Columbia University Press

This week our featured books are Sources of Tibetan Tradition, edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle, and The Tibetan History Reader, Edited by Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer.

Today, we’ve got an excerpt from The Tibetan History Reader: “The Dalai Lamas and the Origins of Reincarnate Lamas,” by Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp. In this essay, van der Kuijp looks at the history of the Dalai Lamas and, in particular, when they came to be “associated with the most important Buddhist celestial being in Tibet.”

The Dalai Lamas and the Origins of Reincarnate Lamas, from The Tibetan History Reader

This week our featured books are Sources of Tibetan Tradition, edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle, and The Tibetan History Reader, Edited by Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer. You can enter our book giveaway for a chance to win FREE copies of both books.

In today’s Tibet-themed post, we have an excerpt from Sources of Tibetan Tradition: a timeline detailing important events in Tibetan history, beginning in 247 B.C.E. with Nyatri Tsenpo’s election as king and ending in 1951 C.E. with the “Seventeen-Point Agreement.” (The Tibetan History Reader also contains this timeline.)

Sources of Tibetan Tradition – Timeline of Tibetan History

This week our featured books are Sources of Tibetan Tradition, edited by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, Matthew T. Kapstein, and Gray Tuttle, and The Tibetan History Reader, Edited by Gray Tuttle and Kurtis R. Schaeffer.

Throughout the week, we will be featuring the books and their editors on our blog as well as on our Twitter feed, and on our Facebook page.

We are also offering a FREE copy of BOTH Sourcebook of Tibetan Tradition and The Tibetan History Reader.

To enter our Book Giveaway, simply fill out the form below with your name and preferred mailing address. We will randomly select one winner on April 19th at 1:00 pm. Good luck, and spread the word!

In recent article in Scientific American, Guobin Yang, author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, argues that twitter, microblogging, and other social media is changing China but doubts that radical political change will occur.

Yang cites a recent incident in China where protesters in Guangzhou went online and into streets to protest government censorship of a newspaper. The event did signal the rising power of online activism in China but the Chinese government has been equally adept, if not more so, at using the Internet to stem dissent and protest. Yang writes:

To contain Internet dissent and protest, China aggressively censors Web sites. New regulations or crackdowns are often implemented after new outbursts of online protest. This was the case when the first policy to regulate electronic bulletin boards took effect in 2000. When crude sanctions failed to curb online dissent, the government turned to a more subtle measure: sprinkling anonymous Internet commentators to promote the party line throughout the blogging community. According to a report issued by the official news Web site People’s Daily Online, more than 60,000 government accounts were active on Sina Weibo alone by the end of 2012. With its enormous resources, the government can have its Web sites pour out large volumes of information that serve to inundate dissent.

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My First Trip to China: Scholars, Diplomats, and Journalists Reflect on their First Encounters with China, edited by Kin-ming Liu, includes an essay by Andrew Nathan, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and more recently the author of China’s Search for Security.

In the essay, which is also posted on an accompanying site hosted on China File, describes his first trip to Maoist-dominated China in 1973. Nathan writes:

A three-week program of visits to production brigades, factories, industrial exhibitions, neighborhood committees, department stores, schools, universities, and the occasional classic tourist site, moving from Guangzhou to Beijing, then to Shanghai, Hangzhou, and back to Guangzhou. At each unit we sat in an arc of chairs or around a table, received a jiandan jieshao (simple introduction) from a “leading cadre,” took detailed notes, asked earnest questions, and walked through the facility trying to peer behind the façade of Maoist correctness for signs of real life.

Among other things Nathan, who traveled with other professors and young U.S. scholar, came under suspicion from Chinese academics for a reference he made in his book as well as Chinese officials who thought he was taking taking photographs of propaganda posters.

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The following video is an interview with Andrew Nathan coauthor (with Andrew Scobell) of China’s Search for Security. The interview was done with China File, a project of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. (Apologies for the glitch with the formatting; it should be corrected soon):

In the following video, Andrew Nathan, most recently the author of China’s Search for Security discusses trends in China’s foreign policy:

The following is an interview with Zheng Wang, author of Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations:

Question: What is historical memory? Why did you use “never forgot national humiliation” as the title of this book?

Zheng Wang: Let me give you an example, while only some Americans actually witnessed the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11th, future generations of Americans are undoubtedly becoming connected to this national trauma through its retelling in the news, family stories, and classroom lessons. Historical memory is recollections and representations of past historical events shared by a particular group. For a group of people, their collective historical memory can be linked to both a single event as well as their national experience. It is collective memory of the past that binds a group of people together. For example, the National Mall in Washington D.C. reminds Americans of the glories and traumas of the United States. Each year millions of students visit their nation’s capitol to see these grand symbols and hear the stories that define what it means to be an American.

For the Chinese, their historical consciousness has been powerfully influenced by the so-called “century of humiliation” from the First Opium War (1839–1842) through the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945. Chinese remember this period as a time when their nation was attacked, bullied, and torn asunder by imperialists. “Never forget national humiliation” is the English translation of a Chinese phrase Wuwang Guochi. In this book, I refer to it as the “national phrase” of China. The Chinese characters associated with this motto were engraved on monuments and painted on walls all over China. In general, this book examines how the discourse of national humiliation became an integral part of the construction of national identity and nation building in the different periods of China. It also explains how today’s Chinese youth engage with the phrase and how this informs their understanding of who they are and their perception of the rest of the world.

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April 22 was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, we will be running a series of posts over the course of this week by authors of our environmental studies titles. These articles will cover a wide range of topics relevant to the study of the earth and the environment, from global climate change to the effects of economic development on the environment in China.

Bryan Tilt is an anthropology professor at Oregon State University and the author of The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil Society. Currently a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Beijing, Tilt is working on a book about water resources in contemporary China.

China’s Path to Sustainable Development
Bryan Tilt

“Sustainability” is both an interesting analytical concept and a current buzzword whose precise meaning is difficult to pin down. Without getting too bogged down in the particulars of defining sustainability, it seems clear that the concept hinges on balancing economic and social growth with the limits of the biophysical environment. Nowhere is the need for sustainable thinking and action more acute than in contemporary China, where a population of more than 1.3 billion grapples with rapid industrial growth, urbanization, species extirpation, serious pollution, and a growing middle class of energy-hungry consumers.
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“Chinese history suggests that its foreign policy behavior is highly sensitive to its relative power. If its power continues to increase, China will try to expand its sphere of influence in East Asia…. Brace yourself. The game is on.”—Yuan-kang Wang

In a recent post on Stephen M. Walt’s blog A Realist in an Ideological Age, Yuan-kang Wang, author of Harmony and War: Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics, explores some of myths of Chinese exceptionalism.

Like other nations, most notably the United States, China has a sense of exceptionalism based in large part in large part on the Confucian character of its politics. Wang argues that Chinese think “of of historical China as a shining civilization in the center of All-under-Heaven, radiating a splendid and peace-loving culture.” They have not, as many of the West fear, been an aggressive power that is poised to dominate present-day Asia through violent means. Ultimately, China’s rise, according to Chinese exceptionalism, will be peaceful.

In the post, Wang dissects and challenges three key myths about Chinese exceptionalism regarding their relations with other nations: 1.) China did not expand when it was strong; 2.) The Seven Voyages of Zheng He demonstrates the peaceful nature of Chinese power; 3.) The Great Wall of China symbolizes a nation preoccupied with defense. Wang shows how each of these fall short of the complete truth.

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“China’s escalating popular violence against local authorities and humble petition to the central government in the last two decades should be understood in light of [a] longstanding Confucianist conception of authority. This conception persists despite all the ideological and political revolutions of the twentieth century….”—Ho-fung Hung

The following post is by Ho-fung Hung, author of Protest with Chinese Characteristics:

The recent protests against land grab in Wukan and a polluting power plant in Haimen in South China have captured the world’s attention and lead many to ask whether something significantly different from China’s many other local protests is happening., The Wukan villagers’ orderly exercise of self-governance after the CCP authorities fled the village, as well as their political demand for local democracy, is rare if not unprecedented. So is the Haimen protesters’ occupation of the local government building.

The Wukan protest, in particular, resonates with many great uprisings in China’s history such as the Leiyang rebellion of 1844. In the early 1840s, local intellectuals in Hunan’s Leiyang County adamantly petitioned higher authorities against local tax abuses. The arrest and torture of a leading petitioner unleashed an armed revolt in which villagers seized the county seat and set up their own local government, which was short-lived and was crushed by imperial government forces. After the crackdown, the grievances against the Qing state continued to brew in the area and prepared many locals to embrace the Taiping Rebellion that shook the very foundation of Qing rule in the 1850s.

Despite their democratic demand and parallel with uprisings in Chinese history, we should also notice the Wukan protesters’ emphasis of their loyalty to the central government and their begging for mercy and aid from the highest authorities. In the Haimen protest, we likewise see protesters kneel during their action to beg for intervention from higher authorities to stop the construction of a second power plant. In this regard, these protests are not much different from most other recent local protests that are militant against local authorities but submissive toward the central government. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, China watchers rested much hope on such confrontational local protests and cast them as precursors to larger-scale movements that could radically change the status quo. But these waves of unrest came and went and the party-state remained in control.

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The following is an interview with Lingzhen Wang, author of Chinese Women’s Cinema: Transnational Contexts.

Question: How influenced were Chinese women directors by the sexual revolution happening in the ’70s in the Western world?

Lingzhen Wang: Not that much at the time because in Mainland China socialist ideology was prevalent from 1949 to the very end of the 1970s, during which little contemporary Western feminist or women’s movements were introduced. Although Hong Kong and Taiwan were more open to the West at the time, there were simply few women directors. Tang Shu Shuen was probably the only person who was influenced by some Western gender ideas. She left Taiwan for the University of Southern California for her undergraduate education, and returned to Hong Kong, her childhood home, in 1969. Indeed, her first film, The Arch (1970), centers on women’s desire and sexuality in the context of traditional Chinese chastity.

Q: In a world where Hollywood is forever reappropriating existing properties for remakes or sequels, why hasn’t Chinese cinema been taken up in this way as much as other Asian cinema?

LW: Chinese film industries in the Mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have their own rich traditions of remaking. For example, one of the best Hong Kong martial arts films, New Dragon Inn (1992), is a remake of the 1967 Taiwan martial arts film, Dragon Inn. Recently, Jet Li has joined director Tsui Hark for a 3-D remake of the 1992 film, called New Dragon Gate Inn. For another example, during socialist China, especially between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, many of the modern model operas were remakes of previous socialist feature films. Since the 1990s, there has appeared another wave of remaking of socialist red classics both in film and on TV.

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As reported in Bloomberg and The Washington Post, James Millward, author of Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, was among the “Xin­jiang 13.” The Xinjiang 13 are a group of scholars of China who were denied visas by the Chinese government after contributing to Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland, a volume edited by Frederick Starr and published by M.E. Sharpe in 2004.

In Being Blacklisted by China, And What Can Be Learned from It, a recent post on The China Beat, James Millward discusses the circumstances behind the controversy around the book, which focused on controversial subject for the Chinese government but in a manner that was not unfamiliar to Chinese officials. Millward explains that the context surrounding the volume and how it came to publication was far more objectionable to the Communist government than its content.

Millward also describes his efforts to get his visa reinstated and the support or in some cases lack of support that he and his fellow scholars received from their U.S. institutions. Millward criticizes U.S. universities for not being more active in trying to get scholars’ visas reinstated. He writes:

If institutions don’t support their own faculty, but allow visa refusals to occur and go on unchallenged for years, American academics may well gradually be placed in a situation akin to that of our Chinese colleagues: facing the Chinese state on our own, forced to consider the possible personal repercussions of everything we write.

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Will China follow in the footsteps of the Arab world and witness an outbreak of protests? In a New York Times op-ed China’s Gradual Revolution, Guobin Yang, author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, argues that it is unlikely.

China’s government, unlike those of Egypt or Tunisia, is very savvy about how to handle online protests, restricting Internet access when it senses momentum growing among protest groups. However, the Chinese government is careful not to cut off access completely, knowing that it could backfire on them and hurt the economy.

Despite the Chinese government’s careful watch of the Internet, there are many online protest movements in China but these movements tend to be reformist rather than revolutionary. Their focus tends to be local, centering on corrupt government officials and specific injustices against Chinese citizens. Activists have come to understand the limits of what and how they can protest and in many cases their more concrete, albeit more modest, goals have been met.

Yang shows that these local efforts make a larger movement more difficult, something that plays into the hands of the Chinese government. Likewise even when the Chinese government addresses the concerns of protest movements, many of the larger underlying issues are ignored. Yang writes:

Yet rather than resolving the underlying sources of instability, the government all too often offers short-term, superficial solutions, which are more likely to sweep the problems under the carpet or dam them up. The introduction of the food safety law, for example, has so far failed to solve the country’s serious food safety problems.

What’s more, the energy and resources Beijing puts into maintaining control — its 2011 budget commits more money to internal security than to the military — means that little effort is being devoted to real reform.

There is always the possibility that, if these trends continue, the gaps between reality and people’s expectations will boil over into more aggressive, organized activism. But given the complex dynamic between the Chinese state and public activists, it’s unlikely to happen any time soon.

Tonight Guobin Yang, author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online will be part of a panel discussion on China’s new media landscape at the Asia Society.

The event coincides with the paperback edition of The Power of the Internet, which includes a new afterword describing new developments in online activism in China since the book’s original publication in June 2009. The following is an excerpt from “The Persistence of Online Activism,” a section from the afterword in which Yang looks at an incident in the Yunnan province that led to an online protest that revealed “that the Chinese ruling regime may be suffering a crisis of credibility.” Here is the excerpt:

“Eluding the cat” is a Chinese idiom for “hide-and-seek.” On February 12, 2009, police authorities in Yunnan province announced that Li Qiaom­ing, an inmate in a local detention center, died of fatal injuries from play­ing the game of “eluding the cat.” Doubtful of this bizarre explanation, neti­zens protested and demanded an investigation. In response, the Yunnan provincial authorities announced that an investigation committee would be set up, and in an unprecedented move, invited netizens to join. Ten out of 510 applicants were selected to form a committee with four government officials and three journalists. Subsequently, on the basis of the investiga­tion, the provincial authorities announced that Li had died of beating by fellow inmates and that officers in charge of the detention center would be punished accordingly.
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In the Toronto Star, Christopher Rea the editor of Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays, by Qian Zhongshu, discusses prescient fictional works that speak to China’s recent reaction to Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize.

In the 1946 “Inspiration,” Qian tells the story of a Chinese writer whose work is translated into Esperanto, so he can be eligible for the Nobel Prize. He fails to win which “plunges the entire Chinese population into a righteous wrath.” Rea argues thaat Qian’s satirical story points to China’s longstanding skepticism, if not animosity toward the Nobel.

Rea concludes by writing:

China’s Nobel Complex seems to be alive and well. As the Chinese government tries to extend its “soft power” through Confucius Institutes in foreign countries….

What is often obscured by the spectacle of an angry China, however, is that the indignation is not, and never was, shared by all of its citizens. Nor, as Qian’s story reveals, does the problem originate with the Chinese Communist party, which has done so much to exacerbate cultural chauvinism. The roots of the problem are deeper than politics, even if they are readily ascribed to that most superficial of clichés about China: face.

The recent and horrific attacks on young children in rural schools in China have left the Chinese government and a slew of experts searching for answers. The spate of attacks was recently a topic on the New York Times’ Web feature Room for Debate.

One of the people called upon to participate in the discussion was Guobin Yang, an associate professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College and author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. Yang suggests that the attacks “are only the most explosive and brutal symptoms of an increasingly sullen and contentious society.”

In addition to the attacks on schools, Yang lists other symptoms, including the growing number of mass protests; violent attacks against government authorities; more dramatic individual protests; and online exposure of government corruption.

Yang argues that these violent and dramatic acts result from a lack of faith that the Chinese government as being able to administer justice. Thus, “when citizens have no legitimate channels of seeking justice, violence is then seen as an option.”

However, the school killings do represent something new and something especially troubling:

These acts of violence [against school children] have another deeply disturbing element. The assailants attacked the most innocent and treasured members of their own communities. Community often serves as a buffer in times of crisis (as in times of war). By turning against their own community, these attackers reveal a deep crisis in that community, which has long been a source of stability in Chinese society.

Our titles in Asian literature are frequently reviewed but is always particularly gratifying when they are praised by reviewers in Asia. Most recently, the Taipei Times gave a glowing review to Courtesans and Opium: Romantic Illusions of the Fool of Yangzhou.

The novel written by an anonymous author and translated here by Patrick Hanan, depicts the brothels of Yangzhou and the lives of its customers and the women who work there. From the review:

So, what does this literary trail-blazer have to offer? It’s about the loves and fortunes — often misfortunes too — of five married males who are all enthusiastic brothel-goers. Two things are clear about them, as Patrick Hanan, the book’s highly accomplished translator, explains. First, they are by no means unhappy in the experiences they encounter, so that the novel’s ostensible function as a warning to future customers is undermined from the very beginning. And second, the women they fall for are a long way from being only exploitative gold-diggers. They too have their feelings — their pride, their hopes and their affections.

The review also mentions two other East Asian novels focused on similar themes, Nagai Kafu’s Rivalry: A Geisha’s Tale and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai by Han Banqing. All three novels are published by Columbia University Press, leading the reviewer to praise us for our efforts in bringing Asian literature to English-language readers.

Also, you can save 50% on all three novels during our Spring Sale.

In her article How Not to Respond to an Earthquake, published on the Daily Beast, Sophie Richardson, author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, looks at how the Chinese government could best respond to the recent earthquake in Qinghai Province.

While Richardson notes that the latest earthquake will probably see a similar outpouring of civic activism that took place after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, other responses by the Chinese government are best avoided. Specifically, she laments the lack of rigorous investigations into allegations of shoddy construction of buildings, particularly schools, which led to the deaths of so many children. Likewise, many activists and journalists were forcibly silenced when they inquired too deeply into corruption.

Richardson concludes by suggesting a more appropriate response from the Chinese government

The right way to respond to the Qinghai quake is undoubtedly to focus on the rescue of survivors and recovery of those who died. But essential to those goals are free access to information, regardless of whether it portrays the government in a good or bad light, and regardless of whether that information is sought by a Chinese activist or a foreign correspondent. Rather than suppress demands for accountability, the government should embrace them, partly because doing so might mitigate or prevent suffering when the next natural disaster strikes. And, ultimately, what better way is there to honor the lives lost in Qinghai today and Sichuan in 2008 than by freeing those imprisoned for trying to uncover the truth—and to allow the truth, however painful it may be to the government, to emerge, unfettered—and now?