Post-Olympic Stress Disorder and Other Asian Concerns
October 3, 2008
George Fetherling

With the 2008 summer Olympics finally behind us, a number of books on the subject have tumbled, not unexpectedly, into a kind of limbo. For instance, Olympic Dreams: China and Sports 1895–2008 by Xu Guoqi (Harvard University Press, US$29.95 paper) has lost much of its currency while keeping its useful historical perspective. Another example is China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Publishers Group Canada, $20.95 paper), a collection of essays edited by Minky Worden, the communications director of Human Rights Watch. Alas, many of its insights on human rights threaten to retain their pertinence for generations. Their Olympic context, however, is already too old to be urgent—yet nowhere near old enough to be historical. That still leaves us, though, with a number of fine recent books on Beijing itself published in the run-up to the Games. They all have one element in common: they document the wholesale destruction of entire sections of the city. The specifics are new but the cry is an old one, for many of the books about Beijing beloved by generations of readers in the West arose from the same impulse.
           
Juliet Bredon was a scholarly Englishwoman who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, wrote prolifically and well on Chinese practices and places. Many still hold dear her book Peking: A Historical and Intimate Description of Its Chief Places of Interest, which was first published in 1919. In other words, less than ten years after the overthrow of the last dynasty, an event that led to China’s (and indeed Asia’s) first republic, a process in which the old imperial capital lost its status as the new government was established in Nanking (now Nanjing). The way that so much of Peking (though hardly all of it) survived such drastic political and cultural change must have given Bredon’s readers a feeling of reassurance—for a while.
           
In those days, the British were, commercially at least, the de facto rulers of much of China. They also took over such governmental tasks as running China’s customs and excise and its postal system. These were concessions Britain had won following the Opium Wars of the mid nineteenth century. The Customs bureaucracy was overseen by Sir Robert Hart (whose biographer Bredon became). One of his underlings was a US expatriate named L.C. Arlington, who collaborated with William Lewisohn, a British journalist and former army officer, to produce In Search of Old Peking, published in 1935. Its intent was to be the authoritative guide to the city that had been declining precipitously for thirty years, without having exhausted the possibilities for further decay. The warlord era was only a few years past, and the Japanese seizure of the city lay right round the corner.

Like Bredon before them, Arlington and Lewisohn began what they thought of as a guidebook to streets, neighbourhoods and landmarks. But once completed, it turned into something quite different: a kind of syllabus for nostalgic readers wishing to summon up the spirit of the old days by comparing the present to the past. In this way, their book goes together with George N. Kates’ fine memoir The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933–1940, a marvellous piece of prose that seems to have found its way onto many people’s lists of desert-island reading. Kates, another expat American, had come to China to study, and to emulate as far as it was possible to do so, the nearly extinct habits of the scholar-officials who had dominated the civil service from one dynasty to another, century after century. Kates published the book in 1952, when Mao Zedong was remaking the city, much as, in former times, Haussmann redrew the master plan of Paris, Hitler that of Berlin and Stalin that of Moscow and as Robert Moses was trying to do in the case of New York: disasters all, though not uniformly so.

Mao razed the city’s massive stone walls, evidently considering them relics of European colonialism, though they went back many centuries before the white foreigners. He was equally reckless and ruthless with entire sections of the city. But in Mao’s case there was more than ego and personal ambition at work, for his revamping also involved a sense of historical preservation much different from that found in the West. The notion that something old should be pulled down so that a modern up-to-date facsimile of it can be put up in its place, as a sort of memorial to the past, is one with deep roots in Chinese civilisation. In a way, this idea informs Bredon, Arlington and Lewisohn, and Kates (whose books, by the way, are available in modern reprints, which is why I describe them here).

Since the economic reforms of the 1980s, the process of destruction in China’s cities, a kind of public policy backed up bulldozers, has increased many fold until the scale and speed are almost unimaginable. This is especially true in Shanghai, the country’s business centre and the heart of this new China. It is said to have two thousand skyscrapers. Now a vocal but not always effective countervailing movement has come along, resisting the destruction of traditional Chinese housing and streetscapes in the rush to make the Shanghai skyline look as much as possible like any in the West (or even worse, like Bangkok’s). That the same processes are underway in Beijing is one of the lessons we can take away from a variety of recent books.

The one receiving the most attention—nearly all of it highly positive—is The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed by Michael Meyer (Raincoast Books, $28.95). Meyer, who has worked for various NGOs, first went to China in the 1990s. From that time until the height of Olympic preparations, a million and a quarter Beijing residents were dispossessed of their traditional homes in the narrow lanes (often almost impassably narrow) called hutong. It is a word worth knowing, for none of the English equivalents, such as alley, courtyard or mews,conveys the essential characteristic of hutong, which is a kind of communal living combined with privacy and set apart by the self-help and sense of community so often found in slums.

For a couple of years, Meyer, who taught school nearby, occupied two unheated rooms made of mud and straw. They had minimal electricity, and the toilet was out of doors a few houses down the road. This hutong, called Bamboo Slanted Street, was tucked away in Dazhalan, an obscure neighbourhood that came into being six hundred years ago: a tiny place by Chinese standards, with fewer than sixty thousand people. Meyer sketches a number of the neighbourhood characters, but the texture of the book is less reportorial than evocative, for he sees clearly how the westernisation and modernisation that the Olympics hastened and certainly symbolised, are, in a funny way, the continuation of Mao’s anti-westernisation. In 1949, the year the communists came to power, there were seven thousand hutong. By the time the Olympic Site was being put up, only thirteen hundred remained. There will be far fewer the next time a count is made, even though much of Beijing’s vernacular housing, like the western architecture once so common in cosmopolitan Shanghai, is being saved—for conversion to high-end shops, restaurants and the like. So far at least, Beijing has not begun tearing down hutong to make room for monuments offering tributes to what it has just razed. Or at least it isn’t doing so as a matter of routine. Meyer did discover, however, that a place he was seeking out called Ancient Culture Street has been levelled so that New Ancient Culture Street can both supplant it and call it to mind.

The western media of late have made much of the hutong controversy and what it represents, and in this regard it is especially interesting to have Meyer introduce us to one of China’s leading public intellectuals, the painter and fiction writer Feng Jicai, who has become an activist in the barely tolerated preservationist movement, deriving much of his thinking from the works of Jane Jacobs. But in the end, Meyer’s book is a special kind of literary work, not too different from The Years That Were Fat in the way it weaves cultural and social observation into the conventions of the deeply felt memoir. Legends of the Building of Old Peking by Hok-Lam Chan (University of Washington Press, US$60) is a far more serious history of the city’s evolution, and seems a likely candidate for a long life, though such statements are always conjectural.

Other books that deplore the sacrifice of old Peking to modern Beijing have not been scarce. The Search for a Vanishing Beijing: A Guide to Chinas Capital through the Ages by M.A. Aldrich (University of Washington Press, US$49.50) is precisely the sort of neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood and district-by-district survey the title suggests. One wonders whether it too might find a second life as a work of nostalgia once change makes it obsolescent or even obsolete. A highly readable and certainly informative general narrative of the city’s history (with special emphasis on the last thousand years) is Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City by Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey and Haili Kong(H.B. Fenn, $20.95 paper). One shouldn’t take the phrase “Olympic City” too much to heart, for the book is an easy and educational trot through the past that doesn’t put undue emphasis on the practical importance or even the symbolism of the recent ballyhoo. Much of what comment does come up is found in the final chapter, which deals with the historic preservation problem—without addressing this paradox of China’s past and present with analysis that is even remotely as subtle, nuanced and thoroughly thought-out as that found in Beijing Time by Michael Dutton and two associates, Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo and Dong Dong Wu (Harvard University Press, US$26.95). In some ways, the latter book resembles Michael Meyer’s. Although it is not a memoir, it does try to reveal the often troubled daily existence of ordinary Beijingers, both those born there and those who are part of the mass migration from remote rural regions. Life, it seems to say, has been made far more complex, and sometimes more perilous, by the government’s underlying intellectual assumptions (rather than ideological or even economic ones) about how quickly they must pull down, not the monumental past, as Mao did, but the workaday past, to make room, physically and otherwise, for the trackless conurbation that will pave over what until now has been a relatively navigable city of ten million or so. Harvard has also published The Forbidden City (US$19.95) by Geremie R. Barmé, the Australian historian of the Pacific region (who wrote the introduction to the modern edition of Arlington and Lewisohn’s In Search of Old Peking). It is a small gem of a book in a Harvard series of such bijoux called Wonders of the World.

Curiously, the strongest image of Beijing I am left with at the end of this exercise is a photograph from another new book, Earth Then and Now by Fred Pearce (Firefly Books, $29.95 paper). This is a work of what has come to be called re-photography, an artistic genre in which photographers pinpoint the spot from which an old archival photo was taken and, for comparative purposes, try to shoot the exact same scene as it appears today. For example, a battlefield as it looked when fighting took place there in the nineteenth century next to the same view now, showing how suburban housing or highways have encroached on the past. Pearce’s book follows this method in various cities round the world. The differences he chronicles, however, are related more to environmental change than to development as such. On a left-hand page, he presents a large photo of Tiananmen Square taken in 1997. All looks fine. On the facing page is a photo of the same scene in 2003. The sky, the air, the ground—everything―is a bright orangey yellow, the result of one of the ever more common and ever worsening sandstorms brought on by desertification in that part of the country. Of course, Beijing is frequently dry at certain times of year, given its proximity to the Gobi. Untold numbers of people still alive today can remember when camel caravans supplied the city with drinking water. But the present situation is different. In the rush to find ways of feeding the populace―a constant throughout Chinese history―vast areas to the west of Beijing are so depleted that the fields are turning to dust.

Briefly (far too briefly), some other new books on China:

For many Sinologists in the West, whether career academics, independent scholars or (as with numerous American examples) former diplomats, the ultimate challenge is to produce a readable one-volume history of China, a civilisation so ancient, complex and huge that it measures the hubris of such authors as well as their stamina. These books appear at irregular intervals. One example is China, A History (1988) by Arthur Cotterell, who is otherwise most often associated with his works on mythology and ancient cultures generally. Another is A History of China (1999) by J.A.G. Roberts (retitled A Concise History of China for the US edition, to reassure consumers there rather than intimidate them). Both authors are English whereas the late Rayne Kruger, who wrote All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China (2003), was South African. The equally late J. K. Firbank, after whom Harvard’s East Asian research centre is named, was an enormously influential American who had the ears of the State Department but was also to some extent one of its tongues. Several years ago, his classic China, A New History, first published in 1992, was enlarged and updated by Merle Goodman, another specialist in the field.

All the above is leading somewhere: to China, A History (HarperCollins Canada, $55.95) by John Keay who, although he has published a great deal about East Asia, is better known for his books on South Asia, particularly his general narrative of India’s past. The History is written with the thoughtful authority that comes from long years of study and reflection. But he has made the curious and ill-considered decision to end the main text with the communist victory of 1949, adding only a brief epilogue about the subsequent fifty-nine years, during which time virtually everything in China has been turned upside down more than once.

Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China edited by Irene Eber (University of Chicago Press, US$29) is a small book with a long reach. It will seem indispensable to those of us who, whenever the yoga teacher tells us to go to our “happy place”, imagine ourselves in Shanghai as it was between the two world wars, when it was called the Paris of the Orient or, taking the title of a popular book about the city, “the paradise of adventurers”. Yet Shanghai was in many ways a wretched place to live back then. Human life was not always highly valued, and the city was ruled by a frightening collation of politicians, generals and gangsters that no film noir could even begin to suggest.

Adjoining the majority Chinese part of the city were the enclaves of foreigners who lived with immunity from Chinese law: the British, French and Americans, Japanese and White Russians most famously but perhaps thirty-five or so other groups as well. Following the Anschluss and Kristallhacht in 1938, the city received many thousands of Jews from Poland and elsewhere in central Europe. Hitler had priorised his persecution of them, so that the first wave to arrive in Shanghai consisted largely of doctors and other such educated professionals. They were followed in time by artists and intellectuals. And so on. Once the European war started in 1939, German ships could no longer call at Shanghai, so the refugees travelled aboard Italian vessels (until Mussolini entered the war in 1940) or Japanese ones (until Japan, having already invaded China, joined Germany against the US and Britain).

Eber’s book consists of fascinating documents—poems, fueilletons, short fiction, extracts from letters and diaries—discovered in a number of Shanghai’s Yiddish- and German-language newspapers and magazines of the period. Only one of the selections had ever been translated into English until Eber took on the task, producing this haunting and valuable book.

For so many people, this is the most fascinating period in modern Chinese history (which is to say, recent history, by the standards of Chinese civilisation) because it was chaotic in such a number of different ways, either simultaneously or sequentially. It is no coincidence that China During the Great Depression: Market, State, and the World Economy, 1929-1937 by Tomoko Shiroyama (Harvard, US$45), studying a topic seldom attractive to English-language scholars, ends at the point where Dagfinn Gatu’s Village Gate at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (UBC Press, $29.05 paper) begins. The global economic emergency played out differently in the East than in the West. By 1937, trade and investment were picking up in Britain or North America, beginning a process that the Second World War would complete. But in that same year, the poor Chinese were already engaged in a full-scale war against the invading Japanese.
Japan called its plan to conquer other Asian countries “the Great East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere”, showing a grasp of euphemism rivalled only by that of Chiang Kai-shek who named his dreaded secret police the Bureau of Statistics. Before the end of the year, the Japanese had captured Nanking, an event that led to one of the most infamously brutal events of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanking in which the number of civilians raped, tortured or killed totalled three hundred thousand.
           
For a number of complex historical reasons, the protection of national borders in Asian tradition is an issue taken even more seriously than it is in the West, even when, as is the case now, we are at our touchiest and most paranoiac. In The Chinese State at the Borders  (UBC Press, $32.95 paper), Diane Lary brings together thirteen historians of China, including the always enlightening and highly readable Timothy Brook, to discuss various aspects of Chinese border theory down through the centuries. Persistent reading of the news is enough to show the extent to which China’s concern with its cartographic parameters persists at a high level of discord and suspicion. Border Landscapes: The Politics of Akha Land Use in China and Thailand by Janet C. Sturgeon (University of Washington Press, US$22.50 paper) can be taken as a full-length case-study. The Akha are one of the region’s so called hill-tribes, speaking a language rooted in Tibet and Burma. Akha live in the latter place but are also a significant minority in Laos and Vietnam. Sturgeon examines in detail why it is that the Akha on either side of China’s border with Thailand have led such vexing lives. Most of the factors relate to politics and policy but others are bound up in trade, for this area includes the notorious as Golden Triangle.

George Fetherling’s most recent book is Tales of Two Cities: A Novella Plus Stories (Subway Books).

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