The Origins of Development
It is said that in Huaxi village (华西村), in Wuxi county, Jiangsu, two thirds of the village families own their own car. Three quarters of them are said to have travelled outside China. Pensions, medical fees and school fees from kindergarten to university are refunded by the village council. The spectacular success of Huaxi, “China’s Number One Village”, is famous throughout Jiangsu. Each year apparently it attracts more than one million visitors: officials from around China, eager to investigate Huaxi’s economic model, but also tourists. When I asked my students about nearby places to go, some of them recommended that I too go to see the village “where everyone has a car.” Interestingly, many of the explanations for the village’s wealth on the Internet credit the village’s leaders, and in particular that “Huaxi village has always stuck to path of the collective economy and shared wealth.” “华西村一直坚持走“集体经济，共同富裕”的道路”
Elsewhere in the vast urbanizing, industrialized, hubristic Yangtze delta region there is still fairly severe poverty. But it is not surprising that Huaxi is here and not in a different part of China. Arriving from Sichuan last year my first impression was that I had entered a far wealthier area. There is no shortage of people making excellent descriptions of the changes that this has brought to the region. I have often found it interesting, to ask, on a slightly different track, people’s opinions on why south of Jiangsu, the Yangtze delta region, is far more prosperous that the northern part of the province. Below are some replies.
“The people here work harder. Basically, they spend all their time earning money. They don’t relax.” –An English teacher at my college, from Jilin in north-eastern China.
“People everywhere work hard. The people in Sichuan work hard too. Southern Jiangsu is rich because of the government’s policy.” –A politics teacher at my college, from Anhui province.
“The people in the north have lower suzhi [roughly “quality”]. I know someone from Lianyungang [a port in northern Jiangsu], he has three kids. How will he be able to give them all a good education? My kid will get a better education, and his suzhi will be higher. The north is poorer because the people’s suzhi is lower.” –A taxi driver.
“Lianyungang people! They have a lot of bad habits, they always fight and they don’t work hard.” –The head of a factory-owning family.
“Education is better here, and there’s also a cultural difference. In the north, people think that to become rich you have to save money. Here people think that you don’t necessarily have to save money, the key is to get an income… Also, from when they are small, their aim is to become a boss. Since they were small they’ve been thinking about what kind of boss they will be, so they’ll to take the opportunity when it comes. People in the north don’t have that much ambition. Here they are very ambitious. The major industry in this region is textiles. They have been producing textiles for more than 100 years –initially there were foreigners who invested, but now they do it themselves, I think the way they do business is clever. ” – A migrant worker from Yancheng (a city in the north of Jiangsu), who now repairs motorbikes, and in the past has worked as a foot masseur and an air-conditioning repairer.
I don’t think I have ever heard what would probably be one of my first guesses: the sluggish, blind waters of the Yangtze itself. It seems difficult to avoid using the ultimate major river cliché and call it an artery to that runs through the heart of China, bringing trade-based prosperity to those on its banks.
What I had not considered before I wrote ‘development’, ‘Jiangnan’ and ‘history’ into Baidu, was the role of government policy before the twentieth century. In fact there was a strong government-sponsored textile industry in this region well before either the current boom or the late nineteenth century arrival of western investment. The early Ming government required peasants in the Yangtze delta region to either grow cotton, hemp, mulberry trees for silk farming or to pay taxes in cotton. ( http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/4788999.html ). This policy was revised after the government became aware of the conflicts between its policy and environmental realities. It continued, however, to encourage the Jiangnan textiles industry with tax cuts for textile producers and the dissemination of education on their cultivation and production.
The Ming-Qing transition, or cataclysm as one scholar has labeled the Qing conquest, was particularly devastating to this region. (The Qing army’s 10 day slaughter and pillage of Yangzhou is recorded in the Yangzhou Ten-Day Record 《扬州十日记》written -perhaps with some bias- by Wang Xiuchu, a survivor from the staff of the losing Ming general http://baike.baidu.com/view/420704.htm .) However the region’s textile industry recovered and continued to flourish at greater heights during the Qing. Amid orgies of tourist attraction construction in several major cities, the Emperor Qianlong also found time to make a number of Deng Xiaoping style “Southern Tours” during which he too called for the further promotion of commerce and development in this southern special economic zone.
Reading about this interested me because I think there is a tendency to imagine that economic planning; the promotion of new industries and technologies; and government sponsored education are the properties of modern governments. Pre-modern governments, I think it is commonly assumed, raised taxes to fight and build palaces, but tended not to think in terms of “the economy.” However to explain the current economic success of the region, I think it is necessary to see how, over hundreds of years, an economic foundation has been actively constructed.
2007年6月17日星期日
2007年6月7日星期四
Building the New World 2
People, Identity and Language
The vast amount of new housing of course signals the arrival of new people. At the end of 2006, Sohu News reported that number of legal temporary migrant residents in the greater Changhzou area was 1.43 million, next to a ‘local’ population of about 4.13 million. The exact numbers are extremely difficult to calculate due to the mobility of the migrant population and the migrant figure also does not appear to include professional migrants who have been granted a local Chanzhou ID card and permanent residency. A man once said to me that in the Hutang area of the Wujin district near where I live, migrants outnumber locals two to one. A Baidu discussion forum poster makes the following comment:
“It feels as if there are outsiders everywhere. There must be 2 million, they’re like ants. What do reckon they are all doing? Can they build a more perfect city??? –my God” “我觉得常州到处多是外地人,我觉得有200万,和蚂蚁一样,你说来这么多外地人干什么?他们能把常州建设的更美好>>>>???My god~”
As this comment indicates, the same tensions flourish in Changzhou that exist in wealthy regions everywhere where a large population of migrants does the jobs that local people are mostly unwilling to do. In Changzhou’s case, this is perhaps compounded by the inferiority complex, which some argue the city suffers from. One Jiangsu blogger writes: “Because it can’t get out of the shadow of Suzhou and Wuxi, the city really looks down on people from the north of Jiangsu.” “因为走不出苏州无锡的阴影，所以特别看不起江北人。”
However, it is not only people from farming families in poorer inland provinces and the north of Jiangsu who come to Changzhou. The city’s extraordinary economic boom has also attracted professional middle-class migrants from every corner of the country. Certainly about half of the Chinese people I know here come from outside the city (not including my students, almost all of whom come from outside). And in addition to tension, this it creates the possibilities for multiple confusions with regards to identity.
A student once told my colleague that Changzhou locals look down upon students from outside. As evidence she said that people in shops are rude to her. I heard similar complaints in Sichuan and I have few doubts that in most places of the world people’s first encounters with a strange place are marked by an impression that it is not as friendly as the place where they grew up. But in Changzhou the situation of my colleague’s student is complicated somewhat, because if more one quarter of the city’s population is a temporary migrant worker, and many of them do service work, then a very significant proportion of the people working in shops must also come from the outside. Perhaps the student and the shop-assistants both mistake each other for locals, and believing that locals are prejudiced against outsiders acted on the assumption that the other looks down upon them. Or perhaps the shop assistants would very much like to be locals, and act accordingly. [this idea has been stongly disputed by a reader, but I maintain that it is possible, even if it might not happen often --JL]
When I describe the differences between living in Changzhou and living in Sichuan, I often say that due to the migrant population, Changzhou people are much better at speaking Mandarin, and much more willing to speak it. On more than a few occasions this has drawn the comment that the local Changzhou language is endangered. Two of my colleagues have told me that their children are unwilling to speak the Changzhou language: “they say it sounds too provincial.” Talking about this, some people sound concerned, others resigned and others unsure of what attitude to take. My students here are different from those in Sichuan in that here I mostly hear them using Mandarin to communicate with each other. In Sichuan, the college I worked at ran poster campaigns in vain attempts to achieve such a situation. Granted, in Sichuan there was a strong sense of a Sichuan provincial dialect that does not exist in Jiangsu. I have never heard anybody speak of Jiangsu language; people usually define speech according to city. However, as far as actual linguistic variation goes, the descriptions of people in Sichuan and Jiangsu indicate that both provinces are similar in that speech varies from locale to locale according to distance. The students in Suining, though, would just leap across such linguistic variations and speak what they assumed to be a general Sichuan language. In a class in Changzhou, I once asked a girl from Suzhou and a boy from Changzhou if they could understand each other’s dialects. The whole class was curious. It seemed none of them knew; none of them had ever tried to use their city’s language with someone from Changzhou. The boy in question shrunk back from their curiosity. “You won’t understand,” he said in Mandarin. The others urged him to try. “She won’t…” Then he uttered a quick, short sentence. “See, you didn’t understand, right?” The others looked at her. She nodded, “I can understand most things” she said. But it was clear that, at least for my Changzhou student, Changzhou language wasn’t something that could be used to communicate with outsiders. He seemed not to want it even to be possible. Perhaps for him, living in a part of his local city that was dominated by outsiders, his language was a thing that he wanted to keep for himself and not share with the outsiders. Or it could have been that he was like the children of my colleagues: he desired a national identity, and resented being made to speak his ‘provincial’ sounding language, a tongue that tied him to Changzhou, a city without any of the nationally famous sights possessed by the hometowns of some of his classmates.
I am not sure to what extent that student is typical of other Changzhou people. I have never had a problem communicating with people in Mandarin in Changzhou, and never had the same sense that they would rather speak their own dialect that I had often in Sichuan. Once when I was talking about Sichuan with a friend in Changzhou, I said that I thought Sichuan people were often proud of their identity and language. He seemed a bit confused. I said that, for example, even in children’s classes, students would speak to me in Sichuan dialects. “Maybe they can’t speak Mandarin? Perhaps if they’ve been raised by their grandparents, they don’t really know how to speak Mandarin.”
“Yeah that’s possible. But I do also think they weren’t even trying. They wanted to speak the Sichuan dialect, it seemed to me like they were proud of it.”
“I don’t know… In places like Shanghai and Beijing people, where the economy is more developed and people look down on outsiders, the people are proud of their language. But not in places like Sichuan, or here…” He found the idea strange that a place poorer than Changzhou could be proud of its language.
The vast amount of new housing of course signals the arrival of new people. At the end of 2006, Sohu News reported that number of legal temporary migrant residents in the greater Changhzou area was 1.43 million, next to a ‘local’ population of about 4.13 million. The exact numbers are extremely difficult to calculate due to the mobility of the migrant population and the migrant figure also does not appear to include professional migrants who have been granted a local Chanzhou ID card and permanent residency. A man once said to me that in the Hutang area of the Wujin district near where I live, migrants outnumber locals two to one. A Baidu discussion forum poster makes the following comment:
“It feels as if there are outsiders everywhere. There must be 2 million, they’re like ants. What do reckon they are all doing? Can they build a more perfect city??? –my God” “我觉得常州到处多是外地人,我觉得有200万,和蚂蚁一样,你说来这么多外地人干什么?他们能把常州建设的更美好>>>>???My god~”
As this comment indicates, the same tensions flourish in Changzhou that exist in wealthy regions everywhere where a large population of migrants does the jobs that local people are mostly unwilling to do. In Changzhou’s case, this is perhaps compounded by the inferiority complex, which some argue the city suffers from. One Jiangsu blogger writes: “Because it can’t get out of the shadow of Suzhou and Wuxi, the city really looks down on people from the north of Jiangsu.” “因为走不出苏州无锡的阴影，所以特别看不起江北人。”
However, it is not only people from farming families in poorer inland provinces and the north of Jiangsu who come to Changzhou. The city’s extraordinary economic boom has also attracted professional middle-class migrants from every corner of the country. Certainly about half of the Chinese people I know here come from outside the city (not including my students, almost all of whom come from outside). And in addition to tension, this it creates the possibilities for multiple confusions with regards to identity.
A student once told my colleague that Changzhou locals look down upon students from outside. As evidence she said that people in shops are rude to her. I heard similar complaints in Sichuan and I have few doubts that in most places of the world people’s first encounters with a strange place are marked by an impression that it is not as friendly as the place where they grew up. But in Changzhou the situation of my colleague’s student is complicated somewhat, because if more one quarter of the city’s population is a temporary migrant worker, and many of them do service work, then a very significant proportion of the people working in shops must also come from the outside. Perhaps the student and the shop-assistants both mistake each other for locals, and believing that locals are prejudiced against outsiders acted on the assumption that the other looks down upon them. Or perhaps the shop assistants would very much like to be locals, and act accordingly. [this idea has been stongly disputed by a reader, but I maintain that it is possible, even if it might not happen often --JL]
When I describe the differences between living in Changzhou and living in Sichuan, I often say that due to the migrant population, Changzhou people are much better at speaking Mandarin, and much more willing to speak it. On more than a few occasions this has drawn the comment that the local Changzhou language is endangered. Two of my colleagues have told me that their children are unwilling to speak the Changzhou language: “they say it sounds too provincial.” Talking about this, some people sound concerned, others resigned and others unsure of what attitude to take. My students here are different from those in Sichuan in that here I mostly hear them using Mandarin to communicate with each other. In Sichuan, the college I worked at ran poster campaigns in vain attempts to achieve such a situation. Granted, in Sichuan there was a strong sense of a Sichuan provincial dialect that does not exist in Jiangsu. I have never heard anybody speak of Jiangsu language; people usually define speech according to city. However, as far as actual linguistic variation goes, the descriptions of people in Sichuan and Jiangsu indicate that both provinces are similar in that speech varies from locale to locale according to distance. The students in Suining, though, would just leap across such linguistic variations and speak what they assumed to be a general Sichuan language. In a class in Changzhou, I once asked a girl from Suzhou and a boy from Changzhou if they could understand each other’s dialects. The whole class was curious. It seemed none of them knew; none of them had ever tried to use their city’s language with someone from Changzhou. The boy in question shrunk back from their curiosity. “You won’t understand,” he said in Mandarin. The others urged him to try. “She won’t…” Then he uttered a quick, short sentence. “See, you didn’t understand, right?” The others looked at her. She nodded, “I can understand most things” she said. But it was clear that, at least for my Changzhou student, Changzhou language wasn’t something that could be used to communicate with outsiders. He seemed not to want it even to be possible. Perhaps for him, living in a part of his local city that was dominated by outsiders, his language was a thing that he wanted to keep for himself and not share with the outsiders. Or it could have been that he was like the children of my colleagues: he desired a national identity, and resented being made to speak his ‘provincial’ sounding language, a tongue that tied him to Changzhou, a city without any of the nationally famous sights possessed by the hometowns of some of his classmates.
I am not sure to what extent that student is typical of other Changzhou people. I have never had a problem communicating with people in Mandarin in Changzhou, and never had the same sense that they would rather speak their own dialect that I had often in Sichuan. Once when I was talking about Sichuan with a friend in Changzhou, I said that I thought Sichuan people were often proud of their identity and language. He seemed a bit confused. I said that, for example, even in children’s classes, students would speak to me in Sichuan dialects. “Maybe they can’t speak Mandarin? Perhaps if they’ve been raised by their grandparents, they don’t really know how to speak Mandarin.”
“Yeah that’s possible. But I do also think they weren’t even trying. They wanted to speak the Sichuan dialect, it seemed to me like they were proud of it.”
“I don’t know… In places like Shanghai and Beijing people, where the economy is more developed and people look down on outsiders, the people are proud of their language. But not in places like Sichuan, or here…” He found the idea strange that a place poorer than Changzhou could be proud of its language.
2007年6月6日星期三
Building the New World 1
The New Past and the New Future
Many Chinese cities are experiencing a construction boom, but I have been to few where, like Changzhou, I got the feeling that the city was not just being re-built, but that a completely new city was being built, largely over what was farm land until several years ago.
Even the city’s 5000 years of history is still being built, in the form of an‘old town’ in the suburbs. In several years, that old town will, no doubt, look like Nanjing’s Fuzimiao district. It will boast an atmosphere full of ‘dynamic fusions’ of ‘traditional pasts’ with the neon soaked smells of cooking sausages and dotted with special sights to photograph. Now, the scaffolding is only just off the old buildings that have colonized what was agricultural land on the city’s edge until several years ago. Among them are odd pieces that are genuinely old –three gates salvaged from urban re-construction elsewhere. Its location next to Yancheng Park, which contains an archeological site traceable to the Spring and Autumn Period, will also lend the newly constructed village some amount of credibility.
Changzhou has been highlighted twice by the CCTV news program ‘focus’ (jiaodian fangtan) for its failure to preserve any significant amount of its inner city heritage. I have heard people complain about this several times, and although Changzhou can hardly be unique in China in this respect, this failure is perhaps more galling due to the fame of heritage sites in nearby Suzhou, Nanjing and Zhenjiang. A resulting sense of embarrassment perhaps explains the zeal behind the city’s twin ‘heritage’ construction projects of the new Yancheng old town and also a gigantic, 200 million RMB tower to accompany the temple in the city’s centre. The latter was completed in time for the May holiday in 2007 and ludicrously promoted as ‘China’s Number One Buddhist Tower’ (中华第一大佛塔) (sometimes even ‘Asia’s Number One’). The tower does have a historical precedent, which was destroyed in the remote past. The vice-general manager of the company responsible for its construction explained in a press interview that the head monk and the city government decided to recreate the long vanished structure “in honour of the prosperity of our times, and transmit Buddhist culture” ( http://post.baidu.com/f?kz=154480361 )
Such extravagance almost inevitably leads to criticisms, such as one forum poster’s comment that Changzhou has consistently done worse than Suzhou or Wuxi. Allegedly, Changzhou’s development has been characterized by great attention paid to fantasies, like the ‘Number One Buddhist Tower’ and talk of a “super-city” future, while no attention is given to the city’s realities, such as the torn down old centre. “我们是“实事虚做，虚事实做。”这和前几年的创建特大型城市、如今的天宁开光，都是典型的“虚事实做”。近几年前后北岸等地，拆真文物选假文董，就是典型的“实事虚做” (Link to discussion of tower).
Yancheng is only about 15 minutes bike ride to there from where I live, in a University City –a city said to contain 100,000 students, which was also built only five years ago. That bike ride passes several large wastelands, the sites of a future hospital, future residential areas, parks and of course several future shopping malls. These building sites are flanked by walls coated in large billboards plastered with smiling model citizens, promising a happy, educated and wealthy future with enough space to gaze out on one’s own over parkland and fields of fruit trees. Many of the billboards seem calculated to appeal to women more than men, perhaps hinting at the increased role of women in middle-class family decision making. One, for example, shows a literally high-flying and unattached single woman poised wistfully above a sparkling metropolis.
Many Chinese cities are experiencing a construction boom, but I have been to few where, like Changzhou, I got the feeling that the city was not just being re-built, but that a completely new city was being built, largely over what was farm land until several years ago.
Even the city’s 5000 years of history is still being built, in the form of an‘old town’ in the suburbs. In several years, that old town will, no doubt, look like Nanjing’s Fuzimiao district. It will boast an atmosphere full of ‘dynamic fusions’ of ‘traditional pasts’ with the neon soaked smells of cooking sausages and dotted with special sights to photograph. Now, the scaffolding is only just off the old buildings that have colonized what was agricultural land on the city’s edge until several years ago. Among them are odd pieces that are genuinely old –three gates salvaged from urban re-construction elsewhere. Its location next to Yancheng Park, which contains an archeological site traceable to the Spring and Autumn Period, will also lend the newly constructed village some amount of credibility.
Changzhou has been highlighted twice by the CCTV news program ‘focus’ (jiaodian fangtan) for its failure to preserve any significant amount of its inner city heritage. I have heard people complain about this several times, and although Changzhou can hardly be unique in China in this respect, this failure is perhaps more galling due to the fame of heritage sites in nearby Suzhou, Nanjing and Zhenjiang. A resulting sense of embarrassment perhaps explains the zeal behind the city’s twin ‘heritage’ construction projects of the new Yancheng old town and also a gigantic, 200 million RMB tower to accompany the temple in the city’s centre. The latter was completed in time for the May holiday in 2007 and ludicrously promoted as ‘China’s Number One Buddhist Tower’ (中华第一大佛塔) (sometimes even ‘Asia’s Number One’). The tower does have a historical precedent, which was destroyed in the remote past. The vice-general manager of the company responsible for its construction explained in a press interview that the head monk and the city government decided to recreate the long vanished structure “in honour of the prosperity of our times, and transmit Buddhist culture” ( http://post.baidu.com/f?kz=154480361 )
Such extravagance almost inevitably leads to criticisms, such as one forum poster’s comment that Changzhou has consistently done worse than Suzhou or Wuxi. Allegedly, Changzhou’s development has been characterized by great attention paid to fantasies, like the ‘Number One Buddhist Tower’ and talk of a “super-city” future, while no attention is given to the city’s realities, such as the torn down old centre. “我们是“实事虚做，虚事实做。”这和前几年的创建特大型城市、如今的天宁开光，都是典型的“虚事实做”。近几年前后北岸等地，拆真文物选假文董，就是典型的“实事虚做” (Link to discussion of tower).
Yancheng is only about 15 minutes bike ride to there from where I live, in a University City –a city said to contain 100,000 students, which was also built only five years ago. That bike ride passes several large wastelands, the sites of a future hospital, future residential areas, parks and of course several future shopping malls. These building sites are flanked by walls coated in large billboards plastered with smiling model citizens, promising a happy, educated and wealthy future with enough space to gaze out on one’s own over parkland and fields of fruit trees. Many of the billboards seem calculated to appeal to women more than men, perhaps hinting at the increased role of women in middle-class family decision making. One, for example, shows a literally high-flying and unattached single woman poised wistfully above a sparkling metropolis.
While the slogans on the walls of the villages around Changzhou still exhort local families to follow the one-child future of the 1980s and 90s, those billboards advertise a new future of two child families for those middle class citizens who will inhabit the new housing.
I was once present during a conversation on this subject of university graduates and potential parents of two child families. Their general conclusion was that it would simply be too expensive to have two children: they were under no illusions that the utopia promised by billboards was likely to be cheap. A friend told me once that to get married in his hometown Jiangyin, near Changzhou, a middle-class man’s family would need at least 700,000 RMB: the costs of the wedding plus the costs of a down-payment on an apartment. A different friend once commented that, although gap between rich and poor is perhaps greater in Nanjing, Nanjing’s upper-class is less inclined to flaunt its wealth than Changzhou’s. “Here, they really like to show off… They want to let other people know that they are a boss, but you can understand why… here some of the people with money only have a high-school education, maybe only a primary school education, so it’s more important for them to show others that the own companies.” When I arrived here, a lot about Changhzou's wealthy seemed snobbish to me, and the advertising directed at them seemed like a naked appeal to this sobbishness. But I don't think it should be understood as the product of a particularly Chinese materialism. Rather it is almost the opposite. In a context in which a education (not wealth) is regarded as a primary marker of personal quality and prestige, the conspicuous consumption of the new Changzhou wealthy is the natural response of those without much education to those who would look at them as the peasants.
2007年6月3日星期日
This Blog and Being a Foreigner Writing About China
This blog began when I started writing about some of the places I have lived in China and experiences I had in them. I write mostly for my own sake, to preserve memories and because I find writing about things the best way to spark new ideas. Putting what I have written on a blog was a secondary step that I took after some time of mental swaying.
Most of the things I write about are about local places in China. There are some fantastic things written about China as a nation, but personally I'm more interested in reading about specific places and cultures within this nation
One of the most universal of all the shared human experiences is probably that of picking up slices of wisdom from a kung-fu master. It is a bit like the over-indulged on proverbial box of chocolates: Urma Thurman got some convoluted story about Superman from Bill. I think I got a slightly better one from the man who taught me kung-fu in New Zealand. “The world’s best martial artists, the reason that they're so good, one of the reasons anyway, is that when they see someone doing martial arts, they don't think about who is better. They just think about what they can learn from them. Even if the person has only done martial arts for a short time, maybe that person can do something which they can't." I not only agree, but would suggest that it is applicable to almost everything.
Does this really need stressing? I think it perhaps does when 'I'm-the-local-expert-ism' is one of the most destructive attitudes sometimes displayed by foreigners in China (and probably most other countries too). In Rivertown, Peter Hessler writes of his displeasure about not being acknowledged by two Danish women in a restaurant. "In Fuling, I wasn't a tourist and to have other waiguoren treat me as if I had violated their solitude didn't please me." But why they should have felt compelled to pay more attention to him than any of the other people in the restaurant, I'm not sure. "I was resolved not to help [with ordering food] until they acknowledged me. (p. 348)" Later the waitress apparently asked him to translate, and so full of rage was he because the Danish hadn't treated him as anybody special, that he felt like ordering them a plate of hot peppers. But perhaps the reason they hadn't asked him to help was because they didn't care what they ate or perhaps they thought it would be more fun to try to order on their own. Perhaps just the reason they didn't want to say hello, was because they knew he only wanted to show off his special local knowledge and language skills. Or perhaps they had met people like Hessler in every town they had passed through and found them to be all equally irritating.
It is almost certain that you know things about China that I don't, even if you've never been to China. Someone who's stayed for one day in any of the places I've lived and written about probably knows at least a few things I don't. I do speak reasonable Chinese (with a huge foreign accent) and can and do read Chinese books (slowly). But that doesn't make me an expert at Chinese people or culture.
Most of the things I write about are about local places in China. There are some fantastic things written about China as a nation, but personally I'm more interested in reading about specific places and cultures within this nation
One of the most universal of all the shared human experiences is probably that of picking up slices of wisdom from a kung-fu master. It is a bit like the over-indulged on proverbial box of chocolates: Urma Thurman got some convoluted story about Superman from Bill. I think I got a slightly better one from the man who taught me kung-fu in New Zealand. “The world’s best martial artists, the reason that they're so good, one of the reasons anyway, is that when they see someone doing martial arts, they don't think about who is better. They just think about what they can learn from them. Even if the person has only done martial arts for a short time, maybe that person can do something which they can't." I not only agree, but would suggest that it is applicable to almost everything.
Does this really need stressing? I think it perhaps does when 'I'm-the-local-expert-ism' is one of the most destructive attitudes sometimes displayed by foreigners in China (and probably most other countries too). In Rivertown, Peter Hessler writes of his displeasure about not being acknowledged by two Danish women in a restaurant. "In Fuling, I wasn't a tourist and to have other waiguoren treat me as if I had violated their solitude didn't please me." But why they should have felt compelled to pay more attention to him than any of the other people in the restaurant, I'm not sure. "I was resolved not to help [with ordering food] until they acknowledged me. (p. 348)" Later the waitress apparently asked him to translate, and so full of rage was he because the Danish hadn't treated him as anybody special, that he felt like ordering them a plate of hot peppers. But perhaps the reason they hadn't asked him to help was because they didn't care what they ate or perhaps they thought it would be more fun to try to order on their own. Perhaps just the reason they didn't want to say hello, was because they knew he only wanted to show off his special local knowledge and language skills. Or perhaps they had met people like Hessler in every town they had passed through and found them to be all equally irritating.
It is almost certain that you know things about China that I don't, even if you've never been to China. Someone who's stayed for one day in any of the places I've lived and written about probably knows at least a few things I don't. I do speak reasonable Chinese (with a huge foreign accent) and can and do read Chinese books (slowly). But that doesn't make me an expert at Chinese people or culture.
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