The Case of the Cranky Critics: Wang Hui

Wang Hui's big contribution to English, so far

I made some comments earlier this year on my efforts to read the essays in The End of the Revolution by Wang Hui. I found him a bold and original thinker with a typically challenging intellectual writing style. I just want to note here that I have discovered from the China Beat, a (usually quite boring) China studies blog, that Wang Hui is now the subject of a high-profile plagiarism case. Historian Peter Zarrow defends Professor Wang, albeit in the usual ambivalent way that serves first and foremost to defend his American institutions, as if China's first priority should be to move towards our version of the professionalization of the field. I felt a strong repugnance for this reasoning, because American graduate and professional study of history seems to me to be facing far too many internal crises to recommend itself to any nation-state. If there is any substance to Zarrow's defense, it is in a vague feeling about the communicative effects of Wang Hui's accusation:

...judging from my browsing of the internet, I do not want to see web lynching or a media circus. There is something truly weird about many of the attacks.

Is Zarrow seeing "web lynching" on the internet? What does that look like? Or is he afraid that he will see it soon, judging from his browsing? What does he mean by "weird"? (In my experience, Chinese prose on the internet is almost always "weird," and if not, that's also "weird.")

As a member of a China-studies email list I am on said in the opening reply to Zarrow, it might have been better for Zarrow not to participate at all in this affair, or else if he had wanted to be useful he could have signed onto an open letter to CASS requesting "an open, transparent and impartial investigation" into the affair. I note this because it's a nice example of the kind of intercultural pitfall one faces as an American scholar who wishes to hold a conversation between two extremely complex institutions and traditions. It's no wonder that so often our replies to problems are -- silence. I don't want to encourage silence, but rather sticking to a harsh, cold realism. Just the facts ma'am. Zarrow did make a mistake by acting in a case when he didn't have all the facts, only a sense that something in it was "weird."

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Taking a Li Bai Minute

I really need to finish up my conference paper. That's the next big task, and I've scheduled myself plenty of time for it. But, but....mwa, procrastination always ensnares me when I get near times that I have to finish papers. I'll do it. I will. But first, I'm taking a minute to look at a poem that one of my students brought up in his paper. He had one of his characters recite the following short poem by Li Bai (my translation admittedly reflects my mood as much as the Chinese text):

On a cloudy morning I said goodbye to Baidi,	朝辞白帝彩云间
Then rode a thousand miles, right on down to Jiangling.	千里江陵一日还
A single screech of monkey, crying on both sides,	两岸猿声啼不尽
Peaks and peaks of mountains, I passed them in my boat.	轻舟已过万重山

Li Bai's Homecoming

A page from the Baidu web helped me understand what the deal is with this poem (there is an excellent wikisource page as well). Li Bai was actually on the wrong side of the famous An Lushan rebellion against the Tang dynasty Emperor Xuanzong. Xuanzong probably wanted Li Bai dead, but for some reason -- I guess because he was a famous poet? Or also that Xuanzong was no longer popular enough? -- Li didn't get the death penalty, just exile out to Baidi, which was back then a little fort-type structure out on the southwestern frontier (picture above; odd, isn't it?). Once Xuanzong died, Li Bai got an official pardon.

Ah, That's Better

So this poem is taken to express his happiness that he was able to leave Baidi and return to the more civilized Jiangling, an ancient county and town 'many leagues' down the Yangtze river, in Hubei province (above, the outlandish city walls; from HL Wang's flickr). I wonder if Li Bai put the name of this town because it was the first place he came to that looked like a decent, civilized area, which might have made him feel that he was finally leaving the undeveloped frontier behind, and coming to some place he thought of as home.

Oh Fickle Fame

It's funny, I've always sort of resented Li Bai. I feel like it is because he is so famous -- too famous, but I realize I don't feel the same way at all about Du Fu, even though he is even more famous. This particular poem is so famous that at least one undergrad at the University of Minnesota thinks of it as a typical Tang dynasty poem. Reading it in Chinese, I can certainly see that it has wonderful concision -- it's just four lines long, and yet does quite convey the general emotional state of "whoopee, I'm going home!" But apparently a Ming dynasty critic called Yang Zhen praised it in these terms: "Cool winds and rain do cry down upon the ghosts and gods!" 惊风雨而泣鬼神矣！Uhm...wtf? Does Yang mean that the elements of place and scene come together to express something truly sublime, and/or spiritual? If so, I fail to see that, at least for now. I'll keep reading though.

Better-than-pure Studio?

The Baidu page cites something called Chao chun zhai shi ci 超纯斋诗词 "Exceeding-Purity Studio Poetry" as the source of the Yang Zhen quote. What's that? Worldcat doesn't have any books with "Exceeding-purity" in the title. A few google searches took me to some very strange dead-ends, including a Chinese email-hosting site and a Chinese middle school site. Other pages also give notes to poems and cite the Chao chun zhai shi ci, though. Perhaps it was a website that started off with one host and then moved to others in turn? I found something that might be the source, or some re-incarnation of this source with the same name, on the website of a vocational high school in Taichung. Weird, huh? Chao chun zhai shi ci 超纯斋诗词 is an extremely popular but extremely ephemeral knowledge base that people in China and Taiwan are using to read classical poems. I wonder if these kinds of sources are actually more important than scholarly ones...
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