Dancing Bears, the pictures

I have been bad and haven't posted in a long time. Here are some pictures. Maybe I'll post some text to go with them after dinner.

Non-reading

I've been spending what seems like an outrageous amount of time reading box scores and articles on espn.com recently, and I've started to wonder why. It's not like I'm that interested in the results or anything. Certainly I am an Eagles fan, and I have read with some disappointment about this season where the "Iggs" have managed to loose all of their pro bowl players to either injury or what I feel can only be described as "being TO." However, I'm used to watching the games every Sunday, and reading about them just doesn't carry the same sort of emotions.

And I've been reading about basketball as well. Usually the NBA season doesn't start to interest me very much until at least the early spring, but I've been reading about it almost every day. There must be some reason that I spend so much time pouring over the sports websites. I don't think it's because I'm looking for something to do. On days when I teach, I have plenty of class to worry about, plus my meetings with students, English table, taiji class and sports (playing sports that is). I increasingly think that the main reason I spend so much time at espn.com, as well as reading music reviews and web comics, is that I don't have enough to not-do.

My mom has always stressed the importance of having enough down-time. I think that I have built enough down-time into my schedule here, and occasionlly a little too much. The thing about down-time is that it is still filled with activities of a sort; most people don't spend their downtime just sitting staring into space. This is the time that is filled with conversations about nothing important (gossip, music, sports), by watching TV (Scrubs, Arrested Development, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, sports), by reading (Time, the Phoenix, random stuff on the internet). In China, those non-activities are all harder to come by.

Conversations with Chinese students are usually a little more like work than non-work, and they don't know anything about the music I like or about football. TV here is in Chinese, hence a real activity, and is usually really bad. I do watch the occasional show on my computer, but download times are excessive. Plus half the point of watching TV is watching it with friends so we can make new in-jokes and eat hoagies or Quaker Oatmeal Squares (both unavailable in China). Throw-away reading material is also a little scarce and I'm making all-too-fast progress through my latest shipment of books, both quick-reading novels and slower-but-still-too-quick- reading history books. So I spend an inordinate amount of time reading online: the New York Times, various blogs and music sites and...espn.com.

I have a more interesting post about god complexes that will need to wait a while. I'm kinda tired of writing today; I spent about six hours writing for a project that is not yet ready to see the light of day (Wednesday is my day off teaching). So here's some non-writing to tide you over until I post something more worthwhile, I'm gonna go do some more non-reading.

Eddy Currents 3 - Halloween:

Halloween party was fun. We bobbed for apples and danced and played assassin. It felt a lot like middle school. For some reason, all the girls arrived in a big bunch in costume about an hour before all the boys arrived in a big bunch without costumes. By the time they arrived, my camera battery had died. I guess something had to die to make it a real Halloweeen (spooky!). In any case, the lack of costumes on their part makes the decease of my camera less tragic.
Chinese ghost, foreign devil.










Pumpkins










Failure










And sucess

We interupt this program for a technical bulliten...

At the hazard of having to retract this, again, when my computer fails, again: blogspot is now working from my appartment. It is not working from almost any other computer I have checked in China. Hrm.... In any case, this means that I will be able to see my posts as you see them, dear reader, for means of error correction and the like and I will be able to see comments. So if you feel the desire to comment, please do not restrain yourself on my account; I may even reply.

We now return to Eddy Currents...

Eddy Currents part 2 - Kaifeng: Roosters and Peacocks and Giraffes, Oh My!

Kaifeng was nice. The food was nice. But the predominant feature of the trip was the kitsch. Here's what I mean:

We were there for the Chrysanthamum show. The flowers were nice. Here are some nice yellow and red and purple ones behind Lisa and Mr. Zhao and Ye Dong of the FAO.










Ok. And here is a giant paper-mache rooster on a flower globe depicting China surrounded by more nice flowers and some plastic deer, for some reason.










Remember what I wrote about unintentional poses being funny. Well as Bernice is demonstrating, they're even funnier when you know the person...and a semi-abstract giant golden rooster is involved. But the roosters make sense, it's the year of the rooster. So do the peacocks (not shown) because they are easy to make out of flowers and are pretty and stuff. And then...






"So I really like the purple ones and those balls of flowers are....is that....a pair of....giraffes.....?"












Still to come: Eddy Currents part 3 - Halloween: Clever Subtitle.

Eddy Currents part 1 - Xi'an: Drums and Cranes in the Rain

Due to a variety of reasons (lazyness, computer falure) I have not posted pictures here for a very long time. I have finally uploaded these pictures to the computer, but I decided that rather than going back and adding them to old entries, I would post new entries specifically for these images that got stuck other places. Because it is easiest to post four at a time, here are my four favorites from Xi'an:


In China, only drums and raindrops get in line













This is a good country to be obsessed with construction sites











I always think it's annoying when random people step into your pictures. Except when they make poses this perfect. Note the cranes in the background.











There is a pose in taiji that we jokingly call the backhoe. I'm not sure what it's really called, but that animal is probably just about extinct, which is certainly not the case with this beautiful orange species.

Why I am a socialist

Kinda sick this week. Hope it isn't the bird flu. Makes it kinda hard to teach; realizing just how much energy teaching takes.

I feel like continuing to make broad sweeping statements with little specific justification. So I will.

I've been thinking for a long time about the shortcomings of a free-market system. I suppose in many ways this ongoing dialogue with myself was one of the primary reasons for beginning this blog: to make it easier to trace the course of my thought.

Since the creation of agricultural surplusses, and potentially before that point, the primary concern of society - arguably the concern that created society, religion and government - has been the distribution of that surplus. The control of excess resources (those beyond what is needed for sustinance) is the primary determinant of power in all its guises. This in turn has generated the potential for lasting creation on the part of society. Prior to the possibility of leisure, lasting advances were essentially impossible. Furthermore, greater amounts of free time lead to larger and faster advancements. I think this is relatively evident, especially when you consider the millions of years it took to develop the first cities, the thousands of years it took to create the first metropolises and the mere hundreds of years it has taken for cities to become the predominant locale of human existance (according to the Economist, more than half of humanity is expected to live in cities for the first time starting next year). It is further revealing that the poor of the world in the superslum cities are perhaps not as poor as they are generally considered. They have increasing potentials for limited levels of saving and borrowing, a primary way that the market economy measures excess and therefore leisure.

How to distribute these excess resources remains a particularly tangled issue. On the one hand, the socialist side of me advocates an even distribution of resources to everyone. On the other hand, the elitist side of me recognises that some uses of resources are more fitting than others and that certain people are better equiped to determine this allocation. A free market has shown itself to become by far the best means to distribute resources to those best able to make effective use of them; the more perfectly free the market, the beter the means of distribution. There are many good reasons for intellegent and observant people to advocate liberetarianism. Particularly at the forward- and rear-most margins of social advancement, the market seems to solve a great deal of problems: the market has long been recognized as a good means of allocating to particularly innovative people and ideas, recently it has shown itself as a pretty good means of helping the poorest and most backwards elements of society as well. The problem lies more in the middle.

I have written at least one previous post concerning the problem of the middle-man. I will summarize here by saying simply this: transporation and storage are important services that are nessisary for innovation, nevertheless they appear to take far more than their share of resouces to the point of actively supressing innovation and advancement in some cases. There are two other major problems that diminish the efficacy of the free market as a means of distribution. These can be summarized as history and happenstance.

Take as a thought experiment a group of people crash-landing on a deserted island. The individuals bring nothing with them, and the resources on the island are distributed perfectly evenly among them. Assume further that no particularly disabled individuals are included in this population and that resources are not especially scarce. A market mechanism for distribution of these resources will tend to insure that the individuals with the most talent for innovation will tend to receive more of the resources, improving both their own living standard and that of the island collectivly. Furthermore, the remainder of the population, the less-extrordianry-but-still-able individuals, will still be able to ensure a resonable standard of living for themselves, if somewhat less than that of the innovators, and will benifit from the innovations of the elite, if to a lesser degree than the elite themselves. Finally, people on the island will tend toward the jobs that best suit their skills. The only major problem with the market on this island, at least in the short term, is the afformentioned problem of distribution, which, assuming a small society, is not much of a problem.

The problems that arise when we move from hypothetical island to actual society occur when we remove the circumstances that I ruled out of the thought experiment: circumstance and history. If the resources are distributed less than equally on the island, for instance if one individual by chance lives in an area rich in building materials while the others live in areas poor in building materials, the guy with all the wood will end up richer than the others without needing to be especially intellegent or innovative. The wood-rich individual will also be unlikely to efficiently allocate his labor. This problem can clearly be seen in the distribution of natural resources in the real world (think oil in particular). A second problem of circumstance is created by the existance of individuals with particular disabilities which render them unsuitible for most or all work: they will be unable to provide for themselves. Finally, the problems of training and development are at issue. Perhaps one citizen by temperment would make an ideal doctor but because of a lack of education cannot fulfil this role. Or alternatively, an person whose frame is particularly suitable for heavy lifting and construction may be rendered inneffective by circumstances such as undernourishment or disease.

This last issue of training and development ties in well with the problem created by history, which is perhaps bigger than that of circumstance. In the short-run, the island, returning to hypothetically equal resource and ability distribution, will be run effiently by the most talented individuals recieving the resources they need to exercise their talents. In the long-run, however, certain people will inherit resources beyond their merit as a result of past merit, either their own or that of their ancestors. At first, the smartest, strongest, most skilled will excell, but eventually their children, who might not be particularly smart or strong or skilled will still be able to excell because of what they inherit. Instead of one person happening to have a bigger supply of good building materials than the others by chance, he or she will have a bigger supply because his or her ancestors were more talented. This effectively amounts to the same thing as chance, but while hapenstance cannot be helped, it seems especially unfair that the forces of history will create this same inbalance.

There is an even more insidious way in which history creates an inbalance, however. The inheritance I described above only details the effects on a population where children are only indirectly helped by their parents (by inheriting a favorable situation). This would only occur if children were born essentially mature and their parents died in childbirth. But in fact, children tend to be raised by their parents for the beter part of twenty years, if not longer. During this time, the children of rich parents recieve disproportionately good educations and typically have better health as a result of better nutrition, hygene and medical care. These effects, even without the inheritance of physical resources, are typically more than enough to help ensure elite status, even if the children do not naturally posses greater capacity to learn or superior physical stature. Consider two twenty-one year olds, both of whose families go totally bankrupt just before their twenty-first birthdays (when they are set to recieve their inheritance). The one from the richer family is still much more likely to suceed than the one from the poorer family, simply as a result of living a more comfortable life for twenty-one years.

So what does this mean? It means even if we create a society where distribution and similar concerns are non-existant (i.e. one in which there are effectively no barriers to trade, transportation is effectively free and all industries have essentially no barriers to entry) and in which resources are perfectly evenly distributed (and are all standard, as opposed to positional, goods), it will nevertheless morph into one that is unequal. Furthermore, it will become unequal in a manner that appears to me altogether unfair. While I am willing to accept a level of inequality if it is on a meritocratic basis, I continue to take issue with historical or circumstantial bases of inequality.

However, I think that these historical and circumstantial bases of inequality are exactly those that we can take measures to resolve. These measures include steeply progressive income and especially inheritance taxes, providing for those who are unable to provide for themselves (i.e. wellfare, social security and the like) and especially steps to rectify the inbalances of unequal upbringings such as good quality education and health care for everyone. These last two are especially difficult, but that is what makes them especially important. I hope to write more on this later.

5 Predictions for the Chinese Century

It was inevitable. What with being in China and being a somewhat overly grandiose thinker, I was going to produce one of these lists eventually. These have largely come out of discussions with friends on both sides of the Pacific but their statement here in full is new.

1. It will be a Chinese Century

I usually like to qualify this by saying "baring a major disaster or change of fortune," but I feel like being sweeping with this prediction. I am certainly not the first pundit to have done so:

In the past several centuries, international trade has increasingly become the most significant factor in determining global dominance. At least since Rome, and probably before that, the most dominant powers in the Western world have been those buying into the paradigm of trade. Rome understood the primary importance of trade at its peak. In turn, so did the Arab empire, the free states in Northern Italy, Spain and Portugal, Holland, England and finally the US. I would hesitate to make such statements about the non-Western world until more recently, but it is clear that the acceptance of European-style economies boosted pre-war Japan over a stubborn China, and then a post-war Japan, as well as the Four Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) over a differently-stubborn China. However, if you look at the current state of international economics, it is clear who is becoming dominant. In less than thirty years, China has gone from essentially no foreign trade to one of the biggest-trading countries in the world. It will not need another thirty to surpass the United States as the most important market.

You don't need to look at statistics to see why China is becoming such an economic giant. Certainly, China has the biggest population of any country, a fact which has already made it perhaps the most important producer, but it is increasingly also a country of consumers, which arguably means more in terms of economic power (an argument for another time, but nevertheless a worthwhile one). But beyond these figures, you can look at farmers selling whatever they can find at weekend markets, you can look at museums where everything is for sale, you can look at downtown Shanghai or the smallest villiage and find a culture whose entreprenurial spirit could not be squashed by so small a thing as twenty or thirty years of Mao.

Economics aside, although I would argue (Marxist that I am) that economics is by far the most powerful force in history, China looks poised for leadership. The powers of the last century are on the decline: Russia imploded and shows no signs of resurfacing any time soon; the EU weilds some power, but doesn't have the unity of purpose for real global leadership; the US shows serious signs of decline. We haven't had a real builder as a leader since Jackson, we haven't had a real reformer since the sixties. All we have left are misguided crusaders (like Reagan and Bush the younger) and corrupt bureaucrats (like the rest of the Bush clan and, lets face it, Clinton). Increasingly the voice of reason in the international scene, and the one with enough power to back it up, is China.

This is, to me, the real decisive factor putting China ahead of, say, India or such lesser alternatives as Brasil or Indonesia as the real power of the coming century. All those countries have large and growing populations with growing economic power. But while China has a stable government and growing respect in the international diplomatic scene, the others are still relative basket-cases. China's biggest diplomatic issues are Taiwan, Tibet and human rights. However, if you look at their positions on these issues, they are to preserve the relatively peaceful status-quo. Despite "tensions" across the Taiwan straight, there is no actual fighting, as there is with some frequency in Kashmir and parts of Indonesia. Tibet is China's Trail of Tears, it has been and remains a tragic situation somewhat like (although of a lesser scale than) the exterminations and forced migrations of American Indians. But like American Indians, the importance of Tibetans internationally is essentially a non-issue (or will be as soon as the Dalai Lama dies). The real racial issue China will face will be with its Muslim population (see prediction 4). Human rights is improving somewhat in China, and is at least as bad in its main rising-power rivals (and getting much worse in America).

This will be the Chinese century. And just as the concerns of America, and especially the 20th Century's truely new power - Russia, became the concerns of much of the world, so too will China's problems become those of the world in the 21st Century. These problems will be: Energy, the Muslim world and environmental degradation.

2. Energy will be the most defining concern

The energy crisis in only going to get worse as the Chinese become bigger consumers of energy. They already use more oil than the produce; they even use more coal than they produce. The Three Gorges Dam that is supposed to supply power to a large portion of the country is looking likely to be an environmental disaster of at least a moderate degree, and is unlikely to meet the growing energy concerns. You need only look at the fact that street food vendors are needing to supliment their coal cylinders with found wood (including that from construction sites and even disposable chopsticks) because the price of coal has risen substantially. Or to look at the fact that this is all happening despite strict energy policies in place to limit the use of electricity and heat.

Unless China starts developing significant other sources of energy now, such as building wind farms off-shore and on the windy plains of North China and Inner Mongolia, investing in hydrogen fuel-cell technology, building more nuclear plants and/or building more (potentially disasterous) dams, it is going to need to go abroad for fossil fuels. And just like the US, it will probably be forced into difficult diplomatic relationships with the Muslim world as a concequence. China's largest untapped sources of oil are primarly in the far-western province of Xinjiang. Xinjiang is largely inhabited by Turkik-speaking Muslims who are already becoming upset with the encroachment of Han Chinese, and especially with being left out of the profits from their oil-rich landscape. Other foreign oil will likely have to come from the Middle East. This will probably come through, if not from, the always-unstable central-asian countries that were formerly part of the USSR and are increasingly having their own problems with Fundamentalist Islam.

3. The conflict with Fundamentalism will define the 21st century the way the conflict with Communism defined the 20th.

I am not the first to have said this. However, I think the American (and European) conflict with Islamic Fundamentalism will be ultimately less important than the conflict between China and the Muslim World. Just as America first avoided, then interfered with the problems the rise of Soviet Communism caused the old powers, so too will China first avoid, then interfere with the problems Islamic Fundamentalism will cause the new old powers. As in America, China's economic interests will dictate both decisions. The secondary, and perhaps more immidiate, cause of international conflict will be the rise of a new sort of Fascism among the newest of the old powers (America instead of Germany) and perhaps in a loser power (France instead of Italy?). Like Nazism, this ideology will contain elements of its rival ideology (Fundamentalism), but with a National rather than (at least superficially) International agenda. But ultimately the conflict will emerge clearly as one between the economically dominant power (China instead of America) and the rebel power (the Islamic Middle East instead of the USSR).

4. Muslims will be China's oppressed and rebellios minority

China is already showing some signs or trouble with its own Muslim population. In Xian they significant Muslim population is distrusted by the Han Chinese (the distrust is mutual). They have a harder time finding jobs, tend to be poorer and appear to have a bigger crime problem. Note that this Muslim population is long-standing, and will likely become a problem similar to that of blacks in America after slavery. Like the former slaves, the Hui (another term for Muslims) are subject to both economic and social, and occasionally political, oppression. This is also true, although to somewhat lesser degrees, with the other minorities in culturally-Han China.

The problem in Tibet and especially in Xinjiang is much more significant. The Turkik tribes - including Uygurs, Tajiks, Turkmens and others - are not physically similar to the Han Chinese, they look Central Asian. This means that the problems faced by the Hui (who are also muslims, but look "Chinese" except for their hats) are compounded among the Turkik groups by an even stronger sense of foriegness. For all that the Chinese government claims to give autonomy to the minorities, this autonomy is generally minimal. In the case of the more dangerous minorities (those with stronger claims for independance - the Tibetans and Central Asians), the "special autonomous regions" are actually subject to harsher control by Beijing. Xinjiang, with its oil, is also the destination of choice for carpet-baggers from Eastern China. While Tibet is all but a lost cause, the Muslim minorities are a differnt story. Tibet is isolated, while Xinjiang is connected to the countries in Central Asia with populations most similar to its own natives. And the Hui are already significant populations in some cities in Han China, including Xian and Zhengzhou. They are all in key positions within China and yet when China speaks of Chinese culture it makes at best a minimal and paternalistic reference to the non-Han, just as we paternalize our long-standing black and American Indian minorities. In addition to the external political and ideological threat of Islamic Fundamentalism, China will face the internal threat of its own repressed minorities, many of whom just happen to be Muslim as well.

5. Environmental degradation will be devestating

Everyone wants a car. All the little street vendors use coal in their stoves (or wood now that coal is getting too expensive), creating an incredibly diffuse and hard to control source of air pollution. In most of Northern and Eastern China, your snot turns black all winter. People throw plastic bags everywhere and dump all manner of garbage into the rivers. And they use plastic bags for everything. Forests must be getting felled every day to feed the market for disposable chopsticks. Pigeons no longer live in Beijing because the air has become too toxic. And I haven't even mentioned industry yet.

The damn dam is already causing problems along the Yangzi, the most important body of water in China, and they will only get worse when it actually gets finished. There are few limits on the pollution of heavy industry, and everywhere cement factories and brick factories and steel smelters belch barely-regulated coal smoke into the air to supply the needs of the construction industry, which is building new appartment complexes all the time, even though people still haven't moved into some of the old ones (because developers only want to build luxury or semi-luxury complexes and the primary demand is for low-cost housing). All those shoes and clothes and toys and nicknacks you buy at Wall-Mart are made here in other factories that bech more coal smoke and dump more waste into the topsoil. Chinese growers have few limits on pesticide and herbicide use, but it barely even matters because in some places the environment is so toxic that the fruit is growing carcinogenic even without cancer-causers sprayed on by the farmers. Some tea has been reported to have dangerous levels of lead, presumably because it is grown in soil that has been contaminated.

Parts of Europe took generations for their water supply to become clean after it was polluted by the first waves of factories. I can only imagine what will happen in China, where the population pressures are two orders of magnitude worse than in industrial-revolution England, and the power- and heat-usage and factory size and density are correspondingly higher.

This is too long. So I'm done for now.

Pack

Two posts in one day? Madness!

I've been reading Bertrand Russel's "History of Western Philosophy," which is quite good, I can see why it is such a definitive introductory text. However, I came to the realization today that Russel falls prey to a fallacy that plagues, among others, Rousseau: he assumes that humans are naturally loners and that they group together out of self-interest.

I will address this by refering to a pop-psychology question that I nevertheless feel sheds some particularly interesting philosophical light on this question. Freshmen and kids at sleep-away camp and other groups of youngsters thrown together, when they are first meeting each other and trying to get to know each other's inner souls as quickly as possible, sometimes like to ask questions like "describe a waterfall to a blind man" and such that are supposed to shed light on various aspects of our psyches. My personal favorite, however, is the question "would you rather be happy or be correct?" I have at various times tried to convince myself that I would rather be the former, but I know that in fact this is not the case.

I have tried a variety of techniques to convince myself of this falsehood, but it ultimately does not ring true. For example, I had convinced myself that I don't care so much about being right because I have learned to accept and learn from instances in which I am wrong. The thing that I have come to realize is that the reason I accept being wrong is that once I have rectified my error, I am right again. It is not that I don't care about being correct, but that I am willing to accept the process nessisary to arrive at correctness. This, I believe, is what makes an intellectual, or a philosopher. And it is this preference for correctness and the road thereto that separates them (us) from the bulk of humanity and turns them (us) into loners.

As my writing group has mentioned in their essays on how "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing," knowledge can lead to arrogance. This arroagance can be obvious or subtle, but it almost invariably leads to a sense of separation from people, except for such times as it is nessisary to submit to the crowd in order to convince them of things or get things done, but this invariably entails a certian level of condescention.

So I have thought, probably incorrectly, that when I feel lonely here in China, it is because I miss the intellectual stimulation I had back home. I am sure that this is part of it, but I think that what I really miss is pack. What I mean by pack is the easy and seemingly meaningless interactions with the people who form the everyday. Like dogs, humans naturally like to run around in big groups. They like to form their little alliances and rivalries and infatuations and intrigues that seem meaningless to the outside. I have trivially and cynically commented on numerous occasions that there always seem to be some friends who are more or less
"replacable" and others who seem to last. The thing is that it is hard to know who will be the ones to last. And this does not lessen the importance of any of the members of a pack.

So I think what I miss second-most in China, at least at the present, is intellectual stimulation. And what I miss most is pack. Sure, I have been taking iniative to try to find a group of students to do stuff with. The thing is, I value pack more at night than during the day. The day has always been when work and thinking gets done. The night has always been when I ate with family or with the "pack" friends: when we watched Scrubs on Alex's computer or Korean movies on Sanch's TV or Aqua Teen Hunger Force in Rich's room; when I gorged on mini-donuts with Ed, white pizza with Rob, cereal with dad; when Alex wanted to go to the Haven or Mike wanted to go to Wawa or Joe wanted to go to Wawa or we ran into Chris at...Wawa. So night is always when I want to relax with friends, but it is when the students get kicked out of the teachers' appartments. And I miss those last words of the night, the "don't stay up to late" or "wake me up before you go to class" or "I'm gonna hurt in the morning."

You're not punk and I'm telling everyone

Appollogies for any and all extreme delays, my computer is still "huai de" as they say, I will take it to be looked at later this week.

A decent amount has happened since the last post, including a relatively sucessful first week and a half of English Table, which I started essentially through force of will and with no help from the English department; a trip to Kaifeng, one of the ancient capitals of China (I have now visited five of them, Beijing, Luoyang, Xi'an [then called Chang'an], Kaifeng and Zhengzhou [also previously known as something else], leaving only Nanjing to complete the tour); and a Halloween party for some of my students. I have also come to several interesting revelations that, although I had hints of before, had not fully formed as coherent ideas yet.

Rich, my sometime roomate and the primary reason I started listing to punk, has commented on several occasions that he would never want to live in a pre-hegemonic country. Post-imperial countries on the downward slope of their power supposedly have a better sense of irony, which makes them much more willing to laugh at themselves. Every aspect of their aesthetic is markedly changed, from their architecture and visual art to their music, performance art, humor and litterature. More importantly, these types of countries are much better able to support sub-cultures and counter-cultures.

Rich has also remarked that there is very little that he appreceates fully for itself, without any irony. This is a sentiment which I feel goes a bit far, but nevertheless describes much of the way I think and understand art and culture. This I think is also related to the state of American power. In my experiannce, older people, especially those who came of age before the mid-to-late seventies tend to have a much less developed sense of irony than younger people. And people who are optomistic about American power likewise have a more straightforward sense of humour. But I think that it is my generation that generally has the most developed sense of irony in America. We have gone from laughing at people falling down or at fart jokes to not laughing at them to laughing again, but in a self-consious way. These two things, the state of imperial or hegemonic power and a sense of irony I believe to be correlated very strongly with a punk movement, or something very like one.

In response to a large variety of cultural factors, but I believe largely to the Vietnam war, America had a series of cultural movements in the sixties and seventies running counter to the mainstream. Notable among these were the hippies and the punks. The hippies were the optomistic counter-culture, they represented a utopic view that they could reshape soceity or create a new one. Their music was syncretic and happy in a slightly meloncholy way. The punks came out of their falure; they are the pessimistic counter-culture, self-consious of their own failure. The music is defined short and energetic and simple songs and anger and represented a rejection of the concept of "good" music.

Ironically enough, the punk movement became huge. Anti-hero singers with obnoxious voices like Joey Ramone and Jonny Rotten became superstars. And now songs of rebellion are used to sell cars. The movement went underground and continually resurfaces to self-conciously sell out its ideals for commercial sucess. This is the atmosphere in which my generation grew up: with a counter-culture so counter-culture it is counter- its own independant status. This is the situation, to greater and lesser extents, I believe, in every country that has had a punk-type movement: a pessimistic counter-culture, but one that was powerful enough to become mainstream.

China has not had a punk movement. They have no sense of irony. This would appear to be because it is still a culture of mainstream optimism, it has not even progressed far enough to create a true optomistic counterculture, although it may be close. In America, among the most ardent pro-choicers you can find people who laugh and call themselves "baby-killers". Among the most sober passifists, you can find those who joke about "nuking the towel-heads". In China, it is impossible to find people who will laugh about Taiwan.

At the hazard of making overserious people angry, I will go further. Taiwan is China's abortion. It is China's gay marriage, school prayer . It is an important issue, just as all of these are important issues, but it is not nearly as important as the issues that it overshadows. It is also an issue with a fairly well-established status quo which is unlikely to be substantially changed in the near future.

Say what you will about the danger of Bush's Supreme Court Appointments to Roe v. Wade, I find it fairly unlikely that abortion will be completely criminalized. Which is not to say that we should stop paying attention to it or advocating the position that we support. I find it unlikely that gay marriage will be universally legalized in the near future, but I likewise think it unlikely that "defense of marriage" acts will stick in the long run. These are issues that politicians on both sides of the fence (and why are there only two sides to the issues, that's stupid) use to rally the troops and turn attention away from all the things they're not getting done with respect to education, health-care, social security and of course the war.

In China, with one party in power, they have found an even better issue, one that everyone agrees on rather than one that everyone disagrees on, that they can use to keep the party faithful faithful. But the diplomatic position with Taiwan is fairly stable. Despite some changes in the past few years, Taiwan is unlikely to join the mainland or to have their secession recognized at least until the current generation of politicians, on both sides of the straight, dies. It is also unlikely to be the cause of any sort of serious military confrontation. But it keeps people from talking as much about rural poverty and unemployment, a mounting health-care disaster that makes the US look solvent and increasing environmental destruction.

But China still needs a punk movement so it can laugh at these problems. And listen to some decent music while they're at it.

Cranes and Tables

This is over a week late, due to a number of problems:
-We had to work the weekend following break to make up some of the classes we missed during break (note that only Thursday and Friday classes were made up, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday classes remain a class short for the rest of the semester; another genius of the Chinese education system)
-I have broken a third computer. Well, either I did, or the power in my room did. Of the three broken computers, at least two had their power supplies burn out. Note that this is a relatively uncommon problem, and it means that there is likely something wrong with either the power at the wall or the power stip that is supposed to be protecting this expensive peice of equipment.
-The internet is down on campus, for almost a week, so I can't use the computers at the library or in my neighbor's appartments either.

So, I am once again writing from an internet cafe.

I had all kinds of poetic things to write when I came back from Xi'an, with pictures to help demonstrate my points. About how the rain kept away the worst of the tourists and created an irrigular ground-beat behind the performance at the drum tower (and an irregular wall of droplets in front of the line of drums). About the combination of garden-variety crazies and crazily garden-variety travelers at the hostel where I stayed (which was in the post office, and looked directly out onto the bell tower and the main intersection in town). About the delicious Northwestern Muslim food: yang rou pao mo (a kind of lamb stew), duck eggs (blue-green shells and salty yolks), yang rou xian tang (a kind of lamb stew), palmegranites, yang rou mian (a kind of lamb stew). About the way structural steel cranes now dominate the skies the way bone and feather cranes once did (at least in paintings; the name of my post was going to be "cranes"). About the beautiful serentiy of the Eight Immortals Temple. About the contrast between the seats on the train ride there and the sleeper compartment on the train ride back (and the equally contrasting prices thereof).

Instead, I'm writing about my second war with Secretary Wang. Oh, and the dean of the Foreign Language Department. See, we had a meeting on Thursday. The purpose of the meeting was basically for the dean to nitpick at the way we do our jobs: use the book, work in your office when you're not teaching, use the book, turn out the lights in the office when you're not working, use the book, hold English corner, oh and use the book. He then made the error of opening up for questions. Dennis mentioned that the books are generally bad, he asked if they could buy CD players to replace the out-of-date tape-decks, Janet mentioned that the books are generally bad, she said the movies that they want to teach are generally out-of-date, I said the books are out-of-date, Curtis asked how the books were chosen and could we help choose ones that are not out-of-date. The dean said teaching takes patience. I asked if we could arrange for English-only tables at lunch to help the kids practice, Dennis asked about showing English movies to help the kids practice. The dean said teaching takes patience. Then, the worst of the trouble-makers (myself and Janet) were selected for observation as "volunteers" (because we had asked questions about other things); Dennis barely avoided this same fate, and Bob was chosen as a third, seemingly because he was sitting next to Dennis.

When I mentioned the idea to some of the FAO workers, they thought it was a great plan. After the weekend, they talked to the head of the FAO, who thought it was a great plan and gave the go-ahead to arrange it. For now, the English table will be for 40 minutes at lunch; we will have two tables, which I will man myself five days a week, if need be. However, I feel that this was not the FAO's job. They are in place to deal with the foreign teachers, with respect to any out-of-class concerns. The English table is a teaching concern, and should concern the whole English department, not just the foreign teachers, and certainly not just me. With this in mind, I am looking to recruit more teachers, both foreign and Chinese, to work the tables, in the hope that we can run them more hours (for all of lunch? seven days a week? dinner and/or breakfast as well?) or that we can set up more tables. There are a lot of students, and they need to practice their spoken English more than just in class if they want it to improve. And if the duty is shared, each teacher need only do an hour a week, maybe only an hour a month! However, I think that this is the English department's responsability. If the FAO and I set this up ourselves, we are in effect doing the English Department's job, for which additional recognition is in order. Beyond recognition, the department should be doing what is nessisary to help the students learn English, not ignoring good ideas that cost them no money and a minimal amount of time. So I am going to confront the department about this, and let them know that I am not afraid to go above their heads.

And don't get me started on the state of English books in the library. For what these students are paying, they deserve better.

Xi'an

As the result of my inability to plan ahead and get a ticket to the South, I am instead going to be spending this week in Xi'an (pronounced "shee-an"), the capital of Shaanxi ("shan-shee") province, formerly the capital of the Han Dynasty (although under a different name), close to the site of the Qin (pronounced "chin") Dynasty capital (many people consider the Qin to have been the first dynasty to rule a unified China; note that we took our name for China from Qin, the Chinese people took their name for themselves from the Han Dynasty, which followed the Qin). Within striking distance are the tomb of the first emperor of China and the third-most-famous site in China, the terracotta army. Given this, I expect Xi'an, or at least the major sites there to be almost as crowded as Tian'anmen was during national day two years ago when I was in Beijing; that is to say that I expect that to see the terracotta army of the Qin, I will have to force my way through a flesh and blood army of Han.

I am somewhat more interested in other things to be seen in Xi'an, and potentially in other parts of Shaanxi, however. In particular, the Muslim quarter of the city is supposed to be quite interesting and home to some tasty snacks. Xi'an is also the city where General Zhang from the Dongbei (the Northeast, Manchuria), a sometime ally of the Nationalists under Jiang Kaishek, took the Generallisimo (Jiang that is) captive and ultimately forced the Second United Front between the Nationalists and the Communists, which was probably nessisary in enabling the Reds to force out the Japanese. Actually, this entire period of Chinese history reads like an adventure novel, especially the Long March and the capture of Jiang, and I highly recommend Red Star Over China to anyone who has not read it.

I have no fully formulated intellectualizing for this post. I have only to say that I have been reading a fair amount of Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Soul of Man, bits and peices of various plays), which has served to reaffirm my belief in socialism and individualism and my schepticism about compromise and democracy. Furthermore, I am even more convinced than ever that the appearance of paradox is a good indication that you are actually thinking.

I will end with an incomplete meditation. There is a passage in the Dao De Jing which I think is both one of the most easily understood and one of the deepest. It talks about how utility is brought by what is not there even if value is brought by what is there. For example, a bowl is only useful because it has space in the middle to put things in. At the same time, it is only a bowl because of what is around that space. This seems to me to be both a powerful statement about value and about aesthetics which requires far more thought than I have here to fully unravel. But consider this thought from Oscar Wilde (paraphrased as well): when people are poor, all they worry about is money (because they need to get by); when people are rich, all they worry about is money (because they have so much to keep track of). In both cases, money, or property, is the problem. If you have no clay, you can't make a bowl, if you have a ton of clay, then there is no space in the bowl to fill with stuff, but if you have some clay, then you can make a pretty nice bowl. So I ask, wouldn't it be better to give everyone some clay, and see what kind of neat stuff they can make?

Transportation Costs

My students are in the middle of a three-week project that I assigned them. At this point, they have written up a dialog, which they will be performing next week. Because they are international trade majors, I asked them to act out a lunch meeting wherein they would get a chance to work with business and trade vocabulary as well as general usage (i.e. ordering lunch) vocabulary. So one of the things I've been hearing a lot about is transportation costs.

Then, yesterday I went to buy train tickets for the upcoming national holiday. I discovered that the biggest problem with national holiday is that everyone is off. So by the time I (well, actually, one of my students) got to the ticket counter, there were no more sleeper tickets to Guilin (where I was hoping to meet an old friend from Beijing), there were no more sleeper tickets to Chengdu, none to Lanzhou, none to Hangzhou... Would I like to get a seat instead of a bed, asked Jiang Wei (my student). Well, lets see...all of those destinations are 16-20 or more hours away by train, so that doesn't really seem like a vacation to me.

We went to the travel agent next door to the train station to see about buying plane tickets instead. I knew they would be more expensive, but I didn't especially want to be stuck at Shengda for the week. And I figured they wouldn't be much more than two or three times as expensive as the train (which would have been about 300 RMB [about $35-40 US] to most of the destinations I mentioned). The quoted price to Guilin: 1680 RMB, more that $200 US; to Chengdu 1680 RMB. One way. To round-trip, plus add in the cost of a hotel and food for the week, and I would have been looking at an entire month's salary. Highway robbery. Part of the problem is that, at least from the air, Zhengzhou is a relative backwater (although it is a major train hub) and I would have to fly through Beijing or Shanghai or Guangzhou.

Backwater, highway robbery, these are terms from a previous age of travel. But the fact that they are still in heavy use indicates something about the state of the world; transportation costs are still a limiting factor. Furthermore, it seems that transporting goods or information or even money is still a major source of wealth. If you look at the richest people in the world today, most of them attained their wealth through what amounts to either a bridge tax or to highway robbery. That is to say that they made money by charging people to use some type of transportation, or they took it from people who were on the road. Bill Gates essentially bought up railroad land (intellectual property in the digital world) when it was cheap and made a fortune on it when the track was laid. Many other rich Westerners made their money in investments; they bought a boat and then charged people to ferry across the river. The alternative paradigm in more overt kleptocracies is to just rob the people, whether in the form of oppressive taxes or just taking their stuff.

The Nazi ideology (if they can truly be said to have had one) made a distinction between this sort of parasitic capitalism (which they attributed to the Jews) and productive capitalism (which they attributed to good Germans). This is clearly a false dichotomy, not to mention racial essentialism: without roads and boats and Internet Explorer, other businesses that actually produce things would not function. At the same time, it is bothersome to notice the enormous amount of money that goes to people who did nothing more than own land in a good location or have money to invest or have an army to tax the people. It seems to me that the farmers and craftsmen or musicians or writers aught to see the lions share of the profits. Instead it is the investors in and owners of the companies that make French fries and sell jeans and CDs and books who take the most money home. I tend to find this system of ownership problematic; the system is primarily at fault, not the owners and investors (although I still have major league issues with unethical owners and irresponsible investors; what you do with your money votes much more powerfully than anything you do in a polling booth).

The problem, a problem encountered by a million armchair revolutionaries before me, is that you can't fight a system. The Nazi's ideology was simplistic and reductive, but it provided a concrete enemy; a scapegoat certainly, but nevertheless concrete. There is no such simple solution if you consider the problem in its greater nuances. The Chinese Communists solution was a bit closer to reality: they targeted the actual parasitic capitalists, as well as the Japanese imperialists, rather than those perceived to be parasitic based on some racial characteristics. The problem that emerged was two-fold: despite the egalitarianism of the WWII-era Red Army, a new sort of class divisions emerged; and once the true class enemies had been dealt with; there was no longer an easy target for the revolution.

I'm still uncertain how to resolve this, which I suppose puts me in some pretty good company since thousands of years of thought have done little to change this. In the days of the Roman Empire, Northern and Western Europe was undeveloped because it wasn't on the Mediterranean. River transport was an order of magnitude more expensive than sea transport; land transport was two orders of magnitude more expensive. Hence the term backwater: any place off the major sea routes, even those on river systems, was backwards compared to the open-water ports. This is to a great extent still true. In America, even the major rail hubs and river ports are backwards compared to the coastal cities. In China, development is clustered, as it has been for two-hundred years (since the West forcibly reopened China to ocean trade), along the coast. Beijing is a bit inland, but all the other major development areas are on the ocean: Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Shenzhen... The other major exceptions are Wuhan and Chongqing, which are on the Yangzi (a very navigable river, especially compared to the Huang He). Even though Zhengzhou is the biggest rail hub in Central China (it has the biggest rail station in all of China), it is a backwater compared to these port cities. Hence, I am at the mercy of the bridge trolls and robber barons. And I am going to Xi'an for vacation, not because there were any sleeper beds left (there weren't), but because it is only six hours away, so I can deal with being stuck in a seat.

Big Brother: A Narrative in 3 Parts (with analysis to follow)

Part One: Marching


The first years have arrived and they march. Every morning I wake up to the sounds of them marching, and they march at night when I go to the basketball courts. They march in every avaiable open space - the afformentioned basketball courts, the volleyball courts, the soccer field, the amphitheatre, the open square in front of the library. Accompanying the marching, or leading the marching, depending on your perspective, is the rhythmic sounding of a whistle and yelling of "yi er san si" ("one two three four").
Interesting is the fact that they didn't bother to issue the students fatigues. At first, this makes them appear to be highly irregular groups wearing pink and white and yellow shirts and blue jeans and sneakers. This impression is pretty quick to fade.


Part Two: Xiao Di (Little Brother)


Students and teachers have a variety of reactions when they first see my tattoo. Some of them are turned off; others are impressed, not least of all that I had enough awareness of Chinese culture to know who Laozi is, let alone to put him on my arm; others barely seem to notice. Among the everyday working-class Chinese, however, there is one universal reaction - a mixture of disapproval and fear. This is not entirely without reason.
In China, especially outside of the major population centers of the Southern coast, Tattoos are the sole providence of two groups: the so-called "heishi hui" (literally "black societies," the mob), and outsiders. Both of these are gruops of whom everyday Chinese workers have reason to be, at the very least, wary. Usually, I will quickly explain that in America, tattoos are increasingly common among everyday people. This explanation will receive mutterring acceptance. A few days ago, however, things occurred a little differently.
I was on my way back from buying groceries, from which I was planning to attempt to cook a Western-style meal for some of my students. I stopped off at a restaurant to get some lamb soup. However, I didn't know the third character in the name ("yangrou xian mian" as it turned out). I tried to order the dish anyway, omitting this part. When the waiter replied that he didn't understand my language (a common response that I recieve when people don't bother to listen to my fairly decent Chinese), I started to yell at him that I was speaking Chinese.
This drew the attention of two formidible-looking characters who were also in the process of ordering soup. They praised my Chinese (the other common response), and yelled at the waiter to bring me some of what I wanted. He immidiately became defferential and brought me my soup. I ended up sitting at the head of a table, with these two characters on either side of me. I noticed that I was drawing even more stares than usual. Then, I noticed that one of the men had a rather substantial tattoo on his formarm. And when the two of them left, I don't recall that they paid.
I did pay on my way out, and made a joke ("5 yuan or 5 dollars?") to dispell some of the tension. Somewhat amused by this whole experiance, I told some of my friends the story of how the restaurant workers briefly thought that I was not only a gangster, but a gang boss. This is how my friend Maple began insisting that I call her "xiao di" ("little brother," but also a term gangsters use for kids who run them errands), while she in turn began to call me "da ge" ("big brother," a corresponding term of respect), or even "lao da" ("boss").


Part Three: Marching Redux


All the freshman are gathered in the amphitheater. Their units take turns marching back and forth and executing turns, yells and salutes in unison. The rest of the units sit around the venue giving thunderous applause to each repitition of the same manuevers. This ceremony lasts for several hours.


Analysis


I cannot help but be somewhat impressed by the order that the military cadres manage to inflict upon the freshman in such a short period of time. It almost makes me wonder if the military training is something the government requires the universities to inflict on their students, or whether the military does it at the request of the schools. As I have pointed out in previous posts, the use of mass control tactics is universal at Shengda (and I would hazard to say, within greater China). With this many students, the need for group control is extreme. It's no wonder that all the couples descend on the benches by the lake at the same time, even though this time is not the subject of a rule (so far as I know).
Almost every aspect of life in China these days is regulated according to a set of rules adjusted to control group behavior, and not without reason, the population is simply too big to do otherwise. As Ye Dong, a teacher and worker in the FAO and the most independant thinker I have encountered in China (probably due to his master's degree education in England), pointed out to me, China would simply not work if it encouraged a higher degree of individualism at the expense of rule-following. I responded that it is easier to get people to respect the rules if the rules are fewer in number and each one is of higher importance. This last comment, I have come to realize, is subtley influenced by my upbringing in a culture that encourages free thinking.
See the thing is, I have been raised in a singularly friendly environment to free thought, including exploration of the limits of both the rules of nature and those of government. Not only does the Western world in general place a higher emphasis on individualism, but the family and school environments I grew up in tended to explain the reasons for rules, rather than just insisting that they be followed. On the one hand, this is a particularly good way of encouraging people to be good at thinking (and writing) for themselves. On the other hand, it carries with it the implication that if a rule is not grounded in the proper reasoning, it is not worth following. This is a dangerous implication to impart to a population the size of China's.
Rules in China exist beyond the immidiate dictates of justice; they exist for the preservation of order. This is actually, I believe, a better standard for a system of law, at least as far as criminal (as opposed to civil) law is concerned. In fact, I have often thought that certain laws in America should be done away with because they exist to impose morality, rather than to impose order. Paradoxically, it appears to me that in America, basing rules on the need for order would result in the need for fewer of them, whereas in China, basing rules on the normative morality would result in fewer.
This seems to be the result of a number of factors, but the most striking differences between America and China in this respect can be summarized basically by a difference in population (and population density) and a difference in core morality. In that China has a much bigger and denser population than America, it's need for order is substantially greater and penetrates into areas that we would consider unacceptable. Conversely (and bear in mind, this latter is based on a very topical examination of habits and a rhetorical rather than strictly factual use of history), Americans seem to have a stronger sense of what constitutes proper behavior in public than do their Chinese counterparts. This can clearly be seen in the way that Chinese people (especially Chinese men) think nothing of throwing garbage anywhere, spitting, yelling at waiters, yelling at each other, being publicly drunk and so on, whereas most Americans feel the need to be relatively quiet in restaurants, polite to their waiters and to look for trash cans and keep their drunk friends under control. I posit that this is in part due to the Chinese cultural acceptance (necessity?) of being dismissive to any inferiors and sycophantic to any superiors developed in response to the particular needs of dealing with the everyday running of business in the context of a distant but demanding imperial government. Counterpose this against American neo-Puritanism (if you think that Puritinism died with the witches, consider that the presence of a secret and difficult-to-unlock sex scene in an already rediculously violent video game not recommended for children [GTA: San Andreas]caused as big an uproar [led by Hilary Clinton, potentially the first female president; sex revolution nothing!] as the developments revealing that we were lied to about the Iraq war).
Regardless of the reasoning, Americans have attempted, with varying degrees of sucess, to impose order by getting it internalized in the form of guilt. This has the advantage of being potentially more proactive, people will think about what they are doing in terms of whether it is the right thing to do. On the other hand, when it doesn't work, people cause problems. The Chinese appear to have attempted to impose order by getting it internalized in the form of fear. Everyone knows that they can be replaced if they are caught doing something against the rules. Rules are made numerous so that basically eveyone has something to fear. And they have realized something that Stalin didn't: it doesn't matter if Big Brother is always watching, all that matters is that you don't know when he is; and it doesn't matter that purges are massive, all that matters is that everyone knows of someone who has been affected. When one of my students accused me of breaking school rules by talking politics, I learned what they already know: anyone could be the cause of your downfall. And in China, someone is always watching.
So when I look at the first years marching, I don't really see anything heterogeneous about them at all. The Chinese have recently realized something else that is central to the particular American genius of mass mobilization. See, in America, we don't care about everyone marching, but we do care about everyone buying, we don't care about everyone singing, but we do care about no-one rioting. So we have given the broad population a way of expressing their individuality through what they buy and we have given them enough access to the market that they can't really complain. Is the real American Army the one fighting in Iraq, or the one shopping at King of Prussia? They certainly both wear uniforms. The next time you are out shopping, look at groups of people of similar social classes, and see if they aren't all wearing the same thing (barring small differences in color; often even the brand is the same!). Individualism means choosing your cellphone's ringtone, order means not caring all that much about Iraq or Abu Grahib or Katerina. So all these Chinese freshman have adopted the style of uniform of the modern American military.
And was I talking before about order by fear vs. order by guilt? Because now that I think about it, I'm not so sure that there is that much difference between the two. And I'm not so sure that America doesn't use fear and Chinese doesn't use guilt. Same carrot, same stick; maybe it just takes some time abroad for a black sheep to realize how much of an ass it is.

Crowd Control

Appologies, first of all, for the enormous delay. I am once again writing from an internet cafe because I still have not gotten a working connection in my appartment (I've been a little too busy and a little to lazy to deal with that). Therefore, the pictures I took to go along with this will have to wait.

Shengda has a student body of about 15,000 crammed into a campus about twice the size of Swarthmore. This creates an enormous problem of control that must be very familiar to the Chinese, given the enormous population of pretty much the entire Eastern Seaboard of the country. I knew that it would be like this, coming here, but it is nevertheless amazing to see the vast groups in person. And it is even more amazing to see the ways in which they are controlled.

Every morning at 6 o'clock, the students are woken up by a broadcast on the PA. They are essentially kicked out of their dorms, at which point they procede en masse to the cafeterias. They have a chance to go back to their dorms to wash up afterword, untill they are locked out untill about 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Then, they get an hour and a half for a nap before being kicked out of the dorms again until after dinner. Finally, they must all be in by 10:30, when the gates are locked, with concequenses for any students caught outside. They are only allowed off campus on the weekends or with special permissions or if they are with a teacher.

The rules do not end here, however. Students are not allowed to bring any books into the library. The reason stated is that this makes it clear if they are trying to steal a library book. The actual reason is that the library is way too small for all the students to study in it's relative comfort. It is about the size of the main Swarthmore library (McCabe). Keep in mind that Swarthmore also has a separate Science library almost as big as McCabe, as well as smaller libraries in the music building, the women's resource center, the black cultural center, the educational materials center, and probably some other centers that I never went to. For 1/10th the population of Shengda! Instead, the students have to study in their classrooms.

The library is undersized largely (pardon the pun) because it was designed with a smaller student body in mind. Remember that Shengda is a for-profit college, so it is constantly expanding its enrollment in an attempt to make more money. The library is not the only resource that is squeezed. The cafeterias are completely mad during lunch-time. In fact, this has reached the point where the students are not allowed to use one of the cafeterias during certain periods so that the teachers and staff are assured the possibility of getting a seat. The impact of all of these rules is enormous.

First of all, the students all seem to internalize the rules to an astounding degree. The main road through campus is a mob scene starting about 1/2 hour before classes in the morning, for most of lunch hour, and starting about 1/2 hour before classes in the evening. It is almost completely deserted during the rest of the day. This is despite the fact that some of the student are not in class during this time. In the evening at about 9 o'clock, it is a mob scene again, althogh I'm not really sure why. The massing of students at lunch time and such is not that surprising. The same pattern can be seen at Swarthmore. What is strange is that there is almost never a medium amount of students hanging out, walking leasurely along; the streets are either packed or almost deserted. And you will never find students waiting to have a slightly later lunch. Even though the cafeterias tend to clear out a bit around 12:30, they go from packed to empty; there are no students coming in half an hour late to avoid the worst of the crowds. When I decided to hold my English corner at 1 o'clock, the students were mystified. 1 o'clock is their nap time, and it was totally foreign to consider doing anything else then.

The student mob plays a major role in the order of the community in LongHu Village as well. Because the students are not allowed out during the week, business on the nearby streets is a moderate trickle. There are maybe six or eight street vendors out and small groups of locals in the conveniance stores and restaurants. Starting Friday afternoon, the students descend onto the streets, and a croud of small businesses take up residence to meet their demand. Six street vendors becomes thirty. They sell sandwiches and wraps of various types, skewers of lamb, chicken, eggs and vegetables, skewers of fruit, skewers of fruit dipped in syrup, peanuts, sunflower seeds, fried noodles, fried rice, cold noodles, cold rice noodles, stinky tofu... Four fruit carts becomes twenty, selling apples, pears, plums, little apple-like fruit, kiwis, grapes, oranges, melon... Other carts appear selling tea, crackers (by the half-kilo), house plants, goldfish. Other vendors set up blankets on the ground, selling big thermoses, water bottles, toilet paper, bowls, towels, shoes, trinkets, magazines, socks, basins for doing laundry, soap, basketball jerseys (this last rack, in fact, operated by a student, a friend of mine from the basketball courts). Suddenly, busses cannot pass, people dismount their bicycles, etc. The population of the street probably increases one-hundred-fold for these three days.

The community is institutionalized to an enormous degree that can be a little depressing in class. Individualism and creativity are not traditionally celebrated virtues in China. Given the mob-like behaviour of the students around campus, I can hardly be surprised that they don't like to speak out when they know something, let alone when they don't. They are unhappy to write about anything remotely political that requires thought as opposed to regurgitation. Threre are, of course, exceptions, but on the whole, Shengda is doing an amazing job preparing these mindless drones of students to be mindless drones of businessmen.

Wheeling, and Dealing

Wheeling


I bought a bike a couple days ago. This was an adventure on a much higher level than shopping ever is in America. I decided that I wanted to buy a used bike, because that way I would get more bike for the money (so long as I checked it out carefully) and the bike would pose less of a theft risk. To this end, Eric (another teacher, ethnic Chinese but born in America), David and Peter (two Chinese students) and I took the public bus into Zhengzhou. We were assured by these two that we would probably be able to pay the bus driver extra to take our bikes onboard on the way back.

Once in the city, we took a motorcycle taxi to the area where the used bike lot is located. The lot itself was not visible from the street, we had to walk down an alley past two lots where people were sorting two different kinds of trash and packaging it to be taken somewhere on the back of one of the ubiquitous blue trucks. The used bike lot itself was quite amazing. It was home to close to 500 bikes sold by a variety of different personalities (nearly toothless old women, sketchy-looking middle-aged men, young mothers with children on hand). The bikes themselves varied from almost-new top of the line y-frame mountain bikes (almost certainly hotter than the weather) to old FengGuangs and Flying Pigeons, the two classic brands of steel-frame Chinese bicycles, made in Shanghai and Tianjin respectively. After some perusal, I decided to go with a classic. After some further examination of brakes and alignment and some bargaining, I bought a thirty- or fourty-year old FengGuang for 80 kuai (about $10 American). Eric bought a newer, less well-built cruiser-type for 85 kuai.
At this point, David and Peter had a conference and decided that we probably could not bring the bikes back on the bus. Our options were to leave them at Peter's appartment in the city and come back for them later (with a schoolbus), or to bike home. We decided on the latter. Peter stayed at his appartment, which left the other three of us with two bikes. So we got to bike back in heavy traffic, shifting the extra person from bike to bike as we got tired (the single gear was not made for towing an extra person up a hill, even a 2-3% grade was like doing mountains). After an hour an a half, four bottles of water, a pineapple popsickle, a lot of diesal exhaust and two close calls, we made it back to Shengda. David informed me that I am probably the only person at the school riding such a classic. I'm pretty sure it was worth the trouble.





Dealing


The next day (Friday), we finally got our class scheduals. And I was not pleased. Jay, 1/2 of the couple that lives across from me is teaching journalism; Frank, one of the Shengda veterans is teaching movies; pretty much everyone is teaching English majors. I am teaching seven different classes of international trade majors, at 50-60 students a class (as opposed to ~30 for the English majors), plus two classes of "practical writing" (i.e. filling out forms and reading road-signs). I was not pleased.
I made my disappointment known to a variety of Chinese staff, and was basically told that I should sort this out with departmant secratary Wang. It was this conversation (argument) with Wang that let me experiance first hand the way Chinese traditionally deal with arguments. Which is to say they don't. First, Wang's strategy was to pretend he didn't understand my Chinese (which I know is very clear) or my English (which I know he speaks). Then, when this was no longer working, he told me that my shedule was done to make it easier for me. Every teacher, he said, was given two preps, it would be too hard to prepare for more. Finally, I accepted this explaination, if only because I didn't want to make other teacher's lives more difficult by trying to switch my schedule around.
I then learned that this is a load of crap. Some of the teachers have one prep, some of the teachers have three preps, some of the teachers have yet to be assigned any classes whatsoever! Furthermore, I learned that I had essentially been given what was acknowleged as the crap schedule because I was the most junior teacher. This was not just based on age, or on lack of experiance (there is at least one other teacher just out of college, she is teaching advanced oral and advanced writing to English major seniors), but also on the fact that my resume was translated incorrectly. My "bachelor of arts with high honors" was translated roughly as "honorary bachelors degree" ("bachelor of having influential parents"). Ye Dong, one of the people in the FAO had let them know that the translation was incorrect, but they chose to ignore this (just as the chose to ignore the fact that they had spelled my name wrong [Lan instead of Ian] untill I was physically present to correct them, I bet there are still some forms where I am listed as Lan).
So at this point, I have recognized Shengda for what it is. Private university in China does not mean independant non-profit, it means independant for-proft. We are here to print money for the founder. This is why they remove all the expensive stuff from the appartments that former teachers chose to leave there (netting them, in general, a DVD player, speakers, a rice-cooker etc...esentially 1000-1500 kuai less that they have to pay each teacher). This is why they continue to swell enrollment to the breaking point. So I have no more love left for Shengda, at this point, I am here for the students and the other teachers. And like Wang, I intend to ignore (by pretending not to understand) any rule that makes my job more difficult. I am starting to learn how to deal, China-style.

No pictures this time: My internet connection is down again (because they give us cheapo computers) so I'm writing from an internet cafe. Deal.

Pa Shan

I climbed Song Shan (a nearby mountain) this past Saturday, by myself until I was more-or-less adopted by a trio of middle-school boys. We hiked together, in so much as we went at different paces, looked at different things and barely talked to each other. We did, however, summit the mountain together, and at the other end, reach the parking lot together; there was a vague sort of comraderie that helped us keep going through the sort-of-difficult times as we all realized that it was somewhat-too-cold for tee shirts at the top of the mountain. With a sweeping gesture of my metaphorical wand, I will reveal to you how this climb was a microcosm (is that a kind of molehill?) of my overall experiance here, thus far. But first, pictures:













Liminal is a favorite word of the overeducated and underemployed everywhere, and for good reason. It refers to the between-places and states of being that exist at the margins of all of our activities. Commuting, for example, is a somewhat liminal experiance, in that it is not generally an activity that is sought out for itself. If you're driving for fun, it's called going for a drive, not going for a commute. When you are commuting, you are not at work, but you aren't really not at work either, you're going to work or coming from work.

Which is not to say that there are not a whole slew of activities and even livelyhoods that spring out of this liminal state in which most people exist for more than an hour every day. People listen to the radio, read the newspaper, some even get work done. Which are interestingly cyclical propositions if you think about it, because the radio personalities you listen to work so that you can experiance their product while you are becoming at work; likewise with the newspaper publishers and the laptop designers and such. Which means that they have commutes when they are not at work, and so on...

If I'm getting to a point, it is this: many writers view pilgrimages and the like as a sort of sought-out and extended liminal experiance. In a certain sense, you take a short pilgramage every time you take agency during your commute to, for instance, appreciate the train station as a place rather than suspending agency while you pass through it. Still other writers have posited that the Wanderjahr, taken by so many young people is, even in being so named, a form of pilgrimage, a trip into the liminal.

In the Chinese tradition, the classical form of removal from society to the fringe of civilization it that of the xian (pronounced sheean) or trancendi. The immortals who remove themselves to the mountains and subsist on wind and dew. The character for xian is in fact a combination of the radicals for man and mountain (perhaps more complex than that historically, etc, etc, hooray Prof. Berkawitz). Regardless, the mountains remain one of the places to which the Chinese (among others) like to escape temporarily from the hustle and bustle. They are the primary sites of pilgrimage.

And, bringing this stray topic to the center of my discourse, I reveal that: the very Song Shan I climbed is one of, perhaps the most sacred of Chinese mountians. Song Shan is the axis of the five sacred Daoist mountains; it represets Earth, the central of the five phases (elements) of matter in Chinese philosphy (the other four are metal, water, wood, fire [and again earth, metal...]). So just as the three youthes were fellow pilgrams, so too are my acquantainces here at Shengda fellow travelers. While we share a road and a sort of compainionship, it seems as if we are all (or at least as if I am) waiting for the moment when our paths diverge. Climbing a holy mountain was merely a pilgrimage within my greater pilgrimage. Pretty deep, enh?

Business:
I can't access the blog itself from China, only the applet to post to the blog. As such, I can't get to your comments (if there are any). I also don't know if the pictures are posting properly, so it'd be great if someone drops me an email to let me know.

And for Dana, if she's reading:
Social mountaineering, in Chinese: xiang shang pa (pronounced sheeang shang pa, a's like the o in pot). It's almost dead on, litterally "facing (intending) to climb higher," usage as "seeking social advancement."

Shengda

In liu of a pseudointellectual rant (at least for the time being), a campus tour:
The administration building


The view from my balcony


A road through Campus


The artificial lake


Construction just outside the door to the foreign expert building

Waiting

Waiting seems to be the central activity of my life right now. I'm leaving for China on Wednesday, and the bulk of my errands and preparations are finished, all that is left is to go...five days from now. There is something about this time that seems interminably long, just as six days, seven days and two weeks were before it. I've more or less spent the entire summer waiting. And before that there was senior week, which was basically just waiting to graduate.

Now the fact is that I've done plenty of things during this time of waiting. I've been back and forth between Philadelphia and Princeton what seems like innumerable times, and to Washington DC once, but this feels more like pacing writ large than like any sort of real journey or activity. I even got stuck waiting for an extra two days in DC while my car was repaired after an attemted theft. A theft which the police tried to pin on my friend Aongus because he looked suspicious waiting on Erin and Sarah's porch all day. As fun as all this waiting could be at times, hanging out with friends, going to museums and the Fourth of July celebration on the National Mall (where I missed the fireworks waiting in line for the portapotties), it was nevertheless waiting. All these encounters seemed like the extended cut of running into a friend at the train station.

And when I think about it, all this waiting is just in preparation for more waiting. Traveling in the modern era seems more like waiting to be somewhere else than any particular process of moving. Waiting at the airport is almost down to an science: they make you wait in lines to get permission to wait in other lines. And then you get to your gate and wait to board, board and wait to take off, take off and wait for drink service, wait for the inflight movie to begin and - upon realizing that the inflight movie is horrific - wait for the inflight movie to end. The rest of the flight is basically waiting to land, whereupon you wait to disembark, wait for your luggage, wait for a ride, wait in traffic - all the time glancing at your watch - the adult version of "are we there yet?"

I suppose this can all be put down to a fact of life. Regardless, I am forced to appologise because I will soon need to keep you waiting, although I am sure it is not with baited breath.

China is next.
Apres ça, la deluge

An Introduction

Throughout the history of China (and other places, but most famously of China), the incidence of floods and droughts and the famines caused thereby have been responsable for esentially every cycling of the dynasty. Where a famine occurs within a small area or over a short duration, order is rarely interrupted. However, widespread or long-lasting famines cause enormous amounts of popular unrest. Not only do famines cause people to go hungry (that is more or less the definition of a famine), they also tend to cause people to become idle. Droughts, floods and pestilence destroy fields, leaving farmers without work. The lack of food also propegates through society, creating urban breadlines and the like. When groups of people gather without work to do or leave work in search of food, they cause disturbances.

So long as the disturbances are just related to the food shortages, they tend to remain a regional problem and a minor threat to the group in power. However, when a charismatic leader or group disseminates a particularly applicable idea or a notably appealing ideal, the problem tends to spread. When floods or droughts render the fields infertile to crops, they make them fertile ground for revolutions. The French and Russian revolutions resulted from bread lines, the Boxer rebellion, which threated the failing Qing dynasty, was the outgrowth of a drought famine, the list goes on...

In most areas of the world, the dangers of famines have been largely eliminated. The modern threat is related more to issues of economic - rather than agricultural - growth. In areas where growth has come too quickly, as in the oil-funded booms in the Middle East, instability has resulted. The top growth of the soil is washed out in the flood of wealth into a few hands, much like a flood famine. In other areas where growth has come too slowly, as in the areas variously called the Global South or the [non-]developing world. Much like in the case of a drought famine, the impoverished people rely on raiding their slightly-less-poor neighbors as a major source of sustinance, resulting in banditry, smuggling and civil strife. In many of these areas, most notably sub-Saharan Africa, infectious disease and actual crop famines only worsen these problems.

In Imperial China, it was the role of the Emperor to protect against flooding, and to make efforts at famine relief. In this vein, he called upon elites, both local to the problem and across the empire in order to help assuage the death and destruction. This was done both out of concern for the people and out of concern for the kingdom, as a preventative measure against civil unrest. If he did not provide adequate relief, sometimes the result would be a revolution and the end of the dynasty.

End lecture, begin...

In this frame of mind, I come to the central concern of this blog. I am very interested in the impacts of industrialization, modernization and globalization upon the world as well as its specific localities, both as a student of history and as a concerned individual. Putting aside my concerns with the political situation in America and elsewhere, I have a conflicted view on the the seemingly inevitable course of the global economy which, like a river, is the lifeblood of the nations through which it flows. This river is, however, quite capable of overflowing and destroying the livelihoods of those on its banks. My knee-jerk reaction has always been against the rising tide of capitalism, noting that it drowns beatiful and ancient things and remarkable people (as has happened quite litterally in the Three Gorges of the Yangzi). On the other hand, a greater stream floats more and bigger boats. It is increasingly my view that those in power must, like emperors of old, take precautions against the flooding of this great river or face the concequences. It is less clear to me what to think of the river's gradual rise.

Like an ancient Chinese scholar, my choices lay before me:

• To become a scholar-official and work with the imperium to control the flooding but allow the rising tide (can it truly be stopped?)
• To oppose the work of those in power in the interests of those caught underneath its waves
• Or to retreat to high ground and observe (or ignore) the events taking place

What better place than Henan (a province whose name means "south of the river," and which is part of one of the most infamously famine-prone regions in China) to explore these possibilities.