The current exhibition at the British Museum, The First Emperor, is a tribute to the man who ordered the building of that huge monument to himself, the tomb of the Terracotta Warriors. The focus of the exhibition is a small selection of artefacts from the tomb, including a number of statues of the warriors themselves. It is a blockbuster exhibition which attempts to match the scale and ambition of its subject.
A short film which precedes the main part of the exhibition shows how Emperor Qin managed to conquer and unite what is now the territory of China. At the end of the film we see the map rapidly turning crimson and the word ‘Qin’ appearing on the map. ‘Qin’, we learn, gave origin to the western word China to denote what was called in Chinese the Middle Kingdom – or the centre of the world.
The exhibition was partly criticised in the Guardian for offering an uncritical and revisionist account of the achievements of a man who history has generally remembered as a brutal tyrant who ‘massacred prisoners, burned books and slaughtered scholars’. The words ‘cruel’ and ‘brutal’ are absent from the exhibition. The key message of the exhibition, signalled clearly in that introductory film, is one that the Emperor himself would have been happy with: He was on a celestially-inspired mission to unite ‘All-under-Heaven’ and so to bring China into existence. The existence of China is, therefore, no historical accident: It was written in the stars.
However, historians have on the whole ceased to regard all human history of the great achievements of supreme individuals equipped with armies and visions of a future world reshaped according to their ambitions. Also, it would, or at least should, be very hard in 2007 for any serious thinking person to sustain the belief that nations and states have a historical mission to exist, that they are the result of destiny and not of chance.
We learn very little in the exhibition about the lives of those who actually built the tomb. There are some references to convicts being used, to the huge numbers of slaves whose lives were sacrificed to its construction. But the overall message is that this was the work of a visionary, an emperor creating a coherent and sovreign empire which has survived intact up to the present day.
One key theme or, I would argue, purpose of the exhibition is that of continuity. Qin established the systems of weights and currency and was also largely responsible for establishment of the writing system, as well as beginning the building of the Great Wall. This grants legitimacy to the subsequent rulers of China: a series of dynasties have maintained China’s unity and preserved and guarded its treasures. The rulers of this empire have now generously allowed those who cannot visit the Middle Kingdom to enjoy at first hand a glimpse of its profoundly rich and mysterious cultural legacy.
The way in which China chooses at different times to regard its previous rulers is very instructive. This is particularly true of representations on TV (1). According to the Asia Times:
‘It has been a tradition in China, both under the communists and long before, to criticize Chinese leaders indirectly but deftly by comparing them to misguided, wicked or weak emperors, ignoring the welfare of the people, or by comparing them to the wise and benevolent rulers of the past. Chinese readers - and today's television viewers - are savvy enough to read between the propagandists' lines and understand 2,000-year-old contrived allusions to current politics.’
The Chinese people, then, understand the significance of the different dynasties. Some of them represent more insular styles of rule, some more outgoing, some more brutal and legalistic, some wiser and more benign. Visitors to this exhibition are left to make their own connections between the great rulers of the past of the great rulers of the present.
The current Chinese emperors, then, are laying claim to a heritage which goes back way before 1949, when Chairman Mao told the Chinese people to stand up. Mao was a great admirer of Emperor Qin, by the way, allegedly claiming . It is claiming a inheritance which goes back 2,000 years, and which is ultimately divinely derived. What we are being shown in this exhibition are some of the more treasured family heirlooms.
So what is the problem? Every nation and state in the world seeks to demonstrate that its existence is the inevitable product of all earlier stages of history, and to this end adapts, adopts, invents and constructs myths, legends, historical figures and movements, not to mention pre-existing monuments, in order to prove its rightful legacy. ‘China’ is no more or less artificial an entity than any other nation.
China as a country, if not a nation, has, in broad terms, been around for a very long time. But my question is: How much legitimacy are we prepared to concede the Chinese Government? It consists of an unelected oligarchy of bureaucrats who govern by means of repression and corruption. The subjects of the Chinese Communist Party regime enjoy little in the way of human and democratic rights. It is the world's largest dictatorship, and its claims to legitimate authority are contested, or at least questioned by a large proportion of the world's population, including in China itself.
Would the British Museum, and by extension the British state, be prepared to host a similar exhibition on behalf of the Government of Burma? Or North Korea? (2)
In the exhibition bookshop you can buy a seemingly fairly random selection of things related to China. One thing that may be useful to anyone vaguely interested in Chinese history is a book giving a broad outline and a timeline of Chinese history for children. The book makes a brief reference to the Cultural Revolution, a period when a previous generation of Communist Party leaders ransacked their own country and tried as hard as they could to destroy the country's cultural legacy: it was reportedly only through the direct intervention of Zhou Enlai that such crucial sites as the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace in Lhasa and even the site of Terracotta Warriors were saved. It would be strange, to say the least, if a brief guide to Russian or German history made such scant reference to the Stalin and Hitler eras. There is no mention of the single most prominent recent event in Chinese history in the eyes of the world, the events of June 4 1989, when the previous generation of leaders again murdered thousands in a desperate attempt to hold on to the reins of power, an event which the current leadership refuses to acknowledge on any level.
The culmination of the book's timeline and, presumably the mental timeline of the exhibition's visitors, is, inevitably, summer 2008, when the Chinese capital will host the Olympic Games. This is a key moment for the Chinese Government, a coming-out ball which will confirm beyond any doubt that China is, despite its continuing refusal to grant basic democratic and human rights to its population, a nation whose sovreignty and authority is beyond question (3). It will be a coronation ceremony for the emperors of New China.
This seems to be an apt term for what has previously been known as the People's Republic; given that the only two pillars of CCP ideology for the last number of years has been nationalism and 'we can make you rich!'; a name change, beloved of despots in desperate need of a fresh new image, seems well overdue. The PR in China could stay, of course, but with a different meaning, and given the success of our own beloved former leader in rebranding his party with the facile addition of the word 'New', it seems entirely appropriate for the CCP's attempt to remake itself for internal and international consumption. 'Xin Zhonghuo', anyone?! (4)
The message of the Olympics is, to borrow a phrase: China's Coming Home. And just as the slaves dedicated themselves selflessly to building the stunning monument to vanity that is the tomb of Emperor Qin, the Chinese people are wholeheartedly and voluntarily putting themselves hard to work. A recent Guardian special collected some very revealing comments regarding the importance that a lot of people give to the Olympics, and the effect a successful games will have on 'national pride': '"I don't have any religious or political convictions. So you can say that the Olympics is my main belief," says primary school teacher Zhou Chenguang. According to the taxi driver Xia Shishan: 'We will finish top of the medal table. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil.'' In Beijing projects are being completed at a furious pace and on a meglomaniac scale in the attempt to turn the host city into a place suitable for international visitors such as sports people, journalists and tourists, even if in the process making it into a city which will be pretty much unaffordable to the people who acually live there (4).
The current exhibition at the British Museum is a PR coup for the Chinese Government, and simultaneously an advert for the much greater showcase event next summer. It can to some extent be regarded as propaganda, rather than history.
Of course, a great deal can happen between now and June 2008, and a great deal could happen during the games themselves. What will happen if the very tight control that the authorities are trying to exercise over the event doesn't work? What if there are protests? What are the Falun Gong capable of? And how will the world react?
1 - The Qin dynasty was very positively portrayed in the 2005 film hero, regarded by some viewers as an outright piece of CCP propaganda. See also http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1312773,00.html.
2 - Unfortunately I didn't see the Ancient Persia exhibition two years ago, so have little idea of how that may have related to the question of Modern Iran, beyond what I managed to glean from various websites. There is obviously a significant contrast between the Forgotten Empire, which no clear connection with the present, and the First Emperor, which implies continuity. According to the New York Times, the exhibition 'give ancient Persia its proper place -- between Assyria and Babylon on the one hand and Greece and Rome on the other -- in the chronology of early civilizations. In that sense, ''Forgotten Empire'' is also highly topical...John Curtis, the show's curator and keeper of the museum's ancient Near East department, added in a statement: ''It may also be important at this time of difficult East-West relations to remind people in the West of the remarkable cultural legacy of a country like Iran.'' '. Personally I find such aims perfectly laudable, but whatever the stated aims of the exhibition under discussion here they are not nearly as commendable. Plus, Iran is actually, strictly speaking, a democratic country...
3 - This contrasts with the status of little Taiwan, officially known as the Repuplic of China, which will once again compete under the name of Chinese Taipei, owing to the demands of the Chinese in Beijing. See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2174496,00.html.
4 - I'd love to read an analysis of how Beijing's rebranding of China as a dynamic forward-thinking business-friendly place matches Blair's project to ditch the Labour Party's ideological and historical baggage in the mid-nineties. I remember reading some time ago that one of the many foreign politicians to lecture the Chinese leadership in the 1990s was Peter Mandelson.
5 - Obviously East London is now starting to go through the same process. See http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article555.html.
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Another profoundly idiotic, craven and predictable article by Martin Jacques in the Guardian about the inevitable and glorious rise of China gave birth to an interesting thought.
In contrast to five years ago, the likely identity of the next superpower has become crystal clear. It is no longer just a possibility that it will be China; on the contrary, the probability is extremely high, if not yet a racing certainty. Nor does the timescale of this change have us peering into the distant future as it did five years ago. China is already beginning to acquire some of the interests and motivations of a superpower, and even a little of the demeanour. Beijing feels like a parallel universe to the US, and certainly Europe. There is an expansive mood about the place. China is growing in self-confidence by the day.
And with good reason. There is no sign of China's economic growth abating, and it is this that lies behind its growing confidence. The massive contrasts between China and the US, both socially and economically, are enjoined in the argument over America's trade deficit with the China. The latter is deeply aware that its future prospects depend on the continuation of its economic growth and this remains its priority. But no longer to the exclusion of all else: China is beginning to widen its range of concerns and interests.
So far so predictable: China is growing at an exponential rate and is beginning to challenge the global power of the US. My idea concerns this parallel between Chinese and American power, but at the level of culture.
It's clear that the US as a global cultural superpower foments opposition to itself by crushing or buying off any attempts at cultural independence, so that you increasingly see the same films advertised at the same time in the centres of cities all around the globe, for example, and so many people's free time is spent watching films from Blockbuster video, not to mention eating at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart and so on. This makes the United States a very obvious target for anger against injustice and inequality.
China, on the other hand, has almost no cultural influence on this level, give or take the occasional martial arts epic, which is itself effectively a product of the Hollywood system. There are no global Chinese music stars, and very few if any recent global household names in any field. There is, thankfully, no global Chinese equivalent to McDonalds or Pizza Hut; in fact, the brands most beloved of young Chinese people seem to be American or European ones - NBA, KFC, the Champions' League etc. Aside from a few satellite Chinese speaking parts of the world, China has little or virtually no cultural influence to match its growing economic clout.
Doesn't this mean, then, that its increasing international economic power will attract less notice and therefore less opposition? I'm thinking in terms of other developing countries, specifically Africa, the Middle East and South America, where the locally damaging effects of China's involvement are becoming more and more unavoidable (I wrote about some aspects of this here), as well as the catastrophic effects on the environment if every Chinese peasant did ever get to live the Chinese Dream. What China lacks, though, is anything like the very clear focus for opprobrium that US cultural products and brands represent.( Read more... )
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I’ve always found it a bit puzzling that people pay (often lots of) money to sit in a class and practise speaking foreign languages. Everyone on earth already has at least one language at their disposal and it’s not too hard to track down someone who wants to learn that language and in return will help you as your try your hardest to make yourself understood in their language. It’s just a case of tracking down that someone, which these days, what with the gumtree and whatnot, is not a very difficult task at all.
Of course occasionally you may, especially if you’re a woman, meet people with ulterior motives, or who are actually just really boring, or who laugh pitilessly every time you try and put a sentence together – or in the case of Mandarin Chinese, look at you with such puzzlement that you’d think you’d just told them there was something wrong with the Communist Party, whereas in fact you were simply trying to let them know that you come from Sheffield and you prefer broccoli to spinach. But on the whole it’s preferable to and a lot more effective than, say, paying €50 a month to some unscrupulous bastards who will continue fleecing your bank account long after the school has gone bankrupt and the teacher has fucked off back to London in poverty, or, if you’re Brazilian, will stick you in a tiny classroom on Oxford Street with eighteen of your compatriots so you end up speaking less English than you would back home.
Now I come to think of it, language teachers spend so much time trying to make their students pretend that they are not actually in a classroom at all that it really makes you question the point of being there in the first place.( Read more... )
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The Portuguese generally take a lot of pride in the fact that Brazil, a country they discovered, has become one of the most vibrant and varied countries on earth and a true cultural superpower. That diversity, of course, came into being largely because of the slave trade. But slavery is a word seldom mentioned in discussions of Portugal’s glorious age of expansion and empire.
A current exhibition in the museum in Lagos makes a laudable attempt to promote Portugal’s own multicultural heritage, talking at length about how successive migrations of humanity have culturally enriched European societies and made them much more ethnically diverse, but fails to mention how forced migrations of people created economic riches, or even the remarkable fact that Lagos itself would give its name to the capital of Africa’s most populous nation, as many of the slaves traded in the Algarve originated in that part of Africa.
Portugal first arrived in what would become its largest African colony, Angola, in 1483, and they would stay there for almost 500 years. Like any colonial relationship it was one of brutality and forced obedience:
Until the late 1900's Portugal used the area as a "slave pool" for its far more lucrative colony in Brazil and to benefit from the occasional discovery of precious gemstones and metals. Angola suffered from one of the most backward forms of colonialist rule. (from www.africanet.com)
According to an article by Helena Matos in Público, it always held a special significance for the Portuguese:
(There is a) word which, in Portugal, throughout the entire twentieth century was murmured in times of crisis and in the inevitable periods of euphoria that followed. That word is Angola.( Read more... )
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The thing I'm trying to write at the moment is just getting more and more involving and I might never finish it; if I do it will also contain more links than the internet. When I was in Portugal a couple of weeks ago the press was full of articles about the Prime Minister's visit to Angola, along with 300 empresarios, looking to take advantage of Portugal's past, erm, connections with the country in order to grab a slice of the action. This was followed by a huge article in the magazine VISÃO (which I picked up at the airport) about China's industrial, financial and commercial (but not yet cultural, oddly enough) takeover of the country. It set me thinking about Angola's past masters and their future ones...as I say, it may just stay in my head, driving me mad until I actually get it done. I am sure it has been very much in the heads of Angolans recently, maybe I've accidentally read their minds.
I might just spend the entire afternoon at work tomorrow getting it done. My boss is away for a week in Portugal, oddly enough. I could chat about it all morning with my Somali students, but I'd have to teach them the word 'history' first. And 'China'.
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I don’t quite know how we managed to get onto the subject of smashing up houses the other day, but something one of my flatmates said sparked my memory of an entirely embarrassing incident about 14 years ago when in a fit of very drunken high spirited hilarity we trashed the living room of the student house we were living in. There was a lot of bizarre behaviour involving a great deal of screeching as plants, books, any furniture to hand and a fair amount of messy food got repeatedly danced into the carpet. A surprising amount of destruction was carried out, considering there were only three of us. The following day I was woken up around ten by the sound of someone I surmised to be our fellow house dweller, someone who was by chance not himself a student (which may explain why this long-forgotten event suddenly turned up in my brain so very recently), bumping the hoover down the stairs. I must have conked back out, because the next thing I remember hearing was the sound of him dragging the hoover back up the stairs about six pm. He never spoke to us of that which he had seen.
My current flatmate, oddly enough himself a student, responded with a tale of a party he’d held where the Police were called out five times to try and calm down a very small terraced house packed to bursting with around 200 extremely excitable young people. After repeated attempts to find out from people who a) may genuinely have had no idea who the host was and b) were being very very friendly and not making any sense whatsoever, the Police just went back to the station and presumably waited for their shift to end.
Because what could they really do, in that situation? They could try and batter their way into the house while trying their hardest not to actually kill anyone, or they could, I dunno, just burn the fucking house down. Both of which would, without prior clearance from above, result in a fuck of a lot of paperwork and, in that worst of all possible nightmare scenarios for police persons the world over, an early retirement on a hefty pension.
Sometimes of course that’s exactly what they do do. And when they have special permission or instructions from above, things can get really messy and bloody. Not just when young people are enjoying themselves and potentially upsetting their neighbour’s plant pots and sleep patterns, but particularly when their very objective is to cause trouble and draw attention to themselves. There are countless examples of unrestrained police riots in recent British, European and world history – Orgreave, the Poll Tax riots, the Criminal Justice Bill protests, Genoa, the Candelaria and Carandiru massacres etc, etc, etc – not to mention of course very high-profile episodes like, well, the Tiananmen Square massacre springs strangely to mind. Somebody high up obviously decides that the maintenance of public order is worth a few cracked heads, broken bodies, piles of burning juvenile corpses and all that tiresome paperwork.
In the same way that parties and demonstrations can get catastrophically out of hand, of course, countries can too. Brazil became a significantly less fun place to be after the CIA decided to juntar-se à festa, and although I don't know much about the nightlife in Indonesia, the British and Americans brought more than a bottle of wine and a big bag of honey-roasted peanuts to the party. There are of course countless depressing examples, and it's not like they've suddenly decided that it's wrong and they need to stop poking their noses into other countries' affairs or anything - stai attento, Romano Prodi.
The US saves time and effort on paperwork by simply not filling in the requisite forms and posting them off to the appropriate international bodies, either before or after an invasion, unlawful bombing campaign, coup attempt etc, etc, etc. Now, there is an unyielding amount of paperwork to be completed in the relatively simple task of helping foreigners – many ironically enough displaced by ongoing imperial intervention in their countries of birth – learn the language and settle in a new country, so I can’t imagine the quantity of sheer bureaucracy involved in getting approval for a death squad to go around and slaughter peasant women in a bound-to-succeed strategy of installing a climate of insecurity and fear among the local population of some godforsaken central American country. All politicians claim to abhor red tape these days, don’t they?
Speaking of Latin America, what are the chances of another of the world’s Most Dastardly Oil-producing Countries (Venezuela) becoming the focus of a campaign of global media opprobrium, scare mongering and mass misinformation? I have a sneaking suspicion that after whatever disastrous Armageddon-unleashing campaign Bush & Co are planning for Iran has ended in, er, disaster for everyone but its somewhat opinionated new leader and anyone else who actually likes wars, the US might revert to its more traditional post-Vietnam policy of covertly making it very clear just what the consequences of choosing a different path from other compliant nations might be, through their time-honoured strategy of training and paying the country’s most criminally insane thugs to go on a unrestrained superviolent frenzy of causing pain and death to the poor.
Ahem. I may have rambled a bit from my original point but actually, now I come to think of it, if the burghers of our global village get anything like as much glee and fulfilment from their wholesale pillaging, slashing and burning of our planet and our common future as we did when we were ripping our own house to shreds all those years ago, we’d better hope that there’s some kind selfless non-student type to hoover it all up in the morning. Do you think they might be pissed?!?
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I did not meet one student in China who did not want to live what might be termed the 'Chinese Dream' - to work hard for a multinational company, live in a brand-new apartment in a big city and own their own car. Death of a Salesman anyone? Very few people who aspire to that lifestyle are going to be able to achieve it - and if they do, the consequences for China and the world are almost too horrendous to contemplate. I mean, I have tried to think about what it means for our environmental resources, but thankfully this guy has gone several steps further and actually done the maths. And while I find Maths itself pretty traumatic to deal with, his conclusions may make you want to pack up and head for Mars:
The western economic model - the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy - is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream".
The key point though, which a lot of people writing about the consequences of China's massive industrial growth rate seem shy to confront, is that it's not just a question of how the Chinese do things, but about the unsustainability of our own model of development, which developing countries are simply encouraged to emulate:
In an increasingly integrated global economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain and iron ore, the existing economic model will no longer work for industrial countries either.
It's a very refreshing and not entirely dispiriting article - if you happen to live in China you might not be able to find it via Google:
After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.
According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party.
I reckon I could do that job!
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Any pretensions I may have entertained of Learning Chinese Through FootballTM would have quickly been doomed to failure. Although I had a good grasp of the basic numbers, the names of the world's leading clubs and players are often unrecognisable and hellish to pronounce. I wouldn't imagine that Paul Gascoigne found it particularly easy.
I did, briefly, try: in my first or second week I played my first game of football in quite a while. Disappointed to see the fruitless-yet-predictable results of my time-honoured technique of chasing-the-ball-all-over-the-pitch-and-then-kicking-it-straight-to-the-other-team, I turned to our goalkeeper and asked him how the Chinese say 'Fuuuuck!!!' He told me, I repeated it about ten times and then never used it again.
Chinese kids (male kids, that is to say, which is most of them) love playing football, especially in a curious 20-a-side variety. Nor is it unusual to have to share your tennis court with two or three other pairs. There are just so many young people with so much energy to expend. Now personally, as I may have mentioned somewhere around here, my own preference would be for them to devote their efforts to storming the bastions of power and making their country into a decent place to live, but what the hey. They prefer to direct their youthful frustrations elsewhere.
One of my students, faced with the question of which people he would least like to meet, surprised me by not offering the standard response of a Taiwanese politician or 'anyone from Japan'. His answer was that he would hate to meet the football players of AC Milan, given that he was a fan of their city rivals Inter.
How had this 20-year-old boy (as the Chinese like to say), no more from the north of Italy than I'm from Shanghai (I'm not), developed such a strong emotional attachment to Inter Milan? Well, he'd read about the team in officially approved articles in state-controlled newspapers and on the government-sponsored internet. These days, if Michael Owen fails to score for Newcastle of a weekend, or if the Chelsea manager suggests he may need to strengthen his right-back position, it is back-page news around the world - and in China (and probably in Japan, although for different reasons) it makes the front page.
This contrasts with a genuine lack of interest in home-grown football. In early 2005 the start of the soccer season was delayed for several weeks because a number of clubs didn't have the funds to field a full team and to travel to matches. When I went to see China's number 1 team Dalian Shide I saw a sparsely populated stadium witness the most desultory performance I'd seen since, well, my own a few months earlier. After what I think was the fifth goal ((I wasn't sure as we arrived late, the result of a fairly unnecessary argument with my slightly irrational then-girlfriend over my paying almost three euros for two tickets), the players left the pitch five minutes early, presumably because they simply couldn't be bothered to run around in the cold to such a lukewarm reaction any more.
In European football and American baseball, though, there is a huge amount of interest. The Government don't mind; they seem quite happy to see their young people doped up to the eyeballs on this particular foreign opiate. And football and basketball are foreign imports - it is a form of cultural imperialism just as profound as Hollywood movies or McDonalds.
This Guardian article from two days ago, about the aspirations of a certain British football club to cash in on this new 'goal rush', reads like a grotesque and hilarious satire of the original Age of Expansion:
Sheffield United's manager could become a household name in Chengdu after his club revealed at their AGM yesterday that contracts have been exchanged on a deal to buy the Chinese second division club Chengdu Five Bull FC for a "minimal" sum with completion anticipated early in the new year.
"We are taking the Blades global," enthused Kevin McCabe, the chairman of Sheffield United's plc, who already has extensive real estate development interests in China. "Chengdu city has a population of 11m and is the capital of Sichuan province which has a population of 100m. Although I don't expect them all to become Sheffield United fans, this does represent a potential fan base which we can use to develop both the Five Bull and Sheffield United brands."
Five Bull boast a 40,000-capacity stadium, but it represents virgin marketing and merchandising territory. Previously effectively under government ownership - the club was run by a collective of state enterprises - the Chinese government's recent decree that the country's soccer clubs can no longer be even indirectly state-owned dictates that Five requires outside investment. "We intend to establish a club shop at the stadium for the first time as well as a Blades Bar in the city and to sell branded merchandise, also for the first time," McCabe explained.
The idea is that Five Bull fans will develop a twin affection for the Blades, their enthusiasm fuelled by the internet and satellite television transmissions of English football.
Now speaking as someone from Sheffield, there is little more absurd to me than the thought of someone from Sichuan province dreaming of visiting Bramall Lane. I'm aware that what might appear mundane to me could seem exotic to someone from China and vice-versa, but I can assure anyone who hasn't had the opportunity to see it for themselves that there is very little of the exotic or charming about that part of the city. There are, of course, many positive benefits of globalisation - the internet and being able to buy pesto in Dalian spring to mind - but this, while certainly not the worst thing about our brave new world, is definitely not the best.
The article put me in mind of William Gibson's article about Singapore: a place where the past has ceased to exist. Forget about silk dresses, Mao suits and charming Sichuan tea shops - what the future has to offer China is a replica Sheffield United football top - made, in China, natch - and a Blades theme bar.
To me, it sounds uncannily like my particular vision of hell.
The F Word part 5
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I have to provide a link to a tremendous William Gibson article from Wired, which is from 1993 and about Singapore but rings so many bells in terms the kind of place that the authorities currently want to build where China used to stand - a 'single-party capitalist technocracy', 'a place where the physical past has ceased to exist':
Singapore looks like an infinitely more liveable version of convention-zone Atlanta, with every third building supplied with a festive party-hat by the designer of Loew's Chinese Theater. Rococo pagodas perch atop slippery-flanked megastructures concealing enough cubic footage of atria to make up a couple of good-sized Lagrangian-5 colonies. Along Orchard Road, the Fifth Avenue of Southeast Asia, chocka-block with multi-level shopping centers, a burgeoning middle class shops ceaselessly. Young, for the most part, and clad in computer-weathered cottons from the local Gap clone, they're a handsome populace; they look good in their shorts and Reeboks and Matsuda shades.
There is less in the way of alternative, let alone dissident style in Singapore than in any city I have ever visited. I did once see two young Malayan men clad in basic, global, heavy metal black - jeans and T-shirts and waist-length hair. One's T-shirt was embroidered with the Rastafarian colors, causing me to think its owner must have balls the size of durian fruit, or else be flat-out suicidal, or possibly both. But they were it, really, for overt boho style. (I didn't see a single "bad" girl in Singapore. And I missed her.) A thorough scan of available tapes and CDs confirmed a pop diet of such profound middle-of-the-road blandness that one could easily imagine the stock had been vetted by Mormon missionaries.
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
The article, which is well worth reading right through to the end, could so easily in some places be talking about Beijing, Shanghai, or indeed Dalian, particularly when it compares the sterility of ahistorical Singapore with the spice and teeming variety of life in Hong Kong, which seemed to be, with the coming of the handover, under threat:
In Hong Kong I'd seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention. I'd caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too. Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down.
Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, the Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition. Some kind of profound embarassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands.
Interesting too that in Singapore they have realised that a city with no history is not just marketable but also something that can be franchised - to the Chinese:
In the coastal city of Longkou, Shandong province, China (just opposite Korea), Singaporean entrepreneurs are preparing to kick off the first of these, erecting improved port facilities and a power plant, as well as hotels, residential buildings, and, yes, shopping centers. The project, to occupy 1.3 square kilometers, reminds me of "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, a sovereign nation set up like so many fried-noodle franchises along the feeder-routes of edge-city America. But Mr. Lee's Greater Singapore means very serious business, and the Chinese seem uniformly keen to get a franchise in their neighborhood, and pronto.
It's one thing setting up brand new privatised developments for the new rich; on the other hand, the process of quickly turning cities with millions of people and thousands of years of history into sparkling imitations of the world's cleanest and most boring city is neither a straightforward nor painless one, especially for the people who happen to have spent their whole lives there, and especially when tens of thousands of hopefully high-spending VIPs will be spending up to three weeks in the city in, er, three years' time. Part one of this excellent BBC documentary gives a very precise account of what is going on.
Of course it's not something unprecedented in the modern world; the comments from the old man talking about the prospect of being shipped 20 or 30 kilometres away from his home in the centre to a place with no public transport or facilities reminded me of what someone told me years ago about being moved from the centre of Dublin to Crumlin in the south of the city in the 1950s - he compared it to going to live on the moon. The last number of years in Europe have seen a gradual hollowing out of the centre of our cities, making them more resemble cities in the US, destroying any civic sense and making us more dependent on private transport. The difference in China, I think, is to do with both the speed and the violence of the destruction.
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I've sometimes been asked here to provide some advice or tips about Dalian, given that I recently spent ten months living there. I'm not a big fan of the place, I think it resembles a lot of Chinese cities in that it feels over-sized, characterless, hastily assembled and without any sense of its own history; as for it's the future, the term 'Singaporisation' seems to be entirely apt to describe a city like Dalian, which, when all the ubiquitous building projects have been completed and tidied up and it is finally 'finished', will be a pretty boring place to live.
For the edification of people who haven't been there, I'm going to post an, erm, post that I made two or so months after arriving in Dalian to a foreign teacher's discussion board peopled by, er, people who had, when I was trying to decide on a destination city, recommended and extolled the city to me.
I need to say before I start that when I wrote this I was in a Very Bad Mood, and, as Paul Theroux commented, it is never good to record your response to a city or country when you are feeling down. Other factors played a part in my reaction: our University had gone out of its way to provide no kind of a welcome or orientation whatsoever (which on balance is not totally rare, I believe), and my personal situation was a bit, shall we say, Conflictuous.
I'm also happy to admit that other people have been to or are in Dalian and really like the place. And I should add that things, and my mood, definitely improved as time went by, aided in no small part by a six-week jaunt around Thailand halfway through the year. There were, it is evident, lots and lots of wonderful things about day-to-day life in China that escaped my attention (and I hadn't yet realised what the letters KTV referred to), as of course there still are. I was also being as provocative as possible. These were, however, in an exaggerated and hot-headed form, my first impressions, and I do think that they are not entirely without foundation, so while I could easily muck around with it and edit out all the things I'm embarrassed about today, I'm going to leave it as it is:
There are lots of reasons why I chose to take a job in Dalian rather than any other city. When I was teaching in Dublin a few years ago I had lots of students from here who couldn't speak highly enough of the place, they gave me the impression that it was a laidback city with a relaxed atmosphere, and although at the time I wasn't considering coming to China to work it stuck in my head.
Another important reason is the comments I read on Tefl websites, especially this one. As I'd never met anyone who'd taught in China it was the only way I could get honest first hand accounts of what it is like to live and work here. So I was interested to read the various comments proclaiming that (somebody actually said this) 'Dalian is the best city to live in in China' and suchlike.
Now, I know that a lot of people on this forum may have been here for a while and got used to things. I had never been to China before and so was willing to face whatever challenges came up. I'd done a bit of reading which had made to clear to me that there are places in China where nobody in their right mind would want to go and live. But I had been persuaded that Dalian offered the opportunity to get to witness the real China close up without having to abjure all possible creature comforts (clean air, some kind of social life) for a year.
Now I've been here two months and am more than a little distressed to report that not only is Dalian an ugly, ugly city with just a very short coastline path and a few green hills surrounded by building sites to escape to, there is also absolutely nothing to do at night.
Now I know there are a couple of bars where if you're lucky you might get talking to some people who happen to speak the same language as you, but this is not my idea of a good time. I was led to expect at least some sort of fledgling local scene, places where young Chinese people go to enjoy themselves. But there is nothing of the kind. So by day your choices range from wandering round some department stores to clambering up the same dirty hill for the umpteenth time to get a view of thousands of factories and construction sites. At night you can sit in bars a 45 minute bus ride away with other foreigners feeling just as depressed and isolated as you are.
There are some cities in the world which I'd never even think of going to visit, let alone to live. Off the top of my head Barnsley comes to mind, as does Vladivostok for some reason. As I said at the start of this rant, some places in China I'd sooner cut off my legs than visit. But having been to Qingdao, where at least you can go for a long long walk by the sea, I know there are much better places to visit and live in in China than here. I found out pretty soon after arriving that amongst lots of people here Dalian is regarded as a fairly shitty place to live. Now I know the reason why my students still tell me it's China's most beautiful city - it's because the government has told them it is, and they don't know any better. As for the foreigners who have maybe been here too long and forgotten what it's like to live somewhere with a nice environment, interesting things to see and a variety of things to do in the evening, I wish they hadn't used this public forum to try and persuade themselves and others that they live somewhere 'exotic'! I gave up a secure job in the beautiful city of Lisbon to come to this dump!
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A couple of things I've written here about China find an echo in a recent Guardian article about China's successive hostings of the Miss World contest (it seems that, like the Eurovision Song Contest, no other country would touch it with a chopstick):
For a regime keen to publicise its economic success and internationalist credentials at home and abroad, the month-long beauty-fest is propaganda gold dust. Miss World may not yet have her own float in the National Day parade in Tiananmen Square; but in a country where media content still falls under governmental control, the heavy coverage that the contest receives sends a powerful signal that the senior cadres feel the contest serves their ends.
Domestic TV coverage has a clearly defined political function. In general, the Chinese media like to broadcast footage of resident westerners going about their daily lives. Inevitably the subject is shown praising China - and if, like last year's Miss USA Nancy Randall, they do so in endearingly elementary Chinese, all the better. This kind of material has a significance over and above the feelgood factor; it underlines the success of recent liberalising policies.
Meanwhile on an international level the Miss World contest allows a carefully constructed Chinese message to be broadcast to an audience of two billion across the globe. Over the past 10 years the Chinese have worked hard to dispel once ubiquitous images of China, the bicycling factory state, and glamorous events like Miss World are a tonic. Not only that - the contest sends a strong message to the world about China's changing values and internationalisation, that the days of the Red Guards are over. "This sort of programming helps build an international image that is unthreatening and somehow reassuring," says Crane. "After all, beauty pageants were once considered as American as apple pie."
Unfortunately, what these witless and seemingly profoundly vapid Communist Party dullards, whose apparent ambition is to transform China into somewhere as bland and unthreatening as a Disney theme park, are incapable of realising is that it also portrays China as a country which is utterly, utterly naff.
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If, as James Joyce said, the useful lifespan of a newspaper is one day, how long does a free newspaper last for? In Madrid, one of the many, many free papers that are scattered throughout the Metro network every day is called 20 Minutos, which seems a fair estimate. As you might expect, you don't get a very high standard of news journalism from the free press - Metro, Qué!, 20 Minutos and the other ones whose names I forget just tend to feature the exact same news stories written in a fairly clumsy and sensationalist style. But what can you expect - they are free after all. And because of this, it's not unusual to see people carrying two or three of them to skim through as they move around the city.
As a result, it's actually quite unusual to see people reading 'proper' newspapers, by which I include the generally ubiquitous football papers Marca and As. Which is a shame, because in my opinion Spain has some excellent newspapers. What's wrong, then, with the free ones? Well, it's not too outrageous to suggest that when something is free, it's often because it has no or next to no actual value. Inevitably Qué! (admittedly much better than the others, being a fairly convincing tabloid newspaper with a fair amount of seemingly genuine interest in what the readers think, and which has recently started an aggressive advertising campaign, which is a bit odd considering it's free) and all the others just exist to sell adverts. At least with what used to be called a 'journal of record', you pay your money in return for a certain level of professionalism in terms of how they gather and present information, and you pay to read the considered opinions of experienced people whose opinions actually count for something. With the free ones, it's pot luck whether or not you get as much as you pay for, so to speak.
I'd hazard a guess and suggest that this relatively new and rapidly expanding phenomen is due to the very low value that we place on news information and commentary these days. There is just so much newsprint out there, any number of TV channels trying to fill up airtime without upsetting anyone important, and besides all that there is the internet, teeming with unsolicited and ill-considered rants like, erm, this one.
Obviously free newspapers and magazines are nothing new in most cities, although I suspect that they are expanding elsewhere at much the same rate. Newspapers and magazines, in fact, of often the most surprising kind. In the National Express ticket office in Sheffield in the summer there was a huge pile of Chinese-language copies of the Epoch Times, and although I wasn't able to read it much I did pick up an English language edition a few days later in a Portuguese cafe in London. If you're not familiar with the paper, it's Taiwan-based and has some connection to the outlawed Falun Gong religious cult, which is why it publishes a great deal of very anti-CCP articles, which although not always very persuasively written, are always good fun to read - some people seem to have a huge problem with the FG, and I don't know a huge amount about them, but to be honest if anyone dedicates their time to the destruction of the Chinese Communist Party, whether or not they decide to go to the somewhat puzzling extent of setting themselves on fire, they have my wholehearted support, and are welcome to borrow my lighter anytime.
As I say, their newspaper reads like it's written by someone with a very definite purpose and agenda - but as I said earlier, what the hell, it's free. If someone picks it up, which is quite possible given the kind of random places where it's distributed, under the mistaken apprehension that it's just some normal expat newspaper for overseas Chinese, it will just get jumbled up and/or discarded along with all the other free and mostly useless information they've gathered recently. Unlike when we've invested money in a publication which we have some reason to trust, with the free press we're generally I think disinclined to question the sources or the veracity of the information presented, or the motivations of those who are responsible for it.
Speaking, then, of publications for overseas Chinese and for people interested in China, on the bus yesterday I came across yet another free paper, printed in Spanish, with the title of The Mandarin. It is a weekly publication which, surprise surprise, features story after story of very, very good news about the Chinese economy ('President Of World Bank Praises Social And Economic Progress Of China', 'Chinese Outbound Investment To Continue Growing Rapidly This Year', 'Chinese Economy In For A Smooth Landing'), along with articles about the mystery of Guilin and Tibet, the exotic and colourful traditions of the ethnic minorities that China is a proud host to, a page dedicated to preparations for 2008, a story about those (trojan) pandas and their long-delayed journey to Taiwan Province, and a special page for people starting to learn Mandarin.
For someone with a mild interest in Chinese culture, it might all seem perfectly innocuous. As I said, when we sit, or more often stand, and read a free newspaper, we don't usually think in detail about the credentials or the motivations of those who've written it. Glossy magazines about China on sale at kiosks or in newsagents around the world contain pretty much the same information, after all.
However, there is for me something about finding publications like this freely distributed in relatively free countries which I find disturbing, and I think it's the following: in Wild Swans, Jung Chang talks about how the only western publication they could get hold of during the Cultural Revolution was the newspaper of a tiny group of Maoist sympathisers who were ignored or laughed at in the West. Now it seems that the inheritors of that insane tradition are exploiting our carelessness about what information about the world we allow to enter our heads.
Is the value that we place on news information now so low that we will allow the Chinese Communist Party to distribute state propaganda as though it were just another innocent random source of information about the world?
If that's the inevitable consequence of this explosion of 'free' newspapers, I'd prefer to stick with the Guardian or El País - or maybe even Marca or As.
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I haven't got anything useful to add to the debate about the attack on the democracy activist Lu Banglie, and I am not one to blow my own trumpet, but reading this article from Running Dog put me in mind of what I said a few months ago about attempts to 'reform' the CCP:
"Throughout the country party officials and to a certain extent ordinary Party members are allowed to run amok: charging peasants illegal taxes, running up restaurant bills for thousands of dollars, stuffing their pockets with public cash, paying thugs to beat villagers off their own land, building up huge unpayable debts with banks, everywhere doing favours for people they like and making life difficult or impossible for those who they don't. And doing all this with relative impunity - who is going to stand in their way? Other Party members?
It is only a tiny amount of cases of corruption that we ever get to hear about. As far as I can see, corruption and abuse is the rule and not the exception. My second analogy, then, is the Mafia.
In the Godfather Part 2 Michael Corleone is young, idealistic and determined not to follow the example of his father. He is going to clean up his family businesses and make them respectable. So what happens? I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it is the Mafia we are talking about here after all. How can you reform an organisation that is based on criminal corruption, on the systematic hoarding and abuse of power? Maybe we can conclude that what Michael wants doesn't really change, but as a leading member of the organisation he has a crucial job to do: Protect the Family."
As well as Asiapundit's post, I though that Rebecca MacKinnon's challenge to Chinese bloggers was right on the money:
"At the same time, I hope this question of a foreign correspondent's responsibility will not become a convenient way of distracting people from the core issue: one of human rights and the suppression of a democracy movement in Taishi.
Will Chinese netizens be successfully manipulated into foreigner-bashing as an acceptable alternative to communist party-bashing?"
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En honneur du pays où je me trouve actuellement (à Bretagne), j'ai fait un effort de traduire un article...ah whatever, here's an article from Libération about the recent climax of the 'France in China' year. I think the conclusions of the article are quite interesting, in terms of what it says about 'exchanges culturelles' between China and the rest of the world.
Apologies in advance for the inevitable mistakes in the translation. Anyone who, unlike me, actually speaks French can read the original article here.
L'Année de la France en Chine, a damp squib
It was supposed to be 'the incredible adventure', an event on the scale of the parade down the Champs-Elysées celebrating this year's Chinese New Year. In the end, after one year of work, €1,500,000 and two hundred special guests flown in from France, it was no more than a simple country fair at the foot of the Great Wall near Beijing, with snacks and white wine for several thousand officials. Somewhere between Chinese authoritarianism and the great follies of the French, the dream had cruelly turned sour.
They're just peasants!
This, then, marked the end of L'Année de la France en Chine, with a final note of bitterness and an immense sense of waste: Gad Weil, the organiser of the 'giant picnic', the idea for which came from the French Government, could not hide his anger on Saturday upon seeing the efforts of his team reduced to almost nothing by the presence of delegations of officials. The initial project, which was to bring together 120,000 people over two days along the length of a wall peopled by representatives of different French provinces promoting their traditional products and traditions, had been rendered more or less unrealisable by the obstacles put in place by the local authorities. The final straw came on Saturday, when the police kept the non-invited public away behind safety barriers, a distinctly colonial scene in which hundreds of Chinese watched at a distance as the French and their important guests enjoyed themselves. When Gad Weil complained, the response was: 'But they are peasants, they are of no importance to you, they will never go to France!' 'I am an acrobat', explained in vain the organiser of the Chinese New Year parade in Paris, 'what I do is organise spectacular events for the general public'. His anger was assuaged by the greater access granted to the general public yesterday, but there were very few who turned up owing to the Chinese Mid-Autumn festivities.
L'Année de la France en Chine had begun a year ago with a similar misunderstanding about the 'popular' nature of events, with the concert given by Jean-Michel Jarre inside the Forbidden City. The public on that occasion was hand-picked: no spectators without badges, invitations, verification...That concert was among the most expensive events of the year, only available to ordinary Chinese via television. Now, a year later, not much had changed.
Forty million euros
Obviously L'Année de la France en Chine cannot simply be reduced to these two expensive large-scale flops. With over 200 exhibitions, concerts and festivals, there have been many popular successes, such as the travelling Impressionist exhibition or the Transmusicales of Rennes transplanted to Beijing, despite, once again, an overbearing level of security. But the balance cannot be complete without taking into account the financial cost: 40 million euros, a record for a marketing operation. The financing was mixed, involving for the first time private Chinese interests who contributed six million euros, the rest being shared between the State and French companies. 'Nothing on this scale has been done before', underlines proudly a French official. A lot has also been wasted on an inumerable number of visits by delegations to China (it's the fashion), wining and dining, and vague and botched operations.
The rewards of such 'investment' are impossible to quantify, and the promoters of the campaign take comfort from the fact that other countries, beginning with Italy, plan to carry out their own 'exchange years' following the French model. But this campaign, more diplomatic than cultural, presented initially as an attempt to modernise the image of France, which is traditionally seen as 'romantic' in the eyes of the Chinese, will not serve for much more than confirming that the French are friendly and rich...culturally. It will be difficult to break down those barriers.
The lesson
The Chinese are happy to welcome such initiatives: they reap the benefits of this courting by Western countries in search of market share. And they do it on their terms. Intractable on Saturday with regard to the Wall, they were very generous with the Summer Palace, where, on the occasion of a reception given by the city of Beijing to France, the magnificant site, long ago pillaged and destroyed by the French army in 1860, was superbly decorated in the colours of France. But no question of it being a popular fête: the invitees were all wearing badges. In China, cultural exchanges are something too important to be left to the people. France has learnt that lesson at it's own expense.
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I'm not usually a huge fan of Xinran, but this is a great article from today's Guardian, about a kid's game involving a Chinese bank note:
"You have been moulded by the western media, which has hardly any positive press about China and the Chinese. You often go back to China, so tell me why Mao's picture still hangs on the walls of so many people's houses, shops and offices. You think it is because the Chinese government orders them to display them, or because those people have never heard western views? Or do you think they don't know that Mao did terrible things to his people and how much he damaged his country? Be honest to our history, Xinran. I know your family has lost people under Mao's cruel policies, I know your parents were sent to prison for years and you suffered in the Cultural Revolution as an orphan.
"I am sorry to remind you of your unhappy memories. But don't look down on what Mao did for Chinese national pride, and for those poor parents in the early 1950s. I feel it is unfair to Mao."
I stopped her. "What about the millions of Chinese who died under his rule, because of his policies, in the 50s and 60s?"
"If westerners still believe their God is just after he flooded the world for his own purpose, or George Bush could invade Iraq with growing numbers of deaths for his campaign for moral good, why shouldn't Chinese believe in Mao, who did lots of positive things for the Chinese but also lost lives for his own mission for good?"
For me this seems to neatly sum up two widely held beliefs in China: that all westerners are christians who unquestioningly accept the decisions of their leaders, and that Chairman Mao should be regarded as a kind of god!
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The eyes of the world are being opened to a tragedy far, far greater than that in Sudan, and with more disturbing implications for our planet than the war on terrorism or global climate change: the tragedy of the 40 million jumpers, 50 million pairs of trousers and one billion bras being piled up in European warehouses and ports as a result of the restrictions on Chinese clothes imports into the EU.
All over Europe shoppers are terrified of the very real possibility of the shelves of Zara, Mango and H & M having slightly less cheap Chinese-made garments. Says recently laid-off factory operative Edna Typical, 22, a woman who already owns more clothes than the entire population of Jiangsu Province, "Am I to wander the cavernous empty shopping centres of my land unshod, with nary a stitch of clothing, bereft of accesories? Can not the Governments of the world see a way to resolving this catastrophe to the benefit of consumers?!"
The crisis is being watched anxiously in the clothes' home villages in China. The China Daily quotes one woman as saying, "I work 12 hours a day in basically inhumane conditions for the equivalent of three dollars a day to produce those clothes, and it breaks my heart to think that those poor Western consumers might soon only be able to make four as opposed to twelve separate clothes purchases on a single Saturday afternoon. Long live Chairman Mao."
Pressure is indeed mounting on those governments to take immediate action to Free The Chinese Clothes. According to one real person on the radio who I have honestly not just made up, "the priority now is to find some way to get those garments onto the shelves in time for the Winter Collection".
One solution that has been mooted is to move forward next year's quota of Chinese clothes imports. However, this will inevitably lead to problems next year, when the 2007 quota will have to be brought forward to 2006, and so on, and so on, until the world ends, or Peter Mandelson dies, whichever happens first.
In the meantime millions and millions of human beings who are happy to do nothing whatsoever with their free time apart from eating junk food, watching home improvement shows and shopping for that perfect £6.99 spangly green top are in for an uncertain weekend.
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I've recently found myself in what is for me a very unusual situation; that of being the victim of an injustice. I'm not going to go into any details here, suffice it to say that it's a workplace-related dispute which I'm determined to resolve in the calmest and most effective way possible, which is to get those responsible into big heaps of trouble themselves. I find that doing so actually gives me a fair bit of satisfaction and moral purpose. When I was striding purposefully to work this morning I idly started to imagine myself as some sort of Soldier of Fortune making a stand on behalf of the world's downtrodden and mistreated. Fortunately the consequences for me or for the world as a whole are not particularly serious, but it's gratifying to feel that I'm definitely taking the right course of action for a change.
If by any chance you hear of a bloodbath taking place in a language school in Cambridge, you'll know that I've had a change of tactics.
On the theme of the struggle against injustice, there is someone, quite possibly a child, who has taken to hanging round this website expressing heartfelt concern for the possible fate of Britain's muslims as a result of the Government's catastrophic reaction to the terrorist attacks in London. He, she or it has also repeatedly expressed outrage on behalf of the malogrado Brazilian executed in cold blood and with apparent impunity by the British police several weeks ago.
This may appear puzzling to anyone who has visited this site before, given that it focuses almost exclusively on issues related directly to my experiences of teaching English in China. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that the person concerned may just be Chinese, and that a basic fact about the big wide world outside China may remain tantalisingly outside their grasp.
It goes pretty much like this: it is not just that people living outside of autocratic regimes enjoy the freedom to openly think and speak critically about what goes on in their and in other countries - many, many people around the world do not see the country where they happened to be born as the single defining factor in the way they choose to see the world. This means that they see injustice as something that exists in every country, and something that must be exposed and fought wherever it occurs in the world.
For this reason, until I begin to meet many more Chinese people who can and will express concern for the victims of injustice in China, I will not be inclined to regard their expressions of outrage at injustice elsewhere as genuine or sincere. Which is a shame, because I have the feeling that some very noble and laudable sentiments, especially amongst young Chinese people, are being led carefully astray.
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There's nothing funny or insightful contained in these few lines, just to say that I've been far too busy to write anything recently but it's still my intention to add to this site regularly.
I've been alternately chuffed and appalled to read all the many comments that I've been getting of late. If you have left comments or just enjoyed the site many thanks, I can only say that I feel very encouraged that people read and are so often inspired to respond to what I've left here. As for the negative comments, I have always been an extremely contrary bastard and given to acts and statements of outright provocation. Hence the picture.
Unfortunately my only bit of original thinking recently has been the invention of the word 'Chaiwanese' to refer to about 70% of the students I have here, who I must say have been getting along swimmingly in most of the classes. I have actually been shocked and not a little disappointed to find quite a few pro-Chinese students among those from the country that dare not speak its name - in fact most of the few classroom conflicts that have taken place have been provoked by this rogue element, rather than by the Chinese themselves.
I will find time sometime in the next few weeks to do some writing again. In the meantime, I would suggest that anyone thinking of starting their own blog but hampered by time constraints seriously consider moving to China to teach English. If I hadn't been so fucking bored I would never had got around to starting this in the first place.
Just for the record, though, I'd stay well clear of Dalian in general, and Dalian Maritime University in particular. Now how do I get that sentence to show up in Google?!?
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At the moment in my school we have a group of students from China and one from Taiwan, and it's pretty interesting to witness the dynamics between the two. I've learnt pretty quickly that the best way to distinguish between them is to ask if they're from Taipei or Shenzhen, because the Chinese students, who are absolutely charming in every other way, really do feel obliged to forcefully respond with the point that They Are From The Mainland, And Taiwan Is Part Of China. I have to confess that now I'm not in China anymore my response has been to start whistling and look extremely bored - not that they seem able to take the hint though.
From what I've seen they completely ignore the Taiwanese kids; maybe it's the fear of lack of face that makes them do so, because it's pretty obvious to me that even the shortest conversation would lead to arguments which they might well lose. As a consequence most Taiwanese kids seem to think that the Shenzhen kids just don't like them, which is a real shame. Last week at the disco the Shenzhen kids just sat in a big group near the door looking utterly uncomfortable, while the students from 'Taipei' and, er, other parts of Taiwan pranced around having a great time, dancing and making friends with people from other, erm, countries. So I suggested that next week the (hem hem) mainlanders bring some of their own cds to play - maybe the fact that the Taiwaners know all the same songs will force them to get to know each other a bit. I'm trying in my own small way to break down the barriers a bit - after all, they all like the same music and share a lot of cultural references, so there's no real reason they shouldn't be singing together at Karaoke.
It's difficult marshalling them as a group when we're out on excursions together - obviously the Taiwanese kids don't want to be referred to as Chinese (yesterday I amused them by repeatedly insisting that Taiyuan is a part of China. I don't think I was saying it right though), so I've just taken to shouting 'Can we get all the ethnically Chinese people together please?!' I know it's uncomfortable for the Chinese students, but I just want to subtly suggest to them that their attitude makes them suddenly seem to be completely indoctrinated and more than just a little bit mad.
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Is there anyone alive today who still sees China as a grey, hostile country, closed off to the rest of the world, where everyone sports Chairman Mao hats and rides bicycles while chanting passages from the Little Red Book? Certainly anyone who has visited the country in the last 20 or so years is genuinely surprised by the size and number of the skyscrapers, the traffic jams and the brand-new shopping centres selling the same fashions as in the West.
The Chinese are proud of their new country, and pleased that people come to visit and see the results of the changes for themselves. Foreigners visiting or living in China are encouraged to spread the word, to use the benefit of their broadmindedness and wisdom to impart the truth to others abroad who 'don't understand' how much things have changed. And the authorities also see their own job as 'educating' foreigners about the new China. According to Sun Jiazheng, the head of the Ministry of Culture:
(We) have many foreign friends, including some ambassadors. They have special opinions about China because they are knowledgeable about our country and are very friendly to us. I often travel abroad, and I make self-criticisms when I come back ... sometimes I find foreign countries know so little about China. As a minister in charge of cultural exchange, I feel that I have not done a good job in introducing modern China to the world. Our foreign guests here (on the CCTV discussion show Dianhua) are all experts on China's issues or know a lot about our country, but most foreigners are not like them, and know little about China. Take our trip to Germany for example: When we asked a taxi driver about his impression of China, he said it was a country with a vast area. Then he added that he did not know much and the country seemed quite mysterious to him. Changing the Subject: How the Chinese Government Controls Television, Ann Condi
Apart from the example of the German taxi driver, what does not 'understanding' China mean? According to the Government, many people happily expose their own ignorance, not by talking about Mao hats or little red books, but those other tired items of former importance so beloved of foreigners - Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, and Human Rights.
When the Government talks of the importance of educating the world about China, it's not just pride in the new shopping centres full of consumer goods. What it is, is code: what they really want is for the debate about China's past, present and future to be on China's (meaning the Government's) terms.
My students, as I had expected, were evidently taught to be very suspicious about any less-than-positive information regarding China. But what is interesting is that they weren't taught to see it as 'imperialist lies', but rather as the result of a misunderstanding. Put in these terms, of course, it sounds generous, tolerant and forgiving; but what is actually happening is that the authorities are exploiting the goodwill and naivity of the young in order to encourage them to automatically reject anything that contradicts what the Party tells them. Both Chinese youth and foreigners resident in China are encouraged to talk about the occupation of Tibet as an issue too difficult to discuss. The Cultural Revolution is sold as a terrible period in the past with no bearing on the country's present. Human Rights is a confusing issue because, as we all know, 'all countries have problems' (China now goes as far as to produce a regular report on Human Rights in the US, just to emphasise what a complex issue it really is). Democracy as practiced in the West is perhaps not appropriate for China...and so on.
It's true that many of these issues have complicated aspects to them. But the Party line is that any conclusions reached about them which does not show the Party in a flattering light are based on a false or superficial understanding - so the Government tells China's young people and 'foreign friends' that they have a special duty to tell others the 'truth' - ie. that these things are just too complicated to discuss.
It is of course flattering to be told that you have a 'special understanding' of an issue which your peers lack. Foreign politicians seem to fall for the CCP's rhetoric just as foreign teachers do. One foreign ESL teacher gave the following formula for avoiding controversy in the classroom:
Tibet ("I've heard a lot of contradictory information about that place, let's talk about something else.")
Tiananmen ("I wasn't there, let's talk about something else.")
Taiwan ("I am certain that the people of Taiwan and the Mainland can work out this issue in a peaceful way, let's talk about something else.")
Religion ("People have so many strange and wonderful superstitions, let's talk about something else.")
The 'superiority' of western democracy ("Every country has its problems, let's talk about something else.")
But it seems to me that if we agree to conclude, whether in class or in public, that these topics are not up for discussion for whatever reason, just as the Party insists they are beyond the understanding of ordinary Chinese, we end up conceding a huge amount of ground to the CCP.
Surely it is better for foreign teachers, instead of saying 'it's too complicated' or 'both sides have their arguments', to respond with the basic truth: "One of the conditions of my being here is that I'm not allowed to talk about those subjects".
Of course there are some subjects that the Government does permit, although not encourage, discussion over: the economy, the environment and corruption. I think this shows that they are, at least for the moment, confident of being able to control the debate over those issues, acknowledging them as problems and promoting the idea that they are doing everything they can about them. Sometimes this can lead to bizarre admissions: a university professor interviewed during the BBC's China Week of documentaries claimed that the Government had simply never considered that economic inequality might result from the policy of economic liberalism.
On other issues - alternative political organisations, the legitimacy of the CCP's rule, the status of Taiwan and Tibet - debate will remain completely proscribed and penalised, as they know that to even acknowledge them as issues would jeopardise their very existence.
Another irritating and troubling aspect of the Government's propaganda regarding free information about China, is the argument that any criticism is due to jealousy of China's economic success. This trite argument unfortunately seems to appeal to the young. It is, needless to say, a contemptuous way to deal with genuine concerns about social injustice and human rights, and about the sustainability of the economic model they have adopted.
The authorities have so far been extremely adept at dealing with the Internet Generation. Throughout all my time in the country, despite all the restrictions and without using proxy servers, I was able to find pretty much all the information about Tiananmen Square, Tibet, the recent riots etc etc etc that I was looking for. But when I told my students about the Guardian's special week of articles on China, despite the fact that they had never heard of the Guardian before, and although the Guardian site is not in any way blocked in China, none of them was prepared to take a look. Of course they claimed that they would find the language too daunting, but I think that this was a pretty poor excuse for an excuse. I think that one reason is that they are genuinely apprehensive of the possible consequences of being seen to visit a non-Chinese website. But I think the main reason is that they feel they might encounter information which contradicts what the Party has told them about China; and if they do, they will have to take the time and effort to systematically disregard each and every word of it.
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About 10 or so years ago I used to do a weekly show on pirate radio in Dublin. A lot of it consisted of me ranting about whatever was going through my head, interspersed with playing whatever bits of music took my fancy. It being a pirate station, it wasn't like we conducted regular audience research, and apart from a closely-written postcard accusing me of being an 'English cesspit', the only feedback I remember receiving was comments coaxed out of friends, telling me that it was 'quite funny', 'not quite as funny as that other time' and asking me where I'd got that track from, the one about mescalin that went dum dum THUMP dumdum THUMP THUMP THUMP....A lot of the time it felt a lot like hard work without much more than its own reward.
By comparison blogging is a walk in the park! I mean, hopefully one of these days something I've posted here will be picked up by one of the web's countless equivalents of 'The World's Stupidest Home Videos' and eternal recognition and boundless wealth will be mine. But for the moment I'm really happy with the response that this site has generated, mostly thanks to sites such as the Peking Duck, Simon World and Asiapundit identifying with what I've written and encouraging others to drop by.
Over the last few months the site has served as a kind of out-tray for my reflections on what I see around me here in China and the things I read that help me make sense of it. Now I'm leaving China my intention is to continue with the site, but obviously as time goes by my theoretical in-tray will contain less China-related, er, files (?!?), and more things related to where I am in the future.
Nevertheless I've now got a huge list of books that I want to read which I haven't been able to get hold of here, beginning with Jasper Becker's The Chinese and Jung Chang's Mao book and also including Mr. China, China Inc and lots more. Partly for this reason, China will occupy a large part of my thoughts for some time to come, as well as influencing how I think about other places and issues. So if you have been dropping by this site in search of China-related stuff, don't stop doing so just yet. I will continue to post regular but more occasional China material on it.
In the longer term, well, I don't know exactly what to expect. More things related to teaching, Spanish, Latin America, globalisation and whatever is going through my head.
And in the shorter term you may well find some species of semi-coherent stoned ramblings occupying this space!
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In honour of my 30th post, and my upcoming 30-somethingth birthday, here is a 3-part recording of interviews with my 1st year university students about questions such as: Who was China's greatest leader, Which Chinese people are most famous around the world, and Which events in recent Chinese history are best known in other countries.
Unfortunately due to general ineptitude on my part and poor equipment (see above) the sound quality is not fantastic. It sounds like I was shouting the questions, but I don't think I was.
Part a: The students talk about Zhao Ziyang, once they've got over my mangling of his name; their admiration for Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao; along with some terrible editing and spectacular coughing.
Part b: The Liberation of China; the death of Zhou Enlai; Deng Xiao Ping in Hawaii; and how to say pretty much anything in Japanese.
Part c: What happened if Deng Xiao Ping walked round your house; and how long it will be before China has a female leader.
***** UPDATE *****
After problems with the site they were being hosted on, I've moved them back to yousendit.com, which is only good for a limited amount of downloads, so if that runs out email me and I'll repost them as soon as I can.
Just in case the original links are working (it seems to be a question of browser compatability), the original links (unlimited downloads) are here: Part a, Part b and Part c.
Apologies for all the messin' around.
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Recently, during a class discussion about acceptable questions to ask a recent acquaintance, I asked my students if it was okay to ask a relative stranger if they were a member of the Communist Party. I expected them to answer, as I think most Westerners would do, that it was not okay, because discussing politics in this way might lead to unwanted disagreement. The consensus was, however, that it might be okay if you needed something done and the person concerned might be able to help you.
What, then, is the Chinese Communist Party? It is certainly Chinese, but there are very few people who would these days characterise its politics as related to the theories of Karl Marx or the efforts of the Bolsheviks to establish a classless society in anything other than a purely rhetorical sense.
But is it, in fact, a political party? Not in the sense that it competes on an ideological battleground with other political forces. The Communist Party is supposed to be an all-encompassing organisation that renders other points of view obsolete. In practice, of course, instead of encompassing other points of view it ferociously silences them. The right of political debate is restricted solely to proven Party members.
More recently some of those Party members have been more vociferous about the kind of society they want to create. Known as the New Left, they look to a more social democratic model, influenced as far as I can tell by European societies which in the post-war period established a social pact between the trade unions, the Government and the employers. This social pact enabled Germany and Scandinavian societies to develop sustainably and to provide an enviable social safety net for their citizens.
Could such a model be applied in China? Well, I think it does need to be remembered that the social pact which apparently functioned so well in those societies from which China's New Left are so keen to draw inspiration, was itself the product of struggle; the development of social welfare systems and the inclusion of trade unions in social bargaining was not something freely granted from above, but was based on a recognition of their very real and proven power in relatively free societies. However, could the Chinese Communist Party begin to make serious adjustments and reforms which at least ameliorated the worst effects of rampant capitalism on people's lives and provided some kind of social safety net for those most in need?
This is a hugely complex issue which I think will come to dominate international debate about China in the coming years. According to an optimistic point of view, as expressed by one of the discussion panel members on this BBC radio programme, what China wants and needs to do is to copy the example of the Labour Party in Britain, with the added difficulty of doing so while remaining in power.
To start with, I think that the example of the British Labour Party is hugely misleading. Firstly, because the project of reforming the Labour Party was carried out by the pro-market leadership in opposition to the wishes of a very large proportion of the more left-wing socially concious Party members. In the case of China, it is the left-wing party members who are the advocates of change against the wishes of the dominant right-wing pro-market Party leadership.
Another problem with the analogy is that, although superficially attractive, it ignores the recent history of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has been making a rightward-bound ideological journey more or less ever since the early nineteen-sixties, when in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward a certain amount of market reforms were introduced as a precursor to the start of the abandonment of Communist ideology by Deng Xiao Ping in the late nineteen-seventies. This was of course following the outburst of out-and-out autocracy of Mao's 'Great Purge'. Over ten years ago the disavowal of the wish for an equitable society was formalised by Jiang Zemin, who in his bizarrely-named 'Three Represents' theory welcomed back into the party all those people - 'rightists', capitalists and so on - who had been persecuted throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
However, the journey the CCP has been taking has nothing to do with an increasing sense of social justice; quite the opposite, in fact. What it says clearly is: "If you can't beat them, join them". Now when the CCP is so keen to welcome representatives of the Guomindang to China, it seems that there is very little to distinguish the two in political terms.
So can the Chinese Communist Party reform itself into a Social Democratic Party with Chinese Characteristics? As I say, it's a huge area of debate and I think the arguments will run and run, but I just want to draw two brief analogies.
The first is the Catholic Church, which in the nineteen-sixties attempted through the Vatican II doctrine to get rid of some of it's more backward thinking on social issues. I think that at the time a lot of Catholic clergy took heart from the changes that were made, and it led directly to what we call 'Liberation Theology', the promotion of social as well as heavenly justice.
So what happened? Now we have a church which seems to be more reactionary than ever, promoting the development of AIDS throughout the second and third world, arrogantly refusing to deal with the firestorm of paedophile allegations which threaten to drive more and more moderate Catholics away from the church, and whose congregations are now asked to worship an ex-Nazi Pope, as if to emphasise that there is nothing worldly about his power and that he cannot be challenged by mere mortals. So what happened?
I think the main reason has to do with power. The Catholic Church is driven first and foremost by the need to protect its own existence. Its authority derives from core beliefs which are reactionary and superstitious, and to suggest that they can be adapted to suit social realities is I think to call into question that authority. A Catholic church genuinely and actively committed to challenging poverty and injustice would be unable to sustain its own power and wealth.
As I said at the start, my students don't seem to really regard the Chinese Communist Party as a political party as we might understand it, but as an organisation of power, privilege and prestige. Throughout the country party officials and to a certain extent ordinary Party members are allowed to run amok: charging peasants illegal taxes, running up restaurant bills for thousands of dollars, stuffing their pockets with public cash, paying thugs to beat villagers off their own land, building up huge unpayable debts with banks, everywhere doing favours for people they like and making life difficult or impossible for those who they don't. And doing all this with relative impunity - who is going to stand in their way? Other Party members?
It is only a tiny amount of cases of corruption that we ever get to hear about. As far as I can see, corruption and abuse is the rule and not the exception. My second analogy, then, is the Mafia.
In the Godfather Part 2 Michael Corleone is young, idealistic and determined not to follow the example of his father. He is going to clean up his family businesses and make them respectable. So what happens? I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it is the Mafia we are talking about here after all. How can you reform an organisation that is based on criminal corruption, on the systematic hoarding and abuse of power? Maybe we can conclude that what Michael wants doesn't really change, but as a leading member of the organisation he has a crucial job to do: Protect the Family.
I don't think that China's New Left are in any way insincere about their project of bringing social justice to China. But I think they're misguided and possibly naive about the organisation they are members of. Unfortunately I think their efforts only go to provide window dressing for the Party leadership - it enables them to say 'Look! We have open debate inside the Party! No need for dissidents! Don't you see how wrong Wei Jingsheng and all those other foreign agents were? China is marching straight down the road to democracy all by itself and we don't need any advice or criticism from outside!'
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Several of my students don't know or have already forgotten who Zhao Ziyang was. But they have all heard of Da Shan. Da Shan is 'China's favourite foreigner', renowned in every corner of the Middle Kingdom for his dashing good looks and his complete mastery of the Mandarin Chinese of Beijing. He arrived here from Canada in 1988, and since then, according to his very informative webs...excuse me just a moment, one of the students has a question.
Yes, you there, you had a question?
"Yes, sir."
Don't call me sir. My name's Richard. What's your name again?
"Jamily, sir. Er, Mr. Richard."
Jamily? Your name is Jamily?!? What's your question, Jamily?
"Well, sir, it's just that...I was thinking about that story you made us read, sir, Mr. Richard. The one about the picture. By that guy, er, Oswald Wo-'
Oscar Wilde, Jamily. What about it?
"What, sir?"
Don't say 'what, sir?' It's ... oh it doesn't matter. What's your point, Jamily?
"Well, I was thinking, because, you know, Da Shan came to China in 1988, sir, and that other guy, the one you asked about yesterday? I did some research, and I found out that he was locked up under house arrest, sir, Mr.Richard, in 1989, so I thought-"
Are you suggesting that Zhao Ziyang was like the picture in the attic, while Da Shan is like the-
"Yes, sir, exactly, Mr. Richard, sir! And Da Shan is like the guy who couldn't, I mean doesn't, get any uglier!"
That's bollocks, Jamily.
"Thank you, sir"
No, I mean it's preposterous. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life.
"But sir, just think how much better things would have been! And just imagine all the wonderful things he could have done on behalf of other gay people in Ch-"
Jamily, I never said that Zhao Ziyang was gay!
"Well, sir, maybe just a little bit bi-"
Jamily! This is just too silly for words. Sit Down! Stop calling me Sir!
And change your name!
"Sorry, Mr. Richard, sir."
Right, sorry about that, now where were we? Ah yes, the blog. According to Da Shan's very informative website...
Just a moment. I need to think.
You know, maybe that kid Jamily - Jamily! - has a point.
It does kind of all make sense.
In fact the more I think about it...
Right! I've thought about it.
It's time for the Chinese people to stand up once again!
Down With The Da Shan Dynasty!!!
It's time to establish a People's Republic of China!
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It's a truism about certain people that they would have been 'the greatest leader we never had'. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but then I'd probably disagree with most of them anyway. It's obvious to most people who don't think that evolution is 'the stupidest thing I ever heard' that Al Gore would have been a preferable President to George W. Bush, but that's partly because more people voted for him. In British terms, it's clear to me that instead of that succession of toddlers, nobodies and ghouls who have fronted the Conservative Party in the last few years, Michael Portillo would make a much more charismatic and convincing leader, but for obvious reasons I'm not about to write to the Daily Mail and tell them so - besides which, something tells me that I wouldn't get much of a hearing. I just hope that his sexual orientation causes him just as much pleasure and relief as it causes us.
It’s unlikely that if Michael Portillo had ever met Zhao Ziyang that they would have found they had very much in common. As far as I know, the reason for Zhao no longer being the Chinese leader by June 1989 had nothing to do with being gay, although of course he might have been, in which case spending the last fifteen or so years of his life under house arrest can't have done wonders for his sex life. I don’t know what Zhao’s English was like, and I’d be very surprised if Michael Portillo could communicate in Chinese; Zhao was also a dedicated leading member of the Communist Party. Why, then, did he spend the last fifteen years of his life under lock and key? According to Wikipedia:
Zhao was a solid believer in the party, but he defined socialism much differently than party conservatives. Zhao called political reform "the biggest test facing socialism." He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratisation. As early as 1986, Zhao became the first high-ranking Chinese leader to call for change, by offering a choice of election candidates from the village level all the way up to membership in the Central Committee.
He was known in the west for two things, one of which was when in May 1989 he went down to Tiananmen Square to talk to the students, listen to their demands and try to persuade them to leave peacefully. During the subsequent crackdown he was at first sidetracked and then purged, disappearing suddenly and completely from public life. Think of it as kidnapping, if you like. The other major event was in February this year, when his death sparked panic in the Chinese authorities. They tried to control every aspect of his funeral and of every word of the coverage of his death in the media, and only just a few weeks ago arrested a Strait Times journalist who was trying to get his hands on a copy of his memoirs.
What is it about his memoirs and his memory that the Government is so nervous about? A recent article shed some light on the issue:
Crackdown on China's little-read book
3 June 2005
A SECRET manuscript Beijing is desperately trying to stop from being published outlines purged leader Zhao Ziyang's plea for China to abandon one-party rule and follow the path of democracy.
It also airs Mr Zhao's opinion the government blundered in its crackdown on the 1989 democracy protests that led to hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens being killed, the author says.
The sensitive manuscript is now at the centre of the arrest of Hong Kong-based Singapore Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong. He was detained while trying to obtain a copy of the manuscript that has yet to make its way out of mainland China. China on Tuesday said Mr Ching was arrested for spying and had confessed.
Its authorities have pressured author Zong Fengming, an old friend of Mr Zhao's, not to publish the book.
The 85-year-old, who compiled the manuscript from conversations he had with Mr Zhao while he was under house arrest, said what makes it so threatening to Beijing is the late Mr Zhao's belief China must have democracy in order to prosper, and economic reforms are simply not enough.
"He said China's development must be on the path of democracy and rule of law. If not, China will be a corrupt society," Mr Zong said.
Reporting of Zhao's death was limited to a terse few paragraphs in the state-controlled media as part of an official campaign to erase his memory.
Mr Zong believes the government fears if a book about Mr Zhao's views is published overseas and copies find their way to China, it could have a detrimental effect on the communist regime, making Mr Zhao a hero even in death.
Mr Zhao's views run contrary to the path China's leaders are taking. The Chinese leadership is intent on maintaining one-party rule and quashing dissent or freedom of expression.
It seems to me that if, following the death of Hu Yaobang, there was a candidate for China's Gorbachev it was Zhao. Maybe if he had stepped into that hypothetical power vacuum in mid-1989, there would have been no crackdown, no unleashing of all the forces of political repression, no increase in political indoctrination for the young, no attempt to rehabilitate that monster Chairman Mao, and maybe the Chinese would have been allowed to freely use the internet to develop deeper and more open relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe China would have seen the flowering of a free press, and maybe there would have been some form of development of alternative political parties and perhaps even multi-party elections. Of course it is also possible that a China suddenly impatient for change would have pushed him aside in favour of an outsider, someone more radical and not connected with the Party machine.
Obviously there is a possibility that the hardliners would have fought back and tried to regain power. It happened in 1991 with Gorbachev. But maybe, just like in 1991, the world would have seen this old guard for what they really were - old men whose time had passed, isolated and powerless, railing against a world that had left them behind.
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At the height of the recent anti-Japanese protests, a lot of my students told me that they were going to Lushun for the weekend. Their explanations were a bit confusing, but I gathered that it had something to do with Japan. Lushun is a sensitive area, off-limits to foreigners. In addition to a huge naval base, it apparently features museum commemorating Japanese war atrocities - the whole peninsula was occupied by them in the 1930s and '40s. Naturally I assumed that they were going for some sort of protest.
I was completely wrong. They were actually going there to see the Cherry Blossom Festival - just like in Japan, they told me, when this flower blooms huge numbers of people go for a day trip just to take a look.
When China blooms it can look really beautiful. Out of the window while I write, I can see a large apple blossom tree blocking out the dull view that kept us depressed those long winter months. Let a thousand flowers bloom!
Another thing I'll really miss here is the parks in the summer. Without ever really seeming crowded, they teem with people, singing screechy opera numbers and playing those instruments that I never got round to learning the names of, playing badminton and that ubiquitous shuttlecock-kicking game that all Chinese people can play a thousand times better than me, or gathering under the trees for a game of Mah Jong, Chinese chess or cards. It makes for an enchanting and very friendly atmosphere - people seem so content that I often feel I've just blended into the background, sitting on a bench soaking it all in.
Just yesterday I was sitting watching someone's hilarious attempts to dislodge a mis-hit shuttlecock by throwing the same rock up into a tree again and again, when a young guy sat down beside me with a book. We had a fascinating conversation for about 20 minutes about the different books we were reading. At least, that's what I was talking about - it's quite possible that he was telling me that he'd just failed his driving test for the third time and was thinking of buying a canary.
You sometimes see odd sights in the park. In Beihai Park in Beijing a few weeks ago I was startled to see what looked like an entire army unit with their riot shields and truncheons drawn, all marching in formation behind two soldiers carrying between them a flat-screen TV!
The simple friendliness of some of the people who've been part of my everyday life these last ten months is a memory that I'll cherish. The woman who sells me pineapples and bananas, and who used to sell me strawberries until they were suddenly replaced by cherries, exhibits remarkable patience with my Chinese, and astonishing dexterity at cutting up pineapples. The old man in my local shop is also relentlessly enthusiastic about my Mandarin, even though all I ever really say to him is 'me want two beers/four eggs/one big bottle water/one small cold bottle water', thank you and 'Bye Bye!'.
And this cafe I'm sitting in right now is quite a find - friendly, efficient and cool. They also finally helped me to learn the word for cheese. Just a shame I only discovered the place yesterday.
好, that's it. I'm off to the beach.
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Although I am by nature a lazy thinker, I do try and bear in mind when thinking about things like the events of 1989 that oversimplistic analysis will lead me straight to the wrong conclusions. Furthermore, comparisons, says the old adage, are odious, especially, as the Chinese Government is always so keen to point out, when they concern China and the West. I am also no expert on recent Chinese history. There are almost certainly people reading this who know a thousand times more about these things than I do, and I would be grateful if they would step in and correct me if I get too carried away.
China and Eastern Europe are a long way away from one another, and the prevailing circumstances in 1989 were different in all sorts of ways. This is why the Chinese Communist Party survived not just the turn of the decade but also into the new millennium, while the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe simply disappeared. Here I want to concentrate on those different circumstances:
1. The economy. Although China was still in the process of recovering from complete devastation, the economy was growing, and on the whole people were enjoying an improving standard of living. There were problems with inflation, huge disparities of wealth and low wages throughout the country, but the country was not on its last legs like the countries of the soon-to-be-former Eastern Bloc.
2. The political situation. I think generally people were happy that their leaders were heading in the right direction, albeit perhaps too slowly. People were enjoying more freedom than they had experienced within living memory, given that most of the adult population had experienced at least part of the Cultural Revolution.
As far as I can see, the demonstrations in 1987 and 1989 expressed a growing political confidence which derived from ten years of liberalisation. People were making demands of the system - greater freedom of speech, an end to corruption, better and more responsible government - but I don't think they wanted to see an end to Party rule. The demonstrations were quite different from the ones we don't see reported in the state media today, which tend to be localised reactions to individual cases of corruption and injustice. This is one of the things that I'm completely happy to admit being mistaken about.
3. Lack of political leadership. Jung Chang refers in her new book to the Cultural Revolution as the 'Great Purge'. Successive generations of potential dissidents had been massacred, driven to suicide, locked away or forced to leave the country. The person who was perhaps China's best hope of a Václav Havel, Wei Jingsheng, was part of the Beijing Wall group of dissidents and was locked up in 1979 for 14 years. There was, therefore, no previous generation of rebels from whose mistakes the protestors could learn.
Students groups obviously played a role in the building of the demonstrations, but they certainly didn't constitute a 'government-in-waiting'.
The leader who most resembled a Chinese Gorbachev, Hu Yaobang, had been sacked by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 for being too liberal, and it was his death two years later that was the initial pretext for the build-up of protestors around the square in April 1989. They were of course other reformists high up in the party, but it seems that around this time they did not have the upper hand.
4. Lack of foreign media influence. The state media was very tightly controlled, and the only alternative, the broadcasts of the BBC and other media news organisations, could only be listened to by the tiny proportion of the population who could understand English.
These were I think some of the most important differences between the situation in China and in the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989. However, this set of circumstances did not have to inevitably lead to the events that followed - the Massacre and the unleashing of political repression. It might be interesting, just now we're here, to speculate about how, given the circumstances above, things might have turned out differently.
Let's just say that, instead of giving the order to physically clear the square at all costs, the leadership had dithered. Maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for taking such a momentous decision. Or maybe, having received the order to attack, the army chiefs had not felt comfortable with the situation, and refused to do so. Or even if, and this is probably stretching it quite a bit, the soldiers of the 27th Army had refused to open fire. The leadership would have faced a crisis, and maybe, sensing that the Government didn't know what to do, the protests would have kept on growing throughout the country. The eyes of the world would have been focussed on Beijing, through the lenses of the new global 24-hour news gathering organisations. Protests were growing throughout Eastern Europe too; could the line of dominos reach China? Maybe heads would have rolled in Beijing, people resigning and being forced to resign, nobody sure what to do in this unique situation, nobody wanting to be remembered as the leader who stood in Beijing 40 years on and told the growing mass of Chinese people to sit down again. Maybe the drama would have unfolded with a gradual hollowing-out of the centre of power as the leadership tossed the poisoned chalice of leadership back and forth.
In many accounts written by people who defend the use of force to clear the square, one factor is all important. With the approach of that 40 year anniversary, a special guest was expected, and the Chinese could not be seen to lose face in such a dramatic fashion. Mikhail Gorbachev had recently stood with the East German leadership at their 40th anniversary parade. He had told them what they least wanted to hear, that 'die Wende' had passed:
Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’
If Gorbachev had arrived in Beijing in the midst of this crisis armed with the same advice, how would he have been received? Perhaps the hardliners like Li Peng would have chosen to ignore him, in the same way that Honecker and Mielke chose to take no notice. But maybe at this stage he wouldn't have been dealing with the hardliners. Would there have been anyone among the leadership of the Communist Party who might have been prepared to listen, who might have seen a potential way out of the deadlock? Another Chinese Gorbachev, if you like?
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The great Irish satirical rebel Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly had many songs in his repetoire about the struggle to free his beloved Ireland from the hated British. One of them was called 'Spit on the Brits', and during his raucous concerts he would encourage the audience to participate by coughing their guts up before joining in with the chorus, which went as follows:
We'd spit on the Brits
Spit on the Brits
And we'd shower them in a lovely sea of green,
We'd spit on the Brits,
Spit on the Brits
And then they'd blow us all to smithereens
In the West spitting is usually interpreted as an act of aggression; if you're standing at the bus stop and someone loudly spits on the floor, it's natural to move away. Not because you think that they might spit on you, but because someone who displays such an obvious lack of respect for social convention and basic hygiene might be either dangerous or diseased or both.
The Chinese habit of regularly clearing their lungs in public is therefore an affront to Western sensibilities. Ironically, the Chinese, as Paul Theroux points out, are not among the world's great spitters, because for all the fanfare that precedes the act of expectoration, the end result tends to just dribble out of their mouths and on to the pavement. It's quite distinct from the kind of pinpoint projectile spitting familiar from John Wayne movies.
Another classic complaint amongst Western visitors to China is the staring. Often, for a Chinese peasant, seeing a foreigner is akin to us finding Chief Running Bear in full costume directing traffic. However, for us staring, however harmless the intention of the starer, is also easy to interpret as a hostile act. It seems to say: I'm here, you're there, and I've just decided I don't like you.
It has been said that the Chinese would benefit enormously from the introduction of Spitting and Staring as events in the 2008 Olympics. I don't think that's either accurate or fair. Not accurate, partly for the reasons mentioned above, and not fair because all nations have bad habits. The Americans, for example, would do very well if there was an event for invading other countries and forcing them to release a statement announcing that they are now democracies, while the gleeful minions of the World Bank and the IMF run around cackling and grabbing anything that isn't nailed down. The English would sweep the board in any event which rewarded moving of their own volition to other countries and then spending all their time writing very very long sentences complaining about everything around them, while never forgetting to include the odd self-deprecating remark to mitigate their bigotry and anticipate criticism. Ho hum.
Where the Chinese could put their habits to good use is in the intimidation of opponents in other sports. It would be off-putting to a swimmer if the person in the next lane coughed up a big greenie straight into the pool right before they all dived in. And if your opponent in tennis spent the entire time between sets with their chair turned round so they could stare straight at you if might well put you off your serve.
One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do - if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly, as Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly suggested, if when Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.
It's easy to stand on the border of one country and spit into another. However, for long-range warfare nuclear weapons, although immoral, are probably more effective. Next week I'm off to England, hopefully out of range of the Chinese spitting brigades. It will be interesting to see, though, if in 2008 the Olympic pools will be fitted with those spit buckets they have at each end of the lanes here. Whether or not they do, I have a feeling that the Chinese will do very well indeed in all the swimming events.
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I recently got hold of a copy of 'The Rape of Nanking' by Iris Chang, which I think has brought me closer to an understanding of the mindset of young Chinese people.
Although I've read quite a bit on what the Nazis did, the massacres in Rwanda and in Cambodia and also what took place here during the Cultural Revolution, and am I guess like a lot of people desensitized to accounts of horrific violence, I could not finish the book. The things that she recounts are beyond and beneath my comprehension of what human beings can do to each other. It actually had me in tears at several points, and I can't say that I would 'recommend' reading the book to anyone. Without wanting to sound too trite, perhaps it's no accident that after years of researching what took place the author took her own life.
As I say I've been confronted with terrible violence in books and films throughout my own life, and I couldn't deal with written descriptions of what took place. Imagine, then, how young Chinese schoolchildren feel, confronted again and again with not just words but also images and film footage depicting the most inconceivable tortures and acts of barbarity.
Of course, they generally do not know what happened in their own country's recent past, and those who do are encouraged not to reflect on what their leaders have done or are up to. The only political feeling they are permitted is hatred of the Japanese. And young people like to get angry, as it says here, in one of the most incisive commentaries I've come across in years:
Chairman Mao knew it: it enabled him to launch the Cultural Revolution. As part of their post-adolescent struggle for identity, young students yearn for freedom. If they are not allowed to express their opinions, they have to finesse it, and pretend - somehow - that they identify whole-heartedly with the nation, and that such an identification has been arrived at with their consent and with a complete understanding of right and wrong. In a country where one is not permitted to express dissent, the only way to maintain one's integrity is to pretend that one's patriotism is freely chosen, and based on truth. And so, our patriot-rebels do not want to hear about the various apologies made by Japan over the years, because they have invested so much in the belief that their anger is rational and based on Japan's refusal to apologize. (from Running Dog)
Maybe in the future the contradiction will become more apparent to them, and they will begin to see this incredibly cruel and bloody episode of their country's history in the wider context of other murderous periods in China's past, and realise that absolute power leads to absolute horror. For the moment, the attitude someone talked about on an English teachers' message board is probably the best that can be hoped for:
I asked my Teaching Assistant what she thought about this issue the other night. She answered (rather predictably) that she hated what Japan DID. When I asked her if she would try and be friends with a Japanese person if they came here to teach, she said yes. By the end of the conversation, we'd established that she hated what the Japanese did, but that it happened a few generations ago, and that an individual Japanese person could be quite nice. Rather reasonable, really.
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Obviously it's a mistake to see the post-war pre-1989 Eastern European countries as one huge homogenous monolith governed by Moscow, but each of the Eastern Bloc states did either collapse or rapidly wither away during the historically brief period from 1989 onwards. The events in each country had certain basic things in common.
1. The economies were in tatters. Call it soviet-style communism, state capitalism or whatever you like, but by the late 1980s it had ruined the economic life of the countries.
2. The Communist Party leadership was ideologically bankrupt. They could no longer claim to be marching towards freedom, equality and prosperity for all. The 40 years of spying on each other and political repression was enough proof for the citizens that they were not really marching in any direction at all.
3. People could see and hear for themselves, on foreign TV stations and on radio drifting in from abroad, that things in neither the west nor their own countries were as the leaders told them they were. Furthermore, they could keep up to date with events in Russia and in their comrade nations, and know that changes were taking place and that their own leaders were starting to panic.
4. In most countries, there was an organised opposition. It may have been in prison or in exile, but it existed and it was clear that its ambition was to take power away from the Party.
5. In a lot of countries, the organised oppostion was led by a very clear figurehead. Probably ten years before, neither the leader of Solidarity Lech Walesa nor the intellectual dissident Vaclav Havel would have imagined that they would one day become President. But as events moved on it must have become clear that the people flooding into the streets and squares saw them as leaders. Hence it is very easy to look back now and see them as Presidents-in-Waiting.
6. According to one account I once heard (repeated here), the KGB had a decisive influence on events. They had allegedly decided to oversee the removal from power of the first generation of Eastern Bloc leaders, and settled on street demonstrations as a means of achieving this. Things subsequently got out of hand - I'd imagine that Vladimir Putin was not well pleased.
Then there was the domino effect, and the most significant factor here must have been the USSR itself. Change in Russia, as we all know, was not led from below but from above. Mikhail Gorbachev was, like De Klerk in apartheid South Africa, an insider who wanted to essentially preserve the system, but realised that it would have to change if it was to survive:
The Party, which I had joined, itself badly needed to be reformed and reoriented toward democracy. And through this, the country could begin to gain some freedom. That came later, but it all started with the desire to do something and show initiative. That was what led many good people to join the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and the Party.
At a certain point, though, the momentum for fundamental change had built up to such an extent that 'die Wende' was reached. There was no turning back.
So when in August 1991 some Communist Party hardliners briefly kidnapped Gorbachev in an abortive coup attempt, the world saw them for what they really were: desperate old men whose time had passed. Not only were they no longer at the wheel of the ship of state - they had been thrown overboard.
Incidentally, the fact that the ex-head of the KGB is firmly entrenched as leader of the Great Bear tells us a lot, I think, about the difference between overthrowing a totalitarian state through popular uprising, and waiting on the leadership to quietly reform it and their own positions, powers and privileges out of existence.
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It always used to be really good fun in left-wing circles to sit around speculating about who, come the revolution, should be among the first to be put up against the wall and shot. The people I talked about yesterday would appear at first glance to make ideal candidates, but I think it’s generally better to go straight for the top guys, even if their power is only symbolic. The Bolsheviks knew it was essential to get their hands on the Romanovs in order to make their revolution complete, and I’m sure dictators and despots all over the world are haunted by the fate of Ceucescu in Romania - they did actually put him up against the wall and shoot him, and his wife, and furthermore they showed it on TV, which must have come as a bit of a shock to Gil-Scot Heron.
Other former Eastern Bloc leaders weren’t quite so unfortunate. East German President Erich Honecker was released from prison with cancer in 1992, and subsequently died in Chile two years later. Erich Mielke, the head of the Stasi, the hated GDR secret service, was also released from prison on the grounds of ill-health, and still lives quietly in Berlin.
The Stasi was allegedly even more fearsome than the KGB. In Stasiland - Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, the Australian writer Anna Funder has this to say:
The Stasi was the internal army by which the government kept control. Its job was to know everything about everyone, using any means it chose. It knew who your visitors were, it knew whom you telephoned, and it knew if your wife slept around. It was a bureaucracy metastasised through East German society: overt or covert, there was someone reporting to the Stasi on their fellows and friends in every school, every factory, every apartment block, every pub. Obsessed with detail, the Stasi entirely failed to predict the end of Communism, and with it the end of the country. Between 1989 and 1990 it was turned inside out: Stalinist spy unit one day, museum the next. In its forty years, 'the Firm' generated the equivalent of all records in German history since the middle ages. Laid out upright and end to end, the files the Stasi kept on their countrymen and women would form a line 180 kilometres long.
No surprise then, that when the regime’s days were up in 1989, it was the Stasi offices that were targeted by the demonstrators all over the country, beginning in Leipzig, the second biggest city:
In early October, Leipzig was at a flashpoint. Petrol-station attendants were refusing to refill police vehicles; the children of servicemen were being barred from crèches. Those who worked in the centre of town near the Nikolaikirche were sent home early. Hospitals called for more blood. People made their wills and said things they wanted their children to remember, before going out to demonstrations. There were rumours of tanks and helicopters and water cannon coming, but then so were the postcards from friends who had already reached the west. The people went on to the streets.
Honecker ordered that the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ in Leipzig were to be ‘nipped in the bud’. ‘Nothing’, he said, ‘can hinder the progress of socialism.’ On 8 October Mielke began to activate the plans for ‘Day X’, sending out orders to the local Stasi branches to open their envelopes (containing the lists of the people in their area to be arrested). But things were already too far gone. Instead of incarcerating the people, the Stasi, hiding in their buildings, locked themselves up. In the regional offices they had 60,000 pistols, more than 30,000 machine guns, hand grenades, sharpshooter’s rifles, anti-tank guns, and tear gas. Fears of lynching ran high. Leipzig police were shown photographs of a Chinese policeman immolated by the mob in Tiananmen Square and told, ‘It’s you or them.’ But they were also ordered not to shoot or use violence unless it was used against them.
On 7 October 1989 the GDR celebrated its forty years of existence with lavish parades in Berlin. There was a sea of red flags, a torchlight procession, and tanks. The old men on the podium wore light-grey suits studded with medals. Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’
In Leipzig the extraordinary courage of the people didn’t waver, and it didn’t break out into anything else. On 9 October 70,000 protestors went out in the dark, in big coats and carrying candles. They stood outside the local Stasi headquarters with their demands. ‘Reveal the Stasi informers!’ ‘We are not Rowdies - We are the people!’ and the constant, constant call of ‘No Violence!’ From that night on the demonstrations grew, footage of them was smuggled to the west and Leipzig came to be known as ‘the City of Heroes’.
There were now protests outside Stasi offices all over the country. But even in the smallest towns, the Stasi men in them continued their meticulous work, faithfully sending back to Berlin reports of the demands of the crowds outside: ‘Stasi to the factories’ (heard at Zeulenroda), ‘We earn your money!’ (from Schmalkalden) and the prescient ‘Your days are numbered!’ (Bad Salzungen). In Leipzig the demonstrators had started to shout, ‘Occupy the Stasi Building Now!’ and ‘We’re staying here!’.
In summer 2003 I went to the Stasi headquarters in Berlin, which is now the Stasi museum. A lot of the offices have been preserved exactly as they were on the last ever working day - the calenders on the wall all display a date some day early in 1990. Despite the relatively short period of time that has passed, it's a very eerie place. I have never been to Pompei, but I'd imagine that it feels not too dissimilar. Within a very short few months following what the Germans call 'die Wende', the turning point at which it was clear that the regime was finished, the entire state security system was dismantled and everybody went home and tried to pretend that none of it had ever existed. The most striking parts of the exhibition for me, in fact, weren't the empty offices or the displays of the astonishing range of spying equipment they used, but the posters advertising youth events, the front pages of newspapers, the clips from TV shows and the displays of the products that (sometimes) filled the shelves of East German supermarkets. These were the mundane events and items of everyday life, and after 1989 they were gone. It was as if an earthquake had suddenly swept away an entire civilisation.
The suddenness of the changes that took place is captured in the film Goodbye, Lenin!, from 2002. It is a retelling of the story of Rip Van Winkle - on the eve of the revolution, the mother of the main character collapses into a coma, and when she wakes up several weeks later the doctor warns her family that the slightest shock could kill her. Her family go to all sorts of lengths to protect her from the truth, searching all over town for fast-disappearing products from the fast-disappearing GDR, and even filming pretend news broadcasts showing Westerners flooding over the border into East Germany in search of the good life.
The film was hugely popular in Germany, particularly in the still much poorer east, where over the last few years there has been a popular wave of 'Ostalgie', or nostalgia for all those everyday items and events that disappeared so suddenly - the Trabants, the music, the films, and the TV personalities and programmes which occupied the screen every night throughout the GDR years, and then just vanished.
It's a bittersweet nostalgia of course - very, very few people would want to go back. In the book Anna Funder talks to a friend about her memories of East German TV:
'The school was strict,' she says. 'There were things about it that were seriously traumatic, such as what we used to call 'TV-torture''.
By the 1980s most people in East Germany watched western television, especially the news bulletins. No-one watched the GDR news, despite the fact that it screened daily on both state-run television stations, in a long and a short version. Julia smiles. 'At the school every night without fail we were sat down and made to watch 'Aktuelle Kamera' in the long version. It was hell.'
The news program was so long because when Erich Honecker was mentioned, he was announced with every single one of his titular functions. Julia sits up straight with her hands on the table and puts on a media voice. In the flickering light and with her flickering hair she is a newsreader from outer space, coming through static: 'Comrade Erich Honecker, Secretary-General of the Socialist Unity Party of the German Democratic Republic, First Secretary of the Central Comittee, Chairman of the State Council and of the National Defence Council, leader of the Fighing Groups bladibla-'
We laugh and she pushes back onto two legs of the chair. She is a relaxed and confident mimic. 'And then the actual news item that came after all that would be null!' She straightens up again. ' - today visited the steelworks such and such and spoke with the workers about the 1984 Plan targets which they have over-over-over-achieved by so and so per cent' or, 'today opened the umpteenth apartment built in the new district of Marzhan' or, 'congratulated the collective farm of Hicksville this morning for their extraordinary harvest results, an increase of so-and-so-many-fold on previous years.'
We are laughing and laughing under the strobing light. 'And the thing about it was,' she slaps the table with her fine white hand, 'it never told us anything that happened in the world!' She shakes her head at the wordiness of no-news.
Worse though than the no-news, was the anti-news. The students also had to watch 'Der Schwarze Kanal' (The Black Channel), with Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler. I have heard about this man, the human antidote to the pernicious influence of western television. 'At home,' Julia says, 'everyone called him 'Karl-Eduard von Schni-' because that was how long it took before one of us could jump up and change the channel.'
Von Schnitzler's job was to show extracts from western television broadcast into the GDR - anything from news items to game shows to 'Dallas' - and rip it to shreds. 'That man radiated so much nastiness it just wasn't credible. You'd come away feeling sullied, as if you'd spent half an hour atrociously badmouthing someone.' Julia crosses her arms.'I mean you might have your doubts about the west - I sure did - but we also felt that our own country was feeding us lies and that our futures depended on seeming to agree with it all.'
In the book the author tracks down and interviews both the victims of the Stasi and a lot of the people who worked for it, attempting to trace the real story of the GDR through the stories of ordinary men and women, since she contends that a veil of embarrased silence descended over the whole subject when Germany was united in 1990. And one of the people she manages to track down is the presenter of 'Die Schwarze Kanal', Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler.
It's a fascinating and often hilarious conversation, and I think it's worth posting most of it here because it tells us a lot about the mentality about the people at the top of secretive totalitarian regimes, as well as showing how an insider rationalises the failure of a soviet-based centralised planned economic and social system. I'm not going to post the whole chapter, partly because it's too long, partly because I don't want to get told to take it down, but mainly because I hate typing and the space bar onmy keyboard doesn'talways work properly.
By the way, if anyone is reading this looking for articles on China and wondering what the point of all this is, I can assure you that there is one, I'm just making my way towards it very slowly. Here goes:
'The Black Channel' aired until the very end in October 1989. 'How did you start it? Was it your idea or were you given the task?'
'It was my idea,' he says. 'I once saw the western politicians on the television news sprouting filthy lies about the GDR and before the program was even over I had prepared a script for broadcast! I socked it right back to them. Then the question was: how often? I insisted on once a week. Today-' - he leans towards me, furious - 'Today I could make one every...single...day!' This is a tantrum designed to frighten me. 'That's how disgusting this, this shitbox television is!' He points with his stick at the set in the room.
All right, I think, we'll go in his direction. 'What angers you most about the television today?'
'Nothing 'angers' me!' he says. He is incandescent with rage. Out of the corner of my eye I see Frau von Schnitzler raise her head.'That's why I'm a Communist! So nothing can anger me!' Then suddenly he's quiet again. 'What makes me sorry,' he says in a withering tone, 'is what is dished up today on that piece-of-filth television. For instance that, that idiotic program -whatsit called?' He addresses no-one in particular, but a murmur comes from across the room.
He ignores it. 'They are all idiots, aren't they?' he says to me. 'Marta, do you have to grimace like that?' Then, as if to himself, 'What was the name of that program? B-Block'?
'B-Block?'
'That one where they locked up ten people -'
'Ah yes,' his wife says loudly, 'now I know what you're talking about. 'Big Brozer'.'
'Yes,' he says, ''Big Brozer'.'
He is looking at me. 'I think that television tyrant of yours was involved in that -'
'She's Australian,' Frau von Schnitzler corrects him, 'not American.'
'I know what I'm saying,' he says.
'Murdoch,' I say. 'Yes, he was Australian but now he's American.'
'Who cares?' von Schnitzler counters airily. 'He's a global imperialist.'
I open my notebook. I want to quote him back to himself. I am apprehensive. 'Can I read you something?' I ask. 'In November 1965 two easterners tried to get over the border, and one of them was shot to death. And at Christmas time that year you made a program -'
'Escapes were always tried on at Christmas time,' he says. He uses the word 'insziniert' which means 'staged', as though escapes were orchestrated deliberately to make the regime look bad.
He is so offhand about it, I feel my apprehension being replaced with something more businesslike. 'I want to read you this text from your program, and ask you if you still agree with it.' I read from my transcription:
The politics of 'freeing those in the Eastern Bloc' is code for liquidating the GDR, and that means civil war, world war, nuclear war, that means ripping apart families, atomic Armageddon - that is inhumanity! Against that we have founded a state! Against that we have erected a border with strict control measures to stop what went on during the thirteen years that is was left open and abused - that is humane! That is a service to humanity!'
When I finish, he's staring at me, chin up. 'And your question, young lady?'
'My question is whether today you are of the same view about about the Wall as something humane, and the killings at the border an act of peace?'
He raises his free arm, inhales and screams 'More! Than! Ever!' He brings his fist down.
I'm startled for an instant. Then I'm concerned that Frau von Schnitzler will stop the interview. 'You considered it necessary?' I ask quickly.
'I did not 'consider' it necessary. It was absolutely necessary! It was an historical necessity. It was the most useful construction in all of German history! In European history!'
'Why?'
'Because it prevented imperialism from contaminating the east. It walled it in.'
The only people walled-in were his own. It is as if he has followed my thinking.
'Moreover people in the GDR were not 'walled-in'! They could go to Hungary, they could go to Poland.They just couldn't go to NATO countries. Because, naturally, you don't travel around in enemy territory. It's as simple as that.'
This is so mad that I can't think of an answer immediately. But in the next breath he contradicts himself. It seemsto be his modus operandi to have a bet each way.
'I do think, though, that in the last few years they should have opened it up earlier,' he says. Then, almost ruefully, 'The people would have come back again.' I wonder if he can truly believe this. The eastern states are still, seven years on, losing people. He shifts in his seat. 'Most of them, most of them would have.'
Von Schnitzler is one of the cadre whose ideas were moulded in the 1920s by the battle against the gross free market injustices of the Weimar Republic and then the outrages of fascism, and who went on to see the birth and then the death of the nation built on those ideas.He is a true believer and for him my questions only serve to demonstrate a sorry lack of faith.
'You lived through the whole GDR, from beginning to end -'
'So I did, so I did.'
'Is there anything in your opinion that could have been done better, or differently?'
'Oh I'm sure that there are things that could have been done differently or better, but that is no longer the question to examine.'
'I think it is,' I say, although something stirs uncomfortably in the back of my mind. 'There was a serious attempt to build a socialist state, and we should examine why, at the end, that state no longer exists. It's important.' The something reveals itself to be the memory of the westerners I've met also having so little interest in the GDR.
'I noticed relatively early,' he says, 'that we would not be able to survive economically. And when we started to get tied up in this ridiculous GDR success propaganda - exaggerated harvest results and production levels and so on - I withdrew from that altogether and confined myself to my specialised area: the work against imperialism. Exclusively. And for that reason today I am so be-lov-ed,' he says, heavy with sarcasm.
'What do you mean 'beloved' - by whom?' I ask.
'That's why I'm so beloved by all those who think imperialistically and act imperialistically and bring up their children imperialistically!' Each time he says 'imperialistically' he thrusts his fist on the stick forward towards me. This man, who could turn inhumanity into humanity, faces now perhaps his greatest challenge: to turn the fact that he is hated into the fact that he is, in spite of all available evidence, right.
'Your program was based on exposing the lies of the western media. When you noticed the false success propaganda at home, didn't you feel a responsibilty to do the same?'
'No. I focused in my program quite deliberately and exclusively on anti-imperialism, not on GDR propaganda.'
'But you understand my question., Herr von Schnitzler. The success propaganda in the GDR was also lies -'
'It did distance the people from us, because it was in such stark contrast to the reality.' He can switch from one view to another with frightening ease. I think it is a sign of being so accustomed to such power that the truth does not matter bacause you cannot be contradicted.
'Why didn't you comment then on these lies?'
'I wouldn't even consider it!' He frowns and pulls his neck in like a turtle in digust. 'I'm not about to criticise my own republic!'
'Why not?'
'The critique of imperialism is quite enough!'
'I criticise my own country -' I say
He doesn't miss a beat. 'You've got a lot more reason to.'
There's nothing for it but to laugh. 'That may be,' I say.
We switch to the present. He starts to talk about 'my very good friend Erich Mielke'.
'Did he have a file on you?'
'I don't know.'
'You haven't applied to have a look at it?'
'Why should I?'
'Out of curiousity.'
'My curiousity is directed solely towards the machinations of imperialism and how they can be countered.'
Checkmate. So I start another question. 'The internal observation of the GDR population, with the apparatus of official and unofficial collaborators -'
He cuts me off. 'You can throw 90 per cent of what you know about that out.' He's angry again. 'It's all lies. Mind you, in my opinion even 10 per cent of what they're saying would have been too much.'
'Are you saying that there was only 10 per cent of the number claimed of Stasi employees assigned to work on the East German population?'
'Yes. It's all been exaggerated immeasurably. In any case I am exceptionally sceptical about numbers.'
He changes tack, back to his friend Mielke.'The Wall was necessary to defend a threatened nation. And there was Erich Mielke at the top, a living example of the most humane human being.'
I have never heard Mielke referred to in this way. He was too fierce and feared to be referred to with anything like affection. I look away to the shelves on the wall close behind him. They are full of books and small objects of memory, a row of pill bottles and and a cheap tape deck. The words 'the most humane human being' hang in the air. He starts to cough, hacking and deep, into a handkerchief, then raises a pink drink to his lips.
'And how are you finding it now after 1989, now that you are living in capitalism, or, as you say, in imperialism? Is it what you expected,' I hold his gaze, 'or is it not as bad as you thought?'
'I live,' he says fiercely, 'among the enemy. And not for the first time in my life. I lived among the enemy during the Nazi time as well.' He works himself into another little fury. I see Marta watching him, and I wonder if the medicine is to deal with this, or with its effects. 'What I can tell you,' he says, 'is that as long as the GDR existed no swine in Bonn would have dared start a war!' He gasps for breath. His hand has formed a fist, but he keeps it in his lap. 'The GDR would have prevernted that by its very existence!' He means that so long as the Iron Curtain was up, the NATO countries would not have bombed the former Yugoslavia for fear the Russians would have retaliated on behalf of the Serbs.
He's puffing and cross and, I think, finally stuck. He looks at me and I can see the tiny red veins filigreed across his eyeballs. 'Full Stop!' he screams. 'This ....conversation....is....now....over!'
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One of the most useful tips in the not-always-reliable Rough Guide to China 2002 edition concerns Chinese television. You would, it points out, have to be desperately bored to resort to it for entertainment. Well, I have to confess that very occasionally, when I am extremely bored in hotel rooms or at home, I do find myself watching CCTV9. I'm not proud of it, and it never lasts very long, but there is a certain perverse fascination with some of the 'useful idiots' that present the shows. Unlike Edgar Snow and the British spy circle, however, I think it probable that a lot of the people on CCTV9 genuinely are idiots. At least you can say with some certainty that people like Snow, Burgess and Maclean were extremely intelligent individuals who had probably drawn some of the right conclusions about their own societies; they just seem to have been tragically misguided about the nature of the regimes they crossed over to (with the possible exception of Israel Epstein, who as far as I can tell was a great deal more Chinese than anything else). However, the ex-pats on Chinese TV are not quite in their league.
You have this guy, for example, who preens and stammers his way through some pretend economics programme, accompanied by a Chinese woman whose attempts to pronounce the word 'aluminium' brought tears of pity to my eyes - although I hasten to add that he didn't do much better. There is a young American woman who, during an incisive piece I saw on the important subject of how mobile phones, like, exist?, and how, like, people in China use them?!? changed her clothes no fewer than seven times, which is more costume changes than in an average Kylie Minogue concert. Then there is a fairly geriatric guy who provides the links between the domestic news (propaganda) and the foreign news (footage from international news agencies with all the interesting bits cut out), and whose exclusive qualification for the job seems to be an Australian accent. Also, viewers are treated to the sight of a team of wide-boys in ill-fitting suits who tell us about China's weather. They do it surprisingly quickly considering the size of the country. They also bounce in a jolly and wide-eyed fashion around the screen, and I could try and think of something nice to say about them but to be absolutely honest what most comes to mind is the word wankers.
I have to admit that with a lot of these people I don't actually know what their voices sound like, because I find the only way I can abide CCTV9 is with the sound turned right down and the PC picking its way through my Kate Bush mp3s. The full stereo effect of the programmes is a bit too much to bear.
It would be interesting to know whether or not any of these people have ever worked in news media before. I suspect that in most cases they haven't, partly on the basis of this very enlightening, often hysterically funny and surprisingly moving account of behind-the-scenes life at CCTV:
We lead a broadcast with a Xinhua item stating that 2,500 people have died as a result of the Falun Gong’s influence. The writer makes a mistake, it’s read on the air as 25,000. I’m the only one to notice, because it happens I read the same item that morning in the China Daily. We strike out a zero for the next broadcast and never hear from the audience or management. We report on an 8:00 a.m. broadcast that China will definitely launch a manned space mission in 2003. On the noon broadcast, “the launch date is still uncertain,” and the writer tells me it may be years away. Once again, writers of the source material at Xinhua or CCTV-1 are unavailable or irresponsible and there’s no one in our newsroom who knows or cares enough to pick up a phone for clarification. We don’t strive for it either; just change the story according to the latest copy and trust that no one expects any better.
The question I'm interested in is what happens when they leave China. Do they then try and put their journalistic experience to good use and try and find work in the media? Apart from the ignomy of working for an organisation called CCTV ("what, you were a Security Guard?!?"), there is a world of difference between the Disney Channel or CNN on the one hand, and totalitarian state media churning out nothing but state propaganda on the other.
Actually, on that last point about CNN, I suppose on the face of it they could always try applying for a job there!
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As you probably already know, the Chinese Government is currently engaged in a crackdown on blogging websites, via new regulations obliging bloggers to register with the authorities. There is more on this podcast, from Global Voices. It has a frightening moment at about 15 minutes in, when the interviewee explains what happened when an independent blogger called the Ministry for information on how to register. And if you are outside China and have a web server, you may well be able to help.
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When Mark Rowswell (aka Da Shan) is back in Clark Kent mode in suburban Canada, perched on the edge of the sofa chez les voisins politely sipping coffee, how does he explain what he does in life?
Does he say anything like “I’m the fresh-faced poster boy for the post-1989, post-WTO, pre-2008 Chinese Communist Party Government?” I can imagine the reaction. Because, let’s face it, he’s not quite pretty or memorable enough to make a convincing icon for revolutionary struggle, is he?
Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m not the best judge of this. So, to any women, or gay men, reading this, I would ask: which of the two pictures above is more likely to make you start perspiring slightly and feel a bit faint? And for everyone, male or female, I’d be interested to know, which of the two photos would make you feel more like manning the barricades and storming the palace? And which, while we're at it, would be more likely to cause you to splash out 1,000 Kwai on a fairly crappy copy of a PDA?
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When I take the thoroughly modern local tram from our campus towards Carrefour to stock up on cheese and Alpen, I don't actually get to see much of Dalian. What I do see is mile after mile of huge billboard advertisements for new condominiums called things like Your Marjesty (sic) and Tycoon's Paradise Village. The developments themselves take up an increasing amount of space both in Chinese cities and in the countryside (I especially noticed it on the way from Beijing to the Great Wall), and in addition to the huge, huge billboards blotting out a lot of the landscape, adverts for them also take up page after page in in-flight and ex-pat magazines.
In fact it often seems like wherever you turn in China you're faced with marketing of some kind, if not with those red banners which I never know if they display marketing, propaganda or a happy mix of the two. Waiting for the lift in the electronic department store where I go to pick up my weekly three dozen or so DVDs, there is a TV screen on the wall which shows adverts and nothing else. On the bus home the TV intersperses the same Tom & Jerry cartoon with adverts, adverts, adverts and the occasional karaoke video. It's sometimes difficult to get into the local supermarket because of the crowd gathered around the stall outside handing out free samples of those really quite odd tasting milk tablets.
I'm prepared to accept that this is a sign of progress and there is not much in this that I didn't have to put up with in Europe (apart from the karaoke and Tom and Jerry, that is. And the milk tablets, of course). However, advertising in China has taken on a new and particularly aggravating form: stickers prominently displaying a phone number and some sort of service (no, I don't think it's the obvious one so ubiquitous in London telephone boxes) for sale. These stickers don't just attach themselves to lampposts and any available vertical surface - in an innovative move that I really hope hasn't caught on elsewhere, they are stuck on the pavement.
I guess the people trying to drum up trade in this way have realised that if they hand people a leaflet it will just end up on the floor unread, so they have started advertising on litter, and litter that can't be removed (the stickers they use are of that extremely irritating type that they stick directly onto the CDs in a lot of record shops, which you need washing up liquid and a brillo pad to remove) and cannot be avoided. Once a sticker is stuck, it stays there for quite some time, and probably does get its message across.
Now I've mentioned before that there are lots of things in China that make me angry or depressed, but which I know I've got no hope whatsoever of ever doing anything about. It's the same with these things; here in China my opinion counts for nothing, and I'm leaving very soon anyway. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this innovative new advertising medium - sticker litter - might well begin to catch on in other countries, if it hasn't already. And I've got a good idea about how to do something about it.
My idea involves two very common items: one, a mobile phone, obviously very common indeed these days. The second thing is not so common, but very cheap, even lighter to carry and very easy to get your hands on: a simple ordinary whistle.
Imagine the scene: Poor Unfortunate (although she doesn't know it yet) Receptionist is sitting tapping on a keyboard, looking for pictures of kittens on the internet and trying to avoid doing any actual work. The phone rings.
PUR: Hello, this is Tiny Tim Chimney Sweep Services, how can I help you?
ME (or maybe YOU): Hi, I saw an advert, is this the right number? It was stuck in the street, 'We Clean Any Chimneys, Very Cheap Price, Very Small Chimney Sweep Gets Into All Nooks And Crannies, Does Not Soil Fireplace?'
PUR: Yes, that's us, how big is your chimn..
ME (or maybe YOU): PHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
PUR: AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!! (Slams down phone, holds ears).
Phone rings.
PUR: I'm not ******* well answering that. BOOOOSS!!!
You know, at first it might be difficult for them to make the connection, but given time and persistence the message should get through. As I say, I don't know yet if sticker litter advertising has taken off elsewhere, but I'm going to invest in a whistle, just in case. And I'm thinking of snapping up www.howbigisyourchimn.com before anyone else can.
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The Chinese are not known for giving a straight answer to a difficult question. Partly this is to do with saving face; maybe it is a national trait, but maybe they learnt it from their leaders.
In a fascinating account of a visit to the recording of a CCTV talk show, Ann Condi makes the following point:
There is a very basic aspect of the Sino-foreign media dialogue that is so obvious that it is seldom commented on. It involves a common dynamic in human interactions where hypocrisy, deception, and issues of “saving face” intersect. It is this: If I find myself in disagreement with another person about something, and yet I sincerely believe in the correctness of my own position, I will seek to highlight our differences and show decisively why my position is sound and that of the other person is flawed. If, on the other hand, I am painfully aware that the other person has a point, and I am in the wrong, I will change the subject.
The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject. When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim "Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security." Instead they change the subject to "No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country." When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say "You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why." Rather, they change the subject: "What about your human rights problem?"
Where the question of democracy is concerned, it's very easy for them to muddy the waters. Is democracy right for China? If so, what kind of democracy? And most importantly, whose kind of democracy? I think by posing this question they are exploiting a sore point in the West at the moment, and maybe taking advantage of a basic schism in how we regard our own societies.
Oddly enough, this is not the case in China itself. Recently in class we were doing a quiz about life in Britain, and one of the questions was about the voting age. Most of them knew it was 18 - the same, they said, as in China. It turns out that they all believe that they live in a democratic country, where at the age of 18 they get to participate in elections, which are held at regular intervals. If anyone who's not a member of the CCP could explain this to me, I'd be very grateful.
As I say, in Europe and the US many people are not so confident about the democratic credentials of their own societies. Despite the massive opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their subsequent occupation, both went ahead regardless. People are understandably uncertain about the whole question of the West imposing democracy on other, poorer, countries, and about the legitimacy of the resulting political systems. As is, presumably, Hamid Karzai, whose recent request to the Americans that they give his Government some information about the military operations they are carrying out in his country was roundly turned down. Not to mention the 99% of Iraqis in the survey quoted by Noam Chomsky who do not believe that the Americans are in their country to bring democracy.
Back home, a lot of Americans' confidence in their political system took quite a blow after the 2000 election farce, when the Supreme Court imposed the losing candidate as President. And despair really set in last year, when all the efforts to elect absolutely anybody not quite as dangerous as Bush came to nothing. In addition, the EU is currently in crisis because when people were given a chance to have a say in the future of their continent, they irresponsibly made what we're repeatedly told was the Wrong Choice. After all, everyone within the political system in Europe agrees with the consensus over the need to make constant cutbacks because of the pressing demands of the Brave New World - anyone who questions this is torn to pieces and ridiculed in the press (George Galloway) or explicitly told, in the case of the French voters, that they don't understand the future.
So does the West really believe in giving people a genuine democratic choice? If not, who are we to lecture the Chinese, who after all have had 5,000 years of history to learn from?
Well, the choice between the Republicans and the Democrats is not the widest choice in the world, it's true. However, what people in the United States and many other countries do enjoy is democratic rights. And in the US they are under attack - laws on censorship, gay rights, positive discrimination and equality legislation, to name but a few, are in the sights of the group of fanatical bigots in the US administration, and absolutely must be defended.
But neither can we allow George W. Bush to define what we mean by democracy. He seems to believe in top-down democracy, with a small ruling elite managing the country on behalf of large commercial interests. In theory he believes that these large commercial interests best represent the core interests of citizens, although in reality it's hard to see how anyone could sincerely defend this point of view.
I and many others believe in a grassroots participative democracy in which instantly recallable delegates are elected locally into positions which do not give them access to special privileges, and in which all major decisions are preceded by an extensive and open debate and then resolved through the active participation of ordinary citizens through voting.
This is my own democratic ideal. I don't believe that this kind of democracy is likely to break out anywhere in the world any time soon, and least of all in China. Amongst the people I've had contact with over the last few months, multi-party democracy has never been mentioned. At the top end of society, nobody is keen to be seen as China's Gorbachev, and the man least likely to is Hu Jintao, who recently announced that he wants China to closer resemble North Korea in political terms.
Nevertheless I don't think China will continue in this direction for too long. Essentially I believe in what Jung Chang says at the end of 600 harrowing and bloody pages of recent Chinese history - that the momentum of liberalisation is unstoppable. Just as China will not attack Taiwan because of the mutual commercial interests, I think that some distant day there will be on offer some form of democracy, acceptable both to foreign corporations and to the most advanced sections of the CCP. In the same way, I think that one day much sooner we will see news items on the first McDonalds to open in Pyongyang, followed by the first Subway and the first Blockbuster video, until it starts to resemble every other city in the world, as the IMF and the World Bank send in legions of foreign companies to grab anything that isn't nailed down...I could easily be completely wrong about both of these things, though, and one thing we do not have democratic control over is our environment, and that may start to finally give way before either Kim Il Jong or the CCP does. Certainly in the case of North Korea, economic change will arrive much, much quicker than any moves towards political openness.
(However, before I get too pessimistic about the direction the whole world is heading in, there is always the encouraging example of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian peasants - I'd encourage anyone interested to take the time to listen to the interview with the American investigative reporter Greg Palast on this edition of the Democracy Now! radio show. In fact the whole show is a fascinating listen – towards the end there is a lengthy and very disturbing interview with a former CIA ‘Economic Hit Man’.)
In the meantime, then, there is the entirely unresolved question of democratic rights in China. To me it is indisputable that those democratic demands raised, possibly naively and with not much understanding of the costs they would entail, in Tiananmen Square in 1989 relate to real inalienable democratic rights that are currently enjoyed by real people all over the world, and which do not exist in China. The most important of those right now is the right to a genuinely independent free press. Only in this way can the Chinese people learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from them who not to trust.
Is it ethnocentric and culturally insensitive to demand a free press? Only if we believe that countries such as China, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea have some deep cultural connection which means that their people, unlike ourselves, must be permanently kept in the dark about what has happened, what is happening and what could happen in their own and in other countries.
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This summer I’ll be spending three months in the UK. It’ll be a welcome relief to be in a place with such an exceedingly free press. Unfortunately, though, more and more space in British newspapers is taken up by items of questionable news value, mostly concerning the adventures of that subspecies of micro-celebrities of whom there seem to be about 300,000 in the UK alone.
One of the people responsible for this is Max Clifford. For those fortunate enough never to have heard that name before, he is a celebrity agent - for any Chinese readers who aren’t familiar with the term, I might add that he is 比 日本人 好*, but only just. His important life’s work is promoting formerly famous and mostly notorious clients, who pay huge sums to ensure that they will never have to deal with the shame of nipping out to Tesco’s for some cat food without getting recognised and causing a commotion.
It’s not just the press that is the object of his attention. He also places clients on those TV shows where desperate celebrities are locked or sent away together and subject themselves to all sorts of debasements to create ratings and headlines. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to grab ratings in the same way as it used to – it seems that no amount of humiliation or unlikely celebrity affairs is able to sate the public’s lust to see genuinely pathetic people suffer for media exposure.
So I had an idea that might just work. Basically, you get a group of these people, hungry to stay in the public eye, and put them in an average-sized Chinese city (Dalian would do just fine) for ten months. They needn’t put up with any discomforts of the kind that people enjoyed watching so much in that show that was set in the jungle – they could stay in the best hotel in town, eat Western-style food, watch CNN occasionally – and there would be no need for any humiliating stunts to attract the viewers.
So what would attract the viewers? Well, the real selling point is that it would put their appetite for fame to the test. How much would they really want attention, and how much attention would they really want?
Would they really want people following them round the supermarket, gasping with wonderment at the things they fill their trolleys with? Would they feel honoured to find people’s eyes tracking the progress of the chopsticks to their mouths and back to the bowl? Would they cherish the admiring gazes of fellow pedestrians, wondering just what their secret is as they totter in the middle of the road while traffic hurtles past in both directions? How would they feel about not being able to take two steps down the street without someone bellowing ‘HELLO’ at them, as every single passing taxi pulls in to the side of the road at the very sight of them? And would they feel that all the hard work had been worth it when dozens of gawping waiting and kitchen staff crowded round their table as they tried to decipher exactly what ‘Freezing Shark’s Bait’ was supposed to mean in actual English?
I suspect that as a result many of them might well decide that they preferred a quiet life, away from the spotlight of public acclaim. But for the winners, those who really value the attention given them, fabulous prizes would await. They could even challenge Da Shan in the lucrative and ever-growing Asian market for Western celebrities!
Obviously I’ve not yet had the chance to perform any detailed research into possible audiences. Consider this, if you will, as a pitch. All I can say is that personally it’s the kind of programme I’d love to see on UK television this summer.
Of course, for obvious reasons, Ken Ho and Vanessa Mae need not apply.
* - Not quite as bad as the Japanese
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How many Chinese people does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, if their Government has anything to do with it, it could be quite a few. The other day in the small supermarket in Dalian's state-run Friendship Store, I counted 50 uniformed staff. If I look out of my window I can see two elderly men sweeping the dust up and down the same bit of the same road. And it's also not unusual to find three people staffing a small public bathroom in a public park.
It's not just public places, though. An average large-sized restaurant typically has up to four women stationed permanently at the door to squawk welcomes and goodbyes at the diners. Big hotels have, in addition to a couple of porters and bell-boys, someone whose job seems to be to 'help' people use the revolving doors, which creates obvious difficulties for anyone wanting to get in or out.
Neither is it just Chinese-run businesses. The German-owned wholesaler Metro has literally dozens and dozens of floor staff standing around looking very very bored, while the lucky ones get to whizz around in forklift trucks. They also employ one poor guy to stamp your recept immediately after the checkout staff have given it to you.
I don't know how the system works. Maybe businesses of a certain size are obliged to employ a certain ratio of people. But the smell from the average Chinese public toilet is enough to tell you that employing all these staff does not result in higher efficiency and a better service - quite the opposite, in fact.
In the supermarket, for example, there are often three or four people in the aisle pointing things out to you and encouraging you to buy them instead of whatever you've chosen. However, if you try to find out what the difference is, they can only claim that it is 'better'. They don't know why. It's the same if you try and buy a DVD player, or anything related to your computer. I find that I know more about it than they do. And I've been convinced many times that I would do a better job of driving a taxi or a bus than the person employed to do so, despite the fact that I've only ever had one driving lesson in my life, and that was a disaster. Even more worrying is coming across articles like this. There is a strong sense that any given person doing any given job in China only has a limited understanding of what they're supposed to be doing.
Why is this so? I don't believe any racist nonsense about how the Chinese are any more or less inventive or incompetent than anyone else. My own pet theory is this: After Mao and his henchmen and women had driven anyone with any expertise to madness or suicide, or just plain beaten them to death, there wasn't that much know-how and learning to go around amongst such a rapidly growing population - and the tradition of passing expertise and wisdom on to future generations had itself received quite a beating.
You can see this clearly in the realms of cultural 'products' - although China is the 'factory of the world', what cultural exports has it produced in the last few years, apart from those tourist-friendly films celebrating China's glorious past?
Another enduring legacy of that time is that people don't seem inclined to challenge anyone in a position of responsibility, even if it's obvious that they don't know what they're doing. Maybe this is an ongoing reaction to a time when nobody's position was secure, apart obviously from that of the Great Helmsman. The Government soon recovered its authority, and people nowadays tend to regard any form of authority with craven face-saving respect.
So, the Government is desperate to keep people busy, to give them a stake in China's future and make them believe in the Chinese dream. At least, that's the charitable point of view. However, in China today those who aren't lucky enough to find jobs in foreign-owned factories producing inferior-quality goods for export, or unfortunate enough to labour day and night building the unaffordable apartment blocks and hotels that crowd out the skyline of China's cities, are paid subsistence wages to perform utterly meaningless tasks.
Whatever about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I'm sure this wasn't what Marx and Engels had in mind. And Margaret Thatcher would sleep even less at night at the thought of a public toilet staffed by three salaried employees!
As we all know, low wages are the reason for China's economic 'miracle'. And those low wages are the subject of a very interesting article by Andy Xie (it's the second article on the page), in which he points out that in other fast-developing economies in the past (he talks mostly about South Korea) there was a point at which a labour shortage developed, and wages had to rise.
The crucial point about China, though, is its size. China is starting to run out of land and natural resources - hence the drive to send migrant labourers to Africa to work in Chinese-owned factories. But it will be a very long time before it runs out of peasants prepared to work for very low wages in unskilled jobs. This means that wages will not rise in a country where the supply of labour is basically unlimited and workers are prevented from making demands.
What this means for China, I think, is two things. One is that those new apartment blocks will not rise in price as expected, and there will be some sort of crisis when speculators realise this and stop investing. I think this will lead to big problems for Chinese banks. Andy Xie puts it better than I can:
The fact that Chinese workers benefit little from their productivity gains has profound implications for China’s property market and commodity prices. Property values tend to rise in line with labor income in the long term. Property speculators assume that China’s economic growth will deliver rapid wage growth, and, hence, that they are just front-running Chinese workers in pushing up the prices first, i.e., Chinese workers will buy from them at higher prices with their higher wages in the future. I believe this is an illusion.
The second thing is at some point there will be social unrest related to the failure of wages to keep up with commodity prices. Andy Xie again:
The prices that China can afford depend on wage levels more than the overall size of the economy. The Chinese economy has been expanding rapidly on employment rather than wage growth. In the end, the burden for bearing the costs of raw materials comes down to the income of each consumer. Chinese consumers are just not becoming rich fast enough to catch up with the rapid increase in commodity prices.
But I also believe that all of this has dramatic implications not just for China. China is the 'factory of the world' - as we can see right now with the worldwide crisis in the textile industry, companies from other countries will continue to face stiffer and stiffer competition from Chinese exports. And who is going to pay? I think Andy Xie may have just hit the nail on the head with his final point:
In summary, the global financial markets are speculating in China-related assets, in the belief that Chinese prices will rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD prices are more likely to fall towards Chinese levels.
My own point is this: I don't think that it's just commodity prices that are going to fall across the world. Chinese wages are not going to rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD wages are going to fall torwards Chinese levels.
You know, from a certain perspective, I think that might just be what Globalisation is all about.
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Also on the theme of the Christian right in China, someone reminded me of the role that Christian fundamentalists say China will play in their forthcoming apocalypse. They apparently believe that the rise of China is a clear sign that we are "nearing midnight", and that China's need for oil will soon push it into conflict with Israel, triggering the coming of their lord and the smiting of the godless. They also get very excited at any agreements between China and the EU (the rebirth of the Roman Empire), which they see as somehow connected to the Beast, as is Russia of course. I'd love to know how these Jesus freaks sell that to their potential converts!
You can read about it on sites like this:
Even newspapers in China now predict a war with the United States. China cannot match (yet) the U.S. in modern weapons and technology. For example, the U.S. has 18 times as many nuclear missiles. What China has many more times of is men. According to Revelation 9:14-16, an army of 200 million soldiers will cross the Euphrates from the East to fight at the battle of Armageddon.
According to Revelation 16:12, this gigantic army will belong to the "kings of the east" and advance over a prepared way. The way has been prepared. On April 20,2001, on a CNBC news program, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times international news analyst, stated that the real danger with which the United States will have to contend with in the future is China making an alliance with the nations of the East, which was now in progress.
Poking around in these dark corners of the Interweb is very entertaining as long as you try and forget that George W. Bush's administration takes a lot of this nonsense seriously, and may have it in mind as they provoke chaos and rebellion across the Middle East.
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Yesterday I mentioned that all churches in China have to recognise the ultimate authority of the Communist Party in order to practice here. Well, it's not quite as simple as that:
1. Christian believers must fervently love the People's Republic of China, support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the Peoples Government, uphold the unification of the motherland and the harmony among ethnic groups, and work steadfastly on the road of socialism.
2. Christian believers must strictly abide by all the laws, regulations, and policies of the Communist Party and the State, and strive to be patriotic and law abiding citizens.
3. Christian believers must actively work to increase the material wealth and cultivate the spiritual morals of the socialist civilization. They must comply with the government's labor codes and strive to contribute to the development of the "Four Modernizations." When scheduled religious activities are in conflict with production and work schedules, the economic activities must take priority.
4. A permit must be obtained from the county Religious Affairs Bureau in order to establish religious meeting points. No unauthorized meeting points are allowed.
5. Christian believers must actively cooperate with the government to carry out thoroughly the Party's religious policies to the letter. They shall not persuade and force others to believe in Christianity. They shall not brainwash teenagers under 18 with religious beliefs. They shall not bring children to religious activities.
6. One should see a doctor for medication when sick. Christian believers must not resort to prayer alone for healing so as not to endanger people's health and lives.
7. Christian believers shall not preach their religion outside the church buildings and specific places which have been designated for religious activities. They shall not preach itinerantly. They shall not receive self proclaimed evangelists into their homes, churches, or meeting points.
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While he was still President, Jiang Zemin was allegedly asked at a dinner party what fundamental change he would like to see happen in China. His response was that he would like to see China become a Christian country.
He's not isolated in this. Some of the leading creatures at the top of the CCP have apparently concluded from their studies of developed countries that the key to their success was the role of Christian beliefs. I don't think they're being inconsistent in this, given that there isn't really anything to Party ideology any more apart from nationalism, the need for an authoritarian state and letting the free market take over all aspects of economic life. In fact, I think it's better to think of the CCP as the Chinese Nationalist Party (國民党!) these days. And I think it's precisely this vacuum of ideas that makes young people in particular so vulnerable to right-wing fundamentalist groups like this who dispatch every year more and more young people to China to preach the holy word - under the guise of teaching english.
I came across this fascinating and timely article about missionary groups using ESL as a means of harvesting converts around the world. Unfortunately as it's a PDF I can't copy and post much of it here, but I'd encourage anyone remotely interested in either ESL or the evil influence of these bible bashing nutters to read the whole article, long as it is:
According to a report by missionaries recently returned from China, they are planning to return soon: 'We will teach English to Chinese students between the ages of 10 and 18 for six weeks in July and August.' On their last visit, they tell us, 'over 350 students heard the Gospel' and the principal of the school admired their dedication even though, as he explained, 'I don't understand what they were talking about but I knew it was something very deep and very special.'
It is something I find extremely worrying, not to say depressing. I've heard that in some cases in China the religious organisations offer to pay half the salaries of these 'teachers'. We have at least one of them here - I have seen the person concerned heading into class with a big thick 'Rapture'-type book. I've heard about Chinese students being baptised by foreign teachers in the bathtub of their apartments. Sometimes one of my students proclaims in class that they're a Christian - I just ignore it and move very swiftly on. Tragically though, because the students have so few reference points to help them understand Western life in any depth (hence the appalling and maddening assumption that I am a Christian), I think they actually see it as pretty 'cool'.
Personally the whole thing makes my blood boil.
This is not a general diatribe against teachers who happen to consider themselves Christians - you really need to follow the above link to know what I'm talking about. As it makes clear, what the organisations concerned are proselytising is the complete opposite of Liberation Theology. The article gives some example sentences which one English teaching missionary group encourages their staff to use in the classroom:
Right: Man has a right to punish his children when they behave poorly.
Struggle: I'm struggling to finish this work soon.
Boss: The boss is good. He treats us well and pays us a good wage.
No problem for them that all churches in China are obliged to accept the authority of the Communist Party before they can go about their work. And the Communist Party leadership are fully aware that what right-wing Christian ideology has to say about the world constitutes very little threat to their own power, so they at least tolerate it, and I suspect increasingly encourage it. What is being preached, after all, is submission - submission to whatever forms of authority exist, be it a husband (we call it the missionary position for a good reason!), a corrupt government or an intolerant and ignorant God. In much the same way, in fact, as the world's financial institutions force obedience to the law of the market on the world's poorest countries:
While on the one hand preaching a strong line in neoliberal politics, many evangelical organisations preach an equally strong line on political aquiescence. The Christan Television (online, 2002) warns us to 'Stop the Revolution' because 'one day Jesus will return and overthrow all who remain rebellious to this rule.' Stopping rebellion allows former sinners to find 'true freedom'. This doctrine emphasises aquiescence not only to the authority of God but also to the authority of government.
With tragic irony, these Christian churches are preaching this nonsense under the guise of giving people what has become one of the most empowering tools these days, the ability to communicate in English.
At least in China, I'd question the depth of conviction of any recent converts to Christianity. According to Paul Theroux's book, it's very common for 'religious' Chinese people to bet on several horses at the same time. Just because someone says they're a Christian doesn't mean that they don't believe in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Falun Gong and maybe the Party too!
However, this is not just happening in Chinese universities, but all over the world. There needs to be a movement throughout ESL to expose and challenge these people. They are exploiting the needs of the poor in order to push their twisted, bigoted ideology. They really do qualify as 'foreign devils'!
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I've noticed an increasing and worrying tendency to refer to the Massacre, even in the international press, as the 'Tiananmen Square Incident'. In fact, a friend's Chinese teacher referred to it once as the Tiananmen Square Accident, and then tried to defend her choice of word! The actual 'Tiananmen Incident' took place in 1976. What took place was also a massacre, and certainly not an 'incident', whatever that means:
Things became rowdy, and inside the Great Hall of the People China's rulers were alarmed. After consultation with Mao, it was decided to use force to clear the square. Mao authorized the use of force but not guns.
That evening when only a few thousand protesters remained they were driven from the square by militia armed with clubs. Four thousand were arrested. Sixty were dragged into the Great Hall of the People, beheaded and later shipped to Shanghai and secretly cremated.
It's at best misleading to use this phrase to refer to the events of 1989, and at worst it plays right into the hands of the Chinese authorities in their attempts to have the massacre recorded in the history books of the world as something much more neutral and ambiguous than pure cold-blooded butchery of their own people.
I think this may have something to do with increasing Chinese Government influence in debates concerning human rights in China, and when it occurs I think it needs to be confronted and the fact that it was a massacre must be insisted on at all costs.
The saddest thing about all this is that the average Chinese student, despite seeming to spend every available minute online, probably has about as much awareness of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as the average British student has of the Tiananmen Incident. How foreigners can choose to go on living here year after year in the full knowledge of the extent of their students' ignorance is truly beyond my understanding.
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It seems to me that if you seriously want to understand the mentality of Chinese people today, you have to consider the impact of the events of June 1989. The protests were not isolated but were part of a general push for democracy in the late nineteen-eighties. This is abundantly clear if you read any books which cover the period - at the moment I'm reading 'Riding the Iron Rooster' by Paul Theroux, his account of a year spent travelling around the country. It was published in 1988, and in the book in conversation after conversation people express their shame and disgust at the Cultural Revolution, their rejection of Mao as someone who made nothing but mistakes and as someone who they recognise to have been essentially cracked after 1956, and their wish for more political freedom. He visits Mao's home village, a site of pilgramage 10 years before, and finds it completely deserted.
He talks about the massive protests which took place all over the country in 1987, involving both students and workers demanding greater political freedom: press freedom, electoral reform, a multiparty system, official permission to demonstrate and, perhaps more importantly, their right to have their protests reported in the press; and social freedom - the students' demands included sexual freedom (in 2005 it is still illegal to 'cohabit') and better food in the canteens. At one point there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people on the streets of Shanghai, and similar protests in other cities. The person scapegoated and purged in the wake of these protests was Hu Yaobang, whose death was the initial impetus for the buildup in Tianamen Square in April 1989. There also followed a general campaign against the effects of 'borgeouis liberalism', especially amongst the young.
We all know what came of that - if anyone needs reminding they only need to take the time to read the report which the Guardian fortunately keeps posted on it's Special Report on China page here. As I say, it was not an isolated event. The ongoing impact has involved a partial rehabilitation of Mao's reputation, a refusal to confront the consequences of the Cultual Revolution and what I consider to be a general intellectual impoverishment, contrasted with the real intellectual awakening of the nineteen-eighties which is evident in Paul Theroux's book and also in Ma Jian's 'Red Dust', which is the story of a Beijing writer and painter travelling the country in the mid-80s, on the run from the authorities visiting his friends and witnessing the changes taking place. His friends also paint, write and talk about the recent past and about the possibility of living in a freer society.
I can only compare that with the conversations I've had over the last ten months, obviously especially with young people, in which political change has not been any kind of issue for them.
The authorities after 1989 took the decision that they would systematically crush any sign of independent thinking amongst young people. In order to achieve this they increased military-style discipline in universities, increased political (read nationalistic) education for university and school students and removed from campuses any places where students or teachers would be able to gather and discuss their lives. This over the last few years has happily coincided with a general improvement of the standard of living, along with certain projects of national prestige which are used to bolster young people's sense of national pride and attachment to the state.
Just as important in my opinion has been the growing availability of mobile phones and the internet. Chinese students see themselves primarily as consumers, just as connected to and engaged with the outside world as young people in Japan or the USA. In reality they are disconnected from the society that they live in, atomized, disregarding of any notion of solidarity or democracy. What it will now take to shake them out of this stupor and make them think about what is going on around them I do not know. They really don't seem to know or in fact care that the internet they see is filtered and a pale imitation of what the rest of the world uses. I've tried asking them what they would do if the government banned mobile phones, but it's a bit too abstract as that clearly is not about to happen.
This, on the other hand, is fantastic news.
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The first time I met someone from mainland China was in 1994 at a party. We were both catastrophically drunk and partly because of this, and partly because at the time I mixed in a dark red circle, I naively assumed that he was some sort of dissident who'd fled the country. I don't think he was, and he may even have been a gatecrasher, but I bombarded him with all sorts of stupid questions, the subtext of which was 'Bu..b..but what is your life like?!?' The exoticism of the life I imagined for him in China was boundless. I don't remember a single word he said to me.
Five years later when I started teaching I had Chinese students in all my classes. The boys would turn up halfway through the morning, evidently still fast asleep, and in the meantime we, the Europeans, would bombard the girls with questions. 'So you've really never heard of the Beatles/Elvis/techno music?' was a common theme. They in turn would timidly ask if it was true that there were really late night discos in Dublin. In the break they would crowd round the tape player and turn up their cassettes of what sounded to me like Fisher Price Disney pop ballads.
They were (I think) rich kids who had failed to get into University and had therefore been sent away until they had learnt English. To me ordinary life in China was full of mystery, and even their most mundane comments fed this impression. One insisted throughout his entire stay that back home he was a taxi driver. Lost for the answer to a question he would grin and burst out 'I drive taxi - where you wanna go?' to great hilarity. Discussing the issue of acceptable questions to ask on a first date they came up with 'Who is your local party chief?', which they seemed to find just as deliriously incongruous as we did.
Hungover and mischeavous one early summer day, I decided we would talk about special occasions and festive holidays in our different countries. I mentioned that June 4th was a significant day for many people in China. The idealstic young Russian and German students saw the opportunity I'd sensed they were waiting for and launched into a furious attack. The Chinese were nonplussed. When things had calmed down a bit one of the students, a patient and drowsy whisp of a boy from Qingdao, explained exactly what had happened that day.
The student protestors, he said, had tied duck feathers (duck feathers? we asked, understandably confused. Duck feathers, he assured us) to the soles of their feet and had tickled (yes, he knew what tickled meant) the soldiers, and a lot of soldiers had died because of the tickling.
The students I had that summer and the next seemed to be constantly coming up with similarly bizarre, usually hilarious and often disturbing explanations for things. And I think it was that more than any other single thing that gave me the impulse to want to come to China and to find out what it was like to live amongst people who had such an outlandish view of the world.
Now, I'm aware of how quickly what seems exotic from a distance quickly becomes mundane upon closer contact. I still believe there is more to the attraction of the exotic than this, and there are some places which retain their mystery and allure when you live there. But China today would present quite a challenge to anyone's sense of wonder and mischief. What was the Cultural Revolution if not a war of the mundane against the exotic? Young people in China today revere the most mundane and least interesting aspects of our culture - the NBA, the UEFA Champions' League, KFC - and dream of becoming secretaries, accountants and CEOs. Anonymous, money-making dreams.
So was I naive? My only defence is that I didn't come here expecting to find Shangri-La, or even Thailand. I came here in search of that sense of the bizarre I found in Dublin, for more duck feather stories.
It's something that happens very rarely. The other day in class I was overjoyed when one of my students kept a completely straight face while she told the class that she used to have a patch of grass on the top of her head which could predict the future. People like that really stand out here. They apparently have a word in Chinese, Linglei, which describes young people with a different view of the world and who aspire to a different lifestyle, but here nobody recognises the word, let alone identifies themselves with it. For most their worldview compels them to repeat what they've never had cause to question. One of my students primly informed me that 'the aim of University in England is to cultivate the perfect gentleman'. Another plucked up the courage to ask if I'd had another girlfriend before my present one. I'm 32 years old, by the way.
In just over two months I'll be another year older and I'll be gone. While I've been here and over the last few years mainland Chinese have been spreading out across the globe, possibly outnumbering the wealthier and worldlier Cantonese speakers. Dublin and Lisbon both have more and more shops, supermarkets and restaurants owned and run by newly arrived Mandarin speakers. Wherever I go in the world in the future I'll be meeting more and more people from mainland China.
Now I don't know what happens to Chinese people when they go to live abroad. I suppose that their different experiences may well broaden their outlook and cause them to question what they've been brought up to believe in in China. Now I'm not in much of a position to say. What I do think, however, is that the circumstances in which foreigners are allowed to come and live here in China are too inhibiting to permit any more than a superficial understanding of and engagement with what's really going on around them. It feels like the unspoken question in the inquiring eyes of a Chinese person as they follow me down the street or round the supermarket is 'why the hell did you choose to come here?'. The answer is that I feel ashamed that I made that choice, and I'll feel much freer to talk openly to Chinese people - about the duck feathers and the fortune-telling head grass - when I'm no longer an 'invited guest'of their government, a government which they have a lot more right and reason to hate then I do.
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But this one had nothing to do with Japan. Not wanting to sound hysterical, but it needs to be clearly said that they are only going to be able to keep the lid on this situation for a very short time. Something big is going to happen soon which will make this whole anti-Japanese thing look fairly trivial.
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Does anyone remember Gary North? In 1999 I was a regular visitor to his site, which hosted thousands of links to articles presenting entirely plausible scenarios of global financial catastrophe at the end of the year. Embarrassing to admit now, of course, but I was actually quite frightened.
All the more chastening, in fact, to find out soon after that Gary North was a bit of a nutter. Actually, he was a fully-fledged hysterical fundamentalist lunatic who had already, in the early eighties, but without the benefit of the internet, happily predicted that AIDS would lead to a decimation of the decadent human species. He was a full-time doom-mongerer, with his own silly agenda.
These days I'm much more careful about believing predictions when I don't know who's making them and why, particularly when I come across them on the internet.
Now, Gordon C. Chang is a writer on Chinese affairs, and from what I know of him he's been in a good position to make predictions about the future of the Chinese economy. His book, which I don't think is on general sale in the People's Republic, but which you can read an extract from here, is a very detailed account of what exactly is rotten about China's economic miracle, and he provides a number of possible scenarios, all entirely plausible, for how things could go horribly wrong for the Chinese government in the not too distant future.
It's obviously something he feels very deeply about. In fact, it is this which puts me of the book, which often reads like a rant. The individual stories he tells tend to get lost in the general sweep of his argument, making it compelling to read in short bursts, but over 200 pages he often comes across like somebody with a vendetta.
Could he be another Gary North? His name is not one that crops up much in the increasing amount of articles equally sceptical about the sustainability of the economic miracle, unlike that of Jasper Becker, whose book The Chinese I unfortunately won't have the chance to read more of until I leave the country for good - hooray! - in the summer, but who turns up in this excellent BBC radio documentary.
Now I think I agree with a lot of what Chang says. My feelings cloud the issue, however - I'd love to see the C C P humiliated and overthrown, although I know that whatever challenges may emerge may not necessarily be to my liking. The general feeling, for example, that the Government is insufficiently anti-Japanese
(there is an eye-witness account of yesterday's Beijing demonstration here) could be the spark for a firestorm of grievances against corruption, unemployment and economic inequality
But ultimately I'm not best placed or qualified to say. I only read what I choose to read and believe what I choose to believe. However, I do live in China and I do reflect on what I see around me. From this local point of view, then, and given that I don't speak much Chinese and I miss most of what goes on around me, does all this apparent growth and prosperity look sustainable? Can the momentum be maintained, or is it heading like Chang says for an inevitable collapse?
Since in our college of 16,000 students there is nowhere to go and socialise, I spend a certain amount of time in the gym. I've been going for about three or four months now. I had to change gyms because the better equipped gym at the neighbouring University ceased to be better equipped when some of the machines stopped working. A week or so went by and when they weren't fixed I had to switch to the gym on our campus.
At first this was much better. After 6 months in China I'm getting used to the same song being repeated at great volume for hours on end, and over time I persuaded the staff that it was better to close the doors on very cold days. The staff seemed quite friendly, given that they have what is in China considered a dream job, namely sitting around slurping noodles and sending text messages. The most important thing was that the machines worked.
All good things end eventually. When I asked when the machine would be fixed, the answer was 'bu yi ding'. I asked someone what that meant. It means 'not necessarily'.
I switched to another machine, which seemed at least to be hurting adjacent bits of my arms and shoulders. Truth be told I'm not much more of an expert on body-building than on the Chinese economy, but it was fine for two days. Then it broke. I asked again about the chances of it being fixed any time soon, and this time I was pleased that I understood the answer. Bu yi ding.
Armed with this new bit of vocabulary things are becoming clearer. Now when the state-of-the-art DVD PC facilities stop working, I know there's no point asking if they'll be fixed and if we'll be able to use the classroom again. And the smell that comes out of the bathrooms and fills the corridors of the school's brand new buildings, will anything be done about that? Bu yi ding.
It's a simple question of maintenance. Because nobody knows what to do when these new fangled machines and these shiny new buildings get broken, damaged or worn, the authorities do all they can to prevent this happening. In the brand new language labs the students have to put little blue cloth slippers from a cardboard box by the door over their shoes so the floor doesn't get damaged. In the 12-storey main building, it's not possible to take the lift to or from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th floors in case it breaks down. As for the toilets, the solution is to leave all the doors and windows wide open at all times, which has the added advantage of affording the curious students even more access to the habits of Westerners than they get at the average English Corner.
As I said, I'm no 'China hand' or expert. I know what I see and I try not to generalise too much or let my opinions shade my judgments. But if the different parts of the economy are managed in a similar way to our college, the Government will have, in fact probably is having huge problems maintaining the appearance of economic momentum.
Do I think they'll be able to continue making the economy grow without risking surplus production, over-investment and economic collapse, and without provoking massive social unrest in the not too distant future?
Bu yi ding.
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There are rumours of a large demonstration in Beijing this Sunday against all things Nipponese. I think that having marched everybody up and down the hill so many times over invading Taiwan, the authorities are now in a difficult position with regards to anti-Japanese feeling. They have to be seen internationally to calm things down, but this leads to anger in China as people perceive that they aren't doing enough. And the internet and text messaging, which seems to be where this movement is being organised, are something that's very difficult for them to monitor, try as they might.
For people who aren't living here it's probably difficult to get a sense of how strongly people feel about Japan. Or at least how they say they feel. Time and time again even the seemingly more clued-up students will volunteer that they 'hate Japanese people'. It's amazing how quickly a short statement of opinion can ruin your opinion of someone. 'Congratulations!' I think, 'now I hate you!'
It also opens up an interesting dilemma. Now I'm aware that in the class I can't make any reference to the three Ts. I think that even if I did, it would be greeted with silence. Actually the students are always keen to talk about Taiwan, but nevertheless I never respond when it's referred to in class because I can't honestly tell them how I or most of the rest of the world see it. A fellow teacher was just yesterday upbraided by the Communist Party stooge in the Foreign Affairs Office for pointing out at an English Corner (this is one reason I steer clear of the things) that Taiwan has in effect been independent for a very long time - something that is, for most of the world, a geographical question. Also yesterday when we were practising correcting false statements I mischievously wrote on the board 'Taipei is the capital of Thailand', which seemed to upset some of them - the idea of Taipei being a capital disturbs them, and as they're taught never to say Taiwan, but Taiwan Province, whenever I make any mention of the place they make a big point of it.
However, Japan is a different matter. They don't seem to consider it to be a controversial topic as far as talking to foreigners is concerned. So am I right in thinking that I can openly tell them that they are wrong and that their government is lying to them about it?
It will be interesting to see, now that the Government is clamping down on all references to the protests in the press, if foreign teachers are somehow made to feel they shouldn't talk about it. In the meantime, I have no compunction about making someone who claims to 'hate Japan' lose face in class!
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The Chinese authorities keep a very close eye on the internet. Their objective is to prevent Chinese people coming into contact with information that shows their Government in a negative light. Just recently they have been trying to delete all references to the sometimes violent anti-Japanese protests. In this context, then, just why is it that an estimated 150,000 foreign teachers, most of whom are in their twenties or thirties and share a relatively informed view of the world, are allowed, mostly unsupervised, into classrooms to tell the new generation about how free and prosperous the outside world is?
In fact, I don't think we're here to present a positive image of the West. Actually I think we're here to present a positive image of China.
Let me explain. The best selling book at the moment in China is a biography of Jiang Zemin, the former leader. Why is it so popular? According to the Washington Post:
The biography, "The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin," by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, argues that the party has brought unprecedented stability, prosperity, global prestige and personal freedom to the Chinese people in the years since Mao Zedong died in 1976.
Who is Robert Lawrence Kuhn? Well, apparently he's a managing director at Smith Barney Citigroup and an unpaid economic adviser to Chinese officials, ie a businessman. The Times also says that he speaks little Chinese and is not a China specialist.
And what about his book?
The book presents some new material about Jiang's life, but most reviews of the English edition have panned it as a fawning work that exaggerates Jiang's impact and seeks to defend him against almost any criticism.
The Chinese edition is even less revealing, with references to the internal political battles that Jiang fought to stay in power and other sensitive material deleted by censors. Kuhn said he was disappointed that portions of his book had been cut and said the work represented his own best effort to write a "personal story as told by Jiang's family, friends and colleagues" that conveys Jiang's "way of thinking" in the context of Chinese history and culture.
Now this is the interesting bit of the article, and I think it says a lot about why we were invited here:
Public reaction in China has been mixed. Some readers have praised the book for breaking a taboo against discussing the personal lives of high officials and for presenting details of Jiang's life that were new to them. Others refused to buy it, dismissing it as propaganda.
"Kuhn is like a fan worshiping a celebrity. There's no distance, no objectivity," a Chinese editor who has read (the) book said on condition of anonymity. "It's strange to us that a Westerner would write something like this."
The editor said the fact that Kuhn is a foreigner is a selling point because many readers believe that any book written about the country's leaders by a Chinese author must be propaganda -- unless it has been banned.
In fact, a prominent Shanghai writer, Ye Yonglie, has alleged that the biography was sanctioned by the party and that officials quashed an early plan for Kuhn and Ye to write it together, perhaps because they wanted a foreigner's name alone on the cover.
Now Chinese people, left to their own devices, might start to become suspicious of what the Government and the press in China tells them about China's up and coming position in the world, given the corruption and mass unemployment they see around them. The Government here desperately wants people to believe that China is just another capitalist country, albeit one with massive growth. And who better to convey this message than foreigners?
Think about it. We are foreigners who live here, apparently comfortably. We are surrounded by McDonalds, KFC, shopping malls, English language media and all the trappings of Western life - remember, of course, that the overwhelming majority of our students have never actually been outside China, and don't know what these things mean in a Western context.
When we talk to our students we talk most of the time about things we have in common - sports, DVDs, families, traffic jams. And contrary to what our students may have heard in the past about what foreigners think of China, we don't seem to have any particular problems with life in China. We never mention Tibet, Taiwan or Tiananmen Square. We never talk about democracy or Human Rights and we never question the rule of the Communist Party. Instead, we talk about the massive changes that have taken place in China - the "unprecedented stability, prosperity, global prestige and personal freedom" - implicity endorsing a crucial point of Communist party ideology, that it is only a matter of time until China achieves parity with the West and can be regarded as just another capitalist country.
The conclusion I draw from all this is that our presence here has very little to do with presenting the outside world to the Chinese - and, as we all know, very little to do with teaching English. It does have a lot to do with normalising China as just another capitalist country with which the West has no major issues.
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