Using the past to understand the present

As the son of a sociologist in a family with a long-standing academic tradition, Jaeyoon Song, now a professor of history at McMaster, always knew that he would go into academia.

After his childhood in Seoul and following a stint in the Korean Army, in which he worked with the US army as part of the Korean Augmentation to the United States Army (KATUSA) program, Song completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2007. He taught at the University of Tennessee before coming to McMaster in 2009 – a move that, he says, felt surprisingly familiar, as it reminded him of his time in New England.

As a researcher, teacher, author, columnist and fiction writer, Song says it may look as though his focus is in many different places – the medieval Confucian Classics and related commentaries, modern Chinese history, and contemporary Chinese politics – but it’s actually all part of the same deeply connected interest in China, its government, its history and its people.

We spoke with him recently about his wide-ranging projects.

Can you tell me a little about your work?

I’m a historian, but I began as a philosopher – my undergraduate major was philosophy. Having engaged in philosophical inquiry into human nature for a long time, I realized that in order to study humanity I need to take an empirical approach – to discuss humanity in a more meaningful way I really had to take a close look at people’s real experiences.

I became interested in medieval Chinese history because I had studied the Confucian Classics [a series of five books by Confucius consisting of the Book of Odes, the Book of Documents, the Book of Rites, and the Spring and Autumn Annals] as a philosophy major. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the Confucian Classics, I started to look at the historical contexts in which these works became important over time – and then I realized that I needed to look at people’s actual existential experiences, rather than talking about human nature in abstract. That’s how I got into historical inquiry, and that’s what I’m doing now.

I researched the diverse exegetical traditions of the Confucian Classics, focusing on Song Dynasty China (960-1279). Once I started working at McMaster, my research has gradually expanded to the fields of modern Chinese history and contemporary Chinese politics, and I’ve now written three books on modern China, because without understanding what’s going on in China today I can’t introduce the topic to my students in a meaningful way.

What’s your perspective, as a historian, of China’s role in the world today?

China has become so very important over time – it’s the second-largest economy in the world, but with a political system that’s very different from ours. It’s a non-democratic economic superpower – a one-party dictatorship, as written in the Chinese constitution. Separation of powers in government is not allowed, freedom of expression is limited, and yet it’s become incredibly powerful.

To come to terms with China as it is today, we need to understand how China came into being, how China arose from a “basket case” to an economic powerhouse. In my trilogy A Sad China, I describe the history of modern China – the first volume on the initial stage of the socialist reform 1948 to 1964, the second volume on the Cultural Revolution (1964-1976), and the third on the Reform and Opening-up since 1978, respectively.

Why “Sad China”? I wanted to empathize with the painful experiences of the people – I wanted to observe the real-life experiences of the people such as the great famine and political upheavals during the Cultural Revolution.

In your current project, you’re also using the past to shed light on the present. Can you tell me about that?

I’m trying to reconstruct a political theory based on my understanding of traditional commentaries on the Confucian Classics, with which I can address the constitutional issues facing contemporary China and criticize the monolithic understanding of Confucianism promoted by the Chinese government today.

It’s a long-standing tradition in China, going back two millennia, for thinkers to articulate their political vision through commentaries on the Confucian Classics.  To see this connection we should go deeply into the context of these writings.  The cumulative commentaries on the Confucian Classics have far-reaching implications for Chinese politics today.

For the past two decades, the Chinese government has tried to revive Confucianism to justify the single-party dictatorship – Xi Jinping wants to represent himself as a Confucian monarch, saying that China needs to fight the lure of Western-style liberal democracy by promoting traditional values: none other than Confucianism.

But because Xi has a wrongful understanding of the Confucian Classics, we can use the works of the great sages, who form the basis of Confucian philosophy, to beat him at his own game.

I like to challenge the accepted view that Confucianism can serve as the ideology of autocracy. In 2015, I published a book titled Traces of Grand Peace with Harvard University Press. In that book, I showed that traditional thinkers were not as simple as they’re depicted today, and that their work could, in fact, promote the idea of the separation of powers and division of government.

Is it odd for a historian to do so much work on contemporary issues?

I’ve researched modern Chinese history from the founding in 1949 to the present because without understanding the current problems of China, I cannot address the issues of traditional China in a meaningful way.

In that sense, the approach I have taken might seem a bit unconventional.  Some people might think that because I’m trained as a classicist, my writings should only be focused on the interpretation of the Classics in one way or another – but I want to use my knowledge of the Confucian Classics to address current problems.

You don’t just write about modern China, and Confucian philosophy – you also wrote a novel, Yoshiko’s Flags, about a woman’s experiences in Korea under the Japanese occupation and then in the Korean War.

When I was teaching at the University of Tennessee, I interviewed a Korean lady who was born in the Japanese Empire and grew up in North Korea in the 1940s and 1950s. When the Japanese Empire fell, she was then living under the North Korean government – but when the Korean War broke out, she was able to go to South Korea to live with her family, which she did for 25 years until her family came to the US.

It was an incredibly interesting story, and she told me her entire life’s story on the condition that I not reveal her identity. So I decided to adopt a fictitious device to reconstruct everything she had told me, with a very important message – these historical experiences can never disappear. Sometimes they might be lurking for decades, but they eventually come back.

I showed an early draft to James King, who was a professor in English literature, and he encouraged me to get it published. So I did!

Did you find that writing a novel was a break from your research, or does the work of writing fiction and non-fiction feel more or less the same?

From my perspective, it’s much the same. When I was a little boy I used to write a lot of stories, so I’ve always been used to writing. When I became a historian, it was the same – I wanted to tell the audience the realities of life, as experienced by the people who lived through a particular era.

I try to gain a comprehensive understanding of people’s real-life experiences. By studying their experiences, I can more confidently write about them.

When I wrote about Mao Zedong, for example, it took me a long time to figure out what he was really up to – I perused his writings, referred to many secondary sources, and I looked at the political contexts. When I felt I understood what he was really about, I could reconstruct his thoughts and life from my own perspective.

Similarly, when I was speaking to the woman who inspired Yoshiko’s Flags, I learned that she had lost her little brother when they refugees moving from North Korea to South Korea during the Korean War. I could see this made her very sad, but I didn’t really understand the depth of her sadness until I saw a documentary about young girls in the 1930s and 1940s in Korea. These young girls were carrying younger brothers and sisters on their backs while their parents worked in the fields – it was their job to raise their siblings. Obviously, the woman’s bond with her brother was incredibly close.

It’s all about understanding and empathy with the people who have lived through a certain period – so historical study is literary and literary works are historical to me. Both are about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.

Along with everything else, you also write a column for a Korean newspaper…

When my first book about China came out, it was widely reviewed by Korean newspapers, and I was approached by one of them to write regular columns about China. I’ve been writing weekly columns for Korean newspapers for five years now. I’ve written about the Cultural Revolution, the great famine – it’s been well received so far.

It’s such an interesting experience, because I left Korea 25 years ago – and then I reconnected suddenly with Korean people. I even get letters from my high school buddies!

What do you see when you think about China’s future?

The pandemic was terrifying – China’s approach to the lockdown was far beyond our wildest imaginations in terms of the totalitarian control that could be exercised by the government.

With the white paper revolution in 2022, where people protested the lockdowns as well as other government restrictions, the voices of the people actually led to the lifting of the lockdowns. Although people in China are still unfree in many ways, they are moving in the direction of trying to expand their liberty and exercise democracy.

China has a long way to go, but the Chinese people are clearly aware of the importance of human rights as well as the basic liberties of the individual. We can only hope that China in the future would become more democratic, more liberal, more open, and more constitutional.