Reason Number 11 - Crossing the Line for a Penny

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 21
"China has the world’s fastest-growing economy, but many millions in China’s countryside have been left behind, forming the ranks of the 1st Army of Instability.

In 1978, before China reformed its economic policies, the country had 250 million people who lacked adequate food and clothing. By the end of 2005, that number had dropped to 23.6 million. By 2007 that figure had dropped a little further, to 21.48 million. In addition to these people, defined as living in ‘absolute poverty’ there were another 35.5 million in the ‘low-income’ category, said Zhang Baowen, vice-minister of agriculture.

It is easy to be impressed with the drop of poverty accomplished no matter which accounting method is used. However, even under the best circumstances, there are still 23 million living in absolute poverty. That’s equal to two-thirds of the population of Canada or one-third of the population of the UK. It’s more than the entire population of Australia – or the State of Florida. That’s twenty-three million citizens who cannot even afford an extra change of clothes or nutritious daily food. Or afford school fees for their children. Or a simple visit to a doctor."

ChinaBounder comments:

I wonder what it’s like to be poor? I wonder if any reader of this blog knows what it’s like to be poor?

Sure, I’ve had to count the days to the next paycheck from time to time, after, say, too many dinners out in a month, too much temptation from the wine list of Le Garcon Chinoise, Shanghai’s finest restaurant.

But true poverty? No, never. Nor, I suspect, any of the readers of this blog. All you readers read English. In China, that’s the language of privilege. If you speak English, you’ve been lucky enough to have an education. You’ve got options. English is the language of empowerment, of success. English is caste.

The mere fact you are here, you are online -- that sets you above hundreds of millions of people. You're not poor.

Certainly not the kind of poor that sends so many of the elderly out into the streets to scavenge for rubbish to recycle. The kind of poor that makes every day a struggle, the kind of poor that saps the joy out of existence, that wraps itself around your soul and sleeps there.

And what must that poverty be like when you’re surrounded by flash cars and glittering buildings, when your great motherland has (though you likely don’t know it) the largest pile of foreign reserves in the world? When it has forty billion dollars to spend on the Olympics, seventy billion to spend on the army, and untold billions, wealth beyond counting, diverted into the pockets of its corrupt officials?

I’ve read the statistics. I’ve seen the pictures. Worse, I’ve seen the people – seen them every day in Shanghai, the people with nothing. I know what poverty is. But can I feel what poverty is? Hardly.

Can you?

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 22
"Just how serious is China about poverty reduction? In 2005, the central government assigned about US$1.7 billion for poverty reduction. In the same year, it said it spent more than US$30 billion on its armed forces. The Rand Corporation, a US-based nonprofit think-tank, estimated the true figure was closer to US$70 billion per year.

In China’s western regions, home to about 400 million people, 20% of the population cannot afford hospital fees and more than a third cannot afford high school fees. Sending a child to college took 74% of an average family’s entire income. Again –74%! Illiteracy, another side-effect of poverty, was at 28%.

These millions of ‘low income’ individuals exist in something like a state of limbo. Hovering just above absolute poverty, they face a daily struggle to keep their sanity and their bodies functioning for the next day of work.

We have seen these members of the 1st Army clustered around the single television in their village, which is often perched on the shelf of a store owner’s establishment. They watch in disbelief at the flickering pictures from Shanghai or Beijing, and they see the glittering towers of modernity. Programs, commercials and reports show cars, restaurants and the happy and content life of the upwardly mobile new middle classes.

They do not see their own life. They see the good life.

One day, when they finally realize this good life is not on another planet, but is in their own country, and that the pictures on the screen represent now, not some promised future, they will begin to march, the first of the armies that spell a colossal threat to China."

Don't forget, even for a moment - every chance you get when in China -- 'T' for Tibet and 'X' for Xinjiang.

Reason Number 10 - The Builders of Myths, the Tellers of Tales

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 19
“The Party has an irresponsible approach to history as part of its modus operandi, consistently fabricating stories to glorify its own actions, often at the expense of others. The true ‘Long March,’ for example, bears little resemblance to the internationally famous version the Party gives of it, and the many mistakes of Mao Zedong, which led to the death of tens of millions, are airbrushed out of the official record, at least within Chinese history books.

The government claims that “China has never launched pre-emptive strikes against any country. It is not part of its defensive ministry strategy.” This statement, made in blustering denial of Pentagon worries concerning China’s huge military spending, is simply a lie. China’s invasion of Korea in the 1950s was clearly a pre-emptive strike, and its attack on Vietnam in 1979 was wholly unprovoked.

With its upbringing of historical falsehoods, it is perhaps no wonder that myths and lies are virtual ‘truth’ for the government of China today.”

ChinaBounder comments:

Here’s another thing I like to do in class – to play the ‘China is a peace-loving country’ card. It’s a simple enough trick, and pretty childish too. But it’s fun.

It’s easy enough to get into this game – a mere mention of America will give rise to disapproving comments about the way that nation swaggers around the world. And pretty often a student will mention Britain, yapping along like a little dog behind the States. Fair enough.

‘But China is a peace-loving nation, yes?’
‘Yes’ reply all the students.
‘So China would never attack another nation?’
‘Never!’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not even a pre-emptive strike?’
‘No!’
Then I fake up a ruminative pause, before the big reveal. ‘Ah. So… what about the Sino-Indian war? The Korean War? The attack on Vietnam?’

Now this might set off a faint recollection in some people’s minds – some of them think back to high school and the single paragraph they might have read in school on some of these wars.

But really that makes no difference at all. Fact is, they do not need to have heard of any of these wars. Because the answer is always the same. ‘They’ – meaning the other country – ‘started it.’

That’s always the way. ‘It wasn’t us. It was them.’

Now, sure, the Sino-Indian War was an obscure mess on both sides. But that is not the point. The point is there is no willingness to countenance debate. There’s no willingness to even consider another point of view. No, sir! ‘They started it. They attacked first.’

The Korean War is perhaps a more interesting example, because here I can really press my students into thinking in shades of grey – something they find pretty hard when it comes to analyzing their own country.

Often I’ll begin with a potted history of that particular war. I’ll say how the North attacked the South, and here most students will agree that was wrong. They still feel they’re in familiar territory. One country should not attack another. Yes. They’re pretty sure of that. Black and white.

Then I’ll talk about the UN response, using force to drive the North Koreans out of the South. ‘Right or wrong?’ I’ll ask. ‘Right’ they will most often say. They like the UN. (I save how China has several times blocked the UN from helping stop war crimes for another class.)

Usually when I do this routine I’ll draw up a map of the Korean peninsula on the board. So now I’ll put the UN forces at the 38th parallel. ‘Should they stop?,’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

So there we are, united in righteous indignation, watching as they cross the parallel and barrel into the North.

Then I put the UN forces up against the Yalu River. ‘What happened then?’ I ask.

‘China attacked.’

‘Hmm… isn’t that a bit of a … pre-emptive strike?’

A ripple of discomfort here.

But I do not press this – instead I get the class back on-side by saying how the Chinese then forced the US Eighth Army to make the longest retreat in American military history.

That goes down well.

Next, I put the Chinese at the 38th parallel. ‘What happened?’

Here the most usual answer is silence.

Silence, or someone will tell me, ‘China stopped there.’

Because, of course, that’s the default answer. China can do no wrong.

‘Not so. China crossed the border and captured the South Korean capital.’

More discomfort here.

Then the killer question.

‘So, was China wrong?’

This they mostly cannot cope with. They know they’ve said the UN was wrong to cross the parallel. But they just can’t bring themselves to apply the same yardstick to their own nation.

The most common way they break this impasse?

‘You must be wrong. It cannot have happened. Your history books were telling lies.’

And so then to 1979. Now for most Chinese people, 1979 is a year to be proud of, for it was the year when Deng Xiaoping embarked on China’s ‘opening up and reform’ program (also known in regular language as ‘Behaving with the common sense you’d expect from anyone over the age of 10.’)

But 1979 is also the year that China attacked Vietnam. And again, I get the usual bullshit. ‘Vietnam attacked us first’ they’ll say, oblivious to the fact that this is akin to a mouse ‘attacking’ a gorilla.

And so I lay it out. How Vietnam attacked Cambodia to try to end the insanities of Pol Pot – how China had supported Pol Pot, paid him and armed him. How millions died thanks to Chinese cash. How China decided to ‘punish’ Vietnam for trying to stop the genocide.

They know nothing of it, nothing at all. They cannot accept that China does the same shit as so many other countries. Again, they tell me I must be wrong, that this must be Western propaganda. I urge them to research it themselves, to look beyond the textbooks of their own nation. But I know they never do.

Lies are comforting. Lies are honey.

Myths give a certain sort of strength. Myths are steroids for the soul.

It’s easy to believe the Party line.

Much harder to open your mind and try to consider both sides.

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 20
“China applies its culture of myths and lies not just to territories it has colonized, such as its ‘autonomous’ regions Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang, but to those it seeks to colonize, such as the vast areas of maritime territory it claims sole right to.

On 25th May 2007, media reports announced ‘conducive’ talks between China and Japan concerning territory in the East China Sea which both countries laid claim to. The territory in question lies midway between China and Japan, and is the site of several large gas fields. Japan had proposed a median line giving each nation roughly half of the disputed area. China’s proposed line pushed significantly past the median line suggested by Japan, putting the gas fields in their entirety on the Chinese side, leaving Japan with nothing.

The Chinese side was represented by Hu Zhengyue, Director of the Asian Affairs Department of China’s Foreign Ministry. He said the talks were a ‘new beginning’ and said China was ready to make joint efforts with Japan to push forward consultation. In another article published on the same day, Feng Zhikai, a senior researcher at China’s Institute of Japanese Studies, said that ‘It is fair to say China’s emphasis on cooperation in energy development has been a prominent feature in the development of bilateral relations.’

The very next day Chinese media issued another report, this time quoting Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman. Jiang said ‘that China wanted to promote the negotiation process and achieve a joint development plan at an early date, and reiterated China’s opposition to a demarcation line proposed by Japan, adding that ‘China has not and will never accept the median line and will not accept the median line as the basis for discussing joint development.’

Jiang Yu’s words made it clear China had no intention whatsoever of backing down from its greedy and rapacious desire to exploit the gas fields to their utmost, sharing them with no-one.”

Just a few more days until the Olympics begins. Will you be there? You know what to do, right? Make a 'T' sign for Tibet, an 'X' sign for Xinjiang.

Reason Number 9 - The Largest Box of Toy Soldiers in the World

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.’ Excerpt 17.

“`The Chinese army started its IT revolution in the 1990s’ said media in 2007. ‘Digital technology allows commanders to electronically monitor the borders right around the clock even while cooks in the barracks are rustling up some tasty grub using a recipe from an e-Book consulted on a scr'een in the kitchen.’

‘With regiments … far from towns, soldiers used to have to travel a long way just to buy a tube of toothpaste. But in January 2007, an online shopping site appeared on the district’s military LAN -- and now a soldier staring out at the hillside in a remote border post can simply click on a website to whistle up his favorite brand of rice cakes’ said reports.

But perhaps worried that too much hi-tech would corrupt the troops, state media also announced that ‘the tradition virtues of frugality, discipline and readiness to serve the people remain unchanged among the troops.’ One can almost see young lads vying for the hard-to-acquire ‘frugality’ merit badge.

To remind new recruits of the importance of these virtues, members of the PLA are shown the ‘classic’ Chinese film romantically called ‘Guards Under Neon Light.’ This film, made some forty years ago, details the virtues of the PLA’s Eighth Company while stationed on Shanghai’s famous Nanjing road. The film shows how the ‘soldiers who patrolled on a dazzling road of Shanghai…resisted various lures of the booming city and remained frugal, well-disciplined and ready to serve people.’"

ChinaBounder comments:

The Communist Party’s attempt at bait and switch. Worried about the tens of billions of dollars the CPC is spending on the Chinese army? Worried that the troops are being used in Mini-Tiananmen Squares all over the nation?

Hey! We got rice cakes! We got the internet! We got stirring, patriotic films!

So that’s all right. Let’s forget about the other stuff, shall we?

It’s all part of the way the CPC frames what passes for public debate in China. Trivial. Infantile. Bipolar. Such and such is bad. So and so is good.

There are no shades of grey in China.

But indeed sometimes it’s good be stark, to be emphatic.

So here’s a stark tale.

The classes I teach are pretty poor value for money, I have to admit. I spent, say, six months or a year refining my class style, finding the routines that worked best; and after that I have always just done the same shtick, every class. I always begin with the same routine, coming into the first class and doing a whole thing about ‘Why is no one here talking English?’ In eight years of teaching I have never once walked into a class and heard the students practicing English with each other. Chinese language all the way. It just never occurs to students that, given they are in a class to practice spoken English, every else in the class will have a certain level of spoken skill, and thus be a great practice partner.

So I give ‘em a little lecture about that. I tell them the truth, which is seldom wise – but here it is, for what it’s worth. ‘If you just spent an hour each day talking English to a friend you’d improve fast. You don’t need to come to this class. You don’t need to pay this school’s high fees.’ That’s the boiled down version, by the way. In class I make it at least five times as long as that, just to run down the clock.

Then I talk about how to improve written English, and I use newspaper headlines from China’s English language media as talking points, showing how to get a conversation going on that basis.

Naturally, I focus on the headlines that interest me – the stories of corruption, pollution, politics. And I often work on death penalty stories, a fairly common item in the paper given the glee with which China’s government washes its hands in the blood of its people.

So the story will be of some hapless guy being put to death by the state, and I lead the conversation into a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the death penalty.

Most students are bloodthirsty. The death penalty’s fine by them – helps keep order in society, they say, suggesting that without the death penalty Chinese society would degenerate into violence and chaos.

Then I say, “Here is a statistic for you..” and write up on the board, “In 2006, China executed more people than the rest of the world put together.”

“What do you think of that?” I ask.

Some students look uneasy. Some point out “But China is so much bigger than any other country, and not all nations use the death penalty.” True enough.

Then I say, “But in fact what I just wrote on the board is not completely true…” and here I will often observe one or two self-satisfied smiles, as if to suggest “He is about to admit this is more Western anti-China propaganda…”

On the board, I add to the end of the statement “In 2006, China executed more people than the rest of the world put together…” the words, “…in the previous five years.”

This, at least, creates a deeper ripple of discomfort, yet even so many of the students will still support it. They know the government is corrupt, the police are corrupt, the courts are corrupt. But they still support the mass executions, the show trials, the public executions.

And so to the point of this entry.

A couple of years ago, at the end of one class, a student stayed behind to talk to me. Turned out he’d been in the armed services, though whether it was the People’s Liberation Army or the People’s Armed Police Force I confess I cannot now recall.

He told me he had participated in an execution.

“I got about half an hour’s notice” he said. “My superior came into the dorm and told me and the other guys to get ready for the duty. We prepared and went to the place where it was going to happen. They brought in the guy. He was utterly terrified. We lined up and each of us aimed our gun at him. We were given the order to shoot, and we shot. He collapsed, but he did not die. So then my commanding officer told me to use the … what it is called, knife on the gun?”

“Bayonet.”

“Yes, bayonet. He told me to use my bayonet to kill the guy. So I went up to him and stabbed him in the neck and then the chest. Then he died.”

This student was around 26 or 27. He told me this story with no more emotion than he might have recounted killing a chicken at the market.

“How did you feel about it?” I asked.

“It was my job.”

“What did the guy do? What was his crime, I mean?”

“I don’t know. They never told you that.”

“Didn't that bother you?”

“No. They told me to kill someone, I killed them. That was my job.”

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.’ Excerpt 18.

“A more truthful ‘healthy’ view of the PLA might be to reflect that since 1949 over 300,000 members of the army have died on active service. This is according to government figures which are, naturally, much lower than outside independent estimates. According to Beijing, for example, the official death toll in the Korean War was around 140,000 deaths. But the historian Jung Chang, citing an unofficial statement by Deng Xiaoping, puts the number at 400,000.

When a soldier dies for his country it should mean something, serve a purpose, or gain freedoms. What do China’s 300,000 military deaths mean? What purpose have they served, what freedoms have they gained?

China still vilifies Japan for its military past. But it can be suggested that Japan’s recent military history since 1945 is far more successful than China’s. In the same decades that China has lost at the very least 300,000 soldiers, Japan had no military casualties at all.

None.

Zero.”

Traveling to China soon? Have a real impact -- 'T' for Tibet and 'X' for Xinjiang. Every time you're near a camera, don't forget to make the signs.

Reason Number 8 - The Godless

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.’ Excerpt 15.

“One strand of Chinese belief well-exposed in Western media is Falun Gong, which at this date is still totally outlawed. Part cult, part religion, part exercise, the Falun Gong followers fatally attracted attention to themselves when using an internationally recognized method of religious protest -- the non-violent demonstration. The crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999 when members of the group gathered near Zhongnanhai, the residence compound of many of China’s top leaders in Beijing, to protest about perceived unfair treatment. This unified display of political protest outside Party control terrified China’s leaders. Within weeks, China banned the movement with extreme prejudice.

Amnesty International reported soon after that 'Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been arbitrarily detained by police, some of them repeatedly for short periods, and put under pressure to renounce their beliefs. Many of them are reported to have been tortured or ill-treated in detention. Some practitioners have been detained in psychiatric hospitals. Those who have spoken out publicly about the persecution of practitioners since the ban have suffered harsh reprisals.' It has recently been alleged that many Falun Gong detainees who died in custody had been used to provide organs for transplant through organ harvesting.”

ChinaBounder comments:-

Fear.

Fear. Sheer, pure, fear; fear that at any moment the police might come, that you might be taken off to jail, beaten, tortured.

Fear. Fear that you cannot trust anyone, not your neighbors, not your friends, not even your family members.

Fear. Fear, because the whole of society hates and despises you, views you as an enemy of the state.

Fear. Fear that if anyone knows what you are – who you are – they will inform on you, betray you; and you will become one of the vanished.

Many groups have known this fear at different times in history. Jews. Gypsies. Homosexuals. Intellectuals. A death sentence always waiting, watching, hovering behind you simply because of who you are.

Today, in China, it is followers of Falun Gong who feel this fear.

Sure, Falun Gong is just as berserk as any other religion, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, whatever; it is all a bunch of dark ages fairy tales that impedes human progress. To be religious is to embrace ignorance.

But that is hardly a reason for persecution.

And it is persecution, persecution of the most brutal and horrible kind. And just like being Jewish in 1930s Germany, or a suspected ‘red’ in 1950s America, virtually the whole of Chinese society condones, even approves, the persecution.

This is why Falun Gong followers live a life of silence and terror.

Yet in a nation where telling the truth means prison, means pain, some Falun Gong supporters will talk. Not to their fellow Han, of course, but to people like me – foreigners. Just like the people of Xinjiang, like the Taiwanese, Falun Gong followers can speak the truth to foreigners. They can say what they believe, sure in the knowledge that they will not be informed on, will not be handed over to the police.

They cannot trust their countrymen. The risk is too huge. They cannot say what they are to any Han, no more than a Tibetan can tell a Han ‘Your country invaded mine,’ a Uighur can say ‘You are murdering my culture’ or a Taiwanese can burst into laughter at the preposterous, absurd notion their proud and praiseworthy nation ‘belongs’ to China. But to me – to any foreigner – they can speak clear.

And so I have met several of these despised and persecuted people. Some drew strength from their crazy beliefs, strength enough to leave China, and set up lives in other nations, countries where they get the basic human respect denied to them by the motherland.

I cannot forget one young woman I met, two or three years ago now. This was in a class, of course, and there was something … broken, snapped about her. There was a pallor to her skin, a timidity, a fear to her body language. She seemed too scared to even make eye contact with me, and she did not interact with the other students at all.

It bothered me, worried me. She was always the last to leave the class, sitting at her desk, pallid, passive, until the other students had all gone. So at the end of that course of lessons, I tried to get to know her. And, with the other students away, she began to open up a little – made eye-contact, spoke with a little more conviction.

She had spent a year in a labor camp, she told me, undergoing ‘re-education.’ She’d followed Falun Gong, and the State, with its tentacles, its informers everywhere, had found out. What life was like in the camp she would not say. But she did not need to. It was obvious – obvious from the pain and fear in her demeanor, obvious from her broken, shattered spirit.

Tortured, brutalized, destroyed. That’s what China had done to her. Violence, wrath and anger – and she would never be free, she knew it. China would never let her go. Monitored. Watched. Under surveillance. Made a pariah, an outcast in her own nation. And of course her family, her friends, anyone she talked to – they, too, would come under suspicion from the police, the security services – from guys who would be just as happy working in the Killing Fields as downtown Shanghai.

I wanted to keep in touch with her, wanted to reach out – wanted her to see that not all her fellow humans distrusted her. She gave me her phone number. I tried sending a few messages. Nothing came back.

This was, as I say, two or three years ago. I have never forgotten her. Not least because I now carry my own fear, my own worry. For in sending her even one sms message in English I put her in real danger. The police would have intercepted that message, traced it back to me (for the Chinese state will happily see its poorest starve while spending tens of millions of dollars on the most elaborate surveillance) – and would have persecuted her yet further for it. Talking to a foreigner! That was crime enough to put her right back in the labor camp.

I wonder where she is now. Is she even alive? Has she been put to death, has she taken her own life?

It bothers me.

But I cannot imagine it will bother many of my Han readers.

'Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great.' Excerpt 16.

‘Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism were ruthlessly suppressed for much of “New China’s” history. Today, however, the Communist Party has begun to embrace Confucius once more, using the philosopher to support its own target of ‘harmony’ – a sort of Confucius dressed in Marxist clothes. A communist Jesus.

What is noticeably absent is the Judeo-Christian ethic of doing good, of helping the less fortunate. In Chinese belief, both ancient and modern, wealth is a sign of heavenly blessings. Even Deng Xiaoping said ‘To get rich is glorious.’ Rather than wealth being seen as a mandate to help the poor, it is viewed as approbation from heaven. The wealthy man is the righteous man, often above reproach, as is demonstrated by the way some wealth-seekers in China disregard public welfare, environmental concerns, and often basic human morality. ‘Glorious’ in China has nothing to do with graceful.

Religion is comfort. That so many lives in China are devoid of comfort only increases the vacuum for the religions of the world to flow into. Although the Party has yet not imagined such a theoretical catastrophe, communism is not one of those religions.’

Not long now. The Olympics will soon be here. So - don't forget, 'T' for Tibet and 'X' for Xinjiang.