This is a book review that's been sitting in draft stage as a collection of raw quotes and no commentary since mid 2007. Edge of Empires: Chinese Elites and British Colonials in Hong Kong by John M Carroll, © 2005 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, ISBN 0-674-01701-3) is perhaps the best book I've read describing Hong Kong's socio-economic development under colonialism.

I took a few of those quotes for this post in August 2007 on HK's Chinese elite and how they see themselves as separate and above the general Chinese population here.

This touches on one of the keys to the accuracy of the book. Old school historians either were apologists for colonialism, trying to focus on the education or infrastructure they brought to places like Africa or Tibet or India, or they openly decried colonialism as sucking the life out of a country and keeping the locals down. There is a new school that sees both of these schools of thought as unrealistic. Far from keeping all of the locals down and sucking the life out of a country, colonialism inevitably formed/forms a symbiotic relationship with a certain strata of locals, who use the symbiotic relationship to accomplish their own goals, which may not mix with the colonialists.

p97
Yet, by forming their own exclusive social world instead of trying to join the Europeans' world, they were able to define themselves in contrast to the European bourgeoisie and thereby highlight their own uniqueness. Had the leaders of the Chinese bourgeoisie tried to join the European social world, they would have remained in a subordinate position. In their own social world, however, they were the undisputed masters.

Some fine examples of this are the Tung Wah Hospital group, which still puts on gala shows to allow HK's elite to parade themselves above the masses, while providing an opportunity for the masses to buy in to this group via donations to the charity. This elite didn't just create a parallel social hierarchy to the European social world, but to the social world across the border.

p.14
The leaders of the Hong Kong bourgeoisie claimed to represent the interests of the colony. They were conscious, indeed proud, of their contributions to economic development in Hong Kong and China. They were careful about the people with whom they associated, how they conducted their professional and social lives, and how they presented themselves to the rest of society. As elsewhere, the bourgeoisie was united by a strong sense of itself in regard to other classes. In Hong Kong, this bourgeoisie identified itself against a wide array of "others", including the Chinese bourgeoisie in China, the local European bourgeoisie, and the Chinese lower classes of the colony.

But Hong Kong's Chinese elite was not a spontaneous phenomenon. They were created and nurtured by the colonial leaders.

p.18
In early Hong Kong, colonialism not only required collaboration with a local elite, it also helped create a local elite. Although the British did not attempt to create a local bourgeoisie as actively, for example, as the Japanese after annexing Korea, the making of the Chinese business class was inseperably linked with the colonial nature of the island. By rewarding such men with privileges—for example, land grants—and offering them lucrative monopolies, the government helped foster the growth of a local Chinese business elite. By enforcing separate business and residential districts for Chinese, the colonial government provided them with a domain in which to flourish (though this did not always work to the government's advantage). Hong Kong did not merely continue patterns of collaboration; it intensified and institutionalized them.

Would you be surprised that from the very beginning of colonial occupation of Hong Kong, that one of the prime "gifts" to reward the right sort of businessman was land?

p.28
Land grants constituted one important source of wealth. The new government used these to reward those Chinese who had helped the British secure and develop the island. For his services during the Opium War, Loo Aqui received a plot of valuable land in the Lower Bazaar. He was later able to obtain, through other grants or purchases eased by his connections to the colonial regime, many more lots in the Lower Bazaar.

And it didn't stop at land grants to individuals.

p.113 - 114
That many Chinese had come to see Hong Kong as their permanent home became evident in December 1911, two months after the Chinese republican revolution. Ho Kai and seventeen other Chinese petitioned Governor Frederick Lugard for a permanent cemetery for "Chinese permanently residing in Hong Kong."

...

In July 1912 Lugard's successor, Francis May, happily approved the request. As May explained to the Colonial Office, Lugard had supported the proposal because "it would tend to create a colonial feeling and to specialize a class who desire to identify themselves with the Colony."

In fact a real history of early Hong Kong calls in to question the official narratives, including about Hong Kong's growth being the result of the free market and free trade.

p.29
Apart from land grants, the early colonial regime introduced other measures that made the colony attractive to Chinese willing to settle there. Scholars of all political stripes have stressed the role of free trade in Hong Kong's economic development. This economy, however, was neither free nor, at least in the early years, impressive. An elaborate system of monopolies and farms, usually offered at public auction, regulated the production, preparation, and retail of commodities such as opium and salt. Liquor and tobacco were licensed and taxed. Ironically, it was from these same types of regulations and monopolies that the British has insisted the Opium War and the "imperialism of free trade" would liberate China.

So how did these official narratives get formed? Marketing 101 and collaboration between the colonial leaders and Hong Kong's Chinese elite.

p.4
If defined at all, Hong Kong has generally been delimited by its negative qualities: a sleepy colonial backwater overshadowed until 1949 by semicolonial Shanghai; a capitalist paradise without history or culture, where nothing matters but money; a place where the only political values are pragmatism and apathy; and a haven for sojourners or refugees with only a temporary identity. Even the legendary "Hong Kong success story" depends on Hong Kong's negative qualities: before the British arrived in the late 1830s, Hong Kong was nothing but a "barren rock"; prior to the communist revolution of 1949, when entrepreneurs from Shanghai poured into the colony, Hong Kong was just a colonial entrepot with little industry of its own—and the best-known appellation of all, "borrowed place, borrowed time," is based on the assumption that Hong Kong has no real time or place of its own.

None of these are historically true, but they've all been told uncountable times as part of the official narrative and conventional wisdom. For example:

p.67
Even though Hong Kong's industries were highly developed before 1949, when entrepreneurs came from Shanghai to escape communist rule, the government maintained that Hong Kong's economic success was due to the entrepot trade. This interpretation followed from colonial policy, which dictated that Hong Kong should be an entrepot, even though Chinese industry was the largest employer in the colony.

p6
Through dating the "real" history of Hong Kong to its founding as a British colony—they linked themselves to this history. By stressing the colony's commercial growth, they stressed their own role in the process.

By discounting anything that had gone before, they raised their own importance in the historical narrative. This can still be seen at work today in Hong Kong as archaeological studies of the time prior to the Elite Families of the New Territories go underfunded and underworked.

Another fine example provided for the social reinforcement of the Chinese elite and the moulding of the official narratives were the directories of prominent business and social persons in the colony.

p.83
Regardless of their intent—whether to display the human "holdings" of the British Empire or to illustrate how a colonial society should be organized—these guides and directories distinguished such Chinese from the rest of the colony's Chinese residents. By showing how far some Chinese businessmen had come since the colony's early days, they explained the rules for making it to the top of Hong Kong society.

And since 1997 the rules for making it to the top of Hong Kong society haven't changed much, with a simple switch of allegiance from London to Zhongnanhai being enough to boost one to the very top of society.

p.192
Although Hong Kong has returned to China, it has not been de-colonized. Rather, it has been re-colonized, with the metropole, simply shifting from London to Beijing. The new cadres coming down from Beijing are reminiscent of the early British administrators in the 1800s, with their own language, their own clubs, and their own condescending attitudes toward their new subjects.

If you're going to read one book about Hong Kong's socio-economic development during the colonial period and want to come away with the groundwork to understand the current socio-economic and political situations in Hong Kong, this is it.

Undress Me In The Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
ISBN-10: 0-446-57892-4, Grand Central Publishing, publisher's description of the book, Amazon page for the book including many positive early reviews.

I was contacted by Miriam Parker, who handles the Internet Marketing for Grand Central Publishing and asked to do a review of this book. I asked what strings would be attached and Ms Parker said there were none other than writing this review. No requests or demands were made for positive spin. The publisher's blurb for the book sounded interesting, so I agreed and within 2 days of receiving the book, I'd finished it.

It reads quickly, though the reading isn't as easy as one might be led to believe from the publisher's blurb. This isn't a book I'd recommend for beach reading or for spending time on during the nicest day of Spring. Rather, being the tempermentalist that I am, I'd suggest finding a late season winter storm that has you trapped at home and the Cabin Fever is setting in.

This is a tale where things go seriously wrong. We're not talking going wrong like the mythic three hour cruise of Gilligan's Island. This isn't a tale that everyone has been through and will easily relate to. This isn't even a story where the reader should easily find warmth through schadenfreude. No, there is no way to easily confuse this with a road story starring Bing Crosby or Hunter S. Thompson.

It is a road story of two new graduates from Brown University, who were inspired by an IHOP placemat and set out to conquer the world in 1986. Although I'm really not sure anyone could have been fully prepared for what actually happened, this was definitely one of those grand schemes hatched by overly confident youth. The scheme became burdened with over-planning of minutiae and under-planning of the whens and wheres and whats and whos. Travel doesn't have to be a HK outbound tour group, but excessive flying by the seat of the pants does tend to require extra money and effort to extricate oneself from unplanned predicaments.

The over-planning results in the pair being laden down with the works of Nietzsche and Linda Goodman's LoveSigns and an excess of other gear that would never be used. Burdened by weighty packs and a lack of planning combined with hubris the pair set off for their first stop, China, without a clue in the world where they would go or stay beyond possible recommendations found in a Lonely Planet guide. Entrance to the PRC in 1986 for foreigners was via Hong Kong, so the story opens with the pair coming in for the approach to Kai Tak Airport and deciding on the spur of the moment that staying in Chungking Mansions sounded like the proper way of roughing it and going native.

The author does a great job of conveying the sights, smells and sounds of her surroundings. (The non-native speaker in the house commented that the sentences have a lot of commas and a lot of descriptive commentary.) This paired with the human touch does a great job of explaining why people get bitten by the travel bug and often find themselves with a nagging sense that they can never view home the same way again. On the other hand there is a bit of question of how much of the sights and smells are written from memory of this first trip and how much has been re-filled in from later trips to the same locations.

The characters and the events though are written from memories of the first trip. The characters include fellow travelers, helpful and curious Chinese, the usual crew from "the Asian hippie backpacker's trail", and of course the Chinese authorities as things spin out of control.

The author does a nice job of foreshadowing things going from bad to worse for those readers who are paying attention and a fairly realistic portrayal of the illnesses and "the wonders" of the mainland Chinese medical establishment and the peculiarities of mainland officials.

Since the official description doesn't provide any spoilers, I'll refrain from revealing too much of the ugly descent that this buddy story takes, but recommend that you read it for yourself.

The last chapter written about contemporary events and musings, including return trips to China to track down some of the folks met 20 years earlier, provides a certain level of redemption. Though as with real life there are the ever present loose ends that we'd like to mend (some people just don't want to be found or reintegrated in to our lives) and those that we still aren't sure we're ready to re-face our actions of 20 years previous (there are some people we're not ready to be found by or to reintegrate in to our lives).

So I've excerpted quotes from Cadres and Corruption previously, but I've left a draft entry for 5 months with lots of quotations for a more proper book review.

Cadres and Corruption, Xiaobo Lü, Stanford University Press, © 2000

I'd recommend this book highly to anyone interested in the phenomenon of corruption and the Chinese Communist Party. Even if you end up disagreeing with the central thesis, the book's examples and arguments will change the way you think about the CCP and its social organisation.

The book starts with a discussion of what constitutes corruption.

pp12-13
Corruption by public officials renders itself mainly in two forms, economic and non-economic corruption. They in turn consist of three subtypes: graft, rent-seeking, and prebendalism.

Graft.
...
What characterizes this type of deviance is that it often involves something of value given to, and accepted by, public officials for dishonest or illegal purposes. It may also involve officials engaging in fraudulent expenditures or diversion of public funds for private benefit.

Rent-seeking.
...
The concept is employed to refer to the behavior by public officials or agencies of seeking illicit profits through a monopoly over critical resources or regulatory power. It includes profiteering by officials or official firms, and extortion in the forms of illicit impositions, apportionments, fees, and other kinds of charges.

Prebendalism.
Prebendalism refers to the practice where incumbents of public office receive privileges and perquisites tied to the office. Incumbency or control of an office entitles the holder to rents of payments for undertaking real or fictitious duties. It occurs when "organizations are transformed from places of work to resource banks whereby individuals and informal groups pursue their own goals."

The author then turns to debate some of the other approaches to studying corruption. One of the common beliefs about corruption in China is that it couldn't have existed prior to Deng's reforms, since you can't have corruption without money.

p.18
That is, those who ardently present themselves as value-free in studying corruption by criticizing the cultural approach cannot escape the very pitfall they are trying to avoid—the market is not neutral after all. More serious flaws, however, lie in the reductionist tendency of the "market" approach, in that it overlooks the political realm and corruption in non-economic activities not entirely driven by pure economic considerations. Paradoxically, that is the reason why this approach is so fruitful: it latches precisely onto cases in which incentives override public norms.

The presence of money changing hands makes the corruption more obvious and makes these cases the low-hanging fruit of corruption studies, but they overlook the non-economic corruption and fail to provide adequate explanations about the social organisations that allow for the more subtle forms of corruption.

The author then turns to the history of the People's Republic and starts to examine the effects of the anti-Rightist campaigns and the Cultural Revolution on corruption.

p.26
However, because of the dominant concern of the CCP leadership to carry out continuous revolution, the Maoist emphasis on the compatibility of a cultural "superstructure" with a new political regime, and the conviction of the power of moral discourse over institutional elements (itself rooted in the traditional Chinese belief in moral indoctrination and cultivation), the propensity toward routinization that charismatic movements often face was much more consciously and constantly disrupted, suppressed, and even reversed in China than in any other Communist regimes.

This disruption and suppression of routinization of the socio-political structures and organisations via mass movements like the anti-Rightist campaigns and the Cultural Revolution produced an environment dominated by the absence of firm political or social norms and the importance of creating strategies to survive chaotic "Big Winds" blowing this way and then another. The author suggests the survival strategies were often neotraditional in nature and led to a process of organisational involution.

p232
The organizational involution of the Communist party is a historical development. But it is not the simple recurrent phenomenon in Chinese history that some scholars have asserted it is, nor is it a sociological pattern embedded in Chinese culture. Rather, it is a novel, generic process of its own. Such a development reveals the tension and conflict among different modes of relations and authority within and without the party organization, between formal institutions (policies, ideological doctrines, organizational rules, etc.) and informal modes of operation. The consequences of organizational involution suggest that neotraditional modes continue to dominate. It is important to make this distinction because involution seen as a consequence of cultural embeddedness (as in some scholarship) implies the inability and failure of the Communist regime to transform old relationships, whereas my argument is that the new institutions, policies, and norms have played a major role in motivating cadres to pursue neotraditional modes of action. In the Maoist era, it was precisely the conscious choice of anti-routinization and anti-bureaucratization strategies, purported to fulfill the goal of "continuous revolution" under socialism, that was responsible for the involution.

The author works very hard to differentiate between cadres backsliding to pre-Revolution behaviour and cadres moving forward and developing new variations on old melodies in response to the circumstances presented by the Maoists and "continuous revolution". The problem of corruption wasn't a result of the Maoists' efforts to reform the CCP and China failing, but a result of the Maoists' efforts having unintended consequences.

p136
Some have suggested that the resurgence of informal, instrumental relationships rooted in traditional Chinese values was a direct result of people's needs in an environment where the marketplace was under state control. Such an assessment points out one important structural cause of deviant behavior in Chinese society, that of satisfying material needs in a non-market economy. But there were also more complex institutional causes, such as weakening organizational control, confusion of norms, volatile political mobilizations, and, most significant, the inherent contradictions between the routinization propensity of a post-revolutionary organization and the conscious attempts to resist such tendencies.

And as the Cultural Revolution fell apart, Dengist reformism came to the front. One of the earliest reforms was the apparent dismantling of the class-struggle as a basis for "continuous revolution". This led to an acceptance of the routinisation of the CCP and the revolution. Often this is phrased as the CCP having to move from being a revolutionary party to a ruling party. With the acceptance of routinisation, one might be tempted to believe that the Maoist forms of corruption would disappear. Far from it. In fact the new variations on old themes modified to the new circumstances quite well. For example the non-economic corruption via false reporting of data to superiors first evident during the anti-Rightists campaign and the Great Leap Forward.

pp 220-221
The practice of dabiao is an example of how the "goal culture" of the Maoist era has not only survived the changes but adopted a new rule-oriented form. Instead of appointment and promotion of cadres by superiors' evaluation (kaocha) without standard procedures, now examinations and performance evaluations with set standards (kaohe) are applied. In a mobilization regime, routine rules and procedures are disregarded and overshadowed by goals and ends. In a neotraditional regime, officials are judged by their goal-oriented performance, but with rule-oriented requirements. The fact that provincial governments still designate a county "well-to-do" through a systematic evaluation (yanshou) indicates, ironically, that the pressure to be unrealistic about development goals comes from the very authorities who try to stop predatory practices by government agencies.

And...

pp170-171
With such "modern," meritocratic procedures, it is believed, cadre evaluation and promotion are to be based on objective standards, rather than the personal discretion of their supervisors. In rural areas, a most common and important criteria by which cadres are evaluated is level of local economic development. Some concrete criteria are applied: whether paved roads are connected to villages; whether all children of school age are able to attend schools—the list can go on and on. If, for example, a township is able to generate a certain amount of GDP from local township and village enterprises (often the standard is 100 million yuan annually), local leaders are likely to be promoted to higher rank or rewarded with bonuses. Local officials thus face mounting pressures as well as economic incentives to show evidence of achievements under their leadership, even if it means they must inflate statistics, not unlike during the Great Leap Forward. Little wonder that the relationship between officials and statistics is often described as "officials produce numbers and numbers make officials" (ganbu chu shuzi, shuzi chu ganbu).

And even as the bureaucratic organisation of the party and state were being routinised by Deng's reforms, the actual anti-corruption processes themselves weren't.

pp163-164
These rules and norms {ed note: from 1979-1980}, issued with high frequency, indicate both the existence of widespread problems and the concerns of the regime about decline in cadre integrity and the effectiveness of organizational norms. Ironically, however through these rules and norms were directed at informal modes of operation, they were made and promulgated via decrees and announcements. As such, they were often regarded by cadres, learning from past experience, as ad hoc, less stringent, and replaceable.

This was describing anti-corruption efforts in 1979-80, but it still holds true for the most part today as well. Though there have been some neotraditionalism in anti-corruption efforts as well, as noted by looking at some of the oldest efforts in China.

pp 248-249
A host of preventive measures were adopted by the rulers to guard against corrupt behavior by officials. Of the many such institutions and methods dating from the late imperial period, three appear as most significant: the huibi system (law of avoidance), the local taxation reform under Emperor Yongzheng, and the censor system. The law of avoidance was designed to prevent nepotism and the use of non-official relationships to influence decisions.

Rural taxation reform to reduce ad hoc taxation of farmers by cadres. A system, where all corruption of the party is investigated solely by the party staffing office. And the law of avoidance has been reborn with new regulations on the need to shuffle upper level party staff between provinces every few years.

These techniques and the administrative decrees and announcements failed to make serious dent in corruption in imperial China and have been equally ineffective in contemporary China.

Furthermore the repetitive waves of ineffectual decrees and announcements actually reduces their impact in the future as people realise that the real factors for being charged with corruption are based more on political reasons than some rational principle applied equally to all. This creates more opportunities for unintended consequences where pursuit in informal political connections become antagonistic to the Dengist goals of rationalising the party and state.

The book does not provide policy suggestions about how to combat corruption in modern China, but it does provide plenty of history and examples of how past policies and decrees have produced unintended consequences and have been counter-productive to their stated goals. And as a work of social science it provides a great starting point for the analysis of corruption in China and some interesting threads to explore in the organisation of the party and state.

So during my first trip to Hong Kong not so many moons ago, I browsed through the video shops of Causeway Bay and picked up 3 fairly current movies that had received good reviews. Shaolin Soccer, Infernal Affairs and The Eye.

Shaolin Soccer, one of Stephen Chiau's goofball comedies, went through a torturous path to reach American screens. Unfortunately, a path that is all too common for Hong Kong films, including massive cuts and redubbings to accomodate attention-deficit Americans.

Infernal Affairs was recently nominated for Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards. Oh wait, no it wasn't. Martin Scorsese's The Departed was nominated for these awards, even though it's clearly an inferior product to the original.

This interview with Christopher Doyle, renowned Hong Kong cinematographer and visual consultant for Infernal Affairs, talks about Hong Kong cinema and Hollywood.

If you have something to say, then people will listen. If you have nothing to say, then you make or remake Shrek 3. [laughs his hyena laugh] Or, as in America, you buy the rights to all these wonderful Asian films because we've run out of ideas. Hello! Ha-hah! We've run out of ideas so, "Fucking hell, how come they have all these very interesting stories? Let's buy them!" And then you put it on a shelf and you don't know what to do with it and then you don't realize until the Beijing Olympics in 2008 how far Asia has gone, and then you say, [whispering] "Fucking hell."

...

Tarantino is the perfect metaphor for the West: Appropriation, references. It's articulate in its own way but it's chop suey. [laughs]

That's a jerk-off. As well as it works, it's still a jerk-off. It's still an intellectual conceit, as pedestrian as he tries to pretend it is, as working class as he tries to pretend he is.

Which brings me to news about the third of the three films I bought not so many moons ago, The Eye. It just came across my rss reader that Tom Cruise has hired Jessica Alba to star in his remake of The Eye. I've got nothing against Jessica Alba, but Tom Cruise remaking this movie scares me.

The Eye is a horror/supernatural movie from the Pang Brothers. A blind girl receives eye transplants and can see again. Unfortunately for her, the eyes come along with the ability to see ghosts. Having been blind, she doesn't realise that everybody else can't see the ghosts as well. The rest of the story deals with the very Chinese concept of ghosts and their restlessness due to the manner of their deaths or burial and how to satisfy them in order for them to find peace (and hopefully de-supernatural the eyes).

I doubt Tom Cruise's ability to understand the underlying theme of bringing peace to the unresting dead. Though even scarier is having a man who sees invisible aliens as an important part of his life handling a movie about a woman gaining the ability to see invisible ghosts. This could go from being a remake of a decent, visually slick, supernatural film to being a chicken real fast (and no, I don't mean a Golden Chicken.).

Reading through Xiaobo Lü's Cadres and Corruption and it seems rather timely. I'm about halfway through the book and enjoying it, though it surely is not a summer beach page turner. The author sets out the questions he intends to answer, a few different theories about corruption and why he's chosen to use a modified version of Clifford Geertz' theory of involution as the basis for his analysis of corruption in China from 1949 to about 1998.

Here is one of the money quotes explaining that the anti-Weberian Maoist "continuous revolution" to purge bureaucratism and corruption from the cadres during and after the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Great Leap Forward ironically increased the underlying factors that caused corruption and recreated a neo-traditional bureaucracy that outwardly resembled a Maoist dream, but under the covers looked more like a Ming Dynasty creation.

For the first time in post-liberation history, cadres who carried out policies that turned out to be disastrous were later blamed for many of the consequences. Many learned a lesson not taught in party schools or training classes: to survive in a politically sensitive and dangerous game, it was not enough to follow orders and meet goals. They had to find protection by utilizing particularistic and informal relations or strategies that the revolution had intended to destroy. Ironic as it may sound, the "revolutionary" character of the party and the conscious choice of the leadership to counter the erosion of revolutionary ethos among its ranks, however ineffectively, were what compelled cadres to seek shelter under the guise of politically correct formalities.
pp 105-106, Cadres and Corruption, Xiaobo Lü, Stanford University Press, © 2000

So does the following cause you to hear ghostly echoes from the near past ringing across present-day China? Like restrictions on peasant mobility provide tremendous power to local officials in the urban areas over migrant workers fueling the economic growth in their jurisdictions.

However, the party did not acknowledge that the commune structure and the restriction on peasant mobility provided tremendous power to local officials in the countryside. Almost all aspects of peasant life were under their control. As one high-ranking party official put it, they "hold other people's rice-bowls (i.e., daily meals of peasants) in their hands.

Ironically, one of the major target of the Anti-Rightist-Orientation Campaign of 1959 was cheating and fraudulent reports by local officials. Yet after the campaign, wary of political persecution of this sort, cadres, including high-ranking officials, became more afraid of speaking the truth or what they really had on their minds. It was revealed later, at a national conference of party/state officials in 1962, that a prevalent mode of operation among cadres was the "three looks and three don't-speaks": look for the direction of the wind (kan fengxiang), when it is not clear where the wind is blowing from, don't speak; look at the color of the eyes of supervisors (kan lingdao yanse), when the color is not right (that is, not in the right mood), don't speak; look into the intentions (kan yitu), when the intentions of superiors are not clear, don't speak.
pp. 99-100, Cadres and Corruption, Xiaobo Lü, Stanford University Press, © 2000

The Great Game, The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, Peter Hopkirk, ©1990 1992, 1994 Kodansha America edition, ISBN 1-56836-022-3

So you're looking for some escapist summer reading about spies and adventures and empires and war? This is the book for you. At 524 pages, plus lengthy bibliography, index, and maps, this might not be the sensible choice to take to the beach, but it's got the entertainment value of a best selling spy thriller. The huge difference being that when you finish this book, you'll actually know a bit more about the history and culture of the world around you.

from the Foreword, p. xv
Meanwhile, a new struggle is under way as rival outside powers compete to fill the political and economic void left by Moscow's abrupt departure. Already political analysts and headline writers are calling this manoeuvring for long-term advantage 'the new Great Game'. For, while the stakes are far higher and the players mostly new, they see it today as a continuation of the age-old struggle. It is this which give the following narrative an even greater significance. For it tells, in full and graphic detail for the first time, how a succession of ambitious Tsars and ruthless generals crushed the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and occupied their lands. Fearing that the Russians would not stop until India too was theirs, the British sent young officers northwards through the passes to spy on them. At time the Great Game spilled over in to Afghanistan, Persia, China and Tibet - as it could again today if it is allowed to escalate.

Yes, it is history and not historical fiction. But most of the time the truth is far stranger and much more interesting than fiction. And Hopkirk acknowledges that this is a book about the individual characters and adventures of the Great Game more than it is a detailed history text of the period. So there is no need to run away from the prospect of being bogged down in the written equivalent of trench warfare. The story gallops effortlessly along like the famed horses of the Mongol-descended Central Asian warriors.

The first chapter, 12 pages in all, moves from the Golden Horde conquering Russia between 1219 to 1240 to Napoleon invading Egypt as the first step in conquering India with the aid of Russia in 1798. The last chapter , another 12 pages, moves from the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 to the fall of the Soviet Union. The 500 pages in between cover the stories and intrigues of the 19th Century between England and Russia to dominate Central Asia.

One of the things that stood out from the book for me was the tendency for the outside powers to be as happy with chaos as with a strongly supportive client state. That internally divided countries that fell in to chaos often was favoured over a strong central government that might switch allegiances to "the enemy". As was seen with the British response in the 2nd Afghan War, which showed that they had learned the lesson that a permanent occupation was politically impossible, but had failed to devise a plan that accomplished British long-term goals without committing political suicide.

p. 395
However, although the struggle for the capital had been decisively won, the war was still far from over. So long as the British remained in Afghanistan, and the country was without a ruler, any hopes for peace being restored were remote. Equally remote were the prospects of Britain being able to look to Afghanistan as a bastion against a Russian invasion of India. All that Lytton had succeeded in doing was to turn the hand of every Afghan against the British.

p. 396
All question of a permanent occupation, with its enormous cost in lives and money had been ruled out. The consensus was that the country should be broken up, thereby making it more difficult for the Russians, or any other potential enemy, to gain control of it. But, more immediately, it had to be decided who was to rule in Kabul when the British garrison there was withdrawn. Until this was settled, General Roberts and his troops would obviously have to remain, with the former to all intents and purposes occupying the throne.

China In Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History 1912-1949 by James E. Sheridan, ©1975, The Free Press, ISBN 0-02-928610-7

This is the second book in The Transformation of Modern China Series and the follow-on to the previously reviewed The Fall of Imperial China The warlord and Kuomintang era of Chinese history was a gap in my education. Furthermore the history of a period dominated by weak central governments unable to deal effectively with corruption and local and regional warlords and their armies seemed extremely interesting given the warlordism and regional armies dominating Afghanistan and Iraq now.

First, the good. Sheridan has done a lot of research on the period and knows the material well. The stories, data and maps provide a nice high level view of China during this period.

Now, the bad. The book is forced in to a story arc of disintegration and reintegration based loosely on a social science theory, that was not very well fleshed out at the time of publication. As the book returns to the story arc of the social science theory of national intergration, the work seems exceptionally contrived and forced. The sections detailing the history in between seem more genuine and informative. the other major flaw is the glaring pro-Maoist tilt to the book. Sheridan explicity states there are no good guys or bad guys, but every description of the Communists describes them as pure good and every description of the Kuomintang decribes them as pure ineptitude and corruption. A typical example is this whopper.

p. 293
Industry was developed intensively, with all that industrialization implies regarding regional interdependence upon resources and products. Agriculture was collectivized, removing once and for all the possibility of reversion to the old landlord-tenant system that had inhibited the modernization of Chinese farming.

In light of the Dengist-era agrarian reforms to decollectivise agriculture to provide incentives to modernise and expand production and the Hu Jintao-era efforts to remove the rural taxes and incidental fees that once again had become the bane of the Chinese agrarian peasant, the naivete of Sheridan towards Mao's reforms seems quaint. And this doesn't even include the autarkic industrialisation of the Great Leap Forward and GPCR that had stressed regional independence instead of interdependence.

Sheridan doesn't provide any comparisons to the power struggles and inter-dynasty histories to compare the post-Qing national disintegration with previous disintegrations of imperial rule and struggles to reintegrate under potentially foreign rule (as per the Yuan and Qing Dynasties). He does conveniently split the period in to three sections. The warlords being the predominant force until '27. Then Chiang Kai-shek's purge of the KMT liberals and Communists in '27 and the Northern Expedition led to a nominally unified China under KMT rule until 1937. The final era runs from the expansion of hostilities with Japan until the 1949 retreat to Taiwan by Chiang and the remnants of the KMT army.

A typical example of Sheridan's analysis of the KMT's desire to unify the country struggling against the warlords' desire to keep the country regionalised follows.

p.205
Chiang's inability to eliminate the warlords was symptomatic of the profound weakness of the Kuomintang government generally. The destruction of warlordism was more than a military problem. To give but one specific example, the extirpation of autonomous provincial military power implied the disbandment of at least portions of the provincial armies; there were simply too many men under arms. But unless disbandment were accompanied by effective programs for the employment of the soldiers involved, it would only produce the raw material for new bandit gangs and the seeds for a new phase of warlordism.

Sadly, this wasn't one of the considerations made by the US Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. There are reasons to study history to avoid making the same mistakes others have made before you.

Sheridan also points to other faults of the KMT, that weakened support for Chinag's regime.

p.210-211
Intense political repression on the part of the government also weakened it by fostering resentment and dissipating support. The chief goal of government seemed to be to hang on to power, and it increasingly used harsh repression to attain that goal. Assassinations, illegal arrests, summary executions became commonplace. Censorship was extremely heavy. Between 1929 and 1936, some 450 literary works and nearly 700 publications in the social sciences were banned. A total of about 1,800 books and journals were proscribed during the Nanking decade, in addition to a host of newspaper items.

These same censorial tendencies followed Chiang to Taiwan and wouldn't be resolved until many decades later. And it goes without saying that the CCP has continued the same censorial control of content, but there is disagreement over how much these actions have actually fostered resentment and weakened support for The Party. The same could be said of the government of Singapore.

And as Richard Li, son of Li Ka-shing, passes up billions of dollars to sell his shares in PCCW to a family friend instead of a foreign bidder and the continuing problems of nepotism in Taiwan and the mainland, let me end with this citation.

p.211
The central government was also weak because, in a sense, it was irrelevant. For one reason, personal relations rather than government institutions determined much of what actually got done; for another, Chiang Kai-shek moved more and more toward a position as unchallenged dictator.

As civil service and government decisions became dictated more and more by nepotism and cronyism, the actual government institutions weakened and became irrelevant. The weakness in the actual government institutions helped lead to the eventual failure of the government, as citizens saw no point in preserving irrelevant institutions and realised that they needed to topple the old order of nepotism and cronyism in order to achieve a more equitable distribution of power and economic resources.

Whether any of the current Chinese political philosophers have learned this lesson seems in doubt as the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and even Singapore have lost some level of support for their governments due to the nepotism and cronyism that tarnish their systems.

Doug Crets takes an interesting field excursion at night to a Hong Kong country park. I haven't gone beating the bushes locally at night, because I know that the local Green Bamboo Pit Viper is there in the brush waiting for me. But you can't mistake the sounds of the nocturnal amphibians and nocturnal birds, now that the rainy season has returned.

My one quibble with Doug's article is this line:

feng shui forests, the moniker given to forests left untouched by development.

Doug, let me recommend Venturing Fung Shui Woods, a bilingual book by Hong Kong's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department. The book is an excellent guide with historical, environmental, and "tourist" information on Hong Kong's feng shui woods with big photos and maps to help one find the feng shui woods and identify what's located inside.

Feng Shui Forests aren't untouched by development. In fact they are a product of village development in an earlier era of Hong Kong's history. And named "feng shui" because they are linked to the fortunes of the village, as they were planted behind villages (usually up the hillside as villages are supposed to have hillside behind and water in front). This is part of the explanation of villager discontent in the New Territories, when non-villagers move in and start cutting down the trees, which have brought the village good fortune for anywhere up to 300 years.

In the first post on Kadoorie Farms and Botanical Gardens, I featured a wonderful photo of a red dragonfly against the backdrop of a sunflower. I promised in that post from late November 2005, that I'd post a few other photos of the trip once in a while. The photos have been sitting in the folder on the server but haven't been linked up yet.

So for part 2 I provide an image of the Butterfly Garden, which is about half-way up the Gardens. It's still quite the hike {as you can see from the mirroring hills in the distance}, but on that particular "Indian Summer" day in November, the flowers were beautiful in the late afternoon and the butterflies were dancing from plant to plant.

check the extended entry for the photo of the view from the KFBG Butterfly Garden from November 2005 {and you thought of Hong Kong as an urban concrete jungle}

Last night TVB Pearl showed American History X as their Friday night Movie of the Week. A story of racism and racial violence in America, it was shocking that a mainstream film company would put up the money to discuss the extremes of "White Power" and neo-nazi groups in the US.

Unfortunately for America, this white racism is no longer found just on the extremes. Jesus' General ran with a tip on Fox Carolina fluffing Stormfront, one of the most prominent of the white power websites. Check the comments on this post at Roger Ailes' blog to uncover links which disclose the freelance writing wife of the managing editor {soon to be Editor in Chief} of the Washington Times has written pieces like this one for vdare, another of the most prominent white power boards. Furthermore the Washington Times comes in for a scathing report from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its practice of publishing racist and racial extremist propagand veiled as expert opinion. {A British Nationalist Party officer as an expert on Muslims?}

To tie in to this theme, yesterday's reading in the late Iris Chang's The Chinese in America {©2003, Viking/Penguin Group, New York, ISBN 0-670-03123-2} meant wading through Chapter Nine entitled "The Chinese Exclusion Act".

From their first immigration to America, the Chinese had been denied the right to become naturalised citizens. Despite their hard work and intelligence in the gold mines and to help build the trans-continental railway and to create arable agricultural land in California, the economic panics of the 1870s created the labour pressures that led eventually to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese, except for a minority wealthy class, from entering the United States for a period of 10 years. This was followed by a wave of anti-Chinese immigration laws and court cases that made their way to the Supreme Court of the United States over the next 25 years. What follows are a few highlights and lowlights of the period, including the Wong Kim Ark case, which has come under renewed pressure by white identity anti-immigrant groups to be reversed.

p. 136
Chinese emigres immediately challenged the Scott Act in federal court. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States, a laborer (Chae Chan Ping) who had lived in San Francisco since 1875 and had obtained a legitimate return certificate before departing for China in 1887, was denied permission to disembark upon his return to California on October 7, 1888. His case went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which upheld the Scott Act, ruling that as the United States "considers the presence of foreigners of a different race in this country, who will not assimilate with us, to be dangerous to its peace and security, their exclusion is not to be stayed." Continuing in this vein, the highest court in the land labeled Chinese immigrants a people "residing apart by themselves, and adhering to the customs and usages of their own country." As such, the Chinese in America, the Court decided, were "strangers in the land."

p. 137
Three Chinese facing deportation under Geary took their case to the Supreme Court. In Fong Yue Ting v. United States, the Court decided that just as a nation had to determine its own immigration policy, it also possessed the right to force all foreign nationals to register. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled in Lem Moom Sing v. United States that district courts could no longer review Chinese habeas corpus petitions, a decision that opened the door to all kinds of corruption and abuse by immigration authorities who assumed the unchecked power to bar or deport Chinese immigrants without fear of opposition from the courts.

p.137-138
In 1894, Wong Kim Ark, a twenty-one-year-old Chinese American born in San Francisco, visited his parents in China. Returning the following year, he was denied permission to reenter the country. Once again, despite two setbacks, the Chinese took their case to the courts. Filing a writ of habeas corpus, Wong Kim Ark argued that his native birth entitled him to the privileges of American citizenship.

p. 138
In theory, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, the United States had embraced the right of birthright citizenship, but in practice, the government had failed to protect the full privileges of citizenship of blacks and Native Americans. Legally, the Wong Kim Ark affair forced the Court to determine whether nonwhites born in the United States would be entitled to U.S. citizenship on the same basis as that applied to whites or to be relegated to a permanent foreign underclass.

To the credit of the Supreme Court, the majority opinion ruled on March 28, 1898, in Wong Kim Ark's favor, declaring that all children born in the United States are American citizens, even if their parents are ineligible for naturalization.

p. 138 footnote
The Wong Kim Ark case was only one of several important legal battles waged by the Chinese that would pioneer the field of civil rights law in the United States. Another landmark case, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, would set the standard for equal protection before the law.

p. 141
In 1905, just when it seemed things could not get any worse, the Supreme Court announced its decision in United States v. Ju Toy

...

But in the Toy decision, the Supreme Court determined that Chinese immigrants denied entry to the United States, even if they alleged United States citizenship, could no longer gain access to the courts to appeal the decision. Instead, it gave the secretary of commerce and labour, who oversaw immigration issues, jurisdiction on this matter. The decision of the secretary, the Court ruled, would be "final and conclusive even when the petitioner alleged U.S. citizenship."