Take two: The Shortest History of China, Linda Jaivin

For a full review, see my Patreon. 

This book came from Dymocks in Broadway Shopping Centre, where I went while doing grocery shopping during lockdown. Most bookshops in Sydney are closed for browsing, so I went to the best option available. The sales clerk said he wanted to read this book, having seen it discussed on a Tv program. I said that I’d tried a different history of China and had found it wanting, and that I hoped Jaivin’s book would avoid the usual way of chronicling the various tiresome dynasties. 

Take two: China; A History in Objects, Jessica Harrison-Hall

For a full review see my Patreon. 

I bought this book at Abbey’s in the CBD at the same time as the Wagner book and the one on the Emperor Augustus. A book with a title like this needs little introduction, so I’ll be brief. One thing to note about this book is the carefulness of the commentary regarding the CCP. I suspect that this kind of soft diplomacy is institutional – the book was produced by the British Museum – in order to secure the future cooperation of authorities in China.

A free kick given to the CCP by the loony left

It seemed as though people were so intent on overthrowing the government that they’d do without representative democracy, the very thing that allows them to comment so vocally on social media. A fairly toothless response by the Chinese government to the feds’ abrogation of Victoria’s ‘Belt and Road’ agreement with the CCP was greeted by a round of catcalls from the gallery. 

China’s decision to suspend talks that most people on social media never knew existed made the news on Thursday and the crowing was audible across town. But if you were Chinese such behaviour would be simply impossible because the CCP monitors Chinese social media and suppresses activity of which it disapproves. People’s understanding of realities that govern the lives of millions of people are blanketed by a myopic hunger for revenge on an administration whose election – in mid-2019 – is still regretted by a healthy section of the community.

You find all sorts of strange ideas if you spend any amount of time watching what passes for debate these days. The word “debate” must be used loosely as there is no order in the proceedings such as you find, for example, in federal Parliament. One person makes a statement and another person jumps in to rubbish it in a way that makes discussion impossible. Seasoned journalists who engage in this environment occasionally and openly celebrate the ability to block people from seeing what they write.

The Communist Party of China, meanwhile, presses on with its long-term program of shutting down all debate that it itself does not want. It has used its consulates in Australian cities to harass advertisers of local Chinese language newspapers who still pay for ads, when the Party takes exception to a story that runs. Its chosen delegates open up their own newspapers and run the Party line, making sure that the message from Beijing is communicated widely. It makes life difficult for Australian journalists working in China, and sometimes these individuals choose to leave the country rather than risk incarceration. Books full of their thoughts have just been published in Australia. ‘The Truth About China’ by Bill Birtles can be bought now in bookshops and at Amazon. There’s also ‘The Beijing Bureau’ written by a number of foreign correspondents.

So it’s not that there’s no information, it’s just that people refuse to look. Yet they still spout their vague opinions criticising a government that has been forced to negotiate a tortuous path by the CCP. The Belt and Road initiative was just the latest in an ongoing financial relationship that includes the sale of multiple assets to Chinese companies. And remember that each of these concerns must have a senior executive who is a Party member, so that Party discipline is maintained along the entire value chain.

About four years ago I was working on a story that never got published. The story was about Asian investment in Australian agriculture. In the process of researching the article I found a number of different plays that were part of the continuing economic relationship between China and Australia. Here are the non-land plays worth over $100 million.

Here are the land plays worth over $100 million.

The non-land plays worth under $100 million:

The land plays worth under $100 million:

And finally the smaller plays, worth under $20 million:

You can see from looking at these tables that the biggest investor at the time – my research was mainly conducted at the end of 2017 – was China. That might’ve changed in the intervening years but China will still be a major player in Australian agriculture today. What the Twittersphere ignores is the fact that the government here still allows Chinese companies to buy assets in Australia – despite the fact that the reverse is impossible. An Australian company that wanted to buy, say, a shipping port on China’s eastern seaboard, would not be allowed to complete the transaction.

When it comes to China, two sets of rules apply. China wants to profit from the global consensus but it wants to do so on its own terms. For its companies and for its government there is one set of rules. For everyone else there is another set of rules. The loony left supports this settlement because it is solely focused on the small picture. In its eagerness to remove the Morrison government from power it ignores the facts and sticks to a line the Party applauds because it is in its interest to see the Liberal Party – which has so warmly welcomed Chinese ownership of Australian assets – criticised. Twitter is doing the Party’s work for it.

Book review: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Jonathan Clements (2004)

I’ve lost all recollection of how this book came to be in my collection, but it’s been there for a good long while – from memory, at least 10 years. It came out of a small UK press and seems not to have been talked about much, which strikes me as like a wasted opportunity. This is not only a thrilling (though, like most nonfiction, complex) work of history, it’s also topical.

Complexity can of course put some people off though what might attract readers are the pirates and the smugglers. The story is set on the coast of China, in Taiwan, and in Japan in the 17th century. Dutch traders headquartered at Batavia (now Jakarta) engineered deals through their operatives in northeast Asia and often these turned into skirmishes with Coxinga’s father, a pirate-turned-admiral named Iquan. Coxinga’s mother was a Japanese woman but Iquan later married a Chinese woman who lived at his base in Amoy (Xiamen).

If this sounds complicated it’s not surprising as you are dealing with four cultures (counting the Taiwanese, closely related to Pacific islanders) each with different histories and priorities. It’s however rarely daunting as the style used for the conveyance is at the same time flexible and robust, though at points in the narrative you feel things get a little slippery – which seems fitting given the nature of the story being told.

Since derring-do is so popular these days, perhaps over-the-top TV viewers might want to sample real stories of sorties and escapades, of fortunes stolen and kidnappings, of epic battles and men clad in iron. On top of this kind of relatively predictable scenario – predictable at least in terms of the prosaic motives that seem to drive people, in a way that is much the same as in narco-thrillers – you also get access to solid history.

Here things are fortunately less predictable – depending on your personality, of course; some people like things black-and-white, others prefer greys of different shades (the story of Coxinga’s life is most definitely of the latter brand) – but I’m not sure Clements always makes the most of his material. Perhaps he could have used more that can be found in ancillary records, such as those belonging to the Dutch East India Company, or in China’s or Taiwan’s historical archives.

Why you might want to read Clement’s book, if you are not all that interested in history, would rest with the fact of China’s current standing in the world and the way it positions itself vis-à-vis the West. As Taiwan forms a prominent element in the drama, too, the story of Coxinga has contemporary echoes; it was only with the Qing that Taiwan was brought politically into China’s orbit, so its being considered by some to be “part of” China is a relatively recent innovation.

As for Iquan, how he earned his commission from Beijing might furnish material for a TV drama, but it’s all true (as Shakespeare said of his play ‘Henry VIII’). While the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) did have a naval presence for part of its reign, it shut down trade apart from Macao, so Iquan’s position as admiral was complicated, as he had financial interests, prior to accepting the posting, that depended on overseas trade. He also kept up good relations with men employed by the Dutch East India Company. If you were to write Iquan’s story today you would have a drug dealer turn into a narcotics policeman.

The Manchus would restrict trade even more radically once they took control. Coxinga, raised in early childhood in Japan, was a very different kind of man from his father. He was educated, steadfast, and loyal to the Ming Dynasty, embodying the Confucian ideal in a way that the arriviste Iquan couldn’t manage to do. The two men expressed their patriotism in different ways.

This difference providing a dramatic hinge upon which the story, to a degree, depends, but the interest inherent in the book isn’t limited to armed conflict alone. It’s actually quite a complex story about the nature of good governance. Cruelty appears often, allied with such ideas as patrimony and justice, but there is little space given to other ideas – love or beauty are absent beyond possessiveness – and so while it is comprehensive as far as the records consulted allow, in a sense the book has a limited scope. Justice without love or beauty is a fragile thing.

Book review: A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World, Rana Mitter (2004)

This Oxford University Press publication was bought at the Co-op Bookstore at Sydney Uni, where I worked from 2003 to 2009. It was bought on sale. A sticker on it shows a date (August 2006, which probably indicates when it was put on the shelf) and a price of $14.95. It was later remaindered for $9. Such an index of success; the author was born in India, but is British, and works at Oxford University.

His wonderful book takes a longer view of Chinese history in the 20th century, launching its narrative in 1919 when there was an incident of some renown in China – the May Fourth Movement began at this point in time – and then it looks at the country’s struggle to accommodate modernity. The Qing dynasty had collapsed in 1911 and there was subsequently a power vacuum that various actors attempted to fill, the Communists being one of them.

It’s salutary to note that the CCP wasn’t by any means destined to win that struggle but Mitter doesn’t just concern himself with politics and also looks at such things as the status of women, and private enterprise. Nevertheless, politics was important as it linked with people’s identities. The incident in question happened as a result of simmering tensions between Chinese people and foreign nations that operated in coastal settlements (such as Shanghai), but it exploded violently after an international meeting in Paris decided, following WWI, to give the German concessions to Japan. Mostly involving students, the incident resulted in no deaths but one man was badly beaten with a metal object and a house was burned down.

In China the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s was an aspirational time, with publications circulating ideas associated with modernity – such things as freedom, equality, democracy, science, and the nation – at least among the part of the community that was literate. Universities attracted students, who formed communities in surrounding suburbs, both in Shanghai and in Beijing. These debates were mainly urban in nature until, later on, the Communists changed the nature of the debate by bringing into it the rural poor.

The war against Japan, which started in 1937, changed the tone of proceedings, and debate became more polarised, even acrimonious. Now, it wasn’t possible to talk publicly about things in the same way that it had been even a few years before, when debates had been relatively free.

Chinese people associated with the movement didn’t restrict their purview to countries such as the USA, Britain, and the newly formed USSR. At least as far as they might be models to follow, countries such as Hungary and Turkey offered more interesting examples of how to embrace modernity. Both of those countries came into existence as a result of WWI and their experiences and the policies of their political parties formed part of the context for discussions in China about how to change things to “save” China, which implied protecting it from foreign interference. This often involved talking about how to deal with China’s heritage, including Confucianism. Was it an asset or a liability? What to keep? What to reject? How to deal with a term like “socialism”? How, even, to translate it?

It’s worth noting also that socialism was a policy also of the Nationalists and so the way that people’s lives could be improved sat at the forefront of the minds of most intellectuals and other people, many of whom were animated by the ideas they retailed in. This, regardless of which party or group they were allied with. It’s also worth noting that the memory of the May Fourth Movement remained strong and was leveraged by the CCP in an effort to create cohesion in the community, though the free-thinking that initially characterised it was, ultimately, discouraged by the Party. As Mitter says of the Cultural Revolution, it “wanted the technology, but not the means of creating the knowledge that went with it”. This is still mainly the case in China today.

The Cultural Revolution, like the Qing, wished the end results of technological modernity, but to fit them into a frame in which they were constructed as purely Chinese products. Yet the xenophobia (expressed as anti-imperialism, but in fact violent anti-foreignism) meant that this was always a well that would run dry eventually: the techniques that had been learned from the west before 1949 and then the Soviets until 1960 could be adapted to Chinese circumstances to a certain point, but the desire simultaneously to create a Chinese knowledge base drawing on western modernity without any foreign input, and furthermore condemning any association with foreign knowledge (Soviet or western), led to a dead end of spectacular proportions.

Millions of people died because the internationalism that had characterised the May Fourth Movement was jettisoned even as, in an attempt to shore up power, Mao celebrated its dead figureheads.

The interplay of economic factors, geopolitical ones, and ideas animates Mitter’s narrative. At different points in it, ideas associated with the May Fourth Movement add drama through historical personages, the men and women who held them and who often expressed them in publications. How ideas themselves are reified constitutes a key point the book tries to make. Ideas are appropriated by people – for example by Party cadres – and are used to achieve specific ends. So while internationalism returned to China in the 1980s, in 1989 the search for more political openness in the form of democracy would be bloodily crushed.

A paradox seems to lie at the heart of China. Nationalism gave birth to it as a modern country but an unwillingness to embrace ideas from outside – an unwillingness that is rooted in the very idea of the nation – makes it hard for the leadership to change direction. Unless the outside idea is in the interests of the Party. So a narrow point of view manacles China's future. And bitterness inculcated by the effort to overcome the humiliations of the 19th and 20th centuries has led the CCP to try to do to other countries what it had done to its internal opponents during the Cultural Revolution. Again, nationalism is at the heart of this dynamic: it is "us" versus "them".

Mitter also suggests that in the absence of the spirit of the May Fourth Movement, China risks a return to backwardness, like the Qing. He offers advice to China’s leaders, suggesting embracing pluralism, wisely pointing to Taiwan as an example of an ethnic Chinese country that went – in the space of one generation – from dictatorship to democracy. Let’s hope the Party follows their lead but in the years since the book was published there have been few indications of a willingness on its part to do so, although Chinese people do discuss politics among themselves (even if they mostly keep their discussions off social media) and the diaspora grows larger every year, sending new ideas back home.

One man’s view of ‘Sydney Today’, a Chinese-language news website

The following interview with a Chinese-born Australian was made on 30 November 2017. I got it transcribed in October last year and am publishing it today. The subject of the interview is ‘Sydney Today’, a Chinese-language news website delivering news to the community in Australia and, presumably, wherever people who can read Chinese are based. I have changed the name of my interlocutor. 

Editing this for publication it struck me how often, when I had paraphrased what I had been told, I was faced with a “No”. But this dynamic seems to me to be par for the course in the public sphere. We seem to have an urge to say “No” hard-coded into our DNA.

MdS: So, do you work in Australia, are you a student? How did you get to be in Australia?

Mark: I am an Australian citizen now. But 10 years ago, I came here to study and, after fulfilling the criteria of the residency, I applied for the visa and also, I got the Australian citizenship a few years ago.

MdS: Sydney Today is one of the most popular media outlets in Australia. It’s a website only, right, they don’t publish a printed version?

Mark: That’s right. Because Sydney Today has their own website and also Sydney Today has their own official account with WeChat and WeChat is the most popular socialising network-type one just like a popular Facebook, is for Australians. For the Chinese people who live in Australia, and if they want to read the news in their own language, normally they just get on the WeChat and just read the articles from Sydney Today.

MdS: So, Sydney Today is more popular than, for example, New Express Daily or Sing Tao?

Mark: So, we have Sydney Today, we also have Australian Chinese Daily and we also have, I think it’s called, Australia Mailer or Australia Chinese Mailer. So, they are about the three of our major media companies in Sydney. The Australian Chinese News Daily, that used to be one of the most popular media companies because that newspaper it was, well, popular but nowadays everybody is reading the news from smartphones. Nobody really purchases the paper-based news anymore so, the Australian Chinese Daily, that company is getting less popular [compared to] Sydney Today.

MdS: Right. Do you think that especially young people rely on Sydney Today, or is it old people as well?

Mark: Actually, it’s a mixture of young and old. For the older people, they can only read the news in Chinese, for the older people who don’t speak English, and then the Sydney Today has many, many interesting articles. For the young people in Australia, they have a good education, they have a good English knowledge and they are able to read the news in both language but, somehow, the news from [unclear] always quite interesting so, it trigger people’s interest to read it.

MdS: Hm. Do you know how long Sydney Today has been operating in Australia?

Mark: I am not sure because I use Facebook more often than WeChat, but normally the Sydney Today spend their major energy on their WeChat official account. But I think it should be six years? That’s just my random guessing. It’s getting so popular now.

MdS: I understand, because of the conversations that I used to have with [my friend], I understand that the Chinese government is always monitoring the activities of Chinese language publications in Australia. Is the same true of Sydney Today?

Mark: No, because Sydney Today is based in Sydney. According to my understanding, as long as the articles [unclear]

MdS: Sorry, I can’t hear you.

Mark: I am saying, my understanding is, because Sydney Today is a Sydney-based media company, so I don’t think there is anything to do with the Chinese government.

MdS: Right, okay. How would you describe Sydney Today’s attitude towards politics? What sort of approach does it take? Is it more favouring the Labour Party or the Liberal Party or is it both, or it doesn’t matter?

Mark: Actually, I think it doesn’t matter because Sydney Today, I read a couple of articles from Sydney Today, what they do is, when there is news from the major Australian media platforms, they just translate it into Chinese, and publish into their platform. So, they don’t have a clear obvious stance of a preferred opinion, they just translate news from the local Australian media company. Translate the news to Chinese and repost on the Sydney Today media platform. So, normally, they don’t write their own news, they normally just translate it.

MdS: Yeah, but they change the – they don’t just publish exact translations, they change the story, especially at the beginning of the story, to make it more interesting for a Chinese reader, right?

Mark: That is right, and that is what I am really concerning about.

MdS: Okay. For example?

Mark: We are only talking about Sydney Today, this media company, right? We are not talking about Chinese language-based media in general, so, you only want to talk about this specific company, Sydney Today, right?

MdS: [Yes].

Mark: Hm, let me think. I think it … For example, I’m not sure if that article is translated – it's from Sydney Today, but I’m quite sure it is from a Chinese-based company and this is very common behaviour among the Chinese language-based media company. So, when they translate a Australian news into Chinese language, they do not really change the content quite a lot, however, they change the title of news quite a lot to attract the readers.

MdS: Yeah, that’s right.

Mark: So, for example, I think before the – April there was a long weekend, right? I mean, there was a public holiday in April. So, the local news says, the police are targeting the drivers who are speeding, targeting the drivers who drive with negligence. Then there was a Chinese platform – I think maybe from Sydney Today, or maybe it’s from Australian Chinese Mailer, another Chinese language-based media company. So, they put a title like – I think the title was something like this: the traffic authority want you to cry over the weekend, or something. I’m sorry, I can’t really recall how they – the exact title.

Basically, they are writing something really, really bizarre to get your attention and so the reader will think, oh, what’s going on? Then when they read the news, actually it is very standard news.

MdS: Yeah. So, would you – I mean, the word I’m thinking of is, sensationalism. Is that an accurate word?

Mark: Actually no, I think I would say the title they make for the reader is very stimulating or something, so, they want to stimulate your interest, get your interest. After you read the entire article and realise, oh, see the title is saying something very, very shocking, but after you read the entire content of the news, you realise it’s nothing extraordinary.

MdS: Right. So, you think that they’re not honest about the use of headlines?

Mark: The use of what?

MdS: Headlines, the titles.

Mark: That’s right. Yes, you are quite right and it is quite common among the official account in WeChat. So, they want to attract the readers as much as possible and once they attract a large amount of readers, and they have a very good advantage to dealing with – they’re advertisements for a company. Because they get paid by how many readers could follow their official account.

MdS: Yeah. We call this type of story, clickbait. Have you heard that term before?

Mark: Yeah, I think so, click view.

MdS: Clickbait. We call it clickbait.

Mark: Oh, I see.

MdS: So, it’s a bait – it’s like when you go fishing and you put bait on your hook, and you want someone – you want a fish to get your hook, so you have to put bait on the hook. So, it’s called clickbait, to get people to click.

Mark: Oh, yeah, that’s right.

MdS: Yeah. So, do you think that this is different from other Chinese language media in Australia?

Mark: It really depends. I think for a large Chinese language–based media company, they use this kind of trick way too often, way too often. Yeah, so, what they do is, they write a really shocking – they write a headline to draw your attention and then the content of the article is quite – it’s less extraordinary. That is very common among Chinese language–based media company.

MdS: So, not just Sydney Today but other companies as well?

Mark: Oh, of course, of course. I think Sydney Today use this kind of trick quite moderately, but there are some other Chinese language–based media company, they overly use this kind of trick and it’s getting really, really annoying nowadays.

MdS: Hm. Yeah. But people continue to click, I guess people – even though they think that the media organisation has a bad reputation, they still continue to click, right?

Mark: That’s right, and the reason why the media company with the bad reputation could still get enough reader because, in Sydney, we only have three or four major Chinese language–based media company. So, of course, from these three or four companies, we don’t really have other choice.

MdS: So, there’s a big appetite for Chinese language–based media in Australia, is that right?

Mark: Sorry, would you ask that again? You say there is a big advertisement, right?

MdS: Big appetite. There’s a lot of demand for Chinese language media in Australia.

Mark: Yes. Also, because the Chinese language is different from the English language, culturally and linguistically. If some Chinese editor could have played with the word a little bit, for the article to translate into Chinese could be 100 times more interesting. If you’re going to change the content a lot, if you play with language, it could enhance the flavour, the attraction of the article.

MdS: So, what is your main complaint about Sydney Today? What is it mainly that you don’t like about it?

Mark: Let me see. The reason why I don’t like about it is about the contradiction, because you see the Sydney Today reports the article from an Australasian for families [of the] Asian. That article is talking about the link between the same-sex marriage and the Safe School Program. So, this article is promoting and calling for all the Chinese people to vote ‘No’ against the same-sex marriage, claiming that if we allow the same-sex marriage to be legalised, our children will – the future of our children will be jeopardised because the school will be forced to carry out the content of the same-sex material in the school curriculum.

Which is a very, very – I mean, the way how they present the fact, is very distorted and very misleading. That’s why, I think – so such a very unreliable article. Sydney Today should use its discretion: should I report it or not. Because that article itself is very clearly unreliable.

MdS: Yeah, that’s right. Even if the readership knows that it’s unreliable, they continue to click. I think that Sydney Today knows that people have a big appetite for sensational headlines and so they are giving people what they want.

Mark: Yes, because the title of that article is attractive enough to let the Chinese reader to click their fingers, to click that article, to read the entire article.

MdS: Yeah, but it’s not the only problem you have with Sydney Today, is it? Same-sex marriage is not the only thing that you don’t like about Sydney Today. Is that right?

Mark: Yes, and also, I do not exactly like the way how Sydney Today write the advertisements for their clients. For example, I’m not sure if it’s because I have never dealt with Sydney Today as a client, but my understanding is if you are – for example, if you are a restaurant owner, and if you want your restaurant name to appear on the Sydney Today website, you can pay them the fee for the listing, so they could put your restaurant name on the website and write a story about the restaurant, as a promotion. There was an article, it’s also – it’s not written by Sydney Today, but it is reposted by Sydney Today, word by word.

MdS: Right.

Mark: So, I think it's a very small worry - I believe it’s a worry. So, there was an article about this restaurant. The article claim that the owner of the restaurant travels thousands of kilometres across half of the entire China, to look for some good ingredients for the hot pot – you know what is hot pot?

MdS: Yeah.

Mark: It’s kind of the Chinese cuisine, right, it’s more spicy, puts different foods into the boiling water with some really good ingredients. Basically, this article write a very sensational story about how this restaurant owner travels half of China – you understand that China’s a very huge – travelled half of China, so it’s a very big thing, to look for very special ingredients to make their very special cuisine and once you go to the restaurant, and eat, you will be so satisfied, after you eat a meal, you also want to lick the remaining food on your bowl or something.

So, basically, this article is really, really sensational and if we use our common sense, this article itself is a lie. Because if you want to study how to make the cuisine in a professional way, you should go to the local school or you look for the master chef from local. You do not travel that much just to study the art of food, because if you travel to different regions, and they have the different idea about how food could be prepared, it will never work in that way. But, anyway, that article is really sensational, really stimulating. And Sydney Today repost this article on its website.

MdS: Hm. Right.

Mark: So, basically, I believe it’s a very normal restaurant with a very normal owner. However, somehow, they write a entire large story about it and, if we use our common sense, and it looks like the story itself wouldn’t be that true.

MdS: Yeah, but it seems like they’re not honest, Sydney Today. The way that they treat information, everything is designed to get profit, I think that’s the main aim. Is that right, would you agree with that?

Mark: Yes, yes. Because on one hand, the media company, like Sydney Today, are using a very intriguing, stimulating headline to get the attention from the reader, so reader will be intrigued to read the entire article. On the other hand, I think that the reader has something themselves to be blamed, because nowadays, the reader has a very little interest in reading good quality articles, so they are only interested into reading some interesting, intriguing, stimulating article. I think both parties, the reader and the media company, both of the parties need to be blamed somehow.

MdS: Right, yeah, I understand what you’re saying. So, there’s responsibility on both sides.

Mark: Yes. Actually, [our friend] forwarded me her website, so she also has a website, and her website also do some advertisement for restaurants, and I really like the [unclear] on the website. The way how she does the advertisements. So, she wrote a very beautiful story about a restaurant, it’s nothing extraordinary, nothing unreliable, it’s just very comfortable to read. There is nothing beyond the truth. But, unfortunately, nowadays, few readers are willing to be patient – sit and enjoy reading the good quality articles, and nowadays, I would say, the readers’ tastes are getting very different.

MdS: Right, yeah. I understand what you’re saying. I think that it’s difficult for all media companies to make a profit and I think that – especially with .. the value that you can capture from online advertising is going down because the number of potential stories that you can advertise on is increasing. So, the pay-per-view, when the reader views the ad, that’s one view, so the amount of money that the advertiser can get for each view is going down, so they have to get more views.

Mark: That’s right. I am interested in a matter of conversation, there was a idea just flashed into my head. You know, because nowadays, we have smartphones and we have the laptop, and it’s so handy to get the news from anywhere, from our Facebook, and our WeChat, our online platform is flooded with different news and the people – but the news stories, articles, I think a lot of these are coming [I say] more [then] before, right, but we still have 24 hours a day. So, we only have the same amount of time as before but now we are dealing with 10 times, or even 100 times, more information from the internet.

So, nowadays, I would say that readers are very, very impatient. So, they are going to read the news, if they don’t get interested into the first 10 seconds, then they are going to move on to the next article until they find something could get their interest up after 15 seconds of reading. That’s why they have to – I think the media companies are forced to make their headlines very eyeball-grabbing, very attractive.

MdS: Yeah, it’s an attention economy. The media is working within the attention economy so you have to get people’s attention, otherwise you can’t do anything. You’ve got to get people to read your stories.

Mark: Yeah, that’s why and not only they have to get the attention of the readers, but also, they have to get the attention of the readers within the first 10 or 15 seconds of reading, because nowadays, readers are getting impatient if they do not get interested in the first 10 seconds, then they move on. You see, in the past, we are only dealing with very limited number of the information, but we have the patience of reading the entire article, digest and then make the judgment of how good or bad it is. But nowadays, these readers don’t really read through or think a lot about the articles. They just want to [unclear] articles in a shallow way and they want to read anything that could interest them in the first few seconds.

MdS: Yeah. On the issue of the same-sex marriage survey that the government ran, the seat of Bennelong, which is where a lot of Chinese people live, actually voted …

Mark: Seat of Bennelong, which suburb is it close to?

MdS: Epping.

Mark: Oh, I see.

MdS: Yeah, so, Bennelong is a seat where a lot of Chinese people live and Bennelong actually voted, ‘No’. I think it was 50.2 per cent voted against the same-sex marriage plebiscite.

Mark: Yeah, that is very disappointing but that is very predictable because Chinese people don’t really have a strong voice against the gay and the lesbian. However, they believe that if we have a large population of gay and lesbians, their children could be influenced on their sexuality. Which is so far from the truth because, actually, the people’s sexuality is with our genes, right, it’s not something that could be influenced.

But there are many, many Chinese residents here, they believe if their children are spending too much time with gays and the lesbian people or if the Safe School program runs in their children’s schools, then their children will be taught to be gay and lesbian, will be induced to [unclear] the sexuality, which is very, very far from the truth. Because, actually, I believe the Safe Schools Program is not promoting the gay and lesbian behaviour, it’s only promoting the equality, the way how we respect the gays and the lesbians, not the gay and the lesbian behaviour. So, we are promoting equality and respect, mutual respect, not the sexuality and the sex itself.

However, some Chinese media companies, they just change the word, play with the word, and twist meaning of the fact and then they induce the Chinese readers to believe that if we have the same-sex marriage, the Safe School Program will be pushed through our schools in Australia, and then their children is going to have – spend a lot of time to discuss gay and lesbian issues in their school, and then their sexuality might be influenced. So, this is a idea that the Chinese media companies try to deliver which is very misleading.

MdS: Yeah. Okay.

Mark: Okay. Do you have any other questions?

MdS: Not really. I think we’ve covered everything, but I think that the main – that was the main thing that you were worried about, is that particular issue, but it’s not just that issue, it’s other things too. Sydney Today is twisting the truth, especially in the headlines, in order to get attention in the media space.

Mark: Yes, but to be honest, because yesterday, we were asked about how we inform conversation today, that’s why I spent some time to go through the Sydney Today’s website, so I was trying to find some good examples for you, for you to write the article. But actually, I did not find a lot of the very typical examples to have, because most of the reader read that article, actually it’s not written by Sydney Today but it has been reposted by Sydney Today. So, the writer is from other Chinese language–based media company.

But, anyway, once Sydney Today reposts it, I believe, they should have the responsibility of checking whether or not they should repost it or not. So, that’s why I no longer spend enough time to read the articles from these Chinese language–based websites and also, sometimes if I see very interesting, very intriguing headlines, and I try to control myself, I told myself, don’t read it, because if I read it, I will be wasting my time to processing this information. So, for me, it’s about self-control, because I have read a lot of articles like this: it’s a very ordinary fact, however the way how they present it is very extraordinary.

MdS: Yeah. I understand. Okay. Well I’ll turn this off.

What are the Hong Kong protesters asking for?

For the past three months protesters have been taking to the streets in Hong Kong to show their unhappiness over actions taken by the Chinese government. The events were sparked by an attempt by the CCP to introduce a law enabling the Party to extradite people from Hong Kong (which has a different legal system to the mainland) to face trial in China proper. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, had to announce, as a result of the displays of outrage, that the law would not be introduced at that time.

But the protesters are now asking for more than just that the CCP drop an unpopular law, as this sign shows.

I’ll list the demands that the protesters now have but first I think we need to establish the legitimacy of this photo. It was taken, on Sunday 18 August in Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island, by Sandra Eckersley (on Twitter, @SandraEckersley), an Australian. After asking permission from a protester in the street, she snapped this photo. At the same time, Eckersley asked some other people she knows there if these demands were actually what is being asked for and heard in reply that, “Yes, this is what is being asked for.” I saw the photo on Twitter on Monday 2 September. 

Here are the demands:

1. Complete withdrawal of the extradition law
2. Establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into police behaviour
3. Retraction of 612 “riot” characterisation
4. Unconditional release of all arrested protesters
5. Implementation of dual universal suffrage

The first four of these demands are pretty clear just on the face of it, and without any additional explanation. The protesters want China to give up the Party’s demand that people resident in Hong Kong could be tried on the mainland (item number one). They also want to be able to protest (item number three) without hindrance from the police or any other arm of the government. In addition they want the conduct of the Party in the present case to be the subject of an inquiry (item number two). And the release without charge of people the police have arrested (item number four).

To understand the last of the demands (item number five) most people will require a bit of explanation. In Hong Kong two arms of government are the chief executive and the legislative council. The chief executive is chosen by the Party and the Legco is controlled by the Party. The demand for “dual” universal suffrage means that the protesters want the people of Hong Kong to elected both the chief executive and the legislative council. One person, one vote. I saw a story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation dated 2 September that says the protesters want “full democratic elections”. 

Currently, half of the Legco members are elected by the broader community in five geographical constituencies (Hong Kong Island, Kowloon West, Kowloon East, New Territories West, New Territories East), and half are elected with a limited franchise. The Party, however, largely controls what the Legco does. It has no power that the CCP does not want it to have.

The ABC story also says the protesters want Lam to step down. They don’t like Lam much, and this is clear from the following photo, which was also snapped in Hong Kong by Eckersley (@SandraEckersley).

So, nothing less than the future of the world is at play in the current impasse in Hong Kong. Either the Party moves closer to democracy or else it continues to cement its power more firmly by backtracking further from a settlement that conforms to global expectations. Do the protesters also want to inspire a similar movement in mainland China? The ABC story says they do.

‘Free Hong Kong’ graffiti, Chinatown, Sydney

I snapped this photo (above) yesterday when I was down in Chinatown for yum cha. This was visible at around 1pm on Dixon Street, in the heart of Chinatown. More than half of the street is a pedestrian mall, so wholesale deliverymen bring produce to restaurants that operate there using trolleys like this one, pushing them along the pavement on foot.

It wasn’t surprising for me to see the graffiti here. The day before, in Belmore Park, about five minutes’ walk from this spot to the east, a pro-CCP rally had taken place. Hundreds of protesters were there, and the day before that an anti-CCP rally had taken place in Sydney as well. These rallies can get quite boisterous, they are not at all friendly. The second photo (below) shows the same graffiti on the same ornamental lion but without the people walking in front of it.

It might seem a little incongruous for an Australian to publish a post like this one. Easy to do this when you are protected by centuries of precedent and by institutions that tolerate dissent. But I felt that it is important to do what you can to support the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. Every little bit helps when you have an enemy as powerful and determined as they do. Whoever wrote this slogan evidently thought the same way as me.

I actually have little patience for people who say that it’s not worth talking about these problems because it’s common knowledge that the CCP is corrupt and unaccountable. For Hong Kongers, they are real and not at all abstract. It’s hardly a “truism” to say it if you live there and if you want to decide who makes the laws that govern your life. It goes to the very core of who you are.

(UPDATE 7pm, 19 Aug: The graffiti had been rubbed off by someone using their hand. The chalk was smeared all over the lion's plinth, making a mess.)

The hat lady and her important husband: A China tale

This was too good not to share. It’s a short story but an interesting one for people who are curious about China and how the public sphere works there. Most people will know about the strict controls the Communist Party imposes on online service providers such as social media and news websites, but the public sphere, as this story shows, can function effectively merely given active participation by ordinary people.

The story unfolded in Chongqing, a populous administrative area next-door to Sichuan in central China. On the day in question an expensive, red Porsche driven by a woman wearing a hat and sunglasses hit an undistinguished sedan driven by a man. The resulting encounter between the two people was captured in a video that was widely shared.

The woman and the man got out of their cars and the woman walked up to the man and slapped him across the face. People watching the events unfold were surprised by this tactic but they were even more surprised when the man slapped the woman across the face in return, causing her hat and sunglasses to fly off. She slumped back onto her car. The woman went on to declare, in a voice audible to people in the gathering crowd, “It was my fault, but you can’t arrest me!” In the end the police arrived.

Intrigued, some of the people who saw the video investigated the woman’s identity and found out that she was the wife of the most-senior officer at a local police command. In the face of the woman’s hubris the outcry from people using social media was so intense that her husband’s organisation became alarmed and embarrassed, and he was compelled to resign from his position. A surprising twist was added to the saga when the man whose car had been hit by the sports car publicly apologised for causing trouble.

The first picture, above, is from the video that was taken on the day of the slap. The second photo, below, was unearthed by a citizen intent on finding out more about the Chongqing hat lady.

Book review: The Souls of China, Ian Johnson (2017)

This book provides something like an introduction to religion and culture in China. I gave it a good go but I didn’t find much in the way of a narrative arc and I felt that it was repeating itself past a certain point. The chapters are colourful and interesting on their own terms but the book itself has no single, dominant story to tie it together and to keep you turning the pages. In this sense it was disappointing but from what I read it is clear that Johnson is a worthy chronicler for his chosen subject.

Johnson has a gentle character and this comes out in the journalism that makes up this book. As far as the author’s persona is permitted to be known by the reader, I presume from what transpires that he is himself religious. He is obviously a fluent Chinese speaker and reader, and these skills open doors for him when he wants to get information about the religiosity of the Chinese people. It appears that Johnson is a practicing Christian and he certainly sympathises with people who are devout, regardless of the specific creed they obey.

It is such a shared view of the place of the individual in the world that allows Johnson to extract so many interesting stories about religion in China. He speaks to a large number of people – including Buddhists, Daoists, and Christians – in order to write the book. What is of interest for Westerners is the persistence of religion in China despite the ravages of the bad years, when the Party outlawed any and all religious observance.

The decision of various Chinese people at various times to jettison religion as practiced over millennia because of losses experienced in contests with the West lies at the heart of the temporary demise of religion in the country. But from what Johnson describes, it is clear that the need of the people to have a guide for conduct as well as relief from suffering remain strong motivators for the embrace of religion for contemporary Chinese. As in Japan, religious form is as important for people as the content of whatever texts are used to guide observance. This reliance on form is a particularly Asian phenomenon, it appears to me, and is something that marks out as different the way the Chinese do religion from the way that Westerners normally do it (with some exceptions of course).

There are now probably over 100 million Christians in China and religion is tolerated under a policy that values “intangible cultural heritage”. There are more Protestants than Catholics by far but it is hard to know exactly how many people practice regularly as there is no official count. If you go to a church service in China however you have to provide the local policeman with your name and address.

Books related to religious observance were hidden by the devout during the Cultural Revolution and people now flock to ceremonies. The way that certain types of observance, such as that which is practiced by people who follow the way of the Falun Gong, has survived in the face of official censure, indeed of outright bans, is instructive for people who want to understand Chinese people’s attitude toward such things as mortality and virtue.

The use of marked sticks to tell your fortune, which many Chinese who observe traditional forms of religion still use during ceremonies, hearkens back to the earliest known form of writing in the area that is known now as the heartland of China. In the old days, in prehistory, the shells of turtles and the shoulder bones of oxen would be placed in fire until they cracked. The cracks would them be “read” and the “meaning” would be written on the same artefact, in an effort by religious practitioners to foretell the future. So many aspects of Chinese culture, including fung shue, are predicated on this same need to know what is going to happen. The way that culture and religion and history are intricately intermingled in China means that religion can never be eradicated, regardless of the express aims of the government.

Book review: Red Azalea, Anchee Min (1994)

For this memoir and for her other books the author uses her given name first and her family name last, in opposition to common Chinese practice. It would be an understatement to say that the events in this book are dramatic, but you have to start somewhere and with a work as compelling as this one you have to give credit where it’s due or else you can appear as if you have misunderstood the point of the exercise. On the other hand, every Chinese family has stories to tell of the bad years and there is no reason why Min’s story needs to be unduly celebrated. So the critic is, if you like, faced with something of a dilemma.

Min is a clever writer however and the task of ascribing talent is easily completed. Her story is told often in very short sentences that serve to heighten the suspense the reader feels at different points in the narrative. There is a breathless, urgent quality to the tale that makes it especially compelling.

The story takes the reader initially out of Shanghai, where Min was born into an average family. Her parents had several children and Min is sent to a collective farm named Red Fire Farm when she is a teenager. The story of how she survives on the farm take form around the character of Yan, who runs the operation, and the second-in-command, Lu, who wants more power and influence. Min and Yan become lovers but one day as she is in the fields, Min is questioned by some visiting dignitaries and she is given a place at a film academy, so she goes back to Shanghai to live.

Min is given the task of preparing for an important role: the lead of an opera titled ‘Red Azalea’ that has been commissioned by Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. One of the teachers takes a liking to another young woman, named Cheering Spear, who is also being considered for the role, and Min is outperformed at an audition. She is then given the job of set clerk (continuity) and secretly spends time smoking cigarettes in an empty room where she licks her wounds. There, one day, she is spoken to by a man who turns out to be the Supervisor, the man in charge of the production. They become friends and eventually Cheering Spear is replaced in the lead role by an exultant Min, who visits the Supervisor’s lavish residence in Beijing and is given the task of perfecting the lines she must speak in order to play it.

This gives you the bare outline of the plot, something that is quite unequal to conveying the nature of the work at hand. Min spends a lot of time talking about desire and about love and it is in the context of such feelings that her own feelings about her homeland must be interpreted. The long scene that takes place at her parent’s house, when Yan visits so that she can be alone with her lover, who runs a collective farm near Red Fire Farm, is gloriously rendered in all of its details so that you can understand the feelings that Min has for Yan in the light of her new relationship. In fact, the relationship with Yan lies at the core of the drama in so many ways.

One day, while she is still working at the academy, Min goes back to Red Fire Farm to visit Yan because she misses her. She knows that if anyone from the academy found out about her visit, she would be forced to explain herself and her situation might worsen. But she is compelled by loyalty to go back and see Yan in all the pathos of her reduced circumstances, reduced because of the circumstances that accompanied Min’s leaving the farm for the big city. But without such details the book would make no sense. In fact, there would be very little to say if Min and Yan had not been so close.

Min’s relationship with the enigmatic Supervisor also draws nourishment from Min’s relationship with Yan, and she tells him about it one night in a park where they are surrounded by other furtive Shanghai lovers trying to find some privacy in the strict moral environment the Party enforced on the people it governed.

The Party is a silent force at the core of the drama, and although Min must come to terms with it in many ways up to the point where she finally leaves the country to settle in the US, part of her remains to the end, to some degree, unsullied by the idiotic logic of the perverse calculus imposed on people in China at the time by Party policies and agendas and by the unworldly vagaries of Mao’s seemingly endless dicta. Under such conditions, people’s legitimate desires and aspirations were perverted and channelled into bizarre behaviour that on the face of it as expressed in this book has the appearance of a kind of psychopathy.

Book review: Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China (2013)

This collection of poetry by writers mainly born in the 1960s but with some born in the 1950s and others in the 1980s (one, a girl, was born in 2002) is of generally high quality.

The book’s introduction and the translations were made by Ouyang Yu, who has lived in Australia since 1991. None of the poems are precisely dated and for some poets the names of previous books are mentioned in the short preliminary text that accompanies the work of each.

There are 10 poems in the book by a woman, Lu Ye, one of whose poems is mentioned below, but this is the most work of one artist contained in the book. The orthography is not uniform, with some poems using a capital letter for the start of each line, and others not. All of the titles of the poems are capitalised in title case.

Bai Heilin’s (a man, born 1973) ‘A Fake Rattan Chair’ is strong and whimsical with a sudden and compelling final line. It examines such ideas as tradition and the modern manufacturing economy and interleaves the referents it uses with elements from the writer’s personal life.

Also strong is Ben Shao Ye’s (a man, born in the 1970s) ‘Lover’ and it uses a highly poetic register to create a set of referents that enable the poet to examine enduring and important themes about life, especially about the nature of the individual.

‘Warnings Against My Own Insomnia’ by Chu Chen (born 1969) is an interesting short poem in a traditional register that comments on mortality with humour and lightness. It is just eight lines long and contains worlds.

Geng Xiang’s (born 1958) ‘The Garment of Mafang’ is a lovely poem that contemplates the links between generations and the ties that bind Chinese people to the country they live in. It is a long poem, running to a whole page, and it tells a story that has a narrator.

Liang Yujing’s (a man, born 1982) ‘The Old Man’ is a fascinating poem that looks at the relationship between Chinese people and Chairman Mao. While Chinese people uniformly have negative feelings about the Japanese, due to events that took place in the 20th century, they still revere Mao, despite the fact that he brought more suffering to China than the Japanese ever did.

‘Taking a Nap’ by Lu Ye (a woman, born 1969) creates a domestic scene where a woman is lying in bed in the room next to the room where another person – possibly a lover, possibly a husband, it’s not clear – is also asleep. With a few deft strokes, Lu creates a small, intense reality that is peopled with individuals who have desires and who dream. And then, at the very end, with the flick of her brush, she involves the whole country. It is a very beautiful poem.

Qi Guo’s (born 1968) ‘The Last Day’ takes a quick look at the world through the eyes of a Chinese and then, in the final stanza, reduces it to a witticism. A very fine poem that has depth and humour in plentiful supply and that finds the universal in the act of travel, a very modern preoccupation for Chinese people.

As a general observation the collection shows a wide variety of types of writing with individual poets taking their head and producing work to their own standards and on subjects that they themselves have chosen. This is encouraging, and the resulting range of work displays different themes that are central to people in the country. Contemplative pieces rub shoulders familiarly with pieces that have overtly political content. There is no single type of poetry being produced in China today, but it is clear that the ecosystem is fecund and that the work being produced is responding to contemporary social and artistic concerns.

In terms of categories, the translator includes one poet born in Taiwan in this collection. Two other poets were born in mainland China and moved to Taiwan. One of these poets subsequently moved to Canada to live. The rest of the anthologised poets (as far as I can tell) were born on and still live on the mainland.

I’m not sure how others might go about finding a copy of this book to buy. I bought mine from the translator direct through Facebook, where he can be found (on the book he puts his given name first and his family name last, in the western style, unlike Chinese people do in general, but in Facebook he uses the traditional Chinese way of writing his name). Otherwise, a good bookstore might be able to order it in for you.

Book review: Two collections of Chinese poetry from American university presses

It’s extremely frustrating to have to give poor reviews to two collections of poetry at the same time, but there you have it. Stephen Owen’s ‘The Late Tang’ (from Harvard University, Asia Center) and ‘Chinese Poetry’ edited and translated by Wai-Lim Yip (from Duke University Press) are, each in their own specific ways, dismal books.

Owen’s collection gives you an introduction of such mesmerising complexity that you would have to be a Chinese literature scholar to make much sense of it. And Yip flatly declines to translate the poems at all, holding, as he does, that the syntax of Chinese is too different from that of Indo-European languages to make that task meaningful.

So you get nothing useful. All you want is to read a reliable narrative about Tang poetry and to be able to read what Chinese poets wrote, in a translation. Instead you get these two books which make the job of understanding so difficult as to be completely impossible.

Book review: Li Shangyin, Poems (2018), and The Complete Cold Mountain (2018)

These two recent bilingual editions of Tang poetry are welcome additions to books of Chinese literature but it’s difficult to see how I can substantially add to the comments I have already made about the period (16 September on this blog) apart from refining some of the ideas that I explored in that post. This blogpost attempts to do that.

The Li Shangyin collection, edited and translated from the Chinese by Chloe Garcia Roberts, is a New York Review of Books edition and it is more highly mediated than the collection of Tang poetry I reviewed earlier. But to my taste it’s not adequately annotated. A lot more could have been done to explain esoteric referents that the poet uses in many of the poems.

The significance of things that were common in Li’s day is, naturally enough, remote today. Doubly so because this is not just a collection of classical poetry, it’s a collection of classical Chinese poetry. So, frankly more work is needed to clarify things. The poet lived from 813 to 858 and was, as the poets in the earlier reviewed collection were, a state functionary.

Li’s subject matter is singled out for comment by the translator in this edition but the poetry seems to be fairly typical of the Tang period from what I could see. The privileging of the natural world is again evident here, as it had been in the other collection I read. What is also clear in these poems is the fact of the present moment. In the absence of any form of narrative (which I had also remarked on with respect to the earlier collection) the predominant feeling in these poems is a kind of melancholy linked to the transitory nature of life.

You are caught in a matrix of sensations and you register impressions as you observe the natural world, but nothing very much takes place apart from your ephemeral impressions.

Today a pine
On the ravine floor,
Tomorrow a cork tree
On a mountain peak.

The immediate sensation of the physical world circumscribes your horizons, limiting the scope of your imagination and rendering your feelings as mere sensations that fly past the periphery of your consciousness. The lack of even superlunary beings leaves the poet bereft of a certain potential for the creation of meaning. There is also no significant other in the mundane universe to bounce off. And there is no certain consequence for any perception, just the passing of the moment into a kind of oblivion that is fortuitously avoided through writing.

This kind of writing can be inspiring because it offers a distinctive outlook on life (and this point will be explored more in the review, below, of the second book being considered in this blogpost) but humans crave narratives and we produce them, apparently without even thinking, all the time in the course of our daily lives.

Just today, for example, it being a Friday when I wrote these words, there was a tweet in my feed by an Australian academic living in America about the Kavanaugh inquest. There had been so much news already this week, she said, that the news team in the studio could just go home without putting out more. This kind of memeification of personal moments, tying the individual’s perceptions of reality to larger debates going on in the public sphere, is frequent and unceasing on social media as people come to terms with things that they hear and see throughout the day. It is the narrative instinct at work that we see in theses artefacts of consciousness on Twitter and Facebook, and that we react to with surprise, anger, or approval. In poetry like Li’s, and like that of the hermit(s) whose work is described below, the moment is cut off from that larger narrative, even though we strive as readers to fix it in place in relation to something bigger and more meaningful. Being constantly deprived of that narrative focus is tiring and eventually frustrating.

In my mind, these poems are best not read all at once, but rather they should be sampled selectively one at a time, and preferably talked about with a friend. Left alone, the mind cries out for some sort of development, something on which the emotions can hang.

In the second collection under consideration, which is a collection by the hermit Hanshan (which is translated as “Cold Mountain”) you are again faced with the point of view of a single mind. There are no other points of view on offer, and while there is a certain credible aphoristic quality present, there is no dialogue. The tone is often ironic and tired in the face of the conventionality of the world, or concerned more with eternal things than the mundane subjects that animate the vignettes on offer. But there is again little argument although you are aware of the point of view of the narrator, who is a Buddhist, and his distinctive system of values, one which eschews material wealth in favour of other things.

Here, the development is very sparse indeed.

Fulfilling means fulfilling the spirit,
this is called being fulfilled.
Transforming means transforming the form,
this is called being transformed.
If we fulfil the spirit and transform the form,
we can reach the stage of an immortal.
Not fulfilling the spirit means no transformation,
no escaping death and suffering in the end.

The Chinese original is also given in this edition, and you can see the way the five-character blocks are set up in a rectangle, the totality of the poem forming a single piece of text that can be understood as a standalone unit of signification. I’m not sure how the poetics operate in this kind of scheme but it looks like each poem has a physicality that makes it seem to be inevitable, with the prescribed number of characters lining up to form the whole.

Not all of the poems are as reductive as the one included above here, but that poem seemed, to me, to state something central to the kind of poetics on offer in this collection, animated as they are by the distinctly Chinese form of Buddhism known as “Zen” (or “Chan”). The circularity and aridity of the movement from beginning to end has something emblematic that goes to the core, in my mind, of the vision being proposed here. Here’s another one that goes along similar lines:

A good-looking man
who had mastered all six arts
went to see the south, but was driven back to the north.
He went to see the west, and was chased toward the east,
so he wandered a long time, drifting like water weed,
and flying about like mugwort without taking a rest.
I ask what kind of thing he is –
his family name is poverty; suffering is his given name.

The essential lesson of the piece is clear, and it goes to something that is central to the Buddhist ethos on offer in these poems, but the sterile nature of the composition is not evocative of anything that transports the individual out of a world of care. It is a dry and austere mode of living that is presented to the reader. There is little hope of improving your life, and there are few consolations for the solitary traveller apart from a certainty of the essential nobility of material poverty, and certainly no hope of transcendence.

This edition is a strange book as it is published by a religious imprint, so presumably you are supposed to glean meaning from the poems without much context placing the verses in the historical moment. The approval of the editors is unironic and patent, like shiny leather. The poetry in the book was recovered from obscurity via Japanese scholars of Zen Buddhism starting in the Edo period (1603-1868). Zen Buddhism was strongly influenced by Taoism.

Book review: Three Hundred Tang Poems (2009)

This hefty little book contains poetry, in a new English translation, that dates from the time of the Tang dynasty (AD 618 to 907), which was in power in the years during which Chinese calligraphy and Buddhism were first exported to Japan.

The poems were compiled originally in the 18th century in a different order than that in which they are presented here. This is an Everyman edition and scholarly content is absent, making it hard to understand the subject and relevance of each of the poems it contains. The introduction is very short and says nothing about the individual poets (around 75 of them) whose work is featured. Some people might have heard the names Li Bai and Du Fu. Their work is included in the collection.

Most of the poets whose work is included in the book are men; there are a few women but it seems that most of the poets were imperial retainers who were employed on official business because they could write. Being versed in the literature of the kingdom they found gainful employment and were often, it appears from reading the poems, sent to distant parts of the realm. I read more than half of the poems in the book before tiring of the exercise. The lack of academic glosses made reading the work more frustrating than it otherwise could have been.

To help describe these poems it serves to use the example of painting. Most people will have some acquaintance with Chinese brush painting, with its clean lines, realistic depictions of birds and fruit, and creative use of white space. This poetry resembles that kind of painting. Here, the negative space is provided by descriptions of nature. There are endless meditations on the natural world, such as the sight of the clouds reflected in the water or the sight of the wind blowing through grasses. Birds fly across the sky against the backdrop of rugged mountain peaks. It’s hardly remarkable that such things occupy so much of the poets’ energies; descriptions of nature are apolitical and it would be hard to get into trouble for admiring the sound of cicadas in summer.

What is less often examined in much detail are the poets’ own feelings. Although they might be mentioned briefly in a poem they are not articulated or explored to see where they lead the writer. Most of the writer's effort is spent describing the landscape. The person is thus rendered in terms of where he is absent: in the spaces between words like “tears” and “sighs” that crop up occasionally. These poems are mainly occasional meditations on life with reference to specific, concrete things in the here-and-now. There are a few fictions with complex narratives but they are the exception rather than the rule.

A recurring theme in the poetry in the book is the longevity of the country’s culture. Already, for Tang Chinese, people were aware that China had existed in a recognisable form, to which the Chinese people alive at the time might profitably compare themselves, for a very long time. Certain people’s names recur, such as those of famous generals or noblemen, just as the name of the capital city of the empire (Chang’an) crops up from time to time as a point of reference. There is a longing to be close to the centre more frequent than there is a longing to be close to a woman.

Women are referred to fleetingly, often in concert with references to the zither, an instrument that they evidently played in those days. The illustration on the book’s cover shows a contemporary painting of a woman dressed in ornate robes holding a stick in her hand that has a tassel attached to its end. She is using it to play with a small dog. There is mention of wine in the book but more often of ale, although it’s not clear what sort of crop it had been made from. Poets drinking beer and talking about the moon while listening to women play a stringed instrument: good times for a Tang author right there.

Like Chinese music, in tone the poetry in aggregate is plaintive, and sadness seems to be the emotion invoked most frequently but there is very little use of psychological development that I could see; the pieces are mainly too short and merely give a snapshot of reality at a given moment in time.

Other emotions might flare up on occasion but overall the feeling of the poems contained in this book is elegiac, like a sunset or the dying days of spring. Life itself is full of pathos of course, and as time passes so does precious youth. While a reliance by the poets included in the collection on the physical world for imagery seems unsentimental the emotion contained in each poem is strong. The most common point of reference is the living world surrounding the poet as he gets by in his rural backwater, where the sound of troops marching against the Tartars is audible and where he fondly imagines the moon shining on his wife’s arms in remembered moonlight.

Here is a sample of the kind of poetry this collection contains. It is by Li Qi and it is titled ‘Something told as of old’:

As boys they did service with the frontier troops,
Youthful adventurers from You and Yan,
They tested their prowess under horses’ hooves –
Then as now men careless of their lives.
Now when they’re killing, no one dares come forward:
Their beards stick out like bristling hedgehog spines. 

Below the ridge of sandy clouds there are white clouds flying;
Their ruler’s grace is not yet required – they cannot yet go home.
There’s a young woman from Liaodang, fifteen years of age,
Who knows the lute, and can sing and dance, and now is playing the tune
‘Going beyond the frontier pass’ on a Tibetan flute,
Making the soldiers in our legion shed their tears like rain.

This poem strongly reminds me of the movie ‘Youth’ (in Chinese ‘Fang hua’), by director Feng Xiaogang, which was released in 2017. I saw it this year on New Year’s Day and wrote about it on the blog at the time. It tells the story of a troupe of entertainers attached to the People’s Liberation Army in the days when it was active in the task of cementing the borders of China in the years around WWII and later.

The fortunes of the troupe members are examined by the director in the movie, and it also contains many patriotic messages that people in the theatre audience were receptive to. Love of country, it seems, is ageless, but the Communist Party of China initially did not allow the movie to be screened in the country because of some things in it that were critical of the party. It was finally released in China in the middle of December and despite that ended up being the 6th highest-grossing domestic film of the year. To my eyes, the movie was heavily sentimental and determinedly nationalistic, but having read these poems I can see that the feelings it retailed in have always been there in the culture that produced it.

Here is another poem from the collection. It is by the monk Jiaoran and is titled ‘Looking for Hong Jian, but without finding him’:

Although the place you’ve moved to is near the city walls
It’s reached by a country path through mulberry and flax.
By the fence nearby you’ve planted chrysanthemums –
Autumn is here, but they haven’t flowered yet.
I knock at the door, but the dog doesn’t bark,
So I go and ask in the home to the west of yours.
They tell me you have gone off to the mountains
And won’t be back as usual till the sun starts to set.

Once again the imagery is strikingly secular and is formed to have an impact in the reader’s imagination. The moment is captured in a few, choice images like a bird in a painting made in the same era might have been formed with a few brushstrokes. All at once, in a few lines, you are there in the moment knocking on doors and questioning the neighbours about the friend you have come to talk with. The journey the narrator takes assumes the significance of a quest and the feelings you are left with at the end, as the final words pass through the barriers that sit in front of your mind, are sadness and a longing for something unattainable.

As in the case of the poem by Li Qi included above it, the monk’s poem takes you very quickly from the particular to the general, so that you are suddenly faced with universal things that can have resonance for anyone. This I think is the essence of the beauty contain in this collection of poetry. The thing that is also evident about a book like this is that it can take you in your mind to a foreign country: the past. Doubly foreign in this case: ancient China. I wonder why people spend so much time reading science fiction when this kind of diversion is also available. Spend a few hours of your time getting to know about the feelings of a Tang bureaucrat as he experiences life on the borders of civilisation, wishing he were at home! These wonderful poems may transport you away from the concerns of contemporary life.

And having read this volume it is quite clear to me that there is an urgent need in the trade book market for a better-presented collection of the same poems, one that comes with detailed scholarly notes that can help the reader to position the poet whose poem is being read, and the referents used in the poem, in relation to historical events and in relation to the corpus of published work of the era. Being situated so far from the time when the poems were written, as we are, we can form conclusions and make associations that someone alive at the time would certainly have missed. I would definitely buy and recommend such a book.

Book review: You Jump to Another Dream, Yan Jun (2012)

Occasional bits of interesting stuff emerged when I read this book of poetry but they were rare. In ‘February 14th, Going to the Hospital with my father’ (2008) there is a solid ending and a clear focus, but in the majority of the poems the abrupt juxtapositions of images, tropes and metaphors reveal no insights worth noting.

It’s not clear when Yan was born. The book says that he started writing poetry when he was 14 and the earliest poems in this collection date from 1991, so we know at least that he belongs to the post-Deng generation that has grown up in the new China of unfettered capitalism and record economic growth. He lives in Beijing and does other things as well as writing poetry: music critic, organiser, producer, sound artist.

The lines of poetry are often disjointed and broken off before they reach the end of a sentence. There is little punctuation. A new sentence will start in the middle of a line after the fragment of an earlier phrase has finished. All very avant-garde though ultimately pointless. In the prose pieces you get the feeling there’s an iconoclastic political identity here that might serve to explain the poet’s appeal to overseas critics, as though he represents something about an emergent progressive class in China. Perhaps this explains his appeal to the publisher. The book did nothing much for me.

Book review: Silent Invasion, Clive Hamilton (2018)

Subtitled ‘China’s influence in Australia’, this is a tiresome but formidably important book. It takes us on a trip behind the curtain into the corridors of power in Beijing where for the past 15 years or so the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have pursued a policy of world economic and political control. The way this has happened with the acquiescence of the people of the country has been remarkable, but it is necessary to know that the leaders are relying on a popular opinion that they are also fabricating to support their ambitions. To do this, the state is educating children to resent the economic colonialism pursued by countries such as Britain in the 19th century that led, for example, to the Opium Wars.

Such humiliation is hard to forgive – and for people in the West, hard to excuse – and on top of it came the further humiliation meted out by the Japanese in the 20th century. But there is a willing audience for messages based on these revanchist narratives. And we know they work. Just look at what happened in the 1930s in Europe when the German people were mobilised to overthrow their own democracy on the back of resentment at their treatment at the end of WWI.

Hamilton says that the CCP decided to pursue the goal of being the central power of “all under Heaven” as a result of the 2008 GFC, when major banks failed due to lack of regulation in the US financial system. The much vaunted free press there also did a bad job of picking the disease of interest-only loans given on limited-term contracts to undocumented mortgagees that then reverted to interest-plus-principle loans they were suddenly unable to afford, leading to a run of property sales that led to the financial crisis. So the West has a case to answer (but the answer is not less regulation, despite what ideologues in the Republican Party opine).

The education policy that underpins this policy dates from the 1990s, following the opening of China’s economy to the world as a result of US political moves. Things took a turn for the worse in 2016 when the CCP decreed that corporate chairpersons had to also be the party head in the company. The party in China thus controls all organs of the state, from the education system to the courts, from the press to the corporations. Its reach is unassailed and its goal is global hegemony. It doesn’t want to go the direction of the Communist Party in Russia, although both countries are now kleptocracies (where government is by thieves).

Hamilton’s problem with his narrative is not to do with his research, which is broad and deep. He has trouble however forming its dramatic superstructure. I managed to get about 40 percent of the way into the book before giving up in frustration.

The way in which Bob Carr, for example, who is now the vocal head of a China-focused thing tank based at the University of Technology, Sydney, turned from being an admirer of the US to being a lackey for Beijing is a case in point. A journalist with an eye for the cogent detail might have more amply chronicled Carr’s journey. How, furthermore, did the Liberal Party’s Craig Laundy become such a China booster? And who is the replacement for the CCP in Canberra in the ALP now that Sam Dastyari has fallen on his sword? Chris Bowen?

The author shows how front groups funded and promoted by Beijing through its consulates in the capital cities help to channel money to the political majors in Australia. The NSW Labor Right faction, furthermore, which is headquartered in Sussex Street, in Chinatown, is also a major supporter of policies such as the One Belt, One Road. And there are dozens of businesspeople in Australia who unthinkingly spruik the benefits of following the CCP’s line so that we can all benefit, we are told, from the economic prosperity that would follow. It seems that the only people we can rely on for unbiased opinion nowadays are ASIO and the Department of Defence.

One case Hamilton could have made more of, I thought, was the free trade agreement signed with China in 2015. Andrew Robb, who pushed the deal through Parliament, now works for a Chinese investor in Australia on a fat salary. But the reservations forwarded in Canberra by the ALP relating to its clauses about the hiring in Australia of imported foreign labour on 457 visas, has received less scrutiny, perhaps, than they should have done. We’ll have to see how that one plays out in the press, but Hamilton makes a good case for the ALP to revisit the deal if it wins the general election in 2019.

While his arguments are compelling, I think Hamilton’s editors might have given him a few pointers about how to structure a narrative so that it follows a more conventional dramatic arc. The stories that play out in the media in countries like Australia are always based on potentialities – to fall or to rise – and the dangers inherent in these liminal zones for the actors involved. Hamilton’s story frustratingly points inexorably in one direction.

He had a bit of difficulty finding a publisher for the book, on the other hand, and Hardie Grant finally agreed to accept the risk of legal action and go ahead. The legal threat is real. Chau Chak Wing, who funded UTS’s new Frank Gehry-designed Faculty of Business building in the Haymarket, is currently suing Fairfax Media and the ABC in the courts over their coverage last year of CCP influence peddling in Australia. That’s part of the story. (Gehry himself said that the building looks like a “brown paper bag”, which is apt in light of what Hamilton discovers.)

Another part of it is the way the book will be received by the community. I’ve already read one review of the book, by Tim Soutphommasane, our Race Discrimination Commissioner, that suggests one future direction for its treatment in the public sphere.

He says that we have to be careful not to provoke responses among parts of the community characterised by the sorts of racial discrimination that had motivated the views of the broader community in the country for the last decades of the 19th century and for most of the 20th century. In a way, Hamilton had predicted this sort of reaction because he says that our policy of multiculturalism is seen by the CCP as a weakness particular to Australia that allows ethnic Chinese here to participate in soft-power plays designed by the CCP to ensure that the country becomes a Chinese tributary state.

But the truly sad fact about the book for me is that even though I only read part-way through it, the argument that we are sleep-walking in a direction the destination for which is against our best interests, is overwhelming.