May 4th - Star Wars & China

Souvenir Series #9

In honour of today being International Star Wars Day ( … “May the 4^th be with you!”), I thought I’d take the opportunity to jot down a few thoughts on a curious little tome I was given (now almost half my lifetime ago!) by a close friend of mine as a very special gift for my 21^st birthday – an original copy of Star Wars ... in Chinese.

The original Star Wars film came out in 1977, and this book, rather remarkably, was published only 3 years later, on 1^st June 1980. It’s amazing to think that a piece of popular Western culture like this could have found its way into Communist China so soon. The Cultural Revolution had only very recently ended with the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, but perhaps the existence of this book shows that cultural boundaries can never be completely closed off. Certainly Western literature was never totally eradicated from China, as Jie Li’s recent book, Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life (Columbia University Press, 2015) amply attests. Dissident literary activity is something which has always interested me. As part of my undergraduate degree in Anthropology I wrote a short dissertation on the samizdat literature of the Cold war era in Czechoslovakia. Censorship and the control of information is a fascinating topic to study on a number of differently levels, whether we look at it from a political, a sociological, or a philosophical point of view, it seems human curiosity cannot be contained. Human beings always seem able to find a way to connect and share their thoughts and ideas. 

As a notable date in history, however, May 4^th has a much deeper and different resonance in China than it does in the West. May 4^th 1919 witnessed a massive student uprising in Beijing, protesting against Western Imperialist incursions into China which began in the late 19^th Century, and also against the weakened geopolitical situation which the relatively new Republican Chinese Government found itself confronting after the Treaty of Versailles was signed at the close of the First World War. Many of China’s youth at that time felt betrayed by the West and by their own Government, despite China having rendered its assistance in joining the allied war effort during the last two years of the global conflict, not least in the non-combat orientated support efforts of the Chinese Labour Corps. As such, May 4^th remains a poignant date which is publicly marked and remembered to this day in Modern China (see here).

Given my prior interest in samizdat I was fascinated to read how Star Wars was so quickly assimilated and re-imagined in Communist China. My Twitter pal, Maggie Greene, who is an Assistant Professor at Montana State University, where she specialises in Chinese history, has written two fascinating pieces examining this topic in greater depth (which you can read on her blog here and here). The lianhuanhua 连环画 which she writes about contain some fascinating visual adaptations, suggesting these images were created by Chinese artists and illustrators who may only have had a very limited exposure to the original Star Wars film as a visual source, or perhaps they may not have seen any of the original images at all and simply re-imagined the story for themselves from hearsay alone. As such, the everyday elements of cooking utensils or the incorporation of other kinds of modern cultural markers, such as the reference to the “Kennedy Space Center” on a wall map which is being studied by Darth Vader himself, is all equally fascinating. 

But we should be wary, perhaps, of reading too much of our own cultural interpretations into this particular text. It may well have been an acknowledged cultural import from the decadent Capitalist West, but this does not mean that Chinese readers would necessarily have interpreted this particular text in the same way as a Western audience. It might seem starkly obvious to us. Where we might see this as a simple parable of good versus evil, the freedom loving rebels pitted against the vast, overbearing and oppressive evil empire which seeks to control all aspects of the people’s daily lives (i.e. – Totalitarianism) – these are themes which the Chinese proletariat would have been very familiar with themselves. If we look at China’s recent history in the political context of revolution and dissent, Star Wars can easily be assimilated into a long lineage of this kind of exemplary rhetoric. The evil empire could just as logically equate to the corrupt Imperial Dynasty of the Qing which was overthrown in 1911, or, as Maggie Greene has suggested, it could even be the Gang of Four, who were deposed at the end of the Cultural Revolution. Parallels to the Sino-Soviet split could just as easily be found. The Rebel Alliance could even be those brave, self-sacrificing students of the May 4^th movement, who rose up and challenged the Unequal Treaties imposed upon China by the Imperialist West. Anthropological interpretations of social and cultural phenomena are always relative. Often we need to look with eyes other than our own if we are to make sense and properly understand.

After the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Chairman Mao, perhaps the importation of this fantastical tale from the modern West was a small token in the opening up of Chinese political life and the normalisation which needed to begin in order to stabilise and start the rebuilding of Chinese society and the Chinese economy anew. The few illustrations in the Chinese novel of Star Wars which my friend gave me seem to suggest they were very much based on official stills released alongside the film itself, but it’s wonderful to see these images, so familiar to us today, transformed almost into ancient woodcuts, much like the earliest printed texts which originated several millennia ago in China itself. This may, of course, be attributable purely to the technologies of mass publishing which were available at the time as much as to the conscious cultural appropriation and assimilation of a particular cultural aesthetic into an established Chinese tradition. The novel, which was published in Changsha, Hunan, was bought by my friend in Beijing's Wudao Kou area whilst visiting as a student studying Chinese at the Foreign Languages Institute in the 1980s. It’s intriguing to wonder how many copies of this work were published at that time, and just how many of those original copies might still survive on people’s bookshelves to this day. 

Further Reading

Darth Vader & the Triceratops - A Q&A with Maggie Greene on "Star Wars" in China, by Jeffrey Wasserstrom (The LA Review of Books)

Chinese Star Wars Comic (1980), translated by Nick Stember

Encyclopedia of Unauthorized Star Wars Lianhuanhua, by Thomas Bini

The Heart of the Amazon - John Hemming

Late last year I heard John Hemming speak at the Royal Geographical Society on his latest book, Naturalists in Paradise (Thames & Hudson, 2015). Hemming, who was formerly Director of the RGS for over twenty years, is an expert on the Amazon having explored and studied in depth many of its lesser known reaches. This fact alone makes him the perfect author to recount the lives of three, similarly remarkable, adventurers who ventured into the Amazon rainforests in the mid-1800s – Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Richard Spruce.

These men were all naturalists – self-taught experts from the less well-advantaged strata of Victorian society – but they were also true explorers, taking months to travel through the most arduous of terrain, enduring oppressive climates, roughing it without complaint through unforgiving changes in weather and serious discomfort from insect pests and animal predators, shipwreck and bouts of malaria, to say nothing of the dangers that came from unpredictable encounters with disreputable and corrupt officials and bandits in distinctly isolated and out of the way places. These men were ‘jobbing’ collectors, who carefully collected, catalogued, described, packaged, and dispatched a staggeringly capacious supply of entomological, zoological, icthyological, botanical, and even ethnographic specimens to scientific societies, institutions, and dealers back home in Britain. 

Many of the specimens (often entirely new to science at the time) which they meticulously prepared and expertly preserved can still be found in major scientific collections held in museums to this day. Likewise, their writings on their travels and researches stand as a testament to this untiring achievement. It’s perhaps most remarkable that three such individuals intertwined their journeys and their researches with one another, coming together to correspond and compare notes not only amongst themselves from the furthest reaches of the Amazon basin, but also with like-minded scholars and scientists back home as well. These were ‘unlearned’ men, in the sense of the conventional education system of their day, but they were nevertheless rightly accepted into the scientific fraternity which helped revolutionise scientific thinking along Darwinian lines, proving that amicable and even selfless collaboration is the best and most noble means of advancing the pursuit of knowledge. Modern science clearly owes them a great debt. And John Hemming’s wonderful book is a fitting summation of that fact.

I first came across John Hemming’s writing in his now seminal first book, The Conquest of the Incas (1970). I was captivated by his prose which so deftly seemed to bring to life what the realities of being a part of that small force of Spanish Conquistadors might have been like as an individual’s experience, venturing into what must have felt like such a vastly formidable and alien civilisation at near the peak of its cultural rise. Vaster in geographical extent than the Roman Empire and yet still so vulnerable. The cultural misinterpretations and misunderstandings on both sides must have been mind-boggling! ... The surprise for an Inca when a Spanish soldier dismounted his horse, to realise that this was a composite of two creatures and not just one. Horses must have appeared as marvellously odd creatures to the Incas as much as llamas must have seemed strange to the Spanish. Yet, somehow the odds seem to have been stacked improbably in favour of the tiny force of European invaders. Their temerity and cunning, perhaps allied with the cultural myths and expectations of the Inca, as well as the Incas’ helplessness in terms of immunity to illness, germs and diseases brought from the “old world” helped wrong foot, weaken, and then irrevocably decimate their number. It was against their custom for the Inca military to fight after nightfall, the Conquistadors’ guile was less susceptible to such propriety. The shock and awe of their superior technology and weaponry added to the advantage.

As an explorer himself, John Hemming is well-experienced in cultural first encounters. When still only in his twenties, he was part of a three man expedition team which went into an uncharted reach of the Amazon in 1961, one of whom did not return home alive. Hemming’s friend, Richard Mason, the expedition team’s leader, was unexpectedly ambushed whilst walking alone on a forest path they had created in a part of the rainforest which was reliably believed to be uninhabited. A chance encounter with a long distance hunting party of indigenous and uncontacted Indians resulted in Mason's tragic death. Hemming’s sensitive response to the tragedy, leaving gifts for the Indians at the site of his friend’s murder, was met over forty years later by a reparation of sorts, when travelling on another expedition into a nearby region of the Amazon Hemming finally met the tribe who had been responsible for his friend’s death. You can read a fascinating account of this encounter on fellow explorer and Inca expert, Hugh Thompson’s website (see here).

Like Bates, Wallace, and Spruce – John Hemming is a true gentleman scholar, an explorer who adeptly counters the misconceptions which haunt the Amazon, which he feels has been over-romanticised and obfuscated with darkness and unwonted mystery by the likes of self-promoting adventurers and crack-pots, such as the legendary Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (see here). Instead, Hemming’s writings and his talks all seek to illuminate the true beauty of the Amazon, its remarkable flora and fauna, the sadly dwindling vibrancy of its indigenous cultures. To read Hemming’s writings is to travel with and see the world as it is through a genuine explorer’s eyes. You can’t help closing his books without feeling you have gleaned something of an enriched understanding of our shared world. This is why he sits large in the pantheon of my most favourite writers.

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