the capital in the north

How to be as successful as a Jew

2011-12-17T17:43:00.000-08:00

One of the most curious and revelatory things about China which my newly acquired ability to read Chinese has allowed me to discover are the Chinese self-help books concerning the Jews.

Wonder into any large bookshop in Beijing (and I guess anywhere else in China), and you can find books in Chinese with titles like: "Discover the secrets of the Jews", "Jewish business wisdom" and "How to be as successful as a Jew". On the back cover you will usually find phrases like: "the Jews are the cleverest, richest and most successful people in the world. Learn the secrets of their success". Books with similar titles would be considered at best very dubious, and at worst downright antisemitic, anywhere in the Western world. But the fact is that here in China, such books can be seen as a sort of distorted compliment to the Jews.

In China most people have never met a Jew, but there is one extremely common stereotype about them: they are very intelligent. The huge number of succesful Jews in every field, from Einstein to Freud, is considered proof enough. Whenever I have told a Chinese person that my mother's family is Jewish, I have almost always been told: "oh, you must be very clever then." (the Chinese, not having our Western notions of political correctness, are quite happy to assume that every single Jew must be intelligent, with no exceptions). The stereotype that Jews are wealthy also exists, but it is not seen as something to be envied or hated, but rather just another proof of the Jews' abilities and intelligence. All the negative stereotypes of the Jews as stingy and clannish which infest Western culture simply haven't made their way here, thank goodness.

In today's extremely competitive and materialistic Chinese society, success in work is an obsession for many, and this coupled with the belief that Jews are inherently successful and smart can produce some curious results: a Chinese girl I once knew had actually read the Talmud (in Chinese of course), because she had heard that reading it could help you to achieve success in life (if the Jews are so succesful there must be a reason after all).
I must say that I can't help but feel ambiguous about these Jewish-themed business success guides in Chinese bookshops. I know there isn't any hostility towards the Jews behind them, but I can't help wondering if it is a good thing to encourage the stereotype of Jewish wealth and success in business which has brought the Jews so much misfortune elsewhere.

(Below, the cover of a Chinese book entitled "the Business Acumen of the Jews")

Berlusconi's secret society

2011-11-13T06:59:00.000-08:00

Berlusconi has resigned as Italy’s Prime Minister. It is too early to know whether we have finally seen the back of him in Italian politics, but given his age (75) it does seem likely that Italy will never be governed by him again.

The man has been the dominant figure in Italian politics for 17 years, from his sudden entry into politics in 1994 until today. He won the elections three times (in 1994, 2001 and 2008) and lost them twice (1996 and 2006), and the government he formed in 2001 was the only one in the history of the Italian Republic to survive until the end of its term.

I think it is hard for people who can’t speak italian and aren’t well acquainted with the country to understand just how corrupt and indecent the man and his cronies are. Any one of the scandals surrounding him, from his trials for corruption to his sex with underage girls, his relationship with convicted mafia bosses, his obscene and offensive puns and pranks, his blatant conflict of interests and his laws tailor-made to save him from prosecution, would have been enough on their own to cause his resignation in most western countries. His continuing hold on Italy has done great damage to the country’s international reputation, especially in these last few years. At the same time his ownership of Italy’s most popular private television channels, which hold a great influence over the less educated sectors of the population, helps to ensure that most of his voters aren’t even aware what the world thinks of their prime minister. One scandal above all others seems to me to be worth mentioning, especially since it is virtually unknown outside of Italy, and even within Italy it has been all but forgotten by most people.

In the early eighties Berlusconi was a member of the infamous P2 Masonic lodge, alongside numerous other members of the italian elite. This is not some conspiracy theory, but a fact which was certified by a police investigation at the time. The P2 lodge (the name stands for Propaganda 2) was a freemason lodge headed by Licio Gelli, a shady Italian businessman who started off as a liaison officer between the Italian and German fascist regimes during the Second World War, and chose to participate in Mussolini’s puppet state, the “Republic of Salo’”, after the Nazis invaded Italy. After the war he went on being a convinced fascist, joining a small party on the extreme right, and in 1966 he took on the leadership of the P2, a lodge which fell under the jurisdiction of the Grand Orient of Italy, the official Italian Freemason organization. Slowly, Gelli set about using his powerful connections to bring as many politicians, industrialists, and military leaders as possible into the lodge, and turning it into a vehicle for his vehemently right wing ideas. The Freemasons expelled or suspended the P2 lodge in 1974 (it has never been quite clear), after finding out what Gelli was up to, but the lodge went on existing illegally, violating Italian laws against the constitution of secret societies.

The existence of the lodge came to light in 1981, during a police investigation into the collapse of Michele Sindona’s financial empire. A list of members was found in Gelli’s home, and the names included a host of important politicians and businessmen, the heads of all three of Italy’s secret services and the son of the last deposed king of Italy. They also included Berlusconi. Later on, a couple of documents were found hidden in the false bottom of a suitcase belonging to Gelli’s daughter in Rome airport. One of the documents, ironically entitled “Plan for a democratic rebirth”, is generally seen as the P2’s political program. The document clearly stated the aim of turning Italy into an authoritarian right-wing state so as to curtail the influence of the Communist Party and the trade unions. This was to be done by placing P2 members in key positions in the country's institutions and engaging in widespread political corruption. These were no empty threats. Gelli himself had taken part in the failed coup organized by the former fascist general Junio Valerio Borghese in 1970, whose aim was to set up an authoritarian right wing dictatorship. He was on excellent terms with the leaders of Argentina’s military regime. And Italy’s neighbor Greece had become a fascist dictatorship as a result of a right wing military coup a few years earlier.

Berlusconi has never denied being part of this shadowy secret organization dedicated to subverting democracy, but when asked about it he has simply given evasive answers, saying that he didn’t really know what he was getting into. Of course, you would never hear the issue mentioned at all on Berlusconi’s TV channels. As a matter of fact, you would hardly ever hear about it on the state channels or on independent newspapers either. Quite simply, it has become one of the outrageous facts about Berlusconi’s past which are well known and documented, but do not seem to have any impact on his popularity with the half of the Italian population which has supported him for years.

Simplified vs. traditional Chinese characters

2011-10-28T04:48:00.004-07:00

Today I would like to share some thoughts with you about the simplification of the Chinese characters. It is well known that the characters now used in Mainland China were simplified in the middle of the twentieth century, so as to make literacy more accessible to the masses. The vast majority of people learning Chinese throughout the world, and all those who learn it within the People’s Republic of China, will be familiar with the simplified characters.

For those of you unfamiliar with the issue, I will give some background: various Chinese intellectuals started suggesting that the Chinese writing system should be simplified towards the beginning of the twentieth Century, especially after the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when traditional Chinese culture was challenged by modernizers. There was an attempt by the Guomindang government to simplify the characters already in 1935, something which makes the current die-hard opposition to the simplified characters in Taiwan all the more curious.

After the revolution, the characters were simplified in two rounds, one in 1956 and one in 1964. The simplification involved reducing the number of strokes and the complexity of the characters. Many of the simplified forms had already been used in handwriting for years. A few characters which had the same pronunciation and meaning were merged. Many characters were also left entirely the same. There was a second round of simplification in 1977, just after the Cultural Revolution, but due to widespread opposition and confusion the reform was abolished in 1986. A few of the simplifications introduced in 1977 can still sometimes be seen I handwritten signs, for instance仃for 停 and歺for 餐 (I can see why people like that one).

While the People’s Republic of China and Singapore officially use the simplified characters, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau continue to use the traditional ones. In some cases, the traditional characters can be extremely more complicated than the simplified ones. Take 个，the most basic Chinese character, whose traditional form is個. Or 与, which becomes與.

I have personally never studied the traditional characters, and although I find I can guess some of the most basic ones, I am basically unable to read them. Here in Mainland China, traditional characters are usually only found in ceremonial circumstances or in logos, although most people seem to know them to some degree. The only time I find not knowing them a problem is when I go to karaoke parlors, since most of the karaoke machines have subtexts in traditional characters, because they are produced in Taiwan.

When I studied Chinese in Qinghua I used to sit next to a student from Hong Kong. He was dead against the simplified characters, and tried various times to convince how they are ugly, illogical and actually more difficult to learn than the traditional forms. A hostile attitude towards simplified characters is apparently widespread amongst the Chinese outside the Mainland and especially in Taiwan. In Taiwan people are basically convinced that the simplification of the characters was part of an evil Communist ploy to destroy traditional Chinese culture, and that they are the defenders of Chinese tradition because they stick to the old writing form. This is in spite of the fact that it was by no means only members of the CCP who initially wanted Chinese writing to be simplified.

I have been surprised however to notice that even quite a few Chinese Mainlanders, when asked, will lament the disappearance of the traditional characters and even advocate their return. I have heard many people argue that the traditional characters are preferable because they “contain Chinese traditional culture”, and that they are actually easier because you can guess the meaning just by looking at the character.

Although I realize that since I am not Chinese and I don’t know the traditional characters, most Chinese people would not take my opinions on the issue very seriously, I am still going to share my thoughts on the matter. Even though I am not literate in the traditional characters, I find the idea they are easier because they allow you to guess their meaning rather improbable. Although a few of the traditional characters may have a rather obvious relationship between their shape and their meaning which is lost in the simplified form, this is not such a common occurrence. In any case, the traditional characters have got to be much harder to learn to write by hand and to differentiate, and in a country where it takes children until high school to learn to read and write, this has to be an important point.

It may be because I am not used to it, but when I see a website written in traditional characters I can’t even make many of them out without enlarging the font size, because they are so full of strokes. Although this can also happen with a few particularly complex simplified characters, it is much rarer. The traditional characters seem to me to be impractically complicated for a modern society to use (although the Taiwanese seem to manage somehow). Then again, isn’t that true for the entire Chinese writing system? It is impractically complex, but the Chinese manage one way or another. In the past there were proposals to just overhaul the entire character system and only use pinyin. However, they never gained much popularity.

There is the argument that Chinese could not practically be written solely in pinyin, because the language is so full of homophones that in some cases the meaning is ambiguous if you use a phonetic script. If this is so, it means that the characters have to be kept, but simplifying them seems to me to be a reasonable move. The fact that after World War II the Japanese also simplified the Chinese characters which they use suggests that it is a natural step towards creating a modern society where the writing system has to be accessible to the masses. It is true that modifying the characters could be viewed as a cultural loss, but then again Chinese characters and all other writing systems have changed throughout history, and it is right that they should keep on changing.

And as a final point, poor foreigners in China like me already struggle enough to learn Chinese as it is. With the traditional characters the difficulty would be even greater. This is not such an irrelevant point. As more and more foreigners flock to China, and more and more people around the world take an interest in learning Chinese, it is important that the writing system be easy enough for them to at least have a chance of becoming functional in it.

On the girl run over in China

2011-10-22T18:53:00.000-07:00

Most of you will probably have heard about the horrible case of the two year old girl who was run over by a van in Foshan, Guangdong province, and was ignored by 18 passers-by until finally a 57 year old rag collector picked her up and tried to find her parents.

The story has received lots of attention within China as well as worlwide. The incident has produced much soul searching and revulsion. There is an assumption that some recent high-profile cases in which people who tried to help someone who had had an accident were later blamed and sued by the person they wanted to help have discouraged people from assisting strangers. There is now discussion of changing the law to protect and reward those who offer assistance to strangers. The government has also promised a big reward for the woman who finally tried to help the little girl.

And of course, just a few days after the event the Chinese press has conveniently come up with a different story about how in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, a 22 year old girl who was hit by a car was immediately helped by by passers-by and the workers from a nearby construction site, who came, lifted the car up from on top of her and called the emergency services.

Websites directed mainly at expats in China, for instance chinasmack, shanghaiist and echinacities, have all run articles about the incident. And of course, if you look at the comments under the articles, you will find the usual outpouring of expat prejudice and hostility towards China and the Chinese, mixed with some (rare) intelligent comments. For many of the commenters, this episode shows how the Chinese and their culture are indeed basically flawed, how they only care about money, how they have no morals or compassion, how this country is basically a hell-hole etc....

The fact that the incident has precipitated a lot of public disgust and condemnation within China would already seem to disprove this vision of things. Not to mention the fact that in the end it was a poor rag collector who did try to intervene.

Another important fact to remember is that this sort of thing can happen anywhere. For instance, in 2010 there was a case in New York in which a Guatemalan homeless man was stabbed while trying to save a woman from an attacker with a knife, and he then bled to death on the pavement as dozens of people walked by and did not help or call for an ambulance. One person even stopped to take a photo. Just as in the case of the girl in China, it was all captured by a surveillance camera. Clearly heartlessness towards strangers in big cities is not limited to China.

My assumption is that what stopped those passers-by from intervening was a mixture of fear of being blamed themselves and getting into trouble, and the idea that someone competent would surely deal with it anyway and that they might as well mind their own business. One of the passers-by who ignored the girl has spoken out, according to a report by China Daily. Here is the excerpt from the article:

Many of the 18 people who passed by the girl at the accident scene and did not help denied that they saw the girl or were aware of the situation.

One of them, a mother of a five-year-old girl, said she felt "regretful, compassionate, painful at heart and guilty," for seeing Yue Yue but not helping her.

"I thought she had fallen down from playing and didn't know she was run over by vehicles until her mother came in tears.

"She was bleeding from the mouth and nose and crying faintly. I was scared and my daughter was scared to cry. So we left in a hurry," said the woman surnamed Lin, cited by Guangzhou Daily.

"I wanted to lift her, but there was so much blood. I was scared. If someone was helping at that time, I would have done the same."

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

2011-09-26T07:16:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading Amy Chua's hugely controversial memoir "the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother". The book by the Chinese-American Yale professor (photo above) on how she raised her two daughters has already generated much discussion, and some of it has even reached China.

In her book, Amy Chua tells us about how she set out to raise her two daughters in a strict Chinese style (or what she considers to be the Chinese style), even though she lives in Connecticut and her husband is not even Chinese. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who came to the States from Fujian through the Philippines, she was raised in a very strict fashion by her parents, always being expected to excel in school and in anything else she did and never being allowed to mess around. After becoming a Yale professor, Chua decided that she was not going to give in to the soft and liberal approach to parenting which "Westerners" favour, but she would stick to the model which she believed had worked so well for her. Her husband, another Yale professor raised in a liberal Jewish household, rather surprisingly agreed to let her have her way ( although "in exchange" the girls were brought up as Jews with Bat Mitzvahs and the like).

In the book, Chua's methods come across as quite extreme. The girls are never (and I mean never) allowed to attend sleepovers, watch TV or play computer games, get any grade less than an A, act in school plays and a host of other things. Their mother chooses an instrument for the two of them (the piano for the older daughter and the violin for the younger one) and forces them to practice hours a day, pushing them to excel as much as is humanely possible. As a result, both of them become prodigious musicians as well as star students. But while the oldest daughter Sophie responds quite well to this upbringing, her younger sister Lulu has a rebellious personality and is much less willing to go along with her mother. By the age of thirteen she has her way and breaks free from her mum's control, refusing to play the violin any longer.

Part of the book's controversy originated from this piece in the Wall Street Journal which contains excerpts from the book designed to shock and a title ("why Chinese mothers are superior") which the author later said she didn't choose and disagrees with. Much of the fuss probably originates with the unease in the US at the idea that there might be one billion Chinese tiger mothers producing super kids, waiting in the wings to take away Americans' jobs and turn China into the new superpower. In any case, I found the book to be extremely readable and sometimes quite amusing, and I finished it in the space of a weekend. Amy Chua's parenting methods certainly come over as ridicolously over the top, especially the way she obsesses over her children's musical progress, which seems to border on insanity (for god's sake, playing the violin or the piano don't even lead to a good job, except if you are going to be a musician, but I suspect she would not consider that a decent occupation for her kids, since you don't need a Yale degree for it.) She later stated that she exaggerated it all in the book for literary effect, which I certainly hope.

Others have already written lots about the obvious downsides to her way of being parent: you are depriving your kids of valuable social skills by preventing them from socializing, you are preventing them from discovering their own interests and developing their own personalities (although she claims that these are Western preoccupations which the Chinese don't share, because they believe children need guidance) etc....

What I am struck by is Chua's attitude towards China and Chinese culture. This woman was born and raised in the States and went to an American school. She has never lived in China and her ideas about Chinese culture seem to be based entirely on her parents, who must have left China something like sixty years ago. And yet she feels completely Chinese, and often speaks about the "Westerners" who surround her in opposition to her Chinese self. It doesn't seem to strike her that Chinese culture and the Chinese immigrant culture in the States which she grew up in might not be quite the same. It reminds me of an article I once read about Chinese Americans who move to China and are surprised to find that they don't fit in at all.

And while she is going on about the advantages of forcing children to engage in rote learning for hours, choosing their hobbies for them and never being happy with anything but As, here in China there is increasing interest in more liberal Western approaches to child rearing (although the Chinese schooling system doesn't make it easier to allow children to take time off from schoolwork).
It also strikes me that Chua's methods might make sense in the context of China, a country of a billion people where most children have to work extremely hard to even have a hope of getting into university, and there is huge competition for everything. However, they don't make sense in the context of a privileged American family whose children will have loads of opportunities whatever happens.

Amy Chua's book has been translated into Chinese, with the title 我在美国做妈妈（being a mother in the US) . With characteristic lack of political correctness, it was added on the bottom of the Chinese cover that: "this book proves it: in the field of educating children, Eastern parents are more successful than Western parents." Some Chinese commentators have pointed out how the book is actually very un-Chinese, because even though many Chinese mothers could identify with the author's obsessive desire for her children to excel, none of them would ever publicly expose embarrassing facts about their family life with such honesty and candor.

Sounds which the Chinese mix up.

2011-09-11T02:39:00.000-07:00

It is a universally held stereotype in the West that the Chinese and the Japanese cannot distinguish between the letters L and R. As for the Japanese, this stereotype does seem to hold true in my experience. When Douglas MacArthur was running as presidential candidate in the States, his Japanese supporters displayed a banner in the centre of Tokyo, reading "we play for MacArthur's erection".

When it comes to the Chinese, it is little realized that it is actually only the Chinese from the South who can't distinguish between L and R, since Southern dialects don't distinguish between the two. Southerners get the two sounds mixed up even when speaking standard Mandarin Chinese, which does distinguish between the L and the R (although the Chinese R is a bit different from ours, and the ability to produce a long rolled R can make the Chinese fall around with laughter.)

The Chinese from the South have much greater trouble pronouncing the sounds of standard Mandarin Chinese than do Northerners in general. This is unsurprising, since the language is based on the Beijing dialect, which is closer to other Northern dialects than to the Southern ones.
Another mix up which is not at all well known in the West, but which I find far more baffling than the inability to tell an L from an R, is the lack of distinction between the L and N sounds which one finds in many dialects of Southern China (although not in all of them).

When I traveled through Guizhou province, understanding the locals' Mandarin was made harder by their constant and unconscious substitution of N for L. Although I had never thought about it before coming to China, I suppose the two letters are pronounced similarly. I know lots of people in Beijing who come from Sichuan, Guizhou or Hunan, and they are still unable to tell the two sounds apart. If they know English they will make the same mistake in English, referring to a lecture as "necture" and Mr.Li as "Mr. Ni". Although some of them do make an effort to learn the difference between the two letters (which is after all marked in the Pinyin they learn in school), it still seems to take a conscious effort for them to remember which one is which. A bit like me with the second and third tones of Chinese.

Life as an ant-person

2011-09-03T02:06:00.000-07:00

Here in China the term "ant-people" ( 蚁族) has become popular in recent years to describe a certain demographic in Chinese society: the masses and masses of young people, often university graduates, living in cheap and overcrowded accommodation on the outskirts of big Chinese cities and shifting from one job to another.

Although I am certainly not part of that demographic (I have not heard of any "foreign ant-people" yet, although one day soon it may start happening), my current accommodation is making me feel like the definition fits me and my flatmates rather well. I am living in a flat on the 14th floor of a high-rise in Haidian district. The flat is one of the old-style Chinese ones, with no living room, but just a small kitchen, bathroom and three bedrooms. It is facing a large junction, so that there is quite a racket from all the engines and hooting down below, especially when the windows are open. My flatmates are two young men, a Chinese and a Japanese, who work here. As is normal in this kind of place I didn't know my flatmates before moving in, and indeed I never even met them before signing the contract. There is also no suggestion that we should get to know each other.
There is an abundant number of flats of this kind around in Beijing: relatively cheap flats where young working people live, often for relatively brief periods of time (but it can be years). The atmosphere is almost like a hostel, so that although you share the same kitchen and bathroom with the others, you do not necessarily get to know them or ever feel that you are actually living together. There is normally no such thing as a living room, or if there is it goes unused, since people spend their free time surfing the internet in their own (often tiny) bedrooms, and do not feel that the rest of the flat is really their home. In fact, it is normal to lock your bedroom whenever you go out, since you are basically sharing a flat with strangers. Another feature of these flats is that while people keep their own bedrooms clean, there is no agreed rotation for cleaning the kitchen and bathroom, so very often they are simply not cleaned, or cleaned only very rarely.

Last year I stayed in another flat of this kind for a few months, and there were two Chinese girls living there who never took the trouble to introduce themselves to me a single time while I was staying there. There were also three rather nice young boys from Guanxi province who were sharing a bedroom, and they invited me to chat and drink beer in their room a number of times.

Life for most of these young people (who are usually university graduates and work in offices) in a place like Beijing is often stressful and not much fun: they earn comparatively little money, they live in cramped and not very high-quality accommodation, they sometimes work overtime for no extra pay, and they have to commute for ages in unbelievably crowded buses and subway trains. Most of them come from other parts of China and make the long journey home only once a year, for the Spring Festival. Except if they go to some park in the weekend, the only scenery they ever see is a concrete jungle of high rises and more high rises, cars, people and polluted air above.
Most of them will also readily complain about how in Beijing 压力太大（the pressure is so great). Because of the stress and the pressure of living in Beijing, most of the city's locals have apparently migrated to the extreme suburbs outside the fifth ring road, where life is still comparatively less stressful. Within the fifth ring road, where the city proper is located, there are now only two million native Beijingers, and eight million waidiren, or outsiders.

China, South Sudan's independence and the scramble for oil.

2011-07-10T02:35:00.000-07:00

Southern Sudan has gained independence a few days ago, becoming the world's newest country.

Although I am no expert on Sudan, I understand that the splitting in two of one of Africa's biggest nations is the result of an ethnic division between the North of the country, which is mostly Muslim and identifies with the Arab world, and the South which is mostly christian or animist and identifies with Black Africa. The country has always been ruled from the North, and some Southerners have been at war to gain independence for decades.

The aspect I would like to focus on are the obvious geopolitical interests circling around Sudan and its oil. Sudan has very large oil reserves (it comes 20th in the world in this respect), and about 80% of the country's oil is concentrated in the South. Although secession does seem to be the genuine will of the people who live in Southern Sudan, it would be naive to think that the attitude of the great powers towards the birth of the nation of South Sudan is not heavily influenced by their insatiable thirst for oil. My original assumption was that the split of Sudan into two nations is basically an important point scored in the Western countries' battle with China (and other emerging powers) for prime access to Africa's oil resources.

It is well known that the Sudanese regime of Omar al-Bashir is in pretty good terms with China, and very bad ones with the US and the West in general. Sudan used to host Osama Bin Laden, and the US army bombed a chemical factory in Sudan in 1998, claiming that it was linked to Al Qaeda. An International Criminal Court arrest warrant even hangs over Al-Bashir's head. The country is on the US's "state sponsors of terrorism"list, and the US has imposed sanctions on the country, forbidding its companies from trading with it. As a result, most of the country's oil fields are owned by China's National Petroleum Corporation, Malaysia's Petronas, and India's Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, with the Chinese having the biggest share.

Of course, China has always been criticized in the West for its proximity to the Sudanese regime, especially in connection with the massacres in Darfur. I cannot help feel that there is a certain hypocrisy in such criticism, especially when it comes from those who will not hesitate to go to war themselves over oil, as well as support all kinds of regimes as long as they will continue providing them with their flow of black gold. As relative newcomers in the scramble for Africa's natural resources, the Chinese (and to an extent the Indians, Malaysians and others) are forced not to have too many scruples and do business with whatever government will agree, and countries which the West treats as pariahs, such as Sudan, are clearly a very good option for them.

On the face of it, the independence of South Sudan doesn't seem to bode well for Chinese interests. It is not hard to imagine that the government of the new nation of South Sudan will be much friendlier towards the West (as well as lying outside of the Arab sphere), and it will hold the lion share of Sudan's oil resources. However, after a more detailed look at how South Sudan's oil will be refined and exported, the real beneficiaries of the new situation are not at all clear anymore. North Sudan still holds all the refineries, the only pipelines and the only seaport (the South is landlocked). During the period of autonomy which the South of Sudan has already enjoyed from 2005 until 2011, the North got 50% of the revenue for the South's oil, in exchange for the use of its refineries, pipelines and its port. It is not clear what will happen from now on, but the North wants to continue receiving a 50% cut, while the South is reluctant to agree. Although South Sudan is not under US sanctions, if they continue exporting their oil through the North then the sanctions will still apply and the US will continue to be unable to extract or buy the country's oil. There is a plan to build a new pipeline running from South Sudan through Uganda to Kenya which would avoid relying on the North, but it is not clear whether this is viable. Meanwhile China's economic councilor in South Sudan, Zhang Jun, has already told the Financial times that China would be willing to give loans to the country to keep it going financially while the Chinese build the pipeline to Kenya themselves.

All in all, I am beginning to wonder whether South Sudan's independence is that bad for China after all. It's companies still seem to own most of South Sudan's oil fields, and their allies in North Sudan may still get a big cut in the export of the South's oil in any case. What seems pretty certain is that South Sudan is going to become another unstable and corrupt country whose economy is entirely based on exporting one particular natural resource, and the oil revenues will most likely only benefit the local elite and foreign companies, rather than the local people. Renewed conflict with the North over oil is not to be excluded either.

One thing is clear: as long as the world economy is so dependent on fossil fuels and oil in particular, it will be difficult for countries like Sudan to achieve lasting peace and a healthy form of development.

A Chinese poem on Western bias: "What do you really want from us?"

2011-02-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

A poem originally written in Chinese and called "What do you really want from us" has recently been making the rounds on the internet, both in Chinese and in its English translation, and it has caused much debate. Although its autorship has not been confirmed, it is rumoured to have been written by a retired Chinese professor of physics in an American university.

The poem is directed at Westerners and complains about the double standards they employ when they view China. Although I don't think all the points raised in the poem make sense, I feel at least some of them really hit home. It certainly gives voice to the general feeling among many Chinese that Westerners are basically biased towards them and unwilling to accept China becoming a great power which is able to compete with them on its own terms. Here is the poem itself, in both English and Chinese:

The Poem (in English)

What Do You Really Want from Us?

When we were the Sick Man of Asia, we were called The Yellow Peril.
When we are billed to be the next Superpower, we are called The Threat.

When we closed our doors, you smuggled drugs to open markets.
When we embrace Free Trade, You blame us for taking away your jobs.

When we were falling apart, You marched in your troops and wanted your fair share.
When we tried to put the broken pieces back together again, Free Tibet you screamed, It Was an Invasion!

When tried Communism, you hated us for being Communist.
When we embrace Capitalism, you hate us for being Capitalist.

When we have a billion people, you said we were destroying the planet.
When we tried limiting our numbers, you said we abused human rights.

When we were poor, you thought we were dogs.
When we loan you cash, you blame us for your national debts.

When we build our industries, you call us Polluters.
When we you goods, you blame us for global warming.

When we buy oil, you call it exploitation and genocide.
When you go to war for oil, you call it liberation.

When we were lost in chaos and rampage, you demanded rules of law.
When we uphold law and order against violence, you call it violating human rights.

When we were silent, you said you wanted us to have free speech.
When we are silent no more, you say we are brainwashed-xenophobes.

“Why do you hate us so much”we asked.
“No,” you answered, “we don't hate you.”

We don't hate you either, But, do you understand us?
“Of course we do, ”you said, “We have AFP, CNN and BBC's.”

What do you really want from us?
Think hard first, then answer. Because you only get so many chances.

Enough is Enough, Enough Hypocrisy for This One World.
We want One World, One Dream, and Peace on Earth.

This Big Blue Earth is Big Enough for all of Us.

The Poem (in Chinese)

　　给西方的诗〈你究竟要我们怎样生存？〉

　　我们是东亚病夫时，我们被说是黄祸；

　　我们被预言是下一个超级大国了，我们被指是主要威胁。

　　那时我们闭关自守，你走私鸦片来强开门户；

　　我们拥抱自由贸易了，你责骂我们抢走你的饭碗。

　　那时我们风雨飘摇，你铁蹄犯境要求机会均等；

　　我们要整合破碎的山河，你说我们“入侵”…… 叫喊“给西藏自由”。

　　我们试行马列救国，你痛恨我们成为共党分子；

　　我们拥抱资本主义了，你又恨我们当了资本家。

　　当我们的人口到达十亿，你说我们在摧毁地球；

　　我们要限制人口了，你说我们践踏人权。

　　那时我们一贫如洗，你视我们贱如狗；

　　我们有钞票借给你了，你怨我们令你国债。

　　我们发展工业了，你说我们是污染者；

　　我们有货品卖给你了，你说我们是地球暖化的因由。

　　我们购买石油，你说我们取兼灭族；

　　你们为石油开战，你说是为了解救生灵。

　　那时我们动乱无序，你说我们没有法治；

　　现在我们要依法平暴，你说我们违反人权。

　　我们静默无声时，你说我们欠缺言论自由；

　　我们不再缄默了，你说我们是被洗了脑的仇外暴民。

　　为甚麽你这样憎恨我们？我们想知道。

　　“不”，你说，“我不恨你们。”

　　我们也不恨你；只是，你了解我们吗？

　　“当然了解”，你说。“我们消息多的是，有 AFP、CNN、还有BBC……”

　　其实你究竟要我们怎样生存？

　　回答之前，请仔细的想一想…… 因为你的机会不是无限的。

　　已经够多了……这个世界容不下更多的伪善了。

　　我们要的是同一个世界，同一个梦想，靖世太平。

　　这个宽广、辽阔的蓝地球, 容得下你们，容得下我们。

Discussing politics in the Yellow Loess Plateau.

2011-02-09T01:36:00.000-08:00

During my stay in the village in Shanxi detailed in my previous post, I had an interesting chance to hear the political views of the father of the friend I was staying with. Her father spends most of his time working in cities as a labourer, although he comes back to his home in the village regularly. One evening he started telling me how when he was a child, Chinese schools stopped teaching foreign languages for a while because Jiang Qing, the wife of chairman Mao and a member of the Gang of Four that was behind the Cultural Revolution, said that in her opinion learning other languages was not necessary.

Since he obviously didn't think the Cultural Revolution was a good period, I decided to ask him why there was a medallion of Chairman Mao dangling over the bed where I slept. He told me that he admires Chairman Mao, because when he took power he redistributed the land to the peasants. I have often heard this mentioned as a reason why the Chairman is still held in high esteem. He started telling me how Mao Zedong fought against the Guomindang, who wanted to exploit the people. Even though he made some mistakes in later years, he is still basically a positive figure. I then asked him if he also admires Deng Xiaoping. He immediately shook his head, and said the Deng Xiaoping improved the economy by starting the "reform and opening up", but at the same time the society's "security" got worse. I asked what he meant by security, and he answered that political corruption has got much much worse. Nowadays most politicians are corrupt, and the ordinary people can do nothing about it. The man's anger at the politicians' corruption was obviously very strong. He also said that since Deng Xiaoping got into power, people's attitudes have changed. In the old days people would help each other out, but nowadays they only think about themselves and about making money. My host also quoted the famous saying by Deng Xiaoping "it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mice". While the phrase was usually understood in the West to mean "it doesn't matter if the economy is socialist or capitalist, as long as it works well", his understanding was rather different. According to him, the saying's real meaning is "it doesn't matter if you make money by honest or dishonest means, as long as you get rich". The way he sees it, this philosophy caused a big decrease in public morality.

The man's views rather confirmed what I read in a book by prof. Mobo Gao, "the battle for China's past", in which the author stated that in rural areas of China people tend to have a generally positive image of Mao, but a negative one of Deng Xiaoping and of the current leaders, who are seen as corrupt and developing the country at their expense.

A week in the Yellow Loess Plateau

2011-02-07T23:14:00.000-08:00

I have just got back from my Spring Festival travels. As you can see I managed to make my way out of Beijing in the end, although I had to take a plane to do so, since buying a train ticket turned out to be simply impossible. I initially flew to Xi'an and stayed there a couple of nights, taking the chance to see the fabled Terracotta warriors. After that I made my way to the small village of Dong Hou, in Shanxi (山西） province. A Chinese friend of mine comes from there, and she invited me to spend a few days at her family's home.

The village is located in the depths of the Yellow Loess Plateau, the plateau that straddles the Yellow River and covers 640.000 square kilometers of Central-Northern China. To get to the village I first took a train to the town of Sanmenxia, where I was met by my friend and we travelled by bus to her home. As the bus crossed the Yellow river and made its way through the countryside along dusty roads, houses and cars started to get scarcer and scarcer and I realized with pleasure that I was headed for somewhere quite remote. The village in question turned out to be the last stop on the bus line. It must have consisted of a few hundred houses.

Although I have been to the countryside in China on other occasions, before this experience I had only ever been to rural areas in Southern China, where the villages and the landscape look remarkably different. In the North, houses tend to contain their own private courtyards, as my friend's house did. As I expected from my previous experiences in rural areas, the living conditions turned out to be quite rough. There was no heating, no possibility to shower and no running water. There was a tap in the courtyard, but it was frozen, so we had to rely on containers of hot water. The bathroom was the usual hole in the ground behind the pig sty. What I found hardest to stand was the constant cold. Since this was Northern China the temperatures were often bitterly cold, only slightly better than Beijing. Although in Shanxi central heating does exist in the cities, it still hasn't reached such small villages. I spent every waking hour with a heavy coat on. At night I was so cold that I slept with my hat on, as well as three thick blankets over me. Towards the end of my stay I got a cold myself. The food I was given was good, although it was pretty much the same for every meal. Rice is not usually eaten in rural areas of Northern China, and I never eat it once while I was there. Instead, the staple food which is eaten with every meal is Mian Bao (a kind of bread bun). Another interesting fact is that the family I stayed with only eat two meals a day (one around 10 AM and one around 4PM). I was told that in the summer they eat three times a day, but in the winter only twice because they days are shorter.

My friend's father works as a labourer in cities during the year and only returnes to the village during holidays, while her mother lives there permanently. As a result the father could speak relatively good Putonghua (Standard Chinese), while the mother only spoke in pure local dialect, which I could hardly understand at all.Of course, on the first evening of my stay they displayed much curiosity towards me and asked me many questions, including "what special food do people eat in your country for the Spring Festival?". During the following days, relatives of the family would pay visits to the home for the Festival, and I would also be taken to the homes of other relatives. I found that most people could speak to me in Putonghua, except for the elderly. Among the many questions I got from people, there were certain recurring ones: "is it true that England is very developed/more developed than China", "is it true that in your country you don't have the Spring Festival, but only Shendangjie (Christmas), "Can you get used to our food" etc... One rather unusual question which I was aked by various different people was if it is true that in the West when a person turns 18, their parents will stop looking after them. Although nobody has asked me this anywhere else in China, it seems to be common knowledge throughout the village that Westerners turn indipendent at age 18. Perhaps they had just had a program on a local television channel which implied this. Various people also asked me if I thought their village was "luohou" (backward), to which I was forced to reply that yes, the economy is not very advanced there. (In the photo, some rather dramatic scenery next to the village where I stayed)

What really struck me was the apparent level of adherence to traditional folk religion and customs. The house where I stayed and many others displayed a shrine for the local gods in the living room, and a little shrine to the "earth god" near the entrance. My friend's mother is apparently a strong believer in these gods, while she herself said that she "would like to believe in them", which I take as an indication that she doesn't. There is a little temple to the gods located on the edge of the village. The road going towards the temple from the south was blocked for the following reason: more people than usual have died in the village over the last two years, and a Feng Shui expert suggested that blocking the road might lead to better luck. Feng Shui is clearly still followed and taken seriously by everyone.

My friend's family belongs to a clan which was begun by a man who arrived in the village 200 years ago. On the first day of the new year, all the members of the clan gathered together, and the men conducted a religious ceremony to commemorate the clan's ancestors. The ceremony is forbidden for women, and I was given the chance to observe it. I followed all the clan's men to the courtyard of a house where the ritual would take place. Sitting among the others was a man who I immediately supposed must be a religious figure of some kind. He had long hair gathered in a pony tail, a long beard and big round glasses, all of which made him very conspicuos in the context of a Chinese village. Indeed, he turned out to be a professional Feng Shui expert. On my arrival he looked at me with curiosity and asked me where I was from and if in my country our ceremonies are the same. The ceremony consisted in all the men (about 40 people) bowing down in front of a shrine and praying under the guidance of the guy with the pony tail, while someone lit fire crackers on the side.

All this doesn't really fit in with the commonly held opinion that religious practice is almost absent in China. Even many Chinese will tell you that most Chinese people have no religion, however in rural areas such as the one I visited traditional folk religion is clearly alive and kicking. As well as shrines to the gods, many homes displayed a picture of Chairman Mao. My friend's grandfather had a bust of the chairman in his bedroom. The bed I slept in also had a little medallion with Mao's face danggling over it. Considering that many Chinese gods are actually former generals or other historical figures who were turned into gods after their death, I wonder if Mao might not just become another Chinese folk god in the run. It would be a funny end for a professed Marxist.

I also observed some interesting traditions related to the Spring Festival. Ash was scattered outside the door on the first day of the year, to prevent evil spirits from coming into the house. The usual red strips of paper contain 对联 or Chinese lines wishing luck and prosperity were pasted around the doors of the houses on the last day of the old year, just like everywhere in China. I noticed that one home had white strips and not red strips pasted around the door. When I asked why, I found out that it means that someone has died in the home over the last year.

Talking about death, someone actually died in a home next to the one where I was staying on the first day I arrived. He was only 60, and died of cancer. My friend told me that there has been an increase in cancer deaths in the area over the last years, which she blames on increasing pollution. However, she said that most local people have no awareness that there might be a connection with pollution.

Another interesting feature of the area are the yaodongs, or homes inside caves. Many people used to live in rooms carved out of the rock below ground throughout the area, and a few elderly people still do. I myself visited a home in a cave in which and elderly couple live, in the middle of the village. It was necessary to walk down a flight of stairs to get to the cave's entrance. Seeing how warm the cave was inside, I wished my host family lived in one too. Apparently when my friend was a child, a big proportion of the people still lived in such dwellings, but nowadays most of them lie abandoned.

All in all, the experience was interesting and fun, if a bit trying because of the constant cold and lack of conveniences. Once I got back to Beijing after a 12 hour train ride, I suddenly had a new appreciation of living in a flat with heating, plumbing and a shower. (In the photo below, me with my friend's grandfather, and a little grandchild of his)

On the greatest annual human migration in the world, and my failed attempts to join it.

2011-01-24T22:44:00.000-08:00

Do you know what the greatest annual migration of people in the world is? Anyone who lives in china might guess: it is the hundreds of millions of Chinese people who go back to their homes to celebrate the Spring Festival. Every year around this time, countless numbers of Chinese travel across the country to go back to their beloved 家乡 (hometown) to spend the Chinese new year with their loved ones. This leads to the dreaded 春运, loosely translatable as "Spring festival rush". In 2008, the total number of rail journeys undertaken during the Spring festival was 2.26 billion. All the country's transport systems, and especially the trains, are overloaded like mad, and getting hold of train tickets is incredibly difficult and frustrating. I have just found out how difficult it can be myself.

This year, I am (or was) planning to go to Shaanxi province to pass the New year's eve (which will be on the 2nd of February this year) in the home of Chinese friend. The closest towns to my friend's home are Yuncheng and Sanmenxia. There are two trains a day from Beijing to Sanmenxia, and one to Yuncheng. According to the current system, train tickets only start to be sold five days before the train leaves, so as to avoid the tickets running out months in advance. Since I was planning to leave on the 29th, and today was the first day that the tickets for the 29th are on sale, I got up early and went to the ticket booth near my home to attempt to find a ticket. I was not surprised to see a long queue of people waiting outside the booth. At around 8.30, I got into line and started waiting. I waited for about two hours in the open in sub-zero temperatures, while the queue painfully moved forward at the pace of about 1 meter every half an hour. My feet were freezing despite the thick socks I was wearing. At around 10.30 I finally reached the front of the queue, and guess what, I found out that the tickets for soft sleepers, hard sleepers, and seats had all already sold out for both the destinations. They had only started selling the tickets on the same day at 9 in the morning, and by 10.30 they were sold out! The only tickets left were for standing. Although I am pretty enduring, standing for over 10 hours in a ridicolously crowded Chinese train during the Spring Festival is more than I can bear. The incredible amount of people makes even going to the bathroom a huge struggle.

I left empty-handed, remembering how I used to live in a country where all you need to do to take a train is go to the station on the same day you want to travel and buy a ticket. This is the kind of thing that millions of Chinese need to put up with around this time in order to buy a ticket to go back home, unless they can afford a flight. In the last few days, the Chinese internet has been full of articles on how a man in Shanghai streaked almost naked through the train station in protest, after he could not buy a ticket to go back to his hometown even though he had started waiting in the station the evening before the day when the tickets were first put on sale.

As for me, I have not made up my mind on my plans yet. Flying is far more expensive, and buying a ticket is an uphill struggle. I will now consider how to get out of Beijing for the holidays (something I am determind to do).

The differences between China and Germany in pictures.

2010-11-19T04:12:00.000-08:00

I have come across a series of pictures which rather cleverly capture the differences between life in China and in Germany. The artist who made them, Yang Liu, was born in Beijing but moved to Germany when she was quite young.

Below are some of the pictures. The blue part represents Germany, and the red part China:

How emotions are expressed

How the weather affect emotions

The position of the Boss

How problems are tackled

Noise level in a restaurant

Relationships between people

Lifestyle

Sense of self

Modes of Transport in 1970 and 2006

The life of the elderly

The position of the child

Queueing

Punctuality

Although the series of pictures is specifically meant to represent the differences between Germany and China, most of them could also be applied to the differences between China and Britain or any other North European country, or the United States for that matter.
Interestingly, some of these pictures could also represent the differences between Germany and Italy, or between North European cultures and Mediterranean ones in general. The ones on punctuality, queueing and the noise level in restaurants certainly could be applied to Germany vs. Italy as well (actually when it comes to punctuality, I think the Chinese are somewhat more punctual than the Italians. However there's no beating the Germans on that one). Other pictures are more specific to China and Eastern cultures, for instance the ones related to expressing your feelings, the sense of self and the role of the boss.

The first case of anti-foreigner hostility directed towards me in China

2010-10-05T03:11:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I had the experience of witnessing a case of open hostility directed against me as a foreigner, for the first time since I have started living in China two years ago. The setting was the small city of Chengde (承德） in Hebei province, slightly to the north of Beijing. I went there with a few friends over the holidays for the Chinese national day. Chengde used to be the summer resort of the emperors during the Qing dinasty. The Manchu rulers would come to this place to escape the heat of Beijing, but they would also use Chengde to hold talks with the nomadic groups who lived along China's northern borders, making use of the town's location on the northern fringes of China. Emperor Qianlong (1735-1796) commissioned the building of twelve temples around the town, eight of which survive today. One of the temples is an exact replica of the famous Potala palace in Tibet, once the residence of the Dalai Lamas.

It was outside the entrance to the 避暑山庄 (bishu shanzhuang or literally the "avoid summer town")，the summer resort of the emperors, that the unpleasant incident occured. My friends and I were waiting in a queue to buy the entry tickets, which were ridicolously overpriced (120 yuan each with no student discount!). Our group included two Chinese, a Tibetan girl, a Dutchman and myself. While my Dutch friend was buying the tickets and I was nearby, a Chinese man buying his ticket in a different queue suddenly blurted out in an angry tone in Chinese that he had seen so many television programmes about how the foreigners burned down and looted the Summer Palace in the last few days, that he really couldn't stand foreigners. After that he took his ticket and walked away. The comment was clearly directed at my Dutch friend and probably at me, as we were the only foreigners on the scene at the time.

For those of you who don't know the background: the Summer Palace the man referred to is the Yuanmingyuan complex in Beijing, also know as the old Summer Palace, not to be confused with the new Summer Palace which is still a famous tourist attraction. It was built in the eighteenth century, and it used to be a magnificent complex of palaces and gardens where the Qing emperors resided, until it was looted and destroyed by British and French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War. This act of wanton destruction is still seen as a potent symbol of Western aggresion and imperialism in China. The 150th anniversary of the looting of Yuanmingyuan falls on October 18th this year, and a series of activities and events will mark the anniversary (all of them under the theme of "peace, cooperation and friendship", including the Sino-French cooperation society donating a statue of Victor Hugo, who wrote about the looting in a book). I suppose that there have been a lot of television programmes talking about the anniversary in the last few days, and this is what set the man off.

To be clear, the destruction of Yuanmingyuan was a barbaric act of destruction which deserves all our revulsion. It was theoretically done as retaliation for the torture and execution of twenty foreign prisoners by the Chinese (in the context of a war of aggression started by the British and the French). On the other hand, when the British troops finally burned down the palace, 300 eunuchs, maids and workers were unable to escape because the gates were locked, and they were burned to death. However, all this happened 150 years ago. It is clearly not a good reason to go abusing Westerners one meets nowadays. Not to mention that the man had no way of knowing whether my friend and I were British or French, but clearly in his eyes one white person is worth another.

As I said this was the first instance of open hostility towards me as a foreigner which I have come across in China, and it is certainly not a common occurence. In my estimation it is actually far more common for foreigners to experience hostility directed at them in Britain or in other Western countries. One has to live in China a long time before coming across such a thing. A friendly kind of curiosity is a much more common reaction to foreigners. The man at the center of the incident (which was after all very minor) has most likely never had any interraction with a foreigner throughout his life, which partly explains his attitude and the fact that he sees all foreigners as an undistinguished mass. However, the incident is significant of the fact that the memories of the "century of humiliation", the Opium wars and Western colonialism are still strong in China, and they can still generate a certain resentment of Westerners, which the recent commemoration of the destruction of Yuanmingyuan obviously brought to the surface in the case of this man in Chengde.

Inside the imperial resort in Chengde, there were more reminders of the history of European imperialism in China. The resort turned out to be the place where the emperor was forced to sign the convention of Beijing in 1860, under which the Chinese ceeded to the British part of the Kowloon peninsula which now lies in Hong Kong. Next to the spot where the signing took place, there was a plaque entitled "never forget the national humiliation".

Cuba's double currency

2010-08-08T04:42:00.000-07:00

One unusual fact about Cuba which I had already heard about before going there, but whose significance I didn't realize before arriving, is that the country has two different currencies in use. There is the National Peso and the Convertible Peso. The Convertible Peso (CUC) used to be pegged to the same value as the US dollar, although it is nowadays slightly more valuable. The National Peso is exactly 25 times less valuable than the CUC. This system with two different currencies has basically created two parallel economies within the country. As I understand it, basic goods and services are bought using the national peso, while any luxury items can only be bought with CUC. Items sold in national pesos tend to be extremely cheap by Western standards, while items sold in CUC tend to have similar prices to what you might find in Europe. Basically, the CUC is the currency of the rich, and the national peso is the currency of the poor. Most ordinary Cubans are paid in the national peso, which means that a whole host of goods and services are off-limits to them. Foreign tourists generally only use the CUC during their stay. The result is that Cuba is not a particularly cheap country to travel around in for foreigners, since taxis, hotels and good restaurants have prices in CUC and are no cheaper than they would be in a Western country (although the service is not necessarily as good).

Personally I only used national pesos during the last two days of my stay, and that was only because I and the other foreigner I was with wanted to do things in Havana like taking public transport and going to the cinema, which require the national currency. Both services tunred out to be extremely cheap: the bus cost less than one peso (remember, 25 national pesos make up one dollar), and the cinema cost exactly one peso. When my friend went into a bank in Havana and said he wanted to exchange two CUC for national pesos (that being quite enough for all our needs), the bank clerk gave him quite a surprised look, since very few foreigners ever use the national currency.

The moment when I got a real inkling into what it is like to live in Cuba only using the national peso came when my friend and I went to Coppelia, a famous ice-cream parlour in the middle of Havana. There is a large hall where the ice-cream is sold in national pesos, and a stand outside where it is sold in CUC. On the first day we went to the CUC stand, where there was almost no queue and lots of different flavours, although the price was 1 CUC (in other words one dollar) for a scoop. The next day we went to the section where the prices are in the national peso. We had to wait one hour (literally) in a queue just to get in, since the place is extremely popular with Cubans and there are huge queues to enter the building. When we did finally manage to get in, we sat down in the hall and had to wait quite a while for a bad tempered waitress to come and serve us. When she did we found out that there were only two available flavours (and since one of them was chocolate which I don't eat, I had to settle for one flavour). Apparently, the two flavours vary from day to day. On the other hand, the ice-cream was extremely cheap, with about five scoops costing 5 pesos, or 20 cents.

Basically, when you pay in national pesos the service and the queuing times are reminiscent of the former Soviet Union, while if you pay in CUC you get Western standards and Western prices. Most Cubans' wages are in the national peso, and the average wage amounts to around 400-700 pesos a month. This would translate to only 17-30 CUC or dollars a month. That is why using the CUC is out of reach for many Cubans. It also gives you an idea of how precious tourists' tips are to Cubans. When I was staying in a resort in Playa Jibacoa, I gave a maid a 10 CUC tip to wash my clothes for me (admittedly it was a very large tip). She was extremely grateful and told me "esto me va a ayudar mucho" (this will help me a lot). Later on I realized that I had given her about half her monthly wage just to wash a few clothes.

Que linda es Cuba?

2010-08-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

I am back from a two week journey to Cuba. The reason for my trip to Cuba was the fact that the World Esperanto Congress was held in Havana this year, and my parents were also taking part. As a result they invited me to come along and meet them in the Caribbean island, which is literally on the other side of the world from Beijing.

Cuba was certainly an interesting (as well as a relaxing) place to visit, and the contrast between Havana and Beijing couldn't have been greater. I am aware of the fact that two weeks is not nearly enough to come to grips with a country and what it means to live there. However, I have gathered some impressions of Cuba and I have learnt a bit about the country, and my knowledge of Spanish allowed me to chat to people everywhere I went.

My first impression of Havana, to be honest, was one of decay and stagnation. Even the center of the city is full of crumbling old buildings, decaying pavements and ancient US and Soviet cars which are miracolously still running, as well as some shiny new ones. The lack of shops and commercial activity is especially stunning coming from Beijing. Although I found one modern supermarket in Miramar, the fancy embassy neighbourhood, there is a general scarcity of shops and businesses and a total lack of the large shopping malls you can find in most capital cities of the developing world. What shops there are usually only allow purchases in convertible pesos and not in national pesos (more on the double currency system in the next entry).

What the city lacks in shops, it makes up for in political rethoric. The walls are full of posters and slogans invoking Che Guevara, the revolution, defending Cuba from US intereferences etc... (in the photo on top, you can see a mural of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution on a Havana wall, saying "More united and combative in defending socialism"). Immediately ouside the airport, big billboards inform you that one hour of US embargo deprives Cuba of enough electricity to generate I don't know how many power plants, and similar sorts of things. What I didn't notice in the streets are large images of Fidel Castro himself. Perhaps that would seem too dictatorial. One of the causes embraced with most passion in Cuba seems to be the liberation of the five Cubans who were imprisoned in Florida in the nineties on espionage charges. The five were apparently investigating some of the anti-Cuban terrorist groups who operate in Florida, mainly among Cuban exiles. Some such groups have certainly been responsible for shameful acts of terrorism directed against Cuba, like the bombing of a civilian Cuban flight from Barbados to Jamaica in 1976 which killed 73 people, whose culprits now live happily in the US. These five Cubans are now national heroes, and all over Havana posters demanding the release of "the five heroes prisoners of the empire" are in evidence. The museum of the revolution dedicates a whole floor to them.

As I stayed in Havana, I found that Cubans tend to be laid back, friendly and sociable. If you can speak Spanish it is quite easy to get chatting to people, although in the center of the city you have to avoid the touts who constantly try and start up a conversation with tourists for easily imaginable hidden motives. The city certainly has its charm, especially the historic center with its old colonial houses (in the photo, a street in central Havana). It is also quite safe, unlike most Latin American capitals. The laid back atmosphere is so different from Beijing's mad rush that in the beginning I felt like everyone was moving in slow motion.

I have to say that I feel quite ambiguous about the country's social and political situation, as the Cubans themselves obviously do. On the one hand, it is true that Cuba lacks the terrible slums and extreme poverty which many Latin American countries display, including economic powerhouses like Brazil. Education and health services really are free and accessible for everyone, as the Cuban government loves to remind everyone. As a result, the UN's human development index, which is calculated on the basis of indicators such as illiteracy rates, average life expectancy and average income so as to give a composite picture of human well-being, ranks Cuba 51st out of the 182 countries listed, above most Latin American and third world countries. This is all undeniable. At the same time, the island is no paradise for most of its people. All the Cubans I spoke to complained about how hard life is, with average wages simply insufficient to support themselves. Most Cubans apparently have to supplement their income in some way, with the lucky ones receiving money from relatives abroad or working in the tourist industry, while others have to take on a second trade or work in the black market. A taxi driver told me how he had a university degree in economics, but he became a taxi driver because it is more profitable to do a job like driving a taxi which involves tourists in some way than to get a proper professional job. Although I doubt that the average person leads an easier life in the neighbouring countries of Central America and the Caribbean, life in Cuba is also no joke.

Of course, the strict US blockade certainly plays a big role in Cuba's troubles and economic stagnation, with the United States effectively making it very difficult even for European companies to trade with Cuba. Then again, the United States are simply unable to accept the idea that a Latin American country might slip out of their control, and their anti-Cuban extremism knows no bounds. It is illegal for US citizens to even visit Cuba (actually, in a typical twist, it is technically illegal only for them to spend money there, not to go there). Ones who do visit have to pass through Mexico or Canada. If they are found out, they have to pay a huge fine. A young man from California came to the esperanto congress in Cuba via Mexico. Before leaving Cuba, he made sure to throw out of his bag anything which might prove he had visited the place.

Another striking fact about Cuba is the extremely limited spread of the internet, which in 2010 is truly surprising. Good hotels in Havana usually have a few computers in the lobby which can be used to access the internet, but the service is slow and expensive, costing about 6 dollars an hour. The vast majority of Cubans apparently don't have an internet connection at home, and neither do they have other opportunities to access the internet. I never saw an internet cafe' in Cuba. I have read that some exist, but they are few and the price is far too high for ordinary Cubans. A young Cuban esperantists who wanted to correspond with me actually asked me for my postal addres, since he didn't have an e-mail. Another one gave me his cousin's e-mail, since he has the opportunity to get online through his university. As always, the Cuban government blames the US embargo for forcing them to make use of a more expensive and slow satellite connection because they can't connect to the US's internet cables which they would otherwise do. Others blame the government itself for not wanting ordinary Cubans to have access to the internet. I don't have the technical expertise and knowledge to assess these claims, but the basic situation is that Cuba is essentialy an offline society. There is talk of Venezuela, Cuba's new oil-rich ally, helping the country aquire a better internet connection, but up to date this has not happened (in the last photo, young people gathered in a cultural center in Havana).

21 million people go without internet access for 10 months

2010-05-17T03:01:00.000-07:00

How many of you often think that you should waste less time on the internet, chatting on MSN to people you haven't met in years (or ever), updating your profile on some social networking site or watching random videos on Youtube?

Well in the marvellous land of China, an entire province of 21.5 million people has been forced to let go of such time wasting habits for almost a year. In the province of Xinjiang, a huge expanse of land in China's North-Western frontier, the internet was entirely cut off across the province since the ethnic riots occured last July. The authorities, claiming that the Muslim separatists were using the internet to organize their activities, decided point blank to block any access to the internet in the entire province, which is around eight times bigger than Great Britain and has about a third of Britain's population. The move was justified with the need to "maintain social stability" and contrast activities harmful to it. This policy was only reversed two days ago, when the internet was finally unblocked in Xinjiang after ten months.

Although in China many rural areas still lack internet access in any case, in cities (including Xinjiang's cities) the internet is a part of people's lives almost as much as it is in the West. The situation in Xinjiang represents a unique sociological experiment, which no university researcher could ever hope to repeat: seeing how a relatively modern society copes without the internet for an extended period of time.

According to a report in yesterday's China Daily, the people who will be most unhappy about the return of the internet are the owners of cinemas, bars, KTV (karaoke) parlours and other entertainment venues. As a result of the lack of internet access, people had been going out to such places far more than usual. DVD sellers were also doing much better than usual, since no one could download films from the internet. The happiest about the return to normal will probably be businessmen, whose operations were obviously seriously disrupted by the ban. I would suppose that people who use the net to speak to relatives who work in other provinces will also find the return most welcome.

It was also reported that a street poll of 100 random people in Xinjiang's capital Urumqi found that only 10 declared themselves "severly affected" by the ban, while 70 declared they could cope comfortably with the situation, and 21 said they didn't miss the internet at all (yes I know, it makes 101 people, go figure). Some people even described the last ten months without the net as a kind of "mental detox". Take this example from the article:

"It was hell for the first couple of months without the Internet, which I think I've been addicted to since 1999," said Luo Liang, 29, an advertising planner in Urumqi. "I didn't know how to entertain myself. I felt so frustrated and helpless.

"But then I started to find alternatives to keep me occupied, such as watching movies and going to KTV with my friends. I later realized that my dependence on the cyber world is actually an addiction," she said.

Luo even started to learn Japanese, which she has always wanted to, by utilizing the time she normally used to surf the Internet.

"My attitude towards the Web has changed. I've learned that there is more to life than Internet," she added.

Sound familiar? If I were unable to access the net for ten months, I might well have similar things to say. Although the Internet is certainly an extremely useful tool, and I am not suggesting that we should get rid of it, I can't help feeling that perhaps there would be some positive sides to doing without it (yes, yes, I am using the internet to share these thoughts with you all, but so what?). The amount of time most young (and even less young) people seem to waste reading, watching and writing inanities on the net far surpasses the amount of time they spend doing anything useful with it, like doing research or communicating with people they actually need to communicate with. As a result, people also seem to me to be reading less novels and books, and perhaps spending less time with real people.

Anyway, it may be that humanity is only just starting to get used to the presence of the net, and as time goes by things will stabilize and people will learn to use it in a more balanced manner. Or maybe not.

(Below, a photo of the skyline of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.)

China's 56 ethnic groups

2010-05-10T07:38:00.000-07:00

Anyone who has ever had anything to do with China and the Chinese will immediately be able to tell you that there are 56 ethnic groups in China. Of course, in most countries of the world if you asked the average person how many ethnic groups the country holds you might get confused looks and different answers, however in China everyone knows the exact answer: there are 56 ethnic groups.

The reason for this is of course simple: the Chinese state officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups. A big thing is made of this in much of the government's official propaganda, with slogans like "the 56 peoples are one family" and similar. Whenever the National People's Congress convenes, you will see photos in the papers of representatives from minorities in their traditional costumes, which are actually only worn in daily life in remote rural areas.

In fact, the 56 peoples are by no means equal in size. As most of you will know, the Han form by far the biggest group, comprising over 90% of the population of the People's Republic of China. The remaining 55 ethnic groups are the minority peoples, or 少数民族 (shaosu minzu) in Chinese.

The Han are in many ways identifiable with China as such. The Chinese language is their language (in fact one of the names for it is hanyu or "the Han language" in Chinese), and what is usually considered to be Chinese culture is basically their culture. However, the official line is that the 56 ethnic groups of China are all Chinese, and that being Chinese does not depend on your race. Most of the minority groups conserve at least some of their own customs and their own language. Their languages usually belong to completely different families from the Chinese language.

The 55 minorities can be quite large by European standards. The largest minority are the Zhuang, with around 16 million people. The better known Tibetans are more than five million. At the last count, 18 of the minorities passed the million mark. The smallest minority are the Lhoba of Tibet, who only number a few thousand (however there are far more of them over the border in India apparently). Unsuprisingly, some of the classifications are rather dubious, with some small groups being lumped together with other ethnic groups which they don't necessarily feel part of, and other small ethnic groups still unrecognized (there is even a Chinese term for these unrecognized peoples: 未识别民族, or wei shibie minzu).

To understand why the issue of relations with the minorities is crucial in China, it is necessary to realize one fact: although the minorities constitute less than 10% of China's population, the areas where they are the majority cover over half of China's territory. This is because many of them are concentrated in the scarcely populated but vast Western territories like Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Tibet etc..

The Eastern part of China consitutes the heartland of the Han. Made fertile by the Yellow River and the Yangtze rivers, it is extremely heavily populated, containing about 90% of China's people. The arid and less hospitable Western and Northern reaches, as well as the South-West, are the homeland of most of the minorities. Although most of these areas have been under Chinese control for centuries, the Chinese cultural influence has always mixed with other influences, and the population is a patchwork of different ethnic groups and religions. Particularly over the last centuries, the Western and Southern regions where most of the non-Han groups live have received large numbers of Han settlers from other parts of China, and in many cities the Han are now a majority.

The history of relations between the Han and the surrounding peoples are complicated.The craddle of Han Chinese civilization was the North China plain, but the Han gradually expanded southward to satisfy their growing population and demand for land. In so doing, they came into contact with a variety of ethnic groups, some of which fled, others stayed and were assimilated by the Han, while others retained their distinct identity. At the same time China was often conquered and subjugated by nomadic peoples from the north, most recently by the Mongols and by the Manchu. However all the invaders quickly assimilated the far more advanced Han civilization.The Han used to look down upon the "barbarians" who surrounded their world, and their culture was indeed far more sophisticated by most standards.

The minorities have assimilated Chinese culture to varying degrees. The Manchu, the people from North-Eastern China who took control of the whole country in the seventeenth century and created the infamous Qing dynasty, are now almost totally assimilated, and their language is spoken only by a few elderly people. Another group, the Hui (who the women in the photo on the left belong to), are basically just Hans who practice the Muslim religion, and are therefore given a separate classification. However some minorities, like the Tibetans and the Uyghurs, remain very different from the Han in their lifestyle, language and sense of identity. Resentment against the Han still exists within a few minorities, most notably in the case of the last two peoples mentioned. In the general chaos of nineteenth century China there were various rebellions against Han rule. For instance, the Dungan and Panthay rebellions by the Hui or Chinese Muslims led to a decimation of China's Muslims, with a few million being killed, and many others fleeing to Russia. Nowadays violence still occasionally flares up in Tibet and Xinjiang, something which I'm sure you've all heard about. However in the rest of the country there is generally no violence between different groups.

Every Chinese citizen's ethnic group (or minzu in Chinese) is registered on their identity card. Being a Han or belonging to a minority makes a real difference to a Chinese citizen. Due to a kind of affirmative action policy, the minorities are exempt from the one child policy, and they are given preferential access to university places and government jobs. Although Communist party members are officially not supposed to practice a religion, this rule is relaxed for minorities, since otherwise it would be very difficult to allow people from some of the minorities to become members.

The provinces with the highest prevalence of ethnic minorities are also given the statues of "autonomous regions", with special provisions for the protection of the local language and culture. Tibet, Xinjiang, Ningxia, Yunnan, Guanxi all enjoy this status. Although the governor of these provinces has to be from the local minority, the party secretary who is the real power broker is currently a Han in every single one of them. The languages of the minorities enjoy official status, and any Chinese banknote has the value written in Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang as well as in Chinese. This is in contrast to the situation with the different dialects of Chinese spoken in different provinces, which are not recognized and are even discouraged by the state. However, as one might imagine, anyone from a minority who wants to get anywhere in modern China has to learn standard Mandarin Chinese.

In the Western world, where since the French revolution the ideal has been that all the citizens of a country are equal regardless of their ethnic group or religion, the idea of having your ethnic group recorded on your identity card might seem quite strange. However, the system currently followed in China was actually influenced by the practices of the Soviet Union, which followed a similar policy towards minorities. A similar system is also followed in Vietnam, which recognizes 54 groups rather than 56, and in many other countries around the world (in many Middle Eastern countries you are classified by religion rather than by ethnic group).

Article in the Chinese press praises the "relaxed" Italian lifestyle!

2010-03-24T19:38:00.000-07:00

I was amused yesterday to read an article in the English language Chinese newspaper China Daily by someone called Lu Chang, called "Piano, Piano stressed Beijingers". Piano, Piano means "slowly, slowly" in Italian. The article encourages Beijingers to learn from the slow, relaxed Italian mindset.

The author apparently spent some time as an exchange student in Perugia a few years ago. She recounts an episode in which she wanted to buy a dress in a shop on the main street. She started to enter the shop, but the shop assistant stopped her and told her to come back the next day, because she was already off work and closing the store. The author insisted that she was a serious buyer, but the shop assistant was unmovable: it was closing time.

The Chinese woman, naturally for her, assumed that this shop assistant must have something urgent to attend to, but later on she saw her merrily drinking espresso and chatting with her friends in a bar. As the author says, at that point "I realized that for her money is far from everything. She would rather enjoy her coffee and leisure time than do business with me."

This is contrasted with Beijing, where a shop assistant would apparently never turn away a customer, whatever the time. She goes on praising the relaxed pace of life she found in Perugia, where businesses will close for two hours during the day for lunch, and comparing it with stressful, hurried Beijing.

Although comparing Beijing (at least 10 million inhabitants) with Perugia (166,000) seems a bit unfair, it is obviously true that to the Chinese, European life seems very relaxed and slow. Chinese people who come back from holidays in Europe, and not just Italy or Spain but even Germany or Britain, will often tell you how much free time everyone seems to have. I remember a Chinese man who had been to Germany and Italy on holiday, telling me how relaxed people are there, always drinking beer in bars. Another Chinese girl I know who spent a summer in Denmark, told me that she could never get used to such a lazy lifestyle! And it's not just holidaymakers. Chinese people who have lived in Europe also tend to have this impression. If even Germany or Denmark seem slow and relaxed to them, then Italy must really blow their minds.

I do wonder if it doesn't in part boil down to misunderstanding, due to the fact that the Chinese have different ways of spending their free time than Europeans. Perhaps in China it is simply less common to see people drinking coffee or beer in street caffes with their friends, because people tend to spend their leisure time in other, less public ways. In small cities, people certainly seem to find the time to play majiang a lot, and KTV (Karaoke) parlours never lack customers anywhere in China. However, it certainly is the case that Europeans do have more free time and work less hard than the Chinese on average.

Anyway, at least one Beijinger has decided to take life a bit more piano piano.

Why do so many foreigners in China carry a chip on their shoulder?

2010-03-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have a long experience of dealing with different cultures, and of being in contact with people living in a country other than their own. In fact, I have been steeped in such an environment since childhood, since my parents come from different countries, and I went to an international school part of the time. I probably spend a large amount of time with people who have migrated to a different country (usually called "immigrants" or "expats", depending on how rich their country of origin is).
I can understand that when you move to a different country, you sometimes find that there are things about it which drive you crazy, and sometimes it can get frustrating. Some people react by getting very negative about the country, and spending their whole time complaining about how much better their own country is in every aspect. I have met people like this all over the place.

Some Westerners who have lived in China for a while, on the other hand, really get on my nerves. A lot of them like to think of themselves as 中国通（zhongguotong), a Chinese expression usually translated as "China-hand", in other words a foreigner who is very familiar with China and its culture. Since China is such a difficult place for Westerners to understand or penetrate, especially because of the language barrier, any Westerner who manages to learn Chinese and lives here for a while obviously feels a bit superior, as if they are in on a secret. A lot of them also develop this attitude where they are convinced that anyone who can't speak Chinese and hasn't lived in China for a very long time cannot possibly understand anything about the place, and can only sit and learn from the superior wisdom of the China veterans like them.

The ones who really get on my nerves are the ones of this kind who decide that they don't like China. It is alright not to like living in China, of course. Personally I quite like the place, but I can understand that the country and its people and their ways may not be to everyone's taste. Fair enough. What gets me, though, are the Westerners residing in the Middle Kingdom who feel that they have cracked the secret, they have got behind the facade, and they have understood why China is actually really quite an awful place. They usually mix horror stories about how they were swindled, cheated, shouted at on the street or god knows what by the devious Chinese, the recounting of conspiracy theories and extreme cases (which they probably read about on some American internet site) about the powers that be in China and their devilish activities to keep everyone suppressed, and a smug sense of superiority which comes from understanding what China is really all about (according to them).

If you meet these people, and you have been in the country less time than they have, or speak Chinese less than they do, trying to argue with them is absolutely useless. They will simply look at you as a hopelessly naive and uninformed novice if you try to defend China and the Chinese in any way. Recently, some person of this kind stumbled upon a post in my blog entitled "ten things I like about China". Yes, it was a rather light-hearted piece of work which I wouldn't take too seriously, and since I didn't make a parallel list of ten things I don't like about China (which I could have done), it might seem like I am idealizing the place a bit. However, the guy was driven nuts by the fact that one of the points I listed was: "the modest and unconfrontational attitude which is deeply engrained in the Chinese psyche". He answered back saying that I clearly don't get out much, and the first conversation he had in mainland China was with a random stranger who approached him on the street and insulted him. He then went on to list more examples of how the Chinese are actually very confrontational and rude. It's funny how these things always seem to happen to those who go looking for them. To be fair, I have also had a few bad experiences in China. For instance, a Chinese souvenir seller once started shouting at a Chinese friend of mine because he was helping me bargain to bring the price down, whereas in the seller's mind he should have been helping him to get a higher price, out of solidarity with another Chinese person. Why was he helping the foreigner instead? My friend started shouting back, not liking being called a "traitor to China", and for a moment they looked like they were going to come to blows. However, such rare events are by far overshadowed by cases of people being kind and going out of their way to help me, both in Beijing and elsewhere in China. If I see the Chinese as basically friendly, it is not because this guy sees something I don't, but rather because he chooses to dwell on the worst experiences he's had, or maybe even invites them with his attitude.

To be fair, this kind of attitude is not limited to "old China hands" gone sour. A lot of foreigners in China have a habit of moaning about the country and its people in a way which sometimes strikes me as unfair. Yes, the Chinese are not perfect, and I also have my complaints. However, some people do seem to choose to dwell on the negative sides, and on bad things which have happened to them in person. I remember when I got into a debate with two foreign students in my university. They were complaining about how Chinese men always smoke like chimneys. It is indeed true that many Chinese men smoke like mad (although almost no women). However, things are changing, young people are becoming more aware of the dangers of smoking, and among university students it is less prevalent than it once was. In big cities, significantly more places are now smoke-free than was the case the first time I came to China five years ago. When I tried making this point, they wouldn't even listen to me. Instead one of them came up with a story of how somewhere in China, a government body has recently promoted smoking among the local people to boost tax revenues, and linked it with the fact that a big Chinese cigarette company is state-owned. I checked up on the story, and found that it was an extreme case in a little county in Hubei which was widely criticized and ridiculed in China itself, and the measure has since been revoked. In fact, in Beijing I sometimes see anti-smoking adverts at bus stops, which are also financed by the government. However, that doesn't even register, while some extreme case which one hears about on the internet becomes "proof" that the Chinese government as a whole is pushing its citizens to smoke. The fact that the situation is changing in a good way isn't even realized or taken into account. I have encountered this kind of attitude among foreign residents in China again and again. Others complain about how the Chinese will sometimes say "laowai" (foreigner) or "hello" when they see a foreigner pass, especially outside of the big cities. Some see it as a form of mocking, and disrespectful. Personally, I have never seen it as anything more than an indication of how surprising it is to see a foreigner, and it does not seem to me to be done in a hostile or unfriendly spirit. However, you can find blog entries written by foreigners living in China where this is presented at best as an example of Chinese impoliteness, at worst of actual racism. Yes, of course in the USA or Europe it wouldn't be polite to say "Chinaman nihao" to every passing Chinese person, but isn't that a bit beyond the point?

I am not saying all foreigners in China are so negative, however it does seem to be quite a widespread attitude. There are also a few cases of people who go to the other extreme and see everything about China through rose-tinted spectacles (see this book for instance), but I think they are far outnumbered by those who pounce on every opportunity to complain about the country they are living in. Well I am not going to be one of them. Call me naive, at least I am having a good time!

Chinglish 2

2010-03-18T22:17:00.000-07:00

Over a year ago I posted some funny examples of "Chinglish", in other words the funny and mistifying English you find on signs all over China.

Here's some more examples of funny Chinglish which I have encountered during my travels around China.
The first photo was taken in the olympic park in Beijing. The second one is from the famous 798 art district of the capital. It is meant to be something about driving in a civilized fashion perhaps. The third one was taken in a well known park in Guiyang, Guizhou. There are a couple of the park's famous monkeys sitting on the sign. I think it must be some kind of environmental slogan. The next photo was taken next to the great statue of Buddha in Leshan, Sichuan. The final one was also taken in Leshan, in the same park. It basically means "don't step on the flowers". Isn't it much more poetical to say "take beautiful memory away, and leave pretty spirit"?

Some Reflections on Buddhism

2010-03-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

While I was travelling through South-West China during the so-called spring festival (who knows why they call it like that, when it's actually in the middle of winter), I stopped in Leshan, a city in Sichuan province whose main attraction is a massive statue of Buddha, which is the largest carved stone Buddha in the world at 71 metres of height (although not the biggest statue of Buddha in general. This honour goes to the Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan, also in China, which is 128 meters tall).

I actually went to the city because I have a classmate who is from there who invited me to come and show me around. Next to this article you can see some photos of me and the 大佛 (Da Fo or Big Buddha). The statue was completed in 803 AC, and it is truly impressive. Even one toenail could accommodate a seated human. The city of Leshan is also quite pleasant and relaxed like Sichuan towns typically are. The Sichuanese are well known in China for their relaxed lifestyle, especially as compared to the Chinese of the East. The statue and the park around it were of course absolutely packed with Chinese tourists, and I had to wait an hour and a half in a queue before being able to go down the winding staircase at the statue's side which takes you down to the bottom of the statue.

In any case, rather than just bore you with accounts of my journey, I wanted to share some thoughts on Buddhism which visiting the statue inspired. While I was in Chengdu, I managed to find a book in English about Buddhism (one of the "very short introduction" series) and bought it. I thought that since I was going to visit a statue of the Buddha, it would be a good idea to read up on the subject first. Although I already knew a bit about Buddhism, the book gave me a clearer idea about the religion's main principles.

Personally I am an atheist, and I distrust organized religion as a concept. I think that nowadays there is really no reason to believe in the superstitious beliefs which religions promote, and that their main effect is to divide people, control them, discourage rational thinking and reinforce old-fashioned ideas with an irrational basis about sexuality, abortion, euthanasia etc.... However, just like most Westerners, before I came to China my exposure to religion was limited mainly to the Western monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Although I grew up in a non-religious family, my father comes from an Italian Catholic background, and my mother from a British Jewish one.

A lot of Western secularists who dislike the monotheistic Religions they are most familiar with have a much more ambivalent attitude towards "Eastern" religions, especially Buddhism. Many contrast "intolerant, expansionist" Christianity or Islam with "peaceful, tolerant" Buddhism. Some claim Buddhism is not even a religion at all, but a philosophy of life which can accommodate other faiths. Many Westerners, even ones who have no use for the religions of their own cultural tradition, feel attracted towards Buddhism, even though their actual understanding of it is often quite limited. Even much of what passes for Buddhism in the West is actually rather different from the Buddhism which can be found in Asia. According to some, most of Western Buddhism is really just the respectable face of new age mysticism. I certainly have a strong suspicion that a lot of the Westerners who consider themselves Buddhists actually turn Buddhism into what they would like it to be, removing the more superstitious, dogmatic and ritualistic sides of the religion which are in evidence if you look at the popular Buddhism of the Far East. Even Richard Dawkins, the champion of the new atheist movement which is taking the Anglo-Saxon intellectual world by storm, seems to think that Buddhism is benign and harmless in comparison to the three Monotheistic faiths, which he believes are actively harmful to humanity.

Buddhism in China

China is not a "heavily" Buddhist country, and never has been. Buddhism came to China from India in the second century BC. However, it has always had to coexist alongside other Chinese religions and belief systems. The traditional Chinese religion of Taoism (the only real religion to be born in China) and the social ideology of Confucianism (which as far as I can see is definitely not a religion) have also had a strong influence on Chinese thought, and Confucianism has usually been the ideology of those in power. Thus, the Chinese are far less influenced by Buddhism than the people of countries like Thailand or Burma, where Buddhism is central to the culture and identity. Buddhism is in fact based around an Indian philosophy, not a Chinese one, and it shows. When Buddhism came to China, it had to give greater prominence to Chinese values such as filial piety and accommodate ancestor worship before it could be accepted by the Chinese. What's more, the Buddhist view of life as suffering does not really fit in with the traditional Chinese view of life as something pleasant which should be enjoyed. In any case, Mahayana Buddhism did eventually flourish in China, and there are still quite a few adherents (although not the majority of the Chinese people by any means).

In sum, living in China I have not really been exposed to Buddhism in the way I imagine I would have been in a place like Thailand, or Sri Lanka. Out of all my Chinese friends, I do not know anyone who is a practicing Buddhist. In fact, most of them don't practice any religion, just like most urban Chinese people.

Buddhist Theology

However, I am still curious about the religion, and whether it is really so "different" from Western monotheistic religious traditions. After having done some research, I can say that first of all, Buddhist theology certainly is very different from Christian or Muslim theology. The most basic difference is that Buddhism does not include any belief about a sentient god who created the universe and cares about us. The fact that Buddhism does not include this belief suggests that it is not such an "obvious" belief for human beings to hold as many Christians and Muslims seem to assume.

However, Buddhist philosophy is still based on the assumption that a certain supernatural, improvable event is a fact, namely reincarnation. As far as I understand, the whole edifice of thought which Buddha constructed is based around the idea that after death we reincarnate into a different being. In his view, human life is inescapably an experience of suffering. The basic cause of suffering is desire, or craving. If a person can manage to extinguish desire by eliminating delusion and achieve enlightenment, they can escape from the endless cycle of death and rebirth and enter nirvana, a state which cannot be understood by the human mind, but sounds very much like a kind of paradise. The four noble truths of Buddhism expose this view of human life, and are the kernel of the Buddhist faith. Enlightenment can be achieved by following the so-called "noble eightfold path", which is supposed to be a guideline for achieving wisdom, ethical conduct and concentration. Some people may find consolation or meaning in the Buddhist view of life. However, to be honest it seems like a very pessimistic and negative one to me. Plus, if one does not believe in reincarnation, which as you would expect I don't, then what exactly is the point of the whole thing? Is it really desirable to live without desire?

These are the basics of the faith, but if you dig deeper, you can find some aspects of Buddhism which are quite reminiscent of the monotheistic faiths of the West. For instance, there are the "five precepts", a basic code of ethical conduct for laypeople, which are basically: "don't kill, don't steal, don't commit sexual misconduct, don't lie and don't take intoxicants". Sound familiar? Then there are the "eight precepts", for laymen who want to be a bit stricter with themselves. They include abstaining from sex, singing, dancing, wearing perfume, eating at the wrong times and a few other petty prohibitions of this kind, as well as the more basic ones. Apparently in some Theravada Buddhist countries like Thailand or Sri Lanka, laypeople will sometimes spend one day a week in a monastery, practicing these precepts. To be fair, all these precepts are not imperatives like the Christian Ten Commandments, but rather rules which laypeople may undertake voluntarily.

Of course, Buddhism has had a long and complex history, with schisms and different interpretations. It later split into at least two distinct schools, the Mahayana school which is the one followed in China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam, and the Theravada school followed in South-East Asia and Sri Lanka. Tibetan Buddhism, followed all over the Himalayas and in Mongolia, is often considered to be another distinct school. Buddhism has also been very mixed up with other religions and practices in the countries it has reached.

Is Buddhism really so peaceful and tolerant?

On another note, is this common perception that Buddhism has been a uniquely tolerant and peaceful religion in practice actually true? Looking at its track record, the answer seems to be rather mixed to me. Yes, it would seem that Buddhists have historically been far less prone on imposing their beliefs on others or discriminating against others than Christians and Muslims. They do not purport to believe in a god who sends you to hell for not believing in him (or her?). However, Buddhists have also been quite able to fight each other for religious reasons. If you look at the history of Tibet, for instance, it is full of cases of different Buddhist sects fighting each other for control, just like Protestants and Catholics in Europe. It is not entirely true that Buddhists always grant total freedom to other religions when they are in power: for instance, in the benighted and isolated Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan (often presented as some kind of "last Shangri-la" in the West) there are currently reports of religious discrimination against the Hindu minority and Christians, and non-Buddhist missionaries are barred from entering the country. Buddhism has also been the inspiration behind some quite bloody actions. To take an excellent example, look at this description of the "Mahayana rebellion" of China in 515 AC, which was called that way in reference to Mahayana Buddhism: "Using drugs to send its members into a killing frenzy, and promoting them to Tenth-Stage Bodhisattva as soon as they killed ten enemies, the Mahayana sect seized a prefecture and murdered all the government officials in it. Their slogan was "A new Buddha has entered the world; eradicate the demons of the former age", and they would kill all monks and nuns in the monasteries that they captured, also burning all the sutras and icons." (Quotation taken from here). The rebellion was eventually overcome, but one can't help be reminded of crusades and holy wars when hearing of people being promoted to the rank of Bodhisattva for killing ten enemies.

Even more to the point, Buddhism has sometimes been useful to those in power for the purpose of legitimizing absolute rule, and convincing the poor and downtrodden not to uprise or demand their rights, just like other religions have been. The idea of reincarnation was used in the past to justify poverty and suffering, since it was popularly believed in Buddhist societies (and maybe still is) that people who are born poor or in unfortunate circumstances are paying for sins committed in their previous lives. A few years ago the coach of the English football team showed how this kind of nonsense can still infect people's minds (see here). And having a religion which teaches people to see craving and desire as the causes of suffering and pushes them not to desire more material comforts could certainly be useful for the purposes of those who oppress them and steal from their pockets. In the history of Asia, there have been various oppressive Buddhist theocracies, the most glaring example of which is the one which use to exist in Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lamas (another place which many Westerners naively romanticize).

In spite of all this, it does seem to me that the record of Buddhism is far superior to Christianity or Islam's record of oppression and bloodshed. At least it hasn’t wiped out other religions and practices with the ruthlessness which Christianity displayed in the early middle ages. Moreover, in many ways the Buddhist vision of the world does seem to me more pleasant than the monotheistic one which originated in the Middle East. For one thing it is less guilt-ridden and not so fixated with mandating what people should do in bed. Sexual desire in Buddhism is seen as a hindrance to enlightenment, just like other kinds of desire, and monks are expected to be chaste. However, Buddhist scriptures don't go into detail as to what is acceptable and what is not, and leave it to the layperson to decide. I also find meditation an interesting practice which can apparently lead to some real changes in personality and perception.

All in all however, I think Westerners who are secular and opposed to religious obscurantism should stop giving Buddhism a free ride. Buddhism is essentially a religion, which in its practical application and its effects on society has not been all that different from other religions. It isn't surprising: after all, it was created about the same time as other world religions, in a society with a similar level of development and social structure. Although certain practices of meditation and exercise associated with Buddhism may be genuinely worth learning, the religion as a whole should stop being painted in such a romantic light by people who should know better.

(for a well argued criticism of Buddhism, see here)

The heart of remotest China

2010-02-26T06:25:00.001-08:00

During my stay in Guizhou over the spring festival, I had the chance to visit a place which was really incredibly remote even for my standards, and I have already been to quite a few out of the way places in China. In fact I don't think I have ever been to somewhere which felt so remote and out of the world (well my world anyway), at least in China
The place itself was a little village in 织金（Zhijin) county, which is located deep in the mountains of Western Guizhou. Guizhou is considered to be a bit of a backwater in China, and this county is considered to be a backwater even within Guizhou. I went to the village with my local friend, who happens to know someone who lives there. Otherwise, I am sure nothing in the world would ever have brought me there, and I could never have found the place on my own anyway. I am also pretty certain that I am the first non-Chinese person who ever went there, or at least the first in a very long time.

To get to the village, my friend and I first had to take a bus for four hours from the provincial capital Guiyang. After getting off in a little town in the mountains which reminded me slightly of the Far West, we got on a little mini-bus of the kind where you have to arrange a price with the driver in advance. Unfortunately the first mini-bus we took turned out to be driven by a guy who was either drunk or completely out of his mind, and probably both. I and my friend and the other passenger watched in terror as the driver skidded down little paths through the mountains at breakneck speed, swearing at any groups of children playing on the roadside or other drivers he crossed on the way. We all begged him to slow down, but our pleas seem to have little effect. I suppose that in such remote areas police checks on drivers are not common. As soon as we reached another little town we all got off, badly shaken and happy to be in one piece, and went and looked for another mini-bus with a saner driver. The next driver drove normally, but at one point a completely drunken local man got on and sat next to me, which was also rather unsettling. In any case, the driver finally dropped us off in the main "square" of another little town and drove away. As we stood there waiting for my friend's local contact to come and pick us up, I saw an elderly woman walk by in the traditional costume of the "long-horn Miao", one particular branch of the Miao people who are so called because the women wear animal horns as head ornaments, as this woman was indeed doing (see the photo). I could already see that I was in a very remote area, and my sense of adventure was ticking. Finally my friend's friend and another local man came on motorbikes and picked us up on the backs of their bikes (none of us wore any helmets of course). After riding along little mountain roads for another twenty minutes we reached our final destination: the little village where we were going to spend the night. The place had a feeling of real remoteness to it: just getting to it with ordinary public transport would have been impossible, and it was surrounded by mountains on all sides. There appeared to be only one main road going through the village, with one shop, a police station and a primary school. On a wall there was a large poster with a picture of two policemen, proclaiming: "dealing with social order, bringing safety and happiness for everyone", as if to remind everyone of the long arm of the state. I was taken to the house where we would spend the night. The conditions inside the houses were similar to those I had encountered the previous year in my stay in a village in Guangxi. There was electricity and a television, and also a measure of running water, at least cold water, but no real shower or sink. I had to clean my teeth and my face using a bowl of water in the courtyard. Of course, there was no proper toilet you could flush, and no heating, despite the cold winter weather (on the next day it actually started snowing slightly).
In the evening I ate in the house of some other local relations of our host, who were obviously extremely curious about having a foreigner staying with them. I found the local food quite delicious, even nicer than in other rural areas of China I have visited. Among the dozen people who ate with us, there was a young couple in their twenties. I later found out that they were only back to the village for the spring festival, but they are actually working in Guangdong. This is typical in small villages in China, in which the young people have all gone off to the big cities in the more developed provinces like Guangdong to find jobs, leaving the older people behind. Later in the evening I was taken to about four or five other houses to meet various local people, who were all very happy to entertain me and offer me food and drink. Their warmth and hospitality are genuinely of a kind which you can no longer find in the West, if you ever could.

The next morning, after eating two bowls of Yuan Tang for breakfast, I set off with my friend and our host for a walk through the hills surrounding the village. On the way we stopped at various farmhouses to say hello to various acquaintances of our host. The conditions and the lifestyle I saw were probably similar to what one might have found in many parts of Europe 50 or 60 years ago (in Britain it might be closer to 100 years ago). Some rooms did not even have electric lighting.

After walking for a while, we reached a village belonging to people from the Miao ethnic group (whereas the village where I spent the night was inhabited by Han people). This village has to take the prize for being the most traditional and untouched place I have seen in China. Many of the women still wore the traditional clothes of the Miao, which are extremely colourful and pretty (in the photos, you can see a bit of the village, and me with a girl wearing the traditional Miao clothes, which she put on especially for the occasion by the way). Even some young women wore them. Many of the houses were still in the traditional style, as far as I could tell. There were no roads which could reach this village, but you had to walk from the village for a few minutes to get to a road which cars could use. There were no shops, no schools, no police station, nothing whatsoever. The local children have to walk about half an hour to the village where I stayed overnight (which must seem like a metropolis to them) to go to school. Of course, the village is not completely untouched by the modern world. Electricity, televisions, and various consumer goods are visible in every home. We went into various houses, where the locals were obviously very curious about me. In one home, I asked my friend to ask the two local men we were talking to if they could tell us how to say "hello" in the Miao language. He asked them in Chinese, but they seem to find the question quite confusing, and couldn't come up with an answer. My friend insisted, asking them what they say to each other when they meet in the morning. In the end they came up with an answer, a Miao word which I have now forgotten. I suppose that if no one has ever asked you how to say "hello" in your language, you might find the question confusing.

After walking back to the village where I stayed the night, and eating a large lunch, we left the area. The way we left was as appropriate as possible. A few other local people also had to leave the village, perhaps to go back to work after the spring festival, so we all climbed into the back of a lorry which would take us to the bottom of the mountain. As the lorry left the village, a few firecrackers were set off to mark our departure. The lorry started driving down bumpy mountain paths. Although there were some stalls for us, I found that it was easier to stand then to sit down, since the lorry was jumping up and down so much. It was at that moment that it started snowing a little. Luckily I was wearing heavy clothing, but the wind was still bitingly cold. What made up for the discomfort was the scenery of the mountains rolling by. Although I have seen such sceneries before, looking at them from the open back of a lorry while travelling with a group of local people is rather different from seeing them through the windows of a comfortable tour bus. We passed quite a few villages and farms on the way, but since I was wrapped up in a hat and a scarf, the locals staring at us could probably not make out that I was a foreigner. If they could have done, their reaction would certainly have been one of complete amazement.
At some point we reached the edge of a really high mountain, and we could see a huge distance down below. There was a valley surrounded by mountains, with a river snaking through it, and we were looking at it from the top. The scenery reminded me a bit of the Lord of the Rings. The lorry slowly made its way down the mountain side, while I watched the amazing view down below. After about an hour we finally disembarked at the side of the river I had seen from above, and we took a boat down the river for another hour. After getting off the boat, I had to share a motorbike-taxi with the driver and my Chinese friend (it was the first time I rode a motorbike with two other people at once, although this is a common sight in China. Of course, no helmets to speak of). Then we finally reached a bus station and made our way back by bus to the relative comfort of my friend's home in Qingzhen.

Being woken up at 5 in the morning by a train attendant trying to sell Chairman Mao memorabilia to the passengers

2010-02-18T05:10:00.000-08:00

I spent yesterday night in the third class of the Guiyang-Chengdu train, and while in it I had one of the weirdest experiences of all my travels in China: being woken up at 5 in the morning by a member of staff with a microphone trying to sell Mao Zedong memorabilia to the passengers.

I was hoping that this year I would be able to avoid travelling over night in the third class of a Chinese train, in other words in a hard seat. Sleeping in a seat is never comfortable, but in Chinese trains during the spring festival it is made hellish by the incredible overcrowding, with people sleeping on the floor the whole way. I already had such an experience last year, and didn't want to repeat it. However, I was unable to find a ticket for a bed, so I had no choice but to travel this way. This year people are only able to start buying train tickets five days in advance over the spring festival period, to avoid the tickets being sold out ages in advance. However, if one wants to find a ticket for a bed, one probably has to arrive at the ticket station on the morning of the fifth day before they want to travel. I bought my ticket three days before I wanted to go, and a ticket for a seat was all I could get.

I was told that the trains to Chengdu shouldn't be too crowded, because Sichuan is a producer of migrant labour, rather than a receiver, and so after the new year's eve people would be leaving the province, not going to it. My local friend told me I would probably be able to change the ticket and get a bed once I was on the train itself. I was skeptical, and rightly so. The train was perhaps slightly less packed than Chinese trains can be around this time, meaning that getting to the bathroom wasn't actually a feat of acrobatics, however there were still plenty of people sleeping on the floor. I managed to find an attendant, and asked her if I could switch my ticket. She was very helpful and curious about me. She asked me where I had learnt Chinese, offered to teach me her language and asked me whether I thought her putonghua (mandarin Chinese) was good or not (!). She put my chinese name down on a list of people who wanted to switch their tickets, but in the end there were obviously no places available, so I spent the night on a seat.

My attempts to get some sleep were pretty useless. The enviroment was filthy, there were little children hollering everywhere (with their parents doing nothing to stop them) and I was sitting opposite an elderly man who kept drinking shots from a bottle of Chinese spirit and smoking, even though smoking is forbidden. During the evening, I noticed train attendants walking around the carriages selling toys for the children and toothbrushes or other goods. Even though they were dressed in an official uniform, they would pedal their ware and try to get passengers to buy the products, as if they were street pedallers. I found this rather surprising.

At 5 in the morning, while I was trying to nap without much success, a young woman who was clearly working in the train, with a uniform, placed herself right next to my seat with a microphone. To my amazement, she started reading a long text about chairman Mao, and how he established the Chinese railway system (or at least I think so, since my Chinese is still not really good enough to follow what she was saying). After reading the text for about 10 or 20 minutes with her microphone so that the whole carriage would hear, she started to try and get the passengers to buy a series of little effigies of Chairman Mao, going on about their convenient price and their other qualities. Incredibly, no one complained or even grumbled, and some people even bought some of the effigies. Some people even managed to go on sleeping, despite the long speech. The Chinese ability to sleep in any circumstances never fails to amaze me. I on the other hand was not getting much sleep even before the woman came, and by now I was completely awake, and quite fed up too. I could not believe that a person officially working for the train company would start pedalling cheap goods to the passengers at 5 in the morning, waking everyone up. I have never experienced anything remotely like this before in a Chinese train. I didn't know if this was the attendant's own little side business, or part of her job requirements, but Chinese people who I have spoken to since told me that it is probably her own side business. Apparently they are allowed to sell things to the passengers privately. However, they should not be allowed to do this at such an unearthly hour with a microphone.

In the beginning I thought the woman was just making a speech about the achievements of Chairman Mao, and to be honest I would have prefered that. Even though being woken up at 5 to listen to political propaganda is not my favourite pastime, at least there would have been some point to the whole thing. One could even see it as a glimpse of what it was like in China 40 years ago, when if you were woken up at 5 by someone talking about the virtues of chairman Mao, you not only had to put up with it but probably clap enthusiastically too. But being woken up at 5 to listen to the train attendant trying to sell cheap rubbish to you? Why are people working for the state railway service allowed to sell non-essential items to the passengers, and pedal the qualities of what they are selling like television salespeople? It's really weird, and it shows complete disrespect of the right of the paying passengers to get some sleep. Then again, the train was supposed to arrive at 6, so maybe waking people up at 5 is considered to be fair game. On the other hand, I bet the first class passengers were not woken up at all.

Happy year of the tiger from Qingzhen, Guizhou

2010-02-14T17:22:00.000-08:00

The year of the tiger has officially started a few days ago, on the 14th of february 2010. I am currently staying with a friend in Qingzhen, a little town in the province of Guizhou, South-Western China (You can see the town in the photo). I have celebrated the Chinese new year with his family. As expected, the celebrations involved a lot of fireworks, good food, playing majiang and lots of children running around excitedly with the new year gala on television in the background.

The town I am staying in is a relatively small one, quite close to the provincial capital, Guiyang. Guizhou is one of the more remote provinces of China, and it has a reputation as a bit of a backwater. It is usually eschewed by tourists in favour of neighbouring Yunnan. Even so, I find the mountainous landscape to be very beautiful. Although it is meant to be one of the least economically developed provinces of China, I find the conditions in this town to be relatively similar to the ones I have found in other small towns across China. The town is very close to the provincial capital, Guiyang.

Guizhou is one of the provinces with the highest proportion of non-Han ethnic minorities, about 37% according to statistics. Being in the remote South-West of China, it is not situated in the heartland of the Han (the major ethnic group of China), which is in the Eastern half of the country. Although the province was already under Chinese control over two thousand years ago, it was only during the Ming dynasty (which started in the thirteenth century) that the Han Chinese started migrating to Guizhou en masse, and the area really came under Chinese domination. My friend's family is Han, and he tells me that they descend from a general who was sent to the area around 500 years ago by the emperor.

As a result of the Han only migrating to the area relatively recently, the local dialect of Chinese is not too distant from Putonghua, the official standard Chinese. However there are still some big differences, both in vocabulary and pronunciation. Although I can usually catch some of what people are saying to each other in Beijing, I find I can't usually catch anything which is said in the pure Guizhou dialect. Most people here can also speak standard Chinese and attempt to speak it to me, however they usually retain a strong local pronunciation. What confuses me most is that, just like in other parts of Southern China, the "l" and the "n" are not distinguished in people's minds, and so they are constantly mixed up.

The weather is warmer here than in Beijing, however some days it can still be around freezing, and just like everywhere in Southern China there is no heating to speak of in the houses. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable side of staying here for me, since I am not used to spending every waking hour in uncomfortably cold temperatures. When I arrived, it was so cold that I could see my own breath inside the room where I was sleeping. The worst thing of all is having a shower. Luckily, every home is equiped with a table with a kind of stove incorporated, and families always eat on it and gather round it in the evenings to keep warm.

Since this is a small town, the main entertainment for the local people seems to be playing majiang. Since I have arrived, I have learnt to play the famous game with the local rules, which are particularly complicated. Local men often gamble large sums of money with the game, but when I am playing the sums are always kept smaller, so that I don't lose too much money (since I obviously can't compete with people who seem to play the game every other day of their lives). Many families here also posses a special majiang table, which automatically shuffles the chips for you and provides you with a new set. I have never seen this anywhere else in China.

I have determined that there are currently two resident foreigners in this town, a New Zealender who has opened an English school, and an American who teaches there (I happened to bump into the Kiwi at the only decent local bar). Otherwise no foreigners ever cross these parts. As always, this means that I am the object of much curiosity and stares. On my first day here, I was taken to the fanciest hairdresser in town to get a haircut. Of course, all the people working there were curious about me and keen to speak to me. My hair colour was the object of much admiration, since the Chinese always have black hair. After I left, the person who accompanied me told me that one of the boys working in the hairdresser asked her a question about me before we left. Apparently, the question was "why is his skin so white?" (In the photos , a view of the street outside my friend's home, me on the streets of Qingyan, a well known ancient town in the same area, and me with some of the local acquaintances of my friend).

Foreign and Chinese university students in China: same campus, different world

2010-01-28T03:13:00.000-08:00

It was reported in this article in China Daily that the government has just quadrupled the monthly allowances of Chinese PHD students in 35 different universities of Beijing. In 1996 the sum had been frozen at 250 yuan a month, but this year it has been increased to the much more reasonable sum of 1000 yuan a month. Anyone who has the slightest experience of life in Beijing will know that 250 yuan a month is just about enough to eat, and nothing else. Most PHD students have other sources of income, like part time jobs or extra money from their colleges or their families, but they still have much lower incomes than most other Chinese university graduates of their age with jobs.

Foreign students on Chinese government scholarships like me tend to get much higher allowances than the Chinese students do. As a master student I get 1700 yuan a month, and foreign PHD candidates get 2000 (this is not including accomodation, which is paid for). Most of the Chinese university students I know have to subsist on much lower sums, although some lucky ones with well-off families may get a lot of money from their parents.

The dorms for the foreign students in Chinese universities are also much higher quality than the dorms for the Chinese students, and far less overcrowded. In my campus, Chinese undergraduate students share rooms for six people, master students are four to a room and the lucky PHD students share double rooms. On the other hand, foreign students share double rooms if they are doing a master, and enjoy single rooms if they are PHD candidates. What's more, our dorm is incomparably more comfortable than the Chinese students' dorms. Our rooms are of the quality you might find in a good hotel, with a bathroom in every room, and a kitchen on every floor.

On the other hand, the Chinese students have to share common bathrooms, and when they want to have a shower they have to go to a special shower room in a different building. They have to pay for all the hot water they use, including when they shower, as a result of which many of them choose not to shower every day (although the cost of the hot water is tiny, if you have a 5 minute shower every day it might add up to about 60 yuan a month, which is a big sum for some students). There are also no kitchens in the Chinese students' dorms, forcing them to eat in the canteen whether they like it or not. They have no televisions, and no air conditioning for the sweltering Beijing summer, whereas in my dorm we have both.

The Chinese students also live in dorms which are separated by sex, and it is hard if not impossible for someone to visit a dorm of the students of the opposite sex (as far as I know, boys are only allowed into the girls' dorms in exceptional circumstances). The foreign students, on the other hand, all share the same dorm. What is really surprising to Westeners is that in the dorm for the Chinese undergraduate students (who may be in their twenties) the lights are turned off automatically at 11 pm, forcing them to bed. After all, you wouldn't want them staying up all night playing computer games, and the idea that adults have a right to make their own decisions doesn't seem to hold much ground here. I have heard of even more repressive university campuses in other parts of China, where the students are forced to wake up in the morning and go outside to do their morning exercises, and receive lower grades if they don't do so. However I have never witnessed such things myself.

The only thing that my dorm has in common with the Chinese students' dorms is the lack of lifts. Most of the dorms are around six floors high, including my one, and even if you live on the sixth floor like I do, you still have to walk up the stairs every time. Good for your health I suppose. In all other respects, we are much better off.

Given the disparity in our living conditions, I sometimes feel a bit embarassed about inviting Chinese students I know to come and see me in my dorm. Every time one of them does, they always comment on how nice my room is, no doubt with some envy. Luckily this situation does not seem to generate any general resentment against the foreign students.

I understand the reason for giving foreign students nicer dorms than the local students have. It would be very difficult to find foreigners, let alone Westeners, prepared to accept living in rooms for four people, having to go to a different building to have a shower, and in general putting up with such uncomfortable conditions. Before I came I was rather shocked to realize I would have to share a room with one other person, let alone three, although I have got completely used to it by now. When I tell Chinese students that in British universities even undergraduates have single rooms, they are usually quite surprised. They don't necessarily envy it though. In fact they often ask if it isn't lonely to live in a room all by yourself. Privacy is not as highly valued in China as it is in the West, and other people's company is usually considered to be an enjoyment rather than an annoyance.

Biggest snowfall in 60 years and freezing cold in Beijing

2010-01-05T06:20:00.000-08:00

The whole of the Northern Hemisphere is currently in the grip of particularly cold weather, from North America through Europe and Asia. Here in Beijing, the winters are usually extremely cold anyway by most people's standards, with the average temperature in January being -1. But this winter is definitely colder than usual, and the last few days have been particularly bad. On sunday Beijing saw the heaviest snowfall since 1951, with 3 inches falling on the city (and this time the snowfall was entirely natural) . Since then it has been unusually frigid even by Beijing's standards, with the temperatures constantly below -10 and falling as low as -16 in the night. The heavy snow and the freezing cold have disrupted the traffic and daily life up to a point. Most flights from Beijing were cancelled on sunday, and on monday all of the city's schools were closed because of the cold and the snow, an unusal event in the city. Fortunately the authorities have prepared some warm shelters for the homeless to ensure they don't freeze to death. 300,000 snowshovellers worked for hours in the open yesterday to clear the streets from the snow.

Personally it is the first time I have the experience of going out and doing things in temperatures below -10. As long as I make sure I wear warm clothing I find I don't have too much trouble, although of course I try not to stay in the open longer than necessary. However, at least the snow is pretty, and it makes a change from the usual dry and windy barreness of Beijing in the winter.

I really have to sympathize with the migrant workers living in the poorer neighbourhoods of Beijing, since many of them have quite inadequate heating. They often have no central heating, but perhaps just an electric heater in one room. I also can't help empathizing with some of the foreign students in my dorm, coming from places like Africa or Vietnam or Indonesia, who have never experienced temperatures below freezing before. Most of them are doing their best not to go out at all.

圣诞快乐 (Merry Christmas)

2009-12-25T22:29:00.000-08:00

It was christmas yesterday, but as usual living in China I have not really celebrated it.

Christmas is of course not a public holiday in China (it's amazing how many Westeners still find this surprising when I tell them), since it is not a traditional Chinese holiday. However, in Chinese cities it has now become impossible not to notice when christmas is coming up. Although the level of excitment over christmas is not nearly as high as it is in the West, the Chinese are also increasingly aware of it, at least in big cities. Shops and restaurants often display signs saying "merry christmas" in English or in Chinese and christmas decorations, and I have seen some christmas trees in shopping malls and public places. I have also attended a couple of christmas shows held by a university department and a high school. I have even seen waiters in restaurants wearing santa claus hats. Of course, for most Chinese people in practice christmas doesn't mean very much, not least because it is a working day. Last year my Chinese teacher initially set an exam on christmas day, although after all the foreign students complained it was moved to the 26th (at that point some people tried to complain again, but luckily and quite rightly the teacher took no notice).

The Chinese name for christmas is 圣诞节 (shengdanjie), meaning the "holiday for the birth of the saint". Even so, I am doubtful that many Chinese even know what is actually being celebrated at christmas. The exception to this of course is the minority of Chinese christians. For most Chinese it is simply a Western holiday, and so it is considered of interest and worth imitating. In recent years the Chinese have become more and more aware of all Western (or at least Anglo-Saxon) festivals, from Hallowen to St. Valentine's day. The funniest thing is when Chinese friends wish me a happy thanksgiving day, not realizing that it is only an American holiday, and that people in Europe are hardly even aware of it. However, I am glad to see that the main holidays in China remain the traditional Chinese ones. The biggest Chinese festival, the real equivalent of what christmas is for the West, remains the Chinese New Year, and I hope it stays that way. It would be so boring if the whole world started celebrating the same holidays.

What are the prospects for Chinese becoming an international language?

2009-12-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

The "Beijing Center for the Promotion of Chinese overseas" has started a recruitment drive to find young Chinese volunteer teachers who could teach the Chinese language in other Asian countries. They will pick a total of 300 people in Beijing to join a total of 1000 to 1500 Chinese teachers who will go to countries like Thailand and the Phillipines to teach Chinese. In some Asian countries, like Thailand, teaching Chinese is now a compulsory part of primary education.

China's rise on the world stage has predictably given rise to a huge increase in interest for learning Chinese among non-Chinese people. Asian countries near China are the ones most affected by this phenomenon, although it is also present in the rest of the world. It was estimated by the Chinese minstry of Education that by 2010 there will be 100 million non-Chinese people learning the language of Confucius worldwide. The prime minister of Australia Kevin Rudd is proud of being able to speak fluent Chinese, and I am sure there will soon be other similar examples. The Chinese government is clearly aware of how beneficial it will be for China if people around the world learn Chinese, and is doing its best to promote this. In 2004 it set up the Confucius Institute, a public organ whose aim is to promote the Chinese language and culture worldwide. It currently has set up 282 institutes in 88 countries. The government is also handing out scholarships to foreigners to come to China and study how to teach Chinese as a foreign language, with the aim that they will then go back to their countries and teach it.

The Chinese which is being learned around the world is of course 普通话 (Putonghua), known in English as Mandarin Chinese. This kind of Chinese, the official language of the People's Republic of China, is also gaining ground in the large Chinese communities in South-East Asia, which traditionally speak Southern Dialects of Chinese. In Singapore, whose people are mostly of Chinese origin, the government is actively promoting Mandarin at the expense of the other dialects, seeing it as the language of the future. And in Hong Kong, which when it was governed by Britain only used Cantonese Chinese, more and more people are learning Mandarin.

Of course, interest in learning a language tends to rise as the power of the country where it is spoken rises, and Chinese is no exception. The widely held perception in the rest of the world that China is on its way to become a superpower is what is fueling this sudden passion for learning Chinese. The real reason for the global dominance of English lies of course in the fact that it is spoken in the United States, although incredibly there are people who are genuinely convinced that English gained its current status as a lingua franca for being easy to learn. As a language becomes more widely learned, the country where it is spoken gains further advantages, being able to export its culture, music and films more easily, and increase its soft power. The Chinese government is clearly aware of this, and is doing its best to export its language. This is quite normal, and legitimate.

Is there any chance that in the future Chinese might replace English as a kind of global lingua franca? Personally I find it hard to believe that Chinese will ever come to be widely known by the general public in the West, although one never knows. Apart from anything, it is so much more easier for speakers of European languages to learn English, or Spanish, or any other European language. What I could maybe see happening is Chinese becoming a kind of lingua franca for East Asia, which is where there is the most interest for learning Chinese. After all, English is not much easier to learn than Chinese for the average Korean or Cambodian, and in fact some other Asian languages (specifically Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese) have borrowed heavily from Chinese in the past, so part of the vocabulary is similar. Knowledge of English has never really become very widespread among the masses of East Asia, with the exception of the Phillipinnes and maybe Malaysia and Singapore, which are former colonies of the USA or Britain.

But isn't the Chinese writing system too difficult for it to become widely known worldwide? The fact is that learning the Chinese alphabet is hard, but not as hard as many imagine. It is possible to learn to recognize the few thousand characters one needs to know to read an ordinary Chinese text within a couple of years if one lives in China, and even not living in China it is still not that prohibitive, especially starting as a child. Learning to write by hand is more difficult than just learning to read, but nowadays computers make writing by hand less of a necessity. Of course learning Chinese would be difficult, especially for school children who don't live in China, but then isn't learning English terribly difficult for Asians too? How many years do Chinese students struggle with English before gaining any kind of fluency? And how many of them never do? Plus the extremely illogical nature of English spelling means that in a sense the spelling of every English word has to be learnt by heart, just like every Chinese character. Of course it's not the same, but it does mean that English children take longer to learn to write than any other children in Europe, and this hasn't stopped English from gaining its huge worldwide popularity.
Coming to spoken Chinese, I can only say that in my Beijing university I am already using my very bad spoken Chinese to communicate with some of the foreign students who come from places like Thailand or Kyrgizstan, who don't know English but have learnt Chinese. They use it to communicate with each other as well, and they seem to manage just fine, despite the general misuse or lack of tones.

The fact is that when a language has a powerful country and culture behind it, and it is perceived as useful or even necessary, then there will be people who will suddenly be able to learn it, no matter how difficult it is. Keeping this in mind, it's not impossible to imagine that one day even in the West knowledge of Chinese might become relatively widespread, at least among the elite.

The Taiwanese pop group S.H.E. have made a song in honour of the increasing international importance of their language. It's called 中国话 (Zhongguo Hua), and you can hear it here, although there are no English subtitles.

The lethal injection to replace the firing squad

2009-12-12T19:44:00.000-08:00

The north-eastern province of Liaoning has become the first Chinese province to make lethal injections the standard way of executing criminals, rather than firing squads. The Higher People’s Court of the province stated on its website that “lethal injection can reduce the fear and suffering experienced by criminals. (…) It is a symbol of progress and civilization, and also serves to punish criminals”. This seems to be part of a general trend. It was reported in June that lethal injections will eventually become the only method of execution of criminals in China, completely replacing firing squads. The director of the Supreme People's Court was quoted as saying that this method for terminating a person's life is "cleaner, safer and more convenient", and also more humane. Even in this area China is obviously falling more in line with international standards, or at least with American ones.

Public executions of criminals have also pretty much ceased in the last few years, and the death penalty in general is being handed out less and less freely. Even so, it is clear that we are still a long way away from abolition. Serious crimes like murder are still most often punished by death. What's more, even very serious cases of corruption and other crimes not involving direct murder can be dealt with through the death penalty, including even drug dealing. This year, two executives from the Sanlu group were sentenced to death for their part in the melamine-tainted milk scandal which caused the death of at least six children. Just a few days ago, an official was executed for pocketing staggering amounts of Yuan illegally. To be fair, only the most severe cases of corruption are dealt with this way, the ones which in the United States might attract sentences of decades in prison. And after all, by now the Chinese application of the death penalty is in some ways more "civilized" than it is in the US. At least there aren't any public executions any longer, while in the US every execution is still public in some sense, since the relatives of the victim are invited to watch.

Personally I am dead against the death penalty (no pun intended). However, I realize that if I were Chinese I would probably be in favour. Most of the Chinese people I have asked about the issue seem to consider the death penalty a natural way of dealing with serious crime (having said that, I have encountered one or two exceptions). Many people are also clearly not aware that this penalty no longer exists in many other countries. A Chinese girl who I had a language exchange with a few years ago in my university in Britain was quite surprised when I told her that the death penalty no longer exists in the UK, even though she had lived there for a few years. A very intelligent Chinese student (now studying in Canada) who I discussed the issue with last year told me that since China has so many people, "extreme laws" are necessary to keep order. Invoking the huge population as a justification for pretty much any aspect of how China is organized seems to be common in Chinese thinking. Others claim that in traditional Chinese thinking, someone who takes a life should pay with their own life. At the same time, I would not make too much of cultural differences in explaining the persistence of the death penalty in China. After all, in England in the nineteenth century you could be hanged for far more petty crimes than the ones for which you can be executed in China today.

In any case, even though there is much that I like about China, this readiness to dispense with the lives of criminals is one aspect of the country I find quite unappealing, and I can only hope that it will go on becoming less and less common as international attitudes on such matters become more influential.

The one-child policy

2009-11-28T06:52:00.000-08:00

It was reported yesterday that Chinese experts have called for the country's notorious one-child policy to be changed. They claim that the country now faces a gender imbalance because of this policy, and an ageing population.

The policy is one of the things about China which everyone has heard about in the West, and it is usually seen unfavourably. However, the perspective most Chinese people have on it seems to be very different, ambivalent and even accepting. Of course, to Westeners the idea that the state could intrude on such a private decision in people's lives seems unacceptable. However in China, because of differences in culture and history, the idea that the state can impose similar restrictions on its citizens for the sake of the common good does not seem so strange.

The policy is not enforced as strictly as many imagine. For a start, it only applies to the Han, the main ethnic group of China, and not to any of the 55 minority groups (why is anyone's guess). Couples made up of two single children are allowed to have a second child. Furthermore, rural coupls in many areas are allowed to have a second child if the first one is a girl, in order to prevent the phenomenon of female infanticide or the abortion of female foetuses. Couples whose first child is handicapped or deceased can also usually have a second one. If a couple breaks the law and has a second child when they are not supposed to, they usually just have to pay a fine. In practice, a lot of families do have more than one child, especially in rural areas, and they simply pay the fine. I have a lot of Chinese friends who have brothers and sisters. In urban areas the policy appears to be more widely followed than in rural ones.

The policy certainly has had its well publicized drawbacks, the main one being cases of female infanticide in the countryside. In the Chinese countryside, sons are still often considered more valuable than daughters. Although cultural reasons certainly come into it, another good explanation is that in areas where farm work is still carried out using traditional methods, boys are more valuable because of their superior physical strenght. Although there have been cases of female infanticide in rural areas, the actual extent of the phenomenon is debated. Nowadays, thanks to ultrasound scanning which reveals what sex the phoetus is, it is possible to simply carry out an abortion if the phoetus turns out to be female. This practice is illegal, but however it is still common.

China currently suffers from quite a wide gender imbalance: the sex ratio at birth between males and females was of 117:100 in mainland China in the year 2000, which is significantly higher than the natural baseline (which is around 105:100). It is estimated that there will be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020 (however this has to be seen in the context of a population of 1300 million). Other Asian countries also have a higher proportion of men than women, although maybe not as high as China. The Indian economist Amartya Sen has written widely about this phenomenon, talking mainly about his native India, where the sex ratio is also quite skewed. The reasons for this phenomenon obviously have to do with the bias in favour of boys leading to baby girls receiving less high-quality health care and nutrition, as well as selective abortions which also occur in India. Even countries like Taiwan and South Korea are affected by this, although recently South Korea's gender ratio has become more balanced because of the increase in the standard of living and education. In the case of China, however, statistics seem to show that the gender imbalance has got worse since the introduction of the one-child policy, which has to be at least partly responsible.

Defenders of the policy point to the reduction in the birth rate of this overcrowded country. Since the introduction of the one-child policy in the early eighties, the birth rate has fallen from about three births per woman to around 1.8 in 2008. Others respond that the birth rate had already been dropping previously because of the increase in the standard of living and education, and it would probably have gone on falling anyway without such an extreme policy being imposed.

Personally, I can understand why a lot of Chinese people feel that there is a need for such a policy. It is one thing to read about overcroded China is, and it's another thing to experience it everyday. Once you have travelled in the absurdly packed third class of a Chinese train during the spring festival, with people sleeping on the floor all over the place, you can begin to appreciated the problem. In my experience, the Chinese are all very aware of living in a country with too many people. Whenever you have a discussion with a Chinese person about any of the social problems of China, they almost always begin their reply by saying: "in China there are too many people....". This almost seems to become a kind of justification for everything which is wrong with China. Even when I had a discussion about the death penalty with a Chinese student, he told me that extreme laws are necessary to keep order in China "because in China there are so many people".

Statistics on the population density of China hide the scale of the problem, because they obscure the fact that about 90% of China's population lives in about 50% of its territory. The North-Western area including Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia is huge but scarcely inhabited because of the inhospitable terrain. The South-Eastern Chinese heartland is the really densely populated region, and it is just as overcrowded as India.

Even though the Chinese birth rate may have been falling even without the one-child policy, the policy has clearly speeded things up. There certainly are couples in China who decided only to have one child because of it. I can see that any reduction in the birth rate can only be a good thing, for China and the world. As for the worry about the population ageing, this is a problem which all developed country have to face, not just China. Although I can see that it will cause problems, I also feel that the planet is overcrowded, and it is basically a positive thing if birth rates drop. If this means that for a period there will be more old people than young people, so be it. It's not the end of the world.

It may be that China will soon embark on some kind of less extreme family planning policy. It was certainly a good idea to allow couples in rural areas to have a second child if the first one is a daughter. The problem of the gender imbalance should also be addressed by educating people, and trying to create the conditions for people not to feel the need for having a son rather than a daughter. All in all, I can't help feeling that some attempt to discourage people from having a lot of children would still be positive. But it will probably be economic development and education which will push the birth rates down more than anything else.

To be an "outside-country person" in China

2009-11-23T07:38:00.000-08:00

What is it like to be a foreigner in China? I think I am now in a position to give some kind of answer, but first let me explain the meaning of the title of this post. The most commonly used word for a foreigner in China is 外国人（waiguoren), the literal meaning of which is "outside-country-person". There is also another colloquial word which is very often used to indicate foreigners: 老外（laowai), which literally means "old-outside". Even though it is a very colloquial expression which is not used in official circumstances, it is not a term of abuse. In my understanding, "old" is used in the sense of "good old". During my time in China, I have heard people call me laowai more often in small towns and the countryside, and waiguoren more often in Beijing and other big cities.

So anyway, what is it like to be a foreigner in China? First of all, let me state from the onset that I have never encountered any outright hostility as a foreigner in this country, and I think such incidents are very rare, if they happen at all. What is certainly true, on the other hand, is that most Chinese people have hardly any experience in dealing with foreigners. The reason is not hard to understand. Until recently, China was a country with practically no resident foreigners. Even nowadays, the number of foreigners is infinitesimal in comparison to the entire population of China. Even so, the amount of foreigners living in China is of course getting larger and larger, especially in the main cities. It is calculated that there are now 110.000 foreigners in Beijing staying for longer than six months, according to today's "China Daily". Of course, this is still a small proportion of the 10 million inhabitants of the city, but it is far more than there were just a few years ago. The largest community is the South Korean one, followed by the US one. This doesn't surprise me, since Koreans are well known to be numerous in Beijing, and it is quite common to see Korean writing around. The number of foreign students in China is also increasing rapidly, although of course the proportion is still very small. In Beijing there are supposed to be about 30.00 foreign students.

It is also getting more common to meet foreigners who are fluent in Chinese, especially with the growing number of people who come here specially to study it. Twenty years ago, a Canadian using the Chinese name of Da Shan became a superstar of the Chinese entertainment industry, entirely because he could speak unbelievably good idiomatic Chinese. He has admitted that nowadays it would not be possible for him to become famous so easily, simply because it has become too commonplace to meet Westeners who speak fluent Chinese.

Most of the foreigners in Beijing live concentrated in certain areas, especially Chaoyang district, where the embassies are located. Another area with a lot of foreigners, especially young ones, is Wudaokou, around which there are many universities. In these areas, it is easy to find international restaurants and shops catering to foreigners. Luckily, my campus is not in any of these areas. It is located right on the edge of Beijing, in an area which was open countryside just a few decades ago. Most of the foreigners I see in the area around my campus are associated with my university in one way or another (and even in my campus there are only a few dozen foreign students).

In Beijing it is by now almost possible to feel that you are just one of the crowd when you are walking around on the street. It is very unusual to get stared at because you are a foreigner. Even though I am still usually the only white face around when I take the bus, or go to the supermarket, I don't feel that I attract much special attention. No doubt, just ten or fifteen years ago this would not have been so.

Of course, China isn't all like Beijing. Travelling around China I have found that, unsurprisingly, the more I move away from big urban centers, the more attention I draw. Generally speaking, in big cities across China I have usually been ignored, even in cities which are far less international than Beijing, like Chongqing and Nanning. However, in small cities I usually begin to draw stares and startled looks. In Qijiang, the town where I use to teach English, I would sometimes get people staring at me as if I had just landed from Mars, not even trying to conceal their surprise. Quite conceivably, I was the first foreigner they had seen in their lives, or at least one of the first. Then again, in the whole town there were exactly two resident foreigners while I was staying there: me and an Australian who was teaching English in a different school.

Of course, in little villages and the countryside the attention a foreigner draws is even bigger. It is not impossible to find a little crowd gathering around you. Of course, the way the foreigner looks also makes a difference. Black people tend to attract more attention than white people, since they are rarer and perhaps seem more outlandish to the Chinese. If you are very tall, and have a big beard or blond hair, or other phisical features which the Chinese don't usually have, you will be more noticeable. Personally, I find that I draw less stares than my Dutch classmate, who is very tall and has long blond hair.

Although foreigners in Beijing may not be something unusual any longer, it is still true that as a foreigner in China you are never just an ordinary member of the public. Until a few years ago, foreigners where only allowed to live in certain neighbourhoods and buildings, although this has changed. In universities, foreign students live in special dorms which are reserved for them. The Chinese students live in their own dorms where the conditions are much worse. In my campus, undergraduate Chinese students live six to a room, and they have to go to a separate building to have a shower, where they have to pay for the hot water. The foreign students, on the other hand, share double or single rooms, en suite bathrooms, and a kitchen on every floor. Perhaps it is true that few foreigners would want to live under the conditions the Chinese students endure. However, this division clearly means that foreign students and Chinese ones remain quite apart. It is the same in many aspects of life in China: foreigners don't and can't just live an ordinary life, in which the fact that they are foreigners plays no part.

As I mentioned, most Chinese people have never had any experience in dealing with foreigners, even in Beijing, and they are unable to see a foreigner as just another person. This does not mean that they are rude or unhelpful; on the contrary, they are often ridicolously helpful with foreigners, sometimes to a point where it is embarassing. They are often curious about foreign countries, but know very little about them, and if they have the chance they will always be happy to ask you about where you come from. University students in Beijing tend to know some English, but they are often extremely shy about speaking it to a foreigner, especially if they have never done so before, and do not feel confident enough to do so. It is common to meet people who can read English quite well, but have never had the chance to speak it before, and find it very difficult.

The ideas Chinese young people have about Western countries can be quite naive, despite (or because of) all the American films and TV series they watch. A lot of people seem to be convinced that everything in the West works better than in China, since the Western countries are the most developed in the world, and don't seem to be aware of the problems there are in the West. This naiveness also extends itself to the fact that most Chinese people are absolutely unaware of what foreigners do and don't know about China. They generally expect you to know nothing. The Chinese friend who accompanied me to visit Mao's mausoleum last year was surprised that I had heard of Chairman Mao. Another one was surprised that I had heard of the one-child policy. When I eat with Chinese people, they often comment on how well I can use chopsticks, even though learning to use chopsticks is actually very easy and virtually all foreigners who live here learn to do so at once.

This kind of naiveness and lack of experience with foreigners sometimes seems to lead the Chinese to imagine that humanity is divided into two groups, the Chinese and "the foreigners", and to talk about foreigners as if they were some big homogenous group (to be fair, I have heard people in lots of other countries talk about foreigners in exactly the same way). However, like I said earlier, I have not experienced any anti-foreigner hostility. The only country which I have heard Chinese people make negative remarks about time and again is Japan, which is not hard to understand, considering the fact that they have yet to apologize for the second world war. Despite the bitter memories of European colonialism, the West is basically admired for its high level of development and material success, something which the Chinese have great respect for. Other developing countries do not seem to figure very much on the minds of the Chinese. I have the feeling that Westeners are more highly respected in China than people from the developing world, although this is quite common in other countries too. However I have never heard of incidents of racist violence against foreigners in China, whether they be Japanese, African, American or whatever. What I do find is that quite a lot of foreigners retreat into the cocoon of the foreign community and have little interaction with Chinese people, so that they conserve their own prejudices and fixed ideas about China. Even within my campus, I find that few within the assorted collection of Asian, African and Middle Eastern foreign students have much social interaction with the Chinese outside the classroom or lab. Many of them do not seem to be particularly interested in trying, although there are some exceptions. Even though most of them had to study Chinese for a year before starting their courses, and so they can speak Chinese fluently, they are still not too interested in using this knowledge to try to understand something about the country they are in.

The Chinese, the Jews and Israel

2009-11-16T20:18:00.000-08:00

One refreshing aspect about China in comparison to the West (or of course the Middle East) is that practically no one has any strong preconceived ideas about the state of Israel and its conflict with the Arab world. Well educated Chinese people have usually heard about the conflict, in my experience, but their notions on it tend to be vague. Most of them feel about as strongly about the Arab-Israeli conflict as most Westeners do about the Taiwan issue or the civil war in Sri Lanka, in other words not at all. Last year, during the brief Israeli offensive in Gaza, it made a change to be in a country where practically everyone was completely indifferent, and just saw the event as a far away war which is no concern of theirs. The Holocaust and the whole history of the Jews (犹太人or Youtairen in Chinese) also don't elicit particularly strong feelings in most Chinese people, who only know about these things in the vaguest terms. Although there have been some Jewish communities in China in the past (in the photo you can see some Jews from Kaifeng, Henan, from the later 19th or early 20th century), they have always been few and far between, and their influence on Chinese history has been virtually none. Furthermore, none of these traditional communities have survived until this day, since they have all integrated into mainstream Chinese culture (perhaps the lack of persecution was the reason for their integration?).

Of course, the Chinese government officially embraced "Third World solidarity" and anti-imperialism in the past, and until the 1980s it had no relations with Israel and officially supported the PLO (even though Israel was one of the first countries in the world to recognize the People's Republic of China in 1948, the favour was not returned). However it never made a big thing of the Palestinian cause, which is simply too far from the concerns and the history of the Chinese. And in any case nowadays the whole ideology of international anti-imperialism has fallen out of fashion in China as well. In 1992, China and Israel established diplomatic ties, and the two countries now enjoy a fruitful economic and military relationship.

Although most Chinese people have no preconceived notions about Israel, they do seem to have one about Jews: they are very intelligent. Whenever I have mentioned to a Chinese person that I have Jewish origins on my mothers side, they usuallly look very pleased and say something like: "oh, that's good, the Jews are very intelligent." Educated Chinese people have usually heard that in the West there are masses of famous Jews in every field, and that this clearly points to some superior intelligence they have. (of course, there must be hundreds of millions of Chinese people who have never heard of the Jews at all, but that is another point). I remember that the first time I was in China, I was having a meal with a group of Chinese accademics in the city of Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu province. At some point I asked them if they had any opinions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them said: "yes, I support Israel, because I have heard that the Jews are very intelligent."

Of course the idea that Jews are automatically "very intelligent" which many Chinese seem to have is also a kind of prejudice, but at least it is a positive one, and there do not seem to be any negative stereotypes about Jews circulating, which makes a nice change from Europe. The traditional Chinese respect for education and hard work means that the Jews' achievements are seen with respect, rather than suspicion. One Chinese girl did once tell me that "the Jews are very clever, and so they are very succesful in science, politics and business", but she didn't seem to attach any negative feelings towards being succesful in business, and this was only one of a list of things which the Jews are supposedly good at. I actualy feel that Jewish communities and Chinese ones around the world have quite a lot in common (although size is of course not one of them. There are more people in the Beijing municipality than Jews in the world). The position of the Chinese communities in South-East Asia, succesful but mistrusted and with no political clout, can't help but remind me of some Jewish communities of the past.

Who knows, in the unlikely event that Jews feel unwelcome in the West again, perhaps China and Asia might become a new haven for them, the more accepting, forward-looking places where the Jews could feel at home.

To have or not to have the Chinese Swine flu Vaccine?

2009-11-14T21:29:00.000-08:00

Here in China, public worry about swine flu is about as high as everywhere else in the world. Even though for a long time the Chinese authorities quarantined anyone who was found to have a temperature on entering the country, in the end the flu was obviously not deterred by such measures and penetrated China, just like you would expect from a flu.

There are different figures about how many people have died of it, depending on how the deaths are recorded, but it seems that around 40-60 people have already died of the illness in China, with dozens of thousands being infected. Here in Beijing, there seem to be even more people walking around with little masks on their faces than there usuallly are. A few weeks ago, a university student in a Beijing university died of swine flu (not in my university, fortunately), and hundreds of other students turned out to be infected.

The Chinese health authorities have already managed to domestically produce millions of swine flu vaccines, and they plan to vaccinate 65 million people by the end of the year (or 5% of the population) by the end of the year. Up to now, over 12 million people have already been vaccinated. Beijing receives priority of course, and they are talking of offering the opportunity to be vaccinated to all the Beijing residents very soon (but will it really be all the residents, or only those with a Beijing Hukou?). It must be said that China is the first country to be able to produce so many copies of a swine flu vaccine, but many are uncertain about the safety of this Chinese-made vaccine. It does seem a bit suspicious that China has been able to produce millions of vaccines before any other country, and it maybe that the vaccine's safety standards are not of the best. Many people are refusing to have the vaccination because of concerns over its quality.

Personally, I was offered the opportunity to be vaccinated last friday, alongside all the other students in my college (all the university's students in Beijing are being offered the vaccine), however after thinking about it a lot I decided to decline the offer. There have been a few cases of people having anaphylactic shocks after being vaccinated, and I do seeem to have a slight predisposition towards allergies. The message which we were given a few days previously about the vaccination was not encouraging. It stated that one should not take the vaccination if one is allergic to a long list of things, including eggs and some chemicals I have never heard of, and that anyone which chronic diseases (or of course a cold or a flu) should not be vaccinated. Finally, it asked those who would be vaccinated to wait on the premises for half an hour "to make sure they are ok". I have taken vaccines in the past, and I have never been asked if I was allergic to anything beforehand. I have certainly never been asked to wait half an hour after the vaccination in case I felt ill.

The whole tone of the message made it feel like the health authorities are not too confident on their own vaccine's safety, and this pushed me towards deciding not to take it. The next day, the headline on China's only English daily was "two die after H1N1 vaccine", although on closer inspection it appears that one of the two people died 8 hours later of a heart attack, and it is probably just coincidence, while the other case is still being investigatd, and no news is available at present. In any case, it does seem that there are serious concerns over the vaccine's safety, and I personally know various other students, both foreign and Chinese, who decided against taking it. The day after the vaccination, a message was passed on to the foreign students who had taken it asking them not to shower for one week! Although there is some idea that one should not shower for a while after a vaccination, I have never heard of not showering for a week. I suppose no one will take the advice too seriously. My roomate, who was vaccinated, has certainly already showered without dropping dead.

Personally I feel that the risk posed by the vaccine is probably tiny, but the risk posed by swine flu is also extremely small at present. After all, 40-60 people dying in a nation of one and a half billion is not a cause for panic, is it? And most of them probably had underlying health conditions anyway. However, if the swine flu gets more widespreadd and takes more lives, I may still change my mind and get vaccinated. Plus, if most of Beijing does get vaccinated, that would also protect me up to a point I suppose.

I am aware of the fact that if I was back in Britain or Italy, I would still not have the chance to be vaccinated. However, with their huge population and limited resources, the Chinese authorities are probably so keen on avoiding a pandemic that they would be quite prepared to start using a vaccine before all the necessary safety checks were made. Of course, vaccines are never completely safe, and new ones less than ever. In other countries, people are also debating whether getting vaccinated is a good idea, as I have discovered by looking through the internet. The issue is confusing, but the for the time being I have decided to wait and see....

Who decides when it snows and when the heating comes on in China?

2009-11-03T22:08:00.000-08:00

Beijing was graced by its first snowfall this year last sunday. It is very unusual for it to snow so early in Beijing. Infact, it was the earliest snowfall in 22 years. However, there is more to it than just a freak weather phenomenon. The Chinese authorities quite often seem to engage with attempts to modify the weather, especially by inducing or increasing rain artificially over Beijing and the north of China to alleviate drought, which is often a problem in this arid region. Sunday's snowfall was at least partly induced by seeding the clouds with 186 doses of silver iodine. According to some reports, the aim was just to make it rain, not snow, but a sudden cold front which descended on sunday made it snow heavily, disrupting the traffic and power grid and delaying many flights. The temperature did indeed drop very suddenly between saturday and sunday, going from 13 degrees to below freezing. The weather forecast had already been reporting that it would snow for several days, and so I wonder how many days in advance the clouds had been seeded, if they were not expecting to produce snow. Others claim that the effect of these weather manipulation techniques is exagerated, and that it is impossible to predict what the result will be.

Anyway, another problem here in Beijing was that in most places, including my dorm, the heating was still not turned on when the snow came and temperatures outside dropped below
zero. The thing is that in China, the heating system is centralized. In the North of China, defined as everywhere north of the Yangtze river (or everywhere blue in the picture above), buildings usually have central heating, however it is not turned on until a specific set date, which in Beijing is usually november the 15th. Although some well off people and some offices have their own private heating systems, most people have to wait until the 15th of november for the heating to come on (it is then turned off on march the 15th.) It is well known that the two weeks before the heating comes on and after it comes off are the most uncomfortable time. This year however, they have decided to turn the heating on early here in Beijing, due to the unseasonal cold. They finally turned the heating on in my dorm on monday, although we had already experienced some pretty chilly nights, and I was forced to buy myself an extra blanket. Today it's a bit warmer outside, and they've turned the heating off again.

In some northern regions which are technically in Siberia, the heating comes on earlier. However, in the whole of Southern China, that is South of the Yangtze, it doesn't come on at all. Although again some wealthy people may have private heating, the vast majority just don't have any. Although the winters in the South are much less cold than in the North, with the temperature rarely dropping below zero, it is still unpleasantly cold inside the houses sometimes, and people often keep their coats on even inside. When I visited the south of China during the last Spring festival, I got used to keeping my coat on inside the hotel room or house I was staying in, and getting undressed to have a shower was always unpleasant.

Fragrant Hills, but very crowded

2009-10-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I visited a well known site outside Beijing called 香山 (Xiang Shan), or the "fragrant hills", as it is usually called in English. I was invited to go by a Chinese student who I am doing a "language exchange" with, and her three roommates.

The place in question is a natural park just outside Beijing, on my campus's side of the city. It consists of hills covered by forests and dotted with traditional buildings and relics. The highest peak, Xianglu, is 557 meters high. The park is particularly popular in the autumn, when the numerous maple leaves turn red, covering the place in red. I find that the Chinese have a very strong cultural tendency to appreciate flowers, leaves and plants, and this is the kind of thing which reallly warms their heart. Chinese students often ask me what particular flowers or trees are called in English, and of course more often than not I don't know the answer.

Anyway, we went to the park on an october saturday with lovely weather, exactly on the same day that the entire rest of Beijing had the same idea. Given Beijing's huge population, if you go to a famous site exactly at the time of year when it is most popular, and on a weekend with nice weather, you are bound to find it is packed. Naively I thought the park must have space for everyone, soo it wouldn't be a problem. However, even getting to the place proved to be a major issue. We planned to take a bus, but the bus which takes you to the park was so full that it was impossible to even get near it, let alone get inside. Even though it passed by at a frequency of about every 10 minutes, we immediately saw that it was useless even trying to get in. We decided to go by taxi, but the only taxi driver we managed to stop refused to go, saying that there would be too many cars around the park, and it would take him too long to get back out. We spent ages, literally ages, trying to stop another taxi, but every single one was engaged, even though in Beijing there are usually free taxis available all over the place. Perhaps everyone else had the same idea. In the end we decided to take what is known as a "black car", in other words an illegal taxi. The only problem is that in a normal taxi it would have cost us about 10 or 15 yuan for the trip, while in a black taxi it cost 10 yuan per person (about 1 euro actually, but all the same...). What's more, even the driver of the illegal taxi refused to go to the entrance of the park, saying that there would be too many other cars, and left us somewhere which was a 20 minute walk away from the park. Of course, the road to the park was jam-packed with other Beijingers going to get their share of fresh air. At the entrance, we had to struggle through an absurd mass of people to buy a ticket. Only undergraduate students are given discounted tickets, not post-grads, so I had to pay the full price. However, the girls I was with (who are also doing a master) had fake undergraduate student cards which you can apparently buy for 10 yuan outside my campus. I must do that sometime.

Anyway by the time I got inside, I was already quite tired, and it was already much later than we planned. We decided to give up going up the highest hill in the park, which is what most people do, and just walk around the base of the hills. Wherever we went it was full of people, on the paths, on the grass, on the rocks, etc.... however, we managed to relax a bit and have a nice picnic on the grass. Of course, the Chinese girls I was with were very excited about the red leaves, although personally I must say that I found the traditional Chinese buildings much more interesting than the leaves. Getting back home was of course also a feat. The queues at the bus station next to the park were unbelievable. However, in the end we made it back to out campus.

It is after days like this that one really appreciates the wisdom of the one-child policy, and almost wishes they would enforce it more strictly!
(The photo is of the crowds waiting to catch the bus to get back home)

The typical mistakes the Chinese make when speaking English

2009-10-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

When Chinese people speak English, there are some specific mistakes which nearly all of them tend to make, and some specific English words and expressions which they all tend to mis-use or else overuse like mad. Most of the mistakes which the Chinese typically make when speaking English are connected to particular features of the Chinese language, and now that I am learning Chinese I am beginning to understand the reasons behind some of the most frequent mistakes.

Anyway, here are some mistakes and mis-uses which I have encountered again and again in the English spoken by Chinese people, especially university students:

1) This one is a constant: mixing up "he" and "she" (or "him" and "her", "his", and "hers"). This is a mistake which virtually all the Chinese people who can speak English make, even ones who know English very well. The reason is obvious: in Chinese, he and she are both pronounced exactly the same way, in other words "ta" with the first tone. However, they are actually written slightly differently: 他 means "he" and 她 means "she". All the same, in Chinese minds there obviously isn't the idea of distinguishing between he and she while speaking, and this is clearly very difficult to overcome.

2) Getting adjectives and nouns mixed up. How many times have I heard things like "He is a very patience person", "my assignment is very emergency", "the professor is very humour", "Chinese adverts are not very creativity" etc...

3)Mis-using the word "play": the first time a Chinese adult asks you if you want to meet and "play together" some day, it can be a bit disconcerting. Using the word "play" to refer to adults hanging out or going out together is common, and a bit comical at first.

4) Mis-using the word "let": in Chinese there is a single word, 让（"rang") which means both "let" and "ask", as in "I will ask my friend to come out" (not as in "to ask someone where the station is"). As a result, the Chinese tend to use the word "let" to mean ask, for instance: "I will let my friend to come out with us on tuesday" or "I will let her to do me this favour".

5) The constant overuse of some particular English words, first and foremost "hometown" and "delicious". This is not really a mistake, but it does allow you to spot a Chinese person a mile off. In China the food is never good, it is always "delicious", and no one ever goes back to their village, town or city for the holidays, they always go back to their "hometown". The word hometown is apparently taken by the Chinese to be the translation of the Chinese word 家乡（jia xiang). Sometimes they even think that the word doesn't only refer to towns or cities, but can also refer to regions or countries, so for instance a Chinese classmate once asked me: "is England your hometown?". The word is so ubiquitous that I even use it myself when talking to Chinese people.

This is just a short list, the first examples which came to my mind, but I'm sure that anyone who has taught English in China would have many more to add.

Ten things I like about China

2009-10-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

Ten things I like about China:

1) the general exoticity of it all.

2) being able to walk around the streets at night and feel perfectly safe.

3) the fact that the Chinese don't have a culture of going to the beach (I don't like to either).

4) the modest and unconfrontational attitude which is built into the Chinese psyche.

5) the fact that most people don't practice an organized religion.

6) people staring at me on the street. It's nice to be in the center of the attention without doing anything to deserve it.

7) the fact that people have absolutely no strong preconceived opinions about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or any other divisive issue in the West.

8) the food of course. Especially the fact that almost all the foods I don't like, for instance chocolate, tomato and cheese, are relatively rare.

9) the fact that the girls are so girly. No swearing, getting drunk, smoking, etc.... because it's not girlish. And yet that doesn't mean that they are all stuck in old-fashioned ideas about gender roles and sexual issues.

10) how the Chinese go out of their way to help foreigners, to an extent which is sometimes so extreme it's almost embarassing. It's also very convenient if you happen to be a foreigner.

11) the weather of Beijing (I'm kidding this time).

I won't list 10 things I don't like about China, for fear of causing offence, but when it comes to Beijing, the weather, crowded public transport and the days with scarce visibility (because of a combination of the pollution and the weather) would spring to mind. Not to mention the tofu they sell on the streets which stinks so much you have to keep at least 10 meters away. And the internet issue.

the Chinese writing system

2009-10-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

What is the Chinese alphabet? Can it rightly be viewed as an extremely uneconomical phonetic alphabet, or as a pictorial one?

Some linguists have claimed that the Chinese alphabet is in fact not a pictorial writing system in which every character represents a concept, as it is often assumed, but rather a phonetic one, in which every character represents a sound. In this case, it would certainly have to be the most extraordinarily uneconomical phonetic alphabet in the world, since it contains thousands of characters, while most phonetic alphabets get away with 20-30 letters! It is estimated that the average educated Chinese person knows about 6000-7000 characters, and at least 3000 or 4000 are used in ordinary life.

Now that I have been learning Chinese for a while, and got a grasp of the basic structure of the language, I would say that it is basically a mixture of the two.

On the one hand every character does indeed represent a certain syllabic sound. For instance every Chinese person knows that the character 巴 is always pronounced "ba" with the first tone, or that 马 is pronounced "ma" with the third tone, regardless of the meaning. This is how foreign names are transliterated into Chinese. For instance, the Chinese name for Barak Obama is 巴拉克奥巴马， pronounced ba-la-ke ao-ba-ma. The fact that the last character in Obama's name actually means horse is completely irrelevant. There are a few characters which can be pronounced in two different ways according to the meaning, for instance 得 is pronounced "de" with the second tone in some cases or "dei" with the third tone in some others, depending on the meaning. However such cases are quite rare. Most characters always maintain the same pronunciation. From this point of view, the writing system could be regarded as a phonetic syllabical system, with each character representing a syllable.

At this point, the question would be why thousands and thousands of characters are necessary. After all, only a few hundred syllables exist in Mandarin Chinese. Of course, every syllable can be pronounced with any one of four different tones, multiplying the number of possible sounds by four, but this still wouldn't explain the huge number of characters. The answer lies in the fact that there are large numbers of characters which are all pronounced in exactly the same way. For example the four characters 往, 网, 辋, and 罔 are all pronounced precisely the same, in other words "wang" with the third tone. However, the first one means "towards", the second one means "net", the third one means "a circle that is connected to the spokes on a wheel", and the last one means "to deceive".

It is hard to maintain that the Chinese alphabet is purely phonetic when confronted with this. Which other alphabet has numerous different letters which are pronounced in exactly the same way? At the same time, it would be wrong to view the Chinese writing system as it is popularly viewed in the West, in other words as a system akin to the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt, in which every character is a picture representing a word in its own right. The fact is that most Chinese words are actually made up of a combination of two characters. Many of the characters only have a vague or general meaning when on their own, and only acquire precise meanings when they are combined with another character. It is also misleading to think of the Chinese characters as "pictures". When Chinese writing first developed a few millenia ago most of the characters really may have been highly stylized pictures of what they were supposed to represent, but by now there is usually no obvious relationship between the shape of a character and its meaning. However there are some characters which have maintained and obvious pictorial resemblance to the concept they represent, for instance 伞, which means umbrella, or 门 which means door. It must also be said that many Chinese characters were simplified after the revolution in 1949, so as to make the alphabet easier to learn for the people. However, the traditional forms of the characters, although more complicated, often had a more obvious resemblance to the concept they represented.

An interesting question is why a great civilization such as the Chinese one has never adopted a straightforward phonetic alphabet with a few dozen letters, just like virtually all other advanced societies have done centuries ago.

Part of the answer may lie in the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language. Like I mentioned, there are large numbers of characters in Chinese which are pronounced in exactly the same way, but have different meanings. The Chinese do not think of them as being the same word, since the characters are different. If Chinese were written with a normal phonetic system, all of these words would be written in exactly the same way, introducing an element of ambiguity. On the other hand, perhaps that wouldn't be such a great problem. After all, when the Chinese speak, they seem to be able to distinguish between the different homonyms on the basis of the context. Another factor is the tonal system. When Chinese is transliterated to the European alphabet with the Pinyin system, a special accent needs to be put on every word so as to distinguish the tone. However, one would think that historically the Chinese could have developed special letters to represent the four tones without any trouble. Perhaps the real reason for the failure to develop a phonetic writing system is the relative phonetic poverty of Chinese, which actually has a rather limited number of combinations of sounds in comparison to most languages. If the language were written phonetically, it would look rather boring and repetitive, as it does when it is written in Pinyin. The characters instead make it extremely varied and interesting.

Whatever the reason, the Chinese characters have survived for thousands of years, and they are obviously too engrained in the culture to make it possible to do away with them. The system is certainly inefficient and difficult to learn in comparison to other writing systems, however it is obviously possible to use it for the purposes of a modern society, as the Chinese have been doing cheerfully for decades. It may take Chinese children years and years to learn to read and write, but in the end they do. After all, learning a few thousand symbols is not beyond the abilities of the human brain. Even I can now recognize hundreds and hundreds of characters after being in China one year, without even studying Chinese full time. True, learning to write the characters by heart is much harder than learning to recognize them, but nowadays computers allow you to write Chinese by writing the words in Pinyin and only having to recognize the characters on the screen. It is true that apparently even well educated Chinese people sometimes have trouble remembering how to write some of the less common characters by hand, but it could be answered that English spelling is so illogical that even well educated native speakers of English make spelling mistakes. And the fact that the Chinese have not crossed over to using the pinyin system for most purposes, despite its availability, testifies to the resilience and practicality of their traditional writing system.

The 60th anniversary of the People's Republic of China

2009-09-30T23:29:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, a momentous occasion here in Beijing. The first of october, China's national day, is a holiday every year, but this year it is a particularly big affair, because it is the sixtieth one. The city has been gearing up for the occasion for weeks, with phrases like 欢度国庆 (happy national day) and the number 60 visible everywhere, as well as lots of Chinese flags.

The day was marked by a huge parade in Tiananmen square. Of course, it was near impossible for ordinary people such as me to even get anywhere near the square (the subway stations nearby had not been in use since the previous afternoon), so I have watched the event on television, just like most Chinese people.

In the few days before the event the air was particularly heavy and polluted in Beijing and the visibility was highly reduced, but on the previous evening some rain (which apparently was artifically induced by the authorities) managed to clear the air in time for the parade. Watching the lovely blue sky, I wish the authorities would do this to the weather more often!

The parade was truly impressive, with countless numbers of people in Tiananmen waving placards of different coulours so as to form different shapes or Chinese characters, and lenghty parades of different army units, groups of students, representatives of ethnic minorities and what not. Chairman Hu Jintao was of course the star of the occasion, going round in a car to review the troups and giving a little speech. The former chairman Jiang Zemin was standing close behind him on the podium, which was in front of the forbidden city. I was pleased to find that I could understand bits of the speech and the commentaries on television. Words like "renmin" (the people), "fazhan" (development) and "Xin Zhongguo" (the New China) kept cropping up.

Watching the military parade and the smiling crowds, I felt caught between my European left-wing suspicion and dislike of great military parades and my understanding of the fact that most Chinese feel genuinly enthusiastic about the occasion and are not at all cynical about it. I am sure that most of the students of my university who were not selected to take part in the parade would have felt absolutely honoured to be able to do so. I am also aware that the military parade is not perceived as a show of aggresiveness directed towards other countries, but simply as a display of China's might. Plus, the revolution whose anniversary is being celebrated was a genuinly progressive affair which brought change and improvement to most Chinese, whatever happened later.

Watching the images of the event on television, I realized that I could finally read and understand the Chinese sentences on the two big red placards which sit on either side of Mao's portrait infront of the forbidden city. One sentence reads 中国人民共和国万岁（"long live the People's Republic of China", or literally "ten thousand years for the People's Republic of China") and the other one reads 世界人民大团结万岁 (long live the unity of the world's peoples).

In the evening a big show was held in the square, with lots of singing and dancing and fireworks. Watching it on television, what I found particularly impressive were the people waving coloured placards and flags to create different shapes in the center of the square. The impression of moving images which they managed to create from above was simply astonishing, and must have taken months of non-stop practice. I have never seen anything quite like it. Then again, the Chinese are always good at coreography and at putting on a show.

Stay in Vietnam

2009-09-21T01:59:00.000-07:00

(The photo is of my roommate from Beijing in a bar in his hometown near Hanoi)
My stay in Vietnam lasted about a week. I spent most of it in or around Hanoi. Before going there, the main thing I knew about Hanoi was that it is absolutely packed with motorbikes, and this is the first thing which strikes most visitors. My expectations were not disappointed. Indeed, most of the inhabitants seem to be equiped with a scooter, which they use to carry around virtualy anything. What I didn't expect is that most of them do actually wear helmets, because it is now mandatory to do so and fines are given to those who don't comply. My Vietnamese roommate from Beijing came to pick me up at the train station with his own little motorbike. With an experience which comes from years of practice, my roommate (who is about 1.60 ms. tall) stuck my large suitcase on the front of his motorbike, me on the back, and sped off trough the bustling streets of the capital, dodging other motorbikes in every direction. After taking me on a tour-de-force through Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum (which is no less magnificent and displays no less reverence than Mao's one), the museum of Ho chi Minh and a few other famous sites, my friend (whose name is Hien) took me to his home, which is in a small town outside Hanoi. The little town immediately struck me as the "real" Vietnam, lacking the touristy atmoshpere of central Hanoi. Although the country is obviously quite poor, I did not see any desperate poverty of the kind one finds in the shantytowns of India or Latin America.

Vietnam's culture is traditionally very influenced by China's, setting it apart from neighbouring countries like Laos or Thailand, which have been more influenced by India. The influence is very obvious in the temples of Hanoi, which display the Chinese characters which Vietnamese used to be written in. However, I found that the country's atmoshpere is still relatively different from China's. The economy is far less developed (although in Hanoi nice cars and fancy shops are now in evidence, and I didn't visit Ho Chi Minh city, which is supposed to be bigger and more developed), the pace of life seems more laid back, and the people are also significantly shorter than the Chinese, especially the Chinese from the north. My roommate from Beijing seemed much less short among his own kind! Another thing which struck me was the large number of government propaganda posters along the streets, displaying a typical "Soviet block" kind of style, which has now fallen out of fashion in China.

After staying a night in my flatmate's town and a few days in Hanoi, I visited Halong bay with an organized tour. (I usually abhor organized tours, but in this case it seemed the simplest option, given my lack of time and total ignorance of Vietnamese). Halong bay is the most famous natural wonder of Vietnam, a bay with thousands of little islands in different shapes and sizes. I spent a night on a boat in the bay with a small group of other tourists. The bay was indeed beautiful, although it was also absolutely packed with foreign tourists, and we never spent a moment without various other boat loads of tourists in sight. I also tried my hand at kayaking for the first (and perhaps last) time in my life. The guide's English was characteristically incomprehensible. Although a higher proportion of people seem to know a bit of English in Vietnam than in China (or at least in Hanoi than in Beijing), they seem to have even more difficulty than the Chinese in pronouncing English words and sounds, and it is often a real challenge to understand what they are trying to say. Or perhaps I have just got used to the Chinese accent.

On my last day in Hanoi I went out with some local Esperanto-speakers. The ones I met were very young and surprisingly fluent in Esperanto. One of them, a 21 year old university student originally from the Vietnamese countryside, had only studied the language for six months but spoke it extraordinarily well and clearly, especially given the Vietnamese's seeming inability to speak and pronounce foreign languages. Another proof of the relative ease of Esperanto, I suppose.
In the photos below you can see, in order of appearance, a street from my roommate's hometown, government propaganda posteres in Hanoi, a woman with a traditional hat in central Hanoi, and a view of Halong Bay from my ship's deck:

Journey to Vietnam

2009-08-31T03:44:00.000-07:00

I have just returned from a week long visit to Vietnam. The main reason behind the visit was that my Vietnamese roommate from Beijing is still home for the summer holidays, and he was terribly keen for me to visit him in Vietnam, inviting me several times to go down and see him. I thought it would be a good opportunity to see the country, and it would also be interesting to see my quiet roommate in his own environment, so I took the chance.

I decided to go to Hanoi from Beijing by train to save money, even though the ride takes almost two days. Getting hold of the tickets was extraordinarily difficult. In Beijing, it is very easy to buy a train ticekt to any destination within China, but buying train tickets to foreign destinations like Vietnam or Mongolia is another matter entirely. I went to the gigantic West train station of Beijing, which the train itself leaves from, and I was told by the lady at the information desk that I could buy the ticekt in the Central train station, which is quite a distance from where I was. I trekked to the Central station and found the special ticket booth for foreigners, where the staff can speak English. I was told that I should go to the West station, which I had just come from. After I protested, the woman went and checked with her colleague, after which she advised me to go to a travel agent in a nearby hotel. Exhausted after a day of going around Beijing in the sun, I got to the hotel to find the travel agent had already closed for the day. The next day I went back to the travel agent, and they told me that I should go to another travel agent near the West train station. Getting increasinly frustrated and wondering if anyone really knew where to buy the ticket, I went to the other agency, this time by taxi. Having got there, I was told that they do indeed sell the tickets, but however the person responsible had already left for the day, so I should come back tomorrow (it was already the afternoon). The next day I came back and finally I bought the ticket, conducting the negotiations entirely in Chinese. Unfortunately there turned out to only be tickets available for "soft beds", in other words for the fanciest class, so a plane would not have cost much less. Between buying the tickets and getting a visa, I spent a good five days rushing up and down this huge city in the boiling heat.

After recovering for a day, I set off for Vietnam on sunday afternoon. I shared my berth in the train with three Chinese men, who were very keen to chat with me. Unfortunately my Chinese still isn't really good enough to hold proper conversations, although I managed to tell them a bit about myself. There were quite a few foreigners, since the train was headed to Vietnam, and it only leaves twice a week. In the booth next to mine there was a couple of middle aged English chaps who turned out to be going by train from Britain to Singapore (!). One of them was filming out of the window, hoping to turn it into a documentary. There was apparenly a story behind it about how one of these men had been born in Singapore and brought up by adoptive British parents, but he had recently been contacted for the first time by his real mother in New Zealand, and he was going back to the place where he was born, and then on to New Zealand to meet her. He works as a television documentary producer and hopes to be able to make a decent documentary out of it.
All the Chinese passengers in the train got off before Vietnam, and by the time we reached the border the next night, it was only me and about eight other foreigners left in the train. We had to wait on the border for ages, and then take another train to Hanoi, which arrived in the Vietnamese capital at 8 in the morning. In all the journey took about 40 hours.

Snow in Beijing

2009-02-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

In the last two days there have been some heavy snowfalls in Beijing, the first real snow to grace China's capital this year. My Vietnamese roommate finds this quite exciting, since he has never seen snow before.

In Beijing it usually snows more often in the winter, but this winter has been particularly dry, and the peasants have been suffering because of draught in large areas of Northern China. I have read that the recent snow in Beijing was at least partly artificially induced by the authorities through iodide sticks which were fired into the sky, so as to ease the draught. The Chinese authorities sometimes resort to such methods to prevent or encourage rain and snow, even though their effectiveness has not been conclusively demonstrated

Anyway, here are some photos of Beijing unders the snow.

(my campus)

More photos of me in Guangxi 2

2009-02-08T08:59:00.000-08:00

More photos of me in Guangxi

2009-02-08T08:54:00.000-08:00

Happy 牛 year!

2009-02-06T21:50:00.001-08:00

The title of this post is a pun which has become extremely popular in China over the last Spring festival (the holidays for the Chinese new year). The chinese character 牛 is pronounced "niu", like the English word "new", and it means "ox", and the year which has just started is indeed the year of the ox. Thus happy 牛 year!

New year's eve was on the 25th of january this year. I spent it in a tiny little village in Guangxi province, in the South-West of China, near Vietnam. I have a friend in my university who comes from there originally, and she invited me to spend the new year at her family's home.

The experience was very interesting. The village was extremely small and remote. The only shop in the village belonged to the parents of this girl, and it was placed in the entrance to their house. All it had on sale was a few basic items. The people of the area are not Han but Zhuang, the biggest ethnic group in Guangxi, and they speak a language which is completely unrelated to Chinese, although almost all of them are also able to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese.

The local people were very friendly and gave the impression of being happy and relaxed most of the time. The weather was relatively warm during the day even though it was the middle of the winter, since I was deep in the south of China.

On new year's eve I experienced some of the local traditions related to the new year. All the houses in Chinese villages usually have red scrools pasted around the door, with phrases wishing fortune and prosperity written on them. On new year's eve, the old scrolls are scraped off and new ones are stuck up, at least in the village where I was staying. I encountered my Chinese name "Jixiang" on quite a few of these scrolls, since it is a traditional expression meaning "auspicious". The Chinese seem to attach an awful lot of importance to symbols of good omen and good luck, and traditions pertaining to this. It is also common to find a drawing of a fish on the scrolls, since the word for fish is pronounced the same as the word for wealth. A Chinese character which one sees almost everywhere during the new year period is 福, pronounced "fu", which means good luck. You can often see it on posters stuck onto doors, sometimes written upside down, as this is also meant to bring good luck.

(two examples of the red scrolls pasted around the doors of Chinese houses)

Next to the village there was a little temple for the ancestors, where the local people brought offerings to the deceased on new year's eve. One of the most common offerings was a chicken. People also offered bills of fake money with huge numbers written on them, which were then burnt. Some of the houses in the village also had an altar for the ancestors inside.

In the evening everyone in the village set fire works off again and again, creating a huge racket. The children seemed to be having an especially good time. Of course, the family I was staying with had a huge meal in the afternoon to mark the New Year.

(The village where I stayed)

(Fireworks set off on New Year's eve)

Chongqing and Qijiang

2009-02-06T02:11:00.001-08:00

(me and my Esperantist friend, plus another friend of his)

During my New Year holidays I took the chance to return to the place where I taught English for a few months four years ago. The little town where I taught is called Qijiang, and it is an hour's drive away from the big city of Chongqing, which is well known throughout China.

(Central Chongqing)

Coming back to Chongqing after four years, I had a chance to witness the pace of China's development first hand. I had the feeling that the city has changed a lot since the last time I was there, even though four years is not such a long period of time. There are noticeably a lot of new high-rises and less old, run-down buildings. Although the city still has some shabby areas, everything somehow looks newer and smarter, especially in the center. It is hard to know how much of it is just down to my perception, but I saw some things which were definitely not there four years ago: there is an ultra-modern monorail which crosses the center of the city, and I also visited a new multi-storey building on the Yangtze river (shown in the photo) built in a traditional style, full of fancy shops and restaurants. Of course, for many ordinary people life has not changed a great deal: the local Esperantist who found me the teaching job four years ago still lives in a cramped flat in an old and run down apartment block on the city's outskirts.

I had the same feeling when I visited Qijiang, the town where I actually taught English: even though it is hard to put my finger on why, I had the definite feeling that the place had changed and developed considerably in just four years. There was a brand new modern supermarket, which didn't exist when I lived there, and the road outside the school where I taught now has cement on it, while four years ago it didn't. When I went out in the evening, I came across a huge new night club which didn't exist the last time I was there. Of course, living conditions are still quite simple for many of the people, as I witnessed when I visited the home of a retired school teacher who used to know Esperanto many decades ago, although he appeared to have forgotten it completely.

I have read that Chongqing has been showered with money by the central government in the last years, and it has developed faster than most other places, becoming the richest city in Western China. The pace of development is probably not as fast in other regions. Also, it must be remembered that life in the villages and the rural areas remains extremely simple.

The one thing development has not brought these places is a big influx of foreigners. Even in such a big city as Chongqing, foreigners remain quite rare, although I did see a few in the center.

Taking a train in China over the new year.

2009-02-05T20:08:00.000-08:00

I have just got back from three weeks of travelling for the holidays for the Chinese new year. The new year is the most important holiday in the Chinese calendar, a bit like christmas in the west. This year new year's eve fell on the 25th of january. My university gives its students around a month's holiday for the new year.

During this period, every single Chinese person who can goes back home to celebrate with their family. It is the one moment in the year when every Chinese family expects to be together. All the migrant workers in the big cities like Beijing also go back to their homes in the countryside, often travelling for days. The transport system, and especially the train system, is put under huge strain during this period, as dozens of millions of people return home.

I had the brilliant idea to start my travels by taking the train from Beijing to Chengdu on the 13th of january, just as the holiday season was getting started. Chengdu is the capital of Sichuan, the province which was hit by the earthquake last year, and it's almost on the other side of China from Beijing. Me and the Chinese girl I was travelling with only started looking for a ticket seriously a few days ahead, even though it is advisable to buy your ticket weeks ahead if you want to travel during this season. It turned out to be impossible to find a ticket for a bed. All we could get was two tickets for hard seats on a train which would stop at every station and take 31 hours to get to Chengdu.

Most of the Chinese people who I told about this were horrified. Everyone warned me that travelling with just hard seats over the new year period is horrible, that the trains are unbelievably crowded, that people sleep on the floor and that sometimes you can't even go to the bathroom because there are people there too. A girl who comes from that part of China tried to push me to take a plane instead, even though it would have cost ten times more (my train ticket only cost about 100 yuan). I was so put off I almost decided not to go, but in the end I thought it might be an interesting experience and I went all the same.

The train ride was indeed quite uncomfortable, although not as bad as some people had predicted. The train left at 10 in the evening and arrived at 5 in the morning two days later, so I effectively had to sleep on the seat for two nights. The train was indeed compeltely packed, with people who just had "standing tickets" sleeping on the floor. Climbing over people to get to the bathroom really was quite an effort. In the morning I had to wait in a queue for a full hour to go the bathroom. However, the train became less packed towards the end. Me and my travel companion brought our own food and drink, just like everyone else, although they did sell food on the train. Washing my hands was also next to impossible, and my legs got quite bad cramps from spending such a long time sitting down. The girl I was travelling with comes from a little village next to Beijing, and so she had never needed to travel by train over this period, and she also found it quite uncomfortable. However, in the end we survived and we reached Chengdu, where we went to our hostel by taxi and collapsed into bed.

Visit to a village

2008-12-20T03:36:00.000-08:00

Last weekend I visited the family of one of my new Chinese friends, a girl who studies English at the Beijing language University. This girl comes from a tiny little village outside Beijing, in Shunyi district. The village is actually very close to Beijing in geographical terms, but of course it feels a million miles removed from China's capital. All I had to do to get there was take a bus for an hour to a town called Yangzhen, where I was met by the girl herself, and then another local bus for about ten minutes. In the bus, which was unbelievably crowded, I attracted the curiosity of the driver, who asked my friend where I was from, what I was doing in his hometown, and why he had never seen me around there before (!)
When I got off at the tiny hamlet the girl comes from, which is called 荣各庄 (Rong Ge Zhuang) the first thing which struck me was the fair amount of snow on the ground. The countryside around Beijing gets considerably colder then the city itself, where there had only been a very slight snowfall a few days earlier, but there was no snow to be seen on the ground. The village itself must only have contained a few hundred people, a thousand at best. Foreigners are obviously unheard of in such places, so I attracted a fair amount of stares. The girl's family was very nice, although of course proper communication could only occur through her translation, since my Chinese is still pretty dreadful. Her parents are basically farmers, and there was a large number of small pigs living in sheds in their front yard. Her sister works in a shop in the nearby town. The house itself was quite large, but the conditions inside were very simple. There was no private bathroom, but just a comunal bathroom in the field outside shared by quite a few families, which consisted of nothing more than a hole in the ground. There were no taps with running water inside the house, but there was an outside tap which apparently works for 12 hours a day, and the family always keeps water stored in the kitchen. What struck me most was how freezing the house was inside. Although there were some radiators, the heating was completely inadequate, and I kept my coat on pretty much the whole time I was there. The only really warm place in the house were a couple of beds of the kind which are often used in the countryside in northern China, which are made of bricks and have hot water running through them to keep them warm. I slept on one, while the whole of the girl's family slept together on the other one in a different room, even though there would have been single beds available for my friend and her sister, both in their twenties, but I suppose that it was too cold to sleep on any of the other beds. Luckily I never needed to get up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night, since putting my coat on and going outside in the freezing cold wouldn't have been too pleasant. The house had an internet connection for my friend and her sister to use, although it was rather unreliable.
The supper was very tasty, and it consisted of meat and vegetables which had to be cooked on the spot in a large pot of boiling water in the middle of the table, in the Chinese style. The parents seemed quite happy to have a foreign guest, certainly the first one they'd ever had. After supper, I was introduced to a neighbour, a young woman who works in Beijing but comes back in the weekends, who spoke a little bit of an English and wanted to practice.

The next morning I went for a walk around the village and took some photos, which you can see here. I was told that the villages in the municipality of Beijing, such as this one, tend to be better off then villages in other provinces, because they benefit from the capital's proximity. For instance, this village had cement roads, which you would not find in rural areas in many other parts of China. The extremely flat landscape and the snow reminded me a bit of Russia.

Mao's mausoleum

2008-11-08T06:24:00.000-08:00

Today I visited the mausoleum of 毛主席 (Mao zhuxi or "chairman Mao"), as Mao Zedong is often known in China. The mausoleum is in the middle of Tian An Men square, and still attracts scores of visitors from all over China. Entrance is free, although you have to surrender your bag outside for security reasons, and pass through a metal detector. I had to wait in a queue with scores of Chinese visitors to get into the building itself, on a freezing cold november day. In the ante-chamber, the atmosphere becomes extremely solemn and quiet. Quite a lot of visitors leave bunches of flowers in the room, as a homage to Mao's memory. Some of them even bow in respect before leaving the flowers, as if they were making a religious offering. After slowly passing through the hall, you get to the smaller room which actually contains Mao's remains. You only get to spend about half a minute in the room before you are ushered out to make way for the other visitors. Mao's corpse is kept in a hearse with a hammer and sickle on the front, just a reminder that in China the government still officially professes to be communist, even though in Beijing communist symbols are not that visible anymore. From the brief glimpse I got of the chairman's remains, I could hardly even tell if the body was real or just a wax statue.

After leaving, I asked my Chinese friend who had accompanied me to the mausoleum how she feels about Mao Zedong. "I think he is a very romantic figure" she replied, "he wrote some very romantic poems".

A Pleasant Tour in Mind from a Clean Tour in Deed

2008-10-31T22:34:00.000-07:00

Chinese English (sometimes known as "chinglish", or even "engrish") can be extremely hilarious. Every English-speaking foreigner who has lived in China for a while has their own personal favourites. Chinese ways of saying and Chinese sintax translated mechanically into English give rise to a huge number of funny, memorable and even mystifying English notices all over China. The school where I used to teach in Qijiang, in the municipality of Chongqing, had a notice on top of the main gate which read "Qijiang Normal School: Civilized Unit".

Here in Beijing, I find the level of the English on public signs for foreigners has improved a bit since the last time I visited. Perhaps the local authorities have got someone to check the English on the most prominent signs and notices in time for the Olympics. However, there are still plenty of amusing examples of Chinese English around.

Here's a few funny examples. The first photo is of a completely mistifying noticeboard which I saw in a fun fair in Chongqing. The second one is a "gentle tip of tourism bureau of Changpin". The sign in front of the Elephant in the Forbidden City says "don't touch the cultural relic please". The last photo was taken in the biggest bookshop in Chongqing, and although it is hard to read, the writing in English says: "Elementary school religion is assisted." The notice was in front of the section with primary school books, and the Chinese writing above actually means "Primary school teaching aid". Someone had obviously created this hilariously wrong translation into English by looking up the chinese characters in an English-Chinese dictionary and translating them literally according to some of their possible meanings (the third character, 教, can mean teaching but also religion).

I will add more when I see them. Unfortunately, I couldn't take a photo of the sign in the Forbidden City which said "Do not climb. Perilous Hills" in front of some rather dangerous looking rocks, because my batteries had run out.

Visit to the Olympic Park

2008-10-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I visited the Olympic park in Beijing. I went with a couple of Chinese girls from my university, one of whom happens to be a friend of my Chinese teacher (who is a student herself). I had never met them before, but my teacher gave them my number, because they were keen on having the chance of showing a foreigner around Beijing, and I was quite happy to go along.

The Olympic park is certainly worth visiting. It covers a huge area on the outskirts of the city, and it includes most of the stadiums and venues which were used during the games. It has now become a tourist attraction for the Chinese, and there were hordes of Chinese tourists everywhere. We wanted to visit the so called "water cube" which hosted the swimming and diving, but there were huge queues to buy the ticket to go in, and we didn't want to pay double to buy it from a tout, so we decided to give up on that.

The Park is so huge there is even a special underground line with three stops which takes you across the park. Next to the underground stops you can find a series of works of art built using classical Chinese themes.

During the visit I also had a chance to chat quite a lot with the two girls who went with me, who spoke reasonable English. I found out that one of them is originally from Guangxi province, in the far south of China, and she comes from the largest ethnic minority in China, the Zhuang. I had never heard of the Zhuang, but after doing some research on the internet, I have found out that there are about 18 million of them, concentrated mainly in Guangxi. Out of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China, they are the second largest after the Han (the "real" Chinese), who make up about 90% of the population. They are actually a far bigger group than the better known Tibetans. Even though there are more Zhuang than there are people in Hungary, Portugal or Sweden, almost no one has ever heard of them in the West. The Zhuang also have their own language, which belongs to the Tai language group and is unrelated to Chinese. My new Chinese friend told me that she speaks both Chinese and the Zhuang language fluently.

Karaoke and China

2008-10-15T04:38:00.000-07:00

The Chinese are often described by Western observers as being shy and reserved as a people. However, there is one moment when the average Chinese person is certainly far less reserved than the average Westener, and that is when they are in the presence of a karaoke set. Karaoke (which is known as KTV here) is hugely popular in China, and an evening out in a restaurant between friends or colleagues will often end with a karaoke session. In my experience, most Chinese people feel absolutely no compunction about singing publicly on such occasions, no matter how well or how badly they can sing. I have found myself being asked to sing myself several times but I have always declined, since I am aware of how appalling my singing can be and I have no desire to show it off. A few times I have tried explaining to some Chinese students of my age that where I am from karaoke is not nearly as widespread as it is here, and so I am not used to singing in public. When I explain that people almost never entertain themselves with karaoke when they go out in the evening in Europe, I am usually met with surprise and disbelieve. "But then what do people do when they go out?" I am asked. The idea of going out and having fun without the aid of a karaoke set is obviously alien to most people in these parts.

It would be interesting to find out why the Chinese, who are usually more reserved and less keen to stand out than Westeners, are often quite happy to sing in front of dozens of people they may not even know.

First Post

2008-10-10T06:47:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

And welcome to my blog, which I will use to chronicle my adventures here in the Middle Kingdom.
I am currently living and studying in Beijing, whose Chinese name means “capital of the North”. That’s were my blog’s name comes from, in case you were wondering. Interestingly, Tokyo’s name means the capital of the East, and Nanjing’s name means the capital of the South, since it was the capital of China during several historical periods. I am unaware of the existence of a capital of the West.
In any case, I am planning to stay here for a couple of years, which should give me plenty of time to get below the surface of this fascinating and widely misunderstood country.
The name I have chosen for myself is quite simply my semi-official Chinese name. You see, if you live in China it is often convenient to have a name which can be written down in Chinese character. The university I am studying at requires foreign students to come up with a Chinese name for themselves. Your Chinese name can just be the closest rendition of your original name which is phonetically possible in Chinese, but it is far more interesting to make up a completely different name, usually with the help of someone Chinese. Personally, I had already been given a Chinese name by my students when I was teaching in China four years ago. The name was Ji Xiang, which is a traditional expression meaning "auspicious". I have sometimes seen the name written on top of temples, or on the scrolls which get pasted around the doors of Chinese houses on new year's eve. In the photo you can see my name written over the door of a temple in Chengdu. It is not a common name, however I gather it sounds quite good, or at least I hope so, so I stuck with it.
Having a Chinese name is not just a bureaucratic necessity, but it is also useful because for the Chinese it is usually very hard to pronounce and remember foreign names. Very often, your Chinese name becomes the name you are known by. Young Chinese people often do the opposite and pick an English name which they use when they are introduced to foreigners, who find Chinese names just as difficult and hard to remember.