Past Present

If I were to chose the point where modern Chinese history began it would not be the overthrow of the Imperial Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic in 1911; no, it would be even more precise than that – it would be 4 May, 1919. 

It was on that day that students demonstrated on the streets of Beijing, protesting against the Treaty of Versailles, specifically the transfer of the German concessions in Shandong Province to Japan, contrary to past promises.  Protest spread across the country, the first spontaneous and populist movement in the country’s history, an upswing of Chinese nationalism far more significant than the events of 1911.

Anger over past grievances, particularly over grievances at the hands of Japan, continues to be an important measure of Chinese national feeling.  The Japanese are also good at remembering past sorrows…at least when it comes to their own.  It's not long since the annual commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, attended this year by the grandson of President Harry Truman, the man who ordered the attack. 

I’m sure there’s lots of genuine feeling here, a desire that history should be remembered and never be repeated.  I might feel more sympathy but for the fact that I see Hiroshima and Nagasaki used, abused, if you like, as alibis, conveniently wiping out inconvenient memories.  Where is the sorry and wringing of hands, the Chinese might very well, ask, over the Rape of Nanking in 1937, one of the worst atrocities in Japanese imperial history?  That single incident left more dead than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. 

Japanese school texts make fulsome mention of the atomic bombs.  They are a bit more reticent when it comes to other aspects of the the country’s history between 1931 and 1945.  Virtually no mention at all is made of the war, as John Dower highlights in his recently published Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan and the Modern World.  Japanese conservatives are a little less reticent, passing off Imperial Japan’s rampage across Asia as a “holy war” against Western colonialism.

That’s not how the Chinese see it.  They have their own memories of Western colonialism, but Japanese colonialism is much more immediate in the national mind.  The spirit of 4 May 1919 has never really gone away.  It was revived again recently, when thousands of people took to the streets across the country to protest against Japan.  The 19 August Movement, if I can call it that, was triggered by a long-standing dispute between China and Japan over the uninhabited Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea. 

Like the May 4 Movement, the demonstrations appear to have been quite spontaneous in nature, sparked off by micro-blogging sites.  There clearly had to be some kind of official sanction – the Communist Party is not averse to occasional expressions of the vox populi – but the authorities are concerned least matters get out of control.  Nationalism in China is a dangerous tiger, ridden at some peril. 

Now directed against Japan, the anger could just as easily turn inwards as the economy begins to show serious signs of slowing down.  It’s particularly sensitive as the Communist Party heads towards its eighteenth national Congress in October, when a major change in the present leadership is expected. 

For China and Japan the past is not a foreign country; it’s part of a naturalised present.  They do things much the same as they have always done.  

Son of Herostratus

Over two thousand years ago a man called Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, destroying this wonder of the ancient world. He freely confessed to the crime. It was a way of ensuring that his name lived down the ages. It has, as you can see, despite the best efforts of the authorities in Ephesus, who attempted to damn all memory of him to oblivion. In a way I’m glad they did fail, because Herostratus deserves a place in the Olympian pantheon. He is there for me as the god of mediocrity.

I was away in Paris for the Easter weekend, so I missed the advent of his latest acolyte, a character called Trenton Oldfield (Trenton!) This oik deliberately tried to disrupt the annual Oxford and Cambridge boat race by swimming into the path of the rowers. It was a protest, he later said, against ‘elitism.’ Personally I’m thinking of mounting a protest against horses’ arses like Trenton, but sadly there are just too many.

I’ve known people who’ve taken part in previous races. I know just how hard they work; how gruelling the training is, physically and emotionally. They spend months working up to the race, a brief and transitory moment of glory or disappointment. But the important thing is being there. Just taking part is a huge privilege.

To see it spoiled in this way is infuriating. Even more infuriating is the acres of copy that darling Trenton attracted. Here I am, contributing to this inflation of a balloon. What else can I do? I would, like the ancient Greeks, far rather that his name was damned into oblivion. But, sadly, it will forever be linked with the event, forever linked with a noble English tradition. Oh, never mind; the blessings of Herostratus be upon him.

He needs publicity; the whole thing is a fatuous exercise in self-promotion. He has a website which I refuse to click on because I know he is - please forgive the vulgarity – bound to get a sort of Viagra induced stiffy from the number of hits he gets. But I’m glad that Tim Stanley, writing in the Telegraph, did, otherwise I would have no insight into the ramblings of Trenton, a sort of pathetic polytechnic Marxism by way of Adrian Mole;

The boat race itself, with its pseudo competition, assembled around similar principles of fastest, strongest, selected …etc, is an inconsequential backdrop for these elite educational institutions to demonstrate themselves, reboot their shared culture together in the public realm.

As Stanley says, the only surprising thing about this sad-speak is that is not written in crayon.

We live in the age of mediocrity. These should be no surprise that the Caliban-like Trenton has come to the fore, full of resentment, typical of so many like him, another facet of the louts who protested at government ‘cuts’ across the country last summer…by stealing trainers and tellies. The boat race is ‘elitist’, Trenton says, and “elitism leads to tyranny.” No it does not. Ignorance leads to tyranny; plebeian resentment leads to tyranny; mediocrities like Trenton are the seed corn of tyranny. We need to celebrate excellence in all its manifold dimensions, not reduce everything to a lowest common denominator. Just imagine a world full of Trentons!

Apparently, while not swallowing Thames water, he is a member of the wholly unelitist Royal Society of Arts. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, I would not care to belong to a club that has Trenton as a member. He has a bio on their website, more verbal imbecility;

Trenton’s foremost preoccupations include unearthing the socio-political history of fences/railings - including when they shifted from keeping things in to keeping things out, the spaces in cities people have set out to make together, contemporary places of work, emotions in finance, the processes of creating and conceptualising ‘a home’ in a new city, the tension existing between danger & beauty embodied for example in aeroplanes and how social relations (dissolving of nation states and rise of cities) might change on earth with the colonisation of other planets. Trenton is also working on debates within inter-disciplinary urbanism around notions of ‘Darwinistic individual selfishness’ – or ‘Who Dares Wins Urbanism’ attempting to make apparent the predictable, though overlooked failures of individualism within and apparent across the 'leadership' of the centre, left and right.

I can only laugh; I am laughing as I write this, laughing at this absurdist twaddle, forcing me to correct a higher than average number of typos! Now I take my leave of Trenton, safely behind a fence, safely in the keeping of Herostratus. The worst fate I wish him is a special place in Hades, where he will live forever among the commonplace, forced to eat pot noodles while watching endless repeats of Britain’s Got Talent, The X Factor and Celebrity Big Brother.

Bishops and Toads

James Delingpole is one of my favourite journalists. He was in great form last month in the Telegraph, aiming several well-placed shots at the risible Dr Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London and the third most senior clergyman in the Church of England.

Apparently the benighted bish visited the Occupy protestors on Christmas Day, handing out a box of chocolates in his munificence. These are people whose dirty presence (they certainly look dirty to me) has disfigured Saint Paul’s Cathedral for several weeks now, the worst kind of rent-a-mob lowlifes in their ugly little tents, like some kind of gypsy encampment.

The sooner they are off the better, one would have thought; the better for London, the better for Saint Paul’s and the better for the Church. But, no; Chartres has promised them a permanent memorial. With the chocolate came some saccharine: “The canons have been very imaginative and consulting with the protestors about how to leave a legacy of the protests. We are looking for honouring what has been said when the camp moves on.”

Is he married, I wonder? He reminds me of Bishop Thomas Proudie from Barchester Towers, the novel of nineteenth century clerical doings by Anthony Trollope. If so, he really should have a wife as indomitable as Mrs Proudie to put him in place, to draw him away from his embarrassing public absurdities.

Dear James might serve in the role, judging on the basis of his remarks, direct and to the point;

What’s particularly depressing about this episode is that Chartres is supposedly one of the Church’s more traditional senior clerics. If this is the line the Church’s reactionary old school is taking, imagine what insanities its more progressive elements are yearning to impose on us. Presumably they won’t really feel that justice has been done until St Paul’s has been razed to the ground and replaced by a permanent Anti-Capitalist Peace Camp.

Actually, I’m going to change gear completely here. I almost never read the comments that follow articles, written by so many jackals following a lion, petty, snarling and vicious. On this occasion I’m glad I did because there were truly excellent remarks by someone posting as Tayles. His point was quite simple, that the leftists are not opposing capitalist society as it really exists, but a fictionalised version that forms part of a broader narrative;

According to this narrative, the poor and the disadvantaged are victims of oppression and prejudice by the rich and powerful. Capitalism is the economic expression of this travesty, allowing the rich to hoard wealth at the expense of everyone else, who must make do with whatever crumbs the rich deign to brush from their table.

As he quite righty says this is rubbish. I would only add that it’s complete rubbish. Capitalism, unlike socialism, isn’t even a system; it’s freedom, it’s what happens when people are left to their own devices. Condemn economic liberty then one condemns personal liberty.

But the left-wing narrative, the narrative embraced by the Protest crowd, is far more satisfying for some, Tayles proceeds, portraying as a ‘mistake’ the kind of society that evolves when people are free to express their wants and needs. It condemns success as much as pardons failure, all gains, of course, being ill-gotten.

It’s a narrative that would turn the things upside down, granting wealth and power to those who, by their natural incapacity, would be denied these things. It creates, above all, a paradigm of good versus evil: “If you are a clergyman, a control freak, a metropolitan poser, an over-entitled layabout, or an envious toad, the left-wing narrative holds considerable appeal.”

Envious toads – how I love that! Returning to the Bishop I don’t think he envies very much at all; he’s just a trendy doing the trendy thing. Sadly the trendier the C of E gets the less relevant it becomes, less relevant to those who care, and irrelevant to those who don’t, like the happy campers.

However I’m feeling charitable enough in this New Year to offer Chartres and the canons suggestions for the prospective permanent protest memorial. I think a mountain of Starbuck cups might serve, cast in bronze, or an unmade tent in the style of Tracey Emin. I would favour the latter. Perhaps talentless Tracey might even be commissioned for the project? The Bishop might even be charitable enough to extend the principle of memorial to embrace the summer riots. A statue of a hoodie carrying away a TV would be good, a real anti-capitalist statement.