REFLECTIONS IN A CHINESE EYE

Chinese recruited for war had secret passage through Canada

Capt. Harry Drummond Livingstone, of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, examining would-be recruits in Shandong Province in 1917. Livingstone examined men for diseases that could disqualify them, including tuberculosis, venereal disease and trachoma, a bacterial eye disease that can cause blindness. (Livingstone family)

YPRES, Belgium — Under pristine, white tombstones in the British military cemeteries dotting the landscape throughout Belgium and northern France, the graves of thousands of Chinese labourers can be found.

Some 140,000 Chinese men were recruited by the Allies during the First World War to fill a critical labour shortage at the Western Front. While their contributions have often been overlooked or even forgotten, there is evidence of their work everywhere in and around Ypres and along the coast of north-west France, not far from the site of the Battle of the Somme.

You just have to know where to look.

The Chinese Labour Corps unloaded cargo ships and trains, chopped down trees for timber, and maintained docks, railways, roads and airfields. Skilled mechanics repaired vehicles and even worked on tanks. Later, after the Armistice, the Chinese stayed behind to clean up the mess. As late as 1919, Chinese labourers remained in France and Belgium to help clear the rubble, bury the dead and clean up the battlefields.

Though the Corps was the largest ethnic minority group to participate in the Great War, their story is often left out of the history books, said Belgian historian Philip Vanhaelemeersch.

"In the West, the labourers were no war heroes. They fought no battles, they had no share in any of the great victories during the war," said Vanhaelemeersch, a Sinologist at University College West-Flanders in Bruges. "Their presence in Europe during the war was, at best, a footnote in the history books on the war."

Crucial link between China and the West

The Chinese recruits "figured importantly as messengers between Chinese and Western civilizations," wrote Xu Guoqi, author of "Strangers on the Western Front," a new book published this year on the Corps.

"Although most of the Chinese labourers were illiterate farmers with no clear ideas about China or the world when they were selected to go to Europe, they had a part in developing that new national identity and would play an important role in China's internationalization," Xu wrote.

Vanhaelemeersch agreed. "Chinese labourers to Europe during the war was China's first ever entering the international political scene," he said. "Today, the increasing interest in the Corps perfectly fits in the international agenda of the new superpower which China wants to be."

Read more at CTV News

China shop — II

The soldier is 178 cm tall and weighs 180 kg. He'd make mincemeat out of me. Fortunately, he's 2,200 years old and made of terracotta. He is one of the 8,000-odd famous terracotta warriors of Xian in west central China. Billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, the terracotta army was made in 221 BC to protect the palatial tomb that Qin Shi Huang, the self-proclaimed first emperor of China, had built for himself. Qin unified the country, introduced a common script and ordered the Great Wall of China to be built to keep out the barbarians from the West. To ensure there was no challenge to his authority, he destroyed Confucian writings and had scholars executed. His was the first of the many dynastic dictatorships that China has witnessed over 2,000 years, and which continue to this day under the successors of Emperor Mao, whose enormous portrait looms over Tiananmen Square. Daily, thousands of devotees queue for hours to file past his adjacent mausoleum. Maoism has been replaced by capitalism, but the worship of absolute power still rules supreme in the Middle Kingdom, as it has done since the days of Qin Shi Huang.

Like all other public buildings and landmarks in China, Tiananmen Square is huge. Its vastness is deliberate; it represents the architecture of the intimidation of the individual by the state. It's been the same for over 2,000 years. When he was having his Great Wall built, Qin Shi Huang decreed that every family in China would have to send one of its members to work on the project. My guide in Beijing, Susie (name changed) says that for every kilometre of the Wall built, over 200 workers died. Susie mentions this number unemotionally, in the same way she says a little later that 'only about a hundred' students died in Tiananmen Square when the democracy movement was brought to an abrupt and brutal end by the mailed fist of the state. Like her 1.3 billion-plus co-citizens, Susie accepts that greatness comes at a price.

Read more at the Times of India

Anarchist Publications of the May Fourth Era

China experienced a tide of anarchist activity in the May Fourth era. Particularly in the early part of the 1920s, many young people were so inspired by anarchist political critiques and cultural and social insights that they began publishing their own radical journals. Although many of these publications lasted only an issue or two and their content was largely derivative of existing writings, they proliferated in the universities and large cities across China. Though many of these publications are lost, there have been a few attempts to document them. These journals form part of the story of anarchism's development in China and demonstrate its relevance to modern China. They tell us much about what aspects of anarchism were most attractive to Chinese intellectuals and to what extent anarchism influenced China's political climate in spite of the growing communist hegemony of the period's politics.

The May Fourth era is named for the patriotic, anti-government demonstration that took place in Beijing on the 4th of May 1919, though the time-line of the May Fourth Movement spans a half-decade on either side of the May Fourth Incident. The Movement has its beginnings in the anti-Japanese indignation sparked by the September 1914 seizure of Qingdao in Shandong province, which was then a German possession, as well as the New Culture Movement among the literati, generally described as beginning with the founding of New Youth by Chen Duxiu a year later. By 1919 the explosive potential of these two trends was realized. On May Fourth, student demonstrators representing nearly all universities in Beijing took to the streets with a message. Their rallying cries included nationalist slogans revolving around some form of “Save the Nation!”, often paired with more broadly anti-imperialist slogans such as “Self-Determination!” and “Oppose Power Politics!” At the time, these two tendencies – the nationalist and the anti-Imperialist – found common ground in opposing the Republican government, though their collusion has resulted in a certain undecidability about the May Fourth that continues to this day. The pervasive radicalism of the period, however, is certain.

The Qing Dynasty had fallen in 1911 and was succeeded by the supposedly modern and democratic Republic of China under the leadership of president Yüan Shikai. The early years of the Republic were tumultuous and by 1919 China as a nation was confronted with a number of concrete problems. Not only had the country witnessed the decline of the Imperial System which had ostensibly maintained order and stability for millennia, but the powers which replaced it yielded to Japanese aggression and dissolved into warlordism on the periphery of the territory. For the intellectuals there was an added crisis, traditional philosophical traditions, namely Confucianism, appeared bankrupt in the face of early 20th century's global modernity as alternative forms of Western philosophy such as socialism and liberalism appeared to offer the only practical solutions to the nation's problems.

This profound sense of alienation was felt by a generation of young intellectuals. The decline of the Qing dynasty also spelled the decline in the traditional examination system, by which intellectuals would be assigned their governmental jobs. Losing faith in political solutions to the country's problems, they shifted their attention to the social realm where anarchists had been agitating since before the fall of the Qing. One quote from a Peking University student from around 1917 is revealing: "We had nothing to do with our government, that we knew very well, and at the same time we could no longer depend upon the principle of any so-called great leader like Woodrow Wilson...." The failures of the Versailles Peace Treaty were linked to the futility of World War I in the minds of most Chinese. Further elaborated, this ubiquitous skepticism of imperial benevolence highlighted the bankruptcy of modern democratic diplomacy. The fact that the May Fourth Incident was ignited by widespread dissatisfaction with the results of official diplomacy also means that there was a degree of resistance to governmental solutions. The failures of government oversight, both foreign and domestic, correlated to an increase of interest in anarchism in this time period. The rise of anarchism was concurrent with the general elaboration in Chinese people's minds of what the May Fourth Movement stood for.

The ideas of the May Fourth Movement, then, were not seen as purely intellectual pursuits, they were the evidence of a large-scale search for solutions to national problems; it was an atmosphere conducive to anarchist activity. Though the May Fourth Movement was essentially nationalistic, it was also receptive to anarchism and shared many thematic qualities with it. Anarchism's theoretical inquisitiveness and perceived practical victories in education, labor organizing, and the Russian revolution formed the basis for its appeal. One of the most popular campaigns of the New Culture Movement, for example, was the reorganization of Peking University under the libertarian educator, Cai Yuanpei. Cai, who accepted the chancellorship of the university in late 1916, was receptive to anarchist ideas and held many of the leading anarchists such as Li Shizeng, Wang Jingwei, Wu Zhihui, and Huang Lingshuang as close colleagues. Thus, the liberal Hu Shi's declaration of “less talk about isms, more talk about problems” seemed, as “China's first Marxist,” Li Dazhao, argued, out of touch with what most people thought about the practical applicability of new ideas to the Chinese situation.

Read more at Institute For Anarchist Studies

Deng Xiaoping:Founding Father of China's Economic Rise

New American Foundation

The Real Deng

Fang Lizhi

When a scientific experiment uncovers a new phenomenon, a scientist is pleased. When an experiment fails to reveal something that the scientist originally expected, that, too, counts as a result worth analyzing. A sense of the “nonappearance of the expected” was my first impression of Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. The term “human rights” does not appear in its index, and it turns out that this omission was not an oversight of the indexer. Systematic nonconsideration of human rights is one of the book’s features.

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

Vogel, an emeritus professor of social sciences at Harvard, retells the story of the massacre in a chapter he calls “The Tiananmen Tragedy,” which ends with a meticulous—and, it seems, angst-ridden—review of all the ways one might evaluate the “tragedy.” In the end Vogel comes down to the following:

What we do know is that in the two decades after Tiananmen, China enjoyed relative stability and rapid—even spectacular—economic growth…. Today hundreds of millions of Chinese are living far more comfortable lives than they were living in 1989, and they enjoy far greater access to information and ideas around the world than at any time in Chinese history. Both educational level and longevity have continued to rise rapidly. For these reasons and others, Chinese people take far greater pride in their nation’s achievements than they did in the previous century.

With these words Vogel indicates that he basically accepts an argument that the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department has been making for the past twenty years: that “stability” and economic growth show that the repression at Tiananmen was justified in the long run. When foreign dignitaries or journalists have asked about the massacre, the response of Party leaders has been consistent: if Deng Xiaoping had not taken “resolute” (i.e., murderous) measures, China could not have had the stable society or flourishing economy that it enjoyed in the ensuing years.

Other aspects of government rhetoric, however, suggest that even the sources of such statements do not quite believe them. If it were really true that Deng’s “resolute action” led to economic growth, and that this causal connection is plain for Chinese people to see, one would expect Party propaganda to be highlighting “the suppression at Tiananmen.” But they do the opposite. Over the years, the official description of the massacre events has steadily shrunk from “counterrevolutionary riot” to “turmoil” to “incident” to “flap.” The leaders are well aware that what happened is an extremely ugly mark on their historical record, and they have been eager to have the world forget it as soon as possible.

Read more at  The New York Review of Books

Book review: ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,’ by Ezra F. Vogel

By John Pomfret, Published: September 9

Twenty-six years ago, an American vice president went to the western Chinese city of Chengdu with a message for China: America is here to help. In a speech to students from Sichuan University, George H.W. Bush said the United States would allow China access to a far greater range of American technologies — some with military applications — than other communist countries were granted. American firms, he said, were eager to invest in China. American consumers, he predicted, would soon hanker after Chinese goods. “We are interested in helping China,” Bush told his audience. “Very, very interested.”

An American vice president wouldn’t visit China again until last month, when Joe Biden addressed a similar audience of students from the same university, in the same city. Only this time, the message was different. Instead of promising markets, investment and technology, Biden pledged that the U.S. Treasury would make good on the trillion bucks it owes Beijing. It raises the question: Do the schedulers at the White House lack imagination, or are they just trying to help a scribbler draw a parallel?

The Bush and Biden trips to Sichuan bookend one of the world’s greatest stories: the rise of China and its emergence as a global juggernaut. How China got to this point — last year it surpassed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy and Germany as the nation with the most exports — is the story that Ezra F. Vogeltells in “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” a masterful new history of China’s reform era. It pieces together from interviews and memoirs perhaps the clearest account so far of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has become today.

Vogel, a Harvard professor who has bounced between interests in China and Japan for all of his professional life, picked one man on whom to center his tale: Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), the communist leader who left the Sichuan countryside for France when he was 16. While Deng might have been tiny (he stood 4-foot-11), this book is massive, Yao Ming-big — the text alone runs to 714 pages.

But Vogel has a monumental story to tell. His main argument is that Deng deserves a central place in the pantheon of 20th-century leaders. For he not only launched China’s market-oriented economic reforms but also accomplished something that had eluded Chinese leaders for almost two centuries: the transformation of the world’s oldest civilization into a modern nation.

“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many?” Vogel asks. “Did any other twentieth century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” He clearly believes that Deng — known in the West mostly for engineering the slaughter of protesters in the streets near Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 — has been wronged by history. His tome is an attempt to redress the balance.

Read more at The Washington Post

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The following is a synopsis of the impact of international agreements on the legal status of Taiwan:

1. Article 2 of the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) ceded Formosa, her dependencies, and the Pescadores from China to Japan in "perpetuity and full sovereignty." Japan's sovereignty over the islands would not be disputed by China or any other state for the next 50 years.

2. In paragraph 3 of the Cairo Declaration (1943), the United States, Great Britain, and China declared that "it is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." This and the following two declarations were unilateral statements of intent, not legally binding on the declarants, much less so Japan, the title-holder to Formosa. The Cairo Declaration, intended only as a press release, was issued without signatures. From their language, it is clear that the conference statements are not of the variety of declarations that possess legal force. Indeed, some of the provisions of at least one of the declarations were repudiated by one of the declarants, the United States of America, in her ratification of the Treaty of Peace with Japan.  Moreover, the term "restored" was used in reference to the Republic of China without specifying, though assuming, the Republic of China as the successor to the "Ta Ching Empire," the legal person that had ceded Formosa to Japan. The Republic of China never held possession of Formosa, nor did she claim rights to her until the onset of war with Japan. 

3. The Agreement Regarding Japan contained in the Yalta Declaration (1945) is silent on the disposition of Formosa.

4. Section 3-b(8) of Annex II of the Potsdam Declaration (1945) makes reference to the Cairo Declaration stating "The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine."

5. Under the Instrument of Surrender signed in September 1945 by Japan and the Allies, Japan explicitly accepted the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration, and thus implicitly accepted the provision of the Cairo Declaration "that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." The Instrument of Surrender gave legal effect to the Allied Conference Declarations hitherto absent. However, the Instrument was a record only of provisional arrangements, a modus vivendi, that anticipated replacement by a more permanent and detailed settlement. The Instrument required no ratification and does not have the legal force of a treaty.

Read more at Taiwan Documents

Immigration Nation Ep.1: White Australia Policy

 

View sections 2, 3, & 4 at THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR, sidebar, this blog. 

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Review by Chris Patten

Ezra Vogel produces a massive biography of the leader who brought markets to China but denied it democracy

An image of leader Deng Xiaoping looms over a street in the city of Shenzhen in 1992

When Chinese historians are able one day to ply their subversive trade without control or censorship, their judgment will surely be that their country should revere Deng Xiaoping way above his predecessor Mao Zedong. Mao led the Communist party to victory over the Kuomintang and the Japanese, and united China in the 1950s. He then plunged his country into the famine and bloody mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Deng carefully put the pieces of the smashed nation back together again and launched China on its recovery to become assuredly once again the world’s largest economy.

Ezra Vogel’s massive biography assembles the case for Deng (1904-97) with narrative skill and prodigious scholarship. Vogel, for many years a Harvard professor, published the bestselling Japan as Number One in 1979. His principal academic interest then turned to China and he spent some time in the late 1980s studying economic reform in Guangdong. The sources and acknowledgements he cites in this book indicate the breadth of his contacts and study, though when required to stray outside the world of conventional western Sinology he is less sure-footed. His knowledge of British and Hong Kong politics, for example, is pretty sketchy.

Read more at FT

As Interest From the Next Generation Wanes, A Family's Tofu Legacy Totters

By Stephen Nessen

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  Barrels of tofu at the Fong Inn Too factory in Chinatown. (Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

On a recent afternoon, David Eng conducted an orchestra of tofu makers, peering into vats of bean curd in various states of coagulation.

A fog from the steam-spewing, high-pressure pumps fills the air at his family’s Chinatown factory, which is next to a Buddhist temple under the Manhattan Bridge.

Tofu has been Eng’s family business for 78 years, since his grandfather, an immigrant from Guangdong, China, set up shop in on Mott Street in Chinatown in 1933.

“All Asians like to claim ancient ancestry,” said William Shurtleff, author of “The Book of Tofu.” But Fong Inn Too, is, “certainly one of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuously family-run tofu shop in the U.S.”

But after Eng, a 56-year-old banker-turned-farmer who returned to his family business in the 90s, there is no clear fourth generation leader to take over the tofu-making venture. He said he fears he may be the last of his family to run Fong Inn Too.

“Business is slow, terribly slow, especially this past year,” Eng said recently.

Eng starts his day at 5:30 a.m. and is rarely done before 6 p.m. The factory processes about 2,400 pounds of soybeans a day, yielding about 10,000 squares of tofu.

(David Eng at the factory on Division Street. Stephen Nessen/WNYC)

Much of the tofu is destined for local Chinese restaurants. Fong Inn Too, a major wholesaler, has a network of 80 distributors, each of which supplies tofu to an average of 16 restaurants in the city.

“If you come to Chinatown from eight to nine in the morning, it’s bumper to bumper on Mott,” said Jan Lee, the owner of the antiques shop, Sinotique, a few doors down from Fong Inn Too. “Vans from restaurants come religiously every week to pick up supplies. It’s a part of Chinese commerce that the layperson doesn’t see.”

The shop on Mott Street has bags of sugar stacked in one corner, and white take-out boxes for tofu spilling off the shelf.

Read more at WNYC News Blog

Thanks for the tweet:

kattebelletje Alice de Jong | 雍莉

RT @stirfrygrace: My fave tofu RT @rodhuntress: After 78 years family tofu biz in NY Chinatown faces uncertain future: ow.ly/6TOj4

Almost half of £1 million Chinese auction bids unpaid six months after they were lodged

Almost half of all £1 million-plus bids placed in China's auction houses remained unpaid six months after they were lodged, it has emerged.

The findings by the Chinese Association for Auctioneers give a rare official glimpse beneath the surface of what one Western art-dealer has described as the "shark infested waters" of China's art world.

The 18th century Qianlong-dynasty porcelain vase

International auction houses have enjoyed a series of record-breaking sales since 2009 as 'hot' Chinese money flooded the market in search of investment opportunities following a massive surge in cheap credit following the 2008 financial crisis.

But the problems of the weak regulation in the Chinese art market could be seen last year when a Chinese bidder 'paid' a record-breaking £53m for a Qing Dynasty vase found in the house of a Middlesex widow.

The 'sale' initially attracted celebratory headlines but these were quickly tempered by reports that both the owner and the auctioneer had been forced to travel to China in pursuit of payment. The parties will still not confirm if the payment has been received.

The survey of last year's autumn sales from 250 Chinese auction houses found that two fifths of sales above 10m yuan (approximately £1m) had not been fully paid by April this year, according to Ou Shuying, the Association's deputy general-secretary.

Read more at The Telegraph

World War II (CBI) Theater, 1942-1945 (Flying The Hump)

A veteran pilot once explained the "CBI* takeoff" to newcomers: "If you can see the end of the runway through the rain and mist, then a takeoff is expected."

Following the invasion of China in 1937, Japanese forces succeeded in controlling virtually all of China's Pacific coast, and large parts of the interior — giving the Japanese Navy command of all ocean approaches. In the spring of 1942, Japanese units overran Burma (on India's northern border), cutting off the last significant land routes that supplied the struggling armies of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China.

The United States and its allies needed to keep China in the war because its forces preoccupied hundreds of thousands of Japanese troops. Holding that valuable Chinese turf permitted the Allies to attack Axis powers in the European theater, at the same time building a necessary launch site for an Allied attack on Japan's home islands. However, that grand strategy could only work if China and allied troops could be routinely supplied.

In April 1942, pilots started flying the "Hump," and continued missions until 1945, when the Burma Road was reopened. The dangerous 530-mile long passage over the Himalayan Mountains took its toll. Nearly 1,000 men and 600 Air Transport Command (ATC) planes were lost over the hump by the end of China-Burma-India Theater (CBI) operations. In addition, China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC) lost 38 planes and 88 airmen.

First to fly the hump

During the 1930s, the CNAC had pioneered air routes over the Himalayas. CNAC operated with the support of the Chinese government and the expertise of Pan American Airways. CNAC became a contractor to operate air cargo services between India and China, although it was clear that far more capacity was needed. Accordingly, the 10th Air Force, based in India, took responsibility for substantial air cargo flights and began operations over the hump in April 1942.

In October 1942, General of the Air Force Henry H. "Hap" Arnold decided to put the ATC in command of all hump operations, and 10th Air Force units on hump assignments were transferred to the ATC in December. The ATC, with authority to handle all airlift requirements in the theater of operations, brought its special experience to sort out the problems in air transportation and cargo flying.

Read more at U.S. History

BRIGADIER GENERAL ROBERT L. SCOTT JR.

Retired Sep. 30, 1957.   Died Feb. 27, 2006.

Robert Lee Scott was born in Macon, Ga., in 1908. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1932, completed pilot training at Kelly Field, Texas, in October 1933 and was assigned to Mitchel Field, N.Y. Like other air officers, Scott flew the air mail in 1934, commanded a pursuit squadron in Panama and helped instruct other pilots at bases in Texas and California.

After World War II began, he went to Task Force Aquila in February 1942 to the China-Burma-India Theater where he pioneered in air activities. Within a month he was executive and operations officer of the Assam-Burma-China Ferry Command, forerunner of the famous Air Transport Command and Hump efforts from India to China.

At the request of Generalissmo Chiang Kai-Shek he was named commander of the Flying Tigers, formed by General Claire Chennault, and also became fighter commanding officer of the China Air Task Force, later to become the 14th Air Force.

He flew 388 combat missions in 925 hours from July 1942 to October 1943, shooting down 13 enemy aircraft to become one of the earliest aces of the war/

Read more at U.S. AIR fORCE

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Brook, T., et.al., eds.

The two parts of this work investigate judicial punishments in imperial China as well as 18^th and 19^th century  Western reactions to and obsession with  Chinese methods of torture and with the Chinese method of public execution called death by a thousand cuts (lingchi). The authors present their interdisciplinary study as a "cross-cultural hermeneutics" (245), concluding that this use of torture and tormented death in China is not special but forms part of a global pattern of state-sponsored cruel and inhumane punishments recorded over time.

Commentary

Used especially during the Qin dynasty, lingchi (tormented execution) was the death penalty for treason, murder, and other crimes. This illustrated volume begins with a description of one of the last executions by lingchi, in Beijing, in 1904.The practice was terminated by law in 1905. Wang Weiqin, a multiple murderer, is tied to a tripod; the state executioner and his assistant employ their swords to slice flesh from his breasts, biceps, and upper thighs. They then kill him by stabbing him in the heart. Thereafter, they dismember the body. The criminal would often be given a heavy dose of opium before the slicing  which was not by a thousand, but a smaller number of cuts.

A number of Frenchmen photographed this execution and these photos are discussed in detail as causing outrage and obsession in the West. However, the authors point out that Western governments practiced crucifixion, hanging, drawing and quartering, burning, breaking on the wheel, and other similarly cruel punishments. But some Western publications about lingchi resulted in an emphasis on the extreme barbarism of Chinese culture which could then serve as a justification for colonizing the country to civilize or Westernize it.

Read more at Literature, Arts and Medicine

China 1911: The Birth of China's Tragedy

 As China celebrates the centenary of the 1911 revolution this October Jonathan Fenby reappraises the uprising and argues that its failings heralded decades of civil conflict, occupation and suffering for the Chinese people.

 

Chinese rebel leaders Liu Fuji (left) and Peng Chufan were arrested and beheaded early on October 10th. The Chinese displayed their heads as a warning, ‘killing the chicken to scare the monkeys’, but the Republican government honoured them as martyrs. Photograph by Francis Stafford.

 

The revolt that toppled the world’s longest-lasting empire had been brewing for decades but, when it finally came 100 years ago this October, it was triggered by accident when a bomb exploded in the office of a group of revolutionary soldiers in the Russian concession of the city of Hankou on the river Yangtze in central China. Russian police arrived to investigate and uncovered a list of the members of the underground cell that was dedicated to overthrowing the ruling Qing dynasty. Since the Russians were likely to hand this over to the Chinese authorities, the revolutionary group was forced to consider taking action rather than continuing to plot in secret.

Tension had been building in the region between Qing loyalists and those bent on bringing about its fall. This was heightened when, the same day, Chinese police swooped on a meeting place for radicals in Hankou, one of three cities that made up the metropolis of Wuhan together with Wuchang and Hanyang. They arrested 32 people, three of whom were executed in public, in wind and rain, at dawn the next day, October 10th, 1911. In a third incident two soldiers shot dead an officer who questioned them about weapons they were carrying without authorisation. Their colleagues in an army battalion stationed in Wuchang mutinied. China’s revolution had begun. Four months later on February 12th, 1912 the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated; since he had only passed his sixth birthday a week earlier, his adoptive mother, the Empress Dowager Longyu, agreed to the regime change on his behalf.

Failings of the Qing

This October the revolution will be celebrated in both the People’s Republic, which rules mainland China, and in the Republic of China on Taiwan across the 90-mile strait separating the two. A giant portrait of the country’s first republican president, Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), is on display in Tiananmen Square, the heart of Communist China. The regime in Taiwan stresses that it can establish a direct line back to the rebels who ended an empire that dated back to 221 ad and the reign of the first emperor, Qin Shihuangdi.

But that revolution was a far from straightforward process, creating issues that persisted through much of China’s 20th-century history and beyond. One thing is clear, however. By the later part of the 19th century the Qing, whose ancestors had swept down from their homeland of Manchuria in north-east China to unseat the Ming dynasty in 1644, had run out of time and will power.

Their great emperors, notably Kangxi (1661-1722) and Qianlong (1736-95), had presided over one of the most flourishing periods of the 2,000-year empire. They had expanded the country’s frontiers to the borders that encompass today’s China. As well as his military exploits, Kangxi was a cultured and humane ruler, who created an agricultural base to feed the nation’s growing population. Qianlong, who was also a scholar and patron of the arts, undertook massive expeditions to conquer Tibet and to forge into Central Asia. At the time of his reign it has been estimated that China accounted for one third of the world’s wealth. When George III sent a mission to Beijing in 1792 under Lord Macartney the emperor waved aside the products of the Industrial Revolution presented to him as gifts with the contemptuous remark: ‘I set no value on strange or ingenious objects and have no use of your country’s manufactures.’

However the imperial treasury was severely stretched by the cost of Qianlong’s military campaigns, which were increasingly unsuccessful as he aged, by the extravagant expenditure at court including the construction of the Summer Palace outside the capital and the depredations of the emperor’s corrupt favourite Heshan, who was estimated to have accumulated a private fortune equivalent of a billion of today’s pounds. At the same time a huge population boom strained the economy.

Read more at HistoryToday

The Impossible Thought of Lingchi in Georges Bataille's The Tears of Eros

Darren Jorgensen

In Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss critique a certain history of modernism. They take Georges Bataille at his word that informe, or formless, is "a term that serves to bring things down in the world" and describe its “operation” for undoing the formalisations of twentieth century art.[1] As James Elkins notes in "The Very Theory of Transgression: Bataille, Lingchi, and Surrealism," the effect of Formless has been to inspire artists to practice along the lines it set out, so that it has become a user's guide not for deconstruction but for its own positive appropriation.[2] In the final pages of the book Krauss proposes that informe has “its own legacy to fulfil, its own destiny,” words that tacitly sanction its development in art.[3] What was for Bataille a way of negating the impulse to classify turns, then, into a history of modern art that is still playing itself out.

 

Contesting this theory of transgressive art put forward in Formless, Elkins turns to Bataille's publication of photographs of lingchi, or the death by a hundred cuts.[4] Elkins argues that these devastating photographs, which were published in Bataille’s The Tears of Eros (1961) but not in Bois and Krauss’ Formless, out-transgress Bois and Krauss's transgressive ideas about modern art. The reason Bois and Krauss did not reproduce the lingchi photographs is that their extremity would “ruin” the art in Formless, undoing artifice with an unbearable reality.[5] Yet as we shall see, informe is not necessarily transgression, nor can transgression be considered apart from Bataille's philosophy of eroticism that is outlined in The Tears of Eros and his earlier text Eroticism (1957).[6] While transgression played a formative role in the development of poststructuralism and subsequently critical theory itself, its appropriation from Bataille has all too often neglected this eroticism. For Bataille did not distinguish the real from artifice, the movement of transgression from its representations in art and literature. While Elkins wants to argue that the power of lingchi is to exceed the power of any art, and so to negate the idea of an art of transgression, this argument makes a partition between art and lingchi, art and reality, that is not consistent with a philosophy of eroticism in which such classifications spill into each other.

 

When faced with images of lingchi it is difficult not to share Elkins' revulsion. He explains their effect with the idea that they trap death, a death that lies somewhere between the victim's moments of suffering and demise, captured over a sequence of camera shots.[7] What Elkins does not say, but is implicit in his argument, is that this aspect of the photographs is connected to the precise method of death at work here.[8] What may be unique to these images is the sheer extent of suffering that the victims are visibly enduring, and their documentation of other human beings who are imposing this suffering.  Elkins’ attention to the shock that the photographs contain, and his concomitant reluctance to interpret them, is a refusal to converse about the pain and cruelty so evident within them.

 

In an earlier book, The Object Stares Back (1997), Elkins narrated the photographs, seeing the victim as a woman among male executioners and witnesses. Thinking of the execution as symptomatic of gender relations, including the possibility that this was an adulteress being put to death, was what made these images "difficult to come to terms with."[9] Here the difficulty of the image did not prevent its interpretation, but was rather dependent upon an investigation of that image’s content. In his 2004 article “The Very Theory of Transgression,” Elkins discusses the accounts of physicians and penal theorists who have looked extensively at the photographs. The methods of these scholars have to do with a certain kind of looking, one immersed in the particular reason of this or that specialisation, reasoning away the horror of the images. To this approach we can contrast a certain refusal to look in Elkins' descriptions of the victim as being of "indeterminate sex." This shift from specific to indeterminate gender in Elkins' work here is part of his withdrawal from the very possibility of interpreting the images.[10]

 

Bataille suggested another way of looking at lingchi photographs in The Tears of Eros that is not entirely repulsed by their cruelty. Following on from his earlier text Eroticism in which he argued that death and sex collapse into each other at moments of orgasm, in ritual or in sacrifice, The Tears of Eros juxtaposes Bataille's own writing with images of prehistoric objects, modern paintings and photography. What unifies these images is their relation to the author’s philosophy of eroticism. In eroticism, achieved at moments when terms such as "divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror" blur together and become interchangeable, one may experience the continuity of life beyond oneself, relieving the physical tension of discontinuity to which we are bound by death.[11] It is by such a dissolution that the images reproduced in The Tears of Eros, including those of lingchi, may be understood as a series of contemplations on that continuity. Through this idea of eroticism we can make more sense of the crowds of onlookers that surround lingchi executions, of the attraction of looking at extreme suffering.

Read more at  intertheory

Chinese Torture

ID: 1
Ressource_Provider: Jérôme Bourgon
Title: Execution of Fu-zhu-li
Date of event: 10 April 1905
Date Accuracy: Exact
Place Continent: Asia
Place Country: China
Place Region: Hebei (Zhili)
Place City: Beijing
Place_Street: Caishikou菜市口
PlaceAccuracy: Exact
EventNature: Execution
Summary: Fu-zhu-li was a guard at the service of the *Mongol prince head of the Aohan (Jehol) banner. On New Years eve (*February 1905), he murdered the prince (essay: The Fu-zhu-li case). He was sentenced to quartering, the penalty prescribed for slaves who had murdered their master. As the photographs show, this was witnessed at close range by a number of witnesses. The photographs are now found, either printed on glass (for the stereos only) or on paper prints (essay: Photographic Processes). In addition, a set of 12 postcards (essay: Postcards), published in Tianjin, was available by 1912. The appalling images were accepted by the postal service, and some cards were actually mailed.
The photographs of Fu-zhu-li's execution added to the sulfurous interest already surrounding the lingchi penalty in the West. A few details on the criminal and the reasons for his sentencing were published by Carpeaux in 1913, together with two photographs. Some details are accurate (the names of the criminal and his victim, the executions date), others are more dubious (essay: The Fu-zhu-li affair) (critical review of Carpeaux). For example, and contrary to what he stated, Carpeaux cannot have been a witness to the execution (essay: Phony eyewitnesses). His story was nevertheless used by Georges Bataille in 1961 as a source on another lingchi execution (* to fiches "pseudo" Fu-zhu-li) (essay: Executions by Lingchi).

Bibliography
  1:Ref.: BOURGON, Jérôme Chinese Executions: Visualizing their Differences with European Supplices
  2:Ref.: MONESTIER, Martin Peines de mort. Histoire et technique des exécutions capitales, des origines à nos jours
  3:Ref.: MATIGNON, Jean-Jacques Dix ans au pays du Dragon
  4:Ref.: CARPEAUX, Louis Pékin qui s'en va

Essay
  1:Title: Photographing 'Chinese Torture' Jérôme BOURGON

Photographs

	1:Title: Lingchi C 0 tied to the post Fu-zhu-li is tied on the post, his face evincint a moving expression of sorrow. He seems well aware, however, not at all stunned by opium.
	2:Title: Lingchi C, Arrival2 The only broad angle shot in the set representing Lingchi C (Fu-zhu-li's execution), showing the huge crowd massed at close range of the executioners and the executed. The latter's expression is sorrowful.
	3:Title: Lingchi C, 1 in photocard The man is photographed frontally, in a close up, already tied up to the execution post. Both assistants (only the right one is fully visible) have moved to the side to clear the frame. The crowd of onlookers stands very close in the back.
	4:Title: Lingchi C, 1rst cut     Continuation at Turandot:Chinese Torture

1905: Fou Tchou-Li, by a thousand cuts

On this date in 1905, Fou Tchou-Li suffered the last execution by lingchi in Beijing, for the murder of a Mongolian prince.

Lingchi, or slow slicing, involved the public dismemberment of the victim. As such, it became iconic to westerners as an image of exotic Chinese cruelty — albeit iconic in a mythicized form, the accounts conflicting, undependable, Orientalist. (Many different ones are collected at the Wikipedia page.)

Lingchi is especially notable — apart from fathering the phrase “death by a thousand cuts” in the English lexicology — for its overlap with the era of photography.

Fou Tchou-Li’s death was captured on film, and the images famously captivated Georges Bataille for the expression of seeming ecstasy on the face of the dying (or dead) man.

Bataille was said to meditate daily upon the image below in particular — “I never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.”

Agony and ecstasy? A sequence of images, strong stuff in spite of their low quality, describing Fou Tchou-Li’s execution can be viewed here. Notice, however, that it’s not the one pictured here — the scholar who maintains this page claims the man’s identity became confused by western interlocutors. The different, unnamed man who as “Fou Tchou-Li” riveted Bataille is pictured here.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explained the mystical nexus of pleasure and pain Fou Tchou-Li’s torture suggested to the French theorist, aptly comparing it to graphic but pre-photographic exaltations of torture in the western artistic tradition, such as Saint Sebastian:

Read more at Executed Today

1799: Heshen forced to commit suicide

It was on this date that notoriously corrupt Chinese minister of state Heshen or Ho-Shen was forced to commit suicide in lieu of execution.

The able child of a Manchu military officer, Heshen came of age in the long reign of the emperor Qianlong.

That Heshen rose above his modest station with this monarch’s favor was the source of no small resentment. Rumors circulated that the attractive young former bodyguard reminded the emperor of a lost, beloved concubine — with all that implies.

“Elegant in looks, sprucely handsome in a dandified way that suggested a lack of virtue,” a Korean diplomat described Heshen.

Whatever there might have been to the homosexuality angle, Heshen exploited the imperial protection to gorge himself on the state’s revenues; he’s reported to have filled the bureaucracy with clients who saw to it that Heshen got a yuan out of every tael that passed through state business in the last quarter of the 18th century. He even dynastically married his own son to one of Qianlong’s daughters.

Read more at Executed Today

Ling Chi

Slow slicing (simplified Chinese: 凌迟; traditional Chinese: 凌遲; pinyin: língchí, alternately transliterated Ling Chi or Leng T'che), also translated as the slow process, the lingering death, or death by a thousand cuts (simplified Chinese: 杀千刀; traditional Chinese: 殺千刀), was a form of execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until its abolition in 1905. In this form of execution, the condemned person was killed by using a knife to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time. The term língchí derives from a classical description of ascending a mountain slowly. Lingchi was reserved for crimes viewed as especially severe, such as treason and killing one's parents. The process involved tying the person to be executed to a wooden frame, usually in a public place. The flesh was then cut from the body in multiple slices in a process that was not specified in detail in Chinese law and therefore most likely varied. In later times, opium was sometimes administered either as an act of mercy or as a way of preventing fainting. The punishment worked on three levels: as a form of public humiliation, as a slow and lingering death, and as a punishment after death.

Read much more at Wikipedia

Yixuan, 1st Prince Chun

 

Prince Chun of the Blood 醇親王

Yixuan, 1st Prince Chun (simplified Chinese: 醇贤亲王; traditional Chinese: 醇賢親王; pinyin: Chún Xián Qīn Wáng; officially Prince of the First Rank Chun Xian) (16 October 1840 – 1 January 1891) was a prince of the Qing Dynasty, the last reigning dynasty of China. He was the father of the dynasty's penultimate emperor, the Guangxu Emperor, and the paternal grandfather of China's last emperor, Puyi.

Birth and early life

1st Prince Chun was born in the twentieth year of Emperor Daoguang's reign. He was the seventh son of the Daoguang Emperor. His mother was the Worthy Lady Lin (琳貴人). Four months after his birth, Yixuan's mother was elevated to the rank of Imperial Concubine Lin (琳嬪). In 1842, she was again elevated to the rank of Consort Lin (琳妃), and in 1846 was elevated once more to the rank of Noble Consort Lin (琳貴妃). She was posthumously honored as Imperial Noble Consort Zhuang Shun (莊順皇貴妃) by the Tongzhi Emperor. As the seventh son of the emperor, he was titled as the Seventh Prince (七王爺).

 During the Xianfeng and Tongzhi Emperors' reigns

In February 1850, Yixuan's older half-brother Yizhu (奕詝) ascended the throne as the Xianfeng Emperor, and Yixuan was made Prince Chun of the Second Rank (醇郡王). Although 1st Prince Chun led a quiet and undistinguished life at court during the Xianfeng Emperor's 11-year reign, his fortune was made by his sister-in-law, Empress Dowager Cixi, following the Xianfeng Emperor's death.

In 1860, he was married by the Xiang Emperor's imperial decree to Empress Dowager Cixi's younger sister, Yehenara Wanzhen. The marriage created close ties between the house of 1st Prince Chun and the woman who was about to become regent and absolute ruler of China. Then, on 22 August 1861, the Xianfeng Emperor died, leaving his and Empress Dowager Cixi's five-year old son, the future Tongzhi Emperor, as his only heir. In the ensuing struggle over who would assume the regency, 1st Prince Chun sided with Empress Dowager Cixi's party. In November 1861, when Empress Dowager Cixi launched the Xinyou Coup (辛酉政變) with the help of the 1st Prince Chun's older half-brother, Yixin, Prince Gong, 1st Prince Chun carried out the order to arrest Sushun, the leader of the opposing party, and brought him back to Beijing where he was beheaded.

As a result of this event, the prince found himself elevated to the highest military and government positions at court. Throughout the following 14 years of the Tongzhi Emperor's reign, 1st Prince Chun led a military and government career. In 1872, he was officially elevated to the rank of Prince Chun of the First Rank (醇親王).

Read more at Wikipedia

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    

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

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.