If you have a Chinese friend, or happen to have read some history on China, you know what we call ourselves, “the Middle Kingdom”. Obviously we think we are the centre of the world. Until we encountered the “West” and were forced to “open the door”.
With vast mountain ranges including the Himalayas standing imposingly to the southwest, the Gobi Desert to the north, and the Pacific Ocean stretching out to the east, the Chinese were in relative isolation from the rest of the world until the 1800s. In fact, because they believed they were in the middle of the world, surrounded by natural barriers on all sides, the Chinese thought of themselves as “Zhong Guo” — the Middle Kingdom.
So, in the 1800s, when colonialism forcefully opened the door of the Middle Kingdom, the experience is considered as humiliating and painful. Nonetheless, China had a time when Chinese went to the West to study and work. Some settled there, some came back trying to change China. Westerners came for charity work, adventures and profit. Coming to Shanghai was such a popular activity back then, that Shanghai was made into a verb.
The period of opening the door to the world (the West, in particular) was ended when CCP took over. When Mr. John Leighton Stuart, then US ambassador to China was recalled by the US government and left, Mao wrote a sarcastic essay titled “Farewell, Leighton Stuart!”. In it, he wrote:
John Leighton Stuart, who was born in China in 1876, was always a loyal agent of U.S. cultural aggression in China. He started missionary work in China in 1905 and in 1919 president of Yenching University, which was established by the United States in Peking. He has fairly wide social connections and spent many years running missionary schools in China, he once sat in a Japanese gaol during the War of Resistance. On July 11, 1946, he was appointed U.S. ambassador to China. On August 2, 1949, because all the efforts of U.S. imperialism to obstruct the victory of the Chinese people’s revolution had completely failed, Leighton Stuart had to leave China quietly.
Yanching University, later became Peking University, where Premier Li got his Ph.D in Economics. It is not uncommon: most of the best universities in China were established by foreigners.
With the departing of Mr. Stuart, the door of the Middle Kingdom to the world was shut, after it was painfully opened a hundred years ago.
In December 1978, Mao had died by then and China had a diplomatic relationship with the US for 6 years, Deng Xiaoping was the de facto leader of the country. Meanwhile, the country was very poor, higher education had been stopped for years and just resumed in the summer of 1978 with the first college entrance exam for a long time. The CCP decided to “reform and opening-up (改革开放)” the country. So, China opened its door again, after almost 30 years.
At that time, Mr. Xiang Biao was 6 years old. Later, in 1990, he went to Peking University to study social sciences. He spent 6 years doing field study on migrant workers from Zhejiang province (where he grew up), and wrote a book Transcending Boundaries, Zhejiangcun: the Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing . The book was widely considered the best book in Anthropology in China. You can borrow it from the Internet Archive.
Then Mr. Xiang Biao was offered scholarship to study for Ph.D in Anthropology at Oxford University. He could not speak English yet and he struggled to keep up with the school work. But he successfully transformed himself to be a leading Anthropologist on migrant workers in the world by studying Indian IT workers.
From 2003 to 2021, Mr.Xiang Biao was a professor at Oxford. Now, he heads the department “Anthropology of Economic Experimentation” of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research.
In a recent interview to a Chinese magazine, Mr. Xiang explained that he was hired to lead the department into a new direction. It is not rare to see Chinese scholars excel in science and technology related fields. But as far as I know, Xiang is the first scholar that is trusted to direct a social science department at a major institute. And on a topic not related to China. To me the achievement of Mr. Xiang is a true testimony of the success of opening-up: by opening up to the world, a generation of Chinese can join the best in the world in (re)shaping humanity.
Mr. Xiang is also a star in China because he is very open to engage with Chinese audience on issues that concern them. For example, when unnecessary competition for scarce resources is driving parents crazy, “involution”(内卷)” becomes a trending word to describe the anxiety of society. Mr. Xiang participated in the public discourse through a few interviews, mostly in Chinese. But if you wonder what it is about, the New Yorker has an article titled China’s “Involuted” Generation, citing Mr. Xiang.
I first came to know of Mr. Xiang in 2017, because of his interview in an overseas Chinese online media. He offered a perspective on China and the world that was very refreshing and unique. He is different from the western scholars who look at China from the vintage point of the West, understandably. Mr. Xiang is a Chinese and he understands China deeply as a person who grew up in China. But he is also different from most of the Chinese scholars who can only understand China in the framework set up by Chinese intellectual history and CCP.
It is not hard to second guess his political opinions, but he has been very good at staying apolitical. So he has a far reach audience in China and he is often interviewed in major news outlets. Over the years, he showed up on my reading list from time to time, sometime too often! I wonder why he offers his opinions on so many issues. Until I read an article about his latest book “Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World”, in which he argued that one’s main task is to stimulate others to think. That is why he offers himself to the public. He also said that chatting with people is considered major work in Oxford University. You can read an excerpt of the book in English: it will be published in English in October 2022 as open access.
The new direction Mr. Xiang is taking his department to go is called “common worries”. In an interview published in German, “Was haben wir gemeinsam?”, (“What do we have in common?”), Xiang explained: “Anthropology in particular must name real common worries, the shared concerns in a globally intertwined reality of life.” He does not see the world separated as the Middle Kingdom and the West. He sees the common humanity we all have.
It is 2022, you would think the Middle Kingdom is going crazy if they want to close the door again. But, crazy things are happening in the Middle Kingdom everyday.
On August 29th, an article published by Chinese Academy of History (which belongs to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) got attention on social media. The article is titled “We should not label the Ming and Qing dynasty as Closing-The-Door”. In it, the authors argued that before 1800 China did not close the door completely, there were still some communications to the outside world. The policy should be described as “autonomous restriction of trade”, as a protection against the colonial power.
(This recent photo is being circulated on Twitter, as an example how much some corner of the Middle Kingdom wants to go back to Qing Dynasty. The slogan on the red banner says: “Happily welcome the 20th Party congress, Work hard for the new era. Education activity of immersion history.” The immersion shows up in the man’s dress: it is clothe for a Qing dynasty government official.)
The 20th Party congress is when the next government will be decided and our dear Supreme leader will start his third term as the second longest supreme leader.
With COVID and restrictions on border crossing, this revisionist history of the Qing Dynasty got huge public pushback. Most of Chinese people don’t want “autonomous restriction of trade”, whatever the name one uses.
If China indeed shuts down the door to the world, the young generation will suffer the most. One never knows among today’s 6-years-olds in the Middle Kingdom, what kind of sparkling mind could break out to the world and help us understand “common worries”.
In July, a few arrests of high level executives in the semi-conductor industry and senior government officials that supervise the industry have shocked China. Finally, New York Times reported it: “Xi Jinping’s Vision for Tech Self-Reliance in China Runs Into Reality”.
At the same time, with massive investment, there is actually some breakthrough in the industry. China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) appears to have used 7nm technology to manufacture a chips. This surprised experts in the West. In semiconductor manufacturing, the 7 nm process was ‘state of the art’ in 2018 and this process allows to manufacture ‘good’ chips.
If you look closer (7nm is small after all), it’s a bit more complicated… Opening the door also allows people to come and help!
And it’s not the first time SMIC got ‘inspired’ by TSMC:
A California jury ruled on [November 4, 2009] that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp stole and used trade secrets from rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, possibly putting SMIC on the hook for more than $1 billion in damages for TSMC, a lawyer for TSMC said on Tuesday.
The jury also found that SMIC breached the terms of a 2005 settlement over similar claims, for which it had agreed to pay $175 million and to surrender all TSMC documents and stop using TSMC technology and processes, lawyers for the companies said.
My guess is, the only reason the Middle Kingdom is not shutting its door yet is that they still have to rely on the US and Taiwan for chips. The day they think they got their own chips, they will do “autonomous restriction of trade”. He he.
Three years ago today, the 2019 Prince Edward station attack, aka the 31 August MTR station incident happened. That night, HK police raided commuter train in Prince Edward station in Hong Kong, beating commuters (taking them as protesters), and locked down the station for 30 hours. Apart from initial photos of police violence and crying civilians, there was no more reports on what happened in the station that night. People feared that many protesters were killed inside the station. The police of course dennied it.
In the past years, people have tried to put flowers at the station to commomerate the event, but with the national security laws and oppressive atmosphere in Hong Kong, a few brave people showed up despite heavy police presence.
A man in black shouted, “HongKongers, resist!” A woman’s shirt read, “have you forgotten or are you afraid to remember?”
This reminds me of Milan Kundera’s words: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting