Humor Me (Shanghai Subway Edition)
The Shanghai subway accident has reignited concerns over China’s transportation infrastructure, in particular the involvement of a company called Casco, which supplied the signalling systems for a number of subway systems in China.
I wrote before about Internet memes following the Wenzhou train collision. It’s no surprise that this incident has spawned another wave of Internet jokes.
This duilian (traditional Chinese couplet) which involves a bit of Chinglish, has been retweeted over 27,000 times:
Top: “Subway, railway, highway, way way to die.”
Bottom: “Officer, announcer, investigater [sic], word word to lie.”
A commenter suggested that the top scroll for this couplet should be: “Welcome to China.”
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.
Proof: Chinese Have Least Fei Hua
Finally, a scientific validation of what we already knew intuitively!
Brad Plumer over at Ezra Klein’s blog has a link to a Time article where researchers coded languages to see which ones were more information-dense—meaning they contained more meaning per syllable. English is fairly dense, with a score of .91.
Mandarin Chinese was the densest language studied, with a score of .94.
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.
Material Worlds
In reading Zoe Williams’ excellent Guardian piece on the psychology of looting, in which she analyzes the significance of London rioters doing away with consumer retail products, I was reminded of a vaguely analogous story in China, of a 17-year-old boy who sold his kidney to buy an iPad 2. Both stories seem to illustrate the extremities to which consumerism has driven us.
Recent Comments