From: cshi@cs.ulowell.edu (Chunde Shi)
Subject: Who are eager to trash China: Anglo Saxons. Re: FWD: CND Books & Journals Review, October 13, 1992
Organization: University of Massachusetts at Lowell Computer Science
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 21:58:56 GMT

Anglo Saxon nations: Britain, Canada, Australia, US(WASP--White Anglo Saxon
Protestents, domination), NewZealand.
**************************************************************************
Most of publications that trash China has something to do with the above Angly
nations. We were drugged by them, We are bad-mouthed again to shut us up.
**************************************************************************
That is my assertion, just bear it in your mind, you can test how trueful it is 
when you see China is trashed in the future.


In article <Bw1ny8.6IM@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> xiong@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Bo Xiong) writes:
>
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>            |  \/___| |/    China News Digest     | |/__/  |/
>             \_______/  (Books & Journals Review) |_______/
>                            
>                             October 13, 1992
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>1. "Quelling the People" by Timothy Brook .............................. 90
>
>2. "Art and Revolution in Modern China"  by Ralph Croizier ............. 20
>
>3. The Nightmare of the Red Chamber --
>   "New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
>    Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin ............ 110
>
>4.  Forbidden Fruits -- Exhibition of the Sacred Art of Tibet, London .. 50
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>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. "Quelling the People" by Timothy Brook .............................. 90
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
>Source: The Globe and Mail (Toronto) 10/3/92
>Review by: Charles Foran
>
>"Quelling the People: The military suppression of the
>Beijing democracy movement." by Timothy Brook
>Publisher: Lester Publishing. 265 pages $C 26.95
>
>It's in the details that Tiananmen finally becomes clear.
>
>In late May 1989, the Beijing campus where I was living was electric with
>rumors of an argument between moderate leader Zhao Zhiyang and his
>intransigent boss.  The conversation, alleged to have occurred two days
>before martial law was declared was pithy.  "I have the Army behind me,"
>Deng boasted.  "But I have the people behind me," Zhao answered.
>
>"Then you have nothing," retorted Deng.
>
>Some quality of distillation in the exchange led many observers to suspect
>it was apocryphal.  Whatever its verisimilitude, for those millions of
>Beijingers who heard the rumor the message was one of menace and
>confrontation and potential crackdown.
>
>Timothy Brook includes the argument in his admirable recreation of the
>Tiananmen massacre.  Deng Xiaoping indeed had the army behind him.  A the
>subtitle of "Quelling the People" suggests, a largely lawful, entirely
>pacific protest movement was suppressed by a brutal military operation.
>June 4, 1989 was not a police action, nor an over-zealous response by a
>nervous authority; it was a concerted attempt by the dominant faction in
>the Chinese government to frighten people out of thinking by killing them in
>large numbers.
>
>The clarity of the position in "Quelling the People" is most welcome.  The
>first half of the book is devoted to outlining how the Chinese capital came
>to be surrounded by 150,000 soldiers. Brook, a University of Toronto
>historian, is a scrupulous researcher; using interviews, Chinese and Western
>media reports, published and unpublished accounts, along with some
>obligatory speculation, he reconstructs the massive troop build-up ordered
>by Deng for an attack on the square.
>
>The exegesis of the military campaign is revelatory: a tale of confusion,
>ineptitude, and dissent within the army.  It is also dry reading, a problem
>the author acknowledges during a discussion of the divisions that were
>deployed.
>
>But  "Quelling the People" is actually groundbreaking in its focus in these
>particulars.  For example, tanks thundered past our college gates the night
>of the massacre, but I could never get a straight answer about the invaders.
>Brook tells me which army it was, how they ended up on that road, and who
>resisted them. This kind of detail - the skirmishes were minor - serves to
>reinforce both the scale and ferocity of the assault.
>
>The book comes to life during the siege.  Again, simply by presenting the
>weeks preceding June 4 as a military siege of a disobedient city, Brook
>makes an important point.  Armies are not normally ordered to storm their
>own capital, especially when the nation's rulers are safely housed within a
>kilometre of the supposed centre of anarchy.  There was, in other words, an
>artificiality to the "turmoil."  The fury of Beijingers was in part a
>reaction to their sense of being manipulated.
>
>Finally, "Quelling the People" offers a meticulous account of the massacre.
>While Brook has more company here - dozens of versions have been published -
>his retelling is notable both for its clarity and the evidence that the
>operation was a bloody-minded fiasco.  Numerous misperceptions about June 4
>are corrected, and a strong case for the valor and restraint of the Beijing
>population is put forth.
>
>Brook is equally adamant about reversing the casualty count. The
>international press, he notes, gradually lowered its estimate from thousands
>to hundreds in the months following the crackdown, largely to avoid
>appearing hysterical.  Yet, as his informal survey of Beijing hospitals
>suggests, the number was far higher.  What "Quelling the People" settles on,
>as did the American journalist Edward Gargan in "China's Fate", is the
>original Red Cross figure of 2,600.  (The organization was forced to retract
>afterwards.)  Such jostling may seem macabre, but, as Brook argues: "The
>quantity of killing matters most to those who died and those who mourned
>them."
>
>Ironically, the statement belies a reluctance to factor biography into the
>equation.  Even granting the book's fact-oriented approach, it still would
>have benefited from more attention to the key individuals involved.  The
>non-presence of the student leaders is acceptable, given the focus on the
>military.  But the absence of Deng Xiaoping or President Yang Shangkun as
>anything but shadows inhibits "Quelling the People".  Who these men are, and
>how they think is vital to understanding why they acted as they did.
>
>Brook closes on a curious chapter on China as a victim of economic
>imperialism and "the capitalist world system".  Until this point , he has
>remained cool and steady, wisely eschewing generalizations.  This abrupt
>plunge into murky, and highly contentious, abstractions feels pat, almost
>tacked-on. His ideas certainly need a lengthier and more considered
>presentation to be compelling.  They may even belong to a different book.
>
>[Charles Foran is the author of "Sketches in Winter: A Beijing Postscript",
>which has been short-listed in this year's QSPELL competition for English
>Quebec literature]
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>2. "Art and Revolution in Modern China"  by Ralph Croizier ............. 20
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Jian Liu
>Source: Choice Book Reviews
>Reviewed by: James Caswell
>
>"Art and Revolution in Modern China"
>by Ralph Croizier  
>Published date: 1988, California; 
>224 pages ISBN 0-520-05909-3  US$35.00 
>
>Modern Chinese painting has often suffered a bad press or simple neglect,
>and this is not entirely undeserved as Chinese artists have found it
>difficult to escape the inertia of their own long tradition and to cope with
>foreign ideas.  Many dilemmas remain, and this is reflected in some
>scholarly bewilderment and in the paucity of significant books to date on
>the subject.  Croizier's study is the first to find a clear path through
>part of it, this by focusing upon a single school and examining the issues
>have finally "failed" in their revolutionary aims, but the effort to give
>painting new purpose was laudable and the implications remain significant on
>several levels. Croizier clearly reveals these in a rich tapestry of people,
>places, causes, events, and visual results. Although the connoisseur may not
>be drawn to this study (or to the 83 lackluster illustrations), any academic
>library will be because it tells more about a nation and the struggles of
>artists than does the singular masterpiece.
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>3. The Nightmare of the Red Chamber --
>   "New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
>    Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin ............ 110
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: XU Ming Yang
>Source: Far Eastern Economic Review  6/11/92
>Review written by: Jonathan Mirsky
>
>"New Ghosts, Old Dreams:
> Chinese Rebel Voices"  by Geremie Barme & Linda Jaivin
>Times Books, New York.  US$30
>
>Long ago the Chinese Communist Party adopted the Leninist view that
>dissenting literature is particularly subversive because its "sugar coated
>bullets" invisibly slide past readers' defences. Another invisible weapon in
>the current "smokeless warfare" designed to bring down Chinese socialism
>through foreign-inspired "peaceful evolution" is "spiritual pollution".
>
>During the past seven or eight years Geremie Barme and Linda Jaivin, experts
>on modern Chinese intellectual history at the Australian National
>University, have exposed more clearly than anyone the party's crude concepts
>- such as "spiritual pollution" - of how literature works, and have shown
>how implacably the cultural commissars labour to wreck art.
>
>"New Ghosts, Old Dreams", Barme and Jaivin's startlingly original collection
>of largely unorthodox fiction, essays, poems, and filmscripts, concentrates
>on the past five years, but also uses flashbacks of the Taoist sages of
>antiquity to take us behind the party's increasingly rickety stage sets.
>
>Take, for example, "A Sexy Lady," a 1988 interview with an army nurse by the
>journalists Dai Qing and Luo Ke. It is well known that China has a rich
>tradition of pornography, and it is equally well known that the party's
>elderly leaders, here as elsewhere modelling themselves not on Mao Thought
>but on Mao Deed, have consumed women one third their age - while forbidding
>public discussion of sex.
>
>Inevitably, therefore, any bit of sex bolted into mediocre Chinese novels
>like "Half of Man is Woman" causes a sensation in China and abroad. "The
>Sexy Lady" and Wang Shuo's novella "Hot and Cold, Measure for Measure,"
>abstracted here by Barme and Jaivin, reveal a lot, in explicit terms, about
>sexual exploitation. The sexy lady uses men, is used by them and like most
>such people has an unhappy time. The young hoodlum in "Hot and Cold" seduces
>and abandons a young woman who becomes a prostitute and kills herself. He
>learns nothing from this - a great sin in China, where Mao dictated in 1944,
>while still a guerilla leader, that above all literature must have a
>didactic, optimistic function. And in 1988 the literary hack Zhang Mingduo -
>one virtue of this book is its inclusion of criticism of the literature
>presented - found "A Sexy Lady" especially repulsive because "the portrayal
>of moral depravity among military and medical workers undermines the
>people's trust in them." The story was banned the following year, after
>Tiananmen, when Dai Qing was imprisoned. The editors comment dryly: "Little
>did he (Zhang Mingduo) know that violence, not sex, would be undoing of the
>PLA's reputation."
>
>"New Ghosts, Old Dreams" is the successor to "Seeds of Fire; Chinese Voices
>of Conscience" the wonderful collection of early and mid-1980s dissident
>literature first assembled in 1986 by Barme and John Minford. Although the
>1989 edition of "Seeds" contains references to Tiananmen, it seems in
>retrospect to have reflected a more relaxed era, with greater room for sugar
>coated bullets and smokeless warfare, though critics like Liu Binyan and
>playwrite Wu Zuguang were already under party attack. But in that
>pre-massacre era it was possible for Wu, whose much grimmer voice is heard
>again in "New Ghosts", to write that he had agreed to quit the party, rather
>than wait for expulsion, because he felt sorry that Hu Quaomu, the party's
>venerable literary hatchet-man, had to climb many flights of steps to tell
>him to resign.
>
>Many of the earlier book's contributors reappear, with essays, poems and
>stories written just before, during or after Tiananmen, their themes
>contained within imaginative categories that, for example, relate party
>constraints to footbinding.
>
>Here again is the young literary critic Liu Xiaobo, who emerged as one of
>the hardest-hitters in the square, was convicted after the massacre of
>issuing "counter-revolutionary propaganda," and finally discharged for
>persuading the students not to use weapons on the night of the massacre.
>
>Liu derides Chinese intellectuals for their paltry analysis and for mourning
>the death of party boss Hu Yaobang - "an air of servitude normally seen only
>in the relation between loyal mandarins and their emperor" - instead of
>concentrating on the Democracy Wall activist Wei Jingsheng who, Liu notes,
>called for the abolition of the authoritarian system itself - and in whom
>the Tiananmen demonstrators explicitly denies any interest.
>
>"New Ghosts" introduces the young conservative He Xin, whom the party likes
>to quote when it goes after "bourgeois liberals". His best piece is a letter
>to the leadership analysing the causes of the tiananmen demonstrations which
>had only recently begun. Ignoring the customary projection of "a tiny
>handful of trouble makers," He observes: "There is widespread
>dissatisfaction among students and spontaneous demands for speeding up
>political reform," and warns that "Civil War, military coups, and popular
>uprisings in China for decades to come are now far from unthinkable." To
>deal with the problem, He emphasises that the party must address its own
>corruption. In another essay he is blunter still: the network of national
>corruption, he says, "is like a massive and invisible mafia-like
>organisation enmeshing the whole of China."
>
>Two of the most moving inclusions are among the shortest. The ancient Ba
>Jin, whose novels were considered subversive in the 1930s, wrote to the
>Tiananmen demonstrators: "Seventy years have passed, and we are still a
>backward country. I believe the students' demands are completely reasonable.
>What they are doing today is completing the task we were unable to finish."
>The equally venerable writer, Bing Xin, wrote a beautiful calligraphed
>couplet three days before the killings: "The students love the nation; I
>love the students."
>
>"New Ghosts" is sad but ultimately encouraging. One may disagree with the
>editors' statement that "democracy was not one of the movement's strongest
>points." This may have been true in the square itself; but if Tiananmen,
>like 4 May 1919, was more than a specific time and place, some of the most
>stirring statements in "New Ghosts" show that the Chinese people, despite
>what they often say about themselves, deserve more than the post Deng New
>Authoritarianism.
>
>The now-exiled Bei Dao, for example, describing himself as "a poet with no
>interest in politics," insisted in early 1989 that: "Capitalism has no
>monopoly on the protection of human rights and freedom of speech; they are
>the standard of any modern civilised society." And one week before the
>declaration of martial law in Peking, on 19-20 May, some of China's most
>eminent intellectuals disputed "the excuse that China's situation is unique
>and therefore that democracy, freedom, human rights, and rule by law are
>irrelevant."
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>4.  Forbidden Fruits -- Exhibition of the Sacred Art of Tibet, London .. 50
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From: Steve Haber (shaber@ccm.UManitoba.CA)
>Source: The Economist  9/26/92, abridged by CND
>
>None of the 160 sculptures and paintings in the exhibition, "Wisdom and
>Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet", at Londion's Royal Academy (until
>December 13th), comes directly from Tibet.
>
>Thirty of the exhibits in London, collected by a Russian explorer early this
>century, come on loan from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.  Others come
>from American collectors who have acquired artworks secreted out of the
>country by Tibetan refugees.
>
>The artworks are meditative and devotional, infused with Buddhist
>spirituality.  And, like the art of the great European cathedrals, Buddhist
>art is anonymous, highly schematic, and strikes universal chords.  A stock
>Buddhist iconography of essential themes and forms has existed for
>centuries, from which the monk-artist can draw, and from which he must not
>deviate in a single particular.
>
>Many of the statues (mostly bronzes or gilt brass) and paintings here of the
>seated Buddha are either uniform or very similar in detail. His right hand,
>for example, often gestures downwards to Mother Earth, while the left curves
>upwards in contemplation.  Stylistically, they vary immensely, with
>influences, at different periods, from neighboring Chinese, Mongolian and
>Indian art.  Famed for its inaccessibility, Tibet has in fact been on some
>of the great Asian trade routes.
>
>Some of the statues are exceedingly ornate, set with precious stones; others
>have a squat simplicity and smooth finish.  The earliest tend to be the most
>raw and immediate in execution and feeling. The beatific stillness of these
>Buddhas (and other enlightened beings, including rulers and teachers) is
>evoked not only through enigmatic, smiling features, but also through
>perfectly harmonious bodies.
>
>Some of the most extraordinary images include an 18th century sculpture of
>the thousand armed goddess, Tara; and a silk embroidery of the terrifying
>buffalo-headed Tama, Lord of Death, trampling on a bull, which in turn is
>seen raping a dying human being.  Buddhism acknowledges the darker aspects
>of the psyche, which it believes can be harnessed in the fierce battle for
>enlightenment.
>
>The Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, now in exile in India once
>summed up the sacred power of art: "It's best to use a small Buddha image as
>the focus of concentration; it plants a good seed for your own future
>Buddhahood.  But make sure you have a well-made Buddha image; if you
>meditate a lot on a crooked Buddha image, there's a danger you will one day
>become a crooked Buddha!"  At which point he burst into gales of laughter, a
>typically Buddhist way of recognizing the truth.
>
>[The picture of an exquisitely finely detailed Buddha statue has the caption
>(typical Economist dry wit) "Lent by the Hermitage"]
>
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