Wow, this new blog about the sucky dating situation for expat women in China seems to dovetail beautifully with one of this site’s most commented-on posts. This is not your ordinary blog – you have to see it. Even the blog’s name is, um, different.
Via Danwei.
Damn. My arch-rival beat me to the punch on a post I’ve been meaning to blog about for a long time – four years, to be precise. This is an absolute must-read and something I suspect many of you can relate to.
If only computers could convey fragrances (something I hear is not that far off)…. Beijing taxi “fragrances” are unique, and I’m often surprised at just how bad a single car can smell. They’ve gotten a bit better; I remember the days in the freezing winter of 2002, when I would open the window a fraction and press my face up so I could catch some outside air, no matter how painful the cold. I never could define exactly what it was that smelled so bad – bad breath, body odor, some local air freshener I didn’t appreciate. But it was intense. And it’s still an issue. (Stale garlic seems to be a key ingredient, along with tobacco.)
Please don’t say this indicates any bias against China; it doesn’t. It’s the equivalent to commenting on Beijing traffic or weather – a fact of life. Check out the Imagethief post and see how much of this criticism comes from Chinese citizens.
While I never experienced such foul aromas in taxis anywhere else, I did have an occasional problem in Taipei, where many taxis seem to use a flowery air-freshener with a sickly sweet, suffocating stench. It wasn’t dirty or filthy smelling, just nauseating. I did the crack-the-window thing over there quite a bit. I would love to know the source for this stench so I can recommend banning it.
Meanwhile, I am still loving Beijing. It will take a lot more than a smelly taxi ride to turn me off from this incredible city.
Two readers now tell me TPD is blocked, one in SE China, the other in mid-east China. On top of that Danwei reports Livejournal blogs are now banned. F*cking Chinese fire drill.
(Fine here in Beijing, by the way.)
And his site looks like a class act. Be sure to check out this post on one of my favorite topics.
There is a long piece in this week’s edition of Spiegel Online with the provocative title, “Does Communism work after all?” It is one of those articles with something for everybody. At times the authors seem almost in awe of China’s Gang of Nine, comparing Hu Jintao to a slick, corporate boss managing a massive business empire with his team of executives, while other sections go into detail about the nasty side effects of China’s economic miracle.
For starters, the article praises the CCP for the economic gains of many Chinese in the reform period:
The Chinese communists rescued about 300 million people from poverty — a number unprecedented in history — with their reforms. The signs of affluence are everywhere, and not just in Shanghai and Shenzhen, where luxury boutiques like Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Versace attract a growing middle class. The Chinese boom even extends into the country’s more backward interior, to places like Chengdu or Chongqing. The number of Chinese dollar millionaires is growing steadily, with 320,000 Chinese already worth an average of $5 million. The rich are among the Communist Party’s most loyal supporters because it protects their affluence. And the army of migrant workers moving from the countryside to construction sites in the cities is also unlikely to rise up against the Communist Party. As long as life improves by a fraction each year for every Chinese citizen, the Mandarins will continue to enjoy the mandate of heaven.
But this of course sets up a paradox. Given the undemocratic nature of the PRC, the question must be asked, in true academia-speak: “What gives?”
Is China, one of the most undemocratic nations on earth, setting an example for democratic countries on how to effectively solve problems? Do China’s successes fly in the face of every critic and skeptic who believes that Marxism-Leninism and capitalism are as incompatible as the devil and holy water?
Well, that would be a “No” and a “Yes.” I told you there would be something for everyone.
The article uses several examples–party officials, entrepreneurs, and workers–to show that while mistakes have been made, there have also been tremendous gains. Nevertheless, this is not a love-fest. The authors, Andreas Lorenz and Wieland Wagner, just two weeks ago published a rather scathing profile of China’s environmental mess. None of it particularly new to anyone who follows China (or who tries to breathe here), but it should demonstrate that Lorenz and Wagner aren’t simply panda-huggers either.
China is a big country, a future superpower. Its leaders, accountable only to themselves, don’t care for economic or environmental advice. They set their own path.
But each year, each month, almost every week, China experiences some sort of major environmental catastrophe. The mess spreads across the land, in its waterways and the air. And far too often, the rest of the world gets sprinkled with some of it too.
In the latest piece, the authors interpolate amazement at China’s dynamic rise with details of the troubling side effects of rapid economic growth in a system with limited accountability to its stakeholders. And there are problems with deep roots. The intimate relationship between party lackeys, business leaders, and government bureaucrats meant quick approval of multi-million dollar deals for foreign investors who came to China attracted by cheap labor, lax regulations, and the laughable enforcement of environmental protections. Chinese entrepreneurs were quick to take advantage of the same “perks” and officials looked the other way while Communism began to lose all meaning. The economy grew but at at a cost. The social safety net (the iron rice bowl) quickly became a relic of another age. The right to strike was abolished in 1982 with worker grievances referred to the party bosses, who then sent in the police (or worse) to suppress disgruntled workers. Corruption became endemic. An environmental crisis of monumental proportions now looms. And the benefits of the reform era have been distributed so haphazardly and unevenly that “the rising tide lifting all boats” is beginning to look alarmingly like a tidal wave. Many in China’s rural areas are feeling the water rising around them and they are unhappy about it. Yet the economy marches on. Perhaps Jim Mann is right after all.
It’s impossible to summarize the whole article. Some of it is a bit stale and many people might find themselves nodding along at the usual hurrahs (Gleaming cities! Millions have food!) and rasberries (Corruption bad! Pollution dirty!). But the article is worth the read in its entirety. I might particularly call attention to part four which discusses internal debates within the CCP and the government. The Chinese government is not a monolith and while there may be only one party with any power, the views within that party are perhaps more diverse than is generally assumed. Witness the dust-up last summer over private property protections when the CCP found itself under attack on its left flank from those who criticized the excessive focus on economic development at all costs and who feared the growing influence of foreign companies in China’s domestic economy.
It’s an interesting article. There are certainly some points that are genuine clunkers (including a return to the “closed China” myth on page two.) There are probably others. That said, there is much here for conversation and debate. Enjoy.
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Since the article is in sections, I’ve included the links to all five parts here:
This is a most unusual and extraordinary post. A former self-proclaimed “lizard” and “anti-idiotarian” in Europe confesses that what LGF and Michelle and the like hath wrought goes exactly counter to what America needed to achieve in the wake of 911. Considering that the writer was not that long ago a serious and strident advocate of the war in Iraq who aligned himself with the “warbloggers,” it’s nothing short of astonishing. It’s tone is somehow calm yet urgent, poignant and blisteringly logical. It reminds us of just how noble a thing it can be to be “for the war before we were against it.” In other words, changing your mind and reshaping your opinion can be a sign of maturity and wisdom, not cowardice and treason.
Anyone who argues for war plays with dangerous forces, so they must do it responsibly or not at all. Foolish wars have led countries to disaster. They have caused the deaths of millions. History and psychology tells us that war parties tend to be over-confident, paranoid and emotional. So the minimum you should expect from a responsible war supporter is that they are aware of this bias, and do their best to counterbalance it.
It’s not enough to believe that you are right. You have to be actively open-minded, you have to listen to your critics, and encourage devil’s advocates. You have to set up a robust information structure that makes it as difficult as possible for you to ignore reality. This is the only good way to prevent self-deception. It works. And we did not do it.
What we did was the opposite. At every level, from the lowliest blogger to the highest official, war supporters set up filters that protected them from facts they did not want to hear. We saw what we wanted to see, and if anyone saw differently, we called them left-wing moonbats who were rooting for the other side. We defined the entire mainstream media establishment as irrelevant, leaving more biased, less experienced “new” media as our primary source of facts. We ignored reasonable critics, and focused on the crazy ones, so that we could tell ourselves how incredibly smart we were.
Among the bloggers there was a sense that there were all these brilliant people, who knew so much about history, war and society, who had previously been without the tools to express themselves. Thanks to the wonders of amateur media, we could now finally exploit this huge reservoir of expert knowledge. And when you contrasted the lazy neutrality of the old media with the energy of the new, it certainly could seem that way. Here were people who regularly would write thousands of words about the historical context of Islamist terrorism, who could write brilliantly about freedom and democracy, who commented boldly on the long trends of history. How could such people be wrong?
But what we saw was not expert knowledge, but the well-written, arrogantly presented ideas of half-educated amateurs. This, too, went all the way from the bottom to the top. It often struck us how well the writing of the best of the bloggers measured up to that of pro-war pundits and intellectuals. We thought this showed how professional the amateurs were, when what it really told us was how amateurish the professionals were.
Retraction is never an easy thing to do and I give this writer very high marks for doing so with such fortitude and eloquence. Instead of an emotional mea culpa, it is a step by step walk-through of all the dreadful, tragic errors we made in the September 11th’s wake, and how the vitriolic call for vengeance clouded our better judgment and led us into the mouth of hell, where we find ourselves today.
Please check out the entire long essay. It’s a rare blog post that keeps me thinking about it throughout the day, This one definitely did, and then some.
It’s started again as everyone returns from their holiday, and I am back on the treadmill. The recent flurry of posts will have to come to a halt, or at least be reduced to a trickle, though I’ll do the best I can to update the site. Hopefully a guest blogger or two will help keep things kicking. It’s going to be an intense few weeks ahead; thanks for sticking around.
Last chance over the next two hours or so to email me for the details. Thanks to all of you who’ve responded – it looks like it’ll be a high-class gathering with a truly diverse group. See you at 19.30.
Who would have thought it? Same old, same old. However, this time there are new ingredients in the broth, namely a rapidly growing middle class and a wave of support among intellectuals for reform and even the “D” word.
The Communist Party cautioned China’s increasingly impatient reformers and intellectuals Tuesday that political liberalization and democracy are still a long way off despite the rapid pace of economic change during the past two decades.
The warning, in an article attributed to Premier Wen Jiabao in the official People’s Daily, constituted the party’s first-known response to a bubbling up of political debate as China prepares for an annual session of its legislature and an important Communist Party congress — held every five years — that is scheduled for this fall.
Most of the debate has remained behind closed doors, in keeping with the party’s tradition of secrecy. But two recent articles by prominent establishment figures brought out into the open suggestions to President Hu Jintao’s government that moving faster on political reforms would help smoothe the transformation to a market economy.
One, by Zhou Ruijun, a former People’s Daily editor known for reformist views, said greater democratic opening is necessary to defuse tensions over a growing gap between rich and poor, which he warned could lead to instability. Another, by former Renmin University vice president Xie Tao, suggested that China should move speedily toward a Scandinavian-like social-welfare democracy.
Wen, who recently was reported to be in charge of preparing a leadership platform for the party congress, reached into familiar Marxist vocabularly to build an argument that China is not yet ready for such democracy, even though it remains a distant goal for the “socialism with Chinese characteristics” that the party hopes to build.
I know, I know, China’s not ready and they need a tough, no-nonsense leader to be “the Decider” and the people are too uneducated. Still, the demand for reform is being accelerated every day by China’s progress. Could there come a time when these inherently different philosophies – demand for representation and personal freedoms vs. the authoritarian quasi-police state – collide (or perhaps I should say collide again)? I don’t see it happening anytime soon – not when so many people here are having such a good time. But I do see the two forces grinding away at one another like tectonic plates, and ultimately we will witness a major shift, precipitated by an unforseen event like
You have to read Richard Spencer’s blog post on his trip to Tibet. We all know the script whenever the Tibet issue arises, how the good liberators paved the roads and ended theocracy and serfdom, which is not inaccurate (though I might not use the term “good liberators”). But the bottom line question remains, do these liberated people feel they have indeed been liberated and are they grateful for the present-day situation? Do they feel one with China, or is there a sort of apartheid that keeps them separate from the Han Chinese who have settled in? Read Spencer’s post and draw your own conclusions.
For many (most?) Tibetans the tie that binds them together is their religion. When their religious leaders constitute “the main source of opposition” and “hostility” to the PRC, is it possible for their followers to feel none of the same?
Of course, the management committees of the monasteries are now effectively controlled by the Communist Party through their appointees, who don’t have to be religious at all. It seems very unlikely to me that this religious revolution could be allowed to happen, in any case. There is obviously a conflict everywhere in China between the government’s professed desire to preserve and promote thousands of years of Chinese culture and yet also promote atheism, its official creed, since that is a denial of the mainspring of much Chinese culture.
But at least elsewhere religion poses little threat to the established order. In Tibet, the monasteries remain the main source of opposition. How can the authorities promote Tibetan culture without accepting that the religious part of it, at least, is profoundly hostile to Chinese control?
So maybe the family isn’t as happy as most Chinese are taught in school. However, I’ve all but given up arguing with friends and colleagues here about Tibet (and I am no great fan of the Dalai Lama or the “Free Tibet” movements). Like Taiwan and Japan, the mere mention of the topic elicits a robotic response that is uncannily identical from person to person. Just like the Taiwan baby returning to its mother,
It’s good to see that travel restrictions in China are being eased, as Spencer reports, and the fact that he can tell this story is a sign of progress. But the underlying message of the post is a grim one: China’s collective amnesia and willful ignorance of what Tibet went through and what it is today is staggering. It’s fine to hold onto your fantasies of what you’d like to think Tibet is, but be aware that this is a scripted mirage concocted by the same spinsters who bring you China Daily.
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