MCLC: on jubilees and anniversaries

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: martin winter (dujuan99 at gmail.com)
Subject: on jubilees and anniversaries
***********************************************************

Source: Rectified Names (6/4/12):
http://www.rectified.name/2012/06/04/on-jubilees-and-anniversaries/

On Jubilees and Anniversaries
By Jeremiah Jenne 

This year marks the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth Regina Twice, who joins
Queen Victoria, her great-great grandmother, as the only other British
monarch to have lived long enough to celebrate six decades on the
throne.[1] 

While the Commonwealth countries seem to be doing their part to mark this
milestone, global enthusiasm for the Jubilee has been…muted.  After all,
the British Empire doesn’t have quite the brand power that it used to.
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee featured colonial troops from all over the
empire parading through the center of London. Her Gold Jubilee, held in
1887, was quite the occasion even as far away as Shanghai.  Brits and
non-Brits turned out to watch a military parade and hear proclamations to
Her Majesty’s continued benevolent rule over the benighted people of the
world.  Although as benevolent as it may have been, the Chinese residents
of Shanghai were neither invited nor encouraged to attend.

Six years later, on the occasion of Shanghai’s own Golden Jubilee as a
Treaty Port, the Shanghai Municipal Council reversed course and actively
sought to showcase the cosmopolitan nature of “their” city by soliciting
the (carefully orchestrated) participation and support of the Chinese
community.Yes, the various colonial powers actually had the balls to try
and persuade Chinese living in Shanghai to join a massive city-wide
celebration of their own subjugation.
Historian Byrna Goodman argues:

“In these respects the proceedings demonstrated to the British viewer the
formidable and well-oiled municipal machinery introduced into China by the
British, and the receptive and willing position of the Chinese. Chinese
eagerness in this view, confirmed the superiority of the Western model;
Chinese dimness and obedience confirmed the appropriateness of Western
leadership and guidance.”[3]

Or as The North China Herald drolly described it at the time:

“The amenability of the Chinese native when he comes under firm and
friendly control.”[4]

Sound familiar?

In 2009, the Chinese Communist Party, acting through the Tibetan People’s
Congress, created a new holiday: Serf Liberation Day.  The day – March 28
— was set aside to commemorate the “liberation of the serfs” in 1959, when
a failed uprising by Tibetans against the Chinese ended with the PLA
taking control of Lhasa and the Dalai Lama fleeing into exile.  Each year
since 2009, the date is celebrated
<http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-03/29/content_14936596.htm> with
galas, newspaper articles, exhibits, school lectures, and highly public
displays of Tibetan acquiescence to Chinese rule.The Economist
<http://www.economist.com/node/13382035>  in 2009 wrote: “With grim
determination, the authorities try to manufacture joy.”
This is not to say that Tibetans – or at least key groups in Tibet – are
unwilling participants in this commemoration.  As was the case of the
Shanghai Jubilee, many ‘local’ groups take part in the observance,
although they often do so with their own agendas.  During the 1893
Jubilee, Chinese merchants used their positions to organize guild
participation in the parades and festivities as a way of displaying their
own wealth and power, although overly enthusiastic coöperation without
some acknowledgement of ‘native’ identity was to risk being labeled a Han
Traitor.[5] Tibetans today, especially those with ties to the Party or
extensive business interests, face a similar dilemma.

As Tsering Shakya writes
<http://www.jamyangnorbu.com/blog/2009/03/22/tsering-shakya-on-serf-emancip
ation-day/>:

“It is indeed possible that such an initiative may have come from one
group of Tibetans – senior party apparatchiks on the receiving end of
internal criticism for their failure in 2008 to guarantee a loyal and
docile populace.  But this itself is telling of the nature of the Serf
Liberation Day initiative: for in an authoritarian regime, the failure of
a client administration leaves performance as one of the few options
available. It is natural then that authoritarian regimes have a love of
public displays of spectacle, engineered to perfection, in which the
people are required to perform ceremonial displays of contentment.”

What we choose to celebrate is not only intimately tied to how and why we
want to remember a specific event,  but also present-day concerns.
British Republicans <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18161083> are using the
occasion of the Diamond Jubilee to bring attention to their cause, even as
much of the Jubilee itself seems calculated to try and rub a little shine
back onto a tarnished crown.

Like Jubilee galas, anniversaries have power beyond merely marking the
passage of time, and sometimes their power can be most keenly felt when
they are actively forgotten.  Like Arthur Doyle’s dog which did not bark
in the night, the silence speaks.[6]

Today is of course a day of some significance in modern Chinese history,
and while there are likely to be a few carefully worded articles in the
Chinese media, this is a date to be forgotten, not remembered.  I’m
heading to the National Museum this afternoon with a group of American
university students.  We will see rooms devoted to memorializing the
atrocities of imperialism and exhibits solemnly recording as humiliation
what the Shanghai Municipal Council of 1893 sought to celebrate through a
Jubilee. There will also of course be a section recalling the liberation
of the Tibetan serfs.  But the students may find it a challenge to locate
the spaces allocated to remembering more recent – politically inconvenient
– events of Chinese history.  Once again, absence of memory can say as
much as about contemporary concerns as any grand gala or public display of
 remembrance.

________________________________________

[1] The Qing historian in me feels compelled to remind readers that two
Manchu rulers, Aisin-Gioro Hiowan Yei (The Kangxi Emperor r. 1662-1722)
and Aisin-Gioro Hung Li (The Qianlong Emperor, r. 1736-1796/1799)
accomplished the same feat. Although in the annals of Chinese history
septuagenarian emperors were quite rare.

[3] Bryna Goodman, “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to
Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community,” Journal of Asian
Studies, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Nov., 2000), p. 901.

[4] Cited in Goodman, “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme,” p. 901.

[5] Goodman, “Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme,” p. 918.

[6] For those not up on their Sherlock Holmes, the dog which did not bark
in the night was the key to the disappearance of race horse Silver Blaze
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Blaze>.