The Useless Tree

This Day...

..twenty one years ago..  The PRC government tries to eradicate the memory but recollection cannot be stopped.  Here is a cartoon that ran in the Guangzhou newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily on June 1st, which was recognized as "Children's Day", an obvious allusion to the iconic "Tank Man" photos:

 

The image was taken down very quickly from the paper's website but it has been preserved - Roland, as usual, has it saved.  The fact of its publication, however, suggests that the protests of 1989 live in the memory of Chinese people.  Global Voices has some of those memories. 

Below the fold are some of my memories, from a post I wrote in 2006:

In Honor of D. C. Lau

The great translator and scholar, D. C. Lau, passed away on Monday.  I never met Professor Lau but I am one of those touched by his erudition and eloquence.  As I look around my office, his work is nearby.  His translations of The Analects and Mencius are at hand.  I have learned from his Introduction to Mencius.  Here is an excerpt, which provides nuance to the general point that Mencius asserted an innately good human nature:

...First of all, let us dispose of certain misunderstandings.  It has been said that Mencius put forth his theory solely with sages in mind, as the sage is the only type of man who possesses unadulterated goodness.  This it to restrict the application of Mencius' theory to sages, but as Mencius makes it quite clear that his theory is meant to apply universally to all men, there much be something wrong with this interpretation.

Mencius nowhere contradicted Kao Tzu's statement that "appetite for food and sex is nature".  He would probably admit that desires and appetites form the greater part of human nature.  What he emphatically denied was that human nature consisted solely of desires and appetites.  According to him, "Slight is the difference between man and the brutes.  The common man loses this distinguishing feature, while the gentleman retains it" (IV.B 19).  To say that the difference between man and the brutes is slight is to imply that they are, for the most part, the same, and if the nature of animals consists solely of desires and appetites, then these must also make up the greater part of human nature.  There is, however, a difference, and this, though slight, sets man apart from animals.  Whether a man is a gentleman or not depends on whether he succeeds in retaining, and, we may say, developing this difference.  But what is this distinguishing feature that the gentleman retains?  The answer is, it is his heart (hsin).  In IV.B 28, Mencius says, "A gentleman differs from other men in that he retains his heart."  This "retaining of the heart" is again mentioned in VII.A 1.  It is necessary to emphasize the retention of the heart because it is something very easy to lose.  Since the heart is something we possess originally, it is also referred to as the "original heart".  Mencius describes a man who loses his sense of shame and comes to do things for unworthy motives which he would not, in the first instance, have done even to escape death as a man who has lost his "original heart" (VI.A 100.  Mencius also calls it the "true heart".  It is not the case that a man never possessed the benevolent and righteous heart, but that he has "let go of his true heart" (VI.A 8).  We are said to "let go" of the heart because we possessed it in the first place.  The purpose of learning is "to go after this strayed heart" (VI.A 11). 13-14

So, let's remember Professor Lau by remembering what Mencius teaches us: don't lose heart...

September

 

My Youthful Encounter with Andre Gunder Frank

Peony, from Tang Dynasty Times, asked me to recount an exchange I had, years ago, with eminent economic historian Andre Gunder Frank.  There's no ancient Chinese philosophy in this, just a rather amusing personal story.  It's a bit long, so I am putting it below the fold, for any who are interested.

June 4th

     Attention must be paid.

     Here is something from Mencius to contemplate, as we remember the hundreds and hundreds of people who lost their lives on this day nineteen years ago:

Prince T'ien asked: "What is the task of a worthy official?"
"To cultivate the highest of purposes," replied Mencius.
"What do you mean by the highest of purposes?"
"It's simple: Humanity and Duty.  You defy Humanity if you cause the death of a single innocent person, and you defy Duty if you take what is not yours.  What is our dwelling place if not Humanity?  And what is our road if not Duty?  To dwell in Humanity and follow Duty - that is the perfection of a great person's task."
(13.33)

    A single innocent person....

   And here is something to read, a short piece that reflects upon the historical significance of the day.

Another Year

   I posted these two pictures last year on this day and here they are again (the top one is from Roland):

Remembrance

     Roland posted this picture.  It is beautiful.  It reminds me of riding the Staten Island ferry, going to see my wife-to-be, and the NYC of the seventies.

 

UPDATE: And here is a sad reminder of the presence of inhumanity in the world:

Memories of a Man I Hardly Knew

    Yesterday I went to a memorial service for Vince Barnett, a man who had been a faculty member at my college for many years and had served as Chair of my department years before I arrived.  He retired in 1984; I came in 1989.  Our only real contacts occurred at annual department dinners, where all members, past and present, come together for food and conversation.  It was at one of those gatherings that I learned he had served in Italy in the early 1950's, the same time my grandfather was the Labor Attache in the American Embassy in Rome.   They had known each other.

     I didn't know Vince all that well but I learned something about him at the memorial service.  He had an accomplished public life.  He was a diplomat, a college president, an adviser to foreign governments, moderator of our local town meetings - a position of some honor.  Listening to the eulogies, I thought of how academic life was so different in the 1950s and 60s.  Fields of study were not as narrow as they are now, social science was not as mathematized.  A person with a political science degree, like Vince, could manage an economics program, something highly unlikely today. 

    A piece of local institutional history came out.  One past president of the college mentioned that Vince had almost been selected president himself, but the job went to John Sawyer.  It turned out that when he retired, Vince made a brief farewell speech in which he said that it was better that Sawyer had been named president instead of himself.  That moment of public humility set my Confucian sensors tingling. 

   But the full measure of Vince's Confucian gentlemanliness was expressed by his children.  Their stories of the warm and close home life they shared, Vince's commitment to his mother's care in her later years, and the openness with which he welcomed friends brought to mind Confucius's "greatest ambition:"

"...to comfort the old, to trust my friends, and to cherish the young."

    I think Vince lived just like that.