Books on the history and politics of China (2020).

a longtime fan and support of the
channel on patreon ODS wrote in asking for recommendations for what he should read about the history and politics of China this is gonna be a short answer because I think the vast majority of what's available in the English language is complete garbage and it's not just that I wouldn't recommend it the general history looks on China I often have to urge people warned people not to read them because they're really really misleading if you're not going to get into very specific single topic academic articles that are very hard to find anyway there is there is some good scholarship up there on history and politics in China but any book you pick up that just says China on the cover the history of China China thirteen hundred to nineteen hundred anything like this of course there were some that cover five thousand years it's all terrible why is it terrible yes some of it is propaganda more often what you're dealing with is boosterism boosterism is different from propaganda I remember there was one book called the shorter science and civilization of China so shorter as part it was a condensed version of a longer work called science and civilization in China famous and the whole work just the whole book just consisted of the most you know laughable attempts to bend over backwards and convince you that China was the most wonderful most inspirational civilization of history of the world even things that were terrible about it were wonderful you can read that sort of really embarrassing thing coming out of the Muslim world every so often - I remember a book that was on the history of science under Islam where the office so read this it's like worse it's worse than the worst communist propaganda but it's neither Pro communist nor any communist it's just boosterism it's just trying to tell you that everything in ancient China was wonderful and of course we would never tolerate this for medieval Europe we wouldn't even tolerate this for Antebellum you know North America United States America or something you know yeesh yeah there's a lot of complete garbage out there on library shelves and store shelves under the heading of Chinese history and politics and civilization and the situation is not getting better it's getting worse as bad as that book was that I just mentioned as an example when it was published there was real money to be made in publishing nonfiction you could you could put together a proposal and go to a publisher and say hey I'm gonna do the research and writing I'm gonna give you a book that says China and big letters whatever it is China 1,500 to 1,900 or no China from the Han Dynasty to present and that book really had the chance to make a lot of money and today if you go into the world expecting to find a good book on a topic you should ask yourself first who paid to publish it increasingly non-fiction publishing is a charity not a for-profit business and if there isn't some foundation or some government interest if there isn't someone losing money to make the book happen it's very likely it won't happen at all if you want a whirring example let me ask you something who abolished slavery first Europe or China have you have you seen any books in English on the history of the abolition of slavery in China no the research hasn't been done in English and it's never gonna be done it's my lifetime there will be no groundbreaking new book published on the abolition of slavery in China and I'm not gonna write it myself either and this financial constraint is crucial to understanding that okay so if these warnings haven't been stated this young man asked me for a recommendation I'm gonna give one that's about ancient or pre-modern China and one that's both the politics of modern China in terms of the wonder that was China before the Revolution before modern and Western technology arrived what I recommend is a work of fiction called the water margin a work of traditional Chinese literature so water margin and English is also known as outlaws of the marsh this gives the title all men are brothers I've definitely seen heroes of the marsh in any case shui huge Juan is translated into English as the water margin it's a terrible translation of the title and it is available in several different English translations why is this book so important useful why would I recommend this to someone who's interested in the history of China whereas I'm warning against badly biased history books and again some of those history books are biased because they're pro-communist some of them are biased because they're anti-communist but some of them are just of poor quality alright let's let's be clear but yes within the last 50 years the main spark illuminating english-language interest in China has been communism including the disaster of communism but what a great many books including books professors have handed to me in a university context are written with an overt pro-communist bias and they are not worth reading for that reason unless you're interested in research into the nature of communist propaganda and it may not be obvious to you as a non specialist or an outsider that what you're reading is communist propaganda or it may not be obvious until it's too late years later you look back and realize wow that was a really biased version mr. Chen so however history can be biased more ways than one it can be bad in more ways than one in terms of an introduction to the wonder that was China the water margin is a work of literature it's a work of fiction written by someone who is profoundly discontent with his own culture and society right at the beginning of the book right in the first couple volumes shall we say you have a depiction of how the prison system works and the prison system is corrupt you have a depiction of how the Buddhist monasteries work and the Buddhist monasteries are shown to be flagrantly corrupt you have a depiction of how torture works and people paying bribes to the torturer to alleviate their suffering you get this very strange step-by-step analysis of that society and the author's view of what's wrong with it and from this author's perspective practically everything that's wrong with it now you might think I'm describing some work of carefully studied social realism and this is in fact a an adventure story with elements of magic elements of kung-fu and sword fighting and swashbuckling you might say however both the author's interests and my interest at least in reading it today is the way in which it carefully depicts how that society works both in terms of organization and even the technology that defined daily life so when I fatally said before you figure out how the court system works you get descriptions of how someone would sit down and pay a scribe to record their sworn testimony to present to the court you see the way in which that society relied on handwritten documents people didn't have identity cards to prove who they were you would show up and present something in writing and the person receiving it would have to scrutinize it and confirm that the handwriting in what you've presented matches the handwriting with the governor from that province well I'm familiar with this governor's handwriting and they would really have to watch for fraud and what-have-you and and again the author is very interested in the way in which fraud vidiots the whole society the dishonesty bribery fraud he's very interested in showing the police and the courts as being morally no better than the the robbers the bandits and so on it's very addressed it's very careful studying this way now I have not read the whole of the water margin I think I read the first four volumes of my translation ito and I forget if it was four volumes at a nine I forget how many there were but it's a long long work and each volume I read was about the size of a novel you know in terms of understanding how China worked the social inequality and the different forms of cooperation between people even religion the way in which Buddhism and Taoism and vegetarianism were part of daily life there's a lot there you can learn from reading the water margin and it's presented in a very unpretentious way because it's presented to an audience it's already very familiar with that that social setting but for a modern person to even understand how how a restaurant worked its F period there there's a there are a lot of mechanisms of daily life described how farming worked how the economy worked under feudalism and as I say the legal system the political system how the land was governed and how people on a face-to-face level interacted with their oppressors I can say the book is written in a way that's that's very interesting now I said I didn't finish it and I may just be too busy to ever return to and finish reading the water market it's also possible who'd become less and less interesting to me as it goes on because in those early books you get all that description of how society works and I don't know where it goes from there I don't know I mean once you get past vol 3 or volume 4 maybe you've hit a point of diminishing returns where there isn't any anything really new to is what I don't know or maybe maybe there really is a lot more that's valuable later on but you know it's a book that also scholarly progress has been made in identifying the correct conclusion of the book in Chinese and to my knowledge the correct conclusion has never been translated into English so part of me wanted to wait for a new translation and future that would bring together the findings of recent scholarship and really give a definitive and correct ending so you know because I do wonder in terms of the author's intent the artistic intent and the moral of the story I don't know if I'd really want to read it with the current bad ending an ending that we now know it's not really what the author intended so yeah the water margin is very very instructive in all those ways and from my perspective the descriptions of swordfights are absolutely no interest but if you find them entertaining good for you because you'll be learning and at the same time you'll be entertained at the opposite end of the historical and political spectrum the book that people will be talking about in the year 2020 2021 is the English translation of how the red Sun rose by Galois so how the red Sun rose was published in the year 2000 in Chinese but it only emerged in English translation in 2019 so it's definitely still a new thing sending shockwaves I have to tell you I feel I already know a lot about this book because I have read other works that were influenced by it I have not seen the English nor of course I haven't read it in Chinese either it's a book that fundamentally shifted analytical attention from the post 1949 a period of communism to what happened in the formative years between say 1930 and 1945 when is so to be clear this is not about the foundation of communism in China this is not about the creation of chemistry it's really about the way in which communism was recreated and redefined in one place at one time under the leadership of Mao Zedong how Mao Zedong established his own authority and the way in which his version of communist doctrine was significantly different from the Orthodox Russian version of communism how that was first articulated and how Mao Zedong first put himself in a position of unquestioned authority and how Mao Zedong first started carrying out purges massacres if you like persecution trial and massacres of political enemies as part of this snowballing of his of his unique political authority so that no I haven't read the book yet I will at least make time to look at the book to evaluate the book my apprehension is that while this book was intended to demolish a certain myth about the history of the Communist Party the origin that comes party it's meant to demolish certain myths about the purges themselves persecution and mass murder under Chinese communism I'm very apprehensive that it actually creates another myth that's put in its place and even though this book is considered anti-communist it's banned in communist China it's illegal in communist China gets printed in Chinese in Hong Kong and then mysteriously distributed I don't know oh to the back of someone's car trunk or something and in China it's it's contraband in China we could say that even though the book is considered anti-communist and a challenge to the Communist Party it nevertheless I'm deeply apprehensive than in effect it's not anti-communist enough that it is in its way a new Meisel valor that it's mmm yeah I'm concerned that it creates it creates another myth and again I've only I've read this book I'm sorry I have this book but I have read other works influenced by it and I can I can see its influence across the board in Chinese some discussion of Chinese politics and I think there are actually important questions to pose challenging this idea that it's really that period before 1945 that defined all these elements then obviously you're demoting or disregarding some other important elements of history that some important things maybe were improvised at a later date developed in some sub so look import interesting questions they go the situation with english-language publications on Chinese history and politics is bad and it's only going to get worse you know a lot of people ask is a sort of snide joke what's the point of studying a subject like this in university and believe me this is a question that gets put to me and it gets put to my girlfriend also what's the point of studying something university that can't possibly earn any money it really becomes a much more profound question if we look at the body of scholarship and realize that in each generation this has been transformed again and again with the assumption that publishing groundbreaking exciting new books about history and politics could earn money and in a field like this now that has disappeared so how I mean what we're talking about here is not the progress of science if you invent if you invent a slightly better light bulb you can be sure millions of dollars will be generated by it very trivial improvements in science technology can correspond to massive amounts of money being unleashed for the creators and manufacturers very profound improvements in the writing of history very important and substantive improvements in the understanding of politics now corresponds to absolutely no money no wealth being generated for and of course this is especially true if you're talking about books written in English about China you know if you're talking about books written in Italian about Italy maybe there's a little tiny bit of a financial incentive so we definitely need to move beyond a sort of snide a set of recriminations about the uselessness of academia in generating money in people's lives and move on to a productive critique of how scholarship is supposed to work not even at a break-even basis but at a loss