Fell Rains

The people of southern Taiwan are suffering the ravages of the worst flooding to hit the island in 50 years. This tragedy was brought about by Typhoon Morakot, which combined with a tropical depression near the Philippines to produce a blob of tropical moisture nearly 1,000 kilometers in diameter that dumped between 6-7 FEET of rain on Taiwan's southern regions from August 7-9, 2009, with the most severe rainfall occurring on August 8 (Taiwanese Father's Day or 八八(爸爸)節). The resulting floodwaters and mudslides have toppled buildings and buried entire villages. Current casualty figures stand at 103 dead and 45 injured, with hundreds of other people unaccounted for (some reports claim that the authorities have begun to acquire 2,000 body bags). Thousands of other people are homeless.

The areas that have been worst affected encompass the mountains of Nantou, Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung, and Pingtung counties, including many villages that my research assistants and I visited while doing fieldwork for my book about the Ta-pa-ni Incident. Their inhabitants are in many ways least prepared to cope with a disaster of this magnitude. Most are poor or lower middle class wage earners, entrepreneurs and agriculturists, who struggle to scrape out a living from cash crops like bananas, betel nuts, and taro, most of which have been destroyed. Others have profited from the tourism industry, especially hot springs hotels, but these have been washed away. They are also an ethnically diverse group, including numerous Hoklo descendents of migrants from Fujian, but also sizeable percentages of Hakka, Plains Aborigines, and Mountain Aborigines. Through the years, these men and women have struggled to overcome the ravages of natural and man-made calamities, and I have never ceased to be amazed by the inner strength they have shown in coping with intense adversity, as well as their willingness to move forward despite the odds against them.

Now those fortunate enough to survive face the prospect of trying to recover after having lost everything. Unlike an earthquake, where people can salvage items that have not been crushed under the rubble, personal possessions that have been drenched in water or mud are utterly unusable. In addition, the flooding has wiped out crops and decimated livestock, with the fouled waters posing the very real risk of sparking outbreaks of contagious diseases. The government is doing its best, but faces the usual problems of inefficiency and competing political agendas. The afflicted regions have the additional misfortune of being in the south, which has long been neglected when it comes time to distribute flood control funds (this represents a longer-term problem of favoring the north over the south or 重北輕南). After Typhoon Nari ravaged northern Taiwan in 2001, for example, effective flood control measures were enacted; the same cannot be said for the south, which has suffered disastrous flooding for years with no sign of relief. It probably does not help that this region is the DPP's last remaining stronghold.

One consolation is that the devastation is bringing out the best in many of Taiwan's citizens. One leading humanitarian group at the forefront of the relief effort is World Vision Taiwan, while the unstinting efforts of Buddhist and Christian groups are especially striking. For example, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Merit Society (Fojiao Ciji gongdehui 佛教慈濟功德會) has mobilized 15,000 volunteers, while Buddha Light Mountain (Foguangshan 佛光山) and Dharma Drum Mountain (Fagushan 法鼓山) are raising funds and performing Buddhist services (法會). Members of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan (台灣基督長老教會) are also busy organizing relief efforts at the local level.

Perhaps even more impressive are the efforts of Taiwan's vibrant Internet community. One group of Netizens has put together a website providing updates about damage and casualties, with visitors being able to post messages about missing persons or ask for assistance. There is also a section for donations. A second website contains similar information, but also uses Google Map to help users locate communities in need. Leading citizens are also stepping forward, including the island's most renowned artists and athletes. Yankee pitcher Wang Chien-ming, who comes from Tainan, has made a donation of NT$2.6 million, while players from Taiwan’s own baseball league (the CPBL), many of whom are southerners, have been active in fund-raising efforts as well.

More is needed. While the disaster has received extensive international news coverage, it will soon begin to fade from memory, while the long and hard recovery is expected to take years. News articles posted on the Taiwan's news websites list many websites and post office accounts where donors can make contributions. At present, food, clean water, and medical supplies are of the utmost urgency, but the needs of disaster victims will change as time goes on. Let us do what we can, and do our best.

China’s Migrant Workers in the Wake of the Economic Crisis: Unemployed, Undeterred

By Robert D. O’Brien

After growing at double-digit rates for most of the last three decades, the Chinese economy is now in jeopardy of failing to achieve the eight percent GDP expansion benchmark widely considered necessary for the government to stave off social unrest. Although a fairly insulated and underdeveloped financial market allowed the PRC to avoid the first order effects of the global financial crisis, the drying up of China’s main export markets – the U.S., Europe, and Japan – has wreaked havoc on the manufacturing sector, leading to the unemployment of over 20 million migrant workers.

In the wake of the recent mass layoffs, there has been rampant speculation over the possible ramifications of such widespread unemployment for political stability. A multitude of scholars and journalists have written of a migrant class on the edge of revolt – jobless, landless, and growing increasingly desperate.[1] Relatively small, largely localized “mass incidents” (quntixing shijian) – 300 aggrieved migrant workers rioted in Guangdong, 1,000 commenced a march on Beijing from Hebei, and one man blew himself up in a northwest China government office – are widely cited as indicators of future unrest, possibly on a grander scale.[2] A careful analysis of the situation, however, leads one to question the soundness of any claims predicting an impending political crisis. Indeed, an examination of several critical factors, namely the ability of laid-off migrants to meet their basic needs, their reactions to getting laid off, their capacity to organize on a large-scale, and the government’s response to the crisis, all show that it is highly unlikely that Chinese political stability will be seriously threatened by the country’s migrant worker class.

The Vast Majority of China’s Migrant Workers Can Meet Their Basic Needs

Western observers often view the plight of unemployed Chinese migrant workers in stark terms. The prevailing sentiment seems to be that laid-off migrants face many of the same challenges as recently unemployed workers in America – no source of income and no savings with bills to pay and debts accrued. Such a bleak outlook only worsens in severity when the weakness of China’s social safety net is taken into consideration. The combination of the two, unemployment and China’s weak social welfare system, leave many believing that the PRC’s jobless migrant workers have no means of subsistence. This, however, is rarely the case.

While Chinese migrants may lose a significant source of income when laid-off, they are seldom left without a way to meet their needs. A high personal savings rate combined with the difficulty of procuring personal bank loans ensures that most unemployed migrant workers have both accumulated some capital and avoided significant debt. More importantly, they possess land, a dynamic and stable asset. The vast majority of Chinese migrant laborers are either the children of farmers or former farmers themselves. Though some have lost their plots to commercial development, corrupt officials, or environmental degradation, most still have land that they can farm when they lose their jobs in the city. A recent nationwide household survey conducted by the Chinese Bureau of Statistics confirms as much, finding that among unemployed migrants, only 6.6 percent do not have any farmland.[3] When coupled with any savings and a lack of debt, this land provides migrants with a means of subsistence in the face of unemployment.

Given the Chinese government’s historic propensity to skew certain numbers – unemployment figures, cases of social unrest, etc. – in order to make the country’s condition seem better than it actually is, there will doubtless be many who question the reliability of the Chinese Bureau of Statistics’ survey results. While there is no way to independently confirm the findings’ accuracy, the figures are lent credence by current Chinese governmental policy. In the wake of the recent mass lay-offs, the CCP has been “offering numerous subsidies for workers willing to leave the cities and go to rural areas.”[4] Some believe that the government’s belief that a disaggregated migrant population is less likely to engage in social unrest has guided it in devising such incentives for migrant laborers to return home. As scholar Ray Yep points out in a recent Brookings commentary, though, relations between migrant workers and local level officials are growing increasingly volatile, rendering this motive for the subsidies improbable.[5] It is more likely the case that the distribution of such subsidies indicates the Chinese government’s confidence that, as the survey results indicate, migrant laborers can meet their needs in the countryside. If the Bureau of Statistics numbers are indeed inaccurate, then they are fooling not only the outside world, but also China’s own government officials, a highly unlikely scenario.

Migrant Workers are Looking to Find Jobs, Not Start a Revolution

In recent months, numerous notable periodicals have published articles suggesting that mass lay-offs have led to a widespread sentiment of anger and frustration among China’s migrant workers. One prominent example can be found in the Washington Post’s “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers,” which quoted one migrant laborer as saying “this is an unfair society” and noted that, as a whole, China’s migrant workers “are becoming desperate.”[6] There are undoubtedly some migrants who feel this way. Anecdotal evidence, however, along with a thorough understanding of the nature of migrant work reveals a migrant class whose sentiments are far from revolutionary.

As a Fulbright Scholar conducting researching in China this past year, I have interviewed numerous unemployed migrants living in areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, Suzhou, Nanchang, and rural Henan. Such interviews are striking in that they feature relatively few expressions of anger and desperation. On the contrary, the sentiments most frequently shared by the migrant workers are that a) the government is working to aid China’s migrants and fix the economy, and b) that the downturn will not last long. Though this collection of reactions does not represent empirical evidence demonstrating that no migrant workers are enraged by their plight, it does speak to both the widespread nature of these benign sentiments and the importance of understanding the nature of job loss in the migrant worker’s world.

Migrant work is, by nature, both transitory and nomadic. The disappearance and reappearance of jobs is part of the migrant worker’s reality; one that rarely has a conspicuous underlying logic. While many migrant workers understand that the root of their latest job loss is the economic crisis, their reaction to being laid-off is not changed by the cause of their unemployment. In some extreme cases where corruption and/or fraud led to significant personal financial loss, migrants have engaged in small-scale, short-lived incidents of social unrest. The vast majority, however, have responded to their status as unemployed laborers by finding their bearings in the new economic climate and beginning to search for new work. For the migrant masses, their focus lies neither on their agitation in the wake of the mass-layoffs nor on how the government may have failed to protect them from the effects of the economic crisis. Rather, their efforts are zeroed in on finding a new job, just as they always are when work arrangements fall through.

Migrants Cannot Organize to Incite Large-Scale Unrest

Even if there did exist a widespread sense of anger and frustration among China’s laid-off migrant workers, they are impotent to incite large-scale social unrest. In this regard, they are constrained by both their inability to organize themselves and the fact that no outside group can help them in the organization process.

The geographic distribution of migrant workers alone makes it difficult for them to organize in a way that could lead to collective political action. The waves of workers who returned home this last winter are now disparately located and unlikely to aggregate. Meanwhile, in the cities, where there remains a critical mass of migrant workers, the police and other public security officials are on high alert for potential social unrest, making organization a near impossibility.

Outside forces are also unable to organize the migrant class. In recent years, China has witnessed the proliferation of non-governmental organizations designed to aid and support its migrant workers. These members of China’s adolescent civil society, however, recognize the fragile nature of their existence in the authoritarian PRC. Thus, in an effort to steer clear of any activities that could lead the state to shut them down, they focus on politically innocuous issues such as education and healthcare, staying away from potentially dangerous tasks such as organizing workers and fostering political consciousness among them.

The Chinese Government’s Response to Migrant Unemployment

The above analysis assumes that the government is a passive actor in this situation; that it is not implementing policies to address migrants’ needs. The Chinese government, however, has been anything but passive in responding to the employment crisis. With the central authorities loudly announcing the need for programs to aid jobless migrants, provincial and local governments have launched numerous initiatives designed to ameliorate the concerns of the migrant laborers. Though such aid has come in several different forms, vocational training and entrepreneurship are the two most prominent, both having been endorsed by the powers that be as panaceas to the problem of mass unemployment.

In recent months, Xinhua has repeatedly published articles lauding the importance of vocational education. The titles speak for themselves: “Skills Training Key to Future for China’s Jobless Migrants,” “Vocational Education to Help Laid-off Chinese Workers Find Jobs,” and “Skill Training: A Way to Bail Out Migrant Workers.” The National Development and Reform Commission has followed suit, announcing that a “special program” will be created to increase vocational training for migrant workers in 2009 and 2010.[7] For its part, the Ministry of Education made such promises a little more concrete, stating that vocational schools would enroll 8.6 million new students this year, 500,000 more than in 2008.[8] With the central government leading the push to educate migrants in vocational schools, several provinces have pledged to expand their training institutes. Sichuan has made $11 million in training vouchers available, Guangxi has allocated $35 million to the cause of providing free training to migrant workers, and Anhui has promised to educate at least 50,000 migrant workers this year.[9]

Entrepreneurship, too, has been championed as a solution to migrant woes. The government’s belief that laid-off workers are returning home with practical experience, skills, and capital drives their efforts to convert unemployed migrants into entrepreneurs. In articles such as “Migrant Workers Try Hand at Entrepreneurship in Hometowns,” the state-controlled media celebrates migrants-turned-entrepreneurs, encourages more migrants to make the switch, and calls for local governments to support migrants in such endeavors. Several provinces have rallied to the central government’s battle cry, initiating programs aimed at inspiring migrant workers to consider starting their own enterprises. Henan has pledged $220 million in small loans for peasants to start small businesses. In the same vein, Hunan and Shandong have promised that farmers who start businesses will enjoy tax or fee exemptions for three years.[10]

Though vocational training and entrepreneurship have dominated government efforts to aid migrant workers, some less orthodox methods are also being implemented. At the national level, China Education Television is opening a new channel to offer vocational training and educational services to the masses, with some segments designed explicitly for migrant laborers. Locally, one Zhejiang county is subsidizing migrants’ purchases of tea processing machines and teaching them how to grow tea leaves, while a Jiangxi county is encouraging unemployed migrants to turn to forestry by giving out free tree seeds.[11]

Should these proactive policies not mollify the aggrieved migrant workers, China is counting on its security forces to quell any potential uprisings. In late February, more than 3,000 public security directors gathered in Beijing to “learn how to neutralize rallies and strikes before they blossom into so-called mass incidents.”[12] In addition, several prominent Chinese publications, including Outlook (liaowang), a weekly newsmagazine put out by Xinhua, have warned officials to be prepared to combat social unrest.

On their own, government efforts to aid migrants and stave off social unrest would likely be sufficient to ensure political stability in the PRC. When combined with the ability of migrants to meet their basic needs, their general lack of angst and desperation, and their inability to organize in any meaningful way, the CCP’s handling of the situation renders the prospect of China’s migrant laborers seriously threatening social stability extremely remote.

China’s Migrant Workers Will Inspire, Not Challenge, Future Development

China’s migrant laborers have been the heroes of their country’s long drive toward modernization and will play an integral role in any future development. As a result, any assessments of the PRC’s economic and political trajectory must include an evaluation of the dynamics of China’s migrant labor class. Incomplete examinations of the welfare, sentiments, and abilities of China’s migrants have led many to conclude that they may derail their country’s march forward. A more thorough examination, however, indicates otherwise.

Though China’s migrant workers have undoubtedly been hit hard by the global economic crisis, they seem poised to trudge through their hardships rather than incite large-scale social unrest. The challenges posed by the economic downturn may have left them momentarily wounded, but they appear undeterred in their quest for ever-greater prosperity.

Robert D. O’Brien is a graduate of George Washington University and a current Fulbright Scholar in the People’s Republic of China.

[1] Ray Yep. “Economic Downturn and Instability in China: Time for Political Reform?” Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary, No. 28. April 2009; Austin Ramzy. “Migrant Workers Suddenly Idle in China.” Time Magazine. February 1, 2009; Ariana Cha. “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers: Millions Are Without Jobs, Options.” Washington Post. March 4, 2009.
[2] Lu Yanan. “As Job Losses Bite, Unrest Grows in China Province.” Xinhua. February 25, 2009.
“Over 1,000 Workers March on Beijing in Protest Over Job Losses.” Channel News Asia. April 4, 2009.
Peter Foster. “Chinese Worker Blows Himself Up Over Unpaid Wages Claim.” The Telegraph – U.K. April 3, 2009.
[3] “2008 Year End Survey of Migrant Workers.” Chinese Bureau of Statistics. March 25, 2009.
[4] Ramzy, “Migrant Workers Suddenly Idle,” Feb. 1, 2009.
[5] Yep, “Economic Downturn and Instability in China.”
[6] Cha, “In China, Despair Mounting Among Migrant Workers,” March 4, 2009.
[7] Fang Yang. “Government-aided Job Training Helps Migrants Find Work.” Xinhua. February 27, 2009.
[8] “Vocational Education to Help Laid-off Chinese Workers Find Jobs.” Xinhua. March 12, 2009.
[9] Calum MacLeod. “Return of Jobless Strains China.” USA Today. February 16, 2009.
“Skills Training Key to Future for China’s Jobless Migrants.” Xinhua. March 13, 2009.
Lu Yanan. “Migrants’ Mass Return Tests China’s Rural Administrators.” Xinhua. March 5, 2009.
[10] “Hard Road for Chinese Migrants to Start Businesses.” Xinhua. March 31, 2009.
[11] Lu Yanan. “China Launches Satellite TV Channel to Train Students, Teachers and Migrant Workers.” Xinhua. February 25, 2009.
Liu Fang. “Local Governments Help Migrant Workers Find Jobs.” CCTV. March 31, 2009.
[12] Andrew Jacobs. “China Fears Tremors as Jobs Vanish From Coast.” New York Times. February 22, 2009.

Rolling the Dice in Macau

It has been almost a decade now since China regained control of Macau, but the city’s present and future crops up in news coverage much less than Hong Kong, another reclaimed colony. We’re delighted, then, to be able to run this piece about Macau from someone who has been spending time there, meditating on not only whether or not Macau is democratizing but also how Macau’s relationship to the mainland and the world is changing its economy and society. For those interested in background information on Macau, see the reading list that follows the piece.

By Dustin Wright

Sitting in a hip dessert shop recently, I asked three University of Macau undergraduates, all Macau natives, what they thought about Macau’s new Chief Executive-elect, Fernando Chui. He is only the second person to hold the post since the Portuguese handover in 1999.

“I don’t really think about it,” one told me. “Young people here don’t really think about who is in the government.” The two others nodded in agreement. “Connections are the most important thing to succeed in Macau. Anyone here who is rich was born rich.”

Such apathy can be understood, given that Chui’s appointment as the new head of Macau was decided by a 300-member “election committee” comprised of the city’s elite, many of whom have strong ties to PRC officials. Chui, the former Secretary of Social Affairs and Culture and holder of college degrees from the United States, including a PhD in Public Health from the University of Oklahoma, will be officially sworn in this December. The victory of his unopposed election was a foregone conclusion, emphasized by the fact that The Macau Daily lead with a headline declaring Chui’s victory before the vote actually took place. An online poll at the English language MacauNews.com showed that 44 percent of respondents felt that Chui’s top priority should be combating public corruption, while only 2.3 percent stressed the importance for political reforms. This strong displeasure towards corruption was likely exacerbated by a recent high-profile case involving a former official in Macau, now serving 28 years in prison.

However, not everyone is apathetic toward the election process. On election day, pro-democracy legislators unveiled banners and staged a protest in front of the iconic façade of St. Paul’s ruins, calling for universal suffrage by 2019. The rally hinted at the fact that political (and economic) disparities are just as Macanese as Portuguese egg tarts.

As with the changing of the guard in the Chief Executive’s office, the gaming sector might also be in a state of transition. For nearly four decades, the casino industry has been heavily influenced by one man, the philoprogenitive Stanley Ho, whose failing health has raised speculation as to who will make up (and benefit from) Macau’s next generation of corporatists.

All of this begs the question: What is the Macau that Chui will soon be running?

Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR) is a city of variations, scattered with amalgamations, and permeated with assimilations. Since the sixteenth century, Macau’s seemingly effortless blending of cultures has impressed and marveled those who visited and inhabited this Portuguese outpost on the Pearl River Delta. “Culturally,” writes Austin Coates, “there has never been anything like Macao, where so much of China and so much of Europe are enshrined in one small place.”[1] Wang Zeng Yang, President of the Cultural Institute of Macau, remarked that this is a city “where different cultures are treated not as mere rituals, but instead, as truly symbiotic, as totally complimentary,” and that “even tourists in Taiwan advise their friends if they wish to know Europe but do not want to take long trips, to visit Macau, to know how it feels to be in a European city.”[2] At a very cosmopolitan and Iberian dinnertime of 10:00 p.m., you might find yourself dining on stewed bacalhau (Portuguese salted fish) and African chicken. At the same restaurant the previous night, it was mapo tofu, steamed Chinese broccoli drowned in oyster sauce, and eggplant sautéed in oil and chilies, washed down with milk tea.

Just as identity and cuisine are in constant motion in Macau, so is the movement of capital. Since the handover of Macau back to Chinese rule a decade ago, and the relaxation of monopolistic gaming licenses in 2002, foreign casino operators have set up shop at a dizzying pace. Macau peninsula—along with the islands of Taipa and Coloane—makes up only 29 square kilometers and often goes unnoticed when compared to the larger Hong Kong SAR. However, in terms of generating wealth, size doesn’t matter: Las Vegas is 7.5 times bigger than Macau, yet more money is generated in the SAR than Sin City.

Climbing up the hill to Guia Fortress, one of the many historical sites that pepper the peninsula, one can see much of Macau spread out below. Looking south, the Sands Macao Hotel, which is responsible for fully two thirds of Las Vegas Sands Corp.’s profit, fights for elbow room with a bevy of Chinese and foreign-owned casinos. Large condominium complexes are still being built within sight, though at a slower pace than this time last year. Fisherman’s Wharf, a Disneylandesque amusement park built in the images of famous landmarks and cities, including a mock Coliseum, sits atop 111,500 square meters of concrete along the waterfront. Even Isidoro Francisco Guimarães, governor of Macau from 1851 to 1863 and the first to introduce licensed gambling, could hardly have imagined the garishness of the city today.

To the west, towards the central business district of Macau, one can see the immense and lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa rising from a sea of comparatively diminutive casinos, along with banks, shopping malls, pastel-colored cathedrals, and apartment blocks. Nearby, a towering needle, complete with a rotating restaurant and bar, confirms Macau’s ascension as a tourist haven. Wynn Macau is visible, a casino as much as a high-end shopping bonanza for tourists, most of whom come from mainland China. An American expat working in Macau told me about his experience watching a man, who was half-naked and sweating profusely, struggle to fit into a shirt while standing in the middle of Wynn’s Giorgio Armani store. I asked why the store personnel would allow such behavior, to which the expat, shocked by my ignorance, replied without pause, “Because he had money.” (When Henry Kissinger came to Macau a few months ago to speak at Macao Polytechnic University, his old friend, Steve Wynn, made sure to come to listen and, perhaps, comped the former Secretary of State’s room at the Wynn Macau.)

On a clear day you can catch a glimpse of a smattering of islands to the east, the largest of which is Lantau, part of Hong Kong SAR, while to the north is the city of Zhuhai, gateway to Guangdong Province and mainland China, visible from much of Macau. Travelling between the SARs and the mainland ensures one’s passport is stamped with the frequency of a pre-EU jaunt through Europe.

It’s a small city, yes, but the numbers are big. Macau’s population is roughly 560,000, nearly identical to that of Las Vegas. With such a small land area, Macau is one of the mostly densely populated places on earth. Government figures indicate that 23 million people visited Macau in 2008 and helped the city generate nearly $22 billion in GDP. With so many visitors spending so much money, Macau is a city that truly never sleeps.

The massive expansion of Macau’s gaming industry dovetailed with the global real estate gorge of the last decade, giving way to a bevy of expensive condominium projects, followed by the subsequent drop in market prices late last year. In Senado Square, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a lodestone for tourists, the young professionals who bought many of those condos bark into Blackberries and loosen their European-brand ties, while tourist families vie for space to take their portraits in front of the picturesque St. Dominic’s Church. Macau’s overall standard of living is quite high, with a quality-of-life index comparable to Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

However, even with the huge influx of capital (or because of it), economic inequality is prevalent. Not far away from Senado Square, in an area known as Fátima Parish, lies a rusted and mosquito-infested slum, where elderly women can be seen washing dishes at a communal spigot. It isn’t a unique example of poverty in greater China, but it’s proximity to the corporatist wealth of the casinos makes the disparity all the more egregious. Inoperable cars sit on blocks as they are slowly parted out, while above, a messy labyrinth of wires indicates that much of electricity that people can access in this area is pirated. It is a squatter community of mostly mainland Chinese immigrants, some of whom entered Macau illegally but were later granted legal status. Until 1979, Chinese mainlanders could enter Macau without restriction, though it was illegal for them to do so under PRC law. Portuguese administrators tacitly endorsed the immigration of Chinese mainlanders, eager to have a ready supply of cheap labor that could be easily repatriated once their labor had been exploited.

Fatima Parish. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
The size of the slum has been halved since 1991, mostly through government campaigns to tear down the shacks and build high-rise housing and commercial buildings, evicting many of the squatters once their labor had been utilized to build the more expensive new real estate. Today, these towers loom over the shacks of corrugated tin that remain. Even though the slum is physically smaller and stronger immigration laws have made it more difficult for mainlanders to come to Macau, squatters are just as essential for today’s labor demands as they were twenty years ago. Sociologist D.Y. Yuan, a longtime researcher of Macau’s immigrant community, writes that, “Squatters have continuously provided a cheap source of labor, helping Macau to remain competitive in the international trade market.”[3] Last year’s census indicates that there was an increase of 8.2 percent in the number of “non-resident workers,” making up a population of over 92,000, many of whom have less than a junior high school education. Most of these workers are not salaried staff in the casinos (jobs which can require expensive training) but are instead employed in construction and more vulnerable to the global recession. When the economic crisis hit last fall, many ambitious building projects were shuttered and thousands in the construction industry lost their jobs.

For those lucky enough to have kept their jobs in the casinos, gaming is still profitable, even though the number of tourists has decreased (due in part to travel restrictions by Beijing and the curtailing of gambling by PRC officials). Direct gaming tax revenue doubled from 2006 to 2008 to nearly $5 billion and many of the Macau government’s 20,000 employees can expect a pay raise this year. For the slums in Fátima Parish, things will likely remain the same.

The hotel Lan Kwai Fong. Photo by Erica Hashiba.
It remains to be seen whether Chief Executive-elect Chui will be able to oversee the level of prosperity heralded during the last decade, or indeed whether Macau can remain a global gambling Mecca. For some, surely, things could be worse. Down the street from my apartment, I recently happened upon the opening party for a new hotel. On the street where I stood, looking rather pathetic with my mouth agape, throngs of people queued for admittance, while glittery VIP couples seemed to prance in slow motion as they made their way to the front of the line. Up above us, the silhouettes of a dozen voluptuous women—paid performers—gyrated in the windows of the new hotel. A powerful sound system blasted Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” throughout the neighborhood, inviting all of Macau to find “someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares.”

This fall, Dustin Wright will begin his doctoral studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Recommended readings on Macau:

Lucky for us, Hong Kong University Press just republished many of Austin Coates’ informative and immensely enjoyable books on Macau: City of Broken Promises (fiction), A Macao Narrative, and Macao and the British: 1637-1842 Prelude to Hong Kong.

For a general background on Macau, check out Jonathan Porter’s Macau : The Imaginary City : Culture and Society, 1577 to Present (Westview Press, 1999).

Cathryn H. Clayton, Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii and a prominent scholar on Macau, has written the forthcoming Sovereignty at the Edge: Macau and the Question of Chineseness (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Atlantic correspondent James Fallows’ take on Macau.

César Guillén Nuñez, art historian and Research Fellow at the Macau-based Ricci Institute, recently wrote a wonderful book entitled, Macao's Church of Saint Paul: A Glimmer of the Baroque in China (Hong Kong University Press, 2009).

[1] Austin Coates, A Macau Narrative (Hong Kong: Heinemann Education Books [Asia] Ltd, 1978), p. 105.
[2] Wang Zeng Yang, “Unveiling a Cultural Dialogue,” in Lucy M. Cohen and Iêda Siquera Wiarda (eds.), Macau: Cultural Dialogue Towards a New Millennium (USA: Xlibris Corporation, 2004), p. 17.
[3] D. Y. Yuan, Chinese Immigration and Emigration: A Population Study of Macau (University of Macau, 2000), p. 11.

On the Web: Images of China

China Beat readers looking for cool “new” desktop pictures for their computers might want to think old. More and more archives are digitalizing their collections of photographs and making them available online, so now finding that perfect snapshot of Old Beijing or the Great Wall couldn’t be easier. Here are just a couple of the many websites out there, and some sample photos that we found by searching for topics like “Shanghai” and “China.”

1. Friend of the blog Jeremy Friedlein (Program Director, CET Shanghai) pointed us to Life magazine photos available on Google Images. Adding “source:life” in the search box limits results to those photographs from the Life collection--a helpful hint, since searching for “Shanghai” in Google Images produces over 20 million results. In the much more manageable two hundred Life photos of Shanghai, there are plenty of street scenes, Bund panoramics, and rickshaw snapshots, as well as pictures showing the city in the last days of the civil war:



2. Jeremy also knows of our interest in the upcoming Shanghai World’s Fair, and turned our attention to more Life photos of World’s Fairs in the past:



3. The Library of Congress has a large online digital archive, which is an excellent source for photos of historic Beijing:



4. Finally, instead of looking to the past, why not imagine the future? This poster advertises a “Worlds’ Fair” to be held in Shanghai in 2474 (no, the placement of that apostrophe isn’t a typo). It doesn’t seem that the Pudong waterfront will change much, but we’re hoping that the Jetsons-style flying cars will reduce some of Shanghai’s traffic woes.

China Behind the Headlines: Xu Zhiyong

A few days ago we suggested readings about the disappearance of legal scholar and activist Xu Zhiyong in Beijing. There has been more news on the subject here and here. China Beat contributor Susan Jakes, who has known Xu since 2004, contributed the following comment.

By Susan Jakes

Earlier this year, a graduate of his country’s most prestigious law school with an impressive record of public service, a comfortable academic post at a major university, and a political office he’d won in a trailblazing election summarized his life’s mission for a local newspaper. “I strive to be a worthy citizen, a member of a group of people who promote the progress of the nation,” he told the reporter. “I want to make people believe in ideals and in justice and help them see that there is hope for change.”

Like a more well-known community organizer, Xu Zhiyong has made a career of breaching barriers and raising hopes. But, as we were reminded, painfully, last week, this kind of project looks different in the cavernous plazas and narrow lanes of Beijing than it does on the streets of Chicago. The victories are harder to see, the defeats loom larger.

In the week since Xu was detained at his apartment on July 29, much has been written about the reasons for his disappearance, what they may augur, how much worse things may get. Most stories have mentioned at least a few of Xu’s long list of achievements. But none has quite captured the remarkable breadth of his activities and the distinctive approach he brings to his work.

I’ve known Xu for five years. I met him in my capacity as a journalist and got to know him better through his work with my husband who works at Yale’s China Law Center. As was the case for many people in China, I first heard Xu’s name in June of 2003. A young graphic designer in Shenzhen named Sun Zhigang had been beaten to death in detention after being picked up by police for not carrying his household registration ID. In part because of Xu’s involvement, the case had become a national news event and I was covering the story for TIME. Others protested the brutality of the beating and the way the police had mishandled Sun’s arrest or complained about the notorious corruption of Custody and Repatriation, the system of extra-judicial jails for “vagrants” to which Sun had fallen prey.

But Xu, just 30 at the time, took a different tack. In addition to offering legal advice to Sun’s family, he and two of his law school classmates wrote a petition to the National People’s Congress, demanding that Custody and Repatriation be abolished on the grounds that it was unconstitutional. In a matter of weeks, China’s Sate Council ordered an end to Custody and Repatriation. And although none of the official statements made reference to Xu or to the constitution, the prospects for both seemed, momentarily, to brighten.

Xu’s advocacy in the Sun Zhigang case displayed what would become the hallmark of his career: the decision to base his calls for political change and social justice in China’s existing laws and political institutions. Rather than just shouting from the sidelines—the only available options for a previous generation of Chinese political critics—Xu has made a point of investigating and trying to improve troubled political institutions from the inside. This approach is evident in the way he handles his advocacy on behalf of death row inmates—Xu conducts exhaustive, Innocence Project-like interviews with prosecutors, witnesses and judges before he takes on the case. It’s evident in the research he put into his calls for reform of China’s petitioning system—he lived for several months among petitioners in their make-shift “village” on the outskirts of Beijing before circulating his findings. When Gongmeng—an outgrowth of the organization he founded along with Teng Biao and Yu Jiang, the other two legal scholars who co-wrote the Sun Zhigang petition—issues an opinion, it’s a safe bet that careful, thorough research has gone into it. This is part of what makes the group’s recent report on Tibet so powerful and so unusual.

Xu has a knack for seeing what’s possible where others see only futility. In 2003 and again in 2006 he ran as one of China’s handful of independent—that is, not CCP pre-approved—candidates in an election for his district People’s Congress. He not only won by a landslide, but in both of his terms in office has sought to prove through his actions—by providing constituent services, demanding budget reviews, preventing the relocation of the Beijing Zoo and lobbying on behalf of aggrieved dog owners—that the congress was not the parody of a political institution it sometimes seemed to be. “Actually,” he explained, “the People’s Congress has real power. It’s just that people don’t take it seriously.” I interviewed Xu shortly after his first election. When I asked him how he decided to run, he looked at me evenly for a moment before replying. “I ran,” he said, “because the law allows me to.”

Of course, Xu has never been naïve about the degree to which his work takes him into sensitive territory. Over the years following his election I tended to see or hear from Xu when things the law allowed him to do put him at odds with officials nominally in charge of law enforcement. In 2005 we had lunch together after his sojourn in the petitioners’ village. He’d been beaten repeatedly in the process, but he was in good spirits, talking about gradual change and talking with quiet conviction about his faith in “step by step progress.”

In 2006 we talked on the phone a few minutes after he’d been released from a night in detention that had also involved a beating; a group of hired thugs had dragged him off the road to keep him from going to court to defend Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist who himself had studied law and tried to use it to defend the rights of victims of forced abortion. Xu swiftly deflected my questions about his night in jail and reminded me that what he’d been through was nothing compared to the ordeal of his client, who was on his way to four years in jail after an absurd trail in which he was convicted of disrupting traffic.

Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work. But Xu, who happens to have been born in Minquan Xian—literally “Civil Rights County”—in Henan Province and was raised in a Christian family, has a temperament that suits the path he’s chosen. He has an impressive capacity for empathy. As he explained in a recent blog post, he feels “anguished” when he’s unable to help clients, but he channels those feelings into focused hard work. He is also—despite the Ph.D., the official title, the international reputation—self-effacing. When he lived in the petitioners’ village, he was often mistaken for a migrant. Mayling Birney, a political scientist and expert on local elections at Princeton who has followed Xu’s career remembers watching him sit down to talk to a group of peasants who’d traveled days to come to Beijing seeking legal aid. “His respect and humility were so clear I could just see these people’s spirits were fortified,” she recalls, “Xu is among the most talented and inspiring public servants I’ve ever met, and I say this having worked in the U.S. Senate for Bill Bradley.”

Xu’s mission was never going to be an easy one. But he’s been a brave and patriotic contributor to the progress China’s leaders say they embrace and he deserves far better than the attacks he’s had to endure in the past few weeks. He often closes his public speeches by telling people he’s an optimist, that the darkest aspects of life in China are brightening and that there’s good reason to jump into the fray, “to do something.” I believe him every time I hear him say that. And I’m hopeful he’ll be back to work making more people believe it very soon.

Filthy Fiction: The Writings of Zhu Wen

By Julia Lovell

Chinese fiction of the 1990s was not short on shock value. If we think of the decade’s cultural tone being set by Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 command to unleash commercial forces, then the years that followed proved rich in works that would have done the old man proud. Quick off the mark was Jia Pingwa, who triumphantly became one of the earliest, most notorious cases of a serious writer surrendering to lurid populism, with his 1993 novel, The Ruined Capital (Feidu): a best-selling, soft-pornographic tale of a male writer’s travails through the corruption of contemporary China. Things were not looking much more restrained by 1999, when Weihui, in Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei), had her young heroine Coco jettison her dreamy Chinese artist boyfriend for a torrid affair (featuring a hard-to-forget toilet sex scene) with a German accountant called Mark.

Just halfway between these two literary moments came the quiet publication of something genuinely outrageous. In 1996, a 28-year-old thermal engineer-turned-avant-garde novelist called Zhu Wen produced a novella, around 150 pages long, entitled Didi de yanzou. Translating the title alone makes me blush, though I will do my best to gloss its subtleties. An unimaginatively literal rendering would make it “My Little Brother’s Performance”, but in Chinese “little brother” (didi) happens also to be one of the language’s many slang usages for penis. If I were then to add that it’s set in a university (in east-coast Nanjing) and features a cast of late adolescent, sex-starved male undergraduates, you might reasonably infer that the story is a Chinese first-cousin to the Western teen-sex comedy -- American Pie and its many sequels and spin-offs. It certainly enjoys a good share of the genre’s gross-out crassness.

Here’s a basic summary. The novella starts as it means to go on, with its unnamed narrator meandering through campus in an ill-fitting suit that he has mortgaged off a random fellow-undergraduate with his penultimate condom, looking for girls in short shorts and aimlessly shouting “copulate!” outside classrooms full of diligent students. Our narrator’s roommates are a similarly disreputable lot. There’s Zhou Jian, whose first contribution to the group is to offer them the sexual services of his older cousin (without mentioning this to her in advance). “She must have been frigid,” reasons the narrator, after she has refused every one of them.[1] In one uplifting scene, they take her out for a graduation dinner in the anticipation of getting her so drunk they can all, one by one, have their way with her. (Unfortunately for the hopefuls, they fail to regulate their own intake, and wind up biliously under the table, while she remains decorously compos.) Then again, there’s the spineless Haimen, as desperate to join the Communist Party as he is to ingratiate himself with his degenerate classmates; or the subnormal Lao Wu, who gets put away for attempted rape in the middle of his academic career. The best of the bunch is probably the narcoleptic Jian Xin, whose sole, lofty ambition is to sleep his way through university.

At one point, the group decides to widen their search for women by riding the local train-routes around Nanjing, on which expeditions the narrator’s job is to treat any female they meet to a complementary Freudian analysis, invariably diagnosing sexual repression curable only by promiscuous sex. And so on they go: groping each other’s girlfriends and occasionally impregnating their own; struggling to make a buck out of human waste products on the nascent free market economy; picking fights with local nouveaux riches; eyeing up nightclub prostitutes, etcetera, etcetera – all the way up to graduation in 1990.

Didi de yanzou, in short, makes the short story that in 1994 first dragged Zhu Wen into China’s literary spotlight – I Love Dollars (Wo ai meiyuan), a tale of a father and son searching for sex in a provincial Chinese city – look like Jane Austen. Reading it today, it seems extraordinary that it should ever have been allowed to emerge into the “spiritual socialist civilisation” that the Communist authorities supposedly began building in 1996. (Its publication, in the way of many of contemporary Chinese literature’s more unpredictable events, was probably as much accidental as anything else. Zhu Wen claims that the editor who saw it into print did so only “because he owed me money.” [2])

So far, so filthy. But I wonder if there’s something a touch more interesting, and less provocatively sensationalist about the novella than the summary I’ve just given might suggest. The novella is rescued, first of all, by Zhu Wen’s even-handed toughness on his protagonists. The spermatic journey is a pretty widespread feature of post-Mao Chinese fiction written by men, but authors usually spare their sex-questing males at least a glimmer of sympathy: the locus classicus here would be Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian’s all-conquering narrators in Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible, but works by Jia Pingwa, Mo Yan and Yan Lianke could also serve to illustrate.

Zhu Wen, by contrast, is serious about his characters’ offensiveness – at no point does he permit a whisper of boys’-own approval to prettify his reprobate anti-heroes. Across his ten-year writing career (he abandoned fiction in 1999 for film-making), Zhu Wen made plain-speaking his speciality. Moving across the bleaker, seedier landscapes of contemporary China (sinking state-owned factories, callous hospitals, cheerless Yangtze passenger boats), his stories take a long, hard stare at the pettiness, greed and indifference of Chinese society. And in Didi de yanzou, as elsewhere, Zhu Wen is determined not to let anyone escape his pages with any kind of dignity. In the course of the story, his protagonists’ every deficiency – physical and mental – is hung out to dry: their aimlessness, their uncouthness, their sexual opportunism, their haemorrhoids. Our narrator ends the story the sex-toy of his married, late-thirties boss, the deputy installations manager in the dead-end power plant that the socialist state transfers him to after graduation – a fairly poor kind of advertisement for the life he leads.

Zhu Wen’s harshness has a clear, critical purpose (to shatter the saccharine pieties of socialist realism) that goes beyond a superficial desire to shock. “I deliberately made my characters a bunch of clowns,” Zhu Wen (who was himself at university through the same years) has explained. “That’s how we felt, back then – powerless, ridiculous. And that’s all down to history, of course. Our background was empty – because of the destruction of traditional culture that had been going on since May Fourth, and through the Cultural Revolution.”

It’s this same talent for straight-talking that saves the novella from oppressing the reader with obnoxiousness. The swaggering machismo of the plot is undercut by a relaxed, colloquial narrative voice (another Zhu Wen trademark), that lets the base delusions of the characters speak for themselves, without requiring any omniscient moralising commentary [3]. In their penultimate year, the friends get caught up in the poetry-writing pandemic of late 1980s China, turning out their own samizdat journal – modestly entitled The Highway to Heaven. Naturally, the entire venture is just another game-plan for sniffing out attractive females (to whom distribution is free). “We’d made 200 copies, of which 100 were now in the public domain,” the narrator calculates. “Before it ended up being used as toilet paper, each issue would have gone through at least ten readers; each reader would have told at least ten more people about it before consigning all memory of it to oblivion. That meant we had at least 10,000 readers…Bearing in mind the national male-female ratio of 5.6:4.4, in theory 4,400 of these were female. And if you failed to find that exciting, you clearly had a problem.” (93-94) The poets then retreat to their dormitory, staying up all night anticipating the arrival of thousands of beddable female admirers – who of course never materialise. Our aspiring literati receive one lone anonymous female fan letter (which they all suspect each other of having forged); when they try to hold a poetry discussion meeting in their room, only male students turn up, hoping (likewise) to meet some girls.

Zhu Wen also has a surprisingly serious message to communicate about a very specific moment in the recent Chinese past: almost a fifth of the novella is taken up in describing the student demonstrations of the 1980s. It is, it should be remembered, a very unusual thing for literary works published in mainland China to refer so directly (or indeed at all) to the late-decade spiral of protests. The subject has so far been largely monopolised by writers publishing abroad, beyond the reach of the Communist establishment: by Gao Xingjian, Ma Jian and Ha Jin, for example. Despite its pretensions to create an epic of China’s last four decades, Yu Hua’s Brothers (Xiongdi) seems to lack as much as a veiled allusion. Zhu Wen, of course, does not write directly about the marches of spring 1989 – even the napping censors of 1996 would probably have woken up to that. Instead, he focuses on the anti-African riots that began in Nanjing on Christmas Day 1988. But his purpose remains to try to express something about the mess of motivations that brought the students out onto the streets. “I wanted to write about 4 June, about the atmosphere surrounding the demonstrations, but I couldn’t,” he has admitted. “That’s why I ended up writing about the African protests.” (It is, incidentally, unusual for Zhu Wen to write about anything so historically precise: ordinarily, he seems happier rooting his stories at non-specific times and places through the 1990s, searching after a general zeitgeist without pinning himself down to political particulars.)

And true to his provocative colours, Zhu Wen assembles a picture of the turmoil that demolishes not only the Communist Party’s dream of a “spiritual socialist civilisation”, but also many of the West’s cherished perceptions of some of these events. As the Western media swivelled its cameras onto the demonstrations of spring 1989, China’s rebellious students made highly effective use of the attention, filling international news coverage with pictures of hunger-striking martyrs, the white headbands over their pale foreheads demanding “democracy or death”. And those images, not surprisingly, hold a powerful monopoly on our memories of this time – at least partly, in the interests of providing a back-story worthy of the demonstrations’ tragically horrific finale. Zhu Wen’s protestors, by contrast, are a very different crew: a gang of late adolescent chancers, searching only for an excuse (any excuse) to “let off steam” – gifted to them in the novella by an eruption of racial hatred.

On Christmas Day 1988, we’re told, a wealthy Zairean student in Nanjing invites some female Chinese students to his room on campus. After an elderly caretaker kicks up a fuss, a fight results, leaving the old man badly injured – on the point of death, reports the rumour mill. The student community is instantly incensed: although the narrator and his friends aren’t slow to join the action, they’re too late to enjoy an initial riot in the foreign students’ building. “There was nothing left for us to do,” he sighs. “Everything had been smashed: all the windows, and the bikes parked outside; even some of the doors to the rooms.” (60) Next, one of the narrator’s wastrel roommates, Niu Yue (whose star turn this far has been to eat his own faeces– as a gratuitous publicity stunt – while claiming it’s an outcry against poor quality cafeteria food) reinvents himself as protest leader, exhorting his fellow students to take to the streets, to fill campus with angry banners: “‘Punish the murderers, give our people back their national dignity’ – that kind of thing….We were used to seeing Chinese people done over by Westerners,” muses the narrator. “Our prettiest female comrades would faint the moment they saw a white man. Or a dollar…Some of them would consider it a tremendous honour to be screwed by such individuals, hoping that after the deed was done, they’d get taken back to America to be screwed again…All this, we were well used to – we were adjusted. But now blacks were trying the same trick – this was too much. That’s why the locals were lining the streets, clapping and cheering us on. What reason did we have for giving up? Even if we had all long wearied of a movement that was growing vaguer, more directionless by the day.” (65-68)

Behind the high-flown rhetoric, though, the students seem interested only in the pleasures of anarchy: “Now we all had sticks, we could do whatever we liked, it seemed. There was no stopping us.” (61) At every opportunity, Zhu Wen robs the protests of any suspicion of political idealism: “Why not?” thinks the narrator, when asked to confront the college’s Students’ Association about their failure to get involved. “It’ll give me an appetite for lunch.” (64) Others join in just for a break from routine. Within a day or two, a strike is called – classes and exams are cancelled, and students sleep happily through the cacophonous dawn broadcasts summoning them to freezing, open-air physical jerks. Jian Xin uses the disruption to “set a new personal best: three days without even getting out of bed. Though no-one doubted his proud sense of national dignity, of course.” (68) The narrator throws himself into the marches to distract himself from breaking up with his girlfriend – and in the hope of bumping into her somewhere around the city – while another of his roommates secures himself a girlfriend from among the random females he rubs up against while out on the streets.

Zhu Wen’s determination to deny the demonstrations even a whiff of heroism holds to their climax: a mass student march on the train station, where the African students may – or may not – be waiting to get on a train to Beijing, and a stand-off with riot police. “Now he was painfully aware of Being Someone,” the narrator snipes, “Niu Yue held himself with a special kind of stiff dignity – as if permanently at the ready to strike a pose for the cover of Time Magazine.” (73) Later on in the march, Zhu Wen heartlessly has Niu Yue’s envoy to the riot police wet himself with fear, sending him back and forth between the two negotiating groups “his trousers dripping with urine”. But Zhu Wen can also reach beyond cheap mockery to evoke crowd dynamics with a claustrophobic surrealism faintly reminiscent of Lu Xun’s mob horror. “My eyes – fixed ahead – were burning, my head a screaming blank,” recalls our narrator, waiting for the final march to begin.

As dusk fell, the sodium street lamps slowly brightened. The assembled crowd kept looking up at the lights, buzzing through the twilight, then back down again – waiting. All these faces, I suddenly felt, were floating, spinning before me, in and out of shadow – I seemed to know them, then not at all. I no longer knew what I was seeing. All I wanted was to breathe in and out, in great, thirsty exhalations, as if I were gasping for life itself. At this moment of standstill, an invisible hand suddenly seized my heart, fast. I wanted to cry out: and perhaps my mouth was open to do so, but no sound was emerging. I fell out of line, desperate to get out of the group, to draw breath. Then the whistle sounded, and our untidy column began to straggle down the street…When we got to Zhonglou Square, I got cramp in my calf. I fell out of line again, trying to kick the pain out against the tarmac. No joy; I tried again. I knew that I had now become an object of considerable interest to my fellow marchers: Look at him, they were saying to each other, kicking the tarmac….But my performance had to go on, because the cramp was getting worse. The column moved round the square, and on towards the train station. I’d now been at it so long that I was starting to feel foolish, embarrassed, but still I had to continue…The longer I spent doing it, the worse my mood, and the pain got. At last, someone came over – a broad, well-built type – and told me to sit down. I was more than happy to obey. My only hope at that moment was that someone should stand up and tell me exactly what to do. So I sat down, both hands flat on the ground. I looked up at him, as he towered opposite me. What was he going to do for me? Why wasn’t he getting on with it? At this juncture, an anxious voice called out to him, and without another word he turned and melted back into the crowd. I never saw him again. So there I was: alone, on the tarmac, looking about me…I waved at one of my spectators. He nervously approached, stopping at a safe distance. Do me a favour, I said. Kick me. Whether he heard me or not, I’ll never know; he just stared then ran off. (73-76)

The whole thing ends as anti-heroically as it begins. The stand-off with the police peters out; the authorities gift the students a slap-up New Year’s feed; the students happily guzzle it down. (“‘Fuck,’ complained Niu Yue. ‘These bastards have all dipped their sense of national dignity in vinegar and swallowed it.’ Though his keen sense of betrayal didn’t seem to be affecting his own appetite.”) Niu Yue – the true leader – escapes unscathed and sets about pursuing one of the girls romantically linked to the African students, while the luckless chairman of the student association (hectored by Niu Yue into taking part) takes the full wrath of the establishment. The roommates drift into their final year. (79)

Zhu Wen’s apparent dedication to puncturing established, noble images of the late 1980s has succeeded in enraging literary veterans of the political and cultural turbulence that reached such an awful climax in early June 1989. At a festival in London in May 2008, he was asked about his views on the events of 1989. He was in bed, asleep, he responded. Ten days later, a member of the audience, the dissident author Ma Jian – whose own epic novel of the demonstrations, Beijing Coma, has won him much literary acclaim in the West over the past year – published an article in the London Times that spat with indignation. Zhu Wen, he fumed, was “a savvy young Chinese writer…with a self-satisfied smirk…There is a word in Chinese that describes this attitude: xiaosa. It means imperturbable, detached, nonchalant. This carefree denial of the meaningful role of an artist in society is a blight that inflicts great numbers of China’s unofficial cultural elite.”[4] It’s easy to see how Zhu Wen’s public manner – full of a bantering self-confidence that could be read as complacent swagger – might provoke. At a recent talk in Britain, he observed that he had only two conditions for a prospective translator of his work: first, that she should be pretty, and second, that she shouldn’t take a personal interest in him – that way she’d be sure to concentrate on the job. In one of his more unguarded moments, he has confided to me that he does not need to watch the news, as he has the gift of foresight.

All the same, Ma Jian’s response strikes me as a little unfair. For Zhu Wen is a serious author masquerading as a joker; just as Didi de yanzou is a serious novella masquerading as a scurrilous burlesque.[5] He is, in short, a novelist suffering from an advanced case of bipolar disorder. In public, Zhu Wen plays down the idea of a literary vocation (he only drifted into writing, he claims, because his friends suggested he might be good at it), studiedly subverting the melodramatic May Fourth vision of literature as a kind of moral mission. But beneath its irony and slapstick, Zhu Wen’s fiction – the very opposite of carefree, or imperturbable – expresses a thoughtfully, provocatively dismal view of the China that surrounds him. “Writing is a way of intervening in life,” he has commented – a turn of phrase that recalls Maoist diktats to bourgeois authors to make their work relevant to the masses. “That’s what I wanted to do when I began. Whether you like Didi de yanzou or hate it, you have some kind of a response. That’s a good thing, I think.” In Zhu Wen’s hands, levity serves to accentuate the sobriety of his subject matter – not to ridicule it. It’s the intriguing contrast between his stories’ lightness of tone and grimness of content that succeeds in underscoring, without portentous overemphasis, the harshness of life in China today; that grabs readers’ attention and holds their interest. And with Didi de yanzou, grotesque farce is Zhu Wen’s vehicle for explaining the extraordinary tumult of the 1980s.

I wanted to find a way, a mode in which to write about this particular period – a period of over-excitement. I chose a kind of adolescent carnivalesque. And once I’d settled on this, all my characters had to fit in with it. They had to be symbolic, in some way – larger than life. So I turned them into cartoons. I felt that if I wanted to capture something of that period on paper, I had to write them like this. I wrote about sex so much because I felt that it said something about the characters. When you’re young, you think there are no limitations to anything, including sex. Their obsession with it was part of the whole fever, the delusion of youth – a delusion that the students could win against the government. Of course it was a tragedy – people lost their lives. But it was also a hallucination. I left the specific question of politics out of it because I thought the whole thing was more about rebelliousness, in general – a spirit of rebellion.

For Zhu Wen, then, hormones – as much as politics or economics – are the key to understanding the decade. (Though not necessarily, it should be remembered, to unravelling the specifics of spring 1989; the censors have so far kept him quiet on that particular, enormously complex sequence of events.) “Everything, everyone was over-excited,” the novella begins, “society, the economy, science, culture, sports, even politics…It was a catastrophe: the whole world seemed to be complaining its underpants were too tight. Everywhere you went, you heard disappointed sighs of premature ejaculation. Every single dream – the dream of becoming rich, or successful, the American, French, Japanese, even Turkish dreams – ended in premature ejaculation. Until eventually, pulling on clean underpants, we found ourselves in the 1990s.” (2)

What we’re left with, then, is a paradox: a novella whose apparently slapdash crudeness is part of a careful literary design; whose surface sensationalism overlies an audacious desire to probe difficult historical questions. For Zhu Wen, no subject is sacred: neither the establishment fantasy of a wholesome socialist civilisation, nor defiant student idealism. There are plenty of works of Chinese fiction written in the 1980s that seem rooted in the feverish cultural atmosphere of that decade; there are plenty of works written in the post-1989 period that are steeped in the crass materialism of the 1990s. There aren’t many that look back at the late 1980s from the subdued perspective of the 1990s, trying to make sense – within the censorial limits imposed by the Chinese government – of a period that the authorities would prefer to pretend never happened. For the time being, Didi de yanzou is one of the few that are available to us.

Then again, though, Zhu Wen would probably tell me not to take the whole thing so seriously. “It’s not a documentary. It’s only fiction, remember,” he reminded me when we last spoke.

Julia Lovell is a lecturer in Chinese history at London University, and her next book will be a new translation of the complete fiction of Lu Xun, to be published by Penguin Classics later this year. Her most recent piece for China Beat was "It's Just History: Patriotic Education in the PRC."

[1]Zhu Wen, Didi de yanzou (Shanghai: Shiji, 2007), 10. From here on, numbers in parentheses in the text refer to this edition.
[2]Unless otherwise specified, all direct quotations from Zhu Wen in this article are taken from an interview by the author on 23 June 2009.
[3]For a development of this idea, see Sebastian Veg’s review, “Zhu Wen, I Love Dollars and other Stories of China, trans. with a foreword by Julia Lovell, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, 228 pp”, China Perspectives, 2007.1, at http://chinaperspectives.revues.org/document1503.html (accessed on 20 July 2009).
[4]http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4032543.ece (accessed on 20 July 2009).
[5]In this respect, Zhu Wen could be seen as following the example of the godfather of post-Mao cultural hooliganism, Wang Shuo. See, for example, Geremie Barmé’s discussion of Wang in In the Red (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 62-98.

In Case You Missed It: Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture

By Miri Kim

For scholars of China who are interested in modernity, the looming question seems to be, is 'modernity' a valid and useful analytical category for describing, explaining, and understanding China? And if so, how should modernity and its attendant conceptual apparatuses be deployed in investigations of China's various aspects, historical, political, cultural, and so on? In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, editor Kam Louie and a distinguished list of contributors seek to explore China within its particular modern contexts and clarify the idea of 'modernity' by using historical and contemporary cases.

In his introduction Louie writes, "At first glance, the concept of 'modern' should not present many problems since it should really be a matter of definition only," with the standard definition locating the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution as the benchmark by which to recognize the advent of the modern era (3). Louie rejects this definition as being unrepresentative of changes in Chinese culture; he likewise rejects the rigid schema used to organize Chinese history using the terms jindai (mid-nineteenth-century to the 1919 May Fourth Movement), xiandai (1919 to 1949), and dangdai (the post-1949, i.e. contemporary, period) (3-4).

Instead, Louie proposes 1900 as the beginning of modern Chinese culture, due to the changes heralded as well as influenced by the intense output of works on modernization from famous writers like Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei around that time (5). As this starting point implies, the influence of late Qing culture on China's emerging modern cultures is taken seriously by the authors featured in this volume. And as Louie points out, this periodicization centers the discussion of modern Chinese culture firmly in the twentieth-century and beyond, into a "new millennium [that] has already witnessed a Chinese culture that was unimaginable only a few generations ago" (6-7).

The matter of how to define 'China' and Chineseness, while perhaps not quite as harrowing as plunging into the vast literature on modernity, also merits mention in the introduction and is addressed in several chapters. As the twentieth century is such a big focus of this volume, Chinese diasporas and overseas communities and the ways in which they have shaped and are shaping modern Chinese culture also constitutes an important part of the story. For example, the benefits and significance of an outsider connection can be clearly seen in the phenomenon of the so-called haigui, relatively young, foreign-educated, energetic professionals who are returning to live and work in China in increasing numbers. Wang Gungwu's chapter, "Flag, flame and embers: diaspora cultures" highlights the connections between overseas Chinese communities within their host countries as well as with mainland China, as well as offering an interesting comparative look at different diasporic communities and how their specific histories affect their relationship to Chinese culture (123-124). Wang divides diasporic communities into three types, “the faithful,” composed of those who contend that non-mainland Chinese culture is the only authentic one, “the peripheral,” who “strive for a modified authenticity that could win recognition not so much from their fellow nationals as from the Chinese of China,” and “the marginal,” who have absorbed elements of host cultures to the greatest extent (129-130). Wang suggests that “the quality of the modern culture that China projects to the outside world” (132) will be a key element in the ways these communities define and negotiate their identities and national-cultural relationships with China, host countries, and other diasporic communities.

In another chapter dealing with changing configurations of Chinese culture, Sor-Hoon Tan examines the phenomenon of the Xin Rujia (translated as “Contemporary Neo-Confucians” or “New Confucians”), a diverse group of writers and thinkers who advocate a culturalist strategy for situating and understanding China in the world, particularly vis-à-vis modernization and the West (129-130). Rather than a single unified movement calling for the return of “traditional” values or rehabilitation of old forms of Confucian philosophy, New Confucians take many different approaches to reconfiguring and repositioning meanings within Chinese culture. In chapter five, William Jankowiak, in "Ethnicity and Chinese identity: ethnographic insight and political positioning," discusses social, cultural, and historical aspects of conflicts over identity playing out along the Han-minority axis of ethnic relations. As this chapter suggests, the volatile and ambiguous intersections between ethnic identity and political agency in China presents a persistent challenge to contemporary attempts to define 'Chineseness,' where historical linkages mesh uneasily with geopolitics and the contingencies of the present.

Past and present also run together in David Clarke’s chapter on modernity and Chinese art in the past century. Highly readable, his essay on the long-term trends in Chinese art from the Republican period to the twenty-first century comes at a time when modern Chinese art has gone global in scale and scope. The article provides a historical perspective that is sure to be informative and useful during a time when the international market for works of art is undergoing significant changes, with recent developments pointing to a downturn whose duration and effect remain unclear. Another chapter worth highlighting is Arif Dirlik's "Socialism in China: a historical overview," which contains a succinct summary of the overarching political developments in twentieth century China, sparse in detail but effective in conveying the importance and effects of socialism as theory and practice in China in a world historical context. Moreover, given its brief length, this chapter may function very well as a primer for undergraduate students on the topic.

While the authors present a varied look at the contexts for Chinese modernity since 1900, they do little to address the uneven modern experience in China during the past century, an inequality even more apparent as the “modern” has been defined by the infiltration of high technology and the urban lifestyle. Overall, however, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture presents a thematically coherent, interesting, and useful guide to the multifaceted changes unfolding in China today.

Readings for August 3

1. An important story emerged this weekend in the blogosphere: Chinese legal scholar Xu Zhiyong was taken from his home by police last Wednesday and has not been seen since. From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

Xu might not have reached Marshall status yet, but he is as close as China gets to a public-interest icon. He teaches law at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He has also run the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal aid and research organization that worked on many of China’s path-breaking cases. He and his colleagues had investigated the Sanlu milk scandal, in which dangerous baby formula harmed children’s health, and assisted people who had been locked up by local officials in secret undeclared jails. All of those activities are emphatically consistent with the goals of the Chinese government, even if they angered the local bureaucrats who were caught in the act.

Xu has never set out to undermine one-party rule; he is enforcing rights guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution. He has enough faith in the system that he joined it: in 2003, he ran for and won a seat as a legislator in his local district assembly, one of the few independent candidates to be elected in an open, contested election. He even received the recognition, rare among activists, of being profiled last year in a Chinese newspaper. “I have taken part in politics in pursuit of a better and more civilized nation,” he said at the time. “I am determined to prove to the citizens across the country that politics should be desirable.”

His work naturally angered parts of China’s bureaucracy, and pressure on him mounted. On July 14th, the Open Constitution Initiative, also known as Gongmeng, was fined 1.42 million RMB for “tax evasion.” Then it was banned. Xu was to have had his day in court, except he was picked up before he could. Separately, a young colleague named Zhuang Lu has also been detained, and her whereabouts are unknown. It is easy to look at China’s list of high-profile detentions and rationalize them: That guy was a cowboy, or, things in China are improving, and we have to keep it in context. Sorry. Not this time. Xu is no cowboy.

James Fallows has a good collection of suggested further readings on Xu’s detention at his blog, including links to important materials at CDT and Chinese Media Project.

2. Michael Meyer has a new piece in this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated on post-Olympics Beijing:

What is the legacy of the Beijing Olympics? Western perceptions of China tend to plant their standards at the poles of enchantment and apprehension: Witness the reaction to the opening ceremonies, during which many viewers' impressions slid along a continuum of awe at the sight of thousands of drummers and flying sylphs to the uneasy realization that a production of that scale is only possible in a nation with an enormous population and resources, and a government powerful enough to mobilize them. If they can do this, what can't they do?

The performances of Chinese athletes during the Games confirmed the country's formidability. Shortly after Beijing was awarded the Olympics, in 2001, China devised Project 119—an initiative named for the number of gold medals awarded (only one to a Chinese athlete) at the 2000 Games in track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing, and canoeing and kayaking. The plan was to boost the country to the top of the medal standings. China finished with its highest total ever, 100 medals, 51 of them gold (sidebar, page 70). Only the U.S. won more, 110 total, though just 36 were gold.

Yet despite the Beijing Olympics' spectacle and success—officials claimed the Games made a $146 million profit—the capital is feeling the hangover that comes after hosting the world's biggest-ever coming-out party. Beijing is learning, as host cities have in the past, that the Games' influence is often extinguished with the torch. (The hangover was not soothed, of course, by the simultaneous near collapse of the world's economy.) A year after the Olympics, Beijing residents still cannot drink the tap water, or surf an unfiltered Internet, or exercise in safe air.

In the article, Meyer returns to the neighborhood he wrote about at length in his book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, and weaves the story of Beijing's Qianmen neighborhood with his discussion of the remnants of Olympic spirit in the capital:

The redevelopment of our neighborhood has been tabled for lack of funds. At her courtyard home, as her father's pet pigeons flap in circles overhead, my former student Little Liu, now 12, teaches me the Chinese term for "global economic crisis."

Little Liu once anticipated the Beijing Games the way I used to Christmas Eve, but now the event feels very far away to her. "The Olympics showed foreign countries that China is a friendly and developed country," she says in English. "But now it's over." She shrugs and switches to Mandarin. "All the activities about the Olympics at school have been replaced by ones about psychological health, like 'Don't snatch purses' or 'Don't cheat people online.' And the posters with the Olympics slogan One World, One Dream were changed to ones praising our neighborhood's 800-year-old history and culture."

I cannot confirm these replacements firsthand; fears that foreigners might carry swine flu meant that I was forbidden to enter the grounds of the school where I taught for three years.

Moreover, Meyer emphasizes that the Olympics did not create the openness some international observers hoped for:

Beijing's Olympic legacy doesn't compare with that of Seoul, whose 1988 Games cajoled the then one-party government to allow direct elections and liberalization. No such defrosting is taking place in Beijing, where plainclothes police are everywhere, including outside the studio of Ai Weiwei.

3. China gets “Simified”: In the recently announced first expansion pack for the videogame The Sims 3, the latest installment in the Sims franchise originally created by designer Will Wright (also of SimCity), players will be able to take their Sims to China. The Sims allows players to control individuals or families of “Sims,” designing homes for them and guiding them through professional and personal choices (Sims can become famous in their chosen professions, have babies, age, and so on). In addition to China (specifically, “Shang Simla, China”), the expansion will also allow players to take their Sims to France and Egypt. In an interview, the game’s producer noted that the Sims won’t just be going on vacation—players will be taking their avatars adventuring, interacting with the virtual destinations:

Visiting real world locations has always been a draw for our players. There is a great push in our community to always bring more reality into the game be it through modders making celebrity hairs or recreating famous buildings on the exchange. Taking your Sims to real-world based, but Sim-inspired locations is a natural extension of that desire. Taking your Sim to a generic destination is one thing, but taking your Sims to the Great Pyramids is a big deal for us, and we're really excited about it. When players get into the game they will see that we're utilizing and building upon the innovations offered by The Sims 3 to create situations that would not have been possible before. It doesn't necessarily represent a shift in what the game is about, you'll still find that although your Sim is visiting Egypt, it's a Simified Egypt; we treasure our quirkiness. ..

The Sims 3: World Adventures isn't really about "visiting" at all; that implies you are an observer of another culture or destination. In this expansion pack, you are directly participating in the places you are travelling to, and it's very different than just being there. Your sims will start out at a kind of "base camp" and will have to earn their way up to being able to have a local home to travel to. While camp will be where your sim starts, it's all about getting out into the world and encountering what experiences are to be had. Your sim might start walking downtown to meet some locals and be asked to help find a lost artifact that will kick them off on an adventure that might lead to a secret nook of the location or into a lost tomb.

So far, we have not seen any screenshots from Shang Simla--all releases appear to be of Sim Egypt.