From the May Fourth Generation to Today

- The Telegraph reports in alarmist fashion about Hu Jintao warning, as the newspaper headline puts it, of “cultural warfare from the West”

- A closer examination of the story indicates that Hu Jintao’s “battle cry,” above, was a speech given on October 18, 2011, that was republished yesterday in the preemminent journal for CCP theory, Qiushi (Seeking Truth / 求是).

In fact most of the speech is not at all about the West, but the need for more powerful socialist culture.  However, the key detonating sentences in this long and rather boring speech are, after a discourse on China’s rising soft power, as follows:

同时，我们必须清醒地看到，国际敌对势力正在加紧对我国实施西化、分化战略图谋，思想文化领域是他们进行长期渗透的重点领域。我们要深刻认识意识形态领域斗争的严重性和复杂性，警钟长鸣、警惕长存，采取有力措施加以防范和应对. At the same time [that we develop our cultural industries and gain international advantage thereby], we must see with utmost clarity that hostile international forces are currently stepping up the implementation of Westernization in China, attempting to do so via in a variety of strategies; their long-term focus is on infiltration [渗透/shentou] in the ideological and cultural fields. We should thoroughly understand the seriousness and complexity of this ideological struggle, remaining vigilant (lit. “always keep the bell ringing“), ever alert, and taking effective measures to prevent and respond to [the challenge of cultural infiltration].

The full text of the article is available in rough English via Google Translate here.

- My own evidentiary contribution to the discourse on Hu Jintao’s retrograde and conservative tendencies with regard his extensive work in “socialist culture” are described in this essay about some materials I found about Hu Jintao in East German archives in 2009.

- As usual, with reference to cultural diplomacy and the soft power discourse, JustRecently is already well ahead of the curve.  His website has the most extensive open-source translation available of the Party’s “cultural document”, a document which stemmed out of the same meetings at which Hu Jintao weighed in above.

- In reading headlines about Hu Jintao’s fear of Western “infiltration,” I think it’s important to note that there are far more nuanced Chinese examinations of soft power out there.  PRC scholar He Zengke published a rather wide-ranging article this past December 23 in a reformist journal surveying French and German modes of exerting soft power, noting:

France was one of the first countries to understand the role of cultural soft power. Napoleon once said that a pen was equal to 1,000 Mauser rifles^*), and a former French minister of culture said that culture and the economy are one and the same battleground. French people believe that a cultural mission can take the place of a country’s military power.[9] In 1883, France established the Alliance Française to promote French culture. Starting in 1959, France began to define the “First Five-Year Plan for the Expansion of French Cultural Activities”, and afterwards, 25- and 35-year plans etc. were gradually developed. From the total amounts spent and per capita, France belongs to the first-ranking countries worldwide.[10] From that, it can be seen that France attaches great importance to the development and use of soft power.

法国是最早懂得文化软实力的地位和作用的国家之一。拿破仑曾经说过，一支笔等于1000支毛瑟枪。法国前文化部长曾经说过：文化和经济是同一场战斗。 法国人认为，文化使命可以代替国家武力。[9]1883年法国就建立了法语联盟，在世界各地讲授法语，推广法国文化。从1959年起，法国开始制定“关于 在国外扩张和恢复法国文化活动的第一个五年计划”（1959－1963），后来又陆续制定了“二五”、“三五”计划等。法国的国际文化交流支出从总数和人 均来看都居于世界第一的位置。[10]由此可见法国对发展和运用文化软实力的高度重视。[Translation here by JustRecently]

He’s essay reminds us again:

-For all the huffing and puffing about Confucius Institutes, the “hanban” is still behind such institutions as the Alliance Française when it comes to enrollments and influence globally, a fact which I reported in July 2010 (from a cafe in Seoul, awash in K-pop, WiFi signals, kimchee and bubble tea) via a translation of a Huanqiu Shibao interview with the Hanban head.

- Finally, the magazine Monocle (which I fittingly tend to read in international airports; this one was in Tokyo) recently did some comprehensive “soft power ratings” in which the US was #1 but France not far behind.  China, by the way, was #17.

Not a Hyundai: via New York Times

A cover story in the latest issue of 看天下 [View, 2011, Vol. 35, pp. 59-62], a national weekly magazine published in Beijing, contains some new information from North Korea as regards the successor, Kim Jong Un.

Mainly this information takes the form of conveying internal rumors favorable to Kim Jong Un which are presently circulating in the DPRK.  While the source is rather unclear (listed as “North Korean propaganda materials”), it seems probable that the Chinese reporters are also conveying information given in conversation with North Korean colleagues.

What follows is my loose translation:

Kim Jong Un is an extreme genius in politics, economics, arts, history, and the military. In a little less than two years in Switzerland [note the difference here; foreign media has him there for longer], Kim Jong Un mastered English, French, German and Italian, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Russian.  When this little genius was but three years old, he wrote his grandfather Kim Il Song a poem entitled “Brightly Shining Star of Praise” in perfect Chinese characters.

More recently [here the magazine simply cites ‘reports’ which probably includes Daily NK on the North Pyong’an purge], under Kim Jong Un’s leadership, North Korea has undertaken strenuous anti-corruption measures, arresting 15 of the biggest offenders against the people.  Leading up to the 65^th anniversary of the Workers’ Party, Kim Jong Un led a massive purge of more than 150,000 Party members guilty of crimes, then “forgave them” with his great generosity.

He has also paid great attention to the question of people’s comfort, from alcohol to grain and meat.  He has unceasingly published lectures on economics [where the lectures are is a mystery] and pledged to ‘bring the national economy, within 3 years, back to the level of the 1960s and 70s, so that everyone can eat rice with meat soup’,” using his grandfather’s slogan.

In the crucial area of military affairs, a person knowledgeable with the November 2010 Yeonpyeong Island bombing [told the magazine] that Kim Jong Un was “a specialist in artillery, and a genius of cannon work in military affairs.”  The outside world has analyzed that [the above incident] was part of North Korea’s succession work.

Other media reports have stated that Kim Jong Un education has started in North Korea, and that his portrait is on display at Army bases.  In the military, they are told that “the Great General learned to shoot at the age of 3, and by 9 he could hit a bullseye.  Besides that, when he was 3 he learned to drive, and by the end of his 8^th year, he drove a car 120 kilometers from Pyongyang to many different places.”

Besides that, materials from North Korea stated that when Kim Jong Un was 16, he wrote an thesis on the subject of Kim Il Song’s artful military strategy in the Korean War.

Lest the reader think that the Chinese media simply serves to amplify these claims (which are relayed essentially by the magazine without comment), a great deal of information follows about the coming youth movement within the DPRK’s power structures which, sadly, I haven’t got enough time to relay.  But the new elite is primarily graduates of Kim Il Song University and Foreign Languages Institute in Pyongyang.

A few minor points as coda: North Korea is clearly frustratingly vague to many Chinese writers, who lavish it with accordingly vague locutions and Chinese idioms, or chengyu. A list of chengyu or of strategic axioms which are presently being used in reference to the DPRK could be rather revealing.

The article tends to emphasize the successor’s aunt, Kim Kyo-hui, as a new power center rather than her husband, Jang Song-taek.

Chinese analysts may be operating under the general l idea that “China supports stability, Kim Jong Un represents stability, therefore we support Kim Jong Un,” but there is still a fair amount of frank writing about the process of his rise.  First, the North Koreans never told their most important ally how to write his name in Chinese.  Second, the naval and island provocations of 2010 are allowed to be attributed via speculation to Kim Jong Un so long as the reports are sourced to foreign media.

Kan Tianxia magazine is owned by the Ningxia Media Group; its coverage of the Kim Jong Un elevation at the Party Congress last year was also rather decent.

(Perhaps this is why it has always struck me as just a bit ridiculous to write down specific outcomes for courses prior to the beginning of classes, because one must come into contact with actual students, whose individual interests — if the professor is any good at all — should and do shape the experience to a degree.  To state that “the student will have a solid grasp of the main currents of contemporary Chinese history” in a course entitled “Contemporary Chinese history” strikes me as being somewhat intellectually demeaning. But, although this too has to do with preplanning and attempting to both enjoy and understand the chaos of the present moment, I suppose I digress.)

In front of a large group of fawning journalists, all slavering for even the smallest memo, a wise man once said that: “There are known knowns, and there are unknown knowns.”

It seems to me that in the case of North Korea more generally and Sino-North Korean relations more specifically, that we as a learning, historical, and analytical community need to do a more scruplous job at the very least of deliniating which areas of inquiry we know nothing about.

It is time when regarding Kim Jong Un, in other words, to leave that Japanese chef behind and embrace testimonials from middle-school graduates in Bern, Switzerland.

Is the present situation really adequate?  Is this the best we can do?

Fortunately the directed and nevertheless protean Chinese press comes to the rescue with regard to the new North Korean successor, whose voice, like that of Hirohito prior to 1945, has never been heard by the worshipful public.

(And isn’t it time also to revisit the work of B.R. Myers with regard to the Kim-Hirohito connection, an analytical stretch which actually manages to make it across to the other side of the abyss of understanding?)

For the Chinese newspaper conoisseur (which I aspire to be, and am by no means yet), to be back in Shanghai after a couple of weeks in the provinces is like taking a bath after a month on the frozen front lines in Korea, a parallel which I can speak about authoritatively, having read James Brady’s pre-publication manuscript (it is typewritten) of his Korea memoir The Coldest War, later ripped off by David Halberstram, who died before a single critical review of his epic book by the same name came out.

In any event, to the primary evidence, such as it is…

North Korea's Hong Kong? Perhaps. Image courtesy Shijie Zhishi, linked well below.

An empty optics firm looms on the horizon on the dirt-torn and perpetually expanding fringes of Xinchengqu, the new city being built southwest of Dandong. Photo by Adam Cathcart; click on the photo for more pictures.

The following is a cross-post from SinoNK.com.  And King Tubby (a regular commenter on both this site and David Bandurski’s essential China Media Project) points out a new Los Angeles Times article that deals with the matter of North Korean capitalism from a different angle. 

Along the frontier between North Korea’s North Hamgyong province and the PRC’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region, journalists, according to Chosun Ilbo, have been encountered problems with Chinese police.

Not so for Jeremy Page of the Wall Street Journal, who files a report which, amid all the other often completely baseless bloviating about rumors in Pyongyang, actually points the way forward to change of a sort in North Korea.

Entitled “Trade Binds North Korea to China,” Page’s dispatch virtually lays out a blueprint for further research and observation.

Among the questions prompted by Page’s work: Are North Korean cross-border traders an effective and powerful interest group in the DPRK today?  Is their relationship to provincial officials in North Hamgyong and North Pyong’an adversarial or symbiotic?  Does Jang Song-taek represent the interests of the trading elite, or an otherwise “pro-China” or “China-leaning” faction in Pyongyang? And, to be just a bit insouciant, why do the North Korean officials in or passing through Yanji prefer the Liujiang Hotel (which does not have a DPRK state-affiliated restaurant) when they could stay at the Rason Hotel (which assuredly does)?

To answer the question about Jang Song-Taek and the “new” (in the sense of “newly emergent”) Pyongyang elite and their relationship with China, it behooves us to look at the players on the Chinese side.

Dandong Leadership Watch (Part I) 

Last week at SinoNK, we discussed the role of the past Vice-Director for Public Security in Yanbian, and today, the provincial official in focus is the Secretary of the Dandong CCP Committee, Dai Yulin.

The highest-ranking CCP provincial and city leaders, or the most successful ones at least, are technocrats, and they tend toil away in provinces distant from their personal power bases.  Dai Yulin, born in 1959, is indeed a technocrat — with a doctorate in finance and two subsequent professorships in the same field — but he has been firmly entrenched in Liaoning province since at least the late 1980s, operating primarily within the tri-cornered circuit between Shenyang, Dalian, and Dandong.

In other words, he is a peninsular creature — that is to say, of the Liaoning peninsula, that economic counterweight to Kyonggi-do, which has the western part of North Korea caught in a kind of inevitable pincer of economic ties.

In particular, Dai is a Dalian man, having arrived there in 2001 and being promoted to vice mayor to the gregarious Bo Xilai [son of Bo Yibo], China’s most famous “princeling” and now in charge of Chongqing, in 2008.  Dai’s success in Dalian — a city which, in spite of three massive oil spills and a major chemical spill in the past 14 months of so, foreign columnists like Thomas Friedman still like to depict as a kind of ecotopia worthy of emulation by American mayors — resulted in his being thrown into Dandong at the unique historical juncture of August 2010, as plans began to materialize for accelerated ties with North Korea.  He was re-upped for the position by the CCP Party Congress in Beijing in July 2011.

Dai’s new office is in Xinchengqu; the entire city government has been moved out there.  The famous Yalu River bridge, as was pointed out by Tang Longwen in a very nice Shijie Zhishi article earlier this year, is a relic of Japanese imperialism, and hardly has the capacity for the kind of extensive mega-city and multi-national trade that China ultimately has planned to flow via Liaoning and North Pyong’an and onward to Pyongyang and points well south and east.  In other words, Dai’s new office is near the new $250 million bridge to Korea, which was reported on by the present author in dispatches from Dandong in June (here) and August of 2011.

(More photos of the construction in Xinchengqu are here, and then subsequently with more documents, thanks to Curtis, at NK Economy Watch).

By way of closing the argument about local ties and the relation of Chinese provincial officials to Pyongyang,  this analysis from September 2011 bears repeating in full:

At first I wondered: even in the midst of North Korea’s biggest wave of Chinese aid and investment since 1958, isn’t it a little bit unusual for the mayor of Dandong to go to Pyongyang?  And for KCNA to throw down not one, but three stories about the friendly visit?

And then I read a new piece in the Daily NK (which unlike so many DailyNK stories has much more than a just single source breathing rumors into a borderland cell phone) which describes a major purge going on in Sinuiju and surrounding North Pyong’an province.

…Occasionally one’s cross-border counterparts will simply disappear, and with them the claims to capacity or access of various kinds.

For Chinese officials in the northeastern provinces, the lesson is clear: always have friends in Pyongyang (preferably a handshake away from the Dear Leader), because the provincial cadre (even the ones you took out to karaoke, warbling away on the Dandong riviera) may not have your back after all.

And regardless of what North Korea does, money in the meantime is still flowing in Dandong, the little city with international ambitions. Not to veer into boosterism, but the city has indeed created an attractive investment environment for electronics and flat-screen manufacturers; a recent visit to the city of a representative from Philips was a focal point for Dai Yulin on December 15.

The interest in Sinuiju and the new Special Economic Zone — passed into law by the DPRK only on December 9 — is properly the subject of another post, one which will probably introduce SinoNK’s new Economic Analyst, Alan Ferrie.

Adam Cathcart, “Bow Before the Portrait: Sino-North Korean Relations Enter the Kim Jong Eun Era,” The China Beat, December 23, 2011.

Adam Cathcart, “Soft Power Struggle: Ai Weiwei and the Limits of Sino-German Cultural Cooperation,” The China Beat, December 15, 2011.

For those who have not been introduced, China Beat is the top-flight blog headed by Jeffrey Wasserstrom.  As a widely-published public intellectual, head of the History Department at University of California-Irvine, editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and author of several important historical studies on student nationalism in Shanghai, Wasserstrom is someone I draw a great deal of inspiration from, so I’m particularly delighted to have a chance to write for him, as well as for some of his readers.

It seems that no Chinese delegations can get into the DPRK along the northern border, but, according to DailyNK, they are sending wreathes in as gifts.

As 2011 comes to a close — and as the Kim Jong Eun era begins — I am pleased to announce that I will be migrating new writing about China’s relations with North Korea to a new platform, SinoNK.com.  That site is still under construction but, like the Kim Jong Eun project itself, it was forced to launch a little early.

SinoNK.com will be evolving into a regular examination of China’s relationship with North Korea, geographically anchored in the study of the Sino-North Korean borderlands, both historically and in the present.  My aim is to make it the premiere web resource for the study of contemporary Chinese influence in North Korea, the Chinese outlook on the DPRK, the historical relations between the Workers’ Party of Korea and Chinese Communist Party, and the shadows cast over the relationship by the (ongoing) Korean War.

To further this goal, I’ve put out a call for applications for a number of positions at SinoNK.com which can be accessed here.

Excising the North Korean angle from the present site will allow for greater credibility and influence with the think-tank and policy crowd, without all the distractions of the personal idiosyncracies and more lyrical modes of writing that tend to proliferate on this website.

At the same time, I’ll be maintaining Sinologistical Violoncellist as a solo and more China-focused site whose energies are directed toward the issues which regular readers are probably already familiar — issues like Sino-Japanese relations and Chinese war memory, Sino-European relations, and cultural diplomacy between the West and China, both as history and in the present.

Here at SV, we are going to keep scanning the French press for stories about East Asian contemporary art, translating German theater reviews from Beijing in Berlin cafes, talking about the environment and design in Northeast Asia, experimenting with the linkages between soon-to-be-smashed buildings in Chinese cities and towns and the architecture of the Cello Suites of J.S. Bach, beating the bushes on the North Korean border for music scores, and playing Chinese contemporary music around the world.  In short, studying a whole gamut of things that we might group under the category of “soft power” or cultural relations, but that we also might call, more simply, inquiry.

I hope that Sinologistical Violoncellist will stay on your dial, and if Chinese influence in North Korea is also your thing and you get a kick out of archival documents from Pyongyang, I hope that you will be checking SinoNK.com regularly as well.

Pyongyang in Spring -- image courtesy David Guttenfelder, Associated Press, images picked up as well by Huanqiu Shibao

Every visit to Shanghai is worth the price, but it remains possible to waste the experience, frittering away one’s time in sullen Western cafes from Seattle and reeking of a desperate quest for WiFi, or in being too rapidly sated by a stroll along the Bund as the sole recognition of the shadows of the 19^th century, when in fact a Li Hongzhang-Alfred Thayer Mahan redux is perpetually in motion in the newspapers that so rapidly populate one’s backpack.

What is a wasted visit to Shanghai? Surely, it would be a visit absent a stroll along the long spine of Huaihai Road. There looms the Shanghai Municipal Library, that object of lust for many a researcher with a hunger for the dead, for old magazines, for epochs reorganized and reclaimed, for the first Chinese Republic.  Just beyond the great translucent book drop of the library, which neatly displays and precatalogues what patrons have been dropping into its great and vigilant plastic innards, the American Consulate squats in colonial splendor behind high cream walls.  Once, enchanted by a new digital device and the music positively throbbing from a scratchy erhu by an old man under those walls, I there kicked a can of RMB coins in every direction. It was a worthy metaphor for Shanghai: desire – for experience, for documents, for modernity, for funds — radiating in every direction, abundant technology colliding in mistaken entwining with a dental casualty of some unnamed province, fingertips hardened by rural farming in the one case and by urban typing in the other,  scattering metallic largesse to the sound of a Communist war song in the shadow of muted American power.

And just beyond, beyond a bend on Huaihai Road, rises a large round pillar, the largest bulwark of Western music on the mainland between Tokyo and Calcutta, the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.  To come to Shanghai and miss the opportunity to visit such a site would truly be counted as wasted.

Thumbing through the shelves at the Conservatory bookstore is always rather instructive: ethnomusicological research at the institution is abundant, and the publications in this realm are rapid and interesting. Titles like “PHONE”… proliferate.  Western-educated scholars have returned to Shanghai in droves, and their work fuels this city’s prodigious growth not simply in GDP but in lists of published work, or things in the category of what some idealistic people with no regard for the convincing heft of aircraft carrier ordinance might call “cultural capital.”

Then I ran across an intriguing new collection of cello scores “in the style of [Chinese] ethnic minorities” which I proceeded to purchase.  Upon negotiating my way through a few large crowds of Japanese moms retreating out of the campus with their children, each person radiant with the kind of upward gestalt that only in-tune group singing can provide, I went to the airport, flew to Chengdu, and there reunited with one of my cellos in order to test which of the “ethnic talents” who was writing for cello was most worthy of my attention.

Shanghai was thus dispatched.

Immediately upon opening the score in Chengdu, I was struck most by the piece “Autumn Song [秋之歌]” by Kim Jongpyong, or Jin Zhengping [金正平].  Judging from the textual introduction to the collection (focusing on “high talents from among our country’s ethnic minorities”), as well as the svelte harmonic style and harmonically supple idiom, I assumed the composer to be a successfully struggling ethnic Korean music graduate from, say, the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing sometime in the mid-1980s.  If the reader be a bit uncertain, such a provenance should be regarded as a complement: the young talents like Gao Ping who emerged out of the conservatory milieu in that era are cutting new pathways into the musical realms all over the world, and justly so.

I was quite wrong about his age, and his relationship to China’s cultural bureaucracy.  Jin’s full biography is available on the website of the Association for the Research of Chinese-Korean Music, to be explained shortly.