From: gaojeng@durras.anu.edu.au (J. Gao)
Subject: CND: Books & Journals Review, Thu, 10/8/1992
Summary: CND
Keywords: CND
Organization: Computer Services Centre, Australian National University
Date:  8 Oct 92 05:02:07 GMT

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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
                            
                             October 8, 1992

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1. Voices and Visions --
   "Voices of China: the Interplay of Politics
    and Journalism"  edited by Chin-Chuan Lee  ......................... 83

2. Peppers sans Passports --
   "Why We Eat What We Eat"  by Raymond Sokolov
   "The Gunpowder Gardens" by Jason Goodwin
   "Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in
    Asian Maritime Trade, C. 1400-1750"  by Ptak and Rothermund  ....... 92

3. The Birth of an Auctioneer .......................................... 60

4. Patrimony - Bring Back My Buddhas to Me ............................. 44

5. Friends or Neighbours --
   "The Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Sino-
    Vietnamese Relations"  by Ramses Amer. Forum  ...................... 52
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Editor's Note:  We welcome all CND readers to contribute to this column. If 
                you encounter any China-related books  or journals that you
                would like to share with  other CND readers, please send in  
                comments, newspaper reviews, journal articles, and excerpts
                etc to  cnd-editor@Sdsc.edu   Thank you.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Voices and Visions --
   "Voices of China: the Interplay of Politics
    and Journalism"  edited by Chin-Chuan Lee  ......................... 83
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 1/31/91
Review written by: Andrew Giarelli

"Voices of China: the Interplay of Politics
and Journalism"  edited by Chin-Chuan Lee.
Guilford Press, New York. US$30 hardcover, US$16.95 paperback

With China now pressing capital charges against a publisher and editor
imprisoned after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Chin-Chuan Lee's broad
anthology comes at a key moment. It assesses how an embryonic free press
took shape during the reform decade of the 1980s, how it was doomed from the
start, and how American media consistently misread China's democratic
portents.

In one of the book's few optimistic notes, Lee argues in his introduction
that, despite hardliners' current dominance, "a more liberal undercurrent
appears to be regrouping." He is convinced that "aspirations for press
freedom, once aroused, cannot be crushed," especially given the media
diversity that flourished in the reformist 1980s.

Other items in the anthology, though, belie such hopes and suggest that the
movements for press freedom and democracy were fatally flawed. The most
telling argument comes not from such "star" journalists as Liu Binyan or
Harrison Salisbury but from inside the circle of reformist policymaking
itself. This is written by Ruan Ming, a former aide to the late party boss
Hu Yaobang.

Peking's reformists, he insists, were as attracted as the leaders of Taiwan
or South Korea by the theory of "neo-authoritarianism." In the leadership
power struggle after the 1976 fall of the Gang of Four, Deng Xiaoping
exploited the appearance of spontaneous journals on Peking's "Democracy
Wall" to topple his rival, Maoist premier Hua Guofeng.

Once firmly entrenched, though, Deng had no qualms about crushing the
journals and opposing a press law.  These policies were also aped by Deng's
protege, Hu Yaobang, at the very height of "liberal"  influence in 1985. The
next reformist leader, Premier Zhao Ziyang, also withheld his support for
press freedom while he lobbied for economic and political reform. Even that
supposed heroine of press freedom, "Enlightenment Daily" reporter Dai Qing,
credited benevolent dictatorship with China's most progressive moves this
century.

It was Zhao's aversion to a free press, Ruan charges, that led him to muff
the opportunity of spring 1989 - a disturbing precedent for anyone who
harbours hope for a different China under post-Deng "reformists."

In the run-up the the Tiananmen repression, Ruan claims, party reformers and
democracy activists could not manage to even consider the possibility of
making common cause.

Still, pre-1989 Chinese journalism seethed with unprecedented activity, as
documented in a survey of publishers, editors and reporters by contributor
Judy Polumbaum. Fewer than 200 newspapers survived the Cultural Revolution,
she writes, but by 1987 there were over 2,500, including some 100
"semi-official, semi-public" newspapers like Shanghai's "World Economic
Herald" that operated partly outside party control.

Competing for scoops in these newsrooms was like "hitting line balls" in
ping pong, according to "Herald" editor Qin Benli in another of this
anthology's articles. When local officials kept regional journalists from
reporting on northeast China's 1987 forest fires, for example, national
newspapers sent in correspondents to grab the story.

Party officials were even reduced to such "Western-style" techniques of
press control as demands for "fairness" checks and threats to clam up on
troublesome reporters in the future.

Less riveting is the book's latter half, which deals with American press
coverage of China - a tale all too familiar to China hands. Why were
American reporters so ready to believe that China was heading for press
freedom in particular and democracy in general?

Was it the legacy of more than a century's worth of American journalistic
misreadings, as Peter Rand suggests? Or merely, as Amanda Bennett argues, a
strange mix of cynicism about official China and romanticism about the
democracy movement on the part of the current, Woodstock-influenced crop of
American correspondents in Peking?

Even in the reformist heyday, it has always been dodgy to get any sort of
story that is verifiable by Western standards, as former "Wall Street
Journal" bureau chief Frank Ching points out.

As for the future course of Chinese media, success may well hinge more on
economic than philosophical issues. In his article on Shanghai's media
explosion, Lynn White III implies that market-driven battles for limited
funding, newsprint supply and advertising-circulation revenues have created
a radically altered scenario for the 1990s. If he is right, China's
"neo-authoritarian reformists," some of them now under house arrest, may
have triggered a more substantial and irreversible revolution than either
they or the Tiananmen protesters imagined.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Peppers sans Passports --
   "Why We Eat What We Eat" by Raymond Sokolov
   "The Gunpowder Gardens" by Jason Goodwin
   "Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in
    Asian Maritime Trade, C. 1400-1750"  by Ptak and Rothermund  ....... 92
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Far Eastern Economic Review 3/12/92
Review written by: Don Cohn

"Why We Eat What We Eat" by Raymond Sokolov,
Summit Books, New York.  US$22
"The Gunpowder Gardens"  by Jason Goodwin.
Chatto & Windus, London.  US$27
"Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in
Asian Maritime Trade, C. 1400-1750"  edited by
Roderich Ptak and Dietmar Rothermund.
Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart.  No price given

Christopher Columbus has yet to be enshrined as a Kitchen God in Sichuan
province. But his failure to find pepper in the New World he stumbled upon
set off a complex chain of events that resulted, a short century later, in
Mexican chilies burning the tongues of landlocked Chinese dining on eggplant
in garlic sauce.

In "Why We Eat What We Eat", Raymond Sokolov, food critic for "National
History" magazine and leisure and arts editor of the Wall Street Journal,
details the revolutionary nature of the international traffic in foodstuffs
and tastes that 16th-century Spanish colonisers initiated in places like
Mexico, the Philippines and Puerto Rico, where Sokolov encountered "the most
complex tangle of culinary influence and geography in the world."

In the next century, trading barques transported seeds of the inanimate
heroes of Sokolov's tale - tomatoes, potatoes, chilies, chocolate and maize
- to Europe, where they quickly went native. And when chilies reached
Sichuan in western China in the 16th century, he says, they redefined the
nature of oriental picante, although numbing, native Chinese flower pepper
(huajiao or fagara) and brisk, black "barbarian pepper" imported from
Indonesia as early as the Han or Tang dynasty had long inflamed Chinese
dishes. A millennium later, Japanese culinary minimalism inspired French
chefs in the 1970s to lay out "nouvelle cuisine" mosaics on huge plates,
although Sokolov also locates this development in the tradition of the
flamboyant "pieces montees" of the 17th century.

In a food book lean on recipes, Sokolov the gastroehnogeographer and
peripatetic food pilgrim lards his text with etymologies and definitions of
ingredients and dishes. Oddly enough he mentions the kiwi fruit several
times, apparently oblivious to the fact that the Chinese gooseberry was
named after a slow-moving New Zealand bird as part of a public-relations
stunt. Lists exhausted, he muses on bigger questions: What is Chinese
cuisine? And when did French cuisine become French? A liberal in the
kitchen, he reveres the classics while encouraging experimentation, even if
it turns out pickles and ice cream. Worry not: one of his premises is that
"old cuisines never die, they add new dishes and ingredients to old recipes
and slough off the losers, the evolutionary dead ends."

Later, confronted with the grotesque heterogeneity displayed in some new
wave restaurants, he attains enlightenment at a lecture on deconstruction:
"nouvelle cuisine", both syntactically and on the plate, is metaphor,
simile, pun. "Escalopes de saumon" are "delicious, but ... also witty."

As is his jaunty journalism, although rather than answering the Why in his
title, Sokolov goes further into How. Perhaps we are less what we eat these
days and more what we import, export and wax faddish about.

Tea is a perfect subject for gastroethnogeography, less so for
soul-searching. In his mid-20s, Jason Goodwin set out on an Asian wanderjahr
with a contract to write a tea book. His "madeleines" are the Chinese and
Indian tea caddies his grandmothers acquired through colonial residence in
those countries. At times Goodwin takes pleasure in his quest, though he is
rarely at ease in the company of other professional teamen.

"The Gunpowder Garden" is a mixed brew that begins with a summer trip to
Hongkong and South China, where Goodwin paints his way out of his
unfamiliarity with the language and the odd ways of the people (who all
speak pidgin) in the most cynical colours. But his historical narrative of
opium and tea in Canton is exquisite and has the makings of a fine book.

In China, now a minor player in the world tea trade, Goodwin communes with a
few tentative disciples of Lu Yu, the God of Tea, but his search is
misguided and ill informed. On Gulangyu island near Xiamen (Amoy), where his
grandfather worked for Standard Oil, he encounters one of the many Chinese
bureaucrats who discourage him from seeking the elusive leaf. In India,
Goodwin is less at home on rail platforms than in aristocratic bungalows,
where he quotes present-day planters on their trade at soporific lengths. If
only he were suffering from Chinese cultural shock again, for he writes
about such experiences with the exuberance of a seething kettle.

The highly meticulous scholarship of oriental trade tracks the movements
overland and sea routes not only of tea and vegetables, but of
tortoise-shell, cowry, venison and deer-skins, bird's nests, sugar and zinc
(as ballast), salt and opium. "Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs in
Asian Maritime Trade, C. 1400-1750" consists of 23 chapters by "historians
(who) have been 'left in the lurch by the economists and led astray by Karl
Polanyi' when moving from the abstract market of economic theory to the
actual markets of history."

The papers reflect two schools of thought about the trade: one that
emphasises "the strength and resilience of Asian societies in the age of
European penetration"; and another that views Asia as marginal in the
development of world capitalism before the 19th century.

Swallows' nests provide an intriguing model. The Javanese actively harvested
and processed them, but rarely ate them. The Dutch saw them as a tool of
political manipulation and a financial resource. The Vietnamese court and
elite consumed the nests but exported most of their harvest to China. The
the Chinese, who controlled most of the international trade in these
crystallisations of avian saliva, they were a substitute for cash and, as
today, a luxury commodity, precious tonic, aphrodisiac and
immortality-conferring drug. Small wonder so many sailed the ocean blue to
put them on their tables.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
3. The Birth of an Auctioneer .......................................... 60
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts & Society 6/11/92
By: Don Cohn

China's cultural commissars are aspiring to the fame and fortune associated
with Sotheby's and Christie's, the world's largest auction houses, and are
mounting the first public auction of Chinese cultural relics including items
dating from before 1795, the cut-off date for exportable antiques. The sale
will be held in a Peking hotel this October as part of the Visit China 1992
tourism promotion.

But beyond the glamour and hype attached to such an ambitious project is the
notion that by boldly selling off one-of-a-kind cultural relics, China is
making a bid to control trafficking in such items and keeping the profits at
home.

The auction is being organised by the Peking Auction Market, part of a large
trading network that runs commission stores in the city, as well as the
popular Huaxia Handicraft Store. The trading company's future plans include
opening Peking's largest gold shop, and the first pawn shop in the city
operating on socialist principles since the 1950s.

The sale of over 2,200 items will take place over the course of six days, a
marathon feat that would test the mettle of any auctioneer, says Julian
Thompson, chairman of Sotheby's Asia. Putting out a catalogue for a sale of
this size is in itself a daunting task.

The items to be auctioned in October include porcelain, jewellery, textiles,
furniture and high-quality art reproductions, such as bronzes. Regarding the
identity of the auctioneer, Feng Jiabo, deputy general manager of the Peking
Auction Market, promises "a dramatic announcement." Ying Ruocheng, the
English-speaking former vice-minister of culture and an actor who played
Willy Loman in a Chinese production of Arthur Miller's "Death of A
Salesman", is one likely choice.

Feng proudly states that many of the Chinese objects "are of higher quality
than the pieces Sotheby's and Christie's sell at auction," but declined to
offer further details. Among the several vintage automobiles to go on the
block are 1950s-Cadillac-inspired Red Flags, China's state limousine until
the mid-1980s, when the elite began driving around in Mercedes. The sale
will also include foreign-made clocks, watches, telescopes and cameras.

The sale is estimated to bring in Rmb 50 million (US$9.35 million), roughly
equivalent to a three-day Sotheby's or Christie's auction. The Peking
Auction Market will assess a buyer's premium and seller's commission that
will be "lower than that of the major Western auction houses," says Feng.
Sotheby's and Christie's charge 10-15% for these terms.

The pieces were acquired by placing an advertisement in two Peking
newspapers. The response from the public was overwhelming, says Feng, with
Chinese from as far as Qinghai province bringing their family heirlooms to
the Chinese capital, and with many being turned away because of the sheer
numbers.

To allay suspicions that the auction was a ploy to ferret out valuable
relics in private hands, those who submitted pieces that were not accepted
for this auction (for reasons of either quality and quantity) were not
compelled to register their names. In the past, liberalisation in the
enforcement of laws governing the antiques trade, particularly in antiques
bazaars, had been followed on occasion by raids in which officials
confiscated pieces deemed "illegal to sell." The vendors received no
compensation or even a receipt for the goods removed from their shops. Most
felt that the goods were destined for clandestine sale elsewhere.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Patrimony - Bring Back My Buddhas to Me ............................. 44
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: Arts & Society 6/11/92
By: Don Cohn

The xenophobia that in part explains the reluctance of the Chinese
government to sell of the country's cultural patrimony can be traced back to
the fate dealt to the great cave temples along the Silk Road in China vast
desert northwest by a number of remarkable foreigner at the end of the 19th
and 20th century.

The best known of these sites is the Mogao Grottoes in Dunhuang, an oasis in
Gansu province, where French, British Japanese, Russian and American
explorers carted away some 50,000 scrolls, manuscripts frescoes and
sculptures, including the world's earliest printed book, dating from the 4th
to 10th centuries. While Aurel Stein, Paul Pelliot, Sven Hedin and company
are generally regarded in the West as great scholars who risked their lives
to discover and rescue cultural relics from oblivion and possible
desecration, the Chinese (publicly) have only contempt for them.

In a lengthy harangue published in the People's Daily in March entitled
"Examining the Question of Human Rights with Reference to the Mogao Grottoes
of Dunhuang," Duan Wenjie, director of the Dunhuang Research Institute and
two colleagues added a new angle to an old argument: they took US
congressmen to task for their criticism of human rights in China.
Specifically, they cited the example of the Harvard scholar Langdon Warner,
who in 1924 removed 26 fresco fragments and a Tang Dynasty Buddhist statue
from the caves. At the time, they wrote, "not a single well-meaning American
congressman raised the hue and cry about the infringement of the Chinese
people's human rights, or the destruction of Chinese culture."

The argument that these archaeological adventurers contributed to the
preservation and dissemination of knowledge about these relics by placing
them in museums in London, Paris, New Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul and St Petersburg,
thus saving them from loss and destruction during the ensuing chaotic
decades in China, is dismissed as fantasy.

Warner's "vicious criminal behaviour" represents a disregard for China's
"intellectual property," Duan and his comrades said, their tit for the tat
of US accusations of Chinese book and computer-software piracy. Chinese
archaeologists follow the Confucian version of the Golden Rule and "show
respect for the rights and culture of other nations [Chinese archaeologists]
are the only people capable of respecting the principles of intellectual
property."

But today China has its own Warners. On a visit to the grottoes this spring,
a curator explaining the significance of some erotic frescoes to a group of
foreigners announced that a Chinese man had been executed recently for
slicing two sections of the frescoes off the wall.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. Friends or Neighbours --
   "The Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Sino-
    Vietnamese Relations"  by Ramses Amer. Forum  ...................... 52
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: XU Ming Yang
Source: F.E.E.R. 7/9/92
Review written by: Diana Martin

"The Ethnic Chinese in Vietnam and Sino-
Vietnamese Relations"  by Ramses Amer. Forum
Petaling Jaya.  US$10

It is often when a minority people is substantially similar to those around
them but is careful to remain differentiated, that its members provoke the
most animosity among the host people. If they happen to be economically
successful as well they are almost certain to attract persecution. The Jews
in Europe are one obvious example of this phenomenon, the Chinese in
Southeast Asia another. It is the situation of the Chinese community in
Vietnam and how it has affected, and been affected by, the shifting
relations between the two nations that the author, Ramses Amer of Uppsala
University in Sweden, describes and analyses in this book.

A brief outline of the thousand years when Vietnam was part of China sets
the subsequent events in historical context. After that period, Vietnam
remained a vasal of China, then colonisation by the French in the 19th
century was followed by the American presence until the last quarter of the
20th century. Finally, a mere 15 years ago, after a stormy and bloody
battle, Vietnam gained national unity and independence.

The Chinese community in Vietnam has always been substantial and for the
most part has successfully engaged in commerce. In addition, Chinese culture
has greatly influenced Vietnamese culture. The resulting friction has meant
that a certain periods the Chinese have been forced to take Vietnamese
citizenship and Vietnamese names.

However, unlike the Jews and other minorities, the Chinese come from a
powerful neighbouring country that could, if it wished, intercede on their
behalf with its Vietnamese counterpart.

For the Chinese community, the division of Vietnam in 1954 and the
reunification under communist rule 20 years later, created complications in
terms of assimilation and assumptions about loyalty. The Chinese population
in the North was small, rural and economically insignificant, and after
division many left for the South. Their economic role contrasted with that
of those already in the South, largely urban traders. As the government in
the South forbade contacts with China, there was a stronger drive to
persuade the Chinese to take Vietnamese citizenship. In 1956 Zhou Enlai
added his voice to this theme against the wishes of many ethnic Chinese.

Given that the Chinese Government has a poor record of protecting its
citizens' rights within its own borders, one suspects that broader issues of
policy, linked to power-play between China and Vietnam, and later among
China, Vietnam and the Soviet Union, determined China's actions on behalf of
its own people.

A lack of information about the larger background is the main weakness of
this well-researched book. Amer documents the fate of the Chinese community
in terms of Vietnamese decrees, and the policies of China and Vietnam with
respect to each other. But he rarely gives insights into what made the
Chinese community wish to resist taking Vietnamese citizenship, or why China
acted as it did. It is understandable that many of the early refugee boat
people were Chinese, but what motivated the Vietnamese departure that began
later? The internal social and economic circumstances of a country and its
people are, after all, often what influence how it treats its minorities.

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