Muninn

I watched the old movie “55 Days at Peking” starring the National Rifle Association’s dear leader Charlton Heston. The movie is an account the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900, but specifically of the valiant defense of the foreign legations by a divisive group of Great Power diplomats and soldiers from around June 20th, when a German minister was killed by Boxers, to August 14th, when Allied forces take control of the city.

The movie was full of blanket stereotypes, weird music (presumably to give it a Chinese feel) and western actors speaking in a mechanical tone of voice to help us believe they are the Empress Dowager and her followers. Nothing more or less than common for a movie of its time.

To its credit, the Westerners don’t come across completely untarnished. In the first few minutes we hear some disgruntled Chinese say, “Different nations say the same thing, ‘We want China.’” The audience is also asked to respect the Chinese as Charlton Heston reminds his US soldiers, “This is a highly cultured civilization so don’t get any idea that you are any better than these people just because they can’t speak English.” It doesn’t help though that the next scene has Heston trying to save a Western missionary from torture and execution at the hand of Boxer rebels (who for some reason all seem to wave banners saying “Beijing” 北京 and “the capital” 京都). When he tries to buy the life of the missionary, our hero explains that the greedy capitalist Chinese will sell anything at a price.

Our American hero, as is often the case in these movies (and in reality?), is an impatient, aloof, but thoroughly seasoned warrior who doesn’t have time for the subtleties of diplomacy (that is left to the British ambassador). He only knows bravery, duty, and action and he gets very angry at the British ambassador when told that killing the Empress Dowager might not be a good way to resolve the crisis. I could see his eyes totally flashing, “Dude! But she’s like, EVIL!” More below…
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I just started reading Lessig’s new book Free Culture, which is generously available for download under the Creative Commons license and I’m already loving it. On page 2 he quotes a Supreme Court ruling on traditional land rights including the sky above the land and how this conflicts with the new age of flight travel. Lessig focuses in on one quote from this and adds his own comment:

“Common sense revolts at the idea.” This is how the law usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but eventually, this is how it works.

When I saw this, I was immediately reminded of my moral theory courses as an undergraduate philosophy major, and I couldn’t help thinking that, at least for the field of ethics in analytic philosophy, the above statement needs little adjustment:

“Common sense revolts at the idea.” This is how ethics usually works. Not often this abruptly or impatiently, but at the heart of every logical argument, this is how it works.

In the case of a normative field like ethics, of course, it is the “when” and “who” absent in this formulation that gives rise to so much trouble.

You pick up the most circulated newspaper in Shanghai on August 15th, 1945, the day of Japan’s surrender. What do you see? Well, the news of the surrender hasn’t made it for the day’s issue. Instead, in the days leading up to the end of the war the newspaper focuses on the Russian advances in Manchuria, or the arrival of B29 bombers attacking Japanese targets in China. Of course, you still see the usual advertisements for CPC Coffee, and various brands of penicillin. But how will the newspaper change in the next few days as Japan’s control over Shanghai comes to an end? While this wasn’t a question related to my research, it was at the back of my mind as I skimmed through an important Shanghai newspaper called 申報 from the second half of the year 1945.

I have become a big fan of the 郭廷以 library next to the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica (中央研究院) See my English entry about it on my reference wiki for more information. Pretty much anyone can use the library without any membership or introductions, and its stacks are open for browsing. Their collection of history related materials is great and includes a lot of Japanese and English materials as well as Taiwanese and mainland China sources. On this trip to Taiwan I have started looking at early postwar newspapers to get a preliminary look at how Chinese traitors (collaborators, or 漢奸) are portrayed. For now, I’m concentrating on the period of 1945 to say 1948, by which time most of the trials of 漢奸 had finished up. I was only able to get a start on this project this time. Also, newspapers (and “traitors” in China) are only a first stop, but hey, I haven’t even started my PhD program yet.

I have to say though, the leaning over musty (ok, they aren’t musty, but try to get in the mood with me here) volumes of old newspaper collections has so far been a lot of fun. Today I took a little extra time to jot down some notes on things I found interesting in Shenbao issues just after the fall of Japan. Read on if you think advertisements for cosmetics, candy and movies from 1945 can actually be interesting.
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Sometimes Sayaka pats my head and in a patronizing voice says,「いい子いい子」Sometimes I pat her head and tell her she is an「いい子いい子」Today I tried to explain to her that what we essentially have going on here is an echo chamber (in which we each congratulate the other for being a “good little boy/girl”). She said, “No, we have an いい子 chamber.”

One thing I hope to think a lot about in graduate school (assuming I will still have time for personal thinking) is how academic work is published/distributed. As most of my friends know, I’m very interested in and active in the “open” source/access/content movement but I’m far from having sorted out all my thoughts on this when it comes to history and the academic world. The key word, and most troublesome issue is “peer review” or more broadly the academic world as meritocracy. There are lots of blogs talking about this already but the postings are all over the place. One particularly high concentration of stuff is being written on the Open Access News blog. For example see this entry on how the scientific journal Nature is thinking about open access publishing.

I love the smurfs. I always have. My sister and I were raised on Smurf songs and the cartoons. Never, never did I (and I doubt Carleen did either) turn the analytical eye on the holy smurfs. Others have, though. Now, after all these years, do I realize where my deep socialistic instincts find their source. I must overcome these urges towards an egalitarian society born of the propoganda of my youth and the seeming tranquility of Norwegian welfare society and embrace the invisible hand! 資本主義萬歲! :-)

My friend Duckling, over at Blackberry Picking has a fantastic idea about creating a history related blog targeting young adolescents, say 10 to 15 years old. I think this will make for a very unique and valuable project. She is nearing the close of her own graduate studies in history. In the fall I begin a half decade or more journey of a doctorate in history. I hope eventually I’ll be able to call myself a historian, and with even greater pride, a teacher. I must confess though that, at the end of the line, I have rather quaint images of myself as a writer of children’s stories, holed up in a Norwegian mountain cottage which is somehow miraculously connected to the internet.

I don’t know what Duckling’s motivations are, but I tend to agree with a line from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot, “It is through children that the soul is cured.” (p90 in my copy). Whenever I interact with children, I can almost feel the years of meaningless crap being scraped from an aging heart. It is the storyteller that inspires children. The only difference between them and us, as far as I’m concerned, is that we see this in them, but refuse to see it in ourselves. Whatever one’s stance on the relationship of history to literature, I think we can all agree that history is born of the storyteller’s craft. In my case, I fed a hunger for fantasy with reading and child’s play. The interactive element provided by a love for role-playing games was incredibly important as well. I think Duckling’s idea is an exciting one and I wish her luck in it and her other projects.

There has been a day of full protests here in Taipei. After lunch, Sayaka and I headed downtown to see what was going on. Chiang Kai-shek memorial hall and the surrounding area was pretty empty but a few thousand people were protesting in front of the KMT headquarters and the red presidential building. You can download all my pictures I took from today’s protests and last night’s victory rally near the DPP headquarters here (18 MB) but I’ll take them down eventually.



Opposition leaders Lian and Song are ready for a post-election war. After Chen Shuibian was elected for another term by a razor edge lead, opposition leaders Lian and Song declared the election invalid and their intention to sue for irregularities in the votes, etc. The votes are going to be recounted and the investigation into the assassination attempt on the 19th continues.



The protests on TV were getting out of hand with some rioting and violence around the country. What we saw was quite calm by comparison, with snack booths set up, songs being sung, and drinks and sandwiches being passed out to protesters. The government buildings were cordoned off by barbed wire and police lines on all sides, but individuals could pass through the 2/28 Memorial Park to get behind the police lines.



The riot police were friendly, that is, those who were still conscious. The police had been there since late last night when the protests started. They seemed to be rotating between those manning the lines and the dozens who were sleeping in their riot gear along the edge of the park or, if awake, enjoying a relaxed coffee in the park’s cafe. Some waved, one yelled in English, “Welcome to Taiwan” and I spoke a bit to one exhausted riot police officer surounded by the rest of his sleeping unit. No one seemed to be bothered by the fact we were wandering around in their carefully cordoned off area or that stray KMT protesters were wandering in from the park. I did hear however, that apparently this area was closed off more tightly later in the day as the protesters grew in number.

Later in the day TV showed more scenes of violence (a KMT truck tried to break through police lines somewhere) which my KMT friend assured me was rare (indeed we were puzzled at one TV shot of a man shaking the fence near where the above police line picture is - he could have just walked around if he wanted to get to the other side. The media was definitely looking for anything juicy) and there have been lots more photos released of Chen Shuibian’s exposed belly button, dazed face during his surgery, and various medical files all designed to put to an end questions about the assassination attempt.

Things are getting crazy here in Taiwan, much more so than yesterday (the election day). The opposition is out of control with anger and there are protests everywhere, some violence. Sayaka and I are going down town to see how things are in Taipei. This is sooo sad. I’ll be blogging here throughout the next few days and will update this entry today as I see things…

The Taiwan election is officially over and Chen Shuibian has won another term. I’ll be reading the various newspapers tomorrow at nearby coffee shops (which Taipei has an abundance of). The opposition KMT party has disputed the election, the suspicious facts surrounding the assassination attempt yesterday, hundreds of thousands of invalidated votes, etc. Whether or not foul play is proved regarding the assassination, or if some of the invalidated votes were done so unfairly, the dispute of the election is a blow to Taiwanese democracy and rings all too familiar. More on this at NYT and BBC in English. It would be very sad to see this get ugly in the next few days.