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Having read through my last few posts, I've noticed two things: it looks like one post every two weeks is a fairly manageable rate, and I'm not all that great at coming up with opening lines. So I'm just going to hop right into something that literally just happened as I opened up my laptop, and hopefully post this before the weekend's over. [Note: this was written last weekend. Whoops].
Amongst the many fine channels that make up the televisual landscape in China is a CCTV channel (China Central Television - yes, that's quite an ironic name, but on the other hand the UK's the most surveilled country in the world, so who's in a police state now?) whose purview is music. Unlike its Western equivalents, this is a music channel whose programming is genuinely mostly music - live performances of various songs by various different artists. It's largely of the slightly saccharine tendency that is characteristic of Chinese pop music, but at least from my perspective it means the singing's normally quite clear and the lyrics tend to stick to a few predictable themes. Oh, and as with most Chinese TV programmes there are subtitles, which is a godsend to me.
Anyway, I turned to said channel for some background music/lazy language practice(1) as I wrote this post, and the most bizarre thing I've yet seen on Chinese TV came on (beating off some strong competition): a very pretty girl in a short red dress came on and sang a peppy, feel-good pop song all about how the Chinese flag was utterly wonderful, with lines like: "Your name [as in reputation/good name] is more important than my own life", and it seemed everyone from the hosts to the audience was clapping along and having as good a time as they always do at these performances, which is to say a very good time indeed. Naturally, there were backup dancers, in this case in military costume and waving flags, but not in a North Korea kind of way; the gleaming white smiles and the amount of leg on display from the women made me deeply suspicious about how effective their camouflage would have been in a combat situation. And then, three cheesy love songs later, another woman was singing a Cantonese cheesy love song - talk about a return to business as usual.
On paper this might seem like a fairly obvious thing to expect in a one-party state, but politics has so far seemed to be so separated from daily life that it completely threw me to see a song expressing patriotism that would leave Ted Nugent open to accusations of anti-Americanism by comparison being just one part of an otherwise standard pop concert. There's been the odd nationalist song before, but mostly around the National Day weekend which was on the 1st, and never anything so effusively reminiscent of bona fide revolutionary attitudes. There's a huge amount I could write about this, but I'll try to be at least slightly concise in talking about why it was so interesting:
For all the song's unrestrained patriotism, there wasn't a single mention of the party. For quite a while I've been of the opinion that as far as patriotism's concerned, most Chinese people are Chinese first and Communists second, i.e. their love for China leads them to support or at least be in favour of the Communist Party, because of all it's done for China (according to the official narrative's reckoning, at least). It's a nationalism in which the Party can easily find a niche for itself in post-Mao China, since it can point to its record of having avenged many of the perceived wounds inflicted on China during its 'century of humiliation' by the revolution(2), and bringing about globally unprecedented economic development and the international power that comes with it, to justify China continuing with the economic system of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'(3) without it actually having to do anything particularly Marxist.
And there's no doubt that Chinese people are, by and large, and despite the massive love for foreign culture and imported products, quite staunchly nationalist. Do a quick Google search for 'Diaoyu' and you'll see what I mean. I was also asked last summer by the 13-year old boy whose family I was living with, and who was trying to get a grip on what life in the UK was like, whether or not I love my country, which struck me as a pretty odd question from a 13-year old. Not that patriotism's separate from pop culture elsewhere in the world (just look at Rocky IV, or the amount of money newspapers, CD retailers and tea towel manufacturers made off the Royal Wedding and Diamond Jubilee), but still. I guess that's what a lifelong diet of "China was great, then feudalism weakened her and allowed foreign powers to exploit her, and now she's back on the road to reclaiming her rightful place amongst the leading nations" will do to you. At least it's a more optimistic nationalism than you're likely to find in the tired post-imperial powers, but maybe that's just because China hasn't yet been threatened by the Muslamic ray guns.
Update: since writing that, I've seen another song performed by a One Direction-esque boyband, with the verses of an old Chinese folk song and a rapped chorus in double time that as far as I could make out was about running Japanese people down in a Mercedes-Benz. China, you never cease to baffle me. I hope I never stop learning from you.
Anyway, what have I been up to recently? Well, for one thing I've stopped worrying so much about the polluted air. According to a blog written by a foreign doctor based in one of the English-speaking hospitals, a 24-hour period of breathing air with a pollution count of 500 is roughly equivalent in terms of what it can do to your lungs to a sixth of a cigarette. Of course that won't be a direct correlation, to say nothing of the effect living here for a year might have, but in fact the count's only been above 400 once, and that was only for about 6 hours. Normally it's somewhere in the 150-300 range, which isn't great but not likely to kill me, despite the horror stories everyone seems to have of a friend of a friend who got cancer here. So the cheap mask's gone in the bin, and if things get really bad I'll use some disposable 3M ones - at least I'll know they work. As with everywhere else, the things most likely to push me into an early grave are nutrition and exercise. I'm probably not eating any worse than I did in the UK (lots of oil and salt, but very little sugar or dairy) and the 7 hours of kung fu have to count for something, so healthwise I'm pretty relaxed.
Now that I'm no longer running around after a million and one administrative niggles, I'm finding I actually have a fair bit of time in which to enjoy myself. I had a gorgeous dinner on Wednesday in a Western restaurant thanks to a friend's godmother who was in town, I spent last Sunday night playing poker with some Chinese friends (not with real money, although it turns out I'd have made about £300 if it had been), and I've acquired another pupil - Lydia, a classmate of my teacher's daughter Jasmine. [Update: there's a third in the pipeline. I never would have thought lots of little portraits of Chairman Mao could make me so happy. I guess pink's just his colour.] Her English isn't as good, which is actually quite useful as it means I can teach her from the sort of English storybooks available in the nearby bookstore (things like Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk etc., aimed at younger children) rather than having to try ordering something from Taobao or Amazon without a Chinese bank account. I'm really enjoying the tutoring work, it's good money, not particularly taxing, and being invited inside the homes of members of the world's largest emerging middle class and seeing how they live is really very interesting.
Both live in nuclear families on the Qinghua university campus (Qinghua and Beida are essentially the Oxbridge of China, and they're next door to each other), in small flats that make the most use possible of the space. Lydia's home, for example, has a double mattress taking up most of the floorspace in the living room - whether that's as an alternative to a sofa, the place where their ayi(4) sleeps or both, I'm not entirely sure. Lydia also has a younger sister, who turned 5 this week on the day I was trying to teach her sister English. Needless to say, it was quite difficult to keep Lydia interested in yet another lesson after a full day of school when her sister was bouncing off the walls with her new lego sets in the same room, but I did my best. My 'teaching' style isn't exactly the rote drilling that's pretty standard for China (I'm currently trying to gauge her level from a book of simple 'what am I' brainteasers, accompanied by a generous helping of animal impressions), so I think I've at least got a slight chance of making English interesting to her, rather than just another thing she has to memorise half to death for the sake of essentially pointless exams.
As to how she gets to have a sister, that's because the one-child policy has been actually been relaxed slightly (in the face of a looming demographic crisis where some 50 million Chinese men may never be able to find wives) so that if a couple's first child is female, they're allowed to have another child. Alternatively, one of her parents might be from a non-Han minority - bizarrely, they're exempted from the restriction. It's quite unusual to see ethnic minorities granted freedoms denied to the majority, particularly in China, but I suppose for such an intrusive policy there was no need for the government to risk stirring up tensions amongst ethnic minorities when numerically the effect on the population of them having multiple children isn't a game-changer (they make up less than 10% of China's population).
Jasmine, my teacher's daughter, lives in an even smaller flat (although to be fair, they are only three people instead of five). Her mother mentioned to me during one class that they move out of that flat for the weekend - presumably this means they go to live with one or the other set of grandparents. I'm not sure what her father's job is, but he's obviously well-educated, with the Chinese equivalent of a BBC accent (and a wife who teaches Chinese literature at the best university in China). He met me at the entrance to Qinghua before my first class to show me the way to their house, and as we cycled past the original gate of the university (which, weirdly, is a major tourist draw), we started discussing the university's history. Apparently, as well as funding the Woodrow Wilson scholarships for Chinese students to go to the US to study (which I'm pretty sure are either still going or only ran out very recently) the US decided to put the money it received from the Boxer indemnity(5) into founding Qinghua.
What was interesting about hearing this from Jasmine's father was how positively he talked about the US and all the good things it's done for China in the past. Lydia's mother and the father of the boy I taught last year also both said to me that they wanted their children to study abroad, ideally in the English-speaking world and if possible in America. It never ceases to amaze me that despite all the nationalist headaches around Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, trade deficits, ideology and so on that politicians both Chinese and Western are only too happy to thump tubs over and use to demonise the other side, most Chinese people have a really positive view of the West. That's obviously not to say that they have some kind of deep-seated longing to throw out the Communists and usher in a liberal democracy based around life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but there's an openness and interest there that I wish were reciprocated in the West. Instead we get the sort of garbage of which this is an extreme but representative example: http://edge.org/response-detail/23838 (and for a thorough dissection of the above nonsense, I refer you to the excellent Hugh Grigg: http://eastasiastudent.net/china/edge-org-chinese-eugenics-rubbish)
OK, having already rambled I'm at a real risk of beginning to rant as well, so I'll end it here. I'll try to note down more of what I see out here as and when I see it, and hopefully be able to write these posts more speedily. Except I'm going to Shanghai next weekend and Tianjin the weekend after that, so don't start hanging on the edge of your seats for the next no-holds-barred installment of my Oriental odyssey just yet.
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1. One could say that I'm so lazy I count watching TV as studying; I prefer to think of it as being so dedicated that I even study when watching TV.
2. But just look at http://sinostand.com/2012/04/16/chart-comparing-historical-chinese-and-foreign-inflicted-deaths/ to see how it went about doing so.
3. i.e. capitalism. But we don't say that. More about this in a later post, if I can find the words.
4. A term that literally means 'auntie', but can be used as a colloquial term of address for any woman aged around 30-50, and colloquially means a cleaner (since they're almost all in this demographic). The ayi in Lydia's house seems to be more of a live-in housekeeper-cum-childminder, but she's still called ayi.
5. A huge fine paid by China to most of Europe, Japan and the US after the Boxer Rebellion, a fascinating bit of history that I just can't go into because I'll never stop. Go and watch 55 Days in Peking on Youtube for an utterly Hollywoodised depiction if you've got a few free hours.
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Iain Nice to see things have settled down, plreased your enjoying it.