Roland, at ESWN, has provided some great coverage of the closing, and then the reopening, of the Freezing Point (Bingdian) section of the China Youth Daily newspaper. His posts are numerous and spread about his site; it is well worth the effort to click around to follow the Bingdian story.
While there are many facets to the Bingdian saga (press censorship, the power of the internet, etc.), I want to focus on what may, at first blush, appear to be a rather abstruse part of the story - the uses of history in contemporary Chinese politics - but which turns out to be rather important.
To begin, it seems that the story that got the Bingdian editors in trouble or, at least, the story that proved the be the last straw for the censors, was an article entitled, "Modernization and History Textbooks," (scroll down here for Roland's translation). Here is a brief description of that piece from the Washington Post:
The piece, written by Yuan Weishi, a reform-minded scholar at Zhongshan University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, criticized Chinese textbooks for teaching an incomplete history of China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing, that fosters blind nationalism and closed-minded anti-foreign sentiment.
For example, he challenged the textbooks for portraying the 1900 Boxer Rebellion as a "magnificent feat of patriotism" without describing the violence committed by the rebels or their extreme anti-foreign views. He also criticized the books for blaming the Opium Wars of the mid-1800s entirely on foreign nations, without mentioning the Qing government's record of violating treaties by refusing foreign merchants access to Chinese cities.
So, it seems that the only "correct" historical conclusion is that the Boxer's were 100% right and the imperialists were 100% wrong. Any suggestion of complexity or interdependence is ruled politically beyond the pale; and if you dare publish anything else in your newspaper, the Party will close you down.
Roland has now posted a translation of the article refuting Yuan's original piece, the publication of which was a condition of reopening the Bingdian section. It reads like an old-fashioned Cultural Revolution scolding:
Historical Materialism Must Not Doubted
The study and interpretation of history is a very serious business. One must present the results of the research and interpretations to the broad masses of readers in common language, and one must have a very responsible attitude towards society and readers. The historical processes and facts are not up to anyone to explain as they please, for there is the attitude of historical materialism. At the same time, the historical process is filled with the movements of contradictions, and complicated events are the result of all kinds of specific events. When we analyze and study historical events, if we cannot understand the historical materials, if we cannot place things into a historical framework, if we cannot grasp the nature of the historical process and if we cannot present the historical phenomenon through class analysis and debate, we will not be able to find the threads in the chaotic historical phenomenon and grasp the basic laws of the historical processes. If we ignore historical facts and if we make arbitrary interpretation of historical facts and processes, that would be historical idealism.
In other words, there is only one politically tolerable way to study and present history. Anything other than class analysis and historical materialism is simply wrong, by definition. Heaven forbid that complex details of any particular historical event do not fit neatly into the historical materialist box. And heaven forbid (or maybe I should say "Marx forbid") that we suppose that historical actors might have multiple motives, personal idiosyncrasies, or political agendas other than what our class-analysis presumptions might posit. I say this as someone who is generally sympathetic to materialist accounts of history. But this is simply sophomoric and pathetic.
Now, it is certainly true that all of this is driven by a struggle to maintain control over the national narrative, for that is all that is left of the Party's claim to historical legitimacy. If the struggle against imperialists were anything other than a black and white morality play, there would be reason to doubt the Party's role in "saving the nation." The last line of the politically correct article makes this clear:
We should tell the Opium Wars to the next generation with true history in order to let them understand where the true path to modernization lies, so that we can be more firm in our march for the glorious revival of the Chinese nation.
Ultimately, however, nationalists must do violence to history; they must force it into a form that suits their political needs of the present. And this is true of all nationalists everywhere - Chinese, American, Japanese, Russian. And in all cases, it is simply a matter of enforcing political control; it is not history.
One last thing to add. In the Chinese context, some might say that history looms especially large because there is so much of it and because it has always been used to rationalize the most recent political regime. Some might even see a tie to Confucius in all of this. That is, he was so bent on maintaining what he understood to be the virtue of "tradition," that he, and those who came after him, produced a "backward-looking culture," one that searched in the past for standards to judge contemporary society and politics. And when this inclination is wed to a crude Marxist historiography - and the Party-controlled narrative is nothing if not crude - what emerges is a powerful impulse to deny the complexity of the past and demand that our readings of history be pure and unsullied by moral ambiguity.
I would like save Confucius from this sort of accusation. Yes, it is true that, for him, the moral standards of the Sage Kings were best and the China of his own time (and, by extension, societies of our own time) should look to the past for positive models for the present. In the famous first passage of chapter 7 of the Analects he says:
"Transmitting insight, but never creating insight, standing by my words and devoted to the ancients: perhaps I'm a little like that old sage, P'eng."
We could take this as his self-identification as a simple transmitter of past truths. He was not creating anything new; he was just applying the timeless lessons of the past to his contemporary setting. Just like the Party ideologists.
But he was not doing just that. A fuller consideration of the Analects as a whole - and I thinking of Finagrette, here, as well as Hall and Ames - suggests that he was an innovator. He varied ritual practice - the timeless lessons of the past - to express more perfectly his ethical responsibilities in the present. In other words, the connection between past and present was not an inflexible iron law, but, rather, a supple field of possibility. Was there only one right way to carry out ritual action? No. One has to orchestrate a virtuosic performance that creatively links past to present in a specific context. He was not a slave to the past but a creator of the present who avoided stultified "laws" of history.
Too bad the Party ideologues cannot match his creativity.
Reading Confucius seems to me a lot like reading the bible: you can find stories to support any point of view and any point on the moral compass (George Bush, for example using "an eye for an eye" from the old testament when it suits him while the new testament tells us to "turn the other cheek"); especially if you include the Analects. But old Kungzi always told us to trod the middle path and by that I believe he meant that we should avoid extremes in behavior of any kind.
Posted by: Grant | March 06, 2006 at 01:21 PM