A Historical Reason for China’s High Rate of Execution?

If China executes so many people, one key question is why? More specifically, what moral and legal reasoning might cause the state to accept the death penalty in so many criminal cases? Their might also be a secondary question as to why the Chinese state seems to be ethically unconcerned about the use of the organs of those executed by the state within the growing organ transplant business.

Leaving the second question aside for now, are there historical reasons why it seems to be more acceptable in China than in the West today to carry out the death penalty? Can we identify a historical trend of the use of the death penalty in China? The answer to this question is yes. Historically, use of corporal and capital punishment in China has been common. In the Ming Dynasty, which began in 1368, one key means of reducing government corruption was the public execution of officials caught in corruption. A common means of carrying out this particular death penalty was what is often know and the “death of a thousand cuts,” or “death by slow slicing.” A corrupt official would be brought to a public place and subjected to numerous small cuts, eventually bleeding to death in the midst of torture. The public nature of this horrific penalty was an important part of the ritual. Like the Chinese government today, the purpose of this kind of execution was preventive. The Ming hoped that those in positions to become corrupt might see the horror of the death, and the shame that fell upon the family in such a public way. This would lead to recognition of the potential outcome of corruption, and prevent others from taking the same path.

During the Qin Dynasty, from 221 BCE to 206 CE, the central political philosophy was Legalism. Developed by Confucian scholars who came to disagree with the founder of their discipline about the nature of human kind. Thinkers like Li Si and Han Fei came to see human nature as basically self-serving. Since humans, they thought, could not just be taught what was right and expected to behave well, they developed a system in which a strong ruler created strong laws. For them, it was unimportant what moral or logical basis the laws had. It was only important that the ruler had the right to create the law through the ability to enforce it. Obedience to such laws would be enforced through strict punishments that were often capital in nature. Once again, then, the use of capital punishment was not simply for punishment of wrongdoing. It was used to warn others not to commit the same or similar acts of disobedience. The question of whether the person punished deserved the punishment administered was less important than that others know of the brutality of the punishment and avoid the situation in which it might be administered.

Do laws and attitudes like this make China any more likely to accept the death penalty in large numbers today than other states in the world? Probably not. Capital punishment has probably been used in most societies. In Europe, now the globe’s most vocal supporter of abolishing the death penalty for any crime, capital punishment has a long and storied history. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was common to execute religious prisoners by burning them alive, often on the flimsiest of evidence that a crime had even been committed. At various stages in European history hanging, drawing and quartering, and other horrific punishments were applied to numerous crimes. In cases where members of a community were found to be in rebellion against the community or to have acted magically against other members of the community, their friends, neighbors, and strangers were often invited to participate in administering public violence that led to their deaths. These executions were at the time sanctioned by the religious and secular authorities, and appear to have been used often primarily for punishment, with a justice system that was often so inconsistent that torture and death provided little in the way of guidance for others about what behavior to avoid in order to survive. So China has no lock on the historical use of the death penalty or torture.

More recently, the Communist Party took control of China in 1949 in part on the premise that crime was inexcusable in a socialist society. Mao and his contemporaries put significant resources into a brutal repression of crime during their consolidation of control in China after 1949. Crime rates in every area from theft to violent crime to drug dealing dropped drastically. In large part, credit for this is given to the brutality of Communist anti-crime initiatives. Judgment was swift, and punishment was not infrequently capital in nature. The success of this policy may have left a deep impression in China even up to today. Deng Xaoping refused, even after the discrediting of Mao’s policies that came after his death, to consider getting rid of the death penalty. In a way, the Chinese state may continue to see this policy in a kind of “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it,” sense. Of course, in China today the Communist Party of China retains only a precarious hold on power an increasingly capitalist society. Through a kind of pragmatic social contract, the Communist Party retains legitimacy through the practical success of its policies. As long as China’s economy is getting better, and Chinese citizens have increasing opportunities to benefit economically, the Communist Party can maintain power with little problem. A part of this is its success in reducing the crime rate. Another part is finding ways to silence those who no longer accept this deal as practical or desirable. In other words, probably since the rise of Deng in 1976, the death penalty in China provides a means of holding power that goes beyond the primarily preventive role that it has historically held in that society.

A Method for Calculating China’s Death Penalty Statistics

There are twenty two nations in the world today that execute criminals. According to Amnesty International,the highest per-capita number of executions each year take place in Iran and Singapore. The highest actual number of executions take place in China. Because the number of executions it carries out is classified by China as a state secret, Amnesty International says that accurate data on executions is too hard to obtain to make even an educated guess. It therefore leaves China out of its annual report on death penalty statistics except for the claim of high numbers of executions there.

However, estimates regarding China’s execution numbers do exist. Understanding how these estimates are created is important in assessing their accuracy. Since China’s policy is to keep their totals a state secret, clearly the methods for calculating inmate executions must reach that data indirectly. One method has been to estimate death row executions by using the number of organ transplants carried out in China. A description of one way of thinking through this method is available online at www.stoporganharvesting.org. Despite its use by an organization with a clear political agenda,the method is worth a look.

Stop Organ Harvesting does not claim that their method gives an exact estimate of executions in the Chinese justice system. Rather, they claim that by using claims of execution numbers, the percentage of possible organ donors, and the number of potential organ donations. Using this method, they have evaluated estimates that between 1999 and 2002 an average of about 10,000 executions occurred in China, and found them to be consistent with the number of organ transplants performed there.

Given a low growth rate in organ donations from family members of the receiving patient, and the absence of a national organ donation network, the only way to account for the total number of organ transplant carried out in those years is to include the number of potential organ donations from death row inmates.

The article is here. There is some lack of sophistication in the estimate. The variables involved in calculating the number of potential donors would not likely be as simple as Stop Organ Harvesting assumes in their formula. For one thing, it may be statistically untrue that the death row prison population reflects the distribution of organ transplant compatibility in the general population. For another, it is possible that a prison population is less healthy that the general population, which could lead to lower-than-average discovery of tissue healthy enough to transplant. However, again with the caveat that this particular organization has a clear political agenda, as corroborating data, the method gives some means to analyze the veracity of claims made by death penalty watchdog groups globally.

 

A Question that worked

I have been grading my online class post-unit quizzes for unit 9, which is on the beginnings of Islam.  During the grading,  I found that one of the questions that I asked (chosen randomly by the CMS) was particularly effective, eliciting some above-average responses from students.  Even the best students outperformed themselves on this question.  I have to figure out whether this has to do with interest, or the nature of the question.

The question:  Discuss how the Qur’an defined honor and how the Islamic class system evolved during the caliphates.

This seemed to me like a pretty complex and difficult question.  But here are the answers I received:

[

The honor of the Qur’an lies within the Five Pillars of Truth, which set the basis for understanding and practicing the teachings of Islam. The Qur’an entails muslims to follow a strict code of moral behavior. Muslims must first learn to distinguish that they are to worship one holy god, “Allah”, and not the prophet Muhammad. This is achieved by “reciting the profession of faith in god and muhammad as prophet”. Other practices of the five pillars of truth related to giving praise, is that five times a day Muslims are required to pray to Allah, and also that Muslims must once in their life time make a pilgrimage to Mecca, the roots of Islamic heritage and the home of Muhammad. The Qur’an also defined honor by your ability to be disciplined enough to resist worldly and lifelike temptations like gambling, drinking alcohol, and following a strict sexual code. Discipline and honor were also displayed by fasting and preying for the 2nd month of Ramadan. Lastly, Muslims expressed their honor of the Qur’an by showing compassion, fairness, and caring for others. The last of the five pillars of truth not yet mentioned is that Muslims are required to give back to the poor or less privileged within their umma or community. Its also common practice of Islam to conduct fair business and not take advantage of others, any breaking of these laws did not differentiate between genders either, as punishment were the same for both males and females.

The Islamic Class system evolved quite a bit during the caliphates rule, first starting with Abu Bakr who was elected caliph after the death of Muhammad.  The job of the caliph was to obey god’s law and he was only their to oversee and enforce god’s law.  Calphites were selected over the next 3 successors; Ali, Umar, and Uthman.  Uthman was the next successor and was assisanted for giving favors to his family, contradicting the umma.  Ali was next in line but he too was assassinated as the Ummayad Family refused to honor Ali as caliph.  Mu’awiya of the Ummayad family was the next caliph, he had a new agenda in mind tho regarding the caliph and decided that the caliph would no longer be elected but rather hereditery as the Ummayad’s ruled for the next 2 dynasties creating the Ummayad Dynasty.  During the Ummayad Dynasty their was a split in Islamic beliefs creating 2 different belief systems, the Shi’a who supported Ali, and the Sunnis who accepted Mu’awiya as caliph.  In 747, Abu Al Abbas finally put an end to the Ummayad Dynasty and became recognized as caliph, as did his next 3 successors.  The Abbasid dynsasty established a more citizenship oriented basis of rule by creating a more worldly, humanly, and Islamic way of life as compared to the Ummayad dynasty.  Throughout the rule of caliphs, imperial systems within the government were created.  Obviously beginning with the caliph, then Arab Emirs or governors, then there was the shari’a who acted as enforcers of the law.  There was also the Vizier, the caliphs chief assistant or right hand man who oversaw all of the caliph’s duties as well. ]

[The Qur’an emphasized the Five Pillars of Islam. A Muslim must profess that God is God and Muhammad is his prophet. Muslims must also pray five times a day, make a pilgremage to Mecca, fast and pray during the sacred month and give to the poor. The Qur’an also called for Muslims to take up arms if need be in order to spread the “truth.” This belief drove Arabs to conquer surrounding lands and convert followers to Islam. The conquered lands soon grew to be so big that Muslims had to find a way to govern these peoples and thus the caliphate system was born. The first Caliph was Abu Bakr and he took up the responsibility of enforcing the law of god. Under his successors, however a class system evolved. After the assasination of Ali, Mu’awiya gained the title of caliph and this is where Islam divided; followers of Ali came to be known as Shi’a, while followers of Mu’awiya came to be known as Sunnis. The Abbasid clan further divided the muslim community when they took over the caliphate. Under the Abbasids, society turned from tribal to provincial. Caliphs adopted Persian styles of rule and soon became completely seperate from “normal people.” Commercialism also took off, distinguishing merchants, slaves, and scholars.]

[According to the Qur’an, honor was achieved through spiritual and religious devotion rather than bloodline.  Although equality amongst Muslims was promoted, many full-blooded Arabs still considered themselves superior.  These ideals continued in the Umayyad period.  The ruling Arab Muslims descended from Bedouin tribes people and were the ruling class.  Converts made up the second class and eventually through intermarriage united people of various backgrounds.  Jews and Christians made up the third class.  Because of their monistic religion they were accepted, however they had to recognize Muslim political leadership and pay a tax.]

[The Qur’an defines honor in the reading as definining acceptable and required behaviors. There are many strict standards to be followed such as the “five pillars of islam”. Be the Qur’an they are required to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, give to the poor, and restrain from certain behaviors such as drinking alcohol or eating certain foods.

Under the rule of caliphates it seems as though the Muslims changed form a religion based society to a scholarly based society. The caliphates also manipulated the government in their favor to ensure that everyone was dependent on their power and believed that living in seperate tribes than unified as a large nation was more favorable.]

[Although Qur’an taught that a bloodline does not matter and only criterion was piety for honor, Muslim society was distinctly hierachical during Umayyad period.  On top was caliph’s household and the ruling Arab Muslims composed of warriors, veterans, governing officials, and town settlers.  Second was converts to Islam composed of merchants, traders, teachers, doctors, artists and interpreters.  Below that was dhimmis – Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians – being considered as “protected people” because they worshipped only one God, they were allowed to practice their religion freely with small tax and recognition of Muslim spremacy. Slaves were allowed but Qur’an encouraged owners to free their slaves.

Most dramatic changes that happened, I understand, was the treatment of women.  The hadith depicts women in terms of moral virtue, domesticity, saintly ideals, and some political. Women were treated more equally in the beginning, but the understanding of Qur’an changed.  With a marriage seen as a sefeguard of virtue, girls married husbands much older than them at early age, while girls were still virgins. Later on, women were started to be thought as possetions of men, so the rich men were allowed to have up to four wives. Women are restricted from public affairs, but they were provided well and treated well.  Personally, that does not sound too bad.

Muslims and Islam were interesting. I didn’t know anything about them other than 9-11 related matters.  I am thinking of reading Qur’an one day.]

These answers vary in quality and in structure, of course, but what struck me about all of them was their concreteness, and the willingness of students to analyze the information they received from the textbook and lecture, and come up with their own understandings.  These answers seem to me to be evidence of students internalizing their lessons.  I was very pleased.  The question remains – did the lecture and textbook present these ideas better than usual?  Did the lecture (I emphasize these points in my lectures and notes) complement the text well, or was this a result of student interest? Given the small sample, it may also have to do with a random student sample that was of a generally high quality.

It seems worth trying to correlate this with other questions that get high quality responses to try to find out.

The Inadvertent Tourist: Reflections on Nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro

Nostalgia is a search that is rooted in the exile from traditional cultural forms that is symptomatic of late capitalism.  In this search are all tourists in a global empire of signs, unmoored and reading images of other pasts and alternative pasts as floating signifiers which help us to appropriate romanticized experiences that never were.  Nostalgic memories are comforting, and are often triggered by encounters with nostalgic things – objects or ideas that bring to mind comforting memories.  Yet, nostalgia is often imagined and so does not have to be moored to real events.  The nostalgia in the film Tonari no Totoro is an excellent example of a series of signifiers that can easily be appropriated by viewers.  In particular, Tonari no Totoro provides all of us, as tourists, with multiple view points on the way to our own generalized longing for childhood and the countryside.  What is ironic about this film as a location for the generalized global nostalgic is that it does not have the ‘odorless’ or mukokuseki quality discussed by Joseph Tobin in the edited volume Pikachu’s Global Adventure – in fact, Tonari no Totoro is redolent of Japanese culture.  In effect we are touring an idealized place and period in Japan.  Still, the nostalgia that it creates works for non-Japanese audiences as well as Japanese.  This is primarily because the film is not about being Japanese.  It is a tour for those of us who live the experience of modern urban life and feel alienated from tradition and culture.  As tourists, we view Totoro in search of those traditions and cultures which we no longer have ourselves.

The sense of nostalgia that the movie creates is based on this feeling of exile from anchoring cultural forms and the desire to return to those forms.  As a tourist looks for hints of a ‘true culture’ in places where it can’t exist, tourists of nostalgia look for a personal past in a romanticized general human experience.  Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart has defined nostalgia as dependent not on the reality of memory, but on a series of practices which read cultural images and code them instantly as the play of forms, the traces of interpretive strategies by which individuals craft meaning, rather than as acts participated in and remembered.[1]  According to Stewart, our viewing of cultural artifacts which we read as nostalgic is akin to the practices of tourists, the difference being only that the practice of nostalgia is a touring/looting of the global past, and of culture.  We collect images, signs, which we read as disassociated memories – floating signifiers of a romanticized, timeless past that we appropriate as a longing for connectedness in the disconnected cacophony of the marketplace of late capitalism.  Totoro works as nostalgia on this level.  In fact, Totoro is imbued with nostalgic devices from multiple memories, times, and even places.

The film even has a nostalgic frame of reference with which we can circumscribe our tour of Japan’s idealized past countryside and of Japanese childhood.  This frame is important for the feeling of nostalgia, because it creates a liminal space within which we can reinvent ourselves through the reformulation of our generalized memories.  That frame of reference has to do with time.  Tonari no Totoro was produced by Studio Ghibli in the 1980’s.  This was the time of bursting urbanization and the real estate bubble.  Roland Barthes went to Japan and declared it the world’s first truly post-modern society: an ’empire of signs’ by which he meant the urban world of Japan was a world of floating signifiers, disconnected from anything but the meaning invested in them at the moment by those relating to them.  But the film is set in the 1950’s.  The family does not own a car, and there is no telephone in the house.  The rural roads are surfaced with dirt, and the bus is an old 1950’s snub-nose.  There is no automation, so the bus must have a conductor at the door.  It is ironic that the period in which the movie is set, and the period in which it was actually made sit on opposite ends of the income-doubling policy of the Japanese government, and the period of high economic growth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and the economic bubble of the 1980’s.  To watch the movie in this frame of reference is like looking backwards through a long tunnel to the beginning of a journey.  The film was made in the 1980’s urban world that Satsuki, Mei, and their father come from, and is about the rural, childhood, nostalgic world of the 1950’s.   For this reason, although it is a kind of convenience that children can get a thrill from viewing the movie, it seems that the content of Tonari no Totoro is coded for consumption by adults.

These adult consumers of Tonari no Totoro are tourists of the countryside.  The countryside presented in the movie is Japan’s inaka in the 1950’s, before the period of high growth and income doubling.  But it can stand for a generalized countryside, outside of modern urban life, simply because it is the countryside.  The journey of Satsuki and Mei, and their father to the old house at the beginning of the movie can be read as a migration from the modern city to the “unchanging” countryside, and is analogous to the nostalgic journey undertaken by the audience watching the film.  The house they move into is old, and ready to fall down.  It looks very much like a Meiji-era western style farmhouse, and that is no surprise, since producer Hayao Miyazaki has admitted a “nostalgia” for what he has called “pseudo-Western-style buildings.”[2]  The fact that the house is in terrible condition, and that it is probably haunted, all make Satsuki and Mei a bit scared, and somewhat excited.  The very oldness of the house, and the fact that it has been made home by soot sprites makes it at once a place of apprehension, and of magical comfort for the two main characters.  All of these things are a part of its existing in the countryside.  They are also signs of the haunting which consumers of the film read into their own immediate experience, as they can draw up their own nostalgia for the countryside through the ‘ghosts’ of the film characters,  and the quality of dreams that is so common in the world of Japanese anime.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the way in which Japanese culture adopted the Tales of Tōno, an early 20th century attempt at recording the folk stories of the Japanese countryside before it disappeared through urbanization and westernization.   Author Marilynn Ivy has found that the social process of popularizing the Tales of Tōno involved the experience of an unusual (virtually indecipherable) dialect of Japanese that came to be associated with the inaka, or countryside, along with a kind of fascination with the primitive and almost brutal nature of the stories, and the simplicity (Ivy often reads it as poverty) of life in the Tōno region.  But, as she notes about the idea of hometown, or furusato, the existence of  Tōno as an idealized, sentimentalized referent for a Japan that has passed into history and a “Japaneseness” that has somehow been lost in the mad rush of modern development was only possible through the viewing of Tōno from afar.  Those to whom a place is actually home do not need to refer to that place as the place of their origin.  As Stewart noted, the nostalgia is not for a real experienced past, but a practice that calls up the trace of that past that exists within its absence in a scene drawn from a parallel experience in a foreign culture. The same is true for urban Japanese looking for a sense of their cultural origins – those for whom Tōno culture is a part of daily existence do not think of it as more than their daily routine.  Those who look from afar for signs of traditional culture, though, see Tōno as a place where traditional culture is performed on a daily basis, and adopt the Tōno culture as a sign of their own lost moorings to earlier Japanese cultural authenticity.[3]  Miyazaki, by showing the traditional trappings of the Japanese countryside, including the rice fields worked by hand by family groups of farmers, the natural rhythms of the countryside (time in the movie is marked exclusively by weather, and consists of months as the smallest unit), mountain shrines, old trees, dirt roads, and old-style vehicles probably obsolete even by the 1950’s is calling up the ghosts of viewers’ pasts by showing them the ‘ghosts’/characters in the film, and the spectral landscape which they can haunt.  For foreign viewers this constitutes an opportunity to reflect upon the scene of supposed Japanese cultural nostalgia, and recall the nostalgic past that exists through its absence in the scene being watched.  That is, they are touring the episodes in Totoro and assigning meaning that they wish to assign – a nostalgia for nostalgia.

These tourists of the countryside, though, are also tourists of childhood.  As tourists seek to become temporarily, vicariously, members of the culture they are visiting, but must always remain on the outside, viewers to this movie can relive childhood through Satsuki and Mei, but can always and easily return to their adult world.  Once again, it is the absence of child-ness which allows these viewers to imagine their own childhood through the main characters of the film.  The nostalgia for childhood that this movie evokes is complex and provides many opportunities through multiple layers of signs for viewers/consumers to appropriate for the purpose of reading a generalized nostalgia of their own experience onto it.  First, the simple fact of having been a child in or before the 1980’s – the scenes of outdoor play, the excitement of exploring a countryside wonderland, and the idea of walking to school with friends all can be appropriated by adult viewers as generalized memories of childhood.  In addition to the basic relation that adult viewers might make to the characters, the use of film techniques to emphasize characters’ feelings and situations is masterfully done in order to create a sense of sympathy, which can also often trigger nostalgia.  Frequent close ups of Mei and Satsuki in intense emotional situations, as when the film cuts to a shot of Satsuki’s beat-up feet, bruised and blistered from running in sandals for hours, or a close-up of the goat that tries to take Mei’s ear of corn lead us to recognize the desperation of both characters at crucial points in the narrative, and to relate through the characters’ facial expressions to their own childhood experiences of pleasure, pain, fear, and excitement.

Second, the plot of the movie is driven by the childhood fears that go with moving to a new place, to the idea of a haunted house, the difference in dialect and behavior between country and urban people, and the foreignness of the countryside.  I have noted before how all of this is similar to the journey taken by the audience in the process of viewing the movie.  Further, a kind of vicarious titillation at re-experiencing the pain and fear of a child whose parent is not well helps us to explain the overdone nature of the characters emotions of fear for their mother.  The vivid sequences of Totoro flying, and the cat bus parting the woods give a sense of the wonder and mystery of the world that exists when one is a child.  The clear linkage between the blowing wind that makes Satsuki drop the firewood she is carrying on the first night in the new house, and the inability of the adults to see anything but wind when Satsuki and Mei pass them riding in the cat bus provides adult viewers with a gateway into the magic of the world of children, as does the way in which Mei first discovers Totoro.  This movie provides an unambiguous opportunity to temporarily return to a generalized childhood.  This invitation works on so many levels of consciousness, it is difficult to refuse.

In fact, there are also some very specific elements involved in the movie that provide nostalgia that could be related directly to the personal experience of some viewers.  For instance, the movie itself evolved from a 1970’s era television anime by the same producers (Takahata and Yamazaki) called Pandakopanda, the art and storyline of which is very similar to Totoro, though the main character is a panda.  Adults who viewed the original TV series will find Totoro to be quite a nostalgic experience, with a similar cast and art reminiscent of the Pandakopanda series.[4]  When they watch Totoro, it is entirely possible that they will be transported back to memories of life when they watched Pandakopanda as children, even though the story of Totoro has nothing to do with their memories.  Nostalgia, then, allows us to fill space between the film and our own suspension of disbelief in the reality of animated characters with personal experience and memories.  These memories need no direct relation to what we are watching.  They can be triggered by the situation on-screen.  Watching, we recognize a situation analogous to our own that constitute the memories of an unknown other.  We transfer our nostalgia to the scene we are witnessing, relating ourselves to the characters, and filling in the interstices of the character’s experience and the situation we are witnessing with our own memories.  By giving the character our own memories and thoughts, we appropriate the character, and so inhabit the character as ourselves within the scenes of the movie.  This process of nostalgia-creation is what makes Tonari no Totoro so successful, even in an international context, and even without deodorizing.

In this way, a large part of the success of nostalgia in Tonari no Totoro is the fact that the main characters, Satsuki and Mei, are young girls (shoujo), yet their childhood experience stands for the childhood experience of all viewers.  Shoujo are commonly androgynous in appearance, and that is certainly the case with Satsuki, whose hair is short, and somewhat unkempt, and who, despite her skirt, frequently looks like a boy.  Satsuki’s androgyny is also reflective of the Japanese popular aesthetic of the bishonen – loosely translatable as the beautiful young boy, who is also androgynous, and who exhibits characteristics that are sometimes more relevant to female behavior than male, such as easy tears, smooth, feminine facial features, and relationships with other characters that are non-sexual in nature, but show much caring from the heart.  Both Mei and Satsuki are constructed such that they are clearly female, and yet their differences with males are somewhat effaced.  Satsuki is clearly somewhat of a ‘tomboy’ – willing and able to play games with the boys, and not shy about sticking her tongue out at her classmate and neighbor Kanta when he bothers her.  But she is also distinctly female.  She carries Mei at the bus stop while waiting to give an umbrella to her father.  She makes bento lunches for everyone in her family in the absence of her mother, and she is clearly flattered by her mother’s comment, during the hospital visit, that her hair is just the same as her mother’s was when she was a child.  Satsuki’s foil in this role is the coarsely male character of Kanta, whose stereotypical male behavior sets off the androgynous Satsuki as female.  Satsuki’s curiosity is combined with courage, as in the scene in which she charges up the stairs despite her fear of the ‘dust bunnies’ living in the attic, and takes a look around before opening the window.  She clearly has motherly instincts. She is willing to run for hours searching for Mei, despite the bruises, dirt, and blisters on her feet.  But she can be aggressive like a boy in scenes like the one in which she stops the motorcycle by jumping in front of it.  As an androgynous female, Satsuki is effective as a kind of ‘every child’ with whom both males and females can relate.

Along with that fact, the unmediated way in which Satsuki and Mei, two urban children relocated to the countryside, take in life in their new surroundings can remind parents of a romanticized childhood self.  The pain of the possibility of mother’s death, along with the thrill of flying with Totoro, and of participating in a magical tree raising ceremony, however much it might be a dream, can lead to a sensation of longing for the unproblematized experience of a child experiencing life for the first time.  In this way, as Stewart says, adults watching Tonari no Totoro become tourists of an experience that they cannot have had, but from which they can code a nostalgia for a generalized experience of childhood and feast on the longing that such an imaginary provides.

The movie Tonari no Totoro, then, is itself an act of nostalgia.  It provides a space where adults and many children can find traces of a past that is less than a memory, and therefore, common to all.  Satsuki and Mei act as signs that we read as ourselves, as bakemono tour guides taking us away from the busy, urban, modern life that we live to a generalized mythical countryside in which we find ourselves, once more, children –  not the children we were, but the children we want to have been.


[1] Stewart, Kathleen. “Notalgia – a Polemic.” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 229.

 

[2] Ryoko Toyama, trans. “Interview:  Miyazaki on Sen to Chihiro No Kamikakushi.” Animage, no. May (2001).

 

[3] Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing : Modernity, Phantasm, Japan.Chicago:University ofChicago Press, 1995.

[4] Niskanen, Eija. “Untouched Nature, Mediated Animals, in Japanese Anime.” Wider Screen, no. 1 (2007), http://www.widerscreen.fi/2007/1/untouched_nature_mediated_animals_in_japanese_anime.htm.

 

A speech I gave at the unveiling of a replica of the gun monument in honor of John Lenon at Honolulu Community College

It was today, the events outside the New York City apartment building known as The Dakota.  Today, Mark David Chapman, a huge fan of the Beatles, and one of their founding members – John Lennon – got an autograph from Lennon in the evening, then, as John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were coming home to their apartment, he shot John in the back, four times.  Four times.  He pulled the trigger four times.  When he was asked if he knew what he had done, he answered “I just shot John Lennon.”

But it could have happened yesterday – DID happen yesterday – December 7, 1941, when John Lennon was one year old, thirty-nine years to the day before his death – Japanese pilots flew across the mountains behind us, and dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, sinking ships, and killing more than 2000 people, all of whom were passing a quiet Sunday.

It could have happened three months ago – DID happen three months ago – on Sept. 11, 2001, when a group of terrorists boarded airplanes, and with box knives and a willingness to do violence hijacked those aircraft and drove one into the ground, one into the Pentagon, and two into the World Trade Centers, killing thousands.

It happened in August, when a Honolulu man killed his ex-girlfriend and their 13-year-old daughter.

It happened last night, and the day before, and the day before that.  Every day, someone is a victim of violence.

John Lennon would have been proud of this sculpture.  It has taken me some time to see that.  It is not so much that Lennon was an activist for peace, though he was.  He had a unique position in the world, and in an ironic way, he owed the end of his life to that position – John Lennon was perhaps the biggest celebrity of his time.  He had a bully pulpit – a soapbox bigger than anything anyone had seen before – maybe since.  As he once famously said, surveying a crowd of Beatles fans – and I paraphrase – the Beatles were bigger than God.  He meant to make this a comment on how popular they were.  He later apologized, recognizing that few people understood the irony of his comments.  But he knew why he had this public stature – why people listened to him.  Lennon was under no illusions.  He was a former Beatle, and continued to make music after that revolutionary band broke up in 1970.  His fans stayed loyal, and more came to know him as his own reputation grew, and as the impact of the Beatles, like ripples in a still pond, continued to increase the numbers of their listeners, in a macabre dance of death – heck, I didn’t know about the Beatles until six years after their breakup, but I became a fan anyway.  He knew that he was a pop icon – a clown – a dancing bear – and to his credit, he embraced that, and made it what it never was before – maybe, again, not since.

John Lennon did not run away from the public.  He embraced us.  He knew that his fans were at once the source of his voice, and the chief means of its transmission.  He invited the public into his life – even into his bed as he and Yoko Ono, his wife, on their honeymoon in 1969, held a “bed-in” for peace at the Amsterdam Hilton, where they were staying.  Media photographers came it to take some of the most controversial, and popular, photos of the year.  In their second “bed-in”, John sang the tune “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” – a song which became an anthem for the anti-Vietnam war movement.  Imagine was released in 1971, followed in 1972 with “Happy Xmas (War is Over)”.    Not all of Lennon’s songs were successful, but he did have a talent for creating tunes that captured certain prevailing social moods, and his post-Beatles career was to some extent, though he would protest, defined by these anthems – anthems that, as I am reminded looking around the place, shaped and comforted the ideals and values of an entire generation – my generation – the late baby boomers.

We watched Lennon, one of the most public figures for his time, navigating a very difficult life, and we identified with him, and with his music.  We felt the loss of his mother and the abandonment of his father.  We identified with the rebellious streak that led to his music with the Beatles and lived the rock ‘n roll dream with him.  We watched him get married, have a child, then send that marriage into the rock and roll round file, dropping his son and his immensely successful band along the way, and go off with a foreign girl and we felt the pain, the anger, the pity, and identified with the romance and the weakness and the love.

John Lennon lived his life for all of us to see, and we routed for the reunion of the Beatles and witnessed their public feuds.  All the while we sang the old songs, and the new songs, and hoped for peace – not just freedom from war and from violence, but peace between John and Paul.  It never really came.  None of it.  But it was, and is, a grand dream, and one that we can live up to if we continue to try.

Mark David Chapman was right – John Lennon was in many ways privately different from his public persona.  He was wealthy, he lived a stormy life that at times appeared to follow no moral compass, and at most other times to be a complete wreck.  Yet, in his public life – the life with makeup on –  the life where he performed John Lennon, Pop Star, he gave us a moral compass.  He said to us, if we give peace a chance, it can happen.  He told us, if we want it to be, war can be over – not next week or next year, but now.  He stood on a soap box, as who he was, and got tomatoes thrown at him for expressing the best of himself – for dreaming that he, along with all of us, could learn the ways of peace, love, and care.  Despite his many flaws, he sang to the world of making an effort to be better – and to care for each other.

Yes, John Lennon was a pop star, and he would be first to remind us that a pop star is nothing special – just a clown in a zoot suit, made up and dressed up for all to see, performing an idealized dance of life, and giving us all some space to imagine who and what we can be – with love, without violence, without forcing each other to conform to pre-established assumptions or rules.   He asked us to imagine what we can be…imagine.

Lesson on Class consciousness in 19th Century Europe (Hist 152)

This week I did what I think was quite a successful lesson on class consciousness.  On the first day, I posed four questions to the students, and asked them to work in 4 groups to come up with answers using their minds and their textbooks. (This is related to Craig, et al, Chapter 35).

1.  What is the meaning of “proletarianization” of the common people?

2.  What were living conditions like in 19th century European cities?

3.  What were the ideas of Karl Marx?

4.  Describe the causes of the formation of trade unions and mass political parties.

On the second day, I showed the first 20 minutes or so of a movie titled “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (with John Gielgud, among others) and asked the class to identify class structures as depicted in that movie.

This made the study of class structure, and the development of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in Europe generally, and more specifically in England, both effective and interesting for the students.

Yingjin Zhang: *Chinese National Cinema*

Yingjin Zhang, in Chinese National Cinema, provides a useful, and very complete, chronological account of the development of film in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  An important subtext of Zhang’s history (he makes it his central goal, but the organization of the book is really that of a chronological history) is the idea that Chinese cinemas do constitute a national cinema, not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of the nation people.  Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music, and Geremie Barmé’s In the Red both operate under similar assumptions.  First, that popular culture is most effective and valuable when it is a de-centralized product of a self-defined group (Zhang’s nation-people).  Second, that when used by the state popular culture is little more than a blunt instrument for propaganda, easily read and ineffective.  And third, that cultural history can be read through the intentions of culture producers and the environment and technology by which they are informed. All three authors address these points while dealing with essentially the same chronological structure, which frames their analysis in nearly every way.

I discovered upon reading the three assigned books for this week:  Andrew Jones’ Yellow Music and Geremie Barmé’s In The Red, that the chronology followed by Zhang is by no means unique among scholars attempting to decode Chinese popular culture in the twentieth century.  In fact, for all the criticism that these three authors heap upon the CCP for its blunt-instrument style use of popular culture to inculcate mass national values in the Chinese people, they seemed to me to be surprisingly willing to follow the political chronology of Chinese history when defining moments of popular culture change within Chinese society.

The fact is that all three accept this chronology and write around it.  Zhang makes it the centerpiece of his history of national film, where Jones actually begins with it, and rotates his whole story around this periodization scheme.  Barmé, trying to be revolutionary himself, tackles only the last piece of it, and makes the assumption that he is dealing with a piece of Chinese time that, by definition, is the end-point, the late-stage, of the very same chronology.

This chronological system of analysis begins with the prewar period, the search for modernity and national unity in a fragmented China threatened from without, and gloriously, though also infuriatingly, diverse within.  The Second World War then occurs, and this necessitates a shift toward nationalism in cultural production.  At the end of the war, the Revolution brings an end to KMT rule, and the People’s Republic of China, born of the nation, attempts to use culture to indoctrinate the masses in national and communist value systems.  Upon the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao Zedong, a new opening to the world is engineered by Deng Xaoping, and that includes a freeing of cultural constraints, paving the way for Zhang’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, and other producers more able, or willing, to buck the system, and less likely to be incarcerated for doing so.

The key to the entire chronological system being used here is the Maoist period from the 1950‘s to 1976, during which all three writers assume what Barmé has called the “Culture as Cudgel” model.[1] This is Barmé’s reference to the period between 1950 and 1978, when to produce culture products was to be required to produce state-sponsored, state-censored films with state-specified symbolism and dialogue.

All three authors implicitly set this period, or the attitudes toward the necessity of turning culture to some social use that characterized it, as the center-stone, and sort of a straw man despite its accuracy, as the fulcrum for their analytical projects.

For Zhang, it is this period that helps him set up the idea of Shanghai provenance and Chinese chronology as the essential features of Chinese national cinema, as opposed to the imposed national-state culture of the CCP.

For Jones, it is the desire of CCP culture worker predecessors such as Nie Er, who see the need to make popular culture have some social utility, some meaning, which sets up the whole discussion of “Yellow Music” – the western-influenced predecessor and erstwhile model for the New Music – as a cultural product.

For Barmé, it is the “Culture as Cudgel” period that makes it possible to imagine a freedom in contemporary Chinese culture that may not exist.  Since contemporary culture producers in China do not have the proverbial ax over the head when it comes to content in their culture products, it is easy to imagine that they are not co-opted by the state, when Barmé believes that in fact it is their co-optation by the state that makes them the artists they are.

Yingjin Zhang begins Chinese National Cinema with a short and useful explanation of his project.  He admits that China is a geographically and culturally diverse place, and takes note of recent approaches to cinema in general, and Chinese cinema specifically, that reject the idea that there is a single ‘national cinema’ history for China.  Zhang wants to compare Chinese cinematic history in all of its centers – Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei, looking for a set of cultural assumptions that show these traditions as Chinese not in the sense of the nation-state, but in the sense of what Zhang calls the “nation-people”.[2]

Concentrating on this cultural view of the nation-people, and thus giving some agency to the producers of Chinese popular culture even during the Cultural Revolution years, Zhang eventually succeeds in making a case for Chinese film as roughly comparable in all of the centers which he addresses.  Zhang’s point that this constitutes a kind of national cinema is not as securely founded.  His regional approach does a fine job of exposing the myths that have obscured the diversity of Chinese cinema in the name of the nation, but is unable to securely fasten them together as a national cinema with all of their differences intact.  Instead, Zhang connects the various cinematic traditions of Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to a common set of origins, which, ultimately, seems to make them Chinese in provenance rather than in terms of a nation-people which he never fully defines.

Zhang’s first, and primary focus throughout the book, is the physical process of producing culture – in this case, specifically films – and relating that directly to the system by which audiences (the nation-people, presumably) were induced to view, and become comfortable with, this new form of art/entertainment.

Zhang’s first point, which he returns to quite often in the book, is that the new motion pictures, which premiered in 1896, were early on taken in China as being related to the shadow play in traditional Chinese entertainment culture.[3] The use of this term, according to Zhang, “foregrounds a conscientious effort of the Chinese to treat film as historically related to and conceptually indebted to some kind of Chinese tradition.”[4] In fact, film was placed within a chain of events which saw the shadow play move from China to the West, where film started.[5] Thus, in a sense, Chinese could take credit for the new art form, and so comfort in viewing it.

Still, film debuted primarily, as in the West, not as a fully developed art, but as a curiosity.  The technology for creating was new, venues suited to showing it did not exist, and so had to be improvised, and audiences were unsure what to expect, and whether they had gotten what they paid for.[6]

One of Zhang’s most critical points is that Chinese national film culture originated in Shanghai.  The first production company in China, Yaxia, was formed in Shanghai in 1909.[7] Zhang’s exhibition of Chinese film culture as it develops mostly in Shanghai gives readers a blow-by-blow of the art prior to the war with Japan which secures for Shanghai the title of origin.  Zhang’s narrative makes it clear throughout the book after this point that Shanghai is the place where the majority of pre-war production companies was born and died, where the largest number of theatres existed, and where the greatest box-office results were found.  Shanghai, with its growing middle class, its international character, and trading city status was the birthplace of the cinema that Zhang wants to call Chinese.

Zhang spends the majority of his space from Chapter one on talking about three things in a literal step-by-step history of film in Shanghai, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  His first step in each part of each chapter is to introduce a new development in the film industry, usually introduced historically by a studio.  The focus of this is always on two things:  production process, and new methods of production, acting, and screenwriting that make up the content of film in each era.

This is the case when Zhang discusses the move of film from curiosity to narrative drama, through the development of the pre-war giant Mingxing studio.  Mingxing used the popular “butterfly” fiction of the day, full of stories of romance, emotion, and complex dramatic elements, all tied together by coincidence, to create narrative stories designed to pull the heartstrings of their audiences.  According to Zhang, when May 4th intellectuals were critical of this form, Mingxing responded by updating their butterfly films with more edifying family themes that still used the elements of butterfly fiction, but gave a more moral, nationally oriented story.[8]

In fact, more than a national thread in the history of film, it is this type of stage-by-stage development of technology, plot elements, and film style that is the story Zhang wants to tell.  The idea of the change from curiosity to narrative form is mirrored in nearly every chapter of the book.  In Chapter 2, Zhang concentrates on connecting his vision of Chinese cinema to the experience of Chinese people in all areas (and specifically tries, rather unsuccessfully, to avoid tying this experience to the re-creation of the Chinese State) just before and during the war period from 1930-1949.  The missing element here is evidence about consumption that might show how Chinese audiences actually responded to the intentions of producers.

Jones follows this kind of analytical model as well, though the fulcrum of his chronology centers where Zhang’s is just beginning – in the early to mid-1930’s, with Japan’s conquest of Manchuria, social tensions, cosmopolitanism, and Chinese nationalism.

Ironically, Jones’ project is much more transnational in aim.  With the confluence of new musical technologies, Western music and Chinese music and musical traditions, Jones argues that in an attempt to be national, Chinese, and modern, New Music in fact became cosmopolitan, transnational, non-Chinese, and modern.[9] Jones is arguing that national history is not adequate to contain culture and the conflict between prewar popular music and the popular music of national utility created by Nie Er.  Instead, there is a need for a process “whereby “national cultures . . . [are] rearticulated within the new global framework” of colonial modernity.”[10] In other words, Jones sees the regional and colonial in the national, whereas Zhang sees the national in the regional.  These complex arguments bring us to a key question about popular culture in general which is worth asking:  where do popular culture modes begin and end?  Is popular culture a sign of increasing globalization, or simply cultural expressions of the national at the global level?

Jones sets this question off by making some important observations about two of his protagonists.  Li Jinhui, “to whom the creation of a hybrid genre of American Jazz, Hollywood film music, and Chinese folk music known in China as “modern songs” . . . is usually credited.”[11] This hybrid music, redolent of colonialism as of Chinese tradition, was eventually rejected by one of Li’s protégés, Nie Er, who wanted to create a form of popular music to inspire national sentiments and to increase awareness among Chinese of their plight within the world and within China.  Nie Er’s music was to be useful, and he thus tried to set it off against that of Li Jinhui, claiming both musically and in articles that were critical specifically of Li Jinhui’s style of modern music, its decadence and lack of social utility.  Yet, Jones notes that Nie Er and his fellow critics shared much with Li Jinhui musically.  In early leftist film scores, some of the simplest critiques of Li’s music were done by putting leftist words to Li’s own music.[12]

Nie Er himself was heavily influenced by what Jones calls phonographic realism – a rejection of the subjective techniques of Li’s mixed origin, emotionally driven songs performed by sing-song girls, with the explicit intent to be objective and scientific in representing the world through music.  The idea comes from Marxist cultural criticism, and was expounded, Jones says by the Creation Society, a group of leftist activists who shared Nie Er’s desires here.  A phonograph, it was said, did not observe the world from a particular perspective, hearing only what it wanted to hear.  A phonograph was objective, and to attempt to write music like a phonograph, hearing and creating an objective recording of the conditions of the world, was Nie Er’s and the Creation Society’s objective.[13] To be like the technology of recording, mechanistically to capture the world and present it to the nation-people, to borrow a term from Zhang, was to make oneself useful as a composer.

Ironically, Nie Er’s music drew on the same traditions, the same multi-cultural mix, as that of his teacher, Li Jinhui.  In making music useful and modern, Nie Er did not succeed in making it Chinese.

For Zhang in regards to film, as for Jones when it comes to music the point is that nationalist film was an increasingly popular product for directors and studios – particularly those in Shanghai, who were isolated in the International Settlement when Japan occupied Chinese Shanghai in 1937.  The same was true for ‘nationalist’ new music such as that created by Nie Er.  The 1930’s and 1940’s were a period of reaffirmation of Chinese identity, and the desire was not to broaden or contest what it meant to be Chinese, but to unify and solidify Chinese culture as a monolithic defense against conquest.

According to Zhang, the growing concern about Japanese control of Manchuria after 1932, and the war with Japan after 1937, engendered two major reactions.  These reactions coincide with the political/military realities of China at the time, though not with the geography of that political split.  Shanghai film-makers existed in a world where it was possible to collaborate with the Japanese, become both nationalist and leftist, or follow a line that encouraged a Chinese sense of nation without leftist ideology.  There were, according to Zhang, many films that were in between these extremes, and though censorship existed in all areas of China, many films were able to tread the fine line of censorship while expressing their messages in one or more of the above ideological camps.

Zhang characterizes this period as one of possibility, dynamism, and real subjective agency by film producers and directors.  Films explored, according to Zhang, “ideological struggles between the Nationalists and the leftists, between heroic glorification and humanistic exploration, between social realism and aesthetic modernism.”[14]

The possibility and freedom of expression that Zhang explores in the pre-war period is portrayed as having so much energy and creating such competition between studios that despite the existence of censors and a need to make profit or find financing, studios produced a plethora of films in art and popular genres.  Zhang’s discussion of this era almost seems like the foreshadowing of a communist straw man film industry after the revolution, which Zhang can then knock down later when he discusses the post-Cultural Revolution period.  This turns out to be exactly the case, but not until after Zhang takes a brief interlude to discuss Hong Kong and Taiwan and their relationship to Shanghai film during and before the war.

Zhang gives a critical foreshadowing of his most important contribution in this book in Chapter 4, “Cinematic Reinvention of the National in Taiwan, 1896-1978.”  Here Zhang makes the first point that, “Taiwan did not have a film production history of its own until the 1950’s.”[15] The chronology that Zhang has constructed in this book, with the goal of showing the culture of film as a part of national culture, is one that involves the development of China from one China through the war to multiple Chinas.

Consistent with this theme, this chapter on Taiwan cinema really gets going only when it begins to discuss the postwar transition.  Taiwan’s experience of Japanese rule prior to the war, then KMT rule, and finally, as the site of KMT power and political propaganda made this a particularly difficult place for a film culture to set down roots.  When Japanese films were banned in the postwar, the Taiwan reaction, according to Zhang, was to dust off old Chinese silent films (probably mostly produced in Shanghai) and import “over 100 Shanghai films. . .”[16] This direct connection to Shanghai is the source of the Chinese national in Taiwan film, as far as Zhang is concerned.  This provides the roots, and the experience of war, and particularly post-war and post-revolutionary trauma, martial law, and KMT propaganda, define the Taiwan film industry in its early incarnation.

The separation from mainland film culture comes in the early 1950’s with the emergence and popularity of Taiwanese dialect films.  These films emphasized the differentiation of Taiwan from the Chinese mainland, and catered to audiences who were becoming middle class and economically successful.  They also dealt with the social difficulties of becoming a modern, capitalist, urban state.

According to Zhang, the separation from mainland China was incomplete, caused insecurity, especially among displaced mainlanders, and this provided a market for Mandarin cinema, as well.  Zhang’s take is that the very cosmopolitan nature of Taiwan’s film market is evidence that Taiwan is a part of Chinese cinema history, apparently because it makes it clear that whatever the reactions, Taiwan is dealing with the same chronology as the other “Chinas” he is writing about.

In the same way, Zhang places Hong Kong within the chronology of Chinese cultural development, and connects Hong Kong film to roots in Shanghai cinema.  Since these connections are the only really stable ones, they are the bearers of his national standard.  In Chapter 5 he connects Hong Kong cinema to the pre-war Shanghai experience by claiming that so many Shanghai film-makers moved to Hong Kong during and after the revolution that Hong Kong underwent a cultural Shanghainization.  Major film companies that had had Hong Kong branches relocated production there, and others started it in the confines of the British colony in response to the arrival of the Chinese film industry.

Zhang maintains that the ideological battle between the KMT and the CCP were continued in Hong Kong Mandarin cinema, with left-leaning and bourgeois, market-oriented directors producing films about the nation as a whole, often ”in the tradition of postwar Shanghai realism.”[17] The shadow of Shanghai, and thus mainland China, as the arbiter of Chinese art and national identity, looms large here.  The development of Cantonese cinema in Hong Kong wins world-wide popularity and is diverse and well-produced.  Still, despite the linguistic victory of Cantonese in Hong Kong film, the local nature of these films is, according to Zhang, eventually subsumed back into a mainstream of Chinese film culture.

Jones, too, sees the creation of a new vocabulary of Chinese nationalism in music not simply as a replacement of pre-revolutionary idioms with new nationalist-socialist terms, but as an absorption and regurgitation of those idioms within the new cultural context.  The critical point, of course, is that Jones sees the chronology of these events in the same terms as Zhang.  Thus Jones’ story about the transformations of a song in the movie New Year’s Coin sees the possibility of salvation for the sing-song girls who have come to symbolize the decadence of Li Jinhui’s modern songs and the culture to which they are categorized as belonging.  The sing-song girl can become a part of society, but only by giving up her decadent ways and becoming a part of the collective.[18] Nie Er and others used Li Jinhui’s formula for popular songs to create a new nationalist song that reflexively attempted to negate its own roots.

A key theme in the Zhang and Jones books, whose chronology is taken up by Barmé, is the assumption that the popular culture in China comes from pre-war Shanghai.  This “sprouts of popular culture” idea is what informs Zhang’s idea of the Chinese national in cinema, and creates the Chinese colonial cosmopolitan in Jones’ understanding of Li Jinhui’s “Yellow Music”.

To a great extent, the evidence they share seems to bear them out.  Shanghai’s cosmopolitan nature, large population, and economic importance made it the popular culture capital of Republican-era China.  As Zhang notes, here was where the first movie studio came into existence in China.  Jones makes it clear that Li Jinhui’s broad popularity really began to soar when he and his troop came under the umbrella of the popular and market-oriented Lianhua movie studio in Shanghai.[19]

Further evidence that both Zhang and Jones see Shanghai as the source for Chinese popular culture comes in the discussions of competition which occur primarily in Shanghai.  Zhang discusses the cutthroat competition of movie studios, and then of theater chains, in Shanghai, as a driving force in the production decisions of the industry, dictating what kind of films would be made, what niche each company would fit itself into, and ultimately the survival of producers themselves.[20]

Finally, though, for both Zhang and Jones, the Second World War creates a difficult period for culture producers, most of whom felt some need to express themselves in support of national goals of defense.  These expressions, though, were often of varying ideological quality, with artists on the left, and others on the right, and frequent interchange between them.

The war, however, also forced many producers of popular culture to either live with Japanese occupation in Shanghai, or find a new place where production of culture without Japanese influence or interference was possible.  The dearth of such places, and of consumers for their products, led to a period of drought which many production companies did not survive.[21]

Following the war was the revolution period, and this also created shake-ups in the industry.  The growth of films produced by the CCP, the bald use by the CCP of popular culture to create national and collective consciousness (the “Culture Cudgel” of Barmé referred to earlier) as well as anti-communist propaganda in song and film, KMT training films and documentaries in pre-1949 China, and in Taiwan after 1949.  Zhang wants to argue that the Communist victory makes Taiwan and Hong Kong as much a part of the Chinese nation-people as are those in the PRC, because of the fact that, although their experiences were different, they were reacting to the same post-revolutionary changes.  Thus Zhang’s concentration on Taiwanese Mandarin cinema in Chapter 4, and on Hong Kong Cantonese cinema as an outgrowth of Shanghainization in Chapter 5.[22]

Jones is interested in this part of the chronology of Chinese popular culture, as well.  It is in the post-revolution era when the reactionary music of Nie Er, his foil for Li Jinhui, comes into its own as pragmatic music of the Chinese Communist nation-state, in the service of the people through educating them about their essential and objective collective unity.[23]

It seems clear then that for Zhang and Jones, who have worked together closely, the chronology of the development of Chinese popular culture follows a clear pattern that reflects the chronology of Chinese political developments.  The fulcrum for both books is the Maoist era of 1950-1978, during which subjective, individual expression was not only unacceptable, but not allowed by the state.  On either side of this era, there is a period of possibility and amazing cultural production – a real counter-culture, as Barmé defines it – not as a binary opposite to the dominate or state-sponsored culture, but as a series of graded alternatives to the blunt simplicity and repetitive nature of state-centered symbols and narratives.  This fulcrum period, which is, in effect, a popular culture wasteland in the minds of these two writers, provides a sort of steeping period during which lack of expressive opportunity allows Chinese producers of popular culture to store their collective productive energy for the more freely expressive time to come in the post-Mao period.  It is here that the work of Geremie Barmé becomes most relevant.

Barmé, in his introduction, paints himself as a dissenter when it comes to popular culture analysis.  He gives a long description of his education in China to establish his credentials, he spends time on eschewing recent scholarly trends toward theorizing in analyses of popular culture, while keeping himself in the game by not espousing a ‘just the facts’ approach for which he could be easily criticized.  In fact, Barmé seems to define himself as a researcher and his argument about popular culture primarily in the negative.

In any case, after making his remark about the blunt brutality of cultural suppression in the Maoist period, Barmé goes on to say that, contrary to popular belief, Chinese artists and culture producers are not any more free today than they were then.  In fact, he says, “[after] decades of rule by Proledic [the dictatorship of the proletariat], external political coercion and the internal pressures of the Chinese deep structure meld to create a new self-censoring cultural figure, the state artist. . .”[24]

In Barmé’s view, the new artists of the post-Mao period are not really any more free, they simply are better able to negotiate with the state a position of acceptance of the social contract which allows them some room to criticize society.  The true art, according to these people, says Barmé, is in the ability to “write between the lines” and create culture products that can be passed into production by the state, but also contain critique of that state in subtle ways, coded into the writing in such a way that it is recognizable, but not clear or obvious.[25]

For Barmé, though, this new art of subtle critique, as well as the more overt critiques of Communist Party Rule that have appeared in the recent past are not a sign of a new freedom.  They are instead relatively meaningless, barbs directed at officials, the state of society, or, ironically, and the media itself, but produce no action, and no material change.[26]

Conversely, the market itself, thought of in the West and by many Chinese as the agent of change in the possibility of self-expression, is frequently seen as corrupt by its participants, both producers and consumers alike, for the very reason that it is the market.  This comes clear in the story of author Yu Jie’s book Fire and Ice, rushed to press in the ironic moment of celebration of the importance of Beijing University just as one of its most prominent students, Wang Dan, was being ejected from China for taking its tradition of free speech and criticism too seriously in 1989.  Yu’s critique of the Maoist period and of critics of the new cultural and market freedom was barbed and direct, but appeared to many of its readers as redolent of the market pandering that was the target of the very people the book aimed at.[27]

For Barmé, then, Chinese contemporary popular culture is a circular argument that adjusts itself to the prevailing political winds for market purposes, but achieves nothing important through its cultural criticism in what is a kind of ultimate betrayal of the objectives of Lu Xun.

My key point here is that, writing about the post-Mao period as he is, Barmé does not call into question the chronology used by Zhang and Jones, but works with it, simply correcting the view that the era after the fulcrum period is really an indicator of a return to subjectivity or agency.  The fundamental structure of equating the popular culture chronology to the chronology of China’s modern political history remains unchanged.

Still, Barmé does add something new to the mix in the post-Mao period – a sense that popular culture is not linked to political or social change at all, except, because of the market, as a reflector – a mirror that inadequately expresses the opinions of the masses as contrary to, but not necessarily any better than, those of the holders of power in China.  Worse, because the producers, and especially the consumers of Chinese popular culture are essentially subalterns themselves, popular culture functions as a way to provide the masses with a voice with little risk, because as shrill as it may be, this voice can say nothing.  To twist a phrase from Spivak, the subaltern can speak, but it has no impact.

This brings several questions to mind.  First, does the production of culture really fit the political periodization so neatly?  If so, do the politics drive the culture, or does the culture, as Jones wants to think, provide us with the understanding of our time, which we therefore create in line with our understanding?  In other words, is political culture the real driver of historical change?  Another key question might be, is it possible to write a chronological history in terms of the production of culture, rather than the events of politics?

Finally, one primary missing piece to all three of these analyses is any clear sense of what consumers thought as they participated in re-producing these cultural artifacts, be they songs, movies, novels, etc., during each of the periods discussed.  This is, of course, a tall order, especially, as Jones mentions, because of the relative difficulty of finding sources created by the producers themselves.  The chances of finding evidence about how consumers – common Chinese from various classes, locations, etc., viewed these products as they were using them would be very hard to find indeed, especially from the pre-war period.

However, as Stuart Hall and John Storey have pointed out, and Jones has mentioned, the culture production system is a two-way street.  Producers may have intent for the use of their products, and their meaning, at the time of production.  Consumers, however, use products, even cultural products, for their own purposes.  Even if it were possible for Nie Er to create an objective musical recording, the consumers of that recording would all use it in subjective ways.

Zhang gets close to this analysis – maybe as close as can be for the pre-war period – when he shows statistics of theater attendance, quotes from movie magazines and theater advertisements, etc.  Still, these statistics are only slightly useful, and don’t give a complex story about individual consumption habits.  The movie magazines are highly mediated, themselves selling to their audience ideas that they think people want to hear, but cannot be sure of, and they were mostly the products of the moving production companies.

The closest to this kind of analysis is Barmé, but his book reveals him as a participant in the wars over popular culture – one of the many voice-ful, but ultimately perhaps meaningless subalterns – in the debate.  He has access to much of the evidence on consumption, and uses it to fire potshots at his critics rather than to make a critical reading that is really useful. Still, Barmé’s approach is useful.
Bibliography

Barmé, Geremie. In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Jones, Andrew F. Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001.

Zhang, Yingjin. Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2004.


[1] Geremie Barmé, In The Red: On Contemporary Chinese Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1.

[2] Yingjin Zhang, Chinese National Cinema (New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2004; reprint, NY, NY: Routledge, 2005), 5-6 (page citations are to the reprint edition).

[3] Ibid., 13-15.

[4] Ibid., 15.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 17-20.

[7] Ibid., 19.

[8] Ibid., 22-28.

[9] Andrew F. Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 7-20.

[10] Ibid., 10.  Here Jones is himself quoting from Wang Yuhe.

[11] Ibid., 6.

[12] Ibid., 113.

[13] Ibid., 108.

[14] Zhang, 59.

[15] Ibid., 113.

[16] Ibid., 121.

[17] Ibid., 159

[18] Jones, 130-133.

[19] Ibid., 97.

[20] Zhang, 58-81.

[21] Zhang, 83-95.

[22] Zhang, 113-185.

[23] Jones, 133.

[24] Barmé, 2.

[25] Ibid., 6.

[26] Barmé, 147-149.

[27] Ibid., 350-353.

Karl: *Staging the World* synopsis

In Staging the World Rebecca Karl argues that contemporary approaches to the study of nationalism are too narrow.  Benedict Anderson sees nationalism as defined by the state even as it defines the state, and analyzes nationalism’s development primarily as an internal politico-cultural process.  Prasenjit Duara, Karl says, goes just he opposite direction and uses local history to oppose the idea that nationalism exists in any way but the contrived narrative produced by a governing body trying to define and legitimate its control over geographically, culturally, and economically disparate areas.  Rather than these narrow approaches, Karl argues that Chinese nationalism at its inception was a complex set of intellectual conceptions not circumscribed by the existence or position of the Chinese state, nor defined by processes within China alone.  Instead, Karl posits the possibility that Chinese intellectuals perceived China as a national entity by way of a growing sense that China was a part of the world, and that there were certain analogues for China’s problems in other places in the world from which the Chinese could learn and by which China could be reimagined as a modern state.  This sense of China in the world Karl calls “globality’, and it is her position that China discovered itself by creating histories of other places within the colonized world (Turkey, Japan, Hawaii, South Africa and the Philippines, among others) that served as tropes for thinking of China’s problems, opportunities, and identity in the intellectual world of 1898-1911.

Weston: *The Power of Position* Synopsis

Weston, Timothy B.  The Power of Position:  Beijing University, intellectuals, and Chinese Political Culture, 1898-1929. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2004.

In The Power of Position, Weston contends that during the Republic the founding and growth of Beijing University as an intellectual center for China created the mouthpiece for Chinese intellectuals to make a case for themselves as the proper leadership for China in the modern era.  After making this point in his introduction, the second and third chapters discuss the founding of Beijing University in the end of the Qing Dynasty as the Jingshi daxuetang and then follow the University through China’s 1911 revolution and its aftermath in Beijing.  Weston’s primary goal in the fourth chapter is to show the University’s ability to position itself as new, but the inheritor of the intellectual tradition in China. In the fifth, titled “The Insistent Pull of Politics” he asserts that intellectuals saw themselves as the proper leaders of society, in the Confucian style, and sought to use Beijing University as their mouthpiece and as a place to train their students to think in terms of service to the larger nation of China.  In chapter six, Weston sees this process of moving from Imperial University to “Beida”, the modern hotbed of intellectual discovery and political activism, as having reached its peak in the May 4th Movement of 1919.  Chapter seven discusses a crossroads after the 1920’s during which the University seemed to be trying to choose between political activism and academic professionalism, where the problems of modern society could be thought out in a quiet, careful, critical way.   Westons conclusion is that Beijing University was uniquely positioned to accomplish the task of mediating the modern and traditional through an essential conservatism that came with the territory of being an intellectual in China, whatever the subject of study.  Rather than seeing Beijing University as a revolutionary place, then, Weston sees it as essentially a liberal institution, rooted in the Republic, and dedicated to the values of intellectual social leadership, individual self-reflection, critical thinking, and service to society as a whole.

Howell, *Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan*

Howell, David L., Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan.

Berkeley and  Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 2005.

In Geographies of Identity David Howell sets out to present what he calls a series of essays on the changing features of identity in the period of transition between early modern and modern (read Tokugawa and Meiji) Japan.  Howell’s project is worthwhile, though the way in which he goes about it in this book, using unconnected essays to make a variety of points around and about the main idea, leaves gaps that make the whole less than fully successful.

First, in his introduction, Howell attempts to cobble the essays together into a coherent whole – a project which he then warns the reader not to look for.[1] In fact, this is the theme of the introduction.  At one and the same time, Howell comes up with interesting, even compelling theses, then constantly defines them in the negative or warns us not to look for too much in them.  This technique is dismaying, and makes the book seem very much like a set of notes from another research project published in order to clear the author’s desktop.

In addition, a number of promises go unkept, or are only partially fulfilled.  He spends time in the introduction, for example, explaining how he sees the concept of Japanese identity traveling across the Tokugawa-Meiji boundary in a kind of discontinuity-that-is-continuity.  “I write,” he says, “as an early modernist looking across the transom into the modern world.”[2] Across this divide, “Contiuity and disjunction were one and the same.”[3] This is an interesting, though counter-intuitive idea, though no less difficult than the idea of transition in educational thought provided by Brian Platt in regards to the same historical nexus.  Platt, however, focuses his book on this difficult concept and makes his point rather well.  Howell never comes back to it, and while the idea can be detected in some parts of the book as an undercurrent, whatever it carries with it is quickly submerged by the essays presented, and the way in which this connection-that-is-division works is never satisfactorily explained nor worked out through a discussion of historical events or evidence.  This is one fundamental flaw of the disjointed essay approach Howell uses:  no single theme can be easily carried through the book without continually making it explicit.

Still, some of Howells ideas are very worthwhile.  It would do the field some good if he would turn some of his essays into monographs in their own right.  His primary concept – that identity is partially defined by institutions and the way in which they shape the social, political, and economic topos, and that one primary function of such institutions is to create borders and delineate the space in which they exists, whether that be geography in the traditional political sense of the word, or geography in the sense of status divisions, institutional-functional divisions, or other delineating ideas.[4]

Most of the introduction, however, is spent defining what the book is not.  It is not a book about ethnic identity.[5] “This book is… not a history of the Ainu, nor for that matter a history of the discourse of Japanese ethnic and cultural identity.”[6] It is not a book about “how the Japanese Self was constructed vis-à-vis an Ainu other.[7] Howell promises he “will not say much about how individuals imagined ethnic and national communities.”[8] The classification of what the book is, and what it does, in fact, intend to do, has to be read as a function of what it does not.

Ultimately, this collection of essays is an institutional history of the classification of individuals by state organizations and institutions (or the equivalent thereof in the Tokugawa period) and the way in which those institutional classification of individuals circumscribed the possibilities of identity within which they could operate.

Defining the book’s intent in a positive way, it is possible to find some merit – in fact some important contributions, in Howell’s work.  He remains throughout his own worst enemy, though, refusing to take his ideas to their destinations, sometimes, apparently, through sheer stubborn rejection of the need to write more.

Whatever the case, Howell’s sense that identity is circumscribed by institutions is hardly new, but its application to the Tokugawa-Meiji transition can be enlightening.  His two chapters on the Ainu, for example, are useful in the way in which they present the change in official recognition of Ainu as a part, or not, of the state itself.  Howell’s argument here is that the arrival of the Meiji government overturned Ainu identity itself.  In the Tokugawa period, Howell argues that the Ainu as trading partners provided the Matsumae clan, then after 1855 the Shogunate, with important revenue, and so keeping their identity separate from that of Japanese was institutionally as well as economically useful.[9] In the Meiji period, Howell makes the well-taken point that the needs of a centralizing state made it more useful to erase categories of Ainu identity officially as Japanese, without special privileges or state-supplied identities, so that identity for Ainu individuals became a function of private practice and personal proximity to Ainu population centers, but not an officially recognized category.[10] By doing this, Howell explains in his introduction, ““Japanese” was the only identity through which Ainu subjects could negotiate with the nation-state.”[11]

Howell’s most important point in the book is in his first chapter, where he discusses the idea of status as “geography of identity.”  Howell’s assumption here is that the idea of status was at once a state-complicit, if not a fully state-sponsored, system and a framework for local authority and social relations that was naturalized (ala Ooms) through practice so as to make performance of status-based roles manifest definitions of individual identity within an ever-larger set of politico-social systems.  Further, Howell wants us to see that the Tokugawa Shogunate , through the status system, did function as a state apparatus.[12] He tells us, “The very pervasiveness of the status system freed the state from the need to intervene directly into community affairs because it could depend on internal hierarchies to take care of the details of administration.”[13] Though this is not a new idea, Howell does give it new life in discussing it in terms of institutional frameworks, making the point that understanding identity in Tokugawa Japan requires that we understand how institutions functioned at all levels, and uncover the hidden links between them.  One of these links was the status system, according to Howell.

This argument underpins the rest of the book.  In chapters on the transition to a Meiji state, Howell discusses how changes in status structures allowed the Meiji state to redefine its relationship to all Japanese, by making all subjects of the emperor equally Japanese, rather than defined by status and operating on different levels with different understandings of the geographies in which they acted based on political differences alone.  By doing this, the Meiji state was able to create a Japanese identity that was national in character and geographically centered on the emperor’s seat in Tokyo.[14]

Howell bases his discussion of the change in burakumin status under the same rubric.  His contention is that by officially making the burakumin status the same as that of commoners, the Meiji state was able to also create a large new group of subjects from whom taxes could be taken and eventually service required.[15] According to his discussion of changes in the status system in Chapter 3, “the Meiji state expected much more of its subjects than their money, and over time it translated expectations into demands ever more effectively.”[16] The leveling of status, including that of burakumin and Ainu, forced these groups to act within state definitions of being Japanese, without special limitations, but also without special protections.  The only way to relate to the state was through the same apparatus that all other Japanese did so.

This, however, was not always easily accomplished on the non-state level, according to Howell, and when problems at this level led to violence, Howell wants to claim that such violence was an opportunity for the state to assert its national central authority.  The chief merit of this argument, as well as its greatest difficulty, is that Howell here discusses violence as not-class-conflict.  That is, he attempts to remove social class from the picture by discussing the violence involved in some peasant protest (particularly the Mimasaka Blood Tax Revolt) not as class-based or identity-based protests, but as essentially a conflict between the official version of identity and local perceptions of identity politics.[17] This is problematic because there is clear evidence that such conflict was class-based.  However, Howell’s argument is compelling as well because he is able to show that a different dimension existed at the level of state-society relations.  This argument deserves the attention of a full monograph.

The unconverted opportunity presented above shows up one great weakness of the book: it attempts to universalize its arguments with reference to all ethnic and social groups in Japan.  The problems here are legion, but might still be dealt with if Howell were to make an effort at unifying his thoughts, and removing ideas that didn’t work.  One example is the leveling argument made in the first three chapters of the book in comparison with that made about the Ainu and about Ryukyu.  To suggest that status defined social, political, and economic relations in the Tokugawa period is not a new, nor very much argued, point.  This is solid ground.  To go further, as Howell does, and make the link to identity – that is, that status affected not only relations between individuals and groups, but political and geographical realities, economic opportunities, and social relations, making the realities – the identities – of individuals and groups in one status group essentially invisible to those in another – is a very interesting idea, and one that, again, deserves the attention of an entire, and theoretically unified, monograph.  The goal of the book, in other words, is subverted by its best argument.  To treat the burakumin, the Ainu, and the Ryukyu people as the same is antithetical to the very approach of this particular idea.  If their identities were different during the Tokugawa period, that is probably because these groups did, in fact, have different geographies in every way that Howell describes the term.  They lived, even the burakumin in this case, in different places which probably precluded most contact between them.  To make a cross-application of a Marxist concept reread – class consciousness read here as identity consciousness – these groups, even had they been in contact with each other in regards to identity and ideology – would have required much more common ground than they had.  Howell does not even begin to think about that, but lumps them together.

In addition to the above oversight, Howell also ignores the differences in size between these groups, and the essential differences between their relations to the Tokugawa state.  The Ainu were only a few thousand in population, where the burakumin, already identified as Japanese ethnically, had a population in the millions.  Moreover, the burakumin, while they were, as Howell points out, largely autonomous in their social and political activities because of their outcaste status, were Japanese, and politically a part of the Tokugawa order and Japanese history.  The people of the Ryukyus had their own monarchy, and political relations to the Qing state as well as to Satsuma (though not, for some time, directly to the Tokugawa).  Thus there are few comparisons to be made in terms of why differences, even within the Tokugawa status classification system, existed between these three groups.  To treat them, then, as undergoing similar processes of integration into the Meiji state stretches Howell’s argument of the Tokugawa-Meiji transition as consisting of ruptures-as-continuities really only confirms the taxonomic oxymoron he is working with, and does not end up enlightening the reader as to what these changes might really have meant in terms of the transition, or of modernity.

Because of its disjointed nature, and comparison of apples with oranges when it comes to groups incorporated into the Meiji state from outside the Tokugawa status structure, Howell’s book largely fails.  This in spite of the fact that some of his ideas could be very useful analytical frameworks for examining the period of 1850-1890.  What this suggests to me is that Howell really needs to break this book up into its constituent essays, look at each carefully, and provide monographs where there is merit.  The essays cannot really work, either together or apart, in the length, or the degree of depth, that they exist in this volume.


[1] David L. Howell, Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth Century Japan, (Berkely, Los Angeles, and London:  University of California Press, 2005), p. 17.

[2] Ibid., p. 3.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Howell, p. 4, 5.

[5] Ibid., 6.

[6] Ibid., 9.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 13.

[9] Howell, p. 141-153.

[10] Ibid., p. 174.

[11] Ibid., 15.

[12] Ibid., 42-43.

[13] Ibid., 43.

[14] Ibid., 45-78.

[15] Ibid., 78.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Howell, p. 90-91.