Saturday, February 16, 2008
Strolling Beijing
I have been in Beijing for the past two days. Later this morning I will go to Beijing West Train Station to meet the 16 folks coming in from Qinghai, and then we'll head back to Tianjin. The weather is great in the capital city. Yesterday I spent the day taking photos, and, of course, spent several hours in the afternoon and early evening circumambulating the CCTV HQ project (and no, it didn't fall down), getting into the Chinese housing blocks northeast of the complex to see how it feels from the POV of those who, no doubt, will be losing their homes after the Olympics as the CBD expands and gobbles them up. These folks have watched this thing rise up among them, knowing that it is the first line of attack which will inevitably set them to retreat. My love-hate relationship with this building continues. I can't take my eyes off it. Will post more photos when I return to Tianjin.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Long-Awaited Slap
One World, One Dream had another nightmare today. It took awhile, but the inevitable finally happened: Steven Spielberg pulled out from his participation in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, and Beijing is … quiet. According to the IHT article, the two spokesmen for the organizing committee were working on a response. This one should be good!Yesterday morning while speaking with my wife about the high level of privilege some ex-pat kids grow into here, I mentioned Spieleberg’s Empire of the Sun and one of my favorite movie scenes. Jamie Graham (Christian Bale), the young boy who is separated from his parents as they flee Shanghai ahead of the Japanese, returns alone to his home and finds his ayi (nanny) carting off furniture that formerly had clearly been ‘The Grahams.’ Jamie, full of the propriety that once fueled an Empire, asks them what they were doing, and the Chinese woman who had to suffer under the weight of Jamie’s privilege, slaps him, a getting-up-to-speed-in-a-flash crack that has a here ‘n now-ness to it that drives the rest of the story. I love that slap. It’s the instance of pure education, that life as you've lived it has gravely veered, the information delivered perfectly, effectively. Life-long learning, indeed. A Chinese woman who knows exactly where things are headed gets young Jamie focused on the open page at the end of his nose. Great stuff.
(As an aside, I must say that I am neither condoning nor advocating corporal punishment. I am, in fact, strongly opposed to it after having been the young recipient of some pretty serious thrashings administered by adults, many of them ‘people of religion.’ God clearly whispered some weird secrets into their twisted ears to allow them such a dissimilar vision than the one I was in the process of doing my best to form. For the record, I remember every single one of those cocksuckers, and have often entertained getting even with all of them, until I realized they are all either dead or fixedly looking down the barrel at it.)
Maybe ayi slapped her own kids in anger, but young Jamie received something quite clearly different. Despite attempting to live alone as he had before things unraveled, young Jamie has slipped off the knife- edge, and at some deeper level he knows it. The slap was punctuation, an exclamation point, a hard sign that nothing would ever again be as it was.
So, once more Spielberg is involved in a slap, though it is one that has caught the Chinese off-guard. I’ve been wondering how this would play out – would SS follow the course or bail? – and now that he’s committed to not signing the contract, we’ve gotten a little closer to finding out how China will retaliate, for surely there’s a loss of serious face on this one. How the State’s weight will finally come down will probably work itself out in much the same fashion as the USS Kitty Hawk being refused entry to Hong Kong as a nah-nah for any number of perceived diplomatic jabs. I suspect Spielberg should prepare himself for never playing China again, but, then again, how much money does anyone really need. He will walk away from this one, and due to some level of Chinese reciprocity, take some sort of bath, though I feel as if he’ll get through it okay. Some others who are living as if they cannot get by without China, need to pay a little attention here. There are things that take precedent over profit.
A person who is moderately mentally healthy has a fairly good idea of how they are perceived by others who they interact with everyday. I believe that a convincing argument can be made that countries and their leaders can also be judged by how well they understand how they are seen by those who are not them. China’s flat-footedness, as IHT puts it, at this pullout is indicative of how little they are able to understand how they are perceived by the world beyond their borders. This latest incident and China's slow reaction to it is evidence enough that there is a lack of imagination at work here, and that the World with its multiplicity of Dreams is not quite ready to have it distilled into only one, especially one that's defined by China.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The Ongoing Struggle
There continues to be much noise raised about the air quality for the Olympics in Beijing in 6 months, as there well should be. Anyone who has spent any part of a summer in the North China Plain knows how hot and humid it can be, and with the number of cars and factories cranking out pollutants, it will be curious to see just how clean they will actually be able to get the air. The Chinese have promised ‘no rain’ for the opening ceremonies, and after observing how they manipulated the weather for the August 8, 2007 year-long celebration kickoff to the Games – the We Are Ready salvo – their resolve can hardly be questioned, though their ‘weather mitigation’ folks sometimes get it wrong.Xi Jinping, a member of the nine-person Politburo Standing Committee and the person seen by many as being the heir-apparent to Hu Jintao, has been chosen to run point on the preparations for the Olympics, handling the air quality and security issues which have dogged and will continue to dog the Chinese government in the lead-up to the Games. The stories just seems to get worse: USOC bringing their own food to Beijing; the persistent air quality concerns; the British Olympic team agreeing to a political gag order; and some teams opting to practice in other countries in the lead-up to the Games. Bleeding in public is not something the Chinese officials wish to do, though, despite all the triage, they just can’t seem to stop. Mr Xi is seen as being the man to stanch it. This should be an interesting one to watch, given his future potential.
It is interesting that neither the English versions of Xinhua or the China Daily are even covering this story (5 AM, February 12, 2008), proving once again that what is news elsewhere is not news here. Or rather, what is news here is not worth reporting. Now there’s a surprise.
But what’s also not a surprise is the latest ‘blue sky report’ from Beijing serving up the January stats for the number of days deemed ‘blue sky days’ in the capital this past month – 22. This works out well with their projected total number of blue sky days for 2008 – 256 – which puts them a bit ahead of the game after Month 1. They reached their goal last year by moving air quality measurement equipment from obvious trouble spots which were persistently reporting levels too high to reach their goal, proving once again that it’s all about Location.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
The New Harmony Maul
Before moving to China I heated our rural Virginia home with wood and had a variety of tools to assist with the duties of making fallen trees into stove-sized fuel. Of all the tools I owned, the Monster Maul was one that, short of my neighbor’s hydraulic splitter borrowed for the nastiest of hickory, put all the other wood rending tools to shame. The wide orange wedge set on an unbreakable metal handle, was wrapped in an all-weather hardy black foam. Total weight: 23 pounds (10+ kilos). It was a lift-and-drop medieval-looking weapon that split nearly anything. Rounds of the nastiest hardwood seemed to pop apart from fear before the Maul even made contact. In its design, Beauty had been forsaken for Utility, and the force that drove the form was a mix of heft, taper and gravity which ultimately leads to heat. If you had the strength to repetitiously lift it, the result was a ready pile of fuel. It was impossible to imagine this maul being heavier, as being any bigger than it was. But that was, as I mentioned, before I came to China.To be in Beijing right now is to live beneath the insensible shadows of an unimaginable building wave, punctuated by a visual siege of disparate and competing architecture. The assault leader, located in the emergent Central Business District, is the CCTV (China Central Television) Headquarters Building and its smaller neighboring sister ship the TVCC (Television Cultural Center), the State’s center of propaganda and highly-controlled entertainment, as well as being ‘control central’ for the upcoming 2008 Olympics. This loopy project commands not only the skyline but also imagination, but not as inspiration as much as anxiety, as people try their best to come to some sort of terms with this large mass of steel (100,000 tons, equaling 250 kgs. [550 lbs.] per square meter of floor space) and glass rising in flagrante among them. The only sense I can make of it is as a strained cross-cultural joke , one told from a culture that is, as yet, undefined, a symbol out ahead of the cause, a nebulous cloud that is trying its best to form. Whatever shape the cloud will finally take, through sheer bully ‘n shove and long-casted shadow, this structure will become the icon for it.
Although I have not been to Beijing in a month the massive project continues to uncomfortably fascinate me. I want to be there right now photographing it; I want go inside to see it before it's completely skinned, something that I know will not happen. But I also want to be there if and when it loses its balance, shivers for an instant in the exhaust-choked air before toppling over in a grand heap and cleaving a large chunk of the Third Ring Road. This is something that I also know will most likely not literally or figuratively happen.
While it may actually be a brilliant feat of engineering, it is one in the body of a rattling eyesore, the accident you can't look away from. It is The Thing on the Third Ring Road, a perfect fractured metaphor for a confused and confusing China, which is a place that thinks it knows what it is and what it will become, but, in fact, is just as clueless about its present and future identity as much as the rest of the world is about their own. Despite its inability to adequately identify itself, China could not dream a more ideal symbol of insecurity, menace and Damoclean angst than this ‘icon’ which is in the process of erection, of being hung. But it is difficult to look beyond the obvious symbol of this building as weapon, as a solid anchor of danger and threat.
Last year MoMA hosted an exhibition on this project before it was barely out of the ground. They referred to it as "one of the most visionary undertakings in the history of modern architecture,” which has me wondering, “What, pray tell, am I missing? And what, after all, is the vision?” There is a lot of art-&-architecture-speak on both OMA and MoMA’s web pages concerning this project – the kind of fog one expects when dealing with visionaries and their visions – but none of it speaks clearly to any specific vision.
The closest I could find to a mention of a vision – though the obvious function is to assist the Propaganda Department in doing their job with greater efficiency and ease – is that “the project proposes an iconographic constellation of two high-rise structures that actively engage the city space.”
Despite the absence of a definable vision, the architects have clearly stated what they believe the function of this project to be:
“A new icon is formed... not the predictable 2-dimensional tower 'soaring' skyward, but a truly, 3-dimensional experience, a canopy that symbolically embraces the entire population .... The consolidation of the TV program in a single building allows each worker to be permanently aware of the nature of the work of his co-workers - a chain of interdependence that promotes solidarity rather than isolation, collaboration instead of opposition. The building itself contributes to the coherence of the organization.”
Rem Koolhaas fancies himself a writer, and he has books and a few screenplays to back up this assertion. He is also on the faculty at Harvard, where his profile hails, among other things, his accomplishments, awards and list of authored books. I can only hope that he was not the writer of the above paragraph, since I would expect a writer to do a lot better than this. There is so much wrong with the above paragraph that it is hard to understand the words as anything more than mere propaganda. It reflects a cultural unawareness that can be described as insensitivity.
“[A] canopy that symbolically embraces the people” are junk -words, an attempt at social inclusiveness that has absolutely no precedent (or official intention) in China. One should understand embrace here as corral, as in, “I am embracing the horses so I can more easily work them.” One does not embrace the people by holding a weapon over their heads, but this is exactly what this building is becoming, especially now that the southeast ‘cutting’ edge takes form.
To have as a purpose the “consolidation of the TV program” which “allows each worker to be permanently aware of the nature of the work of his co-workers” smacks of “Watch your neighbor!” which has a long, odd and threatening history here. It has always been used to keep everyone in line, as true today as it has been for millennia.
“[C]ollaboration instead of opposition” is a velvet explanation for the traditional one-party China, one that hasn’t changed that much in it’s very long cultural history. In the Shu, The Book of Documents there is a speech purported to have been given by Tang, the founder of the Shang dynasty, on his way to overthrow the opposition, Xia, dating to the 18th C. BCE, that best describes the type of collaboration that one-party systems tend to stress:
"Now I will necessarily march. May you support me, the One Man, to apply Heaven’s punishment. I will then greatly reward you. May there be none of you who do not believe me. I do not eat my words. If you do not obey the words of this proclamation, I will kill you, and your wife and children; there will be no one who will be pardoned."
Voila! Collaboration, as far back as the legends go.
The organization that they are helping to be more coherent is the muscled wing of the Propaganda Department of the CCP, and there is no question to (nor questioning of) the overall intent of their mission. The building has been designed to support their heavily blinkered vision of heavy-handed authority in order to facilitate mass control.
This complex of high-tech overbuild clearly will give the State a firmer hold on the propaganda machine by honing the edge of its greatest cutting tool, the "Television Culture." This state-of-the-art behemoth will be a vital part of the engine whose drive is to control, through selective presentation, all those who are mesmerized and watching. It's the Maul all dressed up in a suit.
If, in fact, every force evolves a form, as Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers (a group who knew Beauty when they built it) suggested, then the force that drives this mutant flower is one of high-tech social manipulation and threat. It is impressive Ugliness in service of Control. (Whenever I see it, I am reminded that there was a good reason why Medea killed her children off-stage.) It is the temple the CCP has always been lacking. No mythically ornamented curved hips or imperially deer-headed rafter tails. This new icon will fit them quite nicely: a hard-edged, cutting tool that is an ominous presence casting an equally ominous shadow.
Before a few years ago it was not possible to have generated the computer-modeled plans for a building such as this one. But doing something because it can be done, doesn’t mean that it should be. That's Achilles dragging the carcass of Hector around the tomb of Patroclus all over again. Building this complex because it can be built can hardly be misinterpreted as a vision. One hopes for more than that. But sometimes it’s that and that only, no matter how high you stack it, no matter what words you use, no matter how fine you thread the story in order to comfortably screw it into your head. This is more engineering bling – bling as dazzle, without tangible worth: all sizzle, no real heat – than architectural vision, and no matter how the architects spin it, in the end it sounds more and more like a Leni Riefenstahl ‘It’s Art [Architecture] not Politics’ dodge, which has proven in the past to have been a poor attempt at justifying collusion.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Here Come The Rats
In the beginning
There were rocks.
And on those rocks with harder rocks
We learned to make a million bruises.
--Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives
Being here in China seems to get odder all the time, which I see as a combination of several things: that China is, in fact, getting odder; that I am, in fact, getting older – which is a major factor in what’s determined to be odd and odder; and that I don’t believe there is any hope for recovering the health of the planet, despite world governments agreeing that it needs to happen and the Nobel Prize being awarded to Wooden Al and the IPCCs. What this means is that I see this show as in a slow, though steepening, slide: carrying capacity, ignorance, greed, and weird smokes all coming together in an equation that I can only conclude is adding up to less than zero. But at least for now, I don’t see this as a hopeless position, though for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I still get up every morning, happy to be Here, glad to know that the heart is still pumping, and that the Chinese are still firing off fireworks and not guns as the remedy for keeping evil on the move, from not settling in, not in this backyard, at least not for this very moment. Nice thought, but in the end it’s just part of the smoke. But Noise always has a lesson, and one of the lessons I have learned is that I am comfortable with random explosions at all times of the day and night. It’s like war without shrapnel, without the bloody casualties, and all the collateral damage – though plenty of folks get wounded doing fascinatingly stupid things using cheap lighters with spark-shooting flints and paper-wrapped parcels of gunpowder. I see it more as effective aural practice for the return of the real thing. And I feel quite certain that it will happen again. And again, until the final one. I would not be surprised to find myself in another war before this life officially winds down. Not a happy thought, but not, anymore, an unhappy one either. It’s just a thought, like going to the store to buy onions, which I happen to be about to do. No onions, arbitrary explosions, a dying planet, the recipe for disorder in close-up, all of which have gotten me accustomed to the unexpected arrival of chaos. As I mentioned above, I’m getting older. This sort of thing happens. Life happening despite the ubiquity of its opposite.
To live in China now is to live at a human pace that I can only classify as fearfully frenetic, as if a random blink, a momentary disconnection, could precipitate a hopeless slip beneath the ever-roiled surface, lost forever to the primal qi. What Chinese of a certain age and level of admission know is that the past has an uncanny way of always happening again. Their history tells them so. (All histories tell us so, though those with the power over textbooks and education do their best to keep that out of print.) The Chinese common folks, the laobaixing, have learned much in the self-consumptive confusion of their 5,000 years of history, but what they know more acutely than anything else is that no one in the history of China has done worse things to the Chinese than the Chinese have done to themselves. This, at some deeper and uncomfortable level, they understand. It’s written all over their faces. And at a deeper, more potent level, they also know a lot more about surviving in the bad times than do the western pundits who predict great fortune and glory for this, “the century of China.” It is best to interpret these predictions as the first signs of dementia, since there is obviously some deep forgetting backing up their words.
If you would have told a moderately educated, middle-class man on a New York street in 1901 that two world wars were coming, along with thousands of local ones funded with his tax dollars, several holocausts and the development of unimaginably powerful weapons that would proliferate at such a staggering rate as to have the potential to destroy the earth a hundred …, no a thousand times over in the course of the upcoming century and that millions of people – more millions than he and his entire neighborhood have fingers – would suffer at the hands of tyrants, dictators, messianic tribal leaders and neocons, getting off with a “You’re friggin’ nuts,” would have been a blessing. But if you were to have presented a man in 1901 Beijing with the same unfolding scenario, only with a few added particulars – Chiang Kai Shek (Jiang Jie Shi), aka Peanut, in 1938 will blow the levees on the Yellow River to slow the advancing Japanese army and as a result nearly a million people will die; a Great Leap Forward where your future family will have to smelt all the metal objects they own in their own backyard furnace for the collective glory of the state; a man-made famine that will kill 30 million, and a ‘revolution’ where the kids will take over and torture and kill their teachers and anyone else they don’t like (and in Guangxi 1968 some of them will cook their enemies in hot pots and wash them down with piss-warm tea) – he wouldn’t have even blinked. Reality is always more unimaginable than fiction, though here the unimaginable never wanders too far afield. This is what the Chinese know.
The best indicator of how the times are perceived by the folks on the street comes on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, seven days prior to the passing of the year. Xiao Nian is the day the Kitchen God reports to the Jade Emperor in Heaven on the state of things around the hearth, a “who’s been naughty and who’s been nice” assessment of the household. It is the initial salvo for the holiday season, the first night when the people roll out the firecrackers to keep the Kitchen God from being heard when he spills the beans to the Boss. It usually begins at sunset and builds to a crescendo about 9-9:30 PM, tapering off, with a few ripping through the cold night until midnight or 1 AM.
In this week, the lead-up to the Spring Festival, there seems to be a sense of restraint among the people, despite the incessant cheering from the Propaganda Ministry about the brilliance of the upcoming Olympics, the uncommon Chinese resolve in the face of the wintry weather disasters, and the glorious future unfolding at everyone’s feet. Though the new spring moon and the kickoff to the festival will not officially begin until midnight, February 6th, this past Wednesday night was Xiao Nian. We went to a restaurant to celebrate the evening with friends. On the way we passed a strip of classier restaurants in the higher dollar real estate market not far from the east entrance to the Water Park ,where the big black cars – not the Xialis and Santanas – were lined up in long shiny rows. In a vacant lot across the street several people (restaurant employees?) were setting off cannon-like boomers. When we arrived at our destination in a Chinese neighborhood of more modest flats, there was noise, but it was mostly the higher pitched long strips of lower ‘caliber’ common red crackers. When we left the restaurant at 8:30 we walked through the evening near the TV Tower and were surprised by the relative quiet. I had wondered how the folks would turn out to welcome this season, and if this was any indication of how they feel, I would say that they are keeping things close. Firecrackers tell it better than any pundit can, and this year’s Xiao Nian was not a good sign.
The Pigs are pushing back their chairs prepping to leave the feast, making way for next ones to sit at the table.
Here come the Rats.
There were rocks.
And on those rocks with harder rocks
We learned to make a million bruises.
--Robert Ashley, Perfect Lives
Being here in China seems to get odder all the time, which I see as a combination of several things: that China is, in fact, getting odder; that I am, in fact, getting older – which is a major factor in what’s determined to be odd and odder; and that I don’t believe there is any hope for recovering the health of the planet, despite world governments agreeing that it needs to happen and the Nobel Prize being awarded to Wooden Al and the IPCCs. What this means is that I see this show as in a slow, though steepening, slide: carrying capacity, ignorance, greed, and weird smokes all coming together in an equation that I can only conclude is adding up to less than zero. But at least for now, I don’t see this as a hopeless position, though for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I still get up every morning, happy to be Here, glad to know that the heart is still pumping, and that the Chinese are still firing off fireworks and not guns as the remedy for keeping evil on the move, from not settling in, not in this backyard, at least not for this very moment. Nice thought, but in the end it’s just part of the smoke. But Noise always has a lesson, and one of the lessons I have learned is that I am comfortable with random explosions at all times of the day and night. It’s like war without shrapnel, without the bloody casualties, and all the collateral damage – though plenty of folks get wounded doing fascinatingly stupid things using cheap lighters with spark-shooting flints and paper-wrapped parcels of gunpowder. I see it more as effective aural practice for the return of the real thing. And I feel quite certain that it will happen again. And again, until the final one. I would not be surprised to find myself in another war before this life officially winds down. Not a happy thought, but not, anymore, an unhappy one either. It’s just a thought, like going to the store to buy onions, which I happen to be about to do. No onions, arbitrary explosions, a dying planet, the recipe for disorder in close-up, all of which have gotten me accustomed to the unexpected arrival of chaos. As I mentioned above, I’m getting older. This sort of thing happens. Life happening despite the ubiquity of its opposite.
To live in China now is to live at a human pace that I can only classify as fearfully frenetic, as if a random blink, a momentary disconnection, could precipitate a hopeless slip beneath the ever-roiled surface, lost forever to the primal qi. What Chinese of a certain age and level of admission know is that the past has an uncanny way of always happening again. Their history tells them so. (All histories tell us so, though those with the power over textbooks and education do their best to keep that out of print.) The Chinese common folks, the laobaixing, have learned much in the self-consumptive confusion of their 5,000 years of history, but what they know more acutely than anything else is that no one in the history of China has done worse things to the Chinese than the Chinese have done to themselves. This, at some deeper and uncomfortable level, they understand. It’s written all over their faces. And at a deeper, more potent level, they also know a lot more about surviving in the bad times than do the western pundits who predict great fortune and glory for this, “the century of China.” It is best to interpret these predictions as the first signs of dementia, since there is obviously some deep forgetting backing up their words.
If you would have told a moderately educated, middle-class man on a New York street in 1901 that two world wars were coming, along with thousands of local ones funded with his tax dollars, several holocausts and the development of unimaginably powerful weapons that would proliferate at such a staggering rate as to have the potential to destroy the earth a hundred …, no a thousand times over in the course of the upcoming century and that millions of people – more millions than he and his entire neighborhood have fingers – would suffer at the hands of tyrants, dictators, messianic tribal leaders and neocons, getting off with a “You’re friggin’ nuts,” would have been a blessing. But if you were to have presented a man in 1901 Beijing with the same unfolding scenario, only with a few added particulars – Chiang Kai Shek (Jiang Jie Shi), aka Peanut, in 1938 will blow the levees on the Yellow River to slow the advancing Japanese army and as a result nearly a million people will die; a Great Leap Forward where your future family will have to smelt all the metal objects they own in their own backyard furnace for the collective glory of the state; a man-made famine that will kill 30 million, and a ‘revolution’ where the kids will take over and torture and kill their teachers and anyone else they don’t like (and in Guangxi 1968 some of them will cook their enemies in hot pots and wash them down with piss-warm tea) – he wouldn’t have even blinked. Reality is always more unimaginable than fiction, though here the unimaginable never wanders too far afield. This is what the Chinese know.
The best indicator of how the times are perceived by the folks on the street comes on the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, seven days prior to the passing of the year. Xiao Nian is the day the Kitchen God reports to the Jade Emperor in Heaven on the state of things around the hearth, a “who’s been naughty and who’s been nice” assessment of the household. It is the initial salvo for the holiday season, the first night when the people roll out the firecrackers to keep the Kitchen God from being heard when he spills the beans to the Boss. It usually begins at sunset and builds to a crescendo about 9-9:30 PM, tapering off, with a few ripping through the cold night until midnight or 1 AM.
In this week, the lead-up to the Spring Festival, there seems to be a sense of restraint among the people, despite the incessant cheering from the Propaganda Ministry about the brilliance of the upcoming Olympics, the uncommon Chinese resolve in the face of the wintry weather disasters, and the glorious future unfolding at everyone’s feet. Though the new spring moon and the kickoff to the festival will not officially begin until midnight, February 6th, this past Wednesday night was Xiao Nian. We went to a restaurant to celebrate the evening with friends. On the way we passed a strip of classier restaurants in the higher dollar real estate market not far from the east entrance to the Water Park ,where the big black cars – not the Xialis and Santanas – were lined up in long shiny rows. In a vacant lot across the street several people (restaurant employees?) were setting off cannon-like boomers. When we arrived at our destination in a Chinese neighborhood of more modest flats, there was noise, but it was mostly the higher pitched long strips of lower ‘caliber’ common red crackers. When we left the restaurant at 8:30 we walked through the evening near the TV Tower and were surprised by the relative quiet. I had wondered how the folks would turn out to welcome this season, and if this was any indication of how they feel, I would say that they are keeping things close. Firecrackers tell it better than any pundit can, and this year’s Xiao Nian was not a good sign.
The Pigs are pushing back their chairs prepping to leave the feast, making way for next ones to sit at the table.
Here come the Rats.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Perhaps Tonight There Will Be No Disasters
It’s difficult to get the state-sponsored Chinese media to take the least little bit of a breather from hyping the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games (190 days away and counting – the digital counters are everywhere), an event that is trying its best to supplant the Berlin 1936 Olympiad as being the grandest display of hyper-nationalism ever. But news in the electronic age has a way of eluding border guards in ways that even the Chinese can’t spin their way out of. The winter woes that are gripping the country are getting world-wide attention, and Beijing has had to follow suit.
Cold weather has spread far south this January, and snow continues to pile up in places where it usually doesn’t. All of this inauspiciousness is happening at the worst possible time, the annual Spring Festival, the largest annual human migratory event the world experiences. In sheer numbers the Hajj doesn’t even come close. It is difficult for anyone who has not been to China to witness this extended holiday to understand what this event truly means.
Despite the historic vagaries of shifting polities, Spring Festival has survived as deep ritual, deeper than the inconstancy of news. Unidentifiable as Confucian, Buddhist or Daoist, it is more than the heaped sum of them all could have possibly dreamt up. Even the CCP didn’t mess with it. It is the cultural fulcrum that has survived the erratic extremes of the swinging political and economic pendulums and swords. For a brief mid-winter fortnight it is the correction for a world that, at times, seems to go very mad. It is the essence and timelessness of annual restoration, when even the advantaged east coast urbanites almost grudgingly acknowledge their rustic cultural heritage through rituals with roots deeper than any they can possibly admit to. It is home, and to be at home as the present year folds and next year’s hand gets dealt is critical to the continuity of the individual as a member of a family.
In China, family is the basis of religion, and has been as far back into the past as anyone has been able to venture. It is safe to say that it goes back a lot farther. Kith and kin, hearth and home, this is it. And Spring Festival is the reserve tank that keeps this old engine humming. To get home is a desperate duty, and the travelers press the limits of finite transportation space in order to get on board something, anything that will move them closer to home. There are stories to be told, and food to be eaten and firecrackers to be fired off to fend off all the unseen trouble that naturally awaits us all. Noise is light, the remedy for darkness, which is over there, and over there and over there, too. So they cook and eat and make great clatter until the sun again rises. And they’ll do this for fifteen days, until they push and shove their way back to the cities, loaded with bundles of hometown rations, the things that sustain them, that keep them whole until the coming of the next Spring Festival sets them again on the jammed road home.
But this year things have gone horribly wrong. Foul weather has fouled it all up: trains halted, roads closed, people stranded in places where they angrily don’t want to be. As the snow piles up, so do cars, buses and unbearably overloaded trucks on the nation’s highways. Amid the latest China stories of pre-Olympic crackdowns and tainted drug scandals, the IHT reported 25 deaths in a bus accident in Guizhou province. The state-sponsored media is reporting 50 deaths related to this latest bout of bad weather, but anyone with any sense knows this figure to be a shameful under-estimate. I have spoken with friends in western China on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau, and the grim news from there isn’t even making it out: roads and passes closed, many accidents with many deaths, and herders losing their stock. This does not bode well for the economic outlook in the near-future
Weather has always been a worry for humankind, and the Chinese have a long history of trying to predict it. Pyroscapulimancy, the heating and cracking of turtle plastrons and ox scapulas in order to divine the future, is the first examples we have of Chinese written language, dating back to the Shang dynasty 3,300 years ago. After the sacrifices and cracking ceremonies, an inscriber would record the event on the hairline fractured surfaces. In a few rare cases they even recorded the verifications, though mostly what was left were just the simple charges: "Tonight, there will be no disasters." "We make burnt offerings to Di’s Clouds." "To Di’s emissary, Wind, we offer two dogs." Though there are great blanks in the understanding of what was actually going on in these rituals, the events along with the inscribed records were clearly part of the exercise of political authority. One’s reputation as leader hinged on auspicious and accurate prognostications. If bad news was the only news, it was probably better not to report, record or verify it.
The range of divining topics was wide, from the speculation on the gender in a consort’s womb to toothaches. Disasters of every stripe were also on their minds, and weather was often the source of Shang angst and the focus of their divinations. In another venue I wrote:
"More than 7% of the thousands of published oracle-bone inscriptions refer to the weather: the coming of bugs like great winds or great winds like a myriad charring of bugs; hard rains and no rains and field-baking droughts, floods that swept away royals on their hunts, as well as the kingdom’s crops and the peasants who grew them. The world, then as now, was a dangerous place with forces afoot that needed pacification. There are some things that never change. That Yahweh was referred to as the “rider on the clouds” tells us that anxiety over the weather was not only restricted to the bone carvers of East Asia."
The problem in a country that has little substantive news reporting is that rumors become as close to news as most people get. But as the game of Chinese Whispers always reveals, what the message bends itself into by the time it reaches the end of the line is often not vaguely related to the story at the beginning. And as human are want to do, when it comes to bad news, the rumors often inflate the degree of suffering. So, in the end, more damage is sown at the grass roots level, where the rumors become the story, than would have been sown if more accurate assessments had been made public from the beginning.
Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa has appeared on television to apologize to the people for what amounts to a lack of adequate infrastructure to deal with the growing calamity, a move that many are seeing as bold. He has even flown to cold, rainy Guangzhou in the far south, a city overflowing with migrant workers stuck on the streets and under the bridges, and ventured into the crowd of hundreds of thousands stalled travelers. This should not be seen as a sign that things are possibly changing as much as it is an attempt to keep the loose-fitting lid on, to help take the edge off a political and natural disaster. No one wants to see this crowd go wild. There are just too many others watching. What China doesn’t need is a riot on the eve of the Olympics in the middle of the economic jitters.
Right now millions are facing the possibility of not getting home for the festival. What is normally a cultural pilgrimage home – a bearing of gifts for parents, mates and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents if still alive – has turned into a colossal disaster. Normally there is another bus, another train to catch, some hope of being delivered home in the nick of time, to be there when the year passes. But not this year. Many of those who have given up hope of getting home are in areas where the sun is shining, the skies are blue, and the weather is fine. Here in Tianjin it is beautiful, with more blue sky days than we know how to deal with. But there are those here who have realized that the blowback from the south is going to affect them too. Maybe they’ll get home or maybe they won’t.
So in the run-up to the Olympics I am left wondering if Premier Hu, within the secret confines of Zhongnanhai, is fiddling with turtle plastrons and mumbling to the heavens, “Perhaps tonight there will be no more disasters.” If he is, I feel quite sure that it won’t show up in the news.
Cold weather has spread far south this January, and snow continues to pile up in places where it usually doesn’t. All of this inauspiciousness is happening at the worst possible time, the annual Spring Festival, the largest annual human migratory event the world experiences. In sheer numbers the Hajj doesn’t even come close. It is difficult for anyone who has not been to China to witness this extended holiday to understand what this event truly means.
Despite the historic vagaries of shifting polities, Spring Festival has survived as deep ritual, deeper than the inconstancy of news. Unidentifiable as Confucian, Buddhist or Daoist, it is more than the heaped sum of them all could have possibly dreamt up. Even the CCP didn’t mess with it. It is the cultural fulcrum that has survived the erratic extremes of the swinging political and economic pendulums and swords. For a brief mid-winter fortnight it is the correction for a world that, at times, seems to go very mad. It is the essence and timelessness of annual restoration, when even the advantaged east coast urbanites almost grudgingly acknowledge their rustic cultural heritage through rituals with roots deeper than any they can possibly admit to. It is home, and to be at home as the present year folds and next year’s hand gets dealt is critical to the continuity of the individual as a member of a family.
In China, family is the basis of religion, and has been as far back into the past as anyone has been able to venture. It is safe to say that it goes back a lot farther. Kith and kin, hearth and home, this is it. And Spring Festival is the reserve tank that keeps this old engine humming. To get home is a desperate duty, and the travelers press the limits of finite transportation space in order to get on board something, anything that will move them closer to home. There are stories to be told, and food to be eaten and firecrackers to be fired off to fend off all the unseen trouble that naturally awaits us all. Noise is light, the remedy for darkness, which is over there, and over there and over there, too. So they cook and eat and make great clatter until the sun again rises. And they’ll do this for fifteen days, until they push and shove their way back to the cities, loaded with bundles of hometown rations, the things that sustain them, that keep them whole until the coming of the next Spring Festival sets them again on the jammed road home.
But this year things have gone horribly wrong. Foul weather has fouled it all up: trains halted, roads closed, people stranded in places where they angrily don’t want to be. As the snow piles up, so do cars, buses and unbearably overloaded trucks on the nation’s highways. Amid the latest China stories of pre-Olympic crackdowns and tainted drug scandals, the IHT reported 25 deaths in a bus accident in Guizhou province. The state-sponsored media is reporting 50 deaths related to this latest bout of bad weather, but anyone with any sense knows this figure to be a shameful under-estimate. I have spoken with friends in western China on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau, and the grim news from there isn’t even making it out: roads and passes closed, many accidents with many deaths, and herders losing their stock. This does not bode well for the economic outlook in the near-future
Weather has always been a worry for humankind, and the Chinese have a long history of trying to predict it. Pyroscapulimancy, the heating and cracking of turtle plastrons and ox scapulas in order to divine the future, is the first examples we have of Chinese written language, dating back to the Shang dynasty 3,300 years ago. After the sacrifices and cracking ceremonies, an inscriber would record the event on the hairline fractured surfaces. In a few rare cases they even recorded the verifications, though mostly what was left were just the simple charges: "Tonight, there will be no disasters." "We make burnt offerings to Di’s Clouds." "To Di’s emissary, Wind, we offer two dogs." Though there are great blanks in the understanding of what was actually going on in these rituals, the events along with the inscribed records were clearly part of the exercise of political authority. One’s reputation as leader hinged on auspicious and accurate prognostications. If bad news was the only news, it was probably better not to report, record or verify it.
The range of divining topics was wide, from the speculation on the gender in a consort’s womb to toothaches. Disasters of every stripe were also on their minds, and weather was often the source of Shang angst and the focus of their divinations. In another venue I wrote:
"More than 7% of the thousands of published oracle-bone inscriptions refer to the weather: the coming of bugs like great winds or great winds like a myriad charring of bugs; hard rains and no rains and field-baking droughts, floods that swept away royals on their hunts, as well as the kingdom’s crops and the peasants who grew them. The world, then as now, was a dangerous place with forces afoot that needed pacification. There are some things that never change. That Yahweh was referred to as the “rider on the clouds” tells us that anxiety over the weather was not only restricted to the bone carvers of East Asia."
The problem in a country that has little substantive news reporting is that rumors become as close to news as most people get. But as the game of Chinese Whispers always reveals, what the message bends itself into by the time it reaches the end of the line is often not vaguely related to the story at the beginning. And as human are want to do, when it comes to bad news, the rumors often inflate the degree of suffering. So, in the end, more damage is sown at the grass roots level, where the rumors become the story, than would have been sown if more accurate assessments had been made public from the beginning.
Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa has appeared on television to apologize to the people for what amounts to a lack of adequate infrastructure to deal with the growing calamity, a move that many are seeing as bold. He has even flown to cold, rainy Guangzhou in the far south, a city overflowing with migrant workers stuck on the streets and under the bridges, and ventured into the crowd of hundreds of thousands stalled travelers. This should not be seen as a sign that things are possibly changing as much as it is an attempt to keep the loose-fitting lid on, to help take the edge off a political and natural disaster. No one wants to see this crowd go wild. There are just too many others watching. What China doesn’t need is a riot on the eve of the Olympics in the middle of the economic jitters.
Right now millions are facing the possibility of not getting home for the festival. What is normally a cultural pilgrimage home – a bearing of gifts for parents, mates and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents if still alive – has turned into a colossal disaster. Normally there is another bus, another train to catch, some hope of being delivered home in the nick of time, to be there when the year passes. But not this year. Many of those who have given up hope of getting home are in areas where the sun is shining, the skies are blue, and the weather is fine. Here in Tianjin it is beautiful, with more blue sky days than we know how to deal with. But there are those here who have realized that the blowback from the south is going to affect them too. Maybe they’ll get home or maybe they won’t.
So in the run-up to the Olympics I am left wondering if Premier Hu, within the secret confines of Zhongnanhai, is fiddling with turtle plastrons and mumbling to the heavens, “Perhaps tonight there will be no more disasters.” If he is, I feel quite sure that it won’t show up in the news.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Confucius Redux?
Laobaixing: the common folk; the People in the People’s Republic of China; the cab drivers, office workers, migrant workers, small shopkeepers, beauticians, food sellers, the people on the street. In essence, it’s all those who are trying to make the staggering adjustments to survive in a nation that once tried it’s best – at least in name – to take care of the common man and woman, but has since turned into one that is unashamedly self-interested and ravenous, leaving social safety nets completely shredded and the laobaixing pushed ever-closer to the edge.
But many have already been pushed hopelessly over that edge, victims of a health care system that demands payment upfront, where those who can’t afford it are turned away to die; where farmers lose their land to officials and developers who turn productive farmland into industrial, though often temporarily profitable, wastelands; where longtime city dwellers continue to lose their humble homes to the vertical rise of high-dollar real estate schemes or, as we’ve seen in Beijing, routes for Olympic events. This is hardly news. Everyone within and without the country is reporting stories of corruption, thieving and thuggery.
In the “to get rich is glorious” era (a proclamation ascribed to Deng Xiao Ping), no one has gotten the message out that if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is, along with the basic rule that, more often than not, to make money you’ve got to have some to begin with. If you don’t have the money, you can’t get to the right people, to the officials, who are the fast track to the gold. In a land of too many people and not enough resources, doing the math will tell you soon enough that most of those who heard Deng’s message are so deeply buried in the stacks that getting rich is something that will never filter down to them. But still they dream. And, being Chinese, they have saved: five kuai here, ten kuai there, building little nest eggs where they can. This is something that those who have a combination of connections, power and money know, which allows them the opportunity to help steal the eggs from all those little nests.
The LA Times on January 12, 2008 ran the story Trail of Risky Investments in China, concerning a pyramid scheme in northeast China (Dongbei) that almost seems comical from a western POV, if it were not so heartbreaking and indicative of the desperate lengths that many of the laobaixing are willing to go to in their scramble to keep their heads above the rapidly rising waters. The grifters, a collusive group of businessmen, officials and celebrities, headed by Wang Fengyou, the CEO of Yilishen, preyed on the hopes of poor farmers in the frozen north where life is at best, a hardscrabble grind. The scheme, which ran for 8 years before coming to an abrupt halt this past November (2007) when the pyramid collapsed and Yilishen filed for bankruptcy, was based on the selling of ant farms, which were purported to be used as a powerful aphrodisiac. After three months of feeding the ants – but you can’t look into the box – the dead ants were bought back by Yilishen at a profit, though in most cases, the marks rolled over their profits into more ant farms. When it finally folded Yilishen and their backers walked away with the equivalent of 1.2 billion USD. Through the years Mr. Wang had been praised by many in the official Chinese media, including the China Daily and CCTV, for his business skills, which, no doubt, added to investors’ confidence that they were in the right business.
As the scheme began to unravel people who’d been scammed hit the streets in Shenyang, the provincial capital of Liaoning province. On November 20, 2007 Global Voices Online reported that
Shenyang was mobbed today with furious ex-ant farmers, former employees of Yilishen, a media darling and one of China's most well-known brands in the health supplement market, as the company has just closed, taking the huge amounts its peasant-class employees had invested with it. The city's ant farming industry is no stranger to controversy, and neither is the company. Blog posts on the subject were quickly deleted, including most of the ones below, but a larger mass action remains scheduled for November 21.
Mark O’Neill’s story at the Asia Sentinel, A Chinese Pyramid Scheme Built on an Anthill, is a good overall report on the scheme.
Stories of officials involved in manipulating and stealing from the marginalized common folks are appearing more and more online. As they do, more draconian efforts are made to keep them from getting to the public, often with the suppression of courageous individuals who do their best to get the stories out. It is a battle that China cannot win, short of denying total access to the internet, something that would cause a degree of social unrest that even they are not prepared to deal with.
As China continues to shakily emerge, what is sorely missing in their developing equation is a centralized rule of law. I am reminded of a line by Lucian Pye, former MIT Professor of Political Science: “China is a civilization pretending to be a state.” Official corruption and its very selective prosecution underscores this point as well as exposing the Deadwood nature of the place. This is what Confucius knew 2,500 years ago and why he tried to answer the troubling question: How do you trust the guy you send over the hill to do the right thing? It is still a question that has not been answered, and one that won’t be until there are real laws that protect the people from official abuse. Now as always the laobaixing are the ones who suffer as those on the periphery continue to act in their own best interests despite the deeper social problems that they are fueling.
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