Tianjin

We went to Tainjin today; Tianjin is the official royal port, being about 100 km from Beijing, and had been one of the first treaty ports. It was a slightly disappointing trip compared to what it could have been; we had a local tour guide that made the trip feel too much like a tourist guided tour and not enough like a bunch of students exploring a city. We went to mostly tourist places; first the 'arcient chinese culture' street that was mostly a bunch of shops. They were actually decently priced, but i wasn't in the mood to shop and it was extremely cold and windy, so i didn't end up buying anything. I took some pictures of the markey; there were people who had mats set up on the street selling stuff, so hopefully some of those came out.

We then had a really good lunch, though they didn't give us quite enough food, or at least, we could have eaten a lot more. After that we were told to wander around another shopping area for an hour; this time a food market area. That wasn't so bad as it was at least a bit different than the usual shopping. We bought some twist-dough, a dense pastry type thing (though as with most chinese food, it wasn't very sweet, but it has a nice peanut butter flavor in it). We also got some yummy chocolate.

Finally we made it to the Nanjing history museum, which was actually a pretty nice museum, but we only got an hour there. They had a really interesting calligraphy section that had calligraphy from ancient history (before the chinese language was finallized; many of the characters still resembled pictograms), and then from around the 6th century AD to present. It was gorgeous; calligraphy has a very sweet style to it. Many of the calligraphers had very distict styles; some of them looked halfway between writing and paintings. One of my favorites was a mid 18th to mid 19th calligrapher who wrote in the old style (lots of rounded lines) with very clean lines and had a feel to it that reminded me of a lot of post-modern graphic design. It was also sweet to see how little calligraphy has changed in hundreds of years. One neat thing about nonphonetic writing systems is that you can go back and read hundreds of years worth of material fairly easily. With phonetic writing, you're lucky if material from two hundred years ago makes sense.

There was also a super super sweet photography exhibit. They had lots of really good photos, i loved it. It was a nice mix of simply amazing photographs and historically significant (and also usually really good artistically) photographs. One of my favorite is one of a march protesting the Gang of Four. The protesters had portraits of all four of them up on posters with X's through them; the caricature of each of them was hilarious.

After that we took a like fifteen minute walk of the foreign concession area; there was some interesting architecture, i wish we had more time to see the museum and concession district rather than wasting time at stupid tourist places. Oh well.

One thing Tianjin got me thinking about is the transition from the trade and concession-area style imperialism that focused mostly on procuring (or forcing) trade and, while the Western powers took some real estate and transformed that, had only limited cultural flow to the later imperialism which would change the whole way of life of China. As I discussed previously, one of my main frames of thought is the consideration of systems of manipulation of the world, and in this case I think the industrial revolution and the introduction of those technologies and systems into the relationship between the West and East have a clear impact, but I want to think more on this before I write anything further.

Also, I want to try to elucidate some of the cultural and physical technologies that lead to the formation of the imperialist relationship in the first place. The West, at the start of imperialism, was materially very poor compared to the vast wealth of the East, and didn't even have much in the way of material products that the East would be interested in. How then was the west able to quickly (in historical scope) put itself into a position of dominance over the long-standing Eastern empires? The west's weapons certainly would be one factor, however, I find an argument that claims weapons and a willingness to use them as a main cause of Western Imperialism a woefully incomplete and perhaps even misleading explanation. I think there are other, and perhaps far more basic and important, factors at work here. Two that I would like to think about are:
1) the Western monetary and banking system
2) the Western concept of representative government

Keep in mind that I am going to do my best to avoid putting any subjective labels on things, i.e., I'm not going to argue "The West won out cause our banking and representative governments are such great things" (A simplified version of what such a sentiment might look like anyway), just as I'm also going to try to avoid any moralist judgements on imperialism (Not that there is no moral implications, just that I'm going to try to leave those out of my consideration). Rather, I want to try to find the underlying causes for imperialism and the means by with it took place, as I believe could provide a glimpse at the deeper patterns of cultural interactions.

another long post. more off-the-cusp asshole philosophizing. at least i'm getting in the habit of leaving that off until the end, so you can at least hear what is actually going on with us in China before having to wade through it, haha.
Later.

-Tom