The Ukraine is not Vietnam: just ask the Vietnamese

One of the more banal and asinine lines of commentary to come out of the online ‘progressive’ and ‘anarchist’ left in recent months regarding the situation in the Ukraine, is the idea that the Ukraine is, or should be, ‘Russia’s Vietnam’, and that the left should support the Zelensky government in its war against Russia for the same reasons the left supported the Vietnamese partizans in their war against America.

You know who doesn’t find this line of argument compelling? The Vietnamese people. Along with the government which actually fought the Americans out of their country.

A few days ago, at Davos, Texas Republican congressman Michael McCaul snapped a picture of what he claimed were the Chinese delegation, sitting down during a standing ovation given to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a speech. He later claimed that they walked out on the speech. The only problem seems to have been that the Chinese delegation was not actually present at Zelenskyy’s speech at Davos. Instead, at that time, they were meeting with the executive director of the International Energy Agency. The people who sat during Zelensky’s speech and left without applauding were actually the Vietnamese delegation.

I think a passing comment may be justified here about Rep. McCaul’s utter and embarrassing stupidity (additionally disgraceful considering he’s somehow the lead GOP member on the House Committee of Foreign Affairs) in leaping instantly to the conclusion that the Asian-looking men in suits sitting next to him had to be Chinese… and his subsequent malevolence in using that photo in an attempt to rile up anti-Chinese sentiment on CNN. This is precisely the same sort of logic which motivates random racially-motivated attacks on, not only Chinese and Vietnamese, but Thai and Hmong people in the US. In a more civilised time and place, Rep. McCaul would probably be forced – at the very least – to resign from his position on the Committee of Foreign Affairs. However, it is sadly unlikely that he will face any professional repercussions at all for his imbecilic race-baiting.

But more to the point: Vietnam—along with other nations in East and Southeast Asia such as China, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia—has taken a position of principled neutrality on the current conflict. Vietnam has steadfastly opposed economic sanctions on Russia, and its statesmen have responded quite negatively (using decidedly undiplomatic language) when the Biden administration tried pressuring them to adopt the sanctions. And, it is also worth noting, the Vietnamese people tend to be far more pro-Russia than the government. It’s common for Vietnamese citizens to refer to the Russian president as ‘Uncle Putin’… an epithet of endearment which deliberately echoes the public veneration for Ho Chi Minh. In general, the citizens of Vietnam tend to see Russia as being a close friend and geopolitical ally during the Sino-Soviet split. More recently, the Vietnamese military has largely been equipped with Russian armaments, and Russia has cancelled 85% of Vietnam’s sovereign debts going back to the Soviet period.

The fact of the matter which the Vietnamese delegation’s non-applause of Zelensky and precipitous exit at Davos symbolise, is that the Vietnamese government—which, by the way, is made up largely of men who were children or service-aged young adults during the War—simply do not see the situation in the Ukraine as analogous to their own. At all. And the Vietnamese delegation happens to be right.

The Vietnamese people were fighting against two overseas colonial powers. They were fighting against two nations—France, then the United States—which sought to keep their population addicted to opium and exploitable as a cheap labour pool, resource mine and tax base. Later, the Vietnamese people were essentially conscripted as proxies in the Cold War, as they saw their interests as more aligned with the Soviet Union than with the United States. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the situation in the Ukraine is nowhere close to analogous.

The history is entirely different. French colonialism in Vietnam began in the 1880s and was replaced, functionally, by American colonialism in the 1950s. The relationship between France and Vietnam was very clearly one of imperial master and colonial subject. By contrast, the Ukraine and Russia are both successor states of the same polity—the Rus’ polity—which was first centred at Holmgarðr (Novgorod) under the Viking prince Rurik and later at Kœnugarðr (Kiev) under his brother-in-law Oleg. The development of a ‘Ukrainian’ identity within the Rus’ actually only emerged by way of the divergence of the areas of Rus’ that were under Polish-Lithuanian rule from the areas of Rus’ that were under the rule of the Golden Horde. Complicating matters is that there was a class division between the Rus’ who lived in the Carpathians versus the Rus’ who lived in the lower areas. However, suffice it to say that the history involved here is much longer and is simply not as clear-cut as the relationship between coloniser and colonised.

In terms of economics, as well, the situation is entirely different. The occupation of Vietnam by France, and their subsequent economic exploitation, left the Vietnamese population in a condition of complete economic subjugation and penury. Vietnamese people were targeted, in other words, for exploitation based on their ethnic and linguistic characteristics. In the later decades of colonial domination by France, Vietnamese GDP per capita barely grew at all (and actually fell off toward the end), and average Vietnamese household income ranged between 5 and 10% of the income of the average French household in France. The gap is pretty stark when you look at the data.

There was also exploitation in the Russian Empire, very much so. However, the data suggest that the exploitation did not differentiate between Ukrainians and Russians… and in fact, the Ukrainians had it quite a bit better than most Russians did. Lindert and Nafziger, authoring a paper in the Journal of Economic History, show a picture of the late Russian Empire which demonstrates that the income gradient in that country was not split between north and south—not split between speakers of Ukrainian / Belarusian / Great-Russian—but instead split between west and east, with the west being relatively wealthier and the east (apart from Moscow, of course) being relatively poorer. Ukrainians were, in general, no worse off than the majority of Russians. In fact, in economic terms (apart from Poltava), Ukrainians were in the top income quartile in Imperial Russian metrics. And—unlike in the French overseas empire toward Vietnamese, Laotians, Cambodians, Algerians, Guianese and Cameroonians—there is no evidence of any active attempt by the Imperial Russian government to exploit Ukrainians economically on the basis of a separate identity or racial hierarchy.

And finally, the political character of the governments involved nowadays is entirely different. The Independence League (Viet Minh) in the north and the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) in the south were indeed a movement for national liberation. However, they were also driven by principles of economic fairness and egalitarianism that led them to sympathise with, and ultimately adopt, the ideology of Marxism-Leninism: an ideology which the government of Vietnam still espouses to this day.

By contrast, the current Ukrainian government operates on neoliberal and ethno-nationalist principles. Poroshenko was a Ukrainian ethno-nationalist, and Zelensky is a neoliberal, similar to Russia’s Boris Yeltsin. His landmark legislation, commodifying land for sale on an open market, was wildly unpopular in the Ukraine—but it was encouraged by the IMF as a precondition for loans and was presented as such to the Rada. This is in fact a similar playbook taken to nearly all of the right-wing governments in Latin America in the 1980s. The result of Zelensky’s policies, even if this war had never escalated (though the war is certainly making things worse), is going to be the further impoverishment and demoralisation of the Ukrainian people.

Now, I am not a Marxist-Leninist. I am an Orthodox Christian… an Orthodox Christian with certain social-economic preferences and positions informed by the Basis of the Social Concept. But I can definitely see where the Vietnamese are coming from on this question, and I happen to think their stance on the war is the correct one. I can certainly understand why they wouldn’t out-and-out support Putin in this attack. However, the way the Vietnamese see it, the Ukrainians also aren’t fighting for their own material or political (or, I would add, spiritual) liberation—they’re fighting on behalf a corrupt bourgeois-nationalist government which essentially does the bidding of the US State Department, the IMF and the European Troika. And the thing is: they’re not wrong about that.

Russia and the Ukraine belong, at root, to the same linguistic culture, to the same civilisation, the same Christian religious tradition. Their interests are firmly wrapped up in each other’s welfare—Ukrainians and Russians very often share close family ties which connect them to each other on a personal level. This is one thing which makes the current war, and in fact the past eight years of civil warfare, so appalling. However, if there is to be any kind of lasting peace, then there needs to be first an accord on the basic nature of this reality. That accord is simply not possible if the Ukrainian government keeps attempting to mainline a set of ethno-nationalist fables and pseudo-historical lies in order to forward a neoliberal economic agenda that further enriches the already-wealthy at the expense of everyone else. Just as it is simply not possible if the Russian government keeps attempting to appeal to nostalgia for a lost political order.

A growing Third World consensus position

Here’s an interesting map and dataset from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Now, the accompanying commentary is, of course, bourgeois nonsense (as to be expected from a neoliberal rag like The Economist)… however, the data itself are interesting for several reasons.

The great bulk of the world’s population have not, in contrast to what many in the Western media would tell you, chosen a side in this conflict. Most nations of the global south have either staked out a carefully neutral position through their diplomatic and economic policies, or else they tend to lean mildly in one direction or the other (with Asian and African countries generally leaning in Russia’s direction, and Latin American countries generally leaning in the West’s direction—though there are obviously notable exceptions in all cases).

If there are any commonalities in what one sees coming out of the global south in response to Russia’s assault on the Ukraine, then they are these. Global south countries are willing to condemn the assault itself, but are highly unwilling to back the West’s New Cold War hybrid-war strategy (including economic sanctions, freezing out of international agreements, and weapons sales / shipments) against Russia. The data show a fairly significant cleft between the Washington-Tokyo-London ‘triad’ (now joined unconditionally by Brussels, sadly) and the rest of the world at large. And they show nowhere near as clearly as in the EIU’s own breakdown of support for Russia by population vs by GDP. Countries with low financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s supporters; while countries with high financial clout are overrepresented among Russia’s enemies.

Whether they take this position for economic reasons, reasons of political expediency, ideological alignment or security interests is a matter of debate, of course. And in most cases, this debate ends up being a façade for some rather patronising views of the global south generally. That is to say, Western observers tend to attribute resistance to the Western agenda in the global south to base mercenary motives, corruption or ‘authoritarianism’—while they attribute acquiescence to the same to good-faith democracy-and-human-rights idealism. But the data are what they are.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly on this, but this shows a tendency I’ve been talking about right along on my blog. Even here, though, I’ve been taking my queues somewhat from Dcn Steve Hayes over at his blog, Khanya. The fact that certain of my readers are only just now upset with me, whether for pointing this out or for agreeing with the global south over the new Western bloc, shows that they never have read me very carefully. Ah well, que sera.

It used to be the case that four primates of the Local Churches were devoted to finding a just ecclesiastical solution to Orthodoxy’s geopolitical woes between Moscow and Constantinople. That was before the primates of both Cyprus and Alexandria decided to break fellowship with and betray the Third World by decisively throwing in their lot with the US/NATO bloc. The primates of the Third World had been, in fact, Orthodoxy’s best hope for restoring a just ecclesiastical peace—which might very well have averted a shooting war. Jerusalem and Antioch—both of which have been and continue to be the sites of religiously-motivated violence and discrimination against Christians—may yet manage to be an instrument of God’s justice and of God’s peace in Eastern Europe.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of when a radical Jewish teacher from the backwater Syrian province of Galilee (al-Jalîl), from a humble background in carpentry, was put to death in Jerusalem for opposing the greatest empire in the world of that time, along with that empire’s religious toadies. This is a Jewish teacher Who was venerated by Rome’s official enemies, magi from Parthia, as well as by a Roman centurion; by local collaborators (tax collectors) of this empire, and by local resisters (zealots). In the end, He was crucified between two of these latter. He was betrayed by one of his own disciples. His own step-brothers did not believe in Him. His most trusted disciple denied Him three times. All of the (male) disciples but one fled from danger at His arrest.

This week of all weeks, we should not look for truth to the great centre of financial and military imperial power, to the latter-day Cæsar among his marble monuments and idols on the Washington Mall. Nor should we necessarily look for truth to the rival power, to the latter-day Parthian Shâh in the Kremlin. Adherents of truth may be found in either place, and it is probably easier to find them in the rival power, but those with power will not be likely to be among them. We should not look to the disciples who all fought each other to be at His right hand, yet at the Crucifixion had all deserted their teacher and were nowhere to be found. There is no doubt in my mind that Patriarch Bartholomew (with all of his strivings to claim for himself the honour of ‘first without equals’) is one such disciple… and the jury’s out on whether or not Patriarch Kirill will ultimately be found to be such. We shall see.

Instead, we must look to where the Theotokos stood, to where the disciple John stood, to where Saint Dismas was crucified by the Lord’s side. Look to where the forgotten and crucified peoples of the world are: the Christians and Alawites and other religious minorities of Syria, the Yemenis, the Congolese, the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Kashmiris, the Palestinians, the refugees and civilians of Donbass. Christ will be among them.

What lies behind Singaporean educational success?

Interesting news from the educational realm in Singapore. Singapore’s educational system is widely regarded as one of the best in the world, and its students routinely outclass other nations in test results on standardised international assessment tools like the PISA exams.

Intriguingly, Singapore has ceased standardised testing entirely for primary 1 and primary 2 students, and also switched to giving whole-point test scores and GPAs for students in older grades in order to de-emphasise competition. Singapore’s Minister of Education (now Minister of Health), Ong Ye Kung, has even stated that ‘learning is not a competition’ and therefore the system should not encourage students to think of it as such.

Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it’s a surprising volte-face for a country whose education system has, until fairly recently, been incredibly keen on high-stakes standardised testing. And Singapore’s education system, despite its high outcomes, is not to be considered perfect. Students in Singapore’s school system often report high levels of stress, and mental illness sometimes results from this stress. But there are still a number of other things that Singapore’s educational system does well that we could stand to learn from.

For one thing, greater attention has been paid to the STEM subjects in Singapore than in many other countries. From an early age students are trained to think mathematically and approach problems from a practical point of view. Students are encouraged to retain their curiosity about the natural world by gaining experience in hands-on experiments and projects. This actually helps them to think more creatively across the board. I don’t agree with the late lamented Carl Sagan on everything (to put it mildly), but I do agree with him on this, which he was saying back in 1994: unfortunately, this retention and encouragement of curiosity and wonder in students is something that is being neglected in Western educational systems.

I will also note, to anticipate a possible objection to this, that Singaporean classrooms are infamous for their strictness, marked by demanding uniform codes, emphasis on teacher talking time, lots of drills and memorisation, and even corporal punishment in schools. Now, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment – or of learning-by-rote, for that matter. However, it is worth remembering that strictness, per se, is not incompatible with cultivating curiosity. In order for experiments to yield results worth observing, a highly-regimented formal procedure and cautious painstaking observations, often iterated over a considerable period of time, are necessary. Curiosity requires, and thrives off of, discipline. The two are not necessarily at odds.

In Singapore, all teachers employed by the Ministry of Education are represented by the Singapore Teachers’ Union. The unionisation rate for teachers in Singapore is virtually 100%: a proud distinction they share with that other high achiever in international education metrics, Finland. The median income for teachers in Singapore is about $8,000 a year higher than in the US, despite American GDP per capita being $4,000 per year more than Singapore’s. In general, teachers who are unionised are better-compensated, better-supported and happier, which leads to higher achievement and more consistent outcomes for students.

The other thing that Singapore does well – and the thing which seems to receive the least attention in English-language media on Singapore’s education system – is the fact that there has been a sustained, decades-long push for collaborative educational models in Singapore. The recently-voiced sentiment of Mr Ong Ye Kung that education should not be a competition actually has long standing and precedent in the city-state, as the collaborative model was first introduced around 1985 and has been elaborated upon ever since. Students are encouraged to work together in groups to solve problems rather than compete against each other or hide their results from each other.

The cohort of kids that took the test this past year were raised from primary 1 in an environment that encourages teamwork, collaborative problem-solving, and the understanding that ‘I do well when we all do well’. This is important because the PISA exam, as well as having questions formatted to gauge individual performance, also has a collaborative problem-solving section. But the results would seem to indicate that even on the individual questions, the collaborative problem-solving model of approaching science, engineering and math enhances the results. Human beings are social creatures – and children are no exception! We are often at our best when we are able to learn and discover together, as part of a team. And our experiences with team learning can often help us frame or approach questions creatively even when we’re left on our own to answer them.

To reiterate: Singapore’s school system has definite problems. However: the cultivation of scientific curiosity; the insistence on student discipline; the high unionisation rate and strong collective bargaining stance of teachers; and the strong emphasis on collaborative problem-solving – these are all things that the American school system should learn from and try (within reasonable boundaries) to emulate. Particularly the latter two: strong teachers’ unions and collaborative learning.

Trying to process the Atlanta shootings

It’s been my experience that Clean Week always seems to hit hard with bad news, at least in recent years. Tuesday’s news of the shootings of eight workers in massage parlours in Atlanta kind of struck home hard for me and my family. We haven’t discussed it that much, but it’s been on my mind a lot. Firstly, there is much here to grieve over, much here to pray over. In particular I pray for the affected communities in Atlanta, for the victims and their families, and for the Asian American and Pacific Islander folks in the United States who feel the grief and insecurity of this massacre most keenly.

But it is only natural, as part of that grieving process, to ask ‘why’ and to seek to understand how this could have happened. This case should raise for us Americans several troubling questions surrounding the modern relationship between the sexes. We should be intensely scrutinising how particularly American Protestantism has attempted to address that relationship, and how fraught it has become in recent years. We should be looking closely at the historical ways in which white American (and British and French too, to be fair) men have ideologically colonised the (female, or feminine) Asian body, and how the association of Asian-ness with a certain kind of femininity has fed into sexist myths. And following from this we should be carefully examining the current-day power struggles and ideological struggles between Western and East Asian countries that continue to prop up both the related ‘yellow fever’ construct and the ‘yellow peril’ construct. I’ve already encountered people commenting on this story, already trying to dismiss the killer as ‘mentally ill’ and pointing out his sexual hang-ups to preclude any discussion on how race relations, œconomic exploitation or foreign policy might have had some bearing on his motives or on the vulnerability of the victims. This is remarkably depressing, because there is much that needs to be said along each and every one of these dimensions.

To the first, the fact that there was a self-acknowledged motive of sexual entitlement and ‘sex addiction’ on the part of the killer, and the fact that the killer was a fundamentalist Baptist, are both worth commenting on. To a certain extent, the same commentary that I made in the blog post ‘Misogyny and the flight from feeling’ also applies here. Our culture places a ridiculously unhealthy emphasis on sex. American culture having abandoned healthy traditional rites-of-passage, fraternal and communal forms of male bonding, and ideals of physical fitness and activity in their own right as expressions of masculinity, American manhood is now primarily expressed in the unhealthy terms of capitalist wealth acquisition, risk-seeking behaviours and sexual conquest. Although women have not been desocialised to the same degree by the culture, there is also an unhealthy burden placed on women to make themselves sexually-appealing and -available; contradictorily to remain chaste and ‘pure’; but at the same time also responsible in toto for the consequences of frustrated male libido, including any violence perpetrated against them. The killer in this case seems to have been motivated by the same frustrations, and foisted the responsibility for his own sexual hang-ups onto the women who ‘tempted’ him.

It’s also worth exploring the relationship of how these ‘temptations’ are configured, to the expressions of chiliastic American fundamentalism and the incredible, intolerable psychic burdens that it places on its members as individuals as a result of its apocalypse-oriented legalistic and Calvinistic theology. The Southern Baptist Church of which the killer was a member has, of course, repudiated all of his actions and made a public statement renouncing all forms of misogyny and racism. We may take that statement, for what it’s worth, as sincere and well-meaning. But we also need to be examining the content of the misguided and hæretical theology that this church and its pastor have preached, which absolutely had an effect on the actions the killer chose to take. It is worth asking what sorts of beliefs made him think that murdering masseuses would ‘help’ and ‘protect’ other men, and preserve them from ‘temptation’; and if a belief that the end of time and the threat of hell was imminent might not have accentuated and lent an urgency to these beliefs.

Likewise with the idea that Asian women’s bodies are in some way ‘fair game’ for white Western men – a power dynamic that undergirds an entire marketing and business model of Asian-themed American erotica. That goes all the way back to the days of British and French colonialism in Asia. Among George Orwell’s œuvre (knowledge of which among Americans seems to stop with his anti-Soviet screeds Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm), his book Burmese Days actually manages to be an insightful view into the way that even well-meaning British colonisers used their military power and carefully stage-managed social prestige to sexually dominate and use local women (and then toss them aside). This pattern also held true with the French in colonised Southeast Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the American military in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea (still ongoing), Guam (still ongoing) and Okinawa (still ongoing). The entire stereotype of Asian women as ‘exotic’, hyper-feminine, submissive sex dolls, which figures into the marketing of pornography and prostitution involving Asian women, stems from this long legacy of colonial violence and rape by Britain, France, the Netherlands and America.

The ‘yellow fever’ problem and its associated stereotypes among Western men, are thus inextricable from even the present-day configurations (and associated myths) of military power and capitalist exploitation in the Pacific. The mirror image of this, of course, is the demonisation of Asian masculinity in the ‘yellow peril’ stereotype. It’s an old story, but the ‘yellow peril’ mythology has extended in the modern time into the international scene, where it has metastasised into a shadowplay of anti-Russia and anti-China narratives, meant specifically to distract the American people from the gross political mismanagement and œconomic rapine happening at home. But to begin with, the stereotype of the fecund, inscrutable, untrustworthy and ultimately disloyal and seditious Asian man has its roots in the deliberate capitalist exploitation of Chinese wage slavery on the railroad construction projects in America in the latter 1800s. To prevent Chinese workers and ‘native’ white American workers from banding together or unionising, California railroad bosses actively promoted anti-Chinese racism as a way to divide the workers and depress wages. Which leads us full circle back to the beginning consideration: the deconstruction and hyper-individualisation of masculinity in America by capitalist modernity, and the sole remaining outlets for masculine self-expression being wealth acquisition, consumerist excess, violence and sexual domination.

What is clear to me is that in the murders of these eight Atlantans – six of whom were AAPI women – the entire American culture needs to grapple with itself. Standing in the dock are the emptying of American masculinity of all values except violence and material gain and sexual domination; the pervasiveness of evil doctrines of penal substitutionary atonement and chiliastic proclamations of a divine judgement in wrath and wilful damnation; and the ongoing American imperialist warmongering in East Asia and the Pacific that initially led to, and reinforces, these racial stereotypes of Asian women. Not just one man, and not just one confession, but America as a nation must repent of its sins before God and humankind.

The Evenki hero Hailanqa

Statue of Hailanqa, Hailar, Inner Mongolia

As I was reading The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian 遲子建 several months ago, one name in particular popped out at me: Hailanqa. The narrator of the novel, as did many of her relatives in the urireng, treated the name of this hero with reverence and awe. Hailanqa, the greatest martial hero of the Evenki people of the 18th century, was described in the novel as an orphan who lost both of his parents while he was still a youth, and he ended up a servant for a horse-merchant in Hailar. He was something of a folkloric figure of tall-tale proportions, somewhat akin to a batyr in a Turkic dastan. One Evenki saying about Hailanqa is that he was able to scare wolves away from the herds of horses even in his sleep, because his snore was as loud as a tiger’s roar. He rose to prominence to become one of the Qing Dynasty’s bravest, most tenacious and most successful generals.

But like most heroes of legend, Dolar Hailanqa (Duola’er Hailancha 多拉爾海蘭察) was in fact a historical figure. He belonged to the Solon 索倫 tribe of the Evenkil, and was born sometime around the year 1740, around the same time that the Evenkil around Lake Baikal were being converted to Orthodoxy by Russian missionaries. The stories about him being an orphan and a servant to a Hailar horse-merchant might very well be true. But when he was probably about fifteen years old he entered military service as a cavalryman.

In 1755 the Qing Dynasty had begun its conquest and destruction of the Dzunghar Khanate. The Dzunghars had overextended themselves on account of their sustained campaign of subjugation against the Kazakhs, which the latter people were spiritedly resisting under leaders like Abylai Khan. Hailanqa was recruited from amongst the Solon Evenks to participate in this campaign against the Dzunghars. As many of the Evenkil still are, he was a practised marksman, and his favoured weapon was the short cavalry bow. He distinguished himself in battle by shooting and capturing the Dzunghar general Bayar; and he impressed Emperor Qianlong 乾隆帝 enough to be granted the courtesy name of Erke Batlu. He later accompanied the Emperor in Mulan Park, and shot two tigers that were about to attack the Emperor. The grateful Qianlong promoted him to a senior captain rank in the Imperial Bodyguard.

He rose quickly through the ranks from there. Hailanqa again distinguished himself in military service against Burma, where he fought with bravery and distinction in highly unfamiliar terrain as a vanguard of the light cavalry (though the Burmese campaign itself turned out to be a disaster), and was awarded with a position in the Bordered Blue Banner. Two years later he was promoted to the Bordered White Banner and sent to Jinchuan – modern Sichuan – to quell a rebellion by the Tibetan Chieftain of Tsanlha. The campaign was an incredibly costly one, and the siege lasted five years. Even so, his service there was enough to ensure his promotion to the Plain Red Banner and his generalship in the Imperial Guard.

Hailanqa’s greatest military achievements were yet to come. He was sent to Taiwan to participate in the suppression of the rebellion of Lin Shuangwen 林爽文. Lin Shuangwen was a leader in the Hongmen 洪门 or Heaven and Earth Society 天地会, a quasi-Masonic organisation which by that time was engaging in piracy and racketeering. Lin Shuangwen organised an army of 300,000 people and proclaimed himself king. Hailanqa was sent to Taiwan in 1787 to advise the local police force of 3,000 led by Huang Shijian 黄仕简 on how to quell the rebellion. Once he landed, Hailanqa found his forces badly outnumbered and besieged. Despite being badly outnumbered, Hailanqa and Huang Shijian held out for months until Hailanqa’s friend and fellow bannerman Fukang’an 福康安 was sent with a relief force of 20,000 soldiers from the Chinese Southwest to take charge of the defence of the island. Lin Shuangwen was captured alive and sent to Beijing to face trial for his treason.

Hailanqa was also involved as one of the generals in the Sino-Nepalese Wars of 1788-1792. In 1791 the Evenki marksman was ordered to assist Fukang’an’s army of Manchu and Mongol bannermen in repelling an invasion of 10,000 Gurkhas from Tibetan territory, where they were under orders from Bahadur Šâh to exact tribute. The Manchus and Mongols under Fukang’an and Hailanqa marched through Tibet in the bitterest of winter conditions, and arrived to repulse the Nepalese force. The two bannermen won a number of engagements, but were soon overextended. They made a peace agreement with the Nepali šâh to the effect that instead of Tibet having to pay tribute to Nepal, Nepal would have to pay tribute to Tibet instead. Qing suzerainty was asserted over both countries.

By this time, Hailanqa was awarded a position in the Bordered Yellow Banner, the highest of the Manchu banner ranks. He died of illness in 1793 – possibly from his campaign in Tibet – and was awarded with the posthumous title of Wuzhuang 武状, or ‘Martial Champion’. In his life he had participated in at least five of the Ten Great Campaigns of Emperor Qianlong. His remains were interred in the Zhaozhong Temple 昭忠祠 – an honour reserved for the bravest of China’s veterans – and his name was inscribed in the Ziguang Pavilion 紫光阁 as a hero of the Qing Empire. Not a bad career at all for a horse-trader’s serving-lad from Hailar.

Cannabin-there

It’s a more-than-unfashionable, ‘square’ stance to take these days, to be against legalisation of Schedule 1 controlled substances. Even so, I am one of the apparently shrinking body of people who believes that cannabis (and other drugs) should remain illegal. And that’s not only because I’m a Lin Zexu fan, though I admit that is a real factor.

Firstly, the health effects are a major concern, and marijuana is often favourably compared to tobacco in the popular press. This largely stems from a comparison of the respective psychoactive compounds: it does appear to be true that THC is less addictive than nicotine. However, by volume (and especially given the way in which smoke is inhaled and retained), weed smoke contains between 50% and 75% more of the carcinogenic hydrocarbon compounds that cigarette smoke does. Marijuana also contains three times more ‘tar’ and five times more carbon monoxide than tobacco does. Potentially more concerning, particularly in our current social environment, are the psychological effects. Marijuana is linked to the development of severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Also alarmingly, corresponding to the liberalisation of attitudes on marijuana use, reported use has more than doubled among American adults; and abuse has nearly doubled.

Therefore, even if, as legalisation proponents rather dubiously claim, it’s not possible to overdose on cannabis in a single episode in the same way it’s possible to overdose on opioids, this is very much a public health question rather than a ‘victimless crime’. There has been a proliferation of vehicular accidents and vehicular accident-related deaths in states which have legalised marijuana – no doubt related to the CNS-depressant effects of THC. Colorado has seen increases in critical care admissions for children exposed to (legal, commercial) marijuana.

Speaking of which: it’s also more than clear by now that the beneficiaries of legalisation are not going to be the folks (mostly people of colour) who have been incarcerated for drug possession in the past. This is why – despite agreeing with many legalisation proponents that most such incarcerated people should be pardoned – I’m not particularly sympathetic to the appeals to emotion which use the unjustly-incarcerated as an argument for legalisation now; these arguments conflate what are already two separate issues. In fact, given the small fraction of incarcerations nationwide which are related to drug possession, the conflation of the two policies amounts to a red herring.

More to the point is what the Basis of the Social Concept document calls ‘the selfish interests of the drug business’, and marijuana stands to be no exception to these selfish interests. The beneficiaries of legalisation already include (mostly white-run) for-profit corporations looking to cash in on a new market, including the same multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates which have historically opposed legalisation as well as plutocrat-class lobbyists and legislators like John Boehner. Drug legalisation logic, including the popular form of that logic which is reproduced and proliferated by the popular press, stands firmly ensconced in atomistic, neoliberal assumptions about human behaviour. It is therefore no wonder that legalisation stands to benefit primarily the affluent and the well-connected – in whose interests neoliberal policy logic always operates – at the hidden expense of œconomically-struggling communities including children who stand to be hurt most by the negative health effects of widely-available, legal cannabis.

At the same time, I believe that we have enforced anti-drug policy in many of the wrong ways. The United States does disproportionately punish nonviolent possession offences while coddling traffickers. The CIA in fact has a history of promoting the growing, manufacture and trafficking of controlled substances, which dates back to their involvement in the Chinese Civil War, when they were involved in the opium shipping business on behalf of the Chinese Guomindang, and later on behalf of the rebels in Laos in the Golden Triangle. In the mid-1990s, Gary Webb investigated the CIA’s involvement in the Contras’ drug smuggling in Nicaragua – both cocaine and marijuana – and the ‘crack’ cocaine epidemic in American cities; for this investigation, the CIA, together with a compliant commercial media machine, attacked Webb’s reputation and killed him.

This post is rapidly turning into an anti-drug policy fact sheet, which was not my intention to begin with. It’s true that there are real costs associated with enforcing the law against marijuana, and benefits in dollar terms – for some people – to legalising it. But the real question is what kind of society we want to have, what we value as a society, and what we are willing to sacrifice for it. This was, in fact, the exact same debate that the Qing Dynasty had internally with regard to opium, prior to the Opium War. All the same arguments that have been advanced in the United States over marijuana, were also advanced by Qing officials during the 1830’s and 1840’s over opium, including the benefits to the œconomy if its legal status were secured. Lin Zexu was one of the brave souls who grounded his objections to the opium trade in the wisdom of Confucius and the Ru tradition. The Daoguang Emperor sided with Lin Zexu, fought the British over his choice, and lost the war – mostly due to technological overmatch, but also due to the corruption, backbiting and incompetence of his generals. But that does not mean that Lin Zexu was wrong.

The fundamental argument at the core of the controversy over decriminalisation or legalisation of drugs, is not an œconomic but a moral one. We may take for granted that enforcing laws is costly; this is the case with everything from traffic violations to national security. But do we simply accept it as ‘normal’ that a significant and growing proportion of our population seeks a chemical escape from the banal horrors of our hyper-capitalist age, to their own (and others’) immiseration? The destruction of human life wrought by the laisser-faire deregulation of guns is tragic. Why can we no longer say the same of the destruction of human life (and health, and potential) wrought by the deregulation of drugs?

A sæcular saint of sociology

I recently finished reading David Arkush’s English-language biography of the great Fei Xiaotong 費孝通, a figure who somehow manages to become more and more impressive to me every time I read something about or by him. Being Eastern Orthodox, I do not use the word ‘saint’ lightly, and certainly here not in the strict hagiographical sense. But there are aspects of his life illuminated in this book that speak to a soul that was filled with love for those near to him, and to a temperament that was willing to forgive even his political enemies for more than a decade of gross personal injustice done to him, both to his face and in the press.

Fei Xiaotong was born to a slightly less-well-off gentry family in Jiangsu in 1910; his parents were both educated and members of the intelligentsia. His father was not religious in the slightest, but his mother Yang Renlan 楊紉蘭 was a devoted Christian, and had him sent to missionary schools for most of his early education. (For his own part, Fei Xiaotong seems to have come down in the middle – his writings evince a vague and ill-defined theism, but he never observed any religious discipline, and even called himself an ‘irreligious man’.) Fei continued his studies at Tsinghua, which had been established by Americans under the ‘Boxer indemnity’; it is thus fair to say that his education through college was deeply Westernised, Western-influenced and progressively-oriented. His major academic influences after Tsinghua were American urban sociologist Robert Park, Russian white émigré sociologist Sergei Shirokogoroff (a family friend of Alexander Kerensky who had cut his teeth on sociological research among the reindeer-herding Evenki people of Siberia, related to the Manchus) and Polish-British pioneer of functionalism Bronisław Malinowski. He didn’t see much use for Confucius as a schoolboy, but in his post-graduate work he came to a new appreciation of the classical philosopher, and quoted him numerous times in his later work From the Soil.

Yet despite Fei’s Westernised academic environment, his Western teachers and his generally Anglophile orientation to scholarship, such politics as he had were – if anything – amenable to a kind of mildly-conservative Chinese patriotism. His schooling happened in the context of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria; his early professional life was situated in the looming context of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and he and his brother Fei Qing 費青 criticised the Nationalist government of the time with accusations of cowardice in the face of foreign threats. This was the extent of his political involvement, however. For the most part, he was content to be absorbed in academic questions and sociological work.

Fei Xiaotong, as stated before, was never a Marxist; indeed, his tutoring under Shirokogoroff and Malinowski instilled in him a deep, Tory distrust of all forms of Whiggish and developmentalist social-scientific schemas. Malinowski in particular, possessed of what Ernest Gellner called an ‘anti-colonial moral intuition’, hated the condescension that ‘civilised’ Westerners deployed when talking about ‘primitive’ peoples, and much of his functionalist approach consisted of demonstrating the complexity and the utility of the social structures of non-Western cultures: this attitude is one that Fei himself took up with zeal. Taking the lead of his mentors – particularly Shirokogoroff’s studies of the Evenki, and Malinowski’s studies of the Trobrianders – Fei undertook his own field studies of minority communities in China, particularly the Yao people of Guangxi Province.

I will note again how important the Chinese southwest appears to be and continues to be as a physical location in the thought development of many left intellectuals of twentieth century China. Though the situation is slightly more complicated now, the inland southwest (Guangxi and Guizhou particularly) continues to be a ‘red’ beacon. The ancestral home of Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 was in Guangxi; that of Yan Yangchu 晏陽初 in Sichuan; and Tao Xingzhi 陶行知 spent much of his politically-formative professional life in Chongqing. It’s not an accident that Kunming was the capital of ‘Third Force’ politics: the populist leftism engendered in the Chinese southwest far predates Bo Xilai 薄熙來, Cui Zhiyuan 崔之元 and the slow-food movement.

Fei’s first wife, a bright young fellow sociologist named Wang Tonghui 王同惠, accompanied him on his field studies into Guangxi Province in 1935. Fei, who had unfortunately picked up a few pseudoscientific notions from Shirokogoroff about skull shapes, often busied himself with calipers among the Yao and travelled from village to village; Wang Tonghui, on the other hand, stayed mostly in one Yao village and used her social abilities and language skills to greater effect. However, this field study would end in tragedy. While hiking on an isolated rural backroad, Fei triggered a tiger trap which crushed his leg beneath a mass of rock. Wang Tonghui left to get help; however, she did not return that night or at all the following day. Fei, cold, thirsty, famished and in wrenching pain, managed to crawl his way to help. When he was well enough to do so, he asked his Yao rescuers to mount a search for his bride, for days to no avail. A week after the search was called, the Yao found Wang Tonghui’s body floating in a river: she had fallen off the road and drowned there.

Fei was devastated. He lost a great deal of weight in the years afterward, had to walk most of the time with a cane, and blamed himself for his wife’s death. He fell into depression and contemplated suicide. What saved him from taking his own life, by his own account, was a desire to be able to face his wife in the afterlife having done something useful with his life that she might take a professional interest in. His work, then, became his life. Moving back to Jiangsu Province and living with his elder sister, Fei Dasheng 費達生, he determined on using his sociological research to study, not isolated aboriginal groups, but instead the Chinese peasantry in the countryside around him – taking up a study of the peasant community in Kaixiangong 開弦弓. It seemed his sister encouraged him in this. She herself was involved in rural advocacy, self-help projects and the development of rural sericulture coöperatives for the impoverished and indebted peasants of Jiangsu. (In effect, she was doing much the same work that the itinerant lecturers of the Farmers’ Alliance had done in the United States two generations before, as Janez Evangelist Krek had done among the Slovenes, and as Svetozar Marković had done among the Serbs.) It was during this time of his life that Fei Xiaotong began advocating rural coöperatives and rural industrialisation. He moved back to the southwest and undertook a programme in Yunnan Province which mentored young sociology students.

He undertook a couple of trips abroad at this time, as well. He was on very friendly terms with American scholars, owing in large part to his training under Robert Park. He cultivated close relationships with the Fairbanks, Wilma and John, with Margaret Redfield and with Dorothea Mayo. Initially enthusiastic about America – being a fan of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Henry Wallace’s contributions in particular – his impressions began to sour when he began noticing various facets of American life that didn’t agree with him. He didn’t like the ugliness of our urban industrialisation, the thick black smoke that hung over our cities in palls, or the square, faceless frames of our modernist architecture. He didn’t like Western food (with the exception of breakfast) or eating habits. He was disgusted with Jim Crow and anti-Chinese sentiment. He worried over American youths’ addiction to superhero comic books. And he was particularly appalled at the way we treated our elderly:

I know well all the tragedies of the [Chinese] big family, but… I became a reactionary and felt that to make sacrifices to bring up children and then watch them fly away like swallows, leaving one able only to sit on a cold park bench and feed sparrows, is just too cruel. I am glad I was not born in America.

Not for the first time, he wondered if he were seeing a society in decline. Fei Xiaotong briefly flirted with Western reactionary thought at this time – being particularly drawn to Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, to whose thesis he would return after the Cultural Revolution was over. Fei saw China as an ‘Apollonian’ society in Spengler’s schema, a society whose creative energies were bent to the preservation and renewal of an established order; and America as a ‘Faustian’ society. In the years after the Cultural Revolution, his criticisms of American society were largely cultural-conservative: in particular, he deplored our ugly suburban sprawl, our skyrocketing divorce rate, our tolerance of crime and drug addiction, and the sexual licence which was evident in our academic life (being embarrassed in one particular case by an American female professor’s discussion of the Ming erotic novel Jin ping mei 《金瓶梅》).

Despite these conservative misgivings about the American spirit and its hostility toward the old, Fei was nevertheless an outspoken fan and proponent of the New Deal, and relentlessly criticised Truman in the wake of the war for having reneged on the promises made by his predecessor and funnelling that energy into the creation and maintenance of a global empire and an aggressive Cold War posture. He became a fervent critic – here again there are echoes of his mentor Malinowski – of the colonialist and imperialist policies pursued by the United States in the Third World in its shadow war with the Soviet Union. Fei Xiaotong was particularly critical of American military and financial support for the Chinese Guomindang 國民黨 in the postwar years, which he felt only worsened the lot of common Chinese people and legitimated a Communist takeover in their eyes.

Fei’s travels to Britain in the postwar era were much more positive in tenor. On good terms with Richard Henry Tawney, whose travels and studies in China had placed him within Fei Xiaotong’s circle of acquaintance, Fei quickly befriended several Labour backbenchers and watched in appreciation as the Labour government of Clement Attlee instituted various œconomic reforms to the benefit of the urban poor: job guarantees, public healthcare, public education, industrial policy. His one critique of British Labour was its continued dependence on American aid money and its subservience to American gæopolitics – he felt that eventually, Labour’s posture of dependency on America would trigger a massive rollback even of Britain’s admirable postwar social gains. (Thatcher sadly proved him right.)

As I mentioned in my previous piece on Fei Xiaotong, it was during this time that this previously rather apolitical or mildly-conservative professor of sociology became political. Fei may have been gentry, but he had managed to get a ground-level view of what the Guomindang’s policies were doing to the Chinese peasantry: bullying, conscription, deliberate starvation. He understood full well the appeal the Chinese Communist Party had for peasants driven to the edge by the casual brutality of Nationalist rule – but he did not join the Communists. Instead, Fei was drawn (initially thanks to his older brother) into the same Democratic League in which the aforementioned Liang Shuming, Yan Yangchu and Tao Xingzhi were particularly prominent. Fei Xiaotong, for all his admiration of English and American constitutionalism, followed the lead of his fellows in the League in that he never thought full democracy was feasible or desirable in a Chinese context.

Kunming – in particular the National Southwestern Associated University or Lianda 聯大 – under the rule of warlord Long Yun 龍雲 was the hotbed of Third Force politics. The Nationalist government was weak there, and the refugee academics from Japanese-held territory were more or less free to critique it. Fei was in good company among these refugee academics, though he also put down some local roots in the southwest. He married again, a woman of peasant upbringing named Meng Yin 孟吟, whom Fei praised affectionately for her humble, hospitable and hard-working character, and appreciated for the long hardships she endured together with him.

The safety promised by Long Yun in Kunming was not absolute, however. Fei Xiaotong and Meng Yin lived in fear of Japanese air raids, once leaving their home for the shelter of the woods while Meng was pregnant with their child – only to return to find their home destroyed. Also, Guomindang secret police and informants were everywhere, and they managed to assassinate Li Gongpu 李公樸 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多 for speaking out against the government. Fei Xiaotong – along with the entirety of the Democratic League – bitterly condemned these shootings, but he himself along with a number of League supporters and their families had to take refuge in the American Consulate in Kunming to keep from being assassinated themselves, and were later evacuated to Nanjing in the care of American consular staff.

Yet, for all his detestation of the Guomindang, Arkush maintains that the extent to which Fei was radicalised and the extent to which he embraced the Communists in the years running up to their victory in the Civil War is far from clear. The Communists themselves would find plenty of reason to distrust him and malign him as a ‘rightist’ from his writings in this period and after. Insofar as Fei speaks of the Communists at all during the Civil War years, he speaks of them with a kind of detached appreciation (in that they pursue reforms beneficial to the peasantry) mixed with apprehension about their ultimate accountability to the peasantry. Yet Fei does not flee abroad the way so many others of his cohort do, to Hong Kong, Taiwan, England or America: instead he stays put, for reasons which any good traditionalist conservative ought to appreciate.

I feel much better that I am going through the dark period with my people… I am glad that I decide to return home instead of run away to foreign countries. The sense of belonging and rooting which grows responsibility is essential to human life. It makes one’s life rich.

Fei would ultimately pay a heavy price for that choice. In the years immediately after the establishment of the People’s Republic, Fei fought an uphill battle to establish and defend the scholarly discipline of sociology, which as often as not (under Soviet influence) subject to fundamental critique on Marxist-Leninist grounds as a ‘bourgeois’ discipline. The documents Arkush cites from Fei usually take on a fairly optimistic and ebullient tone, but the biographer is clear that they were written in something of an adverse political atmosphere, and his work was as often as not regarded as subversive. He was put to work, ultimately, working with the ethnic Mongolians of the Chinese north and the Hmong and Zhuang peoples of Guizhou and Guangxi in the Chinese southwest. During this time he ventured some rather trenchant criticisms of Han chauvinism and uncomradely condescension toward the ‘brother nationalities’ on the Chinese frontiers.

When the Hundred Flowers Campaign opened up, Fei pressed home his advantage and fought to gain a place at the table for the objective study of social conditions within the country, even – at this time – returning to Kaixiangong for a follow-up study to his earlier Peasant Life in China to see how things had improved. He was clear that under the new government’s rule the peasants’ lives had improved materially, but that there was still more work to be done.

But the Hundred Flowers Campaign ended abruptly, as the Communist Party was inundated by internal criticism – much of it, in fact, from League members. In the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed, the League were among the first and foremost of the targets, and Fei Xiaotong, being a high-profile member of the League whose work appeared prominently in print, came in for early and harsh censure as an unreformed ‘bourgeois intellectual’ who had not sufficiently engaged in self-criticism or thought reform. Fei’s public humiliation was swift, sudden and harsh, and he was denounced by several people and former students he had thought of as close friends. Much of this denunciation was salacious, patently ridiculous, and motivated by malice and intent to humiliate rather than edify. Fei was accused of being a lackey of the landlords and an agent of American imperialism – both of which charges are easily falsifiable by a cursory examination of his work. But his treatment was not nearly as harsh as what later victims of the Cultural Revolution would have to endure. He lost his job and his reputation; he was lucky not to have lost his family and his life.

For the better part of twenty years, Fei was not allowed to return to academic work, and the social ostracism and abuse he endured during those years put an awful strain on Meng Yin and their children. The book does end on a hopeful note, though. In the wake of the trial of the Gang of Four Fei Xiaotong was largely exonerated and rehabilitated, and allowed to return to sociological work. He was particularly eager to return to the villages and the peoples he had studied as part of his national minorities work; and he was warmly received back by the Hmong and Zhuang communities he had studied, in no small part due to his advocacy on their behalf.

Getting back to my first paragraph, though. The reason I consider Fei Xiaotong to have a ‘saintly’ disposition lies precisely in the fact that, after the Gang of Four trial and the thaw in the intellectual climate brought by ‘reform and opening’, Fei Xiaotong did not avail himself of the opportunity to strike back at the people who had denounced and borne false witness against him, for the sake of pursuing revenge. No one came through those years with their hands clean, and it seems like Fei understood that perfectly well. If he was not as outspoken as he could have been about the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution, at least he also did not engage in recriminations or feuds with former friends, and for the last years of his life instead focussed on bolstering his own work and continuing to advocate both for sociology and for the peasantry.

Fei continues to be of scholarly interest to me as one of the ties (along with Wen Yiduo) between the strand of populist leftism in Russia represented by Kerensky (and Mother Maria, and Saint Bunakov, and Priestmartyr Valentin), and the strand of populist leftism in China represented by Liang Shuming. The ties in the present day between the thought of Dr Aleksandr Shchipkov and that of Dr Wen Tiejun 溫鐵軍 go far deeper than a mere mutual admiration for Immanuel Wallerstein. And those ties continue to have something to do with the interactions on the frontiers of both nations exemplified by the sociological work of Dr Fei Xiaotong and the political poetics of his comrade in Kunming.

‘Rustic’ poetry, simplicity, attraction of the mind

A ritual meeting of young girls and young boys in the state of Zheng

喓喓草蟲、趯趯阜螽
未見君子、憂心忡忡。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則降。

陟彼南山、言采其蕨。
未見君子、憂心惙惙。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則說。

陟彼南山、言采其薇。
未見君子、我心傷悲。
亦既見止、亦既覯止、我心則夷。

The meadow grasshopper chirps
And the hillside grasshopper leaps.
Until I have seen my lord,
My anxious heart is disturbed.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will have peace.

I climb that southern hill
There to gather the ferns.
Until I have seen my lord,
My anxious heart is tortured.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will be gay.

I climb that southern hill
There to gather the ferns.
Until I have seen my lord,
My heart is troubled and sad.
But as soon as I shall see him,
As soon as I shall join him,
My heart will be soothed.

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Caochong 《草蟲》, Shao and the South 召南 3

爰采唐矣、沬之鄉矣。
云誰之思、美孟姜矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣。

爰采麥矣、沬之北矣。
云誰之思、美孟弋矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣 。

爰采葑矣、沬之東矣。
云誰之思、美孟庸矣。
期我乎桑中、要我乎上宮、送我乎淇之上矣。

Where does one pick the dodder?
In the country of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Jiang.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

Where does one pick the wheat?
On the north side of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Yi.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

Where does one pick the turnip?
On the east side of Mei.
Know you of whom I am thinking?
The beautiful Meng Yong.
She waits for me at Sangzhong;
She yearns for me at Shanggong;
She follows me on the Qi!

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Sangzhong 《桑中》, Airs of Yong 鄘風 4

溱與洧、方渙渙兮。
士與女、方秉蕑兮。
女曰觀乎。
士曰既且。
且往觀乎。
洧之外、洵訏且樂。
維士與女、伊其相謔、贈之以勺藥。

溱與洧、瀏其清矣。
士與女、殷其盈兮。
女曰觀乎。
士曰既且。
且往觀乎。
洧之外、洵訏且樂。
維士與女、伊其將謔、贈之以勺藥。

The Zhen and the Wei
Have overflowed their banks.
The youths and maidens
Come to the orchids.
The girls invite the boys: ‘Suppose we go over?’
And the lads reply: ‘Have we not been?’
‘Even so, yet suppose…’
‘… we go over again.’

For over the Wei,
A fair green-sward lies.
Then the lads and the girls
Take their pleasure together;
And the girls are then given a flower as a token.

The Zhen and the Wei
Are full of clear water.
The lads and the girls
In crowds are assembled.
The girls invite the boys: ‘Suppose we go over?’
And the lads reply: ‘Have we not been?’
‘Even so, yet suppose…’
‘… we go over again.’

For over the Wei,
A fair green-sward lies.
Then the lads and the girls
Take their pleasure together;
And the girls are then given a flower as a token.

　 　 - The Odes 《詩經》, Zhen and Wei 《溱洧》, Airs of Zheng 秦風 21

‘Food and sex – that’s what people want. Shi se xing ye 食色性也.’ That’s what my wife said to me with a laugh – quoting an idiom coined by Gao Buhai 告不害 (one of the zhuzi baijia 諸子百家) in the Mencius, who in turn was paraphrasing the Classic of Rites 《禮記》 – as I told her that I was reading the Granet-Edwards translation of the Classic of Odes 《詩經》. (I left out the part about how I was basically provoked into reading it by the eldest of the theological Hart brothers, the same one who made me a fan of comedian and documentarian Rich Hall.)

Now, this being a translation, I am sensitive that I am pretty much wholly at the mercy of Granet and Edwards – a French sociologist, looking at these poems through an anthropological lens, and his English translator – and their interpretations. The validity of all of what I write below must be tempered by that understanding. But Granet argues, rather convincingly, that the Odes are basically a collection of folk songs; folk songs that describe and speak to the realities of life in the villages and countryside of China in deep antiquity.

Granet – being a good sociologist – draws a number of conclusions from these songs that attempt to paint a vivid portrait of village and country life in China’s deep antiquity. Granet seems given to certain orgiastic flights of fancy that seemingly tell us not so much about ancient Chinese culture as they do a bit more than we need to know about his imagination (a common enough failing among sociologists of a particular Freudian era). But more valuable are his comparisons of archaic rural Chinese betrothal and marriage festivities with the customs of their neighbours: the Yi, the Pubiao and the Hmong. Granet puts forward lively images of bands of young men and young women from different villages (exogamy being strictly upheld) meeting together at a carefully-determined date in springtime, just after the winter thaw, at festivals and fairs held at sacred sites like the confluences of two rivers, a copse or a hillside, giving each other gifts, holding competitions with each other in choral singing, sports and racing, and then pairing off to court each other for the remainder, before the festival ended and they returned to their home villages – to be married off to their chosen partners the following autumn. To my mind there is something very charming in a McTellian way (also) about these images, and that’s probably no accident – the folk tradition being what it is.

From a literary view, these folk songs, even in translation, are simple. They spring forth from a singleness of mind. They contain little by way of characterisation, few metaphors and certainly nothing by way of extended conceits; they rely on repetition, antiphonal structure and rhythm for their power. But they are powerful: touching, indeed in many cases stirring – due in part to their frank directness. They speak to deep needs, desires, passions in the human heart. They are concerned with the stuff of a peasant’s daily life: harvesting, gathering wood, hunting, eating, sleeping, the rise and fall of the rivers, the turn of the seasons. They are concerned even more with courtship and erotic love. The first awkward, halting, sometimes confrontational – but seasonal and heavily ritualised – meetings between boys and girls of different villages. The awakening of desire. The heartaches and anguish of first love and parting. Loneliness. The thrills of the chase and the plight of covert assignations. The dread and sorrow (for a girl) of leaving her parents and siblings for a new village. The bliss of consummation. Heartbreak. Despite the lack of personal details – very few of the characters have names, and even those that do are generic enough to avoid causing scandals for the young folk involved – the Odes speak to something deeply human that are easy for those who have loved to recognise.

These poetic expressions, as you can see from the Yong ode ‘Sangzhong’ which I’ve quoted above, are deeply laden with gæographical and botanical imagery, but there is nothing really symbolic in them; rather, they reflect and amplify the emotions expressed within them. Granet calls these ‘rustic themes’. He says:

It is evident that the odes of the Shih ching frequently contain lively and sparkling descriptions of subjects borrowed from Nature … Sometimes we are shown a tree in the fullness of its vigorous growth, and, when its flowers, fruit, leaves and branches are praised, it seems that a parallel is being drawn between the growth of plants and the awakening of the human heart … the loves of the beasts seem to be the counterpart of those of men. The state of the weather, the thunder, snow, wind, dew, rain and the rainbow, or the crops, the gathering of fruits or herbs also form a frame or an opportunity for the expression of the emotions.

Granet includes in his translation the traditional interpretations of the compilers and scholastic commentators of the Odes, including most importantly Mao Heng 毛亨 and Zhu Xi 朱熹. But he clearly takes issue, often quite disparagingly, with the scholarly hermeneutic they apply to the texts: in the broad strokes, he finds these classicist commentators too eager to twist the simple, innocent expressions of feeling in the Odes into sophisticated satires on the policies of the feudal lords of the various states from which the Odes were collected, or else examples of or warnings against the deterioration of morals and feudal ritual propriety in ill-governed states. The irony, of which Granet appears sensible enough himself, is that Confucius himself would probably agree more with him, Granet, than with his own mediæval followers. From the Analects:

子曰：「詩三百，一言以蔽之，曰『思無邪』。」

The Master said, ‘In the Book of Poetry are three hundred pieces, but the design of them all may be embraced in one sentence: “Having no depraved thoughts”.’

(What a far cry indeed from Zhu Xi’s interpretations, which are so apt to see depraved thoughts and licentiousness at each turn in the Odes!)

But clearly, even though Confucius himself thought some of the Odes to be ‘lewd’ (like those belonging to the state of Zheng), he found certain of them worthy of being kept in this collection – and this has always been something of a puzzlement to the later compilers. As Granet puts it:

The embarrassment of the Chinese tradition is evident. It may be expounded thus: after the Shih ching was used as a theme for exercises in rhetoric, and especially after it had become a classic and a subject of instruction, it was considered desirable to attribute to this educational work a moral value, independent both of the use to which it might be put and of the value which it would have had from the beginning. The odes were used for purposes of instruction and it was imagined that they were composed for that purpose…

But for the moral which was to be inculcated some of the songs seemed too licentious; it was felt that they were not adequately excused by saying that the presentation of vice recalls to virtue—for tradition declared them to be licentious. Fortunately, opinion declared the expurgation of the Shih ching by a Sage, and that made it possible, since, officially, no licentious poems were to be found in the collection, to put forward for most of the poems an interpretation which rid them of all baleful influence by completely setting aside their character as love-songs. But in some instances, this method was defective, and it had to be admitted that a certain number of sensual poems were included in the Shih ching.

Now, from my own perspective, since (as I am not a ‘higher critic’) there is no valid internal reason to doubt the Chinese tradition which holds Confucius to have been the compiler of the Odes, the challenge for Confucians posed by Granet is evident. Why did Confucius, who placed such peculiar emphasis on the importance of the Odes for understanding his teachings (to the point where he would not teach even his relatives who hadn’t read the Odes), include these ‘sensual’ songs? Granet nowhere alludes to this comparative-philosophical point, but I will draw the connexion explicitly. By including the love-songs of Zheng (like ‘Zhen and Wei’ above) in the Odes Confucius poses to Chinese society the same challenges about the nature and purpose of poetry that Socrates poses to the Greeks about Homer’s Achilles in Plato’s Dialogues, particularly the Hippias Minor and the Republic.

The Odes themselves ‘have no depraved thoughts’; so says Confucius in the Analects. But why would he say this when these love-songs – direct, bold, sometimes even ‘indecent’ by the Sage’s own standards – would offend both contemporary and later ritual-moral sensibilities? Granet notes:

No mere declarations and tokens of love sufficed to bind [young lovers’] hearts that demanded nothing less than that complete union which would give them eternal possession of each other. It is not to be wondered at that, in songs in which Chinese commentators see only licentiousness, foreigners find traces of an ancient morality, preferable to the existing one. This is due to the fact that, in the lavish protestations of faithfulness made by the lovers, they see an ancient monogamy. As a matter of fact, from the time of their union in the festival of general harmony the lovers considered themselves bound irrevocably, and their apprehensions and agony gave place to security and peace of mind.

Reflecting on which I would ask, in all seriousness: is it so hard to believe that Confucius himself might have seen the Odes in a similar way as Granet (and the ‘foreigners’ he references) claims to? After all, the Analects are not lacking in praise for simple, direct ceremonies and music (!), particularly those found in elder times, and particularly in comparison with the elaborateness and subtlety of the prevailing ritual norms of his own day. (And he particularly detested toadies with well-kept appearances, insinuating manners, glib tongues and fine, well-honed speeches.)

子曰：「先進於禮樂，野人也；後進於禮樂，君子也。如用之，則吾從先進。」

The Master said, ‘The men of former times in the matters of ceremonies and music were rustics, it is said, while the men of these latter times, in ceremonies and music, are accomplished gentlemen. If I have occasion to use those things, I follow the men of former times.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 11.1

And then there is this instance in which Confucius references the Odes directly, talking about them with his student Bu Zixia 卜子夏:

子夏問曰：「『巧笑倩兮，美目盼兮，素以為絢兮。』何謂也？」子曰：「繪事後素。」曰：「禮後乎？」子曰：「起予者商也！始可與言詩已矣。」

Zi Xia asked, saying, ‘What is the meaning of the passage – “The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colours!”?’ The Master said, ‘The business of laying on the colours follows (the preparation of) the plain ground.’ ‘Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing?’ The Master said, ‘It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the Odes with him.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 4.8

To what, precisely, did Bu Zixia find the ceremonies (or li 禮) subsequent – that is to say, contingent or dependent upon? The Analects answers this question, too. And note this: the answer carries a direct reference to the Odes:

子曰：「興於詩，立於禮。成於樂。」

The Master said, ‘It is by the Odes that the mind is aroused. It is by the Rules of Propriety that the character is established. It is from Music that the finish is received.’

　 　 - The Analects 《論語》 8.8

The Odes, then, were not meant to ‘establish character’ or to provide ‘finish’ to a student’s education. It appears that Confucius did not mean to use them as a guide to the establishment of good character and good ritual norms in a civilised state (the two of those being suspended in a certain dialectic): that’s what the Book of Rites was for. The Odes, rather, are meant to ‘arouse the mind’ (xing 興 – a term which can also be glossed as ‘interest’, ‘wonder’, ‘excite’, ‘pleasure’; whose gloss of ‘arouse’, interestingly enough, also includes erotic entendres; and which, to me, recalls in particular the Platonic use of aporia). What does Confucius mean for us to be excited by, or to wonder at, in the Odes? I wonder if it is not precisely what foreigners wonder at in them.

We see, after all, a number of things in the Odes, that are the subject of exuberant (though unpolished) expression. The patterns of the seasons. The often-terrifying majesty of thunder, rain, wind and floodwaters. Awe at natural beauty – in lakes, hills, rivers, trees, flowers. Delight in the form of a young woman from a man’s perspective. Delight in the form of a young man from a woman’s perspective. Mystique – half-rejection, exhilarated pursuit, gossip, attraction, flirtatiousness, abandon – in the seasonal meeting of the two sexes, separated by custom, by gæography (exogamy, remember?), by the primoridal order of the cosmos. What is seen in the Odes are man’s erotic – in the full breadth and depth of the term – stirrings upon beholding the face of the Divine. It is in this vein also that a devotee of Confucius in the ‘foreign’ land of Chu, Qu Yuan 屈原, wrote the Chuci 《楚辭》. ‘Shi se xing ye’ is not a dismissal. Confucius talked about the superior man returning to the root. He would have us behold all of this and wonder at man’s condition, wonder at his place in the cosmos. If we do not have a good ‘plain ground’, how can we apply bright colours? If we do not understand and respect the human appetites, how can we possibly understand the need for rites? If we do not look on the human condition and love it, and feel compassion for it, how can we possibly begin to seek to correct that condition in ourselves?

In a certain sense, I am beginning to suspect that Zhuangzi 莊子 had it right – at least partially. Much like Khomyakov and Herzen in Russian intellectual history, Confucius and Laozi 老子 were probably closer to each other in outlook than either of their respective students and schools ever would be afterward in history, despite the efforts of syncretic thinkers like Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 and Wang Bi 王弼 who tried to bridge the two schools of thought. Confucius and Laozi beheld the same human Dao. The two of them shared a certain awe of it. Confucius placed the emphasis on the ‘human’ and followed the Odes. Laozi placed the emphasis on the ‘Dao’ and followed it – out of China. But that is a reflection, perhaps, for another time.

One final thought. If Confucianism is ever going to be made relevant again in an uncertain age such as this, perhaps one of the things that will be demanded of the academic proponents of Confucianism is that they find creative ways to recapture the simplicity and singleness of mind in the Odes, and have us wonder at them.