the
nature of humanity and are applying them to
Chinese society. While for various reasons their
influence is limited here, it's obvious when these
bands play that both Chinese and foreigners in the
audience get what they are doing. They don't have
to get it cerebrally, just viscerally, and you can
see that when they writhe and dance to the music
or sing along to the songs.
DS: What has been your
experience with your weblog Shanghai
Journal so far?
AF: I actually don't know
who reads my blog exactly, aside from friends and
family and the occasional comment by an anonymous
reader. I do know from statistics that are
available to me through my platform that the
subscribership has jumped in the past three weeks
from around 300 to over 1,200, and I expect it to
keep climbing. The other day a Chinese woman
posted a comment about my blog on Wei Hui's book
Shanghai Baby, which I'd posted a couple
months ago. It was obvious she'd taken some time
to write her comment and that she was laying out
her genuine feelings and insights, while
challenging some of my own opinions. I was so
thrilled that I turned her comment into a blog.
I'd really like to encourage more people
to comment on my blogs or to send me stuff that
they have written, which if it's of good quality
I'm happy to post. I'm hoping that this will
develop into a dialogue about China, where it's
been and where it's going.
DS: Do you have many Chinese
readers?
AF: There are two
things that limit my audience here in China. One
is that I write in English. The other is that this
site, for unexplained reasons, is blocked in
China. There is no reason for it to be blocked
here, since it is by and large a celebration of
China, though I do throw in a critique here and
there. My guess is that many sites that shouldn't
be blocked here are because the system is like a
sawed-off shotgun.
Maybe there are one or
two sites on my platform Squarespace that are
controversial here, and that is enough to get the
whole platform blocked. To be honest, I really
don't know how that works. So most of my audience
I think is abroad, though I do have a MySpace.cn
site that I hope is reaching more people here
locally, where I post my blogs as well. But I'd be
really happy if they unblocked my Shanghai Journal
site.
DS: What inspired you
to start a blog?
AF: I think
what originally inspired me to create a blog site
was that for a long while I was actively
participating in a lot of online or e-mail
discussions in various forums, including H-ASIA
and MCLC and Asia Times Online, and I felt that I
had a lot of things to say that didn't quite fit
the academic format of books and articles.
At the same time, I've been an avid
photographer and more recently a filmmaker in
China, and I wanted to publicize some of my photo
and film collection so that people could benefit
from it. Most of these photos and short films are
didactic in nature, describing a certain
historical or contemporary site, an event such as
a performance or lunch at a restaurant. To be
honest, I haven't put together films lately for my
blog because I am already spending a lot of time
on the blogging itself, and the filming I'm doing
now is more serious and oriented towards a
long-term project.
A third reason I built
my blog site is that I feel that the standard
media focus way too much on the more sensational
aspects of China, giving people in the West a
slanted view - take the current shoddy-products
campaign in the Western media, which has been
hyped ad nauseam. I felt that I could take some of
my academic knowledge and apply it to people,
places and things that I encounter in China
through daily life or through my projects.
Not that I wanted this to be an academic
website - in fact, I try to stay away from the
four-syllable words that we academics tend to
string together into long and convoluted sentences
just to show how clever we are. I prefer short
declarative sentences and try to be as accurate as
I can in describing things, places and people,
adding my own reflections and insights now and
then.
DS: You have used many
media in your work, including movies and blogs.
What's next for you?
AF: I
have another project based around the
assassination of a Japanese officer in Shanghai in
1935, which is a fascinating case study in local
and international politics during the vital period
prior to the outbreak of a full-scale war between
China and Japan. I've already done archival
research on this case in Shanghai and Tokyo and
have a pretty good theory of what happened and why
it's important to tell this story. Sino-Japanese
relations is one of the most vital issues in this
part of the world, as anybody following the news
would know.
As [the late German literary
critic and philosopher] Walter Benjamin once wrote
(I'm loosely paraphrasing here), history is
constantly changing because it is constellated
with our understanding of the present age. My
historical research is conducted with an eye on
illuminating the present. More and more I'm
becoming interested in capturing certain aspects
of contemporary China as they grow and change -
history in the making, so to speak. I consider
myself an inheritor of the Benjaminian way of
documenting past and present, though I don't
possess his aphoristic skills. One thing I have
that he didn't is film.
My latest film
project, which began last month, is to document
the country's live indie music scene. Over the
next few months I want to get to know the bands,
the club owners, the promoters, the record
producers, and the audience. This weekend I plan
to attend a concert in Hunan featuring veteran
rocker Cui Jian and a Beijing-based punk band
called The SUBS. I don't know yet where this
project will lead, but I've invested a lot of
money in a new HD [high-definition] camcorder, and
a lot of time in filming and documenting the
scene, so I'm hoping I'll be able to recoup my
investment in time and money some way or other.
Andrew Field is a lecturer at
the University of New South Wales School of
History. He received a bachelor of arts in Asian
studies at Dartmouth College in 1991 and a PhD in
East Asian languages and cultures at Columbia
University in 2001. He lectures mainly in Chinese
and East Asian history and culture. He has taught
at Columbia University in New York, the University
of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, and the
University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has
also taught for several study-abroad programs in
Shanghai and Beijing including CET, CIEE (Council
on International Educational Exchange) and
Dartmouth College. Field is fluent in Mandarin and
Japanese. He runs the weblog Shanghai Journal.
Devin Stewart is editor of
Policy Innovations, Carnegie Council for Ethics in
International Affairs, Global Policy
Innovations.
(Published with
permission of the Global Policy
Innovations program at the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
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