“She who can truly ease the flame understands the Way.” -Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan channeling his inner Jim Morrison.”

I thought…wow, who wins in a Lizard King/Taiping smackdown?

So…channeling my inner Bill Simmons channeling his Dr. Jack, here is [...]]]> On twitter last week, Shanghai-based author and historian Derek Sandhaus (@dsandhaus for those who are tweet-ready) made the following comment:

“She who can truly ease the flame understands the Way.” -Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan channeling his inner Jim Morrison.”

I thought…wow, who wins in a Lizard King/Taiping smackdown?

So…channeling my inner Bill Simmons channeling his Dr. Jack, here is the breakdown:

Jim Morrison and his dead Indians, Hong Xiuquan and the Manchu demons, flaming swords, and the whole “God is my father” dream sequence in which he was commanded to purge the Earth of evil.  EDGE: Hong Xiuquan

Educational achievement? Morrison famously walked out of UCLA film school and formed a rock and roll band that performed on Ed Sullivan. Hong just as famously flunked the provincial-level exams, had a nervous breakdown, and formed a God-Worshipping Society which went on to nearly topple an empire in a massive war that cost the lives of as many as 30 million people.  EDGE: Hong Xiuquan

God complex? Hong Xiuquan was perhaps a bit clearer in his claims to be God’s son, but anyone who plays balance beam on the Venice Beach sea wall loudly proclaiming “I am the Lizard King, I can do anything” definitely has a sense of his own inner beast-deity. Still, son of God trumps getting in touch with your personal reptile. BIG Edge: Hong Xiuquan

Women? Well, we know Hong kept quite the harem even as he was attempting to get his followers into single-sex barracks (didn’t work too well).  Jim Morrison may or may not have been married to Pamela Morrison (née Courson) while he also participated in a Wiccan wedding ritual binding him to the rock journalist Patricia Kennealy.  And then there were the groupies.  I suppose we can argue over who had more groupies, certainly Hong’s were better organized — that whole ‘harem’ thing again — but I can’t get over the hypocrisy of the Taiping leaders. EDGE: Jim Morrison

(Weird,  but sort of relevant, social media note. On my Facebook page it once said “Connect with Patricia Kennealy: 1 Mutual Friend.”  I thought…nah.  Sure enough, it was THAT Patricia Kennealy. I’m still waiting for her to accept my friend request, perhaps if I hadn’t signed it “The Gecko Prince” she would have gotten back to me sooner…)

Supporting Cast? Jim Morrison had The Doors.  I know people will disagree, but I love The Doors musically.  Hong Xiuquan heavily relied on his back-up musicians, notably Yang Xiuqing and Shi Dakai but Jim Morrison had the good sense not to make Ray Manzarek and Robbie Krieger “kings” nor did John Densmore claim to speak with the voice of God (thus technically outranking Hong who was only God’s #2 son).  Edge: Jim Morrison

Life after death? Both died relatively young and under mysterious circumstances.  The Taiping tried to carry on under Hong Xiuquan’s 15-year-old son, who presided over the sack of the Taiping capital and was executed less than six months after taking the throne.  After Jim Morrison’s death, the surviving Doors made the Other Voices album with the surviving Doors taking over vocalist duties.  Hmmm….having your son lose your kingdom and then be killed in a painful and gruesome execution or listening to Ray Manzarek sing? Edge: Hong Xiuquan

Jim Morrison is awesome, but hey…Hong was an icon of bad-assdom before it was cool. I’m giving it to Hong.  Feel free to disagree in the comments section.

At first glance, this sentence sounds offensive. How do ordinary Chinese think? However, thinking for a second, I [...]]]> The New York Times published an article about Han Han last week. In the article, Graham Lee, a Hong Kong native studying in Peking University was quoted saying “His way of thinking is different from that of ordinary Chinese.”

At first glance, this sentence sounds offensive. How do ordinary Chinese think? However, thinking for a second, I am not surprised that he felt this way.

In any other country, I don’t think Han Han would be that special. His criticisms and the courage to challenge authority, even the having the balls  to drop out of high school, are common characteristics of young people around the world. He is a very good writer, that’s for sure, but in most places his writing wouldn’t be enough to make him one of the most popular bloggers and an iconic figure. However, in China, what Han Han says and does has value.

When I was in college, I was a fan of Han Han. His books opened my eyes and mind. For the first time in my life, I realized students could criticize and analyze profoundly the problems of the China’s education system. His words were harsh, but they were just so true.

Throughout elementary school, middle school and high school, and even in college, I thought passing exams was all that education was about. Reading books other than textbooks seemed a waste of time. And thinking about questions, rather than memorizing the expected answers on the exam, was not a required skill for getting the all-important high test scores. That was education, and I never thought about questioning what it all meant. I was one of a great number of students fed through the system. We were encouraged to obey and to follow. Anybody who challenged this system, for example dating a girl, or developing a hobby, was labeled as a problem student.

Late in my college career, after reading more books and talking with more people, I realized I spent the first 20 years of my life learning bullshit. It was all basically useless for real life. I, and hundreds of millions of students in China, had been cheated.

We don’t want to be single-minded idiots filled with minds filled by doctrines and propaganda. We love Han Han because he says what we want to say. However, it is hard for many people to speak out because their courage and their ability for independent thinking have been strangled such a long time ago. China’s education killed our chance of developing critical thinking skills and as such may well have  stifled millions of other potential Han Hans.

The saddest thing is that today, millions of students in China’s education system are still suffering from the exam culture, and it’s even worse than when I was a student. Parents and teachers went through the system themselves, and they still let the same things happen to their children. However, in the big exam machine, they don’t have other options. If their children want to go to a better school and get better jobs in the future, they have to sign up for all kinds of classes and tutorials, and Olympia Maths, English courses…anything to get ahead even though it’s all completely useless, just academic hucksters looking to make a buck on the anxieties of middle class parents. Today these children are the victims of China’s educational system. Tomorrow, they will become Chinese citizens who cannot think for themselves.

——–

Yajun (A.K.A. Mrs. Granite Studio) works in the Beijing bureau of The Christian Science Monitor.  You can read her latest article for the Monitor here. Her last posts for The Granite Studio were on the recent Chinese student demonstrations in Paris and a review of Peter Hessler’s Country Driving.  She would like to strongly point out that she “is not a guest” since it’s her computer.  Fair point.

When I first heard about the movie, I thought this was Feng’s way of capitalizing off the Sichuan earthquake.  Going [...]]]> Feng Xiaogang’s new movie 唐山大地震 (Aftershock) is setting all-kinds of domestic box office records this week.  I haven’t seen it yet, but good friend and fellow China blogger Modern Lei Feng has reviewed the movie.  He said:

When I first heard about the movie, I thought this was Feng’s way of capitalizing off the Sichuan earthquake.  Going into the movie, I had low expectations, and when it started and the credits included a minute of producers and executive producers,  I sat back and prepared for a movie along the lines of “Founding of the Republic”, where everyone in the Chinese movie industry was falling over themselves to play a role in the CCP’s love letter in film to itself.  If not that, it would be an overly contrived attempt to cram history into a movie lacking a story like Summer Palace.  Spoiler alerts below (not that there’s a lot that can be spoiled), so if you want it all to be fresh, wait until you’ve watched the movie before reading on.

This is not like either of those, it is definitely a movie with a story to tell and while the earthquake’s “aftershocks” loom large throughout the movie, the actual event is over after the first 30 minutes.  That 30 minutes is incredibly moving though.  I’m convinced the Red Cross should have a 30 minute informercial every year where they just show the first 25 minutes of the movie, its bound to bring in more than they’ve ever taken in before.  It gets pretty graphic with parts of buildings constantly falling and crushing people and while it feels like the quake scene goes on for a long time, it probably is over in a few minutes.

As movies — and especially domestically produced ‘blockbusters’ — go, Aftershock sounds like a winner.  Though…anything has GOT to be better than Founding of the Republic, and by “anything” I am including having a rabid iguana shoved into your intestinal cavity and your rectum sewn shut.

But nobody comes here for my taste in movies, so what about the historical aspects of the film? In The Wall Street Journal’s China Real Time Report, Shen Hong criticized the movie, writing that while moving and heartwarming, the film generally glossed over the social and political context for the tragedy and overlooked key factors in the disaster, such as officials ignoring earthquake warnings in the weeks leading up to the quake and the slow recovery due to the Chinese government’s decision to turn down foreign aid in the aftermath.

Shen quotes blogger and commentator Shi Shusui:

“Without the particular historical background, ‘Aftershock’ is undoubtedly a wonderful movie of moral education… Regrettably, history is history. It can’t be wiped out or eliminated,” wrote Shi Shusi, one of China’s leading current-affairs commentators and bloggers.

“It seems it would go against an artist’s conscience to keep evading or even whitewashing previous tragedies without undergoing any deep self-reflection or genuine repentance,” Shi added.

But is that really the point of historical dramas? Does it always need to be about the suffering?

On his blog, Bruce Hume translated an excerpt from an interview with the adapter of the screenplay, Su Xiaowei who, Humes reminds us, also moonlights on the Film Review Board at the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT).

“Besides [changes to] the structure of the story, the movie also “performed major surgery” on the theme; the basic tone of the story was altered from one of darkness and pain, to one of warmth and hope [in the film]. The novelist Zhang Ling intended to convey that even after the disaster was over, the ravaged land gradually flattened and structures rebuilt, the blood from the wounds scratched open by the earthquake in the souls of children continued to ooze silently long thereafter”

Later she adds:

Film is a mass medium that speaks to greater numbers of viewers, and it’s not like a book that represents a more ‘personalized’ account. After all, a film should offer a sense of warmth and consolation.

I felt like I needed an expert opinion and so I turned to James Palmer.  James is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia and is currently working on a new book about the Tangshan earthquake.  Last week, in his secret identity as mild-mannered op-ed editor for The Global Times English edition, James had this to say about the new movie:

When I went to see Aftershock, I was expecting it to match its Chinese title, The Great Tangshan Earthquake. As it turned out, the 1976 earthquake, which killed at least a quarter of a million people, was over in the first 15 minutes, which then turned into a family drama spanning the next 30 years.

As a historian of the Tangshan Earthquake, I was a little disappointed; it was like going to see Titanic and watching the boat sink in the first half hour.

I asked James if he would comment on the Wall Street Journal blog post, and expand his thoughts about the historicity of Feng Xiaogang’s movie.  This is his reply:

The earthquake prediction stuff is bollocks, and pseudoscience for the most part.  It comes up sometimes in conversations with Tangshanese, but all the seismologists I spoke to, Chinese and foreign, were scathing about it. Nobody can predict earthquakes reliably; China had a lucky experience with the Haicheng earthquake, where it was successfully predicted (and an evacuation took place) because of a series of foreshocks, and there were general predictions of a a possible earthquake in the Hebei belt, but it’s a far cry from that to calling a time, date, and scale, never mind what would have been required – closing down one of the foremost industrial cities in China and evacuating 1.6 million people.

Qinglong County, a couple of hundred miles away in the mountains, did carry out an evacuation based on local signs and judgements, and had no casualties – but, based on conducting interviews with locals, they seem to have also quite significantly exagerated the scale of their evacuation and the threat posed afterwards; I spoke to local village and militia heads who had heard nothing of a prediction or evacuation, and Qinglong is a long, long way from the epicenter, so even villages that didn’t evacuate (most of them) suffered no fatalities.

What the movie didn’t show was that the PLA efforts were concentrated almost entirely in the centre of Tangshan, so that people living on the outskirts didn’t see any form of relief for a week, and most of the surrounding countryside – where the fatality rate was also very high and the damage devastating – saw no sign of gov’t relief at all.

It’s always tough to do history as movie.  The demands of entertainment strain against the weight of what actually (or what we think might actually) have happened. But it sounds like Aftershock is worth seeing, even if some of the details are a little amiss. Besides, I could use a good cry.

Just an aside (and yes, this will be a threadjack), I was wondering if anyone here could help me out with ‘the great laowai’ debate I am having here. I have been living in China for 2 years, I HATE to be called laowai (because of the informal connotation of lao3, because [...]]]> From a reader in Sichuan:

Just an aside (and yes, this will be a threadjack), I was wondering if anyone here could help me out with ‘the great laowai’ debate I am having here. I have been living in China for 2 years, I HATE to be called laowai (because of the informal connotation of lao3, because hey, if you don’t know me, you gotta keep some formality… for example, once I accidentally called my then future-father-in-law laoshu, and he got SUPER pissed, etc). One of my friends who has been here a hella long time agrees, another does not. Waiguoren is a ok. Hell, somebody could call me wairen. Am I being overly sensitive, or should I be resigned to my fate to be people’s dear foreigner here?

Also, where the hell did the term come from?

This is one of those topics that is perennial fodder for China bloggers. (See these posts in 2005, 2008, and 2010 as well as my own take on the subject back in 2006. )  Is Laowai a term of respect or of contempt?

I asked Yajun and this was her response:

After all this time, it’s become a label, a way to separate “us” and “them.” For some people it’s a neutral term. Phoenix TV uses ‘laowai’ all the time because it sounds more casual and colloquial than ‘waiguoren.’ Some people do use it as a way to put down foreigners, assuming that foreigners are ignorant or clueless.  People in the rural areas though, and this is just my opinion, don’t mean anything bad by it, it’s just the only term they know for foreigners.

My somewhat simplistic take on it is: It depends.  Language is not only about the words but about other signifiers which indicate the meaning behind the words.  There is also the all-mighty context.  Being called a ‘laowai’ by my friends over beers is obviously less annoying than somebody muttering it under the breath as an epithet or having it shouted at me from a passing motor scooter by some guy who thinks a tiled squatter is the height of modernity.

For the most part though, I equate Chinese who use the word “Laowai” with the morons back in the US who still use the word Oriental whenever they see someone of Asian descent.  It’s less the offensiveness of the word than the fact that using “Laowai” (or Oriental) screams to the world: “I am too stupid and ignorant to realize the diversity of people who are not like myself.”

In any case, I highly doubt this will be the last blog post to try and reconcile the term Laowai.  But it’s certainly something that people ask about all the time, especially my students.

Of course, we can also indulge in every foreigner’s favorite airport game.  The next time you fly back from China, just wait until you get off the plane and into the baggage claim.  Guaranteed at least one idiot is going to say something like “Aiya, zheme duo laowai” (Wow! There are a lot of laowai”).  At which point you can lean over and in your best putonghua remind them that: “Duibuqi, zai zher NI shi laowai.”  (Sorry, here YOU are the ‘laowai’!)  Silly? Sure. Childish? You bet. But we’ve all done it and it’s a helluva lot of fun.

“Foreign Minister Yang reacted by leaving the meeting for an hour. When he [...]]]> Apparently Chinese foreign minister Yang Jiechi didn’t take it too well when Secretary Hillary Clinton last week essentially called “bullshit” on some of China’s more creative and ambitious claims to the South China Sea.  According to US and Asian officials present at the meeting:

“Foreign Minister Yang reacted by leaving the meeting for an hour. When he returned, he gave a rambling 30-minute response in which he accused the United States of plotting against China on this issue, seemed to poke fun at Vietnam’s socialist credentials and apparently threatened Singapore”

Safe to say, it probably wasn’t Minister Yang’s best day on the job…