Zoo Escapee—Roaming the Countryside
It's pretty interesting to get out into the countryside on my bicycle. People often notice me when I'm on the street in the city, but in the countryside I always get long stares. Of course, it's understandable enough in that few foreigners have any reason to venture out there. So whenever I roam around there I feel pretty much like an escapee from the zoo. Most just give a long surprised look, but some will give you a cheery “hello” and you can also overhear others just say 老外 (laowai) ‘foreigner’ as they point you out to other bystanders. It's something like canoeing in the north woods with your buddy, and suddenly: “Look, a moose!”
People in the countryside are busy. They are working hard and it's a bit difficult to get into conversations for that reason. Most of the people you see in the villages during the day are oldsters looking after grandchildren. The elders are challenging for me to talk to because they invariably have really heavy Henan accents. Everyone else is out in the fields hard at it.
Northern Henan is mostly corn at this time of year and most of that goes to pigs and and some to cows. (The other biggest crop is winter wheat, which is often double cropped with corn because summers here are fairly long, but this necessitates the pumping of ground water.) I've heard that some people still make a kind of gruel out of this rough corn and others make kind of layered cake, which I think is steamed. This kind of food used to be eaten by really poor people, but I've been told it's making a kind of comeback in a sweetened version now that that people don't have to survive off it. Farmers can be seen husking corn and putting it out to dry in the sun on the sides of the roads. I saw corn standing stalks being chopped up in the field by mechanical choppers on small tractors to be turned over in the earth for the next crop, but I've seen some of them being stacked up and trucked around as well. I asked some people by the side of the road what they do with the corn husks and they said they just throw them away rather than composting them. Corn cobs seem to be saved but I was not able to ask what for. In all my forays into the countryside so far I have seen only one mule pulling a cart, a very, very commonplace sight on roads and in fields when I first came to China 20 years ago.
The important thing about farming here is that everything is done so intensively. Every little patch of 黄土 (huangtu) or ‘yellow earth,’ the stuff that blows in from the northwest, is cultivated for something. Near town there are also lots of hothouses whose sides are made of earth with clear heavy plastic sheeting coming down at an angle. As anywhere this gives a few weeks or more on either side of winter. 黄土is very fertile but the north China plain is very dry and has been getting drier over the millennia. In the month that we have been here it has rained just once, yesterday, about a quarter of an inch. Water for these vegetable plots comes from wells and you can see where small irrigation ditches carry it to the plants from central locations. Some water is still carried in buckets so each plant gets a drink. Interestingly, raised beds don't seem to be used universally here but I hope to have a chance at some time to talk about such things if I find someone with time to talk!
Recently not far out of the city I saw people crating up tomatoes that were still only about half ripe. I asked where they were shipping them off to, and they said Loyang, a city somewhat larger than Xinxiang about 3 hours away. I would say that looking down the street there was the equivalent of about 2 or 3 semi-tractor trailers full of tomatoes still on small carts. This location was literally blocks from a new superhighway to Loyang, but I was still mystified as to why they were shipping them to Loyang, when this city of nearly 600,000 was only 10 minutes away. Of course, they are probably selling here too, but then why doesn't Loyang have tomato truck farms of its own? The climate and soil conditions are virtually identical. I wanted to ask more but everyone was busy, busy, busy getting those tomatoes into the crates. Anyway, it seems that these highways have opened up some markets for these producers that the train to Loyang, also just 3 hours, didn't deal with. (Trains seem to carry mostly passenger traffic and coal and other heavy bulk freight.) So the covering of what was once farmland with 6 lanes of highway has produced this market “benefit.”
Another interesting thing I found was a kind of industrial park about 30 minutes by bike out of town. This reminded me exactly of something similar near the Duluth airport. The one here had a huge new 6-lane concrete highway heading for about a mile to a row of 3 or 4 factories with corn fields all around, fields that presumably will gradually grow more factories than corn. The workers are undoubtedly from the local villages because many of my students from farm families say that their fathers—and usually it's the fathers—will take on additional part or full time work off the farm. Needless to say that this is a common phenomenon in the US too as small farmers try to keep struggling to make ends meet until they too are gobbled up by agribusiness.
Everywhere I've gone outside of town a bit there are many small patches of cotton plants. Cotton seems to grow well here, but I'm surprised to see it grown on such small plots. The first time I saw it, I wasn't at first sure what it was when I saw one older woman picking it but I couldn’t get much info because she had a really heavy local accent. Later I asked another younger guy and he said that people grow it like this and just sell it to the government at a set price by weight, so it seems to be a way to make a little spare cash maybe particularly for older people or retirees like the fellow selling cigarettes that I met last week. Small vegetable plots are everywhere too, for personal use but also for sale of vegetables in the towns and villages for non-agriculture workers. It's mostly middle aged and older people peddling bicycle carts into town to sell small amounts at the vegetable markets. Again, as in the US maybe, hard times in the countryside can be mitigated by supplementing one's income in such ways—growing some vegetables, raising some chickens or some fish in a farm pond, sharing a slaughtered pig, etc.
The local stores in the villages are all well stocked with big bags of chemical fertilizer, which farmers must buy directly for local use. Even 20 years ago I recall asking farmers if there was anyone equivalent to a county agricultural agent to oversee or consult with on the issues of fertilizer use and soil conservation, etc. and they said no. Everyone just does their own thing to maximize yield and profit with predictable results. The “river” that runs through the city is pretty much black but when it gets to the countryside it's more greenish with the overflow of chemical fertilizers as one can still see in some farm ponds in the US in late summer. Incredibly, I saw some people fishing in this “water,” which might not be fit for putting out fires, to quote a Native American friend from back in Minnesota. This river flows south to the Yellow River, which I recently read has lost a third of its fish species to extinction due to pollution.
There's lots of good fruit here, more than I remember being the case. The local peaches and Asian pears are very nice as well as the apples. I paid a heavy Confucius’ revenge tax for not being able to stop eating them once. Wandering the countryside I have seen people liberally spraying rows of vegetables with hand pumped sprayers and tanks on their shoulders. Few wear face masks or rubber gloves. I'm sure the fruit gets the same treatment, so I peel everything I eat just as the locals do.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I have seen in the local countryside so far was a very tiny old lady probably in her late 70s or early 80s walking with a cane next to where corn had been laid out in the sun on the concrete pavement. She had smaller than normal feet, probably someone whose feet had been bound for a time as a young girl but then unbound after the Liberation. The most interesting thing was that she was laboriously walking on the edge of the piles of corn painstakingly moving each single wandering kernel with her cane back into the bigger pile lest even one be lost, hardly a concern to her great-grandchildren, who might well have been downtown shopping for some new clothes at that very moment. She could indeed be seen as a symbol of just how much things have changed in her lifetime.
Tomorrow we leave for Inner Mongolia.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Bicycle Wanderings
Bicycle Wanderings Saturday 9/22/07
Well, I've had the bicycle for a week now and I've been able to do what I most love doing here (which by the way is not reading essays!): wandering around the city and countryside observing the daily life of real people and stopping to have a chat with them when the opportunity presents itself. I've gotten out three times this past week and I spent a good three hours out this morning because it was Saturday and I'm off for the weekend. This time I just went out the university gate and headed straight west on the main drag out of the city. This direction is definitely more of a working class neighborhood of the city. The housing was older and there was little new housing or evidence of air conditioners in the windows, etc. and after a certain distance the streets were not so well maintained. (Kind of reminded me of coming to my neighborhood in Duluth from the East End when it comes to the quality of the streets.)
After I got out to the edge of town I started to see lots of corn drying in the sun out in front of smaller, single storey buildings about 10 yards from the curb. Most of the corn was still on the cob, some was already shelled and some cobs were still in the husks. I was pretty much out of town, and it was a bit hard to tell because I was on the main drag, but not far behind the small factories and shops and houses that lined the street were fields, mostly of corn, the harvest of which was pretty much done.
I stopped to ask whose corn it was because I thought maybe the farmers were renting the open space by the road but actually it was the farmers themselves who lived in the older housing adjacent to the main road sometimes behind shops or small factories. I kind of lucked out because I got to chatting with these two older fellows and we had a good long talk over the customary cigarettes that always come out at such times. (I was also lucky because their local accent wasn't too heavy though I think I'm also catching on a bit to the pronunciation differences.) The one fellow was born in 1942 and the other fellow was probably in his 50s. The second one had his ankle in a cast because he had twisted it and temporarily couldn't do farm work. The older fellow had a small roadside stand selling cigarettes. In spite his being old enough to get some kind of retirement he left whatever job he'd had before the customary retirement age so didn't get anything and so sells cigarettes to help make ends meet. (The conversation moved on and unfortunately we didn't get into details about that. We talked about lots of stuff and I don't know how much of it I can remember now affected as I am with chronic CRS syndrome (Can't Remember Shit).
One reason I also wanted to stop at that place was because there were two very large factories there that made various kinds of 3-wheeled vehicles, some powered by batteries and some that have gas-burning motorcycle engines. They were big enough that each could employ hundreds of workers if not a thousand for the larger one. I asked these guys how much workers in them made per month and they said about 1300 or 1400 yuan (rmb), that is, not a little under $200 US per month. They said that this was a more or less average salary for such work. I told them that I have seen some nice new housing going up around town and wondered if these families could afford such housing. They said that if a husband and wife both worked in such a place—and both virtually always do work—they could probably afford to buy something at least. In such situations, couples would typically hand their kids off to grandparents or put them in day care that would cost them a couple 100 rmb per month, not really so bad. They said that some work places had day care centers and some didn't though certainly none are free. They also mentioned that there was a lot of corruption in such enterprises and managers were always running off with a big slice of the pie. I nodded and translated the US saying that the best way to rob a bank was to own one. They got a kick out of that.
Of course they asked me about the US too, and I am always surprised to find that the attitude toward the US is almost always quite positive. The only exception to this I have ever experienced in China is when I happened to be here soon after both the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, which resulted in 3 Chinese deaths, and then the forced landing of the US spy plane off the south China coast, which resulted in the death of the Chinese fighter pilot. Even at those times people weren't hostile, but did sometimes say things like “What's with this bullying, anyway? Why does your country do things like this?” Genuine wonder more than anger and never personalized. These two fellows asked about what people in the US thought about the Iraq war and they had puzzled looks on their faces when I said that it was widely opposed but continues nevertheless. My explanation was that the war benefits the corporate elite who want Iraqi oil, and since both US parties feed at the same trough the war continues--not so complicated really.
At this the old guy smiled and shook his head and said something like yeah, it's the same everywhere, the people at the top get theirs first and the common people (the 老百姓) deal with it. That said, when I asked them outright, both of them were on balance pretty satisfied with the direction China was going in since Deng Xiaoping opened China to massive foreign investment in 1978: China needs the foreign investment to modernize and create jobs and it's a good thing. This is an almost universal viewpoint here. As long as the vast majority are “warm and have full stomachs” (温饱) things are acceptable. The situation in Henan, traditionally a very poor hinterland agricultural province, has improved greatly just in the 6 years since I was last here and this was noted by these fellows so they didn't express any negative feelings when I asked them straightforwardly if they were jealous of or angry about the extreme wealth in Beijing and Shanghai though the younger fellow shook his head and frowned a bit when he added, “We're 20 years behind them.” When I asked about pollution, the older fellow—rightly I think—said that it was a world problem and one that countries had to cooperate on. I wondered what they thought about the “6-4” (the Tiananmen shooting) because I suggested that it was Deng who was responsible for that too. Well, it was all 不清楚, “not clear” about who was really responsible for what. They might well have been dodging the question, but I think they were telling their true feelings when they said that Deng and Mao like all leaders all over the world had their shortcomings but on the whole the plusses of these two—Mao for unifying the country in the face of imperialism and Deng for changing the course of the economy—in their view far outweighed the mistakes they certainly did make. By the way, I was told by the younger that the older fellow did have more education (though I was not able to ask exactly how much, maybe senior high school), so I asked him if he had had problems during the Cultural Revolution and he said no, though undoubtedly the shutting down of schools adversely affected him as he was just coming of age at that time. They said that they were pretty satisfied with current leader Hu Jintao as well. They seemed to be willing to cut him and the government slack when it comes to development of the city vs. the countryside. Twenty years ago city people complained that country people had the economic advantage and now it's the opposite but even as country folk they were willing to accept it. Once again, like it or dislike it, I have found these views to be a very, very commonly held here among people like these two gentlemen for the last 20 years that I have been coming to China, views that are very likely in sharp contrast to those of the well educated, upper class, professional Chinese that one meets in the US or those who get to write their memoirs in English. These people have far more in common with their elite American counterparts that they now lilve among than any common person in China, which should come to no surprise to anyone. Knowing these people is a very truncated window into China. (By the way, this group of upper class émigrés also has nothing in common with the working class overseas Chinese who do endless hours of restaurant and sweatshop work in the US and, if I may add, are never, never, never there to help translate for these English deficient largely economic immigrants or morally support them in emergency rooms or police stations or workplaces or their children's schools as my wife and I have done again and again in Duluth for all the 20+ years we have lived there. The reason? Social class. Like the upper class here in China they are just too damn worried about and busy with their careers, their status, and their bourgeois comforts and I share no common interests with them.)
In short, for better or for worse, like it or not in America, some modicum of economic security and hope for a better material life is what moves people like these two I talked to today. For the sake of those ends, they are willing to accept some lumps, some of them pretty serious. But inasmuch as they seem to see concrete economic improvement in today's China they are contented enoug...for now. Something on local agriculture next time maybe.
P.S. For whatever reason, I have not been able to access comments posted on this website. Feel free to post them because you can probably get them outside here, but if you want to communicate with me it's best to send email. I would be interested in hearing your reactions.
Well, I've had the bicycle for a week now and I've been able to do what I most love doing here (which by the way is not reading essays!): wandering around the city and countryside observing the daily life of real people and stopping to have a chat with them when the opportunity presents itself. I've gotten out three times this past week and I spent a good three hours out this morning because it was Saturday and I'm off for the weekend. This time I just went out the university gate and headed straight west on the main drag out of the city. This direction is definitely more of a working class neighborhood of the city. The housing was older and there was little new housing or evidence of air conditioners in the windows, etc. and after a certain distance the streets were not so well maintained. (Kind of reminded me of coming to my neighborhood in Duluth from the East End when it comes to the quality of the streets.)
After I got out to the edge of town I started to see lots of corn drying in the sun out in front of smaller, single storey buildings about 10 yards from the curb. Most of the corn was still on the cob, some was already shelled and some cobs were still in the husks. I was pretty much out of town, and it was a bit hard to tell because I was on the main drag, but not far behind the small factories and shops and houses that lined the street were fields, mostly of corn, the harvest of which was pretty much done.
I stopped to ask whose corn it was because I thought maybe the farmers were renting the open space by the road but actually it was the farmers themselves who lived in the older housing adjacent to the main road sometimes behind shops or small factories. I kind of lucked out because I got to chatting with these two older fellows and we had a good long talk over the customary cigarettes that always come out at such times. (I was also lucky because their local accent wasn't too heavy though I think I'm also catching on a bit to the pronunciation differences.) The one fellow was born in 1942 and the other fellow was probably in his 50s. The second one had his ankle in a cast because he had twisted it and temporarily couldn't do farm work. The older fellow had a small roadside stand selling cigarettes. In spite his being old enough to get some kind of retirement he left whatever job he'd had before the customary retirement age so didn't get anything and so sells cigarettes to help make ends meet. (The conversation moved on and unfortunately we didn't get into details about that. We talked about lots of stuff and I don't know how much of it I can remember now affected as I am with chronic CRS syndrome (Can't Remember Shit).
One reason I also wanted to stop at that place was because there were two very large factories there that made various kinds of 3-wheeled vehicles, some powered by batteries and some that have gas-burning motorcycle engines. They were big enough that each could employ hundreds of workers if not a thousand for the larger one. I asked these guys how much workers in them made per month and they said about 1300 or 1400 yuan (rmb), that is, not a little under $200 US per month. They said that this was a more or less average salary for such work. I told them that I have seen some nice new housing going up around town and wondered if these families could afford such housing. They said that if a husband and wife both worked in such a place—and both virtually always do work—they could probably afford to buy something at least. In such situations, couples would typically hand their kids off to grandparents or put them in day care that would cost them a couple 100 rmb per month, not really so bad. They said that some work places had day care centers and some didn't though certainly none are free. They also mentioned that there was a lot of corruption in such enterprises and managers were always running off with a big slice of the pie. I nodded and translated the US saying that the best way to rob a bank was to own one. They got a kick out of that.
Of course they asked me about the US too, and I am always surprised to find that the attitude toward the US is almost always quite positive. The only exception to this I have ever experienced in China is when I happened to be here soon after both the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, which resulted in 3 Chinese deaths, and then the forced landing of the US spy plane off the south China coast, which resulted in the death of the Chinese fighter pilot. Even at those times people weren't hostile, but did sometimes say things like “What's with this bullying, anyway? Why does your country do things like this?” Genuine wonder more than anger and never personalized. These two fellows asked about what people in the US thought about the Iraq war and they had puzzled looks on their faces when I said that it was widely opposed but continues nevertheless. My explanation was that the war benefits the corporate elite who want Iraqi oil, and since both US parties feed at the same trough the war continues--not so complicated really.
At this the old guy smiled and shook his head and said something like yeah, it's the same everywhere, the people at the top get theirs first and the common people (the 老百姓) deal with it. That said, when I asked them outright, both of them were on balance pretty satisfied with the direction China was going in since Deng Xiaoping opened China to massive foreign investment in 1978: China needs the foreign investment to modernize and create jobs and it's a good thing. This is an almost universal viewpoint here. As long as the vast majority are “warm and have full stomachs” (温饱) things are acceptable. The situation in Henan, traditionally a very poor hinterland agricultural province, has improved greatly just in the 6 years since I was last here and this was noted by these fellows so they didn't express any negative feelings when I asked them straightforwardly if they were jealous of or angry about the extreme wealth in Beijing and Shanghai though the younger fellow shook his head and frowned a bit when he added, “We're 20 years behind them.” When I asked about pollution, the older fellow—rightly I think—said that it was a world problem and one that countries had to cooperate on. I wondered what they thought about the “6-4” (the Tiananmen shooting) because I suggested that it was Deng who was responsible for that too. Well, it was all 不清楚, “not clear” about who was really responsible for what. They might well have been dodging the question, but I think they were telling their true feelings when they said that Deng and Mao like all leaders all over the world had their shortcomings but on the whole the plusses of these two—Mao for unifying the country in the face of imperialism and Deng for changing the course of the economy—in their view far outweighed the mistakes they certainly did make. By the way, I was told by the younger that the older fellow did have more education (though I was not able to ask exactly how much, maybe senior high school), so I asked him if he had had problems during the Cultural Revolution and he said no, though undoubtedly the shutting down of schools adversely affected him as he was just coming of age at that time. They said that they were pretty satisfied with current leader Hu Jintao as well. They seemed to be willing to cut him and the government slack when it comes to development of the city vs. the countryside. Twenty years ago city people complained that country people had the economic advantage and now it's the opposite but even as country folk they were willing to accept it. Once again, like it or dislike it, I have found these views to be a very, very commonly held here among people like these two gentlemen for the last 20 years that I have been coming to China, views that are very likely in sharp contrast to those of the well educated, upper class, professional Chinese that one meets in the US or those who get to write their memoirs in English. These people have far more in common with their elite American counterparts that they now lilve among than any common person in China, which should come to no surprise to anyone. Knowing these people is a very truncated window into China. (By the way, this group of upper class émigrés also has nothing in common with the working class overseas Chinese who do endless hours of restaurant and sweatshop work in the US and, if I may add, are never, never, never there to help translate for these English deficient largely economic immigrants or morally support them in emergency rooms or police stations or workplaces or their children's schools as my wife and I have done again and again in Duluth for all the 20+ years we have lived there. The reason? Social class. Like the upper class here in China they are just too damn worried about and busy with their careers, their status, and their bourgeois comforts and I share no common interests with them.)
In short, for better or for worse, like it or not in America, some modicum of economic security and hope for a better material life is what moves people like these two I talked to today. For the sake of those ends, they are willing to accept some lumps, some of them pretty serious. But inasmuch as they seem to see concrete economic improvement in today's China they are contented enoug...for now. Something on local agriculture next time maybe.
P.S. For whatever reason, I have not been able to access comments posted on this website. Feel free to post them because you can probably get them outside here, but if you want to communicate with me it's best to send email. I would be interested in hearing your reactions.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
My Students
My Students
Friday night. Just cracked open a 航空, the local brew. It's not bad at all and comes in 590 ml bottles for about 20 cents US. 航空 (hangkong) means something like ‘aviation’ or more literally ‘navigating the sky’ and I suppose about three of them could send one 'navigating’ high enough before crashing. One or two is not quite enough but three is a bit too much if one has to get up early for work the next day. I've yet to try the local brandy that goes for a bit over 1 USD for about 250 ml. I will have to put that off till another Friday night. It's probably not suitable for weekday nights.
I just finished the first week of classes. I think things went quite well and I have to say that I was really very pleased with the students. I like them very much. They are serious, energetic, enthusiastic and quite willing to speak in class with a good level of English proficiency. The students I teach, except for one class of first year graduate students, are all sophomore English language majors. They are about 80% female, which is probably not unlike foreign language majors in the US. Thus, most are about 19 years old and I got a big laugh when I told them that I was in China before they were because I first came here 20 years ago.
This is a ‘normal’ university 师范大学, that is, primarily a teacher training college, so most of the students are heading toward being junior or senior high school teachers, but in fact they have a variety of career goals. Some want to be translators or interpreters or use their language skills for business, but whatever their career ambitions, I find them to be almost uniformly optimistic about the future and possessed of a faith that their hard work can pay off. I'm not sure how justified this optimism is, but it seems to be in rather sharp contrast to the outlooks of US students, who seem to me rightfully concerned about their futures—unless they are double majoring in Spanish and criminal justice and want to work for the Border Patrol.
Give me a moment as I open a second 航空. I've lost a few kg. since I came here, so it's ok.
The vast majority of the students are from Henan Province, but relatively few are from Zhengzhou, the capital and largest city. Most are from the smaller cities and towns or rural villages. Many are the children of farmers and workers and thus first-generation college. The next largest group would be the children of primary and secondary teachers, following in their parents’ footsteps. This makes me feel particularly close to them and I shared with them my own working class background and told them not to call me “Dr.” because where I grew up, doctors were people who set bones and cure sickness—useful, productive work. This overwhelming presence of working people is the thing that has always made me feel comfortable in China (and uncomfortable among my co-workers on most US college campuses), and though somewhat less so now than before, it's still very much in evidence in this hinterland city far from the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou nouveau riche. I could see it in the parents bringing their children to campus with their weather worn faces and red and white and blue square vinyl “suitcases.” (However, I didn't see any of the heavy plastic bags labeled “chemical fertilizer” that rural émigrés use to carry their belongings in when they come to the cities looking for work.) Yes, I had some concerns before coming here, but without doubt I'm still quite comfortable in this China.
Regretfully, I came home tonight with only two 航空. As they say in Chinese, I have “paid my tuition” 交学费. I am a wiser man. Two 航空 is not enough on a Friday night if one has fully recovered from jet lag. I will content myself with eating garlic peanuts. There are so many wonderful ways to eat peanuts here and it reminds me of an essay from the 50s that I once read extolling peanuts at a time when their protein meant so much to the people's survival after 150 years imperialism, war, and starvation.
Back to my students. Students go to an average of 17 or 18 90-minute classes per week. Thus, they are in class a good bit more than their US counterparts though they get less homework. For this reason, too, there are classes on Saturday and lots of evening classes, and indeed I have to do most of my teaching from 4:30-6:30 p.m. or 7:30-9:30 p.m., but the late hour does not seem to dampen the enthusiasm. (Most people take an afternoon nap after lunch.) Class size is just under 30 for these writing classes. The classrooms have raised platforms and very large, high permanent wooden podiums in the front of the room, suggesting that wisdom and knowledge flow from on high to below. There are no overhead projectors, no DVD, CD or VHS players, or money for photocopying. If I want to make handouts, I will have to pay for them myself and make them off campus or make a few copies and get them around to a few students who will then pass them around for the students to copy at their own expense. (I might mention that this is may not be so different from the US where increasingly students get supplementary reading on the web and download and print it at their expense.) Students still sit on wooden stools at wooden benches on concrete floors surrounded by whitewashed concrete walls. Dust is everywhere. Keep in mind the optimism and energy I referred to above. It seems to be not in the least diminished by these conditions.
I mentioned that many of these students are from rural villages or small towns. I found it interesting that a good number of them have 2 or even 3 siblings. Relatively few of them in fact come from 3-person one-child families probably due to their rural origins (though those female students who do seemed to announce it with some pride). This is interesting in that most of them were born in the late 80s, a good bit after the enactment of the one-child policy in the early 80s. Also interesting to note is that there was usually one youngest male sibling in the larger families. That is, some of these families kept trying until they got a boy. It could be that the regulations were never strongly enforced or that these parents just bribed their way to larger families. On the other hand, there are a good number of families with one or two girls who stopped there—it's totally legal within the “one-child” policy to try again if the first child is a girl—so here too gross generalizations do not explain much, convenient as they are in the western media. Nevertheless it's true that there about 18 million fewer females than males in the youngest population cohort due to higher abortion rates for females in the last 15 or 20 years, a situation that the government is now trying to reverse with new laws about the use of ultrasound. I have read that South Asia is also experiencing this problem.
While writing about changes from high school to university, students talked about how hard they had to work to prepare for the college entrance exams and how much better life is now. Nevertheless, this rote learning in preparation for entrance examinations does not seem to have turned them to passive learners, at least not in my classes. Some of them are in fact disappointed that they didn't get into one of the “key” universities and are going to this provincial school instead. As in most countries in Asia, acceptance into one of these key schools is the ticket to a good career. Others are clearly pleased to have been able to get one of the few university seats that are available in China in spite of the fact that this school has nearly doubled its capacity in less than the past decade (from 10,000 to about 20,000 students). A few of them are a bit older, 21 or 22, suggesting that they retook the entrance exams a couple of times before succeeding. Most students mention access to the internet as one of the big new interesting and liberating experiences of being here, even though certain sites are clearly being blocked (though it's sometimes hard to distinguish between blocking and when the system is just crashing because sometimes you can get things and sometimes not. So far I can't see a clear pattern of what's blocked and what's not).
For the most part, students dress very simply and casually probably because they don't have lots of resources for such things though some clearly do. In fact, there was just an article in yesterday's local paper that some fundraising efforts gave grants totaling 400,000 RBM (about $60,000 US) to 168 local “poor” students to help them through college. Tuition here is about 5,000 RBM (about $700) per year, which is indeed a fair amount for most rural and worker families.
The first journal topic I gave students was to respond to Erich Fromm's idea of Being and Having. It was possibly ambitious, but in the class discussion they seemed to be able to get into it. The textbook that I have been given has sample essays that are pretty superficial if not outright childish and steer away from serious issues. I'm hoping to get into more challenging topics and ideas to consider. I am sure they are up to it.
Below I'm attaching an article from the UK Guardian on Beijing pollution. It pretty much agrees with what I said last time about improvements in pollution control but barely enough to keep up with runaway export-oriented economy.
'I hope the world's athletes will not be overly worried about air quality.'
Yu Xiaoxuan, environment director of the Beijing organising committee Interview by Jonathan WattsThursday August 9, 2007The Guardian
He looks like a man under stress: as one of the most senior officials in charge of air quality, Yu Xiaoxuan knows that Beijing's environmental problems are the biggest publicly stated concern of the International Olympic Committee.
In the days before our interview, the pollution index hit its worst point this summer. At noon, the skies were dark with exhaust fumes, dust from building sites and factory emissions. The 200mg of particulate matter in every cubic metre of air was four times worse than the level considered safe in Europe and twice as bad as Beijing's own standard. The higher the level, the greater the risk of lung disease and the worse the impact on athletic performances.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Yu. Beijing's pollution problems have built up over two decades and all 14 million residents are responsible. But he is the one carrying the can. Yet, official numbers suggest an improvement on the recent past. "Since 2002, when Beijing gained the right to host the Olympics, the air quality has improved every year," says Yu. "But we are a developing country. In the short term we cannot reach the standards of London, Paris or New York."
He points out that the city is in the process of switching its 1,100 coal-burning power plants to gas, reducing emissions of sulphur and nitrogen dioxide from the five main electricity generators and cutting production at the biggest iron company by 4m tonnes. More than 2,000 old buses and 5,000 taxis are being upgraded or replaced with cleaner models. The subway line network has almost been doubled to 200km.
But although environment spending has increased from 5.7bn yuan (£370m) in 1998 to 23bn yuan (£1.5bn) last year, clean-up efforts have struggled to keep up with the mess made by a supercharged economy. Beijing's GDP has doubled since 2006, energy output has ramped up 30% and 2 million more people have been added to the population. "I feel big pressure," Yu says. "Foreign athletes and visitors from developed countries will feel a big gap in the environment between here and their countries. Our own government is not satisfied, nor are experts."
Many building sites and polluting factories will be closed for the duration of the event and meteorologists are planning a barrage of rockets to induce rain to clean the roads, and the air.
Yu acknowledges, however, that all this could come to naught if there is no wind in the run-up to the games - pollution quickly builds up and chokes the city if it is not blown away every few days. He is optimistic that levels of particulate matter can be kept below the city's standard of 100mg a cubic metre. "I think God will help us. In August and July there is usually plenty of wind and rain in Beijing. With this and all our hard work in the coming year, plus the temporary measures during the games, we can keep the figure under 100 for the Olympics."
Even if it goes higher, he says, visitors should not be worried. "According to our statistics, if the figure is between 100 and 150 it only affects the health of the most sensitive group. I can't deny that there is a link between environment quality and sports performance. But if the figure is not that bad it won't have a big impact. People should remember that at the last Olympics, China came second in the medal table even though most of our athletes trained in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities with similar conditions. I hope the world's athletes will not be overly worried about air quality."
Despite the pressure, he says he is glad the Olympics is putting more of a focus on the environment. "I had no idea what my job would entail when I was assigned to environmental protection in 1974. But in the years since, I have become very passionate about it."
Friday night. Just cracked open a 航空, the local brew. It's not bad at all and comes in 590 ml bottles for about 20 cents US. 航空 (hangkong) means something like ‘aviation’ or more literally ‘navigating the sky’ and I suppose about three of them could send one 'navigating’ high enough before crashing. One or two is not quite enough but three is a bit too much if one has to get up early for work the next day. I've yet to try the local brandy that goes for a bit over 1 USD for about 250 ml. I will have to put that off till another Friday night. It's probably not suitable for weekday nights.
I just finished the first week of classes. I think things went quite well and I have to say that I was really very pleased with the students. I like them very much. They are serious, energetic, enthusiastic and quite willing to speak in class with a good level of English proficiency. The students I teach, except for one class of first year graduate students, are all sophomore English language majors. They are about 80% female, which is probably not unlike foreign language majors in the US. Thus, most are about 19 years old and I got a big laugh when I told them that I was in China before they were because I first came here 20 years ago.
This is a ‘normal’ university 师范大学, that is, primarily a teacher training college, so most of the students are heading toward being junior or senior high school teachers, but in fact they have a variety of career goals. Some want to be translators or interpreters or use their language skills for business, but whatever their career ambitions, I find them to be almost uniformly optimistic about the future and possessed of a faith that their hard work can pay off. I'm not sure how justified this optimism is, but it seems to be in rather sharp contrast to the outlooks of US students, who seem to me rightfully concerned about their futures—unless they are double majoring in Spanish and criminal justice and want to work for the Border Patrol.
Give me a moment as I open a second 航空. I've lost a few kg. since I came here, so it's ok.
The vast majority of the students are from Henan Province, but relatively few are from Zhengzhou, the capital and largest city. Most are from the smaller cities and towns or rural villages. Many are the children of farmers and workers and thus first-generation college. The next largest group would be the children of primary and secondary teachers, following in their parents’ footsteps. This makes me feel particularly close to them and I shared with them my own working class background and told them not to call me “Dr.” because where I grew up, doctors were people who set bones and cure sickness—useful, productive work. This overwhelming presence of working people is the thing that has always made me feel comfortable in China (and uncomfortable among my co-workers on most US college campuses), and though somewhat less so now than before, it's still very much in evidence in this hinterland city far from the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou nouveau riche. I could see it in the parents bringing their children to campus with their weather worn faces and red and white and blue square vinyl “suitcases.” (However, I didn't see any of the heavy plastic bags labeled “chemical fertilizer” that rural émigrés use to carry their belongings in when they come to the cities looking for work.) Yes, I had some concerns before coming here, but without doubt I'm still quite comfortable in this China.
Regretfully, I came home tonight with only two 航空. As they say in Chinese, I have “paid my tuition” 交学费. I am a wiser man. Two 航空 is not enough on a Friday night if one has fully recovered from jet lag. I will content myself with eating garlic peanuts. There are so many wonderful ways to eat peanuts here and it reminds me of an essay from the 50s that I once read extolling peanuts at a time when their protein meant so much to the people's survival after 150 years imperialism, war, and starvation.
Back to my students. Students go to an average of 17 or 18 90-minute classes per week. Thus, they are in class a good bit more than their US counterparts though they get less homework. For this reason, too, there are classes on Saturday and lots of evening classes, and indeed I have to do most of my teaching from 4:30-6:30 p.m. or 7:30-9:30 p.m., but the late hour does not seem to dampen the enthusiasm. (Most people take an afternoon nap after lunch.) Class size is just under 30 for these writing classes. The classrooms have raised platforms and very large, high permanent wooden podiums in the front of the room, suggesting that wisdom and knowledge flow from on high to below. There are no overhead projectors, no DVD, CD or VHS players, or money for photocopying. If I want to make handouts, I will have to pay for them myself and make them off campus or make a few copies and get them around to a few students who will then pass them around for the students to copy at their own expense. (I might mention that this is may not be so different from the US where increasingly students get supplementary reading on the web and download and print it at their expense.) Students still sit on wooden stools at wooden benches on concrete floors surrounded by whitewashed concrete walls. Dust is everywhere. Keep in mind the optimism and energy I referred to above. It seems to be not in the least diminished by these conditions.
I mentioned that many of these students are from rural villages or small towns. I found it interesting that a good number of them have 2 or even 3 siblings. Relatively few of them in fact come from 3-person one-child families probably due to their rural origins (though those female students who do seemed to announce it with some pride). This is interesting in that most of them were born in the late 80s, a good bit after the enactment of the one-child policy in the early 80s. Also interesting to note is that there was usually one youngest male sibling in the larger families. That is, some of these families kept trying until they got a boy. It could be that the regulations were never strongly enforced or that these parents just bribed their way to larger families. On the other hand, there are a good number of families with one or two girls who stopped there—it's totally legal within the “one-child” policy to try again if the first child is a girl—so here too gross generalizations do not explain much, convenient as they are in the western media. Nevertheless it's true that there about 18 million fewer females than males in the youngest population cohort due to higher abortion rates for females in the last 15 or 20 years, a situation that the government is now trying to reverse with new laws about the use of ultrasound. I have read that South Asia is also experiencing this problem.
While writing about changes from high school to university, students talked about how hard they had to work to prepare for the college entrance exams and how much better life is now. Nevertheless, this rote learning in preparation for entrance examinations does not seem to have turned them to passive learners, at least not in my classes. Some of them are in fact disappointed that they didn't get into one of the “key” universities and are going to this provincial school instead. As in most countries in Asia, acceptance into one of these key schools is the ticket to a good career. Others are clearly pleased to have been able to get one of the few university seats that are available in China in spite of the fact that this school has nearly doubled its capacity in less than the past decade (from 10,000 to about 20,000 students). A few of them are a bit older, 21 or 22, suggesting that they retook the entrance exams a couple of times before succeeding. Most students mention access to the internet as one of the big new interesting and liberating experiences of being here, even though certain sites are clearly being blocked (though it's sometimes hard to distinguish between blocking and when the system is just crashing because sometimes you can get things and sometimes not. So far I can't see a clear pattern of what's blocked and what's not).
For the most part, students dress very simply and casually probably because they don't have lots of resources for such things though some clearly do. In fact, there was just an article in yesterday's local paper that some fundraising efforts gave grants totaling 400,000 RBM (about $60,000 US) to 168 local “poor” students to help them through college. Tuition here is about 5,000 RBM (about $700) per year, which is indeed a fair amount for most rural and worker families.
The first journal topic I gave students was to respond to Erich Fromm's idea of Being and Having. It was possibly ambitious, but in the class discussion they seemed to be able to get into it. The textbook that I have been given has sample essays that are pretty superficial if not outright childish and steer away from serious issues. I'm hoping to get into more challenging topics and ideas to consider. I am sure they are up to it.
Below I'm attaching an article from the UK Guardian on Beijing pollution. It pretty much agrees with what I said last time about improvements in pollution control but barely enough to keep up with runaway export-oriented economy.
'I hope the world's athletes will not be overly worried about air quality.'
Yu Xiaoxuan, environment director of the Beijing organising committee Interview by Jonathan WattsThursday August 9, 2007The Guardian
He looks like a man under stress: as one of the most senior officials in charge of air quality, Yu Xiaoxuan knows that Beijing's environmental problems are the biggest publicly stated concern of the International Olympic Committee.
In the days before our interview, the pollution index hit its worst point this summer. At noon, the skies were dark with exhaust fumes, dust from building sites and factory emissions. The 200mg of particulate matter in every cubic metre of air was four times worse than the level considered safe in Europe and twice as bad as Beijing's own standard. The higher the level, the greater the risk of lung disease and the worse the impact on athletic performances.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Yu. Beijing's pollution problems have built up over two decades and all 14 million residents are responsible. But he is the one carrying the can. Yet, official numbers suggest an improvement on the recent past. "Since 2002, when Beijing gained the right to host the Olympics, the air quality has improved every year," says Yu. "But we are a developing country. In the short term we cannot reach the standards of London, Paris or New York."
He points out that the city is in the process of switching its 1,100 coal-burning power plants to gas, reducing emissions of sulphur and nitrogen dioxide from the five main electricity generators and cutting production at the biggest iron company by 4m tonnes. More than 2,000 old buses and 5,000 taxis are being upgraded or replaced with cleaner models. The subway line network has almost been doubled to 200km.
But although environment spending has increased from 5.7bn yuan (£370m) in 1998 to 23bn yuan (£1.5bn) last year, clean-up efforts have struggled to keep up with the mess made by a supercharged economy. Beijing's GDP has doubled since 2006, energy output has ramped up 30% and 2 million more people have been added to the population. "I feel big pressure," Yu says. "Foreign athletes and visitors from developed countries will feel a big gap in the environment between here and their countries. Our own government is not satisfied, nor are experts."
Many building sites and polluting factories will be closed for the duration of the event and meteorologists are planning a barrage of rockets to induce rain to clean the roads, and the air.
Yu acknowledges, however, that all this could come to naught if there is no wind in the run-up to the games - pollution quickly builds up and chokes the city if it is not blown away every few days. He is optimistic that levels of particulate matter can be kept below the city's standard of 100mg a cubic metre. "I think God will help us. In August and July there is usually plenty of wind and rain in Beijing. With this and all our hard work in the coming year, plus the temporary measures during the games, we can keep the figure under 100 for the Olympics."
Even if it goes higher, he says, visitors should not be worried. "According to our statistics, if the figure is between 100 and 150 it only affects the health of the most sensitive group. I can't deny that there is a link between environment quality and sports performance. But if the figure is not that bad it won't have a big impact. People should remember that at the last Olympics, China came second in the medal table even though most of our athletes trained in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities with similar conditions. I hope the world's athletes will not be overly worried about air quality."
Despite the pressure, he says he is glad the Olympics is putting more of a focus on the environment. "I had no idea what my job would entail when I was assigned to environmental protection in 1974. But in the years since, I have become very passionate about it."
Sunday, September 9, 2007
One Has to Be Impressed
Just a few days in Beijing after an absence of nearly 6 years leaves one overwhelmed with how much has changed and how much newer, cleaner and more organized the place looks even in the eyes of one very skeptical of “development.” The large number of new structures has often been reported on in the Western press. One can only say that if anything it’s been understated. A large part of the new construction seems to be 20-30 storey condominiums for the new bureaucrat, business and technocrat types flocking to the city from everywhere around the country. (The population now tops an incredible 17 million.) Most of the new high rise housing seems as nice as anything one would find in other world capitals in developed countries. One cab driver told me that only certain sections of the city are slated for these kinds of building projects and other parts will retain a more traditional residential character of smaller buildings. For sure the major bulldozing of residential areas and the protests that followed has probably already been accomplished, not unlike the leveling of the low income housing to make way for UIC in Chicago that I remember from decades ago. Indeed, gentrification may well be an international process.
Before coming back to China, I was very concerned about air pollution. I was again unexpectedly surprised to discover that the haze around Beijing is not really much worse now than what one would see in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Taipei or for that matter, Los Angeles or New York City. Of course, visual impressions don’t say anything about how many invisible parts per million of God knows what is floating around in the air. Nevertheless, even if it is still very bad—and it almost surely is—one no longer sees the old busses putting pounds of soot into the air with each step on the accelerator on every street 24 hours per day. Indeed, every bus in Beijing is virtually new and has no visible exhaust and a significant proportion of the busses are in fact electric trolleys. I saw not even one old car giving its last gasps of black exhaust all the time I was in Beijing. Furthermore, there are very few motorcycles and none with visible exhaust, for the most part replaced by electric bicycles powered by batteries that recharge and can be pedaled in a pinch. A experimental odd-even license plate number scheme has been enacted by way of experiment to reduce the number of cars on the street. On alternate days only the odd or even plate cars are permitted on the streets. (Interestingly, one local told me that the fat cats have probably bribed their way to two sets of license plates for their cars!) Streets are swept daily in the traditional way and are much cleaner than most US small towns, not to mention major cities.
Anyway, though not worse than the US, there are still too many cars. This was very clear coming back into the city on Sunday night by taxi. At that time huge numbers of private cars, almost all full of presumably more well-heeled families, were returning from a day outside the city before returning to work on Monday. Sunday night in front of the Beijing main railway station and all the way on Qianmen Street past Tiananmen was auto-madness. Taxis are everywhere and plenty of people seem to have the money to use them. Also interesting to note is that the number of Japanese cars is greatly reduced and there is now a large variety of makes and models, Hyundai being perhaps the most common. A local Chinese model, I was told, goes for about 30,000 yuan, or about $4000 US.
The trip to Tianjin by bullet train was also an eye-opener. It took just an hour and reached speeds of about 180 km/hr. The bullet trains have been in use only since this April and compare well to those in Japan. Tickets were reasonably priced and it seemed to be not only the nouveau riche that were riding. The railway between Beijing and Tianjin is lined with a green belt of poplars and willows about 100 yards wide on either side, the same situation as the 4-lane highway out of Beijing north to Hebei. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the roughly 100 km of land between Beijing and Tianjin is still overwhelmingly farmland as it was 20 years ago. Crop plots were small and alternated (corn, soybeans, vegetables), perhaps as a way to control insects. There is a large amount of new housing in the country side as well, but mostly multi-storey structures instead of the traditional one-storey countryside houses.
Tianjin is definitely behind Beijing by some years but is cleaner and also experiencing a good bit of new construction and will host some team sports for the Olympics.
The trip from Beijing to Xinxiang—reduced from 7-9 hours overnight to just over 4 by bullet train now--solved some of the mystery of where the dirty air hangs out. While the city is noticeably improved, coal fired power plants are everywhere in the countryside along with other smokestacks belching out large quantities of don’t-ask-what. (Of course, it may be that the air pollution is just more visible over the unobstructed distances in the countryside.) Once again, however, the air quality improvements were noticeable in Xinxiang over 6 years ago and one can see further down the street and up into the sky in this city of 570,000 than was possible before. In short, air quality improvements I’ve been able to see so far go beyond Beijing and the Olympics.
Certainly it would be foolish and naïve to think that pollution is being conquered in China, but it seems possible to say that the country is turning a corner toward at least making a genuine commitment to doing concrete things about it while not at all stopping or slowing its export oriented neoliberal economy--the ultimate cause of the glut of pollution in the first place. What we see in the US media about China in particular looks simply like further evidence for the Chomsky-Herman media thesis that bad things about US enemies, while not necessarily untrue, are reported many times more frequently and in far more detail than any neutral or positive things while the US and its client states get off relatively scot-free.
For those of you able to get it, the Reader Weekly in Duluth has apparently just (finally) published my response to a China bashing article that came out a few weeks before I left. Unfortunately, it seems to be unavailable on the internet.
September 9, 2007
Before coming back to China, I was very concerned about air pollution. I was again unexpectedly surprised to discover that the haze around Beijing is not really much worse now than what one would see in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Taipei or for that matter, Los Angeles or New York City. Of course, visual impressions don’t say anything about how many invisible parts per million of God knows what is floating around in the air. Nevertheless, even if it is still very bad—and it almost surely is—one no longer sees the old busses putting pounds of soot into the air with each step on the accelerator on every street 24 hours per day. Indeed, every bus in Beijing is virtually new and has no visible exhaust and a significant proportion of the busses are in fact electric trolleys. I saw not even one old car giving its last gasps of black exhaust all the time I was in Beijing. Furthermore, there are very few motorcycles and none with visible exhaust, for the most part replaced by electric bicycles powered by batteries that recharge and can be pedaled in a pinch. A experimental odd-even license plate number scheme has been enacted by way of experiment to reduce the number of cars on the street. On alternate days only the odd or even plate cars are permitted on the streets. (Interestingly, one local told me that the fat cats have probably bribed their way to two sets of license plates for their cars!) Streets are swept daily in the traditional way and are much cleaner than most US small towns, not to mention major cities.
Anyway, though not worse than the US, there are still too many cars. This was very clear coming back into the city on Sunday night by taxi. At that time huge numbers of private cars, almost all full of presumably more well-heeled families, were returning from a day outside the city before returning to work on Monday. Sunday night in front of the Beijing main railway station and all the way on Qianmen Street past Tiananmen was auto-madness. Taxis are everywhere and plenty of people seem to have the money to use them. Also interesting to note is that the number of Japanese cars is greatly reduced and there is now a large variety of makes and models, Hyundai being perhaps the most common. A local Chinese model, I was told, goes for about 30,000 yuan, or about $4000 US.
The trip to Tianjin by bullet train was also an eye-opener. It took just an hour and reached speeds of about 180 km/hr. The bullet trains have been in use only since this April and compare well to those in Japan. Tickets were reasonably priced and it seemed to be not only the nouveau riche that were riding. The railway between Beijing and Tianjin is lined with a green belt of poplars and willows about 100 yards wide on either side, the same situation as the 4-lane highway out of Beijing north to Hebei. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the roughly 100 km of land between Beijing and Tianjin is still overwhelmingly farmland as it was 20 years ago. Crop plots were small and alternated (corn, soybeans, vegetables), perhaps as a way to control insects. There is a large amount of new housing in the country side as well, but mostly multi-storey structures instead of the traditional one-storey countryside houses.
Tianjin is definitely behind Beijing by some years but is cleaner and also experiencing a good bit of new construction and will host some team sports for the Olympics.
The trip from Beijing to Xinxiang—reduced from 7-9 hours overnight to just over 4 by bullet train now--solved some of the mystery of where the dirty air hangs out. While the city is noticeably improved, coal fired power plants are everywhere in the countryside along with other smokestacks belching out large quantities of don’t-ask-what. (Of course, it may be that the air pollution is just more visible over the unobstructed distances in the countryside.) Once again, however, the air quality improvements were noticeable in Xinxiang over 6 years ago and one can see further down the street and up into the sky in this city of 570,000 than was possible before. In short, air quality improvements I’ve been able to see so far go beyond Beijing and the Olympics.
Certainly it would be foolish and naïve to think that pollution is being conquered in China, but it seems possible to say that the country is turning a corner toward at least making a genuine commitment to doing concrete things about it while not at all stopping or slowing its export oriented neoliberal economy--the ultimate cause of the glut of pollution in the first place. What we see in the US media about China in particular looks simply like further evidence for the Chomsky-Herman media thesis that bad things about US enemies, while not necessarily untrue, are reported many times more frequently and in far more detail than any neutral or positive things while the US and its client states get off relatively scot-free.
For those of you able to get it, the Reader Weekly in Duluth has apparently just (finally) published my response to a China bashing article that came out a few weeks before I left. Unfortunately, it seems to be unavailable on the internet.
September 9, 2007
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