I was traveling from April 17 to May 7. Until April 30, I was with about half of my Beida classmates on the "red line" trip through central and southern China, and after a brief couple of days back in Beijing, I visited Hong Kong and Macau with my friends Warren, Cathy, Diane, and Chris MacKenzie. There's no way I can go through day by day and tell all of the stories from those 3 1/2 weeks... that is probably a small book unto itself. I think the best way for me to wrap up the blog is probably to go through and report a list of observations, things I witnessed on the trip, and those thoughts on China that I wasn't comfortable posting to the internet while behind "the bamboo curtain."
First, about the internet. People here in the States keep asking what I could and could not do online in China: without a VPN (virtual private network, purchased in the US prior to departure) I would not have been able to visit social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube. Blogs are also banned (so Chinese citizens cannot view this blog). Sensitive search topics are not allowed to be executed. For example, if you run a Google Images search in America for the term "Tiananmen," the first page of results is almost entirely images of tanks and bloodied protestors from 1989. The same search in China, however, returns only views of the Square, filled with flowers and smiling Chinese people. If I were to search "Tiananmen Massacre," the browser would immediately return the message "Website not found." Same can be said of searches about topics like the Wighur rebellions last year, civil rights in Tibet, and independent Taiwan.
I asked several Chinese students with which I was relatively comfortable (like my language partner Yiwei, right) what their thoughts on the internet censorship were. In their typically nervous, giggly way, they smiled and said that
yes, censorship is troubling, no, it is not a good thing. They all said, in some way, that they are hopeful that things will change as China grows and matures in the 21st century, but that it is out of their hands; all they can do is hope. And while the idea of information and knowledge being withheld from the public makes our skin crawl and the media to have a field day in America, the students at China's greatest university don't seem to panic or want to take up arms about it. They just deal with what they have and move on.One of the questions that weighed heavily on my mind throughout the semester, but that I never had the guts to ask a real Chinese person, was, "Do you feel oppressed?"
When I asked my American-born Chinese friends if they thought the Chinese population by and large felt oppressed, most said no. Sure, the Communist Party has loads and loads of social issues dealing with civil rights, freedom of speech, etc., but in a country of 1.3 billion people, most seem to just go about their daily business and keep their noses to the grindstone. I reread George Orwell's classic 1984 while I was in Beijing, and while some themes reminded me of the CCP and its heavy hand, it was enough to convince me that no, today's China is not a socialist, totalitarian danger-zone. By and large, the Chinese people seem genuinely happy. As westerners, we think of China's dirty cities and impoverished rural rice paddies and think, wow, those people are miserable and deserve better. And while their lives could definitely be improved (whose couldn't?), talking with locals taught me that the vast majority are very happy and friendly.
In late April we spent two nights in Longsheng County, a vast, isolated collection of rice paddies that cling to steep, cloud-covered hills. The small village we stayed in was inhabited by a indigenous racial minority called the Yao (chatting with William & Mary's Andrew Scott, right). Their women wore large headdresses, pink and black traditional dresses, and giant hooped earrings that made their earlobes sag several inches downward. We saw them tending their rice paddies and leading gigantic oxen along narrow
stone-covered paths that snaked up the mountains. We also, however, saw them laughing and playing with their children. They played cards and sat in the sun, chatting until dark. In speaking with some of them (in my still very limited Mandarin), they seem to genuinely enjoy their unique way of life. They may not have internet access (much less unfiltered access), they may not have air conditioning or a Seven-Eleven nearby, but these people are not miserable. They may be different, but they are happy. We westerners need to respect that.Yangshuo was the last stop on our class trip. Yangshuo is a small town in the far south of China, not far from Guangzhou and Hong Kong. It lies nestled between south China's famous parabola-shaped mountains, the ones that look like hundreds and hundreds of camel humps just popping
out of the terrain (see right). One afternoon we went kayaking down the Li River, which winds through the gorgeous hills. Our route ended in a small, rural village down river from Yangshuo, and we had to walk through the town to find the dirty van that would take us back to town. The locals looked up from their card games and cooking to gawk at our parade of westerners, but we were used to that. What was interesting was to see that in these impoverished little homes and kitchens, each bore a large, color poster of the Chairman Mao, grinning and looking heroically off into the distance, with some CCP slogan written below. I asked Warren, a Hong Kong native, if that was common, and he informed me that displaying Mao posters is mandatory in most rural villages. Despite all of China's changes, Warren said, the CCP in theory still views the working, rural class as its core, and the posters are a way to maintain loyalty. Alex Pan commented that it was ironic that Communist party doctrine still claims to hold the rural community closest to its heart, yet China's politics over the last 20 years have virtually ignored the welfare of those people, instead making concessions to industry and the growing commercial behemoths in Shanghai, Beijing, and other large cities. It makes one wonder if these poor rural people know of the resources being diverted away from them and toward the cities, and if they do, how long they'll put up with it.On the topic of Chairman Mao (and file this one under "Could Not Be Written on Blog While In China"), I am, in general, appalled that his likeness is still shown as much as it is. He's on posters in restaurants and homes, his massive portrait hangs over the middle of Tiananmen Gate, and images of his smirking face hang from the rearview mirrors of most cabs. Trinket stands in markets offer everything from Mao's little Red Book of Communist sayings (in dozens of languages) to porcelain figurines and sculptures. When vendors approach me and shove Mao wristwatches in front of my face and say "You want?" I feel like buying one just so I can deface it in front of him. It continues to baffle me that so many people can be so naive as to show support for a man that some say killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. As John Lennon once wrote, "But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow."
People back home keep asking me if Chinese people treated me and my American friends poorly because we were American. To that, I can honestly say no. Sure, we were stared at and joked about, but I never felt like anyone was mean-spirited. When it came to one-on-one interactions, the Chinese were almost always extremely friendly and helpful, especially if you tried to speak to them in Mandarin. As in pretty much every foreign nation, they seem to genuinely appreciate any effort to communicate in the local tongue, no matter how poor the attempt.
Public perception of America varies greatly from individual to individual. Some seem to buy the Party's assertions that American companies like Google are sinister and corrupt (the official party newspaper, after Google's departure from China, claimed that the company was assisting American spies). Some see American culture as poisoning China's traditional values. Yet not a day went by I would walk down the street without seeing dozens of Nike and Adidas shirts, Yankees and Red Sox hats, or giant billboards of Lebron James soaring through the air in his #6 USA jersey. And after asking where I was from, the majority of Chinese seemed happy and interested in the fact that I was American. The only not-so-happy times were usually in cabs, when the cabbie would dive into some angry sounding diatribe, "Obama" usually the only word I could make out.
It still baffles me that Chinese engineers, some of the world's most brilliant, were able to build something as enduring and magnificent as the Great Wall centuries ago, yet cannot design a shower that does not flood the entire bathroom.
My stay in China was one of the most interesting and rewarding experiences of my life, and definitely the most culturally-challenging. I can't promise that the blog ends here, because as I digest and think about my experiences in China, I come up with new ideas and theories all the time. I'll probably write them on this blog just so I can have somewhere to put them in writing and try to make sense of it all. Not that any American can truly understand the vast complexities of China after just four months. But it's a start.
Thanks to everyone who read the blog this semester. I had a lot of fun and enjoyed hearing feedback from all of you in Boston, Cincinnati, and around the world.
My challenge to each of you is to do some reading of your own on China. Read the newspaper articles, but also search online and try to get deeper. American perceptions of China and its people aren't close to the whole picture at all, and for our countries to grow and mature together, it's important that we get to understand and listen to each other.
E-mail me or message me on Facebook. I love talking about China.
