This is one of several rambling commentary on our experiences during our visit to Southwest China in September-October 2005. I am here as a professorial guest of the Guizhou Academy of Science. It is routing me through several universities, including Guizhou University and Guizhou Normal University in Guiyang (the capital of Guizhou), and Chongqing University and Southwest China University in Chongqing, which is also the name of the new capital province of which it is the capital. Chongqing province was spun off Sichuan province a few years back, designated as one of four capital provinces in China -- two of the others are Beijing and Shanghai, I forget the third. Today is 30 Sept.
Yokelin is with me. She aptly summarized the socio-political state of affairs in China thus: "Chairman Mao must be spinning in his grave". I chuckled at that, but remembered with a start that his embalmed body still attracts millions of visitors revering his memory, but obviously only in the way that millions of Christians go through the motions at weekends in church revering Christ and his Father, and come weekdays they defile the sermon on the mount by way they conduct themselves. Same with the Chinese. In both Chongqing and Guiyang, filthy rich people can be seen spending their money ostentatiously, yet people still beg in the streets. We saw the same in Guangzhou a few years back, but thought at that time it was corrupted by proximity to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. So this new capitalist China is for real, and economic inequality is on the rise. The Party is not about socialism any more; it is about control. It no longer controls movement of people, but it controls the right of mass assembly and organization. If you see how people dress and behave in the streets, Yokelin's remark on Mao is spot on. Chongqing and Guiyang rival the most modern cities in the world in amenities and affluence. My hotel room in Guiyang has broadband, and the cafe downstairs serves an acceptable espresso with great pastry. Street vendors in the evenings are like the ones in SS2 near KL. Yokelin hurried me past the ones who offered porn vcds and dvds. The nearby Parksons department store stocks all the expensive Italian and French stuff which I have never even thought of buying any time in my life due to severe lack of purchasing power. But they do not lack customers here!
A new Pizza Hut franchise opened in Guiyang yesterday and there is a queue to go in from 9am to midnight. Yokelin saw a BBC documentary(yes, that is a channel in our hotel room tv) showing a Chinese lady entering a department store in Shanghai with a suitcase of money. She looked at things like handbags, and did not even bother examining them, pausing only to ask, "Is that Italian?". If the answer was "yes", her response was, "I'll buy it", and she dished out cash from her suitcase. Holy smoke! Mao spins again.
Crossing streets is a hazard. The cities here will soon end up like Bangkok -- permanent gridlock -- if the planners do not put in efficient metro systems. There are crossing lights but neither the cars nor the pedestrians observe them if they can get way with with it. Guiyang has "crossing cops" at its most busy intersections, usually middle-aged women appointed for their ability to blow whistles at transgressors. We saw one berating a couple of PLA officers who jay-walked, and the two men looked sheepish. The cars ignore the women cops. The rule simply seems to be this. There are lights that stop you from going straight, or allow you to go straight. But if you are turning, as long as you are not crossing traffic that is goiing straight, you can do it any time. In theory you have to give way to pedestrians if they have a green crossing light, but in practice it is a game of pedestrian vs car/bus/truck chicken. We never thought we had the guts to play such a game, buttonight after eating chicken at the KFC nearby (just to satisfy our curiosity, you understand) we were emboldened. We out-chickened asmall van. The safest method seems to be to join a large crowd of pedestrians who cross en mass to challenge the cars. The worst divers, as in most parts of the world, are the 4-wheelers, many of whom I think have erectile problems from the way they behave behind the wheel.
It is said that the girls in this and the immediately neigboring provinces (e.g., Sichuan, Chonqing, Hunan) are the prettiest in China. Empirically I think this is true, as I also have observed data from Hong Kong and Malaysia (hence Guandong and Fujian, mainly) whose girls are not as pretty. I say this without fear or favor, having married a girl whose ancestors came from Fujian. Then something stirred. There is an unacknowledged prejudice among the Chinese against people of darker and/or rougher skin. Yokelin drew my attention to the frequency of ads on CCTV (it has over 15 channels, including an exclusively English language one) for lotions that lighten and soften skin. And naive me, I simply thought it was the prevalence of exaggerated almond-shaped eyes, higher noses, etc. that made these southwestern girls more attractive to Chinese men. No, it is the fact that this area has a lot less sunshine to darken and roughen the skin! I checked with one of my professorial hosts, and he confessed to me in a moment of candor that this is indeed so. Then he let me in on a dreadful secret. In his youth he lived near a Tung minority village, and the Tung girls were renowned for their pale and smooth skin. He lusted after these girls. His wife is Han. Oh, in case you did not know, Han means mainstream ethnic Chinese, or at least accepted by other mainstream Chinese as one of them. Isn't this a wonderful fixed-point definition?
Just like the definition of a Malay in the Malaysian constitution.And for most of my relatives, you aren't quite Han, our male ancestors having diluted their ethnicity with Malay blood. But not to worry, so many of our children and grandchildren are, or will be, at most half-Han any way.
Which brings me to the fate of the minorities in China. Well, in Guangdong and Fujian from which our ancestors originated there have not been any minorities for over a thousand years. But here in the Southwest minority peoples still have their own villages. I think the largest group in Guizhou are then Miao who number around 3.5 million. They may be the group that has the best chance of preserving their language and culture. I feel a bit sad about most of the others. An anecdote suffices to illustrate the odds they face. Yokelin and I went on a Three Gorges cruise from Chongqing to Yichan last week, a private holiday of 3 days. In the penultimate off-cruise boat we went by ferry up a smaller gorge, then upstream the rapids in Shen Nong River on sampans rowed, later pulled, by minority Tu people. The girl providing the English commentary was also Tu. Later she told us she could not speak Tu, nor could her mother. Nor could she even sing and dance in the Tu tradition. Both her parents are ethnic Tu. But both parents, and her, went to standard Chinese schools, and I can infer she is now to all intents and purposes a Han, albeit a bit darker, like many Malaysian Chinese. The Tu do not have a written language, and unlike say Cantonese or Hakka, its grammar is different from Chinese. Hence it is not a dialect. The grammar of Cantonese or Hakka is identical to Mandarin, and they are mutually intelligible if written as it is one script-- the achievement of the first emperor to unify China, Qin Shi Huang Di, the builder of the Great Wall. Pity his dynasty was one of the shortest on record, he backed the Legalist philosophers against the Confucianists -- big mistake, the latter are still riding the Chinese mind today. But back to the minorities. While I do not sense any resentment by the minority people against the Han, surely they must have some regret at the passing of their culture? But then who am I to judge, having lost so much of my Chineseness that I feel like an alien here in a way I do not in England or Greece? I do not resent the people responsible for my de-tribalization.
Yokelin is with me. She aptly summarized the socio-political state of affairs in China thus: "Chairman Mao must be spinning in his grave". I chuckled at that, but remembered with a start that his embalmed body still attracts millions of visitors revering his memory, but obviously only in the way that millions of Christians go through the motions at weekends in church revering Christ and his Father, and come weekdays they defile the sermon on the mount by way they conduct themselves. Same with the Chinese. In both Chongqing and Guiyang, filthy rich people can be seen spending their money ostentatiously, yet people still beg in the streets. We saw the same in Guangzhou a few years back, but thought at that time it was corrupted by proximity to Hong Kong and Shenzhen. So this new capitalist China is for real, and economic inequality is on the rise. The Party is not about socialism any more; it is about control. It no longer controls movement of people, but it controls the right of mass assembly and organization. If you see how people dress and behave in the streets, Yokelin's remark on Mao is spot on. Chongqing and Guiyang rival the most modern cities in the world in amenities and affluence. My hotel room in Guiyang has broadband, and the cafe downstairs serves an acceptable espresso with great pastry. Street vendors in the evenings are like the ones in SS2 near KL. Yokelin hurried me past the ones who offered porn vcds and dvds. The nearby Parksons department store stocks all the expensive Italian and French stuff which I have never even thought of buying any time in my life due to severe lack of purchasing power. But they do not lack customers here!
A new Pizza Hut franchise opened in Guiyang yesterday and there is a queue to go in from 9am to midnight. Yokelin saw a BBC documentary(yes, that is a channel in our hotel room tv) showing a Chinese lady entering a department store in Shanghai with a suitcase of money. She looked at things like handbags, and did not even bother examining them, pausing only to ask, "Is that Italian?". If the answer was "yes", her response was, "I'll buy it", and she dished out cash from her suitcase. Holy smoke! Mao spins again.
Crossing streets is a hazard. The cities here will soon end up like Bangkok -- permanent gridlock -- if the planners do not put in efficient metro systems. There are crossing lights but neither the cars nor the pedestrians observe them if they can get way with with it. Guiyang has "crossing cops" at its most busy intersections, usually middle-aged women appointed for their ability to blow whistles at transgressors. We saw one berating a couple of PLA officers who jay-walked, and the two men looked sheepish. The cars ignore the women cops. The rule simply seems to be this. There are lights that stop you from going straight, or allow you to go straight. But if you are turning, as long as you are not crossing traffic that is goiing straight, you can do it any time. In theory you have to give way to pedestrians if they have a green crossing light, but in practice it is a game of pedestrian vs car/bus/truck chicken. We never thought we had the guts to play such a game, buttonight after eating chicken at the KFC nearby (just to satisfy our curiosity, you understand) we were emboldened. We out-chickened asmall van. The safest method seems to be to join a large crowd of pedestrians who cross en mass to challenge the cars. The worst divers, as in most parts of the world, are the 4-wheelers, many of whom I think have erectile problems from the way they behave behind the wheel.
It is said that the girls in this and the immediately neigboring provinces (e.g., Sichuan, Chonqing, Hunan) are the prettiest in China. Empirically I think this is true, as I also have observed data from Hong Kong and Malaysia (hence Guandong and Fujian, mainly) whose girls are not as pretty. I say this without fear or favor, having married a girl whose ancestors came from Fujian. Then something stirred. There is an unacknowledged prejudice among the Chinese against people of darker and/or rougher skin. Yokelin drew my attention to the frequency of ads on CCTV (it has over 15 channels, including an exclusively English language one) for lotions that lighten and soften skin. And naive me, I simply thought it was the prevalence of exaggerated almond-shaped eyes, higher noses, etc. that made these southwestern girls more attractive to Chinese men. No, it is the fact that this area has a lot less sunshine to darken and roughen the skin! I checked with one of my professorial hosts, and he confessed to me in a moment of candor that this is indeed so. Then he let me in on a dreadful secret. In his youth he lived near a Tung minority village, and the Tung girls were renowned for their pale and smooth skin. He lusted after these girls. His wife is Han. Oh, in case you did not know, Han means mainstream ethnic Chinese, or at least accepted by other mainstream Chinese as one of them. Isn't this a wonderful fixed-point definition?
Just like the definition of a Malay in the Malaysian constitution.And for most of my relatives, you aren't quite Han, our male ancestors having diluted their ethnicity with Malay blood. But not to worry, so many of our children and grandchildren are, or will be, at most half-Han any way.
Which brings me to the fate of the minorities in China. Well, in Guangdong and Fujian from which our ancestors originated there have not been any minorities for over a thousand years. But here in the Southwest minority peoples still have their own villages. I think the largest group in Guizhou are then Miao who number around 3.5 million. They may be the group that has the best chance of preserving their language and culture. I feel a bit sad about most of the others. An anecdote suffices to illustrate the odds they face. Yokelin and I went on a Three Gorges cruise from Chongqing to Yichan last week, a private holiday of 3 days. In the penultimate off-cruise boat we went by ferry up a smaller gorge, then upstream the rapids in Shen Nong River on sampans rowed, later pulled, by minority Tu people. The girl providing the English commentary was also Tu. Later she told us she could not speak Tu, nor could her mother. Nor could she even sing and dance in the Tu tradition. Both her parents are ethnic Tu. But both parents, and her, went to standard Chinese schools, and I can infer she is now to all intents and purposes a Han, albeit a bit darker, like many Malaysian Chinese. The Tu do not have a written language, and unlike say Cantonese or Hakka, its grammar is different from Chinese. Hence it is not a dialect. The grammar of Cantonese or Hakka is identical to Mandarin, and they are mutually intelligible if written as it is one script-- the achievement of the first emperor to unify China, Qin Shi Huang Di, the builder of the Great Wall. Pity his dynasty was one of the shortest on record, he backed the Legalist philosophers against the Confucianists -- big mistake, the latter are still riding the Chinese mind today. But back to the minorities. While I do not sense any resentment by the minority people against the Han, surely they must have some regret at the passing of their culture? But then who am I to judge, having lost so much of my Chineseness that I feel like an alien here in a way I do not in England or Greece? I do not resent the people responsible for my de-tribalization.
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