The early Education of Ding Wenjiang, China's first foreign trained geologist
Plus Tim Walz's China connections, updates on the evil Mayor Alice Guo, and the MaMaHuHu cross-cultural comedy troop from Shanghai
Greetings,
Thanks for being here. Again, I hope that I have provided work of sufficient quality to reward the visit.
When I ask people what they think of this publication, they often say that they like that they can learn some interesting things in a short period of time. Yet I know these have been getting longer. Therefore, this week, I have made an effort to keep things shorter. Just FYI, the original plan last week was to include last week’s piece on how the Chinese write Kamala Harris’s Chinese nickname with this week’s piece, but an even longer version, and I just decided that was much more than people would appreciate. Therefore, this week’s piece is a shorter historical essay.
Again, while I am aware that the life of Ding Wenjiang, China’s first foreign trained geologist is little known, the story of this man, and why and how he went to the effort to get a foreign education is amazing and gives great insight into the state of China in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. I genuinely believe that if you have an interest in Asian or world history, the time spent reading this will be rewarded. Sometimes you get great insight into the big picture by looking carefully at a much smaller picture. In this case, the story of the childhood of one intelligent child as he grew up and went to school gives a picture of what his country and the world around him was like. And it gives great insight on the history and image of science outside of Europe and the West.
Again, a lot of this information comes from my master’s thesis. You may access it here, if you’d like: Cornell e-commons: Chinese and Western Interactions Surrounding the Preparations for the Peking Man Digs of the 1920s
Second, a bit on Tim Walz’s significant China connection. Meanwhile consider reading my highly rated Trump book please: Scams from the Great Beyond --The Presidential Edition: A Skeptical Look at Our 45th President Using the Tools of a Paranormal Debunker and Historian
And then there’s another update on the saga of the evil Mayor Alice Guo and an introduction to one of my favorite, late, great YouTube channels, MaMaHuHu, a mixed nationality comedy group based in Shanghai that often created very funny videos about what life was like in that city.
Ding Wenjiang, and how a kid who worked, really, really hard to go to school while the world around him fell into chaos repeatedly tried again and again, and then succeeded against all odds through the study of science.
Personal details: Born 20 March 1887
Taixing County, Jiangsu, China, Qing Dynasty ( 1644-1911 )
Died 5 January 1936 (aged 48)
Changsha, Hunan, Republic of China ( 1911-1949 )
Political party: Independent
Spouse: Shi Jiuyuan
Education: University of Glasgow,
Graduated from Zoology and Geology in 1911
Occupation: Essayist Geologist Writer
(source: Ding Wenjiang - Wikipedia )
Two weeks ago, we were introduced to the life of Ding Wenjiang, China’s first foreign trained geologist. He became one of China’s leading scientists of the early twentieth century as well as one of the key figures in the Peking Man paleontological digs of the 1920s and 1930s. (see The Saga of Ding Wenjiang, early Chinese scientist, Part one, naming China's first geologist and the traditional way of choosing a fortuitous name )
How did a man from a complex and tradition bound non-Western culture, someone who at birth was trained to become a Confucian scholar, instead come to follow the path of Western education in science and ultimately became one of China's leading men of science and an internationally respected geologist?
To understand the life of Ding Wenjiang, we must try to understand the events that shaped his life.
Born in 1887, Ding was born into a China whose borders and culture were under assault from outside forces beyond the Chinese people's control and often even beyond their understanding.
In 1892, he began school at age five. Study consisted of long hours spent practicing calligraphy and traditional penmanship as well as the memorization of Confucian texts and commentaries which for more than two thousand years had been thought of as the fundamental basis for good government and learning. For long centuries, the path to success in China was based on a civil service system in which examinations consisted of regurgitating carefully memorized essays on the Confucian classics in writing using good calligraphy.
In 1894, when Ding had been studying just two years, war with Japan came, the first Sino-Japanese War, and China was resoundingly defeated by a nation it had always looked down on, largely because the Japanese military had been modernized and adapted Western technologies in ways the Chinese hadn’t. As part of their victory, the Japanese had seized portions of Chinese territory including the island of Taiwan. In 1897. when eight year old Ding had been studying for three years, the Germans seized Qingdao (aka Tsingtao)[i] and its peninsula as their colony and established a naval base. This was not too far to the north of Jiangsu province where lived. Again their military had technologies that the Chinese did not. The year after that, 1898, the British seized the port of Wei-hai-Wei, also near Jiangsu and not too far from Qingdao. Simultaneously the Russians were pressuring China for a “sphere of influence” with special privileges for their nation. (The French already had their own “sphere of influence” in the Chinese territory adjacent to their colonies in Southeast Asia.) Again, Western nations with Western technologies had been able to easily dominate and impose their will on the Chinese government and people. It was clear that China could not defend its borders from the foreign powers with Western military technology being a factor in each and every foreign seizure of Chinese territory.
The seizure of pieces of Chinese territory was a common part of the relationship between foreign nations and China during this time. Among the foreign nations and their governments, there was a feeling that if one's nation did not gain control of a desirable portion of Chinese territory, the likelihood was that it would be seized by a rival foreign power, instead of remaining under Chinese control. A “scramble for empire” was taking place among the foreign powers interested in China. Among Chinese intellectuals of the time, there was a growing fear that China would ultimately be dismembered, “cut up like a melon,” and divided between the different Western powers. It's important to note that these were not paranoid unrealistic fears. This was exactly what had happened, more or less, to virtually every other nation of Asia or Africa during this period. (see Mostly Asian History Dashboard Western Expansion and Colonialism )
In this same year, 1898, there was, however, a glimmer of hope, and it excited Ding and his classmates. The new emperor, Guanxu (Kuang-hsi), announced reforms and modernizations with the goal to strengthen and improve China. These included educational reforms and when news of the reforms reached 11 year old Ding Wenjiang and his classmates, the students at his school held a mini- revolt of their own, swearing that they would not spend more time practicing “eight legged essays” of the traditional style or spend hours on practicing their calligraphy. Instead, they announced, they intended to pursue “solid studies,” by which they meant studying the lives and historical examples of important persons who had come before them and from whom they could learn by example.[ii]
The new emperor intended to reform education and find a more modern basis for civil service examinations, reform and modernize the military and the economy, change the government from its traditional system to a constitutional monarchy with several democratic elements, and do away with several government positions where persons had traditionally received money in return for very little.
Unfortunately for Ding and China itself, the reforms of the idealistic young emperor proved too much for many people to handle. A cluster of conservatives with ties to the Imperial Court staged a coup and ousted him from power approximately three and a half months later.[iii] The brief, exciting episode known to history as “the hundred days reform” was over, finished. The government of China was now firmly controlled by people who wished to maintain tradition and opposed the adaption of foreign technologies and ways.
To an eleven year old boy such as Ding Wenjiang, this sudden crushing of an exciting idealistic movement which he supported must have been devastating.
And just a couple years later, the life of this obscure then 12 year old Chinese schoolboy was marked by the events of the Boxer Rebellion. Many historians consider the Boxer Rebellion to have been China's last attempt to meet the challenge of the modern, western-shaped world using the tools and techniques of tradition-bound China and its culture. Ding could not have been moved in some way by the bloody, violent, anti-foreign uprising with an ideology firmly grounded in superstition and the tragic results of this uprising, including even more foreign influence and seizures of Chinese territory, which resulted from its failure.
Like his nation itself, he probably felt powerless and directionless. Although his “goal” at this point was to educate himself so that he would be better prepared for the future, his nation was in a flux with both its future and its educational system in question. Direction and goals were needed, for both himself and his nation.
Fortunately, for him, these goals came in the form of a young Chinese intellectual with an interest in radical reform of the troubled nation. Long Yanxian was one of many intellectuals who had become interested in politics and advocated radical reform for China. To Long, the study of Western and foreign learning was an important part of the path to reform. He'd come to Tahing, Ding's hometown, to assume the role of district magistrate. In 1902, when Ding was 15 years old, he met the young man and his family. After briefly interviewing the boy on his knowledge of Chinese history by asking questions on the famous military campaigns of an Emperor of the Han dynasty, Long recommended to Ding's parents that they send the boy to Japan for study and an education that included Western ideas.
Prior to the 1890s few intellectuals in China had much interest in foreign or Western ideas. Unlike Japan during this period, the bulk of educated Chinese or Chinese students before the 1890s simply did not see non-Chinese thought or institutions to be interesting enough or worthy enough to spend time studying. When translations of Western books were available in Chinese, they did not sell well, particularly when compared to the way they sold in the actively modernizing nation of Japan.[iv]
But as foreign powers and Western nations gained more and more control over Chinese ports, and foreigners of various kinds, including missionaries who spread both religious and secular knowledge, [v] gained more and more access to the Chinese interior, foreign ideas inevitably spread further and further throughout China and through Chinese intellectual circles. Although initially, starting in the 1870s, the interest was solely in foreign technical knowledge, by the mid-1890s, there was increasing interest in foreign thought of all kinds. In the 1890s, however, perhaps in part due to spread of Western knowledge through the treaty port colonies and the missionaries' projects, but clearly due in large part to frustration over the current state of affairs in China and a need for more efficient alternatives, there was increased interest in foreign ideologies, philosophies and political structures. Thus the 1890s was marked by a growth in reformist writings from Chinese intellectuals whose ideas were based or influenced by foreign ideologies.[vi]
As Japan was undoubtedly the most modernized nation of Asia at this time, with the greatest acceptance of Western learning, it was a common destination for Asian students anxious to learn of the West yet unable or unwilling to travel to Europe or America. Because Japanese often used Chinese characters for reading and writing (although with a completely different pronunciation) and because Japanese scholars and authors had done more writing on the West and more translating of Western works than the Japanese, a surprising amount of Western scientific and intellectual terminology was entering China through Japan using Japanese terms that were written with Chinese characters (and pronounced by the Chinese differently from the Japanese yet written the same.) [vii]
At the turn of the twentieth century, the number of Chinese going to study in Japan to learn about the West and to learn about Japanese modernization and adaption of Western ideas was rising drastically. Before 1900 virtually no Chinese studied abroad. In 1901, 280 students traveled to Japan for study. In 1903, according to a leading Japanese historian, the number was 1,000 and after that it grew even higher. (The scholar did not provide statistics for 1902 for some reason, but they may be assumed to be somewhere between those of 1901 and 1903.) Although most of these students did not graduate, and were often quite unprepared for study abroad in a foreign language, the result was that they came back with greater exposure to the outside world and Western technology and ideas, and, in part due to Japanese example and in part due to humiliation and teasing at the hands of Japanese who looked down on the often lost, confused and seemingly backwards Chinese students, a greater sense of Chinese nationalism.[viii]
Study in Japan required adaptation in a thousand little ways, for instance, students often had to find a hairstyle that satisfied both their traditional need to have their hair in a queue but also their need to conform to Japanese codes about “modern” hairstyles. The result was something called a “Fuji hairdo.” While I have been unable to find a photograph or drawing of the hairstyle, the Cambridge History of China, Vol. 11, Part Two, says “Barbers toiled to bring the queue into some sort of conformity with the laws of modernization, and achieved a pompadoured compromise that became known as the Fuji hairdo.'“ [ix] As for Ding's studies, it's not clear what exactly he learned academically but like most of his peers he did spend a great deal of time involved with radical student politics. He, like his peers, advocated against opium use, footbinding, the Confucian education system, and advocated for the emancipation of women.
Ding studied in Japan from 1902 until 1904 (approximately age 15 to 17) and the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War. The Russo-Japanese War was a major event in Asia. When the Japanese military defeated the Russian forces, it was seen as the first time an Asian nation had successfully stood up to a Western power. To many in Asia, this was inspiring, and one result was an even greater increase in students from throughout Asia, not just China, coming to Japan to study. But for the Chinese students who were in Japan during the war, the experience was different. Not only were they aware that much of the fighting was taking place on Chinese territory in Manchuria, with the Chinese people and government unable to do anything about it, but the surge in nationalistic Japanese pride that resulted from the war often had an ugly side as the Japanese felt themselves to be superior to other Asians. According to a novel of the time written by a Chinese student who had studied in Japan, even the Japanese rickshaw drivers would taunt the Chinese students and make them feel ashamed as they spoke of their nation's ability to resist and defeat the Russians, contrasting it to the powerlessness of the Chinese of the time.[x]
Ding decided study in Japan was not for him at this time and returned home.
Coming soon, perhaps next week, perhaps later, young Ding Wenjiang buys a one way ticket to study in Britain without properly budgeting from room, board, and tuition. Stay tuned and subscribe!!
Notes
FYI, the Cambridge History of China can be found online at archive.org. see: Archive.og -- The Cambridge History Of China All Volumes
[i] Yes, this is the same name as the popular Chinese beer. The Germans, after seizing Qingdao / Tsingtao and establishing their colony their built a brewery, and it still functions and produces beer today. While China has many brands of beer, few would deny that Tsingtao is the most famous.
[ii] Furth, page 18-19.
[iii] Among those engaged in the coup were the Dowager Empress, aka Cuxi and Yuan Shi-kai, two extremely important Chinese historical figures of this period.
[iv] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 276-277.
[v] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 278-279.
[vi] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 278-280.
[vii] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 343, 367.
[viii] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 350-351.
[ix] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 352.
[x] Cambridge History of China, Vol 11, page 354.
Tim Walz and his China Connection
As stated, there’s a lot of commentary out there on the current election and the personalities involved. While I have largely tried to avoid political commentary here, unless there is a direct Asian history connection. But Tim Walz definitely has strong and direct China connections.
First, a word on my thoughts on sharing journalism, journalism such as the story of Tim Walz, in the year 2024.
If you are reading this on your computer, well, chances are you are familiar with this thing called “the internet.” It began to get really big in the 1990s, but it was an incremental thing becoming bigger each year little by little. When I entered newspaper journalism as a reporter in 1999 to 2000, people usually got most of their news from print sources and when we found some news, generally local news, there was often a feeling that you were finding some data or an interesting story that had never been put in the public eye and making it available to your readers for the first time ever.
These days though, most people get their news from the internet, huge amouts of data are available everywhere at any moment on your phone or laptop , and there’s a feeling that usually when you write about something you are just repackaging pre-existing information and spreading it around from one place to another place, and if you are lucky adding new context.
So with the story of Tim Walz instead of repackaging the data and information in these stories, I am simply providing links to the stories themselves. Honestly, I don’t have much context or opinion to add, except in the case of the New York Post story. Therefore, I have provided several links to news stories that I feel no real need to comment on, some similar videos, and a New York Post video report that lacked some context but I was unable to tell if the reporter was withholing the context or simply was not aware of the context. But I included it as I did not wish to simply share stories that were from one point of view. I did, for the record, start to view a Fox News story on Tim Walz and China but it was one of those media stories where they “ask questions,” ugly sounding questions, when anyone could easily obtain answers and instead share the actual answers. Therefore, I saw no real reason to share it.
So several links, not much to add here.
By contrast, I wrote a whole book on Trump because back in 2020, and I did it because I thought there were things I understood about him, patterns of manipulation and the way he reaches out and connects with fringe groups, that the mainstream media seemed to be missing. (Anyone who can build a coalition of loyal supporters that includes both Orthodox Zionist Jews and White Supremacist Neo-Nazis plus the Falun Gong Sect should never, ever be underestimated, and Trump did exactly that.) For the record, I am finding him much more difficult to understand these days. The patterns are gone. Calculated lies are few and far between. Instead there are just bizarre false statements. People who know more than me, say he may be suffering from a mental state common to aging people with narcissistic personality disorder. Still, buy my book please.)
As for Tim Walz, what I will say is that I think having someone with this knowledge and background can only be good for America and there is nothing here that makes me concerned about his relationships with foreign entities such as the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party , the Kuo Min Tang party of Taiwan, the Falung Gong sect, or even the Dalai Lama, and he seems much better qualified than most politicians to recognize if any of these groups try to manipulate or mislead him.
(And, for the record, some people who know me, think I get paranoid as I sometimes see things they don’t see. For the record, I honestly do believe that one of the local China friendship groups has come under the control of the Kuo Min Tang party of Taiwan, and people who have not been spied on by the Kuo Min Tang and who do not know what a Kuo Min Tang informant looks like or how they act think I am nuts for saying this, but having spent time in Taiwan during times when Kuo Min Tang informants would definitely try to collect information on foreign visitors, I do not think I am wrong on that. —so if I thought there were something suspicious about Walz, I would definitely tell you.)
But having said that I think Walz’s China background is a very good thing and will help us in our China relations if the Democrats win. I definitely support him in the next election.
The New York Times -- Tim Walz’s Long Relationship With China Defies Easy Stereotypes
BBC - Walz has history with China - it's more hawkish than critics claim
NPR - Democratic VP nominee Walz gets flak from the right for his relationship with China
Radio version - (same story) -- Looking at Tim Walz's connection to China
A quick note on this one, for those who don’t know, The New York Post has traditionally been, seriously, one of the worst newspapers in the world and at times can be simply delightful because of it. Really, it has always been one step up from a gossip tabloid, with one foot in that genre, with these crazy, big-lettered screaming headlines. In fact, it made journalistic history when it ran one of the most incredible headlines of all time in great big letters, “Headless body found in topless bar.”
Over the years, its cover stories have often been intriguingly irrelevent and inconsequential yet engrossingly weird. Among the top examples would be the endless back and forth of the pre-political Donald Trump and his late wife Ivanka in 1989 (including the Trump quote / headline “adultery is not a sin”) 1 , the story of dart man -a creepy weirdo in NYC who shot women in the buttocks with homemade darts shot out of a soda straw 2 and the story around 2009-ish of the Connecticut woman who had a pet chimpanzee who she showered with, shared her xanax with, and had a very strange and disturbingly close relationship with until the chimpanzee one day attacked her and killed her in a gruesome way. 3
Each of these stories was stretched out from day to day in an absolutely lurid and sensationlistic way. In this context, the paper is featured in both the 1980s film and novel, “Bright Lights Big City,” and in the film from the same era “It Could Happen to You.”
It’s an iconic part of the New York City cultural landscape, and I used to find stories from it sometimes and use them in my classes in China with two I remember being one about a woman who wanted to be buried with her dog but New York State cemetery laws forbid it, and another being about high school students in New York who protested their school dress code by wearing revealing clothing one day. —the students used these to practice proper citation and paraphrasing of facts.
However, in the last few years of so, somehow it has gone off on this right wing political bent and is trying harder to cover national news, but with an obvious slant. Back in the day, the paper tended to really skim over news of any events outside the City of New York, but, alas, no more.
FYI, this Post reporter largely has her facts in order, in my opinion, except for two things. She doesn’t seem to understand that almost everything in China, including any foreign visit by an organized group or university program, needs to be approved by the Chinese government’s security apparatus, and the reason people who were touched directly or indirectly by the Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre wish to remember it is to honor the people who stood up for their principles and died for them when a brutal dictatorship slaughtered its critics.
Interestingly, Trump seems to have difficulty with grasping the concept of honoring the dead who died for their principles while trying to make the world a better place. (Citations and evidence available upon request.)
The Evil Mayor Alice Guo Update
Okay, the saga continues. This has to be one of the weirdest assed stories I have heard in a long time. Remember how just a little bit above on this very same page I said people often find me paranoid? They say I sometimes see threats that aren’t there? Then I say, “no, there is a danger here.” Well, if this doesn’t make you paranoid what will? While I sincerely and genuinely believe most people are basically good, honestly, some of the evil, predatory ones can be so much worse than a normal person can imagine, and this story is a case in point. Crazy sh*t is out there, just outside the fringes of our perception, and this story proves it.
Rehashing, months ago, in the Philippines, authorities raided an off-shore internet phone center intended for running overseas, online gambling games. Instead, they found literally hundreds of people imprisoned against their will and forced under threat of torture to make scam phone calls and reach out by internet and try to trick people out of their life savings.
Then it was discovered that the local Mayor, Alice Guo, mayor the town of Bamban, had a financial connection to the center, and people began looking into her background to evaluate what the possible connection was.
They discovered that the mayor basically did not have a background like a normal person would. No one knew where she had gone to school, or grown up, and her birth had not been registered until she was about 16 years old. When asked for details on her life, she often said she did not remember, but then gave a story about being born illegitimate, raised in isolation because of it, and home schooled.
Fingerprint evidence established that she was not a Filipino at all, but a Chinese national connected to the Chinese crime syndicate that ran the phone center.
The authorities decided to raid her house, but, alas, she was not there.
No one knows where she is now, but the authorties have removed her as the mayor of the town.
She has released messages from hiding saying the whole thing is a misunderstanding, and she’s being mistreated, and her lawyer insists this is indeed the case, although he also says he has no idea where she is, but he is sure she has not left the country.
Now, why would that smile make someone worry?
“MANILA, Philippines — The lawyer of Alice Guo said on Wednesday he has been assured by the dismissed mayor of Bamban, Tarlac, that she remains in the Philippines.
Guo’s legal counsel Stephen David surmises she is in the “central Philippines.”
“She told me that she is still in the Philippines, she assured me of that. And of course, I believe in the capacity of our [Bureau of] Immigration to safeguard our ports. As of now, no Alice Guo has been apprehended in any of our ports,” David said, noting that they were able to talk to each other via video call.
Though communicating only via Zoom and phone calls, David said he continues to convince Guo to surface and face the Senate investigation and other legal proceedings in connection with the allegations against her over Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO).”
From Phil Star Global -- Alice Guo still in the Philippines, preparing motion — lawyer
See:
Phil Star Global - Guo cries political harassment
Manila Standard -- Criminal case vs. Guo to continue despite Ombudsman ruling removing her as Bamban mayor
MaMa HuHu, Awesome YouTube Channel
For years, MaMaHuHu was one of my favorite YouTube channels. Based in Shanghai, the channel was created by a Shanghai based comedy group that included both Chinese and non-Chinese members. The name, MaMaHuHu or 馬馬虎虎 is a Chinese language expression that translates as “a couple horses, a couple tigers” (“horse horse tiger tiger”) but has the actual meaning of “so so” or “not too good, not too bad.” Just as the word “so so” tends to be over-used by English language learners, 馬馬虎虎 is also often overused by people who are learning to speak Chinese and struggling to communicate.
MaMaHuHu produced very funny videos about the life of ex-pats (foreign people) in Shanghai as well as the differences between Chinese culture and Western culture and what happened when the two interacted. I loved it.
Sadly, when the pandemic came along, lockdown hit, many foreign people left the city, the Channel largely died, and the group largely stopped making videos of the sort they had made before.
Occasionally members of the group use it to share videos of their personal projects, and not too long ago one of the key figures, the man who apparently handled much of the actual camera work, editing, and cinematography changed the name of the channel to “Mythic Picnic” and is using it to show off some of the projects he is currently doing in his distant homeland of Scotland. (So if you find videos about life in modern Scotland, well, that’s the story on that.) While I wish he hadn’t, honestly, I would have done the same thing.