One Party Democracy

An Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman, which picks up on something I had been talking about here, in regards to the political differences between the US and China, and how health care is being dealt with.

Reading the title I had thought Friedman was going to talk about how much both parties are so influenced by corporate money that in effect the government had turned into a corporatocracy, but perhaps later.

Seeking truth from whatever...

From Jottings from the Granite Studio, a great Chinese scholar's blog. The last conversation is hilarious, and I have had innumerable conversations like it myself. (Qiu Shi, btw, means "seeking truth." For those of you who have never been to China, this is what happens when you're not taught culturally to think critically. Chinese people think, with few exceptions, that if they could just explain things correctly without the pesky western journalists lying and distorting things, everyone would love them. Shadow projection? Recently having lunch with my Chinese mom, she said to a friend about Japanese people, "they just don't like Chinese people." That's how I translate it, because that's what she meant. Literally, though, she said, "they just don't understand Chinese people," as if that would automatically turn them around.

"

For what it’s worth, David Bandurski and his team at China Media Project absolutely rock, and today’s commentary and translation of a bit of whiny blather from Qiu Shi on “people being mean to China” or some other such spray of sputum and self-pity is just the latest in a line of great posts. For what it’s worth, someone desperately needs to alert the editors of Qiu Shi as to the dangers of inadequate nutrition…poor sods seem to be suffering from a serious case of irony deficiency.

Leaving aside the whole point that very few people in the Chinese government understand, are willing to understand, or even want to understand how the media actually functions outside of PRC…the mother of all “dead horse” topics…There is this blissful piece of ineffable twaddle:

But in developed nations like the United States, some people now voice surprise at seeing that Chinese have mobile phones just as they do, and they ask ridiculous questions like, “You Chinese use mobile phones too?” Their understanding of China is trapped in the 1970s.

Yeah, maybe…but for every nameless American who “expresses surprise at Chinese using mobile phones,” I’ll give you 10 Beijingers who can’t wrap their skulls around the notion that a foreigner could read/speak/understand Chinese or is able to use chopsticks without jabbing themselves repeatedly in the eye socket.

A: “Oh, you can use kuaizi!?!?!? You are really lihai! Did YOU knOW that “kuaizi” is what we Chinese people call chopsticks!”

B: “Why thank you. In the nine hours I just spent at the Number One Archives going over a decade of Qing Dynasty court documents, the word kuaizi did not appear once. Thank goodness you told me that because otherwise I’d have had to eat with my toes.”

A: “Really, how did you read the material? It is all in Chinese!!!!* Did they translate them into English for you?”

B: [sound of head banging against table repeatedly]

(And yes, I’ve had this EXACT conversation. Many times.)

————-

*I’ll save the reaction when I say, “Yes, it’s in Chinese, but the really GOOD stuff is in Manchu” for another post.

"

Open Information and China

"China has become a dead-zone for any business planning on building an international online presence."

This is one of the two things (the other being pollution and lack of life) that I could not stand living in China.

From a great blog post at Chinasolved.com. So good, I'm posting the whole thing:

China’s Fractured Web Part III – Myths and Realities

At the time of this writing, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are still unavailable in Mainland China. YouTube has been blocked since March of 2009, and Facebook and Twitter have been dark for almost a month. There is no indication about when - or even if - the blockade of these sites will be lifted.

First, let’s put a couple of myths to rest.

Fractured Web Myth 1 – the Chinese internet blockade is a minor inconvenience that just about everyone can get around.
Fractured Web Myth 2 – the only ones affected are kids surfing for fun.
Fractured Web Myth 3 – it’s a temporary phenomenon
Fractured Web Myth 4 – it’s about national security - not an international business or trade issue.
Fractured Web Myth 5 – Chinese counterparts and substitutes already exist.

Myth 1 – It’s just a minor inconvenience that just about anyone can get around. Simply not true. There was a time when proxy servers were simple, effective and free ways to get around the Chinese internet blockade, but China’s technology has gotten better and better. Even some commercial VPNs (virtual private networks) that charge for access are being blocked now. The cost of going online in China wasn’t cheap to begin with, but going online in China is now becoming more expensive, slow and difficult. Another problem with VPNs is that they often require software to be downloaded – making online life even more difficult for those of you who have more than one computer. A handful of digiratti will take the time, trouble and expense to get around the blockade – the vast majority of Chinese netizens won’t bother.

Myth 2 – These social media sites are all just kid’s stuff. True, 90% of the bandwidth used by Twitter, Facebook and YouTube seems to be devoted to college-boy pranks and sophomoric banality - but that is rapidly changing. Twitter is being used as a news feed, marketing platform and communications-tool by serious, grown-up businesses. Facebook is emerging as one the best ways to build and maintain an online professional or customer groups – and a great advertising platform. YouTube videos, embedded in private sites, puts professional quality broadcasting within the grasp of small & medium sized businesses everywhere. The impact of China’s blockade is relatively minor for now, but business applications for the Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are growing fast. Businesses interested in marketing to or from China are going to find themselves at an increasingly significant disadvantage.

Myth 3 – It’s temporary. YouTube has been blocked since March 2009, and Facebook & Twitter have been down for over a month. In the 24-7 world on online commerce, that level of service interruption is total. YouTube may come back someday (or it may not), but no IT or Marketing department will ever again be able to rely on the platform in China. The same goes for Twitter and Facebook. Even Google has been restricted and hobbled to the point where it is not a 100% reliable business tool in China. For business owners the bad news is already in the market and they are responsible for finding a way around it. No one can claim ignorance about a risk that has already been demonstrated.

Myth 4 – It’s not a business issue. The 20th century benchmarks for international trade were how many containers or freighters one nation sent across the water to another. In the 21st century, it will be about data, viewers and users. The few big sites that have been blocked and hobbled in China are powering thousands of small businesses and driving the future of online commerce. China has become a dead-zone for any business planning on building an international online presence.

Myth 5 – Chinese replacements already exist. Sites like Tudou, Youku, Xiaonei, Kaixin, Baidu and a host of others already replicate the functionality of the blockaded sites – so it’s easy to say that the problem has already been essentially solved by the marketplace. Indeed, if it were possible to link Twitter and Xiaonei or Facebook and Kaixin, this argument would be valid – and represent an exciting opportunity. But the fact that the two internets are developing in isolation and segregation from one another creates diseconomies of scale. Companies wishing to bring their online presence to China will have to duplicate budgets and content – and overcome substantial hurdles as far as quality control and due diligence. Multiple platforms that cannot integrate with one another raise the hurdle rate for business and makes marketing to or from China so expensive and risky that it is now beyond the reach of most small business.

Health Care with Chinese Characteristics?

This morning waking up from a nightmare a fairly bitter and ironic thought struck me: health care reform would get passed in China.

Of course, the type of sweeping health care reform that we need in America with the type of coverage that we're talking about never could actually get passed over there- most of the populace (900 billion peasants) has never had anything resembling the type of care Americans with decent health care are accustomed to, and the political system is not in the business of giving away gobs of money and or services, and is corrupt beyond anything most Americans could imagine.

The thought was not realistic, just something of an amusement. Chinese leaders are said to be contemptuous of the weaknesses of democracy, and this whole issue is a prime example of why: this health care debate is a whole mess that never would have happened in their country. They don't realize that the strengths of our system lie in these very weaknesses, but that's not for this discussion.

To be sure, our democracy is ideally healthier than their "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" by ten, but that presupposes certain things, some of which have been in the balance for some time, such as a media disengaged from power, and some of which have come up short, such as education. (Shout out to Nate for this.)

Our sort of democracy presupposes an educated electorate, and by educated I mean up to the ability to think critically, rationality. Far from being rational, human thought is predicated on emotions, growing on their root. It is a human capacity, a possibility, but not an inevitability. It is something that people must be educated into, though I don't necessarily mean formally so. One does not teach rational thought like one teaches about the American revolution, one teaches rational thought in how one teaches about everything. It is cultural, not a subject.

Not that there aren't rational arguments in any direction on this debate. There are. But most people are not reacting against a public plan from some disinterested intellectual perch. They are reacting against a fear of change coming from people unlike them whom they don't trust. They reject a public option because they don't like black presidents, they are terrified of socialism, they are fearful of becoming a minority in their own country, and all of this could be summed up by saying they're terrified that they are losing their voice, and so their power. They are not alone; their fear is being drummed up by the greed of people who are benefiting from the current system and likely to benefit from any arrangement without a public option in the future, but the fear is there, and is accessible because of a lack of rational thinking. Democracy is born in rationality, and needs it to flourish. (For the Integral out there we are obviously talking about SDi 5 v SDi4.)

I feel as if these people who are de facto with the insurance companies on this have never actually had to deal with them before, having their coverage dropped for nothing, getting seventy percent of the allotted (already only one third of what's necessary) maximum reimbursement per week because their psychologist isn't in the network (someone I know), or having to sift through claims and do paperwork with most of their energy and all of their out of bed time during chemotherapy.

My family has gone through it as well. When my brother got Hodgkins disease in 2003, we routinely received letters from the insurance companies that his medication wasn't covered. Yes, for cancer. Even with excellent health care provided to employees of New Jersey (my mom), we had to jump through hoops. Thankfully we weren't one of the thousands affected by "rescission," which means cut from the rolls for some technicality just as we needed care, a practice illuminated in this excellent Nicholas Kristof piece. In it, Kristof talks about a health care executive that saw the light as he was preparing response propaganda for the Michael Moore film "Sicko," and testified in Congress about the methods used by insurance companies to purge the sick from their rolls. It's a sort of short tell-all, and it shows the depths of depravity of the system we have, if not necessarily all of the people operating it, and just how desperately we need reform.

But how?

I am praying that, as Howard Dean said, Obama has been rope-a-doping the Republicans, displaying that they're not really interested in sitting down and working out the kind of reform that we need, and therefore should be largely ignored. I'm looking for one of those powerful speeches to come just before the fall legislative session begins, outlining the necessity of reform, pushing the public plan as the only legitimate option, and calling out the opposition, all in a straightforward and rhetorically excellent manner as only Obama can do.

But as I said, I'm at the point of praying, and am not a religious man.

As lofty as my love of the country grew when it elected a black man with "Hussein" in his name, so hard will it crash back into tempered cynical realism if we get change all insurance companies can believe in, as evidence of it not mattering who you vote for, or why. For the economy, for the people, for business, and as a moral imperative, we need reform. I trust Obama knows this, but we're all seeing that he's somewhat uncomfortable leading against hard-nosed opposition. (Enneagram 9 with a 1 wing? Anyone?) It still isn't impossible, but make no mistake: this is the defining event of his presidency, and his life.

It's almost enough to make one wish for a government that could just magically take all the cars off the roads and shut down all the factories in the area for some large international event, contrary opinions be damned. Don't be afraid, America: it's not socialism, it's socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The Future of Social Media: The Open Web

Good blog post here about the future of the web and social media.

It's interesting for a few reasons, even though it's mostly directed at large companies. What I find most interesting is the potential for this kind of interface to lead to a much more open society, something identified here as "Transparency." This has been on my mind recently with this post at the Far Eastern Economic Review, about the near impossibility of producing "hard news" in China. Anyone who has been following China knows of its burgeoning and noisy online community, however. Could direct person to person reporting overcome the collusion of the government and industry? I'm optimistic.

In any case, the potential for this kind of application to create smart-mobs is huge.

Controlling/Managing the Chinese people?

I'm a little late on this due to my 24-hour weekend working cycle, but if you hadn't heard about Jackie Chan's recent remarks in China: here's a short debate in the Times about it.

There's a mini-debate in Chinese watching circles about whether or not the word he used would best be translated as "managing," rather than "controlling." The word under discussion, "Guan," (“管”) , usually does mean "managing" but this seems fairly unimportant given the context of insulting Hong Kong and Taiwan for being "chaotic" while speaking to an audience including high-level Central Party members. Certianly the essence was "China needs Authoritarianism."

Much of what I found interesting, as often happens with China blogs on the NYTimes, were the comments. Without getting too much into it, There seem to be two sides of the debate, a sure way to miss the meat of the argument entirely: Chan is a moron (or is in it for the money) and Chinese people yearn to be free, or Chan is right, Chinese people have been successful under the control of the Central Party, and would fall apart if not. Unfortunately, of course, little attention is paid to the arguments themselves, and more is paid to ad-hominem attacks on people writing. Basically, everyone in the comments is either rabidly pro-China, or anti-Chinese government. Notice also the conflation here: most of the pro-Chinas take any criticism of the government by foreigners (in public, published places) as being anti-China, as in the country (something the government actively inculcates), even though among themselves, and in private, they are often quite critical of the government.

All of this friction, for an integral thinker, should point to competing vMemes, through even the debate about whether Chan was cynically only doing this for CCP approval. So what's the deal here? Anyone watching China knows the friction created is largely between the up-and-coming 5s in the country and the authoritarian 4s. Moreso than in most cases, the power of the 4s has been used to help foster in some respects the emergence of the 5s as a powerful new class, and for this often the new capitalists in China are the most vocally in favor of the government. Nonetheless, there are plenty of 5s in the country that see right through this, and Gordon Chang is right when he says that voices of online protesters and self-organized groups to aid victims of the BeiChuan earthquake last year to help the survivors before even the governement did displays the yearning and capability for a more open society.

The biggest mistake in all of this whole thing is locating this with something inherantly "chinese." Chan's words "we chinese" make it seem as if there's some sort of essence in the Chinese people that makes them incapable of democracy (something Beijing promotes against reality and the benefit of its own people) and will always do so.

Of course, some of what he's saying is correct. China is still mostly at an authoritarian 4 level, and much of the country is still at a 2. Creating a "one-person, one-vote" system would be likely disasterous at this point, as one of the commenters notes, drawing comparisons with some African countries, and south-east asian. Democracy is not the cure of all ails. However, it ought to be clear that it is the only successful way to run a fully modern country is through a representative democracy. Even if you cannot establish democracy at the highest levels of government, at the local level it ought to be implemented, something which will give the populace experience with it for later down the road. Of course, for all its unintentional help, the CCP is rabidly anti-democratic, which is to say the small concessions made to democracy in village elections are unlikely to be expanded.

The word "chaos" is also interesting. Here, Chan notes the 4s fear of chaos/anarchy, one made stronger by chinese memories of the cultural revolution. Will China ever be able to embrace the kind of "chaos" Chan finds in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and become stronger as a result, or will the party simply not be able to let go this far? Much of the question of whether or not China will be able to fully transform itself into a modern country rests on this. Control only goes so far.

Still Kickin'

I am not dead, for anyone wondering. I have a Chinese literacy test in two weeks, and am bearing down for it, so don't expect anything for the next couple of weeks.

But the week of the twentieth, look for some shit. There are like twenty things open on my browser to write about.

So for now, just a note on how circumscribed some of the kids' minds' are that I teach. In one of my twelve-year-old students books recently there was a question about what you might change in your life if you could, and I opened it up and asked him what he could do if he had magic powers. His first response?

"I would go to school...very fast!"

Schooling vs. Education

I have written quite a few times about the Chinese education system and the structure of Chinese society, and the double-bind the people seem to be in: there's recognition that something's wrong, that there needs to be a jolt of individuality in the country, but the system's so entrenched that it's basically impossible to succeed without it (of course, the objection could be raised that talk of individualism is lip service. Let's assume, here, that it's not.) Here's probably my best one. Here's another.

Here's a terrible essay written by a high-schooler in relatively poor AnHui province. (Terrible because moving, not written poorly.)

Two days before I read that I was in class with a High-schooler in his second year. He brought in his winter homework for me to check. It was amazing for a few related reasons. Firstly, it was pretty high-level English, though with quite a few vague usage mistakes on the parts of the (obviously) Chinese compilers. And, he got most of it right. had it been a test, he would have scored in the 90s. But the most amazing thing of all is that this kid basically can't say a complete English sentence without mangling it, pausing for an inordinate amount of time, or simply stopping in the middle.
After finishing checking half of his homework, (which took me 80 out of our 100 minute class) I put the book down and asked him if he thought what we were doing was helpful, or a good use of time.
The most astounding thing was that in the book itself, there was a passage about the difference between schooling and education, starting off with "It's common to think of kids going off to school to start their education, but many experts say going to school interrupts a child's education.." and then going into a short comparison of education vs. schooling, a dichotomy I would call Life Experience vs. Formal (Institutional) Education. At the end, it was clear that the authors came down firmly on the side of Education as being helpful for society, and schooling as... well... not so much. There was even a passage that said "High-schoolers know that what they learn in politics class is not relevant to the political issues of the day." (Really???) When I asked my gf about this, she said, "I hated politics class in highschool, because everything is bullshit." Though this was all framed by the initial "In The United States of America..." it was obviously pertinant to the Chinese education system.
Outside, it was the 15th, last, and second most important day of the Spring Festival, what we call the Chinese New Year. Fireworks were going off everywhere. People were eating special food for the celebration. And here it was, 8pm, and this poor kid was trapped in a room basically watching a high-paid English instructor check little red marks in his book. I called to his attention the irony of all of this.

The Chinese Education system is about 80 percent schooling, 20 percent education, I'd say. It's really good for a few things. It's great for learning how to do math problems, or fill-in-the-blank English problems. It's great for creating a cowed populace of robots. (Cynics would likely say that's the point.) It's probably not so great for creating great earth-changing people. Even the Chinese people who are doing big things in China are doing so mostly in a Western style. (Like, say, real estate developers educated in England.)

It will happen, though. It might be happening now. We just haven't seen it yet, I don't think. And someone's got to tell the kids to forget their homework and play during their vacations. Loss to "Intellectual Knowledge" - 5%. Gain in Experience, understanding and comfort in life? 80%.

The above percentages have been thoroughly researched.

Happy Niu Year!

I certainly was not preparing to write about the Chinese New Year at 8 in the morning, not after a night spent chasing fireworks around town until two booming in the Niu year (Niu =牛, which means ox, or cow.) Add in jet lag from arriving here in Beijing two days ago, and you could understand why I’d be excited about getting a real nice night’s sleep. I should have known.
It’s hard to describe the sound, though I’m sure any one reading this has heard fireworks. Imagine the end of a gigantic fireworks display, except you’re in four corners Arizona and each state has their own display for their respective corner. Add in the “cracklers,” which are as to our little cracklers like a tarantula is to a picture of a spider drawn by a four-year-old, and you have a foothold. Loud, continuous. Our fireworks displays have the pace of moderate rock, with some climaxes of sixteen notes on the snare drum. This is more like jungle trance: 240bpm, and all sixteenth notes, directly next to your apartment building, which is a concrete wall in a giant sound rebounding maze. In war, sitting under a tin roof in a furious hail, while shots from automatic rifles scream around you mixed in with an occasional chorus of mortar fire, you would hear that same mix of percussion, but the anxiety would likely not give you space to listen, or hear.
Hear, as opposed to see, being operative. Despite the night bringing out all varieties of exploding colored lights and streaming jets of sparks, in the day, it’s all about the noise. Vaguely, and I don’t at the moment of writing have the internet so I will not confirm this, I remember that fireworks in the superstitious mythos that is the Chinese motivation for doing all things are supposed to frighten off evil demons, and so their powers are needed the most at the end of the old/beginning of the new year, I suppose because demons have off from work during this time as well and are disposed otherwise at their offices. Most of the fireworks that go off during the day are either the aforementioned cracklers, or large M-80 style noisemakers, which is not to say they are not present during the night, merely that any association of “fireworks,” with “pretty,” or “majestic,” is purely a nighttime phenomenon.
As is the association of “fireworks,” with “children.” While kids certainly enjoy the fireworks, they’re not setting them off. Most of what I have seen in the last two days of setting off fireworks has been single men, by themselves, usually in their forties or beyond. It’s a little creepy, their approach to the task eerily robotic. But that is not to say there is nothing childlike about it.
In fact, one of the greatest things about being here at this time is the sense of wonder and simple joy on people’s faces, from the young to the old, as they watch and hear fireworks blast off all around them. It is as if the stodgy no-fun discipline of the rest of the Chinese year were simply a show, and the time off (just about everyone has a week off, at least) and periodic unexpectable bursts of sound act as just enough of a counterweight to keep everyone aware that life is fun, the burst of sound behind a young woman making her grasp for her ears in her winter coat and turn her beaming laughing face towards her companion, blurting out something like “oh that surprised me!” If this seems like an extreme reminder, it should only go to hint at what the other 360 days of the year are like.
There is, after all, a reason this is a tradition held so strongly. If (and I think this is true) the more rigid a society is, the more unflinching its rituals must be honored, each holding up its own inch of the society, then the Chinese adherence to tradition becomes clearer. I realized this week an interesting way of putting the difference between American and Chinese culture. In America, if we say, “it’s just a tradition,” we mean that there’s no solid reason to keep doing it, and if for one or another reason, we have to or want to do something else, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s just a tradition, after all. In China, “it’s just a tradition” means, “even though no one knows why we do it this way, this is the way it is done, so it is how we must do it.” This became clear for me when I asked my girlfriend why it’s so important to eat dumplings the first day of the New Year, (and noodles the second, and on and on…that’s how specific some of these are) and she responded, “I don’t know, it’s just a tradition.” There’s a great pride in the Chinese traditions, and the sense that this is what brings Chinese together as a people, something that not only creates but also in a sense is their cultural identity. Evangelical Christians have the literal word of God in the Bible; this is what gives them their identity. But the Chinese have only Chinese-ness, and so all of these rituals, all of the history, the shared sense of hard work and study as children, and the reverence for their ancestors come together to create the sense of identity. While all these internal factors are true for Evangelicals as well, at least they can point to the book to cover it all up. Chinese only have this, which is likely a factor making them so aware of the boundaries between “us,” and “them.” You’re either Chinese, or you’ll never be, and will never understand. (Because you don’t eat dumplings on the New Year?)
There’s another interesting contrast between our two societies I have noticed but have not so far been able to find an example for: the difference in degrees and places of freedom that society allows. One might think that China and America are simply at two ends of a spectrum, Americans being more or less “free,” and Chinese not, but this is a gross over-simplification. Exhibit A: in the public square last night, there were probably 2-3 thousand people, all setting off fireworks, and very very few cops, or authorities of any kind. In the square, it was absolute anarchy, which is not to say chaos, only that the crowd had its own logic. In the middle was a huge open space, around which people were gathered. Most of the fireworks were set off in the middle of the square, and all went well. It was all done privately, by the people. Juxtapose this to a fireworks display in America, where people aren’t involved in it at all, except as spectators. The point I’m trying to make is that while in America the range of activities allowed people (by society, I’m not exactly saying by law) is broader, there is almost always still a set of rules one must abide by. In China, the range for free activity is greatly circumscribed: 360 days of the year, there is no spring festival, and you can’t choose when to have off. However, within this circumscribed area, when allowed, you can do 100% as you please. I had noticed something similar when teaching in a primary school: between fifty- minute classes there is a ten minute break of complete chaos you’d never see in America, and students run as fast as they can wherever they’re going, unless it is with the whole class. In America, you don’t run in school, only on the playground. In America, if the students were allowed to go ape for ten minutes between classes they might never calm down. But, this is China. As soon as that class bell rings (actually a twenty second song) kids are in their seats, if not ready to learn, then at the least orderly. Again, I don’t quite have an explanation for this, other than to say perhaps it is the tradeoff for circumscribing free space so totally: within that space, freedom is also total. But they’re trained well: when the bell rings, kids are sitting, when the lights in the square went off (at 12:10) people began to filter out in droves.
Another fascinating social phenomenon is the yearly four-hour pageant, broadcast all over the world, and without commercial interruption, that precedes the 12 AM turn of the year (in a way it’s odd that they’re so westernly precise about the exact time the year turns when they are using the lunar calendar, but, such is modern China.) This year the theme was overtly a celebration of the last thirty years of economic reforms, which have brought the country great wealth. In this generally tame and traditional setting (one song featured the lyrics “Mao ZeDong has to lead us” over and over again…actually that may have been the Beijing pageant the next night, but same idea) where the comedy acts were snow-white and everything family friendly, one act stood out: a dance/rap routine featuring a man, a woman, and a ten-year old. It was overtly hip-hop inspired in fashion and in music, and it stuck out precisely because the older generations find the hip-hop fashions of the youngest generation revolting. Far from an embrace of hip-hop, however, this seemed to be far more a way of acknowledging the youth culture and bringing it in ever tighter into the fold of society, defusing any element of rebellion and individuality. It was, after all, only a display, lasting ten-minutes in a four hour program, a way for China to say, “don’t forget, kids, what’s underneath the adidas pants.” Oh, there was break dancing. But the kid was wearing a helmet.

Barack Obama, and Freedom

Fair enough to say that no one will know exactly what last week's election means for a long, long time. Perhaps this is part of the reason that I've had such trouble articulating what effect it has had on me, and what it has made me feel, beyond an incredible giddiness, and an outpouring of emotion. I think I have finally figured out just why Barack Obama moves me as much as he does, and it starts with the words in his victory speech that moved me the most, playing with Lincoln's (second?) most famous excerpt from the Gettysburg address, that "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," has not perished from the face of the Earth.

There were other moments, seeing the first-family-elect step onto the stage for the first time was another, but this moment made me choke up the most. I think this is why:

I believe in American exceptionalism. I think that America introduced something new into world politics, something fundamentally new. This does not mean, of course, that I support every interpretation of this, far from it. I think most of the problems we get into involve some romantic idea of American righteousness, and so while I don't and cannot support "my country right or wrong" thinking, I do think that America introduced something critical for the future wellfare of mankind, something that no other country could have, and something that is slowly leaking out elsewhere (I do not think another country in the world could have elected Obama, (or an equivalent) for those who disagree with the "slowly" part of that) and something that is overwhelmingly beneficial for humankind and civilization.

Obviously, I am an idealist.

Over the last eight years, my idealism has been tempered by a great deal of cynicism and skepticism, (not two words for the same thing, though there are overlaps in certain situations) two other modes of thought that I am quite comfortable with, despite my core of idealism. What the idealist loves about our country, the cynic/skeptic is terrified we are losing, or have already lost. This has not been partisan (i.e., I'm not simply "anti-republican") rather it has been the fear that certain philosophies of governing embraced by the current administration have been threatening to government for the people. The road to fascism is paved with good intentions. Fascism, here, means government that uses its power to subjugate its own people. Not culturally, mind you: I would argue that conformity to cultural practices and, say, death camps, are two entirely different phenomenon. Culture is, at the same time, much more benign a form of "subjugation," if you wish to call it that, and much more insidious, built into the fabric of what people's identities are. But it is not being billy-clubbed for talking negatively about the government. I am following Naomi Wolf here. For a laundry list talk about the road to fascism, watch the following, or read her book, "The End of America."



In any case, for me, this has been the most important thing about the Obama candidacy, and the election. It is the key element that holds everything else in together: the appearance of an unabashedly rational, intellectual candidate; the major step taken for civil rights; the potential return of moral and political authority to america; returning america from the brink of modern-day laissez-faire economics; the face of america returning as being young, optimistic, inclusive, practical, idealistic (at the same time,) humble, etc. etc. opposed to the face we've seen in the last eight years; the excitement and participatory level in politics; the understanding of the importance of issues (the economy, energy, and the environment,) as trumping divisive politics (and the media, by the way;) the emergence of an interconnected citizenry plugged into the media but not dependent upon it: all of these aspects, and more, I see as the natural outcome of a (relatively) free and (relatively) open society in crisis.

Had McCain won the election despite the popular push for Obama apparent in everything and in nearly every demographic and the above, it would have been a symbol to me that the American Dream, not of a chicken in every pot, but of the enshrined ability to say and be and feel whatever one wants, and the belief that this leads to a better world for all, was either being threatened by the powers that be, or was dead already, killed when we all weren't looking.

It is, in a word, the ability to freely agree or disagree without repercussion.

America brought the sense that a country and its government are separable, and that patriotism is not love of government, but love of country, something, under the Bush administration, that was smeared two hundred years into the past. In China this has been one of the most dumbfounding aspects for me, that there is no separation, theoretically or practically, between what "the government" is and what "the country" is. There's an awareness, sure, and a line I often get from people who start interrogating me about how America could be so stupid (often a line of questioning starting with Iraq and Bush) is that "okay, okay, American people are good people, Chinese people are good people, but governments everywhere are bad." Of course, what I couldn't say, because I had had no evidence for it, was "when the people are good, and allowed a large degree of participation, the government can't but be good as well." I have some evidence for that now.

Are we being hoodwinked? Is Obama a Manchurian candidate working to support a global elite against (an important word) the citizens of the planet? A quick reversal of tone and policy by his administration in the areas that Bush has done the most and potentially permanent damage to the fabric of the country would do much to silence those two voices, skepticism and cynicism, so essential to freedom, and well-trained in the last eight years.

It is up to us to keep watch, and our power to keep the world moving towards an open and free society, inclusive and supportive of all. It is our power. And power concedes nothing.

The Rule of Law and China

A great article in the New York Times about the Chinese legal system.

Some pertinent highlights for what I want to talk about:

'As with the school collapses, the milk scandal involves a web of complicity linking company executives to government officials. Those connections make sorting out responsibility a delicate political task. Rather than allow the courts to weigh in, officials prefer to press complainants to take compensation, said Teng Biao, a lawyer in Beijing who is collecting material for a possible class-action lawsuit. “Traditionally in China, politics is always higher than the law,” he said.

“To protect Sanlu is to protect the government itself,” he added. “A public health crisis like this not only involves Sanlu. It involves many officials from authorities in the city of Shijiazhuang up to the central government. It involves media censorship, the food quality regulatory system and the corrupt deal between commercial merchants and corrupt officials.”'

'Many lawyers find it hard to ignore the entreaties of provincial judicial bureaus or lawyers associations, which they are required to join. Those groups are controlled by the Ministry of Justice, which ultimately makes the rules for licensing lawyers.'

'There was no outright ban on class-action lawsuits, but the association put in place onerous rules, including a requirement that lawyers report conversations with clients to the judicial bureaus[.]'

When I talk with people about China, and they mention democracy, I always say that it's a long way off, and far from the most important thing at this moment. Democracy, as we have seen in Iraq, is not a cure for what ails ya, it is a structure ensuring stability that can be functional only after many props are inserted for it to rest on, and one of the most important, and the one I always mention to people, is the Rule of Law. Rule of Law, basically, is the idea that no one is higher than the law, and that everyone respects the decisions of the law and of due process.

The law has to be basically respectable, of course, or no one would follow it.

As the above quote makes clear, this is definitely not the case in China. Things in China run on a personal basis, not an impersonal one, and the Law, if it is to be effective, must be impersonal. No one above it, and no one below (an ideal the West still has not entirely mastered.) I have written about this before, here.

A student and I discussed this a week ago, and, astoundingly to me, the Chinese reaction to the crisis is, "we should trust the government to handle it and to do what's right." Seeing as how the government is largely, though not entirely responsible, this struck me as foolish. Without a recourse to change, of course, there's little the Chinese people can say. Still, the reaction isn't so much, "we're powerless to do anything, we have to hope the government can help out," it's still "the government will do what's right." There's little sense in China of government ever being the problem, even with people who agree that the Mao years of Communist rule were devastating to the country.

There's also a sense that the government, as monolithic as it may appear in the west, is actually made up of fairly separate entities, and that the local government may not be on the people's side, but the central government will still do what's right, and that's the case here as well. Along with an increasing openness in the media and what's allowed to be reported on, it gives Chinese people the sense of progress.

How long will it continue though, until something bursts? Will the government ever really be able to put the law above the party, or, say, turn the army over to the country, instead of having a private Communist army? Watch and learn.

Chinese Nineties Kids （九零后）

I had an interesting conversation recently with an old-china hand about the kids growing up in China today, and his opinion and mine match pretty well: they suck.

Now, some of this may just be crotchety-old-timerism, as he is older than I am, and I myself am a generation removed from these brats, but of course, as my opinion, I think some of it is warranted.

I've written a couple of things about these kids before since I find them fascinating, here, about some of my students and how they don't have any time of their own, and here, about the phenomenon of having a country of single children.

The way my conversational partner put it was that "if you were born in the 40's in China, you had a fascinating life [though not always a great one], if you were born in the 50's (60's, 70's) you're living a fascinating life, even if you were born in the 80's you'll live a fascinating life, but if you were born in the 90's, your life is shit!"

That's in quotes but is certainly not verbatim.

The charge against the kids is that they have no roots, care for nothing but money and personal comfort etc, etc, and as far as I can tell this is true. They are pampered more or less by their elders (sometimes two sets of grandparents and of course their parents) but have little of a real emotional connection to them, are given complete free reign to do as they please within rigidly defined boundaries (you should see these kids in restaurants it's terrifying, but, of course, when seven am rolls around they're off to class lock-step,) grow up isolated from any historical sense of their culture other than what is purely sentimental (of course, sentimentalism seems to be the common thread of modern Chinese culture, a harsh but only slightly exaggerated comment) part of which is that the concept of hardships is really no more than a concept. (We are talking mostly about urban lower-middle class to upper class kids, of course.) There's much more here that I won't go into depth about but, basically, these kids suck. The above, of course, are just theories as to why, you'd have to actually see them and their behavior to really understand what I'm saying. Those of you who have seen them probably agree. I actually give them some slack, I think they're growing up in a real twisted environment. My girlfriend (Chinese) is harsher on them than I am.

On a hike on the great wall, I saw some chalking done by some (obviously) 90's kids that said, basically, "there is no love, there is only fooling people." This is a typical sentiment, I feel, from them. Of course, seeing the culture they've grown up in, it's hard to argue that, from their point of view, it could appear any other way. More later, perhaps.

But this is where it gets interesting.
Apparently, according to the old-China hand, the PLA (People's Liberation Army, which would be the Army of China if it didn't belong exclusively to the Communist Party, a distinction only a naive foreigner would make) commissioned a study some years ago about what the effect of China's rise would be in the world, undergone by the intellectuals, and freed of any official pressure (the warping effects of pressure are applied after the study is published,) that found that China's rise into the world order would start seriously conflicting with other countries in the late 2020's and the 2030's, right at the time when these twits would be taking over the country. After this period, China would be an established world power, and the balance would be restored, but during the period of troubles, the idiots would reign.

Because of the arch-conservative nature of the central party, I am hoping this will not entirely turn out to be true, but certainly that generation will be the ascendant one during this time period, which is just great for everyone concerned.

I just can't wait.

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.

Summertime, and the living is, crap.

Interesting assumptions break down here for me all the time. At the beginning of the summer, I had been talking to my students about what summer is like in China. At first, I was really confused, but the more and more I dug into it, the more I understood my students inability to understand what the heck I was talking about.

Summer, I have always felt, is a magical time. Things just feel different. BBQs, the freedom of being off from school, (or taking long weekends at work,) going to the beach, or camping, or a lake, drinking a beer outside with friends, playing frisbee in the park or basketball, the fourth of July, ice cream parlors... this is really just the beginning. In short, summer is really different. I tried to get my students to talk about this earlier in the summer, with mostly black stares coming back.

It turns out, summer is no different in China than the rest of the year, and actually, kind of worse for all concerned. There are few individual vacations, everyone has the same national holidays off, and kids, while they aren't in school, are pressured by parents to take more outside of school classes, (like my English class,) plus, they still have to do a few hours of homework every day for their regular school (this was a real surprise to me) and they don't get to see their friends. Plus, it's too hot. All of this adds up as the answer "nothing" to the question, "what's special about summer in China?"

Kids actually like school, really really like school. They get to play with their friends, and, since there's no alternative, they don't know anything else. You might have liked school too if "not school" actually meant more work and less play with your friends. School, for them, is life, and so, since they like life, they like school.

Keep this in mind as you read about China, about how families aren't grieving after the earthquake (see my last post,) or about the post "A beautiful but disturbing day."

More from the Times Today

Two more quick op-eds from the Times today.

One, from David Brooks, a real strange one about Chinese grief in the aftermath of the Earthquake- I have little to say about it, other than it struck me as just as weird, but that there are perhaps two unfair points: first, directly after the earthquake the drama was huge, and there was a great deal of grief, much of it put down forcibly by the Government, so calling Americans whiners is not entirely fair, though Chinese people don't whine and moan so much at the little things. It gets beaten out of them as kids. (Not necessarily literally.)

And one from Paul Krugman. Krugman's is a post on nationalism and the economic effects of the Russian invasion of Georgia. China is, of course, an overly nationalistic country, but this worries me less than Russia does, for two reasons. Russia has a democracy in name, but has power vested in a very small member of elites, most of whom see the country along the lines of a military power. Also, Russia has not until recently had an overly strong nationalistic sense, or a sense of nationhood, which is one reason why lawlessness and mobsterism prevailed after the USSR broke down. No one in the USSR (or few) actually loved the USSR, and so its breakdown did not lead smoothly into a strong Russian state. That has taken some time to emerge, and emerge it has. But, the problem is the Russians are just starting, as a nation, on this level of development. It takes quite a long time to really go through it to get to the point the west did after the enlightenment. The point is, Russian nationalism is here to stay, and much of the citizenry will be behind it one hundred percent, ignoring rational cooperative concerns for the honor of the Motherland. (Much of this is based on a theory of development I did not myself invent but subscribe to that I will surely be talking about later.)

This contrasts with China, whose leadership, though all agreed on one thing (the continued and unquestioned rule of the CCP) are more cautious, fractured, and numerous than the Russian leadership. China, though strong in her own country (and as Krugman points out, that includes in their minds Taiwan, though recent deals make a military takeover much more unlikely in the short term and hopefully in the long term) and ruthless, are not as likely to go off on somebody else. This is not absolute, of course, and no one knows what will happen as the country matures, but I still feel better about this than about Russia.

The other thing about China is that its genuine and heartfelt nationalism has been rooted and has been expressing itself for some time. Along with that, the western-philes of the country have been undertaking their own Enlightenment, and while this will take a long long time to find a true root and expression in the mainstream culture, it has already started expressing itself in the highest halls of power. (Though is by no means the dominant force in Chinese politics, far from it.)

What may be interesting is a Russia jostling with its neighbor China, both rising world powers and nationalistic neighbors.

But in any case, while nationalism can be healthy, just as self-confidence can be healthy, and is a necessary step for any country or group of people, helping them find an identity, it does not necessarily bode well for world peace, even as interconnected as our economies have become.

So what's the solution? I do not know, but for some time have been thinking of a global organizing body, much more powerful than the U.N. The U.N., of course, has done some good, but its structure is not equipped for the world we live in. Membership, of course, would be voluntary, and governments would only be allowed to participate that exhibited certain features, like direct democracy practices such as having elected officials, and the ability to depose them, a strict rule of law, the ability for direct citizen participation, etc. etc., perhaps on a sliding scale, (the U.S. would not be among the ten highest, if I can remember correctly that would be Denmark) as well as including considerations of population for power-wielding. This could be dangerous, of course (new world order, anyone?) but if a Rule of Law were established, and the countries joining were already culturally proficient in rule of law, there's no reason to believe that this would become an oppressive system. Nor would it exist to threaten other countries national sovereignty. It could merely be a system, a big party, with its doors wide open to anyone who wanted to join, urging countries forward in development. This, of course, is only the slightest sketch.

But perhaps this is just more junk.

Yes. I read the Times compulsively. It is a fault.

And I really know nothing. I am only trying to provoke thought.

A beautiful but disturbing day.

I wrote this in May and sent it to some people, but it seemed pertinent now considering yesterday's post.


This afternoon I had Stone. He is a smart child of eleven and he speaks English very well. Because it was such a beautiful day, and because it is very difficult to get him talking about anything, (we have played monopoly during our two previous classes) and because I was exhausted and didn't want to be boxed up in a room unless I was sleeping in it, I decided we would go for a walk. He strongly resisted this, but as I am his teacher he had little to say. We walked a little way, he complaining all the time. At the underpass of a large road he stopped and refused to continue, so I walked downstairs and waited in the tunnel, figuring he would follow me, and he did, so I led him like this, bit by bit, promising him we could sit as soon as we got to a group of benches in a little corporate park about a five or ten minute walk from the building in which we have class. We sat, and he began to talk, and this was good. We weren't talking about anything in particular, and he, every five minutes or so, brought up the fact that he would much prefer to be inside, but I kept saying wait a little longer, and he did, and we sat, talking and not talking.

He is a boy that loves his freedom, which is rare in China, but freedom to him means the freedom to play games, and little else. We talked about how schools are similar to jails in many respects (an analogy he, not I, made) and about how even inside of a jail one can be entirely free if he is master of himself. I kept poking him with the hints of nature around us, the birds, and the trees, the flowers and the wind, which (in particular) was too pleasant for me to acquiesce to his desire to return to the classroom, a two by two meter room which may or may not have a window on the eighteenth floor of an office building. I stretched out on a bench a few minutes after arriving, my head and arms and legs hanging off of it (it had no back) and he did the same, and I realized something, and asked him, "Stone, you never in your life have a time when you don't have to do anything at all, when you can just sit and enjoy the day, right?" He said "yeah." "Well then," I said, "I am offering you the opportunity to simply sit and feel the breeze and listen to the trees and do nothing, since you already speak English so it's not difficult for you and you want to go back inside? Why?" He said something about having to work during class, about always having to work and study, about not having any time to do anything else, because this was all that was important. I mentioned the irony of his using our class time to play games with me (he didn't bring monopoly this day, I think because his mother brought him, but he did bring a deck of cards, and was, as I said, rather disappointed when I said that we wouldn't be using them) but the conversation died there, more or less.

After he won me over and I'd had my fill of the (relatively) fresh air of spring in Beijing, as we sat in the classroom, I asked an innocuous question about how much he slept every night. Sleep being important to me and apparently impossible for the majority of Chinese students, I was curious. He said he slept usually nine hours, sometimes eight, sometimes ten, and then he said, which made me laugh, "sometimes more than this or less." While laughing I almost missed him say, "sometimes not at all." "Not at all," I said, trying to drag more out of him but not incredulous, as I have more than one student who routinely pulls all-nighters to finish homework and review even though eleven seemed a little young for this and he said "Sometimes my parents don't let me sleep, because I didn't finish my homework." The way he phrased this made me rather aghast, and I asked him how often this happened. In the last year, he said, "only once." I felt a little better. He has mentioned previously and briefly how his mother is always angry at him, and his family life does not seem joyful, to say the very least. I don't remember how this next part came up, it may have been started by some loose questions and comments about his parents, or he may have just started talking, but he then went on to talk about how his parents hit him, about how they beat him in secret, and how they made him not able to scream, and when he said this last part I almost started crying. "Parents don't care about anything," he said a few times, as I told him that western people think that this is wrong, that in America kids would be taken away from parents for this, that in the west we think this is the worst thing that you can possibly do to a child, someone who is entirely defenseless and powerless, the worst thing you can do is hit them. "It's a terrible, terrible thing," I said in the calmest and strongest voice I could, because I couldn't say anything else. "I know," he said, "parents don't care about anything."

There are parents who genuinely love their children, of course, there are a few I can think of in particular whose pure and warm love for their children shines through their every gesture when I see them together, and even these beatings are motivated out of concern for what the parents believe is the welfare of the child, which is what makes them even more twisted. There is a phrase in China that translates roughly into "Use a stick to raise a good son," something akin to our "spare the rod, spoil the child." There's another one that means, "If you don't beat a kid at all for three days, the kids will climb onto the roof of the house and kick the tiles down." Chinese accomplishes this sentiment in only eight syllables, if you can believe this, (it literally says "three days no hit, house on overturn tiles,") but my admiration for this entirely different language is rather besides the point. "Backwards thinking," I said to him in Chinese, so it would have more effect, and so I'd be sure he understood. He nodded and continued looking at the table between us. "Now can we play a game?" he asked me.

I actually might have forgotten about this, busy and tired as I was today, were it not for my last two students of the day, two middle schoolers, Wendy and Joyce, who I teach together. They'd be seventh graders in America. I had only three hours of sleep last night, so I was exhausted, and I had nothing to talk about really. We usually gossip, more or less, and they tell me about their school, and the students (this I could really write a book about, they go to the best middle school in the country, with all that this entails. They are both good students, but there is some serious influence at this school. The President of China gave a speech there this year. That sort of school.)
Today, as I said, I just couldn't keep any line of questioning up, I was way too tired. Eventually for some reason the question popped up in my mind again (again, on topic) "How much do you sleep at night?" Joyce sleeps a healthy amount; Wendy between four and seven hours, a little on the shy side. We then had a long discussion about how lack of sleep hurts students and doesn't allow one's mind to function at one-hundred percent, and then how people need time to themselves during the day or the week or sometime at least when there's nothing that they have to do, which I was comparing to the sleep that the body needs to regenerate, which evolved into a discussion about how people shut parts of themselves off in order to get done what they have to, and how that makes them ultimately weaker and less able to accomplish anything meaningful (my view,) or how this makes one capable for doing what they have to do, to get what they want, and how it is the people who need rest who are actually weak (Wendy's view. Joyce usually disagrees with her when we talk about things like this but I think she feels powerless to do anything about it, she sees the logic and feels what I'm saying but sees no road out.) Without going into the details of the discussion, Wendy, the more talkative but less fluent one said, "we've lost our tomorrows," at one point, which I think is one of the most beautiful English phrases I can remember hearing, and later, when I summed up the conversation by saying, "you're saying to me that in your lives the two of you have no time to just be yourselves," she said, "yes. We have no time in our lives to be ourselves."

This was the connection to my time with Stone. My female student was saying that she can't stop, that she couldn't stop, that she couldn't listen to those parts of herself that she had shut up in order to be able to sleep only four hours a day, in order to be able to study with all of her "free time," in order to go to special classes all weekend etc. etc. I was getting that feeling from Stone as well. Walking outside on a beautiful day, just sitting on a bench in a park watching people walk around made him uncomfortable.

This frightens me deeply, because these are not isolated cases. This is the mindset of the entire society. Every kid is expected, required, and made to do this. One of my older students has a son of five years. He recently went on a trip with his grandparents to Nanjing; she picked them up at the train station the morning of our class. "You let him miss a week of school?" I asked with a teasing disbelief. "How? Why?" "It's Kindergarten," she said. "It's not important." "Would you," I began, knowing the answer, "have let him do that next year, if he were in first grade?" "No!" She said, with a tint of surprise and the same air of obviousness with which I asked the question. "And why not," I asked, "what is the difference between kindergarten and first grade?" "In First Grade," she said, "there have..." she struggled for the word, "kaoshi." She looked at me hopefully. "Tests," I said, "In first grade there are tests." "Yes," she said, "In First Grade have tests."

Little Emperors, Huge Country

A very good essay in Psychology Today about only children in China, and one that covers all of its bases, good and bad.

Just a few highlights:

"You must do this to live:" keeping up with the Joneses x 5. Though China seems more and more like a land of plenty, with 1.3 billion people, there's nowhere near enough to go around. Kids, from first grade, study every single day for hours. This is no exaggeration. Of course, what the article doesn't mention is that, out of the 1.6 million college level jobs for 4 million graduates, the majority go to someone not because of credentials, but because of connections. After all, with such limited space, it's natural that that would provide the crucial push.

Also note that one of the reasons parents push their kids so much is selfish: kids are expected to take care of their parents after they retire (55 for women, 60 for men, though the numbers are growing) and there's no other system in place to do so, nor is it customary for an individual to plan for his or her retirement. It's all on the kids' shoulders. "risky family," indeed.

This I particularly like:
"Back then, every mental problem was seen as anti-socialist," says Kaiping Peng, a University of California Berkeley professor who was among the first generation of Chinese psychologists to receive formal clinical training, in the late 1970s. "If you were depressed, they thought you were politically impure and sent you to a labor camp."

I think even the west is just now starting to understand in a mass way that mental problems don't mean there's something wrong with you as a person.

Also, the point I make to many of my students:
"On your resumé, you can't put, '1988 to 2001: studied 10 hours every day,' " laughs Howe, the Chengdu student. "You have to actually do stuff," though the way I say it is, "you need to have a life, too."

As a freedom lover myself, I find this truly pitiable, and believe it probably makes for a less healthy individual and society.

Anyway, see my post later this week called "Whose Century," for some more.

have fun today.

Taking it personally

Righteousness does not mean self-righteousness. A blog from the New York Times.

The article doesn't really concern me, it's the comments underneath. The vituperative nature of nearly every blog is troublesome. It's not just that people have the ability to carelessly insult others on the internet, it's that people reading these comments take them personally. A dialog is basically impossible on this "democratic" forum, because everyone just trenches in to their position, baffled and infuriated by how wrong every one else's view (but their own) is. They are all, more or less, saying the same things, over and over again, just directed at the opposite side.

Now, don't get me wrong, dialog is not always the most effective solution to a problem (like, for instance, the failure of dialog) nor is it always necessary, but arenas as this, where the worst of each country is displayed, just pushes us all further and further into nationalism, the type that could easily destroy the progress the world community has made as community since the end of World War II.

The most ridiculous thing is that basically everybody's point is stupid. I don't have the time or space (I guess I do have the space) to refute all of this, but basically, the Americans are all openly harping a country they still think of as being the U.S.S.R., and the Chinese people are all defending their country and pretending like nothing's wrong with it. Some Americans take the reverse position, of course, and are even more cynical than the Chinese, but this is even worse. There are points to be made on both sides, and nobody makes them at all, and when they're (rarely) made, people respond to other mistaken posts in a way that shows they often didn't understand the post in the first place!

The other thing that frustrates me is that everyone acts like blog comments are representative of the general population, and that each post were being written by the collected will of the american/chinese people.

Ha. I guess I'm guilty of that too.

Well, for those of us who are willing to listen and dialog but still rebuke, China has an authoritarian government. The United States has a lot of idiots.