Tiananmen Revisited – Frontline Club 29/7/14

Just to note I’ll be chairing a discussion on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre at the Frontline Club in London on 29th July with Louisa Lim (author of the recently published The People’s Republic of Amnesia) and James Miles, the Economist’s new China Editor and author of The Legacy of Tiananmen)….RSVP here

In the early hours of 4 June 1989, soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on a pro-democracy protest in Tiananmen Square, killing untold hundreds of people. Twenty five years on, the event has been commemorated around the world, but how does China remembers this defining moment in the country’s history?

We will be joined by a panel including the award-winning journalist Louisa Lim, whose book The People’s Republic of Amnesia charts how events unfolded that night, revealing previously unknown details.

Whilst looking back, we will also trace the effect the crackdown had on society then and the impact it continues to have today. We will explore how the events of twenty five years ago have shaped national identity in China.

Chaired by Paul French, an author and a widely published analyst and commentator on Asia, Asian politics and current affairs. He is author of North Korea: State of Paranoia and the international bestseller Midnight in Peking.

The panel:

Louisa Lim as an award-winning journalist who has reported from China for a decade, most recently for National Public Radio. Previously she was the BBC’s Beijing correspondent. She is author of The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited.

James Miles is the outgoing Beijing bureau chief of The Economist, a position he took up in 2001. He will begin a new appointment in August as The Economist‘s China Editor, based in London. He is the author of The Legacy of Tiananmen: China in Disarray.

H.B. Morse, Customs Commissioner and Historian of China

A biography of HB Morse – interesting as don’t know of another one and a reissue of John K Fairbank’s bio….

Hosea Ballou Morse (1855-1934) sailed to China in 1874, and for the next thirty-five years he labored loyally in the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service, becoming one of its most able commissioners and acquiring a deep knowledge of China’s economy and foreign relations. After his retirement in 1909, Morse devoted himself to scholarship. He pioneered in the Western study of China’s foreign relations, weaving from the tangled threads of the Ch’ing dynasty’s foreign affairs several seminal interpretive histories, most notably his three-volume magnum opus, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (1910-18).

At the time of his death, Morse was considered the major historian of modern China in the English-speaking world, and his works played a profound role in shaping the contours of Western scholarship on China.

Begun as a labor of love by his protégé, John King Fairbank, this lively biography based primarily on Morse’s vast collection of personal papers sheds light on many crucial events in modern Chinese history, as well as on the multifaceted Western role in late imperial China, and provides new insights into the beginnings of modern China studies in this country. Half-finished when Fairbank died, the project was completed by his colleagues, Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith.

John King Fairbank (1907-1991) was Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History at Harvard University and founder/director of Harvard’s East Asian Research Center, now the John King Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
Martha Henderson Coolidge is associate in research at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University.
Richard J. Smith is professor of history and director of Asian Studies at Rice University.

Atención – Medianoche en Pekín es publicado

The Spanish edition of Midnight in Peking – Medianoche en Pekin – is now available courtesy of my Spanish publishers Plataforma Editorial – many thanks to Ricard Vela for the translation…

Indian Hill Station Development

I’ve long been interested in the old hill stations of India and those summer resorts and hill stations that existed elsewhere, notably China (Moganshan, Kuling etc – which I’ve posted about before – just use the search box for those posts) but also those in Vietnam, the Philippines, Ceylon and elsewhere. This interest was partly sparked by Barbara Crosette’s excellent book from the 1990s (and still eminently readable) The Great Hill Stations of Asia as well as the novelist JG Farrell’s The Hill Station. For those with an interest in Moganshan there’s also Mark Kitto’s history of Moganshan China Cuckoo and a rather fun novel (featuring Wallis Simpson and her wild times in China) called Mokanshan. Others have also grabbed my attention for posts and visits including Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands and Maymo in Burma.

Anyway, according to the FT, Hindustan Construction is to float its hill station subsidiary, Lavasa. Lavasa is a rather newer incarnation of the tradition established during the British Raj of places to escape the lowland heat – India has about 80 hill stations. A more interesting question might be whether or not the existing hill stations that date back to the Raj may also be revived?

Nora Waln’s House of Exile, Penguin Edition 1933

Nora Waln was one the first of the ‘girl reporters’ to head to China and once shared a house in with Edna Lee Booker (who I’ve blogged about previously). While in China Waln worked on her novels while reporting for the Atlantic Monthly.  Her reporting on Mongolia was especially interesting for the times when few went there.

Came across a 1933 Penguin edition of her China memoir The House of Exile the other day…

The China Threat: Memories, Myths, and Realities in the 1950s

A new book from Nancy Bernkopf Tucker that looks at the larger forces that shaped Eisenhower Administration policy toward China in what was an especially critical moment for US relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan.

Nancy Bernkopf Tucker confronts the coldest period of the cold war—the moment in which personality, American political culture, public opinion, and high politics came together to define the Eisenhower Administration’s policy toward China. A sophisticated, multidimensional account based on prodigious, cutting edge research, this volume convincingly portrays Eisenhower’s private belief that close relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China were inevitable and that careful consideration of the PRC should constitute a critical part of American diplomacy.
Tucker controversially argues that the Eisenhower Administration’s hostile rhetoric and tough actions toward China obscure the president’s actual views. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, pursued a more nuanced approach, one better suited to China’s specific challenges and the stabilization of the global community. Tucker deftly explores the contradictions between Eisenhower and his advisors’ public and private positions. Her most powerful chapter centers on trade and Eisenhower’s recognition that rigid prohibitions would undermine the global postwar economic recovery and push China into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Tucker finds Eisenhower’s strategic thinking on Europe and his fear of toxic, anticommunist domestic politics constrained his leadership, making a fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward China difficult if not impossible. Consequently, the president was unable to engage congress and the public effectively on China, ultimately failing to realize his own high standards as a leader.

Arthur Ransome’s Missee Lee Reissued as E-book

I’ve blogged about Arthur Ransome’s time in China in the 1920s before (here). For those who haven’t read his one China book, Missee Lee, where the Swallows and Amazons find themselves in the South China Seas it’s now out in e-book form. The Swallows and Amazons finally meet a real pirate – the tiny, pistol-carrying Missee Lee, who has rescued them after their shipwreck off the coast of China. The only trouble is she wants to keep them… for ever.

How China Rose? Edward Wilson’s The Whitehall Mandarin on China and Vietnam

Edward Wilson is a favourite espionage writer of mine who deserves a lot more readers. His latest novel, The Whitehall Mandarin, is effectively the fourth in what I think was planned as a trilogy that comprised The Envoy, The Darkling Spy and The Midnight Swimmer. I recently reviewed The Whitehall Mandarin and Wilson’s work for the Los Angeles Review of Books (The Exile and the Spy here), but there’s a lot more in the novel that might make it especially appealing to those with an interest in China history (presumably China Rhyming readers). So this is a sort of additional few comments, like a DVD extra – you didn’t really ask for it, you didn’t really want it and you most probably don’t need it, but anyway….

One of the issues at the heart of Wilson’s closely observed novel is the idea that, just as Soviet Intelligence penetrated British Intelligence from the 1930s, so the Chinese did from the 1960s and that this is one explanation of how Maoist China, amidst the turmoil of the Sino-Soviet Split and the start of the Cultural Revolution got the A-bomb. Just as an earlier generation of men and women who went on to serve in British Intelligence became enamoured of the USSR in the 1930s, perhaps there was another group, in the 1950s, who became equally enamoured of the PRC and offered western secrets to them. Of course we know that Britain and America had its fair share of student Maoists but it’s not generally assumed that Beijing was in a position to recruit and effectively use them in the way the Soviet Union and KGB had done previously. The Whitehall Mandarin posits that maybe we’re wrong to think that. It is the case that China’s nuclear programme appears to have moved at lightening speed:

FISSION TO FUSION

France = 105 months

United States = 86 months

Soviet Union = 75 months

United Kingdom = 66 months

People’s Republic of China = 32 months

I’m not going to give away any of the plot of Wilson’s novel – you really should read it if even slightly interested in this period and question but it has some interesting scenes in the Zhongnanhai of the 1960s and some observations that are extremely pertinent today given current tensions and events. At one point, among the North Vietnamese, fighting America with Chinese made weapons there is a discussion of whether General Giap and the North Vietnamese will ultimately prove pro-Moscow or pro-Beijing – they are of course playing each of against the other during the Sino-Soviet Split to get as much materiel as possible. But older tensions simmer: “She’s a fanatical Maoist. And she doesn’t realise that China is Vietnam’s historical enemy. We admire their culture, but fear their power.” Given the current tensions between Beijing and Hanoi and the stalemate in their ongoing talks this week this rings as true of 1964 as it does of 2014. One Vietnamese leader tells Wilson’s spy hero – “China doesn’t want this war to end. It’s in China’s national interest to keep Vietnam weak and dependent…” Plenty in Hanoi would still nod sagely at that analysis.

Of course China supported the North during the war but relations swiftly soured after 1975 and a border war followed in 1979 but now those South China Seas issues are back again….