Skip to content

The Real Tibet

In Foreign Policy Christina Larson provides a useful reminder that Tibet is no ‘Shangri-La’. My own experience traveling through Tibetan parts of Yunnan and Sichuan Provinces confirms this; Tibetans aren’t the enlightened, beatific race imagined by the region’s more fervent supporters.

Yet the Tibetans are, in fact, Tibetan and not Chinese. China likes to tell the world that it alone among the great powers eschews colonial expansion, a narrative that sells well with the patriotic masses. But the simple fact remains is that periodically throughout history, China has established suzerainty over Tibet in order to form a buffer zone with other powers as well as to exploit the region’s abundant resources.

More recently, China has invested greatly in Tibet’s infrastructure in order to link the region to the rest of the country, both physically and culturally. Likewise, Beijing provides incentives for Han Chinese to migrate to Tibet as a means to dilute the area’s demographic makeup and guard against organized rebellion.

China’s actions are by no means unprecedented. Great powers have long made incursions into strategically important territories on their periphery. Yet the notion that China is different- exceptional, if you will- because it does not behave as a colonial power is central to the national narrative promulgated by the Communist Party. Such a narrative helps inspire a sense of patriotism among the population, essential in maintaining national unity.

So while it appears on the surface that the Dalai Lama is winning the global public relations battle over Tibet over Beijing, it is important to recognize that China prizes a different battlefield- domestic opinion. As a result, I don’t expect editorials in the China Daily railing against the Dalai clique to cease anytime soon.

Posted 17 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Chinese Internal Affairs § Useful Links ‡ Comments (3) °

On Education in China

This afternoon I’ve stumbled across an interesting article (via Alec Ash) discussing the Chinese secondary and tertiary education system, a subject in which I’ve been interested since my days as a high school teacher in Lianyungang and Fuzhou. The basic conclusion? The Chinese system as it is designed fails to promote critical thinking skills.

Added to my own thoughts, here are a few reasons why this point of view has some merit:

  • To a large extent Chinese high school education serves as a preparation for the all-important 高考, a mandatory exam encompassing several subjects which largely determines how Chinese students place in universities. The 高考 is many times more important than the SAT or ACT exams in the US. As a result, teachers teach to the exam and emphasize rote memorization above a broader understanding of the subject.
  • Chinese teachers, like their counterparts everywhere else in the world, vary tremendously in quality. Yet in China teachers are hamstrung by an inability to devise their own curriculum, or to deviate from interpretations presented in textbooks. This restriction stifles the ability of students to think differently about familiar subjects. Even good teachers are forced to toe the party line.
  • Chinese students of all ages waste an inordinate amount of time memorizing the political tenets of Marx, Lenin, Mao, Deng, and other politically correct thinkers. While I think it is important to some extent for students in China to learn the philosophical underpinnings of their nation’s founding, these courses make no effort to place Marxism or Communism in a broader global context and are almost universally regarded as tedious by the students.
  • For my fourth point, I’ll relate an anecdote. For the better part of my first year teaching English, I would conclude each major point by asking my students if they had any questions. Silence. I’d ask, ‘are you sure?’. More silence. Finally, one of the sassier girls in the back yelled out, “no, no questions!”. It took me awhile before I learned that my students were wholly unaccustomed to raising their hands and asking their teacher for questions. Even months of my encouragement could not undo many years of educational passivity. The problem with this approach is that students tend to accept what they learn at face value rather than think critically about what they read. The notion that what teachers teach merely represent a particular point of view or interpretation hasn’t penetrated very deeply into the Chinese national psyche, and a lack of critical thinking skills results.

It is important to bear in mind the enormous challenges China has faced in bringing their system up to international standard. When the Communists assumed power in 1949 the vast majority of China’s hundreds-million strong peasantry were illiterate. Improving this number remains one of Mao’s greatest achievements. During my trips through the Yunnan countryside, surely one of the poorest regions in the country, I have seen many schoolchildren sitting in restaurants poring over exercise books. Better a flawed educational system, I would say, than none at all.

An additional challenge in China is the vast array of regional dialects spoken throughout the country. In addition to the better-known tongues such as Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uighur, there are immense differences in dialects between and even within provinces- I know that two people from opposite sides of Yunnan would speak mutually incomprehensible dialects. People raised in the countryside tend to speak only their dialect during their daily life; I’ve encountered many uneducated peasants who still today require an interpreter to speak to me- in Mandarin. It may seem funny to a laowai that signs plastered throughout Chinese schools ask students to speak Mandarin, but they are surely needed.

For this reason, I can see why a 高考 exists. Whatever its flaws, the exam does provide opportunities for students hailing from far-flung provinces to matriculate to the country’s best schools on their own merit. Having a nation-wide exam makes sense, but why not modify its content by de-emphasizing memorization and promoting critical thinking skills? I’d be delighted if one day I stepped in front of a classroom and had a room-full of students eagerly challenging my point of view.

Posted 16 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Education ‡ Comments (0) °

The Power of Textbooks

Who writes the textbooks we use in our schools? Who pays for them? From which point of view do they argue? How do our schools choose these textbooks? Do alternatives exist?

To the last question, I can definitively answer yes. Not long after I arrived in college, a friend lent me a copy of the recently-deceased Howard Zinn’s People History of the United States. Zinn’s conclusions may not please everybody but his immense contribution to historical scholarship cannot be denied.

But think about it- for the average American, an enormous amount of our historical education is inculcated via textbooks. These books- written near-anonymously, in soothing words devoid of any polemical content. Teachers treat these textbooks as repositories of factual information rather than texts worth critically analyzing. As a result millions of children develop a shared sense of ‘what actually happened’ without the faculties to criticize it.

If this wasn’t frightening enough, check out this fascinating, 10-page article in the New York Times Magazine detailing how evangelical Christian activists have managed to hijack the Texas governing body responsible for approving content to the vast majority of American public schools.

At question is the notion of whether the United States is an explicitly Christian nation. Non-American readers may find this question baffling; why does it matter, after all? Yet to understand this divide is to understand the separate political forces that operate in the country.

Posted 15 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § History § US Politics § Useful Links ‡ Comments (1) °

The New Year

As I type, a string of firecrackers are going off somewhere on the street below. At various times in the past 48 hours, the streets of Kunming have sounded like a war zone, and the odd plume of smoke and stench of powder merely amplify this impression. This is, unmistakably, Chinese New Year in China.

For all the time I’ve been in China, this is only the second time I haven’t left town for the holiday. During my first two years as a grossly overpaid English teacher living in cold climates, I took the opportunity to leave China for the sunny beaches of Southeast Asia. Last year I hopped on my bicycle and zoomed off the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau for the balmy border town of Hekou. This year, for various reasons, I’ve decided to stay in Kunming.

What has struck me most about the Spring Festival is how, well, dull it is. The explosives seem more suited to breaking up the dull monotony of the holiday rather than actual expressions of joy. With almost all shops, restaurants, and businesses closed most people have little to do but sit around with the family, eating and watching television.

Yet that alone, in China, surely means something. Watching television with the family may sound tedious, but not when you haven’t seen your family for a year or more. A vast number of Chinese live far from their familial homes, and Spring Festival is often the only chance they have to go home. Lest anyone doubt that this is a powerful desire, consider the millions of people traveling in hard-seat class for three days cross-country in an effort to spend just a handful of days at home.

So perhaps Spring Festival isn’t dull at all; merely that the action normally played out on China’s bustling streets, shops, and factories now occurs inside family homes and apartments.

——————————————————————————-

The other day I met a guy who announced that he had gotten married just two days earlier. “Just before the new year!”, I said, at which point his wife said, “Thank god!”. Apparently there was a surge of weddings in the weeks and months preceding the turn of the year, as Chinese superstition holds that marriages begun in the year of the tiger are doomed. For a country of such pragmatic, atheistic people the Chinese propensity for superstition is staggering.

—————————————————————————————————————

What will the year of the tiger bring in China’s relations with the outside world? Already there are signs that Beijing has taken a more confrontational turn; witness the indignant reaction to President Obama’s visit with the Dalai Lama, hints of currency manipulation, and other supposed slights. There are also signs that the Communist Party-engineered police state have ratcheted things up a notch recently with the detention of dissidents and censorship of the Internet.

Rather than a sign of some newfound arrogance on China’s part, I’d say a likelier scenario is that any brinkmanship is designed primarily for domestic political purposes. Beijing is surely concerned that rising income inequality, environmental degradation, and other issues might arouse domestic grievances, and uniting the country through an emphasis on foreign policy is one way to diffuse discontent.

Posted 15 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Two Saturday Links

On the heels of a lazy Saturday day and a rare Saturday evening at home, here are a couple of links to brighten your weekend reading.

  • I realize I talk about Peter Hessler a lot, but skeptics will know why after reading this wonderful interview the writer gave entited “Why I Write”. Well worth a read, for China and non-China interested readers alike.
  • Hessler once wrote regularly for a site called The China Beat. While his articles seldom appear there any longer, the site itself is a wonderful source of information, analysis, and stories about China. Plus, it seems to be getting better with age.
Posted 06 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Useful Links ‡ Comments (0) °

Odds and Ends

Apologies for the relative silence as of late, but here are a few comments to whet your appetite:

  • Isn’t the obvious conclusion  from the Obama/Scott Brown/health care debacle that the American political system is hopelessly dysfunctional? We’re faced with the odd situation that a president elected in a near-landslide from a party with large majorities in both houses of Congress cannot pass a basic element of his agenda due to the dogged intransigent by the minority party, who have shown that if nothing else they possess discipline. Many have suggested doing away with the filibuster rules; I’d go a step further and junk the US Senate entirely. But no- such an idea is an anathema to a large number of Americans who believe in the divinity of a group of men who lived in an era in which powdered wigs were worn to court and black people were counted as 60 percent citizens.
  • Obama’s biggest problem is that he labors under the misconception that the Republicans are operating in good faith and are a worthy opposition party. They’re not. They’re simply a group of men and women who, facing near-extinction after last year’s election results, have devoted themselves fully to blocking Obama’s legislative agenda. They have no principles, and it is important to recall that next time you hear one of their leaders blathering on about big government. Any sincerity they might have had on that subject is laughable; nobody said a word about government spending when Bush was in office.
  • I was going to write a blog-post about how the media is overreacting to the latest round of China-US bickering but then Christina Larson of Foreign Policy did it for me
  • A word about the Dalai Lama, though. The Chinese media goes to great lengths describing the Lama as a wicked, horrible human being, a view totally at odds with his international reputation as a beatific spiritual leader. All Beijing does by vilifying the Dalai Lama- and Rebiya Kadeer for that matter- is make themselves seem ridiculous and out of touch to the rest of the world. Wouldn’t it be easier to calmly let them agitate, knowing that neither side can realistically achieve any sort of independence? Or is this propaganda merely meant for domestic consumption?
Posted 05 February 2010 † matt_schiavenza § China and World § China and the US ‡ Comments (10) °

Sino and American Exceptionalism

One aspect of contemporary Sino-American scholarship largely overlooked is the notion that both China and the United States contain a notion of ‘exceptionalism’ that largely doesn’t exist elsewhere in the world. The most immediate explanation I can think of for why is the enormous size of the two countries as well as their relative insularity from the outside world.

American exceptionalism is best exemplified by universal health care reform. Any rational comparative analysis of health care systems around the world would lead one to conclude that the US system is easily the least effective and the most expensive of any OECD country.  The obvious solution would be to look at a model that works better- say, in France- and come up with ways to reform the American system so that it conforms to a higher international standard.

Yet opponents to universal health care in the US, represented neatly in the Republican Party, believe that because the US system is different it must therefore be better. As a result they devote their energy to devising mendacious explanations for why our broken system is in fact superior.

In foreign affairs right-wing Americans find no trouble distinguishing between acts of terror and violence by our political enemies between those of ourselves and allies such as Israel. If we do it, then it isn’t bad, because we did it, right?

China for its part is at least well aware that it is a developing country, yet Sinic exceptionalism does exist. One notion shared between both countries is its persistent refusal to accept that they are imperial in nature.

Rather than accept that China annexed and colonized Tibet for strategic reasons, most Chinese I know find it easier to believe that Tibet has ‘always been a part of China’. The same logic applies to Xinjiang. Beijing’s historical designs for Central Asia are no different than that of the Russians, British, and other participants in the Great Game. Yet for some reason China pretends that that part of the world is intrinsically Chinese regardless of what the indigineous inhabitants say.

Americans are fond of the same fiction. I remember the usually-astute Bill Maher claiming on a talk show that America has never engaged in empire- building. Oh, really? Historians familiar with the late 19th/early 20th century administrations of McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt would likely beg to differ. In contemporary America, there are currently US soldiers stationed on bases throughout the world. As much as we’d like to believe that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan were strictly for liberalization purposes, imperial strategy dictates otherwise.  And from the Monroe Doctrine to Bush-era US skullduggery in Venezuela and Haiti the US has long claimed a certain dominion over the distribution of power in the Americas.

I’m not trying to be cynical for its own purpose but rather point out that nations the size of the US and China- and Russia- are imperial by nature.

Exceptionalism also shines through in politics. In China, the Communist Party is fond of saying that while democracy may be well and good for other countries it doesn’t suit China. Chinese and Western apologists for the CCP parrot this line oblivious of how self-serving it is.

Why doesn’t exceptionalism exist elsewhere? In Europe, there are so many countries crowded in a small area that insulation is simply untenable. Yet in China and the US our shared sense of exceptionalism can persist given our physical immensity.

I understand that geo-politics are much more complex than this, and that there are a great number of variables at play. But would elements in both China and America realize that both are merely members of the great big nation-state family rather than exceptional elements some progress could be made.

Posted 20 January 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Chinese Internal Affairs § Current Events § History ‡ Comments (6) ° Tagged: , , ,

Google Thoughts

Like Chris I’ve hesitated to weigh in on the latest Google news, though needless to say I consider the company’s brinkmanship with the Chinese government troubling news indeed. James Fallows of the Atlantic and Sky Canaves of the Wall Street Journal have provided a useful summary of what is and isn’t happening with the search engine here.

In practical terms Google’s possible departure from China would have little effect. For web searches in Chinese Google’s rival Baidu is better, anyway. Google’s YouTube doesn’t work here, but Youku and Tudou both do. For most every service Google provides there is a domestic equivalent in China.

Yet the symbolic importance of Google’s maneuver is significant. In particular, the idea that the spread of the internet will necessarily challenge the Communist Party’s iron grip on power in China has come under further question. To borrow a phrase from the popular Chinese blogger Han Han, the People’s Republic is in the process of creating the world’s largest local area network (LAN). Beijing’s efforts to manipulate the web are becoming more, not less, successful.

A second idea being challenged? That multi-national companies can operate with impunity in China. For years global firms have salivated over China’s 1.3 billion-strong population and eye-catching GDP figures, imagining that what sells in Peoria might, too, in Xi’an. Yet Beijing has shown that any attempt to tamper with its desire to suppress dissent will not be tolerated.

I agree with John that acquiring a virtual private network (VPN) will before long become de rigeur for China’s internet users. As I wrote over a year ago, I believe China’s efforts to censor the web will only stop once everyone finds a cheap and easy way to work around the firewall.

As for me, paying 50 US dollars a year for unfettered Internet access is a small price to pay for a sense of personal freedom as well as a middle finger raised to the worst excesses of the Chinese nanny state.

Posted 18 January 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Current Events § Technology & Society ‡ Comments (4) °

Comeuppance

Over the past year I have been unable to obtain more than a three-month, single and double visa at any given time, so as a result constantly must be vigilant about the validity of my stay here in China. This has resulted in no small amount of frustration, particularly when other Americans in my position seemingly have very little trouble getting vastly superior visas.

When I submitted my visa application form a few months ago, I was led to believe my request for a one-year multiple-entry visa would be granted. Alas, it wasn’t- and in a moment of pure frustration I loudly swore in the visa office on my way out.

Last week I went back to apply for yet another extension. The officer in charge remembered me. He wasn’t happy, either. Speaking good English, he accused me of swearing at him and of humiliating him. He said that he had no control over my visa and that it wasn’t right for me to be so angry at him.

I mildly protested that I wasn’t swearing at him, that I knew he didn’t make the decision, and that I was merely frustrated with the whole process. But within a minute I began to apologize profusely. Fortunately, the official accepted and shook my hand. ‘A new beginning’, he said.

So I left with my tail between my legs. Lesson learned? Two, actually. One- never assume that the people you deal with in China can’t understand English. Two- intemperate outburts can be easily misinterpreted, and are probably best avoided altogether.

Posted 12 January 2010 † matt_schiavenza § Me ‡ Comments (4) °

Avatar in China

The invaluable China Smack has an interesting post translating Chinese netizen reactions to the just-released blockbuster Avatar. Intriguingly, many commenters connected the eviction of the Na’vi people from their forest home to the frequent eviction of Chinese people who stand athwart government-led development.

What surprised me most about the film was its seemingly leftist point of view. The heroes are pointy-headed scientists and a disabled soldier who strive to protect the indigenous population and their ancestral homeland. The two primary villains are a grizzled Marine and a weaselly corporate goon intent on destroying the forest and obtaining unobtainium, the amusingly fictional mineral resource on the fictional planet of Pandora.

Avatar is playing virtually everywhere in China, and here in Kunming we were told that we had to wait three days in order to get tickets for the 3D show. Feeling impatient, I watched the 2D version in the cinema and came away dazzled- this is definitely a must-see film even for those normally disinterested in special-effect laden sci-fi films.

Posted 11 January 2010 † matt_schiavenza § China Culture § Film ‡ Comments (6) °