No Melon Seed Cracking, No Smoking
These were the first words by way of announcement as we rolled out of Hohot on the way to Datong by bus during the next leg of our Inner Mongolia/Datong trip. ‘Melon seed cracking’ is the literal translation of 嗑瓜子, which refers to the eating of sunflower, pumpkin or other melon seeds after cracking them between the front teeth and skillfully grabbing the little prize with the tongue, something people frequently do while killing time for whatever reason, like a long bus ride. Most often people just spit the seeds out on the ground or wherever they happen to be. However, this was not going to be acceptable on this bus presumably because he who was making the announcement would be he would be cleaning up the piles of seed husks at the end of the trip.
The bus ticket from Hohot to Datong (大同), the home of the Yungang Buddhist grottoes, was 50 yuan or about $7 US for the 3 and a half hour trip. It's just the kind of trip I love—overland through eastern Inner Mongolia and then south into northern Shanxi (山西) province. Shanxi means ‘west of the mountains’ though there is hardly a place in China that is not east, west, north, or south of some mountains or others.
As we headed east—but also on the previous day above Hohot and in Xinxiang as well, I noticed that lots of tree planting has been going on in recent years. Many seem to have been planted just this spring and many othes are clearly only about 5 to 10 years old. Most are along road sides, in the dry gulches, or on the lower slopes of the low mountains we were winding through. Most were making it, but given the drought of the past 3 years some have not. Twenty years ago it seemed that very little tree planting was being done after the demise of communes, after which time everything was to be done only for immediate profit. Though the profit motive is more operative than ever, tree planting has made a come back probably for environmental reasons, and hopefully not too little too late. High on the bare brown mountain sides in a several places there were huge slogans spelled out in white stone, “Re-beautify the mountains and rivers.” Note the appropriate emphasis on Re-. At least a start is being made on doing something about these dry valleys and bare mountains. It's encouraging. I choose to be encouraged.
The 4-lane highway was incredibly crowded with truck traffic and very few private cars. The trucks carried mostly semi-finished goods like pipe, specialty steel products, light machinery, etc. License plates were virtually all local Inner Mongolian plates so there is almost no long distance hauling by truck as in the US. Thus, in spite of the loss of some land, the highways seem to be serving a better more regional purpose than they do in the US. Our driver was exceptionally aggressive. He laid on the loud horn constantly and it always sounded the same but the meaning did in fact vary. Sometimes it meant “Be careful because I'm passing you on the left” while other times it meant “Watch out because I'm passing you on the right shoulder” or perhaps “Here I come squeezing in between at 90 km/hr." or maybe "Get out of my way because I'm passing someone who's in the process of passing someone else.” Variations on a theme, as you can see. The right shoulder is in fact a passing lane or at least is used as such without hesitation. People have no qualms about passing vehicles that are themselves passing vehicles in the face of oncoming traffic. Amazingly it somehow all seems to work because everyone is operating by the same rule and accidents are in fact quite rare. That basic rule of the road is that driving here is an elaborate second-nature game of chicken.
In spite of the rather dry and somewhat bare countryside, the villages we rolled by seemed to be prosperous enough, well kept, and in a generally good state of repair. Fifteen years ago I wandered into rural villages like these in the northeast where homes had only dirt floors, not to say that there couldn't still be some like that here. As is typical, all the homes face southeast with their high back walls to the cold northwest wind and the courtyards and large windows welcoming the warm sun, which here does manage to get through the dust and minimal pollution. Villages varied in size from maybe less than a hundred to three or four hundred, but not so big as one would see in the far south, where more people can live per square mile due to year around agriculture. Some homes still had corn drying on the rooftops and in a few places further north farmers were still digging up potatoes. In this dry area there seemed to be little in the way of a second crop. The poplars in the valleys were getting quite yellow and reminded me a lot of northern Minnesota, but in that their beauty was comparable I wasn't homesick. To my joy and amazement, I even saw a couple of wild geese in flight.
In the fields with some regularity there were traditional mound burial sites, in some places quite elaborate with large round piles of soil and stones and even occasionally low concrete walls rather than the more modest oblong ones with a few flat stones in front. These were once strictly forbidden lest farm land be wasted on the dead, but even 20 years ago they were making a comeback.
In a couple of places I saw a few new Buddhist statues, in particular one maybe 20-meter new concrete lying Buddha with some new temple buildings going up around it. Clearly there has been some renewed interest in Buddhism, but new structures on this scale are still rare.
In this somewhat less developed area, I saw more donkeys than further south but also more milk cows. Maybe it could be said that as donkey labor decreases with mechanization cows are on the increase replacing old animal labor for cereal crops with new animal sources of protein.
Across the valleys parallel to our highway was a train bed with long trains passing every 20 minutes or so all heading west probably out of Shanxi coal country, maybe toward the Batou steel mills in central Inner Mongolia.
Fortunately, we managed to get an hour and a half into the trip before the DVD player came on at the front of the bus with loud syncopated pop song music videos sometimes accompanied by anime characters or else MTV style singers. There was even one disc of Cantonese songs, and all of them had karaoke lyrics at the bottom. Fortunately, no one started singing along.
Outside, in stark contrast to the DVDs, the wild geese and the yellow poplars around the villages made it clear that the quiet beauty and simplicity of the Chinese countryside hasn't been totally lost. Yet, near Datong a ceiling of grey daylight took over and spoke to the precariousness of country life as 5 huge coal-driven turbines and their accompanying stacks came into view, the center of a tangle of power lines heading off frantically in every direction to carry needed power but also noise and neon into every village and valley.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
The 17th National Communist Party Congress
17th National Party Congress—The State of the Union
On Monday night 10/15 I stayed up and watched a good bit of Hu Jintao's 2-hour plus speech at the opening session of the 17th National Party Congress (NPC). Though I have watched these before, this one more than ever struck me as so similar to presidential State of the Union messages in the US: look authoritative and confident, stay on the scripted message, hit the major themes repeatedly, have good applause lines, and give the pundits something to chew on after the show. It was all there. Only George Bush was missing.
Actually, though evening classes and reading essays leave me little time for TV, I noticed a number of programs in the week prior to the opening of the NPC that were clearly meant to prime the political pump. One chronicled the abolishment some years ago of the hukou (户口) policy, which had tied rural people to the countryside by making it technically illegal for them to move about freely to seek work. In fact, due to the old policy it was easier for employers to exploit rural émigrés who were “secretly” “sneaking” into the city to work in the booming construction field in particular. Now that the policy is gone workers can come freely to the city, though it's an open question as to whether they are less exploited. In any case, the TV program had a clear spin interviewing former rural residents now working in computer fields or showing young women in clean, quiet high-tech production industries. Indeed, the population shift is massive. An article in the local paper just a few days ago reported that in Henan Province alone from now until 2010—three years—two million will move from the countryside to medium and large cities. Though these clean and quiet workplaces may likely be the exception rather than the rule, there is no doubt that the new policy has greatly contributed to China's current economic boom just as the US a century or more ago evolved from a nation of small farmers to one of urban factory workers.
What then were some themes of Hu's speech and what do they tell us? Let me mention a few that struck me as hinting at some underlying tensions that the government is struggling with and that are of major concern across the population. Two related phrases that were repeated by Hu and discussed afterward were “scientific development” (科学发展) and the pursuit of “both good and rapid development” （又好又快的发展）. These, of course, are related to the issue of whether or not the government is going to be able to continue sustained growth without overheating the economy. The follow-up pundits made much of the fact that the word “good” preceded the word “rapid” in the second phrase, suggesting an awareness of the need for careful choices, not just unrestrained and uneven growth. By some accounts the income gap in China has outstripped even that of the United States. The differences in opportunity and quality of life between the city and the countryside are also of serious concern. So the question of who the future growth is going to be good for is on the table more than ever. In this context, Hu's emphasis on “social harmony” (社会和谐) is also telling because it indicates awareness that if the benefits of development are not more equally distributed there will be trouble. While the lid is still pretty much on the kettle, the potential for its flying off is never far removed. This is not a matter of altruism or even justice. The regime's fate depends on it and they know it.
Indeed, Hu frankly stated that the very survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) depends on solving the problem of corruption. There has been some very good foreign reporting on issues of corruption, particularly land grabs by local party officials of farm land, which is then sold or leased to “developers” often over the protests of farmers, usually older ones because many younger people would often just as soon throw in the towel and seek their fortunes in the city. Some of the protests have been met with violent suppression while others have been left to simmer. The question is whether there is more to this phenomenon than numerous or even patterned instances of blatant corruption. In my view there is.
In fact, the CCP needs to deal with two non-voting but very influential constituencies as it tries to “modernize” and “develop” China (= industrialize production and turn the population into consumers). The first is the ever more powerful urban business class, many of whom go through revolving doors with party members and their families. Like their American counterparts, they never seem to have quite enough, and they are always ready to tell others how good their acquisitive behavior is for everyone else. The second is the majority of the population, which is either still on the land or working in factories or the growing service sector, many of them mom and pop small enterprises. Lots of these folks are struggling with marginal salaries and worries about health care, but are also as hopeful as they are wary and suspicious. On the surface, the party's strategy seems pretty straightforward—alternatively throw bones at one group and then the other to keep the lid on the kettle and stay in power. It's kind of like the Wall Street crowd switching its contributions from Republicans to Democrats in the current election cycle.
However, the picture I see in China is in fact a good deal more complex than that. Besides just staying in power, or indeed for the sake of doing so, the CCP has to make China into a modern world economy capable of competing with the established industrialized economies like the US and Japan as well as local rival rising star India. In order to do that, the thinking goes, farmers have to be gotten off the land and into urban production facilities. This is what the Meiji autocrats accomplished in late 19th century Japan and what the combination of poor European immigrant workers and robber baron capital did in the US. Now it's China's turn—the same top down exploitative process—but about 100 years or so later, a mere blink of the eye when it comes to Chinese time.
Making this transition with both of the above constituencies hot on their heels in the context of a very volatile world economy is no mean task. Even Bill and Hilary would be challenged. Given a recent history of high-handedness, corruption, and the legacy of Tiananmen, one might wonder how they have survived even this long. There is an answer, but it goes beyond the superficial and self-serving conventional western press explanations of Stalinist repression, lack of human rights, not enough churches, or whatever.
During the week of the NPC, evening television programs of nationalistic song, dance and pageantry were everywhere. I even saw an old Korean War propaganda film rerun as well as a current TV drama about the WW2 Chinese resistance against Japan. Of course, these broadcasts did not just happen by accident during NPC week. They were meant to recall the Chinese Communist Party's finest hours. Certainly not everyone is enthusiastic about the regime, and almost across the board people are concerned about rising income gaps, rural health insurance, unemployment and inflation, but the celebrations about the success of the Chinese economy and the Chinese nation are far less about the CCP government polity than they are about the Chinese people's feeling of having finally arrived after more than a century and a half—yes, a short time by Chinese historical standards but excruciating nonetheless—of weakness, imperialism, and national humiliation. It is hard to tell government statement chickens from public opinion eggs when one reads official editorials about the right of all Chinese people to have a comfortable life (小康) as their Western and Japanese counterparts do and not just be free from hunger and cold (温饱) because this is indeed a matter of national consensus. Equally it is a matter of human rights and justice in the mind's eye of the majority of Chinese, and at this time in their history it is of the highest priority.
On Monday night 10/15 I stayed up and watched a good bit of Hu Jintao's 2-hour plus speech at the opening session of the 17th National Party Congress (NPC). Though I have watched these before, this one more than ever struck me as so similar to presidential State of the Union messages in the US: look authoritative and confident, stay on the scripted message, hit the major themes repeatedly, have good applause lines, and give the pundits something to chew on after the show. It was all there. Only George Bush was missing.
Actually, though evening classes and reading essays leave me little time for TV, I noticed a number of programs in the week prior to the opening of the NPC that were clearly meant to prime the political pump. One chronicled the abolishment some years ago of the hukou (户口) policy, which had tied rural people to the countryside by making it technically illegal for them to move about freely to seek work. In fact, due to the old policy it was easier for employers to exploit rural émigrés who were “secretly” “sneaking” into the city to work in the booming construction field in particular. Now that the policy is gone workers can come freely to the city, though it's an open question as to whether they are less exploited. In any case, the TV program had a clear spin interviewing former rural residents now working in computer fields or showing young women in clean, quiet high-tech production industries. Indeed, the population shift is massive. An article in the local paper just a few days ago reported that in Henan Province alone from now until 2010—three years—two million will move from the countryside to medium and large cities. Though these clean and quiet workplaces may likely be the exception rather than the rule, there is no doubt that the new policy has greatly contributed to China's current economic boom just as the US a century or more ago evolved from a nation of small farmers to one of urban factory workers.
What then were some themes of Hu's speech and what do they tell us? Let me mention a few that struck me as hinting at some underlying tensions that the government is struggling with and that are of major concern across the population. Two related phrases that were repeated by Hu and discussed afterward were “scientific development” (科学发展) and the pursuit of “both good and rapid development” （又好又快的发展）. These, of course, are related to the issue of whether or not the government is going to be able to continue sustained growth without overheating the economy. The follow-up pundits made much of the fact that the word “good” preceded the word “rapid” in the second phrase, suggesting an awareness of the need for careful choices, not just unrestrained and uneven growth. By some accounts the income gap in China has outstripped even that of the United States. The differences in opportunity and quality of life between the city and the countryside are also of serious concern. So the question of who the future growth is going to be good for is on the table more than ever. In this context, Hu's emphasis on “social harmony” (社会和谐) is also telling because it indicates awareness that if the benefits of development are not more equally distributed there will be trouble. While the lid is still pretty much on the kettle, the potential for its flying off is never far removed. This is not a matter of altruism or even justice. The regime's fate depends on it and they know it.
Indeed, Hu frankly stated that the very survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) depends on solving the problem of corruption. There has been some very good foreign reporting on issues of corruption, particularly land grabs by local party officials of farm land, which is then sold or leased to “developers” often over the protests of farmers, usually older ones because many younger people would often just as soon throw in the towel and seek their fortunes in the city. Some of the protests have been met with violent suppression while others have been left to simmer. The question is whether there is more to this phenomenon than numerous or even patterned instances of blatant corruption. In my view there is.
In fact, the CCP needs to deal with two non-voting but very influential constituencies as it tries to “modernize” and “develop” China (= industrialize production and turn the population into consumers). The first is the ever more powerful urban business class, many of whom go through revolving doors with party members and their families. Like their American counterparts, they never seem to have quite enough, and they are always ready to tell others how good their acquisitive behavior is for everyone else. The second is the majority of the population, which is either still on the land or working in factories or the growing service sector, many of them mom and pop small enterprises. Lots of these folks are struggling with marginal salaries and worries about health care, but are also as hopeful as they are wary and suspicious. On the surface, the party's strategy seems pretty straightforward—alternatively throw bones at one group and then the other to keep the lid on the kettle and stay in power. It's kind of like the Wall Street crowd switching its contributions from Republicans to Democrats in the current election cycle.
However, the picture I see in China is in fact a good deal more complex than that. Besides just staying in power, or indeed for the sake of doing so, the CCP has to make China into a modern world economy capable of competing with the established industrialized economies like the US and Japan as well as local rival rising star India. In order to do that, the thinking goes, farmers have to be gotten off the land and into urban production facilities. This is what the Meiji autocrats accomplished in late 19th century Japan and what the combination of poor European immigrant workers and robber baron capital did in the US. Now it's China's turn—the same top down exploitative process—but about 100 years or so later, a mere blink of the eye when it comes to Chinese time.
Making this transition with both of the above constituencies hot on their heels in the context of a very volatile world economy is no mean task. Even Bill and Hilary would be challenged. Given a recent history of high-handedness, corruption, and the legacy of Tiananmen, one might wonder how they have survived even this long. There is an answer, but it goes beyond the superficial and self-serving conventional western press explanations of Stalinist repression, lack of human rights, not enough churches, or whatever.
During the week of the NPC, evening television programs of nationalistic song, dance and pageantry were everywhere. I even saw an old Korean War propaganda film rerun as well as a current TV drama about the WW2 Chinese resistance against Japan. Of course, these broadcasts did not just happen by accident during NPC week. They were meant to recall the Chinese Communist Party's finest hours. Certainly not everyone is enthusiastic about the regime, and almost across the board people are concerned about rising income gaps, rural health insurance, unemployment and inflation, but the celebrations about the success of the Chinese economy and the Chinese nation are far less about the CCP government polity than they are about the Chinese people's feeling of having finally arrived after more than a century and a half—yes, a short time by Chinese historical standards but excruciating nonetheless—of weakness, imperialism, and national humiliation. It is hard to tell government statement chickens from public opinion eggs when one reads official editorials about the right of all Chinese people to have a comfortable life (小康) as their Western and Japanese counterparts do and not just be free from hunger and cold (温饱) because this is indeed a matter of national consensus. Equally it is a matter of human rights and justice in the mind's eye of the majority of Chinese, and at this time in their history it is of the highest priority.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Can't Make It To Inner Mongolia? Try the Western Dakotas.
Can't Make It To Inner Mongolia? Try the Western Dakotas. 10/14/07
On the second day of our time in Inner Mongolia we took a day long tour to part of the grasslands above the city of Hohot （呼和浩特）. It was good to get out of the city and up into the mountains, but in fact once you get up in elevation to the grasslands you see that they look virtually identical to the high plains of the western Dakotas. The area has been badly short of rain for the past three years so the grass is in rather poor condition. Our tour guide for the day was a very energetic and interesting young woman of Mongolian ancestry who had lots of stories about history and customs of the local area. Like our cab driver from the previous day, she knew some Mongolian but didn't speak it fluently. We shared the van with 4 other folks from the northeast of China who were also there on vacation. The lunch we had was far more than the six of us could possibly eat and included two different kinds of mutton, both of which were very delicious.
The big thing on the grasslands that the tourists go up there for is horse back riding and it's a regular dude ranch atmosphere and that's where the locals make their money. Well, whatever. We coughed up a little more cash and went horseback riding. You had to pay for a guide too even though you could hardly get lost given that you could see so far and the horses sure as hell knew where to go back to get fed. Stupid me assumed that at least the guide would be a local Mongolian whom I could pump for some comments on the state of Mongolian culture in Han-dominated Inner Mongolia, but in fact he turned out to be a Han Chinese ex-farmer from the area of Taiyuan (太原) in central Shanxi (山西), about 8 hours southeast by bus. The conversation turned out to be interesting anyway. This fellow like so many others was dying to escape the drudgery of low income farming and was lucky to have someone introduce him to this better paying less strenuous job. Typical of rural folks, he was a man of very few words. We talked of farming in his native area and he confirmed that it's a “yellow earth” (黄土地) area, the fertile but dry soil that covers much of northern China. Thus, farming relies extensively on pumping ground water for irrigation and he acknowledged the need to go deeper for the water every year. He also confirmed what I had read in the local paper that the first phase of a huge south to north irrigation project was already beyong the experimental stage. (This is a project even bigger than the schemes we have heard discussed in the Duluth area about diverting Lake Superior water to southern states.) We talked of coal mining, which is big in his native area. He said the pay is good so many people go into it, but it's dangerous because "something's always exploding.” He said that he felt that indeed lots more people in China were “warm and full” (温饱) than before, but that it does not include all. He kept talking about the US as a “developed” country unlike China in almost fatalistic way. He was riding behind me most of the time so I didn't really get a good look at him until later and then saw that we was probably about 50 with the leathery face of someone who'd worked hard outside all his life. Now his whole immediate family lives up on the high plain and his two sons have even gotten into college though he was quick to add that the tuition was a big burden for a horse riding guide, on top of what he'd already paid to get then through junior and senior high school. (No free tuition anymore at those levels either.) But he agreed that this was an investment and he can probably expect that these sons will support him in his old age. I wondered what he might get of the 50 yuan/hr that we paid for the guiding; probably only a fairly small portion washes back to him. Anyway it is surely better than farming. He rarely goes back to his old home around Taiyuan these days.
After we got back from the horseback riding there was an exhibition of Mongolian wresting, but most if not all of the participants were Han Chinese including our former riding guide. Actually, it was rather interesting. Contestants wear a kind of loose leather vest and grab each other on the vest at the shoulders and try to take each other down by tripping and pulling down the opponent at the same time. Winners kept pairing off until only two were left. The champion was one pretty short fellow, who then took on any willing tourists including a few pretty tall Westerners and some husky Koreans, but he beat all of them even though some were easily 1/3 taller.
The whole experience invites comparisons to going to a Hawaiian luau in spite of the fact that bilingual education and the existence of an "autonomous region" should make the area of Inner Mongolia at least potentially more viable than US Indian Reservations in pre-casino days. However, the issue is overwhelmingly one of economics, not bilingual education, as explained in Vanishing Voices (Oxford University, 2000), one of several recent works on the ever quickening disappearance of the world's lesser spoken languages. Sticking with one's native language (even as a bilingual) makes little sense since it's either a waste of time or becomes an impediment to economic survival. It makes a lot more economic sense to speak the language of those with the jobs and/or commodify one's culture and package it for majority culture tourists. Minority culture becomes handicrafts, horse rides, or eco-tourism, all for sale. The North American illustrations of the process—back to the Dakotas—are perhaps the best, or at least most familiar. Indigenous cultures are first overwhelmed (if not outright attacked), then isolated into tiny islands, and finally given the option of total assimilation/annihilation or commodification. Well, perhaps the absolute final stage is having one's culture become a museum exhibit, be it in Hohot or part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. But from beginning to end the operative factor is economics. In North America, Native Americans hunter-gatherer land was taken by small scale European farmers, who were themselves later replaced by huge scale agribusiness and then perhaps by suburbs. The supreme arbitrator at every turn is profit, rewarded most generously to those who are best at turning land into bank accounts.
Driving from the low plains around Hohot up to the high plains, one can see why over the past few thousand years the Han Chinese and Mongols have fought over the low plains, which could be used equally well for pasture land or farming. It is at the northern edge of the yellow earth belt, and the Han there today grow corn in the lower areas or potatoes in the higher areas till the elevation rises and the yellow earth gives way to thin soils that can only support rough grasses. Thus, this area became the northern outpost of the Han sedentary agriculture-based civilization. This land could function just as well as low pasture for grazing animals at certain times of the year and quite attractive to a nomadic culture like the Mongols. In short, this little corner of the earth illustrates perfectly the Owen Lattimore thesis that the very productive and efficient Chinese agriculture-based civilization extended itself as far as it could from its original center to the northeast, the north, the northwest and west, its political and cultural boundaries becoming equivalent to the geographical boundaries to Chinese style farming.
On the way to the Hohot bus station the next morning to head out for Datong, I listened to the young male cab driver's rather interesting radio station. It was part of a syndicated chain of stations that broadcast simultaneously in about half a dozen major Chinese cities including Hong Kong. The music was very contemporary with some English words like “music radio” splashed in here and there for effect. It was definitely youth-oriented with phrases like 我要我自己的音, ‘I want my own voice.' The best example was a syncopated version of the old classic love song 忘不了‘I can't forget’ with a few phrases of breathy English right at the end. The golden hoards Genghis Khan meet the gold diggers of simulcast radio. And so it goes.
On the second day of our time in Inner Mongolia we took a day long tour to part of the grasslands above the city of Hohot （呼和浩特）. It was good to get out of the city and up into the mountains, but in fact once you get up in elevation to the grasslands you see that they look virtually identical to the high plains of the western Dakotas. The area has been badly short of rain for the past three years so the grass is in rather poor condition. Our tour guide for the day was a very energetic and interesting young woman of Mongolian ancestry who had lots of stories about history and customs of the local area. Like our cab driver from the previous day, she knew some Mongolian but didn't speak it fluently. We shared the van with 4 other folks from the northeast of China who were also there on vacation. The lunch we had was far more than the six of us could possibly eat and included two different kinds of mutton, both of which were very delicious.
The big thing on the grasslands that the tourists go up there for is horse back riding and it's a regular dude ranch atmosphere and that's where the locals make their money. Well, whatever. We coughed up a little more cash and went horseback riding. You had to pay for a guide too even though you could hardly get lost given that you could see so far and the horses sure as hell knew where to go back to get fed. Stupid me assumed that at least the guide would be a local Mongolian whom I could pump for some comments on the state of Mongolian culture in Han-dominated Inner Mongolia, but in fact he turned out to be a Han Chinese ex-farmer from the area of Taiyuan (太原) in central Shanxi (山西), about 8 hours southeast by bus. The conversation turned out to be interesting anyway. This fellow like so many others was dying to escape the drudgery of low income farming and was lucky to have someone introduce him to this better paying less strenuous job. Typical of rural folks, he was a man of very few words. We talked of farming in his native area and he confirmed that it's a “yellow earth” (黄土地) area, the fertile but dry soil that covers much of northern China. Thus, farming relies extensively on pumping ground water for irrigation and he acknowledged the need to go deeper for the water every year. He also confirmed what I had read in the local paper that the first phase of a huge south to north irrigation project was already beyong the experimental stage. (This is a project even bigger than the schemes we have heard discussed in the Duluth area about diverting Lake Superior water to southern states.) We talked of coal mining, which is big in his native area. He said the pay is good so many people go into it, but it's dangerous because "something's always exploding.” He said that he felt that indeed lots more people in China were “warm and full” (温饱) than before, but that it does not include all. He kept talking about the US as a “developed” country unlike China in almost fatalistic way. He was riding behind me most of the time so I didn't really get a good look at him until later and then saw that we was probably about 50 with the leathery face of someone who'd worked hard outside all his life. Now his whole immediate family lives up on the high plain and his two sons have even gotten into college though he was quick to add that the tuition was a big burden for a horse riding guide, on top of what he'd already paid to get then through junior and senior high school. (No free tuition anymore at those levels either.) But he agreed that this was an investment and he can probably expect that these sons will support him in his old age. I wondered what he might get of the 50 yuan/hr that we paid for the guiding; probably only a fairly small portion washes back to him. Anyway it is surely better than farming. He rarely goes back to his old home around Taiyuan these days.
After we got back from the horseback riding there was an exhibition of Mongolian wresting, but most if not all of the participants were Han Chinese including our former riding guide. Actually, it was rather interesting. Contestants wear a kind of loose leather vest and grab each other on the vest at the shoulders and try to take each other down by tripping and pulling down the opponent at the same time. Winners kept pairing off until only two were left. The champion was one pretty short fellow, who then took on any willing tourists including a few pretty tall Westerners and some husky Koreans, but he beat all of them even though some were easily 1/3 taller.
The whole experience invites comparisons to going to a Hawaiian luau in spite of the fact that bilingual education and the existence of an "autonomous region" should make the area of Inner Mongolia at least potentially more viable than US Indian Reservations in pre-casino days. However, the issue is overwhelmingly one of economics, not bilingual education, as explained in Vanishing Voices (Oxford University, 2000), one of several recent works on the ever quickening disappearance of the world's lesser spoken languages. Sticking with one's native language (even as a bilingual) makes little sense since it's either a waste of time or becomes an impediment to economic survival. It makes a lot more economic sense to speak the language of those with the jobs and/or commodify one's culture and package it for majority culture tourists. Minority culture becomes handicrafts, horse rides, or eco-tourism, all for sale. The North American illustrations of the process—back to the Dakotas—are perhaps the best, or at least most familiar. Indigenous cultures are first overwhelmed (if not outright attacked), then isolated into tiny islands, and finally given the option of total assimilation/annihilation or commodification. Well, perhaps the absolute final stage is having one's culture become a museum exhibit, be it in Hohot or part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. But from beginning to end the operative factor is economics. In North America, Native Americans hunter-gatherer land was taken by small scale European farmers, who were themselves later replaced by huge scale agribusiness and then perhaps by suburbs. The supreme arbitrator at every turn is profit, rewarded most generously to those who are best at turning land into bank accounts.
Driving from the low plains around Hohot up to the high plains, one can see why over the past few thousand years the Han Chinese and Mongols have fought over the low plains, which could be used equally well for pasture land or farming. It is at the northern edge of the yellow earth belt, and the Han there today grow corn in the lower areas or potatoes in the higher areas till the elevation rises and the yellow earth gives way to thin soils that can only support rough grasses. Thus, this area became the northern outpost of the Han sedentary agriculture-based civilization. This land could function just as well as low pasture for grazing animals at certain times of the year and quite attractive to a nomadic culture like the Mongols. In short, this little corner of the earth illustrates perfectly the Owen Lattimore thesis that the very productive and efficient Chinese agriculture-based civilization extended itself as far as it could from its original center to the northeast, the north, the northwest and west, its political and cultural boundaries becoming equivalent to the geographical boundaries to Chinese style farming.
On the way to the Hohot bus station the next morning to head out for Datong, I listened to the young male cab driver's rather interesting radio station. It was part of a syndicated chain of stations that broadcast simultaneously in about half a dozen major Chinese cities including Hong Kong. The music was very contemporary with some English words like “music radio” splashed in here and there for effect. It was definitely youth-oriented with phrases like 我要我自己的音, ‘I want my own voice.' The best example was a syncopated version of the old classic love song 忘不了‘I can't forget’ with a few phrases of breathy English right at the end. The golden hoards Genghis Khan meet the gold diggers of simulcast radio. And so it goes.
Monday, October 8, 2007
First Days in Hohot, Inner Mongolia
First days in Hohot, Inner Mongolia
As I knew before we got there, few Mongols live in Inner Mongolia anymore. It's about 85% Han Chinese nowadays, but in fact the Han Chinese have been engaged in a tug of war for an upper hand in Inner Mongolia for a couple of thousand years. After being there for a while one can see why.
As luck would have it, during our first days in town we stayed in a hotel that is just on the border of the Moslem and Mongolian districts of Hohot. I had no idea that there was such a huge Moslem presence in Hohot. Due to the fact that the economy is taking off, lots of Han Moslems, ethnic Uyghur Moslems and non-Moslem Han Chinese have come to Hohot from far west provinces like Gansu and Xinjiang. Wandering the back alleys in the Moslem district around 9 p.m., we tasted some snacks like hot roasted chestnuts, fried beef dumplings, wind dried beef, and, best of all, delicious greasy mutton roasted on a stick over hot coals with local spices that I could not identify but probably containing cumin. The kids selling it were working for a middle aged Xinjiang Uyghur fellow, but they were Han Chinese from the countryside of Gansu, the province next door, one of the poorest in China. The older one was maybe in his upper teens, but the younger kid looked barely fifteen. They said repeatedly that the place they come from is “very poor” and they looked the part with their quiet manner, dark rough faces and hands, worn down fingernails and brown teeth, all dead giveaways. “Very poor” in this area can mean things like minimal health care, marginal protein intake, limited education and maybe dirt floor houses—things that would make one want to take a chance on moving on and doing just about anything else. I kidded with their boss about how many thousand yuan (rmb) he was paying them per month. He answered with a loud laugh that they were getting a few hundred per month—less than $100 US—plus room and board. But they looked pretty well-fed and I suspect that was their primary motivation for being there.
Just after dark the worshippers in a local mosque were just finishing prayers; most of the people leaving the place on their bicycles were older though there were some younger ones too. All the women had their heads covered but not their faces. Nearby there was also a very large Moslem high school, and restaurants serving religiously appropriate menus were everywhere to be found in the district.
Hohot, a city of 1.4 million, is booming. Baotou, an hour and a half to the west, is the industrial center in Inner Mongolia with its mines and steel mills, but a good bit of the money from resource exploitation in Inner Mongolia seems to be finding its way into Hohot, the provincial capital. New construction and business hotels are everywhere. Tourism is the other big industry. Someone with a strong public relations/advertising background is doing lots of aggressive city planning in Hohot. In the Moslem district all the buildings on the main drag are done in a Mid-East décor of domes and minarets outlined in neon (which happily got turned off around 11 p.m.). Monday was the first day of National Day, celebrating the founding of the PRC and a 3-day national holiday for all workers. However, it was more like a huge city-wide Fourth of July sale at Walmart and a K Mart blue light special rolled into one because nearly every business was open, many of them having nothing to do with direct consumer sales to the throngs of people wandering the streets to shop and sample the street food. Given that there's so much money to be made everyday of the year, why would any fool want to take a day off?
A cab driver we hired to take us to one of the bigger historical sites a bit outside the city turned out to be an ethnic Mongol, but he and his parents were all born in the city in Hohot. I asked him about Mongol-Han relations and he said that they were good. He took a little light razzing in the army (he volunteered for 3 years) about being a mutton eater, but said he never had any problems at all. He recounted his experience in a bilingual Mongolian-Chinese program in high school that he was put into due to his ethnic heritage, but he often skipped the Mongolian language classes because knowing Mongolian wasn't going to do him any good in the future. He didn't grow up speaking the Mongolian at home either. Virtually all shop titles in Hohot are in Mongolian script as well as Chinese characters, but this fellow said that the quality of the Mongolian translations was terrible, probably as bad, he guessed, as the English one sees on signs and T-shirts. He mentioned almost in passing that he has a brother who's studying for a Ph.D. in Japan. This could be testimony of equality of opportunity or just as likely that the family is investing in this brother as the one most likely to succeed.
The place he took us was the tomb of Wang Shaojun（王绍君）, a beautiful Chinese woman who was a commoner but agreed to marry the Mongol chief during the Han dynasty (about 2,000 years ago) to promote peaceful relations between the two peoples and end many years of bloodshed. Due to the success of her mission she was given a lavish burial by the Han dynasty government after her death. On the grounds of the tomb there was also a free live performance of Han era music that was both interesting and enjoyable. Later we visited a district with some Buddhist temples and all around them was a huge area of new construction in traditional architecture—maybe 3 or 4 bocks long and about 2 blocks wide—for shops to make cash off tourists. They were just finishing construction, so there were “for rent” signs for potential shop keepers, but the signs said you could only open a shop if it was for selling cultural kitsch along the themes of the neighborhood or food, of course. One of the temple complexes to the Bodhisattva Kuanyin was being completely rebuilt from the ground up by a company from Hangzhou (way on the other side of China) that specializes in such projects. However, the huge new main temple was being built in concrete, an incredible departure from any other temple restoration project I'd ever seen before anywhere, which is typically done piecemeal maximizing use of original materials by or under the supervision of local monks. I don't think there is going to be as much as a scrap of original material in any of the new structures. I'd love to know who was putting up the cash for this project. This is clearly an economic venture that has nothing to do with Buddhism.
Of the other two temples, one was in fact a rather peaceful place with its original structures intact. It has an inscription from Kangxi, the first Qing emperor, written around 1700 in Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan and Mongol script. It was interesting to see the scripts side by side. In front of one of the statues of Buddha I observed a woman in her 30s giggling slightly and doing a quick embarrassed kowtow (with her family standing sheepishly around) and then drop a 100 yuan note--the only one--into the offerings basket. That could be about10% of an average worker's monthly salary, so maybe it would be no laughing matter for some, though she was pretty well dressed, so the 100 yuan might not be more than she'd spend for a new skirt. She might just as well have been thanking the Buddha for her good fortune as asking for a favor. One might as well cover all one's bases—Pascal’s wager in modern China.
Since October 1st was the actual national day, the day of the proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the evening TV was full of appropriate programming—patriotic songs and sketches, etc. Two things of note were that a number of song-sketches gave average people high visibility, one in particular to the hard hat workers doing all the new high rise construction projects going up everywhere around the country. The other thing was the prominent role of the military, both in the performances and in the audience, which was panned frequently by the cameras. Various prizes were given out for artistic and cultural achievements and many of the recipients were in the military. Their acceptance speeches were impassioned declarations of their loyalty to the nation and willingness to sacrifice on its behalf.
As I knew before we got there, few Mongols live in Inner Mongolia anymore. It's about 85% Han Chinese nowadays, but in fact the Han Chinese have been engaged in a tug of war for an upper hand in Inner Mongolia for a couple of thousand years. After being there for a while one can see why.
As luck would have it, during our first days in town we stayed in a hotel that is just on the border of the Moslem and Mongolian districts of Hohot. I had no idea that there was such a huge Moslem presence in Hohot. Due to the fact that the economy is taking off, lots of Han Moslems, ethnic Uyghur Moslems and non-Moslem Han Chinese have come to Hohot from far west provinces like Gansu and Xinjiang. Wandering the back alleys in the Moslem district around 9 p.m., we tasted some snacks like hot roasted chestnuts, fried beef dumplings, wind dried beef, and, best of all, delicious greasy mutton roasted on a stick over hot coals with local spices that I could not identify but probably containing cumin. The kids selling it were working for a middle aged Xinjiang Uyghur fellow, but they were Han Chinese from the countryside of Gansu, the province next door, one of the poorest in China. The older one was maybe in his upper teens, but the younger kid looked barely fifteen. They said repeatedly that the place they come from is “very poor” and they looked the part with their quiet manner, dark rough faces and hands, worn down fingernails and brown teeth, all dead giveaways. “Very poor” in this area can mean things like minimal health care, marginal protein intake, limited education and maybe dirt floor houses—things that would make one want to take a chance on moving on and doing just about anything else. I kidded with their boss about how many thousand yuan (rmb) he was paying them per month. He answered with a loud laugh that they were getting a few hundred per month—less than $100 US—plus room and board. But they looked pretty well-fed and I suspect that was their primary motivation for being there.
Just after dark the worshippers in a local mosque were just finishing prayers; most of the people leaving the place on their bicycles were older though there were some younger ones too. All the women had their heads covered but not their faces. Nearby there was also a very large Moslem high school, and restaurants serving religiously appropriate menus were everywhere to be found in the district.
Hohot, a city of 1.4 million, is booming. Baotou, an hour and a half to the west, is the industrial center in Inner Mongolia with its mines and steel mills, but a good bit of the money from resource exploitation in Inner Mongolia seems to be finding its way into Hohot, the provincial capital. New construction and business hotels are everywhere. Tourism is the other big industry. Someone with a strong public relations/advertising background is doing lots of aggressive city planning in Hohot. In the Moslem district all the buildings on the main drag are done in a Mid-East décor of domes and minarets outlined in neon (which happily got turned off around 11 p.m.). Monday was the first day of National Day, celebrating the founding of the PRC and a 3-day national holiday for all workers. However, it was more like a huge city-wide Fourth of July sale at Walmart and a K Mart blue light special rolled into one because nearly every business was open, many of them having nothing to do with direct consumer sales to the throngs of people wandering the streets to shop and sample the street food. Given that there's so much money to be made everyday of the year, why would any fool want to take a day off?
A cab driver we hired to take us to one of the bigger historical sites a bit outside the city turned out to be an ethnic Mongol, but he and his parents were all born in the city in Hohot. I asked him about Mongol-Han relations and he said that they were good. He took a little light razzing in the army (he volunteered for 3 years) about being a mutton eater, but said he never had any problems at all. He recounted his experience in a bilingual Mongolian-Chinese program in high school that he was put into due to his ethnic heritage, but he often skipped the Mongolian language classes because knowing Mongolian wasn't going to do him any good in the future. He didn't grow up speaking the Mongolian at home either. Virtually all shop titles in Hohot are in Mongolian script as well as Chinese characters, but this fellow said that the quality of the Mongolian translations was terrible, probably as bad, he guessed, as the English one sees on signs and T-shirts. He mentioned almost in passing that he has a brother who's studying for a Ph.D. in Japan. This could be testimony of equality of opportunity or just as likely that the family is investing in this brother as the one most likely to succeed.
The place he took us was the tomb of Wang Shaojun（王绍君）, a beautiful Chinese woman who was a commoner but agreed to marry the Mongol chief during the Han dynasty (about 2,000 years ago) to promote peaceful relations between the two peoples and end many years of bloodshed. Due to the success of her mission she was given a lavish burial by the Han dynasty government after her death. On the grounds of the tomb there was also a free live performance of Han era music that was both interesting and enjoyable. Later we visited a district with some Buddhist temples and all around them was a huge area of new construction in traditional architecture—maybe 3 or 4 bocks long and about 2 blocks wide—for shops to make cash off tourists. They were just finishing construction, so there were “for rent” signs for potential shop keepers, but the signs said you could only open a shop if it was for selling cultural kitsch along the themes of the neighborhood or food, of course. One of the temple complexes to the Bodhisattva Kuanyin was being completely rebuilt from the ground up by a company from Hangzhou (way on the other side of China) that specializes in such projects. However, the huge new main temple was being built in concrete, an incredible departure from any other temple restoration project I'd ever seen before anywhere, which is typically done piecemeal maximizing use of original materials by or under the supervision of local monks. I don't think there is going to be as much as a scrap of original material in any of the new structures. I'd love to know who was putting up the cash for this project. This is clearly an economic venture that has nothing to do with Buddhism.
Of the other two temples, one was in fact a rather peaceful place with its original structures intact. It has an inscription from Kangxi, the first Qing emperor, written around 1700 in Chinese, Manchu, Tibetan and Mongol script. It was interesting to see the scripts side by side. In front of one of the statues of Buddha I observed a woman in her 30s giggling slightly and doing a quick embarrassed kowtow (with her family standing sheepishly around) and then drop a 100 yuan note--the only one--into the offerings basket. That could be about10% of an average worker's monthly salary, so maybe it would be no laughing matter for some, though she was pretty well dressed, so the 100 yuan might not be more than she'd spend for a new skirt. She might just as well have been thanking the Buddha for her good fortune as asking for a favor. One might as well cover all one's bases—Pascal’s wager in modern China.
Since October 1st was the actual national day, the day of the proclamation of the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the evening TV was full of appropriate programming—patriotic songs and sketches, etc. Two things of note were that a number of song-sketches gave average people high visibility, one in particular to the hard hat workers doing all the new high rise construction projects going up everywhere around the country. The other thing was the prominent role of the military, both in the performances and in the audience, which was panned frequently by the cameras. Various prizes were given out for artistic and cultural achievements and many of the recipients were in the military. Their acceptance speeches were impassioned declarations of their loyalty to the nation and willingness to sacrifice on its behalf.
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