Chongqing

Roger Cohen, Op-Ed Columnist – Chinese Openings – NYTimes.Com
Jan. 19. 2010

CHONGQING, CHINA — The tombstones loomed in the dusk, some of them rising more than 25 feet, each telling a forgotten story of China’s troubled history. I had come to find them because, for the first time, China has sanctioned the preservation here of a site commemorating the numberless victims of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

That’s a hopeful sign. I spent too long covering the bloody wars in the Balkans not to believe that history denied can devour you.

But until now, the Communist rulers of China have been relentless in suppressing the history of their worst errors, not least the frenzied attempt of Mao Zedong in the decade before his death to revitalize his rule by spreading terror.

So the decision, made last month by authorities in this gritty central Chinese city, to designate a cemetery containing the remains of 573 people slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution as an official relic worthy of maintenance is a significant opening.

That, it seems to me, is modern China: two steps forward, one back. For every new repression there is some relaxation, for every new abuse some advance.

Few things have made the capitalist-communist overseers of China’s frenzied thrust for modernity as nervous as history. On the one hand, it’s a source of pride. On the other, it’s a fount of fear.

When an American working in China met a Communist Party cadre recently, he was greeted by a backhanded compliment: “With our 5,000 years of history, we in China think you Americans are doing pretty well for your brief history of about 230 years.”

To which the American, alluding to the six decades of the People’s Republic, responded: “Well, we in the United States think China’s not doing badly for its mere 60 years of history!”

The remark did not do a lot for Chinese-American relations, but it has to be said that history is a malleable thing here. China finds comfort in a past whose immensity contains many dynasties that lasted longer than all U.S. history. Posters exalting the Communist Party show the Great Wall, the better to link its rule with immovable authority and nationalist grandeur.

At the same time, China’s modern rulers like nothing so much as reducing history to a blank sheet. Everywhere the past — temples, ancient walls, sinuous alleys — is being swept away. Disastrous periods of Mao’s rule, including the famine of 1959-61 and the Cultural Revolution, have been airbrushed from history. Like “June 4” — shorthand for the crushing of the Tiananmen uprising in 1989 — they are taboo.

Here in Chongqing, the Cultural Revolution took particularly devastating form as rival factions bent on demonstrating their devotion to Mao’s wild anti-capitalist, anti-rightist, anti-cadre purge battled each other. The local arms industry fed the frenzy: mass murder in the name of a personality cult.

Outside the walled cemetery in Shaping Park, as I waited for hours to be admitted into the overgrown sanctuary with its whispering of these terrible deeds, a man approached me: “Everyone was shooting in 1967 to protect Mao! I don’t know why. Even now I don’t know why. I just followed my school with a gun.”

He shook his head. “We’re not interested in any of that now. All we do is talk of development.”

But a few people, like a scholar named Chen Xiaowen, were interested. Now 54, Chen became concerned over the fate of the cemetery in the 1980s and has since campaigned to block the ever-ready bulldozers of real estate developers.

He was part of a group of scholars who submitted a petition to the Chongqing authorities requesting the safeguarding of the cemetery as a “cultural preservation site.” On Dec. 25, 2009, the request was approved, allowing the eventual devotion of city funds to restoration. “It’s progress!” Chen said.

The cemetery, with its 131 graves containing multiple victims, many of them young Red Guards, is a place of hushed mystery. A faded photograph of a young man, his features blurred, is propped against one tombstone. Ferns grow from the stones, weeds advance. Chinese characters peel away. “We can be beaten, struggled against, but we will never bow our revolutionary heads,” says one inscription. Another lists the ages of the dead: 49, 29, 45, 26, 51, 26.

I asked Chen why this past still haunts a party that has hoisted China from destructive folly. “It’s a form of rule based on results, efficacy, not on democratic legitimacy,” he said. “So if you dig too deeply into the mistakes of the past, you make yourself vulnerable.”

Still, here in Chongqing, China has taken a small step toward a genuine history, an honest accounting, and away from history as merely a vehicle for the consolidation of power. I applaud that. The Chinese people, their wounds assuaged by time, are ready for more openness.

In the fading light old men come out with their birds, hang the cages on trees, and let the birds sing to each other as they gossip. Some say history is for the birds. I say it needs to be aired or it will turn on you.

Fort St. George in Chennai

See the BBC website for a good summary – .

Chinese Poems

300 Tang Poems

English Translation of 300 Selected Poems

Tang Shi – 300 Tang Poems

Tang Dynasty Poetry

The Poems of the Tang Dynasty: Introduction

Diwali

From Prof. Lal at UCLA – link

This is perhaps the most well-known of the Indian festivals: it is celebrated throughout India, as well as in Indian communities throughout the diaspora. It usually takes place eighteen days after Dusshera. It is colloquially known as the “festival of lights”, for the common practice is to light small oil lamps (called diyas) and place them around the home, in courtyards, verandahs, and gardens, as well as on roof-tops and outer walls. In urban areas, especially, candles are substituted for diyas; and among the nouveau riche, neon lights are made to substitute for candles. The celebration of the festival is invariably accompanied by the exchange of sweets and the explosion of fireworks. As with other Indian festivals, Diwali signifies many different things to people across the country. In north India, Diwali celebrates Rama’s homecoming, that is his return to Ayodhya after the defeat of Ravana and his coronation as king; in Gujarat, the festival honors Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth; and in Bengal, it is associated with the goddess Kali. Everywhere, it signifies the renewal of life, and accordingly it is common to wear new clothes on the day of the festival; similarly, it heralds the approach of winter and the beginning of the sowing season.

This website from the Smithsonian has a simple, but informative discussion of Hindu worship and iconography – link

Hindu Navratri festival celebrations kick off this weekend in N.J.

By Thomas Meagher

http://www.nj.com/news/local/index.ssf/2009/09/hindu_festival_celebrations_ki.html

September 18, 2009, 5:12PM
ELIZABETH — The celebrations start when darkness falls. A kaleidoscope of saris swirl as drummers play traditional rhythms mixed with modern beats until well after midnight. Asian Indians from around the state will gather in the coming weeks for Navratri, a Hindu harvest festival. The revelry honors the goddess Shakti.

“It’s right when harvest happens, kind of an offering to the goddess,” said Anil Patel, the president of the Union Township-based India Culture Society.
Hindus celebrate Navratri — literally “nine nights” — differently, but all the festivities offer one generation of immigrants the opportunity to share their culture with the next generation.

The Navratri festival is a place where second-generation immigrants can learn their parents’ cultural values, according to Patel. “It’s like a skill that you learn from your parents,” said Patel, whose organization is beginning its annual Navratri festival Saturday in Elizabeth.

Festivals are also happening in Edison, Old Bridge and Somerset Saturday and in the coming weeks.
The Garba dance, also known as the stick dance, is one of the highlights of the Elizabeth celebration.
Participants hold colorfully decorated sticks, which they rhythmically strike during the dance. Prayer and food also fill the evenings of Navratri celebrations.
Patel’s son, Hetal, said the annual celebration became more poignant after he visited India two summers ago.

“It was a big chance for me,” said the 20-year-old Patel, who was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. and raised in New Jersey . “Being old enough now to realize where you come from and what your background is, that means a lot.”

Now, the younger Patel tries to impart that knowledge to his peers. He leads the youth organization for the India Culture Society and helps market the association’s events to a younger audience.
He said one of the goals of his generation should be to “maintain where we come from and what are parents strive us to be, while staying true to where we are now.”

Both father and son said the Navratri festival offers youth the opportunity to explore tradition in a modern way.

In years past, teenagers donning jeans and t-shirts have joined in celebrations with older generations wearing traditional garb. The younger Patel said the modern influence doesn’t stop there.

“Now, a lot of kids seem to make up their own style, make up their own groove,” said Patel.

In India, Navratri is celebrated for nine consecutive nights. Here, work and school schedules can make nine nights of festivities a difficult commitment.
So, the celebrations, like the celebrants, have also adapted.

Across the state, Indian organizations stagger the festivities — one of the most important Hindu celebrations — over several weekends.
“We maintain our old heritage and give it a new twist,” said the younger Patel.

This from Lisa Miller at Newsweek:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/212155

America is not a Christian nation. We are, it is true, a nation founded by Christians, and according to a 2008 survey, 76 percent of us continue to identify as Christian (still, that’s the lowest percentage in American history). Of course, we are not a Hindu—or Muslim, or Jewish, or Wiccan—nation, either. A million-plus Hindus live in the United States, a fraction of the billion who live on Earth. But recent poll data show that conceptually, at least, we are slowly becoming more like Hindus and less like traditional Christians in the ways we think about God, our selves, each other, and eternity.

The Rig Veda, the most ancient Hindu scripture, says this: “Truth is One, but the sages speak of it by many names.” A Hindu believes there are many paths to God. Jesus is one way, the Qur’an is another, yoga practice is a third. None is better than any other; all are equal. The most traditional, conservative Christians have not been taught to think like this. They learn in Sunday school that their religion is true, and others are false. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me.”

Americans are no longer buying it. According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65 percent of us believe that “many religions can lead to eternal life”—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to believe that salvation is theirs alone. Also, the number of people who seek spiritual truth outside church is growing. Thirty percent of Americans call themselves “spiritual, not religious,” according to a 2009 NEWSWEEK Poll, up from 24 percent in 2005. Stephen Prothero, religion professor at Boston University, has long framed the American propensity for “the divine-deli-cafeteria religion” as “very much in the spirit of Hinduism. You’re not picking and choosing from different religions, because they’re all the same,” he says. “It isn’t about orthodoxy. It’s about whatever works. If going to yoga works, great—and if going to Catholic mass works, great. And if going to Catholic mass plus the yoga plus the Buddhist retreat works, that’s great, too.”

Then there’s the question of what happens when you die. Christians traditionally believe that bodies and souls are sacred, that together they comprise the “self,” and that at the end of time they will be reunited in the Resurrection. You need both, in other words, and you need them forever. Hindus believe no such thing. At death, the body burns on a pyre, while the spirit—where identity resides—escapes. In reincarnation, central to Hinduism, selves come back to earth again and again in different bodies. So here is another way in which Americans are becoming more Hindu: 24 percent of Americans say they believe in reincarnation, according to a 2008 Harris poll. So agnostic are we about the ultimate fates of our bodies that we’re burning them—like Hindus—after death. More than a third of Americans now choose cremation, according to the Cremation Association of North America, up from 6 percent in 1975. “I do think the more spiritual role of religion tends to deemphasize some of the more starkly literal interpretations of the Resurrection,” agrees Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard. So let us all say “om.”

See Fareed Zakaria’s 2006 Newsweek story on India. Click Here.

Thought you might like to read this New York Times OpEd piece from Sept. 9, 2006. It is quite relevant to things we will be discussing:

September 9, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

China Is Not Just Rising, but

Also Changing

By ROSS TERRILL

Xian, China

CHINA’S advance toward global economic pre-eminence appears irresistible. Having recently surpassed Britain, France and Italy, its economy is now the fourth-largest in the world, growing, Beijing says, at the startling rate of 10 percent a year. Brokers in Hong Kong and New York entertain themselves by predicting the year in which China’s gross domestic product will outstrip that of the United States.

The speculation is understandable. China’s appetite for oil, gas and other natural resources from abroad is all but insatiable. Its urban middle class enjoys cellphones, poodles, Häagen-Dazs, gated apartments, psychiatrists, overseas vacations and cars for which city streets have little room in a nation that is now 40 percent urban.

Yet the facade of China’s urban coastal economy hides problems that, sooner or later, are sure to put a damper on the celebration.

If China is perfecting a new system of Leninism-plus-consumerism, based on yin and yang, such a hybrid would be a first. The Soviet Union and its satellites could not blend strict authoritarianism and a loosened economy. Nor did they slide gracefully into post-communism; several states broke into pieces in the process.

China is more brittle than it looks from the superb restaurants overlooking the Shanghai Bund. Scores of new skyscrapers in Shanghai are half-empty. The government seldom allocates capital to private, commercially rational projects. Banks extend 65 percent of their loans to state-owned firms that produce only 25 percent of the national output. State subsidies make it hard to measure the returns on capital.

Meanwhile, labor costs are on the rise in southeastern China, prompting exporters to move to Vietnam and Cambodia. Old folk proliferate, as do farmers on the move for coastal cities. Urban air is dirty, and water is in short supply in the north.

China welcomes some foreign business but still fears domestic entrepreneurs. The country ranks high on global lists of gross domestic product, foreign direct investment and exports, but its legal system is unreliable, making capitalism at times a difficult game to master. Although China’s per capita income is double that of India, China is only 37 percent wealthier. So it’s no surprise that the World Economic Forum’s most recent Global Competitiveness Report, which takes into account the rule of law and open flow of information, was warmer on India’s prospects than on China’s.

China’s recent growth has been aided by an unprecedented calm. No international crisis has complicated Beijing’s economic decision-making in the 27 years of peace since the China-Vietnam war; no domestic disturbance has shaken the state in the 17 years since Tiananmen Square. But tensions, both internal and external, are unlikely to remain at bay.

Should there be unrest in North Korea, millions of refugees could destabilize northeastern China. A confrontation with Taiwan would bring tension between commercial south China and the politically orthodox north.

A tussle between economics and politics, yin-yang’s stiffest test, seems inevitable. President Hu Jintao has surely bet that freedom in the two realms can be separated. But if Adam Smith was correct to call his free market economics a “system of natural liberty,” this will not be possible. In Beijing in the spring, I watched people snap up Chinese-language copies of F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” which says a command economy is precisely that.

Many Chinese shrug off official doctrine, whose cultivation, together with the allocation of resources, is a key vocation of communist rule. In Shanghai, the only time I have seen Mao recently is in a department store display, reclining in a suspiciously bourgeois pair of green silk pajamas.

Although Maoism has been buried and Mao himself airbrushed out of history textbooks, the Leninist lid is still clamped awkwardly on the bubbling cauldron of a complex new economy and society. Just last month, the Chinese government locked up a lawyer and two journalists — including Zhao Yan of The New York Times — on trumped-up charges behind which lay the offense of indiscreet speech.

Even without such sharp contradictions, economic fireworks have a way of flaming out sooner than expected. It was just a short time ago that Japan’s economy was the object of envy and terror. That experience — and the hype that accompanied it — is a reminder that linear projections of economic growth are subject to the nonlinear realities of politics, culture and human nature.

China’s new economy will surely experience setbacks. But eventually, with its emerging middle-class society, it will refashion the old politics. In that sense China’s economic boom will both fail and succeed. As Leninism-plus-consumerism it will reach its limit. But as a base for a post-communist political system, it seems destined to run well into the future.

Ross Terrill, a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center, is the author of “The New Chinese Empire.”

Read Jim Hoaglund’s editorial from the Washington Post:

Tales of Asia Rising

By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, February 9, 2006; A23

The global balance of power is shifting decisively to Asia, which will dominate the 21st century as Europe and the United States dominated in their respective heydays. So say we all, or nearly all, in international seminars, gatherings of statesmen and big-picture essays.

Asia Rising has become the theme of the moment, even something of a sacred cow. The description is amended at times to make China, or India, the superpower of the future instead of the Asian continent as a whole. And there is plenty of evidence on the surface — statistical and anecdotal — to feed the cow.

Impressive growth rates registered by India and China, and the latter’s emergence as the manufacturing hub of the world, seem to prove that a historic transfer of power and leadership is taking place. To see that Europe and the United States are simultaneously being displaced by the powers of the East, you have only to look at the $23 billion takeover bid launched last month by Lakshmi Mittal of India for Arcelor, Europe’s most important steel company.

Or so I thought when the controversy — kicked up by European protectionists who oppose Mittal’s hostile bid — first caught my eye. I gingerly began to consider writing this column to tell how, in this event, two major strands of the Asia Rising story were coming together.

One strand would be the continuing economic weakness of Europe, hit by sharply declining birthrates and market rigidities in many of its most important countries at a time of Asia’s economic revival. The other strand concerns the emblematic displacement of U.S. corporate power abroad — in this case by Mittal’s company, which has become the world’s largest steelmaker.

Last year Pepsi-Cola was similarly pilloried for threatening European jobs and assets by supposedly trying to buy out the Danone group. (No deal happened.) This year an Indian-owned multinational firm has triggered the same fears and grandstanding by protectionists, who demand that Mittal not be allowed to take over Arcelor, which is headquartered in Luxembourg.

So, are greedy, job-destroying Indians really muscling aside greedy, job-destroying Americans in the power sweepstakes? It turns out not to be that simple. The Mittal company is actually headquartered in the Netherlands and already is a major player in Europe — a market it sees as continuing to be profitable.

Mittal buys up inefficient companies in Europe and elsewhere and modernizes them, at times in partnership with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp. The end result of a Mittal purchase of Arcelor is likely to be diffusion of power in a hybrid concern with roots deep in Europe and Asia, rather than greater concentration in solely Asian hands.

The same may turn out to be true of military power in the 21st century as well. It would be possible to hang another Asia Rising tale on the news that the United States will push NATO’s European members at the Riga summit in November to invite Australia, Japan and South Korea to become “global partners” of the alliance. That same status could eventually be extended to India and other Asian nations.

You could spin out a Rumsfeldian “Old Europe” vision, with the United States gradually replacing demographically and politically weakening European mates with fresher and strengthening partners from the world’s new power center. But once again there is more symbol than substance.

For one thing, Japan, the overlooked Asian great power, will exert its considerable talents and resources to diffuse power within the region and, toward that end, to slow the erosion of U.S. influence there.

It is not in Japan’s interests to have power concentrated in the hands of its regional neighbors, either collectively or individually.

Under Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, Japan has played a clever, below-the-radar balancing game with China and India while committing forces and substantial aid to Iraq and Afghanistan in support of U.S. goals.

Tokyo’s history of close security cooperation with Washington may suggest to the Japanese that only American power can stabilize the Middle East and Central Asia, which are major exporters of energy and importers of security. India, Asia’s other great democracy, is coming to a similar conclusion.

This is a tale with two morals: One should always distrust neat symbols that fit handily into preconceived and popularized strategic theories.

The other is that the continental transfer of superpower is no more certain than was the popular “end of history” notion of the past decade. There is no straight line to a new unipolar hegemony in a world in which the fragmentation of state power is common to all regions. It is always more complicated tomorrow than we believe today.