I am watching the CUBA again (in halftime as we watch this post). Why? Because volleyball practice was canceled today due to incliment weather (not rain mind you - dust). So I subjected myself to the CUBA again.
And I owe them an appology. There is at least one team in the CUBA that passes decently (incidently from nearby Henan University). They can run the break fairly well considering that they have noone with the hight or the hops to finish above the rim. They have a big man who can find open shooters, although I use the term big loosely - this is a guy who's about 6'4" and probably weighs less than I do (and I'm losing weight again, probably down to about 175 thanks to a recent lower GI bug). And they make the hustle plays that, combined with the other team's total inability to make accurate passes, gets them on the break quite frequently.
The other team doesn't know how to deal with it. Passing has turned a bunch of not-very-tall skinny guys with awkward jump shots into a respectable team, just like it's supposed to. Toward the end of the first quarter these guys led 28-8. Then the refs got angry. "Passing and playing defense! Not in China!" they exclaimed and promptly called three quick touch fouls on Henan which had the desired effect of making them stop playing defense entirely.
In the meantime, I am totally mystified by the assortment of entertainment during the timeouts and halftime(which I get to watch because all the ads on Chinese TV come at the beginning and the end of an hour, usually a welcome continuity, but in this case somewhat pointless). First of all, there are three mascots running around: a monkey, a panda and what appears to be a pumpkin, which is making it hard for me to figure out which teams they belong to. The downtime entertainment also includes your typical dance teams, trying to show all their teeth while staying together to an overly frenetic beat. Them there is kung fu which is kinda entertaining. Then some guys with whips, which I assume is to fulfil the deep Chinese need to continuously punctuate the air with atonal loud noises. Then there is an opera singer. Then another dance team (who's music I recognize as a techno remix of the opening theme to Fushigi Yugi, the first Japanese anime series I ever watched). Then another team dancing to "Hey Mickey," the 80s cheerleader-themed hit. Curiouser and curiouser.
In the meantime, the score has reached 67-37. Henan has managed to widen the gap despite overzelous officiating and decreased defensive pressure due to Xinjiang's continued inability to pass and deep-seeded love of the three-pointer in traffic. In fact, they seem to feel lonely taking a shot without defenders to the point where they delay wide-open shots for full seconds. Please consider that this relatively high score (for a college game) is basically due to complete lack of defensive intensity rather than any particular offensive execution. Although I remain fairly impressed with Henan's fast break execution.
A final note. China seems to only be capable of producing fashions that I find either strangely fascinating and even attractive or painful to the naked eye. The jerseys are an example of the latter (as I mentioned last week). The fabric is too shiny, the shoulders are too broad and the amount of cloth in the midsection makes every player look either really fat or really skinny. The kung fu outfits are more of the same: too shiny, cut too loose, unattractive colors (they really love yellow in particular). The dance teams, however, are much better outfited (in my opinion) than most in the NBA. One group is 80s-tastic with short shorts and high socks for both the boys and the girls (incidently not the group singing mickey). Another have non-matching-but-matching black tee-shirts with punk-style elements that brings a nice element of asymetry to their routine (although that's probably the only thing Kim [Arrow, not Fogarty] would appreceate about it). As I mentioned, this is quite in keeping with most of China aesthetically: it never works in an understated way, it's either terrible, terrible to the point of being amazing or genuinely and surprisingly pleasing to the eye. Strange. I wonder if it's some sort of lingering culture shock, but I kinda doubt it.
Oh, and they still need to learn how to box out on rebounds.
Monday, March 27
Sunday, March 19
Building Madness
I am now completely surrounded by construction pretty much all the time. There is a new building going up in front of my appartment, another one in between the academic building where I teach and the one where I have my office, another one near the basketball courts and the track, pluss a bunch outside campus. Needless to say, this is driving me completely insane and I don't think I'm the only one.
As you may know, I am sound sleeper and I deal relatively well with most types of noise. Mechanical noise, especially high-pitched mechanical noise is the exception. A few summers ago when I was living in Princeton, our neighbors across the street were remodeling and the noise had me constantly on edge. But at least they stopped working for the night. Becuase the construction firm here is under some time-restricted contract with the college, they work all night under spotlights. At first, it was actually the light that bothered me the most; that was until they started cutting rebar. I think the sound of steel sawing steel at four in the morning is enough to wake pretty much anyone up.
And of course the deep and restful sleep I have been getting is inevitably followed by the joy of teaching in some of the closest classrooms to the up-campus construction. As if this wasn't enough, the college felt the need to redo the windows on both my building and the one it faces so for a week I was followed by noise even when I was teaching on the side of the building furthest from the construction. The noise not only leaves me unrested and chippy but also means that I have to talk louder than normal, which is tiring and wears on my vocal cords, which are already somewhat tested by teaching enormous classes, which are distracted by the construction and make more noise of their own, which means that I have to talk louder than normal...The college has also decided to remove my primary means of escape: most of the fields around campus were either set on fire or turned over, presumably to make the grass grow back better this spring, but for the time being taking away my favorite reading spots.
However, the work on campus is far from the only thing that is insane about construction here. I have perhaps made brief mention of the way that the government effectively subsidises construction because they like the jobs that it provides. This has created some very strange places like the one behind the campus. This is a very extensive walled compound with a very paradoxical combination of features. It is centered around a lake which includes a beach and a very large development of what appear to be vacation homes. It is also home to several farms of a very traditional variety, some offices for the China-Australia University (which is also in Longhu), a training center for a bank, a school for judges (which does not appear to be in session? or I understood the characters wrong? something about judges and a school) and the office for a real estate company (presumably the one that developed this community, if it can be called that). Strangely, given the assortment of buildings, the guard at the gate is supposed to charge an entrance fee. But he didn't because his boss wasn't there.
It gets stranger. The vacation homes (if that is what they are) are a wide variety of pseudo-neo-classical houses about the same size as, say, those at the Jersey Shore. They seem to be what you would get if someone was shown pictures of vacation homes but had never actually been inside one. They are built entirely of cement with no brick, wood, shingles or anything else to be seen. There are several still under construction and it appears that the project is ongoing. The thing is, the ones that have been built are already falling into disrepair with peeling paint and rusting metal. And the insides have not been finished.
Curious to check on this hunch, I climbed in through the window of one and found nothing but cement floors (not even tile), radiators and trash. Nothing was painted; the stairs did not have a railing; there was no sign that any particular room was designated as a bathroom or a kitchen (i.e. plumbing). The trash is evidence that the workers lived in the house while they were building it, which is very common in China. The fact that it was well into disrepair with no attempt to finish the interior is evidence that the workers will probably be the only people to ever live in it.
This was not just one house, but dozens, probably hundreds of similar ones all along the shore of the lake. A community of unfinished, crumbling vacation homes with ongoing construction would be strange enough, but some of the houses (about four) showed evidence that their interiors had been finished and that people had moved in. I cannot imagine vacationing in such a strange and empty place. Or living there full-time. Around the grounds, workers continued to build houses and work on pseudo-European gardens. Theese too looked like someone had seen a picture of gardens in Europe but had never been to one, then made a half-assed and completely superficial attempt to recreate them. The streets were kept clean of trash by two older women that I passed and occasionally cars would go by on the streets, but the houses themselves were almost completely deserted.
When you place this in the context of China's need for space, its need for housing, it is depressing to think just how wastefull this whole thing is. I say thing because I am almost at a loss for words to describe the feeling of exploring this thicket of insanity. It felt strangely like post-appocolyptic survivors living in the decaying ruins of a misguided and unfinished utopia, groping to complete it but without an understanding of why or how. It felt like Animal Farm 2: Detente and Opening. And yet I am sure that this is not the only place in China like this.
As far as I can see, this is the result of the overpowering need to keep the population employed. As long as people are working, the party can hold power and enrich themselves. I've read a little about subsidies for construction, and quite honestly, some combination of these subsidies, graft, poor oversight, partial privitization and central planning are the causes of this insanity. Rich cadres taking bribes from rich developers buiding vacation homes for a theoretcial Communist leisure class that doesn't exist in quite the way it is imagined. All the while, money goes into this that could be going to health-care, education, better enforcement of regulations or hell, builing homes for middle class people. All of which are somewhat pressing needs in the China of today.
Just crazy.
As you may know, I am sound sleeper and I deal relatively well with most types of noise. Mechanical noise, especially high-pitched mechanical noise is the exception. A few summers ago when I was living in Princeton, our neighbors across the street were remodeling and the noise had me constantly on edge. But at least they stopped working for the night. Becuase the construction firm here is under some time-restricted contract with the college, they work all night under spotlights. At first, it was actually the light that bothered me the most; that was until they started cutting rebar. I think the sound of steel sawing steel at four in the morning is enough to wake pretty much anyone up.
And of course the deep and restful sleep I have been getting is inevitably followed by the joy of teaching in some of the closest classrooms to the up-campus construction. As if this wasn't enough, the college felt the need to redo the windows on both my building and the one it faces so for a week I was followed by noise even when I was teaching on the side of the building furthest from the construction. The noise not only leaves me unrested and chippy but also means that I have to talk louder than normal, which is tiring and wears on my vocal cords, which are already somewhat tested by teaching enormous classes, which are distracted by the construction and make more noise of their own, which means that I have to talk louder than normal...The college has also decided to remove my primary means of escape: most of the fields around campus were either set on fire or turned over, presumably to make the grass grow back better this spring, but for the time being taking away my favorite reading spots.
However, the work on campus is far from the only thing that is insane about construction here. I have perhaps made brief mention of the way that the government effectively subsidises construction because they like the jobs that it provides. This has created some very strange places like the one behind the campus. This is a very extensive walled compound with a very paradoxical combination of features. It is centered around a lake which includes a beach and a very large development of what appear to be vacation homes. It is also home to several farms of a very traditional variety, some offices for the China-Australia University (which is also in Longhu), a training center for a bank, a school for judges (which does not appear to be in session? or I understood the characters wrong? something about judges and a school) and the office for a real estate company (presumably the one that developed this community, if it can be called that). Strangely, given the assortment of buildings, the guard at the gate is supposed to charge an entrance fee. But he didn't because his boss wasn't there.
It gets stranger. The vacation homes (if that is what they are) are a wide variety of pseudo-neo-classical houses about the same size as, say, those at the Jersey Shore. They seem to be what you would get if someone was shown pictures of vacation homes but had never actually been inside one. They are built entirely of cement with no brick, wood, shingles or anything else to be seen. There are several still under construction and it appears that the project is ongoing. The thing is, the ones that have been built are already falling into disrepair with peeling paint and rusting metal. And the insides have not been finished.
Curious to check on this hunch, I climbed in through the window of one and found nothing but cement floors (not even tile), radiators and trash. Nothing was painted; the stairs did not have a railing; there was no sign that any particular room was designated as a bathroom or a kitchen (i.e. plumbing). The trash is evidence that the workers lived in the house while they were building it, which is very common in China. The fact that it was well into disrepair with no attempt to finish the interior is evidence that the workers will probably be the only people to ever live in it.
This was not just one house, but dozens, probably hundreds of similar ones all along the shore of the lake. A community of unfinished, crumbling vacation homes with ongoing construction would be strange enough, but some of the houses (about four) showed evidence that their interiors had been finished and that people had moved in. I cannot imagine vacationing in such a strange and empty place. Or living there full-time. Around the grounds, workers continued to build houses and work on pseudo-European gardens. Theese too looked like someone had seen a picture of gardens in Europe but had never been to one, then made a half-assed and completely superficial attempt to recreate them. The streets were kept clean of trash by two older women that I passed and occasionally cars would go by on the streets, but the houses themselves were almost completely deserted.
When you place this in the context of China's need for space, its need for housing, it is depressing to think just how wastefull this whole thing is. I say thing because I am almost at a loss for words to describe the feeling of exploring this thicket of insanity. It felt strangely like post-appocolyptic survivors living in the decaying ruins of a misguided and unfinished utopia, groping to complete it but without an understanding of why or how. It felt like Animal Farm 2: Detente and Opening. And yet I am sure that this is not the only place in China like this.
As far as I can see, this is the result of the overpowering need to keep the population employed. As long as people are working, the party can hold power and enrich themselves. I've read a little about subsidies for construction, and quite honestly, some combination of these subsidies, graft, poor oversight, partial privitization and central planning are the causes of this insanity. Rich cadres taking bribes from rich developers buiding vacation homes for a theoretcial Communist leisure class that doesn't exist in quite the way it is imagined. All the while, money goes into this that could be going to health-care, education, better enforcement of regulations or hell, builing homes for middle class people. All of which are somewhat pressing needs in the China of today.
Just crazy.
Wednesday, March 15
Basketball
Chinese basketball is bad.
Like, really really bad.
I am pretty certain that the worst team in the NCAA tournament could give the best team in the CBA (Chinese Basketball Association) a run for their money, and the better high school teams could probably beat most of the schools in the CUBA (Chinese University Basketball Association). I probably play better defense than about half of these guys.
Across the board, players are lacking in fundamental skills. Their dribbling would probably have them called for a violation in the NBA, let alone the NCAA. Many of them still shoot with both hands from the chest instead of one hand from the forehead. They don't know how to box out on rebounds, they don't pass well, the list goes on and on. What makes it truely unwatchable, however, is the utter lack of team play. Well, that and the uniforms (in the CUBA, all the teams wear the same uniform design, just in different colors and with different school names; in both the CUBA and the CBA, the colors are terrible and they insist on wearing those tremendously ugly unis with the wide shoulders and enough fabric in the mid-section to make a bedsheet) and the commentary (all they know how to say is "good ball" and talk about how tall the players are; you have to get more creative than that if you're doing sports commentary).
If you watch the CBA, you will see a lot of ugly three-pointers, the occasional awkward drive to the basket, a lot of bad passes and a few fast breaks.
You will not see:
-Big men who can score from the low block.
-Big men who can use the low block to find open shooters.
-Big men who can pass at all.
-Perimeter players who can drive to the hoop and finish.
-Perimeter players who can drive and kick to open shooters.
-Any scoring from the pick-and-roll.
-More than 1 good pick per game.
-Good outlet passes on the fast break.
-Players trailing on the fast break.
-Any passing on the fast break.
-Anyone who can create their own shot.
On defense, you will see two or three "big men" standing in the paint (there is no defensive three-in-the-key rule in international play) a guy playing on the ball and two guys "playing the passing lanes." They will not slide their feet to stay in front of their man, they will not help with any degree of regularity. This is surprisingly effecive because of the inability of the offense to create shots of the dribble or the pass.
Invariably the most dynamic player on a team is a foreigner, usually a black guy from America. He is usually either:
-A big with bad hands
-A big with no quickness
-A big with decent skills who is three inches too short to ride the bench in the NBA
-A swingman with an awkward shot
-A point guard with good quickness, shooting and passing ability who is three inches too short to ride the bench in the NBA (and who's teameates will invariablly be so surprised to recieve an accurate pass that they will drop it).
In other words, the entire CBA should be forced to watch, on continuous loop, film of Jason Kidd and Steve Nash running the break (and passing to open teammates!!); Nash and Tony Parker driving to collapse the defence and then finding an open man; Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Brad Miller and various other big men working the post to create shots for teammates, Detroit playing help defense and basically any other effective team players. They should be banned from watching Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury, Kobe Briant and any other players who need to dominate the ball to create a shot (and who incedentally tend to be the favorite players of most Chinese people).
This raises at least two questions:
1. Why do I waste any of my time watching any of this?
2. How the hell did the CBA produce Yao Ming?
The answers:
1. The NBA is on in the morning, so I can't very easily get my fix of sports telivision. I do watch the NBA on most Mondays (when I don't have class), but invariably they show something like the Knicks vs. the Bobcats or the Rockets when both Yao and McGrady are hurt. I sometimes turn on the TV in the afternoon hoping to catch the replays on the news or to see the Chinese Volleyball League (both the men's and women's leagues are quite good) both for entertainment and to watch their technique (esp. because I'm now playing for the international trade department volleyball team). So I turn on the TV and discover a basketball game that I would probably not watch if it was my college playing. But I watch for ten minutes before giving up in disgust.
2. I have no idea. Yao is not just tall, he actually has an all-around game. Early complaints about his toughness and his leg strength are increasingly being resolved. In fact, he is currently having a rash of 20 and 10 games and leading the Rockets to wins without McGrady, which he had never been able to do before. Despite being outclassed in the All-Star Game, he is clearly still a star player with a good skill set. He even passes decently.
Like, really really bad.
I am pretty certain that the worst team in the NCAA tournament could give the best team in the CBA (Chinese Basketball Association) a run for their money, and the better high school teams could probably beat most of the schools in the CUBA (Chinese University Basketball Association). I probably play better defense than about half of these guys.
Across the board, players are lacking in fundamental skills. Their dribbling would probably have them called for a violation in the NBA, let alone the NCAA. Many of them still shoot with both hands from the chest instead of one hand from the forehead. They don't know how to box out on rebounds, they don't pass well, the list goes on and on. What makes it truely unwatchable, however, is the utter lack of team play. Well, that and the uniforms (in the CUBA, all the teams wear the same uniform design, just in different colors and with different school names; in both the CUBA and the CBA, the colors are terrible and they insist on wearing those tremendously ugly unis with the wide shoulders and enough fabric in the mid-section to make a bedsheet) and the commentary (all they know how to say is "good ball" and talk about how tall the players are; you have to get more creative than that if you're doing sports commentary).
If you watch the CBA, you will see a lot of ugly three-pointers, the occasional awkward drive to the basket, a lot of bad passes and a few fast breaks.
You will not see:
-Big men who can score from the low block.
-Big men who can use the low block to find open shooters.
-Big men who can pass at all.
-Perimeter players who can drive to the hoop and finish.
-Perimeter players who can drive and kick to open shooters.
-Any scoring from the pick-and-roll.
-More than 1 good pick per game.
-Good outlet passes on the fast break.
-Players trailing on the fast break.
-Any passing on the fast break.
-Anyone who can create their own shot.
On defense, you will see two or three "big men" standing in the paint (there is no defensive three-in-the-key rule in international play) a guy playing on the ball and two guys "playing the passing lanes." They will not slide their feet to stay in front of their man, they will not help with any degree of regularity. This is surprisingly effecive because of the inability of the offense to create shots of the dribble or the pass.
Invariably the most dynamic player on a team is a foreigner, usually a black guy from America. He is usually either:
-A big with bad hands
-A big with no quickness
-A big with decent skills who is three inches too short to ride the bench in the NBA
-A swingman with an awkward shot
-A point guard with good quickness, shooting and passing ability who is three inches too short to ride the bench in the NBA (and who's teameates will invariablly be so surprised to recieve an accurate pass that they will drop it).
In other words, the entire CBA should be forced to watch, on continuous loop, film of Jason Kidd and Steve Nash running the break (and passing to open teammates!!); Nash and Tony Parker driving to collapse the defence and then finding an open man; Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Brad Miller and various other big men working the post to create shots for teammates, Detroit playing help defense and basically any other effective team players. They should be banned from watching Allen Iverson, Stephon Marbury, Kobe Briant and any other players who need to dominate the ball to create a shot (and who incedentally tend to be the favorite players of most Chinese people).
This raises at least two questions:
1. Why do I waste any of my time watching any of this?
2. How the hell did the CBA produce Yao Ming?
The answers:
1. The NBA is on in the morning, so I can't very easily get my fix of sports telivision. I do watch the NBA on most Mondays (when I don't have class), but invariably they show something like the Knicks vs. the Bobcats or the Rockets when both Yao and McGrady are hurt. I sometimes turn on the TV in the afternoon hoping to catch the replays on the news or to see the Chinese Volleyball League (both the men's and women's leagues are quite good) both for entertainment and to watch their technique (esp. because I'm now playing for the international trade department volleyball team). So I turn on the TV and discover a basketball game that I would probably not watch if it was my college playing. But I watch for ten minutes before giving up in disgust.
2. I have no idea. Yao is not just tall, he actually has an all-around game. Early complaints about his toughness and his leg strength are increasingly being resolved. In fact, he is currently having a rash of 20 and 10 games and leading the Rockets to wins without McGrady, which he had never been able to do before. Despite being outclassed in the All-Star Game, he is clearly still a star player with a good skill set. He even passes decently.
Sunday, March 12
Empire
It has been almost a month since I last posted. However, this post is not really about the things that have happened since the last post, but rather a dump of the revelations I had over winter break that I have been far too lazy to actually put into writing.
It occured to me as I was walking along a dirt road between fields of sugar cane in southern Yunnan province that I had been thinking about China using the wrong framework. I spent much of my vacation, when I was not just sitting in Chengdu "recovering" from my ankle injury (i.e. drinking coffee with other foreigners and playing pingpong with the hostel staff), traveling through some of the poorest most minority-dense regions of China. Actually, that is potentially misleading for a variety of reasons, so perhaps I had better write it as: traveling through some very poor and minority-dense regions. In any case, I was traveling through places where Hui, Tibetans, Hani, Dai and Bai people occasionally outnumbered the Han that make up the vast majority of the Chinese population. And I was trying to understand the dynamics that were at play between these groups.
The critical error that I had been making in terms of thinking about this interactions was considering them under the minority paradigm. I was thinking about the parallel problems of integrating a minority group into the mainstream, modernizing and enriching poor comunities, while simulatneously maintaining among them a distict and viable sense of culture. This is, in fact, a sampling of the problems facing the Chinese government and Chinese society vis a vis its minority groups. However, considering these groups as minorities in the same sense that Blacks, Hispanics and South and East Asians are minorities is confusing, and understandably so.
China is not really a single nation in the sense that the US or France is a nation. This is particularly evident when considering its minorities. Whereas the US and most European powers are (largely) past their periods of imperialism, China is still best considered as an empire, not as a single nation. While the US has killed (both intentially and by accident) the vast majority of the native population of its landmass, China has not. Because of this, where the American minorities are (with the significant exception of most Blacks) immigrant groups, the Chinese minorities are conquered peoples. This distinction helps to explain many of the most glaring macroscopic differences between ethnic politics in America and in China.
As an American, I am very unaccustomed to thinking about minorities as anything other than immigrants. The fact is that in most of Europe, like in America, minorities tend to be in cities where they typically occupy positions in the unskilled working class (short-order cooks, factory workers) in the case of one immigrant segment or in the professional class (engineers, doctors) in the case of another. There is often another major group of immigrants serving as migrant agricultural laborers. These three types of immigrants make up the majority of non-black minorities in America and of all minorities in most of Europe.
In China, as in Latin America, some of Eastern Europe and presumably many other parts of the world, the immigrants are not workers looking for good jobs, but rather conquerors and carpetbaggers taking over the leadership of the region. In most of Western China, the cities are dominated by Han, but the countryside is almost entirely local minorities. The Chinese came, in some cases recently, in some cases hundreds of years ago, and imposed their order by military and economic force. The divide between the Chinese way of life and the local one is therefore even more substantial than I had expected it to be. Until quite recently, the conquerors made little serious effort to impose their culture on the locals, just as long as the locals bought their goods and didn't revolt. The result is that Tibetans in Gansu, despite hundreds of years of Chinese rule, generally don't speak any Chinese. They remain, for the most part, the same sort of destitute yak-herders that they have been for hundreds of years.
This distinction makes it enormously difficult to think of a reasonable way to deal with the Chinese West. Cultural integration is always a mixed bag, but at least when Americans expect immigrants to integrate (on which issue my feelings are conflicted), they give a level of agency to the migrants, at least allowing them to opt out by not moving to the US. In the case of conquest minorities, they are given no choice in the matter, they are part of the Chinese empire by dint of military force. And cultural integration is simple compared to difficulties in the economic and political spheres.
And what is the Chinese justification for their occupation of Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai, substantial portions of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi and smaller parts of Hunan, Hubei, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Gansu, Guangdong, Hainan and Sichuan? All these are places where racial and cultural minorities predominate. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Chinese people are Han, the vast majority of Chinese places are not. Mostly this occupation is considered to justify itself. The Northwest has been part of the Chinese empire for hundreds of years, and China is still able to control it militarily, so despite the fact that many of its inhabitants do not consider themselves Chinese and generally not considered Chinese by others, they are part of China. Likewise with Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Ask Chinese people if these Central Asians are Chinese and they will usually say yes. But not in the same way that Han are Chinese.
In fact, the name of China in Chinese is 中华人民共和国 (zhong hua ren min gong he guo). Let's break that down character by character. 中 (zhong) means middle; one of the traditional names of China and the still-common short form is 中国 (zhong guo): "middle country" or "middle kingdom." Skip to 共和国 (gong he guo) for a minute. This translates to "socialist republic." It is the 华人民 (hua ren min) that is a little more problematic. 华 (hua) is another, older name for China from a time when, I am assured by my Chinese teacher, the territorial extent of the empire was in fact greater than it is currently. However, 华 (hua) also carries the connotation of Chinese culture. 华人 (hua ren) is a term that is used to refer to culturally Chinese people, both in China and abroad (in Singapore or the US for example). This can be easily construed as meaning Han Chinese culture. In fact if you ask most Chinese people about Chinese culture, they make no mention of anything remotely Tibetan or Mongolian or Uiguir. So 华人民 (hua ren min) means culturally Chinese people, in other words Han and the minorities so far integrated that they are basically indistinguishable from Han. In full, word by word, 中华人民共和国 is 中 "middle" 华 "culturally Chinese" 人民 "people" (with both socialist and non-socialist implications) 共和国 "republic." The Central Socialist Republic of Chinese People. It's no wonder that minorities get shorted politically.
So in their justification for the rulership over the greater territorial extent of China, the Party and most Chinese people point to the fact that those places have historically been part of China (i.e. the Chinese Empire dating back to a time when it was actually called that). The real reason is because they are able to control it militarily. This is the same reason why India was once part of the British Empire and Algeria was once part of the French Empire. The problem is, the Chinese want it both ways. Their justifcation for considering Taiwan part of the PRC, well it is culturally Chinese and was historically part of the Chinese Empire. Pay no mind to the fact that Vietnam was once part of the Chinese Empire (well, actually China kinda wants Vietnam too, every year they push the border further into Vietnam) or the fact that there are other culturally Chinese places (Singapore) that are not part of China. Or the fact that Taiwan was a relatively recent addition to China. We want Taiwan because it's culturally Chinese and who cares that we don't actually controll it, but who cares that Tibet is not culturally Chinese because we do control it.
It is easy to look at it as a nation because that is how the cultural core operates and because that's what they want you to think and because it's contiguous. In fact, China and Russia are the only real land empire remaining. Russia and the US killed most of their native populations (in the American West and the Russian East, who incidentally were genetically quite close to eachother) and most of the bigger minorities split off from Russia. Maybe Brazil or Mexico or Indonesia places like that are also home to many conquest minorities, but these are strange because they were created as countries by the external conquest of a now-defunct imperial power. And because these are the only real exceptions, most people tend to think of modern empires as per the British/Dutch/Spanish/Portuguese/German/Belgian model of a power on one continent and colonies on others. But in China the colonies are part of contiguous extent, which makes it harder to distinguish where the cultural home ends and the carpetbagging begins. This is scarily like Central and Eastern Europe prior to the World Wars.
I'm kinda going off in weird directions now, so it's time to finish this. I have more to say about cultureal imperialism and carpetbaggers, but for now it is enough to say that China is still an empire and should be considered as such, thinking of it as a nation in the normal sense is confusing at best.
It occured to me as I was walking along a dirt road between fields of sugar cane in southern Yunnan province that I had been thinking about China using the wrong framework. I spent much of my vacation, when I was not just sitting in Chengdu "recovering" from my ankle injury (i.e. drinking coffee with other foreigners and playing pingpong with the hostel staff), traveling through some of the poorest most minority-dense regions of China. Actually, that is potentially misleading for a variety of reasons, so perhaps I had better write it as: traveling through some very poor and minority-dense regions. In any case, I was traveling through places where Hui, Tibetans, Hani, Dai and Bai people occasionally outnumbered the Han that make up the vast majority of the Chinese population. And I was trying to understand the dynamics that were at play between these groups.
The critical error that I had been making in terms of thinking about this interactions was considering them under the minority paradigm. I was thinking about the parallel problems of integrating a minority group into the mainstream, modernizing and enriching poor comunities, while simulatneously maintaining among them a distict and viable sense of culture. This is, in fact, a sampling of the problems facing the Chinese government and Chinese society vis a vis its minority groups. However, considering these groups as minorities in the same sense that Blacks, Hispanics and South and East Asians are minorities is confusing, and understandably so.
China is not really a single nation in the sense that the US or France is a nation. This is particularly evident when considering its minorities. Whereas the US and most European powers are (largely) past their periods of imperialism, China is still best considered as an empire, not as a single nation. While the US has killed (both intentially and by accident) the vast majority of the native population of its landmass, China has not. Because of this, where the American minorities are (with the significant exception of most Blacks) immigrant groups, the Chinese minorities are conquered peoples. This distinction helps to explain many of the most glaring macroscopic differences between ethnic politics in America and in China.
As an American, I am very unaccustomed to thinking about minorities as anything other than immigrants. The fact is that in most of Europe, like in America, minorities tend to be in cities where they typically occupy positions in the unskilled working class (short-order cooks, factory workers) in the case of one immigrant segment or in the professional class (engineers, doctors) in the case of another. There is often another major group of immigrants serving as migrant agricultural laborers. These three types of immigrants make up the majority of non-black minorities in America and of all minorities in most of Europe.
In China, as in Latin America, some of Eastern Europe and presumably many other parts of the world, the immigrants are not workers looking for good jobs, but rather conquerors and carpetbaggers taking over the leadership of the region. In most of Western China, the cities are dominated by Han, but the countryside is almost entirely local minorities. The Chinese came, in some cases recently, in some cases hundreds of years ago, and imposed their order by military and economic force. The divide between the Chinese way of life and the local one is therefore even more substantial than I had expected it to be. Until quite recently, the conquerors made little serious effort to impose their culture on the locals, just as long as the locals bought their goods and didn't revolt. The result is that Tibetans in Gansu, despite hundreds of years of Chinese rule, generally don't speak any Chinese. They remain, for the most part, the same sort of destitute yak-herders that they have been for hundreds of years.
This distinction makes it enormously difficult to think of a reasonable way to deal with the Chinese West. Cultural integration is always a mixed bag, but at least when Americans expect immigrants to integrate (on which issue my feelings are conflicted), they give a level of agency to the migrants, at least allowing them to opt out by not moving to the US. In the case of conquest minorities, they are given no choice in the matter, they are part of the Chinese empire by dint of military force. And cultural integration is simple compared to difficulties in the economic and political spheres.
And what is the Chinese justification for their occupation of Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Inner Mongolia and Qinghai, substantial portions of Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi and smaller parts of Hunan, Hubei, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Gansu, Guangdong, Hainan and Sichuan? All these are places where racial and cultural minorities predominate. Despite the fact that the vast majority of Chinese people are Han, the vast majority of Chinese places are not. Mostly this occupation is considered to justify itself. The Northwest has been part of the Chinese empire for hundreds of years, and China is still able to control it militarily, so despite the fact that many of its inhabitants do not consider themselves Chinese and generally not considered Chinese by others, they are part of China. Likewise with Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. Ask Chinese people if these Central Asians are Chinese and they will usually say yes. But not in the same way that Han are Chinese.
In fact, the name of China in Chinese is 中华人民共和国 (zhong hua ren min gong he guo). Let's break that down character by character. 中 (zhong) means middle; one of the traditional names of China and the still-common short form is 中国 (zhong guo): "middle country" or "middle kingdom." Skip to 共和国 (gong he guo) for a minute. This translates to "socialist republic." It is the 华人民 (hua ren min) that is a little more problematic. 华 (hua) is another, older name for China from a time when, I am assured by my Chinese teacher, the territorial extent of the empire was in fact greater than it is currently. However, 华 (hua) also carries the connotation of Chinese culture. 华人 (hua ren) is a term that is used to refer to culturally Chinese people, both in China and abroad (in Singapore or the US for example). This can be easily construed as meaning Han Chinese culture. In fact if you ask most Chinese people about Chinese culture, they make no mention of anything remotely Tibetan or Mongolian or Uiguir. So 华人民 (hua ren min) means culturally Chinese people, in other words Han and the minorities so far integrated that they are basically indistinguishable from Han. In full, word by word, 中华人民共和国 is 中 "middle" 华 "culturally Chinese" 人民 "people" (with both socialist and non-socialist implications) 共和国 "republic." The Central Socialist Republic of Chinese People. It's no wonder that minorities get shorted politically.
So in their justification for the rulership over the greater territorial extent of China, the Party and most Chinese people point to the fact that those places have historically been part of China (i.e. the Chinese Empire dating back to a time when it was actually called that). The real reason is because they are able to control it militarily. This is the same reason why India was once part of the British Empire and Algeria was once part of the French Empire. The problem is, the Chinese want it both ways. Their justifcation for considering Taiwan part of the PRC, well it is culturally Chinese and was historically part of the Chinese Empire. Pay no mind to the fact that Vietnam was once part of the Chinese Empire (well, actually China kinda wants Vietnam too, every year they push the border further into Vietnam) or the fact that there are other culturally Chinese places (Singapore) that are not part of China. Or the fact that Taiwan was a relatively recent addition to China. We want Taiwan because it's culturally Chinese and who cares that we don't actually controll it, but who cares that Tibet is not culturally Chinese because we do control it.
It is easy to look at it as a nation because that is how the cultural core operates and because that's what they want you to think and because it's contiguous. In fact, China and Russia are the only real land empire remaining. Russia and the US killed most of their native populations (in the American West and the Russian East, who incidentally were genetically quite close to eachother) and most of the bigger minorities split off from Russia. Maybe Brazil or Mexico or Indonesia places like that are also home to many conquest minorities, but these are strange because they were created as countries by the external conquest of a now-defunct imperial power. And because these are the only real exceptions, most people tend to think of modern empires as per the British/Dutch/Spanish/Portuguese/German/Belgian model of a power on one continent and colonies on others. But in China the colonies are part of contiguous extent, which makes it harder to distinguish where the cultural home ends and the carpetbagging begins. This is scarily like Central and Eastern Europe prior to the World Wars.
I'm kinda going off in weird directions now, so it's time to finish this. I have more to say about cultureal imperialism and carpetbaggers, but for now it is enough to say that China is still an empire and should be considered as such, thinking of it as a nation in the normal sense is confusing at best.
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