“The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha” by Jairam Ramesh

Edwin Arnold (via Wikimedia Commons)


Victorian poets such as Matthew Arnold and Alfred Tennyson are celebrated for having survived the test of time, as literary historians would put it. But it is someone else, an “Oriental” poet from England and a popularizer of Buddhism in the West, in Asia, and even on the Indian subcontinent who has been translated into 13 European and 22 Asian languages.

This poet is Sir Edwin Arnold and the poem he is most known for is The Light of Asia, an epic romantic work about the life and the message of the Buddha. Published in 1879, it went on to influence leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, as well as authors such as Rabindranath Tagore, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, and famous, influential leaders and scientists. Arnold wrote a good many other poems too in addition to The Light of Asia, but it was this work that made him an international celebrity and which, in several ways, revived the neglected story of the Buddha for the modern world; works written prior to it were more or less scholarly pieces not meant for the general public.

India’s former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh has written a “biography” of this poem. His The Light of Asia: The Poem That Defined the Buddha investigates the times in which it was written, and tracks every translation, adaptation, and dissertation dealing with the author and the poem. It also points out countless references to the poem in global politicians’ correspondences with each other, even in unnoticeable scenes in movies, and in school children’s syllabi and guidebooks to document the cultural phenomenon it has come to be.

The close-to-universal appeal of the text has shaped popular contemporary imagination of Buddhism and the Buddha.

The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined The Buddha, Jairam Ramesh (India Viking, May 2021)

Born in 1832 in Gravesend near London and educated at King’s College and Oxford University, Arnold had his first brush with Buddhism through poetry contests held in the college. He came to India for a couple of years to take charge of the principalship of the prestigious Poona College in 1857, the year of the Indian Mutiny. It was there that he was exposed to the classical texts of Hinduism and Buddhism, translating some of them.

Thanks to the rising interest in “the Orient” (as it was then) and the publication of numerous works in Indology such as Samuel Beal’s The Romantic Legend of Sakya Buddha, Buddhism was in the air. While working as a journalist back in Britain for The Daily Telegraph, Arnold stayed in touch with Indian culture and translated the classics such as The Hitopadesa and Gitagovinda. The Light of Asia was soon to follow.

When it did, it became something of a cult text: it received glowing reviews everywhere and found an astonishingly wide audience eager to buy copies in all formats—illustrated as well as special Christmas gift editions. It was hailed as “‘an Idyll of the King’ with Gautama instead of Arthur for its hero and Nirvana instead of the Christian ideal and the Holy Grail as its aim,” and for bringing the style of John Keats and Alfred Tennyson to the themes of karma and nirvana. Here’s an example:

Ye are not bound! the Soul of Things is sweet,
The Heart of Being is celestial rest;
Stronger than woe is will: that which was Good
Doth pass to Better—Best.
I, Buddh, who wept with all my brothers tears,
Whose heart was broken by a whole world’s woe,
Laugh and am glad, for there is Liberty
Ho! ye who suffer! know
Ye suffer from yourselves. None else compels
None other holds you that ye live and die

The narration of Buddha’s life and doctrine in simple terms would enthrall the world. Ramesh provides the context:

The Light of Asia came at a time when organized religion was in retreat in Victorian society and was under attack across the Atlantic as well. It came exactly ten years after the word ‘agnostic’ was first coined. To use the title of Thomas Hardy’s extraordinary poem, Arnold placed Buddha in the public consciousness at a time when ‘God’s Funeral’ was taking place.

The success of the poem would upset those who had worked on Buddhism for several years but couldn’t get into the limelight. It would also make a lot of people insecure. Ramesh quotes several attacks on the poem and the poet by such people, one of whom says that “the dulcet and eloquent strains” of the poem would fool “uninformed and unsuspecting people” “into conclusions detrimental to Christianity.” Another quote from the archive says:

There has entered the general mind, an unconfessed, a half conscious, but a most shrewdly penetrative, misgiving that, perhaps, after all, Christianity has not of right quite the exclusive claim that it was previously supposed to possess, upon the attention and reverence of mankind.

His engagement with Buddhism was not limited to the authoring of the poem: it would also involve launching a huge movement to recognize a sacred Buddhist site. As Arnold became, or came to be seen as, a sort of “insider” in Buddhist affairs of his time, he launched a campaign for the handing over the Bodh Gaya temple in modern-day Bihar in India, where the Buddha attained Enlightenment, to the Buddhists. He compared it with such other sacred sites as Mecca and Jerusalem and campaigned heavily for it to be wrested from the control of the Hindus whom he saw as desecrating the sacred Buddhist site with Hindu rituals. The temple was transferred to the leading Buddhist body only in 1953—after seven decades of struggle by the Buddhist leaders all over the world.

In the process of recording the impact of the poem and its legacy, Ramesh also deals with an intriguing episode in the life of the text—that of the discovery of the Buddhist heritage site in Jharkhand, India. The researchers involved had followed an excerpt from the poem:

Thou wouldst see where dawned the Light at last,
North-westwards from the “Thousand Gardens” go,
By Gunga’s Valley till they steps be set
On the green hills where those twin streamlets spring,
Nilanjana and Mohana! Follow them,
Winding beneath broad-leaved mahua trees,
‘Mid thickets of the sansar and the bir,
Till on the plain the shining sisters meet
In Phalgu’s bed, flowing by rocky banks
To Gaya and the red Barabar Hills
Hard by that river spreads a thorny waste,
Urawelaya named in ancient days …

and found Buddhist ruins near Hazaribagh, the “Thousand Gardens” mentioned in the excerpt.

Such revelations about a seemingly forgotten 19th century poem unsettle a lot of deeply held beliefs about literary merit and canonicity in literary histories. Where does a text’s value lie: in popular appeal and its influence on statesmen and scientists or in the literary merit as articulated by literary critics? Ramesh makes a case for the former:

The enduring fascination that Mahatma Gandhi had for his translation of the Bhagwad Gita is sufficient for Sir Edwin Arnold to occupy a distinctive niche in not only Indian but also world history. If you add to this prodigious influence The Light of Asia had, then it would be fair to say he was. A poet who helped interpret not one but two faiths – an achievement that is quite extraordinary by any yardstick … The Light of Asia did not involve painstaking academic investigation. But clearly it met a demand, fed a hunger, filled a need and fulfilled an aspiration. It had something for everybody. It appealed to the Christian non-missionary world because of the close parallels in it between the lives of the Buddha and of Christ. It made Buddhists feel proud because it portrayed the founder of their faith in a glorious manner … Upper-caste Hindus in India did not see it as a potent threat because of the extensive use of Brahmanical themes in the poem.

This close-to-universal appeal of the text has shaped popular contemporary imagination of Buddhism and the Buddha. Ramesh’s biography of the text does a commendable job of tracing the origins of that appeal.

Soni Wadhwa lives in Mumbai.

Soni Wadhwa 20 July 2021 Non-Fiction

“The Missing Buddhas: The mystery of the Chinese Buddhist statues that stunned the Western art world” by Tony Miller

Luóhàn at British Museum (photo David Castor, via Wikimedia Commons)

A discovery in the history of art is a discovery like any other, so wrote in 1913 Friedrich Perzynski, a German art dealer, in Hunt for the Gods, an account of his exploits in China the year before. This was a time of turmoil. A dynasty had just fallen and the capital Beijing was humming with activity, as artefacts from all over the country were resurfacing in the open or in back rooms. Foreign archeologists, dealers and curators, who had been coming in growing numbers, marveled at the remnants of a civilization that only then was starting to be known.

Among the art treasures that left the country, a unique set of glazed terracotta statues represented the peak of sculpture and ceramic achievement. These were images of arhats or Luohans, Buddha’s disciples chosen to protect the law. Ten statues in total (or nine and a half), they are known as the Yizhou or Yixian Luohans, after the place just 96 miles southwest of Beijing where Perzynski went to search for them. They ended up in some of the most important museums in the world, the Met, the British Museum, the Penn, the Guimet… But were they really found in a small inaccessible cave as Perzynski seemed to suggest? Where and when they were made? And why had nothing been known until then?

The Missing Buddhas: The mystery of the Chinese Buddhist statues that stunned the Western art world, Tony Miller (Earnshaw Books, July 2021)

The writing on these terracotta Luohans so far has been scarce, fragmentary, or confusing, not measuring up to their importance. In The Missing Buddhas, Tony Miller sets out to unravel the enigmas surrounding these sculptures and the stories they tell, he retraces Perzynski’s footsteps and a century of scholarship on Buddhist art and Chinese ceramics, from those pioneering times until today. This multilayered study of a remarkable chapter in the history of art is masterfully told with the thrill of an adventure—the adventure of knowledge—one which, at its conclusion, delivers a nuanced view of dynastic China, its shifting borders, and its cultural roots.

Miller engages the reader from the start with his own shock of wonder on first encountering the Luohan in the British Museum, “one of those rare examples of great art that communicates across time and space and cultures,” an experience that, by now, millions of museum visitors can relate to, which echoes the reaction when the first sale outside China took place:

The unveiling of the first two Luohans at the Musée Cernuschi in June 1913 was met with a mixture of amazement and uncertainty. Curators and critics, accustomed to seeing only idealized or stylized representations of Buddhist icons, were surprised by images so clearly taken from life. More than that, they looked in awe at the manifestation of spiritual struggle.

The book is illustrated throughout, and the strong magnetism of these images will follow readers as they reflect upon the meaning of their facial expressions. Yet the virtue of the book lies in the strength of its arguments, so it rewards careful reading. Perzynski’s tale of discovery, central to the story of the terracotta Luohans, is critically examined at last. Inconsistencies in his account as well as correspondence that Miller has unearthed shed light on the question whether he found the Luohans at all.

No photograph of Perzynski is known, yet Miller recovers the man with a fuller picture: Perzinsky was a born storyteller, his description of his collaborators is full of flavor, “a Lamaist priest expelled from his monastery for theft…, and another no less disreputable character whose head also sits uneasily on his shoulders. Both have offered to serve me as spies.” Yet, he was a learned man too: in Germany he was a founding member of the Workers’ Art Association together with Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut; he also understood the cultural sensibilities of the East, the affinity of the Chinese for a painting of a leafless gnarled tree or the endless possibilities of expression of a Noh mask.

Perzynski’s account, which was a sales brochure after all, however, has colored the provenance of the terracotta Luohans to this day. It is surprising to find eminent figures in the field of Chinese art history who had given credence to bizarre propositions, above all that these statues were hidden in a cave. The most recent book on the subject, by Eileen Hsu Hsian-ling, not only takes Perzynski’s account at face value and assumes that these larger-than-life size and most fragile terracotta sculptures were taken through rugged terrain, and then lifted into a small inaccessible cave, but also alleges that this became a place of pilgrimage. But no traces of pilgrims have been found. And against all known evidence and the historical context, Hsu gives a Ming date based on late steles (or commemorative stones) placed in the vicinity of the cave in Yixian. These ideas and theories which are regularly replicated unchecked, are here fortunately debunked, elegantly, point by point, discussing the matter from both sides of the argument.

Progress on the dating and identification of these sculptures has been slow but consistent. Because the sculptures are glazed with sancai (three colors, predominantly brown, green and a creamy off-white), an innovation of the Tang (618-907), early specialists assigned them to that period. Due to the use of the same soft lead glazes during the Ming (1368-1644), the pieces have been sometimes considered as dating from this period, although more than 400 years separate the end of one dynasty from the beginning of the other. Conditions prevailing in 20th-century China compromised the preservation and study of its cultural heritage, but enough archaeological evidence and thermo-luminescence dating tests made by the Penn and the Met together point to the pieces’ origins in the Liao dynasty (907-1125).

Buddhism has had a chequered history in China. Miller has visited the Longmen Grottoes in Henan, climbed the Fogong timber pagoda in Shanxi, and trekked around the temples in Beijing’s Western Hills (which are interestingly relevant to this story): some of the remaining glories of Chinese Buddhism. But he has also stood on a temple hill in Chaozhou, eastern Guangdong, commemorating the Tang scholar-poet Han Yu, whose diatribes against Buddhism are engraved in stone. The impact of Buddhism on Chinese material culture is unquestionable: it lent a unifying mantle to a vast and diverse territory. Its influence on ritual, philosophy, clothing, tea-drinking, the chair, even the bridges built under Buddhist patronage, are some examples. Yet it also suffered violent iconoclastic persecutions, for being foreign among other reasons, the most devastating unleashed by Tang emperor Wuzong (reigned 840-846), “angered by what he regarded as the monasteries’ evasion of taxes”: it caused the destruction of thousands of temples and monasteries, the destruction of statuary reached catastrophic proportions, and tens of thousands of monks were secularized. For historian Jacques Gernet, this was a blow from which Buddhism would never recover, it lost intellectual vigor and its place in society, it fell into steady decline during the Song, and by the Ming dynasty it was in retreat; an 18th-century stele in Yizhou laments, “the sounds of Buddhist chanting under the moonlit pine trees were no longer heard.”

Yet, Buddhism would nevertheless flourish under the semi-nomad Khitan, who invaded and ruled northeastern China as the Liao dynasty (907-1125). Kenneth Ch’en wrote in Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey that the Liao paid nominal respect to Confucianism, but noting its inherent antagonism to alien peoples, they felt more emotionally attached to Buddhism, a Buddhism with Chinese roots. Temples and monasteries began to spring up, built by the imperial family, the nobility, and the common people, while the number in the monastic community was high. It was during the reign of Daozong (reigned 1055-1101) that the printing of the Liao version of the Chinese Tripitaka was completed, regarded as more accurate and complete than the Song edition, and when the impressive Fogong pagoda was built. The Liao coveted the trappings of Chinese civilization: they took with them Chinese artisans that would create distinctive works of art. In ceramics, the Liao would have at their service the most advanced technology and the finest workmanship of the time.

The Missing Buddhas will delight art lovers on issues of style, artistic influences, and their transmission. Witnessing the first steps in the study of these statutes, Miller follows RL Hobson of the British Museum and Bosch Reitz, the first curator of Far Eastern Art at the Met as they made the first appraisals, both were “curious and meticulous” in Miller’s words. Among the most striking insights in a book packed with information, Miller notes that as early as 1913, Hobson had hinted at the roots of the cult and the “connection between the vividly life-like Luohans and Japanese statuary”:

The Luohans were the missing link, he believed, between the Tang statuary and the Japanese chinzo, the portraits of distinguished Zen monks and such a transmission of art via a religious route closely parallels the emergence of the cult of the Luohan following the persecution of Buddhism in 841-845 and the coincident development of Zen Buddhism.

These roots of the cult are now acknowledged, yet originally the first images of Chinese arhats or Luohans to make an impact were those drawn by the painter-monk Guanxiu (832-912), his contorted and highly original forms transmitted mainly on paper. In another fascinating take, Miller draws comparisons between those descriptions of arhats and the terracotta Luohans:

The artists who sculpted the terracotta Luohans may or not have been aware of Guanxiu’s iconic grotesqueries but, if they were, they chose to ignore them. They concentrated instead on the twin task of creating a true-to-life impression of living Luohans, while capturing the inner struggle of the meditative process, the toll taken by asceticism on the physical being and the serenity of its spiritual outcome.

Tracing the stylistic developments under the Liao to its final conclusions, Miller discusses some scholars’ suggestions of a departure from highly stylized Tang in the early Northern Song (960-1126). For Miller, however, this development was already visible, with added twist, under the Liao, whose “statuary has a vivacity that distinguishes from these and lifts it above them, suggesting that under their new masters, the artists were given greater license than before.”

Any book on this topic will inevitably raise questions on heritage preservation. Miller remembers scholar Fu Zhenlun, who lamented the dispersal of Chinese antiquities, and the architectural historian Liang Sicheng, who strived to preserve the last remains of Chinese-built heritage. But these were isolated voices. Readers approaching the subject would be mistaken to think the obliteration of China’s heritage was the result of foreign plunder; not in most cases, not in this case of the terracotta Luohans. Simon Leys’s essay, The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past, comes to mind. Echoing visitors’ surprise at the absence of physical remains, he wonders at the paradox where apparent veneration for the values of the past is compatible with the destruction and neglect of the visible material heritage. Similar commentary was elicited by FW Mote in a dedicated study, A Millennium of Chinese Urban History: Form, Time and Space Concepts in Soochow. He explained out that experience, in sharp contrast with Europe or even the remains of Angkor Wat, by noting a difference in attitude. In China, the past is recorded in the written word, and this is accorded the highest regard: “The past was a past of words not of stones.”

Miller ends with a coda asking for the return of artifacts to the grottoes. This is a complex matter. Except when there is clear evidence of the artifacts having been looted, it may be better to leave things as they are. For once, those museums have largely fulfilled their role to preserve, exhibit and interpret works of art, making accessible this universal heritage to a wider audience. More essentially, history belongs to the past, and the past is a foreign country. The Missing Buddhas has rescued these magnificent statues from the dangerous cliff where they have been pushed. Miller’s work is itself a work of restoration, a labor of love, erudite but also approachable; it demystifies ancient art, while the sense of wonder, mystery and discovery remain.

Juan José Morales is the co-author of Painter and Patron: The Maritime Silk Road in the Códice Casanatense (Abbreviated Books, 2020) and The Silver Way: China, Spanish America and the Birth of Globalisation, 1565–1815 (Penguin, 2017).

Juan José Morales 24 July 2021 Non-Fiction

“Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror” edited by Ian Rowen
 

The Horrifying Inspection by Huang Rong-can, 1947 (via Wikimedia Commons)

“Violence composes a fundament of modern Taiwan history,” opens Ian Rowen’s introduction to Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror. In the almost forty years during which Taiwan’s authoritarian ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), kept the country under martial law and suppressed any form of political dissent, thousands of citizens—including alleged proponents of Taiwan’s independence from China or presumed communist collaborators—were abducted, imprisoned, or executed. This violence has undoubtedly left a scar on a generation of Taiwanese, and the stories that make up this volume, penned by some of Taiwan’s most notable writers, explore the mechanisms of power during that painful—and indeed violent—time. There isn’t however much gore or literal brutality in these stories, which rather reconfigure the violent trauma of history in its most subtle, almost mundane, aspects, displaying how authoritarian power effectively manages to infiltrate every aspect of people’s lives.

Each of the seven stories included in this volume—all originally written between 1972 and 2017—is a window into fragments of lives in different social spaces (village, city, prison, military base, slums) during the White Terror period, and together, they open up a broader observational perspective onto the multiple and varied imaginative reworkings of the country’s historical memory.

Transitions in Taiwan: Stories of the White Terror, Ian Rowen (ed) (Cambria Press, April 2021)

This book is, in fact, a reflection on traumatic memory and the possibilities of its narrativization at a personal as well as collective, or even institutional level. The difficulty of accessing one’s painful past and making it utterable is reflected in the non-linearity of the narrative structures that these texts are often built upon. Metanarration, multiple voices, unreliable narrators, Kafkaesque allegories: these are just a few of the elaborate literary techniques showcased here. These textual strategies are particularly apt at investigating a common theme, or feeling perhaps, that all these stories, in different ways, deal with: displacement.

For instance, in Zhu Tianxin’s “Long Long Ago There was an Urashima Taro” (translated by Sylvia Li-Chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt) the protagonist, a former political offender released from prison after 30 years, has a hard time re-integrating into society; he still believes he is being followed by KMT spies, and everyday has to find a new route to walk his grandson to school. His reality comes crashing down when one day he finds a box that contained all the letters he had sent to his family while in prison, most of which had never been opened. The man suddenly realizes that the reality he had so accurately crafted in those letters has never really existed in the world his loved ones inhabited. He feels spatially and temporally disconnected from the “real” world, and his story is nothing but a re-enactment of the Japanese fable of Urashima Taro referenced in the title, that the protagonist’s mother used to tell him as a child, in which a young fisherman, back from his trip to the underwater Dragon Palace, is suddenly transformed into an old man, after opening a mysterious box.

A similar disconnection in time and space is experienced by the protagonist of Li Ang’s story, “Beef Noodles” (translated by Sylvia Li-Chun Lin). A former political prisoner, the man eventually finds out that the popular Taiwanese dish, supposedly of Sichuanese origin and brought to the island by the Chinese nationalists after 1949, does not really exist in Sichuan. The man had developed a taste for beef noodles while in prison—they were a modest luxury conceded to inmates for a reasonable price, and were also served as last meal to prisoners on death row.

He had thought that his stomach was under KMT control during all those fearful, desperate years in his prison cell, those twenty-three years of suffering caused by his belief in Taiwan independence.

If it is true that food is a privileged site of memory, then Li Ang’s beef noodles function as a powerful gastronomical trigger that offer a personal, gustatory perspective on how the bitterness of history continues to feed the present and influence the construction of social identities.

All the authors whose stories are included in this collection have lived through the White Terror period, with the partial exception of Huang Chong-kai (born in 1981, only six years before the abolition of martial law). His story, “Dixson’s Idioms” (translated by Brian Skerratt) is inspired by the real life of Ko Chi-Hua, a Taiwanese writer and teacher of English—the author, in fact, of a very famous English Grammar manual used by generations of Taiwanese and based on the work of American teacher Robert Dixson—who ended up in prison after being implicated in a conspiracy to commit sedition. An insightful observation of the possibilities and limitations of language and grammar when it comes to narrating traumatic experiences, the text is structured on the model of a language learning manual: it is divided into shorter sections that are given the titles of different English idioms and which function as entry points into the narration.

Transitions in Taiwan is a literary exploration of the forty violent years during which the Taiwan people were ruled by an authoritarian power. The seven carefully selected and beautifully translated stories in this volume, in addition to presenting to the English readership some of the country’s best literary talent, offer an invaluable glimpse into a difficult part of Taiwan’s history, while reflecting on the possibilities for its imaginative reconfigurations by means of fiction.

Serena De Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher of Chinese and Sinophone literature currently based in Taipei.

Serena De Marchi 30 July 2021 Fiction

“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