august philippic

A brief word about Tibet (not intended as support for any particular side).   Tibet was not “part of” China before the twentieth century.  Understanding the relationship between Tibet and China requires understanding the Qing Dynasty, which lasted from 1644-1911.

The emperors of the Qing were from Manchuria, and they engaged in conquest southward into China and westward into central Asia.  Once China was conquered, the Qing were primarily concerned with westward expansion to defeat an ethnic group of Mongols called the Zunghars.  The Zunghars, like many central Asians, practiced Tibetan Buddhism, and for this reason they sought to depict themselves as defenders of the Dalai Lama.  In the course of defeating the Zunghars, Qing emperors sought to take over that role.  The important relationship was not between “Tibet” and “China” — it was between emperor and the Dalai Lama.   There are differing accounts of the nature of that relationship, but basically the Qing was committed to prevent any rival power from gaining influence over Tibet by means of the Dalai Lama.  And again, as there was little danger of anybody sending an army over the Himalayas, the primary strategic problem for the Qing had to do with Mongolia, not control over Tibet.

The Qing did not have “sovereignty” over Tibet, not in any ordinary sense of the term.  The Qing did not collect taxes, nor did Qing law apply in Tibet.    The Qing depicted the entire world as subject to various zones of control, and Tibet was one of those zones.  We can blame Qing leaders and Tibetans for not having the foresight to see that in the future the world would be organized into nation-states, but we can’t claim that the Qing-Tibet relationship has any obvious parallel in modern international law.

The basis of China’s claim to Tibet is the same as the U.S.’s claim to New Mexico.  We can be sympathetic to the sufferings of the Apache, but we’d be suspicious if Vladimir Putin began to champion their cause.  And if an Apache leader took refuge in Tijuana, I can’t imagine that American public opinion would be swayed to reparations or to New Mexican autonomy.    I don’t defend the way that Tibetans are being treated, but I’m also not a fan of Tibet’s champions abroad.  The Chinese government acts like a colonial power largely because it itself emerged in response to colonialism.  Making sense of that history seems to me crucial to figuring out what kinds of policy will promote the greater good in China and elsewhere.  I hope to be writing more about it soon.

Tags: China, philippic by august
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Ira Glass, the host of This American Life on public radio, in total darkness, began his — well, his what? His talk? His multimedia presentation? His spiel? Whatever — it was an homage to voices and their intimate power. Part of his point was that an enormous amount of prejudice is based on visual rather than aural cues. Because radio deprives us of first impressions, we allow its voices to engage us. Ira Glass played a clip of two boys in a housing project, complaining about how hard it is to get dates. Apparently the girls either avoid boys altogether or hook up with the sort of guy you would definitely not wish to piss off by hitting on his girlfriend, or on anybody he might want to be his girlfriend.

The presentation was taking place in Seattle, and it was clear that radio was allowing the white, middle class audience to focus on their common yearning — the desire for a partner. Taking that aspect of radio a step further, WNYC’s “radio rookies” project takes recording equipment to different neighborhoods and helps young people tell their own stories in a medium that encourages listening.

Radio may seem like a one-way transmission of station to those who tune in, but in Chinese cities it is clear that listeners are far from passive. The taxi drivers in Taipei listen constantly to talk radio, and frequently call in to local stations. They are a formidable political block — mobile, engaged, and capable of jamming thoroughfares in short order. When taxi driver’s protest, the city cannot operate. And one can spend hours listening to high schoolers and college students working through their emotional insecurities on the airwaves. Older folks, too. If you’ve ever encountered Delilah on a U.S. dial, you can picture the most common genres of Chinese radio just by pretending that Delilah let the callers talk a bit longer.

In cities, radio can foster a sense of community akin to a public park or an internet message board. I think Charlie Warner over at Media Curmudgeon is on to something when he emphasizes radio’s localism. Radio gives you accents, announcements, debates that can be as grand in scale as global warming or as small as the road work on a particular block.

I’m obviously not claiming that radio’s effects are restrained to cities, but urban areas do offer more venues for listening and for collective response. I like to listen to radio while working, but I hear it nearly everywhere — the cab, the barber shop, the grocery store, or (my favorite) the Met game blasting in the Mustang parked in front of the local bodega. A couple of years ago, during the big blackout, the same Mustang informed me that the problem was a surge, not a terrorist attack.

Of course, much of the conversation is inane, and the ever-increasing number of channels can mean that radio fosters segregation instead of transcending it. But the issue is voice — where do you hear people speaking in cities? You could do worse than to start with the radio.

Tags: cities, China by august
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According to legend (and the testimony of his hostess), in 1912 Rainer Maria Rilke was walking along the cliffs at Duino Castle when he was struck with the inspiration for a series of poems — the Duino Elegies, a collection I tend to keep near to hand the way the English Patient clasped his Herodotus. Thinking about Rilke’s epiphany today (an uncharacteristically overcast, cold August day in New York), I realized that for all the solitude and windswept loneliness of the work, it is an urban poem. If you can imagine the Delphic Oracle walking through the streets of Paris, hearing the music of violins, the arguments, the footsteps, that is close to Rilke’s writing. He is a poet of overheard voices. Life, he says, is spent speaking:

What if we are here just for saying: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, tree, window, –
or at most column, tower… but for saying, understand,
oh for such saying as the things themselves
never hoped so intensely to be.

It confirms my impression of New York — that nobody can stop talking. Consider also: Italo Calvino’s Melania:

…every time you enter the square, you find yourself caught in the dialogue: the braggart soldier and the parasite coming from a door meet the young wastrel and the prostitute; or else the miserly father from his threshold utters his final warnings to the amorous daughter and is interrupted by the foolish servant who is taking a note to the procuress. You return to Melania after years and you find the same dialogue still going on; in the meanwhile the parasite has died, and so have the procuress and the miserly father; but the braggart soldier, the amorous daughter, the foolish servant have taken their places, being replaced in their turn by the hypocrite, the confidante, the astrologer.

In this “invisible city,” what is lasting is the conversation, which survives longer than the participants or the buildings.

A third example: martial arts novels. Paize Keulemans has shown that popular martial arts novels in late nineteenth-century China were products of urban culture. They were filled with sound — writers devised techniques to portray such details as a knife cutting through a melon, a foot striking an opponents head, and of course the swish of sword in the air. These cliches are still recognizable in the conventions of Kung Fu movies.

Urban life is cacophonous. The brakes of New York subway cars, for example, are destroying my hearing. But within the din lurk conversations that shape urban life. I’m going to spend a few posts highlighting these city voices.

——
Excerpt from Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy from Edward Snow, trans., Duino Elegies (New York, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 59. Melania appears in Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 80. Paize Keulmann’s 2005 Ph.D. dissertation is from the University of Chicago. If I ever find the title, I’ll let you know.

Tags: cities, China by august
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This (from Seattle PI) makes me very sad.

When I worked in the archives, there was a secret path to get a cup of coffee. Let me tell you, nothing makes Qing documents sing like a dopio espresso. I understand why the Chinese would not want it there — indeed, it’s exactly the sort of non-place I complain about below. But this one did not displace local residents, and, dammit, the argument for moving it is about political symbolism, not about making Beijing nicer.

Still, I’m glad to hear the news anchors enjoy a good cup of coffee.

UPDATE 8/20: Mickey Kaus makes a useful proposal:

If we pay Starbucks a surcharge–say $1 on a grande latte–will they stop playing Paul McCartney?

Tags: cities, China by august
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I was walking around Central Park this morning, watching neighborhood teams play softball. Actually, I imagine that many teams have a pretty good subway ride to get there. It got me thinking about public spaces — or really, a more simple question: what do people do in parks, and why does it matter?

There is, of course, the famous “Bowling Alone” argument that civic activity fosters voting. If you are one of the folks playing softball, the story goes, you are more likely to vote, more likely to join a political party, more likely to join the PTA or one of the many political clubs in New York city.

Although Chinese authorities punish any formal association, informal gatherings of people are evident in all Chinese cities. There are old women giving each other back rubs. There are kids playing soccer (that seems to be the country’s most popular outdoor sport). Some folks practice calligraphy, others Tai Chi, sword dancing, or other martial arts. Dancing and singing are extremely common — if there are any anthropologists reading, please write an article about this.

Also, there are inevitably groups of old men, airing their songbirds.

My favorite spontaneous association was English Club, an enormous gathering in Nanjing, where people simply show up and start speaking English to one another. If you looked like a native English speaker (which in Nanjing basically meant that you were caucasion), you’d be surrounded by people happy to chat about issues of the day. It was a good way to meet people, and people definitely expressed honest opinions regarding issues of the day.

Political Engagement?

There are two ways of looking at these activities in light of the Bowling Alone argument. One is that they show the argument does not work for China — that groupings of people do not make them politically active. Another way of looking at things is that these neighborhood associations are signs of nascent engagement in government — that the middle class will grow more engaged and more difficult for the current regime to accomodate.

I tend to favor the first argument. I imagine it’s true that in certain scandals, information spreads among folks hanging out in public parks — but cell phones seem to be the more common form of communication when people want to scream about Japanese textbooks or U.S. spy planes. The argument for real activism is often based on the example of East Germany, where church groups were indeed active in bringing down the KPD (German Communist Party).

But the current rulers of China are all too aware of the East German precedent, and they while they tolerate a fairly high level of discussion, they don’t allow any hint of organized activity. It’s a perhaps an open question whether they can maintain such a level of surveillance — but urbanization tends to help the government, making it possible to deploy a very large amount of force in a very short time.

If democratization comes to China, I imagine the more likely path will be splits within the Communist party — between factions, between geographical areas. Party leaders may adapt voting as an anti-corruption measure. I see a splintering of the state, not a splitting of state and society.

Tags: cities, China by august
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There are various ways to classify cities in China.  A lot of folks go by population, which correlates roughly with   administrative status.  Certain cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and now Chongqing) are themselves provinces — if you imagine that Chicago, L.A., and New York were the 51-53 states in the U.S., you get the idea.  Other cities are capitals of provinces, of counties, etc.

Another way to group cities is to classify them according to economic activity.  There are various measures for this, but one of the most enduring models has been that of G. William Skinner, who made use of central place theory and fieldwork on marketing networks in Sichuan to classify cities according to a hierarchy of nodes.  The idea is, you need a relatively small population to support a market, a larger population to support, say, a hospital, and by the time you get to an arthouse movie theater or a specialty store for imported haggus, you are likely to be in a very large city that supports a large, perhaps even national or international clientele.

I’ve been thinking about zones of relatively uniform climate and physical geography, and the ways such zones affect urbanization.   Vast swaths of northernmost China are steppes — through much of the history of the area they supported pastoral nomads herding (usually) sheep and goats.  Typically, they would wander in set circles of pasture, but there were times when great nomadic confederations (think Ghenghis Khan) could form and support massive armies on horseback.  This climate did not particularly favor urbanization.  I have to confess I know nothing of, for example, Ulan Bataar.

In the Gobi Desert, an oasis economy developed.  Near the oasis, it was possible to irrigate some farmland, and farther out one might support small herds.  Much of the nomadic activity, however, was trade in goods from China and into (what is now) Pakistan, Central Asia, and Russia.  This is the famed Silk Road.  One of it’s consequences was cities — Kashgar and Urumqi, large markets, each near an oasis, that supported both a local economy and what we might now call international trade.

Those cities and trade routes were at the center of Chinese strategic thinking for thousands of years.   Secure trade routes and peaceful relations with the Turkic peoples of the area could help support campaigns against the Mongol tribes.  After 1644, emperors of China were Manchu, and particularly aggressive in their efforts at frontier expansion.  More recently, the policy has been one of settlement of Han Chinese in order to swamp the local Muslim population (itself the locus of much “war on terror”-esque anxiety among ruling elites).

When I teach, I’m hoping to incorporate these cities of the desert more fully into existing narratives of urban change.  They are today the loci of geopolitical strategies of governance in the region, but also centers of perhaps the most dangerous challenges to the current regime.   It’s a tension I see throughout China, and indeed in all cities, but the nomadic zone means that these tactics find different appearances in urban form.   My goal: to identify and account for such physical differences.

Tags: cities, China by august
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China is changing, China is changing, China is changing.  Every time you round a corner in New York,, or anywhere really, somebody will scream at you that China is changing.  It’s becoming more market driven, more threatening, more advanced, more stylish, more wealthy, more, more, more.

Urbanization is a key aspect of that change, and it underlies more fundamental transformation.  China’s population growth is leveling off, and the reasons have much more to do with people moving to cities than with the one child policy.  Those who believe China will become more democratic point to the rising power of the urban middle class.  Chinese movies, Chinese markets, and a great deal fo its trade with the rest of the world are products of events taking place in China’s cities.  Indeed, there has been massive migration of people Eastward and into cities — colonies of workers inhabit the fringes of every metropolis in the country.

 I’m trying to design a course that will put these changes in historical perspective, and I want to focus on one “debate” in urban studies — freedom vs. surveillance.  I put the word “debate” in quotation marks because it is not yet clear to me whether anybody has argued the issue in these terms.   But it is clear that there is a long tradition of thinking of the city as a center of freedom.    There’s the idea (probably overstated)  that privileges granted to cities in the middle ages were the basis of what were to become legal rights.  There’s the notion of the city as a place of opportunity, where people go to sample new identities, where people are faced with an abundance of choice — things to consume, trades to master, art to stimulate. 

Then there is the view of the city as a place where the forces of the state and (recently) of capitalism conspire to exert a phenomenal level of power on ordinary individuals.  Although Michel Foucault’s work is not primarily concerned with urbanism, his notion of power and of discipline deepens our understanding of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century urban planners.  In the case of China, colonialism heightened these effects.  Foreigners established bastions in Chinese cities, “Treaty Ports” that were not subject to Chinese sovereignty, and that developed their own police forces and tactics of urban order.  Soon the Chinese were copying these models, resulting in governmental ambitions that sought to observe and order the lives of even the most ordinary people.

I’m suggesting that this debate will help understand present-day politics.  As China becomes more urbanized, the problem of freedom and surveillance will play out in ways that are difficult to predict.  Still, we’ll be in a better position to register these changes if we have a sense of what has happened in Chinese cities, the ways they have served as playgrounds and workplaces, entrepots and symbols, stages for nationalist rallies and centers for colonial exploitation.  It’s with these thoughts in mind that I’m designing my class.  Stay tuned for more notes.

Tags: cities, China by august
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Early Daoism consisted of four kinds of practice: philosophical speculation on the nature of the cosmos, breathing and visualization exercises related to health, rituals that displayed (and seemed to allow communication with) various beings in the cosmos, and alchemy. Daoists believed that each of these practices could prolong life.

The Cosmos
These ideas obviously rest on certain assumptions about the workings of the world, and the most important of these assumptions is that each part of the universe is related to all the other parts. What you can see, what you can’t see, everything you will ever know – all these elements form a coherent whole, and it is this fundamental sense of ordering that leads historians to talk about a “cosmos.”

Cosmological thinking emerged in China in the three hundred years leading up to the birth of Jesus. And since Jesus has come up, we might as well dispense with some preliminaries. Because the number of Christians in China is small, it’s a little rude to refer to the period as “before Christ.” Instead we’ll just use an arbitrary label – “Common Era” instead of “A.D.” (meaning “the year of our lord”). Things happening before the Common Era I’ll call BCE. Of course, the Daoists did not date things this way, and they certainly did not think there was anything special about the year 300 BCE.

So we are beginning our study of Daoism around 300 BCE. It’s all kind of arbitrary. Indeed, the name “Daoism” is just as arbitrary. “Dao” simply means “path” or “road,” and it has the same metaphorical connotations as in English – “a way of doing something”, “a correct path.” In 300, numerous states in China were at war with each other, and the rulers of these states were seeking advisors. The advisors were trying to educate the rulers about the correct path – so everybody was in that sense a “Daoist.” Everybody claimed there was a way, and everybody claimed to know the right way. When Confucius talks about what to do, he says that we must follow the Dao. His plan was very different from what comes to be known as Daoism.

Later on, I’ll try to be more specific about some of the competitors who were setting out various “Daos.” For now the important thing to notice is that there is a shared notion of a coherent cosmos, that there are warring states, that there are advisors to the leaders of these states, and that each advisor claims to understand the cosmos. These phenomena are related.

State and Cosmos In the First Three Centuries B.C.E.

The Chinese-speaking world had been unified under the Zhou Dynasty from about 770 to 476 BCE As it became apparent that the old empire was splitting apart and could not be reconstituted, rulers began to seek new ways to reconstitute political authority. Hand in had with this development came new ideas about statecraft, about legitimacy, about the body, and about the universe.

By 221 BCE a single state came to dominance. It was called Qin (note that Q’s are pronounced like “Ch”. “Qin” rhymes with “gin,” and is the root of the English word “China”). The Qin leader declared himself emperor of all China.

There are many ways to be powerful. One of the most effective is to show that your position is inevitable, natural, and good. If I want to become emperor, I probably have to kill a lot of people. If I want to remain emperor, it would be good if I can convince my subjects that my rule results not from brute violence, but from the same forces that create the changing of the seasons. It is in my interest to show that my state is a microcosm of a larger whole.

Here we have a force pushing toward coherence. And given that political rulers tended to have money, and philosophers tended to be hired guns, one finds a lot of philosophy about the relationship of elements of the universe – hence, the creation of the “cosmos.” Probably there were other forces at work as well, but this one is the most obvious. At the very least, you can see how there might be people who would want to say that the elements of the world are all interrelated.

Body

I don’t’ have a handy political argument for the ways the notion of the body developed. It is clear, however, that Chinese thinkers began to think about what we now call “the body” in the same time period (300 BCE to the start of the Common Era). Here again, we have a semantic trap. “Body” is a little like “BC” – it’s not quite the right word. Chinese thinkers were not especially interested in anatomy or surgery. One’s “body” was not separable from one’s “personhood” and “personality,” nor was it ever set into opposition with “mind.” The body was instead a permeable membrane – what happened in the cosmos as a whole also took place in the body. It was a microcosm, a part of a larger whole reflecting all the characteristics of the whole.

The ideas I have described here were not unique to Daoism. But they were essential to the claims that Daoist put forth, namely that the cosmos (including the body) underwent a series of transformations, and that understanding these transformations can therefore help extend one’s life. Daoist philosophy, medical practice, ritual, and alchemy all follow from this claim.

Tags: China by august
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We at august philippic wish you to know that we have not yet turned on Angelina Jolie. She has our full support for the coming season.

In other news, China shot down a satellite. We’d like to express our sympathy for the satellite, which was no doubt a symbol of budding democracy, or a special unicorn satellite, or perhaps “puppysat,” tracking man’s best friend. Curse you evil Chinese! How dare you shoot your own satellite? And not invite us along?

We at august philippic are feeling surly.

Tags: China by august
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