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'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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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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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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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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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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