REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Late Chinese leader Mao Zedong's second son dies

 

MAO ANQING, the second son of late Chinese leader Mao Zedong, died Friday (Mar 23) in Beijing at the age of 84.

A mourning hall for Mao Anqing was set up in Beijing's Western Hill service center.

Mao Anqing, born in 1923 in Central China's Hunan Province, was the only son of Mao Zedong to bear offspring. Unfortunately, he suffered from mental problems all his life after being beaten by Kuomintang soldiers on a Shanghai street in the early 1930s.

There were few things Mao Anqing could recall about his brief happy childhood spent with his father. Once, he broke a porcelain cup carelessly. Instead of reprimanding him, Mao Zedong explained to him with patience how a cup was produced. "Father tried to teach me to treasure things because everything is created with other people's efforts," he reminisced. Another time, when Anqing was playing with a piece of broken glass, Mao Zedong stopped a nanny who was about to restrain the boy. "It's not a big deal. If he really got hurt by the glass, he would learn a lesson and keep away next time," the father said.

Since early childhood, Mao Anqing led a tough life.

He was sent to Shanghai together with his elder brother Mao Anying and younger brother Mao Anlong after their mother Yang Kaihui was killed in October 1930 by a rival warlord.

Mao Zemin, his uncle who lived in Shanghai then, sent the three children to Datong Kindergarten, which was sponsored by a Communist Party institution. In April 1931, the brothers were sent to live with a communist named Dong Jianwu after the kindergarten was closed when the Communist Party of China (CPC) suffered a major setback in Shanghai. When Dong was forced to leave for Wuhan soon after, the Mao brothers had to lead a vagrant life. After Anlong died of disease (many say he went missing.) Mao Anqing and his elder brother had served as apprentices at a bakery, sold newspapers, collected garbage and helped push rickshaws.

In 1936, CPC members in Shanghai found the two boys.

Dong Jianwu, a good friend of Kuomintang official Zhang Xueliang, asked for Zhang's help to draw up plans for the Mao brothers during a meeting with him early 1936.

Zhang agreed. He sent his old subordinate Li Du to escort the two children, together with Dong's son, to Russia by way of France. Zhang also provided 100,000 francs (US$14,000) for the trip. Li arrived with his "three sons" in Marseille in August 1936.

Late Chinese Leader Mao Zedong (M), his son Mao Anqing (R) and his daugther in law (L)

Yang Kaihui, Mao Zedong's first wife, her son Mao Anying (R) and Mao Anqing

Mao Anqing (Front), his wife Shao Hua (1st from Right), his son Mao Xinyu (2nd from left)

Read more at NEWSDGD    

The Party and China’s ‘Five Religions’ in Two-Man Comedy Skit

Followers of China's five state-approved religions, in an unprecedented display of solidarity, appeared on stage together to sing red Party songs ahead of the officially atheist Chinese communist regime's 90th anniversary on July 1, 2011. (Weibo.com)

The U.S. State Department issued its Annual Report on International Religious Freedom on Sept. 13, and once again pointed out that the Chinese Communist authorities seriously violate religious freedom. In response, the secretary generals of the five [state approved] religions in China jointly issued a statement, “demanding that the U.S. stop the use of religion to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”

When I read the report on people.com on Sept. 16, I could not help but feel humored. When the U.S. government criticizes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the majority of religious believers in China stand to benefit. However, the five religious heads did not show the slightest appreciation, but rather banded together to defend the CCP. It makes one ponder the true identities of these so-called religious figureheads.

I would definitely have taken their statement as having come directly from the CCP’s propaganda department, if it had not clearly said that it was a joint statement by the five religions. The statement is full of Communist Party jargon, such as “arbitrarily distorting” (the facts), and “the Chinese government firmly carries out religious freedom,” and so on.

Jiang Yu, the spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, can take this statement straight to the reporters; she doesn’t have to change a single word.

The five religions in China—Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and protestant Christianity—have rarely had anything to do with each other. They don’t even recognize one another. But under the CCP’s regime they suddenly become “united” in support of the CCP, jointly publishing a statement and even singing “red songs” together on stage.

Maybe one day the portraits of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Deng, and Jiang Zemin will hang in Buddhist and Taoist temples and in churches—who knows?

If what the statement says is true, we can only draw one conclusion: all is well with religious freedom in China!

But is it? Is the Catholic archbishop appointed by the CCP recognized by the Pope? Does the CCP dare to admit its suppression of China’s Christian house churches?

Arrests and persecution of Tibetan Buddhist monks have long been known to the world. Confronted by inquiries [regarding the persecution] of Falun Gong practitioners, dare any of the CCP officials publicly respond to the international community?

China once created a splendid culture due, in part, to the influence of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. It was because of these religions that Chinese people’s moral standard maintained a high level throughout their long history.

However, when the CCP seized power, it burned scriptures, destroyed temples and churches, and smashed Buddha statues. It destroyed religions by all means. Later, to keep up appearances in the eyes of the international community, it raised up many religious figures who showed loyalty to the CCP.

One such example is Shi Yongxin, the abbot of Shaolin Temple. Who would think of him as a sincere monk? The swimsuit catwalk in front of Shaolin Temple is definitely another wonder of the world.

After reading the statement by the heads of the five religions on people.com, another article about Jia Qinglin, the fourth ranking member of the CCP, caught my attention. Jia sent a congratulatory message to the Chinese Islamic Association for holding the 9th National Conference.

I would like to quote a couple of passages from that article: “Jia Qinglin hoped that the new leadership of the Islamic Association of China can learn in depth, and carry out thoroughly, the spirit of the important speech that comrade Hu Jintao made on July 1, and insist on the CCP’s basic policy on religious work ... Continue to vigorously carry forward the glorious tradition of patriotism and faith loving. Firmly and unswervingly support the leadership of the CCP.”

What should one be thinking after reading these passages?

Read the original Chinese article.

chinareports@epochtimes.com

On Tiger Mothers and Music Moms

by Grace Wang

The almost instantaneous uproar elicited by Amy Chua’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” and her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was, in many ways, unsurprising. With her brash and unapologetic claims about the reasons for Chinese success, Chua touched upon several interlocking anxieties: waning US hegemony, growing Chinese dominance, and proper forms of parenting in an era of global competition. As the symbolic embodiment of these fears, Chua evoked a tiger on the loose -- the threat of danger and difference run amok without proper management, domestication, and punishment. Parenting blogs reviled her mothering style as child abuse, pathologized the (narrowly defined) success achieved by Asian American kids as the product of excessive discipline and rote practice, and extolled the virtue of balance, sleepovers, and play. In the thousands of comments generated in response to Chua’s op-ed, a panoply of responses emerged: critiques of the author’s reliance on tired cultural stereotypes, racist generalizations about the authoritarian regime of China (where Chua, as some readers suggested, implicitly belongs), sweeping comparisons between Chinese roboticism and American ingenuity, praise of “tiger” parenting for producing impressive results, and tales of harm suffered as a result of such despotic forms of parenting. Statistics emerged about the high suicide rates among Asian American women. Comparisons formed with other types of “ethnic” parenting. Doubts crept in about the legitimacy of Chua’s Chineseness, given her twice-removed status as the US offspring of ethnic Chinese parents raised in the Philippines. Dispatches arrived from “real” Chinese mothers in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong variously refuting and authenticating Chua’s claims. And in the fray of this media frenzy came a personal rebuttal in the New York Post, penned by Chua’s daughter herself, defending her mother against charges of tyranny, child abuse, and the withholding of love.

In many of these debates, the Chinese immigrant mother became a shadowy figure upon whom to project suspicions and desires, a function that she similarly holds in Chua’s own memoir. Indeed, a haunting presence crowds the pages of Chua’s brash memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother -- the immigrant generation of Chinese parents whose purported ability to enforce discipline and obedience in their children puts even the author’s own stringent parenting tactics to shame. Chua apes these “true” tiger mothers. She aspires to reproduce their toughness, their “motivational” insults, their strictness and exacting expectations. And yet, a challenge still remains. As a tenured Yale Law School professor (married to the same), the author possesses ample cultural resources and class privilege. How could Chua provide her children with the purported benefits of being “poor immigrant kids” while living in an environment of material comfort and plenty? In her search for an answer, Chua turns to the violin and piano -- the seemingly fetishized objects of desire for Chinese immigrant parents. “Classical music,” as Chua observes, “was the opposite of decline, the opposite of laziness, vulgarity, and spoiledness.” To succeed in a cultural site that requires discipline, hard work, and practice, and one in which Chinese immigrant parents invest tremendous energy and effort, would successfully test Chua’s mettle as a tiger mother. And thus, in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the violin and piano become the sites where battle lines are drawn, where the campaign against “generational decline” is waged, and where the “bitter clash of cultures,” as trumpeted on the book’s hardback cover, clangs most cacophonously. While Chua’s older daughter, Sophia, takes to the piano dutifully and wins music accolades, her younger daughter, Lulu, chafes against the rules, the control, and the hours of practice that gaining mastery over the violin requires. Chua’s “high” stakes struggle with Lulu over the violin fuels the narrative forward, leading her to question -- at least rhetorically -- the efficacy of the “tiger” parenting model for her younger daughter.

Who are these Chinese immigrant parents that Chua so desperately seeks to embody? For the most part, the author offers her own parents as ideal models to emulate. Described through the memories of Chua’s childhood, her parents represent an effective combination of strictness, frugality, self-reliance, and discipline. Attempting to replicate their parenting tactics, Chua calls her daughter “garbage” for disrespecting her, much like her father did to her when the author was a child; “it’s a Chinese immigrant thing,” she explains to her horrified “Western” friends, who note that she is, in actuality, not a Chinese immigrant. Chua glosses over these inconsistencies, much as she does the fact that in the present moment, her parents embody rather diluted versions of tiger parenting. As she observes, “America changes people.” Years of living in the United States have softened these once tough-as-nails immigrants; her parents’ suggestion that she ease up on Lulu’s violin practice makes this abundantly clear. Thus, in her quest against “generational decline,” Chua looks to her parents as envisioned in their early years, in the image she conjures up and calcifies of them as recent Chinese immigrants still hardened by the dislocating experience of immigration and the challenges of living in a new land and with a new language. She bases the Chineseness of her tiger parenting vision on her access to this “insider” knowledge about Chinese immigrants rather than any claimed intimacy with China. Indeed, Chua neither looks to nor expresses longing for a Chinese “motherland,” offering instead rather glib hyperbole that trades on dominant stereotypes about China: “Children in China practice ten hours a day.” Or, “In China, they’d have sent Lulu to a labor camp.” Rather, she romanticizes the difficulties that racialized immigrants face being treated like they do not belong. For, as Chua claims, to feel like “outsiders in America ... is less a burden than a privilege.”

Yet, when Chua finds herself face-to-face with her fetishized immigrant subjects, she feels distance rather than affinity. Waiting with her husband for Lulu to finish her violin audition for Juilliard’s Pre-College division, she sees throngs of other anxious Asian parents. Here, in the company of supposedly likeminded parents, one might imagine Chua feeling right at home. Finally, a crowd of her peers! And yet, what Chua experiences is disidentification, not to mention a sinking suspicion that she does not “have what it takes”:

Read More at HYPHEN

Capital Punishment in China

The world's leading executioner is estimated to kill about as many prisoners in three days as does the U.S., the world's fifth-ranked, in a year

A woman from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou shouts before being taken to be executed / Reuters

Wednesday night's controversial execution in Georgia of Troy Davis has inspired much deliberation and soul-searching on the U.S. retention of the death penalty, which has been abandoned by the majority of the world's nations. One particularly revealing, and often-cited, fact is that the U.S. ranks fifth in the world by number of prisoners executed annually. Fellow top-ten nations include Saudi Arabia, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and North Korea. But what about the world's most frequent executioner, the country that in 2010 put more prisoners to death than the rest of the world combined? What is the state of the death penalty in China?

Research by Amnesty International found that 23 countries used the death penalty in 2010. The U.S., ranked fifth, executed 46 prisoners. Iran, ranked second, executed at least 252. China, according to Amnesty International, executed "thousands." The exact number is a state secret. The Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S.-based human rights non-profit that focuses on China, estimates China kills about 5,000 prisoners annually. In absolute terms, that would be about 14 executions daily, or in three days what the U.S. performs in an entire year. Most executions in China are reportedly carried out by lethal injection or a single gunshot to the head, although, as in the U.S., there does not appear to be a uniform national policy.

The statistics are less unflattering for China when view per capita. China has the largest population on Earth with 1.3 billion people; 5,000 executions would mean one in every 260,000 residents. In the U.S., the rate in 2010 was one in every 6.7 million. Iran and North Korea executed about one in every 300,000 and 460,000, respectively.

Two of the factors apparently contributing to China's frequent use of the death penalty are the troubled court system and a national policy that permits capital punishment for crimes that are not considered capital in most other countries. Corruption, embezzling, drug-related crimes, and even theft on a large enough scale can all get you killed in China. Last month, a Chinese telecommunications executive was sentenced to death for accepting bribes. In March, China sparked a diplomatic incident by executing three Filipino citizens on drug trafficking charges. Other non-violent crimes punished by death have included, for example, 43-year-old Du Yimin, killed in March 2008 after he borrowed $100 million for investment schemes that never panned out.

READ MORE AT THE ATLANTIC

War veteran battles to keep wife in NZ

At age 89, a Kiwi war veteran is fighting a new battle - trying to convince Immigration New Zealand that his marriage to his 56-year-old Chinese bride is genuine.

Unless Bill Wickstead is able to prove that his relationship with Song Yi, whom he married in 2008, is genuine and stable, his wife will be asked to leave the country.

Her first residency application was declined on the grounds that the couple had not proven that they had been having a stable relationship over the previous 12 months.

However, that decision was overturned by the Immigration Protection Tribunal in May because Immigration NZ had not interviewed the couple.

Mr Wickstead thinks the reason the first application was declined was that he had been married to another Chinese woman, whom he divorced in 2007 when that wife refused to migrate to New Zealand.

"At my age, time is really not on my side, and I am really looking for a companion in a wife, not wild sex and romantic love," he said.

"I have fought for this country, put my life on the line to defend it, now all I am hoping is that they give me a chance to have a good final few years of my life, and not force me into a position where I will have to die alone."

Read more at NZHERALD

China's One-Child Policy Toll Reaches 400 Million

Over the years, I have been asked many times to estimate how many lives have been lost in China as a result of the one-child policy. Given that the policy has been in place for 30 years, I respond, and given that each year the government aborts between 10 to 15 million women, the total number of unborn children whose lives have been sacrificed is somewhere between 300 and 450 million. It is impossible to be more precise, I add, because of the Chinese Communist party's penchant for secrecy about such sensitive matters.

Now, thanks to Congressman Tim Huelskamp, a pro-life Kansas Republican, we have shocking confirmation of these numbers from a senior Chinese government official.

During a meeting yesterday with members of the House Budget Committee, Congressman Huelskamp asked Gao Qiang, who served for two years as the Party Secretary for the Ministry of Health of the People's Republic of China, about the country's population control policy.

Through an interpreter, Party Secretary Gao responded that the population of China is 400 million less than it would have been had the Party not adopted and enforced a one-child policy. He went on to say that China had prevented more births than the population of the United States, which currently stands at 312 million.

Read more at Spero News

Pepsi Helps Chinese Farming

Pepsico Inc. (PEP - Analyst Report), the world leading retailer of soft drinks and snacks has inked a deal with China's Ministry of Agriculture to improve farming practices in the nation. The company’s initiative is a step toward boosting its Snacks and Foods Segment by procuring raw materials easily and at affordable rates. 

The retail giant will work with the Chinese government to build ‘demonstration farms’ and promote the best farming practices among China's farmers. The farms will use advanced irrigation, fertilization and crop management techniques and aspire to raise income levels and living standards of farmers throughout the country.

This venture on the part of the company comes as a huge support for China's 12th Five-Year Plan. The government of China has been promoting sustainable agriculture in this new era, for which several policies have also been formulated.

Pepsi is one of the world’s leading agricultural enterprises. Every year Pepsi grows and uses more than 4 million tons of potatoes, 0.6 million tons of oats and 3 million tons of oranges and other fruits and vegetables. The retail giant employs more than 20,000 people in China for its farming activities.

Read more at Zacks

Chinese tobacco firms 'use schools to promote smoking'

A woman smokes a cigarette at a bar in Beijing seen in this October 2008 file photo. More than 100 primary schools in China are sponsored by tobacco companies in a move described by anti-smoking campaigners as hunting for the next generation of smokers.

Photograph by: AFP/Getty Images, Frederic J. Brown

SHANGHAI — More than 100 primary schools in China are sponsored by tobacco companies in a move described by anti-smoking campaigners as hunting for the next generation of smokers.

The schools often have the names of Chinese cigarette brands, such as Zhongnanhai or Liqun, over their gates and in some cases have promotional slogans in the playground.

"Talent comes from hard work - Tobacco helps you become talented," says one slogan, in foot-high gilt letters, on the front of the Sichuan Tobacco Hope Primary School.

The school, which was built by the tobacco company after an earthquake in 2008, also bears the green leaf logo of China Tobacco, the country's powerful state-controlled monopoly.

China Tobacco is the world's largest manufacturer of tobacco products, with more than 900 brands, and is owned by the Chinese government. China is the world's largest tobacco market, with as many as 60 per cent of its men smoking. Regulations to prevent smoking in public places, including schools, have been widely ignored and the World Health Organization estimates that two million Chinese will die each year of smoking-related diseases by the end of the decade.

Read more at Edmonton Journal

ANALYSIS OF THE CLASSES IN CHINESE SOCIETY by Mao Tse-Dung

1926

This article was written by Comrade Mao Tse-tung to combat two deviations then to be found in the Party. The exponents of the first deviation, represented by Chen Tu-hsiu, were concerned only with co-operation with the Kuomintang and forgot about the peasants; this was Right opportunism. The exponents of the second deviation, represented by Chang Kuo-tao, were concerned only with the labour movement, and likewise forgot about the peasants; this was "Left" opportunism. Both were aware that their own strength was inadequate, but neither of them knew where to seek reinforcements or where to obtain allies on a mass scale. Comrade Mao Tse-tung pointed out that the peasantry was the staunchest and numerically the largest ally of the Chinese proletariat, and thus solved the problem of who was the chief ally in the Chinese revolution. Moreover, he saw that the national bourgeoisie was a vacillating class and predicted that it would disintegrate during the upsurge of the revolution, with its right-wing going over to the side of imperialism. This was borne out by the events of 1927.

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution. The basic reason why all previous revolutionary struggles in China achieved so little was their failure to unite with real friends in order to attack real enemies. A revolutionary party is the guide of the masses, and no revolution ever succeeds when the revolutionary party leads them astray. To ensure that we will definitely achieve success in our revolution and will not lead the masses astray, we must pay attention to uniting with our real friends in order to attack our real enemies. To distinguish real friends from real enemies, we must make a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and of their respective attitudes towards the revolution.

What is the condition of each of the classes in Chinese society?

The landlord class and the comprador class.[1] In economically backward and semi-colonial China the landlord class and the comprador class are wholly appendages of the international bourgeoisie, depending upon imperialism for their survival ant growth. These classes represent the most backward and most reactionary relations of production in China and hinder the development of her productive forces. Their existence is utterly incompatible with the aims of the Chinese revolution. The big landlord and big comprador classes in particular always side with imperialism and constitute an extreme counterrevolutionary group. Their political representatives are the Étatistes [2] and the right-wing of the Kuomintang.

The middle bourgeoisie. This class represents the capitalist relations of production in China in town and country. The middle bourgeoisie, by which is meant chiefly the national bourgeoisie, [3] is inconsistent in its attitude towards the Chinese revolution: they feel the need for revolution and favour the revolutionary movement against imperialism and the warlords when they are smarting under the blows of foreign capital and the oppression of the warlords, but they become suspicious of the revolution when they sense that, with the militant participation of the proletariat at home and the active support of the international proletariat abroad, the revolution is threatening the hope of their class to attain the status of a big bourgeoisie. Politically, they stand for the establishment of a state under the rule of a single class, the national bourgeoisie. A self-styled true disciple of Tai Chi-tao [4] wrote in the Chen Pao, [5] Peking, "Raise your left fist to knock down the imperialists and your right to knock down the Communists." These words depict the dilemma and anxiety of this class. It is against interpreting the Kuomintang's Principle of the People's Livelihood according to the theory of class struggle, and it opposes the Kuomintang's alliance with Russia and the admission of Communists [6] and left-wingers. But its attempt to establish a state under the rule of the national bourgeoisie is quite impracticable, because the present world situation is such that the two major forces, revolution and counter-revolution, are locked in final struggle. Each has hoisted a huge banner: one is the red banner of revolution held aloft by the Third International as the rallying point for all the oppressed classes of the world, the other is the white banner of counterrevolution held aloft by the League of Nations as the rallying point for all the counter-revolutionaries of the world. The intermediate classes are bound to disintegrate quickly, some sections turning left to join the revolution, others turning right to join the counter-revolution; there is no room for them to remain "independent". Therefore the idea cherished by China's middle bourgeoisie of an "independent" revolution in which it would play the primary role is a mere illusion.

Read more at Marxists.org

Behind modernity---New luxury stands on history at Shijia Hutong

Photos: Yin Yeping

By the time you enter Shijia Hutong from the west, you are already walking into a site with more than 300 years of history. No. 59, the primary school in Shijia Hutong, was established back in 1724, originally for teaching the children of royal bannermen.

After a few years as a middle school from 1912 to 1939, No. 59 was turned back into a primary school. Rumor holds that the school was originally an ancient temple to famous general and hero Shi Kefa, who led his troops defending against the coming Qing army as the last stronghold for the crumbling Ming Dynasty (1368-1644). But a female staff member from the dean's office said the school's style is more like an old siheyuan. "You could not tell its relation with Shi from its appearance at that time," she said. "After 1986 the whole school was completely razed for new construction, including the siheyuan as the last remains of No.59."

Not far from the school is No. 51, the former residence of Zhang Shizhao (1881-1973), a scholar, writer and politico in recent Chinese history. Zhang had the opportunity to study in Japan and later in the UK, which allowed him to see the messy situation of China more clearly than many Chinese at that time. Later he worked under Sun Yat-sen as the general secretary of the activity for suppressing Yuan Shikai's restoration of Qing fedualism. Yet Zhang is even better known for his friendship with Mao Zedong. During the revolutionary period in 1920, Zhang loaned 20,000 yuan to Mao in his early period for revolutionary use in Mao's hometown in Hunan Province. After 1949, Mao sent part of the royalties from his publishing every year to Zhang in repayment of his loans. Zhang first moved to No. 51 door in 1959 under the arrangement of Premier Zhou Enlai. After he died the house went to his daughter, Zhang Hanzhi, who was Mao's personal English tutor and the wife of Minister of Foreign Affairs Qiao Guanhua. Today the house is owned by Hong Huang, the daughter of Zhang Hanzhi, and is closed to outside visitors.

Read more at China.Org.cn

Full River Red

 

怒发冲冠，凭阑处、潇潇雨歇。
抬望眼，仰天长啸，壮怀激烈。
三十功名尘与土，八千里路云和月。
莫等闲白了少年头，空悲切...

Leaning against the railing,
Watching the rushing rain easing,
My heart is raging.

Tossing my head towards the heaven,
Letting out an anguished wailing,
My blood is boiling.

Thirty years of exploit,
To me, just a pile of dust;
Eight thousand miles of expedition,
I lived rough under clouds and moonlight

With all these, I have no regrets,
For I didn't waste my youth
By doing something meaningless...

Read more at Multiple Texts

Will Chinese shoppers save the world?

As economic growth in the US and Europe has stuttered, the world has looked for a new saviour among China’s consumers.

Trouble is, the share of private consumption in China’s GDP is inordinately low – just about 33 per cent. Moreover it has come down in the past decade or so from about 45 per cent of GDP to 33 per cent today. By contrast, in most economies, including some of China’s East Asian neighbours, private consumption is about 50 per cent of GDP.

Yet luxury goods companies, automakers and many other multinationals have seen larger shares of their sales coming from China in the past couple of years than ever before.

How to reconcile this paradox? Arthur Kroeber, managing director of Gavekal Dragonomics, an economic consultancy, has an explanation. He argues that China’s private consumption has actually accelerated from around 7 per cent in the late 1990s to around 10 per cent a decade later (although growth did slow noticeably in 2010). Kroeber declares that China’s real per capita consumption growth in recent years is “the fastest of any country in history”.

Among the many clouds looming over the world’s economy, it is reassuring to have a ray of sunshine to look ahead to. Kroeber goes further, arguing that China’s very high investment rate of 46 per cent, also the highest in recorded history, may also be a precursor to economic super-stardom rather than the precursor to a crash as several sceptical observers believe it is. The US and Germany ( with investment ratios of more than 20 per cent of GDP when they were industrialising rapidly ) and subsequently Japan and South Korea (more than 30 per cent) also invested more as a percentage of their GDPs than ever seen before, he argues. They then went on to be economic behemoths.

Read more at beyondbrics

Is The Chinese Yuan 300% Undervalued Against The Dollar?

You may have heard many times in popular media that the Yuan is manipulated versus the dollar, and if so you have probably heard the number 40-50% tossed around. But is it possible that the Yuan is dramatically more manipulated than anyone has been led to believe? The chart below shows that the Yuan was trading at a 300% premium to today's price in the early 1980s. So, thinking this through logically, can we say that China is more or less economically powerful today or in the early 1980s?

That should be an easy answer. Obviously China is a much larger economic power than it was back then. It also has a more stable government. So this is evidence that the true market-driven value or exchange rate for the Yuan should probably set the Yuan even more valuable than it was set at in the early 80s. In the early 80s it was set at roughly 2 Yuan per dollar, and it is currently set at over 6 Yuan per dollar. Some would argue that the Yuan should be set to a 1 to 1 ratio with the dollar, or close, just as the Euro is. This theory also helps explain the massive rise in the price of gold: namely the Chinese Yuan is at least 300% undervalued versus the dollar!

(Click chart to expand)


Disclosure: I have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours

 

Seeking Alpha

China invests billions in Canada oil sands

Robert Lee, a lab technician at ConocoPhillips' Surmont oil sands project in Alberta, examines a vial of water and oil sediment. Looking on is Perry Berkenpas, vice president of oil sands operations for ConocoPhillips Canada. (Photo: The Houston Chronicle)

 

FORT McMURRAY, Alberta – As U.S. companies look toward oil riches in northern Canada, they’re encountering increasing competition – as well as some much-needed cash infusions – from the Far East.

U.S. and Canadian companies have dominated Alberta’s oil sands for decades. Now, though, Chinese firms are rushing to snap up Canadian oil sands resources and invest in ongoing projects – to the tune of $15 billion in the past 18 months in Alberta alone.

They are motivated by a desire to jump into one of the world’s lowest-risk oil investments and to quench the exploding energy demands of Asian markets – even though getting the product from Canada to Asia is just a pipe dream now.

The foreign funding can help pay for what research firm IHS CERA estimates will be $100 billion in spending on oil sands projects over the next decade.

And for a growing number of U.S. oil companies, many based in Houston, the infusion of Chinese cash in Canadian projects is welcome funding for some capital-intensive oil sands projects.

“Many of the actual oil companies – no matter where they are from – are very interested in partnering,” said Jackie Forrest, the Calgary, Alberta-based head of oil sands research for IHS CERA. “That can help raise capital and, in some cases, also bring expertise and knowledge to the partnership.”

Read more at  fuelfix

The bawdy politic gets caught in the Web – again

There should be a vaccine developed for every middle-aged married male politician who gets his head turned by someone young and pretty.

Then, instead of say, tweeting pictures of himself at full mast in his underpants, or even, as in the case of Tory MP and Parliamentary Secretary Bob Dechert, sending “innocent” mash notes to a lovely Chinese journalist who may unfortunately turn out to be a government insider, he simply gives his head a little shake, calls his wife, and then vows cheerfully: “Gotta read that briefing paper tonight!”

But alas, there’s no immunity yet from crazy stupid love. Politicians are, after all, human beings, and if every member of parliament, in government or out, lost his job because he (or she, for that matter) inappropriately flirted with someone, the House of Commons would be a ghost chamber.

Mr. Dechert’s e-mails to Rong Shi, a Toronto correspondent for Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, surfaced a week ago - apparently after her irate husband hacked into her e-mail account - and they are gooey. He wrote to her after she sent him a photo, “You are so beautiful. I really like the picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed. That look is so cute. I love it when you do that. Now, I miss you even more.” (In fairness, perhaps mindful of the line he was crossing, he signed this billet doux Bob Dechert, MP. But another one ended with “love, Bob”).

Granted this is not an Anthony Weiner sexting scenario, in which the Democratic congressman from New York was forced to resign after revealing himself to be a sext-addicted egomaniac. Nor is it former New York governor Eliot Spitzer brazenly hiring hookers. (Hey this isn’t New York, it’s Mississauga!)

Read more at The Globe And Mail

China media watchdog pulls smash-hit talent show .

BEIJING — China's media watchdog has pulled the plug on the nation's smash-hit answer to "American Idol" to make way for shows that "provide practical information for housework", state media said Saturday.

Much like its US counterpart, "Super Girl" -- launched in 2004 -- proved an instant hit, attracting hundreds of millions of viewers and turning some of its singing contestants into nationwide celebrities.

Li Hao, spokesman for Hunan Satellite TV -- which aired the programme and is part of one the nation's biggest television networks -- said the channel had been accused of violating broadcasting rules, Xinhua news agency said.

According to the report, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, China's media watchdog, issued rules in 2007 banning talent shows during prime-time, evening slots on local satellite TV channels.

It also restricted the broadcasting time of these shows to just two hours a day due to official concerns that young viewers were spending too much time watching the hugely popular programmes.

Read more at Google Hosted News

Chinese condoms 'too small' for South Africans

Pretoria court blocks government contract for 11 million female condoms because the made-in-China condoms are 20 percent too small.

A worker displays 'Clinton' brand condoms produced by the Guangzhou Haojian Bio-science Co during a promotion in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, China. (China Photos/Getty Images)

A South African court has stopped the government from buying 11 million condoms from China on the grounds that the made-in-China condoms are too small.

But the problem is not what you might expect — the condoms in this case are for women.

Judge Sullette Potterill set aside a decision by South Africa's finance minister to award a contract for the supply of female condoms to a KwaZulu-Natal company that planned to import the condoms from China, Johannesburg's Citizen newspaper reports.

The Chinese female condoms, with the brand name "Phoenurse," have not been approved by the World Health Organization, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Agency or the South African Bureau of Standards, and are 20 percent smaller than the approved product, South Africa's Beeld newspaper reports.

Read more at Global Post

Chinese artist Ai weighs future as activist - Austrian radio

(Reuters) - In fear for his life and abandoned by many peers during weeks of detention, dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is considering his future as a rights activist, he said in an interview with Austrian radio broadcast on Saturday.

"They can make me disappear. I have no protection, no lawyer," he said in a rare media interview conducted in connection with the opening of an exhibition of his work in Austria.

"So I have to be careful with (my actions) because I may lose my life," he added from his studio in China.

"I don't think there is any form of law (that) can protect me."

China's leading social critic has been under close watch as part of the strict terms of his release from custody in late June after 81 days.

Despite this, the artist, 54, has spoken out on his Twitter account on behalf of detained dissidents and his associates who were held at the same time as he was and have since been released.

Asked about calls by his family to take a break from activism and relax for a while, Ai said: "Frankly everybody said so -- friends, family and relatives.

"So I have to really examine and think. I have been trying to find a way to deal with the rest of the time."

Ai endured intense psychological pressure during his secretive detention and faces the threat of prison for alleged subversion, according to a source familiar with his detention.

Ai's incarceration ignited an outcry from many Western governments about China's tightening grip on dissent that started in February, when dozens of rights activists and dissidents were detained and arrested.

In the interview, Ai said there were thousands of professional artists in China but not one had piped up to ask what was happening during his detention.

"Nobody dared ask one question," he said, adding he was advising young artists to leave China because "this is crazy".

Read more at REUTERS

Returning to Songshan Mountain - Wang Wei

Read more at Chinese Poems

Clear river belt long thin Cart horse go idle idle Flow water like have desire Dusk birds another with return Desolate town face old ferry Set sun whole autumn hills Far successively Song high down Return come for now close shut

The limpid river runs between the bushes, The horse and cart are moving idly on. The water flows as if with a mind of its own, At dusk, the birds return to perch together. The desolate town is faced by an ancient ferry, The setting sun now fills the autumn hills. And far below high Songshan's tumbling ridges, Returning home, I close the door for now.

Sapajou

Shanghai's Schemozzle collates the cartoons crafted by Russian army Lieutenant-turned-cartoonist Georgii Avksent'ievich Sapojnikoff, who also went under the artistic alias of Sapajou.

Sapojnikoff became a refugee in Shanghai in 1920, and for 15 years he published daily cartoons in the North-China Daily News, the most influential English-language newspaper of the time, beginning in 1925 and through the Japanese occupation.

The text was edited by R. T. Peyton-Griffin, editor of the paper, who used the pen-name "In Parenthesis". The book is available from Earnshaw Books.

How to get out of the trap of war

Western media woes

                                                                                                                                                          DANWEI

Sapajou


The decadent life of the Shanghailanders in the 1930s was illustrated by two great European cartoonists, Schiff and Sapajou. Sapajou, in our opinion, was the best of the two.

Sapajou was a White Russian who came to Shanghai in the early 1920s to escape the Bolshevik Revolution back home. He and thousands of other Russians made their homes in Shanghai which as an open city accepted just about anybody.

 

An excerpt from Sin City, by Ralph Shaw: "Star of the (North-China Daily News) office was 'Sapajou', the cartoonist. He was a White Russian ex-officer named Sapoinikoff, a brilliant artist with a wonderful sense of humour. Tall, thin, bespectacled he limped badly as the result of a wound received in an engagement with the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. In Shanghai he had quickly earned fame through his brilliant political cartoons and, for a stateless exile, his membership of the Shanghai Club classified him as a rare specimen.... (In 1942), Sapajou became the cartoonist of the German newspaper. It was either that or starvation as a stateless Russian. More than a thousand White Russians had lost jobs in British, American and Netherlands firms closed down by the Japanese and their plight was pitiful - worse than that of the Jewish refugees, most of whom were still in the Wayside camps supported by donations from international Jewish charities. After the war there was no job on the North-China Daily News for the Russian cartoonist and, after a poverty-stricken existence in a Hongkew hovel, kept alive on the hand-outs of friends, he ended up in a transit camp for stateless refugees in the Philippines. A sick man, he died shortly afterwards.

MORE At Tales of Old Shanghai

Tibet

Tibet, province-level administrative region of China, located in a high-mountain area in the southwestern part of the country. It is officially called the Xizang Autonomous Region.

Throughout its long history, Tibet at times has governed itself as an independent state and at other times has had various levels of association with China. Regardless of China's involvement in Tibetan affairs, Tibet's internal government was for centuries a theocracy (state governed by religious leaders), under the leadership of Buddhist lamas, or monks. In 1959 the Dalai Lama (spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and at that time the head of Tibet's internal government) fled to India during a Tibetan revolt against Chinese control in the region. China then took complete control of Tibet, installing a sympathetic Tibetan ruler and, in 1965, replacing the theocracy with a Communist administration.

The TAR covers an area of about 1,222,000 sq km (about 472,000 sq mi). It is bounded on the north by Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and Qinghai Province; on the east by Sichuan and Yunnan provinces; on the south by Myanmar (formerly known as Burma), India, Bhutan, and Nepal; and on the west by India. Lhasa is the region's capital and largest city. Some Tibetans contend that Tibet includes parts of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces where ethnic Tibetans live.

With an average elevation of more than 4000 m (12,000 ft), Tibet is the highest region on earth. For this reason, it is sometimes called the Roof of the World. Most of the people in Tibet live at elevations ranging from 1200 m (3900 ft) to 5100 m (16,700 ft). Tibet is also one of the world's most isolated regions, surrounded by the Himalayas on the south, the Karakoram Range on the west, and the Kunlun Mountains on the north.

The southern part of Tibet is situated entirely within the Himalayas, and many of the world's highest summits are located in the main Himalayan chain, which extends along Tibet's southern frontier. Among the principal peaks are Mount Everest (8848 m/29,028 ft), the world's highest mountain; Namcha Barwa (7756 m/25,445 ft); and Gurla Mandhata (7728 m/25,354 ft). The Kailas Range, a chain of the Himalayas, lies parallel to and north of the main chain and has peaks of up to 6700 m (22,000 ft). Between the Kailas Range and the main chain is a river valley that extends about 1000 km (about 600 mi). The Brahmaputra River (known in Tibet as the Yarlung Zangbo) flows from west to east through most of this valley. The Kailas Range slopes north to the Tibetan Plateau (Qing Zang Gaoyuan). This vast tableland extends to the Karakoram Range on the west and the Kunlun Mountains on the north. The Tibetan Plateau, which slopes gradually from south to east, is broken by mountain outcroppings and has an average elevation of about 4570 m (about 15,000 ft). The eastern part of Tibet is a rugged region with numerous smaller mountain ranges interspersed by deep valleys.

The mountains in Tibet form Asia's principal watershed, or dividing line, between westward-flowing and eastward-flowing streams, and Tibet is the source of many of the continent's major rivers. The Brahmaputra is Tibet's most important river. The Indus, Ganges, and Sutlej rivers have their headwaters in western Tibet. The Salween River (Nu Jiang) rises in central Tibet and the headwaters of the Mekong (Lancang Jiang), Yangtze (Chang Jiang), and Huang He (Yellow River) are found in northern Tibet. Many of Tibet's rivers have potential for hydroelectric development. The Tibetan Plateau is dotted with numerous somewhat salty lakes, including Ngangla Ringco in the west and Nam Co (Na-mu-ts'o) in the east.

Vegetation on the Tibetan Plateau is extremely sparse, consisting mainly of grasses and shrubs. Scattered wooded areas occur in the extreme west and east. Most vegetation, however, is concentrated in the Brahmaputra, Indus, and Sutlej river valleys. These areas support a number of species of trees, including conifers, oaks, cypresses, poplars, and maples. Apple, peach, pear, and apricot trees are cultivated in the valleys.

Tibet is home to a variety of wildlife. Musk deer, wild sheep, wild goats, wild donkeys, yaks, and Tibetan antelope are common in mountainous areas. Other large mammals include leopards, tigers, bears, wolves, foxes, and monkeys. Birdlife includes geese, gulls, teal, and other species of waterfowl, as well as pheasants and sand grouse.

Read more at Exploring Chinese History

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei:

Volume Two: The Rivals
Translated by David Tod Roy

 

WU YÜEH-NIANG SWEEPS SNOW IN ORDER TO BREW TEA;
YING PO-CHÜEH RUNS ERRANDS ON BEHALF OF FLOWERS

Troubled in her sorrowing heart,
she murmurs to herself,
"This good affinity has turned out
to be a bad affinity."¹
In retrospect she rails against
that "willow" in the quarter;²
Though shamefaced to confront
the "lotus" of the Jade Well.³
Only because his spring dalliance
has been carelessly revealed,
Have the phoenix mates been forced
to go their separate ways.
Who is able to dip up the waters
of the River of Heaven,
That they may wash their former sins
completely away?⁴

THE STORY GOES that by the time Hsi-men Ch'ing returned home from the quarter it was already the second watch. When the page boys had succeeded in getting someone to open the front door he dismounted and:

  Trampling the scattered fragments of alabaster and jade, made his way as far as the inner gate which led into the rear compound. He found the gate standing half open though there was:
  Not a human sound to be heard,⁵ from the courtyard within.
  From his mouth no word was uttered, but
  In his heart he thought to himself,
"There's something strange about this."

Thereupon Hsi-men Ch'ing stealthily took up a position behind the whitewashed spirit screen just inside the gate in order to see what was up. No sooner had he done so than he saw Hsiao-yü come out and set up a table in the courtyard beneath the loggia that ran along one side.

It so happens that Wu Yüeh-niang, ever since the falling out with her husband that had resulted in their no longer being on speaking terms with each other, had been in the habit of fasting on the seventh, seventeenth, and twenty-seventh days of each month. On these occasions she would pay obeisance to the dipper and burn incense at night, praying to Heaven that it would protect her husband and grant him an early change of heart so that he could devote himself to the regulation of the household and the begetting of an heir in order to accomplish:

  The plan of a lifetime.⁶

Hsi-men Ch'ing was quite unaware of this. He continued to look on as Hsiao-yü finished setting out the incense table. Before long Yüeh-niang emerged from her quarters, carefully attired, and proceeded into the courtyard where she ignited a full censer of incense.

Looking up at the sky and making a deep bow she prayed, "Your humble servant, n&eeacute;e Wu, has been joined in wedlock with Hsi-men Ch'ing. However, because my husband is enamored of the 'mist and flowers'; though yet in the prime of life, he remains without an heir. Wife and concubines, there are six of us in all, but none of us has borne a child, so that we lack anyone to continue the care and worship of the ancestral graves. Day and night I worry about this lest we be left with no recourse. Therefore, without my husband's knowledge, I have sworn an oath that on the seventh, seventeenth, and twenty-seventh of each month, beneath the moon and stars, I shall offer up a prayer to the 'three luminaries,' beseeching them to protect my husband and grant him an early change of heart, that he may abandon his extravagant ways and devote himself wholeheartedly to family affairs. That one of his six consorts, no matter which, should soon bear him a son, in order to accomplish:

The plan of a lifetime, is my sincerest wish." Truly:

As she slips out of her chamber
  the night air is cool;
Fragrant mist fills the courtyard,
  the moon glimmers bright.
Bowing to Heaven, she spills out
  all her heartfelt desires;
Quite unaware that anyone might be
  listening beyond the wall.

Nothing might have happened if Hsi-men Ch'ing had not overheard this, but having heard Yüeh-niang's prayer:

From his mouth no word was uttered, but
In his heart he thought to himself,

"It turns out I've been mistaken in my resentment toward her all this time. Everything she said was inspired by concern for my welfare. She and I really are husband and wife after all."

Suiting action to words, he strode out from behind the whitewashed spirit screen and embraced Yüeh-niang. His wife, who had just finished with the incense burning and never expected him to show up on such a snowy night, was so startled that her first impulse was to flee back to her room. But Hsi-men Ch'ing prevented this by embracing her with both arms.

"Darling," he said, "I had absolutely no idea that you've really been inspired by concern for me. I've been wrong about you all this time I've been giving you the cold shoulder. By now, I'm afraid, it's rather late to repent."

"You must have lost your way in the snow," said Yüeh-niang. "I dare say these really aren't the quarters you're looking for, anyway. You're barking up the wrong tree. I'm that 'undutiful whore,' remember. Since there's nothing between us, where do you get that stuff about concern for you? What reason should you have to pay any further attention to me? If we were never to see each other again:

For a thousand years or all eternity,
it would be all right with me.

Hsi-men Ch'ing took Yüeh-niang by the hand and pulled her into the room where he proceeded to look her over by lamplight. She was wearing her usual attire: a scarlet jacket of Lu-chou silk that opened down the middle, and a skirt of a soft yellow material. On her head she wore a sable toque over her chignon and, in front of her coiffure, a tiara of gold representing "Kuan-yin in her full glory," setting off to perfection:

Read more at Princeton University Press

 

Jin Ping Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase (Chinese: 金瓶梅; pinyin: Jīn Píng Méi, also translated as The Golden Lotus) is a Chinese naturalistic novel composed in the vernacular (baihua) during the late Ming Dynasty. The author was Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (蘭陵笑笑生), "The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling", a clear pseudonym,^[1] and his identity is otherwise unknown.^[2] (The only clue was that he hailed from Lanling, or present-day Shandong.) Earliest versions of the novel exist only in handwritten scripts; the first block-printed book was released only in 1610.^[3] The more complete version today comprises one hundred chapters,^[4] amounting to over a thousand pages.^[5]

Jin Ping Mei is sometimes considered to be the fifth classical novel after the Four Great Classical Novels. Its graphically explicit depiction of sexuality has garnered the novel a level of notoriety in China akin to Fanny Hill in the English literature.

Read more at Wikipedia

I Ching

Foreword
by Carl Gustav Jung

HTML Edition by Dan Baruth

Since I am not a sinologue, a foreword to the Book of Changes from my hand must be a testimonial of my individual experience with this great and singular book. It also affords me a welcome opportunity to pay tribute again to the memory of my late friend, Richard Wilhelm. He himself was profoundly aware of the cultural significance of his translation of the I Ching, a version unrivaled in the West.

If the meaning of the Book of Changes were easy to grasp, the work would need no foreword. But this is far from being the case, for there is so much that is obscure about it that Western scholars have tended to dispose of it as a collection of "magic spells," either too abstruse to be intelligible, or of no value whatsoever. Legge's translation of the I Ching, up to now the only version available in English, has done little to make the work accessible to Western minds.^[1]Wilhelm, however, has made every effort to open the way to an understanding of the symbolism of the text. He was in a position to do this because he himself was taught the philosophy and the use of the I Ching by the venerable sage Lao Nai-hsüan; moreover, he had over a period of many years put the peculiar technique of the oracle into practice. His grasp of the living meaning of the text gives his version of the I Ching a depth of perspective that an exclusively academic knowledge of Chinese philosophy could never provide.

I am greatly indebted to Wilhelm for the light he has thrown upon the complicated problem of the I Ching, and for insight as regards its practical application as well. For more than thirty years I have interested myself in this oracle technique, or method of exploring the unconscious, for it has seemed to me of uncommon significance. I was already fairly familiar with the I Ching when I first met Wilhelm in the early nineteen twenties; he confirmed for me then what I already knew, and taught me many things more.

I do not know Chinese and have never been in China. I can assure my reader that it is not altogether easy to find the right access to this monument of Chinese thought, which departs so completely from our ways of thinking. In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind. it is a curious fact that such a gifted and intelligent people as the Chinese has never developed what we call science. Our science, however, is based upon the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in. What Kant's Critique of Pure Reason failed to do, is being accomplished by modern physics. The axioms of causality are being shaken to their foundations: we know now that what we term natural laws are merely statistical truths and thus must necessarily allow for exceptions. We have not sufficiently taken into account as yet that we need the laboratory with its incisive restrictions in order to demonstrate the invariable validity of natural law. If we leave things to nature, we see a very different picture: every process is partially or totally interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception.

The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.

The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor our causalistic procedures. The moment under actual observation appears to the ancient Chinese view more of a chance hit than a clearly defined result of concurring causal chain processes. The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence. While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.

Thus it happens that when one throws the three coins, or counts through the forty-nine yarrow stalks, these chance details enter into the picture of the moment of observation and form a part of it -- a part that is insiguificant to us, yet most meaningful to the Chinese mind. With us it would be a banal and almost meaningless statement (at least on the face of it) to say that whatever happens in a given moment possesses inevitably the quality peculiar to that moment. This is not an abstract argument but a very practical one. There are certain connoisseurs who can tell you merely from the appearance, taste, and behavior of a wine the site of its vineyard and the year of its origin. There are antiquarians who with almost uncanny accuracy will name the time and place of origin and the maker of an objet d'art or piece of furniture on merely looking at it. And there are even astrologers who can tell you, without any previous knowledge of your nativity, what the position of sun and moon was and what zodiacal sign rose above the horizon in the moment of your birth. In the face of such facts, it must be admitted that moments can leave long-lasting traces.

In other words, whoever invented the I Ching was convinced that the hexagram worked out in a certain moment coincided with the latter in quality no less than in time. To him the hexagram was the exponent of the moment in which it was cast -- even more so than the hours of the clock or the divisions of the calendar could be -- inasmuch as the hexagram was understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin.

This assumption involves a certain curious principle that I have termed synchronicity,^[2] a concept that formulates a point of view diametrically opposed to that of causality. Since the latter is a merely statistical truth and not absolute, it is a sort of working hypothesis of how events evolve one out of another, whereas synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance, namely, a peculiar interdependence of objective events among themselves as well as with the subjective (psychic) states of the observer or observers.

The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist, who cannot deny that his model of the world is a decidedly psychophysical structure. The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation. Just as causality describes the sequence of events, so synchronicity to the Chinese mind deals with the coincidence of events. The causal point of view tells us a dramatic story about how D came into existence: it took its origin from C, which existed before D, and C in its turn had a father, B, etc. The synchronistic view on the other hand tries to produce an equally meaningful picture of coincidence. How does it happen that A', B', C', D', etc., appear all in the same moment and in the same place? It happens in the first place because the physical events A' and B' are of the same quality as the psychic events C' and D', and further because all are the exponents of one and the same momentary situation. The situation is assumed to represent a legible or understandable picture.

Now the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the instrument by which the meaning of sixty-four different yet typical situations can be determined. These interpretations are equivalent to causal explanations. Causal connection is statistically necessary and can therefore be subjected to experiment. Inasmuch as situations are unique and cannot be repeated, experimenting with synchronicity seems to be impossible under ordinary conditions.^[3] In the I Ching, the only criterion of the validity of synchronicity is the observer's opinion that the text of the hexagram amounts to a true rendering of his psychic condition. It is assumed that the fall of the coins or the result of the division of the bundle of yarrow stalks is what it necessarily must be in a given "situation," inasmuch as anything happening in that moment belongs to it as an indispensable part of the picture. If a handful of matches is thrown to the floor, they form the pattern characteristic of that moment. But such an obvious truth as this reveals its meaningful nature only if it is possible to read the pattern and to verify its interpretation, partly by the observer's knowledge of the subjective and objective situation, partly by the character of subsequent events. It is obviously not a procedure that appeals to a critical mind used to experimental verification of facts or to factual evidence. But for someone who likes to look at the world at the angle from which ancient China saw it, the I Ching may have some attraction.

My argument as outlined above has of course never entered a Chinese mind. On the contrary, according to the old tradition, it is "spiritual agencies," acting in a mysterious way, that make the yarrow stalks give a meaningful answer.^[4] These powers form, as it were, the living soul of the book. As the latter is thus a sort of animated being, the tradition assumes that one can put questions to the I Ching and expect to receive intelligent answers. Thus it occurred to me that it might interest the uninitiated reader to see the I Ching at work. For this purpose I made an experiment strictly in accordance with the Chinese conception: I personified the book in a sense, asking its judgment about its present situation, i.e., my intention to present it to the Western mind.

Although this procedure is well within the premises of Taoist philosophy, it appears exceedingly odd to us. However, not even the strangeness of insane delusions or of primitive superstition has ever shocked me. I have always tried to remain unbiased and curious -- rerum novarum cupidus. Why not venture a dialogue with an ancient book that purports to be animated? There can be no harm in it, and the reader may watch a psychological procedure that has been carried out time and again throughout the millennia of Chinese civilization, representing to a Confucius or a Lao-tse both a supreme expression of spiritual authority and a philosophical enigma. I made use of the coin method, and the answer obtained was hexagram 50, Ting, THE CALDRON.

In accordance with the way my question was phrased, the text of the hexagram must be regarded as though the I Ching itself were the speaking person. Thus it describes itself as a caldron, that is, as a ritual vessel containing cooked food. Here the food is to be understood as spiritual nourishment. Wilhelm says about this:

The ting, as a utensil pertaining to a refined civilization, suggests the fostering and nourishing of able men, which redounded to the benefit of the state. . . . Here we see civilization as it reaches its culmination in religion. The ting serves in offering sacrifice to God. . . . The supreme revelation of God appears in prophets and holy men. To venerate them is true veneration of God. The will of God, as revealed through them, should he accepted in humility.

Keeping to our hypothesis, we must conclude that the I Ching is here testifying concerning itself.

When any of the lines of a given hexagram have the value of six or nine, it means that they are specially emphasized and hence important in the interpretation.^[5] In my hexagram the "spiritual agencies" have given the emphasis of a nine to the lines in the second and in the third place. The text says:

 

Nine in the second place means:
There is food in the ting.
My comrades are envious,
But they cannot harm me.
Good fortune.

Read more at iging

Frederick Townshend Ward

Frederick Townshend Ward Frederick Townshend Ward, an American adventurer from Salem, Massachusetts, arrived in Shanghai in 1860, just as the Taiping forces were threatening the city. Ward went to the Shanghai Taipans with a business proposal - he offered to create and lead a defence force if they would bankroll the enterprise. They agreed. His first step was to attack the Taiping rebels at Songjiang, about thirty miles southwest of Shanghai. The ragtag band of soldiers drank too much the night before the attack, and the affair ended in farce. But his unit survived and was later instrumental in turning away the Taiping attacks on Shanghai. The Shanghai businessmen paid him well, the Chinese Imperial Court, and particularly the Empress Dowager, was so overwhelmed with gratitude at his assistance in beating back the Taiping that his force was given the name "Ever Victorious Army". But the authorities in the Settlements were not so impressed. The Americans objected to his actions, as up to this time the policy of neutrality had been adopted by their government. The British authorities were incensed because the temptation to join Ward's force and enjoy the plunder and mayhem led to many desertions from the Navy. In May 1861, Admiral Hope arrested Ward on the charge of enticing sailors to leave their ships and he was brought before the American Consul for trial. He secured his acquittal by declaring he had renounced his nationality and had become a Chinese subject. Read more at Tales of Old Shanghai

Hong Xiuquan and Protestant Hymns

Hong Xiuquan (1814-1864), who thought he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, became exposed to Protestant hymns while in Canton in 1847 seeking instruction in the Bible from I. J. Roberts (1802-1871), a Baptist minister born in Sumner County, Tennessee. Roberts began his work in China in early 1837 as a missionary under the aegis of the Roberts Fund Society.

Much of Hong’s encounters with Christian tracts came through translations of Robert Morrison. In 1866 Augutus F. Lindley wrote that after Hong and his cousin Li Jingfang familiarised themselves with translations of chapters of the Bible by Morrison, they 'administered baptism to each other' and then Hong Xiuquan composed the following ode upon repentance:

When our transgressions high as heaven rise,
How well to trust Jesus’ full atonement;
We follow not the demons, we obey
The holy precepts, worshipping alone
One God, and thus we cultivate our hearts.
The heavenly glories open to our view,
And every being ought to seek thereafter.
I much deplore the miseries of hell.
O turn ye to the fruits of true repentance!
Let not our hearts be led by worldly customs (Lindley, 1866:41)


Hong later adopted the Protestant hymn ‘Old Hundredth’ as his own apocalyptic vision of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. A new text was written for the hymn and renamed ‘Ode Praising the Heavenly Kingdom’ (Tianchao zanmeige):

Praise the Lord
Praise Jesus, the Savior of the World
Praise the Holy Spirit
Praise the Holy Trinity.


While 'Ode to the Heavenly Kingdom was sung at all Taiping rituals and rallies, we know very little about the organisation and structure of their religious observances. In his book The Visions of Hung-siu-tshuen, and Origin of the Kwang-si Insurrection published in Hong Kong in 1854, and republished the following year in London in a slim volume titled The Chinese Rebel Chief, Hung-siu-Tsuen and the Origin of the Insurrection in China, Theodore Hamberg writes:

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