by Percy J. Smith

The study of Chinese copper coinage is one of entrancing interest. Naturally those who go the deepest into it get the most out of it, and there is in Chinese numismatics a field for exploration big enough to engage study and attention for a lifetime. But fortunately it also offers large attractions to those who can give to it but a comparatively limited amount of attention and, what is very important, money.

Specimens of ancient coins of the ‘spade’ and ‘sword’ variety are each year more difficult to obtain, although clever modern counterfeits of them are quite common, and are apt to entrap the unwary collector. But even these are worth obtaining, for, although not genuine, yet being copies, they give the form and character of the original. On the other hand, a multitude of coins, of real historical value and interest and dating back centuries of even milleniums, are to be found on many of the strings of cash in current use among the people to-day, and, with a little pains, can easily be obtained. Here then is a strong inducement for those who are on the look out for a hobby which makes relatively small demands upon the time or the pocket. 

Needless to say, the historical is one of the chief fascinations of this study, for even coins tell a story. That story can be followed just as far as one’s inclinations lead, or may be dropped at the threshold. But the writer, at any rate, has found the collection and classifying of the copper cash of the past ages a wonderful introduction to phases of Chinese history, to men and dynasties and movements, which would otherwise have been unknown to him, or only reached by the dryasdust method of the text book.

The object of the present article is to bring some illustrations to bear upon this point; and it is at once obvious that a very large field is opened up, which, if traversed ever so lightly, would take us far beyond the scope of an article of this nature. Hence the desirability of imposing limitations; and the writer proposes to do this by confining his remarks to a few coins taken from his own collection. Although, as this collection is far from complete, this will necessarily exclude many very interesting specimens and many interesting historical facts, yet we shall doubtless find sufficient for the present purpose.         

The authentic history of China may be said to commence during the Chou Dynasty (B.C. 1122-255), and by some the point is put at the reign of Yu Wang (B.C. 781-771). Before this, legend and tradition are intermixed, so that although knife and spade currency have come down to us from these ancient times, it is difficult to dogmatise upon their origin. Let us take one specimen belonging to the class known as ‘Chin Hwo’ (金貨) or ‘Metal Currency’.

The date of this may be placed between B.C. 770 and B.C. 250, namely, during the second half of the Chou Dynasty. Only five of the characters are recognisable, while the shape of the coin itself is supposed to be representative of the ‘seal’ form of the character ‘Ch’uen’ (泉), one of the oldest terms for money. But the interest of the coin lies in the fact of its connection with the period ‘in which are to be found the origins and principles of Chinese civilisation, for most of the customs, laws, and institutions which we see to-day have been handed down to us from this period.’ It was an age of darkness, we are told; the moral standard of he people was low; intrigues between the different States were rife. But it was an age which produced the colossal figures of Confucius, an nearly two hundred years after, his great disciple Mencius, and it needs no greater claim upon our interest and admiration than this! At its commencement China was, politically, a mere collection of feudal states, numbering 1773; at its close China had become for the first time a united empire under Shih Hwang Ti.

To the period immediately succeeding the Chou is attributed another famous coin, viz, the ‘Pan Liang’ (半兩). This cash, which is made of a good red copper, is still fairly common. The seal characters are especially well formed and protruding; the coin has no rim and we are told that its weight was as its inscription, that is, half an ounce. 

It is placed by some under the Han Dynasty, but there is also a record that it was minted by Shih Hwang Ti (B.C. 221). He was evidently a man of strong personality and enterprising spirit, as is shown by the histories. In his day the vast number of feudal States had gradually diminished in number, until there were left but seven, of one of which he was the ruler. He welded these States into one, and became the first Emperor of a United China. Two facts which are always connected with his name shed a strong light on his character. One was the famous burning of the Classical Books, which was his reply to the literati who criticised his overthrow of feudalism, and was followed by the burying alive of those who refused otherwise to be silenced. The other was the building of The Great Wall, which was an attempt to keep out the barbarous and fierce tribes of ‘Hsiung Nu.’ Two other things not so well known in connection with Shih Hwang Ti are the following;−

The Lesser Seal style of writing, and the brush pen so well known in China are generally believed to be the invention of his reign.

Curiously enough, there is one issue of the ‘Pan Liang’ cash with the inscription reversed, i.e., ‘Liang Pan’; and one of these has found its way into the writer’s possession.

We now go forward more than two hundred years to the commencement of the Christian era, when a most interesting set of coins makes its appearance. Here are some which we find under the date A.D. 9-20, issued by the notorious Han dynasty usurper Wang Mang.

The inscriptions are all in the Seal script. Nos. 1 and 2 read ‘Ta ch’uen Wu Shih’ (Large coin worth fifty); No. 3 reads ‘I Tao P’ing Wu Ch’ien’  (One knife. Equal to 5,000); No. 4 has ‘Hwo Pu’ (Exchange Coin); No. 5 has ‘Hwo Ch’uen’ (Exchange Coin); and No. 6 reads ‘Hsiao Ch’uen Chih I’ (small coin worth one). This latter, an extremely small coin, is rather rare now, and is often used as a charm. Only the obverse of these coins is given, as the reverse face of each is plain.

Wang Mang was evidently a gentleman with fantastic and original ideas in the way of currency. He issued many others not recorded here, which are characterised by the greatest variety of style and inscription, some of them bearing images of such things as stars, swords, snakes and tortoises. In the illustrations given above how varied were his attempts. Here are round coins, large and small, ‘Pu’ coins, and a combination of round coin and sword coin. The round variety had not long been current, and perhaps some of the ancient shaped coins were concurrently used. Wang Mang in the coin illustrated in No. 3 seems to have attempted to combine the two styles; and the interesting thing is that this was not by way of transition from the old to the new, but was an attempt to revert to, and recall, the ancient Chou Dynasty customs and practices. Now, when we come to look into the records of Wang Mang, we find that the tendency so splendidly illustrated in this coin, was in fact the guiding principle of his life and government policy. The History states that when he overturned the Han Dynasty and usurped the throne, his whole attitude to tradition was one of upmost reverence, and he gave himself up to the attempt to restore and resuscitate ‘all laws and institutions that experience had long since discarded as out of date and impracticable.’ He used the word ‘New’ as the title of his reign but ‘Old’ would have been a more suitable name. We are told that he promulgated many ridiculous currency laws, and, if these are to be interpreted by the variety of his styles of coinage, we may well believe it. 

It is however extremely interesting to find the coinage of this period so illustrative of the facts we find recorded of it in the histories.

In passing, a sufficient study in contrasts is afforded if we remember that Wang Mang was issuing his anomalous coinage and engaged in his reactionary policy, at the very time when Jesus Christ as a young man walked in Galilee pondering his great reconstructive policy for mankind.

For the rest, Wang Mang seems to have been an unprincipled ruffian. He made his way to the throne by intrigue and murder. By his actions and reactions he roused rebellions to one of which he succumbed, and was eventually beheaded in A.D. 22.

A very brief mention must be made to the well-known ‘Wu Shu’ (五銖) class of coins, of which but two examples are given here. It is almost impossible to assign to each coin now extant its period of issue, for the Wu Shu coins were issued under different dynasties from B.C. 118 to A.D. 618. One authority states that the first issue was made by the Emperor Wu Ti of the Han Dynasty in B.C. 117, and that by the year A.D. 1 there had been minted 280,000,000,000! As there were further issue under succeeding dynasties, the total output must have been enormous, and there is little wonder that so many have been handed down to the present day. The period of history covered by this coin is, or course, far too great to be discussed here.

Before passing on however, it may be well to note that the second character ‘Shu’ means a weight standard equal to 100 millet grains. This standard for weighing coins has ben invariably used by the Chinese numismatists, and it is easy to see how in primitive times, when standards were unfixed, this practice was adopted. Strange to say, the Five Shu coins are not recorded as invariably weighing five Shu. One cast in A.D. 187 (Eastern Han) weighed four Shu; another was eight Shu and yet another was three Shu. That these were all styled and inscribed as ‘Five Shu,’ evidently presented no incongruity to the Chinese mind!

Our last study shall be concerning four examples of the T’ang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906) coins, which are still found in current China in large numbers. Our four examples we will take in the order of their issue, and the first is the ‘K’ai Yuen T’ung Pao’ (Currency of the Inauguration) cash. We are told that this cash was minted in the 4^th year of the Emperor Wu Ti (A.D. 622), and Wu Ti is an important character in history. He was the founder and first Emperor of the T’ang Dynasty, a dynasty which is rightly celebrated among the dynasties of the past. It was an age of poetry, of literary culture, of military skill and of vast Imperial expansion. Under the first T’ang Emperor the Empire reached ‘from the Yellow Sea to Aral Sea; from Siberia to its southernmost point in Farther India’. We are told it was the largest Empire ever under sway of a purely Chinese dynasty; and according to Wells Williams, during the 287 years they held the throne, Chin was probably the most civilised country on earth.

Of our Emperor who founded the dynasty we know a good deal, which cannot be enlarged upon here. But one curious story shall be recorded of him, which connects us up with the coin portrayed above. On the reverse will be seen a small crescent, and concerning its origin we are told that when the wax model of the proposed new coin was sent in to Emperor Wu Ti for approval, his Empress also examined it, and unconsciously left a slight impression on it with her fingernail, which doubtless according to custom was very long. Hence all the minted coins bore the mark. By how small a thing has her fame been handed down to posterity!

The second coin is the ‘Ch’ien Yeun Chung Pao’ (Heavy currency of Ch’ien Yuen). Ch’ien Yuen (Heavenly), was the reign title of the Emperor Hsu Tsung (A.D. 758), but if he was indeed Heaven’s appointment, he proved unworthy. He banished his own father; and his maladministration resulted in disorders in which his Empress and her two sons perished. His epitaph in history is as follows: ‘Above, he did not protect his own father; within (or around), he did not protect himself; below, he did not protect his wife and sons; and was the laughing stock of after generations’. Let us take leave of him, however, with pity, and pass on to No. 3.

‘K’ai Yuen T’ung Pao’ cash. (With various characters on the reverse, e.g. ‘Ch’ang’ 昌etc.) We have now gone forward nearly one hundred years to the declining days of the T’ang. The Emperor Wu Tsung issued this coin during A.D. 841-846, and there are two facts to record which illustrate the force of our contention that the study of coinage is of itself an introduction to history.

(1) There are a number of these coins which have on the reverse one character, and these, with one exception, are place names, probably the place where the particular coin was minted. The exception is the character ‘Ch’ang’ (昌), which refers to “Hui Ch’ang’ (會昌), the reign title of Wu Tsung. Some of the others in our collection are ‘T’an’ (潭) for T’an Yang Prefecture, Hunan; (興) ‘Hsing,’ modern Feng Hsiang (鳳翔) Prefecture, Shensi, and ‘Tzu’ (梓) modern 梓潼District, Szechuen. Others again have characters which indicate the provinces of Anhui, Chekiang, and Kiangsi, and many other districts as the place of origin.

It will thus be seen that a very large area is covered by the few names already given; and, as this was in the declining days of the T’ang Empire, it offers a strong corroboration of the assertion made earlier as to the vast extent of territory under their dominion during the height of their power.

(2) The copper cash of T’ang are intimately associated with two important items of history in the time of the T’ang power. One is the great ascendancy of Buddhism in the earlier period of the dynasty; and in confirmation of this we read that ‘As soon as the K’ai Yuen Cash were put into circulation, they were destroyed by the people in order to obtain copper for making images of Buddha. Cash famines became frequent, and led to the somewhat unsuccessful experiment with paper money towards the end of the dynasty’. The other is the severe persecution of Buddhists set on foot by the Emperor Wu Tsung in A.D. 845, when 4,600 monasteries and 40,000 smaller buildings were destroyed; while 260,000 monks were compelled to return to secular callings. Further, the Chinese historian relates that ‘When Wu Tsung abolished the Buddhist Monasteries in the Empire, he used the copper bells, and the images of Buddha to mint cash, the inscription still being K’ai Yuen, but on the reverse face was inscribed with it the name of a place’. So in these particular coins we probably are handling copper that once served in a very different capacity and was intimately connected with a person’s religion before it was put to the secular use of the exchange and mart. Here, too, we have what is surely an unparalleled situation, wherein a double change was effected, the coins in the earlier times being converted into images of Buddha, and in the later age the Buddhist images and bells being converted into cash!

Of Wu Tsang little more need be said. An historian records that he belonged to a class of rulers, who, with few exceptions, were mere palace debauchees, or puppets in the hands of their eunuchs. We will leave him, only quoting a quaint passage which says: ‘He took the golden pills until be became ill, and notwithstanding this, trusted in them to change his bones.’

The last coin that we shall mention is the ‘T’ang Kwo T’ung Pao,’ (Currency of the State of T’ang).

The vast Empire of the T’angs had disappeared, and all that remained in A.D. 937. was the small southern State of T’ang, which in its turn was to be absorbed by the rising Empire of the Sung. Li Ching, whose reign title was Yuen Tsung, having empty treasuries, issued the ‘T’ang Kwo’ cash with its inscription in the seal character.

We are informed that he was lenient and humane, liberal minded and humble, kind, reverent, peaceful, frugal, and loving towards his people. All truly estimable characteristics; but very different from those rugged and forceful qualities which had in his ancestors extended the Empire and consolidated its position against all comers.

The problem of the fact that so often the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift, and that virtue does not seem to be always rewarded, w evidently in the mind of the Chinese writer who says of Yuen Tsung’s eclipse that ‘when at last the dynasty perished, it was truly because the star of Sung was in the ascendant!’ The last ruler of T’ang, the son of Yuen Tsung ended life as a Marquis under the suzerainty of T’ai Tsu the first Sung emperor.

Some Authorities quoted in above article:−

‘Outlines of Chinese History’ by Li Yung Ping. (Commercial Press)

‘Stewart Lockhart Collection of Chinese Copper Coins’ (Royal Asiatic Society, China Branch)

‘Ch’ien Chih Hsin Pien’ (錢志新編). In Chinese (Published 1830).

Source: The China Journal of Science & Arts, vol. V., no. 6 (December 1926): 58-65.

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In the summer of 1966, as China’s Cultural Revolution gained momentum, Mao’s call to destroy the old world of feudalism and the bourgeoisie and to create a new, ideal social order ignited a nationwide rebellion. Inspired by a small group of classmates in Beijing who called themselves the Red Guards of Mao Zedong Thought, students converged on the Chinese capital. Massing in Tiananmen Square in their millions they strained to catch a glimpse of the Chairman, the ‘Reddest Red Sun’ 最红的红太阳. (Although Mao did shine down on eight mass rallies over that summer, he would mostly direct the action, and infighting, of the Cultural Revolution era from Liu Zhuang 刘庄, his villa by West Lake in Hangzhou.) Thus fired up, the students dispersed to spread revolution throughout the country. Given free travel and accommodation to aid their ‘justified rebellion’, they set off with a sense of heroic purpose.

Millions of urban youth in the Red Guard movement took part in the new ‘long marches’. They succeeded all too well in visiting upheaval and destruction on the provinces. But the marches also had an unintended side effect: they brought the Red Guard generation, who’d grown up under seventeen years of state socialism and carefully modulated propaganda, into direct contact with the physical realities of China. It was an encounter that most of them never forgot.

Jinggang Shan: the road from Shaoshan 韶山——井冈山公路. Source: Renmin huabao 人民画报, no.5, 1970.

In their treks through the nation’s vast hinterland, many Red Guards retraced the history of the revolution itself, visiting the ‘sacred sites’ of the communist movement. These included Shanghai where the Party was founded; the former guerilla base in Jinggangshan, Jiangxi 江西井冈山; and Shaoshan in Hunan 湖南韶山, ‘where the sun first rose’ (i.e., Mao’s birthplace). Following this, many embarked on a truncated version of the 1935 Long March, travelling southwest to Zunyi in Guangxi 广西遵义, where Mao became the Party’s chairman, and finally reaching Yan’an in Shaanxi 陕西延安, the ‘holy land’ 革命圣地 of the Communist resistance against Japan (and the Nationalist government) during WWII. There, many would scoop up handfuls of soil to keep as relics of their pilgrimage along the red via sacra.

The Red Guards were often shocked by what they encountered in the China that they claimed as their revolutionary inheritance. Rather than the uplifting visions of a New China fed to them by teachers and political commissars, they discovered grinding rural poverty, sullen submission to local Party bosses and a country that looked for all intents and purposes untouched by the twentieth century. For the Red Guards, and many of China’s present leaders, this ‘first trip to China’ influenced the rest of their lives and determines still the breakneck development policies of the People’s Republic.

It is only in retrospect that foreign and overseas Chinese visitors to Maoist China might appreciate that their encounters with a country of hyperbole and myth, possibility and deception parallel in many respects the experiences of China’s educated youth. The Party’s dream-weaving propaganda industry, at the centre of which loomed the demiurge Mao Zedong himself, beguiled and inspired both Chinese and foreign revolutionary aspirants.

In many respects, from the early 1950s onwards, China had become a terra incognita for urban dwellers. The agrarian revolutionary society that Mao and the Party leadership were creating was certainly as mysterious for the travelers among whom were journalists, diplomats and scholars, including no small number of ‘political pilgrims’. Their reflections are gathered in Kin-ming Liu’s My First Trip to China. As one of the early US observers of late-Mao and Deng-era China, Orville Schell, points out in his Forward:

While so much of the rest of the world had been blurring its boundaries during the early stages of 20th century globalization, here was China, defiantly maintaining its revolutionary identity and isolation, becoming not only a terra incognita for much of the world, but also conferring on it an air of mesmerizing impenetrability and unpossessability. Its haughty detachment, fierce dedication to self-reliance and abject refusal to surrender to the outside world’s pressure paradoxically also made it a strangely alluring place … at least, for some of us! [pp.10-11]

Liu’s collection takes us back to the 1960s, when a few scholars like Bill Jenner and Delia Davin worked in China as ‘foreign experts’. Most of the accounts, however, come from visitors allowed in as a strategic, albeit fitful, opening up to the world began under Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai in the early 1970s. This era saw the emergence of a publishing mini-genre of books by ‘one trip wonders’ following ‘study tours’ during which they were introduced to a supposedly revolutionized populace in ‘model agricultural communes’ such as Dazhai 大寨; monumental socialist construction projects like the Red Flag Canal in Henan 河南红旗渠; as well as school and factory visits that featured mind-numbing ‘short introductions’ to production statistics and rote politics over tea, sweets and acrid cigarettes. The reflections presented in My First Trip offer an informal history of a particular time in China’s relationship with the outside world. Having been an exchange student in China from 1974, I would hope a future collection (already being planned by the editor) might broaden to include essays by some of my classmates from European countries (including Albania), Africa, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Villages in Zhejiang province enthusiastically participate in the mass movement to ‘Learn from Dazhai’ 延浙江省农村轰轰烈烈地开展‘农业学大寨’的群众运动. Source: Renmin huabao, no.12, 1970.

Many foreign travelers in the 1960s and 1970s encountered a revolutionary China that represented the high point of Maoist-style socialism. Few, however, saw it as the apogee of a revolutionary era that began early in the twentieth century. It was not until 1995 that the writers Li Zehou 李泽厚 and Liu Zaifu 刘再复 would publish their famous essay, titled ‘Farewell to Revolution’ 告别革命, questioning nearly a century of revolutionary rhetoric, radicalism and uneven development in China. For all the trumpeted revolutionary aspiration and idealism, young people and zealots, firebrands and ideologues were finally having to confront the fact that the one-party state had created a secretive and self-serving nomenklatura whose shrill rhetoric and public Puritanism disguised privileged lives and vicious infighting (something that the Red Guards had also discovered when they ‘smashed the old world’ of Party control and broke open the files). It is a reality with which observant first visitors to China even today must also come to grips.

The vanguard that first discovered revolutionary China in its wartime holy land of Yan’an travelled there from the country’s urban centres in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Among them were writers like Wang Shiwei 王实味, Ding Ling 丁玲 and Ai Qing 艾青 (father of the internationally celebrated free-thinker Ai Weiwei 艾未未) who criticised and lampooned the grim realities and hidden prerogatives of the revolution in stories, essays and poems. They’d pay for taking liberties. Wang Shiwei, the most outspoken critic of Party privilege and corruption and author of an acerbic work titled Wild Lilies, was denounced by Mao himself, in his influential talks on culture in 1942. Those talks remain the bedrock of official Chinese cultural policy today. (The Nobel laureate Mo Yan 莫言 was among those who participated in celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of the culture-crippling ‘Yan’an Talks’ last year).

Like many of the authors in My First Trip to China, Wang Shiwei journeyed to revolutionary China with high hopes of experiencing a fresh way ahead for humanity and a radical new way of organizing society. While most of the memoirs in Liu Kin-ming’s interesting collection end with thoughtful reflections, or in some cases self-justification, Wang Shiwei did not survive his adventure. When the Communists retreated from Yan’an in 1947, they had him beheaded.

The first encounters with revolutionary China and the long farewell to the Chinese revolutionary experience should be considered in tandem. Of course, it was hard for most travelers – be they internal acolytes or international visitors – to discern the realities that were so carefully disguised from them. Besides, they wanted to think that here in China the impossible was perhaps coming true in ways different from the Soviet Union and the countries in its thrall. Most Chinese would concur in presenting that false view of reality – whether they believed it or not. No dissent was brooked. We now know that a few courageous individuals like the student Yu Luoke 遇洛克 (executed in 1970) and the economist Gu Zhun 顾准 (d.1974) secretly recorded their insights into the system of hyperbole and lies, but most people, even China’s best and brightest, had learnt the harsh lessons of the punitive ideological campaigns that began in the 1950s: they burned their letters and diaries and learned to parrot the Party line (a powerful account of the constant pressure under which thinking people were placed can be found in the extraordinary collection of the journalist Xu Zhucheng’s personnel file records, published in late 2012: 《徐铸成自述：运动档案汇编》, 北京：三联书店).

For one young man named Zhao Hang 赵珩, the discovery of China moved along an entirely different path. It was a rare individual who managed to make use of the public journeys of the Red Guards for entirely private purposes. Zhao had grown up in a secure Party compound in Beijing where his learned father oversaw a vast historiographical project at Mao’s behest (his great-uncle was Zhao Erzhuan 赵尔撰, the head of the Qing Dynastic History Office during the Republic, which was in charge of compiling the Draft History of the Qing Dynasty 清史稿). Home educated, Zhao Hang studied maths and science and under his father’s guidance he steeped himself in the Confucian classics, traditional poetry, prose and fiction. Assuming the costume of a Red Guard he took advantage of the free train travel and accommodation to visit a China he knew intimately from classical poetry and prose, a China of the mind and the heart. The great translator and Sinologist Arthur Waley is noted for not wishing to sully his appreciation for cultural China by visiting the modern country. The very year Waley died, young Zhao Hang began his travels. He was able to see beyond the seemingly immutable ‘Red China’ (quanguo yipian hong 全国一片红) of the Mao years to travel in a world of letters and ideas, literary allusions and poetic imagery. It was a reality that both pre-dated and has outlasted the passions of political fervor.

As Zhao recalls:

I simply wanted to live that dream of the ancients; having ‘read 10,000 books’ I wanted to ‘travel 10,000 li’. I never read any big-character posters – best not to pollute your eyes with that sort of language. I stayed in the hotel on the peak of Mount Tai [in Shandong] for three days. It rained for two days non-stop. When I woke on the afternoon of the third day, the sun was shining through the window and the whole mountain was bathed in shimmering green light. I felt the truth of [the Tang Dynasty poet] Du Fu’s line about ‘at a single glance … all the other mountains grow tiny beneath me’ and I realised that when [the Tang-dynasty artist] Li Sixun created ‘gold-and-green landscapes’ he was not exaggerating at all.

After that I went to Suzhou eager to take a boat up the Grand Canal to Hangzhou so that I could experience for myself that famous poetic line [by Zhang Ji of the mid-eighth century] ‘And I hear, from beyond Suzhou, from the temple on Cold Mountain,/ Ringing for me, here in my boat, the midnight bell.’ But I ended up going in the opposite direction – from Hangzhou to Suzhou.

Zhao did not entirely escape the Cultural Revolution. In 1969, he was sent off with other urban youth whose Red Guard days were over to be ‘re-educated by the poor and lower middle peasants’. Like the awakening of those who traveled the path of the revolution only to discover how little socialist China had delivered to the peasantry, so the movement to send young people ‘up the mountains and into the countryside’ confronted countless idealistic pro-Party students with a second opportunity to become acquainted with the grim realities of rural China.

Zhao too was rusticated but after a year he snuck back to Beijing:

[I] lived ‘a life of leisure’ at home. I didn’t worry about not having a residency permit. I spent my time punctuating the History of the Han Dynasty. I had the cheapest Zhujian Studio edition and I punctuated and annotated it from cover to cover. Then I started working on the Records of the Historian [by the Han-dynasty writer Sima Qian], but didn’t manage to finish it. In the three years I remained unemployed at home, I also copied out Confucius’ Analects in formal small-script calligraphy on a long scroll, which I eventually had mounted. I still have it. I also reread all of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and stories with my wife – ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Flea and the Professor’, ‘The Silver Shilling’… . On Chinese New Years Eve in 1973 my family all got together, ‘trimmed the wicks of our lamp, ground some ink and made a painting together’. I painted [the vanquisher of ghosts and demons] Zhong Kui, my mother added the background scenery and my dad composed a poem and wrote it in calligraphy on the painting. It was to repel evil spirits big and small. We really were out of step with the times.[1]

The New Face of Yan’an 延安新貌. Source: Renmin huabao, no.10, 1970.

My First Trip to China contains stories from three categories of visitors: fellow travelers, people of Chinese descent, and business people. The editor also divides the essays according to the period the authors first encountered the People’s Republic: during the Mao era (which he puts in the category ‘bamboo curtain’), the years after US president Nixon’s 1972 trip, and the opening up under Deng Xiaoping. Foreigners were readily accused of ‘not understanding China’. It is a charge, a declamation that is still leveled at visitors and commentators, thinkers and activists, Chinese or foreign, who disagree with the prevailing political line. To be ignorant of ‘China’s unique national conditions’ 国情 or the abiding value of ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ is, according to the party-state and its propagandists, to be denied the right to an opinion. In the stentorian tones of commentaries in People’s Daily, editorials in Global Times, and essays published by Xinhua, the rest of the world is constantly admonished how to understand ‘accurately, correctly and objectively’ Chinese realities. Fortunately, the Internet and the Weibo-sphere of recent years have made the furtive samizdat writings of the past a common right for Chinese citizens.

The great twentieth-century Chinese writer, Lu Xun 鲁迅, remains perhaps the most insightful and effective critic of his country’s politics and culture; his work still sets the tone for those who question authority, decry the vestiges of authoritarian Confucianism, and despair that submission to power and narrow material goals define the country. He once remarked that China was like a banquet, one that attracted foreigners to gorge themselves. He was also scathing of the pseudo-leftists he encountered in the 1920s and 1930s. Fortunately, most of those who recall their first trip to China in the pages of Liu’s collection were wary of the lavish banquets they were fed, as well as of the steady diet of ersatz information provided by their hosts.

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Notes

[1] Zhao Hang, ‘1949-2009: Sixty Years Out of Range’, an oral history interview by Sang Ye, translated by Geremie R. Barmé, China Heritage Quarterly, Issue 19, September 2009.

Shen’s intellectual career is reflective of the tumult and opportunity that characterised the early reform years under Deng Xiaoping. Shen achieved professorial stature without tertiary qualifications as his youthful attempts at further education were stymied. In 1976, he successfully expunged a fabricated murder rap inserted into his personal file, only to be labelled a counter-revolutionary. This made him ineligible for the university entrance examinations that were reinstated in 1977. Nonetheless, he was eventually accepted for graduate studies at CASS, owing, as he later recalled, to the good offices of  Deng Liqun, then a Vice-President of CASS and China’s propaganda chief in the early 1980s. In 1983, however, Shen was arrested on the charge of leaking state secrets and received a two-year jail sentence. Released early in May 1984, he found himself a pariah and unable to return to his studies. In the spring of 1985, he went to Shenzhen to pursue an export business opportunity and was soon enjoying a comfortable living. The resumption of his academic career began with his return to Beijing in 1988 to help a publisher friend edit manuscripts. He realised that he could follow an independent intellectual career provided he had the funds to do so. Shen returned to the south to start a gold trading business in Guangzhou and soon made a fortune. In 1993, he founded his own research institute in Beijing, laboriously named the Centre for Oriental Historical Research and Association of Chinese Historical Studies 中国史学会东方历史研究中心 (which operates today as the Association for Oriental Historical Studies 东方历史学会). Shen and his wife Li Danhui 李丹慧, who is also a noted Cold War historian, run this private research institute which has hosted numerous conferences, seminars and other forms of scholarly activity. The institute has also sponsored the publication of dozens of books and articles on China during the Cold War years. Shen is currently Director of the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He holds adjunct professorial positions at CASS, Peking University, Renmin University, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has a five-year appointment as a public policy scholar (2009-2014) at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or The Wilson Centre).  Below we present some highlights of Shen’s scholarship:

In Mao, Stalin and the Korean War 毛泽东、斯大林与韩战 (1998), Shen provided a rich empirical study of the relations between China and the Soviet Union in the period preceding China’s intervention in the war. This was a follow-up to his 1995 book, Secrets of the Korean War 朝鲜战争揭密. Shen’s scholarship in the mid- to late 1990s was strikingly at odds with that of Party historians and he was widely praised among his peers for offering an evidence-based and critical perspective on how Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated in the late 1950s. Using archival materials, he traced the decision-making process leading to China’s intervention in the Korean War. He also drew extensively on published memoirs and monographs as well as on diplomatic documents that he had gathered from both Russia and the US.

Shen’s Realpolitik analysis was to have a profound impact on subsequent mainland scholarship about the Korean War. Up until then, official accounts had presented two main reasons for China’s intervention in the war: preemptive self-defense to ensure that the war did not spill across the border; and, support for a neighbourly ally in defense of communist internationalism. In contrast, Shen advanced the view that China, as a fledgling member of the Communist bloc, needed to prove itself to the Soviet Union in order to secure protection and assistance for its planned military campaign to ‘liberate’ Taiwan. He also argued that Stalin had endorsed Kim Il Sung’s invasion of South Korea partly because of the Sino-Soviet Treaty negotiations in 1950. The result of these negotiations was that the Soviet Union would have to vacate its military base at Lushun (Port Arthur) in 1955, leaving North Korea as its only option for an ice-free Pacific port. According to Shen, China’s involvement in the Korean War reflected its inability to negotiate with the Soviet Union as an equal. By focusing on the different interests involved in the triangular relationship between China, Korea and the Soviet Union, Shen substantially undermined the official account of China’s decision to enter the Korean War. Highlighting the hollowness of the Chinese government’s claims of a ‘teeth and lips’ relationship with North Korea, Shen also argued that North Korea’s subsequent policy of radical isolationism was a direct consequence of China’s involvement in the war. (He presents a summary of these points in a lecture on Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, 朝鲜对抗心态从何而来, 凤凰网讲座, 25 February 2013).

Shen was widely acknowledged as China’s foremost Cold War historian by the late 1990s. In 2011, Stanford University Press published a collection of translated essays by Shen and Li Danhui under the title After Leaning to One Side. The essays examine China’s relationships with its allies during and after the Korean War and argue that the war shaped Chinese official policy, thereafter reinforcing the consensus of the Party leadership that ‘the only way for China to achieve an independent position among the world’s powers was to struggle continuously.’ The anthology has enabled the scholarship of this husband-and-wife team to reach a wider international readership.

Online biographies of Shen frequently include the line, ‘Personnel files broke his rice bowl in the first half of his life but became his soul food in his later years.’ Shen’s business talents, his personal wealth and his willingness to spend enormous sums of money in furthering Chinese scholarship have earned him many fans in China. He has spoken freely about how he exploited loopholes in China’s transitional economic system in the 1980s to gain a reputation as China’s biggest gold trafficker. He reminisced in a 2008 interview about how, as a frequent flyer in the 1980s, he brazenly carried bags of gold bars between north and south, explaining that while gold was a heavily regulated commodity in China at the time, it was easily obtained through ‘connections’ (see this Southern People Weekly interview).

The Chinese media make frequent reference to Shen’s ‘legendary’ purchase of declassified Soviet archives in the 1990s. He has spoken of how he successfully bypassed a Russian bureaucracy that levied high fees and tough restrictions on foreign access to archival materials by recruiting a team of Russian scholars to photocopy, collate and ship several suitcases worth of documents to his home in Daxin, Beijing.

In 2013, Shen attracted media notice again. First, there was much publicity in January surrounding the eight book-length works he published in 2012, Shen Zhihua’s Five Books on the Cold War 沈志华冷战五书, a five-volume anthology of his writings, A Forced Choice: The Cold War and the Fate of the Sino-Soviet Alliance 无奈的选择：冷战与中苏同盟的命运, a two-volume anthology, and At the Crossroads: China from 1956 to 1957 处在十字路口的选择：1956-1957年的中国.  Then in an interview in March with the Chinese journal Time-Weekly 时代周报, Shen reflected on the situation of historical scholarship in China, noting that mainland scholars were at a distinct disadvantage by comparison with their foreign counterparts. He referred to Ezra Vogel’s magisterial 928-page work, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard University Press, 2011), praising it as scholarship that Chinese people simply could not achieve for the time being. He added, ‘Actually, if Chinese people could really research this topic, they would surely reach depths that he couldn’t.’  The remark, and Shen’s interview, was soon widely relayed on the Chinese Internet.

Additional links

• Profile in Southern Metropolis Daily 南方都市报, 沈志华：想写的太多，差的是时间, 5 May 2013.
• Kramer, Mark, ‘Review of Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, “The Whirlwind of China: Zhou Enlai’s Shuttle Diplomacy in 1957 and Its Effects” ‘, H-Diplo, 4 November 2011. Online in PDF version.
• Shen Zhihua, ‘Sino-Soviet Relations and the Origins of the Korean War: Stalin’s Strategic Goals in the Far East’, Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring 2000, pp. 44–68. Online in PDF version.

It is a relationship that touches on virtually every aspect of our national life. A mature and beneficial engagement of such breadth and depth requires the leadership and support of government at all levels, as well as public stewardship, media understanding, educational enhancement, and the strategic involvement of the business community.

Australia-China exchanges are also profoundly influenced by regional and bilateral relationships. Australia and China trade in goods as well as culture, politics and people, ideas and education, community and personalities.

Australia-China Agenda: 2013 brings to the attention of the public and the media, politicians and specialists some reflections and policy ideas authored by specialists with a professional interest and involvement in the relationship.

The first agenda paper, downloadable here in PDF format, is written by Carrillo Gantner. Carrillo trained as an actor and director in the USA. He founded the Playbox Theatre Company in 1976 and served as Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy in Beijing for several years from 1985. He was Chairman of the Asialink Centre at the University of Melbourne for fourteen years, President of the Victorian Arts Centre Trust for nine years, and he currently serves as President of the Melbourne Festival. Carrillo is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Australian Centre on China in the World. An earlier version of this text was written for a CIW workshop on Australia-China cultural contacts in the 1970s and 1980s held in Canberra in February this year.—Geremie R. Barmé Founding Director, CIW

The few remarks which follow may serve to explain, to those who are not familiar with the curious phenomenon of the Chinese restaurant in America, some of the characteristics of this institution. A few facts about their management and the conditions of labour in them may also be of sociological interest.[1]

The rapid increase in the number of Chinese restaurants, or ‘chop suey’ parlours, is a rather striking fact in the life of America. Fifteen years or so ago, there were just a few of these eating houses, confined to the China-towns of the large cities. About ten years back, their number began to increase, until now they may be found everywhere, even in small places, and they have supplanted the Chinese laundryman in typifying for America where China is. It is probable that they have augmented the vogue for Chinese handicrafts, which is so large a factor in current American taste.

A poster for the Port Arthur restaurant in New York, circa 1920s. Source: coolculinaria.com

The reasons for their popularity are simple: they are clean, cheap, they offer a combination of the exotic and artistic, and they are honestly and efficiently managed. During a recent kitchen inspection, carried out by the New York city police, the Chinese restaurants were given first rank, and the dining rooms are invariably spotless. As the tables are always bare, there is no soiled linen, and the debris of previous diners is conspicuously lacking, thus giving these restaurants an air far superior to the cheap dining places in occidental style. Besides this, many of the restaurants were artistically decorated with Chinese lanterns and scrolls, and the more pretentious have inlaid tables and chairs. This pleasing and exotic picture, together with the unfamiliar in the items on the bill of fare, form a stimulus to appetite and an aid to digestion which have a very definit result in trade.

Just before and during the war, when prices in America began to catapult, the vogue of the Chinese restaurants increased, because prices in them did not rise to such heights as elsewhere. The first cause of the comparatively moderate prices was that the Chinese bought from their fellow-countrymen, who were content with a smaller margin of profit, and among whom large jobbing and supply houses were organized, just to take care of this new trade. A second and very significant factor is that these restaurants are invariably on the second floor. The avoiding of the high prices of ground floor locations was a very clever business coup; some of the most successful of the Chinese houses are exactly above foreign restaurants, some above the branches of a big chain, others above high priced cafés in favoured locations. To be sure, even there, the rents were vey high, and, in order to offset high overhead, the service had to be cheap and the food attractive to bring in a mass trade. It is a distinct tribute to the quality the Chinese restaurants, that the restaurateurs were able to meet competition as they did.

Perhaps the most interesting fact in the low cost in these restaurants is the actual cuisine. At a time when food was high, the Chinese gave a big meal for the price. An examination of the food contents of these meals, that is, of the big sellers like ‘chicken chop suey’ or ‘chow mien’, shows that though the words beef and egg and chicken appeared on the menu, the contents of the dishes were largely vegetable: celery, onions, and some more distinctive Chinese greens, grown on the truck farms of Long Island by Chinese gardeners, made up the New York menus. The meat, in true Chinese fashion, was largely condimental in amount and value. An extra bowl of rice could be got for very little, sometimes free, and there was unlimited tea. The clerk and shop girl trade was quickly attracted to these places for their noon-day meal, and the vogue spred rapidly. The fact is, that this food met and satisfied certain requirements much better than the average éclair, coffee, and ‘sinker’ type of lunch. Bulk and easy digestibility were their own peristaltic recommendation, and so the food itself unconsciously created its own vogue.

The menu for the Port Arthur restaurant in New York, circa 1920s. Source: coolculinaria.com

The Chinese restaurant opens for business at 11 a.m. and closes at 2 a.m., or even later. There is a heavy noon trade, a somewhat lighter supper business, and then a very heavy after-theatre trade, especially in the more pretentious resorts. The noon trade is in the cheaper plats du jour, the supper trade about the same, the evening and night trade in the more expensive dishes. Many of the restaurants do not serve the cheaper dishes after the noon trade is over, or after they have accommodated the cheap supper trade. The manners in all these restaurants have from the first been free: smoking by women was permitted early, there was a pleasant informality about the places which made a strong appeal, and in all there were opportunities ‘pour manger des ecrivisses en cabinet particulier’, as the chanson puts it. This does not imply that the Chinese restaurants are immoral, or even tough; here and there, there may be a house of assignation among them and the Chinese hotelier, in New York certainly, looks with a lenient eye upon the moral vagaries of his patrons. With the dancing craze, orchestras were introduced, floor space cleared, and a type of cabaret was developed. The trade which arose round this form of entertainment was typical of the night life of the big city: it ate the more recherché dishes, spent freely and had no interest in the restaurant as an eating house. It probably always paid well because the Volstead Act had no influence on the character of the Chinese restaurants; these rarely had licences and so were not affected by the advent of prohibition, which impelled most eating house to raise their prices to offset the loss of the liquor trade. This is rather an important point. In many restaurants of the ordinary type, the advent of prohibition caused a complete change of customers, and many were compelled to rebuild their whole trade. The Chinese restaurants were faced with no such problem. It is true, however, that, with changed social conditions during the war, many of the Chinese places became more or less foreignized. It was almost impossible, for instance, to get chopsticks to eat with, bread was served with the Chinese food, and in many other points, a rapprochement of type could be observed: the gradual Americanizing of something Chinese and the acceptance by the mass of Americans of this new form of entertainment as something obvious, usual. With this there came the complete commercializing of the restaurants and their loss of charm for those acquainted with the actual Orient.

If looked at from the inside, the following points may be noted in regard to these places: all employees are hired from a few big companies in the large cities where there is a surplus of Chinese labour, as, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston for the East, Chicago, for the Middle West, and San Fransisco for the Coast. The rates of wages are practically uniform, owing to the easy mobility of Chinese labour, as well as the easy mobility of Chinese capital in the States. This tends to keep prices very uniform in all the restaurants and has led people to suppose that they are all run by one or two large monopolistic concerns. But I have been told on good authority that this is not true. Wage scales run about as follows. The figures are naturally in U.S. gold dollars. The first column represents New York, the second, Pittsburg.

Restaurant manager   ..      ..$170    180 per mensem

Cashiers      ..      ..       ..       .. 120     130

Head waiter        ..       ..       .. 130     150

Asst. head waiter         ..      .. 100     110

Ordinary waiters          ..      ..  40       50

Coat-room girl    ..       ..       ..   2         2 per diem

Cooks          ..       ..       ..       .. 150   170 per mensem

Checkers      ..      ..       ..       .. 130   160

Bus boys     ..       ..       ..       ..  50      60

Dish-washers     ..       ..       ..  50      60

Extra waiters are paid $3 to $5 a day; the American or other occidental musicians $40 a week. The number of waiters runs from one to 20, of cooks from 6 to 10 per restaurant. There are 3 to 4 bus boys, 4 to 6 dish-washers, 4 to 6 musicians. The overhead is thus very heavy, especially as all these people get their meals free, except, save the mark! for ice cream and cake. The men may live in the place, in so far as there is room. A restaurant running with this force has about 100 tables and a capital of about $100,000 U.S. Such a place must take in a minimum of $500 daily. In San Francisco, the wage scale is somewhat lower.

Restaurant employees move rather freely from restaurant to restaurant and from state to state, not only to get better wages, but also for the sake of seeing the country. Very few (according to my information) stay more than six months at a place, and I myself have several times met the same man in different cities.

Within the restaurant there are two groups: one is off from 2 to 5 p.m., the other from 8 to 10 p.m. they have alternate Sundays free. ‘Nearly all the Chinese restaurants throughout the United States are operated by separate shareholders who may have shares in several companies. Although they adopt the same name, such as, New China, the Oriental, etc., in different cities, they have neither financial nor any other connection. Very few of them have branches in the same city. Therefore the competition is most keen, and the price level is very little above the cost. Recently, they have lost money on account of the business depression and the cut-throat competition.’[2]

As the Chinese restaurant has become a permanent part of the social structure of city life in the United States, the foregoing remarks may serve to clarify some details about them for those to whom such information is valuable.

Source: The China Journal of Science & Arts, vol. III May, 1925 No.5, pp. 286-289.

See also the China Rhyming website: The Port Arthur Restaurant, Mott Street, New York City and London’s Chinese Restaurant Scene in the 1930s

___________

During the spring and summer months Tashi is a hard man to find. He and his family travel far into the mountains of western Sichuan in search of pasture for their yaks. They follow a centuries-old route carved through the mountains by their ancestors.

Over the winter months they take shelter at a campsite 200 kilometres to the west of Garze, which is where I found them during a recent trip to Kham, the eastern part of the Tibet Plateau.

Mountain road in south-west China. Photography: Lois Conner

Their campsite was 4000 metres above sea level. When I arrived, the winter sun was already low in the sky and the temperature was plummeting. Tashi’s wife Lhamu ushered me into their cinderblock hut past two ferocious mastiffs and toward a carpeted stump of wood located next to the hearth. Her husband, she told me in the nomad dialect of Tibetan, would be home soon. I tried speaking in Chinese, but neither she nor her daughter seemed to understand. I sensed that their son, a thirteen-year old monk, could follow what I was saying, but he was too shy to engage in conversation. He sat in front of an old television set on the other side of the hut, stealing occasional glimpses of me.

A few minutes later Tashi entered with a big smile and a wave. He squatted next to me, shrinking into a bulky woollen coat from which he began to extract various odds and ends. Tashi pulled out some cash, a hand-woven slipper, a knife and a small picture frame. As he placed these items on the floor, he said with a grin: ’This is what people give me for telling their fortunes.’

Tashi is not just a pastoralist, he is also a fortuneteller whose services are highly sought after by other drokpa (Tibetan nomads) in the area. He advises people on auspicious dates for leading yaks to summer pasture and predicts whether somebody would survive a serious illness. His secret, he told me, was a string of prayer beads that had been blessed by an important lama. ‘These beads are very accurate’, Tashi told me in broken Chinese. ‘Nowadays everybody wants me to tell their fortune … sometimes I have to make two or three house calls in a day … it’s very tiring.’

Tashi took off his coat and laid it on the floor as a rug. As we spoke his daughter brought a truck battery in and connected it to a transformer that was wired to a single light bulb and the television set. The battery had been charged during the day by a solar panel – a welcome gift from the county government. ‘The government gives us more things these days, even some money to build this house,’ he told me in broken, but intelligible Sichuanese.

Tashi explained that he spoke better Chinese than most nomads because he had been to prison. I learned that he was given a three-year sentence for aggravated assault. He  had stabbed a man but claimed to have good cause. The man he stabbed was a fellow drokpa who lived in the next valley. ‘We used to be friends with his family,’ he said. One day the man accused Tashi of stealing one of his yaks — an accusation he vehemently denied. Unconvinced, the man went to the township police who detained Tashi and beat him up while attempting to extract a confession. Furious at this injustice, Tashi later tracked down his accuser and settled his grievance in the traditional way of Khampa (Eastern Tibetan) men, by cutting him with a blade. They eventually caught the thief who stole the yak, but Tashi still went to jail.

‘Is that the only time you’ve been in trouble with the law?’, I asked.

‘No, the police beat me up another time. It was about seven or eight years ago, before I went to jail. A friend gave me a really nice picture of the Dalai Lama. I took it into town to get it framed. Outside the shop, a guy asked if he could see it. I showed him. Then other people crowded around wanting to see it. This caused a commotion. A policeman came and took me to the station. They asked me where I got it. I told them I bought it from a Chinese traveling salesman – you know the guys who come from Hubei or wherever selling shoes and things. I said this so they wouldn’t be able to trace it.’

‘Anyway, the motherfuckers thought I was lying so they beat me up.’

‘What about the picture?’

‘They took it, of course. But I got another one.’

Tashi seemed to bear no grudge against the police or the authorities. He told me his life was good. When I asked him what was good about it he stood up and beckoned me to follow him outside. We exited the hut into the fading light, walking a narrow path between the two-ton yak hulks that were tethered to stakes in neat rows in front of the hut. ‘Don’t step on the yaks,’ he warned, ‘they don’t like it.’

Tiger Leap Gorge, Jingsha River, Yunnan 云南金沙江虎跳峡. Photograph: Lois Conner

Tashi led me down a path that stopped in front of a dilapidated timber shack with no floor and no windows. ‘My family lived here twenty years ago,’ he said. Then pointing along the path to a more solidly built yet basic rammed-earth hut, he said ‘we lived there ten years ago.’ Then he gestured at me to follow him to a building across the courtyard from the brick house where his wife Lhamu was preparing dinner.

Tashi opened the heavy timber door into what appeared to be a storeroom. Slabs of dried yak meat hung from the rafters. Two trail bikes were parked underneath. I followed Tashi across the dark room and through an internal door. Crossing the heavy wood-block threshold we entered into a large Tibetan Buddhist chapel that was elaborately decorated with wooden carvings, thangkas and photos of revered lamas, including a large poster of the Dalai Lama. There were thick-pile carpets for comfortable seating. Dozens of bottles of soft drinks as well as cakes and lollies covered a five metre-long row of tables. ‘Look,’ he said to me, ‘this is what we have now. Tonight you will sleep here.’

Tashi’s family lived a very simple life by the standards of China’s growing middle classes and even those of less well-off Chinese farmers.  By traditional Tibetan nomad standards, however, they were rich. Tashi had built his own prayer room – an item of religious significance and a symbol of wealth and status. His ancestors could not have dreamed of such luxury. He could also afford to send his only son to the monastery to become a monk. This was considered highly prestigious among rural and nomadic Tibetans. It was a commitment that demanded significant resources. Not only did Tashi have to forgo his son’s labor in the household economy, he also had to pay his son’s living costs at the monastery. Unlike in previous times, when the monastery was funded by a fixed share of the peasants’ harvest, monks now have to pay their own way. Eventually, when the young monks are suitably educated and qualified, they can earn an independent income by charging fees for officiating at religious services such as funerals.

Zhongdian (Shangrila), Yunnan province. Photograph: Lois Conner

The secret to Tashi’s and many other nomad families’ new-found wealth is a strange creature known as the ‘caterpillar fungus’. Highly prized in China and Tibet for its medicinal qualities (it is used in the treatment of ailments from low libido to cancer), the caterpillar fungus can be found in the plateau’s grasslands at an altitude of 3000 to 5000 metres. When the grasses sprout, the larvae of the ghost moth awake from a subterranean sleep. As the larvae emerge, many fall victim to a colonizing fungus. The fungus devours the larva as it germinates, leaving behind a fruity mummified body. Tibetans call it yartsa gunbu, which means ‘summer grass winter bug’. In Chinese it is popularly known as dong chong xia cao 冬虫夏草, or chongcao虫草 ‘plant insect’ for short.

Yartsa gunbu has brought hitherto unattainable wealth to Tibetan nomads like Tashi who can capitalise on their expert knowledge of the grasslands to know when and where to look for the mummified bugs. ‘My daughter has the best eye for them,’ he tells me. ‘Each year she can make more than 20,000 yuan.’ It’s equivalent to the annual salary of a government-employed teacher or a nurse. Tashi’s wife also harvests yartsa gunbu, bringing in a further 20,000 yuan.

As we talked, Tashi proudly showed me various features of his prayer room. He has plans for a future extension. ‘Following next year’s [yartsa gunbu] harvest, I am going to add an atrium to the eastern end,’ he said. ‘I’m going to make a wall of glass to capture the morning sun.’ We talked about the angle of the sun during the winter and the best place to erect a glass wall.

Tashi led me back to the hut, treading deftly between the sleeping yaks. Inside the hut a broth of noodles, yak meat and dried chilies was simmering on the stove. Harnessing power from the sun-charged truck battery, Tashi’s son and daughter were watching a Chinese kungfu period drama on TV.

Tashi asked me if I had any medicine. ‘Medicine for what?’, I asked. ‘Medicine for my wife’s leg – it really hurts her.’ Lhamu nodded in agreement from the working end of the stove. It occurred to me that the family’s new-found wealth did not afford them access to decent healthcare. Hospitals in many of China’s remote rural areas are scary places that demand high fees in return for poor service. It is little wonder that many rural Tibetans seek advice from fortunetellers and shamans before considering treatment at a public hospital.

From the way Tashi described his wife’s pain, it sounded like she might be suffering from rheumatoid arthritis. Much as I wanted to help, I didn’t want to give Tashi the impression that I knew something about medicine. I made a vague promise to bring medicine on my next visit, although I confessed I did not know when that might be. ‘Come back in the summer,’ he said, ‘the summers here are a lot of fun.’

Lhamu began serving the noodles, which tasted good even though my non-Tibetan teeth and jaws were insufficiently evolved to masticate the chunks of rehydrated yak meat. Helpfully, Tashi poured me some barley wine from a jerry can.

My visit to Tashi’s house coincided with the fifth anniversary of the 2008 Tibetan unrest, the most widespread and violent unrest in decades. The region where Tashi and his family live had experienced particularly high levels of unrest, including riots which led to the burning of government buildings and several deaths. Earlier that day I had passed through the nearby county town where armed police stood at every corner. An armed personnel carrier sat in a central parking lot.

‘I saw a lot of police in the county town today,’ I told Tashi, ‘I guess it’s because of the anniversary of 3.14 [the standard reference to the 2008 demonstrations, which erupted on 14 March].’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Why do you think people joined the protests?’

‘Because people are sad’, he said. ’We are sad because our lama is not among us. It’s been a long time since he left. Most people, including me, have never seen him. We want the Dalai Lama to come back.’

‘Is that why some people are burning themselves?’

‘I don’t know. A nun from over that mountain burned herself. She was very brave.’

Lhamu ladled more noodles into her husband’s bowl as he continued talking. Some of the hot broth splashed on his hand, but he didn’t flinch or bother wiping it off.

‘You know, life is good here. I can do what I want. We take our yaks into the mountains and come and go as we please. We collect yartsa gunbu and sell them for a good price. My son is in the monastery learning to become a monk. I have a good house for the winter and a chapel. The only thing we miss is the Dalai Lama. If he came back life would be excellent.’

Tashi grinned as he said ‘excellent’. I asked him, ‘Do many other people you know feel the same way?’

‘Yes – all of them.’

We continued talking into the evening. When it was time to retire, I was taken, as promised, to sleep in the chapel. The family was accustomed to sleeping on mats near the kitchen stove where it was warmer. The temperature was already below freezing. Inside the chapel I crawled into my sleeping bag and shone a flashlight on the walls around me. A gold-framed Dalai Lama looked down benevolently. I studied the picture and marveled at how even a photograph of the holy man could bring Tibetans so much joy.

‘Mani stones’ in Qinghai province (Amdo). Photograph: Lois Conner

_________

As a book-loving young child, I needed no long-term plans. I had a short-term plan. I would win a scholarship and get far from where I didn’t want to be.

I loved the clarity of examination scholarships. You sat a test and if you didn’t get the marks, you didn’t get in. If I needed sixty-five on math – well, sixty-five it must be. So I diligently wrote to the scholarships testing board asking for practice exams, and sweltered through another Whyalla summer preparing. I was a very strange child.

Yet, as it turned out decades later, perhaps I wasn’t that strange – I was just in the wrong place. Elite Chinese university students seemed to understand my mindset as an eleven-year-old perfectly. Of course, they would say, mei banfa 没办法(there’s no other option). And, having shrugged their shoulders and delivered this most resigned and yet resilient of Chinese phrases, conversation would move on.

Stephen Schwarzman
(Source: Askmen.com)

I suspect US multi-billionaire Steve Schwarzman might well have a similar love of clarity. He recently said that he was ‘frustrated’ after being turned down for a number of scholarships after he finished college.

Instead, Mr Schwarzman became wealthy beyond measure. He decided this week to use his personal wealth and connections to create his own scholarship – in his description, a new US$300 million Rhodes scholarship alternative to send graduates to China.

Businessman and colonist John Cecil John Rhodes (Source: Wikimedia)

Schwarzman scholars will have all their fees paid to attend Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University for a year. They’ll undertake one of four newly designed Masters degrees, taught in English. They’ll get language training, cultural immersion and a number of trips throughout China under the guidance of their professors. And they’ll all live together in the rather posh Schwarzman College (currently under construction), complete with sunk pool, bar and custom library.

On the face of it, this is a bloody brilliant idea. What could possibly be wrong with more people – and handpicked rainmakers of the future no less – knowing more about China without a cent of public money being spent? Yet the idea is not without its critics.

Part of this may be due to differing views on what Schwarzman scholars should be. A scholar implies someone of deep learning and knowledge; a scholarship then, presumably, is an award in recognition of that learning and knowledge. Yet scholarships such as the Rhodes – which, judging by Australian evidence, appears to be the template for most scholarships these days – are aimed more at discovering leaders than training academics and scholars.

But picking future ‘leaders’ is a subjective, and prospective, game. So success in these modern-day scholarships is usually seen as an arbitrary matter, often dependent more on luck than any form of objective achievement. Candidates are advised to concentrate more on justifying their decisions than reciting their achievements. Why one did something is as important as the fact that something was done at all. One’s values are examined as much as one’s achievements.

Elements of this attitude can be seen in Rhodes’ Will in which he bequeathed the scholarships. Rhodes explicitly didn’t want mere bookworms, ‘smug’ or ‘unctuous’ types (nor women, for that matter, who were banned from the scholarship until the 1970s, and who are still statistically under-represented today). Instead, he wanted men of literary and scholarly attainment, fond of and successful at ‘manly outdoor sports’ who possessed the (many) values that Rhodes himself thought most worthwhile.

Rhodes saw the great idea of his scholarship being the promotion of the ‘importance of qualities entirely ignored in the ordinary competitive examinations’. The other part that was somewhat unique was his insistence that Rhodes scholars show ‘the demonstration of moral force of character and of instincts to lead … to guide him to esteem the performance of public duty as his highest aim’.

Rhodes’ goal for what his scholars would do at Oxford was far more open. He wanted them to spend some time in a residential college, to absorb some English values and to gain an attachment to the country. This was once pithily described to a scholar thus: ‘to bring some people to England, leave them alone for a couple of years and hope they don’t hate the place too much at the end’.

Rhodes’ long-term goal for his scholars was ambitious. He wanted a ‘union of English-speaking people’, thinking that this would encourage world peace. He saw his scholars as creating and even enforcing this peace – fighting, as the saying goes, the world’s fight.

This potted history may provide us with some hints as to the direction of the Schwarzman scheme. Schwarzman scholars are not supposed to be China specialists, just as Rhodes’ ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were not meant to be England specialists. Neither do they appear to need to be specialists in a field. Nonetheless they are supposed to know what they want to do in the future so that they can be paired with a Chinese mentor.

The Rhodes Colussus – a cartoon illustrating the businessman and colonist Cecil John Rhodes as a giant standing over the continent – Rhodes was known for his ambitions of controlling Africa ‘from Cape to Cairo’.
Cartoon by Edward Linley Sambourn, published in Punch magazine in 1892

Mainly, Schwarzman, like Rhodes, wants to send people he thinks will be future leaders to China for a little while, expose them to China, in the hope that one day some of the things they pick up will be useful. The experience is intended either to make them more predisposed toward the place or at least better able to interpret developments in China.

Whether of course this will work remains to be seen. Many a foreign student has fled Beijing swearing never to return. Schwarzman’s goal, indeed, is to isolate his scholars from this, noting that ‘Beijing can be a harsh place in terms of weather, traffic, all kinds of friction’.

Yet developing sentiments against a place because of living there was (and to this day remains) a situation not unknown to students at Oxford. Rhodes himself noted: ‘A lot of young Colonials go to Oxford and Cambridge, and come back with a certain anti-English feeling, imagining themselves to have been slighted because they were Colonials. That, of course, is all nonsense. I was a Colonial, and I knew everybody I wanted to know, and everybody who wanted to knew me’.

This idea of ‘being known’ is the other part of Schwarzman’s plan that appears unspoken but clear – Schwarzman wants future winners as much as leaders: people who will be ‘known.’ As he puts it, his thinking behind the scholarship was ‘what does it take to really attract the best kids you could ever get. You know, the top of the top’. The big idea of Schwarzman’s scholarship is not that scholars have a certain set of values – it’s that the ‘best of the best’ go to China rather than England.

‘New King of Wall Street’ – Schwarzman on the cover FORTUNE magazine, March 2006

China specialists may pooh-pooh the sincerity of this study in China. They may question the need for a special program in English, instead of allowing students to enrol in a normal masters degree. And they may question why the program should only be for one year.

These criticisms miss the point: Schwarzman’s goal – and he’s explicit about this – is not to create a cadre of trained China specialists. Nor, it appears, is he trying to simply stamp his scholars as ‘China experts’. Rather, this is a program to identify future talent and cast it in his own mould. Schwarzman undoubtedly wants, like Rhodes, to bring about something akin to world peace, and to bring people together in the interests of fostering brotherhood among all. The idea is that his scholars will be able to do that with China once they become President.

Curiously, I would argue that – should it succeed – Schwarzman’s program would be a wonderful thing for China scholars. Schwarzman is, in essence, creating a market for genuine China expertise and engagement. The more our high-level leaders know of China, the more likely they are to ask the sorts of questions that require us to know more about the country – and the less likely they are to fall for simple stereotypes or characterisations.

And, to be clear, I think part of the resistance to this program is due to its China focus. It’s hard to imagine similar reactions should these scholarships be to France and this in itself is yet another indication of the global shift of power.

The poignant symbolism of the best students from the West coming to China would not have escaped Chinese leaders. The idea of one’s best students going away to study in a more ‘modern’ foreign land and then coming back to lead reforms is central to recent Chinese history – quick examples include the English-educated Yan Fu 严复 and his contribution to the Hundred Day Reform Movement (1898) 戊戌变法, the French and Russian studies of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 and Zhou Enlai周恩来 among others or the Russian-educated Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇.

But why does this matter? I’d argue that much of our problem is with the moral element of what we think a scholarship involves. If we send our best and our brightest to China, what are we saying about our own society? Are the values of modern China really what we want our leaders of tomorrow to be learning? As the eminent Australian sinologist John Fitzgerald was recently quoted saying: ‘Why would I want to be associated … with a university that does not allow free and open critical inquiry in the humanities and social sciences?’

I’d argue that we want to be associated with this program not for the values of the Chinese university per se (nor the Communist Party that enforces them) but for the values of the students.

As Fitzgerald, a historian of the Chinese Republic, knows well, we’re not going to see ‘free and open critical inquiry’ into all topics in Chinese universities without a change in the Chinese political system. There will always be verboten topics for the Chinese Communist Party. But dare I say it: this is well beyond the realms of our control. The Party shows no intention of going anywhere soon and it regularly (and shamefully) ensures that there is no vocal or organised opposition to it, in order that everything can change but their leadership remains.

Sending our best and brightest to China doesn’t mean that we accede to this. We need to show that we aren’t afraid of Party crackdowns and oppression. We need to show that we can do things in China other than go to make money, that we don’t need to simply agree with the novelist Yu Hua’s 余华 view that ‘to make money in China, they (we) need to learn how to defer to our government and ingratiate themselves with our officials’.

For the record, I have absolutely no amity with nor sympathy for the Chinese Communist Party.  But – and this is the central point for me – going to China doesn’t indicate that you support the Party. China is not the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP may rule China presently but it is not China. There is much beyond this simple dichotomy: it is an entire world that I think we need to engage with – the many different groups, cultures and ideas that comprise, to my mind, the Chinese equivalent of Rhodes’ ‘union of English speaking people’.

Photo: West gate of Tsinghua University

And Tsinghua University is undoubtedly a part of this imaginary ‘union’. It is indeed the alma mater of many of the Party’s senior leaders but it is also, along with being possibly the most difficult university to gain entry to in the world, the home of many of China’s top minds. In many cases, students and faculty at Tsinghua University are, literally, one in a million intellects. I’d argue that these are precisely the people that we should be engaging with – no matter that they attend institutions controlled with values we don’t support.

This is part of the dilemma we face in Australia – not one of choosing between the US and China, like kids choosing a sports team, but rather a choice between engaging with China as it is and engaging with China as we think it should be. I don’t think we can engage with China as we want it to be. It is already an engine of economic and, increasingly, intellectual growth that we must engage with in order to assure our own economic and intellectual growth. Mei banfa.

But if we accept that we need to engage, we should engage on fields of our choosing. Universities are these fields. Many of the individuals in these universities possess the sorts of values that I think we would all be happy to see inculcated in any future leaders of tomorrow.

Maybe this is only my lonely eleven-year-old self speaking here but I found an enormous amount to admire in people in elite Chinese institutions. Most of these students and scholars are incredibly driven, disciplined, humble, hard-working, polite, respectful and filled with hope that they can improve things. Many of them are also cynical and jaded observers of Chinese politics and society. I’d say that these are exactly the types of people I’d like to see future leaders of my society exposed to.

I think there’s still much to be done with the Schwarzman scholarships. I’d like to see far more focus on how scholars can gain yet further exposure to everyday Chinese experience and not just those of elite students. An idea raised by many people I’ve spoken to is the introduction of internship or visitation programs to ensure that Schwarzman scholars would spend more time in local or rural areas working alongside Chinese people, or be involved with Chinese local government or business.

But I’m quibbling over how to make the Schwarzman program more effective. There’s no reason that activities like the ones I’ve mentioned above can’t be developed as an adjunct to or outside the Schwarzman program.

Personally, no matter its potential efficacy, I support any program that helps ‘beat back the profound state of ignorance about China’, as Orville Schell puts it. I’m not sure that Schwarzman has any explicit values he wants to inculcate in his students other than that they are successful and better able to do whatever they need to do in China, or in partnership with China. While it would be great to see Schwarzman scholars contribute to a broader goal or public good, he’s made clear that he thinks that their future success would be in and of itself enough of a public good and he’s devoted US$300 million of private money to this end. Brilliant. The only question I have is how to encourage this sort of thing to happen more often.

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As the maritime commons of Asia’s rapidly-growing, export-oriented countries, the South China Sea is traversed by some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. In recent years, it has also become a site of increased disputes over sovereign rights.

The paradox of these South China Sea disputes is that the escalation of maritime confrontations, resource conflicts and competing territorial claims has occurred among Asian countries that otherwise reflect an extraordinarily high degree of cooperation on matters of trade and commerce. Hence regional, and global, economic integration has had the unintended effect of intensifying resource competition and territorial nationalism around the South China Sea. Will these discords and tensions lead to a regional arms race? That depends on the intricate interplay of three factors: resource competition, resource nationalism and military modernisation programs.

The Top 20 Containers Ports

Resource competition is the result of deeply-rooted, long-term trends of coastal urbanisation, rising consumption, export-oriented industrialisation and the resulting competition for vital resources, especially fisheries and hydrocarbons. A recent example began on 8 April 2012 when a Filipino Navy vessel attempted to detain eight Chinese fishing boats, which had entered waters around Scarborough Shoal, an area that both China and the Philippines claim. An armed boarding party from the Philippines’ frigate BRP Gregoria del Pilar discovered that the fishing boats were in possession of a large illegal catch of coral, giant clams and live sharks. Before the fishing boats could be detained, two Chinese surveillance vessels blocked the frigate from pursuing any further action. Filipino and Chinese Foreign Ministry officials quickly moved to negotiate a diplomatic pause to the confrontation. But why did the Chinese fishermen venture so far into contested waters for illegal fishing in the first place? The simple and obvious answer is that it is profitable. The demand for fish has increased markedly in recent years, surpassing the fish catch supply in coastal waters, and encouraging fishermen to venture further abroad.

Resource nationalism is strong in East Asia where most states actively manage their economies to pursue their national agendas. Coastal states want to assert and extend their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims under the 1994 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This is further encouraged by governments seeking to enhance their legitimacy by making a show of protecting national sovereignty and defending the homeland. Displays of patriotism have been a feature of the recent major leadership transitions in North Korea, South Korea, Japan and China, among other countries. In several littoral countries, state patriotism has been further complicated by xenophobic street demonstrations.

Many countries in the region have been pursuing military modernisation programs. Most notable among them is China’s program for upgrading the PLA-Navy’s South Sea Fleet, the development of the Ya Long Naval Base on Hainan Island, and the expansion of China’s paramilitary fleets; e.g., coast guards and fisheries inspection patrols [1]. The threat of a regional arms race has been exacerbated by the seemingly intractable disputes over conflicting claims to several features in the South China Sea. For example, after the confrontation at Scarborough Shoal mentioned above, both China and the Philippines announced plans to expand their maritime patrol capabilities in the contested waters. China now no longer hesitates to send armed maritime patrol ships to prevent their fishermen from being arrested by foreign nations. The China Marine Surveillance (CMS) and the Fishery Law Enforcement Command (FLEC) can both deploy paramilitary vessels to exert Chinese jurisdiction. The CMS appears to be an independent agency that can take action without authorization from the Foreign Affairs Ministry. This approach – when states or their navies support their fishermen, even when they are fishing illegally or poaching – unfortunately blurs the distinction between traditional and non-traditional security concerns. Arming marine police boats, however, increases the risk that a similar incident might escalate into a violent conflict.

These developments have aroused the concern of commercial and naval stakeholders such as Japan and the US who want to preserve the ‘freedom of the seas’, or unrestricted access to the seas and the straits of the South China Sea and its archipelagic waterways for their mercantile and naval vessels.

Conflicting Standards for Asserting Territorial Claims

Perhaps the most controversial maritime territorial claim is China and Taiwan’s nine-dash line claim to the South China Sea. This has also been called the ‘nine-dotted line’, the ‘nine interrupted-lines’, the ‘U-shaped line’, the ‘cow’s tongue’, as well as the official Chinese name: ‘traditional maritime boundary line’ (chuantong haijiang xian 传统海疆线). The modern history of this line goes back to December 1914 when Hu Jinjie, a Chinese cartographer, published a map with a line around only the Pratas and Paracels, entitled ‘The Chinese Territorial Map Before the Qianglong-Jiaqing Period of the Qing Dynasty (AD 1736–1820)’. In 1935, the Land and Water Maps Inspection Committee of the Republic of China (ROC) published a ‘Map of Chinese Islands in the South China Sea’ with an eleven-dotted line drawn around 132 islets and reefs of the four South China Sea archipelagos. In 1947, the ROC Ministry of Interior prepared a location map for internal use, renaming the islands in the South China Sea and formally allocating their administration to the Hainan Special Region. One year later the Atlas of Administrative Areas of the Republic of China was officially published, including the first official map with the line for the South China Sea. An eleven-segment line was drawn instead of the previous continuous line. In 1949, the newly-established People’s Republic of China (PRC) published a ‘Map of China’ with the eleven-dotted line. In 1953, following Premier Zhou Enlai’s approval, the two-dotted line portion in the Gulf of Tonkin was deleted. Chinese maps published since 1953 have shown the nine-dotted line in the South China Sea [2].

Contested Waters of the South China Sea

In sum, the PRC inherited and maintained the claims first developed by the ROC, the predecessor of the current government on Taiwan. Further, the current claims of the Beijing government and the Taiwan government are essentially the same. Indeed, the Taiwan government occupies the largest of the Spratly Islands, Itu Aba (Taiping Dao).

China’s policy on settling maritime territorial disputes has gone through shifting patterns of cooperation and confrontation over the past decade. However, it became consistently more assertive in 2009 after Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines submitted their claims to the UN Commission on the Limits to the Continental Shelf. In response to these perceived intrusions on its historic claims, China submitted its counter-claim, including its nine-dash line map. This appears to be the first time China has attached this map to an official communication to the UN. The claim is manifestly ambiguous, but has led some to conclude that China is officially claiming all the waters within the U-shaped line as its territorial or historic waters, a position which is contrary to UNCLOS.

What can ASEAN do about China’s claims in the South China Sea? There are major differences among ASEAN members in terms of their history, culture, natural resource endowments, and strategic priorities and capabilities. They disagree on basic economic and security issues, including how to deal with the US and with China. Several littoral states (Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia) support the US-initiated Trans-Pacific Partnership, which excludes China. The mainland ASEAN states (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand) support the China-initiated Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which excludes the US.

With regard to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, Cambodia actively supports China’s policy against internationalising the issue; i.e., not involving the US or any international agencies in dispute settlement. The other mainland states – Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand – maintain a low-profile role but generally defer to China’s preferences.

The four states who have conflicting claims with China – The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei – are themselves internally divided. The Vietnamese and Philippine governments have both sought some outside support from UNCLOS, from the US, and from Japan to resist the continued pressure from China and Taiwan to assert their claims in the South China Sea. The Philippine government is attempting to stop China’s effective occupation of Scarborough Shoal by appealing to the UNCLOS Arbitration Tribunal for a ruling on the status of the shoal. Malaysia and Brunei avoid public criticism of China’s claims but do support finding a unified ASEAN position on the disputes. Indonesia and Singapore have no conflicting claims with China. They are both strong advocates of maritime security and freedom of navigation, a position shared by the US.

Sino-Vietnamese Tonkin Gulf Joint Resource Management Zone

Additional efforts by all interested parties will be necessary to get China and Taiwan to clarify the delineation of the nine-dash line, and bring it under the jurisdiction of dispute settlement mechanisms under UNCLOS and other courts. In the meantime, and in the absence of any widely-agreed-upon and well-tested way to determine how to govern the resources of the South China Sea, countries have occupied features and based their claims on different standards of justification. For example, China and Taiwan invoke the standard of historical usage and occupation. Malaysia and Vietnam base some of their claims on the continental shelf extension of their national territory. Indonesia, the Philippines and others appeal to the provisions of UNCLOS.

Resolving the Disputes

There are three ways that coastal countries might resolve their disputes in the South China Sea:

• First, they could continue to arm their marine patrol vessels and intimidate or coerce each other into compliance. As noted above, this increases the risk that a local confrontation might escalate into a violent conflict;
• Second, they could refer the territorial sovereignty dispute to an international court or tribunal and ask them to decide which State has the better claim to sovereignty. This was done by Malaysia and Indonesia over a maritime border dispute in the Celebes Sea and by Singapore and Malaysia over several small islands near the entrance to the Singapore Strait. These cases where the states agreed to refer their sovereignty disputes to the International Court of Justice are rare. Current nationalist concerns over preserving national sovereignty make it difficult to turn any territorial disputes over to international courts; and,
• Third, countries could agree to set aside their sovereignty disputes and jointly manage resources in the disputed area. The most successful example of this is the standardisation, automation and regulation of shipping traffic and container movements in the world’s busiest ports of Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Busan, Ningbo-Zhoushan, GuangzhouHarbor, Qingdao, Tianjin, Kaohsiung, Taiwan and Port Kelang. Clearly, co-operation pays, especially when it provides prompt and tangible mutual benefits. This is also the case among former adversaries, China and Vietnam, in their Tonkin Gulf Joint Resource Management Zone. China and the Philippines could do something similar in the Scarborough Shoal region [3].

There are several compelling reasons to pursue joint resource management programs. Fishery resources, especially migratory species, follow their ecosystem dynamics, not territorial seas or EEZs. They are an intrinsically regional resource. They have high value as a source of protein, food and jobs. There are several examples of long-standing, cooperative fishing practices in the South China Sea. There are international working groups and an epistemic community of marine biologists and resource managers to provide sustainable resource management.

The international legal framework for resource use in the South China Sea is provided by UNCLOS. It calls for establishing joint resource management areas and provides guidelines for doing so, even where conflicting territorial claims are unresolved. For example, Article 61 of UNCLOS requires countries to monitor their fish catch in relation to both economically – and environmentally -sustainable yields. Articles 116-119 provide for provisional agreements for joint resource management in disputed areas.

The major solution recommended here is for South China Sea stakeholders to begin or expand functional cooperation for joint resource management for marine safety, search and rescue operations, scientific research, disaster relief, protection of the marine environment and other politically feasible areas, even while their sovereignty disputes remain unsettled.

Given the increasing economic growth and inter-dependence within East Asia, it is inevitable that there will be confrontations and conflicts at sea. The South China Sea needs a way to regulate and resolve these conflicts through administrative, legal and police enforcement means. For example, it would be useful to establish an ‘incidents at sea’ agreement to provide a hotline or emergency response system to report confrontations and conflicts involving vessel seizures and crew detentions. The IMB Anti-Piracy Reporting Center and ReCAAP, the Regional Cooperation Agreement on Combating Piracy and Armed Robbery against Ships in Asia, would be useful precedents. In addition, military modernisation programs need to be complemented by confidence-building measures among coastal countries and other international user states to reduce the risk of arousing suspicion and distrust among neighbours, thereby fuelling a regional arms race. As Deng Xiaoping said many years ago, the only viable way to deal with intractable sovereignty disputes in the South China Sea is to set them aside and jointly develop the resources.

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Notes:

[1] Carlyle A. Thayer, ‘Chinese Assertiveness and U.S. Rebalancing: Confrontation in the South China Sea?’, presentation to the panel The South China Sea: The New Crucible in U.S.-China Relations?, Association for Asian Studies 2013 Annual Conference, San Diego, California., 21-24 March 2013. Several related reports are available at Thayer’s website, see: http://www.scribd.com/carlthayer.

[2] Michael Sheng-Ti Gau, ‘The U-Shaped Line and a Categorization of the Ocean Disputes in the South China Sea‘, Ocean Development & International Law, vol.43, no.1 (2012): 57-69.

[3] David Rosenberg, ‘Beyond the Scarborough Scare: Joint Resource Management in the South China Sea‘, e-International Relations, 1 May 2012.

Born into a rural Hohhot family in Inner Mongolia in 1939, at the age of nine Li Tuo went to Beijing with his family, where his mother worked as a servant for a high-ranking Communist official family. A biographical account states that the family adored the young boy, treated him well and sent him to a primary school attended exclusively by children of top officials. Li was in the same class as Zeng Qinghong, the influential Politburo member and close ally of Jiang Zemin who served as China’s Vice-President from 2003 to 2008.

After graduating from the prestigious 101 Middle School next to the ruins of the Garden of Perfect Brightness in 1958, Li went to work at a heavy machinery factory where he spent the next two decades. During this time, he wrote stories and hoped to pursue a literary career. His first work was published in 1975. In 1979, he was admitted to the Chinese Writers’ Association, thereby becoming an officially recognized writer. The same year, he co-authored with the film director and his then wife, Zhang Nuanxin (张暖忻, 1940-1995) a widely-discussed article, ‘On Modernizing the Language of Film’  谈电影语言的现代化. By the early 1980s, Li had established his reputation as a literary critic and prize-winning fiction writer. At this time, he gave up writing fiction and turned to literary criticism. He became a prominent and outspoken figure in the literary world that was growing alongside and in competition with the Party-state cultural apparatus.

His admirers speak of Li Tuo’s charismatic personality and his dedication to mentoring the work of emerging writers. This image of the generous maestro is a familiar archetype in Chinese intellectual culture, inspired by prominent thinkers and writers of the May Fourth era  (roughly 1917-1927), most notably Lu Xun. In the 1980s, Li’s home was a regular gathering place for literary aspirants, several of whom later achieved fame as writers, including Yu Hua 余华 and Su Tong 苏童. During his tenure as Deputy Chief Editor of the influential journal Beijing Literature (1986-1989), he published innovative writing, for which the journal enjoyed an avant-garde reputation in the 1980s. He also edited a number of anthologies to showcase leading literary currents of this post-Mao period: ‘root-seeking’ literature (中国寻根小说选), experimental literature (中国实验小说选), and the new realism (中国新写实小说选).

His demeanour and style were not, however, always appreciated. More unruly members of the rambunctious literary sphere of the 1980s lambasted Li for his obsession with discovering and claiming a unique appreciation of new talents; some mockingly called him ‘Grand Master Tuo’ 陀爷. The literary firebrand and later dissident Liu Xiaobo pilloried imperious new cultural authorities in the following terms:

The famous in China are much taken with acting as benefactors of others who caress and suckle the unknown. They use a type of tenderness which is almost feminine to possess, co-opt, and finally asphyxiate you. This is one of the peculiarities of Chinese culture… . Some people have the talent to excel, but shying from the dangers of going it alone, they instead seek out a discoverer (Bo Le 伯乐). They look for support, for security, so they can sleep easy; lunging into the bosom of some grand authority or other, and doze off in their warm embrace.

During the tumultuous year of 1989 Li was among the intellectual shock-troops in favour of radical change; he did not stay around to face the consequences of the feverish agitation that so many intellectuals had encouraged. Following his discrete departure for the US, Hao Ran (1932-2008), the Party writer who enjoyed unrivaled fame during the latter years of the Cultural Revolution, was appointed Chief Editor of Beijing Literature. The journal’s subscriptions fell sharply.

Li lived in the US for the next five years. During this time, he produced numerous essays, expressing his increasing ambivalence about the country, its culture, its values, democracy and ‘the West’ in general. He professed admiration for the American way of life but was at pains to point out that the prosperity required to sustain it came through exploiting Third World countries and environmental degradation. In one article, for instance, he wrote that his love of well-trimmed American lawns turned to disillusion when he learned about the quantities of pesticide required to maintain them (not to mention the labour of non-legal immigrants to keep them manicured; see 现代文明背后的野蛮, 天涯, 2007).

For his limited understanding of North America, Li is recognised by many as an astute observer of Chinese intellectual life. He made his first trip back to China in 1994, and has divided his time between China and the US thereafter, being one of many intellectual zealots who critique the West while enjoying the privileges bestowed by a Green Card.

As a critic, he is best known for his essays on Maospeak, Mao wenti 毛文体, a term he coined in 1989 (the term ‘Maospeak’ or Maoyu 毛语, was previously used by Geremie Barmé in a series of conversations with Chinese intellectuals in 1987). He attracted controversy when he examined the influence of Maospeak on the ideas and language of eminent Chinese writers. (On the limitations of ‘Maospeak’ as a concept, see Geremie R. Barmé, ‘New China Newspeak‘ in the China Story Lexicon on this site). Li’s 1993 article, ‘Ding Ling is Not So Easy: the complex role of intellectuals and their discursive behaviour under Maoism’ 丁玲不简单——毛体制下知识分子在话语生成中的复杂角色 (今天, 1993.3) generated considerable debate. Of Ding Ling (1904-1986), one of China’s best known woman writers and an intellectual luminary who suffered twenty-five years of harsh treatment under Mao, Li wrote that she had so thoroughly absorbed Maospeak that it infected the way she thought and spoke.

This article was re-published in Yesterday’s Stories 昨天的故事 (Oxford, 2006), an anthology of writings by Li  and other writers that had first appeared in the 1990s in the highly regarded magazine Today 今天. Li was a regular contributor to the magazine’s ‘Rewriting Literary History’ column. Li also co-edited, with the poet Bei Dao, The 70s 七十年代 (Oxford 2008, Sanlian Joint Publishing, 2009), a book of interviews in which cultural figures who achieved fame and success in the 1980s, the first decade of Reform-era China, looked back on their formative influences in the 1970s. In 2000, Li co-founded Horizons 视界, a journal seen as a vehicle for ‘New Left’ ideas. Li’s own writings reflect the critical views published in the journal of a world despoiled by ‘late capitalism’. He has also continued to write on Chinese literary history and the politics of language use in China. As Geremie Barmé has remarked, ‘Like many intellectuals of the globalised New Left, Li too is adroit at navigating the authoritarian Party-state system of the mainland while achieving a measure of intellectual kudos among fellow travellers in international academia.’

Li Tuo is currently a research scholar at the East Asian Languages Cultures Department at Columbia University. His wife Lydia H. Liu is Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at the same university.

Additional links

• Liu Kunya 刘琨亚, Shenzhen Evening News 深圳晚报, 李陀：只做批评家, 25 November 2006.
• Beijing Youth Daily 北京青年报, 李陀：种种现实 一种目光, 29 July 2009 – In this interview Li Tuo comments on China’s media culture: the net, TV, film, and literature.
• Horizons 视界 http://www.hnzose.com/vision/

A cartoon depicting recent environmental problems and food safety scares in China by the Internet artist and cartoonist Perverted Pepper (变态辣椒), reproduced with permission. For more work by Perverted Pepper, see 变态辣椒的漫画

On 14 January 2013, the People’s Daily published a front page editorial, ‘A Beautiful China Begins with Healthy Breathing’ 美丽中国，从健康呼吸开始. The editorial highlighted the nation’s serious pollution problems and the urgent need for effective remedies. The same day, news media outlets across the country carried articles openly deploring the environmental consequences of ill-considered economic development. This rare departure from the normal situation of press restrictions that always err on the side of the upbeat and optimistic did not escape the notice of commentators in or outside China. Many wondered if the gravity of the nation’s environmental situation had finally hit home: Beijing and other parts of northern China were then experiencing unusually high levels of airborne pollution. Mounting public complaints about air quality and environmental degradation have also been impossible for the government to ignore.

China and the Environment: The Green Revolution, edited by Sam Geall of Chinadialogue.net 中外对话, offers five substantial case studies of how Chinese environmental activists and ordinary citizens are dealing with the problems in their midst. The introduction to the volume by the veteran journalist and a founder of Chinadialogue, Isabel Hilton, presented below, offers valuable insights into the civic will to make China more liveable, a will that drives the country’s environmental movement today. The book (available on Amazon as a Kindle version or paperback; or in paperback from Zedbooks) features field interviews and translations from relevant Chinese reports and documents. It has attracted high praise in advance reviews.—The Editor

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China and the Environment, cover

The Return of Chinese Civil Society

by Isabel Hilton

In the early 1970s, the first batch of British students to be admitted to Chinese universities since the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution made a large, if understandable, mistake: they proposed to the authorities at the Beijing Languages Institute (now the Beijing Language and Culture University) that they should be permitted to set up a foreign students’ association.

The response was swift and, to a Western eye, a little disproportionate. The normally mild-mannered Bi Laoshi (‘Teacher Bi’), head of the waiban, the office in the institute that dealt with the foreign students, could not have made the official response plainer: he made several visits to the foreign student dormitory to ensure that the tiny spark of this idea was firmly stamped on and completely extinguished.

Teacher Bi was a diminutive, bespectacled figure who normally bore the burden of managing his tiresome flock of foreigners with a certain grace and occasional flashes of humour. On this subject, though, he was grim and categorical. There was no foreign students’ association at the Beijing Languages Institute and, he explained repeatedly and firmly, there never would be. It was out of the question, probably illegal and certainly prohibited.

It seems implausible today that we could have been so naive as to imagine that the Chinese Communist Party would not see the proposal as a threat. It had established its dominance of everything that moved, thought, spoke or acted in Mao’s China, and in the years since 1949 it had repeatedly directed its overwhelming firepower against any organisation that the Party did not control.

Pre-revolutionary China, on the other hand, had been rich in civil society bodies, from secret societies that ranged across the political, through social welfare to the outright criminal. There were religious associations of all denominations, business associations, clan associations and, among China’s foreign residents, everything from Masonic lodges to tennis clubs. There were trade unions, welfare bodies and professional guilds. There were also numerous political organisations, including alternative communist parties and democratic parties of various stripes. None had survived in its original form and by 1973 those organisations that the Party had not destroyed or brought under control had been driven underground.

As the high point of Mao Zedong’s millenarian socialism, the Cultural Revolution seemed to be the final chapter in the destruction of autonomous civil society in China. Mao saw enemies everywhere and interpreted any views that did not accord with his own as disloyalty. By the time the cult of Mao reached its apogee in the late 1960s, the space for independent thought and civic action in China had been eliminated. By the early 1970s, China could boast only a few monochrome mass organisations, such as the All-China Federation of Trades Unions, the All-China Women’s Federation and the Communist Youth League of China. All claimed large membership, but they functioned to transmit the Party’s message rather than to challenge its policies.

Ordinary citizens had no right to organise. Chinese citizenship conveyed no intrinsic rights at all: no guarantees of constitutional protection; no right of association; no defence against arbitrary persecution by the state; no right to observe a religious faith other than in the shifting catechism of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought; and no right to set up any organisation, however innocuous the intent. It was well understood – though not by the foreign students of the day – that to try to do so would be to invite swift retribution from above. The Party had reserved to itself the right to calibrate and control everything, from matters of life and death to the most mundane activity.

chinadialogue

More than thirty years were to pass before my next attempt to set up an organisation in China. The second venture – www.chinadialogue.net, a bilingual Chinese–English web publication on environment and climate change – met with more success. The year was 2006: Mao was long in his tomb and his arch rival Deng Xiaoping had also left the stage. The respective legacies of both leaders, each in his own way politically authoritarian, were closely entwined. Their shadows still lay across the lives of new generations of Chinese citizens. But China had also been through nearly three decades of rapid change and not just in economics and industry: society was changing too. The new century had brought new perspectives on China’s rapid growth and China’s citizens were no longer content to be silent on the problems that affected their lives and health. The environmental costs of China’s model of development were driving people to take action; it was no longer unthinkable that foreigners and Chinese should be able to share ideas and information on China’s environmental crisis.

That was what chinadialogue set out to do. We wanted an even-handed exchange: neither side would lecture to the other but we would aim to be honest, as well as useful and informative to both. We would commission Chinese writers to write about China and Western writers to write about international experience. We believed that there were lessons to be learned in both directions, and that it was possible to discuss climate change and environment in the spirit of trying to solve problems rather than simply blaming each other for past mistakes or present policies. Our international readers would gain a window into the Chinese experience, unmediated by a foreign lens. We would aim to be interesting for Chinese policymakers and, importantly, for the growing numbers of Chinese citizens who were beginning to find a voice and were eager to learn what had happened in other times and other places.

By 2006, when chinadialogue was setting out its stall, Professor Wang Ming of Tsinghua University estimated that there were 500,000 NGOs in China, most of them unregistered. It was hard to be exact, or to define what that term might mean across a wide range of options, but clearly civil society in China was bouncing back from the crushing catastrophe of the Mao era. By the end of 2011, there were approximately 449,000 legally registered civil society organisations in China. The estimate of the unregistered may be as high as three million. Many of them register as businesses; others do not register at all and receive little oversight, unless, in the eyes of the government, they transgress.

1994: Modest beginnings

The return of civil society, in the environmental sphere at least, began modestly: on 31 March 1994, the organisation popularly known as Friends of Nature was officially registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, under the rather less user-friendly name of the Green Culture Institute of the International Academy of Chinese Culture, listing its purpose as raising environmental awareness. Technically this was not the first legally registered environmental NGO in China: an organisation was registered in Liaoning in 1991. But Friends of Nature was to play a significant role, not least because of the distinguished pedigree of the man who founded it.

The late Liang Congjie was the son of a distinguished family: his grandfather Liang Qichao had led an ill-fated reform movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Congjie’s father, Liang Sicheng, was a planner and architect who had fought valiantly, if unsuccessfully, to save historic Beijing from destruction in the 1950s and 1960s. He had first tried to persuade Mao Zedong that the city, with its nesting walls and intimate historic spaces, was unsuitable for the needs of a modern state and that the new People’s Republic might care to build its capital outside the walls. Later, in the Cultural Revolution, he fought again to save Beijing’s magnificent city walls from destruction. They were pulled down, despite his protests and Mao ordered them replaced with Beijing’s first ring road. Liang Congjie represented the third generation of a family with a keen sense of civic responsibility and reason to understand the art of confronting power with care.

Friends of Nature was influential but necessarily cautious. The revival of civil society that its registration heralded was part of the long transformation from Mao’s China to today’s hybrid society – an authoritarian, semi-market economy with a substantial quotient of ‘Chinese characteristics’. The retreat of the state from many aspects of life in China, a necessary prerequisite for marketisation and opening up to the outside world, created both the need and the opportunity for non-state organisations in everything from policy advice and formulation to the delivery of welfare. At the same time, the retreat of the Party from its earlier efforts to dominate all thought and action has opened up space for more pragmatic, reality-based approaches and for discussion. But although the government recognises the need for civil-society organisations, and the contribution they can make to China’s modernisation, environmental protection and sustainable development, it has been slow to create the legal and regulatory conditions that would allow civil society to fulfil its potential. At the root of this much-delayed institutionalisation lies mistrust.

Through the two decades of the 1990s and the first decade of this century, China became an industrial powerhouse, a transformation that profoundly impacted the environment, but also every aspect of life and governance: the law, labour conditions, education, consumerism, land use and migration – all were affected.

Building the institutions to support China’s transition is a continuing undertaking. It began with a revision of the constitution and the enactment of thousands of new laws and regulations to govern the international business and commercial relations that China needed to open its economy for foreign investment, manufacture and trade, and to manage the retreat of the Party from the day-to-day management of Chinese society. New domestic laws and regulations were drawn up, including those intended to govern non-Party and non-state organisations.

The first regulation, Regulations on Foundation Management, was issued in 1988, when the officially sponsored non-profit sector began to emerge. The Regulations on the Registration and Management of Social Organizations followed in October 1989. These regulations required independent organisations to find a government sponsor if they wanted to register, a requirement that remains in place and is an insuperable obstacle for most grassroots organisations.

These regulations were revised in 1998, along with Provisional Regulations for the Registration and Management of Popular Non- Enterprise Units (PNEUs). In the early 2000s, some independent non-profits were able to register as PNEUs, but many more remained unregistered, or registered as businesses. New regulations have been promised and some limited experimentation in a more relaxed approach is under way, but until now the regulatory regime heavily favours state control and is widely thought to inhibit, rather than to enable, a well-functioning civil society.

It was clear by the early 1990s that the transition to a more market- oriented economy was going to entail a civil-society revival, if only to facilitate services that the government itself was no longer able to deliver. It was equally clear that the Chinese authorities remained extremely nervous of allowing autonomous institutions to function in China. The danger that the Chinese government had in mind – and one it was anxious to avoid – was the fate of Soviet Communism, in the USSR itself and in the countries of the Warsaw Pact.

The year of China’s Tiananmen trauma, 1989, began with martial law in Tibet. It ended with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the end of state socialism in Europe and the end of the Cold War that had defined world politics for forty years. Three years later, the USSR itself imploded, shrinking down to the rump of the Russian Federation and spawning a shoal of revived states from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Watching from the sidelines, the Chinese Communist Party was determined neither to lose political power, as in Europe, nor to allow China to follow the example of the USSR and break up.

The role of ordinary people on the streets in bringing down communism was not lost on Beijing. The countries of the Warsaw Pact, like China, had allowed little space for independent civil society, but it did not escape Beijing’s notice that there had been enough – in the Lutheran and Catholic churches, in embryonic environmental movements, in the writers’ and artists’ organisations and the trade unions – to allow people to mobilise around a common purpose. When the popular purpose became to change governments – or entire political systems – people were prepared.

The aftershocks of 1989, both within and outside China, were felt for many years. Further waves of civic action swept across the post-Soviet world and beyond in the 1990s and again in the early twenty-first century, with the colour revolutions that touched Georgia, the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon and Iran. By 2010, to the surprise of many, protest even spread to the Arab world. Demonstrations in neighbouring Myanmar in 2008 had not brought down the dictatorship, but no doubt contributed to the tentative liberalisation that began three years later with the release of scores of political prisoners, the lifting of Aung San Su Kyi’s house arrest and a cautious step in the direction of democracy.

Viewed from Beijing, these events owed much to the actions of indigenous civil-society organisations that relied on international funding and logistical support. For some observers in Beijing, it was evidence that foreign money and ideas conspired to bring down governments.

A Necessary Modernisation or a Menace?

A debate developed: on one hand, important voices in the government, and even more in the academy, argued that an active civil society was a necessary part of social and economic modernisation and that civil society was at its most useful where it was independent and properly funded.

Against this, elements of the state apparatus argued that legal independence and funding were the two factors that would enable uncontrolled entities to be created that could threaten the Communist Party. These opposing perspectives persist, and may account for the government’s failure to enact long-awaited new regulations governing NGOs in China. Until new regulations appear, NGOs face continuing obstacles: they have great difficulties in obtaining legal registration, without which they cannot open bank accounts or legally receive foreign or domestic funding. Whilst tens of thousands operate in the unregistered grey zone, they have no protection from prosecution or other official sanctions.

In 2006, in the same week that Professor Wang Ming told me that there were 500,000, mostly unregistered, NGOs in China, I sat in a hotel lobby in Beijing with a group of China’s most prominent environmental activists. None worked for, or with, a state-sponsored organisation. All, by then, had a track record of opposition to the dam building that was threatening China’s last unspoiled rivers in the west and south-west. None had been able legally to register the organisations that they had cooperated with and, in some cases, founded.

These fledgling organisations were facing a bewildering set of problems, the scale of which had been summed up the year before by Pan Yue, a vice minister in the Environmental Protection Agency, later upgraded to the Ministry of Environmental Protection. In what must count as the most outspoken interview ever given by a Chinese official to a member of the foreign press, he described the threat that China’s environmental crisis posed to China’s future prosperity. He said:

This miracle will end soon, because the environment can no longer keep pace. Acid rain is falling on one third of the Chinese territory, half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one-fourth of our citizens do not have access to clean drinking water. One-third of the urban population are breathing polluted air, and less than 20 per cent of the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner.

Finally, five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in China. He continued:

Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and 15 per cent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn’t include the costs for health. Then there’s the human suffering: in Beijing alone, 70 to 80 per cent of all deadly cancer cases are related to the environment. Lung cancer has emerged as the number one cause of death. …[T]he western regions of China and the country’s ecologically stressed regions can no longer support the people already living there. In the future, we will need to resettle 186 million residents from 22 provinces and cities. However, the other provinces and cities can only absorb some 33 million people. That means China will have more than 150 million … environmental refugees.

The vice minister might have added desertification and greenhouse gases to his list, or the predicted impacts of climate change on China’s food security. It was clear that there was a huge mismatch between the scale of the problems and the ability of China’s vulnerable civil society organisations to address them.

All of the activists gathered that day were nervous: environmental activism was well established by 2006 and actively encouraged by some elements in the Chinese government. But that did not change the fact that major economic interests were at stake and this group had come under severe pressure. In China’s compressed development, these men and women represented the next generation of environmental activism from Liang Congjie’s Friends of Nature: they were younger and more activist; some were more confrontational; many had backgrounds in journalism and had moved from writing about China’s environmental crisis to trying to mobilise others. They reached for any tools that were to hand and played an important role in fashioning new ones, such as the regulations on transparency, the public right to know and public participation that offered environmental activists a field of action that went beyond protest.

In January 2007, the State Council introduced new Regulations on Open Government Information that gave citizens the legal right to obtain government information. These came into force on 1 May 2008, along with the rather clumsily named Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation). Ma Jun, one of China’s most celebrated and effective environmental activists, hailed the new regulations as ‘an important milestone for freedom of information in China’, and a ‘powerful lever for the public to monitor companies’ environmental performance’.

Taken together, these measures gave environmental activists – and ordinary citizens – the means to monitor pollution and bring polluters to public attention. It gave them the right to demand information on violators, including what action they might have taken. As Ma Jun wrote on chinadialogue:

If an environment agency turns down the public application for disclosure, the public may report this to the superior environmental authorities, which shall then urge the subordinate agency to fulfil their disclosure duties. The public may apply for administrative review or file administrative suits if they believe that the rejection of disclosure has infringed upon their legal rights.

On paper at least, the measures represented an important step forward in public trust and empowerment.

Curiously, despite the government’s reservations about the dangers of foreign interference, the period of reform has also been marked by a significant growth in the activities of foreign NGOs operating in China. According to the Ministry of Civil Affair’s China Charity and Donation Information Centre in March 2012, 1,000 US NGOs were operating in China, mainly working in humanitarian aid, environmental and animal protection, and gender and labour rights. American NGOs, according to the report, have donated nearly twenty billion yuan (US$3.18 billion) to China since 1978, much of it into education and research.

Increasing trans-boundary contact is an inevitable side effect of China’s transition and one that also affects China’s civil society.

As China opens to the outside world, Chinese citizens come into contact with images of global civil society; they are influenced by international events and by a growing sense that global civil society has the capacity to organise around global problems, especially in the environment. Environmental imagination draws on the image of one planet; climate change offers the concept of a single global eco-system.

These connections may stimulate China’s domestic NGOs but they do not directly foster their development, or help them overcome the obstacles to financial survival that the Chinese government puts in their path. On 1 March 2010, for instance, new regulations came into force that placed additional obstacles to receiving international funding, with new requirements for notarised agreements and detailed application forms. These regulations represent a large burden for independent NGOs, and leave them vulnerable to interference by government agencies through the uncertainties they create.

In 2011, there were again hints that the impasse over regulation might be resolved. Although the year began with the government’s extraordinary attempt to prohibit the use of the term ‘civil society’, later in the year experiments in liberalising registration in Guangdong province, in southern China, and in Beijing were given official endorsement. In Guangdong, eight types of civil society organisation were permitted to register without official sponsors; in Beijing, social organisations were permitted to use the local Ministry of Civil Affairs Bureaus as both registering and oversight bodies. In another sign of change, the One Foundation, a private foundation set up by the film star Jet Li, was allowed to register in Shenzhen, also in Guangdong province, which made it the first private foundation in China that was permitted to raise funds from the public – a move perhaps inspired by a series of scandals in China’s public, government-sponsored foundations that has made Chinese citizens reluctant to donate.

A proposed Charity Law, currently on the legislative agenda of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), may move to a first reading in March 2013, and the Twelfth Five Year Plan envisages a growing role for civil society in the delivery of social services. The institutionalisation that this would demand could also benefit activist and environmental groups, but in a year of political transition much remains uncertain.

In one sense, the Twelfth Five Year Plan marks the moment that the ideas voiced from the political and social margins ten years earlier entered the mainstream, enthroned within the state’s core declaration of values and developmental intentions. When they were first voiced, these ideas were thrown down as a challenge to the top-down orthodoxy of ‘develop first, clean up later’. Today, they are encompassed within the new official orthodoxy, one of sustainability and circular economy, of inclusion and a more rounded growth.

What does that mean for the legitimacy of the civil society that threw down that challenge, and that had tried to develop its inspiration and its methodology outside the state system, albeit frequently in an uneasy dialogue with power? Its ideas may have been incorporated, but that does not mean that its standing as a legitimate sector has been vindicated. The state may have modified its understanding of the environmental costs and benefits of competing development models, but the approach to adjustment remains as top-down as ever. And, ironically, the very cause that gave birth to the present generation of Chinese environmental NGOs – the construction of big hydro, in virtual abeyance under the Eleventh Five Year Plan – is set to resume with increased force with the departure of premier Wen Jiabao. By the end of the Twelfth Five Year Plan it is likely that not a river in China will remain undammed, the protests of residents and of civil society notwithstanding. The state might have changed its views, but its methods, and its view of the subordinate role of non-state and non-Party actors and organisations, have scarcely altered.

How China resolves the ambiguities that currently weaken the position of its civil-society organisations will be an important signal of the direction of Chinese society in the coming years. Will the recent trend continue of greater access to information for a liberalised media with its environmental journalists, which Sam Geall explores in Chapter 1? Will the kind of organisation that Olivia Boyd explores in Chapter 2 be allowed to develop and grow? Greater independence and more robust protection for civil-society organisations would indicate a maturity of Chinese society and a confidence in the rule of law that would help to equip China to cope peacefully with its difficult next phase of development. Adam Moser’s chapter on legal activism illuminates what is possible, but also the continuing difficulties of using the law to support environmental activism. Liu Jianqiang leaves us in no doubt that China’s civil society will continue to find ways to amplify the effectiveness of its actions, but how far will the authorities allow this to develop?

Continuing restrictions and harassment of individuals and organisations, of the kind that is also chronicled in the following pages, could be a disturbing signal of a return to authoritarianism, and could lead to more social unrest and street protest, like the Xiamen PX protests so brilliantly explored by Jonathan Ansfield. From the following chapters the potential for a robust and vibrant civil society is clear. Whether it is allowed to come into being is less certain.

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Further Reading:

Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. (One of the first accounts of the roots and evolution of China’s ecological crisis, including an introduction to the key figures and the early campaigns of the environmental movement.)

Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. (Compelling exploration of the disastrous environmental policies of Mao-era China, an important backdrop to the problems and campaigns of today.)

Ma Jun, China’s Water Crisis, Pacific Century Press, 2003. (First published in 1999, Ma Jun’s book is often compared to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, as the country’s first major book drawing public attention to the environmental crisis.)

Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2004. (An exhaustive, scholarly and highly readable environmental history of China, covering around 4,000 years of development and environmental degradation.)

Katherine Morton, International Aid and China’s Environment: Taming the Yellow Dragon, London: Routledge Studies on China in Transition, 2012. (An analysis of the relationship between international and local responses to environmental problems in China.)

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Isabel Hilton is a London-based writer and broadcaster and editor in chief of chinadialogue.net. She has been visiting China since 1973.

Sam Geall is Departmental Lecturer in Human Geography of China at the University of Oxford and executive editor of chinadialogue.net.