Soccer as a metaphor for Corruption

James Montague and Jaime FlorCruz have a feature piece up on CNN.com on the state of soccer (sorry, football) in China.  It details the trials and tribulations of establishing a professional league in the PRC and FIFA’s hopes to tap into China’s legions of soccer fans in the face of corruption and match fixing.  The whole piece is worth a read, especially for sports fans, but author Rowan Simons makes a point which bridges the gap between the world of athletic competition and the ills which face Chinese society as a whole:

“The CSL was already the third attempt at setting up the league because the other two collapsed due to corruption and fan violence,” Rowan Simons, author of Bamboo Goalposts, a recent book about soccer in China, told CNN.

“There’s corruption at every single level of the game, from the top to the very bottom. It’s an indictment of wider Chinese society and representative of a much bigger problem with corruption and nepotism. It’s more visible with football because your results are taken by your performance in international competition. So there is nowhere to hide. They are 85th in FIFA’s world rankings with a population of over a billion

May 25th, 2010

On Culture, Arson, Love, and Dickishness

Chinese graduate student Zhai Tiantian was arrested recently on charges he threatened to burn down the campus of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey.  Now, as  a fellow graduate student I totally get the whole battling tortured impulses and the importance of NOT listening to those voices in your head…

But according to Luo Gang, the Chinese Consul General in New York, the cause was quite simple.  Such cases, said Luo, originate usually out of cultural differences.

What a crock.

I am in no way denying the existence of cultural difference nor am I (totally) minimizing the importance of culture in our daily lives.  My students just read the Anthropology classic “Shakespeare in the Bush,” and while there may be more sophisticated and systematic looks at culture and the nature of culture, even four decades later few pieces present the problem in such stark relief or with such a rich helping of humor.

That said, when somebody works or lives in a different culture, this notion of ‘cultural difference’ can become a broad brush to paint over the myriad other complex relationships that bind us together as human beings.  If I work in a Chinese office and I

May 24th, 2010

Four days in Napa and not a drop of Chardonnay...

A fortuitous trip into “town” (in this case Zhongdian) means a quick stop in a local Internet Cafe.  We’ve been spending the last few days in Napa Village, a small Tibetan (with a dash of Naxi) settlement not too far outside of Zhongdian.  The village is on the edge of Napa Hai which in wetter weather is a large, shallow lake but at this time of the year transforms into a broad, green expanse of pasture land dotted with more yak than one would think possible. 

The villagers of Napa have made several transformations themselves in the last few years, shifting their economy from pastoral agriculture supplemented by quasi-legal logging to ecotourism supplemented by a quasi-legal toll booth blocking the new highway which runs through the area.  In fact those traveling in Northwest Yunnan should be prepared for several of these make-shift money-making roadblocks.  All over the Zhongdian area local villagers are whacking passing vehicles (even bicycles, one villager proudly announced at dinner) for 30 RMB a pop.  My students were a bit perplexed until I reminded them that highway brigandry has long been a staple of the local economy and the new toll both minders are far more polite than their 19th-century

May 11th, 2010

Beijing to Shangri La

If my posting seems even more sporadic than usual, it’s because I’m starting a two-week trip in Northwestern Yunnan/Southwestern Sichuan this week.  It’s part of a course on Tibetan Studies offered by IES.  We have seven students  who will be trekking in the area; taking classes on Tibetan culture, history and Buddhism; and living the majority of the time with Tibetan homestays.  It’s a very cool class and I’m excited to be a part of it.

Yesterday we flew from Beijing to Zhongdian with a nearly eight hour layover in Kunming.  It was enough time for us to stash our gear and head out into the city on what was a truly spectacular day.  I love Beijing, I’ve lived there off and on since 2002, but given the right opportunity I’d have a hard time saying no to a couple of years (or more) in the Yunnan capital.  It was a gorgeous late spring day with temperatures in the 80s and a nice breeze to keep things from getting too hot.  I spent most of the day strolling around Cui Hu Park and the streets around Yunnan University, including the obligatory salad and smoothie at Salvador’s. 

We finally arrived in

May 9th, 2010

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