All China Can Eat
The salmon sashimi platter at Golden Jaguar is never full. Every time the employee behind the counter slides some on, customers swarm around and snatch them all up. Since they don’t know when they might get more, each diner grabs enough for her whole table. The sight reminds me of those Chinese temples with fish that try to jump over each other to snatch a morsel of food, or piranhas at feeding time. If you’re having trouble visualizing the situation, try this:
I was eating lunch at the restaurant with some friends when my roommate remarked that he saw a woman literally pick up the platter and scrape half of the salmon sashimi onto her plate. I decided to see this for myself.
Perhaps it was the furious way diners descended on the sashimi like ravens on a deer carcass, or perhaps it was because I had just finished Jonathan Watts’ fabulous but depressing book When One Billion Chinese Jump, about environmental crises in China and what they mean for the world, but I suddenly had a vision of the apocalypse.
Gaysthetics
Only in Asia, it seems, is a tradition valuing the androgynous beauty of the meizhengtai (美正太)—the beautiful boy—enjoying a revival. Increasingly, the meizhengtai is seen as on par, if not exceeding, the appeal of his more typically masculine counterpart, the nanzihan (男子汉). While we have our androgynous sex icons in the West, too—Johnny Depp, Taylor Lautner and, though I shudder to say it, Justin Bieber—the sexuality of these people is always kept rigorously beyond doubt, at least in the media.
Here is where East and West divide. Sexual ambiguity in males, unlike androgyny, is not looked upon with favor by either men or women, and appreciation of the beautiful and unapologetically gay man remains taboo. Sure, we had our dandies, our fops and our New Romantics, but there have been countless casualties along the way.
Death by Indifference
Nearly everyday when I take the subway I hear the same refrain, “‘Respect the old and cherish the young’ is a traditional Chinese virtue.” So how does one make sense of the news that a two-year-old child was run over twice and passed by no less than 17 people before she was helped? “Girl Who Was [...]
Crazy Train or: A Loco Motive
I stepped on the train ready to die. I knew, rationally, that an accident was unlikely—thousands of passenger trains run everyday and recently the government had lowered the maximum speed on the fastest commutes and recalled a number of trains on the Beijing-Shanghai route over safety concerns. Still, my mind focused on the recent… malfunctions of the Chinese railway system.
The train pulled out of the station into a clear Beijing morning. As we got rolling, I played through various worst-case scenarios.
Repression 101: Deterrence
Most repressive regimes use the total authority they possess like a hammer—midnight arrests, curfews, executions, and the like. While China also utilizes these methods to a large degree, they tend to wield their power more like a scalpel, carefully calibrated to the offender and the offense.
The key to this proportional response comes from the government’s ability to apply direct and indirect pressure on offenders. They use a variety of enforcement methods to ensure cooperation from the subject.
The concept in China is called ruanjian (“soft prison”), perhaps roughly corresponding to house arrest in English. However, ruanjian is far more nuanced than simple house arrest. It can be as simple as an athletic young man in a crew-cut following you wherever you go and sitting in a car outside your house at night, to full-on imprisonment in a small rural cottage, surrounded by bright floodlights and blaring speakers, with no phones or visitors.
Repression 101: Censorship
The first and most obvious feature of how Chinese government maintains order is through censorship. The Great Firewall of China, Xinhua News, and the censorship of books and publications is merely the most blunt instrument they have in their hands, but far from the only one.
By controlling the flow of information, they possess a strong ability to control the narrative of a given story. While it is not especially difficult to get around the Great Firewall, the question that most Chinese people ask themselves is: “Why bother?” China has successfully cast the media narrative as an “us vs them” situation, where foreign sources are automatically biased against China. The average Chinese person feels little incentive to seek out foreign sources of news for a different point of view. Similarly, despite there being almost no barriers to access, not many Americans actively seek out Al-Jazeera for a second opinon on world affairs.
Most Western media reports focus on the most basic of censorship methods—like blocked searches for sensitive keywords, deletion of blog posts, or media blackouts on certain news items. However, far more insidious than that is the censorship that editors impose upon themselves.
Back to September
Ten years ago I was sitting in a high school classroom conjugating Japanese verbs when there was a distant boom. Our teacher, Fujita sensei, a retired air force vet, remarked that it sounded like an explosion. We laughed it off and I wondered silently what in northern Virginia was worth bombing. Fifteen minutes later I found out.
Ten years ago, I knew nothing of politics. I knew nothing of the struggle for power and the insatiable human lust for domination and violence. But I knew, from the faces of my teachers, that the world had shifted; that there was no going back to September 10.
In the last decade, regardless of what politicians say in their memorial speeches, Americans have lived, more or less, in the shadow of 9/11. The heightened awareness—some might say fear—of terrorism led to a new government department, two intractable wars, and an ongoing Islamophobia. Words like “international terrorism,” “Islamic fundamentalism,” and “suicide bomber” are now common parlance. Only the death of Osama bin Laden offered some scant comfort to anxious Americans.
Repression 101
With the Libyan Revolution seemingly nearing its end, it’s worth taking a step back to look at authoritarian regimes around the world. It brings us to the unique question of why some authoritarian regimes can maintain stability for so long, and some collapse.
The maintenance of stability in the Middle East and other countries, such as Russia or Venezuela, depends heavily on one thing: petrodollars. Generous government subsidies funded by oil or gas reserves help keep the population sedated—up to a point, as we can see from the Arab Spring. Others, like Cuba, depend heavily on a cult of personality built around the leader himself. But the largest authoritarian country in the world has neither vast natural resources nor a hypnotically charismatic leader. In fact, the opposite—China is resource poor, and its leaders are famously wooden-faced and stiff.
So how, then, do they maintain social order? Is it through the justness of their social policies? Is it through strong institutions? Or is it though respect for and commitment to their citizens? Anyone at all familiar with China knows that this is not the case.
The Battle of Beijing
Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.
Thus begins Ai Weiwei’s concise and lucid evaluation of Beijing, in which he touches upon the myriad indemnities of the city. In true gadfly fashion, he flits from issue to issue, landing only long enough to raise one’s ire. The things he mentions, in roughly chronological order: poor treatment of migrant workers, official corruption, unaffordable house prices, preferential treatment of foreigners, lack of health care, lack of an independent judiciary, rule of power, Beijing’s lack of vitality, black jails, arbitrary justice. He ends with a simple conlusion:
Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.
The Annotated Guo Meimei Interview
On August 3, in her first television interview since the Red Cross Society scandal, Guo Meimei appeared on Ningxia television’s “Decoding Finance” with her mother, Guo Dengfeng, to tell her side of the story. The host, “Larry” Lang Xianping, an economics professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, put on the kiddiest of kid gloves for the 20-minute interview. Here was their chance to set the story straight, or at least recite the answers they’ve rehearsed for the last month.
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