First, I though Professor Baumler's post, "Chinese History sucks," over at Frog in a Well, was spot-on. I guess it's helpful to some degree that I'm less interested in working on the early periods (motivated, I'd say, in not insignificant part by pragmatic considerations exactly in line with the post--more sources, more "relevance," etc.), yet I feel a bit guilty about it. Who knows, change is possible. But I can't imagine trying to read Han-period texts or seal-script steles. Face explode. Then again, even the Ming-Qing's called "ancient" by some folk (cough certain politics professors of my acquaintance cough), since they predated 1949.
Speaking of sweeping, digit-abundant history, Professor Barnett's Q&A in yesterday's NYT answers some burninatin' questions and points that people in forums from Facebook to the NYT itself have been raising. I especially like this bit:
"Q: Whenever we write about Tibet on this blog, we get many comments from Chinese readers that refer to the Dalai Lama as a slaveholder. What is that about?
RB: First, we can see that as just propaganda that lodges in certain people’s heads, because it’s not even what the Chinese government says. The Chinese government uses the word “serf” — it technically imagines that Tibet is full of serfs, but very few slaves. It was a mistranslation that has circulated and gained some purchase with the Chinese public, including intellectuals, and now they’ve got hold of the slave idea, which was never the case.
The Communist Party sees history in terms of a set number of facts, in this case the party says that 5 percent of Tibetans were aristocrats or landowners, 90 percent were serfs and 5 percent were slaves. I don’t think any of these are actually what you and I would call facts.
[...]
But those laws were made in the 14th century or so and had hardly been used for hundreds of years. But the Chinese cite these old laws, which are really horrendous in writing, and use those as the main basis for these histrionic claims about slavery."
The Chinese suppression of decent scholarship--in content or in method--is horrible, but what's truly disgusting is how history has been reduced to a set of fill-in-the-blank factoids, tinged by nationalism and a staunch refusal to consider alternative points of view, not to mention the totally irresponsible use of sources. And then young intellectuals and bourgeoisie today parrot these tidbits with the greatest pride--which merits the proverb “哭笑不得.”Issues relating at all to gender and sexuality frequently involve enormous hypocrisies, but the sexual hypocrisy of contemporary Chinese-made history and cultural studies is of course complicated by the whole Marxist-Leninst-Maoist line (in case the dear reader, in hir zest for teh cashz, had forgotten that we're discussing a real live unitary authoritarian government) and its concomitant self-contradictions regarding love, sex, and gender. I'm sure someone learned and wise has written on this somewhere, but why haven't we heard more about these things? Where, O Media, are the more probing inquiries into not just the political or economic oppressiveness of the system, but the crushing effects it has had on people's conceptions of themselves and of the past? No, let's publish yet another story about how materially wealthy those elite young Chinese are, yay! And wow, gee whiz, they're really good at science and math and overseeing semi-illiterate people make shoe bottoms all day, aren't they! Okay, I admit that last one's a bit cheap, and probably motivated in part by my personal grievance with most things numerical, but seriously. So tired of history and culture seeming to take a backseat in these ubiquitous discussions of (mythical narrator voice) China.
Enough ignorant rambling for now. Less of that and more sexies next time!
