In Australia it is available only on YouTube, with sometimes hilarious computer-generated subtitles. As long as viewers bear in mind that “the cavalry in the birch wood” means “Captain Ma in the town of Hualin” the story will carry them effortlessly along from its gentle beginning to its bitter-sweet ending.

The Long Season is based on an even bleaker novel, Yu Xiaoqian’s The Cutting Edge of Winter. The story centres on an elderly man’s dogged search for whoever killed his son nearly twenty years earlier. The cold case investigation, with its post-industrial social criticism and #MeToo edge, mixes grim subject matter with moments of levity and ends with a message of hope. Imagine the cast of the BBC’s New Tricks in a Ken Loach movie and you’ll get the picture.

The setting is a rustbelt town in northeast China called Hualin, hometown to our ageing hero, Wang Xiang (Fan Wei), and the site of an ailing steel factory. The series is filmed in split time, the events of 1997–98 shown in flashback from 2016. Wang, once a “model worker” who drove a freight train for the factory, is now a taxi driver. His college-educated brother-in-law, Gong Biao (Qin Hao), used to work in the factory’s office; he drives a taxi too. When a chance event involving Gong’s taxi leads Wang to suspect that his son’s killer has resurfaced, the two men join forces with retired cop Captain Ma (Chen Minghao), who investigated the original case.

Much of the series’ popularity rests on the relationship between these three characters. Their dealings with each other range from bumbling strategising to resigned philosophising. Variously single, widowed and on the edge of divorce, they are in the process of coming to terms with the lives they’ve had. Their pursuit of the case, and its link with Gong’s taxi, seems at one level like a dramatic realisation of this process.

They all struggle to maintain control over their lives. Wang has prostate problems. Gong is diabetic. Health problems among people in the town and the cost of treating them make up a minor but persistent refrain. Director Xin Shuang’s father was dying while he was making the series. His close observation of the challenges of old age and the cost of hospital care may have informed his treatment of these topics.

Juxtaposed with the character-driven treatment of the three men — middle-aged in 1997, getting old in 2016 — is a plot-driven story about the younger generation. Wang’s son Yang (Yitie Liu) is a budding poet. The girl he loves, Shen Mo (Teresa Li), is a medical student with a troubled background who plays piano in a nightclub to support herself. Shen’s deaf-mute brother and his business partner run a home-made cinema showing videos on a clapped-out television. Their lives interact, often violently, with those of other young people adrift in the ruins of socialism.

Confronted with the fraying of the social fabric, the parents cling desperately to the known world of lifetime employment in a factory where workers were the masters. In one of many references to that disappearing world, episode six has Yang’s mother, Meisu, reflecting on how different life was for them.

“Our generation was used to being organised,” she says. “At home, there were lots of children, and we obeyed our parents in everything. In the collective when we grew up, we had to listen to our leaders. We’ve always felt that there’s a circle surrounding us. All our lives we just walked in that circle and no one stepped outside of it for any reason, not even to put a foot on a coin.”

By 2016, the lives of the young people have either come to an end or come to nothing. With its focus on older men struggling on in a landscape significantly devoid of women and children, the series forces reflection on what the society has done to itself.

Out of this Pandora’s box hope wings its way in episode twelve. There is justice — the corrupt manager of the steel factory gets his comeuppance — and there is a woman, a former factory worker, who offers Wang the possibility of someone with whom to “pass the days.” In a remarkable scene performed by the accomplished Fan Wei, Wang talks to her indirectly about that possibility, glancing at her occasionally in the rear mirror of the taxi he is driving.

There is also a child: Wang’s younger son, born in 1997, his origins unexplained until the very end of the series. And there is a future that lies in (where else?) Beijing, China’s centre of wealth, culture and politics, as Wang more than once states. The long-dead elder son never got there but the younger son will.

Reviewing the series for Foreign Policy, James Palmer asks “how did this brilliant Chinese rust belt noir get made under Xi?” The answer surely lies in its redemptive conclusion. At the end of the final episode the camera returns viewers to the cornfields that greeted them at the beginning of the series. The narrow-gauge railway along which the factory train once ran is still there. Wang stands by the track with a beatific visage as the train once more chuffs into view, his younger self at the controls. “Look forward,” old Wang calls to him. “Don’t look back!”

The media in the People’s Republic of China has tried to make this the central message of the series. For the Global Times, The Long Season “meets Chinese people’s demand for quality productions that deliver positive messages, such as the theme of the show: ‘Move on, don’t look back.’”

Yet the ending doesn’t feel quite right. With its series of betrayals, the story’s logic points to an alternative conclusion, the one Yu Xiaoqian wrote for the novel. There, readers discover that decades earlier, on the very day he was to be nominated a model worker, Wang witnessed the sexual abuse of a minor. Like a time-delayed bomb, his failure to report the crime precipitated the series of events that led to his son’s death. The novel ends not with him smiling in the cornfields but being forced to jump to his death.

Viewers can be grateful to the scriptwriters for leaving them with a gentler final scene. But the benign ending suggests, if not the hand of the censor then at least a process of self-censorship.

The fact that Yu Xiaoqian himself was one of the scriptwriters brings to mind the fate of Lao She’s 1939 novel Rickshaw Boy. In 1945 this profoundly pessimistic story about the failure of Republican-era Beijing to meet the modest aspirations of a rural migrant was issued in English translation with the unauthorised addition of two extra chapters and a happy ending.

Lao She was disheartened by the bowdlerisation of his work in the United States, but worse came when the Chinese-language original was savagely redacted during the revolutionary upsurge under Mao in the 1950s. The 1955 edition omitted one and a half chapters of the original, all sexual references, and some other incidental material. Lao She approved these alterations and apologised for the novel’s lack of optimism.

Optimism — “joyful socialism,” as it has been termed — is a hallmark of Chinese communism. On the small screen it is better expressed by China’s top-rating series in 2022, Daughter of the Mountains, the dramatisation of the true story of Huang Wenxiu, a village girl who makes it all the way to university in Beijing before returning home to participate in programs of poverty alleviation.

Unlike in The Long Season, where the Communist Party is hardly evident, in Daughter of the Mountains it is front and centre. Huang is a party member who rises to the position of local party secretary. She meets her death tragically in a car crash on a mountain road, one of the many slated for repairs under infrastructural plans for the region. But this is by no means a devastating finale, for Huang leaves a legacy of hope for a better future. In real life, her father paid tribute to the Communist Party for all the opportunities it had offered his daughter.

That two such very different series should have received equally high ratings in China says much about the divided self that China is today. •

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Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.

If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

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The DPP’s main opponent is the Kuomintang, or KMT, a party with roots deep in pre-revolutionary China and members that are far more inclined than their DPP counterparts to claim Chinese heritage. The KMT’s presidential candidate, New Taipei mayor Hou Yu-ih, is a centrist pragmatist from a local Taiwanese family, but both his running mate and the first-placed candidate on the party’s list are “deep blue” — strongly pro-Chinese figures from families that fled to Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949. Intra-party tensions reflecting these different views could complicate legislative processes after the election.

The third party fielding a presidential candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party, is predicted to retain its present strength in the legislature. It has feistily courted younger voters during the campaign.

On current predictions the next president of the legislature will be the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, whose position on the party ticket assures him of a win despite his having made history in 2020 as the only mayor ever recalled from office by popular petition.

Outside Taiwan, the election is attracting interest more for its international than its domestic repercussions. The war in Ukraine alerted the world to the possibility of a matching war on the opposite side of Eurasia. The dramatic increase in incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace over the past two to three years resonates with the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the months ahead of its February 2022 invasion. From London to Tokyo, commentators have been speculating on the potential for a bellicose response to the election in Beijing.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of war has been a theme in the election campaign. KMT posters show Hou Yu-ih declaring “Peace on each shore; we don’t want war.” The fact that all candidates agree with this sentiment doesn’t stop it being invoked as a point of difference between the DPP on the one hand and the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party on the other. A widely read article by influential American commentators advocating greater restraint in Washington’s approach to Taiwan has been weaponised by the opposition parties to attack the DPP for a China policy they portray as flirting with war. China’s defence ministry has weighed in, criticising the DPP for “deliberately hyping up the so-called ‘military threat from the mainland’” for electoral purposes.

In fact, says the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, “In the eyes of Beijing, the three of us [running for president] are all supporters of Taiwan’s independence.” In this sense, Taiwan seems to have passed a point of no return in its journey towards resolving its political status. China’s claim to Taiwan is grounded largely in the historical struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, a struggle that culminated in the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and its reconstitution there of the shattered government of the Republic of China. The government in Taipei has now long since ceased to be a government-in-exile, waiting for the Communist Party of China to collapse.

People in Taiwan have also stopped thinking of themselves as Chinese. Mostly, they don’t know very much about China. Research by Chinese social scientists suggests that the more they know the less they like it. Taiwanese businesses are withdrawing from China, taking their money and nous elsewhere.

All this has had a profound effect on electoral politics in Taiwan, where there is next to no interest in becoming part of the People’s Republic of China and no advantage for politicians in pro-China policies. At best, critics of the DPP can claim they will manage relations with China better than has Tsai Ing-wen, who has presided over extremely frosty cross-strait relations.

But when Hou Yu-ih’s “deep blue” running mate Jaw Shau-kong declared himself and Hou at one in their rejection of Beijing’s “one China, two systems” policy, the legacy of Tsai Ing-wen was apparent. “Regarding the ‘one country, two systems,’” said Tsai, ahead of the 2020 election, “our answer is: that is not possible.” Tsai won that election in a landslide. Now, all three current presidential candidates have put defence as their top priority.

Neither US restraint nor Taiwanese domestic politics necessarily have much bearing on the prospects of war or peace in the Taiwan Strait. If the Kuomintang were to be victorious in the presidential election, Beijing would be gratified but might not greatly alter its present course. On the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December, and again five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping declared yet again what he has often stated before, that the reunification of Taiwan with China is a historical necessity.

On this point Xi is in no danger of outraging China’s netizens, who naturally share his conviction that Taiwan belongs to China. A majority, though not an overwhelming one, supports “recovery” of the island by force. Xi has reassured Taiwanese that “Chinese people will not strike Chinese people” but left himself with a way out: “if [Taiwanese] don’t want to be Chinese, we just can’t look on and do nothing.”

Voters in Taiwan display a remarkable insouciance in face of such threats. While jets scramble overhead they go about their daily lives with barely an upward glance. They are nonetheless alert to the need for skilful management of Taiwan’s international relations. If the DPP retains the presidency despite the electorate’s favouring a rotation of power, it will be partly because Tsai Ing-wen’s assertion of the sovereignty of Taiwan and its separateness from China satisfies the views that most Taiwanese hold of themselves and their country.

Opinion polls also suggest that voters have confidence that Lai Ching-te, at heart a strong supporter of independence, will adhere to the status quo in cross-strait relations. And they have a high opinion of Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, who performed spectacularly well as Taiwan representative in Washington during 2020–23. With Lai focusing on domestic issues on the campaign trail and Hsiao responding on international issues, the electorate has been presented with an image of complementarity and compatibility that distinguishes the DPP’s candidates from their rivals.

Yet, in the final analysis, maintaining the status quo in Taiwan — by far the preferred option among Taiwanese voters — is likely to depend more on Xi Jinping than on the election. Xi’s dream of national rejuvenation, articulated at the beginning of his time in power, has a territorial aspect that is manifest in tensions on many of China’s borders. The conflict over Taiwan is significant partly because China’s entire diplomatic relations framework is premised on the accommodation of the politically powerful claim of “one China.”

War games conducted in the South China Sea by China and by a US–Philippines alliance just a week ahead of the Taiwan election are a reminder, however, that Taiwan forms part of the “First Island Chain,” which includes islands of Japan in the north and of the Philippines in the south. Control of the chain would give China a commanding position in the Pacific. More than Taiwan is at stake in any change in the status quo.

There are many reasons why Xi might hesitate to start a war in the Taiwan Strait. These include the dispiriting example of Russia in the Ukraine; the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of combat experience, flawed missiles and corrupt generals; the potential loss through wartime casualties of tens of thousands of “only children,” the products of China’s former one-child policy; and the parlous state of the Chinese economy in combination with the impact of the inevitable trade sanctions.

Weighed against Xi’s personal ambitions, however, all these might count for nought. Last year, Xi turned seventy. In Chinese lore, this is the age for “pursuing the heart’s desire,” but by anyone’s calculation the window of opportunity for doing so is shrinking. He has time to play with: his father lived till eighty-nine and his mother is still alive. But Mao Zedong, born an auspicious sixty years before him, died at eighty-two. Xi will want to achieve his heart’s desire before he reaches a comparable age.

A shrinking population, a slowing economy, and an underperforming global infrastructure project — the Belt and Road Initiative — mean that much on which Xi has staked his prestige is beginning to slip away. It is not impossible that he will see the election in Taiwan as offering an opportunity to respond to the call of history, reunify the nation, and establish an enduring legacy for himself. •

The post The call of history appeared first on Inside Story.

In an election noted for the number of male candidates promising to take on a female running mate, Hsiao was not the first woman to make an appearance. In September, independent presidential candidate Terry Gou, billionaire founder of Foxconn, made headlines with his choice of running mate: actress and motivational speaker Tammy Lai, familiar to Taiwanese Netflix subscibers as the fictional presidential candidate in the series Wave Makers. Gou has withdrawn from the race but Terry and Tammy posters can still be seen on buses all over Taipei.

In contrast to Tammy Lai, Hsiao Bi-khim’s political experience is firmly grounded in Taiwanese party politics. She first came to prominence in 1999, when at the age of twenty-seven she was invited to serve as international affairs director for the DPP. Appearing on television for the first of many such interviews, she explained who she was: born in Japan in 1971 to a Taiwanese father and American mother, educated in the United States, Taiwanese in her heart. In transliterating her personal name into English, she uses the Taiwanese pronunciation, Bi-khim, not the Mandarin.

Her career unfolded within the occasionally uncomfortable embrace of the DDP. She grew up under martial law in Taiwan, before multi-party elections were a possibility, and left for the United States in 1986, the very year the DPP was founded. By the time she returned as an adult, Taiwan was in transition to democracy and the DPP was beginning to challenge the ascendancy of the ruling Kuomintang, or KMT.

Hsiao was working for DPP leader Chen Shui-bian in 2000 when he inflicted on the KMT its first crushing defeat in a general election. She surrendered her American citizenship that same year in order to qualify for public office. The following year, aged thirty, she was herself elected to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. She has now spent close to quarter of a century working in political or para-political roles in or for Taiwan.

This second homecoming comes at a crucial time in the political cycle. The 2024 election is less than two months away. President Tsai Ing-wen, who brought the DPP back to power in 2016, has completed two terms of office and by the terms of the constitution is ineligible to stand again. Next May she will hand over to whoever wins the 13 January election. The DPP will be hoping that it is Lai Ching-te, and so far opinion polls have him in the lead.

Although the lead is steady, it is slim, and popular sentiment favours a change of government. If Taiwan had a two-party preferred system of voting, Lai would be staring at defeat. Last week that possibility seemed closer to realisation when the dynamic new Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, signed an agreement with the KMT to run a unity ticket. In the lead-up to the agreement, support for Lai dropped to well below the 35 per cent “safety bar.” This marriage of convenience quickly collapsed, but with Lai’s approval ratings so low, even a victory in the presidential election would mean political chaos if a correspondingly low number of DPP legislators were to be returned.

Under these circumstances, Hsiao Bi-khim’s appearance at Lai’s side on Monday could not have been better timed. For the preceding five days, the media had been in a frenzy first over the deal between the KMT and the TPP and then over its spectacular collapse. For longer still, the potential deal and its brokers had dominated the local political news. The DPP’s loss of visibility over this period contributed to its decline in opinion polls. With the deal in shambles, the sight of the high-achieving and well-regarded Hsiao standing alongside the current vice-president should have been reassuring to more than simply DPP supporters. That has yet to show in the polls.

Disaffection with the DPP government in the electorate is attributable to Taiwan’s economic slowdown. Projected growth this year is the lowest in eight years — since Tsai Ing-wen took office, that is. Outside an enviable high-tech industry, manufacturing on the island is disappearing. Salaries are stagnant and prices are rising. The workforce is ageing. Youth unemployment is high and job security low. A young male “precariat” is flocking to alternative parties.

Adding to the malaise are sanctions by China, including bans on tourism to the island and imports of Taiwanese produce, which are slated home by critics government to the deterioration of relations with China under Tsai Ing-wen. Markets responded positively to news of the opposition unity ticket — while it persisted — last week.

If the economy were booming, other things would matter less. As it is, opposition parties have found plenty of other targets for attack: the government’s handling of Covid; corruption on the part of legislators; incidents of sexual harassment and their cover-up (not limited to the DPP but particularly damaging to it as the party in office); food safety; energy security; sleeping with the enemy; and even the shelf life of eggs.

Hsiao, who is close to the current president as well as the wannabe future one, can’t avoid being associated with the DPP’s failures, such as they are. But she has a strong record as a legislator and political campaigner, and strong ties to the south and east, important factors in a country where the capital and much of the population are in the north. She grew up in Tainan, where her father served as pastor in the Presbyterian church. Between 2012 and 2020 she was the DPP representative in Hualien, on the east coast, once a “deep blue” KMT stronghold. Hsiao is credited with weakening the KMT’s grip there in 2012 and breaking it in 2016, when she won the seat.

In the Chinese press she stands accused of serving American rather than Taiwanese interests: the expression “running dog of the Americans,” so often used in Mao’s time, has been used of her. But in a country with a favourable view of the United States, her native-level English, American heritage and strong performance as Taiwan’s representative in Washington all count in her favour. Her commitment to Taiwan is unassailable. She speaks Taiwanese as well as English and Mandarin.

True to her Presbyterian upbringing (Presbyterian being synonymous with progressivism in Taiwan), she stands for progressive politics. Taiwanese society is socially conservative and in a referendum in 2018 a majority voted against marriage reform. When the legislature nonetheless passed the reform bill, Hsiao didn’t brush over the contradiction but pointed to the responsibility of a government to all its citizens. “We need to take responsibility for the referendum last year,” she declared, “and we need to take responsibility for people who have suffered from incomplete laws or faced discrimination.”

If she is more progressive than the majority of her compatriots on social issues, Hsiao is at one with them on the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. A majority of people in Taiwan now identify as Taiwanese rather than as hybrid Chinese–Taiwanese and hostility to China is deep-seated among DPP supporters.

It follows that China regards the DPP in general as anathema. As de facto ambassador in the United States, Hsiao was subject to vitriolic attacks in the Chinese media. News of her pending appointment as presidential running mate was criticised as portending a phenomenon of “independence on top of independence” in Taiwanese politics. Ever responsive to signals from China, the KMT called the announcement a recipe for disaster, bringing “troubles at home, perils abroad.”

It is difficult to tell how greatly China features as a factor in the minds of electors. Taiwanese have virtually no appetite for unification under the Chinese Communist Party but they have lived for a long time with the threat of forced unification hanging over their heads. It is impossible not to be struck by a certain sangfroid in the attitudes of people on the street. As they will point out, they have no means of preventing a war. While they wait for the threat either to eventuate or to evaporate, they want to be able to buy fresh eggs, see a doctor when they need to, and house their families if they have them. The birth rate in Taiwan has itself become a political issue, with rival candidates offering rival policies to get women to have more babies (KMT) or get more women to have babies (TPP).

The dangers of provocation posed by the DPP’s leaning towards independence nonetheless make cross-strait relations an obvious issue for opposition parties. Accordingly, KMT campaign posters are running the slogan “We don’t want war; peace on two shores.” Both the KMT and the TPP have promised to resurrect the Cross Straits Services Agreement in the interests both of boosting the economy and easing political tensions. This very agreement inspired a massive protest in 2014 and helped to bring down the KMT government in 2016. During the 2014 student occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Hsiao Bi-khim was one of the legislators who supported the protestors by keeping watch at the premises. But times have changed since then, as everyone knows. One of the leaders of the 2014 protest is now himself running for the TPP.

Hsiao won’t be able to avoid talking about cross-strait relations in the lead-up up to the election. At an international media conference on Thursday she had to field a barrage of questions on exactly this issue. Contrary to statements from China, however, she is not one of the independence diehards of the DPP. To the extent that Lai is regarded as leaning just a bit too far in that direction, Hsiao may help give balance to his campaign and claw back some middle ground. This would be true to her established image as a “cat warrior” who — in contrast to China’s “wolf diplomacy” — treads a delicate line between self-determination and confrontation.

Election campaigns in Taiwan are restricted by law to a period of twenty-eight days counting backwards from the eve of the election day. The pre-campaign has been rumbling on for most of this year, pending the formal registration of candidates on or before Friday 24 November. Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim registered on Tuesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week it still seemed possible that the KMT and TPP would patch things up, but the chance was faint. TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je had said publicly that he hates three things: “mosquitoes, cockroaches, and the KMT.” Granted that he was in a bad temper, it was a difficult statement to unsay. A poll taken in the middle of the week showed, moreover, that the gap between the DPP and KMT had narrowed to less than one percentage point, reducing the KMT’s incentive to seek an alliance.

On Friday morning, all speculation ended when separate TPP and KMT tickets were announced.  Ko Wen-je would team with TPP legislator Wu Hsin-yeh — a woman, as he had promised. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih had also said he provisionally favoured a woman as running mate, but in the end he came up with senior party figure, Jaw Shaw-kong. If the mid-week poll is right, the contest will boil down, again, to a two-party race between the DPP’s Lai-Hsiao team and the KMT’s Hou-Jaw.

Seventy-two years old, the son of a KMT soldier and an advocate of unification, Jaw could hardly provide a starker contrast to Hsiao Bi-khim. More clearly than the presidential candidates themselves, the two symbolise the different choices facing the electorate in January. •

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Billionaire Foxconn founder and independent presidential candidate Terry Gou quickly came out in support of Ma, criticising the country’s leaders for their position on national identity. Ko Wen-je, presidential candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, demurred, arguing that National Day should be above party politics; but on the day itself he left the ceremony early to attend a demonstration.

In a country that has yet to declare its own independence — a country, moreover, claimed by another country — a “national day” is inherently problematic. Taiwan’s National Day is the anniversary of the 1911 uprising that led to the founding of the Republic of China, or ROC, the following year, at a time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. After the People’s Republic was created by the Communist Party in 1949, the ROC survived in rump form in Taiwan. The island itself, governed by the Kuomintang under martial law until 1987, was technically nothing more than a province.

All this was a long time ago. The participants in the original conflict are mostly dead; martial law has given way to multi-party democracy. With every new generation, Taiwan’s connection to the Chinese past has become increasingly attenuated and “Republic of China” less meaningful to them as a name for their country. Identification with the People’s Republic is much weaker again.

Around two-thirds of people in Taiwan now think of themselves as Taiwanese without qualification — in other words, they don’t even describe themselves as Taiwanese-Chinese. Judging by the level of electoral support for President Tsai Ing-wen’s independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party, they would have opted by now for independence if it were not for fears of triggering war with China.

In these circumstances, the question “Whose National Day is it, after all?” has become progressively sharper. At Taipei’s monumental East Gate, not far from the site of the annual ceremony, the tensions underpinning the day are openly expressed each year. Separated by a thin blue line of police, a unification-with-China group and an independence-for-Taiwan group hurl abuse at each other in what has become a National Day ritual.

Under President Tsai, in office since 2016, the response to this question has been to allow greater leeway for expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, which in turn has reduced the visibility of the name “Republic of China.” Passport covers have been one scene of action. Within a few months of Tsai’s election, increasing numbers of Taiwanese travellers were covering up the words “Republic of China” on passport covers with a sticker carrying the inflammatory words “Republic of Taiwan.” The current passport design, issued early in Tsai’s second term, altogether omits the English words Republic of China from the cover.

Another site for subversion of the island’s ROC status is the National Day logo. This is generally designed around the Double Tenth symbol “++” (the Chinese character for ten, repeated), which evokes the date of the 1911 uprising, 10 October. Since 2017, this symbol has by degrees become more abstract and the accompanying references to the Republic of China less clear, if they’re retained at all. “Better Taiwan,” “Taiwan Together” and “Taiwan Forward” are among the slogans used in logos issued during Tsai’s first term of office.

Since 2020 the designs have become more assertive again. The Kuomintang criticised the 2021 logo because it carried no mention of the Republic of China. The logo for 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, for the first time carried no reference to the Double Tenth. It instead featured a stylised sun — its blue and yellow rays read by some as a salute to Ukraine — accompanied by the words “Protect the Land, Guard the Country.”

The Double Tenth sign was resurrected for this year’s design. But the slogan of “democratic Taiwan,” resonating with the name of the Democratic Progressive Party, was provocative. In combination with the absence of any reference to the ROC, it was enough to prompt the Kuomintang’s boycott of the last National Day ceremony to be presided over by Tsai Ing-wen. In May next year, Tsai will hand over to whoever wins the presidential election in January.

The trend towards erasing references to the ROC can of course be reversed if the Kuomintang is returned to office, but at present that seems unlikely. The Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te, has been leading the polls since the race began. As long as none of his opponents join forces, Taiwan’s first-past-the-post voting system means he is likely to succeed Tsai Ing-wen next year.

Lai’s forward position on independence for Taiwan is well known but as vice-president and now presidential candidate he has had to juggle the fact of Taiwanese self-determination with the realities of cross-strait relations. In a recent interview he summed up the complexities of talking about a country that not everyone agrees is even a country in saying: “Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country called the Republic of China.”

And there’s the rub. As “Republic of China” under Kuomintang rule, Taiwan was a recognised enemy of the People’s Republic during the Mao Years, 1949–76. The 1992 consensus — entailing both sides recognising the core principle of “One China” — ushered in a period of neutrality. Hostility was replaced by pragmatism, trade and migration between the two places. As the Republic of China, Taiwan remained formally “Chinese” and paradoxically compliant with the One China principle.

Had the Chinese Communist Party been prepared at any stage to put One China ahead of One Party, Taiwan might have joined with China to form a reconfigured republic — neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party version, but something attuned to the briefly hopeful, democratising world of the late twentieth century.

This chance appears to have evaporated, and the very term “Republic of China” is again becoming anathema in China. In Hong Kong this year, commemoration of the Double Tenth was prohibited because of its association with Taiwan independence. Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, born and raised in Hong Kong, recalls that in his boyhood the largest number of Chinese flags displayed there each October were the Republic of China’s, in commemoration of the Double Tenth. This year, Hong Kong was a sea of mainland China’s “five-star red flags” — 70,000 of them, around sixty-three per square kilometre.

It was the prospect of a sea of five-star red flags on Taiwanese soil that brought voters out to return Tsai Ing-wen to office in 2020. In her final National Day address on Tuesday, Tsai mentioned Taiwan over fifty times and the Republic of China just seven. Occasionally the two terms were coupled, most notably in her reference to national defence and the “resolve to defend the Republic of China (Taiwan).”

Needless to say, this is a rather different ROC from the one that China’s leaders have imagined might voluntarily return to the ancestral fold. From a Taiwanese point of view, it is an open question whether it ever belonged to that fold at all. •

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The visual contrasts with Australia mask many similarities. Taiwan is a young democracy, but its robust institutions underpin a remarkably progressive society. Democratisation has fostered a degree of civic consciousness unknown in the decades of martial law between 1949 and 1987. Multicultural policy has allowed local cultures to flourish after decades of repression, fostering a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.  A substantial body of law, still growing, protects and advances Indigenous rights to land, language maintenance and participation in government. A  marriage equality bill was passed on constitutional grounds in 2019.

Among these measures, Indigenous rights must resonate keenly for the visiting parliamentarians, themselves about to vote in a referendum on constitutional recognition of First Nations in Australia. On their way down Ketagalan Boulevard to the presidential office building on Tuesday, they may have been told that the road had been renamed in honour of the Aboriginal people who first lived in the Taipei area. They may also have seen the small “tent embassy” that has stood in adjacent parkland since 2017, the year that marked the beginning of a protest movement aimed at achieving something like a Wik determination (or better) in land rights.

It won’t be news to the visitors that Taiwan has a substantial Indigenous population. Indigenous studies and arts have been an increasingly important area of interaction and cultural exchange between Taiwan and Australia. In 2018, the Northern Territory government and the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre launched a six-week artist-in-residence exchange program. In 2019, the first combined Yirramboi–Pulima festival brought together dance performers from Australian and Taiwanese First Nations in Melbourne. This year, the Narrm Oration at Melbourne University will be delivered by Akawyan Pakawyan of Taiwan’s Pinuyumayan people.

Beyond their First Nation status, little obviously connects the Aboriginal peoples in the two places. The First Nations people of Taiwan are Austronesian. Their languages (and there are many) link them to populations scattered across the Indo-Pacific, from Madagascar in the west to Hawaií in the east and New Zealand in the south.  But Austronesians never settled in Australia.

As colonial subjects, moreover, Taiwanese Aboriginals have a rather “tangled history” that seems not to fit neatly into the model provided by the European settler-colonial states. Since the Dutch occupation of the early seventeenth century, the island has been taken over by a series of competing powers in Northeast Asia. An independent settler-colonial state has emerged, populated largely by descendants of Chinese immigrants, but it is overshadowed and to some extent forestalled by the threat of war from its large neighbour, the People’s Republic of China.

Nonetheless, there are striking points of correspondence in the histories of First Nations in Taiwan and Australia. In both places, immigration, albeit from largely different sources, led to massive population growth during the nineteenth century. In both cases, the influx of newcomers was accompanied by a severe diminution of the Aboriginal population. Forced relocation of whole tribes sundered links with ancestral lands. In both cases, the process of dispossession continued into the second half of the twentieth century, leaving a legacy of trauma and social disadvantage reflected most poignantly in shorter life expectancy for Taiwanese and Australian Aboriginals alike.

Momentous developments meant a fundamental shift in relations between First Nations and the majority society in both places in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Australia, the Mabo and Wik High Court cases quashed forever the doctrine of terra nullius, altering perceptions of land ownership in Australia and returning a considerable degree of authority over Country to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. In Taiwan, Aboriginal activism gathered momentum as the whole society shifted into democratic mode; the development of opposition political parties in non-Indigenous society was matched by the formation of Indigenous associations that were soon asserting their rights to self-determination.

Since then, First Nations’ issues have rarely been absent from the political landscape in either place. In 2007, prime minister Kevin Rudd, having brought Labor to power after a period of eleven years of conservative government, apologised to members of the stolen generations. In 2016, newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen, bringing the Democratic Progressive Party to power after eight years of conservative government under the Kuomintang, apologised to Taiwan’s First Nations for crimes committed against them after the island was handed over to China at the end of the second world war. Even the sharp division between political parties on Aboriginal issues shows parallels.

Constitutional changes, however, present different problems in the two places. In Australia, the Constitution can be changed by the people, who may or may not prove willing to support the changes about to be presented to them in the referendum. In Taiwan, the constitution is an historical relic, a document drawn in another time for another place — the Republic of China in 1947. Constitutional amendments are impeded by China’s tendency to view any such moves as “a path that seeks independence.” It was in the face of strident criticism from Beijing that Taiwan’s constitution was amended in 2005 to reserve six seats in the national assembly for Aboriginal representatives. With this and one other “additional article” the then president, Chen Shui-pien, made good on his promise that Indigenous Taiwanese would receive constitutional recognition.

Needless to say, all this is bound up with the development of democracy in Taiwan. The formation of political parties and the introduction of open elections in the late twentieth century meant shaking off the Chinese yoke. Politically, acknowledgement of and alignment with Aboriginal rights, especially land rights and cultural rights, has stamped Taiwan as different from China and established Aboriginal people as prior owners of a land that China regards as its own.

Incorporation into China would be damaging to Taiwan’s First Nations.  The very terms Aboriginal/Indigenous — in Chinese, literally “the peoples who originally lived here” — are frowned on in China for their suggestion of prior claim on the land and a history that might privilege them over the Han majority. China has effectively defined its own Indigenous peoples out of existence; all that is left are ethnic minorities (xiaoshu minzu).

Whether this complex of issues has been discussed by the visitors during their time in Taiwan has not been reported. Prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pending trip to China has anyway meant that their visit has been low key. But if some future parliamentary delegation to Taiwan includes a First Nations MP, we can expect indigenous issues here to feature in political debates about Australia’s relations with both China and Taiwan. •

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

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Mitter is fundamentally interested in the Chinese government’s efforts to integrate the history of China’s war with Japan into the world history of the second world war. As he indicates, success in these efforts would mean a China-centred history in which China replaced the Pacific as the significant theatre in the east and the Chinese rivalled the Americans in importance in combatting the Japanese.

The book is overtly aimed at showing (to quote the subtitle) “how World War II is shaping a new nationalism,” though the nationalist character of China’s project is mainly left implicit. Statist aims seem more obvious. In chapters on formal historical scholarship, TV drama, film and other forms of popular history, sites of historical memory, and historical debates, Mitter shows that remembering the war, and reminding the rest of the world about it, is helping China to burnish its “claim to ownership” of the post-1945 world, “deny Japan any significant role in the region” and “add moral weight to China’s presence in the region and the world.”

China had a long war with Japan: just over eight years counting from the attack on Beijing in July 1937 to the Japanese surrender in September 1945. These days, as Mitter tells us, children in China are taught about a fourteen-year war that begins with the Manchurian crisis of 1931 and the Japanese occupation of northeast China. The September 18th Historical Museum in Shenyang, built to commemorate this starting point, was formally opened in 1999, but Mitter dates the new orthodoxy to a 2015 statement by Xi Jinping. In 2017, the education ministry decreed that the iconic “eight-year war” was henceforth to be called the “fourteen-year war” in all textbooks. Historians in China have greeted this new development with a mixture of irritation and resignation.

Early sign: the September 18th Historical Museum in Shenyang. Antonia Finnane

Mitter’s own view is that China did not regard itself as being at war with Japan during the six years before 1937 (which were admittedly marked by extreme tensions and even outbreaks of armed conflict between China and Japan). His introductory chapter provides an outline history of the war, and it is for the most part the eight-year war. As he goes on to show, research and publishing on war history in recent years have also mainly been concerned with events that took place in those years.

Prior to the 1980s, Chinese research on the war years was largely directed at party history rather than war history. The result, not surprisingly, was a body of work that contrasted a positive interpretation of the Communists with a “very hostile analysis of the record of the Nationalists.” (Even Western historians held a negative view of the wartime Nationalist government.) When China entered a period of relative openness in 1980, discussion about the war widened. In this newly established field of research, moves were made to rehabilitate the Nationalists’ role in the war. As it turned out, they had done most of the fighting.

The treatment of the Nanjing Massacre of 1937 epitomises historiographical change in the 1980s. A much-studied topic in Japanese and English as well as Chinese-language works, the massacre doesn’t dominate Mitter’s book but he frequently returns to it. Research on the massacre carried out at Nanjing University in the 1960s had been suppressed during the Mao years but was finally allowed to see the light of day in the eighties. A museum commemorating the massacre was built in 1985 and redeveloped in stages in subsequent decades.  Partly inspired by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, it is a standing reminder of Japanese wartime atrocities in China. Later, in the early 2000s, a number of documentary and feature films about the massacre were released, some to international acclaim.

In a historical landscape dominated by Beijing, attention to the massacre signified a new acknowledgement of local history, significant not least because Nanjing had been the Nationalist capital and also the capital of a collaborationist regime during the war. A comparable process of recovering local history has been undertaken for the wartime capital of Chongqing, another topic explored by Mitter.

The recovery of these local histories has been accompanied by a fever of interest in the Republican era, causing some concerns in Beijing. An effort to “own” the histories is the obvious strategic response. On 13 December 2014 (although Mitter doesn’t mention this) Xi Jinping presided over a ceremony at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum on the occasion of the first National Day of Mourning. The nation came to a standstill as air sirens sounded. In retrospect (since 2014 is a fairly random year in commemorative terms), that event seems to have laid the groundwork for the great victory parade of 2015, which marked the seventieth anniversary of the Japanese surrender.

Mitter was in Beijing for that parade — an event designed, he writes, “both for domestic political purposes and also to send signals to the outside world about China’s international role.” He uses it to highlight the significance of the second world war in the Chinese government’s repackaging of itself in a changing world order. If the war was remembered primarily as an anti-Japanese war in the 1980s, by 2018 it had become “the main Eastern battlefield for the global war against fascism.” In other words — in history, as at the present time — China was to be perceived as a world player, not merely a regional one.

An important point of reference in the new war history is the 1943 Cairo Conference, at which president Chiang Kai-shek joined Churchill and Roosevelt to discuss postwar arrangements in Asia. In an absorbing discussion of the conference, Mitter shows that the point of the Chinese Communist Party’s present-day (re)writing of war history is to show not only that China fought the “good war” too. Even more importantly, it also participated in postwar planning.  In other words, China was “present at the re-creation” of the postwar world.

The pace of change in Chinese historiography has been rapid, and the politics of the changes rather transparent. Mitter is far from the only observer interested in the relationship between the two. As a call for a greater awareness of history as ideology in China, his book is part of a growing chorus: Zheng Wang’s Never Forget Humiliation (2012), Huaiyin Li’s Reinventing Modern China (2013) and Bill Hayton’s The Invention of China (2020) all riff on similar themes. In similar vein, James Millward, historian of Xinjiang, has called on historians of modern China to be less lazily compliant with the revised standard version that passes muster as history in China.

All of this prompts consideration of what, if anything, students in Australia are learning about Chinese history. Sure enough, guidelines for the Chinese Revolution unit for the Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education reveal a series of sub-topics that might well be taught from a critical perspective but nonetheless follow a path that could have been laid by the Chinese education ministry.

If teachers are asked any time soon to bone up on the 1943 Cairo Declaration, they could do worse than read Mitter on the subject. He writes a plain, uncluttered history that informs and explains in equal parts. In China’s Good War, he shows that the history of wartime China has been largely shaped by just one of its outcomes: the ascendancy of the Chinese Communist Party and the creation of a state that depends heavily on a certain sort of history for its legitimacy. •

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All this explains why one of the most important days in the Chinese ritual calendar passed very quietly this year. Traffic across the country was down nearly 17 per cent on the same day last year. With people staying at home, sales of fresh flowers and festival foods were no doubt much slower than usual.

In other ways, the observance of Qingming this year was scaled up. Flags were at half-mast across the country. In Beijing, Xi Jinping lined up with other Politburo members to bow, as well they might. Mass media next day carried the photo: twenty men in suits, each with a white flower in the left button hole. Absent from the line-up was vice-premier Sun Chunlan, the only woman in the present Politburo. Sun directed the central response to the pandemic in China, much as Wu Yi, the sole woman in an earlier Politburo, managed the SARS outbreak of 2003.

Sun passed the Qingming festival in Wuhan, where she led 500 mourners in the official ceremony at Jiangtan Park in Hankou district. The mourning site is just a few kilometres away from the infamous seafood market where the pandemic is supposed to have started. Smaller ceremonies were conducted in hospitals across Wuhan. News reports showed the no-doubt-traumatised staff in their white coats, masks on every face, lined up shoulder to shoulder, heads bowed.

Qingming, a festival of considerable antiquity, is not normally a day for weeping and wailing. Weather permitting, it can be more like a picnic. People take food to the graveside, present it to their forebears, and then take it away again to eat. In the past, it was a day of temple fairs, a time when normally secluded wives and daughters would venture out of doors. The festival always falls in spring, when trees are beginning to blossom and the sun to have some warmth. It is the closest thing to Easter in the Chinese year, marking both death and life.

Yet Qingming, as a day of mourning, also has the potential to create problems for the government. In China, mourning is a flashpoint for political unrest. The Tiananmen protests and subsequent massacre in 1989 grew out of mass mourning for former premier Hu Yaobang. After the death in 2005 of Zhao Ziyang, who fell from power during those protests, the government contained the news and kept the burial low-key in order to avoid another Tiananmen. A much earlier Tiananmen protest, again on a considerable scale, had marked the death of Premier Zhou Enlai in 1976, and in fact erupted on Qingming day that year.

The association between mourning and protest may have been an element in the 2007 decision to make Qingming a national holiday. It was not the only festival to be elevated to holiday status, but the fact that it lends itself to the performance of patriotic ceremonies made it the most important. Over the past twelve years, the Beijing Museum of Resistance to Japanese Aggression has used the festival as a day for remembering fallen war heroes. This year, it combined commemoration of the war dead with mourning for coronavirus victims. Aligning the two blunts the potential of the pandemic to be politicised.

With thousands of bodies to be disposed of in the wake of the virus, the government had reason to be worried about popular disquiet during Qingming this year. The sustained need to control transmission has enabled it to avoid what might have been nightmarish scenes at cemeteries in Wuhan, with crowds of people attending new graves, clustering around columbaria, and looking around to assess how many recent deaths there might have been.

Controls were not limited to keeping cemeteries shut. In the fortnight leading up to Qingming, Chinese social media was alive with chat about censorship and the concealment of data. Long queues outside crematoria and the large numbers of funeral urns being delivered to the city have caused speculation about the number of dead, which officially stood at 3326 on Saturday. How could the figure be this low if identification of the virus was late, knowledge of it suppressed and the shutdown — harsh as it was — delayed? How many people died of pneumonia without having been tested?

The very act of censorship has sharpened doubts. Who is deleting the pictures of queues for collecting ashes? Who is stopping them circulating? Who is giving the orders imposing public security and curfews? And beyond the questions of how and who lie questions of why. Why is the government paying the bereaved 3000 yuan to keep quiet about the burial of their dead? Why are videos shown of coffins lined up in Italy and Spain, while comparable images in China are deleted?

All of these questions point to sensitivities about the number of people who have died of Covid-19. Numbers are an old and familiar problem in the history of the People’s Republic. In the Great Leap Forward in the late fifties, the reports of productivity were too high; in the ensuing famine, the reports of deaths were too low; when the Nanjing Massacre Memorial building was opened, it featured a round 300,000 in large numerals, as if the well-attested 200,000 deaths did not quite make the grade; and after the Tiananmen massacre, there was no credible accounting at all.

In the case of the famine, the tens of millions who died eventually showed up in population statistics because of the long-term effects of the massive population loss. In the case of Covid-19, alternative estimates of the death toll, based largely on the activity of crematoria, come to between forty and fifty thousand in Wuhan alone. But in the context of China’s huge population, figures of that order are unlikely to show up in future demographic data. How many died, and who they all were, may never be known. •

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The danger for Wuhan is that it will come to be known simply as the virus city. While Covid-19 has somewhat offensively been referred to internationally as the “China virus” or “Chinese virus,” in China it is popularly known as the Wuhan virus, or Wuhan pneumonia. The year of the rat, complain Wuhanese, has left them feeling like the “rats crossing the road” (guojie laoshu). Other Chinese are avoiding them like the plague.

It doesn’t take an epidemic to bring out regional prejudices in China. Wuhan’s detractors — and there are quite a few of them — regard it as a dirty and unattractive place where people swear a lot. Spend a bit of time in Hangzhou, says one émigré, and you’ll realise that the educational level in Wuhan is rather low. Not so, say the city’s champions. People in Wuhan might be a bit rough and ready, but they are open to the outside world, adaptable, tolerant and resilient.

Like jokes about the Englishman, the Scot and the Irishman, there are variations for virtually every other place in China. But the virus has given a nasty edge to criticism of the Wuhanese. One person jokes about throwing out his “Wuhan duck necks,” a local delicacy, and another about giving up his recently acquired Wuhan girlfriend. Wuhan novelist Ai Jingjing, plainly affronted by the charge that the city’s eating habits caused the outbreak, felt impelled to go online to explain to the rest of China what people in Wuhan actually do like to eat: fish, rice and lotus root.

Along with the jokes and abuse has come ostracism. On 27 January, sixteen people from Wuhan narrowly avoided being stranded in Japan after seventy Shanghainese refused to travel on the same plane. “Are we compatriots or what?” asked a furious victim. It took the intervention of consular staff to end the stand-off.

Wuhan isn’t like Beijing or Shanghai. Despite its size, its pivotal position in central China and its many universities, it doesn’t have an identifiable reputation that might help it overcome negative associations. This is partly because its rich history, the natural source of cultural standing, is split among its component parts: Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou. Divided from each other by the Yangtze and Han rivers, these were formerly distinct cities, and local identity is still marked. “I’m from Hankou,” says a Wuhan student to a visitor. “I’ve just come to Wuchang to attend university.”

As a great port and market town for centuries, Hankou, or Hankow in an older spelling, is the most recognisable of the three place names. Neighbouring Hanyang, once the seat of government for Hankou, is now the poor cousin. Across the Yangtze River, Wuchang, long the provincial capital of Hubei and its cultural centre, has great historical significance. It was the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 that sparked the revolution that led to the founding of the Republic of China, Asia’s first republic, in 1912.

Wuhan’s constituent settlements — Hankow (now known as Hankou), Hanyang and Wuchang — probably in the 1920s. From the 1924 edition of the Japanese Government Railways Guide to China. Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy

This history could have been leveraged to greater advantage for Wuhan as a whole, but China’s ruling Communist Party prefers history to be about another revolution — the one that culminated in the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Wuchang does have a museum to the 1911 revolution, but the story of that first republic is tightly controlled on the mainland. For an insight as to why, you need only look at Taiwan, a largely unrecognised state that is steadily resisting incorporation into the People’s Republic and still formally bears the title of “Republic of China.”

A rather rocky administrative history brought Wuchang, Hanyang and Hankou together as Wuhan under the Nationalists in the 1920s, and then again under the Communists. The histories connected with the name of this larger entity are also difficult ones. In 1927 Wuhan was the site of a purge of communists from the left-wing government formed in the city during the Nationalist Revolution. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, it was the site of armed conflict that left more a thousand dead. That clash — the Wuhan Incident, as it came to be known — was condemned at the time as counterrevolutionary, but when the verdict was reversed after Mao’s death it didn’t do much for a subdued Wuhan. Like much of the Cultural Revolution, the Wuhan Incident is passed over in silence, or at best smoothed over.

These histories of violent struggle are somehow consistent with the popular characterisation of Wuhanese as fierce and aggressive. But Wuhan has had its place in the sun, and in a less controlled ideological environment that would be celebrated. Between January and October 1938, following the infamous siege of Nanjing by the Japanese, Wuhan served as the refuge for the Nationalist government and became the provisional capital of China. In these months, writes historian Stephen MacKinnon, “the metropolis blossomed.” Crowded with refugees, on tenterhooks about the Japanese advance, the city came into its own.

“To a degree unmatched in any Chinese capital before or since,” writes McKinnon, “Wuhan enjoyed parliamentary style debate and political experimentation, the flowering of a free press, and the unleashing and redirection of enormous creative energies in cultural spheres.”

MacKinnon’s book, Wuhan, 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley, 2008), has been translated into Chinese and published by Wuhan Press. As the present epidemic runs its course, Wuhan people might care to read it, and remember the ten months when their city symbolised to the entire country unity and courage in the face of apparently insuperable odds. •

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As we now know, that mention was to be his downfall. Last year, he recalled it as a murmured or garbled off-the-cuff response to a question. When the tape emerged it showed what he had really said: “The role that Australia should be playing as a friend is to know that we see several thousand years of history, thousands of years of history, where it is and isn’t our place to be involved.” What was he thinking?

On the face of things, it seems bizarre that a politician should voice approval of the policy of a foreign country on grounds not only satisfactory to the country concerned, but actually supplied by that country – in this case the “thousands of years of history” that China commonly advances  as justification for its actions in the South China Sea, and many other places as well.  But invoking those “thousands of years” has become common in the age of China’s rise. Dastyari may have picked up the habit from his sometime mentor, former foreign minister Bob Carr, who has urged that “the China story needs to be told and given credit for all that it has achieved… It has a culture and civilisation that goes back five millennia.” Carr may in turn have been influenced by, and has certainly quoted, Henry Kissinger on the importance of paying attention to “five thousand years of history.” On this point, all three men are in lock step with Xi Jinping.

It is difficult to understand what is meant by “five thousand years of Chinese history.” None of the commonly mentioned linchpins of Chinese culture were secured that long ago. The earliest forms of writing in East Asia have been dated to around 1200 BCE, or 1400 at a stretch. Confucius was not alive till the sixth century BCE. A unitary state — the Chinese empire, that is — was not founded till 221 BCE, and since then, a succession of states have existed in what we now recognise as Chinese territory. Through centuries and even millennia during those five thousand years, vast areas of this territory were occupied by non-Sinic peoples.

Probably the period is best viewed as something like the four thousand years of biblical chronology: a sacred period attached to a belief system. This would explain why the line between history and mythology is blurred. “China has a full rich history of over five thousand years,” writes Kang Ouyang. “From ancient times when the three emperors and five sovereigns started the Chinese civilisation, national wisdom began to sprout…” Ouyang is director of the Institute of Philosophy at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and is known for his work on the “national spirit.”  He otherwise writes on Marxism, but in this account, a recently published book on The Chinese National Spirit, the true believer trumps the Marxist. The “five thousand years” is advanced at several points in the book, most fascinatingly as a label for the period within which China has been engaged in international relations.

What is the logic of the connection between the “five thousand years” policy positions on either China’s part or anyone else’s? In another recently published book, History and Nationalist Legitimacy in Contemporary China: A Double-Edged Sword, Robert Weatherly and Qian Zhang chart the ruling Communist Party’s purposeful use of history and historical memory as a legitimising strategy, to replace the foundations formerly supplied by commitment to revolution and Marxism. The point they make is not a new one, but it is worth reiterating until it permeates general knowledge about contemporary China. Every country has its national myths, most of which are grounded in or derived from history; but in China, history alone is the bedrock. The People’s Republic doesn’t have a religion, and it doesn’t have a constitution — or at least, not one that counts. It no longer even has a revolutionary ideology. It just has history, lots of it.

Needless to say, such “history” cannot be freely researched and openly debated. It is more akin to a religious doctrine. Its central tenets can be recited, as if from a catechism. What is the history of the Chinese Communist Party? “It is a history of leading the peoples of the whole country under the guidance of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought to undertake a socialist revolution and the establishment of socialism, with tremendous achievements…” What is the Chinese Dream? “It came out of the great experience of the thirty years or reform and opening up, out of more than sixty years of persistent searching since the establishment of the PRC, out of the profound conclusion of 170 or more years of development of the Chinese people, out of the enduring legacy of the Chinese people’s 5000-year old culture.”

When Dastyari first heard mention of “thousands of years” uttered in relationship to the People’s Republic of China, his instincts should have told him that it was a mantra routinely uttered in the service of a particular belief system, with no self-evident relationship to the South China Sea. As things stand, it is hard to understand why he would have chosen to recite it, other than that he might have been talking too much to Bob Carr, whose position on the South China Sea he echoed. The rather muddled sentence quoted above, in which he actually rephrases the term, suggests that he might have been somewhat confused as to what he was saying. As a citizen of a country with sixty-five thousand years of human settlement, and as a parliamentary representative in a complex society with a different sort of history — difficult, intensively researched and much debated — he was in a position to bring quite a different perspective to bear on regional disputes. That might have required greater sensitivity to Australia’s history, as well as a better understanding of China’s. •

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The English-language edition of the Global Times didn’t carry this editorial, and the intended audience was clearly a domestic one. But the vocabulary is a reminder of what and whom Australia is dealing with in these globalised times. An Asialink blog post by Anthony Milner and Jennifer Fang, quoted by Needham in the same report, suggests the importance for Australia of joining with its neighbours in full acknowledgement of China’s leadership. But the Global Times, likely to be happy with Milner and Fang’s argument that Australia is out of step with the region on this issue, doesn’t make such a concession easy. Its editorial projects the image not of an established leader, but of an easily angered hegemon that hasn’t yet worked out how to make all its clients fall into line.

If they are well-read in their own history (and Xi Jinping certainly is), Chinese leaders will recognise the problem as an old one. When China’s first emperor was yet just one king among many, he granted an audience to the strategist Wei Liao. Wei flattered him, saying, “Qin’s might is such that the rulers of other states are like mere heads of a province or a district beside it.” The problem for such a strong state, Wei went on to say, was that these lesser states might join in league against it. He had a plan: “I hope Your Majesty will not be sparing of goods and money but will hand out bribes to their leading ministers so as to disrupt their schemes. By laying out no more than 300,000 in gold, you can completely undo the other feudal rulers.”

And so it came to pass. Qin followed Wei’s advice, and the surrounding states fell like flies into the trap. More than two millennia later, Beijing is following the same script. Rodrigo Duterte’s rapid transformation from a Churchill to a Chamberlain of the South China Sea is an outstanding example of how successful the strategy can be.

Most states in the region are still working out how to manage this big new power. Do they subscribe to China’s invocation of ancient historical relationships that were sundered by Western gunboats and are now, properly, being restored? Or do they stand on their dignity as modern nation-states with sovereign rights, as deserving of respect as any great power? For Australia, the question is a bit different, since it has no ancient relationship with China. Admiral Zheng did not land on these shores early in the fifteenth century, and Australians did not make their way to the capital to pay tribute any time thereafter.

Nonetheless, as is the case elsewhere, the “300,000 in gold” counts for a lot in Australia. When Milner and Fang argue that “Australia has become disconnected from its own region,” they imply that this reflects a dated attachment to the US alliance. In fact, the rise and rise of China has captured the attention of politicians, investors and educators in this country to an extraordinary degree. Influential Australian commentators here, as in Southeast Asia, have not only acknowledged China’s leadership but have been hard at work getting the rest of the country to do so as well. Bob Carr and James Laurenceson at the Australia–China Relations Institute and Hugh White at the ANU are only the most obvious advocates. Dazzled by China, Australians have lost sight of Southeast Asia in important respects. The fall-off in engagement is particularly evident in a decline of Southeast Asian expertise in our universities.

It is one thing to urge reconnection, as Milner and Fang do, and another to subscribe to an imagined regional consensus on the status of China’s leadership. Whatever Asialink knows about the attitudes of commentators in the rest of the region, it is at least clear that there is not at present a consensus on China’s leadership. Vietnam is resistant to Chinese hegemony; Indonesia is watchful; Singapore “remains a great believer in a strong US presence in the region.” Japan, which may not have entered into Milner and Fang’s analysis, seems in no present danger of being led by China. South Korea, a country that China should have been able to cultivate more effectively than has been the case, has put in place an American missile shield in face of China’s objections and threats of economic retaliation. Chinese enrolments in South Korean universities, accounting for up to half of some student bodies, have dropped precipitately in the current academic year.

China does have significant acolytes in the region, but must wish they were less flaky. The Philippines has a populist and erratic leader whose tenure is uncertain, Thailand is run by a military junta, and Malaysia’s prime minister is embroiled in ongoing financial scandal. These shortcomings in political culture at the leadership level do not mean that their cosying up to China is unimportant, or that Australia should not be engaging with the countries concerned. (In fact, this country’s current engagement with the Philippines is much in the news.) But it is open to question whether a democratic country with an anti-corruption commission and a free press should be lining up with them to pay tribute to China on the basis of regional consistency.

In an ironic historical shift, these three countries were aligned with the West during the cold war, and looked to the United States as protector, while Jakarta and Hanoi formed an “axis” with Beijing — at least until the military coup in Indonesia in 1965. Current relations are more complex. In July, Indonesia enraged China by bestowing a new name, North Natuna Sea, on the maritime zone in the northern outreaches of the Indonesia archipelago, crossing China’s sacrosanct “nine-dash line.” At the ASEAN meeting in early August, Vietnam in its turn provoked China by pressing for tougher wording in the South China Sea code of conduct.

Jakarta and Hanoi are now showing signs of wanting to strengthen bilateral ties. Two weeks ago, Nguyen Phu Trong, secretary-general of the Communist Party of Vietnam and head of the Politburo, paid a visit to Jakarta. This was the first visit from Vietnam at this level since Ho Chi Minh attended the Bandung Conference in 1955. Trong’s main presentation was delivered at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, and focused on the need for unity in ASEAN and for resisting great power interference. He did not name the “great power,” but with the renaming of the North Natuna Sea still fresh in their minds, the audience would have understood it to be China.

Trong’s visit coincided with the fourth annual meeting of the International Conference on Chinese Indonesian Studies, held at the country’s top university, Universitas Indonesia, and attended by scholars from Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, China and (in a tiny minority of two) Australia. The theme of the conference was China’s Impact on Southeast Asia and Its Diasporic Communities. Papers by Chinese presenters in the plenary sessions, including one on Sino-Indonesian relations in the 1950s and another on China and ASEAN, provoked critical and even angry responses from the floor, expressed mainly but not only by Indonesians in the audience.

A matter of particular irritation for the audience was the supposition that China should be able to build bridges with mainstream societies (notably Indonesia and Malaysia) through its contacts with the diaspora communities. Such a strategy, defended by the speaker on grounds that it was “normal” and “understandable,” was viewed from the floor as divisive, and likely to have a negative impact on the Chinese ethnic communities in Southeast Asian countries.

It is not easy being a scholar in China. In international contexts in particular, there is a strong expectation that the interests of the country (in other words of the party-state) be defended in any academic presentation. In 2014, Xi Jinping embarked on a soft-power strategy of “telling the China story well.” Since then, academics in Chinese universities have been undertaking training (“brain-washing,” in their own words) in how to tell the China story. Not surprisingly, the senior academic in the Chinese delegation at the conference segued in his presentation from history to policy, urging the importance of ASEAN unity. Needless to say, the premise for this piece of advice differs from Nguyen Phu Trong’s.

China is demonstrating an ability to divide and rule ASEAN, particularly through its relations with Malaysia and Singapore. But Beijing is used to dealing with orderly hierarchies and prefers not to be in the position of herding cats; what it would ultimately like is its own Monroe doctrine in the Asia-Pacific region. Australia is far from being the only country in the region resisting this prospect. For this among other reasons, stronger connections with its neighbours seem desirable. The mere promise of military aid in times of crisis (as currently with the Philippines) is woefully inadequate. But these is no obvious reason why closer relations should entail capitulation to an authoritarian regime in the interests of regional conformity. Diversity, too, can be a source of strength that needs recognising and protecting. •

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THE Tibetan street pedlars are back. They were expelled from Beijing for the course of the eighteenth party congress in November, or went into hiding, but they cannot have gone very far. Soon after the end of proceedings they were back on the steps of Dongsishitiao subway station hawking their factory-produced “handicrafts”: beads, combs, bronze ware. They wear thick skirts and boots that give them a slightly exotic look.

In a sphere well removed from theirs, art collectors gathered at the end of November for the inaugural Poly International Auctions event in Hong Kong. The top-selling piece was a scroll painting, Tibetan Women with Dogs, by Zhang Daqian (1899–1983), one of the best-known painters of twentieth-

century China. The title in English does not do justice to the original, which translated literally would read “barbarian women with mastiffs.” The word for barbarian is never used in official language now, but it used to be a common term for non-Chinese, including the Western “foreign devils.”

The painting sold for the equivalent of nearly A$6 million, close to seven times the anticipated top bid. Zhang, a prolific artist of great technical skill, is famous for his forgeries of old masters. The question with this painting, however, is whether this time he might be the victim rather than the perpetrator of a forgery.

Art auctions in China are a major means of money laundering by officials. A journalist for the Global Times has described how it works. The corrupt official, desiring to create a legitimate-seeming paper trail for money being offered as a bribe, puts up for auction a forged painting that has been given to him by the client. At the auction, the client and a partner bid the price up to the desired level of the bribe. Having won the bid, the client buys the painting, and the official pockets the proceeds. For a very high bid to be credible, the painting needs to be the work (putatively) of someone of Zhang Daqian’s status.

This painting’s provenance looks reasonably sound. It is known to have been executed in 1944, when Zhang was living in Chongqing, China’s wartime capital. He had spent much of the two preceding years in the ancient Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, a famed site on the Silk Route, where he was employed in copying murals for the regional satrap. Working alongside him was Sha Bo Tshe Ring, a young Tibetan painter from the Amdo region, in present-day Qinghai province. Other people in Tibetan dress must frequently have crossed Zhang’s path during these years, providing the context and inspiration for his painting. Such details surrounding the history of the piece are reassuring. Its most recent owner was reportedly a well-known collector, Liu Piji.

The reputation of the auction house is another matter. Poly International Auctions was established in Beijing in 2005. Its website proclaims the company to be “based on the rule of ‘authentic, essential and rare,’ and insisting on the principle of ‘being honest, fair and just to clients.’” This claim seems to be almost immediately belied by the fact that the site doesn’t mention that the company belongs to the People’s Liberation Army. The auction house is in fact part of a trading conglomerate, the Poly Group, which runs cultural events as well as dealing in arms.

In a widely circulated article published by Forbes in August, Abigail R. Esman repeated the claims about fraudulent trading in auction houses. Unlike the Global Times article, Esman named Poly as a major offender. She went on to speculate on what these fraudulent practices mean for the art market in China. Not only might the apparent worth of the market (reckoned at around US$13 billion) be greatly overstated; in a very large number of cases the merchandise – in particular, ancient paintings – might not be what it seems. In other words, the market is probably flooded with fakes.

A painting purported to be by Zhang Daqian himself is among the famous cases of fakes to have been exposed in recent years. Found among the possessions of the disgraced deputy police chief in Chongqing, Wen Qiang (later executed), it was authenticated by a team of experts from Beijing, who valued it at around US$600,000. The verdict was later reversed by the State Administration of Cultural Heritage and National Committee of Cultural Relics. Zhang would no doubt have been amused.

In his later years, Zhang had to give up painting fakes: deteriorating eyesight prevented him from either seeing or duplicating the detail in the old landscapes he liked to copy. The paintings he executed in his old age were in the splash-and-daub style. But he had left China when the Communist Party seized power, so was otherwise free to paint what he liked. In this he was luckier than his former associate, Sha Bo Tshe Ring, who was forced in the 1960s to retrain as an oil painter of workers, soldiers and peasants. The centuries-old Amdo art culture, as Mark Stevenson of Victoria University has shown, was very nearly destroyed at this time.

Officially, China makes much of things Tibetan. Zhang Daqian’s cheery picture of Tibetan Women with Dogs was produced before the present regime came into existence but it is stylistically consistent with the bright propaganda prints of ethnic minority figures in national costume that have been churned out in the decades since. The reality is different, as shown by the self-immolation of more than eighty Tibetan monks in the last three years. Around the same time as Tibetan Women with Dogs was being auctioned, reports of a violent crackdown on Tibetan student demonstrators were emerging from the Amdo region. Twenty students are said to have been hospitalised, four with serious injuries. The school, a medical college, was locked down. The students were protesting over a questionnaire distributed to them in a political education class. Among the questions was “What is the nature of self-immolation?” Among their demands in response was “a new government.” •

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On the basis of this statistic, observers should have been expecting that the seven members of the newly appointed Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party who emerged to public view on 15 November would include two or three with shiny pates. Alas for any such expectations: not a bald head in sight. Wang Qishan is getting there: his receding hairline suggests a degree of transparency well suited to his new position as head of the party’s anti-graft commission. And it’s true that Shanghai party boss Yu Zhengsheng, who at sixty-seven is the oldest of the group, has a rather high forehead. But for the rest, it is luxuriant black locks to a man.

What explains this statistical anomaly? One possible hypothesis is that the leadership group is different from the common herd. The abundance and vigorous growth of their tresses is simply consistent with and testament to their talents and vitality in other respects. Another reason could be that the selection process for the party leadership favours men with a lot of black hair. Or perhaps some of the seven have had hair transplants. (Wigs are also a possibility although not one supported by close visual inspection.)

This is not an easy question on which to purse armchair research. If men get their hair from their mother’s father, as common lore has it, a historical record is difficult to construct. We can readily find photos of Xi Jinping’s father (lots of hair at a comparable age) but not of his maternal grandfather. Yet it would appear that among Communist Party leaders, the 35 per cent–plus statistic was probably apparent until recently. We need look no further than the most obvious heads: Mao Zedong suffered frontal balding, president Liu Shaoqi had vertex balding, and defence minister Lin Biao balded dramatically at an early age (hence his trademark cap). Premier Zhou Enlai had hair, but even his was thinning in his old age.

The Reform Era reversed this pattern, although not immediately. Zhao Ziyang, forced off the political stage after soft-pedalling on the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, had very little hair. His replacement, Jiang Zemin, had quite a lot more, suggesting the beginning of a trend appropriate to the era of plenty in China. In keeping with the pattern of economic growth over the last ten years, the hair on the heads of leaders has become ever more luxuriant: swept up and back, or parted on the side, the glossy manes of president Hu Jintao and future president Xi Jinping, together with the more modest coiffures of their comrades, command a certain respect. Not since Ronald Reagan has America seen the like.

Television may be a factor encouraging this trend. The phenomenon of Politburo-meets-the-global-media is one of the more bizarre outcomes of the survival in China of a political organisation that in most other places has been outmoded. Chinese women watching the televised events of the morning of 15 November duly commented on the looks of the new party leaders. Incoming premier Li Keqiang got the guernsey for best-looking, but everyone agreed that Xi Jinping was excellent on TV; in striking contrast to Hu Jintao, he exudes geniality. (There are rumours that under his benign leadership the “harmonious society” of the Hu Jintao era is to be rebranded a “happy society.”)

The section of Chinese society least susceptible to androgenetic alopecia, women, was not represented on the podium. The party appears to be conscious of the problem of severe under-representation of women in government. A second woman has been moved up into the Politburo, increasing the percentage of women at this level to 8 per cent – still well below the percentage of party members who are women, which at around 18 per cent is also very low. One would hardly wish that more women could be participants in such a deeply self-interested, authoritarian organisation, liable as it is to corrupt all those who enter its embrace. Rather, these low figures are interesting as prima facie evidence either of strong networks of male patronage that work against high levels of female participation, or of the party’s failure to attract women as members, or both.

The under-representation of women in politics is an almost-global phenomenon, but with the creation of the new leadership group in China following so closely on the heels of the American election, it was difficult not to notice the contrast between the Chinese and American political systems in this respect. In the United States, as summed up by Maureen Dowd, “more women voted than men. Five women were newly elected to the Senate, and the number of women in the House will increase by at least three.” In China, women were visible as minority delegates in national costume, attendants within the hall, dancing girls and glamorous media representatives. But these were all young women. Members of the baby-boomer cohort, the sisters of the men standing on the stage, those who in their youth had been told that a woman could do whatever a man could do – they were hardly visible at all. •

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THE shelves of our local video shop have been cleared again. You can buy How Green Was My Valley with Chinese subtitles but not much else. People in the know make their way out the back, past the toilets, to a storeroom behind an unmarked door, where Chinese and Russians jostle with Americans for elbow room and the chance to buy a full season of Homeland for seven or eight dollars. (Homeland is getting mixed reviews from Chinese viewers: “Can’t compete with 24” is a common response.)

The last time the shelves were cleared was a month or so ago, shortly before the National Day holiday. The video shop is just around the corner from the local police station: the police must come around with a warning at critical junctures. The logic of having all these pirated goods in full view 90 per cent of the time and then mysteriously absent for the other 10 per cent is that Beijing should set a good example when there are visitors in town, especially visitors from the provinces. The biggest drought in pirated videos was in 2008, around the time of the Olympics. Of course, there are pirated videos available in the provinces, too; it’s about face, not practice.

Not coincidentally, the internet has become almost impossibly slow. Google can be opened, but not the individual links, and Google books can be searched but not always previewed. People in government offices and institutions aren’t answering email enquiries, or if they do answer it’s to say that the enquiry should be directed elsewhere. Work meetings are being held without reaching decisions; international conferences are being cancelled or postponed. Since life is otherwise normal in many respects, it has taken a while for people to realise that an unusual number of things aren’t being done at the moment.

This has not gone unremarked. As the capital formally entered the advent period for the congress, Beijing’s evening paper published an article scolding Beijingers for their current attitude of “just wait and see, hold on a bit” – an attitude that isn’t helpful, stated the article, to the “scientific development of the capital’s economy” at this moment in the nation’s history. The barely articulated assumption was that nothing untoward was happening. The eighteenth party congress was business as usual: a routine meeting for the routinised transfer of leadership to the next generation of party leaders. The current massive upgrade in security, we might conclude, is just another part of that routine.

The city took a while to show the imprint of the coming event. Even in normal times, this is a place that carries its ideology on its sleeve. Red banners all over the city call on residents to foster the spirit of Beijing (patriotism, creativity, tolerance, virtue), reject heterodoxies (in other words, unauthorised religious affiliations), study Lei Feng (the St Aloysius of the Chinese Communist canon), and be civilised (which means queuing up). Street bulletin boards carry propaganda posters alongside the daily newspapers. In advance of special occasions – National Day, for instance – it is normal to see a rash of fresh banners and floral installations around the city. But before this week, it was possible to walk many blocks without seeing any reference to the congress at all.

Now the banners are proliferating. “Welcome the delegates to the eighteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party” hangs back to back with “Resolutely develop socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Outside the Ministry of Justice a large floral installation features “Welcome the great eighteenth” against a backdrop showing the city’s iconic modern buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the splayed legs of the CCTV tower. These are all products of the last decade, and indelibly associated with the regime of party secretary Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, which is drawing to a close. The shapes on the installation are vaguely suggestive of how the buildings look when they’re glimpsed through the haze of pollution that regularly clouds the city.

With this “great eighteenth” in mind, Wang Xiangwei, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, turned his attention recently to the problems of the Chinese capital: crowding, traffic, real estate costs, pollution and associated health problems, and an uncertain water supply, to name a few. He had a solution inspired by South Korea’s diversion of much government business away from Seoul: move the capital. For many, the obvious alternative site would be an earlier capital, Nanjing, situated far to the south on the Yangtze River. But Wang’s idea is that the capital should be moved to a site in Hebei province, the province in which Beijing municipality sits, as the Australian Capital Territory sits within New South Wales. He didn’t mention a specific location, but suggests somewhere between 100 and 150 kilometres away from Beijing and easily reached by very fast train. Baoding, around 150 kilometres to the southwest and for some decades the provincial capital, fits the bill.

This good idea is unlikely to advance beyond the pages of the South China Morning Post. The opportunity to bypass the problems of rampant urban growth in Beijing was surrendered in the 1950s, when a sensible proposal to leave the old city intact and build an administrative city to its west – like India’s New Delhi – was rejected. “Beijing’s fate was sealed,” the art historian Wu Hung has written, “by locating the government in the old city.” From this decision flowed the problems of traffic management and conservation that continue to characterise debates about urban planning for the ever-expanding capital.

The city is currently expecting one of the cyclical inflows of visitors that test its best-laid plans for organised flows of traffic. Shiny new crowd control barriers have been installed in the subway stations, replacing the bits of string that used to serve as guidelines to the security stations. The sleepy-looking girls and boys who slouch by the surveillance machines are being joined by smartly uniformed militia. Around 1.4 million volunteers have been recruited to keep everyone in order. Ninety thousand street cleaners have been mobilised. The municipal security forces have taken a collective oath to “wage the battle in unison, carry out the mission with honour, fight with determination and win with resolve!” In short, as the press here reports, “The Great Eighteenth is at hand! The bugle has sounded!” Homeland just can’t compare. •

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THE National Day “golden week” holiday in China is not long over and the usual chorus of complaints from holiday-makers can be heard everywhere: crowds, traffic jams, and mountains of rubbish in China’s famous scenic spots. People with money to spare often head out of the country for this holiday, but with international tensions intensifying in the region the flow of tourists was thinner than usual. Japanese airlines were reporting tens of thousands of cancellations in the week leading up to National Day.

The alternative was to stay at home and read a book. Hot off the Shanghai Belles Lettres Press this golden week, and under review in the daily papers, was a new biography of Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a man who in Chinese intellectual history occupies a position comparable to, say, that of his near contemporary, David Lloyd George, in British history. In the early twentieth century, Liang was perhaps the closest thing China had to a statesman in a country that was struggling to regenerate a workable state. He was a native of Xinhui in Canton, the home county of many Chinese immigrants to the Australian goldfields, and when he visited Australia in 1901 he was struck and influenced by the egalitarian ethos of the country.

Educated in the old classical tradition, quick to engage with the new, a prolific writer and one of the most influential thinkers of his time, Liang was a reformer rather than a revolutionary. Unlike Lloyd George, who was prime minister for six years, he had few opportunities to put his politics into practice, although after the 1911 Revolution he did join the cabinet of the first Republican government, formed a century ago this year. In the eyes of the Communists he was a counter-revolutionary, like all of the so-called “reform faction” of the early twentieth century, and his family suffered badly during the Mao years. Whatever its other qualities, a book about him can hardly fail to be interesting in terms of the winds of intellectual change in China.

The author of this new biography, Xie Xizhang, a Beijing native, is a journalist by training. At a literary event in Beijing recently he was modest about his credentials as a historian but paid tribute to his training in journalism at People’s University. “Training in journalism does actually have its advantages,” he said. “You can’t just dash things off...” – a statement perhaps as much about politics as about reporting in China. The first indication in the book that it has not been “dashed off” is the preface, written by Liu Zaifu. Sometime academician in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Party member until he was expelled in 1987, Liu Zaifu attained fame in exile as the author of Farewell, Revolution, a book that came to define China’s turn from the revolutionary road in the 1990s. A book endorsed by Liu is self-evidently unlikely to be a standard textbook account. Indeed, Xie’s stated motivation for writing the biography is that he felt impelled to set the historical record straight. He was irritated particularly by the portrayal of Liang in a television series made in 2001 to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

The book (or books – it comes in two volumes) is timely. There has been a flurry of interest in Liang Qichao recently, to a point where Xie has been asked how he came to produce such a topical work. The interest lies in the road not taken: not “Revolutionary Road,” then, but rather “Constitution Avenue,” a wide, peaceful road following a route determined by a constitution separating the state from government, and political from military power. Although Liang Qichao is commonly described as a constitutional monarchist, he was primarily, as Xie points out, a constitutionalist rather than a monarchist. The ritual form of the state was not a matter of great concern to him: monarchy or republic, both would work with a constitution, and neither without one.

Reviewing Xie’s book for Beijing’s daily paper, the Xinjingbao, historian Duanmu Cixiang places it on a time-line of notable biographies of Liang, showing how this significant historical figure has served as a political “weather vane” in the decades since his death. Depicted as defender of the nation in 1944, as counter-revolutionary and class enemy in 1980, and as a figure bypassed by history in 1993, he emerges from Xie Xizhang’s pen as a man of and for his times. More importantly, implies the reviewer, he has renewed relevance for the present, an era defined by Liu Zaifu’s phrase, “farewell, revolution.” With some self-conscious irony, Duanmu endorses the characterisation of Liang as a “counter-revolutionary,” but one in the mould of Edmund Burke: a praiseworthy counter-revolutionary for whom “gradual, safe, considered reform [was] the only proper way.”

As she elaborates on this analysis it becomes clear that Duanmu is talking about reformism as a way forward for present-day China. (The unstated alternative is a return to the “red” political culture of the past, the road taken by the disgraced Bo Xilai in Chongqing.) As it turns out, this reformism has little to do with constitutions. Duanmu defines it as entailing the exercise of “wisdom and courage” by the authorities and, even more importantly, “common sense and forbearance” by ordinary people. This formulation may be her response to the recent wild demonstrations against Japan, in which common sense and forbearance were conspicuous by their absence.

It would probably have been no surprise to Liang Qichao that China and Japan should still be at loggerheads over sovereignty issues in the early twenty-first century. In 1895 he took part in a demonstration by examination candidates against the concession of Taiwan to Japan following Japan’s victory over China in a short, sharp war the previous year. From then until Liang’s death in 1929, Japan continued to loom large, and usually with menace, on China’s eastern horizon. Even more than the Western powers, it was a defining presence in China’s experiments with social and political change.

Xie Xizhang does not deny but neither does he dwell on Japan’s importance in shaping Liang Qichao’s knowledge and views of the modern world. After the violent suppression of the 1898 reform movement in Beijing, Liang fled with his family to Japan , where helived until the collapse of the dynasty in 1911 made it safe for him to return home. His intellectual horizons were vastly expanded there by the flood of new works by both Japanese and, in translation, Western writers. This is not an easy subject for a writer in contemporary China to tackle, and Xie is anyway interested primarily in Liang’s Chinese context. The biography is written as a series of chapters structured around Liang and his male contemporaries, including mentors, disciples and political opponents, in political and literary circles.

As other historians have shown, Liang was well-disposed towards Japan in his early years there. He was sympathetic to Pan-Asian ideals and deeply impressed by the Meiji constitution. But in Japan he also came to grips with the idea of the nation and nationalism, as well as reaching a cooler appraisal of the implications of Japanese interests for China. These factors, nationalism and the Japanese interest, contributed to China’s history of modern state formation, in which Japan has mostly been a negative influence and constitutions have hardly figured at all.

China does have a constitution, of course. Indeed, since 1949 four constitutions have been promulgated, the most recent in 1982. The national constitution problematically co-exists with the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party, in a relationship that could be described as the tail wagging the dog. In a recently published interview about the forthcoming Eighteenth Party Congress, the Brookings Institution’s director of research, Cheng Li, commented that party leaders at the congress may be just anxious enough about stability to think it worth asserting the supremacy of the Chinese constitution, thus bringing the party under the rule of law. “But as one can imagine,” he added, “not all leaders agree with that view, because it opens the door for fundamental political changes.” •

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If the book were to have a subtitle, it would be “Between economy and security.” This is not the focus of every essay, but it reflects the contents as a whole as well as the reigning paradigm for any discussion of Australia–China relations. According to the editors, James Reilly and Jingdong Yuan, Australia’s “economic and security interests are diverging” as a consequence of the fact that, “for the first time in its history,” its major trade partner is not a democratic country. Correspondingly, Han Feng from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences observes “tensions… in the bilateral relationship, affecting, for example, economic, cultural and security ties.” Nick Bisley thinks there is no need for such tensions: “It is perfectly possible for Australia to be able to enjoy good economic relations with the PRC and excellent military relations with the US…” John Lee is less sanguine, pointing to “the uncertainties of China’s rise” and the need for strategic measures to guard against undesirable outcomes.

If further evidence of this paradigm is needed, it can be found in recent debates in Australia. Hugh White’s book The China Choice, which urges the United States to share power with China in the Pacific, provoked a vitriolic response from the Australian’s foreign editor Greg Sheridan, demonstrating the heat likely to accompany any serious discussion of Australia’s strategic alternatives in the context of the rise of China. In a more measured comment on the same issue, the incoming head of Defence, Dennis Richardson, recently declared bluntly: “Our alliance is not for sale.” The comment appears to have been directed at billionaire businessman Kerry Stokes, who had complained about the impact of the American base in Darwin on business relations with China, and bigger billionaire James Packer, the part-owner of gambling interests in Macau, who at the same meeting said that Australia was “a less grateful friend” to China “than it should be.”

An overemphasis on this tension and especially on its novelty might convey the impression that Australia was absolutely cocooned from its region for more than two centuries. In fact, scholars are still groping for a balanced assessment of the actualities, which include a long and complex history of involvement with China through migration, trade, war and diplomacy. In his contribution to this book, “From Kapyong to Kapyong: A Cycle in Australia–China Economic Relations,” James Cotton concludes that “it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that for the period from 1788 to 2008, Australia was in the happy position of thriving within an uncontested Anglo-American hegemony, with economic and security components mutually reinforcing…” But as he himself shows, this bird’s-eye view fractures when it is viewed from closer at hand. In the 1930s, too, Australia was “dealing with a rapidly industrialising [East Asian] economy,” Japan, that was “vying for regional dominance.” And in 1964, when Australia was shaping up for combat against an enemy generally supposed to be backed by China, it was also shipping nearly half its wheat crop there. A Venn diagram of Australian economic and security interests over time would show that they have by no means always been perfectly matched.

That they are linked is easier to establish. The 1970s, as illustrated by James Curran’s chapter, marked a turning point in Australia’s security arrangements. In that decade leaders on both sides of Australian politics moved away from dependence on the United States. Whitlam offered China recognition in 1972 and developed a foreign policy based on an assessment of the security risks in Asia that was far more optimistic than anything emanating from the White House. Subsequently, Malcolm Fraser turned to China to provide a regional bulwark against the Soviet Union. During these years, as Curran notes, China was vying with Japan for the attention of first the Whitlam and then the Fraser governments. Reilly and Yuan present the seventies as a decade in which Australia “managed to deepen its economic integration within Asia while reinforcing the security alliance with the United States,” but this conclusion is slightly at odds with the drift of Curran’s chapter, which stresses the degree to which Australia was making decisions independent of and in some cases displeasing to the United States.

How the two interests might weigh up against each other in future cannot be predicted with any certainty . Michael Wesley seems to think that economics will win out. “Pretty much every country in this region has a major stake in the ongoing success of the Chinese economy,” he states, before putting a rhetorical question: “if another Tiananmen Square massacre happened tomorrow, how many countries in the region… would break off their trade and investment relationship with China?” The hypothetical choice here should arguably be between economic and other interests in a single country, not between human rights in China and economic issues elsewhere. Japan, one of China’s largest trading partners, has in recent weeks shown just how possible it is to risk economic interests for amour propre. The Japanese government’s nationalisation of two of the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands was a move calculated to “hurt the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese people,” as China’s Foreign Ministry put it, and also to harm bilateral trade worth more than US$300 billion. What leverage has the PRC been able to exercise in these circumstances? Wesley suggests that “an offer by Beijing to forestall a move by its firms into components manufacturing could be highly compelling to a country whose industry would be heavily affected,” but fails to take into account that a country consists of more than the state. In the case of Japan, an elected mayor of Tokyo was prepared to buy the islands concerned if the Japanese government did not. Electoral politics can work against economic rationalism, and so can populist nationalism.

IN THE blurb for Australia and China at 40 Stephen FitzGerald describes the contents as “neither political nor polemical.” It is true that the contributors on the whole avoid becoming heated. Nonetheless, political sensitivities inherent in the relationship are clear from differences in the views expressed, arising in part from differences in national perspectives. The list of contributors shows that the authors, all male, include three from Chinese institutions and two others who are former Chinese nationals. Among the challenges of the China–anyplace relationship is establishing what can be said with impunity in any shared forum, especially by the Chinese representatives. China is a country where publishing an opinion can land the writer in trouble. For this reason, it can never be absolutely straightforward for a Chinese scholar to engage in a collaborative writing project, and politics is always implicated at some level.

One major difference of opinion is to be found in contrasting perceptions of who is doing best out of the relationship. Contributors from Chinese institutions are inclined to think that China is the underdog; those from Australian institutions tend to think that China is looming too large for comfort. Wesley sees China as doing very well indeed, with everyone else in the region in danger of becoming hostages to its rampant growth. “China’s scale,” he argues, “has allowed it to maintain a reasonably diversified economy and trading profile, while its neighbours’ economies are increasingly restructured around and dependent on their trade with China.” In contrast, Yu Chang Sen, from Zhongshan University in Guangzhou, sees China’s trade position vis-à-vis Australia as weak. His case is roughly as follows. China is highly dependent on Australia for resources needed to fuel its development, particularly iron ore, which it cannot buy elsewhere without sacrificing much in terms of efficient delivery. Australia, on the other hand, buys from China only things that it could easily buy from someone else – Vietnam or India, for example. Yu shows that the size of China’s trade deficit differs according to the data used: Chinese data shows a deficit nearly twice the size of that indicated by the Australian data. Further, Australia gets more out of the relationship because profit margins for iron ore have widened much more rapidly than profit margins for steel. Finally, Australian agriculture is very competitive, and would place pressure on China’s rural sector if allowed an open door through a free-trade agreement. And despite all these advantages, Yu complains, Australia indulges in “resource nationalism.”

Similarly, Ding Dou, from Peking University, points to the unfavourable terms of trade for China in the bilateral relationship. Central to this perception is the price of iron ore, in conjunction with China’s heavy dependence on Australia as a supplier. Strategies to diversify supply have “met with only marginal success.” Australia, Ding observes, has its own problems, such as the “Dutch disease” arising from a growing over-dependence on Chinese demand for mining products. It has survived the global financial crisis for reasons largely to do with China’s economy, but it is not proving particularly competitive in the non-resources sector.

For Ding Dou, banks are a good example of Australia’s weakness. To quote: “the big three banks in China… now rank as the top three banks in the world in terms of market value. And for the time being, it is Chinese banks that are opening up business investment in Australian resources. In contrast, there is little sign that Australia’s big four banks have taken a foothold in China.” The picture emerging here is of a well-resourced but small and otherwise not very competitive country. Ding mentions the concern in China that “Australian restrictions [on foreign direct investment] are politically motivated” but doesn’t appear to recognise comparable Australian concerns about dealing with China.

What are these concerns? Nick Bisley notes that “when dealing with a Chinese firm one can never be entirely confident that one is dealing simply with a profit-maximising concern.” Unlike a Canadian firm, for example, a Chinese firm is “likely to be suffused with statist interest.” Indeed, China’s major enterprises, including the “big three banks” Ding mentions, are in the main state-owned. Their competitiveness is won at the cost of competitiveness in private enterprise in China, affecting both local and foreign firms. John Lee points out that “three-quarters of all formal finance (ie. bank loans) go to the country’s 130,000 SOEs.” Of these, the 150 leading enterprises, centrally managed, “own two-thirds of all fixed assets in the country while their combined revenues amount to about half of the revenues generated by all publicly and privately owned Chinese firms each year.” This state-owned complex constitutes a mountainous obstacle to foreign investment, compared to which the Australian Foreign Investment Review Board, much vilified by Chinese critics, is as a molehill.

A second area of difference lies in views of the security environment. You Ji’s chapter, “Managing Off-Balance Tripartite Relations: How to Avoid Unnecessary Confrontation,” presents a sustained critique of Australia’s defence policy, with particular reference to the 2009 Defence White Paper, which identified China as a threat. He sees the perception of a “threatening China” as inherent to a pathology characterised by a “tyranny of distance” mentality. This view of the world “may prove to be inadequate,” he writes, to deal “with a complicated process of regional order restructuring as a result of the economic redistribution of power.” Australia emerges from his discussion as hostage to its own historically grounded security anxieties, which lead it, arguably against its own interests, to cling to a US-centred defence system. Beijing, by contrast, has dealt “wisely” with Australia, even in the face of provocation. China “holds the view,” according to You Ji, “that major powers differ in political systems and security interests, but that all face a common need to foster economic prosperity.”

John Lee does not directly take issue with this juxtaposition of anxious Australia, but presents a very different China in a more complex strategic environment. First, countering a general tendency to accept China’s growth as a natural and self-described “peaceful” rise, he identifies China with the Chinese Communist Party and a geopolitical program: “China under the CCP is predisposed to seek leadership of Asia and to recast the regional order according to its preferences.” Quoting his own very quotable phrase, “the loneliest rising power in world history,” he portrays a China that has failed to develop allies in the region. It is rising moreover, “within an order that is now characterised by ‘democratic community’ as one of its key pillars,” and that is favourable, in terms of national dispositions, to maintaining American pre-eminence in the region. Within the region China has proved unable to exercise economic leverage, not least because “at least half and perhaps as much as two-thirds of its trade with East and Southeast Asia is ‘processing’ trade.” What Wesley sees as regional dependence on, indeed capture by, the Chinese economy, Lee sees as China’s dependence on the rest of Asia. He warns against the hope that a friendly China will be a loyal friend. Its “willingness to ‘reward’ strategic friends,” he counsels, “is as elusive as its capacity to ‘punish’ potential strategic competitors.”

LEE’s is among the more thought-provoking of the contributions to a book that is generally useful for marking where Australia and China sit in relationship to each other forty years after recognition. The authors are mostly concerned either with the structure of the economic relationship or with the implications of that relationship for defence and security. Non-traditional security, people-to-people relations, cultural exchange, migration, tourism, education: these are among the many aspects of the forty-year history that are not touched on at all. It must be concluded that they did not fall into the scope of the book as planned.

A preoccupation with the tripartite relationship between Australia, China and the United States is overwhelmingly apparent in the book. The rest of the region, and the world, form a pale backdrop. But it is likely that Australia’s actions and reactions in regard to both China and the United States are not totally peculiar to itself but consistent with global trends. Recently the Guardian published an article by Jonathan Kaiman called “Maple Leaf Ragged: What Ails Canada?” No Australian reading this could fail to recognise the key phrases – “undercurrent of anxiety,” “harsh crackdown on illegal immigrants,” “increasingly toeing the US line” in foreign relations, “adjusted environmental policy” and so on – or to identify with the issues raised. Canada has its Afghanistan, its Indigenous population, even its Pauline Hanson, who is there called Pauline Marois.

It is worth recalling that Canada established relations with China in 1970, two years before Australia. Jenny Hocking discusses the implications for Australia in the first volume of her biography of Gough Whitlam. In brief, Canada, as a wheat producer, was able to supplant Australia as a provider to China. In 1971, Hocking records, China failed to renew the Australian Wheat Board’s $100 million contract. That hotbed of radicalism the Victorian Farmers’ Union, passed a motion urging the McMahon government to recognise China. The rest, as they say, is history. •

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ON MONDAY this week, 4 June, international news agencies reported a police crackdown on petitioners arriving at Beijing South Railway Station. Having made their way to the capital in the hope of getting justice for wrongs suffered in their various home towns, hundreds of people were summarily interviewed and sent back to where they came from. The aim of the exercise, the police made clear, was to avoid the possibility of a mass protest on the twenty-third anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre.

In Tiananmen Square itself, the police, or at least police vehicles, were unusually numerous; and in the centre of the square the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs was isolated within a much larger enclosure than usual, as though to forestall the possibility of anyone climbing on it, as students did back in the spring of 1989. But China is full of fences and security personnel, and the out-of-towners wandering around the square probably noticed nothing untoward. It was a Monday, when the mausoleum containing Mao’s corpse is closed to visitors, which probably explains why there weren’t very many of them.

Tiananmen Square, created in the early 1950s, can be seen in its original form – a vast empty space bordered on the north side by Changan Avenue – in Antonioni’s 1974 film, China. In recent years it has become cluttered and tawdry-looking, with fences and security stations along the perimeter diminishing the visual impact. Advertising and propaganda films play continuously on long, low screens in the centre of the square, and large installations are periodically wheeled in to advertise national events of note. The currently advertised event is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting, which has brought Vladimir Putin, among other heads of state, to town this week.

A twenty-third anniversary is not a particularly important one: it does not mark the passage of another decade, or a quarter century, or any of those time periods on which we confer commemorative significance. But each anniversary has its own features. On 25 May this year seventy-three-year-old Ya Weilin hung himself in a parking lot in Beijing, nine days before the twenty-third anniversary of the death of his son, Ya Aiguo, one of the victims of the 4 June killings. On 27–28 May, a group of mainly elderly people held a protest in a public park in Guiyang, capital of the southern province of Guizhou, surprisingly without interference from the police (although there were follow-up detentions). Small demonstrations, again by people in this age group, were held in some other cities.

A striking feature of most reports about 4 June protests in recent years is the age of the people involved. They are the parents and the former teachers of the dead, or even officials who were caught up in the events. Between these older people, extending down to the 1989 generation itself, and the current younger generation, born in the eighties or after, is a great gulf in knowledge about political events over the forty years between 1949 and 1989.

Not so long ago, a curious researcher showed the iconic photo of the man in front of the tank in June 1989 to a number of young people in China, none of whom was able to identify it. How could they know? Their education is devised to prevent them knowing many aspects of their own country’s past. Chinese students attending a summer subject on Chinese history at Melbourne University earlier this year were amazed to find that a man called Wei Jingsheng, of whom they had never heard, was famous outside China. They read with fascination (and diverse reactions) his now classic essay, “The Fifth Modernisation,” written up as a wall poster on Democracy Wall in Beijing in April 1979.

It’s unlikely that people of this generation were watching Beijing Television at 8 pm last Monday night, the time slot for Extraordinary Recollections (Feichang jiyi), an interview program designed to create a congenial collective memory of the twentieth century. The program has youthful hosts (one male, one female) and a studio audience old enough, on average, to be their parents. The guests that night were two women who served on the personal staff of Premier Zhou Enlai from 1964 until his death in 1976. Their place of employment was the Great Hall of the People, which flanks the west side of Tiananmen Square, so the program was oddly appropriate for the night of 4 June.

The program perfectly captured the quality of the silence hanging over much of the history of contemporary China. One of the two women, Jin Yaoling, inadvertently provided what could be taken as a historiographical premise when she quoted the first principle of job training in the Great Hall of the People: “Don’t ask about what you don’t know; don’t speak about what you overhear.” In the forty-five minutes that followed, viewers learnt that Zhou Enlai did not sleep for three days and three nights during a certain “incident” in September 1971; that the non-smoking premier actually smoked a cigarette during this time; that on the occasion of the reception for US president Richard Nixon in the Great Hall of the People Zhou put on a new black woollen suit; and that he was just like a father to his young staff – indeed, to the whole country. Like many a Chinese popular film or television show, the program concluded with everyone in tears, including the hosts.

Of the many things that were not mentioned in this interview, the most conspicuous was the name of Lin Biao, Mao’s right-hand man and defence minister, whose plan to depose Mao was sprung on 13 September 1971. In fact, in the course of around seven minutes’ discussion of the incident, neither hosts nor guests made any allusion to what it entailed. Nor was the name of any other Communist Party leader, apart from Zhou himself, uttered in the course of the program – a triumph of tight scripting, to say the least.

Less surprising was silence about another incident, one precipitated by Zhou Enlai’s death. Whether or not he deserved it, Zhou was idolised in China. By the time of his death he had become the repository of people’s faint hopes for something better than what was offered them by Mao and the Cultural Revolution. His death in early 1976 prompted an outpouring of grief: on 5 April of that year, “tomb sweeping day,” Tiananmen Square was awash with wreaths and filled with mourners. It was a spontaneous gathering at the time of year when people in China were accustomed to attending to the spirits of their deceased forbears.

As would happen in 1989, what began as mourning turned into a political protest, and on the morning of 6 April the demonstrators were cleared from the square by military force. Beijing people of a certain age must have recalled that incident as they watched Monday night’s program. Some of them must have been there. Mao’s supporters, the so-called “Gang of Four,” blamed Deng Xiaoping for the demonstrations, which were declared a counterrevolutionary movement. It was a strange foreshadowing of 4 June 1989, when Deng himself would be calling in the troops to clear the square. Surprisingly, there were no reported fatalities in 1976. The difference appears to have been that the demonstrators in that case were clubbed, while in 1989 they were shot.

In a new book called Conversations with Chen Xitong, author Yao Jianfu reveals the regrets felt by the eighty-one-year-old jailed former mayor of Beijing about what happened in Tiananmen Square on 4 June. It was a “regrettable tragedy,” he said, and “could have been avoided.” Published in Hong Kong on the eve of the twenty-third anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, this book is a good example of the kind of history that won’t be available in Chinese bookstores in the forseeable future. •

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WHAT do Chinese bloggers blog about if they’re not allowed to comment on what the rest of the world is talking about? In the course of April, the names of Bo Xilai (corrupt high official) and Chen Guangcheng (blind defender of human rights) both became unmentionable on the China-wide-web. This must have made life difficult for more than the bloggers. Chen Guangcheng being a common name, it is probable that thousands of people have been affected; and words like “blind” and “sunglasses” have also become sensitive as censors track the use of nicknames by inventive netizens.

Fortunately there is always a little scandal to talk about if the big one is off limits. As the Bo Xilai saga was unfolding in the international media, the Wang Qian saga was unfolding in Chinese cyberspace. The two cases have been feeding off each other in daily conversation: like Bo Xilai’s son, Guagua, Wang Qian is the indulged child of a party official. China is full of parents anxious about the future of the one precious child most of them have, and nothing galls them like the privileges enjoyed by someone else’s offspring.

Wang Qian is “gen nineties,” as everyone in China now knows. She was born in October 1991, and will be celebrating her twenty-first birthday later this year if she is in the mood for it. Until recently, her father, party member Wang Dawu, was a provincial-level official serving as director of large projects within the Development and Reform portfolio of the Hunan provincial government. Large projects give an official access to lots of money, and enable him (rarely her) to wield power and influence over officials further down the provincial hierarchy.

A powerful official can make his subordinates do nearly anything, but he cannot always get his only child to study hard. Wang Qian attended the top high school in her hometown but failed to distinguish herself in the national matriculation exam. According to media reports, she undertook tertiary study at the University of Hertfordshire (Singapore), or claimed to have done so. UH(S) may be a virtual campus: an organisation called the TMC Academy in Singapore has partnerships with half a dozen British universities, including Hertfordshire, and awards certificates, diplomas and degrees accredited by those institutions.

After a year’s study, with some sort of certificate in hand, Qian returned home to a difficult job market in China. In recent years, graduates around the country have been queuing up for lowly positions, and those from overseas universities face particular difficulties. By definition, they are poorly networked, without teachers and fellow students in the system to help them along. Party and government positions are especially unlikely to go to overseas graduates, even those from a good American university. Half a qualification from UH(S) was not likely to cut the mustard.

Qian’s advantage was a father in the system. In September 2010, just short of her nineteenth birthday, she obtained a position in the key projects office of the development and reform bureau of a county in west Hunan province. She then applied for leave from the same position to continue her studies, but apparently without having the course certified by the Ministry of Education’s study abroad centre. This has since given rise to suspicions in China that there is no such thing as UH(S). In October 2011 she was formally admitted to the ranks of the civil service, and in November, at the ripe old age of age of twenty, she was selected for the position of deputy head of the development and reform bureau in Yuetang District, Xiangtan, not far east of Mao Zedong’s old hometown.

Perhaps her father thought that no one would notice what was going on down in the depths of Hunan province, and perhaps no one would have if it were not for the fact that new appointments are usually listed in accessible places. On 19 April this year, the Xiangtan municipal government released the list of new appointments to office. In accordance with regulations, the table showed name, present position, new position, year and month of first official appointment, and year and month of birth. The Chinese bureaucracy is nothing if not thorough. Twenty-year-old Wang Qian, incoming deputy bureau head, was revealed to be the youngest appointee by a margin of six years, and the only non–party member. She was quickly dubbed “the goddess of Xiangtan,” a mocking reference by netizens to her supposed super powers.

It is a sign of the hubris of Communist Party officials that Wang Dawu failed to predict the ensuing uproar on the internet. The reaction led to an investigation and, on 28 April, father and daughter were both stripped of their positions. The head of the local organisation department, who had had to approve Wang Qian’s appointment, was transferred. All the party members involved underwent internal party discipline. Wang Qian avoided this, not being a party member, but has seen her name dragged through the mud of internet commentary, jokes and cartoons. It seems that a photo of her circulating in the early stages of this story was soon removed from the internet, but when the print media began to cover the story, photographs of both father and daughter were published.

It is hard not to see this spoiled girl as a victim of very bad parenting, not unlike Bo Guagua, the Ferrari-driving (or was that a Porsche?) party boy (the usual party, not the Communist one) with his 2nd from Oxford and his shattered hopes of Harvard. Wang Qian’s mother hasn’t killed anyone, and as far as we know her father hasn’t had anyone tortured, but as parents they have something in common with Bo Guagua’s parents. Like King Midas, who wanted everything he touched to turn into gold, they have ended up destroying their own children.

The Chinese Communist Party, which has a tradition of presenting itself as the parents of the people, is of course anxious to dissociate itself from these erring ones. On 2 May, the party’s news site posted a thundering response to the Wang Qian case, declaring its unity with the people in its abhorrence of favouritism, connections and the abuse of power in the making of appointments. The netizens will be having a field day. •

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THE contrast between unfolding political dramas in Burma and China this year has been striking: on one side of the border, democracy and hope; on the other, corruption, murder, and crackdowns on the internet. In the middle of April, a Chinese netizen went online to ask why China seemed incapable of producing a Gandhi or an Aung San Suu Kyi. The question was addressed to Yu Jianrong, famously outspoken professor of rural development in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who responded dryly that it might better be put to the Central Organization Department. (That department is responsible for keeping the eighty million members of the Chinese Communist Party gainfully employed in running the country.)

As it happened, while Aung San Suu Kyi was out on the campaign trail re-introducing democracy in Burma, Yu Jianrong himself was engaged in drawing up a plan for how to achieve democracy in China. The result was reported briefly in the Western press in late March, not long before the Bo Xilai case began to take up all available room in the media. In a single-page document, posted on the internet as a photo image, Yu set out the steps for a staged transition to constitutional democracy over the next ten years. On 19 April, around six weeks later, the Guangzhou-based current affairs magazine Shidai Zhoukan (Time Weekly) published a long interview with him on this topic, marking the first mention of the document in the Chinese print media.

Yu’s ten-year plan is worth comparing with another online call for constitutional democracy, Charter 08, which in 2009 led to the arrest and imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo. While the fundamental similarities between the two show that he is sailing close to the wind, Yu’s carefully constructed document ultimately stays within the limits of the agenda for change set by Premier Wen Jiabao at the National People’s Congress earlier this year. Charter 08 contains an ambit claim: freedom, equality, human rights, a new constitution, separation of powers, protection for the environment, the whole shebang. Yu’s plan itemises measures necessary to achieve social justice in the first phase of reform (2012–15), and to implement political reforms in the second. His priorities in social justice are clear: rural land rights, social welfare and the reform of the urban–rural household registration system. A second tranch of projected reforms, to the judicial system, would lead to the abolition of the petitioning system and of “education through labour” camps. Only then does he get to free speech. It might be concluded that he has put someone else’s problems ahead of his own.

Interviewed for the New York Times, Liu Yu of Tsinghua University criticised the ten-year plan as “unrealistic,” comparing it unfavourably with approaches in the West where intellectuals “make proposals on specific things,” rather than developing blueprints for the whole country. But it doesn’t require a very close reading of this plan to recognise Yu’s trademark concerns: rural land grabs by local officials; entrenched inequalities resulting from the urban–rural household registration system; and the gross mistreatment of petitioners – people who, for want of other means, seek redress for injustices by appealing to the authorities, and end up in prison, hospital, sometimes even the morgue, for their pains.

It is these issues that have made Yu Jianrong a familiar figure on the virtual horizon in recent years. He is less a democracy activist than a rights activist. Blunt, tenacious and generous, he is well known to at least two types of audience in China. One consists of officials, especially officials at the county level, to whom he often delivers lectures. A professor from the Rural Development Research Institute in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences is a sought-after commodity for training purposes, and he gets lots of invitations. The second audience, which must include much of the first, is composed of netizens.

Yu Jianrong is not quite up there with the renowned Han Han as a blogger, but his website began hotting up in November 2010 after he posted a comment concerning an encounter with an official in Wanzai county, Jiangxi province. The official had taken exception to comments made by Yu about unlawful demolitions. Online, Yu quoted him as saying: “No demolition, no development. If we officials don’t demolish, what will you intellectuals eat?” A couple of journalists keeping track of blog traffic subsequently reported that the sentence had been re-posted 3000 times within twenty-two hours, eliciting 2000 new strings of commentary.

Wanzai is an agrarian county in the middle of China which it had done well out of rural commercialisation in the 1980s but was left behind during the “get rich is glorious” nineties. Yu had done some homework before he went there, and knew the range of problems he would find there. Rural problems, in his view, can all be traced to the absence of property title, which leaves rural communities helpless in face of local officials colluding with big business to take over their land. Rising conflicts in the countryside are a result, as is a stream of petitioners to Beijing.

On the latter subject, Yu’s due diligence uncovered an unsavoury figure in the person of the party secretary of Wanzai, one Chen Xiaoping (who has since been promoted to a position elsewhere). Chen was on record as having a three strikes policy for petitioners, who are typically peasants heading off to Beijing to complain about local officials: first “offenders” were to be reprimanded and fined; second offenders were to be remanded; third offenders were to be re-educated through labour. This story elucidates the close connection in Yu’s ten-year plan between the petition system and re-education through labour.

Wanzai is not the poorest county in Jiangxi, but like most rural areas it sends large numbers of its young people as migrant labourers to major urban centers. This phenomenon underpins another of Yu Jianrong’s concerns: access by rural migrants to education, health, insurance, and rights in general. The disadvantage of rural migrants in this respect is a legacy of the household registration system, introduced in the late fifties. At that time, urban registration meant access to grain and cotton rations coupons. These were resources which country people were meant to supply for themselves. But it meant, for instance, that during the famine of 1959–61 peasants making their way into the towns were unable to buy grain there, and starved anyway.

The coupon system has long since gone, but there remains a sharp difference between urban and rural people to education and health care entitlements, both because these services are poorly funded in the countryside and because access to well-funded resources in the towns is extremely costly for anyone who is not registered there. The children of rural migrant workers in Beijing, for example, have no natural right to education at a local school. Migrant workers who can pay for a good education for their child here will find all their best efforts to secure a city education frustrated in the end because the child will have to sit for matriculation in the area where the family is registered. For this reason, Yu’s ten-year plan links education to the issue of household registration.

AN INTERVIEW conducted by Taiwanese researcher Chen Yizhong last year shed some light on Yu’s engagement with such issues. The son of a communist party member and minor local official, he was four years old when his father was “struggled into the ground” during the Cultural Revolution. The family was stripped of its precious city registration, and was unable to secure registration in the countryside either. For around eight years, his mother fed her children by foraging. His father was rehabilitated in 1977, but died shortly afterwards. He and his sister travelled “everywhere,” he recalls, petitioning on their mother’s behalf for recognition and compensation for the family’s sufferings. His personal story took a turn for the better when he gained entry to university through competitive exam in 1979.

Such stories are common among the families of officials and intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution, but they do not often produce champions of the poor. One thing that stands out in Yu’s particular saga is the family’s loss of registration papers, which in the bizarre world of revolutionary bureaucracy left them as non-people (fei min), like animals scavenging for a living. He describes the driving intellectual interest of his early years as lying in this problem: understanding the process by which people could become non-people. Disenabling this process is not on the timeline of his ten-year plan, but it would surely be among the effects of its implementation. •

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Tomb-sweeping day in China fell on Wednesday 4 April this year, just before Easter. I meant to catch a subway that day to Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery: the Number 1 line runs nearly to the gate. But something else cropped up and I missed my chance to stand at a respectful distance and observe the sweeping. I might not have made it onto the train, anyway, because even on ordinary days the Number 1 subway is packed. In fact, lots of people attend to their grave duties before the actual day so as to avoid the crush.

In all, the festival period lasted three days. The government decided a few years ago to make Qingming (its proper name) a national holiday, and now organises the working week so that people can travel back home to the ancestral graves if they live far away. But most people just take a holiday and, if they go anywhere at all, visit local sites. The subway line going to the Beijing Zoo was expected to carry around two and a half million people over the first two days of the holiday period. This is in keeping with the spirit of the season: Qingming is a time for picnics and kite-flying as well as for tending graves.

On Thursday, life was back to normal. In the Western calendar, Thursday is Maundy Thursday, not a day much marked any more, even in Anglophone societies, but broadly part of Easter. For Chinese Christians, it is the “feast day of washing feet,” a reference to events at the Last Supper. On this day, the children at the school across the road from our apartment could be heard singing the national anthem (“arise, people who are unwilling to be slaves/let us build a new great wall with our flesh and blood!”). It is an experimental school. The perimeter fence is adorned with over 200 plaques attesting to its achievements as a model school, a progressive school and a progressive grassroots party organisation (this last complete with hammer and sickle).

Unlike Christmas, Easter has made little imprint on China. You will search Beijing in vain for chocolate eggs, or for currants for your hot cross buns. Easter services are held in churches across the city, but there are restrictions on what people can attend. Last year there was a major crackdown on an unregistered church in the western part of Beijing, where the congregation had attempted to organise an outdoor service after they lost their meeting hall.

There are plenty of registered churches in the city, and by way of marking Easter Sunday, we decided to go to one. St Joseph’s in Wangfujing, otherwise known as the East Cathedral (Dongtang), falls within the folds of the Patriotic Catholic Church. Although an underground Catholic Church exists as well, the Patriotic one is easier to attend. A church has stood on this site, not far from the Forbidden City, since the seventeenth century; the present building, completed in 1905, was constructed after its predecessor was burnt down during the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

The service was advertised as a Latin mass, which is a curiosity anywhere nowadays, but it turned out to be in Chinese after all. The 7 am service was packed, with people crowded into pews and standing two or three deep at the back of the church and along the side aisles. An electronic board carried the congregational responses, which were sung in plain chant. The congregation was a mixture of ages, but elderly women predominated. They were dressed simply, some even quite poorly, and they were small, as though malnourished in their early years. There were no children in the church, making me wonder whether they were not allowed to attend. But as the mass was winding up, families with children began pouring in, impatient to take the seats about to be vacated in time for the later service.

It was a long time since I had been to any church service other than a requiem, but I observed differences. In Catholic churches in Australia, the sign of peace is manifested by shaking hands with one’s neighbours. In Beijing it is made by bowing. Catholics at home bow their heads when saying the name of the Lord (Jesus, that is), or at least they used to do so; but in Beijing, people perform a bodily bow. At communion, taken by most of the congregation, the electronic board instructed non-Catholics in the congregation how to receive the host if they wanted to, which seemed a bit startling, but maybe that’s tolerated everywhere in this permissive age.

Otherwise, it all felt rather familiar. There was a grown-up altar boy serving mass, dressed in a red soutane with white surplice. Two young women divided the duties of reading the epistle and the prayers of the faithful. The gospel, read by the white-haired priest, told of Mary Magdalene going to the tomb and finding it empty. The priest had a southern accent and must have been around seventy: that would mean he was baptised around 1942, if born into a Catholic family, and would have been old enough to be imprisoned during the anti-rightist campaign in 1957–58. In his sermon, he reminded his parishioners that Easter was a time of new life, but his main theme was keeping holy the Sabbath day. Sunday was a day that Christianity had given to the world, he said. They should take a break on this day: people work too much.

This made me recall an old Chinese film called Jintian wo xiuxi (“Today’s my day off”), a 1959 comedy about a policeman in Shanghai who found that his day of rest was employed in helping people. When people in China get nostalgic about the old days, this is what they remember: a time when Uncle Policeman helped you instead of taking bribes. Maybe on another Sunday there will be a sermon on “thou shalt not steal.”

I looked in the papers next day to see if there were any reports of incidents related to Easter celebrations and didn’t find any, but I learnt from one small column that while we were sitting in church with the broad masses of the people, a conference on the revival of Confucianism was getting under way at Peking University on the other side of the city. A descendant of Confucius in the seventy-ninth generation had crossed the strait from Taiwan to participate – not quite the second coming, perhaps, but fitting in with the general theme of new beginnings. •

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A few months earlier, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement had published an article by Wesley about “Australian Education in the Asian Century.” At the conference, he took a lateral approach to the theme of that essay by asking his audience to imagine a “Generation Z” in 2030, a generation of “knowledge empowered and networked” students, all asking why they should pay for an Australian university education if it would not help them compete with “ten million graduates of Chinese universities.” Charging the university system in Australia with elitism, he threw down a gauntlet before the assembled vice-chancellors: “Justify your privileged position, your public funding, your cloistered existence by making sure that we are at the forefront of the knowledge economy.” The Australian carried a lengthy report of the lecture and ensuing questions, and placed the full text of the address on its website.

It would be interesting to know what all those vice-chancellors were thinking as they listened to this lecture. Could any of what Wesley said have been new to people who spend their days pondering the challenges of changing technologies, university rankings, and Asia? That he should find it “curious” for Australian universities to be “so Western in character” was perhaps novel. On this point, they might have wondered whether Chinese universities, too, were not rather Western in some of the respects that especially attracted Wesley’s ire: mortarboards at graduation, faux gothic architectural features where possible, and valorisation of the classics.

And here’s the rub. Towards the end of the session, Wesley put the rhetorical question of whether we in Australia have “made any progress in internationalising – really Asianising – how we think about knowledge.” What does “Asianising” mean? One of the challenges for Ken Henry in producing the white paper on Australia in the Asian Century will be to define such terms. Historically, Asia has served as a catch-all phrase for societies that were literate but not Christian: hence its application to places from Turkey in the west to the Philippines in the east. It may be approaching its use-by date. Societies in this enormous region are in flux. They differ greatly from one to the next in approaches to knowledge, among other things, and often have points – sometimes vast areas – of similarity to Western societies.

Does Wesley think we should Asianise in an Indian way, or in a Chinese way – to mention two rather different possibilities? India, with its strong British intellectual traditions and English-language culture of learning, a place where one can still read statements such as “Western culture is humanity’s culture”: will that provide sufficiently “Asian” ways of thinking? Perhaps not. And probably Wesley was not thinking of India at all, but of China, which is actually what Australians now often mean by Asia, even if they throw in India for good measure.

Consideration of the China option, however, suggests that “Asianising” ways of thinking about knowledge is not a concept to be bandied about with impunity. In China, with its 2263 universities, knowledge is not so much acquired as selectively dispensed. This is a very particular sort of knowledge economy. Students take seven to ten subjects a semester, sitting in classrooms to be lectured at for three hours at a stretch. In assignments, they repeat back to the teacher what the teacher has said to them, and are praised for it. The most common question asked of a lecturer by a Chinese undergraduate writing an essay in an English-language institution must surely be: “Do I have to give my own opinion?” But teachers also watch what they say. Students can get upset by statements that sound unpatriotic, and report them to the university leaders, or even to the police.

The surprising thing about this system is its failure to eliminate every last spark of intellectual life in China, but the effect overall is not good. Employers complain about graduates’ lack of initiative and the government frets about the failure of its top universities to produce creativity on demand. The pressures on academics and students alike are enormous. Academics write with care and restraint to avoid political problems, then have their writings censored, or else rejected as incompatible with the “national situation.” Plagiarism is rife throughout the system.

Are these just growing pains? On 21 March, the Australian’s Higher Education Supplement carried a report on research by Oxford academic Janette Ryan on comparative attitudes of educators in Confucian-heritage and Anglo-heritage cultures. According to the report, these educators share a vocabulary of “catchwords” for education, including “originality, imagination, independence and challenges to authority.” Such a finding gives ballast to the views of Michael Spence, vice-chancellor of Sydney University, who last year dismissed problems of academic freedom in China on grounds that things are changing. The Chinese government is “asking all the right questions,” he said, and “is committed to having an innovative university system.” The picture emerging from these references to the carefully cultivated signs of normalcy in China is of a hardworking society earnestly pursuing the goal of a higher education system featuring universal values of learning.

THERE is something missing from this picture, and it is the Chinese Communist Party, sometimes hard to see because of its ubiquity. Universities in Australia (or my university at least) make “breadth” subjects compulsory. Universities in China make classes in Marxism-Leninism compulsory. Universities in Australia have benign chancellors, who preside over graduations. Universities in China have party secretaries, whose task it is to make sure “challenges to authority” are not challenges to the government – that is, to the party. Hence the plight of a former associate professor at Nanjing Normal University, Guo Quan: original, imaginative, independent, and imprisoned for ten years in 2009.

Having taught in China, Michael Wesley must be fully aware of all of this, and it is not to be supposed that he means we need a system like China’s when he talks about Asianising. But what exactly does he mean? His overall point, to judge by the shock-and-awe numbers that he produced for his audience (nicely illustrating a point he has made about Australians’ tendency to talk about Asia in numbers), is that Australian universities need to remain competitive in the region. The thousands of universities in China and India, crammed with hard-working, high-achieving students, are threatening to render our own redundant. A return to rote learning is among the preventative treatments he suggests. It is not clear how rote learning would serve to nurture “the critical thought, innovation and the courage needed to push back against and shape society’s trends and pressures” he envisages as desirable for the future university. It plainly does not nurture those things in China.

If we are seriously to engage or compete with universities in Asia to a greater extent than is now the case, we need to be clear about what we want our own education system to be. Is it possible to compete with Chinese universities on their terms? Probably not. The students in China are engaged in a Darwinian struggle: too many students, not enough places. Students in primary school stay up to 10 pm doing homework, and are awake again at 6 am to get to school. High school students probably average six hours of sleep a night Monday to Thursday. They go to school on weekends to learn what they weren’t taught in school during the week. Their mothers sit up beside them, feeding and coaching them as they slog their way through sums and multiple choice and fill-in-the-word.

There may be something to be said for such a mode of life, but it is not going to take off in Australia any time soon. These habits of hard work are by no means maintained throughout the years of university, but they underpin the skill levels achieved in maths, the sciences and languages, especially English.

Under these circumstances, Australian universities should be looking not to compete, but to co-exist with universities in China, and elsewhere, in a meaningful way. One of the things that we now offer students, local and international, is a liberal education that fosters critical thinking and creativity. If “innovative” comes to be defined by what the Chinese government envisages then we may not have it for too much longer, but while it is still with us, it may be worth exploiting for what it has to offer in terms of niche markets for learning in our regions. Like many Australian academics, I have taught Chinese students in both China and Australia. I agree with Michael Wesley about their “hunger and ambition,” but where the hunger is for knowledge, it is not one they can easily satisfy at home.

There are high levels of cynicism in China about the value of the education to which children are subjected. A typical response to Shanghai’s strong showing in the secondary school numeracy and literacy rankings released last year was a rueful comment on life-long outcomes: “Our students can top the exams, but then no one ever hears of them again.” For Chinese students who drift by chance into an Australian classroom where history, politics, philosophy and literature are actually being debated rather than simply taught, the effects are, in my experience and those of many of my colleagues, electric. The impact is not one-sided. I would be surprised if closer examination bore out Wesley’s charge that “Australian educators have continued to teach using the same knowledge frameworks and teaching techniques they always did.” He may not have been inside a classroom for a while.

To go with our strengths means developing them. The “knowledge-empowered, and networked” students that Wesley imagines populating our campuses in 2030 are already with us. It is their education that should now be preoccupying us: in 2030, they will be teaching the next generation. Many of our current students are themselves from “Asia,” or only one generation removed. For all the others, Asia is important. With proper support, thousands of them could be spending one of the three or four years of their undergraduate degrees studying in places like China, Indonesia, India or Vietnam. They would love it, and benefit from it. This would not necessarily result in Australia’s universities looking any more “Asian,” but it would do a lot for the quality of their Australianness. Such a project would depend, of course, on funds, which are no longer as public or as plentiful as Wesley has implied. •

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