Tag: china

Is there anyone alive today who still sees China as a grey, hostile country, closed off to the rest of the world, where everyone sports Chairman Mao hats and rides bicycles while chanting passages from the Little Red Book? Certainly anyone who has visited the country in the last 20 or so years is genuinely surprised by the size and number of the skyscrapers, the traffic jams and the brand-new shopping centres selling the same fashions as in the West.The Chinese are proud of their new country, and pleased that people come to visit and see the results of the changes for themselves. Foreigners visiting or living in China are encouraged to spread the word, to use the benefit of their broadmindedness and wisdom to impart the truth to others abroad who ‘don’t understand’ how much things have changed. And the authorities also see their own job as ‘educating’ foreigners about the new China. According to Sun Jiazheng, the head of the Ministry of Culture:

(We) have many foreign friends, including some ambassadors. They have special opinions about China because they are knowledgeable about our country and are very friendly to us. I often travel abroad, and I make self-criticisms when I come back … sometimes I find foreign countries know so little about China. As a minister in charge of cultural exchange, I feel that I have not done a good job in introducing modern China to the world. Our foreign guests here (on the CCTV discussion show Dianhua) are all experts on China’s issues or know a lot about our country, but most foreigners are not like them, and know little about China. Take our trip to Germany for example: When we asked a taxi driver about his impression of China, he said it was a country with a vast area. Then he added that he did not know much and the country seemed quite mysterious to him. Changing the Subject: How the Chinese Government Controls Television, Ann Condi

Apart from the example of the German taxi driver, what does not ‘understanding’ China mean? According to the Government, many people happily expose their own ignorance, not by talking about Mao hats or little red books, but those other tired items of former importance so beloved of foreigners – Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, and Human Rights.

When the Government talks of the importance of educating the world about China, it’s not just pride in the new shopping centres full of consumer goods. What it is, is code: what they really want is for the debate about China’s past, present and future to be on China’s (meaning the Government’s) terms.

My students, as I had expected, were evidently taught to be very suspicious about any less-than-positive information regarding China. But what is interesting is that they weren’t taught to see it as ‘imperialist lies’, but rather as the result of a misunderstanding. Put in these terms, of course, it sounds generous, tolerant and forgiving; but what is actually happening is that the authorities are exploiting the goodwill and naivity of the young in order to encourage them to automatically reject anything that contradicts what the Party tells them. Both Chinese youth and foreigners resident in China are encouraged to talk about the occupation of Tibet as an issue too difficult to discuss. The Cultural Revolution is sold as a terrible period in the past with no bearing on the country’s present. Human Rights is a confusing issue because, as we all know, ‘all countries have problems’ (China now goes as far as to produce a regular report on Human Rights in the US, just to emphasise what a complex issue it really is). Democracy as practiced in the West is perhaps not appropriate for China…and so on.

It’s true that many of these issues have complicated aspects to them. But the Party line is that any conclusions reached about them which does not show the Party in a flattering light are based on a false or superficial understanding – so the Government tells China’s young people and ‘foreign friends’ that they have a special duty to tell others the ‘truth’ – ie. that these things are just too complicated to discuss.

It is of course flattering to be told that you have a ‘special understanding’ of an issue which your peers lack. Foreign politicians seem to fall for the CCP’s rhetoric just as foreign teachers do. One foreign ESL teacher gave the following formula for avoiding controversy in the classroom:

Tibet (“I’ve heard a lot of contradictory information about that place, let’s talk about something else.”)
Tiananmen (“I wasn’t there, let’s talk about something else.”)
Taiwan (“I am certain that the people of Taiwan and the Mainland can work out this issue in a peaceful way, let’s talk about something else.”)
Religion (“People have so many strange and wonderful superstitions, let’s talk about something else.”)
The ‘superiority’ of western democracy (“Every country has its problems, let’s talk about something else.”)

But it seems to me that if we agree to conclude, whether in class or in public, that these topics are not up for discussion for whatever reason, just as the Party insists they are beyond the understanding of ordinary Chinese, we end up conceding a huge amount of ground to the CCP.

Surely it is better for foreign teachers, instead of saying ‘it’s too complicated’ or ‘both sides have their arguments’, to respond with the basic truth: “One of the conditions of my being here is that I’m not allowed to talk about those subjects”.

Of course there are some subjects that the Government does permit, although not encourage, discussion over: the economy, the environment and corruption. I think this shows that they are, at least for the moment, confident of being able to control the debate over those issues, acknowledging them as problems and promoting the idea that they are doing everything they can about them. Sometimes this can lead to bizarre admissions: a university professor interviewed during the BBC’s China Week of documentaries claimed that the Government had simply never considered that economic inequality might result from the policy of economic liberalism.

On other issues – alternative political organisations, the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule, the status of Taiwan and Tibet – debate will remain completely proscribed and penalised, as they know that to even acknowledge them as issues would jeopardise their very existence.

Another irritating and troubling aspect of the Government’s propaganda regarding free information about China, is the argument that any criticism is due to jealousy of China’s economic success. This trite argument unfortunately seems to appeal to the young. It is, needless to say, a contemptuous way to deal with genuine concerns about social injustice and human rights, and about the sustainability of the economic model they have adopted.

The authorities have so far been extremely adept at dealing with the Internet Generation. Throughout all my time in the country, despite all the restrictions and without using proxy servers, I was able to find pretty much all the information about Tiananmen Square, Tibet, the recent riots etc etc etc that I was looking for. But when I told my students about the Guardian’s special week of articles on China, despite the fact that they had never heard of the Guardian before, and although the Guardian site is not in any way blocked in China, none of them was prepared to take a look. Of course they claimed that they would find the language too daunting, but I think that this was a pretty poor excuse for an excuse. I think that one reason is that they are genuinely apprehensive of the possible consequences of being seen to visit a non-Chinese website. But I think the main reason is that they feel they might encounter information which contradicts what the Party has told them about China; and if they do, they will have to take the time and effort to systematically disregard each and every word of it.

About 10 or so years ago I used to do a weekly show on pirate radio in Dublin. A lot of it consisted of me ranting about whatever was going through my head, interspersed with playing whatever bits of music took my fancy. It being a pirate station, it wasn’t like we conducted regular audience research, and apart from a closely-written postcard accusing me of being an ‘English cesspit’, the only feedback I remember receiving was comments coaxed out of friends, telling me that it was ‘quite funny’, ‘not quite as funny as that other time’ and asking me where I’d got that track from, the one about mescalin that went dum dum THUMP dumdum THUMP THUMP THUMP….A lot of the time it felt a lot like hard work without much more than its own reward.

By comparison blogging is a walk in the park! I mean, hopefully one of these days something I’ve posted here will be picked up by one of the web’s countless equivalents of ‘The World’s Stupidest Home Videos’ and eternal recognition and boundless wealth will be mine. But for the moment I’m really happy with the response that this site has generated, mostly thanks to sites such as the Peking Duck, Simon World and Asiapundit identifying with what I’ve written and encouraging others to drop by.

Over the last few months the site has served as a kind of out-tray for my reflections on what I see around me here in China and the things I read that help me make sense of it. Now I’m leaving China my intention is to continue with the site, but obviously as time goes by my theoretical in-tray will contain less China-related, er, files (?!?), and more things related to where I am in the future.

Nevertheless I’ve now got a huge list of books that I want to read which I haven’t been able to get hold of here, beginning with Jasper Becker’s The Chinese and Jung Chang’s Mao book and also including Mr. China, China Inc and lots more. Partly for this reason, China will occupy a large part of my thoughts for some time to come, as well as influencing how I think about other places and issues. So if you have been dropping by this site in search of China-related stuff, don’t stop doing so just yet. I will continue to post regular but more occasional China material on it.

In the longer term, well, I don’t know exactly what to expect. More things related to teaching, Spanish, Latin America, globalisation and whatever is going through my head.

And in the shorter term you may well find some species of semi-coherent stoned ramblings occupying this space!

In honour of my 30th post, and my upcoming 30-somethingth birthday, here is a 3-part recording of interviews with my 1st year university students about questions such as: Who was China’s greatest leader, Which Chinese people are most famous around the world, and Which events in recent Chinese history are best known in other countries.

Unfortunately due to general ineptitude on my part and poor equipment (see above) the sound quality is not fantastic. It sounds like I was shouting the questions, but I don’t think I was.

Part a: The students talk about Zhao Ziyang, once they’ve got over my mangling of his name; their admiration for Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao; along with some terrible editing and spectacular coughing.

Part b: The Liberation of China; the death of Zhou Enlai; Deng Xiao Ping in Hawaii; and how to say pretty much anything in Japanese.

Part c: What happened if Deng Xiao Ping walked round your house; and how long it will be before China has a female leader.

***** UPDATE *****
After problems with the site they were being hosted on, I’ve moved them back to yousendit.com, which is only good for a limited amount of downloads, so if that runs out email me and I’ll repost them as soon as I can.

Just in case the original links are working (it seems to be a question of browser compatability), the original links (unlimited downloads) are here: Part a, Part b and Part c.

Apologies for all the messin’ around.

Recently, during a class discussion about acceptable questions to ask a recent acquaintance, I asked my students if it was okay to ask a relative stranger if they were a member of the Communist Party. I expected them to answer, as I think most Westerners would do, that it was not okay, because discussing politics in this way might lead to unwanted disagreement. The consensus was, however, that it might be okay if you needed something done and the person concerned might be able to help you.

What, then, is the Chinese Communist Party? It is certainly Chinese, but there are very few people who would these days characterise its politics as related to the theories of Karl Marx or the efforts of the Bolsheviks to establish a classless society in anything other than a purely rhetorical sense.

But is it, in fact, a political party? Not in the sense that it competes on an ideological battleground with other political forces. The Communist Party is supposed to be an all-encompassing organisation that renders other points of view obsolete. In practice, of course, instead of encompassing other points of view it ferociously silences them. The right of political debate is restricted solely to proven Party members.

More recently some of those Party members have been more vociferous about the kind of society they want to create. Known as the New Left, they look to a more social democratic model, influenced as far as I can tell by European societies which in the post-war period established a social pact between the trade unions, the Government and the employers. This social pact enabled Germany and Scandinavian societies to develop sustainably and to provide an enviable social safety net for their citizens.

Could such a model be applied in China? Well, I think it does need to be remembered that the social pact which apparently functioned so well in those societies from which China’s New Left are so keen to draw inspiration, was itself the product of struggle; the development of social welfare systems and the inclusion of trade unions in social bargaining was not something freely granted from above, but was based on a recognition of their very real and proven power in relatively free societies. However, could the Chinese Communist Party begin to make serious adjustments and reforms which at least ameliorated the worst effects of rampant capitalism on people’s lives and provided some kind of social safety net for those most in need?

This is a hugely complex issue which I think will come to dominate international debate about China in the coming years. According to an optimistic point of view, as expressed by one of the discussion panel members on this BBC radio programme, what China wants and needs to do is to copy the example of the Labour Party in Britain, with the added difficulty of doing so while remaining in power.

To start with, I think that the example of the British Labour Party is hugely misleading. Firstly, because the project of reforming the Labour Party was carried out by the pro-market leadership in opposition to the wishes of a very large proportion of the more left-wing socially concious Party members. In the case of China, it is the left-wing party members who are the advocates of change against the wishes of the dominant right-wing pro-market Party leadership.

Another problem with the analogy is that, although superficially attractive, it ignores the recent history of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has been making a rightward-bound ideological journey more or less ever since the early nineteen-sixties, when in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward a certain amount of market reforms were introduced as a precursor to the start of the abandonment of Communist ideology by Deng Xiao Ping in the late nineteen-seventies. This was of course following the outburst of out-and-out autocracy of Mao’s ‘Great Purge’. Over ten years ago the disavowal of the wish for an equitable society was formalised by Jiang Zemin, who in his bizarrely-named ‘Three Represents’ theory welcomed back into the party all those people – ‘rightists’, capitalists and so on – who had been persecuted throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties.

However, the journey the CCP has been taking has nothing to do with an increasing sense of social justice; quite the opposite, in fact. What it says clearly is: “If you can’t beat them, join them”. Now when the CCP is so keen to welcome representatives of the Guomindang to China, it seems that there is very little to distinguish the two in political terms.

So can the Chinese Communist Party reform itself into a Social Democratic Party with Chinese Characteristics? As I say, it’s a huge area of debate and I think the arguments will run and run, but I just want to draw two brief analogies.

The first is the Catholic Church, which in the nineteen-sixties attempted through the Vatican II doctrine to get rid of some of it’s more backward thinking on social issues. I think that at the time a lot of Catholic clergy took heart from the changes that were made, and it led directly to what we call ‘Liberation Theology’, the promotion of social as well as heavenly justice.

So what happened? Now we have a church which seems to be more reactionary than ever, promoting the development of AIDS throughout the second and third world, arrogantly refusing to deal with the firestorm of paedophile allegations which threaten to drive more and more moderate Catholics away from the church, and whose congregations are now asked to worship an ex-Nazi Pope, as if to emphasise that there is nothing worldly about his power and that he cannot be challenged by mere mortals. So what happened?

I think the main reason has to do with power. The Catholic Church is driven first and foremost by the need to protect its own existence. Its authority derives from core beliefs which are reactionary and superstitious, and to suggest that they can be adapted to suit social realities is I think to call into question that authority. A Catholic church genuinely and actively committed to challenging poverty and injustice would be unable to sustain its own power and wealth.

As I said at the start, my students don’t seem to really regard the Chinese Communist Party as a political party as we might understand it, but as an organisation of power, privilege and prestige. Throughout the country party officials and to a certain extent ordinary Party members are allowed to run amok: charging peasants illegal taxes, running up restaurant bills for thousands of dollars, stuffing their pockets with public cash, paying thugs to beat villagers off their own land, building up huge unpayable debts with banks, everywhere doing favours for people they like and making life difficult or impossible for those who they don’t. And doing all this with relative impunity – who is going to stand in their way? Other Party members?

It is only a tiny amount of cases of corruption that we ever get to hear about. As far as I can see, corruption and abuse is the rule and not the exception. My second analogy, then, is the Mafia.

In the Godfather Part 2 Michael Corleone is young, idealistic and determined not to follow the example of his father. He is going to clean up his family businesses and make them respectable. So what happens? I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but it is the Mafia we are talking about here after all. How can you reform an organisation that is based on criminal corruption, on the systematic hoarding and abuse of power? Maybe we can conclude that what Michael wants doesn’t really change, but as a leading member of the organisation he has a crucial job to do: Protect the Family.

I don’t think that China’s New Left are in any way insincere about their project of bringing social justice to China. But I think they’re misguided and possibly naive about the organisation they are members of. Unfortunately I think their efforts only go to provide window dressing for the Party leadership – it enables them to say ‘Look! We have open debate inside the Party! No need for dissidents! Don’t you see how wrong Wei Jingsheng and all those other foreign agents were? China is marching straight down the road to democracy all by itself and we don’t need any advice or criticism from outside!’.

At the height of the recent anti-Japanese protests, a lot of my students told me that they were going to Lushun for the weekend. Their explanations were a bit confusing, but I gathered that it had something to do with Japan. Lushun is a sensitive area, off-limits to foreigners. In addition to a huge naval base, it apparently features museum commemorating Japanese war atrocities – the whole peninsula was occupied by them in the 1930s and ’40s. Naturally I assumed that they were going for some sort of protest.

I was completely wrong. They were actually going there to see the Cherry Blossom Festival – just like in Japan, they told me, when this flower blooms huge numbers of people go for a day trip just to take a look.

When China blooms it can look really beautiful. Out of the window while I write, I can see a large apple blossom tree blocking out the dull view that kept us depressed those long winter months. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Another thing I’ll really miss here is the parks in the summer. Without ever really seeming crowded, they teem with people, singing screechy opera numbers and playing those instruments that I never got round to learning the names of, playing badminton and that ubiquitous shuttlecock-kicking game that all Chinese people can play a thousand times better than me, or gathering under the trees for a game of Mah Jong, Chinese chess or cards. It makes for an enchanting and very friendly atmosphere – people seem so content that I often feel I’ve just blended into the background, sitting on a bench soaking it all in.

Just yesterday I was sitting watching someone’s hilarious attempts to dislodge a mis-hit shuttlecock by throwing the same rock up into a tree again and again, when a young guy sat down beside me with a book. We had a fascinating conversation for about 20 minutes about the different books we were reading. At least, that’s what I was talking about – it’s quite possible that he was telling me that he’d just failed his driving test for the third time and was thinking of buying a canary.

You sometimes see odd sights in the park. In Beihai Park in Beijing a few weeks ago I was startled to see what looked like an entire army unit with their riot shields and truncheons drawn, all marching in formation behind two soldiers carrying between them a flat-screen TV!

The simple friendliness of some of the people who’ve been part of my everyday life these last ten months is a memory that I’ll cherish. The woman who sells me pineapples and bananas, and who used to sell me strawberries until they were suddenly replaced by cherries, exhibits remarkable patience with my Chinese, and astonishing dexterity at cutting up pineapples. The old man in my local shop is also relentlessly enthusiastic about my Mandarin, even though all I ever really say to him is ‘me want two beers/four eggs/one big bottle water/one small cold bottle water’, thank you and ‘Bye Bye!’.

And this cafe I’m sitting in right now is quite a find – friendly, efficient and cool. They also finally helped me to learn the word for cheese. Just a shame I only discovered the place yesterday.

好, that’s it. I’m off to the beach.

The great Irish satirical rebel Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly had many songs in his repetoire about the struggle to free his beloved Ireland from the hated British. One of them was called ‘Spit on the Brits’, and during his raucous concerts he would encourage the audience to participate by coughing their guts up before joining in with the chorus, which went as follows:

We’d spit on the Brits
Spit on the Brits
And we’d shower them in a lovely sea of green,
We’d spit on the Brits,
Spit on the Brits
And then they’d blow us all to smithereens

In the West spitting is usually interpreted as an act of aggression; if you’re standing at the bus stop and someone loudly spits on the floor, it’s natural to move away. Not because you think that they might spit on you, but because someone who displays such an obvious lack of respect for social convention and basic hygiene might be either dangerous or diseased or both.

The Chinese habit of regularly clearing their lungs in public is therefore an affront to Western sensibilities. Ironically, the Chinese, as Paul Theroux points out, are not among the world’s great spitters, because for all the fanfare that precedes the act of expectoration, the end result tends to just dribble out of their mouths and on to the pavement. It’s quite distinct from the kind of pinpoint projectile spitting familiar from John Wayne movies.

Another classic complaint amongst Western visitors to China is the staring. Often, for a Chinese peasant, seeing a foreigner is akin to us finding Chief Running Bear in full costume directing traffic. However, for us staring, however harmless the intention of the starer, is also easy to interpret as a hostile act. It seems to say: I’m here, you’re there, and I’ve just decided I don’t like you.

It has been said that the Chinese would benefit enormously from the introduction of Spitting and Staring as events in the 2008 Olympics. I don’t think that’s either accurate or fair. Not accurate, partly for the reasons mentioned above, and not fair because all nations have bad habits. The Americans, for example, would do very well if there was an event for invading other countries and forcing them to release a statement announcing that they are now democracies, while the gleeful minions of the World Bank and the IMF run around cackling and grabbing anything that isn’t nailed down. The English would sweep the board in any event which rewarded moving of their own volition to other countries and then spending all their time writing very very long sentences complaining about everything around them, while never forgetting to include the odd self-deprecating remark to mitigate their bigotry and anticipate criticism. Ho hum.

Where the Chinese could put their habits to good use is in the intimidation of opponents in other sports. It would be off-putting to a swimmer if the person in the next lane coughed up a big greenie straight into the pool right before they all dived in. And if your opponent in tennis spent the entire time between sets with their chair turned round so they could stare straight at you if might well put you off your serve.

One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do – if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly, as Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly suggested, if when Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.

It’s easy to stand on the border of one country and spit into another. However, for long-range warfare nuclear weapons, although immoral, are probably more effective. Next week I’m off to England, hopefully out of range of the Chinese spitting brigades. It will be interesting to see, though, if in 2008 the Olympic pools will be fitted with those spit buckets they have at each end of the lanes here. Whether or not they do, I have a feeling that the Chinese will do very well indeed in all the swimming events.