A Chat With the Global Times

Were you aware that Standard & Poor’s downgrade of U.S. credit heralds the fall of Western political systems? No? This Global Times editorial may have the weak  title of “World politics enters uncharted territory,” but it’s hard to miss what the author really wants to say with passages like:

The West can no longer cover up its problems. Large numbers of immigrants have poured into the West; an aging population is bringing escalating pressure on the economy; the rising of emerging powers is challenging Western dominance. However, the West only tries to deal with these problems by highlighting past achievements.

Sub in “China” for “the West” in that one and I think we’d have a publishable American editorial, no? Oh, Global Times, the U.S. has its troubles. So do we all, and it seems that we all like to avoid discussing them by debating the shortcomings of our frenemies.

Western countries are losing the authority of their system. All the major powers have their own problems. The world is losing its leading examples.

Who might take their place, Global Times?

It is hard to predict what this means for China. For the country, the key is to take control of the direction of its reform and avoid serious mistakes.

Well, kudos for the false modesty, Global Times. But what this editorial is building, even if with a number of twisted truths, is an unabashed narrative of Western decline and Chinese ascendance.

From the American press, I learned that the Chinese state is too authoritarian to survive and will soon collapse. Now, from the Chinese press, I learn that “the West” is equally unstable, no doubt soon to implode from sheer arrogance. Oh dear.

Where does this schadenfreude come from? Part of it is in history, and China’s long past of dealing with foreigners who took every opportunity to abuse the country, extract its wealth and demean its people. China’s resurging wealth and stability, then, is a hugely satisfying, and fair ending to a tragic story.

The only problem with that narrative is how blind it can make you to things that don’t fit in neatly. Like China’s own problems, the U.S’ own successes and good ideas. Is it so hard to admit that both nations have huge successes and failures? And both could learn from one another?

This Floating Life

Now the heavens and earth are the hostels of creation;

And time has seen a full hundred generations.

Ah, this floating life, like a dream…

True happiness is so rare!

— Li Bai, “On a Banquet with my Cousins on a Spring Night in the Peach Garden”, “春夜宴诸从弟桃园序.”

Tang poetry, full of brief but deep friendships and obsessive love for alcohol, has an affinity with expat life in modern China.

Last night I went out with some new friends. We went out for pizza, spoke English or Chinese depending on what we wanted to say, and went to a karaoke palace. As I rode home I watched the street vendors lining the street and felt that I was floating on the surface of this country, this life.

China is wonderful for me. It’s cheap. It’s fascinating. How much of expat joy is about the country’s culture, and how much of it is about the privilege we enjoy here?

A Chinese Sex Shop in a Typhoon

The remnants of Typhoon Muifa are pouring over Dalian today. The streets are rivers and my entire department is skipping work, since the whole area around my office building is flooded (Some people actually are going to work, but I’m not sure how exactly. Fords?)

On the way home from the grocery store, I noticed that the neighbourhood sex shop was still open. I’ve been curious about these shops for a while, but due to my reputation, as a foreign girl, of being promiscuous, I’ve avoided approaching them. But today nobody was around.

There are a couple of striking things about these shops: their tiny size and ubiquity. These mini-sex shops are scattered all over the city (there are about four or five in my neighbourhood alone). This is very unlike Montreal, where the sex shops can mostly be found on one block downtown.

The goods are probably easy for the shopkeepers to get, since China manufactures 70% of the world’s sex toys. Online porn may be censored, the state of sex ed may be miserable (a student told me that during the procedure of getting her marriage license, she had to watch a sex ed video for the first time in her life), but sex shops seem to be booming business in my neighborhood.

And in 2004, a survey showed that only 21% of Chinese men could find the clitoris…well, that suggests an enormous educational (and business) opportunity to me.

This is what I knew, but I hadn’t really prepared for the reality of what a sex shop looks like when it’s a mom-and-pop business in a poor country.

I yelled from outside, “Open or not?”

A lady poked her head out and said, “Come inside, come inside,” so I did…

This sex shop was about 4×4 meters. Two single beds were lined up on the floor and two more beds were suspended from the ceiling. On these beds sat the woman’s family (probably). There were a couple of middle-aged men, a second middle-aged woman, and a beautiful young girl, probably around six, looking rather grumpy. They were clearly packed in in order to wait out the typhoon – but the beds – did they live there as well?

The sex toys/porn were lined up on tiny shelves behind the bunks. I couldn’t really see clearly what they were. The woman asked, “Are you looking for —– (indecipherable Mandarin) or ———-?”

The family looked at me.

I said, “I’m sorry, my Mandarin isn’t too great. I was just curious about your store. I’ll come back another day when the weather is better.”

“Okay,” she said, beaming. I glanced at the little girl – she was staring determinedly into the middle distance.

Then I got the hell out of there. I might be curious about Chinese approaches to sex, but not curious enough to browse in front of a large group of strangers, probably a family.

One half of me says sex toys are just another commodity and it’s cool that the family can make a living this way…and sex toys are great things in their way. But what is it like for a little girl to grow up inside a sex store? Is she embarrassed? Are her friends or family? Is it a high social price to pay for a living?.

UPDATE:  For those of you who have arrived at this post looking to find sex shops in Dalian, just look for these characters: 成人用品, “adult useful items”…. they’re everywhere.

An Immodest Proposal on China’s Gender Imbalance

According to an article published two years ago in the Guardian, there were then over 32 million more men than women in China. The sex imbalance here is the largest in the world and is the worst among under-sixes.

Although gender testing ultrasounds before birth are illegal, the gender imbalance shows that the practice has continued, along with sex-selective abortion. So I sometimes ask my friends and acquaintances about the preference for sons.

I guessed that it was because men might still earn more money on average and would be better prepared to support their parents. Considering the one-child policy, it would be economically rational to choose a son.

When I ask the question, however, that’s not what people tell me. The answer that pops up the most often is a very simple one: “Tradition.”

One of my students, a lawyer, gave me that answer and explained what it meant to her. “At the Spring Festival,” she told me, “I go to my husband’s parents’ home. I don’t go to visit my own parents. And when my husband’s parents grow old, we will support them.”

The vast majority of Han Chinese society has, historically, been patrilocal – a new wife joins her husband’s family. Raising a daughter, if looked at from a financial perspective, was like an investment that would never grant you returns, since her labour and children would ultimately belong to her husband. Daughters change families, sons stay. Based on what my student tells me, this basic belief persists.

My students, just today, told me that when a couple marries, the groom generally buys the new house or apartment in which they will live – a sign of his and his family’s strong investment in the marriage.

Looked at from this perspective, a sex imbalance does not reflect differing career prospects but the way that marriage distributes wealth differentially between the sexes.

If husbands and wives were equal financial contributors to their marriages, and supported each set of parents equally, I bet that it would have a significant effect on China’s sex imbalance.

Censorship and Rudeness in China

When I began teaching here, I got this advice from both my boss and from an English teacher who teaches across the road: “Do not, do NOT, ever, bring up politics in the classroom.”

I saw that this was sensible advice (later, my students brought up politics themselves) but I resented it at the time.

Before I moved here, I decided that I would not censor my words. If I did – if, every day, I was constantly putting walls between my thoughts and what I expressed, I knew I wouldn’t be happy living here.

But lately there have been cracks in my attempt to be forthright. Today, in the client lounge, I picked up a book about Ai Weiwei. I was hopeless with the Chinese text but was looking through the photo section.

The lounge manager, a nice guy, came over and asked me what I was reading. He didn’t know who Ai was.

I decided not to shy away from the basic truth of Ai Weiwei’s story.

“He’s a famous artist,” I said. “He designed the Bird’s Nest in Beijing. But in the past few years, he has been defying and criticizing the government. He was arrested recently.”

“Ah,” said my friend. “Smart Chinese people never criticize the government.”

I laughed. I’ve read that the Chinese laugh when they feel embarrassed – and so do I.

“No, I’m serious,” said my friend.

I knew he was serious. I changed the subject, but the atmosphere stayed awkward.

The reason why I felt so uncomfortable, and the reason why my policy of self-censorship might not work out, is the gradient of privilege in that conversation.

I may not be afraid to speak my mind, but that’s because I have freedoms not everyone else has. Why feel proud about that?

Another Fake Apple Store in Lushun

This photo was snapped from a bus as I was heading back to Dalian from the small town of Lushun. I was surprised to see one of these fake stores in such a tiny city – really a district of Dalian.  

My LB didn`t believe it was fake, but luckily I had read Language Log and could reliably inform her that real Apple stores never put text on their storefronts. (Not that “Apple Orchard” was a convincing name). My LB gave me a hint as to why this store bothered to steal Apple’s store design: “If I realize something is fake,” she said, “I’ll never buy it.” (The merchandise might not necessarily be fake, actually, because Chinese stores are allowed to resell Apple stuff if they apply for a permit successfully. It’s the copying of the store design that’s illegal).

I hear officials have started cracking down on these stores back in Kunming. I don’t know how they’d manage in Dalian, because I’ve seen two or three since I got back to Dalian and I don’t even wander far from my apartment.

Things They Don’t Tell You in Chinese Class

Here is the situation I was prepared for when I first came here: 

When speaking Mandarin, I say something with the wrong tone and people don’t understand me.

[For anyone who isn’t aware: Mandarin has four tones. This means that any syllable changes its meaning depending on whether your voice rises, falls, dips or stays flat as you say it. Yange, said with dipping tones, means “strict,” while yange said with flat tones means “castrate”. It’s great fun when you get that one wrong.]

 Here’s the situation I didn’t prepare for:

I say something with the correct tone and people still don’t understand me.

The otherday I was chatting with a coworker and I said the word “swimming,” youyong. He didn’t understand so I mimed it. I assumed I’d just mixed up the tone but instead another coworker butted in. “She speaks Chinese better than you!” he said. “How come you didn’t understand her?”

Turns out I had pronounced the word “swimming” perfectly but my particular coworker speaks Northeast Chinese dialect and never really took to Standard Mandarin, (‘Standard Mandarin’ being, after all, just another regional dialect, specifically a Beijing accent). Thanks to his non-standard speech, the poor guy has to deal with a lot of teasing.  

(This linguistic emphasis on standardization also bleeds into English. People often ask me if their English pronunciation is “standard” and I, never sure how to answer, always say “yes.”)

At that point I was thinking..well..I could speak Beijing Chinese perfectly, get all my tones right, and it would still do me no good in how many areas and situations? No doubt this is common knowledge to anyone who’s spent some time here in China, but I’d studied Chinese in Canada and hadn’t yet processed this crucial adjustment. Another day, another frayed neuron…

Two Women and the One Child Policy

The first week I met my roommate, Anna, she took me on a tour of the neighbourhood while I peppered her with questions about her life. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” I asked, the words out of my mouth before I realized what the answer had to be. The one-child policy may not be perfectly enforced, but it reached almost all urban families like Anna’s.

Anna told me that she had missed having a brother or sister when she grew up (Anna herself is miles away from the “Little Emperor” stereotype of a spoiled only child) and she wanted to have two children: one boy and one girl.

Now Anna’s dream might come true. In the past, urban families who wanted a second child either had to keep the child hidden, take pay cuts or pay large fines. But now a humane modification to the One-Child Policy has been put in place: if you and your spouse are both only children, you may have two children of your own.

When Anna’s boyfriend broke up with her later that week, what hit Anna hardest was the fact that she had to delay her dream of getting married and having a family. “I ask for so little,” she said sadly, as her friends rubbed her shoulders

.

My xiao laoban or “little boss,” Jane, has a very different story. She’s 28 and happily married for two years. In conversation class today, work-life balance came up, and Jane and I stayed on the topic over lunch together.

I asked if Jane was pleased at the chance to have two children. “Ugh! I don’t want children!” she said, laughing, and explained, “they’re too much trouble, and definitely too expensive.” There is no free education in China, and LB would rather focus on her career than on paying a long string of tuition fees.

“But,” she added, “I think I will have children in a few years.” Jane might not want children for herself, but it turns out her husband, parents and in-laws all have a say in the matter. Jane’s parents deeply want grandchildren, and as an only child she is their one chance for them. Jane took it as inevitable that she would fulfil this obligation.

For all that the One Child Policy is draconian, it’s not only the state that coerces people.