“The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes” by Nicolas Verstappen

Comics in Thailand have enjoyed a long and rich history and have been enjoyed by people of all socio-economic classes, even though they’ve had a reputation as a form of “low culture”. In The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes, Nicolas Verstappen goes back even further than a hundred years to show just how long comics have been embedded in Thai culture.

It wasn’t just that comics were seen as lowbrow in Thailand when Verstappen set out to research his beloved art form, but pre-1980s comics were all but unknown to those in Thailand who were interested in this genre.

Due to the humid tropical climate of Thailand, monsoons and their unforgiving floods, voracious bookworms and a lack of consideration and archival endeavors, most of the pre-1980s comics production has been wiped out. Roaming markets, libraries, antiquarian bookstores and online groups, I struggled to find the seminal comics works that had been cited in the literature.

He hit the jackpot in early 2020 when more than a thousand comics from the 1930s were discovered in an attic—cut out, curated, and bound into volumes. These comics were not included in the national archives, so they were indeed a great find.

The Art of Thai Comics: A Century of Strips and Stripes, Nicolas Verstappen

 (River Books, April 2021)

Verstappen is a Belgian professor in the department of Communication Arts at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and has arranged his book according to historical period, but also breaks most of the chapters into chronological profiles of almost two dozen comic writers and illustrators. He begins, however, with some context.

Verstappen goes as far back as the origins of the Thai language in southwestern China and the earliest known illustrated art appeared in Thailand in the 14th century, depicting stories of Gautama Buddha in stone reliefs.

Chulalongkorn University is named for King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) whose son Vajiravudh, later Rama VI, was educated in Britain at the turn of the century, where he learned to enjoy political satire cartoons. He even drew his own caricatures of corrupt officials to expose their vices. Rama VI also wrote crime serials along the lines of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Guy de Maupassant. His most significant contribution to comics, however, was establishing the Poh-Chang Academy of Arts in 1913, where many of the artists profiled in this book studied.



Sawas Jutharop was a Poh-Chang graduate and the first artist in Thailand to have a serialized comic strip in 1932. One of King Rama VI’s unfortunate legacies was an article he penned in 1914 titled “The Jews of the East”, which combined anti-Semitic tropes from Europe with anti-Chinese sentiment. Sawas Juthrop included in his comics derogatory characterizations of Chinese migrants in Thailand. He also drew a comic inspired by the American character, Popeye.

Thai culture has always been a blend of influences, so it’s not surprising to find this reflected in comics. Another illustrator of that time, Witt Sutthastien, who used the pen name Wittamin and was only seventeen at the time, combined Popeye and Mickey Mouse into a character named Ling Gee.

From the sailor, Wittamin keeps the elongated body shape with over-developed calves and forearms, the ears, the rolled-up sleeves and the famous pipe. From Disney’s mouse, Wittamn borrows the dark skin, the white hands (or gloves) and face, the prominent black nose, the oval eyes with each pupil reduced by a quarter, and the famous pair of shorts with two buttons in the front.

In another instance of blended cultures, Verstappen portrays the cartoonist Tookkata, born Pimon Galassi. The grandson of an Italian government official in Thailand during the reign of King Rama V in the early 20th century, Tookkata was also a graduate of Poh-Chang. He often wrote strong female characters and was a popular cartoonist in the four decades following World War II.

As the Cold War descended on much of the world, these fears and worries were depicted in Thai comics.

For the insurgents and soldiers in the jungle, the petrified students, the disfranchised farmers and the alienated migrants, the muted traumatic experiences of the previous decades seem to have found a derivative—and maybe cathartic—expression in the ‘silent’ and unbridled comics form.

The evolution of Thai comics and the stories they tell show the way in which Thailand changed through the decades. Verstappen has provided a comprehensive narrative to go along with the comics published in this book and displays a variety of illustration styles that range from black and white figures to those that resemble manga in vibrant colors. In the foreword, renowned cartoonist Sonny Liew writes that comics are traditionally seen as American-Anglican, Belgian-French, and Japanese. With this new book from Verstappen, Liew writes that

The work of excavation, exploration and scholarship done here opens up rich new spaces for readers to appreciate and ponder—to empower us, perhaps, to make up our own minds about what an alternative history of the medium might look like.

Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong.

 Susan Blumberg-Kason 2 August 2021  Non-Fiction

“Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History” by Wendy Doniger

Birth of the Celestial Twins, detail of Mughal watercolor, ca 1585-1590 (LAMCA)


Traveling in rural Bengal in 1963, the 23 year-old Wendy Doniger spied the bas-relief of a horse carved into a simple mud and thatch hut. “Resembling the T’ang horses at a gallop … in style something like Picasso bulls, [it was] altogether one of most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The Bengali villagers did not own horses, and seldom ever saw them. Her insight contrasting the profusion of Indian horse imagery with the animal’s actual rarity in India germinated, 58 years later, into Doniger’s latest book, Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares.

The historical and cultural importance of the animal—highly prized for its rarity—is indeed in inverse proportion to its numbers in India.The status of the horse in India has been described by many authors, going back to Marco Polo, Lockwood Kipling (Rudyard Kipling’s father), and most recently Yashaswini Chandra. The monsoon-dominated weather, the lack of wide pastures and the mineral-poor soils combine to make it difficult to graze horses freely in large numbers. India’s neighbors in Afghanistan and Iran, from the Kushans to Nader Shah, could invade and conquer India with droves of bigger, faster and better trained horses. To defend themselves against invasion, Indian rulers had to import horses from drier climates and raise them in stables, feeding them on costly delicacies to make up for the lack of grass. Unlike the steppe horses living in a semi-wild state, the stabled Indian horse was like a pampered, yet willful child. This made the horse a vehicle and symbol for power, for divinity, for beauty, an inaccessible object of desire.

Why are the mares wicked?

Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares: Horses in Indian Myth and History, Wendy Doniger (University of Virginia Press, April 2021)

Doniger’s ride through four millennia of Indian legend and folklore is full of sacrificial horses, horse-headed gods, transformations and couplings. These horses emerged, wingèd, from the primordial churning of the sea. They pulled the chariot of the sun. They give birth to the heavenly twins, the Ashvins, India’s Dioscuri. The protagonists of the great Sanskrit epics and the historic Buddha all rode heroic horses. Closer to modern times, horses featured prominently in Brothers Grimm-like folk tales with a dazzling magical variety and echoes of more ancient practices like the Vedic horse sacrifice.

Doniger seeks to make sense of this rich legacy of equine myths with her combination of Sanskrit erudition and equestrian experiences. Why are the mares wicked? Doniger suggests that as horses raised in stables are deprived of their natural social environment, the mares in particular wind up responding badly to the advances of the stallion, often biting and kicking, sometimes fatally, their suitors. I note, in contrast, that in Turco-Mongol folk tales such poor behavior on the part of their steppe-raised horses is unknown. Doniger, as in her previous writings, retains her knack for poking fun at the phallocracy, showing that her sympathy clearly lies with the wicked, put upon mares.

Her study suggests that animal sexuality deeply permeated pre-modern society. Living side-by-side with animals, such societies inevitably developed religious traditions and folklore heavily-colored by the love and fear such animals inspired. Some of the stories recounted here make for heavy going, with bodily fluids liberally splashing about. If Hindu mythology often seems messy and inordinately concerned with sex, it is only when compared to the sanitized version of Greek mythology that most of us learned in school via the prim Ms Edith Hamilton. The original Greek episodes, peeping out of the ancient texts, show a similar preoccupation with equine sexual symbolism. What is striking about India, as opposed to Greece, is how their equine-inspired myths have lasted into early modern times, reflecting the political and military importance of horses down to 1800.

Stallions symbolize “good” male power. Mares stand for “bad” female desire. Since any work by Doniger comes with a strong point of view concerning gender, it presents a puzzle to her, and a challenge to the book’s title, when the heroic stallions of the great Sanskrit epics are replaced in the 17th century Rajput ballads with dutiful mares. Her tentative explanation that this reflects an influx of Arab mares does not stand up, because the Arabs did not export mares to India in any number (as Marco Polo himself noted). It may simply reflect the fact that the brigands of Rajasthan preferred the quiet mares for raiding and plunder. The Mughals rode stallions into battle and fought on horseback. The Rajputs rode to battle but dismounted to fight.

There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past.

Readers familiar with the literature on horses in India, or indeed elephants (eg, Thomas Trautman’s Elephants and Kings, Chicago University Press, 2015), will find few new historical insights in this book. On the other hand, Doniger uses her deep equestrian experience to probe both historical sources and legends. She claims that foreigners’ complaints that Indian fed their horses ghee (clarified butter) or lamb biryani are groundless calumnies. She asserts that most of the advice given in Sanskrit equestrian manuals, so decried by the British colonialists, must have been good, otherwise the Mughals, who knew a thing or two about horses, would not have so assiduously translated them into Persian. Legends about people eaten by horses or killed by their bites, she writes, are transmitted by people unfamiliar with horses. Getting bit by a horse’s blunt teeth is no worse than getting your fingers caught in a door! The back of a horse is where the danger lies.

Reviewers of Doniger’s many previous works have remarked on their erudition but also their similarity to American shaggy dog stories (which go on and on). Doniger excused herself once by saying that the book in question was not meant to be so long “but it got the bit between its teeth, and ran away from me”. Readers will sometimes feel this way about this book as well. There’s no horse that cannot be ridden, and no rider that can’t be thrown, writes Doniger. There is no ancient myth that doesn’t lead us further and further into the deep past, and no interpretation that doesn’t fall a little flat at the end. Readers will enjoy the long ride even if they experience a few falls and kicks.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.

David Chaffetz 11 August 2021 Non-Fiction

“History of the Caucasus, Volume 1: At the Crossroads of Empires” by Christoph Baumer
 

Early 10th-century Alanian church of Shoana, Karachay-Cherkessia, Russian Federation (photo: Alexander Svirkin)

As Azeri drones pounded Armenian defenders of Stepanakert in the September 2020 war, “Armenian and Azerbaijani politicians and historians continue to discuss whether the Nagorno-Karabagh region [was] only annexed to Albania after the division of Armenia in 387 BC”, writes Christoph Baumer in his new History of the Caucasus. In this part of the world, the past is never dead, it isn’t even past. That persistence of the past is what lends the Caucasus its fascination while it creates many challenges for its modern citizens. To dwell in the shadow of fortresses repurposed since the Bronze Age by Persians, Romans and Arabs, is both an enriching legacy and a burden.

To perform a historical survey of such a long time span, from prehistory to the collapse of the Soviet Union, of a region containing several dozen nations and intersecting with so many of the great world empires would seem to be a foolhardy undertaking. It is hard to imagine a coherent narrative that includes Sargon the Great, Shah Abbas and Stalin. Christopher Baumer just about pulls this off through dogged erudition and enthusiasm for his subject, the unique, autochthonous peoples of the Caucasus and their lands.

History of the Caucasus, Volume 1: At the Crossroads of Empires, 

Christoph Baumer (IB Tauris, August 2021)

This outcropping of perpetually snow capped mountains, resembles an hour glass squeezed between the Black Sea and the Caspian, with the Eurasian steppe to the north, and to the south the Mediterranean lands on the west and Iran on the east. The shape of the region has determined its history from ancient times up until today. The native Caucasian people have always had to deal with more powerful neighbors: from the steppes (Cimmerians, Scythians, Alans and Russians), from the Mediterranean (Lydians, Greeks, Romans, Ottomans) and from Iran (Assyrians, Medes, Iranians). This makes even ancient history seem relevant today.

Many of the earlier cultural and ethnic evolutions Baumer ascribes to environmental factors: successive waves of wetter or drier weather changed the options available for human activities. The waning of the Ice Age forced the rugged Neanderthals to cede the land to the more polyvalent homo sapiens. Early villages were abandoned when water ran out. Scythians invaded the Caucasus when the steppe became too dry. It is a lesson that no way of life is forever. If we run out of petroleum or we overheat the planet with fossil fuels, we are unlikely to have done worse than the Neolithic farmers of Georgia. The only drawback to this historical approach is a lingering feeling of ex-post facto thinking, and the lack of agency on the part of the supposedly clever homo sapiens.

The Cathedral of the Assumption, also called Bagrati Cathedral, at Kutaisi, Georgia (photo: Christoph Baumer)

Baumer’s narrative of the succession of cultures, indigenous to the Caucasus like Urartu or invasive like Assyria, Iran or Russia, is brisk and easy to follow. The earliest populations seem to have survived in today’s Georgians, Chechens and Circassians. Later Iranic peoples like the Ossetes, descendants of the Scythians, the Armenians, perhaps the first Indo-European immigrants, and the Turkmen pastoralists who make their appearance in the Middle Ages all contributed to making the ethnic mosaic of the Caucasus dazzling and politically volatile.

The narrative slows down as more historical events intrude. The weft of history in the Caucasus is complicated by the fact that since earliest times, history has been used to advance political agendas. Each of the Christian nations insists that its church is apostolic, ie, it received the gospels directly from one of Christ’s apostles. These claims aimed to place their churches on par with rival Constantinople. Early church history was thus instrumentalized for politics in a rough and tumble environment where bishops struggled with kings and nobles for power and influence.

Baumer tries to untangle the political threads from ancient fake news to give a comprehensive account of these centuries, but this requires heavy slogging through the intrigues of the Roman and Iranian courts, the incursions by the Khazar Turks, Varangians from Scandinavia and the Caliphal civil wars as well as the conflicts between the autochthones themselves: Armenians, Kartlis (Georgians), Albanians (Udis) and others. And this is only Volume I. Confused readers can consult the useful appendix for all the dynasties and kings cited in the text, while the many large and clear maps are essential to following the narrative.

The ancient capital of Armenia, Artaxata, was located near the monastery of Khor Virap south of Yerevan; in the background is Greater Ararat (photo Christoph Baumer)

Many fascinating insights into the persistence of the past in the Caucasus reward the diligent reader. The Christian Ossetes preserve ancient Iranic worship practices. Armenian and Georgian personal names recall the heroes of the Iranian Shahnameh. The minor king of the city of Ani called himself the shahanshah. The Albanian/Udis lost all their written records in an ancient quarrel with the Armenians over the nature of the Christ, but still preserve their language orally. Russia’s recent war against Georgia maintains the independence of the ancient kingdom of Abkhazia. The past is not even past.

The text is admirably illustrated by wonderful photographs of places which are both hard to visit and difficult to photograph. I have to confess I visited some of these sites and got only an imperfect sense of their grandeur. Contributors have sat on some precarious perches with good cameras to show us just how formidable the churches, mosques, temples and fortresses of the region still appear.

Baumer’s earlier work on Central Asia was designed to show how our current lack of knowledge and interest in other parts of the world is in no way justified in light of their incredibly rich and eventful history. This latest work on the Caucasus demonstrates its essential role in the history of the Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome, of Iran, the steppes, of early Christianity and ultimately the spread of Islam to Constantinople. It should be consulted by travelers planning a trip to the region, or used as a reference upon return.

David Chaffetz is the author of Three Asian Divas: Women, Art and Culture in Shiraz, Delhi and Yangzhou (Abbreviated Press, November 2019). He is working on a new book about the horse in Asian history.

 David Chaffetz 13 August 2021  Non-fiction

“Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture” by Anthony J Barbieri-Low


Anthony Barbieri-Low starts his book comparing ancient Egypt and early China by saying it was a somewhat off-the-wall thing to do.

Scholars have engaged in the comparative study of ancient civilizations since the enlightenment, and in recent decades they have produced an admirable body of work comparing aspects of early China with analogous phenomena in Greece or Rome. To these scholars, the Greco-Roman comparisons are self-evident, while juxtaposing the politics, laws, or religions of Egypt and China would be to compare the incomparable, like apples to oranges.

To those who follow academic trends less closely, the comparison may seem less far-fetched: the histories of both China and Egypt are marked by numerous dynasties, one following the other, interspersed with periods of internal conflict, in a cycle enduring for millennia. Most other civilizations and polities, from the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Mongols and Inca, have a rise and fall dynamic, measured at most in centuries; the non-linearity of Chinese and Egyptian history can seem distinctly alien. Less profoundly perhaps, but more visibly, both civilizations also wrote using scripts that were (or, in the case of Chinese, are) to a greater or lesser extent logographic.

Barbieri-Low (the Low part is a pen-name), a Sinogist who moved sideways, as it were, to study Egyptology, explains his foray into apples and oranges:

to keep making progress in understanding early imperial China, and to avoid the trap of overspecialization that leads to claims of essentialism or exceptionalism, it is necessary to move outside of East Asia and seek further insight through a reflective analysis in the mirror of comparison.

He chooses to compare New Kingdom Egypt (ca 1548-1086 BCE) with the Western Han period (202 BCE-8 CE) since they “share some structural similarities and convergent developments that make the comparison quite compelling”: both, for example, were centered around a major, flood-prone river and both “conquered vast new territories to form empires, conducting diplomacy and warfare with major peer polities and building a network of vassal states.” The roughly 1300 years between them, is presented as an advantage, for any similarities could not then be due to cultural osmosis.

Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society, and Culture, Anthony J Barbieri-Low (University of Washington Press, July 2021)

For an academic book, Ancient Egypt and Early China can be rather fun; Barbieri-Low has a way with simile and anecdote. In comparing the two rivers, he writes of


the dramatic shifts of the Yellow River, which has several times in recorded history swung about like an untended garden hose …

Anecdotes, some of them, seem chosen to amuse. When “the Babylonian king requested to marry a daughter of Amenhotep III”, he was turned down flat.

The Babylonian king could not understand pharaoh’s rudeness and obstinacy, and so requested that Amenhotep III just “send me a beautiful woman as if she were your daughter. Who is going to say, ‘She is no daughter of the king!’?”

The rather more serious point was that the Pharaohs took foreign princesses in marriage as a sign of their power, never sending their own daughters to marry while the Chinese emperors were the opposite:

Chinese emperors of the Han never took foreign princesses as brides or concubines, either from their geopolitical peers, like the Xiongnu, or from any tributary client state… If such a woman were to give birth to the next emperor, she would have exercised considerable power over the new emperor due to the dictates of filial piety.

Chinese daughters, meanwhile

were never permanent members of their natal families, for when they married, they became part of their husband’s lineage… having one marry out to cement an important political alliance was probably viewed as only a minor sacrifice.


Another fun anecdote is of the Egyptian worker who had some shirts stolen. Rather than going to the court, he took the case to the local oracle:

He brought a local sorcerer who called out the names of every house in the village, and when he reached a certain house, the god’s cult statue dipped forward, indicating the culprit who stole the shirts. In this case, the god also verbally named the culprit as the daughter of one of the village leaders, the scribe of the royal tomb, Amennakht … One might also ask why litter bearers of the image of the god nodded when the sorcerer called out the house of Amennakht. It is likely that everyone in the village already knew who stole the shirts, and the oracle system was the only way that they could get at the culprit without going through the court system.

What Amennakht said at being caught out in this way isn’t recorded. This somewhat shambolic, albeit possibly effective, judicial system is contrasted with the far more legalistic Chinese system.

Barbieri-Low has proven his assertion that the compare and contrast method is illuminating; it’s a terrific way of coming to know both societies—the description of Chinese and Egyptian board games is fascinating despite the rules remaining largely obscure—but it isn’t always clear how profound these comparisons are. One, however—that between the two renegade rulers Akhenaten and Wang Mang—almost certainly is. Barbieri-Low calls them “radical reformers”:

They both sought to make radical changes to the political, religious, and economic structure of mature dynasties that were beset with entrenched interest groups… Both attempted a reform agenda based on a fervent fundamentalist belief and signaled those changes to the population by desacralizing the old order and communicating visual signifiers of a new order. And both were undone by overreach in their reform…

Some political processes seem to be universal.

The comparative approach, the benefits of which have been amply demonstrated here, is one that could be usefully applied to studies and commentary of contemporary China as well, where some aspect or another of China is often presented as intrinsic and unique rather than being, possibly, the result of general exigencies.

Barbieri-Low (probably wisely) eschews larger and broader pronouncements, but back in the day, ie when I first studied archaeology and ancient civilizations, there was a feeling that much human invention could credibly have happened only once and must have spread from a single source. This idea, backed up by the reality that some inventions (paper, gunpowder, the zero, silk) really did spread that way, has proven difficult to dislodge: one can find it popping up in discussions of everything from democracy and mathematics to noodles and dumplings. But, as Barbieri-Low shows in this creative and surprisingly readable book, humans, being more independently inventive than they are occasionally given credit for, sometimes come up with similar ideas.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.

Peter Gordon 18 August 2021 Non-Fiction

“Until the World Shatters: Truth, Lies, and the Looting of Myanmar” by Daniel Combs


Resource extraction has been integral to the economy of Myanmar’s borderlands for decades. One of the most valuable of these is jade, mined in northern Kachin state and then smuggled over the border into China. In Until the world shatters: truth lies and the looting of Myanmar, Daniel Combs depicts this extraction, the cost it imposes on civilians and the myriad of uneasy business relationships between parties nominally at war with each other.

The lives of two young men are used for this portrayal. Bun Htit, a Kachin volunteer for the Red Cross, is hoping to secure his family’s livelihood by breaking into the lucrative jade trade. With Bun Htit’s efforts to penetrate the secretive world of the jade trade, Combs explains how the myriad of dealers, agents and miners operate in an arena of corruption and secrecy. He explains how the the Kachin Independence Organization and Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, who have been fighting a bloody on-off war with each other since 1962, facilitates this trade and how being rival armies is no barrier to a business relationship. Combs tells stories of local miners risking their lives to toil in the mines, hoping to find a piece of jade large enough to allow them to leave the mines behind. Kachin’s resource curse levies a terrible toll on Kachin civilians and Combs explains the role jade has in prolonging conflict.

Gems, minerals and opium have been fueling and funding conflict in Burma for decades and this reporting on the jade trade and the central role it plays in the development and politics of Kachin state is a highlight of the book. Combs also provides informative examples of how jade makes its way from the soil of Kachin State to jewelry stores around the world: how jade is bought and sold as rough stones by prospectors, sold to bigger mining companies and then smuggled over the border into China where the jade is worked and set into jewellery that regularly retails for tens of thousands of dollars. Combs gives voice to those directly involved, from local miners scraping for a living, all the way up the chain to the big brokers who make fortunes from the trade. In addition to a great detail on how this secretive trade actually works, Combs puts a human face to the trade, and the myriad of dangers those involved risk.

The second protagonist is Poe Wa, an aspiring journalist taking his first steps in the world of journalism after moving to Yangon from Mawlamyine. Poe Wa is the vehicle for a discussion of the media repression that was so prevalent under both the National League For Democracy government and previous military rule, and a vivid portrayal of the overall state of the media industry in Myanmar. Intertwined in this Combs details his own experiences reporting on Burma.

Until the World Shatters: Truth, Lies, and the Looting of Myanmar, Daniel Combs (Melville House, March 2021)

The chapters on Kachin State and Poe Wa are somewhat diluted by a lack of focus, as Combs detours onto other subjects. Chapters on interviews with punk rockers in Yangon, travels to local health clinics to cure his lethargy and insomnia with blood tonics and recollections of previous backpacking trips across the country distract from the important reportage from Kachin state. Even the powerful chapter detailing the Rohingya genocide, life in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh and a long, interesting interview with a monk feel out of place with the central aim of the book.

The analysis of resource theft in Myanmar’s borderlands would have been more complete had it included serious discussion of the drug trade, which operates on the same uneasy alliances between Tatmadaw, ethnic armed organizations and organized crime. While the Kachin jade trade is worth up to US$30 billion a year, Myanmar is the production hub of a regional drug trade in heroin and amphetamines worth more than twice that.

Since the book was written, the military seized power in a coup on 1 February; more than 1000 have since been killed by the junta. In Kachin state, an escalation of conflict between the Kachin Independence Army and the Tatmadaw has seen thousands of civilians injured and forced to flee their homes. While the situation on the ground may have changed, the dynamics have not, and Until the World Shatters provides an illuminating snapshot of life in Myanmar before the coup and of the uneasy alliances that the jade trade thrives on.

Maximillian Morch is a researcher and author, formerly based in Yangon and Kathmandu, focused on regional refugee and migratory issues.

Maximillian Morch 20 August 2021 Non-Fiction

Podcast with Jason M Kelly, author of “Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent”
 

Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent, Jason M Kelly (Harvard University Press, May 2021)

We think we know the history of China’s opening to the outside world. Maoist China was closed off, until Deng Xiaoping decided to reform the economy and open up to international trade, leading to the economic powerhouse we see today.

Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Jason M Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent.

Jason M Kelly is a historian of modern China with interests in Chinese foreign relations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, commerce and diplomacy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international history. He is currently an assistant professor in the Strategy & Policy Department at the US Naval War College and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

The views he expressed in this interview are his own, and not those of the US Naval War College.

We’re joined in this interview by fellow New Books Network host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. Sarah is a PHD candidate at Harvard University that studies Qing China and, like Jason, is a graduate associate at the Fairbank Center.

Today, the three of us talk about trade policy in Maoist China, and what that means for our understanding of the country’s attitude towards both the capitalist and socialist worlds. We also discuss what this history may mean for how we understand China’s attitude towards trade today.
Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.

Nicholas Gordon 19 August 2021 Podcast

“China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism” by Rana Mitter
 

China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, Rana Mitter (Harvard University Press, September 2020)

In 1985, Studs Terkel won a Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, an oral history of World War II. Oxford professor Rana Mitter, director through 2020 of the University’s China Centre, has done well to choose a title for his book that pings Terkel’s massively influential work.

In the countries that called themselves the Allies from 1939-1945, WWII has almost always and everywhere been considered a “good war”. But leveraging not just the title of Terkel’s work, Mitter notes that

Terkel’s use of [good] was layered with irony, since the war had been devastating for so many Americans, and the ‘goodness’ of its overall narrative stood in sharp contrast to the Vietnam war that had followed just two decades later.

In the United States, media properties like The Greatest Generation and Band of Brothers continue a 70-year tradition of reinforcing the “good war” narrative, but the concept of WWII as a “good” war came much later to China, and in his latest historical tour de force, Mitter seeks to describe how “the idea of China’s Second World War as a ‘good war’ became widespread,” starting in the 1990s. Another goal: to describe why that transition in memory, some of it official (and officially engineered), is so tectonically important—not just for China, but for the world.

What is this transition, and why has it happened? In his introduction, Mitter writes:

During the Mao era, class identity was central to China’s self-definition; under Deng Xiaoping, class distinctions were blurred with the restoration of capitalism. A new form of non-class-based national identity was needed. World War II, with its message of shared anti-Japanese struggle across class lines, proved to be a powerful vehicle for that new nationalism.

Not only across class lines, but across battle lines. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists (the Guomindang, commonly abbreviated KMT) were the primary opponents of the Japanese military expansion into China that started in the late 1920s, and became a full-scale invasion in 1937. Yet for decades, recognition of the KMT role in “China’s good war” had been all but forbidden outright. Chiang famously described the Japanese as a “disease of the skin”, but the Communists as a “disease of the heart”, and the CCP leadership felt similarly about their eventually defeated KMT nemesis. Mao Zedong famously opined that the CCP should thank the Japanese, because without their invasion, the CCP would not have prevailed to the extent that its leaders could sit in Beijing and enjoy the city’s famous, eponymous opera performances.

In Mitter’s chapter named “History Wars: How Historical Research Shaped China’s Politics”, he quotes “a depth charge under the CCP’s traditional historiography of the war years”, placed there by an essay in the mainland academic journal Republican Archives (Minguo Dang’an) in 1987.

Of course, looked at with today’s eyes, the history of the war of resistance written in the thirty years since the foundation of the PRC is clearly inadequate and has serious flaws. First, the research was too narrow…

In “Old Memories, New Media”, Mitter traces the changing nature, and content, of bloggers and other denizens of China’s social media, and of course the rapid growth of the anti-Imperial Japan movie genre. This transition has proven a challenge. In 2019, The Eight Hundred, an epic drama about an iconic defense by the Chinese during the 1937 Battle of Shanghai (August to November 1937), was scheduled to debut at the Shanghai International Film Festival. The Festival cancelled the showing, and The Eight Hundred was later released only after some further “editing”, because of a robust dispute about how to portray the KMT soldiers and flag.

The Chinese Red Culture Association, linked to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had condemned the film, arguing that it gave far too rosy a view of the Nationalist government’s contribution to the war. The group was outraged over scenes such as one in which the Chinese soldiers defend the Chinese Nationalist flag with its distinctive white star and blue background.

There were no overtly Communist troops in the 1937 battle, indeed there were few anywhere, one year after the end of the Long March, which retreat had decimated (literally) the Communist forces. And no hammer-and-sickle flag.

Part of creating a “good war” narrative within China requires rehabilitation of the KMT, part requires changing the enemy from Chinese of other class backgrounds to Imperial Japan. Each component is fraught. Regarding the ongoing challenge of integrating the KMT into the “good war” narrative, Mitter writes:

Still today, the CCP is in a position where it is making several conflicting arguments simultaneously: that (by implication) the Nationalist state was legitimate and sovereign, presumably up to 1949, even though the civil war was based on the premise that it was not … The state has still not found the right balance to enable it to use but also control the memory of the Nationalists.

And as for an evolving relationship with Japan,

Yet at some level, the dispute between these two countries is not best understood as a conflict between China and Japan. Rather, it stems from a continuing debate within China about the nature of Chinese identity… many of the gestures that observers and external bodies suggest for bringing about Sino-Japanese reconciliation, whether further apologies from Japan or the writing of joint textbooks, are unlikely to bring about a final resolution to the issue. These are rationalist responses to what is an emotional and ideological phenomenon.

Moreover, the CCP’s “good war” initiative is not, indeed cannot be, merely domestic. In his penultimate chapter, “The Cairo Syndrome: World War II and China’s Contemporary International Relations”, Mitter points out that

China’s international relations have been significantly shaped by its attempt to change the collective memory of the war, particularly in the twenty-first century.

He quotes from a Xi Jinping speech in 2015:

The goal is to reconsider the great path of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance and confirm the great contribution that the war of resistance made to the victory in the world antifascist war…We must encourage international society accurately to recognize the position and role in the world antifascist war of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance.

There’s no shortage of justification for official China’s claim to moral legitimacy for the country’s sacrifices during the War of Resistance. Well north of 10 million Chinese died unnatural deaths between 1937 and 1945, most of them civilians murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army. And the continent tied down more than half a million Japanese troops during those years. In the introduction, Mitter writes,

If the United States could gain decades of dominance on the back of its wartime contributions to Asia, Chinese analysts argue today, so should China…

and that China “is keen for its growing presence in the world to be seen as one of normative and moral leadership, rather than leadership defined solely by economic and military weight.”

Regardless of the theoretical merit of that argument, it may not matter much—at least so far. Several years ago, a consortium of Chinese and Hollywood folks set out to make a blockbuster about Imperial Japan’s 1938-1943 bombing of China’s wartime capital, Chongqing. Titled The Bombing, the film attracted Bruce Willis as leading man and Mel Gibson as art director. Mitter quotes from Showbiz, an industry publication, in 2016:

… we may never see The Bombing. It’s a bomb … It’s about the Chinese fighting back against the Japanese in World War II … It’s not like a lot of people around the world care about that.

Official China may aim for the “good war” repurposing to enhance their moral as well as realpolitik stature, but it will surely be an uphill, er, battle to gain even the attention of the G-7 on this point, let alone their appreciation.

But habitual lack of awareness or appreciation from the rest of the world may matter less and less. China’s increasing assertion of its moral legitimacy may be harder and harder to ignore. In his conclusion, Mitter suggests why official China’s repurposing of the memory of the war years is so important today—and tomorrow—and therefore suggests why his book about that strategy is so timely and valuable. In the final two sentences of China’s Good War, Mitter writes:

As China becomes more powerful, the world will have to pay more attention to the stories that it wants to tell. Whether we realize it or not, we are all living in China’s long postwar.

Van Fleet’s first book, Tales of Old Tokyo, a scrapbook history of the city from 1853 to 1964, was published in 2015. Resident in Japan for the decade of the 1990s, Van Fleet has lived in China since. He is steadily producing episodes of his multimedia project, Quarreling Cousins: China and Japan from Antiquity to the 2020s. He serves as Director, Corporate Globalization, at the Antai College of Economics & Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

John Darwin Van Fleet 6 September 2021 Non-Fiction

“Opium Inc.: How A Global Drug Trade Funded The British Empire” by Thomas Manuel
 

The Stacking Room: Opium Factory at Patna" (1851) (Wellcome Collection)

Opium’s role in the history of East Asia has been well-documented, most notably perhaps in Julia Lovell’s definitive 2011 book The Opium War. This, and others like it, deal with the issue mostly from the perspective of the consuming countries, in particular China; Thomas Manuel’s Opium Inc. is noteworthy in focusing just as much on the producer: India.

The outline of the story is well-known. Britain (then as now) was running a large trade deficit with China: the British bought masses of tea, while the Chinese were peculiarly uninterested in British products such as woolens. But opium plugged the hole. Although China had some of its own opium, Indian production was better and cheaper, and in what might otherwise have been a textbook example of Ricardian competitive advantage at work, China began importing so much opium that the trade balance turned the other way. Chinese attempts to ban both opium and the trade ultimately led to the two Opium Wars, the establishment of Hong Kong and what China has called “the century of humiliation”.

The strength of Manuel’s book is that he includes a detailed description of India’s part in this sorry saga: he sums it up as “the Chinese got opium, the British got tea, and the Indians got colonialism.”

Opium Inc.: How A Global Drug Trade Funded The British Empire, Thomas Manuel (HarperCollins India, August 2021)

The British didn’t invent the international opium trade: that distinction, says Manuel, goes to the Portuguese, but it took the Dutch to make it big business:

Suddenly, in the late seventeenth century, the opium trade began to flourish. Not to China but to the Dutch-controlled ports like Batavia (currently Jakarta), Malacca and Manila in the Philippines… By the end of the century, opium exports from Bengal were forty-three times higher than they were at the beginning.

When the Dutch East India Company declined, and the East India Company took over Bengal, the British took over the trade as well, claiming monopoly rights on Bengali opium in 1773. The trade was initially restricted, helpfully raising price in China, but:

In 1830, all attempts at restricting trade… were unceremoniously ended. Between 1830 and 1839, the area under cultivation doubled in size. Opium exports tripled…. By 1860, the area of opium cultivation had almost doubled again. Then, in three years, by 1863, it had doubled again! So over the century, the lands devoted to opium cultivation went up by almost 800 per cent. There were eventually one million peasant households cultivating opium on approximately half a million acres of land.

This drove the development of Indian bureaucracy, while the peasants were trapped between landowners, moneylenders and brokers. “The lives of these peasants were miserable,” writes Manuel.

This leads into what is Manuel’s main point, delineated in his subtitle: “How A Global Drug Trade Funded The British Empire”. Opium not only saved Britain’s trade balance, but also the finances of British India and hence the Empire:

At its peak, opium was the third-highest source of revenue for the British in India, after land and salt. This makes the Honourable East India Company a drug cartel masquerading as a joint stock corporation masquerading as a government. The British Raj in the nineteenth century was a narco-state – a country sustained by trade in an illegal drug.

Manuel’s conclusion is perhaps overdrawn—opium was the third-highest source of revenue, not the bulk of it—but the point is broadly true. Nor is he wrong when he says that the legacies of this trade remain today, in India as well as globally.

Again, it is in India where Manuel perhaps is most illuminating, at least for readers who only know the East Asian side of this story. While his description of the manufacturing process are Dickensian:

From farms, it was sent to factories where it was tested, standardized and packaged in chests of mango wood. These factories employed a small army of children to crawl over ceiling-high scaffolding and painstakingly maintain the precious drug till it was ready to be shipped…

the “business story” is fascinating in what it says about how trade, business, economics and politics intertwined. The market was thrown open in 1830 because the East India Company had failed in enforcing its monopoly in West India: so-called “Malwa opium” was proving a formidable competitor for the Company’s own Bengal product:

It began to allow any merchant to export opium from Bombay as long as they paid a transit duty. As paying the duty was cheaper than smuggling, the smugglers made the savvy economic choice. As a result, Bombay exploded into life.

Despite the baleful effects of opium on Indian society, Indians do not always come off very well:
opium money became a vital source of income for the government in India. This meant that the nationalist movement, as it gained purpose and momentum, remained curiously silent on opium. In their pragmatism, they didn’t want to risk winning the independence of an impoverished nation.

A book of this kind should be full of interesting titbits, and Opium Inc. has its share. One is that opium traders would bank their silver receipts in Canton and receive a document allowing them to cash out in London.

This method of moving money across the world before the banking system really existed became the most efficient way to transfer fortunes back to London from India. Soon, privateers who made fortunes in India would invest in opium and use these documents as a way of transferring wealth back home to England – regardless of how they made their fortune in the first place.

It’s obvious when you think about it.

Another, which one feels one ought to have known about, was the system of loan guarantee insurance operated by the merchants in Canton:

This system came to be known as the ‘Canton Guaranty System’ and became the inspiration for the first American bank deposit insurance statute, the Safety Fund Act of 1829.

Manuel’s book can make curious reading for non-Indians. He finds it necessary to explain that sherry is “a kind of wine that has been fortified with extra spirit for potency” and when describing opium’s origins, he notes that

The Minoans are one of the earliest civilizations in the European sphere, overlapping for centuries with the Indus Valley civilization thousands of kilometres away…

inverting the way such a comparison would “normally” go. These are healthy reminders that even the most objective study is ever grounded in certain cultural and historical points of view.

The book unfortunately contains more errors than it should. He writes, for example, of opium clippers “with the power of steam” in the 1820s, and how, during the Opium War of 1840s, one clipper “was deployed to carry mail for the British from India through the Suez Canal” which didn’t open until 1869. He has the “British Community in Hong Kong” during the First Opium War, and Russia denied trading rights in Canton because it had a separate treaty-designated “port” (it was a border post). These are for most part not very serious, but someone should have caught them.

Opium Inc. is a good, readable book, and a salutary Indian take on a subject that is mostly written solely with a China-Britain focus. More editing could have made it a very good book.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.

Peter Gordon 21 August 2021 Non-Fiction

“Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia From the Past to the Present”

 edited by Bérénice Bellina, Roger Blench and Jean-Christophe Galipaud

Anyone who has gone even slightly off the beaten track in Southeast Asia is likely to have come across “sea people”, which go by various names: Orang Laut, Sama Bajau, Chao Le, “Sea Gypsies”. These are the people covered in Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia From the Past to the Present, a recently-published collection of (very) academic essays.

The introduction lays out the book’s rationale:

Sea nomads have been part of the economic and political landscape of Southeast Asia for millennia… But so far there have been few attempts to trace the evolution of sea nomadism in the archaeological record or to make use of modern genetics in understanding these trajectories. There has been a certain bias against these communities because of their supposed ‘archaeological invisibility’… Part of the subtext of this book is to suggest this is far from the situation. As such it is the first book providing historical, archaeological and genetic data in the attempt to explore sea nomads’ longue-durée historical trajectory as well as their role in regional historical developments.

The potential appeal, to say nothing of the importance, seems undeniable. But this book is however one for university library shelves: if you’re not familiar with terms like “swidden-farming” and “autosomal markers” or can’t identify molluscs from the Latin name alone, this is probably not the book for you. One must always be careful not to review the book one wishes had been written rather than the one that was. Nevertheless, while providing a single overview of the subject for the non-specialist is evidently not this book’s objective, Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia makes the necessity of such a volume all the more evident.

Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia: From the Past to the Present, Bérénice Bellina (ed), Roger Blench (ed), Jean-Christophe Galipaud (ed) (NUS Press, September 2021)

That being said, there is much of interest here. Roger Blench’s fascinating paper on “Ship Construction and Navigation in the Early South China Seas” points to the central role of Southeast Asia in navigation technology:

… already by the third century CE, the Chinese were encountering extremely large trading ships with as many as four sails, far larger than anything they could construct. It seems Chinese shipwrights learnt from this and by the Sung dynasty had begun to design ships which merged both Chinese and Southeast Asian constructional techniques… All of this evidence points to a remarkable evolution of maritime technology indigenous to Island Southeast Asia (ISEA), which was far ahead of other naval traditions until the appearance of very large European vessels from the end of the sixteenth century.

But it all started far earlier:

The migrations of modern humans across large stretches of water in the Palaeolithic is incontrovertible evidence for the existence of some type of sophisticated water transport… If modern humans could reach Australia by 65,000 BP [before present] … this implies some open ocean capacity. Evidence for movement between islands in the Ryukyus goes back to 35,000 bp… Obsidian was being transported around Bismarcks as early as 20,000 BP.

This subject deserves a book of its own some day.

The various sections on linguistics are similarly interesting. It helps to know going in that conventional wisdom now has the Malay, Polynesian and related languages (and the people that speak them) originating in Taiwan. The linguistic distribution of the Sama Bajau languages and dialects helps pinpoint their historical origins:

the reasons and date of the migration of Sama Bajau ancestors to the southern Philippines are probably linked to the expansion of the Srivijaya empire in the ninth century.

Some of the links between language and identity are surprising. Despite the sea nomads being in general marginalized, it appears that in certain situations, other people would integrate into the Sama Bajau community rather than the other way around:

In Sapeken, the non-Bajau migrants from neighbouring islands such as the Mandar, Bugis or even Chinese, have, more often than not, switched their daily language as well as their ethnic identification to the Bajau. Simply speaking, the Bajau population in Sapeken swelled from 1930 through 2000 as the non-Bajau have ‘become Bajau’.

Some of the contributors express the view that the sea nomads have been badly done by—as have, it goes without saying and wasn’t here, most peoples whose traditional lifestyles do not conform to governments’ view of development. In this, the story of the sea nomads is sadly typical.

Collections of academic essays by disparate authors can be less than the sum of their parts; that is unfortunately the case here. There is considerable duplication of information (on geographical and linguistic distribution in particular) and quite a bit is left out: for a historical outline and basic ethnography, the general reader might be better off referring to online sources (Wikipedia in fact covers these peoples in no small amount of detail).

That is of course not what Sea Nomads is trying to do. While the editors express hope that
this book will encourage archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, geographers, linguists and geneticists to follow up these methodological reflections and to work together to provide a history for the ancestors of a large proportion of current Southeast Asian populations …

one might also hold out hope for a book targeted at the rest of us.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.

Peter Gordon 21 September 2021 Non-Fiction

New Book Announcement: “We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law” by Simon Chesterman

We, the Robots?: Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law, Simon Chesterman (Cambridge University Press, September 2021)

Should we regulate artificial intelligence? Can we? From self-driving cars and high-speed trading to algorithmic decision-making, the way we live, work, and play is increasingly dependent on AI systems that operate with diminishing human intervention. These fast, autonomous, and opaque machines offer great benefits—and pose significant risks.

This book examines how our laws are dealing with AI, as well as what additional rules and institutions are needed—including the role that AI might play in regulating itself. Much of the literature focuses on the EU and the US. Drawing on diverse technologies and examples from around the world, with a particular focus on China and Singapore, the book offers lessons on how to manage risk, draw red lines, and preserve the legitimacy of public authority.

Though the prospect of AI pushing beyond the limits of the law may seem remote, these measures are useful now—and will be essential if it ever does.

We, the Robots? Regulating Artificial Intelligence and the Limits of the Law
by Simon Chesterman
Oxford University Press, September 2021 (ISBN 9781316517680)

Editor 30 September 2021 Non-fiction