The Servants of Hong Kong
One can hardly be in Hong Kong very long at all, especially in middle class residential neighborhoods, without noticing the very large number of women who are obviously not Chinese or Western doing everything from shopping to walking well manicured dogs to pushing baby carriages with Chinese or Western children in them. They are domestic servants, mostly from the Philippines, but there is a sizeable number from Indonesia as well. Most are younger women from rural areas but there are some middle aged ones as well. The Philippine women speak Engish and can take their orders in English from native speakers or from professional Chinese, but there is a sizeable number who speak Chinese (both Cantonese and putonghua) to serve the Chinese monolinguals as well.
They work six days per week but on Sundays, their day off, they are everywhere—out shopping in the cheaper street markets, meeting with friends downtown, taking pictures, having picnics on the hillsides, or just strutting around in their Sunday finest. They all have cell phones and are constantly in touch with their friends and getting together with different groups from early on Sunday morning until they head back late on Sunday night for another week of work. On Sundays especially, they seem to talk a mile a minute. It felt this way to me possibly because I don't know a word in their langauges but maybe because they have spent the last 6 days listening to people telling them what to do and can now finally talk freely to peers. Their presence adds a new energtic cosmopolitan dimension to Hong Kong. There have always been domestic servants in Hong Kong but they were typically older Chinese woman who were invisible in the majority populace.
The servants are all live-in and they typically have a tiny room of their own to sleep in or go to when not on duty, which is not very often. Looking out of the window where we were staying, I could see into a kitchen in another wing of the same building (about 50 feet away) and noticed a servant's bed hanging about 3 feet off the ceiling in a corner of the kitchen. Needless to say these young women are not uncomely and having them at home all the time might put some stress and temptation into some marriages. Abuse is probably a more likely outcome than wrecked marriages, but this is only conjecture on my part. In Cantonese the usual term for the Philippine women is 宾妹, the first character of which is from the transliteration of 'Philippine' and the second of which means 'girl' but in a somewhat condescending way in this context. It's kind of like calling a foreigner a laowai on the mainland. It's not the worst, but not exactly respectful. On Sundays, I've seen middle aged Philippinas handing out business cards which looked like they might have hotline numbers. Many others, however, were just trying to sell bargain airfares back to Manila.
I'm surprised at the large number of people who are able to afford domestic servants. Of some people we saw—a technical college teacher, a legal worker, a social work couple—all had servants. A decent HK salary is about 20,000 HK dollars per month and a live-in servant might cost 4-5000 HK dollars per month in addition to food and a little room or corner to sleep in. Thus, for a 2-income couple it's not much of a stretch and covers child care, pet care, cooking, dish washing, shopping, house cleaning, laundry, etc. Quite a bargain. Clearly, the servants themselves must consider it worthwhile or at least better than other options back home because they are there in HK in the tens of thousands. Five to six hundred US dollars per month is not very much, but remitting half of it to a relative in a rural village could mean a lot. The comparison to Mexicans in North America is obvious.
In the house where we were staying we were waited on by an Indonesian woman in her early 30s who gets about 4000 HK dollars per month. She saves her money and sends it home to buy farm land and a house for her parents. She doesn't go out even on Sundays, seems to have only the barest necessities for clothes, and goes home only once every one to three years for a week or two. She's extremely polite, calling everyone Sir or Miss. She does things you don't ask her to do—I never asked her to do anything—like making coffee, peeling fruit, washing clothes, etc. Her biggest pleasure seems to be staying up late watching the house TV, which she is permitted to do, and sleeping in late when possible. She speaks good everyday Cantonese, which she learned from TV. She is also said to speak putonghua and basic English. She graduated from senior high school but said there was no point in studying further since there were no good jobs to be had in any case.
I explained to her that I didn't like the idea of servants and it was not necessary to treat me formally or do things for me since I wasn't her boss, but she said that she was a maid and this was her station in life. Anyway, she probably knew we would give her some extra money for her trouble, which we did. She refused to go out to dinner with us probably because she feared that the person who pays her salary would disapprove. (It's a very complicated family situation in which the friend we were staying with and where the servant works is not the one who pays the servant's salary.) She gets somewhat overworked in the sense that besides the place where she lives and works she occasionally gets dragged over to the employer's sister's place to do cleaning there too.
The whole idea of servants is repulsive to me, but perhaps one can say that being a domestic gives this person the chance to develop herself and save some cash, travel, and learn a language. After all, I did essentially the same thing with teaching English as a second langauge—not my first career choice by any means and one that opened me to heavier work loads, lower salaries and no job security, but got me off the block. She said if she gets enough land she'll have people farm it and take 50% of their crops. Thus, she in turn will become an exploiter after 13 years to date of being exploited. As yet she has no idea or plan as to when she can return home. She does not appear the least bitter or angry about her station in life. On the contrary, she always comes across as very cheerful.
She recognized that people in Indonesia have a negative view of Chinese because of the economic power of the overseas Chinese there and in most of Southeast Asia. An interesting and not unexpected aside is that she spoke well of the former independence leader Sukarno but dislikes the deposed and corrupt Suharto. I would presume that to be a common opinion among the dispossed majority of the country.
From the window of this flat I saw servants in other flats constantly washing windows, drapes, even the rims of flower pots and other stupid make-work projects. In return they get Sundays off and get to descend on flea markets and wear their finest right along with their young Chinese and Western counteparts. This is their gift from international capitalism, the global economy. Abuse—beyond what's totally legal—must exist, but to hear them laugh, chatter and picnic on a Sunday afternoon you would never know it. Is this what they came for? Are they content? Hopeful? It's easy enough for Tom Friedman to point to them and say yes. He's a busy and important man and may well have a servant too.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Culture Shock in Hong Kong
Culture Shock in Hong Kong
At the doorstep of Hong Kong is Shenzhen, the city developed by Deng Xiaoping to be the mainland's version of Hong Kong. Now the whole area is pretty much one seamless web of business and development. Getting across from one side to the other still requires paper work and passport stamping for foreigners but for HK residents the process is very easy. Needless to say the many comings and goings are very beneficial, that is, economically profitable, particularly for the mainland side as HK shoppers and investors stream into Shenzhen for lower prices on goods and labor.
An interesting thing about Shenzhen is that all the workers at the airport and along the bus route to Hong Kong spoke very nice putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) and were very disciplined about keeping it up even among themselves though Cantonese was surely their native dialect. The reasons might have been the rather large number of non-Cantonese speaking mainlanders getting off the planes and/or strict enforcement by their supervisors. The only recalcitrant one was the bus driver, a young guy in his 20s. When I asked him in putonghua how long it would be before the bus left he answered "20 mintues" in Cantonese. Only after the bus was under way did one of the woman workers switch to Cantonese to talk to him. This dialect switching is a very interesting linguistic phenomenon and it remains to be seen if it contributes to a coexistence of equality between the dialects or the eventual erosion of the regional dialects.
My first culture shock came when we were heading up to where we would stay with friends on better heeled Robinson Road: White people. Some of them even had blond hair. Since the end of August of last year I had seen a total of two white people in all my time in Xinxiang. Oh, I forgot I saw one one the street in Hohot in Inner Mongolia too. It's like sperm whales or lynx. You know they exist and you know people have seen them, but you don't expect to see one yourself. It's the same thing that produces that look on the faces of rural people when I bicycle in the countryside. Somehow I never expected this feeling and it even took me a while to realize what it was that I was disoriented about.
It has been ten years since I was in Hong Kong last and 30 years since I first lived there. In many ways nothing has changed. HK is still a place where you make money and go out to eat. Not that much else happens there. Yet there are some changes. On a TV program giving out awards to new young vocal artists, there were three MCs, 2 of whom spoke Cantonese and one who spoke putonghua. Of the vocalist winners, maybe 2 or 3 of the 4 sang putonghua songs instead of Cantonese songs. Government workers are getting "encouragement" to learn putonghua but it does not seem that they are resisting. It's just harder for them because they didn't grow up with both as the airport workers did. On the subway trains and in other public locations announcements are now made in putonghua as well as Cantonese.
Housing in HK is about the same as in previous years except higher—both in price and the number of storeys above the ground. More and more high rise office and residential buildings are replacing older smaller ones, but this is a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. Increased housing costs leave moderate income people in a difficult situation, an international phenomenon. Living space is very limited. If one looks out of a window the only thing to see is the walls and windows of the next building. To see sky one has to look pretty much straight up. To be sure, if one goes high enough up on the mountain, where the wealthiest live, the size and luxury of the flats grow and the angle for seeing sky gets cut down, but these are my assumptions as I have never been in such places. Even in front of the new building next to where I was there was an outdoor swimming pool about 30' x 60' a full 4 or 5 floors off the ground.
There's now an escalator that goes up and down the mountain side from the mid-levels to the central district of downtown HK. It is reversible and goes uphill most of the day but downhill from 8 to 10 a.m. when one can see all the suits and briefcases and spiked high heels flying past on the left with earphones and cell phones buzzing even before they make it to the office—buy, sell, move, deliver. Along the escalator a new neighborhood catering to foreigners and their Chinese counterparts has sprung up. Mostly there are bars but also coffee shops, health food restaurants, taco shops, fast food places, a huge health center and, interestingly, lots of places to buy wine—a sure sign of a full-scale yuppie invasion. In fact, it seemed to me that there are more white foreigners in HK now, but maybe I just never saw such places before. From overhearing conversations, I felt that there were still lots of Brits and a larger number of Australians but relatively few Americans. I'm told that overall the population of HK has increased and it certainly seems to be the case. Except for fewer Indians, HK looked overall to be more cosmopolitan than before, but this impressioin too might just have been due to my relative isolation in the mainland hinterland for nearly 5 months
One can still tourists wandering around HK because it remains a shopping mecca even though there's not much else to see or do except eat. On the tram I sat opposite a young French speaking couple. Each one had a canvass bag with "Beijing" on it. Hers was pink and his was blue, and each had a striped shirt to match the bag. He had blue canvass loafers too, but hers, mon Dieu, had gold trim instead of pink!
There are still working class neighborhoods that are more or less similar to those of past times, where one sees few if any servants (more on this important phenomenon later) or foreigners. No busy businessy foreigners or overdressed women or yuppie watering holes, just people who work for a living. Working class people, though certainly as many as before, are more hidden these days in post-industrial HK. However, when one stops to think of the legions of cooks, vegetable choppers, waitstaff, drivers, cleaners, etc., there can't be fewer. In the old neighborhood we had 芝麻雾 'sesame mist' a kind of sweet black thick liquid made of sesame seed. We used to go there 30 years ago, and it was still busy with pretty much the same kind of local people. At the place where one pays on the way out, I asked this old guy taking money if he was there 30 years ago, the last time I was probably there. It took a few seconds for him answer no. Then he repeated, "30 years!?" Indeed.
We had dinner with a 30-something couple who have a child in the first grade. He brought his homework with him to the restaurant because he had a big important exam the next day. During the meal his father stopped eating occasionally to quiz him. It was pretty impressive/scary to see what he had to know in terms of Chinese characters at that age. Furthermore, he was only in an average school, not the most high-pressure accelerated place he could have been in. Indeed, his father said he's somewhat concerned because his son doesn't care much for study and is nearly at the bottom of his class. Because his father got a Ph.D. in the US and speaks English fluently, this little 8-year old also speaks English quite well. In one of the mid-level parks where I went out for a walk and in some other locations, I overheard parents who were obviously not native speakers of English speak only English to their very young children. This education situation bears semblance to that of the mainland, where "stuffing the duck" （填鸭）education is also the norm. Though US education is gratefully different in this regard, it suffers from other problems and just as successfully avoids the teaching of critical thinking by other means. The common factor in all these places is the separate educational paths for children of the priviliged and everyone else.
While we were in HK, a demonstration organized by the HK "democracy movement" took place though I knew or heard nothing about it until seeing it reported in the newspaper the next day. According to the report about 6,000 people turned out though organizers claimed the number was over 20,000. In any case, it was down considerably from 250,000 in December of 2005 when the larger numbers turned out to oppose the mainland's decisions about the election of the territory's chief executive and legislature in 2007 and 2008 respectively. The current Basic Law gives the mainland an upper hand in determining HK policy because of its power to appoint the chief executive and enough of the legislators to have its way. Thus, the demonstrators' main demand is for "real universal suffarage," not just limited input from those neighborhood legislators who are elected democratically but constitute only a minority.
I've always found it interesting that while HK was totally a British colony with a London-appointed absolute power governor, there was never a peep from the English-speaking HK elite. Of course, that's probably due to the fact that this elite had far more in common with the British imperialists than with HK workers and average citizens. Now they are torn because they want to maintan their elite status and wealth, the source of which is now autocratic Beijing, not the former "democratic" albeit imperialist Britain, but they are unsure as to how to accomplish this without looking too much like they are the willing todies of Beijing. It's the appearance of the thing that troubles them, not the reality. It's maybe not so different from the US corporate elite flip-flopping between Republicans and Democrats. Expediency overrules all other considerations. The fact that public support for the movement has dwindled also reflects the absence of fear of economic change or rather the continuity of the economic status quo since 1997, when Beijing first took over.
What excited me about living in HK in my 20s would very quickly tire me now—too much running around and very little living space. When I think of culture shock potential, I think of my students from the countryside of Henan who have had serious problems adjusting from village life to even a medium sized city like Xinxiang in the hintherland of China. Hong Kong would overwhelm them--not only the pace of life and the din of traffic but also things like the ads with women in scanty lacey underwear plastered 3-storeys high. It would be sensory overload to dangerous proportions. I don't know how they would manage, but I suppose given time, aggressive advertising and the profit motive all things can be accomplished.
At the doorstep of Hong Kong is Shenzhen, the city developed by Deng Xiaoping to be the mainland's version of Hong Kong. Now the whole area is pretty much one seamless web of business and development. Getting across from one side to the other still requires paper work and passport stamping for foreigners but for HK residents the process is very easy. Needless to say the many comings and goings are very beneficial, that is, economically profitable, particularly for the mainland side as HK shoppers and investors stream into Shenzhen for lower prices on goods and labor.
An interesting thing about Shenzhen is that all the workers at the airport and along the bus route to Hong Kong spoke very nice putonghua (Mandarin Chinese) and were very disciplined about keeping it up even among themselves though Cantonese was surely their native dialect. The reasons might have been the rather large number of non-Cantonese speaking mainlanders getting off the planes and/or strict enforcement by their supervisors. The only recalcitrant one was the bus driver, a young guy in his 20s. When I asked him in putonghua how long it would be before the bus left he answered "20 mintues" in Cantonese. Only after the bus was under way did one of the woman workers switch to Cantonese to talk to him. This dialect switching is a very interesting linguistic phenomenon and it remains to be seen if it contributes to a coexistence of equality between the dialects or the eventual erosion of the regional dialects.
My first culture shock came when we were heading up to where we would stay with friends on better heeled Robinson Road: White people. Some of them even had blond hair. Since the end of August of last year I had seen a total of two white people in all my time in Xinxiang. Oh, I forgot I saw one one the street in Hohot in Inner Mongolia too. It's like sperm whales or lynx. You know they exist and you know people have seen them, but you don't expect to see one yourself. It's the same thing that produces that look on the faces of rural people when I bicycle in the countryside. Somehow I never expected this feeling and it even took me a while to realize what it was that I was disoriented about.
It has been ten years since I was in Hong Kong last and 30 years since I first lived there. In many ways nothing has changed. HK is still a place where you make money and go out to eat. Not that much else happens there. Yet there are some changes. On a TV program giving out awards to new young vocal artists, there were three MCs, 2 of whom spoke Cantonese and one who spoke putonghua. Of the vocalist winners, maybe 2 or 3 of the 4 sang putonghua songs instead of Cantonese songs. Government workers are getting "encouragement" to learn putonghua but it does not seem that they are resisting. It's just harder for them because they didn't grow up with both as the airport workers did. On the subway trains and in other public locations announcements are now made in putonghua as well as Cantonese.
Housing in HK is about the same as in previous years except higher—both in price and the number of storeys above the ground. More and more high rise office and residential buildings are replacing older smaller ones, but this is a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. Increased housing costs leave moderate income people in a difficult situation, an international phenomenon. Living space is very limited. If one looks out of a window the only thing to see is the walls and windows of the next building. To see sky one has to look pretty much straight up. To be sure, if one goes high enough up on the mountain, where the wealthiest live, the size and luxury of the flats grow and the angle for seeing sky gets cut down, but these are my assumptions as I have never been in such places. Even in front of the new building next to where I was there was an outdoor swimming pool about 30' x 60' a full 4 or 5 floors off the ground.
There's now an escalator that goes up and down the mountain side from the mid-levels to the central district of downtown HK. It is reversible and goes uphill most of the day but downhill from 8 to 10 a.m. when one can see all the suits and briefcases and spiked high heels flying past on the left with earphones and cell phones buzzing even before they make it to the office—buy, sell, move, deliver. Along the escalator a new neighborhood catering to foreigners and their Chinese counterparts has sprung up. Mostly there are bars but also coffee shops, health food restaurants, taco shops, fast food places, a huge health center and, interestingly, lots of places to buy wine—a sure sign of a full-scale yuppie invasion. In fact, it seemed to me that there are more white foreigners in HK now, but maybe I just never saw such places before. From overhearing conversations, I felt that there were still lots of Brits and a larger number of Australians but relatively few Americans. I'm told that overall the population of HK has increased and it certainly seems to be the case. Except for fewer Indians, HK looked overall to be more cosmopolitan than before, but this impressioin too might just have been due to my relative isolation in the mainland hinterland for nearly 5 months
One can still tourists wandering around HK because it remains a shopping mecca even though there's not much else to see or do except eat. On the tram I sat opposite a young French speaking couple. Each one had a canvass bag with "Beijing" on it. Hers was pink and his was blue, and each had a striped shirt to match the bag. He had blue canvass loafers too, but hers, mon Dieu, had gold trim instead of pink!
There are still working class neighborhoods that are more or less similar to those of past times, where one sees few if any servants (more on this important phenomenon later) or foreigners. No busy businessy foreigners or overdressed women or yuppie watering holes, just people who work for a living. Working class people, though certainly as many as before, are more hidden these days in post-industrial HK. However, when one stops to think of the legions of cooks, vegetable choppers, waitstaff, drivers, cleaners, etc., there can't be fewer. In the old neighborhood we had 芝麻雾 'sesame mist' a kind of sweet black thick liquid made of sesame seed. We used to go there 30 years ago, and it was still busy with pretty much the same kind of local people. At the place where one pays on the way out, I asked this old guy taking money if he was there 30 years ago, the last time I was probably there. It took a few seconds for him answer no. Then he repeated, "30 years!?" Indeed.
We had dinner with a 30-something couple who have a child in the first grade. He brought his homework with him to the restaurant because he had a big important exam the next day. During the meal his father stopped eating occasionally to quiz him. It was pretty impressive/scary to see what he had to know in terms of Chinese characters at that age. Furthermore, he was only in an average school, not the most high-pressure accelerated place he could have been in. Indeed, his father said he's somewhat concerned because his son doesn't care much for study and is nearly at the bottom of his class. Because his father got a Ph.D. in the US and speaks English fluently, this little 8-year old also speaks English quite well. In one of the mid-level parks where I went out for a walk and in some other locations, I overheard parents who were obviously not native speakers of English speak only English to their very young children. This education situation bears semblance to that of the mainland, where "stuffing the duck" （填鸭）education is also the norm. Though US education is gratefully different in this regard, it suffers from other problems and just as successfully avoids the teaching of critical thinking by other means. The common factor in all these places is the separate educational paths for children of the priviliged and everyone else.
While we were in HK, a demonstration organized by the HK "democracy movement" took place though I knew or heard nothing about it until seeing it reported in the newspaper the next day. According to the report about 6,000 people turned out though organizers claimed the number was over 20,000. In any case, it was down considerably from 250,000 in December of 2005 when the larger numbers turned out to oppose the mainland's decisions about the election of the territory's chief executive and legislature in 2007 and 2008 respectively. The current Basic Law gives the mainland an upper hand in determining HK policy because of its power to appoint the chief executive and enough of the legislators to have its way. Thus, the demonstrators' main demand is for "real universal suffarage," not just limited input from those neighborhood legislators who are elected democratically but constitute only a minority.
I've always found it interesting that while HK was totally a British colony with a London-appointed absolute power governor, there was never a peep from the English-speaking HK elite. Of course, that's probably due to the fact that this elite had far more in common with the British imperialists than with HK workers and average citizens. Now they are torn because they want to maintan their elite status and wealth, the source of which is now autocratic Beijing, not the former "democratic" albeit imperialist Britain, but they are unsure as to how to accomplish this without looking too much like they are the willing todies of Beijing. It's the appearance of the thing that troubles them, not the reality. It's maybe not so different from the US corporate elite flip-flopping between Republicans and Democrats. Expediency overrules all other considerations. The fact that public support for the movement has dwindled also reflects the absence of fear of economic change or rather the continuity of the economic status quo since 1997, when Beijing first took over.
What excited me about living in HK in my 20s would very quickly tire me now—too much running around and very little living space. When I think of culture shock potential, I think of my students from the countryside of Henan who have had serious problems adjusting from village life to even a medium sized city like Xinxiang in the hintherland of China. Hong Kong would overwhelm them--not only the pace of life and the din of traffic but also things like the ads with women in scanty lacey underwear plastered 3-storeys high. It would be sensory overload to dangerous proportions. I don't know how they would manage, but I suppose given time, aggressive advertising and the profit motive all things can be accomplished.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
The PLA and the CCP
The PLA and the CCP
The presence of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is very noticeable pretty much wherever one wanders not only on the street but also in the media.
In the neighborhood not so far from campus I saw a big character poster saying that one enlistment in the army brings glory to the whole family. China's army, like that of the US, is now an all-volunteer army, but also as in the US the majority of recruits are people whose economic opportunities are rather limited and no one denies this. Recently passing through Beijing, I saw a smiling young recruit wearing his fatigues and backpack having his picture taken by one of his army buddies in front of the main railroad station, a famous Beijing landmark. He's probably a kid from the countryside escaping his life of boredom not unlike a counterpart in the US from a small town in Mississippi. There aren't the aggressive glitzy TV and newspaper ads for enlistment as there are in the US or huge enlistment bonuses, but due to the ubiquitous and positive presence of the military it's an obvious option. In the local paper last fall there was an article about the military registration procedure. All 18-year olds must register at special locations and have their physical fitness analyzed and categorized. They don't just go to the post office and fill out a form. Seventeen-year olds can join but they have to get an ok from relatives or guardians.
Soldiers are often seen on the street in uniform, much more than in the US even though one sees more US soldiers in uniform now than during the Vietnam war. Many small PLA detatchments and offices are located in cities and scattered close to populations, so their non-armed presence is obvious but not resented. I've detected no negativity whatsoever toward the military as a result of its role on "June 4th" (the 1989 Tiananmen shootings). Quite the contrary. There's the idea that the army defends the nation but doesn't invade or harm others. This positive attitude exists across generations. Of course, there's plenty of positive reinforcement on TV, mostly about the PLA role in the anti-Japanese war. Also, on newsstands there's a variety of newspapers and magazines about the Chinese armed forces and their military equipment and that of other countries. This is another Chinese-US similarity. Most everywhere in the world it seems there's something that gets people cranked up about high tech, sleek jet fighters, missles and navy ships. There are also military surplus stores where people can buy fatigues and military overcoats and army equipment, and one sees civilians on the street wearing such stuff about as much as in the US.
Freshmen students at the university undergo a pretty intense one-month military training program on campus and classes begin one month late for them. They get up early, run around in fatigues, march and sing patriotic songs. I don't think that they train with weapons or in the field, so this experience is probably of limited military value, but it certainly adds to patriotic fervor and solidarity with the army.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also everywhere but less obvious to the uninitiated. Every unit of work or organization has a party secretary (书记) whose duty is to implement party policy at the local level. I have gone to art and Chinese language department dinner parties and there was the department party secretary. I was riding around on my bicycle and met some people in a neighborhood where an amateur performance of a Chinese opera was being given and before long someone introduced me to the neighborhood party secretary. The number one person in the university is not the university president but the party secretary, and he takes his lunch almost daily in the foreign student/teacher cafeteria in a separate room next to ours with a nice selection of dishes for just one person. Just as you can't be a univeristy president in the US without cozying up to and probably joining the Chamber of Commerce, you can't be a high official in the university or anywhere without at least embracing the party and probably joining it.
The link to the campus plan for implementing the 17th National Party Congress initiatives is on the university home page and on bulletin boards around campus. There are study sessions on it at all levels of the university and students study it and take exams on it. I saw their Marxism study book for the final exam. It was maybe 100 pages of nothing but questions and multiple choice answers that they will have to regurgitate. Some students are upset about having to do this at all, but others are interested in and positive about Marxism and politics but turned off by the predigested way in which it's presented. On the desk of one my students I also saw a book on how to become a party member. Join it or not, you have to deal with it. Once at a dinner party someone was chatting up a friend about Buddhism, but the friend said that he was a party member so he could only be a Buddhist in his heart.
Just like the Republicrats in the US, the CCP metes out favors to friends, keeps lids on kettles and stamps out fires. To be sure, as among politicians in the US, there are serious hard-working professional people who are trying to do their best for the most within the system. Certainly, not everyone is on the take. Just as it's easier to be an honest sincere city council member, it's easier to be a sincere and effective local CCP official. However, in either system as one tries to move up the ladder of power to affect policy, the contradictions, compromises and real sources of power quickly appear.
The amount of personal freedom in the US is great though for the most part expressed at the mall, with one's internet mouse, or in front of one's cable TV. However, the problems of the US are not so much personal as social, and US consumer capitalism is not interested in addressing them. Due to its incredible size and diversity (the latter just as great as that of the US even though China does not have the racial diversity of the US), China has to keep a lot more balls in the air and lots of people seem very willing to accept the idea that a powerful single party government that can move fast when it decides something is the best way to go. This attitude was expressed to me by a graduate student in regard to the water shortage and the dropping of the water table in the north. Yes, he recognized that it's a very serious problem but is confident it will be addressed and acted on before it becomes critical. Indeed, part of an eventual south-north waterway, equivalent to moving Lake Superior water to Oklahoma, has already been started.
With impressive economic development, personal freedoms of the kind now enjoyed in the US have grown steadily in China, so many Chinese feel they are having their cake and eating it too. For the time being, the chief butcher, baker and candlestick maker are all members of the CCP.
The presence of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) is very noticeable pretty much wherever one wanders not only on the street but also in the media.
In the neighborhood not so far from campus I saw a big character poster saying that one enlistment in the army brings glory to the whole family. China's army, like that of the US, is now an all-volunteer army, but also as in the US the majority of recruits are people whose economic opportunities are rather limited and no one denies this. Recently passing through Beijing, I saw a smiling young recruit wearing his fatigues and backpack having his picture taken by one of his army buddies in front of the main railroad station, a famous Beijing landmark. He's probably a kid from the countryside escaping his life of boredom not unlike a counterpart in the US from a small town in Mississippi. There aren't the aggressive glitzy TV and newspaper ads for enlistment as there are in the US or huge enlistment bonuses, but due to the ubiquitous and positive presence of the military it's an obvious option. In the local paper last fall there was an article about the military registration procedure. All 18-year olds must register at special locations and have their physical fitness analyzed and categorized. They don't just go to the post office and fill out a form. Seventeen-year olds can join but they have to get an ok from relatives or guardians.
Soldiers are often seen on the street in uniform, much more than in the US even though one sees more US soldiers in uniform now than during the Vietnam war. Many small PLA detatchments and offices are located in cities and scattered close to populations, so their non-armed presence is obvious but not resented. I've detected no negativity whatsoever toward the military as a result of its role on "June 4th" (the 1989 Tiananmen shootings). Quite the contrary. There's the idea that the army defends the nation but doesn't invade or harm others. This positive attitude exists across generations. Of course, there's plenty of positive reinforcement on TV, mostly about the PLA role in the anti-Japanese war. Also, on newsstands there's a variety of newspapers and magazines about the Chinese armed forces and their military equipment and that of other countries. This is another Chinese-US similarity. Most everywhere in the world it seems there's something that gets people cranked up about high tech, sleek jet fighters, missles and navy ships. There are also military surplus stores where people can buy fatigues and military overcoats and army equipment, and one sees civilians on the street wearing such stuff about as much as in the US.
Freshmen students at the university undergo a pretty intense one-month military training program on campus and classes begin one month late for them. They get up early, run around in fatigues, march and sing patriotic songs. I don't think that they train with weapons or in the field, so this experience is probably of limited military value, but it certainly adds to patriotic fervor and solidarity with the army.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also everywhere but less obvious to the uninitiated. Every unit of work or organization has a party secretary (书记) whose duty is to implement party policy at the local level. I have gone to art and Chinese language department dinner parties and there was the department party secretary. I was riding around on my bicycle and met some people in a neighborhood where an amateur performance of a Chinese opera was being given and before long someone introduced me to the neighborhood party secretary. The number one person in the university is not the university president but the party secretary, and he takes his lunch almost daily in the foreign student/teacher cafeteria in a separate room next to ours with a nice selection of dishes for just one person. Just as you can't be a univeristy president in the US without cozying up to and probably joining the Chamber of Commerce, you can't be a high official in the university or anywhere without at least embracing the party and probably joining it.
The link to the campus plan for implementing the 17th National Party Congress initiatives is on the university home page and on bulletin boards around campus. There are study sessions on it at all levels of the university and students study it and take exams on it. I saw their Marxism study book for the final exam. It was maybe 100 pages of nothing but questions and multiple choice answers that they will have to regurgitate. Some students are upset about having to do this at all, but others are interested in and positive about Marxism and politics but turned off by the predigested way in which it's presented. On the desk of one my students I also saw a book on how to become a party member. Join it or not, you have to deal with it. Once at a dinner party someone was chatting up a friend about Buddhism, but the friend said that he was a party member so he could only be a Buddhist in his heart.
Just like the Republicrats in the US, the CCP metes out favors to friends, keeps lids on kettles and stamps out fires. To be sure, as among politicians in the US, there are serious hard-working professional people who are trying to do their best for the most within the system. Certainly, not everyone is on the take. Just as it's easier to be an honest sincere city council member, it's easier to be a sincere and effective local CCP official. However, in either system as one tries to move up the ladder of power to affect policy, the contradictions, compromises and real sources of power quickly appear.
The amount of personal freedom in the US is great though for the most part expressed at the mall, with one's internet mouse, or in front of one's cable TV. However, the problems of the US are not so much personal as social, and US consumer capitalism is not interested in addressing them. Due to its incredible size and diversity (the latter just as great as that of the US even though China does not have the racial diversity of the US), China has to keep a lot more balls in the air and lots of people seem very willing to accept the idea that a powerful single party government that can move fast when it decides something is the best way to go. This attitude was expressed to me by a graduate student in regard to the water shortage and the dropping of the water table in the north. Yes, he recognized that it's a very serious problem but is confident it will be addressed and acted on before it becomes critical. Indeed, part of an eventual south-north waterway, equivalent to moving Lake Superior water to Oklahoma, has already been started.
With impressive economic development, personal freedoms of the kind now enjoyed in the US have grown steadily in China, so many Chinese feel they are having their cake and eating it too. For the time being, the chief butcher, baker and candlestick maker are all members of the CCP.
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