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.
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