Perhaps most interesting, Clayton argues that the surge of violence led locals to accuse the departing Portuguese colonial administration of ineptitude in dealing with the triads, not because they thought that the triads should or could be totally suppressed, but that the state was supposed to ensure that business could proceed as usual, despite the fact that corruption and triad involvement in government and business was pervasive. They welcomed the incoming PRC-led government partially because they were confident that it would be able to restore Macau’s image, and many residents apparently held the (totally wrong) belief that the PRC had totally destroyed and suppressed triad activities on the mainland (ha!).

Can’t wait to read the rest of it.

My first idea is to build on research I conducted during a Fulbright fellowship from 2004-2005, about the transformation of popular interpretations and scholarly historiography on the Taiping Rebellion from the 1850 to the present or at least until the beginning of the Reform Era. Basically, this would look at the rise of Taiping apologetics and more sympathetic or even hagiographical accounts of Taiping leaders. I’ve got photocopies of major bibliographies of Taiping historiography compiled by Ssu-Yü Teng (邓嗣禹) at Harvard and Luo Ergang (罗尔纲) and Cui Zhiqing (崔之清) on the mainland. Another place to start would be the People’s Daily articles published every 5 years or so, commemorating major Taiping anniversaries starting with the 100th anniversary of the Jintian Uprising in 1950, which provide a nice survey of developments in “official” interpretations. I also have a suspicion that the more sympathetic portrayals of the Taiping in China may partially originate from contact with Western accounts or the sympathetic research of Chinese Christian scholars such as Jian Youwen (简又文, a fellow Oberlin graduate). I expect that such a study would tell us a great deal about a number of issues, including nationalism, historical memory, adapting history to the Communist teleology, conflicted feelings about the roles of Christianity and “superstition,” and similar uncertainties about the role of women in the rebellion and the Revolution as a whole.

A second, somewhat related idea would be to investigate how and why the surname Hong (洪) came to be associated with rebellious, apocalyptic, and messianic activities. I’ve seen a number of explanations offered by a number of sources, but it seems like a question that could be tracked down and answered. Some arguments place the surname as far back as Gong Gong, whose descendants supposedly added the water radical to their name, reflecting their water deity ancestor. This strikes me as a story invented much later, at least in the Ming. But Hong is the surname of the soldier who releases the 108 spirits in the introduction to the Water Margin, part of the title assumed by the Hongwu Emperor, the brotherhood name taken by members of the Heaven & Earth Society and other ritual underworld organizations, and – not entirely coincidentally – the surname of Taiping founder Hong Xiuquan and his relatives. Hong’s meaning of “flood” also seems to be important in apocalyptic and messianic texts predating the Taiping by quite a while and probably even pre-dates the Ming founder, since there was assuredly a reason he took that name. So far, the only references I’ve seen to the meaning and significance of Hong have been in studies of secret societies by folks like Hubert Seiwert and David Ownby, but I have not yet had time to track down useful Chinese sources. Suggestions in this regard would be much appreciated. I am excited by the topic for a number of reasons, but one is that it speaks to the interrelatedness of certain Chinese concepts about political and religious power, concepts that apply to both the central state and rebel groups that intend to replace it. Examining this topic might also be a way to consider the transformations that have occurred in thinking about the “mandate of heaven” and related concepts in late imperial and more recent times.

Looking at these two, it seems like I have one topic (Taiping historiography) that has a concrete starting point and research path, but may be less useful in advancing knowledge or enabling us to draw more general conclusions, while the latter topic (the significance of Hong) is a bit more amorphous right now in its research plan but whose findings might be much more significant in the long run.

My three strongest memories of Brooke go like this:

In early 1999, Brooke and I were assigned to be roommates for most of the big February trip down to Vietnam and back to Beijing by way of a convoluted route that took us through Yunnan and Sichuan. The first day in Hanoi, Brooke, Paul, and I were strolling around the central lake, playing ping-pong with locals at these random outdoor tables, practicing our terrible Vietnamese out of bootleg Lonely Planet phrasebooks, taking motorcycle taxis even though we weren’t supposed to, and in the process somehow managed to make friends with a couple of girls who sold t-shirts to foreign tourists. They refused to let us treat them to ice cream, because “It’s winter” even though it was 75 degrees out, but Brooke gradually developed a major crush on one of them, who was named Hua. I got the feeling that it was mutual but the whole thing remained painfully unrequited because we were only there for a few days. We saw Hua every day, though, and she and the people she introduced us to were a major part of our experience there. I’ll never forget Brooke saying a sad goodbye to Hua before we got on the bus to head to the train station. When I saw Brooke’s dad in Beijing in 2004 or 2005 at SYA China’s 10th anniversary, I was not surprised that Woody was talking about putting a new SYA program in Vietnam, given how much our experience there meant to Brooke.

Later, in Yunnan, the entire group took a trip to the Stone Forest and Brooke and I hung to the back of the tour, out of sight of the teachers and tour guide. It started with us just monkeying around, ducking deeper into the rock formation, away from the paved paths, and climbing a few feet up the rock face. Eventually, though, egging each other on, we ended up completely abandoning the tour and free climbing up the inside of this chimney-shaped crevice between these two large standing stones. There were a couple moments when I thought we’d have to climb back down or would be stuck but, spotting for each other and giving advice, we managed to work our way to the top, meeting up with the path again. I still have a few black and white pictures from our makeshift scramble and actually painted the image from one of them onto a 2 x 5′ panel of wood for a high school art class Senior year. After we managed to rejoin the group, we got chewed out by our history teacher, but afterwards Brooke turned to me (I was a bit terrified that we would get in serious trouble) and said: “That was totally worth it.” Later, we were to another place called the “Small Stone Forest” and Brooke and I — along with Sam, I think — climbed all over that too, at one point sitting on a brick wall way, way out away from everybody else, facing a radio tower we had somehow stumbled upon, watching the sun set. It’s likely due to Brooke’s influence that my roommate Mike and I broke away from the beaten path and stumbled upon an old abandoned lighthouse on the eastern side of Hong Kong island in 2005. His sense of mischievous adventure is something I will always remember.

In Lijiang, Brooke and I stayed with this older family where the grandparents were at least in their 70s. They lived in a traditional style courtyard house with water flowing through these open outdoor canals in front of their doors, parallel to the street. Their grandson — probably 6 or 7 — was also frequently around and, since the Chinese New Year was approaching, he was really excited about fireworks. Somewhere there’s actually a picture of all of us together in the courtyard, which may have even gotten into the SYA advertising literature at some point. In any case, Brooke had a thing for fireworks too and kept buying these handfuls of poppers which you could throw. On contact, they would explode, making a loud popping sound and a brief flash of light, which he found incredibly amusing. We walked around the old-but-totally-refurbished center of Lijiang on New Year’s Eve and Brooke was constantly throwing poppers around. I specifically remember him trying to get one inside the mouth of one of the standing stone lion statues. That night, we bought as many fireworks as we could carry and set them off in the alley outside the courtyard house with the family’s grandson and his young friend. I can still remember the look on Brooke’s face when we showed the kids how to set off Roman candles, all those sparks flying in the darkness and all of us laughing together.

This is an abstract that I’m submitting to the Northwest Forum for Upcoming East Asia Professionals, a graduate student conference happening January 8-9 at the University of Washington. The paper itself will build on research I conducted while at the Long Term Strategy Group, new information made available since then, and more recent research done at the University of Washington.

Internal Security in China:
Preserving the People’s Democratic Dictatorship

China’s internal security apparatus is an embodiment of the persistent historical belief that internal division poses the greatest threat to China’s national security, a “disease of the heart” more dangerous than any external “disease of the skin.” But while China’s leaders have consistently exhibited a heightened sensitivity to domestic security concerns, the objectives of internal security work have changed dramatically over time, as have the structure and composition of internal security forces.

In a series of irregular developments since the early 1920s, the ideology of irreconcilable “struggle” with domestic enemies has given way a focus on resolving “contradictions among the people.” Formerly demonized opponents are now frequently declared to be voicing legitimate complaints against unfortunate circumstances or corrupt local authorities.

However, the complete transformation of China’s domestic security apparatus — from the Communist Party’s political enforcement arm to a Western-style civil police force — has not been fully or consistently realized. Neither is such a transformation the ultimate goal of most Chinese security theorists or the likely outcome of recent trends in security reform.

This paper builds on previous studies of the pluralization of social authority in mainland China by examining the ways in which the PRC’s massive security apparatus is struggling to adapt to China’s ongoing social and political transformation.

This is a review of Cheng Li, ed. China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (DC: Brookings, 2008), though I only focus on some of the articles in the volume.

Over the past three years working for a small think-tank, I gradually learned that the US government is mainly interested in three issues involving the People’s Republic: 1) China’s imminent democratization, 2) the CCP-PRC party-state’s imminent collapse, and 3) the imminent challenge posed by the PLA’s military modernization. All three of these are issues involving the near future, since long-term planning is considered difficult in a rapidly changing international environment and doesn’t help various government interests secure funding right now. Even though Li’s edited volume mostly focuses on the democratization issue, there are enough glimpses of the other two to make this book feel like a summary of the world I recently left behind. Since this volume came about in the aftermath of a presumably state-funded conference at Brookings, I suppose that’s not too surprising.

What’s also unsurprising is that no one convincingly articulates why the US government –- and, presumably, the majority of American citizens –- wants China to become more democratic. Indeed, John L. Thorton’s introduction seems to state that the main purpose of the volume is to rectify outdated views about China held by many US officials and mitigate the underlying distrust that pervades Sino-American relations. He presumes, then, that most US officials would be pleasantly surprised by the “democratic” developments described in this volume. That presumption seems doubtful when a majority of the contributing authors do not seem convinced of China’s democratic prospects, at least in the near future. Even if one were to be persuaded by the few optimists, it’s not at all clear that popularly elected Chinese officials would be more supportive of US interests in East Asia or that a “democratic” Chinese state would resemble Taiwan rather than the Russian Federation or some other illiberal democracy.

Andrew Nathan’s article was among the most consistently solid, since he accurately describes the intellectual environment in which discussions of China’s future are occurring, an environment in which the third of the Four Basic Principles –- the continued leadership of the CCP –- is assumed by major actors all across the political spectrum. His assertion that Chinese Marxism is bankrupt (p. 35) seems presumptive given the continued support for otherwise anachronistic political language among the lower classes that feel their historical social contract with the party-state has been violated. The Hu-Wen administration is at least pretending to pay more attention to such voices which gives socialist ideas a bigger spotlight than they ever enjoyed under Jiang Zemin. I am also baffled by Nathan’s assertion that “core ideas that… seem valid to those currently situated within China’s historical experience… social structure and language” shouldn’t be called culture (p.39). I’m not sure what else to call them, though perhaps he’s trying to resist the idea that there are inherently Chinese tendencies that make democracy untenable. I strongly agree with him that contemporary Chinese views on democracy make a PRC-implemented democracy liable to look very different from Western expectations, a belief that is strongly supported by Yu Keping’s article immediately following, which describes the core of democracy as “guid[ing] the voluntary, sporadic, and disorganized political participation of citizens into a political framework led by the party and government” (p.55).

Jacques deLisle, while perhaps a bit overly enthusiastic about developments in the Chinese legal system, accurately describes the “implementation gap” that exists not just in legal affairs but across the entire Chinese political system and furthermore was able to convincingly claim that any shifts in a positive direction represent “discretionary authoritarian decisions to represent popular interests, not institutionalized and obligatory responses to popular preferences” (p. 201). His invocation of the imperial model of a benevolent ruler clouds this insight a bit, but his core point is good. While it is not entirely fair to say that the general populace — which, after all, includes many significant sets of interests, including many elites — can exert no pressure on the party-state, the Hu-Wen shift towards popularism is not the direct result of such pressure. Perhaps 80,000 popular protests a year serves as a form of indirect pressure, but a different set of leaders with different priorities could easily choose to not respond to popular concerns, as Chinese leaders have done in the past and will continue to do on a number of other issues. A major difficulty for the current Chinese political system is the lack of incentives and/or institutional pressure on leaders to perform well and address local concerns. Consequently, when positive moves are made, they are the result of arbitrary decisions that can later be reverse or flounder as their chief architects turn their attention elsewhere. Despite Hu’s kexue fazhan guan (“Scientific Development”) being enshrined in the PRC constitution, there’s no guarantee that the recent focus on poorer interior provinces will achieve any major results or reflects a permanent change in the CCP’s orientation. The party-state’s current approach to legalization and institutionalization — two sides of the same coin — does nothing to change the fundamentally arbitrary nature of Chinese politics, which is subject primarily to social restrictions from other political leaders, not firmly institutionalized mandates.

James Mulvernon has written the best article I’ve seen on the four Bush-era US-China security crises and what they tell us about the relationship between the civilian government and the PLA, but I’m not sure what that article has to do with democratization.

Chu Yan-Han’s article comparing China’s future to Taiwan’s democratic transition is interesting, though strongly pro-GMD. I would be more interested to see what he thinks since the ouster and splintering of the DPP, with China-Taiwan relations as good as they’ve ever been but Ma Yingjiu and the Nationalist Party crippled by his deep unpopularity. Chu’s description of both the GMD and CCP originating as clandestine Leninist parties based around democratic centralism (p. 310) resonates strongly with my own work on the origins of modern Chinese security ideology and its persistent influence on modern state-society relations, which was somewhat encouraging.

At first glance, I considered Chu too optimistic about the parallels between China and Taiwan’s liberalization, but his list of the three major differences that benefited Taiwan’s democratization (starting on p. 315) — foreign pressure, a shaky foundation, and prior commitments to democracy — is an improvement on most comparisons I’ve read, if a bit underdeveloped compared to the similarities he enthusiastically describes. Furthermore, his acknowledgement of many Taiwanese citizens’ skepticism about the universal value of democracy stands out as a fact worth recognizing. Finally, the relatively long-term survival of the semi-liberalized Nationalist government of the 1980s, which — despite what Chu implies — was unexpectedly pushed towards democratization far more quickly than they would have otherwise preferred, indicates that the current PRC status quo may persist and be relatively successful for some time to come.

Overall, the various contributed articles were sprinkled with occasional valuable clarifications and insights but also put forth many claims that had not been rigorously evaluated. I honestly doubt that most US officials — the ones that bother to read some of this book themselves — will come away with solid conclusions about China and its future direction in regards to political reform. Occasional flashes of optimism appear to be strongly tempered by multiple assertions that the party-state is consolidating power and attempting to strengthen recent traditions of governance rather than move in new directions that might prove more exciting to Americans. But since that’s not the answer that this book’s proposed audience wants to hear — not strong enough to support either pro-China or anti-China interests within the US government — I’m sure that money will still be spent researching China’s future liberal democratization for decades to come, right on up to the unlikely event in which that actually happens.

In both traditional and modern Chinese society there are a number of significant social structures that are mandatory — i.e. you can’t opt out of them — and hierarchical in nature, most critically the family and the state (also class, but I won’t get into that here). Indeed these two are often conflated in official ideologies, where the patriarchal family serves as a metaphor and model for the relations between a ruler and his subjects.

However, there is another set of social structures which work differently. These take the form of voluntary organizations that are supposedly egalitarian and democratic, where members have chosen to join and decisions are reached by consensus or at least by consulting with members. These organizations take several different forms — peasant mutual aid societies (partially co-opted by the state in contemporary 互助组), agricultural cooperatives, guilds, native place associations, certain religious sects, secret societies, organized crime, political parties, intellectual study groups, nationalist or reformist groups, peasant rebellions, unions, some NGOs, certain local militias, etc. — but they all operate largely outside or parallel to traditional hierarchies, offering alternative forms of social organization.

Western scholars are especially enthralled by this “mutual protection” branch of Chinese social organization for two important reasons. First, they see these groups as an important source of resistance to the hierarchical demands of family, state, and class. If a local official is demanding excessive taxes from the peasants, a society might form to resist these demands and eventually even mobilize to further the peasants’ interests. Secondly, as voluntary, non-state organizations, Westerners like to hope that these organizations — combined into a hodge-podge of competing interests along with the family, state, and other social structures — might be that magical thing called “civil society,” something that we suspect might be important for sustainable democratic government.

For my current research interests, I find it much more interesting that this “mutual protection” branch of traditional social organization underlies the both the Nationalist and Communist parties, which for most of their early histories operated as a secret societies of mutual protection for people who might be killed at any time by Qing, Nationalist, Japanese, Communist, or puppet government forces (or purged by their own side). This is especially true, I think, within early security forces who worked alongside and borrowed ideas from criminal brotherhoods like the Green Gang and traditional Chinese scholarly societies and religious sects (along with, of course, European fascism and socialism). Sun Yatsen had a huge admiration for the Taiping founder and peasant rebel leader Hong Xiuquan. Chiang Kaishek apparently liked speaking of the Nationalist secret service as if they were heroes from popular martial arts novels, outlawed men of virtue banding together and adopting a bandit lifestyle to save the kingdom from a dire fate. The Nationalist “blue shirts” from the Society for Vigorous Practice (力行社) operated a kind of secret freemasonry built on the principles of traditional secret societies.

However, and this is what I hope to study in my first project, almost all of these traditional (and contemporary) forms of organization in the “mutual protection” model were built on the foundation of a fictional brotherhood created among male peers. The Taiping were considered somewhat revolutionary, in fact, partially because they allowed women into military and political roles, such as Hong Xiuquan’s sister Hong Xuanqiao. But in Shanghai and other areas between 1900-1950, women began taking active roles in these early security and secret service organizations, in effect making these traditional secret brotherhoods “go co-ed”, which must have created interesting social tensions for everyone involved. So I’m going to be digging into scholarly literature from and about the period looking to see how these tensions played out and what they tell us about the larger changes taking place in Chinese society as a whole.

I’m currently reading Leslie Chang‘s terrific Factory Girls, which describes the emotional aftermath of such a confrontation perfectly. She’s on a “black” illegal bus from Guangzhou to Dongguan when the driver stops and demands everybody get off, long before reaching their destination. After an angry confrontation, she realizes she is powerless to earn justice for herself or the other passengers, even after playing the “foreigner card” and writes:

I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of all the young women I knew who lived here and how every single one of them had been cheated, abused, and yelled at… There was no recourse but tears and fury at your own impotence. In a confrontation, everything boiled down instantly to brute force, and a woman would always lose. I had money, and with money I could by my way to comfort and safety. They didn’t have that.

And yet there were also people who were kind… You had to focus on that or you would never survive.

A great, accurate passage.

The only thing I would add is that a single foreigner — if you can be readily identified as such — always loses these confrontations too, even if they are male. Groups of foreigners also lose if Chinese crowds get involved.

My friend Siragan told me a story about how he was riding his bike when he was bumped by a car full of young Chinese businessmen illegally driving in the bike lane. They laughed and he yelled at them, so they jumped out and accosted him on the street. He was alarmed so he went to the local police station. The businessmen followed him and accused him of various things in front of the police. Eventually the police drove him out to a vacant lot really far away, forced him to apologize to the businessmen — who were clearly connected to someone powerful, most likely the sons of someone rich or an official — and then left him there with his bike, forcing him to bike all the way back into the city center, where he lived.

Peter Hessler describes a classic crowd confrontation at the end of River Town, an account of his Peace Corps experiences in central China. He and some of his other Western friends are goofing around in a part of the city they hadn’t really spent time in before, making a spectacle of themselves as foreigners. An older Chinese man directs some vague insults at them — a near inescapable aspect of being a foreigner and something that can be hard to stomach after a long, unbroken period of time in China — so Peter escalates by tossing back some sarcasm about “foreign devils” and the like, effectively demanding what he considers to be fair treatment, provoked (I imagine) by months of minor slights and alienation. A crowd of Chinese onlookers forms, boxing Peter and his friends in. Things begin looking dangerous, since onlookers can instantly become a mob. They struggle to break out of the circle and run.

I found that passage of River Town really powerful, because it brought to mind a confrontation I experienced in high school. While traveling in an unfamiliar city (perhaps soon after we arrived in Beijing?), our gaggle of foreign students stopped in an urban city park for a brief respite. While wandering around we found a place where you could rent motorized children’s vehicles — like Chinese Power Wheels cars — and a bunch of students jumped in to try it. Our program directors and tour guides were not nearby. While tooling around in these cars, one student decided to sit on the hood of a car while another student drove it. This turned out to be too much for the little car and its engine died. The man renting the vehicle angrily demanded a bunch of money to replace it. As a group, the students reacted slowly to the developing confrontation, being confused and uncertain. A crowd of onlookers formed. Things started looking mob-like. Eventually, one of the Chinese-American students acted very conciliatory and gave the man the money he wanted. We broke out and walked quickly away. As we were leaving, one of the students remarked that the man had already gotten the little car running again.

I’m not entirely sure yet what to conclude from these experiences, both the ones I’ve experienced personally and the vicarious ones I’ve read about. There’s something here about Westerners expecting and occasionally demanding personal justice while in China and that expectation slowly being undermined and occasionally running head-on into these incidents of confrontation. And the other part goes: you nearly always lose these confrontations, so you need to find an alternative way of dealing with perceived injustices, both the minor, daily slights and the bigger incidents.

I only wish I knew what that was.

As she walked us through the text, we were getting to some of the thornier sentences and I noticed a couple of my classmates struggling with translating certain sections into English. Honestly, I think part of the problem was that the intent of those sections was totally opaque to people who weren’t necessarily thinking about the context.

The most confusing passage was probably:

任何一方都不准备代表任何第三方进行谈判，也不准备同对方达成针对其他国家的协议或谅解。
Neither side is prepared to negotiate on behalf of any third party, or prepared to reach an agreement or understanding directed against another nation.

What does that mean?

Well, the first phrase seems pretty clearly about Taiwan. The US wanted to make it very clear that their recognition of China did not equal a Taiwanese surrender and that the US did not speak for Taiwan and was not prepared to negotiate on Taiwan’s behalf. Indeed, the US would use the excuse of “preserving economic relations” with Taiwan to continue to sell the ROC arms up to the present day.

The second phrase seems to be about the Soviet Union, primarily. The Cold War was still brewing, despite America’s withdrawal from Vietnam and, to avoid unnecessary provocation of the USSR, both China and the US wanted to emphasize that they were not publicly declaring an anti-Soviet alliance. Sure, both parties wanted Moscow to be worried about the warming of Sino-American ties — this was after the Sino-Soviet split and the border skirmishes of 1969 — but not worried enough to totally freak out and make the Cold War into a hot one.