REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

A Chinese Immigrant Makes His Home in Turn-of-the-Century America

In this autobiographical sketch published in 1903 in the Independent magazine (which ran a series of about eighty short autobiographical “lifelets” of “undistinguished Americans” between 1902 and 1906), Chinese immigrant Lee Chew looked back on his passage to America, and his years as a launderer and merchant on both the East and West coasts.

The village where I was born is situated in the province of Canton, on one of the banks of the Si-Kiang River. It is called a village, altho it is really as big as a city, for there are about 5,000 men in it over eighteen years of age—women and children and even youths are not counted in our villages.

All in the village belonged to the tribe of Lee. They did not intermarry with one another, but the men went to other villages for their wives and and brought them home to their fathers' houses, and men from other villages—Wus and Wings and Sings and Fongs, etc.—chose wives from among our girls.

When I was a baby I was kept in our house all the time with my mother, but when I was a boy of seven I had to sleep at nights with other boys of the village—about thirty of them in one house. The girls are separated the same way—thirty or forty of them sleeping together in one house away from their parents—and the widows have houses where they work and sleep, tho they go to their fathers' houses to eat.

My father’s house is built of fine blue brick, better than the brick in the houses here in the United States. It is only one story high, roofed with red tiles and surrounded by a stone wall which also encloses the yard There are four rooms in the house, one large living room which serves for a parlor and three private rooms, one occupied by my grandfather, who is very old and very honorable; another by my father and mother, and the third by my oldest brother and his wife and two little children. There are no windows, but the door is left open all day.

All the men of the village have farms, but they don’t live on them as the farmers do here; they live in the village, but go out during the day time and work their farms, coming home before dark. My father has a farm of about ten acres, on which he grows a great abundance of things—sweet potatoes, rice, beans, peas, yams, sugar cane, pine apples, bananas, lychee nuts and palms. The palm leaves are useful and can be sold. Men make fans of the lower part of each leaf near the stem, and water proof coats and hats, and awnings for boats, of the parts that are left when the fans are cut out.

So many different things can be grown on one small farm, because we bring plenty of water in a canal from the mountains thirty miles away, and every farmer takes as much as he wants for his fields by means of drains. He can give each crop the right amount of water.

Our people all working together make these things, the mandarin has nothing to do with it, and we pay no taxes, except a small one on the land We have our own Government, consisting of the elders of our tribe—the honorable men. When a man gets to be sixty years of age he begins to have honor and to become a leader, and then the older he grows the more he is honored. We had some men who were nearly one hundred years, but very few of them.

In spite of the fact that any man may correct them for a fault, Chinese boys have good times and plenty of play. We played games like tag, and other games like shinny and a sort of football called yin.

We had dogs to play with—plenty of dogs and good dogs—that understand Chinese as well as American dogs understand American language. We hunted with them, and we also went fishing and had as good a time as American boys, perhaps better, as we were almost always together in our house, which was a sort of boys' club house, so we had many playmates. Whatever we did we did all together, and our rivals were the boys of other club houses, with whom we sometimes competed in the games. But all our play outdoors was in the daylight, because there were many graveyards about and after dark, so it was said, black ghosts with flaming mouths and eyes and long claws and teeth would come from these and tear to pieces and devour any one whom they might meet.

It was not all play for us boys, however. We had to go to school, where we learned to read and write and to recite the precepts of Kong foo-tsze and the other Sages and stories about the great Emperors of China, who ruled with the wisdom of gods and gave to the whole world the light of high civilization and the culture of our literature, which is the admiration of all nations.

I went to my parents' house for meals, approaching my grandfather with awe, my father and mother with veneration and my elder brother with respect. I never spoke unless spoken to, but I listened and heard much concerning the red haired, green eyed foreign devils with the hairy faces, who had lately come out of the sea and clustered on our shores. They were wild and fierce and wicked, and paid no regard to the moral precepts of Kong-foo-tsze and the Sages; neither did they worship their ancestors, but pretended to be wiser than their fathers and grandfathers. They loved to beat people and to rob and murder. In the streets of Hong Kong many of them could be seen reeling drunk. Their speech was a savage roar, like the voice of the tiger or the buffalo, and they wanted to take the land away from the Chinese. Their men and women lived together like animals, without any marriage or faithfulness and even were shameless enough to walk the streets arm in arm in daylight. So the old men said.

All this was very shocking and disgusting, as our women seldom were on the street, except in the evenings, when they went with the water jars to the three wells that supplied all the people. Then if they met a man they stood still, with their faced turned to the wall, while he looked the other way when he passed them. A man who spoke to a woman in the street in a Chinese village would be beaten, perhaps killed.

My grandfather told how the English foreign devils had made wicked war on the Emperor, and by means of their enchantments and spells had defeated his armies and forced him to admit their opium, so that the Chinese might smoke and become weakened and the foreign devils might rob them of their land.

Read more at History Matters

1788 The First Chinese in North America?

Most historians agree that there must have been Chinese among the “Indios” (Filipinos) who often served on the crews of the Spanish ships – the so-called Manila galleons – that sailed annually between the Philippines and Mexico from the late 16th century onward.  There must also have been Chinese crewmen on board British and American ships bringing tea, silk, and porcelain from China to the Atlantic coast of North America in the 18th century.  In both cases, however, nothing definite is known about those Chinese.  We do not know for sure that they actually existed.

More will be known once researchers have gone through crew lists of merchant ships preserved in British and American archives [1].  For now, however, the first identifiable Chinese individuals to reach this continent seem to have been two seamen who served with John Meares in his voyage to Vancouver Island in 1788-89, Affee (Ah Fei?) and Aehaw (Ah Ho?) [2].  The “Ah” prefix shows that both were ethnic Cantonese.  They belonged to a group of 50 Chinese who had come with Meares from Guangzhou.  Affee and Aehaw were assigned by Meares to help man a small ship, the North-West America, that had just been built on Vancouver, partly by Chinese carpenters.  Its mission was to trade along the coast for sea otter furs and to take those for sale to China.

 Meares had left Guangzhou with two British-built ships, the Felice and the Iphigenia.  “The crews of these ships consisted of Europeans and China-men, with a larger proportion of the former.  The Chinese were, on this occasion, shipped as an experiment: – they have generally been esteemed an hardy, and industrious, as well as ingenious race of people; they live on fish and rice, and, requiring but low wages, it was a matter also of oeconomical consideration to employ them; and during the whole of the voyage there was every reason to be satisfied with their services. – If hereafter trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a very valuable acquisition.” [3]

These Chinese were skilled workers rather than mere coolies, and all were volunteers:  “A much greater number of Chinese solicited to enter into this service than could be received; and so far did the spirit of enterprise influence them, that those we were under the necessity of refusing, gave the most unequivocal marks of mortification and disappointment.  – From the many who offered themselves, fifty were selected, as fully sufficient for the purposes of the voyage: they were, as has been already observed, chiefly handicraft-men, of various kinds, with a small proportion of sailors who had been used to the junks which navigate every part of the Chinese seas.” [4]

It may seem surprising that there should have been so many volunteers at a time when China was prosperous and at peace.  However, the inhabitants of the southern provinces already had a tradition of seeking their fortunes overseas, and the newly discovered Northwest Coast sea otters, with fur that was much more valuable in China than any other fur, offered a chance at fortunes that were truly worth seeking.

Some of the Chinese with Meares, including Affee and Aehaw, were captured by the Spanish warships Princessa and San Carlos, and forced to build fortifications and then to work in mines. [5]  These may never have returned to China.  Some may have married Indian women and settled down in the region that later became British Columbia, Washington State, and Oregon.

Read more at CAMOC

 

 

“The First Chinese in Chicago? The First Chinese American Legal Action in the Midwest?”

by Terry Douglas Goldsworthy South Bend, Indiana

The following article appeared in the February 2nd, 1860 issue of the Chicago Tribune:

POLICE.

JOHN CHINAMAN IN QUEST OF JUSTICE AND DUPLICATES   

It is a fixed fact that every male Celestial (we refer, of course, to the mundane species with almond-shape eyes and two braided occipital tails) is to be called John.   In the Police Court yesterday afternoon, Justices Akin and Milliken sitting quietly and running the institution under easy steam, appeared one John Dorming, a Chinaman, of the well known itinerant company of experts in the pleasant little arts of throwing knives, heavy and sharp, within as few hairbreadths as possible of each other’s corporeal systems, and in other ways manifesting rare powers of sleight of hand.

John and his comrades have been in the country ten years. His troupe was broken up last year, and only three of them are here.  They had, at the solicitation of the proprietor, added the attractions of their performance to the evening programme in a saloon kept by one Michael Gaule, whereby a claim accrued which John urged yesterday morning in earnest tones, calling on Gaule to come down with the dust.  The latter brought his fist so near John’s chin, that he did not miss it, but dealt a solid rap on that part of the Celestial scenery.

John Chinaman went at once to Justice Diehl and sued out a warrant, had Gaule arrested and fined.  Very good.  John was satisfied but only so far, and deeming that one cannot easily have too much justice, he went at once to Justice Hoisington and had a warrant made out for the arrest of Michael Gaule.  Thence he went to Justice De Wolf and procured a warrant for Michael Gaule, and then he dropped in as stated upon the Police Court and made out a complaint and got out a warrant for Michael Gaule.  The officers all came down upon Michael, who was horrified in the extreme, and looked upon himself as in a bad way.  He rallied enough, however, to introduce in evidence Justice Diehl’s docket into each case, and the whole batch was despatched with a laugh.

John Dorming waxed a little indignant, but being a quick-witted fellow, and not ill-natured, paid for his warrants and let Michael Gaule go.

Read more at Chinatown Museum Foundation

Horrors of War (Bubble Gum Set - 1938)

Ask any card collector to show you their most prized possession and the odds are good they will produce a high-grade and slabbed treasure that pictures an artist's rendition of a legendary slugger, a photograph of a favorite quarterback, or an action shot of a dunking center who served as their childhood hero.

Ask that question of Ronnie Paloger of Marina Del Rey, California who collects The Horrors of War cards and he'll produce a card with a very different image. "My favorite card is the number one Marco Polo Bridge card which I have in a PSA Mint 9 – the only one to have ever attained this grade," said Paloger as he produced his treasure that showed the scene of a horrific and bloody battle between the Japanese and Chinese from 1937 in which a soldier's heart is being pierced with a bayonet. "In my opinion, it is currently the most valuable card in The Horrors of War set. It's arguably the Honus Wagner of non-sports cards. It is an extremely difficult card to find in high-grade due to the fact it is the first card in the set which is, of course, prone to excessive wear."

	Ronnie Paloger has been named to the PSA Registry Hall of Fame for compiling the finest set of The Horrors of War cards ever assembled.

Produced in 1938 by the Philadelphia-based Gum, Inc. (later Bowman), The Horrors of War cards were the brainchild of the company's president Warren Bowman and advertising counsel George Moll who said they created the cards to "Teach peace by exposing the horrors of war."

The Horrors of War cards depict graphic and, in some cases, unspeakable scenes of horror related to wars and conflicts in 1937 and '38 involving the Japanese invasion of China, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the Russian and Japanese conflict in Manchuria, and Germany's annexation of the Sudentenland from Czechoslovakia. In order to chronicle these atrocities, Gum, Inc. became more like a news organization rather than a card and candy manufacturer. They hired a staff of artists, designers, copywriters and researchers who delved deeply into the stories of people who actually witnessed these atrocities firsthand.

Paloger's favorite card is the #1 Marco Polo Bridge card which he has in a PSA Mint 9 – the only one to have ever attained this grade.

First offered in a series of 24 new cards every two weeks, Gum, Inc. produced the cards in what at the time was the state-of-the-art, full-color lithography process. This resulted in the proper reproduction of the brilliance and detail of the original art. Printed in large sheets that contained 240 cards, they were then cut into the 3 1/8 x 2 1/2 inch size in which they were offered.

The first series of 240 cards caught the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who used them to explain the horror of what actually went on in war-ravished countries. The president's use of the cards raised the ire of some United States senators who condemned the Commander-in-Chief for employing what they called: "bubblegum diplomacy." A second series of 48 high-numbered cards, from 241 to 288, were also released in the late summer and fall of 1938 that included three cards that show Adolf Hitler's emergence as a threat to world peace.

	Paloger was originally attracted to The Horrors of Wars set because he was looking to do something different.

Controversial from their first release, The Horrors of War cards have been the subject of vigorous debate that has ranged from their use as anti-war propaganda and social education tools to their racist content. In 1938, the cards were the subject of a story that ran in "Life" magazine in which the author opined that: "Some future historian may trace a cause for a future U.S.–Japanese war to the fact that preadolescents in America received severe anti-Japanese prejudices through its curious liking for blowing bubbles with gum."

Since that time, the cards have continued to be both controversial and educational. They have been endorsed for use by many peace organizations and have been used by numerous teachers, librarians and historians to promote the value of peace.

While today's card collector is still inclined to gravitate towards the genre of sports, vintage television shows or music, The Horrors of War cards have caused a stir and a fascination over recent years, especially with Ronnie Paloger who has been named to the PSA Registry Hall of Fame for compiling the finest set of The Horrors of War cards ever assembled. With a weighted GPA of 8.10, Paloger sits at the top of the non-sports genre, owning one of the greatest non-sports sets ever produced. "Out of 3,713 non-sports sets on the PSA Registry, only four non-sports sets, including this one, have been voted into the Hall of Fame Set Registry," said Paloger.

Read more at PSA CARDS

"No Turning Back"

Chinese Americans achieved greater acceptance following World War II. Photo Credit: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California In 1932, Anna May Wong was the leading Chinese American actress in Hollywood. But she was often passed over for roles since bi-racial kissing was considered taboo. Photo Credit: Bettmann/CORBIS "I wanted to be Roy Rogers," says second-generation Chinese American Shawn Wong. He would grow up to become an English professor. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Shawn Wong Jerry Yang came to America from Taiwan. Later he founded Yahoo!, one of the most successful Internet companies in the country. Photo Credit: AP/Wide World Photos

Program Three: "No Turning Back" World War II ushered in the beginning of major changes for the Chinese in America. At war with Japan, China became an American ally. In an abrupt about face, Chinese Americans found themselves suddenly embraced by America's political establishment, and the exclusion laws were quickly repealed. To fuel the war effort, Chinese men and women moved into factory jobs, the military service and other arenas formerly closed to them. With this integration into mainstream American society, barriers of racism started to dissolve. But it was in the late sixties, as Civil Rights laws and the 1965 Immigration Reform Act took effect, that Chinese Americans began their rise to the pinnacle of U.S. life. Part Three of BECOMING AMERICAN: The Chinese Experience focuses on the personal dimensions of this contemporary experience. With legal obstacles removed, Chinese American families who have lived in this country for generations and a massive new wave of young, highly educated and upwardly mobile Chinese immigrants have struggled with the true meaning of becoming American. Today an author and college professor, Shawn Wong grew up idolizing Roy Rogers and Willie Mays like many American boys of his generation. "My mother used to tell me 'We're Chinese and you're Chinese American,'" he recalls, laughing. "I had no idea what that was, I didn't know what the difference was!" For author and activist Helen Zia and many other Chinese Americans, the last three decades have been a time of political awakening inspired by the Civil Rights movement. They have forged a new Asian American identity, which was at first an alien notion to American descendents of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Filipino immigrants. One landmark in the development of a pan-Asian identity was the murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit. In the late 70s, pressure from Japanese automobile imports had forced massive layoffs in the American auto industry and gave rise to virulent anti-Japanese feelings. Celebrating his imminent marriage at a local bar, Chinese American Vincent Chin was mistaken for Japanese by two white Americans on the night of his bachelor party. They argued with him, followed him as he left the bar and beat Chin to death. The two attackers plea-bargained to manslaughter charges, and they were sentenced to probation and $3,720 in fines and court fees. This galvanizing event brought Asian Americans together in protest and supported the growing realization that they could be a more effective political force if they worked together. With a traditional cultural emphasis on education and an understanding that it was the most promising path to success in America, some Chinese immigrant parents have pushed their children to excel in their studies. Jerry Yang, a founder of Yahoo, recalls that his mother required him to memorize words from the dictionary every day. And quizzed him. Jean Tang, a student at Stanford Medical School, remembers that getting a B in school caused her mother to break into tears. Her parents worked 365 days a year running a children's clothing store to establish a foothold in America. As a child, Tang constantly absorbed the message that she was personally responsible for ensuring that her family's circumstances improve. Such drive, deeply rooted in Chinese family tradition and Confucian belief, may offer one explanation for the enormous success on the part of Chinese Americans, and their growing impact on the U.S. culture and economy. It has also earned them and other Asians the label as a "Model Minority." Flattering and discomforting at the same time, this stereotype obscures the wide diversity of circumstances among Chinese Americans — from the educational elite which disproportionately populates America's top universities to the sweatshop laborers in America's Chinatowns, too busy to learn English much less help their children to prepare for school. The image of the Chinese in America has fluctuated through the nation's history, right up to the present. One constant, however, has been their identification as "foreign." Michelle Ling, born in St. Louis, constantly battles the perception that she is an outsider. She tells Moyers, "I am an American, but I have to become an American to everybody else all the time." He asks her why that is, and she responds candidly, "I don't know. You tell me, you're the white guy!"   Bill Moyer's 'Becoming American: The Chinese Exeperience'

"Between Two Worlds"

The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882. Photo Credit: British Columbia Archives Chinese immigrants banded together in "Chinatowns" in many American cities. Photo Credit: Library of Congress Chinese women and children wait at the Angel Island Immigration Station. Photo Credit: California Historical Society

Program Two: "Between Two Worlds" The 1882 Exclusion Act prohibited Chinese laborers from entering the country and becoming citizens. It also ushered in the most violent decade in Chinese-American history, with assault, arson and murder becoming ever-present dangers for a people marginalized in the eyes of the law. Part Two of BECOMING AMERICAN: The Chinese Experience tells the story of these hostile years when Chinese Americans existed in a kind of limbo, denied the rights of their new country and no longer at home in their former one. They found refuge in Chinatowns, insular worlds that provided a sense of security and the companionship of kinsmen. But as few Chinese women were able to immigrate due to both Chinese custom and U.S. law, the majority of Chinese men could not establish families here. As age, disease and death claimed the earlier immigrants, the number of Chinese declined dramatically almost to the point of vanishing from American life. But those here clung to American life and values, and fought for their rights using the only tools of democracy available to them: the courts. Recognizing that the Constitution offered protection to all people in America, not merely its citizens, the Chinese boldly filed over 10,000 lawsuits challenging laws and practices designed to harass and oppress them. When Wong Kim Ark, a 22-year-old cook born in San Francisco, sued to be considered a citizen, it was a decisive victory against discriminatory legislation. Moyers says, "It took the Supreme Court to remind the government that the words of the 14th Amendment meant just what they said. A person born in America was American." The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent conflagration burned most of the immigration records and provided a crack in the wall of exclusion that the Chinese could use to bring others from China into America. With no records available, the Chinese already living in the U.S. could claim to have been born here, making themselves citizens. As such, they were entitled to bring their children from China. Many Chinese Americans engaged in an elaborate deceit through a widespread practice of claiming "paper sons." The Chinese immigrant would claim to be the father of a young person still in China and provide the paperwork for their "child" to immigrate. But to be permitted entry to the United States, Chinese immigrants crossing the Pacific to San Francisco had to pass through the gauntlet of Angel Island. Unlike Ellis Island in New York, which rapidly processed primarily European immigrants, the U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island in San Francisco Bay frequently detained Chinese immigrants for long stretches of time. They were subjected to aggressive questioning about the details of their village in China, the daily habits of their family life, important occasions in their family history and other personal information to determine if they were, in fact, the relative they claimed to be or just a "paper son." Ark Chin recalls, "I was ten years old, and so to be brought into a room for interrogation and you see this big Lo Fan — you know, the devil so to speak — it was kind of overpowering." Thousands were detained for months in a purgatory of isolation and suspense, and for some the fruitless wait ended with a return journey to China. Despite the odds against them, Chinese still struggled to get to America, attracted by the same hopes of economic opportunity that drew all of America's immigrants. Here they found a culture often at odds with the traditional values of China. New tensions developed within Chinese immigrant families as exposure to American freedoms and attitudes inspired the women and young people to defy the patriarchal culture of their homeland. For many, the struggle to become American played out within their homes. Jade Snow Wong remembers telling her father that she had decided to go out on her first date despite his pronouncement that it was forbidden. "He was really angry because it was the first time I had talked back to him," she says. "Nevertheless, I went out, and it was my sort of declaration of independence." Bill Moyer's special Becoming American: The Chinese Experience

"Gold Mountain Dreams"

As civil war and famine ravaged Southern China in the mid-19th century, word of the California Gold Rush reached the port of Canton. The prospect of making a fortune in America proved an irresistible lure to young Chinese men. Looking more for a new livelihood than a new homeland, they set sail across the Pacific hoping that hard work and sacrifice would enable them to provide a better life for their families and to return one day to their villages, prosperous and esteemed.

On the American frontier, fraught with opportunity and danger, the Chinese contended not just with the racism of 19th century America, but also with the pull of their own traditional culture. Living as bachelors, the bonds of family strained by distance and the cost of returning often out of reach, Chinese men carved out their own society. Series Producer Thomas Lennon, who has explored America's historical struggle with race and ethnicity in a number of his prior productions, recognizes the ambivalence about becoming American that many Chinese immigrants carried with them. He says, "So much American ethnic history is told as a sentimental romance. Or a litany of the wrongs done to a people. We were determined to tell this story from the inside out: why the Chinese first came, the excruciating human dilemmas they faced once here and the tug-of-war between the old world and the new."

In Part One, BECOMING AMERICAN: The Chinese Experience illuminates their all-too-forgotten role in settling the West and building the western leg of the Transcontinental Railroad, perhaps the greatest engineering feat of the 19th century. In Western cities and frontier settlements as far away as Idaho and Oregon, Chinese men also saw opportunity in the economic activities undesirable to white men. Setting up makeshift restaurants to sell hot cooked food, taking care of children, and doing laundry — all services that were traditionally considered women's work - these occupations would create a stereotype of the Chinese as servile that would persist long into the future. For the more limited number of Chinese women in America in the last decades of the 19th century, both the new country and their native culture offered few options and little hope. Even after the Civil War, most of the Chinese women in the U.S. were brought here as virtual slaves to work in brothels and saloons catering to the bachelor communities of Chinese men. For them, it was a cruel life of subjugation — prisoners of their gender, poverty and lack of status.

When the gold strikes tapped out and hard economic times loomed in California, Chinese immigrants faced a wave of violence, terror and discrimination. Anti-Chinese labor leaders like Denis Kearney, himself an immigrant, rallied Americans against these "almond-eyed lepers." An epidemic of laws and regulations spread through state and local governments aimed at limiting Chinese immigrant rights and economic opportunities. Anti-Chinese fervor ultimately became a presidential campaign issue, and in 1882 the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. This landmark legislation was a turning point in American immigration policy. Chinese-American historian L. Ling-chi Wang points out, "Up until 1882 America was open to everybody who wanted to come. We welcomed everybody. The only people that we excluded by law, at that time, were prostitutes, lepers and morons, and in 1882 we added the Chinese to that list."

Becoming American: The Chinese Experience

Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882

Children of Chinatown, San Francisco

China’s Assertive Behavior

Part One: On “Core Interests”
Michael D. Swaine
(I am deeply indebted to Rachel Odell and Tan Weilu, Carnegie Junior Fellows, for their
invaluable research assistance in the preparation of this article.)

Among both casual observers and experts alike, the single most dominant
theme in Sino-U.S. relations of the past year or more has been the
emergence of a more “assertive China.” In CLM 32, we examined how both Chinese and outside observers look at China’s growing assertiveness on the international stage, that is, the purely perceptual dimensions of the issue. In this and several subsequent CLMs, we intend to assess whether, to what extent, and in what manner, the Chinese government is becoming
more assertive in several major areas of relevance to the United States: First, in defining and promoting the concept of “core interests”; second, with regard to U.S. political and military behavior along China’s maritime periphery; third, concerning a variety of economic, trade, and finance issues, from so-called indigenous innovation to global standards regarding reserve currencies; and fourth, with regard to several issues related to international security, from counter-proliferation to climate change. In each of these four areas, we shall to varying degrees attempt to answer several basic questions regarding Chinese assertiveness that build on those addressed in CLM 32: In what ways are Chinese leaders becoming more assertive, employing what methods, and to what apparent ends? Is Chinese assertiveness a “new” and highly significant
phenomenon for U.S. interests, and if so, in what manner? What misconceptions, if any, exist about China’s assertiveness? What internal and external forces are driving China’s assertive behavior? In particular, is Chinese assertiveness associated with particular interest groups or factions within Chinese state and society? How is China’s assertiveness evolving in response to both inside and outside pressures? And finally, what do the answers to the foregoing questions tell us about the likely future direction and strength of China’s assertiveness over the next several years?

Read more at Hoover Institute

What Kind of Assertive Behavior?

As indicated in CLM 32, China’s assertiveness means different things to different people.As a result, the concept, in describing Chinese behavior, is somewhat vague and
ambiguous, potentially encompassing everything from attempts to play a more active role Swaine, China Leadership Monitor in a wide variety of international regimes, to deliberate efforts to alter basic international norms and challenge the fundamental national interests or policies of the United States. In addition, there are many forms of assertiveness, from mere verbal statements orcomments, to concerted official actions that appear designed to intimidate or even toforce other nations or foreign entities to change their behavior. As this typology suggests,some forms of Chinese assertiveness are probably beneficial to the workings of the international system and U.S. interests while others are not. Indeed, U.S. officials welcome a more active, engaged China that seeks both to strengthen and to shape international institutions and norms in ways that advance prosperity, stability, and the peaceful resolution of problems. They presumably do not welcome a China that desires or appears to do otherwise

In addition, not all indications of Chinese assertiveness (whether “good” or “bad” for the United States and other Western powers) are sanctioned or supported by the Chinese government. Indeed, as we have seen in CLM 32, many unofficial Chinese observers and pundits express or advocate various levels and types of assertiveness that are not reflected in official Chinese statements or documents.

Thus, any assessment of Chinese assertiveness must distinguish between official and
unofficial actions or utterances, productive or creative assertiveness (what one might call“positive activism”) and confrontational, destabilizing, or threatening (from a Western orU.S. perspective) assertiveness. This essay, and those that follow, focuses primarily on identifying, measuring, and assessing official or governmental forms of negative or>potentially threatening Chinese assertiveness, given its clear significance for future Sino-American relations and the obvious attention that it has received among outside observers.

Read more at Hoover  Institute.

This is China

China's dirty secrets

Look at the Cross and pray for an end to capital punishment

The deed has been done. The death dealing chemical was injected and three human beings had their lives ended. Last Wednesday, March 30, three Filipinos were put to death in China by lethal injection. Amnesty International says that there may be thousands executed in China: the real figure is unknown due to strict secrecy. Iran and Saudi Arabia also execute minors. Eighteen countries executed people in 2009. Despite a United Nations call for a moratorium on the death penalty. The methods of execution can be beheading, stoning, hanging, electrocution, shooting and lethal injection. Twenty thousand more are on death row around the world.
 
The Filipinos executed in China were found guilty of separate crimes for trafficking heroin into China. They were drug couriers hired by syndicates and sent to their death. The Philippine government asked for a stay of execution over a month ago, it was granted but only for a short period. The Philippine government has little leverage with China, the Asian giant. It is scorned in China, and seen as corrupt, disorganized and incompetent, especially after eight innocent Chinese tourists were killed in a botched rescue attempt when they were held hostage on a bus in Manila by a fired policeman seeking reinstatement.

Read more at Spero News

Fossil Is Best Look Yet at an Ancestor of Buttercups

ScienceDaily (Mar. 31, 2011) — Scientists from the United States and China have discovered the first intact fossil of a mature eudicot, a type of flowering plant whose membership includes buttercups, apple trees, maple trees, dandelions and proteas. The 125 million-year-old find, described in the journal Nature, reveals a remarkably developed species, leading the scientists to argue for an earlier origin of the eudicots -- and perhaps flowering plants in general.

"This fossil opens up a new way of thinking about the evolution of some of the first flowering plants," said Indiana University Bloomington biologist David Dilcher, the Nature paper's American coauthor. "We are also beginning to understand that the explosive radiation of all flowering plants about 111 million years ago has had a long history that began with the slower diversification of many families of eudicots over 10, perhaps 15 million years earlier."

Dilcher and his Chinese colleagues Ge Sun and Hongshan Wang (Shenyang Normal University) and Zhiduan Chen (Chinese Academy of Sciences) named the fossilized plant Leefructus mirus in honor of Li Shiming, a non-scientist who donated the fossil to Ge Sun's new museum of paleontology in Liaoning Province, China. Ge Sun was the project's principal investigator.

The fossil shows the above-ground portion of a mature plant. A single stem leads to five leaves, and one leads to a fully developed flower. The entire fossil is about 16 cm (6.3 in) tall. Leaves are innervated by branching veins, and the small, cup-shaped flower has five petals.

"I think Leefructus had attractive flowers to advertise for pollinators to visit," said Dilcher, when asked to speculate. "There were no bees at this time, so I think that flies, beetles or extinct types of moths or scorpion flies may have been involved in its pollination. Leefructus was found in the volcanic ash beds of an ancient lake. I think it was living near a lake, perhaps in a wet or marshy area much as buttercups do today."

Read more and view photos at Science Daily

China sheds light on new solar plans after Japanese nuclear disaster

China will ramp up its deployment of solar power and cut its power capacity target for nuclear power by 2020 in the wake of the nuclear crisis in Japan, according to the country’s National Development and Reform Commission.

The country’s previous goal was to create nuclear plants capable of producing 80 gigawatts of electricity by 2020 and enough solar power and wind power farms to generate 20 gigawatts of electricity. The new plan involves reducing the power target for nuclear power and increasing the amount of power produced by renewable energy sources like solar and wind power — though there wasn’t a specific wattage target. To put things in perspective, Chinese households consumed about 4.2 million gigawatt-hours in 2010.

Solar power farms use flat photovoltaic panels that absorb sunlight and convert it to electricity. Typical wafer-style solar panels can capture around 30 percent of the sunlight shining on them and convert it into electricity. Flexible, thin-film photovoltaic cells that can be placed on most surfaces can only capture 15 – 20 percent of the sunlight shining on them. One photovoltaic cell typically generates around a watt of power. Solar panels that are seen throughout the world are large collections of photovoltaic cells, usually around 6 inches across each.

Read more at Green Beat

Google Losing Ground in China

BEIJING—A year after Google Inc. moved its search services out of China, the Internet giant is struggling to maintain traction on a range of businesses in the country despite its executives' desire to keep growing in the wake of a feud with the Chinese government.

Bloomberg News

Baidu and Google websites display a map of Beijing.

BEIJING—A year after Google Inc. moved its search services out of China, the Internet giant is struggling to maintain traction on a range of businesses in the country despite its executives' desire to keep growing in the wake of a feud with the Chinese government.

BEIJING—A year after Google Inc. moved its search services out of China, the Internet giant is struggling to maintain traction on a range of businesses in the country despite its executives' desire to keep growing in the wake of a feud with the Chinese government.

Chinese online media company Sina Corp. said this week that it dropped Google's Web search service from its popular portal site, marking an end to one of its most important remaining partnerships in the market.

At the same time, Google's Gmail free email service has become difficult to use in China; the company blames stepped up efforts by censors to disrupt Gmail access.

Meanwhile, new regulations to tighten oversight of online map providers make the future of Google's map service in China unclear. On Thursday—the deadline for applying for new online mapping licenses—Google said it was in discussions with the government on how it can continue operating the service. It wouldn't comment on the likely outcome of those talks.

The developments are the latest signs that significant parts of Google's business in China, home to more than 450 million Internet users, have been unraveling since last March. It was then that Google replaced its self-censored China search service with an unfiltered version based in Hong Kong, citing censorship and cyberattacks that the company said were traced to Chinese hackers.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704530204576234693138486996.html#ixzz1ICmv5Oqc

Chinese online media company Sina Corp. said this week that it dropped Google's Web search service from its popular portal site, marking an end to one of its most important remaining partnerships in the markeAt the same time, Google's Gmail free email service has become difficult to use in China; the company blames stepped up efforts by censors to disrupt Gmail acceMeanwhile, new regulations to tighten oversight of online map providers make the future of Google's map service in China unclear. On Thursday—the deadline for applying for new online mapping licenses—Google said it was in discussions with the government on how it can continue operating the service. It wouldn't comment on the likely outcome of those talks.

China 'Jasmine Revolution' Crackdown Nabs Over 20 Dissidents And Human Rights Advocates

More than 20 people have been detained and others are missing in what has been called the most severe crackdown on Chinese dissidents and activists in over a decade.

As the Guardian is reporting, at least 23 people have been detained, mostly in relation to charges of incitement to subversion or creating a disturbance following anonymous calls for a "Jasmine Revolution." In addition, three others have been formally arrested; and a dozen people are missing.

Several well-known Chinese figures, including law professor Teng Biao and human rights lawyers Tang Jitian and Jiang Tianyong, all disappeared around Feb. 16-19, Reuters reports. Another lawyer, Liu Shihui, was savagely beaten before being taken into custody, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read more at The Huffington Post

The Universality of Incest

Like India, China has only recently emerged from the infanticidal mode of childrearing, but reliable research on childhood sexuality is somewhat more limited than for India. Although parents traditionally sleep with their children until they are adolescents,(131) exactly what happens in Chinese family beds has not yet been much investigated, although some observers have reported that Chinese girls, like Indian, have no trace of a hymen, supposedly because caretakers "clean the sexual organs of the little children during daily washings... so scrupulously..."(132)

Like so many early civilizations, ancient China institutionalized pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys so they could be used sexually as eunuchs, the marriage of young brides with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves.(133) Under the popular ancient sim pua system of marriage, parents would adopt a girl during infancy, bring her up as a sister to their son and then force them into a marriage that must be considered as incestuous in every way except genetically. Alternatively, they could adopt a son to marry his sister.(135) Sexual use of adopted girls was said to be common.(135) Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households for sexual use - if volunteered as a eunuch, the parents would have their boys' genitals cut off, which the parents carried with them in a jar.(136) In some areas, male marriage to boys was so popular that there are records of sacrifices to patron deities of pederasty.(137)

As was also common in other early civilizations, extreme maternal symbiosis caused the Chinese to believe that women were so powerful that they depleted men of their strength by taking their semen during intercourse. The Chinese thought women ejaculated a life force (yin) during sex, which a man could absorb and gain strength from, if he could withhold ejaculation himself. Manuals were written describing methods whereby the man could hold back his semen, terminating intercourse - called "the battle" - by inhaling the breath and sucking the saliva of the woman - who is called "the enemy.(138) During adolescence, youths were instructed to have intercourse with young girls who have "undeveloped breasts," but to practice "moderation" by withholding their semen.'(139) Rulers had more life force because they absorbed more of it from their many wives and concubines. Whether this led them to believe that men could absorb the life force from their children through intercourse is not immediately apparent, although this might be indicated by the widespread practice of buying (under the rubric of "adoption") children in infancy under the popular mui tsai system - children who were then used by their "adoptive" parents both as domestic slaves and as sexual objects.(140) Boys, too, were often adopted for sexual use, and had their feet bound like girls-bound feet being considered sexually arousing.(141)

Foot binding was a unique Chinese sexual mutilation practice that was performed on girls of all classes. Like other fetishists, the Chinese were so afraid of the vagina as a dangerous, castrating organ that they could only feel erotic toward the woman's foot - mainly her big toe. As a Cheng Kuan-ying described foot binding in the nineteenth century: "When a child is four or five, or seven or eight, parents speak harshly to it, and frighten it with their looks, and oppress it in every conceivable manner so that the bones of its feet may be broken and its flesh may putrefy."(142) The girl undergoes this extremely painful process for from five to ten years, crying out in pain each night as she hobbles about the house to do her tasks while holding on to the walls for support.(143) As the bones became broken and the flesh deteriorated, her foot became a perfect penis - substitute, often losing several toes as they were bent under her foot in order to emphasize the big toe sticking out.

The penis-toe then became the focus of the man's perversion and of his sexual excitement during intercourse. "It formed an essential prelude to the sex act, and its manipulation excited and stimulated... The ways of grasping the foot in one's palms were both profuse and varied; ascending the heights of ecstasy, the lover transferred the foot from palm to mouth. Play included kissing, sucking, and inserting the foot in the mouth until it filled both cheeks, either nibbling at it or chewing it vigorously, and adoringly placing it against one's cheeks, chest, knees, or virile member.(144) Thus even sex with a female could simulate homosexual intercourse for Chinese males.

Although Chinese literature has many descriptions of the screams of girls whose feet are being crushed,(145) the sources are silent as to whether the little girl herself fully understood the sexual purpose of her mutila-tion. Since she shared the family bed with her parents and presumably observed her father playing sexually with her mother's penis - foot, it is likely that the sexual aim of her painful mutilation was apparent to her.

Read much more at The Journal of Psychohistory

The History of Child Abuse

The Journal of Psychohistory

Psychohistory, the science of historical motivations, combines the insights of psychotherapy with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. The center of psychohistorical research around the globe is The Institute for Psychohistory, which is headquartered in New York City and has 18 branches in other countries. The Institute is chartered by the State of New York as a not-for-profit educational corporation, the Association for Psychohistory, Inc., and for the past 40 years has published The Journal of Psychohistory, various books by The Psychohistory Press, and has been affiliated with the International Psychohistorical Association, which holds an annual convention. Its director is Lloyd deMause, whose work (see below for full texts) is used in most college courses in psychohistory. This website contains extensive material reproduced from The Journal of Psychohistory and from deMause's books: Foundations of Psychohistory, Reagan's America, The Emotional Life of Nations and The Origins of War in Child Abuse. It also contains addresses of Institute branches and links to the International Psychohistorical Association and other websites and discussion lists.

by Lloyd deMause

Childhood in China has historically had the same institutionalized rape rituals as in India, including the pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of boys to be used sexually as eunuchs, marriage of young girls to a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual use of child servants and slaves. So prevalent was the rape of little girls that Western doctors found that, as in India, few girls entering puberty had intact hymens. Even the universal practice of foot binding was for sexual purposes, with a girl undergoing extremely painful crushing of the bones of her feet for years in order that men could make love to her big toe as a fetish, a penis-substitute.

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The crucial relationship in this evolution is the mother-daughter relationship. If little girls are treated particularly badly, they grow up to be mothers who cannot rework their traumas, and history is frozen. For instance, although China was ahead of the West in most ways during the pre-Christian era, it became "frozen" and fell far behind the West in evolutionary social and technological change after it adopted the practice of footbinding girls. Similarly, the cliterodectomy of girls in Moslem societies has inhibited their social development for centuries, since it likewise puts a brake on the ability of the next generation of mothers to make progress in caring for their children. Clearly, different groups have moved different distances up the ladder of psychological evolution, since some contemporary groups still practice brain-eating as our Paleolithic ancestors did, and different subgroups of our more advanced nations still terrorize and abuse their children in ways identical to those that were commonplace centuries ago, producing the "historical fossils" (early "psychoclasses") we now call borderline personalities and other severe character disorders. Your neighbor is as likely to be a result of medieval parenting as of modern parenting, so modern societies contain a full range of childrearing modes and psychoclasses. The "generational pressure" for psychological change is not only an independent historical force--originating in inborn adult-child striving for relationship--it occurs independent of social and technological change, and can be found even in periods of economic stagnation. My "psychogenic theory of history" posits that a society's childrearing practices are not just one item in a list of cultural traits, but--because all other traits must be passed down from generation to generation through the narrow funnel of childhood--instead makes childrearing the very basis for the transmission and development of all other cultural traits, placing definite limits on what can be achieved in the material spheres of history. The main source of childhood evolution is, I believe, the process I call psychogenesis, by which parents--mainly the mother for most of history--revisit a second time around the stages of childhood and undo to some extent the traumas they themselves endured. It is in this sense that history is like a psychotherapy of the generations, undoing trauma and giving historical personality a chance at a new start with every baby born. Only humans have brain networks that allow this miracle to take place. All cultural changes in the past 100,000 years of Homo sapiens sapiens are epigenetic, not genetic. Regardless of changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur that epigenetic changes in the brain can occur and societies can begin to progress and move in unpredictable new directions that are more adaptive. That more individuated and loving individuals are ultimately more adaptive is understandable--because they are less under the pressures of infantile traumas and are therefore more rational in reaching their goals. But that this childhood evolution--and therefore all social evolution--is terribly uneven is also understandable, given the varying conditions under which parents all over the world have to conduct their childrearing tasks

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That periodic sacrifices are in fact lawful is suggested by the regularity with which they occur, nearly every state producing a major war on the average of about every 25 years throughout the past two millennia. In between wars, periodic economic sacrifices serve to relieve our guilt for too much prosperity and to cleanse us of our dangerous economic and social progress. Depth psychology has shown that in individuals progress toward individuation and success often produces regression, including both fears of leaving mommy and wishes for maternal re-engulfment, along with fears of losing one's self. In nations, the same thing occurs after periods of rapid change and prosperity, and is defended against by the sacrificial ritual called war.

Read more at The Journal of Psychohistory

How China Won and Russia Lost

Two dissimilar economic paths

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it. The timing is significant for our story. The peasants took action one month before the “reform” congress of the party was announced. Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages. One farmer said, “When one family’s chicken catches the pest, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.”

Ten years later, in August of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev lifted his nation’s 50-year-old prohibition against private farming, offering 50-year leases to farm families who would subsequently work off of contracts with the state. Few accepted the offer; Russian farmers were too accustomed to the dreary but steady life on the state or collective farm. Thus began reform of agriculture in Soviet Russia.

The results in each country could not have been more different. Chronically depressed Chinese agriculture began to blossom, not only for grain but for all crops. As farmers brought their crops to the city by bicycle or bus, long food lines began to dwindle and then disappear. The state grocery monopoly ended in less than one year. Soviet Russian agriculture continued to stagnate despite massive state subsidies. Citizens of a superpower again had to bear the indignity of sugar rations.

As farmers brought their crops to the city by bicycle or bus, long food lines began to dwindle and then disappear.

These two examples point to the proper narrative of reform in Gorbachev’s Russia and Deng Xiaoping’s China. Our narrative contradicts much received doctrine. The standard account is that China succeeded because a wise party leadership deliberately chose gradualism, retained the monopoly of the Communist Party after rebuffing democracy at Tiananmen Square, and carefully guided the process over the years. The narrative says that Russia failed because the tempestuous Gorbachev ignored the Chinese reform model, moved too quickly, and allowed the party monopoly to fall apart. This standard account is incorrect. Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, contrary to popular legend, did not agree on a reform program at the Third Plenum of the Eighth Party Congress in 1978, which installed him in power. A Chinese reform official by the name of Bao Tong later admitted as much: “In fact, reform wasn’t discussed. Reform wasn’t listed on the agenda, nor was it mentioned in the work reports.”¹

Throughout the reform process, the Chinese Communist Party simply reacted to (and wisely did not oppose) bottom-up reform initiatives that emanated largely from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of Chinese reform as “fording the river by feeling for the stones” is not incorrect, but it was the Chinese people who placed the stones under his feet.

Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of his party in March of 1985. By that time, he knew that the Chinese reforms were successful. His reforms, contrary to the popular narrative, closely mimicked China’s. He proposed to lease land to peasants, establish free trade zones, promote small cooperative businesses, and set up joint ventures. The difference was that Gorbachev imposed these changes from above, on an urban economy in which virtually all citizens worked for the state. Gorbachev’s reforms either were ignored or they were enacted with perverse consequences. Bottom-up reforms worked in China; top-down reforms failed in Russia.

Both countries began serious reform after the passing of a leader (or leadership) that abhorred reform. Deng Xiaoping and his allies succeeded Mao in 1978 after a brief power struggle with hardliners. Gorbachev succeeded the initial beneficiaries of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, who rose quickly as young men to replace those who were executed. The forgettable Konstantin Chernenko was the last in line; there was no choice but to turn to a relative newcomer when he died. For Gorbachev, the horrors of the Stalin era were in the distant past. For Deng Xiaoping and his supporters, the excesses of Mao — the starvation of the Great Leap and the “reeducations” of the Cultural Revolution — were recent and personal experiences. Whereas Stalin had physically annihilated independent-minded party officials, Mao permitted them to survive, subsequently to take over after he was gone. Gorbachev worked his way up the party ladder as a typical apparatchik; although touted as a reformer, he had few reform ideas. His Politburo and Central Committee comrades had no real stomach for reform. Deng Xiaoping also had not worked out a reform program, but he knew enough not to oppose reforms that work (“I don’t care if it is a black or yellow cat as long as it catches mice”).

Real reforms, whether dictated from the top or bubbling up from below, require a reform constituency. In the Chinese case, a large percentage of the population was recovering from the catastrophes of the Mao years. Rural dwellers, in particular, had witnessed the chaos of the Great Leap and had seen their parents and children die from starvation during the 1958–61 famine. They learned they had to take care of themselves. The urban elite had been ripped from the cities to a life of work and reeducation in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and a whole generation had been deprived of schooling. In the Russian case, the last famine lay three decades in the past. After the war, few people were executed for political crimes (political dissent became instead a mental disorder); the Gulag had been gradually dismantled after Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956. All lived under the motto, “We pretend to work and you pretend to pay.”² Surveys show that Russians were basically content with the system, comfortable in the bosom of their state enterprise or state farm.³ China had a reform constituency; Russia did not. Gorbachev had few reform-minded aides. He listened to the bad advice of his economists. He was opposed by an entrenched bureaucracy but supported by enterprise managers eager to cash in on ill-conceived reform.

Read more at Hoover Institution Stanford University

 

LloydDeMause - The Institute for Psychohistory