China Divide, This Site, and Me
A couple of announcements for a lazy Saturday morning in hot and sunny Kunming, China.....
Keen followers of the China blogosphere may have noticed that there's a new kid on the block: China/Divide. Combining the talents of Stan Abrams of China Hearsay, Kai Pan of CN Reviews, and Charles Custer of China Geeks, China/Divide has already become a go-to source for smart, witty analysis on all things China.
To my delight, I have been invited to join the team. My first contribution, a piece discussing the recent thaw in Sino-American relations, is now live. Go and have a look.
Some of you- ok, maybe just close friends and family members- are probably thinking, "Damn, Schiavenza. You already write for Lost Laowai, China Intelligence Online, Yunnan Magazine, and MattSchiavenza.com. Don't you think you're stretching yourself a little thin?"
Perhaps. There is only so much time to blog each day, and only so many things to blog about. As a result, I've decided to change the direction of my personal site and make it, well, more personal. Since its launch in summer 2007 I've consciously tried to devote this space to thoughts and reflections about China, deviating only occasionally into rants about US politics and other subjects. Doing this has brought focus to my writing as well as a group of intelligent and interesting regular readers.
So while I still plan to write often about China, those posts will likely appear elsewhere. This space, then, will become a repository for the millions of other things clamoring around in my brain. In the past I've wanted to write about books, baseball, movies, politics, and other subjects but refrained in an effort to maintain the China focus on this blog. Now, posts about those things will begin to appear more regularly.
With that out of the way, I've got another announcement to make, one which will likely not be news for most of you. Beginning this fall, I will be a student at Columbia University in New York City, pursuing a Masters in International Affairs. Leaving the Dragon for the Apple will be a big change, no doubt, and I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about it. Though I'll be sad to be leaving China after six wonderful years, I'm excited about this new challenge in my life and feel now is the best time to go for it.
Anyway, I hope all of you stick around for the ride- writing this blog has been one of the best things in my life both personally and professionally, something that would not have been possible had you not popped in with comments. Once again- thank you very much.
Now, back to regularly scheduled programming...
Can Do People
Yesterday while attending my first yoga class in well over a year, my teacher kept using the term huiyuan to signify those- not me- who were able to do the positions properly. The term appears to me to be a combination of 会 and 员, literally 'can person'. Yet when checking on Wenlin the term 会员 has only one meaning: member.
Does anyone know whether this is an actual term, or was my teacher simply making words up on the spot? In any case I found it a clever use of the language, and aspire to be a yoga 'can person' myself.
UPDATE: Dylan in China
James Fallows also picks up on the Bob Dylan in China story and now has an interesting rejoinder provided by Zachary Mexico, the former Kunming laowai whose book China Underground I reviewed in this space last July:
I have it on good authority that the Chinese government did not deny Bob Dylan permission to play in China. It was the Taiwanese promoter's outlandish financial requests that made the tour unrealistic.
If there's anyone I know of who would be in position to know this thing, it's Zach, so this could well be the case. If so, I'd like to issue a hearty apology to the culture warriors at Zhongnanhai for my insinuation that they were behind this travesty. Who knows? Maybe Hu Jintao was more of a Beatles guy than a Dylan fan.
Stay Bobby Stay
According to the Guardian, Bob Dylan will not be permitted to play concerts in Beijing and Shanghai, thus scuttling his proposed East Asia tour:
China's ministry of culture, which vets planned concerts by overseas artists, appeared wary of Dylan's past as an icon of the counterculture movement, said Jeffrey Wu, of the Taiwan-based promoters Brokers Brothers Herald.
Dylan fans denied the chance to see their hero might also blame Björk, who caused consternation among Chinese officials two years ago byshouting pro-Tibet slogans at a concert in Shanghai, Wu told Hong Kong's South China Morning Post.
The verdict scuppers Dylan's plans to play his first dates in mainland China. The singer, who plays around 100 concerts a year on his Never Ending Tour, had hoped to extend a multi-city Japanese leg with concerts in Beijing, Shanghai, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. All these would now be called off, Wu told the newspaper.
I think I own or have listened to most of Bob Dylan's music, and I'm struggling to remember if China, Tibet, Taiwan received any mention at all in his lyrics. Dylan also hasn't been a counter-cultural icon since the early '60s. When the hippie movement blossomed in the latter part of that decade, Dylan was living on a farm in Woodstock, New York and making folk/country albums like John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline. In other words, he hasn't raged against the machine since before the Cultural Revolution was in full swing.
I also find the Bjork connection dubious. Ministry of Culture apparatchiks are understandably not paid to keep up with Western pop music, but had they seen just one of her videos they'd have realized that the Icelandic ice queen isn't exactly a bellwether of mainstream Western culture. If anything, her embrace of Tibetan rights would almost be enough to discredit the movement.
Once again, the Chinese government reveals its inept approach to international public relations regarding the Tibet issue. Moreover I doubt even the most rabid fenqing would have been riled up by a near-septuagenarian folk singer entertaining a few thousand nostalgic boomer laowai.
The Chinese Fly
Over the past three weeks I spent some time on the road, visiting first Shanghai and then Chongqing. Unavoidably, this meant a lot of time in airports, the truest indication that in the words of Thomas Friedman, the world is indeed flat.
I've been to airports in probably 25 different countries, and what strikes me is how remarkably similar they all are. It's as if airports exist as a country unto themselves, peaceful enclaves surrounded by an often hostile world. The prices, too, seem to have little relation to how much things cost elsewhere, a point most humorously made by Jerry Seinfeild. "Tuna sandwiches, 14 dollars. Tuna's very rare here,".
In China, the verisimilitude of airports is even more striking, as China itself is so vastly different from everywhere else. For those who haven't had the chance to visit our lovely Middle Kingdom, China is a smash of sights, noise, attitude, excitement, and hustle.
So airports here provide a respite from the madness, an oasis of order, sanity, and direction. Nevertheless, differences in the flying habits do persist.
Over the course of my lifetime airports in the United States have become progressively less pleasant. This is of course a consequence of our idiotic 'homeland security' regime, in which airports enact inept and reactionary policies in a futile attempt to ward off terrorism. The security check at American airports is particularly galling. Uniformed officials herd us together like cattle, barking orders like kindergarten teachers on a school field trip. Once the passenger approaches the magic security point, he's ordered to remove all clothing that might remotely trigger the ire of the metal detection machine. Should he neglect to remove a coin, or a belt, or some other harmless item, he's forced to try again, keeping the queue from progressing smoothly.
In China, on the other hand, the system is far more laid back. For some reason, I set off the metal detector each and every time I walk through it. No problem. I merely step on a platform, have a polite official scan my body with a wand, and then am sent through. Far more humane and pleasant.
The Chinese though are rather impatient when it comes to getting on and off the plane itself. People hover around the gate anxiously, trying to block others from marching into the passageway first. When the gate opens, people hurry through in a desperate attempt to sit still in their uncomfortable seat before all others. I've had little old grannies slip past me so slyly I thought I'd been caught in a basketball-style pick'n'roll. In the end, though, we all end up tied- sitting still in our seats, breathing recycling air, ready for the ritual of the flight.
The flights themselves are mostly unremarkable, though is it just me or do the Chinese seem unnaturally eager to announce the onset of turbulence? On the one-hour flight from Chongqing to Kunming, the stewardess announced that we'd encountered turbulence no fewer than five times, so much so that I became irritated by the constant 'fasten your seatbelts' bell sound.
Then there's the landing, which is so ordinarily so rough you might as well have parachuted in. While the plane taxies around the airport at high speeds, Chinese passengers are fond of standing up, switching on their phones, and organizing their luggage. The young, pettite stewardesses try in vain to get everyone to calm down to no avail. Again, all the rush is for no apparent benefit. We all end up having to stand in a straight, orderly line anyway before disembarking.
Finally, there's the baggage claim. The Chinese have turned jockeying for position at baggage claim terminals into something of a contact sport. At the airport last week I counted no fewer than five people literally poking their heads into the space where the bags come out from, as if to call for the bags to arrive sooner. Of course, this is again a waste of time. All the movement, pushing, shouting, and frayed nerve do not make the slightest bit of difference into when we actually get to arrive at our eventual destination.
That last bit depends on the taxi. So once you've miraculously gotten off the plane, found your way into baggage claim, fought successfully for your suitcase, navigated the crush of people in the terminal, and gotten outside, you're faced with an even bigger challenge: China itself. And there, as if they'd been waiting for you all along, stand a group of men and women who'd love to take you to your hotel if you'd just be willing to pay three times the meter price.
So maybe the flying experience in China isn't like it is everywhere else, after all. Yet like airports and airplanes all around the world, China's are possessed by ritual and habit and arcane rules and a million other little things that are uncannily part of the process of moving, very quickly through air, from point A to point B.
Life and Death on the Gorge
The blog In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock has a terrific tribute to Margo Carter, an eccentric Australian woman who ran a guesthouse near the beginning of Yunnan's Tiger Leaping Gorge trail. Carter died recently, likely from exposure while hiking. Sadly, her demise followed reports of bizarre behavior:
I got much of my information from a website set up by a Yunnan-based British trekking guide called Richard Scotford, who used to run a trekkers lodge in Deqin. In an article Death on The Kora, Richard describes a strange encounter he had with Margo while he was leading a group of trekkers over the Doker-La pass on the first leg of the Kawa Karpo kora in October 2009.
His group were surprised - to say the least - to be passed by a lone western woman traveling at speed (alone, that is, except for her dog and a local guide with a horse, left trailing well to the rear) and they noted that she was only lightly clad for the trail. Not only that, but they were taken aback by how rude she was to the trekking group, refusing to talk with them at all during their brief encounter on the trail.
Things got stranger later in the day when they saw her again and she chose to camp alongside them, but again was uncommunicative. That was until she started saying that she would 'turn them in' to the local authorities and warning them that they would be turned back at local police checkpoints further up the Salween (Nujiang) valley and the local Tibetans would shun them. The group were un-nerved by her unfriendly and bizarre behaviour (she would only talk to them in Chinese at one point) and her apparent threats.
Margo left early the next day and they never saw her again. In fact, they were some of the last people to see her alive. Richard is an experienced trekker in the region and he thought the claims that Margo made to them about the authorities were implausible and hard to believe. He was proved right. There were no roadblocks, and after some cautious checking, his group continued on uneventfully into the Salween valley, where the local Tibetans were friendly and helpful, and soon the trekkers had put the memory of this odd encounter with the 'mad' western woman out of their minds.
However, a few days later when they came to do the strenuous return leg of their kora, back over the high passes to the Mekong valley in the east, they got a shock. After the exhausting climb up to the exposed Shu-La pass, they descended on the eastern side to find Margo's guide waiting at the first small settlement high up on the mountain. He was frantic and said he had not seen Margo for two days. She had gone missing at some point after leaving the guide behind when she hurried along in front to attempt the pass by herself
I actually met Margo once, when hiking the gorge in 2006. From what I remember she was small and wiry and talked a mile a minute; she struck me as the kind of person who was always doing a million things at once.
I found her helpful, though- she provided useful recommendations for how much to bring, for what to eat, and other details inexperienced hikers like me were bound to get wrong. She also recommended a guesthouse in Lijiang which proved to be a nice place to stay.
I imagine it takes a dash of eccentricity for a Westerner to want to live in a place as remote as the Gorge, and certainly spending 15 years there would be challenging from a mental health perspective.
The list of foreigners drawn to Yunnan's stunning landscape is long and peppered with eccentrics like Margo, someone whom I'm sure never intended to settle here but did anyway. That her last days were characterized by bizarre and unpleasant behavior are merely a sad coda on what was apparently an interesting, full life South of the Clouds.
(link via Danwei)
Chungking Express
I'm currently writing from the comforts of the Starbucks just astride the Liberation Monument right in the center of Chongqing, China, where I'm attending a work-related conference. My hotel, the conference room where my meetings have been, and my hotel form a triangle representing a mere sliver of this city. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to throw out thinly-referenced, totally unfair perceptions gleaned from my few days here.
Chongqing by some accounts is the largest city in the world. This might come as a surprise to some of you who, while your knowledge of Chinese geography might not be Magellan-like in its thoroughness, still think you'd know a fact like this. In fact, this distinction relies a little too much on misleading accounting.
Amid its various provinces, special administrative regions, and laughably named 'autonomous regions', China has four cities that serve as their own province: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing. Until 1997, Chongqing was snuggled neatly in the eastern part of Sichuan Province. After a bit of administrative maneuvering, it is a province of its own.
So while there are technically 30 million people in Chongqing, this figure represents the population of the province, not the city. An area, mind you, roughly the size of the Netherlands. Fuling, the city made famous in Peter Hessler's River Town, is now considered part of Chongqing.
Chongqing itself then isn't the largest city in China, much less the world. This isn't to say, though, that it's in any way small. It's astonishingly, mind-blowingly big. The skyline appearing on the banks of the Yangtze River stretches on for miles in all directions. Everywhere one looks in this city- provided the notorious air pollution isn't particularly nasty that day- there are gigantic apartment and office blocks. The city's many hills also allow for a number of neck-craning vistas during a day's stroll around the center.
Chongqing is also known for its hot food- and hot women. Proving the former conviction is as easy as a bite of the city's tongue-numbing hot pot cuisine. As for the latter, conclusive evidence is rather more subjective, but in the humble opinion of this blogger the reputation is justified. Also hot- the tempers of the locals here. I knew the Sichuanese were fiery but even I was surprised to witness two near-fracases (fracasi?) in the space of five minutes while quietly eating a bowl of dandan noodles (æ‹…æ‹…é¢) only the aptly named Good Food Street (好åƒè¡—).
Tomorrow night I fly back into the mountainous redoubt I call home: Yunnan Province. But in the meantime I'll enjoy my last 24 hours in one of China's three furnances, one whose name rather unfortuantely has been given to a well-known Hong Kong slum guesthouse.
Shanghai
I suppose China is one of the few countries in the world where one can have culture shock during a domestic trip. During my first two or three days in Shanghai's French Concession, I felt much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. We're not in Kunming anymore, Toto.
That Shanghai is big needs no more comment. Nor that it is expensive- I felt like a country bumpkin when I audibly gasped at the price of a whiskey cocktail I had at a trendy bar. What struck me as most impressive about the city was the individuality of its businesses.
This might require further explanation. In Kunming, as in most Chinese cities, quite a lot of the businesses one encounters on the street have an ersatz quality. The various å°å–部, 兰州拉é¢,过桥米线, and other joints all resemble each other and have little discernible special qualities. It's as if Kunming's city planners conceived a Platonic ideal of a snack shop, replicated it a thousand times, and distributed them throughout the city.
In Shanghai I noticed that every little shop, or restaurant, had individual characteristics, much as they do in San Francisco and Paris and Istanbul.
Then again the cumulative effect of Shanghai is that you feel like you could be anywhere around the world. I seem to think a Westerner could be transplanted into the French Concession, given a wad of 100 RMB notes, and feel utterly and completely at home. I recall in Beijing wandering through neighborhoods that were unmistakably Chinese, while in Shanghai these proved elusive. For me, as a person very much at home in China, this felt unnerving.
Then again Shanghai has the hustle and bustle of a city that knows it's world-class. The subway system is fantastic- clean, fast, efficient, comprehensive, and affordable. Even the taxi drivers seemed to have a degree of professional polish occasionally lacking in places like Kunming.
Yet I wonder if in a way Shanghai hasn't reverted back to its pre-revolutionary days as a playground for the international elite; a place whose back seems firmly turned against the hinterland behind it. I got a few looks from people when I mentioned that I lived in Kunming- like a visitor from the stix who wandered into the big city.
Nevertheless, as I sat with my perfect orange juice, coffee, and burrito breakfast one morning overlooking the city I felt a distinct sense that any city that can provide this, in such a setting, is alright by me.
Shanghai Slim
I'm currently visiting the Whore of the Orient...no, silly, not a person but rather the city of Shanghai. I'm here attending a conference for work but will have a few days off to explore a little. More content to come.
Exceptionalism Cont.
Damon Linker of the New Republic has an interesting, intelligent response to the National Review article I linked to recently in defense of American exceptionalism. I particularly liked this remark about President Bush:
Lots of conservatives turned on George W. Bush by the end of his presidency. But here we see that if Bush didn't exist, the right would have had to invent him. His proud parochialism, his simple-minded and insecure suspicion of intelligence, his swaggering self-righteousness€”all of it is the natural expression of contemporary conservatism's outlook on the world.
Couldn't agree more.
National Review has responded to Linker's criticism, as well as other reactions, in this piece. I take exception- pun intended- to this comment about left-wing support of mass transit:
Contrary to our least literate critics, nothing in that passage suggests that we consider subways an infringement on our liberty. Nor does it mean that we are skeptical of mass-transit subsidies because the policy strikes us as European. It means something closer to the opposite: that we suspect that much of the enthusiasm for these subsidies among liberals is based on mass transit's association with Europe.
Emphasis mine. This statement has it exactly wrong. Speaking as a liberal, my enthusiasm for subsidized mass transit comes from the fact that mass transit programs are environmentally sound, reduce dependency on foreign sources of energy, and are typically more efficient in and between urban areas than automobiles. These reasons derive from having empirically observed mass transit systems in action while living in foreign countries, and thus wishing subsidized programs to be implemented in the US.
The NR piece appears to accuse liberals of believing in European exceptionalism, when in fact the opposite is true. The conservative opposition to mass transit exists largely because it is less prevalent in the US than in Europe, and therefore in their twisted ideology must be better.
NR concludes with an absolute whopper of a statement. To wit:
Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England "a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs." Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.
The shocking part of this sentence? Hanson is actually a professor of history. This remark would embarrass a fifth-grader. But in their effort to keep any contrary evidence from interrupting their precious pet theory of American exceptionalism, NR somehow tries to argue that slavery 'never became part of the national psyche'.
The mind boggles. I realize contemporary conservatives disdain intellectualism, but in publishing this piece shouldn't an even cursory understanding of basic American history be required?
I realize I could probably devote hours of my time to reading mind-numbing right-wing screeds and rebutting them, but I think this question of exceptionalism cuts to the very core of how right-wing and left-wing Americans view our country. And as I've argued earlier, exceptionalism has a central position in contemporary Chinese politics as well.