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