Starseeker
Vault Senior Citizen
Dug up some view point files and expat files, might prove interesting to read.
I did not have that similar of an experience here. I think maybe it's due to the fact that I look Asian. People have told me about their gripes with the government, but that's only after I reassure them that I am an friendly expat who doesn't know China at all.
On economy:
Welsh's favorite subject, inequality. And yet how do you deal with 900million farmer's plight?
I'll post translation of the speeches made on the Nobel Economy forum later.
EXPAT FILES:
China: waiting for democracy
CBC News Viewpoint | February 3, 2005
How is it possible for an individual living in a vastly over-populated country to feel isolated? This question occurred to me after a friend of mine, Mr. Zhang, who lives in a country of 1.4 billion, told me that he felt this way. Somewhat like myself, Mr. Zhang’s favourite topics of conversation are quite obviously politics and history, yet, unlike myself, the rare occasions he has to speak of his interests occur only when he meets a foreigner who is interested and will listen.
George Orwell said that to see what is in front of your nose requires a constant struggle. But struggle is bearable, and can even be healthy while in the company of others. For Mr. Zhang and those like him, who fear their political beliefs could lead to a prison cell, and are too busy making a living to risk seeking like-minded people, the struggle for an independent view of the world, irrespective of the government's official line, is a solitary one.
Mr. Zhang's contradictory position, as he himself likes to discuss, is a product of history. The years of the cold war saw the world powers taking part in many competitions: the space race, the arms race, the Olympics, chess tournaments, and so on. But the most important and most lasting was the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people – the development of the most effective possible system of propaganda.
While virtually all governments took part and had varying degrees of success, those on the communist side of the world were able to easily dismiss freedom of speech and expression as "bourgeois" and parliamentary democracy as "capitalist," and build propaganda machines that could only have been the envy of the Western leaders.
In China, this policy has been so effective that today, even after property rights have been enshrined in its constitution – making it in a strict sense more capitalist than countries like Canada – the average Chinese person will still claim that theirs is a socialist state.
The propaganda system in China is formidable, with independent media virtually non-existent and the government going so far as to control which websites its citizens have access to.
Knowing I was looking for a place to live, a friend referred me to a Chinese man who was offering a free room in his apartment in exchange for giving English tutorials to high-school students. I jumped at the opportunity to live for free while having unlimited access to a Chinese person who could help me with my own language skills. And once I moved in with Mr. Zhang, it didn't take long for politics to come up.
Being a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., I was preparing to vote in both 2004 elections in absentia and I thought my new roommate might be interested in seeing the ballets. He was ecstatic. "Who are you going to vote for? If I were you I'd vote for Bush."
At first I was reluctant to discuss the subject with him since neither his command of English nor my Chinese would allow us to give an adequate account of our feelings – compounded by the fact that I was most definitely not going to vote for George Bush. But after an evening stroll that ended with him flailing his arms in the air and declaring: "A man living without democracy is no better than an animal," I realized that the subject couldn't be ignored.
That night, Mr. Zhang explained to me his feelings, stopping frequently to write down a few words too difficult to pronounce or to thumb through the dictionary. Sometimes he would form a grammatically correct sentence such as: "For me to live without democracy is like a fish without water," that must have been memorized sometime in the past. Through the night I slowly began to form a coherent picture of his politics and where his ideas had come from.
Mr. Zhang, a 34-year-old private tutor for a dozen overworked high-school students, had grown up in a village in Sichuan province. His parents had been property owners before the 1949 Communist take-over and were subsequently the victims of Communist party-encouraged hatred of the landlord class. According to Mr. Zhang, his parents had both been physically attacked, with his mother being forced to kneel on sharp objects making her bleed from the legs. To balance the conversation I sometimes try to explain that even in Western democracies, an inequality exists that both reduces the effectiveness of the democracy itself and makes "making what one wishes of one's own life" impossible for most people, especially immigrants.
But such arguments have little impact on a person who witnesses the citizens of other nations actively choosing their own leaders while he is not even able to express to his fellow countrymen his dissatisfaction with China's single party out of fear of prison, or worse.
Such a situation is what led to Mr. Zhang's feeling of isolation; with passionate beliefs that can only be expressed to a foreigner who is neither able to completely empathize, nor effectively speak a common language.
Today, when people in the West think of China they imagine a poor country quickly becoming rich; a potential competitor to the American dominance of the world market; a one-time repressive Communist country that has somehow seen the light. This attitude is a good indication that the systems of propaganda that have taught us to equate free markets with democracy, and democracy with goodness, live on today. China has a free market, but not a democracy.
It has the fastest growing economy in the world, but Mr. Zhang and others like him have no reason to believe that to be true. The party-controlled media have always painted a rosy picture of the economy, even during the worst times. Witnessing the continued poverty of his home-village, of the difficulty of his own life and of his friends', he has no reason to think that the party is telling the truth now.
For Mr. Zhang, freedom doesn't come when he is able to choose amongst a variety of toothpaste brands. It will come when he is simply able to speak his mind without fear. And when he has a say in his country's political destiny.
I did not have that similar of an experience here. I think maybe it's due to the fact that I look Asian. People have told me about their gripes with the government, but that's only after I reassure them that I am an friendly expat who doesn't know China at all.
On economy:
Cultivating crisis: a look at rural China
CBC News Viewpoint | May 18, 2005
Growing up on the Canadian Prairies undoubtedly gave me a kind of affinity for the land and an appreciation for the lifestyle that comes from living off it. I loved the smells, the space and the serenity of it all, even if our family eventually found it economically unviable.
In time, I came to realize the farm industry in Canada was being challenged, and my experiences in China have let me see that the plight of farmers is nothing short of a pandemic.
Everyone is so used to citing China’s population – 1.3 billion people – that the number just sort of slides off the tongue; but when one realizes that of those 1.3 billion some 900 million are farmers – yes, 900 million farmers – the dimensions seem unfathomable.
I remember my first trip on a train here, peering out the window and being at a loss to tell where the cities ended and farms began.
On China’s eastern plains, where the land is most arable, clusters of drab, concrete villages occupy what could be an otherwise picturesque landscape. With so many farmers and limited land, the countryside at times looks more like a series of community gardens than farms. It’s not hard to see how communes were a natural step in the social evolution here.
Far from the idyllic sentiments often attached by foreigners, farming here is generally a hard existence that most people are born into and spend the bulk of their lives trying to get out of. Work is mostly done by hand, shovel and water buffalo, and has changed little in thousands of years. Small, makeshift machines can be seen in some areas, but generally, the farms are so small that it isn’t cost-effective to buy machinery.
In the north, where conditions are more arid, irrigation is an exhaustive process where men, and in no small numbers, women, carry buckets of water on bamboo poles, and water their crops by hand. When every pair of helping hands counts, equality of the sexes becomes a given.
In the area where I live, harvesting wheat is a truly curious process. It is cut and stoked by hand before being thrown on busy roads where it’s run over by passing traffic until thoroughly threshed.
Then the grain is tossed in the air by shovel to separate the wheat and chaff before being fanned out on the roads to dry. During harvest, major roads become a kind of checkerboard, where sections of drying wheat are demarcated by bricks and stones to keep vehicles from driving through.
While reportedly on the rise, incomes remain dangerously low for most farming families. According to national statistics, the average annual net income for farmers is some 2,500 RMB, or a little over $400 Cdn. And unlike Canadian farming, where there are good years and bad years, incomes here seem hopelessly capped by the inherent small scale of farms.
As well, most crops and produce are consumed locally or nationally, limiting the price they can be sold for. To get rid of the “middleman” and keep a little more of the profit, many farmers take truckloads of fruit and vegetables to markets to sell themselves.
Such a bleak outlook has sent farmers in mass exodus looking for seasonal work in Chinese cities as construction workers and labourers. The work is hard and dangerous and the men live in makeshift camps and spend months away from family. To add insult to injury, construction companies are notorious for not paying workers after months of toil.
In recent years, government leaders have been anxious to resolve the impending crisis, but find themselves in a precarious position: if they modernize farming and allow farmers to expand their operations and profits, tens if not hundreds of millions would be without work, education or the resources to pursue any other form of subsistence.
While many leaders appear genuine and pragmatic about wanting to change the situation, attitudes toward farming and the language in which the problem is couched are less encouraging. One article I read recently referred to farming and farmers as “the weak link in a strong economy,” which would be nothing to take offence at if a) farmers were machines instead of people and b) were in a position to significantly change their livelihood.
Some attitudes are even more insidious, with city folk making harsh and rude remarks about how dark-skinned and ugly farmers are, and how they create problems by moving to the cities.
As well, many people I’ve spoken to here – educated, moderate people – often comment that they don’t like Chinese movies that take place in rural settings because they make China look poor or weak to Western audiences.
When I hear comments like this I don’t know whether to be upset because they would choose to pretend farmers don’t exist or because it’s assumed westerners are shallow and callous.
Insensitivity and oversensitivity aside, the reality of China’s rural situation threatens national stability. Moreover, it is equally curious that the problem is dumped solely onto a central government that is either already overburdened or incapable of effectively addressing the situation.
For, unlike other international crises of smaller dimensions, which if ignored might not cause any major ripples abroad, the fate of 900 million people can hardly be called regional in the wake of globalization, nor can it fail to go unnoticed by the international community.
Welsh's favorite subject, inequality. And yet how do you deal with 900million farmer's plight?
I'll post translation of the speeches made on the Nobel Economy forum later.