On the eve of another semester
So university will start again in a week or so.
Work, of a sort will be on us. We foreign teachers will attempt to teach the finer points of spoken English to a mostly disinterested crowd of students, who fear the high costs of noodles and absence of hot water much more than anything else.
The job is not difficult, nor is it as easy as some people think. The endless frustrations and difficulties of life in China are mostly mental. Perhaps even spiritual. It is not a physically demanding job, one spends at most 6 hours a day standing, and there are long breaks in between.
Of course there are plenty who envy me this position, and complain about it. The students are trained from an early age to look down on those foreigners who come to teach them English. Oblivious to the fact that the horrible conditions in China, as well as the terrible pay, are why they do not have tenured foreigners with PhD’s working in their schools. The higher education system in China is really a joke. In fact the universities are a way to slow the arrival of new workers into the labor market, a 4 year grace period so-to-speak, and one that provides jobs for the educators.
The future is not any more Chinese than it will be Indian, Brazilian or Korean. I do think the economic hegemony the US and Japan has enjoyed is coming to an end. It is only logical that countries with large populations started demanding a style of living that we’d be enjoying for a century, while they rot of curable diseases in the streets. No if anything this new Chinese middle class will provide markets for more and more ‘American’ companies to enrich themselves and the chosen few, while laying off ever more of the working class. Still, the frightening thing is that China’s labor costs have risen. Many companies have said China won’t be competitive, after all many Chinese now refuse to work for…get ready…less than $10 a day.
What does this drifting thought really mean? That the unexamined life is not worth living, and my own life is getting a little too introspective. I’m an American, yes, but what I did was live a life that got stranger and stranger from the norm. Raised with no TV, Homeschooled, a social reject followed by an even stranger period of religious idealism of a protestant kind, finished up with a rather unspectacular university career that ended with me moving to Russia at the age of 22. Since then it has been East Asia, with a few exceptions.
America exists in my head, most importantly as my immediate family. That’s it. The friends I had in America have all, steadily gone away, some because of the natural flow of time and distance, others because of more personal feuds. Still others have fallen by the side, as we changed over the years we realizes we have little or nothing in common. Some marry, perhaps some even die.
I was sent a picture of my sister’s wedding. My father’s hair and bear are white, far whiter then I remember when I left. My mother never seems to age. My younger brothers have changed the most, rapidly, and when I see them again it will be with the awkwardness of strangers and not a family member. 2 years abroad is longer than most people in the military serve. I have volunteered not for the service of my country, but out a curious desire to see the world, to drink tea and eat strange animals.
Men can work, live, play and reproduce without freedom. China has taught me this. One is not free to think here. And Orwell and Solzhenitsyn were right, and wrong. The reason communism has never failed in Asia, is because the Asians do not think. To think, to be a ‘free thinker’; to have an idea opposed to another idea, is wrong in and of itself. The country creeps ever towards the absolute tyranny of patriarchal men who break their women’s feet. They may drive a BMW they may wear a suit, but much like Korea, this is not a neutral middle kingdom. This is the results of thousands of years of slave mentality. In China Man is Not Born Free. So he sees this government not at a slave master but as her protector. Much like a parent keeps a child from hurting himself by punishments so China must keep the nation from chaos and disharmony.
Those who disagree are referred to as terrorists, unharmonious, and even worse, traitors to the great Han race. China sees the recent pains in the US since the recession as vindication of its own policies, America’s problems being the results of too much freedom and deregulation. In a way they are right. The continuing growth of the middle class will solidify the CCCP’s power. They need not share with the masses, but rather as long as the middle class can become, some of them, the elite, they will be happy. Just like the old imperial examinations were based on ‘merit’ so the new power in China is based on wealth and connections. Sufficient quantities of these guarantee a harmonious life, an imported car, and a mistress. Not to mention enough money to send your child to get an education in America.
The inevitable comparisons between the USSR and China are mostly irrelevant. Russia had too few people after the civil war, too many natural resources, too long a history of westernization, and strongest of all, a history of Christianity. After the death of Stalin the Sino-Soviet split saw the countries travel in separate directions entirely. What ever similarities may have existed in 1950 are certainly of interest to historians but do not tell us anything about the direction of modern China.
A disciplined man would try to separate the political and historical side of this from the personal details. But I’m not writing for Newsweek. To be honest I’m writing from boredom. Who reads livejournal anyway? I’m just lucky that site hasn’t been blocked. Google has annoyed the Chinese enough that blogspot is always blocked.
Yet with all this I’m far, far happier in China. The US seems to be modeling their passing on the literary fall of the Roman Empire. A rich class is decedent. We have this certainly. Barbarian hordes, not so much, unless one feels the needs to stretch it to Iraq and Afghanistan. In that case the hordes have defeated the legions, but we have no fear of the sacking of Washington DC. I would welcome the burning of the Washington by the Mexicans or the Canadians.