Neil J Dimant’s Useful Bullshit on the history of constitutional conversations in the PRC…
In Useful Bullshit Neil J. Diamant pulls back the curtain on early constitutional conversations between citizens and officials in the PRC. Scholars have argued that China, like the former USSR, promulgated constitutions to enhance its domestic and international legitimacy by opening up the constitution-making process to ordinary people, and by granting its citizens political and socioeconomic rights. But what did ordinary officials and people say about their constitutions and rights? Did constitutions contribute to state legitimacy?
Over the course of four decades, the PRC government encouraged millions of citizens to pose questions about, and suggest revisions to, the draft of a new constitution. Seizing this opportunity, people asked both straightforward questions like “what is a state?”, but also others that, through implication, harshly criticized the document and the government that sponsored it. They pressed officials to clarify the meaning of words, phrases, and ideas in the constitution, proposing numerous revisions. Despite many considering the document “bullshit,” successive PRC governments have promulgated it, amending the constitution, debating it at length, and even inaugurating a “Constitution Day.”
Drawing upon a wealth of archival sources from the Maoist and reform eras, Diamant deals with all facets of this constitutional discussion, as well as its afterlives in the late ’50s, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao era. Useful Bullshit illuminates how the Chinese government understands and makes use of the constitution as a political document, and how a vast array of citizens—police, workers, university students, women, and members of different ethnic and religious groups—have responded.
I’m afraid I don’t know much about William Greener except he rather offered himself up to the newspapers as an expert on all things China in the early 1900s and certainly hinted at his connections with British Intelligence. He regularly appears commenting on the work of missionaries in China, the comforts of the Trans-Siberian Express and does seem to have been in northern China during the start of the Russo-Japanese War. It is claimed Greener was an employee of the London Times who got to Port Arthur (Lushun) around February 1904. He was apparently expelled from Port Arthur and moved to nearby Newchwang (Yingkou). Some reviewers considered him unreliable and the Times did receive some criticism for contining to run his pieces, often considered inaccurate and so stopped using him.
But, much of this criticism cvame from those Greener didn’t think much of and writes about in his book – lazy and ineffecutal British diplomats (very often the case in China at the time) and corrupt US Consuls (which annoyed Washington and US newspapers but was true and later led to several sensational trials of corrupt US Consuls in China).
So while A Secret Agent in Port Arthur seems at the outset a little sensationalist, a mix of excited reportage and sub-John Buchan shenanigans, it may actually be a more accurate account than the more censored newspaper articles.
A close up of the large Sine Pharmacy billboard on Nanking Road (Nanjing East Road) in 1949. Rather than repeat the excellent work of the Industrial History of Hong Kong Group’s blog I’ll link to them here for the history of the firm…
Want to keep up with news from Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Eagle home while travelling in China…in 1925…no problem (expect it seems in Shanghai surprisingly, but anyway…maybe Brooklynites were a little vulgar and low class for snooty Shanghai?)…
British explorer, writer, scholar, diplomat, and soldier Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) died in Trieste where he was British Consul. Burton is primarily associated with the Near- and Mid-East as well as Africa rather than the Far East. His travels and writings are too numerous to mention here, but if you’re not familiar with him and his work then he has an extensive Wikipedia page.
Anyway, I came across these paintings of his Trieste house painted in 1889 by Albert Letchford (1866-1905), an English artist resident in Italy and also provided some (actually 72) illustration to books in Burton’s 17-volume translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The paintings reflect various aspects of Burton’s life – his ambivlance yet fascination with religion, his books and files, artworks and momentos as well as (in the first painting) a Chinese/Japanese parasol and in his bedroom (bottom painting) a Chinese/Japanese paper lantern hanging from the ceiling.
These paintings now reside in the Burton Collection in Orleans House, Twickenham, West London.
Letchford’s A Corner of Sir Richard Burton’s Study, Trieste, 1889
Letchford’s simiarly titled A Corner of Sir Richard Burton’s Study, Trieste, 1889
Letchford’s Sir Richard Burton’s Bedroom, Trieste, 1889
More Than 1001 Days and Nights of Hong Kong Internment is the wartime journal of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster, former attorney-general of Hong Kong and one of the three highest-ranking British officials during the Japanese occupation. He was imprisoned by the Japanese at the Stanley Internment Camp from 1941 to 1945. During his internment, he managed to keep a diary of his life in the camp in small notebooks and hid them until his release in 1945. He then wrote his wartime journal on the basis of these notes. The journal records his day-to-day experiences of the fall of Hong Kong, his time at Stanley, and his eventual release. Some of the most fascinating extracts cover the three months immediately after the fall of Hong Kong and when Alabaster and his colleagues were imprisoned in Prince’s Building in Central and before they were sent to the camp, a period little covered in previous publications. Hence, the book is an important primary source for understanding the daily operation of the Stanley Internment Camp and the camp’s environment. Readers will also learn more about the daily life of those imprisoned in the camp, and Alabaster’s interaction with other prisoners there.
David St Maur Sheil is the great-grandson of Sir Chaloner Grenville Alabaster and has been conducting research into his family’s long history in Hong Kong and China. Kwong Chi Man is an associate professor in the History Department of Hong Kong Baptist University. Tony Banham has studied the Battle of Hong Kong for a quarter of a century and has written on the subject, aided in the production of television documentaries, and helped many children of veterans in their researches into their parents’ war years.
Four marvellous painting of author and art critic Douglas Sladen’s #32 Addison Manions flat from 1915 painted by the Japanese artist resident in London Yoshio Markino. Sladen was a champion of Markino’s work and a keen lover of Japanois in the late 19th and ewarly 20th centuries. Sadly the building is gone, but Markino’s paintings remain…Addison Mansions comprised two blocks of apartments on Blythe Road, Hammersmith, opposite the Olympia Exhbition Centre built around 1888. (pic of the building at bottom of post).
The Dining RoomThe Mooish RoomThe Japanee RoomThe Roof Garden
