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This is either an online photographic archive documenting an interesting cultural phenomenon which touches on a host of issues worthy of further study and research…or a fetish site. Could go either way. (h/t Sinosplice via Adam Schokora via Twitter). A few random hits from around the China blogosophere on this Sunday morning… **** In Foreign Affairs, Mixin Pei considers the challenges facing the Communist Party as the world’s economy tumbles downward and even China’s much bally-hooed economic miracle takes a bit of a stumble: Until recently, most leading China watchers thought the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had become remarkably resilient. Through learning and adaptation, it seemed, the world’s largest and most powerful one-party regime had become politically nimble and skillful enough to overcome difficulties that would have overwhelmed lesser autocratic rulers. For two decades, the party has compiled an impressive list of achievements: at home it has kept the economy growing at a gravity-defying double-digit rate, while abroad it has pursued a pragmatic foreign policy, avoiding confrontation with the United States and methodically gaining prestige and influence. Because of the global economic crisis, however, Beijing is in trouble. The problems are numerous: China’s exports are plummeting, tens of millions of migrant laborers have lost their jobs, millions of college graduates cannot find employment, industrial overcapacity is threatening deflation, and the once red-hot real estate sector has nose-dived. The country’s faltering growth is posing the hardest test yet to the Around 8:00 p.m. on December 24, 1946, a group of American marines including 23-year old Corporal William Pierson and Private William Pritchard snatched Beijing University student Shen Chong off the streets near Dongdan in Beijing, dragged her to the adjacent Polo Grounds (what is today the Dongdan basketball courts) and raped her. A group of workers heard her cries for help but –intimidated by the American soldiers — they didn’t intervene and instead ran to report the crime to the joint Sino-American Police Force tasked with keeping order in the city. Pierson was arrested later that night. The crime electrified the Beijing intelligentsia. The fact that the two soldiers were tried in an American military court with limited Chinese involvement recalled memories of colonial extraterrioriality. Moreover, the assault raised the question of why American troops were continuing to occupy key Chinese cities a year after the Japanese surrender. Many students, academics, and intellectuals, already predisposed to sympathize with the CCP and leftist groups at the expense of Chiang Kai-shek’s government, used the case of Shen Chong’s rape to call for immediate US withdrawal from China, accusing the Americans of being in league with Chiang and possibly planning to return China to colonial Mara Hvistendahl writes in The New Republic this week about the possibilities of future unrest and social ills as unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy. I wrote a little something about this last year: There are many factors that can contribute to social instability and political unrest, but having a large population of young, underemployed, and unmarried males is a big one. By way of example, I give you the Old “Wild” West in the United States, rural China in the mid- to late-19th century, and Sanlitun’r on any given Saturday night. Ms. Hvistendahl concurs: In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People’s Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States–frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps–are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are– today as well as then–disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term Dave at The Mutant Palm has posted a critique of the “guang’gun goin’ to hell” narrative that pops up every so often. The short form of that story is that sex-selection in family planning, exacerbated by the One Child Policy, is creating a bachelor bomb (a generation of guang’gun 光棍 or ‘bare sticks’) that will mean years of social unrest in the PRC. Dave and I disagree slightly on the guang’gun issue, I’m more pessimistic than he is, but I agree with him that this has been overblown by the mainstream media and the historical parallels with the demographic pressures in the turbulent decades of the 19th century, while instructive, are hardly exact. I wrote a seminar paper on this subject in 2006, and if I can dig it up out of my archive I’ll post it online. In the meantime, check out Dave’s very thoughtful post. (Mainland link here.)——————Kudos also to Dave for his ongoing series exploring the recently opened NYT archives for snippets of historical China analysis. Fascinating stuff from the “The More Things Change…” desk. |
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