Asian Studies Commons^™

July Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

What Next for Sri Lanka's 2.5 Million Tamils? by Amantha Perera. Time. May 26, 2009.

and

How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example by Bobby Ghosh. Time, May 20, 2009.

Moving Beyond Conflict In Sri Lanka: The Economic Rights Dimension, Shareen Hertel

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Much of the literature on transitional justice underplays the role of economic rights in shoring up peace. The case of Sri Lanka demonstrates the urgency of addressing them. Until a month ago, Sri Lanka was the country with Asia’s longest running civil war. Since independence in 1947, the island nation has been wracked by conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority—a conflict that has eroded political stability and aggravated internal inequalities. The struggle was marked not only by inter-ethnic and religious tensions but also by a fight for control over land and resources.

The War Goes On - No Reconciliation At This Stage, Anja Mihr

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The victorious Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaska has been quite bold to pass a reconciliation note after he declared the thirty year war over. Can he be taken seriously?

Radical Politics In Hong Kong: Can Business Make A Difference?, James T. H. Tang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As Hong Kong in 2009 retained its title as the world’s freest economy for the fifteenth consecutive year, radicalism seemed to have gained wider support in local politics at a time of economic turbulence—even though a timetable for universal suffrage has been set.

Moving In The Open Daylight, Nicola Colbran

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The road ahead for Sri Lanka is certainly not easy. Although the government has declared that the LTTE ( Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) has been defeated, this “victory” has come at a high cost for civilian lives and democratic values. Decades of instability and violence have given rise to deep rooted and sustained human rights violations. Thousands of Sri Lankans have been displaced, killed or wounded, and are malnourished and traumatized after months of extended fighting between the two sides.

Justice After War: Sri Lanka And The Rights And Duties Of A Vanquisher, William Paul Simmons

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Human rights scholars, attorneys, and activists will deservedly focus on the human rights abuses committed by the Sri Lankan military as the decades - long civil war against the Tamil Tigers came to a crushing end this past spring. The military’s brutality, especially its failure to discriminate combatants from non-combatants, should be investigated by both domestic and transnational institutions. It remains to be seen whether such wanton disregard for civilian collateral damage will become the norm for regimes embroiled in civil wars and present yet another realpolitik threat to humanitarian law, or will Sri Lanka and other regimes face accountability …

Tehran Events And Tiananmen Analogies

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With so many references to Tiananmen showing up in the news, we wanted to take a quick break from our time away to recommend a couple of the best uses of 1989 analogies (if we weren’t on hiatus, we’d also look at some of the worst, and there have been some pretty bad ones). One powerful rumination on the relevance of China’s 1989 for thinking about Iran’s 2009 is by Andrew Leonard of the “How the World Works” blog at Salon.com:

He begins as follows:

“In the spring of 1989, the fax machine was China’s Twitter — the miracle technology …

June 4th Around The World: Notes From One Week After The Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A week (or so) after the anniversary of the “May 35th” events (as some Chinese netizens put it to circumvent automatic blocks on mention of a highly charged date), we got several more responses to our request to Friends of the Blog for word on how June 4th was commemorated, discussed, or ignored in various parts of the world. The most substantial (reproduced in full below) is a second contribution to the series (click herefor her first) by Paola Voci (an Italian-born, American-trained, New Zealand-based specialist in Chinese visual culture whose book, China on Video: Small Screen Realities, is due …

Berkshire Encyclopedia On New Media

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Berkshire Publishing has recently published its Encyclopedia of China with contributions by China scholars like Sherman Cochran, Kerry Brown, Judy Polumbaum and many others and featuring one thousand entries on a diverse range of historical, social and cultural topics.

A few of the entries caught our attention as a little unusual for a print encyclopedia—including entries on “internet use,” “online social networking,” and “blogging.” As these topics are of particular interest to us (and we’re guessing to many of you, too), we were curious how Berkshire would cover them in the encyclopedia format. Here are a few relevant excerpts (selected …

June 4 Around The World: California

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

We wrote to the peripatetic Pico Iyer, a Friend of the Blog, to see how June 4th was marked wherever he happened to be this year on the anniversary date. He sent us the following ruminations, in which he alludes to the mid-1980s when he first went to Beijing and first saw Lhasa, at a time when each, in ways he’s described elsewhere, was a very different place than it is now:

On the Fourth of June–the great annual feast-day at my old English school, the very opposite of its associations for modern Chinese–I was, as I so often am, …

Looking Backwards: From 1989 To Han Times And From 2008 To 1964

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There have been many efforts during the last month, on this site and elsewhere, to bring history into discussions of the twentieth anniversary of June 4th (particularly via allusions the May 4th Movement of 1919), just as a year ago there were many efforts to bring history into discussions of the Beijing Games (especially via allusions to the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and Seoul Olympics of 1988). But there’s still room for this Top Five list of historically minded pieces on 1989 or 2008 that have just appeared and stand out as especially worth checking out, due to either how …

June 4 Around The World: A Letter From Lima And A Hong Kong Perspective

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In this third offering in our series, we limit ourselves to one short post, from a Friend of the Blog who recently moved from Shanghai to Peru, and a brief description of and link to what one of China Beat’s longtime contributors, Angilee Shah, has been up to lately: a podcast series on “Global Lives,” the most recent of which offers a perspective on Tiananmen from the former Crown Colony turned PRC SAR. For additional reading on June 4 from a perspective that takes you into a different part of the world, check out this piece on France’s special connection …

Historical Bafflement Of The Chinese People

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

David Kelly, researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, translated the following opinion piece by overseas political commentator Liang Jing. He has published several previous pieces at China Digital Times, including, “Trigger for an Earthquake in Chinese Society” and “Where Does Wen Jiabao’s Faith Come From?”

One of the most significant cultural phenomena in Chinese society in recent years is the growing interest in history. Everyone—elite and general populace, leftists and rightists—shows an unprecedented enthusiasm for understanding China’s past. And in 2009 a series of major historical anniversaries, including the 90th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, have pushed China’s …

6/4 Around The World: The First Sequel

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In our second installment of the series (for part one click here), we return to Japan (via a follow-up post by James Farrer on coverage in Tokyo) and offer a view from Hanoi (where long-time Reuters China correspondent John Ruwitch is now based and sometimes writes on themes that link or divide the two countries).

John Ruwitch, Hanoi

Six-four didn’t make its way into the official Vietnamese media, of course, but reports about it on CNN, which is widely available in Hanoi, were not censored. When I told a Vietnamese friend I found that mildly surprising, given the somewhat similar …

A 6/4 Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Su Yang has never written anything for China Beat, but a few of us get to have lunch with him occasionally as he is a professor (of sociology) at UCI. TheOrange County Register profiled Su, discussing his experiences in 1989 and after.

2. Jeff Wasserstrom’s most recent piece at the Huffington Post points out some of the good coverage on China in recent weeks (and sketches some of what was missing or wrong).

3. Friend of the blog and former student leader Wang Chaohua has completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and is graduating this weekend. UCLA Today has a …

Notes From A Non-Anniversary, Jeremiah Jenne

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I woke up this morning and took a short walk to a big square. As expected, it was pretty calm in the kind of jittery, strained, composed way one usually associates with a dinner party where one of the hosts is having an extramarital affair with one of the guests. The square looked relatively normal but with a beefed-up security detail that included a ring of young slack-jawed crew cut types in tracksuits and matching gray badges worn on unmatching t-shirts. Reports of visitors being asked to produce passports, to weed out foreign journalists, appear to be overstated. I walked …

6/4 Around The World

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Last August, we called on contributors and friends of the blog around the world to send in short reports on how the Olympics were being covered and received in their neck of the woods. Recently, we sent out a similar call regarding today’s anniversary. Here are a few of the responses we’ve received so far, pulled together into a piece that we think would make for interesting reading beside the very different “around the world” survey that David Flumenbaum has done and will keep updated over at the Huffington Post. Included here are some comments by people who contributed to …

6/4/89: The Night Of No Moon

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This piece is excerpted from the manuscript of Philip J. Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham’s book. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

You didn’t have to be a fortune-teller to know Tiananmen was the target, but what were they going to hit it with and when? The long anticipated crackdown had been postponed so long, getting it over with might resolve the political impasse, but it wouldn’t bring justice, it wouldn’t buy back the mandate of heaven.

Being part of the teeming mass as the army approached, …

China’S Growing Cage: The Legacy Of Tiananmen, Zhang Lijia

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Whenever “1989” is mentioned, people in the West instantly think about the protesting students in Tiananmen Square. In fact, although it started in Beijing and was led by the students there, the democratic movement was a nationwide event, drawing together people from all walks of life.

Twenty years on, I remember vividly every detail of that day when I organized a demonstration among the workers from my Nanjing factory in support of the movement. It was Sunday, May 28, a week before the crackdown in Beijing.

The death of Hu Yaobang had triggered the spontaneous democratic movement. The popular former …

Another Anniversary

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In Taiwan, June 4 marks another anniversary, namely the 185th day of Chen Shuibian’s detention without having been convicted of a crime. Chen was first ordered to be held in custody on the night of November 11, 2008, with actual detention beginning on November 12. Taking into account the few days during which he was released in December, Chen’s incarceration has lasted almost 200 days now, with no end in sight. In principle, he can be held in detention indefinitely due to the fact that he has been charged with a felony, and because prosecutors have expressed concerns that Chen …

Tsingtao Beer: A Complex Brew, Robert Bickers

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

‘What are we to drink?’ asked a British doctor in Shanghai in 1867, reflecting on the precautions needed to maintain health in the sweltering city. His answer, asShanghai water was too filthy a solution, was simple: beer. For ‘7 or 8 months of the year’ he wrote, bitter was ‘as wholesome a drink as we could have’. Its medicinal properties were, I rather suspect, far from the minds of the inhabitants of the new military garrisons established in north China after the late 1890s ‘scramble for concessions’, and the Boxer rising and war. They wanted the relief only a cool …

It’S So French, Paul French

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Five foreign correspondents of the past I never tired of reading while doing my research for this book:

1) JOP Bland – the man who (about 1906) complained there were too many books on China being written and then promptly wrote about half a dozen himself (can’t not feel a kindred spirit there).

2) BL Putnam Weale – who decided mocking the pompous was not enough and dedicated his life to getting involved in one warlord intrigue after another until he got himself butchered and assassinated in Tianjin in some dodgy deal.

3) Aleko Lilius – who came to China …

Do I Still Love China?, Xujun Eberlein

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

In Sunday’s New York Times, Ha Jin reflected on his decision to remain in the West after graduate school and to write primarily in English:

That was when I started to think about staying in America and writing exclusively in English, even if China was my only subject, even if Chinese was my native tongue. It took me almost a year to decide to follow the road of Conrad and Nabokov and write in a language that was not my own. I knew I might fail. I was also aware that I was forgoing an opportunity: the Chinese language had …

6/4 Reader

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A set of links to readings about 6/4 from various sources:

1. A short and straightforward documentary from Al Jazeera (in English), posted at YouTube in two parts: Part I and Part II. This documentary has notably less emphasis on the influence of Western-style democracy than the average (Western) doc on the subject, and more on the opposition to authoritarianism…

2. Mara Hvistendahl has written a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education on a well-trod topic—the shifts in China post-89, particularly among those of the 6/4 generation. Yet, Hvistendahl, in addition to getting the basics right (unlike others we …

Shanghai Girls

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

A few months ago, we ran an interview with Lisa See about her new novel,Shanghai Girls. The book was released last week and See is in the middle of a series of talks and readings, including one that China Beat is co-sponsoring on June 6 in Corona del Mar.

For those interested in learning more aboutShanghai Girls or Lisa See, you can check out this link to a few of her favorite books, anearly review of the novel, and an autobiographical piece in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times.

See talks frequently about the historical research that undergirds her novels. Here …

Do We Have A Winner? What The China-India Paradox May Reveal About Regime Type And Human Security, Devin K. Joshi

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

As the concept of human security spreads in the pose-Cold War period it is often presumed chat non-democracies have worse human security than democracies. But the national human security (NHS) siruation in weak or failed democracies can be even worse than in some non-democracies. So how exactly do the NHS records of stares with different regime types like non-democratic China and democratic India compare? To address this question the paper assesses and compares NH S in terms of "freedom from want" (anti-poverty security) and "freedom from fear" (anti-violence securiry). Ir develops a theory of how different regime types might impact …

Geithner In Beijing–What To Read (Or Perhaps Re-Read)

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

With press reports circulating about Timothy Geithner’s plan to speak at Peking University/Beida tomorrow, this might be the perfect time to dip into China in 2008: A Year of Great Significance and read Geremie Barmé’s “Facing Up to Friendship” (pages 212-214), a smart look at the talk Kevin Rudd gave at the same campus on April 9, 2008. (If you don’t have the book, check out the earlier and slightly shorter version of it that appeared in the April 12, 2009, edition of theSydney Morning Herald, under the title “Rudd Rewrites the Rules of Engagement.”)

For two typically smart wrap-ups …

5/28/09: Chai Ling’S Last Will And Testament, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

This piece is excerpted from the manuscript of Philip J. Cunningham’s forthcoming book, Tiananmen Moon, part of an on-going China Beat feature of excerpts from Cunningham’s book, and describes the set-up for one of the most famous interviews of the final days of the student movement. Interested readers can see more at Cunningham’s website.

A petite sun-bronzed woman wearing a stained white tennis shirt and dusty beige trousers sits next to me in the back of the taxi, grimacing as if in pain, weeping quietly to herself. Named to the police blacklist, she says she fears imminent arrest. Up front …

In Search Of Old Shanghai (Buildings)

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Earlier this week, the Washington Postpublished a fascinating article by Maureen Fan, paired with a very effective video that the same reporter narrates (hat tip to Shanghaiist for bringing both to my attention), that combines architectural and family history. This is because the grandfather of the Post‘s Beijing bureau chief was Robert Fan, a leading local architect who designed, among many other buildings, the one pictured here.

I won’t try to summarize her piece, which is part memoir and part analysis of the fate of buildings her grandfather designed (some of which are shown in the accompanying video), as it …

5/26/89: An Audience With An Audience, Philip J. Cunningham

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On May 26 I got another glimpse of student command central, when Chai Ling was at the height of her power. She was holding court in the broadcast tent, the ideological hothouse of student-occupied Tiananmen Square. It wasn’t easy getting in. I had to pass three rings of student security to secure an “audience.”

The BBC had yet to give me any kind of ID, so I learned to talk my way into things. My only “press” pass was my wit, which worked okay because I liked to talk and could do so in Chinese. There were times when the …