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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Red China’s Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development under the Commune by Joshua Eisenman (2018)

by Horus Tan

The People’s Commune was both a collective farm and a local institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. It was introduced in China in 1958 and abolished in 1983. Many scholars suggest that the People’s Commune was unproductive because its remuneration system was too egalitarian. According to James Kai-sing Kung , it offered only “a tenuous link between effort and reward. This weakness of incentives led to extensive free-riding behavior, which was cured only by the eventual replacement of the collectives by family farms.”[1] The Chinese Communist Party today shares this perspective. In its official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of the peasants, and the abolition of the commune was set into motion by a couple of destitute peasants in 1978 who were attempting to improve their living standard. Joshua Eisenman offers a quite different perspective. In Red China’s Green Revolution, he argues that, instead of being an economic failure, the People’s Commune was successful in modernizing agriculture and promoting agricultural productivity during the 1970s. Some top officials of the Chinese Communist Party, not some poor peasants, abolished the People’s Commune in 1983 for their own political gain instead of its economic performance.

Poster of People’s Commune ca. 1958 (via Flickr)

Eisenman’s foremost conclusion is that the People’s Commune of the 1970s can be considered productive because of its ability to generate investment. Eisenman found that the People’s Commune was not a rigid institution. When it was introduced in 1958, it was indeed a disastrous failure and led to the famine of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). However, it experienced a dramatic transformation in the 1960s. By the 1970s, the People’s Commune, which Eisenman called the “Green Revolution Commune,” was successful in raising the agricultural productivity in China. One of the biggest problems agriculture in China faced before the introduction of the People’s Commune was the lack of capital. In a country with scarce capital and an unlimited labor force living just above subsistence level, it was hard to cut consumption and increase saving rates, in order to make productive investments to take advantage of high returns to capital. The People’s Commune of the 1970s extracted agricultural surplus before produce was distributed among the peasants. In other words, the peasants were taxed before they got their income. This system enabled the commune to “reduce consumption and ensure the high savings rates necessary to finance agricultural modernization.” Unlike the People’s Commune of 1958, which invested household savings in poor quality capital and caused the most catastrophic famine in human history, the People’s Commune of the 1970s turned savings into productive investments like agricultural machinery and chemical fertilizer. It kickstarted a continuous development process that produced rapid growth in food production. At the same time, the People’s Commune of the 1970s tolerated the existence of private sideline plots, cottage enterprises, and rural markets. This tolerance helped the peasants maintain their lives above the subsistence level and avoid the over-extraction which took place in the People’s Commune of 1958.

Mao Zedong shakes hands with Peoples commune workers ca. 1958 (via. Wikimedia)

Many scholars suggest that the remuneration system of the People’s Commune allowed the less productive members to be free riders, and made more productive members work less hard for the commune and seek better compensation outside it. In contrast, Eisenman argues that the free rider problem was largely alleviated by Maoist collectivist indoctrination. He argues that the People’s Commune was a kind of religious community, a church of Mao. Through ceremonial behaviors, like the public recitation of Mao’s teachings, the performance of Maoist opera and dance, and the display of Mao’s profile, the People’s Commune created a self-disciplined labor force who prioritized the fulfillment of Maoist collectivist ideology over material wealth. These activities also created a strict political atmosphere in which a nonconformists felt that criticized by the entire commune. Maoist indoctrination was backed up by the People’s Militia—the semiautonomous local military institution nested within the commune. The People’s Militia was controlled by the leaders of the commune to enforce both the commune’s collectivist ideology and its external security. Eisenman points out one additional characteristic that forced peasants to accept the high savings rates. The People’s Commune was not only a collective farm but also an autarkic institution that managed almost all economic and political activities in rural China. This autarky made it almost impossible for the peasants to flee the commune and seek a better life in the world outside.

People’s Commune Canteen ca. 1958 (via Wikimedia)

Eisenman’s second major conclusion is that the abolition of the People’s Commune was carried out by top officials of the Chinese Communist Party. According to the official narrative, the People’s Commune was too unproductive to maintain the subsistence of its members, so eighteen starving peasants in a commune of East China decollectivized their own commune, risking the death penalty on December 24, 1978.  The improvement of these peasants’ economic conditions after decollectivization supposedly encouraged the authorities to abolish the People’s Commune. However, Eisenman argues that the fate of the Commune was decided not by its economic performance or by grassroots demands, but rather by the winner of the factional struggle within the Communist Party—Deng Xiaoping. The abolition of the Commune was a deliberate decision taken by these top Party officials to overthrow their pro-commune rivals who were still loyal to Mao’s ideology after Mao’s death.  He also shows that there were many local and commune officials who opposed the abolition of the commune and refused to return to household-based agriculture. They did not dismember their commune until they were asked to do so by provincial officials. Some provincial officials admitted that they had to issue orders to stop the local officials from hindering the decollectivization movement.

People’s Commune ca. 1981 (via Wikimedia)

One of the merits of Eisenman’s study is that it offers a very useful approach to help scholars understand the transformation of agriculture in China during the 1960s and 1970s. Famine is one of the most common topics in Chinese history, and agriculture in China still underperformed until the 1960s. But during the 1970s, the situation definitely changed. Between 1962 and 1978, although China was almost completely closed to foreign trade, added almost 300 million people without suffering any massive famine. We can’t understand how Chinese agriculture accomplished this if we do not recognize the contribution of the People’s Commune to agricultural productivity. Eisenman’s study also helps researchers to dispense with their  idealization of private property rights. Researchers of collective agriculture in the Soviet Union and Communist China usually are occupied with the underperformance of collective agriculture and the tragedies peasants suffered in the collective farms in these countries. These tragedies sometimes make researchers assume that private property is therefore superior. Eisenman’s study shows that the foremost obstacle faced by agriculture in many developing and underdeveloped countries is the lack of capital rather than the lack of private property rights. Small peasants cannot overcome the lack of capital by just building a closer connection between effort and reward.

[1] James Kai-sing Kung, “Transaction Costs and Peasants’ Choice of Institutions: Did the Right to Exit Really Solve the Free Rider Problem in Chinese Collective Agriculture?” Journal of Comparative Economics 17, no. 2 (June 1993): 486.


You might also like:
Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China
China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s
The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past, by Gail Hershatter (2011)
Sowing the Seeds of Communism: Corn Wars in the USA

Panel: “From the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution”

The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement and the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Communist Revolution in China. Beginning with the unreserved embrace of Western values by “enlightenment” intellectuals, the three decades following World War I in China witnessed dramatic transformation on all fronts, ending in the establishment of a communist government that would rule China to the present day. To make sense of the impacts and legacies of these two historical events as well as the ironies and contradictions that were intrinsic to them, our panelists will discuss the impact of the May Fourth movement on social and intellectual life in Republican China, the opportunities and dilemmas that confronted Chinese women in their involvement in the Communist Revolution, and the strategy and tactics behind Communist success in the Civil War in 1949.

Featuring:

“Rethinking of the May Fourth Discourse: Family, Marriage and Women in the Chinese Revolution”
Xiaoping Cong
Professor of History
University of Houston

“The Making of “Youth” in Modern China: Reflections on the May Fourth Movement”
Iris Ma
Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer, Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
University of Texas at Austin

“From 1919 to 1949: The May 4th Movement and Communist Strategy and Tactics in China’s Civil War”
Harold Tanner
Professor of History
University of North Texas

Huaiyin Li, moderator
Professor of History
University of Texas at Austin


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

2019 History PhDs on Not Even Past

This month on Not Even Past we are celebrating the accomplishments of seventeen students who completed their doctoral dissertations and received their PhDs in History in 2018-2019. Above you see some of them pictured. Below you will find each of their names and the title of their dissertations.

Many of these students were also contributors to Not Even Past throughout their time here, developing their skills as public historians alongside their training as a academics. Here we offer a comprehensive index to all our new PhDs’ publications on Not Even Past.  Congratulations to all!

Ahmad Tawfek Agbaria
Dissertation: The Return of the Turath: Arab Rationalist Association 1959-2000

Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture by Ziad Fahmy (2011)

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights. June 1967 (via Wikipedia)

Christopher Babits
Dissertation: To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (Dir: Desiree Akhavan, 2018)

Digital Teaching: A Mid-Semester Timeline

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

Age of Fracture by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

Nature Boy, 30 for 30 (Dir: Rory Karpf, 2017)

Doing History in the Modern U.S. Survey: Teaching with and Analyzing Academic Articles

Finding Hitler (in All the Wrong Places?)

The Rise of Liberal Religion by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)

Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self by Jessica Grogan (2012)

Another Perspective on the Texas Textbook Controversy

Religious Book Week Poster from 1925 (via Library of Congress)

Bradley Joseph Dixon
Dissertation: Republic of Indians: Law, Politics, and Empire in the North American Southeast, 1539-1830

Facing North from Inca Country: Entanglement, Hybridity, and Rewriting Atlantic History

Map of Virginia, discovered and as described by Captain John Smith, 1606; engraved by William Hole (Via Wikimedia commons)

Luritta DuBois
Dissertation: United in Our Diversity: The Reproductive Healthcare Movement, 1960-2000

Historical Perspectives on Marshall (dir. Reginal Hudlin, 2017)

UT Gender Symposium: Women’s Bodies and Political Agendas

Thurgood Marshall in 1957 (Library of Congress)

Dennis Fisher
Dissertation: To Not Sell One Perch: Algonquin Politics and Culture at Kitigan Zibi During the Twentieth Century

The Many Histories of South Austin: The Old Sneed Mansion

A 1936 photograph of the Sneed House taken by the Historic American Buildings Survey (via Library of Congress)

Kristie Flannery
Dissertation: The Impossible Colony: Piracy, the Philippines, and Spain’s Asian Empire

A New History Journal Produced by Students

#changethedate: Australia’s Holiday Controversy

Acapulco-Manila: The Galleon, Asia and Latin America, 1565-1815

Notes from The Field: The Pope in Manila

Outlaws of the Atlantic by Marcus Rediker (2014)

Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire by Eliga Gould

Sixteen Months in a Leaky Boat

The Sapphires (2012)

2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse by Matthew Restall and Amara Solari (2011)

Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America edited by Andrew B. Fisher and Matthew D. O’Hara (2009)

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001)

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz (1999)

detail of an 18c map depicting a pirate ship sailing near the Philippines.

Pedro Murillo Velarde and Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay. Mapa de las yslas Philipinas (1744) (Detail: Benson Latin America Collection, UT Austin)


Travis Michael Gray
Dissertation: Amid the Ruins: The Reconstruction of Smolensk Oblast, 1943-1953

Every Day Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000)

Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

Soviets fighting during World War II (via wiki commons)

William Kramer
Dissertation: Faith, Heresy and Rebellion: Resisting the Henrician Reformation in Ireland, 1530-1540

Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI (via Art Institute of Chicago)

John Lisle
Dissertation: Science and Espionage: How the State Department and the CIA Deployed American Scientists during the Cold War

What Killed Albert Einstein

This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age by William Burrows (1998)

Soviet postage stamp celebrating the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Sputnik satellite

James Martin
Dissertation: In Search of the Nixon Doctrine on Latin America: Levers of Influence and Resistance in Hemispheric Relations

Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade drives through Caracas, Venezuela and is attacked by demonstrators, May 1958 (National Archives via Wikipedia)

Kazushi Minami
Dissertation: Rebuilding the Special Relationship: People’s Diplomacy and U.S.-Chinese Relations in the Cold War

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World by Hajimu Masuda (2015)

Past and Present in Modern China

Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)

shot from animated film of a boy looking up at airplane in the sky

from Hayao Miyazaki’s film The Wind Rises

Elizabeth O’Brien
Dissertation: Intimate Interventions: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Surgery in Mexico, 1790-1940

Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in The Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973 by Heidi Tinsman.

Gendered Compromises: Political Culture and the State in Chile, 1920-1950 by Karin Rosemblatt

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

“Women Advance with the Flag of the Motherland” La Unidad Popular poster (1970).

Nakia Parker
Dissertation: Trails of Tears and Freedom: Black Life in Indian Slave Country,1830-1866

Popular Culture in the Classroom

The First Texans: An Exhibit in Jester Hall

Confederados: The Texans of Brazil

Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)

Chickasaw Freedmen filing for allotment in Oklahoma (Oklahoma Historical Society)

Christopher Rose
Dissertation: On the Home Front: Food, Medicine, and Disease in WWI Egypt

You’re Teaching WHAT?

Wrong About Everything

Mapping & Microbes: The New Archive (No. 22)

Searching for Armenian Children in Turkey: Work Series on Migration, Exile, and Displacement

Industrial Sexuality: Gender in a Small Town in Egypt

Texas is Adopting New History Textbooks: Maybe They Should Be Historically Accurate

Exploring the Silk Road

The Ottoman Age of Exploration by Giancarlo Casale (2010)

What’s Missing from ‘Argo’ (2012)

Chris is also the co-founder and main force behind our podcast, 15 Minute History, where he has done many of our interviews.

Map showing typhus outbreaks in Egypt, September 1, 1914 – May 31, 1919 (created by Chris Rose)


Edward Flavian Shore
Dissertation: Avenger of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil

 

History and Advocacy: Brazil and Turmoil

Sanctuary Austin: 1980s and Today

Beyonce as Historian: Black Power at the DPLA

Remembering Willie “El Diablo” Wells and Baseball’s Negro League

The Public Historian: Giving it Back

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part II

The Quilombo Activist’s Archives and Post-Custodial Preservation, Part I

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

Getz/Gilverto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

Por Ahora: The Legacy of Hugo Chávez Frías

The Cuban Connection by Eduardo Saénz Rovner (2008)

Che: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson

Narco-Modernities

Photo from Edward Shore’s Collection

Eyal Weinberg
Dissertation: Tending to the Body Politic: Doctors, Military Repression, and Transitional Justice in Brazil (1961-1988)

Our History Mixtape: Embracing Music in the Classroom

Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)

For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 by Barbara Weinstein (1996)

The Works Progress Administration’s music project employed musicians as instrumentalists, singers, concert performers, and music teachers during the Great Depression (via Library of Congress)

Zhaojin Zeng
Dissertation: Nourishing Shanxi: Indigenous Entrepreneurship, Regional Industry, and the Transformation of a Chinese Hinterland Economy, 1907-2004

 

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yansheng Huang (2008) 

Cantonese bazaar during Chinese New Year at the Grant Avenue, San Francisco, circa 1914 (via Wikipedia)

Pictured in photo: Dr. John Lisle, Prof Daina Berry, Dr. William Kramer, Dr. Nakia Parker, Prof. Ann Twinam, Dr. Christopher Rose, Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, Dr. Eyal Weinberg.

Confucian Patriarchy and the Allure of Communism in China

By Alan Roberts

Former flag of the communist part of China (via Wikipedia)

Despite a growing tolerance for socialism, “communism” is still a dirty word for most Americans.  Many point to Stalin’s Gulag, the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge, and the repressive Kim dynasty in Korea as they preface the question how could communism ever appeal to anyone?  For each country, there are myriad answers to that question, but it is useful to consider the historical situation in each nation before they embraced communism.

In China, for instance, there were political, economic, and nationalistic reasons for the popularity of communism, but interestingly, Chairman Mao Zedong’s movement found broad popular support in part because of his explicit efforts to enforce gender equality.  It was he, after all, who proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky.”[1]  Compared with China’s Confucian patriarchal system that had oppressed women for so long, many saw this as a welcome change.  Nevertheless, part of what makes patriarchy so insidious is its ability to trick whole generations of people—including women—into propagating an oppressive system rather than overthrowing it.

Judith Bennett’s History Matters analyzes patriarchy in a medieval European context, but her theoretical claims could also be applied to pre-communist Chinese society in general, and Confucianism in particular.  Bennett points out that it is problematic to broadly assume that men alone are the perpetrators of patriarchy and that women are their passive victims.  While the institution of patriarchy certainly privileges the masculine over the feminine, Bennett also states that patriarchy has harmed individual men just as it has benefitted individual women.  Indeed, certain women have not only benefited from it, but have also served as active “agents of patriarchy.”[2]

Portrait of Confucius, painted by Wu Daozi, 685-7 58 (via Wikipedia)

Confucius lived circa 500 BCE, but it was not until the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) that Confucianism became the official state ideology.  Since then, Confucianism was not simply a “main character” in Chinese society but also the stage, set, and scenery upon which the play of Chinese daily life unfolded.  Central to Confucian philosophy is the doctrine of filial piety.  This principle teaches that universal harmony is maintained when everyone shows proper respect to their elders because the organization of the family is a microcosm patterned after the organization of the state.  A filial son honors his father, but filial piety also articulates the rules of conduct between friends, elder and younger brothers, husbands and wives, subjects and emperors.  In this way, society is hierarchically structured with men ruling over women and the old ruling over the young, all the way from the lowliest peasant granddaughter to the imperial Son of Heaven.

At the apex of the Confucian philosophical pantheon sits Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi.  Writing almost four-hundred years after the fact, the Han dynasty scholar Liu Xiang (79-8 BCE) compiled a biography of 125 women who each exemplified Han feminine virtues.  One of these women was the mother of Mencius, who, according to Liu, taught her son that a woman’s duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that is all!  This means that a woman’s duty is not to control or to take charge.  Instead she must follow the ‘three submissions.’  When she is young, she must submit to her parents.  After her marriage, she must submit to her husband.  When she is widowed, she must submit to her son.  These are the rules of propriety.[3]

It is worth pointing out that although this quote is attributed to the mother of Mencius, it was actually written centuries later by a man whose intention was to reinforce the patriarchal order by projecting stereotypical female attitudes into the mouth of an authoritative woman whose own gravitas is enhanced by the respected tradition surrounding her son.  However, Liu Xiang laid the foundation for others to buttress the Confucian patriarchy.

Photo of He Zhen (via Wikipedia)

Almost a hundred years after Liu Xiang, Ban Zhao, China’s first female historian, wrote a book titled Admonitions for Women.  Her work condemns spousal abuse, but this text would certainly qualify Ban Zhao as one of Bennett’s “agents of patriarchy”:

On the third day after the birth of a girl…lay the baby below the bed [to] plainly indicate that she [is] lowly and humble and should regard it as a prime duty to submit to others…give her a spindle with which to play [signifying] that she should accustom herself to labor and consider it a prime duty to be industrious.  Let a woman modestly yield to others; let her put others first, herself last.  Should she do something good, let her not mention it; should she do something bad, let her not deny it.  Let her bear contempt; let her even endure when others speak or do evil to her.  Always let her seem to tremble and to fear.[4]

A thousand years later, Confucian patriarchy would intersect gender and class by adding foot binding to its repertoire of female suppression.  While women of the upper class suffered the debilitating pain and immobility of having bound feet, women of the lower classes without bound feet suffered socially from diminished marriage prospects and public humiliation.  However, prior to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, bowing to society’s unrealistic beauty standards, all classes of Chinese women were binding their feet. Roughly half of all Chinese women had bound feet, although the percentage rose significantly among the upper classes.  Although many Chinese emperors and administrators tried to outlaw the practice, only the communists were successful at doing so because of their superior organizational tactics and relentless campaigning.[5]

In 1907, an expatriated Chinese woman named He Zhen published a series of articles on feminism and equal rights.  Although she preceded the Chinese Communist Party by over a decade, and although she was not widely read by the Chinese public, her essays did influence a number of important social agitators whose movements helped bring the Communist Party to power.  She begins her essay, “Women’s Revenge,” by outlining the patriarchal injustices that Chinese women have suffered.  She then asks “how did this poison fill the entire world?  It can be traced to the doctrines of Ban Zhao.”  She continues by labelling Ban a traitor to her sex, a dupe of Confucian misogyny, and a willing agent of patriarchy.[6]  He’s intention, however, is not simply to lay the axe at the root of patriarchal Confucianism, but to actively promote communism as the treatment for China’s nineteenth and twentieth century social ills.

In another essay, He declares that starvation is the strongest tool of sexual oppression in Chinese society.  By controlling the food (i.e. the products of labor), men control the labor of women.  He argues that just so they can eat, women generally fall into one of three categories: either they are slaves to their husbands; they work in factories for slave wages; or else they become prostitutes and enslave themselves to their pimps.  He proclaims that the problem for Confucian women is that they are dependent on others, and “as long as you depend on others, you cannot be free.  I have a good idea that will exempt you from relying on others while still finding food naturally.  How?  By practicing communism.”  Whether or not a twenty-first century Westerner agrees with He’s assessment, it should at least be understandable why so many oppressed Chinese women agreed with Mao and He that because women hold up half the sky, “if we only unite together, with [communism] we can naturally have a good future.  As we say colloquially, ‘the good times are coming.’”[7]

(Alan Roberts is an alumnus of the Defense Language Institute’s Chinese language program.  He is currently a graduate student in history at Utah State University where he is writing his Master’s thesis on performative elements of gender in Chinese Communist propaganda.)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/asia/holding-up-half-the-sky.html?_r=0

[2] Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 59.

[3] Xiang Liu, “Women’s Virtues and Vices,” in Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook, 2nd Ed, ed. Patricia Buckley Ebrey (New York: The Free Press, 1981, 1993), 73.

[4] Zhao Ban, “Admonitions for Women,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 1, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 821, 822.

[5] Louisa Lim, “Painful Memories for China’s Footbinding Survivors,” National Public Radio, March 19, 2007, accessed May 2, 2018, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8966942.

[6] Zhen He, “Women’s Revenge,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 394.

[7] Zhen He, “What Women Should Know About Communism,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition Volume 2, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 390-2.

Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, by Frank Dikötter, Lars Peter Laamann, and Zhou Xun (2004)

By Horus T’an

The opium myth is one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. According to the myth, opium is presumed to be a highly addictive narcotic and highly harmful to its users’ health, and Great Britain used its military superiority to impost the shameful opium trade on China and turn it into a nation of opium addicts who were “smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos.” In the opium myth, opium symbolizes the imperialists’ pernicious intention to dominate China and the tragedies suffered by all the nations facing imperialist aggression. In Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China, Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun debunk the opium myth through exploration of the history of opium in China from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. They point out that the opium myth was invented by nationalist reformers and never reflected the reality of opium in Chinese society during the late imperial period. The authors also argue that the miseries experienced by Chinese opium smokers  from the end of the nineteenth century were brought on by the anti-opium campaigns launched by the Chinese authorities rather than the chemical property of opium. These campaigns degraded the opium smokers into a morally depraved status and forced them to use more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin.

The opium myth analyzed opium smoking practices in China and India in isolation from the cultural and social factors sustaining these practices. In contrast, this book shows that opium in China served as an essential lubricant in male social activities. Opium was prepared and appreciated in highly sophisticated ceremonies by male social elites. Opium also served as a panacea for many ailments. Quite contrary to the incurable addicts in the opium myth, the authors argue that the opium consumed in both China and India was relatively moderate and had few harmful effects on either health or longevity. Most opium smokers were able to control the quantity of the opium they consumed, and the irresistible compulsion toward ever-increasing doses was not a common phenomenon among them.

The highlight of this discussion about the history of opium before the end of the nineteenth century is the comparison between tobacco and opium. The authors demonstrate that tobacco and opium played a relatively similar role in social activities and people showed similar attitudes toward them. There were alarms in the 1830s and 1840s from a few Han officials over moral decay and the breakdown in social order caused by the prevalence of opium. The opium myth interpreted these critiques as Chinese people’s unyielding resistance to imperialists’ attempt to turn China into a nation of opium addicts. Nevertheless, the authors prove that these alarms were based on Confucian asceticism rather than Han officials’ understanding of the addictive chemical property of opium since some officials expressed similar concern about the popularity of tobacco. In addition, the authors emphasize that the critique of opium by Han officials was related to their desire to restore the scholar-official class to the position of moral authority that it possessed during the Ming dynasty.

The authors suggest that the opium myth, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, was a confluence of two trends. The first is the prevalence of opium prohibition in Europe from the 1870s. Opium prohibition was “part of the medical profession’s search for moral authority, legal control and statutory power over pharmaceutical substances in their fight against a popular culture of self-medication.” The second is  Chinese nationalists’ effort to defend their own country from the encroachment of imperialism. The nationalists were eager to figure out why China was repeatedly defeated by imperial powers. The authors suggest that the  Chinese nationalists viewed opium smoking as the origin of national weakness rather than a personal behavior and that they saw anti-opium campaign as a useful tool to save China from a world dominated by imperial powers.

The authors’ second conclusion is that the anti-opium campaigns, rather than the opium itself, brought miseries to opium smokers. The anti-opium campaigns transformed the public image of opium smokers from gentlemen to thieves, swindlers, and beggars who were enslaved by powerful chemicals. These campaigns also transformed opium houses from a culturally sanctioned venue for male sociability into a site of perdition, a marker of uncivilized behavior and barbarism where vulgar and despicable addicts were leading the country to complete extinction. The prohibition laws passed in these campaigns gave authorities the right to arrest, punish, and kill opium smokers. Besides creating a criminal underclass, these campaigns also pushed smokers from moderate opium to more addictive and more harmful semi-synthetic opiates like morphine and heroin. Even worse, these semi-synthetic opiates are consumed in a much more harmful pattern: heroin and morphine were usually mixed with other unknown compounds and snorted, chewed, or injected with dirty needles shared by many addicts without any protection.

There are some omissions in this book. The first is the process by which the opium myth gained its concrete shape. The authors do a great job in deconstructing the opium myth but fail to dedicate enough attention to this process. This omission weakens the credibility of their argument. The second is the role of racism in the anti-opium campaigns. Opium smoking was mainly a habit practiced by Chinese and Indian. Racism against Chinese immigrants in the United States is responsible for linking opium smoking as a Chinese behavior with opium smoking as a barbarian behavior. Some Chinese intellectuals might accept the anti-opium ideas without any awareness of the racism behind it. The absence of the discussion of racism makes this book less useful than it is supposed to be in understanding how Chinese intellectuals changed their way of thinking through their interaction with the Western world. Furthermore, the authors’ conclusion that the anti-opium campaigns facilitated the spread of the semi-synthetic narcotics is also questionable. After the collapse of the Ch’ing Dynasty, some places of China witnessed the prosperity of both opium and semi-synthetic narcotics. This prosperity could not be explained just with the pressure of the anti-opium campaigns. Despite these omissions, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China serves as essential scholarship for the researchers of modern Chinese history. It re-interprets opium use in Chinese society from the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and shatters one of the most important pillars of the conventional narrative of modern Chinese history. It reveals the complexity of modern Chinese history and implies the failure of the conventional narrative in addressing this complexity. The book throws lights on opium smokers’ miseries caused by the anti-opium campaigns and reminds readers that some important stories are crushed and abandoned in the writing of modern Chinese history. Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China also indicates the significance of culture in shaping public opinion about narcotics and encourages readers to reconsider the effectiveness of the restrictive prohibition law in dealing with the spread of narcotics.

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Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

You may also like:

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra by Roy Doron
CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia,” October 13, 1950 by Mark A. Lawrence
David A. Conrad reviews Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

 

China Today: Communism for Americans in the 1930s

By Fei Guo

China Today was a monthly periodical and the official organ of the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP), an organization formed by a group of American Communist Party members and left-leaning intellectuals devoted to introducing the Chinese communist revolutionary movement to Americans. Located in New York, the AFCP also organized public talks on Chinese politics and economics. The journal never became widely popular, with its highest monthly sale of a mere 7,000 copies, yet it remained influential among left-wing intellectuals who shared a concern for events in China.

The Communist Party USA’s Workers’ Bookshop, at its headquarters on 13th Street, between University Place and Broadway, New York City. Posters in the window advocate for a U.S. invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, to open a “second front” in 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The editors included Philip Jaffe and a secret Communist Party member and graduate student at Columbia University, Chi Ch’ao-ting, using the pseudonym Hansu Chan. Chi joined the Communist Party in America, and together with a few other Chinese students, formed the Chinese Bureau of the Communist Party of USA. With the help of Moscow, Chi was able to receive Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents, which became an important source for articles in China Today. Chi later returned to China and acted as an undercover agent inside Kuomintang (KMT) government, the main enemy of CCP. Chi eventually became a prominent trade official in Mao’s China in the 1950s. Philip Jaffe, a successful leftist businessman, became well known because of the “Ameraisa” spy case in 1945, in which he and several other Amerasia editors were accused of espionage, after US intelligence agents found classified government documents in their office. The espionage charge was later dropped due to lack of evidence, and they were only punished with fines. Jaffe supported the journal financially since China Today was never an economically profitable enterprise and he gave the journal some credibility. Jaffe became interested in China well before the launch of the journal and, although a leftist, Jaffe never joined the Communist Party, sometimes even criticizing the orthodox Moscow-dominated communist movement.

Philip Jaffe, Owen Lattimore, Zhu De and Agnes Jaffe in 1937 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There were two reasons behind the launch of China Today. First, American Leftists were curious about the Chinese revolutionary movement. Classical Marxism predicted that communist revolutions would sooner or later sweep the world and liberate the whole of humankind. The founding of Soviet Union seemed to confirm the inevitability of the spread of communism globally giving hope to leftists. Many intellectuals believed that China would be the crucial next step in the global enterprise of revolutionary human liberation. A journal dedicated to introducing the Chinese communist revolution would perfectly fit the niche. Second, the journal sought to compete with reactionary news outlets and spell out the Communist perspective on Chinese events for the Anglophone world. China Weekly Review, a prominent pro-KMT government newspaper based in Shanghai was their direct target. Given its limited circulation, it appears China Today only partially fulfilled this object.

What gave this China Today a special advantage was its ability to procure Chinese communist documents. Because of KMT government censorship, people both inside and outside China had difficulty accessing undistorted political messages of the CCP. China Today offered such an opportunity when publishing original political manifestos or decrees of Soviet China. Chi was the crucial link as he was secretly receiving documents from China.

Three reports from China Today give an indication of the character of the journal. The three articles center on Chinese communists’ activities in Szechwan Province during the war between the Nationalist government and the communist insurgency that resulted in the Long March (1934-36) and the ascendancy of Mao Zedong. The first two articles give a detailed account of the origins of Szechwan Soviet Base (1929-35) and the military campaigns conducted by its main force, the Fourth Red Army. The third article surveys the communist military movements towards the latter stages of Long March.

Mao Zedong on the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

These articles contain important material not available elsewhere and they offer perspectives on the ways Chinese history, in this case the history of the Long March, was framed for an American audience. The heroism and sacrifice of Chinese communists portrayed in these articles are helpful in writing a more nuanced and comprehensive history of Communist China in America. The article on the Fourth Red Army, which occupies a unique position in Chinese revolutionary history, offers both valuable information and a case study in the political shaping of the past. The Fourth Red Army was led by a prominent Chinese communist leader Zhang Guotao (Chang Kuo-tao) who had a huge policy disagreement with Mao Zedong during Long March and even tried to kill Mao in late 1935. Szechwan was the base area controlled by Zhang at that point in time. The Fourth Red Army subsequently was defeated by government troops and suffered huge losses. Zhang lost his power base and eventually defected to KMT. As a result of this internecine fighting, official Communist Party history tends to erase the achievements attained by Zhang in constructing Szechwan Soviet Base. But these China Today articles were published just after the Zhang-Mao split, when the Fourth Red Army was still praised. Given the poor communication during Long March, the editors of China Today were probably still not aware of the inter-party struggle and therefore their account was more accurate and informative than later assessments of Zhang Guotao.

These news reports were about the events occurring during the epic Long March, but the reporters never explicitly mentioned the term Long March or the supposed goal of Long March: to go to North China to fight with Japanese invasion. This is a call to rethink the narrative of Long March. Chinese official history tends to frame Long March in a way that emphasizes the CCP’s superb strategical capabilities and nationalist political agenda. The Long March was considered to be a strategic retreat that has a clear purpose and destination. We can hardly glean any convincing evidence in articles in China Today that support this characterization. The Communist forces acted more opportunistically, striving to fend off government forces and find a favored location for building a new base. This was in fact for a long time a distinct pattern of Chinese communist guerrilla warfare before Long March. Thus, these news reports open a window to scrutinize pro-communist narratives of CCP activities from 1934-36 before a full-fledged account of Long March came into being.

Route of the Long March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The articles in China Today provide useful information regarding both historical facts and narrative building. We still need to be cautious about overstating the achievements of the Fourth Red Army, but in this case, considering interpretations of Long March narratives, the journal’s ideological bias are not an obstacle, but instead a valuable asset.


Sources:
China Today is part of the Philip J. Jaffe Collection of Leftist Literature in Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin.

Stephen Averill, Revolution in the Highlands: China’s Jinggangshan Base Area (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)

Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh, The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

This essay mainly uses Wide-Giles Romanization System to denote Chinese names and places following its usage in the historical sources being analyzed, except for some well-known Pin-yin names such as Mao Zedong.

You may also like:
CIA Study: “Consequences to the US of Communist Domination of Mainland Southeast Asia.”
Writing Chinese History.
Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China.

A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

By Sandy Chang

On the eleventh floor of the National Library of Singapore, I sit with a pile of large, gray boxes stacked high on a trolley. I am hoping to be transported to the island’s past. The boxes are filled with legal documents from the British colonial era, mainly affidavits, writs of summons, bills of costs, and occasionally testimonies from witnesses in the Straits Settlements. The pages are sepia-colored, some speckled with mold – a reminder of the gulf of time that separates me from the people who produced these very documents I now hold in my hands. To be a historian is almost always to be cognizant of the passage of time and the changes that accompany it.

Koh Seow Chuan Donor's Gallery Courtesy of National Library, Singapore

Koh Seow Chuan Donor’s Gallery (via National Library, Singapore).

For historians, archives are portals into the past. They offer tantalizing, if partial, glimpses of a different era; snapshots of those who inhabited a world different from our own. Engaging with primary sources, in the words of historian James Warren, entails the experience of “’passing over’…a crossing over to the standpoint of another culture, another way of life, another human being” and to return with a deeper understanding of the past. Of course, historians know that our sources are not unmediated versions of history nor do they contain self-evident truths about the lived experiences of others. Nonetheless, we search longingly for that one document, one photograph, or one artifact that we hope will bring us closer, back in time, to the worlds we study.

The papers I rifle through are part of the Koh Seow Chuan Collection, named after its donor, a retired Singaporean architect. Koh was one of the founders of DP Architects, a company responsible for the design of the famous Esplanade Theaters by Marina Bay. He also happened to be an avid collector of stamps, art, and historical artifacts. In 2009, he donated 1,714 heritage items to the National Library Board of Singapore, consisting of rare maps and photographs, old letters and envelopes, and legal documents dating back to the early nineteenth century. The legal documents in Koh’s personal collection include records from the Straits Settlements Supreme Courts and District Courts, filling over four hundred boxes. In them, historians can locate the records of many prominent members of the Straits Chinese community, including Lim Boon Keng, Lim Nee Soon, and others.

The_Esplanade,_Theatres_on_the_Bay_(3751455311)

The Esplanade, Theatres on the Bay, Singapore (via Wikimedia Commons).

I am, however, using these documents to search for traces of Chinese migrant women who sailed across the South Seas and settled in British Malaya in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Far from the thrilling adventure I had anticipated, the process feels tediously dull. Combing through the dense law cases and reading the highly formulaic legal rhetoric for evidence of migrant women can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. In the first week, I encountered a gamut of historical characters: planters and traders, merchants and bankers, manufacturers and small shopkeepers, pineapple preservers and cake-makers. While some of their stories offered delightful anecdotes, I could not help but notice the absence of women. It made me wonder, were these documents appropriate sources for my research or did I need to change the questions I was asking altogether?

With time and patience, the women in these documents gradually became visible to me. At first, their appearances were elusive: a woman sued by her father-in-law for jewelry; a sister embroiled in a legal battle with her half-brother over the administration of their father’s estate; and six women petitioning the court to be legally recognized as the wives of one Chinese man. These were exciting discoveries, but I was baffled by how I would piece together these scraps to construct a coherent narrative of the past. How could I make sense of the “smallness” of these stories within the broader context of a rapidly changing regional maritime economy and of Chinese labor migrations into and around the British Empire in Asia?

Bil of goods - transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 Source: Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore

Bill of goods; transaction between a trader and opium shopkeeper, 1913 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection, National Library, Singapore).

The fragments of these women’s stories emerged slowly, but collectively they gathered momentum. A marked pattern became clear: women almost never appeared in colonial Supreme Court records, either as plaintiffs or defendants, unless they were widows. Of course, the colonial records of the Police or District Courts in the Straits Settlements tell a different story. But, in the colonial Supreme Court, women were first and foremost recognized by the state as conjugal subjects. In case after case, the marital statuses of Chinese women were meticulously recorded: “married woman,” “widow,” or “spinster.” Not all women, however, had equal access to legal recourse via the Supreme Court. Lengthy legal battles, expensive civil litigations, and the practical challenges of serving writs of summons to individuals in a highly transient and mobile colonial society meant that only the very wealthy could take their disputes to court. As such, the women in these records were almost always propertied individuals with substantial wealth.

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

In Koh Seow Chuan collection, I encountered widows who appealed to the colonial state for maintenance; others who sued for outstanding debts owed to their husbands; some who battled one another for the distribution of the family estate. Their stories reveal a fascinating and complicated relationship between conjugality and wealth, gender and colonial law. Collectively, they demonstrate how migrant Chinese women increasingly utilized colonial legal institutions as one way of resolving transnational family disputes concerning inheritance, succession, and property rights. At the same time, their stories also shed light on their vulnerability within the colonial legal process itself – a process that was in many ways arbitrary and precarious.

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow 1893 Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore

Statement of claim by a Chinese widow, 1893 (via Koh Seow Chuan Collection National Library Singapore).

Historians often dream of finding that one treasure trove that will unveil the secrets of the past; that one document from which we could write a whole chapter. Sometimes, we are given four hundred boxes instead. Their contents, which at first appear to be “run-of-the-mill,” require us to scour through them carefully. Only then does the past come momentarily into focus. In the digital age, we are often tempted to shuffle through our sources quickly for relevant finds and discard those that don’t “fit” the scope of our research; there’s a temptation to photograph first and read later. But, practicing patience in the archives and learning to sit still with the sources we are given can yield surprising rewards. It enables us to “pass over” to the other side and to see patterns that arise only when we attend to both the absence and presence of women’s lives in the colonial legal archive.
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Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

By Kazushi Minami

History is a contested area of politics in any country. Particularly so in China, where the Chinese Communist Party defines the national history. In the 1980s, in a period of reform, China started to open up its archives and archivists generously helped researchers find documents they needed. The Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive used to be a mecca for historians of Chinese foreign policy. Then in the early 2010s the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly introduced much tighter restrictions, presumably because of the international dispute over the territoriality of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Now, the Foreign Ministry Archive is virtually closed, and historians have turned to provincial and municipal archives scattered throughout China. Between the fall of 2015 and the summer of 2016, I visited seven Chinese archives as part of my dissertation research on Sino-American bilateral exchange in the 1970s and witnessed the Chinese politics of history in motion.

guangdong-provincial-archive

Guangdong Provincial Archive (via author).

Each Chinese archive has its own rules and regulations. The Shanghai Municipal Archive, for instance, has relatively liberal policy and scholars can read and transcribe anything they can find in the on-site computer database. They even allow visitors to photocopy documents—but not any document. In my case, the Shanghai Archive usually denied photocopying of foreign policy related materials, including reports of American visitors after Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to China. Chinese researchers told me that the archival staff would not give us any physical document on a potentially sensitive topic with their official stamp on it. The Guangdong Provincial Archive, once a must-go place for historians, now has a much more restrictive policy and researchers cannot even look at most documents produced in the 1970s. Documents on seemingly harmless issues, including the American track and field delegation in 1975, are no exception. Considering Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong, China’s gateway to the Western world, the Guangdong Archive’s stringent policy detracts much from the scholarship on history of Chinese foreign relations.

Although foreign scholars usually travel to large coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Chinese archives in the remote hinterland sometimes possess surprisingly richer collections. Such was the case with the Shaanxi Provincial Archive in the ancient city of Xi’an. Unlike other archives, the Shaanxi Archive has made available most documents of the Office of Foreign Affairs, which administered hundreds of American visitors in the 1970s. Whenever Americans traveled to Xi’an, the Chinese hosts meticulously planned their itinerary and activities for propaganda purposes. They took American visitors to communes, factories, and schools to show off their socialist achievements, which did impress many Americans who were fed up with social ills back home, including racism, sexism, poverty, inflation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency.

nixon_shakes_hands_with_chou_en-lai

Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai while on a visit to China in 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Among various targets of archival restrictions in China, the history of culture illuminates the sensitive politics of the past. All the archives I visited had tight restrictions on documents of the Office of Cultural Affairs in the 1970s. One archival assistant explained to me that this was because “the old policy was different from the current policy.” During the Cultural Revolution, the notorious Gang of Four, who pursued leftist radicalization of Chinese foreign and domestic policies, controlled a large part of cultural life in China. For instance, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife and the leader of the Gang of Four, used famous revolutionary ballets “The White Haired Girl” and “Red Detachment of Women” to drum up support for her radical agendas. The politicization of Chinese culture, therefore, makes it difficult for us to dig up documents on China’s cultural exchange with foreign countries in the 1970s.

ballet_during_nixon_visit

The Red Detachment of Women ballet premiered in 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All restrictions notwithstanding, Chinese archives still hold numerous sources that reveal how the Chinese masses saw the United States, their deadliest Cold War enemy, in the 1970s. In the wake of the Nixon trip, communes, factories, and schools throughout China held study meetings, where government officials justified the sudden turn in Chinese foreign policy as a tactical move to defeat the United States in the future. Chinese people, however, remained unconvinced of the virtue of making friends with “the U.S. imperialists” that they had fought in Korea and Vietnam. In the late 1970s, when China embarked on the so-called four modernizations in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology, Chinese people—scientists at universities or peasants in the countryside—enthusiastically embraced the assistance of the United States. Nevertheless, they never completely shook off the long-held suspicion of the United States, as seen in another round of study meetings after the normalization of bilateral relations in January 1979.

Today, there is no sign of an immediate relaxation of Chinese archival policy. It will be years, if not decades, before we gain even partial access to the Foreign Ministry Archive, let alone the Central Archive of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese provincial and municipal archives, however, still offer valuable materials that help us understand Sino-American contacts on the eve of the reform era.
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Read more by Kazushi Minami on Not Even Past:
Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, by Hajimu Masuda (2015)
Past and Present in Modern China: Two Works on Historical Memory in China
Historical Perspectives on Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013)
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Great Books on Women’s History: Asia

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we have been posting their suggestions throughout the month. This is our last set of book recommendations; this week we feature books on women and gender in East Asia and South Asia. 

chinese womens books

Huaiyin Li recommends:

Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories (1999)

Focusing on the life stories of five prominent women activists in twentieth-century China, this book examines Chinese feminism in the Republican era and its fate under the socialist state.  Its depiction of the feminists’ pursuit of national salvation and self-emancipation contrasts sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of women’s liberation under its leadership.

Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011)

Based on interviews with 72 village women in Shaanxi province, this book shows how the Chinese Communist Party’s policy reshaped women’s agriculture work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting from the 1950s through the 1970s.  It also addresses the intriguing questions of how memories are gendered and how gender figured in the making of socialism in Chinese agriculture. (Reviewed on Not Even Past).

asia womens

Nancy Stalker recommends:

Jan Bardsley, Women and Democracy in Cold War Japan (2014)

(Bloomsbury, 2016) is an engaging new work that reveals gender roles and gender politics in the 1950s through close readings of diverse popular media.  Focusing on newsworthy events centered around women, such as the wedding of the imperial prince to a commoner and Japan’s first Miss Universe title, Bardsley reveals the media construction of the “housewife” embedded within discourses on postwar democracy, Cold War geopolitics, and US – Japan relations.

Cynthia Talbot recommends:

Davesh Soneji, Unfinished Gestures: Devadasis, Memory and Modernity in South India (2012).

This book combines historical research and ethnographic fieldwork to track the fate of South India’s devadasis, originally Hindu temple dancers who came to be regarded as prostitutes as India was transformed by colonial modernity.  Typically unmarried and residing in quasi-matrilineal communities, devadasis often served as concubines or courtesans for elite men but came under increasing condemnation by social reformists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century; they were officially outlawed in 1947.  Soneji goes beyond the standard narrative of social change in colonial India by including an extensive examination of the role of dance in Indian royal courts and a sensitive exploration of the memories of ex-devadasis in this innovative, well-written work.

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For more books on Women’s History:

Great Books (Europe)

Great Books (Crossing Borders)

Great Books (US)

Indrani Chatterjee, On Women and Nation in India

Our 2013 list of recommendations:  New Books on Women’s History

 

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