Updated May 2nd S sends me a link at ESWN commenting on the same issue. The author there did more research than I did, and quotes more liberally. To see some examples of what I was riling about below, take a look there first.
Earlier this week, a big can of worms was opened when the front-page on the MIT website spot-lighted a course to illustrate the effectiveness of the OpenCourseWare initiative. Unfortunately, the course being spotlighted deals with a rather touchy issue in modern history: that of the Japanese occupation of Korea and China after the Meiji restoration. Certain members of the Chinese community have written in to express displeasure at seeing the web-page, and responses ranging from deep concern to out-right profanity-filled accusation of racial discrimination were observed.
After many days, MIT finally released a statement, which I find deeply unsatisfactory--not for the lack of punishment given to Professor Miyagawa, but for the lack of derision at those who complained. (I would have welcomed a Larry Summers type response laughing off this one-sided Froschmäusekrieg.)
Some Background Information
The web-page in question has already been temporarily removed pending reconsideration of wording, but I'll give a summary description of what the page contained.
The website, as mentioned in the MIT press release, is for the project Visualizing Cultures in which historical images are studied and examined to gain understanding of the cultural significance of events in history as well as the mass perception of those events by the people involved. In particular, this website featured wood-block prints by Japanese artists dealing with the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-1895, interspersed with captions by the participating professors explaining the historical context that was depicted by the prints, as well as offering some explanation into the artists' rendition of the events. Some quotes from the texts on that page include:
Still, predictable patterns give order to this chaos. Discipline (the Japanese side) prevails over disarray (the Chinese). The sword-wielding Japanese officer and bayonet-thrusting infantryman are invariably present--and easy to locate, since their black uniforms contrast sharply to the flamboyant clothing and paraphernalia of the Chinese... In contrast to the ubiquitous rising-sun-with-rays military flag of the Japanese, Chinese banners and ensigns feature a range of designs. Sometimes the enemy employ archaic weapons such as a three-prong pike or trident... In short, the Chinese are riotous in every way--disgracefully so in their behavior, and delightfully so in their accoutrements.and
The single most honorable Chinese singled out in the war prints, however, was not a mounted officer but an admiral--the venerable Ding Juchang, whose fleet was destroyed after hard fighting off Weihaiwei early in 1895. After surrendering in a courteous exchange of messages between the two sides, Admiral Ding Juchang committed suicide by taking poison.... Death by one's own hand held an honorable place in Japan's warrior tradition, of course; be that as it may, several woodblock artists commemorated the admiral's death with respectful renderings.
However, unfortunately, in the description of the images, sometimes the distinction between whether the author was referring to the artist or himself was not drawn very clearly. And some less astute readers managed to confuse the two, despite the glaring opening paragraph that declared that what follows are to do with artists' depiction of a war.
The Protest
After the web-page was featured on the MIT front-page, many people accessed it, and some of them, of Chinese origin, took offense at the website--that, to some extent, is understandable: the late 19th century was a particular non-glorious part in Chinese history, marked by corruption, cowardice, and close-mindedness. The Chinese collectively want to shed that image as much as the Germans now-a-days want to shed the image of Nazi-ism. For some, seeing those images and those words feels like having a cultural-scab torn open. The image of weak Chinese doesn't sit well with the image especially portrayed by the modern communist party.
Still, due to either deliberate misrepresentation, or to just complete incompetence, several people posted to some Chinese message boards that MIT is hosting material discriminatory to the Chinese race and that we, the Chinese people, should do something about it and get the professors involved fired. In particular, they cited a quote from the offending web-page that called a particular image "beautiful" and thereby claimed the author was racists, neverminding that the quote was taken out of context and was referring more to the artistic techniques and the artist's interpretation of a courageous event rather than a judgment by the author of the page on the subject matter.
Due to the powers of the internet, the 'controversy' quickly spread to the corners of this globe and e-mails began pouring into MIT, at one point nearly bringing the e-mail server to a grinding halt (we are talking about one of the founding fathers of the internet here, a school with its own /8 domain).
The reaction was strongly negative. The responses sent to OCW ranged from courteous questioning of the motive for the web-page, to out right threats of legal action, to non-coherent babble mixed in with obscenities.
Slap those b****es silly
That is my take on this whole issue.
My first reaction, when I head the news several days ago, was the following:
What the f*** do people with an obvious lack of reading comprehension skills have to do dictating to others how to design a curriculum?My strong disgust came after looking at the web-page myself first hand, and discovered that, once you scroll down beyond the half-way point, the author makes the following remarks:
It is particularly sobering to keep in mind that this was not on-the-scene "realism". The woodblock artists worked largely out of their own imaginations, tailoring this to news reports from the front. They were commercial artists catering to a popular audience, and this was the war Japanese wished to see.followed a few paragraphs later by
Even today, over a century later, this contempt remains shocking. Simply as racial stereotyping alone, it was as disdainful of the Chinese as anything that can be found in anti-"Oriental" racism in the United States and Europe at the time--as if the process of "Westernization" had entailed, for Japanese, adopting the white man's imagery while excluding themselves from it...and then
Because racism in the age of imperialism is most commonly associated with "white supremacism" (and the smug rhetoric of a "white man's burden"), this explosive outburst of Japanese condescension toward China and the Chinese seems all the more stunning... What made this even more disconcerting was the intimate overlay of race and culture in the case of Japan and China. No non-Chinese society was more indebted to China. Japan's written language, its great traditions of Buddhism and Confucianism, vast portions of its finest achievements in art and architecture--all came from China. In an abrupt phrase familiar to all literate Japanese, even in the Meiji period, China and Japan were culturally as close as "lips and teeth."
Does any of the above read like the rantings of a crazed racist? The complaints that people were fielding were aught but knee-jerk reactions to something (I will expand on that later), and somehow, when filled with choler, people tend to treat the world they see with a tint of bloodlust and paranoia. Lacking the patience (or, perhaps, the mental capacity) to finish reading the discourse offered by the author, the readers jumped directly to the non-sequitor conclusion that the author was racist and the passages are discriminatory.
The Child who Cried Wolf
What shocked me most of all, however, was the fact that the Chinese Student and Scholar Association of MIT got involved. I had imagined, in my naïvité, that students of that esteemed Institute were level-headed and logical beings, capable of calm judgments in a time of chaos. Instead, the CSSA demonstrated themselves to be mere sheep. "Baa!" I say to them. A basic education in science should afford the students the instinctive urge to check the facts, the look behind the surface. Yet, either urged on by some outside force (SB Woo, I am looking in your idiotic direction) or from the internal workings of several members, it is rather inexcusable for a body of self-proclaimed students and scholars at MIT to get involved in this type of an incident on a false pretense.
Perhaps this is why events like this rile me so. Remember the fable of the little boy who cried wolf? After twice fooled, the townfolks no longer went to his aid when he was finally attacked by his lupine fiend. This is the second time in recent memory when I see my fellow Chinese people being roused for no good reason in particular in protest of supposed racial discrimination. The first was then the political group 80-20 started a campaign to change the nickname of Fort Irwin in the Mojave desert, "Chinaman's Hat", in utter disregard of the fact that the usage is in no way discriminatory against the Chinese people, and that it came about due to the the geological formation of the area that makes it resemble a particular mollusk called the Limpet, which used to be called "Chinaman's Hat". While they did manage to get the Army to remove that name from the database, I doubt they would have the same luck with Mokolii Island in Oahu, Hawaii, also known as "Chinaman's Hat", this time indeed named for the hats worn by stereotypical rural Chinese.
My point is that, when it comes to strong issues like discrimination, one must pick its battles based on the merits. A continuous pestering of the society at large with trivial matters with few factual bases would eventually lead to the cause being marginalized. In the case of true discrimination language used directed against Chinese people--calling Yao Ming a Chinaman for example--raising a stink might increase public awareness of the issue. But in the case of a senseless attack of the sort I have been seeing, it would only cause the people to stop listening.
The Chinaman's Victimization Complex
Just as startling was my discovery that what the comedian Lee Li Qun (李立群) refers to as the Victimization Complex (被害妄想症) of the Chinese people actually has support in evidence. Once I understood that the whole protest was much ado about nothing, I began to wonder what prompted people to post incendiary comments on the message boards to get other to mass e-mail MIT in regards to this fictitious issue? And I suddenly realized that it is a whole set of mentality that I had a glimpse of since I was little.
It is probably rooted in the decline of the Chinese empire starting middle Qing. During the reign of KangXi, the Chinese empire was the second largest empire in history, behind only the briefly unified Mongolian empire of Genghis Khan. For centuries the Chinese were the envy of the world: a working meritocracy, food on the tables of most citizens, stuff Europe could only dream of. And then, starting mid-Qing dynasty during the rule of DaoGuang, the great grand son of KangXi, the policy of not trading with the western world and cultural and intellectual stagnation allowed the west to catch up and eventually surpass China in terms of military powers. After playing catch-up to the industrialized powers for the past two hundred years, and suffering from the multiple western invasions, Japanese occupation, at such, the Chinese is allergic to discrimination (among other things, but I won't go into details of my not-completely-formulated theory). As such, the proud Chinese men cringe at any mentioning of possible inferiority of the Chinese race. To make things worse, the Chinese are taught, since we are little, the traditional mythos of the culture in which we are the blessed people and should thus be more talented and stronger then all other cultures. Yet at the same time we were instilled with the Confucian doctrine of humility. Thus when any indication to Chinese inferiority is mentioned, guild and shame often overwhelm a typical Chinese person and sometimes resulting in an emotive response characterized by anger.
With this sort of twisted mentality in mind, it is easy to see why, at the mere sight of Japanese propagandist art of the late 19th century, some people exploded. They carry the irrational fear of contradiction. They are afraid to confront something they have always known, that the cultural indoctrination of greatness is in fact, not compatible with recent history.
Who's racist here?
While I might have contented myself with the above introspection, what perhaps drew my ire was the fact that I completely abhor the holier-than-thou attitude a lot of the Chinese people take when expressing rightful indignation. According to the MIT press release at least, the web-page in question was authored by Professor Dower of the department of history. Yet, vindicating what I mentioned above, the prejudiced Chinese reader immediately assumed that this "offensive" section would be authored by the "racist Japanese professor" listed as one of the participants in the project. Furthermore, postings on the message boards go as far as calling him "Little Japan" (小日本) and other racial slurs. Is this the attitude of someone who was insulted? Or is this the attitude of someone looking for a fight?
Amidst the obscenity, it seems to me that those people were just looking for an excuse. Professor Miyagawa, unfortunately, fell into their targeting-sight through a series of events. There are certain groups of Chinese that can never conceded to themselves that over the past two centuries, Japan has seen more development and better technological advances than China has; that overall, the Japanese people have better work ethics; that Japan has established itself as a dominant economic power while China lacked behind. Some people still carried the age-old discrimination of Japan as outcasts from China, the people who stole our culture and language, as shorties, as insignificant beings. To those people, their innate ideal of Chinese supremacy is heavily challenged by facts that they cannot help but see on an every day basis. And with that, they seek every opportunity to "exact revenge" on the Japanese people for what, they think, is rightfully theirs.
These type of people would not listen to reason. They would not be content with a partial apology. They are out for blood. That is why, I think, that if they cannot be ignored, the best policy would be to laugh at their faces until they realized their own stupidity and cowardice and fade back into their proper places.