Mark's China Blog

CNY, Foxconn, and Baijiu

2012-01-27T19:38:00.002-06:00

Happy Chinese New Year!!

I love that video. So happy and joyful. China is a wonderful place to be during the days leading up to and the days following the lunar new year. Qian and I have missed China a lot the past few days.

Now that you've finished reveling in the awesomeness that is China in wintertime, listen to this hour-long This American Life podcast about an American guy visiting the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. This is worth your time.

And then finally, to all of you capping off this taking-in-some-Chinese-culture-session with a shot of baijiu, I say to you ,"Gan bei!"

A Collection of Yue Baoqun's Photograpic Works

2012-01-15T10:37:00.003-06:00

I found one of my favorite books while moving last month, a photo book of the Chinese countryside - A Collection of Yue Baoqun's Photographic Works.

A man I knew in Xi'an arranged for a folk arts festival in his home village, about two hours west of Xi'an, every year. He planned a day of cultural activities - including Qin Qiang (Shaanxi-style opera), puppet shows, and a tour of the recently opened art gallery - to give his 10,000 person village an annual shot of activity and money from outsiders. The man I knew is big in the voluntourism industry in China. TV cameras, newspapers, government officials, and a couple minibuses full of foreigners were brought in to the village every spring for the festival.

I went to this festival in 2006, 2007, and 2009. I have very fond memories of going to this event. The mental image that is most strongly burnt into my mind is watching Qinqiang with several hundred villagers laughing and smoking pipes as the performers belted out their songs from the stage. I didn't spend tons of time in the countryside during my time in China. I really cherish the times that I did spend there.

On my second trip, I saw Yue Baoqun's book for sale at the art gallery's gift shop (hardly any village in China would have a gallery like this one has, it only has one because of the voluntourism aspect to the village). After flipping through the book, I was immediately convinced that it was worth its 68 kuai (about $10 or $11 at the time) price tag and got it.

Yue Baoqun is a photographer from Baoji, Shaanxi Province. Baoji is about a two hour intra-provincial train ride from my old home, Xi'an. Yue's book highlights photos of people from the countryside of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Gansu Provinces. Yue's photos of the Chinese countryside are some of the best I've seen anywhere.

Here are a few of my favorites (I took these photos of the book myself, sorry about the quality, they really don't do the book much justice):

A man playing an erhu in rural Shaanxi Province

I remember seeing a huge blown up poster of this photo for sale at the gallery. It was 250 kuai (about $40). I regret I didn't get it. I love art featuring musicians performing.

Two portraits of Shaanxi farmers

Two photos of ethnic minorities from Gansu Provice

Yellow Hat Buddhist monks in Gansu Province

A farmer on the Yellow River in Shanxi Province.

It was hard for me to narrow down my favorite photos to just five. Just about every photo of this 80 page book is special.

The parts of China that Yue features in his book are some of the poorest in China. The people on the loess plateaus and imposing terrain of northwest China live lives unfathomable to those who've only seen the wealth of Beijing, Shanghai, and other large cities in China.

Yue's book gives the reader an intimate glimpse into a world that is often ignored when discussing "rising China." I think that seeing how people live outside of China's major cities is an important thing to understand. Not all of China has the luxury of being crazed over the new iPhone 4s.

I just did a few searches for Yue Baoqun (岳宝群) on Google and Baidu. I found his blog, but could only find this book for sale on the Chinese internet. If you can read Chinese, you can buy his book here. At 30 yuan (about $5), this is a steal. Yue Baoqun's photos and his book are incredible.

Mr. China

2011-12-31T11:22:00.002-06:00

The introduction page to the book, Mr. China: A Memoir by Tim Clissold, is one of the most captivating pages of text I've ever read:

My jaw dropped when I got to the end of that paragraph. I felt like Clissold had written this page just for me (with the Edgar Snow reference and all).

I can relate to the fantasizing of becoming "Mr. China" so deeply. China over the past few years has taken over my life. I lived there for a few years and even now living in the US read about it constantly. If I'm not keeping up with my China-watcher stream on Twitter, then I'm probably reading a book or a blog about China. Expanding my knowledge of China is my most time-intensive hobby. Whether I consciously pursue it or whether it's something going on beneath the surface, becoming a "China hand" is something that I'm really quite obsessed about.

After reading this ridiculously awesome introduction to Mr. China, I was so pumped to devour the book.

Mr. China is a memoir from a foreigner who participated in the first wave of foreign investment in China from after the country embraced Deng Xiaoping's liberalization policies in the early 1990s. Tim Clissold is an Englishman who was introduced to China for the first time through visiting Hong Kong as a young man.

China infiltrated Clissold's person almost immediately after arriving in the country. He quit his job in England to return to Beijing to study after a brief exposure to China. After a couple years of Chinese language study and getting to know the culture, he was re-hired by the firm he quit in England in the first place, Arthur Andersen, as a China specialist in 1992.

It's only a few pages in and is not an integral part of the book as a whole, but reading about Clissold's first experiences in China is another highlight of the book for me. He fell in love with China quickly like a lot of foreigners, including myself, do.

The following passage from pages 12-13 really struck me:

Just like with the introduction paragraph highlighted at the beginning of this post, I was completely taken with this passage. Reading Clissold's thoughts on "willful infatuation" really made me think about the nature of my obsession with China.

Mr. China, a business book, stopped me in my tracks twice by the time I had reached page 13. You really can't ask much more from a book than that, can you? Tim Clissold is a freakishly good writer.

There is a lot of good stuff in Mr. China after page 13 as well. There are a plethora of funny, maddening, and insightful business stories. China in the 1990s was in many ways more of a wild west-like frontier than the country is today.

Reading about corrupt factory owners, two-faced investment partners, and capricious government officials is often times comical. The stresses of working on multi-million deals with the uncertainty that underlines China's legal and business culture are intense.

There are several nail-biting scenes where Clissold and his partners appear to have been taken to the cleaners. I nearly got light-headed and butterflies in my stomach as I read of cleaned out multi-million dollar bank accounts and maniacal factory owners. The actual toll taken on Clissold is seen very prominently when, in his 30s, he has to leave China due to a stress-induced heart attack.

Everybody in the world today hears about "the Chinese economic miracle" and the robust year-after-year growth in China. Few have seen the inner workings of those processes as intimately as Clissold has, though. Getting to see such wheeling and dealing from almost twenty years ago is special.

Mr. China is a very good book. It took me on a much harder and more turbulent ride than I was expecting. It's ostensibly a book on business in China. It's much more than that, though. Few books cut to the heart of China's culture like Clissold's does. Clissold, a financier by trade, is a dazzling writer. Any starry-eyed dreamer thinking of becoming Mr. China needs to pick up Mr. China.

House

2011-12-04T07:51:00.001-06:00

The cause of the dearth of posts here recently is that Qian and I just bought and moved into our first house. Anyone who's gone down that road before knows that the preparation and execution of finding the right house, moving out of the old apartment, and getting into the new place is all-consuming. Between my job and all of that house stuff, blogging has fallen by the wayside.

Although I've been busy with life, I'm still engaged with China and still have things to write. I'm hoping things will settle down soon and I'll get some posts up soon.

In the mean time, I have a couple Chinese movies upon which I want to comment quickly.

First, Raise the Red Lantern 《大红灯笼高高挂》directed by Zhang Yimou is incredible. I found it to be just as good as the other Zhang movie I saw recently, To Live. It's the story of a concubine in the early twentieth century. The story is laid out very delicately and is executed with great passion. The cinematography and setting of the movie are still etched into my mind a couple weeks after watching it. I highly recommend it.

And then second, In the Heat of the Sun 《阳光灿烂的日子》is one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen. Qian and I watched since it was one of the only movies she hadn't seen from the list that was recommended in the comments section of this blog a few weeks ago. It's about a group of rebellious youths during the Cultural Revolution. It is very avant-garde. I appreciated watching this more than my wife did (she hated it), but I'd have a hard time recommending this one.

When a Billion Chinese Jump

2011-11-05T09:25:00.004-05:00

My biggest problem with living in China when I was there was the pollution. Language issues, trying to understand social mores, being treated differently because I was a foreigner, and any homesickness I felt being on the other side of the planet from my home all paled in comparison to the you-can-only-fathom-it-if-you've-been-there pollution that engulfs China.

Xi'an's pollution, in particular, is horrific. Xi'an, the city I lived in for three and a half years, is just to the south and to the west of the richest coal reserves in China. Xi'an's streets are choked with cars and its economic activity (carbon emissions) is booming. South of Xi'an stand the mighty Qinling Mountains, a very formidable range. You may not know there are mountains near you if you live in Xi'an, though. The peaks of the Qinling range are not visible 350 days out of the year. The beauty of the Qinling Mountains are no match for Xi'an's all-encompassing smog.

Jonathan Watts, a China correspondent from The Guardian, last year published a book entirely about China and its environment, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind - or Destroy It.

I'd heard a lot of hype about this book for more than a year in the China blog and Twitter-sphere. Having now read it, the book lives up to the big buildup it's garnered. When a Billion Chinese Jump expanded and refined my knowledge of environmental issues in China a great deal. Watts' book put important facts and figures into my brain to go along with the negative experiences I've had with China's pollution.

The organization of Watts book is very good. It is split into four sections - Nature, Man, Imbalance, and Alternatives - and highlights each of these themes by focusing on different corresponding regions in China - the Southwest, the Southeast, the Northwest, and the Northeast. The result is a full portrait of what is going on in the humongous land mass that is China. The good, the bad, and the ugly all make it into Watts study of Chinese people and their relationship with their land.

I've talked before on my blog about how western China is the most interesting part of the country to me. The West is the frontier land of China that is often overlooked by journalists and policy-makers who only spend time in the large metropoli of eastern China.

Nobody can accuse Watts of not getting the full picture of China in When a Billion Chinese Jump. He visits nearly every nook and cranny of every corner of China - the snow-peaked mountains and glaciers of Tibet and Sichuan, the barren deserts of the former Silk Road in Xinjiang, and the idyllic scenery of Yunnan - to get the widest-ranging scope of China's environmental impact possible.

One thing I found very interesting on a personal level is that Watts visits every city in the on-and-off series on this blog - Chinese Cities that You've Never Heard of But Should Know. The giant factory that is Guangzhou and its surrounding area, the "model village" of Huaxi, the excesses of Ordos, and the Bladerunner-esque city of Chongqing are all places that Watts highlights.

I think it's pretty cool that Watts and I see eye-to-eye on what are the larger-than-life stories going on in China today. There were several points in When a Billion Chinese Jump where I felt Watts had written the book just for my reading. That's a great feeling to get when plowing through a meaty book.

One of my favorite chapters in the book is titled, "Why Do So Many People Hate Henan?" I laughed out loud when I saw chapter title in the table of contents. I imagine that anyone who's ever lived or spent a some time in China know the reputation that Henan Province and its people have amongst non-Henanese Chinese people.

Watts writes: "The antipathy of so many Chinese feel toward Henan seems to mirror the prejudice that many foreigners express towards China: that it is dirty, overcrowded, and untrustworthy."

Watts reminds the reader, though, that Henan is the birthplace of some of the most glorious Chinese things from China: tai qi, kung fu, and Zen Buddhism. Watts writes convincingly that Henan, which at one time was a bucolic place, is the dystopia it is now because of a systematic destruction of its environment. Instead of being known for some of the most beautiful things China has offered to the world, Henan is now famous for pollution-induced cancer villages, corruption-induced AIDS villages, and the worst of the worst man-made problems in China.

The story of Henan is tragic. Watts hammers what's gone on there hard because the entire country of China is on the brink of becoming one big Henan-like hellhole.

I'm going to highlight a passage from When a Billion Chinese Jump that I liked. It features a general theme found throughout the book: ingrained Chinese cultural traits make one wonder whether there is any hope that China will be able to change its attitude towards its environment.

From page 68 and 69:

Whether China's deeply ingrained negative cultural attitudes towards nature can be overcome is going to be one of the most important things to watch in the world over the next several decades.

My only criticism of When a Billion Chinese Jump is that it, at times, sounds a bit patronizing. Hearing Watts, an Englishman, lament fast food's growth, the Barbie store in Shanghai, and China's embrace of materialism was a bit much at times. I do think that it is near impossible to avoid this problem when a westerner writes a critical book about a developing country. Reading about "Barbie's eco-footprint" (the CO2 that Barbie, if a real person, would've been responsible for emitting) made me cringe some, though.

Watts book is a great guide to understanding China's struggle to build sustainable economic and societal structures. Watts knows a ton about China and such is reflected in his very serious, yet readable, book. I recommend anyone with even a hint of a green world-view or interest in China to pick up When a Billion Chinese Jump.

To Live

2011-10-15T11:11:00.008-05:00

Qian recently rented a Chinese movie from the library at the school where she teaches. The movie she picked up was To Live (or 活着 in Chinese) by Zhang Yimou. Zhang is one of the most famous directors in China. In addition to making block-buster movies, Zhang also directed the 2008 Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. I had never heard of this movie and am honestly not too familiar with much of Zhang's work. I'm glad Qian got this randomly. To Live is a great film.

To Live is the story of a northern Chinese family and the events that unfolded in their lives in the middle part of the twentieth century. The 1940s through 1970s were a very turbulent time in China. Watching the main character, Fu Gui, go from being forced into the Nationalist Army to being forced into the Communist Red Army to taking part in campaigns against land owners in the 1950s to smelting iron during the Great Leap Forward to being surrounded by Mao-fanaticism in the 1960s and 1970s is a fascinating journey.

Fu Gui early in the movie is a spoiled brat from a rich family. He spends more time losing money gambling than with his wife and young daughter. After Fu loses his home and all of his inherited riches gambling, his pregnant-with-his-second-child wife leaves with him and takes their daughter with her.

Fu, having been left by his family and having lost all his money, has to restart his life. He does the only thing he knows how to do besides gamble - he plays the ruan and sings Shaanxi-style opera (秦腔) for traditional Chinese shadow plays with a troupe that tours surrounding villages.

These shadow plays and Fu Gui's singing and strumming at them are scattered throughout the movie. Shadow plays are a very unique Chinese form of entertainment. Shadow play scenes were a very nice addition to the movie.

Fu Gui, after having hit rock bottom, rebuilds his life. He reunites with his wife and kids after a few years away from them.

The family, once reunited, lives a decent enough life. Well, as decent as life could be in 1950's China.

Fu and his wife are level-headed, non-political people. This, unfortunately, couldn't keep them away from the chaos that Mao threw his country into. Mao's ideas of "constant revolution" and their implementation in society affected every Chinese person on a very deep level.

Fu and his family are witness to land-owners and the rich of society being attacked in the mid-1950s. Scenes of the Great Leap Forward, when Mao ordered China's agriculture collectivized in an attempt to "overtake" Britain and the US, then grip Fu and his family beginning in 1958. The town's leaders seize the family's pots and pans and the family has to eat at communal kitchens during that campaign. Many scenes take place next to burning backyard furnaces attempting to produce steel. The family doesn't suffer famine at all, at least. Much of the country did. As many as 35 million people died during the three year-long famine.

The psychosis of the Cultural Revolution, when students beat up their teachers and red guards destroyed temples and relics of ancient Chinese culture (among other things), is also featured very prominently in To Live.

Fu and his family are affected brutally during these horrific campaigns. There is never any criticism of Mao and the horrors that his policies caused by the main characters in the movie. The family, despite facing unimaginable man-made, politician-induced challenges, just plows on. There is never any complaining or lamenting about the hand that they'd been dealt.

In a way, I really admire Fu and his family for that. They continue, as the movie is called, to live despite the terrible atmosphere that surrounded them. In another sense, though, there were many points where continuing to roll with the punches and not making any protest about the things going on in society was, one could say, too passive of a stance.

I suppose it's easy for me, living in a free society after the fact, to be an arm-chair quarterback and say that they were too timid in the face of wretched political upheaval. I also understand what the fate was of people who resisted Mao's policies: they were murdered. It's true that it was nearly impossible to go against any of Mao's campaigns without being killed or at least jailed. But Fu and his family's lack of protesting and essentially going along with all of that degradation of society is a remarkable aspect of the movie.

I really enjoyed To Live. I had no expectations going into it and was moved by what I saw. Zhang created this movie in China in 1994. It's not the edgiest thing ever made. It's edgier than you might think, though. That SARFT - The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television - would've been OK with this film five years after Tiananmen Square occurred during a particularly rocky patch for the CCP is somewhat surprising. I heartily recommend To Live to anyone interested in seeing contemporary Chinese history from a Chinese perspective.

Edit: Be sure to check out the first comment on this post from Hopfrog. He gives a fantastic primer to non-kung fu Chinese film.

Riding the Dragon's Back

2011-09-24T10:33:00.001-05:00

Simon Winchester, in his book about the Yangtze River, River at the Center of the World, has a section at the end giving his "Suggestions for Further Reading." Winchester has glowing praise for one book, in particular:

Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of the most spectacular places I ever went in China. Winchester's description of a book about adventurers going to Yunnan and Tibet to get to the Yangtze's source really got my attention. I ran to my computer to get Riding the Dragon's Back off of Amazon (where I was able to purchase the book for $.01 plus shipping).

Riding the Dragon's Back: The Race to Raft the Upper Yangtze by Richard Bangs and Christian Kallen is a unique China book. Neither Bangs nor Christian are China experts or scholars. Instead, they are adventurers. Specifically, world-class white water rafting guides. Their perspective - one that comes from having rafted the greatest rivers in North America, Africa, and Asia - makes for a wonderful reading experience.

The book is broken into a few different sections:

The first section is a general history of the Yangtze. The second is the history of the first Chinese expedition to tackle the river. The third is the narrative about the cocky American explorer, Ken Warren's, expedition. And the fourth is the story of the two author's attempt at conquering the Yangtze at the Tiger Leaping Gorge section of the river.

Trying to raft the upper reaches of the Yangtze is crazy. There is a reason no human had ever done it up until the mid-1980s; Tibet, Yunnan, and Sichuan Provinces, where the Yangtze's waters begin to flow, are some of the most dangerous and formidable places on earth.

The Yangtze's source begins in the Himalayas of Tibet, the roof of the world. Altitude sickness ravages humans who are strong enough to reach such heights. The world's deepest gorge and countless impassable rapids have been carved into the earth by the river over the course of millenia. Adding onto all of these natural difficulties, the lack of economic development and medical infrastructure on these upper reaches make the Upper Yangtze one of the most inhospitable places on the planet.

With China's "reform and opening" in the post-Mao era came a desire from both explorers abroad and those within China to conquer the river from its untamed source.

The man most obsessed with floating the Yangtze was Ken Warren. Warren, an adventurer from the United States, tried for years to get the Chinese authorities to allow him into the country to raft the Yangtze. By the mid-1980s he finally started making some headway.

As word got out about foreigners planning on being the first to raft the Yangtze, a nationalist fervor swept over China. Several teams of young Chinese men volunteered, for the sake of China's pride, to be the first to raft the mighty river.

This race to be the first down the Yangtze is a major part of Bangs and Kallen's book. The drive to "win" was intense. The Chinese, given a head-start from governmental bureaucratic red tape keeping the foreigners out, were the first to push off from the source down the river. What the Chinese team lacked in rafting experience, it made up for with sheer courage.

Or maybe stupidity is a more appropriate word. As the Chinese team approached the most trying parts of the river, it resorted to pure ridiculousness. Check out this raft that some of the team attempted to ride down the rapids:

Photo from shangri-la-river-expeditions.com

The team members are in the middle of all that UFO-looking contraption! The men inside the boat were not steering the raft in any sense. They were simply going down blind, much like going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Unfortunately, three Chinese team members died riding that death-trap through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Undeterred by death, the collection of Chinese teams continued to push on. Stuck at the furious rapids of Tiger Leaping Gorge not sure how to continue, the following passage from page 139 really shows the determination of the Chinese teams going down on these expeditions:

Two weeks slowly passed. Nearly every member of the two teams hiked down the high, narrow trail, viewed the rapids, and returned to Qiaotou discouraged. Fifteen percent, or at most twenty, were the estimated chances for success. One in five was not good odds, and some rafters considered the effort suicidal. But several of the Chinese argued that they must go through Tiger's Leap Gorge - to do otherwise would be fraud, for to run the Yangtze one must run Hutiaoxia. Some pointed out that the Americans led by Ken Warren were coming down the river after them; they would surely run the narrow gorge even if the Chinese did not - and they were getting closer every day.

On September 3, a new enclosed capsule arrived for the Luoyang team, a smaller but hopefully more secure model, just seven feet in diameter and four feet high. It was only big enough for two people, lying on their sides, but it was equipped with an air-filled pillar to allow the passengers to breathe in the raging waters. The team immediately took it to the first drop, Upper Hutiao Shoal, with its huge pyramid rock fronting a sixty-foot drop in two main pitches. The next day, to test the capsule, they put a dog inside, attached an oxygen mask to the animal's muzzle, lashed the capsule shut, and sent it over the falls. The capsule bobbed in the quickening water, then accelerated and careened over the white chasm into the maelstrom below. A few minutes later it flushed into an eddy, and the rafters eagerly clambered over the rocks to fish it out of the water.

The craft had been badly damaged in the falls; the door had been wrenched open, and the dog was gone. No one had thought to put a life jacket on the animal, and it was never seen again. Surprisingly, when the rafters reviewed the videotape of the run, they perceived good news: the drop had only taken a few seconds, the boat had floated through it all, had not even been caught in any of the several large reversals. Perhaps if one made sure the door was secure, and tucked oneself in the the corner of the capsule and held on tight - the dog did not have the benefit of two hands and the awareness of what lay ahead - the odds of survival might rise to a more reasonable 50 percent. The seriousness of purpose the Chinese had for their effort is measured by the incident: their experiment had killed their involuntary subject, yet they regarded it as a success and decided to try again - with humans this time.

You'll have to get this book to find out what happens next as the capsule is loaded with humans.

As great as the section on the Chinese teams was, the highlights of the book are the accounts of the American teams.

The leader of the first US team, Ken Warren, is half John Wayne, half Leslie Nielsen from Naked Gun movies. He's a brave buffoon. Reading about Warren's exploits - such as overriding doctors who deemed his crew members too sick to raft and bringing multiple cans of hair mousse with him on the death-defying expedition - is just awesome.

The authors - Bangs and Kallen - portray Warren as a real mad man. They used extensive interviews with the American team to research what they wrote. Warren refused to speak with the authors, so the only perspective is that from the team he led. The caricature that makes it onto the page is unforgettable. Reading about Warren in Riding the Dragon's Back is one of the most fascinating character studies in failed leadership I've ever seen. Warren's tales alone make this book worth reading.

Shifting away from piecing together stories from the accounts of others, the two authors for the last section of the book tell of their own expedition that they went on to raft the Yangtze.

It is great to finish the book on their own first-hand experiences from the river. Some truly beautiful passages fill the pages of this last section. In addition to painting beautiful landscapes for the reader, the authors share the gambit of emotions that overcame them as they experience the thrill of a lifetime: rafting the Yangtze River at Tiger Leaping Gorge. The stories of testosterone-fueled butting of heads, interacting with local communities, and real fears of death make this a delightful read.

Riding the Dragon's Back was even better than what I was expecting. Winchester was spot on with his recommendation of this book. I haven't read any other books like it. Its mix of adventure with a commendable attempt at bringing the reader into Chinese history and culture make it a book I highly recommend picking up yourself.

IOU/USA

2011-09-18T21:46:00.005-05:00

There is a massive public art project currently on display in midtown Kansas City across from the KC Federal Reserve building. I went down to the site with my camera today to take a few photos.

Side 1 of the display:

Side 2 of the display:

This art project is a 15 x 7 x 1 political statement - the letters "IOU" on one side and the letters "USA" on the other - arranged out of 105 empty shipping containers.

Here is a write-up about the project from the Kansas City Star:

A new monument with attitude awaits visitors to Kansas City’s Memorial Park over the next four weeks.
Towering over the park’s existing bronze memorials is a huge wall composed of 105 cargo containers. And it has a message.
The containers are mostly red, white and blue, and the white ones have been placed to spell out “IOU” on one side and “USA” on the other. The occasional green container prompts thoughts of money, especially as the 65-foot-tall structure stands across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Noted sculptor John Salvest created the temporary installation as a project for Grand Arts, and considering the nation’s struggle with debt on all levels — from personal home foreclosures to the recent downgrade of the nation’s credit rating — the timing is spot on.
Read On

Debt and the US' global economic position are no longer esoteric academic issues only concerning the educated of society. The US' debt problems are at the heart of mainstream America. Whether it was the debt ceiling debate debacle this past summer or the jobless reports that come out each week, the news of America's economic woes and debt crises are inescapable.

This gargantuan exhibit highlighting debt's prominence in American society is powerful. I think that shipping containers and everything that they invoke - China, trade imbalance, America's empty factories, the shallowness of materialism, etc. - are the perfect vehicle for the artist's message. The sheer physical scale of these containers is tremendous.

I took several more photos that I've posted below. Below those is a time-lapse YouTube video of the shipping containers being erected.

Edit 10/15/2011: For what it's worth, Kansas City's Occupy protest is going on at this display. Below is a wonderful photo showing this from ericbowersphoto.com. To see more of Eric's photos of Occupy KC, click here:

Ordos Two Years Later

2011-09-11T08:21:00.000-05:00

In late 2009, a number of western media outlets ran reports on the "ghost town" that is Ordos, Inner Mongolia. I put up a blog post about the city at that time. Ordos, a city flush with natural resources and wealth, is a fascinating case study of China's method of development.

Melissa K. Chan from Al Jazeera just visited Ordos this week and has a short video clip on what it's like there now, two years later:

I've written a lot about this sort of growth in the past. Building cities with the hope that one day residents will move is, undoubtedly, a risky move.

When I was in Xi'an this summer, I saw row after row after row of apartment blocks that were finished with only a couple lights on in the entire building at night. While Ordos is the poster child for ghost cities, it's not the only place in China where this is going on.

At this point, I still can't venture a guess as to whether this is all going to work out. My gut tells me that development like what's going on in Ordos is ludicrous. But China has proven me wrong many times before and I wouldn't be shocked, in five years, to see this experiment working out.

Yes China

2011-08-28T21:07:00.012-05:00

Yes China: An English Teacher's Love-Hate Relationship with a Foreign Country by Clark Nielsen is a book by an American from Utah who taught English in China for a couple years. The book is half stories from Clark's ESL classes and half stories of life in China from a foreigner's perspective/Clark's life history.

The thing I liked most about Clark's book is the brutal honesty he shares with the reader, particularly in regards to his own life. Clark writes about a bevy of things that are incredibly personal and often embarrassing - his bladder control problems, his dating history going back to high school, and having a dream one evening about making out with one of his ESL students.

The honesty in the book isn't only limited to these more juvenile sorts of topics, though. Clark also delves into many more serious issues from his life.

The most interesting aspects of Clark's book to me were his thoughts on growing up Mormon and then, as a young adult, formally breaking with the church. I don't know many Mormons personally and only have a cursory knowledge of the religion (a lot of which came from this great PBS: Frontline documentary). But I am aware that breaking from the church is a huge decision that affects a young Mormon's life tremendously.

I really liked the following passage from page 91:

Mormon boys are expected to "serve a mission" when they turn nineteen, the church's way of guilting people into paying for the chance to preach the gospel in another part of the world. The boys don't get to pick where they will live for two years. They are called. Sometimes, they are called to foreign countries like Thailand or Brazil. Other times, they wind up in Twin Falls, Idaho. Man, if I had turned in my application to be a missionary, and I got sent to a nearby US state, I would have been pissed.

Fortunately, it didn't come to that. In every Mormon community, people like to ask high school seniors when they'll be going on their missions. As people started asking me this, I had a revelation. I didn't understand Mormon theology. All this time, I'd only been agreeing with what everyone else said, going along with the group so I'd fit in. I decided I had better know for sure if this was true before I gave up two years of my life. So I did what my teachers always told us to do if we ever needed proof of the gospel. I read the Book of Mormon, prayed about it every day, and removed all sin from my life. You had better believe it was hard, but I did it, because I wanted the truth more than anything.

But nothing happened...

Hey, wait a minute! I followed all of the steps! I did exactly what they told me to do! I kept this up for months, but I never received any kind of spiritual confirmation, no warm, fuzzy feeling in my heart to tell me it was true. In a last act of desperation, I hiked up a mountain, knelt down to pray, and begged God to give me an answer. When I came down that mountain, I had my answer. God didn't respond to prayers, and Mormonism wasn't for me.

Clark has a lot to say about Mormons and Mormonism. The teaching organization he went to China with was based out of Provo, Utah. While not officially a Mormon organization, Clark was surrounded by Mormons much of his time in China. His perspective of being around Mormons after having fallen from the church is fascinating stuff.

I liked a lot of Clark's anecdotes from teaching English as well. I've read about teaching English in China in a couple other books - The Last Days of Old Beijing (a book I will post a review on here at some point) and Iron and Silk - but considering how many books on China by foreigners are out there, it's a somewhat under-represented topic.

Clark does a good job bringing to light many of the absurdities that every ESL teacher finds in China. He also highlights well the progress he made, things he learned, and some regrets he had from his time in the classroom.

I particularly liked this passage from page 177 about administering the exam he gave his students at the end of a year of teaching:

I made it through the list of students with a few minutes to spare, so I stood at the back of the class and watched Shaun the Sheep with the students, noting to myself every time they laughed at something and realizing I would be hearing those same laughs at those same times in the next eighteen classes.

But as we watched the movie, more realizations started piling into my mind. It would have been nice of them to knock instead of barging in like that. I'd been at this school for two semesters - a year - and now it was over. And yet there were a lot of kids in this room I never got to know. Like the twins. Like... all of them. There were so many students who came up today to answer my questions that I didn't even recognize. Who are you? You are in this class? Why didn't you ever raise your hand? Why didn't you ever say anything to me?

To be honest, I didn't make much of an effort to get to know them, either. Outside of class, I always hid in my apartment or went downtown instead of hanging out with the kids on the basketball court. Oh, I had tried to play with them before, but it was too aggravating. As soon as I stepped outside, every student in the proximity started screaming, "Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello!" and swarmed around me to touch my beard and yank on my shirt and yell Chinese at me and wave their jump ropes in my face. I didn't like putting up with that and found these situations void of any meaningful teacher/student relationship. Now, I really wished things had been different. I wished we could have played together on the playground, played tag together, played Red Rover together, just done something together.

These regrets of Clark's are pretty sad. It seems he never really related with a lot of his students.

Thankfully, this was never really the case for me. I feel like I generally developed good relationships with my students during my time in China. Sure, there were kids that I never really connected with, but on the whole, I got to know the kids I taught on an individual basis.

For all of the problems that the school I taught at in China had, I think that the set up - not having more than 18 kids or adults in a two hour class and having much more training that Clark ever received - made my teaching experiences much richer than his. I never had anything similar to some aspects of teaching that Clark describes in the book - trying to get a classroom of 60 rowdy kids settled down or not having any idea that the kid I was testing in front of me had been in my class all year. Reading Clark's teaching stories made me reflect back on my teaching experiences more positively than I did before.

Although I enjoyed reading several of Clark's stories and thoughts from teaching English, those sections started to drag for me by the end of the book. The setup of the book is one chapter on teaching and then one chapter on life in China/Clark's personal life, the whole way through. I don't think there were enough good teaching stories to warrant half of the book. A third of the book devoted to ESL would've been better by me. By the time I got to the last few chapters on teaching, I was really worn out reading about his classroom and just skimmed those sections.

I have two more criticisms of Clark's book. Both are on display in one passage, a discussion of foreigner-to-foreigner relations from page 121:

Despite this, we at least had a common ground in teaching, which was why I always got along with other foreign teachers but not foreign businessmen. Foreign businessmen led very different lives. They took taxis everywhere. They ate at expensive restaurants. They liked to woo married Chinese women. (This doesn't go for all businessmen, but it does happen a lot. And for God's sake, please don't take that personally! I lost a good friend, because I unknowingly insulted her husband by posting that statement on my blog. You didn't realize half of the content in this book was available on the Internet for free, did you? Sucker.)

Clark is, obviously from this passage, also a fellow China blogger. Finding out half-way through the book that what I was reading was more of a collection of blog entries than of a cohesive narrative explained a lot to me. For as honest as Clark was in the book and for all of the aspects of the book I liked, I felt as though the book never really got going with a full head of steam or moved in a linear direction.

Clark came and went from China on a couple different stints. He switched cities and worked at different schools. He taught adults some times and he taught kids at other times. Through all of these changes, where he was or any other contextual information at any given time was never very clear to me. I never detected an over-arching feel or arc to the book.

The book did feel as though it was a collection of articles strung together in a somewhat random order. And this quote above tells the reader that that is pretty much the case.

The bolded sentence from above is also an example of my biggest problem with Yes China: Clark's self-referential dialog with the reader that goes on throughout the entire book.

Here are a few other examples of this author-reader dialog that I'm talking about:

Now take that knowledge and... no, no, no, don't put it in the microwave. Take that knowledge and apply it to China.

I'm not writing a Yes Mexico book, though, so let's get back to China.

Between you and me (and that creepy guy looking over your shoulder), it was the latter.

This shtick never did anything for me. If I'm feeling generous, I'd say that this attempted humor was distracting. If I'm feeling less charitable, I'd say that it was quite irritating. Clark is a good writer. I just wish he'd not tried so hard in so many places to be funny. Such attempts felt very forced.

Overall, I liked Yes China and would recommend it to someone who wants an account of what it's like being an ESL teacher in China. It's a good effort from a talented young author. I'll definitely be interested to see what Clark writes next.

Why China Will Never Rule the World

2011-08-13T10:07:00.015-05:00

Why China Will Never Rule the World: Travels in Two Chinas by Troy Parfitt is a well-written, informative, and sometimes convincing book about China. Parfitt effortlessly strings together tales about his travels littering it with history and anecdotes that were new to me. There's no doubt that Parfitt is a well-read writer.

Saying all of that, Why China Will Never Rule the World is one of the most ridiculous books I've ever read.

Whatever positives can be found in the book are more than offset by the hostility and one-sidedness Paritt shows towards China. Parfitt doesn't get close to a nuanced view of China even once in his book. Parfitt hates traveling and living in China, shows a real disdain for Chinese people, and loathes everything about the country's culture and history. Written without the slightest hint of balance, Parfitt's book reads like Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Jung Chang's Mao: The Unknown Story, two of the most unenjoyable books I've encountered.

After struggling through Parfitt's 400-page diatribe, I give Why China Will Never Rule the World a resounding two thumbs down and cannot recommend avoiding it highly enough.

8/20/2011 - Edit: I've realized in the past week that I'm not big into writing overwhelmingly negative reviews of other people's work, like the one I wrote about this book. Writing such a stinging review was a first for me. Parfitt and I ended up leaving each other a string of comments questioning and criticizing what the other had written. We were speaking over each other and were getting nowhere.

I just don't have the stomach for this kind of stuff in my free time and have never wanted this blog to be a venue for bitter and divisive arguments. There's enough of that already on the internet. This blog is something I do for enjoyment and regret that it got as sour as it did.

I stand by what I initially wrote in my review. At the same time, I began to feel that initial post and the comments Troy and I left for each other made both of us look bad. I've decided getting into a drag-out war with someone over a book in which I have no stake in is not a good use of my time or energy. I can't believe how much time I've spent going back over this book, one I didn't enjoy, to argue with the author.

I will leave the lede to this post summing up my thoughts to the book, but have deleted the rest of the post and all comments. Comments are closed.

8/20/2011 - Second Edit: Troy wrote this comment as I was writing the "edit" above. I will publish what he wrote here:

Mark and I have come to the conclusion that we hold different truths about the nature of this book and think it best not to continue debating it. So, in the spirit of the China debate, Canada-US relations, world peace, and so on, we're going to stop trading comments. Life's too short, and all that jazz. I'd like to thank him again for reading my book, and am sorry he didn't like it. It is tough in places, I admit. Thanks again, Mark.

Calligrapher at Shuyuan Men

2011-07-31T21:09:00.001-05:00

This is my favorite photo from my trip to China in June:

This photo is of a calligrapher at Xi'an's Shuyuan Men near the south gate of the city's walls. My good friend, Richard, and I were enjoying coffee and chatting as we watched him work. Drinking coffee and discussing China and the world with Richard in many of Xi'an's best coffee shops were highlights of my trip.

High-Speed Rail Accident

2011-07-26T21:00:00.002-05:00

I went out on a camping/canoeing trip in the Ozarks this past weekend. I was saddened to hear upon my arrival back home of the horrific high-speed train accident in Wenzhou.

I've posted about high-speed trains a couple times this year. I find the grand experiment the Chinese are conducting to be fascinating. They've gone all-in with the notion that fast trains will be the wave of the future. I'm not going to make a prediction on the long-term viability of the plans at this point, but one has to think that this is going to be a significant setback for the Chinese government's ambitious goals.

Go check out the following websites for exhaustive coverage of the tragedy: China Geeks and China Media Project. These sights are providing an exhaustive amount of information from both western and Chinese sources.

River at the Center of the World

2011-07-10T09:24:00.001-05:00

River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester is one of the two books I brought with me on my trip to China last month. I absolutely flew threw it. In fact, I read it too fast and ended up book-less for my long flight home. I knew I was reading the book too fast as I was reading it during the middle of my trip, but couldn't help myself. The book was just too much fun to read.

River at the Center of the World is based around the 1995 several month-long journey Winchester took from the sea east of Shanghai, up the Yangtze River, to its source in the Tibetan plateau. As Winchester narrates his trip, he delves deep into the history of the river he's tracking. The book is as much recounting the histories of previous adventurers and different areas' rises and falls as it is about Winchester's experiences.

Winchester hires Lily, a married woman from northeast China, to be his guide/translator up the 长江 (in Chinese, the "Yangtze" is literally "long river"). She is with Winchester throughout the book. Winchester speaks a bit of Chinese but isn't so fluent.

Going from the east to the west, the book begins in the East China Sea several miles outside of Shanghai. Winchester then slowly works his way up the river - through Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Yichang and the (at the time) freshly begun three gorges dam, Chongqing, northern Sichuan, northern Yunnan, and into Tibet.

I've traveled through a lot of China. Despite having seen a ton of the Middle Kingdom, I found myself envious, teetering on jealous, of Winchester's epic journey. He stayed in big cities, saw tiny villages, visited historic sites, took in the unparalleled natural beauty surrounding China's main artery, and had countless humorous run-ins with Chinese people along the way. The trek was executed so well.

In addition to the experiences Winchester took in himself, I really liked to hear the tales about the people in the past who attempted to conquer the river. The stories of the likes of Cornell Plant and Joseph Rock - foreigners who got to know the river and China intimately - are histories that I had never heard before.

Winchester is a really good writer. He seemlessly weaves his experiences with previous explorers' experiences with a more general history of the Yangtze.

I want to highlight a particular long passage of this book. I didn't know how to cut this wonderful chunk of writing down. The following is from p. 295-7, while in Sichuan Province searching for the famous bridge at Luding Qiao, the famous bridge where Mao escaped the nationalist army and crossed the Dadu River:

The River at the Center of the World is a great read. I have a few criticisms, though.

First, there were times where I really grew to dislike Winchester. There were several sections of the book that simply rubbed me the wrong way. In one instance he goes on and on for pages about how terrible contemporary Chinese architecture is and, specifically, how much he hates the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai.

Image from gilygily.com

These sections where he rails against things in China he finds distasteful (don't get him started on Chinese green vs. English black tea) both haven't aged well and come across as arrogant and, frankly, annoying.

Second, eastern China is far more prominently featured than the western half of the country. Winchester doesn't get to Chongqing, which is about halfway up the river (give or take), until page 270. The book is 395 pages long. I didn't feel like the first half of the Yangtze (and the latter part of the book) was given enough space.

I found Winchester's experiences in the small villages of western China dotting the river to be just as interesting (if not more) than his time in the mega-cities of the east. I wish he'd written about the rugged more and the (relatively) refined less. I understand that the end of his trip was desolate and maybe didn't have quite as much "content" as the lower reaches of the river. But western China is where I've had my most exciting travel adventures and would've liked to hear more about it.

And third, the book was too foreigner-centric. Winchester, an Englishman (although he has a home in America), seemed particularly fond of other Englishmens' experiences in China.

On top of the stories of Plant and Rock, the foreign boatmen mentioned above (whose stories I did find enjoyable), Winchester also goes to visit another foreigner explorer's grave. The history of old-time Shanghai was nearly exclusively about foreigners. And Winchester seeks out other foreigners working on the three gorges dam and again in more remote sections of western China.

Winchester travels through areas occupied by millions upon millions of Chinese people throughout his trip but his book ended up being mostly about foreigners. That's not the case with a lot of newer travel books written in the past few years that I've reviewed on my blog (see Peter Hessler or Rob Gifford for examples of foreign travel writers who completely immerse themselves in the Chinese experience).

Despite my criticisms, overall The River at the Center of the World is a very fun book that's well-written. It's a great travel read. Bring it on a plane or train with you. You'll fly through it.

Traffic

2011-07-04T11:02:00.006-05:00

Xi'an's traffic is much worse now than it was when I left China in 2009. And it's multiple factors more intense than when I arrived in China in 2006.

Qian learned how to drive in the US last year. She hadn't been back to China since getting behind the wheel for the first time. Traffic was the first thing she commented on upon returning to her home. Switching lanes without looking or using a signal, stopping and reversing on the shoulder of a highway, those turning left going before those going straight at an intersection, etc. - she couldn't believe the audacity Chinese drivers possess given the tight spaces in which they have to operate.

Chinese cities, so dense when compared to western metropoli, are already so crowded. The addition of scores of personal automobiles to Chinese cities is causing serious gridlock. Unfortunately, there's really no solution to the problem of China's increasingly cramped traffic lanes.

China already has plenty of public transportation options - buses that constantly run, trains, subways, and a rapidly developing high-speed train network - and the masses use them. Several Chinese people I know who own cars often ride buses or trains. But there are just too many people who are beginning to accumulate wealth who want to own a car for the increasing traffic problems to go away.

In many respects, I think it's great that so many Chinese are getting to achieve their dreams of car ownership (the red blood flowing through my American veins just perked up as I typed this sentence on the morning of July 4th). Overall, though, I find China to be far less charming of a place to live the more congested its streets become.

Migrants in the Big City

2011-06-29T19:05:00.011-05:00

There were two every-day experiences I had in Xi'an that I'm going to try to describe below. Both stories involve observing migrant workers in Xi'an. The episodes were nothing out-of-the-ordinary from every day life in China, but they struck me rather deeply.

*****

During our last week in Xi'an, Qian and I went out to eat with one of her old 同学 (classmates) and her classmate's husband. We had a wonderful seven course meal of 川菜 (Sichuan cuisine) together. The restaurant was 热闹 (lively), the conversation was flowing, the classmate's husband and I downed a few beers each, and all of us were content.

Despite being relatively early, just a little before 8:30PM, our friends had to go home since they had their three month-old baby at home with its grandma. We walked outside the restaurant, which was near the long-distance bus station in the 明德门 section of Xi'an, and determined that we needed to ride bus 18 to get back to Qian's parents' apartment.

We stood at the stop waiting for bus 18 for several minutes. One usually doesn't have to wait more than five minutes for a bus in China. So as we continued to wait and wait, I went over to the bus map/schedule displayed at the stop. I saw that the bus had stopped running at 20:30 and that it was now 20:38. I told Qian and her friends that we'd probably missed the bus. Unfazed, they suggested that we wait to see if there was one more bus on its way.

The sun had just set and the energy that permeates Chinese nights was building. The ground we stood upon was filthy, both from litter and from spilled oil from the motorbike repair shops that dotted the neighborhood. The air smelled of 孜然烤肉 (cumin and assorted herb-flavored BBQ meat skewers) and I could see groups of people eating food and drinking beer in half-full 川菜饭馆 (Sichuan restaurants) the size of rental storage spaces.

The area where we were standing was gritty, if one is being generous, or rundown, if one is being less charitable. We were on the edge of 八里村, one of Xi'an's biggest 城中村 (city villages). Nearly every store front around us had a neon flashing sign displayed out front with the characters 住宿. These characters were advertising a temporary place to live. 住宿 are kind of like a hotel. They are very cheap and of a very low standard, though. A middle-class Chinese person is not going to stay in a 住宿. The people in these 住宿 next to the bus station are migrants, hence their close proximity to the long-distance bus station.

8:44... 8:46...

As we stood there, I became less engaged in the conversation. Maybe I was growing tired of trying to keep up in Chinese. Maybe I was getting impatient. I stood a bit apart from them as they continued laughing and talking.

I turned towards the busy street in front of us and saw two young men speaking with a 电动车 (an electric motor bike the size of a Vespa) owner. The two men had obviously just stepped off of the long-distance bus in Xi'an. Each carried over-sized plastic rucksacks full of who knows what. Each appeared slight in physical appearance; they looked like thirteen year-olds in eighteen year-olds' bodies.

One sported an unsightly, thinly-grown mustache that was more a result of not shaving than a fashion statement. The other wore a loose-fitting suit that hardly fit his under-developed body. I could not figure out how old either of the two men were. I suppose my guess would be twenty-two years old, but that would be give or take five years in either direction.

It's normal for entrepreneurial-minded 电动车 owners to wait next to bus stops offering rides. The owners of these vehicles will exhort those waiting for the bus to quit waiting and just jump on the back of their vehicle. That's exactly what this 电动车 owner was doing with the two men. The 电动车 owner had a strong physical appearance and sported a 板寸 (a squarish haircut popular amongst middle-aged to older Chinese men).

8:48... 8:50...

I couldn't really hear what the two men (were they brothers? cousins? friends?) and the 电动车 owner were saying. Maybe they were speaking a dialect, maybe it was the noise on the street, or maybe my Chinese just isn't that good. But I wasn't processing what was being discussed. I didn't have to comprehend every word to know that the 电动车 rider was trying to convince them that they'd missed their bus, that he knew where the two guys wanted to go, and that they should jump on his bike.

There was a bit of resistance from the two men. They didn't want to pay this guy if they could just spend a couple RMB and get on a bus. They talked amongst themselves. They stared into the distance hoping to see that last bus roll in front of them. You could tell that they were helpless, though. Just as a salesman about to complete a deal, the 电动车 owner was dominating the conversation. They only lasted a few more moments before finally conceding. Their defeated body language showed that they didn't know their surroundings and needed to be taken away.

The men grunted a few noises to each other and then began handing their bags over to the 电动车 owner, now their ride. The thin man somehow lifted the bag that looked to be as heavy as him and put it on the front, flat platform that was between where the driver of the vehicle sits and the handle bars. It took several seconds for them to figure out how to get the huge sack loaded and balanced onto the bike. The man with the moustache then loaded his smaller bag on top of the first. The gaunt man then jumped onto the back of the bike. The driver took his position. Then the moustached man got onto the very back of the bike, nearly hanging off the edge of the bike, sandwiching his gaunt friend between himself and the driver and the driver between the gaunt man and the cargo up front.

电动车 are electric. They are not powerful. They are smaller than a motorcycle. It was quite a sight seeing this thing loaded up with three passengers and a significant amount of cargo up front.

The driver silently turned on the vehicle and it slowly started to pull away. After getting the bike's momentum up to a few miles per hour, the driver was in complete control.

Off into the night they went. I can only guess where those two men, fresh off a bus from the countryside finally in the big city, were heading and where they ended up.

*****

The next night after seeing the scene described above, Qian and I ate dinner at her parents' house. We then set out to the heart of the city for drinks just inside Xi'an's South Gate.

We headed out of her parents' apartment at about 7:45PM. It was a hot evening. We debated whether to spend the extra 1 RMB each to ride on an air-conditioned bus or whether we'd tough it out on the normal, open-air, bus. We decided that we'd just take the first one that came.

K800, the air-conditioned bus, came first. We boarded it to find that much of the bus was empty. We had seats to sit down upon. Air-conditioned buses are usually less crowded than normal buses because of their higher fare.

Qian and I sat across from each other on the parallel seats just behind the driver that are perpendicular to the rest of the riders, who are facing forward. I sat in the seat just behind the driver and Qian sat in the second of four seats on her bench.

I had my iPod Shuffle playing in my ears, which was often the case when out and about. Lost in the music, I took in the scenery we were driving by. I had to turn around from my seat to see the south city wall. I remember contorting my body to get a better view of the glorious sight that was the sun setting over one of China's most beautiful attractions.

As we moved along the outside of the city wall approaching the South Gate, the man sitting next to Qian in the first seat on her bench blurted out something to the driver. I hadn't noticed him before he made that noise. I was awaken from my aural and setting-induced trance and saw that Qian was sitting next to a shaggy man probably about thirty years-old (again, give or take) in the suit that every construction worker in China wears.

One of the first things I saw about him was that he only had four fingers on his left hand. That's not something I usually notice. I mean, who counts other people's fingers out on the street? I'm not sure how, given his clenched fist, I noticed this, but one of the first things I processed about the man was that he was missing a digit on his hand.

I missed what he'd shouted. I could tell it was something to the driver, though. The driver had apparently missed what he'd yelled too since all I heard from up front was a loud, "啥?!!" which is what a northern Chinese person slangily says for, "What?!!"

The nine-fingered man repeated himself. This time I caught it: "到交大电脑城了没?" or, "Are we at the Jiaoda Computer City yet?" I couldn't really make out what the driver said, but he surely said, "No, it's still several stops ahead" since the Jiaoda Computer City (a computer market) was still several stops in front of us.

The man paused for a few seconds. He put his weight onto his right foot and he held onto the support bar that was next to him. He was in between sitting and standing. He looked confused. After being in limbo for a few seconds, he stood up and started to walk to the back of the bus towards the exit.

Qian stopped him and said, "我们还没到。你还有几站。" or, "We're still not there yet. You still have a few stops to go."

The man then retraced his steps and sat back down next to Qian where he'd been sitting.

He spent the next several minutes, until we got off of the bus, holding onto the support bar that was next to his seat staring out the front of the bus perched between sitting and standing.

We got off of the bus before he did. I'll never know if he got off at Jiaoda Computer City or not.

*****

I can't say exactly what the meaning of these two stories are. I'm not sure why they struck me as they did or why I'm sharing them on my blog either.

I suppose it's just that the "migrant story" in China fascinates me. Tens of millions of people every year move from farm to factory or city. Hundreds of million have done so over the previous decades and hundreds of millions will over the coming decades. It's a remarkable story.

I'd been wanting to write this post for several days. I was even more inspired to get it done after reading the following piece: How I was treated on the subway when I was doing fieldwork as a migrant worker, a blog article by Tricia Wang (h/t @niubi). Tricia is an anthropologist/sociologist doing research on migrant workers in China. It is a really nice supplement to this post. Her writing, about being perceived as a migrant worker on a subway, fits in nicely with what I tried to describe above.

Night Shots

2011-06-25T10:46:00.006-05:00

Qian and I agree that the thing we miss most about living in China is the night life. I'm not talking about clubs or bars or concerts, I'm talking about life, masses of people, outside on the streets, outside of their homes, after the sun goes down.

It frustrates us that there aren't any night markets or shopping areas or places besides bars that draw Americans (or at least Kansas Citians) out at night.

I wish I'd taken more, but the following are a few of my better night shots from Xi'an:

The Bell Tower - The Bell Tower is the heart of Xi'an. It stands epically in the middle of the city, both symbolically and figuratively.

The South Wall Moat at Dusk - The City Wall is just over the trees on the right. A great scene at sunset.

Sky Streak - I tried getting a few photos of a guy selling little toys that shot into the sky. I enjoy the photos I was able to get.

Out and About

Fountain - Kept the shutter open for a second on a small fountain near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda.

Red Reflections - Another shot from near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda

There were times during the day in Xi'an - on crowded buses or staring at smoggy polluted skies - that I didn't miss living in China at all. Night was a different story, though. Being back in America now, I already miss the night markets, old people dancing on the streets, and general laid back nature of life at night in the Middle Kingdom.

Random Observations from Xi'an

2011-06-21T06:48:00.000-05:00

The following are some random observations I wrote down while in Xi'an:

- I could see nine construction cranes from the bedroom we stayed in at Qian's parents. NINE! Every morning at dawn, the sounds of hammers started echoing throughout the apartment blocks. Construction continues at an amazing clip in the Middle Kingdom.

- Related to the new construction, scores of old 城中村 (city villages or "primitive" neighborhoods) are being torn down at an amazing clip. Although there haven't been western journalists writing about the destruction of neighborhoods in Xi'an (like there have been on Beijing and Kashgar), Xi'an's old-time, low-income neighborhoods are disappearing quickly. New apartment blocks and luxury shopping centers are rising up from their rubble.

- Xi'an (and China in general) has gone nuts promoting the 2011 International Horticulture Expo that is in Xi'an this summer. I got annoyed with the hype of this event and I was only there for three weeks.

Qian and I went to the expo with her family. It was lame. Three hour waits to get into a greenhouse or climb a pagoda. We ended up just walking around the giant park that had minimal items of interest. There are free parks in Xi'an more interesting than this 100 to 150 RMB per ticket event. All of Qian's family agreed with this sentiment.

The greatest irony is that this green expo is in one of China's most polluted cities. The day we went to the expo, the pollution and smog in Xi'an were at an unfathomable scale.

- After mocking Xi'an and the expo, I do have to say that the pollution in Xi'an is getting better. It's still horrific and surely unhealthy, but it's light-years better than when I arrived in China the first time in 2006.

- Like Americans, the Chinese are drinking lots of vitamin water. "VC," or vitamin C, is something the Chinese have gotten into.

- Groceries are damn expensive. We've all heard about inflation in China. I can confirm from the ground that it is bad. Qian and I calculated that for many items, including a lot of varieties of fruit, that things are cheaper in the US (after translated into US dollars).

- Chinese people are incredibly scared of eating hot pot at restaurants these days. I had to beg Qian and her family to eat a proper Sichuan-style hot pot meal at a restaurant. I'd missed the news from the US, but beginning last year, there have been a score of reports on the unsanitary conditions at hot pot restaurants. The one accusation I kept hearing from people is that the restaurants re-use oil from one table's pot and then give it to the next people who come in. Don't get me wrong, that's absolutely disgusting. I find it hard to believe that it's impossible to find a clean hotpot restaurant, especially given the scrutiny the restaurants are under these days, though.

Back in the US

2011-06-20T06:07:00.000-05:00

After a missed flight and two delayed flights, Qian and I finally made it back to Kansas City last night 49 hours after our first flight in Xi'an. It was a huge mess. China Eastern airlines has very cheap fares, but I'm not sure I can recommend flying them to anyone.

I don't want to focus too much on the air travel though. We had a great three week trip in Xi'an.

We spent most of our time catching up with Qian's family and old friends. I felt over and over again that things in Xi'an were very 幸福 (xìng fú). 幸福 roughly translates to happy or blessed, but is even deeper than the English word happy (in my understanding of the word). Truly, it was special being back in Xi'an.

This is the first post I've done in a month. Blogspot is 100% blocked in China right now. I didn't set up a VPN before I went. I tried using proxy servers, but Blogspot is locked down even harder than sites like Twitter and Youtube.

Not being able to surf the internet freely was pretty damn annoying but at the same time it did keep me from using the internet as much as I might've otherwise. That is probably a good thing.

One of the only disappointments from the trip is that I never got my film SLR camera to work. It probably would've been a good idea for me to test that camera out before I went (sigh). I did take some photos with my digital camera, but not as many or of the quality that I was hoping for. Oh well.

I took several notes on things I found of interest while I was in Xi'an and have a few ideas swirling around my jet-lagged mind for posts. I'll try to get a few posts up here in the coming days.

Headed to China

2011-05-23T18:22:00.001-05:00

I'm going to be in China at this time next week.

Seeing that I've maintained a blog about China after having left the country almost two years ago, you'd be right in guessing that I'm excited about this trip.

Qian and I are going to spend three weeks in her hometown and the only place I've ever called home in China, Xi'an.

We don't have too many definite plans for this sojourn. I'm expecting a Spring Festival-esque welcoming from Qian's parents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and grandparents upon our arrival. There will be several days of home-cooked food and great warmth, I'm sure.

As far as the rest of the trip goes, I'm bringing my old SLR camera and a few rolls of black-and-white film along. I expect some sort of an attempt at "capturing Xi'an, circa June, 2011" to follow. Qian and I would love to get out to a holy mountain for a day or two if possible. And I'm sure plenty of coffee will be consumed with old friends. But besides these loose ideas, my schedule will be very open.

If anyone reading this will be in Xi'an and wants to meet up, either leave a comment or send me an email - markschinablog at gmail dot com.

It's been more than twenty months since I've been to the Middle Kingdom. It's going to be epic getting back to the city that has been so important in the direction of my life.

Henry Kissinger On China

2011-05-12T06:41:00.004-05:00

No American has influenced the US-China relationship more than Henry Kissinger since the countries restarted diplomatic relations forty years ago. Aside from kicking off the partnership in the first place, he's also played a key role in maintaining it. It is therefore unsurprising that Kissinger's soon-to-be released book, Henry Kissinger On China, is an instant classic.

Kissinger explains the purpose of his book in the prologue:

"This book is an effort, based in part on conversations with Chinese leaders, to explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order, and its relationship to the more pragmatic, case-by-case American approach."

Kissinger begins his study by laying a framework that he uses throughout the rest of the book. He goes into great depth explaining the basics of Chinese strategic theory using Sun Tzu's The Art of War and the board game weiqi (or, in English, "Go") as his main examples. Kissinger argues that Sun Tzu's work, which is about "the means of building a dominant political and psychological position," and weiqi, which is focused on "strategic encirclement," are and have been the guiding principles of China's thinking and action for centuries.

Although more modern history is the main focus, this foundational section - the first fifty pages or so - may be my favorite part of this 500+ page book. It really crystallizes the Chinese ethos and its leaders' decision-making processes.

By page 100 or so, the reader has entered the 20th century. I'm going to highlight a few of the most memorable sections from the heart of the book:

- Kissinger's analysis of the relationship between Mao and Stalin is fascinating. The dance between two of the most ruthless and conniving rulers of the twentieth century is, as you'd expect, something to behold. Reading Kissinger's inside baseball analysis of the two leaders' maneuvering and manipulation of each other makes for great drama.

- The lengthiest section and the climax of the book is the preparation and execution of Kissinger and Nixon's opening up of China to the United States and the rest of the world.

From Mao changing his tone towards the US in the 1960s to Kissinger feigning sickness on a diplomatic trip to Pakistan so he could sneak away for his first visit to Beijing to Zhou Enlai and Kissinger hammering out the technicalities of Nixon's invitation to visit China, the reader takes in history from the man who created it.

I'm going to highlight a particularly nice passage from this section - the moment that Kissinger and Nixon first were introduced to Mao at his residence. From page 257:
Mao's residence was approached through a wide gate on the east-west axis carved from where the ancient city walls stood before the Communist revolution. Inside the Imperial City, the road hugged a lake, on the other side of which stood a series of residences for high officials. All had been built in the days of Sino-Soviet friendship and reflected the heavy Stalinist style of the period similar to the State Guesthouses.

Mao's residence appeared no different, through it stood slightly apart from the others. There were no visible guards or other appurtenances of power. A small anteroom was almost completely dominated by a ping-pong table. It did not matter because we were taken directly to Mao's study, a room of modest size with bookshelves lining three walls filed with manuscripts in a state of considerable disarray. Books covered the tables and were piled up on the floor. A simple wooden bed stood in a corner. The all-powerful ruler of the world's most populous nation wished to be perceived as a philosopher-king who had no need to buttress his authority with traditional symbols of majesty.

- Although Kissinger had officially been out-of-office for years by 1989, he played a critical role in mending US-China relations in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. He describes being invited to Beijing in November of that year to try to help out with the very rocky situation.

It is during this section of the book that Kissinger's ideas on the policy of realpolitik are discussed in great depth. I'd love to share several pages of heady prose from this chapter here on my blog - they are some of the best blueprints for US/China relations I've ever seen - but I'll just recommend reading the book instead.

As you can tell from this gushing review, I really enjoyed On China. The only criticism I can give is that the pacing felt off at times. Hundreds of pages were given to certain time periods and other eras felt skimmed over. I suppose that is to be expected, though, given the amount of information covered and Kissinger's own experiences.

Henry Kissinger On China is a must-read for anybody interested in better understanding China, its people, or the relationship between the China and the United States. I can't recommend it highly enough. It goes on sale May 17th.

This review is part of a TLC "Virtual Book Tour." Below is a schedule for upcoming reviews of On China. I want to thank TLC Book Tours for including Mark's China Blog on this tour.To read more of my China book reviews, click here.

Henry’s Tour Stops
Wednesday, May 11th: Man of La Book
Thursday, May 12th: Mark’s China Blog
Monday, May 16th: Hidden Harmonies China Blog
Tuesday, May 17th: Inside-Out China
Wednesday, May 18th: Lisa Graas
Monday, May 23rd: Divided We Stand United We Fall
Tuesday, May 24th: Bookworm’s Dinner
Wednesday, May 25th: Pacific Rim Shots
Thursday, May 26th: Asia Unbound
Tuesday, May 31st: Wordsmithonia
Wednesday, June 1st: Lit and Life
Thursday, June 2nd: ChinaGeeks
Tuesday, June 7th: booker rising
Wednesday, June 8th: Power and Control
Thursday, June 9th: Marathon Pundit
Friday, June 10th: Rundpinne
Date TBD: Rhapsody In Books

Trump's China Reading List

2011-05-07T11:34:00.002-05:00

One of my favorite bloggers/thinkers in the world, Nate Silver from 538.com and now the NY Times, recently described Donald Trump and Sarah Palin's "obvious constituency" within the republican party as "the low-information voter." That made me laugh.

An article from the LA Times (h/t Ray Kwong) that I read this week makes it look as though Donald Trump isn't quite as as low-information as Sarah Palin, though. He's at least read a few books.

Trump recently gave China's Xinhua News a list of his "Top 20 China books." As a HUGE China book nerd, I have to say, he has a surprisingly impressive list:

1. "The Party" by Richard McGregor
2. "On China" by Henry Kissinger
3. "Mao: The Untold Story" by Jung Chang
4. "Tide Players" by Jianying Zha
5. "One Billion Customers" by James McGregor
6. "The Coming China Wars" by Peter W. Navarro
7. "The Beijing Consensus" by Stefan Halper
8. "China CEO" by Juan Antonio Fernandez and Laurie Underwood
9. "Poorly Made in China" by Paul Midler
10. "CHINA: Portrait of a People" by Tom Carter
11. "The Man Who Loved China" by Simon Winchester
12. "China Shakes the World" by James Kynge
13. "Mr. China" by Tim Clissold
14. "Country Driving" by Peter Hessler
15. "The Dragon's Gift" by Deborah Brautigam
16. "Factory Girls" by Leslie T. Chang
17. "The Heavenly Man" by Brother Yun
18. "1421" by Gavin Menzies
19. "Seven Years in Tibet" by Heinrich Harrer
20. "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" by Amy Chua

Read On

There are a couple questionable books on this list. The widely criticized Mao: The Untold Story, for instance, reads like an Ayn Rand novel and should not be #3. But I'm nitpicking here. I'm impressed that Trump has read The Party, Country Driving, Factory Girls, and Kissinger's On China (a book that I'll be reviewing here on the blog next week).

The Donald is definitely no Sarah Palin.

Saying that, I have not enjoyed at all the venom that Trump has brought to the political scene since he began exploring his presidential ambitions. The racist undertones of the "birther" movement that he's exhorted highlight some of the worst undercurrents of America.

I don't think Trump is going to factor much in next year's presidential election. He may very well run, but I don't see him being able to pull off a real campaign. For example:

He is cleverly capitalizing on having his name in the news for his trash television shows, though. He's great at pushing his brand and attracting attention (hence, this blog post). I'll give him that.

A Few Thoughts on bin Laden

2011-05-03T21:29:00.001-05:00

One of the best books I read this past year had nothing to do with China. It was Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll.

This book, obviously, has some resonance right now.

Hearing the accounts of the US elite forces swarming bin Laden's compound brought to mind a very memorable passage of Ghost Wars. It was another time, in 1999, when the US had bin Laden its sights.

From page 445:

...

Pick up the book to see how and why the US missed getting bin Laden at that time. Fascinating stuff.

Like nearly every American, Sunday night was an memorable experience for me. I was actually getting ready to go to bed early after a long weekend when I started seeing messages on Twitter talking about "a big press speech from Obama in the next few minutes."

Before I read anything else, I said to Qian, "I think we just killed bin Laden." A few minutes later, Twitter started blowing up with rumors that it the US had, in fact, killed bin Laden. And then a few minutes after that, every major news network began reporting that bin Laden was dead.

My stomach was buzzing and I got a wave of energy taking me later into the night. I definitely wasn't going to bed early.

Obama's speech (that he wrote himself) was incredible. He said everything that needed to be said. I was/am so proud to have him as my president.

Hearing the news of Osama's death was a great relief. I didn't feel the need to take to the streets and chant "USA" or anything, but I was most satisfied upon hearing the news. I would've cracked open a couple of the Boulevard Beers in my fridge had I not had to get up at 6:45 the next morning.

Americans know that burying Osama bin Laden under the Arabian Sea is not a silver bullet to end all Islamic extremism or terrorism or hatred directed towards the US. But it was an important event.

Al Qaeda, an organization already appearing to be on the decline, now has to have its first change of leadership at the top. The Arab Spring has already shown that Al Qaeda's promotion of death and destruction is not resonating like it was a decade ago. I'm cautiously optimistic that bin Laden's death will make the organization irrelevant.

9/11/2001 was during the third week of my freshman year of college. I'm smack dab in the middle of the US' "9/11 generation." The terrorism on US soil on 9/11 did not affect me 1/1,000,000th as much as it did thousands upon thousands of other Americans. But even in the midwestern US, far away from New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, I was rocked by 9/11 big-time.

Just as I hope bin Laden's death marks the end of Al Qaeda's influence, I hope that it symbolically marks the end of a really difficult era for the United States of America and its people.

Time will tell whether my hopes become reality.

The Ultimate White Elephant?

2011-05-01T12:35:00.003-05:00

I was taken aback by a headline I saw a couple days ago.

From China's The People's Daily:

Kunming-Singapore High-Speed Railway begins construction

The Kunming-Singapore High-Speed Railway began construction on April 25. The railway will shorten the travel time between Kunming and Singapore to only a little more than 10 hours in the future.

The Chinese government expects the railway to be put into operation by 2020. The line, starting from Kunming, capital of Yunnan Province; passes Mohan, a border town with Laos; and Wangrong, a popular Chinese tourist city; and ends in Vientiane, capital of Laos. Construction of the Mohan Railway Logistics Center has already started.

According to the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Trans-Asian Railway Network, the Kunming-Singapore High-Speed Railway, which is in fact the central line of the southeast part of the Trans-Asian Railway Network, will also pass Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, and end in Singapore, with a total distance of 3,900 kilometers. Once completed, it will take passengers a little more than 10 hours to travel between Kunming and Singapore by train.

Read On

This is such an audacious plan. The red-blooded American can-do spirit pumping through my veins admires the 人定胜天 attitude that lies beneath such grandiose aspirations. I have a soft spot in my heart for this sort of stuff. China is grabbing the present by the horns and is going all out.

There is going to be plenty of skepticism of this sort of stuff from western pundits. The logistics of a plan this big can certainly be questioned. But the constant questioning of China's infrastructure by some seems misguided to me.

The loudest critic of these sorts of projects (and proponent of 杞人忧天) across the globe is "Dr. Doom" - NYU professor Nouriel Roubini. Roubini wrote an opinion piece a couple weeks ago that China is going to falter after 2013 after a recent visit to the country.

From Slate.com:

I recently took two trips to China just as the government launched its 12th Five-Year Plan to rebalance the country's long-term growth model. My visits deepened my view that there is a potentially destabilizing contradiction between China's short- and medium-term economic performance.
China's economy is overheating now, but, over time, its current overinvestment will prove deflationary both domestically and globally. Once increasing fixed investment becomes impossible—most likely after 2013—China is poised for a sharp slowdown. Instead of focusing on securing a soft landing today, Chinese policymakers should be worrying about the brick wall that economic growth may hit in the second half of the quinquennium.
Despite the rhetoric of the new Five-Year Plan—which, like the previous one, aims to increase the share of consumption in GDP—the path of least resistance is the status quo. The new plan's details reveal continued reliance on investment, including public housing, to support growth, rather than faster currency appreciation, substantial fiscal transfers to households, taxation and/or privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), liberalization of the household registration (hukou) system, or an easing of financial repression.
...
Eventually, most likely after 2013, China will suffer a hard landing. All historical episodes of excessive investment—including East Asia in the 1990s—have ended with a financial crisis and/or a long period of slow growth. To avoid this fate, China needs to save less, reduce fixed investment, cut net exports as a share of GDP, and boost the share of consumption.
Read the Whole Article

Roubini tweeted a few times from his cell phone while on one of the trips to China he described in his article (these should be read from bottom to top).

I replied to Roubini with this comment:

Nouriel didn't reply to this, of course. But I'd like to hear his response to what I said.

I'm finding that when pundits are limited to the eastern seaboard of China - basically from Beijing to Shanghai on down to Guangzhou - they often feel as though China's over-invested in infrastructure (while some people who've never been to China really don't like China's method of development).

It is certainly true that China is developing unlike other countries in the present or the past. The more I watch China, though, the more I think that I see method in the madness: China is impossible to compare to any previous developing or currently developed country. They are simply playing by a different set of rules.

While there are cities in China with unbelievably developed infrastructure, there are hundreds of places throughout the interior of the country that have a long ways to go in terms of creating an adequate foundation. There is still so much of the country that is shockingly "backwards" in terms of infrastructure.

China is a big country. It's impossible to get a picture of China by looking at one city or one small region of the country. The skyline of Shanghai is certainly seductive, but one needs to counter-balanced its sleekness with a visit to a dusty third-tier provincial city in northern China or a mountain village in western China without a paved road.

Nobody knows whether China's bold actions such as high-speed rail, sprawling airport construction, and dozens of subway systems are going to be the path to greatness or the ultimate white elephants. But it is safe to say that there are hundreds of millions of Chinese people whose lives are changing very rapidly. And with those changes are going to be a new set of expectations: the freedom of leisurely travel, big-city life, and things to spend their disposable income on.

Developing the way China is developing is making more and more sense to me. It's hard to wrap one's mind around because what China's doing has never been done before. I understand the skepticism of China's methods of development. But personally, I wouldn't bet against their ultimate success.

Chineseposters.net

2011-04-27T19:01:00.001-05:00

Someone I follow on Twitter (I can't remember who) linked up to a great website a couple weeks ago. The website is chineseposters.net. It features Chinese posters from throughout the 20th century up to today. My favorites are the iconic propaganda posters from the height of Maoist era in the 1950s - 1970s.

1966
Hold high the great red banner of Mao Zedong to wage the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to the end - Revolution is no crime, to rebel is justified - link

You'll see these sorts of Mao-era posters at antique markets or at youth hostels and bars. But there really aren't too many remnants of these posters, or this era as a whole, in China today.

As a student of Chinese history, I find these posters so interesting. The height of Mao Zedong thought and the campaigns carried out during that era continue to fascinate me.

I'm going to post a few more posters from the site here. Go check out the site to see the wide array the authors have collected.

1958
Study the Soviet Union, to advance to the world level of science - link

1965
Fully engage in the movement to increase production and to practice economy to set off a new upsurge in industrial production - link

1953
It's glorious to take part, to oppose America, support Korea, protect the home and the nation - link

A Walkabout With Hopfrog

2011-04-24T18:19:00.002-05:00

Anyone who's ever read the comments section of this blog knows who Hopfrog is. Hopfrog has been the most frequent commenter on here for some time.

It's funny, when I came back to the US from China in 2009, a long-time friend of mine who'd kept up with me in China through my blog asked me when I'd met/become friends with Hopfrog in Xi'an. I laughed. Hopfrog was never in Xi'an and I'd actually never met him in person. Hopfrog and I developed our friendship completely through our writings/back-and-forths on this blog.

Hopfrog and I still have never met in person. I consider him a good friend, though. He always adds thoughtful and high-level discussion to this blog. And, as I said when talking about another of my favorite commenters, Ramesh, he sports a refreshingly positive and constructive attitude, which is such a rarity here on the interwebs.

Hopfrog has started his own blog - Hopfrog's Walkabout. It is a chronicle of his hike on the Pacific Crest Trail from the US border of Mexico to the border of Canada. Hopfrog is several posts into his preparation for the hike. His writings definitely look like something readers here would enjoy.

Socialism is Great!

2011-04-21T20:24:00.000-05:00

Socialism is Great! A Worker's Memoir of the New China by Lijia Zhang has a great cover.

The book is quite good too.

Socialism is Great! begins as Zhang's mom, a factory worker, has been offered ding zhi, an opportunity to retire early and give her teenage daughter her factory job. During the time of "iron rice bowls" and the relative uncertainty after Mao's death, being able to give her daughter a stable job (and getting out of the factory herself) was not something she could pass up. Thus, as China began its reform and opening in 1980, Zhang, a budding intellectual and book worm, found herself dropping out of high school early at the age of sixteen to begin a dirty government factory job.

The book is largely about Zhang's struggle with the hand she was dealt at her mindless factory job on the outskirts of Nanjing framed during a time of great change in China.

China had transformed almost overnight after Chairman Mao's death. Over were the days of memorizing the little red book. Replacing cultural revolutionary dogma was the opportunity for higher education, studying foreign languages, and the ability, to a greater degree, to choose one's own path.

Zhang was born with a free spirit and wanted more than anything to take advantage of the newfound freedoms afforded to her and the rest of her countrymen. But because of her circumstances, she was largely stuck while everyone and everything around her blossomed.

Zhang found plenty of adventure in time, though. She slowly broke free from the shackles of her factory and developed quite a nose for trouble and excitement. Her numerous romantic endeavors were pretty wild. I was shocked at some of the the tawdry affairs she describes with young bohemian men. Her entry into China's mid-1980's underground sub-culture is fascinating stuff.

Socialism is Great! is a really nice exploration of the bubbling intellectual movement that began in the early 1980s. It's a portrait of a China that I have not read much about. Zhang is a good writer that takes the reader through many unexpected twists and turns. It's a fun, fast read.

A Day in the Life of China

2011-04-10T18:00:00.006-05:00

I bought a coffee table book about China a few weeks ago at an antique store in Weston, Missouri. The book, A Day in the Life of China, is a really interesting premise: sixty western photographers and thirty Chinese photographers were dispatched throughout China on April 15, 1989 to take photos. The resulting book is over 220 pages of pictures taken between 12AM and 11:59PM on that one day.

The book has a nice blend of urban, rural, factory, everyday, and scenic shots. One thing I like about it as that there are people in nearly every shot. The 老百姓 (old hundred names, common folk) of China are prominently featured.

The China of 1989 is very different from the China I was introduced to in 2006. It's pretty wild to see how fast the country developed in those seventeen years. There are so many bicycles in the book, exponentially more than you'd see on the streets of China today!

I was able to find a few of the photos from the book scanned online here. The scans are not of the greatest quality, but they'll work for this post:

April of 1989 is a very noteworthy time in contemporary Chinese history. It's just as the historic student protests began in Beijing. Being a snapshot of China just before one of the most important events in its recent history is just another reason that this book is worth checking out.

This book can be purchased for a couple bucks on Amazon used. It's been a great add to my library.

The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land

2011-04-07T21:13:00.001-05:00

The Uyghurs: Strangers in Their Own Land by Gardner Bovingdon is an in-depth study into one of China's most unique and interesting ethnic minorities.

The Uyghurs are an ethnic group living throughout central Asia largely concentrated in Xinjiang Province, China's far west. They are predominantly Muslim and culturally distinct from the Han majority of China. The Uyghurs, like another ethnic group in western China - the Tibetans - have a very tenuous and, in many cases, tragic relationship with their own country.

Bovingdon's book began as his dissertation in graduate school. It turned into a larger project. He lived in Xinjiang for years in the 1990s and put in over twenty months of field research into the writing of the book. The interviews conducted and the research put into the book are impressive.

Bovingdon begins The Uyghurs by framing the Uyghurs' story with the deserts that they inhabit.

From page 23:

There are a lot of ideas and topics explored in the book that I enjoyed. I particularly liked the discussions of 20th-century Sinification of Xinjiang, the effects of decolonization after World War II and how that affected Beijing's views of how to handle Xinjiang and the Uyghurs, "everyday resistance" that present-day Uyghurs direct towards the Chinese system, and the divisions amongst Uyghurs living abroad and the effects that such disagreements have on the world's attitude towards the Uyghurs (the Uyghurs' plight has never gained traction abroad like Tibetans' has).

That being said, I wish Bovingdon's personality would've shown through more in his book. There were scores of interviews and several stories told from the first-person perspective. But instead of expounding upon those experiences, Bovingdon used them and then quickly moved on adding very little flavor to the text. Bovingdon's (surely) amazing experiences seemed under-utilized to me. Maybe I'm too used to reading journalists pour their hearts onto the page instead of a more strictly academic approach, but I found this book to be drier than it had to be.

The Uyghurs deepened my understanding of the Uyghur ethnic group and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region a great deal. I'd recommend it those wanting a serious examination of one of China's least-understood groups of people.

Interview with Ramesh from Business Musings

2011-03-27T17:28:00.001-05:00

Anyone who's ever clicked on the "Comments" section of this blog should be familiar with Ramesh from the blog, Business Musings. Ramesh has been reading and commenting here frequently for a couple years now.

Whether it's on his own blog or commenting on what I've written, I always enjoy reading what Ramesh has to say. His perspective - which comes from being an Indian with extensive work experience abroad in China, Europe, and the US - is one-of-a-kind. Add on to that point-of-view the positive and constructive attitude he brings (something that can be tough at times to find on the internet) and I'm really glad that I've been able to get to know him through his writing these past couple years.

I asked Ramesh for an interview several days ago. I wanted to pick his brain on a number of big issues and questions I've had about China, India, and the US.

His responses did not disappoint:

On China
Where did you work and how long did you live in China?

Ramesh: I lived in Guangzhou for 3 years and a bit.

What are some of the positives and negative aspects of doing business in the Pearl River Delta region?

Ramesh: Positives of doing business in the PRD were:

- Huge government support. I am in the outsourcing industry and Guangdong had realised that it was overweighted in manufacturing and underweighted in services. So the government was willing to do a lot to get services to grow. Professionally – not pork barrel.
- Talent availability and their proficiency in multiple Asian languages. China is unbeatable in sheer proficiency in every imaginable Asian language
- Great infrastructure as everywhere else in China
- Proximity to Hong Kong . We often underestimate the influence of Hong Kong in the economic growth of China. You see it for real in the PRD

Negatives of doing business in the PRD

- Surprisingly, educated talent from other parts of China don’t want to come to Guangdong. Climate, “funny language” (real quote !), miss home, all sorts of reasons. While workers are incredibly mobile in China, the educated elite don’t want to move !
- Unwillingness to go global. This amazed me as Chinese have traveled everywhere in the world. The worker still goes anywhere. The educated elite wants to stay – in three years I couldn’t coax a single guy to work outside China
- Too much factory mindset. Aptitude for the service industry is still in its infancy
- Not a specific PRD problem, but English is a huge huge challenge. This is where I don’t see China competing with India for the next 50 years.

Did you have a chance to work in any other regions in China? Do you have a feel for how business operates in Guangzhou compared to the rest of the country?

Ramesh: I think PRD has a much higher Hong Kong influence and hence much more global. The Canton fair is really one of a kind. Otherwise I think business up and down the Eastern coast is not very different. I have no experience inland.

Is there any advice that you would give to a foreigner moving to China for a new work opportunity?

Ramesh: Learn Chinese before coming !! I didn’t do that and really suffered in the first year. Otherwise an open mind and willingness to make the effort to accept the culture will do wonders. The Chinese are so friendly that its easy to get well settled.

What were the greatest positives and negatives you found in Chinese workers? Management?

Ramesh: While generalisations are never correct, I’ll attempt some anyway. Easily the biggest positive was the work ethic. Everybody works hard without supervision. It was easy to bond a team – much less distraction, politics, etc. There was a sense of pride in what they do; so easy to motivate.

Greatest negative was a real paucity of creativity. Innovation comes very hard and unless really driven , does not happen. But my biggest surprise was the difference between the factory worker and the educated elite. I noticed the educated elite starting to become soft. The virtues of hard work, ambition, drive all seem to be waning away. This was a shock to me ; totally unexpected. Maybe just my experience, but I could see it big.

On India
Where in India are you now? Are you planning on staying indefinitely?

Ramesh: I am now in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, famous for its IT companies. It has a population of about 5.5 million, has a big economy because of IT and is fast growing. Yes, I plan to stay in India for the foreseeable future – don’t think I’ll live in another country for at least the next 5-10 years.

Does India's growing economic growth trickle down to all? Or is opportunity limited to major urban centers?

Ramesh: The answer is a paradoxical Yes and No. The rich poor divide in India is extreme. For the rich and upper middle class it has been a bonanza time. The lower middle class has also risen, but compared to those above, less so. The challenge in India is the poor – both urban and rural. The benefits of growth are trickling down, but slowly. The problem is that the majority of the population is dependent on agriculture which hasn’t grown all that much. Having said that, there has been significant improvement for all; but human nature is such that it’s easy to look at somebody who has benefited more and feel having been left behind.

Why has China grown faster than India? Can India be competitive with China in the global economy?

Ramesh: China has grown faster because it started reforms earlier and has implemented them far better. One major difference is the public vs private ownership of land. China has financed much of its growth from government ownership of land. Its far more difficult to do so when faced with private ownership in India. India and China will compete and in some areas where there is natural competitive advantage India may score. But by and large my belief is that for the next 20-30 years, China will be significantly ahead of India. After that, who knows !

Do you feel India's democracy in anyway puts it at a disadvantage to China? I've heard pundits in the past say China's "decisiveness" has helped put it ahead of India. Does India's leadership put the country in a position to succeed?

Ramesh: Yes, India’s democracy does put it at a disadvantage when it comes to economic growth. China can implement better. India for example struggles with getting big factories up and running, because there is always opposition to land acquisition, especially in agricultural communities. Land being privately owned, there is always opposition, so starting a factory takes much much longer. Another problem with India is that there isn’t a single party government, but a coalition. That’s the worst case scenario for reforms. I believe democracy with a single party in government is the ideal solution for India. If that happens, then democracy will not be a major deterrent to growth. Unfortunately that’s an unlikely situation given the fractious nature of Indian democracy.

On the US
When did you work in the US and for how long?

Ramesh: I have been on and off to the US for the past 15 years. Never lived permanently, only a few weeks and months at a time, mostly in the East coast. I have probably been to 20 out of the 50 states.

In the past, on posts on your blog and on comments on my blog, you've spoken very optimistically about the US and the entrepreneurial attitude of its people. Could you expand on this a bit more? In a globalized world, is there still something that sets the US apart from other countries?

Ramesh: I could go on and on. The US is in my opinion unique in the world. There is an absolute meritocracy that I haven’t seen anywhere, and I’ve worked in Europe too in addition to Asia. It’s the easiest culture in the world to assimilate in or do business with, because most Americans respect people for their ability, not their background. The US is the freest country in the world to do business in and that’s why it attracts the best talent in the world. Work ethic in the US is miles ahead of Europe and on par with Asia. For sheer creativity no country even comes anywhere close.

Its reflected simply in one undisguised fact. Ask anybody where he would live, if not in his own country, most people would say the US. The Economist once carried a brilliant piece. Covering street protests in Iran against the US the reporter said – the chants were Death to America, Privately the protesters asked him – How can I get a green card !!

What are some differences you found doing business in the US as a foreigner compared to China?

Ramesh: There is almost no comparison ! In the US, I came and simply did business – the system is familiar, the language is familiar, the business practices are familiar, what you see is what you get, I am not a lao wai, and there isn’t a stacked deck when competing against a local company.

In China, I had to learn to do business. And by the time I left, I don’t think I learnt half of what I had to !
_______________________________

I want to thank to Ramesh for taking the time to share his thoughts with me. Be sure to keep up with his blog here.

Farwestchina.com Review and 100,000

2011-03-17T18:17:00.001-05:00

Josh at the blog farwestchina.com just posted a really nice review of my book.

Here's a snippet of what he wrote:

...
A good portion of this book focuses on Mark’s trip to Xinjiang with his brother. During a planned trip to Tibet with his brother in 2007, certain events in the region caused a government clampdown on travel.

“Taking into account the increased costs and needing to have a guide to go anywhere outside of Lhasa, we decided to go to Xinjiang instead. We didn’t have to hire any guides in Xinjiang and, since I knew some Chinese, we were able to be much more independent. We felt that Xinjiang totally took care of the “crazy adventurous” part of the trip that we had originally planned on going to Tibet satisfying.”

“My brother and I were floored by what we saw in Xinjiang. I’m really glad everything worked out the way it did. I’m not sure I would’ve made it to Xinjiang if the circumstances had been different.”

I just did a quick count of my book and twenty of the eighty or so photos in the book are from Xinjiang. Seeing how many photos from China's far west ended up in my book compared with how long I was there (just a little over two weeks), it should be obvious that I was completely floored my experiences in Xinjiang.

I'd strongly recommend traveling in Xinjiang to any adventurous traveler in China. The scenery (the numerous mountain ranges, deserts, and oasis towns), the culture, and the history are some of the most exciting things one can see in China.

Josh's site, farwestchina.com, is a great resource for anyone planning a trip or wanting to learn more about Xinjiang. Josh, like I am, is living in the US now after a multi-year stay in China but is still continuing to write and read about the part of the world that has changed his life. Bookmark his site/add him to your RSS feed so you can see his updates. And explore his archives if you're new to the site.

On a separate note, I want to mark a (somewhat) historic event in the history of this blog. My Sitemeter counter hit 100,000 visitors this week (the page views are at about 140,000).

From what I gather, Sitemeter is not considered to be the most accurate counter for websites. Google Analytics seems to be the more popular method to tabulate traffic these days. Sitemeter counts search engine spiders and that kind of stuff as legitimate traffic. Those sorts of things pad Sitemeter's numbers.

On top of that, Sitemeter straight tells me that a huge percentage of my traffic comes from Google search queries. It's great having a high PageRank, but "organic" traffic (people who come to the site sans search) is always something bloggers strive for.

Saying all that, I'm really proud to have hit this 100,000th visitor milestone. It's been a great two and a half years on this blog. Writing my thoughts, discoveries, and rants about China here has been a special and important part of my life. I'm not writing as much right now as I have at other times, but I plan on posting as much on here as I can. I'm not going to let this blog die.

I'm so happy to have had a group of people who've kept up with me throughout the years. Thank you! Things have definitely progressed from my 15-Sitemeter-hit-a-day Xanga blog back in 2006-2007.

Watching the Chinese Dating Show 《非诚无扰》- “You Are the One”

2011-03-07T21:09:00.003-06:00

Qian and I are watching a lot of\ the Chinese dating show 《非诚无扰》－"You Are The One." Here is the premise of the show from hellonanjing.net (h/t sinosplice.com):

The basic concept of the show is that 24 girls will stand in a line, each atop a podium with a light hanging over their head. Facing them is one boy, who will at first secretly choose one of the girls to be his date. Then, he reveals some basic information about himself, after which each of the girls will decide whether he is ‘date-worthy’ or not.

If a girl doesn’t like him, she will turn the light above her head off. If all 24 lights go off, the boy loses. If some lights remain on after the boy’s introduction, the boy may choose two or three of the girls for ‘future communication’. He also has the option in this case to choose a girl who turned her light off.

Finally, with three girls left, the boy will ask another round of questions, after which he will make his final choice. If the girl accepts, they may walk towards each other, join hands, and head off into the sunset for a future date and possible romance.

This show is enjoyable for me on many levels.

First, it's great for me to watch Chinese TV for language practice. Qian and I speak Chinese a bit, I speak with her family a bit on Skype, and I'll chat with Chinese friends on Skype some, but I'm really not doing anything to better my spoken Chinese or listening living in the US. I don't want to lose what I have and feel like engaging with Chinese shows - especially one that uses simple language - is very helpful.

Second, I like to see the reactions the 24 women on the show have to each male contestant/potential date that the producers roll out on stage.

Some of the ladies looking for love

《非诚无扰》is essentially a public trial of the guy standing in front of the twenty four women. The viewer gets hardly any information about any of the women who've come to the show looking for love. At most, each one will get in a few sentences and answer a question or two.

The man, on the other hand, is needled incessantly by the women and the hosts. Any physical shortcoming or personality deficiency that comes to the surface during the interview is investigated thoroughly. The guys, understandably, squirm at times. It can be pretty awkward. It's a good awkward, though; reality TV at its best.

And third, I like to think that I can glean some sociological information about what Chinese women are looking for in potential boyfriends/husbands.

The host (who is quite good) with a contestant who's choosing the girl he thinks is hottest after giving them a once over

The women on the show are very blunt. This man is too short. His clothes are shabby or out-of-fashion. He seems weird.

I've talked before on my blog about the difficulties facing twenty something year old men in China. For most urban-dwelling young bachelors to be deemed marry-able, they have to own an apartment, have a stable job, own a car, and come from a respectable family/city/region of the country (being from Henan Province is a disqualifier for many girls' parents).

I find this criteria fascinating. Especially when taking into account the general male/female ratio problems that China faces. Those ratios aren't that out-of-whack at this point in 2011. They'll be much worse when the children in China now start dating in the next fifteen to twenty years. But it's still tough for young men today. I met plenty of guys while I was in China who felt they had no prospects for ever finding a girlfriend or wife.

I don't want to get too carried away with reading into the show, though. I'm not going to try to say that 《非诚无扰》should be studied in graduate school courses or anything. It is, in the end, still a trash dating game show.

But if you understand Chinese and have some free time on your hands, I recommend checking《非诚无扰》out (here's a link to some episodes on tudou.com). It's a fun time.

Visualizing the Chinese and US Economies

2011-02-27T08:59:00.006-06:00

The Economist has a great map showing just how much China's economy has developed. Each province in China is labeled with the corresponding country whose GDP it is equivalent to:

For an even more detailed map showing GDP per person, population, and exports from The Economist, click here.

Back in 2007, I found this map from a blog post at dailykos.com showing the same thing with US states:

This US GDP map is a couple years old so it might not be incredibly accurate right now. But I think it should generally hold true or be in the same ballpark.

It's funny to see the shared countries on the two maps:

- Nebraska and Inner Mongolia's economies are both the size of the Czech Republic's
- Virginia and Zhejiang are both the size of Austria
- Oklahoma and Beijing are both the size of the Philippines
- South Carolina and Hunan are both the size of Singapore
- New Mexico and Shanxi are both the size of Hungary
- West Virginia and Shaanxi are both the size of Algeria
- Kansas and Sichuan are both the size of Malaysia

The comparisons could go on.

A couple things of note: no Chinese province even comes close to US states like California, Texas, or Florida. In fact, there really aren't really any economic powerhouses on China's map at all. Also, when you compare a hugely populated province like Shandong (around 95 million people) to Switzerland (around 8 million people), a straight GDP number doesn't give a very meaningful picture of what the situation really is in the two places.

It'd be interesting to compare the populations of all of China's provinces with the population of the countries on the map. There's no way the countries on the map come close to China's 1.3 billion people.

Population disparities aside (China tends to screw up population-based comparisons), these maps do show just how dominant the winners of the world economy have been. The disparity between the haves and have nots has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. This, I believe, is why we're seeing governments across the Middle East topple.

I'm watching everything in the Middle East with great excitement and trepidation. What happened in Egypt and Tunisia is incredible. What's going on in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, and other countries throughout the Arab world is frightening.

Democracy in the Middle East is going to be a long struggle. It's inspiring to think that 2011 could end up being a year that more than 100 million people were emancipated from autocratic rule. Saying that, there's no guarantee what will happen now that the strongmen at the top are gone. I hope that the US and other democracies around the world support any country striving towards honest and fair elections.

No matter what happens down the road, 2011 is shaping up to be a very historic year.

High Speed Rail

2011-02-23T20:38:00.004-06:00

Things changed so much in Xi'an between 2006 and 2009 when I lived there. The pace of development is hard to comprehend. I know that when Qian and I go back to Xi'an this coming summer, after being gone for twenty months, there are going to be many parts of town that we won't recognize.

Reading a post from my friend, Richard, on his blog - Notes From Xi'an - I see that Xi'an has indeed added something major since I left: a high-speed rail station.

The Xi'an to Zhengzhou line high-speed rail station

Richard's post does a nice job giving basic information about the new "Xi'an North Station," highlighting the controversy surrounding the corruption of China's ousted high-speed rail minister, and discussing whether high-speed rail is really a wise investment. Check it out.

From Cave to Chairman

2011-02-16T20:34:00.003-06:00

The New York Times has a good piece on the soon-to-be president of China, Xi Jinping, and the time he spent in Shaanxi Province's countryside as a youth:

LIANGJIAHE, China — The cave is dim and narrow and musty. A platform bed covered with a reed mat sits by the door. A green canvas satchel and a lantern hang from two rusty nails on a wall — possessions supposedly left behind by a lanky teenage boy from Beijing sent here four decades ago to do hard labor.

“He liked reading books,” said Lü Nengzhong, 80, a farmer who housed the boy, Xi Jinping, for three years. “They were thick books, but I don’t know what they were about. He read until he fell asleep.”

These days, Mr. Xi’s reading materials veer more toward speeches and government planning documents — the vice president of China, age 57, he is expected to take over from Hu Jintao next year as the nation’s top leader. His official biography is being airbrushed. Village officials here have received orders to bar journalists from sniffing around Mr. Xi’s old home.

Liangjiahe is the foundation of a by-the-bootstraps creation myth that Mr. Xi has long cultivated. In an essay for a 2003 book Mr. Xi said his seven years here led to a life transformation. Using standard Marxist-Leninist-Maoist language, he wrote about learning to serve the people.

We “mustn’t stand high above the masses nor consider the masses as our fish and meat,” he said. He went on: “The hard life of the grass roots can cultivate one’s will. With that kind of experience, whatever difficulties I would encounter in the future, I am fully charged with courage to take on any challenge, to believe in the impossible and to conquer obstacles without panic.”

Read On

Photo of Xi Jinping from the AP

I highlighted a few basic facts about Xi Jinping a couple years ago. I noted at the time that I'd heard very positive things about Xi Jinping from people in Xi'an, which is in Shaanxi Province where Xi spent a significant part of his youth and where his father is from. (Read his dad's Wikipedia page. Very prominent guy.)

The best thing I've read on Xi is from a Wikileaks cable from 2007. Fascinating stuff, this. Hearing Xi speak in an unadulterated fashion about the prosperity he oversaw in Zhejiang Province, China's income inequality, and his affinity for World War II films is only something Julian Assange could've provided the world.

Edit: Here is another longer profile on Xi from Reuters.

Road to Heaven

2011-02-09T20:41:00.009-06:00

A couple months ago, the New York Times had an article about the rise of Daoism in China that I featured in a blog post. A few days after posting that article, I read a post on the excellent China Beat blog by the author of the NYT article, Ian Johnson, giving some reading suggestions for those interested in learning more about the history of Daoism.

I've never had a tremendous interest in Daoism, but figured it wouldn't hurt to better familiarize myself with the history of the religion a bit. I picked up the number one book on Johnson's list - The Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter.

I got very excited about this book just a few moments after opening it. The following map is on the page after the table of contents:

I copied this on a copy machine and then scanned it. Doesn't look quite as good as it does in the actual book. If you can't tell, this is a map of where Porter goes searching for hermits: Xi'an and Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi Province (the Sian in the middle of the map is Xi'an). The setting of Porter's book is where I lived while I was in China.

I thoroughly enjoyed that this book takes place on my old stomping grounds in China. Visiting ancient temples, meeting Daoist hermits, climbing serene mountains - Xi'an and its surrounding area is just a surreal place. When it comes to history and culture - the birthplace of Daoism, the numerous dyasties, the terracotta warriors, the beginning of the Silk Road, etc. - Xi'an can't be beat.

Outside of my three climbs of Hua Shan, I hadn't been to any of the places that Porter writes about. But anyone who's read my blog before or has seen my travel recommendations knows that I'm crazy about Hua Shan and am very taken by the Daoist aspects of that mountain.

Porter goes to Hua Shan in the book and has an entire chapter on the mountain. He gives a thorough history of Daoism on the mountain. Here is the beginning section of his Hua Shan chapter - "Sound of the Crane" from page 60:

"The Road To Heaven" - A photo I took at Hua Shan in 2008

Very romantic stuff, this. Between this chapter in Road to Heaven and the chapter "The Hermit of Hua Shan" in China Road, I've been able to learn a lot about Hua Shan since leaving China.

Qian and I just bought tickets for a three week trip to China this summer. I'm hoping to consult the map at the beginning of this post and the pages of Porter's book as a guide for an off-the-beaten-path couple day excursion outside of Xi'an. I'm not expecting that I'll run into hermits or go searching for the history of Daoism like Porter did. But spending some time in the Qinling mountains at the heart of China's Daoist history is something I want to try to do on our trip.

While there were parts of Road to Heaven that I really appreciated, it is hard for me on the whole to endorse the book very enthusiastically. The book was only 220 pages, yet it took me several weeks to finish. Many of the stories, history, and interviews with hermits ran together badly by the middle of the book. I got stuck/bored for long periods of time.

If you don't know the difference between Buddhism and Daoism, are interested in China's folk religions, are planning a trip to Xi'an, or want to read the history of China's only major home-grown religion, Road to Heaven is something you may appreciate. I didn't love the book, but I'm glad I picked it up.

Chinese cities you've never heard of, but should know - Part 5

2011-01-26T20:31:00.004-06:00

The city featured in this installment isn't a city yet. It is a cluster of cities in southern China that will one day in the not-too-distant future be, at 42 million people, the largest city in the world.

From The Telegraph:

City planners in south China have laid out an ambitious plan to merge together the nine cities that lie around the Pearl River Delta.

The "Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One" scheme will create a 16,000 sq mile urban area that is 26 times larger geographically than Greater London, or twice the size of Wales.

The new mega-city will cover a large part of China's manufacturing heartland, stretching from Guangzhou to Shenzhen and including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing. Together, they account for nearly a tenth of the Chinese economy.

Over the next six years, around 150 major infrastructure projects will mesh the transport, energy, water and telecommunications networks of the nine cities together, at a cost of some 2 trillion yuan (£190 billion). An express rail line will also connect the hub with nearby Hong Kong.

"The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas," said Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project.

Read On

There's no doubt that there will be plenty of people willing to populate this new monstrosity. Tens of millions of people flock to Chinese cities every year. Everybody in China wants to get in on the new opportunities city life provides.

The audacity of this plan is startling. This project in southern China makes previous large infrastructure projects - the Panama Canal, the US interstate highway system, and even the Three Gorges Dam - seem like child's play. The logistics involved with creating such a vast "city" is on a totally different plane from previous man-made ventures.

Image of Shenzhen from Reuters

Reading this story today, I immediately thought of some of the words President Obama said last night in his State of the Union address. From near the end of his speech talking about the need for the US to become a more competitive nation:

We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit — none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.

Of course, some countries don't have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don't want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn't get written.
And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

The Entire Transcript

There's no question who these words were targeted towards. China is a challenge Obama has to deal with every day.

Obama spent last week schmoozing President Hu here in the US. He surely hears everyday from disgruntled voters out of work due to "jobs being shipped over to China." Forty-seven percent of Americans believe, incorrectly, that China's economy is the largest in the world.

I was moved by Obama's speech last night. I've seen many mock his "Sputnick-moment" rhetoric. I'm also not sure that the post-partisanship he's pushing for is going to last. But I appreciate the, to borrow a word I've already used in this post, audacity of what he said last night.

No matter what one thinks of Obama and his policies, he proved last night that he understands what has made the US what it is. His exhorting of innovation and ingenuity in the face of strong challenges from abroad was inspiring.

Is China's economy and world influence going to surpass the US in the coming decades? Most likely it will. Considering its population, it's not that surprising that it would. But even if it does, I think there's something to what Obama said in his speech.

China's economy can and will continue to boom. It will build cities and undertake projects that put America to shame. No matter how big it gets, though, China's citizenry is still not going to have basic rights that citizens of the US and other democracies enjoy. No amount of development or wealth creation will ever be able to make up for the basic freedoms denied in China.

Chinatravel.net Interview

2011-01-19T18:07:00.001-06:00

An interview I had with David Perry at Chinatravel.net is on the front page of their website right now. You can read the whole thing here. We discuss photography, putting my book together, travel, and life in China as a foreigner. A lot of the photos from my book are featured as well.

Expressing the Orient is a prize for Chinatravel.net's Ctrip China Travel Photo Contest. Check out what the contest is all about and sign up if you have a nice collection of pictures from China. You might just win a free copy of my book!

Iron and Silk

2011-01-15T13:56:00.002-06:00

Peter Hessler is one of the most popular writers on contemporary China. I've read all three of his books - Rivertown, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving - as well as several of his articles for the New Yorker and other various publications. I'm a huge fan of all of his work.

Last year, a fellow China blogger wrote a piece entitled - How Peter Hessler Ruined My Life. Here is the beginning of that article:

Peter Hessler, the American writer of bestselling Oracle Bones and River Town, has singlehandedly ruined my China life. I’ve never actually seen Peter Hessler in China, but I live everyday in his footsteps.

I’ve always had an adversarial jealously of Hessler, seeing as how he’s achieved the fame and success as a China writer with Princeton connections that I’d take in a moment. I’ve scoured his writings to find faults and thereby a basis for my rivalry, but I still have yet to come up with anything.

Living in China in the shadow of Peter Hessler is a bit like what a real-life Harry Potter would feel toward J.K. Rowling if Potter were an aspiring novelist and he one day discovered someone had beaten him to the punch—and made a tidy sum in the process. I suspect that nearly every Princeton in Asia fellow has a tinge of jealousy-based grudge-tinged-with-respect for Hessler.

To understand how Hessler has stolen my thunder, it’s necessary to understand one of the most essential benefits of choosing to live in China. That is you get to wrap yourself in the plush, velvety illusion that you’re the first one to experience all of the crazy aspects of China life.

Read On

I can relate a lot with what this blogger is talking about in his post. After I finish reading one of Hessler's books, I often think to myself the following kinds of things:

Why don't I keep up with all of the Chinese people who've passed through my life like Hessler did?
Why didn't I completely dedicate myself to learning Chinese at a more fluent level?
Why did I waste time watching pirated American TV show DVDs while in Xi'an when I could've been doing something productive?

I believe that this sort of reaction to Hessler's writing is natural. One of the most amazing aspects of living in China (or any foreign country for that matter) as a foreigner is the novelty of expanding one's boundaries to limits that before seemed impossible. There were countless times when I was in China where I thought to myself, "I can't believe what I'm doing right now." Reading beautifully written accounts from a first-class writer about his own unfathomable adventures can dampen one's buzz a bit.

Peter Hessler found this blog post about him a few days after it was written. He wrote to the author about his thoughts on the article.

Here is a snippet from Hessler's letter that the blogger published:

It’s a funny phenomenon, and one that I remember when I first came to China. There were certain books that everybody read, and the longer you lived there the more you might be inclined to resent them. It’s a natural reaction in a place like China, where you’re constantly learning and discovering. It’s a very personal process, very intense, and a sense of ownership develops. In “River Town” I wrote about how I wasn’t so charitable when I saw a couple of Europeans in Fuling, the first (and only) “uninvited” foreigners that I ever saw in town. I really did not want them there. I realized it was an unfair reaction, very childish; but I also saw that it was quite natural. After a long period of isolation I felt like it was my city.

During the years that I was in Fuling, “Iron and Silk” was the book that all foreign teachers read, and sometimes complained about. When I sent out the unsolicited manuscript of “River Town,” a lot of reactions were clearly shaped by Mark Salzman’s book. Most agents and publishers rejected it, probably because there was already a successful book about teaching in China. Or they wanted to build on it in narrow ways: one agent wanted me to cut my manuscript down into very short vignettes, like Salzman’s book. I’m glad I resisted; over the years it’s become clear that these are very different books and each has its own place. A couple of years ago, I met Mark Salzman at a literary event, and I told him that the foreign teachers now complain about me as well as him. He laughed; he knew what I was talking about. When I was in Fuling, I really benefited from reading his book, as well as Bill Holm’s “Coming Home Crazy.” The fact that they were so different struck me as a good thing. It reminded me that it’s not simply the experience that matters: it’s the writer. And I noticed that these books shared something in common: a sense of humor.

...

Of course, it’s not strictly the experience that distinguishes a piece of writing. China has been around for a long time, and experiences have overlapped for years and decades and even centuries. Recently I was reading Archibald Little’s “Through the Yangtse Gorges,” in which he describes a Sichuanese banquet, and then he apologizes because it’s hardly a new story: “Chinese dinners have been described over and over again, but I have narrated this one, as I think few have given an idea of their tediousness and the absence of all that we deem comfort.” Little wrote this in 1887! So I wasn’t exactly breaking new ground with the baijiu banquets in “River Town.”

I had to get beyond this, especially since my goal in that book was to write about everyday observations and experiences. Lots of foreigners shared those things, and there was nothing special about my China background. Fuling wasn’t an important place. Many foreigners spoke the language better than I did, and many people had a deeper knowledge of the culture. But I thought of myself as a writer, not a China expert. My training was more along those lines; before going to China I had worked as an ethnographer in southeastern Missouri, and I had thought a lot about the social sciences and theories of observation. In college I took a lot of courses in fiction and nonfiction writing. I had very few ideas about China, but I had strong ideas about voice, structure, set pieces, story structures. People often don’t realize how technical writing is. It’s a lot harder than learning Chinese or learning about China, that’s for sure. By the time I left Fuling, I had spent only two years engaged seriously with China, but thirteen years engaged seriously with writing. If the ratio had been the opposite thirteen years in China, and two years thinking about how to write that book would not have happened. I might have known a lot, but I wouldn’t have known how to express it, and how to structure it. In any case, that book is more about a learning process; it’s about how language, people, and culture came into focus for me. It’s not about “China” in the strictest sense.

Read the entire letter (recommended)

I really like this response. It's not the experiences that set Hessler apart from others, it's the writing. It'd do all travel writers good to reflect on what he has to say here.

After reading Hessler's response, I was interested in reading the "Peter Hessler before Peter Hessler" book that foreigners living in China in the 1990s complained about - Iron and Silk by Mark Salzman. I picked it up a few weeks ago.

Iron and Silk is 210 pages of short vignettes on Mark Salzman's two years in China. Salzman was a young Yale grad who taught at a medical college in Changsha, Hunan Province in the mid-80s. The book mostly focuses on his teaching experiences, daily life, and his study of Chinese "kung fu."

Salzman took a strong interest in China when he was a twelve year-old boy. He began studying how to speak and read Chinese, painting Chinese calligraphy, and practicing martial arts at that time. Thinking back on the jealousy discussed above, I'm very envious of the fact that Salzman already had such a solid foundation of Chinese culture before he ever went over to China.

A great deal of the book is about Salzman's martial arts lessons. Here is a section of the book going over some of the basics of Chinese "kung fu" from page 30:

Salzman has several different teachers of different styles of wu shu. He's pushed really hard by all of them. It's not exactly like Uma Thurman going to learn with her master in Kill Bill vol. 2, but it's not too dissimilar. Studying wu shu with Chinese masters as a suburban American kid is a great story and Salzman nails many of the passages working with his teachers in his book.

The theme of "gong fu" - 功夫 - or a skill that transcends mere surface beauty - mentioned in the passage is weaved throughout Iron and Silk as well. I appreciated this mode of self-examination. By the end of the book, one has gone on a long journey both in terms of getting into Chinese culture and in the development of Salzman's character.

On the whole, though, I didn't particularly like Salzman's choice of writing a series of twenty-five or so short stories instead of stringing together one longer narrative. For this reason, Iron and Silk doesn't stand up to anything that Hessler's done. The full depth of the experiences just don't quite make it onto the pages of Salzman's book.

Saying that, I enjoyed Iron and Silk a great deal. Reading about Salzman's unique stories taking place a generation ago, just as China was embracing reform and opening, is very worthwhile.

Red Bike Over China

2011-01-07T07:26:00.002-06:00

(This is a guest post from my brother, David. David lived in Jinan, Shandong Province for one year from 2009 - 2010. He's now getting his master's degree at a European university. I asked him to write about his experiences cruisin' the streets of Jinan on his gasoline powered motorbike. Please check out the nine minute YouTube video he shot of one of his rides, at the end of this article.)

Dingy little motorbikes litter the streets of China – or at least the streets of Jinan, the somewhat rustic yet endearing city on the east side of China where I taught English for a year. Per testosterone and cherished memories of Grand Theft Auto, some of us (male) foreign teachers became infatuated with the idea of owning our own motorbikes. For months we didn’t pursue this ambition, mainly for logistical reasons: we didn’t know where to get them, we’d be skipping country in a matter of months, the winters in Jinan are hellish. Oh, plus it’s illegal for non-licensed folk to drive gas-powered vehicles, and the idea of brazenly defying Chinese law made us a bit queasy.

Eventually, though, as the bleak Jinanese winter gave way to cozy spring weather, a quartet of foreign guys, me among them, made the decision to get motorbikes. Law and safety be damned. Some of our adult students were intrigued (or at least entertained) by the idea of a bunch of foreigners darting around the streets of Jinan, so they gave us directions to a “bike market.” There, we were told, we could find any bike we wanted.

The bike market – along with the other adjacent markets – was one of the most bizarre places I saw in China. There was a decrepit stream encasing one side of the market, a stagnant pool teeming with motor oil, trash and a slew of unidentifiable refuse. Thankfully, we only saw one person doing laundry in it. We traipsed along the *creek* and passed what must be the world’s biggest cache of broken refrigerators, as well as places to buy clothes, TVs, and other items that were either dysfunctional, stolen or counterfeit.

Eventually, we stumbled across the bikes. Row after row of every conceivable genus of bike – big motorcycles, little scooters, three-wheeled flatbeds, everything. If it had an engine and less than four wheels, it was here.

There was a little cluster of bikes in particular that caught our attention. They were comically small and certifiably crappy – features that, for some reason, seemed appropriate. It’s akin to not wanting lobster and filet mignon at a Kansas City Chiefs tailgate: you don’t eat gourmet food at Arrowhead, and you don’t have a slick, aesthetically pleasing motorbike in Jinan. Or so went our logic.

We conveyed to the purveyor of this particular family of bikes that we were interested. He unlocked the chain that bound them together, grabbed a water bottle full of gasoline and fired up one of the machines. It didn’t have a key, but instead a pair of chords dangling out the front that acted as the ignition. It kept getting better.

Despite its minute size – waist-high and far shorter tire-to-tire than I was tall – the bike gave out a furious roar, sending plumes of blue-white exhaust into the air while it struggled to come to life. I hopped on and had the distinct sensation that I looked like Donkey Kong, the oversized Mario Kart character who himself dwarfs the size of his little go-kart.

It was perfect. It cost a hair less than $38.

Thus began my six-month-long love affair with my motorbike, which is featured in this film. This video was recorded by my then-girlfriend, who would often ride on the back of this thing even though, as you will see, it is hardly fit for one regular-sized person.

Riding a motorbike in China is nuts. Start with the sheer volume of people. Jinan, according to Wikipedia, has more than 6 million. There is no number of lanes that can accommodate that swarm of people. Add to that the relative lawlessness of Chinese streets compared to American ones, and the result is a chaos that you can traverse only with an unnatural combination of patience and recklessness. Often times, you just have to trust that the other drivers don’t want to get in a wreck, and will act accordingly. This hope-for-the-best philosophy seems to legitimize many of the common maneuvers in China – not using signals, not looking before changing lanes, not heeding oncoming traffic, driving at night without the headlights on…the list goes on.

Another complicating factor with the motorbike is sidewalk etiquette. In Jinan, the major thoroughfares have bike paths for pedal bikes and motorbikes. This is theoretically a boon for bikers – a way to avoid some of the kamikaze behavior that defines Chinese street traffic. Problem is that these bike paths are invariably littered with people walking like it’s a sidewalk.

What’s more, these bikeless pedestrians seem to have a heartfelt disdain for the concept of “look both ways.” One of my American co-workers, who himself had a motor bike and who himself was constantly dodging oblivious pedestrians, hypothesized that Chinese parents tell their children at a very young age not to look for traffic before walking because, if they did, they would never get anywhere: there is always traffic, and heeding every car or bike that drives by will prevent you from ever moving. By not looking, the theory goes, the Chinese absolve themselves of responsibility and can traverse even the busiest thoroughfares with blissful ignorance.

The accuracy of this hypothesis is debatable, but the anecdotal evidence is there. Chinese people, at least Jinanese people, don’t look where they are walking, even if there are bikes liable to be whizzing around them. The scariest manifestation of this practice is when people get off of buses. They charge out the back exit and hurl themselves into the bike lanes, which are mere inches from where people exit the buses. (Adding to the constant drama: my bike didn’t have functioning brakes or a horn. Don’t tell my mom.)

OK, so that’s the backdrop. Now on to the video, where you’ll see all of these nerve-racking variables in play: wall-to-wall traffic; suspect decision-making at stoplights; pedestrians who are impervious to the American roaring past on his brakeless bike.

For more long-winded blog posts about life in China, check out my blog.

Painting of Garden in Nanjing

2011-01-02T12:36:00.002-06:00

The owner of the company I work for purchased my book - Expressing the Orient - for everyone at the company as a Christmas present. It was a nice gesture that I greatly appreciate. I've received really positive feedback from everyone at work on it.

Below is the most positive response I got:

This is a painting inspired by one of my photos painted by my former co-workers, John Burns.

Here is the original photo from my book:

And the two next to each other:

John said he really liked the contrast of the Chinese garden with the ultra-modern skyline in the background. That is exactly what I was thinking when I took the photo back in Nanjing in 2006.

You can see an online gallery of more of John's work here.

A Nation of Wusses

2010-12-29T11:44:00.001-06:00

The pace in which structures get built in China is staggering. Xi'an markedly changed in the three and a half years I lived there. I would often leave the city for a few days, come back, and be amazed to see a new building erected or road paved in the time I was gone.

This following viral video (h/t @elliotng) really captures what I'm talking about. The video is of a hotel in Changsha, the provincial capital of Hunan Province, being built in two days (literally):

This is an eye-opening video. It fits in nicely with a popular meme in the US right now: that the US is a "nation of wusses" and that China is "kicking our butts."

Last night, I hung out with Qian, my brother, and my roommate from college at our apartment. We watched the Sunday night NFL game of the week on a Tuesday night. The game in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania between the Eagles and Vikings had been pushed from Sunday night to Tuesday night because of snow.

Pennsylvania's governor, Ed Rendell, had a lot to say about the NFL delaying a football game because of bad weather:

"My biggest beef is that this is part of what's happened in this country," Rendell said in an interview on 97.5 radio in Philly. "I think we've become wussies. ... We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

This is a rather bombastic statement from Rendell. My old roommate from college, who lives in DC, commented that Rendell is notorious in political circles for bloviating and loves to hear the sound of his own voice.

I don't think Rendell's words are all that accurate.

Chinese people often get very worked up about weather. From my experiences of living in the middle of the US and the middle of China, Americans are not wusses when it comes to weather and braving the elements. While I get what Rendell was going for, he's off base.

First, domestic sports leagues are just not that popular and don't hold the same value in Chinese society as they do in the US. There is no comparison in China for something like an NFL night game in Philadelphia. And second, Chinese people would not pay boat loads of money to voluntarily sit in mind-numbingly hostile conditions to watch sports. I don't see any city in China packing 60,000+ people into a stadium to watch a sporting event in a blizzard.

All that said, the rapid development in China and the US' economic sluggishness scares a lot of Americans. The video above is a beautiful portrait of what the US is envious of China for. We pride ourselves on being hardworking and industrious. Seeing a different country beat us at our own game (and Communist China of all places) stirs up great emotion. I sense nostalgia for the way things were in the US post-WWII both in the media and in daily interaction with family and friends. I think Rendell is grasping for those "good old days" when the US was the economic engine of the world in his comments from the other day.

Things have changed. I don't see those heady industrialist days ever coming back to the US. That's a difficult pill for many Americans to swallow. But even if those days are gone forever, I don't think the US is done for as a country or an economic powerhouse. Although frustratingly sluggish, the US economy continues to churn. We went close to the brink, but did not collapse. We, as a nation, need to adjust our priorities, expectations, and, most importantly, education system. Wusses we are not, though.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-24T16:33:00.003-06:00

The Christmas season is upon us. Qian, my parents and brother, and I saw a performance of "The Christmas Carol" at the Kansas City Repertory Theater last night. I have quite a Christmas buzz going on after seeing that. This is a truly special time of year.

My brother is back in town (and the US) for the first time in a year and a half. It's been great seeing him. I have several family events in the next few days. In addition to the more Christmas-y stuff, I'm going to Arrowhead Stadium on Sunday to cheer on the division leading Kansas City Chiefs vs. the Tennessee Titans.

I want to thank the readers who continue to frequent this blog. I'm going to try to keep it going even though I'm no longer in China. I'm still having a fun time and hope to continue blogging indefinitely.

This picture below - from our trip in July to Chicago - is what we would send if Qian and I were ones to send out Christmas cards:

Photo edited out

Merry Christmas to all.

Ant Tribes

2010-12-13T20:28:00.003-06:00

It is a terrible time to be a fresh college graduate looking for a job. Even in China.

I'm going to highlight three pieces in the western media on "ant tribes" (蚁族), the term referring to the millions of college-educated young Chinese people looking for work, that I've seen in recent days.

First, an article from The New York Times:

Photo from Newsweek (see below)

BEIJING — Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.
Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.
Often the first from their families to finish even high school, ambitious graduates like Ms. Liu are part of an unprecedented wave of young people all around China who were supposed to move the country’s labor-dependent economy toward a white-collar future. In 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then the president, announced plans to bolster higher education, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May, that number was more than six million and rising.
It is a remarkable achievement, yet for a government fixated on stability such figures are also a cause for concern. The economy, despite its robust growth, does not generate enough good professional jobs to absorb the influx of highly educated young adults. And many of them bear the inflated expectations of their parents, who emptied their bank accounts to buy them the good life that a higher education is presumed to guarantee.
“College essentially provided them with nothing,” said Zhang Ming, a political scientist and vocal critic of China’s education system. “For many young graduates, it’s all about survival. If there was ever an economic crisis, they could be a source of instability."
Read the Entire Article

Here is a short video from the author of the article:

Several of my Chinese friends and colleagues from Xi'an had jobs similar to the ones described in this piece. Salaries of around 1,500RMB (or about $220) a month or less. Shared living quarters in "city villages" (城中村), cramped and inexpensive areas of cities with very low-rent units. Few prospects for upward mobility.

The job situation for college educated youths in China are, in many ways, just as bad as they are for young people in the US.

I'm pretty sure most Americans attribute employment problems to the sluggish US economy. But China's "ant tribes" suggest that the problem is not only because of slow growth. Even booming countries have this problem for young people right now.

This afternoon after work (I'm so thankful to not be part of the US' "ant tribe" right now), I heard a story on NPR about life inside of Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen:

Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that manufactures iPhones and iPads, was in the news this year as more than a dozen factory workers leaped to their deaths. NPR's Melissa Block talks with Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Frederik Balfour, who spent time at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, China, about what the company's response has been, and how effective it's been.

You can download the audio of this story here.

The story of suicides at Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen from earlier this year were a symbol of a larger problem in Chinese society. Young people living far away from their families, insanely long hours, and a low tolerance for mistakes are among the many pressures involved with factory life in China. It goes without saying, but the lives of those on the ground floor of the Chinese "economic miracle" are arduous in a way that is impossible for many western people to imagine.

And lastly, Newsweek has a photo gallery of ant tribes in Beijing. The photo above on the New York Times story is from this collection. The photos below are too. All of them are really well done:

It's not easy being a young person looking for work anywhere in the world right now. Expectations across the globe are as high as they've ever been. Young Chinese people want a piece of big city life and the riches millions are beginning to reap. They have an opportunity that their parents did not have. Unfortunately, it seems that higher education, the path most often prescribed to "get ahead," is not a guarantee of financial success, though.

The Good Women of China

2010-12-05T19:16:00.004-06:00

Leslie T. Chang writes about the lives of the young women working in factories in her book, Factory Girls. I thought some of the most interesting parts of that book were when Chang spoke with the host of a radio show in Dongguan that the young factory girls called into with their problems. It's not hard to imagine the issues women from farms in interior provinces have once they enter factory life in a coastal megalopolitan Chinese city.

When looking for more books to read on China recently on amazon.com, I saw a book written by a radio host of a women's talk show from Nanjing - The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices by Xin Ran. Seeing how much I took from Chang's interviews with the host in her book, I gave Xin's book a chance.

Xin Ran was the host of the first call in radio show for women in China with her program in the early 1990s. She was wildly popular. Women from all over China, not just Nanjing and the surrounding Jiangsu Province, were drawn to her. Women of all ages and from all walks of life poured their hearts out to Xin both on her radio program and through mail.

Xin paints several vignettes in her book: a liberalized university student speaking openly of sexual promiscuity, a beggar, a lesbian, women who survived the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 (when their children didn't), women living in caves in a primitive village in northern Shaanxi Province, and women whose lives were shattered by the cultural revolution.

The women Xin described in The Good Women of China show a comprehensive picture of what it means to be a Chinese woman in contemporary society. They also portray the painful history Chinese women have endured for centuries.

There is one particular passage that I think shows the oppressive history Chinese women have gone through in particularly stark terms. This paragraph is from a discussion with a women who was able to get an education in the 1940s, a time when most women did not have such an opportunity on page 114:

These "Three Submissions and Four Virtues" that Chinese women were to live by show a lot about the value placed on women in traditional China. Although the "Three Submissions and Four Virtues" are not pertinent to life in China today, women in Chinese society still face uniquely difficult challenges.

Both Chinese people and foreigners have told me more than a couple times something along these lines:

"Mao and the communists weren't all bad. They changed China's backwards attitude towards women and made women equal to men. Women don't have their feet bound any more, after all."

I've always found that argument spurious. After reading Xin's book, I now find such arguments completely ~~disingenuous~~ off-base.

The second half of Xin's book highlights women and stories from the cultural revolution. I wasn't expecting Mao's cultural revolution to be a major part of the book since it was written in the 1990s. But it makes sense; there is no way that women in the 90s, or even now, could have broken free from everything Mao inflicted upon his own people decades ago. And seeing how taboo trying to reconcile or discuss that era is, there still has to be a lot of emotion teeming beneath the surface.

From pages 202 and 203:

Women in China have the highest suicide rate in the world. Baby boys are valued much more than baby girls; there are 126 boys for every 100 girls aged one to four in rural areas. Despite the great steps China is making and has made in recent decades, there are still deep scars both from contemporary and more ancient Chinese history. Xin Ran's book gives the reader a deeper understanding of the struggle Chinese women face.

It’s Not Over Til The Fat Man Sings

2010-11-30T21:42:00.003-06:00

Over the Thanksgiving break, I asked Qian if she remembered the "This American Life" program we listened to a year ago about an American guy and Chinese girl and the story of how they found each other. Qian got a smile on her face and said that she remembered. I couldn't help but beam a little bit too as I recalled the story again.

Here is the synopsis of the radio program that brought smiles to our faces:

It’s Not Over Til The Fat Man Sings

When Eric Hayot was 23, he went on an exchange program to China one summer. He took an opera class on a lark, and before he knew it, he was on stage, singing the part of a famous judge. Accompanying him, on a traditional two-stringed fiddle, was a 19-year-old musician named Yuanyuan Di. Eric fell for her the moment he saw her, and began spending time with her. But a couple of weeks later he went back to the States, and that was that. They didn't keep in touch—it was too hard to communicate by letter. Then, two years later, Eric went back to China to study, and decided he had to find Yuanyuan again. Only he didn't have her phone number, or address or any other way to contact her. So to track her down, he deployed his secret weapon: The fact that Chinese people love it when westerners sing Chinese songs. This American Life Producer Sarah Koenig reports. (19 minutes)

You can listen to this episode here. The story of the American boy and the Chinese girl can be heard at the 9 minute 30 second mark of the broadcast. I recommend listening to the Prologue before the "The Fat Man" begins as well, though.

I'm not sure exactly why I randomly remembered this story that we listened to well over a year ago. It probably had to do with having a very nice Thanksgiving weekend. I have a lot of family in Kansas City and Qian and I had a great time visiting with my family and friends back in town. Having good people in our lives has made our move from China to America a smooth one.

Although the days are shorter and the temperature has plunged, there's something very bright and warm about this time of year. This story that I highlighted above should bring you this joy this holiday season. I heartily recommend listening.

Expressing the Orient: A Photo Exploration of China

2010-11-22T19:17:00.008-06:00

I have finished my photo book. It is titled - Expressing the Orient: A Photo Exploration of China.

Here is the cover:

Expressing the Orient is 70 pages of color photographs that I took during my three years in China. Some of the most interesting places in China are featured. Chinese people, both the Han majority and ethnic minorities, distinct landscapes, and the contrast between ancient history and contemporary development are themes explored in the book.

The book can be purchased from blurb.com here.

The book ships anywhere in the US as well as internationally. Just now, I looked at Blurb's Shipping Calculator. Shipping rates are actually quite reasonable across the globe (the book is "Standard Landscape" and is 70 pages). The one place Blurb does not appear to ship to is China. If you are in China and would like to purchase a copy of the book, email me at markschinablog at gmail dot com and we can work something out.

You can see a the first few pages of the book here:

Expressing the Orient | Make Your Own Book

I'm really happy with the way this book came out and hope that you can enjoy it.

Son of the Revolution

2010-11-13T11:45:00.002-06:00

Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro is a first-person account of growing up in China during some of the most harrowing times in human history.

Liang Heng was born in 1954, just five years after China's communist revolution. Liang's childhood was turbulent. Some of his first memories were of the One Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward. And then his formative teenage years were spent navigating through the chaos of the Mao's Great Cultural Revolution.

At the start of the book, Liang's life seems fairly normal. He is the youngest of three children with two older sisters living in Changsha, Hunan Province in southern China. His mother and father live a relatively happy life. His father works as a journalist at the Hunan Daily newspaper.

Things turn against Liang Heng early in life, though. His mother had family members - aunts and uncles and cousins - who went to Taiwan at the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Liang's whole family's life would be pay dearly time after time for that action. There was no way to live down such a mortal sin committed by family members, even if distant ones. The family's "politics" were always in question and Mao's campaigns/whims always affected Liang and his family gravely.

Most of the book focuses on Mao's Cultural Revolution. The idea of that campaign, simply, was to destroy China's long history in the hopes of creating a "pure" culture and society free from the "olds" of Chinese culture that existed before the communists remade the country in 1949.

The passage below from pages 66 - 68 describing the early stages of the Revolution from Liang's eyes:

The "Sixteen Articles" had stressed the need to criticize the "Four Olds" - old thought, old customs, old culture, and old morals - and this was the thrust of the Red Guards' first campaign. The immediate and most visible result was that the names of everything familiar changed overnight. Suddenly "Heaven and Heart Park" became "People's Park." "Cai E Road," named for a hero of the Revolution of 1911, became "Red Guard Road." The Northern Station where I had pushed carts for a day was now to be found on "Combat Revisionism Street," and a shop named after its pre-Liberation Capitalist proprietor became "The East is Red Food Store." Changsha quickly acquired a "Red Guard Theater," a "Shaoshan Road," a "People's Road," and an "Oppose Imperialism Road."

All this was extremely confusing, especially for the old people, and everybody was always getting off at the wrong bus stop and getting lost. To make matters even worse, the ticket-sellers on the buses were too busy giving instructive readings from the Quotations of Chairman Mao between stops to have much time to help straighten out the mess. Of course, there were some people who never did get used to is, and to this day they live on the ghosts of streets whose names today's young people have never heard of.

People changed their own names, too. One of my classmates rejected his old name, Wen Jian-ping ("Wen Establish Peace"), in favor of Wen Zao-fan ("Wen Rebel"). My neighbor Li Lin ("Li Forest") called herself Li Zi-hong ("Li Red from Birth") to advertise her good background. Zao Cao-fa ("Zao Make Money") became Zao Wei-dong ("Zao Protect the East"). Another friend got rid of the "Chiang" in his name because it was the same as Chiang Kai Shek's.

So, there is a lot of excitement in the city, but at home it was very quiet. Father spent every evening at his writing, and Liang Wei-ping (Liang Heng's second sister) and I never felt much like talking. We were sitting silently like this, reading and writing, on the hot night that Liang Fang (Liang Heng's oldest sister) came home. I hadn't seen her in more than three weeks. She was a changed person.

She looked splendid, never better, strong and slim where her leather belt cinched in her waist. Her green army-style uniform with its cap of authority over her short braids gave her an air of fashion and confidence I had never seen in her before. She looked a real soldier, and I sat up straight and stared with big eyes, unsure whether or not she was really my sister. My desire for my own Red Guard uniform dated from that instant.

Father emerged when he heard voices and looked glad to see Liang Fang. "How have things been going?" he asked. "We haven't seen you in a long time."

"The situation is excellent," she answered in the language of revolution. "We're washing away all the dirty water. But I never sleep. Every night we're out making search raids."

"What's a search raid?" I asked.

"You know, before you've been on a search raid you have no idea what's really going on in this society. People have been hiding all sorts of things. Counterrevolutionary materials, pre-Liberation Reactionary artworks, gold, jade, silver, jewelry - the trappings of Feudalism-Capitalism-Revisionism are everywhere."

My father looked surprised. "What do you care about those kinds of things?"

But Liang Fang was too involved in her story to answer. "We have a schedule to follow. Every night we go to a series of homes and go through every book, every page to see if there's any anti-Party material. It's an incredible amount of work. We have to check all the boxes and suitcases for false bottoms and sometimes pull up the floors to see if anything's been hidden underneath."

Liang's family, not too long after Liang Fang described giving these raids as a Red Guard, is the victim of such raids. Because of Liang's father's position as a writer (a "stinking intellectual") and because of his family's "political" history, Liang is always treated particularly harsh by the maniacal campaigns being directed by Mao from Beijing.

Liang Heng, going through everything he did, has fantastic stories. There are the accounts of machine gun firefights between rival gangs on the streets of Changsha. There is his trip to Beijing where he saw (with his own eyes!) the great leader, Mao Zedong, in Tiananmen Square. There is his own personal "Long March" where he and friends take a pilgrimage from Changsha to the revolutionary shrine, Jinggang Mountain in Jiangxi Province.

There is a lot in Son of the Revolution. This account of the book has only scratched the surface. It's hard for me to say that I "enjoyed" the book. It was grueling to finish. But it is something I'm glad I've read.

Liang's life and the China the book describes are tragic. But there is hope in Liang's story. The simple fact he survived to write it is a testament to human endurance. By the end of the book, you have to marvel at the man he's become.

I feel that that same hope can also be found looking at China as a whole. No matter what one thinks of its currency manipulation, environmental degradation, or strict internet regulation, there's no denying that China and its people's story is a remarkable one. I think and hope that there is still much progress to be made. But even for China to be where it is today, after having suffered the heartache and turmoil just a few decades ago described in Liang's book, is astonishing.

Taoism Rises

2010-11-09T17:55:00.001-06:00

Ian Johnson has a very insightful article on religion and the rise of Taoism in China in this past week's New York Times Magazine.

Below is a section I particularly liked from the article:

RELIGION HAS LONG played a central role in Chinese life, but for much of the 20th century, reformers and revolutionaries saw it as a hindrance holding the country back and a key reason for China’s “century of humiliation.” Now, with three decades of prosperity under their belt — the first significant period of relative stability in more than a century — the Chinese are in the midst of a great awakening of religious belief. In cities, yuppies are turning to Christianity. Buddhism attracts the middle class, while Taoism has rebounded in small towns and the countryside. Islam is also on the rise, not only in troubled minority areas but also among tens of millions elsewhere in China.

It is impossible to miss the religious building boom, with churches, temples and mosques dotting areas where none existed a few years ago. How many Chinese reject the state’s official atheism is hard to quantify, but numbers suggest a return to widespread religious belief. In contrast to earlier surveys that showed just 100 million believers, or less than 10 percent of the population, a new survey shows that an estimated 300 million people claim a faith. A broader question in another poll showed that 85 percent of the population believes in religion or the supernatural.

Officially, religious life is closely regulated. The country has five recognized religions: Buddhism, Islam, Taoism and Christianity, which in China is treated as two faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each of the five has a central organization headquartered in Beijing and staffed with officials loyal to the Communist Party. All report to the State Administration for Religious Affairs, which in turn is under the central government’s State Council, or cabinet. This sort of religious control has a long history in China. For hundreds of years, emperors sought to define orthodox belief and appointed many senior religious leaders.

...

Taoism has closely reflected this history of decline and rebirth. The religion is loosely based on the writings of a mythical person named Laotzu and calls for returning to the Dao, or Tao, the mystical way that unites all of creation. Like many religions, it encompasses a broad swath of practice, from Laotzu’s high philosophy to a riotous pantheon of deities: emperors, officials, thunder gods, wealth gods and terrifying demons that punish the wicked in ways that make Dante seem unimaginative. Although scholars once distinguished between “philosophical Taoism” and “religious Taoism,” today most see the two strains as closely related. Taoist worshipers will often go to services on important holy days; they might also go to a temple, or hire a clergy member to come to their home, to find help for a specific problem: illness and death or even school exams and business meetings. Usually the supplicant will pray to a deity, and the priest or nun will stage ceremonies to summon the god’s assistance. Many Taoists also engage in physical cultivation aimed at wellness and contemplation, like qigong breathing exercises or tai chi shadowboxing.

As China’s only indigenous religion, Taoism’s influence is found in everything from calligraphy and politics to medicine and poetry. In the sixth century, for example, Abbess Yin’s temple was home to Tao Hongjing, one of the founders of traditional Chinese medicine. For much of the past two millenniums, Taoism’s opposite has been Confucianism, the ideology of China’s ruling elite and the closest China has to a second homegrown religion. Where Confucianism emphasizes moderation, harmony and social structure, Taoism offers a refuge from society and the trap of material success. Some rulers have tried to govern according to Taoism’s principle of wuwei, or nonaction, but by and large it is not strongly political and today exhibits none of the nationalism found among, say, India’s Hindu fundamentalists.

Read the entire article

The growth of religion in communist China is a very interesting topic. Ian Johnson, the writer of this article above, has written the best pieces I've read on religion in China. The section of his book, Wild Grass, on the Falun Gong is journalism at its finest.

(All of Johnson's Wild Grass is journalism at its finest, actually. The book is at the top of my must-read China book selections along with Out of Mao's Shadow. I read it earlier this year but didn't quite get a review of it written for my blog. My thoughts on the Wild Grass in short: read it!)

Johnson compliments his NY Times article about Taoism with a piece he authored over at the blog, The China Beat. In his blog post, Johnson gives a primer to those interested in reading more about Daoism. I just ordered a copy of the number one book on his list - Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits.

Taoism is intriguing to me. I'm not too familiar with its specific tenets, but I have been moved by what I've seen. I'm particularly fond of Taoist holy mountains (they occupy spots #1 and #5 on my "Top 10 Travel Destinations in China" list from last year). Maybe I'm just a sucker for the commercialization at those sites that Johnson's article talks about. Or maybe I will find something exciting about Taoism once I look into it. I'm looking forward to finding out.

The Mandate of Heaven

2010-10-30T11:32:00.001-05:00

Orville Schell's The Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China's Leaders was published in 1995. Most books I've read about contemporary China more than five years old feel dated. This book, written more than fifteen years ago, does not have that problem. In fact, with Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize a few weeks ago, The Mandate of Heaven is astonishingly relevant to present-day discussions about China.

Weighing in at more than 450 pages, Schell covers a lot in this book. It is split into five meaty sections: The Square, Three Routes to Exile, Dead Time, The Second Channel, and The Boom. Through these five sections, Schell lays out, in exhaustive detail, what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the consequences of such events, the malaise China faced from '89 to '92, the counter-cultures that arose in response to putting down the protests, and, finally, the economic boom orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping and his "Southern Tour."

Prior to reading The Mandate of Heaven, I had a general knowledge of the student protests in 1989. Now, my understanding of those events is many times deeper.

There are several passages I want to highlight from this book. Questions raised in The Mandate of Heaven about how China is ruled are as important as ever right now.

The meaning of the title of the book is laid out on page 21:

And finally, it was through Tiananmen Gate that with awesome pomp and ceremony the emperor himself passed whenever he left the Forbidden City to travel the empire or make his annual pilgrimage to the Temple of Heaven, where he performed rituals to protect the dynasty from losing the favor of heaven.

An emperor's ability to rule was said to reflect the cosmic sanction bestowed on his reign by tianming (天命), or the "mandate of heaven," which Chinese believed was signified by peace and harmony with his realm. Traditional political philosophers held that moral legitimacy was a vital component of tianming and that if the moral bonds between ruler and ruled were irrevocably violated, the all-embracing forces of "heaven" from which an emperor drew his "mandate" to rule as "the son of heaven" would be withheld and his dynasty would collapse.

天命, as described by Schell, sounds a lot like the English word "legitimacy." In the spring of 1989, after the death of Hu Yaobang, students in Beijing were not impressed with the "cosmic sanction" the CCP was maintaining. Legitimacy was what was in question during those protests.

As the protests grew both in numbers and passion, splits within the leaders of the Party widened. There is one particular passage on page 113 that put the dilemma in stark terms:

On May 17 the leadership struggle erupted again at a late-night emergency session of the Politburo at Deng's house where Zhao Ziyang was accused of sowing division within the Party and an appeal made by him to visit the students was voted down. When a declaration of martial law was formally endorsed, Deng was reported to have told Zhao, "I have the army behind me."

"But I have the people behind me," countered Zhao.

"In that case, you have nothing," Deng replied.

Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, but Deng's coldness and bluntness here hit me hard.

What happened a couple weeks later will live in infamy forever.

The CCP survived a tremendous challenge to its legitimacy in 1989. It also succeeded in building an economic powerhouse in the subsequent decades. Many in western democracies now see China as quickly surpassing the West. In many ways it is. But I think that many of the fault lines brought to light in 1989 have not been resolved.

The past few weeks have been turbulent. Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize. A prominent group of Party elders wrote an open letter calling for the Party to guarantee the rights granted in its constitution. Premier Wen Jiabao's interview with CNN was harmonized.

Several weeks ago, I wrote my review of The China Fantasy through the lens of recent discussions of political reform. With all of this recent controversy, I believe that this topic of legitimacy and political reform is worth highlighting again.

Schell presents ideas being bandied about almost twenty years ago that sound remarkably like the ones being discussed today. From page 408:

And there were other signs that seemed to suggest political relaxation. In July 1992, the relatively liberal Politburo Standing Committee member in charge of propaganda, Li Ruihuan, gave a speech that sounded more as if it had been delivered by a New Age California guru than by the propaganda boss of a Communist party. "The establishment of wholesome human relations is a basic requirement in the construction of a socialist ethic," gushed Li. "The cardinal principle for government lies in comforting the people, and the most important task in comforting people is to discern their hardships." Li then took a swipe at those who had fallen "under the influence of 'leftist' ideology" and used the pretext of class struggle to persecute people, thereby "seriously distorting human relations and causing unnecessary tension." That August, when the French paper Le Figaro interviewed Li, he became the first leader in some time to publicly link economic and political reform: "the two should go hand in hand, in order to improve speech, participation, and control." When the NCNA chimed in a few days later, it was even more emphatic. "The matter has become clear: The development and the reform of the political system. If reform of the political system drags on for a long time, reform of the economic system will be subject to a bigger restraint."

Continuing to page 412:

Whether such signs of relaxation were just so much cosmetic image polishing aimed at enhancing China's chances of assuring renewed MFN status and winning its bid for the 2000 summer Olympic Games or part of an ineluctable trend toward greater political liberalization was still not clear. But even the ambiguity came as a relief, and many Chinese allowed themselves to be soothed by cautious optimism. Perhaps, they reasoned, if political confrontation with the government could be avoided while Deng's economic reforms took deeper root and the country gathered a new sense of dignity and self-confidence, aspects of a civil society, of which gray culture was a harbinger, might mature and slowly nudge the Party into accepting more openness and political pluralism. The hope of many of those who allowed themselves to be encouraged by such optimism was that since the Party was obviously not about to relinquish political control voluntarily, free markets provided the best available goad toward greater democracy. But few had forgotten that for Deng, development and political stability, not democracy, were the primary goals. He might allow a certain vague promise of political liberalization to be lofted about, but for him the ideal was still authoritarian politics combined with economics. While there was no doubt by 1994 that life in Chinese society was in many ways becoming increasingly relaxed, there were few signs that the Party was any more prepared to tolerate real challenges to its political hegemony. Each time manifestations of even moderate political opposition arose, the Party moved to suppress then with a familiar thoroughness.

And then to page 414:

As momentous as economic changes were, China was still a one-party state. And as reform efforts in the past had repeatedly proven, it would be no easy task for a country as deeply rooted in the traditions of authoritarianism and Big Leader cultism as China to change politically, especially when the ruling leadership viewed such changes not just as a challenge to its power, but as an invitation to disorder. Deng was caught between the two conflicting sets of political purposes that Tiananmen Square symbolically represented: the tradition of broadly based liberal reforms first called for by the May Fourth generation, and the tradition of stubborn conservatism that since the failure of the Hundred Days Reform in 1898 had rejected almost all fundamental change. His solution was to adopt aspects of each side of this contradiction, and to goad one side of society into radical change while leaving the other frozen in place. In this sense he was much more in the tradition of those nineteenth-century reformers who had imagined that China could borrow technology and management techniques from abroad without affecting the existing society's culture and values, or political "essence." Now as then, such an effort depended on something of a split personality. For Deng, the contradiction manifested itself as an attempt to separate politics and economics in a way that led some observers to refer to his experiment as "laissez-faire Stalinism," "Confucian-Leninism," or "gulag capitalism." Such a bastardization might temporarily give the appearance of stability, but it was difficult to imagine how a system with such internal inconsistencies could long contain itself, especially when it was in such a dynamic state of unbalanced change.

The Mandate of Heaven is a monster of a book. I've had a hard time reviewing it; no blog post/review can do it justice. Schell is a China hand's China hand. His understanding of and insights into China jump out at the reader. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

A Conversation with Edgar Snow

2010-10-21T18:42:00.003-05:00

The 14th Biennial Edgar Snow Symposium took place in Kansas City on Monday through Wednesday of this week. Snow is the author of one of the best-selling and most influential English language books ever written about China - Red Star Over China - published in 1937. The Kansas City connection is that Snow was born and raised in KC at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Several events related to Snow's life went on early this week. I was only able to go to one of them. Last night, I saw "Meet the Past: Edgar Snow" at Kansas City's downtown public library.

I liked the premise of this performance a lot. You had a Kansas City intellectual, Crosby Kemper III, interviewing a local actor, Bob Brand, playing Edgar Snow on stage in front of about one hundred people (the dialog was taped and will be on Kansas City's public television and online at some point in the future). Both men immersed themselves into their roles. I can't imagine how much time and energy went into making this free hour-and-a-half performance what it was.

The interview began with Snow talking about his early life in Kansas City - growing up the son of a printer in a Catholic family, attending Westport High School, and going west to work on farms near Topeka, Kansas to earn money during the summers. Snow also described his road trip with friends to California in 1922, an event he said got him into traveling.

Snow then talked about attending the University of Missouri, Columbia's masters in journalism program. Mizzou takes pride in being the best journalism school in the country. Snow talked about how the "Missouri Mafia" - a group of influential journalists - was in full force when he arrived in China in the 1930s and that his Mizzou guanxi opened up countless opportunities for him.

He described taking the train from Beijing to Xi'an and then heading into northern Shaanxi Province to find the mythical communist stronghold (some people, apparently, didn't even believe the place existed). This was probably my favorite part of the conversation last night. It is also probably my favorite aspect of Edgar Snow's life. I appreciate the story of a KC boy going to Xi'an and Shaanxi Province for the adventure of a lifetime (even if his story and mine are completely different in just about every way imaginable).

A beautiful description of Bao'an, the lush, low-lying valley where the communists had settled, was painted. Snow recounted meeting Mao and the subtle details of the man that would fifteen years later become the leader of China. He also talked about the general sense of camaraderie and excitement that one felt being at the camp.

The discussion then moved to the writing and publishing of the Red Star Over China and the decade or so that followed, which was largely spent outside of China.

Towards the end of the interview, Kemper asked Snow about his visit to China in 1960. On this visit, China was in the middle of the most horrific famine in the history of the world - the Great Leap Forward. Snow, amazingly, did not witness any effects of the tragedy on his visit. He famously wrote in his book, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today:

Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials and headlines referred to "mass starvation" in China and continued to cite no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-communist visitor to China provided an authenticated instance of starvation during this period.

I assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine (and only one beggar, among flood refugees in Shenyang) and that the best Western intelligence on China was well aware of this. Isolated instances of starvation due to neglect or failure of the rationing system were possible. Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.

Kemper asked Snow to explain himself - "How did you not see this famine that historians estimate killed 35 million people?" The actor playing Snow did a wonderful job here. One could see the pain, embarrassment, and anguish on his face. He couldn't come up with a good explanation. He knew that this mistake was one of the defining moments of his career and that history had punished him for it. After stammering a bit, Snow conceded that he'd been betrayed.

I was really glad to see this darker aspect of Snow's legacy addressed. I honestly wasn't sure it would be at an event commemorating his life. In recent months, I've written about my problems with Edgar Snow. It's hard to refute that Snow was an enabler to Mao and the terror he brought upon the Chinese people. Snow's glowing reports from China during a time of unimaginable horror legitimized the awful things that that were going on there.

I'm proud that one of the most important China writers ever is from my hometown in the middle of America. But I also acknowledge the serious problems surrounding Edgar Snow.

I often see Snow mocked today by western writers and China hands. I can completely understand why this happens. It's fair that history judges him harshly. At the same time, I don't see Edgar Snow and his work in 100% black-and-white terms. He made grave mistakes during his career and got way too close with people he shouldn't have. The world's understanding of Mao and China in the middle of the twentieth century is certainly richer thanks to his work, though. Maybe I'm being too sympathetic, but I see Snow as a complex figure.

After the conversation finished and a few people from the audience asked questions, Qian, a couple friends of ours, and I went to the back of the library where there was a photo exhibition on the Chinese Cultural Revolution - Red-Color News Soldier: The Photographs of Li Zhensheng - on display. Here is a write-up from the website about the collection:

The Red-Color News Soldier exhibit is among the first visual records of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which spanned from 1966-76.

Almost no visual documentation of the era exists—and almost all that does is biased—due to the Chinese government’s control of the media, arts, and cultural institutions.

Li Zhensheng, a party-approved photographer for The Heilongjiang Daily, was granted unusual access to capture events during the Revolution and managed to hide and preserve over 20,000 stills for more than four decades. Those stills became the basis for a book, Red-Color News Soldier by Zhensheng and Robert Y. Pledge, as well as the accompanying exhibit.

These photos alone would've been worth a trip downtown to the library. They were haunting.

Between this Edgar Snow discussion, this cultural revolution photo exhibit, and the Gao Brothers' exhibit I wrote about the other day, Kansas City is a treasure trove of China-related events and information right now. I hope similar China-related events continue to occur in KC and that I can participate in them.

The Gao Brothers' Artwork in Kansas City

2010-10-15T23:11:00.004-05:00

Qian and I finally went to the Gao Brothers' art exhibit currently on display at the Kemper Art Gallery in Kansas City tonight. It is amazing. I'm so impressed that this exhibit - an artistic exploration of Mao and the Cultural Revolution - is on display in my home city.

To hear a radio program about the Gao Brothers' exhibit in KC from PRI's "The World," click here.

Below are photos of some of the pieces I took on my phone:

This next photo is a close-up of this map of China:

The piece that struck me most from the exhibit is the sculpture below entitled "Mao's Guilt:"

Here is the placard explaining the work (sorry about the low quality on this):

"Mao's Guilt" was the focus of this New York Times article from last year.

Mao's reign and the turbulence China went through under his leadership, particularly the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, fascinate me. I have such a hard time reconciling that time period with the China I lived in for three years. Seeing where China was under Mao forty years ago and comparing that with the country now makes China's rise seem so improbable.

But despite the economic prosperity, Mao's Party is still the one running the show in China. There is no cult of personality around Mao any more, but he still is very much a larger-than-life figure. His portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square. His face graces every denomination of currency above 1 yuan. Mao statutes look down upon several Chinese cities.

China has not had a national dialog about Mao and the trauma the country endured under his rule. The official line is that he was 70% good, 30% bad. While that's what everyone is supposed to say, I believe Chinese people think it's more complicated than that.

The Gao Brothers' work I saw this evening is a fascinating meditation on Mao. I find their attempt at "taking off the emperor's clothes" (literally in one piece) and examining the psychology and spirit of the man intriguing. While the Gao Brothers' art is certainly not the mode in which most Chinese people would, if possible, examine the former leader, I thoroughly enjoyed their take on the man.

Anyone living in or passing through Kansas City before January 2nd should see this exhibit. It is something you will not forget. I will surely go back in the coming weeks. I forgot to mention, admission is free.

China's Water Crisis

2010-10-10T12:10:00.003-05:00

China's Water Crisis by Ma Jun is a comprehensive look at one of China's most serious problems. Ma covers all of the bases of China's water problems in his book - dying rivers, over-development, pollution, the building of dams, and the many other issues related to trying to hydrate China.

The biggest thing I took from Ma's book is this - the destruction of China's water systems and environment goes back much farther than its recent rise in the past few decades. The roots of China's water problems go back to the birth of Chinese civilization thousands of years ago.

Break-neck industrialization in contemporary China has certainly been bad for the environment. Mao and his Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution were possibly even worse than anything done since reform and opening. But the seeds of China's environmental destruction were sowed millenia ago.

China takes pride in its long and continuous culture and history. And it should. Such longevity is impressive. Having such a history has a very high cost though. China's natural resources, and especially water, have been taxed and manipulated by both the population and emperors with little regard for future generations.

Maybe this is common knowledge to others, but I had no idea how much China's topography has changed over the past several centuries. The deserts of Xinjiang used to be green. The barren loess plateau of Shaanxi used to be fertile. And 90% of the industrial northeast's land used to be lush forest.

To illustrate this example, I want to highlight an excerpt from the book on pages 130 and 131 about the history of north China's water problems:

The degradation and ultimate destruction of the Hai River system, especially of its once verdant forests, occurred over a period of centuries - since humans started inhabiting the area, in fact. The first emperor of the Qin (Qin Shi Huang Di) has gone down in the history books as China's great unifier and the first contributor to the Great Wall. But what is often overlooked in this record of nation building is the fact that his grandiose construction project required an enormous amount of wood. The first large-scale attack on the forests of the Yan and Taihang mountains began there.

During the following dynasty, the Han (206B.C. - A.D. 221), a dramatic increase in the population of the empire led to large-scale land development across the North China Plain. That resulted in a reduction of the area's once-rich forests and grasslands. Subsequent dynasties had a practice of moving the capital to different cities, and the construction work on city walls and ornate imperial buildings for each and every one of the meant an increased demand for lumber from the Yan and Taihang mountains. Aside from the more obvious uses of timber for beams, supports, and rafters, it was needed for the equally important wood that fired the immense number of kilns that produced all the bricks needed to build the walls.

As Buddhism spread throughout China from the fourth century A.D. on, even more wood was needed for the many temples that still dot the area, In the Wutai mountains along the upper reaches of the Yongding River, there was one peak alone that had 300 temples, which were built at great expense for the surrounding forests.

By the time of the Yuan dynasty (A.D. 1271 - 1368) local forest reserves were already depleted, and the Yongding River, the largest tributary of the Hai system, began silting up so much that it soon became known to locals as the "Little Yellow River."

By the Ming Dynasty, whose capacity for destruction of the environment has already been noted several times, the population increase had pushed the land reclamation efforts farther up into the mountains. The Ming emperors made an attempt to strengthen and connect parts of the Great Wall, and by the time they had finished the large construction projects, virtually all the forests within several hundred kilometers of the wall had been denuded.

But "civilization" was not about to be stopped. By the time of the last dynasty, the Qing (A.D. 1644-1911), population growth was so unchecked that per capita access to arable land began to decline. Put another way, the ecological limits of the Hai River valley had been reached, as was made amply clear but the frequency of the droughts and floods that hit the valley. In 2,000 years of civilization, the forest cover of the North China Plain went from 60-70 percent to just around 5 percent by 1949.

Showing that China's resources have been exploited for centuries is a major point of the book. But the past fifty years, particularly the Great Leap Forward and the economic development of the past thirty years, are shown to have wreaked an amazing amount of havoc as well. Ma goes into great detail on these issues.

Ma takes the reader through a tour of the entire country writing about the problems that each region faces. I look at China in a completely new way having read Ma's book.

One of the only issues I have with Ma's China's Water Crisis is that it was published in 2004 with much of the data coming from the 1990s. There are a number of issues - northern Chinese cities being built of falling water tables, the moving of "heaven and earth" to hydrate Beijing, and general shortages - that would be interesting to see updated. This is a small quibble seeing that these things are all addressed. It would still be nice to see a revised edition though.

As global warming intensifies and climates change at more rapid rates, China's water problems very well may be the country's most difficult social issues in the coming decades. Himalayan glaciers that are the source for China's (and Asia's) major rivers are melting. Huge urban metropoli are being built on falling water tables. And industrial pollution has made many of China's rivers unusable by those lucky enough to be positioned next to fresh water.

Ma's book is a great primer on some of the biggest challenges facing the people and the leaders of China.

Photo Book Done

2010-10-05T18:58:00.000-05:00

I've FINALLY finished my China photo book. I've been working on it on-and-off for nearly a year now. It hasn't been that time-intensive really. It's just been a matter of putting it down and picking it up and having trouble making real progress.

I just ordered a copy for myself. Once I make sure the physical book looks like it does on the software I've used to build it, I'll put it up for sale and will start promoting it.

Hopefully it all turns out like what I'm expecting and it will be ready to sell in time for the holiday season.

Red China

2010-09-30T17:42:00.001-05:00

I saw a disturbing map the other day from a report on China's pollution from the Wall Street Journal (h/t to @danharris):

Here's an explanation of the map:

To get a sense of how China’s air quality compares with the rest of the world, there’s a new map of global air-particulate pollution from Canadian scientists using National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite data. The verdict: It doesn’t look good.

...

It’s important to note that the data used for this map are derived from 2001 to 2006. But as The Wall Street Journal noted in July, authorities affirmed that China’s air quality continues to get worse, not better.

According to the NASA post, health officials say fine particulates can get past the body’s hair-like cilia defenses, penetrate the lungs and blood, and lead to chronic diseases, such as asthma, cardiovascular disease and bronchitis.

Read the Whole Article

This isn't too surprising. It's still disturbing though.

The biggest drawback of living in Xi'an is its air. It's horrific. The mountains in the (not-too-far) distance cannot even be seen because of the omnipotent smog. When I lived there and was outside for too long on particularly gray days, the air made me feel like I was getting strep throat. When I used to ride my bike, I would wear a cloth facemask in a futile attempt at limiting the number of harmful particulates entering the membranes of my body.

There are plenty of things I miss about China and life in Xi'an. They greyness there isn't one of them. The fiery sunsets of the great plains are a new-found appreciation I've discovered upon coming back to the US.

China Underground

2010-09-24T17:59:00.003-05:00

I didn't finish China Underground by Zachary Mexico. I read six of the book's sixteen chapters/vignettes. It's been the only book in recent months that I haven't finished.

In those first six chapters, I read profiles of gangsters in Qingdao blowing ketamine and partying hard with corrupt police officers, prostitutes working at a KTV parlor, and a virtuosic Uyghur guitar player trying to make it in Shanghai (who Mexico smokes hash with).

Now that I'm writing this post, those stories sound pretty cool (except for the prostitute profile which is a played-out topic for me at this point having already read similar accounts in China Road and Factory Girls). The reviews I've read of China Underground - both on Amazon and the internet at large - have been overwhelmingly positive as well. Despite thinking that I should like China Underground, this book didn't do it for me.

I appreciate Mexico's language skills and ability to document a segment of China's population that has been largely elusive to western writers. But I just found China Underground too over-the-top. The stories seemed superficial and the characters didn't resonate with me. I didn't feel as though I gained perspective or learned anything particularly noteworthy from the sections that I read.

I concede that my inability to get into the book may very well derive from me being too big of a square at this point in my life.

Shaanxi Pomegranates

2010-09-19T18:20:00.001-05:00

Qian and I went to the Chinese super market near our house today to buy moon cakes (月饼) for the students Qian is teaching this fall. I enjoy shopping at this Chinese market. We can buy a lot of Chinese food products that I hadn't realize would be available in America before coming back. Every trip to the market is good listening practice for me too; there are always tons of Chinese people there speaking their native tongue (which, unfortunately for me, is usually incomprehensible southern dialects). It really is a nice little slice of China in the middle of suburban Kansas City.

One of the things we saw today was pomegranates. They were expensive - $2.70 for one. We didn't get any hoping that they'll drop in the next couple weeks as we fully enter pomegranate season. But even assuming that the pomegranates do get a bit more affordable, I'm sure the market will never offer the quality of pomegranates I had in China.

Xi'an is right next to one of the pomegranate-growing capitals of China - Lintong, Shaanxi. At this time of year in Xi'an, pomegranates straight from the farms are everywhere. They generally range in price from 1 to 5 kuai ($.18 - $.80) depending on the quality. Over the three falls I lived in Xi'an, I became accustomed to having copious amounts of insanely good pomegranates at my disposal.

Talking about my Chinese home town and one of its greatest flavors, I feel as though I should share this great article I saw recently on Twitter painting a picture of Xi'an and Shaanxi Province:

Resource-rich Shaanxi has seen significant developments in the past few years, as this most traditional of Chinese provinces enters a new century full of hope, promise and a gleaming makeover of its capital city, Xi’an.

Like the most attractive of China’s magnets for investment, Shaanxi can rely on more than one component part for attracting development and creating opportunities. Coal supplies are plentiful and of a high quality, while the province also has large reserves of natural gas and oil. While that does give it a more hardened feel to life here, the province also boasts a rich cultural history, and that, coupled with excellence in engineering academia, gives Shaanxi a fairly unique character not found elsewhere in China. From the historical perspective, Shaanxi is considered one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.

...
Shaanxi’s mineral reserves are ranked the highest of all the provinces in China, and particularly coal, oil, and natural gas. Communist-led education to exploit this over the years has also led to the province having a very strong pool of well educated workers, ranked third in the country, only after Beijing and Shanghai, while most of Shaanxi’s universities – over 50 of them – provide education in many different engineering disciplines from aviation, dam building to coal and gas extraction, much of it pioneering work. Shaanxi has an additional 2,000 science and technology research institutes, and these have taken a leading role in R&D in aerospace, equipment manufacturing, electronics, and agriculture.

Shaanxi’s GDP has been developing well over the last few years, growing at about 12.5 percent per annum since 2004, and with now the expanding secondary sector accounting for 54.9 percent of this figure. Shaanxi’s nominal GDP for 2009 was RMB818.7 billion (US$112 billion) while GDP per capita was RMB21,729 (US$43,179), ranking it 14th in the PRC. The minimum wage in Xi’an is RMB760.

Natural resources are crucial to Shaanxi’s development – the province ranks third in coal production, and fifth in oil production nationwide. A complete industrial system comprising high technology, fruit, animal husbandry, tourism, national defense, energy and chemical industries also developed and is well integrated. Large reserves of natural resources have been a spur to heavy industry such as oil drills, and equipment for mining, railways, petroleum, and chemical processing. In agriculture, the main produce is fruit and grain. Regulations are also in place to encourage investments in infrastructure, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metallurgy, machinery, electronics, light industry, and building materials. Utilized foreign investment in the province was US$1.2 billion in 2009, and has proven sustainable at about this figure over the past decade.
Read On

Shaanxi Province is one of China's most interesting. It's the cradle of Chinese civilization. It's topography - largely mountains and loess plateau - is unique. And it's one of the poorest yet fastest-growing provinces in China.

Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, is a place that I'd recommend to any foreigner traveling to China or wanting to live abroad. The pace of life for a big city is very relaxed. Another positive is that Xi'an is not as overrun with foreigners as it seems other coastal cities in China (not that having a thriving ex-pat scene is necessarily a bad thing). There are scores of universities and job opportunities there. And as evidenced by the above article, it's not a bad place to get familiarized with for business purposes.

I'm not sure exactly why I'm writing this post. I suppose seeing pomegranates at the Chinese supermarket reminded me of my Chinese 第二个故乡 (second home). I have such warm memories and such a positive impression of Xi'an and Shaanxi in my mind.

China Shakes the World

2010-09-14T21:41:00.002-05:00

"Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world." - Napoleon

There is a ton of valuable information in China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future - and the Challenge for America by James Kynge. Kynge is the former Beijing bureau chief for The Financial Times. He knows his stuff.

The first half of China Shakes the World largely focuses on how China's has affected and is affecting other nations around the world with its rise. Kynge profiles a steel factory from Dortmund, Germany that was dismantled and then reassembled in China, the "China town" of Prato, Italy (which just happened to be featured in the New York Times a couple days ago), and the, now, dreary rust belt town of Rockford, Illinois. These stories are somewhat dated - they are from the first half of this decade - but are still very relevant and insightful.

The second half of the book focuses on China and its domestic issues. Pollution, the social problems arising from the transition from a planned to open economy, and issues regarding China's lack of political reform are all explored. There is a lot to take in from these chapters. I took a lot of notes.

I always try to highlight something that caught my eye in these book review on this blog. It took me a while to decide what to feature in this review. There is so much in this book. I eventually decided to go with a passage from the chapter, "The Collapse of Social Trust," on page 169:

The horrific nature of such cases (the contamination of blood supplies with the HIV virus in Henan Province and the authorities knowledge of such events) provides a bleak commentary on contemporary society. It also detracts from the national image. To some people, that may seem a mere inconvenience. But the reputation of a country, like that of an individual, is of inestimable value. China has much going for it in this regard: an ancient culture, sparkling traditions in literature and the arts, the accumulated wisdom of thinkers over thousands of years, the size of its potential power, the taste of its cuisine, king fu and other martial arts, the diligence and intelligence of its people, the gleaming skyscrapers in cool new cities such as Shanghai, and of course the cuddly giant panda. But against these positive associations are a raft of less alluring images: shabby products, counterfeit goods, ripoffs of intellectual property, exploited labor, human rights abuses, the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, official nepotism and corruption, the persecution of religion and other forms of spirituality, a sick environment, outbursts of angry nationalism, and opposition to the exiled Dalai Lama. All or any of these impressions, plus others too numerous to mention, can coalesce to shape the attitudes of people in the West when they read the label "Made in China" on products. The resulting image, or brand, is often far from positive, and Chinese companies pay handsomely every year for the poor perceptions held in the west.

I really like this paragraph. It sums up China's "brand" issue so well.

China just has so much going for it in so many different ways. The mystery and romanticism surrounding some its most ancient and traditional customs are one-of-a-kind. There is not another culture on earth that can compare to what China's has to offer.

Yet at the same time, China has just so much going against it in the eyes of the international community. Kynge's exhaustive list in the paragraph above only scratches the surface. The many positives China's culture brings to the table are tarnished on a daily basis.

Such is the dilemma of being a country with many remnants of its fascinating past developing at an unprecedented pace often at the expense of the rest of the world. Kynge doesn't have the answers to China's "branding" problem. But he does do a wonderful job of laying it out.

China Shakes the World is both meaty and accessible. That is a very difficult thing to achieve. I was reminded a lot of China Road by Rob Gifford as I read this book. I mean that as a great compliment. China Shakes the World makes a great economic-leaning companion to Gifford's book. Being a largely economics-focused book written more than five years ago, it is dated. But that shouldn't keep someone interested in China from reading it. There is more than enough timeless material in this book.

The China Fantasy

2010-09-09T18:55:00.005-05:00

The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression by James Mann is a short, quick-hitting book about, as Mann says in the first sentence of his book, the "China he has encountered outside of China." Mann is a China hand who's spent much of his life watching China from news rooms in the United States. The goal of his book is to make his readers re-think their conceptions about China's political system and the direction China is heading.

Mann says that the US political and media establishments are essentially divided into two camps when it comes to China and its political future - those who believe in the "soothing scenario" and those who believe in the "upheaval scenario."

Those in the "soothing scenario" camp believe that "eventually, increasing trade and prosperity will bring liberalization and democracy to China." Basically, the more China opens up economically, the closer China is getting to real political reform. Liberalization under the current regime is inevitable.

Those in the "upheaval scenario" camp believe that "things can't go on the way they are in China and that eventually the current system will be pushed to the breaking point." Basically, China's current Leninist system will not be able to keep control in the coming years and decades. There will be an earth-shaking upheaval. It's just a matter of when.

Mann doesn't believe either of these conventional wisdom schools of thought. He lays out a convincing argument that there might be a "third scenario:"

What if China manages to continue on its current economic path, yet its political system does not change in any fundamental way? ... What if China becomes fully integrated into the world's economy, yet it remains also entirely undemocratic?

This "third scenario" sounds like a very likely outcome to me. Mann does a good job laying out the reasons why he believes that there is a good chance China develops economically but not politically. In fact, in the weeks since I finished the book I've found his ideas to be an insightful prism through which to view China news.

First, I want to highlight a passage from page 98 and 99 of The China Fantasy:

In May 1998, then secretary of state Madeleine Albright landed in China to lay the groundwork for a visit by President Clinton. She had planned to give a speech in Beijing on the subject of the rule of law. Shortly after she arrived, the China Daily "coincidentally" published a story about what China was planning to do to improve the rule of law. When the time came for her speech, Albright proudly help up that day's newspaper to her audience as a sign the situation in China was already getting better. "Clearly, both your leaders and your citizens recognize the need to strengthen the rule of law," she said. She did not seem to grasp that the newspaper story was not some random, independent bit of journalism but had been timed specifically to influence her and her trip.

In that same spring of 1998, while Clinton was deciding whether to visit China, the Chinese leadership suggested on a number of occasions that change was in the air. There was a lot of talk of political reform, of a new "Beijing spring," of a loosening of controls on political debate. In the end, Clinton decided to make the trip. On the day he arrived in China, a handful of dissidents moved to establish an opposition party, the China Democratic Party. The event, too, was taken as a sign of change in China. That fall, when top representative of the Human Rights Commission was preparing her own trip to China, the authorities said they might consider letting the China Democratic Party operate in some provinces.

Clinton and the UN representative had smooth visits to China. Then, at the end of 1998, after all these prominent visitors had returned home, Chinese authorities made their move. They cracked down on the fledgling party, ended its operations, and sent all its leaders to jail. The talk of a a Beijing spring ended, as it often does, with the reality of Beijing winter.

Now I want to highlight an editorial from The Wall Street Journal from a few weeks ago about comments that Wen Jiabao, the Premier of China, made about political reform:

As the Chinese nation grapples with a series of disasters — floods, landslides and now a plane crash — some in the Party are clearly trying to prevent what they see as another calamity: the further postponement of political reform.

And it is becoming clearer that Premier Wen Jiabao agrees with them.

Symbolism and celebration matter greatly in Chinese politics. When China’s then-paramount leader Deng Xiaoping wanted to restart economic reform in 1992, he made a trip to the south of the country, blessing the Special Economic Zones as the fire of China’s future, singling out Shenzhen in particular.

Over the past weekend, Wen made his eighth visit to Shenzhen since becoming premier. The inspection trip was supposed to be celebratory, praising Deng as the architect of opening and reform, and emphasizing the importance of China not straying from the socialist path of the past 30 years. Wen paid obeisance to much of that sentiment, placing flowers at the foot of a statue to Deng at a Shenzhen exhibit.

Wen’s sojourn to Shenzhen was also intended as support for “talking about economics, not politics” — the central Party dictum under Deng wherein ideology took second place to the great rush toward a more robust economy.

But here Wen went well off-message. Instead of engaging in platitudes, Wen insisted that strengthening socialism depended on producing political reform to protect the gains that economic restructuring had already provided.

Wen did not stop there. People have the right to criticize and monitor the government, he intoned, and the bureaucracy needs to start paying greater attention to those made most vulnerable by economic success. Wen did not bother to use codewords such as “democracy with Chinese characteristics” or “accountability,” and he also lashed out at what he cast as the overcentralized and unrestrained system of power in China. For a trip that was supposed to be a simple celebration of success, Wen’s comments were pointed, and profound reminders of what was still lacking.

None of that made the conservative wing of the Communist Party happy. Cadres in that camp were quick to corral much of Wen’s rhetoric. While the local press felt free to feature the Premier’s remarks in close to full-form, the central Party media offered only truncated versions of Premier’s remarks, and reverted back to an economic focus as the new week began. The official discourse defaulted again to the main line of “no politics, if you please.”

Read On

This seems to be the same thing - CCP leaders giving lip service to political reform - that tricked Madeline Albright over a decade ago. I literally read this story about Wen Jiabao from August 25th minutes after reading that section above from The China Fantasy. It was pretty amazing, actually.

I'm not the only one who sees the emptiness of Wen's comments from late August. Below is an article from The China Media Project highlighting the usage of the words "political reform" from China's leaders:

The issue is now back in the spotlight. Why? Because Premier Wen Jiabao (温家宝) said on a recent visit to Shenzhen to commemorate the city’s 30th anniversary that: “We need not only to promote economic reform, but must also promote political system reforms. Without the guarantee provided by political system reforms, the results of economic reform will be lost, and the goal of modernization cannot be achieved.”

Was this a bold and forward-thinking statement from the Premier? Did Grandpa Wen go off script?

No, not really.

Any statement on political reform is significant. And at the very least, Wen’s statement offers an opportunity for Chinese media to push more searchingly on this issue. But let’s not forget, either, that Wen Jiabao said the exact same thing during this year’s National People’s Congress back in June, when he delivered his government work report.

Read the whole article

Go check out the full article at the CMP. It's a really interesting study.

Over the past few months, I've come to the firm conclusion that there is little to no chance of meaningful political reform in China in the coming years. I don't think I'll be buying into any of these "soothing scenario" arguments any time soon. Saying that, I'm not much of a proponent for the "upheaval scenario" either. The CCP's grip on power continues to impress me.

Weighing in at only a little more than one hundred pages, The China Fantasy reads more like a think-tank paper than a book. I was disappointed it is so short. Mann's writing style and tone are a bit off-putting as well. But I did find the book to be a very helpful tool in my quest for crystallizing what China is and the direction it is going.

AmCham-China Podcasts

2010-09-02T18:04:00.001-05:00

I found a treasure trove of China podcasts for all of the China news/culture/politics/economics nerds out there. The podcasts are all produced by the American Chamber of Commerce from the People's Republic of China - AmCham-China - and can be found here.

So far, I've listened to the following:

Bill Bishop (@niubi on Twitter) talking about Chinese real estate.

Jeremy Goldkorn (from danwei.org) talking about censorship.

Zachary Karabell talking about the US/China economies and his book Superfusion.

There are dozens more discussions on the site with prominent China thinkers that I look forward to listening to (Ambassador Jon Huntsman, Peter Hessler, Evan Osnos, etc.). The ones I've heard so far have been quality. Go listen.

Though I am Gone

2010-08-30T20:33:00.000-05:00

I read a very sad blog article from McClathy's bureau chief, Tom Lasseter, last week:

I wasn't sure why at first, but this moment lingered longer than the rest: Wang Jingyao sat at a small breakfast table in his apartment and stared at me for several seconds. Two small plastic fans whirled next to the wall. There was a bouquet of fake flowers, a collection of cookie tins, and some old apples in a bowl.
We'd been talking for a while and sipping tea, working our way slowly to the subject of his wife, who was mercilessly beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution. I thought that Wang, 89, was just gathering his thoughts. The old man, wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, was in fact thinking over a question before asking it.

He'd been the central character in a 2006 documentary about the murder of his wife, Bian Zhongyun. It is a powerful piece of film in which Wang repeatedly looks straight into the camera's eye and talks plainly about Bian, a mother of four, being bludgeoned by teenage girls until she died in a mess of her own blood, urine and excrement in 1966.

So now he had a question for me: "How much influence has this movie had in America?"
Read On

The first ten sections of the movie, Though I am Gone, can be seen here. I'll go ahead and embed the first one if anyone care to begin viewing (the movie is in Mandarin but has English subtitles):

Several of the books I've read in recent weeks have delved into these dark chapters of contemporary Chinese history. All of the information I've taken in, including this movie above, has been eye-opening and disturbing.

I love China. I'm fascinated by the country. I'm trying my best to wrap my mind around the Leninist-capitalist amalgamation that is every day wielding more power across the globe. But aside from macro-economic and geo-political trends that I enjoy following, I also am trying to understand the people and culture of China better.

My wife is Chinese. I lived in China for more than three years. I met scores of wonderful people in China who have affected me greatly. I've invested a lot of time, energy, and, honestly, my heart into the country. It is very possible that Qian and I would want to live in China again in the future.

All of these stories on recent Chinese history, such as the one above, strike very close to home for me.

When my parents were being moved by speeches from Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, witnessing men land on the moon, and listening to Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis, my wife's parents were living through the insanity of Maoist China.

Now, nearly a half-century later, a decade into the twenty-first century, Qian's parents are the ones living in the country who's economy is developing at unprecedented rates while my parents' country is the one stagnating (more than just economically). My parents dream of retirement. Qian's parents (who are a few years younger than my parents) are about to start their pensions.

The world is a crazy place. Looking at China as an American can be strange. I apologize if this blog is often contradictory, rambling, and/or nonsensical. I'm just trying my best to make sense of it all.

Kansas City and China

2010-08-28T10:04:00.002-05:00

I came across a hilarious quote while reading The China Fantasy the other day:

"With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up until it is just like Kansas City."
- Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska during the era of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist China (in the 1940s).

It's funny how misguided people often sound after history plays out.

Photo of Kansas City from photocamel.com

Photo of Shanghai from cuewb.com

While talking about Kansas City, my hometown, I'm going to feature an article I found while searching for information on that quote from Senator Wherry. From Globaljournalist.org:

Missouri and China do not ordinarily go together in people's minds. One tends to think of China as most closely tied to parts of the U.S. that either sit by the Pacific (like California) or were early magnets of Chinese migration (like New York)-and neither is true of the Show Me State. Still, dig around a bit and a host of connections between Missouri and the Middle Kingdom emerge. Some are merely interesting historical tidbits. For example, the fact that a nephew of the Chinese emperor attended the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, or the fact that the plane that launched the missiles that hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 set off for Serbia from a Missouri airfield. Other China-Missouri links are more significant, such as that a native of the Show Me State, Harry S. Truman, was President when Chinese and American forces fought each other in Korea. Still others are just bizarre. In this category, I would put the presence of the “New Shanghai Theater,” which hosts year-round performances by the Acrobats of China performing group, in Branson, Missouri (aka the “Las Vegas of the Ozarks”). And the infamous 1940 statement by a U.S. Senator that has often been quoted in the past to epitomize a certain kind of recurrent American hubris concerning nation-building projects: “with God's help we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”
Probably the single most intriguing connection between the two places, though, is a literary one, which was brought to my mind by the recent announcement that a National Book Award nomination had gone to Oracle Bones: A Journey between China's Past and Present. Peter Hessler, the author of this elegantly written book, which mixes elements of travelogue and memoir with reportage and political analysis, grew up in Columbia, Missouri-and he is just the latest in a long line of writers with ties to that state to emerge as an influential shaper of American images of China. The originator of the lineage can even be said to be none other than Mark Twain, the first Show Me State citizen to gain global renown as an author. Though he never made it to China on his travels, Twain was fascinated by the country, and he wrote everything from an epistolary tale about a Chinese immigrant (“Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again”), to a newspaper editorial denouncing the “unequal treaties” that the West had forced upon the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in the mid-1800s, to essays sympathetic to the anti-Christian Boxer insurgents (since, in his mind, any foes of missionaries couldn't be all bad).

The highpoint of China-writing by people with ties to Missouri came a bit later than Twain's day, in the early-to-mid 1900s. This was when Edgar Snow and Agnes Smedley, both Missouri-born journalists, published famous books on the Chinese Revolution. The influence of Snow's Red Star Over China (1936), the book through which many Americans got their first close look at the previously mysterious figure of Mao (presented there as a very sympathetic, indeed heroic figure), is hard to overstate. Smedley never wrote a book that had as big an impact, but her writings introduced American readers to new topics, such as the role that women played in the Chinese Revolution, and her Battle Hymn of China (1941) was one of the most widely read accounts of the country published in the United States during World War II.
Read On

I'm not sure if I've talked about it much on this blog, but the reason that I ended up going to China is the Kansas City/Xi'an's sister-city organization. A group of people in Kansas City and a group of people in Xi'an have a relationship and work together to promote friendship between the US and China. Hardly anyone in either city has even heard of their sister city, but there are groups of people passionate about the relationship on each side. When I was looking for an opportunity to go abroad back in 2005 after graduating from college - I was looking at Japan, Taiwan, and Chile - I was introduced to someone in the friendship organization.

The foundation of the KC/Xi'an connection is largely based upon Edgar Snow who is mentioned in the article above (the geography of KC and Xi'an is quite similar too... gateways to the west). Snow was born in Kansas City and ended up spending a significant amount of his later life in China. He's most famous for his book - Red Star Over China - where he embedded himself with the Communist rebels in northern Shaanxi Province (Xi'an's province) in the mid-1930s.

I read Red Star Over China years ago. I wrote a review of the book on my old blog here. The book is a bit tedious at times, but it's something someone interested in China should read.

Overall, Snow's legacy is not a positive one. He's credited for deepening our understanding of Mao in Red Star Over China. But he was used badly by Mao throughout much of his life. I blasted Snow in a recent post for the things he wrote about the Great Leap Forward. He really was a pawn being played by Mao at that time.

Conceding that I, and many others, have major problems with Snow and his work, I do appreciate Snow's life. Growing up in Missouri in the early-1900s and then going to China during a tumultuous time in its history, Snow's life was a unique one.

I know it's not the same at all, but I like to think that the journey I took to China has at least some elements of his adventure. I also appreciate Peter Hessler's story (a writer who I have the utmost respect for), which took him from Columbia, Missouri to China. I take pride in the fact that middle-America, my home, has such a strong legacy in the Middle Kingdom.

Breaking the Gridlock

2010-08-24T12:44:00.000-05:00

I work at a reverse-logistics company. I'm learning a lot about the trucking industry and moving freight. It's a whole different world than anything I'd ever been exposed to before. I'm really liking it.

I sent out an email to my boss and colleagues the other day about this following story. We all got a kick out of it.

From Bloomberg:

Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese demand for coal to produce electricity for the world’s fastest-growing major economy is creating traffic jams lasting as long as nine days on roads connecting mines in the nation’s hinterland to its eastern ports.

Thousands of trucks were stuck along the Beijing-Tibet Expressway for as many as nine days, China Business News reported today. The blockage, which began to ease yesterday, was created by a surge in trucks carrying coal from the province of Inner Mongolia, the newspaper reported. Road maintenance since Aug. 19 has been a major cause of the congestion, the Global Times newspaper said today.

Inner Mongolia passed Shanxi province last year to become China’s biggest coal supplier after the government closed mines on safety concerns following a series of deadly accidents in Shanxi. A dearth of railway capacity connecting Inner Mongolia to port cities such as Caofeidian, Qinhuangdao and Tianjin, where coal is shipped to power plants in southern China, has forced suppliers to rely on trucks.

“The situation may ease in three or four years, when rail capacity from Inner Mongolia to Caofeidian gets upgraded and the new rail line to Liaoning province starts,” David Fang, a director at the China Coal Transport and Distribution Association, said by telephone today.
Read On

A traffic jam that is 62 miles long and has already spanned nine days. Only in China.

This story of the "expressway" outside of Beijing being plugged up is coupled nicely with this one I found on Beijing's city traffic from China Daily:

Image from Bluetechblog.com

BEIJING - Average driving speeds in the Chinese capital will likely drop below 15 km per hour in five years if the number of vehicles continues increasing while no further measures are taken, said a Beijing transport official here on Monday.

Guo Jifu, head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center, made the remark at a symposium to discuss the city's traffic problems.

He said the number of vehicles on the road increased by 1,900 per day on average in the first half year. If the growth rate continued, the total number of vehicles would hit 7 million by 2015.

He warned that the city's road networks could only accommodate 6.7 million vehicles, given the current ban keeping private cars off the road one work-day a week in the urban areas remained.

Read On

As a caveat, I heard a report this morning on NPR from Louisa Lim saying that car sales (as well as real estate) are way down over the past few months. So some of the projections on this article from China Daily may not come to fruition. But there is no denying that China's car industry has been BOOMING and will continue to grow at incredible rates into the future. And the trucking industry, highlighted by that traffic jam up above in the first article, shows just how many semi-trucks are moving freight on China's roads.

Last year, China committed a ton of its stimulus money to infrastructure. It's obvious that China is in desperate need for better roads, rails, and other means of transportation that will allow its economy to continue on the pace it's been, and will continue, growing.

Money spent on infrastructure in China is money well-spent. There have already been massive improvements - I could see them with my own eyes in the 3.5 years I spent in Xi'an from '06 to '09 - but there still need to be a lot more money invested.

As the foundation of China's transportation, and, thus, economic backbone, gets stronger, China's growth will continue to be pace ahead of the rest of the world's well into the future.

Hungry Ghosts by Jasper Becker

2010-08-22T19:16:00.001-05:00

The last chapter of the book I reviewed a few days ago, The Party, is about the Chinese Communist Party and its history. In that chapter, Richard McGregor profiles the journalist, Yang Jisheng.

In 2008, Yang published a phone book-sized tome, Tombstone, about the Great Leap Forward, the most lethal famine in the history of the world that took place in China from 1958 to 1962. Yang, a Party member and reporter for Xinhua News, wrote the book from the inside. He navigated his way through secret archives and records across the country that had been locked away for decades. A snippet of Yang's story can be read here.

Tombstone can be purchased in Hong Kong and abroad, but was banned immediately in mainland China. The history of the Great Leap Forward remains something that Chinese people are not allowed to explore.

China's most horrific famine has, of course, been written about in English. After finishing The Party, I picked up a book I've heard recommended on the history of the Great Leap Forward - Hungry Ghosts: Mao's Secret Famine by Jasper Becker.

Hungry Ghosts is not for the faint of heart. A book about the downfall of an entire country and the deaths of 35 million people is not a light read. Becker paints a haunting picture of a nation completely destroyed from the top-down.

The book is split into three parts: the political foundation and lead up to the famine, anecdotal accounts of the famine as it was occurring, and then the aftermath, big-picture recount, of what happened.

I'm going to highlight a few of the things that stood out to me most in the book.

Chairman Mao in the mid-1950s wanted to transform China from a poor agrarian nation into an industrial powerhouse. Mao proposed that China, if it followed his ideas, worked hard, and sacrificed for a couple years, would pass the United States and Great Britain in steel and food production in less than a decade.

Mao used many of Stalin's ideas as the foundation of his plan. I found the part of the book discussing the "science" borrowed from the Soviet Union that Mao employed to be absolutely terrifying. From page 61 of the book:

Marxism claims, above all, to be a "scientific" philosophy, one which applies the principles of science to politics and society. In like manner, Mao believed, modern science could transform the lives of those millions of ignorant peasants sunk in the mire of centuries of feudal superstition. There was no time to wait for them to become convinced, they would have to be forcibly dragged into the twentieth century. Everything connected with traditional beliefs was smashed in the Great Leap Forward (although many observers tend to assume that this happened later, in the Cultural Revolution) but, ironically, what Mao put in place of these beliefs was a pseudo-science, a fantasy that could not be validated by science, or stand up to rational examination, and more than could the peasant superstitions which the Party ridiculed.

Kang Sheng, Mao's loyal henchman, exemplified this casual approach to facts: "We should be like Marx, entitled to talk nonsense," he told everyone, and he toured the country lecturing about the need to add imagination to science. "What is science," he asked teachers in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in 1958. "Science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing mysterious about it."

....

All over China in 1958, the Party created thousands of new colleges, universities and research institutes, while real scientists were imprisoned or sent to do manual labor. In their place, thousands of untrained peasants carried out "scientific research." Many kind of miracles were announced but the Great Leap Forward was above all about creating huge increases in grain and steel production. There were the "two generals" that Mao said would modernize China.

The results of this new "science" were unbelievable. Things such as "close planting" and "deep plowing" were promoted to revolutionize agriculture. "Close planting" was, literally, throwing more seeds down on the same area of land to have more "dense" crops. "Deep plowing" was plowing the land up to ten feet deep in the attempt to unlock the land's potential. These "agricultural advancements" were, obviously, nonsense. Such techniques were were wasteful and went against how Chinese peasants had toiled the land for millenia. The result of adopting such ideas was a collapse in output.

That's not to say there was no output from the farms though. Crop yields were down, but Chinese farmers were able to grow things during the Great Leap Forward. Instead of allowing the farmers who grew the crops to eat what they'd grown though, Mao, in an effort to show how well his policies were working to leaders in the USSR and other countries, exported large amounts of what had been sown. Millions of Chinese peasants swelled from edema and died in unthinkable numbers because Mao both refused to believe his policies weren't working and labelled anyone who said otherwise an enemy of the state.

The accounts Becker writes about of what was happening "on the ground" during this time are hard to read. Cannibalism was rampant, gulag-style prison camps for "opportunist rightists" were ubiquitous, and masses of people simply dropped down dead in the fields due to the disastrous social experiment being put forth from Beijing.

Becker, decades after the famine, traveled to many of the worst-hit parts of China in the 1980s and 1990s and transcribes several of the interviews he conducted with people who lived though the hell of the Great Leap Forward. He also quotes liberally from memoirs of people who experienced the famine and later wrote about the horrific events.

In the later section of the book recounting how the famine was allowed to happen, Becker has a chapter called "The Western Failure." In that chapter, Becker examines many of the useful idiots and fellow travelers who wrote for their western publications that Mao's "grand social experiment" was working.

One of the most guilty of these foreign correspondents is a writer from Kansas City: Edgar Snow. Snow's most famous work is Red Star Over China. In that book, Snow profiles a young Mao Zedong in the 1930s at the communist base of Yan'an in northern Shaanxi Province. Snow, at that time, introduced the world to the people who would eventually become the leadership of China.

Being a Kansas Citian who's spent a significant amount of time in Shaanxi Province myself, I'm particularly interested in Snow's role in Chinese history.

Becker quotes Snow from his 1960 book, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today, on p. 291 of Hungry Ghosts:

Throughout 1959-62 many Western press editorials and headlines referred to "mass starvation" in China and continued to cite no supporting facts. As far as I know, no report by any non-communist visitor to China provided an authenticated instance of starvation during this period.

I assert that I saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time famine (and only one beggar, among flood refugees in Shenyang) and that the best Western intelligence on China was well aware of this. Isolated instances of starvation due to neglect or failure of the rationing system were possible. Considerable malnutrition undoubtedly existed. Mass starvation? No.

It's clear in hindsight that Mao had Snow wrapped around his finger. Snow was not shown what was really going on in China on his tour. Unfortunately, Snow didn't have the wherewithal to know he was being duped by Mao. Snow failed miserably in not recognizing the famine and historians, rightly, view Snow in a profoundly negative light.

After finishing Hungry Ghosts, there is no doubt that the Great Leap Forward was an avoidable, man-made fiasco. The initial explanation of the famine - "three years of natural disasters" - has been proven false. Becker's book shows that the blame lies solely with Mao. He refused to believe that his ideas could not be bearing fruit and stuck with his maniacal plan for far too long.

I've been recommending books left and right here on my blog the past few months. Hungry Ghosts is another book that has greatly deepened my understanding of China. I recommend it, but only to people willing to delve into the insanity of the Great Leap Forward. It is not an easy or enjoyable read.

Real Estate Music Video

2010-08-16T23:32:00.001-05:00

I heard an interesting piece on Public Radio International's The World this evening about young people's frustrations with China's real estate market. You can listen to the story here. The story is a bit sensationalistic - the comments of people wanting blood and to go out with a bang and Andy Xie's comments - but I still appreciated it.

Here is the music video that is discussed in the radio piece (it's in Chinese):

This music video reminds me a lot of the show I reviewed a couple months ago - 蜗居 - although this video is significantly more blunt.

I've talked many times over the past couple years about China's real estate market. I've been much gloomier about it in the past than I am now. Prices are still outrageous in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, but things appear to be calming down a bit. And in places like my old home Xi'an, prices aren't that insane (relatively speaking).

Things are still out-of-whack and will continue to be so throughout much of the country even if prices don't go higher. I think there is a lot of truth to the messages of 蜗居 and this music video. The masses cannot afford housing in many urban centers and rich people are buying multiple apartments and leaving some empty. This is very tough for young men wanting to marry (owning an apartment is a prerequisite for marriage), for couples wanting to settle down, and scores of other people.

But I'm becoming convinced that things will cool down and that a popped real estate market isn't going to mean the same thing to China as it has to the US. China's economy is still going to be strong, the country will continue to grow, and people's lives will continue to improve even if real estate is no longer seen as a hot speculative investment. I'm beginning to agree with what author Zachary Karabell told me last year, "a popped real estate bubble in China isn't going to be derailing."

China's New Tomorrowland

2010-08-15T21:37:00.002-05:00

I wrote a short overview of Chongqing a few weeks ago. Chongqing is at the very top of the list of incredible places in China. Foreign Policy just put up a stunning photo exploration of the city that is, "growing faster than mapmakers and even government officials can track." Go check out the photos. Try to wrap your mind around this model of the city that is already "hopelessly out-of-date."

The Party

2010-08-14T10:03:00.009-05:00

The Chinese blogosphere has been a buzz recently with reviews of the new book - The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor. The book has been getting very favorable reviews (and has already been banned in China). I just finished the book and agree with what most everyone else is saying; The Party is a great read.

Richard McGregor was the Financial Times' China bureau chief for most of the past decade. The goal of his book is to give his reader a vivid picture of the shadowy organization behind the scenes in almost every facet of Chinese life. The Party is an ambitious project. Getting a meaningful picture of the CCP as a foreign journalist is nearly an impossible task.

McGregor writes about this difficulty in the prologue:

An old adage in journalism, that the best story is often the one staring you in the face, holds true in China. The problem in writing about the Party, though, is that, much as the Party might be staring you in the face, you can't easily glare back. The Party and its functions are generally masked or dressed up in other guises. When it interacts with the outside world, the Party is careful to keep a low profile. Sometimes, you can't see the Party at all, which makes the job of reporting how China is governed maddeningly difficult.

McGregor succeeds in his gargantuan task of painting a picture of the Party for his readers. So much useful and little-known information is highlighted. I have a much deeper perspective and knowledge of China after finishing The Party.

The book is broken down into eight chapters and shows how the Party dominates every aspects of Chinese society. I took notes as I was reading. There are dozens of things that I'd like to talk about from this book. But I'm going to limit my thoughts to a couple.

Chapter three in the book is titled, "The Keeper of the Files: The Party and Personnel." The chapter paints a picture of the CCP's "Central Organization Department." From p. 69 in the book:

The party body with ultimate power over personnel, the Central Organization Department, is without a doubt the largest and most powerful human resources body in the world. Barely heard of outside China and little known inside the country itself, beyond official circles, its reach extends into every department of state. Much like the Party itself, the department is a fearsome, secretive hulk, struggling to adapt to a vastly more complex world which has grown up around it in the last three decades.

Delving into the Party's inner political structure that is still largely based on a Leninist-Soviet structure and seeing how they run 10%-GDP-growth-a-year-China is fascinating stuff. McGregor highlights the rotating of CEOs at large Chinese companies to keep them in their place, the administering of personality and lie detector tests for potential cadres, and the myriad of other techniques the Party uses to make sure that their strangle-hold on power remains strong.

Chapter five in the book is titled, "The Shanghai Gang: The Party and Corruption." The "Pearl of the Orient" is painted in a light that I was ignorantly unaware of. From p. 150:

Streams of foreign visitors have been dazzled by the view of Pudong, usually while clikning glasses on the terraces of the upmarket eateries housed in the colonial-era buildings that line the riverfront strip opposite, known as the Bund. The image this view conveyed - that Shanghai had returned to its entrepreneurial heyday - was far from reality. Unlike southern China and the Yangtze delta region, where Deng's policies had bred a risk-taking, private economy, Shanghai was developed as a socialist showcase. Few visitors admiring the skyscrapers realized that most of them had been built by city government companies. Far from being the free-wheeling market place that many visitors believed, Shanghai represented the Party's ideal, a a kind of Singapore-on-steroids, a combination of commercial prosperity and state control.

Deng Xiaoping had chosen southern China instead of Shanghai as the place to build up China's market economy. Things opened up in Shanghai in the early 1990s and the past twenty years has seen the metropolis turn into a major powerhouse. McGregor shows that Shanghai is a different sort of economic center than what most think when they see the glass skyscrapers though.

I would love to go on and continue to highlight more passages of the book. All eight chapters are worthwhile. But I'll just refer you to the book instead.

I'll leave with one final thought. McGregor has an over-arching theme that he comes back to over and over again: the most important thing to the Chinese Communist Party is the Chinese Communist Party. Staying in control of China is the organization's one and only objective. Economic growth, developing the military, carefully-crafted nationalism - everything stoked by the Party, really - is to ensure that it stays in power. Seeing the many positive things going on in China, I often forget this. McGregor has reminded me in a very convincing and scathing fashion of what's going on though.

Will the Boat Sink the Water?

2010-08-05T19:02:00.001-05:00

"Water holds up the boat;
water may also sink the boat."
- Emperor Taizong (600 - 649, Tang Dynasty)

In the absolute must-read, Out of Mao's Shadow, Philip P. Pan wrote a chapter about the authors of the run-away best seller, 中国农民调查, or the English title, Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants by husband and wife Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. Pan wrote about the controversy the book caused and the libel suit that the husband and wife were charged with from one of the government officials described in their investigation. Pan, a Chinese-American journalist for the Washington Post, actually dressed up as a peasant and attended parts of their trial.

Will the Boat Sink the Water? (I'm just going to refer to it as WTBSTW? from now on) was a hugely influential book in China earlier this decade. The book investigates the horrors that were thrust upon the people of Anhui Province over several years from the mid-1990s to the early-2000s. Initially, the book was published and accepted by censors. It got too big though. Censors got antsy and banned the book. In response, a huge black market was created. It's impossible to say how many counterfeit books were actually sold, but I've seen estimates that WTBSTW? sold between seven and ten million copies in China.

Seeing how much I was moved by Pan's description of the authors and the stir that this book caused, it was a no-brainer that I'd pick up WTBSTW? The book lived up to the hype I'd created for it in my head. WTBSTW? is shocking. There were parts of the book that were hard for me to read. Saying that, it is captivating and is a book that should be part of a person interested in China's library.

To write their book, Chen and Wu traveled to rural backwaters in Anhui Province where China's economic boom is being felt indirectly through migrant labor, as opposed to the riches that urban dwellers are enjoying, and chronicled the stories of peasants who have been tortured, cheated, and crushed by local government officials. The stories they uncovered are gruesome and incredibly violent. There were several instances where I could not believe that I was reading about something that had happened in such recent history. Some of the incidents described sounded like Cultural Revolution madness transplanted into the 1990s.

Most of the violence directed towards the peasants is in the name of taxes. Taxes. Taxes. Taxes for everything. Fees for killing farm animals. Fees for keeping them alive. Peasants featured in the book were exploited and taken advantage in almost every way imaginable. All the while, the local officials lived lives of, relative, luxury and ease.

There are a couple excepts of WTBSTW? that I want to highlight:

In ten years, between 1990 and 2000, the total of all the taxes that the state had extracted from the peasants had increased by a factor of five, from over 8.7 billion yuan to over 46.5 billion yuan. By 2000, the peasants' tax burden averaged 146 yuan per head, six times the average urban resident's tax burden of merely 37 yuan per head. Yet city dwellers' income was on average six times the peasants' income! This in itself is already a grave injustice, but over and above regular taxation, the peasants had to suffer further extortion for village reserves and fees for social services.

I think it's fair to say that Chinese peasants were "squeezed" during the 1990s. As many parts of of China were coming out of a long economic slumber, millions upon millions of peasants had their throats stepped on by local cadres.

Here is another interesting section:

"In the past," he (Lu Zixiu, an activist featured in the book) said, "Mao Zedong said that 'a serious problem is educating the peasants.' I would rather say that the serious problem today is ensuring the interests of the peasants. If the peasants' interests are over-looked, agricultural growth, social development, and political stability are just empty words." He went on to quote Lenin: "Lenin warned that 'capitalism is cropping up among us every moment, every day.' But what's wrong with that? Isn't it better than feudalism cropping up among us every moment, every day?"

Lu summed up his views by quoting Emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty. "Over a thousand years ago, Emperor Taizong said, ' Water holds up the boat; water can also sink the boat.' Water here refers to the peasants. Emperor Taizong realized the importance of the peasantry. Each and every dynasty understood full well the importance of the peasantry, but once they are in power, they turn around and exploit the peasantry, even suppress the peasantry. Using history as a mirror, the Chinese Communist Party is faced with the same problem."

China's leadership appears to have learned many of the lessons hammered home in WTBSTW? and its popularity. Most of the events in this book took place before the year 2000 and the current regime in China headed by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, which began in 2002. Things have changed. The New York Times Book Review of WTBSTW? touches on this:

The book also predates the accession of President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen, who have made rural problems a priority. The authors get some credit for that policy shift. But today the book’s focus on excessive taxes feels dated. Mr. Wen abolished the main agricultural tax, freeing peasants of formal taxation for the first time in two millenniums.

Taxes, however, were a symptom. No sooner had the tax burden eased than a new and arguably greater abuse has riled the countryside: rural land grabs by local officials eager to cash in on the real estate boom. Mr. Chen’s and Ms. Wu’s work will not be obsolete soon.

Read the whole review

This book should be read more as a snapshot of a historical period as opposed to a picture of present-day China. I totally agree with the last paragraph in that review though. Despite cleaning up the tax system, there is a lot of discontent in China's countryside still today. The tens of thousands of protests a year that occur there are a symptom of such problems. Although not an exact description of what's going on in China right now, WTBSTW? shows the other side of the coin from the China that most westerners with experience in China are familiar with.

NPR - Religion and One Child Policy in China

2010-07-29T18:42:00.004-05:00

My beloved National Public Radio has run a couple of excellent stories over the past few weeks. I was only able to catch bits and pieces of them as they happened live on the radio. But I found time today to catch up on the both of the series - New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China and China's One Child Policy.

The first series - New Believers - was in five parts. The following clips ran Monday through Friday on the program, All Things Considered:

In The Land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity
China’s Divided Catholics Seek Reconciliation
Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China's Muslims
Beijing Finds Common Cause With Chinese Buddhists
China's Leaders Harness Folk Religion For Their Aims

All of these contain either audio slide shows or photos, so be sure to check those out along with the audio.

This is a worthwhile series. It covers a lot of the bases that should be covered in a China religion discussion. In particular, I found the story on the female imams of Henan Province informative. I was not aware that China had such a unique sect of Islam. There are no female imams outside of China.

The second series - China's One Child Policy - was also a week-long series. It ran on the program, Marketplace by American Public Media:

How China's one-child policy came to be
One-child workers: A generation of 'little emperors'
China's only children carry family hope
In China: More kids or more stuff?
Chinese labor pool on the decline
Back Story

Also be sure to check out the "Cast of Characters" at the bottom of the page. It profiles some of the 老百姓 - normal Chinese people - covered in the stories.

These programs too were all very good. I want to highlight one section from the third one, "China's only children carry family hope," that particularly resonated with me:

Scott Tong: For sixth grader Fang Jin Xue, the day starts at seven, sharp, with a...

Fang Rong: Baobei kuai dian!

Hurry up! From her mom. The 12 year-old grunts a word of compliance. And then pulls on her clothes: Green hoodie sweatshirt, black cotton pants and pink eyeglasses. The morning hustle feels like my house on a school day -- but this is a Saturday.

Fang Jin Xue explains why: Tutoring class, every weekend.

Fang Jin Xue: First, two classes of English. Then one science, one writing, one Chinese. Then two math classes. It goes late, so we eat dinner at the school.

Mom Fang Rong nukes some sesame porridge. They wolf it down. And scamper down seven flights of stairs -- no elevator here. It's hectic, mom says. Every family is racing to get its one child ahead.

Fang Rong: Competition is fierce, so we all feel we have to do something, right or wrong. If parents don't put kids in tutoring classes, they panic.

Fang Rong, the mom, is a factory quality control worker, making $7,000 a year, about the median income in urban China. Dad works at a factory too. Together, they spend 10 percent of their income on their daughter's schooling. Surveys suggest other families shell out as much as 50 percent.

It makes for a thriving education market, says Tom Doctoroff at the marketing firm J. Walter Thompson.

Tom Doctoroff: Anything that helps a kid become smarter, and able to compete in an increasingly dog-eat-dog landscape is a priority for the parents. Whether it's English lessons or piano lessons, parents are gonna spend money and time in making sure their kids are equipped to rise.
Read/listen to the entire story

I saw this kind of stuff first-hand. In fact, a huge chunk of my time in China was spent working at a private English training school first as a teacher and then later as a manager.

The school I worked for, which was one of many that the American-owned company operated throughout China, was a weekend "training schools" like the one described in this program. Chinese children would attend a two hour session of classes at the "school" every weekend for 24 weeks (two weekends off every six months). The parents would pay about an average of $200 for a semester of classes.

The classes' costs were based upon how much time was spent with the foreign teacher. If a foreign teacher taught the entire two hour block, it cost $200 a semester. If a foreign teacher only taught thirty minutes of the class, then the classes would be about half that price.

I'm not real crazy about the kind of English training schools that I'm describing. I don't want to say these kinds of training schools are completely worthless. They aren't. I saw some incredibly talented students take great advantage of their weekend English classes. But, in general, the teachers were poorly trained, the books terribly-designed, and the students nearly impossible to control. I would probably not recommend the school, or any like it, to a Chinese family wanting the best for their kid.

The school, started by Americans in the late 1990s, is a huge success financially though. That's just it, the school cares more about making money than the kids learning anything. Because of their $uccess (and the $uccess that other competing schools are finding), these sorts of ~~cash cows~~ schools are going deeper and deeper into the heart of China and millions upon millions more children are going to have the opportunity to attend them. They aren't going away any time soon.

My disillusionment for these kinds of schools surely results from me having worked in one for a while. But it also has to do with the fact that Chinese children have no lives outside of studying. I really wish Chinese kids were given the opportunity to act like kids.

So many of the children I saw on the weekends at my school were worn down. They were being forced by their parents to attend English class, math class, Chinese class, piano, etc. etc. On top of that, they were drowning from homework from their Monday through Friday school, which they usually attended in the morning from 7AMish until noon, in the afternoon from 2:30 to 5:30, and then in the evening from 7:30 until 9:00 five days a week (and sometimes either on Saturday morning or Sunday evening).

I would sometimes tell older Chinese kids about the way I grew up in America. I went to school from 8:30AM until 3:10PM. I played on soccer, basketball, and baseball teams outside of school. I did stuff outside - went swimming, made snowballs, etc. I aimlessly rode my bike. I watched too much TV. I was basically an average, generation-Y, suburban kid. That sounds like heaven to the Chinese children of today.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese kids face such pressure. More than I can quantify. But there are two things that I feel contribute.

I'm convinced a large part of what I and the NPR story are describing has to do with China's civil society, or lack thereof. China is just barren in so many ways in this area. I'm sure that as China improves, its civil society will improve. But at the moment, during this time of massive change for every person in China, things like community groups, organizations, or even, gulp, religious infrastructure just haven't fully developed. Contemporary China, in many ways, is just too Darwinian and every-man-an-island. This will change. But it will take time.

I'm also confident that the one child policy has a lot to do with the heavy burdens placed on Chinese children. Nearly every young child in China is the hope, joy, and treasure for its parents. It's all or nothing.

Given where China is today, one can understand why Chinese children face the pressures they do and Chinese parents smother their children.

Studying via PopupChinese.com

2010-07-26T20:01:00.000-05:00

Until recently, I'd never used the internet to study Chinese. I've seen the light now, though.

In the past, I was all about Supermemo and other memory techniques for "burning" Chinese into my brain. Supermemo is very effective and I think that it's helped me a lot get to the intermediate-ish level of Chinese that I'm at. But Supermemo used as a primary method of learning a language lacks a lot. Focusing on vocabulary and reading instead of listening and speaking eventually caught up with me. I was to a point where I knew hundreds upon hundreds of characters but could have only the most basic of conversations.

Frustrated, I focused more on one-on-one classes and eventually really expanded myself with my Chinese. I got to a very conversational level of Chinese. Not incredibly proficient, but I could do a wide array of things with the language. Focusing on listening and speaking helped me tons.

Things were going great and I was making serious strides and then... Qian and I moved away from China to America. I stopped studying for several weeks after the move. Eventually, I got reinvigorated with Supermemo and studied pretty well for a while. I wasn't able to continue an any one-on-one classes though. And without the listening and speaking practice, the studying of characters tapered off after several weeks. I stopped Supermemo months ago.

People reading this who know my living situation must surely be thinking, "Mark, have lessons with your Chinese wife for God's sake!" Yes, Qian is Chinese. And add on to that that she is a Chinese teacher of all things! But it's not that simple. Qian and I talk some, but we've never been able to have a productive teacher/student relationship. I can't explain why, but it doesn't work. In lieu of formal classes, she and I have made efforts to move our conversations over to Chinese, but it, too, has had limited success. Again, I can't explain why. It just hasn't worked.

In more recent months, watching Chinese TV shows has been a good way for me to keep up a steady exposure to Chinese language. But watching TV with Qian is not necessarily a great way for me to learn anything. It's good for listening practice, but if I have any trouble she just explains things to me and I hardly ever write anything down or stop to focus on a certain grammar point. And I have plenty of trouble trying to watch a Chinese TV with my Chinese level.

I've been at a a crossroads in recent months. I still have desire to learn Chinese, but have been frustrated with studying via textbook/Supermemo, watching Chinese TV, and annoying Qian about speaking Chinese. All the while, I've certainly been forgetting a lot of what I'd learned over the past few years by not using any of it in the US of A.

Everything changed for the better for me recently, though. I found popupchinese.com.

After listening to another excellent Sinica podcast hosted by popupchinese.com a few weeks ago, I actually checked out the rest of the site. I found a vast library of podcasts/language lessons for learning Chinese. The lessons ranged from absolute beginner to a level that I'm sure I'll never ever achieve. I was captivated by the high-quality and free content given to anyone who cares to download it.

The best thing about popupchinese is that the lessons are hilarious and twisted on top of being relevant. The host of most of the podcasts, Brendan, has a unique sense of humor. The lessons are consistently full of win. Some of my favorite lessons recent lessons are as follows:

- A father telling his daughter that her childhood has been a sham and that her mother and brother are not her biological family members.
- A father cooking his son's pet rabbit.
- And an honest cabbie telling a foreigner how terrible his Chinese is.

The Popup lessons, both the dialogs and the explanations by the teachers, Brendan and Echo, are entertaining and the language in them is very useful. So basically the opposite of using the conventional textbooks that have guided my first couple years of studying Chinese.

I'm finding the elementary lessons to be great review and the intermediate lessons full of new information. I have a notebook for new grammar structures, vocab, etc. and am trying to listen for a few minutes a day.

I recommend anyone interested in learning Chinese to go check out the site. The lessons start at the most basic of basic. You can listen to any of the lessons for free. If you really like the site, you can sign up for membership at really quite reasonable rates. I haven't decided whether I'm going to sign up for membership. Seeing that I haven't given them a dime yet and I really like what they're doing, I figured the least I could do is to try direct some traffic their way from my little blog.

We'll see whether I can continue on with Popup Chinese. For the moment, at least, it is helping me immensely in my life-long challenge that is learning Chinese more proficiently.

Wal-Mart in China Photos

2010-07-20T20:01:00.001-05:00

Last year, I posted several of the best photos that I took at a Walmart in Xi'an. The photos were from right after the first Walmart opened in the fall of 2007. Being from middle-America (Wal-Mart Country), I wanted to share what a Chinese Wal-Mart experience is like.

My friend, Timo, recently sent me a link of someone else's Wal-Mart in China photos. They're way better than mine.

Here are some of my favorites:

All sixteen photos from this site can be seen here.

These are some pretty wild photos. The Wal-Marts in Xi'an didn't have crocodiles, turtles, or pig faces. Or at least I don't remember seeing them. My guess is that this Wal-Mart is in southern China.

The Wal-Mart website says that it has 180 stores in over 90 cities. Wal-Mart is obviously doing pretty well in China. They're very clean and the quality of the things in the store is relatively high. They're something of an upscale market.

I'm a little embarrased to admit it, but I really enjoyed shopping at Wal-Mart in Xi'an. I was able to get things like Doritos, grapefruit, and several other western items that I missed. Since being back in the US, Qian and I have only been to Wal-Mart a couple times. We don't enjoy American ones nearly as much.

Chinese cities you've never heard of, but should know - Part 4

2010-07-15T19:50:00.003-05:00

This installment of "Chinese cities you've never heard of, but should know" isn't actually about a city. It's about Huaxi Village, a village one hundred miles north of Shanghai in Jiangsu Province.

Huaxi Village touts itself as the "Number 1 Village in China." Here is an article from the Guardian on why the village feels so proud:

China's road to riches could not be more boldly signposted than it is in Huaxi, officially the country's wealthiest village. Take the municipal government's stretch limousine across Textile Bridge, pass the smokestacks of the steelworks, speed alongside row after row of symmetrical pale-blue houses, skirt the 15-story pagoda hotel and then alight for a walk down the red-carpeted corridor of capital.
This concrete-covered passageway is a monument to the giddy material progress made by the commune since China's policymakers began mixing their ideological drinks 26 years ago.
None went as far as Huaxi in combining the strict political control of the ruling Communist party with the get-rich-quick economics of the market - and the results are being hailed as a model for the nation to follow.
To demonstrate how good that cocktail is supposed to make the locals feel, "Huaxi Road" is decorated with smiling pictures of every family in the village.
Each household's assets are listed in detail: size of the family, value of their property, average level of education, number of members of the Communist party, as well as how many cars, mobile phones, televisions, washing machines, computers, air-conditioning units, motorbikes, cameras, fridges and stereo systems they own.
At first sight, the figures seem to justify Huaxi's boast to be the "number one village in China". Since 1995, when Huaxi became the first commune in China to list shares on a stock exchange, local businesses, mostly in textiles and steel, have taken off. Their spectacular expansion has made even the national average growth rate of 9% a year seem laggardly. In 2003, the village reported the combined turnover of its companies at 10bn renminbi (about £640m). Last year, it hit 26bn - and by 2008 it is expected to double again.
This has turned residents - all still officially registered as peasants - into wealthy industrialists. Elsewhere in the country, the annual average disposable income of urban dwellers only recently passed $1,000 (about £530). In the countryside, the figure is two thirds lower. But Huaxi's residents get a yearly salary of $1,500, a bonus of $10,000 and dividends of $25,000.
Twenty years ago, most were farmers living in small, one-storey houses, who struggled to save the money to buy a bicycle. Now, they are shareholders with an average living space of more than 450 square metres and at least one family car.
Read On

This article is dated. It is from 2005. Five years is a long time anywhere. But it's a really long time in contemporary China. One important thing has occurred since this story was written; Huaxi Village has embarked upon building two of the tallest skyscrapers in the world.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In China, bigger is almost always better, even in small towns, and Huaxi, a formerly rural village in the eastern part of the country, is no exception.

Huaxi has long been heralded as a symbol of China’s successful transition from communism to capitalism. It calls itself “the No. 1 village in China” and boasts of being the country’s wealthiest village, with an annual per capita income of 80,000 yuan (about $12,000), according to Xinhua. Now, it appears that Huaxi has a new ambition: to become the “tallest village,” not just in China, but in the world.

Officials in the town are currently building a 74-story, 1,100 foot tower to house up to 2,000 residents, at a cost of 2.5 billion yuan ($370 million), the Guangzhou Daily reports (in Chinese here). Planned amenities include five clubhouses and “sky gardens,” 24-hour concierge services, 35 elevators and a revolving restaurant at the top of what’s slated to be the 15th-tallest building in the world. The tower, named “New Village in the Sky,” will be completed in June, but marks only the starting point of the village’s dreams. Next year, construction will commence on an even taller building, the 1,800-foot Huaxi Dragon Plaza (And for this plaza, the total investment will be around 6 billion yuan, and the government is to divide the total 6 billion yuan into 600 shares, with each share 10 million yuan).

Local party secretary Wu Xie’en, told the Guangzhou Daily that he hopes that the skyscrapers of Huaxi will become a major tourist attraction. He also cites a more pressing motive for building upwards: conservation of land resources. Huaxi’s rich residents have long favored sprawling mansions — up to 5,000 square feet in size, huge by Chinese standards– to house several generations under one roof, cutting into the supply of land available for industry and agriculture.

Read the entire article

The excellent blog, Chinasmack.com, translated a Chinese news report from earlier this year on the first skyscraper that is already being built. Here is a clip of that article:

Designed in accord with a 5-star hotel standard, with a construction area of 200,000 square meters, it can accommodate more than 2000 residents, with a dining capacity of 3000, and having the largest 360 degree revolving restaurant in Asia. Inside the building contain 35 elevators, with speeds of 10 meter per second, the fastest in the world, in addition to having the world’s most advanced monitoring and fire safety equipment.”

You must be having a hard time imagining that a “socialist new village” is building this soon-to-be completed luxury tower. In Jiangyin Huaxi village, this building with height ranked number 8 in China, and number 15 in the world will be completed in June of this year.

...

The tower has five sky gardens with five levels in accordance with the Five Elements of Gold, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth as each level’s theme. Inside contain 35 elevators, with speeds of faster than 10 meters per second, among the top in the world. The form of the tower will be the shape of a “Three-footed tripod”, the center will top out with a 50-meter sphere, as if it is a dazzling pearl.

The tower is also named “The new village in the sky” with a special meaning attached. Wi Xie’en said, “People’s impressions of rural villages were always low-rise buildings, now we must make a breakthrough, even rural villages can break this old impression and create a village in the sky.”

After investigation, this tower originally was planned to cost RMB 1.5 billion, but from the looks of the current situation, after renovations and decorations, it will cost at least RMB 2.5 billion to complete.

Read the entire translation

I have no idea what to say about this hamlet on steroids.

The development going on in Huaxi Village is a good rorschach test for what one thinks of China's break-neck economy. Some will say that such seemingly wasteful and misallocated use of energy and resources will be the undoing of China ("Dubai times 1,000") while others will surely see it as China forging ahead (hooray for Technocracy!).

I don't even want to bother weighing in on these kinds of economic matters any more. I've been bearish in the past on China's development and my natural instinct is to think that this Huaxi experiment is insane. But China's sustained economic development has impressed me. I'm just going to go with "a little from column A and a little from column B" on Huaxi for now.

Regardless of what one thinks of what is going on Huaxi Village, there's no doubt that this little dot on the map deserves to be on a list of places that could only exist in the present-day Middle Kingdom.

Out of Mao's Shadow

2010-07-10T15:25:00.004-05:00

I just finished a haunting book - Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China by Philip P. Pan. It is an intense read. Out of all the books on China I've read over the past few months, it might be the most important one that I've picked up. It, along with Wild Grass by Ian Johnson, are certainly the most intense.

Pan was the Washington Post's Beijing bureau chief from 2000 until 2007. His book chronicles the lives of a handful of Chinese people who refuse to submit to the ways of "the Party." A wide range of people fighting the system are featured: a fearless documentary-maker, a truth-seeking journalist, and lawyers trying to develop a rule of law to name a few. The bravery of these people willfully standing up to the government in a fight for justice is inspiring.

Reading this book puts the economic development and all of the positive things we hear about China's rise in perspective. Yes, the masses' lives in China are for the most part improving. But there are a lot of problems. There are millions upon millions of people who are not gaining the benefits that others are.

Out of Mao's Shadow shows through many examples that a large numher of China's problems are the results of poor governance from the CCP. The brutality shown in the book is shocking. I feel like I keep up with China news and politics, but I was stunned time and time again by what I read. The horrors that some government officials have inflicted upon their own people within the past decade are staggering.

One of the chapters that struck me most was the one about the SARS epidemic in 2003 and the subsequent cover-up. The charade that was put on in the face of a serious health crisis was awful. Pan documents the doctors and journalists who put their own reputation on the line to do the work that the government wouldn't: protect the Chinese people from a serious outbreak.

There is a passage I want to highlight from the SARS chapter on pages 202 and 203:

The day after the medical experts visited Heyuan, the local paper published the world's first story about SARS under a headline that read "Epidemic Is Only a Rumor." Officals later acknowledged that their primary concern was the provincial economy. The weeklong Spring Festival holiday was scheduled to begin on February 1, and local businesses were counting on people to spend money. "The most important vacation in the life of Chinese people, the Spring Festival, was coming. We didn't want to spoil everyone's happy time," Feng Shaomin, director of foreign affairs for the Guangdong health department, told my colleague John Pomfret. "You can imagine how people would have reacted if we had told them about the disease. They wouldn't eat out, nor would they go shopping or get together with family members and friends. If we had done it earlier, it would definitely have caused chaos."

But if party officials didn't want to tell the public about the disease before the Spring Festival, they were even less eager to do so after the holiday. On February 10, the Guangdong government announced that three hundred people had been diagnosed with "atypical pneumonia" and five patients had died, but officials assured the world the disease was under control. It was a lie, but all provincial newspapers were ordered to publish it. With the National People's Congress only weeks away, no one wanted to be blamed for spoiling the picture-perfect ceremonies installing Hu Jintao with headlines about a fast-spreading illness of unknown origin. Even after the congress, the cover-up continued. Now officials were worried about the impact on tourism during the next national holiday, the May Day vacation. It seemed like a bad joke: When the best time for the party to break bad news to the public? Never.

Last year, I wrote about the tendency for China's government to put off bad news for the sake of "saving face." Pan's passage here talks about this same phenomenon. I saw this tendency many times while I was in China. There are constant buildups to specific dates or events where the party wants everything to go right.

In recent months, I've seen arguments that the Chinese political model - authoritarian capitalism - is the wave of the future because of its speed and willingness to tackle problems. Many seem to think that democracy's slow pace is being eclipsed by China's lightning-quick autocratic government. Thomas Friedman is one of those who's argued such a premise. Here's a passage from an article he wrote last year:

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
Our one-party democracy is worse.

Read On

The United States is an election year. Democrats are going to struggle to retain control in the House and Senate. There is a lot of politicking going on. There probably won't be any meaningful legislation put through in the coming months. America is certainly suffering from inaction in the face of potential catastrophic climate disasters. One could also say that we are not properly handling our economic/housing crises very effectually either.

And yes, China is doing a good job of developing its green industries. But to think that its "reasonably enlightened leaders" are immune to inaction for the sake of politics is just wrong. The leaders of China consistently ignore problems for the sake of saving face or not wanting to stir up trouble before a particular event or anniversary.

I can't fathom using the word "enlightened" to describe China's leadership after reading Out of Mao's Shadow as Friedman did. I've consistently written that China is a confusing place. I still stand by that. There is a lot of good going on in the country. But the bad that is occurring is impossible to ignore. It simply can't be explained away by a high GDP, lots of skyscrapers, or the millions who are getting rich.

I keep endorsing books here on my blog. I'm enjoying all of them. If you are to just pick up one though, I think this might be the one to read. You will now look at China the same after reading Out of Mao's Shadow.

It All Began With the Netherlands

2010-07-06T20:56:00.000-05:00

After the United States and China, the country I've spent the largest chunck of my life in is the Netherlands. When I was twenty years-old and in the first semester of my junior year at Saint Louis University, I spent four months studying abroad and living in Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Today was a very happy day for me. For those that have tuned out of the World Cup, the Netherlands had a gutsy, impassioned semifinal victory over Uruguay, 3 - 2.

The Netherlands has a very special place in my heart.

Maastricht, the town where I lived in while studying abroad, is a town of about 120,000 people on the southern tip of the Netherlands. It is just a short bike ride from the border of Belgium. Maastricht is one of the oldest cities in the Netherlands with a history that dates back to the Roman Empire. In more recent history, it is where the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. The Maastricht Treaty is the agreement that, for better or worse, created the Euro as a currency.

Partly due to its long history, Maastricht is largely a resort tourist town these days. The architecture is ancient (one neat fact about my life is that I've lived in two cities that have city walls: Maastricht and Xi'an). Most of the narrow streets are made of cobblestone. It is the hilliest place in the Netherlands. The Maas River running through the middle provides outdoor activities as well as vibrant night time scenes. And there are more than 300 pubs and 25 coffee shops (the, uh, Dutch kind) in the small hamlet.

Maastricht is, in my mind, one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It is an absolutely mind-blowing place for a twenty year-old college kid from middle America to live for a few months.

As weird as it sounds, my time in Maastricht is the one of the main reasons why I ended up going to and living in China for so long. Before studying in the Netherlands, I'd never been very international-thinking at all. Maybe it's because I am from land-locked Kansas. Maybe it was my fear of foreign languages (I never did well in Spanish). I don't know. But up until that point in my life, I never had an inkling that I'd want to spend a significant part of my life outside of the United States. That all changed after spending time in another culture and "seeing the world."

Life in Maastricht was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. On top all the gushing things I've said about Maastricht itself as a city, the town is in a perfect base of operations for seeing the rest of Europe. In my cushy study abroad program, we had three day weekends EVERY WEEKEND. It was ridiculous. In the middle of the semester, we had a ten day vacation as well. During all of my time off, I was able to visit something like twenty countries including Italy, Germany, Spain, the Czech Republic, the Balkans, and many more. My eyes were opened to so many new things.

While in the Netherlands, one of my best friends, Mikey, talked about teaching English in Japan after graduating from college. The more time I spent abroad, the more the idea started to resonate with me. I'd heard my mom mention a couple years before that Asia really needed native English teachers from western countries to go abroad to teach. When I heard her say that, I'd never considered doing such a thing. I didn't understand how a person could live in such a foreign place without being able to speak the language (at the time, I also, foolishly, thought Asian languages were impossible to learn). Going around Europe and living in a country that spoke another tongue changed my attitudes towards going abroad to Asia after graduating from college.

A year after studying abroad in the Netherlands during my senior year of college, I applied to teach English in Japan through the JET Program. The program was surprisingly competitive to get into. I made the first round of cuts, went to an interview at the Japanese consulate in Chicago, and was then wait-listed to the program. It turned out that I never was called and never had the chance to go to Japan through JET (just think, you could be reading "Mark's Japan Blog").

After some scrambling and looking at places like Taiwan and Chile, I ended up going to Kansas City's sister-city in China, Xi'an to satiate my itch to get outside of the United States. The next three and a half years of my life after that were spent in the Middle Kingdom. And today, even in America, China dominates my life.

So, that's my personal story with the Netherlands and how it changed my life. Well, almost all of it.

Even before studying abroad, I was a huge Netherlands football fan. It was largely based on their bright orange jersey. In 1998, I even splurged and bought the authentic, expensive-as-all-hell Nike Netherlands jersey:

It wasn't all about the jersey though. In addition to the sweet threads, that '98 Dutch team was a blast to watch. I still remember Patrick Kluivert, Edgar Davids, Edwin van der Sar, and others. That team, which made the semifinals and lost to Brazil, was a great team to support.

Ever since the '94 World Cup in America, I've been addicted to the World Cup. I've stayed up late or woken up early many times to watch games. (This year I've been blessed with an incredibly cool manager at work who has kids who played soccer and have been allowed to have the games on while we work on a computer that nobody uses. I've literally seen just about every minute of every single game of this Cup in Africa. It's been bliss.) Every year, the Netherlands has been my number two team after America (except for 2002 when the Dutch didn't qualify).

In 2006 while watching the Cup backpacking in southwest China with my South African friend, Joseph, I was particularly struck by one player - Dirk Kuyt. His energy and hustle stood out to me. His appearance also stands out too; a tall bleach-blonde Dutchman sprinting around is hard to miss:

After that 2006 World Cup, I got into the English Premier League via my friends from England while living in China. I figured out after a while that Kuyt plays for Liverpool. After seeing him on Liverpool, I embraced Liverpool as my team in the English Premier League.

Kuyt is still my favorite footballer in the world. I've told many an Englishman and people abroad that my Dirk Kuyt is my favorite player and he's the reason why I like Liverpool. They usually laugh at me and say that he's goofy and unskilled. Well, he's playing awesome this World Cup and his team is playing in the final! So haters be damned!

Sunday is going to be a great day. I can't wait to watch the Netherlands win the World Cup. The team and this run means a lot to me. Not only has it reminded me of my great times in the Netherlands and made my proud of my Dutch "heritage," but the Dutch have put on a wonderful display of football for the world.