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SPEAKING
FREELY
Asia's two butterfly
syndromes
By Subhash
Kak
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing.
The ease with which
public opinion was manipulated by Western
governments and the media in the run up to the
Iraq War shows that it is no longer safe to use
standard discourse to analyze international
events. Conventional economics and political
science cannot make sense of the fact that the
United States, the most indebted nation in the
world, remains the most powerful and prosperous.
American stores are full of goods made in China,
which is content to put several hundred billion
dollars of foreign exchange back in American
banks. How is the periphery of the modern American
empire providing this seemingly inexhaustible
energy to the heartland, which the economist Andre
Gunder Frank famously called the "the center of
the doughnut"?
One explanation of recent
history is that the Asian nations have become
prisoners to their own success. If they offload
the dollars they own, the value of their holdings
plummets. Nor can they let their currencies
appreciate against the dollar, because then their
products will be too expensive for Americans to
buy, leading to social unrest and unemployment in
their own lands. In short, Asia has a stake in
letting the situation continue as it is. America
is like the city to the rest of the world, and its
banks are a magnet to the world's wealth. Given
that, the bonds that the Asians hold might in the
future become somewhat like the beads and trinkets
that the Dutch gave to the Indians in 1626 in
exchange for Manhattan.
But American power
is not merely a result of the dollar being the de
facto world currency and American military might.
The Asian response is conditioned by its
experience with the West during the past couple of
centuries. It is the internalization of this
experience that provides the scripts that guide
national policy.
Japan's
perception of the West is shaped most deeply by July
8, 1853, when four black ships led by
USS Commodore Matthew Perry, anchored at Edo (Tokyo)
Bay. Not having seen steamships, which were like
"giant dragons puffing smoke", the Japanese
realized that they were in no position to defend
against the West. Perry insisted on negotiating
only with the emperor, and, in a few months, he
received the treaty he had been sent to obtain.
Bushido and Madame Butterfly
Certain
literary creations present a mythic encounter that
captures the meeting between different cultures
perfectly. Madame Butterfly
does this for Japan and the West. A short story
written by the American author John Luther Long in 1898
is the sad tale of the young Cho-Cho-San
(nicknamed "Madame Butterfly") and the dashing US Navy
sailor Lieutenant Pinkerton, who is modeled on
Commodore Perry.
Pinkerton is waiting out
his hardship posting in Japan. A marriage broker
finds him Cho-Cho-San, and he goes through the
motions of marriage with her, converts her to
Christianity and forces her to relinquish all ties
to her friends and family. Believing her marriage
to be real, the naive Butterfly allows herself to
fall in love with him. Pinkerton departs with his
ship, promising to return. During his absence,
Butterfly gives birth to his child.
Pinkerton does return, but
when Butterfly learns that he has married an
American woman who wishes to take her child back
to the United States, she attempts suicide. When
Pinkerton and his wife arrive to pick up the
child, the house is empty. A stage version of the
story was produced on Broadway and also in London.
Giacomo Puccini saw the show in London, and
realizing the promise in it he set the story to
music. His Madame Butterfly
was first performed Italy in 1904 to much acclaim,
and has continued to enjoy great success.
Butterfly captures the
stereotype of the Asian woman's submission to her
husband that mirrors the fidelity of the peasant
to the feudal lord. In Japan, the real political
and military power in the Tokugawa period of
1603-1868 was in the hands of the shogun
who distributed lands to his loyal vassals, the
daimyo, who, in turn, granted lands to
the samurai. A strict code of conduct,
called the bushido, governed the samurai.
When disgraced, a samurai
was expected to perform
seppuku (suicide) for the sake of his
family's honor. Madame Butterfly's suicide in the
story accords with this code of honor.
Japan's loyalty to the United States after
the World War II has been according to the
bushido, and it included even paying for
most of the costs of the 1991 Iraq war. Japan has
been loyal to America by not being too aggressive
with its exports to the US and not getting into
sectors such as aerospace that would hurt American
interests.
China as Monsieur
Butterfly
Chinese self image is very
different from that of Japan. China has long seen
itself as the Middle Kingdom, but the modern
Chinese state confronts fundamental
contradictions. It is a communist state that
follows unabashed capitalism. It claims to be
guided by modern values, yet it sees itself as a
successor to the domains of the Qing Dynasty.
Since it has not yet created institutions that
provide a democratic legitimization of the state
power, it uses state-coordinated demonstrations as
an instrument of its policy. We saw this, most
recently, in the demonstrations against Japan last
month.
The story of how Taiwan was wrested
wrongfully from the Qing by Japan in 1895 still
plays big in China and it wants this wrong to be
righted as soon as possible. Periodically, threats
of war are issued if the "renegade province" were
to declare independence. China's capitalism comes
without the West's legal protections, and it
remains deeply tied to its authoritarian
tradition. It aspires to responsible leadership
yet it has proliferated nuclear weapons technology
to Pakistan. It is the main economic benefactor of
North Korea, which remains one of the biggest
foreign policy headaches for the United States.
In contemporary writing, David Henry
Hwang's acclaimed play M Butterfly goes to the
heart of these contradictions and China's complex
interaction with the West. The play is based
on the true story of French diplomat Bernard Bouriscot,
who, in 1964, began an affair with Chinese
opera singer Shi Pei Pu in Beijing. The two
became lovers and Shi Pei Pu claimed a few years
later to have given birth to his son.
Bouriscot had to leave Beijing during the
Cultural Revolution, but he was able to get Shi
Pei Pu and their boy to join him in Paris a few
years later.
In 1982, Bouriscot and Shi
Pei Pu were arrested for spying for China.
Bouriscot claimed at the trial that he had passed
intelligence to protect Shi Pei Pu because the
Chinese had found out that Shi Pei Pu was his
lover and the mother of his son.
The
prosecution responded by revealing that Shi Pei Pu
was in fact a man! Bouriscot, a sophisticated
person who had had many affairs, was humiliated by
this announcement, but he later explained that he
had been deceived by Shi Pei Pu's extreme modesty,
which he believed was an Oriental custom.
"A former French diplomat
and a Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to
six years in jail for spying for China after a
two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine
love and mistaken sexual identity ... Mr Bouriscot
was accused of passing information to China after
he fell in love with Mr Shi, whom he believed for
20 years to be a woman." - The New
York Times
, May
11, 1986.
David Henry Hwang's diplomat in
his play is named Gallimard, who falls in love,
not with a person, but an imagined stereotype. His
Chinese lover, Song Liling, encourages this
stereotype, playing the role of the Oriental woman
as demure and submissive. Gallimard, who had
thought of himself as the macho Pinkerton, husband
of the beautiful and fragile Butterfly, is the one
disgraced. In the end, when Song Liling disrobes
completely, Gallimard is so humiliated that he
kills himself.
In a courtroom scene, Song
explains why Gallimard is deceived.
The real
reason is the many wrong assumptions by Westerners
about the Orient, seen as inscrutable, feminine,
submissive, and agreeable. This is further
complicated by the Western male's drive to
conquer. Song concludes that Westerners will "lose
in all dealings with the Orient".
The two
butterfly syndromes represent two different
responses of Asia to the West. As part of its
experience as an imperial power, China has created
a complex web of encirclements of potential
enemies. This is why it continues to support North
Korea, which provides a useful regional buffer
against United States encroachment on the Korean
Peninsula.
Wheels within
wheels
During the Cold War, China was a
partner to the United States in a struggle that
eventually destroyed the Soviet Union. Now, China
has even more leverage since it has become
America's factory and it hopes to use the
festering Korea problem to offer a strategic
partnership to the United States in exchange for
the US acceptance of a "Hong Kong" solution to the
Taiwan issue.
China is keeping its
pressure on Taiwan by the rapid upgrade of its
military. It is on the verge of launching a new
fighter jet that resembles the design of Israel's
Lavi warplane, which is reported to be superior to
the F-16. It has nearly doubled the number of
short-range missiles aimed across the Taiwan
Strait over the past two years to over 700. By
acquiring dozens of new warships and submarines
and strengthening its air power, China has the
ability to knock out Taiwan's airfields and ports
before the US could intervene.
A side-show to China's competition with Japan
and ultimately its rivalry with the US is its
relationship with India, which has the potential to become
the third largest world economy in the next
couple of decades. The US administration is pressing
for a strategic partnership with India
as a counterweight to China's ambitions.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has termed
it more benignly a "strategic partnership initiative''.
China, on the other hand, is arming Pakistan and
Bangladesh with missiles that are clearly aimed at
India, but it is asking the US not to supply the
Patriot II anti-missile system to India. It
doesn't approve an Indian entry into the Shanghai
Cooperation Council. yet it seeks to become a full
member of the South Asian Association of Regional
Cooperation Council.
Subhash Kak
is Delaune Distinguished Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Professor of Asian Studies and
Cognitive Science at Louisiana State University in
Baton Rouge. Click here for his web
site.
(Copyright 2005 Subhash Kak.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say. Please click here
if you are interested in
contributing. |
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