Its a pretty exciting time to be in China right now in more ways than one. Changes - small perhaps, unnoticed not only by the West but by many even in China - are happening in quick succession.
And in the wake of the horrendous earthquake which I also spoke about in my last blog (I am assuming that no-one who is likely ever to read this lives under a rock so is aware of the details by now) something else happened this week which has never happened before in China's history. Yet another small piece in the jigsaw which will one day be viewed as the story of a countries epic journey, fell into place.
In terms of the great strides this country is making in commerce and industry the fact that a three minute silence was observed country wide at the exact moment the 'quake hit is probably not exactly rocking the West. But in the context of China's change from her traditional past those three minutes carry great weight.
For centuries China lived under dynastic rule. These dynasties exhibited in macrocosm the societal structure throughout the country. Although the three tiered strata of loyalty demanded of all citizens (Country, Emperor, Family) was adhered to in theory, in practice it was the family dynamic that held sway.
Loyalty to ones country, in a land as vast as China, was tested mainly in border disputes. To the hordes of ordinary folk, who could spend a lifetime traveling and trading across thousands of square kilometres and never set foot outside of China, it was a somewhat abstract concept. China was the Motherland and their first duty was to her. This was a a requirement which, for millions, however, was never tested.
Loyalty to the Emperor was also somewhat abstract. The Emperor and his (there was only ever one female leader) Court was a huge machine requiring hundreds of minions for its upkeep and functioning. Outside of these minions and favoured Court members however, comparatively few people were likely in their lifetimes ever to set eyes upon their supreme ruler. Indeed, so wide were China's borders and so inhospitable and inaccessible much of its terrain that news of an emperors death could take months to reach many of his subjects. By the time it did, often, they had been professing loyalty to a dead man and were unaware even of their new leader's name.
But loyalty to family: now that was a concept which framed the life of everyone from the Emperor himself down to the lowliest tiller of the fields. It can be viewed both as China's strength and as her weakness. Loyalty to family subsumes loyalty to one's employer (unless s/he is family), officials, friends, town or village: to anyone that is, below the rank of Emperor.
In the years since the end of dynastic rule loyalty to family has often been tested by the changing face of politics in China. Regimes which encouraged children to report their parents, brothers to compete with brothers or husbands and wives to place party loyalty above marriage ties have, at various times, almost succeeded in ensuring that loyalty to country was the only one of the three societal expectations to survive.
But in the thirty years since opening and expansion and, spurred on by the so-called One Child policy, family loyalties have emerged as strongly as they have ever been throughout China's 5,000 year old history.
There has always been a danger in this re-emergence of family-as-all, however. Civic duty, volunteer associations, even, it could be said in some areas, ethical business practices have not flourished here. Instead of a sense of community, a community is more a loose collection of individual families each striving for their own separate goals. This translates, in the street, to what many Westerners often see as an uncaring attitude.
I once, from a tenth floor window, watched an elderly woman belabour a child of about 5 or 6 about the head with the wooden shaft of her umbrella. The child was screaming in pain and terror and trying to shield his head while the huge lunch-time crowds surged around them. Why, I asked desperately of my class, did no-one stop her? They shrugged and looked down at the scene. Didn't they think it was pitiable, I asked. They agreed it was monstrous and expressed compassion for the small boy. One girl even had tears in her eyes. But why isn't somebody doing something? I started to push past the students and make for the stairwell, but they held me back. "It's not our business" they admonished me. "We are not family."
Service Clubs, Fire Fighters, Rescue Teams, S.E.S., Lifesavers, Meals on Wheels, ...the community service organisations that many Westerners take - if not for granted then as an indispensable part of any community, do not exist as yet in China. This is not to say that services are not administered. But it is the Army who does so.
Eighteen months ago when China allocated a larger slice than normal of expenditure to the Army America, in particular, expressed concern and fear mongers in print and in broadcast media whipped up another minor reds-under-the-beds flurry. But for soldiers who had not had a pay increase in years, who were using out-moded rescue techniques and apparatus, who had to administer to a growing population, this expenditure was necessary. Already the new helicopters, training schemes, equipment and medical apparatus have more than justified expenditure both in the severe winter which devastated the country and now in the earthquake.
And yet...for the first time, during this latest crisis, people have not been content to sit back and leave it to the Army. From all over the country people have been taking leave from offices, from factories, from shops and setting off - often through terrible conditions - to offer their services. Town and villages have got together and sent donations of food, clothing, money, water - anything that will help. A reporter trying to interview passengers in a plane which had been chartered to take some of these volunteers a few days ago was having difficulty in getting one young man to face the camera as he spoke. Eventually he turned, laughed and said "I was trying to keep my face hidden - my wife doesn't know I've come."
Whether, with their attention directed more outwardly due to the Olympic Games hype and since Lhasa, people have become more aware of how differently things are done in other countries; whether loyalty to country - which indeed has become highlighted since Lhasa - is now being seen as loyalty also to ones countrywo/men, or whether the spirit of The Olympics is indeed alive in the land...whatever the cause, there is a palpable change.
When the three minute silence was called one week to the minute after the earthquake I did not, at first, think too much about it. I remember, as a child, similar silences on the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" which both my parents, discreetly, observed until they died. Calls for a minute or two of quiet reflection have been part of my world forever it seems.
But this was the first time, ever, in the history of China that each individual member of millions of families, no matter where they were or what they were doing, took part in a communal act such as this. Traffic halted, streets stilled, schools became silenced - even the rescue workers, streaming sweat and concrete dust and, in some cases blood, all stood with heads bowed in an act that bound the whole country - voluntarily - together.
Monday May 12th is a day that will never be forgotten by millions of Chinese. All of our hearts have been torn over the past week at the thought of entire schools full of once lively children forever silent under the ground. Some families will never recover and many peoples lives have been ripped apart. It was a tragic and black day for China.
But Monday May 19 was also a day to remember in China. It was a day yet another small piece of history was made.
Thursday 22 May 2008
Monday 19 May 2008
The Earthquake in China
I've been told by quite a few people that last Monday's devastation has been covered extensively in the overseas press. One of my friends said that it had temporarily eclipsed the Lhasa/Torch/Freedom polemics which, of course, it has done here too. However, I think that the coverage of this earthquake has also been influenced greatly by those events in Tibet.
In a previous blog I spoke about the lasting effect on young people and students of the Western coverage of the Lhasa riots. I have since talked about it with a couple of ex-students who also agreed with me that from then on they have started to look at news coverage of the world and, in fact, at the world itself from a different perspective.
Judging from the local coverage of the earthquake it seems that the face of Chinese news coverage has also begun to change.
In a country with such a large migrant worker and student population at any one time a large percentage of any city population will comprise people who are not locals. In a disaster of this magnitude then, interest from all over the country is not disinterested, but comes from distressed family members. And, as most people will be aware, in China Family is of paramount importance.
As the extent of the disaster became known news centres on television and radio realised that, with communication down in such a large part of the country, they would have a huge role to play. It was interesting to watch how this role expanded until, on the weekend, it had reached a point where it was indistinguishable from the kind of disaster coverage seen in the West.
Switching on the t.v. at any time over the past two days reminded me of the coverage at the time of major international stories such as the death of Prince Charles' wife in England or 9/11 in America.Scheduled programmes were suspended while on every channel there was breaking news and readers being interrupted with this-just-in messages. We crossed extensively to on-the-spot reporters who were just as stuck in airport lounges as they had been last time we crossed and who did the familiar (to Westerners) mix of re-hash, speculation and desperate interviews with fellow travellers. Interviews with distraught family members were interrupted with new footage, constant up-dates ran across the bottom of the screen and there was even the ubiquitous telethon.
When we did veer from direct coverage there was instead panel discussions and expert testimony from anyone with a geological degree to climate-change experts to victims of other natural disasters. Studio discussions covered everything from personal anecdotes about people who were missing, to speculation as to the future, and the fate of the children who had been so traumatically orphaned. (Adoption schemes are already up and running, by the way.)
Importantly too, although criticism of Government policies or interventions are not unknown here, this time the feelings of dazed, angry and grieving people demanding to know why the Government hadn't done more in advance were treated as just that: a variation on the eternal "Why?" theme and not any serious threat to internal stability.
Anyone in doubt about transparency issues is not going to find much fuel for their arguments in the way the national press has handled this latest crisis. There have, I believe, been the usual claims from the West that journalists were not given access everywhere. However, all but the most unreasonably biased know that the nature of the damage, continuing aftershocks and the natural inhospitable terrain have been one of the most heartbreaking and frustrating difficulties for everyone concerned in rescue operations. In areas where it has taken vital days to reach entire communities public outrage was already putting pressure on rescue teams, the military and medical personnel to do more. Journalists of any ilk who took the place of any of the above in arriving at such centres would have found themselves in a perilous position in every way.
At twenty eight minutes past two this afternoon people in every corner of China - from taxi drivers, to office workers, to rescue workers and students all stood for a three minute silence at the exact time when the quake struck exactly one week ago. As I stood in my living room with a student the silence from the usually frenetic campus outside and the absence of traffic noise was melancholy. I don't knew what my student's thoughts were, but I stood there feeling such horror for those who had - and those who were still - dying alone in dark places under the ground that I willed my thoughts to reach them and perhaps somehow permeate the unimaginable alone-ness of their deaths.
Already committees have been set up, think tanks organised, provisions for new and different strategies in future national emergencies are being given urgent attention. It is certain that many changes in disaster prediction, rescue operations and management of refugee centres will come about because of the events of the past week. International experts are being invited to pool their knowledge and different strategies formulated with co-operation from all sectors of both the national and international communities.
It will be interesting, some time in the future, to see how many changes come about because of the extraordinary difficulties that were experienced in rescue operations here. And for me there is also the speculation as to whether Chinese journalism has also reached a point of no return from which it will advance into a whole new era.
In a previous blog I spoke about the lasting effect on young people and students of the Western coverage of the Lhasa riots. I have since talked about it with a couple of ex-students who also agreed with me that from then on they have started to look at news coverage of the world and, in fact, at the world itself from a different perspective.
Judging from the local coverage of the earthquake it seems that the face of Chinese news coverage has also begun to change.
In a country with such a large migrant worker and student population at any one time a large percentage of any city population will comprise people who are not locals. In a disaster of this magnitude then, interest from all over the country is not disinterested, but comes from distressed family members. And, as most people will be aware, in China Family is of paramount importance.
As the extent of the disaster became known news centres on television and radio realised that, with communication down in such a large part of the country, they would have a huge role to play. It was interesting to watch how this role expanded until, on the weekend, it had reached a point where it was indistinguishable from the kind of disaster coverage seen in the West.
Switching on the t.v. at any time over the past two days reminded me of the coverage at the time of major international stories such as the death of Prince Charles' wife in England or 9/11 in America.Scheduled programmes were suspended while on every channel there was breaking news and readers being interrupted with this-just-in messages. We crossed extensively to on-the-spot reporters who were just as stuck in airport lounges as they had been last time we crossed and who did the familiar (to Westerners) mix of re-hash, speculation and desperate interviews with fellow travellers. Interviews with distraught family members were interrupted with new footage, constant up-dates ran across the bottom of the screen and there was even the ubiquitous telethon.
When we did veer from direct coverage there was instead panel discussions and expert testimony from anyone with a geological degree to climate-change experts to victims of other natural disasters. Studio discussions covered everything from personal anecdotes about people who were missing, to speculation as to the future, and the fate of the children who had been so traumatically orphaned. (Adoption schemes are already up and running, by the way.)
Importantly too, although criticism of Government policies or interventions are not unknown here, this time the feelings of dazed, angry and grieving people demanding to know why the Government hadn't done more in advance were treated as just that: a variation on the eternal "Why?" theme and not any serious threat to internal stability.
Anyone in doubt about transparency issues is not going to find much fuel for their arguments in the way the national press has handled this latest crisis. There have, I believe, been the usual claims from the West that journalists were not given access everywhere. However, all but the most unreasonably biased know that the nature of the damage, continuing aftershocks and the natural inhospitable terrain have been one of the most heartbreaking and frustrating difficulties for everyone concerned in rescue operations. In areas where it has taken vital days to reach entire communities public outrage was already putting pressure on rescue teams, the military and medical personnel to do more. Journalists of any ilk who took the place of any of the above in arriving at such centres would have found themselves in a perilous position in every way.
At twenty eight minutes past two this afternoon people in every corner of China - from taxi drivers, to office workers, to rescue workers and students all stood for a three minute silence at the exact time when the quake struck exactly one week ago. As I stood in my living room with a student the silence from the usually frenetic campus outside and the absence of traffic noise was melancholy. I don't knew what my student's thoughts were, but I stood there feeling such horror for those who had - and those who were still - dying alone in dark places under the ground that I willed my thoughts to reach them and perhaps somehow permeate the unimaginable alone-ness of their deaths.
Already committees have been set up, think tanks organised, provisions for new and different strategies in future national emergencies are being given urgent attention. It is certain that many changes in disaster prediction, rescue operations and management of refugee centres will come about because of the events of the past week. International experts are being invited to pool their knowledge and different strategies formulated with co-operation from all sectors of both the national and international communities.
It will be interesting, some time in the future, to see how many changes come about because of the extraordinary difficulties that were experienced in rescue operations here. And for me there is also the speculation as to whether Chinese journalism has also reached a point of no return from which it will advance into a whole new era.
Friday 9 May 2008
About Face
Last year I was one of the keynote speakers at an international conference on teenage literature held at my University. This actually put the backs up of a couple of visiting academics from overseas as I was the only speaker at the conference who did not have a PhD. I tried to explain to them about the Chinese concept of Face, but they did not seem to be appeased.
In this instance it gave the university face that they could provide their own "foreign expert" from within their own ranks. Simple.
It does give me pause that so many people find the concept of face so difficult to understand and that it is regarded as one of those inscrutable concepts that separates Eastern and Western mentality. I heard just recently of someone in Australia inviting a guest speaker to give an entire talk on the concept as if it was something that pertains only to Chinese or Japanese cultures and needs unpacking by an expert. For a fee.
Whereas the only difference is in nomenclature: in the East the concept is acknowledged for what it is and is named while in the West in shelters under a variety of more politically correct names such as prestige, leverage, or one Conversely losing face in the West is known as public embarrassment, humiliation, looking bad or being out-manoeuvred.
If the results of this mystification were not so serious sometimes it would just be laughable. Last year the Us Secretary of State, Ms. Rice, was due to visit China. The Chinese were very excited about this public acknowledgment from the US government and, as is not unnatural, diplomatic circles were a-buzz, plans were made and schedules drawn up. When, at the last minute, Ms.Rice announced that she would have to cancel the China leg of her tour it was not just a disappointment but, considering the tension between the two countries, was a diplomatic boo boo of rather large proportions. China lost face: - especially as not much importance was attached by America to this move.
Some months later, when the Chinese Government in turn canceled a proposed jaunt to America however, political pundits, armchair tacticians, the ubiquitous person-in-the-street, all were engaged in ever more fanciful speculation about what prompted this move. Theories ranging from the onset of a third world war to the start of a new alliance between China and Russia were not simply hinted at but given credence in some circles, columnists whipped upstanding American citizens into a lather wondering when the Yellow Peril would start invading and, for all one knows, smelly men on street corners felt that at last they were justified in carrying their "Repent the End of Days is Nigh" placards.
There wasn't any speculation in China, however. Everyone knew it was just about face. You shunned us so we shun you. Not a difficult concept to understand - yet far too simplistic it appears for some of the top brains in The Pentagon to figure out.
If the whole concept of face were demystified in the West it would probably ease the troubled hearts of many. Most notably those who maintain that the whole of China is looking down with bayonets fixed and burning with a desire to attack Australia. No they aren't. They're all too busy being the worlds third largest consumer of luxury goods: they are busily ammassing face so they can make a good marriage, get a good job or show old Li back in the village who the top dog is now.
The average urban citizen has no more interest in Australia than whether their child could get a good education - and plenty of face - by going to school there. They would have trouble pointing out Canberra on a map, and, far from envying the life-style, have no idea what that lifestyle is. Australia, like France or Africa is just a place on a map. More importantly, it is a place outside the Motherland.
As for the average farmer on the land - though many may have heard of Australia, their main interest, as is the main interest of farmers or agricultural workers everywhere, is getting their crops in, or finding a way to take part in the prosperity others are enjoying. It does not occur to them that to join the army and go and get killed in a war is the way to do this.
This year marks the thirtieth year since the Opening and Expansion - the time when China committed to forge trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. The changes that have taken place in those thirty years cannot be exaggerated. Parents, grandparents and offspring often find themselves on opposite sides of a cultural gap so wide that they cannot comprehend each others lives. The shining cities with their innovative modern buildings reaching up into the skies, the plate-glass windowed boutiques in which salespeople who look like professional models elegantly burnish their nails, the shopping malls showcasing luxury goods from all over the world, the perfectly groomed women on their impossibly high heels, the traffic jams where Mercedes, Jaguar and high-tech SUVs and family cars wait impatiently - all these paint a portrait of China to-day.
Face rules in these cities. Just as keeping up with the Joneses, consumerism and image rule the cities of the West. It seems that, in the West, the Cold War left an indelible mark: fear of China was bred into so many minds for so long that it has become part of what defines their world. To give up this fear now would be to shake the very foundations of what some people regard as their truth. The China of The Great Famines, the Long Marches, the fanatical communist, a country where people in quaint wooden sun hats slog wearily through flooded rice paddies and all that breaks the skyline is an ancient pagoda or a concrete bunker still exists for these people. A time when there was no possibility of gaining face and the concept had all but disappeared.
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, the events of more than 30 years go are encountered only as stories of one part of the long history of China for the majority of people. Nowadays whats important is the latest Disney t-shirt, or Sony laptop or blackberry.
And the driving power, the fanatical dedication, the single-minded ambition that drives this consumerism is the re-emergence of China's face.
In this instance it gave the university face that they could provide their own "foreign expert" from within their own ranks. Simple.
It does give me pause that so many people find the concept of face so difficult to understand and that it is regarded as one of those inscrutable concepts that separates Eastern and Western mentality. I heard just recently of someone in Australia inviting a guest speaker to give an entire talk on the concept as if it was something that pertains only to Chinese or Japanese cultures and needs unpacking by an expert. For a fee.
Whereas the only difference is in nomenclature: in the East the concept is acknowledged for what it is and is named while in the West in shelters under a variety of more politically correct names such as prestige, leverage, or one Conversely losing face in the West is known as public embarrassment, humiliation, looking bad or being out-manoeuvred.
If the results of this mystification were not so serious sometimes it would just be laughable. Last year the Us Secretary of State, Ms. Rice, was due to visit China. The Chinese were very excited about this public acknowledgment from the US government and, as is not unnatural, diplomatic circles were a-buzz, plans were made and schedules drawn up. When, at the last minute, Ms.Rice announced that she would have to cancel the China leg of her tour it was not just a disappointment but, considering the tension between the two countries, was a diplomatic boo boo of rather large proportions. China lost face: - especially as not much importance was attached by America to this move.
Some months later, when the Chinese Government in turn canceled a proposed jaunt to America however, political pundits, armchair tacticians, the ubiquitous person-in-the-street, all were engaged in ever more fanciful speculation about what prompted this move. Theories ranging from the onset of a third world war to the start of a new alliance between China and Russia were not simply hinted at but given credence in some circles, columnists whipped upstanding American citizens into a lather wondering when the Yellow Peril would start invading and, for all one knows, smelly men on street corners felt that at last they were justified in carrying their "Repent the End of Days is Nigh" placards.
There wasn't any speculation in China, however. Everyone knew it was just about face. You shunned us so we shun you. Not a difficult concept to understand - yet far too simplistic it appears for some of the top brains in The Pentagon to figure out.
If the whole concept of face were demystified in the West it would probably ease the troubled hearts of many. Most notably those who maintain that the whole of China is looking down with bayonets fixed and burning with a desire to attack Australia. No they aren't. They're all too busy being the worlds third largest consumer of luxury goods: they are busily ammassing face so they can make a good marriage, get a good job or show old Li back in the village who the top dog is now.
The average urban citizen has no more interest in Australia than whether their child could get a good education - and plenty of face - by going to school there. They would have trouble pointing out Canberra on a map, and, far from envying the life-style, have no idea what that lifestyle is. Australia, like France or Africa is just a place on a map. More importantly, it is a place outside the Motherland.
As for the average farmer on the land - though many may have heard of Australia, their main interest, as is the main interest of farmers or agricultural workers everywhere, is getting their crops in, or finding a way to take part in the prosperity others are enjoying. It does not occur to them that to join the army and go and get killed in a war is the way to do this.
This year marks the thirtieth year since the Opening and Expansion - the time when China committed to forge trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world. The changes that have taken place in those thirty years cannot be exaggerated. Parents, grandparents and offspring often find themselves on opposite sides of a cultural gap so wide that they cannot comprehend each others lives. The shining cities with their innovative modern buildings reaching up into the skies, the plate-glass windowed boutiques in which salespeople who look like professional models elegantly burnish their nails, the shopping malls showcasing luxury goods from all over the world, the perfectly groomed women on their impossibly high heels, the traffic jams where Mercedes, Jaguar and high-tech SUVs and family cars wait impatiently - all these paint a portrait of China to-day.
Face rules in these cities. Just as keeping up with the Joneses, consumerism and image rule the cities of the West. It seems that, in the West, the Cold War left an indelible mark: fear of China was bred into so many minds for so long that it has become part of what defines their world. To give up this fear now would be to shake the very foundations of what some people regard as their truth. The China of The Great Famines, the Long Marches, the fanatical communist, a country where people in quaint wooden sun hats slog wearily through flooded rice paddies and all that breaks the skyline is an ancient pagoda or a concrete bunker still exists for these people. A time when there was no possibility of gaining face and the concept had all but disappeared.
Meanwhile, back in the here and now, the events of more than 30 years go are encountered only as stories of one part of the long history of China for the majority of people. Nowadays whats important is the latest Disney t-shirt, or Sony laptop or blackberry.
And the driving power, the fanatical dedication, the single-minded ambition that drives this consumerism is the re-emergence of China's face.
Thursday 8 May 2008
Come Teach in China - Part Two.
(This is the second part of an article already written on Myspace.)
Having said that I don't agree with the blurb in the recruitment posts, in my last blog I mentioned that many foreign teachers were completely unprepared for just how little China knows about the rest of the world.
I don't mean to infer that before arriving in China its necessary to do a quick course on the combined histories and social mores of every country outside of China's borders. What I am trying to stress is that its NOT enough just to be able to speak English. Its also necessary to change your entire worldview a complete 360 degrees and prepare for a complete re-thinking of what you considered to be "the world".
Even if you have travelled widely and/or lived in a variety of cultures, if you haven't been to China before then most of the places you have been will have common points of reference.
From South Africa to Papua New Guinea people understand what's meant by The Second World War. From Switzerland to Australia they've heard of Hollywood and Queen Elizabeth the Second. We tend to think of film stars as being universally known; the impact of rap has been felt from Mombai to Wellington:- we regard points of commonality as extending around the globe.
China, however, although being a culture that has endured for 5,000 years, has done so without reference to the world outside what is now known as China proper, its closely neighbouring countries, and small areas that the average Westerner has never heard of.
All the huge empires of the West were commonly influenced by movements such as The Renaissance, The Enlightenment, The Industrial Revolution, Colonialism, Feminism, Hippiedom and Greenpeace. Certain cult movements such as the Dungeons and Dragons phenomenon; musical protest groups and things such as Live Aid; "Worldwide" news events like the Princess Di hype are considered to have permeated every prominent culture in the modern world.
I personally have discussed the British Royals with a Chimbu tribesman in the central New Guinea Highlands; Michael Jackson's nose with Zulu villagers and the old group Cream with a family of remote cattle herders in a peasant hut hidden in the depths of the European Alps.
But in China, a civilisation which remained static for most of the course of history, the majority of these events went by unnoticed.
Since the brutal power quests by Nationalist and Communist forces began at the end of Dynastic rule the average Chinese was more concerned with survival than with the assassination of archdukes, the abdication of foreign kings or the invasion of unheard-of small European countries.
During the Mao era food was an all-encompassing concern which left no time for strange entertainers who ate their guitars; who held press conferences from their beds, appeared on-stage in their underwear or heroes who wore theirs on the outside.
Although the Opening and Expansion took place 30 years ago those thirty years have been a time for clawing themselves up first from the remnants of a feudal and then a militaristic society for most Chinese. There's been no energy left over to learn about people who painted their fingernails black, or cut their hair like cockatoos, or shaved their heads and wore workmen's boots from choice rather than necessity.
The relevance of all this for those who come to teach in China is immense. I have sat in Starbucks while foreign teachers have told of standing speechless in front of an entire class while their carefully prepared lesson for the day containing quizzes and discussions about "well-known" popular idols was met with blank looks and incomprehension.
I've comforted colleagues who don't want to get out of bed because their last class which was carefully structured to include components of general knowledge was received in stony silence.
And I howled into my own soggy pillow for hours after my utter inability to reach behind any of the polite smiles the first time I presented a class on popular music.
When all of the above is coupled with a profound lack of geographical knowledge of any place in the world which does not exist within Chinese borders some teachers arrive at the conclusion of Chinese arrogance or xenophobia. Indeed for those who love to slap quick, neat labels on sociological groups: - while the Germans get labelled collectively as humourless and/or disciplined, the English as either a nation of football hooligans or the sexually frigid and the Americans as loud and overbearing, the Chinese are inevitably thought of as either arrogant or inscrutable.
The sad, sad thing is that these stereotypes, as is the nature of stereotypes generally, once disseminated into the province of received knowledge,become very hard to dislodge. Those who have spent time in China totally misunderstanding that it is their own inability to imagine a worldview different from the one they assume to be common to the "whole" world, inadvertently spread these misconceptions.
If the idea that the only qualification for teaching in China was the ability to name objects and concepts in the English tongue was qualified only slightly, there is a good chance that a lot of the misconceptions that exist and get perpetuated between the East and the West could be dispelled.
Armed with only a little preparation, supplied with a modicum of knowledge, made aware of the huge and disparate connotations which attach to the concept of education in China and the West, it is possible that those "who grew up speaking English" could play a much more important and positive role here than they currently do.
"Come and Teach in China!"
(This post first appeared on my Myspace blog some weeks ago. Am I infringing my own copywright?!)
The Internet is full of adverts assuring people that "If you are a native English speaker then you are qualified to teach English in China". I risk raising the ire of hundreds of those who have answered the call of these advertisements by disagreeing with them.
There are others who deplore these adverts, but their reasons for doing so differ. Some think that the flood of young graduands looking on China as the ideal place for a year-long paid holiday do nothing to help students improve their English markedly. Others think that the rash of English "Academies" to which the majority of young people are attracted by the undeniably higher wages, exploit Chinese parents. Still others feel that the standard of English displayed by many of these native English speakers from Mississippi to Mombai is so diverse as to be almost unintelligible. There is also growing dismay in some quarters that many of these "teachers" have a grasp on the English language that is tenuous at best and disturbingly inadequate at the least.
My own objections do, if I am honest, carry some aspects of all of the above in some cases. But my main objection is because, while one may be adept and conscientious enough to satisfy any high standards, teaching English in China is nowhere near as simple as these hopeful advertisements lead one to believe. In fact, trying to teach English in China has caused many a person who grew up speaking English as their native language doubt not only their own proficiency in language but in any other area.
Yes of course, on a very basic level, if you grew up knowing that the rectangular object from which you eat your meals is called "table" in English, you are capable of passing that information on.
However, the concept of teaching is more involved than this simplistic view allows. And, given that the country in which you are being invited to teach is China, the underlying impact which you - your personality, views, outward appearance, convictions and cultural bias - will have, assumes greater importance than those of most teachers in their own environment.
In preparation for going to China those who have done ESL or similar courses are told that English is a compulsory subject in all Chinese schools. What is not explained is that, in the majority of cases, English teachers in Chinese schools are Chinese. Thus, for many, we walk into a classroom for the first time being the first Western person that our pupils have ever encountered. Henceforth, all information or ideas about foreigners or indeed the whole, vast melting pot that is Western civilisation is, for pupils, filtered through the lens of the only benchmark they have: you.
This was brought home to me when I was seconded for a short while to teach in a Primary school. When asked later by their regular Chinese teacher what pupils had learnt about Westerners in her absence, she was startled to learn, amongst other things, that Western ladies had green fingernails and pink hair.
With this salutary lesson in mind I was inspired to ask my regular pupils - university students between the ages of 20 and 26 - what their understanding of Westerners was. The results of this ad hominum assignment were to provide the direction my classes were to take for the rest of the semester.
I learned that Western parents were irresponsible. This was gleaned from the movie "Home Alone" which some students had been shown by a previous teacher. The premise of the movie - that a 10 year old child could be forgotten by his entire family and left in sole possession of the family home - was a shocking and alien concept to the close-knit, family-centred Chinese.
I also learned that all Westerners were fundamentalist Christians because the only other two foreign teachers the combined experience of students produced were two graduates of a small missionary "College" (my inverted commas there will stand as my only comment on my impression of the level of education this institution provided) in some backwoods community in the American bible belt.
I also learned that just by the action of walking through the door I had immediately puzzled the majority of students who firmly believed that all Westerners were obese. This conclusion was shamefully backed up the next time I went downtown by the undeniable fact that the majority of tourists wandering around the city were, indeed, noticeably, if not morbidly obese.
While I, myself, drew some very sad conclusions simply by conducting roll-call and learning the English names that some of these kids had had bestowed upon them by other Western teachers: Fanny, Placenta, Watermelon, Dickwad, being a sufficient illustration.
This ambassadorial role carries with it a whole raft of responsibilities not sufficiently stressed before would-be teachers take up their positions. While it may be thought quite amusing, during a year out from ones "real" life to dub some unknown Chinese kid "Placenta", the ramifications once that small child has grown up and realises the so-called joke that has been perpetrated upon him or her by some uncaring Westerner could be more serious. Especially if the child becomes involved in politics or business dealings with foreigners in later life.
Many who respond to the Come Teach in China advertisements arrive fully prepared for the fact that they may know little about the Chinese. But what they have not been primed to expect is the extent of the lack of knowledge they will encounter about events that have taken place outside the vast borders of China - not just over millenia, but in the past few months. Once they become aware of this it tends to be a very dislocating experience of culture shock from which many of them either do not recover or totally misinterpret.
So sure, come and teach in China. But before you come make sure you realise that you are the one who is going to have a wider learning experience than any of the pupils you are going to encounter.
Tuesday 6 May 2008
Close Encounters of the Feminist Kind
I came pretty late to feminism. Starting Uni in 2000 as a mature student this was what I knew about it: -
Germaine Greer started it
In the Sixties feminists burned their bras
Feminist were pretty hairy generally, but it wasn't a condition of entry
Feminists were all frighteningly clever, but irrelevant
Feminism had nothing to do with The Suffragists
It started in the '60's but ended sometime when I was knee-deep in nappies and baby-sick
All of which is not to say that I didn't think that the world was a pretty unfair place if you were female. Or that I didn't burn in indignation over things like gendered salary structures. Or that I didn't throw my toys out of the cot once in South Africa when told I couldn't buy a set of friggen saucepans on HP without my husbands signature. Or that I wasn't aware of injustices.
I just didn't know that any of that had anything to do with feminism.
Even had I been I still don't think I would have been particularly interested: I am not a joiner-of-things and I imagined that to be a Feminist I'd have to register somewhere or clock-in or at least go to meetings with lots of strident strangers who would all despise me because I wasn't comfortable in exclusively female surroundings.
So when I first met Margaret Cavendish I was gobsmacked.
I think we are so used to hearing people gush about everyone from Oprah Winfrey to their Avon lady changing their lives that we are continually surprised when we come across someone who genuinely does. So the first time I heard a voice speaking the very things that I have inside my head I was more than just surprised: I was transformed. Especially as the voice which uttered these words has been silent for over 400 years. I had a fleeting fear that my head would start rotating clockwise at 360 degrees or that I would pee on the carpet as was Linda Blair's wont when finding she was no longer alone inside her own head. I even began to feel sorry I hadn't believed a friend who had once gravely confided in me that she had always known she was the re-incarnation of Barbara Castlemaine so that, when she met her husband who was, in fact, the reincarnation of Charles the Philanderer, she knew immediately that the fates had conspired to bring about their union.
Once I had started to recover from my initial gobsmackedness (that one gets patented alongside "blogdem") I became aware of feeling first, puzzled and then a little later of the initial stirrings of overpowering indignation. Where the hell had this lady been all my life?
While I may only have decided to get my formal qualifications in Literature and Drama at the dawn of the new millennium both were subjects in which I had been immersed all my life. At the age of 8 I could, (and unfortunately did) quote great swathes of Tennyson, Ben Jonson, Kipling and Omar Khyam. I had stood in at rehearsals or "heard" lines from works as varied as Dostoevsky, Miller, Noel Coward and She Stoops to bloody Conquer so often that, by the age of 13 I could, at a pinch, have understudied for a multitude of parts at a moments notice. When I was 15 I won my first nationwide Adult Literature Award.
I knew my stuff as well as any other person, goddammit. But nowhere, ever, had I heard the name of Margaret Cavendish. In fact, I dully began to realise, nowhere, ever, had I heard the voices of any women - apart from the religious -until Austen and The Brontes. I had swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the received wisdom that there were none to be heard.
I had been so used, all my life, to being out of step with the rest of the world; to knowing that, whatever I felt about a subject, the minute I opened my mouth and uttered what I assumed to be the general consensus a hush would fall and people would start to shuffle their feet uncomfortably. I had been told so repetitively by a constant stream of starched nuns until the age of 18 that I was "a strange girl", by a procession of men that I was "weird" and by my husband that I was a conversely a half-wit and up myself, a loony and a bitch, that I had become used to invalidating any opinion I had as soon as others showed they were not on the same page.
Yet, unbelievably, here was this woman who, in her time, was more popular than Shakespeare ever was in his, who had been the only woman ever to be accepted into the male cloisters of both Oxford and The National Society in the Seventeenth century, who had been philosopher, playwright, author, scientist: - and we shared the same views on so much.
Being considered eccentric was something she played to the hilt: the story of her shamefully adopting men's clothing on occasion I discovered to have been prompted by the same urges that had caused me at 18, to start smoking a pipe. She was nick-named Mad Madge by others and my husband had labelled me a crazy woman and threatened to commit me to a loony bin. She adored dressing up for her own amusement and so did I. But, much more that any of these superficial and random similiarities (she was, after all, a Duchess and married to the richest and most influential man in the kingdom while I, at the time, was a single mum on Oz-study who took her kids out to dine at the local soup kitchen once a week), was that all the thoughts I had ever had about men she had had too.
I did what I always did at such times and burst in on my friend Wendy, smoking furiously, walking up and down her backyard and eulogizing about all this sudden fellowship to a dead woman. I was overcome!! Every married woman I had ever known was blissfully happy in her lot, adored her spouse and was adored in return. Other women respected men and were not consumed by these traitorous little niggling that perhaps, after all, they were not quite the perfect sex.
I had never dared to tell anyone, even my mother, that instead of awe and wonder, I regarded some of them as pompous prats and sniggerred at them in the privacy of my own room. Yet Margaret, up to her plucked eyebrows in the constraints of patriarchal strictures and codes of conduct, laughed openly and exposed her feelings on the public stage through her plays - and was the first woman ever to do so in England.
When I eventually wound down I saw Wendy sitting on the back step hugging her legs and eyeing
me curiously. Without a word she went inside, poured two glasses of wine and made two cups of coffee. Plonking herself down on the steps again she sipped her wine and stared at me.
"Hmm. So every married woman is blissfully happy with her lot, huh?" she asked me with a cocked eyebrow. "Other women consider the entire male gender to be superior?" She patted the ground in front of her and said:
"Come, kiddo. I'm going to educate you."
That was an illuminating afternoon - the first of many in the unlikely setting of a suburban back yard. In time I began to lose my fear of other women and my feelings of aloneness and alienation. Somehow the knowledge that nothing I thought was shocking, or unique or even new, and that Margaret had been there before me, gave me courage to start voicing my thoughts and sharing them with women other than Wendy. And rather than sniggerring alone in my room we giggled and shrieked and slapped our thighs and belly-laughed about the oddities of male/female relationships until the tears ran down our aching cheeks.
I made up my mind to write my thesis about Margaret Cavendish and the research I began then led me from Mary Astell to Aphra Behn and right up through Mary Wollstonecraft, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf and into the waiting arms of Dale Spender and all the funny, passionate, intelligent contemporary women who lay claim to the title "feminist" today.
It saddens me that the mediocre and second-class minds of those who, sated often in nothing more than bias, ignorance and personal agendas, consistently marginalise these feisty, loving and brave women have the same kind of power that they did in Margaret's day. For four hundred years the woman who first publicly voiced what we would call feminist ideas, has been purposely pushed to the back of mouldy archives and libraries and that witty, innovative voice silenced. The same is already happening to women who followed in her footsteps in the twentieth century and today the mouths of such ardent feminists as Hazel Hankins Hallinan, Constance Rover and Mary Stott are already filling with dust as everything they stood for becomes denigrated and turns to dross. It is stated even in history books that the Feminist movement began in the '60's.
So, after all that, do I now consider myself a feminist? Well, to tell the truth I don't know. Its a label that has been posted on me by many others. But when I think of the lives of our foremothers and all they went through, I honestly don't think I have the bravery, the wit or the strength of purpose to follow in their footsteps. However I will continue not only to remember them but to give them their due. And as for Margaret - I will continue to fight for her to be able to take her rightful place in the canon of English Literature.
So, I might not yet be a true feminist, but I thank all these women continually that, through them, I am at last proud to stand up and be counted as a woman.
Germaine Greer started it
In the Sixties feminists burned their bras
Feminist were pretty hairy generally, but it wasn't a condition of entry
Feminists were all frighteningly clever, but irrelevant
Feminism had nothing to do with The Suffragists
It started in the '60's but ended sometime when I was knee-deep in nappies and baby-sick
All of which is not to say that I didn't think that the world was a pretty unfair place if you were female. Or that I didn't burn in indignation over things like gendered salary structures. Or that I didn't throw my toys out of the cot once in South Africa when told I couldn't buy a set of friggen saucepans on HP without my husbands signature. Or that I wasn't aware of injustices.
I just didn't know that any of that had anything to do with feminism.
Even had I been I still don't think I would have been particularly interested: I am not a joiner-of-things and I imagined that to be a Feminist I'd have to register somewhere or clock-in or at least go to meetings with lots of strident strangers who would all despise me because I wasn't comfortable in exclusively female surroundings.
So when I first met Margaret Cavendish I was gobsmacked.
I think we are so used to hearing people gush about everyone from Oprah Winfrey to their Avon lady changing their lives that we are continually surprised when we come across someone who genuinely does. So the first time I heard a voice speaking the very things that I have inside my head I was more than just surprised: I was transformed. Especially as the voice which uttered these words has been silent for over 400 years. I had a fleeting fear that my head would start rotating clockwise at 360 degrees or that I would pee on the carpet as was Linda Blair's wont when finding she was no longer alone inside her own head. I even began to feel sorry I hadn't believed a friend who had once gravely confided in me that she had always known she was the re-incarnation of Barbara Castlemaine so that, when she met her husband who was, in fact, the reincarnation of Charles the Philanderer, she knew immediately that the fates had conspired to bring about their union.
Once I had started to recover from my initial gobsmackedness (that one gets patented alongside "blogdem") I became aware of feeling first, puzzled and then a little later of the initial stirrings of overpowering indignation. Where the hell had this lady been all my life?
While I may only have decided to get my formal qualifications in Literature and Drama at the dawn of the new millennium both were subjects in which I had been immersed all my life. At the age of 8 I could, (and unfortunately did) quote great swathes of Tennyson, Ben Jonson, Kipling and Omar Khyam. I had stood in at rehearsals or "heard" lines from works as varied as Dostoevsky, Miller, Noel Coward and She Stoops to bloody Conquer so often that, by the age of 13 I could, at a pinch, have understudied for a multitude of parts at a moments notice. When I was 15 I won my first nationwide Adult Literature Award.
I knew my stuff as well as any other person, goddammit. But nowhere, ever, had I heard the name of Margaret Cavendish. In fact, I dully began to realise, nowhere, ever, had I heard the voices of any women - apart from the religious -until Austen and The Brontes. I had swallowed, hook, line and sinker, the received wisdom that there were none to be heard.
I had been so used, all my life, to being out of step with the rest of the world; to knowing that, whatever I felt about a subject, the minute I opened my mouth and uttered what I assumed to be the general consensus a hush would fall and people would start to shuffle their feet uncomfortably. I had been told so repetitively by a constant stream of starched nuns until the age of 18 that I was "a strange girl", by a procession of men that I was "weird" and by my husband that I was a conversely a half-wit and up myself, a loony and a bitch, that I had become used to invalidating any opinion I had as soon as others showed they were not on the same page.
Yet, unbelievably, here was this woman who, in her time, was more popular than Shakespeare ever was in his, who had been the only woman ever to be accepted into the male cloisters of both Oxford and The National Society in the Seventeenth century, who had been philosopher, playwright, author, scientist: - and we shared the same views on so much.
Being considered eccentric was something she played to the hilt: the story of her shamefully adopting men's clothing on occasion I discovered to have been prompted by the same urges that had caused me at 18, to start smoking a pipe. She was nick-named Mad Madge by others and my husband had labelled me a crazy woman and threatened to commit me to a loony bin. She adored dressing up for her own amusement and so did I. But, much more that any of these superficial and random similiarities (she was, after all, a Duchess and married to the richest and most influential man in the kingdom while I, at the time, was a single mum on Oz-study who took her kids out to dine at the local soup kitchen once a week), was that all the thoughts I had ever had about men she had had too.
I did what I always did at such times and burst in on my friend Wendy, smoking furiously, walking up and down her backyard and eulogizing about all this sudden fellowship to a dead woman. I was overcome!! Every married woman I had ever known was blissfully happy in her lot, adored her spouse and was adored in return. Other women respected men and were not consumed by these traitorous little niggling that perhaps, after all, they were not quite the perfect sex.
I had never dared to tell anyone, even my mother, that instead of awe and wonder, I regarded some of them as pompous prats and sniggerred at them in the privacy of my own room. Yet Margaret, up to her plucked eyebrows in the constraints of patriarchal strictures and codes of conduct, laughed openly and exposed her feelings on the public stage through her plays - and was the first woman ever to do so in England.
When I eventually wound down I saw Wendy sitting on the back step hugging her legs and eyeing
me curiously. Without a word she went inside, poured two glasses of wine and made two cups of coffee. Plonking herself down on the steps again she sipped her wine and stared at me.
"Hmm. So every married woman is blissfully happy with her lot, huh?" she asked me with a cocked eyebrow. "Other women consider the entire male gender to be superior?" She patted the ground in front of her and said:
"Come, kiddo. I'm going to educate you."
That was an illuminating afternoon - the first of many in the unlikely setting of a suburban back yard. In time I began to lose my fear of other women and my feelings of aloneness and alienation. Somehow the knowledge that nothing I thought was shocking, or unique or even new, and that Margaret had been there before me, gave me courage to start voicing my thoughts and sharing them with women other than Wendy. And rather than sniggerring alone in my room we giggled and shrieked and slapped our thighs and belly-laughed about the oddities of male/female relationships until the tears ran down our aching cheeks.
I made up my mind to write my thesis about Margaret Cavendish and the research I began then led me from Mary Astell to Aphra Behn and right up through Mary Wollstonecraft, Rebecca West, Vera Brittain and Virginia Woolf and into the waiting arms of Dale Spender and all the funny, passionate, intelligent contemporary women who lay claim to the title "feminist" today.
It saddens me that the mediocre and second-class minds of those who, sated often in nothing more than bias, ignorance and personal agendas, consistently marginalise these feisty, loving and brave women have the same kind of power that they did in Margaret's day. For four hundred years the woman who first publicly voiced what we would call feminist ideas, has been purposely pushed to the back of mouldy archives and libraries and that witty, innovative voice silenced. The same is already happening to women who followed in her footsteps in the twentieth century and today the mouths of such ardent feminists as Hazel Hankins Hallinan, Constance Rover and Mary Stott are already filling with dust as everything they stood for becomes denigrated and turns to dross. It is stated even in history books that the Feminist movement began in the '60's.
So, after all that, do I now consider myself a feminist? Well, to tell the truth I don't know. Its a label that has been posted on me by many others. But when I think of the lives of our foremothers and all they went through, I honestly don't think I have the bravery, the wit or the strength of purpose to follow in their footsteps. However I will continue not only to remember them but to give them their due. And as for Margaret - I will continue to fight for her to be able to take her rightful place in the canon of English Literature.
So, I might not yet be a true feminist, but I thank all these women continually that, through them, I am at last proud to stand up and be counted as a woman.
Monday 5 May 2008
The Environment DOES Matter in China
O.K., I think that before I even start here I have to make something quite clear. I am not partisan in matters Chinese.
I invariably temper this statement in respect to the person or persons to whom I make it. Thus, I can claim that, being a Libran, I find it impossible to make up my mind on any subject at all from what to wear to international politics. To colleagues I often explain that I am merely being mischievous and playing devil's advocate by presenting a case from the other side. To my students I explain that I am teaching them to expand their horizons by considering differing aspects of a problem, while in academic circles I merely refer to scholastic objectivity.
But for some reason none of this ever plays out when posting a blog. Mentioning a view which deviates from accepted wisdom instantly puts one firmly behind enemy lines. And it seems that whenever I talk about China 99.9% of people come back with accusations of traitorous behaviour, slanders about my research methods, dismissive mutterings about naivete, and claims that I am a pinko/greeny/loonie left/marxist/liberal/intellectually challenged/ inhabitant of ivory towers.
In fact a recent post startlingly revealed me to the world as a CCP plant trained in covert propagandist activities who interrupted my 24 hour internet-surveillance activities merely to disseminate disinformation. I was instantly reminded of a scene from the old musical My Fair Lady where Pygmalion/Eliza was presented at her first soiree . Afterwards her mentor described the scene where a cunning adversary ("oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor") suddenly, publicly and - more importantly and hilariously - erroneously unmasked her!
So no, I am none of the things of which I stand accused (well, to be honest, I'm not too sure what the results of an IQ test would reveal about me these days) but simply operate from a position of giving people a fair go. I am, these days, an educator. I wish therefore merely to educate those who are unaware, that there are always two sides to any question.
I read this morning yet another comfy armchair-commentator calling for boycotts on the Games from the standpoint of China being the worlds largest contributor to global pollution.
Now, truthfully, not being an environmentalist, I am unaware of the veracity of this claim. However, as one fifth of the world population lives in China it seems logical. In fact, if the entire world collectively and miraculously reduced all pollution levels to below acceptable levels the Chinese would still be the worlds biggest polluters. There are 1.3 billion people living there, fachrissake! If they all banded together and farted on cue they could probably destroy the world.
But two things other than this rather reductionist claim worry me about the unceasing attacks on China's environmental degradation issues. The first is that industry from all over the world is centred in China. Last year 260 of the companies responsible for unacceptable levels of water pollution in China were multi-nationals, as were 50 of the worst air polluters. The MNC's with the worst pollution records in China are: Pepsi, KFC, Carlsburg, Nestle, GM, Dupont and 3m according to an article in the Worldwatch Institute's newsletter of February 6th.
Now how many people infest blogsites or newspaper columns calling for boycotts which would deprive them of any of the above products? Its much easier to boycott the Games which, for most people, is not going to deprive them personally of anything: - especially the average Aussie who couldn't even rustle up the airfare to Beijing for the family right now, let alone accommodation, tickets and all the rest of the paraphenalia: they're too busy trying to meet their mortgage payments.
The same source on January 21st published the finding that 80% of the 4 to 5 trillion non-biodegradable plastic bags produced annually are used in North America and Europe. They've been banned in China as of June 1st while many of the countries (not pointing any fingers here) who show such concern for China's record are still only discussing and squabbling over whether or not to do so.
And while industrial pollution causes such outrage it seems alarming to me that no outrage is manufactured from anyone other than the odd pinko/lefty/greenie/ non patriot regarding what the US military call "ecocide" - the souped up version of the burnt earth policy famously used in the Anglo-Boer war. Hand in hand with the USA's military forays all over the world the planned policy of ecocide lays waste to thousands of acres of foreign fields from Vietnman to Iraq as part of an acceptable tool in the fight for democracy with little or no comment. Certainly I've never heard of anyone threatening to boycott, say, the NBA play-offs in protest.
The above was the first of the two points which worry me about the current discourse on China. The second is that while the vast majority of experts on China - who seem to be retired old parties who have never actually touched down on Chinese soil themselves or who, if they have done so, did so at some unspecified moment in her fast-evolving history - eagerly provide site after site that back up their comments, the provision of sites that would provide a balance or counter argument is (not unnaturally) not often included.
A kind of round-robin of anti-Chinese propaganda is therefore evolving where journalists or commentators citing lack of transparency as an excuse for lack of rigorous research, borrow heavily from these sites; the resultant copy is added to or quoted in other anti-Chinese polemics, which in turn becomes material proffered in yet another article.
Attempts to question the veracity of the products of these hastily-constructed (China is NEWS, man, news!) articles which are cobbled together from second-hand sources, bias, unchallenged "common knowledge" and the occasional Beijing bar-fly, are thwarted brilliantly: - to provide information from first-hand experience or primary sources is to court accusation of partisanship and to refer to sources emanating from China itself or the Chinese is to invite scorn that one has swallowed CPP propaganda.(Or is actively producing same).
It is little wonder that the students after the Lhasa riots became disillusioned with the Western media (See previous blog). I have been part of it myself for most of my adult life and have few illusions left. I am not calling for anyone to abandon their views in respect of China. What I do wish, however, is that people would spend a little more time in the large grey areas between, rather than jumping hastily and irrevocably into the black or white position. Both are places with reduced visibility.
I invariably temper this statement in respect to the person or persons to whom I make it. Thus, I can claim that, being a Libran, I find it impossible to make up my mind on any subject at all from what to wear to international politics. To colleagues I often explain that I am merely being mischievous and playing devil's advocate by presenting a case from the other side. To my students I explain that I am teaching them to expand their horizons by considering differing aspects of a problem, while in academic circles I merely refer to scholastic objectivity.
But for some reason none of this ever plays out when posting a blog. Mentioning a view which deviates from accepted wisdom instantly puts one firmly behind enemy lines. And it seems that whenever I talk about China 99.9% of people come back with accusations of traitorous behaviour, slanders about my research methods, dismissive mutterings about naivete, and claims that I am a pinko/greeny/loonie left/marxist/liberal/intellectually challenged/ inhabitant of ivory towers.
In fact a recent post startlingly revealed me to the world as a CCP plant trained in covert propagandist activities who interrupted my 24 hour internet-surveillance activities merely to disseminate disinformation. I was instantly reminded of a scene from the old musical My Fair Lady where Pygmalion/Eliza was presented at her first soiree . Afterwards her mentor described the scene where a cunning adversary ("oozing charm from every pore, he oiled his way across the floor") suddenly, publicly and - more importantly and hilariously - erroneously unmasked her!
So no, I am none of the things of which I stand accused (well, to be honest, I'm not too sure what the results of an IQ test would reveal about me these days) but simply operate from a position of giving people a fair go. I am, these days, an educator. I wish therefore merely to educate those who are unaware, that there are always two sides to any question.
I read this morning yet another comfy armchair-commentator calling for boycotts on the Games from the standpoint of China being the worlds largest contributor to global pollution.
Now, truthfully, not being an environmentalist, I am unaware of the veracity of this claim. However, as one fifth of the world population lives in China it seems logical. In fact, if the entire world collectively and miraculously reduced all pollution levels to below acceptable levels the Chinese would still be the worlds biggest polluters. There are 1.3 billion people living there, fachrissake! If they all banded together and farted on cue they could probably destroy the world.
But two things other than this rather reductionist claim worry me about the unceasing attacks on China's environmental degradation issues. The first is that industry from all over the world is centred in China. Last year 260 of the companies responsible for unacceptable levels of water pollution in China were multi-nationals, as were 50 of the worst air polluters. The MNC's with the worst pollution records in China are: Pepsi, KFC, Carlsburg, Nestle, GM, Dupont and 3m according to an article in the Worldwatch Institute's newsletter of February 6th.
Now how many people infest blogsites or newspaper columns calling for boycotts which would deprive them of any of the above products? Its much easier to boycott the Games which, for most people, is not going to deprive them personally of anything: - especially the average Aussie who couldn't even rustle up the airfare to Beijing for the family right now, let alone accommodation, tickets and all the rest of the paraphenalia: they're too busy trying to meet their mortgage payments.
The same source on January 21st published the finding that 80% of the 4 to 5 trillion non-biodegradable plastic bags produced annually are used in North America and Europe. They've been banned in China as of June 1st while many of the countries (not pointing any fingers here) who show such concern for China's record are still only discussing and squabbling over whether or not to do so.
And while industrial pollution causes such outrage it seems alarming to me that no outrage is manufactured from anyone other than the odd pinko/lefty/greenie/ non patriot regarding what the US military call "ecocide" - the souped up version of the burnt earth policy famously used in the Anglo-Boer war. Hand in hand with the USA's military forays all over the world the planned policy of ecocide lays waste to thousands of acres of foreign fields from Vietnman to Iraq as part of an acceptable tool in the fight for democracy with little or no comment. Certainly I've never heard of anyone threatening to boycott, say, the NBA play-offs in protest.
The above was the first of the two points which worry me about the current discourse on China. The second is that while the vast majority of experts on China - who seem to be retired old parties who have never actually touched down on Chinese soil themselves or who, if they have done so, did so at some unspecified moment in her fast-evolving history - eagerly provide site after site that back up their comments, the provision of sites that would provide a balance or counter argument is (not unnaturally) not often included.
A kind of round-robin of anti-Chinese propaganda is therefore evolving where journalists or commentators citing lack of transparency as an excuse for lack of rigorous research, borrow heavily from these sites; the resultant copy is added to or quoted in other anti-Chinese polemics, which in turn becomes material proffered in yet another article.
Attempts to question the veracity of the products of these hastily-constructed (China is NEWS, man, news!) articles which are cobbled together from second-hand sources, bias, unchallenged "common knowledge" and the occasional Beijing bar-fly, are thwarted brilliantly: - to provide information from first-hand experience or primary sources is to court accusation of partisanship and to refer to sources emanating from China itself or the Chinese is to invite scorn that one has swallowed CPP propaganda.(Or is actively producing same).
It is little wonder that the students after the Lhasa riots became disillusioned with the Western media (See previous blog). I have been part of it myself for most of my adult life and have few illusions left. I am not calling for anyone to abandon their views in respect of China. What I do wish, however, is that people would spend a little more time in the large grey areas between, rather than jumping hastily and irrevocably into the black or white position. Both are places with reduced visibility.
China - after the Lhasa riots.
The discerning reader/browser/FBI Agent (if they are all not all over on Wikipedia. See http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker) may have registered that my blog name is actually taken from the Chinese proverb that figures women as being those who hold up half of the sky. This is because I am a woman in China. Not actually a Chinese women - but nevertheless I support my little piece of the sky with dedication and shaky arms.
With The Games looming in a couple of months it seems that China, these days, is rarely out of the news. I lament daily that such coverage has not been consistently so intense over the past few years. Then perhaps we might not have quite so many scared, conspiracist and just plain ignorant "concerned citizens" filling blog-spaces, Letters to the Editor spaces and Talk Back radio programmes with the current China hysteria. Of course, many of the articles which are appearing at the moment are culled from extant, out-dated sources, from the myopic views of returned expatriates, or from over-paid foreign journalists who fly in on expense-paid junkets and become experts on the scene over their first beer in a Beijing pub.
It is not surprising therefore that no-one outside of China has yet picked up on what seems to me to be the most prominent and radical effect of the Lhasa riots: - the fact that Chinese students and a large proportion of others who have been following the progress of events as reported through Western media have, finally and collectively, lost their cherries.
For the last few weeks I have gone round with the words of an old R.E.M. song running through my head: "There's me in the corner/There's me in the spotlight losing my religion..." because for thousands and thousands of young Chinese this is analogous to what has happened to them: their faith has been totally ripped away from them.
As naive as it sounds to those of us brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations are there not to report on events but to push through various partisan agenda, the average Chinese slavishly believed, until recently, that Freedom of the Press in the West meant freedom to report the truth. Especially in America: home of the brave, land of the free and the guardian of truth and democratic ideals. It is for this very reason America seeks to dominate, isn't it? The genuine and noble wish to bring these freedoms to the rest of the world?
The war in Iraq is just such a point in case, isn't it? It is, isn't it?
And Bush really and honestly wanted to save the world from slaughter by revealing the WMDs he genuinely thought were being concealed. Didn't he?. ....
When the first cropped photograph appeared on the net following the Lhasa riots Chinese netizens became uneasy. This was a genuine mistake of course. It had to be. Any moment now someone would realise this.
As photographs of what were clearly police of another country were presented as representing Chinese cops there was even more unease, followed by the certainty that no-one could possibly mistake the clearly racial characteristics and colouring of an Indian for that of a Chinese person. But, as the photo kept circulating unchallenged the knowledge that, to the rest of the world, all who are neither negroid nor Caucasion have no distinguishing characteristics, began to sink in.
It was a a cruel shock. Because hand in hand with this realisation came the unwelcome thought that all the collective knowledge they had grown up considering as definitive to what characterised a Chinese person could possibly not be generally known either. That which they had always considered contributed to their meaning and identity in the eyes of the world suddenly held no meaning. It was an identity crisis of traumatic and national importance.
Suddenly people began paying more attention not just to the dodgy photographs which proliferated unchecked, but to the texts that accompanied them. These texts completed a process begun only hours before and struck at the very core of each Chinese who read them: through these articles not only were the Western ideals of truth in reporting being betrayed but Chinese themselves were losing Face. The concept upon which all Chinese honour is grounded. A slow indignation which had started to burn began to smoulder into anger. The West - that fabled bastion of justice and freedom of speech - was betraying them.
To those outside China whose ideas of Chinese news sources are still based on the quaint Boys Own caricatures of their youth: - smudgy broadsheets on which amusingly propagandist slogans full of "noble comrades" and "capitalist running dog lackeys", are taken up and pressed fervently to pigeon chests, the above may be hard to believe. However, the sins of the Chinese news sources are largely sins of omission. The average Chinese knows and accepts this: just as the average Western person knows and accepts that the news they choose to believe will vary from publication to publication both in interpretation and veracity. In China they do not receive ALL the news, but the realisation that the news Westerners accept can actually be manufactured as part of a vast propaganda machine has come as a rude awakening.
The fall-out from the way the Lhasa riots have been reported world-wide and accepted unquestionably, have changed Chinese perceptions both of self and of other. Their place in the world and the worlds place in China has been questioned and found to reflect through a glass darkly. They are reeling as if from the shock of finding that benevolent, magical Father Xmas is just a tawdry old wino dressed up in frowsty moth-eaten finery.
The process of loss of innocence, the result of the West's colonisation throughout the rest of the world from Australia to India, has finally begun in the last bastion to withstand it. Should we now rejoice that globalisation is at last being achieved?
With The Games looming in a couple of months it seems that China, these days, is rarely out of the news. I lament daily that such coverage has not been consistently so intense over the past few years. Then perhaps we might not have quite so many scared, conspiracist and just plain ignorant "concerned citizens" filling blog-spaces, Letters to the Editor spaces and Talk Back radio programmes with the current China hysteria. Of course, many of the articles which are appearing at the moment are culled from extant, out-dated sources, from the myopic views of returned expatriates, or from over-paid foreign journalists who fly in on expense-paid junkets and become experts on the scene over their first beer in a Beijing pub.
It is not surprising therefore that no-one outside of China has yet picked up on what seems to me to be the most prominent and radical effect of the Lhasa riots: - the fact that Chinese students and a large proportion of others who have been following the progress of events as reported through Western media have, finally and collectively, lost their cherries.
For the last few weeks I have gone round with the words of an old R.E.M. song running through my head: "There's me in the corner/There's me in the spotlight losing my religion..." because for thousands and thousands of young Chinese this is analogous to what has happened to them: their faith has been totally ripped away from them.
As naive as it sounds to those of us brought up in the sure and certain knowledge that newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations are there not to report on events but to push through various partisan agenda, the average Chinese slavishly believed, until recently, that Freedom of the Press in the West meant freedom to report the truth. Especially in America: home of the brave, land of the free and the guardian of truth and democratic ideals. It is for this very reason America seeks to dominate, isn't it? The genuine and noble wish to bring these freedoms to the rest of the world?
The war in Iraq is just such a point in case, isn't it? It is, isn't it?
And Bush really and honestly wanted to save the world from slaughter by revealing the WMDs he genuinely thought were being concealed. Didn't he?. ....
When the first cropped photograph appeared on the net following the Lhasa riots Chinese netizens became uneasy. This was a genuine mistake of course. It had to be. Any moment now someone would realise this.
As photographs of what were clearly police of another country were presented as representing Chinese cops there was even more unease, followed by the certainty that no-one could possibly mistake the clearly racial characteristics and colouring of an Indian for that of a Chinese person. But, as the photo kept circulating unchallenged the knowledge that, to the rest of the world, all who are neither negroid nor Caucasion have no distinguishing characteristics, began to sink in.
It was a a cruel shock. Because hand in hand with this realisation came the unwelcome thought that all the collective knowledge they had grown up considering as definitive to what characterised a Chinese person could possibly not be generally known either. That which they had always considered contributed to their meaning and identity in the eyes of the world suddenly held no meaning. It was an identity crisis of traumatic and national importance.
Suddenly people began paying more attention not just to the dodgy photographs which proliferated unchecked, but to the texts that accompanied them. These texts completed a process begun only hours before and struck at the very core of each Chinese who read them: through these articles not only were the Western ideals of truth in reporting being betrayed but Chinese themselves were losing Face. The concept upon which all Chinese honour is grounded. A slow indignation which had started to burn began to smoulder into anger. The West - that fabled bastion of justice and freedom of speech - was betraying them.
To those outside China whose ideas of Chinese news sources are still based on the quaint Boys Own caricatures of their youth: - smudgy broadsheets on which amusingly propagandist slogans full of "noble comrades" and "capitalist running dog lackeys", are taken up and pressed fervently to pigeon chests, the above may be hard to believe. However, the sins of the Chinese news sources are largely sins of omission. The average Chinese knows and accepts this: just as the average Western person knows and accepts that the news they choose to believe will vary from publication to publication both in interpretation and veracity. In China they do not receive ALL the news, but the realisation that the news Westerners accept can actually be manufactured as part of a vast propaganda machine has come as a rude awakening.
The fall-out from the way the Lhasa riots have been reported world-wide and accepted unquestionably, have changed Chinese perceptions both of self and of other. Their place in the world and the worlds place in China has been questioned and found to reflect through a glass darkly. They are reeling as if from the shock of finding that benevolent, magical Father Xmas is just a tawdry old wino dressed up in frowsty moth-eaten finery.
The process of loss of innocence, the result of the West's colonisation throughout the rest of the world from Australia to India, has finally begun in the last bastion to withstand it. Should we now rejoice that globalisation is at last being achieved?
Saturday 3 May 2008
Begin at the beginning....
As an only child my constant companions - apart from a set of eccentric parents - were books. From one of which the excellent advice above lodged itself into my brain and, apart from a brief flirtation with post-modernistic writing, has pretty much ruled the way I write ever since.
While starting at the beginning may sound like the only logical step to take it isn't really as easy as it sounds, is it? To take this statement at its most simplistic, many will be able to remind us that, in the beginning was the word. Even as a kid I used to think it was pretty unfair that nowhere was it actually specified which particular word that was. I spent many an idle hour pondering upon exactly that question (I was, admittedly, a somewhat weird kid), but never came up with a conclusive answer. Indeed, this is probably the first beef I was to come up with in regard to organised religion.
I hasten to add here that the above-mentioned eccentric parents never for one moment tried to coerce me into any religious ways of thought. This was done at the age of 11 when, as a pupil of a local Catholic school, I, along with other assorted pagans, was made to do extra Maths. lessons in lieue of R.E. or Benedictions or Mass...or any other Catholic ways of legitimately skiving off from regular education. As Maths. was my most hated subject I was recieved into the Catholic Church about three months after first enrolling at this fine institution. In retrospect, one of my companions in those enforced previews of purgatory, went on to become a maths wizard and finally, at the age of 16, settled definitively for herself the question of whether god existed with a set of formidable equations, thus escaping the years and years of religious angst . Angst which, in my case, at the age of 15 propelled me (literally) into the hands of a Catholic priest who imagined that trying to solve my existential crises of faith with his holy fingers in my knickers would jolly well teach me not to question the ways of god.
Right. Now to anyone wondering if all of the above may not be somehow straying from the point of how or why I consider a breathless world is waiting in anticipation of my venture into blogdem (not a word? Should be.) I counter with the explanation that I am merely illustrating, in somewhat tedious detail for those at the back, how starting at the beginning is not the easy or logical approach it seems at first glance. It throws up not only the conundrum with which I grappled as a small child, but the equally baffling one of what point anyone can consider to be the beginning of anything. Even a blog.
You'll notice that blog sites and Myspaces and place of that ilk never advise anyone to start at the beginning in their profiles. They provide precise headings and guidelines and categories to gently nudge us into that mind-boggling abyss of Telling Everyone All About Yourself. Whereas this bloody blog page squats there blankly asking only for a title. And anyone who has done their research knows that upon that title rests their future in blogdem (the word is patented and appropriated by now). Because no-one in their right mind is going to pause and peruse a blog entitled Every Boring Detail About Me, or Explaining Me and my Blogsite in numerous Disassociated Segues Into Irrelevance. (Actually, I think I might - in the hope that the person was going to be wildly amusing rather than tediously literal).
Look I know that Begin at the Beginning is not going to set the cursors of the world in my direction either, but any one of those Like Minded Souls one hopes is going to read a blog might just turn to it in the hopes that here, at last, will be the answer to that question of what the first bloody Word was that there was in the beginning. A quick flick up to the top of the page will lead them to the conclusion that it must have been "as". Which, it is to be admitted, is not a very inspiring word with which to begin things but which does have the advantage of providing, once and for all, a result to all the anxious casting about that may have occupied their spare time since childhood. And, on a personal note, serves the very satisfactory function of propelling me, gasping and spluttering into the the world of public blogdem.
While starting at the beginning may sound like the only logical step to take it isn't really as easy as it sounds, is it? To take this statement at its most simplistic, many will be able to remind us that, in the beginning was the word. Even as a kid I used to think it was pretty unfair that nowhere was it actually specified which particular word that was. I spent many an idle hour pondering upon exactly that question (I was, admittedly, a somewhat weird kid), but never came up with a conclusive answer. Indeed, this is probably the first beef I was to come up with in regard to organised religion.
I hasten to add here that the above-mentioned eccentric parents never for one moment tried to coerce me into any religious ways of thought. This was done at the age of 11 when, as a pupil of a local Catholic school, I, along with other assorted pagans, was made to do extra Maths. lessons in lieue of R.E. or Benedictions or Mass...or any other Catholic ways of legitimately skiving off from regular education. As Maths. was my most hated subject I was recieved into the Catholic Church about three months after first enrolling at this fine institution. In retrospect, one of my companions in those enforced previews of purgatory, went on to become a maths wizard and finally, at the age of 16, settled definitively for herself the question of whether god existed with a set of formidable equations, thus escaping the years and years of religious angst . Angst which, in my case, at the age of 15 propelled me (literally) into the hands of a Catholic priest who imagined that trying to solve my existential crises of faith with his holy fingers in my knickers would jolly well teach me not to question the ways of god.
Right. Now to anyone wondering if all of the above may not be somehow straying from the point of how or why I consider a breathless world is waiting in anticipation of my venture into blogdem (not a word? Should be.) I counter with the explanation that I am merely illustrating, in somewhat tedious detail for those at the back, how starting at the beginning is not the easy or logical approach it seems at first glance. It throws up not only the conundrum with which I grappled as a small child, but the equally baffling one of what point anyone can consider to be the beginning of anything. Even a blog.
You'll notice that blog sites and Myspaces and place of that ilk never advise anyone to start at the beginning in their profiles. They provide precise headings and guidelines and categories to gently nudge us into that mind-boggling abyss of Telling Everyone All About Yourself. Whereas this bloody blog page squats there blankly asking only for a title. And anyone who has done their research knows that upon that title rests their future in blogdem (the word is patented and appropriated by now). Because no-one in their right mind is going to pause and peruse a blog entitled Every Boring Detail About Me, or Explaining Me and my Blogsite in numerous Disassociated Segues Into Irrelevance. (Actually, I think I might - in the hope that the person was going to be wildly amusing rather than tediously literal).
Look I know that Begin at the Beginning is not going to set the cursors of the world in my direction either, but any one of those Like Minded Souls one hopes is going to read a blog might just turn to it in the hopes that here, at last, will be the answer to that question of what the first bloody Word was that there was in the beginning. A quick flick up to the top of the page will lead them to the conclusion that it must have been "as". Which, it is to be admitted, is not a very inspiring word with which to begin things but which does have the advantage of providing, once and for all, a result to all the anxious casting about that may have occupied their spare time since childhood. And, on a personal note, serves the very satisfactory function of propelling me, gasping and spluttering into the the world of public blogdem.
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