Tag: China Stories

On passing the academic intellectual torch

William Kirby is a renowned China scholar at Harvard. He has written a dozen books on Chinese history and our relations with China. He has a long list of accomplishments at the highest levels of international academia and professional societies.

When he writes about superior universities in Germany and the US and China, I can only marvel at the scope of his erudition. So I feel a bit out of my element commenting on his latest book Empires of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to America to China.

Kirby writes that on academic engagement with China the educational resurgence is much less a threat than an opportunity for American and other international universities…. American research universities have been strengthened enormously by recruiting Chinese doctoral students, themselves largely graduates of Chinese universities, who are admitted exclusively on the basis of merit. Our faculty ranks, too, are augmented by extraordinary Chinese scholars. We restrict these students and colleagues at our own peril. Today, any research university that is not open to talent from around the globe is on a glide path to decline. 

True enough. Kirby is familiar with the finest research universities and students in China and the world. Some Chinese students go on to excel in academia and business, scientific and professional worlds in the US and China – fewer right now in the US, and that is an issue for American xenophobia.

Kirby is talking about intellectual leadership. In his historical progression, the 19th century German university model of openness and serious intellectual pursuit passed to the US in the 20th. He says the leading research, learning and education model for the 21st century is now being passed on to Chinese universities. No nation has greater ambition than China, or ability to devote resources to higher education.

Kirby’s approach to international cooperation is what one would expect from a man with so many interconnections – diplomatic and deflecting on sensitive issues and no one can fault that. It is sophisticated and mature. In Empires of Ideas, one is reminded of the marketplace of ideas, the informal, collegial and multinational networks that were part and parcel of the Enlightenment. Free exchange of information and ideas advanced science and engineering and freedom. True then, and true now.

I want to push back a little, though, basically to report on what I’ve seen at schools not in the top ten of universities in China. Kirby sees engagement with Chinese universities as an opportunity, not a threat. I agree. More exposure to the world is a good thing. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking that (1) there are always good intentions behind the dinners and smiles; and (2) most Chinese students are international work-force caliber.

On (1), no one should assume that exchanges are all collegial. CCP has weaponized exchanges within the academy and between businesses. For evidence, one need look no further than the hundreds of cases brought by the FBI against researchers, Chinese and American, seeking to steal IP from university labs and from businesses. FBI director Christopher Wray’s “whole of state” threat from China is not hyperbole.

On (2), no one should fault Kirby for addressing the university environment with which he is familiar. But most schools, faculty, and students are not in that top 5% internationally. We know the myriad stories of cheating and plagiarism in schools in China, and students who come to the US with the same attitudes toward doing the work. I’ve seen myself how lack of respect for honest work tends to bring down the performance of an entire class, including that of domestic students. We know the Yale-Peking University program was cancelled in 2012, partly attributable to allegations of widespread plagiarism and cheating.

Dishonesty in academic work is not unknown among American students. But I know of many instances in which faculty at schools in China simply turn their backs on cheating in exams. And they get little administration support when they try to restrain the dishonest behavior. 

We know cheating on the college entrance exam – the gaokao – is controlled more now than a decade ago, when attempts to control cheating resulted in an angry mob of 2000 parents yelling at test administrators. “We want fairness. It’s not fair if you won’t let us cheat.”

The national push in China to control cheating resulted in some odd experiments. At our school in Hangzhou the new president decided to promote an honor code in final exams, as is the case at nearby Zhejiang University (Zheda), one of those top schools in China. This is not to take anything away from Zheda. There is an honors option in the Global Engagement Program, designed to cultivate Chinese students for work in international organizations. The program is conducted in English. Professor Kirby would be happy to engage with these students, some of the best and brightest in China.

But at our provincial-level school an exam honor code was DOA among both students and faculty – no one thought it could work. The only faculty member who could give voice or pen to objection, though, was me. Everyone else had careers on the line. I didn’t have to care. But what the president wanted, the president got.

Before the honor code was to be implemented, I did my own experiment. In one economics course I had plenty of scores from homework, quizzes, and a midterm to provide final grades. I had noticed years before that a final exam with a significant weight – 30% or 50% of a final grade – almost never changed a grade from that going into the final exam.

In class we had some discussion of the honor code. I proposed an experiment. The final exam would only count 10% of the final grade. But I would hand out the exams and leave the room for two hours and we would see what result. No monitors in the room. If students cheated, others were supposed to report them to the instructor for consideration, as the university president proposed.

I also arranged with six of my very good students, three foreigners and three Chinese, to take the final exam a day earlier and then take it again during the whole class exam. In the whole class exam they were to very obviously cheat in any way they wished, but so that other students could see. Open textbooks, read from notes, use phones, copy from other students. Make it obvious. And oh, yes – the whole class exam was different from the one I gave my star students.

You can guess the result – my good students cheated as best they could, and no one reported them to me. When my six finished the exam, they hung around outside the exam room and took pictures of students getting up from desks to look at other exam papers and using phones with abandon.

I don’t know if you call the experiment a success or a failure. But no one told me I had to use the honor code in subsequent semesters.

There is little sense of honor built in to these students. Lots of American students are no different. But an honor code needs good intentions. What good intentions do exist can get waylaid by pressures from family, culture, and particularly CCP.

Kirby is impressed by the earnestness, even in the current days of trauma and contestation, with which Chinese academics pursue joint arrangements with American schools. On one hand, that is understandable. Chinese academics are desirous of contacts for academic and personal reasons (including the ability to publish in western journals and to get their own kids into American schools). Kirby alludes to the CCP corporate overlords that can work to encourage or discourage such arrangements. For a few years before 2012, university joint ventures of all kinds were the rage. CCP pushed for engagements and wanted measurable results. A couple of my Chinese government students from Chicago were responsible for those foreign outreach programs. The pressure to get some agreement was palpable – one-way semester exchange, two-way, with or without American faculty in China, some sort of joint program, and even in some cases a joint degree with an American school. My school had a joint civil engineering degree program with San Francisco State University. A couple of years in China and then to the US for the last two or three years. The American degree was worth something. The Chinese degree – not so much. Until recently there was no international accreditation for most Chinese engineering degrees.

We need the Chinese students, undergrad and PhD candidates, for our own development. But we should not lose sight of the ill-preparedness and ill will that still lurks.

Plenty of Chinese, students and families, come to the US for education and business and – dare I say it – the freedoms that accompany a green card. There are tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants to the US each year – 150,000 in 2018. I know several student immigrants personally- come for the advanced degree, stay for the high-paying job. Quite often, their parents tell them not to come back to live, but to stay in America. 

Not so many Americans go the other way.

Kirby is right to promote engagement for the good of American schools and students and faculty. Some Chinese universities may well join the upper ranks of international schools in the next ten years. But I hope he – and other administrators and scholars – can go into the engagements with a  bit of the skepticism and hard evidence-seeking that led to dismissal of Confucius Institutes at the University of Chicago, Penn State, William and Mary, SUNY, Oklahoma, Texas A & M and others and cancellation of the Yale-Peking U program and consideration of the continual warnings of Chinese deception and theft from attorneys experienced in Chinese business arrangements. Harris Bricken is a good example.

We can take a hint from Ronald Reagan’s treaty policy with the Soviet Union – trust but verify. The expensive dinners and gifts and warm smiles are enticing. Its easy to become enamoured under the influence the velvet-gloved fist. I keep thinking of Sergeant Phil Esterhaus’ warning to street cops before going out on patrol in Hill Street Blues –“Let’s be careful out there.” It can be hard to do that, especially after the wining and dining and graciousness of their potential partners. But Kumbaya this ain’t.

I don’t have hard recommendations for administrators of great American universities. But they should jealously guard the reason they became great in the first place – freedoms of expression, dissent, and honesty in relationships. Too often we have let the Chinese camel’s nose into the academic tent to the detriment of American academic quality standards, research and innovation. A little caveat emptor is always a good idea.

River water flows east

James Palmer reminds us in Foreign Policy that deaths of CCP leaders are sometimes … inconvenient. Announcement of a death may be delayed by hours or days while CCP figures out what the death means. Deng Xiaoping’s death was not reported immediately. Jiang Zemin was not nearly so popular as Deng, but he was known as not-so-loyal opposition to Xi Jinping. His death amid virus-related protests including denunciations of Xi everywhere in China requires some … consideration.

On November 30 Shanghai blogger Qin Feng reported – pointedly, again, in the same words – jiang shui dong liu qu  the river water flows to the east. She had posted that on November 13 and her wechat was immediately blocked by CCP. She posted it again yesterday.

I have no information about any relationship of Qin Feng to the Jiang family. It is possible that she is the daughter of an acquaintance of the family from many years ago, or that someone in her family worked for Jiang at one time. It is possible that she is just making stuff up. There has been a Jiang death watch for years now. He was 96.

No matter. Since we are returning rapidly to an information-free China, when speculation and conspiracy theories are all we have to go on, I’m going with this. Qin had some inside information from about two weeks ago. Her post was odd – what could it mean? The Jiang could be a reference to Jiang Zemin. This odd post was then blocked by CCP.  When she regained her access to wechat – after Jiang’s death was announced – she posted it again.

There is the joke about eastern European political intrigue, when nations were competing frantically both publicly and surreptitiously. Deception was the order of the day. A meeting was scheduled between two fierce opponents, meant to clear the air at least a little. Hours before the meeting, the chief negotiator on one side died. Hearing of the death, the lead on the other side mused. “Died? I wonder what he means by that.”

Et tu, Jiang.

I m Perfect – Picture at an Exhibition

Until at least 2016, there was a fascination with western looking models in China, just as there has been with Asian looking models in the US. Women’s clothing stores are a major venue for other-looking models in ads and store windows. This upscale women’s clothing store at our local mall in Hangzhou featured a beaming, perhaps ecstatic sophisticated western woman, with long curled hair – the store’s image of perfection.

The photo is from 2016, and from the angle, one can miss the apostrophe. But this is 2020. Given the efforts in China now to eliminate western influences, perhaps the store would be required to eliminate the apostrophe in any case.

Give Me Liberty! in Hangzhou

There is a saying – with guanxi, you can do anything.  Without guanxi, you can do nothing.  Sometimes, with guanxi, you can get Liberty! in China.  A story about ordering textbooks in China.

In 2009, I began teaching fulltime at Zhejiang University of Science and Technology (ZUST) in Hangzhou. I had a joint appointment with the business school and the engineering school.  For the business students, I was to teach micro and macro economics; for the engineers, courses in urban and environmental planning.  My students were a mix of Chinese and foreign students, mostly from Africa, a few from the middle east and Indonesia.

This was the era when Chinese schools were looking to form cooperative relationships with school in the US, England, Germany. In the fall of 2010, the president of San Francisco State University came to ZUST and delivered a promotional talk – in Chinese – to my engineering students.   The proposal that had been worked out was a 2+2 deal – two successful years of study at ZUST could lead to two, possibly three, years at SFSU and a joint bachelor’s degree in engineering.

This was an excellent opportunity for ZUST students, since a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in China was not worth much outside of China.  With the possible exception of one program at Tsinghua, no Chinese engineering bachelor’s degree programs were internationally accredited.  This meant that a graduate could not apply to take the professional engineering exam in most of the world without substantial additional study or years of practice.  There was no guarantee that the SFSU joint program would receive accreditation, but there was certainly a chance.  Basic courses in math and science would be taught in China. The more substantive courses would be in the US.  This was not unlike a junior college transfer program into a major American university.

SFSU wanted a couple of core courses taught at ZUST – an American history course and an American politics course. My background is in civil engineering, urban planning and policy, economics and organization.  But I spoke English and looked American, so I was tabbed at the instructor. As they say, what could possibly go wrong?

No other teacher at ZUST had ever taken, much less taught, American history.  It might be fair to say that this was the first time such a course had ever been taught in Zhejiang Province.  It was a historical first.

These were still heady days of openness in the second half of the Hu Jintao administration.  I was at ZUST because I had just finished six years of teaching midlevel CCP officials in a graduate program in public administration at IIT in Chicago.  I wanted to see what teaching in China would be like, so I went.  The director of the international program at ZUST was a student of mine in Chicago.  She was smart, open, and interested in making deals with foreign schools and foreign teachers.  It is fair to say that I was the face of the foreign program at ZUST at a time when such programs were much desired.

Textbook selection was going to be a challenge.  In the US, book ordering need not be more complicated than an instructor sending book details to the ordering department of the school, and a few days or weeks later the book shows up in the school bookstore.  Students buy the book, and the course is in business.

I knew that would not be the process at ZUST.  There was a book ordering department, but of course that was mostly for Chinese books.  There were a few American books used – most notably, the Greg Mankiw Fundamentals of Economics books, but those were published legally in China, so the Mankiw books had already been vetted for content.

The course was to be American history since 1865.  No other details provided to me.  There were many book from which to choose, and Eric Foner had written more than twenty of them.  His Give Me Liberty! is still the most used American history survey course text in the US.  For the instructor, the teacher’s edition provided powerpoints, which would save me dozens of hours of work (no one teaches in China without powerpoints). The book was also used at SFSU.  I chose the Foner book.

I emailed my book choice to my former IIT student, the head of the international program at ZUST, now my colleague.  If she had been drinking tea when she saw my email order, she probably would have done a spit-take.  Give Me What?

These were heady days of openness, but come on, there are limits.  Give Me History would have been ok. 

My former student was the head of the international program, but she was not the No. 1 – that was the Party leader, who was ultimately responsible for all my actions.  She could not speak much English, and could certainly not read the book, so vetting fell to my former student.

This is where the guanxi worked.  We were teacher and student in Chicago, and we had many chances to talk.  She saw me as at least reasonably trustworthy – I was not going to be running down China in the classroom.  Give Me Liberty! was the SFSU book.  The whole point of the course was to expose these Chinese students to American style courses and teaching so they had a chance to go to the US in their third year.

But still.  We had meetings.  My former student had to look up the book online, and read what she could from the W.W. Norton website. She had to convince herself that the book was ok, just an unfortunate title. I had to promise her that there were no passages suggesting that China or CCP were implicated in the bombing at Pearl Harbor or responsible for the Great Depression, and that destruction of CCP was not an integral part of American history since 1865.  She took me at my word.

There was a more serious vetting process on the ZUST side than I know.  My former student was putting herself on the line, and her Party leader, in ordering such a book.  She could not order the book herself – that had to be done by someone in the civil engineering department, and that woman was putting her reputation and that of her dean on the line as well.  I had more than half a dozen meetings with various of the parties.  I sent long emails, with text of my discussions with the WW Norton rep in the US.  I don’t know if there were provincial education bureau discussions before the book order could be placed, but I would not be surprised. Liberty was not a censored word, but it wasn’t on everyone’s lips, either. If something went south with the book or me or the course, the jobs of several people could be on the line. 

Then there was the money.  Students are supposed to pay for books. In the US, the book sold for about $46 at the time, about 300 yuan.   Three hundred yuan was the book allowance for one ZUST student for an entire semester. We could not order CD copies – those would have been illegal to ship and WW Norton would not send them anyway- as the rep told me, they didn’t have good IP protection in China.  We could not order used copies – Chinese only wanted new, and could only order from the publisher in any case. Illegal copying was still common in China, but the school did not want to engage in that itself, so ordering one copy was out.  A real world example – the Mankiw Fundamentals book was about 790 pages.  The book printed legally in China was sold for 79 yuan (about $12).  In the US, the book cost over $100.  But photocopying in China cost 0.1 yuan per page.  You do the math.   The school was going to have to buy the books, about 9000 yuan, and eat the cost.  That was a couple of months salary for some teachers.

I could have put together notes, and taught without a book.  But Chinese teachers are expected to use a book (presumably so it can be vetted, and so the school has some assurance that the teacher is at minimum reading something to the students).  For my course, a book was most certainly going to be necessary.

There were time constraints.  Shipping on a boat would take about six weeks to get to ZUST, and this was after whatever approvals and vetting were needed outside of ZUST.  WW Norton did have a relationship with one of the required Chinese book importing companies, so paper copies of the book could be sent to China. But time was getting short. We had been having the meetings and email discussions all through the spring, the school closes down in the summer, and I needed the books by about August 1.

I thought perhaps I could just order the books myself from W.W. Norton in the US – thirty or so copies, wrap them up, put them on a boat, they would arrive in six weeks or so.  But that wouldn’t work. The Chinese government still controlled book ordering.  Books could only be ordered through one of the designated import agents.  If my thirty books had just shown up at Shanghai port, they would have been seized and tossed.

I gave the school a deadline – I needed the books ordered by July 10.  My guanxi with my former student worked.  Give Me Liberty! was ordered by ZUST.  The books got delivered, and we used them – or I should say, the books were in the bookstore.  Only a few students purchased the book.

ZUST did not repeat the course.  Very few – perhaps none – of the Chinese students wanted to pay the American tuition to SFSU, and they did not respond well to an “American-style” course, with quizzes and exams and papers to write.  The students got a taste of liberty, taught American style, and judged it wanting.

I ordered other books from America for other courses.  None of those were the existential crisis of ordering Give Me Liberty! in English, for use with Chinese students, with such a provocative title.  When the course was over, the unsold books were delivered to me in my apartment.  Perhaps they are still there. Anyone interested, contact me.  I’m at liberty to make a deal.

浙江科技学院教材预订表

院、部、(盖章)   建筑工程学院                院教学主管（签名）：           教研所所长（签名）：        联系电话：           填表日期：  2011  年  6 月    日  

序号

课程名称

Course name

教材名称

Textbook name

主编姓名

author

出版社

Press name

版次

version

书号

ISBN

价格

price

使用对象

预订数(册)

Order volume

库存

合计

征订人

签名

使用

时间

备注

 

学生

student

教师

teacher

1

American

History Since 1865

Give Me Liberty!

Foner

WW Norton

2nd Edition Volume 2 Paper

ISBN 978-0-393-93256-0

$37.00

William D. Markle

20

2

     

2

     “

Norton Media Library

WW Norton

WW Norton

CD-Rom

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

3

      “

Instructors Manual and Test Bank

Valerie Adams

WW Norton

CD-Rom

  

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

4

       “

Studentt Study Guide

WW Norton

WW Norton

       pdf

 

free

William D. Markle

  0

1

     

注：一份送教务处教材中心，，一份系部留存.                                                           

Life in School – and Beyond

November, 2009 


note:  This was written more than ten years ago, when I began teaching full time in China. Some slight editing and updating.  My students were all undergrads in business, marketing, civil engineering, or urban planning.  These notes are early observations on student life at ZUST in Hangzhou.  I can’t say this email feels inaccurate years later.   Life goes on, in and out of school, but the beat goes on, too – stress upon stress, and not stress of one’s own making.   Smoking and environmental cancer are big contributors to early death.  But stress is also an environmental constant.

The middle class Chinese diet is full of the stuff that doctors in the US tell us we should eat- lots of fish, lots of vegetables, fruit, a little liquor (ok, maybe not a little), a little meat, nuts, grains.  But adult Chinese die at about the same rate as Americans, and now, from mostly the same causes – heart, and cancer.  Why don’t Chinese people live forever?

One reason is stress.   When life is about guanxi (relationship and who you know), then official lines of responsibility mean little.   The official lines do matter, but what is more important is the friendships established over a life of school, and work, and after-work events, and weekend trips, and friend-of-a-friend contacts.    So it is possible to get many things done that could not get done otherwise, because you Know People.  Sort of like being related with the government in any American city.   Or, better, being the one high school senior who knows the name of the maintenance guy who can open the gym a little early so the tables for the dance can be delivered on Friday night, instead of waiting for Saturday morning. 

Stress Relief in Dalian

A Chinese government friend and I were driving to a museum in Dalian when she got stopped by the police.  They were conducting a city sticker search- you know, the annual sticker you buy for $75 or $100 from the local government.  Same in Dalian.    Her car was brand new- I mean, a couple of days old.   She did not have the sticker, since the car dealer is supposed to handle that, and the sticker comes a week or two later.   She had the paperwork showing the car was new, and the sticker was applied for, and  true to police form (anywhere, I think) they still gave her a ticket for no sticker.

She was miffed.   She decided to fight City Hall, instead of just paying the $15 (which I would have done, all day long, and I guess most people in China would have done, also).   She didn’t know anyone in the police department- no direct guanxi there- but her job was sufficiently large that when she went to the police station, the guardians of not letting people see the Chief did not want to mess with her.  So she got to see the Chief, and pleaded her case, and got the ticket dismissed.    She got to see the Chief, she said, when other people would not have gotten that far.   Two lessons here- guanxi is based not just on who you know, but also who you are, and does this sound too different from how any American city works?  Stress relief is possible, some times and for some little things.  But a ticket is just ordinary annoyance stress.  Much of Chinese school and business life is pressure, pressure, pressure, all the time. 

Relationships can make projects easier, but at a cost

It is possible to get a ticket fixed in Chicago, too (so I have heard).  What may be different in China is how extensive the guanxi networks are, and the willingness of everyone to use them as needed.   Just like in Chicago politics, you can’t be using your Chinaman for every little thing, and you can’t pull the race card, or whatever trump you have, at every instance.   But the networks are the life blood of Chinese government, and business also.   Anyone who thinks rule of law in China is just a couple of court cases or law changes in Beijing away from implementation should think again about what 5,000 years of history means.  Networks are as deeply ingrained in China as my disgust with Tony Cuccinello for sending Sherm Lollar, the archetype of slow running catchers, home from first base on a double by Al Smith in the second game of the 1959 World Series, and Lollar was out by – oh, about 85 feet- and the White Sox lost that game that they could have won, and they could have gone to Los Angeles 2-0 instead of 1-1, which would have changed the outcome of the series, and life forever after.   That ingrained.

In China, the proper power relations can get things done – real estate projects, infrastructure projects that require cooperation across governments, business perks. But along with the ability to get things done comes the stress at relationship maintenance.  How many dinners, how much late night drinking, how many hongbao, how much self-denial and relationship sucking up do you need? 

Think of the second string baseball catcher, who plays, but not that often, and the team trades for a young catcher who can hit and has gotten a lot of press.   Or the number 3 member of the girls’ in-group at high school, and the new girl shows up who is prettier, has more money, a bigger smile, and a more winning way with numbers 1 and 2.  Think Mean Girls – The New Queen Bee.  New Queen Bee Stress is constant. There is an ex-queen bee, too.  What is your strategy in these situations?  As the second string catcher, do you talk to the manager more, or the team leader, or just try to play harder, when you do play?   What will you do if they put you to third string, or cut you?  As the number 3 member of the girls’ group, do you try to get more time alone with number 1, or find some other group to belong to, or just hope the group can expand to four people? You have to keep up the network, or the network will leave you behind. And that means phone calls, and little gifts, and remembrances, and doing for others before they do for you.  This is the part that would keep me digging ditches on some farm in China. 

You do not have one boss, or one leader.  There are usually two or three, and they need not agree. The Confucian model of respect for authority means that you must do what your leader asks, and you don’t object.

So when your leader calls, and asks you to do something, you cannot say no.  You may be able to find someone else to carry out the task, but that is your obligation to find.   And when the teacher assigns homework, no one says, wait a minute, we all have a test tomorrow.   We must do it.

It starts in primary school – or before …

One of my colleagues was worried about his daughter.  She is seven, in first grade.  His daughter refuses to go to school, and cries every day about going.  The reason given is that  she must complete 100 addition problems before she can engage with the rest of the class.    The daughter is a smart enough kid, but she is wilting under the pressure from the teachers.  Teachers pass the stress on to parents, who get blamed by teachers if kids fail to keep up.  And, it is China – none of this, “well, you tried your best, you can do better next time” American soft soap.  If you aren’t keeping up, you are told so, and berated in front of all your classmates.  “Why can’t you do better?”  And none of this throwing money at programs for  kids who fall behind in class.  Teachers will publicly berate parents for not monitoring homework, and not requiring extra work at home.  Parental responsibility, seemingly a … well, foreign – concept in the US. 

At home in Hangzhou, we have a little kid audio toy, a letter, animal sound, and addition machine that we bought in China.  On the addition segment, the kid is asked to push a button for the correct answer.  In the US, an incorrect answer is indicated by a raspberry, or a plink or a quick low note.  On our machine, a voice tells the kid in Chinese, you are very stupid. 

The stress starts in primary school, and extends into high school.  The later primary and high school day is generally in the range of ten to twelve hours, from about 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM.   There is time included for phys ed, and lunch, and certainly art and music.   Chinese high school students, at good schools, are well-rounded.  And in college, they learn to sing, and dance, perform, and do art. Maybe not well, but they know the concept.  Once, we had that idea in the US – you know, humanities.   

I have visited a couple of Chinese high schools, and talked with a number of kids, sons or daughters of friends.   My sample size is too small to generalize too much, but let me tell you what I saw.   At the No. 2 high school in Fushun, in Liaoning Province, the school building is new and clean and has a big closed campus, with tennis courts and basketball courts and outdoor performance areas and lots of nice landscaping.   This is a residential school, which means that most high school students live in the dorms, and only a few are day students, who are picked up and dropped off each day. 

The hallway are pasted with big portraits and lists of accomplishments of political leaders and scientists and giants of philosophy.  Yes, Mao and Confucius and others (that, pointedly, I do not know), but also Plato and Aristotle and Bell and Einstein and Edison and Fermi and US presidents and Franklin and Kant and Hobbes and Freud.   High school.  In China.  And these students know who these people are, and when they lived, and what they did.

Everybody learns English, starting at various times but generally about age 7.   I have seen the English workbooks for high school students and for college students.   The high school workbooks, in English, rival what I would expect to see in English in the US.   Participles and mood and future perfect and obscure terms and phrases.   Long passages to decipher and get the meaning.   The college workbooks are harder.  Long passages in technical fields, economics or engineering, to decipher, along with differences between US English and foreign English.   I am teaching three courses right now- a negotiation course, an economics course, and an environmental course- in English, of course, and the student level of understanding is pretty good.  But the technical terms in these three courses are a little daunting for American students, and the only way for Chinese students to keep up is to study, all the time.

… and continues in college …

I just now talked with one of my students, a third year student in marketing.  She would like to do fashion design, but as she says, “I cannot do that.”   She has obligations to her parents and to the school, now, and to the society.   Students in college in China select a major in their first year – or have it selected for them – and stay in that major for four years.  There is one chance to switch majors, at the end of first year, but only if you are in the top 15% of your class and the program to which you want to switch will take you.  How many majors did you have in college?

Ms. Liu is a smart kid, and her English is very good (although she thinks it is not) and the other students look to her for interpretations in Chinese but also for information about other happenings at school.  She is always prepared.

I asked if she had ever been unprepared for an exam in college.  “Yes,” she said, in her freshman microeconomics class.    “How did you do?”    “I got a B,” she said, ashamed.   A whole country of Type A people.

But lots of them don’t want to be Type A people.  They know that going to university in China is a big privilege, and the society is investing a lot in them, and “from those to whom much is given, much is expected.”   But Ms. Liu does not feel free to change her major to fashion design, and she feels that she now has no motivation to do the things that she must do.   Now these are not unfamiliar complaints to any of us, and it is easy to use one student as a metaphor for millions.   Ms. Liu will certainly do fine, and she will snap out of her funk.

But the story is one I hear repeated over and over again, not only from students but from faculty and government officials and people in business.   The sense of obligation to the group, or the greater good, is important and useful to building a society – we have seen that in the last thirty years.

Costs of obligation are passed on to parents, students, employees

But I don’t doubt that the stress, expressed in the form of heart conditions, and blood pressure, depression and lack of motivation are one reason why Chinese do not outlive Americans.   When Americans work sixteen hours a day, 7 days a week, they do it because they want to, or because they know it is a temporary condition – get this project completed, and we can go back to normal.  But in China, it is a constant sword of cultural obligation hanging over everyone’s head.  It is the constant, I must do it.  (2019 update – it is now common for companies in the US to demand that some employees be available 24/7 for texts and emails.  That is certainly Chinese.  But there is now a movement in the US for the “right to disconnect” during a good part of the day.  That will certainly not be Chinese).

I have a friend, a Ph.D. from my school here, who is spending nine months at a school in Houston.   She is unhappy about her living arrangements, and feels trapped by the situation, and not able – culturally – to do anything about it.  She is on a nine-month sabbatical, in school and supposed to be learning some things, but she is in the US and one thing I know is that she should be having some fun.  She is not, and all because, as she says, I must do it wo bi xu zuo.  An American friend of mine recently returned to the US from a six-month academic fellowship in Scotland.  I don’t think he wore a hair shirt for six months.

college and beyond …

Lots of Chinese students apply to college or graduate school in the US.   A lot of the Chinese government students I have had in Chicago have a leader, or a friend, with a son or daughter who is 12 or 17 and wants advice about admissions.   So far, so good.  But too often the parents have given the student a high bar – “if you cannot get into Harvard, or MIT, or Stanford, then your life is a failure, and you are a failure to your parents and family and nation,” or something to that effect.

Now there are parents like that in the US.   But I think there are more in China, and not just because of the population difference.  This is the meritocracy gone mad, the sense that the perfect is in fact the enemy of the good, and individual achievement and wishes matter less than societal approval and the ability to find a job that will make a lot of money. 

Amy Chua, the NYU law professor, is the poster woman for parental stress, passed on to her kids.  As a law professor at a major American university, she is not going to display a laid back, devil-may-care attitude.  But her Tiger Mother book is a call to arms for parents whose approach to parenting does not intentionally impose severe stress on their kids.  It is no doubt true that parental encouragement, even stress, can make kids better at whatever task is demanded, and usually the long term effects seem inconsequential.  The question is always for whom the kids are being pressured – for their own long term benefit, or that of the face and glory of the parents?  Even for Amy Chua, the answer to that question is not so clear. 

And lots of Chinese students do end up in the US, or Australia, or England, or Germany, at small schools and big schools that are not ranked in the top 20 schools in the nation.  And everyone seems to survive that diminished status.   But the stress and shame are not good things, for the kid, or the family, or China.  The suicide rate for Chinese students is far higher than that for American students. 

Students- at least at my university- have between 35 and 40 class periods a week, at 45 minutes a pop, so about 25 to 30 classroom hours a week.   This is the demand for 10 or 12 courses per semester.  On top of that is homework, of which there is quite a lot.   Papers and tests and assignments, just as in any college course.   I have told you before that fun does not seem to be in the course catalog.  I still think that is true.   College students seem tired in the US also, but here the extent of sleeping in class (not so much in mine, I am happy to point out) is remarkable.   And there seems a general sense- not universal, of course – of simply walking through the motions.

That is supported by ideas about entrance to schools in the US and China.  Faculty here tell me that in the US, it is easy to get into college and easy to flunk out.  In China, they tell me, it is hard to get in, but once in, you are assured of graduating.   College is almost like the reward for the intense work in high school (30 class hours per week, and no sleep, and lots of stress.  All effort is focused on the Gaokao, the one-time only college entrance exam taken in senior year.  Midway through junior year – “only 335 days until the gaokao!”). 

I don’t mean that there are no students playing basketball, or tennis, or ping pong, or singing in the singing contest.   All students here just had two days off so freshmen could participate in the annual sports day, which is kind of like the senior class games weekend.  Everybody goes to the stadium and there are vendors and student cheering sections and flag waving for some group’s favorite student athlete, and 110 meter hurdles and sprints and broad jumps and other events.  China is full of contradictions, so I can’t claim definitive knowledge.  But this is what I see, and what I sense.

the system grinds away, through adulthood

Students like Ms. Liu pick a major to study in their freshman year, and for the next four years, the students in that major take all their classes together, study together, and live together in the same dorm and with each other.  Four college girls in a room about the size of your bedroom, with their clothes and books.  For some students, the school picks the major for them, and that major is where nearly all of them stay for four years. So when Chinese people come to America, and say that they have a college friend to see, they are going to see more than someone they were buddies with for a year or two.  These are the lifelong, guanxi networks operating, at long distance and years apart.   When was the last time you spoke with your college roommate?   One of my government official-students from IIT in Chicago, someone who was in Chicago in 2004, called me from Nanjing.  He is at a training seminar for a week, far from his home in Shenyang.   He was going to get on a bus, travel for four hours to see me, and take the bus back to Nanjing for more training.  While I am flattered that I have such an impact on people, I am sobered by the idea that someone would think such a thing thinkable.   But guanxi, and networks, and respect for authority, including teachers, runs deep.

Two days ago I  attended the alumni reunion, in Hangzhou, of all the CCP government officials from Zhejiang Province who have been to IIT in the last 6 years.  A lot of people came- my guess is over a hundred and fifty.   There was the big screen repeating slide show, pics of government officials at IIT, when they were in college, and maybe more recently.   And below one of the repeating slides was the reminder, We Are Family.   This is not just some pop music line, or a marketing campaign.  Far more than in any fundamentalist family in the US, here the family is the primary unit in society.  And family extends to CCP as well. The government students in Chicago had a leader then, and he is still a leader in their minds, with lesser status over time obviously, but still a person of respect and honor.   Another leader to honor, among the two or three or four that everyone has already.   The beat goes on, for good and ill, in everyone’s heads, all the time.   

The National Day Singing Competition

Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, September, 2009


note:  this post is from 2009, a few weeks after I came to ZUST to teach full time and I was still awed by most everything.  As it turns out, there were no more singing day competitions. This one was part of the celebrations of 60 years since the founding of the PRC.  Still, an impressive event.

One of the emcees wore a black tuxedo with diamond –  I wanted to say rhinestone- studs along the collar and piping.   The other wore a white tux with black piping.  The women emcees wore serious prom type dresses, or serious I-am-a-grownup-take-me-out-dancing dresses- a slinky reflective gold long dress for one, a more demure white for the other. 

The rhinestone reference kept running through my head because the between performances music was the theme song from Ponderosa. 

This was the annual singing competition between departments at ZUST.   Each school department- economics, marketing, civil engineering- puts together a group of about 50 students, generally about half and half by gender, and practices for weeks before the big night.  So for days before tonight, it was like walking past the music building at Northwestern, and hearing beautiful voices floating out from classrooms.   Except these were 50 voices, and lots of the men sounded like men- deep voices and big and almost scary.

I am not going to keep you in suspense.  I am pleased to report that for the 5th year in a row (?), the computer science students beat every other department, including the architects (who came in second this year). 

Every department has money in their budget for clothes for the singing competition.  The standards vary a little, but generally tuxedos for the boys, fancy dresses for the girls, and all the same for each department. 

The competition started about 6:00, and ran until 8:00.  Each department did one number, generally a song built around love of country or home.   One was about the Qiantang River, in Hangzhou, as having come from very far away, and being the mother of all Chinese.  Another was about someone climbing a tree, and when I asked for clarification, I got back a finger pointing at a dictionary entry, “guerilla,” and I didn’t want any further clarification.   But it is still not clear. 

Every department sounded as if they had practiced for a long time.  The men were forceful, the women sweet and a nice  counterpart to the men.   Everyone on stage- this was on a temporary staired stage in front of the library entrance- sang, and loud.  No one looked embarrassed or too cool to sing.   It was a competition. 

There were stage lights, a lot of them, and videos, and a couple of the groups had small sparklers or fireworks as part of their song and a couple of the groups had some slight choreography, as  much as they could do  while standing on temporary stands under hot lights outside in big clothes.   The judges sat at tables in front of the stand, and hundreds of students were behind the judges, standing on small chairs and on planters at the library entrance.   The library has a six story covered entryway between two buildings, so we were shielded from the light rain and  there was plenty of room for hundreds, and the voices carried.  I could hear the groups clearly from my apartment, across the lake from the library and a good quarter mile away.   Somewhere, someone was selling or handing out t shirts inscribed with “music has no borders”  and “nations without foreigners.” 

At the end, after the awards, the winning group came back for an encore and brought in the front row another twenty or so students in ethnic costumes, mostly from the west of China, and an American student from NYC who I know, and one of the German students who is in my urban economics class.   The song was about love of country, and everybody sang.

So for Scott, and Jim, now you understand how the Chinese government IIT students have such wonderful voices, and use them, and how they can put on such performances for spring festival.  They have been doing it every year since they were small, and they practice, and they believe in the value of it.   So much for individualism and do your own thing.   One of my students in the urban economics course said she had heard some things about the development of economies, from slavery to feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism.   But, she said, socialism did not have enough money to do good things for people, and capitalism helps.  But she was worried that capitalism might harm the socialism in China.   I said that was a good question, but that no country was purely capitalist or socialist.   In the US, we have a socialized safety net for health care for the elderly and poor, for people who get hurt on the job, for retirees, for housing for poor people, and for schooling.    China does not have any of those in a nationally uniform way.   But they can really sing, and when they get together to do something, it works.   I read an article yesterday expressing fears about the China future- you know, economic stimulus and corruption and too much infrastructure spending and no democracy.   One of the comments to the article provided the usual “it’s all a sham, and it will collapse any day now”  view.   Another commentator noted that in his experience, the people who claim the sham argument have invariably never been to China.   Or heard them sing, organized, for fun, in a competition just for themselves.

I wish Rachel were here.  She would have loved it.

An Evening in Middle Class Life

October, 2009 

There is a pattern in the west of seizing on negative China stories as definitive proof than revolution, or collapse, or the Second Coming are just around the corner.   Debt and moral vacuum and lack of trust and cheating.  But China is a big country, with a big middle class that is vested in ongoing stability.  This is just a dinner story from ten years ago, with government friends from Hangzhou and Shaoxing.  This is just middle class people relaxing and enjoying the holiday.

This story is also about middle class CCP members, and such an observation seems sorely overlooked in most discussions of China’s future.  I have no systematic data, but my educated guess is that a Venn diagram of Chinese middle class – however you wish to define them – would show great overlap with CCP membership.  There are about 90 million CCP members.  With some dual member households, let’s speculate that comes to 60 million households.  These are the people holding nearly all government jobs, heading up non-government organizations, teaching in high schools and universities, and owning many small and large businesses.  Let’s give those 60 million households one child and a grandparent or two, or four, and that is roughly the same as the size of the middle class.  CCP is the middle class, and when writers talk about emerging democracy and civil society and middle class demands for voice, we should remember who we are talking about.  The CCP is the bourgeoisie.

I went to dinner last night at Jennifer’s apartment, with Stone, and James, and Morgan, and Shelly from Shaoxing.  Alice was there too.  Jennifer and her husband and son live in one of the new developments on Zijinghua Road, just past the xixi wetland national park and about fifteen minutes from ZUST.   Like many or most new developments in China, this one is gated, with a seven foot high wall at the perimeter.   There are problems with burglary in china, not so much robbery, but historically towns and developments of all kinds have been enclosed, in a cellular pattern, so gated communities now are partly for security but also a historic design legacy.   Since this is a pretty fancy development, and mostly for government people, there are two uniformed guards at the gates, who check for who you are visiting and act as building doormen for the residents- get this package, give directions to your aunt when she comes visiting, tell the plumber where to go to find your apartment when he comes to fix the toilet.

Like most any new development, this one is very big.  I don’t know the number of buildings- I will say, thirty- a mix of four story walkups with others, surrounding a driveway that curls around behind buildings and leads to an underground garage, as well as a fair amount of parking at grade level adjacent to the buildings.  The landscaping is pretty, bamboo and rocks and other green stuff, not as extensive as at some projects where there is no at grade parking, but still thoughtful.   There is a community building which has a dining room and a party room, and a slightly raised agora, with stone and landscaping that serves as a meeting point – “meet me at the agora in ten minutes.”   Buildings are close together- the driveway is really one way, except in a couple of places where it doubles back on itself, and the feeling is that of close-knit, though expensive, community.   In the short two way driveway from the gate to the buildings, there are eight or ten small stores on each side of the street, on the first floor of the first two buildings.   A fruit stand, a dry cleaner, a grocery store with a few more essentials, I think an insurance office.    Think self-contained and walkable and low stress and low key.   The world is outside and tense, not far away, but inside, the tension melts.   At least that is what I saw.

Jennifer’s family has the top floor and the fifth floor finished attic, really another entire floor, of a four story walkup.  The apartment has all the tricked out stuff typical of an middle American family with a ten year old boy.   The big screen tv set to video games of wii tennis, or baseball, or badminton.   Soccer ball in the corner, which we used a little in the dining room.   (I can beat the ten year old, no problem).   Plastic basketball net set up facing out from the middle of the railing on the stairway to the fifth floor, at about six feet high.   The kid is a good shot from behind the dining room table, but it is his court.   And he seldom has to drive past somebody twice his size, so I was able to hold my own.

Stone, who is an administrator at a college about an hour away from ZUST but still in Hangzhou (east of the river and the Hi-Tech Zone) picked me up at school.  When we walked in to Jennifer’s apartment everybody there was already making dumplings.  Alice joined in, and this was her entre to the Hangzhou group from one year later at IIT.   You know that many city governments send people to IIT each year, some from the same departments each year, but the group loyalty is to the group that comprises your year, not the group from your city.   So Shelly, from the same year as Jennifer in Chicago, was Alice’s contact to get invited to this dinner.   But Alice was making dumplings with everybody else, and chatting away, and this is one way to get accepted into the group.   If I were crude, I would say it was sort of like dogs sniffing to see if the new person acceptable.  Everybody laughed at my attempts at dumpling making, which was fine.   Some of theirs, notably some of the guys, were not too great either, but my job is to be the clumsy foreigner.

Jennifer’s inlaws cooked dinner. In a way I have seen repeated many times, the parents cook, behind the closed parting doors to the kitchen, which are standard because so much Chinese cooking involves oil, and frying, and fish, but do not join us for dinner.   Dinner the usual- big cherries, not from China, but probably from Australia, maybe US, she said.   (Prices on cherries are down a little from the peak of spring festival.   At the peak, they were 65 rmb a pound, she said, which even if she meant a kilo, is still pretty expensive).  Everyone said they missed the prices on cherries in the US.  Big strawberries.   Little shrimps, which are easy to eat if you pull off the heads and the rest of the shell comes away easily.   Chinese are able to dismantle the shells in their mouths with their tongues, which must under different circumstances be a great comfort to Chinese women.  A fruit like a grape, but with a tough skin that must be peeled, but is good.  Of course, the dumplings we all made, by the dozens, when we got to the apartment, and is a source of much community building.   A shared food making experience that everyone’s ancestors did.   Dumplings are what you eat at  the beginning and end of an event, so this was standard end of spring festival fare.  Also, since it was Lantern Festival day (eve, actually), we had fish balls, which are not nearly so repulsive as they sound.  A little sweetened dough with a little bit of tasty fish wrapped inside the ball, cooked for a moment.   Cabbage and mushrooms, and chicken feet and …. corned beef.    Also specially treated pork, that Jennifer confessed to buying frozen, because it is better than she could make herself, but was tasty with a dark sauce and lots of darker meat.   Alice brought a flagon, I think is the word, of Shaoxing rice wine, which is only from Shaoxing, and is famous, and is tender and drinkable without being sweet or killer in aftereffect, and is the head fake drink that Linda, one of our government students in Chicago, sometimes drinks to get through the nights of business dinners and drinking (One Third Coke, Two Thirds Sprite) in Shenyang, a thousand miles away.  When she is not surreptitiously mixing coke and sprite.

Fireworks on National Day

After dinner, the ten of us or so went downstairs to the agora.  Morgan had brought several boxes of fireworks, and tonight was the last night to set off fireworks during the spring festival.  Morgan and Stone were in charge of placement of the skyrockets and firecracker strings.  They placed some, held others in reserve.   Several of us took turns lighting the rockets, which were bursting in air just like in the song.   Not too high, maybe three or four stories, but pretty and loud and smoky and fun.   We stood around, talked, some other people stopped with their two year olds, and watched, others went about their business.   The other apartment buildings were not more than 30 or 40 yards away, but no one was yelling out the window or calling the cops or fussing at us.   Given the age of Jennifer and Morgan and the other students, you have to think of our parents at age 35 or 40, in the backyard with the neighbors, shooting off fireworks in 1955 or 1960.   Everybody the same age, everybody the same situation, including having parents live with them, everybody pretty happy to be where they are, everybody happy to let someone else be happy.  It is true that fireworks in china are part of the culture, and it certainly is true that I do not see a lot of what I am looking at, but I am telling you what I did see.   There is a lot of paper and mess to clean up after a fireworks display, but we did not have to worry about that, presumably because the cleaning people would be there in an hour or tomorrow morning to take care.  It is part of the deal.  They would do a good job on the cleaning, because that was their job.

A digression-  there is a lot of writing and observation about how difficult it is to get Chinese to work.  Response to instructions is literal, and no one does more than minimally acceptable. The Chinese version of the Russian, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.”  I see some of the literalness in students, and some of the mule mentality – “we will work if you beat us” thing.    Maybe the positive side of that description is that people respond to incentives, and maybe the literal instruction is “pick up every visible scrap of paper you see,” but I have a hard time reconciling the mule mentality with the cleanliness of the agora as I know it will be tomorrow.   Maybe having to work is a great incentive- the cleaning people are never twenty or thirty years old, but look to be seventy.   Though they might only be forty.

The evening stroll

After the fireworks, we walked toward the front gate, Jennifer chatting with a couple of neighbors on the way.   it is fascinating to see Jennifer this way.   In Chicago, she was the academic monitor of the Zhejiang students – the person in charge of making sure schoolwork got done and serving as liaison with the school faculty. My image of her was always this nice, not overdressed, but nicely dressed and together but tightly wound woman with a friendly but still Chinese seriousness about her.   Like she understood everything, just her range was intentionally limited.  Anyway, here she is in slightly faded jeans that are a little worn, and a floppy grey sweatshirt, and tennis shoes, and she looks relaxed and happy and the entire group of us is just a bunch of friends going for a walk after dinner and fireworks.  No agenda, no face, no guards.   I kid Jennifer that my one hope in China is that some night I take her out to some jazz club on Nanshan Road, and by the end of the night see her dancing on the table.    But with this Jennifer, the one last night, that does not have to be the hope anymore.  This is hostess Jennifer, and mom Jennifer, and daughter Jennifer, and wife Jennifer, and friend and colleague Jennifer, and the package is so much more interesting than the IIT academic monitor Jennifer.

We walked a few blocks down Zijinghua Road, to Wen’er Road and Xichen Square, name of a neighborhood and a retail district.  There is a big department store I have been to a couple of times, and next to it is the actual square.  Nothing too fancy, just a fifteen foot tall sculpture to the moon month goddess, and a flat square surrounded on two sides by apartments and one by the department store.   The department store has a pizza hut and KFC on the first floor, and both are crowded.   This is Saturday night, so the KFC is busy.   That means that there are five lines of customers to place orders, each line four or five people deep.   Not because the busload of tourists from Naperville just arrived.   This is everyday busy.   Upstairs from the KFC and Pizza Hut is the strategically located health club.

We stopped and got ice cream at KFC for Jennifer’s son and his buddy, and walked over to the square, which was fitted out with a bunch of displays, all about celebrating New Year’s year of the tiger and spring festival.   There were stands selling huge amounts of cheap Chinese junk- the same stuff we buy at street fairs and at the beach- the colored trinkets that spin, or blow in the wind, or pop up and down, or just look pretty, or colored light sticks.   We thought there would be fireworks at the square, and maybe there were later, but we left after about 45 minutes and a bunch of pictures of us together in front of the big plastic and paper tiger than moved its head and body on a small motor.   We could have stayed, but I think Alice and Shelly had to get back to Shaoxing, which is about 90 minutes away, and Alice had kept her driver the whole time in Hangzhou, so she wanted to give him a break and let him get home to Shaoxing before midnight.

We walked back to Jennifer’s apartment, past her son’s grade school, and past several other restaurants and apartment buildings.  It was a beautiful February night, about centigrade 10 or 12 degrees, so you needed a jacket, but no scarf or gloves or hat.   There were lots of people out, and stores were all open, and traffic moved, and couples walked by holding hands, and couples were out with their kid, and if you tell me that the entire chinese economy is a ponzi scheme, and will collapse next week, well, you have to account for the incredible normality of daily life.   I suppose we could be sitting in the eye of the hurricane, but the burden of proof is going to have to be on the extreme skeptics.   Can there be slowdowns in growth?   Can real estate prices drop some, and construction take a tumble, along with local government revenues?  Can there be news stories about why didn’t we see this coming, and who do we blame, and what do we do now?   Can the PBOC have to step in and recapitalize some banks?  Can the central government have to restructure fiscal relationships with the provinces, to bail out provincial and city developments?   Can a mountain of debt be a problem for China, too?  I just don’t think Xichen Square is going away, nor the KFC, nor Jennifer’s apartment complex or lifestyle.   Michigan Avenue is still there, and stores are still open, and I bet the beach will be crowded on a hot day in July, when I come back.    We have very tough times ahead in the US, but I don’t think we are going to look like 1932, and  there can be tough times ahead in China, but most everybody will weather the storm. There is a big differences among a financial crisis, an economic crisis, and a depression. There is froth in the financial and real estate markets in China, and that will lead to a tough financial crisis and a minor economic crisis at some point, but it will be contained, because of the ability of the government to act and because past growth, real estate excepted, has been based on realities, not hyperbole.   Yes, the infrastructure may be too advanced to suit the economy (an argument I have heard made by some macroeconomists, and which I get but I think is wildly academic in this case), and there will be some empty office buildings, maybe a lot of empty office buildings, and the apartments are empty because Chinese are long term investors, so the crisis from a drop in apartment prices will be confined to developers mid project and to a few individuals who will need the cash, but their units will be snapped up quickly, and the office space crisis will be limited to the owners, some of which are SOE, who will be bailed out, and when the economic conditions change, the migrant farmers can go back to the farms in the rural provinces, where the government is already building infrastructure and encouraging FDI, and some loosening of investment laws will unleash the next wave of consumer-driven investing and spending in China, so some power shifts will take place.   (Another digression – I disagree now with these early speculations about the Chinese macroeconomy.  That is another story.  I leave these observations as they were made in 2009 to remind myself of how radically different my own views are now.)

I know, I know- I  am seeing Jennifer’s China, not the China of 800,000,000 peasants, but the people in Xichen Square are not all of Jennifer’s lifestyle, but they are there anyway, and the Chinese Dream is well and alive throughout China, I think, so the government has a couple of generations to make good on its promises, riots and disruptions and google and corruption on land taking and blocking of facebook and persecution of activists figured in.   This is by no means a perfect society, Jennifer’s lifestyle notwithstanding, but it is not fragile and not going to hell in a handbasket.   It is 5,000 years old, with pretty much everyone the same culture, and zero history of democracy, and a cultural expectation that the government will provide, which it gladly does, cynically if you wish, to keep the powers that be the powers that be.   With  the legal ability to protest, and strike, and democracy, and far worse metropolitan conditions relatively than in China, and far worse economic prospects for the next decade, the government in the US seems able to buy off those damaged by the crisis with some references to capitalism and free markets and hope and making sure everyone is tuned in to American Idol or the next blonde teenager disappearance national crisis.   Somebody ask Lubet what he thinks about the status of protest in the US now, compared with that in 1968.  And the Chinese government is very well practiced at controlling protest.

enyce and guanxi and … chen dongfan

Fall, 2009 


Note – this was a couple of months after I began teaching full time in Hangzhou, so I was being sensitive to … everything.  Food, clothes, manners.

Ju la, or as it is sometimes written, Ru la, is an American-sixties style restaurant in the hills of Hangzhou. Chinese food, Chinese patrons, but the design is all exposed and rough-cut wood, with American nineteen-fifties advertising posters on the walls and tables that are enormous rough hewn blocks.  It is very popular, especially on Sundays.  It is a custom to go to a restaurant on Sunday, take a table, and spend two or three hours or more eating and drinking and talking.  No waiters hustling you out as you take your first bite of dessert.  It is Sunday, the one day of rest.

Ju ra       Trip Advisor – Restaurants Hangzhou

I told you about Ju la before.  It is set in the very pretty Hangzhou hills, surrounded by tea farms and trees. Birds flit and sing just outside the open windows.  We sat on the second floor, in one of the private rooms by a window with a big tree outside and some vines overhanging the window.   There were many small birds, about three inches long, with orange tops of their heads, sort of bluish bodies, and white underbodies.  Tiny and chirping and having fun. Flitting in and out of the vines and the trees.  They looked like birds somebody painted up for a Chicago Bears game, in blue and orange.

Inna Xu Yi Yin and I already had plans to go there for lunch, to plan her assault on the Hangzhou government to support young Chinese artists, as she has been doing herself for some years.  Try as she might, she could not get the Hangzhou government to support any of her artists, in any way.  She did not want money, but access – to galleries, to media, to public exposure.   I told her I knew some people in the Cultural Bureau, which is the Bureau that put on the Hangzhou Reading Festival, and maybe they could help.

As it turns out, Mr. Xiao Jun from the Cultural Bureau called me on Friday, and asked me to go with him on Sunday for lunch.   So I put the deal together for us all to meet at Ju la.

Mr. Xiao and his son picked me up at 9:30, and we drove to Ju la.  His son is 9, and has been taking English for a year.   It is pretty good, certainly better than my Chinese, and I understand my role in these events is to be the Foreigner Who Speaks English, to help the kid, let him talk with an actual meiguo (American), and not so incidentally keep up the English skills of my host.

We got some tea, and waited for Inna to come.  I brought my learning-Chinese language book (the middle school daughter of a friend of mine looked at the book and sniffed, huh, first grade).  But we exchanged words and ideas and talked about the New China (with the dad, not the kid).  Inna got up late, and called three times in the 45 minutes we waited to assure us that she was on the way.

It is probably not necessary to describe the clothing styles.  Mr. Xiao is a good guy, spent 2007 and 2008 at Nottingham getting a Master’s degree.  He is a good and smart public servant, and was dressed casually in a grey long sleeve sweater and nice pants.  His son had gym shoes and sweat pants and a down vest, also blue and orange, and a red sweater with embroidered raised enyce on the front.  Ms. Inna rushed in, a little out of breath, in her uniform.   Slightly worn blue jeans with colored patches carefully sewn into the carefully designed rips in the legs, a multicolored rope belt, and a charcoal grey turtleneck.  A black leather vest.  Imperially slim, with the frizzed hair and the huge smile and the doe eyes.  Faye Dunaway.  The room, at least, shifted.

We did introductions and ordered corn juice.  I told you before about corn juice.   Mark my words, it is coming to the US.  Hot or cold, still good.  I suppose you could add a shot of Jameson’s, if the vitamins in the corn juice were not enough.  Anyway, at this point in the lunch my role was to talk with Mr. Xiao’s son, and watch, and get caught up every now and then when someone stopped for breath. 

Inna was describing her philosophy of life, the needs of young artists in Hangzhou, her work over the last few years in doing just that, purity vs. commercialism in art, and what she would like for the future.   Mostly Mr. Xiao listened, but countered with some philosophy of his own, some perspective on government support for the arts, and advice on what to do next.

I think I was in this same meeting in Chicago about 1977 – many times.   Then, it was about storefront theaters or outdoor seating in restaurants.   Informed, reasoned, but passionate case-making on one side, and well, we have to be careful, we don’t have that much money, what might happen, and we have to follow the guidelines on the other.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think we met with the right guy.  Mr. Xiao and I had talked before about the need to change the government approach to thinking, and schools, and innovation. Mr. Xiao was my guide for the Hangzhou reading festival event, where I received the gift of books from  the vice mayor of Hangzhou, so we had spent some time together.   But he was saying what an interested and helpful bureaucrat would say.

Every now and then, I would chime in with some Wisdom about Development from America.   The role of theaters in economic development in Chicago.  The concept of an arts incubator.  Government support for artists does not mean supporting the meaning of the art, it is support for the whole of the economy of Hangzhou.  Hangzhou as the cultural center of China. The standards of measurement for art- a key issue for Mr. Xiao – were unavailable.  Van Gogh was not terribly successful during his life.   Once dead, the value of his art zoomed.  So the measure of the success of art is the death of the artist?  The only quantifiable measure is the market.   There is little difference between a reading festival and an arts festival.  Both are designed to get people to think differently about their world.   La Villita Little Village in San Antonio, as an arts colony that became a tourist destination in town.  The stated goal of the central government to increase tourism to China over the next few years (2018 note – this was in 2009).  The reason why the government should do this (or something) is that some amount of failure is expected.  If success could be measured, if the externalities were few, then a private business could do this (whatever it is).   That success is measured over twenty years, not two months.   So the government role in supporting the development of the artists is a natural economic consequence of the nature of the good, art.   In twenty years, Hangzhou will be thankful it started something now.

My role was to be the objective foreign voice.  I couldn’t think of anything else.

Mr. Xiao was talking about the usefulness of soft power, another central government idea that is floating around now.  That the arts are a form of soft power.   I asked his son to open his vest, showing everyone the enyce on his sweater.   Neither Mr. Xiao nor Inna knew what that meant, but I explained, and demonstrated the soft power of NYC, regardless of the commercial origin of the sweater.   So Mr. Xiao understood.

We all left about 2:30, Mr. Xiao to drive me back to school and Inna in her white Range Rover.   The next step is for Inna to meet with the No. 1, the Party leader, in the Cultural Bureau.  He would make the final determination about access.

All in all, not bad for a Sunday afternoon sitting next to Inna with the Government across the table.   So Ju la is where I brokered my first deal.  I not only know what the word guanxi means, I think I have it, and have now used it. 

Postscript – About a year later, Inna got a commission for her star young artist, Chen Dongfan, to decorate the exterior of two buildings in the neighborhood of Liu Xia, the town in Hangzhou about three miles from ZUST, my school.  Inna now has a gallery and studio space in Hangzhou and a gallery in New York  Inna Contemporary Art Space  and Chen has exhibited in shows across Europe.    Pictures of the building art below –

Chen dongfan, the author, and Brenna, my daughter –  May, 2011

 

 

You can see more of Chen’ work at –

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/chen-dongfans-mural-on-doyers-street-1329968

and the work at Inna’s studios –

http://www.innart.org/en/

http://www.innart.org/en/artist/about/7b6eww.html

Inna at linked-in   https://www.linkedin.com/in/inna-xu-67818b66

Shibboleth

October 2007 and Spring, 2015 

The first time was in 2007, in Dalian, one of my favorite cities.

One of my students – government officials from China – was showing me her hometown, and we were late night driving from Dalian to our next stop that would take me to the airport in the morning.

She was not driving.  Her driver did that, so we had plenty of time to talk.  And there were two other of my students in the van, and we moved from topic to topic about China and the US and national monuments and American history and  9-11 and terrorism in China and the US.   And I said that the 9-11 terrorists missed the most important target – the Statue of Liberty.

The government officials had just spent a year in Chicago, learning about markets and government management in the US, and many of them had become personal friends and they had just returned to their home, and I was visiting.  A lot of them were sad to leave Chicago. They had had a year of new experiences and fun and learning on the government’s dime, and they were going back to pressure and anxiety.

But like a lot of people in China, my government students were looking at American schools for their kids and openness and a life free of the kind of stress they were all returning to.

And I talked about the history of the Statue of Liberty.  From France. And in New York Harbor, facing southeast, to Europe.  And the Emma Lazarus.

And we were hurtling through the night, 10,000 kilometers from home, all of us nostalgic, me a little homesick, talking softly even in the warmth among friends, and the word just poured out.

Give me your tired, your poor

(Friends, from different backgrounds)

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

(And now different lives facing us tomorrow)

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore

(Nostalgia, wanting to turn back the clock)

Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me

(And for some, even with serious jobs and bright futures, muffled anxiety and a wish that might become a reality again, someday)

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

I could go back, they could not.   Tomorrow, I could get on a plane, and they could not.   They had lives, good ones, great ones, family, friends, future, security, money.   But I could go, and they absolutely could not. 

The sign, the password to the plane was American.   As in,  I am an American.   And I could go back to a place where, once inside, there was no password, no test, no badge of admission to the school or the city hall, no code of arms or card or letter of introduction that gave me benefits and not the other guy. 

And it was impossible not to tear up at that moment.   Ten thousand kilometers from home, among friends who were staying home, not reluctantly but inevitably, but everyone in the car felt a tug.

Believe me, you should try it sometime.

Everyone in China has a password or a loyalty test or shibboleth to master.  Not a phrase, or a card.  But access always requires a password.  Somebody knows somebody.  In China, it is like Milt Rakove said, we don’t want nobody nobody sent.

And the second time.  In the fall of 2014, and into 2015, the Chinese government was cracking down hard on foreign web sites, and foreign email addresses, and almost anything that was foreign.  Foreign businesses targeted for investigations, foreign products assailed. 

In the new shopping mall ten minutes from our home, there was – for reasons unknown – a 25 foot statue of liberty, complete, for about two years. A new shopping mall for modern Chinese, with modern ideas. 

In spring of 2015, it disappeared.   Times are reminiscent – for some Chinese – of 1966, the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.  The hammer is coming down everywhere – on foreigners, on Chinese.   And it was time to … come home.

One of my computers had already been fried by the government – no internet access at all anymore, anytime.   And my undergrad foreign students were in danger of failing a course because papers they emailed to me had been blocked by the Chinese government, and I could not email them in return to say whether I had received their paper or not. 

I had a CD set of the tv show West Wing, and I was watching episode 8 of season 2.  Now you know the writing and acting in West Wing was just about the best ever done on television, so finding a heart-string pulling scene is not tough.

And the story was about 96 Chinese Christians who had stowed away in a shipping container, six weeks on the ocean, 13 dying en route, to get to America and freedom from religious persecution.  

I was listening to President Bartlet practice the Thanksgiving proclamation –

Well over three and a half centuries ago, strengthened by faith and bound by a common desire for liberty, a small band of pilgrims sought out a place in the new world …

and a pause…  

… where they could worship according to their own beliefs …

and a pause…  

… Now therefore, I, Josiah Bartlet, President of the United States by virtue of the authority and laws invested in me do hereby proclaim this to be a national day of Thanksgiving.

 And then, to his aide Josh Lyman –

Let me tell you something … we can be the world’s policeman, we can be the world’s bank, the world’s factory, the world’s farm … what does it mean if we’re not also …. 

 Almost breaking up –

They made it to the new world, Josh …

You know what I get to do now?   I get to proclaim a national day of  thanksgiving….

To avoid an international incident, Bartlet, with some assistance from a remarkably lax guard at the stowaways temporary holding rooms, provided an entre to another new world where there was no password or loyalty test needed.  He convinced himself of the sincerity of their faith by using a shibboleth, giving 83 people access to a place where they no longer needed one.

And we do wish that life could imitate art.

Go ahead, watch the two clips.

Moller Villa

October, 2008 

You will all like this one, Rob particularly.   I am staying at the Moller Villa in Shanghai, which was a family home built by a Swedish/English shipping magnate in the 1930’s for his daughter.  The story is that the daughter envisioned living in a fairy tale castle, and her father proceeded to comply with her wish.  The villa, interior and exterior, is phenomenal – beautiful brickwork and wonderful carved wood, like in some European… well, castle.  The villa was used in turn by both the Guomindang and the Gongchandang (Nationalists and Communists) after 1945 – no reason for leaders of any stripe to stint on luxurious surroundings. 

 

Source: Legolas1024 [CC BY-SA 4.0  (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)],from Wikimedia Commons


Moller villa is now a small hotel.  The staff is even more than the usual Chinese attentive, almost obsequious.   I don’t know whether to respond to the constant “Thank you for coming” and “Have a nice day” or just ignore them.  Am I encouraging them by responding or showing a western lack of respect by ignoring them?    Are they thinking about this as much as I am?

Breakfast is held in the dining room of this incredibly elegant villa.  The room is frightfully smart and polished, with tasteful amounts of marble (apparently, tasteful use of marble was once possible in China) and carved wood ceilings and moldings and inlaid parquet floors.    And the staff is the usual Chinese redundancy- there are four young girls in qipao(s? – no plural in Chinese, but this is pinyin … oy. complicated) at the front entrance to say hello and welcome and this way and good morning- I think each person has one assigned phrase, and that is their job.

One could say the hotel is overstaffed.  When you ask for coffee, this is a two person delivery job.  Someone brings the coffee from the kitchen halfway to the table.  Not kidding.   It’s not like they are carrying the coffee two hundred yards, and someone’s legs get tired.  But at the halfway point in the dining room, someone else takes the coffee off the tray of the first guy, and brings it all the way to the table, BY HIMSELF, and puts it down.  (Thankfully, there is someone else to attentively put the spoon facing the right way on the saucer, and adjust anything on the table that might have gotten out of place by the mere fact of my using it).

So one of the breakfast choices is an omelette, which is okay- green onions and red and green peppers and mushroom and maybe a little bacon- everything is cut up so fine they have obliterated the ability to distinguish meat from vegetable- and the omelette is delivered, via relay team from the kitchen, on a fine china plate, and set tastefully on the table.   The omelette is sitting on a drizzled dark red sauce, looking very sophisticated and proper, until you taste the sauce, expecting some exotic combination of flavors, only to discover that the drizzled sauce is…. ketchup.

Sometimes it is better to squint than to know all the details.

Update – In 1910, Eric Moller took over the Asian part of their family shipping business, later expanding to Shanghai.  By 1953, the company abandoned their mainland Chinese operations, and relocated to Hong Kong.  

The villa is on every higher-end tourist site.  But the government travel site http://www.china.org.cn/travel/   contains an error.   From the web site –

In 2006, the hotel was ostensibly “closed for repairs” while in fact being used as the headquarters of a corruption investigation into Shanghai’s top official, Party Secretary Chen Liangyu.  It was said that the fairyland villa turned into a nightmare for many corrupt officials who thought that they had been invited there for a “cup of coffee.”  The villa hotel did not reopen to guests until April 2009.  http://www.china.org.cn/travel/travelogue/2009-05/20/content_17804418_2.htm

 

I stayed at Moller Villa in October of 2008, six months before the reopening, per the government web site. Maybe they didn’t see me as a guest, or maybe I was a decoy, or maybe the reservation, made for me by one of my government students, was itself a guanxi thing.  I didn’t see many other people staying there.   Didn’t see any officials looking nervous.  Anyway, reading this, the Chinese government will no doubt be happy to correct their error.