Teaching Comparative

Don't forget the historical context

While I was on the road between home and Beloit, Wisconsin (helping get my younger son back to campus after spring break) and Rockford, Illinois (visiting my older son and his family), Karmin Tomlinson, who teaches at Oregon City High School in Oregon City, Oregon, sent me a reference to this Economist article.

This raises some interesting issues. What would your students predict the results of these proposals will be?

I only added a tiny bit of context at the end of the excerpt below.

You have permission to think freely

"IT MAY seem an odd time for China's risk-averse officials to be talking about political change. Yet at the opening of the country's annual session of parliament on March 5th the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, echoed recent calls in the state-owned media to 'liberate our thinking', even as he gave warning of a difficult year ahead, with threats from inflation and from America's subprime mortgage mess...

"In his two-and-a-half-hour speech Mr Wen told nearly 3,000 delegates in the Great Hall of the People that China must 'break the shackles of outdated ideas' and 'boldly explore new ways'. As is the way of things in China, the words were vague; Mr Wen did not spell out what he meant by 'thought liberation' and he did not offer any strikingly bold initiatives. Yet the intention was clear and these vague exhortations will fuel debate in the months ahead. In the build-up to the Olympics, Chinese leaders are anxious to preserve stability (not to mention one-party rule). But they appear ready to think about making the party a bit more accountable. This, they hope, might reduce social tensions caused by rapid economic change...

"Few are expecting much change on the political front in the months ahead. But Mr Wen wants to see checks on government authority strengthened. 'Civic organisations' (to party officials the term NGO sounds too much like organised opposition) would be given a role in 'voicing the concerns of the people', he said.

"Officials are keen to stress the importance of bureaucratic changes that are expected to be endorsed by delegates in the coming days...

"Recent talk of 'thought liberation', however, has gone far beyond the need to shake up hidebound bureaucrats. Much discussion in the state media has centred on a book published late last year by a group of scholars including several from the heart of the citadel, the party's academy for senior officials, China's equivalent to France's ENA. The work, whose abbreviated title is Storming the Fortifications, tactfully supports the party's continued monopoly of power. But it outlines 'urgent' steps for political reform in unusual detail: turning the legislature and courts into “modern power balance mechanisms” by 2016 and creating a 'modern civil society' with flourishing NGOs and religious groups by 2020. Freeing up the press, it says, would also help..."

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The subtitle of The Economist article is "China's prime minister lets a hundred flowers bloom. Well, ten."

Students should be reminded of The Hundred Flowers Campaign because every educated Chinese will think about it.

The Library of Congress Country Studies Glossary for China, describes the Hundred Flowers Campaign this way:

• "Also Double Hundred Campaign. Party-sponsored initiative to permit greater intellectual and artistic freedom. Introduced first into drama and other arts in the spring of 1956 under the official slogan "Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend." With Mao's encouragement in January 1957, the campaign was extended to intellectual expression and, by early May 1957, was being interpreted as permission for intellectuals to criticize political institutions of the regime. The effect was the large-scale exposure and purge of intellectuals critical of party and government policies."

The Country Study itself is a bit more direct:

• "As part of the effort to encourage the participation of intellectuals in the new regime, in mid-1956 there began an official effort to liberalize the political climate.
  
  Cultural and intellectual figures were encouraged to speak their minds on the state of CCP rule and programs. Mao personally took the lead in the movement, which was launched under the classical slogan 'Let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend.'
  
  At first the party's repeated invitation to air constructive views freely and openly was met with caution. By mid-1957, however, the movement unexpectedly mounted, bringing denunciation and criticism against the party in general and the excesses of its cadres in particular. Startled and embarrassed, leaders turned on the critics as "bourgeois rightists" and launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign."

The Anti-Rightist Campaign was also a prelude to The Great Leap Forward.

We should also note that Mao's call for the blooming of a hundred flowers and a hundred schools of thought, was a reference to the 6th century BCE period.

The Library of Congress Country Study for China, describes that time this way:

• "So many different philosophies developed during the late Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods that the era is often known as that of the Hundred Schools of Thought. From the Hundred Schools of Thought came many of the great classical writings on which Chinese practices were to be based for the next two and one half millennia. Many of the thinkers were itinerant intellectuals who, besides teaching their disciples, were employed as advisers to one or another of the various state rulers on the methods of government, war, and diplomacy." [Kong Zi (Confucius) and Meng Zi (Mencius) were the most prominent of these thinkers.]

That too will be part of context within which educated Chinese will evaluate Wen Jiabao's call to "break the shackles of outdated ideas" and "boldly explore new ways."

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Labels: change, China, political culture, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:05 PM