Month: January 2008

I noticed yesterday that it was the 79th anniversary of the death of Liang Qichaot, the famous late Qing Dynasty scholar, journalist, translator, reformer, exile, historian, and all around busybody. Liang Qichao has often been a popular focus for studying numerous facets of China’s encounter with the “modern”: newspapers, anthropology, historiography, education, sports, democracy, science. Liang was a complicated guy, and like any good scholar his views and ideas changed over time. But throughout his career he wrestled with two overlapping ideas, both of which were profoundly influential not only to his peers, but in Chinese society ever since: an evolutionary view of history, and the mortal threat to the existence of China as a race and nation.

By the late Qing, having lost wars, territory and pride to foreign nations, Chinese elites were utterly consumed with the fear of the extinction of China, as a culture, a people, a nation and a race. It did not help matters much that these four concepts were often seen as being one and the same, though there was an enormous amount of trouble defining quite what it was. It was easier, however, to talk about the things China was not: it was not strong; it was not modern (developed, we say now); it was not Manchu; it was not safe; it was not healthy. There were numerous voices for change, such as Zhang Zhidong, Kang Youwei and Zhang Binglin. Though they jockeyed amongst themselves for influence and power, and differed on ideas about how to go about it (respectively, “Chinese learning for fundamental principles, Western learning for practical application”; the Confucian utopia of”Great Unity” and “self-strengthening”; and “kill all the Manchus”), they agreed on the problem, and to varying degrees with each others solutions.

Into this environment came Darwin, or rather interpretations of Darwin were reinterpreted to explain what had happened and what must be done. In a translators game of telephone, Darwin as described by social Darwinist thinkers such as Spencer and Huxley were first translated into Japanese during their own Meiji reform, and then into Chinese, notably by Yan Fu. Translations of Darwin’s actual work would come later. Yan Fu was, along with Liang Qichao, a disciple of Kang Youwei. As Andrew Nathan summarized in his review of Pusey’s China and Charles Darwin,

Where Darwin said that evolution proceeds by competition among individuals within a species, Chinese social Darwinists read that the strugggle to survive occurs among nations or races as groups; where Darwin saw this competition as the effort of each organism to survive and reproduce in a given environment, Chinese social Darwinists saw conscious rivalry among enemies; where Darwin defined fitness as adaption to an environment, Chinese social Darwinists saw it as a quality of moral stature and will power; where Darwin regarded all species as being fit for the environments in which they happened to exist, Chinese social Darwinists saw a hierarchy, with men more fit than animals and the white and yellow races more fit than any others.

As anthropologist Wang Mingming has pointed out

In their translations, evolutions was termed “the Argument about the Heaven’s Change” (tianyan lun). In the footnotes that they made to the translated texts, many comments were made to interpret evolution into “the turn [or conjuncture] of fortune” (yunhui). Evolutionism was, to them, not simply a bio-medicine that was prescribed for the “East Asian Sick Men” (dongya bingfu), a self-name for the Chinese. It was, more importantly, an explanation of how Heaven that once shifted to Europe had by the late 19th century returned to its home in China. In the 20th century, Chinese-speaking anthropology has served as an instrument whereby the shift of Heaven from Europe to China has been made more or less a mytho-history.

Liang Qichao played quite a role in taking this interpretation and applying it to history. As he wrote in the first issue of his journal-in-exile, New Citizen (part of a continuing habit of labeling everything he did as “new”), he wrote:

What is history? History is nothing but the account of the development and strife of human races. There is no history without race .. .. I don ‘t know whether we can enjoy the great harmony of mankind across the boundaries of race in the future. Today, however, it is no exaggeration to say that the racial problem is the biggest problem in the world.. .. The essence of history is to follow the tracks of the rise and fall of every race over thousands of years. The spirit of history is to uncover the reasons for the rise and fall of every race over thousands of years.

Liang also promoted “survival of the fittest” from his perch at the newspaper Shiwubao (where he also constantly proclaimed everything was “new”, though scholar Natascha Vitinghoff has argued convincingly that practically every thing he claimed was “new”, from circulation to the importance of the fourth estate to journalistic ethics had in fact already been done in the 1870s by newspapers such as Shenbao). In the “newspaper wars” in the first decade of the 20th century, arguments over competition between papers was cast by some as a battle between the old and the new, with one being condemned to extinction, while others argued that in the “survival of the fittest”, the truth would emerge. The truth that, all agreed, would save the nation and the race.

One of the most virulent forms of this narrative of racial struggle was in anti-Manchu revolutionary thinking, and the revolutionaries were the ideological enemies of Kang and Liang, who were by and large royalists. Zhang Binglin, for example, called for revenge against the Manchus, the “public enemy of the Han race”, while Liang (and Kang) argued that

It has been said that the Manchus and we are completely different races, but that is not strictly true.. ,. Actually, the Manchus have been definitely assimilated into us in four out of the six elements which the debater [namely, Wang Jingwei] applied to classify races. In the remaining two elements, we cannot easily draw a conclusion that they and we are different. We therefore conclude that, judging from the sociological definition of race, that the Manchus have already assimilated into the Han and have sufficient qualifications to be members of our mixed nation.

Note here that Liang’s defense of Manchu’s is to say that they are Chinese, so they aren’t bad guys. Given that he saw history as a struggle for racial dominance, the only way to cast the Manchus as allies was to claim they had been sinicized. All the same, Liang still participated somewhat in the vilification of the Manchus, as he was one of many who helped circulate tales of the Yangzhou and Jiading massacres in the late 1890s. These accounts of survivors of Qing atrocities during the fall of the Ming Dynasty were re-cast with entirely Manchu soldiers (originally some were Chinese), and the victims implied to not simply be those unfortunates present, but later generations, the Han people, and China itself. These stories, and the idea that the Manchus were bloodthirsty wolves and the Han “slaves to an inferior race”, were later used by Sun Yatsen. In the Darwinist/Confucian hierarchy that Liang Qichao had helped promulgate in his writings, the Han were really at the bottom of the ladder. They weren’t just under the Manchus, they were under the Manchus who were under the Europeans. And for Sun Yatsen, in his own version of the Dolchstoßlegende, some Han were race traitors. Popular response to the massacre tales and this whipping up of racial hatred was “irrepressible gnashing of teeth and shouts of anger” (much like many on the Chinese Internet today gnash their teeth over the Japanese, or Chinese with foreign passports).

As a major popularizer of social Darwinist thought, Liang applied it to various subjects. According to Barry Sautman, he wrote that since Hungary was founded by the Huns, it was “established by the yellow race on the territory of the whites”. The ideas colored everything he wrote: when writing on education, he combined the idea of foetal education, a traditional belief that the mothers of great men, such as Mencius, had sat up straight and spoke no evil, thus contributing to the moral character of the foetus, with a micro-level view of Darwinism. If the child evolved right, then the nation would too. Women’s education was necessary, he argued, because without it they could only teach their children to be materialistic and shallow, and the nation would suffer. Rote memorization would block the development of the brain, and the nation would suffer. Competitive sports were necessary, for both men and women, as he wrote in On Martial Spirit, because without every “new citizen” engaging in physical competition, the nation would be weak… and yes, suffer.

Liang Qichao was not solely responsible for China’s fixation on “survival of the fittest” in the early 20th century, but he was tireless in disseminating it. He was very much a man of the times, seeing everything under the shadow of impending extinction. To be sure, the reformers championed many ideas that we today find progressive and laudable, such as ending footbinding, but the underlying reasons for it are profoundly disturbing. One can’t help but look to the coming Olympics, which overlaps the 110th anniversary of the Hundred Days Reform, and think of how many in China view it through the lense of the honor of the nation and the race, to prove to themselves that they are not inferior, and that they are strong. Guys, that’s so nineteenth century.

The Wall Street Journal has the tragic story of Wang Guocheng, a schizophrenic who could not receive treatment and whose family (and neighbors, and local police) caged him after he stabbed an old woman to death. He later beat his mother to death as well. One form that his mania took was this:

At one point, Guocheng spent his time painting over slogans written on power poles by supporters of Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement. Adamantly opposed to the group, Guocheng once held a knife to his father’s neck, saying, “If you are a member of Falun Gong, I will kill you,” his father recalls.

It reminds me of the Human Rights Watch report on the political use of psychiatry in China, Dangerous Minds: Political Psychiatry Today and its Origins in the Mao Era [blocked]. As Jonathan Mirsky summarized in the New York Review of Books:

One of the main categories of “people taken into police psychiatric custody” for diagnosis, according to an official police encyclopedia cited by Munro, are those

commonly known as “political maniacs,” who shout reactionary slogans, write reactionary banners and reactionary letters, make anti-government speeches in public, and express opinions on important domestic and international affairs.

In 1994, a case of what a senior official termed “utter political lunacy” was published in a training manual for Chinese forensic psychiatrists. According to Munro’s account in Dangerous Minds, “Zhu,” fifty-seven, an army veteran, Communist Party member, and retired worker, had been diagnosed as a “paranoid psychotic” and probably confined in one of China’s special Ankang. Although Zhu had been praised in the official newspaper People’s Daily as a model activist during the Cultural Revolution, by the Eighties, still an ardent Maoist, he spoke and wrote against Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping. His workmates regarded Zhu as quiet, respectable, orderly, and sane, although somewhat eccentric; he never discussed his “reactionary” views with them. He wrote a 100,000-character manifesto, bought a printing machine, and sent his views to various leaders.

Psychiatrists found Zhu “politically deluded,” and deemed his views and writings “incompatible with his status, position, qualifications, and learning” (he was, after all, a mere semi-educated worker, and hence seen as not being qualified to speak on politics and economics—despite having held a leading position on his local Revolutionary Committee). They declared that he was “divorced from reality,” although his delusions were said to be “not entirely absurd in content,” and his “overall mental activity remained normal.” His fate in the Ankang [asylums] is unknown, as is almost always the case.

This approach, according to Munro, has been reapplied to Falun Gong members:

In another case, a “female,” age forty-five, described in the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychological Medicine in 2000, was arrested for being a member of Falun Gong and practicing the qigong exercises which Falun Gong claims improve spiritual understanding and health…

The only “mentally dangerous” symptom or activity cited in the forty-five-year-old woman’s police psychiatric report was:

Even after the government declared Falun Gong to be an evil cult, she refused to be dissuaded from her beliefs and continued gathering people to practice Falun Gong.

Moreover, she went to Beijing to petition the authorities “about the suppression of the group.” She was then “placed under criminal detention.” Her official diagnosis: “mental disorder caused by practicing an evil cult.”

…In both cases a serious sign of their “mental disorders,” frequently cited in similar Chinese psychiatric diagnoses of political or religious “crime,” was that, unlike what are called “genuine dissidents,” the accused made no attempt to “disguise their identities or run away.”

The NYRB article was about how the World Psychiatric Association was attempting to investigate China’s psychiatric hospitals as a result of the report in 2003. Haven’t figured out what happened since. I do know one thing: the U.S. executes schizophrenics sometimes.

Because they’re Japanese. The original fortune cookie, called “tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), or suzu senbei (“bell crackers”)”, appears to be from bakeries surrounding a Shinto shrine in Kyoto, and when Japanese immigrants introduced them in America, Chinese immigrants picked up the ball and ran with it. Japanese fortunes seem more practical than today’s lottery numbers: “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”

China Media Project’s David Bandurski points out that Hu Jintao’s political report to the 17th Party Congress placed some emphasis on increasing China’s “cultural soft power”. China’s soft power pundits, apparently, believe that culture is a tool in “international struggles” and that America uses its music and movies to promote its strategic interests. Hu Jintao proclaimed:

“[we must] create more excellent, popular works that reflect the people’s principal position in the country and their real life… vigorously develop the cultural industry, launch major projects to lead the industry as a whole, speed up development of cultural industry bases and clusters of cultural industries with regional features, nurture key enterprises and strategic investors, create a thriving cultural market and enhance the industry’s international competitiveness.”

Of course, this all must be done under “correct guidance” – nothing “very yellow, very violent”, I presume, would be one of those things. Bandurski ends by saying:

Suppression, macro-meddling, nationalism and cultural snobbery. Now there’s a recipe for a cultural renaissance.

But the proof, as Hu would tell you himself, is in the business. And the question is now set: when the flowers of China’s “soft power” are brought to market, will the free world care to buy them?

The simple answer is no. And to provide the answer, I turn to the philosopher-poet Will I Am, producer and member of the Black Eyed Peas, who have turned out “some of the catchiest, most shamelessly commercial, unapologetically stupid hit songs of the 21st century”, when asked about why his band isn’t compared to more high-brow groups like the Roots anymore:

People always want to say you’ve lost your mission, but you can’t let that distract from what you love to do. I love to make music. If I were a painter, I would paint beautiful bodies—I would paint nipples, and I would paint Bibles. Am I going to say, “I’m not going to paint this woman’s neck because people will think I just want to lick on necks?” Please! That’s not what art is about. Some people could say “My Humps” isn’t art, and I’d say, cool. But I think it is. Also, our biggest hit ever was “Where Is the Love,” which is a very political song…

No one really thinks of the Black Eyed Peas as a political band (at least I don’t), but I’ll say one thing for them: in the summer of 2005, I heard the song “Let’s Get Retarded” in Urumqi (where all my Russian and Central Asian friends played it endlessly), Shanghai, Vienna, Budapest, Hvar, Mostar (nice clubs next to the new bridge), Belgrade (where I also saw on Euro MTV that they were performing it in Ibiza), and then finally the radio edit version “Let’s Get It Started” on American television for the NBA. The entire Western hemisphere. And it’s about being “retarded” (under the influence). And one of their other songs was lip-synched by the Backdorm Boys.

If China wants to make some big bucks spread their cultural products around the world, pop music and movies are where its at (and comic books, but they totally botched the 5155 Project, which just proves how doomed these campaigns are). And globally, nothing sells like booty shaking and giant robots. But all that is going to be too low brow for the Chinese state-dominated media. China’s not going to have much cultural soft power until the State Council loosens up. Which ought to be some time around, oh, never. And a nations turns its lonely eyes to Hong Kong…

Before 9-11, China was expected to be more of a front burner issue with the Bush Administration than it turned out. But one might get a glimpse of what some of the more extreme voices might be saying if they weren’t so busy flogging threats like so-called “islamofascism” by checking out Lev Navrozov, regular columnist at NewsMax. Is the China Threat an expanded navy? Economic blackmail? Armies of hackers? No, no, it’s grey goo:

As I have written repeatedly before, the dictators of China face a dilemma. Either lose their slave-state power (which can yield its owners more than any wealth can), as they nearly lost it to the Tiananmen peaceful uprising and as the Soviet dictatorship did lose its power in 1991, or establish world domination via post-nuclear (such as nano) super weapons.

Few Westerners know that today, about 100,000 Tiananmens of all forms and sizes occur annually in China. The Chinese people are not dainty figurines as one might find on old Chinese vases, and to keep them enslaved is not as easy as it may seem to the Western owners of such vases.

Wow, this is going to be entertaining:

The dictatorship of China has unlimited possibilities for channeling all their resources into the development of post-nuclear super weapons, which do not entail Mutual Assured Destruction, as did nuclear weapons developed in the United States, Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and some other countries…

Here is an example from my personal observations. When in 1986 Eric Drexler published his book about nanotechnology, I was fascinated by its Chapter 11 about molecular nano weapons. Let me explain why. “Atomic bombs” required over four years of development — and were developed ahead of Nazi Germany partly because European scientists, including Einstein, fled from Europe into the United States to escape anti-Semitism. Now the U.S. was saved — not by those European scientists, but by Drexler!

Drexler’s weapons (never developed in the United States, but still existing only on paper) are based on molecules. A molecule can be converted into a tiny computer (“nano” means one-billionth of a meter), an artificial virus, etc.

Imagine billions of such molecules flying as a vast and growing cloud (since molecules multiply) capable of, for example, finding atomic weapons and destroying them.

And what does Navrozov say must be done to combat this threat?

How to enlighten the majority of the Western electorate?

I believe there is only one way. We, who are aware of the geopolitical situation in the world today, must create a film, based on documentary evidence, but showing the annihilation of the West by post-nuclear super weapons, now developed by the dictatorship of China…

I am enlisting volunteers. As for myself, I am recalling that reviewers of my book “The Education of Lev Navrozov” (Harper & Row) compared me to Orwell and Dostoyevsky, that I am an Einstein Prize laureate as well as the winner of the Andrew Jackson “Champion of Liberty” award. I hope to contribute to the script of the film in order to save the Western civilization and its liberty.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your chance to break into Hollywood. Who the hell is Navrozov, though, and why would anyone take this man seriously? Well, it seems that few people do, but the few that do aren’t exactly living in cabins in Montana writing long diatribes about how things that start with the suffix “uni-” are bad. Lev is one of many people on the board of the Lifeboat Foundation, dedicated to “encouraging scientific advancements while helping humanity survive existential risks and possible misuse of increasingly powerful technologies, including genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI, as we move towards a technological singularity.”

His bio there explains a bit about him: a Russian translator of literature, he pulled a Solzhenitsyn in 1972 and “told The New York Times and a CIA senior analyst (who came with his two assistants to speak with Lev) that the dictatorship of Russia had been developing post-nuclear superweapons, to be able to destroy the Western means of retaliation in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and thus to circumvent Mutual Assured Destruction on which the defense of the West had been based. Neither The New York Times, nor the CIA, believed him, but Ronald Reagan did, met him, and publicly announced the tragic news, which the CIA declared to be “evil empiricism”, that is, his mania.”

“Evil Empiricism”?

The Lifeboat Foundation sports a few interesting members, such as Ray Kurzweil, he of the Singularity, Pam “Atlas” Oshry of the blog Atlas Shrugged, Wole Soyinka and the newly appointed Huckabee campaign consultant Jim Pinkerton. Sadly No! points out Lev was an inspirational figure for the infamous Team B, the neocon hawks of the seventies who gave a second opinion on CIA figures for Russian economic and military strength as a rationalization for a military build-up – thinking that came up again with the Cox report on China in the nineties, and again seems eerily familiar in the build-up to the war on Iraq.

Lev takes sides in the debate between the coiner of the terms “nanotechnology” and “grey goo”, K. Eric Drexler, and the late Richard Smalley, Novel Laureate for the discovery of Buckminsterfullerene, stating that if one discounts the possibility of Chinese supernanoweapons, “What would be the danger? That the West, including Dr. Smalley and his carbon nanotubes, would be reduced to dust or would surrender unconditionally to become a vast Hong Kong.” Indeed.

The Drexler-Smalley debate basically involved redefining the term “nanotechnology”. While Drexler had talked about self-replicating nanomachines in his book Engines of Creation, leading to the threat vast clouds of tiny robots gone AWOL devouring the Earth for raw materials to reproduce themselves (see the Michael Crichton book Prey for the movie version), Smalley was a chemist and he defined “nanotechnology” as really any work being done at a nanoscale – like the nanotubes he discovered. He argued in his 2001 Scientific American article “Of Chemistry, Love and Nanobots” (PDF) that “there isn’t that much room” for a molecular assembler to work, essentially trashing Drexler’s idea.

Drexler eventually lost that battle and the accepted version of “nanotechnology” became the more mundane one. Drexler also stated that fears of “grey goo” were overblown, though the Lifeboat Foundation considers it one of their key worries. Most predictions about future nanotech have to do with drug delivery, smart materials and sensors, not swarms of killer nanobots. Most Chinese press, despite some of Navrozov’s claims, is mostly full of references to nanoweeds, nanomaps and the dangers of using ultrafine particles (technically a nanotech product in the Smalley sense) in textile manufacturing. Of course there are military applications to nanotechnology. Field responsive particles for increased material strength, quantum dot sensors, energy absorbing nanomaterials, and the like are being researched by DARPA and similar agencies. With the exception of molecular motors, all the projects are material and chemistry science projects. Nothing about tiny bots. Its worth noting these are American nanodefense projects, so Lev’s claims that the U.S. is doing nothing is hysterical and false. Also, none of these are remotely close yet to any sort of “superweapons”.

But Lev Navrozov knows. He predicts Chinese super nano weapons, and he can back it up:

…some of my readers ask me in their e-mails — respectfully and good-naturedly — whether I can adduce the proofs of that apocalypse of the West I envisage.

I have been told by a Chinese that the Chinese “Manhattan Projects,” developing post-nuclear super weapons, are located deep in the rocky mountains so that nobody could drill a hole in the walls, in the floor and/or the ceiling to get a glimpse into what is being done within.

So a special mobile drill should be constructed for me (at the cost of $100 billion?) to move into those rocky mountains, drill a hole in them, sufficient to get out a half-ready nano super weapon and bring it before Western TV cameras as proof of development of nano super weapons in China.

Buy that man a drill!

Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy and Square Word Calligraphy Classroom. Britta Erickson: “Square Word Calligraphy is a new kind of writing, almost a code, designed by Xu Bing. At first glance it appears to be Chinese characters, but in fact it is a new way of rendering English. Chinese viewers expect to be able to read it but cannot. Western viewers, however, are surprised to find that they can read it. Delight erupts when meaning is unexpectedly revealed.”



A Book From the Sky by Xu Bing (徐冰), 1987-1991. “An installation that took Xu Bing over four years to complete, A Book from The Sky is comprised of printed volumes and scrolls containing four thousand ”false” Chinese characters invented by the artist and then painstakingly hand-cut onto wooden printing blocks.”

United Nations – China Monument: Temple of Heaven, 1998, by Gu Wenda (谷文达). “a site-specific installation commissioned by the asia society for “inside out“, PS1 contemporary art center, new york city, usa, 1998 . an entirely human hair made temple of pseudo-chinese, english, hindi, arabic and synthesized english-chinese, chinese ming dynasty’s furniture tv monitors, a video film heaven.”

DD, Confucius (2005) and O, Lao Tzu (2004) by Roman Verostko, from the Pearl Park Scriptures. Sections of the Legge translations of The Analects and the Tao Te Ching. “Each work presents a colorful drawing accompanied with lines of glyphs that read from left to right. An “alphabet” of glyphs was generated for each text in this exhibition.” The texts are converted into algorithms and a computer guided pen plotter draws the image and glyphs.

Tsang Tsou-Chio (曾灶财) died last July. He spread calligraphy graffiti across Hong Kong, and was dubbed the “King of Kowloon”.

A grubby man who looked like a tramp and who many thought barking mad, Tsang spent five decades roaming the metropolis — often shirtless and on crutches — scrawling his idiosyncratic calligraphy on lamp-posts, walls, phone boxes, pedestrian underpasses and electrical boxes.

“To some extent he’s quite cuckoo,” said leading Hong Kong fashion designer William Tang, a longtime admirer of Tsang who used the graffiti as a motif for several clothing ranges.

“I started to look at the calligraphy carefully and found it’s not just a joke. It has some kind of power, which is very raw, very original,” Tang added

Some say Tsang’s Chinese-style calligraphy, peppered with obscenities and abuse toward Britain’s Queen Elizabeth — is naive and an eyesore. But its quintessential Hong Kong symbolism has inspired other artists, including local film-maker Fruit Chan, and has drawn international acclaim.

Tsang was often at odds with police, and most of his city work has been erased. But by 2003 he was at the Venice Biennale.

Laura Ling’s profile and work at Current TV.