tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41683900235577089612024-02-19T13:49:03.158+08:00Chinese Law and SocietyI live in China. I work with Chinese law. These are my observations about both.Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-6535333453460599762012-03-08T16:31:00.005+08:002023-01-26T07:57:46.812+08:00Why China's Political Model is Superior..for Whom? Or, Something Polemic this Way Comes<div class="MsoNormal"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnBWCVLeYUS1oRZIGQqw5PShXFrQzJ9HeyhxL6tolvsQg5LoFnqe3BufZSzW6VlQXVgniJozYoCJnnyt3DGhoPmoKN_pgZt7JGr_k8Pz9vmTun8KhcumHJAdf8X8H-X0raNEEsZhk8nH8/s1600/depression-pic-740272.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="330" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnBWCVLeYUS1oRZIGQqw5PShXFrQzJ9HeyhxL6tolvsQg5LoFnqe3BufZSzW6VlQXVgniJozYoCJnnyt3DGhoPmoKN_pgZt7JGr_k8Pz9vmTun8KhcumHJAdf8X8H-X0raNEEsZhk8nH8/s400/depression-pic-740272.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Mr. Eric Li’s recent editorial, “Why China’s Political Model is Superior,” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/opinion/why-chinas-political-model-is-superior.html">link here</a>) deserves a place in the New York Times. His is an important opinion, as it is not only Mr. Li who feels this way: many of those Americans he claims suffer from a “faith-based ideological hubris” in democracy have recently come down with a contagious crisis of confidence In their political system. Implicit in much of the Western coverage of China’s economic rise is an awe (or fear?) that China’s economic successes may reveal a political system that will inexorably prove more efficient than ours, and in this efficiency, superior.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">I, too, agree with Mr. Li that we should get away from trite, absolutist, language and the pitfalls of hubris. The question I would pose to Mr. Li, then, is “Superior for whom? And, superior for what?” These questions are important, for right now, I worry that the most probable answer to those questions is this: superior for venture capitalists and venture capitalism.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">A critical flaw in Mr. Li’s editorial is his conflation of the <i>delivery</i> of public goods with the <i>determination</i> of public goods. Most of his anecdotes contrast the efficiency with which China achieve policy ends (even to the point of “crushing rebellions”) with the apparent paralysis of how Western democracies determine policy (legally regulated recalls and referenda). But the endless referenda in California, gridlock in Congress, or recalls in Wisconsin have less to do with the delivery of public goods than with the determining of how and what we as a people determine what is just and right to deliver. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">China’s delivery of a limited number of public goods over the past 30 years has been breathtaking. It has, as is often recorded, moved hundreds of millions out of poverty and improved their material well-being. But it hasn’t improved it <i>that much</i>. Mr. Li notes with pride that China is now the number two economy in the world, but neglects to mention that per capita GDP is still, at minimum, ninetieth in the world, or that its GDP numbers say nothing of environmental degradation, He does not talk about GINI index number over .5 or the gap between the rich and the poor, the city and the country-side, politically-connected and not; and that theseare not just gaps, but chasms. Many of the poor who have moved out of poverty hang precariously close to it, often times a simple statistical manipulation away…<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: yellow; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Mr. Li has the advantage of profiting from the market, without suffering from its externalities, which have been grave here. Were he writing his editorial from <a href="http://cmp.hku.hk/2012/01/30/18237/">Wukan</a> or <a href="http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/02/wukan-2-0-zhejiang-villagers-protest-land-grabs/">Panhe</a> or <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/16/foxconn-suicide-china-society">Foxconn</a> or with children in rural schools or countless other places in the center and west of this vast, magnificent place (or simply next to those living in the shadows of his office in Shanghai) it would indeed take hubris to state that China’s political system is superior. It has done some good things for its people. It is certainly superior for those who agree with its policy goals, especially those who have profited from them (perhaps us?), and we must assume that Mr. Li is one of those. But is it capable of handling the myriad demands a sophisticated polity places on its government? Is it capable of providing just resolutions to social discord and disagreement?<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">If we can leave aside provocation for a bit, the reality is that we all—East and West—are now firmly anchored to the international economy, and face a crisis in global governance, both domestically and internationally. An unfortunate subtext to this year’s election primaries (or the financial crisis, or the Euro crisis, or the…) is the impotence of any one government to address domestic problems that are now inextricably linked to international markets, something that should have been made clear to all of us during the financial crisis. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">While conventional wisdom was that China avoided many of the most serious repercussions of the financial crisis, the psychological impact of the financial crisis may have been far worse than documented, but in a way few of us may have expected. Far more devastating than any transitory economic losses was the creeping angst that has bloomed as China’s blueprint to prosperity for the past thirty years was tarnished. China had, in many ways, treated Western industrialized history as a how-to guide for development, and one of the next things on the docket was reform of its financial system in the West’s own image. Then came 2008, and a collective disillusionment the likes of which Holden Caulfield could scarcely dream about. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Just like individuals react to psychological trauma in different ways, so too have Chinese responded in different ways to this “loss of innocence” in their belief in a scientific development that modeled itself after Western history and institutions. Some, the reformers, have become dismayed, for what is the hope for China’s own reform if the West itself is so flawed? Some others (perhaps more) have become emboldened, apparently assuming that this “fall” of the West doubtless heralds the ascension of China. Mr. Li’s editorial exhibits many of the features of this mentality. But what is ironic about this type of braggadocio is that it comes at a time that China is least sure about the direction it needs to take, politically and otherwise. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal">Beijing, like Washington, now finds itself teeming with “lobbyists,” with uncounted moneyed interests pressing Zhongnanhai from within, and countless un-moneyed interests without, taking to the streets in as petitioners (and protestors), who bring every manner of grievance to Beijing from all corners of the Middle Kingdom. Superior system or not, China’s administrative and legal systems currently lack institutional capacity (or will) to remedy the ills so many of its citizens suffer. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But what is more obvious is that China’s system also lacks basic institutions for policy debate and determination. Beijng has made laudable attempts to seek public input: expanding the size of the “selectorate” that consults on legislative drafting and offering draft laws up for public comment with increasing regularity, but there is still little transparency about whose opinion matters and why—an exceedingly important issue to the growing numbers of Chinese citizens who realize that interest groups haunt their corridors of power just as much as they do America’s. Mr. Li believes the US government is paralyzed by an overrepresented, overwrought, and irrational population. His country is not so different: it’s facing domestic paralysis from an underrepresented, overwrought, and irascible population. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">I do not believe Mr. Li’s portrait of American democracy is accurate or complete. Our system of governance (democracy and its complement, rule of law) is far more flexible and sophisticated than he lets on, and has provided means for efficient, effective administration in times of crisis. More impressively, for many centuries, it has prevented any of those crises from devolving into tyranny, a track record few countries can match. <o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">The simple answer to Mr. Li’s op-ed is that China is in far too early a stage of development, with far too many challenges yet to face, to proclaim its system superior in any meaningful sense. The flip answer is to ask him how many “naked officials” agree with him<a href="file:///C:/Users/Seth/Documents/China's%20Political%20Model%20is%20Superior%20For%20Whom,%20Seth%20Gurgel.docx#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a>. The sensible answer is to call for less rhetoric, less provocation, and more engagement. These issues are too critical to dismiss through intellectual saber rattling. <o:p></o:p></div><div><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><div class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///C:/Users/Seth/Documents/China's%20Political%20Model%20is%20Superior%20For%20Whom,%20Seth%20Gurgel.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">[1]</span></span></span></a> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_official]<o:p></o:p></div></div></div><br />
<div><div id="ftn1"></div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-87733659421438291642011-07-16T22:53:00.011+08:002011-07-22T09:12:34.653+08:00Why Tiger Moms are Great, but Not Great for Democracy<h2 align="center"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small; font-weight: normal;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFSK31zVjg6UeCM2_OCZ4CqjhyUGmHOjqB2_HqqU0MHe12mB-i3TKFDXKJS8EiZ0y0cstfEG5CL4Xh8HB2QrA7jh1ieFLSd06fEl_zodgI4pRtIFUEAL4-mza23SmG4PmoiU6YS8v0-xc/s1600/Blake_The_School_Boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFSK31zVjg6UeCM2_OCZ4CqjhyUGmHOjqB2_HqqU0MHe12mB-i3TKFDXKJS8EiZ0y0cstfEG5CL4Xh8HB2QrA7jh1ieFLSd06fEl_zodgI4pRtIFUEAL4-mza23SmG4PmoiU6YS8v0-xc/s640/Blake_The_School_Boy.jpg" width="406" /></a></span></h2><div><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Tiger, tiger, burning bright</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>In the forests of the night, </i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>What immortal hand or eye</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>-William Blake</i></div><br />
I suppose this post seems a bit dated, as the “Tiger Mom” meme has already put its girdle around the earth, planting itself safely and securely into the subconsciousness of suburban moms throughout the developed world. And what a meme it was, a strand of RNA perfectly fashioned to colonize the increasingly timorous Western DNA in a way that China's economic and military miracles could never achieve. It spoke directly to our most important demographic—our exhausted soccer moms: “While Chinese and American moms are both breaking their backs raising their kids, <i>the Chinese</i> are raising their children better than you are, and that is why we're seeing this tectonic shift of wealth, power, and influence to the East.” <br />
<br />
I suppose I didn't write anything about the Tiger Meme when it first hit the news in part because I thought it would do some good. I haven't yet figured out what type of Shaolin Animal School parenting tactics my mother used on me, but it certainly wasn't not of the tiger-variety, and so I may suffer from a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome. More than that, after spending two years teaching English to American kids whose mothers were decidedly not Tiger Moms, I've welcomed a bit of fear if it meant a few more of my students would take Shakespeare to heart, or Blake, as this post hopes you have. <br />
<br />
But my biggest “I suppose I didn't write” was probably <i>the way </i>we defended our mothers: “Sure Chinese kids beat the pants off our kids in math and science (while their moms are beating the pants off of them), but our kids are more <i>creative</i>, <i>free-thinking</i>, and [hopefully] <i>happy</i>.” Most spent their time trying to convince themselves that our system will win this battle just like we won the Cold War. The responses were defensive and cliché (often displaying a woefully inadequate understanding of Chinese culture), belying the argument that “we” are better, more cosmopolitan, freer thinkers. Worst of all, they seemed to set up a dangerous proposition: we will know which child-rearing style is right by watching whose economic and political power proves ascendant. <br />
<div><br />
</div><div>And yet, they served their purpose: the fear was met and neutralized, if not eliminated. And so the latest case of our Orientangst came and went, or rather, eased uneasily back below the surface of our subconsciousness like the specter of the U-Boat after the Great War – we don't how to deal with them, but at least we won't have to worry about them for another twenty years.<br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div><br />
Unfortunately for me (and now you, dear reader), it's been nary a year and I'm already thinking about it again, forced to face East-West educational difference by virtue of the fact that I'm friends with lots of (more or less) tiger-ish Chinese Moms and Dads, but mostly because of a poem by William Blake that ended up in my inbox.</div><div><br />
First, the poem. I'm on Garrison Keillor's <i>Writer's Almanac</i> mailing list, which means I get a poem (and more) a day sent to my inbox. It's a sort of welcomed spam. Today I received Blake's “The Schoolboy.” Part of Blake's <i>Songs of Innocence and Experience</i>, it is a short, good read. For fun, as you're reading, please try to guess if it was a <i>Song of Innocence</i> or a<i> Song of Experience</i>. There's no time here to talk too much about what those terms mean, but it's probably fair to say that they deal with questions of good/evil, romanticism/rationalism, idealism/realism and the proper balance of such things one is to keep in his or her own life.</div><div><br />
<br />
The Schoolboy <br />
<br />
by William Blake <br />
<br />
<br />
I love to rise in a summer morn,<br />
When the birds sing on every tree;<br />
The distant huntsman winds his horn,<br />
And the skylark sings with me:<br />
Oh, what sweet company!<br />
<br />
But to go to school in a summer morn, —<br />
O it drives all joy away;<br />
Under a cruel eye outworn,<br />
The little ones spend the day<br />
In sighing and dismay.<br />
<br />
Ah then at times I drooping sit,<br />
And spend many an anxious hour;<br />
Nor in my book can I take delight,<br />
Nor sit in learning's bower,<br />
Worn through with the dreary shower.<br />
<br />
How can the bird that is born for joy<br />
Sit in a cage and sing?<br />
How can a child, when fears annoy,<br />
But droop his tender wing,<br />
And forget his youthful spring?<br />
<br />
O father and mother, if buds are nipped,<br />
And blossoms blown away;<br />
And if the tender plants are stripped<br />
Of their joy in the springing day,<br />
By sorrow and care's dismay, —<br />
<br />
How shall the summer arise in joy,<br />
Or the summer fruits appear?<br />
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,<br />
Or bless the mellowing year,<br />
When the blasts of winter appear?<br />
<br />
<br />
So, which one is it, <i>Innocence </i>or <i>Experience</i>? Well, it's both, so the good/bad news is that either you can't get the question wrong (saith the “American” mom) or you can't get the question right (quoth the <i>better</i> mom). “The Schoolboy” was one of the few poems Blake first published as <i>Innocence</i> and later changed to <i>Experience</i>, and the jury's still out on what that move meant. What it means for us, though, is that if you thought Blake was 100% on “our” side in the debate about what to do with our children, you've got another think coming. In the meantime, I'll tell you what thoughts came to mind when I read the poem -- hopefully it will help shed some light on the debate.</div><div><br />
</div><div><br />
<i>Thoughts from Stanza Two </i><br />
<br />
“But to go to school in a summer morn, —<br />
O it drives all joy away;<br />
Under a cruel eye outworn,<br />
The little ones spend the day<br />
In sighing and dismay.”<br />
<br />
<ul><li><i>The Crying Hour. </i>In homage to the “Twilight Bark” of 101 Dalmatians, last year in my apartment complex, I coined the phrase the “Crying Hour.” After supper, if one paid attention to the noises that rose above the din of everyday street life, one would invariably hear at least one argument between a parent and an unlucky child—no doubt over homework. This drama was played out with eerie regularity, and contained no shortage of spanking, scolding, and crying. If they weren't sighing and in dismay, I certainly was. </li>
<li><i>Loads of Homework.</i> The children of my Chinese friends have four to six hours of homework a day, starting from first grade. Most of this is spent memorizing and re-writing Chinese characters. The number of Chinese kids who become near-sighted during this time far outpaces their Western peers (something I didn't believe until I saw the study). Reading for fun? It's hard to find among the post-preschool-aged kid.</li>
<li><i>Teachers telling parents to spank their kids.</i> A friend of mine had her daughter's teacher call her and tell her, “The reason your [third grade] kid's grades are falling is because you're the only parent who doesn't spank her kid...and, oh yeah, it's also probably because you're a single parent.” To be fair, teachers are under incredible stress here as well. OK, everyone's under a lot of stress, but perhaps more importantly, the education system is "outworn" -- society's undergone massive changes, but the system still expects children who grow up in a world of computer games, cartoons, and relative prosperity to behave like their parents who had none of that.</li>
<li><i>Childhood isn't just difficult, it's faced alone.</i> I was watching “To Kill a Mockingbird” with a friend. Early in the movie, Dill sleeps over at Jem and Scout's house. My friend turned to me and asked “What is Dill doing there? Why doesn't he go home?” It was then that I discovered that there's no such thing as a sleepover in Shanghai. In fact, this friend's daughter had about two hours of playtime each week –on Sunday afternoon—and she spent almost all of it alone, rollerblading back and forth within the complex's small Japanese garden. Amy Chua may not have allowed her kids to sleepover at kids houses, but Chinese parents don't know what a sleepover is. </li>
</ul><br />
<i>Thoughts on Stanza Three </i><br />
<br />
"Ah then at times I drooping sit,<br />
And spend many an anxious hour;<br />
Nor in my book can I take delight,<br />
Nor sit in learning's bower,<br />
Worn through with the dreary shower."<br />
<br />
<ul><li><i>What happens between pre-school and middle school?</i> My first year in China I got roped in to teaching a pre-school English class. It destroyed any notion I may have had that Chinese kids were just innately less curious, outgoing, or active than their Western brethren. They were loud, funny, and playful – like any other group of 3-5 year-olds. But something happens to kids when they enter first grade, and its exactly what Blake says, they become both anxious and "drooping" -- over time, the stress and anxiety of it all leaves many simply ambivalent towards learning. </li>
<li><i>Parental Anxiety. </i>Pre-school director to friend of mine after he failed to enroll his kid in the district's top pre-school: “You want your kids to go to a key university? You're already too late -- all the good pre-school spots have already been filled.” In each district of Shanghai, there are one, maybe two good “key” middle schools, and then usually one “key” high school. Parents are told from first-grade on that if their child isn't in the top 25% of his/her elementary school class (and therefore can't make it into a decent middle school), they might as well give up on making it into a decent college. Everybody (parents, teachers, and kids) believes this, and in my experience, the only people who are brave enough to tell the system to kiss off are those rich enough to send their children abroad. </li>
<li><i>No parents can “wear through with the dreary shower” better than Chinese parents.</i> I've survived countless family dinner tables here in which the entire meal was filled with three generations of Chinese women <i>jiang daoli</i> ("speaking reason") to their children. I've also become quite familiar with the passive, obsequious glaze that comes over the eyes of these kids. Where do Chinese pre-school children lose their curiosity? Here, at the dinner-table. Here their rough edges are made smooth, the shower is indeed dreary. In fact, the more time I spend here, the more I realize that “childhood” for many Chinese kids is (and always has been?) an 20-year-long lecture. While it seems to be the dinner table where the stereotypical Asian passivity is created, I've also come to respect this obsequious glaze: it's the only type of rebellion the system permits – you're not going to be able to fight the authority, so you might as well tune everything out. You rebel by not putting yourself into your work, but you do that when no one is looking. Some kids are even able to create a private space for "joy" in their lives behind that facade, when no one is looking. Childhood <i>Innocence</i> is far more formidable than we give it credit for, and doesn't leave without a fight, but it's not easy to retain it over here. </li>
</ul><div><br />
</div><i>Thoughts on Stanza Four </i><br />
<br />
"How can the bird that is born for joy<br />
Sit in a cage and sing?<br />
How can a child, when fears annoy,<br />
But droop his tender wing,<br />
And forget his youthful spring?"<br />
<br />
<ul><li><i>It's not about the “right” education for economic success</i>. I think Blake's rhetoric is probably the best, truest expression of an anti-Tiger-mom sentiment. It's a far better counter than most of the responses I've seen in the months since the Tiger Mom struck: insecure, half-hearted attempts to assuage our fear of being out-parented in a realpolitik sense, “Don't worry, our kids are going to invent stuff, and your kids are going to make it.” Rather, Blake (as a Romantic) is tapping into something deeper, that there's something precious about childhood and innocence in itself, regardless of the economic or strategic side effects. We are born for joy. But not just any joy. I'd like to suggest that just as Jefferson wanted the "happiness" in "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to read "public happiness," Blake here is talking about a more substantial type of joy, one that is just as concerned with education as its Confucian counterpart. </li>
<li><i>Not a difference in kind, but of degree.</i> One thing that was covered—albeit with less emphasis—in the US press was the fact that many Chinese parents agree with this (and Blake, and "us"). The “Tiger Mom” wasn't representing all Chinese mothers in China as much as a certain type of mother who believes both in its necessity and its rectitude. Many Chinese mothers, rightly or wrongly, believe that their system stifles creativity and steals childhood away from their children -- they're as insecure about the ascendancy of our system as we are of theirs. Many of them hate “the crying hour” as much as their children do. Some are even prone to agree with Blake on normative terms, childhood “should” be unfettered and uncaged, although this may not be a “traditional Chinese belief.” In fact, I believe these are the parents we need to think about recruiting to our schools -- if our schools become increasingly indistinguishable from Chinese schools in their emphasis on math and science and little else, what is going to be the draw of our system: that we're better at beating the joy out of our kids? I don't feel like fighting for that crown.</li>
<li>But once you've talked long enough, once the tea in the teapot has lost most of its flavor, once you've gone over the differences in the systems and possible avenues for reform, most Chinese parents, even those most inclined to preserving <i>Innocence</i>, will shake their heads and spit out <i>mei banfa</i> ("there's no way out”), their capitulation to <i>Experience, </i>and perhaps also to the the pragmatism that has stood China in good stead throughout its history. I believe that were Blake to have been Chinese, his <i>Songs of Experience</i> would have been riddled with <i>mei banfas</i>. But then again, if Blake were Chinese, there's a good chance the <i>Songs of Innocence</i> may have been expurgated long ago by some grandmother's well-meaning attempt to <i>jiang daoli.</i></li>
</ul><br />
</div><div><i>Tiger Moms and Democracy</i><br />
<br />
"O father and mother, if buds are nipped,<br />
And blossoms blown away;<br />
And if the tender plants are stripped<br />
Of their joy in the springing day,<br />
By sorrow and care's dismay, —<br />
<br />
How shall the summer arise in joy,<br />
Or the summer fruits appear?<br />
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,<br />
Or bless the mellowing year,<br />
When the blasts of winter appear?"<br />
<br />
"I didn't care about the rights of criminals the way others did...I also wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning. I just wanted to write down everything the professor said and memorize it." <br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">--Amy Chua, “The Tiger Mom,” on her time at Harvard Law School </div><br />
Here Amy Chua votes for <i>Experience</i> (worrying about one's own class rank) over <em>Innocence </em>(worrying about someone else's fate in the criminal justice system). In my mind, this was the most under-reported Tiger Mom quote, and I worry that the lack of emphasis on this critical phrase exposes how far we have strayed from our democratic ideals. Please excuse this hopelessly simplistic postulate: Autocracy requires just a few people to weigh questions of right and wrong and a whole tribe of people to carry out whatever that decision may be; Democracy requires top to bottom participation (and therefore contemplation) – if that doesn't happen, the system is set up to be hijacked by the wealthy and powerful. If an autocracy is led by leaders worth their salt (and that's the real trick) they are most likely going to be more efficient than a democracy -- something Plato considered "the best of the worst forms of government." But efficiency and economic gain don't translate to Blake's "joy," or a pursuit of justice, which is what Aristotle hoped we would all do, <i>together</i>, in a democracy. It scares me that a) a student who “doesn't care about the rights of criminals...[and] wasn't naturally skeptical and questioning” made it into Harvard Law School, and b) that she's now teaching at Yale Law School. No doubt she had great grades and test scores, but the whole point of law in a democratic state is to concern yourself and your knowledge with questions of justice, to be skeptical and question the status quo. <br />
<br />
Ugh, some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been committed by very smart people who weren't concerned with those things. As a parenting method that privileges Experience over Innocence, Amy Chua's philosophy of education isn't right for the United States -- our students need to learn how to participate in civil society, how to interact in public space, and how to determine moral questions when in that space. This doesn't (and can't) start after law school, and requires development of the self in ways that an <i>Experience</i>-heavy education can't provide: our system requires childhood joy to fuel the next wave of political ideals. Chua's mentality is far better suited for the Ming and Qing Dynasty bureaucratic exams than it is for Harvard law School; hers is the logic of Zhou En Lai not that of Thomas More.</div><div><br />
And that's fine, if you want a country led by Zhou En Lais rather than Thomas Mores. It's why I'm so frustrated with our responses to Amy Chua in particular, and to reports of the Chinese economic and political rise in general. Please accept this: as long as it can retain average to above-average leadership, China's economy is going to continue to grow, it should surpass the US in overall GDP and perhaps even in per capita GDP. The Chinese education system has worked for many thousands of years, it will continue to do so. Chinese Tiger Moms will produce children capable supporting such a state.<br />
<br />
I welcome it. First of all, one-fifth of the world's population deserves a chance to climb out out of poverty. But more importantly, our system works too (or, at least, could work if we stopped measuring educational progress simply in terms of jobs created or tests passed). Let's stop competing on base economic indicators, and start expecting more from our students: self-determination, civic participation, joy, <i>Innocence. </i>If we can finally stop obsessing with being “number one” it will allow us to start thinking about what really matters: building a more perfect, democratic union. The fatal flaw in the “Tiger Mother” mentality isn't economic, psychological or realpolitik – it's simply that it's not a democratic way to raise a child. That's fine for some places but shouldn't be fine for us. If the kids of Tiger Moms eventually fill the corridors of power, it won't be because it's a superior way to raise a child, but because we've given up on the idea that a knowledge of Blake's "joy" is essential to building a healthy, functioning democracy.</div><div><br />
</div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-25334922112751393942011-05-01T21:14:00.010+08:002011-07-15T02:13:34.876+08:00Oceans and Mulberry Groves: A Hebei Middle School Girl's Tips for Dealing with Tragedy and Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-3_HOhdr6ro4kM5zkck7jDJ5ArNBdylEiWYWxFz9CmDH_93p499ZJFTYv7t69DRO5kfAsjHNptzTpUauXse2pDlVQ1KtbCP6nvxWXJ1EZ7GmQJK8QeV8JVbvXGegZ0RdUoJyLdi_edqM/s1600/Mulberry+Grove.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-3_HOhdr6ro4kM5zkck7jDJ5ArNBdylEiWYWxFz9CmDH_93p499ZJFTYv7t69DRO5kfAsjHNptzTpUauXse2pDlVQ1KtbCP6nvxWXJ1EZ7GmQJK8QeV8JVbvXGegZ0RdUoJyLdi_edqM/s400/Mulberry+Grove.gif" width="400" /></a></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=4168390023557708961&postID=2533492211275139394" name="114"></a> <span style="color: black;">“</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">We are time's subjects, and time bids be gone.”</span></span></span></span></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i>Henry IV Part Two</i></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">If you've been paying anything more than scant attention to China the past six months, you're probably aware that China's had a full plate of metaphorical problems of late (accompanied by metaphorical solutions to those problems): the proverbial dams bursting and the Han Brinker-type plugging of dykes; a pre-emptive cutting of (jasmine?) trees to save poorly defined forests; and plenty of (international and domestic) chickens coming home to roost. Of course, the particular resonance of any and all of the above idioms will depend on at least two factors: one, your own political ideology and, two, your understanding of what's actually happening “in China,” something I'd like to suggest that no one, Chinese or non-, can ever wholly grasp. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course, that's debatable, and I'm happy to debate it with anyone. Here's some provocative opening generalizations. </div><ol><li><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Size Problems. China's simply too big and too complex.</div></li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Media Problems. The media is either incapable of, or prevented from, publishing reports of consequence. Most reports of consequence aren't published, but supplied on a need-to-know basis. </div></li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Bureaucracy Problems. People of need-to-know status are almost completely surrounded by yes-men and women who obfuscate information out of self-interest and/or a desire to please. People below the need-to-know-folks at the provincial, county, and village levels have no interest in letting anyone know what's actually happening on the ground. </div></li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Sociological Problems. China's empirical tradition is not strong, and is complicated by the fact that most political/economic elites have little interest in real interaction with the vast majority of Chinese who dress/eat/live worse than they do. In short, well-entrenched stereotypes and prejudices regarding different regions and classes hinder true understanding. </div></li>
<li><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Interest Problems. And the kicker, most people just don't have time, energy or interest enough to care. </div></li>
</ol><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course, none of these stops anyone, including the author, from putting forward what may be wildly irresponsible claims, most centered on what “the left behind” population in China wants or needs. We're elitist populists, speaking for a population few of us know. This is dumb. Most of the time, these opinions are based on careful reading of the media reports <i>we</i> deem to be the truth; “inside information” from people “in the know” who really aren't (again, also, <i>our </i>friends); and regional and class biases that make my Wisconsinite distaste for most (all?) things Illinois seem quite agapic.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The other “of course” here is the fact that one's opinions can always be less dumb, and it is with this hope that many of us make our own quixotic journeys west—a west packed with complicated assemblages of humanity and developmental problems, but also rife with portent, as the “west” now appears to be the hanging chad in the prolonged political referendum we call New China. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>My Sancho Panza</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Any quixotic journey requires a Sancho Panza, and I found mine in an unlikely place, Shangyi County's Third Middle School. Sancho in this epic is a teenage girl, Zhou Xiaomin. Her home, Shangyi (“Upholding Righteousness”) County, is in Hebei province, right on the border of Inner Mongolia. It is truly more north than west, but is certainly “west” in the sense that it has not profited much from China's boom. Xiaomin is a scholarship recipient in the West China Story program, a program that represents a great bit of Taiwanese altruism (link <a href="http://www.westchinastory.com/module/a0012/index.php?intModulePK=A0012&tagorder=0&isinner=0">here</a>). WCS provides scholarships to ensure that kids in poor regions have access to education. The scholarship doesn't come free though: scholarship recipients have to create a website/blog and post ten essays each year.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In the interest of my own personal “dumbing up,” I've been considering doing a week or so teaching stint in one of West China Story's schools, and went to their website to scope out my potential students. I expected to be charmed, or perhaps patronizingly inspired. I didn't expect to be moved, but that Little Zhou is quite a writer. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Him</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Zhou's story is entitled “Him.” Here's an abridged version. If you read Chinese, I'd suggest heading <a href="http://www.westchinastory.com/module/a0050/showcontent.php?intGetProjectNo=1&intModulePK=A0050&isOther=0&strSubmiter=hb000002_20090021&inttopicid=66842#">here.</a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It's a first-person narrator, we'll assume it's Zhou Xiaomin. She sees an older boy who's just come back home from time spent away doing migrant labor. He had been the bad kid in school, which in China means he “didn't love studying.” Like millions of teenagers around the country, he'd been forced to leave home to earn money for the family. He's come back “wearing fashionable clothes,” which, based on experience, I can only assume means it has some type of metallic flair attached to it, probably (preferably?) sequins. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He's standing in front of his house, but all the doors and windows have been boarded up. This is obviously a surprise to him, because he asks Little Zhou about it. She tells him, but doesn't tell us. All we know is that it's bad. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He replies, “<i>Quatsch</i>! What was I doing coming home? What was I doing?!” Again, we don't know what this means either and are left to guess. Did he not want to face these things? Does he feel guilt for coming home when he should still be out working?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Zhou tells him to store his bag at her house, and they'll then set off together to find his mother. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
He doesn't talk much on the way. They hit a bunch of dead ends. They stop at a kiosk. He buys some smokes and “swallows clouds and spits out fog just like one would opium.” </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">They continue on. He “inadvertently” brings up his little brother, asking if he's still in school. He is, and seems to be in Zhou's school. The big brother “breathes out a satisfied breath,” then turns around and heads back to that same kiosk, buying some treats for his little brother. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">[Millions of older brothers and sisters give up their own education for their younger siblings.]</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It gets dark. After a number of wrong turns, they finally find the house where his mother and brother are staying. He calls out his brother's name in the darkness, </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“'Zhigao!” he called, with his rich, strong voice reverberating through the night sky, but it was also a voice echoing “oceans and mulberries.” [More on this later.]</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“Who is it?”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“It's me. I've...I've come home.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">His younger brother comes running. They hug and make small talk for a bit. Zhigao stops for a second, then shrieks, “Older brother, what happened to your finger?”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">It wasn't until then that the author noticed that half of his middle finger is missing, leaving a stump in its place. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“No worries. It got rolled over by a machine while I was working. At the time I thought it had just cut the skin, I never thought...” He smiles, and doesn't say anymore. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The author leaves and writes, wistfully, “As I walked on the road home, a host of thoughts floated in the air towards a distant place.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">---------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There's plenty to talk about here, and I hope you can see why I would be attracted to this story. It is a first-hand account of new China as perceived by not-yet-new China. For many children in towns like Zhou's, outside of the TV, older brothers heading out of town and coming back home are their only connection to life outside their village. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But more than that, I loved reading about <i>a person </i><span style="font-style: normal;">again. This</span> past year I've been living in a world of reports and statistics about Chinese labor, about workplace accidents and strikes. But labor and its concomitant unrest have become so abstracted here, by all parties involved, it's as if we've boiled out all the humanity from the problem until “labor” becomes some malleable collection of facts, which, once properly molded and galvanized, can be used to bludgeon opponents both foreign and domestic. (This isn't just some random thought. Statistics can only do so much and normally only speak to a small segment of the population. It's the stories and videos, the humanity, behind so much of the unrest that is eerily absent from most news.)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But to be honest, it's Zhou Weimin herself that really captivated me. She has an incredible consciousness, and proves it by what facts she reveals and when. She says much between the lines. I was most intrigued by the phrase she used to describe the older brother's voice when he called out towards his family's new temporary housing:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“'Zhigao!'” he called, with his rich, strong voice reverberating through the night sky, but it was also a voice echoing <i>oceans and mulberries</i>.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I had no idea what that meant, so I looked it up. It turns out that “oceans and mulberries” was a two-character shortened form of a four-character phrase “blue oceans and mulberry groves.” Big help. In either two- or four-character form, it's an ancient phrase that means “time brings great changes.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Chinese is loaded with ancient idioms like this, called <i>chengyu. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">M</span>any of them are passages from great works of art and literature that have been subsumed into the common language, much like the bevy of Shakespeareanisms we have in English, but on a far larger scale. They are the bane of many a Chinese student's existence. (I've written about their banefulness <a href="http://www.chineselawandsociety.com/2008/10/concrete-milk-space.html">here</a>.) However, at least in my experience, one can normally at least <i>gues</i><i>s </i><span style="font-style: normal;">at the meaning of most </span><i>chengyus. “Oceans and mulberries”</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> was one that allowed no opportunity for educated guessing. I had to look it up, humming the tune of “Incense and Peppermints” as I did.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>How Oceans and Mulberries Became “Time Brings Great Changes”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Turns out that once upon a time, two immortals, Wang Yuan and Ma Gu, set a dinner date for 500 years into the future. When the day arrived, Wang Yuan arrived at the predetermined location first, but even though he spent half the day looking for Ma Gu, he couldn't find her, and no one else, mere mortals, knew anything about her whereabouts. He sent some Hermes-types out to locate her. They returned with a message: Ma Gu had been waylaid on Penglai Island (the Chinese Mt. Olympus), and would be with Wang Yuan in half a moment. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Ma Gu arrived with a flourish, with all the trappings you'd expect of an immortal Chinese woman. She was stunning, and didn't look a shade over nineteen. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">As they were eating, Ma Gu commented to Wang Yuan, as if talking about the weather, “From the time I was born, I've already seen the East Sea retreat and turn into mulberry groves three times. This last time at Penglai Island, I noticed that the sea is already quite shallow, perhaps only half its normal depth. Could it be that it's going to turn into mulberry groves a fourth time?”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Wang Yuan sighed, “You're right. All the sages are saying that the waters are retreating. Before long, it's all going to be dust.” </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">After dinner, the two called their carriages, and ascended back up to the heavens. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">---------------------------------------------------------------- </div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Now I don't know what Zhao Weimin thinks of when she speaks of mulberries. I like to believe she is yet in that childhood reverie that requires she take the figurative in a literal sense, that she first pictures water and mulberry trees, perhaps teeming with silkworms, then she remembers Wang Yuan and Ma Gu's immortalized conversation, all before her mind clicks on “time brings great changes.” I don't know. I have no doubt that she, like most of us, will slowly start speaking words without reflecting on their origins. </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I, on the other hand, was suffering from idiom envy. As soon as I read the story of oceans and mulberries, I started retroactively inserting it into my past. </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I thought of Ephesus. The ancient city still stands, partially because the sea retreated and the people moved along with it, more tied to the sea than the city. I remember standing at the windy top of the amphitheater with my brother, the highest point of the old city, and I still couldn't see the Aegean that had long ago ceded ground, to the ground. I guess it would have been “oceans and olives groves” to the Greeks, at least until Justinian stole silkworms and mulberries from the Middle Kingdom. </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I thought of my grandfather's pale blue eyes that had certainly seen oceans and mulberries. </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;">I thought of the Korth Farm, or what used to be the Korth Farm. It had stood across the lake from my hometown but was now no more, the land reclaimed by the wild grasses that pre-date any of us. I thought of the pyramids that lie under the lake (seriously, we were almost on </span><i>Unsolved Mysteries</i>), perhaps built by someone with sense enough to build on what was once dry land but is no longer. And then there are the Indian mounds down Country Trunk B that contain all that's left of the Aztalans, the likely builders of said submerged pyramids. They were gone before any Europeans even arrived, their civilization reclaimed in means somewhat different than the Korth Farm, but reclaimed nonetheless. <br />
<br />
In a sense, the beauty of oceans and mulberries isn't in the objects, but in the perspective. Oceans won't move much in our lifetime, but they have in the life of this saying. And it is through <i>chengyu</i> like this that Zhou Xiaomin can sound far older than her years. That's good, because she's having to deal with experiences few of us had to deal with in middle school. </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">There are seismic changes occurring here, in Shanghai as well as in Shangyi. There are few who are qualified to speak with authority on the full nature and breadth of those changes. But it certainly is a time when older brothers go out and come back with oceans and mulberries in their voices. For all that we don't know, this isn't lost on anyone, perhaps least of all Little Zhou. </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-36474368478096256472011-02-12T09:16:00.010+08:002011-02-12T10:08:22.488+08:00What Egypt Means for China: Just More Boring Scientific Proof<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgSWj9o-t_KPBGzHfMDRUQ1RozMEd_KWNQwqIXWOVPEX369VEfjfyL42bkPpwGLNavvi40UBgUBtAbLGKXnmcWXA-B3kYs91jU0wi8OtP0sn5zEIESCIy_kraOYr5xBWT6qVbn32JCBc/s1600/EgyptianChinese2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQgSWj9o-t_KPBGzHfMDRUQ1RozMEd_KWNQwqIXWOVPEX369VEfjfyL42bkPpwGLNavvi40UBgUBtAbLGKXnmcWXA-B3kYs91jU0wi8OtP0sn5zEIESCIy_kraOYr5xBWT6qVbn32JCBc/s400/EgyptianChinese2.jpg" width="265" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;">(Photo from <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/02/chinese-posters-in-egypt.html">Evan Osnos</a>)</span></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 20px;"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 20px;">I'm sitting in my apartment, inspired by what's just happened in Egypt, and wondering if the millions of Chinese living around me feel the same.</span><br />
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;">In one of my <a href="http://www.chineselawandsociety.com/2010/10/your-old-men-will-dream-dreams-wen-jia.html">last posts</a> (quite a while ago, I know), I asked: </span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;">“What is still unresolved [in China]? [I]t's the question of whether or not the concept of “scientific development” extends to political reform, rule of law, and universal values.</span> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Besides the overabundance of Greek-inspired architecture in China, another thing one notices if one spends a lot of time here is the (surprising?) belief, held by more people than you would think, that democratic progress is inexorable. In many ways it makes sense. The story of post-Renaissance Europe is a messy, violent, bloody period, but progress in science, culture, art and economics were intricately tied to political reform. Enlightenment-era romantics certainly believed this was the case. More than that, China's neighbors -- South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan -- are all excellent examples of how well democracy took in Confucianist countries when it was more or less imposed upon them (by foreign and domestic agents). Perhaps their confidence that democracy is just another offshoot of their economic and social progress of the past thirty years is not too far-fetched.”</span></span></span></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"></span><br />
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</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Most of the posts I've read these past few weeks about “what Egypt means for China” have either used "Egypt" as a symbol with which to bludgeon the Chinese government or have run China through an “Egypt analysis,” evaluating the likelihood of the same type of revolution happening here. There are so many analyses, in fact, that I won't bother you with another one. Personally, I think that there are few people in the world with enough information about China's overall political and social health to make either judgment. </span></span></span></span> </div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I do think it's fair to say this: Egypt has become yet one more empirical example that progress, so-called, entails democratization. For a country and people that have become the most avid empiricists of all things “modern,” in that sense, Egypt is less an inspiration than a proof. The progress of democracy in China in some ways depends on it remaining a matter of course, as fashionable as Coach bags and subways (every city in the US has a subway, right?), and as certain as gravity. </span></span></span></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></span></span></span></div><div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 0.21in; margin-bottom: 0in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">But this whole democracy-in-the-Middle-East thing has to work now, because, make no mistake about it, China will be watching. Keep it up Egypt, we'll send you some of our presidential candidates if you'd like. Really. </span></span></span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-5161935741872048212010-10-24T17:34:00.006+08:002011-11-16T17:31:14.805+08:00Chinese Political Reform: A Question of Hu, Wen and How<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Last week, I argued at considerable <a href="http://www.chineselawandsociety.com/2010/10/your-old-men-will-dream-dreams-wen-jia.html">length</a> (sorry) about my belief that China's fundamental underpinnings have not really changed that much, but rather, that it has adopted a Confucianist type of reverence for the “old white men” of Western science and economics. Reading the Western experience as a road map, China's been able to develop rapidly, in part <i>because</i> the majority of its population has not adopted the pesky democratic habit of publicly questioning the wisdom of each particular action. I believe this makes sense, it's much harder to blaze a trail than to follow it, and requires very different institutional capacities -- China's long tradition just happens to be one of the best at following the precepts of its venerated classes.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The problem for China, though, is <i>just how far</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to go on this second journey West? <a href="http://www.chineselawandsociety.com/2010/10/your-old-men-will-dream-dreams-wen-jia.html">Wen Jiabao and a group of party liberals</a> have recently made their case for universal values, made manifest in political reform and increases in the rights of speech and the press. These leaders seem to hold to the notion, (surprisingly?) prevalent in China, that democracy is inevitable -- a striking imbibing of 19th century Europe's belief in the inevitability of “progress." The star of last week's blog, Mao Yushi, has more to say about the necessity of political reform, and does so again in a forthright, hilarious way here: “nobody trusts the government.” </span> </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">So, one group of China's patriarchs has spoken, but many have been wondering the following: where's Hu Jintao in all of this? I think to many of us in the West -- perhaps because we were reared on bianary conceptions of good and evil in popular movies and literature -- assume that for Wen's “Luke Skywalker” there must be a “Darth Vader,” and Hu seems the most likely choice (or rather, the default choice, because really, how many other members of the Politburo can you name?). Of course, Darth Vader wasn't a simple character by any means, and neither is Hu.<br />
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</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">First of all, following last week's Confucian logic, it is quite rare that one speaks out without the approval of one's superior. How likely is it, really, that Wen would speak out so regularly about the need for political reform without having consulted Hu, who is, after all, his “political father.” Also per last week, I'll let someone older, more Chinese, and far more in the know than me corroborate this, a former aide to Zhao Ziyang, <a href="http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/10/14/8085/">Du Daozheng</a>:</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-left: 0.52in; margin-right: 0.41in;">A: On several occasions Wen Jiabao has openly spoken on the issue of political reform, and these I’m afraid were not incidental. In my view, he recognizes on the one hand the current predicament facing reforms in China, and on the other hand he has suggested that this is not [merely] his personal view. I personally believe that Hu Jintao supports Wen Jiabao. On a number of important questions this year, [Hu] has loosened his hand and let the Premier [take the lead]. Zhao Ziyang (<span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span lang="zh-CN">赵紫阳)</span></span>once said to me, “Wen Jiabao is a good person, and Hu Jintao is a sensible person.” I think this assessment is right on. I think Wen Jiabao should be given more support, creating the conditions enabling him to make use of his abilities. This would benefit the country and benefit the people. Protecting Wen Jiabao is about more than protecting an individual – it means protecting the claim to political reform, and protecting the forces [that might promote] political reform.</div><div style="margin-left: 0.52in; margin-right: 0.41in;">Q: Still, many people have noticed that contrary to Wen Jiabao’s speeches, Hu Jintao made little mention of political reform in his speech during celebrations [of Shenzhen's anniversary], so perhaps these two have different views on this issue.</div><div style="margin-left: 0.52in; margin-right: 0.41in;">A: I’m not completely in support of this interpretation. I’m a Party member who has lived within this Party for some 70 years, and speaking in terms of the structural nature of the Central Committee, Wen Jiabao’s speeches should represent the spirit of the Party. The key points emphasized by Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao can be different, but in [their determination to] unswervingly carry out reforms they are on the same page. Since Hu Jintao became General Secretary he has raised the issue of political reform and promoted democracy on numerous occasions...While he may not have spoken of political reform so openly as Wen Jiabao, toward reform and toward the SEZ’s role in striking out ahead [his remarks] have still contained much about political reform. Besides, Hu Jintao is the General Secretary, and when he speaks it is more wide-ranging, and it is natural that he accommodates all the various aspects of reform.</div><div style="margin-left: 0.52in; margin-right: 0.41in;">...[T]hey are not laboring separately for their own agendas, playing their own political games, but are launching a converging attack, that they working together to slay the tiger that guards the road to reform, and together opening the door to change in China.” This sentence represents my own views very well.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">In a grassroots poll of every smart Chinese person I know, almost all of them have agreed with this. Still, just what <i>has </i>Hu said? Of course, he's in the news nearly everyday, but something he mentioned a few weeks ago has caught my attention, first reported on by Duncan Innes-Kerr at <a href="http://www.chinatranslated.com/?p=1022">China Translated</a>.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-left: 0.52in; margin-right: 0.42in;">There has been some discussion in the Chinese press recently over a new slogan that President Hu Jintao came out with ahead of the APEC summit last month, advocating “<span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span lang="zh-CN">包容性增长” </span></span>(<i>baorongxing zengzhang</i>). This has usually been translated in the English language media as “inclusive growth”, but this is something of a simplification. My Chinese colleagues suggest that it also contains elements of everything progressing together in the appropriate order, not getting out of step. The new phrase has caused a stir of excitement as it is being paraded ahead of the crucial party meeting that will settle the 12th Five Year Plan (for 2011-15), and many suspect that the term may work its way into the plan as a sort of guiding slogan, along the lines of “<span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';">和谐社会” </span>(<i>hexie shehui</i>, or harmonious society) and “<span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';">科学发展” </span>(<i>kexue fazhan</i>, or scientific development). </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I wholeheartedly agree with this interpretation, and also believe that this statement echoes a lot of what Du Daozheng said about Hu Jintao, Hu is more “sensible,” has to consider a larger range of actors, and may even be providing “cover” for Wen here while they commence their “converging attack.” At the same time, just like the calm, rational, “come on, guys” friend requisite to any group, Hu may also be restraining Wen here as well. This becomes clearer as we unpack the wonderful ambiguity of the term, <i>baorongxing. Baorong </i><span style="font-style: normal;">has two basic meanings in Chinese, “to contain or hold,” hence “inclusive;” but it also has another meaning, “to forgive or to pardon.” I'd like to focus on the second of these, and then, perhaps, on the nexus of the two definitions. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Connotation One: “Inclusive Growth”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think that the above excerpt from China Translated covers the “contain” definition pretty well, and there's much more worthwhile commentary in the rest of the article. I'd just like to add that the “let's not get out of step” connotation could also be construed as an answer to Wen, to the Party Elders calling for free speech, to Mao Yushi and the others: <i>Hey, first things first, a quarter of the country's living a pretty good life right now, let's make that happen for everyone else first and then worry about political reforms. </i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Connotation Two: “Forgive us, or at least, tolerate us.”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But it's the other definition of <i>baorong </i><span style="font-style: normal;">that interests me most, and when you add the </span><i>xing </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(“nature,” or “dispostion”) on the end of it, it</span><i> could</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> easily connote the idea of forgiveness and toleration. In some ways, it raises the specter of an abusive relationship, with a crummy guy constantly asking for another chance he doesn't deserve; in other ways, what we're hearing is one of the most stirring appeals for tolerance of a flawed, but effective utilitarian policy I've ever heard. If Hu is really implicitly asking for forgiveness, perhaps it's this connotation that best answers Mao Yushi, and even Liu Xiaobo and his supporters. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Yes, you don't trust us. Yes, the massive gap between the rich and the poor, between the developed coasts and the far-from developed interior was intentional, but we believed it was the best way to grow, and grow we have. Yes, we kind of looked the other way when local governments and the capitalists/robber barons took your land for pennies on the dollar, used your labor in sweatshops to enrich themselves and millions of foreign investors while you had to ask your parents and grandparents to watch your children grow up without you.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>Yes, corruption hasn't been tamed and awful things have happened in the past. Yes, most of us have looked out for ourselves, our children and our friends in spite of our public duty. But please, life has actually gotten better for a lot of people while we've been in charge. Please forgive us, or at least, understand why we did what we did.</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">I'd always thought that Dostoyevsky's (?) argument against utilitarianism was pretty convincing. If you could take all of the world's sadness, all of its suffering, and put it on one child in the middle of Africa, would you do it? Could you handle doing that to one person? The more I learn about the China miracle, the more it seems that this kind of deal, in fact, did happen here over the past thirty years. The miracle cost lives and happiness, or perhaps, <i>transferred</i> happiness from one group/generation to another. But what if we were to ask the child, <i>Are you willing to do this for the greater good? Or, even if you weren't, can you at least forgive us? Can you at least understand why we did it? </i>Does that, in any way, change the equation? More pragmatically, could that plea at least get people off the streets?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Connotation Three: “Be patient.”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I think when one considers connotation one (inclusive growth) and connotation two (forgive us) together, we get the closest to what this actually means, “be patient and trust us.” There are probably very few officials who are asking for forgiveness in any meaningful way (save, of course, <a href="http://www.chinahush.com/2010/10/22/perpetrators-father-li-gang-apologizes-publicly/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+ChinaHush+(ChinaHush)">Li Gang</a>, and most people don't believe his remorse is real). However, while connotation two's a long shot, it's highly likely that the true meaning of <i>baorongxing</i> is more than just a cold order for more inclusive growth, Hu's also asking for patience, which of course, has elements of forgiveness in it. It's a deal: the government will <span style="font-style: normal;">do its best to think more holistically, more inclusively, you, well, you just sit tight, and don't go off and </span><i>nao shi </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(cause trouble)</span><i>. </i> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">If this is right, this is already a big step in the history of Chinese politics. It's my understanding that the public works projects of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal (feats equally impressive as China's recent economic growth, but that also came with similar utilitarian casualties) were not accompanied by a plea for forgiveness, tolerance, or peace by the ruling classes. (Even if they weren't, they were also followed by revolutions.) Perhaps Hu here is showing marked improvement in recognizing the value of an individual life, or, at least, the pain of an individual's suffering. Or maybe while Wen's been reading Western classics, Hu's been re-reading the histories of the Qin (Wall) and the Sui (Canal) Dynasties. </span> </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-12261023641681706702010-10-13T23:11:00.007+08:002010-10-14T05:36:58.970+08:00Your Old Men Will Dream Dreams: Wen Jia Bao's “Political Reform” and "Universal Values," Party Elders Calling for Free Speech, and the Addition of Old White Men into the Chinese Canon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JJKbKBHytbFf1A7p5WtXXAoYaV99xoCDmigusCvXuZ1YjTEjOZsFg0jehl282ezvb8gceKQVtYTRfYvOEJOSbMZ-WrveZ46oQVweYRibYzXiphDtiwELvPmVnGLJwRFNwk3A18jNleg/s1600/old+white+men.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JJKbKBHytbFf1A7p5WtXXAoYaV99xoCDmigusCvXuZ1YjTEjOZsFg0jehl282ezvb8gceKQVtYTRfYvOEJOSbMZ-WrveZ46oQVweYRibYzXiphDtiwELvPmVnGLJwRFNwk3A18jNleg/s320/old+white+men.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There's an old, <a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ethicalesq/2005/06/21/did-churchill-coin-that-over-30-maxim/">apparantely mis-attributed</a>, quote by Winston Churchill that reads, <i>“Show me a young conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains.”</i> Whoever said it, I'd like to suggest that this is a kind of Western common knowledge. We expect our children to feel, question, and explore – to make something new. We expect that, through the process of maturation, accumulation, and procreation, those older than us will naturally become more conservative, as they have very important things – their children, choices, and dignity, among others – to protect.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course there are myriad exceptions to this rule, but I'd like to argue that this “common knowledge” is what makes dramatic actions, admissions, and changes of course by our elders so moving, and so persuasive. Our fathers say things like this. After twenty years of fly fishing with me and my two brothers, and after we'd just finished yet another day of scaring trout upstream with nothing to show for it, none of us expected my dad to sit down, sigh, and then laugh hysterically, saying, “We really don't know what we're doing, do we?” We didn't, but never thought that he'd say that. When the formally pro-death penalty Supreme Court Justice Blackmun stated, after twenty years of trying to formulate a just death penalty process, “I will no longer tinker with the machinery of death,” it caused even the most pro-death penalty law students to pause, and even the least wonder-prone to wonder. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I believe that in China, this “common knowledge” is exactly the opposite. Tradition, pragmatism, and political necessity require that the young use their brains conservatively, nodding their way up professional and social ladders that don't want their opinions but only their obedience. Only once one is at the top of the ladder can one be explicit about what her heart is telling her. This, in some ways, is the essence of a Confucian, conservative society: <i>learn everything that's been learned, experience everything that can be experienced, have children, wallow in life's complexity and contradictions, learn about hypocrisy, submit your will to the mass of greatness that has come before you, and if you still have something to say at 70, maybe we'll listen to you. </i> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So while the common knowledge may be different here in the Middle Kingdom, the power of such admissions of elders may be even greater because their audience is better prepared to accept them (or, at least, less prepared to disagree). Our elders here have said quite a lot of late.<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Wen Jia Bao and his Regiment of Retirees</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Those of you who've read my blog for a while (thanks!) know about my respect for Wen Jia Bao's year-long “dignity putsch” (posts <a href="http://chineselawandsociety.blogspot.com/2010/06/wen-and-wenceslas.html">here</a> and <a href="http://chineselawandsociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/dignity-always-dignity-wen-jia-bao-does.html">here</a>), he's bulwarked that with recent bold, public proclamations calling for political reform, both in China and in the U.S., even on CNN. These last calls have been censored by Wen's political underlings, a most un-filial (and unconstitutional?) of moves. As he has convinced <a href="http://zhangwen.blshe.com/post/214/600916">incredulous reformers</a> that he is more than just show, more than just a <i>yingdi,</i> “a king of the silver screen,” other murmurs have risen to the surface from another camp, <i>daowen, “</i>Take Wen down.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For the most part, Wen had been the single public actor in this play. But perhaps because of the censorship of their premier, perhaps because of the rise of the <i>daowen</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> camp, perhaps because of what happened in Norway last week, over twenty very influential and very retired former cadres have written an <a href="http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/10/13/8035/">open letter to the National People's Congress Standing Committee</a></span> asking for immediate and substantial reform of China's freedoms of speech, press, and to the internet. It is a stirring read and fills one with hope; here's part of the introduction.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.53in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.53in;"><span style="color: #666666;">“<span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">We have for 61 years “served as master” in the name of the citizens of the People’s Republic of China. But the freedom of speech and of the press we now enjoy is inferior even to that of Hong Kong before its return to Chinese sovereignty, to that entrusted to the residents of a colony. Before the handover, Hong Kong was a British colony, governed by those appointed by the Queen’s government. But the freedom of speech and freedom of the press given to residents of Hong Kong by the British authorities there was not empty, appearing only on paper. It was enacted and realized.</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.53in;"><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.53in;"><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;">When our country was founded in 1949, our people cried that they had been liberated, that they were not their own masters. Mao Zedong said that, “From this moment, the people of China have stood.” But even today, 61 years after the founding of our nation, after 30 years of opening and reform, we have not yet attained freedom of speech and freedom of the press to the degree enjoyed by the people of Hong Kong under colonial rule. Even now, many books discussion political and current affairs must be published in Hong Kong. This is not something that dates from the [territory's] return, but is merely an old tactic familiar under colonial rule. The “master” status of the people of China’s mainland is so inferior. For our nation to advertise itself as having “socialist democracy” with Chinese characteristics is such an embarrassment.”</span></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.53in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What's happening in China? Where is this coming from?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are many reasons for the change. First and foremost, it's the bravery of China's elders and, of course, the dissociated persistence of millions of unnamed non-elderly all over China. They all deserve part of Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize. But I'd like to thank another group of people here, a group that's fallen into disrepute of late: old white men.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>The Confucian-ization of the West's Old White Men</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">After the Opium Wars, when China suffered defeat at the hands of the British, there was much hand-wringing and brow(-)beating, but it also led to another, more positive, hyphenation: a collective soul-searching unlike any thing that's ever been done. Thousands of scholars left China to study in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. They came back with science, technology, and ideas. They also brought with them a whole new group of old men to deify: Beethoven and Bach, Newton and Pascal, Marx and Hegel, and countless others, some of whom were sanctified immediately, others, like Adam Smith, were adopted later on. [Please note, I in no means mean to downplay the enormous role, both explicit and implicit, that women have played in the development of Western society. Part of this is just rhetorical, but it's also simply descriptive, these are the figures I have seen and heard discussed.]</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I wouldn't be so quick to spout gross generalizations about an entire culture if I didn't have an esteemed octogenarian in my corner, Mao Yushi.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" bgcolor="0xffffff" flashvars="&backcolor=0xffffff&dock=false&file=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia.asiasociety.org%2Fvideo%2Fchinaboom%2F2AMYS_Boomh264.mp4&frontcolor=0xffffff&image=http%3A%2F%2Fcms.chinaboom.asiasociety.org%2Fsites%2Fcms.chinaboom.asiasociety.org%2Ffiles%2FMaoYushiLarge.jpg&lightcolor=0x000000&plugins=viral-2d&screencolor=0x000000&skin=http%3A%2F%2Fchinaboom.asiasociety.org%2Fjwplayer%2Fstyle.zip&viral.allowmenu=true&viral.functions=embed" height="377" src="http://chinaboom.asiasociety.org/jwplayer/Player_5.0.swf" width="630"></embed></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> Not only does Mao Yushi hilariously back up my point here, but he also backs up my earlier point about Chinese culture. He says things that “no one else” would say in a public forum, according to the Chinese friends who were watching this with me. His laconic, straight-forward statements and criticisms had them rolling – it was funny because it was so very true, but it was also funny because it's taboo to speak truth that could so obviously get one in trouble. Mao Yushi is old, has the requisite credentials, and can say what he wants. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">When I first moved to China, I was astonished to find the halls of my university filled with these men, their books, their portraits, their statues. The main library downtown had huge busts of Beethoven, Tolstoy and Einstein outside it. A square in Shanghai near the railroad station has the largest statute of Bach I've ever seen. As anyone who's travelled across China knows, its cities and countryside are packed --Citizen-Cane-basement-style-- with Greek and Roman statues, Corinthian Columns, and other massive, garish, totally out of place monuments to a (slightly) misunderstood “West.” But they're not as out of place as I thought, the cultural founders of the West really have become esteemed here, in many ways more than they are in their countries of origin.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Many of the Chinese scholars who came back from the West believed not only that more old men needed to be added to the Chinese canon, but also that some of the Chinese old men needed to be exorcised from it. China needed to get rid of the yoke of Confucianism, of its slavish respect for the old and established, for it was a structure that stifled innovation. And in many ways, I think that most of us who've spent time here feel that they did it that to a certain extent. If the Socialist Revolution didn't do it, then the Cultural Revolution did, and if neither of them did it, well, the debate's been put to rest since the Reform and Opening. But I'm not so sure anymore. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In fact, I think the truth behind what Mao Yushi is saying is this: we didn't change our Confucian culture that much; rather, we just greatly expanded the number of old men that we respect. In many ways, it was easy. If it's true that China didn't have much of a history at all in the natural sciences, in economics, in Western music, then there was very little dissonance in accepting these concepts into an already robust culture. In that way, no one should be surprised at how fast China has grown: they had the cultural infrastructure to read Western (and East Asian) experience like a map, and import and reproduce anything that worked. They imported engineering, left out post-modernist thought; imported monomaniacal belief in the progress of humankind, left out angst and self-doubt. To this day still, this process of learning, revering, instilling, and reproducing goes on, at rapid pace.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But one clause of one sentence from Mao Yushi intrigues me, “This debate continued until Mao's time and, even now, the debate goes on but, <i>for the most part</i>, the debate on this issue has been resolved.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What is still unresolved? I believe it's the question of whether or not the concept of “scientific development” extends to political reform, rule of law, and universal values. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Besides the overabundance of Greek-inspired architecture, another thing one notices if one spends a lot of time here, is the belief that democratic progress is inexorable. In many ways it makes sense. The story of post-Renaissance Europe is a messy, violent, bloody period, but progress in science, culture, art and economics were intricately tied to political reform. Enlightenment-era romantics certainly believed this was the case. More than that, China's neighbors -- South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan -- are all excellent examples of how well democracy took in Confucianist countries who had it more or less imposed upon them (by foreign and domestic agents). Perhaps their confidence that democracy is just another offshoot of this is not too far-fetched. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This confidence was evident in the Open Letter to the Standing Committee. First it shamed China that it has yet to achieve the amount of free speech that England, that awful imperialist country, gave to Hong Kong. Then it said this:</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.52in;"><br />
</div><div align="JUSTIFY" style="line-height: 0.19in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.52in; orphans: 2; widows: 2;"><span style="color: #666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">“</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">There is little doubt that systems of legal responsibility </span></span></span></span><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">mark progress</span></span></i></span></span><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;"> over systems of censorship, and this is greatly </span></span></span></span></span><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">in the favor of the development of the humanities and natural sciences, and in promoting social harmony and historical progress</span></span></i></span></span><span style="color: #666666;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: small;">. England did away with censorship in 1695. France abolished its censorship system in 1881, and the publication of newspapers and periodicals thereafter required only a simple declaration, which was signed by the representatives of the publication and mailed to the office of the procurator of the republic. Our present system of censorship leaves news and book publishing in our country 315 years behind England and 129 years behind France.”</span></span></span></span></span> </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I agree with them, so I'll neglect the fact that this argument is committing a logical fallacy, namely, it makes an irrelevant conclusion. England and France could have been wrong to make the choice they did, or it could be wrong for China now. But this isn't intended to be a logical argument -- they are appealing to “progress” and “scientific development,” to people that haven't gone through the loss of faith in those ideas that England and France did. Our old men haven't let them down like they let us down, when they “<a href="http://www.poemtree.com/poems/ParableOfTheOldMan.htm">killed half the seed of Europe, one by one</a>” in the Great War and what came after.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Attaching civil and political rights to “scientific development” is the last frontier in this debate that Mao Yushi is talking about, and it will probably prove to be the most contested. It's why Wen Jia Bao talks about “universal values” and “dignity.” It's why Liu Xiaobo, when he “was asked by a Hong Kong reporter what China needed to make fundamental changes to its social-political system...answered, '300 years of colonization; Hong Kong had 100 years, so it should take more than that for the entire mainland.'” (A quote for which his conservative detractors have continually called him a traitor.)</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But putting aside realistic obstacles to reform like entrenched political and economic interests, this concept has some ideological vulnerability as well. For in politics, law, and the humanities, there's more competition among the “old men” that Chinese revere. China has a long history of political theorists who were not so unsuccessful at building a social system, thank you very much, and they, like Plato, didn't place freedom of speech or freedom of the press high on its priority list. Moreover, if your government is just going to keep following the Western plan of development, eventually giving you everything that millions of people had to fight, die, and wrest away from the hands of the elites in the West, is it even smart to call for all of the freedoms we have in the West, many of which large numbers of apathetic citizens never exercise?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But maybe I'm thinking about this too much. Maybe I, too, need to just trust the judgment of Wen Jia Bao, Mao Yushi and these retired cadres calling for freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Perhaps old men dreaming such dreams shouldn't be questioned. (Until my next post when I tell you about Hu Jin Tao's newest dream.)</div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-19570784165724408602010-10-09T02:13:00.004+08:002011-02-13T17:09:03.765+08:00Liu Xiaobo, Weibo, Beethoven, the Nobel Prize and Whether to Feel Happy or Sad<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCvF3VbPcIUilzvJN3AMu5RofuRZTKYX6VJMSqZl0VwAlVVpdM8Z-OTsCQk6YfNu0KH_hcWlP0Rx-H2qUfsMgwKcbA3wL_8-XweKL-WljjtijQC7Qr-noCOeV7DzLtTu2CiqFQ3YOgxA/s1600/link_1-011509_jpg_230x439_q85.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ex="true" height="222" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYCvF3VbPcIUilzvJN3AMu5RofuRZTKYX6VJMSqZl0VwAlVVpdM8Z-OTsCQk6YfNu0KH_hcWlP0Rx-H2qUfsMgwKcbA3wL_8-XweKL-WljjtijQC7Qr-noCOeV7DzLtTu2CiqFQ3YOgxA/s320/link_1-011509_jpg_230x439_q85.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
有一位姓刘的中国人,长期致力于中国的非暴力人权事业,今天获了一个奖<br />
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<em>“There's a Chinese man named Liu, who has for a long time devoted himself to the non-violent human rights movement. Today he received an award.” -- Posted today on Weibo, a Chinese Twitter-type site. </em><br />
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I cannot read this phrase without emotion, and keep returning to it like one might return again and again to the notice of a death of a loved one. The only difference being, perhaps, that I'm uncertain of whether I'm happy or sad. <br />
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It reminds me of when I was younger and would play Beethoven's simple piece for children, <em>Lustig, Traurig</em> (Cheerful, Sorrowful), a two-page song that had two themes -- one major, one minor, one happy, and one sad -- both beautiful. Beethoven had you play <em>Lustig</em> first, then <em>Traurig</em>, and then finish with <em>Lustig</em>, intimating, at least to me, the romantic view that we can (and maybe, should) pass through difficulty to find an even greater, enlightened happiness. And it's true, <em>Lustig</em> has another layer of meaning once you've played <em>Traurig</em>. I was less convinced though, in high school, and would keep playing through the coda, from <em>Lustig</em> to <em>Traurig</em>, over and over, in a kind of musical Russian roulette, daring myself to stop after <em>Traurig</em>, to ignore Beethoven's notation, but perhaps also his admonition, that finding joy amidst sadness is something we must do to stay sane. It's why Dostoyevsky could write entire novels that depressed you, but would finish with two pages of exuberant (desperate) hope. I still don't know if I'm convinced, but tonight I'd certainly like to be. <br />
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<em>Lustig</em><br />
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The man in the above quote, Liu, is of course, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/world/09nobel.html?hp">Liu Xiaobo</a>, who was just announced to be this year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. He is most likely not aware of this fact, however, as he has taken up an eleven-year residency in a Liaoning prison, sent there for subversive activities.<br />
<a name='more'></a>This is the fourth time he's been incarcerated, almost always for his involvement in the writing and publication of works that contained unflattering analysis of the causes of China's social problems, and also outlined solutions to those problems that were absent the requisite amount of “Chinese characteristics.” In other words, he has appealed unendingly for regime and structural change, and a full slate of the finest human rights mechanisms the world has to offer, imperfect as they may be. This latest eleven-year sentence, given in the wake of Charter 08, a national petition calling for comprehensive political change, was one of the longest sentences given for political subversion since China shook off the detritus of the Cultural Revolution, which leads me to believe that “they doth arrest too much,” proving, perhaps, by the excessive tightening of their grip, that the groundswell for reform is higher than it has been in quite some time. <br />
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Liu Xiaobo has spent the last thirty years writing and talking about the unfulfilled promises of the Chinese republic. The fact that he is gaining international support and represents a growing cadre of like-minded Chinese is certainly a cause for <em>Lust</em>. The fact that Norway withstood <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2010/1008/Why-Liu-Xiaobo-Nobel-Peace-Prize-could-harm-Chinese-rights-activists">heavy Chinese pressure </a>and awarded him the Nobel Prize anyway elevated that <em>Lust</em> to <em>viel Lust</em>.<br />
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It just so happens that another poster on Weibo, who let fly a slew of posts after the Nobel Prize announcement, had one post that said just that: <em>kaixin </em>(happiness). One word and nothing more. We all knew what he meant. Just <em>kaixin</em>, happiness, <em>Lust</em>. The next post was an open invitation to anyone online who wanted to head downtown to eat and drink with him. It made me think of the story of the Prodigal Son. Our first reaction was joy. Joy's natural reaction is to want to share itself with others. So Beijing students lit fireworks, and in Shanghai they went downtown to eat and drink, more or less mindful of the fact that virtually no one who saw them celebrating would have any idea why they were so happy.<br />
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<em>Traurig</em><br />
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But there's something else in that first post that deflates. A countertheme.<br />
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<em>“There's a Chinese man named Liu, who has for a long time devoted himself to the non-violent human rights movement. Today he received an award.”</em><br />
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The first time I read it, it read with a beauty not unlike that of Chinese landscape paintings. Simple, minimalist, and wistful: the understatement actually elevates the meaning, and allows your emotions to rush in around the bare bones of the text. But this poster wasn't trying to be Hemingway for stylistic reasons. No, we all knew that he had posted in this way to avoid being censored. No “Xiao Bo,” no “Nobel,” no additional details that might pop up in a Google search. Posting on Weibo is like a real-life game of Taboo, with posters trying to get their idea across without saying anything that might tip off censors.<br />
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At first avoiding the censors was simply funny. People wrote their posts entirely backwards, or in Shanghainese. People wrote detailed announcements of what the six o'clock news was broadcasting, which of course, was everything but Liu Xiaobo, whose name did not and does not appear on any media website and was not mentioned in the news. But as time went by, things got serious. More and more posts were deleted. You couldn't text Liu's name via cell phone. Liu's wife's house was apparently surrounded by police, who wouldn't let people in to talk to her, and she's now rumored to have been “encouraged” to leave the city to avoid media hounding. Pretty soon, Weibo, the lifeline of liberal Chinese across the country, was a wasteland, on virtual lock-down. And the first doubts crept into your head. You started to think, “They very well might keep 99% of Chinese in the dark about this.” <br />
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Then you heard that the guy who'd invited everyone to dinner in People's Square might have invited one too many people. People were worried he'd been arrested. You went back to his Weibo page and found that every one of his posts had been erased, or “harmonized,” as the ironic are want to say. That is, every post was deleted except one. His "kaixin" remained. Lonely and horrifying. <br />
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It was horrifying, because at that moment you were anything but <em>kaixin</em>. Whether intentionally ironic or not, that lone “happy” on that vast censored plain hurt more than anything I've felt in a while. <br />
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It was then that I thought of Beethoven, and of <em>Lustig, Traurig</em>. This was a great day, but it may portend many far worse, both for Liu Xiao Bo and all of his ilk. I pray it does not for my <em>kaixin</em> friend. But the song doesn't stop, and doesn't have to stop. We can control the amount of irony we perceive behind that single <em>kaixin</em>. At least, I hope we can. And I hope Beethoven's right, that the song always reaches its end at <em>Lustig, </em>not <em>Traurig</em>. I think that's why Xiaobo hasn't changed his theme, no matter how many times he's been arrested. His happiness stems from something that can't be touched. <br />
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Congratulations Liu Xiaobo, may we not forget you, at least not until everyone's heard of you once.Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-22687308086548111332010-10-06T00:26:00.008+08:002011-05-02T08:35:08.519+08:00Something Forgotten in the State of Denmark? Crowding out the Mermaid at the Shanghai Expo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzLzHiI9ka21ua-r3JSf2-usHVtmAxiurVEDRSFVYUyeH2cGiDteQJlWtiiJkHOb8Nz0Px__B_wiM2-eQ3L_xjuPpCNFWeqrqcNsm1BOmbZd0Xd9BpC1F7JJIwmWBrwbkk3ugzTMZQP_M/s1600/mermaid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzLzHiI9ka21ua-r3JSf2-usHVtmAxiurVEDRSFVYUyeH2cGiDteQJlWtiiJkHOb8Nz0Px__B_wiM2-eQ3L_xjuPpCNFWeqrqcNsm1BOmbZd0Xd9BpC1F7JJIwmWBrwbkk3ugzTMZQP_M/s320/mermaid.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I went to the World Expo yesterday, to add my scalp to that of the 70-odd million others Shanghai plans to have notched to its belt when this whole thing is over. Despite the fact that I have had many opportunities to go in the past and that I only live <span style="font-style: normal;">ten miles away</span>, this was my first visit. It had taken all of five months for me to overcome my cynicism; my childish urge to dislike anything too many other people like; and my fear of four, five, and even eight-hour waits to see single exhibits. But China doesn't need you to approve or disapprove of anything it does, and it is this Taoist (?) desirelessness that assures that it wins most battles of wills.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">So I went, holding firm to my mantra that it's better to have had mixed emotions and lost than to have never had your emotions mixed at all. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And mixed they were. There's plenty of great things to see, and eat. It was a lot of fun introducing the Chinese I was with to authentic Belgian fries, Thai food, and Turkish ice cream. The <a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/shanghais_expo_nearly_ready.html">architecture</a> of many of the exhibits is really outstanding, breathtaking even. However, the insides were often a different story. Or, rather, many different stories.<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Some felt like you were reading the back of a label on very large tube of toothpaste. Others felt like you'd been airlifted into a rubber products and ball bearings trade show. The rich European nations fell over themselves to bring whatever national treasures they could part with. (France brought seven works of art that had never left the country before, each on its own separate plane.) And montages! Montages everywhere! 180 degree screens! 360 degree screens! 3-D! 4-D! (I still haven't figured out which one -- time or space -- they managed to include.) Each montage had the requisite amount of flair, soundtrack, and heart-rending/pulse-pounding/eye-misting/soul-transmigrating images to create impressions that stayed with you even though you left the building remembering nothing. All sorts of things, wondrous things, mundane things. You went from something like the Met to a Swedish kitchen with a slide for an exit, from a trade show to a room simply filled with swings. What was funny, is that if it weren't so obvious that countries had spent as much time and money organizing these exhibitions as they had, you could be excused for thinking that you were just sort of rummaging through their collective basements. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have an idea why.<br />
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In 1792, the British sent the Macartney mission to China to engage the Qing emperor Qianlong. Macartney refused to kowtow to the Emperor, creating a stir and much cognitive and Confucian dissonance throughout China. While the kowtow never came for the emperor, this year's Expo shows many countries bending over backwards in varying degrees of discomfiture to an even higher power: the Chinese consumer. It's no secret that the China has been able to pull the Expo out from its thirty-year swan song because we (non-Chinese) want Chinese to buy our stuff. But there's a problem, no one really knows what the Chinese consumer wants or even who she is. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The feeling was mutual, though. Chinese consumers don't necessarily know anything more about us. Hence the Expo and its hullabaloo. Countries gave us their attics, and their basements, and we rummaged like few have rummaged before. If they didn't know what we wanted, we didn't know either. <br />
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It's hard to describe the feeling of twelve straight hours at the Expo. Perhaps it's best thought of as a Serengeti wildebeest migration forced into a maze. You rarely go a few seconds without contact from the back or front. Un-group-like behavior results in collisions. Stopping in this flow to read a caption or the fine print about Indonesian batik or Bosnian Nobel Prize winners is ill-advised, trying to head back the way you came, suicide. This fact evens out the national treasures and the trade shows. In this world, a Van Gogh is given about the same amount of time as a Malaysian Palm Oil prospectus.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But then, Denmark. An oasis from all of this. A <a href="http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/big_wins_danish_pavilion_for_2010_world_expo_in_shanghai/">beautiful and conscientiously designed pavilion</a>, specifically designed to obliterate everything I just described above, </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmJTaZ25XlS019DUtCiHXSG1DcF24ZhFwTHHJLe3GJ2aGMjWsjLeplYJb7G4ocAzWCe6GKP1mZyL4T0kkye4nOKMXdpZsQAyMQZPteRkqGg6P0s_IIsarIgYQo-HwuZKKoS-0GuWfn20/s1600/Shanghai-Expo-2010-Denmark-Pavillion-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnmJTaZ25XlS019DUtCiHXSG1DcF24ZhFwTHHJLe3GJ2aGMjWsjLeplYJb7G4ocAzWCe6GKP1mZyL4T0kkye4nOKMXdpZsQAyMQZPteRkqGg6P0s_IIsarIgYQo-HwuZKKoS-0GuWfn20/s320/Shanghai-Expo-2010-Denmark-Pavillion-5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“When we visited the World Expo in Zaragoza [Spain], we were stunned by the artificial content. State propaganda in papier mâché,” Ingels said in a statement. “The Danish Expo pavilion 2010 is the real deal, and not just endless talking.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">As you can see, it's a gorgeous, simple, modern building. There is one centerpiece, something worthy of being in the center, <i>The </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Little Mermaid Statute, airlifted out of Copenhagen for the first time ever (<a href="http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/global/little_mermaid/">not without controversy, mind you</a>). The building swirls its way up and around her, allowing you to stare back at her again and again. It gave you time to think, to breathe, to remember the story, but not just that, to feel the story and the magnitude of the gift Denmark had given China. After all, for once, there was nothing to do but look at her and think. And she was </span><i>real</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I didn't know the above quote existed and I said the exact thing to my girlfriend, “This is the one real thing we've seen all day.” </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">And it made me sad. Which is probably ok. I don't think you're supposed to look at her loneliness and be happy. At that point, I welcomed any sustained emotion, even a non-Expo-like melancholy. It was dusk, and the light around The Little Mermaid drew my attention down to her, two stories below in a pool of clean water (also brought from Denmark). Two stories up, I planted my feet, hugged the wall, and prepared to defend my territory from the coming onslaught. I didn't have to, though, because the onslaught went on behind me.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Every pavilion has a “customs booth,” a place where kids can get their Expo passports stamped with the stamp of the country they've visited. It's a great idea, except for the fact that this adds to the earnestness and single-mindedness of the herd:</span><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>Wait in line, get passport stamped, go find another line.</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> The customs line behind me had digressed into a medium-sized mob, which led to arguing and pushing and passbooks flailing in the air, so that it soon resembled a run on a small bank, with one, slight, dutiful Chinese passport stamper to handle it, doing his best for Denmark. I turned around only once. But I wasn't going to let it bother me. I'm pretty much immune to small bits of public chaos now. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">A large Danish man stalked up to the booth, Viking-like in both actual and relative terms, he bellowed at the crowd in a halting, Nordic Chinese, “Please line up in a </span><i>civilized </i><span style="font-style: normal;">manner.” The word </span><i>civilized </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in Chinese, is a word that I've only heard foreigners use with irony. It's plastered everywhere, part of the nationwide effort to get people to speak, act, and think in a </span><i>civilized </i><span style="font-style: normal;">way. He was not being ironic. And he repeated it over and over again. He was visibly angry (my guess is that this was a regular occurrence), and was trying to use </span><i>civilized </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to guilt them into lining up. It worked on the Chinese passport book stamper, who muttered “</span><i>Come on</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> guys, this is really embarrassing, a </span><i>foreigner</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is calling you out,” but the rest of the line seemed unphased. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">People didn't quite know what to do, and sort stayed put: a passive, confused resistance. The Dane then decided to up the rhetoric. He walked directly up to a heavy-set Chinese man, and yelled directly in his face, “You acting that way is </span><i>of no quality</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.” Snap. </span><br />
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<span style="font-style: normal;">This made me turn around. I'd rarely heard someone called out like that in public, and never by a foreigner. While saying someone “has no quality” sounds rather mild, I'd direct the non-feint of heart to <a href="http://club.pchome.net/thread_1_15_688135.html">this chat room</a>, where some Chinese try to decide how to translate </span><i>“you have no quality” </i><span style="font-style: normal;">into English. Be forewarned, it's pretty crass. One commenter on the bottom of the page probably summed it up best when s/he wrote, whatever the best English translation, “It's a lot, a lot of asterisks.” This kind of public criticism can lead to a serious altercation in any country, and China is no different. Whatever it was -- the Dane's size, his persistence, his foreignness, his disrespect, (his rectitude?) -- his Chinese rival coolly moved to the back of the crowd and formed a line. Others followed. Quietly. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">At that point, already feeling sad, I looked at “the only real thing at the Expo” and felt even more so. She seemed farther away from me, but then again, perhaps more real. She and I were now facing the same dilemma. No longer was it her thinking “Do I want to be a human or a mermaid?” [Or, for those who like the real story, “Do I kill my love or kill myself?”] and me sympathizing with that choice and what that means for all of us. Now it was “Do we really want to be here or just back home, to the West?” Or maybe, “Why did we come here, didn't we know that it was just going to end this way?” Or maybe, “What is it going to take for East and West to really understand each other?” </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">More than an Expo for sure, but definitely not less than one. More realness, definitely not less. </span> </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-60750120514126652932010-09-26T11:09:00.007+08:002010-09-26T18:08:44.521+08:00China vs. Japan, Out of the Mouths of Babes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbdpYOJTlRjNgVM4x7wBzzdN2eUc4YGPxkGfUYpn9U7lJ311vvu8RbcsCkM08nDPHD_D1RaxqrSe0pgSTVfpTxiPaJphUtl27udxpAhyphenhyphen5yvViIBJIca_G2t01NoBm_jofRDKCc8bHnA3k/s1600/chinese_babies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbdpYOJTlRjNgVM4x7wBzzdN2eUc4YGPxkGfUYpn9U7lJ311vvu8RbcsCkM08nDPHD_D1RaxqrSe0pgSTVfpTxiPaJphUtl27udxpAhyphenhyphen5yvViIBJIca_G2t01NoBm_jofRDKCc8bHnA3k/s400/chinese_babies.jpg" width="275" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A few days ago I was walking along the road, weaving in and out of what must have been a kindergarten class coming back from a field trip. Chinese kids are cute. Not just in the way that all little versions of people-not-your-own are cute, but they've also got another quality that makes them even more endearing: Unlike children in (most parts of) the world, Chinese go to school to learn not just how to read and write but also how to speak. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
Mandarin, while it's spoken by an increasing number of Chinese, is often not the language spoken in the home—especially here in Shanghai. This means that elementary school language classes are packed with pronunciation and oral Chinese classes. You even have to pass pronunciation tests to graduate from high school and college, which is why foreign teachers here are constantly asked if their English pronunciation is the “standard” pronunciation (and obviously, unless you're from Wisconsin, it's not). So, if you listen carefully to a young Chinese speaking Mandarin, they speak with a broken, self-consciously exaggerated enunciation, as if whatever they were saying was still part of the rote exercises they did in class, and also as if they're taking the first greedy bite of a candied apple. It's cute, trust me. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On the day in question, I happened to be eavesdropping on this phalanx of hyper-enunciators. From behind me I heard, “If I were a Chinese official...” followed by a dramatic pause. I knew this pause. This was a kid who wasn't talking to anyone, but rather, to some imaginary everyone. He was a transcendentalist, who had made up his mind about something and was going to proclaim it to the world, regardless of who was listening or how out of context it was.<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“If I were a Chinese official...” What? No one would go hungry? No more earthquakes? There wouldn't be any homework? You'd make it illegal for grandmothers to force their grandchildren to wear three layers of clothing even in September? Speak, young one. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“If I were a Chinese official, I'd send a million soldiers into Japan and destroy them.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">However transcendentalist, this kid was not Thoreau.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">For those of you who've been watching the recent international <a href="http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2010/09/25/and-winner-china-japan-feud">staring contest</a> between China and Japan (note, Japan blinked), the fact that a child in one of those two countries might spout this kind of language might not be all that shocking. In fact, for those of you who haven't forgotten childhood, this statement is <i>also</i> not that shocking (I probably said something of similar ilk after watching <i>Rocky IV</i>). What worries me most is the thought that China's officials were stuck, trapped in a position where a large portion of their constituency could not have transcended the belligerent idea of my little transcendentalist friend.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Even after China most certainly “won” the diplomatic dispute, Chinese chat rooms were filled with a bizarre griping that China had proven itself still “too weak” in the international context. Good Chinese friends of mine echoed the same sentiment. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Too weak? </i> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Not once did China ever publicly change its line, not once did it ever compromise or ever try to recognize that there was any complexity to this dispute, that there was any possible legitimate disagreement. But, to be honest, I don't mind that so much; there's actually a pretty good international legal reason for doing so: neither side wants to show that it doubts for a second that the other has some kind of claim to the islands at the heart of this dispute. What <i>was</i> very troublesome (rather than just un-gentlemanly), however, was the way China had to keep pummelling Japan: calling off all mid and high-level talks, embarrassing the Japanese ambassador to China, the threatening of the Japanese tourism industry, and finally, the targeting of Japan's (and the world's) technology industry by the purported refusal to allow exports of rare minerals to Japan. From almost any point of view, China was anything but weak. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But from at least two points of view, they most certainly were. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The first is weak governing structures. We normally think of Constitutions as protecting rights, but they also outline divisions of power in governments, proactively preventing disorder and opportunities for abuse of power. This dispute showed a China rife with special interests, both inside and outside the government, who were abusing whatever division of power existed (outlined in fascinating detail <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2010/09/what-does-chinas-dispute-with-japan-tell-us-about-rule-of-law.html#ixzz10aUWCCVSChromeHTML\Shell\Open\Command">here</a> and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092306861.html">here</a>). Special interests at home are resulting in China's failure to speak with a unified voice abroad. This does not bode well for anyone, although perhaps it does portend a more indirect way to encourage Chinese constitutional reform.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The second weakness is how the government is beholden to its hawkish kids. I should start by saying that very few of us, myself included, know enough about the horror of what happened in China during the War Against Japanese Aggression, better known in the US as <i>what are you talking about</i>? Anytime between 10-20 million of your people (mostly civilians) were killed in the recent past, there's going to be some animosity between yourself and the perpetrator, especially if that perpetrator used some of the most vile means imaginable to do so. It's even more real here in the Yangtze Delta region, as every few months or so my girlfriend's mother will talk about visiting the ashes of villages near her home that were completed sacked, looted, terrorized and then burned to the ground. She's talked about those more of late.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But even though that's lamentably the case, the Chinese leadership hasn't helped itself in two other important respects vis a vis its children. First, it has made the doctrine of not ceding one inch of its disputed territories part of the hallmark of its legitimacy, and bulwarked that with a singular historical narrative that emphasizes China's two-hundred year-long humiliation at the hands of Western powers. China's recent rise out of that humiliation is an anti-thesis to that narrative, and is spoken of in determined, Hegelian-Marxist terms. In other words, it's an unchallenged version of history that is announced with a singularity we normally only see in religious faiths in the West. I'm going to call this Weakness 2a.<br />
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Last night at dinner, my girlfriend said to me, "You don't understand, the one thing that Chinese leaders absolutely will never do is compromise on territory they believe to be their own." I said that I did understand, and it was very unfortunate, because there's a lot of territory Chinese considers its own that many other countries feel to be their own as well, even if it is mostly uninhabitable ocean and really high mountains (...with oil under them). When I heard my little friend detail his plans for Japan's demise, I couldn't help but imagine myself as his teacher. What would I have said to him had I heard him say that? Probably some happy jingle about non-violence, love, tolerance, or forgiveness -- but hopefully the truism would have some impact. I worry that Weakness 2a would compromise the answer even a well-meaning Chinese teacher could give our bellicose transcendentalist.<br />
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Adding to the weakness of a singular historical narrative is Weakness 2b: the vigorous protection of that narrative from competing ideology and sophisticated reasoning. What this means is that even if there are teachers who wish to teach a more complex story, rules of the written and unwritten variety stand in their way, such as this <a href="http://chinageeks.org/2010/06/he-weifang-under-the-banner-of-strict-professional-ethics/">dictate</a> on "Professional Teaching Ethics" issued this past spring in Fujian Province, which forbade teachers from "the dissemination of misguided or erroneous speech against the general and specific policies of the Party, the basic theory of the Party, the law and the constitution of the country during the course of teaching, which leads to a harmful effect on conveying correct ideas and political ideals to the students.” This creates a moral (and professional) dilemma for even the most enlightened teachers. Do your job and lose your job, don't do it and keep it. But most teachers don't need a rule to tell them this, it's pretty much a consciousness you are born with here, or one you take up once you go through customs. <br />
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The sad result of this is that few Chinese students are taught to read and filter competing renditions of the same event, which, in this author's opinion, has played no small part in the recent explosive, nationalist anger evidenced by some of China's most educated students at what they deem to be Western media bias in its coverage of China. It's not that the bias isn't there (although most of the time it's simply lack of information or understanding), but that many Chinese aren't used to dealing with competing normative claims regarding the same event. Of course, few of us are either, really. How many of us bookmark both the New York Times and Fox News, etc.? I don't. (Although I've tried to squeeze as much mileage out of my Republican upbringing and environs as possible). <br />
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I think that most of us probably look at Weaknesses 2a and 2b as shortcomings, but not as weaknesses. In fact, it's more common for us to see them as threats or opportunities. Threats because democracies tend to get uncomfortable dealing with non-democracies. Opportunities because most Western capitalists have loved doing business here -- no messy competing interests or democratic processes to deal with: it fuels their inner autocrat. But could I paraphrase Mick Jagger for a second and ask for some "Sympathy for the Politbureau?" Weakness 2a and 2b threaten to hoist them on their own petard. <br />
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An example. These past two weeks, there have been many well-documented, virulent anti-Japanese protests across China. At first glance, one is tempted to assume this is all positive for the Chinese leadership -- create a common external enemy, fan the flames of nationalism, and make people forget about their domestic problems, it's win-win. But governments have been shutting down these protests. Most likely not out of some enlightened understanding of the nuances of international politics (Weakness 2a won't allow that kind of talk), but because they're afraid that the un-huddled masses may all of a sudden start airing their many domestic grievances at the same time. This happened before, with horrifying result, a few years after the release of <i>Rocky IV. </i><br />
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So while I, too, like many, was frustrated by the heavy-handed, unsophisticated way in which China bullied its way through this recent dispute (and the way it's still <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/world/asia/26japan.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss">bullying</a>), I've begun to feel increasing sympathy for the Chinese leadership, sometimes even more than I feel for the little warring Emerson I met on the street or his teachers. Even if they had wanted to handle this situation differently, could they have? I'm beginning to think not: they're all handcuffed by a petarded education system. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-14853504631378056262010-09-24T11:51:00.011+08:002010-09-25T05:34:37.456+08:00A Festival for Longing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7mm_0z10xx6b8uI5nFRBAND7-YeSisIoFHs2C4QJYXpcVL-Xa4EqvS59nh9put5YB2k9RNa2tzi2Dw98yLgYcCwsGX3C5cGy8Y-XG3o6K5HXbD-ibOcUGvTfCIo3lmfaAVxLp32_XMMU/s1600/mooncake-2010-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7mm_0z10xx6b8uI5nFRBAND7-YeSisIoFHs2C4QJYXpcVL-Xa4EqvS59nh9put5YB2k9RNa2tzi2Dw98yLgYcCwsGX3C5cGy8Y-XG3o6K5HXbD-ibOcUGvTfCIo3lmfaAVxLp32_XMMU/s640/mooncake-2010-1.jpg" width="456" /></a></div><br />
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Yesterday was Mid-Autumn Festival, the Chinese celebration of the fall equinox. Because it's one of those holidays related to the seasons and the harvest, it's very old, and potentially quite meaningful. I say potentially, because, in many ways, Mid-Autumn Festival could have all of the blissful simplicity of Thanksgiving, but the traditional holiday killers of modernization and commercialization haven't left Mid-Autumn Festival unscathed.<br />
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For starters, like Thanksgiving, Mid-Autumn festival is about reunions: all you really have to do for Mid-Autumn festival is get together with your family for a great meal, perhaps light some lanterns, and recite one of the seemingly hundreds of Chinese poems to the moon. The first problem is that a lot of people don't go home (talked about <a href="http://cnreviews.com/life/society-culture/modernization-going-home-holidays-luxury_20100923.html">here</a>), for a variety of reasons, big and small: My girlfriend's sister-in-law missed our meal because she was attending a class on how to dress fashionably. (Presumably for occasions of more import to her than 3000-year-old holidays.) The rest of us watched the Chinese version of Dick Clark's New Year's extravaganza. Which is fine, but for the fact that every Chinese holiday ends up nearly the same way, with a variety show that stultifies most meaningful familial conversation. (Come to think of it, it's <i>just</i> like Thanksgiving.)<br />
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Also like Thanksgiving, while there isn't much to commercialize, the commercialization came just the same: in the form of moon cake packaging. One of the traditional delicacies of mid-Autumn festival, mooncakes are round, flaky, sweet or savory pies, and actually very delicious in their original manifestation. The problem is you can't make that much money off of pie. So what happens? An entire industry goes up, making incredibly <a href="http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2009-10/474343.html">extravagant</a>, expensive packaging in which to put increasingly tasteless, Hostess-like versions of the original cake, preserved well enough to last for a thousand Mid-Autumn Festivals, or at least until someone's adventurous enough to consume it out of its misery. </div><div><br />
For the few weeks before the festival, Chinese are busy buying and re-gifting preservatives packaged with the requisite degree of extravagance that matches their wealth and the status, and the wealth and status of the intended recipient. These are then re-gifted with hot-potato-like gusto until the day of the festival, where everyone simultaneously loses the game, and is punished by having to eat whatever glittery nastiness is in their possession. At my girlfriend's house, I was the only person who finished his entire mooncake.<br />
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This is unfortunate, because Mid-Autumn Festival, at least metaphysically, could be even better than Thanksgiving. Unlike Thanksgiving, while it's of course a festival made to enjoy earth's bounty and family, it's also a festival specifically centered around longing. It's great to make it home, but it's almost more meaningful not to make it home. Why? Because of poems like this one by Li Bai, the most solemn hymn of Mid-Autumn Festival.<br />
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</div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span style="font-size: small;">床前明月光,</span></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span style="font-size: small;">疑是地上霜。</span></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span style="font-size: small;">举头望明月,</span></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span style="font-size: small;">低头思故乡。</span></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Arial Unicode MS';"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;">It's quite difficult to translate Chinese poetry, so I'll just give a simple prose translation. </span> </div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><i>“</i><span style="font-size: small;"><i>I lay in bed and see the moonlight shining in front of my bed, </i></span><i> </i></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>and wonder if there's frost on the ground.</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>I look up at the moon, </i></span><i> </i></div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>and then lower my head and think of home.” </i></span> </div><div style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><br />
</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal;">Poems like this are the heart of the festival, and are a big reason why I love Chinese culture so much, once all the garish packaging is removed. We all get lonely, we all think of home, or what we wish home would have been like. People separated through all time have found comfort in the fact that they look up at the same sun, moon or stars as their loved ones. But who ever invented a holiday dedicated explicitly to that? Only the Chinese would do that.<br />
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I received a number of e-mails from Chinese friends of mine on Mid-Autumn Festival. All of them happened to be overseas, and were certain to have stared at the sky and thought of home. In some ways I envied them -- unadulterated homesickness is a more real expression of the holiday than what it was for me: moon cake packaging and Heineken. Luckily, I was away from home, too, and could think of my family, even though they--foreigners as they are--were unaware that I was formally missing them. But that's Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday that includes, even elevates, the melancholy, rather than a holiday that just makes half of us so. Unfortunately, even the melancholy has been drowned out of the festival, in the same way that most holidays kill what makes them meaningful.</div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-33516519248055601472010-06-23T17:55:00.015+08:002010-09-25T03:47:36.638+08:00The Answer to Societal Corruption? A Liberal Arts Education: The Chinese Stanley Fish Speaks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWpgD198V8uT3HrsXLZ_wo-Hq_tCtuCsR2vZvN6uCJjfLz8PF15hKqcszaYUuoLT77uZH5aPReljnLtKeXMsboRqkS6Ro7v1jvZ0Df9M3v4k5yMM0V27FqCUUxBnxGl7nTg3NrjjESEP8/s1600/Septem-artes-liberales.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWpgD198V8uT3HrsXLZ_wo-Hq_tCtuCsR2vZvN6uCJjfLz8PF15hKqcszaYUuoLT77uZH5aPReljnLtKeXMsboRqkS6Ro7v1jvZ0Df9M3v4k5yMM0V27FqCUUxBnxGl7nTg3NrjjESEP8/s400/Septem-artes-liberales.jpg" width="305" /></a></div><div><br />
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</div>Today, browsing Professor Liu Cheng's <a href="http://www.bloglegal.com/blog/user/liuchengss/">blog</a>, I came across a <a href="http://www.bloglegal.com/blog/cgi/shownews.jsp?id=2600049005">fascinating interview</a> with the dean of Fudan University, the top university in Shanghai and one of the top universities in China. Of course, while I'm always thrilled to read every dean interview I can get my hands on, it was the title of this interview that particularly intrigued me: "The Collapse of the Chinese University Consciousness." <br />
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</div><div>It seems fair to ask what consciousness existed that could have collapsed, as it was only thirty years ago that many of China's universities re-opened after being shut down for years during the Cultural Revolution. Well, Dean Yang answers that:<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“If there's corruption, bribery, and sex-power transactions even within the universities, then is there any point in talking about social trust at large? Universities are getting carried away with following the trends, and have become employment services. ...."</i><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">There are two major points here. One is that many Chinese feel that nothing is sacred anymore. In the public consciousness, nearly every profession has been corrupted by greed and posturing. Teachers, doctors, engineers...name a profession, most Chinese can give you the stereotypical scam. (More on this tomorrow.) I don't know how much academic dishonesty, corruption, degree forgery, plagiarism goes on in Chinese Universities; I only know how much people think goes on. I have a number of friends who went to work for l<i>aw firms</i> because the academic world was too suffocating.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Second, universities are under huge pressure, both from above and below. From above, there's pressure to build Asia's Ivy League. For about half as long as China's been chasing the developed world's economies, it's been trying to build world class academic institutions, with far less success. A recent blow to China's academic ego was that a British college ranking institution failed to place even one mainland university in Asia's top ten. From below (and I guess, from above, but what pressure here isn't from above?), there's the burgeoning unemployment of recent graduates. China graduates close to seven million students a year into a country that just doesn't have that many slots for college-educated workers. Hence, you can see Dean Yang's frustration at becoming China's "employment service."</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Yang isn't interested in resumes, he's far more interested in what the university can do about Problem One. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>"[Fostering] social responsibility is a key value extant in the university. When breakdowns in social norms arise in a society, university scholars need to step forward boldly, speak and write, caution against impending disasters. They need to say why something is happening and which road to take in order to solve the problem.”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“Our universities are being charged with the responsibility of raising generation after generation of the Elite. Take the students at Peking University, Qinghua University, at Fudan, the accomplishments of these students after graduation will determine the direction of the country. For a great nation like China, the accomplishments of this group of people will even determine the future peace of the world. That's why even before WWII, the British philosopher Russell expressed his anxiety at the Fascist education of the young taking place in Germany and Japan. Sure enough, after that generation of students emerged, the world was unable to stay at peace.”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">One of the things that makes studying China so fascinating is that Chinese communication is far more dependent on implication than English. I'm not sure, but I think what Yang's saying is "Watch out, right now our children are receiving an education that puts us all a road to global nastiness." More than that, I think here we start seeing more of what Yang intimated by the "collapse of the Chinese University consciousness." There have been times when Chinese universities were the conscience of the country, times during in my lifetime. In fact, during the lifetime of any American of legal drinking age... </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">What's also fun about Yang is that he, in traditional Chinese fashion, spends far more time talking about what needs to be (and no doubt, is being) done than the problem itself. Yet while the form is typical, the solution is anything but: liberal arts education. This is where I wished <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/a-classical-education-back-to-the-future/?scp=2&sq=stanley%20fish&st=cse">Stanley Fish</a> would make an appearance, so that they could commiserate, no doubt in Latin. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“Why does Fudan have to carry out a General Knowledge Education Program [Liberal Arts Education -- it's important to note hat he doesn't use the word "Liberal Arts Education" here, perhaps for good reason]? Because in 20 years China can't help but play the part of a powerful country, the role of a great nation. We have to have a group of people who can take on that level of responsibility. According to current maturation patterns of top talent, the ages 35-45 are exceedingly important years [in the determination of who will eventually become a leader of influence]. Those [leaders] are studying on our campuses right now. What kinds of qualities do they need to posses?”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“First off, they need to have a global vision, with a mentality that's incredibly open to the world. We don't want them to be like American politicians, just believing that their country is the best: 'If you don't listen to me, I'm going to send my army and destroy you.' [Ouch]. [They] can't forget that different cultures and histories exist on this earth. Every country has its own set of stuff [of worth]. If there's just one culture and one value system extent on this earth, we're going to be facing Armageddon, because culture is like human genes, requiring cross-hybridization in order to engender new culture -- [the pool] can't be too limited.”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">A quick note. I don't feel that I need to justify the simplistic view of Americans or American politicians Yang presents here, there are, unfortunately, some American politicians who do present this simplistic a front. Moreover, both liberals and classical liberals in the U.S. frequently use similarly broad generalizations about China's economic or humanitarian record, devoid of any nuance. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But if he has offended, think but this and all is mended: this was purely utilitarian, no other statement could get more Chinese heads to nod in agreement at the obviously true point: a globalized world needs a globalized perspective. The whole premise of his article is that Chinese universities can't hold a candle to American universities (something I'd fault as equally lacking in nuance, even if it's laudatory). </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“<i>Second, they need to have deep understanding of their respective disciplines, otherwise they're just going to be people who simply indulge in exaggeration. A people, a country, can't not have a group of academic masters. Third, what are their ethical principles going to be like? The squandering of wealth by the rapacious American Wall Street financiers caused a global disaster. Do you want leaders like that?”</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Side note II: You think it's just Main Street that's mad at Wall Street? Nope. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Again, he could have mentioned any manner of corruption in Chinese society (and does in other sections), but why alienate his audience? They've already internalized that.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“Fourth, they need to possess proper levels of verbal and written eloquence. Regardless of with whom they're communicating --what group of people, of what cultural background, and regardless of what discipline they're engaged in, they all need to be able to communicate.” </i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“Fifth, they must have a critical understanding of the natural world and of the humanities. They can't believe that scientists don't need to be accomplished in the humanities. That kind of person is a scientific craftsman, and will never become a leader in academic circles. Academic leaders must have an incredibly integrated, comprehensive character and moral personality. First-rate scientists are all profoundly accomplished in philosophy, so much so that even philosophers are surprised by it.” </i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>“Therefore, we need to clarify a few notions. Liberal arts education is an idea, and isn't antagonistic to specialization....We will increasingly emphasize the wisdom of the liberal arts, emphasize fundamental academic thought, methods, and history, not simply teaching the skills required to take a test or solve a problem."</i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>"Only after one possesses a profound grounding in Chinese culture, an understanding of global culture, is both tolerant and accepting, and has a strong foundation in his/her specialization, hereafter [in this modern age] only that type of person is going to be able to become a leader in his/her respective field. Our "general education" program isn't yet meeting this demand, so we're right in the middle of improving.... University deans don't just go around raising money.” </i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i><br />
Three quick comments.<br />
<ol><li>I always liked Thomas Friedman's idea in <i>The World is Flat</i> that one of the ironies of modern society is that everyone thinks everyone else is behind in education. We think we're behind the Chinese, the Chinese think they're behind us. We're trying to shed the weight of canonical, rigid liberal arts education for more specialization while China's academic leaders are pleading for it. </li>
<li>I hope you gleaned something positive from this, as I did: the fact that highly intelligent, sensible discussions are happening in the Chinese media and are consumed by the Chinese public. This is an incredibly regular occurrence, especially because Chinese TV has far more PBS-es than MTVs. </li>
<li>Finally, one thread that runs through Dean Yang's commentary is just how much <i>social morality</i> is on everyone's mind, even if, according to this great post on <a href="http://www.chinalawblog.com/2010/06/china_corruption_we_aint_seeing_it.html">China Law Blog</a>, China's actually ahead of most similarly-situated countries in its corruption indicators. But China wants to be a "great nation," Transparency International's survey would provide little solace to most Chinese: they want to compare themselves with the US, the EU and Japan, even if our financiers and politicians are rapacious, intolerant, and hawkish. </li>
</ol></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Unfortunately, the space for public discourse of solutions to the problem of social immorality is quite limited, as it touches upon issues of government power and moral suasion. If it's not politics, it's philosophy or religion -- and who wants to talk about that? Well, anyone who likes the liberal arts. And there it is again: the brilliance of the indirect statement/interview, and the slow evolution of the word "consciousness." I have no doubt that not only Stanley Fish, but many Chinese academics would welcome a reanimation of the Chinese University consciousness. The only question is, will Beijing?</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-29321649892365106542010-06-22T17:37:00.013+08:002010-09-25T03:47:48.373+08:00What'll it be World...Cup or Expo?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZD9BKMUNcAhggqIktu50IsbatDIKZ3xN9OZPuo2EuO443MHksoDI1M-0JhwoW-dGnjbKP8O__Zkkr4HisgPsVe5VZisJWslbJm5CAAzXJc-e-jgAjV8KFJOpNSXdfSjgwOIb0BFA4YU/s1600/china_pavilion_expo2010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWZD9BKMUNcAhggqIktu50IsbatDIKZ3xN9OZPuo2EuO443MHksoDI1M-0JhwoW-dGnjbKP8O__Zkkr4HisgPsVe5VZisJWslbJm5CAAzXJc-e-jgAjV8KFJOpNSXdfSjgwOIb0BFA4YU/s640/china_pavilion_expo2010.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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If you haven't heard, the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/04/china-rules-the-world-at-expo-2010/39566/">World Expo's</a> taking place right now in Shanghai, the same time that South Africa's hosting the World Cup. Assuming you had to pick one to visit, to which would you go?<br />
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I'm a fan of an educated decision, so let's look at the stats:<br />
<br />
<i>Stats de Excess</i><br />
<ul><li>Shanghai's spent forty-five billion US dollars on the event, more than was spent on the Beijing Olympics.</li>
<li>South Africa's spent over five billion US dollars, <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Money/The-Sports-Economist/2010/0513/South-Africa-spends-3.5-billion-on-World-Cup-preparations.-But-for-what-return">nearly 2%</a> of its GDP.</li>
</ul><br />
<i>Stats de Exasperation</i><br />
<ul><li>If you head to Shanghai, you'll have to deal with long lines, over-booked hotels, and <a href="http://chinadivide.com/2010/gumby-versus-haibao-shanzhai-mindset-shanghai-expo.html">Gumby's googly-eyed Chinese cousin </a>, Haibao, plastered all over the city.</li>
<li>South Africa promises long lines, over-booked hotels, and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8737455.stm">a cacophony of 127-decibel traditional horns</a> that they will guilt you into tolerating.</li>
</ul><i>Factor de la Determination</i><br />
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So, as far as excess and exasperation indicators go, they're running neck and neck. What to do? Please allow me to offer the determining factor: their official songs.<br />
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In the South African corner, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRpeEdMmmQ0">Shakira and Freshly Ground</a> (<a href="http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/sdH4MUCtjZ8/">China link</a>). In the Middle Kingdom (Corner), <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBul8Mi6L9I">Quincy Jones, Tan Dun, Alfredo Rodriguez, and Siedah Garrett</a> (<a href="http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/toZD3g1mcIY/">China link</a>).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGcIbJoQHWIIA8xKqXqxRoaz7i_dfF1Q8wvRlzl5R-vN0CwrJuPBFvp-KwG1Y91UK_nUa-PPG6KfEEq_IJbs96wJUCjnXeSG3VtY_j0xBvYUY31YV23jqUuvg_qHFu3y1yVX7QEcUmKyY/s1600/south-africa-2010.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGcIbJoQHWIIA8xKqXqxRoaz7i_dfF1Q8wvRlzl5R-vN0CwrJuPBFvp-KwG1Y91UK_nUa-PPG6KfEEq_IJbs96wJUCjnXeSG3VtY_j0xBvYUY31YV23jqUuvg_qHFu3y1yVX7QEcUmKyY/s320/south-africa-2010.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
It's a battle of platitudes, and who wants to get into that battle with Shakira? The first time I saw the World Cup video, I was sitting with my girlfriend, who immediately wanted to go to Africa (after she asked me if Shakira was a natural blond). The second time I watched the video, I wanted to go to Africa.<br />
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Shanghai will give a billion dollars to anyone who was motivated to go to the Expo after hearing "Better City, Better Life" (or who can give an coherent English interpretation of what the phrase "Better City, Better Life" is supposed to mean). <br />
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But it's not Shanghai's fault. The Olympics, the World Cup...these are things that can be hyped and over-hyped and still retain their magic. With a World Expo, Shanghai's got something that's past its prime, and lavishing it with $45 billion dollars-worth of trappings somehow makes it seem smaller, and, ironically, makes it seem cheaper, like a really fancy trade show. That's something that even Quincy Jones couldn't mask.Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-34356246704566695332010-06-21T18:17:00.010+08:002010-09-25T03:48:19.913+08:00Tennis and Implicit Quality<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdleAin9QYHlbRvTB1tAP-EFM3TobPe1DTGEYJIY32vs-25o4-tnTdAJinh990OENCxYABURpdt7BJbaNWJ3zJcnF5kegUMVQycJtcSONQthBR1StiU-lbxZqlMz6jyXpUToxOO1XD-b4/s1600/21062010595.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdleAin9QYHlbRvTB1tAP-EFM3TobPe1DTGEYJIY32vs-25o4-tnTdAJinh990OENCxYABURpdt7BJbaNWJ3zJcnF5kegUMVQycJtcSONQthBR1StiU-lbxZqlMz6jyXpUToxOO1XD-b4/s640/21062010595.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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I'm no good at writing home about my day. Sometimes I'll write home – paragraphs, pages – and I'll still get this reply from my mom, “That's nice Seth, but what have you been <i>doing</i><span style="font-style: normal;">?” So here goes. I'm going to try and stick to a narrative.</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Yesterday my girlfriend and I went to play tennis. It's the first time she's ever played, which I felt gave me good odds. Thus far, we've only played sports that were geared to her strengths (coordination, focus, poise, general motor skills) and not to mine (the fact that I'm twice her size). Of the racquet/paddle sports, then, tennis was the natural choice, especially because she's had a plastic dry cleaning bag stuffed with over one hundred brand new tennis balls sitting on her balcony for over five years -- a present from a friend at an athletic club who never bothered to ask her if she owns a tennis racquet, plays tennis, or puts much stock into gift presentation.<br />
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</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">There's a tennis court in her apartment complex, with a droopy, Savannah-type aesthetic, as if it's the tennis court next to the Garden of Good and Evil. It's a single court, enclosed with an hexagon-ish fence. There's more than enough paved area inside for two courts, but it's arranged in a way that only allows for one – with the same uncomfortable asymmetry of a baseball stadium that's been converted for a football game. For weeks I'd passed by, secretly plotting our tennis take-up. </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The day arrived. We warmed up, and I could feel my 5</span><sup><span style="font-style: normal;">th</span></sup><span style="font-style: normal;"> Grade Rock River Tennis Tourney prowess coming back to me. She seemed quite impressed. Relieved might be the better word, for as modern and “non-feudal” as she is, she still maintains a quite Confucian conception of the male-female sports hierarchy, and was getting tired of beating me in ping-pong, badminton, shuffleboard, and other sports that shall remain nameless. </span> </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Imagine my disappointment then, when, just as we started to really hit, I started edging back behind the baseline and realized that the fence was far too close to allow any real backline play. My racquet kept rattling off the chain-links behind me, and the ball kept on ending up in the net. My power game was effectively cowed, as was my ego. Of course, this being the first court Xuxu's ever played on, it wasn't the court, but I, who had the problem. Any excuse I made, sounded like, well, just that. I felt how the Russian hockey team must have felt when the Canadians made the Olympic ice smaller in order to limit their Slavic speed and agility. And, as is unfortunately the case for ex-pats here who unfortunately encounter an unfortunate coincidence, the thought crossed my mind that this was some type of Chinese conspiracy. They were badminton-ing tennis, no doubt as payback for our 100 years of semi-colonization.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Of course, this is ridiculous. There are no Chinese conspiracies as far as you or I know. </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But what is interesting is the way this baseline-less tennis court mirrors quite a lot in modern China. Things here are built by people who've no interest or experience with what they're building. Homes and skyscrapers are built by people who wouldn't see the inside of modern highrises if they weren't building them. (Which is why the most beautiful apartments almost always seem to be missing something. Insignificant example: I've never lived in a Chinese apartment with a bathroom drain placed at the lowest point of the floor, which has meant that I've squeegeed the bathroom floor after nearly shower I've taken in my three-plus years here.) Tennis courts are constructed by people who have no reference point but badminton, which (unfortunately for me) requires very little baseline play. Legal systems are built by people who've never known the feeling of non-human checks on power. </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The word for this in the business/manufacturing world, I've learned, is “implicit quality,” which, when you put “low” in front of it, sounds quite disparaging. Despite the fact that “low implicit quality” seems like quite a vicious personal attack, it's simply supposed to denote the ability of an assembly-line worker to view the product he's making with the same critical eye that a developed-world consumer would see it. I've been told that training a quality-control worker on a Nike shoe line to see a pair of running shoes with the “same eyes” as an American consumer takes nearly a year. Before that, they're quite unwilling to take a perfectly good pair of shoes and just throw them away. “Low implicit quality” is the benign answer to why we've now got lead in our toys, carcinogens in our drywall, and any manner of nasty stuff in our toothpaste. Or, in other words, “Congratulations, by virtue of the fact that you've grown up in one part of the world, you know what kind of stuff to throw away and what kind of stuff to use for six months and then throw away.”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">But just like that tennis court's not going away anytime soon, neither are cheap unsafe goods and cheap unsafe toys. Not until the people who make the products are making them for themselves.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">At the end of the day, there don't seem to be any shortcuts. You either do the work, pay a little more to raise everyone's “quality level,” do your best to ensure that the people making Nikes can buy them, or you just get used to killer consumer goods and tennis courts that are only good for badminton. </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-17916321709035590422010-06-18T11:13:00.013+08:002010-11-30T01:52:57.352+08:00Wen and Wenceslas<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpEFWruV03m61kZysVWGIaXxLSDSucGYuHCzzF7dUtb3-2eODC2ROraP_jRpHZYAkfwOQcX9rsbWIY27-DRULk0WQhNwY3jRkA1SNYNIIp7p90Qul7Ugtv86q8f76tBUqJYcE3v7Rj7nk/s1600/Wen+watermelon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="427" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpEFWruV03m61kZysVWGIaXxLSDSucGYuHCzzF7dUtb3-2eODC2ROraP_jRpHZYAkfwOQcX9rsbWIY27-DRULk0WQhNwY3jRkA1SNYNIIp7p90Qul7Ugtv86q8f76tBUqJYcE3v7Rj7nk/s640/Wen+watermelon.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Here's the title of a recent article I saw on <a href="http://news.workercn.cn/contentfile/2010/06/16/190906277353348.html">workercn.com</a>, “We have to show care and concern for the new generation of peasant [migrant] workers just like we would for our own children.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“On June 14<sup>th</sup>, on the approach of the Chinese people's joyful celebration of the Dragon Boat Festival [Duan Wu Jie], Premier Wen Jia Bao successively visited a number of child welfare institutions, the 'Modernize/Enrich One's Country' Community, and the construction site at the Line Six 'Peace' subway stop; [he went] to call on orphaned and disabled children and those receiving little social aid, to understand the current vegetable supply and price situations at the farmers' market, and to convene a 'new generation of migrant workers' symposium.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I have great respect for Premier Wen Jia Bao (see my earlier posts on his “dignity” comments), and it was with equally great interest that I opened the link to this article about Wen's recent day with the people. As I've mentioned earlier, “Grandpa Wen” is the human side of the central government, a side that has been increasingly shown in the news media. Proving again that no one can compete with China in either photo op quality or quantity, Wen managed to visit poor and disabled children, poor pensioners, the poor pensioners' market, and the new generation of poor migrant workers all in one morning. (Showing care and concern for one dispossessed group is good. Showing care and concern <a href="http://news.workercn.cn/contentfile/2010/06/14/233604824115230.html">for every dispossessed group is better.</a>)<br />
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</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Regardless of the amount of irony you perceive or do not perceive in the preceding paragraph (I myself don't know how much to perceive, which is why I'm writing), it was a meaningful gesture. More than that, it was an astounding gesture. It's rare that you see <i>any </i><span style="font-style: normal;">politician, anywhere, near his country's poorest citizens – I have a hard time picturing Obama holding a press conference with a homeless community.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The </span>Migrant Worker Conference was highlighted by Wen's remark that “We have to show care and concern for workers just like we would for our own children.” Again, it is because I respect the man so much, and because I believe that he has genuine intentions, that I regret my first response to this was a warm fuzziness...and an awkward feeling I get whenever confronted with excessive patronization, similar to the feeling I get at Christmas when forced to sing <span style="font-style: normal;">the horribly-pleasant peasant-loving “Good King Wenscelas.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Premier Wen Jia Bao stepped out,</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>'Fore the Duan Wu season</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Vegetables lay piled about,</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Deep and crisp and even.</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Brightly shone the camera lights,</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Made the scene surreal</i></span></div><div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Wen asked poor men of their plight,</i></span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Food and health and fuel.</span></span> </i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><br />
</span></span></i></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">But lots of things in China can be uncomfortable, particularly anything involving the government, the media, and regular people. This isn't just China, in <i>any </i>country, how one interacts with the needy/poorest/dispossessed/disenfranchised is tricky business – even choosing the proper nomenclature is difficult. Everyone struggles with it. I like to think of it as the P<i>atronization-Guilt Spectrum</i>.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">On one side is patronization, this is Good King Wenceslas: <i>“</i><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">Therefore, Christian men, be sure, Wealth or rank possessing, Ye who now will bless the poor, Shall yourselves find blessing.”</span></i></span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">One who resides solely on this side of the spectrum will think of herself as generous, magnanimous, filled with religious or civic duty. She may think of the recipients of her “charity” as helpless, pitiful, and lacking drive or education. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">The other side of spectrum is guilt. The most talked-about type in American public service circles is White Guilt (a certain degree of which is a necessity to engage in polite, modern society), but there are many other kinds. Guilt as motivator brings people to the inner city because they can't reconcile the gap in wealth, success, or status between themselves and others who have very little. While patronizing feelings may attribute that gap to difference in personal integrity, effort, or choices, guilt doesn't see that gap as attributable to anything other than an accident of birth, or worse, a history of discrimination and oppression. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Over the past few weeks, I've read a number of books about the founding of the Communist Party in China, and one thing I found quite interesting was the success to which the founders used “Bourgeois Guilt” to train and educate their elite members. “Your wife wants to stop going on food raids just because she's eight months' pregnant? Peasant workers work in the fields until they have their child. Then they just cut the umbilical cord with a sickle right in the field and keep on threshing.” A powerful image, necessary perhaps to break down residual, and equally powerful conceptions of class and rank left over from dynastic Chinese society. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">In my own experience, I feel that I'm all over the spectrum, and believe most others are as well, which I think (hope) is normal. At the end of the day, the only way to get out of this angst-filled dilemma is to just stop thinking about it and start actually interacting with those whom you've put on this abstract pedestal/anti-pedestal. This is why I admire what Wen's doing. No matter how much I cringe at some of his responses and at the excessive, manicured press it receives. He's the only one actually out there talking to people on a consistent basis. That said, let's look at what he's saying. </span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">He said a lot, and, as one would expect, everything he said was the right thing to say. He thanked the workers profusely, claiming that their work building the towering skylines across the country makes them the “glory of China,” he stressed that they needed comprehensive support and improvement across every life indicator: wages and benefits, medical insurance, housing help. He admonished them to be morally good, to pursue the good and to pursue success when it was time, but to go against the grain when it was time to do that as well [Did he mean when other workers want to strike?].</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;">He took ten questions from the workers. One of which came from Wu Chang Wei.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">“<span style="font-style: normal;">'Premier, I have something to say.' Wu Chang Wei, who was sitting in the back row, stood up, raised his hand, and spoke. This 28-year-old Central Iron worker told the Premier that, although company living conditions (room and board, etc.) are all good, my work is intense and my life is boring. Therefore, I really envy the relaxed, carefree lives and neat and tidy clothes of the city residents.'</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">'I really understand where you're coming from. You've raised a huge question on how to make the lives of this next generation of migrant workers more substantial, more rich and diverse.' Wen said, 'At 28, outside of work, it's natural to think about [one's] life. The first thing is that companies need to give workers a more rich and diverse life, for example, instituting sports and athletics activities, singing activities. The second is that individuals need to have long-term ambitions, make full use of their youth to read more books, develop skills. A person needs to have a love [hobby], have things s/he pursues. If you live that way you'll feel that there's never enough time, life won't be dull.' Premier Wen then heard that the day before had been Wu Chang Wei's birthday, and he wished him a happy birthday...<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">I also want to give you my hope [for you], I hope that while you're young you have ideals and ambition, that you do your work and duty well, and use your work, your ingenuity, and contributions to</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"><i>win</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 15px;">dignity...”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">You may have guessed that I originally wanted to say that Wen was Wenceslas and leave it at that. Well, close. What I had originally wanted to say was that much of the Chinese conception of dignity remains in the Victorian Age. That in that conception, treating 28-year-old migrant workers as you would your children is not only not wrong but to be encouraged (after all, while I might take offense to being treated like a child, they <i>are </i><span style="font-style: normal;">the age of Wen's children, probably younger)</span>. And yet, I found myself moved by Wen's (no-doubt-prepared) answers, even wishing that I could have the chance to ask his advice, too. It's not just iron workers who are lost and need grandfatherly wisdom. </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I also wanted to analyze "treating workers like we'd treat our children" using Jeremy Waldron's conception of dignity as “change in status.” Waldron <a href="http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv1/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__news/documents/documents/ecm_pro_061885.pdf">claims</a> that </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.42in;">“<span style="font-size: x-small;">'Dignity' is a term used to indicate a high-ranking legal, political, and social status, and ...the idea of human dignity is the idea of the assignment of such a high-ranking status to everyone....the idea of human dignity keeps faith with the old hierarchical system of dignity as noble or official rank, and we should view it in its modern form as an equalization of high status rather than as something that eschews talk of status altogether.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.5in; margin-right: 0.42in;"><br />
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I wanted to say, that for all the change over the past 100 years in China, for all the bourgeois guilt, there still hasn't been an equalization of status here. In fact, in the past thirty years, I fear there's been somewhat of a retrenchment of older ways of viewing status as tied to position or power, and rights, respect and one's due dignity have been re-attached. I want to say, that for many Chinese, the status of peasants and peasant workers is not too far from the status their peasant ancestors had (or didn't have) in "feudal" China.<br />
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I think it's true that dignity has to be “won” in China (and elsewhere), but I don't want to say the rest of the above about Wen (which is why I haven't included the other four verses of my adapted Christmas carol). Considering what he has to fight against on a daily basis, and what he's been through, I doubt few could do a better job of expressing humanity to people who society sees, and who most likely see themselves, as far less dignified. If he is Wenceslas, or even part-Wenceslas, he is only because his castle is far more prison than abode.<br />
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</div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-54038109755299431842010-03-17T00:35:00.010+08:002010-09-25T04:06:47.324+08:00Building Up and Tearing Down? Educating Workers on the Labor Law<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ7aTwkRChvQbUxWWrgVqIywk-aJ0zEdd5lUqg3jEo1A2_ECX3g9pMb0le0TUYCp0-3yCeuaZ5fKVgIdpN3uOWwDnfGQbOCtup6OAdDlBchwyDBlqn4UslSiXM7YnHh93Ejw2hSq3zQeA/s1600-h/Laborers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ7aTwkRChvQbUxWWrgVqIywk-aJ0zEdd5lUqg3jEo1A2_ECX3g9pMb0le0TUYCp0-3yCeuaZ5fKVgIdpN3uOWwDnfGQbOCtup6OAdDlBchwyDBlqn4UslSiXM7YnHh93Ejw2hSq3zQeA/s640/Laborers.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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</span></div></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Just today, I got my hands on a workers' pocket guide to the Labor Contract Law, China's new labor law that's been hailed as (or hoped to be) a panacea for many of China's labor problems, as well as for the recent, worrisome, social unrest and growing economic inequality. I had lots of other materials to choose from, some far more erudite and enlightening no doubt, but this one had diagrams, cartoons, and middle-school-level Chinese, so naturally I started with it.</span><br />
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<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It's a small, passport-sized book, limited to a few dozen pages, but it does an excellent job of introducing the law to any worker who's lucky enough to receive a copy. The law's taught in a Q & A format, with the questions pertaining to real-life problems at the beginning of each chapter: “Little Ming's factory didn't have money to pay her this month, so they gave her a box of pants off the assembly line and told her to go sell them on the street in order to get her monthly wage. Is this legal or not? Answer: No. It is not.”</span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
I learned quite a bit, but wouldn't have thought it worth mentioning here until I got to the last chapter, which has the laconic title, “Life.” There's no labor law talk here, but simply a chapter that seeks to help the readers –most likely “peasant” migrant workers―to adjust to life in China's cities. “Life” is kind of a cross between the State Department Travel Warnings and Miss Manners, and it had me laughing on the subway (something it strictly forbids).</span><br />
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Here's an excerpt:<br />
</span> <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Developing Desirable Life Habits</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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You should do your best to develop good life habits, the </span> <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">most important</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> [emphasis added] of these behavioral norms and habits are the following:<br />
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1) Line up for public transportation and in supermarkets, don't cut in line.<br />
2) Don't make loud noise or roughhouse in public places.<br />
3) Don't spit or throw garbage on the ground randomly – work to keep the environment clean.<br />
4) Be conscious to care for public facilities: public and private property, trees, plants and flowers, public phone booths, underpasses, garbage cans, etc.<br />
5) Pay attention to living in a polite and civilized way, wear proper clothing and accessories [this could also be translated “befitting your position”], behave in an appropriate manner, try to avoid vulgar behavior.<br />
6) Pay close attention to personal hygiene, wash your hands before and after meals, avoid strenuous work after meals.<br />
7) Reasonably plan out your food and beverage consumption, avoid overeating and drinking too much, too fast, don't drink alcohol to excess.<br />
8) Be careful to use civilized language, such as “Hello,” “Thank you,” “I'm sorry,” etc.</span> </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
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Why is this noteworthy? I think its noteworthiness lies in the fact that the Chinese friends with whom I discussed this passage and others felt it lacked note-worth. </span> </div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
On one hand, these very reasonable suggestions make complete sense. In China, the move from the countryside to the city is roughly the equivalent of going to another country (especially if that city's Hong Kong), and there is quite a bit of a cultural clash between the two groups. Moreover, I'd be a hypocrite to deny that I haven't looked to the sky on occasion and prayed that certain people next to me (on the bus, in a restaurant, in the park) who were breaking one (or all) of these “behavioral norms” would cease and desist. The book's life lessons seem even more reasonable when one considers that little communication occurs between migrant workers and their "more sophisticated" urban comrades – even if someone were to live in Shanghai for ten years, the amount of real, sustained conversation that occurs between those with Shanghai </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">hukous</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> (residence permits) and those without is about the equivalent of what goes on between Americans and their friendly neighborhood undocumented aliens. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The organization that published this handbook works closely with workers, respects them, and is simply trying to make their lives in the city easier. After all, as each of my friends told me, “These people have not been educated...” and need it desperately. In many ways, these eight rules are the nucleus of the modern Chinese elite's vision of polite public society: rules of etiquette mixed in with common sense maxims from the archetypal Chinese grandmother, rules about protecting the environment gel seamlessly with words from the wise involving various ways to avoid overtaxing your digestive system. [For those of you who haven't lived here, disobeying China's many common sense rules can be as jarring to some Chinese as being impolite. Failing to dress warmly enough isn't just a bad idea, it causes as much neural disturbance as a loud mobile phone talker on the subway.]<br />
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And yet...and yet, there's a stark contrast between educating someone as to her legal rights and then, in the same breath, telling her to avoid spitting in public and defacing public phone booths. I've wrestled with this all day, struggling with why I was struck by this intra-pamphlet shift while my Chinese friends were not. I suppose a lot of it comes down to differing conceptions of law.<br />
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The first nine-tenths of the handbook were an education, but they were an education about the legal rights of each Chinese person. These rules were meant to be, and are, a great equalizer in Chinese society. I've talked to many lawyers who feel that, if nothing else, the new labor law has ratcheted up the legal consciousness of the Chinese workers. This is a huge step towards rule of law. Others have mentioned that while the standard (often only) path to get justice in China was (is) to throw oneself at the mercy of a government official, the labor law has given workers a “more dignified” pathway. They don't have to rely on the mercy of an official; rather, they can assert a right. This is the appeal of rule of law, an appeal that is directly disproportionate to the number of officials one knows.<br />
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How different these first chapters are, then, from the last. The first are ennobling, liberating even, the last, well, remind them that they are from a dusty, dirty, different world and to that dust they shall return (unless they can manage to change their </span> <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">hukou</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">).<br />
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But perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps each chapter fits in comfortably under the heading of education: people need to learn about their rights just like they need to learn to act like proper Chinese rights-bearers. After all, I'm still not sure which comes first, the fallacy that we're all equal before the law, or the one about being equal. </span> <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">...but couldn't they just make separate handouts?</span></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-68765768925776095302010-03-10T00:13:00.011+08:002010-09-30T22:23:29.878+08:00"Dignity, Always Dignity?" -- Wen Jia Bao Does His Own Singing in the Reign<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhELo3ggRH-n_kCNEi9hHLKTNW7SS5JcJ4pFcog0uOUMvGqaaLEWL1gjVg7CLbjQC9Afu0RPZWZ8dMufy3t1Nrjg2GzgTeqKqN0ZXDcXfNBnAG47v6PR47JC8H2nlyJxg30ga5Vfpndc/s1600-h/Wen.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPhELo3ggRH-n_kCNEi9hHLKTNW7SS5JcJ4pFcog0uOUMvGqaaLEWL1gjVg7CLbjQC9Afu0RPZWZ8dMufy3t1Nrjg2GzgTeqKqN0ZXDcXfNBnAG47v6PR47JC8H2nlyJxg30ga5Vfpndc/s640/Wen.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px;"><b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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<b><i><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world." </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Universal Declaration of Human Rights</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">, meet Wen Jia Bao, “Everything we do we do to ensure that the people live a happier life with more dignity.”</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">-------------------------------------</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">"Grandpa Wen," as he is (mostly) affectionately named, said this in his "state of the nation" address at the opening session of the National People's Congress, a three thousand member assembly which has no problems with super-majorities. That little word, "dignity," piqued quite a bit of interest. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">My girlfriend mentioned his dignity-dropping immediately, claiming that his use of "that word, in this situation," was something big. At first, I thought she'd just mentioned it since it's been a recurring theme of mine over the past year. I feel strongly that China's going to have to produce a robust theory of an "Eastern" conception of dignity if it wants to continue claiming that many of the rights mentioned in the above-cited UDHR are really just Western cultural norms masquerading as universal rights. But she could've cared less about what I said. She meant that this was actually important.</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Later that week, Wen, doing his best Obama impersonation, engaged Chinese netizens in an internet chat, and answered one blogger's question, "...[W]hat does it mean that people need to live with more dignity?" </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">[Side note: I really do feel that he is impersonating Obama. As hard as the Western press was on Obama for not taking a tougher stance with China in his last visit, Obama's internet town hall meeting in Shanghai had a dramatic effect on many of the people here. Chinese leaders are rarely willing to engage private citizens directly, especially broadcast in real time. Since Obama's speech, I don't think I'm wrong in noticing an uptick in Wen's "regular guy" appearances, this internet chat being just one example.]</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Back to the question. Here's Wen's response. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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"...My speech was only 800 characters, but those two words ["dig" "nity"] have elicited the attention of the whole country. I've seen quite a lot of opinions on it. When I said I 'want all people to live with more dignity,' I meant mainly three aspects: first, every citizen should enjoy the freedom and rights they are entitled to under the constitution and the law. Regardless of who it is, in the eyes of the law, everyone should enjoy equality. Second, the ultimate goal of Chinese development is to satisfy the increasing material demands of the people, there is no [goal] other than this. Third, society’s complete development must be based on people’s individual development. We want to give people freedom and complete development to create profitable conditions, let their wisdom and skills compete to burst forth. That was what I meant by dignity." </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">If you haven't lived over here, it's hard to exaggerate the amount of scrutiny the words of high-ranking officials undergo, especially those made in formal situations. More than that, it's even harder to exaggerate the social, political, even legal effects that can spring from such statements. Of course, since I have to play my own devil's advocate here, it's also difficult to exaggerate the amount of beautiful, idealistic language that fills the Chinese constitution. (Or, I should say,"has filled, fills, was redacted and refilled, and will fill.")</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">It's been a tough last year: tough for US-China relations, labor relations, China-Google-internet-at-large relations, minority relations, etc. I was just reflecting on my last few entries, and I realized that they've all smacked of a growing pessimism, or at least frustration, with things here in China. There's a reason for that, I have become a bit more pessimistic in this past year. But it's not just me, I'd like to believe that I'm channeling a collective consciousness of my Chinese friends and colleagues, many of whom go to sleep with these troubled relations on their minds. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I think that's why Wen's words "elicited the attention of the whole country." While a lot of this "attention" was sarcastic, disillusioned, and even downright mean, I still saw something in my girlfriend's eyes that I haven't seen for a while: hope. You don't forget hope when you see it in someone's eyes. You might mistake it for love, but then you realize that you haven't done anything to deserve it that day. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
</span> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> </span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Thanks Wen. </span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
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</i></b></span></span></span>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-21978930689011568372010-03-08T22:27:00.068+08:002010-09-25T03:17:54.705+08:00Chinese Justice, The Internet, and Chinese Internet Justice<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiepMIkWX7OpM2mMboSoILJ8H_DjNSnZq5DpMAeHpZ7TRWG4JEeTloSYh7kurJ1MA5E-qqjzk5OffXKWKy_NdGVqiJgZjiteHb9gDrkz88HCvDiiG-LPyeUp2u5UVEKsfrMTM5knzcB950/s1600-h/P200907130905082548257932.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiepMIkWX7OpM2mMboSoILJ8H_DjNSnZq5DpMAeHpZ7TRWG4JEeTloSYh7kurJ1MA5E-qqjzk5OffXKWKy_NdGVqiJgZjiteHb9gDrkz88HCvDiiG-LPyeUp2u5UVEKsfrMTM5knzcB950/s640/P200907130905082548257932.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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If it were possible to summarize my overarching purpose in coming to China, I suppose it might be this: to understand the Chinese sense of justice. This of course, is impossible, and one of those silly pursuits I should have abandoned in my youth. But like McDonald's double cheeseburgers, bad television, and trying to make people like you, there are just some silly pursuits that never leave you; nor, perhaps, on second thought, should they.<br />
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Since I have yet to figure out what Chinese justice is, any time I try to explain it to someone else, I just end up telling stories. Until I read the article on "human flesh searches" linked below, "justice" boiled down to two recent news stories -- one that made you laugh, and one that terrified.<br />
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The first was that of the <a href="http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/90872/6698787.html">Lanzhou Brick-thrower.</a> A 74-year-old teacher who'd had enough of cars running red lights decided to take a wheel-barrow-full of bricks down to the intersection and pelt any car running a red light with a brick. The best part of the story was the public response: a crowd gathered, a couple other old men started lobbing bricks along with him, others ran and brought them water and more ammunition. Once the story broke, he became a hero of sorts. If you read my recent post on red right turns, you can probably guess that he's my hero as well. As the linked article relates, his vigilantism received near universal acclaim, in the media and over the internet. Which meant that he was never punished for the damage he caused, but also meant that he, very soon, <a href="http://english.cri.cn/6909/2009/07/22/195s503299.htm">became a reformed, model traffic monitor</a>, who dutifully traded in his "justice bricks" for more a civilized (and no doubt, ineffective) means of traffic enforcement. Strangely enough, while traffic problems exist everywhere, he decided to monitor traffic in a city two thousand miles away from the scene of his former public demonstration. <br />
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The second story didn't begin or end as well. Last year, <a href="http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/grace-wang-and-chinese-nationalism/?scp=3&sq=china%20duke%20protest%20grace%20wang&st=cse">Nicholas Kristof</a> posted about the story of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/us/17student.html?st=cse&sq=china+tibet+Duke&scp=1">Grace Wang</a>,<br />
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"...a Chinese student at Duke University who tried to encourage dialogue between pro-Tibet protesters and pro-China protesters. Grace is from China, and bloggers there perceived her as betraying her country and siding with Tibetan independence. The result was a nationalist explosion on the Chinese web, with people posting her parents’ home address [and more] and comments that came across as threatening. Her parents abandoned their home for reasons of safety."<br />
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What I always found terrifying, and fascinating, about this story was that what censored Grace wasn't a government or a firewall, but the nationalist, ethical norms of certain wired members of her culture. These online masses enforced a version of vigilante justice, just as our kindly brick-thrower had, only theirs transcended borders and rendered any US Constitutional rights Grace enjoyed ineffectual to the extent that she wanted to remain a part of the Chinese community (she hasn't returned to China) or loved ones of hers did (her parents' house was ransacked). However far their actions are from what you might call "justice," those Chinese netizens could demand that Grace yield to their morality -- to the unwieldy, anonymous, and volitile force that has been unfortunately (and perhaps aptly) named, the "human flesh search engine," in a recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Human-t.html?pagewanted=1&sq=china&st=cse&scp=2">New York Times article</a>. An article that confirms that Grace's story was not an isolated incident.<br />
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There's quite a lot of excellent (not just excellent, but gripping) reading linked above, so I'll keep my own comments short: I'm overwhelmed.<br />
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One thing that's always amazed me in my study here is how, on one hand, there is no lack of awareness of government shortcomings (indeed, the national media is quite open and honest about the need to purge corruption; the Chinese internet world can be even more unforgiving) and yet, there is also the concomitant mass tendency to assume the guilt of the accused simply upon the announcement of the charges, as if the existence of the first condition bears no relevance on the validity of the second. This might be unfair of me, for, as an American (lawyer no less), I'm perhaps oversold on the truism that one is guilty until proven innocent, which is in many cases neither theoretically or practically true.<br />
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And yet, if you have time and energy to read the above articles in their entirety, I think there is something more to the explanation of what's happening here than just a universal, cross-cultural danger of internet dehumanization, or the vigilantism that can occur when one feels unprotected by the state, or the problem of a collective culture that can occasionally proclaim an individual guilty for even allowing the intimation that s/he has done something wrong. I think there's something else particular to modern Chinese culture implicit in both the harum tales of individuals standing up for what's right and also in the scarum tales of masses of netizens doing what's wrong.<br />
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I believe, first, that it's a problem of trust. A profound lack of public trust exists in China, between individuals and the state and between individuals themselves. Hence, no matter who's accused, whether a government official or a private citizen, each is quite unlikely to gain the benefit of the doubt. But going one step further, this lack of trust can then be either the cause or the effect of another, devastating belief: the belief in the omnipresence of societal badness, and of the need to purge this badness. It's as if everyone maintains the belief that every other stranger is Lady Macbeth. And in this Oriental Scotland, the willingness to instantly villainize whoever's been accused becomes the collective outing of the spot.Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-2270162031312727592010-03-05T18:51:00.006+08:002010-09-25T03:18:19.062+08:00Moral Dilemmas Solved While You Wait, Subway Art in Shanghai<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
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A few weeks ago I was waiting for my subway transfer and was struck by the art that lay across the tracks. Subway ads are normally filled with carefully manicured models or slick public service messages about forming lines, being polite to others, and other "civilizing" behavior. You can imagine my surprise then, when I saw the two pictures posted here staring me in the face. They're abrasive, messy, and dark, with cryptic messages to match their aesthetic: impassioned admonitions to avoid giving money to child beggars, an alarming and increasing phenomenon on the Shanghai subways. I'll do my best to translate this Guggenheimaganda.<br />
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The picture above, with the specter rising out from behind the child says, "She doesn't want the money for herself." True enough. This is a message already on most people's lips here, that children are part of begging rings, raising money for cruel and abusive adults -- made popular (or at least confirmed) in equally horrifying fashion in Slumdog Millionaire. The "fine print" then supplements the argument, though some might question its logic: "It's exactly your sympathetic heart that's making her miss out on receiving an education. There's a black hand [written in red] behind the circulation of begging children. Think thrice before stretching out a compassionate hand to help, and then don't."<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO-K6yqmcLdxCMDhQjVgJRaeIDLxUC0n1jzF6ti7dA2UiC5kY5Iv5LF48hVs2afpCmeXNrr_kRWG996zipwozJ7Jo6C6-_WwO8m-e_FGw8lj1kI461knULd58dc-aWSk7Y9cHZ8YxDvo0/s1600-h/15122009328-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="344" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgO-K6yqmcLdxCMDhQjVgJRaeIDLxUC0n1jzF6ti7dA2UiC5kY5Iv5LF48hVs2afpCmeXNrr_kRWG996zipwozJ7Jo6C6-_WwO8m-e_FGw8lj1kI461knULd58dc-aWSk7Y9cHZ8YxDvo0/s640/15122009328-1.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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The second picture cautions, "You're not helping her!" and then continues with the same fine print. Equal emphasis on the black hand. I'll only note that this picture is unfortunately very true to form. The children who come through the subway, no doubt numb from kowtowing and grabbing the feet of thousands of patrons a day, are stumbling about in a ghostly marianette dance. In other words, this picture completely fits the way the world feels when one of these children is at your feet. In fact, that's my problem with both of these paintings, they're too convincing.<br />
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I get chills every time I transfer at this station, but recently I've been getting angry. It's not that they don't portray a legitimate view of reality and of the possible non-salutary macro-effect your charity might have, but that they make not giving money to one of these children the equivalent of forming a line or waiting for people to exit the subway before entering -- a matter of course, the only right answer. I think that the moral dilemma here should remain a dilemma.<br />
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After struggling with the problem of the child in front of me and the evil (that <i>might</i> be) behind her, the problems of creating a market for villains but also those of creating a dearth of societal compassion, stuck between my fear of being swindled and my duty to respect each human life that passes before me, only then should I make my decision, in pain, sadness and perhaps righteous anger. It's probably going to be different each time.<br />
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It's not the pictures or their message, but their certainty that frustrates me. After all, perhaps the only thing I really owe that child is to think about her as a person. To look her in the eye, and say, "I can't give you money, but it's not because I don't love you." I just worry that looking at these pictures is going to keep us from looking at the children.Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-67493687507428299462010-03-04T21:17:00.010+08:002010-09-25T03:19:02.335+08:00Debating Rules and Standards with Cab Drivers<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Law school classes are filled with heavy, pedantic concepts, but even more than that, they're overflowing with explanatory analogies and metaphors describing those concepts. ("Law is a path...wait...law is a tool.. no, wait...law is a toolbox.") Perhaps it's just the nature of law, or of lawyers, to take a concept and explain it in five different ways. I think the variety stems -- in large part -- from the awareness that the "successful" analogy (in the meme sense of the word) carries a lot of interpretive power, and can result in the liberal or conservative use of a particular law or set of laws. Whatever the reason, legal concepts, like hailstones, pick up layers of understood meaning as they descend through the troubled minds of legal thinkers and into the (unfortunately?) not-so-troubled minds of the public.<br />
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Some analogies do work, though. One analogy that has always made sense to me has been to think of the differences between legal rules and legal standards as stop signs and yield signs. This connection isn't metaphorical -- the commands to "stop" and "yield," are, in fact, respectively, a real legal rule and a real legal standard. Here in Shanghai, I'm reminded of how important those two concepts are every time I cross the street.<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">More on that later. What I really want to talk about today is red right turns.<br />
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While out running a few weeks ago, I was nearly hit by a taxi driver who ignored me and the ten other people walking with me in the crosswalk. We were huddled together in the traditional, flounder-like, strength-in-numbers phalanx -- one of us might not make it across, but at least most would. As the cab passed by us, narrowly missing our group's outliers, my emotions got the better of me and I slapped the trunk. No damage was done to the car (or my hand), but it was enough to get him to stop, get out, and challenge me to a heated, extemporaneous battle of rhetoric and wit. He spoke on a sort of "Madlibs for Adults" script.</span><br />
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"Hey [impolite salutation]. What [adjective involving an [animal name] egg of inferior quality] right do you have to do to hit my car?"<br />
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"I'm sorry sir. I was merely expressing my discontent at your failure to observe the Central Government's statuary laws and relevant regulations on Traffic Safety. I believe that you're supposed to yield to us." (I'm afraid my Chinese does actually sound this Harry Potter-esque, I haven't quite mastered informal Chinese yet.)<br />
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"[Rhetorical indicator] yield?!? I'm turning right. [Interjection that will fail in its intended effect because the foreigner you're speaking with has no idea what insult you're using or its gravity .]"<br />
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"You still have to yield. It's the law....I'm a lawyer. (I promise this was said in jest and self-deprecation.)"<br />
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Luckily, my ten other compatriots in the crosswalk came to my aid. They understood the script far better than I did, and were far more effective in this game of Mad Libs than I could ever hope to be.<br />
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As the Oxford-style debate launched into the Shanghai dialect-ic, I took my leave. But I couldn't help but re-create our argument in my head. Why was it so difficult to convince this driver that there was no possible way he could ever be right in any sense of the word (besides the fact that there might be)?<br />
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As I mused, I thought that, given a second chance, this is what I'd have liked to convey to my driver-adversary...<br />
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<i> Stopping and Yielding in Legal Philosophy</i><br />
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The beauty of a simple stop sign is that it does not allow judgment in determining the best course of action. Whatever else the situation dictates, you must first stop. If you're unlucky enough to be at a stoplight, you're even more bereft of self-determination, as you'll be held in place by an inanimate lighted box for an extended period of time, released to your own devices only when its electrical circuits change the light from red to green. Shanghai drivers have this concept firmly under control. I've been impressed at the decided lack of blatant red-light-running<br />
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"Yielding" is a far more complex concept. In a sense, it's telling you to "continue only if it's prudent." Successfully yielding requires that the driver not only observe the order on the sign, but also that s/he takes in the surrounding environment, considers the safety risks of various courses of action, and then uses his/her judgment in moving forward. This is complex! Consider that in order to obey a stop sign, you only have to observe that sign. If you stop, you've succeeded in obeying that rule. Yet, even once you've "yielded," there is still the chance that you failed to comply with the requirements of that sign. Signs that require judgment on the part of the driver leave room for judgment regarding their compliance. <br />
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Of course, there's much more that can be said about this, especially when considering its relevance to China. (My mind just balked at the myriad blog posts Chinese Intersections could inspire.) I think I'll just stick with one observation though -- that in a complex world, rules and standards coexist at nearly every point in time, and I am never really allowed to forsake judgment: even if I successfully stop at a stop sign, there are any number of traffic rules/standards I can break in embarking from my stopped position. Stop signs don't really relieve us from exercising judgment, only from exercising one particular judgment, and even that's conditional (consider emergencies, broken lights, etc.). So for my purposes, the real difference between the two from the driver's perspective simply has to do with timing. One tells us to think. One tells us to stop, then think.<br />
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The problem with red right turns is that they're actually highly complex, as traffic laws go. It's a standard nestled within a rule -- drivers are to replace a very straightforward rule (stopping at a red light) with a yielding standard. This shouldn't be hard to one used to juggling the many rules and standards we're burdened with at all times, but it can be difficult for those with a less three-dimensional view of legal obligations. </span> <br />
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<i> A Judgment Problem</i><br />
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There are many reasons why the cab driver almost hit us and yet still felt confident enough to get out of his car and engage us in rigorous debate, starting with the possibility that he just didn't know the law, or that what I had done was a highly unusual and perhaps a quite jarring display of public disrespect (for which I have had moments of strong, uncomfortable guilt).<br />
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I'm going to assume that he </span> <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">did</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> know the law, in some form, and make two comments.<br />
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Comment One: He </span> <i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> is</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> exercising the judgment required by the standard, it's just that it is a judgment strongly influenced by cultural and empirical factors that equate to a vastly different conclusion as to what prudence requires. Or, as my girlfriend puts it, more curtly, "They have no notion of cause/effect nor of civil society."<br />
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At this point in time, cars on China's roads are recipients of far more rights than they are responsibilities (strict liability for any damage caused or pedestrian hit aside). As is mentioned in the blog post cited below, there are customary expectations among drivers and pedestrians on how different vehicles will act, and "how they will act" is normally consistent with the status bestowed by virtue of your mode of transportation: four wheels good, two legs bad.<br />
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There's also room here to talk about the value of individual life and the lack of a consciousness of what a ton of motorized metal can do to an individual life (whether that life is the driver's, passenger's, baby-held-in-parent-lap's [!], or that of the pedestrian). That's something I'd love to discuss with anyone who's read this entire thing and is still engaged enough to post a comment.<br />
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Observation Two: This is my favorite, so it's probably wrong: The complexity of a standard within a rule is too much for most drivers' legal consciousness. In my parley with the cab driver, I posited that he was required to yield. He rebutted that he was allowed to turn right on a red light. He had made the exception to the rule equal the negative of the rule. "Stop, think" became "Go, don't" rather than just "think." It was a green light, not a red right turn. The beauty of a rule is that it takes away judgment -- you must stop on red. The danger here is that drivers are equating an exception to the rule as no rule, rather than what it is, a standard within that rule. <br />
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Even I'm laughing at this post's ridiculousness now, but I think there's something to this. In classroom management, there are teachers who use lists of rules to control students and there are teachers who give standards. ("Don't talk, don't stand up, don't _____ without permission." vs. "Respect yourself and others") Both types of systems can run into trouble, but the particular trouble of the first type is that students can fail to learn the spirit of the law, which can lead to a lack of application across different situations, i.e. All rules go out the window when the authority figure leaves. <br />
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In my limited experience in China and with Chinese law, I believe this problem exists in great abundance. Law is often relegated to the administration of rules rather than standards. Authority figures are comfortable enforcing rules, but not so much with enforcing standards. There is seldom a way to rationalize the lack of a stamp or seal on X document -- which of course, means it's also very, very difficult to argue that X stamp or seal was forged or made under duress. It seems as though this could be a common problem of legal development. Do rules have to come before standards? <br />
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To return to my argument with the taxi driver, perhaps what we had failed to do was settle on agreed terms. I was saying, "You failed to exercise proper (or, any) judgment" and he was saying "You have no right to question my judgment, judgment doesn't enter in to it, there's no rule that prevents me from turning now." The rule is gone. The teacher has left the room. And I'm the poor kid who's stuck as class monitor. </span> <br />
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</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Footnote: China and Red Right Turns</i></span><br />
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It's hard to really describe the extent of the problem here unless you've experienced it yourself. For background on how people actually drive, I'd read this blog post AND the comments of the horrified ex-pats written below it. <a href="http://home.wangjianshuo.com/archives/20070426_how_i_drive_in_shanghai.htm">This guy</a> claims to be in the top 5% of Shanghai drivers. Or you can just take my word for it that the daring-do required to cross the street can often approach that of a wildebeest crossing the crocodile-infested Zambeezi.<br />
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I'll only add that I know a number of people who've been hit by cars (or buses) that have sailed through a red right like they were on rails. A close friend of my girlfriend's family was killed by such a driver. I now enter crosswalks like a SWAT team officer securing a perimeter, primed on the balls of my feet, surveying traffic in all directions (including behind me at least twice) before I'm safely on the other side.</span> </div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-54845521528423346322008-10-02T22:48:00.005+08:002015-09-05T19:55:49.193+08:00Concrete. Milk. Space.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0e8fYSdQu63s40nEs1H8nHtA3KNyH_Bki8RziZqOQLtho5P_lWPO-8azmlR2ZkLtumWvmFjg6yR9qf3tGXxj_vckfWCAiI-QZVmUc63V-uI0qIUXRwqIfCO5AFjERkonuabwvi7qrcCb/s1600-h/P1010209.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" height="572" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5252569855233361730" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0e8fYSdQu63s40nEs1H8nHtA3KNyH_Bki8RziZqOQLtho5P_lWPO-8azmlR2ZkLtumWvmFjg6yR9qf3tGXxj_vckfWCAiI-QZVmUc63V-uI0qIUXRwqIfCO5AFjERkonuabwvi7qrcCb/s640/P1010209.JPG" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" width="640" /></a><br />
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School's finally started and life is supposed to have returned to normal. That, of course, depends upon normal's definition.<br />
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The migrant workers' bicycle carts, overloaded with their cheap consumer and industrial detritus (see picture above for what detritus looks like), have returned en masse, but the skies are still blue. DVDs are back on the streets, but people are still lining up for the subways...well, sort of. More than the omnipresent TV screens playing and replaying Chinese gold medal performances on public transportation, <em>inside</em> bathroom mirrors(!), and on high rises, it is these things -- the breathable air and the hesitant, nascent civility of Beijingers -- that remind one of the Olympics' lingering, fragile grip on the city. I won't consider normalcy to have fully returned until I'm throwing elbows on the bus platform under a gray sky.<br />
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But if normal is to mean “lack of the extraordinary,” I doubt China will ever qualify. This past week, while watching China learn how to walk in space, I opened up the refrigerator to find that Aunt Li and Uncle Shen had filled every available nook of our refrigerator with “safe” yogurt. My guess is that their horde reflex, honed in China's less fecund, more tumultuous decades, has been triggered by the milk scare. This reflex is still extant in Depression-era Americans too. My grandma went into horde mode the months before Y2K. I predict that the day the DOW drops below 9,000 she'll already have a small A&P cache stored in the recesses of her apartment. Apart from the small problem of hording perishable goods, my adopted aunt and uncle here might understand a thing or two. Pretty soon we all might just be buying Chinese milk with American securities.<br />
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At least the ex-pats here can provide the axis of normalcy China so desperately needs. This past week, with Chinese astronauts hovering above us, scouring the globe for visions of the Great Wall from space, my new ex-pat classmates and I descended upon an all-you-can-eat (sushi) and drink (anything but Saki) for $8. Six hundred Cathy rolls later, we headed to San Li Tun, Beijing's confused answer to NYC's Meat Packing District, where you pay a 1000% markup on normal beer prices in order to enjoy the tacky lasciviousness and M80-decibel-level to which the fictional Westerners of the Chinese imagination are accustomed.<br />
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Our champagne bottles had sparklers attached to them. Beautiful, uncomfortable Chinese waitresses wore dresses no one's mom would ever allow and no one's best friend would ever recommend. I couldn't help but think they wear them thinking the opposite. While there, a friend told me that you can fly into space now for a mere $21,000; leave earth for a while for a few months' work. I couldn't help but think that right then I was escaping both the Eastern and Western worlds for a mere $10 bottle of beer: my own space walk.<br />
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We landed back in the Eastern half of the globe abruptly. Right outside the door of the club was a dump truck; next to the dump trunk were three guys with shovels and a huge pile of concrete rubble, almost certainly broken to bits by sledge-hammer-wielding migrant workers earlier that day. Or rather, <em>yesterday</em>, as it was 3:30 in the morning. It's not uncommon to see buildings or even entire cities (cf. the Three Gorges Dam project) being demolished by hand, bricks being removed one at a time from demolished buildings to be used in new ones. It's a remarkable conservation of building materials that would simply be ground up in the U.S. And it costs virtually nothing, labor aside...ok, so it costs nothing. But what are the alternatives? More machines means an efficiency that would lead to incredible unemployment.<br />
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Clear of thought as I was at that time, I decided to shovel with them. Below is a recreation of the thought process that led to this decision (concomitant emotions in parenthesis).<br />
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[There are anywhere between 100-300 million “peasant workers” hitting roads with sledgehammers, “living in” at factories, and pedaling truckloads of goods and garbage around cities. (Guilt). I don't know how many of these are concrete rubble shovelers who work the night shift, probably the population of Chicago. (Helplessness). So every morning in Chicago, when the city wakes up, three million people in China are heading out into the dark to shovel concrete for an entire night into a truck to get paid the cost of one freaking toll on Illinois' crappy roads. (Antipathy for the Cubs and any Chicagoan with a summer home in Wisconsin). They do this every day, with maybe two days off a year. (More Guilt). My friend Kevin lives in Chicago. He's an English doctoral student and spends most of his time making snarky comments on people's Facebook pictures. (Amusement). There's a Chinese Kevin here somewhere who shovels thirty-pound shovelfuls of rock for entire nights instead of deconstructing freshmen English majors' conceptions of gender and race. (Bizarro Guilt). I'm going to be the Chinese Kevin for the night. (Mild intoxication/patronization).]<br />
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I grabbed one of the guy's shovels, and told him to rest. We smoked cigarettes (universal guy bonding here) while we worked, sang folk songs, and started shoveling races.<br />
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We talked while we worked. They came from Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing. They had to work for another six months or so before they could work during the day. I told them what I always tell migrant workers I talk with: my grandfather was a farmer, I know I'll never be as tough or hardworking as he was. I respect them just like I respected him. When he was a child every man carried cigarettes in his work shirt pocket and gave them to other men just like they do in China. That's about it, I've never known what else to say.<br />
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In two hours, we loaded an entire dump truck's worth of concrete. We hugged goodbye. I spent their combined day's wages on a cab ride home. I woke up with scabbed forearms, sore hamstrings, blistered hands, and guilt.<br />
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Anyone who lives in China must continually navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of guilt and callousness, of class insulation and patronization. China makes you conscious of the moral tightrope we're all on, anywhere. Before China, I never really “felt” Aristotle's idea that virtue is a balance between extremes rather than a simple right or wrong. The “examined life” that leads to a mild, albeit self-satisfied, “white guilt” in the States can easily become despondent inaction and paralyzed hopelessness here in China. The <em>awareness</em> that I and my fellow do-gooders thrive on in the States can be devastating here because of the massive scope of the inequality and your corresponding lack of agency.<br />
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But, on the other side of spectrum, a “healthy,” suburban acceptance of inequality (i.e. callousness) can easily reach Nero-style indifference. “Numbness,” is how a Chinese friend describes it; she's witnessed a lot of it, as she spends most of her time with those who “eat fragrant foods and drink spicy drinks.” (As tasty as that sounds, this is not a positive idiom.)<br />
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But it's not simply society's upper crust that must fear numbness. A well-known cliché propagated by Chinese and non-Chinese alike is that “human life isn't worth as much in China.”<br />
The truth, or at least validity, of this statement can be derived from study of Chinese history, where China's most impressive public works are also tombs to thousands of laborers who were rolled over in the pursuit higher state interests, whether political, economic, or monomaniacal. For more modern examples, one need only look at the Pickett's-Charge-a-day strategy China employed in the Korean War or even the shockingly callous statements of Zhang Yi Mou's regarding working his Opening Ceremony dancers past the point of exhaustion. (<a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/news/story?id=3543618">http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/news/story?id=3543618</a>. [my favorite sentence is where coffee breaks and human rights are mentioned with equal distaste in the same sentence.])<br />
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But the ironic laugh of some of my best Chinese friends and respected acquaintances has provided all the evidence I need of this cliché's validity: whether it was the secretary at my NGO coolly joking that a university student at her school who jumped from the third floor didn't <em>really</em> want to die or she would have picked a higher building, my current professor jibing that thousands of people die every year in coal mines but “we don't really care about them right now” or the way one of my other profs chuckled after he told me that “[w]e have a saying written on the walls in every courthouse, <em>if you confess, the punishment will be lighter</em>. Well, we found that actually, anyone who confesses usually ends up with a worse punishment, ha ha ha.”<br />
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I believe that anyone who spends much time in China will find it riddled with a ubiquitous, ironic, and sometimes embarrassed, tittering. While the laugh itself may seem quite fragile, it's a powerful defense against engaging with harsh realities that plague this big country and its millions of people. Behind that laughter, bulwarking it, are a slew of truisms (成语, 俗语) that span millenia. Chengyu and suyu are famous quotations and lines of poetry that are the foundation of Chinese language and, arguably, Chinese morality. They are the bane of any Chinese student's existence, and also the bane of any Westerner trying to pursue lines of thought to their endpoints. Once spoken with conviction, a well-placed chengyu can end a debate with its powerful generality. Their power is in their simplicity and the religious fervor with which they are believed: it is the religion of the Really Old Farmer's Almanac.<br />
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For example, whenever I belabor educated, well-off Chinese friends of mine with the toll their society is taking on my conscience, they invariably end up using Mao's famous response to Western criticism of communist China's inconsistencies, “The whole world is a contradiction” (世界就是矛盾). Ha ha ha. End of conversation.<br />
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But easy as it is to assume they're dodging tough questions, I believe their laughter here is a catharsis for the cognitive dissonance wrought on us all by the myriad contradictions of modern China. Most of my Chinese friends know that things aren't ideal, and many sympathize with suffering taking place across their country. The idea that Western conceptions of life and rights don't translate over here is bunk. If it were true, there would be no reason to laugh: anyone who stolidly held that human life was meaningless wouldn't need to laugh, because they wouldn't care. From that perspective, an embarrassed giggle is not callous at all, and certainly a more rational, less patronizing testament to solidarity with the poor and suffering than my blistered hands.<br />
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Somehow space, milk and concrete come together over here. Somehow an ironic laugh helps one navigate landmines of guilt and numbness that mark the territory between skyscaper owner and and builder. It's a survival skill that's been far more effective than my years of tortured, moralistic pondering. In the end, I, too, have to shrug my shoulders and agree with the Chairman, the world is a contradiction.<br />
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There's a real elegance to those Chinese who live in a world of astronauts and abject poverty and keep their humanity, communitarian version though it may be. (Humanity with Chinese Characteristics?). I'm not going to criticize the tittering and clichés until I can provide my Chinese brethren with a better way to walk the tightrope. To do otherwise smacks too much of Tonya Harding, sideswiping a grace you can't replicate.</div>
Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-47638109097649688182008-08-28T17:18:00.002+08:002010-09-25T03:20:01.566+08:00相信科学, 反对迷信 Believe Science, Oppose Superstition.<a href="http://www.cnfxj.org/Files/scqsnmhz/a43.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.cnfxj.org/Files/scqsnmhz/a43.jpg" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<div><div><div>Racing back across the countryside to Beijing from the China-Brazil soccer game in the Chinese version of the Bullet Train, I happened upon this bit of propaganda on a once-whitewashed, now-dilapidated wall: <em>Believe Science, Oppose Superstition</em>. It was the first time I'd encountered this particular brand of governmental encouragement. And upon initial reflection, it made sense that I hadn't seen it before. The majority of my time in China has been spent in cities -- among the quarter of the Chinese population that is not only relatively or actually wealthy, but also “has culture,” which, interestingly enough, means they have rejected much of theirs.<br />
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I didn't think much of it until a few weeks later, when a new tutor/friend of mine recited that maxim almost verbatim. She's a graduate student in Chinese History. She also happens to have grown up not far from said-wall. My conversations with her have been quite a case study in what <em>Believe Science, Oppose Superstition</em> both permits and does not permit.<br />
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************<br />
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When I found out that Zhang Mei Jing was getting her Master's in History, I couldn't believe my luck. One of the reasons I've come here is to study Mencius, arguably the greatest Confucian scholar after the school's namesake himself. Most Chinese know as much about him as Americans do John Dewey, but she knew quite a bit. It was an auspicious beginning.<br />
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The first hour of our conversation went as expected: we were liberal arts kindred spirits. She started by bemoaning the fact that history had been relegated to little more than an elective in Chinese education. First through sixth graders don't even take it. She demonstrated her point by calling a couple fourth-grade boys over from the Tony Little Ripoff Playground (definitely not trademarked) next to the pagoda we were sitting in.<br />
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“Have you studied history at all in school?”<br />
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“No.” She gave me a pursed-lipped, knowing glance.<br />
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“Can you name the dynasties in order from the Qin?”<br />
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“No.” Another nod in my direction.<br />
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“Can you name me an emperor from the Song Dynasty?”<br />
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“No.” She was crushed, and totally vindicated.<br />
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I had experience consoling teachers in faculty lounge conversations of this ilk before, so I tried to comfort her with the fact that my former American high school students were decidedly more ignorant: once, disbelieving a National Geographic survey claiming that 50% of American high school students couldn't find New York State on a unmarked map, I gave my high school juniors a multiple choice pop quiz, asking them which quadrant of the U.S. (North-East, South-East, North-West, South-West) New York was in. Twenty percent got it wrong.<br />
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This commiseration went on for an hour. All of a sudden, things took a turn, and I realized that we were talking about two very different definitions of History: one which encouraged competing views in the (perhaps vain) pursuit of objectivity and one which denied them right out.<br />
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It started, as these problems always seem to begin, when I brought up the Cultural Revolution. Hadn't that been the beginning of the end of modern China's love affair with history? After all, what about the saying, If the old doesn't go, the new'll never come? What about the destruction of family histories, the loss of traditions, the smashed heads on Buddhist statues visible all over China?<br />
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“Oh, that wasn't an attack on Chinese history as much as it was an attack on superstition.” She went on, excited, eyes darting about as if in some type of conscious rem; something I'd said had set her off. She asked me if I had been one of those foreign teachers who filled up his students' heads with “dissonant thoughts” that led them to disparage their country and lose their sense of nationalism.<br />
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This was dangerous territory, so I changed directions. I brought up the propaganda on the wall near her house, and I started wondering aloud what science and superstition meant. Could it be possible that history which doesn't allow for dialog makes superstition out of science?<br />
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Needing domestic backup, I called on my favorite Chinese short story, My Old Home, written by the early 20th Century author Lu Xun. An educated, landed gentry comes home after twenty years away to move his mother to the site of his governmental post. In the short time that he's home, he meets his old childhood friend, Runtu, who was the most mysterious, strange, and wondrous child -- full of life and stories. Things are no longer the same. Runtu is now a beaten, pitiable, shell of a man. He greets the narrator, his former friend, in the most obsequious manner, refusing to call him anything but “master.” After much soul searching, the narrator realizes that this state of affairs was unavoidable: It was life as it was. As he's experiencing this disillusionment, he watches with great melancholy as his nephew plays the entire day with Runtu's child, even as he had once played with Runtu – as equals. At the end of the story, as he's drifting down the canal away from home, nephew by his side, he thinks, or as he puts it, hopes.<br />
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<em>“I hope that our sons will not be like us, that they will not allow a barrier to grow up between rich and poor, educated and not educated. I would not like them to have a treadmill existence like mine, nor to suffer like Runtu until they become stupefied, nor yet, like others, to devote all their energies to dissipation. They should have a new life, a life we have never experienced.<br />
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<em>This hope for my children made me suddenly afraid. When Runtu asked for my family's incense-burner and candlesticks I laughed to myself, to think that he was still worshiping idols and would never put them out of his mind. Yet what I now called hope was no more than an idol I had created myself. The only difference was that what he desired was close at hand, while what I desired was less easily realized.</em><br />
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<em>As I dozed, I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.”</em><br />
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While I must have read this passage over one hundred times, it's hard for me to read it without emotion.<br />
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First, it's amazing that such utterly dehumanizing words like “stupefied” and “devote all their energies to dissipation” could be used, tenderly, to describe human life extant on the same earth my grandparents inhabited. And things would only get worse for Runtu and his children as the 20th Century bore down on them with a misery perhaps unknown in human history.<br />
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Second, I've found no better explanation for the indescribable earnestness that is the backbone of Modern China's industrial revolution than Lu Xun's passage here. It is an earnestness that approaches desperation, and is betrayed even in modern China's successes. In this passage, love for country and countryman confronts the great shame of poverty and the horror of estrangement and isolation: a shame and horror exacerbated by the consciousness of Western economic, military, and technological domination. These are memories that have been difficult to erase, even with China's recent, superhuman achievements. I believe this earnestness was present in the opening and closing ceremonies, which, between their astonishing sets, belied a desperation: we must amaze at all costs. From this point of view, the costly Olympic regalia with which the country draped itself for the past three weeks is in a way, grotesque; so too, is most Western commentators' failure to realize this.<br />
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Sound ridiculous? When Zhang and I were discussing what moral system would balance out the startlingly vicious capitalism run rampant in many parts of China (a common topic here), she replied, too seriously, that “[f]or the past eight years our morality has been the Olympics.”<br />
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But at bottom, it's the narrator's self-awareness that moves me and embarrasses <em>Believe Science, Reject Superstition</em>. I have no argument with science or with the slogan in general. Both China and the narrator were right to bet on technology over traditional superstitions as the road to economic profitability and stability. It's the lack of irony -- on that wall, in the Bird's Nest, in my conversations with Zhang -- that frustrates, especially when they have such a great example in Lu Xun. Irony is what allowed the far-from-stupefied narrator to see Runtu as his equal, if not superior, even as he led his people forward. Lack of irony is what keeps Zhang from seeing the ridiculousness of decrying superstition for the sake of science, but simultaneously denying her students the right to use the scientific method to test and retest competing histories.<br />
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But who knows? Perhaps hope's roads are better paved without self-awareness.</div></div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-50759119726048493252008-08-16T10:07:00.004+08:002010-09-25T03:21:43.585+08:00Contrarians<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrpCulOAV2c8yUoZa2oB1bJ2Qy98aNv_9dzWGflZ17L-uVgJ6vktueKQ-wFV9-xk5PpOVoG6Yh2jpWPzXYE3d2Bfz3s6crvJeJWoqInkGB_xQ26sZ_aMrDBw5wgupMajoXfH9fHm_iwh4/s1600/kelp_fish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrpCulOAV2c8yUoZa2oB1bJ2Qy98aNv_9dzWGflZ17L-uVgJ6vktueKQ-wFV9-xk5PpOVoG6Yh2jpWPzXYE3d2Bfz3s6crvJeJWoqInkGB_xQ26sZ_aMrDBw5wgupMajoXfH9fHm_iwh4/s320/kelp_fish.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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China can be a rough place for people who like disagreement. I'm not talking about the macro-level that everyone's familiar with. Rather, it's the daily pursuit of harmony on the individual, micro-level that most interests me.<br />
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My first experience with this was when I was teaching persuasive essays to my English Composition students at Hangzhou Teacher's College. I had hammered the students on the basics of the essay, stealing catchy mottoes and lesson plans from my days teaching high school kids in Jacksonville: “Say what you're going to say, say it, say what you said.” It seemed simple, I wanted them to introduce a contrary position, support it, and then add a nuanced conclusion.<br />
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It wasn't working, my kids' essays were underwhelming, few of the essays even had thesis statements, the very thing I'd stressed the most while teaching them. Worried that I was missing something, I asked one of my best students about it. She mentioned that this was not the way they had learned to write persuasive essays, in English or Chinese.<br />
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“We were taught to write in a way that would allow everyone to agree with what we were saying, even if they didn't. Stating a contrary position upfront is going to turn off half of the readers right away. We don't say the theme of our essay until the conclusion, once everyone's had a chance to hear things they can agree with.”<br />
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Lesson for me: Know your audience. After that I told the kids that I was their only audience, and I was going to disagree with anything they said, so they might as well tell me their opinions up front. (I also told them that they would fail if they didn't write thesis statements, but I don't think that had any effect.) Either way, I doubt anyone wrote that way after they finished my class.<br />
<br />
This habit of always finding peace in interpersonal relationships can be frustrated for the dirt-seeking foreigner. I thought of this while reading <em>Where's the Grief? </em>(<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?hp">http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?hp</a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?hp"> </a>)<em>,</em> David Brooks amazed article on the apparent lack of misery and depression among Sichuan earthquake victims. My first, self-righteous, skeptical reaction was “Yeah, the first person they're going to open up to is going to be a foreign reporter from the New York Times –the darling of the Chinese media." But it was exactly right. In his unsuccessful quest to unearth victim pain and suffering, Brooks wonders aloud in the article if his interviewees were just spouting canned answers, implying that Chinese would be different behind closed doors. I doubt it, perhaps only behind a labyrinth of closed doors.<br />
<br />
Brooks made me think about my own natural disaster experience in China. Last summer, through a bizarre series of events, I ended up on a caravan of ten coach sleeper buses (basically an army barracks inside a bus) that was heading east from the “Chinese Appalachians” to the more developed coast. It was a sweaty, shirtless, grueling 20-hour ride, and I wished they had just told me it was full rather than kicking a guy off the bus to let me on. About two hours into the ride, I figured out that the buses had been hired by shoe factories south of Shanghai. They were busing in workers from the countryside, who would normally work their fields during the summer and then head to the coast in fall to work in factories making Reeboks during the winter. But this was July. I asked my bunkmate Hong Guo – a paunchy, squared-headed teenager who was amazed that I spoke three languages (Chinese, English, and American) –why they were heading out so early.<br />
<br />
“Oh, there were huge floods all along the Huai river. All of our fields are flooded. So we're just going to Wenling earlier.” Smiling. I searched his face for signs of remorse or sadness. Nothing.<br />
<br />
“Oh, I'm really sorry. That's awful. Is there any government aid available for you?”<br />
<br />
“Yes. The government is giving out aid to flood victims.”<br />
<br />
“That's great. How much do you get?”<br />
<br />
“Oh. We haven't gotten any.”<br />
<br />
Such a great answer, spoken without a hint of irony. <em>The government is doing what it can. So are we.</em> The same tenor of answer Brooks got when he asked a grieving father for a government appraisal. Does everyone have a natural disaster media response cheat sheet in their back pocket?<br />
<br />
But Hong Guo wasn't posturing, nor was his smile faked. The entire bus was raucous the whole trip, more like a high school prom party wagon than a what it was: a bus-load of incredibly poor migrant workers who'd just lost their entire summer's crop, who were leaving behind families in destroyed, dilapidated houses to go make overpriced shoes at under-living wages. <em>The government is doing what it can.</em> So are we. Insofar as I'm right in paraphrasing Hong Guo's responses (and insofar as I can use them to generalize about an entire civilization), I think these are great insights into the Chinese metaphysical survival kit: Confucianism and Daoism, still extant despite undergoing the most effective cultural house-cleaning of all time thirty years ago. Confucius, a precursor of Steve Austin, told you to know your role. Laozi (founder of Daoism) taught you how to deal with it.<br />
<br />
It makes sense. In the U.S., we're oversold on our agency (in law, politics, school, social graces (some of us)), and so growing older is one disillusionment after another until only 50% of us vote, most of us can't do simple math, and we all feel deserving of love even though Paul McCartney was quite clear that the love you take is equal to the love you make. Not so China. The Middle Kingdom has built a country that thinks of itself as a big family. Dad does dad things, Mom does mom things, kids do kids things, government does government things. Your dad might be good, he might be bad, but he's still your dad, and you can't change that (he most likely won't abondon that role either, staying around to raise his family even if he has two or three mistresses.) Same with the party. There's little question that this is more efficient than democracy. It's just that we have this annoying obsession with fairness in the West.<br />
<br />
Try to explain fairness to a one-hundred year old woman in China. I have. The answer I've inevitably gotten was that no one from that generation could have survived if fairness mattered to them: from emperor, to warlord, to Japanese devils, to Nationalists, to Communists, to State Capitalists; from foot binding, to book burning, to reform and opening. You do what you can. Hong Guo got passionate only once in our conversation, when he talked about his parents and grandparents, “Our parents made themselves like dirt, <em>like dirt</em>, just to survive. With just the slight hope that things would be better for their children. Just so I could be here talking to you today.”<br />
<br />
I don't like the word dirt. I like the word kelp. China is the world's largest human kelp forest, with all the beauty and mystery of those shrouded underwater worlds. Everything outside of your role, be it natural or man-made, is treated the same, a tide that can't be beaten but only adapted to. An earthquake is the same as bad government, an annoyance that can't be changed. They don't need the Serenity Prayer here. For balance's sake, though, they might do with some Self-Reliance.</div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-53936301246244878542008-08-12T07:47:00.002+08:002010-09-25T03:22:16.582+08:00Walls<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbs_chz0AGeqBG8wYCkERUWqmOj1s2QXGpAUZLj01p8gRYXeZN4Pyo646XapX7co1_7IbcG1eNEd1frkPzQCDcUHfYPxWMjUegOWKR-y8ZMV7Vgmvwbl_8LH4ny9xRjYTQQ1wtemXqA3yz/s1600-h/P1010207.JPG"><img alt="" border="0" height="480" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5233419167219227202" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbs_chz0AGeqBG8wYCkERUWqmOj1s2QXGpAUZLj01p8gRYXeZN4Pyo646XapX7co1_7IbcG1eNEd1frkPzQCDcUHfYPxWMjUegOWKR-y8ZMV7Vgmvwbl_8LH4ny9xRjYTQQ1wtemXqA3yz/s640/P1010207.JPG" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" width="640" /></a><br />
<div><br />
<div><div><div><div><em>“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,<br />
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,<br />
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,<br />
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”</em><br />
<br />
Frost, “Mending Wall”<br />
<br />
While private ownership is relatively new to modern China, privacy is not. I doubt there is a country with more walls than China. There are few more tangible reminders of the insularity of Chinese politics, history, culture, relationships, psyche than the ubiquitous cement walls that divide and subdivide each city block and therefore, divide people. Chain link fences these are not. They are, bare minimum, seven to ten feet of solid concrete or steel bars, crowned with broken glass, metal spikes, or barbed wire (if you’re lucky). Cheever could never have written <em>The Swimmer</em> here, or, if he had, his swimmer would have had to carry a grappling hook with him from backyard to backyard rather than cocktails (sorry for the obscure reference, blame <em>The Onion</em> and its recent hilarious article on Cheever).<br />
<br />
If it seems that I’m reaching for a topic on what is only my second post, I can explain. I live in a small, two-building apartment complex that occupies a tiny niche on the east side of a China-sized city block. The complex has two entrances: the east gate and the west gate. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a catch. The west gate is open twenty-four hours. The east gate is not. It’s a five-minute walk from the subway to the east gate, but since the north and south sides of our wall are sandwiched between other buildings, you can’t just walk around the apartment complex to the other side. To get to the west gate, you have to walk over a mile to the west side of the block and then sneak back through the middle of the block like it’s the Death Star. I’ve actually taken a taxi twice from the east gate to the west gate. When the driver asks me where I’m going, I point out the car window at my apartment, curse politely, and then say, “There.”<br />
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<br />
When the east gate is open, it’s about as predictable as the DMV. It was closed this morning at 10:30. Frustrated, I asked the guardian of the west gate what the east gate hours were.<br />
<br />
He lisped back to me, “It’s open at seven. It’s closed from twelve to one for lunch, and then closes for the night at nine.”<br />
<br />
“It’s closed right now and it’s ten-thirty.”<br />
<br />
“Yes, that’s true.”<br />
<br />
I waited five seconds. He seemed satisfied with his answer, so I didn’t pursue it any further.<br />
<br />
* * * * * * *<br />
<br />
A few days ago, I posted some pictures of Beijing hutongs: small-alleyed villages, really, that sit in the center of the city. They sprawl all over the downtown—behind, in front of, and around the ancient sites and glassy skyscrapers that dominate the city’s skyline. There’s a ton of life in the hutongs, and sentimental folk, perhaps disproportionately of the white persuasion, get pretty frustrated with the idea that many are being torn down—razed as an offering to modernity. I haven’t quite formed an opinion on this yet (mostly because mine doesn’t matter), but I think a nuanced conversation I had with my friend Ian might be of service. Ian was in Hong Kong at the time...we were on gchat...which I was accessing on my laptop...which was using wireless internet service… from a very trendy coffee shop… in what used to be a hutong.<br />
<br />
<br />
“Me: i think i want to live in a hutong<br />
<br />
Ian: i knew a guy who did that<br />
<br />
me: how’d it go for him?<br />
<br />
Ian: kind of a jerk*<br />
<br />
me: i’d hope to do it without the jerkiness*<br />
Ian: kind of hard<br />
<br />
me: really? why? i’m liking living with old retirees right now. would it have to be different?<br />
<br />
Ian: i dunno<br />
yes its “culturally” interesting<br />
but i bet a lot of those people would want a nicer apartment too<br />
it’s kidn of like you’re slumming<br />
<br />
me: true...”<br />
<br />
<br />
The (de)construction’s happening regardless of if I can run across China to raise money to save the hutongs or not, so I’m going to connect this digression to the wall conversation.<br />
<br />
Anytime there’s a construction site in China, there will be walls around it. Anytime there are walls around it, there will be some sort of propaganda on those walls. I found the propaganda on the hutongs interesting because it makes more concessions than most wall writing, underlying the controversial nature of the destruction/renovation of the hutongs. A few of the more interesting ones were as follows: “BRING ABOUT A SUN-SHINY TRANSITION;” “IMPROVE/PROTECT THE ALREADY BEAUTIFUL ENVIRONMENT;” and my personal favorite (posted above), “FAIR, OPEN, AND IMPARTIAL.”<br />
<br />
That last one really struck me, for the wall dost protest too much. Rarely have I seen a wall feeling the need to laud the procedural legitimacy of its own existence. Fairness is usually implied. There’s too much stuff to tear down and build back up in this country for prolonged, open debate on every ache and pain some local has about a demolition project. Normally the stenciled writing on the construction walls says something like “GREEN CITIES AND BLUE SKIES FOR EVERYONE,” “HELP OLD/DISABLED PEOPLE,” or “LET’S BUILD A CULTURED CITY.” Makes one wonder if in some bureau they’ve got packs of controversial stencils, sort-of-controversial stencils, and completely-uncontroversial stencils.<br />
<br />
Either way, my wholly unsubstantiated judgment is that the Beijing government is quite aware of the dilemma of tearing down one of the sweetest parts of the city simply because it’s old, unhygienic and lacking basic infrastructure.<br />
<br />
* * * * * * * *<br />
<br />
<em>“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.”</em><br />
<br />
There are a lot of walls in China, and a lot of things written on them and hidden behind them as well. But something troubles me about extending the metaphor.<br />
<br />
In my experience, Chinese insularity doesn’t push much past etiquette, an etiquette that is easily—often willingly—discarded. On a deeper level, many Chinese are just waiting to whisper great personal secrets if given a chance. Of course, this may or may not be alcohol induced. This is true on the international level as well. There is a great longing for communication with the West, for acceptance. That’s obvious when you talk to many Chinese who complain that the Opening Ceremony itself was made for the West, not for Chinese people. I've had government officials and taxi drivers tell me the same thing. They're sick of the old stuff- they want to talk about New China. It's all “too much history that we know already.’’ (Some of that might be self-deprecation. They know it was an unreal ceremony, and therefore saying anything complimentary about it at all would certainly be bragging.)<br />
<br />
Yet it’s still a longing for acceptance that has to overcome quite a lot: a language that isn’t easy to translate into or out of, centuries of mistrust and Western domination, a huge population --and the concomitant self-confidence and unselfconciousness that come with being part of a “majority culture“-- that intimidates non-Chinese and provides easy cover for Chinese spooked by unsuccessful attempts to communicate with foreigners. But that longing is still there. It’s as if, behind each wall in China, there’s a person sitting there with a sledgehammer just waiting for the go-ahead to destroy it; one just has to give them that chance – and guarantee that they’ll have someone to welcome them on the other side.<br />
<br />
I think, at bottom, that’s why I came to China, it’s why I learned Chinese, and why I’m so addicted to this place. Amazing things can happen when you can help someone get past superficial stuff like everything that makes you you and them them.<br />
<br />
Anyway, I hope they destroy the wall that separates my east and west gates first.</div></div></div></div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4168390023557708961.post-18118730615417616072008-08-12T07:41:00.002+08:002010-09-25T03:22:50.144+08:00"You Don't Eat Green Vegetables for Breakfast? That's Why You're Fat."<a href="http://www.randrpublications.com.au/images/EdiblePlants_cov.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://www.randrpublications.com.au/images/EdiblePlants_cov.jpg" style="display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
<br />
<div><div>As odd as it is that I might be paying more to board with a pair of retired pensioners than to have my own apartment, it is quickly proving itself to be a great investment.<br />
<br />
This morning, while stalled for a writing topic, I decided to make myself breakfast. It was the first breakfast I had made after coming home with my haul from the grocery store yesterday, and it had that wonderful, healthy sense of infinite choice you have with stocked cupboards: I could eat any combination of juices, yogurt, breads, cheeses, etc, that I had dutifully stocked away either in the fridge or on one of my (four!) wardrobe shelves. I cut off two healthy portions of fresh French bread purchased from a surprisingly good European bakery down the street, warmed them up, slathered them with generous portions of peanut butter (delicious excess that flouts the meager, butter-type rations we were allotted in our youth), and then covered that deliciousness with a layer of sliced bananas. I then poured myself a glass of (drinkable) yogurt and relished my mature choices: eat your heart out, Total, this was a complete breakfast on a bun.<br />
<br />
My roommates-emeritus broke my reverie. “Aunt Li” opened the door a crack and peered in, almost afraid of what was happening in her kitchen.<br />
<br />
“You’re cooking breakfast?” She said with a half-smile, amused. She used that sentence as a password, pulling herself into the kitchen.The Chinese word for “cooking” that she used can be translated in a number of ways: making, cooking, preparing. On behalf of myself and of Western culture, I wanted to clear up the ambiguity.<br />
<br />
“Well, not <em>making</em> breakfast, just putting together something simple. I usually eat a simple, but wholesome (I was sure to include) breakfast in the morning. This isn’t real cooking.”<br />
<br />
“Uncle Shen” followed, boxers and t-shirt, in her wake. Shen is a serious man who makes you think he’s always about to smile – he was smiling now. He has a sort of isosceles triangle-shaped head dotted with tufts of white hair that would typecast him for a Chinese Mad-Hatter. His wife picked up a cucumber with her left hand and a <em>ku gua</em> (a quick google search told me it’s a balsam pear) with her right and continued to lay into my sandwich.<br />
<br />
“You don’t eat green vegetables for breakfast?” She said, voice rising, cucumber shaking in disapproval at me like a long, floppy index finger, “You’re going to get fat.”<br />
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<br />
I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t eating a Toaster Strudel here, there was some real nutrition present. “Oh, it’s ok, I usually eat a lot of vegetables for lunch and dinner. Americans normally eat fruits with their breakfast.”<br />
<br />
Shen reiterated, “So when do you eat vegetables?”<br />
<br />
“For lunch and dinner.”<br />
<br />
He seemed satisfied. His wife was not.<br />
<br />
“No, that’s not ok. You have to have vegetables in the morning. Is that really all you’re eating?”<br />
<br />
“You have to understand,” Shen chimed in, half embarrassed by his wife’s tirade, half serious (so, half smiling), “we’re old. You’re like a child to us.” He opened the pot of porridge that I had unwittingly (and unconsciously) neglected and winced his eyes in a non-verbal sigh of disappointment, as if to say, <em>you could have avoided this whole confrontation if you had just eaten what my wife indiscreetly left for you...Now you’re going to suffer</em>. He grabbed a bowl and began slopping great spoonfuls of slop sloppily.<br />
<br />
And so, just as in my childhood, where refusal to take beets, brussel sprouts or other nastiness resulted in a double helping that had to be eaten before you left the table. I went back to my room with a tray laden with two complete breakfasts: my continental breakfast, now cold, lonely, and shamed; and my Chinese breakfast: a raw cucumber and a huge bowl of very tasty, extraordinarily healthy rice porridge cooked with dates, three kinds of beans, and other nutritional things I don’t eat enough of.<br />
<br />
It’s a good thing I ate green vegetables this morning, now I won’t get fat.</div></div>Seth Gurgelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03722652884203904191noreply@blogger.com0