Are they really that bad?

This has been puzzling me for sometime.

The picture to the right is of two of the posters for the Paralympics in Beijing, like the posters for the olympics, placed in the subway. The one on the left is of a wheelchair basketball player, obviously, and the one on the right, though at first it looks like there might not be anything wrong with the judoists, shows two blind people squaring off, which you can tell if you look closely at the one in blue's eyes. All well and good. There are about eight of these, give or take, and they're all mostly like this: clearly disabled folk, sporting. There's one of a sprinter with only one leg, one of a fencer in a wheelchair, etc. etc.

And then there's this:

Since my usual pace through the subway is so quick that I don't have the time to rigorously investigate every advertisement, I just assumed for a while that there must be something wrong with this guy's arms, or something. After a few days of spot-checking as I raced past it, though, it was clear that nothing was wrong.

I have since found out that deaf and blind people play soccer in the Paralympics, but does that seem like a good thing to represent visually on a poster?

In anycase, since China's soccer team is absolutely terrible, the fact that the man on the poster looks normal begs the question. Are they really that bad?

The Paralympics, and "Cultural Difference."

The paralympics have begun!

Interestingly enough, "para-" in paralympics does not stand for paralyzed, or paraplegic, as I'd assumed before looking it up on Wikipedia, "para-" instead coming from the Greek, and meaning, "besides." So, it means, basically, an athletic competition to take place besides the Olympics (as in, next to.)

Of course, this was just quick thinking. Originally it did stand for "paraplegic," but the inclusion of people with other disabilities made this unsuitable. That's a pretty lucky coincidence, or it would be if the root of "para-" in paraplegic were not the same. But it is.

Anyway, from the official hooplah here you'd think that the Paralympics were as much of a big deal as the Olympics. (I don't mean to be dismissive, I am merely noting that in spectators, number of sports, number of participating athletes, number of advertising dollars spent, etc. etc., the Olympics overshadow their disabled brother.) I have no recollection of this being the case in Atlanta, and of course, there are basically no news stories about athletes or television coverage, what have you, in the western newspapers, unless a story makes a headline for a different reason (say in an article in the Times recently about the benefits the Paralympic athletes get as opposed to those the Olympic athletes get from the USOC.)

At first, I just thought this was China, well, being China, going graciously over-the-top as a host. They are, after all, trying to win us over. (And win over us, but that's a different matter.)

But, as I've been thinking about it, though the above is certainly still a part of the reason for the overwhelming coverage (the games are on T.V. and are similarly unavoidable on the newspapers and newscasts, plus, in Chinese, the Olympics aren't over yet, by which I mean the Olympics and the Paralympics are considered as one big event rather than, as in English, two entirely separate, if related, ones) I've come up with some other possible reasons.

China, as I've mentioned, is trying basically to pull itself one-hundred and fifty to two-hundred years forward in a generation, plus maybe a half. Part of process is acculturation. Party Elites have to do quite a lot of tugging in many different arenas to do this, since it is so drastic, and one of the areas is in manners, basically. There has been a significant improvement in the spitting all over the place, though you still see some egregious examples, like while walking in the subway tunnels, or (not kidding) hocking one up and spitting it out on the inside of the subway car door. That, of course, doesn't count on the streets, where I am far less grossed out. Lining up, too, is a fraction better than it is in Shaoxing, though mostly, still, the line is a foreign concept, and I usually just wait until everyone else is on the Subway before getting on, since, as I am accustomed to waiting for everyone to get off before I get on, I wouldn't get on before everyone else anyway. (Figure that one out, and you should chuckle.) So, I actually half-agree with the statements of the Director of the Paralympics for China below, when he mentions "cultural difference."
Beijing withdraws advice on disabled
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Olympic organizers said Thursday that they had withdrawn parts of an English translation of a guide for volunteers because of "inappropriate language" used to describe disabled athletes. Zhang Qiuping, director of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, did not offer an apology and attributed the problems to poor translation. "Probably it's cultural difference and mistranslation," Zhang said.

The Chinese-language version of the text remained online and was nearly identical to the English, using essentially the same stereotypes to refer to the disabled. A section dedicated to the disabled says: "Paralympic athletes and disabled spectators are a special group. They have unique personalities and ways of thinking." To handle the "optically disabled," the guide advised: "Often the optically disabled are introverted. They have deep and implicit feelings and seldom show strong emotions." It added, "Try not to use the world 'blind' when you meet for the first time."

Regarding the "physically disabled," the guide said: "Physically disabled people are often mentally healthy. But they might have unusual personalities because of disfigurement and disability." It went on: "Some physically disabled are isolated, unsocial and introspective; they usually do not volunteer to contact people. They can be stubborn and controlling; they may be sensitive and struggle with trust issues. Sometimes they are overly protective of themselves, especially when they are called 'crippled' or 'paralyzed.

The bit about "mistranslation" is pure crap, and usually "cultural difference" (you have no idea how often this comes up) is a desperate excuse for, say, why it's perfectly appropriate to arrest two women in their seventies for "disturbing the peace" when all they had done was apply for a permit to protest during the Olympics. (If you haven't been following that story, they were released a week after being sentenced to a year of "labor reform," with no further penalties, which also probably includes being under surveillance to a greater or lesser extent for the duration of their natural lives.)

But in this case, strangely, I actually think the guy's actually right. In the mad rush to modernize, the culture (which always lags behind the edge of innovation and social change) has been scrambling to figure out what's going on. One of the biggest changes in the west over the last two-hundred years is the changing relative importance of intellectual and physical labor. Two-hundred years ago, all you needed to be a worker was a strong back and a stupid mind, which of course favored young men. As work became less and less physically oriented, it opened up opportunities for older people (I mean, late-thirties and up,) women, and the physically disabled to enter the workforce, and, as they became more valuable to society, mistaken notions about these groups of people's intrinsic value began to change. But, in the west, this has taken a few hundred years, and lots of fighting. China still has not reached this level, either in percent of workforce engaged in mind work and not manual, or in valuing those who are not "the man," in this case, Han Chinese men.

The gap between most people's thoughts (let alone the more rural part of the population) and the guide for volunteers, then, is still rather large, and the document, even if somewhat infuriating to westerners, actually represents some sort of progress along these lines, even if it's hard to believe that as a westerner. The document, in a way, splits the difference between the cultural mind of the West and the East. Of course, since people have fought for so long to elevate the cultural conception of the disabled in the west, having an official document like this come along and enshrine stereotypes feels like regression. Again, though, this is mostly the effect of juxtaposition.

Having said that, one of the preparations for the Olympics was getting all the cripples out of sight. When I'd first gotten here it was rather common (like a few times a day) to see horribly disfigured people, some who'd obviously had work-related accidents, others with birth defects, pan-handling on the streets. So, obviously, enlightenment is coming slowly. It's another mind-numbing Orwellian contradiction, that is, that a McDonald's could have a poster outside advertising specials and marking it as a Paralympic sponsor, where just a few months ago a man who had his face burned off by something was begging for the equivalent of less than two pennies on the bench next to the store. Where did they go, exactly? I'd really like to know.

They haven't come back quite yet. But the workers have. They're pretty unmistakable. And their camps, say, next to the light rail tracks, are also rather obvious.

To be cynical, the blitzing news coverage and hangover news about the Olympic Champions and all gives the almost straight-forwardly government run news the opportunity to talk about this and relish in the distraction rather than move on to other things, like the fact that the central government just admitted that "maybe" some of the schools that fell over in the SiChuan earthquake only fell over because of "possible" faulty construction, (though no mention of corruption and why those schools were so faulty. It was blamed on the lightening fast growth.) So China's changing after all. "Maybe."

I had a conversation with one of my students recently about Sarah Palin recently that led to some of the above. In some ways, it appears as if there's been progress, and in others it's the same old China.

My student was amazed that Sarah Palin was warmly supporting her daughter (obviously she is not very familiar with the American political process) instead of being visibly angry with her. I tried to explain to her that support is exactly what this young woman needs at this point, and getting angry at her would help no one, leading to bitterness etc. at the perfectly wrong time. In China, she said, a seventeen year old would be kicked out of school immediately for this, along with the boy who got her pregnant. I was trying to get her to see the point of view that that's a terrible terrible punishment, taking away their only means of bettering their lives and supporting their child, and I think she understood that, but the dominant feeling was still, they've done something terribly wrong, they have to pay for it.

Again, very Chinese. Everyone is one huge happy family. But if you step out of line, even a little bit, you're thrown to the dogs.

My girlfriend, when I laugh about people spitting in the subway, always says the same thing "they're definatly not from Beijing," and she, modern as she is, holds a fair amount of contempt for anything not Beijing (or QingDao recently, because of a vacation we took there that was great.) Family matters stay in the family, city matters stay in the city, and country matters stay in the country. If you're in, we love you, but if you step the littlest bit out of line, you're an outsider, and you're never getting back in.

I don't necessarily advocate high-schoolers having sex (not since I graduated highschool, anyway) but they do it. It takes the most draconian of social controls to keep this from happening commonly (it still does happen in China, though it's about as hush-hush as possible) and there's always a trade-off.

So the question is, what are they losing by denying this urge?

Personal and Impersonal relationships, and cultural development

I was talking today with one of my students when I realized something I think is rather interesting, and it opened up something I've been saying about the differences between China and America.

There's a well-known phenomenon among people doing business in China, which is, basically, they have to meet with the Chinese groups that they're doing business with several times a year, having a few meals together and going out on the town, to keep up and maintain a relationship, where in the West a once-yearly conference would be sufficient to maintain a healthy working relationship. It's also well-known that Chinese people put a great emphasis on "guanxi," which means "relations," or "connections," but in a very different way. Put simply, it's basically what we would call nepotism, or preferentialism, times a thousand or so. You do something for me, I'll do something for you. The legal system, and business, basically runs on a series of bribes.

People write this off as just being a feature of "Chinese culture," but I disagree.

I had asked my student to write me a short story and tell it to me for class as homework, and she chose to relate a problem she was having. She had recently bumped into an old college professor, and they had a pleasant conversation, at the end of which they said they'd see each other again to have dinner, and exchanged information, and her professor said he'd call her to arrange things further. But he still hasn't.

This bothered her, as it was not behavior she understood, or could tolerate. At the end of her short story, she said that this was just an example, and that it was becoming something very common in modern day China, and also asked me how to deal with people like this, and how to deal generally, when (in her words,) "society needs the trust of people and honor people."

As I began to explain to her it dawned on me what the problem was here, and it's not "Chinese culture."

Traditionally, Chinese society has been very closed, but not merely to foreigners. It applies equally as well within Chinese society. You belong to a village, and know everyone in the village, but someone from the next village might as well be from Mars. In this system, everything, business and all, is run on the basis of personal relationships.

In the modern world, though, this is basically impossible. You simply interact with too many people on a daily basis to have a personal relationship with them. Most relationships are impersonal, in the sense that you could exchange one person for just about anyone else with the same basic results. A waitress-client relationship, for example (or, a more extreme one, the relationship between a customer at McDonald's and the cashier) is entirely impersonal.

But this is not a difference between western culture, which prefers an impersonal business relationship, and China, which prefers a personal one. All relationships were personal before the modern age, before the age of the rule of law. Western villages and towns, and even cities, relied much more on personal relationships than we do today. The problem, or the only problem, is that China is trying to move their whole society from operating entirely on the personal level of relationships to the impersonal level as quickly as possible (or rather, introducing the idea that a relationship with a person need not necessarily be a personal one,) where the west has had hundreds of years of this experience. While much has already shifted in the direction of impersonality, there is still a clinging to an outmoded way of doing things, which is reflected in the croneyism and bribery necessary to move up in the country. For this, and for so many other reasons, China is fascinating as a whole country of people are pulled forward at lightening speed. Rather than a (not always, of course) smooth transition between two very different value systems, and ways of handling social interaction, it is as if China is taking the two and placing them directly next to each other, an awesome social experiment.

One of the things holding this back is the relative paucity and non-existent tradition of rule of law. In the west (as an ideal) the law applies equally to all. China's society is much more dependent on the unwritten undercurrents of society, and success is still often a case of currying favor with the right people. You cannot impeach a Chinese president.

And, of course, judging people based on connections and relationship works in some circumstances, and has worked for the majority of the history of civilization. There's a reason this is the "Chinese way." Under a certain system (that is, when you can reasonably assume familiarity with everyone you interact with, and when there's no impartial framework of law under which to work) it would be stupid to hire strangers you don't know or have any reason to trust to work for you, or, say, to head to the next town over for a bowl of noodles.

Personal relationships, it should be noted, have not been destroyed, and this is part of what complicates things. It's just that their scope is circumscribed. Normally, if you and your son have a fight, you're not going to call the police or hire lawyers. If there's a falling-out with friends, say, if a friend steals another friend's laptop, the problem is likely to be handled on a personal level, with friends taking sides, and having, possibly, someone or the other shunned from the group, something that was very common in Chinese practice traditionally. The worst punishment possible was being banished from your village. Famously, there is no room for an outsider in a Chinese village. It was, more or less, a death sentence.

In the west, I think we are "facing," a different sort of problem. We've gotten so good at doing things in this way that, in large numbers, people don't have enough personal relationships, or their personal relationships aren't satisfyingly deep. We are coming to understand that we must treasure and work to maintain these relationships with the people that matter to us, even though we would certainly not revert to a society based entirely on these relationships. Notice, of course, that it's basically impossible to jump from the older model to the post-post-modern model immediately. You need to establish rule of law and a healthy impersonal society before you begin to face the problems with impersonality. The Chinese are just starting to embrace the strengths of doing things this way. We have done things this way successfully for a long time, and are just starting to address the problems.

Of course, none of this excuses the behavior of the professor, it only points out that western people don't really see this as a problem which causes a great deal of angst. The professor simply gets placed in the lump of people with whom you have an impersonal relationship with, or in other words, in the group of people with whom you are not going to expend energy to keep up a good personal relationship with. In modern society, there are too many people to interact with to have a personal relationship with everyone, and so one chooses who is "in" and who is "out." Chinese people are only starting to learn (in a cultural values sense, obviously certain Chinese people are adept at this, and of course the level to which one's relationships are personal is dependant on the individual person) that not every relationship need be a personal one, and this, though more natural than it may appear, will take some time to set in.

But it will. The doors have been opened to modernity, if only (as I would argue) slightly, and eventually those that won't, for example, hire the best candidate because their cousin's son is also a candidate, are going to fall behind to the companies that hire based on skill and talent. But, no matter how fast China is trying to do this, it takes time, because power always prefers itself.