Karen Christensen: China-related insights into the power of social networks

“China promises less-wasteful growth in 2008″

For investors, these troubles might also present some opportunities. The renewable energy sector is worth a look as China can be expected to throw money at the problem. According to Worldwatch China, will invest over $10 billion in new renewables capacity in 2007, second only to Germany. It is also expected to become the world’s largest manufacturer of solar- and wind-energy equipment over the next three years.

And Al Gore addresses the U.S. and China on global warming:

OSLO, Norway (AP) — Al Gore received his Nobel Peace Prize on Monday and urged the United States and China to make the boldest moves on climate change or “stand accountable before history for their failure to act.”

Here’s an account from Wired News.

Here’s a comment from an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune by Michael Vatikiotis, “In Asia’s Chinese diaspora, are loyalties divided?” It’s about the influence of the overseas Chinese people, whose numbers are estimated, with wildly variation, from 35 to 60 million, and apparently even higher. Given the large ethnic Chinese population in southeast Asia, the higher figures seem reasonable to me. But I’m not a demographer, and I’m dazzling by all statistics related to China, in any case.

The difference between being American and being Chinese is that America has a universal appeal, rather like a religion; being Chinese is a tribal thing, Yeo argues. “A Chinese cannot cease being a Chinese.”

Some people would say that religion is tribal, too, and that it’s only Americans who see religions as things to be put on and taken off like clothing. As we put it in the introduction to the Encyclopedia of Community (I’m using an editorial we: in fact, I know that Michael Zuckerman of the University of Pennysylvania wrote these lines):

Consequently communities in industrialized, Westernized nations, at any rate become more elective than imperative. In the United States, people are no longer Italian, or Republican, or Seventh-day Adventist because their parents were or because they have to be. They can embrace their Native American, or Norwegian, or Jewish heritage because they choose to celebrate that aspect of their repertoire of identities. Further, they can style it according to their own preferences and predilections. Contemporary Protestants, Catholics, and Jews alike customize their religions to suit themselves, and so do contemporary ethnic groups. We improvise our sexuality and abandon our old political partisan allegiances for an unprecedented independence.

We go on to say:

But the absence of sustaining primary communities is no minor thing. Humans need to be connected, and without adequate communities we suffer from personal and social ills that include depression, poor health, and crime. At its most extreme, an absence of human ties leads to violence and extreme social disorders - one has only to think of the stereotypical description of a serial killer as a loner.

And this relates to Chinese perspectives a good deal, I think, and to guanxi. The value placed on sustained connections and social harmony, even at the loss of some personal choice and individual autonomy, is something many Americans find hard to understand.

I can’t believe I found out about this site, Nicole Mones’s China for Food Lovers, immediately after returning from Shanghai and Beijing! Her novel The Last Chinese Chef was waiting for me, ordered from the library because I’d so enjoyed A Cup of Light. To my amazement, there’s lots about guanxi in The Last Chinese Chef, certainly enough to convince me that Liz was right in proposing we do an entire issue on the subject of food in Chinese culture and the relationship between eating and guanxi.

Great article just out in the United Airlines magazine this month, “What China’s Reading,” by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, which I read at the Bookworm cafe in Beijing, a wonderful place where one can linger for hours with coffee or wine surrounded by floor to nearly ceiling books, old and new. Check out the “cyber side-bar” in the Wasserstrom article, the author’s photo tour of Chinese bookstores. But it’s not always easy to take photos of bookstores, I find. I was about to take a photo at a bookstore in Shanghai a couple days ago and was stopped by the security guard. My guess is that they were concerned about copyright (and that’s not a bad thing). For good reason, too: at the Beijing Book Fair men with huge cameras walk around trying to get photos of Western book jackets. Last year I followed one and took his photo!

I’d certainly heard of the Opium Wars before I became so immersed in the world of Chinese studies, but I knew nothing about them. When I first read the story of these wars, I was incredulous. Today, as we work on various publishing projects designed to help students and professionals see the world from other perspectives, I often think about the hypocrisy of powerful countries when they claim moral superiority. Indeed they often promote things that are genuinely good: democratic elections, human rights, and corporate ethics, for example. But not only do people around the world see hypocrisy today—think of the United States and its election problems going out to police other nation’s free elections—but they remember history better, it seems, than we usually do. Britain’s going to war with China because China wanted to protect its citizens from drug traffic rates right up there with U.S. involvement with right-wing governments in Latin America.Here’s an article about the Opium Wars from the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, which we published with Scribners in 2002, and a related story from a recent issue of Guanxi: The China Letter.

Opium War

From the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, Berkshire/Scribners 2002

The First Opium War (1839<N>1842) was the beginning of active foreign aggression against China. The war began over Chinese attempts to prohibit British importation of opium. After China’s defeat, the opium trade continued, but China also lost Hong Kong and was forced to open treaty ports to foreign trade and to accept the unequal treaties, which limited China’s control over its foreign affairs.

Opium imports became a serious concern for the Qing dynasty court in the 1820s, as the court was worried about the effects of opium smoking on officials and soldiers and the supposed drain of silver out of the country. In the 1830s, a debate took place over whether these problems were best dealt with by legalizing and regulating opium or by prohibiting it. Prohibition won, and Lin Zexu was sent to Guangzhou (known popularly by its English name, Canton) to bring about the end of the trade.

The British in Canton were already unhappy that the Chinese government forbade them to trade in other ports, forced them to trade with a group of monopoly merchants (the Cohong) in Canton, and forbade the trade in opium, forcing the British to smuggle it or forgo the enormous profits it brought. British merchants were also unhappy at being subjected to Chinese law, which they regarded as barbaric. The McCartney mission of 1793 and the Amhurst mission of 1816 were intended to win the British full access to Chinese markets and European-style diplomatic relations with China, but both were failures.

Lin Zexu seized and destroyed the British opium at Canton and demanded that foreign merchants pledge not to import opium again. The British took these actions to be justification for war and sent a naval and military force from India. Fighting began in June of 1840. British strategy was to seize the island of Zhoushan, near the mouth of the Chang (Yangtze), and then sail north to Tianjin and demand payment for the seized opium and a complete revision of the relationship between the two countries. The British easily defeated all the Chinese naval and land forces they faced. The Qing court was eventually forced to agree to the Treaty of Nanjing. The Second Opium War 1856<N>1858 (also called the Arrow War) resulted in the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, which further opened China to foreign penetration. These treaties were the foundation of the system of unequal treaties that would govern China’s relations with the imperialist powers until World War II. The opium trade continued and grew, and the political and economic dislocations caused by the war and the treaty were key causes of the Taiping Rebellion, which lasted from1851 to 1864.

Alan Baumler

Further Reading
Chang, Hsin-pao. (1964) Commissioner Lin and the Opium War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Polachek, James M. (1992) The Inner Opium War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Waley, Arthur. (1958) The Opium War through Chinese Eyes. London: Allen & Unwin.

English Tea Drinking and the China Trade

From Guanxi: The China Letter

In the early 19th century, Britain faced a major trade imbalance because of the surging demand for Chinese tea at home and China’s lack of interest in Western products. The pendulum swung drastically in Britain’s favor once its traders began buying opium (which was illegal in China) in Bengal, a colony. The traders would sell the opium in China and then buy tea.
Britain’s profitable drug trade naturally had major negative effects on China’s economy and society, and China pressed Britain to end it. Lin Zexu, imperial commissioner at Guangzhou, was responsible for negotiations. He wrote this well-known letter to Queen Victoria in 1839, the year the Opium War began. That war, which showed the vast superiority of Europe’s military, shaped China’s relations with the West for over a century.

Is there a single article from China that has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive? Moreover the woolens, camlets, and longells [i.e., textiles] of foreign countries cannot be woven unless they obtain Chinese silk … As for other foodstuffs, beginning with candy, ginger, cinnamon, and so forth, and articles for use, beginning with silk, satin, chinaware, and so on, all the things that must be had by foreign countries are innumerable. On the other hand, articles coming from the outside to China can only be used as toys. We can take them or get along without them …

The goods from China carried away by your country not only supply your own consumption and use but also can be divided up and sold to other countries, producing a triple profit. Even if you do not sell opium, you still have this threefold profit. How can you bear to go further, selling products injurious to others in order to fulfill your insatiable desire?

From Lin Zexu, “Letter to the English Ruler” (1839), in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, comps. Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 through the Twentieth Century. 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 1I:202. Wm. de Bary was featured in the second issue of Guanxi; his Sources of Chinese Tradition is read by virtually all students of Chinese history and culture.

Adam Hodgkins of Exact Editions has a way with words, like so many of my British publishing friends–even those in science and technology, thankfully. (So much for the two cultures.) I asked if he could put an issue of Guanxi: The China Letter up using their magazine platform. He has done so, and made it utterly painless for us. But even better he’s helped me understand something about a PDF in this Exact Editions blog post about content serving. I was asked the other day if our PDF page files have “underlying ASCII” (or something like that). I love to appear technically knowledgeable but this kind of thing crops up endlessly; I answer without being 100% sure and hope for the best. Obviously, though, we not only have underlying ASCII but Chinese Unicode, too! Take a look, free access till the end of the year: “Olympics Countdown” issue and supplement of Guanxi: The China Letter.

I hadn’t noticed, till just now, the auspiciousness of the dates for the Olympics next year. I’ve mentioned before, in conjunction with buying a SIM card in China, the importance of numbers. While I am unsophisticated about this, I do know that eight is considered good luck. How then could I have missed the fact that China hosts the Olympics in 2008, and that they begin in August. In fact, the starting day and time could not be more auspicious: Ba yue ba hao ba dian ling ba fen, the 8th day of the 8th month of 2008, and the Games will begin at 8.08pm. Here’s more on the opening ceremony preparations.

Now this is hilarious: women expecting Olympic-year babies with Olympic mascots painted on their bellies. I love their smiles, and the English headline with its double entendre: “Growing support.”

I hear now and then about China’s “brand,” and finally found a moment to see how the country rates in the Country Brand Index, “a snapshot of the information that FutureBrand has collected from over 1,500 diverse frequent travelers from the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.” China is rated highly as a place to do business (No. 5), and also rates under Arts & Culture and History. Perhaps most important is that it is No. 1 under the category “Rising Stars.” But I was also pleased to see its high rating as a country where people would like to attend conferences.

I love the news alerts from China Daily and found this an especially useful item:

For the first time in its history, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has mentioned the word “religion” in an amendment to its Constitution adopted on Sunday at the closing session of the 17th CPC National Congress. . . .

It said the insertion has been made in light of the new circumstances and tasks.

The CPC is atheistic but allows freedom of religious beliefs. China is home to 100 million religious faithful, largely Buddhists, Taoists, Christians, Catholics and Islamites.

We’ve long planned to develop an issue about faith - a word we used because it seemed more neutral, and less Western, than religion. But if the CPC Constitution now refers to religion, perhaps that’s what we’ll use, too. We had the topic on our editorial list because it is a subject that a number of Chinese colleagues have urged us to explore and write about. Not because they are themselves believers, but because they see faith - or religion - as of considerable importance in China today and know that it is a subject that we can deal with effectively at Guanxi: The China Letter because we work hard to be fair and accurate and have, at Berkshire Publishing, developed many projects on world religions with many experts. The full article is here.