A friend once came back from a visit to the national gallery of our country, fuming with anger at having encountered a painting he felt was an affront to what he considered art. He had found a large work on canvas, all in blue, a shocking break from the traditional 19th century and early modern work in adjacent galleries. He couldn’t figure out what it was doing there, like an insult to all the talent that had come and gone before. Portraits, landscapes, city scenes, still-lifes, natural scenery, historic paintings of battles – all seemed nullified by this large blue canvass with nothing else on it. The gallery had paid millions of public funds for it, which angered him all the more. He wanted an explanation and seemed to challenge me to provide one.
Not being up on modern abstraction, I had little to say except the work had been effective if it had managed to provoke my friend. Maybe that was the intention. To challenge viewers to think about what qualified as Art. I said the camera had made naturalism redundant; no painter could render nature like photography, so painting had to find new purposes and, maybe, the blue painting was an attempt to do so. It offered food for thought. “But,” responded my friend, “any ten year old can do the same.” Yes, I said, but it took that particular artist to be the first to do so; that’s why it’s in a museum. Besides, ten-year olds don’t fill a canvass with one colour; they attempt to paint as they are taught to by social convention. He may or may not have conceded the point, but I doubt he understood for once people make up their minds about something, they seldom change it.
The point of art – good art – is that it attempts to provoke a dialogue with the viewer; to challenge conventions that have become outworn in an age of rapid change. Art attempts to meet the needs inherent in the human condition; it serves as a medium of communication, not regarding mundane matters as much as matters of the soul, the spirit. There are many examples of this in modern dance, contemporary visual arts, film, theatre, poetry and prose, and even philosophy. In this regard, artists are in tune with the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, slightly ahead of the crowd that is too busy to attend to such matters. Collectively studied in the Humanities, the arts today are an alternative to traditional religion with its outdated narratives, and artists are prophets and priests of sorts, attending to the needs of the soul. Two artists I want to examine are examples of what I mean: Edvard Munch and Marc Rothko.
Munch and Rothko were both Europeans, inheritors of two-thousand and more years of pictorial tradition, although Rothko ended up living in the USA. Both were attempting to articulate feelings more than intellectual or pseudo-scientific hypotheses; they sought truth less in reason than in intuition, and that truth resided in the artist and in the viewers. What the painters expressed was what bothered others: the loss of faith in traditional belief and a sense of profound estrangement and loneliness that has come to characterize the modern world. Both sought to communicate in new ways not understood at first by their peers but applauded once the critics “got it.” Both men had a modern concept of tragedy, that of the ordinary mortal. Such ideas were already articulated by philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche who declared our ability to experience the divine was inadequate, that God was out of the reach of our rational faculties or “dead” to us. We needed new ways to experience the sublime, the spiritual, that which cannot be named but is felt to be.
Edvard Munch had a difficult life; he had a hard time holding on to his sanity as he repeatedly experineced loss in a late 19th century Norwegian household. His mother and favourite sister both died of tuberculosis; his father was excessively religious; the household atmosphere oppressed by illness and death. Munch drank too much, was in and out of mental hospitals, had unsatisfactory affairs with models in the bohemian worlds of Paris and Berlin, and remained plagued by a sense of emptiness. He emigrated internally, cutting himself off from society in order to paint. He became famous, sold well, and could afford to build a large studio in which he sequestered himself with his many paintings. He died in 1944, shortly after his 80th birthday while Norway was still occupied by the German Wehrmacht.
Munch’s paintings often repeat earlier themes: suffering, illness, death, love, lust, jealousy, loneliness and alienation: the stuff of modern life. Later paintings – which seem the product of effort rather than conviction – are lighter in mood, optimistic, sunny in contrast to the earlier slit-your-wrist imagery. In many works, red predominates, and the paintings look unfinished; brush strokes are clearly evident; portraits of friends and family members are life-size. There are swirls as in van Gogh’s work; vibrant colours, solid blacks tending towards abstraction rather than realism. The paintings have been called expressionistic. There are also many self-portraits as if the painter were keeping tabs on what he was becoming.
Interesting, too, are Munch’s depictions of women. Females are often depicted as vampiric, sucking the blood out of men, enveloping male figures in their long hair, entrapping them in their embrace. Death is associated with the female even as Munch experienced it first hand seeing his mother and sister caughing up blood. In many paintings, time seems suspended as though something should happen, although nothing does. A series of paintings depicts the cycles of life: Innocent and Experience, perhaps as in the poems of William Blake. Love, lust, jealousy, and loss – ending in death.
As an undergrad doing a paper on Munch, I found an article, now lost to me, that analyzed Munch’s work psychologically. The author of the piece explained the swirling red sky and city below the cartoon-like “Scream as being linked to Munch’s trauma of witnessing his mother and (later) his favourite sister, Sophie, both dying from tuberculosis. Another painting, “Despair” (1892), is said to have been inspired by a sunset in southern France, but it can similarly be attributed to the young boy’s trauma. Both paintings tremble with anxiety. Another often repeated theme– perhaps Munch could not make up his mind – is “Girls on the Pier” (1901) which depicts a group of young women peering into the dark waters below the pier, as though looking into the darkness of life. The road leading from the pier into the town may lead to safety, but how safe are you in the world? Another version of the same, done a year later, has girls huddled together on the pier looking at the road into town, perhaps with a sense of anticipation. In this depiction, the sea’s depths are not threatening; the girls seem unconcerned with the water. The painting is lighter in mood, more colourful – an antidote to a darker vision.
Other paintings show couples embracing, men lusting after women, women smothering men, suggesting romantic relationships that had ended badly for Munch. In a famous print entitle “The Kiss,” of which there are multiple versions, a male and female blend into each other as they embrace, suggesting a loss of autonomy, a dissolution of the self in the other. A lithograph entitled “The Vampire IV” depicts a long-haired, lusty female enveloping and biting a man in the back of the neck. This doesn’t look like romantic love. Then there are other works like “Death and the Woman,” a traditional theme going back at least to the Middle Ages: woman as seductress, agent of sin and destruction. It appears Munch had a fear of women which he expressed in his art. As such, Munch’s work can be considered autobiographical or therapeutic, but it touched a nerve in society was well. At first, he was condemned for his sketchy, “unfinished,” non-traditional work but, in an age that had learned to embrace Freudian investigation into the unconscious, Munch was very much contemporary and accordingly famous. His art externalizes what many felt.
Munch died in 1944, around the time when, in America, Marc Rothko and like-minded painters announced their interest in giving voice to “an unknown world” and “complex thought.” (They might have added conflicted feelings.) Rothko and his cohorts were labelled Abstract Expressionists, implying an attention paid to the internal life which Munch and his generation had also articulated.
I read a bit about Marcus Rothkovitch, born in Latvia in 1903, died in America sixty-seven years later of suicide, alone in his studio, surrounded by his work. Marcus shortened his name to Rothko probably in order to fit into American society. His family were Jewish, less religious than secular. He dropped out of Yale, was married twice, and taught art for twenty-two years in Brooklyn. He managed a trip to Italy where he was impressed by the large wall paintings at Pompeii, a town that had perished under volcanic ash but left artifacts of its life behind. Like his contemporaries, Rothko reacted to the horrors of the First (and later, the Second) World War by turning to abstraction to give voice to the inner life and hope for new beginnings.
Rothko felt the rendition of the world in a “realistic,” naturalistic, manner had become inadequate to account for a culture transformed by violence. He sought a new language of aesthetics. In the 1940s, he was influenced by Greek mythology and by surrealism. However, by 1947, he was painting coloured fields on huge canvasses that few understood. But then, they did not know how to look at Rothko’s work in order to experience it.
Rothko intended his work to be viewed close up (18 inches away, by one report) so as to fill the viewer’s field of vision completely, to immerse the mind in the painting. Close up, you can see brush strokes, subtleties in colour, layering, all which can elicit a personal response. A Rothko should not be seen; it should be experienced. Apparently, some viewers have a deep emotional reaction to his paintings as deep psychological wounds respond. Perhaps the paintings relate to what Carl Jung identified as subconscious material that is normally repressed but freed up by art. Rothkos can access psychic pain and can express humanity’s emotional life.
In the period 1964-1967, Rothko collaborated with architects and donors to produce a unique space for reflection, the Rothko Chapel.
It is non-denominational and contains fourteen of his large works, mostly hues of black reminiscent of fog surrounding the viewer, 360 degrees. The works vary in their shades according to the daylight streaming into the space from above. I haven’t seen this structure, located in Houston, Texas, but think of it in relation to Monet’s water lilies mural in the Orangerie Museum, Paris, similarly designed to be a wrap-around experience. The one looks inwards; the other looks outwards at nature.
Encountering modern art can be frustrating for viewers used to being fed naturalistic scenes that have single interpretations. Naturalistic art had its purpose, but many of these works have been surpassed by photography. With the invention of the camera, painting called for new tasks and methods, expressing the self, dealing with spiritual and emotional matters, using forms that are not immediately reflective of the world as we see it. The modern visual language presents a challenge; it gives us something to think about, not only in terms of “What is art?” but in how to approach modern and contemporary work.
Unfortunately, today, there is more junk than gems on the market, and money often decides what is shown and what remains unknown. Politics, too, plays a decisive role in what public and private galleries show. Today, didacticism has infected art, telling what the public is supposed to identify with and dictating proper (moral) attitudes we should hold. We are, in effect, being manipulated by ideological agendas more than by our need to experience the spiritual dimension which artists like Munch and Rothko addressed. In many galleries and museums, contemporary art often has more in common with Soviet, socialist (realism) and Nazi propaganda than with the modern soul. As a testament of our times, art ought to be able to tell future generations about the state of our collective, spiritual existence; it ought to articulate the ephemeral and to affirm the constants of humanity. What we find in galleries these days, in my estimation at least, is merely trash.
On the Internet, I saw a photo of a classroom with pupils and a teacher, somewhere in America. At the back of the room was a large sign, possibly to remind the teacher what he or she was supposed to be concerned with. The sign read CRITICAL THINKING. I was immediately reminded of when CT came into fashion.
I was teaching in Saudi Arabia where CT was the latest in a series of academic vogues that came and went without much of a lasting impact. We instructors were asked to “make students think,” as though they had been asleep the entire time we instructed them, which may well have been the case. However, what were they supposed to be thinking about in a society in which asking questions was taboo? Thinking critically entails questioning the validity of what we have inherited as truth. It demands evidential support for what is claimed to be true as well as for what is thought to be false. You can’t just say something is the truth without supporting it with rational argument and facts.
For instance, in a case that ought to have interested the Saudis, do Believers really have to go to the mosque to pray? If the answer is merely evasive, or illogical, why should we accept it? This is critical thinking, but this is not what was wanted in the Salafist state of Saudi Arabia. Those calling for CT were looking for a magic solution out of the stupor their civilization had fallen into. Nowadays, however, this intellectual dead end does not just pertain to Saudi Arabia but to much of the West for we have all forms of “false news” and pseudo-truths presented to us on a thin string.
BELIEVE BELIEVE BELIEVE….
So-called, liberal, democratic countries pay lip service to critical thinking, hoping it will keep them abreast in science and technology, but without having too many questions to answer. For instance, why should any criticism of minorities automatically be morally and legally condemned as “hate speech?”For speech to be motivated by hate, doesn’t there need to be proof of intent? Under the law, you used to have to provide a motive for a crime. If so, why is it alright to condemn someone merely for asking a question? I recall prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, lambasting a woman in the audience he was preaching to, with the put down “We don’t condone hate” when she merely had asked where the money would come from to bring in countless numbers of refugees. From a Canadian taxpayer, was this not a valid question?
It seemed that any doubt as to the moral or political wisdom of the PM was taboo. Trudeau reacted like the feel-good politician he is, with smug moral-superiority, as if you needed to be “progressive” to be a Canadian at all. This virtue signalling essentially claims all that is ethical to one side of the political spectrum and it demonizes anyone who objects. Arrogance has become the default “progressive” position, but Canadians are not the only ones playing a morality game.
These days, complete agreement or absolute silence is demanded by Western ruling elites. It is said – not without reason – that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this seems the case in Western democracies where parties rule without heeding the concerns of their underlings. Mass immigration, the rising cost of housing, higher taxes, and increasing poverty (even among immigrants) are disregarded as governments mindlessly increase the size of their populations, which usually entails the expansion of cities into farm land. Would critical thinking not indicate that paving over good farmland with new housing estates could pose a problem for food-production? Countries like Germany are already massively dependent on foreign supplies of energy without allowing their citizens to be held hostage over basic necessities like food as well. But German governments have not been listening to the people.
Critical thinking is not encouraged by moneyed elites as they are following plans for expansion decided decades ago when the world was different. There is money to be made on housing construction. Bigger populations means more tax revenue to spend on government projects, more profits for corporations and investors, construction companies, furniture producers, and immigrant voters who will show their appreciation at the polls. Greater GDP is the darling of the wealthy who stand to profit the most. Greed overrides critical thought for those who stand to make money. They do what their predecessors did, thoughtlessly and relentlessly, following outdated economic strategies that got us into the precarious position we are in, globally. This begs the question whether this irrational cycle can be disrupted long enough for the world to be fixed, assuming it isn’t beyond redemption.
Do we really need more GDP, bigger populations, bigger cities, more highways, more airports, more seaports, more consumption ad infinitum? Where are the limits if we have not already met or surpassed them? When will the natural world we have been raping collapse around us? Demographers indicate that some decades hence, populations will actually level off and then decline. People are just not reproducing once they become relatively better off. China, Japan, America, and Europe will all see declining indigenous populations and immigration will not be able to replace those who die. Rather than seeing this as a lamentable prospect, why not put those thinking caps on and figure out how to achieve a standard of living/consumption, stable populations, smaller, more livable cities for citizens who will live longer and in good health? Are Switzerland or Lichtenstein or Monte Carlo really so inferior for being small? Do our cities need to have the skylines of Tokyo, Shanghai, or Manhattan? Economies of quality rather than quantity would do better in the long run. Goods would last longer, garbage would be reduced in volume, and the seas might actually become cleaner. There could be clean drinking water for all. Fewer people on the planet does bring advantages.
Small is beautiful….
So, why are we not talking about limited immigration? Why are we not encouraging two- or three-child families, better education, free healthcare, a more physically and mentally fit population able to balance work and leisure? This will not be achieved through constantly rising populations impinging on what is left of the natural environment. A rational (critical) examination of our civilization’s evolution would indicate it is high time for a re-think.
Faith in reason is the most significant feature of Western civilization.
— Sydney Stark
Traditionally, academics considered the Roman Catholic Church as dragging its feet when it came to embracing progress, hindering technological, scientific, and intellectual advancement, in contrast to (Max Weber) the Protestants who, supposedly, were gung ho on individualism and capitalism. Rodney Stark looks to earliest Christianity to demonstrate that Christians had a faith in rational inquiry into God’s works, considering the process of rational discovery capable of understanding the Creator through His works. Christianity spread both the scientific approach to nature and early capitalism in that monks practiced an early form of investment capitalism on their monastic estates. Monks did not shun labour, but thrived on it as a means of staying humble, working the land to produce surplus agricultural goods whose sale brought the monastery a profit to acquire more land and technology through which to achieve yet greater productivity. Behind labour in the service of the Lord was the idea of progress: the notion that humans could approach God through scientific knowledge of how things worked. They could advance their institutions through work and good management to remain independent of sponsors who could always abandon their patronage.
An important aspect of Catholicism, as far as the development of technology was concerned, was the Church’s disapproval of slavery. Perhaps because Christians had been subjected to slavery under Roman rule, early theologians made it known that enslaving others – initially, enslaving fellow Christians – was taboo. This meant that, while it was common practice to enslave others to do the dirty work, it became imperative for Christians to find mechanical means of doing the most mundane tasks. Grinding corn and pumping water, for instance, could be done by labour but only if it was available and cheap. The problem was solved by inventing mills powered by water.
The water wheel became so successful that, by 1086 CE, there were 5,624 mills in operation along rivers in England. In Paris, there was one mill for every seventy feet along the Seine River. By the 13th century, Europeans were using mechanical means for the production of paper, sawing wood, hammering metal, and turning lathes. Pumping water from lowlands allowed Belgium and the Netherlands to reclaim fertile land on which to grow produce and build towns. Water mills were eventually augmented by windmills, which could be located anywhere. Horses were recruited to pull wagons once the padded collar was invented, allowing animals to pull heavier loads than was previously the case. Immense gains in agricultural production were achieved when new types of plows were devised. More food led to population increases, and on and on.
Monastic estates engaged in fish farming because meat was forbidden on Fridays. Until the 12th century, fish farms supplied the European demand until fishing fleets did the job. In the 13th century, eye glasses were invented in Italy, enabling people to be productive despite sight deficiencies, resulting in Italian factories soon producing glasses on an industrial scale. Clocks appeared in medieval church towers to keep workers on time. (Meanwhile, clocks were rejected by the Muslim Ottomans and Eastern Orthodox Christians on religious grounds.) Foundries, too, discovered bellows by which oxygen could be blasted into furnaces, producing greater degrees of heat for making steel. By the 14th century, European foundries produced canons along with church bells. Invented in China, compasses allowed Europeans to sail to the New World and build empires greater than any. Again, faith in the future, in progress, capital investment, and in rational thinking allowed Europe the edge it has held until modern times and, as Stark argues, Europe’s development can be attributed to medieval Christian theology.
Churchmen like Saint Thomas Aquinas (13th century) reasoned that humans lacked the intelligence to see the essence of things but were given rational minds to lead them to the truth, step-by-step. To the logician Aquinas and his contemporaries, God was the epitome of reason and, since the universe was rationally-created, it was knowable through the faculty of reason. However, an understanding of God was limited to our abilities in any given age. Aquinas believed, as we evolved, so did our quest to know the divine. Christian trust in reason, however, was not limited to theology and science but extended to wealth creation. While the conditions for capitalism existed in Muslim lands as well, the key difference was in (religious) attitudes to capital accumulation and reinvestment, how work and profit were regarded, and how far individualism was tolerated.
By reinvesting what they earned, monks were able to buy the latest technological innovations, which resulted in greater surpluses and greater wealth. Monasteries became so rich that they were able to lend money to nobles financially in need. As a result of its growing wealth, the Church became the first modern corporation, powering economies all over Europe. Eventually, wealthy monasteries turned into towns with lay persons working for the monks. Once Europe’s barter system was turned into a cash economy, with letters of credit granted by banks, capitalism spread all the way from Italy to Ireland.
As nobles squandered their wealth and became indebted, the Church gained lands, further enriching itself. French monks in Cluny eventually lived like lords. Technological advances went hand in hand with complicated cathedral construction, extensive battlements to defend towns and cities, but also to new directions in art, music, and literature. It was during the Middle (Medieval) Ages that the organ, harpsichord, violin, and bass fiddle were invented, as was music notation. Oil painting on canvass became standard, and clock towers and stained-glass windows graced church architecture.
These advances, however, were not uniformly applied. France, Spain, and Portugal remained command economies directed by the nobility, with little investment in industries. As Stark notes, when Spain sent its famed Armada to sail against England, nothing aboard the ships – not even maps or cannon balls – was manufactured in Spain. Everything had to be imported. To raise funds for the invasion, peasants were taxed up to a third of their incomes, and the New World was looted for gold and silver to pay for the nobility’s ambitions. Clearly, not everyone shared the capitalist mentality. Had Spain conquered England, Stark speculates, capitalism would have been stopped in its tracks.
At first, Italy was the star in the development of capitalist enterprise. Even during Roman predominance, Venice and Genoa remained independent states with limited manufacturing economies. Florence became a banking and production centre, preparing it for a key role in the development of European capitalism. Competition between Italian city states necessitated constant innovation. Venice became a centre for the production of glass and textiles, shoes, dyes, iron, brass, weapons and jewellery. There were improvements in government as well. Venice exemplified an early form of democracy with limited executive powers and rotating representatives elected by popular will. People were chosen for their competence, not their family names. Trade guilds represented common workers, which allowed Italian states a respite from grass-roots revolutionary pressures that would have disrupted wealth creation.
Rules of trade brought predictability in commerce and lowered the risk to capital investment, while written records and financial accounting professionalized business. Literacy and numeracy became highly important, while the adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system improved financial calculations. Italian banks spread capitalism throughout Europe, with the Medici Bank one of the most prominent. Unfortunately, the Italian goose that produced the golden eggs was killed off, as it often is, by powerful families that sought to control not only commerce but the populations that thrived. Many a business went bust when commercial freedom came to be strictly regulated by the wealthy. Soon, Italy found it increasingly difficult to compete against Northern European industries after Italians were legally prevented from adopting the cost-saving manufacturing that allowed competitors to undercut prices of glass and textiles. Nor did Italian export taxes up to 40% help sales while English products remained barely taxed at all. Italy also faced aggression from Muslim incursions that disrupted commerce. Eventually, Italian states fell behind in a game they originated.
Far from being backward or “dark,” medieval Europe advanced by leaps and bounds. The Middle Ages allowed progress impossible while the Roman Empire had stifled individual effort and innovation. As Stark tells us, “So much progress took place during the so-called Dark Ages that by no later than the thirteenth century, Europe had forged far ahead of Rome and Greece, and ahead of the rest of the world as well” (pp. 54-55). That is the central idea of Stark’s re-consideration of the relation of capitalism to theology, one which others might well consider in their desire to raise the productivity and living standard of their own people.
Rodney Stark’s book is one of many being published as historians reconsider inherited interpretations of what happened and why. They are challenging received histories by revisiting ancient documents and archaeological evidence not available previously, and they are doing this in times of Western doubt as to the value of its own achievements. While others are busy undermining Western self-confidence, revisionist historians are painting new pictures of a past in which Westerners can be proud rather than ashamed. Whether you think the result of progress good or bad, you cannot ignore the contributions the West has made to human progress in all respects. Those who vilify Europe and America have little to offer in the way of alternatives. The fact they are doing their utmost to catch up testifies to this.
Source:
Rodney Stark (2005), The Victory of Reason. How Christianity Let to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. New York: Random House.
A man stands in the rubble, and calls out asking if anyone needs help, after the collapse of the first World Trade Center Tower 11 September, 2001, in New York. Two hijacked planes crashed into the twin towers causing the collapse of both. AFP PHOTO Doug KANTER
From time to time, I post impressions of books I read about various interests, China during the 20th century being one of these. Here is one about a man who went to China to participate in the revolution.
Book Cover: The Man Who Stayed Behind (2001)
Book review of The Man Who Stayed Behind, by Sydney Rittenberg and Amanda Bennett (2001).
This is an often spellbinding account of Sydney Rittenberg’s thirty-five years in revolutionary China, a time when the Communists and the Nationalists (KMT) were fighting for the future of over a half-billion people in one of the oldest civilizations on the planet. Rittenberg had already joined the American Communist party while at college and had been active in attempts at unionizing black Americans in the deep South when he was inducted into the US Army. As he had learned Chinese, he was given the task of delivering compensation for a wrong done to a rickshaw puller’s family, an event which allowed him to get a sense of the hardships facing the ordinary Chinese. He decided that China was way more interesting than America, and that he might have a chance at being relevant in history.
After his discharge from the military, Rittenberg stayed on in China, even then the land exuding a romantic air of adventure. Sydney fell under its spell. Like many others, he believed he could help right wrongs; he could champion the poor in their struggle for a better life. As a communist, he longed to be useful and accepted by his Chinese fellow believers. He wanted his life to matter in a broader context than the unfair system he was born into, a capitalism which was then believed on its way onto the scrapheap of history. With this attitude, he headed for Yanan where Mao Tsetung and a few thousand followers were holed up in the caves dotting the hilly region, gathering their resources and recruiting members for the eventual showdown with the Chinese Nationalist forces.
Of Yanan, Rittenberg recalls feeling at home among like-minded souls devoted to the building of a communal society. He met with Mao and luminaries like Zhou Enlai, at the time already world-famous revolutionaries. To them, Rittenberg was useful but too individualistic and opinionated, lacking discipline and the true believer’s willingness to sacrifice. For Rittenberg, meeting Mao and Zhou was a career highlight. He soon found himself working in the Party’s English propaganda arm of the party. His hope was always to be accepted as an equal communist party member, one of the inner circle, privileged to insider knowledge, instrumental in deciding the direction the country was going in. He saw China as a project to devote his life to. However, he made errors that got him in trouble. He landed in prison twice for spying, a euphemism for misconstruing Mao Tsetung Thought. (For those readers wanting to know what happens to the mind while in solitary confinement, this book is a good resource.)
Where some people blame their oppressors for their punishment, Rittenberg believed he had not been able to measure up to what a true communist had to be. He assumed the fault was his own, that other communists were able to sacrifice themselves where he was not. He believed he needed to put the party and the interests of the masses above everything, including his own family. Twice he was pardoned after long stints in solitary confinement; the party admitted its mistakes. Twice he was released into better circumstances, was given more responsibilities and a higher status. He became a star during the Cultural Revolution, appealing to the old as well as the young, Red Guard revolutionaries. His name became known all over China, and he enjoyed occasionally being proven correct in disputes within the party ranks. Yet it took ages for him to realize that Mao was not a god, and that the party was comprised of fallible people like himself. After thirty-five years of upheaval and trauma to himself and to his wife and children, Rittenberg moved back to the United States, the great capitalistic bastion. He and the wife became consultants to companies wanting to do business in China. If there is irony in this, Rittenberg may have noticed it. Or maybe not.
To his credit, Rittenberg does not whitewash his naivety. He was young and idealistic, devoted to an idea that evaded realization. Like many of his contemporaries, he closed his mind to atrocities committed by Stalin and Mao, wanting at all costs for the egalitarianism they advocated to be historically correct. The ends would justify the means. A new world would excuse all excesses. His blindness was that of a “zealot,” as he says in the book, enchanted by the kind of enthusiasm that drives the fans of the Islamic State. As believers from all over the world who now stream to the Middle East and Afghanistan, hoping to get in on the action while it lasts, or those who participated in the Spanish Civil War and in the Nazi cause, Rittenberg was a product of his times — one who could not settle for a bourgeois existence when adventure beckoned.
Sydney at tea
Revolutions provide a venue for heroic self-affirmation and importance in the eyes of others. They offer opportunities to shine, to be useful to a cause surpassing the narrow confines of the self. You can become a somebody during an upheaval. The unemployed picture-painter, Adolf Schicklgruber, became Adolf Hitler, Führer of Germany. In China, Mao Tsetung, the peasant librarian with a talent for talk and military strategy, became the Great Helmsman for hundreds of millions. It may seem a travesty to put Rittenberg into the same category but, whether one is on the left or the right is only a matter of predilection. Morality seems to become eclipsed when exciting opportunities to shine present themselves.
History will applaud or condemn individuals accordingly. Rittenberg remained a communist devotee to the end. He is on the roster of foreign adventurers who threw their lot in with the Chinese revolution. Perhaps he was not as consequential as Edgar Snow, George Hatem, Norman Bethune, or Rewi Alley, but he is worth knowing about all the same. He describes many of the idiosyncrasies of the party, the relationships that bound believers to each other, and the uncertain fates that waited for many. Where Rittenberg was in error was in his mistaken impression that Mao could not be wrong. Orwell had seen through Stalin’s facade while in Barcelona (1937); Arthur Koestler denounced communism in 1940. Rittenberg seems not to have read any of them, or he dismissed them as reactionaries. Perhaps he couldn’t face the situation he was in. Maybe the closer one gets to power, the less one sees objectively. If so, this book is a confession of personal failings, a plea for understanding and forgiveness and, as such, worth reading.
In China all appearances are deceptive. – Paul Theroux
It’s possible to live among the Chinese for years without understanding anything
about the way they live. – Michel Houellebecq
This is a record of four years in the People’s Republic of China, beginning in Tianjin, at the time a city of some seven million, just an hour-and-a-half by train south of Beijing, and later, time spent in Harbin, the ice capital of the far north. Harbin is in what was once called Manchuria, occupied by the Japanese. It is now called Heilongjiang province.
(Unless specified, all photos are mine.)
In the fall of 2004, I was met at the old Beijing international airport by a delegation of students assigned to take me to their campus in Tianjin, my home for the immediate future. Driving southwards on an unremarkable, two-lane highway through monotonously flat, misty farmland, I was tired from my flight. There was an awful lot of truck traffic on the motorway, going in either direction. Some vehicles looked as though their huge burdens, precariously bound onto them, would tip over at any moment. Our driver was a young daredevil who enjoyed weaving in between such vehicles, horn blasting and gas pedal to the floor. Within an hour and a half, we arrived in Tianjin.
The university I worked at greeted visitors coming through a tall gate. There were tall, aging birch trees on either side of a paved road leading to a central administration building with pseudo-Greek pillars and large wooden doors. If the style seemed incongruous in China, this building stemmed from the early 1900s when Europeans were still in the Middle Kingdom. The college was originally an academy for training textile workers, established by a businessman who needed engineers and skilled workers.
The first things that impressed me were a couple of Bauhaus buildings of concrete and glass, erected in the 1920s. I had not seen anything like them in Europe, probably because most such structures had been destroyed in the last war. But Tianjin has these and many others which were a pleasure to find. Similarly impressive was a single line of insulated heating pipe running the length of the institution, some twenty feet above the pavement. It emanated from a central heating plant, adding to the vintage industrial charm of the place.
The Old University as it was then
The university had all the essentials so that students did not have to venture out the front gates which were locked after 11PM. There were a couple of small grocery stores, street food vendors, several good cafeterias, sundries shops, a privately-operated hotel, adjacent to a small, man-made lake. In one of the teaching buildings, there was a TV room for students who wanted to watch live CNN, BBC, German, French, or Spanish television. Students had to sign in for these, and there were no private television sets in any of the residences.
There was also an indoor swimming pool, several outdoor basketball courts, small sitting areas around the lake for lovers, and an ancient, dilapidated red-brick residence for teachers and retired professors. It was a world all its own. And it was typical of Chinese universities, although our campus was older than many.
A colleague told me that, when he had arrived the previous year, the college wanted him to share a room with three other foreign teachers, as was common with Chinese instructors. (It was clear that the Chinese were not yet aware of western expectations.) The colleague protested until they gave him an apartment of his own. Normally, in China people do not get their own way. More than likely, the Chinese officials saw his behavior as juvenile and insubordinate. Unfortunately, they would soon have similar impressions of the rest of us.
The little apartment assigned to me in the “Foreign Experts Residences” was convenient and comfortable, with the only drawback next to it a railway line carrying some 70 freight trains per day, pulling endless caravans of heavy cargo to the Tianjin seaport. The rolling stock made the residences tremble. At first, the rumble kept me awake at night; yet I got used to this, as to much more.
Student Residences
My neighbors in the six-story residence were an odd mix. On the floors below, there was a contingent of Mongolian students training to become fashion models. Several of them were over six feet tall and the girls were remarkably attractive. Individually, they could be quite polite and charming, but as a group they were rowdy drunkards who slammed their doors at one o’clock in the morning. They also seemed to be in and out of each other’s rooms a lot, emerging in their bathrobes sleepy-eyed in the mornings. They pretty much kept to themselves, so I heard them more than I saw them.
Like most mega-cities, Tianjin is polluted, but it has its redeeming features among which are several downtown streets adorned with art nouveau-style buildings. Built by European families who had left China by the time of the Communist victory in 1948, some have “sunrise” designs on their exteriors, while others show off Romanesque columns and huge, fortified doors, some of which were being restored to their former glory.
One of my favorite homes in this district was a small villa with squared and rounded shapes, looking like a structure that could be in pre-war Berlin. But in 2004, this beauty had a chaotic mess of electrical wires entangling her, as though she had been netted by poachers. Her garden was in a trashy state, plaster falling off the walls and paint peeling off window frames. The building had been left to suffocate because, until recently, the authorities saw no value in maintaining buildings of foreign interlopers in China.
Bauhaus Teaching Building On Campus
A few, better-maintained, European villas had historic plaques on the fences around them, but these gave no indication of their original owners or designers. They just said general, or colonel So-and-so of the People’s Liberation Army, once stayed there. This suggests Europe’s imperialistic intrusion into China was (and still is) resented. But the city is realizing the tourist potential of these remarkable buildings and is restoring many.
One cool winter’s day, a colleague and I went to the “English Corner” at renowned Nankai University (where Zhou Enlai once was a student). An “English Corner” is a designated meeting place where everyone is supposed to practice English. These “corners” are inside or outside, depending on the institution. Arriving at Nankai by taxi, we were immediately surrounded by students whose standard questions were: “Where are you from?” and “What do you think of George Bush?” Or, more commonly: “What do you think of China?”
Tianjin in winter
No matter what our answers were, from the students we usually got knee-jerk responses straight out of some official policy: “China will be the world leader soon,” to which I once replied: “You’ll have to run pretty hard to catch up to the United States.” In most such interchanges, though, I detected a naivety, not to mention xenophobic resentment. Students wanted confirmation of what they had been led to believe (not least by the West), but I had my doubts. I thought that many students in China lived rather sheltered lives. I also wondered how long this innocence would last.
After a year in Tianjin, I moved north to Harbin where I stayed for three years. But later, in 2008, I returned to Tianjin for a pleasant surprise. The city was all fixed up. There were new bridges across the river. On one of them there were bare-breasted water sprites draped over a shield announcing the name of the bridge – rather tacky, but very Chinese in aesthetics. Everything was cleaner than I remembered it. The sidewalks outside my university freshly newly tiled and sparkling new eating places had been established. You could now get a peppercorn steak at “Jacky’s” just up the street – no need to go all the way downtown. And the gleaming buses were just out of the factory. Some of them were even air conditioned. Wherever I looked, I saw new overpasses, flashy office towers, and apartment blocks. There was even a shiny new airport. All of this was created within three years. I was impressed, but at the same time I doubted there had been a radical shift in the people’s thinking.
Sports Day
In the fall of my first year, we foreign teachers were told to take part in the university’s Sports Day. To get us ready, a female drill-instructor came to our residence. We each received a white sweat shirt and a little national flag, some corresponding to our nationalities, others not. Then we were shown how to march: “Ey, Ar, San, Sze… One, two, three four! All in step please,” as our drill sergeant ordered. But try as we might, we couldn’t get it right. Marching was so strange to us. We laughed and cracked jokes, and we remained a bunch of anarchists.
Next day, we were shepherded onto the university’s running track where the bleachers were jammed with dignitaries and senior students. Mustered the field, there were dozens of student gymnastic teams and professors in uniformed outfits. The math professors, the physics teachers, and the engineers were dressed in their own distinguished colors, but then there was our Foreign Legion — smiling foolishly, waving our little flags, but in a hopelessly disorganized mishmash. To the consternation of our minders, to the blare of marshal music, we strolled past the reviewing stand when we ought to have been goose-stepping. Even though I could not stop laughing, all the while I was wondering how we would explain our lack of discipline to our hosts. I also wondered how the audience interpreted our apparently insubordinate behavior. Someone must have been disappointed because the following year we were not asked to march. We got to sit in the bleachers instead.
Speech Contest
Part of China’s attempts at catching up to the modern world is the country’s massive drive to learn English. On a CCTV military channel, I watched a woman soldier in a splendid uniform, eloquently speak of what she would like to do for her country if she were able to. It reminded me of the kinds of speech-training promoted in the 1950s when Americans were trying to “win friends and influence people.” Now, as then, the intention was to win a contest and be fast-tracked into a career, preferably with the opportunity to travel.
Speech contest candidate
In China, eloquence in English is considered a ticket to opportunity. Even taxi drivers are supposed to learn English phrases, although I never met one who could say more than “Bye Bye” and this included Beijing drivers who were supposed to prepare for international guests to the Olympics.
In December of that year, a couple of us from the English program were asked to adjudicate a speech contest. Typically, we were invited at the last minute and had minimal instructions. I was on a panel of four; two of us were Westerners, two were Chinese English-language teachers. We were in a dimly lit, decrepit classroom consisting of a board, a lectern, and rows of tables and chairs facing a podium. The candidates, like sacrificial victims, were called up one at a time. All launched into their spiel without hesitation, seemingly eager to get it over with. Many faltered as they forgot lines memorized morning after morning on the foggy campus grounds.
The contestants were predominantly young men with nerves tied up in knots. Some bellowed their speeches as though they were addressing the masses in Tienanmen Square. Others did a bit of gesturing to get their point across — a technique learned out of a text book on oratory, no doubt. I could not understand half of them. I thought one speech was about going camping, but I had my doubts. Another was a poem on love. The young man delivered it like a goldfish gobbling air. (I had to suppress a laugh.) To my surprise, someone said something complimentary about America, but then ruined it with the cliché: “America has a war-mongering leadership” although, he conceded, the US population was “peace-loving.” Such clichés about the USA were rampant among university-educated people, so it was no surprise to hear this coming from the podium.
One unfortunate fellow got up and simply stated that he had not prepared adequately and would have to miss this great opportunity. He reminded me of a penitent flogging himself in front of the Inquisition. I don’t recall if any of these candidates made it to the finals, but later I adjudicated a Tianjin-CCTV preliminary contest at our university and did not see any of them.
Independence Day
During those heady first months in Tianjin, we foreign teachers wanted to reward our students with a film night, so we decided to show an action flick called Independence Day. However, about half way through the film it dawned on me what monumental American propaganda this was. Briefly put, the film is about the President of the United States, an Anglo who, along with a Jewish nerd (aptly named David), and a daredevil African-American pilot (Will Smith), together save the entire human race from evil-minded aliens. I was afraid there might be complaints; perhaps, we would be reported to the Office of the Party Secretary, the commissar on campus.
I need not have worried. To my surprise (or dismay) when the trio of heroes cleverly defeated the aliens, our audience of over a hundred 19-year old Chinese boys and girls shot to their feet, applauded, whooped, and cheered. I was caught off guard. Later, in my class, when I tried to say a few words about the “propaganda” slant of the film, my observations were met with total disinterest. I probably came across as one of those intellectuals who were forced to wear a dunce cap during the Cultural Revolution.
Chinese Women
The subject of Chinese women dating foreign men is a favorite with male expats, many of whom wouldn’t merit a glance from females in the West. But, in the Far East, even plain-looking foreigners can be hot stuff. The reason is novelty and money, twin aphrodisiacs. Still, for the foreigner, hanging out with Chinese women is not as risk-free as it might seem.
Models at an auto show
I met one young adventurer whose Chinese girlfriend moved in with him in the expectation of getting married. However, he got nervous about the arrangement and asked her to move out, after which she hysterically threatened to kill herself. But she eventually did leave. Yet when I saw him six months later, the two of them were still dating.
Another young foreigner in Harbin, a rather tough town, picked up a Chinese girl he shouldn’t have and took her home. When the girl claimed he “raped” her, her Chinese boyfriend whacked him in the head with a machete and left him to die in the snow. He survived to tell the tale, but barely.
I met several mixed-race couples who had shacked up or married. Usually, the women had kids and were divorced, while the foreign men were older and divorced. The couples seemed happy enough, sort of like refugees getting a second life, but in every case the woman held the power. She spoke the language; she understood the rules of Chinese society; she kept house, ordered flight tickets, arranged for the child’s education, handled the man’s pay, and even got him a driver’s license by filling out the driver’s test for him. As far as I’m aware few of these relationships lasted.
I could never make up my mind whether Chinese girls were as naive as they seemed, or they were deliberately playing a role that was expected of them. They could be cute and childlike at any age (I’ve met grown women who engaged in baby talk), but they could also act like prudes. At first, I found their “little girl” personas annoying but then got used to it and even found it disarming. It seemed to be a strategy to get what they wanted without arousing resistance. I will say more about this when I discuss cuteness in Chinese culture.
Victimhood
No matter what the attitude of the Chinese towards foreigners, regarding their attitudes towards the Japanese, feelings remain bitter. The Chinese government’s position via-à-vis Japan is often hostile despite massive Japanese economic investments in China. The Chinese suspect Japanese intentions. From conversations with students, I learned that many think the Japanese are profiteering from cheap Chinese labor, even while they are “plotting” a repeat-colonization. Just what this “colonization” consists of was never explained to me, but it seems such ideas circulate as part of an ingrained anti-Japanese bias stemming from the last war.
During my first year in China, there were anti-Japanese riots in Shanghai and Beijing. Mobs of angry students chanted “Kill Japanese!” as they smashed Japanese-owned shops and cars. Ostensibly, these protests were against Japan’s official interpretation of the invasion of China during the Second World War. A new Japanese history text did not adequately attribute blame to the imperial Japanese army for atrocities committed, so this had the Chinese up in arms. But, according to Western commentators, hostile anti-Japanese demonstrations are frequently orchestrated by the Chinese government for its own objectives.
I speculated that the failure by the Japanese to fully acknowledge their war-guilt was a matter of avoiding legal responsibility. There could also be a great loss of face and national self-confidence within Japan itself. In the year I refer to, 2004, the Japanese were not doing well economically, and the Chinese elite seemed eager to rub Tokyo’s nose in the ground to elevate China’s prestige among regional victims of Japanese imperialism. Acknowledging national guilt would have burdened Japan with a sense of responsibility that, psychologically, could politically cripple it in any future contest with its gigantic neighbor. Japan only need look at Germany to see how well such a guilt-strategy has worked.
Still, foreign commentators noted that by allowing anti-Japanese demonstrations, the Beijing politicos might be shooting themselves in the foot. Investors could think the mainland was not as stable as they had thought. Also, this kind of political hate mongering could have harmful consequences leading up to the Olympics of 2008. Sure enough, anti-Japanese demonstrations ceased before the Games when the government had other matters to worry about.
Beijing People
The collective Chinese psyche is characterized by a sense of humiliation inflicted by imperial powers over a hundred years ago. But, the self-perception as “victim” is also officially cultivated. When there is a need to divert the populace’s attention from domestic problems, the government can always resurrect grievances against foreigners. For instance, they used the Japanese history textbook issue at a time when Chinese farmers were protesting official land seizures and food price increases; parents were complaining about the one-child policy; and corruption in officialdom was making the news daily. Anti-Japanese drum-beating always garners sympathy for the genuine suffering that the Chinese underwent at the hands of Imperial Japan, and it does momentarily point the spotlight away from the Communist Party. So, it has become a handy political tool.
The guilt card has been used in international trade disputes as well. When China complained about being discriminated against through American or European trade tariffs, there was no mention of the fact that China had been ripping off Western companies for decades, illegally copying thousands of products that were supposed to be patent protected. Nor did it acknowledge that it had been dumping cheap goods on foreign markets, thereby ruining low-tech industries in the developing world. It seems the average Chinese still responds to the image of the little guy who is standing up to big bullies, but he himself remains blameless. It will be interesting to see if the Chinese mandarins still play the victim once history has put them firmly inside the winner’s circle.
The underdog psychology goes some ways toward explaining the need to put on not just a good show but a fantastic one for the 2008 Games. The opening ceremonies, as I will describe later, had to be superlative. The quality of the athletes needed to be top-notch. Everything had to go perfectly in order to demonstrate, well …. What? That China is as good as the United States? This seems to have been the intention. China most readily compares itself to the USA, though you must ask why, considering the Chinese are supposedly communists while the Americans are arch-capitalists. But then these labels hardly apply today.
What does China want? I think this question is really a matter of what does China’s elite want? They want what Hegel called Anerkennung — recognition, respect, affirmation. And, implied in this, they want a confirmation that the Chinese are a culture or race superior to those who once colonized China. It’s all part of regaining face, compromised during foreign incursions into the Middle Kingdom.
Cultural Attitudes
Compared to Western societies, sex is noticeable absent in Chinese public life, but it is creeping in. Television ads often feature sexy girls selling bust-enlargement products, face creams, or shampoos. And sometimes very “soft” erotica is present in sports programs: trapeze artists in circuses; sexy oriental girls doing gymnastic contortions. It isn’t blatant “sexploitation” as in the West, but it is there. However, when you do see partial nudity, big boobs or buns, as in outdoor or subway advertisements, they usually are on Western women. If a couple is shown embracing or kissing in the media, they most likely are Westerners. This is to imply: Chinese do not do this in public. Still, such displays attract attention and invite emulation.
Kissing seems to be making its way into Chinese culture. That is, the Hollywood “deep kiss” is more often seen in locally-made films and soap operas. But with the Chinese, kissing looks frantic, rather as if the kissers were desperately sucking the life out of each other. You also see young couples hugging in public places, but this looks more like they are propping each other up or practicing the Russian bear hug. And, contrary to what you see in the West, Chinese girls often hold hands and hug each other, but this is less common between the sexes.
The problem that liberal attitudes has brought to China is unwanted pregnancies. Despite efforts to educate young people, some are not cautious enough to avoiding the fruits of their passion. Consequently, couples are offered a solution in abortion, which has become a substitute for protected sex. According to one study of single women, a third of respondents had terminated pregnancies and, increasingly, migrant workers, students, and prostitutes are the ones who resort to abortion as birth-control. The shame and stigma of premarital pregnancy in China persists, hence women are often desperate for a quick solution.
As part of the regime’s anti-AIDS drive, condoms are now sold openly in pharmacies and supermarkets. Still, I noted shoppers wandering by condom displays with eyes averted, the way we did back in the 1960s when rubbers first became consumer items. So, while there seems to be more openness towards sex, and topics like AIDS are discussed, embarrassment remains.
Pets
Another attitude that is rapidly changing concerns pets. In Harbin, I once had dog stew, just to see what it tasted like. I did not know what type of dog I was eating, and did not want to know, as I would have been troubled had I been devouring some cute dachshund. The meat was lean but otherwise unremarkable and I soon had my curiosity satisfied. But, over time, I noted dog less on the menus and more on the leash. I observed elderly women with small, fluffy canines taking their “best friends” for walks in public parks.
Girl with pet chicken, Harbin
Pets seemed fashionable. I heard that dogs under 35cm in height were officially permitted in apartments as pets while larger dogs would be problematic as Chinese homes tend to be cramped. So, in addition to people keeping caged birds, they were adopting dogs as approved companions. (In the Mao years, keeping dogs was denounced as a “bourgeois waste of time.”) Moreover, to note, during the weeks of the Olympics, dogs were taken off the menus in restaurants. It seems some foreigners were squeamish when it came to pets in hot pots.
There were cats about too, but they were in pretty bad shape. Many were flea-ridden strays surviving on garbage, along with rats and other vermin that are common in urban areas. Quite possibly, there were cat pets in apartments, but I did not see any. Dogs seemed to have charmed people into being merciful and so were promoted from culinary delicacies to friends, but cats were never on menus to begin with and remained out in the cold, quite literally.
One-Child Policy
Although, in China’s cities, the one-child policy has been in effect since the 1980s, this is not the official stance in rural areas. In 2007, there were reports carried on BBC television (broadcast in China) of townspeople resorting to cheap, Shanghai-produced, fertility drugs that resulted in multiple pregnancies. Women were giving birth to twins, triplets, and even to quadruplets, all under what supposedly was a “one-pregnancy policy.” In some rural areas, the Party tried to enforce the one-child laws with fines, but this resulted in violent backlashes against regional officials. So, when it comes to who gets to reproduce, and in what numbers, the image we commonly have of China is not accurate. The national government has had to be flexible on the policy in many instances.
Still, the policy has largely been successful in slowing population growth to 1.4 billion, as of 2016. However, the people are still increasing by an annual ten million. Many couples grumble about not having brothers or sisters for their precious little “emperor” or “empress,” so there is public pressure to modify the rules. Moreover, due to the preference for boy-children, female infanticide has resulted in a surplus of males compared to females, creating new problems for a government already coping with many headaches.
Little Emperor and Grandma
Because women are in short supply in some areas of China (1.7 million girl babies are missing annually from birth statistics), some men have taken to abducting young women for marriage. Girls are also smuggled into the country from North Korea. Wealthy people resort to bribing local officials to turn a blind eye to registering a second child,1 while some parents claim their first offspring is “handicapped” in order to receive permission to have a second child. Still others pay heavy fines to have a second kid. However, less well known is the fact that members of China’s ethnic minorities (including Muslims) are wholly exempt from the one-child law. These groups keep pumping the kids out, regardless of population pressures.
The one-child policy has had consequences for an aging population. In China, only some 30% of seniors receive a government or company pension (according to 1998 statistics). This means that 70% of the elderly rely on their children to support them. It also means a lot of pressure placed on single children in terms of getting good grades, getting into well-paying jobs, and earning enough to meet all the responsibilities placed on them. Life is tough for the average Chinese.
I noted this in my own students, especially those not from the upper echelons of society. In the drawings they were asked to do for an assignment, all of them placed themselves smack in the middle of a family group consisting of themselves, two parents, and two grandparents. In effect, the offspring is the darling of two sets of elders. But once parents and grandparents are no longer able to work, this golden childhood can become a nightmare for the kids who must support the lot of them. Time after time, when I inquired of students what their goals were, they replied “to take care of my parents.” Just how they will fulfill this obligation remains problematic.
Foreign Influence
It is often a bit of a puzzle how the Chinese regard foreigners. Here, I think we need to separate the official position from the attitudes of many ordinary Chinese. On the surface, most of the people I encountered were polite and welcoming. Some were very curious about the West; others were more interested to know what we were learning in China. All seemed pleased to hear some of us were acquiring the language. Others were happy if we said we liked Chinese food. But all seemed eager to know our impressions of them.
The official position is more complicated. The official idea is that China will take from the West what is useful and dump the rest. However, it’s not always possible to be selective. To put the problem in Deng Xiaoping’s words: “Opening the window inevitably lets in the flies.” Officially, foreigners are considered a necessary evil. The country will learn from foreigners in order to surpass the West. This was made apparent to me by an old Communist from America who had been working in Beijing for decades. Amused, he told me that greedy Western capitalists were building up China, while the Communists were gaining strength from the great inflow of Western capital and know-how. The aim of the Party, he said, had not changed: China would gradually realize the communist society, while capitalism would spend itself to death. To him, this seemed historically inevitable. He may be correct.
During modernization, traditional Chinese (Confucian) cultural values are expected to prevail, and China will end up teaching the rest of the world a thing or two. However, it seems the country is trying to develop a new civilization without any plan or guidelines, ideological or practical. They are playing it by ear primarily because there is no viable intelligentsia that can lead the country spiritually and intellectually. Marxism can only take the nation so far because Marx did not envision the sudden turn to state-capitalism that Deng Xiaoping introduced. And, what there is no traditional Chinese philosophy to guide people in the 21st century as philosophies were denigrated during the Cultural Revolution. All this adds up to a lack of ideas as to where to take the ship into the future. But perhaps this is being too critical of a country that has already changed so much while the West seems no better off in terms of direction or purpose.
It is difficult to say who the current thinkers in China are, or if they are being listened to. I noted a hodgepodge of ideas in the great bookstores in Tianjin, Beijing, and Harbin where it is not unusual to find works about, or by, members of the Party, or works on history and Western classics displayed next to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. There are tons of self-help books, especially those promising to teach people the path to riches and books on meditation, art, and Western philosophy. But, to my knowledge, there is no shared vision or philosophy that people can follow into the future. Instead, there is a potpourri of ideas, Eastern and Western imagery and values mingle in a perplexing torrent, making it impossible to tell what China really is about. So, it is safest to say the country remains a work in progress.
Chinese Women’s Expectations
One of the “flies” let in through the open window has stung Chinese women who see that their Western sisters are more “liberated,” have careers, and are not saddled with kids and kitchen duties. This awareness has influenced the expectations of career-minded ladies so that more of them are entering universities, graduating, and going into professions. Others are gaining the knack of capitalism, establishing their own businesses or working in white-collar jobs. Official Chinese figures put women in government and private corporate positions at 30% of employees, while women make up 37% of the overall workforce. Still, the government admits more is needed to reach a satisfactory level of female economic participation.
Class beauty, Laura
From my own impressions, young Chinese women typically want a good job that will earn them enough to support their parents. They want a clean environment to live in, a family of their own, and the satisfaction of knowing they are useful to society. However, many young females remain in low-paid jobs at which they work long hours that leave little time for a social life. They know they are being exploited; hence they constantly keep an eye out for a better job with a bit more pay.
Another metaphorical “fly” in Deng’s cultural window has bitten the young of China. Today, a youth culture is developing that goes contrary to the values and expectations of older generations. Now there are boyfriends and girlfriends, dating, premarital sex, and the financial demands that this places on people. Men and women are getting married later; they expect more out of life, and idealism is waning, as materialism is making its mark. Those who still espouse the official ideology do so because it benefits their careers, while others flirt with one religion after another in the hope of getting something after death, if not in life. But, most likely, many mainland Chinese believe in striving for “a colorful life,” as they like to put it: to travel, own a car, have a full stomach, and to have a bit more stuff than the couple next door. Quite simply, they have modern consumer aspirations.
I met a man whom I consider “typical” of contemporary China. Mister M chatted to me on a busy Tianjin street one day. He was an office worker and a tourist guide, in his 40s, living with his wife in an older, but comfortable, apartment within a gated complex, for lack of a better term. He had a TV set, a fridge and a stove, and all things a contemporary Western family has; only the quality of the products and the size of the dwelling were more modest. He got to and from work on public transport or on his bicycle.
Mister M was eager to make my acquaintance in order to keep up his English. He asked me if I would like to meet a divorced lady, somewhat younger than I. We agreed to meet in a coffee shop around the corner from where M lived. I arrived early to fully appreciate the candidate’s grand entrance. When M and the woman appeared, she was decked out formally in black, wearing dark sunglasses. (Why was I reminded of Jackie Kennedy at the president’s funeral?) This woman certainly knew how to move gracefully. The problem with the whole situation was that she spoke no English. There wasn’t a question I posed to her that did not have to go through M. I pictured a life with the three of us – Mr. M in a separate little room of our flat, awaiting the call to translate – and I knew it wouldn’t work. However, the woman seemed desperate. When I said I would be moving to Harbin soon, she said she would follow me there. She asked what would happen if she did follow? “Nothing,” I replied. And that was the end of it. I did not see M or the woman after I moved onto the plains below the Chinese border with Siberia.
Another home I visited in Tianjin belonged to a young secretary at the university. Diana lived in a new one-bedroom, a very clean apartment, within a compound that had its own sports hall, grocery store, and maintenance department. It was a comfortable place, but affordable only because she qualified for a state housing subsidy. She commuted to work by bicycle or bus and worked eight hours a day — in an endless routine. Since her parents had insisted that she get married, at twenty-eight Diana was rather desperate to fulfill her obligation. It was rumored she had had an affair with an office mate, but things had turned out badly, and now she could not tolerate the guy. When I paid a visit to her small office, she was at a desk in one corner while her former lover was at his desk in another. They barely spoke to each other but tried to present a front of normalcy to their colleagues.
Students on a bus
Diana was very kind in many ways. First, she bought me a book with which I was supposed to learn Chinese. In the winter, she got me a silk scarf; in return, I bought her a present. One day, she invited me to her place for dinner. She had gone to some lengths to prepare various small dishes. Also present was her former roommate, a woman around twenty-eight. While we conversed in English, I was surprised to note Diana holding the woman’s hand while we joked and had a good time. (What was that all about? I still wonder.)
Finally, I took Diana out to a restaurant only to discover that we barely had anything say. She talked a little about the food while I talked shop; otherwise, there seemed nothing to say. I didn’t see her for months thereafter but, one day, I heard that a young man was regularly giving her rides home on the back of his bicycle, a sure sign of romantic interest. I was happy for her. Later, I learned that the romance did not last, and Diana was alone again. Over time, I got the impression that in China there are quite a lot of women in Diana’s unenviable position.
Alienation
Life in China is a hustle. Many people work 15-hour days, six days a week, or even seven. This frantic pace has brought a degree of family disintegration with absent fathers, troubled youngsters, and increasing divorce rates. My students spoke of a “generation gap,” that scourge of modern civilization. In the old days, three generations of a family would share common dwellings but, nowadays, urban couples are alone with their single child, while the grandparents live elsewhere. Only in rural areas is the extended family somewhat intact; but even there, millions of younger people are leaving for the cities in search of jobs, higher education, or a more satisfactory life style.
The regimented masses
What has all this bustle and change produced? During a conversation, a student told me that he and his friends were totally befuddled. They wanted money, power, and “a colorful life,” but felt everything was out of reach. I got the impression that many of today’s young Chinese are culturally adrift, ideologically lost, waiting for a direction in which to set their sails. We can speak of a lost generation, or perhaps lost generations, for many Chinese are alienated from their cultural heritage. I sensed this whenever I had conversations on the topic of what China is and what “Chinese culture” means. I found the current mood of many young people articulated by a Chinese writer, Wang Shuo:
If by culture you mean a spiritual fount or a shared sense of values, then I have to say that this is something I can’t see in China — past or present. Here in Beijing I’ve got to shove others out of the way just to make it across the street. I stare suspiciously at any stranger who gets too close to my briefcase. I don’t lend money to friends. I never buy history books written by Chinese because I don’t believe them …. Looking into the future I often slip into a sense of dread, yet I don’t know where to turn for support. I’m like a savage in a benighted age, alone and helpless in a land with no culture. (Wang Shuo, The Wasteland, translated by John Crespi. Cited in Time, Saturday, March 24, 2007.)
Of course, Wang’s estrangement might be extreme, but it articulates the feelings of hundreds of millions of young people in search of identity. They are experiencing the kind of alienation that young Western youth went through during the 1920s and 1960s. However, it is certain that for the young, traditional Chinese culture is not a day to day reality. It hasn’t been for half a century, so there is an anomie typical of modern life.
All pressures exerted on the young have consequences. I was told of an incident in the university residences involving some of our students. Triggered by name calling, four girls beat up a roommate to the extent that she had to be hospitalized. Police were called in to investigate. Consequently, several of the instigators were expelled from our college. In another incident, I was just coming off our campus shuttle bus when I noted a woman and two men beating a larger fellow who was raising his arms to shield himself from their blows. At first, I thought they were clowning around, but it became evident the blows to his head were vicious. What I found interesting was the vehemence with which the young woman hit the big guy until he ran off. I had no clue as to what was going on but noted that the other passengers from the bus ignored it all. They just kept walking. This seems to be the universal response to trouble in China: don’t look; don’t get involved; keep moving.
I came to know several students who landed good jobs upon graduation, but the English majors seemed to be the worst off in many cases. If you can speak English in China you can get work, but the perception remains that only foreigners speak “real” English. Yet I knew Chinese people whose command of English grammar was superior to that of most Westerners. They spoke the language more “correctly” than the normal American, but they were the last hired to teach the language. In China, I met Russians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Filipinos who held decent positions in language schools while recently-graduated Chinese English majors went a begging. This was one of the ironies of the People’s Republic.
When students graduate with a bachelor’s degree, they typically can earn between one and two thousand RMB (at 8 RMB to the USD) per month in the private sector (2006 figures). One 23-year old friend of mine took a job as a translator in a boiler-making factory. She would sit around in the company offices waiting for foreign clients to show up; then she would spring into action. But she would typically be on the job nine to ten hours per day and for this she made 1,000 RMB, or about $130 USD per month, barely enough to live on. (Today, this same friend in living in the USA making over a hundred thousand dollars selling real estate to Chinese.) She shared a shabby bedroom and a kitchenette with a roommate in an apartment block that would have been condemned in any Western country. This cost a tenth of her monthly income, but she had some ten thousand RMB in loans to repay, not to mention the cost of living which rose drastically in 2007 when inflation was 6.5 percent.
From conversations I had with young Chinese, their aspirations are normal, even modest: to own an apartment and have kids. When asked where their ideas for what they want came from, students often cited American films. One young woman of 26 said she wanted a life like the family she saw in “Growing Pains.” Another woman of 23 said she wanted to live in a quiet rural house with her parents and “lots of cats.” All young people I asked wanted to travel, with America and Australia as the most frequently mentioned destinations. But money was always a problem. Some young people told me that even the newly rich in China worry about maintaining their social status, and everyone was concerned about being able to support their aging parents. Yet everyone seemed certain that the country’s economic advancement would continue for a long time, and everyone’s lives would improve as socialism became more affordable.
To my dismay, at times I found that the mentality of my twenty-year old students was more like a fourteen-year old’s in the West. I often got the impression that Chinese young adults knew very little about anything other than basketball or computer games. Certainly not many took an interest in reading for pleasure. Mostly my students were into games, movies downloaded from the Net and, of course, telephoning and text-messaging as though they had pressing matters to discuss. Yet when I asked them when the Second World War ended, or when the Japanese invaded Manchuria, they could only give me a blank look.
Student with her priorities
Most had not heard of any –isms except Communism, and most could not tell me what that was about. Nor did watching the news seem to be on their agenda. They were too absorbed in online games. I also didn’t get the impression they were encouraged to learn about the world at large, despite satellite TV, the Discovery Channel, and BBC World – all freely available on college campuses. Overall, my impression of Chinese youth was of arrested development. They seemed reluctant to become adults but were encouraged by the culture to remain in a state of infantilism. With the girls I noted this in their “little-girl” behavior: giggling constantly like kids shuffling off to the toilet, text messaging, and bringing stuffed toys to class.
In commercials and in TV programs, young women put on cute and hapless singsong falsettos, as though to ward off adulthood and its responsibilities. They seemed to be asking to be taken care of. When I asked some of them what they wanted in life, often the answer was a “handsome, rich husband.” Boys, on the other hand, wanted a “beautiful wife,” and a “highly paid job” that demanded little in the way of actual work. I concluded life in China was a hustle for which these kids were completely unprepared.
Subway advertisement
At my college, all the boys showed up with brand-name sneakers, new tee-shirts, and expensive jeans. I found this perplexing at times because, as one of the girls wrote in a short essay, her family made merely four thousand RMB per month, which meant that the parents spent a lot on their child. A cell phone was mandatory, as was a laptop for students in our rather expensive courses. The girls wore new, high-heeled shoes (sometimes a different pair every day), and they sported hairstyles with which to catch that allusive “boyfriend” (another craze). Everything had to look like the parents had m-o-n-e-y. In fact, to me this was what life in China was all about: to look rich no matter what the reality of the situation. At times I thought the country, with its new middle-class, was one big illusion that could burst at the first financial crisis.
Beijing (BJ)
Then there was my first weekend in Beijing. I don’t recall what I expected, but I was in a contemporary shopping mall called the Oriental Plaza, the type you find in any American city: all glitz and glamour; expensive stores carrying clothes, ice cream, Volkswagen and Mercedes Benz cars. There were the ubiquitous Starbucks, and lesser known Blenz, coffee shops, and an X-mas tree made entirely of Heineken beer cans. People were milling around it with their cameras flashing. And everywhere there were security guards in snazzy uniforms who represented the power of the state or private enterprise – or maybe they were one and the same. It all smelled of money. Yet, I noted that most people wandering in the mall had no purchases in hand; they just seemed to be window shopping or hanging out.
At the Summer Palace, BJ
The Oriental Plaza contrasts sharply with what remains of the traditional hutong neighborhoods a little further up the road, on three sides of Tienanmen Square. These are one or two-story dwellings built around central courtyards. In the past, they used to house affluent families, but after the revolution of 1948, they became multiple family dwellings, workers’ compounds that gradually fell into neglect. It remains a pleasure to wander through these ancient lane ways, or to take a bike and ride through them, much like going through a maze. People still live there, although hutong are being replaced by the anonymous high-rise apartments that you find the world over.
When I strolled through one old neighborhood, I enjoyed seeing how people lived day to day: some folks were selling farm produce in the lanes; others were doing tai chi; older ladies were doing their dance-exercises to music; and an elderly man was scratching his back against a lamppost. One woman was waving her hands while walking backwards. It seemed that the hutong dwellers still had a sense of tradition and community that the massive apartment complexes could eventually make a thing of the past. I felt privileged to witness this way of life and had a sense of regret that this community might disappear.
Three years later, in 2008, I again went to Beijing just prior to the Olympics. The city’s core had been transformed. New buses cruised the streets; drivers of private cars seemed better behaved, although there were more of them. Trees, bushes, and flowers had been planted, and there were many more office complexes lining the broad avenues. The Beijing Central Railway Station was enshrouded in green netting under which men sandblasted decades of soot off the facade. Shiny new “bullet trains” pulled into the station. (You would think you were in Japan.) And – could this be true? – here were fewer gobs of spit on the sidewalks. However, in the subway system I still found long lines of commuters queuing up for tickets (at least they lined up) and, reassuringly, the ticket vending machines were out of order. On the subway trains, too, people were still crammed body to body, studiously ignoring each other. In other words, as in most modern cities of the world, the subway situation remained congested.
In the hostel where I usually stayed, workers were tearing out the toilets and showers, putting in new ones, although I couldn’t recall there being anything wrong with the facilities. In the men’s toilet, I found one fellow in a suit and tie, a cigarette in one hand and a cell phone in the other, having a conversation while squatting over the crap hole. He had left his stall door open. (Nothing unusual about that either.) And, deposited in an adjacent toilet stall, in a ceramic “Eastern” squat-toilet, there was a lone turd curled up like a softie ice cream. A “Please Flush Out” sign hung on the inside of the stall door. Nothing new there either.
During my wanderings around a stylish, renovated part of BJ, outside a Hooter’s restaurant I noted a rail-thin, old woman bent over at a ninety-degree angle, spitting out phlegm, as her equally emaciated husband gently rubbed her back. This consequence of air pollution hadn’t changed either. In the same area of town, I noted rows of black Mercedes Benz with youthful drivers lounging behind the wheels, waiting for their bosses to finish lunch in flashy eateries. BJ was as ever.
On the fences surrounding new construction projects, “VIP” apartments and “Lofts” were advertised. I wondered who could afford these, but there were plenty of foreign and rich Chinese managers in Beijing, and the city’s expansion was going to continue no matter what. The city had a dynamic of its own as billions of dollars of capital went into the full-scale transformation of not just the city but of the entire nation. It boggled the mind to behold.
Art was something new in BJ. I went to the Meng Luding Art Exhibit at the Poly Plaza, a place that hadn’t existed three years earlier. Meng produces supernova-like paintings on large canvasses, creating an impression of things exploding — perhaps a fitting metaphor for China. (Chinese modern art was becoming hot in Europe and America.) A sign on the wall told visitors that Meng “emigrated to the Untied [sic] States” — another assurance that not all things had changed.
Three new subway lines had been added to the Beijing system since I last took the underground. Number Five line had smart-looking stations, ready for the summer Olympics. Still, when I asked directions, none of the attendants understood me. When I asked for the “train station,” a woman sent me north instead of south, probably having misunderstood. However, I did note that people were more helpful and friendly than during my previous visits. One old man on a trolley bus nudged a youngster to surrender his seat to me (I walked with a cane) and, later, a student helped me pay my bus fare, much to my surprise. Were they always like this, or was this part of the “We Are Ready” Olympics campaign?
In Beijing I had dinner with a female friend who was working for a foreign company. The restaurant was a dump, but the food was good, as it can only be in China. All the time my friend was talking to me, I was aware of being monitored by two men at a nearby table. They were probably wondering about the “rich” white man “seducing” the innocent (or not so) Chinese flower. It wouldn’t have occurred to them I might be her teacher. In all of this, there remains in China a degree of suspicion of foreigners. I surmised this was not part of the “We Are Ready” spirit.
Scams
Overall, I have always had mixed feelings about Beijing. On the one hand, it is the center of China, the place where the future is happening right before your eyes. Buildings are sprouting up everywhere; there are more cars than in other Chinese cities, more buses, most of them shiny and new, and the subway is efficient and comfortable. There are thousands of restaurants to choose from, lots of entertainment, beautiful public parks, imperial palaces, and neat hutong to explore. BJ is a world-class city in that sense. But it is also a den for thieves and scam artists.
I encountered my first scam a few months into my first year in the country. During a few days off work, a colleague and I went to Beijing to see the attractions. We were walking in Tienanmen Square, when a young woman asked us where we were from. I immediately wondered what she was trying to sell. Anna, as she called herself, explained she was an “art student,” and it happened to be the last day of a show her “professor” had going in a nearby building. Would we be interested in seeing it? The works were for sale (of course). We declined the offer but suggested that if she showed us a place to eat, we would buy her lunch.
Fair enough. Anna took us down narrow lane ways of the vast hutong, West of the Square. We had traditional hot pot and enjoyed talking to her. When we told her we were teachers, not tourists, she confessed that her job was to lure foreigners into an art show where everything was terribly overpriced. The art was not produced by students but in a factory employing hundreds of young painters copying any and everything without a thought to copyrights. The trade included replica of well-known work by Chinese artists. A hundred and fifty RMB was a normal going price for an A-4 sized watercolor, but it wasn’t worth anything near that. Still, plenty of foreigners considered this price chicken scratch and readily forked out the bucks. Somebody was making money.
The second scam I encountered involved another girl. She zeroed in on me in one of the large bookstores in downtown BJ. A colleague and I were perusing English-language editions when she sidled up to us, saying: “Hi. Where are you from?” (This is the normal line.) My immediate thought was that she was a prostitute, as there are plenty of these in every tourist hot spot. But she wasn’t. She claimed her name was Cindy (first an Anna; now a Cindy), and she was from Inner Mongolia. Her “tired parents” were asleep in a hotel recovering from the first leg of a “flight to Sanya.” Ostensibly, Cindy had left the hotel room to look around the big town, and that’s how she found us. Could we recommend any books to read so she could improve her “poor” English? Although we suspected something, we couldn’t quite guess what the scam was, so we played along. She asked if we could go somewhere for tea. Tea? Where had I heard that before?
Cindy took us down gray lane ways through a hutong. We entered one tea shop, but she didn’t want to stay. Then we went straight to another, less flashy place where she set us at a table and promptly marched into the kitchen. Not a good sign, I thought. Who is she to be able to go right into the kitchen?
She emerged a moment later to cheerfully announce that tea was being made. It was “not expensive,” she assured us with a smile. We talked and had a pleasant time. Then, after at least two refills of water into the tea pot, she said she had to leave for the toilet. It was down the lane, but she would be right back. That’s when the bill came. Sixty RMB for tea! Now, for the uninitiated, in terms of buying power in China, at that time, this would have paid for lunch for two, or the equivalent of sixty US Dollars in purchasing power. But, because it was peanuts to us, we paid. Still, I had had enough of Cindy, so I decided to go back to the hotel. My colleague, however, was smitten with the girl and decided to see what else she would offer, so off he went with her to some bars. Later, I learned she had steered him into a club where he had spent a considerable sum on drinks. She had also tried to get him to buy her presents. But, once it became evident that she wasn’t offering anything in return, he said goodnight and left.
We got off lightly compared to a fellow from Australia who had encountered not one Cindy, but two lovelies, both well-versed in English. He ended up in a tea house where he was presented with a bill for two-thousand RMB (about $260 USD), a ridiculous sum for a pot of tea. He was pressured into paying up but fumed all the way home, cursing his own stupidity. How did these scammers make him pay? The manager brought out his meanest-looking heavies, then disappeared into the sanctuary of his office. The brutes stood around the Australian with their arms folded, intimidating him until the cash materialized. Then they escorted the sucker to the door. The girls, of course, were nowhere in sight. The moral of the story is buyer beware. You can count on being fleeced unless you are careful.
A variation on the tea scam is the beer scam. Foreigners will be in a bar, ordering drink after drink without being aware of what they cost. End of the evening, the tab arrives, and the foreigners hit the roof: “Three-hundred Dollars! What!” “Yes,” the waiter insists. “Three hundred dollars. I asked you if it’s OK to charge you triple and you agreed. I have witnesses. Now pay up!” He says all of this in Mandarin, of course, insisting that this is what the guests had agreed to, and now it’s time to pay. The foreigners are outraged, resist, but know they have no recourse as they do not speak the language. They don’t even know how much they drank or what beer costs. Moral of the story: pay-as-you-go, know the price of things and, if possible, invite someone along who speaks Chinese.
A dentist’s office is probably the last place you would expect to be scammed, but in China, this (and more) is possible. If you look at price lists for various dental procedures, note the ordinary prices compared to the “International Standard” figures. This carries the implication that a higher quality service is available for those who can pay. In some instances, this may be so, but when I went to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned, the normal rate was a mere 80 RMB, yet I was charged 260.
If these had been the only rip-offs I encountered in China, I would not dwell on the topic. However, “fooling the foreigners” is a national sport played on all levels of the economy. Allow me to recall another instance. Across the road from the university, where I worked in Harbin, there was a hot pot restaurant. A group of ten of us instructors went there for dinner. Since we had trouble reading the menu, we asked our smiling waiter (possibly the manager) to suggest some dishes. He indicated we should leave it up to him. Soon dish after dish — pork, beef, green vegetables — arrived on plates held aloft by quick-footed waiters. Then came more beef, fish, shavings of ham, shavings of mutton, mushrooms, shrimp … Whatever the human imagination could cook up in the kitchen ended up on our table. The trouble was the stream of food never ended.
For lack of space, dishes began piling up on the sideboards and on the window sills. The table was covered in stacks of empty plates. The beer kept arriving too. Then the hard liquor came. Some of us became too plastered to notice anything, but I finally asked why we had so much food. We’d never be able to eat even half of it. That’s when someone asked for the bill. When it arrived, we collectively had a fit. It was astronomical. After expressing indignation, we paid it. However, we never returned to the place, so they lost ten potential repeat-customers. Did they mind? I doubt it. The temptation to make a quick buck overrides all other considerations in China today. Forget about tomorrow. Only today counts. Life is unpredictable.
Scandals
China would leave a better impression on foreigners if some people weren’t so greedy. “It is glorious to be rich” seems have come with the addenda: “So get rich any way you can.” The most serious incidents of this mentality have been scandals with world-wide implications. For instance, in June of 2007, Chinese-made toothpaste containing ingredients used in antifreeze made headlines around the world. Then illegal dyes were found in candies, crackers, pickles, and sea products. A chemical called melamine was found in dog and cat food that killed dozens of pets in America. (Later it would be killing babies in China.) Other chemicals killed over a hundred people in Panama. All of this would not have raised an eyebrow in the land of 1.3 billion people had it not been for international condemnation and concern. What’s a few hundred dead in the great march of progress? However, the threat of banning imports from the PRC did cause the leadership to worry about China’s international image.
That same year, several drug scandals shook the Chinese pharmaceutical industry. The first one was when a former State Food and Drug Administration official was found guilty of granting licenses for substandard products that caused injury and death. Apparently, the man’s wife and son had gotten used to receiving expensive gifts from pharmaceutical companies. They were enjoying a million-dollar lifestyle, having set up a consulting company through which bribes were collected. The upshot of the scandal was that the agency, originally set up to protect the People, was riddled with bad eggs. According to one industry analyst, “If the head of the drug agency is corrupt, you can imagine how corrupt the whole system is.” In short, the Chinese FDA official was sentenced to a bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head, a common Chinese solution. And that was the end of that.
At School
When I first met my class in Tianjin, what struck me most poignantly was the disorder and filthiness of my designated classroom. The floor was littered with wrappers, plastic bottles, and it was coated in chalk dust. I had never encountered anything like it. Ironically, a mop stood next to a large sink at the back of the room. I gathered from this that we were supposed to clean up our own room, but when I asked my students about this, no one seemed to understand English. At the time, I knew nothing about class monitors who were supposed to organize cleaning, provide chalk, and wipe the board. I assumed there was a cleaning staff that would put things ship shape. But several days into my assignment, it became apparent that no such people would arrive even if they did exist. At that point, I let the program administrator know how I felt about the working environment.
One of my students
The next day, I entered a clean classroom. The floor was scrubbed, the board was washed, and there was new chalk in the tray. I learned that some of the students had stayed behind the previous day and had cleaned the place up. This overwhelmed me emotionally. Chocking with gratitude, I told my darling students I had not seen such respect for teachers in my own country. I loved being in China. I was ready to forgive them anything. As a reward that day, I let them out early. However, later I ran into the administrator who assured me it was she who had ordered the lazy little shits to perform their duties. This came as a reality check for me, the kind I get occasionally when things appear too good to be true. But I would receive many more of these during my years in China.
Students get little sleep in their crowded dorms
As I got to know my charges, I learned that none of them had gained access to university the usual way – that is, on good grades. All of them had bad study habits or were just not smart enough to cut the mustard. Still, their parents or extended families had enough money to get them into what was a very expensive private program with a foreign college-curriculum and qualified instructors, not to mention glossy, imported textbooks. Because the program was on a university campus, the students had the illusion of being “in university” without this really being the case. They carried library cards like normal college students, went to the cafeterias, and lived in dormitories like genuine students. But it soon became apparent that I was part of a grand illusion. The program I had signed on for was a profit-generating, joint-venture between a foreign college and a Chinese businessman. They merely rented facilities from a Chinese university strapped for funds. Still, they were paying me, and I was in China, so I stayed.
Professors
In Tianjin, as in all of China, retired and working professors lived in housing some of which would be condemned as unfit in a Western city. Their on-campus residences consisted of two small rooms in a long, two-story, brick edifice with filthy windows and badly-lit stairwells. Outside the doors to their building stood primitive shanties where migrants from the countryside made food of all sorts — fried noodles, greasy vegetables, soups, and paddies — mainly for a student clientele. At first, this little “slum” seemed too unhygienic for me, but once I got used to the human condition in China, I ended up eating there too. And the food was delicious – most likely because it was smothered in mono-sodium glutamate (MSG).
During my stay in the PRC, I had only a few opportunities to have frank discussions with Chinese professors as most academics were too busy to pay attention to foreign guests. One conversation that I did have, with a professor of philosophy, was interesting for the glimpse into her mind it afforded. We were on the subject of America when she noted “Americans always need an enemy.” Gee. Where had I heard that one before? Pursuant to this remark came stereotypical observations that only those who were not even remotely aware of American history and culture could make. I had heard similar stuff from anti-American bigots in Europe and in the Middle East. I was disappointed to hear such trite from a professor.
Another shocker came during a conversation with a retired engineering prof’. We were talking about conflicts when I mentioned the German invasion of Russia during the Second World War. “Germany invaded Russia?” he asked in surprise. This threw me for a loop. At that point, I began to wonder exactly what people in China had been studying all these years. Granted, these incidents are not enough to judge a system of education, but the students and professors I encountered in China were not the most informed. This could be because, not long ago, under Chairman Mao, intellectuals were denounced as “the stinking ninth category;” academics and intellectuals were much abused, and learning was denounced as “bourgeois.” The Red Guards literally destroyed their own teachers with great enthusiasm, a fact I pondered occasionally while watching over my own charges.
I found that students lacked basic reading and writing skills, spent far too much time playing computer games, and never asked questions. They plagiarized excessively, did not know how to do research, although data banks were available on library computers and, generally, they exhibited little intellectual curiosity about anything. But perhaps I was expecting too much. Given the pressures the kids are under, it must be enough to toe the line and produce what is demanded rather than display any kind of innovative thought or curiosity. Education in China, as in most countries, remains a tool of socialization, not for the liberation of individual minds.
To be fair, I had a job interview at a university outside of Shanghai where I found more able and motivated students, and professors who had studied in the West. All teachers and students were technologists; none were in the Humanities. But they did impress me as being more informed than the faculty and students I had previously met. So, I suppose there is hope for the Chinese educational system.
Senior Citizens
The people in China I came to admire most were the retired. Older people are usually found on public walkways and in parks, playing chess or sitting around, some in their revolutionary blue outfits, myopically watching progress all around them. They may be wondering: “Where did the revolution go?”
Woman in Shanghai
I saw elderly people in Tianjin, Harbin, and Beijing who were remarkably active and flexible. In any city of China, seniors can be seen exercising, dancing, or stretching themselves in little neighborhood parks. I watched with envy as one old man raised his leg way over his head against a tree. All I could do was limp away in shame.
But there are many citizens who are not well off physically or financially. One day, in freezing temperatures, I was in downtown Tianjin with a group of my students when we came across some beggars. One of them, an old man, wore a filthy, padded army coat. He was on his hands and knees, holding out a little pan. I noted that one of his arms was just a stump. The other three beggars were a man, a woman, and a child of about four, all on their knees, faces cast down, huddled together against the bitter wind like a family of sparrows. The oldest man was wearing an worn-out suit and tie, apparently in a bid to look respectable.
As I bent down to give the family some money, one of my students admonished me, saying they were not “real beggars” — he claimed they begged as a profession and even made a small fortune at it. I found this preposterous and said that even if it were true, the fact that it was so tough making a few bucks on the sidewalk in winter qualified this as a form of work. I heard so many excuses for not giving to the poor that I concluded many middle-class Chinese had simply become cold-hearted.
I saw other beggars during my years in China. Memorable among them was a man and a boy outside a department store in Xian, again in the cold of winter. Both were on their knees, the boy bent over a bowl with a few coins in it, while the man was repeated bashing his forehead against the concrete sidewalk (!) in an agonizing show of desperation. (If these were actors, they were brilliant.) This scene seemed not to impress anyone but astonished foreigners. I noticed that few people gave more than a passing glance, and even fewer donated anything for this pitiful performance.
In Beijing, I saw many poor people in the pedestrian underpasses leading to Tienanmen Square (before they were evicted for the Olympics), hawking trinkets, selling gloves, combs, junk of all kinds, day in and day out. One old man, who ought to have been in a retirement home playing mahjong with his friends, sold little Chinese flags. Others were huddling in sleeping bags next to their luggage — presumably country people who had come to the big city in search of work.
Elsewhere, I saw old men telling fortunes along the sidewalks or on pedestrian overpasses while others measured people’s weight on scales for a few pennies. One man drew traditional gods and goddesses with colored pencils, doing a very poor job of it, but seeming to prefer this work to straight out begging. Old women sometimes sold a few carrots or onions, some dirty potatoes or fruit. In general, my impression was that the old and the maimed bore the brunt of China’s leaping progress, but they did their utmost to retain a measure of self-respect – and for that they got mine.
Authority
At the university in Tianjin one day, there was a flurry of activity that, again, gave me an insight into China’s cultural legacy. The president of the university was expected to make an annual visit to the departments, so we were asked to be in our offices for a tour of inspection. Several of us wanted to meet the man and tried to comply with the request. But when the time came, there was no sight of the man.
All the Chinese university staff had been cleaning their rooms that morning. New binders, pens and pads of paper were issued to the Chinese professors — probably to make the administration look less miserly than it was. Balloons decorated the 6th floor where he was meeting with the bigwigs. I happened to glance into the board room where he was addressing spell-bound administrators. There was a video-recording machine to catch his every word, and everyone was dressed in respectful, black attire. But he was too busy to shake our hands. He never showed up on our floor at all.
For all its collectivism, China has never abandoned its top-down management or authoritarian leadership model. The boss is the Boss; managers are called “leaders,” especially in universities; figuratively and literally, the masses are still in uniforms and red bandannas. You see this in staff being drilled outside larger restaurants and in hundreds of department store employees marching to work places early in the morning. All are in uniforms. Clearly, China remains an authoritarian society.
At school, the managerial role is given to the teachers who boss the students around; teachers are presided over by principals who boss the teachers, and so on up the ladder of authority. I saw this in action where I later worked at a university in Harbin. The Big Boss was the “Dragon Lady” whom we seldom saw and rarely spoke to unless it was a perfunctory “Hi Dr. Z.” (She was addressed as “Doctor” although she held no advanced degree.) She had a spacious 9th floor office, the only étage with adequate heating in the winter. Her underlings were all in offices around her, a support staff of a dozen people, most of whom had nothing to do unless it was enrolment or graduation time. They spent the days playing computer games or the stock market or gawking at porn.
All these people were supposed to support twenty of us foreign teachers, but what we mostly got from them was abuse. We constituted the front-line troops in the college’s mad scramble to make money. We were expected to be in our offices even when we had no work to do and were expected to “pass as many students as possible,” regardless of merit or ability. Western academic standards were unheeded even though the bachelor’s degrees would come from a western college. We were also expected to go out in subzero temperatures, to run back to the office at the call of our “leaders.” Not surprisingly, given our liberal upbringing, this rubbed many of us the wrong way. Where the Chinese staff jumped when given orders, we bristled, resisted, and at times nearly came to blows with our masters.
One image I still relish is of several foreign colleagues yelling abuse at our Chinese dean, a particularly inept fellow who spent hours online scanning the stock market for bargains. He never visited any classes and had no idea of what we were teaching, but he lorded it over us with unreasonable demands and massive workloads. That day, after some foreign instructors hadn’t been paid for weeks, the shit hit the fan. The disaffected group marched up to the dean’s office where a yelling match ensued with threats and counter-threats that left all participants shaken. The dean threatened not to pay the faculty at all; in turn, the instructors threatened to withhold student grades. Fortunately for all concerned, a last-minute compromise was reached.
What usually happened after such an incident was that someone’s teaching contract would not be renewed as punishment to impress everyone else. (“Kill the chicken to scare the monkey,” as the saying goes.) However, the office staff was never called to task for anything. They were all Party members and had their “iron rice bowls” for life, while the rest of us lived uneasily from one contract to the next. All of us were uninsured contractors and would receive no retirement pensions or benefits. This did not concern our Chinese employers in the least. For their part, we were considered over-paid foreigners to be scorned and envied.
Following this incident, one colleague put in for a transfer to a Beijing sister-college. The rest of us were amused at first, but then we were kept waiting and waiting for extensions to our own contracts. The office always wanted all our grades and exam papers safely in filing cabinets before offering us future work; hence, we had no bargaining chips. All power remained in the management’s hands, while we were left in suspense. This is part of the Chinese negotiation style, and more widespread than I had realized.
An incident that occurred in July 2007, in Guangdong province, caught my attention. Chinese migrant workers had gone on strike at a Fuyuan Hydro-power construction project after they had not been paid for four months. According to the workers, strike leaders were singled out by company thugs, beaten with shovels, steel rods, and axes. One man was killed. The police treated the incident as a “group fight” to whitewash the company. The same news report mentioned some 200 million migrant workers were facing increasing levels of violence from employers who meted out collective and individual punishment as they saw fit. From my experience of Chinese managers, I was not surprised at this, but it made me wonder how we would have been treated had we not been foreigners.
Rebellion — or Not
Still, despite such draconian measures, there were signs of rebellion among the people. For instance, vandalism was on the rise, more at universities than elsewhere. Many Chinese cities at that time were so dilapidated it would have been difficult to vandalize anything, but on campuses you often saw demolished trash cans and abused classroom walls. Our college was no exception. Brand new surfaces were besmirched with footprints, desks were scratched, and chair covers were torn with a vengeance. Classrooms that had been clean and new looked worn out within weeks of use.
Some young people also attempted to make rebellious statements with outrageous dress, but this quickly became fashionable, so that soon everyone under 25 looked outrageous. As in America, with whom the Chinese constantly compare themselves, youthful rebellion is instantly neutralized once it becomes the material for TV shows. If anything, Chinese young people are frustrated not because they are denied the opportunity to be “different,” but because the opportunities for joining the system and enriching themselves have become more limited. They want in, not out.
Trendiness
It remained trendy for Chinese people to seem “Western” although few spoke any foreign language, and very few had ever been out of the country. Students often wore T-shirts with slogans in English that made no sense: “Rabbi” (instead of “Rabbit”?), or little hearts and flowers around slogans like “Love for ever.” One girl I saw wore blue jeans with “Juicy” embossed on her bottom. A middle-aged woman’s shirt said: “Get drunk;” others said, “Can’t stop to dream,” “free love,” or “live like this,” and “touch the fitness life.” Such slogans gave me the impression that Chinese young people were rather innocent in contrast to us battle-hardened realists from the West. Or maybe they simply had no idea what absurd messages their shirts were sending out.
But, after a time, I interpreted the way young people dressed as a desire to catch up to what they thought life outside China was like. They closely followed South Korean fashions, watched Japanese cartoons, and American films on pirated DVDs. I suppose this was part of their quest for identity given the lack of any in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.
Local fashion
Occasionally, when high American officials paid a visit to Beijing, raids on DVD sellers were conducted in major cities to demonstrate how seriously the government took intellectual property rights. Such razzias were shown on TV news, but within days things were business as usual. In market stalls, you easily found not only American, but French and German films with Chinese subtitles or dubbed voices. For most Chinese, these films were as close as they would ever get to seeing life abroad, hence their enduring popularity. However, when English subscripts were included in English-language films, the scripts tended to be ludicrous. For instance, a character in a film who said, “That was a grenade” had his words transcribed as “That was a goodnight.” Or, “We only report victories” became “Were you getting a piece of egg on mine?” If nothing else, these blunders were great for a laugh.
English phrase-dropping was becoming common too, especially in Shanghai where I heard “Call me tonight” at the end of a conversation in Mandarin. Television news (“World Update”), regular TV shows, commercials, and serials all announced themselves on screen in English script, although not a word of English was spoken on the shows. On Saturday night, one state-owned channel broadcast American and European movies dubbed into Chinese. To me, most of this was cultivating an image of cosmopolitanism rather than an accurate reflection of cultural reality.
Racism and Class Status
The emerging middle-class in China is growing in numbers but exactly whom it includes and what the criteria for membership are is disputed. In an edition of the China Daily (November 13, 2006), the National Bureau of Statistics defined middle-class membership as anyone making more than 2,000 Yuan (then $300 USD) per month. In less developed cities, this criterion was lowered to 1,500 Yuan. The professions included in this “middle-ness” included accountants, entertainers, freelancers, teachers, medical workers and, surprisingly, unpaid housewives. Typically, these people had an education to the Bachelor’s level, aimed at owning a car, wanted to travel, and had personal finances. My own students predominantly belonged to this section and hardly differed in their values and tastes from my own country’s middle-class.
On television, there seemed to be a campaign to mold the public’s consciousness of China’s role in the contemporary world. For instance, one series was filmed in an African country. It featured a lovely young Chinese woman married to a black African. Episodes followed her discovery of her husband’s culture, presumably, to make Chinese audiences aware that their country had interests in Africa – oil, minerals, and other raw materials, in exchange for Chinese engineering and foreign aid. The show did not last very long, and I wondered to what extent it had broadened minds normally focused inwards rather than outwards to the world.
People are generally aware of the Han Chinese as a tribe unto themselves who do not normally marry cross-culturally or inter-racially. Indeed, the Han can be said to have strong conceptions of being a superior type of Asian. Even so, Chinese racism goes unnoticed except when things flare up, as in the 1980s when students in Beijing rioted in response to African students going out with Chinese coeds.
A more recent incident that made news in the Guardian (UK) involved public attitudes expressed on the internet towards Condoleezza Rice, then President Bush’s Secretary of State. In unambiguously racist terms, in China she was referred to as a “black bitch,” “black ghost,” “a really low form of life,” and similarly repugnant characterizations. The occasion was Dr. Rice’s state visit to China. (Martin Jacques, “The Middle Kingdom Mentality,” Saturday, April 16, 2005, edition of the Guardian.) The writer of the article noted that China had ignored dealing with its own racist sense of superiority, especially over black people. In contrast to Western racism, said the journalist, what was missing in China was “a culture of anti-racism.” Apparently, such chauvinist attitudes are virtually unopposed in the Middle Kingdom even as they are in Hong Kong. And, from this we can conclude there will be trouble as China makes deeper inroads into Africa, for nothing can disguise someone’s racial arrogance.
China and Africa
One day on TV, I watched a song-and-dance show featuring singers and acrobats, Chinese and African. The program celebrated an international deal that had been signed in Beijing: African resources in exchange for medical and technical assistance. I noted that the Chinese acrobats outdid the Africans at every trick: jumping, leaping, juggling dishes, riding monocycles — a point that could not have been lost on an audience of hundreds of millions. The Africans looked primitive in their grass skirts and voodoo makeup, whooping and hollering — reinforcing the stereotypical image that the average Chinese probably holds of the “dark” continental.
But how involved is China in Africa to warrant televised extravaganzas? After some research, I found that China is very much focused on the African continent. In Chad, for instance, the Chinese purchased the exploration rights to a vast territory of land. They have engineers searching for oil, and they plan to build a refinery and cement production facility. In the Sudan they have invested some 40 billion US Dollars in port and pipeline construction to ship oil back to the Motherland. From Angola they are pumping a half million barrels of crude per day, some 18% of China’s oil imports. In Guinea they are also looking for the black stuff, while in Namibia they are prospecting for uranium. From South Africa they import manganese, gold, and iron ore.
In Zambia, there are some 80,000 Chinese workers, many of them convicts working in the copper mining industry. From the same country, the Chinese import cobalt. In Guinea, Gabon, and the Congo, the Chinese are busy harvesting lumber for the Chinese market. In Nigeria, they are repairing the railway system that brings oil to the ports. Elsewhere, they are improving roads over which they ship raw materials and bring in Chinese-made goods which, in 2006, already had 6.8% of the African market share. China’s trade with Africa reached $200 billion USD in 2014, more than any other trading partner.
Politically too, China is making friends as fast as it can in order to assure a steady supply of raw materials. It has a “hands off” policy towards the “internal affairs” of its trading partners, leaving African oligarchs to do as they please with the capital gained from the sale of resources. China is also handing out cheap loans and forgiving debts, sending doctors and nurses, engineers, and experts of all kinds in its bid to keep the leaders (if not the people) of Africa happy. So, this was behind the song and dance extravaganza I saw on Chinese television.
Television
Other shows that I watched on TV were less about making friends internationally than with providing a stream of entertainment to keep 1.3 billion citizens entertained. There were very few documentaries unless they were about endangered Tibetan prairie dogs. Typically, shows featured young people bouncing around to music with strobe lights and mini fireworks popping off. The girls and boys did rap numbers, and they gyrated on the floor. They were dressed in black leather (or imitation leather); some girls wore provocatively short skirts and thigh-high boots. Sometimes the “top 10” songs were listed on the screen, along with lyrics translated into English. Occasionally, blonde, white women came on as guest stars. Then phone numbers were displayed for those who wanted to order the music on CDs.
Television commercials were about Softskin creams and anti-dandruff shampoos, or restaurants that had novelties like coffee and expensive wines. An interesting ad was the “Dolly Wrinkle Eraser,” supposedly “made in the USA,” that paragon of modernity. It came with a phony-looking guarantee certificate. Then there was the ad that had a white man speaking Chinese, selling special pillows and mattresses that promised to do wonders for aging spines. An 800-number appeared so that people could get rid of their excess cash immediately. This ad ran over a minute in length, repeatedly hammering its message into hundreds of millions of brains.
Another product was an electronic dictionary. This was for ambitious youngsters struggling with the English language. A studious-looking white guy (again!) promoted this toy for 998 RMB. But the weirdest ad I saw had to be the contraption flaunted by white people speaking English and German. This was a mail-ordered rack that literally stretched people as in medieval times. This contraption was supposed to make people taller. It was surely forbidden in the West; but then, anything goes in China. All ads featured happy, healthy looking couples, young and old, and the ubiquitous parents with their single spoiled brat — the “cool” Chinese family.
Another ad flaunted a huge “family sauna” in which you could sit sweating out the impurities of your body while reading a magazine or making cellphone calls, undoubtedly to friends who wondered why you were in your living room stuck in a huge plastic bag. You could throw away that old-fashioned hot water bottle for your sore back while losing the pounds of fat you put on at KFC and McDonald’s. The ad makers had learned well from American hucksters.
Next on TV came black and white footage of President de Gaul, followed by images of French dignitaries visiting Beijing during the Cold War. This was to remind the audience just who their friends had been over the years. But then this was the build up for the French president’s first China visit. (This love affair would last almost two years until the next president, Sarkozy, intimated he would not be attending the opening of the Olympic Games out to protest Beijing’s handling of Tibetan protesters. At that point all things French became rubbish in China.)
A few nights later on television, there was the French contribution to the Sino-Franco love affair. A group called Equinox attempted to impress the Chinese with high-tech music. Broadcast simultaneously to audiences in Paris and Beijing, the electronic tunes essentially said nothing. (But then, perhaps music has nothing to say these days.) The techno beat was industrial and, eventually, annoying. During the program, a Chinese musician played a traditional string instrument, its haunting tunes kindling images of foggy mountains, cool lakes and rivers — but this was mixed with a grating, electronic beat. Perhaps this was to say that France was offering China a glimpse into the future, bland and meaningless as it may well turn out to be.
Finally, there was the New Year’s Day program on CCTV 1. When I tuned in, there were Chinese belly dancers gyrating against a backdrop of Egyptian pyramids. A moustached Chinese wearing a turban performed in front of a chorus of thirty “harem girls,” but then he was transformed into a singer wearing a Mao suit embroidered with silver. The belly dancers disappeared, then reappeared as 1950s girls wearing red and white silk pants and blouses. With friendly smiles, they unfolded fans to traditional Chinese opera music. Snowflakes fell as they twirled and gyrated. Cut to the hammer and sickle, and the national songstress came on to sing a patriotic song. On screen, behind her, were images of Chinese doctors in white lab coats and construction workers wearing hard hats; policemen and women; farmers; a military man tossing the national flag into the breeze. All cliches for the masses.
Foreigners and Annoyances
My own white-skinned novelty was a handicap at times. As I come from a multicultural country, where you can see every human type from every part of the globe, race was not an issue for me. Back home, no one would stare at a black, yellow, or brown person any more than they would stare at a white one. But in China, this was not the case. There were not many “foreign” faces on the streets of Tianjin or Harbin. Hence, strangers would stop and stare or call out “Hello,” or send over their children to try out their floundering English. Students and adults alike would make my acquaintance solely to practice English, probably without seeing me as a person at all. I was a species: a “foreigner.”
The political correctness in China is not as it is in the West. Apparently, many Chinese do not feel wrong in commenting on the whiteness (or blackness) of one’s skin, or in saying things like “Man, you are fat!” They can be offensive without meaning to be or even noticing it. But they can also be complimentary for no apparent reason at all. It can be rather confusing.
Such issues aside, there were habits of the ordinary Chinese that annoyed me no matter how long I was in the country. For instance, men spat in public places (in department stores and in hospitals they spit into ashtrays). Achhhhhh…sput! I was in a taxi once when the driver opened his door, leaned out and Achhhh… let one fly. Other people did it out of bus windows. Once on a plane, from the seat behind me, I heard Achhhhhh…sput! I just hoped he put it into a barf bag. I found out later that many people had lung disease, thanks to endless volumes of coal dust emanating from hundreds of thousands of chimneys used in industry and domestic heating. Alternatives to coal are only now being explored, but the damage to human health has been done.
Winter sidewalks were commonly spotted with frozen spit – not a comforting thought considering that spring would come. At first, this behavior irked me for I did not see a reason for it, but high levels of air pollution also began to effect me to the point that, now and then, I too had to spit into my handkerchief to clear my sinuses. Then I understood.
The spitting issue made news when the Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee of the Chinese Communist Party decided to get tough before the Olympics. The committee had decided to re-educate uncouth tourists by making travel agencies and tour guides responsible for the bad behavior of their charges. The tour leaders would have to correct the embarrassing behavior of those in their groups lest the nation lose face. When thousands of international visitors arrived for the Olympics, no one wanted to hear Achhhhhh…sput! However, teaching people not to spit is only treating the symptoms of ills that are far more serious. But, more of this later.
Another annoyance was people in crowds who would come up close to listen in on my conversations or to see what I was doing. In stores like Wal-Mart, some shoppers would stare into my cart to see what I was buying. Maybe I knew something they didn’t? When I once had to go to a hospital for a knee problem, I found myself in a room with six guys in white coats examining some dozen people, and as many visitors milling around. When I got the look-over by a “doctor,” every one of them formed a crowd around me to leer as though I were a rare bug caught by a collector. It was Kafkaesque.
Doctors
All in all, in the first three years, I saw no fewer than five doctors in China for a problem I had with my leg. Only one of them offered a diagnosis but none suggested a remedy. This led me to conclude most of the practitioners in China are ill-trained; others are just quacks out to make a buck. As for traditional Chinese medicine, it has never done me any good, and I conclude it is part of a tradition of taking people to the cleaners – except, I should add, for the pain-relieving effects of acupuncture which I underwent for months on end. It seemed to ease the pain although it did not heal me.
I came down with strange illnesses, perplexing pains in one foot and knee. There was a hospital I visited that, for me, came to represent all Chinese public hospitals. In the old Number 2 Hospital in Harbin, barely lit hallways were crowded with patients coming and going while others were packed up against wickets where patients paid to see a normal practitioner or, alternately, as signs above some doors indicated in English, to see a “famous doctor,” presumably a specialist. Prices varied according to whom patients could afford to see. I chose to see a “famous” one.
The examination rooms were small, with sooty walls that had not seen paint in decades. Doctors sat quietly in their rooms, enjoying a cigarette between seeing patients, but they all wore clean, white coats and looked authoritative. When I had to have a blood sample taken, I joined a line before three wickets with a nurse attending each. It reminded me of a war situation, as one after another patient rolled up his sleeve, stuck his arm through a wicket, and had a needle jabbed into a vein. (I assumed I got a new needle.) Blood samples were carefully labelled, and patients could pick up their test results that same day. It all ran quite smoothly, as it should in a country used to servicing hundreds of millions of people per day.
Not satisfied with the public clinics, I went for an x-ray at a military hospital. This was an impressive, new high-rise tower which, to my surprise, was largely empty. I got to see a friendly young doctor who spoke English. Doctor W wore a white coat but had his military uniform on a peg on the wall. When I commented on the splendid design of Chinese military uniforms, he said: “I’ll get you one.” (Since I didn’t take him up on his offer, I don’t know whether he was serious.) He had served in Africa as part of a UN mission and was quite pleased to show me the citations and medals he had received. It was a privilege for him to have travelled to such an exotic place. Interestingly, this doctor finally gave me a credible diagnosis of my leg problem, but he was not able to prescribe a remedy for it. Graciously, he didn’t charge me for his services.
Before I saw Dr. W, I had been treated by several acupuncturists. Of these, “Doctor Pain,” as I called him, turned out to be the most effective. I had been having pains in the muscles around my knee for over a year, making it impossible to walk normally or carry anything as heavy as groceries. For several months, Dr. Pain and his sister-in-law came daily to inject me with ossotides and other mysterious fluids. Frequently, I screamed as I was jabbed with dozens of acupuncture needles, to which he used to give a twist to make sure they went in deep, and then hooked them up to a gadget that released a stream of electrical impulses. I would be sitting in bed, my leg twitching like some poor frog being electrocuted, while everyone else watched television. Often, Dr. Pain and his sister-in-law would go into my kitchen to prepare supper for me and my Chinese friends. We sat like a family around a hot pot with an array of dishes my care-givers had prepared. These remain among my favorite memories of China.
However, overall, I can’t say I was impressed by the quality of the doctors or the health care in the PRC. Typically, a practitioner receives four years of training in medicine before he joins a hospital or becomes “famous” as a specialist (compared to ten years of study in my country). The Chinese themselves are distrustful of doctors, so I am not alone in my conclusion. However, having said this, I found a similar incompetence and lack of concern in Western medical practitioners. Today, everyone seems out to make a buck, and getting people when they are at their most desperate has become quite a racket everywhere.
Service
Beginning March 2008, visitors flew into Beijing’s ultramodern Terminal III, then the largest and most impressive airline terminal in the world. As everything else being built in China these days, it invites superlatives, having been constructed by some 50 thousand workers going at it 24 hours per day. The structure was designed by Sir Norman Foster, one of the preeminent architects of our time, a fact that seems to have been forgotten by the Chinese officials at the opening ceremonies. (Indeed, most Chinese seem unaware that foreigners are involved in the ultra-modern constructions in the country.)
Terminal III (not my photo)
I walked through the new building, having been dropped off by an airport bus. The driver didn’t know if I was at the correct terminal, and neither did any of the attendants at the airline check-in counters. They sent me to Terminal II, but when I got there, the airline people there said “No, no, Terminal I.” I had to walk ten minutes along a corridor connecting Terminal I and II, arriving just in time for my flight. Considering the wonderful structures going up all over Beijing, it’s a pity more wasn’t invested in training personnel. Few could speak English, and even those who did sent me off in the wrong direction whether it was in a train station or in an airport.
On the positive side, some service in China is great. On trains, for instance, an attendant comes by to sell drinks and food; you can read or look out the window, enjoy the ride while eating at your seat. In restaurants, waitresses perform their duties attentively, without the pseudo-friendly banter you get from service personnel in North America. The Chinese do their jobs conscientiously, demand no tips, and work long hours.
Having said this, there are exceptions. True enough, restaurant personnel in China work hard and generally give efficient service, but this was not as true for supermarket cashiers. One day, I was in a Carrefour where I encountered a young cashier who worked only a fraction as fast as the others. She leisurely passed each customer’s goods through the scanner and avoided looking at anyone in the lengthy lineup. To top it off, she carelessly tossed plastic bags to people, telling them to pack their own stuff. When it came my turn, I just said: “If you don’t like working here why don’t you look for work someplace else?” To my further annoyance, she beamed at me like a dumb cow, perhaps pleased that she had been noticed. I glanced at the passive shoppers in line, as it occurred to me that they were used to this. They had that dazed look as if to say: “This is life.” It was then that I decided that people lacked the standards of a modern society; they expected too little respect and consideration. But then, this was Harbin, a comparatively underdeveloped part of China.
A colleague of mine told me an anecdote which I eventually equated with my own experience in the supermarket. He said he had seen several street fights in Harbin, and they always took the form of one guy beating on another guy who, as the underdog, hardly offered resistance. It was as though the victim thought he deserved the pounding he was getting. Like the shoppers at Carrefour, perhaps he believed that it was his fate to be abused.
Something an engineer from Germany told me hit a chord as well. The German worked for a manufacturer of tools – clamps, wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers – all sorts of expensive, elegant tools that in the West are prized for saving time and energy. His company had given a set of these to a Chinese corporation. On a second trip to this company, the engineer inquired how they liked the tools, only to be told they were locked up in a glass display case. Then he noticed, on the shop floor, a worker with a meat cleaver, that all-purpose Chinese kitchen utensil. He was using the clever instead of an Allen wrench to tighten bolts on office chairs. Apparently, the modern tools were a “gift” too valuable to use. I concluded that, despite advances, cultural attitudes take a lot of time to change.
The Elite
Earlier I mentioned the new class of rich who like to drive black cars with tinted windows. Just who are they? At first, I thought they were bureaucrats, but then I concluded while some were, others were new capitalists, those who knew how to take advantage of money-making opportunities. They seemed rather sinister as I could see no reason for the darkened windows unless the nouveau-riche sought anonymity or hoped to intimidate ordinary people who would never be able to afford an automobile. The men behind the shaded windows somehow did not jive with my impression of China’s avowed aim of an egalitarian society. However, gradually I came to realize there is little egalitarian about the PRC these days. The newly rich form an elite class that is becoming quite arrogant.
Some people in China resented this caste. In a story I came across in the China Daily, the February 2nd, 2007, (online) edition, it was reported that a driver of a luxury sedan had physically assaulted an old street cleaner, blaming her for a scratch on his car’s side mirror. According to the report, the driver “blatantly used violence to humiliate [the worker]”. Moreover, the man then attempted to silence the media that had gotten wind of the incident. This news triggered outrage in China, not just because of the way this poor woman had been treated, but because it is believed that many of the newly rich have amassed their wealth through bribery, tax evasion, and market manipulation. So, it is little wonder the wealthy hide behind tinted windows.
Crime
Our university in Harbin had several computers stolen from classrooms, possibly with the connivance of the night watchmen. Days later, bars were installed up to the seventh-story windows and fire-escape doors were padlocked. However, that did not prevent thieves from getting onto campus.
A Japanese teacher had her handbag snatched just outside the foreigners’ residences. A friend of mine had two motorcycle batteries and a bicycle stolen. Eventually, someone stole the motorcycle too. A child’s pram disappeared from outside our residences within minutes of being left at the foot of a staircase. Two mopeds went missing. A digital camera vanished off someone’s desk. Small stuff regularly went missing from teacher’s offices. Two female students from Russia were raped on the campus jogging track. Another three Chinese coeds were brutally raped by workers on a campus construction project. All this occurred within three years.
The list of petty and serious crimes is long, but it took the university months before any action whatsoever was undertaken. After sticking their heads in the sand, the administration hired two rent-a-cops who reminded me of Laurel and Hardy waddling around campus but, after two weeks, I did not see them anymore. That was the extent of campus security.
Then, in the hot summer, with dust-raising construction all around us, we experienced a series of burglaries. Because of the heat, people left their windows open, oblivious to the presence of a thief who managed to climb a security gate. He first entered the premises of one of our instructors and managed to leave with a couple hundred RMB that had been sitting on a dresser. Thereafter, the management installed a motion-sensor alarm that would be tripped by anyone coming up over the gate. The watchman himself was equipped with a stun gun that could zap an intruder. Security seemed improved.
However, a few days later, despite increased vigilance, the burglar returned in the depth of night, climbed the gate, moved along a ledge, and opened what the victim later swore was a locked patio window. Somehow, the thief made his way in and found a stash of ten-thousand RMB, the down payment for an apartment. When the crime was investigated by the police, typically they blamed the victim, wanting to know why he had such a large sum at home. No one talked about the fact that the new security alarm had never been turned on.
We foreign teachers were dogged not just by crime but by bad luck. In the same year as the robberies, a television set in a colleague’s apartment caught fire. As there were no smoke detectors or fire-extinguishers in the building, the set burned rapidly, sending thick, acidic smoke into the halls. Fortunately, our colleague woke in time to see the TV burst into flames. She managed to get out of the place. Within minutes, tenants were coughing as thick smoke seeped into their apartments; then several fire trucks arrived. During the ensuing battle to extinguish the fire, most of the apartment was flooded and made uninhabitable.
The place was sealed by the police and our colleague fled in haste to her home country, without her belongings. The police said they would suspend their investigation until she came back to China. To us, this meant she had better stay away, as the cops would probably attribute blame to her, no matter how the fire might have started.
Workers’ Fate
It seemed that a month did not go by without some coal miners being buried alive somewhere in China. This reminded me of England in the early 1900s, when coal miners labored in abusive conditions to scrape out fuel for the nation. In China, this is reality today, and it is no exaggeration to say the Chinese miner works under very dangerous conditions. Going on statistics, an average of a thousand miners are killed in China per year, but many also contract serious lung diseases. The average coal miner in China remains less productive than the average American miner and suffers many times the number of fatalities. Although the government has invested heavily in mine safety, the Chinese miner’s lot isn’t expected to improve any time soon as the demand for coal keeps growing.
My sympathies naturally went out to Chinese workers. In Harbin, the “bon-bon” drivers were out in their three-wheeled taxis taking passengers to and from work in subzero temperatures and punishing winds. They worked in unheated cabs, some of them wearing green Army-surplus coats and hats so that their faces were barely visible. There were also many elderly street vendors who, in Western countries, would be pensioned off, safe at home drinking beer and watching football games. But in China, street sellers included seniors hawking pencils and school supplies, telling fortunes by reading palms, or tossing joss sticks. In all of China’s major cities, there are so many elderly street vendors that they often impede pedestrian traffic. Daily existence for the ordinary man and woman in China remains hard.
In the middle of winter, I saw men and women on construction sites without hard hats or safety shoes, wearing old suit jackets, carrying burdens up and down planks that would have been condemned as unsafe in the West. If they made a thousand RMB per month (then $150 USD), they were lucky. They slept on construction sites even in below-freezing temperatures and worked in filthy conditions. When a new library on our campus was being built, a construction worker died on the job. I was assured that this was not something to get upset about. It was part of any worker’s risk.
Another problem that workers face in China comes from their employers. A year before the Olympics, a disturbing scandal hit TV screens and front pages of newspapers all over the world. In the province of Shanxi, police rescued laborers who had been held as slaves in a brick kiln operation. One man had been beaten to death; others were half starved and scarred with burns from blazing hot bricks they had to carry. According to Reuters, over 500 workers were rescued from an operator who embodied the worst of the get-rich-quick mentality. Not surprisingly, the culprit in this case was the son of the mayor of the district.
Frequently, the victims of such abuse are those least able to defend themselves, the migrant workers. These are some 200 million of China’s 800 million peasants who come to the big cities to undertake back-breaking labor in the country’s massive building projects. Often, when an employer runs short of payroll funds, such laborers remain unpaid for months. If workers protest, the employer, often with collusion from the police and local officials, sends in thugs to beat labor leaders to a pulp. Many such incidents have come to public attention, but the scale of the problem has yet to sink into the minds of politicians.
But some cases did shock the Chinese enough for action to be taken. In June of 2007, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress enacted a law to give workers more say in wage negotiations and benefits. Chinese employees and factory workers do have a government-controlled union, but it has tended to side with employers to keep labor costs at a minimum. Strikes are still not allowed, nor can workers form independent unions. Such is the national interest.
Appearances and Attitudes
At first glance, Chinese cities seem state-of-the-art. You see the facades of new apartment blocks, glitzy office towers, gigantic hotels, and department stores, and you think “Wow!” But when you go inside, you find everything is ill-designed, cramped, with elevators that are too small for groups of people. In apartments, which are not cheap by anyone’s standards, the toilets are Western in design, but few things in them work. For instance, when I would take a shower in my place, the entire washroom floor flooded because no one had thought to slant the floor in the direction of the drain. Not only that, but several large tiles fell off my bathroom walls. Apparently, to save money, workers had applied only enough adhesive to stick them temporarily onto the wall.
New Building Collapses, China (not my photo)
In the toilet, there was only one electrical socket for a single electrical device – the water heater. When I needed the washing machine, I had to disconnect the heater while standing on a wet floor. (Sometimes I wondered if this had not been arranged to electrocute as many foreign devils as possible.) And, occasionally, there was a vile smell from the drains. Yet this was an apartment building only five-years old, and these conditions were not at all unusual.
In the teaching building where I had an office, entire ceilings fell in. A colleague was sitting at his desk when a barrage of plaster came crashing down, narrowly missing his head. There was dust all over and a neon light dangled by a wire from the ceiling. The same thing happened in several hallways of the building. Only when the ceiling of the Party Secretary fell in was anything done: all ceilings were hastily re-plastered.
Halfway through my stay in Harbin, our program moved to a new high-rise, half of which was still under construction. The building was not a year old, before windows did not close properly, allowing cold air into our classrooms so that we taught with winter coats on while the students huddled in their seats like shivering birds. (They seemed to accept this as the norm.) When the spring rains came, seven hundred pairs of shoes brought in tons of mud from the construction dirt outside. Sand found its way into hallways, toilets, and classrooms. Students slid on the tiled floors, yet college managers didn’t bat an eyelid, and no one mopped up the mess.
Some students assumed the college was a dump which they could demolish. They set fire to notices hung on classroom walls, leaving large, sooty burn marks; others kicked in ventilation grills, and others left imprints of their dirty sneakers on walls. The place looked like it might be in an urban slum rather than on a modern university campus.
And, typical of Chinese management, all of this went unaddressed until someone sent digital photos to the big shots on the ninth floor. Only then did they come down to have a peek into the disaster zone where they found shredded paper scattered everywhere, a board filled with graffiti, bottles, plastic wrappers, and sand on the floors. I happened to be present when managers were inspecting a classroom. One leader’s immediate response was an angry: “Those responsible will be punished!” (The default response in China.) Surprisingly, thereafter cleaning ladies were hired to make the place look more respectable. But it had taken managers six months even to look.
In China, a casual disregard for quality extends to all areas of life, notably to the production of goods. I was teaching in a classroom when I happened to notice one of my students slowly sinking beneath her desk. Suspecting a joke was in progress, I went over to find her sitting on the floor, befuddled. The legs of her metal chair had simply collapsed.
A friend of mine bought one of those trendy, brightly colored mountain bikes. Within a week of purchase, a plastic brake-handle disintegrated; a foot pedal dropped off, and the chain repeatedly derailed. Each time something broke, he took the bike to a sidewalk repairman who patched it up. He ended up with a bike made almost totally of spare parts, a true hybrid. But then it was stolen.
Lousy quality was not just in building construction and maintenance. I bought several shirts that didn’t have a thread of cotton in them, although they were clearly labelled “100% cotton.” Lamps I purchased fell apart; a pair of shoes I acquired lasted a mere week before the upper part separated from the sole. I purchased a pair of Clark’s shoes, made in China. They fell apart after less than a year’s wear. After this, I stopped buying shoes and clothes in China, preferring to wait till I got to Europe, even though I would have to pay more.
My frustration with things “made in China” reached a peak while I was in a Beijing shopping plaza. An art-shop dealer, who spoke fluent English, had invited me into his gallery to inspect his many paintings and prints. I noted one so-called “watercolor,” exactly like one I had bought elsewhere years before. The dealer offered me the picture for half the price I had paid, but I angrily said: “I’m not buying anything more made in China if I can help it. The quality is shit; cotton shirts are not cotton, and Italian leather isn’t leather; not even expensive perfume is genuine. I’m tired of being swindled. People here think consumers are a bunch of fools!” This left him wide-eyed. As I stomped out of his shop, he trailed behind me, pleading: “But if you’re honest, you can’t make a profit in China.” I think that sums up Chinese enterprise today.
Education
In China, professors are normally listened to but not challenged. Learning is by rote, in classrooms far too crowded for anything but a passive audience. As for free time, there is little for students to do outside of study. In my experience, most students do not “party” in the Western sense, although some of mine (who had the money) got plastered in karaoke bars. But many could not afford this. Instead, on Saturday afternoon, some students used to stroll through the so-called “Golden Mile” in Tianjin, two long streets of shops frequented more by people-watchers than genuine shoppers. When they could afford it, students would eat in a noisy restaurant, but their meals were modest.
However, when our wealthier students tried to curry favor, they wined and dined us teachers at their parents’ expense. They never allowed us to pay for meals, nor did they let us pay for the billiard games we occasionally played together. Overall, compared to their Western counterparts, Chinese students were unassuming, respectful, and drug-free – potentially wholesome, for a better word – although cheating on exams and casual bribery wasn’t anathema.
While Chinese students are well-behaved and a delight to teach most of the time, the government is evidently worried by declining discipline so that universities have mandatory “discipline training” every autumn. This involves drill sergeants coming to campuses to train hundreds of thousands of freshmen in the finer points of marching. On our campus, I would hear students at six in the morning, marching to the chant of “YI, ER, SEN, SI; YI, ER, SEN, SI…” (One, two, three, four…). They even did a Prussian goose-step designed to impress spectators on the reviewing stands. They learned to march very well.
Obedience Training, new college students
The government has reason for concern because, in China, as in many countries today, more and more students are getting hooked on computer games. I often went to an Internet café to check my mail and, invariably, I saw the same youngsters, day after day, playing games and smoking up a storm. Perhaps there wasn’t anything else to do. No soccer fields? No basketball courts? Or maybe sports were too demanding for some.
When asked what their free-time activities were, my students responded with either “basketball” or “play computers,” meaning online games. The situation had become so serious that the government began to establish clinics where “addicts” could be weaned away from online gaming. Some of these centres were boot camps, an idea no doubt gleaned from more “advanced” (or degenerate) cultures. But I got the distinct impression that Chinese officials didn’t mind these afflictions all that much for didn’t this prove the country had become “modern?”
Military
The Chinese are proud of their country. This may go without saying, but they also seem to be recovering a sense of themselves they had lost during two centuries of foreign military occupation. Some of this pride is due to the Chinese armed forces, the bedrock of the revolution, which is held in high esteem. I saw uniformed young men everywhere as the People’s Liberation Army numbered two-million men and women under arms. I also noted a constant flow of films on TV that showed the PLA in the best possible light, especially fighting against the much-disliked Japanese.
PLA, Bedrock of the Party (not my photo)
I came to appreciate the importance of the Army when the country celebrated its 80th anniversary. I happened to tune into CCTV 3 in time to witness one of those extravaganzas that are common on Chinese television. On a huge outdoor stage, in front of an audience of thousands of expressionless, uniformed men and women (some in combat gear), youngsters in Mao suits sang and danced. Romanesque dishes, spouting flames, graced the background as though modern China had been part of the Roman Empire. Ethnic Mongols twirled and chanted. The girls were dressed in vibrant red. Others, in splendid military uniforms, gave rhetorical flourishes about self-sacrifice and hardship endured in the battle for liberation. Then video footage of military convoys appeared on a huge screen. PLA truck drivers expertly negotiated perilous mountain roads in both summer and winter. After this, more dancing maidens appeared in Grecian dress with flowing garlands of plastic flowers around their heads.
The the program cut to ordinary soldiers talking about what they did in the lonely mountains of the Motherland. (Sudden applause from the audience that found something to smile about, as if on cue.) A girl in a Western wedding-dress came on stage, followed by bridesmaids in military fatigues; she shook hands with the program host and joined her fiancé, a soldier. Then came footage of the fiancé laughing, flanked by his toothless parents, somewhere in a vast frontier-terrain. Members of the audience looked pleased as one of their own received a huge paper flower pinned to his tunic. The couple bowed respectfully to their comrades who applauded enthusiastically; then the couple gave each other modest pecks on the cheeks. I wasn’t sure what this was all about, but perhaps they had just gotten married on stage.
Footage of fallen comrades in godforsaken places of the hinterland appeared; shots of foggy mountains and hot deserts with gravestones. Cut to a scene of soldiers repeating a sacred vow. (This reminded me of Adolf and the boys.) On stage appeared dancers cradling a fallen comrade within a dramatic pool of light – all three in a heroic pose, arms outstretched to their dying comrade. (At this a tear blurred my vision, and I had to turn the channel. Chinese directors certainly know how to elicit feeling from their audiences, foreigners included.)
CCTV 6 showed a film about a ragtag bunch of Chinese Communists who encountered hill tribesmen armed with spears, bows, and arrows. To avert strife, a volunteer from the People’s Liberation Army stepped forward to sing a patriotic tune to cool tensions. This won them over. Hostile resistance was prevented through song. The PLA and the hill tribe ended up feasting and dancing together around campfires. It was all a bit much for me. I had to go to bed.
The Masses
It was an experience to be among so many humans. I used to think my home city of three million was crowded. But I didn’t know what crowded meant until I was in cities like Shanghai with 14 million inhabitants. For me, “crowded” in China meant not getting a seat on a bus unless I got on at a terminal. It meant a throng of humans shuffling along, bodies pressed against the backs of others, with more bodies on either side, inching down long, dark corridors onto cold railway platforms in the Beijing Central Station. Or, it meant waiting with a thousand others in cavernous railway halls for a gate to open. Crowded, too, was a parking lot crammed with little red taxis as far as you could see – all stuck in gridlock, spewing exhaust fumes, honking horns in exasperation.
Crowded also meant Saturday mornings in a Carrefour supermarket where I often shopped. There are many in China and they offer a level of service that few Europeans or Americans would tolerate. One morning, in a line designated an “express” lane, I waited for twenty-minutes with a basket of goods. “Express” meant it moved as slowly as any of the other thirty checkout lanes, but you could only have a shopping basket, no cart. As I was waiting my turn at the check out, I told myself to be “Buddhist” about this – be resigned like other customers waiting patiently in line. But then I heard a loud SCREECH as though some bird had caught its leg in a trap. It turned out to be a not-so-Buddhist customer in another lane. A young woman had attempted to push her cart into line, when an older woman’s nerves snapped, and she flew at the intruder. Screams and loud insults followed, but then the younger woman made a quick retreat.
I was amused, but I noted that all around me the Chinese remained blank-faced as though nothing had happened. They mentally went into a remote place of indifference. Such explosions of temper were not unusual in China. People did have long fuses, but when they blew the powder keg, you knew it.
Crowding also meant it was wise not to travel during holiday periods; at least not at the beginning and end of the lunar New Year, the month-long holiday of Spring Festival. A friend of mine once stood for twelve hours in the corridor of a train, holding onto a hand rail while all around him people sat on luggage or on the floor. Even though the railways put on extra trains to move the hundreds of millions who go home for the holidays, there is not enough transport for everyone at the same time. Hence, train stations are packed with people sleeping on their luggage, gigantic waiting halls are crammed with bodies; the air is filled with cigarette smoke and the stuffiness of humanity. Yet, sooner or later, everyone gets moved on to their destinations.
Car Show
I attended a car show in Harbin. As I had never been to one, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Once I got through the turn-styles into a huge, new convention centre, my ears were assaulted with an exceedingly loud and steady musical beat, enough to drown out the faculty of reason. Each manufacturer had a display area with a few glistening automobiles, some of which were decorated with lanky women in evening gowns or miniskirts. The women wore huge smiles. One novice model was sitting on top of an SUV, grinning continuously, apparently oblivious to the fact that a half dozen young guys were busy photographing up her skirt. But even this could have been part of someone’s marketing strategy.
Automotive Fans at Auto Show
It was immediately clear how popular automobiles had become and how many brands there were to choose from. And, of course, how much disposable income there was available. It seemed to me that capitalism had arrived in its entire full splendor. But many people still could not afford a private car. They were still riding environmentally-friendly bicycles or mopeds.
Spirituality
Although there are the temptations of materialism, not all Chinese are into buying stuff. The get-rich-quick ethic is raising prices for people who are unable to cope. Consequently, some Chinese are looking for consolation in religion and traditional wisdom. In a Catholic church in Tianjin, I saw youngsters genuflecting uncertainly before an altar of the Virgin Mary. When I advised a friend of mine to get a boyfriend and “fall in love” to solve her loneliness, she answered that she was already in love – with God. It seems she was seeking solace for her mundane existence in the religion her grandfather had adopted decades before the revolution.
Similarly, another friend visited several Taoist and Buddhist shrines before heading out to look for a job. Although she was a professed atheist and member of the Communist Party, she chose to hedge her bets with prayers. Still another friend, who had just published his first academic paper, fantasized about migrating to Australia as a quick way of getting a car, a house, and a lot of money. He was hooked on the Chinese dream of success which, suspiciously, resembles the American Dream of owning stuff and having power over your own destiny.
The emphasis on appearances was made clear to me when I found an emblem for what I think China is all about. In Tianjin, at that time, across from the city’s water park, stood an impressive building in Greco-Roman style, all white columns and cornices. Beyond tall, glass doorways was a large, ornate lobby with chandelier. Parked outside were dozens of black automobiles, many with chauffeurs who were smoking cigarettes. However, when I saw the side of the building, I noticed that this was not an old hotel as I had thought but a brick warehouse with the façade of a hotel. That’s what I thought. But when I asked an old-Tianjin hand about the place, he assured me this was Tianjin’s biggest whorehouse. And so it is with much that one finds in China – a world of illusions.
Sanya
I took a holiday in the Chinese resort city of Sanya on Hainan Island, just off the coast of Vietnam. This is the most southerly point in the geography of the PRC. It has a tropical climate that for northerners is only tolerable in the winter season.
Bird’s Eye View, Sanya
I found the beach resorts east and west of Sanya to resemble the coasts of Florida. Indeed, I would not be surprised if American developers weren’t instrumental in designing the thousands of condos for all have an “American” look. There are gated communities and long, empty beaches with security guards to make sure only the privileged get to play in the sand, and “foreign” restaurants with impressive interiors and expensive meals. All is modern and pretentious but necessary for the local economy.
Sanya is determined to become the prime winter vacation retreat for Chinese mainlanders who can afford a holiday. And, at first, it looks like it will succeed. However, after a while, you begin to note the flaws in the place. For one, any and everything that is underwater, including the fish and the coral, has been eliminated or damaged. This is not apparent unless you go diving, of course, but fish vendors assure you they get their fish from far off places, not from the local waters because they are depleted and polluted.
The Miss World Pageant was held in Sanya for several years, but in 2007 it was moved to Poland. Sanya had hoped to provide a permanent venue for the international contest watched by over a billion people, world-wide. Local planners had built a twelve million-dollar convention center to stage the event, but Sanya could not live up to expectations. This may be for several reasons, first of which is that obvious poverty still exists within the city itself. With its many unemployed migrants, the overall look of the city remains Third World, with beggars and fraudsters galore, no matter how impressive the beaches are.
As everywhere in China, in Sanya you must bargain for everything, including your hotel room, unless you don’t mind being cheated. It begins with your taxi ride from the airport and ends with a lady overcharging you for a shoe shine. Visitors are considered wandering cash cows to be milked for all they are worth. In addition, anyone who has been to beaches elsewhere will not find the sand superior. Overall, you probably get much more for your money in Thailand.
Even in top Sanya hotels, a lack of English-speaking personnel is another reason why the city is failing as an international destination. For instance, what do you make of these signs found on a prime beach spot in Sanya: “The woman dilutes the room,” and “It is male to dilute the room”? These are notices on change rooms, female and male respectively. It is hard to find an English-language sign in Sanya that is correct, and this includes menus. So, while its aspirations might be grand Sanya, at that time, couldn’t be ready for international guests.
Sanya Beach (not my photo)
As for restaurants, no matter what is on the menu, if you have a look into the kitchen, you are likely to vomit. In one eating place, I noted fish being disembowelled on the kitchen floor; slime and guts were all over the place. I watched as fish organs were dumped into a large plastic bucket and fish remains were hosed out into the street where they joined years of blackened grime, run over by cars and carried off on the soles of shoes, probably into hotel rooms like mine.
Hoping to get a meal that was worth the price, I went to a cafeteria in an old Sanya mall. There I found vegetables, fish, and rice for a reasonable sum. Interesting in this establishment, which had recently opened, was its approach to the competition. In contrast to a similar place just a few paces down the hall, the owner of the cafeteria had installed a DVD player that showed an endless stream of soft-porn. This was interesting mainly because customers hardly paid any attention to it. The clients were mostly women.
Now that I have dumped on Sanya, let me add what I liked about it. I liked the fact that the place is trying hard: there are construction projects and tourist attractions going up all over the place. One of these is a gigantic statue of Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, located some 40 kilometers west of the city. It’s an impressive site even though most Chinese probably do not believe in Buddhism. Another mega project is a man-made island, the future location of many villas and docks for cruise ships. It is linked to Sanya by a curved bridge reminiscent of similar mega-projects in the Emirates.
Guanyin. Sanya
But mostly I liked the fact that you can go inland and find normal cities where tourism hasn’t yet penetrated. There are authentic, bustling cities of ordinary people going about their daily tasks, places where bicycle taxis with sidecars run up and down ancient streets. So, on Hainan Island you can have the future and the past, the surreal and the authentic.
Qingdao
In 2007, I took a brief vacation in Qingdao, the short-lived German concession established in 1898 on the Pacific coast of China. Famous for its breweries, the old city has a lot of its original charm left. There are tree-lined avenues leading uphill to the German governor’s mansion, a rather confused looking structure built in the early 20th century. There are multi-storied Teutonic homes that at, one time, were prestigious and well tended. But these “foreign” places have been left to rot. Some homes have no windows, others have no doors; paint is peeling off, cement is coming undone, and roofs need to be repaired. Most likely though, there are initiatives to fix up the old city for Qingdao’s tourism potential has not gone unnoticed.
Qingdao Beer (Not my photo)
There are parts of the old city where Party cadres have retired and here all is neat and tidy. From the look of these areas, you might be in Heidelberg. The trees along the streets are a definite advantage for they weren’t planted a week ago; they are grand and stately, with many oriental pines, attractive in their volumes of green.
After the Japanese replaced the Germans in 1914, and in turn the Chinese kicked out the Japanese, the German governor’s mansion was turned into a guest house for Communist Party visitors. Guests included Chairman Mao and his wife and children who, in Mao’s latter years, liked to travel around the country. You can still see the modest bedroom the legendary helmsman inhabited. By today’s standards, it is rather small and insignificant looking. But what I recall most from the mansion is a framed, fuzzy black and white photograph of the imperial German governor and his wife with their children, all dressed in white, looking directly at the visitor – like ghosts.
Former German Governor’s mansion (not my photo)
While in Qingdao, I went to a spa in the old residential area. On the recommendation of a local, I sought out the Seashore Club which cost 50 quai to enter. This got me entrance to the pool and saunas where men and women were separated, except for the indoor and the outdoor salt water pools. The indoor pool was perhaps 15 meters, but it was worth visiting just for the ambience. Towels were provided on racks around the perimeter. You could hang onto the sides of the pool and listen to a live quintet of girls in traditional Chinese dress playing “Red River Valley” and “Old Lang Syne” on two-stringed instruments. I also appreciated the large, plastic palm tree that added to the oriental look.
The clientele consisted mostly of overweight business men who came to the club after work to be lulled into another time and place. The only thing that I found annoying was the eagerness of the young attendants in the locker room who insisted on drying my back with a towel, holding my shoes for me to slip into and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves. That was a bit overdone.
The other thing which made an impression was something I saw early one morning as I was getting ready to tour the town. Outside a four-star hotel, glum looking personnel were lined up, doing physical exercises in the form of pantomime. The uniformed young men and women had to mime “sleeping,” “getting up” – a choreographed routine describing the rituals of life in the hotel. It was a sort of Hawaiian “every-movement-has-a-meaning” routine set to music. Andre Breton would have loved Qingdao.
Flight to Shanghai
Coming out of the clouds over north-western Japan, descending over the Chinese coast, the Pacific waters gradually become shallower. Here and there are islands in a great expanse of peaceful sea. Every few minutes, though, you note underwater ridges that drop off suddenly from one plateau to another, from light to much darker realms. As you approach the mainland, long, endless strings of waves head towards a shore not yet defined. Then, once inside Chinese territorial waters, the seas assume a brown color – from millions of tons of silt carried by rivers emptying into the ocean. Still seen from high above, but gradually descending, there are hundreds of ships, like slivers pointing landwards or heading south-east. Some are longer, others shorter, ships that tell of busy ports and commerce. Finally, there is a thud as the plane lets down its wheels in preparation for landing.
Descending towards the mega-city of Shanghai, sea walls, like a giant grid, appear. These are meant to trap silt for an ambitious land-reclamation project only rivaled by projects in the Netherlands. If the tide is in, some sections of these barriers are swamped but, from the air, their delineations are clear. The plane swoops onto a section of land won back from the waters. You have arrived at Pudong International airport.
During the hot summer months, it is very humid in Shanghai so that the first thing I did on arrival is get a haircut to stop the sweat running down my neck. The youngster who washed my hair might have been handling fine china. He was apprenticed to a master hair stylist and was watching his every step. Once I was in the barber chair, facing the mirror, the stylist opened his tool case with a little flourish, sort of like a magician pulling a pigeon out of a hat. He surveyed his scissors and combs, neatly held in place by rubber restraints. Everything looked immaculate.
He began clip, clip, clipping and snipping with professional attention to detail. A hair out of place here and there got a quick snip. Then he changed cutting tools to thin out the top, clipping rapidly, sculpting my hair into shape. Meanwhile, the apprentice watched as though memorizing each of the master’s moves. But, somehow, the master had cut one of his own fingers. He barely whispered to the apprentice and a piece of toilet paper was applied to still the blood. At first, I thought I had been nicked, and that the blood on the paper was mine, but then I saw the truth and was relieved. In twenty minutes, the job was done, and I was enlightened.
However, some time later, I was less happy after a taxi ride. I had just come back from a job interview in a Shanghai suburb. The ride to the interview, on the Metro, had cost me only 9 RMB for a trip through half of the city. But on the way home, my taxi driver made sure that my luck would not last. When I got into the cab and asked him to take me to my hotel, he said: “Eighteen.” Just to make sure we understood each other, I drew “18” on the dashboard. “Ahhhhh,” he said, gesturing wildly. He was wedged between his seat and steering wheel but managed to root around in his pockets for a cell phone. On this he typed the number 80. “What! Eighty!” I cried, pretending astonishment. (I knew he was about to pull a fast one.) “No way! I will pay 50. Maximum.”
I drew a “50” on the dashboard to make sure he understood. I thought fifty was what a friend of mine had estimated it would cost. The driver seemed more than happy at my offer for he nodded vigorously and laughed. Then he spun the cab around, and we sped away. He left the meter off, as I had expected. I gloried in having bargained so successfully, thinking it would be at least a half an hour ride. But, within three minutes, the surroundings – the tall buildings, the shops, the little park on the corner with the Heineken beer signs – all seemed disturbingly familiar. In another moment, the driver pulled into the road where my hotel was located. We had just driven around the block.
“Oh no. Oh no. Thirty! I will pay you only Thirty,” I whined.
“Ha. Ha. Ha,” boomed the driver, triumphantly. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”
I gave him a couple of mock punches on his fat arm. “Gangster! This trip is worth only eleven quai, not fifty.” But he just laughed, his quivering bulk crushed against the steering wheel. I must have been his Foreign Fool of the Day, but the money wasn’t much considering what an entertaining character this guy was. I had to laugh at his audacity. I gave him a fifty RMB note. He was still laughing as he drove off, leaving me thinking I just got shanghaied.
Harbin to BJ
I took a flight from Harbin to Beijing, a mid-winter journey of an hour-and-a-half. Departing from Harbin’s then small, provincial airport, I had a window seat so I could see the topography for the entire flight. As far as I could make out, the land was monotonously flat and mostly bare of snow. Cultivated fields ran on an East-West axis; a few angular roads separated the fields, with villages dotting a forlorn landscape. In the distance, I saw a tall industrial chimney emitting a snaking arc of white smoke. There were a few small, frozen lakes but, otherwise, hardly any signs of water.
As the plane neared Beijing, snow was replaced by undulating folds of mountains and sandy valleys in all shades of grey. There was not a forest in sight. The terrain looked dry, dry, dry. Factories appeared, all facing the same direction; power-line towers; smoke stacks, and endless clusters of new high-rise apartment blocks. The big city insinuating itself deep into the farmland.
I had to wait in Beijing’s Terminal One for a while, so I took a seat in a coffee shop manned by waiters in black suits. On my small table, there was a live gold fish suspended in a round bowl to keep me company. But unlike the normal cup of coffee you get at Starbucks for two bucks, my airport cup of brew cost about six US dollars.
While I was enjoying my little cup of sweetened coffee, I happened to hear the following conversation by a young Western expat, in China to make that proverbial buck. I never did look around to see who was talking, but it was an American voice on a mobile phone: “What the Fuck you tell him?! I’m so fucking sick of this shit! You’re the one who pulled me into this bullshit…. So fucking sick of the whole thing! Fucking bullshit!” Looking at my goldfish, I wondered when we Westerners began talking this way.
From where I was sitting in the café, I noted a group of overdressed, vacuous Russian women, probably wondering whether their maids had packed the hairdryer. They were hugging huge shopping bags while pressing cell-phones to their ears, their fat assess wigging as they waddled. Trailing behind them, looking disinterested, were their fat-faced, pot-bellied, dressed-by-Woolworth’s men – signs of global affluence.
Student Protest
Back in Harbin, there was an interesting student strike. In principle, these are illegal. The student action occurred at the international college where I was working, and it happened, as such things commonly do, because of a screw up. It began when some students were told they needed to take a higher-level English course despite having been told, years before, that a lower-level would be all they needed to be admitted to a degree-program of studies.
At first, many of the students thought they could, after all, do the required work at the higher level and get on with what they really came for, the training that would give them access to the labor market. However, a week into the higher-level English course gave them the impression that few if any of them would ever pass. So, they took strike action. It was not clear who had organized the protest. However, the Chinese managers were interested in this more than in settling the students’ complaints. “Who are the leaders? Find out who they are!” they demanded. And so, people were named.
It turned out the students with the least chance of passing were organizing the strike. To get others to comply, the radical students took names of those who showed up for picket duty outside the teaching building. What they would do with the students who did not support them was not clear, nor was it clear what management would do with the leaders. From a classroom high above the quadrant, I noted that most of the strikers were girls, all neat and feminine in their dresses – some even sporting sun umbrellas – sitting in a long line, blocking access to the building. The atmosphere was tense.
We instructors met with our Chinese superiors. “This is illegal. It is against the law,” we were told. “We will find out who the leaders are.” When, in jest, I suggested that China’s future labor leaders might well be among the rabble-rousers, the Chinese official looked horrified. I noted the irony of the situation: the strikers were the sons and daughters mostly of Communist Party members, some even from the political elite. In other words, these were the kids of the same social class that was keeping workers at minimal pay in factories and sweat shops, not to mention suppressing dissidents.
Anyways, a few of the students trickled back to classes on the fourth day of the strike. They tended to be those who had been appointed as monitors by the administration. The rest followed a day later, but only after management had agreed to make the next English exam a “take-home” and not to penalize strike participants. When the students were back in their class rooms, they looked a glum bunch, to say the least. They felt defeated, but I also noted a defiant look in some. For the first time since we had come together, there was no laughter in the room.
Wedding
A friend of mine married a Chinese woman. Their wedding feast was a traditional affair. About a hundred of her family and friends showed up, while the groom had a dozen of us colleagues for moral support. As is the norm at such functions, we were seated at large, round tables in predictable groups – her family and friends in clusters; we foreigners all herded together. Most of us spoke no Chinese and none of them spoke English, so it was the usual apartheid situation.
At a Friend’s Wedding
There was a great din with waiters coming and going, dishes held aloft, children running around, and two MCs announcing the rules of a game the bride and groom were to play. It was a contest of how many Chinese terms of endearment (“Honey Bunny, Sugar Cake, Darling…”) each could reel off to the other as quickly as possible. The one who ran out of endearments lost the game. This kind of thing went on for several minutes while guests were busy handling cameras and video recorders, taping things for posterity. Then a group of entertainers appeared.
These were the bride’s colleagues: nine female dancers moving in synchronized order, imitating swans or cranes, or autumn leaves tossed in the wind. After this came acrobats in skin tight outfits – trainees from a friend’s dance academy. They acted out some traditional narrative that all guests – except we foreigners – recognized. I was impressed at how many talented friends the bride had.
Meanwhile, cigarettes were being lit and chatter was flying all over the place; hard liquor was being tossed back; kids were racing about, and cameras kept flashing. The noise level was so great I couldn’t hear my neighbor commenting on the event, and the wine and smoke was giving me a headache. It was all too chaotic but very Chinese. At ten o’clock, everyone swarmed out into the freezing night, pronouncing the evening a success.
The Earthquake
On May 12, 2008, at 2:28 PM, an earthquake on a scale of 8.0 struck South-Central China. Initial reports from Sichuan province were not too worrying, but then the scale of the disaster became evident. By the third day, 15 thousand people had been reported killed, with many more wounded awaiting rescue from under concrete slabs and rubble. This number gradually doubled and was expected to reach 50 thousand as the week went by. Three weeks later, the toll had reached 60 thousand dead.
Pictures in the media showed dazed mothers waiting anxiously in the rain for their children to be pulled out of collapsed school buildings. Hospitals had disintegrated; farm houses, made of bricks and concrete, were leveled; tarred roads crumbled like crackers, and the rain kept coming down. An entire town vanished under a landslide of mud. The valley in which it had been looked as though there had never been a human settlement at all.
I saw the after-effects of the quake on CCTV channels and on the BBC. From Wenchu, the quake’s epicentre, came images of streets cracked and split; people sleeping in makeshift tents; a collapsed chemical plant; apartment buildings mangled into pieces of concrete and steel rods; dazed survivors looking for loved ones or for belongings in the ruins. Kids on stretchers were attended to by nurses in white uniforms; blood infusions were being administered; babies were clutched by worried mothers; PLA soldiers hurriedly loaded relief supplies onto railway freight cars as citizens lined up to donate blankets, water bottles, clothes and money. Everyone was helping. The nation was united.
CCTV showed white frocked doctors lining up to board flights to the impacted areas. They stood behind a long, red banner with an inscription identifying their group. Ordinary citizens flew paper lanterns (powered by candles) into the night time skies in honor of the dead. “I Love China” tee-shirts appeared on television while emergency broadcasts appealed for financial donations. Men and women in orange overalls and yellow helmets moved quickly and professionally among mountains of rubble to pull a child to safety here, or to extract an old person there. One week into the rescue effort, some 60 thousand people had been rescued as the nation shared in the sorrow and the drama.
The rescue effort was undertaken on a grand scale. Chinese paratroopers had to jump into areas cut off by landslides. On television, you saw soldiers ejecting from transport planes, floating into rain-drenched, green mountainous valleys far below. The military played a very prominent role in the quake’s aftermath. PLA soldiers provided a heroic response that impressed the world and China itself.
(Not my photo)
Relief footage became sentimentalized as TV showed children’s hands reaching out from beneath slabs of concrete and rubble. Other kids were shown fearfully clutching teddy bears while recovering from their wounds in hospitals. Such images were frequently accompanied by choral singing or sweet music that moved viewers to tears. Everyone felt somehow personally involved in the national disaster; it was a tragedy that drew viewers in on an emotional level. I clearly recall a China Radio International host saying: “The flag is at half mast, but every Chinese person’s responsibility has risen.” The nation was unified by the disaster, but television threatened to turn it all into kitsch. I doubt many noticed.
Chinese and Western friends of mine reported spending entire days watching the drama on TV, tears streaming down their cheeks. In one televised report, a mother was said to have protected her child under her body as she was being crushed to death by a slab of concrete. On her cell phone she recorded final words of love for her offspring. How could people not be moved by stories like this? Also, on television, the President of China, “Grandpa” Hu, was shown comforting a young girl in a devastated town. In another video segment, he was actively inspiring rescuers to save lives. The tragic element of the disaster was heightened when two-hundred rescue workers were buried alive as a mountain side came sliding down on them. Nature has always given the Chinese people a hard time.
And rumors were making the rounds. One of these was that natural “signs” had preceded the quake but, foolishly, people had chosen to ignore them. Supposedly, thousands of toads had invaded the town of Mianzhu two days before the tremors hit. At the time, this was explained as a natural migration of toads, but the event was more commonly regarded as a harbinger of doom. Scientific explanations fell on deaf ears.
China Radio International reported examples of magnificent heroism. From under the rubble of a school came a child’s voice calling to his comrades: “After we are saved, we must study harder.” Another child insisted rescuers save colleagues first and leave her till last. Some teachers had been killed while rushing back into crumbling schools to save their pupils. As a teacher, I understood this impulse to save the young and wondered if, in similar circumstances, I could be as selfless. (I still choke up at the thought.) Echoing my students, people on TV were saying “Never give up.” The nation was flooded with sorrow and pride as everyone was pulling together in time of need.
I think the Chinese were surprised at their selflessness in a world that had become all too greedy. In the earthquake’s aftermath, China was able to show traditional values that cemented the country together. People took great comfort in this, and it showed me a face of China I had not seen before.
The official media basked in the congratulatory notes from governments abroad: the Canadian Secretary of State said the rescue operations in China had been “really remarkable, fast and efficient …. Obviously … the largest humanitarian relief operation in recent history.” China was extraordinary. Similarly, the British Prime Minister praised the Chinese government for its leadership, while President George Bush offered prayers (what else?). To quote China Radio International again, other nations “expressed deep sorrow to the quake victims, offered sincere sympathies to the Chinese government and people, and spoke highly of the effective rescue operation by the government and the unity among all the Chinese people.” China took comfort in the international recognition it was receiving.
Mega-devastation 2008 (not my photo)
At first, the praise, glory, and self-sacrifice seemed to suggest that mistakes of officialdom were forgiven and forgotten. The Party was on an unprecedented high, yet there were the parents of some 10,000 children who had died in the rubble of their schools. Emblematic of the buildings that had been destroyed by the quake was Xinjiang Primary in Sichuan Province. It had been flattened with most of its pupils inside while, astonishingly, a school building next to it remained standing with only a few cracks in its walls. This was explained later in that, like many schools in China, Xinjiang Primary was low on the official list of building priorities. Such structures ranked only a third where government buildings ranked first for construction expenditures. Speculation had it that this was because the children who attended Xinjian Primary had the misfortune of being the offspring of poor migrant workers. In a system that demanded tuition, the parents of these children just could not afford a safe building.
Two years before the earthquake, the Xinjiang Primary building had been found unsound, so funds had been allotted to its upgrading, yet the money was inadequate. When it was being constructed, the foundation had to be poured twice because the first was of such poor quality. Money had been saved on steel enforcement rods (rebars) normally used to support pillars, and sand was mixed in with concrete because there was not enough for the whole structure. Moreover, the workers on the site were lowly-paid farmers with inadequate experience in construction. Unfortunately, the unsafe condition of Xinjiang Primary reflects the situation of such buildings across China, especially those located in poorer regions where state funds are first allocated to things other than education or siphoned off by thieving officials. All these factors were behind the high death toll of children, and parents were understandably incensed.
Overall, the year 2008 took on the reputation of “bad luck.” It had begun with unprecedented chaos caused by snowstorms. There followed the international Olympic torch protests, touched off by riots in Tibet; then a viral epidemic in central China, and a train disaster. Such a sequence of ill fortune had people wondering whether the balance between man and nature had not been upset. Since such events commonly are believed to portend big political changes, Chinese officialdom was put on edge, which is one reason why the leadership was so concerned about how they were viewed by the population at large.
A Foreign Venture
Many international companies are flocking to China in the hope of making lots of money. However, those who have been in the Middle Kingdom for a while are still struggling to break even and often do so on frayed nerves. This is because some of China is modern, with officials and managers who think like Westerners, while most of the country remains entombed in a get-rich-quick peasant mentality. The foreign outfit I worked for illustrated the truth of this.
For the years I was employed by a Western college, which I shall not name (for reasons which will become apparent), the problem was that those involved had big dreams, but no one did his homework. The college offered diplomas and degrees mostly in Business studies. This was their “product.” But when they assured their Chinese partners that students would, indeed, receive bona fide college undergraduate degrees, they did not count on the kind of student we teachers would have to work with. They had expected the program would be attractive to youngsters with top high-school grades and rich parents. Instead, once the classrooms were filling up, they discovered that most students did come from affluent parents who could afford the hefty fees but, scholastically, the kids were disasters. Most of them had not at all qualified for entry into any Chinese university; their grades were that low. And so, the college was stuck with students whose English was insufficient for studies leading to a degree. The outcome could only be grief.
In the hope of upgrading the students’ English abilities, academic prep’ courses were added to the program. However, while some students rose to the challenge and improved marginally, most did not. Students would come to lectures late, without books or pens; they would sleep in class – all the charming things naughty students do. Consequently, we foreign teachers became frustrated and many students failed. But then, miraculously, they didn’t fail at all. Despite the foreign college’s strong objections, the Chinese management simply raised grades and sent failing students on to the next level to flounder.
At some point, the Chinese management decided qualified, experienced “foreign experts” were too expensive. They pressed for, and got, the right to replace seasoned English teachers with “cowboys,” inexperienced backpackers who were in China to see the country. Many of these amateurs spoke English well enough, but they had no training in methodology, grammar, or academic composition. The upshot of this policy change was that weak students hardly improved at all but were promoted anyway till they found themselves struggling with unfathomable material.
The problems that began with poorly-qualified students and weak faculty were exacerbated when the Chinese partner failed to pay the bills. At one point, a million dollars went unpaid until the few remaining foreign professors threatened to withdraw their services. Only then was half of the money transferred. Rumors circulated that a lot of tuition money had been used by the Chinese to purchase condominiums. One of the Chinese teachers told us his boss had paid for a South-East Asian vacation for thirty staff members – a little bonus at the expense of the foreign fools.
After five years of mayhem, our Western employer had enough. The college had sent officials to China time and again to solve problems that resurfaced moments after they departed. It was becoming expensive to fly back and forth, and it took up enormous amounts of time and energy to keep a venture going that was not worth the effort. Our managers figured if the college could minimize the damage to its reputation by “teaching out” to clear the students still in the system, they might still avoid becoming a laughing stock back home. But their proposal was unacceptable to the Chinese.
The Chinese partners accused the foreign institution of “embezzling” the students’ tuition; accused them of reneging on promises to grant degrees to students who had passed the required courses. There was talk of law suits, strikes, and protests. Students wrote letters to the college; in turn, the college wrote letters to the students. Relationships descended into acrimony and name calling. We expat teachers were caught in the middle, not knowing which way to turn or when to pack our bags.
Eventually, our bosses notified us that the gig was up; we should pack and look for new jobs. However, the Chinese did not believe the game was over. They were still withholding payment for a full semester, hoping to keep the whole scam going. They needed the foreign program because their students had no other possibility of getting a degree. But the Chinese partners could not just hand out degrees, although they would have loved to do so. The foreign program had been a heaven-sent for kids who, without the prestige of a college education, would end up driving delivery vehicles or shovelling dirt in the family business. Now the golden opportunity was quickly fading away.
I left China before the issue was resolved. The partners of the venture decided to extend their relationship for a year. But the problems remained, and many students transferred into Chinese programs which would lead to a mere diploma. The fiasco left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.
Pollution
I often noted the Chinese love for saving money, so much so that, in November, when the temperature in the far north plummeted below freezing, the workers in the local heating plant did not turn on the heat. In my Harbin residence, we got a few hours of warmth in the morning when we rose shivering from bed, and then a stingy bit more at night so we could sit in front of the TV. I used to sit at my computer, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Buildings leaked heat as they were not designed to save energy. The windows let out precious warmth; doors also allowed it to escape, as did the roofs; the walls had no insulation, and stairwell doors to the outside were commonly left open, day and night, because none of their locks functioned. For a nation running out of resources, China was remarkably inefficient in energy conservation.
I did some research into the problems of energy wastage and pollution. I discovered that, for many top-ranking Chinese, saving money in the short term outweighs the risks of waste and environmental degradation. Apparently, in China there is little incentive to spend funds on saving energy, despite the obvious rewards of doing so. For instance, all over the country, energy-wasting buildings are going up as though the land had all the water and electricity it will ever need. Western-type homes, with expansive lawns that crave water, are being built, and every man must have a car that needs to be washed. In the university edifices where I worked, lights were often left on and windows were carelessly left open even in sub-zero temperatures.
FILE PHOTO: Construction at the site of the former Workers’ Stadium is seen on polluted day before the closing session of National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing, China, March 11, 2021. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
Many windows did not seal properly despite looking like the latest in design. In contrast, in older homes the light bulbs were of very low wattage, and there were no showers; people wore long underwear and heavy sweaters because radiators were inefficient or just turned down very low. In my apartment, the windows allowed cold drafts to enter, and there was almost no heat in the radiators.
Seventy percent of China’s energy comes from coal. The country uses more of the black stuff than the USA, the UK, and Japan combined. This results in more sulfur dioxide emissions, increased levels of respiratory and digestive disorders. Twenty-five percent of Chinese territory receives coal fallout, which means thirty percent of the country’s agriculture is negatively impacted. Ten percent of Chinese farmland is deemed polluted while, annually, some 12 million tons of grain are contaminated with heavy metals.
It costs China 700% more than it does Japan to produce ten-thousand dollars worth of goods. This indicates tremendous inefficiency in production and energy conservation. It also causes severe levels of pollution. Seventy percent of China’s drinking water is believed tainted by hazardous wastes, pesticides, fertilizers, and human excrement. A survey found that only 23% of factories in some 509 cities in China treated their industrial sewage before sending it into rivers and lakes, the sources of drinking water. Sixty percent of untreated human waste water is disposed into water ways. The consequences are that some 190 million Chinese are ill from contaminated water. Upon learning this, I avoided river fish and remained suspicious of the bottled water that came delivered to my door, free of charge. But, finally, I had little control of what I ingested as restaurants cooked with tap water, and I had to breathe the same air as everyone else. It has taken its toll on me. I suffered from sinusitis and diarrhea, and unexplained maladies. I blamed some of this on the great amounts of mono-sodium glutamate (MSG) that went into everything we ate but, mostly, it was the grossly polluted environment. Years later, as I add this, China’s pollution has had its impact on my health.
There was a water scare in Harbin in November 2005. An explosion in a petrochemical plant, located upstream on the Songhua River, resulted in a hundred-ton, eight-kilometre long, benzene spill. As benzene can cause leukemia and other diseases, authorities shut off water supplies to over four-million residents of Harbin’s suburbs. Drinking-water had to be trucked in. People stood for hours in lines for their water rations, yet they took it in stride. They had become accustomed to such screw-ups.
We were safer on a campus that, fortunately, had its own well water. But, one day, I caught an airborne whiff of the river’s benzene and was nearly knocked off my feet. It was heady stuff. The emergency lasted several days, until the deadly slick passed downstream into Russian territory to become someone else’s problem.
This was not the only incident of its kind in China. Rather, it was outstanding only because of the number of people effected. However, chemical spills, and other forms of pollution, had become a part of life, and I wondered that people were not outraged at being poisoned. Occasionally, I saw women in cities wearing face masks, but these were for protection against the cold rather than against clouds of vehicle exhaust. I attributed the lack of outrage to a Chinese sense of futility, as though the ordinary citizen just brushed such problems aside, saying “What can you do?”
But not everyone was passive on pollution. In 2005, there were some 51,000 public protests against environmental degradation in China. These took the form of letters to newspapers, official hot-lines, and street demonstrations. The most dramatic of these was in Zhejiang Province where villagers swarmed thirteen chemical plants, overturned buses, set police cars ablaze, and destroyed government buildings. It took ten-thousand People’s Armed Police officers to quell the riot. The government’s response was to issue new degrees against pollution. However, laws in China are broken more often than they are observed, so the overall situation, even at this time, cannot be said to have improved much.
Winter in Harbin
During the Harbin winter, snow falls infrequently. But when it does fall, concrete surfaces become packed with solid ice that stays till spring. The ice turns black from the soot of thousands of coal-burning ovens. Cars and buses crawl over iced roads at five kilometers an hour, while pedestrians cross intersections in a skating mode – very carefully. The precarious nature of winter transport is made worse by sidewalks that are surfaced with ceramic tiles, a feature of Chinese public spaces I never did comprehend. And when the wind comes directly from the north-west, it bites the skin and tears up the eyes. No matter how many layers of underwear you have on, you feel the chill. At times, I would wake up at four in the morning, shivering under the bed covers. I would get up at six, make my way to the bus by seven, and get to my office by 7:20, all mummified from head to foot.
In Harbin, I usually took the bus, located just up the street from our housing complex. One winter morning, as usual, the bus was unheated, and the windows had iced up. The driver got the engine sputtering, then he tried to close the doors, but they had frozen in the open position. He attempted to pull them shut, yet they would not budge. His remedy for the problem was unique and typically Chinese. He took a sheet of newspaper, set it on fire, and pressed the burning mass into a little compartment above the door where the hydraulic mechanism was located. Moments later, the heat melted what had frozen, and he was able to close the door. And off we went. Where there is the will, the Chinese will find a way.
Beijing Olympics
Long before the 2008 Olympic Games began, national hand wringing commenced. First there were the protests in Europe and America regarding political turmoil in Tibet. Dalai Lama fans all over the world kept disrupting the progress of the Olympic flame being carried through the streets of foreign lands. Some foreign politicos announced they would not attend the opening ceremonies in Beijing, and the US Congress tried to get President Bush to make an issue of freedom of religion. As a result, the Chinese government forbade the meeting Bush had hoped for with Chinese religious dissidents. A poster appeared on some internet sites showing five handcuffs forming the Olympic rings logo. Amnesty International made a great deal of what it called “repression” in China. All of this threatened to upset the Games.
I did not attend the Olympics, but I was in Tianjin, an hour’s distance where I followed proceedings on television. What I saw was this: a report on the Chinese Special Forces formed to safeguard the Olympics from start to finish. Film clips showed heavily armed soldiers in green camouflage running up mobile ramps like medieval warriors storming a castle, rifles ready to blast at terrorists. The report explained these were part of forty new squads, backed up by 100 thousand personnel in China’s defence against terrorism. The display was meant to reassure the public and foreign guests that the government was not taking any chances. (“We are ready,” they seemed to say.) Muslims. Buddhists, and others might attempt to make a mess of the sacred games, but they would pay dearly for it.
Already malcontents and dissidents of whatever stripe had been rounded up and sent out of Beijing to avoid embarrassing the government. Muslims from the far Western provinces were not allowed to travel to BJ. (Predictably, the foreign press trumpeted this as a further indication that China remained a “repressive state.”) It was also reported in the foreign media that Beijing neighborhood watch committees had been reactivated, and some 260 thousand closed-circuit cameras were installed in the capital city. The capital would be ready for anything.
Yet, despite all this control, in China I freely accessed the New York Times with the occasional interview with dissidents who denounced the Games as propaganda. It seemed the Party was responding to criticism that it was attempting to “stifle” unacceptable views, but the authorities were willing to accommodate their foreign guests. Still, the word “authoritarian” came up time and again in foreign reports meant to politicize the event by attacking the Chinese leadership. It appeared that no matter what concessions the government agreed to, the foreign press would keep denouncing it in knee-jerk fashion. In this atmosphere the Olympics began.
The Games were opened on the auspicious 8th day of the 8th month in 2008, at 8:00 PM. However, leading up to the moment, all day long, the television showed cavalcades of vans and cars heading towards the “Bird Nest” stadium in Beijing. Against a background of mist, entire freeways were closed by police as the cavalcades made their way to the great “One World; One Dream” spectacle.
The opening of the Olympics was an unprecedented event. Thousands of singers and dancers performed under the direction of the Chinese filmmaker, Zhang Yimou. Most impressive was the opening display of mass drumming: two-thousand-and-eight drummers pounded on square light-boxes that lit up with each beat. And, of course, all the drummers were in perfect synchronicity. It was reported that nine thousand of the participants in the show were PLA soldiers. Little wonder, then, that everything ran with clockwork discipline. There is no army like the People’s Liberation Army.
The enchantment of the grand opening lasted a few days; thereafter, criticism reappeared. In foreign media, it was revealed some things were not as they had seemed on television. For instance, one of the Chinese involved in organizing the fireworks displays confessed that not all the fireworks shown going off over Beijing during the celebrations were real. They had been prepared for digital insertion into the live TV feed many months before. In other words, there were fewer big bangs over the city than there seemed to be. In the Western press, this was interpreted as a form of dishonesty (as if the press in the West were totally honest). To me, the video insertion was Chinese practicality.
Another “dishonest” aspect of the show was that the cute kid, Lin Miaoke, who sang the “Ode to the Motherland,” wasn’t singing at all. She was lip-syncing because the real singer, Yang Peiyi, was deemed “not cute enough” to be put on stage. The decision had been made by a senior politburo member. The Party obviously wanted everything to look perfect. But this was also deemed dishonest. Again, the foreign press pushed these trivialities to the limit.
How was the opening viewed in the West? Clearly some European media thought it was all a bit much. It was over the top; an excessive “waste of money.” The mobilization of great masses of people always worries Europeans because it reminds them of the Nazi years – all that marching and synchronization, the dwarfing of the individual for a greater purpose. The opening of the Games reminded them of the China they are up against economically, militarily, and culturally. People had already seen the lines of Chinese workers marching to their workplaces; now here was a similar regimentation in sports. It all smacked of authority and ideology, with the Communist Party pulling the strings. And everyone had been told, ad infinitum, that once China was a “superpower,” it would challenge the United States for world supremacy. So here was further proof of this. But the spectacular show also countered many Western illusions of a purely “backward” China, even though, in many aspects, China really does lag far behind modern societies.
Back to the beginning
Just as I began my China adventure in Tianjin, so I ended it there. I stayed in the foreign guests’ residence on the campus where I had taught four years earlier. The campus had not changed at all. It still had that Bauhaus, industrial look, with heating pipes running across the campus past dusty, brown-brick buildings. Workmen happened to be yanking tons of weeds out of the shallow pond to save the few fish that had managed to survive oxygen deprivation. Workers atop floating oil drums were using long poles to drag up evil-looking weeds. These were heaped on the shore to be shovelled into handcarts, and taken to an unknown destination, perhaps to become fertilizer.
Also unchanged were the foreigners’ residences. A colleague, who had been staying there for the past few weeks, reported that not a night had gone by without a party in the building, a pack of dogs barking outside, or a goose or rooster crowing while he was desperately trying to sleep. When he had complained to the house management, he was met with shrugs and a “What can we do?” attitude. However, the colleague’s Chinese wife was not so passive. She called the police on several occasions. They seemed to solve the rooster problem, probably by cutting his shrieking head off; as for the dogs, they were more allusive and remained a nuisance. As for the party animals, mostly Koreans, they soon went home, to be replaced by similarly noisy pests from the Ukraine. The house was as charming as ever.
But Tianjin had undergone a remarkable transformation. Along the waterway, near the train station, embankments had been constructed to make it possible to stroll along the river on either side. A large Ferris wheel spanned the canal, and new bridges had been installed, some of them of beautiful, advanced designs. To recapture the 1920s, “European” atmosphere, along one quay, someone had installed Rodinesque statues of nude Caucasian couples engaged in sexual foreplay. (Meant to be in good taste, no doubt.) Where, years earlier, I had seen an old sampan being pushed by a boatman in murky autumn waters, tourist boats now patrolled up and down the river. In the old town, once inhabited by Europeans, villas had been renovated, Italianate plazas rebuilt, golden Art Nouveau doors, and fancy exteriors, were restored. It all looked nicer than it probably ever did. If you didn’t know any better, you might think you were in Europe.
I left China with mixed feelings. On the one hand, professionally, it had not been what I had hoped for. Some of my students met my expectations but most did not. This was not because they were Chinese, but because they were not good students. No matter what any of us teachers tried to do, the kids were intellectually and emotionally not ready. Having said this, some did impress me because they sincerely struggled with material which was over their heads, and they all were lovable.
During my years in China, I saw the country changing at a pace that can only be described in superlatives. I experienced the improvement in rail transportation, seen new buildings go up virtually overnight, noted the banking system improve, and new universities come into existence. I witnessed China coming together in the face of a natural disaster in a way that convinced me that this nation can weather any storm. The Chinese are ein Volk in every sense of the term.
China has a great potential for expanding its domestic economy, improving its health care and educational systems, and enhancing its agricultural sector. But its exposure to world markets is vulnerable to the vagaries of international economics. But, to remain competitive, China can also produce higher-quality goods and move its factories further inland to take advantage of yet lower labor costs. In other words, there is potential for growth beyond what has already been achieved, and that growth can come within the country itself, given appropriate policies. But China will remain challenged to respect copyrights, stop dumping products, and subsidizing production – all against the rules of trade. The average citizen seems full of hope, but many are cutting corners and otherwise embezzling funds – and emigrating.
In every sense, the Communist Party is still in charge, and there is no reason why it will not be in the future. The government has demonstrated keen political flexibility in response to domestic issues and international demands. It has demonstrated that it can mobilize millions of its people in times of emergency and retain the confidence of its citizens. At the time, it also showed some increased tolerance for diverse opinions and seemed to be listening to the people as well as issuing directives. In other words, the political system adapted to the economic and social changes taking place at all levels of society. There is no reason to believe the Party is coming to an end any time soon. It can evolve and survive.
The CCP decides for China
What the democratic West fears most about China is its global, ideological influence, an impact that is felt most in developing countries. China offers an authoritarian, yet responsive, system guided by a single political will that is more focused, can respond more quickly to changing conditions, and can realize political objectives quicker than any democratic state given to political bickering. This is borne out by the rapid growth that the country has achieved and its ability to respond effectively to global situations.
The downside, of course, is that the one-party system does not accommodate the individual beyond a certain degree. But then, mainland Chinese society is built on collectivist principles. Individuals need to subsume personal interests to safeguard society. Many countries in the world would agree with this principle, especially in the wake of the anti-social, corporate behavior that has reached shocking proportions in the capitalist West. In short, today China offers developing societies an alternative system that becomes ever more attractive as the West continues to discredit itself.
1 By 2018, many more women were allowed a second child in a revision of the child policy.
Doubt is the greatest gift we can give to each other. It is the gift of enlightenment. Doubt will set us free, advance knowledge, and unravel the mysteries of this universe, but faith will keep us ignorant. – “Sina,” cited in Ibn Warraq (2003)
The decisive difference between cultures often lies in the place accorded skepticism. Doubt is normal in humans, but its expression can be officially suppressed, although it cannot be eliminated. Doubt leads to questioning the status quo, and this can lead to change. Entire civilizations have been moved forward due to the Doubting Thomases among their members. There is evidence that many Muslims have started to doubt their dogmatic assumptions even as the world has become mired in uncertainty, and this could serve to propell the religion forward.
Science is driven by doubt. So is progress. The difference between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is that skepticism has been squashed for generations in the Muslim world. Ironically, Mohammed at first doubted he was hearing directives from God during his ruminations in the cave at Hira. As the story goes, only when visited by the archangel Gabriel did Mohammed become certain he was not being confronted by a malevolent jinni. Jesus, too, expressed doubt when he was suffering on the cross. He asked whether the Lord had forsaken him. When Prince Siddhartha came to doubt his privileged way of life, he went into the world to discover and partake of human suffering. It gave him a clearer understanding of the human condition and taught him to mitigate misery. He became the Buddha, the Enlightened One.
Doubt is a basic human quality, and it has been incorporated into many religions, but it has not been equally welcome. When Copernicus and Galileo questioned the accepted Christian view of the galaxy, doors opened to new interpretations of the universal order and humankind’s place in it. Doubt can raise fears, but it can also lay the foundations of new truths, with the proviso that nothing is written in stone. Existential anxieties may result, but humans advance to more sophisticated levels of understanding.
Today, we find ourselves in one of humanity’s great leaps forward, but Islam remains at the tail end of it, a stubborn, medieval ideology. The Arabic word munafiqun, originally used to condemn those who abandoned the Prophet at the Battle of Uhud (March 25, 625 CE), has since become synonymous with hypocrite but was originally applied to those who had reservations or doubted the Prophet (Hazleton, 2013). At present, doubt in Islam remains haram because Muslim states are established on belief in God and his teachings. To openly allow expressions of doubt would be to permit insurrection, or so it is thought.
The fact that Islam condemns those who express misgivings about its dogmas indicates how insecure some adherents feel when skepticism has become common. But there are always doubters among Muslims, as in all religions. To reign in skeptics today, there are hundreds of internet preachers who use entertaining methods to catch the attention of the restless, those tempted by the kaffir (materialist) way of life. For them, it becomes an either-or choice: the Fire or the Garden, the materialism of the West or paradise. Choose rightly and heaven will be your reward. Choose the wrong road, and God will destroy you. And, if that is not enough, skeptics are faced with imprisonment and the pain of the whip, or worse.
What causes believers to doubt? The existence of God perplexes Muslims as much as it does Christians and Jews. They ask: If God exists, why does he allow so much suffering? How can a benevolent deity permit wars and deprivation? Why are my prayers not being answered? The religion seems harsh and outdated, unfair and demanding. Preachers often attribute skepticism to low self-esteem, and doubters are given pep-talks. The reward for belief is said to lie in the next life; there is nothing worth pursuing in this one. Stick to the Islamic narrative; ignore kaffir temptations. Or a modification of this message for students: Learn to dispute the scientific perspective put forth by evolutionary biology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy. Answer with alternatives from religion. As long as science exists, religion needs to wrestle with it, or so it is thought.
Alternately, progressive defenders of the faith are pursuing a different approach by allowing questions from youngsters who straddle worlds and want guidance. Whatever rear-guard actions are being employed, there is a sub-current of disbelief in all religions. Ex-believers may inwardly have reached the stage of atheism but cover it with a show of piety to retain their place in the community; hence, it is not apparent how many have given up believing.
There is a world-wide trend towards atheism and secularism that Muslims have not been immune to. According to a PEW study, 23% of Americans raised as Muslims no longer fully believe in their religion – although many keep up appearances. Similarly, many in Muslim-majority countries are turning skeptic. Some 5% of Saudi Arabs, reportedly, are non-believers, while 19% describe themselves as “not religious.” Also, Richard Dawkin’s book, The God Delusion, was the most downloaded text in Arab-speaking countries, circa 2015. Ahmed Benchemsi (2015) has detected a general move towards atheism as part of the Arab Spring rebellion. Atheism, he says, equates with revolution. However, doubts about Islam are not always atheistic but about how the religion has come to be abused by those in power, suggests Benchemsi. Theism can still be a choice without subscribing to the complete system.
Still, the number of pro-Islam sites on YouTube hoping to bring youngsters back into the flock would indicate a need to save Islam from obscurity. It remains uncertain as to which way the wind is blowing or whether a drift from religion can be sustained. We cannot draw conclusions of how this will play out, because there have been other periods of uncertainty in Islam followed by fanatical revivals of the faith.
Jennifer M. Hecht’s (2003) Doubt. A History traces the period of Islam’s enlightenment, spurned on by the Greek philosophers. This was during Europe’s Middle Ages when famous (later, infamous) rationalists pored over translations in Baghdad’s great libraries, enthralled by the rational human mind – powered by doubt. Arab skeptics included a group known as the Faylasuf (philosophers) who, essentially, thought God equaled the power of reason. They openly challenged some of the teachings of the Quo’ran but kept their discussions to themselves. Concentrated in the city of Basra, the free-thinking poets ended up wondering: Since everything was created, who created the Creator? Such questions sealed their fate.
Abu al-Razi (854-932 CE), an arch-rationalist, experienced personal enlightenment. A medical doctor, philosopher, and chemist, he promoted the establishment of scientific truths through (Aristotelian) experimentation. He wrote treatises questioning God’s motives for granting the gift of prophecy to some when it would have been more effective to grant it to everyone (a blasphemous thought). He concluded believers had been duped, and that belief was the result of habit rather than conviction. Al-Razi expressed similar reservations about Christianity and Zoroastrianism, detecting logical inconsistencies in their dogmas. As Hecht (2003) explains: “Al-Razi made it clear that he thought all supposedly revealed religions were a disaster for humanity, because they led to bloodshed” (pp. 228-229). Skeptics like Al-Razi were believers who had woken up under the influence of reason. Some even doubted the existence of God.
Al-Ghazzali (1056-1111 CE) was the supreme doubter. He was in charge of Baghdad’s most prominent mosque but had caught the bug of reason and began to question everything, including the validity of reason itself. Using rational deduction, he arrived at rejecting philosophy but questioned religious claims to truth as well. At one stage, he retired from public life to try Sufi mysticism (Hecht, 2003). Eventually, however, al-Ghazzali proved instrumental in closing the door to philosophical speculation and scientific inquiry in the Arab Muslim world. That door has been shut ever since.
Ibn Rushd (a.k.a. Averroes, 1126-1198 CE) lived after al-Ghazzali but differed in keeping esoteric speculation out of the public domain where it would invite censure. He questioned the incoherence in classical philosophies but supported the use of reason to understand God. He opposed al-Ghazzali’s ban on speculation and urged thinkers to interpret the Quo’ran allegorically, yet he did not advocate allegorical understanding of the Quo’ran among the masses. This would be going too far. From these interesting men, we can see that rational inquiry did exist in the Muslim realm, possibly to a greater extent than it does today. Their demise meant a great loss for Islam – a deficit still felt.
Jennifer Hecht’s exposition of doubters living during Islam’s classical period shows that there were times in which doubt could be expressed without losing one’s head, but these periods were few and far between. Fanaticism always entered the picture to shut out rational thought. Skepticism threatened the collective. Conservative imams had too much to lose if their monopoly on belief was broken. This is the situation in Iran, Arabia, and Afghanistan today, with mullahs pressured by young people to open windows to permit some rays of enlightenment into society. Just how open Islam will become is debatable given a battle for minds is underway.
According to Hazleton, doubt “keeps religion human …. without it there is only terrifying certainty, a blind and blinding refuge from both thought and humanity” (p. 90). The era in which Mohammed received his visions was a period of general uncertainty, as Persia expanded in the north, potentially disrupting traditional trade routes, threatening established patterns of life. Then, as today, unpredictability informed the Zeitgeist. It should be expected as an impetus for culural transformation.
Skeptics among Muslims should be encouraged to develop themselves through humanistic learning. This takes effort, of course. Women especially have lots to gain by embracing secular humanism, and everyone eventually profits from their full participation in society as emancipated individuals. The West is changing like the rest of the world, but it requires the efforts of talented people from all parts of the globe to steer progress in less materialistic, more eco-friendly and humane directions. Enlightened Muslims and atheists can be part of this venture.
References:
Benchemsi, A. (2015, April 23). Invisible Atheists. The spread of disbelief in the Arab world. The New Republic.
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