In a speech delivered from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the President announced:

I’m directing the State Department to accelerate our ability to process visas by 40 percent in China and in Brazil this year.

The White House has also expressed hopes that 80% of non-immigrant visa applicants could be interviewed within three weeks of getting their application. According to China Daily:

Charles Bennett, minister counselor for consular affairs of the US embassy in Beijing, told China Daily earlier that 50 more American staff members will be deployed to the embassy and US consulates in China this year.

In addition, more interview windows and buildings will be built and the embassy is considering allowing people to arrange an interview date as early as two days after he applied, he said.

But don’t be fooled. Despite the bilateral enthusiasm surrounding these new initiates, the push to expedite visas for Chinese nationals has less to do with improving Sino-US relations than one thing: cold hard cash.

According to the China Tourism Academy, 70 million Chinese traveled overseas last year and spent a total of $69 billion abroad, making them the third largest overseas spenders after Germans and Americans. 2012 could see those figures increase to 78.4 million and $80 billion, respectively. That’s a lot of money. Indeed, Chinese tourists are already making their presence felt in England, Spain, Japan and South Korea, and the Obama administration is eager to get a bigger piece of that pie.

Continue reading at Project Pengyou.

“You’ve hurt me. Do you know I’ve already folded three, four hundred stars for you? My friend tried to introduce me to some guy but I refused. I didn’t realize it before but I like you. I like only you. Will you be my boyfriend? I cannot just be a normal friend to you anymore. Either accept me or I will leave.”

This was the first time to my knowledge I had ever hurt a girl, and it was an experience I was not quite ready to take responsibility for. The Chinese place great emphasis on grand gestures and confessions. To many girls, you are not officially in a relationship until you make the ultimate confession and ask her formally, “I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?” It doesn’t matter if you’ve already had sex, or if you’ve never said a word to each other. The act of confessing, the grand, sweeping scale of expressing your feelings which have been so deeply bottled up, is the only way to consolidate a relationship.

To an American this idea might appear inimical; talk is cheap, actions are real. When you pay attention to a girl, when you ask for her phone number, when you take her out to dinner—this is how Americans say “I like you.” Conversely, when someone only calls when they’re drunk, when they only hit you up for sex, when they haven’t introduced you to the rest of their friends; these actions also clearly delineate the nature of your relationship.

To most Westerners there is no need to be so painstakingly clear cut about things that are plainly obvious. There are no brazen, under the stars, confessions. Even the use of this word “confess” seemed antiquated, dramatic, and old-fashioned when I first heard my Chinese friends use it to describe how their relationships began. “We were just friends, but one day he confessed himself to me. After that we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

What is it about the act of confessing that allows Chinese people to mentally enter into a relationship, at times willfully ignorant and absent of any significant action or contact? My temporary American roommate skyped with a Chinese girl eight times. After their first real life meeting they had sex in our apartment shower while a mutual friend waited in the living room.

My roommate had told her many times in the heat of the moment that he liked her. Then one day in Sanlitun, while they were walking together on the street, he answered a phone call from another girl. This other girl was just a friend, and he was simply having a normal conversation with her, but the way he ignored his companion must have carried some weight. The present girl became angry and began to scream. “I thought you loved me!” She proceeded to chase and berate him as he, mortified, walk off to the nearest subway station.

This poor girl is not crazy and my roommate is not a horrible person; they are just both victims of a cultural misunderstanding. Could something like this happen in America? Probably. But my wager is that one would be hard pressed to find an American girl that didn’t fully comprehend the nature and extent of her relationship with a guy, purely based on their past actions together.

Culturally rooted misunderstandings often cause scenes like this. When one party expects much more than the other party is willing to give it often leads to heartbreak and anguish. There are many things men like. I like Italian food, I like beer, I like movies. When I say I like a girl, it usually means I would like to have sex with her. It sometimes means I would like to date her, and it even more rarely means “I love you!” In China, this “like” is not so casual. It is a big thing to “like” someone. When you say “like” in China, you better be ready to live with the consequences.

There is a word in Chinese called 乱说 (luàn shuō), the literal translation is “chaos talk,” but it generally means to make irresponsible remarks. To a foreigner this can be quite a dangerous and sensitive issue as we are not always fully aware what kind of talking is irresponsible. Americans talk about a lot of things. We are sarcastic, we lie, and we are insincere. We put on many faces to many different people depending on the social situation and the way we want to present ourselves. Americans are naturally attuned and groomed from an early age to filter out this bullshit. We sometimes take it for granted that others can do the same.

In China, not so. There is very little sarcasm in the average Chinese conversation. There is very little subtext or misunderstanding. Chinese is blunt, straightforward, and to the point. Perhaps this is why the candid and direct “I like you” confession is that much more important to a Chinese relationship.

As a kid I had to learn many of these linguistic and cultural differences the hard way. I was always the butt of jokes and taunts when I first moved to America because I had no sense in determining when peers were pulling a fast one on me and when they were being sincere.

“Is our bus late?” I would ask my neighbor while waiting after school the first day.

“No, it only comes on Fridays, you should walk home,” he replied.

I believed him and began to walk home, only to realize halfway down the street that the rest of my friends were laughing at me.

As Americans we grow up organically learning these subtle jokes and quips in the schoolyard. As a culture we are hypersensitive to falsehoods and insincerity. Perhaps this is why Americans value action over words. Perhaps conversely, this is why Chinese place as much emphasis on words as on action. To say something in Chinese is to mean it. There is little innuendo, pretense, or sarcasm. People say what is in their hearts and they stick to it. If you don’t, you are just a bad person or a liar. I find this way of communicating at times both refreshing and frustrating.

When I casually told my friend that I liked talking to her, I had no idea that my words would eventually break her heart when I could no longer live up to those expectations. When a person chooses to endear themselves to someone, it is at that same moment that one also chooses to hurt them. If you cannot continue to live up to the expectations you create, you will ultimately let someone down.

Perhaps I am partially to blame for making irresponsible remarks and being insensitive. I have been on the other side of this as well. When I thought I had made it obvious that I was into someone, they simply brushed it off because a heartfelt confession never left my lips. Things aren’t codified unless you express them in words. Feelings, emotions, actions; they are all just dust waiting to be caught in a beautiful slew of passionate poetry and long-winded platitudes.

In America, what we say is just filler in anticipation for what we will one day do. In China, what you do is largely a pretext for what you will one day confess.

The bus tour of the Korean Demilitarized Zone—the four-kilometer-wide ribbon of land that bisects the Korean Peninsula—left from downtown Seoul at eight in the morning but had begun raining long before. The travel agency was clear about the dress code: “No faded or torn jeans, sandals, leather pants, shorts, sleeveless shirts, sweatpants, slippers, or military-style clothing.”

I assumed the dress code was for our safety but Ms. Lee, our friendly tour guide, explained that if we wore ragged clothes, pictures of us could be taken and used as propaganda: proof that people in the South couldn’t afford nice clothes. I didn’t know what to make of this sudden concern for national image. Surely the North Korean propaganda machine could just as easily download pictures of poorly-dressed South Koreans.

As our bus cruised along Freedom Highway, Ms. Lee gave us some statistics about the North. Soldiers spent 10 years stationed at the border. If they performed well they could earn a trip home. When Kim Il-sung was in power, everyone had jobs and universal health care—things weren’t bad at all.

She patiently catalogued the horrors of the ongoing separation: families torn apart, the occasional bursts of violence across the border, the widespread starvation and destitution in the North. Then she did something strange: she asked our group of bleary-eyed tourists if we had any ideas about how to resolve the situation. I thought it was a rhetorical flourish but she repeated her question and added, “If you have any ideas, please let us know.” It was unclear whom she meant by “us”—the tourism agency? The South Korean people? It seemed unlikely that any novel ideas would arise from our humble bus, and even less likely that any sensible suggestions would be passed up the chain of command to the relevant ministries. I couldn’t help but wonder if tour guides in Gaza posed a similar question to their travelers.

When we reached the DMZ, we boarded a military bus and were acquainted with a new set of rules: no chewing gum, drinking water, or standing up in the bus. Cameras were allowed but we could only take pictures at specified locations. We signed a waiver that basically said, whatever happens, happens. And we had to abandon our umbrellas, leaving us defenseless against the rain.

We drove to a parking lot and walked through a concrete building, called the Freedom House, to the Joint Security Area. It was just like all the photographs. Three longhouses painted robin egg blue. A concrete slab between the buildings indicating the Military Demarcation Line. Three South Korean guards, facing the north, fists clenched, frozen in perpetual war.

As the MP on duty led small groups of us into the MAC Conference Room for pictures, a group of tourists appeared in front of Panmungak, the North Korean building that stood across from the Freedom House. As they waved to us, I remembered what Ms. Lee had told us on the bus: “When you get to the border, do not touch anything. Do not stare. If people wave at you, do not wave back. And most of all, do not point.” When s0meone asked why we couldn’t wave, Ms. Lee kindly reminded us, “The North Koreans are not a reasonable people.”

I noticed that the group on the North Korean side carried umbrellas and took pictures liberally. Some of them wore shorts, though even they heeded the no leather pants rule. “They are Chinese tourists,” the soldier accompanying us said. The Chinese tourists waved enthusiastically but we kept our hands at our sides. I imagined a picture of our stoic tour group on a North Korean propaganda poster: people in South Korea are antisocial.

Drenched in rain and watching the waving crowd just north of us, separated by six soldiers and a gulf of understanding, it was hard to see the Korean situation as anything more than a wound that man had inflicted upon himself—the bitter fruit of a few men squabbling for power, of twisted ideology and hollow nationalism. In any other place we might have called out to them, waved and smiled to affirm our common humanity. But across this imaginary line that man had drawn over the unwitting earth, they seemed a world away.

An American in our group asked why the Chinese tourists were allowed to wave and take pictures.

“They are in violation of the rules but the North Koreans know we won’t shoot,” our soldier answered.

“What will they do if we take pictures?” asked the American.

Our soldier thought about this for a moment. Then he simply said, “I don’t know.”

In September of last year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met with 50 wealthy entrepreneurs in the name of promoting philanthropy but in 2010 donations from the largest state-owned enterprises was only 2% of net income and the numbers for 2011 are likely to be worse for one simple reason: Guo Meimei.

The face that launched a thousand inquiries.

In the beginning of June of this year, China’s charity sector found itself under intense scrutiny when the Guo Meimei scandal broke.

It is hard to describe the impact of this debacle on China’s charity sector, except to say that it’s the biggest thing to happen to Chinese charity since the invention of the donation box. In the three months after the scandal, charitable donations fell a staggering 80%. Zhao Baige, the executive vice president of the Red Cross Society of China, the charity implicated in the scandal, has come out in public to promise reforms. Even declining blood donations are being blamed on the Guo Meimei affair.

This downturn in donations is not the result of Guo or her Hermes bags per se—she merely served as a lightning rod for criticisms of Chinese charities, which, far from being transparent, are translucent at best, like a hamburger wrapper soaked in grease. The rancorous feelings engendered by the Guo Meimei scandal and the fallout afterward is a manifestation of the wider lack of trust in Chinese society.

This crisis of trust was exacerbated by the Wenzhou train collision in late July and the death of Little Yueyue in October. The latter incident brought China’s crisis of conscience to the forefront. Though citizens responded by donating money to Yueyue’s parents when she was still alive, the situation quickly became muddled with speculation. Some postulated that Chen Xianmei, the scrap peddler who tried to rescue Yueyue, did so to get famous.

All this points to the severe dearth of trust in China.

The Gansu bus collision in November left 20 dead.

It’s no surprise that after all these shocks to the national psyche—not to mention the rash of school bus collisions in November and December—citizens would be suspicious of charity and wary of trusting others. But to shy away from charitable giving because of fear and distrust is exactly the wrong thing to do.

These scandals do not prove that kindness and charity are worthless—just the opposite, they prove that empathy and responsible charity has never been more necessary. This turbulent year has exposed a void of accountability in Chinese society that private citizens and civil organizations must stand up and occupy.

Continue reading at Project Pengyou.

Two hours prior to the anchor’s emotively-worded but utterly deadpan performance (which, along with her tearfully hyperbolic North Korean counterpart, deserve Oscar nominations), I had been discussing humorous cat anecdotes with a few of the Chinese people at my local gym. One of them, coincidentally, was a CCTV presenter, who told us her cat had learned to move its feces from its litter tray and onto the kitchen floor, thereby incriminating her pet dog. My boyfriend joined in the discussion. That afternoon, he had stood up in his office to announce the death of Kim Jong-il, China’s great pal, the guy whom the CCP never gets tired of shielding, and was met with utter indifference. “I don’t care about him,” remarked his deskmate. “I’m busy.”

Official portraits of Mao and Kim.

Kim Jong-il’s name wasn’t mentioned once in my office the following day, apart from by myself and the other two foreign employees, who were keeping up with The Onion‘s rolling-out of every back article it had on everyone’s favorite communist oligarch. I had personally witnessed my boyfriend’s parents teasing one another for crying after learning of the death of China’s own Dear Leader, Mao Zedong:

“You cried!”

“No, YOU cried!”

The endless footage of Mediterranean-style weeping helpfully provided to China’s state mouthpieces by North Korea’s even more ridiculous state media agency may have been a popular source of amusement on the Chinese blogosphere, but the Chinese, at least those in my immediate vicinity, seem pretty much unmoved. Compare this to the tears when staff at my previous place of work found out about Michael Jackson’s death in 2010. My boyfriend entered a deep mourning for the loss of his favorite pop icon, joining in the bidding wars on eBay for one of those precious few signed albums, so that he might own something his idol had once touched. To this day, Michael Jackson tributes and rip-offs dominate Chinese talent shows and the few other “entertainment programs” permitted to exist by the Party’s newly-zealous media czars. Hell, I’ve even seen Jackson referenced in advertisements for the children’s TV channel Kaku and the utterly ineffectual brain medication Nao Bai Jin.

I doubt the same treatment, whether reverent or shamelessly exploitative, will be meted out to Kim. Of course that’s entirely due to the media blackout imposed when it comes to mocking North Korea’s potato-faced ex-leader, but even if such a blackout weren’t in place, not even China’s countless brands of undrinkable alcohol would be able to up sales with a grinning Kim clad in a Tang jacket, proffering one of their products from the side of a bus.

The fact that CCTV was compelled to offer up this shameless smorgasbord of communist solidarity is further testament to the decline in its relevance to the sociopolitical views of the Chinese people. Time was that the television was the principal source of both entertainment and information in a Chinese household, and CCTV’s word had gravitas. Now, whether it’s slamming the Nobel Peace Prize committee, depicting the heroic actions of police in hog-tying and humiliating prostitutes, or offering up pronouncements from the Central Committee as if they were engraved on tablets of stone fresh from Mount Sinai, Chinese people have learned to switch off. If we may return to my gym for a moment, lack of a satellite or cable connection means the TVs are eternally tuned to domestic channels, but it’s curious that as soon as a news, current events or “lifestyle” show comes on, a staff member switches over to a nature show, TV drama or kung fu movie. That’s what people want to watch.

North Korean and Chinese propaganda posters.

You can’t liberalize education, open the floodgates to the Internet, sanction overseas travel and expect people to swallow the same propaganda they did in the 1970s. I doubt even the most voracious Party cadres in China looked to Kim Jong-il as an example. While his unique brand of belligerent Stalinist autocracy was a goldmine for satirists, it ran utterly against the Chinese government’s often painful efforts to appear non-confrontational and universally friendly. China rejected the cult of personality with the inauguration of Deng Xiaoping. It realigned its planned economy towards profitability—shrewdly funneling profits to the center in the process—and shaping China into a “rich country, poor people” nation modeled on 19th century Britain. In every sense other than name, the Communist Party of China and its North Korean equivalent have parted ways. And yet, at least on CCTV, they seem to be placed on an equal footing, with Kim’s death treated as the martyrdom of a fellow comrade who, of course, died of “exhaustion” and not a heart attack induced by a blowjob on a luxury train journey, or whatever Kim was more likely to have been doing when he finally shuffled off.

Why not be objective? Show the North Korean footage, sure, but at least acknowledge public opinion by keeping declarations of grief as low-key as possible. Chinese people overwhelmingly pity North Koreans—they compare North Koreans to Chinese two generations ago. The average Chinese youngster, many of whom will have come into contact with someone who has visited the hermit dictatorship on business, sees North Korea as what would have happened had the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward both come at once. Starving, brainwashed and helpless in the face of an absolute despot they have to pretend to worship as if he were a mix of Jesus, Che Guevara and Santa Claus. Sure they’ll cry for the cameras, but don’t expect that of the comparatively well-off and infinitely better-informed Chinese. Not only is it patronizing, it has the potential to be politically incendiary.

If CCTV continues to speak for the Chinese people (as Rui Chenggang famously did for Asia), and what it says continues to run directly counter to popular views, the only result will be that viewers will simply switch off their sets altogether and either immerse themselves in the relative freedom of real world or, more likely, Internet debate. CCTV and print media have had their day as China’s principal source of mind control, and yet they remain massively over-funded when compared to the most effective tool of State control: the education system. Schools in China are screaming for funding, with principals having to pay for school buses out of their own pocket, teachers underpaid and offered minimal training, and children who respond to the absence of authoritative teaching by reaching across borders via the World Wide Web for information. In the few instances where the government has gone all-out to enforce ideology, such as safe sex or anti-Japanese sentiment, the results have been startlingly effective.

However, rather than getting them when they’re young and impressionable, CCTV has the unenviable task of preaching to hardened cynics who, increasingly, are uninterested in hiding their real thoughts and feelings. Now, thanks to their utterly disingenuous coverage of Kim’s death, that distance from China’s social reality, is showing itself with greater clarity than ever before.

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.

Currently, Golden Jaguar is prohibitively expensive for most Chinese. Indeed, the only locations outside of provincial capitals are boomtowns Shenzhen and Wuxi. But maybe one day, it wouldn’t be. Perhaps one day China would have a solid middle class that could regularly enjoy Golden Jaguar’s decadent buffet. This might be great for Chinese epicures but what would it mean for the world?

In his book, Watts makes the counter-intuitive argument that the people most dangerous to China’s environment are not the countryside polluters but the consumers in big cities. He writes:

The energy use of the average person in Shanghai has surpassed that of Toyko, New York, and London and is now 50 percent higher than the global norm…. To provide everyone in China with a Shanghai lifestyle, factories will need to churn out an extra 159 million refrigerators, 213 million television, 233 million computers, 166 million microwave ovens, 260 million air conditioners, and 187 million cars…. Power plants would have to more than double their output.

And to provide everyone with a Beijing diet, the ocean would have to produce much more salmon. More than that, in fact. Other popular stations at Golden Jaguar serve chilled shrimp, steamed crab, and baked oysters. As I watched the people around me gorge on seafood, I couldn’t help thinking that if one day Golden Jaguar became available to the masses, the oceans might run out of animals.

Continue reading at Project Pengyou.

Corolla has a point. A book entitled Generation Me written by psychology professor Jean Twenge does a far better job of elucidating this trend and understanding it’s manifestations than Corolla’s crass bullying, but his attack and extrapolation that the Occupy Movement is simply about young people “throwing shit at another person’s car” is pervasively misguided.

The conservative breakdown of the Occupy Movement uses a simple formula to discredit protesters and follows a single trajectory, “If you do not have a job and you are not financially secure, it is your own fault. Do not blame others for your own shortcomings.” What this argument fails to grasp is that there are systemic issues at play that go far beyond a single person’s or single group’s shortcomings.

Take for example this graph from The Atlantic. In it you can see some stark statistics about the rate of unemployment in Eurozone countries such as Greece and Spain. Both these countries are facing unemployment levels hovering near 20%. In Spain nearly 50% of youth under 25 are unemployed. In case Adam Corolla wasn’t aware, tens of thousands of people took part in Occupy Madrid protests in Puerta del Sol Square over the past weeks. This is NOT just an American movement.

So does that mean that nearly half of Spain’s youth are self-entitled monsters who don’t want to work and would rather scream and whine than get a job? As much as I hate self-entitled rich kids, I cannot bring myself to believe that every other Spanish person is simply not competitive or not good enough to survive. In fact it is categorically untrue as I have met many young Spanish people, fleeing the economic turmoil in their homeland, who have found productive and financially secure employment in Beijing.

These kinds of generalizations are dangerous because they follow the same logic that dehumanizes minorities as being uneducated criminals who have only themselves to blame for their economic woes. It’s based on crude stereotypes that may apply to some, but are utterly irreconcilable with reality.

One point I will cede to Mr. Corolla is that capitalism is the “best system” we have, but it is far from fair. And when free markets require regulation, there needs to be someone there to correct its failures. What the Occupy Movement is fighting for is a level playing field, not equality of results. Let the wealthy CEOs have their Bentleys, but don’t let them gamble with the rest of America (and the world’s) money and then bail them out when they go belly up.

But at the same time, it was freeing to be so different. It was so obvious that I was an outsider, that I didn’t need to make any effort to fit in. As a student Prague, where I studied abroad, I was mistaken for a Czech several times, which was flattering, and made me hesitant to come across as an American, if I could avoid it. In China, despite the perfunctory compliments on my hair, it was obvious that I was a weirdo, and because there was nothing I could do about it, I was freed from any expectation of how I should act, what I should wear, what I should say, or how well I said it. (It’s common for any foreigner speaking a word of Chinese to be excessively praised for their masterful grasp of the “foreign-proof” language.)

The author at the Hanging Temple in Shanxi Province.

Over time, my striking strangeness released me from the heavy expectations that I had unconsciously felt for years. It’s a self-consciousness that everyone feels at some point, the feeling that one must look or act a certain way, have certain desirable characteristics or possessions. Yet here I had no desire to look like the hip Chinese students around me, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pull off their hair styles, or fit into their tiny clothes. So what was the point in trying to be something I wasn’t? I was so clearly different, that I felt free to be 100% myself, to a degree I had never felt before. I stopped wearing makeup, my sense of style went to hell (partly influenced by the lack of decent clothes). I was influenced by the Chinese lack of political correctness, and said whatever I felt without worrying that it might offend someone.

There are people who have no self-consciousness about standing out from the crowd, and I have always admired those individuals. Growing up I had a friend and a boyfriend who had strong, independent personalities, not afraid to be who they were in the face of a judging public, and I admired and wished to emulate their extroversion. But I am naturally shy and overly sensitive to the perceived thoughts and judgements of others. In China I was freed from that.

It was in this state of utter unpretension that I met JR. I’ve always been against public displays of affection, but as our romance blossomed in this strange foreign country we were all over each other—always with arms around each other, kissing in public constantly, even (almost) buying those hilarious matching t-shirts that Chinese couples love to wear. We did not, however, ever consider wearing matching outfits, another popular style among young love-birds in China.

For several years, this socially-unconscious mindset stuck with me, until I started working full time at an institution where external impressions and appearances—physical and intellectual—matter a great deal.

I’m now building up my wardrobe of nice, professional clothing, I’ve started wearing makeup again, and even did my hair the other day. On top of that I have to be conscious of what I say to whom, and how I say it. There are incredibly opaque rules regarding this in Chinese business, which I dabbled in at Media Soda (a small Chinese PR and consulting company), but I could always count on my foreignness giving me a free pass in case of a gaffe. Now I have to build a professional image in a way I haven’t had to before, and I feel my old self-consciousness creeping back. Add to that the stresses of planning a wedding… and I find myself wishing I could run away to China again.

I got an email today from Angelina’s ESL Cafe, the website that I originally used to find my teaching position in Yanjiao, and I was half-serious when I suggested to JR that we go back. Sometimes I want to run away from the expectations and pressures of our life at home. That’s when I get that traveler’s itch. But then I remind myself that these imperious expectations I judge myself by, whether they are internal or external, don’t matter.

No one really judges us as much as we imagine they do, and if do they happen to judge us for who we are, because we don’t wear fashionable clothes, or say the right things, or throw a certain kind of wedding, or like to spend our Friday night sleeping, or if we don’t have the “right” religious convictions or sexual preferences—then we would all do better to remember these wise words:

“It’s better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

J.R. Siegel and Allison Lipps are Boston-based adventurers who met in China. Read this piece and others at The Adventures of Mumpus and Grumpus.

In the blissful summer before my junior year of high school, my parents forced me to take an SAT preparation course in the basement of a brown-brick building named The Lyceum. But despite the name, it was not a place of higher learning.

The teacher, a lumbering middle-aged woman, resembled Aristotle about as much as I resembled Alexander the Great. She stood in the front of a makeshift classroom that looked like it doubled for AA meetings and read from an open Princeton Review prep book. She taught us how to divine, through the process of elimination, the correct answer to reading problems even if we hadn’t understood the passage. She reminded us of things learned and forgotten, like scalene triangles and the transitive property. If you had told me, ten years ago in that depressing classroom, that one day I’d be in her shoes, I would have laughed and gone back to sleeping.

But life has its own sense of humor. Nowadays, as an English teacher in China, I see my fifteen-year-old self every week.

English, as any Chinese student can recite for you, is an international language and an important tool for anyone who wants to study abroad, pass a job interview, work in a foreign company, or do business with foreigners.

However, not every student who walks into an English classroom has those goals. Sometimes the goal is set by their parents: “I have decided you are studying abroad so I am buying you English lessons.” Sometimes it’s set by the school: “You need to take this course so we don’t lose our accreditation.” Sometimes the company: “Why are we sending you on business trips when you can’t understand anything?”

Generally, very generally, students like this don’t improve simply because their heart’s not in it. It sounds like self-help mumbo-jumbo but motivation, especially self-motivation, is a key factor for success. These students also have nothing to lose. It’s not their own money so they have no financial incentive; it’s not their own choice so they have no personal incentive.

I speak from experience, of course. That SAT course didn’t help me at all. I took the test and got the same score as I had on a practice test the year before.

What finally made a difference in my SAT score (my stereotypically Chinese parents made me take it again) were two books. They weren’t vocabulary books or test prep books or anything like that—they were just two novels that I fell in love with. I read them hungrily—between classes, during classes, on the bus—and, because I wanted to understand them so badly, I wrote down every word I didn’t know and looked them up in the dictionary. The next time I took the test, my score jumped 70 points.

When I tell this story, students always ask desperately, “What were the books?” But what saved me weren’t the books themselves or the words in them—it was my desire to learn. The books had somehow managed to ignite that desire.

Today, I try to find that passion within each student and tease it out. It’s easier said than done. Chinese students are treated like machines in school, tasked to remember and regurgitate. They are told not to question, not to disagree. They (or their parents) choose a school and a major, usually based on what score they think they can get on the college entrance exam, before setting foot on campus and find it hard to switch if they don’t like it.

A lot of what I do as a teacher is deprogramming. I try to show students that it’s okay to ask questions and it’s okay to not know; that learning is more than memorizing what’s in the book; that some questions—the most important questions—don’t have a correct answer.

I want to help my students, but some of them don’t want to be helped, just like I didn’t want to be helped. Over the years I’ve realized that some students don’t want to learn English—they resent having to learn another language to compete in this world—and the best thing I can do for them is not to make them love learning English but to make them not hate learning it.

Sometimes, when I see that fifteen-year-old in class, I silently apologize to all my teachers—every substitute, every guest speaker—even my gym teachers. I apologize for sleeping in class and rolling my eyes and passing notes and snickering at their lame jokes.

If I could, I’d like to thank them for their patience and generosity and tell them that I know it’s not easy being a teacher. I’d like them to know that I grew out of it; that I, through fate or amazing fortune, became a curious, passionate, and conscientious member of society.

To all of my teachers, I just want to say one thing: you succeeded.

Few articles have riled me up as much as this one, which exemplifies the misguided conventional thinking regarding China. It is a microcosm of the wishful thinking that permeates the global community at the moment. Here are a few reasons why Paul Kane is wrong.

Geo-political
Taiwan is an old, old ally of the United States, with strong political and cultural ties. Taiwan sends a significant portion of its youth to be educated in the United States. To “ditch” them, as Kane suggests so casually, would severely damage U.S. credibility in Asia. Our other allies—Thailand, Japan, Korea—could not help but wonder that if they would be next. The U.S. is already witnessing a careful realignment of Asia as China flexes its muscles and other countries seek to balance China’s power. To ditch Taiwan would be to irrevocably damage U.S. standing internationally. We would be giving a sovereign, democratically elected government up to an autocratic totalitarian state. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Kane makes the completely unsubstantiated claim that writing off Taiwan “could pressure Beijing to end its political and economic support for pariah states” like Iran or North Korea. China’s firmly stated position is that domestic affairs are domestic affairs, and that no country has the right to interfere in another country’s internal affairs. As far as China is concerned, Taiwan is rogue province, not a country. That means that Taiwan is an internal affair, and not subject to international pressure. To them, the U.S. selling arms to Taiwan is like China giving missiles to Texas.

Ditching Taiwan would merely be an affirmation of China’s position that the international community has no right to interfere in other countries’ affairs. That would give them even more cover to deny, obfuscate, and stonewall on aid to Iran and North Korea. This is a position that they have held since the joint communique that opened China, and one that they have firmly held to since in vetoing intervention in Sudan, Syria, and other countries.

Economic
Let’s start with a few basic numbers. The U.S. debt is approximately 15 trillion dollars. Kane points out that China holds 1.14 trillion of U.S. debt. Guess who holds more than that? We do. As in, the Federal Reserve. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Reserve Banks hold about 1.6 trillion dollars of U.S. debt. In essence, the government is paying itself to loan itself money. Sound screwy? Absolutely. While the normally fringe Ron Paul is crazy about a lot of things, one of the best ideas I’ve heard from him is to have the U.S. government forgive itself its own loans. So, in essence, we could reduce the deficit by more than that without having to throw anyone to the lions.

In addition, Europe holds more in U.S. treasuries, and Japan almost as much.

What’s more, if you adjust for inflation, the yield for 5- and 7-year treasures is negative. In essence, people are paying the U.S. to hold their money for them. If you want to talk about balance sheets, think about that. By having China purchase more U.S. debt, they would essentially be transferring their wealth to our balance sheets.

Thirdly, while much has been made about the supposed “power” that China yields over the United States due to its large holdings of U.S. bonds, that power is shaky at best. While some make comments about how disastrous it could be if China suddenly dumped all their treasuries on the market at once, that fails to account for how much damage that would cause to China’s balance sheet as well. Already, due to a sinking dollar and rising RMB, the real value of China’s dollar holdings have been dropping. So why does China continue to buy treasuries? Because there is nowhere else even remotely safe to park that much money.

Fourthly, Kane describes Taiwan’s growing economic ties with China and states that “the island’s absorption into mainland China is inevitable.” If economic ties meant that absorption was inevitable, Canada would be the 51st state. Taiwan is socially, politically, and economically distinct from mainland China. While integration is possible, it is in no way “inevitable.”

Military
Kane makes a point of talking about the power of the hard-line militarists, and argues that removing Taiwan as a wedge issue would reduce their power and influence. While he is indeed correct in estimating the influence of Taiwan, he misses the larger picture. Taiwan is a proxy issue where China sees its military interests most directly opposed with the U.S. However, the Chinese military sees all of Asia and the Pacific as its rightful sphere of influence. A withdrawal from Taiwan would merely shift the conflict centers to Korea, Japan, and Thailand in the east, and Pakistan and India in the west. There is absolutely no evidence to support the assumption that a concession on Taiwan would reduce Chinese military spending.

China is building a stealth fighter and an aircraft carrier. Taiwan is less than 100 miles away from China at the narrowest point. You do not need an aircraft carrier to militarily dominate Taiwan from the mainland. Nor do you need the world’s largest submarine fleet with ICMBs capable of reaching the West Coast. These projects would proceed unabated even if the U.S. were to abrogate its defense treaty with Taiwan because the goal is not Taiwan—it is to match U.S. capabilities.

Kane calls the U.S. Navy “China’s greatest military asset” because it helps keep the sea lane safe for shipping, a description that is hardly in keeping with the military expenditures I’ve pointed out above. Rather, China recognizes that the U.S. Navy is one of America’s greatest assets, and they want to be able to match it. Hence the enormous submarine fleet.

For me, the clincher to Kane’s ignorance on China is his statement that Taiwan is China’s “unspoken” top priority. For any veteran China watcher, that claim is absurd. China’s emphasis on Taiwan is broadly proclaimed and widely disseminated.

America’s national debt is a long-term problem, not a short-term problem. But betraying Taiwan will do little to help the national debt, and will only destabilize America’s position in the years to come.