Reflections on Some Environmental Issues
All told, Xinxiang, a city of about 600,000, seems to have somewhat cleaner air than when I was first here in 2001 though the bad air then may have been due to the spring burning of the winter wheat stubble. Now there are signs all over the countryside saying that such burning is prohibited and will be fined. I have seen this directive disregarded on a small scale, but the real test will come this spring after the winter wheat harvest when it's traditional to burn the stubble before turning over the soil. I can clearly recall in May of 2001 being able to look directly at the sun in the middle of the day and thinking that this was not a good thing.
The foreign affairs director said last week that the heat in his apartment building has not been turned on because the local government refused to allow the coal burning boiler to be used due to failure to meet pollution standards. In the seven-storey building where most of my classes are, they have yet to turn on the heat, but they are likely just saving money. In another classroom building the heat is on but not in the brand new art building. We have had heat in our apartment since November 15th, but I have heard no rumor that any of this variability has to do with pollution standards.
One sees very few pollution creating vehicles. Some taxis are pretty creaky, but I do not see any of them belching out black exhaust since they would be pretty easy prey to be stopped and fined by the police. (I would say extorted, but this is not Chicago.) There are plenty of public busses and vast majority of vehicles are electric bikes or bicycles rather than cars. Motorcycles are still common enough, but in terms of noise and exhaust pollution they seem well regulated.
However, even given the above, I can almost never see Taihang Mountain (太行山) though it is only about 4 miles from here, an hour or so away on my bike. I know what direction it's in, so if I want to go there I can just head north into the dusty smog and eventually it will appear. Anyway, it's a bit of a mystery where the smog comes from and why it varies so much from day to day. Surely the wind is a factor, but I've yet to see a clear pattern. There are two huge coal burning power plants right near the mountains, and I've bicycled right up to them, one of which looks very new, but I don't see the stacks putting out serious amounts of smoke. Within walking distance of school there are a few small coal yards where they produce these perforated cylinders of pressed coal that go into stoves in individual homes and I have seen them stacked up on the ledges of older flats, so some few people must still have permission to use them. Well, it's probably the usual stuff one would see anywhere. The little fish get caught and the big ones get away. The only thing I really know about these big fish is that they are somewhere upwind.
I can see very little evidence of any organized recycling effort. I do see older folks with 3-wheelers, who collect things like cardboard and plastic bottles, so they must take them somewhere. Also, I've seen some really down and out types going through the trash barrels on the street looking for plastic bottles for the most part. Virtually nothing is canned in aluminum or other metal cans, and just about the only thing that gets put into glass bottles is, thankfully, beer. Everything else is in plastic bottles, which in theory are recyclable.
A huge issue is plastic bags. They are everywhere. When you go to the store they put bags into bags and if you say anything they look at you as if there must be a language issue because you could not possibly be saying that you don't want your things inside of 3 bags. Plastic litter is one of the most noticeable differences from 20 years ago. In the early 90s just outside of Shenyang I once saw a man plowing a small field with a donkey, but there was so many plastic bags littering the soil that it seemed he was either growing or harvesting plastic bags instead of crops. I wish I'd had a camera to record this old to modern transition. Even the woman here who takes care of the compound and does some light cleaning and who once voiced her concern over environmental issues asked me if I wanted her to throw out my accumulated beer bottles. I said that I'd take them out myself for the 一毛钱 refund, a little more than a penny US, but not for the money but just to get them recycled. This seemed both to surprise and impress her.
I've already noted the terrible condition of the river that runs through town and passes near campus. Just walking in the neighborhood I can see drains in any number of places discharging waste water of various shades of tan and sickly green into the river. Some of the drains surely come from the campus. The river typically varies somewhat in color from dark grey to virtually black though on just one single day after a rain it was briefly a somewhat not totally unnatural muddy color. I plan to get some pictures one of these days. Even students have remarked that in their 19 or 20-year lives they can remember swimming and fishing in now lifeless hometown streams.
I've seen farmers in the local truck farm fields outside of town walk the rows of vegetables generously spraying what I take to be insecticides (they weed by hoeing or by hand—their labor being cheaper than the cost of herbicides) without gloves or masks. In reading my 360 students' journals on friendship, there were easily half a dozen who mentioned losing a high school classmate to cancer, often leukemia. A number also reported losing a young father to cancer, a father probably because of a dangerously polluted industrial work site. Of course, such things are plenty common enough in the US, where there was a recent report (in the UK Guardian newspaper) of a cancer cluster near a depleted uranium dumpsite.
Street sweepers are out daily in the morning to get the litter off the streets where people often just drop it because they know somebody will be by in the morning. Nevertheless, people, especially younger ones, do typically take the extra steps to put their trash in receptacles. However, I have also seen the street sweepers conveniently sweep the litter into the run off drains if they happen not to be covered.
I guess there's just not much of the good old 60s what-goes-around-comes-around awareness here yet. One possible reason for this obliviousness to environmental issues is the fact that even 20 years ago most everything was made of natural materials, so it didn't much matter where you dropped it. Furthermore, the previous non-consumerist economy meant that everything had to be used frugally, and you went shopping everyday with your basket as there were no plastic bags given out in stores. Thus, one must ask if the real issue is lack of environmental awareness or lack of foresight—both in China and the West—as to the implications of an immediately and maximally profitable capitalist-consumerist economy. In any case, I have seen some really stunning examples of the failure to deal with these issues here in China.
Once on a ferry from Hong Kong to Canton, I was amazed to see a trash receptacle lined with a plastic bag at the end of every single row of seats and signs about how you should put your trash in the proper place. I was pretty impressed. As we got into the estuary close to Canton, I saw the cleaning guy go dutifully up and down the rows and stuff each of these little plastic bags into two large ones. He then tied them off and proceeded to the fantail of the boat, where he gave them a quick windup whirl and tossed them right into the sea.
On a 3-day ferry trip going down the Yangtze River from Chongqing through the Three Gorges on the way to Wuhan, I saw an even more incredible example of this mindset built into the design of a ship. This 3 or 4-deck ferry had easily a few hundred people on it, and it was one of a constant stream of ferries going up and down the river. We'd pass one every hour or so and on they went day after week after month after year. On the ship you could get packaged eats, but it also stopped from time to time at riverside ports for the purchase of meals in styrofoam containers, which had just become available back then in 1988. Right on the railings up and down both sides on every deck there were numerous handy trash chutes, which seemed to show evidence of forethought. Well, in my wanderings around the ship I happened to go down to the first deck and what did I see but that the chutes were open at the bottom and every bit of trash dropped directly into the river. They might as well have instructed people just to throw their trash directly overboard. Perhaps the chutes could have been fixed with collection receptacles or maybe they were removed to save labor and avoid the cost and trouble of proper disposal. I'd like to think that this issue was taken care of soon after we traveled the river, but the recent official confirmation that the Yangtze River baiji dolphin is extinct leads me to think otherwise.
One last example is something I saw right through my apartment window earlier this semester. There is a copy center in the next building and I happened to see some fellow opening toner cartridges and dumping toner right into a sewer grate 10 feet outside the front door of the copy center. For a moment I felt like running out and hollering at him, but I've been here too long for that.
Life is good. The shelves are full. The neon lights blink and beckon. What you don't see won't hurt you. Welcome to the post-modern-high-tech human condition, most recently arrived in China. Yes, e.e. cummings, pity this busy monster, manunkind,/not. Progress is a comfortable disease. Yes, Alfred E. Neuman, What-me worry? Yes, Kurt Vonnegut, And so it goes…
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Back to Hohot, Back to Xinxiang, Back to Reality
Back to Hohot, Back to Xinxiang, Back to Reality
The trip from Datong back to Hohot was uneventful though it was a nice day of clean air once we got out of the city. From that point of view, I should probably not call it uneventful at all. Clean air is indeed an event. Another uneventful—i.e. typical—situation was the traffic snarl we encountered trying to go the last block into the bus terminal. I clocked us at taking 20 minutes to go the last hundred yards and make a left turn across the lane of oncoming traffic. Needless to say there was no traffic light, no one to direct traffic and no one in the oncoming lanes willing to stop a moment to let anyone make a left turn. To quote the Analects of Confucius, “And so it goes...”
At the evening meal across the street from the hotel I was spoken to in English for the only time on this trip. The speakers were two 15 or 16-year old waitresses who were almost surely just junior high school graduates or drop outs who took this job near the hotel for the occasional break from drudgery that I apparently represented to them. They were paying a Chinese person to teach them some English occasionally, but when they found out I was a native speaker and a teacher they immediately asked if I would take them on as students. For a second I was afraid that they were going to get down to do a traditional kowtow and call me master. I hastily explained that I was just passing through and it wasn't possible. They reminded me so much of my early attempts to learn Cantonese on the street in Chinatown in Chicago, a far cry from the privileged in both China and the US who could shell out big cash to send their bright aspiring youth to study abroad. Stubbornness and a willingness to work my way overseas and learn on the street eventually took me a long way, but only in miles, not career. Indeed, it ultimately dead ended me into permanent “comp slave” status on both sides of the Pacific. I wish these two young ladies well, but it's a very safe bet that if I were to live long enough to go back there in 20 years, I'd find them. My young university students are yearning to go to the west of China to give educational opportunities to the poor children in the villages of Xinjiang and Gansu but haven't figured out that they could save a lot of bus fare by just looking under their noses.
While looking for an internet bar afterward we stumbled onto a small old Daoist temple just blocks from the hotel. The priest we talked to said he was one of five who look after the place and interest in Daoism is growing. He told us he was 75, so he was born in 1932 and has seen a lot of history. For example, he recalled that the Japanese military had come to Hohot. I really did not know the Japanese had gone so far into Mongolia until I came across it for the first time reading Haruki Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicles. The priest also said that he got lots of trouble during the Cultural Revolution and was chased to this place from his original temple, which got shut down. He told me what sect he belonged to and that Daoists still revere Laozi and pay attention to diet and do not eat meat. His parents were Daoists and that was how he got his start. He smiled when I was able to quote a few lines from the Dao De Jing (道德经), and that earned me some "free" books on Daoism though I had to follow with the customary "offering." (Life in the Daoist world is all about balance, don't you know.) We got a complete guided tour of the temple and it was interesting to see a whole separate room for a very large statue of the God of Wealth (财神) complete with smaller statues of Kuanyin and the Buddha thrown in for good measure. As a passerby told me in one of Buddhist temples in Datong regarding the Book of Changes zodiac on the temple floor, well, these traditional philosophies have lots in common. This is certainly true enough, but these believers might just be covering all their bases in a kind of Chinese version of Pascal's wager. This point was reinforced to me later in the evening when we passed a good sized Christian church, and just down the block a bit there was a store with "Soul Bookstore" in English over the door. It sold religious books and crosses, etc., but they were covering their bases too because they also sold drapes and curtains on the side!
Most of the last day in Hohot was spent at the Inner Mongolia Provincial Museum. It is a new huge building with very original architecture. An interesting aside first: We went there by #3 bus, which in fact is run and driven by the military. There was a statement behind the driver's seat that this service was set up to serve some military offices in the area and the public as well. In fact, there were no military personnel on the bus that I could see and I'm thinking it was mostly a public relations thing. The bus driver was a rather austere looking woman in her 20s wearing her army uniform, but she was quite helpful when I asked about where to get off for the museum. I only felt bad that I hurried to the back of the bus so as not to miss the stop and didn't properly thank her.
The museum itself is very impressive—four floors with exhibits on two themes, natural history and Mongolian culture. As for the former, there was an excellent dinosaur and early mammal exhibit with findings from the many rich dinosaur bone fields in the Gobi desert (another parallel with the Dakotas). The exhibits were accompanied by video displays rivaling those of Jurassic Park. The other natural history exhibits were on the geology and geography of Inner Mongolia and how the exploitation of these resources is of great benefit to the nation, etc., etc. I had not been aware of the great diversity of Inner Mongolia's geography including wetlands and forests mostly in the northern and northeastern regions. Much of it looked like northern Minnesota. Everywhere too were statements about the importance of protecting the environment.
Most of the rest of the museum was devoted to the history, culture and society of the Mongol peoples, who are many and varied. The main theme was how these peoples were/are an integral part of the Chinese nation and Chinese history. There was nothing at all that I could see about the country of Mongolia just down the pike to the north. The Wei and Liao dynasties, both of Mongol origin are especially fascinating in that they had a very high level of culture and indeed four or five of the Mongol peoples, including the Manchus, had their own writing system totally distinct from Chinese characters. One small group, the Dauer, number only about 130,000 today and still don't have a written form of their language. Well, as noted in an earlier blog, when your culture turns into a museum exhibit, you'd better be looking over your shoulder because the handwriting is on the wall.
One last exhibit was about Inner Mongolia at the time of the anti-Japanese war. There were many pictures and stories of young “heroes” in their 20s and 30s who were killed by the Japanese for their communist party/nationalist activities. No doubt that their anti-imperialist sacrifices and struggles were inspirational. The exhibits were used, however, to lead into rather typical statements about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history and how due to that history the CCP is uniquely suited to continue leading China today and into the future.
Before going to sleep I headed across the street for some bottled water. Looking to stretch a bit, I took the stairs instead of the elevator and saw some interesting stuff on employee bulletin boards. All of this stuff probably came out of some undergrad personnel management course in the US. There were pictures and awards for the employees of the month, just like the nonsense I used to see at the University of Wisconsin in Superior (except there the big prize was a special parking place!). There were complimentary messages about particular employees from guests (I presume) to make the workers feel good in lieu of decent pay. Sound familiar, oh ye workers of the world? Workers of course are decent human beings and for the most part are kind to their fellow human being hotel guests just as I have busted my chops to teach decently for little pay, no permanent job status and expensive insurance policies (or none at all). There were even English phrases pasted up on the board like “Corporate Culture” without any Chinese translation. Give me a break. I doubt that even one of these sheet changers and mop pushers ever had a chance to go far enough in school to learn such English vocabulary if any English at all. Another interesting notice had to do with an insurance policy option for drivers. They could choose to buy medical insurance for things that might happen to them on the job—accidents, injury, etc.—for 100 yuan per year, maybe about 10 or 15% of one month’s salary. It was not really much, but I could see people blowing it off. What the hell, pocket the money and take your chances. What are the odds that they would pay up on your whiplash anyway?
The last thing of interest I noted was at the Hohot airport on the way out. Clearly catering to the air traveling Chinese business crowd, there were translations of two of Thomas Friedman's feel good books about the global economy—a great thing for everyone, especially Tom Friedman. It just needs a little tweaking in some places once in a while and then we will all benefit. In Deng Xiaoping's immortal words, some of us (us?) just have to get rich first. (His children happened to be among the very first.) There was also a book by a young Chinese CEO, which contained the following advice on politics. As a business person, you have to stay on top of what's going on in politics, but don't try to influence it. This guy will definitely go far.
Well, I can't say the trip to Inner Mongolia was a waste. I got 80 papers and journals read on the road a whole day before getting back to Xinxiang in time to get a fresh batch. Workers of the world...
The trip from Datong back to Hohot was uneventful though it was a nice day of clean air once we got out of the city. From that point of view, I should probably not call it uneventful at all. Clean air is indeed an event. Another uneventful—i.e. typical—situation was the traffic snarl we encountered trying to go the last block into the bus terminal. I clocked us at taking 20 minutes to go the last hundred yards and make a left turn across the lane of oncoming traffic. Needless to say there was no traffic light, no one to direct traffic and no one in the oncoming lanes willing to stop a moment to let anyone make a left turn. To quote the Analects of Confucius, “And so it goes...”
At the evening meal across the street from the hotel I was spoken to in English for the only time on this trip. The speakers were two 15 or 16-year old waitresses who were almost surely just junior high school graduates or drop outs who took this job near the hotel for the occasional break from drudgery that I apparently represented to them. They were paying a Chinese person to teach them some English occasionally, but when they found out I was a native speaker and a teacher they immediately asked if I would take them on as students. For a second I was afraid that they were going to get down to do a traditional kowtow and call me master. I hastily explained that I was just passing through and it wasn't possible. They reminded me so much of my early attempts to learn Cantonese on the street in Chinatown in Chicago, a far cry from the privileged in both China and the US who could shell out big cash to send their bright aspiring youth to study abroad. Stubbornness and a willingness to work my way overseas and learn on the street eventually took me a long way, but only in miles, not career. Indeed, it ultimately dead ended me into permanent “comp slave” status on both sides of the Pacific. I wish these two young ladies well, but it's a very safe bet that if I were to live long enough to go back there in 20 years, I'd find them. My young university students are yearning to go to the west of China to give educational opportunities to the poor children in the villages of Xinjiang and Gansu but haven't figured out that they could save a lot of bus fare by just looking under their noses.
While looking for an internet bar afterward we stumbled onto a small old Daoist temple just blocks from the hotel. The priest we talked to said he was one of five who look after the place and interest in Daoism is growing. He told us he was 75, so he was born in 1932 and has seen a lot of history. For example, he recalled that the Japanese military had come to Hohot. I really did not know the Japanese had gone so far into Mongolia until I came across it for the first time reading Haruki Murakami's The Windup Bird Chronicles. The priest also said that he got lots of trouble during the Cultural Revolution and was chased to this place from his original temple, which got shut down. He told me what sect he belonged to and that Daoists still revere Laozi and pay attention to diet and do not eat meat. His parents were Daoists and that was how he got his start. He smiled when I was able to quote a few lines from the Dao De Jing (道德经), and that earned me some "free" books on Daoism though I had to follow with the customary "offering." (Life in the Daoist world is all about balance, don't you know.) We got a complete guided tour of the temple and it was interesting to see a whole separate room for a very large statue of the God of Wealth (财神) complete with smaller statues of Kuanyin and the Buddha thrown in for good measure. As a passerby told me in one of Buddhist temples in Datong regarding the Book of Changes zodiac on the temple floor, well, these traditional philosophies have lots in common. This is certainly true enough, but these believers might just be covering all their bases in a kind of Chinese version of Pascal's wager. This point was reinforced to me later in the evening when we passed a good sized Christian church, and just down the block a bit there was a store with "Soul Bookstore" in English over the door. It sold religious books and crosses, etc., but they were covering their bases too because they also sold drapes and curtains on the side!
Most of the last day in Hohot was spent at the Inner Mongolia Provincial Museum. It is a new huge building with very original architecture. An interesting aside first: We went there by #3 bus, which in fact is run and driven by the military. There was a statement behind the driver's seat that this service was set up to serve some military offices in the area and the public as well. In fact, there were no military personnel on the bus that I could see and I'm thinking it was mostly a public relations thing. The bus driver was a rather austere looking woman in her 20s wearing her army uniform, but she was quite helpful when I asked about where to get off for the museum. I only felt bad that I hurried to the back of the bus so as not to miss the stop and didn't properly thank her.
The museum itself is very impressive—four floors with exhibits on two themes, natural history and Mongolian culture. As for the former, there was an excellent dinosaur and early mammal exhibit with findings from the many rich dinosaur bone fields in the Gobi desert (another parallel with the Dakotas). The exhibits were accompanied by video displays rivaling those of Jurassic Park. The other natural history exhibits were on the geology and geography of Inner Mongolia and how the exploitation of these resources is of great benefit to the nation, etc., etc. I had not been aware of the great diversity of Inner Mongolia's geography including wetlands and forests mostly in the northern and northeastern regions. Much of it looked like northern Minnesota. Everywhere too were statements about the importance of protecting the environment.
Most of the rest of the museum was devoted to the history, culture and society of the Mongol peoples, who are many and varied. The main theme was how these peoples were/are an integral part of the Chinese nation and Chinese history. There was nothing at all that I could see about the country of Mongolia just down the pike to the north. The Wei and Liao dynasties, both of Mongol origin are especially fascinating in that they had a very high level of culture and indeed four or five of the Mongol peoples, including the Manchus, had their own writing system totally distinct from Chinese characters. One small group, the Dauer, number only about 130,000 today and still don't have a written form of their language. Well, as noted in an earlier blog, when your culture turns into a museum exhibit, you'd better be looking over your shoulder because the handwriting is on the wall.
One last exhibit was about Inner Mongolia at the time of the anti-Japanese war. There were many pictures and stories of young “heroes” in their 20s and 30s who were killed by the Japanese for their communist party/nationalist activities. No doubt that their anti-imperialist sacrifices and struggles were inspirational. The exhibits were used, however, to lead into rather typical statements about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history and how due to that history the CCP is uniquely suited to continue leading China today and into the future.
Before going to sleep I headed across the street for some bottled water. Looking to stretch a bit, I took the stairs instead of the elevator and saw some interesting stuff on employee bulletin boards. All of this stuff probably came out of some undergrad personnel management course in the US. There were pictures and awards for the employees of the month, just like the nonsense I used to see at the University of Wisconsin in Superior (except there the big prize was a special parking place!). There were complimentary messages about particular employees from guests (I presume) to make the workers feel good in lieu of decent pay. Sound familiar, oh ye workers of the world? Workers of course are decent human beings and for the most part are kind to their fellow human being hotel guests just as I have busted my chops to teach decently for little pay, no permanent job status and expensive insurance policies (or none at all). There were even English phrases pasted up on the board like “Corporate Culture” without any Chinese translation. Give me a break. I doubt that even one of these sheet changers and mop pushers ever had a chance to go far enough in school to learn such English vocabulary if any English at all. Another interesting notice had to do with an insurance policy option for drivers. They could choose to buy medical insurance for things that might happen to them on the job—accidents, injury, etc.—for 100 yuan per year, maybe about 10 or 15% of one month’s salary. It was not really much, but I could see people blowing it off. What the hell, pocket the money and take your chances. What are the odds that they would pay up on your whiplash anyway?
The last thing of interest I noted was at the Hohot airport on the way out. Clearly catering to the air traveling Chinese business crowd, there were translations of two of Thomas Friedman's feel good books about the global economy—a great thing for everyone, especially Tom Friedman. It just needs a little tweaking in some places once in a while and then we will all benefit. In Deng Xiaoping's immortal words, some of us (us?) just have to get rich first. (His children happened to be among the very first.) There was also a book by a young Chinese CEO, which contained the following advice on politics. As a business person, you have to stay on top of what's going on in politics, but don't try to influence it. This guy will definitely go far.
Well, I can't say the trip to Inner Mongolia was a waste. I got 80 papers and journals read on the road a whole day before getting back to Xinxiang in time to get a fresh batch. Workers of the world...
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Datong--From the Sublime to the Earthy
Datong—From the Sublime to the Earthy
We got a cab first thing the next morning to head out to the Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟) just outside of town. This is the main attraction of Datong, dating back to the early years of the Northern Wei dynasty in the 5th century A.D. The grottoes are carved into a one-km long sandstone mountain ridge and hold some 50,000 statues of all kinds and sizes from the minute up to the 17-meter high seated Buddha. For those into such things, it's easy to see the strong Indian artistic influence on these carvings reflecting the recent arrival of the Buddhism from India at the time. The cost, energy and craftsmanship required to build such structures at a time when there was little to spare in a subsistence economy never ceases to amaze one.
It was somewhat surprising that there were very few foreign tourists there, though indeed it was past the international tourist season. However, since it was the week of the National Holiday the place was swarming with tourists from all over China. Thus, the austerity of the place was pretty much lost, not only from the crowds but also from the huge coal complex that you knew was just across the valley. By late morning a steady rain was falling and umbrellas suddenly sprang up to 150 yuan from just 15 a few hours earlier. I put a plastic bag on my head and made do. One woman was trying to sell me a picture book of the grottoes for 265 yuan that I had seen on the street for 90 the day before. Indeed, as one so often hears back in the US, things can change fast in China!
On the way out to the grottoes, the cab driver and I were exchanging stories about drunk passengers and other risks and challenges of my former profession. He was also quite interested in US alcoholic beverages and taxes. He seemed pleased that in China when something is listed as 10 yuan, that's what you actually pay. He also said that, unlike the rich in America, the rich in China do indeed pay taxes but nothing in comparison to what they rake in. Then he said what I've heard so often here in the same joking manner—about how the big guys in every country always get the cream and the rest of us have to do real work. Of course, that's true enough but I almost think many average Chinese almost feel good about how they have now joined this “family of nations” and can claim solidarity with the rest of the world. Now that China has fat cats, China has arrived. Another topic was race relations. He seemed very pleased with China's record. One does certainly see many slogans about all people's unity (团起来) as though sloganeering makes it so. Nevertheless, for sure there is more recognition here of the need actively to stress and promote the need for racial harmony, bilingual education, etc. whereas in the US all of this is swept under the rug or papered over on the assumption that all individuals are equal before the law. None of this takes away from the fact that in both countries the real divide is socio-economic class status, the elephant in the room that no one wants to notice.
What's just as impressive as Datong's huge coal complex itself is the many, many blocks of apartments stacked on the low mountain right below the mine entrance to accommodate the workers, certainly many thousands of them. In response to my question, the cab driver said that this particular mine has been safe because it's overseen directly by the state. He said that it's in the small independent mines where the fatalities happen. Even if true, the stats are that about a dozen or so coal miners die in China every day. I've seen several times in international news reports that a new coal burning power facility comes on line in China about once a week. Both the US and China are burning more coal than ever. I just hope that there's no coal under the Yungang grottoes or their fate will certainly be sealed.
Datong is certainly a kind of backward city, not only for its older housing stock but just little things like the fact that the bus station where you buy tickets is in one place and depending on where you are going you might have to trudge for blocks with your luggage to some unmarked parking lot where the bus actually departs from. Unlike in Hohot where a computer spits out your ticket with all the details of cost, seat and departure time, in Datong the handwritten ticket doesn't say anything about which bus you're on, not to mention a seat; it merely confirms your right to fight your way on to one of the busses leaving that day. You also have to pay one yuan for insurance—from Datong to Hohot but not the other way. What do the Datong drivers know that the Hohot drivers don't?
In a bookstore in the highly commercialized temple complex area, we met a young woman who went to a computer school after high school in another city but came back to work in this city and felt positive about recent improvements, modest though they seemed to me. She gave up on computers and got the bookstore job because she loves to read and suggested a couple of popular contemporary novelists. It seems that lots of people I've met are loyal to their home area, even a kind of run down place like Datong. Of course, this is more true of working class people everywhere—place and family are more important than mobility and career—who you are with rather than what you do.
My last experience in Datong was to shed a tear before boarding the bus for the 3 1/2 hour ride back to Hohot. I saw what I took to be a public toilet across the square in a small building run by an old man who sold small snacks and daily use items on the left and oversaw the very odiferous toilets on the right, which more than overwhelmed any pleasant smells that might have been coming from the snacks not 10 feet away. I told him I needed to use the facilities, so he promptly asked me “a shit or a piss? (literally a “big comfort” or a “small comfort,” 大便 or 小便). I wasn't expecting to pay or answer such a question and hesitated for just a moment, so he continued, “Shits are a dollar and pisses 50 cents.” So I said, “A piss” and promptly handed him my coin. “Door number three!” he said, and for just a split second I was reminded of some US quiz show game, but I quickly realized I was in a different realm as I followed my nose down the corridor, held my breath, did what I came for, and headed back to the bus.
I really want to come back to Datong someday. Its combination of ancient cultural treasures and earthiness—China in a nutshell—appeals to me.
We got a cab first thing the next morning to head out to the Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟) just outside of town. This is the main attraction of Datong, dating back to the early years of the Northern Wei dynasty in the 5th century A.D. The grottoes are carved into a one-km long sandstone mountain ridge and hold some 50,000 statues of all kinds and sizes from the minute up to the 17-meter high seated Buddha. For those into such things, it's easy to see the strong Indian artistic influence on these carvings reflecting the recent arrival of the Buddhism from India at the time. The cost, energy and craftsmanship required to build such structures at a time when there was little to spare in a subsistence economy never ceases to amaze one.
It was somewhat surprising that there were very few foreign tourists there, though indeed it was past the international tourist season. However, since it was the week of the National Holiday the place was swarming with tourists from all over China. Thus, the austerity of the place was pretty much lost, not only from the crowds but also from the huge coal complex that you knew was just across the valley. By late morning a steady rain was falling and umbrellas suddenly sprang up to 150 yuan from just 15 a few hours earlier. I put a plastic bag on my head and made do. One woman was trying to sell me a picture book of the grottoes for 265 yuan that I had seen on the street for 90 the day before. Indeed, as one so often hears back in the US, things can change fast in China!
On the way out to the grottoes, the cab driver and I were exchanging stories about drunk passengers and other risks and challenges of my former profession. He was also quite interested in US alcoholic beverages and taxes. He seemed pleased that in China when something is listed as 10 yuan, that's what you actually pay. He also said that, unlike the rich in America, the rich in China do indeed pay taxes but nothing in comparison to what they rake in. Then he said what I've heard so often here in the same joking manner—about how the big guys in every country always get the cream and the rest of us have to do real work. Of course, that's true enough but I almost think many average Chinese almost feel good about how they have now joined this “family of nations” and can claim solidarity with the rest of the world. Now that China has fat cats, China has arrived. Another topic was race relations. He seemed very pleased with China's record. One does certainly see many slogans about all people's unity (团起来) as though sloganeering makes it so. Nevertheless, for sure there is more recognition here of the need actively to stress and promote the need for racial harmony, bilingual education, etc. whereas in the US all of this is swept under the rug or papered over on the assumption that all individuals are equal before the law. None of this takes away from the fact that in both countries the real divide is socio-economic class status, the elephant in the room that no one wants to notice.
What's just as impressive as Datong's huge coal complex itself is the many, many blocks of apartments stacked on the low mountain right below the mine entrance to accommodate the workers, certainly many thousands of them. In response to my question, the cab driver said that this particular mine has been safe because it's overseen directly by the state. He said that it's in the small independent mines where the fatalities happen. Even if true, the stats are that about a dozen or so coal miners die in China every day. I've seen several times in international news reports that a new coal burning power facility comes on line in China about once a week. Both the US and China are burning more coal than ever. I just hope that there's no coal under the Yungang grottoes or their fate will certainly be sealed.
Datong is certainly a kind of backward city, not only for its older housing stock but just little things like the fact that the bus station where you buy tickets is in one place and depending on where you are going you might have to trudge for blocks with your luggage to some unmarked parking lot where the bus actually departs from. Unlike in Hohot where a computer spits out your ticket with all the details of cost, seat and departure time, in Datong the handwritten ticket doesn't say anything about which bus you're on, not to mention a seat; it merely confirms your right to fight your way on to one of the busses leaving that day. You also have to pay one yuan for insurance—from Datong to Hohot but not the other way. What do the Datong drivers know that the Hohot drivers don't?
In a bookstore in the highly commercialized temple complex area, we met a young woman who went to a computer school after high school in another city but came back to work in this city and felt positive about recent improvements, modest though they seemed to me. She gave up on computers and got the bookstore job because she loves to read and suggested a couple of popular contemporary novelists. It seems that lots of people I've met are loyal to their home area, even a kind of run down place like Datong. Of course, this is more true of working class people everywhere—place and family are more important than mobility and career—who you are with rather than what you do.
My last experience in Datong was to shed a tear before boarding the bus for the 3 1/2 hour ride back to Hohot. I saw what I took to be a public toilet across the square in a small building run by an old man who sold small snacks and daily use items on the left and oversaw the very odiferous toilets on the right, which more than overwhelmed any pleasant smells that might have been coming from the snacks not 10 feet away. I told him I needed to use the facilities, so he promptly asked me “a shit or a piss? (literally a “big comfort” or a “small comfort,” 大便 or 小便). I wasn't expecting to pay or answer such a question and hesitated for just a moment, so he continued, “Shits are a dollar and pisses 50 cents.” So I said, “A piss” and promptly handed him my coin. “Door number three!” he said, and for just a split second I was reminded of some US quiz show game, but I quickly realized I was in a different realm as I followed my nose down the corridor, held my breath, did what I came for, and headed back to the bus.
I really want to come back to Datong someday. Its combination of ancient cultural treasures and earthiness—China in a nutshell—appeals to me.
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Datong--Ancient Dust and Modern Dust
Datong—Ancient Dust and Modern Dust
Datong (大同) is the ancient capital of several dynasties starting in about the 4th century A.D. Thus, there is yellow earth dust going back thousands of years. Most of the dust, however, is of more recent origin, more black than yellow, emanating from the huge coal complex right outside of town. Thus, it is perhaps symbolic of lots of places in China where grimy, oily coal dust covers unbelievable cultural treasures. In Datong you can typically look up directly at the sun in mid-day and it looks like the moon. The first impressions are that it also has less of 2007 China's new construction and better quality housing, but I never saw the whole town. Coal powers China, but for some reason it seems to be doing less for Datong.
We arrived at the hotel in mid-afternoon and the cab driver from the bus station was very anxious to cut a deal with us to drive us all around to see all the sites of the area for a fixed price. He was very confident we could do it all in a day, probably at about 100/km/hr., slowing down a bit for some pictures, of course. He said that Datong and the surrounding counties had 4 million people and that the hotel we were staying at was (淘汰) past its prime or fallen into disrepair. I suppose he just wanted us to experience the very best of Datong, and he did introduce us to a fabulous noodle shop right across the street. In fact, the hotel was a bit run down, but there was plenty of hot water in the shower and it had a fabulous view into people's kitchens in the apartment block 10 yards across the alley through some smoke vents.
Since there was plenty of time in the day yet, we set out to see the two big Kuanyin temples, which were within walking distance. They had very nice accompanying exhibits of artifacts from the Tang, Jin and Liao dynasties. Also, in spite of the soot and noise of the city, they were very peaceful places as well as being active temples.
At the second temple, Po-lin bought a small Kuanyin statue, mostly at the encouragement of a friend in Tianjin, who has now become a very serious devotee of Pure Land Buddhism, which they also had books on. After the purchase, the sales lady, having become a Buddhist since starting to work at the shop, suggested taking it over to be blessed by the monk (for a donation, of course!) and while he was doing that I asked the her about a huge newly built Christian church sticking up not a hundred yards from the temple and whether or not there were a lot of Christian converts. She said quite a few (挺多) and I asked why. She quickly became very solicitous and started talking about how we Chinese have our Buddhism and the Moslems have their god and the Christians have theirs and it's all ok. Perhaps she assumed as a Westerner I was a Christian who needed reassurance about China's being open to Christianity. But I said that was not my concern at all. I was only curious about whether Christians were actively proselytizing (传教) and she said no. Nevertheless, there are lots of Christian converts in China compared to before, and it's a topic for further discussion.
After we got back to the hotel we had a dinner of daoxue noodles (刀削面), literally ‘knife cut noodles,' which is a kind of very fat chewy noodle made by slicing strips off of a big cylinder of heavy steamed bread or whatever about 2 feet long and 5 of 6 inches in diameter. These noodles then get slopped into greasy pork or mutton soup or whatever suits your fancy (even vegetarian—guess which one I didn't have). This is a specialty of the region and the place was crazy crowded. One had to stand with one's tray and wait for a table, but not for long because those slippery noodles greased with pork or mutton fat slide down fast.
This was still early in the week of the National Holiday, so most people were off of work and the night market was swarming partly due to decent weather (coal dust aside). There was every kind of snack and we started off with smelly bean curd (臭豆腐), which really does smell, well, pretty bad. It's first fermented in some way and then deep fried, after which it tastes, well, pretty good. In the south they serve it plain, but in north they like to serve it with sauce, which we really didn't want. Please hold the sauce. Oh, no, you have to try the sauce. It's very good. Well, ok, just put a little on the side. A little! This is typical of street vendors, all over the world probably. You always get more than you want. I want half a catty. Before you can start reaching for your money, here's one catty weighed up and in your hands. Oh, well, I guess so. Sure... Why not... I'll use it eventually.
There were various other kinds of things like fried squid, chestnuts, roasted sweet potatoes, barbecued lamb, all kinds of peanuts, melon seeds in all sizes and colors, cold vegetables, steamed corn on the cob (not sweet), pop corn, and much, much more. While we were buying the smelly bean curd, a middle aged dark skinned country woman in the next stall was trying to interest me in some roasted chestnuts. I put her off, but on the way back while finishing my squid on a stick I bought 5 yuan worth and after the usual stuff about my speaking Chinese she looks over and says, Oh, and you've married a Chinese. She seemed pleasd...maybe because I bought her chestnuts after all. She reminded me of Sandburg's fish monger, terribly happy for there to be fish (or chestnuts) and people to sell them to.
We also happened to walk past the very large Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government office building facing the square, and in celebration of the national holiday, it had huge banners of self-congratulation about CCP leadership and banners for long live Marx, Lenin and Mao, all of whom might be somewhat perplexed about what was going on in the square across the street. But maybe not. Anyway, it was interesting to see Mao so unambiguously praised given that he has been pushed into the background for some time. It seems like some kind of reassessment is going on but it's hard to get just which way the wind is blowing.
The night ended at a 3-storey jade store full of very expensive stuff, where Po-lin wanted to go in and look around. Up on the third floor there were small things going for a couple of grand USD. Preferring to be in a bookstore where prices are more in my range, I paced about silently in the distance because I had no/have no/will never have any interest in buying jade, but then somebody, looking in the foreigner's direction, said oh, too bad he doesn't understand, and I said well it's not that, I'm just not a jade shopper. Oh, he talks, he knows Chinese! Well, then, sit down, and out comes the tea and the cigarettes and more chit-chat and the whole thing took another hour. I still don't know anything about jade except that the China-Burma connection has lots to do with it, and I never expect to buy or own a piece of it in my life.
Datong (大同) is the ancient capital of several dynasties starting in about the 4th century A.D. Thus, there is yellow earth dust going back thousands of years. Most of the dust, however, is of more recent origin, more black than yellow, emanating from the huge coal complex right outside of town. Thus, it is perhaps symbolic of lots of places in China where grimy, oily coal dust covers unbelievable cultural treasures. In Datong you can typically look up directly at the sun in mid-day and it looks like the moon. The first impressions are that it also has less of 2007 China's new construction and better quality housing, but I never saw the whole town. Coal powers China, but for some reason it seems to be doing less for Datong.
We arrived at the hotel in mid-afternoon and the cab driver from the bus station was very anxious to cut a deal with us to drive us all around to see all the sites of the area for a fixed price. He was very confident we could do it all in a day, probably at about 100/km/hr., slowing down a bit for some pictures, of course. He said that Datong and the surrounding counties had 4 million people and that the hotel we were staying at was (淘汰) past its prime or fallen into disrepair. I suppose he just wanted us to experience the very best of Datong, and he did introduce us to a fabulous noodle shop right across the street. In fact, the hotel was a bit run down, but there was plenty of hot water in the shower and it had a fabulous view into people's kitchens in the apartment block 10 yards across the alley through some smoke vents.
Since there was plenty of time in the day yet, we set out to see the two big Kuanyin temples, which were within walking distance. They had very nice accompanying exhibits of artifacts from the Tang, Jin and Liao dynasties. Also, in spite of the soot and noise of the city, they were very peaceful places as well as being active temples.
At the second temple, Po-lin bought a small Kuanyin statue, mostly at the encouragement of a friend in Tianjin, who has now become a very serious devotee of Pure Land Buddhism, which they also had books on. After the purchase, the sales lady, having become a Buddhist since starting to work at the shop, suggested taking it over to be blessed by the monk (for a donation, of course!) and while he was doing that I asked the her about a huge newly built Christian church sticking up not a hundred yards from the temple and whether or not there were a lot of Christian converts. She said quite a few (挺多) and I asked why. She quickly became very solicitous and started talking about how we Chinese have our Buddhism and the Moslems have their god and the Christians have theirs and it's all ok. Perhaps she assumed as a Westerner I was a Christian who needed reassurance about China's being open to Christianity. But I said that was not my concern at all. I was only curious about whether Christians were actively proselytizing (传教) and she said no. Nevertheless, there are lots of Christian converts in China compared to before, and it's a topic for further discussion.
After we got back to the hotel we had a dinner of daoxue noodles (刀削面), literally ‘knife cut noodles,' which is a kind of very fat chewy noodle made by slicing strips off of a big cylinder of heavy steamed bread or whatever about 2 feet long and 5 of 6 inches in diameter. These noodles then get slopped into greasy pork or mutton soup or whatever suits your fancy (even vegetarian—guess which one I didn't have). This is a specialty of the region and the place was crazy crowded. One had to stand with one's tray and wait for a table, but not for long because those slippery noodles greased with pork or mutton fat slide down fast.
This was still early in the week of the National Holiday, so most people were off of work and the night market was swarming partly due to decent weather (coal dust aside). There was every kind of snack and we started off with smelly bean curd (臭豆腐), which really does smell, well, pretty bad. It's first fermented in some way and then deep fried, after which it tastes, well, pretty good. In the south they serve it plain, but in north they like to serve it with sauce, which we really didn't want. Please hold the sauce. Oh, no, you have to try the sauce. It's very good. Well, ok, just put a little on the side. A little! This is typical of street vendors, all over the world probably. You always get more than you want. I want half a catty. Before you can start reaching for your money, here's one catty weighed up and in your hands. Oh, well, I guess so. Sure... Why not... I'll use it eventually.
There were various other kinds of things like fried squid, chestnuts, roasted sweet potatoes, barbecued lamb, all kinds of peanuts, melon seeds in all sizes and colors, cold vegetables, steamed corn on the cob (not sweet), pop corn, and much, much more. While we were buying the smelly bean curd, a middle aged dark skinned country woman in the next stall was trying to interest me in some roasted chestnuts. I put her off, but on the way back while finishing my squid on a stick I bought 5 yuan worth and after the usual stuff about my speaking Chinese she looks over and says, Oh, and you've married a Chinese. She seemed pleasd...maybe because I bought her chestnuts after all. She reminded me of Sandburg's fish monger, terribly happy for there to be fish (or chestnuts) and people to sell them to.
We also happened to walk past the very large Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government office building facing the square, and in celebration of the national holiday, it had huge banners of self-congratulation about CCP leadership and banners for long live Marx, Lenin and Mao, all of whom might be somewhat perplexed about what was going on in the square across the street. But maybe not. Anyway, it was interesting to see Mao so unambiguously praised given that he has been pushed into the background for some time. It seems like some kind of reassessment is going on but it's hard to get just which way the wind is blowing.
The night ended at a 3-storey jade store full of very expensive stuff, where Po-lin wanted to go in and look around. Up on the third floor there were small things going for a couple of grand USD. Preferring to be in a bookstore where prices are more in my range, I paced about silently in the distance because I had no/have no/will never have any interest in buying jade, but then somebody, looking in the foreigner's direction, said oh, too bad he doesn't understand, and I said well it's not that, I'm just not a jade shopper. Oh, he talks, he knows Chinese! Well, then, sit down, and out comes the tea and the cigarettes and more chit-chat and the whole thing took another hour. I still don't know anything about jade except that the China-Burma connection has lots to do with it, and I never expect to buy or own a piece of it in my life.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
No Melon Seed Cracking, No Smoking
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.
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 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.
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