From: xc17@cicero.spc.uchicago.edu ()
Subject: CND Books and Journals Review, December 20, 1992
Keywords: CND Books and Journals Review, December 20, 1992
Organization: U of Chicago, SSPPCC
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1992 06:21:53 GMT
Summary: CND Books and Journals Review, December 20, 1992
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            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/

                            December 20, 1992

        *********  Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year  *********

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1. Far From the Mandarin Crowd --
   "China and the Chinese Overseas"  by Wang Gungwu ................... 101

2. "Asian American Panethnicity:
    Bridging Institutions and Identities"  by: Yen Le Espiritu  ........ 36

3. "The Immobile Empire"  by Alain Peyrefitte .......................... 35

4. "Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: the
    Intellectual and Social Background of Science and
    Technology in Pre-modern China"  by Derk Bodde  .................... 23

5. "China Saga"  by C.Y. Lee ........................................... 41
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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.

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1. Far From the Mandarin Crowd --
   "China and the Chinese Overseas"  by Wang Gungwu ................... 101
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Forwarded by: XU Ming Yang
Source: F.E.E.R. 6/20/92
Review written by: Lynn Pan

"China and the Chinese Overseas"  by Wang Gungwu
Times Academic Press, Singapore  US$30.00

Like Chinese migration, Wang Gungwu's scholarship knows no boundaries,
straddling the conventional divide between China and Southeast Asia. This
collection of his lectures and writings has the unusual virtue of ranging
nimbly over both diaspora and homeland. It would be noteworthy enough even if
Wang were not vice-chancellor of Hongkong University.

While he is correctly mindful of the contrast between the emigrant and
stay-at-home (he notes, for example, that immigrants are "notoriously
restless," longing for "upward mobility" or at least for "the promise of
future upward mobility"), Wang also reminds us that the distinction is not
as hard and fast as one might think. Nowadays we distinguish migration from
foreign business trips or extended visits, but not so the 19th-century
seafaring Chinese who traded in the waters of the Straits of Malacca and
established footholds in Singapore or Sumatra. Until modern times, it was
hard to separate the settler from the commercial bird of passage.

Even today, it is not always easy to classify the Chinese outside China. A
Hongkong Chinese does not fit into the huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) category,
in popular usage, unlike a Malaysian of Chinese ancestry. Yet the label is
applicable to neither, since strictly speaking it refers to Chinese
nationals living abroad temporarily, people who may expect Chinese consular
protection and who owe their primary loyalty to China.

Many still understand huaqiao to mean all Chinese overseas, regardless of
nationality. But officials in China have learned to be circumspect with the
term, so redolent is it of Chinese nationalism, of the "once a Chinese,
always a Chinese" notion so sinister to Southeast Asian host governments.
China's hands-of stance on Chinese overseas is reflected in its Nationality
Law of 1980, which makes it clear enough that "any Chinese national who has
settled abroad and who has been naturalised there or has acquired foreign
nationality of his own free will automatically lose Chinese [PRC]
nationality."

What is less clear, though, is whether or not Hongkong is "abroad," and
whether any Chinese who acquires a foreign passport there without having put
in time in that foreign country may think himself safe from the claims of
the Chinese Government. One would think not, from the Chinese refusal to
recognise the validity of the passports Britain will bestow on several
hundred thousand Hongkongers under a scheme requiring no residence
qualifications.

Hongkong's equivocal state recalls that of the treaty ports - places like
Shanghai and Canton that were in China but not of it. To blur things
further, some now speak of a Greater Hongkong lapping over southern China.
Wang clearly knows whereof he speaks when, instead of dichotomising mother
country and overseas community, he identifies a partially or totally
"detached" periphery of areas with Chinese majorities which "(are) outside
central (Chinese) control." Hongkong, Taiwan and the former treaty ports all
fall within this periphery. Just as the treaty ports, part of the detached
periphery before the communists exerted central control, were re-attached in
1949, so will Hongkong be re-attached in 1997.

Wang also refers to "a cultural periphery inside China," ordinary people at
a certain remove from the mandarin Confucian centre. These were the traders,
the archetypical Chinese emigrant.

The key to these traders' commercial success lay in their being "merchants
without mandarins", Wang suggests, free of the mandarins' disdain and
meddling. At home a vigorous "merchant culture" could not have flowered, but
abroad, Chinese merchants found that "working to laws that encouraged and
protected trade, and answering to officials who abided by such laws, gave
them a freedom to develop their talents and expand their business empires in
ways unknown in Chinese history."

Since it paid to be on the right side of the mandarins, it suited the
merchants in China to sustain the myth that their business success derived
from hard work, thrift, trust, family-mindedness and so on - all ostensibly
virtues lauded by Confucians. In fact, Wang says, the merchants' value
system was eclectic, and comprised elements frowned upon by Confucians such
as profit-seeking and risk-taking.

Besides, putting the family at the centre of their business was not merely a
bending to Confucian tradition, but a commercial necessity. If the merchants
wanted to dress up a rational and practical arrangement for starting an
expanding a business with a bit of Confucian rhetoric, good luck to them.
But we should not imagine that they were being Confucian. In any event, Wang
reminds us, putting family first is the immemorial practice of agrarian
societies, whether Confucian or not.

So much for the theory, in vogue in some American academic circles, that
Confucianism predisposed a people to capitalism. But what about the appeal
of Confucian tradition to the Chinese overseas, those who thrive by being
relatively free of Confucian dictates, but who nonetheless jib at
attributing their success to "barbarian" openness and pluralism?

The Singaporean doctor-reformer-businessman Lim Boon Keng, the subject of a
piquant essay in this book, was one such person. Lim was invited back to
China in 1921 to head Amoy (Xiamen) University, where he showed himself to
be "obsessive" about Confucianism. All quite predictable for a foreign-born,
British-educated, transplanted Chinese straining to be more royalist than
the king. Typically, because his spoken Chinese was not up to it, he urged
Confucian ideas upon his students in English - by no means the last
Singaporean Confucian to do so.

The glorification of tradition is an immigrant susceptibility, part of the
struggle for identity. For the Chinese in Southeast Asian, that identity has
always evolved as a reaction to China, and to the adopted country's awe or
fear of China. This gives the Chinese minority a tragic quality, says Wang
in his final chapter, "because China is so much greater in everyone's eyes
than it will ever be."

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2. "Asian American Panethnicity:
   Bridging Institutions and Identities"  by: Yen Le Espiritu  ......... 36
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Magill Book Reviews 12/19/92
Reviewed by: John Wilson

"Asian American Paethnicity: Bridging
Institutions and Identities"  by: Yen Le Espiritu
Temple University Press, 1992; 222 pages  $34.95

An illuminating account of the conditions under which diverse Asian
American groups have forged a pragmatic solidarity.

Although they still make up only a relatively small percentage of the
nation's population, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic minority
in the United States. In part this is a result of massive immigration
following major reforms in U.S.immigration policy in 1965, in part a result
of admitting more than a million refugees from Southeast Asia in the
aftermath of the Vietnam War. The impact of these new arrivals on already
established Asian American communities is but one of many subjects
considered in Yen Le Espiritu's invaluable study.

The term "Asian American," as Espiritu notes, comprises the distinct
cultures of Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others.
While members of these diverse groups have in common cultural roots in Asia,
they have not historically seen themselves as sharing a panethnic identity.
Indeed, strong grievances and mutual prejudices exist among many of these
groups. In the United States, however, people of Asian descent have
frequently been lumped together by members of the mainstream culture; this
blurring of distinctions among different Asian groups has often had a racist
element. Thus, Espiritu shows, panethnic solidarity among Asian Americans
developed primarily as a response to prejudice and discrimination.

Espiritu, a Vietnamese American who is married to a Filipino American, is
an assistant professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San
Diego. While she employs a good deal of social science jargon, her book is
accessible to the interested general reader. Drawing on interviews as well
as a wide range of specialized studies, Espiritu focuses on topics such as
the growth of the Asian American movement, electoral politics in the Asian
American community, and anti-Asian violence. The text is supplemented by
statistical tables, notes, an extensive bibliography, a list of interviews,
and an index.

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3. "The Immobile Empire"  by Alain Peyrefitte .......................... 35
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Edited and forwarded by: Gu Zhen (june@bu-pub.bu.edu)
Source: The New York Times Book Review 11/15/92
Reviewed by: Christopher Hibbert

"The Immobile Empire" by Alain Peyrefitte (French)
Translated by Jon Rothschild; New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30

Alain Peyrefitte, a diplomat who has served four French presidents, tells
the breathtaking story of a foreign mission to China in late 18th century.
It happened when the British, who considered themselves, with justification,
the most powerful and advanced nation on earth, decided to send a diplomatic
mission to China in 1793.

The mission was doomed to failure from the start because the British were
ignorant of China. However, the Chinese were even more ignorant of the West;
and what little they did know of the foreign devils, they did not like. The
question of the kowtow was at the very center of the difficulties that beset
the mission to China led by Lord Macartney, an experienced and accomplished
diplomat. Macartney was instructed by the Chinese officials that, when he
presented gifts to the Emperor, he was expected to make nine prostration of
his head to the ground. With great reluctance, Macartney did make efforts to
show a gesture of "profound obeisance." But this fell so far short of the
required kowtow that the "ignorant" barbarians were required to return to
their own country.

The Dutch, the British's competitors in foreign trade to China, were
encouraged by this rebuff to their rivals. They, prepared to kowtow as often
as required, sent a mission of their own to China. But this was even less
successful. The Emperor could not restrain his laughter when, as the
kneeling ambassador in eager submissiveness bowed his head to the ground,
his wig fell off. The Dutch were sent home as a laughing stock. A Russian
delegation, eager to take advantage of the failures of the British and Dutch
predecessors, was also sent away humiliated.

It seems reasonable to think that if Macartney's diplomacy had been
successful, East and West might have been spared the Opium Wars. As Mr.
Peyrefitte sadly concludes, the lessons of this failed diplomacy remain
unlearned. The Emperor Chien Lung and Lord Macartney "are not dead but live
among us still. Perhaps they are immortal."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. "Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: the
    Intellectual and Social Background of Science and
    Technology in Pre-modern China"  by Derk Bodde  .................... 23
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Choice Book Reviews
Review written by: F.B. Bessac

441pp Pub. date: Hawaii 1991; ISBN 0-8248-1334-0,  Price: $38.00

Originally intended as the capstone to Joseph Needham's monumental Science
and Civilization in China (1954-  ), Bodde's volume was published
independently.  The two scholars disagreed about the nature and importance
of classical Chinese language and writing, which inhibited creative,
scientific thought among the scholar-officials who set the intellectual tone
in China from the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) until the 1911 revolution.
After reviewing classical Chinese, Bodde discusses the Chinese morality,
"the discourses on iron and salt" and the lowly position of merchants, the
lack of communication between literati and craftsmen, and finally, Chinese
concepts of humans and nature.  He argues that the organistic view made it
impossible for Chinese scholars to develop Newtonian physics and thus launch
the scientific, technological revolution of the modern West.  But, as the
late Arthur Wright pointed out years ago, this is the wrong question. The
real question is why the West was able to make this breakthrough when the
learned men of the Islamic world, of India, and of China, did not.  Bodde is
aware of this.  An excellent overview of Chinese thought and society up to
the 16th century, recommended for studying Chinese civilization, philosophy,
and the history of science.  Extensive bibliography of both Chinese and
Western sources.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
5. "China Saga"  by C.Y. Lee ........................................... 41
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Forwarded by: Jian
Source: Magill Book Reviews 11/20/92

"China Saga"
Novel by C.Y. Lee
Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987, 534 pages, $19.95

Following the lives of a Chinese family for four tumultuous generations,
CHINA SAGA is set against the rude awakening of the "sleeping giant."  The
chronicle gives a human face to the century of unrest and revolution since
1880, from the Boxer Rebellion to the Cultural Revolution.

Fong Tai, at age nineteen, is already fond of Western ways and balks at his
prearranged marriage.  China in 1880 is a country divided against itself.
The Han majority is ruled by the minority Manchus, whose Empress Dowager
(Tsu Hsi of the Ching Dynasty) lives to see the failure of the Boxer
Rebellion, which aimed to "purify" China of foreign ideas, at the turn of
the century.  Though Fong Tai rises to some political prominence, his
favored reforms are dashed by the Boxers and his life is lost in the
fighting.

Fong's daughter, Brigid, escapes to France and returns to her homeland full
of hate for the Boxers and the old dynasty and fearing the rape of China by
European powers.  By 1910, Brigid is enmeshed in the politics of Dr. Sun
Yat-sen, whose republican sentiments, and the power plays by the Chinese
warlords, give way in the 1930's to war with Japan and the rise of Chinese
Communism.  Mao Tse-tung declares the People's Republic on October 1, 1949.

Brigid, an aspiring actress, is confident, temperamental, and incredibly
beautiful; a tempestuous affair between Brigid and actor Bo Ho yields Mabel,
who at fifteen is discovered by her mother to be a stripper in a local bar.
Eventually Mabel marries and accepts the Communist line, but she fears that
the Party is turning her two sons, Pang Sin and Jimmy, into robots.  Though
both boys become Red Guards in the 1960's, Jimmy's humanity triumphs over
the reigning student terrorism; in 1976, he welcomes a new pragmatism, a new
openness in China.

The fictional characters created by C.Y. Lee are feisty and intriguing, but
his pedestrian prose betrays them. CHINA SAGA is not mere soap opera, for
Brigid and Mabel, Pang Sin and Jimmy help illuminate the internal
contradictions in Chinese politics and flesh out the book's theme, that of
cultural change.  Yet the reader longs for emotional depth that is more than
cliche.  The characters live for a moment; but in the end it is the reality
of China that holds the reader's interest.

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