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

Not Even Past

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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A Historian in Hong Kong: Living in the Future-Looking at the Past

by Peter Hamilton

Hong Kong is a strange place in which to research the past. This dizzyingly dense city of seven million people moves faster than either New York or London. As any resident can tell you, trains on the MTR arrive every three minutes and you will have cell phone service for the entire journey. Buildings from the 1970s are considered old and rapidly fall to make way for opulent luxury towers and designer stores. Real estate speculation is the local obsession, while historical preservation remains a funny fringe interest. From the bottom to the summit of Hong Kong’s steep socioeconomic pyramid, the name of the game is making and spending money. And whether they are pursuing degrees, scoping flat prices, or waiting in line to exchange an iPhone 4S for that new iPhone 5, most Hong Kongers are relentlessly focused onward and (hopefully) upward.

Hong_Kong_Skyline_Restitch_-_Dec_2007-1

To research and write for a living is thus already odd. But it is the approach of a historian that most often baffles people here. At meals and social events, I find myself explaining primary source research to people who think I am kidding. They assume that I should just read other scholars’ books all day in some windowless dungeon. When I explain that instead I spend my time looking through collections of old documents, there is often a double take. People love to hear that I have to wear white gloves and they giggle with glee when I affirm that no one monitors when I arrive or leave. Their grin wryly says “Oh, I’m onto your game now!” Occasionally someone will lean in and ask, “Where exactly do you go to do this?” Most have never heard of this peculiar place called “The Public Records Office.”

This disbelief only grows when I explain what I study. If I answer broadly “U.S. and modern Chinese history,” a telling response is “Well, which is it?” Due to nationalistic textbooks and the sensationalist media in both countries, America and China figure in public thinking as such radically divergent, oppositional entities that their histories could not possibly interlink. And when I answer more specifically that I study Americans living in Hong Kong from 1937 to 1997, their expressions transform from curiosity to pity. “What a fool!” their arched eyebrows and pursed lips convey. In most Hong Kongers’ eyes, this topic seems nonexistent or even slightly absurd. Several people have questioned, “You mean British people in Hong Kong, right?”

Ironically, I love these reactions. As a historical guppy in a maelstrom of corporate sharks and glamorous clownfish, I then receive this amazing gift—the thrilling, brief, and fleeting opportunity to say something that will change their mind. I comb through research treasures gleaned from the archive and interviews to convey why I choose to spend my time in this way. Do you know that posh and prestigious social club? Well, did you know its first Chinese member was a Hong Kong heiress who was denied admission before she became an American and used her new citizenship to shatter their segregation? Or what about any of these signature Hong Kong companies, all of which were founded by Americans living here? And what about that university that you attended? You might not guess that the man who built it almost singlehandedly was a tireless Chinese American scholar!

My hope in these exchanges is not to appear smug, or simply to impress people here, or even to prove my topic’s value. My earnest and naïve wish is to force them just to wonder—to pause in the headlong profit race and see the magical Hong Kong that I do. For here is where Sun Yat-sen, Ho Chi Minh, and José Rizal each took refuge, forever changing the future of China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Hong Kong is not the periphery of China but the capital of the global China diaspora. Hong Kong has been a nexus of globalization for nearly two centuries and has the historical Armenian, Parsee, Sikh, Hyderabadi, Russian, Filipino, West African, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swiss, Italian, Japanese, Korean, and American communities to prove it. Despite all its achievements and its many reinventions, Hong Kong rarely takes pride in its momentous historical significance. Perhaps perpetual redevelopment makes the past difficult to envision. But when I tell people what I do here, at heart I am really hoping to share what I know to be true—that Hong Kong’s past is impossibly global and startlingly rich.

Although it is more comfortable to be a graduate student in the nurturing scholarly cocoon of UT, this experience of constantly explaining myself to non-academics keeps the overwhelming endeavor of dissertation research in sparkling perspective. Every day, Hong Kong’s bustle reminds me how strange my work is and how lucky I am. This city unexpectedly reminds me of what scholarship should really be about—sharing the knowledge that we are so privileged to cultivate and harvest. On the opposite side of the planet from Austin, my heart still races when the archivists bring me my daily trove of dusty folders and crumbling papers. And I can’t wait to tell my friends about what I find.

You may also enjoy:

NEP podcasts of interviews with graduate students about doing dissertation research

Jessica Luther on writing messy history

Photo Credit:

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0

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