I have been quiet in here of late for a few reasons (excuses?), but my focus has temporarily shifted to creating more of a web presence beyond the blog by building a website to display photos and other content that is not necessarily blog-able. Doing this with a web connection that has done nothing but deteriorate over the last two months has not been easy. This morning, the day of the big show, I am having a difficult time keeping the MLB.com audio connection as I try to listen to a baseball game before watching the spectacle on TV. A few of my former Tibetans students who are now in university in Beijing have been pressed into service to dance past the Gates of Heavenly Peace. What other reason could there be to include minorities in the show?
As I have mentioned in here at least several times before we live across the street from Tianjin’s Olympic stadium, which has remained staggeringly empty over the last 14 months. Though the stadium is barely used, the same cannot be said for the large square on the north side of the stadium, which is used as a venue for light and blaring sound shows, cadre bus tours and any other event that requires audio-visual people to run invasive sound checks for days ahead of any and all events. It has been unpleasant here recently, especially last night when we could barely hear each other speak sitting in our living room as we were again under painful assault so loud as to set off car alarms all around the neighborhood. They finally stopped at 10:15. Sixty years and we all get to suffer.
There has been much written about the message and the audience of today’s spectacle (here, with links to other sites) in Beijing, and I, too, am of the opinion that it will be an external PR disaster: hard to pass yourself off as a peace loving world power when you roll tanks, artillery and warheads along with thousands and thousands of goose-stepping troops through a space the world has come to know for a past display of live ammo and repression.
Though the main audience will be the Chinese, you can bet that snippets of the mighty show will end up playing on television news programs throughout the world, which will give all of those who are not Chinese a good reason to pause. With that said, I am re-posting a section of a piece I wrote a year-and-a-half ago.
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Seems odd to dig into the very distant past to flesh out the present, but this is a country with a cultural continuity that can neither be denied nor avoided. This particular road to understanding is rife with potholes, since suggesting uniformity in thought and action can be, and has been, used wrongly and naively to describe present-day China. But sometimes it is not, and the question becomes, as always, “Who do you trust?”
One of the people I trust is David Nivison, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who began his work at that university in 1948 as a Chinese professor, though he eventually held joint appointments in three different departments: Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Chinese and Japanese. Though he didn’t publish all that much, he was known as a philosophers’ philosopher. One of his books which I have is entitled The Way of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy. The first four chapters are lectures he delivered at Stanford, and the first one is titled “Virtue” in Bronze and Bone, where he comments on the character and concept of de, what is often translated as “virtue.” Nivison on de: “… [de]appears to be a quality or psychic energy in the king that the spirits can perceive and are pleased to see in him; and it appears to be something he gets, or something that becomes more evident in him when he denies or risks himself, does something for another…human being.”
There are two passages I’d like to pass on, and I can only hope they stand somewhat on their own. Again, Nivison is speaking in terms of ancient China, though he brings some of it forward to the present.
[So] military dé is not really military. It is the combined impact of awe, perceived prestige, fear and gratitude for the leader’s restraint; and this impact as a felt force actually makes using military measures unnecessary. I would offer this as a paradigm of a “de-campaign”: part of the Shang king’s function, revealed in these inscriptions, seems to have been to lead his forces forth each fighting season, to overawe the borders, showing the flag, and doubly impressing the border peoples by his restraint in showing his weapon’s edge.” [25]
…
“The feeling of a debt of gratitude for a kindness or a gift or service is something we all know. It is part of being human. But in some societies it is greatly magnified, in countless ways, by socialization and social pressure, until it comes to seem to be an ambient psychological force. Chinese society is like this. I think it is now, and I think it has been, for as far back as I have been able to study. In this kind of society the compulsion I feel to respond appropriately, now or sometime, when you do something for me or give me something, is a compulsion I feel so strongly that I come to think of it not as a psychic configuration in myself, but as a psychic power emanating from you, causing me to orient myself toward you. That power is your dé – you ‘virtue’ or ‘moral force.’” (25-26)
Riding around. Showing the flag. Awing the border people.
