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Ming Fever: the Past in the Present in the People's Republic of China at 60

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Ming Fever: the Past in the Present in the People's Republic of China at 60 Ming Fever: The Past in the Present in the People’s Republic of China at 60 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Szonyi, Michael. 2011. Ming fever: The past in the present in the People’s Republic of China at 60. In The People’s Republic of China at 60: An international assessment, ed. William Kirby, 375-387. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33907949 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Open Access Policy Articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#OAP Ming Fever: The Past in the Present in the People’s Republic of China at Sixty Michael Szonyi1 In summer 2007, while gathering materials in rural south China, I was struck by how often history came up in conversation with the villagers I was interviewing. Evening interviews had to be scheduled around the nightly television broadcast of a miniseries about the founding emperor of the Ming, the Hongwu emperor Zhu Yuanzhang. Next morning, everybody was talking about the previous night’s episode. Browsing the main Xinhua bookstore in Beijing on my way home, I was also struck that the biggest bestseller, the book with the most prominent display, was not a guide to succeeding in business or preparing for the TOEFL, but a work of history. The book was the first volume of a series called Those Happenings of the Ming Dynasty (Mingchao naxie shi’er 明朝那些事儿), and over the next few months, I often noticed people, young and old, on airplanes and long-distance buses, in university cafeterias and on park benches, engrossed in the series. China had caught “Ming fever” (Ming re 明热). The People’s Republic of China has always had a complex and fraught relationship with history. Mao Zedong read history voraciously and was fond of quoting history and historical allusion. But he also launched campaigns like the Anti-Four-Olds movement, seeking to destroy the influence of the past as well as its material legacies in the hope of producing a blank slate on which to build a utopian future. Like other regimes in China and elsewhere, the PRC government has frequently used historical narratives to construct national identity and to legitimate policies. One has only to think of official accounts of the history of Taiwan or Tibet. The current Ming fever suggests that the past is still very much part of life in the present in China. But the driving force behind the use of the past is popular consumption rather than state production. In this paper I use the recent Ming fever as a way of exploring the uses and power of history in the People’s Republic. Rather than assessing the accuracy of any particular historical 1 This article is based on a paper presented at a conference on “The People’s Republic of China at 60” at the Fairbank Center, Harvard University, May 1-3 2009. For comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Macabe Keliher, Sarah Schneewind and Wei Yang. narrative or representation, my interest is in how and why such narratives are seen as relevant to present day concerns. I do not wish to over-state the significance of the contemporary interest in history in general or the Ming (1368-1644) in particular. In China today many other issues matter to people more than stories about history – economic worries, political instability and social turmoil – and most people take less interest in the distant past than they have pride in recent accomplishments. But the Ming fever is nonetheless a social phenomenon that can perhaps tell us something important about the PRC today and even tomorrow. I will argue that the Ming fascinates people today as both a parallel to their own world and the origin of key elements of it. The Ming bears witness that an economically vibrant, globally engaged China can still be truly Chinese. But the fall of the Ming sounds a warning about official corruption and elite profligacy in the present. The Ming analogy also permits reflection on the sensitive issues of a multi-ethnic nation. Ming history, therefore, serves in China today both to legitimize the present and as a safe tool by which to criticize aspects of a present in which open discussion of politically sensitive themes remains constrained. Popular understandings of history can serve as a window into how Chinese people think about themselves, their society and their prospects. Chronology of the Ming fever The first symptoms of what would come to be called the Ming fever appeared in 2005, the six hundredth anniversary of the voyages of Zheng He 郑和 (1371-1433), the eunuch who led a series of massive official naval missions throughout southeast Asia, as far as the Middle East and the west coast of Africa. The anniversary inspired a host of commemorations, culminating in the State Council declaring July 11th to be “China National Maritime Day.” There were state sponsored conferences and exhibitions, historical reconstructions, and a high-budget television drama about the exploits of the fifteenth century traveler. The Nanjing shipyards where Zheng He’s boats were built have been developed as a park and museum. Several other television miniseries aired in the next year to great acclaim, including “The Great Ming Dynasty in 1566: the Jiajing Emperor and Hai Rui,” a retelling of the famous story of a dynasty under threat and of the minister whose loyalty and honesty were his undoing. Popular interest in the Ming dynasty took other forms as well. In 2007, the distinguished Renmin (People’s) University historian Mao Peiqi 毛佩 琦 gave a well-received series of seventeen lectures about the Ming on the television program Lecture Room (Baijia jiangtan 百家讲坛). The show has been a sleeper hit for CCTV since it first aired in 2001. Almost cancelled due to low initial ratings, it has become one of the most popular shows on television, creating several academic media stars. Publication of popular books on the Ming has also been booming, including biographies of emperors and leading ministers, fictionalized accounts of the fall of the dynasty, and several collections of lectures by prominent scholars. Ray Huang’s 1587 – A Year of No Significance, first published in Chinese in 1982, has been re-issued in a new and expensive commemorative edition. A Chinese translation of Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year China Discovered America appeared in 2005. Although Menzies’ claims that Zheng He’s fleets went as far as Australia and California have been almost universally dismissed by professional historians both in China and the West, the book aroused considerable popular interest. Of the more than fifteen thousand books of history published in the PRC in 2006, the largest number reportedly dealt with the Ming.2 The newest site of popular interest in the Ming is the internet. Here the central figure is Shi Yue 石悅 , a young official in China’s Customs Service who is better known by his internet pseudonym, Bright Moon of Yesteryear (Dangnian Mingyue 当年明月). The name is a reference to continuities over time; though everything changes, the moon is as bright as it was long ago. In March 2006, Dangnian began to post tales about the Ming dynasty on the popular BBS site Tianya, under the subject line “Those Happenings of the Ming.” The posts generated huge numbers of hits and a considerable uproar. 2 Guo Li and Li Pei, “Tanxun zuihou yige Han wangchao de benlai mianmu” (Looking for the original character of the last Han dynasty), Nanfang ribao, March 4, 2007. Netizens divided into two camps. Dangnian’s admirers labelled themselves “Ming fans” (Mingfan 明矾) and celebrated his combination of erudition and flair. But others, disagreeing with his historical views or accusing him of artificially inflating his numbers of hits, launched attacks on the BBS. Some posted graphic pictures of traffic accident victims on the comments section, hoping to dissuade readers. Some launched screen- flooding or spamming to interfere with the operations of the website. Accusations of “internet terrorism” flew back and forth. There were calls for the Tianya moderators to step down.3 Recognizing the interest, publishers quickly bought the rights to Dangnian’s work. The first volume – the one that I saw in Xinhua bookstore - appeared in late 2006 to great acclaim. As one effusive reviewer put it, Dangnian’s book was written with “the patience of a Swiss watchmaker, the attention to detail of a German engineer, the romanticism of a French vintner, and humor of an American movie star.”4 Six more volumes have appeared since, with total sales reportedly reaching two million, a remarkable figure given that the content of the earlier books can easily be downloaded for free. Dangnian is now said to be the bestselling author of history in decades, and has undergone a remarkable transformation from a retiring and sometimes awkward blogger to a polished celebrity. His stage adaptation of the King Lear story, titled “Ming,” premiered at the National Theater in October 2008. At some point, all of this interest was given the label “Ming fever”. The phenomenon having been labelled, it became necessary to analyze it, and stories about the Ming fever began to appear in the media in 2007 with headlines such as, “Why is the Ming so hot?” “How did the Ming dynasty become a tasty snack?” Contemporary Nursing offered “A psychological interpretation of the Ming history fever.” It truly seemed, as a popular catchphrase ran, that “this year is the Year of Ming” (jinnian shi Mingnian 今年是明年) (The term “Year of Ming” can also be read “Next Year,” so the 3 The controversy is described in “Ji Mingchao naxie shi’er Tianya shijian” (On the Those Happenings of the Ming Dynasty affair on Tianya), http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4991e77f0100052e.html 4 Liu Qiang, “Shuoshuo Mingchao naxie shi’er” (On Those Happenings of the Ming Dynasty), Xue lilun (Study Theory), 2008 no.5.
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