Random thesis notes

I've updated a post from last year that described the completion of my thesis, and thanked various faculty and family who helped me during the long research and writing process.

Besides adding the final grade report from Prof. Johnston (my thesis director), I also removed the broken link to the archived PDF version of the thesis. It had been stored on my personal FAS Web account, but that expired in April and I have yet to find an alternate solution. I've considered Scribd, or hosting it my own, but would much prefer a database that's associated with the University, and can be used by other scholars studying Chinese media and foreign policy during the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s.

Update 3/15/2009: My thesis is now available via UMI/ProQuest's widely used academic database. You can read it here. Information about how it came about can be read here.

A return to books, and thoughts on translations

I've been reading a lot lately, following the completion of my last class and a change of jobs. After being hired as managing editor of The Industry Standard at the beginning of the year, I decided I needed to brush up on the history of Silicon Valley and the first Web bubble, so I tackled The New New Thing, The Nudist On The Late Shift, and a history of The Industry Standard itself, Starving To Death on $200 Million. I also read The Search, by Industry Standard and Wired founder John Battelle, and the first half of a dry tome on UIs and GUIs entitled The Human Interface.

I read fiction, as well. Since I was a teenager I have been a fan of fantasy and science fiction, and re-read The Hobbit as well as a newer book by an old favorite -- The Knight, by Gene Wolfe. Historical fiction is another genre that I love to explore, and one that I sorely missed when I was deep into my thesis and had no time to read for pleasure. The Piano Tuner has been sitting on my shelf for at least two years, and I was pleased to finally pull it down and finish it in a few days. Last month when we were on vacation, I finished Thomas Harris' Imperium, which is a depiction of several episodes in the life of Cicero. It was interesting, yet disappointing. I had greatly enjoyed Harris' earlier book about ancient Rome, Pompeii, and loved watching the first season of Rome on DVD with my wife, but Imperium came across as too disjointed, and too focused on Cicero's Machiavellian conspiracies in the Late Republic. This was perhaps a result of Harris' desire to remain true to the historical record as it relates to Cicero's life. Unfortunately, many of the extant primary sources consist of Cicero's political and legal treatises -- hardly ideal fodder for a gripping piece of historical fiction.

There are two other books that I have also been reading at a far slower pace. Both relate to Chinese history. They are Anthology of Chinese Literature: From Early Times to the Fourteenth Century, edited by Cyril Birch, and Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man, by Jonathan Spence.

These books aren't meant to be rushed, especially the anthology. The appeal of the two books ties into my studies here -- much of my coursework centered on ancient and modern Chinese history. Both of them contain beautiful English translations of ancient texts written in classical Chinese, and I have to appreciate the skill involved in bringing them to life. Classical Chinese carries a special set of challenges in terms of translation, that goes beyond simply knowing Chinese characters or reading modern prose. The following is an excerpt from one of my last school papers, written for Matthew Battles' history of publishing course, entitled "Written Chinese: An Elitist Script, or a Language of the Masses?" In it, I explain the nature of classical Chinese, and some of the difficulties related to understanding it:

The Zhou dynasty (1122 – 256 B.C.E.) saw the rise of several important Chinese religious and philosophical movements, including Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. These sophisticated concepts were recorded in a series of important texts using a spare writing style called wenyan wen (lit. “literary language,” or “patterned words”). In English, it is known as “classical Chinese,” in reference to the five Confucian classics. Owing to a lack of audio recordings or historical descriptions of common speech, it is uncertain how closely the vernacular and written matched during the Zhou dynasty, but by the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E. – 220 A.D.) spoken Chinese (baihua wen, or “unadorned speech”) had evolved to a considerably different state from written Chinese.

For this reason, classical Chinese was (and still is) difficult to read. While spoken Chinese contains numerous words made up of two or more syllables, most classical Chinese consisted of monosyllables, or single characters. Sparse passages tended to suggest meaning, as opposed to clearly (or precisely) describing it.

My source for this information was Richard J. Smith's China’s Cultural Heritage: The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1983). On page 105 was a very interesting comparison of a famous passage from the philosopher Mencius, written in both vernacular and classical Chinese. The vernacular version was 38 characters, compared to just 24 in the original classical text. My wife -- a native Chinese speaker who grew up with traditional characters and has been exposed to classical Chinese through her own education in Taiwan -- understood all of the characters in the original, but was unable to translate the passage itself when I showed it to her. When I showed her the passage written out in vernacular Chinese, "Ah!" -- she got it right away.

So, when I read the beautiful translations of essayist Zhang Dai's (张岱) autobiographical accounts in Spence's book, and especially the poetic renderings by Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound in the anthology, I not only had to appreciate their skills as translators, but also their talents as writers.

They may have even taken poetic license a little too far in some cases. Consider this poem by the Tang's Han Yu (韓愈), translated by A.C. Graham, and appearing on page 262 of the anthology:

The Withered Tree

Leaf and twig are gone from the old tree,
Winds and frosts can harm it no more.
Its hollow belly has room for a man,
Circling ants quest under its peeling bark.
Its single lodger, the toadstool which lives for a morning;
The birds no longer visit in the evening.
But its wood can still spark tinder.
It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.

(There is a footnote at the end of the last line says "The phrase equates the hollow hear of the tree and the Void Mind of Buddhism, emptied of desire and illusion")

This is a stunning poem in English, but I have to wonder about the challenges of making an appealing translation while remaining true to the original Chinese literary devices and references. In my years of working as a journalist in Taiwan (often with translators, editors, and other native Mandarin and Taiwanese speakers) I found that it was very difficult to take a Chinese phrase that includes complex emotions, concepts, or artistic expressions, and turn it into natural-sounding English that conveyed an accurate sense of the original. Incorporating literary flair involved an extra dimension of complexity.

The footnotes and other explanations by Spence, Birch, and the others are very helpful in terms of putting these works in context. It would have been helpful to include some of the original Chinese, but I understand the technical and economic reasons for not doing so. While I can't read classical Chinese, I do know a few hundred characters, and it's fun to look up others in the dictionary or ask my wife about them.

(Below: Classical Chinese in cursive script by Wang Duo (王铎), who grew up in the late Ming era and painted this sample in the early Qing. From the University of Maine website, which was sourced from the Shanghai Museum)

1907 and 2007: The late Qing press vs. the current Chinese Internet

I'm currently doing some research for an essay in my final class (Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext) and stumbled upon a passage worth sharing here. The essay is about the rise of the Chinese press in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the influence of Western newspaper models. The passage is from page four of Joan Judge's Print and Politics: ‘Shibao’ and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), and discusses the connections between the Chinese press and revolutionary politics toward the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911):

While print journalism served a political function in many nations, this role was particularly consequential in late Qing China, which had neither a system of political parties nor a representative national assembly. Independent of the dynasty and accessible to the reading public, the political press provided one of the few forums where reformists could advance their political agenda. Opening a field of mediation between the different spheres of late Qing China made it possible for reform publicists to challenge imperial authority and express popular grievances, encourage debate over government policies, and educate their compatriots about the urgent need to reform the structure of dynastic power.

Does anyone else see the parallels between what was happening at the end of the Qing dynasty, and what's happening now with the Internet in the People's Republic of China? We're not seeing much online debate in China about the CCP or the current political structure, but late Qing newspapers in the 1870s didn't have this kind of debate, either .... Judge is referring to newspaper activity several decades later, in the first decade of the 20th century -- right before the fall of the Qing.

Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Undoing simplified characters: Traditional Chinese on the rise in China?

My wife draws my attention to the Sunday, Nov. 4 edition of the Chinese newspaper she reads -- the 世界日報 (World Journal). The top article on the front page describes the proceedings at the 8th International Chinese Character Seminar in Beijing, and the discussions surrounding a 15-year-old international effort to standardize Chinese characters in China, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

What's the big deal? Well, the proposal supposedly has received a major boost -- a department of China's Ministry of Education apparently agrees in principle with the proposal to standardize on mostly traditional characters (fantizi, or 簡體字).

If it's true, and the government follows through, this is major news. For the past 51 years, China has standardized its writing and printing systems using 2,751 simplified characters (jiantizi, 简体字) that are easier to remember and write than their traditional counterparts used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and elsewhere in East Asia. Most of the simplified characters were invented by high-level scholarly committees in 1956 and 1964 as part of an effort to spread literacy among China's largely rural and uneducated population. The inset photo (from a Chinese language primer hosted by Gonzaga University in Washington) shows the stroke order for a collection of simplified characters. The simplified version of "gate" is the first character in the second row.

The simplification movement has always been a bone of contention for purists of written Chinese, who treasure the traditional characters for their beauty and connection to ancient Chinese literature and history. Even in China, the simplified characters have been weakened by the spread of Taiwanese and Hong Kong media in the 1980s and 1990s, along with the rise of what I call "historical nationalism". Some younger Chinese we know say that they prefer the traditional characters. I suspect that this sentiment could be one reason why the proposal is now apparently being taken more seriously by the government in Beijing.

According to the article, the proposal calls for traditional forms to be adopted among member countries, except for certain simplified forms which were used in antiquity. For instance, the traditional character 門 ("gate") was simplified to 门 by some calligraphers in dynastic times, and this was adopted as the official simplified character form in China in the 1950s and 1960s (with Mao's blessing -- as Richard Curt Kraus has noted in his 1991 book "Brushes With Power," Mao was a great fan of some classical literature and calligraphy, and directed the simplification committees to use these alternate historical forms when possible). Because of this historical usage, the character 门 would supposedly remain in the proposed international standardization scheme.

However, many of the thousands of other simplified forms used in China for the past four or five decades would allegedly be discarded, as they have no historical precedent.

This is far from being a done deal. This is second-hand news, and I suspect many of the facts were not checked with the relevant authorities in China. Additionally, the article notes that more discussions still need to take place at the ninth meeting of the International Chinese Character Seminar next year to iron out key details of the proposal, and get more buy-in from Vietnam and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Lastly, I am skeptical that the government in China is seriously considering such a move in the near future. The implications for China's educational system -- not to mention the local publishing industry, software developers, and government bureaus -- would be too much. A billion people have been brought up learning the simplified forms, and almost all books, magazines, newspapers, computer programs, street signs, manuals, and recent records created in China use simplified characters. The complexity and expense associated with such an effort would be unparalleled, and at the end of the day, it would be a lot easier to just live with the simplified characters.

Marxism-Leninism dies an uncaring death in China

I've been remiss in my China-related blogging duties. The fact of the matter is I don't have the time to blog everything that catches my eye -- between work, studies, and family duties, and an impending move, I'm lucky if I can devote more than three hours per week to blogging. Lately, I've been devoting that time to my Computerworld and I Lamont blogs.

However, in the past few days, there have been a couple of mainstream media articles about China that piqued my interest. The first item is from the Los Angeles Times, and discusses the near complete failure of the regime in Beijing to teach Marxist-Leninist thought in China. Even though the Chinese Communist Party holds the reins of power, and forces millions to attend classes on Marxism-Leninism, no one cares. And it's not just students -- even some cadre intellectuals have given up:

Daniel A. Bell, a Canadian who is the first Westerner in the modern era to teach politics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China's most elite educational institution, wrote in the spring issue of Dissent magazine of his surprise at how little Marxism is actually discussed in China, even among Communist Party intellectuals.

"The main reason Chinese officials and scholars do not talk about communism is that hardly anybody really believes that Marxism should provide guidelines for thinking about China's political future," he wrote. "The ideology has been so discredited by its misuses that it has lost almost all legitimacy in society. To the extent there's a need for a moral foundation for political rule in China, it almost certainly won't
come from Karl Marx."

I found the Dissent article to read more about what Bell had to say. His thesis did not dwell so much on the rise of capitalism, but rather the increasing role of religion and Chinese social philosophy:

In China, the moral vacuum is being filled by Christian sects, Falun Gong, and extreme forms of nationalism. As Peter Hays Gries has noted, many Chinese intellectuals call on the state to deal with extreme forms of nationalism (rather than viewing the state itself as part of the problem). But the government considers that such alternatives threaten the hard-won peace and stability that underpins China's development, so it has encouraged the revival of China's most venerable political tradition, Confucianism.

See also:

• Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"


• Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications


• Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones


• Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China


• Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and
  press freedom


• Five
  reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

Beijingology, democracy, and "socialism with Chinese characteristics"

As part of my thesis presentation on Wednesday evening, I mentioned "Beijingology," a qualitative methodology used by China-watchers to identify and analyze shifts in official policy. It involves examining documents issued by the central government -- including state-run media reports -- to look for hints of change. Such hints may be the use of a certain word or the reappearance/disappearance of a certain official who is known for promoting a specific policy. Roger Garside, a British writer who lived in Beijing in the late 1970s, did not use the term Beijingology (or Pekingology) but he did note that local Beijing residents and foreign residents used such techniques to fathom CCP power struggles and government policy shifts:

"Small changes in emphasis, the reformulation of a set phrase, the appearance of a new slogan or the quiet dropping of an old one occurred only by design and reflected a political development whose meaning one must search for." -- [Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China after Mao (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), 3.]

Edward Cody, the Washington Post's China-based correspondent, has employed Beijingology to describe a supposed internal political debate.

A little background is in order, for those Harvard Extended readers who may not be familiar with the political situation in China. In a nutshell, Communism is dead, and market forces rule China, yet its leaders -- the Chinese Communist Party and its members -- still cling to the notion of "socialism with Chinese characteristics."

Or do they? Cody cites two commentaries published in official media (The People's Daily) as signs that the facade is cracking, but loyalists can still be found to promote the status quo:

"The path of democratic socialism is not able to save China," said Xin Xiangyang of the government-sponsored Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "Only the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics can make China flourish."

The commentaries, by contesting the idea that democracy would be good for China, suggested some within the party are pushing for political reforms to match the dramatic economic loosening that has taken place during the past 25 years.

Any sign of doctrinal differences has become particularly sensitive as leaders maneuver for advantage before the 17th Party Congress next fall, when President Hu Jintao hopes to cement his hold on power and anoint possible successors in the party hierarchy. In particular, analysts here said, he is expected to name his own loyalists to positions of power to replace the holdover proteges of former president Jiang Zemin.

In what was seen as a manifestation of the maneuvering, Shao Hua, the widow of Mao Zedong's late son Mao Anqing, published a front-page article in the May 18 People's Daily heaping praise on Jiang for what she described as warm-hearted concern for the legendary Chinese leader's descendants. Political observers in Beijing saw the article as noteworthy because, amid the effusive praise for Jiang, it never mentioned Hu.

Whether on doctrine or personnel, most differences of opinion within the party have remained private, forcing analysts to look for meaning in such indirect indications of what is happening behind closed doors. But a pair of essays in party-sanctioned intellectual publications early this year -- one by Xie Tao, a former Renmin University vice president, and another by Zhou Ruijun, a former People's Daily editor -- openly called for democratic reforms as the best way forward for China. Xie specifically referred to Northern Europe's democratic socialist systems as a source of inspiration.

I tried to find the English versions of the commentary on the People's Daily website, but was unsuccessful. However, I was able to find out more about one of the academics who wrote the commentaries in question, Xin Xiangyan. According to this article, Xin is a research fellow at CASS specializing in Marxism, and promotes a "socialist core value system," which "consist[s] of Marxism, Socialism with Chinese characteristics, patriotism, the spirit of reform and innovation and the socialist sense of honor and disgrace."


Related Posts:

Censorship in China meets reality of networked communications

Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones

Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China

Freezing Point tests China's official stance on history and press freedom

Five reasons why Chinese authorities won't be able to regulate the 'Net

ALM Thesis Forum recap

The ALM Thesis Forum wrapped up this week. I spoke on the second night (social sciences), but I also attended the first night, which featured the creative writing and literature concentrators. I was unfortunately unable to attend the third night of the forum (IT concentrators).

What was so special about the forum? For everyone in the audience, the thesis forum was a chance to see results of the candidates' research and learn about the different methodologies, processes, obstacles, and special opportunities that came into play. For me, it was the opportunity to share my research with a new audience and meet the other students who have been going through the same challenges I have over the past two years. The fact that three other social sciences theses were China-focused also made it special (but I am kind of biased on that point!)

For those readers who are in the early stages of their thesis research, consider registering for next year's forum when the notice goes out. The format is casual -- it's really up to the individual speakers to decide what they want to present and how they want to present it. Some people read from a script, while others talked from memory or used powerpoint slides as a reference. Many people had visuals to share, such as charts and photographs. Most presentations were about 15-20 minutes long, with an additional five-minute question and answer session. The audience was receptive, and not too large -- I'd say about 50 people showed up on the first two nights.

For students who have recently started the ALM program, and haven't really planned their theses, the forum is a great opportunity to learn about some of the research possibilities and various ways to approach your research questions.

Many thanks to HESA and the Harvard Extension School for putting this together!

What keeps Hong Kong successful?

The American has an interesting analysis of Hong Kong, and what has kept it successful in the nearly ten years since the UK/PRC handover. The author, John Fund, identifies two main factors -- namely, bureaucracy-free capitalism, and rule of law. He also delves into the mid-1990s predictions of some Western naysayers, who predicted that China couldn't resist meddling once they took over in the summer of 1997.

Of course, such predictions were totally at odds with the history of the People's Republic of China's treatment of Hong Kong since 1949. Senior Communist/pseudo-Communist leaders in Beijing clearly recognized the importance of the British colony as a gateway to the rest of the world, a capitalist outpost that could benefit China, and a bargaining chip/point of leverage with the West. If they wanted to meddle, they would have done so in 1949-1950, when they were clearning out the last knots of Nationalist troops from China's southern coast and Hainan, or in the 1960s, when the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War were raging. They didn't meddle then, and they sensibly didn't meddle in Hong Kong post-1997, with the exception of rejecting many of the democratic reforms that were implemented under British Governor of Hong Kong Christopher Patten in the mid-1990s (something that Fund did not address, incidentally).