Guanxi Master

A Goddess of Mercy becomes a Goddess of Fortune

Last week, I wandered into the Buddhist temple at the famous Shanghai water town of Zhujiajiao. People were charged a 10 yuan admission to enter the main temple grounds, but in the annex, worshippers got a freebie. Before paying the fee, one could kneel on a padded bench before a glass-encased Laughing Buddha (Maitreya Buddha) covered in gold paint, with a mischievous-looking Haibao peeking around the corner of the case. The little blue mascot for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and the golden Buddha are emblems of the same aspiration among the Chinese: conspicuous wealth and a global showcase of modernization. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern Chinese art and the agony of global urbanization

“The new comradeship will be a comradeship in the task of preserving being itself, a comradeship in the work of facing future danger and menace…Without those values another and terrible possibility could emerge; man might succumb to the power of the anonymous” (Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World).

To understand China today, one sometimes has to take a painful look at what the Chinese are losing while they rise as the next economic force of this century.

In the Spring Showcase of Chinese modern art at the Galerie du Monde of Hong Kong, three famously striking and controversial images by artist Liu Bolin (劉勃麟) show a remarkable state of consciousness among the Chinese today. Read the rest of this entry »

How the West overlooks the positive requirements for constructive critique

In a recent blog at The China Beat, the Association of Asian Studies’ annual conference in Philadelphia expressed dismay that Beijing had prevented its Chinese featured speaker Cui Weiping (崔卫平) from attending. Ms. Cui had been scheduled to participate in the conference’s round table discussion “Against Amnesia: History, Memory, and the Role of Public Intellectuals in 21st Century China,” and while her work commitments were cited as the reason for refusing her exit from China, the title of the session itself may have been enough to raise concerns in Beijing. Control of an intellectual who may potentially be critical of China has a long historical precedent.

In China, artists and intellectuals have been fostered in an atmosphere of an almost religious awe for authority that must be scrupulously maintained in order to keep harmony and prevent dissent from breaking out into social unrest and chaos. When it comes to pointing out flaws in the ruling system, class, or person, the Chinese have a saying: Read the rest of this entry »

The charge that usually makes the AAS go into fits of self-criticism

A rather long-winded and pompous article “Asia, Faraway or Next Door?” was posted on The China Beat this week, written by Samuel Y. Liang, post-AAS Conference 2010 in Philly.

While discussing the Chinatowns of Philadelphia and various other cities, he engages in some finger-wagging at his fellow colleagues in the AAS for not paying sufficient attention to the Chinese areas of America’s own front yards, saying that few during the conference had been to Chinatown for anything other than food. He assures them, “I don’t want to say that we Asianists are still somewhat like the Orientalists” (hint-hint, nudge-nudge). But the very word inspires fear and loathing for academic Westerners studying the East, and by “not saying” it, Liang nevertheless exhumes it from the graveyard of jargon, and displays its ugly corpse in his article. Read the rest of this entry »

How the Chinese Ideal of Virtue Transmits to an Ethereal View of Business

On a delightful fall day a few years ago, while with my family on a Sunday jaunt in the rural Songjiang area of Shanghai, we pulled over to look at a roadside stall selling beautiful flowers in narrow pots, hanging from a rack. I was intrigued by the elaborate rig for these simple-looking, grassy plants, and was even more captivated by the smell of their little green flowers. I was hooked. I bought two pots and brought them home, and it was the start of my two-year, love-hate relationship with Chinese orchids.

Doing some preliminary research, I found that the cymbidium (our Latin name for the Chinese orchid) was one of the “Four Sacred Flowers” of Chinese tradition. One of the original features of the “Crystal Palace” of the first World Expo in 1851, it was notoriously hard to grow in hothouses in Victorian England, but its flowers are regarded as one of the most rewarding of the orchid species. Its delightful fragrance fills a room for weeks at a time.

And then, by chance, I stumbled upon an even more interesting fact. After seeing the orchids in my office, a painter friend immediately commented that I was “becoming a Chinese scholar”. “There is no flower that represents the scholar and his life better than the orchid”, he said with a wistful smile on his ancient face. “Why?” I asked innocently. “For that, you must look to Confucius!” he replied, in a mysterious way, and then changed the subject. This peaked my interest, and I started looking into it more. Read the rest of this entry »