History and tourism in China

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 8:28 pm








Opium warlord dies

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 7:47 am








Wukan as history

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 11:11 am

Ho-fung Hong has an interesting post up on the Wukan protests and the history of popular protest in Imperial China.1 While in the Western media protests like Wukun are usually presented as signs of the impending crack-up of China, Hong argues, correctly I think, that they need to be read as part of the history of Chinese forms of protest. Protests of any sort are culturally constructed, meaning that different actions have different meanings in different cultures. Wukan involved some violence.

which in many western cultures is the red line between protest and rebellion, but for Hong it was at its heart a petition movement.2 Petitions, no matter how presented, acknowledge the legitimacy of state power (in this case the central government rather than local) and the supposed benevolence of the rulers is assumed, otherwise why petition? As a bit of confirmation of these different ways of viewing things the Financial Times seems surprised that protest leader Lin Zuluan has been appointed Party secretary “capping a potential breakthrough in the way Beijing deals with dissent.” But of course bringing protest leaders into the fold is very much part of the Chinese tradition for dealing with dissent.  It’s too bad Hong skips over the Republican period, (He implies you can draw a straight line from the Qing to the present) but it’s only a blog post.



  1. I have not yet read his book. It was a good Christmas, but I did not get everything I wanted. []
  2. Which is also what Tiananmen was, to start with. []


The good old days of empire

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 11:48 am















Managing History in China

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 6:10 am

Historic Preservation is the process of  preserving historic stuff, mostly building and sites. China has lots of history. 5,000 years of it, in fact. Historical Preservation, or Cultural Resources Management, or whatever you want to call it is something they have less of as shown by recent events in the Great Within. Basically, the Beijing Forbidden City Cultural Development Company has been accused of setting up a special club for rich people inside the Forbidden City.

Preserving the past is tricky, since it is sometimes hard to figure out what needs to be preserved. It is also sometimes hard to figure out what ‘preserving’ might mean. It could mean ‘don’t touch anything’ but in practice somebody has to touch things in order to maintain them, and people do have to get in to look at things, or else what’s the point?

Even at this level things are more complected that you might think. What exactly -is- this site?  Versailles would not be itself without the gardens, but the park just to the west of the Forbidden City, once considered part of the grounds, was taken over by squatters in 1949. Do they have to be driven out and the pristine park of the past re-created? 1

The big problem though is money. History and the National Essence are priceless, and thus can’t be connected to money, which is dirty. No gift shops. No tacky tourist stuff. No guards in fake old uniforms. Pure, un-commercialized history. That of course is bunk. Every historical site sells stuff, in part because they need the cash and in part because the broad masses want it and helping people connect with the past is what these places do, and buying stuff is part of that. Also, your guests are humans. They need to eat and drink, and they enjoy both of these things a lot. The more of that you let them do it while looking at the history the better they will like it. So maybe some selling things is o.k., but you need to keep it tasteful.  So part of running a historical site is making money, but making it look like you are above money.2

This is particularly important when you are running something like the Forbidden City, a Top Class #1 tourist draw and source of national pride. Some time ago they drove Starbucks out of the palace. This struck most of my students as a good thing. We would not let commerce sully the Lincoln Memorial, why should the Chinese let money into the Forbidden City? Having been there I point out that the palace is enormous, and that having a few places to get a drink or buy some postcards or get a popsicle makes it a lot better. Hiring it out to a foreign company defiles the purity of the Chinese nation, however,  so it had to go.

The current brouhaha has something to do with lack of professionalism on the part of China’s Historical Preservation Financial Asset Management Teams.  Lots of foreign museums rent out space for parties or whatever. You just need to do it with a bit of class. China has a distinct lack of old money, so this is a problem. Good Cultural Managers can help with this by providing a touch of distinction to a commercial transaction, but unfortunately the ones at the Forbidden City can’t even manage a grammatically correct press statement. Of course it also has something to do with class resentments in contemporary China. If the Forbidden City belongs to the Chinese people why are some Chinese people getting to party there and the rest being stuck making electronics in Shenzhen? Plus given what I can find out online  about the entertainment habits of Chinese rich people I’m guessing that the club does not run to dry white wine and chamber music. Massive amounts of vile booze and lots of ladies of negotiable virtue sounds more likely.

Finally, I must add that I am a little disappointed with the Beijing Forbidden City Cultural Development Company. I could forgive the   for prostituting China’s cultural heritage or being sub-literates, but their ‘vengeance’ against the whistleblowers is pathetic. Firing people and confiscating a few cellphones?  This is the Forbidden City!  Cixi plotted here, as did Wei Zhongxian, and there are such things as standards. Couldn’t they boil someone alive and serve the broth in the restaurant, or exile someone to Xinjiang, or something?

I got this from Jeremiah Jenne, who I note left Beijing just before this whole thing blew up.

  1. There are also lots of pasts in various places. Which aspect of the palace are you trying to preserve? As I recall the Forbidden City (and it’s been a few years) they seem to push a pretty a-historical view of a timeless palace, saying nothing about the Republic and running the Ming and Qing together. []
  2. Even if you could get the money out of the site that would just mean asking for more from the state or some sort of foundation. []


Zhang San and Li Si’s Excellent Adventure

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 7:30 am






Via Jeremiah Jenne


A fun toy

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 4:52 am




This is your historical analogy on drugs

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 8:08 pm

Apparently Google is just like the British East India Company. Or so at least the toadies of the CCP would have you believe.  According to People’s Daily,  Google is attempting to corrupt China with information, just as the British tried to corrupt it with opium.

In the colonial era, the British East India Company used the monopolization of trade in the colonies to traffic opium and assist Britain in building its hegemony. In the Internet era, Google uses its monopoly of Internet information search to traffic American values and assist American in building its hegemony.

Besides the obvious historical errors (it was not John Company who attacked China with warships in the Opium Wars, but the British Navy) the historical analogy does not work the way the author would like to claim. It is indeed true that both Google and the British East India Company were foreign firms, but in fact both of them had success in China not because they marched in and forced people to buy their goods at gunpoint, but because Chinese people wanted to buy what they were selling.  (Leaving out the fact that Google gives it away for free.) The piece points out that Baidu has held on to the bulk of the Chinese search market, so I guess this would make Baidu domestic Chinese opium, maybe a nice Yunnan. 1 Where is the Carnival of Bad History when you need it?


Via Jeremiah Jeene

  1. Goes well with fava beans []


Sinai -etic analogies

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 8:12 pm

Jeremiah Jenne has a post up at Fallows1 where he looks at the possibility of a Jasmine Revolution in China. He concludes that it is not that likely, as the CCP is a bit more hip to the dangers of that sort of thing, given the history of protest in China, especially May 4th and the date nothing happened in 1989. I think he’s right about that, but I think the reasons why become clearer if you think about analogies for what is happening in the Middle East. Some people are tossing around 1848 in Europe, which works in some respects, but for an Asian analogy I think 1911 and the overthrow of the Qing works somewhat better.2 The Qing dynasty was not overthrown by Sun Yat-sen and his band of revolutionaries, but ultimately by the various provincial assemblies the declared for the revolution after the Wuchang uprising. A series of provincial elites decided, sometimes for different reasons, to abandon the Qing.  It is not that surprising that Yuan Shikai became the first effective leader of the new state, since what was happening was not a mass uprising or a tidal wave of democracy but rather one part of the elite dumping the dynasty and quickly establishing a new government. This is pretty clearly what has been happening in Egypt, with the military choosing to at least get rid of Mubarak, even if they are not sure what will come next. In Libya at least part of the army seems to be standing with the government, and in Morocco all of it. There is even a Twitter/Facebook parallel with the role of the telegraph in spreading news of the revolution in 1911.

Obviously there are lots of differences as well. The Arab World may be a reasonably coherent cultural area, but its countries are not Chinese provinces. Imperialism is still around, but in a very different form. So why does this comparison matter? I think it matters some because the main thing that encouraged elite factions in 1911 to settle their differences quickly was the fear of foreign invasion.  For whatever reasons (and we really can’t know yet) the Egyptian elite decided fairly quickly that whatever the future would be it would not involve Mubarak or his sons. I can’t think of anything really forcing a rapid resolution in, say Bahrain, other than the fact that chaos is bad. In 1911 the “masses in the street” were the new armies and modern educated people, who conservative modernizers had good reason not to kill. Unfortunately I don’t see much reason for the rulers of oil states to care how many students or poor people they kill. If a Jasmine Revolution did break out in China it is hard to see how it would lead to a split in the elite, and likely they would be willing to kill as many of the dispossessed as they could afford ammo for. Still, hope springs eternal, and Jasmine Revolution is a good name, even if it does not seem likely to be coming soon.

  1. Yes, a post at Fallows site at the Atlantic. Mark Twain published in the Atlantic. It’s only a matter of time before Jeremiah’s friends get a call from VH-1’s Behind the Music about the young, idealistic, talented, scholar-blogger who may still exist somewhere inside the bloated mass of excess and degradation he will have become by about 2014 []
  2. Obviously I say this with very little real knowledge of what is happening right now in Egypt or Libya, but this is the internet. []


Yellow Peril Mk 3.

Filed under: — Alan Baumler @ 8:06 am










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