No, it’s not the pollution, or the fact that there are so many people here. My least favorite thing about China is this lingering cultural perception that everything about China is, at some level, ultimately incomprehensible to everyone who isn’t Chinese.

This is manifested at every level, from the extremely superficial to the deeply personal. For example, China-watchers may recall the hubbub over Ang Lee’s recent film Lust, Caution, which some Chinese people claim is impossible for non-Chinese to understand. I haven’t seen the film and I’m sure it does have a lot of cultural references that make it difficult for foreigners to understand, but impossible? Really? (It should be noted that one of the two writers of Lust, Caution was a foreigner).

This phenomenon exists even in perceptions about the language. Chinese people are, by and large, deeply impressed that I can speak decent Chinese and generally shocked when I tell them that I don’t think Chinese is a difficult language to learn (at least, no more difficult than other languages). Yes, Chinese is written with characters, yes, it has tones, yes, it’s a very old language, but why does that mean it’s impossible to learn?

In those more public arenas, I’m not particularly bothered by it, to be honest. It’s fair that Chinese people expect foreigners to be ignorant about their culture; after all, the vast majority of foreigners are. What’s frustrating is when a difference of opinions with a friend who knows you aren’t ignorant still leads to what seems to be everyone’s fallback defense: “You’re a foreigner, so you don’t understand.”

Now, I’m not claiming that I know everything about China, or Chinese culture, because I don’t. But I do know a fair amount; more than the average Chinese people about some things. In my college classes, I’ve straightened out students who were confused about which ancient philosopher wrote what, and what Lu Xun’s original name was (Lu Xun is a pen name). Still, I’m pretty sure it will never be enough. If a difference of opinion runs deep enough, the eventual response I get is always “you just don’t understand.”

This phenomenon is, I think, one part of a larger issue for me: the clear delineation between “foreigner” and “Chinese person” based completely on ethnicity. Although I haven’t lived here half a year yet, among my coworkers there are people who have lived here for years, married Chinese women, had children. In America, those people would be considered American; in China, they will always be Foreign. And, by extension, it seems they will never really understand China.

Personally, I don’t think I understand China as well as Chinese people, not yet. But I believe there are foreigners who do, and there are plenty of aspects of Chinese culture I understand well enough that I should be able to discuss them without getting the old “you don’t understand” in return.

In the interest of clarity, the conversation I’m thinking of was regarding marriage/dating and a friend of mine who is being pressured by her parents to find someone. I’m of the opinion that she’s still young and can afford to wait until she runs into someone she likes. She thinks I don’t understand, but I do; I understand the extreme pressure she feels from her parents, I understand that different marriage customs mean people get married younger here, and that if she waits too long she might not be able to find anyone. I understand that she’s seeing her friends pair up and get married or move away and she feels a lot of pressure to change something. But I also understand her well enough to know that she isn’t one of those girls that can live happily as long as they have a tolerable husband and material comforts. That does work for some women, but it’s not going to work for her. She’s not mature enough for a real relationship either–she’s admitted that herself–and I don’t care what country you live in or what social pressures you face, those factors make it a bad idea to get married. That’s my opinion. Readers who understand Chinese culture better than I feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel I completely understand the social situation she’s talking about, I just feel that her own happiness is more important than conforming to social norms, even if it means making her parents angry. I KNOW that Chinese culture has different values regarding obeying your parents, it isn’t that I don’t understand, I just don’t agree.

So it hurts to hear even as close a friend as her brush of my arguments with “you don’t understand.”

That’s why I could never live here forever.

Those of you who have been reading this blog from the beginning are perhaps familiar with the saga of my first roommate here, the most arrogant human being I have ever encountered. He is, without a doubt, my least favorite person ever. I knew something was wrong when he murdered someone’s pet, and my suspicions were confirmed when he overheard a coworker and I discussing how frustrating lazy students can be and told me that any teacher with negative thoughts about any of their students wasn’t cut out to be a teacher and was “shit”. I countered that it can actually be helpful to vent about frustrating students outside of class because it keeps you from exploding at them in class, but he wasn’t buying it. Before he left, he also intentionally attempted to insult me in front of coworkers.

I figured he was gone from my life when he moved to another city at the end of our training, but he showed up at my apartment during the National Day holiday and was baffled as to why I wasn’t excited to see him. I showed him the door–actually, I never even let him into the apartment–and figured that was it.

Well, not quite. Yesterday I heard that he was fired from his English teaching job for–wait for it–exploding at his students. Apparently he was frustrated they weren’t working hard enough and started screaming at them that if they didn’t work harder ‘America was going to come hurt them.’ (This is especially odd considering he’s a South African, not an American). Although I feel bad for his (former) students, when I heard that I couldn’t help thinking “I love this moment so much I want to have sex with it.” (That’s something Dr. Cox once said on the TV show Scrubs).

Karma 1, Arrogant Prick 0.

“Free Tibet” is a phrase with a bit of a history. More or less since the Chinese army entered Tibet in 1951, some people have complained that Tibet should be its own country. Over time, rhe cause became popular among Westerners, especially students and celebrities. The intensity of the protesting comes and goes as things in Tibet happen (or don’t), but the song has remained more or less the same: “Free Tibet.” Well, in the West, anyway.

Why has this particular cause attracted so much attention in the West? As I see it, there are two reasons. One is Western perception of the Chinese government, which is shaped mainly by the knowledge that they are Communist and that they once killed students in Tiananmen Square. They are, as a result, “evil”. Western perceptions of Tibetans are based on the Dalai Lama, who seems calm, wise, peaceful, spiritual—everything it seems the Chinese government is not. Controversy closer to home is always complicated, but from afar the China-Tibet issue comes off as good-versus-evil to the uninformed.

The other reason I believe Tibet has attracted so much attention is that it appears to a certain nostalgia many Western intellectuals have; a desire to return to a simpler, more “pure” time. Tibet’s “spiritual” traditional society, its ruggedly beautiful terrain, and its ancient, mysterious religion all give it a special sort of “flavor” that Westerners feel is being destroyed by the modernity the Chinese government brings to Tibet.

Unfortunately, those perceptions are grossly misguided. Traditional Tibetan society was essentially a slave society. The vast majority of Tibetans were extremely poor, there was no real justice system, and the political structure of its “spiritual” government was rife with corruption, exploitation, and perversion. In the book The Struggle for Modern Tibet (the autobiography of a Tibetan who has lived in Tibet, mainland China, India, and the United States), Tashi Tsering describes how he was chosen to become a dancer for the Dalai Lama, taken from his family (forever) as a kind of “tax”, and forced into a dance troupe run by a sadistic director and forever plagued by horny Tibetan monks. These monks (not allowed to marry) took out their sexual frustration through sexual relationships with the children in the dance troupe—Tsering describes this as common practice. Anyone who believes Tibet should return to its roots, leave China, and become a religious nation headed by the Dalai Lama should read that book.

Similarly, what China does in Tibet often goes unreported or is misinterpreted by a Western public eager to find fault with the Chinese government. For example, last May, some Tibetans began a violent riot that caused millions of dollars in damage and touched off a series of racially-motivated hate crimes against Han Chinese and Muslims. Non-Tibetans in Lhasa were stabbed, beaten, and even burned alive in the streets. The Chinese government sent in police to stop the riots, and even though there’s no evidence of violence and the Western reporter in Lhasa at the time reported seeing no police misconduct, the story that played in the West was one of a “brutal crackdown” against “peaceful Tibetan protesters”. CNN even doctored a photo of Chinese police vehicles that ran on their website, editing out Tibetan rioters who were attacking the trucks. Myriad other news media ran misleading headlines and photographs, including numerous photographs of police in Nepal beating protesters that were labeled as if they were photos from China.

Lest you think I’m parroting the Party line here, I urge you to read the aforementioned book (The Struggle for Modern Tibet) and do some research about Western news coverage of Tibet yourself. All of this stuff is well-documented.

You might be surprised to learn that even the Dalai Lama isn’t interested in seeing a fully independent Tibet. While he does want more political autonomy for the region, he does not want it to be a separate country. Nor should he. If Tibet became independent, it would be a disaster for the Tibetan people.

Why? Well, as it turns out, Tibet is still quite undeveloped, economically speaking. China pours money in but gets almost nothing back. The Economist reports:

In 2001, for example, for every renminbi of Tibet’s economic growth, central-government spending increased by Rmb2, according to Mr Fischer. In that year alone, state spending increased by 75%. By 2004 the situation had changed only slightly, with Rmb0.65 of economic growth requiring only Rmb1 of increased subsidies and state investment.
-The Economist

Many might be inclined to blame this on government policies designed to keep Tibet weak, but actually NPR reports that in fact, Beijing pays for 90% of all government expenditures in Tibet, and floats gigantic infastructure projects like new highways and a massive hydroelectric dam.

Now, let’s imagine for a second that tomorrow, Tibet were to become its own country again. What would happen?

Well, the Dalai Lama and the rest of the exile community would probably return. They would arrive to find a society greatly changed from the one they ruled half a century ago, and a people who have had little contact with them for decades. They would also find strong racial tensions that did not exist in the 1950s, and that has frequently erupted into violence in the past. They would also find the embittered remnants of the former Tibetan provincial government, possibly unwilling to rescind control. It seems unlikely that the exile leaders would actually be able to run a modern nation on their own; but even if they were theoretically capable, what money would they use?

As mentioned above, Tibet’s economic output is insufficient to support the region. The removal of all Beijing’s political infastructure would undoubtedly weaken Tibet’s economy further, leaving the new “nation” in the hands of an inexperienced relgious sect with little governing experience and no money.

Tibet would have almost no hope of finding support from other nations, either. China would certainly never support an independent Tibet, and other nations would also refuse support for fear of angering China and harming trade relations.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I can’t imagine any way that a “Free Tibet” wouldn’t quickly devolve into some third-world hellhole, complete with all the starvation and social instability that comes along with that title.

Maybe someone can convince me otherwise, but it seems to me that the first thing we should have in mind here is what’s best for the Tibetan people, and I just can’t see any way it’s good for the Tibetan people to separate from China. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.

I am a teacher. My parents are both teachers; I was raised on the campus of a school. My grandparents–on both sides–were teachers. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about education.

Working in China, of course, exposes you to a variety of different educational philosophies. Students–and school–are different here, as I’ve touched on in previous posts. The ways are myriad, but today I’d like to get into two specific examples from my own experience here.

The first comes from my experience teaching college students at H.U.S.T. (哈尔滨理工大学). Although I am now teaching some regular courses there, many of the first classes I taught were one-time “speaking” classes. Essentially, I was given nothing but a classroom of students–as many as 60 students–and two hours to do whatever I could to help them practice their speaking. The students, for their part, seemed to be required to attend, but certainly hadn’t been encouraged to care much. One student walked into one of my classes and pulled out headphones and a PSP before I had even started talking.

I understand that with “resources” (i.e., foreigners) as limited as there are here in Harbin, large class sizes are probably unavoidable, but why are they paying me to teach students who don’t want to learn English? This is a waste of my time and the students’ time, not to mention the school’s money. At best, these students simply sleep; at worst, they are disruptive and make it even more difficult for other students to learn than it already is.

I didn’t know this, but apparently admission into a Chinese college virtually guarantees graduation. Parents want their money’s worth for tuition, so students who foreign teachers “fail” rarely actually receive Fs on their transcripts. Somewhere in the whole “red tape” process, the grades get cleaned up to make sure everyone passes. Not everyone passes with good grades, but apparently it’s pretty damn difficult, perhaps impossible, to fail out of college here. This makes sense from a financial standpoint, but not really from an educational one.

At the private school I do most of my teaching at–which I’m not going to name–similar rules apply. Because the school is a business, part of my salary (really just whether or not I receive a bonus) is decided by how my students review my class. This applies in all of my classes; thus, part of my salary is determined by how popular I am with a bunch of five year olds.

On the one hand, if the students don’t like the class, they stop coming and the school loses money. On the other hand, though, this system doesn’t take into account at all whether nor not the students have actually learned anything. A teacher who lets the kids run around and do what they like could theoretically get better reviews than a teacher who’s relatively strict so that the kids’ language skills actually progress. I’m not sure how common an occurrence that is, but I do think that generally, when evaluating teachers, how well they teach should be factored into the equation, whether they are popular should not.

Then again, it’s thanks to this sort of policy that I live in a giant apartment and collected a surprisingly significant paycheck today, so how much can I really complain? Teachers need to get paid. It’s just sad that the sacrifice educators make for economics is so often education itself.

The saga of my obnoxious roommate reached a new level today. During the break in one of the classes, I was in the teachers’ office talking to a colleague, and my roommate was sitting in the corner on the computer. My colleague and I were having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about how frustrating student apathy can be, when he suddenly blurted in with his opinion: if we have “that attitude” about our students, then we “aren’t cut out to be teachers.”

Even though this was mainly addressed at me, my colleague tried to point out that we were joking around, and that venting our frustrations outside of class helps keep us from taking them out on the students when we are in class. Not good enough, apparently if you ever have a negative thought about your students; if you’re ever frustrated they haven’t prepared properly or annoyed when they don’t care, then “you aren’t cut out to be a teacher.”

I told him that both my parents were teachers, that I had grown up around teachers, and that I was pretty sure that kind of lighthearted complaining was a perfectly normal part of being a teacher. His response? If the teachers I knew talked or thought negatively about their students, ever, then “they were probably shit teachers.”

Think about that for a second. Think about the extreme level of arrogance it takes to, as a teacher with less than a month of experience (much of which has been spent training rather than teaching), assume that you know better than the lifetime’s worth of teachers I grew up with, including my parents who, between the two of them, have something like thirty years of teaching experience (in fact, it may be closer to forty).

Then there’s the fact that he, the man who killed someone’s pet and then lectured the owner about how his culture was wrong, has the gall to lecture me about my attitude towards anything.

I didn’t really respond to him (because what’s the point?), just went back to class, had lunch and came home. I’m still pretty angry about it, but my day was improved somewhat by stopping and chatting with some of my neighbors on the way home. These are the guys who work at a restaurant downstairs; I interviewed one of them about the olympics so a bunch of them are in the video in the post below this.

Yesterday, they shared some watermelon with me after one of them accidentally hit me in the chest with a large piece. (It was unintentional; still, one never expects to be hit by watermelon.) Today I just stopped on my way home because I was frustrated and wanted to talk about the roommate thing with someone. They asked me to sit down, so I sat for a while and chatted with them about that, my work, and then a bit about the Olympics.

Since they’re all male (all my Chinese teachers have been women)–and since my Chinese isn’t actually that good–I have a hard time keeping up with them sometimes. It’s good practice, but it makes me feel very stupid sometimes. They ask me a question, and then have to explain their meaning five different ways before I answer…maybe by the time I’m done here I’ll have it down to four or three.

(Those of you who are here for the music, please forgive all this academia. The next post will be about music, I promise!)

A friend of mine posted this in the comment section of my previous post, and it got me thinking:

Fear is in most situations driven by ignorance, but in this situation it’s an ignorance that is maintained by the West probably not wanting to know, but also in China’s institutionalized lack of transparency. [The article] raises a great point though, that things have come a far way from where they were. A friend of mine who just visited his relatives in rural China said that things were surprisingly well and that everybody was generally pretty happy. This conflicts pretty heavily with my notion of China, but I readily admit I’m a product of American media.

She makes a good point, and it got me thinking about how much of Western ignorance we can really blame on the Chinese government’s lack of transparency. If the issue we’re looking at here is purely why Americans (or Western people generally) are ignorant about China, then first we need to examine the things Americans don’t know about China and whether the availability of that information is affected at all by the Chinese government. So here are some things Americans are ignorant of, generally speaking, as based on my experience in the twenty-two years I lived in the States.

1) Chinese History: Without knowing at least some history, is it really possible to understand any country? Especially in the case of China, recent history shapes the way citizens view their country and their government. Chinese people, by and large, look at their system and compare it to the way things were in China twenty years ago, or earlier. After more than a century of bloody warfare, ruthless imperialism, disastrous economic management, and heartless ideological persecution of nearly everyone, the current system looks like heaven, even if it does have some downsides.

Americans by and large completely lack that historical context. But can we blame the Chinese government for it? Not really. There are thousands and thousands of English language books available on modern Chinese history, many of them very good. Just reading one book about the last hundred years of Chinese history would do wonders for understanding, but most Americans haven’t. (Many Americans have read a book or two about the mistakes the Communist Party made in the 1950s and 60s, but in my experience, they tend to imagine the China of today as more or less the same place, so it doesn’t help.)

2) Chinese Culture: There’s no way to understand a people without understanding their culture. Unfortunately, Chinese culture is probably one of the hardest to understand because it more or less spans 5,000 years of history and is extremely diverse. Because of this, most Americans tend to pick and choose which parts of it they know anything about, the result being that lots of Americans know the names of famous Kung Fu stars but couldn’t tell you anything about Confucianism.

Again, this isn’t really the government’s fault. Information on Chinese culture is readily available in the States in movies, books, and in the various “Chinatowns” that dot Americas major cities.

3) Chinese Popular Opinion: Everyone in the world knows that most Americans don’t approve of President Bush, and that the war in Iraq has faced bitter opposition both at home and abroad, but what do people know about how the Chinese people feel about their political system and their leaders? In general, very little.

To some extent, one could argue that the government restricts access to this information through censoring dissenting voices inside the country. There are, however, respectable polls that can give Americans a good idea how how the Chinese people feel about their political system. (Most recently, a Pew poll found that “strikingly large numbers of Chinese are happy with their nation’s overall direction, booming economy and how its government is handling important problems”). Alternatively, anyone interested enough to learn Chinese can go online and ask any of the hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users anything they want. Even non-Chinese speakers can get a glimpse from websites set up specifically for them, such as the recently-popular Anti-CNN’s English-language forum.

4) Public Opinion on Controversial Topics: Of course, what everyone in America really wants to talk about is what the Chinese think of controversial issues like, say, that thing that happened in a famous public square in 1989 (You know the one I mean).

Is their access to this information limited by the Chinese government’s lack of transparency? Partially. Certainly, the veracity of information provided by the Chinese government on those kinds of topics is questionable. Of course, there’s tons of conflicting information available outside China from various protest and human rights groups, but much of that is pretty biased, too. Really, the issue here is not a lack of information, but a lack of information that isn’t obviously biased either for or against China.

Talking to Chinese people about these topics can also prove difficult, and one might be inclined to assume that a Chinese person’s reticence to discuss them with foreigners reflects that they are either “ignorant” of the truth or “oppressed” and afraid of state retribution when the foreigner isn’t looking. Both of those things may be factors, but there is a third, and perhaps more powerful factor: the general perception that that sort of “dirty laundry” isn’t something one should discuss with outsiders.

Conclusion: Generally speaking, I think that most Americans have a lot to learn about China before they can rightfully claim that their ignorance is the fault of the government. On a more editorial note, it seems to me that those who really want to change things in China would do better to educate themselves about China before engaging in any pro- or anti-China protests. Read books, talk to Chinese people, learn Chinese (it’s not as hard as you think, start here). And remember that there are always two sides to a story, and the truth is generally somewhere in the middle.

And when all else fails, just ask me what I think, because I’m right, dammit.

This article is something that I think everyone should read. Keep in mind that its author is the same woman who just published the deeply critical Socialism is Great! (the title is meant to be ironic).

I especially think this part is worthwhile:

Today’s schoolchildren [in China] enjoy far more sophisticated sports than throwing hand grenades [a school “sport” during the Cultural Revolution]. They know a lot more about the outside world. I wonder if Western children know as much about China? And if they did, would there be still be the same fear? Maybe the Olympics will bring us closer.

I was going to post a video today about the Olympic opening ceremonies, and what having the Olympics means to Chinese people, but two things got in the way. The first is that I discovered I’m going to need some sort of adapter to plug in and charge my camera here. The second is that my roommate is an idiot, and it’s affecting my life.

I was sitting in the Foreign Teachers’ Office today with a few other teachers when he came in, clearly flustered. He’s often sort of flustered–he’s been putting a lot of effort into meeting Chinese people and just getting out, but he’s been ripped off a bunch of times, and just generally found things difficult (he doesn’t speak any Chinese). Then, he told us that he had just killed someone’s pet.

At first, I figured that was some British figure of speech I had never heard, but no. He saw a praying mantis tied to a string that “appeared to be suffering” and killed it. This, shockingly, had angered the insect’s owner. In an annoyed tone, he explained to us that he had been forced to get a Chinese-English dictionary and explain to them “praying mantises aren’t pets.”

Of course, Praying Mantises have been pets in China for thousands of years. They eat other insects and don’t stain rugs, and so are often kept tied to a string near beds so as to get rid of pests. They apparently live 5-6 months, and I imagine they aren’t kept in the winter, so the one he killed probably had a good couple months left.

It might have been suffering, of course, but honestly, unless you’re an expert in praying mantis behavior how could anyone tell? Can insects even feel pain? (According to this guy, no.). And even if it WAS suffering, why didn’t he tell the pet’s owner that instead of telling him that his pet isn’t a pet?

The answers to these questions are not clear to me. I did ask him if he would kill someone else’s dog if he saw that tied up somewhere. He answered that when he lived in the Middle East, people there considered cats pests, and left poison out for them. The poison took a while to actually kill the cats, he said. He paused for a second, and then: “A cat’s neck isn’t easy to break.” As he said it, he left my room.

The cultural superiority and general insensitivity he displayed is simply staggering to me. I knew that he held some misguided opinions about Chinese culture, but I figured they came more from ignorance than anything else (and that’s a problem a lot of people have when it comes to China). Telling someone his pet isn’t a pet, and refusing to apologize or even pay for it after you’ve killed it, though…that’s something else entirely.

And, of course, as the only other foreigner living in this area, everything he does reflects on me, and in all likelihood, people get the two of us confused. Great.