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The Chinese are not known for giving a straight answer to a difficult question. Partly this is to do with saving face; maybe it is a national trait, but maybe they learnt it from their leaders.

In a fascinating account of a visit to the recording of a CCTV talk show, Ann Condi makes the following point:

There is a very basic aspect of the Sino-foreign media dialogue that is so obvious that it is seldom commented on. It involves a common dynamic in human interactions where hypocrisy, deception, and issues of “saving face” intersect. It is this: If I find myself in disagreement with another person about something, and yet I sincerely believe in the correctness of my own position, I will seek to highlight our differences and show decisively why my position is sound and that of the other person is flawed. If, on the other hand, I am painfully aware that the other person has a point, and I am in the wrong, I will change the subject.

The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject. When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim “Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security.” Instead they change the subject to “No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country.” When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say “You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why.” Rather, they change the subject: “What about your human rights problem?”

Where the question of democracy is concerned, it’s very easy for them to muddy the waters. Is democracy right for China? If so, what kind of democracy? And most importantly, whose kind of democracy? I think by posing this question they are exploiting a sore point in the West at the moment, and maybe taking advantage of a basic schism in how we regard our own societies.

Oddly enough, this is not the case in China itself. Recently in class we were doing a quiz about life in Britain, and one of the questions was about the voting age. Most of them knew it was 18 – the same, they said, as in China. It turns out that they all believe that they live in a democratic country, where at the age of 18 they get to participate in elections, which are held at regular intervals. If anyone who’s not a member of the CCP could explain this to me, I’d be very grateful.

As I say, in Europe and the US many people are not so confident about the democratic credentials of their own societies. Despite the massive opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their subsequent occupation, both went ahead regardless. People are understandably uncertain about the whole question of the West imposing democracy on other, poorer, countries, and about the legitimacy of the resulting political systems. As is, presumably, Hamid Karzai, whose recent request to the Americans that they give his Government some information about the military operations they are carrying out in his country was roundly turned down. Not to mention the 99% of Iraqis in the survey quoted by Noam Chomsky who do not believe that the Americans are in their country to bring democracy.

Back home, a lot of Americans’ confidence in their political system took quite a blow after the 2000 election farce, when the Supreme Court imposed the losing candidate as President. And despair really set in last year, when all the efforts to elect absolutely anybody not quite as dangerous as Bush came to nothing. In addition, the EU is currently in crisis because when people were given a chance to have a say in the future of their continent, they irresponsibly made what we’re repeatedly told was the Wrong Choice. After all, everyone within the political system in Europe agrees with the consensus over the need to make constant cutbacks because of the pressing demands of the Brave New World – anyone who questions this is torn to pieces and ridiculed in the press (George Galloway) or explicitly told, in the case of the French voters, that they don’t understand the future.

So does the West really believe in giving people a genuine democratic choice? If not, who are we to lecture the Chinese, who after all have had 5,000 years of history to learn from?

Well, the choice between the Republicans and the Democrats is not the widest choice in the world, it’s true. However, what people in the United States and many other countries do enjoy is democratic rights. And in the US they are under attack – laws on censorship, gay rights, positive discrimination and equality legislation, to name but a few, are in the sights of the group of fanatical bigots in the US administration, and absolutely must be defended.

But neither can we allow George W. Bush to define what we mean by democracy. He seems to believe in top-down democracy, with a small ruling elite managing the country on behalf of large commercial interests. In theory he believes that these large commercial interests best represent the core interests of citizens, although in reality it’s hard to see how anyone could sincerely defend this point of view.

I and many others believe in a grassroots participative democracy in which instantly recallable delegates are elected locally into positions which do not give them access to special privileges, and in which all major decisions are preceded by an extensive and open debate and then resolved through the active participation of ordinary citizens through voting.

This is my own democratic ideal. I don’t believe that this kind of democracy is likely to break out anywhere in the world any time soon, and least of all in China. Amongst the people I’ve had contact with over the last few months, multi-party democracy has never been mentioned. At the top end of society, nobody is keen to be seen as China’s Gorbachev, and the man least likely to is Hu Jintao, who recently announced that he wants China to closer resemble North Korea in political terms.

Nevertheless I don’t think China will continue in this direction for too long. Essentially I believe in what Jung Chang says at the end of 600 harrowing and bloody pages of recent Chinese history – that the momentum of liberalisation is unstoppable. Just as China will not attack Taiwan because of the mutual commercial interests, I think that some distant day there will be on offer some form of democracy, acceptable both to foreign corporations and to the most advanced sections of the CCP. In the same way, I think that one day much sooner we will see news items on the first McDonalds to open in Pyongyang, followed by the first Subway and the first Blockbuster video, until it starts to resemble every other city in the world, as the IMF and the World Bank send in legions of foreign companies to grab anything that isn’t nailed down…I could easily be completely wrong about both of these things, though, and one thing we do not have democratic control over is our environment, and that may start to finally give way before either Kim Il Jong or the CCP does. Certainly in the case of North Korea, economic change will arrive much, much quicker than any moves towards political openness.

(However, before I get too pessimistic about the direction the whole world is heading in, there is always the encouraging example of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian peasants – I’d encourage anyone interested to take the time to listen to the interview with the American investigative reporter Greg Palast on this edition of the Democracy Now! radio show. In fact the whole show is a fascinating listen – towards the end there is a lengthy and very disturbing interview with a former CIA ‘Economic Hit Man’.)

In the meantime, then, there is the entirely unresolved question of democratic rights in China. To me it is indisputable that those democratic demands raised, possibly naively and with not much understanding of the costs they would entail, in Tiananmen Square in 1989 relate to real inalienable democratic rights that are currently enjoyed by real people all over the world, and which do not exist in China. The most important of those right now is the right to a genuinely independent free press. Only in this way can the Chinese people learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from them who not to trust.

Is it ethnocentric and culturally insensitive to demand a free press? Only if we believe that countries such as China, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea have some deep cultural connection which means that their people, unlike ourselves, must be permanently kept in the dark about what has happened, what is happening and what could happen in their own and in other countries.

This summer I’ll be spending three months in the UK. It’ll be a welcome relief to be in a place with such an exceedingly free press. Unfortunately, though, more and more space in British newspapers is taken up by items of questionable news value, mostly concerning the adventures of that subspecies of micro-celebrities of whom there seem to be about 300,000 in the UK alone.

One of the people responsible for this is Max Clifford. For those fortunate enough never to have heard that name before, he is a celebrity agent – for any Chinese readers who aren’t familiar with the term, I might add that he is 比 日本人 好*, but only just. His important life’s work is promoting formerly famous and mostly notorious clients, who pay huge sums to ensure that they will never have to deal with the shame of nipping out to Tesco’s for some cat food without getting recognised and causing a commotion.

It’s not just the press that is the object of his attention. He also places clients on those TV shows where desperate celebrities are locked or sent away together and subject themselves to all sorts of debasements to create ratings and headlines. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to grab ratings in the same way as it used to – it seems that no amount of humiliation or unlikely celebrity affairs is able to sate the public’s lust to see genuinely pathetic people suffer for media exposure.

So I had an idea that might just work. Basically, you get a group of these people, hungry to stay in the public eye, and put them in an average-sized Chinese city (Dalian would do just fine) for ten months. They needn’t put up with any discomforts of the kind that people enjoyed watching so much in that show that was set in the jungle – they could stay in the best hotel in town, eat Western-style food, watch CNN occasionally – and there would be no need for any humiliating stunts to attract the viewers.

So what would attract the viewers? Well, the real selling point is that it would put their appetite for fame to the test. How much would they really want attention, and how much attention would they really want?

Would they really want people following them round the supermarket, gasping with wonderment at the things they fill their trolleys with? Would they feel honoured to find people’s eyes tracking the progress of the chopsticks to their mouths and back to the bowl? Would they cherish the admiring gazes of fellow pedestrians, wondering just what their secret is as they totter in the middle of the road while traffic hurtles past in both directions? How would they feel about not being able to take two steps down the street without someone bellowing ‘HELLO’ at them, as every single passing taxi pulls in to the side of the road at the very sight of them? And would they feel that all the hard work had been worth it when dozens of gawping waiting and kitchen staff crowded round their table as they tried to decipher exactly what ‘Freezing Shark’s Bait’ was supposed to mean in actual English?

I suspect that as a result many of them might well decide that they preferred a quiet life, away from the spotlight of public acclaim. But for the winners, those who really value the attention given them, fabulous prizes would await. They could even challenge Da Shan in the lucrative and ever-growing Asian market for Western celebrities!

Obviously I’ve not yet had the chance to perform any detailed research into possible audiences. Consider this, if you will, as a pitch. All I can say is that personally it’s the kind of programme I’d love to see on UK television this summer.

Of course, for obvious reasons, Ken Ho and Vanessa Mae need not apply.

Also on the theme of the Christian right in China, someone reminded me of the role that Christian fundamentalists say China will play in their forthcoming apocalypse. They apparently believe that the rise of China is a clear sign that we are “nearing midnight”, and that China’s need for oil will soon push it into conflict with Israel, triggering the coming of their lord and the smiting of the godless. They also get very excited at any agreements between China and the EU (the rebirth of the Roman Empire), which they see as somehow connected to the Beast, as is Russia of course. I’d love to know how these Jesus freaks sell that to their potential converts!

You can read about it on sites like this:

Even newspapers in China now predict a war with the United States. China cannot match (yet) the U.S. in modern weapons and technology. For example, the U.S. has 18 times as many nuclear missiles. What China has many more times of is men. According to Revelation 9:14-16, an army of 200 million soldiers will cross the Euphrates from the East to fight at the battle of Armageddon.

According to Revelation 16:12, this gigantic army will belong to the “kings of the east” and advance over a prepared way. The way has been prepared. On April 20,2001, on a CNBC news program, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times international news analyst, stated that the real danger with which the United States will have to contend with in the future is China making an alliance with the nations of the East, which was now in progress.

Poking around in these dark corners of the Interweb is very entertaining as long as you try and forget that George W. Bush’s administration takes a lot of this nonsense seriously, and may have it in mind as they provoke chaos and rebellion across the Middle East.

Yesterday I mentioned that all churches in China have to recognise the ultimate authority of the Communist Party in order to practice here. Well, it’s not quite as simple as that:

1. Christian believers must fervently love the People’s Republic of China, support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the Peoples Government, uphold the unification of the motherland and the harmony among ethnic groups, and work steadfastly on the road of socialism.

2. Christian believers must strictly abide by all the laws, regulations, and policies of the Communist Party and the State, and strive to be patriotic and law abiding citizens.

3. Christian believers must actively work to increase the material wealth and cultivate the spiritual morals of the socialist civilization. They must comply with the government’s labor codes and strive to contribute to the development of the “Four Modernizations.” When scheduled religious activities are in conflict with production and work schedules, the economic activities must take priority.

4. A permit must be obtained from the county Religious Affairs Bureau in order to establish religious meeting points. No unauthorized meeting points are allowed.

5. Christian believers must actively cooperate with the government to carry out thoroughly the Party’s religious policies to the letter. They shall not persuade and force others to believe in Christianity. They shall not brainwash teenagers under 18 with religious beliefs. They shall not bring children to religious activities.

6. One should see a doctor for medication when sick. Christian believers must not resort to prayer alone for healing so as not to endanger people’s health and lives.

7. Christian believers shall not preach their religion outside the church buildings and specific places which have been designated for religious activities. They shall not preach itinerantly. They shall not receive self proclaimed evangelists into their homes, churches, or meeting points.

While he was still President, Jiang Zemin was allegedly asked at a dinner party what fundamental change he would like to see happen in China. His response was that he would like to see China become a Christian country.

He’s not isolated in this. Some of the leading creatures at the top of the CCP have apparently concluded from their studies of developed countries that the key to their success was the role of Christian beliefs. I don’t think they’re being inconsistent in this, given that there isn’t really anything to Party ideology any more apart from nationalism, the need for an authoritarian state and letting the free market take over all aspects of economic life. In fact, I think it’s better to think of the CCP as the Chinese Nationalist Party (國民党!) these days. And I think it’s precisely this vacuum of ideas that makes young people in particular so vulnerable to right-wing fundamentalist groups like this who dispatch every year more and more young people to China to preach the holy word – under the guise of teaching english.

I came across this fascinating and timely article about missionary groups using ESL as a means of harvesting converts around the world. Unfortunately as it’s a PDF I can’t copy and post much of it here, but I’d encourage anyone remotely interested in either ESL or the evil influence of these bible bashing nutters to read the whole article, long as it is:

According to a report by missionaries recently returned from China, they are planning to return soon: ‘We will teach English to Chinese students between the ages of 10 and 18 for six weeks in July and August.’ On their last visit, they tell us, ‘over 350 students heard the Gospel’ and the principal of the school admired their dedication even though, as he explained, ‘I don’t understand what they were talking about but I knew it was something very deep and very special.’

It is something I find extremely worrying, not to say depressing. I’ve heard that in some cases in China the religious organisations offer to pay half the salaries of these ‘teachers’. We have at least one of them here – I have seen the person concerned heading into class with a big thick ‘Rapture’-type book. I’ve heard about Chinese students being baptised by foreign teachers in the bathtub of their apartments. Sometimes one of my students proclaims in class that they’re a Christian – I just ignore it and move very swiftly on. Tragically though, because the students have so few reference points to help them understand Western life in any depth (hence the appalling and maddening assumption that I am a Christian), I think they actually see it as pretty ‘cool’.

Personally the whole thing makes my blood boil.

This is not a general diatribe against teachers who happen to consider themselves Christians – you really need to follow the above link to know what I’m talking about. As it makes clear, what the organisations concerned are proselytising is the complete opposite of Liberation Theology. The article gives some example sentences which one English teaching missionary group encourages their staff to use in the classroom:

• Right: Man has a right to punish his children when they behave poorly.
• Struggle: I’m struggling to finish this work soon.
• Boss: The boss is good. He treats us well and pays us a good wage.

No problem for them that all churches in China are obliged to accept the authority of the Communist Party before they can go about their work. And the Communist Party leadership are fully aware that what right-wing Christian ideology has to say about the world constitutes very little threat to their own power, so they at least tolerate it, and I suspect increasingly encourage it. What is being preached, after all, is submission – submission to whatever forms of authority exist, be it a husband (after all, we call it the missionary position for a good reason), a corrupt government or an intolerant and ignorant God. In much the same way, in fact, as the world’s financial institutions force obedience to the law of the market on the world’s poorest countries:

While on the one hand preaching a strong line in neoliberal politics, many evangelical organisations preach an equally strong line on political obedience. The Christian Television (online, 2002) warns us to ‘Stop the Revolution’ because ‘one day Jesus will return and overthrow all who remain rebellious to this rule.’ Stopping rebellion allows former sinners to find ‘true freedom’. This doctrine emphasises acquiescence not only to the authority of God but also to the authority of government.

With tragic irony, these Christian churches are preaching this nonsense under the guise of giving people what has become one of the most empowering tools these days, the ability to communicate in English.

At least in China, I’d question the depth of conviction of any recent converts to Christianity. According to Paul Theroux’s book, it’s very common for ‘religious’ Chinese people to bet on several horses at the same time. Just because someone says they’re a Christian doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Falun Gong and maybe the Party too!

However, this is not just happening in Chinese universities, but all over the world. There needs to be a movement throughout ESL to expose and challenge these people. They are exploiting the needs of the poor in order to push their twisted, bigoted ideology. They really do qualify as ‘foreign devils’!

…what Europe do we want?

To put it bluntly, do we want to live in a world in which the only choice is between the American civilisation and the emerging Chinese authoritarian-capitalist one? If the answer is no then the only alternative is Europe. The third world cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American dream. In the present world constellation, it is only Europe that can do it. The true opposition today is not between the first world and the third world. Instead it is between the first and third world (ie the American global empire and its colonies), and the second world (ie Europe).

You can read the complete article here.

I’ve noticed an increasing and worrying tendency to refer to the Massacre, even in the international press, as the ‘Tiananmen Square Incident’. In fact, a friend’s Chinese teacher referred to it once as the Tiananmen Square Accident, and then tried to defend her choice of word! The actual ‘Tiananmen Incident’ took place in 1976. What took place was also a massacre, and certainly not an ‘incident’, whatever that means:

Things became rowdy, and inside the Great Hall of the People China’s rulers were alarmed. After consultation with Mao, it was decided to use force to clear the square. Mao authorized the use of force but not guns.

That evening when only a few thousand protesters remained they were driven from the square by militia armed with clubs. Four thousand were arrested. Sixty were dragged into the Great Hall of the People, beheaded and later shipped to Shanghai and secretly cremated.

It’s at best misleading to use this phrase to refer to the events of 1989, and at worst it plays right into the hands of the Chinese authorities in their attempts to have the massacre recorded in the history books of the world as something much more neutral and ambiguous than pure cold-blooded butchery of their own people.

I think this may have something to do with increasing Chinese Government influence in debates concerning human rights in China, and when it occurs I think it needs to be confronted and the fact that it was a massacre must be insisted on at all costs.

The saddest thing about all this is that the average Chinese student, despite seeming to spend every available minute online, probably has about as much awareness of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as the average British student has of the Tiananmen Incident. How foreigners can choose to go on living here year after year in the full knowledge of the extent of their students’ ignorance is truly beyond my understanding.

It seems to me that if you seriously want to understand the mentality of Chinese people today, you have to consider the impact of the events of June 1989. The protests were not isolated but were part of a general push for democracy in the late nineteen-eighties. This is abundantly clear if you read any books which cover the period – at the moment I’m reading ‘Riding the Iron Rooster’ by Paul Theroux, his account of a year spent travelling around the country. It was published in 1988, and in the book in conversation after conversation people express their shame and disgust at the Cultural Revolution, their rejection of Mao as someone who made nothing but mistakes and as someone who they recognise to have been essentially cracked after 1956, and their wish for more political freedom. He visits Mao’s home village, a site of pilgrimage 10 years before, and finds it completely deserted.

He talks about the massive protests which took place all over the country in 1987, involving both students and workers demanding greater political freedom: press freedom, electoral reform, a multiparty system, official permission to demonstrate and, perhaps more importantly, their right to have their protests reported in the press; and social freedom – the students’ demands included sexual freedom (in 2005 it is still illegal to ‘cohabit’) and better food in the canteens. At one point there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people on the streets of Shanghai, and similar protests in other cities. The person scapegoated and purged in the wake of these protests was Hu Yaobang, whose death was the initial impetus for the buildup in Tienanmen Square in April 1989. There also followed a general campaign against the effects of ‘bourgeois liberalism’, especially amongst the young.

We all know what came of that – if anyone needs reminding they only need to take the time to read the report which the Guardian fortunately keeps posted on it’s Special Report on China page here. As I say, it was not an isolated event. The ongoing impact has involved a partial rehabilitation of Mao’s reputation, a refusal to confront the consequences of the Cultural Revolution and what I consider to be a general intellectual impoverishment, contrasted with the real intellectual awakening of the nineteen-eighties which is evident in Paul Theroux’s book and also in Ma Jian’s ‘Red Dust’, which is the story of a Beijing writer and painter travelling the country in the mid-80s, on the run from the authorities visiting his friends and witnessing the changes taking place. His friends also paint, write and talk about the recent past and about the possibility of living in a freer society.

I can only compare that with the conversations I’ve had over the last ten months, obviously especially with young people, in which political change has not been any kind of issue for them.

The authorities after 1989 took the decision that they would systematically crush any sign of independent thinking amongst young people. In order to achieve this they increased military-style discipline in universities, increased political (read nationalistic) education for university and school students and removed from campuses any places where students or teachers would be able to gather and discuss their lives. This over the last few years has happily coincided with a general improvement of the standard of living, along with certain projects of national prestige which are used to bolster young people’s sense of national pride and attachment to the state.

Just as important in my opinion has been the growing availability of mobile phones and the internet. Chinese students see themselves primarily as consumers, just as connected to and engaged with the outside world as young people in Japan or the USA. In reality they are disconnected from the society that they live in, atomized, disregarding of any notion of solidarity or democracy. What it will now take to shake them out of this stupor and make them think about what is going on around them I do not know. They really don’t seem to know or in fact care that the internet they see is filtered and a pale imitation of what the rest of the world uses. I’ve tried asking them what they would do if the government banned mobile phones, but it’s a bit too abstract as that clearly is not about to happen.

This, on the other hand, is fantastic news.

The first time I met someone from mainland China was in 1994 at a party. We were both catastrophically drunk and partly because of this, and partly because at the time I mixed in a dark red circle, I naively assumed that he was some sort of dissident who’d fled the country. I don’t think he was, and he may even have been a gatecrasher, but I bombarded him with all sorts of stupid questions, the subtext of which was ‘Bu..b..but what is your life like?!?’ The exoticism of the life I imagined for him in China was boundless. I don’t remember a single word he said to me.

Five years later when I started teaching I had Chinese students in all my classes. The boys would turn up halfway through the morning, evidently still fast asleep, and in the meantime we, the Europeans, would bombard the girls with questions. ‘So you’ve really never heard of the Beatles/Elvis/techno music?’ was a common theme. They in turn would timidly ask if it was true that there were really late night discos in Dublin. In the break they would crowd round the tape player and turn up their cassettes of what sounded to me like Fisher Price Disney pop ballads.

They were (I think) rich kids who had failed to get into University and had therefore been sent away until they had learnt English. To me ordinary life in China was full of mystery, and even their most mundane comments fed this impression. One insisted throughout his entire stay that back home he was a taxi driver. Lost for the answer to a question he would grin and burst out ‘I drive taxi – where you wanna go?’ to great hilarity. Discussing the issue of acceptable questions to ask on a first date they came up with ‘Who is your local party chief?’, which they seemed to find just as deliriously incongruous as we did.

Hungover and mischeavous one early summer day, I decided we would talk about special occasions and festive holidays in our different countries. I mentioned that June 4th was a significant day for many people in China. The idealstic young Russian and German students saw the opportunity I’d sensed they were waiting for and launched into a furious attack. The Chinese were nonplussed. When things had calmed down a bit one of the students, a patient and drowsy whisp of a boy from Qingdao, explained exactly what had happened that day.

The student protestors, he said, had tied duck feathers (duck feathers? we asked, understandably confused. Duck feathers, he assured us) to the soles of their feet and had tickled (yes, he knew what tickled meant) the soldiers, and a lot of soldiers had died because of the tickling.

The students I had that summer and the next seemed to be constantly coming up with similarly bizarre, usually hilarious and often disturbing explanations for things. And I think it was that more than any other single thing that gave me the impulse to want to come to China and to find out what it was like to live amongst people who had such an outlandish view of the world.

Now, I’m aware of how quickly what seems exotic from a distance quickly becomes mundane upon closer contact. I still believe there is more to the attraction of the exotic than this, and there are some places which retain their mystery and allure when you live there. But China today would present quite a challenge to anyone’s sense of wonder and mischief. What was the Cultural Revolution if not a war of the mundane against the exotic? Young people in China today revere the most mundane and least interesting aspects of our culture – the NBA, the UEFA Champions’ League, KFC – and dream of becoming secretaries, accountants and CEOs. Anonymous, money-making dreams.

So was I naive? My only defence is that I didn’t come here expecting to find Shangri-La, or even Thailand. I came here in search of that sense of the bizarre I found in Dublin, for more duck feather stories.

It’s something that happens very rarely. The other day in class I was overjoyed when one of my students kept a completely straight face while she told the class that she used to have a patch of grass on the top of her head which could predict the future. People like that really stand out here. They apparently have a word in Chinese, Linglei, which describes young people with a different view of the world and who aspire to a different lifestyle, but here nobody recognises the word, let alone identifies themselves with it. For most their worldview compels them to repeat what they’ve never had cause to question. One of my students primly informed me that ‘the aim of University in England is to cultivate the perfect gentleman’. Another plucked up the courage to ask if I’d had another girlfriend before my present one. I’m 32 years old, by the way.

In just over two months I’ll be another year older and I’ll be gone. While I’ve been here and over the last few years mainland Chinese have been spreading out across the globe, possibly outnumbering the wealthier and worldlier Cantonese speakers. Dublin and Lisbon both have more and more shops, supermarkets and restaurants owned and run by newly arrived Mandarin speakers. Wherever I go in the world in the future I’ll be meeting more and more people from mainland China.

Now I don’t know what happens to Chinese people when they go to live abroad. I suppose that their different experiences may well broaden their outlook and cause them to question what they’ve been brought up to believe in in China. Now I’m not in much of a position to say. What I do think, however, is that the circumstances in which foreigners are allowed to come and live here in China are too inhibiting to permit any more than a superficial understanding of and engagement with what’s really going on around them. It feels like the unspoken question in the inquiring eyes of a Chinese person as they follow me down the street or round the supermarket is ‘why the hell did you choose to come here?’. The answer is that I feel ashamed that I made that choice, and I’ll feel much freer to talk openly to Chinese people – about the duck feathers and the fortune-telling head grass – when I’m no longer an ‘invited guest’of their government, a government which they have a lot more right and reason to hate then I do.

Does anyone remember Gary North? In 1999 I was a regular visitor to his site, which hosted thousands of links to articles presenting entirely plausible scenarios of global financial catastrophe at the end of the year. Embarrassing to admit now, of course, but I was actually quite frightened.

All the more chastening, in fact, to find out soon after that Gary North was a bit of a nutter. Actually, he was a fully-fledged hysterical fundamentalist lunatic who had already, in the early eighties, but without the benefit of the internet, happily predicted that AIDS would lead to a decimation of the decadent human species. He was a full-time doom-mongerer, with his own silly agenda.

These days I’m much more careful about believing predictions when I don’t know who’s making them and why, particularly when I come across them on the internet.

Now, Gordon C. Chang is a writer on Chinese affairs, and from what I know of him he’s been in a good position to make predictions about the future of the Chinese economy. His book, which I don’t think is on general sale in the People’s Republic, but which you can read an extract from here, is a very detailed account of what exactly is rotten about China’s economic miracle, and he provides a number of possible scenarios, all entirely plausible, for how things could go horribly wrong for the Chinese government in the not too distant future.

It’s obviously something he feels very deeply about. In fact, it is this which puts me of the book, which often reads like a rant. The individual stories he tells tend to get lost in the general sweep of his argument, making it compelling to read in short bursts, but over 200 pages he often comes across like somebody with a vendetta.

Could he be another Gary North? His name is not one that crops up much in the increasing amount of articles equally sceptical about the sustainability of the economic miracle, unlike that of Jasper Becker, whose book The Chinese I unfortunately won’t have the chance to read more of until I leave the country for good – hooray! – in the summer, but who turns up in this excellent BBC radio documentary.

Now I think I agree with a lot of what Chang says. My feelings cloud the issue, however – I’d love to see the C C P humiliated and overthrown, although I know that whatever challenges may emerge may not necessarily be to my liking. The general feeling, for example, that the Government is insufficiently anti-Japanese
(there is an eye-witness account of yesterday’s Beijing demonstration here) could be the spark for a firestorm of grievances against corruption, unemployment and economic inequality

But ultimately I’m not best placed or qualified to say. I only read what I choose to read and believe what I choose to believe. However, I do live in China and I do reflect on what I see around me. From this local point of view, then, and given that I don’t speak much Chinese and I miss most of what goes on around me, does all this apparent growth and prosperity look sustainable? Can the momentum be maintained, or is it heading like Chang says for an inevitable collapse?

Since in our college of 16,000 students there is nowhere to go and socialise, I spend a certain amount of time in the gym. I’ve been going for about three or four months now. I had to change gyms because the better equipped gym at the neighbouring University ceased to be better equipped when some of the machines stopped working. A week or so went by and when they weren’t fixed I had to switch to the gym on our campus.

At first this was much better. After 6 months in China I’m getting used to the same song being repeated at great volume for hours on end, and over time I persuaded the staff that it was better to close the doors on very cold days. The staff seemed quite friendly, given that they have what is in China considered a dream job, namely sitting around slurping noodles and sending text messages. The most important thing was that the machines worked.

All good things end eventually. When I asked when the machine would be fixed, the answer was ‘bu yi ding’. I asked someone what that meant. It means ‘not necessarily’.

I switched to another machine, which seemed at least to be hurting adjacent bits of my arms and shoulders. Truth be told I’m not much more of an expert on body-building than on the Chinese economy, but it was fine for two days. Then it broke. I asked again about the chances of it being fixed any time soon, and this time I was pleased that I understood the answer. Bu yi ding.

Armed with this new bit of vocabulary things are becoming clearer. Now when the state-of-the-art DVD PC facilities stop working, I know there’s no point asking if they’ll be fixed and if we’ll be able to use the classroom again. And the smell that comes out of the bathrooms and fills the corridors of the school’s brand new buildings, will anything be done about that? Bu yi ding.

It’s a simple question of maintenance. Because nobody knows what to do when these new fangled machines and these shiny new buildings get broken, damaged or worn, the authorities do all they can to prevent this happening. In the brand new language labs the students have to put little blue cloth slippers from a cardboard box by the door over their shoes so the floor doesn’t get damaged. In the 12-storey main building, it’s not possible to take the lift to or from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th floors in case it breaks down. As for the toilets, the solution is to leave all the doors and windows wide open at all times, which has the added advantage of affording the curious students even more access to the habits of Westerners than they get at the average English Corner.

As I said, I’m no ‘China hand’ or expert. I know what I see and I try not to generalise too much or let my opinions shade my judgments. But if the different parts of the economy are managed in a similar way to our college, the Government will have, in fact probably is having huge problems maintaining the appearance of economic momentum.

Do I think they’ll be able to continue making the economy grow without risking surplus production, over-investment and economic collapse, and without provoking massive social unrest in the not too distant future?

不一定.