I agree with Professor Zhong when he criticizes a 1985 article of mine (he does not say which one, but he means "An Introduction to the Qing Foundation Myth,"which was ten pages long). His criticism is basically that the research was incomplete and left out many instructive Japanese sources, and that is right. Unfortunately for his overall denunciation, even including all the citations he suggests would not have changed the point of the article: The Qing worked hard to identify themselves with the vicinity of Changbaishan and Eastern Heilongjiang, when their political origins were actually on the eastern perimeter of Liaodong. That point was strong enough that I was later able to build around it, but then Professor Zhong is not happy about that either.

There is today some dogmatism about the spelling in English of personal and proper names of individuals connected to Qing history. A little of it has been inspired by the increasing familiarity with Manchu sources, and a conviction that spelling of proper names may be an unerring clue to the competence of the individual deploying the spelling --a quick dip test of who is in and who is out. It is a bit like thinking that bumps on the head are a clue to social or sexual deviance. I think there is something else to it, also, a bit of a suggestion that the context of the English language should not have any discernible influence over the shape taken by names or terms originating in Chinese or Manchu. I recently had called to my attention a curious bit of this in piece on the Chungchi Manchu studies blog, titled 「新清史」的滿文拼寫法新嗎? --"Does 'New Qing History' have a New method of spelling of Manchu?" The complaint in the piece (which originally had my name and 誤 in the title, which was the fashion in December of 2015) is that a few named people (me, Joanna Waley-Cohen, David Brophy) had been caught using the spelling "Hung Taiji" instead of Hong Taiji, or "Xong Taiiji" [sic --Kam Tak-sing has elsewhere specified Xong Taiyiji, more pleasing to the eye though the insertion of the "y" does appear to be arbitrary]. The suggestion is that somehow the genre of "New Qing History" (an imaginary entity in my view) has now exhibited a generic inability to spell Manchu names properly. in case the reader wants proof of the exposé, this graphic is supplied by the site:

是Xong，不是 Hung

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether the spelling-police blogger here (a descendant of Nurgaci who is currently a student of Kam Tak-sing, and blogs under the name of Aisingioro) is really tossing aside his teacher's "Tayiji" in favor of his own "Taiiji," as well as why either one is really different from "Taiji." The question is, to whom does this matter and why?

I have long felt that Kam Tak-sing 甘德星 has done an immortal service to the field by his reporting in the late 1990s on the writing of Nurgaci's name in the yudie (easiest to find now is "Romanization of the Early Manchu Regnal Names" in Studia Orientalia). He happened to note in the article that it was my habit to spell the name in the way that he considered correct: "The American historian Pamela Crossley, who has been using it onsistently in her writings is not its first exponent, although her popular book Orphan Warrior: Three Generations and the End of the Qing Dynasty has directed scholarly  attention to its existence. More  than a decade  before Crossley's works, Jerry Norman, the American linguist, had  already identified T'ai-tsung's personal name as such." Let's first of all assume that he meant to write the correct book title as Orphan Warriors: Three Manchu Generations and the End of the Qing World, and that he meant to write "T'ai-tsu" and not "T'ai-tsung" --though we'll get to Taizong in a minute. Now, I am going to go on and wonder why he thought I was using the spelling he considered correct. Kam and I had the same teacher of Manchu, Joseph Fletcher, at just about the same time. I used "Nurgaci" and continue to use it because Fletcher insisted that it was the appropriate spelling (I would be surprised if Kam had not heard exactly the same declaration). It was appropriate not because it was "correct" in the sense of reflecting the pronunciation of the name, but because it reflected the only known written form of the name (the one on which Kam later based his article). In old Manchu, "g", "k" ("q"), and "h" ("x") were not distinguished. Nobody looking at the name as written in the yudie could know the appropriate modern phoneticization. Therefore "Nurgaci" is a choice made by a writer --in this case, to invoke the only known form of the name in old-style Manchu. I have used this spelling not because I consider it scientifically "correct," but on the instructions of Fletcher, and in sympathy with his idea that spelling the name this way invokes the yudie form.

Why it would be important for all historians of the Qing to use this spelling is unclear to me. The characters used in China and in Korea in Nurgaci's own time to represent his name strongly suggest that people heard something voiceless and aspirated at the "g" position. And as a matter of fact, there is nothing in the yudie form of the name that prohibits an "h" instead of a "g" (nor "k[h]," which one sometimes see reflected in Russian romanizations). So if people --like the sainted writers of ECCP-- want to write "Nurhaci" I don't consider that antique, discredited or reflecting some massive ignorance of the Manchu sources.

The blog was not about Nurgaci (since I had already been given a gold star by Kam for spreading the correct spelling in my "popular" book), but the spelling of the name of Qing Taizong. I use "Hung Taiji," and as Aisingioro notes, I am not alone. Since Giovanni Stary's article of 1984 established "Hong Taiji" as the preferred transliteration, most people (writing about early Qing history) use "Hong Taiji." Kam has insisted that it be spelled "Xong Taiyiji" and Aisingioro wants it spelled "Xong Taiiji."Would a person spelling the name in English as "Hung Taiji" necessarily be ignorant of all that?

This is a quote from footnote 12 of my article "The Historical Writing of Qing Imperial Expansion" in Rabasa, Sato, Tortarolo and Woolf, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing, which was published in 2012 and written a bit earlier: "Fragmentary Manchu annals for the period before 1616 indicate that he was normally referred to as "Fourth Prince" (Duici beile), but Joseon records suggest that as early as 1619 he was referred to as Hung Taiji. Kam Taksing points out that the proper spelling should be Hong Taiji or Xong Taiyiji. I choose to continue my use of "Hung Taiji" for the simple reason that that "Hong Taiji" is indistinguishable from the Chinese romanization for the characters involved; 'Hung Taiji,' while technically incorrect, is clearly Manchu. See also Kam, "The Romanization of Early Manchu Regnal Names," esp. p. 90. For many decades scholarship in Western languages referred to Hung Taiji as 'Abahai,' based on Erich Hauer's translation of the Kaiguo fanglve [...]which was mistakenly derived. See Giovanni Stary, "The Manchu Emperor 'Abahai': Analysis of an Historiographical Mistake" (CAJ 1984).

That was my argument in 2012 and that is still my argument. The article (cited above) in which Stary established "Hong Taiji" as the preferred spelling for the name used Wade-Giles romanization throughout for Chinese; there was no chance of anybody mistaking "Hong Taiji" as a reference to 洪台吉. Today, things have changed, and "Hong Taiji" is equally a reference to Chinese and to Manchu. These are authorial choices. When writing about a foreign history in English, we only have a few tools to invoke the variety of sources and perspectives at work in building our narratives. Transliteration (or outright eccentric spellings) for proper names is one of them. In my case, Nurgaci is spelled as Fletcher told me to spell it and for reasons I understand well and want to reflect in the spelling I use. In the case of Hung Taiji, I want a spelling that makes clear that my referent is

(mage lifted from Aisingioro's blog page)
and not
洪台吉。

I can fully appreciate that choices like this do not apply to people writing in Chinese about Chinese history, even when the sources being invoked are in Manchu. This is not a question of transliterating long phrases or whole sentences, in which best-practice conformity prevails. These are names inside English texts. People have been writing in English about Nurgaci and Hung Taiji for a few hundred years. Their identities are stable in English, and how writers refer to them is not a matter of being "correct" but of selecting one frame or reference or another --in the case of Hung Taiji, "Abahai" was not only wrong but is the name of at least one other person. "Hong Taiji" and "Hung Taiji" are clearly the single name of a single person, just as Mao Tsetung and Mao Zedong are obviously the same. And in a single work the transliteration strategy may vary from one individual to another. It is not generally considered a matter of comment, for instance, if a book that refers to Mao Zedong also refers to Sun Yatsen or Chiang Kaishek instead of Sun Yixian or Jiang Jieshi. Such choices are based on the contextualization of the English text in which they are embedded.

The dogmatism telling us that "Hung Taiji" is not right, and that we have to use "Hong Taiji" or "Xong Taiiji" or "Xong Taiyiji" (all of which are equally right, I guess) is not limited to Chinese historians criticizing their colleagues writing in English. We have librarians who will make a stand against spelling the names of people of Chinese descent as anything other than pinyin --rather than use the spelling actually preferred by the writers themselves. My students each year go on a goose-chase looking for Hsü Cho-yun's book on Zhou China, because the librarians have changed his name to "Xu Zhuoyun," even though there is no such thing as a book in English by such an author. Younger scholars of Chinese history writing in English conscientiously change "Yangtze" to "Yangzi," even though there is no grand river with that name in Chinese. Editors, whether in English or in Chinese, will insist that all transliterations of Chinese names go into pinyin, regardless how unfamiliar or contrary to the wishes of the individuals themselves they become. I would argue that we should spell author's names however they spell them, refer to historical figures by whatever name is familiar or recognizable, and not create meaningless signifiers by pinyin-izing words that are not meaningful in Chinese. And I also prefer to keep names and titles of PRC authors in jiantizi, while putting names and terms drawn from historical documents --or books published into fantizi-- in fantizi. This led one editor to superciliously assume that my PRC titles had been cut and pasted --no, they had been carefully checked to be in the font in which they were had been published. I don't see the difference between that and keeping British spelling in the titles or content of sources published in Britain but cited in American publications.

This causes me to wonder whether English writing about Chinese history is in fact a genre with its own standards and rules, not always subject to meaningful criticism from historians who merely want English writing on Chinese history to follow all the same rules as Chinese writing about Chinese history. And not only transliterative issues, but much more substantial ones, including --I do regret to say-- some related to "New Qing History."

The most glaring point of non-contact between historical discussions associated with "New Qing History" and the Chinese critiques relate to the question of "sinicization." Dating back to the famous but inconsequential attack of Ho Ping-ti upon Evelyn Rawski for her presidential address to AAS in 1995, there has been a persisting tendency among non-readers to assume that the debate has something to do with assimilation and acculturation --specifically, that "New Qing" historians deny that assimilation and acculturation are as much a part of Chinese history as of any other history --or, they acknowledge assimilation but protest it. When I published the critique of "sinicization" in 1989 and 1990 the argument was actually the opposite --that assimilation and acculturation were inseparable from Chinese history, but that nationalist historians of the early twentieth century, then Fairbank, then Mary Wright had refused to acknowledge them, and instead had concocted a distinct process, "sinicization" ("sinification"). Unlike assimilation and acculturation, Fairbankian sinicization was based on the charisma of Chinese civilization. It had nothing to do with military conquests and very little do with economic hegemony. For this reason, attempts to render the sinicization debate into Chinese virtually required that "sinicization" always be translated as hanhua 汉化. But possibly for reasons of political etiquette, Chinese references to the English-language critique of sinicization increasingly translate"sinicization"t as "assimilation" (tonghua 同化) or "acculturation" (xianghua 向化). At that point, the English-language critique of sinicization has disappeared entirely. Casual readers can only assume that the critique really is about assimilation and acculturation --a protest against the facts, perhaps a claim that it is unjust, and perhaps a parallel critque of the current territorial expanse of the People's Republic of China. When the Chinese commentary takes on these characteristics, we are totally outside the points of reference of most American and European scholars of the Qing period. Yet a few Chinese historians continue to denounce the imaginary critique of sinicization --now inverted as a critique of assimilation. The contrast to what the discussion in English really is is profound enough to show the contours of English-language discourse on Chinese history as a distinct historical genre. The critique of sinicization as I wrote it in English was directed against English-language historiography of China. When translated into Chinese, it becomes utter nonsense.

I'm reminded of this again when reading Professor Zhong Han's latest multi-part "analysis" of the ideology that supposes lies behind "New Qing" history (you can start here here ). Part of it is a long description of my supposed premises and conclusions on imperialism, ethnicity and a bunch of other politically sensitive topics on which I very rarely if ever have occasion to express opinions. I'm flattered that, after dismissing me as somebody in no way competent to research or write about Chinese history, Professor Zhong now expends quite a lot of words exposing my retrograde political ideas, before going on to Peter and Mark, who turn out to be nearly as reactionary as I. The method is largely the same as used before. Professor Zhong has found a Chinese translation of a very short piece (in this case, “Nationality and Difference in China: The Post-Imperial Dilemma” in Joshua A. Fogel, ed., Teleologies of the Modern Nation-State, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). I should point out here that this is a very simple article, looking at the changes over time in the significance of essentialism and transformationalism (which I explain) in Chinese discourses of identity. Specifically, in times of political liberalism transformationalism was influential and in times of political radicalization essentialism was more influential. There was a sub-theme of the political visiblity of individuals, which was constructed in imperial times on the basis of the simultaneous rulership and in republican times on an ideology of essential national identity, Virtually self-evident, but at the time it seemed worth tracing out. As before, with a translation (which I have not seen) in hand, Professor Zhong goes on to grand generalizations of my work. Essentialism and transformationalism, liberalism and radicalism appear nowhere. Instead, it turns out that I claim that the PRC is a conquest empire (in fact, over and over in my work I reject the idea that the PRC is an empire of any kind, and in The Wobbling Pivot I argued that there was no alternative to incorporation of Inner Mongolia, Manchuria and Tibet into the PRC), I regret the decline of ethnicity in China (in fact, over and over in my work I deny that "ethnicity" and "ethnic groups" have any effectiveness in historical discourse apart from some very specific meanings), and I deny that the Qing was a Chinese dynasty (in fact, I reject the argument that it was Manchu). The long analysis, couched in much more careful language than Professor Zhong has previously become distinguished for, looks substantial, and perhaps as a work of sheer fiction with no connection to published documents it may be. There are no footnotes, no citations to the pages where I make these obnoxious arguments, no references of any kind to my books or research pieces. In the following sections on Peter and Mark, the method is the same. No sources, no citations, and nothing that their readers in English will recognize as their actual arguments. Professor Zhong admits that attempts by him or others to make it appear that Peter, Mark and I share the same ideas will fail. But at root, he proclaims, we are all apologists for imperialism, foes of the current geographical configuration of the PRC, and champions of "violence" (yes) in its borderlands. That makes us all "New Qing."

Like many of my colleagues in the USA, I have been working hard since 2008 to facilitate academic exchanges with China, particularly the hosting of PRC-funded post-docs and graduate students. The scholars I have been fortunate to host have been excellent people and very dedicated researchers. Our work together has been a tiny part of the huge mosaic of individual and institutional efforts to build and brighten bridges with Chinese historians. On the individual level it works. But there is a dead circuit in the communications above a certain level in China. Chinese educational commissars created the sort of parade-balloon figure of "New Qing history" and strongly encourage politically-vulnerable Chinese historians to shoot arrows at it. Any diatribes produced are prominently featured on the portal pages of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, which presents itself in many venues as a serious home of research and analysis, not as a purveyor of viciously mendacious propaganda. Most relevant to what I am discussing here, in the conditions created by CASS the English-language genre of historical writing about China has grown more segregated from Chinese-language discourse, both in lexicon and in conceptual substance. For virtually all historians outside China, the great empires of the early modern period --including perhaps foremost the Qing-- were empires of conquest. For historians in China, the Qing empire was a dynasty of Chinese history and unlike the empires around it did not engage in conquest. This is why the magic spell of "sinicization" was important. Without it, we have no way to explain how empires get great big except by military and economic dominance. But with it, China instantly has a happy-talk explanation for its size and wealth, and a free pass out of the history of empires. It may be time to admit that the hopes of a cosmopolitan, fluid discourse encompassing the breadth of both Chinese and English scholarship have foundered, at least for now. So long as CASS continues to commission and mount totally fabricated, personally toxic drek in order to protect a historical dream world, there is little reason for American historians to continue to work toward the nurturing of a transnational community. Il faut cultiver notre jardin --afin d'inviter les autres puissent en profiter.

Note on Nikan


I have not read a convincing etymology of nikan, and I don't have one myself. But in a forthcoming issue (58) of CAJ, I share some observations that have puzzled me over the years. It basically comes down to the fact that there seem to be two credible routes to the term as it was used in seventeenth century, and they are not mutually compatible, at least not easily.

The basic plot is two general approaches to a derivation: We have the approach that nikan is han 漢 --not only in meaning, but in origin. This makes a lot of sense to me, and I concluded that with some modifications it is the preferred explanation today. There is one logical objection, which is that the attested Jurchen word corresponding to 漢 was han (the character in the image, from the Yongning si)). If there was already a good Jurchen word for 漢, and it was the character in the image , then why was a new word needed? And there is a related question: If a new word was needed, then why should it have the syllable ni- on the front of it? My initial response would be that there is no reason to think that Jurchen monuments could be easily read aloud by sixteenth-century Jurchens. They could be looking at the Jurchen character and see, essentially, nothing. Or, they could be looking at it and read it out as nikan. How would that come to be?

Still thinking of this same approach, I explore a series of other words I have seen in Jurchen over the years, all starting with ni- and all relating in some way to the trade in goods, or contact, with China. They all were formed basically by putting ni- in front of a loan word from Chinese, and by the seventeenth century a few had acquired an ending that got phoneticized in Manchu as -ke or -he. The post-positioned particle I had no theory about, but the initial particle might be explained by the finding of Yamamoto Mamoru and Toda Shigeki, as well as few of their colleagues, that Jurchen scribes sometimes used a written particle, which they speculate represented a nasal sound, before Chinese proper names. It is an intriguing finding, and it is not a stretch, from my point of view, to assume for discussion that this could have been generalized to Chinese loan words whether proper names or not. A greater problem, but perhaps not insuperable, would be explaining how this scribal convention, which in origins might have been unvoiced, would become part of popular speech. And that would not necessarily provide a chronology for Jurchens forgetting their perfectly serviceable term for 漢 --han, in fact-- in favor of the new term. I have no easy explanation for either, but the coincidence in sound is pretty compelling. As a minor loop in this approach (that 漢 is the root of nikan), there is always the possibility that it is not this prepositioned nasal sound (from my series of Jurchen loan words) but Ming 明 that is represented by ni- --or, to knock it down a little notch, that  明 is the inspiration for the nasally-voiced particle noted by Yamamoto and Toda. Here I am leaving out the more ludicrous explanations for ni- but I do mention them in the article.

Then there is a second approach, which so far as I can see puts the origins of nikan in a different context. This invokes the Manchu verb series nikembi/nikebumbi, which relates loosely to ideas of providing physical support, being subordinate or dependent, being crude or inferior. As I note, terms like this sometimes have a tendency to take on an honorable meaning, as one sees in the case of Jurchen/Manchu Šigianu 史家奴 or --possibly-- the common Manchu name, Nikan. There is a phonological issue with this approach, which is the slide from front e to back a if this is etymologically-related to nikan, but such issues are not always absolute impediments if the historical context is strong enough to suggest a relationship. In this case, there is plenty of observation from the nineteenth and early twentieth-century observers that the term nikan was a popular term for a servant, an inferior, or a bumpkin, which puts at least some of its meanings closer to the nikembi axis than to the 漢 axis. I am also bound to say that I find this possible source for nikan consistent with my interpretation of the phrase ujen cooha, which I have explained both in Translucent Mirror and in The Manchus.

There is something else here, too. The nikembi undertones of nikan would be consistent with the theme running through all my work, from Translucent Mirror to my current book on nomadic rulers in the settled world, and a longer book on the sources of modern identities. I am able to fill in a bit of that arc in my recent article on Liao identities in Song-Yuan Studies, where I argue that current archeology (even more than the fragmentary Liaoshi 遼史) demonstrates that the legal and political ascription of cultural identities in the "medieval" period (I explain that a bit in the new book) was very poorly developed, especially in systems with strong aristocracies and weak rulerships, as in the Liao case. There was essentially no cultural ascription among the aristocracy (that is all done retrospectively by us), but there was legal identity ascription for subordinate classes, particularly those incarcerated in the trusted proprietorships and the personal estates. There resided the 漢, the Balhae, the Fan, and so on. The ability to make these identity distinctions legal above the rank of the dependent populations (or, to extend dependency to all ranks through the imposition of cultural identity) was a function of the development of much stronger rulerships, and particularly those sustaining long and wide periods of conquest --to wit, the Qing (but also the Ottoman and Russian empires). 

So, to me, nikan is a term of that transition from a long history using cultural designations (outside of very specific terms such as Ming i nikan) for dependent populations (the sort with a cozy relationship with nikembi/nikebumbi) to the Hung Taiji to Qianlong periods, in which the state very particularly was determined to impose cultural identities upon the aristocracy as well as the elites in land ownership and trade whom it was carefully taming. This imposition of cultural identities upon elites by centralizing rulerships equipped with formidable tools of media was well as law and military mobilization --that is, extending to elites a condition that centuries before was characteristic of dependent populations-- is what I have argued time and again is the burden of our term "ethnicity." This is one reason I have disliked the indiscriminate use of "ethnic" to describe just any cultural identity, or the quality of just any group suffering the imposition of the identity or internalizing it on their own (none of these can be well distinguished by the term). Nikan is one of many terms carrying with it the long history of imposed cultural identities as a characteristic of dependent populations together with the eighteenth and nineteenth-century denotation of a particular group, without reference to status (though, in Qing, the possible status of nikan was always limited in practice; those rising above a certain political level before the nineteenth-century could expect to be translated to manju).

So I am willing to believe that both these approaches have something to do with the historical process producing the term nikan and its employment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Language is osmotic and shapeless, and a word like nikan is certainly capable of floating on the surface either the 漢 or the nikembi/nikebumbi derivations. I would, however, prefer an elegant derivation that does not depend upon a folk conflation of at least two different signifiers. As I lament in article, I simply couldn't find a better one. 

[7.3.2015]