William A. Callahan
China: The Pessoptimist Nation
Oxford University Press, 2009
248 Pages
£25
ISBN 978-0199549955

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As portmanteaus go, “pessoptimist” is a simple one. In China: The Pessoptimist Nation, William A. Callahan’s latest analysis of modern China, the University of Manchester professor uses this amalgamation of pessimism and optimism to underscore “how Chinese identity emerges through the interplay of positive and negative feelings.” In charting these contemporary cultural trends, the book’s strength lies in its nuanced exploration of China’s continuing struggle to reconcile its “Century of National Humiliation” ethic with its desire to assume a place of greater prominence in the modern world.

The period in Chinese history from 1839 (the start of the First Opium War) to 1949 (the foundation of the People’s Republic of China) is commonly referred to in Chinese historical discourse as the “Century of National Humiliation”. During this time, China suffered severely at the hands of the imperial powers, with Britain, America, France, and Russia all occupying significant parts of its territory at different points. This 110-year period also saw China’s shock defeat by the Imperial Japanese Army in the First Sino-Japanese war (1894-95). This marked the start of major Japanese territorial expansion into parts of China’s traditional Asian empire, culminating in Japan’s full-scale invasion in the 1930s, which pushed as far as Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China.

Official narratives portray these events as incursions into China’s sovereign territory and examples of unacceptable imperial aggression toward a peaceful China. And indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rightfully continues to trumpet China’s past suffering.

Yet, as Callahan points out, in trying to come to terms with its emerging superpower status, the CCP faces a problem: how to commemorate events in China’s history while simultaneously shaking off the country’s inferiority/victim complex. This is not an easy issue to resolve, of course, but Callahan documents some of the more salient examples of the state’s attempts to do so. The Communist Party’s system of national humiliation days, for example, attempts to contain Chinese nationalist feelings within set parameters, aiming to confine the commemoration of national humiliation to isolated moments in the year rather than allowing pessimistic feelings to grow unchecked amongst the citizenry.

Interestingly, China’s citizens have become increasingly adept at finding ways of expressing the national humiliation ethic outside of official channels. By interweaving nationalist symbols into everyday life, they undermine the CCP’s restrictive and controlled approach to national humiliation commemoration. Pessoptimist Nation’s dust jacket illustrates this phenomenon, displaying extracts from a set of playing cards with pictures of the ruins of Beijing’s Garden of Perfect Brilliance (also known as the Yuanmingyuan Park). Built as a network of grand imperial palaces for Qing dynasty emperors, much of the garden complex was burnt to the ground by British and French troops during the Second Opium War in 1860. Seen as the site of one of China’s greatest humiliations, the area is today, in Callahan’s words, a “national humiliation icon”, where the Chinese can walk amongst the ruins and visually relive the “Century of National Humiliation”. By putting these images of national humiliation on such common items as playing cards, the market has stepped outside the purview of the CCP to promote nationalist and patriotic feelings in a new and unofficial way.

Beyond issues of malingering cultural mores, Callahan treats another pressing subject: China’s attempt to change its world image through the use of soft power techniques. The nature of these techniques is aptly summarized by a young Beijing woman, mentioned in the first chapter, speaking on the subject of the Olympic Games: “For a lot of foreigners, the only image of China comes from old movies that make us look poor and pathetic…The Olympics will redefine the way people see us.” Beneath the subtext of sport, Beijing 2008 marked for the CCP the point of China’s full re-entry into the world community as a major power.

Accordingly, the government was heavily involved in the proceedings, with Zhang Yimou (the ceremony’s director) working within a set of strict political guidelines regarding the ceremony’s messages and themes. The long visual narration of China’s 5,000-year history, the perfectly synchronised drummers, and the controversial miming of “Ode to the Motherland” by a young girl (Lin Miaoke) all aimed to convey the integrity and subtle superiority of 21st-century China. The symbolic importance that the CCP placed on the world-televised opening ceremony was reflected in the regular attendance of Central Committee politicians at rehearsals, the hours of rehearsing by performers each day, and the incessant litany of changes made to the proceedings right down to the wire (Callahan cites the interesting example of the 2008 synchronised drummers suddenly being told to smile in the very final rehearsal to “take the edge off”).

Although the controversy over Lin Miaoke’s miming exposed the political nature of the Olympics, “Beijing 2008″ was decisively a Chinese success story. The world has not forgotten China’s rocky human rights record, but the Olympic Games showed a China celebrating its history rather than mourning it. These apparent shifts in Chinese identity are encouraging signs for the international community. But even so, Callahan wants us to remember that the CCP still largely controls the attitudes on display. To understand the nature of Chinese identity today, Callahan emphasises the “need to get out of Beijing more, to explore what the rest of China is thinking and feeling”. Perhaps only then can we really begin to understand the Dragon.

Matthew Wills is reading for a BA in History at Trinity College, Oxford.  He is a managing editor of the Oxonian Review.

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Remembering Sichuan

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One year ago, China’s Sichuan province was rocked by the 19th deadliest earthquake of all time. Less than three months before the country hosted the world in the 2008 Summer Olympics, the “Great Sichuan Earthquake” struck with a Richter magnitude of 8.0 and took the lives of at least 69,000 people.

Just before 2:30 p.m. on 12 May 2008, Wenchuan, the capital of Sichuan, began to shake. The earthquake was so intense that it could be felt in both Beijing and Shanghai—1,500 kilometers and 1,700 kilometers away—where office buildings swayed with the tremor.

Official figures as of 21 July 2008 confirmed:

• 69,227 dead (68,636 in Sichuan province)
• 374,176 injured
• 18,222 missing
• 4.8 million people homeless (though the number could be as high as 11 million).

The Great Sichuan Earthquake was the deadliest to hit China since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed at least 240,000 people, and the strongest since the 1950 Chayu earthquake, which registered at 8.5 on Richter magnitude scale.

One month later, survivors in Sichuan province started to rebuild their lives with the help of the Chinese army and volunteers, picking up the pieces from their old lives.

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Amnon Gutman is a freelance photographer based in Israel. His recent work has focused on the ongoing conflict in eastern DRC, HIV/AIDS afflicted regions of Africa, and Christian vigilante action in the Philippines. Gutman’s photography has been featured in Newsweek, the Guardian, the Observer, Le Monde, the Boston Globe, Courrier Japan, and the Epoch Times.

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University Challenge (Primary School Edition)… Young contestants with remarkable memories in high-pressure, high-stakes, televised tournaments? In the footsteps of Gail Trimble, Slumdog Millionaire and Nupur Lala (of Spellbound fame) comes an even younger, even cuter cast of competitors (ranging in age from seven to eleven), and they’re coming to a theatre near you. The Sheldonian Theatre, that is. The Sunday Times previews “Off the Heart”, the competitive poetry recital scheduled for the last day of this year’s Oxford Literary Festival (5 April 2009). The Times and the BBC sponsored contests in 1,500 schools across the UK and have winnowed the field down to a dozen declaimers. A ten-year-old boy from Iran who spent two years inside a refugee camp will recite TS Eliot’s “Macavity: The Mystery Cat.” Evidently, criminal animals are all the rage. The most oft-recited poem was Roald Dahl’s “The Pig”, which tells the story of a swine who eats a hog farmer for lunch.

Hog Farmers Are Being Eaten Alive… not by their pigs, but by competitive pressures. Chef Jamie Oliver  says that UK pork farmers are an endangered species. So it’s a surprise to see that hog farmers are well-represented on the books pages of British newspapers this weekend. The Guardian reviews Solace of the Road, the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who lifts a ride from a hog farmer and heads westward along the A40. It is the second posthumous publication by Siobhan Dowd, a writer of young-adult fiction who died of cancer in 2007.

Posthumous Literature is the Life of the Book World… so far in 2009. Last week, we reported that the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel was generating controversy in critics’ circles. This week, Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published novel 2666 wins the (US) National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (The best biography award goes to Patrick French for The World Is What It Was: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul—which the Oxonian Review’s Jonathan Gharraie assessed last spring.)

Roberto Bolaño once said that the word “posthumous” sounded like a Roman gladiator. With the late Heath Ledger winning an Oscar for Dark Night, and with works by Nabokov and Kerouac on the way, it’s a word we’re hearing often. Indeed, too often for footballer Eddie Turnbull, who won a posthumous award from a church in Leith, Scotland earlier this year. Turnbull is alive—and upset that he was not invited to the ceremony: “I would have been there but, because I was dead, obviously no one told me about it.”

An Irish Wake… Until 1962, if a dead body was carried through the door of a pub in Ireland, the proprietor was legally required to store it in his cellar alongside his beer kegs until the coroner could hold an inquest. Today, pub owners in Ireland are pleased to see anybody coming through their doors—even if the body has no pulse. This week, the New York Times raises its glass to writer Bill Barich and his new book A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. As the Times notes, the nation of Nigeria now drinks more stout than Ireland (though as the Times fails to note, Nigeria also has thirty-three times as many people. While the “Celtic Tiger” economy roared ahead, the Irish retreated into their homes: they went from drinking 70 percent of their alcohol in pubs at the beginning of the decade to 47 percent in 2007. Barich chalks up the change to—among other factors—tougher drunk-driving laws…Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, County Cork native William Birdthistle proposes that the pub in Ireland may not be as doomed as these statistics suggest. Ending his review on a note as bittersweet as a pint of Murphy’s, Birdthistle writes: “With the wings of Ireland’s economy so badly singed, one wonders whether the treasured pub will return with poverty as it fled with wealth….”

One Irish-style pub that will not survive is Oxford’s own Rosie O’Grady’s on Park End Street. The Oxford Mail reports this week that the pub’s new owner, a native of County Down, is “completely gutting it” and “turning it back into a traditional English pub format”. He tells the Mail: “the days of Irish bars have passed”.

The Best Bar Near Naples is at the rail station in Pompeii, says Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who in this week’s Guardian takes us on a tour of the city where she spent a decade researching her new book. Harvard University Press has “sexed up” the title for American audiences: it was called Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town when it appeared in the UK last year; now it’s The Fires of Vesuvius. This week, the New York Times hails it as “engrossingly mischievous“. Beard meanders through the lurid, louche life of the Latins (“There seem to be phalluses everywhere”). There seem to be pubs everywhere too: by one estimate, Pompeii was home to 158 bars—in a city with a total population of 12,000 to 15,000.

A Posthumous Pub Crawl…Speaking of hog farms, and posthumous publications, and perishing pubs, the Times republishes George Orwell’s 1946 essay on the “ten qualities that the perfect pub should have“. Elsewhere, the Times worries that at the current rate of closure, the last pub in Britain will close in 2037.

“Some People Are More Equal than Others”… We would be thinner, healthier, and happier if incomes were distributed more equally. That’s the (paraphrased) argument of Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm—and of epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson (University of Nottingham) and Kate Pickett (University of York). In a new book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that the social ills of the UK and US can largely be attributed to income inequality. Consistent with the egalitarian ethos of their argument, Wilkinson and Pickett have posted their evidence for all to see—for free—on their website, EqualityTrust.org.uk. The Guardian and the New Statesman (unsurprisingly) are convinced; the Economist (unsurprisingly) is not. Admittedly, the charts and graphs are compelling—although the argument brings to mind a popular cartoon about correlation and causation. Is it possible that in countries where mental illness and drug abuse are endemic, efforts to improve the lives of the lower classes are less likely to succeed? France, for example, has higher tax rates than any of the Scandinavian nations, but it also has higher inequality—and more social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that inequality is a cause of social ills, but could it instead be a consequence?

A Period Is Not Just a Punctuation Mark… In April 2006, the book world went wild after it was revealed that a second-year student at Harvard had published a novel that plagiarised passages from bestselling chick-lit writer Megan McCafferty. Now, a soon-to-be first-year at Yale is reprinting McCafferty’s writing word-for-word! The twist: she has McCafferty’s permission. McCafferty is one of 92 female writers who have shared stories of their first menstrual experiences in My Little Red Book, an anthology edited by 18 year-old Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Nalebuff says she “wanted to evoke Mao’s Little Red Book, the manifesto distributed to all Chinese citizens during the Cultural Revolution”. We’re not so sure about the allusion: menstruation may be traumatic, but the Cultural Revolution (20 million dead) was rather worse. Still, the Chicago Tribune calls it “charming”, and the New York Times loves it so much that it reviews the book twice. The first review is more fawning (Abigail Zuger predicts that the book will “sell briskly for centuries to come”) but the second review has a better title: “There Will Be Blood”.