Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy 9780520910898, 0520910893

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
PREFACE (page ix)
PART I - THE INSTITUTION OF CALLIGRAPHY IN IMPERIAL CHINA (page 1)
1. Chinese Calligraphy as a System of Power (page 3)
2. Demystifying Chinese Characters (page 15)
3. The Legend of the Calligraphy Sage, Wang Xizhi (page 26)
4. The Brush as an Instrument of Rule (page 36)
5. Art Criticism as Political Commentary (page 45)
PART II - CALLIGRAPHY AND REVOLUTION (page 53)
6. The Cultural Dilemma of the Revolutionary Elite (page 55)
7. The Gentlemen Scholars of the Central and South Lakes (page 65)
8. The Failed Assault on Chinese Characters (page 75)
9. Leninist Calligraphy for Mass Politics (page 83)
10. Cultural Revolution Calligraphy: Big Characters and Leftist Lines (page 96)
ll. Evil Characters, Poison Pens (page 109)
12. The Unsuccessful Penmanship of Chairman Hua Guofeng (page 123)
PART III - POSTREVOLUTIONARY CALLIGRAPHY (page 139)
13. Calligraphy's New Conventions (page 141)
14. A Personal Art in a Changing Society (page 151)
15. The Orchid Pavilion's Modern Legacy (page 159)
NOTES (page 173)
CREDITS FOR ILLUSTRATIONS (page 199)
INDEX (page 203)

Citation preview

Brushes with Power

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h ithwitPower brushes Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy

Richard Curt Kraus

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley os Angeles Oxford

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England

© 199] by The Regents of the University of Cahfornia Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kraus, Richard Curt. Brushes with power: modern politics and the Chinese art of calligraphy / Richard Curt Kraus.

p. cm, Includes index. ISBN 0-520-07285-5 (cloth: alk. paper) 1. Calligraphy, Chinese— Political aspects. 2. China-— Cultural

policy. I. Title. NK3634.A2K73 199]

745.6'19951-—dce20 90-23590 CIP

Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO 2739.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

hor Mary S. Erbaugh, honeyed words

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CONTENTS

PREFACE / ix

PART [Ie TH INSTTPUTION OF

CALLIGRAPHYINIMPERIAL CHINA / / |. Chinese Calligraphy asa System of Power / 3 2. Demystifying Chinese Characters / /5 3. The Legend of the Calligraphy Sage, Wang Xizhi / 26

4. The Brush as an InstrumentofRule / 36 5, Art Criticism as PoliticalCommentary / 45

PART II* CALLIGRAPHY AND REVOLUTION /_ 353 6. The Cultural Dilemma of the Revolutionary Elite / 535 7. The Gentlemen Scholars of the Central and South Lakes / 65

8. The Failed Assault on Chinese Characters / 75

9. Leninist Calligraphy for Mass Politics / 83 10. Cultural Revolution Calligraphy: Big Characters and Leftist Lines / 96

{1. Evil Characters, Poison Pens / 109 12. The Unsuccessful Penmanship of Chairman HuaGuofeng / /23

PART IIT * POSTREVOLUTIONARY CALLIGRAPHY / 139 13. Calligraphy’s New Conventions / /4/ vil

vite CONTENTS 14. A Personal Artina Changing Society / J5/ 15. The Orchid Pavilion’s Modern Legacy / 159 —

NoTEs / 1/73 GREDITS FORILLUSTRATIONS / 199

INDEX / 203

PREFACE

During the Cultural Revolution, I acquired as a souvenir n Hong Kong a Maoist fingernail clpper. I knew it was Maoist because its white plastic handle bore the slogan “Serve the people” in tiny red characters easily recognizable as Mao Zedong’s handwriting despite their miniature size and kitsch

setting. | was puzzled to discover that the Great Helmsman was autographing toilet articles, even if by machine and with appropriately populist sentiments. I subsequently learned that Chinese leaders have long spread their calligraphy across the nation to demonstrate both their learning and

their authority and that Chinese citizens and organizations have long accepted and displayed such writing as emblems of patronage and fealty. Thus I was less surprised when | awoke in F'uzhou one summer morning in 1989 and realized that the top of the mosquito net that had protected my

slumbers bore the name of my host instituuon and work unit, Fujian Teachers University, stenciled in red in a rather clumsy imitation of Mao Zedong’s hand. Mao had apparently once honored the university with an inscription of its name, much as he wrote the characters that form the masthead of People’s Daily. But I was mistaken; the “‘Fujian Teachers University”

inscription was bogus. Eager to demonstrate enthusiasm for Mao while he was still alive, university officials had created their own composite inscription by lifting the two characters for “‘Fujian”’ from the masthead of the fujian Daily newspaper (characters that Mao had indeed written) and combining

them with a “Teachers University” that he had written at the request of some other institution. [he new officials of the university would discuss this counterfeit with me only because Mao had been dead for thirteen years and

the university had already invited another influential calligrapher, Zhao Puchu, head of the Chinese Buddhist Association, to write a new version of the school name, one that will no doubt be stenailed on future mosquito nets. 1x

x PREFACE Besides, one calligraphy critic confided to me, the somewhat deceitful joining

of two samples of Mao’s handwriting had produced an awkward, illproportioned logo for the university. I have not yet concluded whether these words were intended as art criticism or as political commentary. ‘This book explores that ambiguity through an examination of Chinese calligraphy as a social and political institution. Brushes with Power alludes in three ways to the connection between the realms of art and politics. First, I refer to Chinese writing brushes wielded by important political personalities. Chinese culture has an elaborate set of conventions by which the handwriting of powerful individuals 1s accorded special honor and sometimes treated with almost magical significance. Such calligraphy is a steady feature of Chinese culture and may be viewed as a

little-understood weapon in the arsenal of devices employed in China’s political conflicts. My simplest purpose is to describe and comment on this tradition and its contemporary manifestations. I also hope to elucidate for students of modern China an aspect of politics that Chinese readily take for granted but rarely discuss in writing. More ambitiously, Brushes with Power views calligraphy as a metaphor for the elite culture of imperial China, a grandiose legacy that Chinese of the late twentieth century have received with ambivalence. Cultural institutions and state power have collided as Chinese debate how they might use their past heritage without being smothered by it. I argue that the Communist revolutionaries adapted this tradition to fit the needs of a modernizing and Leninist society. [his seemingly innocuous argument flies in the face of many simplistic claims that Communism has obliterated traditional Chinese culture or, conversely, that this culture has finally overwhelmed the revolution once waged against it. Only a profound misunderstanding of the intersection of culture and politics can sustain either of these notions. Yet such assertions still lace much popular and scholarly writing on China.

Finally, the book refers to what I see as a normal condition of tension between art and politics. It is our modern Western conceit to imagine a pure and serene realm of art rising high above a soiled world of political squabbling. Implicit in our thinking 1s the ideal of a state which will leave the arts to flourish without impediment. Yet at the same time, artists and their audi-

ences often demand public support of the arts in the form of grants, arts education programs, tax subsidies, and publicly supported galleries, opera houses, and concert halls. We rarely even identify these contradictions, much

less resolve them. ‘he arts in China operate in a sharply different context. Chinese assume an intimacy between art and politics to be a normal aspect of culture. Indeed, a radical disjunction between the two would be profoundly upsetting to most intellectuals. China’s example clearly illustrates the interdependence of art and politics in a way that should enable us better to understand how art brushes against power everywhere.

PREFACE xt “Make the past serve the present, make foreign things serve China.” I seek to understand the political and cultural intricacies condensed into each half of Mao Zedong’s pithy slogan. This volume is a companion to my Pianos and Politics in China: Middle-Class Ambitions and the Struggle over Western Music.

There I used the piano (representing European bourgeois culture) to appraise conflicts over foreign culture’s place in China today. In Brushes with Power, | examine controversies over how contemporary Chinese should respond to their nation’s own imposing cultural legacy. I see calligraphy as both a metaphor for that legacy and a central institution in its transmission and adaptation. Piano music and calligraphy are altogether dissimilar arts, with distinctive circles of advocates and enthusiasts, yet each offers a clear and rather uncrowded window trom which to survey contemporary Chinese society and politics. In the West, Chinese calligraphy 1s usually the province of art historians; they have their own important research interests, often different from the questions raised by social scientists. Although I have relied extensively upon the literature of art history, am concerned almost exclusively with questions

of power rather than aesthetics. I am not an art historian, nor a literary critic, nor a cultural and social historian; I am a political scientist with my own approach to these sometimes curious materials. While I do wish to engage the interest of colleagues in other disciplines, I beg their forbearance if I do not always treat calligraphy in ways they find familiar. I must confess that my handwriting in English is unsightly at best; my ill-formed Chinese characters should be a source of personal humiliation. Only because I am a foreigner will Chinese friends and associates excuse my

barbarian and childlike hand. My distance from this artistic tradition is enormous. Indeed, Chinese calligraphers cannot imagine that I can write intelligently about their art without practicing it. In many ways they are correct. Only by offering a new perspective to their art can I hope to say something worthwhile. Many individuals and institutions aided me in this study. This would be a much more meager book withoui the steady aid and encouragement of Mary S. Erbaugh, my mate and resident linguist, who deserves something better

than a mere dedication. I owe special gratitude to Deborah Baumgold, Joseph Esherick, Sue Glover, Ellen Johnston Laing, Wendy Larson, and Vivienne Shue, who offered unusually thoughtful advice on how to improve an earlier version of this study. In Fuzhou and Xiamen, calligraphers Chen Sanwel, Huang Zhenci, Sun Xiaofeng, Weng Mingquan, Xie Chenguang, Yu

Gang, and Zhu Yisa kindly shared their learning and their art. ‘Timothy Cheek, John DeFrancis, Fu Zongwen, Huang Hao, Anthony Kraus, Michael Shoenhals, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ezra Vogel, Ye Wa, and Yu Taoping suppled much-appreciated information, advice, and assistance. ‘Vhe University of Oregon Humanities Center provided a fellowship in the fall of 1988 that

xu PREFACE enabled me to get this long-contemplated project under way. I have received

critical assistance from four other universities which were my hosts as | worked on this study: the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of California at Berkeley; Fujian Teachers University n Fuzhou; the Fine Arts Department of Xiamen University; and the Universities Service Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I thank them all for their generosity

and courtesy. [he writing of this work was supported by a research grant from the Joint Committee on Chinese Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council, with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In the course of this project I have learned just enough about China’s great calligraphic heritage to realize that my text must contain some conspicuous errors, which I hope the reader will forgive.

PART ONE

The Institution of Calligraphy in Imperial China

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ONE

Chinese Calligraphy as a System of Power

Of China’s traditional arts, calligraphy is the clearest focus for a complex web of social assumptions about the empowering nature of art. [The seventeenth-century dramatist, musicologist, and waterworks official Kong Shangren described the Kangxi emperor’s imposing pen: From outside, | could see into the Palace where there was a table with candles over four feet high. His Imperial Majesty took off his headdress and leaned on the table to write a commemorative placard for the eightieth birthday celebration of the Duke’s grandmother, Lady ‘Tao of the First Rank. The Duke and others were kneeling at the bottom of the steps. In a short while, the inscription “Her Virtue Matches That of the Immortal Pine” was completed. Attendants held it up for all the officials to view. The calligraphy ascended lke a dragon and soared like a phoenix; the ink was suffused with fragrance. I was ordered to read it aloud as the Duke and his younger brother knelt and received it, performing three kowtows:.!

Kong assumes that the creation of authority and of beauty are fused in a single act. This intimate bond survives in the People’s Republic; the practice of calligraphy by leading Chinese politicians, who still carry on such literati conventions as exchanging poems among themselves and writing moralistic inscriptions for their underlings, demonstrates this continuity. Yet a study of calligraphy also helps isolate what has changed: as politics has become ever more tightly organized, so traditional cultural practices have been adapted to such needs of mass politics as the creation of legitimacy, the demarcation of patronage networks, and service as an emblem of nationalism. Although the results are sometimes aesthetically grotesque, at least by traditional mandarin standards, they demonstrate the resilience and adaptability of Chinese culture.

4 CALLIGRAPHY IN IMPERIAL CHINA Like all writing systems, Chinese characters embody relations of power. Some of these are shared with alphabets and other writing systems; some are distinctive to Chinese characters. I distinguish three kinds of power inherent in calligraphy: the power of magic over superstition, the power of ideological control over the Chinese state, and the power of cultural tradition over the,

individual. , THE POWER OF MAGIC OVER THE ILLITERATE

At some shadowy period in China’s past, the mastery of writing was an aspect of magic. The oldest surviving forms of Chinese characters are the oracle bones. The king’s diviners marked characters onto these turtle shells and cattle shoulder-blades. Heating the bone created cracks that gave clues to the initiates for reading heaven’s will in the characters. ‘he proportion of Chinese people who can read characters has certainly increased since the Shang dynasty (ca. sixteenth to eleventh centuries B.c.), but those who cannot read have long associated literacy with mysterious powers.? Arthur Wright argued that written words carried greater weight in China than in other civilizations: A single symbol system was in continuous use for more than thirty-five hundred years. Those symbols were, in early times, manipulated with great solemnity by a small class of scribes. The written symbols were viewed with awe—as indeed they were in many early societies—because they were thought to evoke the potency of whatever they denominated. Some of this attitude carried over into the culture of imperial China where the mass of illiterates looked up to a small elite above them—an elite diflerentiated by its mastery of the written word. Further, the individual symbols did not change; they—and particularly those with value connotations—accumulated with the passage of time a tremendous weight of contextual reference and allusive meaning. To this was added what we can only call aesthetic weight, that is, regard for the wellwritten word as an aesthetic object.°

Chinese have shown their respect for written characters by building special furnaces in which waste paper bearing writing might be burned with respect, separated from ordinary trash. ‘This practice still lingers in parts of Taiwan. The brother of China’s great writer Lu Xun recalls his childhood in late nineteenth-century Shaoxing: Unwanted things were burned. Most of what was destroyed in this manner was printed paper of one sort or another. In those days it was customary for us to “respect” all things carrying printed or written words and the inscription “‘Respect Words Printed on Paper” was often seen on walls. Printed matter could be burned only in big iron basins, never in stoves.*

CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY AS A SYSTEM OF POWER NS)

Calligraphy was treated with such awe that the ink used for writing characters was often believed to have magic properties. Once when Lu Xun’s father was sick and vomiting blood, the traditional physician prescribed a dose of old ink, since it would stop the bleeding by blotting out the red colour of blood. Lu Xun brought Father a glass of ink, and after some hesitation he gulped it down. He looked like a child who had licked his brush while practicing calligraphy.°

That even a scholar’s family would join the ranks of ink-drinkers gives some indication of the depth of veneration of calligraphy in traditional China. Yet superstition about calligraphy’s accoutrements was not unusual among the elite. Nathan Sivin describes a Yuan dynasty prescription offered when a young man became impotent after his new wife had refused to have intercourse with him. The remedy prescribed was the ultimate symbol of male dominance in a literati family-—old writing brush hairs—ashed and downed in wine.®

The tradition of calligraphy as magic was colorfully represented in a 1989 television series based on the youth of Shao Shiping, a governor of Jiangxi province. When young Shao, the brightest lad of his village, 1s about to be

sent off to school in the city, his proud but superstitious neighbors hold a ceremony in the village temple. ‘Uhey feed the young man a soup into which they have mixed freshly ground ink, thereby empowering his body with the scholar’s fluid.’ Magical calligraphy is important in Daoist rituals in which

the gods inspire entranced human intermediaries to write on their behalf. Secret societies also have special magical characters, and many Chinese use calligraphic charms to ward off a variety of evil spells.® THE POWER OF IDEOLOGICAL CONTROL OVER THE CHINESE STATE

Control over written characters has conveyed power over China as a nation.

Before the Qin dynasty of the third century p.c., China was divided into many warring states, each of which had its own form of Chinese characters. Some words were written in as many as two hundred different ways.? The great achievement of the Qin and its tyrannical emperor, Qin Shihuangdi, was to unite all of China for the first tme. As part of his reforms, this em-

peror dictated standard written characters for the entire nation, Just as he standardized weights and measures and even the axles of carriages (so that the ruts they cut into the earth might form a unifying set of national roads).!9

The Qin standard lasted for over two millennia, with occasional reforms

6 CALLIGRAPHY IN IMPERIAL CHINA sanctioned by the central government and its official scholars. In the most recent reform, by the Communists in the 1950s, the writing of several hundred characters was simplified to make it easier for common people to learn to read and write.!! Thus, as John K. Fairbank observes, “the two great institutions that have held the Chinese state together—the ruling elite and the writing system— have coexisted in mutual support for three thousand years.’’!* At times individual emperors showed special interest in the writing system. Vang Taizong (r. 626-49) promoted the work of his favorite calligraphic master, Wang Xizhi, as the new standard for the bureaucrats of his state. The Song dynasty emperor Huizong (r. 1100-25) developed an idiosyncratic but highly elegant

style known as “slender gold.” The Qing dynasty’s Qianlong emperor (r. 1735-96) ordered a massive compilation of copies of the best calligraphy in China’s past, the “Hall of the Three Rarities.”’!° The writing system has preserved national unity where otherwise China might well have been fragmented, European-style, into smaller states. Al-

though China’s written language is shared among all Chinese people, spoken Chinese exists in a bewildering variety of dialects.!+ These so-called

dialects are in fact different languages, no more mutually intelligible than French and Romanian or Norwegian and English. There are seven major dialects: the Mandarin of north and western China (spoken by 71.5 percent of the population); Wu of the Shanghai area (8.5 percent); Cantonese, or Yue, of Guangdong (5 percent); Xiang of Hunan (4.8 percent); Min of Fujyian and ‘Taiwan (4.1 percent); Hakka, spoken in isolated mountain areas throughout south China (3.7 percent); and Gan of Jiangxi (2.4 percent). Many of these dialects, especially Min, Yue, and Hakka, are also spoken by many Chingge abroad. Some 93 percent of the people of China speak one of these dialects, each of which comes in radically different versions—often mutually unintelligible within the same dialect group. Citizens of northern Fujian, for instance, cannot understand the related version of Min dialect spoken in southern Fujian and ‘Taiwan. The spoken language of the court, or Mandarin, has long been the standard for attempting to establish some unity in the spoken tongue. But many officials have spoken poor Mandarin. Both Mao Zedong’s thick Hunan accent and Chiang Kai-shek’s incomprehensible Ningbo tongue were sources of frustration and amusement for their underlings. Only in written language has the Chinese state historically been able to overcome the fragmenting tendencies of regional languages, for Chinese characters have the same meaning in any dialect. They are pronounced differently: in Cantonese, for example, Mandarin’s Jai, “to come,” is leith and guo, “nation,” 1s guok. Moreover,

while all versions of Chinese use intonation to make important phonetic distinctions, each dialect distributes its vocabulary according to a different system of tones (four in Mandarin, eight in Cantonese). Dialects do have

CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY AS A SYSTEM OF POWER / sometimes significant vocabulary differences, but there is sufficient overlap for the written characters to provide a common medium of communication. Thus control over the written language has a historical significance of which any educated Chinese today 1s aware, and one of the traditional bases of state power 1s the authority to determine how Chinese 1s written. THE POWER OF CULTURAL TRADITION OVER THE INDIVIDUAL

The writing system also exercises a profound power over individual Chinese. This process may be less grand than an emperor’s authority to shape China’s national destiny through state sponsorship of dictionaries and promotion of favored calligraphic styles, but every literate Chinese becomes something ofa calligrapher merely by learning to write. ‘Vhrough calligraphy individuals

are both taught discipline and given a sense of personal participation in a living culture of nearly incredible antiquity. Because Chinese characters are more numerous and more complex than the symbols of an alphabet, the initial steps in learning to write impose a clear discipline upon young Chinese.!’ Students must first master the brush, learning to hold and manipulate it, applying and releasing subtle pressure to control the shape of each line. Characters are composed of many separate brushstrokes, which must be mastered in the correct order (fig. 1). There isa conventional order of beginning to write at a character’s top left corner and finishing at the bottom right, with horizontal strokes generally preceding vertical strokes. Violation of this rule produces awkward, unbalanced calligraphy, comparable to crude misspelling in English writing. Because many

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8 CALLIGRAPHY IN IMPERIAL CHINA characters do not have top left corners, students must approach each character as a separate aesthetic task. Beyond the elementary discipline of stroke

order—shared by all the billions of Chinese who have ever written—he the more subtle questions of how to give a character balance, force, and harmony.!®

Studying calligraphy 1s much like learning to play the piano. Students are eager to rush through the basics and play some Chopin while their teachers nag them to practice their scales. Young calligraphers want to learn quickly

to emulate the styles of such past masters as Yan Zhenqing or Su Shi, but their instructors demand that they write yet again the eight brushstrokes of the character for yong, “‘eternal,’’ which 1s said to contain all of the strokes needed to write any character (fig. 2). The discipline of calligraphy does not end with adulthood, as the study of piano often does. All literate Chinese must maintain and improve their writing skills through the thoughtful cultivation of calligraphy. The writing of handsome characters has long been taken as the standard of civilization. Adults in responsible positions are expected to take pride in their calligraphy, and any document, whether a petition to the throne, a letter to a fnend, or a simple receipt, loses authority if written in an ungainly hand.

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CHINESE CALLIGRAPHY AS A SYSTEM OF POWER 9 Even those who are outwardly indifferent to calligraphy find they cannot elude its grasp. Yang Buwei (1881-1980) was China’s first female doctor of Western medicine. As a profoundly self-assured cosmopolitan, Yang had little interest in or patience for calligraphy in her youth. I can write a few one-inch big characters, but I neither like nor can be troubled to write small characters. My father always told me that a person’s characters were a gate [to one’s inner nature]. When you wrote articles, if your

calligraphy was bad, people would take one look and be unwilling to read further. It is as unfortunate as a good person with an ugly appearance. But I never listened to my father’s advice, so today I often write things which people cannot make out, in a true scrawl. Sometimes I even write characters which do not exist, with the result that my friends are puzzled, sometimes thinking me laughable.!’

When this independent-minded young woman took her first examination in Chinese, she was expected to write, in her finest characters, an essay beginning with the words, *‘Women are the mothers of the race.’’ Yang was unable to complete an essay celebrating her own subordination, giving some insight into why there have not been more women calligraphers. Nothing about calligraphy was enjoyable to her: ““When my father insisted that I write small characters, I would close my eyes. He would then poke my eyelids with a matchstick, so I never thought practicing was much fun.’’!® Yet so mighty is the emotional grip of this art that her calligraphic inadequacies haunted her decades after emigrating to the United States. When Yang published her pioneering Chinese cookbook (How to Cook and Eat in Chinese), some were sold on behalf of United China Relief of Boston. An American woman who had been in China enthusiastically suggested that Yang use a brush for signing the copies. Because she dared not say that she had not written with a brush for nearly twenty years, poor Yang was driven to practicing secretly at home. The day after a furtive trip to Chinatown to purchase a brush and ink for a night of practice, she signed three hundred copies.'° If even Yang Buwei felt calligraphy’s potent spell, imagine how those with limited education have been intimidated by the greater cultivation represented by outstanding calligraphy. For the members of China’s literate class, calligraphy has been one source of the tremendous self-confidence that has helped sustain them in power. Students of calligraphy are conscious of joining in an ancient tradition as

they learn each stroke of the brush in precisely the same manner as their forebears (fig. 3). No institution in Western civilization compares with this discipline in its sheer weight of tradition and its palpable link to the past; students pattern their characters upon models drawn a thousand or more years ago. [Through the discipline of calligraphy China’s past extends its power into the present.

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