A Holiday Message from the Chairman

"We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution. Don't make a fuss about a world war. At most people die...Half the population wiped out--this happened quite a few times in Chinese history."

- Mao: The Unknown Story, p. 439.

These are the words of Mao Tse-Tung, chairman and dictator of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. This frightening statement was made during his announcement of the infamous "Great Leap Forward" to the Communist Party congress in 1958 . What followed was the worst famine in human history which left 38 million Chinese dead.

As Mao puts it here, he was willing to offer the lives of 300 million of his own people--nearly half the population at that time--for the sake of global, military domination. China lacked the finances and technology needed to develop nuclear weapons, so Mao had to forcibly take and sell vast amounts of the peasantry's food to Soviet Russia to pay for his bomb. And so it was, for three years that Mao through tyranny and coercion starved his own people to fuel a superpower dream. His dream fizzled quickly, leaving China and Russia at odds and his country a wasteland, from which it has yet to completely recover.

The Great Leap is the crowning atrocity of Mao's rule, with as many mistakes, massacres, murders, deception and terror to fill a 800-page biography that nearly killed me to read. Mao has a very impressive resume of awfulness. Here are a few things from his 27-year reign: He aimed to win a civil war against the Nationalists over fighting the nemesis Japan in WWII, leaving his people open to Japanese occupation and brutality; he terrorized his own people into becoming unquestioning, murderous zealots during the foundation of his cult personality; and then there was the Cultural Revolution, where Mao laid waste to hundreds of thousands of cultural treasures like temples and art across the country--beautiful history lost forever.

It's almost unbelievable that such a man could walk this earth, yet what is astonishing to me is that hardly anyone, probably not you, and definitely not Chinese today, think this man was bad at all. I wasn't aware myself until I went to Beijing in 2007 and saw a twenty foot tall picture of the guy's ugly mug. I mean, it's amazing that the worst dictator in history, far worse than Hitler or Stalin and possibly the chairman of KISQ, the worst man simply ever is someone few people properly hate.

I say "few" because in China, Mao is revered, revered I tell you. He is on every banknote and in most cities there's a statue of him, holding out his hand, blessing the people. In Beijing there's his mausoleum (I thought mao-soleum just now and laughed) where you can join hordes of people that silently walk past his corpse encased in formaldehyde. I went there and it was creepier than you can imagine. And then there's of course the people, as in the vacuous "People's" Republic of China, who have repeatedly told me they think of Mao as the perfect person but can't explain why. The government is mostly to blame, which bans anything that criticizes Mao or communism; I'm sure my book is at the top of the list.

To me, the tragedy isn't that 70 million people, mostly destitute and innocent, were killed as a result of one man's pursuit of global conquest. That's certainly horrible, though. Think of the Holocaust times twelve and the atomic bombs dropped on Japan times a lot more than that. The tragedy, then, is that the world, particularly the survivors who were terrorized for decades, will never be recognized. And this generation and ones to come, both in China and around the world will never see Mao for what he is, and that's evil incarnate.

During the propagation of Mao's cult personality, Mao authored a little red book with short quotations about Chinese history and politics and whatever. It's inane garbage, but one quotation suits him well. It reads "every fart has some kind of smell, and we cannot say that all farts smell sweet."

It just goes to show that deception and tyranny have their weight, but eloquence is the true criterion for dictating mass murder.

Or something.


-K

Top Six Things that Annoy Me about China (Part Deux)

Continuation from my last post:

#3 Loud Noises!!!

A near-constant bombardment of cars, crowds, and bodily noises means the Chinese are desensitized to what we in Michigan would probably split our ears. Everyone has cell phones and none of them have the volume adjusted right. The following is a sample conversation of what I often hear on the bus. Imagine that the person’s barking voice would carry 200 meters.

“Way, Knee How?? (short pause) Eh?? EH??!! EH??? (short pause) Ohh how how…EH???”

And so the conversation continues, the speaker shouting, and then grunting “eh?” or “huh?” and no one else around them blinks an eye. Chinese are shouters. Akin to German, the Chinese language just sounds angry. People could be having a very simple conversation about noodles with what sounds like scalding-hot emotion. Chinese are easily irritated, but most of the time that doesn’t account for their shrieking; they’re just very loud people.

So, when situations give way to silence it makes locals feel rather uncomfortable. One can’t escape riding a bus without enduring China’s public programming. Every bus has two monitors, which usually broadcast some inane comedy show, cooking program, or karaoke music video, invariably at a deafening volume. This is especially taxing on long, inter-city bus trips, where one must tolerate up to fourteen hours of this cacophony. What could be a relaxing trip through China’s gorgeous countryside is destroyed by cell-phone talkers and Chinese pop music, media awful in its own right.

Even the quietest, serenest places aren’t exempt. There are a handful of places in China that are as beautiful as they are barren of human activity. One such area is the small group of mountains behind my apartment. At their peak you can behold the entire city, the white sandy beaches, the famous Laoshan Mountain range and the islands in the distance, all with no else to share it with. That is, until you vaguely hear a radio barking pop music below you. And soon you’re joined by a friendly local who splits the silence with a small FM receiver, its volume at tilt. The music is muddled with static because of the altitude but that makes little difference to its listener. He smiles, nods, and says “hello” in English. A moment later, his phone rings and the man begins yelling bloody-murder into it.

#2 – Too Many $@(*#$ PEOPLE

Over the 26 years of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s reign, he starved and murdered somewhere between 60 and 70 million of his own people. It was hardly noticed. Most of us in the west attribute this colossal cover-up to the power of the Chinese Communist Party to mask and contort history, but having lived here, I think that most people honestly didn’t detect the gradual disappearance of their kin. 1.3 billion. Sweet mother of Buddha.

This presents the government with a bunch of obvious challenges: public transportation is bogged down, unemployment, depletion of resources, and inundation of sewage systems, and so forth. The Party, in its infinite understanding of its people’s needs, decided long ago that the people should have three long holidays during the year, “Golden Weeks” as the tourist industry calls it. So what happens to public transportation when 1.3 billion people get the same twenty or so days off?

I’m a traveler. I travel. So when I heard I was going to get a bunch of days off at my inane job at KISQ to frolic in the countryside I crapped my pants. I plan my trip, get out in the field, and discover that one-sixth of the world’s population had the exact same idea.

China is bloated with people. This has over-arching effects on the value of human life and dignity, the economic hierarchy, and trips to the supermarket. There are about a dozen major markets in Qingdao, and each one of them, at any given time, are crowded with as many patrons as is physically possible. I’m accustomed to warehouse-sized Wal-marts that do their best to encourage customers to stay and shop for as long as they can. Upon entering any such Chinese equivalent, though, one is immediately seized with the desire to escape by any means. One may flee to a bus only to find long queues behind each that is already brimming with bodies. Many Chinese streets are filled with bicyclers but not in Qingdao, where the dangerous practice has been outlawed, dangerous in bicycle-automobile accidents, since pedestrian safety is almost never upheld by drivers. I digress.

#1 – (In)Security

The Party’s desire for control has trickled down to every aspect of bureaucracy. Security guards are ever-present, ready to check your ID or receipt, take your money or interrogate you for inadvertently infiltrating a military base. I’ll get to that.

Within sight of my apartment balcony, there are four shacks each with two security guards pacing out front. They aren’t armed and they hardly look official. If they’re not pacing they’re sleeping, or reprimanding me for climbing over the nine-foot tall, iron gate because I forgot my ID card at the gym. On a later climb over the gate, I would find that the guards had coated every bar with engine grease, impeding my entrance.

In every supermarket, mall, university, tourist destination and Arby’s, there are statuesque guards. Sometimes they check documents, but most of the time they’re simply taking up space—what little there is left from the consumer hordes. Since they have little to do, minute tasks gain more significance. Bringing a backpack into a store, for instance, warrants a good finger-shake and a stern scolding. They have less to do, you see, because China doesn’t seem to have much theft. Pickpockets are the most common crime, though no more frequent than an American city of comparable size. Theft is as rare as burglary, neither of which are as rife as the excessive security would lead you to believe.

With more guards comes a higher demand on patrons to pay for them. It’s evident in touristy places, where ticket purchases come in succession and seeing a whole temple might mean buying five separate tickets, in part to pay for the people who are watching the transactions. One wonders then, if restaurant food would be cheaper if the staff were halved. The questions and conflicts of bureaucracy are as infinite as the potential size of bureaucracy itself. And this, my students, stems from procreation on an impermissible scale coupled with a furious desire to control the subsequent masses.

Somehow, with all this security one never feels completely secure. I can’t think of a better way to explain than to offer an anecdote. A couple of months back, I decided to take a random bus eastward along the sea its final stop, get out and take some photos. When I arrived, I found a desolate hillside. While other passengers transferred to a different bus, I walked around for a couple minutes, took some shots of a billboard with some funny propaganda on it, and started back to the bus stop. A few steps later and I was accosted by three soldiers on a motorbike. They began asking me questions that my rudimentary grasp of Mandarin couldn’t handle. They angrily gesticulated toward the facility adjacent to the bus stop that I mistook for a bus garage. I quivered as two miniature vans and a jeep pulled up, emptying fourteen soldiers, some armed and all with looks of gravity. I rang my Canadian buddy who speaks enough Chinese to be a gangster, handed the phone to the officer who looked the most serious, and hoped for the best. It turned out that all I needed to do was supply some ID from KISQ and I would be forgiven. The officer persuaded me to accept a ride to the school. I grudgingly accepted. As we pulled out onto the highway, the officer turned to me and pointed at a small sign by the road we exited. “NO ADMITTANCE” it read.

And then there was that time that I had to pay 500 USD to have guards let me leave a university, but you’ve heard that tale a dozen times already.

So that’s it, I guess. There is a slue of runner-ups for this list, including cashiers who always ask for exact or easy change, front-desk staff who wake you up in your hotel room 11pm asking if you would like a female friend, and then refusing to negotiate a price over the phone.

Haw haaa…it’s the quirky things that brought me to this country, and the same things that will send me fleeing in eleven days. Next week I’ll tell you about what I love about the flip-side of this seething chaos.

Till then,

K

Top Six Things that Annoy Me in China (Part One)

As the New Year is a time of reflection of the twelve months past, I thought I’d offer a couple lists of things that have annoyed and delighted me here in China. I’ll start with annoyances, just to get the negativity out of the way. I’ll post it in two parts because I got a little carried away.

#6 Restaurant Staff

The silverest lining of China and perhaps all of Asia is the food. (Yeah, I eat a lot, nice to meet you too.) China boats an array of consumable options, and as a large part of them are quite cheap, I eat out about four days a week. I frequent the same twenty or so joints in Qingdao, and never once have I complained about the taste of the food. The staff, however, are the worst I’ve ever seen.

Now, I’ve worked in the food industry for five years and I know bad service. I was the one who fingered your child’s chicken fingers after they made the mess on the floor, and probably the culprit behind your ill-tasting martini you repeatedly blamed the bartender for. But China’s servers operate on another kind of maltreatment, an apathy you can see everywhere you look.

People in Asia don’t tip. It simply isn’t expected. Thus, customer satisfaction doesn’t affect server wages. Moreover, Chinese eateries as well as many other industries suffer from over-hiring because of annoyance #2. The first thing one notices upon entering a restaurant, before the exotic food and décor, is the superfluous number of servers, almost all of whom are doing nothing at all. Personalized service isn’t offered either, so no one greets you at the table or comes to see if everything tastes ok, which would be fine except it falls on the customer to hail a server, a real pain. They seem not to hear you, giggling to each other at the foreigner that stepped in. When they do waddle over, they begin advertising the most expensive dishes, becoming adamant to your agreement and sometimes later bringing dishes you refused. Food arrives promptly but the bill can take ten minutes or longer. When it does come, you may find mysterious charges, like for napkins, for instance.

And the waitresses don’t shave their pubescent-like moustaches. At least I did that.

#5 Teachuh, China dirty!

This annoyance is also a delight at times, since you know I have a penchant for bathroom humor. Whenever my students and I discuss life here, this is always the first complaint: China is one filthy country. It’s not simply about the coal-burning industries that dot the landscape and other wholesale forms of pollution, whose effects are visible; it’s about pollution on a very personal level.

To begin with, like Koreans, Chinese punctuate their conversations by spitting, and spitting vociferously. The hawking and violent excretion of mucous can be heard from great distances, and from every walk of life, from toddlers to sexy femininas to (and especially) old men.

China suffers from a few lacks: lack of public resources, lack of public opinion, and a serious lack of clean, public toilets. This forces many, mostly the peasantry, to take care of their business in the streets in plain view. Worse yet, it’s common if not celebrated for toddlers to excrete on the very sidewalk, as their parents nod in approval. The government has set up some pay-as-you-go latrines. To use one of these, you must pay an attendant a 25 cent fee and a bit more for toilet paper. The attendant’s job is only to take money as the squat toilets remain, like the rest of public loos, disgusting beyond description.

The Chinese do recycle though. Peasants push wheel-carts through apartment complexes, shouting out the particular recyclable they’re collecting. Small sums of money are paid for Styrofoam and the like. Also, for every trashcan there is a peasant to shuffle through it and consolidate recyclables. When these bins aren’t emptied, however, they overflow into huge piles of rubbish that spill into the street. As Qingdao is a fishing town, loads of rotting sea-flesh are thrown in.

Considering these observations and more, it hardly comes as a surprise that many locals smell like burnt bacon wrapped in a week-old, dirty diaper, or that I have an exhaustive supply of things to giggle at.

#4 Hull – Low!

China has only been open to outside civilization for around twenty years. In the same span, China has seen the largest migration in human history as hundreds of millions of peasants have migrated to the larger cities—cities where foreigners like myself congregate to seek awful teaching jobs. Thus, we have a curious meeting of very simple folk and simple folk with laptops.

Many Chinese, regardless of background, have had minimal or no contact with foreigners. The sight of us seems to titillate them, not unlike the way black folk in Detroit look at me as I tread past them in goth makeup. That is to say, for every one Chinese that reacts to a foreigner with wholesome intentions, you have thirty others that treat foreigners with either apathy, mockery, or trickery.

The first ‘y’ is apparent when you need help. There isn’t a single reliable map in China, so asking directions is paramount. I studied Mandarin for a few months so I can ask for basic stuff and understand basic replies. Oddly, language often isn’t the problem. Busdrivers, pedestrians, even information clerks, have a certain absence of mind that prevents them from talking to you past a “mayo” (don’t have) or “boo jer dow” (don’t know) or “boo yow” (don’t care). My favorite is when they shake their heads and flap their wrists like you asked them to give you their pants. I can recall when I arrived in the city of Changsha, only I wasn’t sure it was Changsha from the terrible map I had until I asked the twelfth person.

Chinese think it’s hilarious when honkeys say “hello.” I’m not sure why. I guess when we say it they whisper to each other “Oh! Just like in the movies!” Anyway, Chinese prod foreigners to speak when there are few to be found. Go to a remote village and you’ll bombarded with cat-calls. Greet them in their language and you’ll find your mockers momentarily impressed; they’ll compliment you, and proceed to ask you ten questions in rapid-fire Chinese. This happens nearly anytime a foreigner attempts to speak the native tongue. Like Americans, Chinese expect everyone in their country to speak their language fluently. Mind you, a major difference between the English and Chinese languages is there actually is no such thing as Chinese. ‘Mandarin’ Chinese as it’s called is actually a hundred distinct dialects united by a common, absurdly difficult written language. Hence, even if a foreigner understands Mandarin, it may be difficult to understand a native if their dialect meshes with their Mandarin. If the foreigner seems confused then, Chinese snicker and remark “Low-why ting boo dong!” (the foreigner doesn’t understand). This is aggravating since even when I occasionally understand what’s being barked at me, they assume I don’t because of my whiteness. Yes, never has a race been as disparaged as we are in these situations.

White is also the color of money for people on this side of the world. And no matter who it is, a mere shopkeeper, an art salesman or a driver who sees you are stranded with no alternative, they will ream you for your last mao (the cent, not the chairman). Shopping can be taxing as Chinese don’t hide the fact that they offer their native patrons lower rates, and negotiation can be impossible. “Chinese people never tell you ‘no’” as comedian Russell Peters put it, “They give you the longest no you’ve ever heard in your life. Like ‘noooooo.’” To boot, seemingly helpful folk at times give false directions. This rang true in Beijing when Olympics help staff would give contradictory advice. I’m not sure what that has to do with honkiness but I can only speculate that it’s jealousy for my neck hair.

More tomorrow!