Duke East Asian Nexus 3.22

Duke East Asia Nexus

Duke East Asia Nexus (DEAN) seeks to enrich Duke’s understanding of the political, economic, and cultural issues facing East Asia. We publish this peer-reviewed undergraduate academic work in the hopes of enriching the academic discourse both through print and our online portal.

DukeEastAsiaNexus Volume 3 Issue 2.2

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Playing with Fire in the Dragon’s Den: Human Rights in China

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China: The Next N e o c o l o n i a l Po w e r in Africa Taiwanese Q u e e r L i t e r a t u r e

Duke East Asia Nexus Volume 3 Issue 2.2 2013

FROM THE EDITOR: Three years on and I still cannot comprehend the sheer compass of change our little team of editors has managed to accomplish. A new logo, new cover design, and a fresh group of authors made it seem like our latest issue was beyond reproach, and yet my first decision as Editor-in-chief was to set a new tempo for our organization by opening the doors of DEAN to writers beyond the familiar sphere of academics and readers across the varied disciplines at Duke. The first challenge on this path was to redesign our somber façade and our pokerfaced pages to help bring about this pivot to please both the poets and the academics.

This journal you hold in your hands is a testament to our overcoming this barrier, an embodiment of the changes we have begun at DEAN. In doing so we have begun anew what our predecessors had established, while hopefully keeping alive that spirit of innovation that is so quintessentially DEAN. Yet beyond the cover and the adornments, our journal is naught without its body and soul; its team of tenacious editors and perspicacious writers. From George Lowe’s exploration into ‘modern’ China to Rachel Leng’s imaginative inquiry into Taiwan’s queer discourse, the diversity of thought we encounter never ceases to amaze me.

I am of course indebted to the my predecesors, Kkot Byoul Hannah Yi and Paul William Horak, for their hard work and dedication to the journal and the organization over the past three years. Special thanks must be reserved of course for our faculty advisor Simon Partner, who has helped steer our fledgling organization down the years. And finally I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the hard work of Anh Pham and Jeff Liu, without whose refined touch our journal and website would be sorely lacking.

I am honored to present to you, the reader, the Duke East Asia Nexus, Vol. 3 Issue 2.2

Tenzing Thakbhe Thondup

Editor-in-Chief DEAN Publications Spring 2013

Volume 3 Issue 2.2 Helen XiaoHan Cai President Tenzing Thabkhe Thondup Editor-in-Chief Alexis Morton Chief Programming Officer Emily Feng Director of Conferences Adam Roth Webmaster/Treasurer Jeff Liu Managing Editor Editorial Board Kkot Byoul Hannah Yi Paul William Horak Amy Cahill Jeff Liu Ray Liu Anh Pham Archer Wang Board of Directors Linda Zhang, Jack Zhang, Andrew Cheon, Alice Ren Board of Advisors Richard H. Brodhead, Simon Partner, Bai Gao

Special thanks to Tenzing Thondup for the new DEAN logo design Copyright Š 2013 by Duke East Asia Nexus (DEAN) @Duke University The DEAN publication is charted by Duke University and is a member of the Undergraduate Publications Board, it receives support from the Asian Pacific Studies Institute and the John Spencer Bassett Memorial Fund.

DEAN publishes full-length academic papers related to East Asia.

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Volume 3 Issue 2.2 2013

Table of Contents Essays CHINA: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

Carrie Arndt 7 THE UNITED STATES, CHINA, AND GLOBAL CURRENT ACCOUNT IMBALANCES Arjun Khanna 15 TAIWANESE QUEER LITERATURE: The Development of National Identity Politics in Taiwan’s Emergent Queer Discourse Rachel Leng 31 HOBBES AND MODERN CHINA: A Comparative Study Ainan Liu 43 “NEW CULTURE” 新文化: Republican China’s Opposition or Complicity with Tradition?

George Lowe 53 CAN WANG JINGWEI’S DECISION TO COLLABORATE WITH THE JAPANESE DURING WARTIME BE JUSTIFIED? George Lowe 59

CHINESE URBAN SOCIETY’S RAPID CHANGE IN THE FACE OF RURAL STAGNATION George Lowe 67 PLAYING WITH FIRE IN THE DRAGON’S DEN: Human Rights in China Jack Wagner 73 A STUDY ON APOLOGY: No Gun Ri Sharon Wu 87 IMPERIAL CONDUCTOR? Hirohito And The Rise of Japanese Militarism Jordan Seidell 97

Opinions THE GENESIS OF A CHINATOWN Sabrina McCutchan 113

China: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

Abstract: This paper discusses the heightening activity of China in African affairs, which has begun to capture European attention in its potential to shift the international balance of power. China has made great efforts to distinguish itself from the Western legacy of colonialism, exploitation, and intervention politically and economically. China has diametrically opposed itself to the West, claiming fellowship in sharing a history of colonialism by the West in the past. China claims its interactions with Africa are evincive of equality and mutual benefit.

Further analysis, however, reveals a more manipulative side of China’s actions that mimics the neocolonialist West which China reputes. In addition to growing political and economic involvement, China is strengthening ties with African nations to gain strength in the UN and shift African interests from the West to the East. These actions, if not further explored and exposed, could escalate into a battle for primacy between China and the West, akin to the Cold War of the 1980s.

Carrie Arndt is a rising junior at Duke University, majoring in political science and social psychology.

China: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

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hile China has been involved in African affairs for decades, its heightening activity in the continent has just now gained the attention of the West. There is no disputing that China has built itself a strong and spreading niche in Africa. While its straightforward approach and purportedly pure economic desire for mutual benefit may seem to set China apart from Europe and the United States – whose international pasts are characterized by complex systems of colonialism and power manipulation –China does reflect Western behavior in several ways. This behavior must be considered only after analyzing how Chinese culture has influenced interpretations of Sino-African relations, and how the interpretations of international interest in the African continent are indeed shared between the two parties. The power balance is shifting, and all eyes are on the East. The future boundaries and allegiances of African nations are linked to the ever-increasing likelihood of conflict. China may project itself as a new actor and profess to play by new rules. However, it’s ultimately on the same global stage as its Western counterparts, and equally driven by the same competitive, aggressive, and ruthless environment.

A first look at Chinese policy in Africa displays restraint, cooperation, and brotherhood between two developing entities. Indeed, China has worked hard to earn its reputation of conducting business that onlookers consider mutually beneficial, earning neither friends nor enemies, but rather business allies (Cheru & Obi 2). Under Zhou Enlais’ Five Principles, political neutrality and cooperative economic growth are heavily emphasized: “mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression; noninterference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful coexistence” (Shinn 5). These tenets clearly distinguish Chinese policy from Western policy, which currently is more interested in political issues of security and counter-terrorism (Shinn 4-5). Additionally, the way in which China conducts its business in Africa focuses on clean-cut cooperation. China’s Export-Import Bank, which is the only state-owned entity used by the government to mete official fiscal assistance, distributes “large scale interest free loans with little or no political conditions attached” (Cheru & Obi 4). Efforts are directly aimed at encouraging “Chinese firms to invest in Africa through export credits, loans for overseas projects and international guarantees” (Shinn 7). Chinese workers in Africa work quickly, cheaply, and with few complications (Junger 2). In fact, in Sebastian Junger’s article, “Enter China, The Giant,” he asserts that “Chinese relations with

another country are purely economic,” (Junger 5), while researchers for the 2010 Afrobarometer Studies state “China’s Africa role is…more businesslike than any other country’s at any time in the post-war period” (Gadzala & Hanusch 4). In contrast, contributions from the West always come in the form of grants with strings attached, threatening external involvement (Shinn 9). Fantu Cheru and Cyril Obi assert in “De-coding China-Africa Relations: Partnership for development or ‘(neo) colonialism by invitation’?” that “Western development partners focus more on policy-based lending to make market works better.” This not only implies intervention in foreign affairs, but also the West’s belief that it is greater and more advanced than other societies (Cheru & Obi 3). China plays off such overt signs of patronage, reminding Africa of its nation’s own time as a semi-colony under Western powers, and declaring no interest in establishing any military bases on the African continent (Shinn 4).

The East and West appear to have very different approaches in interacting with African nations. However, the innocent façade of China’s image cannot be taken at face-value; it must be brought under closer scrutiny. One can easily see that China’s involvement in African affairs is not as simple as it seems. First, Communist China maintains strict control over its meetings and trade agreements and thus can release information as it deems fit. In China, “it is still impossible…to obtain statistics on the annual level of Chinese assistance for each African country…Information on military cooperation rarely extends beyond an announcement of exchange visits, the names of the participants and platitudes about good military ties between the two parties” (Shinn 6). Sino-African affairs are predominantly founded on furtive governmental meetings and closed door bidding processes (Gadzala & Hanusch 6). China’s wall of secrecy can obscure a great deal of the complexities involved in its foreign affairs, but it can only reveal the fact that the world is not a vacuum, and that serious economic interactions cannot be indefinitely hidden. In summary, “economics and politics in Africa do not constitute clearly demarcated distinct spheres” (Gadzala & Hanusch 6). China’s relationship with Africa involves far more blood and sweat of politics and manipulation than its image suggests. After all, China had a significant yet subtle role in African liberation movements in the 1960s and 1970s, supporting rebel groups they believed were “pro-China”, strengthening the bonds between Chinese and African armies (Shinn 5-8). Not only does China support military coups, but it’s also unconcerned about prompting them through the lax distribution of materials needed for violence: “China is the only major arms exporter in the world that has refused to sign arms-sales agreements that include human-rights considerations” (Junger 5). Junger goes so far as to assert, “desperate for Africa’s oil, China has been investing

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Carrie Arndt

China: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

hundreds of billions of dollars in pariah regimes – most controversially Sudan – then selling them the weapons to stay in power” (Junger 1). Even the open, economic component of China’s relationship with Africa merits doubt. Currently, the Sino-African trade balance is heavily skewed towards China’s advantage (Gadzala & Hanusch 6). Trade is based upon “highly uneven levels of development and a very different capacity to benefit from such interactions and cooperation…there cannot be genuine winwin development scenarios in such a situation” (Gadzala & Hanusch 5).

Chinese behavior, then, does reflect that of its Western counterparts, in its focus on maximizing profit despite endangering innocent lives, by threatening governmental and social structures to in pursuit of its needs and desires and its strive to be the “winner” in trade relations. Several African leaders have noticed these tendencies, and some are not bought over by benefits from Chinese trade to blindly submit to a future in China’s terms. In a brutally honest statement, “South African President Thabo Mbeki has asked if China’s relations with Africa are significantly different than those of the former colonizing powers.” (Shinn 12)

China’s behavior has been interpreted on multiple levels which have led to diverse conclusions – some applauding its mutual-development relations with Africa, others questioning whether Sino-African relations are leading to real development in Africa at all (Junger 3). The unique and distinct culture of the East may play a significant role in how the Chinese themselves reflect on this matter, as well as how it is spun to international audiences. Assiduity, humbleness, and the Communist governmental structure all impact China’s actions and also the way its actions are perceived. Assiduity, which emphasizes diligence, attention, and care, is shown in many aspects of Sino-African relations. First, and most straightforwardly, “both large Chinese companies and small traders assiduously cultivate African markets” (Shinn 3). In addition, Junger, as well as several other sources, claims that “The Chinese think a hundred years in advance” (Junger 3). Most distinct is China’s careful attention to strategy, which gives it an advantage over Western powers. In contrast “to the standard Western doom and gloom analysis of Africa,” the Chinese “portray Africa in a positive light” and emphasize similarities such as “‘common prosperity’ and shared ‘developing country’ status,” rather than assume a paternalistic role and resort to terms such as “‘development assistance’” and “the language of ‘aid’” (Cheru & Obi & Obi 4). This tactic complements nicely the importance of humbleness in Chinese culture. The good grace and emphasis on humbleness are more effective in building stronger, tighter relationships because it neither elevates one partner above the other nor allows for the biases of ethnocentrism –at least on the public

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level. In sum, “China makes no paternalistic pretense that it is in Africa to help poor Africans develop, or teach them how to govern themselves” (Cheru & Obi 2), while Western powers (in the meantime) fumble and implement policies that portray them as “arrogant and insensitive to the concerns of others” (Shinn 9). A last aspect – the Communist nature of the Chinese state – accounts for several of China’s dissimulating behaviors, which allow Beijing to present a clean and streamlined image of SinoAfrican relations to the rest of the world. Not only does the Communist government limit access and information as discussed earlier, it also limits all official economic assistance to its state-owned Export-Import Bank (Shinn 6-7), while its national ideology lays the groundwork for ostensible concepts such as cooperation and mutual benefit.

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In fact, it appears that China is making increasing efforts to identify with African nations in order to gain their confidence and international political support – which could potentially spark a rift and ignite a realignment of East vs. West alliances in Africa, reminiscent of the Cold war of the 1980s and early 1990s. To be clear, both Western powers, such as the United States, and China desire “political and economic support in international forums from African countries, which constitute more than a quarter of the membership of the UN” (Shinn 1). However, China is at an advantage as it holds more than “22 percent of all US securities owned by foreigners” (Shinn 2). With this edge, China is able to push forward in Africa without meaningful US challenge (Shinn 2). Some African governments have already rejected their so-called “Washington consensus” for a “Beijing consensus” (Cheru & Obi 1). China has overtaken the United States as South Africa’s “biggest export destination” (Gadzala & Hanusch 2).

The relationship between China and Africa in the past creates a foundation for its future. According to David Shinn in “Africa: The United States and China Court the Continent,” “independent African countries were instrumental in supporting Beijing’s admission into the United Nations in 1971” (Shinn 3). Perhaps reciprocally, China intervened and supported African liberation movements during that time period, in which the nation backed “pro-China” revolutionaries in Congo, Burundi, Niger, and Cameroon (Shinn 5-6). In the wake of this exchange, China and the nations of Africa have recognized great potential for gain from one another, resulting in a closer forging of their initial bonds. Today, many African governments and China “support each other in public statements and in the confrontation of criticism from the West” (Shinn 3). China’s emphasis on a shared, semi-colonial

Carrie Arndt

China: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

history and its alignment with African interests simply laid the pretext for further penetration of China into the continent. China is relying on this buddy-buddy schema to further cultivate its hold over the continent and its control over its “partnering” regimes. Reflectively, China already has widened the governing capacity of Africa’s autocrats in allowing them to “reign in domestic demands for democracy and respect for human rights” – two characteristics that define the Communist nation which is itself consistently criticized for human rights issues (Gadzala & Hanusch 6). Are China’s African allies becoming more “Chinese” in nature, falling into a pattern similar to that of their pseudo-patron?

Regardless, the tide is already turning from West to East: “Favorable views of China outnumber critical judgments by two-to-one or more in nearly every country surveyed” in the 2010 Afrobarometer Table 1.A: African Perceptions of Chinese Engagement across Twenty [Countries] (Gadzala & Hanusch 19). Among these countries number Liberia, which was initially founded by the United States in 1847, and Senegal, which has enjoyed a long and warm Francophonic relationship with France since the early years of independence. Almost 55% of those surveyed in Liberia stated that China helped to the highest degree available as a survey option, while nearly half marked the same in Senegal (Gadzala & Hanusch 19). These nations, once so close and cozy with Western powers, are becoming increasingly receptive to China. Is this another indication that Sino-African relationships are causing substantial power shifts, and pulling the rug from under long-held alliances?

According to Junger, “China is potentially a major strategic competitor…at all levels,” and many “balance-of-power academics [are] predicting a global struggle” (Junger 6). Just like the rest of the great power states across the world, China depends on resources – especially oil – and relationships with amenable nations which can actively bolster its political and economic stance. Ironically, “purely economic” China has shown that it is willing to protect violent and repressive governments in order to secure these gains (Junger 8). Cheru and Obi warn that the world needs to pay attention to, “study and understand the broad ramifications of Chinese history, culture, and engagement…otherwise the emerging [Sino-African] partnership could turn out to represent another phase of ‘neocolonialism’ of Africa. Only this time ‘by invitation’” (Cheru & Obi 6). China is rising, and Africa is growing into its strongest supporter.

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Two ultra-powerful entities straddle the globe, occupying diametrically opposed economic and, on occasion human rights positions. Each side feels threatened by the other, and neither dares back down, lest its opponent rise to absolute supremacy. Ensuing buildup of military defense systems, pursuit of neocolonialist interests, and international disputes may escalate until the world begins to wonder, have we reached the point of no return? These phenomena directly explain the Cold War on the 1980s and early 1990s, where the United States was pitted against the Soviet Union. However, how easily can one simply replace the Soviet Union with China to describe a conflict of the future? As indicated, opinions and alliances are shifting in Africa, and neither the United States nor China will be willing to forfeit their power in a continent so instrumental in international economic affairs.

Will Africa become the new stage of a second Cold War, falling all too quickly into a new phase of neocolonialism and puppet states? Will fighting between the global giants create new ruptures in the African social fabric, new repression, new chaos, and the ultimate rebirth of a continent under new terms? As Junger proposes, the potential of global struggle “all depends on how… [China manages] the process of their emergence on the world scene” (Junger 6). The remaining question is whether this development will turn China into a violent aggressor, a hostile competitor, a dragon lustful for power, or one that will follow its promised path of mutual development as Africa’s friend and mentor.

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Carrie Arndt

China: The Next Neocolonial Power in Africa?

References Cheru, Fantu, and Cyril Obi. “De-Coding China-Africa Relations: Partnership for Development or ‘(Neo) Colonialism by Invitation’?.” World Financial Review. 2011: 1-7.

Gadzala, Aleksandra, and Marek Hanusch. African Perspectives on ChinaAfrica: Gauging Popular Perceptions and their Economic and Political Determinants.

Afrobarometer 2010. 117. Afrobarometer, 2010. 2-22.

Junger, Sebastian. “Enter China, the Giant.” Vanity Fair 563 Jul 2007. 1-8.

MasterFILE Premier. Database. hinn, David H. “Africa: The United States and China Court the Continent.”

Journal of International Affairs. 62.2.

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The United States, China, and Global Current Account Imbalances

Abstract: China’s manipulation of its currency is one of the main reasons for the US’ widening trade imbalance with the country. The author proposes three policy measures to lower the US’s trade deficit.

First, unfair trade practices by China, which artificially boost the Sino-American current account deficit, must be addressed. Second, US domestic consumption habits must be changed. The US has a large preference for consumption of foreign goods and an extremely low propensity to save disposable income. These characteristics of US consumers worsen the American current account position. Finally, the author concludes by recommending dollar devaluation to promote long-term US interests as well as improve the outlook on global monetary stability and economic growth.

Arjun Khanna graduated from Duke University in May 2012. He is currently a first year student at Harvard Medical School.

The United States, China, and Global Current Account Imbalances

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ne of the most striking aspects of the global economy today is the large and growing current account deficits accrued by the United States and other economies. While some analysts believe that such deficits will deteriorate slowly over time, there is a probability that a sudden change in investor sentiments in international financial markets could precipitate an acute and disruptive adjustment of these current account imbalances (Ahearne et al, 2007).

Current account adjustment is necessary for the United States to avoid these consequences of continued external deficits. There must be three components to this adjustment process. First, unfair trade practices by China, which artificially boost the Sino-American current account deficit, must be addressed. Second, US domestic consumption habits must be changed.

The US has a large preference for consumption of foreign goods and an extremely low propensity to save disposable income. These characteristics of US consumers worsen the American current account position. Finally, the dollar must be devalued to boost exports and check growing imbalances.

In the following paper, I will first describe the phenomenon of rising global imbalances and explain how Chinese economic policy plays a key role in exacerbating these imbalances. I will then explain Chinese intervention in currency markets and argue that it is imperative that the Chinese revalue the renminbi. A discussion of US policy options to countervail Chinese currency manipulation will follow. Following this analysis of China, I will address the issue of the US role in global imbalances more generally and outline a strategy to curtail the problem. I will end with a discussion as to why dollar devaluation is strategic for the United States and how the international monetary system can be modified to promote long-term US interests as well as improve the outlook on global monetary stability and economic growth.

Rising Global Imbalances: A Review of Literature Pressures on exchange rates around the world are an obvious consequence of persistent global imbalances. Obstfeld and Rogoff (2005) argue that the risks of collateral damage beyond just exchange rate stability have gone up due to a combination of low US savings, the federal government’s poor fiscal trajectory, and a dependence on Asian central banks to finance deficits. They warn of a global financial meltdown, perhaps precipitated by debt liquidity

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crises, in the case of exchange rate swings. Cline (2005) argues that because borrowing now finances consumption instead of investment, foreign inflows and trade deficits are fundamentally less sustainable than in previous decades.

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There are also those with less dire views. Greenspan (2004) claims that global financial integration brought on by foreign capital inflow might soften the fall if a crisis were to occur. Croke, Kamin, and Leduc (2005) find that large current account imbalances in industrialized countries typically resolve themselves in harmless ways. Of course, this study utilized a definition of a sustained current account imbalance and reversal that was smaller than that seen in the US today, primarily because the magnitude of the trade imbalance in the US is unprecedented.

There have been many proposals to resolve these rising global imbalances.

Feldstein (2008), Bergsten (2009), and others claim that the US needs more savings and a weaker dollar in order to adjust. Ahearne et al (2007) point toward the undervaluation of Asian currencies and their large trade surpluses and argue that revaluation of these currencies is critical for a rebalancing of trade. Indeed, Baily and Lawrence (2006) argue that the high value of the dollar in these and other markets is the primary cause of the growing trade deficit, not any fundamental reduction in the competitiveness of US firms.

These proposals and others are discussed in this paper.

The US current account deficit reached an estimated $668.9 billion in 2008 and $378.4 billion in 2009, the largest deficits in the world for both years (CIA World Factbook, 2012). Although these deficits reflect the severe consequences of the 2008 Financial Crisis, the outlook has hardly improved despite a modest global recovery. The US current account deficit in 2010 climbed to $470.9 billion in 2010, and stood at 473.4 billion at the end of 2011. (CIA, World Factbook, 2012) The persistence of external deficits by the United States will lead to an accumulation of a massive amount of foreign liabilities by the United States and an equally massive accumulation of US assets by the Chinese and other Asian economies that finance the US debt.

However, this cannot continue indefinitely. As sovereign wealth funds grow deeper in dollars, governments will divest away from US sovereign debt to diversify national portfolios. Additionally, as more US sovereign debt is accumulated, investors might begin to question the US government’s ability to service the debt, and the US might be subject to the same kind of sovereign debt crisis currently faced Greece and other countries in the Eurozone. These effects will eventually demand higher returns on investment and drive interest rates up in the United States, which would undercut domestic investment.

Arjun Khanna

Global Current Account Imbalances

By virtue of the large and growing volume of trade between the United States and China (and, indeed, China and many other industrialized countries), Chinese trade practices play an increasingly important role in exacerbating global current account imbalances. The following section describes how Chinese trade practices are unfair and how they contribute to these imbalances.

Chinese Currency Manipulation: Causes and Effects The domestic savings rate in China is extremely high and consumption is correspondingly low. This is due to a variety of factors, including poorly developed social safety programs, costly education, and healthcare costs, all of which incentivize the public to save. Because Chinese production exceeds consumption, surplus capacity is exported to foreign consumers in order to maintain domestic employment. As such, China runs a large trade surplus with the United States and most other industrialized countries in the world. The natural market response to such persistent trade surpluses would be an appreciation of the renminbi because of high foreign demand for Chinese exports and therefore Chinese domestic currency. However, such an appreciation would undermine the export sector by making Chinese exports more expensive to foreign consumers.

To keep its exports competitive in global markets, the People’s Bank of China (PBC) regularly intervenes in the currency market by buying the excess dollars it receives from the United States through the bilateral current account deficit and exchanging these for renminbi. To control inflation, the PBC simultaneously “sterilizes” these exchanges by reducing liquidity through other means, such as selling government assets or reducing bank lending through authoritarian means. The dollars that the bank purchases are added to China’s foreign currency reserves. To accumulate interest payments on these holdings at low risk, China purchases US Treasury Securities with these dollars and in this way contributes to large capital inflows into the United States.

Chinese currency manipulation confers an unfair advantage to Chinese export industries because it allows Chinese exports to price foreign competition out of foreign markets.As a consequence of artificially cheap Chinese goods, some US producers exit the market. Some estimates claim that the U.S. trade deficit with China has led to the loss or displacement of 2.4 million jobs in the manufacturing sector in the United States (Economic Policy Institute, 2010), and at least 500,000 of these jobs can be returned if the renminbi were to be revalued to market equilibrium levels (Bergsten, 2010).

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Renminbi undervaluation also puts pressure on other fledgling Asian economies to undervalue their currencies in order to compete with Chinese exports on the global market. In particular, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan all have significantly undervalued currencies (Cline & Williamson, 2010). This prevents the depreciation of the dollar relative to these currencies and therefore reduces the competitiveness of US exports throughout East Asia (Morrison & Labonte, 2010). The aggregate effects of pricing foreign firms out of the global market has a negative impact on resource allocation in the global economy and therefore a negative impact on global production. In fact, Paul Krugman claims that global economic growth would be about 1.5% higher if China stopped manipulating its currency and creating global imbalances (Christie, 2010).

There is no widespread consensus as to how undervalued the renminbi is and by how much it should be allowed appreciate in order to eliminate the effects of currency intervention by the PBC. This uncertainty is due to a number of factors. PBC currency interventions are not transparent, so the exact magnitude of interventions is unclear. There is no consensus as to the exact figure of the Chinese trade surplus, largely due to ambiguities regarding trade with Taiwan and exports that originate in China but are shipped through Hong Kong before arriving at their final destination. There is no consensus as to how sensitive Chinese imports and exports would be to exchange rate fluctuations. Finally, strict capital controls make it difficult to estimate China’s equilibrium current account balance. Nevertheless, estimates using the fundamental equilibrium exchange rate (FEER) method and the purchasing power parity (PPP) theory determine that the renminbi is undervalued by about 20%.

Another indicator of growing global imbalances caused by China is the burgeoning foreign exchange reserves that continue to expand due to the constant exchange of dollars for renminbi facilitated by the PBC. These foreign exchange reserves are the largest in the world, estimated to be worth around $2.4 trillion in 2009. At the end of December 2009, China was also the world’s second largest holder of US Treasury Securities, holding at least $755.4 billion (Johnson, 2010). Rapidly expanding foreign exchange reserves are an indication that a currency imbalance exists because it could represent central bank intervention in currency markets. Based on this evidence and estimates of renminbi undervaluation based on FEER and PPP analyses, it is safe to assume that the renminbi is undervalued by about 20% and that this contributes significantly to global current account imbalances.

Arjun Khanna

Global Current Account Imbalances

It is unlikely that the Chinese will pursue renminbi appreciation in an adequately short timespan to stop and reverse growing global current account imbalances. Chinese policy is designed to maximize employment opportunity and thereby promote domestic social stability. An appreciating renminbi could cause employment to fall and may lead to social unrest.

The Chinese are unlikely to adjust this policy even though it leads to a suboptimal global outcome. Given the unwillingness of the Chinese to revalue the renminbi to correct the global imbalances they have caused, Chinese trading partners must collectively take action to renormalize current accounts with China (Bergsten, 2007).

US Policy Options to Encourage Renminbi Appreciation

FEER and PPP analyses, combined with the observation of quickly expanding Chinese foreign exchange reserves, demonstrate that the Chinese are actively manipulating the renminbi to sustain an export advantage and trade surpluses. However, the US Treasury Department has yet to identify China as a currency manipulator in its semiannual exchange rate policies report. It will be difficult to galvanize international support and to legitimately take international action to pressure China to revalue the currency without formally declaring the country a currency manipulator. Indeed, the very act of the formal designation might send a signal to China and the international community that the current currency policies cannot be tolerated. The US Treasury Department should formally designate China a currency manipulator to define and clarify US trade policy toward China.

Several advanced and emerging economies have agreed that China needs to revalue the renminbi to normalize trade imbalances. The commitment to increase exchange rate flexibility was formalized at the G-20 summit in November 2010 and was agreed upon by all nations present, including China (IMF, 2010a). The Mutual Assessment Process proposed in Seoul emphasizes increasing exchange rate flexibility, boosting domestic demand in developing economies, and decreasing fiscal deficits in advanced economies (IMF, 2010b). The US should engage in diplomatic efforts to pressure China to enact reforms in accordance with these strategies.

In addition to a revaluation of the renminbi, international pressure should be applied to reform key social programs in China to boost domestic consumption. Chinese consumers save primarily to be able to afford education, healthcare, and costs of living after retirement.

If social programs were to be enacted to lessen these costs for Chinese

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consumers, domestic consumption in China would rise, which would reduce China’s dependency on exports. To the extent that it is possible, G-20 countries should pressure China to accelerate these reforms as well as appreciate the renminbi to address China’s trade surplus. The United States can lead this charge.

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In addition to this international pressure to appreciate, the United States can counter PBC currency manipulations by directly intervening in the renminbi market itself. Just as the PBC buys dollars and sells renminbi to devalue the renminbi relative to the dollar, the US can intervene in the renminbi market by buying non-deliverable forward contracts for renminbi and renminbi-denominated securities in Hong Kong in exchange for dollars (Bergsten, 2010) in an effort to counteract PBC action . At the very least, this would drive down the price of renminbi-denominated assets and thereby place even more inflationary pressure on China to appreciate.

Though pressure through international bodies and currency markets for renminbi appreciation is ideal because it is the most direct method of correcting the current account imbalance, the Chinese have historically ignored international calls for currency appreciation. Because the IMF lacks enforcement tools of its own, the US and allies can turn to the World Trade Organization (WTO) to seek permission to enact countervailing trade policy to offset the depreciated currency.

There are two routes by which this case can be brought to the WTO. First, members can indict China under Article XV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Section 7 of this article prohibits countries from “frustrating the intent of the provisions of this Agreement by exchange action” (WTO, 1994). Successful prosecution of China under this article would authorize members to legally retaliate against Chinese exports using import tariffs and other such protectionist measures . Given that currency manipulation plays such a large role in the growth of current account imbalances, it may be necessary to revise Article XV of the GATT to explicitly include cases of currency manipulation. Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made for currency controls and sovereign wealth funds to be brought under WTO oversight (Mattoo & Subramanian, 2008). The United States and allies should pursue both the general indictment under Article XV and reform of the GATT.

Second, countries may individually choose to regard the Chinese currency undervaluation as an export subsidy and submit a legal complaint under the Code on Subsidies and Countervailing Duties (Bergsten, 2010). This would authorize countries to take countervailing action. If a sound legal case for regarding the currency undervaluation as an export subsidy can be made, China would have to individually

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challenge each ruling to reverse these decisions. Aggressive action by a multilateral coalition of China’s trading partners in the G-20, IMF, and WTO to both pressure China to allow exchange rate flexibility in the renminbi and, should China refuse, enact countervailing measures on Chinese imports around the world, is the most effective American international economic policy. There have been several unilateral policy suggestions, including imposing Section 301 trade sanctions against China, applying U.S. countervailing laws to Chinese imports under the premise that currency manipulation amounts to an export subsidy, and applying estimates of currency undervaluation to US antidumping measures (Morrison & Labonte, 2008). However, unilateral action will do little to address the core issue of rising global imbalances due to a growing US trade deficit.

Either renminbi appreciation or widespread global countervailing measures would have the effect of making US exports to third markets more competitive with Chinese exports. This would simultaneously lower the US trade deficit and reduce the Chinese trade surplus, which is precisely the outcome required to resolve one major current account imbalance. Unilateral trade restrictions would increase US competitiveness in domestic sectors competing with Chinese imports to the United States but would do little to combat the unfair advantage that an undervalued renminbi confers to China in third markets. The American trade deficit with China might decrease, but absent any other fundamental changes in American trading patterns, this would do much less to decrease our overall trade deficit. In fact, we may even see our trade deficit with other countries simply rise as a result of a falling deficit with China (Baily & Lawrence, 2006). A much more comprehensive approach that addresses core domestic issues is required to correct US trade imbalances more generally.

General Trade Imbalance in the United States

Over the past five years, the United States has run a current account deficit averaging about $600 billion, the largest in the world.

Deficits have persisted for over a decade. As has been explained in section II, these deficits represent large global imbalances and are growing unsustainably. These imbalances have economic and political ramifications. The Obama administration has announced a plan to increase exports and remove the US from the role of the global “importer of last resort.� There are three primary causes of our overall trade deficit. First, there is a discrepancy between domestic savings and investment in the United States, which causes capital inflow and a

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negative balance of payments. Because the US consumes more than it produces, it needs to import capital from the rest of the world to fuel business investment. The primary cause of this lack of savings is the marginal propensity to save of US households. US household saving was essentially zero – 0.5% of disposable income in 2007. For this reason, the US needs to rely on capital from the rest of the world and run a large current account deficit (Feldstein, 2008).

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Second, persistent and large government deficits cause trade imbalances as well. There are two mechanisms by which fiscal deficits can cause trade deficits, which are together known as the “twin deficits.” An increase in government deficit spending designed to increase household income will also increase imports by a factor equal to the marginal propensity to import, which for the US is extremely high. In addition, financing the deficit creates upward pressure on interest rates in the market, which attracts foreign investment and creates a financial account surplus. This surplus balances out with a trade deficit through a number of mechanisms, including appreciation of the dollar. Finally, an overvalued dollar is an important cause of the trade deficit. In fact, Baily and Lawrence (2006) report “the exchange rate of the dollar is the major factor leading to the trade deficit rather than any structural ability of US manufacturing or services to compete.” A depreciated dollar would make all US exports more competitive in global markets and would reduce the purchasing power of American consumers.

Both of these effects would dramatically lower the trade deficit and reduce global current account imbalances.

Strategy to Correct the American Trade Imbalance

The US government can take measures to manage these issues. First, policy can be constructed to incentivize household savings. There is some precedent for a tax credit to be given for saved income. Enacting this kind of tax credit plan can be an effective way to simultaneously promote savings and allow the market to allocate investment funds instead of the government.

Additionally, the US can shift its national taxation system toward consumption rather than income by instituting a national value added tax (VAT). This would dis-incentivize consumption and thereby promote savings. It would also provide extra government income to reduce government deficits.

Second, US fiscal policy is perhaps the most effective and direct tool by which the government can control the growing trade deficit. As explained above, government deficits can lead to trade deficits through the twin deficit phenomenon. What is perhaps even more dangerous is that interest rates demanded by investors in US sovereign debt are

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probably not reflective of the actual risk associated with holding Treasury Securities. This is true for a multitude of reasons, including the continued purchase of securities by the Chinese and other sovereign wealth funds and sustained global demand for dollars owing to the dollar’s role as the global reserve and vehicle currency. If US sovereign debt continues to be issued at artificially low interest rates, the US may suddenly find itself subject to an illiquidity crisis similar to that of Greece and other Eurozone countries as the debt to GDP ratio continues to grow. The US fiscal position needs to be strengthened by minimizing deficit spending.

Third, weakening the dollar has been cited as a necessity to resolve global current account imbalances in virtually every discussion on the issue. A devalued dollar will make US exports in all export industries more competitive globally and will help to reduce our trade imbalance by increasing exports and decreasing imports. A devaluation of the dollar has a major strategic advantage over the imposition of trade restrictions and the application of pressure for China to allow the renminbi to appreciate. A devalued dollar will promote investment and job creation in exports sectors that largely represent the comparative advantage of the United States in the global economy. According the Heckscher-Ohlin model of international trade, the US should export capital-intensive, high value-added products – what Baily and Lawrence (2006) call “the industries of tomorrow.” A devalued dollar will promote growth in these sectors. Trade restrictions and renminbi appreciation might help preserve low-skill intensive manufacturing industries in the United States and alleviate trade asymmetries in the short and medium run. However, China has a comparative advantage in low-skill intensive goods and should, in the long run, export these goods to the US and elsewhere. Moving the US economy up the value-added chain must be a strategic objective of economic policy. Devaluing the dollar is a sound method of achieving this objective. The multilateral trade restrictions and renminbi revaluation described above will relieve trade imbalances in the short and medium run, but because of fundamental differences in the comparative advantages of China and the US, they can do little to help move US export sectors upstream.

A cause of a persistently high-valued dollar is the constant demand for dollars by countries looking to expand foreign exchange reserves. Currently, the dollar represents 65% of national reserves (Bergsten, 2009). The demand for dollars due to this function ensures that any increase in the foreign currency reserves of a country must be financed by gross debt from the Untied States (Williamson, 2009). This increased demand for dollars also increases the exchange rate of the dollar to make exports less competitive.

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Rethinking Foreign Exchange Reserves and the Role of the Dollar There are, of course, benefits of the dollar as the reserve currency. The dollar reserve system ensures a constant demand for US Treasury Securities that the US can issue in dollar denominations. French President Charles de Gaulle and his economic advisor Jacques Reuff used to refer to the ability of the US to issue debt in the domestic currency as an “exorbitant privilege.”

Furthermore, the demand for US assets allows borrowers in the US to enjoy low interest rates on large amounts of borrowing.

I believe these benefits to the reserve currency status of the dollar should be sacrificed, and a new global monetary system that includes a more diverse array of currencies in national reserves should be pursued. The “exorbitant privilege” conferred on the US only amounts to an estimated $40-$70 billion per year (McKinsey Global Institute, 2009). This relatively small sum should be traded off with better export competitiveness due to a devalued dollar that would come about by diversifying national reserves. And while interest rates on US Treasury Securities would rise, this might help the US avoid a sovereign debt crisis in the future by assigning a more realistic market value to the risk associated with US Treasuries as sovereign debt continues to accumulate.

As international trade proliferates, other currencies will likely rise in prominence and be utilized in sovereign wealth funds. This will naturally diminish the role of the dollar as the international reserve currency. To accelerate this process, the United States should push for the expanded issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) by the IMF to be used as a global reserve currency. The idea of using Special Drawing Rights as the international reserve currency is not new; SDRs were created as a fiat reserve currency almost 40 years ago. To date, however, only about 21.4 billion SDRs are in existence. Because the use of SDRs in the accumulation of sovereign wealth funds allows the growth of these funds without adverse effects on currency valuations and the propagation of global imbalances, some claim that if the rate of SDR creation could satisfy the reserveaccumulation objectives of all countries, global imbalances as a whole could be eliminated (Williamson, 2009). Regardless of whether SDRs or simply another currency is used to diversify the accumulation of foreign reserves, the move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency will depreciate the dollar, allow US exports to compete more effectively on the world market, and reduce the US current account imbalance.

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Conclusions In this paper, I have presented the rise of global imbalances and the role of the US trade deficit in the persistence of these imbalances. I discussed why currency manipulation by China exacerbates these imbalances and what actions the United States and its allies can take to address this currency manipulation. I then explained why the US trade deficit with China is not the only cause of our unsustainable trade and described other aspects of the US economy that contribute to our rising current account imbalance. Finally, I detailed policy that can be pursued to address these more fundamental issues dealing with trade and trade policy in the United States.

There are several outstanding points to be addressed. First, the premise of the argument that the renminbi needs to be revalued can be questioned. An undervalued renminbi benefits consumers of imported Chinese goods and borrowers of incoming Chinese capital alike. Revaluing the renminbi will reduce both of these benefits. However, this sacrifice should be made for the sake of more balanced trade. Reduced consumption of more expensive Chinese goods will lower our trade deficit and perhaps even promote savings.

A reduction in freely available foreign capital will more appropriately assign risk to investments. Both of these effects generate positive outcomes in the long run.

Second, it is possible to make the argument that the Chinese will be forced to revalue the renminbi even if the US does nothing to pressure the change.

Constant undervaluation of the renminbi places severe inflationary pressure on markets in China. Though the use of capital controls and sterilization techniques mitigate this effect to a small extent, over time these techniques will become less effective, and appreciation will become the only viable way to control inflation. However, given the state of the global economy, the ongoing recovery of the US economy, and the continued growth of sovereign wealth funds, action to appreciate the renminbi is required immediately.

The US and other economies might face the consequences of persistent global imbalances before the Chinese consider it necessary to revalue the renminbi if no immediate action is taken.

Third, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which a transition to a floating exchange rate for the renminbi causes depreciation of the currency instead of appreciation. Predictions of appreciation are largely based on trade figures, but if large amounts of capital moved out of China following the removal of capital controls, the renminbi might lose value. This capital flight might occur due to more attractive investment opportunities elsewhere or

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fear of risk in Chinese investment. However, most agree that this is unlikely, especially given that the Chinese are nationalistic and are unlikely to move money out of China in great quantities.

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Finally, there are some who believe that the fact that the Chinese hold a vast amount of dollar assets confers upon them some kind of strategic advantage over the United States. Specifically, many argue that they could precipitate a collapse of the dollar if they begin a widespread selloff of these assets.

However, this is highly unlikely, primarily because doing so would destroy the value of the Chinese investment portfolio. In addition, there are few other assets available for investment with the same low level of risk associated with US Treasury Securities. China could retaliate against the US government by purchasing dollar assets from entities other than the US government, but doing so would reduce spreads on those assets relative to Treasuries and help private US borrowers in the long run.

The point of this paper is not to advocate for a confrontational, unilateral trade policy toward China. Indeed, the effects of such unilateral action are likely to be deleterious. Instead, I argue for a multilateral approach to China to force currency appreciation or a reduction in their trade advantage as an effort to reduce trade imbalances. However, the real work must be done domestically. The United States requires a fundamental shift in consumption patterns and economic policy to avoid the negative consequences of longterm global current account imbalances.

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Global Current References Account Imbalances Ahearne, Alan, et al. Global Imbalances: Time for Action. Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007. Print.

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Cline, William R., Center for Global Development., and Institute for International Economics (U.S.). The United States as a Debtor Nation. Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics : Center for Global Development, 2005. Print.

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Washington, D.C.: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 2005. Print.

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Economic Policy Institute. Unfair China Trade Costs Local Jobs 2.4 Million Jobs Lost, Thousands Displaced in Every U.S. Congressional District: Economic Policy Institute, 2010. Print.

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Activity (2005): 67-146. Print.

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Taiwanese Queer Literature: The Development of a National Identity Politics in Taiwan’s Emergent Queer Discourse

Abstract: As Taiwan witnessed an intensification of political conflict in recent years, the nation’s society has been transformed by new social developments, intercultural interactions and globalization. The emergent queer literature (“ku’er wenxue”) since the 1980s uses indigenous cultural representations of homosexuality to reflect a growing sense of both homosexual and national identity crisis on the island. Queer discourses thus use the homosexual experience as a novel literary trope to illustrate the psychological dilemma of living under the rapidly changing global conditions in Taiwan. This paper analyses two examples of queer novels that reveal the impact of Westernization on Taiwanese society before and after martial law was lifted in 1987. Bai Xianyong’s Crystal Boys and Zhu Tianwen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (NDM) portray distinct fictional narratives of homosexuality to reflect the ambivalent conceptions of both queer and national identity in a society influenced by the emergence of a new globalized cultural paradigm.

Rachel Leng is a Duke junior from Singapore. She is pursuing a double major in Public Policy and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (concentrating on China), as well as a Certificate in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).

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Taiwanese Queer Literature: The Development of a National Identity Politics in Taiwan’s Emergent Queer Discourse

I

n the past few decades, Taiwanese society has been grappling to integrate a strong Chinese cultural heritage together with a unique sense of self-identity resulting from a national history distinct from the Mainland. The intensification of political conflict in recent years bears the imprint of new social developments, intercultural interactions and global influences transforming Taiwan, engendering a highly polymorphous society with different communities vying for their representative cultural voices (Liao 92). The emergent homosexual cultural politics in Taiwan is one such marginalized voice trying to assert itself through literary discourse, commanding focus on complex ethnic and social relationships that exist and interact within the country (Chang 196). Specifically, the development of queer literature (“ku’er wenxue”) since the 1980s uses cultural representations of homosexuality to reflect a growing sense of identity crisis on the island and address the psychological dilemma of living under rapidly changing global conditions (Martin [1] 4). Queer discourses thus define new social categories that forge resistance to foreign influences but are nonetheless still trapped within an institutionalized network subjugated to a global circulation of ideas. Bai Xianyong’s Crystal Boys and Zhu Tianwen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (NDM) are two Taiwanese novels that portray a suppressed homosexual identity to illustrate the complex dynamic arising from a shift in the island’s societal and political framework amidst the emergence of a new globalized cultural paradigm.

A comparative analysis of the novels reveals significant changes in the liberalization and pluralization of Taiwanese society before and after martial law was lifted in 1987. In particular, both Crystal Boys and NDM use fictional representations of homosexuality to portray the issues of globalization and its impact on a changing society.

While foreign influences are ubiquitous in both novels, the differing indigenous and foreign representations of male homosexual culture parallel the tension between local and global influences in a society trying to define its national identity during different periods of Taiwan’s history. Through references to Western cultural commodities and the relationships of central homosexual characters to foreign friends in the novels, the authors emphasize an emerging identity crisis concerned with nationalism in an increasingly globalized Taiwan.

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Taiwan’s History

Taiwan’s history is one of successive waves of colonization that have profoundly shaped the island’s unique contemporary culture that made the rise of queer theory and politics possible. Taiwan was handed over to Nationalist China in 1945 and held under martial law for 38 years until 1987. However, since the Formosa Incident in 1979, Taiwan witnessed increased momentum in nativist resistance and greater efforts pushing for democratization accompanied by a shift towards a more Taiwan-centric identity (Martin 18).

While the first lesbian and gay discourses were brought into Taiwan at this time, the movement did not flourish until the 1990s. The lifting of martial law released powerful democratizing energies with the cessation of political and cultural regulation of speech, accompanied with rapid urbanization and industrialization that called for a more open and multicultural society in Taiwan (Lin 239). The nation’s progress towards modernization thus “appeal[ed] to the values of democracy, liberalism, and pluralism” but has been “defined more by rupture and disjuncture than by any universal or unifying qualities” (Martin [2] 11). In a growing consumer-oriented society, there was a “desire ... to understand the burgeoning social imagery of Taiwan through correlative Western frameworks,” laying the foundation for the explosive success of queer literature (Liao 92). The concept of homosexuality is itself a Western-influenced concept, and the rise of queer literature inherently symbolizes the ubiquitous penetration of foreign culture.

Queer discourse thus politicizes homosexual desire by employing the theme of transgressive same-sex sexuality as a symbolic vehicle, articulating the psychological aspect of living in new global conditions through a spiritual journey in search of sexual and cultural identity (Chang 198). Taiwan’s queer discourse presents itself as avant-garde, progressive and trendy at the cultural front by connecting with the media and postmodernism (Bosco 393). Crystal Boys and NDM use varied fictional representations of homosexual culture to explore the perplexities about identity and tradition that Taiwanese society faces as a result of an increasingly globalized world. However, as the novels were published a decade apart, their distinct narrative conceptualizations of a homosexual cultural identity reflect the evolution of responses to the transnational flow of culture commodities in contemporary Taiwan over their respective time periods.

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Taiwanese Queer Literature

Crystal Boys: Sensitivity to Dilemma of Intensifying Interactions Between Local and Global Cultures Under Martial Law

Published in 1983, Bai Xuanyong’s Crystal Boys was the first novel that explicitly depicted male homosexuality, and is now considered a foundational classic of ku’er wenxue in early 1980s Taiwan (Lin 240). The novel burst onto the literary scene at a historical juncture when Taiwan was undergoing a series of social and political events prior to the lifting of martial law that led to the island’s dramatic transformation and markedly polymorphous cultural climate.

Crystal Boys presents an interesting fusion of sexual and political overtones, deploying homosexual relationships as a metaphor to describe conflicted sentiments of a budding anti-nationalist Taiwanese identity trapped between the local and the global. The very title “nie-zi”, which can be alternatively translated as “sons of sin,” “son born of a concubine” or “monster”, places the novel directly within the context of a traditional family structure where sons have a filial duty to carry on the family line, and the failure to reproduce sets the homosexual community apart from conservative society, constituting a cultural diaspora within Taiwan resulting from globalization (Martin [2] 48). The preoccupation with father-son relationships and anxiety over the absence of a home/ father is a haunting theme throughout the novel, and serves to highlight discordant psychological responses to foreign influences in a rapidly transforming society. Homosexual prostitutes, the “crystal boys” of the title, perpetually seek surrogate fathers in and out of their erotic relationships, but while some crave reconciliation, others strive to assert their own self-identity.

The novel tells the story of a group of young male sex workers and their patrons who gather in the hidden “dark kingdom” of Taipei’s New Park (17). A-Qing, the novel’s young protagonist, is banished from his family home by his father after being expelled from school for “an immoral act with the lab supervisor” (13). He drifts into the underground life of New Park, and joins a community of “young birds” who cruise the park (14). Throughout the novel, the legendary, tragic love affair between Dragon Prince and Phoenix Boy is told on numerous accounts, where the Dragon eventually “plunge[s] his knife right into the middle of [Phoenix’s] chest” out of frustration over the impossibility of their love (186).

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When A-Qing meets the Dragon Prince, Wang Kuilong, just returned to Taipei after ten years of hiding “in Manhattan...the heart of New York...across from Central Park” when he was exiled by his father for a homosexual scandal (103). Wang describes his experience in New York as emotionally traumatic, one that turned him into “a living ghost who never saw the light of day” (103). Central Park was a horrible place to him, and “for all those years [he] lived without memories, without feeling” after being sexually abused (104). Even the “young birds” he encountered there had been sexually victimized or were under constant life threat: “thousands and thousands of kids...[roam] the checkerboard streets of New York, day and night, night and day, prowling, hiding out, picking up diseases, and being devoured in the parks” (107). Wang’s dystopic account of New York demystifies the American Dream and gives a miserable impression of Western society as one that is devoid of all meaning and compassion. Wang yearned “to go home, back to Taipei, back to New Park” (108). Upon his father’s death, Wang ends his forced exile by returning home to Taiwan, taking up the role of a wayward and confused son trying to escape the reach of foreign influences. The relationship between A-Qing and Wang thus contrasts local and global homosexual experiences, symbolizing a community exposed to foreign influences that realizes they no longer belong to either the Mainland or Taiwan, but are reluctant or fearful of fully embracing to Western culture.

This is emphasized when A-Qing consciously tries to distance himself from Wang because intimacy made him feel like Wang was trying to “pull [him] into the quicksand with him,” paralleling local sentiments that the influx of foreign influences were suffocating and inescapable (112).

In contrast, A-Qing’s relationship with Little Jade suggests a different politics that is more favorable towards foreign influences. Both A-Qing and Little Jade consistently seek surrogate fathers throughout the novel, but Little Jade is also determined to pursue his “cherry blossom dream” and search for his biological father, proclaiming that he “won’t rest, dead or alive, until [he finds] that goddam father of [his]” (131). A bastard child, Little Jade only knows that his father is a Taiwanese-Japanese merchant, but is fully determined to “make it to Tokyo,...change [his] name and start over” (132). Resourceful and cunning, Little Jade is unafraid of the unknown and understands that he has to “depend on [his] own flesh and blood” to meet clients such as Lin Maoxiong who can take him to Japan (132). He eventually succeeds in jumping ship to Japan, and his letters to A-Qing are bubbling with excitement about the “neon signs of Shinjuku” and his new job as a waiter (311). Little Jade also tells A-Qing about the much larger and active community of “young birds” in Tokyo who “flit up and down the streets without worrying about the police” in an open and tolerant society (318). Little Jade’s letters give readers a completely different impression of

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Rachel Leng

Taiwanese Queer Literature

going abroad from Wang’s account, wherein foreign cultures imply hope and positive life changes. Little Jade’s refusal to accept abandonment and determination to “search through every inch of Japan” in an active pursuit for his father also symbolizes a desire within Taiwanese society to assert their unique cultural identity amidst pressure towards the increasingly globalized construction of a heterogeneous community (319).

The contrast between Wang and Little Jade’s experiences abroad represents the divided politics of the novel with conflicting attitudes towards globalization as a process in which Taiwan variously embraces, adapts and resists foreign paradigms. While Wang’s disheartening narrative resigned to misfortune represents the dominant voice of the text, Little Jade’s rebellious and subversive character leaves readers with an optimistic outlook at the end of the novel and foreshadows the emerging defiant activism of the 1990s. The preoccupation with the relationship of sexual identity to a traditional patriarchal family structure in Crystal Boys challenges the bourgeois ideologies of familial structure and reproductive sexuality to reflect the emergent cultural hybridity in Taiwan. The distinct foreign experiences of homosexual characters depicted in the novel symbolize an increasingly multi-dimensional attitude towards foreign influences and globalization in Taiwanese society.

Ultimately, the novel is concerned with the “Birds of Youth” who are “a bunch of fledglings who’ve lost [their] nest, like a flock of sea swallows crossing the ocean, struggling to keep flying ahead, with no idea where [they]’ll end up,” alluding to a displaced community within Taiwanese society unsure of how to respond to the dilemma of living in a swiftly transforming political and cultural environment (81). Bai thus uses the fictional portrayal of homosexuality as an anti-nationalist metaphor to represent a shift towards a more Taiwan-centric construction of cultural identity with sexual deviation embodying social and political resistance.

Notes of a Desolate Man: Postmodern Response to the Global Condition Post-Martial Law

Published in 1994, a decade after Crystal Boys and at the height of the post-martial law tsunami of queer literature, Zhu Tianwen’s Notes of a Desolate Man (NDM) is a poignant response to the speed of global modernization and considered a key work for the public representation of homosexuality in Taiwan. Taiwan’s entry into the global realm in the 1990s resulted in dramatic economic development and social transformation “marked by a disjuncture between a traditional life world and the new global environment” (Wang 2000: 372). Writing out of the postmodern milieu, Zhu’s novel

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exhibits a flattening of perception countered by a nostalgic narrative of yearning for the lost world of traditional family structure. In a radically new global capitalist environment dominated by industrialization, technology and urbanization, the Taiwanese population is depicted as being progressively severed from their traditional way of life.

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In NDM, the first-person narrator, Little Shao, is a Taiwanese gay who has “reached [his] fortieth year, the prime of a man’s life,” yet feels like he has already “become like a dead tree,” and gives us the testimony of a desolate man living in an increasingly desolate world defined by instability (1). Similar to Crystal Boys, NDM also prevaricates between endorsing and disparaging a homosexual lifestyle to reflect divided sexual politics and conflicting attitudes towards social changes brought about by new global conditions. However, NDM moves away from father-son relationships as a central organizing axis to emphasize unique characteristics of a new homosexual awareness in a global city undergoing rapid transformations.

This development parallels the wane of Chinese authoritative power and influx of Western cultural commodities in 1990s Taiwanese society. Zhu’s novel offers a self-reflective and recursive account of a man’s attempt to grapple with his social identity overwhelmed by a consumer-oriented environment wherein the individual is increasingly being commoditized to suit the purposes of mass media.

Written in a highly aesthetic postmodernist style, NDM provides a very different construction of homosexual culture, weaving a dreamlike account of the psychological world of a homosexual that is much more intellectual, westernized and decadent than Crystal Boys. The narrative is riddled with references to Western cultural commodities, and a large part of the novel itself consists of Little Shao reading notes from or ruminating on Western literary theories and films. A focal theme is Little Shao’s retrogressive, recurring and masochistic attachment to the social institutions of a traditional nation and family structure that treats homosexuals as “simply exceptions...to be excluded” (38). As Little Shao lingers around Taipei’s central district and New Park, the wandering protagonist embodies a strong sense of “otherness” in Taiwanese society that occupies a space undefined by any clear familial or national social position. As he ponders that the neologism “queer” has resulted in the “creation of a new age, a rectification of names,” he also alludes to the formation of a new cultural identity with the introduction of a term that concurrently empowers and unites yet marginalizes and divides (25). The transient mobility of Little Shao as a result of his unstable homosexual identity thus allegorically represents the emergence of an alternative, ambiguous identity in the context of a morphing globalized urban space.

Rachel Leng

Taiwanese Queer Literature

The novel begins with Little Shao stating in a tone of regret that “this is a time of decadence, this is a time for prophecy” (1). Little Shao is an undeniably gay character, but he appears to strongly endorse mainstream family values by “living ignobly amid the norms of the human world”, repeatedly apologizing for his own homosexual identity and denigrating the sexual practices of gay men (3). On the one hand, he upholds Foucault’s lessons on “the relationship between sex and power” that prevents assimilation into the new heterogeneous system of mass culture as a homosexual (41). On the other, he also reveres Levi-Strauss’s “three-element kinship system” that denigrates gays as freaks doomed to be “the odd components screened out by [his] system” (38-9). Thus, Little Shao equivocates between an admiration of Western cultural theories and self-castigation for “having been brainwashed by White Europeans,” expressing an undefined spectrum of identity politics in a community confronted by the hybridity of contemporary Taiwanese culture (26).

Zhu describes homosexual pursuits aesthetically to symbolize the challenges facing Taiwanese society in an attempt to secure value and meaning in a postindustrial world: in an environment of seemingly heterogeneous global capitalism, wanton sexuality is synonymous with the attempt to redeem lost cultural meaning and “[obtain] freedom through sexual pleasure” (44). Little Shao laments that a non-reproductive society is doomed to “unnatural” extinction, but still savors a decadent aesthetic vision of an “erotic utopia” (45). His ambivalence symbolically alludes to the dilemma of an anonymous yet uniquely Taiwanese “Fido generation” struggling to forge an identity for themselves and “make [their] voices heard” in a progressively globalized, heterogeneous society (69).

The relationship of Little Shao with his old friend, Ah-Yao, highlights their differences and suggests an apparent distinction between Western and Taiwanese homosexual identities. When Little Shao was still “lost and tormented in a labyrinth of identity” before he succumbed to “the ferocious beast named desire” and accepted “the fate of a GAY man,” Ah Yao “was already a happy GAY man” and had been promiscuous since young (26).

Like Wang in Crystal Boys, Ah Yao also lives in New York City, but their experiences of America could not be more different. Ah Yao is an involved activist who protests “Act up. Fight back. Fight AIDS.” and lived in New York happily and comfortably with his sexual identity prior to his death (2). However, Little Shao adamantly proclaims that he “never took part in Ah Yao’s movement” as he cannot comprehend a “[belief] in organizations and movements,” pessimistically dismissing

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Ah Yao’s activism as futile and even ridiculous (25). Despite their differences, Ah Yao would consistently make international “New YorkTaipei phone calls” to Little Shao “for no other reason than to hear [Little Shao’s] voice [that] connected him with his past” even though the conversations “often ended in anger and resentment” (27). Ah Yao’s unwillingness to disconnect himself and continual querying of whether Little Shao “had read the material he sent” represents the perennial presence of the global constantly urging the local to adopt foreign constructs (27).

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The ambivalent relationship between Little Shao and Ah Yao manifests the tension between differences in the local and the global experience, much like A-Qing and Wang in Crystal Boys. However, NDM shines a much more favorable spotlight on the impact of foreign influences and globalization. While Little Shao initially is condescending towards “Ah Yao’s lifetime of insatiable, indiscriminate mating” that led to his contraction of AIDS and eventual death, he later sees Ah Yao as a hero and “a warrior” who “will find his place...on that splendid [AIDS] memorial quilt” (2, 22). After his death, A-Qing also repeatedly “yearned for Ah Yao’s praise” and claims it would “have meant more to [him] than all the blessings in the world” (51). Their intimate international relationship reveals the global and the local as a harmonious hybrid where there is an inescapable necessity for globalization to “bless” and release what is repressed in local Taiwanese society. As such, Zhu uses alternate fictional representations of a homosexual culture locally and abroad to depict how Taiwanese society is changing to become increasingly pluralistic as a hybrid of Western decadence and traditional family values, wherein the identity of a “Fido generation” of both past and future is progressively integrated and intertwined in a global culture (76).

Over the past few decades, Taiwanese society has been confronted with a changing cultural paradigm and new global conditions that have destabilized traditional constructions of family, gender and sexuality. To speak of globalization, then, is to raise the question of a nation’s place in emergent transnational movements and conflicting interests to simultaneously modernize by weakening ties to traditional culture while holding on to historical roots.

The immense social upheavals and penetration of foreign cultural influences compels both Bai and Zhu to explore the definition of a new Taiwanese identity trapped between the local and the global through homosexual identification in queer literature. The globalization process is unique on the island as the influx of foreign cultural commodities occurs concurrently with Taiwan’s landmark separation from Mainland China, intensifying the simultaneous disappearance of old concepts and invention of new ones.

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Taiwanese Queer Literature

In queer literature, sexuality has been “understood as produced by historically contingent organizations of knowledge” with changing structures “varying [with] geocultural locations and historical contexts,” making it the ideal trope to symbolize the impact of globalization on Taiwanese society (Martin [2] 8). As such, although Crystal Boys and NDM deal explicitly with homosexuality, they are ultimately not about homosexuality in isolation, but rather employ fictional representations of drifting, rootless urban sexual subjects to articulate the rapid globalization of lifestyle and identity politics in Taiwan. Both fictions thus present readers with the formation of a dissident sexuality actively “constructed out of complex relations among local cultures, national histories, regional linkages and globally mobile sexual knowledge” (Martin [2] 8). Firstly, both Crystal Boys and NDM relate explicitly to homosexuality, but also reveal the development of conflicting local and global influences on a cultural paradigm before and after the lifting of martial law in Taiwan. Bai’s Crystal Boys serves as a coming out story for queer literature, with the incommensurable foreign experiences of Wang and Little Jade signifying a budding anti-nationalist sentiment but divided response to global influences in Taiwan. While Zhu’s NDM also portrays the ambivalent and ambiguous perspective towards a contemporary society increasingly influenced by foreign cultures, the dissembling narrator breaks off from the familialism that obsesses Crystal Boys but alternates between endorsing heterosexual family values and celebrating the decadent homosexual lifestyle.

Secondly, while the central homosexual characters in both fictions engage in same-sex relationships, they do not necessarily identity themselves as gay, symbolizing a community that is adapting to yet rejecting an identity built on unfamiliar Western constructs. In Crystal Boys, the “young birds” of New Park engage in sex with their patrons, but they do so in order to adapt for survival and the representation of male homosexual love is anything but gay-positive. In NDM, Little Shao is more receptive to accepting a gay identity, but consistently denigrates homosexual behaviors, most evident through his condescension of Ah Yao’s promiscuity.

Finally, the relationships of central narrating characters with their foreign friends also depict a process of cultural negotiation between traditional and contemporary values with conflicting local and foreign theories and practices. A-Qing and Little Shao both represent the local sphere, while Wang Kuilong, Little Jade, and Ah Yao all represent global experiences and foreign interaction. By overlapping the sexual relationships and experiences of these characters in each novel,

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both Bai and Zhu illustrate how the local and the global intersect to influence Taiwanese society. Contrasting antithetical local and foreign homosexual experiences in fiction symbolizes the rupture of tradition with global influences, where globalization is “greeted on the one hand with celebration and admiration, on the other with foreboding and dismay” (Gibson-Graham 239). Fictional representations of homosexual relationships in both novels are therefore characterized by the foreign character dominating the local (as in Wang and Ah Yao’s possessive desire for A-Qing and Little Shao, respectively), allegorically referring to the looming prevalence of globalization with a “penetration of capitalism into all processes of production, circulation, and consumption, not only of commodities but also of meaning” (Gibson-Graham 239). As such, at the same time globalization dismantles transnational boundaries and assimilates foreign influences, a new divergent culture is also created in Taiwanese society, allegorically represented by an emerging homosexual cultural identity in queer literature.

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Rachel Leng

Taiwanese Queer Literature

References Bai, Xianyong, and Howard Goldblatt. Crystal Boys: a Novel. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine, 1990. Print.

Bosco, Joseph. “Chapter 14: The Emergence of a Taiwanese Popular Culture.” The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. Print.

Chang, Sung-sheng. “New Developments in the Post-Martial Law Period.” Literary Culture in Taiwan: Martial Law to Market Law. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. Print.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. Querying Globalization. Post-Colonial, Queer. 2001 Hawley, John C. Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001. Print.

Liao, Chaoyang. “Taiwan: Postmodern or Postcolonial?” Writing Taiwan: a New Literary History. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.

Lin, Song Hwee.“How to be Queer in Taiwan:Translation, Appropriation, and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan.” AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2008. Print.

Martin, Fran. [1]. Angelwings: Contemporary Queer Fiction from Taiwan. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2003. Print.

Martin, Fran. [2]. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2003. Print.

Wang, Ben. “Reenchanting the Image in Global Culture: Reification and Nostalgia in Zhu Tianwen’s Fiction.” Writing Taiwan: a New Literary History. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.

Zhu, Tianwen, Howard Goldblatt, and Sylvia Li-chun. Lin. Notes of a Desolate Man. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print.

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Hobbes and Modern China: A Comparative Study

Abstract: In this case study, we will examine modern China as a representative of non-liberal states that seem to support Hobbes’ theory in Leviathan. Hobbes’ state of nature in which man wages a perpetual war of all against all is a chilling reflection of war torn China in the early 1900s. However, despite the many parallels between Hobbes’ theory and modern political experiences, his proposition that governmental coercion is justified due to the protection it provides to its individual citizens is ultimately unsatisfactory.

First, it only justifies the existence of governments in principle but offers no justification for particular governments and their individual acts of coercion after their initial formation. Second, Hobbes does not justify coercion beyond the point where the basic imperatives of security and safety are achieved.

At this point, I will introduce the concept of “economic legitimacy,” claimed by the current Chinese government, as an extension of Hobbes’s justification of state coercion. This paper puts forward the argument that Hobbes provides a theoretically convincing justification of state legitimacy through the state of nature and social contract formula but falls short in explaining state formation in practice and their acts of coercion after the transcendence of the state of nature. Hopefully, through this exercise, we can evaluate Hobbes’ timeless classic in a contemporary context and at the same time make sense of the fascinating political enigma that is China today.

Ainan Liu is a junior from Duke University majoring in Political Science. He is also pursuing a Certificate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and a minor in French.

Hobbes and Modern China: A Comparative Study

T

h o m a s Hobbes, with his cynicism towards human nature and predilection for absolute government, seems almost anachronistic to the modern citizen belonging to a country with cherished liberal democratic traditions. However, more than three hundred years after the publication of Leviathan, Hobbes’ political vision appears to be given profound expression in other parts of the world today. The experiences of many developing countries follow a familiar trajectory of foreign domination and internecine war, approximating to a primeval state of nature; an equally if not more destructive armed revolution; the eventual establishment of an authoritarian government, when the people are given a strongman leader consensually or otherwise; and finally the gradual loosening of state control as the people transitioned from violent struggle to peaceful development. A common characteristic among such governments is wide-ranging coercive powers over the thoughts and actions of their people, not unlike Hobbes’ hypothetical leviathan. In this case study, we will examine modern China as a representative of such non-liberal states that seem to support Hobbes’ theory. Hopefully, through this exercise, we can evaluate Hobbes’ timeless classic in a contemporary context and at the same time make sense of the fascinating political enigma that is China today.

Despite the many parallels between Hobbes’ theory and modern political experiences, his proposition that governmental coercion is justified due to the protection it provides to its individual citizens is ultimately unsatisfactory. First, it only justifies the existence of governments in principle but offers no justification for particular governments and their individual acts of coercion after their initial formation (Hardin). Second, Hobbes does not justify coercion beyond the point where the basic imperatives of security and safety are achieved. At this point, I will introduce the concept of “economic legitimacy,” claimed by the current Chinese government, as an extension of Hobbes’ justification of state coercion. This paper puts forward the argument that Hobbes provides a theoretically convincing justification of state legitimacy through the state of nature and social contract formula but falls short in explaining state formation in practice and their acts of coercion after the transcendence of the state of nature.

For the discussion on the Chinese political experience, I will focus on the period from the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1911 to the present day.

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State of Nature

Hobbes’ state of nature in which man wages a perpetual war of all against all is a chilling reflection of war torn China in the early 1900s. While we accept that Hobbes devised the state of nature as a purely intellectual experiment that does not explicitly refer to any particular point in human history, it is definitely not against the spirit of Leviathan to compare it with the experiences of certain historic or extant polities. Hobbes claimed that in mankind’s natural condition, there is “continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Bennett) Compare this to a description of early modern China given by a Rudolph Rummel, a scholar on Chinese genocide: [The Chinese] experienced every manner of death for every conceivable reason: genocide, politicide, mass murder, massacres, and individually directed assassinations; burning alive, burying alive, starvation, drowning, infecting with germs, shooting, stabbing (Rummel)

More important than the outward manifestation of indiscriminate violence and death is the cause of this orgy of chaos.

Once again, we can analyze the cause of the miserable state of affairs in China using Hobbes’ conjecture. He claims that man possesses a “vain sense of one’s own wisdom, which most men think they have more than the common herd.” (Bennett) This egoism, when acted upon in a state of relative intellectual and physical equality among individuals, leads to a destructive struggle for supremacy. Furthermore, another important similarity between China in the 1900s and Hobbes’ state of nature is the lack of “a common power to keep them all in awe.” (Bennett) Rummel claims that genocide in China is motivated by “personal power, out of feelings of superiority, because of lust or greed, to terrorize others into surrendering, to keep subjects in line.” (Rummel) After the fall of the Qing dynasty, during the interlude between the death of military strongman Marshal Yuan Shikai in 1916 and the consolidation of power by the Nationalists in 1928, there was a period of warlordism in China notorious for its fragmentation and chaos. Different provinces and regions operated like independent sovereign nations commanded by local bosses with their own private armies. Marshal Wu Peifu, the Zhili warlord, succinctly captured the political climate of China at the time:

Ainan Liu

Hobbes and Modern China

China is…a country without a system; anarchy and treason prevail everywhere. Betraying one’s leader has become as natural as eating one’s breakfast. This is the underlying cause of today’s chaos throughout China. Underlings think of nothing but getting rid of their leaders in order to take their place, so disorder keeps spreading without end. (Rummel) To quantify the anarchy of this period, there were 216 mutinies from 1919 to 1929 (Rummel). In the absence of the Qing government, which administered China since the 17th century to Yuan Shikai, its most powerful general who inherited the bulk of the imperial troops, there existed a dangerous equality among and within the various factions.

And as Hobbes predicted, each tried to overpower the rest by “force or cunning” (Bennett).

Social Contract

Contrary to popular Western belief that the 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) over the Kuomintang (KMT) government was an illegitimate seizure of power (Pepper), Mao Zedong’s forces were actually immensely popular among the Chinese people, especially the peasantry. In other words, the Chinese people actually preferred Communist discipline as an alternative to Manchu domination, Japanese excesses and KMT corruption. This mystical union of party and people is emphatically consecrated in the preamble to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC): After waging hard, protracted and tortuous struggles, armed and otherwise, the Chinese people of all nationalities led by the [CCP] with Chairman Mao Zedong as its leader ultimately, in 1949, overthrew the rule of imperialism… [and] won the great victory of the new democratic revolution and founded the [PRC].

(People’s Daily Online) This official account of the party’s rise to power is really a paraphrase of Hobbes’s account of the social contract: The only way to establish a common power that can defend them from the invasion of foreigners and the injuries of one another… is to confer all their power and strength on one man, or one assembly of men, so as to turn all their wills by a majority vote into a single will. That is to say: to appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person. (Bennett)

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The people’s conferral of their power and strength to the CCP can be demonstrated by sheer weight in numbers. By April 1945, towards the end of the anti-Japanese war, the CCP effectively controlled an area containing a population of over 95.5 million people (Pepper). This at a time when the total population of China was 455 million (Rummel) and the CCP was not even the legitimate government. With this popular mandate, the CCP could “bear the persons” of their constituents and implement extensive land reforms in the countryside amid violent opposition from intellectuals and landlords (Pepper).

The reason for the Chinese people’s support for the CCP also fits Hobbes’s account nicely—a desire for peace and stability under a “common power” after years of continual war and fear. According to John Stewart, the American Ambassador to China in 1949, The CCP was thus giving the appearance of being a dynamic movement fostering among millions those qualities of which China had stood so palpably in need…These gains included the capacity for organization, strict but largely voluntary discipline...This is no mean achievement, especially in the perspective of [KMT] shortcomings. (Rummel)

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It is no wonder that the CCP seemed like an irresistibly attractive source of authority to the people after years of Japanese rapacity and KMT tyranny.

Thus, even an authoritarian government like the CCP which went on to murder tens of millions of its own people (Rummel) had its roots in popular consent. Chinese state formation seems, up to this point, to support Hobbes’s social contract model.

Governments in Practice

We now turn from the search for government legitimacy in principle to the justification of state formation and coercion in practice. Here, we will examine the problems with Hobbes’s framework from three perspectives: welfarist, utilitarian and contractarian.

If the social contract model explains reasonably well the philosophical motivations for instituting a central authority, it does not make sense when we examine the formation of actual governments. According to Russell Hardin’s paper Rationally Justifying Political Coercion, Hobbes’s welfarist argument that people consent to government coercion because it contributes to their welfare (by protecting them from one another) is wrong because the very act of choosing a desired coercive government may be so costly from the outset that whatever potential benefits to be had from the said government are outweighed by the transition costs (Hardin). This can be broken up into two related questions. First, what if the people are not transitioning from no government to government but from a less preferred coercive government to a preferred coercive government? Second, what if the costs

Ainan Liu

Hobbes and Modern China

of transition entail the sacrifice of the very life and limb that the outcome of the transition is supposed to protect? Consider the regime change from the KMT government to the CCP government. The Chinese people already had a coercive “common power” that demanded absolute obedience. The incumbent KMT government was as dictatorial and brutal as any twentieth century regime. In such a situation, the Chinese people were not forming a government from scratch by simply agreeing to the reciprocal renunciation of individual rights. They were instituting a new government by risking their lives. If they were to conform to Hobbes’s laws of nature, according to which man is forbidden to “do anything that is destructive of his life or takes away his means for preserving his life,” (Bennett) the civil war would not have happened and the incumbent government would have always been preferred. The grievous costs to each individual in the struggle for regime change far outweighed the potential benefits of the new regime—1.2 million men died in battle in the Chinese Civil War, close to four times the number of combatant deaths in the American Civil War (364, 511) (Rummel). In history, unfortunately, human life is usually the first casualty in the crafting of the social contract.

The utilitarian reading of Hobbes raises a further issue: actual acts of governmental coercion do not satisfy the Pareto criterion because the coerced party will be made worse off by definition. A move by the government satisfies the Pareto criterion when someone is made better off without anyone being made worse off. But governments rarely if ever consider the utility of the coerced individual or group of individuals when they implement policies.

Consider the land reform program that the CCP carried out in exchange for peasant support in the struggle against its Japanese and KMT rivals.

Mao Zedong claimed that “The republic will take certain necessary steps to confiscate the land of the landlords and distribute it to those peasants having little or no land…and turn the land over to the private ownership of the peasants.” (Pepper) The upshot of this policy was the forcible transfer of property rights of 114 out of 265 million acres of farmland (Rummel).

In the process, 7.5 million people out of a population of 500 million were murdered (Rummel). But one can argue that the CCP was justified in killing the landlords because they did not feature in the communist utopia that the social contract was designed to create. However, the CCP government still considered them party to the social contract because as many as 25% of the landlords and rich peasants were sent to labor reform camps for reeducation (Rummel). This implies that the CCP still treated the undesirable elements of society as part of the body politic. Moreover, the land distribution project not only fails the Pareto criterion but also contradicts Hobbes’s prediction that the absolute sovereign will always be inclined to treat the utility of its subjects as a function of its own. He claimed that laws are not meant to bind

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the people but to keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their impetuous desires, rashness, or indiscretion, as hedges are set, not to stop travelers, but to keep them in the way… For the good of the sovereign and the people, cannot be separated (Hobbes). The experience of the Chinese revolution tells us that a government with wide ranging powers may very well buy over a certain section of society at the expense of another.

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The contractarian argument, which claims that the people consent to all future coercion once they have given consent to the government through the social contract, is also deficient because actual governments are almost always above the contract. Here, we establish that the constitution is the closest parallel to the social contract in a modern political context. The legal document is more of a product of governmental policy and political exigency than a binding contract. It only codifies the legitimacy of the government into law without always having the power to limit its actions.

Furthermore, Hobbes claims that the government has a monopoly over the power of interpretation: “the sovereign alone has the right of judging, i.e. of hearing and deciding any controversies that may arise concerning law (civil or natural) or concerning fact.” (Bennett) So by simply agreeing to a constitution that enables a government does not automatically imply consent to all of its future coercive actions because the government can change the constitution or interpret it as it deems fit.

In the Chinese constitution, just as Hobbes suggested, the government is the sole authority on truth: “it educates the people in patriotism, collectivism, internationalism and communism and in dialectical and historical materialism; it combats the decadent ideas of capitalism and feudalism and other decadent ideas.” (People’s Daily Online) The string of highfalutin “–isms” belies the flexibility with which the ruling establishment could maneuver between the lines. During the early years of the communist revolution, the CCP redistributed land to be privately owned by peasants, according to the communist tenet of labor ownership of the means of production. After the CCP has consolidated its power, in an abrupt about-face, Mao Zedong emphasized collectivism—one of the most ominous words in twentieth century history. The state now owns everything from land, houses and farming tools to even the peasants themselves (Rummel). The village commune organized and disciplined the peasants in military fashion—they ate in mess halls, slept in barracks and owned not even the shirt on their backs (Rummel). None of the peasant soldiers who joined Mao Zedong’s ranks during the civil war could have signed up for such a monstrous social experiment. Coercion is too often a result of arbitrary human agency rather than constitutional rule that embodies the people’s consent.

Ainan Liu

Hobbes and Modern China

Economic Legitimacy Although Hobbes glossed over the economic dimension to security, he did not go on to elaborate on the importance of the protection of material security in government legitimacy. He claimed that By ‘safety’ here I don’t mean mere preservation, but also all the contentments of life that each man acquires for himself by lawful work and without danger or damage to the commonwealth.

(Bennett) So what does this mean in terms of justifying coercion in practice?

The Chinese government routinely claims that its unpopular policies are necessary for economic growth. Notwithstanding Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic blunders, the Maoist era exorcised the twin specters of crushing poverty and relentless war that haunted China in the KMT and Japanese occupation periods. His successors, after inheriting a population with greater purchasing power and a demand for a greater choice of goods (Gray), had to find another source of legitimacy in order to strengthen the staying power of the CCP. This took the form of economic liberalization and progress that continues to this day. The fulfillment of the promise of greater material comforts has, at the same time, exacted a heavy price on the people. On September 25 1980, the politburo of the CCP declared an unprecedentedly intrusive policy that sought to control the people’s family structure and sexual practices— the one-child policy (Nie). In order to reduce the burden that China’s gargantuan population exerted on its economy, the CCP literally standardized family size for the Chinese people. The government claims that the policy has helped the country achieve 400 million fewer births in the thirty years since its implementation (Nie). By equating fewer people with fewer mouths to feed, the country solved its demographic problem by controlling the sphere of domestic life with mathematical efficiency. Unarguably, it has succeeded in both social and economic realms. Without provoking a violent backlash, it managed to deny the people of a huge part of their reproductive rights to make way for its evidently effective program for economic prosperity.

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Conclusion Mao Zedong once claimed that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. Perhaps governments act in the way they do not because they are justified to do so but simply because they can. But then are we no better than the Machiavellian prince? In a genius philosophical move, Hobbes devised a new justification for state sovereignty without recourse to the divine right of kings tradition. The social contract and state of nature formulation is bluntly but forcefully effective. We want government—any government—because no government means impalement and anything is preferred to impalement. But sometimes, the switch to a preferred government comes at the price of blood.

Just when we think that we have arrived at the optimal stage, the government suddenly goes back on the contract that is supposed to express the people’s will. We saw Nazi Germany emerge from the Weimar constitution. We witnessed collectivization under the same party cadres who espoused peasant ownership of land. The CCP today curtails free speech, practices forceful land expropriation and imposes family planning quotas all in the name of economic security. The CCP’s claim to economic legitimacy seems to sit well with the Chinese for the time being. At the end of the day, the Party may very well prove Hobbes wrong by buying the people’s consent with material rewards.

Ainan Liu

Hobbes and Modern China

References Hardin, Russell. “Rationally Justifying Political Coercion.”Journal of Philosophical Research. 15.84 (1990): n. page. Print.

Hobbes, Thomas. “Leviathan.” Some Texts from Early Political Philosophy. Ed. Jonathan Bennett. 58. Web. 18 Sep. 2012.

Rummel, Rudolph. China’s Bloody Century. 1. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991. Print.

Pepper, Suzanne. Civil War in China. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Print.

“Constitution of the People’s Republic of China.” People’s Daily Online.

Web. 18 Sep. 2012. <http://english.people.com.cn/constitution/ constitution.html>.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. Web. <http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm >.

Nie, Weiliang. “China’s One-Child Policy-Success or Failure?.” BBC News 24 Sep 2010,. Web. 18 Sep. 2012. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worldasia-pacific-11404623>.

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Can Wang Jingwei’s Decision to Collaborate with the Japanese During Wartime be Justified?

Abstract:

After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese established the Reorganized National Government of China, a puppet state in central China, centered in Nanjing. It was headed by senior Kuomintang cadre, Wang Jingwei. He claimed to do so to protect the people under Japanese occupation and safeguard China as a whole, as he believed that a ‘War of Resistance’ would be disastrous to the nation. The author examines the complexities of Wang’s role, taking into consideration the historical background and various factors in his argument.

George Lowe is an undergraduate student from the University of Oxford.

Can Wang Jinwei’s Decision to Collabote with the Japanese During Wartime be Justified?

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B

eginning with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7 1937, China embarked on what became known as the War of Resistance, an eight year long struggle for its very survival. Having already set up the puppet state of Manchukuo in erstwhile Chinese territory, the Japanese continued to implement the so-called bunji gassaku (Boyle) program of fragmenting China into many weak, ostensibly autonomous states, all essentially under Japanese control and influence. One part of this strategy was the establishment of the Reorganised National Government of China, a puppet state for central China, centred on Nanjing. It was initially headed by Liang Hongzhi, a pro-Japanese minister. After his defection from Chiang Kai-Shek’s Chongqing government, the Japanese were delighted to receive Wang Jingwei as head in March 1940. Wang had been head of the Executive Yuan under Chiang and a prominent follower of Sun Yat-sen, which lending him a great deal of prestige in the eyes of nationalists and the general Chinese population. Thus his defection and collaboration seems all the more surprising. However, his actions seem more understandable given his belief that China would ruin itself by continuing to fight a superior enemy and his desire to protect the Chinese people in occupied areas from further depredation under Japanese rule. Wang also pointed to Pan-Asianism in order to justify his collaboration, buying into Japanese slogans concerning the “Creation of a New Order in East Asia” (Cheng, Lestz and Spence), which seems less genuine and justifiable, considering the overt intentions of Japanese militarists at the time. In the process of collaboration however, Wang “relinquished to Japan a vast measure of sovereignty” (Boyle) which in some eyes may seem indefensible and unjustifiable.

Throughout the course of Wang’s regime, he had to justify to the Chinese living under his Reorganized National Government the reasons for collaboration. In order to show that he was staying true to the nationalist principles which had won him such prestige (not to mention high office) in the 1930s, Wang often pointed to the concept of “Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Pan Asianism” (Cheng, Lestz and Spence). In a radio address of June 1941, Wang criticised the nationalists for not staying true to Sun’s legacy and having “failed to make united efforts for the attainment of that ideal [Pan-Asianism]” (Cheng, Lestz and Spence). Wang was effectively buying into the Japanese idea of a ‘New Order’ in East Asia by collaborating and associating his prestige with it. However, “he could not conceal the fact that the Japan of 1940 was not the Japan that had befriended Sun and assisted

the Nationalist cause in the early years of the century” (Boyle). Sun himself had become suspicious of Japanese progress and in his final address to a Japanese audience warned them of the dangers of becoming too Western in essence, and not retaining a sense of Asian fraternity (Spence). By the time Wang collaborated, and identified throughout the 1930s with increasingly aggressive Japanese policies, the Japanese had developed a more hierarchical and less fraternal vision of ‘Pan Asianism’. By late 1938, after Wang’s defection from the Chongqing government, Chiang was ridiculing Prince Konoe’s (Prime Minister of Japan at the time) statements on the “Creation of a New Order in East Asia” and the necessary “Unity of East Asia” (Cheng, Lestz and Spence), which Chiang saw as obvious and simple covers for the creation of “an enslaved China” and eventually “further even to subdue the world” (Cheng, Lestz and Spence). Whilst we may see this last claim as hyperbolic, Chiang was actually delineating accurately the trends in Japanese attitudes to ‘Pan Asianism’, which were strengthened by ideas of racial superiority and Japanese nationalism.

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Wang seemed to fail to appreciate this, though he was also perhaps misled by the rhetoric of those such as the reasonably moderate general Kanji Ishiwara; it was mainly he and his followers (particularly Inakai Ken and Kagesa Sadaaki) who regulated the relationship between Wang’s regime and the Japanese government (Boyle). They were part of a military clique which saw the Soviet Union as Japan’s main threat and wanted a conciliatory China behind them as they realised they could not fight a two front war. This led them to pressure for a reduction in the demands placed on Wang by the Japanese government, which would have allowed him to be more independent and nationalistic. As the main proponent of a peace movement and negotiations with the Japanese (which led to his defection from Chongqing, and ultimately his collaboration), Wang would have found such rhetoric attractive. However, the clear trends in Japan (perceived by Chiang) of ‘Pan Asianism’ taking the form of Japanese domination over China means that Wang’s claim that he was staying true to Sun Yat-sen’s legacy and the idea of Pan Asianism in general is a fairly poor justification for his collaboration.

Wang’s last testament provides a source for more convincing and genuine justifications though it may have been an attempt to clear his name in Chinese history, because the events of the period support his claims. In it, Wang argues that he collaborated “because of depredations against his people – not in spite of them”; effectively he wished to help those Chinese living in the areas occupied by Japan. This represents a response to possible criticism of his collaboration with those responsible for such atrocities as the Rape of Nanjing. This atrocity ranks “among the worst in the history of modern

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warfare” for Spence, who cites 20,000 female rape victims, 30,000 fugitive Chinese soldiers hoping to return to civilian life killed and 12,000 civilians massacred (Spence). In the North, in retaliation against the Communist Hundred Regiments Offensive launched from their base in Yan’an, “whole villages were destroyed to the last human being, farm animal and building.”

(Spence) This was part of the wider infamous ‘mopping up campaigns’. In the context of this devastation and cruelty, Wang felt he could somewhat stay the Japanese hand in the areas he might control under a collaborationist government. Indeed, as the Japanese became more desperate towards the end of the war and saw Wang as a potential means for conducting a premature peace treaty with China, he was able to delay enemy attacks and “compete” (as he called it) with Japan for possession of Chinese resources and ultimately Chinese sovereignty (“Documents on the Rape of Nanking”).

For example, American intelligence personnel were impressed with Wang’s efforts in avoiding the indoctrination of Chinese children under his regime with Japanese propaganda, as he refused to allow the Japanese to determine which textbooks would be used. In classrooms, he personally lectured on Sun’s Three Principles and kept the stories and memory of patriotic heroes from the Song dynasty alive (“Documents on the Rape of Nanking”). Thus, we can begin to understand the reasoning behind Wang’s collaboration and the minor successes he had in helping China from within the Japanese camp.

Another fundamental reason for Wang’s collaboration was a genuine belief that negotiation, even concession, was the most productive and successful route China could pursue after the huge, swift Japanese successes of 193738. Within this short period of time, the Japanese had occupied the most culturally, administratively and economically important areas of Eastern and North China, whilst the Nationalists had displayed a woeful inadequacy to protect China and its people. For example, Chiang had pledged at the start of the war in demagogical fashion that the capital would never fall and gave command for Nanjing’s defence to Tang Shengzi (a former warlord).

However, Tang himself fled the city and ordered a general retreat, which turned into a rout (with Chinese soldiers looting civilians for their clothing in order to escape Japanese retribution) due to little central direction (Spence, 1999). Such incidents would have done little to engender a sense of confidence, and for someone who was already disposed to a peace movement rather than continued resistance such as Wang it would have provided evidence of China’s abject weakness. Indeed, in his last testament Wang defends himself on these grounds, claiming, “the desperate plight called for a desperate move” (“Documents on the Rape of Nanking”). However, Mao Zedong represented those who were committed to China’s ‘War of Resistance’ when he claimed in a series of 1938 lectures, “On Protracted War”, that collaboration and compromise was a “danger” to China, acknowledging at the same time that “the social roots of compromise are present” (Mao). He cites that apart from

Japan’s allies and “certain elements in the upper strata of other capitalist countries” there is international support for resistance, not collaboration.

He also claims that these countries will inevitably support China in its ‘War of Resistance’ despite there being no support forthcoming at the time, emphasising the role of “Soviet support in particular” (Mao). Mao combined this with an explanation of how China will inevitably win a “protracted war” as she is bigger, more progressive (whereas he saw Japan in decline), more populous and in international support, therefore concluding that a ‘War of Resistance’ is the only logical course to take. However, the complete dominance of Japan in the early stages of the war means we should forgive anyone who did not share this optimistic view, and Wang Jingwei clearly did not. The lack of Soviet help due to the pact signed with Germany and then its absolute concentration on Europe after Operation Barbarossa in 1941 was further evidence of Mao being overly confident and deterministic. The tone of his propagandistic statements designed to raise morale and ensure commitment to the anti-Japanese, also somewhat undermines his argument that a ‘War of Resistance’ is the only justifiable course to take. Thus we may see Wang’s collaboration in 1940 as an understandable (if not justifiable) and pragmatic response to a seemingly hopeless situation.

In conclusion, Wang Jingwei’s decision to collaborate with the Japanese in 1940 during the Sino-Japanese War can certainly be understood and explained, but whether it is justifiable is more debatable. In his last testament Wang claimed to do so to protect the people under Japanese occupation and safeguard China as a whole, as he believed that a ‘War of Resistance’ would be disastrous to the nation. In typical Chinese style of looking to the past and tradition, he also cited the long history of Chinese collaboration and concession with barbarians who are superior militarily in order to protect Chinese culture and society. Indeed historian Lin Han-sheng goes so far as to state “collaboration with alien enemies has always been a common phenomenon [in Chinese history]. It has actually enriched China’s culture and enlarged her territory and influence” (“Documents on the Rape of Nanking”). Yet Wang did acquiesce in the giving up of Chinese sovereignty and economic and political autonomy, with the Japanese dominating at all levels of the relationship. However, this was somewhat inevitable given Japan’s overwhelming superiority and successful strategy of dividing China into puppet regimes. Whilst this may be used to criticize Wang for collaborating, it also means that he cannot be held culpable for the developments in the relationship after his collaboration. Thus to some extent Wang’s decision to collaborate can be seen as justifiable. Certainly, the picture is far more complex and sympathetic to Wang than the simple characterisation of Wang as a ‘traitor’ and ‘puppet,’ which both the Kuomintang and Chinese Communist Party adopt.

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References Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China. 1990, 1999. Print.

Boyle, John. China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration.

Stanford, 1972. Print.

Cheng, Pei-kai, Michael Lestz, and Jonathan Spence. The Search for Modern China: A Documentary Collection. New York: 1999. Print.

Johnson, Chalmers. Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power. Stanford: 1962.

Print.

Mao, Zedong. Selected Works. 1. Beijing: 1965. Print.

Mao, Zedong. Selected Works. 2. Beijing: 1965. Print.

Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ed. Timothy Brook. Ann Arbor: 1999. Print.

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Chinese Urban Societyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Rapid Change in the Face of Rural Stagnation

Abstract: The author argues that in the first half of the 20th century, urban China changed rapidly whilst rural China stagnated in social and economic matters.

The New Culture Movement had a profound effect on altering urban Chinese culture, characterized by its anti-traditional nature. In the cities, liberal feminist ideas and notions of individuality condemned the traditional conception of the family and popular religion came under attack. In the countryside, however, ideas such as these had a very limited impact, and where they did, were certainly much slower to penetrate. There was also stagnation in the rural areas at a social level, whereas urban society diversified, variegated social classes crystallized as a modern bourgeoisie, and an intelligentsia and a salaried proletariat emerged.

Economically, the cities experienced rapid growth and increasing investment in industry and modern businesses, whereas rural areas saw stagnation, a lack of investment and even a decline in the 1930s.

In addition, and connected with this dynamic urban growth, was a level of social dynamism in the cities not matched in the rural areas.

George Lowe is an undergraduate student from the University of Oxford.

Chinese Urban Society’s Rapid Change in the Face of Rural Stagnation

T

he first half of the 20th century saw many important changes which fundamentally altered the development of Chinese society and economy. However, it may be argued that virtually all these changes occurred in China’s rapidly growing urban areas, and that rural China stagnated somewhat in this period. By ‘urban’, the large, modernizing cities are meant, rather than every urban area in China which would include all the minor provincial cities and towns. In the cultural arena, the New Culture Movement had a profound effect on altering urban Chinese culture, characterized by its anti-traditional nature. Liberal feminist ideas and notions of individuality condemned the traditional conception of the family and popular religion came under attack; yet in the countryside, ideas such as these had a very limited impact, and where they did, were certainly much slower to penetrate. There was also stagnation in the rural areas at a social level, whereas urban society diversified, variegated social classes crystallized as a modern bourgeoisie, and an intelligentsia and a salaried proletariat emerged. The emergence of a bourgeoisie was partly linked with increased investment in the industrial and service sectors in the cities, which saw economic growth and re-structuring in the decade during and after the First World War, which has been termed the “golden age of Chinese capitalism” (Bergere). However, rural China saw no equivalent growth or development, with contemporary sociologists and economic historians pointing to the immiseration (the process by which the average income of the majority of peasantry is dropping to, or below, subsistence level) of the peasantry in the 1930s. Whilst one must be careful not to extrapolate these findings to the whole first half of the 20th century, there is no doubt that economic conditions in rural China were not improving in the way that they were in the cities. Whilst we must qualify this urban growth and development with an appreciation that many of the touted benefits of a modern culture and economy in the cities did not reach the majority of those living there. There is a striking dichotomy when one contrasts the developments in these areas with the stagnation of rural China.

Turning first to the economic facet of development, the cities experienced rapid growth and increasing investment in industry and modern businesses, whereas rural areas saw stagnation, a lack of

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investment and even a decline in the 1930s. The beginning of this urban economic expansion was a result of the First World War, which led to a withdrawal of Europeans as the War occupied their attention.

This in turn allowed native business interests to assume greater control of, and increase investment in, China’s growing industrial base (Bergere). Another beneficial impact of the War, and reconstruction that followed, was a rise in world demand for primary goods that China was well placed to satisfy. Thus exports grew and diversified, whilst imports grew more slowly, in the years after the First World War. However, this growth was largely reflective of an “upsurge of modern businesses in the coastal cities” which constituted the “most striking aspect” of economic development in the post-war period (Bergere).

The growth rate of the modern industries was 13.8% from 1912-1920, and of 120 modern cotton spinning mills listed in 1928, 47 were built between 1920-22 (Bergere), showing an intensification of growth and investment in this period. Food, tobacco and cigarette production also grew rapidly and though the growth in the heavy industries was slower, it was also evident, particularly in Shanghai and Tianjin.

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In contrast, throughout the period, there was at best a stagnation, and at worst, a decline in economic conditions in rural China. This has been attributed to the growth in influence on the world market on Chinese farming, the exploitation by the landlords, overpopulation, and the primitive state of farming technology (Spence).

What may be seen as the fundamental root of this problem of a lack of development, was a lack of investment in the agricultural sector which effectively constituted the rural Chinese economy. This can be seen as partly due to the political fragmentation and chronic violence experienced by China during the Warlord Era. This engendered a climate of insecurity and fear of future violence or pillaging from the various armies and bandit groups active at this time, which dissuaded farmers and capitalists from making investments in the rural interior areas (Eastman). For example planned railroads (a crucial aspect of commercializing and developing the agricultural sector) were cancelled, and wealthy landlords sent surplus capital to the more secure treaty ports, where investment in the new industries or simply deposits in the new banks offered a larger, quicker, more secure return (Eastman).

Eastman states that this drain of national wealth out of the countryside was responsible for “depressing the rural areas and skewing the nation’s financial and industrial development in favour of the foreigndomination cities along the Eastern Seaboard.” Mao Zedong’s report from Xunwu provides first-hand support for this thesis, as he describes

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Chinese Urban Society’s Rapid Change

that warlords would exact extra levies on those landlords investing and lending capital (as it demonstrates their possession of surplus capital) and that “these levies encouraged landlords to hide their money in cellars” (Thompson). Mao also seems to point to a mentality of noninvestment amongst especially the larger landlords when describing heir attitudes to production, claiming that their “purpose is not to improve production methods or increase productivity. You cannot get rich on this.” (Thompson). This would certainly have contributed to the problem of a lack of investment. In an analysis of a Japanese study of Michang Village in Hebei Province, 1937 (its findings reproduced in Spence), we can see that the productivity of farms did not increase with farm size, and farm income. In order of decreasing farm size, the output for the ‘Managerial Farmer’ was 16.5 Yuan per mou (a land measurement unit), that of a ‘Rich Peasant’ was 18.6 Yuan per mou and the figures for a ‘Middle Peasant’ and a ‘Poor Peasant’ respectively were 15.1 and 18 Yuan per mou. This clearly shows a lack of investment and innovation from those of a higher social stratum who could afford the readily available machinery and draft animals. This was due to overpopulation and underemployment in the rural areas, implying an abundance of cheap labour, which meant there was little incentive for investment and mechanization. This significantly contributed to the rural economical stagnation of the period, (though Eastman has warned that a decline or immiseration of the peasantry was a “myth” before the 1930s) which was in stark contrast to the dynamic development of China’s urban areas in the first half of the 20th century.

In addition, and connected with this dynamic urban growth, was a level of social dynamism in the cities not matched in the rural areas.

Whereas Mao was able to talk of rigid social categories in 1920s Xunwu as if they were perpetually constant (Thompson), the same period in the cities saw the emergence of a “true modern bourgeoisie” which was “directly linked to industrial production and exploitation of a salaried work-force” (Bergere), a modern intelligentsia and a proletariat. Whilst there had been an urban elite for centuries in China’s early cities, the crystallization of a bourgeoisie and intelligentsia (those such as Hu Shih and Cai Yuanpei), with all three groups broadly aligned in “a lively coalition which borrowed from the former [old urban elite] their social stability and from the latter their spirit of innovation and initiative”, was an important development in urban China and showed its social dynamism in contrast to stagnation of rural areas, in which the landlords continued to dominate the peasants as they have done for centuries.

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Furthermore, cultural change occurred much more rapidly and significantly in China’s urban areas than it did in the countryside. This is evident in the religious sphere (which saw attacks on popular religion through the period) where an “anti-religious tempest” (Eastman) had been blowing since late Qing administrations ordered the temples to be taken over to finance and house new local institutions such as police departments, public offices and schools. The New Culture Movement, with its anti-traditionalism, continued these trends and even the Nationalist Government attacked traditional forms of worship, including local temples and the burning of incense (Eastman). Eastman cites urban intellectuals as the first to be affected by these “secularising trends”, but by the 1930s urban craft guilds were ignoring their patron deities (which had been an important part of their formation) and the religious processions they had encouraged in cities was dying out. These may have been replaced in part by more political demonstrations and strikes, those organized by labour unions with zero religious affiliation and background. In contrast, in rural Xunwu county in 1930, Mao talks of “community shrines” and how “every village has one”, which is “to ensure that their crops are not devoured by insects and that their livestock do no get sick, and to ensure the health of the people” (Thompson). We can infer from this the continued importance of popular religion, and its resilience in the face of the aforementioned assault, in the rural areas of China, which supports the idea that such trends did not penetrate rapidly or deeply into rural China, and is evidence of rural stagnation in the face of rapid change in the cities.

Furthermore, the issue of women’s emancipation and the breakdown of the system of arranged marriages and, more generally, of absolute filial piety within the family, developed much more rapidly in the cities. Zhu Su’e’s story provides a useful anecdote for explicating this contrast. Her father sent her to school in the small provincial city of Changzhou (which was in a rural area and displayed certain rural social and economic characteristics), which did have a tradition of female education (Wang). Her story shows how ideas of equal education were being disseminated gradually from the treaty port urban areas. However, the social climate of Changzhou was fairly conservative and had been little affected by the rapid developments on the issue of women’s emancipation seen in Shanghai and other major cities. Thus, when her mother fell ill, Zhu was expected to drop out of school and perform her duty as a daughter and look after her mother. Rather than accept this and be “aware of the limitations of a small city and of the opportunities in a big city” (Wang), Zhu left home and travelled to Shanghai to attend a boarding school. Her

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older sister remained in Changzhou and was soon forced into an arranged marriage she opposed, whereas Zhu was , in her own words, able to “pick and choose” a man and married at the age of 29 (much later than what was common in traditional Chinese society), having qualified as an attorney and thus able to live an independent life within both the domestic and public spheres (Wang). Zhu’s father had had to force her older sister into an arranged marriage which would have made her an outcast in society had she broken it off, whereas in Shanghai it was acceptable, even seen as a badge of modernity (Wang), for young men and women to break off their oppressive, arranged marriages. This displays the extent to which a particular urban society (particularly treaty port cities) had been influence by modern ideas and had diverged culturally not just from the stagnant rural areas but also the minor urban areas dotted around the countryside.

Nevertheless, we must qualify this picture of unrelenting, rapid urban development in economic and social matters. Even in Shanghai, arguably China’s most modern and rapidly developing city with new electric, gas and telephone networks, the majority of people lived and spent most of their lives in the distinctive “alleyway-house neighborhoods” (Hanchao) which shared certain characteristics with rural areas. One such characteristic was the widespread lack of sanitary fixtures in these areas and thus the necessitated use of the “simple wooden nightstool” which was the same as that of “any remote hinterland village” (Hanchao). These ‘nightstools’ were collected by ‘the night-soil man’ every morning in a cart, who was employed by the Shanghai Municipal Council, showing at least a level of infrastructure extending to these poorer sections of the city’s population. Another fact emphasizing the gap between rural and urban developments to come out of the study of this practice is the markedly higher quality of diet even these poor urban people had in comparison to the poor peasants in rural China. The ‘night soil’ was sold off to farmers for fertilizer, a common practice in China, and that coming from Shanghai was labelled so and considered superior fertiliser due to the rich diets of its suppliers. This can be corroborated by evidence from rural areas, such as in Hebei where a farm labourer recalls, “boiled millet” in nearly every meal, and another in Shandong citing the same fact but with sweet potatoes (Spence).

Furthermore, even in these ‘alleyway-house neighbourhoods’ there was a diverse range of food available from peddlers, as Lu Xun recounted (he lived his final years in one) “probably 20 to 30 hawkers of edibles who came to these alleyways” and that “residents were really good at spending their pocket money and having between-meal snacks, for they

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often gave the peddlers some businessâ&#x20AC;? (Hanchao). Puluo (proletariat) restaurants and sesame cake stores opened in these quarters, showing that certain luxuries and the commercialization of society spread to even these poor areas of Shanghai. This was in stark contrast to the monotony of diet experienced by the mass of poor peasants in rural China, some of whom would have considered food sufficiency a luxury.

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In conclusion, it is fair to argue that urban China changed rapidly whilst rural China stagnated in social and economic matters.

Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cities were culturally, socially and economically more advanced and dynamic than its rural areas relative to the characteristics of each measure in the late Qing period. The simple fact that that there was huge migration to the cities and accelerated urbanization even in the early period, during the First World War, points to opportunity in the city and a lack of it in the countryside. The provincial capital of Shandong, Jinan, experienced an annual growth rate from 19141919 of 3% whereas in the rest of the province it was 1%, and this was a pattern repeated all across China. The fact that this was not during a period of great famine or hardship or civil unrest in the rural areas demonstrates that it was the attraction of the city that drew this migration (Bergere). There was opportunity for both rich and poor alike in Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s dynamic cities of the early 20th century, whereas there was little opportunity to be had in the vast, stagnant rural areas.

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References Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China. 2nd ed. New York: 1999.

Print.

Thompson, Roger, trans. Report from Xunwu. Stanford, 1990. Print.

Wang, Zheng. Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories . Berkeley, 1999. Print.

Eastman, Lloyd. Family, Fields and Ancestors: Continuity and Change in Chinese Economic History, 1550–1949 . Oxford, 1988. Print.

Lu, Hanchao . Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century. Berkeley, 1999. Print.

Bergere, Marie-Claire. “The Chinese Bourgeoisie.”Cambridge History of China. Ed. John K. Fairbank Cambridge, 1976. Print.

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“New Culture” 新文化: Republican China’s Opposition or Complicity with Tradition?

Abstract: The May Fourth Movement led to the emergence of a ‘New Culture’ 新文化 in direct opposition to traditional Chinese culture. The author argues that the movement incorporated the more general trend of an increasingly wide-ranging and popular public press and a growing culture of mass education that saw the dissemination of knowledge for the general public. The most prominent aspect of the May Fourth Movement was the revolution in language. Hu Shi strove to convince his intellectual peers of the importance of having a “living” language, “the spoken tongue of the people”, or bai-hua白話. In Hu’s thinking it should become the major form of literary expression, replacing Classical Chinese, which Hu referred to as “dead.”.

George Lowe is an undergraduate student from the University of Oxford.

“New Culture”: Republican China’s Opposition or Complicity with Tradition?

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B

eginning with the May Fourth Movement (although some aspects may be traced a little further back than 1919), Republican China saw a ‘New Culture’ emerge, in direct opposition to traditional Chinese culture. The whole movement included what contemporaries called the “Chinese Renaissance” (Hu Shi, 1934) and historians have termed the “Chinese enlightenment” (Schwarcz, 1986), related to the literary and intellectual aspects respectively. In addition to these elements, the New Culture Movement included an emerging urban culture that was centred around Shanghai, China’s rapidly growing metropolis. This incorporated the more general trend of an increasingly wide-ranging and popular public press and a growing culture of mass education that saw the dissemination of knowledge for the general public as desirable, even necessary for the advancement of the Chinese nation. All these facets together became a new cultural movement that was consciously anti-traditional and anticonfucianism and tied up in the “quest for modernity” (Lee, 1976) that was a theme throughout the Republican period in all aspects of culture.

P

erhaps the earliest cultural movement which became part of this New Culture was the “Literary Renaissance or Revolution” (Hu Shi, 1934). Starting as a student in 1915 in Cornell, Hu strove to convince his intellectual peers of the importance of having a “living” language, “the spoken tongue of the people”, or bai hu, as the national language for a modern nation. These were not exactly new ideas, as the importance of the vernacular and ideas about writing in it had been discussed and advocated

by Qing intellectuals. However, what was “truly revolutionary” in Hu’s thinking was the assertion that it should become the major form of literary expression, replacing Classical Chinese, which Hu referred to as “dead.” (Lee, 1976) This conviction, which spread amongst the more radical intellectuals following May Fourth and Hu’s return to China to publish articles such as “Some Tentative Suggestions for the Reform of Chinese Literature” in New Youth, was arguably what facilitated the success of the movement. Hu certainly thought so, claiming that this “conscious and articulate” element of the literary revolution was crucial to its success and what primarily separated it from the efforts late Qing intellectuals who had also been interested in the potential of the vernacular. This conscious effort at establishing a new literary culture had its roots, Hu claimed, in Chinese literary history through the ages, which he saw as to “consist in a series of revolutions” from the commoners using the vernacular in opposition to elite “men of

letters” using Classical Chinese. It was the conscious element described above that set this apart and was the reason for its “rapid success”, seen in the proliferation of “about 400 small periodicals...all of them published in the spoken language of the people” (Hu, 1999) across the country in 191920. By 1922, all the primary and secondary textbooks were ordered to be translated into the vernacular and virtually of the new or popular journals were in the vernacular too, as publishing houses saw the growth of sales in the vernacular and thus “became enthusiastic over the new movement” (Hu, 1999). Thus we can see there was a fundamental revolution in giving China a “New Language” as “the effective medium for the development of the literature of a new China” (Hu, 1999), and the emergence of a modernist trend in Chinese literature can be seen as having its foundation in this. Thus Lu Xun, and many other of the great writers of this period began writing in the vernacular and expressing anti-traditionalist views, with Lu himself comparing Confucianism to cannibalism in an abstract plea for change and revolution.

This revolution in language, rather than being restricted to elite intellectual circles, was also important in the widening of intellectual culture and dissemination of literature and knowledge to the wider populace. This can be seen most obviously in the public arena of urban society in which a culture of modernity was developing through the Republican period, and through the actions of the Commercial Press in Shanghai in what has been termed the “enlightenment industry” (Lee, 1999). The Commercial Press began the production of elementary and secondary textbooks in 1903, and followed the changing political climate, reprinting books after the 1911 revolution as well as after the central government eventually authorised the use of the vernacular in textbooks in 1921 and 1922. The emergence of the vernacular as the national language was important in this aspect of the New Culture as Hu Shi had meant for it to be “an effective instrumentality for popular education” (Hu, 1934) and it did this, by allowing the proliferation of knowledge beyond those who could read Classical Chinese: a notoriously complex and difficult language not understood by the majority of the population and considered “dead” by many, including Hu. The main thrust of this mission to disseminate knowledge though came with the establishment of repositories by the Commercial Press with the ‘Eastern Repository’ and the ‘All-Comprehensive Repository’ set up in 1923 and 1929 respectively, with the latter being “nothing less than a modern library”, and “clearly intended for the task of inculcating new knowledge” (Lee, 1999). The contents of the libraries were modern, in the sense that they mainly eschewed Chinese classics for more relevant works to modern society, including foreign works of literature, science and the social sciences, as well as a whole section on “modern problems”, both those besetting China and

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“New Culture” in Republican China

the world more generally. A mail order system was set up in conjunction to allow teachers (or indeed any citizens) to set up private libraries which were widely advertised in pamphlets, allowing payments in installments, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. This was all marketed at a growing public sphere and growing readership, with the editors’ stated objective of the repositories being to “inculcate in the general reading public the knowledge that is necessary for human life” (Lee, 1999) clearly reflective of this development of an educational culture, concerned with the dissemination of knowledge to wider circles. Whilst a more cynical view sees this as less an educational mission and simple capitalist enterprise from the Commercial Press in an increasingly commercialised urban Shanghai, regardless it still reflects the aforementioned growing public sphere and the effects of the enterprise on public knowledge must have been considerable, as the whole program continued for decades in a popular setting. A more important consideration must be taken into account when comparing rural and urban developments; in just the above example, the expanding popular press was clearly targeted at an urban readership which was itself developing in a specifically urban culture, the emergence of which is examined below.

Shanghai was also the centre for the more general development of an urban culture of modernity, which was centred on the popular press. This was part of a solution to the problem of popularizing modernity in China; intellectuals pondered on the concept of modernity and anti-traditional ideas, but the more superficial culture of modernity developed with the aid of a popular press in Shanghai and other urban centres (Lee, 1999). ‘The Young Companion’, a pictorial journal begun in 1926, is an example of this. On the cover of each issue, there was a modern woman (in modern dress/surroundings and with a modern demeanour) leading the reader in, and connected by theme to a series of images within the magazine itself, many of them about women and displaying the variety of modern clothing on the market suited for different seasons and environments, different ages and women of different social classes, characteristics that are the hallmarks of a modern fashion industry. There was no such occupation as a fashion model in Republican China, yet the idea of advertising different fashions of dress can be seen as indicative of the broadening of the lives of urban middle and upper class women (Lee, 1999). Yet despite this, the women were also generally posed in different rooms of the home with emphasis on interior decoration and the standardisation of a typical middle class home. This was clearly not simply a conservative retreat from the feminism of the May Fourth period though, as the women were placed in new roles in a modern family, including aspects of a new bourgeois lifestyle, including the notion of the domestic space as open to public discussion and standardisation now. This importation, but also appropriation of Western ideas of modern culture is also exemplified in

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the concentration of advertisements in such journals on health and hygiene.

Colgate, Fab, Quaker oats and other Western companies had advertisements in the newspapers of Shanghai, emphasising Western standards of hygiene and health as important to the wellbeing of the nation and the nourishment of its youth (Lee, 1999). But more than simply products was imported from the West; American-style beauty contests, including those for babies, were sponsored by ‘The Young Companion’. Also, the steady increase in the level of nude content in this pictorial magazine through the 1930s can be seen in this context of importing Western norms and standards, overriding traditionally Chinese taboos. However, there had been vulgar journals in the ‘pleasure quarters’ of the market (a growing number at this time) and there is evidence that The Young Companion tried to retain its respectability in this climate. The idea of a “healthy and beautiful body” (Lee, 1999) was that behind such displays of nudity and them themselves must be put in the context of a whole magazine devoted to other themes. The rapid growth of calendar posters too reflects the Western influence on popular urban culture in Shanghai, but appropriated for Chinese society. The date is displayed in both the Western style and the traditional Chinese form, with the latter imposed over the former, with special emphasis on rituals and festivals falling at particular times in this traditional calendrical system still being retained.

As in the West, the covers of these were dominated by a “portrait of a lady in modern dress” and Lee has pointed to innovative styles used in painting, in terms of brushwork and colour (Lee, 1999). Thus we may see this increasing tendency of displaying the female body as just one part of an emerging, diverse public discourse related to a new urban conception of modernity, which was itself strongly influenced by a Western conception.

In conclusion, there was a definitively ‘New Culture’ emerging in the Republican period, centring on a literary, linguistic revolution and changing attitudes to knowledge, within an emergent and fast-developing urban culture. Western influences had some effect on all these aspects. Even in the literary revolution Hu Shi cited the development of Western vernacular languages in Europe as his inspiration and evidence that it was the key for a modern literature, and Chinese writers were influenced by modernist writing from 19th century Europe.

There were perhaps more obvious influences and importations involved in the development of urban culture, that of Shanghai being analysed above. Also in intellectual culture and trends of intellectual thinking, students and writers imported Western ideas, translated Western plays (Dora, a character from Ibsen’s play ‘The Doll House’ becoming a key symbol for women’s emancipation).

However, they were very focused in their appropriation of these and application of them to consciously strive against traditional Chinese culture and social institutions. Ultimately, it was this anti-traditionalism, which tied the various and diverse facets of the New Culture together as a movement, and turned it into an important cultural phenomenon in Republican China.

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“New Culture” in Republican China

References Duara, Prasenjit. “Of Authenticity and Woman: Personal Narratives of Middle-Class Women in Modern China” in Wen-hsin Yeh. Ed. Becoming Chinese, Passages to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley. 2000. Print.

Hu Shih, Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures, 1933. Chicago. 1934.

Print.

Lee, Leo, “Literary Trends 1: The Quest for Modernity, 1895–1927,” in John K. Fairbank et al., ed., Cambridge History of China. Cambridge. 15 vols.

1976. Print.

Lee, Leo. Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,1930–1945. Cambridge. 1999. Print.

Lu Xun, “Diary of a madman,” in Harold Isaacs, (ed.), Straw Sandals.

Cambridge. 1974. Print.

Schwarcz, Vera. The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and The Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Berkeley. 1986. Print.

Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China. New York. 1999.

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Playing With Fire In The Dragon’s Den: Human Rights in China Abstract: The inconsistency of the UN’s responses to freedom of speech abuses and forced detention of activists is clearly demonstrable by the comparison of the UN’s relationship to China and its reaction to freedom of speech abuses in Ethiopia and Honduras. Both cases have, since 1980 seen the detention of approximately the same amount of people, and for the same reasons. According to the Legal Realism framework of international relations, states respond to human rights abuses depending on the political clout of the violator in question, rather than out of an ethical obligation to protect the rights of all people in all countries. The disappearance, detainment, and the subsequent criminalization of the famed artist and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, and the UN’s response to this incident clearly shows how little any effort has been made by international governance to improve human rights situation in China. This paper approaches the thorny issue of human rights in China through a realpolitik perspective.

Jack Wagner is a junior at New York University

majoring in Politics and Religion. He was the former Managing Editor of DEAN, and plays in the band Minor Soul in New York.

Playing With Fire In The Dragon’s Den: Human Rights in China 74

C

urrent account adjustment is necessary for the United States to avoid these consequences of continued external deficits. There must be three components to this adjustment process. First, unfair trade practices by China, which artificially boost the Sino-American current account deficit, must be addressed. Second, US domestic consumption habits must be changed. The US has a large preference for consumption of foreign goods and an extremely low propensity to save disposable income. These characteristics of US consumers worsen the American current account position. Finally, the dollar must be devalued to boost exports and check growing imbalances.

Since the founding of the United Nations after World War II and the exposure of the horrors of the Holocaust to the world’s eyes, human rights has been one of the most controversial issues in international and domestic politics, mainly because of the disagreement over where to draw the line between state sovereignty and international humanitarian intervention. One nation that has walked this political tight-rope over the past few decades is the People’s Republic of China, which has a long history of human rights abuses (as epitomized by the Tiananmen Square Massacre), though has met very little humanitarian resistance from either the United Nations or other ‘concerned’ states.

This can be partly traced back to China’s emergence as a political and military force on the international stage (as symbolized by China’s status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council), but also partly the world’s growing reliance on China economically and strategically – in short, it is in a country’s best interest to keep good relations with China.

This lack of humanitarian action by the international community has most recently resurfaced with the latest series of crackdowns the Chinese government has conducted on democracy and freedom activists in China, the most well known case being the sudden detainment and disappearance of artist-activist Ai Weiwei. In this paper, I illuminate the inconsistency of the UN’s responses to freedom of speech abuses and detainment of activists by comparing the UN’s response to China with her response to freedom of speech abuses in Ethiopia and Honduras, both of which since 1980 have detained approximately the same amount of people for the same reasons as China. Moreover, I will use the Legal Realism school of thought to explain how the UN’s response on such matters is dependent on the political clout that surrounds the particular case, rather than an ethical obligation to protect the rights of all people in all countries.

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Background to China’s Human Rights Issues

There are a number of background considerations to take into account when analyzing China’s position on human rights and the way the international community responded to the latest escalation of detainments and violations of freedom of speech within the past two years. These considerations are important also in my comparison of the UN’s response to China with the UN’s response to other countries, as a nation’s politics and degree of power over the international community depends upon that nations history with both human rights issues and international relations.

In the particular case of China, the first consideration is China’s role in the United Nations itself. Since 1971, the People’s Republic of China has been a permanent member of the UN Security Council, which gives China a veto over all Security Council resolutions. However, according to Article 27(3) of the UN Charter, a state that is party to a dispute has to abstain from voting in Security Council resolutions.

This means that if the Security Council truly wanted to take action with regards to Chinese human rights issues, China would have no legal power in the UN to block such a resolution. However, due to the political reality of the Security Council and the international community, none of the Security Council members have taken any significant action against China for human rights violations. Another consideration to keep in mind is that China is a signatory of both the Convention on Civil and Political Rights (signed on October 5th 1998) and the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (signed on October 27th 1997).

However, China has only ratified the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ratified on March 27th 2001), not the Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which means China is only legally bound to the former. The rights stated in the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights do not apply to our analysis, but the fact that it was ratified indicates that China is legally obligated to uphold certain human rights and that the ratification of the Convention on Civil and Political Rights is a possibility in the future. Today however, China has no legal obligation to uphold political and civil rights such as freedom of speech.

A possible solution to this would be the legally binding forces of the UN Charter, which China signed to become a member of the UN (the fact that it was the Republic of China that signed the Charter rather than the People’s Republic of China is no longer an issue after the UN

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recognized the PRC as the legitimate representative of China in 1971).

However, other than in the non-legally binding preamble, the Charter barely mentions the upholding of human rights as a responsibility of signatory states.

A historical consideration to keep in mind when analyzing the UN’s latest response to China’s freedom of speech violations is the way the UN responded to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4th 1989 – the most severe anti-democracy crackdown in China since the death of Mao Zedong. The United States showed a very strong response to the crackdown, with President Bush calling the crackdown “violent and bloody” and warning China that her relationship with the US relationship will change under “a brutal and repressive regime” (McNulty – “Bush halts arms sales to China”). President Bush also halted arms sales, but did not cut off diplomatic ties, nor did he intervene in any other significant way. The UN, however, produced a much lighter response. UN spokesman Francois Giuliani said that “the secretary-general is greatly saddened that it was felt necessary to resort to force in Beijing”, and followed by stating that “the secretary-general is most mindful of the (UN) Charter’s requirement that the United Nations abstain from intervention in regard to matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of states” (McNulty – “Bush halts arms sales to China”). With this response the Secretary-General is referring to Article 2(7) of the Charter, which forbids the UN from intervening in essentially domestic issues, though the UN Security Council could always use its Chapter VII powers to bypass this rule.

The UN’s Response to Ai Weiwei and Other Activists’ Arrests

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Over the past two years, there has been a growing movement of democracy activists, lawyers and online-bloggers in China, who have been collectively calling for a “Jasmine Revolution” (Pierson – LA Times), as inspired by the revolutions of the Arab Spring against authoritarian regimes. These calls for protests across China constitute the newest widespread movement for democracy in China since the Tiananmen Square Massacre, though the Jasmine Revolution does not match it in scale (Savitt/Wang – NYTimes). Instead of waiting for a mass protest and violently dispersing the crowd as in 1989, the Communist government instead prevented the Jasmine Revolution from becoming another Tiananmen Square Massacre by engaging in a preemptive

widespread crackdown on democracy activists and dissidents of the government early in the process of protest mobilization. The “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue” mentions over 150 cases of government detainment, intimidation or censorship in China since 2010, all of them relating to violations of freedom of expression.

The most well-known detainment cases were those of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who has been imprisoned by the government since 2008 (NobelPrize.org – Liu Xiaobo Biography), and artist-activist Ai Weiwei, who was detained in April 2011 and was released in June 2011 (UNHRC – Refworld) but has been fined US$2.4 million for tax evasion and fines (The Guardian – “Ai Weiwei given hope of tax reprieve”).

Liu Xiaobo was arrested and charged with 11 years in prison for “state subversion” after he drafted a petition called Charter 08 that demanded the Chinese government to give the people freedom of speech and a democratic election system (Jacobs – NYTimes) – Charter 08 was the trigger for his arrest. Today, Liu is still in prison. In Ai Weiwei’s case, however, his detainment seemed to be from a build-up of activist activity that he has undertaken over the past few years, including the numerous art pieces he has created which directly attack the government, as well as the documentary film he made in 2009 on the failed government response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. As stated by Amnesty International, Ai Weiwei’s detainment, unlike that of Liu Xiaobo, was a message from the government that “China’s time for open dissent has come to an end” (Amnesty – “China detains Ai Weiwei as warning against dissent”). These two cases are the most prominent cases within the widespread crackdown on freedom of speech that the government has implemented since 2010.

These two cases, as well as the greater crackdown on dissidents and activists in China, are direct violations of the UN Charter and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights by the Chinese government. Article 1(3) of the UN Charter states that a purpose of the UN is “promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental rights for all”. Even though Article 2(7) of the Charter prevents the UN from intervening in essentially domestic matters of a nation, the UN Security Council can always enact its Chapter VII powers if they feel a matter is out of hand – the question is why the Security Council did nothing against China during this crackdown. Moreover, the Security Council does not necessarily have to intervene militarily to enact Chapter VII powers – Article 41 of the Charter says the Security Council may impose economic sanctions and other non-military actions to deter states.

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Imposing such sanctions on China for a brutal crackdown on democracy and a direct violation of the Charter would, in theory, have been a justified UN response.

Secondly, China’s crackdown was a direct, and more obvious, violation of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which China is a signatory. With the arrest of Ai Weiwei in particular, China violated Article 9 (“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention” – Ai Weiwei was arrested without formal charges before the arrest [SinoDaily.com]); Article 10 (“All people deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the person” – Ai Weiwei was beaten by the authorities during his detainment [ArtAsiaPacific.com – “Ai Weiwei Hospitalized After Beating by Chinese Police”]); Article 17 (“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his … family” – Ai Weiwei’s wife was questioned for three hours by Chinese police a few days after Ai Weiwei’s detention [Branigan – The Guardian]) and, most importantly, Article 19 (“Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression”). Such a number of violations of the Covenant and the Charter should theoretically merit some sort of significant UN action.

However, the politics of the situation influenced the UN to not give a significant response to China for these attacks on freedom. No action whatsoever was taken by the Security Council on this issue, and the Secretary-General made no statements or press releases regarding China’s actions. Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which take pride in being minimally affected by international politics (for example, Amnesty International has recently called on African nations to arrest George W. Bush for human rights abuses during his visit to Africa, clearly a call that proves lack of attention to political realities [The Inquisitor]) made pleas to the UN to take some sort of punitive action on China. Sophie Richardson, the Human Rights Watch Asia advocacy director stated in the plea that: “the past few years have shown that appeasement and ‘quiet diplomacy’ do nothing to dissuade Beijing from cracking down even harder on dissent” (Human Rights Watch – “China: Release Critic and Artist Ai Weiwei”).

The only media through which the UN responded was through the Working Group, which is a subgroup of the Human Rights Council, and through a Report made by the Human Rights Council’s Special

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Rapporteur for freedom of expression. The Working Group writes an annual report on all countries in which “Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances” have occurred. This report is submitted to the Human Rights Council for review and it is the HRC that decides which issues to bring to the Security Council or the General Assembly. Moreover, the Working Group sends “Urgent Appeals” directly to governments, asking for them to explain such detainment cases. The section of the report on China is longer than for other countries, and features appeals for explanations regarding many detainees, including Ai Weiwei. The Chinese government made a smart diplomatic and cooperative move by responding to the appeal, in which she explains that some of the detainments were on charges of “state subversion”, which seems to be the vague go-to justification China gives for the latest crackdown.

However, for the majority of the cases, including that of Ai Weiwei, the response is “the Chinese Government will carry out further investigation into the cases of the other individuals mentioned in the Urgent Appeal letter” (Report of the Working Group; 35). This effectively absolves China of any responsibility to respond to those other cases, because an “investigation” can take as long as the government wants. Moreover, the fact that this report includes disappearance cases from every single country weakens the gravity of a country being included in the report.

The “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue” is the second piece of United Nations documentation that condemns China, though it runs into the same issues of legitimacy and political weight as the Report of the Working Group. Like the Working Group Report, it reviews all countries that have been to some degree suspected of infringing on individuals’ freedom of expression.

The Special Rapporteur’s report is also directed to the Human Rights Council, and has no political significance unless the Council decides to act on the violations outlined in the report. However, this Special Rapporteur’s report seems to have more political awareness than the Working Group’s, mainly because it has an “Observations” section at the end of each country’s report, where the Rapporteur can give his view on the violations as a whole. In response to China’s consistent claim of detaining these people for crimes of state subversion, the Rapporteur observes that “a restriction sought to be justified on the ground of national security is not legitimate if its genuine purpose or demonstrable effect is to … protect Government from embarrassment or exposure of

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wrongdoing” (Report of the Special Rapporteur; 79). This comment brings a UN appeal to China to a different level – a level where the UN is calling China out on its true intentions in this crackdown. However, because of the political clout that surrounds the situation, this appeal is never transmitted to China by a power in the UN higher than the Special Rapporteur.

Comparison to other UN Responses – Human Rights in Ethiopia and Honduras

To further my thesis that the UN’s lack of response to China’s latest crackdown on free speech was politically motivated and was not an accurate reflection of how the UN, in theory, should respond to a violation of human rights, I will compare the UN’s response to China with the UN’s responses to similar cases in the past. By cross-referencing the UN statistics of “enforced or involuntary disappearances” between 1980 and 2011, with the Amnesty International Report 2011 to see which countries have cracked down on free speech, I identified that the countries most similar to China in terms of respect for human rights are Ethiopia and Honduras. According to the Working Group’s statistics, China has had 119 cases of enforced disappearance since 1980 – Ethiopia has had 119 and Honduras has had 209. These three figures are similar enough to be a good basis for comparison on the countries’ human rights records as a whole.

The specific cases of freedom of speech abuses in Ethiopia and Honduras are similar to those of China. According to the 2011 Amnesty International country reports, The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Front won parliamentary elections through a campaign of harassment and intimidation of the populace, and since the election has been creating a “climate of fear” among journalists and human rights activists.

Moreover, there are many political prisoners and activists in detention – another common trait within Ethiopia and China’s similar track record of human rights abuses (Amnesty International Report 2011; 140-142).

This case supports my thesis because the United Nations’ response to Ethiopia has been much stronger than the response to China. Firstly, like China, Ethiopia is condemned in the Working Group’s Report and in the Special Rapporteur’s Report. However, the UN Human Rights Committee brought the Ethiopian Minister of Foreign Affairs to Geneva for three meetings specifically on the Ethiopian human rights issues, in

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hopes of convincing the Ethiopian representative to ratify the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Berhane – Ethiopia: text of UN Human Rights Committee Q&A Session Report). Moreover, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a press release expressing its concern for the Ethiopian government’s lack of respect for human rights (UN News Center – Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism laws must not be misused to curb rights).

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In the case of Honduras, there has been a similar situation of a “de facto government” (Amnesty International Report 2011, 163), much like the Chinese Communist Party, engaged in a widespread crackdown that resulted in hundreds of protesters being arbitrarily detained. Human rights workers were threatened and harassed by the police, and in a very extreme situation, 10 journalists were murdered in a series of uninvestigated and mysterious killings. I would like to note that the situation in Honduras is not significantly graver than the situation in China just because of the deaths of journalists – China’s history of killings at mass protests is far worse than that of Honduras. Once again, the United Nations response to the human rights crisis in Honduras was much more significant than the response to China. Other than being reviewed in the Working Group’s Report and the Special Rapporteur’s Report, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, made an official visit to Honduras for the purposes of investigating the human rights crisis and telling the government to adopt measures to protect human rights activists. The official statement she made after her visit had a section at the end where she directly tells the government what she thinks should be done, and tells the human rights defenders to form a closer relationship with the UN’s human rights mechanisms (UN OHCHR – Margaret Sekaggya).

Needless to say, this was a much stronger response than the UN’s response to China.

Legal Realism and Political Clout

What I hope to illustrate with the case studies of Ethiopia and Honduras is the stark contrast between the strong UN response to these less powerful and less internationally influential states, and the weak UN response to China, one of the most powerful countries in the world. I argue that the model of Legal Realism perfectly explains the inconsistency of the UN’s decisions on human rights issues. Legal realism

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believes that legal decisions made by judges or officials (legal actors) are inherently subjective and will produce outcomes that are inconsistent and incoherent, mainly because of the fact that legal actors are affected by politics and other biases. Therefore, all legal actors are actually political actors. Linked to this, the most powerful political actors are almost always the ones who create the laws and have their own interests at heart, so this means that the legal actors, in an international system, will actually have the most powerful political actors’ interests at heart when making legal decisions (TheFreeDictionary.com – Legal Realism). Therefore, applying this model to the cases previously discussed, it is understandable that the UN responded harshly to the human rights abuses of Ethiopia and Honduras, because they are both relatively weak actors on the political stage. Condemning these nations would not have negative political ramifications for future UN actions or decisions. However, given China’s power on the world stage, and the fact that she is a permanent member of the Security Council, condemning her would not be wise, politically.

The rationale for the UN not strongly responding to the Chinese human rights abuses is rooted in both the Human Rights Council and the Secretary-General’s office. Firstly, the Human Rights Council has had a reputation for admitting members who have poor human rights track records – this undermines the legitimacy of the Human Rights Council since these members have a say in which human rights cases are acted upon. A group of dissidents in 2011 urged the UN to expel China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Cuba from the Human Rights Council because it is very much common knowledge that these states are human rights offenders (UN Watch – “Dissidents urge UN to Expel China”).

As Frida Ghitis wrote for the Miami Herald, “the Council operates as a parody of itself ” and “stands as one of the greatest obstacles impeding the protection of human rights” (Ghitis – “The Human Rights Council is a tragic joke”). To add to this, in the specific case of China, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, declined to attend the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo, in a move that was widely seen as her giving into the Chinese campaign to delegitimize the awarding of the prize to Liu Xiaobo (Goodenough – “UN Leader skips opportunity to reproach China on human rights”). In terms of the Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s shortcomings when it comes to being politically influenced, he has made no statements or press releases condemning China for human rights violations. When Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel prize, Ban Ki-Moon “avoided any direct criticism of

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Beijing’s human rights record, praising it instead for economic, political and human rights progress” (Goodenough), and he did not call on China to release Liu Xiaobo from prison. Legal Realism would interpret this lack of action as Ban being cautious as to not condemn a powerful state, though if it concerned a weaker state he would take a stronger stance.

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Conclusion

According to Li Baodong, China’s Permanent Representative and Ambassador to the United Nations, “the People’s Republic of China has consistently adhered to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations” (China-UN.org – Ambassador Li Baodong). Moreover, in China’s 2006 “Aide Memoire” which announced the government’s candidacy to become a member of the Human Rights Council, China states that she is “committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms of the Chinese people” (Aide Memoir, 2006), though follows by saying that “much remains to be done in the field of human rights in China” China seems to be hinting at the fact that a big population means the government must be more restrictive on its people regarding certain freedoms. Nonetheless, China has been a serial violator of some of the most fundamental and universal rights, and has been named one of the world’s worst human rights abusers by Freedom House (Goodenough, CNS News). However, the reality of the situation is that due to China’s political and economic stature in the international scene, neither the UN nor any other powerful countries are willing to put the protection of human rights over their own interests. As indicated by the comparison to UN responses to Ethiopian and Honduran freedom of speech violations, the UN’s decisions are politically motivated. SecretaryGeneral Ban-Ki Moon stated in an address on March 12th 2012 to the Human Rights Council that “it is our duty, under the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to protect the rights of everyone, everywhere” (UNOHCHR Youtube Page).

Unfortunately for the victims of China’s crackdown on dissent, this duty has not been fulfilled.

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References United Nations Documents: United Nations – Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights; “Statement of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, on the conclusion of her official visit to Honduras” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=11830&LangID=E (accessed on 04/15 at 3:00PM) UN News Center – “Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism laws must not be misused to curb rights”, February 2 2012 http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?

NewsID=41112&Cr=journalist&Cr1= (accessed on 04/15 at 11:00AM) Aide Memoire, announcing China’s candidacy for the Human Rights Council, April 13th 2006 http://www.un.org/ga/60/elect/hrc/china. pdf (accessed on 04/20 at 2:30PM) “Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances”. March 2nd 2012 http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session19/A-HRC-19-58Rev1_en.pdf (accessed on 04/20 at 4:00PM) “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue”, May 27th 2011 http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/ docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27.Add.1_EFSonly.pdf (accessed on 04/20 at 4:00PM) Berhane, Daniel; “Ethiopia: Text of UN Human Rights Committee Q&A Session Report”, July 16 2011 http://danielberhane.wordpress. com/2011/07/16/ethiopia-text-un-human-rights-committee-q-asession-report/ (accessed on 04/15 at 11:00AM) News Sources: Ghitis, Frida; “The Human Rights Council is a tragic joke”; The Miami Herald; June 25 2010 http://www.unwatch.org/site/c. bdKKISNqEmG/b.1289203/apps/s/content.asp?ct=8452345 (accessed on 04/16 at 11:00PM) Branigan, Tania; “Chinese Police question Ai Weiwei’s wife”; November 29 2011 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/29/chinesepolice-question-ai-weiwei-wife (accessed on 04/14 at 9:00AM)

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SinoDaily.com; “Police Remain Silent on Ai Weiwei Detention”; April 4 2011 http://www.sinodaily.com/reports/Police_remain_silent_on_Ai_ Weiwei_detention_999.html (accessed on 04/23 at 4:00PM) ArtAsiaPacific.com – Ai Weiwei Hospitalized after Beating by Chinese Police http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/66/ AiWeiweiHospitalizedAfterBeatingByChinesePolice (accessed on 04/14 at 9:00AM) Goodenough, Patrick; “UN Human Rights Council losing controversial members, as others prepare to join”; CNS News; February 23rd 2012 http://cnsnews.com/news/article/un-human-rights-council-losingcontroversial-members-others-prepare-join (accessed on 04/11 at 12:00PM) Goodenough, Patrick; “UN Leader skips opportunity to reproach China on Human Rights”; CNS News; October 12 2010 http://cnsnews.com/ news/article/un-leader-skips-opportunity-reproach-china-human-rights (accessed on 04/16 at 11:00PM) The Inquisitr – Amnesty International Calls for George W. Bush Arrest in Africa http://www.inquisitr.com/164422/amnesty-international-callsfor-george-w-bush-arrest-in-africa/ (accessed on 04/11 at 11:30AM) Pierson, David; “Online call for protests in China prompts crackdown”; Los Angeles Times, Feb 26 2011 http://articles.latimes.com/2011/ feb/26/world/la-fgw-china-crackdown-20110227 (accessed on 04/04 at 8:00PM) McNulty, Timothy; “Bush halts arms sales to China”; Chicago Tribune, June 6 1989 http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-06-06/ news/8902070136_1_chinese-students-chinese-army-president-bush (accessed on 04/07/12 at 7:00PM) Savitt, Scott and Wang, Archer; “In China, Strolling for Reform”; New York Times Op-Ed, March 4 2011 http://www.nytimes. com/2011/03/05/opinion/05iht-edsavitt05.html (accessed on 04/04 at 8:00PM) Jacobs, Andrew; “Leading China dissident gets 11-year term for subversion”; New York Times, December 24 2009 http://www.nytimes. com/2009/12/25/world/asia/25china.html?_r=1 (accessed on 04/08 at 11:00PM) Amnesty International Press Release – “China detains Ai Weiwei as

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warning against dissent”, April 4 2011 http://www.amnesty.org/en/ for-media/press-releases/china-detains-ai-weiwei-warning-againstdissent-2011-04-04 (accessed on 04/08 at 11:00PM) The Guardian – “Ai Weiwei given hope of tax reprieve”, January 6 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jan/06/ai-weiwei-taxpenalty-review (accessed on 04/04 at 11:00PM) Other Links: Amnesty International Report 2011 http://www.amnesty.org/en/ annual-report/2011 (accessed on 04/20 at 4:00PM) China-UN.org – Ambassador Li Baodong: http://www.china-un.org/ eng/dbtxx/hyxx/ (accessed on 04/02/12 at 8:00PM) UNOHCHR Youtube Page – UN Secretary-General message at Human Rights Council: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtxU9iOx348 (accessed on 04/20 at 3:00PM) The Free Dictionary.com – Legal Realism: http://legal-dictionary. thefreedictionary.com/Legal+Realism (accessed on 04/15/12 at 11:00 PM) UN Watch – “Dissidents Urge UN to Expel China, Cuba, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia from Human Rights Council & Women’s Rights Commission” http://www.unwatch.org/site/c.bdKKISNqEmG/b.1289203/apps/s/ content.asp?ct=11251055 (accessed on 04/16 at 11:00PM) Human Rights Watch – China: Release Critic and Artist Ai Weiwei; April 6 2011 http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/04/06/china-releaseartist-and-critic-ai-weiwei (accessed on 04/11 at 11:00AM) NobelPrize.org – Liu Xiaobo Biography: http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/xiaobo.html (accessed on 04/04 at 11:00PM) UNHCR – Refworld: “China: Ai Weiwei Released, but Colleagues Remain Detained” http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,ART19,,C HN,,4e38f5ca2,0.html (accessed on 04/04 at 11:00PM)

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A Study on Apology: No Gun Ri

Abstract: In 1950, U.S. troops fighting the Korean War committed a gruesome war crime against 400 South Korean civilians. The residents of No Gun Ri, a small town in South Korea, were accused of housing Communist infiltrators and were thus forced to evacuate their town. The U.S. soldiers then fired on the unsuspecting civilians with neither sufficient evidence or permission. The case was the subject of a cover-up by the American military intelligence, but the families of the victims have brought the case to light, demanding an official apology from the U.S. government. Yet the intracacies involved in offical state apologies demand that a serious treatment of the circumstances surrounding the horrific scene set at No Gun Ri. With various governments involved and the prestige and reputation of the United States Army at stake, an apology of the atrocity seems unlikely to be forthcoming.

Sharon Wu graduated from New York University in

2012 with degrees in International Relations and Sociology.

Study on Apology: The Incident at No Gun Ri

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n July of 1950, about 400 innocent South Korean civilians were brutally massacred by U.S. soldiers suspicious of North Korean spies. Ten years after the massacre, No Gun Ri survivors began requesting a formal apology from the United States government. They have yet to receive one.

While the U.S. soldiers were clearly guilty of a horrendous war crime, a formal national apology has not been issued because diplomatic apologies are complicated, expensive, and very political. Yet, they are necessary to human rights, especially when a gross human rights violation has occurred. However, national apologies issued to war victims may temporarily and monetarily alleviate the pain of war crimes, but no verbal apology or monetary compensation will ever entirely erase the physical and emotional scars of war. Therefore, a formal national apology is primarily a symbolic gesture that establishes historical truths, progresses human rights, and strengthens relationships between nations and people. The victims of No Gun Ri are seeking apology in an attempt to accomplish all these things.

Theories on Apology

Norma Field, an East Asian studies professor at the University of Chicago, thoroughly discusses the concept of apology from a theoretical and practical perspective in her article “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” She stipulates that all sincere apologies – between close friends or between competing nations – express regret in hopes of “cancel[ing] the offense.”(Field 6) Sometimes, an apology is issued with some form of physical compensation, be it flowers or chocolate or monetary reimbursement. A genuine apology should also cost the offender in some way, “either in the currency of pride,”(Field 8) or in currency of money. However, the worse the offense, the more difficult it is to convey a heartfelt apology that sufficiently eases the pain. When it comes to national apologies, this is often the case. Their crimes are often so atrocious that any apology – verbal, monetary, or otherwise – is inadequate for all offended parties.

For a nation-state apologizing to a group of people or another nation-state, an authentic and political apology includes three crucial elements: “recognition of the facts, verbal apology, and payment of compensation.”(Field 10) The authenticity and effectiveness of an apology is often measured in the “realization of material [political and economic] gain.”(Field 10)

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There are a number of difficulties naturally associated with national apologies. For one, generational gaps and gender or ethnic differences complicate the terms of apology. (Field 7) When a nation seeks to apologize to a group of people divided by such differences, it is less likely to satisfy all these different groups. Different age groups, gender groups, and ethnic groups have different moral values, forms of communication, cultural environments, and lingual habits. They are likely to interpret apologies in different ways and disagree on the sincerity of the apology. Therefore, they are more likely to be unsatisfied with the apology.

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The issue of “material restitution” (Field 8) as a part of a national apology is also a controversial matter. If a nation issues monetary compensation to the victims of offense, it gives something of value in an attempt to convey authenticity in its apology. While some consider this to be a concerted attempt at apology, others view it as condescending and insulting.

Critics of material restitution as apology believe that currency places monetary value on the lives of victims and degrades victims as “explicitly subject to calculations of value.”(Field 8) Still others figure that, although material restitution may be degrading, simple words will never be enough. Therefore, some economic gain may as well be reaped.

Historical Examples of Apology

There are a number of historical instances that show that national apologies are an effective means of diminishing grief and improving human relations. There are also other public apologies that have been ineffective and even counterproductive. National apologies can evoke any number of reactions, both positive and negative.

Norma Field cites the instance of Japanese Prime Minister Hosokawa Morihiro’s dramatic apology to Asian victims of Japanese violence during World War II. After his apology, three specific positive developments for the people of Japan occurred. One, the Japanese government’s apology acknowledged the historical truths of World War II that are relevant to Japanese history and world history. Two, “the conditions of Japanese citizenship” (Field 5) were fundamentally altered, and Japanese citizens earned greater respect for apologizing to other Asian nations.

Three, there was a possibility for the beginnings of a “new Japan”(Field 5) emerging from the rubble of a devastating war. All three developments signified a strong step forward for Japan’s government and citizens, thus demonstrating a potential positive outcome after a national apology. In this example, the outcome benefited both the war-torn people of Japan and the victims of Japanese war crimes.

Sharon Wu

A Study on Apology: No Gun Ri

Conversely, not all apology efforts are received graciously, and some are futile and even detrimental. In 1998, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan traveled to Rwanda to speak in front of the Rwandan parliament. He planned on apologizing for the U.N.’s failure to intervene on behalf of the victims of the Rwandan genocide in hopes of strengthening the relationship between the U.N. and Rwanda. Historians, the Rwandan government, and the Rwandan people consider this apology to be a massive failure because of Annan’s “nondiscussion of his personal culpability for U.N. action, his democratization of blame for the genocide, and the appearance of personal arrogance created by his language choices.”(Edwards 88) Annan’s rhetorical choices and personal demeanor worked against him.

While he made an honest attempt at forging a closer bond with Rwanda, his apology essentially failed.

Media analysis and behavioral analysis show that the citizens of Rwanda were not satisfied with Annan’s apology. The Rwandan president, vice president, and prime minister failed to show up at a reception for Annan that followed the Secretary General’s speech. (Edwards 99) During a formal meeting between Annan and several Rwandan genocide survivors, citizens interrogated him about his lack of intervention and openly criticized his speech. (Edwards 99) While Annan had warm intentions, his apology failed to address her personal failures on behalf of genocide survivors, leaving scarred victims even more upset. His apology – or lack thereof – demonstrates the symbolic power of formal apologies. His failed speech shows just how deeply a formal apology can affect those who seek one.

South Korean victims of the American crime committed at No Gun Ri compose just one group of people seeking a formal apology from the U.S. government. Their continual plea for a state-issued apology reveals the symbolic strength of a genuine apology. However, the case with No Gun Ri victims demonstrates that a delivering an apology is no simple act. A formal public apology is a complex matter involving historical accuracy, foreign policy, diplomatic relations, and national credibility.

The Incident at No Gun Ri

During the Korean War, hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers were sent to South Korea to defend the democratic government from North Korea’s Communist attacks. Following the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, approximately 380,000 South Korean citizens began fleeing further south in order to escape the advancing North Korean army. (Hanley 590) These refugees included mostly women, children, and the elderly, since the young men had been drafted into the South Korean army. The U.S. army became increasingly concerned with North Korean Communist infiltrators in these groups of unorganized refugees.

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On July 25th, 1950, U.S. soldiers evacuated a small South Korean village and forced the inhabitants south towards the town of No Gun Ri, a village in the North Chungcheong province. U.S. soldiers suspected North Korean spies within this group of South Korean civilians, so they searched the villagers for suspicious items but found none. Yet, the U.S. soldiers still suspected North Korean spies within the group, despite a complete lack of evidence. With no apparent proof of espionage, the U.S. soldiers ordered an air raid that killed about one hundred of these villagers. The remaining villagers were forced into a tunnel nearby. The American soldiers then proceeded to fire into both ends of the tunnel, killing an additional three hundred people. The refugees were trapped in the tunnel for several days and no cease-fire orders were issued. (Hanley 594)

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Years after the massacre at No Gun Ri, the victims remained silent about the crime. It wasn’t until 1960, that survivors began to petition for an official government investigation, a formal U.S. apology, and monetary compensation. (Hanley 591) Initially, the U.S. government made no efforts to investigate the claims and denied any responsibility for their actions. However, in 1999, the Associated Press published Charles Hanley’s investigative report on the massacre at No Gun Ri, bringing the story to international attention.

Following the publication of Hanley’s piece, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen ordered a committee to investigate the incident. After eleven years of research, the Department of Defense released the No Gun Ri Review, a 300 page report that confirmed the massacre’s occurrence and the fault of the U.S. soldiers. (Hanley 593) However, the No Gun Ri Review left out and ignored critical information and documents regarding the attack on the South Korean civilians. The No Gun Ri Report failed to address all the faults of the U.S. military institution in regards to this historic event.

Even after the release of the No Gun Ri Review and hundreds of American and Korean witness testimonies, President William Clinton would not issue a formal apology to the South Korean victims. He stated that “the evidence was not clear that there was responsibility for wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect the government was responsible.” (Hanley 594) Clinton did issue a statement of regret in which he announced that the U.S. would fund the building of a memorial and the establishment of a scholarship fund. (Clinton) However, it was not a formal apology and, according to scholars, “expressing regret about a past deed is seldom viewed as equivalent to an apology.” (Weveneth 17) This is primarily because regret does not include “the recognition that one has been wrong,” (Weveneth 17) which is a key component to a real apology. Since Clinton’s statement of regret, No Gun Ri survivors and South Korean human rights groups have continuously petitioned for a real apology.

Sharon Wu

A Study on Apology: No Gun Ri

Why South Koreans Want an Apology

“By long custom and international law, targeting noncombatants is a war crime.” (Hanley 592) Charles Hanley’s simple statement expresses the gross abuse of human rights that occurred at No Gun Ri. The U.S. soldiers that ordered the air raid and fired upon the innocent South Korean civilians clearly violated international criminal law and basic right to life. In addition to the hundreds of deaths inflicted that day, many more survived but suffered from permanent physical damage. Naturally, all survivors were emotionally scarred by the bloodshed of the massacre. These victims certainly have the right to an apology in hopes of gaining symbolic dignity and emotional closure.

In one of many letters sent from victims to President Bill Clinton, Eunyong Chung requests “a formal apology and compensation” (Hanley 289) for the incident at No Gun Ri. No where in this letter does Chung state that an apology would alleviate the pain of memory. Instead, he states that he and his fellow citizens want “the truth, justice and due respect for our basic human rights”(Hanley 289) because that is all that can be satisfied with a sincere apology. To further prove this, Chung says: We are still suffering from the vivid memory of this unforgetable [sic] day. Some survivors live with permanently disfigured bodies (without one eye or nose and so on). Others are in sorrow because they live without thier [sic] families. About 400 souls roam around high above the killingfield [sic]. (Hanley 289) In these sentences, Chung acknowledges the permanence of the war crimes committed. No apology or monetary compensation can recover the losses or erase the memories. A formal apology would serve as a symbolic acknowledgement of wrongdoing and regret. An apology would also address historical human rights issues and international legal customs that are essential to a democratic society.

Why the US Won’t Issue an Apology

During the Cold War era, the United States defined itself as “the defender of freedom and human rights” (Suh 519). Thousands of American troops fought on foreign territory, all in an effort to prevent the spread of communism and to support the principles and practice of democracy. A U.S. apology during or after the Cold War would challenge its position as a global leader. (Suh 519) An apology would acknowledge an undemocratic error that thoroughly undermines traditional American values of life and liberty.

The U.S. government would be forced to admit that it does not always uphold and practice its own visions of justice. This admission could potentially open doors for other war crimes victims seeking formal apologies. All these admissions would challenge the American military’s respectability.

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Although President Clinton expressed “regret,” offered his “condolences,” and agreed to erect a memorial and fund a scholarship to commemorate the tragic incident at No Gun Ri, he denied a formal apology to the victims of No Gun Ri. (Clinton) In his statement, he said:

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As we honor those civilians who fell victim to this conflict, let us not forget that pain is not the only legacy of the Korean War. American and Korean veterans fought shoulder to shoulder in the harshest conditions for the cause of freedom, and they prevailed. The vibrancy of democracy in the Republic of Korea, the strong alliance between our two countries, and the closeness of our two peoples today is a testament to the sacrifices made by both of our nations fifty years ago.

(Clinton)

This statement clearly establishes the United States’ position of power. Although he acknowledges the unfortunate events that happened at No Gun Ri, Clinton justified America’s military presence in South Korea for the purpose of freedom and democracy. While he regretted the incident at No Gun Ri, he still supported military intervention in Korea because it allowed the U.S. to maintain its position as a global military leader. By admitting fault to war crimes, the U.S. would be questioning the legality of its past military intervention in Korea. In doing so, the United States could lose diplomatic and military credibility.

Additionally, if the U.S. did issue a formal apology to the No Gun Ri victims, other war crimes victims and human rights groups would be encouraged to press their demands for apology. If the U.S. admitted to one military mistake, it would be subjected to admitting many more. An unending list of apologies could possibly take away the sincerity of an apology, thus discrediting all apologies.

Why the South Korean Government May Not Want an Apology

While it is natural for the victims of No Gun Ri to demand a U.S. apology, evidence shows that the government administration of South Korea may be more hesitant to receive a formal apology for American war crimes in Korea.

South Korea remains economically, politically, and militarily dependent on the United States. In 1954, the United States and South Korea signed the Mutual Defense Treaty, which guaranteed that both countries would protect the other if attacked. Because of this treaty, the U.S. government keeps approximately 37,000 troops in South Korea for protection.

(Manyin 4) The United States is South Korea’s most important trading partner, and only in recent years has China overtaken the U.S. as South Korea’s

Sharon Wu

A Study on Apology: No Gun Ri

largest export market. (Manyin 5) The U.S. provides important political and economic resources that protect South Korean interests, and the South Korean government obviously cherishes that alliance. If the U.S. issued an apology to the South Korean civilians for the massacre at No Gun Ri, it would be admitting to a humiliating war crime. An apology would be a South Korean victory at the expense of the U.S. A U.S. defeat could sour the diplomatic relationship between the two nations. Because South Korea is far more dependent on the U.S. than on any other nation, South Korea could potentially suffer.

Because the South Korean government does not necessarily want an apology, it has attempted to impose collective amnesia upon its citizens in hopes of progressing its relationship with the United States. (Suh 519) Following the Korean War, South Korea wanted to strengthen its relations with the U.S. It did so by helping the U.S. maintain its global leadership role. After the Korean War armistice, the South Korean government focused heavily on publicizing anti-Communist rhetoric and glossed over the American crimes committed on Korean soil, including the occurrence at No Gun Ri. Media outlets and news sources purposely overlooked and underreported many of the American war crimes. (Suh 519) The South Korean government purposely disregarded American responsibility, all in hopes of preserving strong ties with the U.S. government and economy.

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Conclusion

While the historical evidence and hundreds of witness testimonies prove that the U.S. did indeed violate international law and human rights at No Gun Ri, a formal apology would certainly have multiple consequences that could be both beneficial and detrimental. Historical examples show that apologies can have positive and negative effects, or can be entirely useless. However, for the victims of any human rights violation, a formal apology would still serve mostly as a symbolic gesture that could provide some element of closure. Apologies are primarily symbolic â&#x20AC;&#x201C; sometimes economic when monetary compensation is paid â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and provide a significant ending to the darker memories in a countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. The best of apologies have the ability to officially conclude these nightmarish chapters in history and give way to a brighter future for people hurt by violence. The best of apologies establish historical facts, open up new historical debates, bring together people with a history of conflict, and set standards for human rights. For the survivors of the No Gun Ri massacre, a U.S. apology would ideally do the same.

Sharon Wu

A Study on Apology: No Gun Ri

References Clinton, William J. 2001. Statement on the Korean War: Incident at No Gun Ri. Washington, D.C.: Presidential Papers, Administration of William J. Clinton.

11 January. <http://clinton6.nara.gov/2001/01/2001-01-11-statement-bythe-president-on-no-gun-ri.html (accessed 4 May 2011>.

Edwards, Jason A. “The Mission of Healing: Kofi Annan’s Failed Apology.”

Atlantic Journal of Communication. 16, no. 2 (2008): 88-104.

Field, Norma. “War and Apology: Japan, Asia, the Fiftieth, and After.” Positions. 5, no. 1 (1997): 1-51.

Hanley, Charles J. “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths.”

Critical Asian Studies. 42, no. 4 (2010): 589-622.

Hanley, Charles J., Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza. The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare From the Korean War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001.

Manyin, Mark. South Korea-U.S. Economic Relations: Cooperation, Friction, and Future Prospects. CRS Report for Congress (2004).

Suh, Jae-Jung. “Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea.” Critical Asian Studies. 42, no. 4 (2010): 503-524.

Weyeneth, Robert R. “The Power of Apology and the Process of Historical Reconciliation.” The Public Historian. 23, no. 3 (2001): 9-38.

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Imperial Conductor? Hirohito and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

Abstract: On August 15, 1945 Japan’s Emperor, known as Hirohito in the West and Showa in Japan, took to the airwaves to announce his country’s complete and unconditional surrender in the Pacific War. For most Japanese—who had warred for the past 15 years in his name—it was the first time that they had ever heard him speak. In one of the greatest understatements of the modern era, he began his address with the statement: “The war has not turned in Japan’s favor.” He then went on to justify Japan’s war effort, while also largely distancing himself from it. Afterwards, he presided over seven years of American-led Allied Occupation, a symbol of the startling continuity between Japan’s wartime and post-war leaders. He died in 1989, after witnessing four decades of “miraculous” economic growth that transformed Japan from a defeated, broken, nation to one that challenged the United States for economic supremacy. His is one of the most remarkable and controversial reigns of any monarch in the modern era.

Jordan Siedell is a Duke University senior majoring in History and Political Science.

Imperial Conductor? Hirohito and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

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n early August of 1945, the most destructive war the world had ever seen came to an end, after years of immense and widespread conflict. With the unconditional surrender of the Empire of Japan, the final remaining part of the “Axis of Evil,” to the United States, the people of the Pacific island nation found themselves under American occupation, with years of rebuilding ahead of them. The next year, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal would assign guilt to various individuals for crimes committed during the previous years, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. The most notable individual to emerge from the tribunal unscathed was the Showa Emperor, Hirohito, whose reign began in 1926 and saw Japan rise to become a militarized world empire before crashing down under the mushroom clouds of humiliating defeat.

In the years and decades following the war, numerous historians have tackled the mystery that surrounds the Showa Emperor and the role he played in Japanese expansion and militarization beginning in 1931 and continuing on into the Second World War. However, due to the lack of sources outlining Hirohito’s exact role, a good deal of controversy has arisen as to how much responsibility the Showa Emperor bears for the decisions made before and during the war,. Out of the various books, journals, articles, and papers on the subject, two main theories emerge. The first is that Hirohito played an important and involved role in the planning and execution of Japanese military strategy, from the invasion of Manchuria to the war in the Pacific. In this line of argument, Hirohito is similar to Hitler and Mussolini in that he led the charge for militarization and conquest. As emperor, “he participated in the making of national policy and issued the orders of the imperial headquarters to field commanders and admirals [and] played an active role in shaping Japanese war strategy” (Bix 15). The second theory holds that Hirohito was an unwilling participant in the pre-war military buildup, as well as the war itself. Historians in this camp argue that his involvement in the war was brought about through pressure from multiple sources, including the government and the powerful military establishment.

Never, historians such as Edwin P. Hoyt argue, “is there indication of the swashbuckling conspirator that several books have made Hirohito out to be, a man intent on conquering the world and using the Imperial Army as his major weapon in so doing” (Hoyt ix).

The goal of this paper is not to disprove one of these theories by shoring up the other. Refuting either of the major arguments outlined above would be difficult as they both are based upon historical facts. Rather, my

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purpose in writing this paper is to utilize both primary and secondary sources to combine the accurate aspects of each argument and put them together to form a clearer picture of Hirohito in wartime Japan, and in doing so, clear up some of the controversy that has pervaded this issue for decades.

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With the above being said, the arguments made in this research paper are twofold. First, as the sovereign ruler of Japan during the time before and during World War II, Hirohito is not and cannot be considered blameless for the Japanese governmental and military actions that define this part of the country’s history, such as the invasion of Manchuria, expansion into China and other parts of Asia, and the decision to attack Pearl Harbor.

After all, it was Hirohito’s signature that was required on the imperial rescript that committed Japan to World War II. One of the responsibilities outlined in the Meiji Constitution for the emperor was to serve as commander of the military forces, and his endorsement, whether willful or reluctant, was needed to go ahead with virtually every major military operation.

The second argument is in many ways a clarification and extension of the first. Although the emperor bears responsibility for Japan’s role in the war and the period leading up to it, he was not a driving force behind the buildup of aggression exhibited by the Japanese military leadership at the time. In many respects, he was an unwilling accessory to the expansion into Asia in the 1930’s, as well as Japan’s entrance into World War II. While Western political cartoons displayed him as a bloodthirsty and ruthless conqueror who yearned for a Japanese takeover of Asia and the wider world, the reality was much different. The Showa Emperor was a pacifistic man who preferred marine biology to war strategy, but circumstances and force applied by military leaders and government officials, among others, led to his involvement in the planning and execution of military action.

From Meiji to Showa

Before examining Hirohito’s wartime role in depth, it is important to first explore the evolution of the imperial system from the time of the Meiji Restoration to the time of Hirohito’s ascension to the throne. When the Meiji Emperor, Hirohito’s grandfather, became assumed the throne in 1867, Japan was still a feudal society that lagged behind the West in many areas. The emperors that came before Meiji, as described by Emiko OhnukiTierney in Ethnology Were essentially shamans; human beings endowed with extraordinary power to communicate deities, but not themselves deities. Their religious and spiritual authority rested on power that had to be periodically rejuvenated through imperial rituals. The emperor was therefore divine only in a conditional sense. (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1991, 204)

Jordan Siedell

Hirohito and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

Under Emperor Meiji, Japan would go through a series of transformations to become a modern power that rivaled those in Europe and the United States. The army and navy would be reformed and modernized based upon European models, allowing for a progression of military buildup that would see Japan defeat Russia and China in war in the early 20th century and announce its relevance to the wider world. (Gordon, 2000.)

However, the most important change would occur with the creation of the Meiji Constitution in 1889.

The constitution that would hold sway over the Japanese imperial system until the end of World War II contained three important changes, inspired by the European monarchy system, to the power of the emperor.

First, the shamanistic characteristics of the emperor were replaced with divine powers. “Article 3 of Chapter 1 of the new constitution issued in 1889 declared that the emperor was sacred and may not be intruded upon. The emperor was defined as Manifest Destiny or Visible Deity” (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1991, 204). In other words, the emperor had gone from being the Japanese equivalent of the Pope to an actual god. As OhnukiTierney continues, “with the Meiji reformulation, the emperor became, at least nominally, the Manifest Destiny, a bona fide deity” (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1991, 204). A second change involved stipulating the Japanese people as subjects of the emperor. From that point on, the citizens were designated in part by the emperor who was ruling during the year that they were born (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1991, 205). For example, a person born during the reign of Meiji would call himself or herself a “Meiji person.” Over time, this would lead to an intense feeling of loyalty towards the emperor that was shared by the majority of the population. To the Japanese, “the Emperor is a personification of their unity. A blow struck at him is a blow at all they hold dear, their culture, their very reason for existence; for this sense of unity is the very essence and end of life to the Japanese” (Reischauer, 1939, 25).

Finally, the constitution gave the emperor control over the military, designating “the emperor as commander-in-chief of the army and navy, which were referred to as the imperial force” (Ohnuki-Tierney, 1991, 205). More than anything else, this article would have a significant impact on Hirohito and the role he played in the war. The Meiji Constitution would help to set Japan on the fast track to modernity, but would also hold significant implications for the imperial system down the road. When Hirohito ascended to the throne, 37 years after the ratification of the constitution, he did so with the label of a living deity in control of the country’s citizens as well as its military. Soon enough, he would have to make tough decisions that would affect not only his legacy, but also the fortunes of his country for years to come.

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Military Buildup and Pre-War Expansion (1928-1940)

By the time Hirohito became emperor in 1926, Japan had already seen its share of warfare in the 20th century. In 1905, Japan made history by becoming the first Asian nation to defeat a European one in battle, when it bested Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. The victory boosted Japanese confidence in the belief that the island nation could and should expand into the rest of Asia in order to achieve greater prosperity and stability in the region (Gordon, 2000). These ambitions would only grow with the 1929 global economic collapse. The depression made imperialism seem even more appealing to certain members of the Japanese ruling establishment, given the economic benefits that it could provide (Gordon, 2000).

For the young emperor, the push for expansion was a constant source of pressure and anxiety, especially from the ultranationalists and members of the military who had significant sway in the government. As Hoyt writes, “The Emperor and the civilians worried lest the army pursue its course of empire building and seize control of the government, and they wanted full disclosure of Japanese army responsibility” (Hoyt, 1992, 61). This was compounded by the widespread sentiment that Japan was being treated unfairly on the world political stage by the Western powers. For example, “the Western powers at the London Naval Conference of 1930 coerced Japan to accept… an unfavorable ratio of 5:5:3 for the US, Britain, and Japan respectively…for heavy cruisers” (Gordon, 2000). However, Bix argues that even in these early years of his rule, Hirohito was not a passive bystander in the midst of political and military machinations. He “intervened in the decisions of the party cabinets and the privy council, arbitrated indirectly disputes among the leading political parties, and even forced the parties in the Diet to halt their debates to suit his convenience” (Bix, 2000, 208). Bix goes on to point out that Hirohito had desired, and received, the resignation of General Tanaka Giichi, the first prime minister during his reign. Tanaka had served as prime minister since 1927, and was in office in June of 1928 when Chang Tso-Lin, a Chinese warlord with a great deal of political influence in the northern part of the country, was killed when a bomb blew up his train in Manchuria. As the area in which he was killed was considered to be under the Japanese sphere of influence, the Japanese military was suspected of orchestrating the attack (Officers in Manchuria had indeed planned the assassination.) Hirohito’s anger with Tanaka stemmed from the fact that no real effort had been made to court martial the guilty officers. With that being said, Hirohito had wanted Tanaka to resign, but did not in fact expect him to do so, according to Stephen Large. The fact that his influence ended in Tanaka’s resignation had a strong effect on the emperor, and “the legacy of his confrontation with Tanaka in 1929 was a lasting determination, bred of his constitutional scruples, to maintain a strict neutrality in dealing with the prime minister and his cabinet” (Large, 1992, 39).

Jordan Siedell

Hirohito and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

The controversy over this incident early in Hirohito’s reign is not easily dealt with, because of the dearth of primary sources from the late 1920s regarding exactly how forcefully Hirohito dealt with the issue. What is clear is that the assassination took place without the consent of Hirohito or indeed any military superiors in Tokyo. (Reischauer, 1939, 150.) Later incidents in Manchuria would bring the tensions between elements of the military and Hirohito into a brighter light.

The Manchurian Incident, which occurred on September 18, 1931, was the first large step towards the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. An explosion occurred along the South Manchurian Railway, with the blame being placed on “Chinese subversives” (Large, 1992, 46). Like the Chang Tso-Lin assassination, this act was undertaken without consent from Tokyo, which caused a great amount of concern and anxiety. As Large writes, “the problem for the military high command in Tokyo was how to reassert its authority over Japanese forces in Manchuria. The parallel dilemma facing the cabinet was how to restrain the military and re-establish control of foreign policy” (Large, 1992, 46). In the midst of this crisis, Bix argues that Hirohito was anxious over regaining control of the army, but also saw an opportunity for Japanese expansion as well. The emperor “was not seriously opposed to seeing his army expand his empire. If that involved a brief usurpation of his authority, so be it-so long as the operation was successful” (Bix, 2000, 240). However, testimony from Kido Koichi, who was at the time the aide to Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, seems to suggest that the emperor’s opinion was somewhat different and not as highly regarded. On September 22, several days after the explosion, Kido reports that:

The Emperor told the prime minister and the war minister that everything was satisfactory because the government had endeavored to prevent this affair from spreading. He stated that the government should make further efforts along the same line.

However, it is reported that the army resented this, because the Emperor’s words suggested the advice of someone around him.

Accordingly, unless there is no alternative, it would be best to not have the Emperor’s word from now on. (Kido, 1984, 5)

This dismissive attitude towards the emperor provides a strong indication that his opinion was held to be less important than the feelings of the military involved in the Manchurian Incident by those around him, including his advisors. More importantly, the Manchurian Incident signaled the end of “a four-month struggle between the army…and the Foreign Office, over the method to be followed in liquidating certain problems at issue between the Japanese

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and Chinese governments” (Reischauer, 1939, 155). This meant that the army now dictated the policies it wanted to pursue, while “the major activity of the Foreign Office hence became justifying the faits accompli of the army, and presenting them in the most palatable form possible to the outside world” (Reischauer, 1939, 155).

The series of events in 1931 were indicative of the growing power of the military establishment in the Japanese government, as well as the desire to restrain Hirohito from voicing strong opposition to the army by those around him. In 1932, the militarist elements of the government had completed their takeover of the Japanese parliament following the May 15 assassination of Inukai Ki, the prime minister at the time (Reischauer, 1939, 157). Inukai had been killed by a group of young military and naval officers. The string of prime ministers that Hirohito appointed in Inukai’s stead either joined the ranks of the militarists or were killed off (Hoyt, 1991, 75). Try as he might, the emperor was powerless to stop the army’s rise. As the US ambassador to Japan at the time, Joseph Grew, remarked, “the military are simply taking the bit in their teeth and running away with it, evidently with a Fascist regime in view” (Grew, 1944, 4).

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The relationship between the emperor and the military would grow even more strained as the years went on. Hirohito displayed a strong opposition to Japanese military action in Manchuria and China, but on certain occasions, he approved requests by the military to proceed with operations. For example, On 4 February 1933, the army chief of staff, Prince Kan’in, who had replaced Kanaya in November 1931, requested imperial sanction for strategic Kwantung Army operations against Chang Hsueh-liang’s forces in Jehol. Now hoping that would end the Manchurian Incident once and for all, the Emperor acquiesced, even though the cabinet had not given its approval. (Large, 1992, 52)

In this case, Hirohito saw approval of military action as a way of satisfying the military’s desire for expansion, but also “stipulated that Japanese forces should not penetrate further south than the Great Wall.” (Large, 1992, 52.) However, the military would take his agreement to continue operations and run with it. As Honjo Shigeru, Hirohito’s chief aide-de-camp at the time reported, When His Majesty found out that the Kwantung Army had crossed the Luan River and was rushing into China proper beyond the borders, he summoned me and asked, ‘Can the Kwantung Army be ordered to cease its advances?’ He seemed to be concerned

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that Japan’s integrity was being undermined by the movement of Japanese troops toward Pekin and Tientsin when the government had issued a statement to the foreign powers that the troops would not move into China proper. (Honjo, 1982, 75)

Hirohito’s dismay in this case is understandable, given that the army had expressly disobeyed an order given by their commander in chief. Yet it provides further evidence of the disconnect between the emperor and the military he was supposedly in control of. Hirohito seemed to grasp the limits of his influence, but at the same time he expressed irritation over being disobeyed before those limits were reached. The next entry in Honjo’s diary includes the observation that “His Majesty does not necessarily intend to place restrictions on military strategy, but he will not condone infractions against the principles of supreme command” (Honjo, 1982, 76).

At this point in the timeline we can see that the role of Hirohito with regards to the affairs of the military was very much regulated by the pressure and advice from people around him in the government and the army. He displayed the ability to approve military action, only to see his orders ignored by the soldiers he was supposed to have the loyalty of. For the rest of the decade, Hirohito would continue to struggle with the clash between his personal misgivings about involving the country deeper in conflict and the pressure to support the drive for expansion.

February 1936 would bring more trouble for Hirohito.

Following the election of a more moderate military government on February 22, a regiment of the Imperial Army attempted an overthrow of the government (Reischauer, 1939, 171). Following the murders of several senior members of the government, including some of his closest supporters, Hirohito was outraged, and ordered the rebellion put down by the military command. When conferring with Honjo, his intense displeasure becomes clear: “When I saw His Majesty on the 27th he frequently said, ‘If the insurgents refuse to obey the orders of the military supreme command, I will personally lead the troops against them’” (Honjo, 1982, 170). The revolt was eventually put down, but in the aftermath the military began a stronger push towards war that culminated in the Battle of Marco Polo Bridge in July of 1937, which signaled the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War (Large, 1992, 86). Grew noted in his journal that “there seems to be a complete unanimity of opinion between the cabinet, the military, the Foreign Office, the press, and the businessmen to resist any weakening of Japan’s position in North China” (Grew, 1944, 211). Hirohito was opposed to involvement in yet another conflict with China, but because

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of an almost absolute lack of information about troop movements on the mainland, his options were limited (Hoyt, 1991, 113). The total war between China and Japan would be the last stepping-stone before the signing of the Tripartite Pact in September of 1940, with Hirohito in opposition until the bitter end. As Large writes, “the Emperor greeted the government’s commitment to a German alliance with much apprehension and a deepening sense of personal isolation and fatalism” (Large, 1992, 99). Hirohito agreed to the pact despite a sense of foreboding over the prospect of war. Grew speculates that “the Emperor was most reluctant to approve the Pact and was finally led to do so only when Matsuoka [The foreign minister at the time] gave the Emperor his studied conviction that war with the United States would be inevitable if the alliance with the Axis were not concluded” (Grew, 1944, 354).

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Hirohito’s misgivings were well placed. Following a decade in which he had witnessed the seemingly indomitable rise of the military regime in Japan, his nation was on the brink of a war that would bring great triumphs followed by crippling defeats and millions of lives lost.

However, it is inaccurate to attribute Hirohito’s apprehension for war to an overriding desire for peace. Rather, he feared that the cost of expansion, namely war with the United States, would be too great to bear.

Japan in World War II (1941-1945)

By 1941, the military establishment of Japan was gearing up for a war with the United States. Members of both the army and the navy were resolved to a conflict with their Pacific neighbor, convinced of Japan’s ability to come out on top in such a conflict. As Frederick Moore noted in 1943, By the summer of 1941, they had so prepared for war, both psychologically and materially, that men like General Tojo actually believed they could take and hold sufficient territory to make it impossible for American forces to dislodge them, and that ultimately we would lose heart and come to terms of peace with them. (Moore, 1943, 50) Meanwhile Hirohito was filled with questions as to the efficacy of such a plan of action. At first, he called for efforts to be made to make progress through negotiations instead of only considering war. (Large, 1992, 108.) However, his difficulties were compounded when Prime Minister Konoe, a Prince, resigned his post in October of 1941 (Hoyt, 1991, 123). In his place, Hirohito appointed general Tojo Hideki at

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the recommendation of Kido, who wrote, “I asserted that the most important things were the revision of the decision of the last council in the imperial presence and the unity of opinion between the army and the navy…I recommended the Tojo Cabinet as an impediment to hurried war. The Emperor approved of my answer” (Kido, 1984, 315).

The appointment of Tojo, who was one of the strongest supporters of war with the United States, may suggest that Hirohito “now believed that war was unavoidable” (Bix, 2000, 419). Grew added that “the Japanese Army for the first time in recent years has openly assumed responsibility for the policies and conduct of government in Japan, which it had previously steadfastly declined to accept” (Grew, 1944, 460). However, according to Kido, the emperor maintained doubts until several days before the declaration of war. On November 30, however, Kido writes The Emperor said that he had ordered the premier to act according to the program, because of the affirmative responses of the navy minister and the chief of the Navy General Staff to his question regarding the success of the war. (Kido, 1984, 321)

The “program” began with the surprise attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941.

The United States had helped Hirohito’s decision somewhat when, through its secretary of state Cordell Hull, it “demanded the complete withdrawal of Japanese troops from China and Indochina and the scrapping of the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis” (Hoyt, 1991, 125). If Japan had accepted those terms and sacrificed its overseas holdings, Hirohito and the rest of the government would have bowed to the United States’ will and lost face in the process, “which was impossible” (Hoyt, 1991, 125). In issuing his imperial rescript of declaration of war, Hirohito sealed the fates of millions. Although he personally avoided the war for as long as possible, Hirohito’s message to Japan marked the point of no return: “We have therefore resolved to declare war on the United States and Britain for the sake of the self-preservation and self-defense of the Empire and for the establishment of enduring peace in East Asia” (Hoyt, 1991, 125). On the other side of the fence, Grew, who was now a prisoner in enemy territory, remarked, “in the long run, Japan’s defeat is absolutely certain, for the American people, once aroused, won’t let go” (Grew, 1944, 496).

The early period of the war, where the victories for the Japanese were seemingly constant, helped to alleviate some of Hirohito’s concerns. In a meeting during March of 1942, Kido notes that the emperor “was in a pleasant mood and said to me, ‘the excellent results of the conflict seem to be coming a little too quickly’… He was so

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pleased that I could hardly give congratulatory answer” (Kido, 1984, 330). His role as commander in chief became a bigger part of his daily routine. As Large states,

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The Emperor routinely received battle reports and followed the progress of fighting from a map room in the palace. He regularly approved campaign decisions made by the high command, although his approval was mostly perfunctory…However, at times, he actively associated himself with specific campaign decisions. For instance he sanctioned Japanese operations in the battles of the Philippines and Okinawa, expressly sharing the military’s desperate hope for a decisive victory that would compel the Allies to offer favorable terms for ending the war.”

(Large, 1992, 115) Cognizant of the thin ice that Japan was walking on, it is clear that Hirohito was eager to see the war end as quickly as possible while still achieving victory, which led to his direct involvement in some instances.

His positive attitude even extended to setbacks such as the Japanese defeat at the Battle of Midway. When Kido met to discuss it with Hirohito, he “had supposed that the news of the terrible damage would have caused him untold anxieties, yet his countenance did not show the least bit of change…he told Navy Chief of Staff Nagano to make certain that the morale of the navy did not deteriorate and that the future policy of the navy did not become inactive and passive” (Kido, 1984, 336).

However, the ability of the United States to out-produce Japan eventually turned the tide and put the Empire on the defensive. At this point in the conflict, Bix argues that Hirohito began a policy of stubbornly demanding victories where none were possible. “Confronted with certain defeat, he dug in his heels and refused to accept it” (Bix, 2000, 476).

However, it might be more accurate to label General Tojo as the stubborn one, for as Large notes, Tojo “was clearly determined to fight to the finish…

In some respects, Tojo ‘had become a virtual dictator…who had shorn the Emperor of the vast vestiges of power and had left him only in the role of a god who was in Tojo’s keeping’” (Large, 1992, 117). In February 1944, with the Japanese suffering numerous defeats as American forces island-hopped across the Pacific, Tojo requested that he be made army chief of staff in addition to prime minister. Hirohito reluctantly agreed, “describing the consolidation of power as an emergency measure necessary at that period of the war” (Drea, 2009, 234). But measures such as these were too little, too late. Less than half a year later, in the middle of July, Tojo resigned (Kido, 1984, 390). Later that month, when Kido broached the topic of possible evacuation from Tokyo to Hirohito, the emperor was resistant.

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Should I leave the capital, the nation, especially the populace in the capital, will be subject to restlessness and defeatism.

Therefore, even if the supreme command considers the matter from the point of view of supreme strategy, it should not be carried out unless there is an absolute necessity. In certain quarters, sentiment may exist that I should move to the continent, because of developments in the war, but I do not agree with that. I must remain on the mainland by all means, to try desperately to protect the mainland… (Kido, 1984, 398)

In this sense, the emperor seems to be most concerned with the well being of his country, with much less regard for his personal safety or the desires of the supreme command. As 1944 turned into 1945 and defeat became clearly imminent, Hirohito’s desire to end the war increased, even though the resolve of the military to continue the fight never wavered. Although the army was preparing to resist an enemy invasion, Hirohito felt that “other ways had to be found to terminate the conflict…This cannot be described as a dramatic assertion of imperial influence for peace, given the typical circumspection of the Emperor’s remarks” (Large, 1992, 123). Indeed, in examining Kido’s notes on the final days of the war, nothing can be found that suggests hostility between Hirohito and the remaining military leadership. Following the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Hirohito instructed the prime minister and the rest of the government to bring an end to the war as quickly as possible. (Kido, 1984, 444.) On August 10, Hirohito commented on the end of the war to Kido: Of course, there is something really unbearable when I think of the disarmament of our loyal and brave fighting forces and the punishment of those in charge of the war, since they are the people who have contributed loyal and meritorious services. Today, however, is the time to bear the unbearable, I suppose…I, holding back my tears, agree to the original plan. (Kido, 1984, 445) What is interesting to note in those comments is the separation made

by Hirohito between himself and “those in charge of the war.” That seems to indicate a sentiment that he really had no control in the orchestration of the war. Another thing to take note of is the fact that Hirohito knew that the people in charge would be punished, but he personally did not expect anything bad to come from the end of the war. A few weeks following those comments, he expresses immense regret over the delivery of the suspected war criminals to the United Nations. Kido writes that it “was unbearable to him, and he would rather assume all the responsibility himself, abdicating from the Throne, than transfer them to the United Nations” (Kido, 1984, 453). Kido dissuades

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him from the notion by reasoning that “the mere abdication from the Throne would not satisfy them…and abdication might eventually ruin the foundation of the imperial family, with the result that the advocates of the republican form of government would gain an ascendancy” (Kido, 1984, 453).

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While the end of the war brought devastation and ruin to Japan, Hirohito was left relatively unscathed. What to do with the emperor was one of the primary questions the American occupiers had to answer in the aftermath of Japan’s surrender. Grew, in a letter written in 1944, voices his opinion on the matter: If that institution of the Japanese throne is to be a liability and an incentive to a continuance of the military cult, it had better be scrapped. If, on the other hand, it proves to be the only cornerstone on which something peaceful and healthy can be built in future, we had better not scrap it through mere prejudice. I am inclined to think that the latter will be the case. (Grew, 1944.)

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Conclusion

Neither Hirohito nor the Japanese imperial institution were ever â&#x20AC;&#x153;scrapped.â&#x20AC;? While Tojo and other leading military leaders during the war were sentenced during the Tokyo War Tribunal, the Showa emperor remained above accusation. However, changes were imposed upon Hirohito as they were upon everyone else in Japan, with the biggest being the renunciation of his status as a god. In his first imperial rescript of 1946, the Showa Emperor explained that We are with you, the people and wish always to share common interests, joys and sorrows, with all of you. The bondage between Us and you, the people, is constantly tied with mutual trust, love and respect. It is not brought about by mere mythology and legends.

It is never founded on a chimerical conception which describes the Emperor as a living deity and, moreover, the Japanese as superior to all other races of people, thence destined to rule the world.

(Hoyt, 1991, 157) Hirohito was never a supporter of conflict for the sake of conflict.

As emperor of Japan during perhaps the most tumultuous and devastating period in the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history, his actions were in many ways influenced by the military commanders and political leaders that oversaw the rise of Japan into a militaristic world power with an eye for expansion. He sat silently in many meetings of the military high command because the limits on his power dictated it. He had to deal with insubordination from the army on several occasions, as well as a violent attempt to overthrow the government. He feared entering a war against the United States because he felt that it was a war Japan could not win. Any optimism he expressed during the course of World War II was of the cautious variety, weighted with the knowledge that the best strategy was to win and win quickly before the war got out of hand. And when defeat was inevitable, he expressed regret that he had to force his brave countrymen to throw down their weapons and accept reality. The Showa emperor was a pacifist at heart who wanted the best things for his people.

Yet it would be inaccurate and irresponsible to end the story there. Under the constitution created during the reign of his grandfather, Hirohito was the supreme religious, political and military leader of his people. He alone could officially declare a war or bring one to a close.

And indeed, he did both during his time on the throne. It is undeniable that the emperor had to deal with pressure from multiple sources, including the overbearing presence of the military. It is quite possible 110

that Hirohito signed the rescript of war declaration while dozens of advisors and military leaders looked on. Yet he was the one who signed it. He approved numerous military actions that resulted in the deaths of thousands, even millions of people, many of them non-combatants.

Did he personally desire the mass destruction that his directives caused?

It is clear from examining the evidence that the answer to that question is a clear no. Yet much like a person who witnesses a crime and does nothing to stop it, the emperor was an accessory to warfare. Hirohito had the constitutional power to end the war earlier, or not even enter it in the first place, yet he did neither. As Grew pointed out in a 1943 letter, “whatever the facts, the Emperor, if only as a symbol, must take full responsibility for the war” (Grew, 1943).

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So the small bespectacled man who ruled Japan for 63 years— most of them peaceful, some of them nightmarishly violent—was neither a bloodthirsty warlord nor an innocent victim of circumstance.

The truth behind Hirohito and the role he played in militaristic Japan is not completely clear, and likely never will be. But the facts that are available point to an image of a man who strongly opposed the thought of war, but nevertheless served as an accessory to the greatest war the world has ever seen. The same man used the radio to convince his people that surrender wasn’t the end of the world, in a decision that was completely on his terms. It is simply a pity that such a decision came too late for too many, including the Showa emperor, a pacifist at heart.

Jordan Siedell

Hirohito and the Rise of Japanese Militarism

References Drea, Edward J. Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall. 1853-1945. University of Kansas Press, 2009.

Reischauer, Robert Karl. Japan: Government-Politics. Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1939.

Large, Stephen S. Emperor Hirohito And Showa Japan: A political biography.

Routledge, London, 1992.

Bix, Herbert P. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. HarpersCollins Publishers, New York, 2000.

Hoyt, Edwin P. Hirohito: The Emperor and the Man. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1991.

Kido, Koichi. The diary of Marquis Kido. 1931-45. University Publications of America, Inc., 1984.

Honjo, Shigeru. Emperor and his Chief Aide-de-Camp: The Honjo Diary 1933-36.

University of Tokyo Press, 1982.

Grew, Joseph C. Ten Years in Japan. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944.

Gordon, William. “Japan’s March Toward Militarism.” www.wgordon.web. wesleyan.edu. March, 2000.

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. “The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami).” Ethnology.

July 1991: 199-215.

Moore, Frederick. “The Emperor Did Not Want War.” World Affairs. March ,1943: 45-52.

Grew, Joseph C. Letter. Atlantic Monthly. October 25, 1944.

Grew, Joseph C. Letter. San Francisco News. November 30, 1943.

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The Genesis of a Chinatown: Congregation or Agglomeration?

Sabrina McCutchan is a Duke senior double

majoring in Economics and Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. She is a research assistant in health economics.

The Genesis of a Chinatown: Congregation or Agglomeration?

T

Part I: Introducing a New Chinatown

he Morrisville Outlet Mall has been “abandoned” for a long time, but today the halls are nearly impassable. It is six o’clock in the evening on February 11, 2012, and the “Year of the Dragon Celebration,” a groundbreaking ceremony for RDU’s new Chinatown, has been underway for four hours (see Appendix). The Chinese dance performances have already ended and people are eating dinner, some buying from the food court (the lines are longest for Chinese cuisine, a few lonely customers approaching the Subway© and Greek vendor) and some walking down the mall concourse to an enormous buffet room. This main artery is lined with red and gold Chinese paper lanterns, their 汉字 (characters) standing out sharply on their sides. It opens on a number of other activity rooms which almost exclusively cater to children: there’s a movie room screening Kung Fu Panda and 龙门飞甲 (Flying Swords of Dragon Gate), a games and craft room with one section cordoned off for hula-hooping, a karaoke room, and local magician Shaun Jay performing in the hall. Underscoring the hustle is the incessant tonal hum of spoken Mandarin.

Roughly 8,000 people showed up for the day’s festivities, the vast majority of them Asian or Asian-American families (“News”). In the six o’clock crowd, there were only two or three Caucasians (myself included) and a handful of African-Americans. About eight men in nicely-cut business suits exited the VIP room attached to the buffet when I walked past; Mark Herman, the CEO of Panda Properties Sino, LLC, later informed me that they were visiting Chinese investors.

The mall’s retail spaces may have been largely empty the day of the groundbreaking, leaving only four retailers and a local model railroad club, but Herman and his partner Kevin Lee have big plans to fill them.

If Saturday’s impressive turnout is any indication, RDU’s local Asian community is excited to see those plans come to fruition.

But what exactly are those plans? Herman’s vision is complex and, as we will see below, fraught with fissure-lines of tension. There are two competing paradigms driving project development. One is a deep personal appreciation for local American Chinese individuals and what is perceived as their Chinese culture and heritage. The other is a potent

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commercial sensibility stemming from decades of involvement in restaurant development. This intersection of business drive and cultural appreciation birthed a plan that revamps the existing retail space with Chinese architecture and imports “authentic” Chinese businesses within the next year, then adds a five-star hotel and cultural school, both also imported from China, by 2015 (Herman) (Chou). Funding stems from both local American and overseas Chinese and Hong Kong-based investors. The food court will be expanded to cover twice as much square footage as it does now, and three more restaurants will be added on the property, all of them boasting “authentic” Asian cuisine. Food is Herman’s life work and an attraction of Chinatowns the world over, so it is perhaps natural for this to evolve as the development’s focal point. But the development will also host cultural activities like martial arts and calligraphy classes, serve as space for Triangle language schools on Saturdays, cater to university and corporate need for a professional conference venue via the hotel, and house service-providers and retailers ranging from attorneys to dentists to multi-million dollar silk artists opening their first galleries outside of China. At the level of factual detail alone, jarring contrasts are already emerging between the different roles this space is expected to play.

Part Two: Structural Tensions “You can’t open up a business and call it Chinatown.”

– Mark Herman, CEO of Panda Properties Sino, LLC

Herman unwittingly uses complexly nuanced language to describe his vision. He simultaneously views the space as “an experience you can only get at a Chinatown,” “a portrayal of modern China,” “authentically Asian,” “a village,” “a conference center,” “an attraction,” and “a small-scale Disney World©” (Herman).

Chinatowns have arguably been all of these things, in some form or fashion. But can this particular project single-handedly integrate these myriad facets? Will the NC Chinatown, crowned with the title “中国城,” serve the dual functions of congregation and agglomeration, uniting a local community as it simultaneously harnesses financial foreign power and commoditized culture to drive a new conception of Chinatown? Many lines of tension fissure outwards from this locus, but for the sake of space, we focus here on the following two: “traditional” Chinatowns versus authentic China, and the local versus the foreign.

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Traditional Chinatown vs. Authentic China “[Chinatowns] don’t do justice to modern China.”

– Mark Herman

The developer’s understanding of what characterizes a Chinatown is problematic in many ways. In describing the genesis process, he says a Chinatown “was just started by one business opening… and then a neighborhood getting together in an unorganized manner.”

Literature on the subject, however, cites politically-motivated formation of Chinese ghettoes in response to social racial tensions as the impetus for these communities. The Morrisville Outlet Mall is a fringe space, abandoned and shunned by other developers; preceding Chinatowns in cities like Vancouver were also relegated to undesirable locations (Anderson). Ethnically-themed business development occurred there because they were the only places available to set up shop. In other words, community predated commerce. This misconception has shaped the developer’s vision in a fundamental way: it leads to the belief that commerce generates congregation, especially congregation of the culturally-rich sort found in some of America’s oldest Chinatowns.

Other recognizable elements of a Chinatown for Herman include authentic food and the gate. Food is Herman’s primary criterion for an “experience you can only get at a Chinatown.” He describes many of the Chinese restaurants in the Triangle as being too “Americanized,” and perceives a need to restore authenticity in cuisine to the community. This restoration takes the form of importing Chinese restaurants from mainland China, which will retain some kind of cultural integrity that local establishments (even those run by first-generation Chinese immigrants) have lost. Several questions arise here: what standards does he use to judge authenticity? Will the particular brand of “authentic” cuisine imported even appeal to local consumers? Then there is the matter of the gate: the developers obviously recognize it as a critical component of their project, as the only design document hanging in their office is the gate sketch.

But the gate is an architectural marker unique to Chinatowns, not a reflection of “authentic” mainland China. From the first moment a customer steps onto the premises, the traditional conception of a Chinatown will assert itself, working at counter-purposes to the developer’s articulated goal of creating a “new” kind of Chinatown which more faithfully represents the mainland.

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Local vs. Foreign “The first thing we did…after deciding the community wanted [Chinatown]…was fly to China.”

– Mark Herman

For this Chinatown to be divergent from its predecessors, it must maintain some kind of strong linkage to China that is absent in other incarnations of Chinese immigrant communities. Herman’s vision for accomplishing this is to import everything comprising the establishment, from architects to raw materials to laborers to business owners to teachers at the cultural school. Over sixty percent of the retail space has already been signed over to Chinese retailers (Herman). The cultural school is a branch of one established in Beijing. Even the fivestar hotel, arguably the least visibly “ethnic” part of the entire complex, will be designed by a Chinese firm.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to some tensions in the local community. Herman admits he has been approached by many owners of Chinese restaurants in the Triangle who want to open spaces in the food court, but says he has turned them all down. This is particularly puzzling in light of the fact that he simultaneously articulates a strong professional pride in creating jobs that can sustain the community: “at the end of the day… the value I set on [what I do] is how many jobs I create.” But who will fill the jobs he’s creating? Not local business owners or workers: their business practices are not “authentically Chinese” enough to merit space. At the same time, proximity to three prominent universities and the preponderance of language schools in the area suggests a local Chinese American community mostly comprised of individuals above blue-collar working class. Does Herman intend also to import laborers from China who will work as stock-boys and sushi chefs? Or will we witness a phenomenon paralleling Durham’s Sushi Love restaurant, where many of the cooks are actually of Hispanic, not Japanese, origin?

As problematic as it may prove in implementation, the project goals described above have a couple of discernible motivations. First, Chinese investors have overwhelmingly abundant investment capital.

“You know what people say to me?” Herman asks, speaking of Chinese investors. “They say ‘I don’t care if we make money in 10 years.’ I mean, who can say that?” Given lingering sluggish economic performance, Chinese investment appears more secure and sustainable to the developers than that offered by local businesses. Second, there is an established political relationship between Hunan province, from whence

Sabrina McCutchan

The Genesis of a Chinatown

originates most overseas investment, and the state of North Carolina.

There have been a few stalled attempts to sign a sister state agreement, which are currently being renegotiated (Herman). But several individual North Carolina cities, such as Pinehurst, already have sister cities (Zhijiang) in Hunan province (“News”). Creating business relationships with investors in these areas thus has obvious political appeal, and could be attractive enough to justify overlooking pressing local concerns, such as unemployment levels.

Part Three: Congregation and Agglomeration “We’ll sell the things made in the cultural school in the center.”

– Mark Herman “The deal I made with [the cultural school] is you can’t have any restaurants in your building, so everyone eats in the foodcourt, and that Saturdays we could have our local community schools occupy their space.”

– Mark Herman

The underlying fuel for these tensions is the question of whether the new Chinatown will function as a space for congregation or for agglomeration. Will it be a place where the community comes together for a unifying cultural experience, or will it be so foreign and so commercialized that the community’s participation is relegated solely to a consumer role? The developers themselves do not seem to appreciate this as a source of tension. Their plan for managing the space is twofold: hire somebody to “run things in the mall” on a daily basis, and establish a board of “12 community business leaders from the Asian community to steer the direction of this organization” (Herman). But the particulars of what this board will actually do remain unclear. It seems unlikely they would have any say over what types of businesses can enter the retail space, since that is currently so strictly relegated to prefer “authentic Chinese” retailers. The cultural school is likewise not the local community’s domain, even if they may occupy it one day a week. Nowhere in the course of the interview did Herman or Lee mention putting in a recreation center, or any other communal space lacking simultaneous retail functions. Moreover, they envision their Chinatown as an attraction and tourist destination that will draw people from all across America. This implies tourists wandering around the mall and school, gawking at the sheer “Chinese-ness” of the space, snapping photos and crowding around calligraphy demonstrations. Such activity can easily create resentment among locals trying to go about their daily

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business. One Yelp reviewer writes on the page for Li Ming’s Global Mart in Durham: “My last comment would be to those who like to go to asian markets just to “look around”. Some of us have real shopping to do and when you bring your group of tourists to the market to gawk and point at “odd” foods you may have never seen or eaten it is very bothersome to have to navigate around you. Go to the market to buy something, not to pick up frog legs, make a yucky face, then put it back down” (Minnow). Exactly how this sort of cultural and functional clash will affect the new Chinatown remains to be seen. What can be said is that the current plan fails to recognize or account for the possibility of negative community backlash. It is true that Chinatowns have historically been both communal and cultural spaces. But they have also been controversial spaces, places where matters of cultural identity and community can spark heated debate and even social violence. The developers would do well to remember that.

Sabrina McCutchan

Duke East Asia Nexus

Duke East Asia Nexus (DEAN) seeks to enrich Dukeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s understanding of the political, economic, and cultural issues facing East Asia. We publish this peer-reviewed undergraduate academic work in the hopes of enriching the academic discourse both through print and our online portal.

DukeEastAsiaNexus Volume 3 Issue 2.2

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Hirohito and the R i s e o f J a p a n e s e M i l i t a r i s m

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Playing with Fire in the Dragonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Den: Human Rights in China

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http://www.dukenexus.org Volume 3 Issue 2.2

China: The Next N e o c o l o n i a l Po w e r in Africa Taiwanese Q u e e r L i t e r a t u r e