Sam's notes

Liu Xiaobo

2010-10-09T03:23:00.003-04:00

Ah, it took Liu Xiaobo to pull me out of my blogging hiatus. It was strange to think that, while walking through Shanghai this afternoon, most people on the street -- people who don’t have access to foreign media or unblocked Internet -- had not heard the news, or even heard of Liu Xiaobo. (Even more alarming is the fact that Liu Xiaobo himself, sitting in a jail in Liaoning province, has probably not heard that he has been awarded the prize.) In the rest of the world it’s front page news, but in China the government has scrubbed clean any mention of this humiliating slap in the face -- all the more humiliating because of the immense value Chinese tend to put on the Nobel Prize.

Almost as soon as the announcement was made, analysts began arguing that the choice of Liu as this year’s recipient will likely cause more harm than good, at least in the short term -- the Chinese government, with its fragile temperament, does not react well to being humiliated, and its response so far has borne this out. But it’s worth remembering that this momentous news comes on the heels of several smaller stirrings of change in China. There are signs of a renewed debate within the government about political reform. Judging from much of the reporting about Liu Xiaobo in the western media, one could be forgiven for thinking that Liu is a diehard anti-government activist. In fact, many Chinese elites in the public realm -- in government and in mainstream media -- subscribe to many of the same ideas. Like Liu Xiaobo, they think China’s judiciary should be stronger and more independent; that the government is ruled by special interests; that censorship stifles innovation and creativity. Even Wen Jiabao, who stood beside Zhao Ziyang in 1989 and then quieted down, has recently made some muted calls for political reform. And I continue to be amazed by some of the material in the Chinese media, especially newspaper and magazine editorials. To take but one example, the southern magazine Nan Feng Chuang recently published a cover story dedicated to criticizing the stifling of free speech in China and the lack of rule of law.

These calls for change aren't as strident as Liu Xiaobo’s. They do not directly criticize China's leaders, and they almost never indicate the underlying problem of China’s political system: that the CCP is unwilling to share power with anybody, or even tolerate any hint that it should share power. And yet, I can’t help but have the feeling that this is a new decade. In the coming years I believe the political climate in China will resemble the ferment of the 1980s more than the clampdown of the 1990s.

Who owns Chinese culture? A view from DC

2010-02-22T09:39:00.003-05:00

The annual Chinese New Year celebration held in Washington’s Chinatown is meant to showcase Chinese culture, but, as is so often the case with celebrating a national culture, this year’s celebration had political overtones. H street, between 6th and 7th streets, was lined with American and Taiwanese flags (right under the “Friendship Archway,” erected to celebrate DC’s friendship with its sister city of Beijing). Vendors sold the ‘ol “Blue Sky, White Sun, and a Wholly Red Earth” to passing spectators. Who was this parade for? What was its purpose?

Well, it was sponsored by the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, an umbrella group serving the interests of Chinese-Americans. The CCBA has strong pro-Taiwanese sympathies; on its website, it states, “Despite enticements and threats from the Chinese Communist Government, the CCBA rejected their entreaties and remained loyal to the Republic of China Government on Taiwan.”

I admit, I had no idea the group’s loyalty to Taiwan was so pronounced. Though it claims it does not discriminate against immigrants from the mainland, its political stance, so blatantly on display at the new year celebration, must alienate some mainland Chinese living in the US. At the celebration I found myself next to a smiling man wearing a large scarf with the Taiwanese flag on it. Another Chinese man came up and, in an accent that was decidedly non-Taiwanese, asked him about the scarf -- where he got it, how much it cost. “But the US and Taiwan have no relations,” he said. The scarf-clad man replied, “It’s not that there are no relations...” and that was the end of it. The man walked away, in a bit of a huff. Later, I overheard three Chinese girls, most likely from the mainland, talking about the Taiwanese flags hung along the street. “What’s up with all these Taiwanese flags?” one asked. “Oh, it’s a type of brainwashing in America,” another replied.

The highlight of the celebration involved dancing dragons, but many of the dancers were not Chinese. The vast majority of spectators were not Chinese. The vendors selling Taiwanese flags and firecrackers were not Chinese. And the streets were lined with Taiwanese flags. The event seemed more like a political rally than a celebration of the year of the tiger. The blog DCist, reporting on the celebration, said the choice of flag makes sense: “It's just as well -- it probably wouldn't do to have Communist flags strung up through the capital of the free world.” This, I think, gets at the root of the issue. Flags represent nations, and nations are supposed to have individual, discrete cultures. But for many Americans, the Chinese flag -- that is, the “Five Star Red Flag” -- does not represent “Chinese culture.” It represents the Chinese Communist Party. The separation of the two intensely frustrates the Chinese government, which seeks to associate itself with the Chinese nation and with Chinese culture.

This dilemma -- who “owns” a nation-state’s culture? -- can never really be resolved, in China or anywhere else. But in China it seems especially pronounced. China has internal conflict on many fronts, a government that is not amenable to hearing alternative points of view, and a population of overseas Chinese that is spread across the world, all with their own loyalties and their own notions about who represents China, its nation, its culture, and its history. It is difficult to imagine this issue reaching any kind of broad consensus while these divisions persist.

Thinking of Liu Xiaobo

2009-12-24T22:44:00.000-05:00

We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes.

-Charter 8

This should be repeated as often as possible.

Copenhagen and China

2009-12-22T23:51:00.007-05:00

The aftermath of the Copenhagen talks appears to have gone through three stages in quick succession: the first was an attempt to figure out what exactly the talks accomplished; the second a sort of stunned silence as the truth set in of how far we still have to go; and the last, a sudden outpouring of recriminations. This final stage, which has largely focused on China’s role at Copenhagen, is a reflection of larger issues at play as China takes its first major steps in asserting itself on the world stage.

The Chinese government’s behavior at the talks demonstrated a level of self-confidence that, to many western observers, seemed premature. Duke professor Liu Kang, in a different but related context, made this analogy: “China is like an adolescent who took too many steroids. It has suddenly become big, but it finds it hard to coordinate and control its body. To the West, it can look like a monster.”

The backlash in American and European media against China’s behavior in Copenhagen backs up this view. A Guardian contributor accuses China of intentionally sabotaging the talks in an effort to make western countries look bad. Britain’s climate secretary, Ed Miliband, made similar accusations, and Jiang Yu, China’s frustratingly obtuse press secretary, fired back in a typically ham-handed manner.

Some Chinese commentators have observed a conspiracy among western countries to denigrate China. Zhao Haijian, writing in the Guangzhou Daily, says, “Some western media have flattered China, and to some degree have affirmed China’s sudden rise and its influence. But behind this we can often discern the hidden intentions of western countries” (一些西方媒体如此“抬举”中国，在某种程度上是对中国崛起和影响力提升的一种肯定，但在这背后，我们常常会看到一些西方国家居心叵测的动机). Zhao argues that, by falsely flattering China, western countries seek to more easily put it in a bad light. A case in point, says Zhao, is Copenhagen, where the United States tried to inflate China’s importance so that China would have to foot a bigger part of the bill to fight climate change.

A preponderance of conspiracy theories usually indicates widespread misunderstanding about a complex issue. The backlash against China’s behavior at Copenhagen in western media, and the angry denials of the Chinese government and its supporters, seem to me to be natural reactions to China’s perceived “rise” in the world. The Chinese government undoubtedly feels it is in a period of momentum. China just held a successful Olympics, it’s about to put on a massive World Expo, and it seems to have weathered the economic crisis better than just about all western countries, at least for now. The government’s ego may be a bit inflated. It may believe it can throw its weight around more freely than in the past.

The Chinese government needs to learn how to negotiate more skillfully -- it’s unacceptable that Wen Jiabao skipped a meeting with Barack Obama and other leaders -- and, of course, it needs to work hard on its public relations. And western observers must come to grips with the fact that China is here to stay, and realize that its government is not always scheming how best to increase its influence while decreasing the power of western countries. The Chinese government, and even China itself, often comes off as monolithic, but it is full of contradictions and internal debate.

In the coming years and decades I suspect we’ll see more situations like the one in Copenhagen, as the world adjusts to countries like China, India, Brazil, and others that are willing to exert newfound global influence. Coping with this shift in global power structures will require patience, flexibility, and a willingness to understand the viewpoints of others.

Red Shanghai

2009-09-30T23:00:00.001-04:00

The 60^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China is upon us, with all its tanks, missiles, mass demonstrations of patriotism, closings of sensitive areas, and the general outpouring of overdone pomp and propaganda that insecure governments everywhere feel the need to display. In celebration of this glorious holiday, here is a list of the most prominent red sites in Shanghai. If you’re in the city, why not commemorate the CCP’s Diamond Jubilee by visited some of these august locations?

The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Centre

This museum is, blessedly, privately run, and so should perhaps not be considered a “red site” at all since it isn’t controlled by the government. But for those interested in Chinese communist culture, this memorial to the propaganda posters of the past is not to be missed. With refreshingly honest signage, the museum guides you through some truly incredible posters from 1949 to 1979. Because many of China’s propaganda posters were recycled during the chairmanship of Deng Xiaoping, the ones on display here are extremely rare. These aren’t the copies you find on the street. Be sure to check out the shop, where you can buy original posters if you’re willing to shell out the big bucks, as well as some good reproductions. Interestingly and unfortunately, the place seems to be known only to foreigners. I asked the attendant working there whether the museum gets more foreign or Chinese visitors. He replied that all of the visitors are foreign. This is a shame. As the museum itself states, “Today China’s economic path to prosperity is well defined. But with the shift toward a more modern and forward thinking China, it would be a mistake to forget our recent history.”

Website: http://www.shanghaipropagandaart.com/

To get there: The museum is a little hard to find. It’s located in the basement of building 4, block B, at 868 Huashan Road, across from Wukang Road, inside a residential complex. The nearest metro stops are Changshu Road (line one), Jing’an Si (line two), and Jiangsu Road (line two). Ask the guard at the gate of the residential complex and he’ll give you a card explaining how to find the museum.

Longhua Cemetery of Martyrs

This is a must-see for those interested in how official history of the Chinese communist movement is written. The Longhua Cemetery of Martyrs memorializes those who died fighting for the cause of communism in the early 20^th century. It is built on the site of a killing ground that Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party used to murder communists, students, intellectuals, members of trade unions, and others deemed to be leftist in 1927. Later it was turned into a prison. Such museums have a habit of labeling everybody who resisted the fascist tendencies of the Nationalist Party as striving for communism, though in reality the situation in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s was more complicated than that. If you can look past the historical whitewashing, however, visiting this site is still a moving experience. As I have noted before, labeling the entire memorial site “propaganda” risks dismissing too easily the deep resonance such places can have. The people commemorated here are worthy of our remembrance, regardless of who is doing the commemorating.

To get there: The memorial is located at 180 Longhua Road, by the Longhua Temple (which is also worth a visit). There isn’t an adjacent metro stop, but the closest one is the Longcao Road stop on line three. After getting off the metro, walk northeast along North Longshui Road, which turns into Longhua Road.

Mao Zedong’s former residence

This one’s a no-brainer. Any tour of Shanghai’s red sites must include homage to the place where Mao Zedong lived in the mid-1920s. As a sign makes clear, Mao’s life was highly revolutionary: “In his youth, Mao Zedong cherished a lofty revolutionary aspiration, actively seeking revolutionary truth and joined in the revolutionary practice.” The place features recreations of some of the rooms of the house, and upstairs is a little museum with, interestingly, a room devoted to Mao Anying, Mao Zedong’s son who died in the Korean War. It also includes some wonderful Chinglish, such as this caption for a photograph: “Mao Zedong gave a banquet to labor representatives and crackerjacks at technical innovation of Shanghai on March 19, 1960” (1960年3月19月，毛泽东在锦江饭店宴请上海的工人代表，技术革新能手).

Website: http://www.jingan.gov.cn:7001/tour/hisHouse/200610/t20061018_466042.htm

To get there: Mao’s former residence is located at 120 North Maoming Road, near the West Nanjing Road metro stop on line two.

Zhou Enlai’s former residence

Zhou Enlai was Mao’s right-hand man, and the highest-ranking official to survive the entirety of his rule. His former residence in Shanghai acted more as an office for the CCP around 1946 than as a house. It’s a beautiful place, and well worth a visit.

To get there: Zhou Enlai’s former residence is located at 73 Sinan Road, near Fuxing Park. The nearest metro stop is South Shaanxi Road on line one.

Site of the founding of the CCP

‘Nuff said. In the heart of Xintiandi, it’s easily accessible by tourists, meaning the curators were extra careful to make everything spotlessly whitewashed. A must see for red tourism, but five minutes is probably enough.

See this interesting article at the China Beat for information about the history of the building.

To get there: Head to Xintiandi, near the South Huangpi Road metro stop on line one, and follow the tour groups.

Liu Changsheng’s former residence

Liu Changsheng is a relatively minor figure in Chinese communist history. He was a leader of the underground communist movement in Shanghai from 1937 to the establishment of the People’s Republic, and was important in the formation of the Party’s labor policy in Shanghai. The small museum in his former residence focuses on underground communist activities in 1930s Shanghai, and provides a good example of how the government writes the history of this period—largely ignoring the considerable intellectual ferment of the times and emphasizing instead the central role of the Communist Party.

Website: http://www.jingan.gov.cn:7001/tour/hisHouse/200610/t20061018_466045.htm

To get there: Liu Changsheng’s former residence is located at 81 Yiyuan Road, close to the Jing’an Si metro stop on line two.

National Anthem Memorial Hall

The history of “March of the Volunteers,” the national anthem, is indeed pretty fascinating; unfortunately, this museum is too focused on making it a tribute to the Communist Party/Chinese nation. If you can get past this kind of language (“After 70 years of trial and hardship, ‘March of the Volunteers’ has become a part of the very blood of the Chinese people and the soul of the Chinese nation”), the place has a lot of interesting tidbits. For example, “March of the Volunteers” had a broad international following during World War II, including a rendition sung by the American singer Paul Robeson, and played a role in international anti-fascist sentiment. The museum leaves the nasty historical bits out, of course—no mention, for example, how Tian Han, the lyricist of the song, died in 1968 after being persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

To get there: The National Anthem Memorial Hall is located by the Dalian Road metro stop on line four. Go out exit three; the museum is on the southeast corner of the intersection at Dalian Road and Changyang Road.

Sites appropriated into red history

The government has attempted to appropriate the figures associated with the sites below into the history of the Communist Party. In many cases that’s not far off the mark—Song Qingling, for example, certainly ingratiated herself with China’s new masters after 1949—but their lives are much more complicated than simple allegiance to the CCP.

Cai Yuanpei’s former residence: Cai Yuanpei had a prominent influence in the development of China’s educational system, and was a main figure in the May Fourth Movement. You can see his former residence inside Lane 303 on Huashan Road, across from the Hilton Hotel, near the Jing’an Si metro stop on line two.

Sun Yatsen’s former residence: Sun Yatsen is revered in both Taiwan and in mainland China. See the CCP’s version of his life at 7 Xiangshan Road, near Fuxing Park. The nearest metro stop is South Shaanxi Road on line one.

Song Qingling’s former residence: Song Qingling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, decided to stay in China after the communists won the civil war (in stark contrast to her sister). Her residence is a beautiful mansion with lots of interesting gifts from foreign dignitaries, and a backyard perfect for lawn parties. It’s located at 1843 Middle Huai’hai Road, not too far from the Hengshan Road metro stop on line one.

Lu Xun Park and former residence: Lu Xun, probably the most important cultural figure in 1920s and 1930s China, never joined the Communist Party, but he was close friends with lots of people who did, and supported many of its activities. The CCP regards him as an important figure in its history. In Lu Xun Park, by the Hongkou Stadium metro stop on line eight, you can see his tomb (with calligraphy by Mao Zedong) and visit a museum devoted to him. Near the park is his old residence, a charming place in a relatively out-of-the-way spot, where he lived at the end of his life. It’s located in Lane 132 on Shanyin Road, southeast of the park.

Duolun Road: Duolun Road is famous for being the site of the former residences of several well-known figures, such as Guo Moruo and Mao Dun, as well as the former headquarters of the League of Left-Wing Writers. Nowadays it’s touristy, but not too annoyingly so. It’s located just south of Lu Xun Park.

The Beijing Olympics in hindsight

2009-09-10T06:01:00.001-04:00

Susan Brownell, a frequent commentator on the Beijing Olympics, has a useful article up on Japan Focus looking at the Olympics in East Asia perspective. I tried to do this in a more limited way last year; her article is much more comprehensive. This, I feel, is an especially interesting observation:

"Western observers tended to dismiss Beijing's Olympic education as just another nationalist propaganda campaign, but I believe they were missing the important point: true, one major goal was patriotic education – but as in Tokyo, the old nationalist symbols were re-shaped by association with symbols of internationalism, the global community, and world peace. This is the paradox of the Olympic Games – they reinforce nationalism and internationalism at the same time. Perhaps the national identity itself is not greatly changed, but it is an important shift in orientation if the holders of that identity start to see their nation as an equal partner among friendly nations instead of a victimized nation among hostile nations."

Worth a read.

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Learning about China, one region at a time...

2009-08-30T22:42:00.001-04:00

In China, generalizations about foreigners are all too common. But why stop there? Below is a translation of a list of stereotypes about different provinces and municipalities that has been going around on the Internet (incomplete, though—several regions aren't listed, at least not in the copy I received). People in China love making jokes about other regions, but this list is a little different because it focuses on how people from various places are perceived to regard the rest of China; that is, generalizing about others' generalizations.

Beijing sees the rest of the country as grass-roots;

Shanghai sees the rest of the country as provincial;

Guangdong sees the rest of the country as poor;

Henan sees the rest of the country as naïve [because Henan is poor, and Henanese have a reputation for being tricky and adept at stealing];

Shandong sees the rest of the country as disloyal [because Shandong natives have a reputation for being forthright and loyal];

Jiangsu sees the rest of the country as undeveloped;

Zhejiang sees the rest of the country as waiting to develop;

Sichuan sees the rest of the country as lacking pretty girls [Sichuan is known for its spicy girls];

Shaanxi sees the rest of the country as without culture [because Shaanxi is thought of as the cradle of Chinese culture, which in turn is supposed to be many thousands of years old];

Xinjiang sees the rest of the country as too crowded;

Tibet sees the rest of the country as unreligious;

Shanxi sees the rest of the country as too elegant [because Shanxi natives have a reputation of being uncouth];

Liaoning sees the rest of the country as cowardly [because people from the northeast are seen as strong brave];

Yunnan sees the rest of the country as boring [Yunnan is a big tourist draw];

Ningxia sees the rest of the country as too busy [Ningxia has a reputation of being laid-back];

Inner Mongolia sees the rest of the country as lacking milk;

Hebei sees the rest of the country as in need of relocation [I believe this is because the Hebei government has a reputation of forcing residents to relocate to make room for big construction projects];

Hainan sees the rest of the country as too cold;

Qinghai sees the rest of the country as unable to hold its liquor.

北京看全国都是基层；
上海看全国都是乡下；
广东看全国都是穷人；
河南看全国都缺心眼；
山东看全国都不仗义；
江苏看全国都欠发达；
浙江看全国都待开发；
四川看全国都缺小姐；
陕西看全国都没文化；
新疆看全国都太拥挤；
西藏看全国都没信仰；
山西看全国都太文雅；
辽宁看全国都没胆子；
云南看全国都太单调；
宁夏看全国都太忙碌；
内蒙看全国都缺牛奶；
河北看全国都该拆迁;
海南看全国都太寒冷；
青海看全国都没酒量

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American democracy in China

2009-08-04T22:43:00.001-04:00

An article written in Chinese by a Chinese-American describing her experience running for the state legislator in Virginia: State Department publicity promoting American diversity? Little-read blog quietly advocating for political change in China? Nope: Nanfeng Chuang, a Chinese magazine that can be found on every newsstand here in Shanghai and in other big Chinese cities.

In what is, in my view, yet another indication of the increasing range and openness of magazine reporting in China, the article lays out, in impressive detail, the steps necessary to run for statewide political office in the US. It's not written by a political scientist or a reporter but by a Chinese-American woman named Sasha Gong (Gong Xiaoxia 龚小夏), who gained the Republican nomination for state legislature in Virginia's 46^th district (her campaign site is here). She lays out her purpose in writing the article:

"Though there are many news reports [about American politics], Chinese people are still often confused when they view the American political process. Where do American candidates come from? How are political activities organized? What function does money play in American politics? How much of a voice do ordinary people have in the political process? How do political parties and social groups work together? In the following piece I hope to use my own experiences while running for office to give readers a new insight [into American politics]. (虽然有各种各样的报道，中国人看美国政治经常会有一种雾里看花的感觉。美国的政治候选人是如何产生的？竞选活动如何组织？金钱在美国政治中起什么样的作用？普通人在政治中到底有多少发言权？政党和社会团体如何运作？在以下有限的篇幅里，我希望能够通过自己竞选的一点亲身感受来给读者提供一些新的信息。)

The article isn't analytical or editorializing in tone―it's a straightforward explanation of the process by which someone goes from thinking about running for office to actually doing it. Gong doesn't try to idealize American politics, at least not here. She gets at the nitty-gritty of how it works―getting support from the local party leadership and a myriad of groups, raising money, going from door to door getting signatures, the necessity of proving you're not a carpetbagger, the necessity of keeping an eye on your opponents to make sure they're doing everything right (so you can disqualify them from running if they're not), the importance for a party to control the state legislature for purposes such as redrawing district lines, etc., etc. This is not the stuff of a starry-eyed democratic idealist nor of a cynic fed up with it all; it's a direct explanation of the messiness of democracy in a country where the process has, paradoxically, become somewhat calcified yet still offers the possibility for sweeping change.

Gong, who became an American citizen in 2001, originally came to the country in 1987. She's the kind of immigrant who makes Americans feel warm and fuzzy inside: she wrote a book called Born American: A Chinese Woman's Dream of Liberty ("Here in the United States, she says, she can be both American and Chinese"). In her Chinese article she writes, "The United States is a country of immigrants. Immigrants have shown outstanding success in every part of America, with the exception of electoral politics, which have been more difficult." (美国是个移民国家，外国移民在各行各业都有非常出色的表现，唯独竞选政治是最困难的一项。) She also has somewhat of an activist background, putting up big character posters in the 1970s and later getting detained. In one interview with an American newspaper she said, "The communists never succeeded to shut me up and shut me off." Definitely prime election material.

None of that kind of stuff, of course, makes it into the Chinese article, but the fact that such a person is publishing in a widely read Chinese magazine is impressive enough.

Incidentally, thinking about her candidacy from the American perspective, it strikes me that people like Gong might be the future of the Republican party. In the article she writes, "I clearly indicated to the [Republican] Speaker of the House that when it came to social issues like gay rights, abortion rights, and gun restriction, I lean more towards the Democratic party. But I support the Republican party's stance on conservative fiscal policy, resisting limitless government power, and the guiding principle of 'big society, small government.'" (我对议长表示了参选的愿望，并明确指出我在社会政策――同性恋平权、妇女堕胎权、枪支管制――这类问题上更倾向于民主党的立场，但是我支持共和党保守的财政政策，反对政府权力和规模不断扩大，坚持"大社会、小政府"的方针。) Similarly, in the American interview mentioned above, she says, "I came from the worst kind of big government. I'm naturally very suspicious of any government that grows too big. And I think our federal government is growing too big. I also want people with faces like mine―minorities―to have more voices." Many immigrants, after all, are conservative in many ways; if the Republican party can break away from its image as a white party and focus less its social messages, I bet it could attract more and more people like Sasha Gong.

But enough political analyzing. I'll end with translations of a few Chinese comments about Gong's article from this blog. I tried in vain to find a comment critical of the article, though this is just a small sample.

"Not bad, it gives Chinese people an idea of how American democracy really works, and makes it clear to Chinese what it means when power genuinely comes from the people." (不错，让中国人真正地体会美国的民主是如何形成的，让中国人明白什么是真正的权力来自于人民的含义。)

"This is what a real democratic election looks like! It's not at all like our muddleheaded electorate! American party discipline is loose [i.e. decentralized], probably because the state treasury doesn't squander all the public money? Ha ha ha…" (这才是真正的民主选举！不像咱们稀里糊涂当选民！美国的党纪律松散，大约是由于没有国库银子供挥霍的缘故吧？哈哈哈……)

"Very focused and thorough" (很有针对性呀.很透彻)

"Very interesting. Your experience should be required reading for the whole country." (有意思。你的经历会成为全国人民学习的教材。)

"A country's strength does not reside in how big its financial resources are! It resides in how well off the people are and how lofty their spirit is! A democratic system is the most desirable one! I hope more people can be introduced to American political life. Thanks for your article!" (一个国家的强大不是体现在国家有多少财力！而是体现在人民生活的富裕和精神世界的高尚！而民主制度又显现最要的作用！希望楼主以后多介绍在美国的政治生活。谢谢你的文章！)

"[Quote from the article:] 'Local political organization and activities are very independent. There may be some interaction [with the national party] at the surface, but this does not involve receiving orders from above.' This is very important!!!! In China the higher-level authorities give orders to the lower level, and the result is that the lower level is the slave of the higher level! The activities of officials are all for the benefit of the higher authorities. Not even a little bit is for the common people!" ("地方组织的活动都是独立的，上面一级的机构可以作点建议，但是却不能下命令" 这点非常重要啊!!!!
中国就是上级命令下级,所以导致下级都成了上级奴隶! 中国官员做事都是为了上级的脸色,没有几个是为老百姓办事的!)

"In fact, everyone knows that in this world there is no perfect system and there is no complete justice. What we need is to guarantee the [integrity and rules of the] system and be relatively fair. But at the moment these two necessities do not exist in China." (事实上人人都知道这世上没有完美的制度和绝对的公平，我们需要的是有保障的制度和相对的公平，但目前的中国这两样都没有)

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Race and espionage

2009-07-28T22:00:00.000-04:00

I have a post up on the China Beat about race and espionage:

What’s interesting about Chinese espionage operations in the US, however, is that they appear to involve strong racial and nationalist overtones. The Soviet Union tended to appeal to ideology, or simply offer money or other types of benefits to its agents; China, it seems, is mainly going after overseas Chinese communities in its efforts to recruit spies.

While I'm at it, the Onion issue that parodies China -- which has gotten an unbelievable amount of attention -- includes an article that taps into this widespread notion of Chinese-Americans as potential spies. When the Onion features something, you know it's worth paying attention to.

Canada for Chinese

2009-07-22T08:05:00.000-04:00

Sometimes while traveling the information in guidebooks and what you actually experience is woefully mismatched, especially when it comes to “cultural” advice. The following is a cultural guide to Canada intended for Chinese people that I happened to stumble across today. I have no idea where it originated, but a quick search on Google reveals several variations of it scattered around Chinese travel advice pages (for example, here, here, here, here, and here)—it seems to be one of those apocryphal Internet texts that sound authoritative to the ignorant. As these things always are, it’s fascinating for what it emphasizes and for what it gets wrong. Makes you wonder how accurate English guidebooks are.

As always, any translation tips would be appreciated!

Canadian clothing is similar to Americans’, but is not as casual. During informal situations they wear whatever they want, such as T-shirts [?夹衫], round-collar shirts, and everyday dress pants. During formal occasions—such as going to work, going to church, going to a concert or a play, or attending a dinner—they pay close attention to their clothing, making sure it is neat and tidy. Men wear suits and women wear dresses. Women are not too particular about the material of their clothes, but they value good taste and originality, coordinated colors, and comfort.

Canadians are simple and honest (朴实), amiable, friendly, and warmly hospitable. When they meet they shake hands, while close friends sometimes hug. When they part they shake hands again. During introductions, the men are [first] introduced to women, younger people are introduced to older people, and lower-status people are introduced to higher-status people. When friends meet they address each other informally. When shaking hands, women, older people, and higher-status people extend their hands first. When chatting, a topic is chosen that everybody is interested in, such as Canadian economic and cultural development, the weather, sports, traveling, and [cultural] customs. It’s not appropriate to inquire about one’s age, income, family situation, marital status, body weight (for women), and other personal topics. Canadians don’t like to compare Canada and the US. They don’t talk about politics, family ancestry (世族), religion, language, and, above all, such sensitive social issues as the [situation in the] French region of Quebec.

Canadians have a strong awareness of time. When a time for an appointment is set, one should be punctual. Usually business is conducted in restaurants or social clubs. One ought to have a specific reason to give somebody a present, and should not give presents for no reason. During birthdays, weddings, and when parting from one another [for a substantial period of time], one should give a present. Pay attention to the wrapping of the present. Usually it’s best to use paper with lots of colors, to attach ribbons or other decorations, and to sign your name on a card attached to the present. When receiving a present, one should open it immediately and thank the gift giver. During family dinners Canadians are commonly welcoming towards guests. Guests should not arrive early, and should bring a bottle of wine, a box of candy, or a bouquet of flowers as a present, or give small presents to the hostess and children. If you give a bottle of wine, it is appropriate to drink it during dinner. Family dinners are usually buffet style: the food and drink are placed on the table, and every person helps himself and finds his own seat. Everyone chats while eating. On the day after the dinner, the guest should write a thank you letter to the hostess. After the dinner is over the guest should not stay for too long; usually one should leave before 10:00 on weekdays and before 11:30 on weekends.

In Canada the number 13 and Friday are taboos [as they are bad luck]. They abide by the 10 commandments found in the Bible, and do not address holy figures with disrespect. When going down stairs, Canadians avoid smashing glass products, and avoid overturning saltshakers [?人从楼梯下走过，忌打破玻璃制品，忌打翻盐罐]. Avoid saying the word “old,” avoid calling an elderly people’s home a “nursing home” [保育院], and avoid calling an elderly person an “old citizen” (高龄公民). White lilies are used during funerals, so don’t use them as everyday gifts. When at home don’t blow a whistle, don’t talk about inauspicious things, and while eating food don’t talk about sad topics. Avoid eating the insides of an animal and its fatty meat. Canadians are used to eating cold food and they attach the most importance to dinner. When eating with Canadians don’t urge them to drink alcohol [if they refuse]. Most Canadians don’t like fatty meat and hate shrimp paste, fermented bean curd, and other stinky food. Canadians avoid eating the insides of animals, as well as their feet. Canadians prefer to have even numbers [of guests] at banquets and dinners, and especially avoid the number 13. Black and purple are unpopular colors in Canada. White lilies are used at funerals, so don’t give them to people [as gifts]. When swimming small children should always wear bathing suits. In the summertime women like to sunbathe in their bikinis, so don’t be too astounded.

Evan Osnos, Xinjiang, and Chinese civil society

2009-07-11T21:57:00.001-04:00

A quick plug for Evan Osnos's blog, for its well-researched takes on the Xinjiang riots. Though Osnos's history can sometimes be a bit fudgy (I took issue with his brief sum-up of race relations in China contained in this article), when it comes to current affairs, his knowledge and contacts are impressive. In his analysis of the unrest in Xinjiang, it is refreshing that he does not set up an automatic juxtaposition between the undercurrents of discrimination in Xinjiang, and the Chinese insistence that any problems are caused by outside agitators. That's the angle that most western reporting has taken. It's true enough, but it's not the whole story.

If one focuses solely on the government's stance towards minorities in China, or on the nationalist hysteria best represented by the "angry youth," the situation really looks bleak, with little hope of the kind of cross-cultural understanding and empathy that can improve race relations in a country. And if we compare the current situation in China to pre-1960s America (the kind of comparison that, though hopelessly problematic, is made so often that it becomes something one must address), the country does not appear to be on the brink of the kind of radical cultural shift that the United States experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly because China, because of tight control and widespread nationalist thinking, does not have the kind of "marketplace of ideas" that enabled to the US to change so fundamentally.

And yet, when one ignores supercilious government pronouncements and actually reads some of the non-fenqing commentary on Chinese websites, as Osnos does, there does seem to be some hope. First, he notes (as no one else seems to have done) that the problems in Xinjiang aren't only about race; they are also a reflection of the economic and political inequality that has accompanied the rapid development of the Chinese economy. In addressing the problems in Xinjiang, China must also address deep-rooted problems with modern society that exist across the country. And in another post, Osnos summarizes an essay about the riots written by a well-known Chinese journalist and consultant, which takes the government for task for some of its acts of mismanagement of the riots.

Osnos's observations get at a phenomenon that has become increasingly apparent in the past couple years: though more and more moderate voices are having their say in China, both online and in mainstream publications, they are very rarely mentioned in mainstream western reportage about Chinese politics and society. Even venerable publications such as the New York Times tend to focus on the more shrill voices. This kind of reporting isn't inaccurate, but it is incomplete. Chinese civil society is becoming more diverse than many people realize—editorials, blog posts, and reporting, often in mainstream magazines and newspapers, are often surprisingly nuanced. But evidence of this is sorely lacking in English-language news about China.

Zhou Enlai and the Cultural Revolution

2009-07-11T06:47:00.001-04:00

At the edge of a lake in the middle of Huai'an sits the Zhou Enlai Memorial Hall, a sprawling cement complex that, considering Zhou's broad popularity both inside and outside China, was surprisingly empty when I visited a couple of weeks ago. Huai'an, a small city in northern Jiangsu province, is Zhou's birthplace and is a delightful place in its own right, with lots to see and do, but the newest Lonely Planet neglects to mention it. So much the better for me! It's the kind of place where people do double takes when a white person walks down the street. They whisper to each other, they say "Don't look now but there's a foreigner behind us," they say "Hellllooo!," they point, they grin, they break into laughter at the sheer bizarreness of it all. In fact, one six-year-old boy who had never seen a foreigner before went a little bit crazy when he saw me. For about ten minutes he kept shouting over and over again, "I hate foreigners!" and "I don't like the foreigner!" At one point he said, "The foreigner will beat us!" His mother was embarrassed and apologetic, and kept trying to explain to her son that foreigners are people too.

There were hardly any other visitors at the Zhou Enlai Memorial Hall, just me and a couple Chinese tourists. Considering the size of the place, one had the sense that Zhou was somewhat of a forgotten figure—which, of course, couldn't be farther from the truth. He is credited for being responsible, sometimes wholly responsible, for the preservation of cultural artifacts during the Cultural Revolution, for saving the lives of various people, and for stopping acts of senseless violence as best he could. Red Guards threatening the ruins and Dunhuang? One call from Zhou will stop them from wreaking destruction. Over-zealous general on the brink of invading Hong Kong? Zhou injects some common sense into the deliberations. Zhou's hand seemed to be everywhere in the Cultural Revolution; the legend of his intervention seems to grow with every retelling.

So powerful is the legend that it even made it into an official museum dedicated to his memory. It's difficult to find any information at all about the Cultural Revolution in Chinese museums—nowadays, most discourse about it in the public space seems relegated to fiction or the odd editorial about how China needs to avoid "excesses," or is neatly brushed aside by being included in the "30 percent" of what Mao did wrong. But in Zhou Enlai's memorial museum I was surprised to see not only a reference to the Cultural Revolution, but several references to it. Not only that, but, in celebrating Zhou's efforts to rein it in, the museum seemed to imply that the Cultural Revolution was something negative. This isn't anything new, but it is rare to see the view expressed in a place devoted to nationalism.

Granted, it wasn't much. One big picture of Zhou had the caption "Devoting his entire energy and thought to the perilous situation during the 'Cultural Revolution'" (殚精竭虑苦撑'文革'危局), and nothing else. A piece of paper elsewhere was, according to a caption, "A list of cadres who should be protected, drawn up by Zhou Enlai." Three other pieces of paper were "Zhou Enlai's three telegrams drafted in his own hand on protecting the leading cadres inside and outside the Party, as well as top democrats." A fourth plaque, in the tradition of Zhou's enigmatic nature, had only a quote elegantly concealing any opinions he might have had about what was going on: "In the midst of the 'Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' I only had eight words: 'Spare no effort in one's duty until one's dying day' (鞠躬尽瘁，死而后已)."

Roh Moo-hyun's suicide: Chinese views

2009-05-27T02:18:00.001-04:00

News of the suicide of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, who was, it seems, overcome by despair from the relentless investigation into corruption among his family, shook Korea and the rest of Asia, but drew relatively little attention in the US. The New York Times, after printing a very good overview of the political situation surrounding Roh's death, quickly moved on to other things. In China, however, the news of how he threw himself off a cliff after leaving a note for his family and supporters prompted cries of shock, empathy, and even some soul-searching in Internet forums and the press. The always dependable Chinasmack has translated several comments left by Chinese netizens about Roh's death. Many of the comments expressed admiration of Roh's honor in the face of corruption charges, standing as it did in sharp contrast with China's own miserable record on corruption. (My personal favorite: "If we here had this kind of conscience, I bet all of our cliffs would be filled up.")

And what of China's venerable editorialists? Before I started looking, I suspected that some mainstream publications would use the occasion as an indictment of Korea's democracy, and I was right. Lu Ning, writing in the Guangzhou Daily, argues that Korea's history of corruption problems and embattled presidents shows that it has too quickly embraced western-style democracy. Lu makes a point of placing Korea firmly within East Asian culture—it has ties of blood, village, literature, people—thus implicitly using its political situation as a guide for China. He does not mince words. Corruption is a part of the very soil in East Asia, he says, but more than that, a hasty embrace of western democracy is inappropriate for all countries outside North America and Europe: "We must face squarely the fact that it's not just South Korea. In East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and even all regions outside of North America and Western Europe, among all countries that indiscriminately copy and imitate western democracy and political systems … there is almost no example of [a country] that has made a smooth transition. Instead, their vitality has been sapped." (尤其不能不予正视的是，不仅仅韩国，整个东亚、东南亚、南亚、中亚甚至于北美和西欧之外的世界各国，那些照搬照抄西方民主政制模式的国家，不管其"脱胎"时间或长或短，其"换骨"的历史进程几乎没有顺顺当当的实例，而被弄得元气大伤的国家却比比皆是。)

Lu's opinion, however, is not ubiquitous. (A full description of the opinions expressed in China's countless Internet chat rooms, newspapers, and magazines is impossible, which is itself an encouraging thought.) In an editorial written by Zhou Yun and published in the Yangtze Daily, Zhou confronts Lu directly, accusing him of exaggerating the negative simply because it is so blatantly obvious. In fact, Korea's economy and society continued to develop rapidly after it became a democracy, argues Zhou, despite two financial crises and other problems. Roh's suicide will certainly damage the spirit of the Korean people, but it will not cause irreparable harm. Instead of focusing on corruption itself, Zhou emphasizes the fact that in Korea such dark practices are often brought to light: "[Korean politicians] are gradually realizing that in this kind of political system … it will ultimately be difficult to stop corrupt behavior from entering the court of public opinion." (他们会逐渐明白，在这种体制中受到的无处不在甚至"敌意"的监督下，任何贪腐行为最终都难以逃过公众的法眼。) Lu ends his editorial by pointing out that no political system is perfect, but people choose democracy because it has proven to be the best at advancing a country's economy and society, as well as curbing corruption.

Not too long ago, such bold views would not be permissible in a Chinese newspaper, and it's encouraging to see them published unhindered. What we are witnessing in this little editorial spat, of course, is not really about Korea. It is about China, and what path China's modernity should take. That is the dominant concern of modern Chinese intellectuals, and I wish them the best in figuring it out.

Remebering the earthquake

2009-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Tuesday was the one-year anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, and memorial ceremonies were held throughout the country. For my part, I stumbled on a small one in front of the Shanghai Museum, attended almost exclusively by young people. It was organized, as far as I could tell from pamphlets that were handed out, by a group of students that used the Internet to spread the word.

A moment of silence:

Lighting the candles:

At another spot, after some discussion about which way was southwest, everybody stood in the proper direction and observed three minutes of silence:

Last year, Chinese nationalism stirred up by the earthquake merged with nationalism stirred up by the Olympics and the worldwide protests during the torch relay. The Tuesday ceremony was reminiscent of that phenomenon, as many people wore clothing intended to celebrate the Olympics and to proclaim one's love of China:

The girl with the megaphone led the crowd in several vows, such as vowing to love the motherland (zuguo) and to never forget the earthquake:

Fake doorways

2009-05-08T01:31:00.000-04:00

It had to happen sometime. One of Shanghai’s most charming and interesting architectural features, the Shikumen, or Stone Entryway, has now entered the realm of the unreal.

A Shanghai Shikumen:

It really shouldn’t be surprising. Beyond its fake DVDs, fake Rolex watches, and fake Prada bags, China also has fake architecture, in the form of theme parks that recreate various wonders of the world, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids. China’s theme parks even recreate the country’s own tourist attractions. Too busy earning money in south China to make the trip to see the Great Wall? No problem: a theme park in Shenzhen has a miniature version, which not only is much easier to get to than the real wall but is easier to traverse as well, as it only comes up to your waist.

Still, my discovery of an underground reproduction of an old Shanghai street, complete with Shikumen, undated pictures of Shanghai in black and white, and, of course, shops selling fashionable clothes, led me to wonder exactly what the point was. Are people really too lazy to leave People’s Square, in the heart of Shanghai, to see some Shikumen? Are there any tourists who actually prefer cheap replicas to the real thing?

Most depressing of all is that, in the future, cheap replicas may be all we have. The current frenzy of construction and destruction in the lead-up to next year’s Expo is not an aberration in Shanghai’s recent history; it is simply an acceleration. This picture, which I took the same day I found the underground old street, has already been the fate of many of Shanghai’s wonderful Shikumen.

The Cultural Revolution in the world

2009-04-19T02:06:00.000-04:00

An exhibit of photography by Solange Brand, a French journalist, taken during the Cultural Revolution, has been getting attention from prominent blogs recently, and yesterday I stopped by to take a look. I’m glad I did: on display were some of the best photographs I’ve seen from the period, and in color!

(Photos from the China Beat)

Too often the Cultural Revolution is remembered as a kind of surreal, almost dream-like event that doesn’t seem to really have happened. It is surrounded by a chilly silence here in China, usually punctuated only by fiction or personal memoirs that don’t see wide circulation. It is also often treated somewhat abstractly—part of the official “30 percent” of what Mao did wrong. That’s why these kinds of photographs are valuable: they bring what happened down to earth.

However, what I found especially interesting was how the exhibit’s curator, Jean Loh, chose to frame the events depicted in the photographs. A blurb about the Cultural Revolution written by Loh briefly discussed the events in China, then offered an unexpected quote from John Lennon: “The sixties saw a revolution among youth, not just concentrating in small pockets or classes, but a revolution in a whole way of thinking; the youth got it first and the next generation second. The Beatles were part of the revolution.”

Why did Loh put a quote from John Lennon alongside photographs from the Cultural Revolution? The Beatles preached love and world peace; the Cultural Revolution saw the destruction of the careers and lives of millions of people, the devastation of valuable artifacts and ancient structures, and the blind vilification of foreign and domestic enemies. What on earth could they have in common?

I think Loh was getting at an insight that is really very valuable: that the Cultural Revolution did not happen in isolation; that it was part of broad transnational forces; and that it was complicit—and is still complicit—in more than what we might at first believe.

When we think back with nostalgia to the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution almost never enters the picture. Indeed, when we do think of it in relation to the period, it is usually treated as a source of shame. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 film The Dreamers, for example, is about a small group of students that sequesters itself in an apartment in Paris in the summer of 1968, where they discuss revolutionary theory and, above all, cinema. Bertolucci portrays their affinity with the Cultural Revolution as a mere distraction, diverting his beloved young people away from what should be their real concern as 1960s students—mutual love and devotion to art, which Bertolucci treats as antithetical to the regimental priorities of the Cultural Revolution. Bertolucci’s 2003 portrayal of the 1968 movement in France absolves these students from any real involvement with the now discredited Cultural Revolution.

But is it really so easy to separate the two? Nowadays it’s almost taken for granted that the Cultural Revolution was a destructive, terrifying event; and indeed it was. But it was not simply that. It also served as an inspiration for millions of young activists around the world. Its origins were ugly, but the myth that it created became an important part of the sense of possibility and change that ran through the global movements of the 1960s, movements that fundamentally changed our world.

It is certainly not my intention to offer an apology for the tragic events that occurred in China during those years. But I do believe it is worth remembering that the Cultural Revolution was an event that informed radical movements around the globe, in a period that had sea-changing ramifications in world history. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to think of it, not just as “good” or “bad,” but also as a great historical force that had a significant influence on how we live today.

Daoism and conservatism

2009-04-02T12:51:00.000-04:00

Just a quick plug for Sam Crane’s succinct dissection of American conservatives’ tendency to compare themselves to Daoists:

It's true that some Daoist sensibilities have some resonance with certain conservative ideas. Less government: the Daodejing moves in that direction. Just letting people do their things: to the extent that libertarianism is a part of the incoherent mish-mash that is contemporary conservatism, sure that's kind of like a Daoist orientation. But here's the big problem for conservatives: Daoism is not, and cannot, operate as a political ideology.

In general, I’m usually suspicious of attempts to relate ancient Chinese thinking, or any kind of ancient thinking, to modern issues. Such attempts tend to be overly simplistic and ignore the complex, and completely pre-modern, cultural, intellectual, and historical milieu in which such thinking developed. A character such as ren 仁, for example, is usually translated as “benevolence,” “humanity,” or something along those lines, but the ways in which we understand those words have been shaped by numerous historical factors that didn’t exist in ancient China.

Remembering Zheng He

2009-03-27T00:21:00.000-04:00

While in Nanjing recently I visited the Jinghai Temple, in the northwest of the city, which was built during the Ming dynasty to commemorate Zheng He, the great Chinese mariner who made seven voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, and parts of the African coast in the early fifteenth century. Zheng He is usually remembered in contrast to European explorers, whose discovery of foreign lands was quickly followed by colonization. Zheng He’s fleets consisted of dozens of huge ships and tens of thousands of men, but the most he demanded was tribute to the Ming emperor. His voyages were not the harbinger of aggressive imperialist policies, unlike early European explorers such as Christopher Columbus, whom Zheng He is most often compared with.

Such historical imagery was probably not on the minds of the British when, in 1842, they negotiated the terms of the Treaty of Nanjing in Jinghai Temple, the first of the so-called “unequal treaties” that helped cripple the Qing government. It is somewhat ironic that the beginning of European imperialism in China—and, in many textbooks, the beginning of modern Chinese history itself—occurred in a place dedicated to what amounted to peaceful exploration (even if relations between China and other states in the fifteenth century assumed a culturally superior position on the part of the Ming).

If the British missed this implicit comparison between European and Chinese maritime exploration, the Chinese Communist Party certainly did not. In one part of the temple is an exhibit glorifying the peaceful voyages of Zheng He; in another, an exhibit denouncing, in a predictably hysterical way, the imperialism of the British. A full third of the exhibit is devoted to the reclamation of Hong Kong in 1997. The Zheng He exhibit, in contrast, emphasizes the friendly nature of China’s exchanges with other peoples, though what it leaves out is as interesting as what it includes: for example, there is no mention (at least that I could find) of the fact that Zheng He was a Muslim who was captured by the victorious Ming army at the age of eleven in what is now Yunnan province, made a eunuch, and brought to the Ming court, where he gained favor with the Yongle emperor. Perhaps that would complicate the image of him as a hero of the Chinese nation.

On the wall of the Zheng He exhibit is a set of three quotes that pretty aptly summarizes how China’s masters hope he will be remembered:

孙中山：乃郑和竟能于十四个月之中，而造成64艘之大舶，载运二万八千人巡游南洋，示威海外，为中国超前轶后之奇举；至今南洋人犹有怀想当年三保之雄风遗烈者，可谓状矣。 “And so when Zheng He was able to build 64 large ships in just 14 months, which carried 28,000 people to make a voyage around the southern seas [i.e., Southeast Asia], he demonstrated to the outside world the wonder of China’s advancement; the people of the southern seas, at least, still cherish the memory of [Zheng He’s] stately bearing [雄风遗烈者].” – Sun Yat-sen

邓小平：明成祖时候，郑和下西洋还算开放的。。。。不开放不行。你不开放，再来个闭关自守，五十年要接近经济发达国家水平，肯定不可能。 “In the time of our accomplished Ming ancestors, Zheng He’s voyage was one of opening up [开放]. … Not opening up does no good. If you don’t open up, and instead adopt a closed-door policy, it is impossible to come close to a developed national economy even in fifty years.” – Deng Xiaoping

江泽民: 就古代而言，中国对外交往可以追溯到公元前二世纪的‘丝绸之路’和公元十五世纪的郑和七下西洋，这些都给我留下了深刻的印象，这说明，中华民族在历史上就致力于同各国人民的友好往来，进行文化和经济交流，共同创造美好的未来。 “With regard to ancient times, we can trace back China’s relations with the outside world to the second century BCE, when the silk road [began], and to the fifteenth century CE, when Zheng He went to the western seas seven times. These [events] have given me a deep impression, because they show that the Chinese nation [中华民族] has historically devoted itself to establishing friendly contact with the people of every country, to carry out cultural and economic exchanges and to create a glorious future for everyone.” – Jiang Zemin

American voices in China

2009-03-20T02:21:00.000-04:00

While in Shenzhen recently, I picked up the March 3 issue of Southern People Weekly magazine (南方人物周刊), whose main feature was intriguingly titled “America’s view of China.” The front of the magazine showed twenty covers of Time magazine that had to do with China—the first, I believe, from 1924, and the last from 2008. The implication was clear: Americans have always been interested in China, but what exactly does that interest consist of? What do they focus on when they look towards China?

I was expecting the feature to be a series of articles by Chinese experts on American politics and society, but I was surprised to find several pieces by well-known American writers. The familiar names included Susan Shirk, who writes about Chinese politics and recently published a well-received book on China’s rising status as a world power, and Peter Hessler, probably the best mainstream writer about China in English.

The ideas in both their articles would be familiar to those who have read their work. Shirk’s article focuses on American anxieties and expectations regarding China’s economic and political rise. She notes that many Americans fear Chinese competition and Americans often seek to impose their own value systems on China, while stating in general terms what people in the US hope to see from China: “Westerners hope to change China based on their own value systems; this is hardly a secret. Of course, we hope China will be able to develop gradually and peacefully; nobody wants China to experience a political crisis.” (西方希望按照自己相信的制度改变中国，这不是什么秘密。当然，我们希望中国能够渐进地，和平地发展，没人希望中国出现政治危机。) Her article is generally couched in these kinds of vague and general terms, but she does poke gentle, if familiar, criticism at Chinese politics: “We greatly respect the importance of stability, but to a greater extent [we hope for] what Mr. Clinton said in a speech at Beijing University in 1998: that true stability should come from below, and should be based on the agreement of the people.” (我尊重稳定的重要性，但正如克林顿先生1998年在北大演讲所说，真正的稳定应该是自下而上的，应该来源于人民的同意。)

In Peter Hessler’s article, he summarizes his experience in China and offers insights about differences between China and the US. As usual, his observations are right on the mark: Americans always think about political issues in relation to China, but Chinese people themselves often focus on completely different issues; Americans who visit China are often stunned by people’s freedom, at least their economic freedom; political change in China is the purview of Chinese people, which doesn’t only mean that Westerners shouldn’t meddle but also that Chinese people should, at some point, be more active in caring about the political health of their country: “I believe China needs political reform, but I don’t think this is America’s responsibility. It is Chinese people’s own affair, and they need to think about how to accomplish it. More contact with other parts of the world and with new ideas is beneficial. I also don’t think it’s a problem when foreigners criticize China. In America we also criticize the American government, so when Americans think China has a problem, they naturally state their views—I think Chinese people should realize this and work harder to accept it.” (我相信中国需要政治变革，但我不觉得这是美国的责任，这是中国人自己的事情，他们得自己想出解决办法。对于他们来说，更多地接触外部世界、接触新的思想是有益的。同时，我也不觉得那些批评中国的外国人有任何问题。在美国我们也批评美国政府，所以美国人如果觉得中国人有问题，自然就要说出来——我觉得中国人应该意识到并能够接受这一点。) Simple stuff, perhaps, but too little heard in this country.

Hessler also makes an interesting point about Chinese intellectuals: “It’s very difficult for me to have a close relationship with Chinese intellectuals. It’s very strange. Chinese intellectuals really care about history and international opinion [about China] … In fact, I think it’s easier for me get along with common people. … In China, there is a chasm between the intellectuals and the masses.” (我很难和中国的知识分子有密切交往。这很奇怪。中国的知识分子很关注历史，国际的观点。。。我倒觉得自己更容易被工农大众接受。。。在中国，知识分子和普罗大众间的确有一条鸿沟。)

I’m often amazed by the insights foreigners can bring to a country—Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is probably the most famous example in the United States—and I’m frustrated when Chinese people dismiss foreigners’ comments because they cannot possible “understand” China. It’s therefore gratifying to see intelligent American commentators given a voice in a prominent Chinese magazine. But the value of these foreign voices doesn’t just come from their ability to offer insights about the country that Chinese themselves may miss. It’s also useful for Chinese to gain an understanding of how foreigners think about their country—the framework in which we think about Chinese affairs.

In Susan Shirk’s article, for example, she mentions American interest in “patriotism” and “nationalism,” and talks about what these terms actually mean: “Of course, the word ‘nationalism’ has a slight derogatory implication. We always say, I am ‘patriotic,’ while you are ‘nationalistic.’ [Part of] nationalism’s inherent meaning is anti-foreign, and it can put pressure on the government, compelling it to make choices in policy that might not be consistent with the interests of the country.” (当然，民族主义这个词本身有一个略含贬义的隐喻，我们总是说，我是patriotic（爱国的），而你是nationalistic（民族主义的）。民族主义的潜在威胁是排外，它可能给政府压力，迫使它选择一些并不符合国家利益的外交政策。) Shirk is treading carefully here, but what it sounds like she’s saying is that Chinese people should ease up on their nationalistic outbursts, which often border on hysteria and which foreigners always react badly to. During such outbursts, of course, western media almost always talks about Chinese “nationalism,” never about Chinese “patriotism.” Chinese would do well to be more aware of how their “patriotic” activities are seen in foreign countries.

Longhua

2009-03-11T23:12:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I went to the Longhua area of Shanghai for the first time, which has a memorial park to fallen martyrs and a very nice Buddhist temple. Longhua doesn’t see too many tourists, as it’s slightly out of the way and is usually relegated to a secondary position in guidebooks. But both sites are worth going to: the temple is from the southern Song dynasty (parts of it are older) and is well preserved, and it is very active, with a healthy contingent of monks, in their orange robes, and a steady stream of Buddhist worshippers.

Inside the temple:

Going to the martyrs’ park next door was a moving experience. A fairly large park, it was nevertheless almost empty when I went there. A smaller area called Tiaohua within the park was used as an execution ground by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in 1927, when the Nationalist party viciously turned against communists, trade unions, intellectuals, and students, killing them in the thousands. Afterwards, a prison was built there, where political prisoners were held and often executed. Though it is now dotted with overdone memorials—huge statues, murals in the social realist style, poems in calligraphy about how brave the martyrs were, etc.—the park gets many things right. One part has many lines of small stone memorials, each with a picture of the person killed, his or her name, and the word “martyr.”

The adjacent museum has about 200 small exhibits of people who were killed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Some of the names were familiar. One newspaperman, Shi Liangcai, was machine-gunned by Chiang’s assassins on the highway from Hangzhou to Shanghai in 1934 while returning from vacation with his family. He had printed critical and well-written articles about Chiang’s government. (I first read his story in Frederic Wakeman, Jr.’s Policing Shanghai, which also gives a thorough account of the 1927 Shanghai massacre.)

Shi Liangcai:

Another figure on display was Miao Boying. A member of the communist party, she was involved in women’s issues in Shanghai, and was executed in 1929.

Miao Boying with her son:

Many faces:

It’s sometimes difficult to know how to approach such memorial sites. They are obviously used to boost the legitimacy of the communist party, but they also hold deep meaning for many people. The propaganda can be tiresome, but the figures these kinds of memorials honor aren’t responsible for that. Labeling an entire memorial, museum, or other site that deals with history as “propaganda” sometimes results in dismissing it too easily, and missing the deep resonance it can have.

For some people, it may be easier to stay away. Here is a quote from Lu Xun, written before his death in 1936:

“As for going to see the well-known place of Tiaohua, or Longhua, which is also a killing ground, I had several young friends who were killed there, so I have never gone.”

至于看挑花的名所，是龙华，也是屠场，我有几个青年朋友就死在那里，所以我是不去的。

Steven Chu, the first Energy Secretary of Chinese origins

2009-02-08T13:34:00.000-05:00

I was pleased when I learned that Barack Obama planned to nominate Steven Chu to the position of Secretary of Energy. A Nobel Prize winner, Secretary Chu has, so far, attacked the problem of global warming with vigor, emphasizing cooperation between greenhouse gas-producing countries rather than a go-it-alone attitude—a welcome change in American policy. I was also pleased for a completely different reason: Steven Chu is ethnically Chinese.

How people of any particular self-identified nation decide who belongs and who doesn’t is one of the major issues in nationalism studies, and I’ve long been fascinated by the differences in how the terms “American” and “Chinese” are defined. In China, being Chinese is generally based on race—Uyghurs and other non-Han Chinese groups aside, it’s very difficult to imagine someone who is not ethnically Chinese becoming a Chinese citizen, let alone serving as an important official in the government. This was not always the case. Matteo Ricci famously became the first Westerner to enter the Forbidden City in the early 17th century, acting as an advisor on astronomical matters to the emperor. Later Western missionaries were actually appointed to be Chinese officials: Adam Schall, a Jesuit missionary, was appointed to be the director of the Bureau of Astronomy by the first Qing emperor (one way he persuaded the Manchus to let him stay in Beijing was by telling them he was “a foreigner like you”), and Ferdinand Verbiest, following in his footsteps, was appointed to the same post in 1669.*

In dynastic China this was possible because race and ethnicity had not yet entered the definition of being Chinese; indeed, dynastic China was remarkable for its ability to pull people in from surrounding areas and integrate them into the melting pot of central Chinese culture. In the modern period, with a growing awareness of ethnicity, a racial understanding of China’s history, and the advent of social Darwinism, all that changed drastically.

There are several Chinese words that mean a Chinese abroad—huaqiao 华侨 means overseas Chinese, huayi 华裔 means a foreign citizen of Chinese origin—and there often seems to be a constant awareness of one’s Chinese origins among ethnic Chinese living overseas. Leslie Chang has written of “the pull of the village,” referring to her ancestral hometown in Jilin province; in China, news reports of Steven Chu’s appointment to be Secretary of Energy invariably mentioned his ethnic status. One such report, for example, was headlined “Zhu Diwen [Steven Chu] to be America’s first Secretary of Energy of Chinese origins [huayi].” American news reports that I’ve seen haven’t remarked on his Chinese origins at all.

It is one of those strange twists of history that it is now easy to imagine the United States having people of various ethnic backgrounds serving in its government, while China, which throughout its dynastic history was as ethnically diverse as anywhere, now defines itself largely based on race. Perhaps Steven Chu’s appointment will complicate people’s notions of what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be American. These terms, after all, are hardly set in stone, thank goodness.

*See Jonathan Spence’s To Change China for an overview of these extraordinary missionaries.

Chinoiserie tapestries

2009-01-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

At a special exhibit of European tapestries at the Art Institute in Chicago, I saw something I didn’t expect: a tapestry depicting one of the early Qing emperors, woven by the Royal Beauvais Manufacture in France, 1716-22:

The tapestry, made at the height of European upper classes’ interest in Chinoiserie, seems to be a sort of cut-and-paste of well-known motifs from Chinese culture: it looks like there’s a phoenix at the upper right, and dragons at the top. (I love European representations of Chinese dragons from this period, because they look like something St. George might fight, much different than images of the long from China itself—the translation is, after all, a bit arbitrary.) Beside the dragons are images of a couple almost-naked Chinese men sitting down—who are they? Perhaps they’re supposed to be wise Chinese philosophers. The emperor relaxes on his luxurious boat, surrounded by, it appears, slaves and concubines. And what on earth is up with those little heads on the pillars with wings coming out of their ears?

It’s always fascinating to stumble upon such brazen examples of Orientalism in unlikely places. For another tapestry from this series, have a look at this.

Who represents China from a diplomatic viewpoint?

2008-12-09T18:26:00.000-05:00

An interview with Wang Jisi, the Dean of International Studies at Beijing University, published in Japan Focus (first published in Nanfeng Chuang), is quite interesting from a diplomatic relations standpoint. Look at this point he makes:

Society in the United States is even more powerful than the government. This is its primary unique feature, and it is also an important aspect of why many countries believe that the United States is not easy to deal with. In that sense, the relationship between China and the United States is essentially one between a country and a society. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, simply having dealings with the administrative authorities in the United States is far from sufficient. It is also necessary to emphasize contacts with its Congress, business circles, the media, think tanks, labor unions, and religious circles, etc., to get them to understand China, and this is a very arduous task.

This is an interesting point—I rarely think about the difficulties other countries have in dealing with the messiness that is the United States. What about the opposite direction—whom must American officials talk to when trying to get things done in China? Who represents “China”? And more specifically, what’s the relationship between the State Department and China’s civil society?

That relationship can probably be traced back to 1988, one year before the Tiananmen Square massacre. That June, American Ambassador to China Winston Lord addressed a gathering of students at Beijing University. It was the first time an important American official broke from the precedent Nixon and Kissinger set of dealing only with important Chinese officials. Lord, who was present during the 1972 meeting between Nixon, Kissinger, and Mao, believed that a primary task of the American presence in China should be to form a relationship with the country’s future leading figures, both in the government and out of it. However, that visit to Beijing University brought a warning from Deng Xiaoping that Lord shouldn’t have met with the students. At that time, any action by the US embassy outside of official channels was heavily frowned upon. (1)

Technically, American diplomats still may not meet important Chinese figures without government approval. But things have changed a lot. In Guangzhou, for example, the American consulate holds a weekly forum in which anyone is welcome to come and hear a presentation about an American topic, often given by a diplomat. American diplomats often meet with ordinary Chinese without getting approval from the Chinese government.

In the future, the amount of access foreign embassies and consulates have to important non-governmental figures in China might be a good way to gauge the freedom of China’s civil society (through how much access foreign journalists have to people they want to interview is probably a better indicator). At any rate, I wish the US would or could treat China’s civil society with the same seriousness that Wang Jisi says the Chinese government treats ours.

(1) See About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China, from Nixon to Clinton, by James Mann.

21st century

2008-11-06T22:22:00.000-05:00

On Monday night, the night before election day, I found a copy of Hendrik Hertzberg’s book Politics, a collection of his past political writing. The last piece in the book was his post-November 2004 election commentary in the New Yorker, a reminder of the hopelessness many Americans felt after the last election. Most disturbing for me was Hertzberg’s prediction that “the anti-Bush sentiments that are manifest throughout much of the world will now transmute into fully fledged anti-Americanism.” No, I wanted to say, this is not the America of the future.

I suspect the heavy, heavy weight of the past eight years has played a big part in the incredible amount of reporting here in the US of international reactions to Obama’s victory. I doubt there has ever been so much interest in how other countries perceive an American election—a product not only of Obama’s win but also of the growing sense in the US that we are interconnected with the world. We certainly deserve a bit of self-congratulation. It’s gratifying to hear statements like, “It’s kind of nice to feel good about the United States again,” from Armando Díaz, 24, a bookkeeper in Venezuela, as quoted in the New York Times. In Dubai, Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned Arabic-language news channel, had predicted that Americans would succumb to their fear of difference. “McCain will win,” a UAE government official had said. “That is the American mentality.”

As I’ve written here before, the most exciting thing for me about an Obama presidency is its potential to reinvigorate the United States as a moral power. People who have been trained to believe that the American population is ignorant, racist, and imperialist have now seen it elect an internationalist black man whose middle name is Hussein. This is not to discount the significance of racism and imperialism in the history of the US. But it does serve to remind the world that America is a young country, and we are not hopelessly mired in any tradition or cultural trait, even one so seemingly intractable as racism.

People’s reactions to Obama’s win have not always been satisfying. Another New York Times article reflects our need for admiration from outsiders, so common in countries that are experiencing an outpouring of nationalism:

There is another paradox about the world’s view of the election of Mr. Obama: many who are quick to condemn the United States for its racist past and now congratulate it for a milestone fail to acknowledge the same problem in their own societies, and so do not see how this election could offer them any lessons about themselves.
In Russia, for example, where Soviet leaders used to respond to any American criticism of human rights violation with “But you hang Negroes,” analysts note that the election of Mr. Obama removes a stain. But they speak of it without reference to their own treatment of ethnic minorities.

In China, it remains to be seen whether the American example will spur critical self-reflection about the political situation there. There are indications that it will and indications that it won’t. “The Opposite End of China” blog posts this e-mail from a Chinese acquaintance:

Congratulations on Obama's successful run for president!! I have been constantly amazed as I follow the elections along the way. What an achievement it truly is... no doubt he'll help restore America's image around the world. At the same time I can't stop comparing. I can't envision a ethnic Tibetan, Uygur, Hui, or Mogol [sic] gets elected President of China, not in 60 years... that's how far apart the two countries are, in terms of maturity in political institutions.

This is the kind of thing we love to hear. Similarly, the BBC ran a quote from an anonymous Chinese:

American elections have shaken me to the core. I have always thought the Chinese
political system is the best in the world, but it is not so. We are deprived of our sacred rights, rule of law and human rights are trampled upon. To have a democratic system like the one in the USA is more difficult than touching the sky... But we long to achieve freedom and democracy, which is a difficult task for us young people in China.

(See the China Beat for more quotes about the election from China. See here for more feel-good quotes from people around the world. See ChinaSmack for interesting comments on the election from Chinese online forums.)

Perhaps most interesting are indications that Chinese who are happy with the status quo are nervous about the American election inspiring people in China. News site Izaobao recalled the late 19th century and early 20th century, when Chinese officials went to the US to observe its political process. According to a translation of the piece by the Wall Street Journal,

The results of those experiments were less than favorable… — the fall of the empire, warlordism, civil war, etc. Factoring in that experience as well as 100 years of growth, [the site] asks, which approach remains wiser? A fuller embrace of what it calls “the false games of the bourgeoisie?” Or the low-level village elections that China has in place?

Izaobao seems to be implying that history has shown it’s dangerous for China use the American political process as a model. This is certainly a common idea in China, and one frequently hears that implementing American-style democracy would result in chaos and instability. I generally agree with this argument—American-style democracy works well in America precisely because it is thoroughly American—but I think it usually goes too far: rejecting American-style democracy doesn’t mean you have to reject free speech and a gradual development towards some sort of representation.

At any rate, Obama’s presidency holds out the possibility that America’s power in the world will indeed be based on moral might, rather than economic or military might, in the 21st century. For many, this country is already becoming, once again, an inspirational force instead of a terrifying one.

Displacement

2008-10-16T11:21:00.000-04:00

If you happen to be in Chicago these days, you may want to take a look at the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago. It currently has a small but interesting exhibit of four artists that deals with the Four Gorges Dam in Sichuan, and its effect on the surrounding population (which, it must be noted, is just about all Western commentators seem to care about when it comes to that monumental project).

I thought the most interesting artist at the exhibit was someone named Ji Yunfei, a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Beijing. His painting, called “Water Rising,” was a long, thin canvas that crept along the wall, wrapping around the corner of the gallery. It played off one of the most persistent themes in the history of Chinese art: landscapes.

Landscape painting, which became widespread during the Tang dynasty and gained popularity in the Song dynasty, has had different meanings for different painters. It’s sometimes represented a kind of alternative, idealized setting from chaotic dynastic upheavals and other political catastrophes. For Buddhists and Daoists, landscapes have been a place of retreat, an escape from the world. A more modern reading of landscape scenes seeks to tie the essence of being Chinese to China’s geography; in a passage about his painting displayed at the museum, Ji Yunfei invokes this idea.

Detail from "Water Rising"

For Ji, such a drastic man-made alteration in the nation’s geography goes to the heart of what China is. His beautiful landscape, with a quiet lake, a peaceful mountain, and beautiful, jagged trees, is covered with the detriments of a population displaced. Rubble litters the landscape, and the people, whose skin and clothes seem to blend in with the land itself, stand in hesitation, not quite knowing what to do. This village, once a place of peaceful retreat, has been targeted by the outside world.

Another one about US politics

2008-10-06T19:06:00.000-04:00

Well, I’m back in the US, and what’s more, everybody’s doing it… so here’s another post about US politics.

Probably the most interesting quote I’ve heard so far during this presidential campaign was on NPR, from a democrat in Virginia as she wrestled with her own feelings about Obama’s ethnicity. The woman had voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary, and she said something along the lines of: I don’t know about racism, but I’m just afraid that he’ll be supporting his own people, and he’ll just be doing things for his own people. “His own people”—of course this is racism, and the opposite of what she fears is precisely what civil rights activists have been fighting since the dawn of the United States: that white presidents—as well as a white Congress, a white Supreme Court, white mayors, white governors, white businesspeople, and every other kind of white person with any kind of power—have tended to support their people, to the detriment of blacks and other ethnic minority groups.

In the past, exploiting this kind of fear would have easily won the Republicans the election. The fact that they haven’t been able to do that represents true progress in this country. Every election is a referendum not on any candidate but on the electorate, and the American electorate, if the polls are to be believed, is finally willing to elect a black president. The fact that Obama—who grew up in countries other than the United States and whose middle name is Hussein—is ahead of a white, experienced, well-liked (at least up until a month or two ago) war hero politician is simply stunning.

Race has been strangely ignored during this campaign, at least on the surface. But it’s always present in American politics, and it will continue to be present for a long time to come. However, even if McCain wins the election, change is coming. White people will be a minority in the US within the next 30 years or so, and the Republican party—whose contemporary incarnation was largely forged out of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement—will change if it wishes to remain a viable political force.

Racism is not a clear-cut issue, and it runs through nearly every facet of American society, in the north as well as the south. Many people forget, or have never learned, that Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago—a thoroughly northern city—and was horrified by the racism he saw there. Neighborhoods in American cities still have clear boundaries, and most white residents would probably admit, if only to themselves, to being more intimidated by a black man on the street late at night than a white man. I sympathize with the woman mentioned above, and I admire her for voicing her fears. Confronting one’s own racism is something most Americans are not yet capable of doing.

10 October: After publishing this post I read a fascinating article by George Packer that deals with the hidden presence of race in the current election. It includes this passage:

[In Ohio, Obama's] name often evoked a sharp racial hostility that was expressed without hesitation or apology.

These were not views that many Americans had been willing to reveal to reporters. For obvious reasons, neither Obama nor McCain wants to address the conjunction of race and class in this election. The national press corps—which more and more confines its political coverage to politicians, campaign officials, strategists, and itself—has often discussed the role of race in the campaign, but the conversation is inevitably softened by euphemism. Americans accustomed to discussing race politely, or not at all, might follow the campaign without a real sense of the potency of skin color.

Turns out the intertwining of race and class in US politics (whose history up until the first Bush is pretty well laid out in "Chain Reaction" by Thomas and Mary Edsall) is not quite as dead as I had hoped. But, as Packer's article shows, people are more aware of it, and there's an active effort to combat it.

Questioning the Olympic project, part 2

2008-08-16T10:59:00.000-04:00

In a previous essay, I wrote that the Olympics makes us question the symbols and values of modernity by forcing us to ask whether the host country is “ready” to become modern. I used examples from the 1988 Seoul Olympics to show how commentators in 1988 looked at factors other than economic advancement to determine Korea’s progress.

The phenomenon of using the Olympics to judge a non-western country’s modern progress has been even more striking in China. At a press conference in Beijing with Giselle Davies, the IOC’s director of communications, the question of what exactly constitutes “progress” was on stark display:

Channel 4 reporter Alex Thomson: “I’m asking whether you’re embarrassed [about the Chinese government breaking its promises to expand human rights and press freedom before the games]. I’m not asking about how well the games have been run or how wonderful the venues are. Are you embarrassed?”
Giselle Davies: “We’re very pleased with how the organizers are putting on a good sporting event. That’s what this is [about]… the organizers have put on an operationally sound games for the athletes.”

The back-and-forth proceeded along these lines, with Davies focusing on operational success and Thomson focusing on human rights and press freedom. Similarly, when Wang Wei, a BOCOG official, said, “The whole world can see how China is progressing,” his emphasis was on what can be seen: infrastructure, operational aptitude, venues, the visible signs of economic progress.

China’s two bids to host the games have both generated this kind of tension about the meaning of progress. When China first bid to host the Olympics in 1993, there was an immediate uproar about the country’s human rights abuses. At the same time, some Chinese were concerned that China’s economic advancement wasn’t far enough along to successfully host the games:

"I don't think we're ready for it," said Wu Xiaoyong, a consultant for the World Bank in Beijing. "The infrastructure and general service level is not up to requirements. It would certainly be a great honor to host the Games, but it would be better if we waited until we were really ready." [1]

China’s failure to win the bid in 1993 left much bitterness among many Chinese, who believed they lost because of protests from the US government and unfair preferential treatment of Sydney.

Unsurprisingly, the language surrounding China’s 2001 bid focused on whether China was ready for the Olympics—but what was meant by “ready” varied widely. Tom Lantos, a Democratic politician in the US, said in a statement on July 8, 2001:

China's leaders have argued that politics should not taint the delegates' deliberations and that each finalist should be subject only to technical review to determine which city has the best sports facilities, transportation systems, hotels and other material resources needed to carry out a successful Olympics.

But turning a blind eye to the egregious human rights violations taking place every day in China does not remove politics from the Olympics—it permits an authoritarian regime to exploit the Games to prop up its faltering legitimacy by gaining an important symbol of acceptance from the international community. The I.O.C. should reject China's bid and protect the Olympic ideal.

China should earn the Games not because of its ability to build world-class sports sites and manage a massive event, but by virtue of its commitment to upholding the Olympic ideal.

In fact, Olympic officials sought to assure skeptics like Lantos that the Olympics are a positive force, and can even spur an authoritarian country to adopt democracy and improve its human rights. The memory of the Seoul games was important in this regard, as many observers argued that the 1988 games had pushed Korea’s democracy along. There were other promising factors: in China’s first bid for the games in 1993, it had released Wei Jingsheng, a well-known dissident, from jail six months before the end of his sentence in an act of goodwill.

Jacque Rogge, who in 2001 was a Belgium delegate to the IOC and is now the IOC president, has always supported China’s bid. When China won the bid in 2001, he and other IOC members believed the games would bring more human rights to China: ''I think the message was that the IOC wanted to open a country that represents one quarter of mankind and had never organized the games before,” said Rogge. François Carrard, another IOC official, had a similar opinion:

Some people say, because of serious human rights issues, “We close the door and say no.” The other way is to bet on openness. Bet on the fact that in the coming seven years, openness, progress and development in many areas will be such that the situation will be improved. We are taking the bet that seven years from now we will see many changes.

For its part, China quite explicitly promised that its human rights record would improve. Yuan Weimin, China’s minister of sport at the time, said,

Like all countries, China has certain areas where something is left to be desired. [As China further opens to the world in preparation for the Olympics and for its expected entry into the World Trade Organization, economic progress] will bring along advances in culture, health, education, sport and, not least of all, corresponding progress in human rights causes. [2]

It is likely that Yuan was sincere in his hope that China would improve its human rights situation, and Rogge and Carrard probably really believed the Olympics would help in this regard. That they were wrong—due to shifting power structures within the Chinese government, an upsurge of Chinese nationalism, increasing defensiveness to Western criticism, and a variety of other factors—is the root of the frustration that Alex Thomson, the Channel 4 reporter, expressed in his harsh questions, as well as frustration elsewhere.

It remains to be seen what path China’s vision of modernity will take in the future, and whether the Olympics will have any real impact on that vision. The country’s current intense nationalism means things probably won’t change for a while, and the games have seriously undermined the credibility of the IOC and, of course, the Chinese government in the eyes of those of us who care about human rights.

What about Beijing impact on the Olympics itself? When IOC officials talk about “Olympic values,” what exactly do they mean? In 2001, human rights were clearly included in those values, and privately, some IOC officials now express regret that Beijing was awarded the games. Publicly, they have a different message: Giselle Davies’s comments above focus on infrastructure and the successful operation of the games, and link those factors to “Olympic values.” We must hope that the Beijing games haven’t changed those values for good.

[1] Michael Breen. “China’s ‘very confident’ on its bid for 2000 Olympics; but Asian giant’s rights record may harm its chances.” The Washington Times, 17 September 1993.

[2] Quotes from Rogge, Carrard, and Yuan are from: Jere Longman. “Beijing wins bid for 2008 Olympic Games.” The New York Times, 14 July 2001.

Georgians and Russians in Beijing

2008-08-12T23:20:00.000-04:00

News about the conflict between Georgia and Russia has understandably been relegated to secondary news in China. Many people haven't even heard of the war. It's perfectly understandable—why take attention away from the Olympics, which China has been looking forward to for seven years, to report on a conflict involving a country many Chinese haven't even heard of? And, of course, the conflict could involve some unpleasant questions for the Chinese government (which would certainly come down on the side of Russia if pushed), as it might attract attention to China's own problems with separatists. (The Chinese news I've found about the war hasn't mentioned any reactions from Chinese officials.)

However, the background of the war has led to one of the only truly feel-good moments of the Olympics: an embrace by the silver and bronze air pistol medalists, one from Russia and one from Georgia. Isn't this kind of thing supposed to be what the Olympics is all about?

Notes: the opening ceremonies and Bush

2008-08-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

I think it’s fair to say the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony took live special effects to a whole new level. The giant unfolding scroll, the Olympic rings that lifted off the ground: the government certainly spared no expense. The ceremonies can hardly be said to be purely “Chinese”—the organizers must have culled technical talent from around the world, under the skilled directorship of Zhang Yimou, a very international auteur. But the impressive level of organization and the strong desire to put on an amazing show were the driving forces behind the spectacle.

As for the content, it seemed to be pretty much the same stuff that big shows at important Chinese events always have, except more so. There was the glorification of Chinese culture (paper, writing, kung fu) and painfully blatant attempts to legitimize the Party (the minorities, in their costumes, carrying the CCP flag and handing it to soldiers). There was the huge number of performers doing random things as if they were filled with meaning, like beating on drums while moving their heads in a certain way, as if this stuff was somehow traditional. And there was the cringe-worthy presence of cutesy kids, singing songs and walking with Yao Ming.

At any rate, the best part of Olympic opening ceremonies is always the long march (no pun intended) of the athletes. To me, it’s one of the most moving representations of our nation-state system: each contingent, in equal standing with all the others, marching behind its flag. The looks on the athletes’ faces make it obvious how ecstatic and proud they are. It’s one of the first images that come to my mind when I imagine diversity without hostility.

President Bush was in the bleachers, looking relaxed and maybe slightly bored. He’s received a lot of flak for his decision not to boycott the ceremony, as well as for his sometimes inconsistent attempts to address human rights and other issues (especially his number one standby, freedom of religion, which of course mainly means less control over Christians). From the New York Times:

Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, who is closely monitoring China’s handling of the Games, said that the president’s speech [at the opening of the new US embassy on Friday] underscored “this administration’s peculiar combination of cowardice and ineptitude in raising these issues directly and effectively with the Chinese leadership.”
She noted that Mr. Bush opted to criticize China while in Thailand, not in China, and that while he met five well-known Chinese dissidents in exile at the White House, he had not publicly spoken out about current political prisoners.
“His administration will receive myriad suggestions about how to improve rights in China but not act on any of them,” she said in an e-mail message. “They will, on the rare occasions they feel compelled to, offer some predictable platitudes about religious freedom being good for China, and they will turn around within a day and subordinate those interests to trade or security imperatives.”

Bush is walking a tricky line. In the US, there tend to be two main political camps when it comes to China: one advocating greater engagement, and one advocating a tough stance. The latter is a mixed bunch, who all have their own agendas. Neoconservatives are concerned with power balances and tend to get hung up on China’s status as a “communist” country. Then there are those who, like Sophie Richardson above, are predominantly concerned with human rights.

It should be clear that taking a consistently hostile stance towards China would be disastrous. You don’t have to know a lot about Chinese nationalism to realize that such a stance would whip up fervent anti-Americanism and boost legitimacy for the Party. On the other hand, staying quiet on issues of human rights is also not an option for a country that seeks to change its image to that of a moral power (a difficult feat, but we’re working on it). Given these complications, I generally think Bush’s treatment of the situation was mature and well thought out. Long ago he pointed out that boycotting the ceremony would be seen in China as a direct affront to the Chinese people. At the same time, in his speeches he made some important points that got to the heart of the Chinese government’s recalcitrance: that China’s leaders should not fear free expression, and that it would, in fact, make the country stronger. His visit included criticism of China’s human rights problems at every step: prior to leaving the US he met with several well-known Chinese dissidents, and he made his points at every speech about China (which drew ire from the Chinese government). His presence at the ceremony unavoidably gave legitimacy to the Party, but he tried to mitigate that effect as best he could by making his reservations clear.

Anyway, enough editorializing. The surge of madness that was the opening ceremony has ended, and it’s retreated to sort of simmering exhilaration, one that won’t end until the closing ceremony. Enjoy the games.

Beijing 2008 and Seoul 1988

2008-08-07T20:36:00.000-04:00

I have an essay up at the China Beat, called "Questioning the Olympic Project: Lessons from Seoul."

It looks back at the 1988 Seoul Olympics to highlight parallel themes that are once more making an appearance in China.

You can access it here.

Olympic fatigue, part 2

2008-07-30T21:15:00.000-04:00

A New York Times article published today tells how the IOC had no choice but to give in to a Chinese ultimatum to censor journalists’ Internet access to certain webpages during the Olympics. There’s a mood of depression and cynicism setting in among those of us who are following the prelude to the Games. Visas are heavily restricted but the Beijing events are sold out: the audience will be mostly Chinese. The news about Olympic preparations in China is all positive, the news abroad is mostly negative. I feel like the Olympics are mainly for the Chinese; everyone else is shut out; who on earth is making these xenophobic decisions? There must be some kind of debate going on inside the government: between those who have lived abroad and understand the hole the country is digging itself into, and those conservatives who don’t understand how Westerners think and who don’t want to relinquish their control. It’s a real shame the latter seem to be winning out.

This quote from an anonymous IOC official, published in a previous Times article, says it all:

Had the I.O.C., and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract, known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics.

Olympic fatigue

2008-07-22T09:31:00.000-04:00

The Olympics are still more than two weeks away, and already I'm sensing some Olympic fatigue.

My own annoyances are both petty and easy to document. For one thing, pirated DVDs are now difficult to find! Another is that the police are paying more attention to foreigners. They’re actually stopping us on the street and asking to see our passports—the law stating foreigners must always have their passports with them has long been on the books, but has rarely been enforced. I also got a personal house call from my friendly local policeman. I guess waiting a few months while they checked out my background, getting a health check, being interviewed by my news company's local handler (for the press card), being interviewed by some toughs at the public security bureau (for the press visa), and registering multiple times at my local police station wasn't enough—they had to send someone around to check on me as well (who proceeded to copy down information from my press card, which one would assume he would already have, since the card was issued by them). I asked him if he was paying me a visit because of the Olympics, and he said, “No, it's for your safety! It's to protect you!” Classic.

But Olympic fatigue from Chinese is much more interesting than my own silly squabbles. Today I had a chat with a workmate in Beijing on MSN (we talked in English and it's mostly unedited):

I just feel weird that it seems the whole country's preparing for the games, everybody~~~but r we really connected to the games...... I mean, its just sport....it should be fun, relaxing..... but see BJ right now.....even missiles around the famous 鸟巢 [Bird's Nest]....what the hell~~~ok, we should protect the games from terrorists.........but its not that fun now.

It seems that we should [be connected to the games] ...the government makes me feel that I should get myself prepared for the games as a host who lives in BJ… it just makes me nervous ... not fun and interesting as i expected… these slogans~~~you can see them everywhere in BJ…. like "give the world a smile"...something like that~~~i may be too emotional....but what if I don't wanna give a smile?

I think this attitude is a symptom of the immense controversy that has surrounded the Games, and the realization by many Chinese that the Games are politicized—not just by foreign protesters, but by the Chinese government as well. In my opinion, the Chinese government, with its absurd insecurity, is more to blame for this souring attitude than foreign protesters (though protesters' glee in disparaging China, and their unwillingness to listen to intelligent Chinese opinions, is sometimes sickening to behold). The government is too anxious about how it will look to the outside world, so it puts up signs outlining in amusing detail how one should behave towards foreigners.

It seems that many people didn't realize the Games have always been politicized and always will be politicized. They just viewed the Olympics as China's chance to show its modernity off to the world, and to be a good host to foreign guests and to the foreign gaze. My workmate expressed some profound sadness about the path the Games have taken:

[I feel] like i wanna hold and host a party~~~as the host, I surely want this party to go well....but I also wanna have fun—that's the reason why i wanna hold a party......if it was not that fun to me, it failed me.

Natural disasters and national formation

2008-07-06T02:30:00.000-04:00

When Premier Wen Jiabao visited the Beichuan Middle School in Sichuan soon after the May earthquake, he wrote “Numerous hardships make a nation strong” (多难兴邦), a Chinese aphorism, on the school’s blackboard. The phrase was quickly quoted throughout Chinese media, and the blackboard itself was even preserved, along with Wen's calligraphy. But what of the saying itself? The latest issue of Chinese National Geography includes an interesting article that explores the background of the saying, arguing that it is rooted in the idea that the Chinese nation was fundamentally shaped by the experience of natural disasters.

The article (which is an editorial and hence unsigned) harkens back to the first famous natural disaster in China: the floods that Da Yu, the mythical founder of the Xia dynasty in the 21^st century BCE, struggled to control. The author argues that the fact that Da Yu, whose great contribution was flood management, is credited with founding China demonstrates the importance of natural disasters in the makeup of the Chinese nation: “The reason we wanted to found a nation-state (民族国家) was to safeguard ourselves—to combat foreign aggression and to resist natural disasters.” Da Yu, the author writes, was the founder (奠基人) of the nation-state because “one of the most important missions [of the nation-state] is to combat natural disasters.”

This idea has several implications. First, it reinforces the notion of historical continuity and progress, vital preconditions in conceptualizations of nation. The author argues that Chinese history is comprised of an unbroken series of natural disasters, which challenged the Chinese nation and made it stronger, forcing it to progress. This process is evident from the beginning of recorded Chinese history—one of the main preoccupations of the Shang oracle bones was predicting when and where natural disasters might strike (a preoccupation that was certainly seen throughout dynastic history, such as Zhang Heng and his famous seismometer)—and has continued until today:

A culture needs to confront challenge after challenge. In the process of standing up to challenges, [a nation] will have true leaders and the whole country will become united. Only then will there be enough impetus for culture to continue to develop and progress…. It is precisely because the Chinese nation (中华民族) was successful in confronting so many natural disasters that it was able to continuously safeguard Chinese culture over 4000 unbroken years.

Second, the idea of natural disasters as a vital part of the Chinese nation offers a partial explanation for the (alleged) powerful unity of the Chinese people by closely linking the national body and its geography. Focusing on the Warring States period to illustrate this point, the author agues that the problem of surviving natural disasters was a significant factor behind the ideal of eventual (re)unification that ran through the period. The author uses famines as an example: if one of the seven states of the period was suffering a famine, it would look towards one of the other states for relief. That such relief was rarely forthcoming strengthened the desire for unity. “Natural disaster after natural disaster forged the most important thing for the Chinese people—a united national consciousness,” the author concludes. “A baptism of blood and fire that lasted for thousands of years resulted in the obtainment of this priceless treasure.” This is why the Chinese people value unity so much: “I believe an important reason why the idea of unity has so deeply entered the marrow of the Chinese people is natural disasters.”

The article also points to the future, offering the certainty of future natural disasters as a reason to continue civilizational progress. In so doing, the author makes a subtle but interesting comparison between Japan’s handling of natural disasters and Da Yu’s. The author points out that in Japan, another very earthquake-prone country, the numbers of deaths and toppled buildings caused by earthquakes have diminished. “The real tragedy is that, even though we [here in China] have seen earthquakes again and again, we still pay the price of massive numbers of dead. [In the latest earthquake] we saw how school buildings collapsed while buildings standing beside them were safe and sound. We must admit that our civilization has a problem.” (Something many readers will know is that many of the buildings that survived the earthquake were government buildings; anti-corruption measures might therefore be part of the author’s vision of national progress.)

How has Japan managed to lower its earthquake casualties? By following Da Yu’s example, the article implies. “[Da Yu] treated flood control as a long process, a process that, though it had many difficulties, was nevertheless on the whole unremarkable…. The essence of Da Yu’s flood control efforts was that natural disasters are part of normal life.” The author writes that natural disasters create many short-term heroes, but Da Yu, though his efforts were not dramatic, was a long-term hero because he labored over many years to create a strong infrastructure against the potential of natural disasters. Again, while not saying so explicitly, this remark perhaps points to media coverage of the Sichuan earthquake, which focused on the individual heroism of rescuers but often failed to address the larger problems of poorly-constructed buildings, the frequent ineffectiveness of government response, and other issues.

Numerous hardships may make a nation strong, but intelligent safeguards represent true progress. The article ends with a final exhortation: to build a statue of Da Yu in front of an earthquake museum in Sichuan. The implication is that Da Yu’s example, if less dramatic, would be far more useful than the image of countless soldiers clawing through rubble with their hands.

Back in the States

2008-06-22T20:05:00.000-04:00

Back in the States, little things have popped out at me that, in China, are front-and-center. The customs officer at the airport was ethnically Chinese and said his family was from Shanghai; he earnestly asked me if I thought Chinese people are friendly and seemed relieved when I said yes. The official NBC store in New York had Beijing Olympics souvenirs on a couple of small shelves alongside shirts for Friends and 30 Rock, as if it was just one more event alongside those shows, and not the most important thing ever to happen ever.

New York, as always, is full of big, delightful surprises. While walking down Sixth Avenue yesterday I saw a big parade with various immigrant groups displaying their cultural dances, clothes, and flags. There was a group representing dear Colombia…

And sparkling Thailand…

And there was an especially large contingent of flags from countries that are controversial or formally nonexistent, such as Puerto Rico…

South Vietnam…

Taiwan…

And Tibet.

…Including a map that would raise fists as well as eyebrows back in China.

These last groups, especially the latter, were not just interested in showing off their “culture”: they had an agenda. Pro-Tibetan activists weaved through the crowd, handing out pamphlets. Thankfully I didn’t see any Chinese nationalist protesters, as they have a reputation for violence when confronted with those with whom they strongly disagree. I did, however, see evidence of their insecurity earlier in Minneapolis, at the University of Minnesota. Stretching across the Mississippi is a bridge that connects the east and west banks, and the two sides of the campus. Along the bridge is an indoor passageway, presumably used mainly during Minnesota’s biting winter. And along the sides of the passageway student groups had posted information about themselves—a nice visual celebration of campus life, which is, after all, really just one small but very active civil society.

Included in the lineup was a group advocating for a free Tibet. The group had appropriated the Olympics slogan “One world, one dream” (could Beijing have come up with a slogan easier to use for various purposes?) to advocate for a free Tibet, the implication being, I suppose, that every nation in the world had a right to its own state. A passer-by, however, clearly couldn’t handle even this small act of defiance, and vandalized the sign by writing “No free Tibet” and “Tibet will never be independent.”

Pro-Tibet protesters can, of course, be just as irritating and ignorant as Chinese nationalist protesters. But the deeper point is that they may say whatever they like and they may wave whatever piece of cloth they want to. I like the fact that, here, these issues are simply incorporated into the larger milieu of opinions, and no one is privileged within the general discourse (in theory at least, and, to a sometimes surprising extent, in practice as well). The country is made up of thousands of little issues, all the more striking after living in a place where a couple of “big” issues are crammed down your throat day in and day out.

Next week back to China and the media meatgrinder.

Among women in Minnesota

2008-06-15T00:14:00.000-04:00

I’m in the States at the moment and, for reasons I won’t go into, I’ve found myself tagging along at the Berkshire conference on the history of women, held at the beautiful University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Most of the conference participants are women, as can be expected, though I don’t see why this should necessarily be the case in the long run—many panels deal with issues that would fascinate historians who don’t primarily focus on women’s history. At any rate, it has been very interesting to learn more about the field.

I’ve gravitated towards panels dealing with Asian women’s histories, but the most exciting talks were in a panel included in the conference at the last minute, entitled “Clinton and Obama: Historians Reflect on Historic Candidacies.” Yes, this blog does deal primarily with China, but I am in the U.S., I am excited about the election, and it is a personal blog after all, on which I can write about whatever I wish! But I promise it will not turn into a blog about American politics.

The auditorium in which the panel was held was overflowing; it was one of the most extraordinary presentations I’ve ever seen. Picture this: a roomful of extremely intelligent, extremely knowledgeable, extremely well regarded feminist American historians. Many have an activist background; their speaking skills are forceful; they have something to fight for. They delve deep into the workings of the primary season that has just come to a close.

Most were furious at Hillary Clinton, though all were excited about how far a woman (and a black man) managed to get in the political process. Here’s a list of some of the points they brought up that I made note of—I just wish I could replicate the energy in the room and the forcefulness of the argumentation.

American media often cast the democratic primary contest as “gender vs. race.” This is a false dichotomy and harmful to the overall progressive cause. In addition, media coverage has revealed much misuse and misunderstanding of terms like “gender”—people say gender when they mean sex. Americans don’t have a sufficient understanding of categories of analysis when it comes to gender conceptualizations.

Jesse Jackson has frequently been invoked in the media and by politicians such as Bill Clinton as a warning—he has been painted as a candidate purely of black grievance. That is false; in reality he had wide support and won several primary contests.

While Hillary Clinton was able to rouse people based on gender (though she didn’t base her campaign on a feminist agenda), Obama has been reluctant to rouse people based on race—he wants to avoid the appearance of an angry black man seeking power, as that would scare people away. He partially succeeded in working through this problem with his remarkable speech on the complexities of race in America. In addition, he largely succeeded in depicting a non-threatening masculinity, though in the process he worked to separate himself from “blackness”—if he were darker or if he were more closely associated with activist black politics he would not be the Democratic candidate for President.

Very few people know of women who have run for President, but there are several—Shirley Chisholm, Margaret Chase Smith, and many, many more. Why have they been so ignored in histories of American politics? Students have said that men have many presidential role models, but women don’t—this should not be the case. There is severe ignorance about the history of female presidential candidates in the latter half of the twentieth century.

While the glass ceiling has been cracked (as Clinton said) or shattered (as Obama said), it will be difficult for future women candidates to gather the same kind of resources that Clinton had at her disposal. However, the barrier has been breached, and a woman President is now more of a normative concept.

Many participants voiced appreciation that John Edwards raised the class question during the primaries. That is often a hidden issue; in this election, there has been a “gender question” or a “race question” but class has often been left out, a common feature of American politics. One participant speculated that Edwards may have asked Obama to work on class before endorsing him.

Hillary performed well as a woman pretending to be a man. The “masculine mystique” has become a very important discourse in American politics, especially since 1964: Reagan and Bush succeeded in deploying it, while Dukakis (riding in the tank) and Kerry (windsurfing) were depicted by their opponents as non-masculine. In the 19^th century presidential candidates did often include “domesticity” in their images, such as being good fathers. This is still present to an extent, but has been overridden by “toughness.” Hillary made passing the “masculine test” her top priority with her focus on the military, the red phone ad, etc. But she got left behind when Obama did well in deploying an anti-war message. The next female candidate for President should challenge the masculine mystique itself, and focus instead on a humanist message. (As one participant put it, “George Bush-like men are not helpful for the environment and other living things”—why should we subscribe to that kind of tough masculinity?)

Finally, a participant said that America is a “sick country” and we still have an enormous amount of work to do. I would note, however, that discussions about race, gender, and other social issues in America—discussions such as this panel itself—are remarkable in their depth and their vitality. Coming as I do from working in journalism in China, where the media and intellectuals are, publicly at least, deathly silent on issues such as minority rights, race, and gender—“everyone is happy and everything is fine, just fine”—the vigor of the debate in the U.S. is stunning. We have come so far, and though we have a long way to go, intellectuals like the ones I heard at this panel don’t make the future depressing, they make it exciting.

Moving forward

2008-06-08T22:33:00.000-04:00

During an internship I once did at an American consulate in China, a disheartening experience was walking through the doors each day and seeing three faces smiling down at me: Bush, Cheney, and Rice (though Cheney’s wasn’t a smile so much as an attempt at a smile). The harm that the Bush presidency has done to America’s image around the world was often most acute in its embassies and consulates. Occasionally it was almost a palpable feeling; at some functions it hung in the air like a noxious fume.

Now that a change in those three portraits can finally be glimpsed over the horizon, and now that the primaries have finally wrapped up and we’re getting down to the general election, I’ve been thinking more about why exactly I support Obama. This blog is as good a place as any to unpack my reasoning—which, as should be evident, is not unconnected to my experiences in China.

An ideal scenario is already impossible. I wish McCain had won the election in 2000, served for eight years, and a Bush-like character—perhaps the Decider himself—would now lose in 2008. I like John McCain—I think he’s honest and a healthy product of American politics. This election is a contest between two qualified individuals who are both closer to the mainstream than they are to their parties’ extremes. That is, after all, what American presidential elections should be like—it would be fine if either candidate won, unlike in 2000, in which the election results led to a disastrous presidency and immense harm to America.

But McCain is less fine than Obama. He represents insider politics, he supported key aspects of Bush’s policies that he simply shouldn’t have, and he’s an old white man. In theory that last point shouldn’t matter—if we’re truly supposed to be colorblind, shouldn’t race not be a factor? Shouldn’t we concentrate on the issues and not on race or age, which are merely symbols and are meaningless to good governance? Probably. But the fact is that race and age do matter. What is politics if not symbolism? The good that actually gets done usually happens away from the spotlight; now more than ever the vital role of the President is not as bureaucrat but as inspiration.

I don’t care much about “the issues.” McCain and Obama are candidates of major political parties in the United States. We basically know how they will behave when it comes to specific policies, and we can become familiar with excellent debates about the important issues in American politics (especially domestic ones) by reading editorial pages and by watching West Wing. Obama is remarkable not because he really has anything new to say but because he is so interesting and so exciting, an opinion shared not only at home but abroad as well. Jeremiah over at the Granite Studio recently wrote about those who are skeptical that Obama can win because they don’t think Americans are capable of getting past the racial factor. Another, perhaps subconscious, reservation is the miserable weight of the Bush presidency. How can a population that elected someone like Bush—and it did legitimately elect him in 2004, even if many votes were cast out of fear—turn around and choose someone as vastly different as Obama?

If it does, and if the doubts that Americans can get past race are overcome, it will be a terrific blow in favor of the United States’ work around the world. This is the root of my support for Obama—America’s reputation internationally. Domestic politics will change slowly and with legitimate input from many groups. That’s how American politics is designed to operate, and that kind of gradual change has worked well for us. But internationally, the President and his foreign policy will really matter. If Obama is elected we’ll show the world that we aren’t willing to put up with torture, arrogance, and hubris. We’ll show the world that we are one of the few countries that are mature enough to elect someone of not just a minority but an ethnic minority, the clearest of them all. We’ll show that our political stability enables us to peacefully enact a sea change in worldview and personality in the most powerful institution in the country, the office of the President. And by getting serious about issues like human rights and the environment we’ll show the world that we can be—we want to be—a responsible member of the international community.

In short, we’ll take a giant step forward in restoring America’s moral authority, which will be all-important as the global power structure shifts in the coming years. The United States’ best hope is not to be a preeminent economic or military power but a moral one. Its power will decline but it can find a new role for itself in its moral weight. In argument after argument with Chinese nationalists, they bring up the legitimate point that for an American to criticize human rights abuses or mistreatment of minorities is deeply hypocritical. The best counter to this is that we’ve succeeded in working through many of our problems through open and uncensored discussions in our civil society, but an Obama victory would show that we’re truly serious about moving forward. Remarkable leaders have been vital in the United States' historic rise; they will be equally vital in its decline.

Like much of the world I look forward to the coming campaign, and like many Americans I look forward to casting my vote for Obama in November. Most of all, I look forward to seeing his face on the wall the next time I walk into an American consulate. That'll be a smile I can believe in.

Thoughts about the earthquake

2008-05-19T21:52:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we had a three minute silence for the earthquake victims, as ordered by the State Council. Everyone stopped working, and on the street people stood in silence and cars stopped on the road. Cars blew their horns and the city set off its air raid sirens. It was really a remarkable display of united grief.

Many people logged off MSN for the three minutes as well, and put a little rainbow in front of their MSN names. (In parenthesis: Why has MSN become such a medium of showing your loyalties and your fervor for China? It’s sometimes overdone: If you don’t have a heart, you don’t love China! MSN is a new way of enforcing the mass line—and one that only targets those who have access to computers.)

This disaster is especially heartbreaking because of the sickeningly high number of schools that collapsed. There have been some tough questions about why those buildings so easily fell down. Government officials are making a public display of indignation. Hopefully something will actually be done. Fate is so cruel—if the earthquake had happened one day earlier, those kids would not have been at school.

All over Shanghai, donation drives are being held in parks and on the street. The names of people who donated to earthquake victims are posted in each neighborhood in Shanghai, with the least amount donated at the bottom of the list and the most donated at the top, and people really stop to inspect them. This may be an effort to ward off corruption, but it also seems kind of rotten to make how much you give public information.

Enforced mourning—you see it in many forms. Last night on TV, every station—every station—showed earthquake news (as ordered by the government). No soap operas, no movies, no other news that I saw. It was really striking. In a country with over 1.1 billion TV viewers, in a culture where most families turn on the TV in the evening as a matter of course, and leave it on, it was impossible to escape this news.

There was also news about Western coverage of the earthquake. (Only in insecure China is there news exclusively about news!) I found myself watching clips from CNN and Fox last night, with the Chinese anchors remarking how all the world is sorry about the earthquake. (Watching Fox again, even for just a moment, made me remember what a disgusting station it is—the Fox anchor was oohing and aahing and sighing. It’s CCTV’s rival—who can most handily disseminate propaganda?)

All the unfettered coverage is of course a remarkable event for China, and, as many have pointed out, it really shows how far China has come since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. What is truly encouraging is that a couple hours after the quake, the government ordered Chinese journalists not to travel to Sichuan to report on it—instead, the news would go through state media—but many journalists just ignored the order. Later, the government changed its mind. Perhaps the message is finally getting through that free media makes a country stronger, not weaker. Even the Myanmar government seems to be paying attention: the leader of the junta recently pulled off a Wen Jiabao and went to the hardest-hit areas to commiserate with the victims, and the country is now letting in more aid. Thank goodness China didn’t follow the route of Burma. Seeing the two disasters side by side—one with real relief efforts and mostly unfettered media access, the other driven by pride, selfishness, and stupidity—emphasizes how far China has come since 1976.

The state and the war hero

2008-05-06T12:09:00.000-04:00

Recently I saw two war movies, one from my country of origin and one from my country of residence: Flags of our Fathers, Clint Eastwood’s remarkable interrogation of wartime narratives of patriotism; and Assembly, Feng Xiaogang’s sympathetic look at the horrors of China’s civil war. Flags is about that famous photograph that is engraved in the memory of just about every American: a group of soldiers hastily raising the American flag above the battleground of Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood’s objective is fairly clear. He explores the background of the battle itself, displaying its messiness and showing how a narrative of heroism was built around it. By doing so he undermines the kind of simplistic patriotism that is often constructed during wartime; his movie is starkly different from the films about the “good war” that we are used to, and it is a testament to how far war movies have come in America.

Assembly came out a year later and deals with roughly the same time period. The setting is China in 1948, during the war between the communist party and the nationalist party. In its own way, Assembly is also a testament to how far war films have come in China: the Chinese civil war, when it is dealt with in popular entertainment at all, has in the past depicted the Guomindang as villainous. In Assembly, the Guomindang is hardly dealt with at all. Instead, the film focuses on a captain on the communist side, Gu Zidi, who leads his unit in a desperate struggle against advancing GMD forces. In the ensuing battle everyone is wiped out except him. The second half of the film is set after the war; it is taken up by Gu trying to gain recognition for his unit’s sacrifice and bravery.

It is striking to view Flags alongside Assembly, because the films are starkly different in how they depict the relationship between the state and the war hero. In Flags, the state is an intrusive, disruptive force. The soldiers have their own private experiences that a simple narrative of bravery couldn’t possibly encompass. The government seeks to use their painful experiences for its own ends; the film explores how subjective and messy experiences can be appropriated for the needs of the nation-state.

In Assembly, however, the war hero’s subjectivity is intimately bound to recognition by the state. In the second half of the movie, Gu goes to great lengths to achieve that recognition. Because he is the only survivor of the battle it is difficult to corroborate the story of his unit’s fight. He tries to find evidence of his soldiers’ heroism, including traveling to the battleground, which has since become a coal mine, and digging until he finds the remains of his comrades. Perhaps the film’s most powerful scene is when the state finally gives him the recognition he needs by putting on an official ceremony and pinning a medal on his chest. In Flags such ceremonies are depicted as hollow and meaningless; in Assembly, it is the pinnacle of Gu’s quest, and lets him live out the rest of his life in peace.

It would be possible to argue that this kind of depiction of the state in Assembly comes from the stiff control the communist government has over public discussions of its wars, and that if given absolutely free rein, Feng Xiaogang would have done it differently. This is no doubt true, to an extent. But as several sources have pointed out, including this blog, state-society relations are extremely different in China than they are in Western countries, and these two films’ depictions of the influence of the state reflect their different historical sensibilities. Both films are products of their locales. To put it much too simply, in America state/society relations are often characterized by tension, and in China they are often characterized by linkage.

The different frameworks of state/society relations that these movies depict lie behind the impression many Chinese have these days that Western critics are out to get China. They also lie behind the shock many Westerners feel when they realize that even Chinese who have access to various points of view are stridently nationalistic. I’m not sure how these misunderstandings can be cleared up—often the two sides seem to be talking past each other rather than with each other—but perhaps watching more movies is a good place to start.

Made-up words

2008-04-25T14:51:00.000-04:00

This little passage has been making the rounds among the Chinese nationalists who, instead of simply boiling over with anger, are also seeking to find a reasonable response to Western criticism (this translation copied from here):

We tried Communism to equalize; you hated us for being Communists.
Now we embrace free trade and privatize; you berated us for being mercantilist
(And since you made up that word, you must know what it means, as we don’t).
Halt! You demanded: a billion-[point]-three who eat well will destroy the planet!
So we tried birth control, then you blasted us for human rights abuse.

The passage succinctly demonstrates the intense frustration many Chinese have with foreign criticism of and interference in their country, a frustration that goes back more than a century. The type of nationalist anger we are seeing now first clearly manifested itself in the May Fourth Movement that started in 1919, when, to the fury of Chinese nationalists, the Treaty of Versailles failed to give China territory and benefits Chinese thought they deserved—and, to make matters worse, privileged Japan. Many of the same themes exist in the current nationalist uproar as in the May Fourth Movement: a focus on youth as the driving force of resistance, a feeling that foreigners are ganging up against China, an intense anxiety that China will be carved up and her sovereignty violated, solidarity with Chinese diaspora scattered around the world, and, finally, frustration at the inability of the Chinese state to successfully resist foreign criticism.

After all these years, and after all of the misery China has gone through, one can sense a certain weariness among Chinese nationalists. China has simply tried its best, the argument goes. Give it a break!

The root issue is that no one—not foreigners, not Chinese—is really sure what China should become. Gorbachev once made the trenchant observation that the root of the Cold War was America’s desire for Russia to become a “normal country.” But who defines what a “normal country” is? Chinese frustrations stem from the fact that it has, since 1978, attempted to become “normal,” but that goal is highly ambiguous. It has developed its economy according to the guidelines of modernization theory and liberal economics. It has opened the country to foreigners, and it allows its citizens to travel abroad. It has raised an estimated 300 million people—the size of the United States—out of poverty. It has, for the most part, stopped interfering in people’s private lives. Still the criticism continues. The conclusion that many Chinese draw is that the West is merely afraid of China, and its criticism is driven by jealously and anxiety.

It is difficult for Chinese to work through the ambiguities of modernity because of the intense control of public and intellectual dialogue that exists in the country. Western intellectuals have of course become severely disillusioned with modernization theory and the modern project; in the 1990s, Chinese intellectuals began to critically examine China’s newfound embrace of liberal economics as well. Yet these ideas have little opportunity to seep into mainstream discourse. When the New York Times publishes its critical articles about China, which often focus on poverty, environmental degradation, corruption, connections between government and capital, widening gaps between rich and poor—in short, the pitfalls of capitalism—it is drawing, if unconsciously, on a massive intellectual base that is severely disillusioned with the promises of “modernity.” In China, that intellectual base has little opportunity to make itself known in public discourse.

The lack of public discourse has also created misunderstanding about how Western media works. Yes, much Western media is heavily biased against China. Yes, Cafferty’s remarks on CNN were hostile and ignorant—as American commentators’ remarks so often are. But to extend that hostility and ignorance to all Western media demonstrates profound unawareness of the complexity of free media. Stupid people may voice their opinions just as freely as anyone else; it’s the process that's important.

Indeed, after seeing nationalist fury unfold around me it’s become clearer than ever that the key to a healthy civil society (not that that term is free of Eurocentrism either!) is unhindered public conversation. In the 1950s during the anti-Communist hysteria surrounding the McCarthy hearings, the United States was united in its nationalist zeal. Over time, however, as people calmed down, the media and intellectuals began to question what had happened, and where they had erred. Americans worked it out for themselves, and American civil society became stronger as a result. Much of the hysteria in contemporary China comes from the inability of people to work out their issues of nationalism, modernity, progress, and all the complexities of contemporary life on their own, in a free and public discussion. No one can say what the definitive meanings of those terms are. What matters is the process of trying to find out.

Love China love China love China

2008-04-17T10:24:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday morning on the bus, I caught sight of the headline of a newspaper over someone’s shoulder: “CNN must apologize!” Oh no, I thought. What’s happened now? At work I turned on my computer and thought I had stumbled onto some kind of strange cult. Nearly every Chinese person on my MSN list had a “(heart) China” in front of his or her name. One workmate logged on and thought her computer had a virus.

Every major Chinese newspaper in the country had the same headline story: Cafferty, a CNN commentator, has insulted the Chinese people. He called the Chinese people “goons” and “thugs.” He must apologize to the Chinese people.

Naturally, there was no mention of the CNN statement emphasizing that Cafferty was, in fact, talking about the Chinese government, not the people (which is abundantly obvious to anyone who is familiar with these American right-wing anti-China folk). There were no interviews with any Americans, who might have mentioned that CNN, and other mass media news stations, are full of such angry, hostile commentators, and they frequently make angry, hostile statements—and that, in fact, there is other Western media besides CNN. No editorial brought up the fact that Cafferty made his statement last week, and was only now being reported—could this not indicate a sudden purposeful campaign to drum up anti-Western sentiment?

Such propaganda is nothing new in China. What was really disturbing, though, was the extent to which people bought it. Educated people who had traveled abroad were saying things to me like, “If he comes here, he’d better watch out!” Some people expressed a mere love for country, but no one considered the timing. Loving your country is no evil thing, but the circumstances of this outpouring of patriotism belie its good intent. Blind, manipulated patriotism that is fueled by hatred and misunderstanding is something every country can do without. I, as an American, know that all too well.

Though there’s no reason to have expected it would be any different, I can’t help but be shocked at the government’s treatment of the whole situation. Is it really a good idea to be stoking anti-Western sentiment on the eve of the Olympics? Doesn’t anyone realize that this violent show of nationalism is scaring people away? Is that what Chinese people really want?

On my MSN list, one brave Chinese friend had something different: “(heart) United Nations.” I’ll end with a cynical comment from him (he wrote in English, and I straightened it up a bit):

Me: Did anyone get mad at you for not putting "(heart) China" [in your MSN]?

Him: Of course not, nobody cares. Chinese are sometimes united, but a plate of sand most times. I’m Chinese, I’m not betraying my motherland, nobody intends to. You know, if China becomes enlightened, it will be the same, no matter how modern it appears.

Graying hair

2008-04-13T12:15:00.000-04:00

An editorial in the New York Times on Sunday by Matthew Forney asks why educated young Chinese have an “unquestioning support of their government.” Forney writes, “The most obvious explanation for this is the education system, which can accurately be described as indoctrination.” Yet if this is the case, why are the most fervent young nationalists educated youth, most of whom can speak English, and many of whom have traveled abroad? Whenever youth rise up in any country, it’s common to claim they are “brainwashed” by some higher power—just think of reactions to the 1960s protests around the world—but such a simplistic explanation is way off the mark. It implies that China’s nationalists can’t think for themselves, and it implies that they are being effortlessly manipulated by China’s leaders.

In thinking about why Chinese nationalists wholeheartedly support their government when it comes to Tibet, it would be more helpful to think about the framework in which that support is expressed than to focus on some kind of indoctrination. Arguments I've had with Chinese nationalists display a deep-seated sensitivity towards criticism by outsiders. To expats it is clear the government is a liar and a cheat. But what is really infuriating is not the government itself, which merely provides a handy focus of irritation, but people’s reactions to it. After all, everyone in China knows the media is controlled, but few people care when it comes to Tibet.

Of course the government dissembles, hides truths, stokes nationalism, and all the rest (thinks the American visitor)—that’s what governments do. The idea of the Bush administration governing during the last seven-plus years without strong, reasonable voices in the media countering government mistruths is so horrifying that it’s impossible for many Americans to contemplate. Yet in China, visitors from the United States encounter just that kind of one-sided correlation between government and civil society. Jeremiah Jenne, among others, has pointed out that the contemporary Chinese relationship between the state and civil society is very different than it is in Euro-America—in China, the “state” and the “people” (both very slippery concepts) are often conflated. In the U.S., however, they are constantly in tension. (That’s why Americans often find the idea of communism—in which the government always and automatically acts in the best interests of the people—so wacky). When an American in China makes a complaint about the Chinese government, she expects a local to either agree or disagree—that is, to engage in a debate within the framework of civil society/government tension. She assumes that the “state” and the “people” are separate, and a member of the latter can choose to agree with the policies of the former, or not. When, instead, the Chinese person becomes offended that a foreigner is criticizing “China,” the debate often descends into simplistic arguments about which country is “better,” and the poor American finds herself trying to defend her country’s politics, which is certainly no easy feat.

Thus during the snowstorms at the beginning of the year many Chinese were quick to point out the atrocious American response to Hurricane Katrina. During the Tibetan protests, many Chinese brought up historical American treatment of Native Americans or African Americans (but, I should add, never American treatment of Japanese during World War II—that’s one I’m still waiting to hear). Indeed, China’s relationship to Tibetans has a lot of similarities to the United States’ treatment of Native Americans. Both minorities have been thought of as uncivilized and of needing strong support to progress. In fact, China’s treatment of Tibetans is undoubtedly better—Tibetans, after all, were not forced to leave their land, and they are afforded many social privileges that Han Chinese do not have. Of course, if China’s argument rests on the idea that it treats Tibetans better than the United States treated Native Americans, well, it’s difficult to think of fainter praise.

One of the biggest political differences between the U.S. and China, then, is not the relative benevolence of the two countries’ governments—both have dark pasts and presents—but the ability and willingness of people in those countries to question their governments in the face of obstinacy. In fact, there is no reason to think that, if there were a free press in China, the country would continue to see such one-sided discourse. Historically, this has certainly not been the case, and it is often not the case now. Chinese intellectuals are extremely vibrant; many have spoken out against Chinese policy in Tibet; and, more generally, a large part of the most exciting critical research on contemporary China has been produced by Chinese. Yet these intellectuals have no voice in popular media. Instead, they are replaced by shrill nationalists and pseudo-political scientists who take umbrage whenever a foreigner remarks that, just maybe, the government might be wrong.

My biggest desire is that people on both sides of the issue settle down. Sometimes I have to remind myself to do so as well. I remember something a Middle East politics professor once said in relation to his own topic of anguish: "I worried about Lebanon for years and years," he told us. "But all it got me was a head of gray hairs."

The Ministry of Industry and Informatization

2008-04-05T01:40:00.000-04:00

A recent pair of jeans came with a label with a girl in pigtails wearing jeans, a bra, and big, square-shaped glasses. She gives the camera a disdainful glance: she’s a rebel. The label says, “L.d.s. denims. Retro funk. How is the female body shown to SEXY and GLAMOUROUS, or is it felt? WE propose the foundation of GLAMOUROUS LIFE.”

I love these kinds of ads. You can find them everywhere in China: on shirts, on billboards, on bags. Chinese advertisers use their limited English to translate from Chinese, and expats spend a good chunk of their time making fun of them. Usually it’s possible to figure out what the advertisers wanted to say, but sometimes it’s not. (Another favorite says: “BLOOK. God continent row blook. God continent numerous blook. All kinds of blook IP. Move zone.” That’s an advertisement for phone cards, isn’t it obvious?)

Stores will spend vast amounts of money making huge, elaborate signs with atrocious English. In a central part of Shanghai, where thousands of foreigners walk every day, there’s an ad for tourism to Heilongjiang with absolutely terrible English grammar. The prominent location must have cost a bundle: couldn’t the advertiser have taken five minutes of his life to go on the street and ask one of Shanghai’s thousands and thousands of foreigners whether the English was correct? Even top government institutions make these kinds of mistakes. When talking about the telecom industry, the government uses the word “informatization” all the time, which makes perfect sense in Chinese (信息化 xinxihua), but not in English.

At bottom, Chinese ads, in Chinese, are just as stupid as American ones. They use the same tricks: pretty girls, flashy graphics, the assertion that everyone’s doing it! But when they’re translated to English, they become silly, and their purpose is starkly clear, enough to make you cringe. “WE propose the foundation of GLAMOROUS LIFE”: for an English speaker, it’s obvious what they’re trying to do—make you think these pants will make you glamorous—but it’s so silly that it fails miserably.

Because of their (unintended) ability to reveal the tricks and the absurdity that lie behind the logic of advertising, Chinese ads in English are extremely useful. Capitalism in China is more immature than in the U.S. and other advanced capitalist countries, so it is easier to spot marketing strategies. Advertising here, after all, uses the same underlying strategies that accompany consumer capitalism in advanced capitalist societies (just go to the business section of a Chinese bookstore to see where businesspeople are getting their ideas), but when it is done so badly, the silliness is exhibited in full. I’m reminded of an interesting argument in feminist theory, which says that pornography can serve a useful purpose because it puts underlying societal gender relationships on stark, cringe-worthy display; these ads do the same for the logic of consumer capitalism: advertisers must appeal to us in the most simplistic, egocentric ways, invoking our need to feel good about ourselves. Chinese advertisers use the same logic as American advertisers, but do it badly, thus rendering it obvious, funny, and, in a way, harmless.

Kill, kill, kill

2008-03-18T12:42:00.000-04:00

On news.sina.com.cn, a popular Chinese news site, readers can leave comments at the end of stories. While looking through the reader comments of a “news” story entitled “The Dalai Lama clique’s efforts to destroy Tibetan social stability are doomed to fail,” two friendly little cartoon police officers trotted across the bottom of my screen and saluted. The java cops informed me that I should “Stay far away from obscene pornography. Advocate a civilized Internet. Refuse to look at vulgar content. Carry forward harmonious progress.”

“Obscene pornography” is clear enough. But vulgar content? What was on my screen, on this mainstream news site, was some of the most vulgar content I've ever seen on the Internet.

Below is a translation of the first screen of the comments that came up on my computer this evening, out of thousands and thousands. I didn't pick and choose the “best” ones, I just translated all the ones on the screen. Some are typically nationalistic (and quite easy to unpack from a historian's point of view); some are simply shocking; and some, like the long one below, may have been written by government big brothers. It would of course be foolish to generalize this sampling as “typical” of China. But it is striking how widespread it is—I've noted the province where each comment originates—and it is surely a scandal that the Dalai Lama and his “clique” have close to zero sympathy in China. On a scale of hating the Dalai Lama to sympathizing with his cause, extremely few Chinese are past the stage of apathy.

The page is obviously censored (meaning absolutely no pro-Tibet comment would get through), but it's shocking that the censors allow so much violent language (from a government that constantly tells its citizens to avoid violent (and pornographic) websites). Reading this, it makes sense why so many Taiwanese are weary, and frightened, of the prospect of unification.

In fact, it's interesting how many of the comments mention Taiwan, even though Taiwan has nothing to do with the current protests in Tibet. For these kinds of Chinese nationalists, all “splittists” are the same: they want to divide the nation, and they should be condemned.

I changed some of the punctuation to fit more closely with typical English style. Some of the phrases sound a bit silly in English—in Chinese they’ve achieved normality in their ubiquity, but I'm not sure if they’re any less silly.

坚决镇压！格杀勿论！
Firmly suppress! Kill on sight with the authority of the law! (Hunan)

我们不怕 - 因为我们是一家人
We are not afraid - because we are all of the same family. (Jiangsu)

杀
Kill (Xinjiang)

对分裂首要分子，严惩不贷，杀无赦
As for the splittist ringleader, [he should be] punished mercilessly, and killed without mercy. (Ningxia)

在打击藏独和台独的势力上,要不惜一切代价,维护祖国的统一,怕啥啊!!!!!!!!!! 有十几亿炎黄子孙做盾牌,我就不信了撒!
When it comes to attacking the influence of Tibetan and Taiwanese independence movements, [we should] not hesitate for any price to safeguard the homeland's unity, fear nothing!!!!!!!!! When over 1 billion descendants of Yan Di and Huang Di [that is, Chinese people] are a shield, I don't believe they could be scattered! (Guangdong)

就一个字“杀！”，这些混球，胆敢乱我中华，杀无赦！杀无赦！
There is only one word, "kill!" These no-good bastards dare to cause chaos in my China, kill without mercy! Kill without mercy! (Sichuan)

中国是一个爱好和平的发展中国家，广大的人民在和平环境中享受着自由和民主，应该好好珍惜这个来之不易的社会环境，刚刚结束的两会又给我们的发展规划了美丽的蓝图，西藏是一个民族问题早已有之的地区，是我们国家重点扶住的经济不发达地区，刚刚建成的进藏铁路，就是对未来西藏的发展起到积极作用的举措。
我们的国家正在进行经济建设，只有强大的经济和国力，我们才能稳定和安定，达赖一直以来以和平为幌子以西方国家的价值判断，破坏我们的安全，这种民族败类是我们整个民族的大敌，只有我们保持了高度的警惕，保持了高度的团结，保持了高度的凝聚力，才能彻底的措败达赖的阴谋。

China is a loving and peaceful developed country, a vast people in a peaceful environment who enjoy freedom and democracy, [and should] truly cherish this hard-earned society. The just-concluded National People's Congress has given us a beautiful development blueprint. Tibet is a region with an ethnic minority problem that has existed for a long time; it's a region whose economic development is supported by our country, [for example] the recently finished railroad is an important and positive development for Tibet's future.

Our country is currently building our economy, it has a formidable economy and national strength, and we are stable. The Dalai Lama has continuously used peace as a pretense towards Western countries to destroy our country's security. This kind of minority group scum is the great enemy of our whole nation. We must simply maintain high alert, maintain strong unity, maintain strong cohesion, [and only then] can we thoroughly defeat the Dalai Lama's conspiracy. (Sichuan)

坚决维护祖国统一!对于分裂分子,我们应当坚决予以回击!
Resolutely defend our homeland's unity! As for these splittists, we should resolutely counterattack! (Sichuan)

坚持维护国家统一
Resolutely defend our homeland's unity. (Hebei)

该关就关,该杀就杀,不能手软!
If we must close then let's close [?], if we must kill then let's kill, we mustn't be softhearted! (Shaanxi)

分裂分子就是要杀无赦统统枪毙
The splittists should be killed without mercy. All executed by shooting. (Hunan)

镇压台独，藏独分子。不能手软
Repress Taiwanese and Tibetan independence activists. Don't be softhearted. (Liaoning)

向在此次事件当中受伤的武警，公安致敬!!!
For the police who are in the middle of this situation and have been injured: pay tribute to the public security [forces]!!! (Jiangxi)

坚决维护国家的安全和统一，反对任何分裂国家的企图
Resolutely defend the homeland's security and unity, oppose any scheme that tries to split the country. (Shanghai)

坚决维护祖国统一,反对分裂分子,严惩叛乱分子,绝不手软!!!!
Resolutely defend the homeland's unity, oppose the splittists, severely punish the armed rebels, never be softhearted!!!! (Anhui)

团结!
Unite! (Sichuan)

维护国家的统一是我们每个中国人的职责!
Defending the country's unity is every Chinese person's duty! (Beijing)

杀光这些危害国家稳定的贱人们！
Kill all these sluts who are harming the stability of the country! (Hainan)

对暴乱闹事的坏分子必需严惩,不能手软!
It is essential to severely punish these rebellious evildoers who are making trouble, [we] cannot be softhearted! (Henan)

坚决打击,绝不手软,露头就打,不留一丝喘气的机会.
Resolutely attack, never be softhearted, [when they] emerge, immediately attack; do not leave behind one opportunity [for them] to keep breathing. (Sichuan)

杀,杀,杀.
Kill, kill, kill. (Zhejiang)

Debating that damn diaspora dilemma

2008-03-08T21:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I was in a taxi with a couple friends. One of those annoying screens was in my friend’s face – the kind that is attached to the back of the passenger seat and is impossible to turn off (though you can sometimes turn the volume down). I have resorted to covering the damn thing up with a piece of paper when the going really gets tough (such as in one travel show, particularly painful, where a Chinese interviewer asked an American tourist in a European country who was eating some fried street food if she was worried about her weight). Anyway, our taxi’s TV was showing a kind of game show. One of the contestants was a Chinese-American, and he described himself as American. “Oh no!” said my friend (who is Chinese). “He is Chinese, not American!” She proceeded to get rather upset about this, while the two of us looked on, rather bemused. Apparently she was offended by a number of things, including: 1) He opted to describe himself as American rather than Chinese; and 2) His mother apparently didn’t teach him to love his homeland, as she should have done. The idea that someone born and raised in the U.S. should not call himself an American is strange to me; to her, that a (ethnic) Chinese person would not call himself Chinese is what is strange.

As can be expected, the discussion turned to what exactly she believed a Chinese person to be (as far as I could tell it boiled down to race), and, subsequently, what an American believed an American to be (not an easy topic to sum up, but suffice it to say that, for me, inclusion into the “nation” of America does not rely on homogeneity but, to the contrary, includes and embraces diversity).

Chinese newspapers will periodically publish editorials or pseudo-reports exhorting overseas Chinese to come home and help the motherland. However, it is important to remember that the inclusion of the Chinese diaspora in the Chinese nation is not a new phenomenon. Its origin can, at least in the way we understand it today, be traced back to the late 19^th century, when Sun Yatsen and Kang Youwei battled for support from overseas Chinese, especially in America, for their respective nationalist projects (revolutionary versus reformist). During this period Chinese intellectuals were working out just what the Chinese nation was exactly (a never-ending question, but a lot more contested then than it is now), and overseas Chinese were appropriated into the narrative (the fact that many of them were wealthy and could contribute to various revolutionary or reformist projects certainly had something to do with it). What did it mean to be “Chinese” and why were overseas “Chinese” included? Race was a big determinant, and much of the concept of race that became so important in Chinese nationalism had as its origin European notions of social Darwinism and racial superiority. The linkage of geography and nation was important as well. These aspects of Chinese nationalism have been extremely well documented and I won’t get into them here.

One thing I do want to mention is a point that another (Chinese) friend brought up: the Chinese idea of hometown, which, I believe, is much older than the 19^th century, might have also been fused into the messy conceptualization of “nation.” The Chinese word for hometown, laojia, doesn’t really mean hometown, at least not the way English speakers understand it. For me, my hometown is Muncie, Indiana, because that’s where I grew up. For a Chinese person, her laojia is the place of her ancestors, meaning she might never have set foot in it at all. (Wenlin, a Chinese dictionary, has this definition for laojia: “1. Native place; old home; one's original home. 2. Hell.” I’m really not sure how to interpret that last definition. Too much time with the in-laws?) Your laojia is not simply where you grew up. It’s where your grandparents grew up, or even older generations: it is the geographical home of your family. It’s possible that this idea of “hometown” worked its way into the Chinese idea of nation, and into the modern meaning of “homeland” (zuguo).

If local ideas such as laojia did find their way into Chinese nationalism, that might change the scope of the debate somewhat. I do think that, when discussing Chinese nationalism, historians sometimes put too much emphasis on ideas of nation that, more or less, originated in Europe, and it might be worthwhile to spend more time thinking about concepts of community that survived past the dynasties. Only one thing is certain: as a stimulant of lively conversation, those unbelievably irritating TV screens on the backs of passenger seats just might have some use after all.

Beijing

2008-02-19T23:05:00.000-05:00

We arrived in Beijing on the evening of Feb. 6, the first day of the Spring Festival. Walking to our hostel was like walking through a war zone. As midnight approached, the city became increasingly ablaze with fireworks (and remained so for several days afterward). There weren't many people on the streets where we were walking... just people setting off an absurd amount of fireworks. The cars didn't seem to care, however. They drove right through the blaze.

I think Peter Hessler is a great writer, probably the best non-academic writer about China I've encountered. However, I've always had trouble relating his stories about China, most of which take place in Beijing or other parts of northern China, to my own experiences in the country. Officials were constantly bothering him, people were always arguing with him about nationalism and which country was better, the US or China. He befriended a Uighur dissident, and was thrown out of hotels numerous times because he was a foreigner or had a reporter's visa. People argued with him about politics. Why did this stuff so rarely happen to me?

When I was in Beijing I had a taste of his China. (I'd been there before, but just for a couple days when I first arrived in China a few years ago.) The city is much more restrictive and tense than Shanghai and other parts of China I've been to. One hotel hadn't yet received a license, apparently required of hotels in Beijing, that would allow them to accept foreign guests. A hostel wasn't allowed to let foreigners and Chinese share a dorm room. The government is too on edge: for the latter restriction, I suppose they're afraid of foreigners telling Chinese about all the things the foreign media obsesses over: human rights, environmental degradation, censored media and internet, the massacre at Tiananmen. Chinese people often have only the vaguest notions of these things, if they do at all, and the government wants to keep it that way.

I realized even more the potential for the Olympics to be very, very ugly. Picture this: on one side, thousands and thousands of foreign reporters entering China (about 20,000, I believe). The ones who are new to China will have brushed up on the country with any news they can find; in foreign reportage, especially in North America, Europe, Australia, etc., that means human rights, censorship, tainted goods, the environment: all the things that the international press loves criticizing China about, and that Chinese people themselves have little idea of. None of these reporters will be content with accepting the news the press conferences give them, or conducting interviews the government sets up. All will work to find the "hidden story" behind what the authorities are telling them—what they're trained to do, and what they will be inclined to do in the midst of the intensely critical attitude foreign journalists typically take towards China.

On the other side, the government. In China, newspapers and other types media all have an appointed censor working with them in their offices. They practice self-censorship; if they don't, heads roll. Things are not as tight as they used to be, but any severe deviation from the party line can mean serious consequences. This is what the government is used to, and it has shown no sign of relaxing its attitude. Recently there has been a crackdown on dissidents, or even on those who simply seek to point out small problems on blogs (a crackdown that the New York Times, and other media, covered with glee). Many of those who will be in charge of dealing with the press have displayed very little knowledge about what foreign reporters will be like; they don't seem to be aware that they may be asked tough questions. (Many such people are members of the communist party, and CCP members are often encouraged to stay in China for their education instead of traveling abroad.) Unless the government decides to change its Internet policy, people will come to China and discover that Wikipedia is blocked, Blogspot is blocked, the BBC is blocked, Voice of America is blocked, and many other sites. In Beijing foreign tourists will confront arbitrary restrictions in relation to hotels, like the ones I encountered, as well as other types of sensitivity. Athletes will stay outside of the city to avoid the pollution and will bring their own food. Meanwhile, the myriad of international groups that are constantly struggling against the Chinese government—people advocating a free Tibet or a free Xinjiang, Taiwanese nationalists, Falun Gong activists, those who want China to put pressure on Burma, Sudan, etc.—will work harder to make themselves heard, and the media will pay more attention to them.

Hopefully I'm exaggerating, but I think the Olympics will be ugly to one extent or another. I fear the recent decision of Stephen Spielberg to drop out of the Olympics, and the subsequent (relatively limited) frenzy, is only the beginning. My advice to all parties—reporters who are out to get China and government officials who panic in the face of criticism:

Take it easy!!

Shanghai sweets

2008-01-28T03:35:00.000-05:00

"Ha!"

That's what I have to say to those who claim Shanghainese like sweets (and I mean it to sting). While it is true that one can find things with more sugar in them than in other parts of China, Shanghai "sweetbread" is a bland mess, candy is decidedly unsweet, and the "cake" here is like cake in much the same way that cardboard is like cake. "Cheesecake" is usually frothy nonsense, and don't get me started on ice cream bars. If I want beans I'll eat beans; if I want ice cream, I won't eat beans.

That's why, when you do find real western goodies, they are inevitably aimed at expats, and thus on the pricy side. Still, on special occasions it is important to indulge.

I was therefore pleased to discover a delicious cake on sale at a bakery chain called "French Croissant" near my apartment. It is more or less a big strawberry shortcake, with yummy brownie and plenty of strawberries. The brownie was moist and choclatey, and the strawberries fresh and sweet. Now I know how Howard Carter must have felt when he discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun.

The ice cream dilemma is not just limited to beans. The local supermarket does have two flavors of passable ice cream (vanilla and chocolate), but for true delectability, one must venture into the scary realm of Hagen-Dazs. Ice cream is supposed to be a sloppy treat obtained from an ambling ice cream truck, or while strolling on a summer evening. In Hagen-Dazs, it is a luxury. A single scoop costs a small fortune, and waiters, clearly trained to be polite to the foreigners, are alarmingly attentive.

Food, I think, is one of the biggest cultural obstacles. That is to say, it's easy to eat lots of things, even if just once. But when you're hungry, the first thing you think of are the things you grew up with. I now prefer to drink warm water over cold, I take showers at night, and I don't think twice about using chopsticks. But when the first thought to enter my mind when my sweet tooth is acting up is a nice, fat, luscious red bean popsickle, I'll know a small Indiana town can never be called home again.

Window views

2008-01-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the mammoth gap between posts! Below are some notes about what happens outside my apartment window. Also, check out this post I did for my friend Andrea's site, which is also about Shanghai neighborhoods: Inside Shanghai's city blocks

Every now and then on a Saturday or Sunday morning I’ll be in my room and suddenly I’m under attack: loud bangs come from outside, the sound of bombs falling and guns shooting. I rush to my window and see someone in a suit sprinting across the street as a loud bang and flash of light explode behind him; car alarms start blaring and little explosions pop in the air at eye level or above, among the electric wires and clothes hanging out to dry. Another man in a suit films the whole process, a big grin on his face, as a nice black car slowly makes its way towards the carnage. When it arrives the groom jumps out and opens the bride’s door; sometimes he carries her inside one of the apartment buildings as everyone smiles. Afterwards the remnants of the fireworks lay scattered on the ground: black, charred cement and little red pieces of burnt paper.

I’ve never been to a Chinese wedding but they look like a lot of fun. The fireworks were originally meant to scare away evil spirits that might be lurking around the couple’s doorway; other traditions include drinking copious amounts of alcohol and eating heaps of food. There isn’t much of a formal ceremony in a Chinese wedding. It’s mainly just one big party. An expensive one, though: I read recently that the average Chinese urban wedding costs the family around RMB 100,000, quite a lot considering the urban salary for someone in his or her lower twenties is around RMB 3,000 a month.

Another common site outside my window at night is a big bonfire, with a few people huddled around it throwing in clothes at a steady rate. It gives off a tremendous stench. I’ve seen this site a few times, but can’t figure out what it’s for. I’ve asked Chinese people but they not sure either; I suspect it’s mainly a Shanghainese custom, and I also suspect the clothes belong to people who have died.

Another Shanghainese custom that people from other provinces find peculiar is that people will often trot around outside, especially on the weekends or holidays, in their pajamas. This looks especially frigid in the winter, but they are very warm pajamas, I suppose.

People selling a range of things pop up outside my window at various times as well. Every couple weeks there will a man who fixes umbrellas, and a man who sharpens knives. Other common sites are nurses taking people’s blood pressure, and once I saw lawyers offering free legal advice. My favorite is the man who pops corn. Every Saturday he shows up outside our apartment with a machine that will pop anything you want (corn, rice, beans). It’s easy to know when he’s arrived. When he opens his machine with a big lever after it’s finished popping, the pressure inside lets off a huge bang; beforehand he always shouts to warn people to cover their ears. When people hear the bang they come out of their apartments and gather around him as they wait for their turn, chatting and sharing cigarettes.

New passport

2007-10-24T07:05:00.000-04:00

The photo in my passport is 10 years old. When I showed it to the guard at the U.S. consulate, he commented to his colleague, “So old!” And they laughed. Time for a new one.

After waiting a mere week (!), I went back to pick up my new passport. The format has changed quite a bit since I was 16. First of all, they’ve added Spanish to the English and French. Second of all, they’ve added patriotic illustrations and quotations about how amazing America is. In the background of each page of my old passport are the seals of each state. In the background of each page of my new passport are pictures of cowboys, cacti, buffalo, and American landmarks such as the liberty bell and Mount Rushmore. At the top of each page is a quotation: the words of Lincoln, Kennedy, Johnson, and FDR grace the pages, as well as quite a few non-Presidents. I’m surprised by one or two of them: one is a Mohawk quote about how nice it is to have animals around. I must sign my name over an American flag and an eagle. On the last page is a rather random picture of outer space, with some planets and a satellite: the next frontier.

I’ve always been fascinated by passports. They are the most solid physical embodiment of the international system, an official symbol of our national identity, sanctioned by the state, that you can hold in your hand and that other governments acknowledge. The message inside from the secretary of state, requesting that all foreigners give the bearer all lawful aid and protection, is an affirmation of national belonging. What such a document includes and what it leaves out must surely mean something.

Why the changes? It’s hard to say. Maybe the people in charge these days simply like that kind of thing. Or maybe, while travelers used to be fewer and more cosmopolitan, the greater number of Americans who need passports (you need one for Canada now after all) has also increased the demand for patriotism while traveling, as people do like to remember their own country when they are out of it. Or perhaps, along with the changes in the way Americans feel about their country over the past few years – unease over decreasing world power, the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks, the failing war in Iraq, the realities of a world now starkly different from a simple Communist/non-Communist demarcation – the passport’s format fits into a larger trend of anxiety over where the country is going. At such times patriotism is always emphasized, in an effort to make up for national uncertainty (a phenomenon that is crystal clear in China), and in American culture you can see the phenomenon everywhere (just look at the popularity of some alarming recent films, such as “300,” which glorifies Western “reason” over the barbarity of the Persians, all in excessive, bloody violence.) At any rate, when I show my new passport, with all its patriotic trimmings, to border agents, I’m not sure if I’ll feel a surge of pride or a tinge of embarrassment.

Civilized

2007-10-19T02:09:00.000-04:00

Recently an American workmate said, half-jokingly, “China is great… except for the Chinese people!” Complaining about Chinese manners is a common pastime for foreigners. Some merely express shock at the spitting, the motorbikes on the sidewalks, and the blatant theft of taxis that clearly stopped for you. Getting on the bus during rush hour resembles a medieval battle. The little old ladies are the worst: they push and jab and shove. Then there are the differences in relationships, the concept of “losing face,” the intricacies of cultivating guanxi, or “connections.” These cultural differences have been written about extensively by Westerners trying to “understand” China; my own understanding of them remains sketchy, partly because, I think, I’m uncomfortable with trying to fit the way people behave under refined labels and explanations.

Most foreigners who have lived here for some time accept Chinese manners with weary resignation, admitting that they’re not here to “change China” but wishing things could be just a little bit different. I have certainly had my moments of incomprehension at people’s rudeness: the staring, the giggling, the constant cigarette smoke, the impossibility of walking even on the sidewalk without fear of being run over, the blunt comments about my weight or a pimple on my face (“Oh, you have a pimple!” “You’re fat.”). Recently we were having trouble with our water pipes in our apartment, so we called a plumber. Not only did he smoke (expected), he also decided to leave his cigarette butt on the floor of our shower (unexpected). “Don’t worry,” my roommate said when I complained about it. “He smokes so much that he’ll die soon.” Somehow, that did not reassure me.

Some take the complaining to a much higher level – take a look at the incredibly cynical blog sinocidal.com to see what I mean. People like this have a strange relationship with China. The country is like someone whose every habit, innocuous or not, turns into unrelenting irritation, like spending too much time with a roommate. My question for these kinds of people is: why are you still here?

My workmate’s comment is not new. (I’ve heard it in other contexts – a Turkish friend of my family’s was once told something similar on a plane in reference to Turkey, from another European passenger.) Such a statement could be unpackaged – European manners are the standard; those who don’t live up to the standard are “uncivilized.” What interests me is the degree to which Chinese people agree that they are uncivilized. My workmate made his comment in front of our Chinese colleagues, who, if they were offended, didn’t show it. (Surely they must have been at least somewhat offended.) In Chinese cities there are constant and unrelenting campaigns to make Chinese people more “civilized” (wenming). It is unclear what precisely the word is referring to, but it is woven into society in the form of signage: signs implore people to be civilized in relation to protecting the environment, to standing on the bus, to waiting in a line, to driving on the street, to walking in a park, to sitting in a movie theater. Class is certainly a factor – the higher trying to educate the lower. And, of course, there is also a strong sense of China trying to reclaim its “civilized” past (whatever form that would take), both for itself and for the foreign gaze.

Thailand, China's national day

2007-10-02T00:19:00.000-04:00

Here’s a new post after a whopping hiatus. First are some notes about my trip to Thailand, and then a little bit about the National Day holiday on the first of October.

You can look at the photos of the trip at this website for pictures of Bangkok, beaches, and Ayuthaya, the former capital—they will probably do the best job of giving a summation of the trip. I’ll list the places where we went, in case anyone is interesting in looking them up (“Koh” means “island”): Bangkok, Koh Tao, Krabi, Phuket, Koh Phi-Phi, and Ayuthaya. Koh Tao, the first island we went to, had some great snorkeling. (I saw a shark swimming under me! It was big!) Bangkok is suitably nutty, though not so nutty as the buildup had led me to expect. Unfortunately it rained a bit on the beaches, but not too much. Thai food is simply amazing—you can find the same stuff as in Thai restaurants abroad, but I also discovered several things that I never knew existed, including some of the best sweets I’ve ever had. Thai street food is the most exciting, as it’s varied, delicious, cheap, and abundant.

Thailand is a fascinating and thoroughly unique country. The people’s respect for the royal family, especially the King, is incredible. Compared to China’s extremely insecure nationalism, Thai nationalism was somewhat refreshing—no constant reminders of the vast length of Thai history, just a quiet self-assurance of its solidity.

Check out this gem from my Lonely Planet guidebook: “As the only Southeast Asian country that’s never been colonized by a foreign power, the Thais have a strong sense of their own identity. Religion, royalty and tradition all play a vital role in creating the national sense of ‘Thai-ness’. In fact, this national self-confidence may have played a major role in keeping the European colonial powers from Thailand’s door.” So which was it? Did Thailand’s success in staying independent create its nationalism, or did its nationalism prevent foreign encroachment? Thailand is indeed extremely self-confident in its nationalism. But this kind of historical reading demonstrates a profound confusion about the very period in which modern concepts of the nation were formed.

The standard narrative of modern Thai history is that the 19th century kings were successful in staving off colonialism by learning to modernize, with the help of Europeans like Anna Leonowens (of “The King and I”), the Belgian Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns (who helped solidify modern international law and who thought international law should aid small, weak countries), and many, many others. Those kings are greatly revered, and the current one is seen as continuing the trend. According to the narrative, the Thai government learned the “language” of Western international law and the importance of Western-style modernization very quickly, and was therefore successful in “modernizing” Thailand while still retaining its fundamental character as a Buddhist nation.

The Muslim population in the south, of course, is one foil to the narrative. Here’s another prizewinner from LP: “In the far south and in rural corners, Islamic culture dominates but it has been mellowed by Southeast Asia’s gentleness.” The statement is referring to the freedom of women relative to their Arabic counterparts. While there is no doubt that Muslim women enjoy greater freedom in Thailand than in many Middle Eastern countries, the causes of that freedom are not clear, and reducing them to “Southeast Asia’s gentleness” is an alarming simplification. Many factors have served to radicalize Islam in the Middle East, not least among them colonialism—it is not simply due to some local, intrinsic quality. And it should be obvious that calling Southeast Asia “gentle” is an incredible act of forgetfulness. The region has been the site of some of the most horrific violence of the 20th century, not to mention just as many wars throughout the ages as anywhere else. Perhaps the sentence is referring to the supposed gentleness of Buddhism? Whether Buddhism is more “gentle” than Islam would be a rather silly argument, one that would necessitate extremely one-dimensional and simplistic understandings of the two religions.

Back in China, the National Day holiday on October first at the Bund was crowded, crowded, crowded. On Chinese holidays at popular tourist sites, you can come a bit closer to getting a sense of the unbelievable number of people squeezed into this country. The city closed off numerous streets, including East Zhongshan Rd., in front of the Bund, transforming them into pedestrian streets. It’s interesting that the automatic site for the National Day celebrations—and the most famous site in Shanghai—is the Bund, a grand monument to colonialism in East Asia. Embrace the buildings but reject the context in which they were built seems to be the popular attitude.

I’m not sure what most people’s opinion of the national day holidays is. In most countries, flags are abundant on national days, but in Shanghai they can only be found on taxis and buses, where they were no doubt ordered to appear by the government. Do Chinese people simply not have the same flag-waving habits as elsewhere? Or is there some other reason for the scarcity of flags? People are of course ecstatic about having days off (those who do are anyway), but apart from that, I don’t sense much excitement about the holiday itself.

Most guidebooks mention that the clock on top of the Customs House on the Bund, built in 1927 by the same firm that designed Big Ben, played “The East is Red” during the Cultural Revolution, and to my delight, it chimed a few bars of it last night! The song was supposedly invented by a farmer in Shaanxi Province who was inspired when he saw the sun rise one morning. Wikipedia says, “Because of its associations with the Cultural Revolution, the song was rarely heard after the rise of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s. Today in China the song is considered a somewhat unseemly reminder of the cult of personality associated with Mao.” I would mention, however, that my friend Angel is very familiar with the song, and learned it in school in the 1990s.

Here is an English translation of the lyrics, which, whatever they may sound like to foreigners, are still rich in meaning and significance for millions of people:

The east is red, the sun is rising.
China has brought forth a Mao Zedong.
He amasses fortune for the people,
Hurrah, he is the people's great savior.
Chairman Mao loves the people,
He is our guide,
To build a new China,
Hurrah, he leads us forward!
The Communist Party is like the sun,
Wherever it shines, it is bright.
Wherever there is a Communist Party,
Hurrah, there the people are liberated!

Perspectives

2007-07-18T03:51:00.000-04:00

When thinking about China, everyone focuses on different issues. Academics have their particular interests, as do diplomats. Reporters, who are usually educated but not too educated (and I don’t necessarily mean that in a negative sense), tend to lie somewhere in between. An extremely large proportion of American and other Western countries' reportage about China focuses on China's human rights problems or its relations with Western countries: What does the lack of freedom of speech, crackdown on dissent, labor abuses and the lack of freedom of religion mean for China? How soon will China become a democracy? Will China be a threat to the "West," will China seek to militarize space, will China try to be dominant in Asia, what exactly is China's purpose in regions such as Africa? It's very difficult to find an accurate answer to any of these questions -- usually, there are no accurate answers. People form their conceptualizations of China through what questions they ask about it; in this respect, it may be that the questions themselves are more important than the answers. In the past few years I've studied or lived in China in various contexts and capacities, and I've found that what questions people ask, and how they ask them, is always a matter of perspective.

Perspective 1. University life in the US, 2005-2006. When I was a student, the general attitude in the East Asian Studies department regarding political issues in China was a strange mixture of frustration and support. The academic context and the distance from China itself gave us the freedom to explore how complicated what we were studying really was. We were always dismayed with the tactics of the Chinese government, but we were also dismayed with Western commentators for resorting to stereotypes and simplistic readings of Chinese history, culture, and politics. One professor of modern Chinese history who had been active in protest movements of the 1960s (and beyond) told me about the deep sense of betrayal and disappointment she felt after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. In various classes, I studied how the communist party has sought to define and package history to support itself; how Chinese nationalists focus on such abstract ideas as culture, ethnicity, and nation to promote the state or what is perceived as state interests; and how the government seeks to control religion and minority groups, and viciously cracks down on any hint of dissent, such as in Xinjiang.

At the same time, the statist focus was always complicated. We also examined the importance of subjectivity in historical retelling and the role of the subject and the impossibility of knowing; others who seek to impose their own narratives of Chinese history, such as Japanese and American commentators; the vilification of the communist party in Western narratives and the need to acknowledge the CCP and its actions as an enabling force. In short, on the one hand we constantly cautioned against being judgmental, and on the other hand we couldn't help but judge.

Perspective 2. U.S. Consulate, Guangzhou, Summer 2006. Priorities in the consulate were, quite naturally, focused on American interests. However, those interests varied widely, and often included simple information gathering for reports. Some officers were concerned with China’s economy; some dealt with immigration issues; as an intern in the Political/Economic section, I focused on such issues as media in South China, labor rights, intellectual property rights, and foreign communities living in Guangzhou. I gave a speech to a Chinese audience about Ronald Reagan as part of the consulate’s public diplomacy efforts – this too fell under the purview of “American interests.”

Attitudes in the consulate regarding China’s political environment tended to be very ad-hoc. We sympathized with activists, since they were seen to be striving for democracy. We worked with Chinese government officials, since they were, after all, the people in power. In short, the consulate’s stance towards Chinese politics was malleable in its efforts to find the right track, and sometimes seemed contradictory – much like American political culture in general.

Perspective 3. News agency, Shanghai, 2007. The news agency where I work deals mostly with business news. From our business articles it would seem that readers care only about how many megawatts of installation capacity certain power plants have; how soon TD-SCDMA, China’s 3G telecom technology, will be released; and how much money a computer game is making. This kind of reportage is designed to attract as little negative attention from the Chinese government as possible. However, it is impossible to be a foreign reporter with a foreign audience in China and not have other subjects on your mind (which often find their way, albeit obliquely, into our articles).

Mainstream Western audiences care about three broad issues related to China: geopolitical power issues; human/labor/political rights; and the “New China” (evidenced by the huge number of articles that seek to compare the “modern” and the “traditional”; take, for example, Howard French’s quest to photograph what he calls the “authentic” in Shanghai).

In addition, long-time foreign journalists working in China always have horror stories of their dealings with the Chinese government, such as Peter Hessler’s account in his book, Oracle Bones, of his ordeal when he happened to stumble onto a local village election, which are always tightly closed to foreigners, while hiking outside Beijing. The constant push-and-pull between Western reporters, who are used to press freedoms at home, and the government, which seeks to control them, constantly informs foreign reportage on China.

Perspective 4. My apartment, July 2007. When I get home, my roommates are almost finished making dinner. They buy fresh produce from a local market and make delicious food. It usually involves at least one dish of greens, a meat dish, rice, and soup. Two of them work at B2B (business-to-business) websites, and one works at an Irish export company. One wants to go back to school to study psychology. During dinner I try to understand what they talk about – usually stories from work, or gossip about their friends. After dinner, we do various things: lately, two of my roommates have been obsessed with a TV soap opera about drama in a Chinese business. It involves overseas Chinese living in Canada and Hong Kong. As far as I can make out, at least one of the characters is extremely evil, and at least one is extremely good. They also read a lot: a magazine of Chinese short stories, a memoir by a Chinese reporter, and Chinese translations of The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, the Harry Potter books, a collection of American short stories, and Watership Down are a few of their recent selections. One night I said I thought Taiwan shouldn’t necessarily be a province of China, and a roommate got offended; another time, I argued that Uighurs should not necessarily be considered “Chinese.” Once I asked one of them whether she’d heard of the Tiananmen protests of 1989. “Sure,” she said. “Of course I’ve heard of that."

Learning to swim

2007-07-03T02:15:00.000-04:00

Last week I joined a gym that has a pool. The first time I went swimming I walked out of the locker room and couldn't find the entrance to the pool. There was one, but it was locked shut. I walked all around the glass walls -- I could see everyone swimming happily -- and finally found an unlocked door at the far corner of the wall. I walked in and a lifeguard looked at me with surprise. "No! You enter over there!" he said, pointing at an entrance connected directly to the locker rooms. "And leave your shoes!"

I deposited my flip-flops by the locker room and stepped in a big pool of water to clean my feet -- clearly this was the correct procedure. The lifeguard eyed my swimming trunks.

"You can't change here," he said. He was wearing a speedo-like suit, which seemed to be the norm.

"This is a swimming suit," I said.

Then I jumped in the water. When I emerged, the lifeguard was gesturing frantically at me.

"You have to wear a swimming cap!" he said.

"Why?"

"To keep the water clean," he said. "Can't you see that everyone else is wearing one?"

I couldn't, actually, because I wasn't wearing my glasses, but I didn't say anything.

"Where do I get one?" I asked.

"You have to buy one," he said.

"I didn't bring any money."

He looked at me wearily. "Okay," he said. "You can borrow mine."

Now I know what it feels like to be the stupid foreigner who doesn't understand how things are done. But it still doesn't make sense to me: we don't have to take a shower before getting into the pool, but we do have to wear a swimming cap! Oh well. Now I own my first swimming cap.

That same day, I tried to teach my friend Angel how to swim. She's never learned, and in the pool she's like a fish out of water. The very first thing I did was to demonstrate the dog paddle. "Just do this," I said. She tried, and immediately sank like a stone. She came back up, spluttering. "Okay," I said. "First, we'll learn how to kick." I remembered from my fourth grade lessons that kicking was one of the first things I learned. Together, we held the edge of the pool and began to kick. "Try to make small splashes," I said. She wasn't making much progress, and I could see why: her legs were moving in and out, instead of up and down. "Push against the water," I said. "Against the water." She seemed to improve a bit, and I found a swimming board. "Practice with this," I said. She grasped it firmly and kicked until she was out of breath, but she stayed in the same spot. "Okay," I said. "Let's take a break from that and learn how to use the hands." I showed her how to close the fingers so water can't get through, and how to paddle. "You should feel the water," I said. "Push against the water."

We went back the next day and kept at it. I tried teaching her how to float on her back, how to float on her stomach, and how to avoid getting water in her nose while underwater. At the end of the day we tried the dog paddle again. She gave it all her effort, and sank like a stone.

I suppose learning how to swim is a lot like learning how to ride a bike, or learning a language: if you do it when you're young, it seems completely natural for the rest of your life. I don't remember learning, so I'm probably not the best person to teach. Anyway, if anyone has any advice, any at all, about how to teach someone how to swim, please send it to me as fast as possible.

China's dirty laundry

2007-06-19T05:42:00.000-04:00

Despite the bad reviews, I was excited about seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean 3," and I was happy to hear that it is being shown in the theaters in China, since everyone knows that seeing a movie in a theater is much better than watching it at home. I was also interested to see what they would do with Chow Yun-fat, the Chinese Pirate King!! :)

Then I learned that parts the film have been censored in China. Why? I asked. Was it too violent? Was there nudity? Did Disney pirates of the 19th century advocate Tibetan independence?

No: they had cut half of Chow Yun-fat's scenes because they "vilify and humiliate the Chinese," as Xinhua, China's official news wire, reported.

I haven't seen the movie yet (and I certainly won't in a Chinese theater), but according to some blogs, it's now difficult to follow the plot. The censors were apparently offended by Chow's bald head, long nails, and scarred skin. It reminded me of the reasons behind China's censorship of "Mission Impossible III," when scenes were cut in which Tom Cruise is in China, and runs past laundry hanging from clotheslines. I suppose the censors didn't want China to be portrayed as a "backward" country, in which, presumably, people hang laundry from clotheslines.

Such censorship is unbelievably inane, and indicates the hyper-sensitivity and pride that is often prevalent in contemporary Chinese nationalism. It's not even proper censorship! Usually things are censored because they are "subversive" in some way. "Devils on the Doorstep," a film about Chinese villagers in World War II, was banned in China for obvious reasons: the villagers in the film are often foolish and weak, and there's no sign of the Communist army. But what possible reasoning lies behind banning images of clothes hanging from clotheslines from a version of the movie that will only be shown in China? Even if we accept the idea that clothes on a clothesline indicates backwardness, there is no other way to hang clothes in China (the only dryer I've ever seen in this country was in a US consulate). Will Chinese viewers who see the clothes suddenly realize their country is backward?

The reasoning behind the censored bits of "Pirates" is slightly less hazy, though equally absurd. One film magazine wrote that Chow's appearance is "in line with Hollywood's old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." That may be so (though "tradition" is a bit strong), but how does preventing Chinese people from seeing those scenes possibly help the situation? Will a Chinese viewer suddenly get depressed because he realizes that his ancestors must have been pirate kings with bald heads and scars?

These are cases of censorship not being thought through, and of China's frequent bristling defensiveness about how foreigners view the country. They are annoying and ridiculous, but they are basically harmless. However, they may also be indications of the Chinese censorship system, which is quite sophisticated, slowly going crazy as it tries to censor too many things coming into the country. To a large extent the system relies on people's apathy -- after all, anyone who is determined can find restricted information. But China is so big, and is changing so fast, that the censors may feel they can't possibly keep up, so they panic too easily and react too hastily.

Beyond cutting out cinematic laundry, the deep absurdity of China's censorship system, and of censorship itself, is revealed during those moments when the system comes full circle to bite itself in the behind. On June 6 of this year, a very small classified ad was published in the Chengdu Evening News that read, "Paying tribute to the strong[-willed] mothers of June 4 victims." It was referring to a group of mothers of students who were killed during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, and who have been vocal in demanding answers from the government about the massacre. Normally, such a thing would never have gotten through, but, according to a source from the Chengdu paper who was quoted in a Hong Kong newspaper, the clerk who received the ad was born in the 1980s and had never heard of the Tiananmen protests. As a result, she didn't know that she was supposed to censor it.

Censorship of information about the Tiananmen protests is revealed to be remarkably, frighteningly effective, so effective that it doesn't work, as censorship never does. And what happened to the girl who unknowingly let the ad slip through? It's unclear, but according to an Internet blogger who may have contacts at the Chengdu paper, several editors have been fired, and the poor clerk has been arrested.

Food

2007-06-04T03:19:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my roommate went to the market to buy meat and vegetables for dinner, but she forgot to buy cloves of garlic. The food that my roommates make often uses garlic, though not in the same way that I use garlic. Usually they chop it up and put it in some kind of spicy sauce with other vegetables. Sichuan food especially often uses garlic combined with a very, very spicy sauce that burns your tongue and makes you want to cry, but you keep on eating anyway because it's so, so good.

The market next to our apartment is a fairly large, friendly place with numerous local stands. However, I rarely go there because I'll inevitably be charged more than Chinese people. In fact, my roommates usually don't want me to go, for exactly that reason. It's a good arrangement for me -- a valid excuse for getting out of the shopping! When I went to buy the garlic, for example, I bought four cloves for 3 yuan, about 39 cents. "What!" my roommate said when I returned. "That should just cost 2 yuan!" She shook her head and sighed. I knew I wouldn't have to go to the market again for a while.

Though we white folks must often pay the foreigner tax, I've found that once people in the neighborhood get to know you, they usually don't ask for more money. I got a haircut at a local barbershop, and I mentioned I lived in the area; at the end I mistakenly paid 15 yuan, and the barber told me it was just 10. I usually buy beer at a small shop beside my apartment -- recently I paid 25 yuan by accident, but it was just 20. Likewise in another store with bread, and another with DVDs.

The market, though, will never get to know me, since I rarely go there, and even if it did, it seems to be part of market culture to always charge foreigners extra. I probably wouldn't know what to buy anyway. My roommates are all good cooks, and they can choose best. We usually have a few dishes: some boiled vegetables; some meat, perhaps with vegetables and some sauce; sometimes lamb, sometimes beef, sometimes chicken. We usually have soup too, and always, always rice.

If we're feeling a little peckish late at night, there are a couple of excellent night food stands close to our apartment. The best one by far is a barbeque where you can buy, among other things, roasted spicy lamb, roasted chicken, and roasted tofu. The lamb is a classic in Chinese cities. Once I was eating some and my sister, who is a vegetarian, called me on my mobile phone. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Eating lamb on the street." "EWWWWW!! That's so GROSS!!" I guess it sounds kind of disgusting -- lamb on the street -- but it's so, so, so good.

Every now and then I'll make something for dinner too, but I usually end up eating most of it. My curries have proven to be somewhat popular, as have my salads. Pastas have been greeted with a lukewarm reception, and I've generally decided to stop making them, since most of the ingredients are imported and it's a bit expensive. Unfortunately I can't unleash my cookie-baking skills, because we don't have an oven. My pizza, with its simple flour dough, will therefore go untasted, which is a shame, because sometimes I yearn for it in the face of so much healthy homemade fare.

In those cases, I'll sometimes resort to good 'ol Mai Dang Lao. If you don't know what that is, say it out loud and you'll probably be able to figure it out.

...

2007-05-21T06:28:00.000-04:00

http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?sid=51398

Hangzhou

2007-05-08T01:12:00.001-04:00

“I never realized just how many people are in China until I came to Hangzhou.”

A Chinese friend said that on our fourth and last day in Hangzhou, “the most beautiful city in China.” The city is considerably less beautiful when you can’t see its famous West Lake because of the thousands and thousands of black-haired heads in the way, or traffic that takes an hour and a half to go a mile or so. On Tuesday, May 1, the first day of the Chinese Labor Day holiday, it was chaos. As Chinese have become more and more affluent, they have begun to travel around their own country; when a holiday such as Labor Day rolls around, the country’s famous tourist cities become seething masses of tourist flags and cameras.

The first day we arrived in Hangzhou, the city still belonged to its residents. Labor Day was still three days away. That Saturday, after getting off the train and making our way to our hostel, we saw hundreds of surly police officers lining the streets, a few meters apart, their hands clasped behind their backs in exactly the same way, looking straight ahead with serious looks. We didn’t know what was going on—was Hangzhou always like this? Soon we learned that the city was holding a parade for its Third Annual International Cartoon Festival. The police, though, were treating the parade the same as any public march, which always had to be closely monitored and controlled. As cartoon characters marched down the street—Spiderman, Garfield, Mickey Mouse, as well as many, many unfamiliar ones—the hoards of police kept the screaming children strictly on the sidelines, and made sure nobody did anything subversive such as try to touch Minnie Mouse. Many kids did anyway, of course. In fact, it was remarkable how thoroughly the gruff police were ignored.

As the long line of characters walked past, waving at the children, I was very surprised to see, tucked in between a float of Disney characters and a line of creatures doing back flips, an ethnic minority contingent. There were several of them, some not Han Chinese dressed in ethnic clothing (as is common when displaying the country’s ethnicities) but actual members, it was clear, of China’s 55 minorities.

China is dotted with “ethnic theme parks,” places where visitors can walk amongst “authentic” ethnic houses, see people dressed in ethnic costumes, and eat ethnic food. I’ve been to such parks in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Nanning. In the National Congress, representatives from the country’s ethnicities usually wear their ethnic costumes, whereas Han Chinese always wear Western style suits. Such packaging and displaying of China’s ethnicities is part of the government’s obsession with control, an obsession that reaches into many aspects of people’s private lives—ethnic identity, religion, etc. (The F_a_l_u_n G_o_n_g never intended to become politicized, and never did anything to directly challenge the communist party; they simply became too well-organized, and their activities often extended beyond the control of the state.) China’s ethnic groups are neatly organized into 56 categories (including the Han), and regulating the 55 minorities to a straightforward display of “authentic” architecture, food, and costumes that can packaged and sold serves to eliminate uncomfortable ambiguities and keep them firmly in their place—happy squares in the patchwork of China.

This tendency to display extends to the business world. KFC in China, which is known for incorporating elements of “Chinese culture” into its restaurants (such as models of the Great Wall, Chinese architecture, and displays of folk art), has recently introduced a new hamburger that uses a sauce made from tomatoes and other spices. It is being marketed as a Miao sauce, the Miao being one of China’s ethnic minority groups. In an advertisement on TV for the hamburger, a Han Chinese backpacker hikes to a remote hut, in which a Miao couple, who happen to be wearing their bulky, colorful costumes, greet him. They give him delicious soup, and he loves it so much that he fakes problems that prevent him from leaving. Eventually he returns home, and is delighted to find the exact same sauce in the KFC hamburger.

As in some progressive countries, minority groups in China enjoy many special privileges in education and government—in some areas, a certain proportion of the local government must be comprised of members of the local minority, and many minorities have more opportunities to go to college than Han Chinese. In addition, some groups have managed to use the government’s obsession with control to their advantage, displaying what is expected of them while continuing their own activities and debates under the radar (see Sara Davis's interesting article, "Dance, Or Else: The Politics of Ethnic Culture on China’s Southwest Borders"). Yet putting ethnicities on display in such a blatant way—and including them in a parade specifically intended for cartoon characters—points to a deeper problem in China, a problem that has to do with where, and how, such minorities can be incorporated into a country that has never had a single race, nor a single homogenous culture, yet is constantly trying to develop unifying claims of history.

New rich

2007-04-23T23:51:00.000-04:00

Today I was walking along the street and I heard drums behind me. A large group of people were marching along the sidewalk, banging large drums. They wore vests with flower patterns, red sashes around their waists, and they twirled red and green flags. There were thirty or forty of them. I thought it must be some Chinese festival I hadn't heard of. Or, I thought, it might be a wedding. I knew that Chinese weddings were loud and colorful; beyond that, I didn't know much about them. Most of the people in the parade were young: were they the bride and groom's friends?

The parade came closer to me, and I stopped to watch it. Ahead of it, three or four people were handing out flyers. I took one. On it were pictures of wine bottles and a big building. It was an advertisement for a restaurant.

In the US, gimmicks are easy to spot, but in China, they often become spectacles. Partly this is due to the abundance of cheap labor: if you want a parade of forty people marching down a busy sidewalk waving flags, you can make one yourself. But it’s also due to the business mentality that has taken hold of China's urban areas--the frenzy to become part of the new rich.

Signs of this frenzy are everywhere. There's a building going up nearby, and judging from the signs outside, it will be called B&W. At first I assumed the initials were two people's surnames--Bing & Wang, or Bu & Wu, or something like that. Then I saw the caption: B&W stood for Boss & Winner. I suppose the implication is that if you live or work in that building, you'll not only be a boss, but you'll be a winner, too.

On the cover of my notebook, which I bought for about 20 cents and which consists of about 50 pages held together by a cheap plastic spiral, it says: "Gambol notebooks, made with future technology, for tomorrow's most outstanding achievers." I'm certainly glad I bought one!

Lanzhou lamian

2007-04-18T04:46:00.000-04:00

For lunch the other day I went to a local lamian restaurant. Lamian literally means "pulled noodles," and it involves yanking and stretching and pounding great slabs of dough and then boiling them into long, long noodles. They're typically eaten in a bowl of broth with meat, green onions, or other small vegetables. The food originates from Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province, in the northwest, and is associated with a large ethnic group in the area, the Hui, who tend to be Muslim. Even if you don't know the characters for Lanzhou lamian, you can usually tell a lamian restaurant. They tend to be hole-in-the-wall places. The women who work there wear scarves and the men wear little round white caps. The spicy sauce found in lamian restaurants is the best spicy sauce I have ever tasted.

I struck up a conversation with the workers. They wanted to know if their kind of restaurant could do well in the US. "How much would that sell for in America?" a waitress asked me, pointing at my bowl. She was 21 years old and wore a beautiful scarf with pictures of flowers on it. I looked at the bowl of noodles. It had cost me 4 RMB, about 50 cents.

"This would probably cost between 30 and 40 RMB in a big city," I said. They smiled at each other in mild amazement.

"How much would it cost to rent a place to have the restaurant each month?" the waitress asked.

"I really don't know," I said.

She thought for a moment. "What do lamian restaurants look like in America?"

I said that most Americans haven't heard of Lanzhou or lamian, but there are many Chinese noodle restaurants in America. "Most people just call them Chinese noodles," I said.

"Do they look like this?" she asked, gesturing at her own restaurant.

I didn't really how to respond: I didn't want to say that they tended to be cleaner and more comfortable, so I just said, "they resemble McDonald's."

One of the waiters put a VCD into the TV hanging above our heads. What looked like a club scene started to play.

"That's in Lhasa," he said, dancing along to the techno music. "In Tibet."

"Have you been there?" I asked.

"Yes." Tibet is relatively close to Gansu province.

"Why did you come to Shanghai?" I asked. "Why did you leave Lanzhou?"

The waitress smiled. "Money," she said, shrugging. "We needed money."

A friend of mine who works in Shanghai once said, "Shanghai is a good place for making money. I don't think it's really a great place to live."

Many migrant workers have this attitude. An American journalist recently commented that in Shenzhen, China's recent boomtown in Guangdong, everyone is so focused on making money that there is no time for friendships, or relaxation, or love; hence in Shenzhen there are many "lonely heart hotlines," where people who need someone to talk to can call. Shenzhen is a city of migrant workers. The average age is about 29, and everyone there automatically speaks Mandarin to each other, China's common language, even though the city is in the heart of Guangdong, where people speak Cantonese. Shanghai is a much older city, with an entrenched Shanghainese population, but for migrants it can still be a lonely place. For all the talk in China about a unified, homogeneous Chinese culture, a migrant worker in a city like Shanghai can still feel very much like a foreigner.

Things to miss

2007-04-09T06:19:00.000-04:00

Five things I miss from North America

1. Movies in theaters. In China, there's a quota of how many foreign movies theaters can show each year. Because the quota is so low -- around 10 or 15 -- distributors tend to opt for sure-hit blockbusters that are often very boring. I would love to watch more Chinese movies, but my Chinese isn't good enough to really understand them without subtitles, which of course they don't have.

2. American Chinese food. I love Chinese food, and I love American Chinese food, and those two things are not the same. Oh, how I miss expertly made General Tso's Chicken, crispy on the outside with tender chicken on the inside! Can't find that here.

3. Orderly lines. Here's a thought: when we're waiting at the bus station, and the bus pulls up, let's not all push and shove to try to get on first. And when someone hails a taxi, how about we don't dart in front of that person and jump in the cab? The Beijing government, by the way, has been putting up signs urging people to queue and not to spit, in preparation of the big influx of foreigners during the 2008 Olympics. In Beijing, the 11th day of each month is "Queuing Day," on which people are especially urged to queue. Apparently, that number was chosen because it resembles two people standing side by side.

4. Cottage cheese. Perhaps influenced by my mother, who had the same frustration while living in Turkey, cottage cheese is one of my most-missed Western foods. It's difficult to find any real cheese in supermarkets, but cottage cheese has, so far, been nonexistent.

5. Non-smoking areas. That includes bathrooms and markets. Enough said.

Five things I'm sure I'll miss from China

1.Cheap DVDs. The abundance of cheap DVDs easily belies the paucity of movies in theaters. That said, if you're looking for something specific and rare, you might be out of luck. But thumbing through hundreds of DVDs, each for less than $1, is one of my favorite shopping pastimes.

2. Being treated like a celebrity just for knowing a little bit of Chinese. What can I say, I hunger for the spotlight.

[2.5. Being treated like a celebrity just for being a foreigner. Not true so much in Shanghai, but very true in other places.]

3. Cheap beer. Get a big bottle of Qingdao beer for 50 cents; can't be beat.

4. Mahjong players. Outside my apartment window, elderly Shanghainese people congregate on nice days to play mahjong. It looks fun and complicated.

5. Parks. In Chinese parks, there's a sense of community that comes with a wonderful lack of self-consciousness. In the mornings old people do taiji or other exercises, and in the afternoon or evening there are numerous kinds of activities -- dance classes, aerobics classes, card games or chess games or mahjong or other kinds of games with huge audiences, fencing, people practicing martial arts, women holding up signs and trying to find a husband or wife for their children, etc.

Expat

2007-04-05T05:17:00.000-04:00

The definition of an expatriate is, "One who has taken up residence in a foreign country." But then what are immigrants? Being in Shanghai, it seems strange to think of, say, a poor Mexican who has settled down in the US an expatriate. A more accurate definition of an expatriate might therefore be, "One who has taken up residence in a foreign country, but not permanently." But then what are sojourners? Can Chinese laborers who worked in France, America, or South Africa, but who were not welcome to settle down in those places, be called expatriates? Perhaps a more realistic definition would be, "One who has temporarily taken up residence in a foreign country in which the average per capita income is less than the average per capita income of the person's home country." That certainly more closely matches the status of expats in Shanghai. After all, the Web site shanghaiexpat.com, which lists corporate job fairs, expat gatherings at expensive bars, and where to find good hamburgers, is certainly not aimed at Shanghai's non-Western foreigners, such as Filipino women who come here to work as maids.

The word "expatriate" originally meant "one who was banished or exiled"; its modern usage emerged in the nineteenth century, with the rise of the nation-state system. It is interesting that it has now attained upper-class overtones of wealth. The strange labels under which foreigners must live -- "immigrant," "sojourner," "refugee," "expat" -- signify difference from the citizenry of the nation-state. But there is, of course, not just one kind of foreigner. Like citizens, foreigners are also classed, if not legally, then practically.

That's in the real world. The denizens of the bureaucratic realm are quite happy to give expats the greatest hassle possible under the law.

The Chinese government insists on keeping tabs on all foreigners living or traveling in China. Wherever you're staying, whether it's a hotel, a hostel, or a friend's apartment, you must register at the local police station. If you're at a hotel, the hotel will do it for you, but if not, you have to trudge over to the local police station and show them your passport and your visa. You can get away with not registering, but if you want to extend your visa (as I had to do this morning), you need a special registration paper from the police station that proves you registered. And, if you happened to put off registering because you didn't think it was a big deal, you have to pay a fine of 300 RMB ($38), as well as wait for an hour or so while various police officers chat, smoke, discuss an excel document they happen to be working on, ask for photocopies of things you didn't bring, ask to see the lease of the apartment you're staying in, ask for the contact information of your host, ask for the contact information of the landlord of your host (I later learned that the police called the landlord to make sure she knew that a foreigner was staying in her apartment), fill out numerous forms, make you sign numerous forms, and, finally, inquire as to whether you have any statements you wish to make. (I did, of course, but I thought it would be wiser if I didn't voice them.) In addition to paying the 300 RMB fine, you must also write down the serial numbers of each of the three 100 RMB notes on (another) special form. This was a new one to me. I suppose they want to make absolutely one hundred percent sure the bills are not counterfeit, as well as provide a safeguard against corruption. At any rate, if by any chance you want a receipt for your 300 RMB fine, you have to trudge back to the police station after about a week, by which time the bank will have checked out your three 100 RMB bills, and ask for it. To ensure that you can get the receipt, they give you another receipt. I suppose you'd call it a receipt for a receipt. That seems logical.

Bless you

2007-03-30T02:47:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, my roommate let out a big sneeze. "Whoa! Bless you!" I said.

She looked at me. "What?"

"I said, bless you."

"Oh." She looked confused. "Bless me?"

"Yes. You say that when people sneeze."

"Oh." She continued to look confused. "Doesn't 'bless' mean zhufu?" (That's the literal translation of "bless.")

"Well, yes, it does, but, you know, Westerners say it when someone sneezes, to, you know, bless them." I paused. That explanation didn't seem to have helped. "It's just a way of being nice."

"Oh." She considered this. "Okay."

"You can also say gesundheit," I added helpfully.

"Oh? And what does that mean?"

"The same as bless you."

"Right," she said. "Well, in China we don't say anything like that."

The closest I could come to any etymology of "bless you" was an image of a nice old lady chuckling merrily and saying, "Oh, bless you, child!" at a little girl's sneeze. I supposed that it had something to do with the sneezer's innocence, and the notion that some small affliction had come down upon her through no fault of her own. Beyond that, I had no idea.

(It turns out that "bless" comes from the Anglo-Saxon bletsian or bledsian, probably from blod, blood, from the use of sacrificial blood in ancient blessing ceremonies. That really doesn't help. Someone on the Internet thinks that the phrase originated during the plague in the 14th century, since a sneeze was thought to be the first sign of death. If that's true, my image of the nice old lady chuckling merrily seems so very, very wrong.)

Even though a sneeze in China is met with complete silence, the urge to say "bless you" when I hear one usually outweighs the difficulty I know I'll have of explaining what it means. In fact, half the time I say it without meaning to. When this happens people either look confused or, if they know about the strange Western practice, smile knowingly at their friends. Oh, these foreigners!

In a way it's alarming how deeply this cultural practice has become embedded into my habits, so much so that it becomes unconsciously reflexive, as innocent as a sneeze itself. It's alarming because the same thing can be said for so many automatic habits and assumptions, some not nearly so innocuous, or unfathomable, as the little phrase, "bless you."

Crossing the street

2007-03-27T02:48:00.000-04:00

Whenever you encounter a new city, it is imperative to learn how to cross the street. If you think the same rules apply in Muncie, Indiana as in New York, or, moving into more dangerous territory, in Istanbul, Hanoi, or Shanghai, you’re liable to get smooshed by a passing taxi, motorbike, or bus (respectively). I’ve found that the best strategy when learning the ropes is to wait patiently at the street corner until a local comes up beside you, then keep your eyes glued on his feet—and only his feet—all the way to the other side. In Chinese cities this may not work, since you could get clobbered from behind as well as from the side. Sidewalks are fair game for any manner of transportation on two wheels (and sometimes three). And in Hanoi, it’s better to think of the road as not so much a road as a kind of lava pit that you must jump over by intermittent stones strewn randomly across it. Sometimes you must pause while an especially fierce bunch of lava rumbles past, and you must never, ever turn and dwell upon the wall of fire that could hit you. Actually, as someone who grew up in Muncie, I had to learn at an old age how to cross the street, since in Muncie no one does so. If one lives across the street from the grocery store, and one needed some eggs, one would typically climb into one’s car and drive there. Consequently, when a Muncie driver does see someone crossing the street, the driver often doesn’t know what to do, and either swerves out of the way at the last minute or slows down far too soon in advance. In Shanghai, slowing down in advance is heavily frowned upon, though cars turning right always swerve out of the way at the last minute, so there is some similarity, though they always honk while doing it, while in Muncie honking is a really big deal. In Shanghai, cars turning right always have the right of way, or believe they do, which amounts to the same thing; and they guard that right fiercely, much like certain Americans might guard their right to have guns by shooting people who get in their way.

English corner

2007-03-20T00:38:00.000-04:00

On Sunday I went to the “English Corner,” an area of People’s Square Park in central Shanghai where people meet every Sunday to practice their English. A few foreigners stood scattered around the area, each surrounded by a mass of Chinese people shooting them questions. I spoke for more than three hours about (in no particular order) real estate prices in America and China, costs of going to college, loans and interest rates, costs of living, car insurance, what children do with their elderly parents, what “alpha dog” means, what “up and coming” means, what “stereotype” means, whether black people are violent and lazy, whether Jews are good at making money, whether Chinese living in America are hard workers, that Xinjiang is beautiful (from a Uyghur man whose accent sounded Turkish, not Chinese); the 1996 American election, the 2000 American election, the 2004 American election, and who will win the next American election; in addition, why there’s so much violence on American TV, whether Americans are really as promiscuous as they are on “Sex and the City” and “Friends,” whether it’s easy for American poor people to advance economically, what annoys me about China, what parts of Chinese lifestyles are most different from American ones, whether Shanghai is similar to New York, why the US attacked Iraq, differences between American girls and Chinese girls; also, what I think about Chinese culture, Chinese food, Chinese philosophy, Chinese literature, Chinese history, and Confucius. I was offered drinks, e-mails, phone numbers, and a job. It was really impossible to escape. People came and left my group, but always I had to stay.

In general, I sensed a great desire to travel, but travel to where? Traditionally, we think of Chinese as imagining the world in a China-Western (plus Japan) framework—that is how histories of modern China are usually written. Recently, it’s become clear that that is not the whole picture: awareness of other “developing” countries, for example, has played a huge role in imaginings of the world in the past 120 years or so. Still, finding ways in which Chinese conceptualize the world in ways that include the non-West usually remains limited to intellectual history. Common Chinese people now, I believe, very much privilege certain cultural hubs: American and Japanese for the most part (though recently Korean TV shows and movies have been hugely popular). I was struck at the English Corner by how focused people were on America, and not just because they were talking to an American. For many Chinese, to some extent at least, the world seems to be limited to a few certain spatial categories, “America” (a word that itself carries much baggage) paramount among them.

Shanghaied

2007-03-08T23:10:00.000-05:00

Southeast Asia is infested with western backpackers. China is different. I stayed in a hostel in Shanghai for a week, and didn’t have a substantial conversation with a single westerner. Instead, the most common hostel guest was Chinese. Especially in the past decade or two, as people have made more money and it’s become easier to travel (while remaining very difficult for the vast majority of Chinese to get visas to “developed” countries), Chinese people have taken to tourism in their own country. (Many people I’ve talked to, though, desperately want to travel the world, but are held back by visas and money.) In China the problem I mentioned in an earlier post, of western backpackers just hanging out with each other, is not so serious (though interactions are usually limited to fellow Chinese travelers who can speak English). In my room the flow of travelers, apart from Chinese, included Koreans and Japanese. What’s more, though everyone spoke at least some English, the language of choice among East Asians was Mandarin. Is this a glimpse of the future?

I’m still waiting for the purported excitement of Shanghai to kick in. It seems to me that contemporary Shanghai, like the mythical Shanghai of the early twentieth century, is at its best for people who have money. An average salary for a Chinese coffee shop employee in Shanghai is about $120-150 a month (usually that includes lodging and maybe some food), while an entry-level office job usually brings in less than $400 a month. A night in Shanghai’s bars and clubs would cost at least $5 to $20, depending on where you go, so the nightlife is really intended for the city’s rich and its expats (of which there are many). I went to an informative talk on Art Deco the other day at a glamorous bar overlooking the Bund, the center of Shanghai’s former International Concession area. The place was filled with expats wearing black and drinking wine who were in love with Shanghai’s architecture. But the negative forces that enabled the creation of that architecture (which is indeed amazing), such as imperialism, were not mentioned. This glaring silence seems to too often be a feature of Shanghai expat life.

Yangshan (photos below)

2007-02-23T08:46:00.000-05:00

The first thing I noticed when I walked into Angel’s home was the calendar on the wall, featuring Mao Zedong. I haven’t been in many Chinese homes, and the thought had half crossed my mind that such portraits were usually in places where other people could see them, such as in shops, the fact of their presence being as important as the meaning they purported to convey. But the longer I am in China the more I realize how significantly the experience and memory of Mao, no matter how much it differs from the “truth” of history, has permeated the everyday lives of many Chinese people, attaining a meaning differing from, though linked to, the realities of his rule. Many foreigners who see such portraits—of Mao in China, of Ho in Vietnam—look upon them with some disdain. They know better; modern Chinese subjects have, regrettably, been duped by the state. But such thinking may just be an updated brand of orientalism, for how can I possibly presume to know what Mao means for Angel’s parents, who have chosen to include his memory in their private space?

The identical calendar of Mao hung on the walls of her other family members—Angel’s uncle got it from his workplace and gave it to everybody, and as I made the circuit from one household to another, and then back again, I realized how close-knit the family is. A particularly raucous dinner wasn’t a dinner so much as an attempt to grab a bite or two between toasts of wine. At that dinner I struggled to understand an uncle (I think) telling me about how an American pilot, a member of the volunteer Flying Tigers which flew for China during the Japanese invasion before the US officially entered the war, was shot down in Yangshan and protected by its citizens. He also told me that the US and China are the world’s greatest nations, which I of course found very interesting! (Incidentally, the Chinese word for nation, minzu, is also the word for race. Its etymology is complicated and much discussed, but it involves the important influence of racial imaginings of the Han in the conceptualization of the Chinese nation in the early twentieth century. Anyway it’s sometimes difficult to figure out which exactly people are referring to, or whether they themselves even know!)

The Spring Festival (or New Year's Festival) very much revolves around chatting with family members, often in front of the TV. Pictures of happy pigs (this year is the year of the Pig) hang everywhere. People put money inside hongbaos, which means “red envelopes,” and are, um, red envelopes, and give them to family members and friends. I got a ton from various people, though when I gave out some of my own I was a little confused about proper hongbao etiquette. I gave one to my friend Su and she said, “Oh! Are you getting married?” I also gave a hongbao to Angel’s parents, one for both of them. I happened to hand it to her mother, but apparently I should have given one to each of them—according to Angel, her mother won’t split the money!

On the first day of the festival (this year February 18th), many people in the town visit the local temple, a very beautiful, recently constructed place on the outskirts of town. There they burn incense and stare particularly shamelessly at any foreigner who might happen to be present. They also set off firecrackers, but there really isn’t anywhere that people don’t set off firecrackers during this time of year. Quiet is precisely what the Spring Festival is anything but. Especially at midnight on the eve of the first day, the noise is unbelievable! It was like a war had suddenly broken out around us. I don’t think I’ll forget the image of Angel’s dad grinning and holding his cigarette while throwing a bunch of extremely loud firecrackers out his front door.

Angel’s parents are extremely nice, but more than that, they are very interesting people, and I’m very glad to have met them. They are low-key and give the impression of knowing what’s up. Unfortunately I had a very difficult time understanding them because they speak Mandarin with a fairly strong accent, though they spoke very slowly for me. They speak I don’t know how many languages, as many Chinese people seem to: Mandarin, Cantonese, the requisite local language (“Yangshanese” I guess), plus two dialects of Hakka (because they grew up in a city with a big Hakka population, though they are ethnically Han).

It was interesting to see different ways of doing everyday things, for example ways of keeping things clean. And I realized that Americans are way too uptight about keeping things in refrigerators. Angel’s family doesn’t have one, but they still have plenty of eggs (which you don’t have to refrigerate) and eat lots of leftovers. Also, it seems that everyone keeps live chickens somewhere. Eating habits are different, as people frequently eat more food late at night. So are showering habits. People almost never shower in the morning, but do it at night instead. Many shower in the late afternoon or early evening because it’s “good for your health,” though I never found out why.

Nanning-Guangzhou-Yangshan

2007-02-19T00:59:00.000-05:00

On Friday night I took an extremely nice train from Nanning to Guangzhou, where I shared a compartment with a couple of young quiet types who work for Texas Instruments in China. In Guangzhou I made my way to Shamian island. Shamian is beautiful, and looks exactly the same as when I lived there for three months last summer in the US consulate—except that now there’s a Starbucks to compete with my dear Blenz! They’re taking over the world.

In my Shamian hostel I met a traveler from Poland who had been in China for just a few days, and was ready to get the hell out. His plan was to go back to Hong Kong and catch a cheap flight to the Philippines. He’d seen enough of China. Hectic, crowded, and difficult were the impressions he conveyed. What he hadn’t realized is that traveling in China during the Spring Festival is about as easy as climbing Mount Everest with your teeth. He’d made his way to the railway station to buy a ticket to go further into the country (he had planned to travel here for about a month), took one look, and ran away with all possible speed. When I passed by the station later, I saw what he meant. The line was unbelievable. I couldn’t figure out where it ended. It didn’t resemble a “line” so much as a great seething mass of people. Where were newcomers supposed to stand? Luckily my friend and I were not about to venture into that outgrowth of Hell, but were on our way to the adjacent bus station, which for some reason was much less frenzied than the train station (though after that experience, my whole conceptualization of “frenzy” has undergone somewhat of a revolution, sending the calm and familiar image of big crowds to the guillotine and replacing it with a frothing, distorted version of its former self). And there we bought our tickets to Yangshan.

Yangshan is a smallish town about three hours northwest of Guangzhou that sees absolutely no foreigners. Walking down the street lets me know what it’s like to be a celebrity, or a monster, or a flock of sheep cycling by while playing violins, because people would probably stare at each with the same amount of shock. A typical scenario is the casual glance, the double take, and then the relentless, shameless staring. It’s difficult to get used to.

I have two friends from Yangshan, whose English names are Angel and Su. They both studied English in Guangzhou, and I met them there last summer. Angel’s parents kindly invited me stay in their home while I am in Yangshan, letting me see their life during the Spring Festival. It’s an extremely interesting and rewarding experience, and I’ll write more about it later.

Nanning (Feb 6-9)

2007-02-09T22:01:00.000-05:00

Nanning is a nice medium-sized Chinese city (about 1.2 million people) that is easy to get around in. There isn’t much to see here, except for some parks, a museum or two, and plenty of shopping, but it’s a good place to just hang out. A nice girl showed me around a bit, and pointed out a good local specialty, laoyou mian, which means “old friend noodles”—sometimes Chinese names get it just right! The next day I went to a museum about the Miao and Zhuang minorities, where a woman who worked there showed me around. She really impressed me: she had taught herself English in two years, and was in the process of struggling through Watership Down! She asked me some questions about vocabulary in it, which were almost all words in rabbit language that the author invented! I don’t think she really understands everything that is going on—the book is, after all, extremely British!—but she’s making a valiant effort. I can’t imagine tackling a similarly difficult book in Chinese after just two years of study.

At the museum I met a very nice French lady whose son had married a girl from Guangzhou whom he had met in France, so she (the French lady) was visiting them and traveling a bit by herself before heading to Kunming to celebrate the New Year with her daughter-in-law’s family. She was staying at the same hotel as me, and we went to a couple parks and ate a couple meals together during the next day and a half, which was very nice. (She’s really into gardening and was interested in the names of all the plants.) Some travelers are amazing: she told me about a Belgian guy she had met in Xi’an who had biked there all the way from Belgium! It took him five months. Some people take traveling very, very seriously.

On the street I randomly bumped into the man from Pingxiang whom I met on the bus in Vietnam, which was quite a surprise!

Hanoi-Nanning (Feb 6)

2007-02-09T21:57:00.000-05:00

The night before I left for Nanning I went with Naomi’s roommate Greet and a friend of hers to a meeting of artists from Hanoi and elsewhere around the world, who meet every week to hear about a local artist’s work. The translator had studied at the Art Institute in Chicago!

Getting from Hanoi to Nanning probably could not have been any easier. I’ll outline it in brief so the future tourist can have some inkling of the pleasures of traveling out of Vietnam.

First, you buy your bus ticket for $22 a few days in advance from a nice looking travel agency in the touristy part of Hanoi. The arrangement is for the travel agency to drive you to the station on a motorbike at 7:00 in the morning on the day you leave to catch the 7:30 bus. The employee tells you to come back the following day to pick up the ticket, which seems like an extra and unnecessary trip, but you shrug and do it anyway, confident that the locals know what’s up. Upon arriving the next day, the employee tells you that the ticket isn’t available yet, so you should just come at 7:00 on the day you leave. Assuming that this is just a small mix-up and not at all indicative of any larger twist of fate, you do so. But upon arrival on the day of departure the store is closed tightly, so you wait for somebody to arrive. 7:15 comes. Then 7:30. While turning away numerous ladies selling food, you begin to get anxious, because you think you’ve missed the bus. At 7:45 someone comes and you tell her so. She runs off to get an important looking man in a suit, who tells you to come back at 8:30 to catch the 9:00 bus. You then wander around for 45 minutes, and return at 8:30 to learn that there is no 9:00 bus. Listen to another employee tell you how bad management at this company is, which would have been fascinating information a few days earlier. You’re then offered two options: 1) Get $10 back and get a ride to the border on a smaller minibus, where you can hopefully find a bus to Nanning. 2) Get a free hotel room (how generous of them!) and get the bus tomorrow. Since your visa for Vietnam expires that day, you choose the former option. You hop on a motorbike and get a ride to a minibus, where thankfully there is someone there from Pingxiang, a Chinese town at the border, who speaks Chinese. Cram in with him and hear his opinions about the war in Iraq (all about oil), women in America (are they really “easy”?), and how America’s economy got to be so strong (lots of reasons). Get to the Vietnamese border town, drive around dropping people off at various places, then hop in a new car with your Chinese companion and another Chinese man, which drives to Friendship Pass, the border. Crowd by the exit window, because in Asia lines are luxuries. Passport vanishes, then reappears with an exit stamp. Proceed to the Chinese entry point, where an astute border guard examines your passport very carefully, looking at every single previous visa and entry or exit stamp. Rewrite entry card in ink instead of pencil. Then the guard spots a problem with your passport: why is your passport number 086747655, but on the Chinese visa is written U86747655!?!?!?!?! Which is it, 0 or U?? He calls his superior and they initiate a deep and engaging conference on the subject. You try your best to explain that it’s just a silly mistake that the Chinese consulate in Chicago made because your passport is old and the number 0 is a bit smudged so it could be a U. After much discussion, they waive you through.

The other side is like a cool swim on a hot day, a nice stretch after a cramped bus ride, ease after difficulty. There’s a bus waiting… to Nanning! Not only does it have seatbelts, but the stewardesses make you wear them! It has air conditioning! It drives you directly to a station! (Instead of random hotels that have deals with the bus company.) In Nanning the air is fresh, the traffic is light, and sidewalks are sidewalks instead of motorbike parking lots. Best of all, when people speak they are not totally unintelligible. It’s nice to be back in China.

Vietnam

2007-02-05T00:17:00.000-05:00

You have to strike a fine balance when posting something on the Internet—writing all your thoughts while keeping in mind that anyone can look at them. When traveling, though, you have a little more leeway, because you can say whatever you want about people who don’t speak English! A nasty trick perhaps, but such are the traits of the language barrier. I shudder to think what has been said about me in front of my face these past two weeks in Vietnam. “What’s that terrible smell? Is it coming from that foreigner? Hello! You very handsome! This just 5 dollar cheap okay!”

In a place like Hanoi, the relationship between tourists and the people who deal with them is often one of misunderstanding, anxiety, even hatred. On the street, tourists are offered products of every kind, from pirated Lonely Planet guidebooks to pastries. Sellers grab at your arms and clothes, and the constant barrage of hassling can wear the poor tourist down. The worst are the motorbike drivers. They sit on street corners and shout, yell, and wave their arms at any passing white person. Tourists, in turn, learn to ignore them or return rudeness with rudeness.

Traffic in Hanoi is lots of fun, both for the driver and the pedestrian! Most people are on motorbikes, and crossing the street involves wading into the middle of a horde of passing bikes. You must walk very slowly but steadily while they weave around you. Driving one involves constant vigilance. Only ex-pats wear helmets. The most distressing sight is seeing a father driving with his wife perched behind and their little child on his lap, all helmetless! Brittany Spears’ lapse of judgment was the pearl of motherhood compared to these transgressions.

My trip has been limited to Hanoi, where I plunged into the (relatively) luxurious ex-pat lifestyle with Naomi and her friends (for Vietnam is cheap, very very cheap); Hue, a city just south of the former DMZ; Hoi An, another city a few hours south of that; and Hai Phong, a city an hour or two east of Hanoi, whose port was mined in 1972 by American ships, which returned the next year to help clean them up. Hue was the only important city held by the Vietcong for a significant amount of time (3 and a half weeks) during the Tet offensive in 1968 (when they murdered thousands of people suspected of working with the Americans), and you can still notice traces of the intense fighting that happened there. Hue was the capital of Vietnam for a while, and it has an impressive citadel that was built in the early 19th century. In Hue, I went on a day trip to the DMZ area from the American War (as it’s called here) and saw battlefields, many of which were household names in the US in the 1960s: the Vinh Moc tunnels, Khe Sanh combat base, the Rockpile lookout post, and the bridge that “connected” North and South Vietnam. At Khe Sanh they had a couple captured US helicopters on display, which was strangely disconcerting for me. All these areas are overgrown now, which is how it should be, though in some of them huge bomb craters can be seen every few meters. There are still plenty of unexploded artillery rounds, projectiles, and mines strewn about. A fairly large number of people die or are injured each year from the stuff. It was heartbreaking to see big billboards warning children not to play in minefields or touch pieces of metal on the ground. One sign showed a child crying with his hand flying through the air. Imagine having to worry about that as a kid!

Hoi An is a beautiful little town with impressive colonial architecture that combines influences from many parts of the world. I stayed in a guesthouse in a stunning 200-year-old building, which had been passed down through the same family was inhabited by a few ladies of various ages—probably aunts and grandmothers. I didn’t see any men or younger people there. It was right beside a beautiful covered bridge built by Japanese residents in the 1590s to connect their area with the Chinese area. One of Hoi An’s most interesting features is the cultural blending that often comes with port cities—influences from all over Asia as well as Europe can be seen in the architecture around the city.

Vietnam is a big backpacking country, and a typical route has people starting in Thailand and going to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. A lot of them are shockingly vapid and incurious, and a lot of them aren’t. Backpacking is a strange product of our modern times, and often seems to simply involve Westerners traveling to far-away places to hang out with each other. The only locals they can interact with are those who speak some English. It’s an interesting subculture, and one that merits further thought.

Tomorrow I’m off to Nanning, where, to my great relief, I shall finally be able to at least partially transgress the dreaded language barrier!

First post

2007-02-04T22:53:00.000-05:00

Well I figure having a nice little internet site people can go to will be more straightforward than sending out a bunch of e-mails, and it will be easier to ignore too! :) So I will post every week or two probably, hope you enjoy it!