Category: China

The Character 着

I usually use the digital Wenlin dictionary because of its convenient look up features, speed, and high quality. Today an assignment I’m working on consists of reading reading a 1936 essay about Shanxi 山西 village life. (I often have to look up older terms in an 1930’s dictionary known as the “Mathews” dictionary. Wenlin is great to check first because looking up Chinese characters in Mathews is a major pain and the software provides the Mathew’s character code number) Just now I was trying to look up the perfectly normal word 着实/著實 and had to try looking this up under as many pronunciations for the first character that I could remember. While this may be common knowledge for everyone else who speaks some Chinese, found out that 着 is often an alternate of 著. In fact, the Wenlin software author, who usually gives very short and concise definitions (or includes the definition from the ABC Chinese dictionary that it has licensed) got unusually chatty in the description of the character, even using personal pronouns/anecdotes and telling the reader not to “get discouraged”:

Originally 着 was just a different way of writing the character 著. Now 著 is mostly written only for the pronunciation zhù, and 着 is written for the other pronunciations; but sometimes 著 is still used rather than 着 among full form characters, regardless of the pronunciation.
 着 seems to have more pronunciations and meanings than any other Chinese character. Don’t be discouraged. Even Chinese people can’t always get it straight, especially the distinction between 着 zháo and 着 zhuó. For example, a friend of mine says 着陆 as zháolù though the dictionaries say zhuólù. The dictionaries disagree on whether 着 in 不着边际 (‘not to the point’) should be zháo or zhuó. On the other hand, the distinction between 着 zhe and 着 zháo really is important.

曲线救国: Saving the Nation Through Twisted Means

One of the interesting catch phrases during the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 is Quxian jiuguo (曲线救国) or “Saving the nation through twisted means” (In his book The Shanghai Badlands Frederic Wakeman translates it as “Saving the nation in a devious way”, 126). This was the phenomenon of Nationalist military agents or soldiers entering into the collaborationist military or puppet government and secretly continuing to retain contact with Nationalist agents, give them information, or if no contact was maintained, to at least engage in anti-Communist suppression while they served in the puppet government and the occupying forces of the Japanese. Sometimes those who claimed to be doing 曲线救国 were not in fact connected to the Nationalists in any way before they surrendered to or joined the puppet institutions.

When the war was over and many of the puppet officials were tried in the treason (汉奸) trials after the war those with any considerable power would invariably claim that they were trying to save the nation indirectly through their anti-communist activities or by feeding the Nationalists information. We have some evidence to show this kind of contact between the agents of puppet regime of Wang Jingwei or the various puppet military units and the intelligence services of the Nationalists (Juntong) and its ruthless leader Dai Li, but some of those who made this claim (such as Chu Minyi 褚民谊) may have been executed quicker to prevent the embarrassing revelation of ongoing contact and peace negotiation efforts between the Nationalists and the puppet government from getting out. A lot of these claims are far from conclusively proven but serve as great conspiracy material.

I’m now reading 刘熙明’s book on the puppet military or 伪军 and he talks quite a bit about the phenomenon of 曲线救国 for those in the military. He argues that there was a Communist equivalent and says there is reason to believe that the CCP also occasionally tolerated the surrender of some of their units to the Japanese and their conversion into puppet troops as long as they continued to serve them indirectly. For these semi-traitors they used the term 白皮红心 or “white skin and red heart” (Fascist or reactionary on the outside but a Communist at heart). (102)

刘熙明 (Liu Ximing) also listed (103) a wonderful collection of some of the idioms that the Nationalist military and government allegedly used to indicate that surrender to the Japanese while shameful, was still better than to give up the fight against the Communists. Here are a few that he has dug up: 反共第一，抗战第二 First: The fight against Communism, Second: the war of resistance 宁亡与日，勿亡与共 Never lose to the Communists, lose rather to the Japanese 日可以不打，共不可不打 It is acceptable to not attack the Japanese, but unforgivable to not attack the Communists 变匪区为沦陷区 Turn a district plagued by [Communist] bandits into a [Japanese] occupied territory 宁可让给敌人，不可让给匪军 Never give up to the bandit [Communist] forces, it is better to give up to the [Japanese] enemy. 宁投日本人，不投八路军 Never surrender to the [Communist] 8th Army, surrender rather to the Japanese.

He doesn’t say if any of these were widespread, indeed it is possible that some of these are fabrications created by Communist propaganda. Though Liu Ximing is a scholar working out of Taiwan, at least some of his footnotes (104) for these lines are from mainland China sources (for example Shandong provincial party archives and Jiangsu Wenshi ziliao).

The Presence of Qian Jinbao

When I arrived at Harvard this fall, there was one PhD student in particular that I very much looked forward to meeting. I had found mention in various places of a student at Harvard who was studying Sino-Japanese wartime relations named Qian Jinbao who had previously worked at the Nanjing historical archives that many a Chinese history student will pay a visit to in search of materials. I had heard that he knew everything there was to know about the sources available for the study of the war and especially about research in Chinese archives.

I met him briefly after I arrived at a Reischauer Institute party and immediately drowned him in questions that revealed my complete ignorance and 1st year PhD student naiveté. He gave me lots of useful pointers on what materials I might find in the archives and in the Harvard-Yenching library related to the collaborator regimes of China and 漢奸 (traitors) of the Sino-Japanese war. I got his contact info and vowed to be better prepared for future meetings. I knew then that I would come to collect steep debts of gratitude to scholars like him who had years of familiarity with these materials and who had read incredibly deeply in areas that I had only scratched the surface of.

Jinbao Qian died of a heart attack only a few weeks after I met him. Harvard has a web page dedicated to him and held a memorial service in his honor. It is a tragic loss, not only for his family and friends but for the entire subfield of the history of the Sino-Japanese war.

Today I had the first reminder since his death of his continued “presence” here at Harvard and for me personally the presence of a mentor I wish I could have had for the rest of my life as a student and career as a historian.

This afternoon, I went to the library to check out an obscure book on Chinese political and military ranks, positions, and organizational charts from the Republican period (中華民國時期軍政職官誌) in order to gather some info on the “puppet” armies of occupied China. I was surprised to find that the library even had the multi-volume work. I had seen the book cited in an 1995 Academia Historica essay out of Taiwan by a Liu Feng-han who had written about the puppet forces. When I found the book, which had never been checked out, I opened it to find on the inside cover, “Gift of Qian Jinbao”

I suspect that this will not be the last time I come upon a tag like that, especially if this book represents the fate of Jinbao’s personal collection of Chinese history books after his death. It looks like I’ll still be racking up those debts to him after all. I only wish I could have got to know him.

千字文: The Thousand Character Classic

You know that “Thousand Character Classic” you see in books about Japanese history (that is where I have seen it most, I guess it comes up in Korean and Chinese history as well). It was used as a basic text to teach children how to write Chinese characters.

I finally looked it up today to see exactly what it looks like. Ouch! While there are many basic and frequently used characters (in our own contemporary times) I can’t say that many of these 1,000 characters would have made the cut for teaching elementary school…

You can buy your own wall chart version of the classic here. And in case you want to know how to pronounce those characters in the Hakka dialect visit this site (Big-5 Encoding).

Chinese Cursive Script and Serving the U.S. Armed Forces

I think I snapped up one of the last in-stock Amazon copies of the wonderful Chinese Cursive Script: An Introduction to Handwriting in Chinese by Fang-yü Wang. We are using it in my class on 20th Century Chinese History Research Methods. It is essentially a class to help history students deal with Chinese documents and sources.

This wonderful little primer covers only 300 Chinese characters but has already helped me decipher all sorts of handwritten scribbles that painfully remind me of how far I have to go in Chinese and the reading of primary documents from China, Japan, and older documents from Korea.

I was so happy to see that such a book on Chinese handwriting even existed for English-speaking students of the Chinese language. Even the preface notes that up until its publication, “Perhaps the demand has never been great enough to stir anyone to what seems at the outset a hopeless task.”

The book was published in 1958 by Far Eastern Publications, a publishing company which no longer exists (some of its books are now available through Yale University Press). 1958 was a turbulent year in the relations between the US and China, and a year of military crisis for cross-straits relations between the mainland and the Republic of China on Taiwan. China launched a massive military bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu beginning in August. Things had been hot in the region for years though since the “first” Taiwan crisis of 1954-5. This was a time when Eisenhower famously declared publicly that the US was considering the use of nuclear weapons against China, “as you would use a bullet.”

It thus wasn’t that surprising for me to find this in the Preface to Chinese Cursive Script:

The Institute of Far Eastern Languages had been serving the needs of the U.S. Armed Forces for some years before a request was received that we provide instruction in the reading of cursive script such that might be used in informal personal communications.

I think this is a nice reminder (dated November 1958, Institute of Far Eastern Languages, Yale University) of the ways in which academic departments were often in very close relationships with governments and their militaries. These relationships continue to exist today but seldom advertise themselves in quite the same manner.

The Character 的

Today during my Korean class, our instructor was introducing everyone to Korea’s use of Chinese characters, or 한자. It was a welcome respite since I usually don’t understand about half of what the instructor is saying. Chinese characters, on the other hand, I feel much more comfortable with. At one point in the discussion our instructor introduced us to the character for 적(的) which we first found use for in a vocabulary word for this week 인상(印象). When you put the two together you can say that something was impressive, or left an impression (as you can in Japanese and Chinese with this same word).

Our instructor then made the most remarkable claim, “This character was invented by the Koreans, and doesn’t exist in any other language.” That is an interesting thing to say about a character which is the most frequently used character in the Chinese language. In Japanese, it is also very often used, especially in the creation of adjectives.
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China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day

I’m going to post a few things about my recent trip to China. See also Sayaka’s recent postings on our trip. July 23rd, 2004: I’ll post this next time I have a net connection. I’m currently in Qingdao (pictures here), a coastal city in China’s Shandong province. Getting here was a thirty-four hour adventure that began in Takarazuka, Japan.
Continue reading China Trip 1: A 34 Hour Travel Day