Timothy Brook

The Tokyo Judgment and the Rape of Nanking

The japanese assault on the city of nanking in December 1937 was one of many incidents that the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, 1946–48) examined in the course of judging the wartime leaders of Japan. What was referred to at the time as the “Rape of Nanking” has in the last several decades become a controversial marker of Chinese identity as well as a source of potent disagreement among Japanese over their nations history as a colonial power in East Asia. Within this controversy, the IMTFE trial in Tokyo has been used as a touchstone to confirm and deny all manner of claims concerning the incident. Those who feel aggrieved over Japans conduct toward China cite the evidence produced at the trial to authenticate the scale and brutality of the massacre (Eykholt 2000, 19–23). Those who feel that Japan and the emperor system have been unfairly blamed for the war in East Asia scour the trial proceedings for failures of logic and evidence that demonstrate to their satisfaction that the “Tokyo trial view of history” is nothing but anti-Japanese distortion and fabrication (Yoshida 2000, 111–14). For both sides, the Tokyo judgment is fuel for ideological fire.

The Spatial Structure of Ming Local Administration

This is an essay on the spatial characteristics of local administrative geography in Ming China. Its focus is on the units that were used to parcellize territory and to group people below the level of the county. Its purpose is to identify them in relation to four distinct but interrelated systems: the subcounty administrative system of cantons, townships, and wards; the lijia; the baojia; and the rural covenant system. AU formed precise hierarchies, for a carefully stepped dispersal of jurisdiction was necessary for the efficiency of the overall system, both in funneling resources to the center and in maintaining adequate surveillance over the people. These hierarchical systems were often parallel with each other, the boundaries of one set of units often replicating those of the others. This study finds that these units constituted a systematic and integrated structure of civil administration in the Ming period.1 The structure has continued, with limited modification, into the twentieth century. Previous investigations of Ming administration have usually stopped at the county level and not proceeded further down into the less clearly understood realms of local society. Just as a prefectural magistrates jurisdiction was organized in terms of the counties in his prefecture, so a county magistrates jurisdiction was affected by the multi-level structure of administrative units below the county. Keeping subcounty units in order was recognized as a major component of good administration.2 This was especially the case with regard to fiscal matters. Similarly, nonofficial activities within a county-informal political organization, social structure, landholding, marketing, and religious observance, to

The Merchant Network In 16th Century China

Merchants have played many roles of varying importance in the economy of China. Since the second millennium B.C. they have served to create economic links within Han and Inner Asian worlds, and this economic role has been of critical importance in forming a long history of specialization and exchange in the Chinese economy. The lower Yangtze valley, especially Suzhou, Hangzhou, Songjiang, and Nanjing, was the centre of textile production in the Ming, and its products were transported and sold throughout the country. The merchant network which put these products into circulation existed as a series of networks of different scope and at different levels in the economy. Zhangs argument for a successful lightening of commercial taxes comes from Mencius. Zhangs argument for lightening of taxes is backed by his own experience that it strengthens the economic power of the state. Such arguments had little appeal for Ming officials. Keywords: Asian worlds; China; commercial taxes; lower Yangtze valley; merchant network; Ming Officials; Zhang Han

The Sinology of Joseph Needham

Rarely does even a great scholar go beyond altering his field to changing the way in which people think about the world. Joseph Needham, who died last spring at the age of ninety-four, was one of those rare few. Because of his work, the great achievements of the Chinese scientific tradition are now common knowledge. The path to that knowledge was strewn with controversy, but Joseph (as he insisted his junior associates address him) was blithe about standing in the eye of a storm when a point of principle was at stake. His sinology was shunned by the American establishment through the 1950s and 1960s, his socialism and internationalism placing him out of step with that illiberal age. It also went against the condescension toward China he felt was the habit of the European academy. It argued for such original hypotheses, and did so with such brimming enthusiasm, that one either embraced them or stood clear. The power of Josephs sinology was a matter of the master intelligence at work, as well as of the hand of the stylist who could write with a flourish and confidence that have since departed from academic discourse. What sustained his sinology was not simply his writing style or personal longevity, however much the latter redounds to a Daoists credit. Rather, it sprouted from a politics committed to Christian socialism, universalism, and the progress of human understanding. This politics is the philosophical ground on which stands his grand Science and Civilisation in China (SCC).

Hesitating before the Judgment of History

The ubiquitous experience of wartime collaboration in East Asia has not yet undergone the analysis that its counterpart in Europe has received. The difficulty has to do with the political legacies that the denunciation of collaboration legitimized, as well as the continuing hegemony of the discourse of nationalism. Both inhibitors encourage the condemnation of collaboration rather than its historicization. Reflecting briefly on the 1946 trial of Liang Hongzhi, China’s first head of state under the Japanese, this essay argues that the historian’s task is not to create moral knowledge, but to probe the presuppositions that bring the moral subject of the collaborator into being for us, and then ask whether real collaborators correspond to this moral subject. In the face of the natural impulse to render judgment, this essay argues for the wisdom of hesitation. “T ODAY HISTORIANS HESITATE TO judge collaborators with the Axis powers in World War II,” writes John Treat. This hesitation, he worries, is not a good thing, for it flees from the moral obligation to make judgments. Collaboration cannot be assessed in this way as a merely historical question. It must be encountered as an existential one and perceived in relation to “what we fundamentally are,” he argues. I shall propose the opposite. Hesitation is not widely regarded as a moral virtue. We admire those who act “without a moment’s hesitation,” as the saying goes, and disdain those who delay leaping from impulse to action. Hesitation is a barrier to authenticity, a symptom of moral weakness, a retreat from the obligation to act—from what philosophers from Confucius to the late Ming spoke of as budeyi, the “inability to stop oneself” when faced with a clear moral choice. He who hesitates is lost, as the eighteenthcentury adage goes. Dismissing hesitation, we have abandoned Locke for Rousseau. One of Locke’s insights in the second edition of his “Essay concerning Human Understanding” is that a morally satisfactory judgment depends on the mind’s “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires”—including the desire to judge good and evil. This power of suspension is vital for insulating the will from the desires that motivate it. Through “due, and repeated Contemplation,” hesitation allows us to anticipate the consequences of our judgments prior to dispensing them, making it the source of our freedom

Communications and commerce

The experience of life in China changed remarkably over three centuries of Ming rule. That, at least, is how it seemed to those who lived through the changes and felt obliged to record their surprise and dismay. By the middle of the dynasty, many literate observers were becoming aware that the institutions laid down by the founding Emperor, Hung-wu, were no longer guiding social practices. They credited this lapse variously to the recurrent problems of lax administration, low-level corruption, and a weakening of moral fibre. Writers of the late Ming knew differently. In their view, something more than just dynastic sag had taken hold. Many became obsessed with the extent to which Chinese society had grown away from what they were trained to believe it had originally been: an agrarian realm where superiors knew their responsibilities and inferiors their places. But, they felt, people no longer stayed put: class distinctions had become confusingly fluid; the cultivation of wealth had displaced moral effort as the presiding goal of the age. The panicked indignation that can be found in writings of the late Ming may not represent the mood that all of that age shared, nor may it speak directly of the actual pressures to which an embattled elite felt vulnerable. But it came close. Some late-Ming writers, for instance, were aware that China was becoming a more crowded place than it had been at the beginning of the Ming, but only the more alarmist insisted that the population had more than doubled between the Hung-wu emperors reign and the turn of the seventeenth century – as in fact it had. Others were sensitive to the difficulty that cultivators were having in gaining access to enough land to survive, but only a few were aware of the migration that had shifted Chinas population westward over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they tended not to grasp the scale of this movement.

Time and Global History

The experience of massive globalization in the past two decades has provoked an epistemological crisis for historians. No longer is it possible to write histories of one part of the world as though the rest of the world did not exist. The challenge is how to do this without writing histories so dense as to be unmanageable. The essay proposes using an alternative conception of time, one based on moment rather than duration. Drawing on selected insights from Buddhist philosophy, the author suggests that, rather than reproducing timeline narratives that confirm existing identities, historians access the multiplicity and indeterminacy of actual experience in the past by suspending the flow of time and examining the world through ‘keyholes’. In addition to enlarging our sense of the complexity of the past, this philosophy of time encourages narratives that accentuate a tolerance of diversity and a compassion for its failures. La experiencia de la globalización masiva en las últimas dos décadas ha provocado una crisis epistemológica para los historiadores. Ya no se puede escribir las historias de una parte del mundo como si no existiera el resto. El reto consiste en cómo hacer esto sin escribir historias tan densas hasta llegar a un punto incontrolable. El ensayo propone usar una alternativa a la concepción del tiempo, con base en un momento y no en la duración. El autor sugiere, partiendo de ideas seleccionadas de la filosofía budista, que en vez de reproducir narrativas cronológicas que confirman a las identidades existentes, los historiadores busquen en la multiplicidad y la indeterminación de la experiencia actual en el pasado, eliminando el flujo del tiempo y el examen del mundo a través “del ojo de la cerradura.” Además de ampliar nuestro sentido de complejidad del pasado, esta filosofía de tiempo promueve las narrativas que acentúan una tolerancia de diversidad y una compasión por sus errores.

Differential effects of global and local climate data in assessing environmental drivers of epidemic outbreaks

This Commentary is the response of a China historian to the paper by the team of biologists headed by Huidong Tian (1) on the differential effects of using long-term or short-term data to reconstruct climatic drivers of human epidemics. The Tian et al. paper is a response to an anomaly they encountered tracking environmental conditions for historical outbreaks of epidemics over two millennia. This anomaly is that disease outbreaks, when charted in relation to long-term climate data, correlate with lower temperatures and decreased precipitation, whereas when observed in relation to short-term climate data, outbreaks are likely to become more prevalent under warm, wet conditions (exemplified in refs. 2 and 3). Tian et al. (1) tentatively conclude that the effect of climate on epidemics is scale-dependent and that the long- and short-term climatic conditions of epidemics yield different findings. As a historian without science training, I cannot comment on how Tian et al. (1) have analyzed their data, but I can bring to bear the methods that a historian employs to provide a perspective on using such data to develop the argument of scale dependency. Historians usually reconstruct the past by identifying a problem, positing several competing hypotheses in the course of accumulating documentary data, then moving inductively upward from the data toward what we judge to be the most reasonable resolution. Our methodology demands close attention to how sources were originally constructed and for what purposes, and to factor out the downstream effects that these purposes may have on the conclusions we draw. We can do this in part because we usually work with small datasets, but we are strict about not generalizing our data to the extent of overriding the particularities of a historical place and time. My data for this Commentary comes from the chronological lists of disasters … [↵][1]1Email: tim.brook{at}ubc.ca. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

A Month of Delta Summer: The Work of Leisure in The Diary of Li Rihua

Leisure is not doing nothing: it involves complex signifying practices that communicate social status and have to be performed to be legible to others. The practice of leisure fills the pages of the eight-year diary of Li Rihua (1565–1635), an artist and art collector of the late Ming who devoted an extended mourning sabbatical to building a major art collection and socializing with like-minded colleagues. For someone outside government service, leisure was an organized project absorbing time and money. Its apparent goal was pleasure, but it was also about accumulating objects and the value and status they conferred. As a man of leisure, Li achieved a prominent place within the regional gentry elite without ever having to return to office, but also without challenging the states foundation of status.

The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China by Dagmar Schäfer (review)

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 73.1 (2013): 156–163 academic fields relate more closely to contemporary politics than others. Thus, we may wonder to what degree jinshi scholarship had to do with contemporary politics, even when the content of that scholarship was ancient politics. Is it possible for someone to study the ancient Chinese political system for (or mainly for) intellectual curiosity? To put this differently: were there jinshi scholars who did not consciously use their scholarship to comment on contemporary social issues? If so, our question becomes, who were those scholars?7 These are general questions that need addressing by all of us in this field of research. The issues raised above are indicative of how stimulating Brown’s book is, especially its many insightful observations and detailed facts. I regard her work as an important contribution to the study of Chinese antiquarianism. Those interested in the cultural history, art history, and intellectual history of modern China, and those who study antiquarianism in other societies, will find it of great benefit.