Monthly Archives: August 2018

opium

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Caught up in the world of cheerfully sexy pirates, I waded through the trials and tribulations of Eitel’s heroic Free Traders to his chapter on “The Opium Question and the Exodus from Canton, 1839” (75-95). Now, the opening chapters of Europe in Asia had prepared me for his ‘blame the addict’ explanation for the opium trade, but I’d be lying if I claimed that I had anticipated the Alice in Wonderland moment which opened his discussion:

“The taste for opium is a congenital disease of the Chinese race. At the beginning of the Christian era, the uses and effects of opium were the secret of the Buddhist priesthood in China. Priests from India secured for themselves divine honours by performing feats of ascetic discipline, fasting and mental absorption, sitting for instance motionless for months at a time indolently gazing at a black wall. These feats were performed by means of opium.”

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a general history of shenzhen

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On Saturday, July 21, I participated in the launch of A General History of Shenzhen (深圳通史) at China’s 28th National Book Expo. We gathered to honor archeologist Zhang Yibin, who has spent over thirty years of his life documenting the shards and towers of Shenzhen. He has contextualized these bits and pieces of material culture within and against local gazetteers and academic research, providing us with a rough timeline of the past 7,000 years. So, now we have an official history that we can begin deconstructing. Who knows? We may actually move beyond the fishing myth and our investment in imagining “normal history” as the history of boomtowns and capitalist accumulation.

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and more from shenzhen book of changes

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Help us make more and better episodes of Shenzhen Book of Changes!

nets to riches

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In our rush to celebrate Shenzhen’s transformation from a fishing village into China’s fourth city, we emphasize a nets-to-riches fantasy. However, this origin story ignores the inequalities that structured coastal society before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. In this episode of the Shenzhen Book of Changes, we visit Nan’ao and speak with the local fishing people, who before 1962 were not allowed to come on land. They floated from port to port in Dapeng Bay, relying on the fish that they could catch and the protection of the goddess Mazu to warn them when storms were rising.

the left behind

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Here’s the thing about the retreat of manufacturing from the townships and villages of the Pearl River Delta; these areas have urbanized, migrants have settled in and are raising families, but as the low-end jobs and shops that once sustained local and migrant communities follow the factories elsewhere, these neighborhoods are withering. Consider, for example, the older section of Dongguan–莞城, which only twenty years ago was a vibrant community and today is an abandoned reminder of the area’s complicated history with Ming pirates and British opium, its deep relationships with the late Qing Chinese diaspora, and the Pearl River Delta’s urban village origins. Old Dongguan has become a focus of concern for urban planners and concerned citizens: how to revitalize an “old street” that is no longer viable, but sits on prime real estate, or more precisely, inquiring minds want to know: to raze or not to raze historic areas and landmark buildings? Continue reading →

only connect

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The two-day event was called “Only Connect.” We emphasized the infrastructure that makes neighborhoods out of houses and buildings. Yes, every building had an electrical light, water tubes, sewage tubes and access to the main road. And yes It’s also true, every time that Handshake 302 holds an event at the P+V Gallery, the kids rock our world. Take a look at the smiles that creativity brings! More about Handshake 302 here and here.

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opiate of the mass-market

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Today’s postcard is a bit of jump jump jump–from Hong Kong free traders to the rise of openly Nazi candidates in the 2018 midterm elections via a bodice-ripper or two. 

Here’s the question: Is E.J. Eitel’s Europe in Asia actually a Victorian-era pirate bromance before the fact? That’s the question that keeps bubbling up when I read his characterization of opium pushers free traders like William Jardine and James Matheson. Compare, for example, how smoothly the prologue from a popular historical romance links up with a passage from Eitel: Continue reading →

a bully’s honor

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As I watch the US president scream and shout and justify his socio-pathologies, as I  engage low-ranking officials who change their minds and force their subordinates to work unnecessary overtime everyday, and as I argue with parents who think that their children are not “strong enough (不够厉害)” to take what they want in life, I’ve been thinking a lot about bullies and institutional forms of bullying that are misrecognized as education or leadership or honor and virtue. Like many in the United States, a significant number of Chinese people accept social Darwinism as an accurate description of “the real world,” rather than recognizing social Darwinism for the self-serving misreading of evolutionary theory that it is.

Then, after a grumble about the normalization of bullying in everyday life, I continue reading E. J. Eitel’s Europe in China: the History of Hongkong from the beginning to the Year 1882, which compounds my frustration with righteous bullies and their inability to empathize with anyone’s pain, including their own. I manage three sentences before the arrogance, misogyny and general smugness of Eitel’s text force me to consider if I really want to read over 600 pages of what must have been considered “edifying” reading material. The text does make clear is the extent to which imperial bureaucracies, colonialism and some misplaced yearning for civilization continue to overdetermine the hierarchies and injustices that characterize contemporary societies. Continue reading →

in the news, eighty years ago

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A bit of follow-up on the persistence of colonial structures.  On the same page that The Evening Telegraph recorded the sale of four ships from China Merchants to Jardines, we see the galling legacies of geographic morality. And yes, the stories could have been tweeted today with the caveat that today we are angry and then we were smug. Sigh. Continue reading →

what’s so free about free trade?

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Like many late 19th century Britons, E. J. Eitel saw the East India Company (EIC) as the economic equivalent of the Qing Dynasty, asserting, “However galling this stolid assertion of self-adequacy and supremacy, and this persistent exclusivism of the Chinese Government, must have been to the East India Company’s officers and to the Ambassadors specially commissioned to bolster up the position of the East India Company in China, it must not be forgotten that the East India Company was, within its own sphere, just as haughty, domineering and exclusive a potentate, as any Emperor of China (19).”

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