History
Book Club
China from 1900 to Today
Wednesday,
August 26, 2020
Wednesday, August 26, 2020.
China from 1900 to today. China has traveled a
long way from the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 when western nations felt free
to wander all over the vast country. Sun-Yat-Sen and the last Qing
emperor…Military wardlordism ..Chiang Kai-Shek…War against Japan… Mao Zedong
and the Communist Revolution, founding of the People’s Republic…”Great Leap
Forward” and The Cultural Revolution…World’s No. 2 Economy, on the verge of
becoming No. 1. [Proposed by Jason Shaw]
My family and I lived for three
years in Japan. Actually,
we lived in the home that had once been occupied by the commander of the
Imperial Japanese naval base in a city near Nagasaki. I never, not one time, ever caught even a
tiny glimpse of the characteristic of the Japanese military that led them to do
the horrible things that they did countless times during World War II.
The
Rape of Nanking is the story of how the Japanese army in December 1937
systematically raped hundreds of thousands of women, then killed them; in mass
killings they murdered men, women and children, shooting them, bayoneting them,
whacking off their heads by sword, then dumped hundreds of thousands of corpses
into the Yangtze river, until the river ran red with their blood.
The
author of this book, Iris Chang, was a young Chinese American woman, and she
received many awards for this book, and for others she wrote. Her grandparents
barely escaped death in Nanking.
This book appears to be well researched. She went through hundreds of drawers of files
to find the story of how the Imperial Japanese Army attacked Shanghai, then
marched overland to seize the capital city of Nanking (Nanjing). The Japanese Army promised Chinese army
troops humane treatment, then bound their hands, and marched them off to be
machine-gunned and bayoneted, hundreds at a time. This horror took place over six weeks in the
city of Nanking. The Japanese murdered
some 300,000 civilians during this time.
The
Japanese Army committed atrocities in many other places in their invasion of
China. They are quoted in numerous
records of saying that they did not look upon the Chinese as humans, but rather
like pigs, “except you could eat pigs.”
Ms.
Chang writes about a few Americans and Europeans living in Nanking who were
responsible for creating a safety zone in the city that saved hundreds of
thousands. One particularly helpful person was a German named John Rabe. He was a member of the Nazi party, and used
his swastika armband to intervene when Japanese were about to kill
Chinese. While the Japanese sometimes
ignored the pleas of other foreigners, the sight of that Nazi armband usually
did the trick. Ms. Chang called him the
“Oskar Schindler of Nanking.” (Schindler was the Nazi who saved some 100,000
Jews from the Holocaust in Europe.) She
tells stories of an American woman, Minnie Vautrin, and a Nanking-born American
surgeon named Robert Wilson, who risked their lives countless times to save
many thousands of Chinese.
Ms.
Chang writes about “A Second Rape” in noting how American schoolchildren learn
about Hitler’s gas chambers, about the diary of Ann Frank, and about our
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they know nothing about Nanking in
1937. In Japan, there is a “soothing
perception” of history that either ignores the Japanese massacre at Nanking, or
puts a decidedly Japanese spin on the actions of the military. Japanese
ultranationalists have threatened everything from lawsuits to death, even
assassination, to opponents who suggest that these textbooks are not telling
the next generation the real story. And
it is not just the ultranationalists in Japan who have tried to airbrush this
part of their history.
In
her epilogue, Ms. Chang sets down three lessons from Nanking:
1.
Civilization
itself is tissue-thin. Japan’s behavior during World War II was less a product
of dangerous people than of a dangerous government. The Japanese Army for years had created a
Samurai culture of unspeakable cruelty to each other, for starters.
2.
The
role of power in genocide. Those who
have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted
that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal.
3.
The
third lesson, one that is perhaps most distressing of all, lies in the
frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into
passive spectators to the unthinkable.
The Rape of Nanking was front-page news across the world, and yet most
of the world stood by and did nothing while an entire city was butchered. The
international response to Nanking was eerily akin to the more recent response
to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda. And, since publication of this book, the
massive killing now in Syria.
Ms. Chang’s book
has received harsh criticism from some quarters, particularly in suggesting
that the Japanese have tried to soft pedal or suppress this part of their
history. She was hounded and criticized harshly
and became very depressed.
In
November, 2004 Iris Chang took her own life… perhaps one more victim of The
Rape of Nanking.
Hessler,
Peter, Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory,
2010, New York: HarperCollins, 438 pp. Cloth on board.
Country Driving is
a wonderful, funny look at the Chinese people by a former Peace Corps volunteer
who was Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker for seven years.
He
obviously has a very good grasp of Mandarin Chinese, because in mid-autumn he rents a large vehicle, fills it full of
bottled water, Dove?? bars and Oreo cookies, and strikes out to visit the
villages along the Great Wall of China.
He drives to Inner Mongolia. Well over 1000 miles before he is stopped
and ordered to go back where he came from.
All
these years after the Cultural Revolution, China is going through tremendous
change. More and more people are
becoming wealthy enough to buy a car, and thousands of cars get added to city
streets every day. They are building
nice expressways all across China, but Hessler notes that these roads, and all
the little roads between them, are empty, and so are the towns and villages of
the north. Only the old people and
children remain, as the young have all traveled south where there is work and
money to be earned.
He
wants to continue exploring the Great Wall, so in the spring he starts out
again, and is able to find various local historians and wise old men to show
him obscure bits of information about the Great Wall, which is really not one
wall, but many, built at different places, and closer or farther from borders,
starting in 200 B.C. Most of the wall was built in the 1500s in the Ming
Dynasty. Most of it consists of
earthworks, not brick or stone like the elaborate walls near Beijing.
Hessler
drops into Genghis Khan’s Mausoleum in a little Mongolian village, and finds
that a whole load of cadres, driving in black Volkswagen Santanas with tinted
windshields, have arrived before him.
These low level communist bureaucrats, most of them Mongolian, have just
had a nice lunch, and are all royally drunk.
A
Mongolian woman tour guide takes him to see the sights and tells him the
building is all a load of crap. Genghis
Khan is not buried here—all the coffins on display are empty. It turns out she is also drunk. But she is telling the truth.
As a
foreigner, and a journalist, he is required to file a request to travel, but he
knows enough about Chinese bureaucracy to know that it is better to ask for
forgiveness after you have gotten caught.
Hessler
runs into two traffic cops near a village on the Tibetan Plateau, and they
surmise that since he can speak Chinese so well, and is not Chinese, he must be
a spy. They both have a good laugh about
that and send him on his way. It’s rare
to see traffic cops, since the government usually chooses to erect clay statues
painted to look like policemen on the roads in these deserted parts of
China. [Which explains the photo on the
book cover.]
He
stops in a Mongolian-Kazakh village (Subei) that is cut right into the Great
Wall. It is so close that many homes are
imbedded in the wall, and so are the pens for their sheep. Most homes have no water, and their outdoor
toilets stink to high heaven.
He
visits a public toilet, but when he comes out, there is a little Mongolian cop
waiting for him. “Identification?” he
asks.
The
cop takes him to the Subei police station, where a woman cop and the Mongolian
cop start looking through file cabinets for the right forms to fill out. Hessler has broken the law, and it looks bad
for him.
Then
the two start to ask him questions, as they fill out all these forms.
Hessler notes that this is a strange way to
interrogate. Finally, the woman states
that he has broken the national law regarding aliens, and he will have to be
punished.
The
punishment is a fine of 500 yuan. However, since this is your first offense,
we’ll make it 100. This is about US$12,
so he pulls out a bill and puts it down.
“Oh
no!” she refuses the money, because of all the fear of corruption. It’s Sunday, but they go across the street to
the Agricultural Bank of China and get a clerk to open up. Hessler gives the clerk 100 rmb and fills out
several forms. The clerk promises that
the cop will receive the order for 100 rmb in two days.
Hessler
then tells about life in a village north of Beijing, and Factory life in
southeast China.
Hessler
must have spent quite a lot of time in a factory in one of many towns being
built from the ground up to handle the tremendous growth of manufacturing. He tells the story of this factory; from the
moment the prospective owners lay out the “design” for the factory. They plan to make little plastic covered
rings that are used to make brassieres, and it all starts with these men buying
a huge machine that will cut and plastic coat these rings. Hessler gets to know some key employees, and
describes how they come together, how they live and work, as they all try to
figure out how to make a success out of this somewhat hare-brained
venture.
Culturally,
the Chinese who come together in this factory are very, very unsophisticated,
but they are eager to learn and to succeed.
This
is a very entertaining book, and I feel that I have learned a lot about China
that I had never thought to ask about.
They can and will learn much from Americans, and we can learn much from
them. Instead of being afraid that they
will eat our lunch, we need to work out ways that we can combine our efforts
and expertise to succeed together.
S.W. Coulbourn
-end-
HISTORY BOOK CLUB TOPICS FOR 2020
Wednesday, September 30,
2020. History of Pandemics.
A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν, pan, "all"
and δῆμος, demos, "people") is an epidemic of an infectious
disease that has spread across a large
region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of people.
Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. The most fatal pandemic in recorded history was the Black
Death (also known as The Plague), which killed an estimated 75–200 million people in the 14th
century. Other notable pandemics include the 1918
influenza pandemic (Spanish flu). Current
pandemics include COVID-19 and HIV/AIDs. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn].
The Chicago Tribune thought Dewey would win in 1948
Wednesday, October 28, 2020. Unique Elections in American
History. The forthcoming
election may seem the most unique, but this month we will look back at past
elections. Select any that you find interesting. For instance: Election of 1828: Andrew Jackson vs. John Quincy Adams; Election of 1840: William Henry Harrison vs. Martin Van Buren; Election of 1860: Abraham Lincoln vs. Stephen Douglas vs. John C. Breckinridge vs.
John Bell; Election of 1864 : Abraham Lincoln vs. George B. McClellan; Election of 1884: Grover Cleveland vs. James G. Blaine; Election of 1912: Woodrow
Wilson vs. William Howard Taft vs. Theodore Roosevelt vs. Eugene V. Debs; Election of 1948: Harry Truman vs. Thomas E. Dewey vs. Strom Thurmond vs. Henry
Wallace. [Proposed by Sam Coulbourn]
Wednesday, November 25, 2020. Gloucester and the Sea.
Gloucester has
throughout four centuries cast its lot with the North Atlantic, remaining a
maritime port for better or worse. The maritime culture of Cape Ann is the mix
of a noble maritime heritage; ubiquitous sea influences that reach as far as
the quarries behind Rockport and into the haunted tracks of Dogtown Common;
seductive but capricious natural splendors; and untidy independence that repels
some but converts other visitors into lifetime devotees. Read any book about
the maritime history of Gloucester and Cape Ann. [Suggested by Richard Verrengia]
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