China Hope Live » Being Chinese about it

Those aren’t Chinese New Year’s fireworks; they’re “recreational munitions”

Joel 大江 — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:48:09 +0000

From Nankai Rob’s Chinese New Year 2012 post “Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load“:
“…parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.”

For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:

Happy Chinese New Year!

Tension rising with Mainland students in American universities

Joel 大江 — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:55:39 +0000

Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA — in contrast to Chinese from other countries — are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It’s Bad Out There.

It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don’t play well among their American classmates. For example:

“They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate.”

“One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again.”

The evolution of Christmas Eve in China [Updated]

Joel 大江 — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:41:28 +0000

In China, Christmas Eve is actually called “Peaceful Night” (平安夜 — after the Chinese translation of the song “Silent Night”), but peaceful is the one thing it definitely isn’t. Here’s a short post about Christmas Eve in urban China, from a foreigner who’s witnessed it go from nothing to the spectacle it is today in just a few short years: Some Thoughts on “Ping An Ye” (Silent Night)
An here’s a Chinese perspective, translated into English: Christmas in Shanghai

For more about the odd creature Christmas Eve has become in China (with pictures!), see:

How we participated in China’s rampant residential electricity thieving

Joel 大江 — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 22:40:34 +0000

In China, you should expect shenanigans. They’re such a part of daily life here that I sometimes wonder if the whole country would simply grind to a halt without them. Here’s an example from our previous year.

Our last apartment was rigged to get free electricity, and it turns out that this is apparently really common. One woman’s interesting-in-a-car-crash-sort-of-way first-hand account of attempting to rectify a similar situation in an apartment she’d bought makes a fine example. Sometimes you can’t do the lawful thing even if you want to because no one cares, even the people in charge of enforcing the law. It reminded me a little of our situation.

Like many apartments built in the same era, there’s an electricity box above the door in addition to the regular meter. There’s an electric key, like a USB stick, that you take down to an office and pay to have credits put on. Then you return home and briefly insert it into the slot in the box above the door to recharge the red, digital number showing on the outside. In our first apartment we did all this ourselves, but in this second apartment, the landlady wouldn’t give us the electricity key. When we first moved in we pushed her quite a bit to turn over the key because I wanted to avoid the hassle of having to contact her every time we were out of electricity. But she never produced the card, always making some excuse that didn’t add up.

But the red digital “3″ above the door never changed, no matter how much electricity we used. And the electricity never ran out. For two years. When we paid rent (every six months), the landlady would just look at the meter and calculate the cost of the electricity we’d used, and we’d pay her, all of us pretending together like we didn’t think anything was amiss. I seriously considered calling her out on the way she was simply pocketing the money we paid for electricity. I don’t mind paying electric bills, but if our money wasn’t going to go where it should then I didn’t want to throw it away.

We asked our more tactful Chinese friends how we could go about it (ask for a receipt?), but none of them could think of a way to do it that was likely to produce the result we wanted. So in the end, since success was doubtful but 麻烦 wasn’t, we didn’t bother, and that always bugged me. But after reading the translated account linked above and finding out some of the likely details of this kind of electricity theft, I’m glad we let that sleeping dog lie. I guess. Anyway, that other story is kind of funny:

“Who Is the Guilty Party?”
In less than half an hour, a slight man wearing the work robe of Electricity Bureau arrived. Within a minute of opening the electricity meter, he was done. Seeing suspicion in my look, the man said: “Rest assured. Wires corrected and the seal replaced. I’m from the Electricity Bureau myself and have done this job often. There will be no problem.”

I was curious: “You are often asked to change wires?”

He said frankly: “Illegal changes are naturally more than corrections. I do all. 500 yuan for an illegal change, not a penny less. For corrections I can give better prices.”

I saw a big wad of seals in his bag and suddenly understood: When the electricity meter was changed in the first place, the seal must have been removed; why did I see one that was intact? The only answer is: the Electricity Bureau’s staff must be the thief who steal what they are guarding (监守自盗). Who knows, perhaps the one who changed the wires last time was the same man today?

More stuff about living in a Chinese apartment:

China’s “leftover women” [Updated]

Joel 大江 — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 01:43:55 +0000

Male chauvinism, narrow and well-defined beauty ideals, and materialism converge in a single phenomenon in China called “leftover women” — urban, professional women in their late 20′s who still haven’t married, and, so conventional wisdom goes, might never. Despite a surplus of males due to China’s ongoing legacy of gendercide, these professionally successful women feel their chances for marriage at 30 are quite slim, and the pressure to settle can be intense.

China’s “Leftover” Women
26-year-old newlywed college graduate Li Fang (a pseudonym) explained to me over dinner why she had been in such a rush to marry:

If I hadn’t gotten married now, I would still have to date for at least one or two years. Then I would already have passed the best child-bearing age and I would be a leftover woman.

More than 90 percent of men surveyed said women should marry before 27 to avoid becoming unwanted. The message to women: If you want to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever getting married in this country, don’t demand too much from your man.

We’ve had our own encounters with this and related aspects of Chinese society:

China’s Third Gender
“A”-class women are so far outside the traditional definition of “woman” and have such trouble finding husbands and realizing the female roles of wife and mother that our teachers joke that they’re like a third gender.
On Love and being ‘smart enough’ (by Jessica!)
The guys also said that she should be “一般聪明” which means “smart enough” or “ordinarily smart.” There’s a definite thread in Chinese culture that says that smart, clever, and independent women are threatening or something to be feared, so the guys tend not to want a girlfriend that might be smarter than themselves.

This one is also worth a look:

The options of yuppie women in China: “strong woman”, housewife or “fox”
“Should I be a ‘strong woman’ (女强人) and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife (全职太太), support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ (狐狸精) — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines (妾，二奶)?”

Finding a mate is difficult when young people are scrambling for a job in a crowded and competitive market, so “marriage markets” (our term) are not uncommon. Since they’re full of bored parents and grandparents, they make great locations for students of Chinese to practice conversational Mandarin. We visited the one in Tianjin several times:

China’s marriage markets
Tianjin’s Marriage Market (photos)
Central Park Marriage Market (photos)
Marriage market, Eric Liddell, weekend slogan (photos)
Tianjin bike ride (photos)

“In my country…”

Joel 大江 — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:59:37 +0000

A Chinese writer’s recent speech delivers unflinching social criticism:
“In my country, the job of the press and electronic media is to promote the government,not to report the truth. The education system is tasked with instructing the people to be loyal to the government and keeping the people ignorant, not with disseminating knowledge. As a result, many people have never grown up intellectually even though they are adults. Even today, many people in my country still are nostalgic for the catastrophic Cultural Revolution that ended over thirty years ago and still promote the cult of personality. Some people still deny that the unprecedented great famine of the early 1960s ever occurred, and insist that the millions of deaths by starvation is a fabrication.
[..]
“In my country, there is a strange system that rewards liars, and with the passage of time, people have become accustomed to lying. People lie as naturally as they breathe, to the point that lying has become a virtue.”

I’m curious about how much of this would ring true for those who grew under Communism in eastern Europe and Russia.

And here’s an interesting piece on how such criticism are sometimes met by people in China: Agents of Conformity

心眼

Joel 大江 — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:54:03 +0000

Pronounced: xīn yǎn
Literally: heart/mind eye; eyes of the mind
Means: calculating, wily

The post “Dumb Americans”and one of its comments explain it this way:
“To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xin-yan (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb. …to speak your mind straightforwardly, to defend your position forcefully, and to uphold what you believe without compromise, are all signs of childishness. A lot of Americans, alas, fill that bill.” [Link 1]

“There is another xinyan word/phrase: 实心眼。 It means solid, blocked 心眼 (note that 眼 also means “hole”), and, figuratively, honest, lack of wily flexibility. It is sort of like 没心眼，the difference being, 没心眼 means no 心眼 at all while 实心眼 means not necessarily the absence of of 心眼，but the insistence on doing things in a more principled way. It is generally recognized that, in China, 实心眼吃亏 — if you are too principled, you stand to lose, you suffer, and you are dumb.

“I read somewhere that the Eskimos have a lot of words for snow; and heck, we Chinese have tons of words for 心眼!” [Link 2]

China’s sexual education, taboos and consequences

Joel 大江 — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 03:58:24 +0000

China’s a very interesting place right now in terms of sex education, sexual behaviour, and tenacious, strong taboos surrounding discussion of sex.

When we first landed in Tianjin (2007) we walked to Chinese class, and noticed that the walls lining the sidewalk outside of residential and school compounds had condom boxes affixed to them. The anonymous (though still public) nature of the transaction made sense to me, given that sex talk was still very much taboo and buying condoms at a convenience or grocery store risked a scowl or scolding from the cashier if the customer looked young.

Here’s a picture of one kind (they didn’t all come with cute posters and fancy framing):

关注生殖健康，共建和谐家园
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Together Build a Harmonious Home
关注生殖健康，构建和谐社会
Pay Attention to Reproductive Health, Construct a Harmonious Society
安全套售货机
Condom Vending Machine (They chose “safety cover” 安全套 rather than “contraception cover” 避孕套。)
Contraceptive Social Marketing

I was reminded of these things by a recent e-mail from the author of this article: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Didn’t Learn Because You Grew Up in China): Despite the one-child policy, millions of Chinese citizens don’t know how to have sex without getting pregnant”, and much of it rings true to what we’ve seen volunteering with a sex ed. project in Tianjin — for example, the practical difficulty of implementing sex ed. directives:

his teacher forced an assistant—who until then had not taught a single lesson—to lead the class. The younger instructor stood in front of the students red with embarrassment, unable to broach the subject. Eventually, the students were told to read the chapter themselves.

The article makes for a decent introduction to the current sex ed. situation in China, tying together the state of Chinese sex ed., cultural taboos surrounding sex talk, traditional Chinese patriarchal gender roles, the rampant, uninformed sexual activity among students, the lack of birth control use and China’s abortion epidemic.

Here’s more on sex ed., cultural taboos, and current sexual behaviour in China, including stuff about the university sex ed. project we’ve volunteered with:

Lying, “Lying” and Mainland China [Updated 2x]

Joel 大江 — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 17:54:59 +0000

“Lying” isn’t just a cross-cultural communication pot-hole between Chinese and Euro-Americans, it’s a crater. Conflicting communication styles result in Westerners sometimes thinking their Chinese counterparts are lying even when they actually have no intention of deceiving anyone. The Americans get the (long-standing) impression that the Chinese are devious and deceptive, while the Chinese, who weren’t intending to deceive anyone and were merely being polite and gracious, are annoyed to no end at the simplistic and judgmental Americans.

But there’s another side to Mainland Chinese society, where ethics are simply a non-factor in decision making. Mainland Chinese lie and deceive reflexively in many aspects of their daily lives and relationships; it’s routine, accepted, expected and generally considered unavoidable. If you’re straight, honest and genuine, people will think you’re simple, naive and stupid. Corruption is endemic in every layer of society, and it is common for it to taint thesis papers, resumes and job applications, personal ads, and communication between spouses, parents and children, employees and employers, clients and suppliers, etc.

This is the China revealed Factory Girls: the post-Communist, unapologetically amoral, full-on materialistic free-for-all China. It’s a social world where everyone seems to automatically, reflexively lie all the time about everything to everyone else, including parents, boyfriends, coworkers, bosses, clients, employees and potential spouses. This is deliberate deception, not mere non-literal communication. Here’s one of many examples:

Married men who pretended not to be were the number-one dating hazard of Dongguan… In a place where people lied reflexively for work, deception naturally seeped into personal relationships. Lying was often the pragmatic choice because it got you what you wanted. Eventually your lies might catch up with you, but few people thought that far ahead.

Chunming had her own rules for such affairs. No one should get hurt, and neither side should make demands. “Of course, I’d like to find the right person and get married,” she told me. “But since I haven’t, it’s fine to be with someone you don’t love. You can still enjoy your time together. You can still rest your head on his shoulder when you’re tired and feel a sense of security.” [p.350]

So Mainland China presents outsiders with a cross-cultural communication double-whammy: a relatively high reliance on nonverbal, “high-context” communication, and generations of people raised in a corruption-saturated society in which deception is routine. You can find both aspects of Chinese “lying” in the posts below:

Caging a Monster (by Murong Xuecun)
“In my country, there is a strange system that rewards liars, and with the passage of time, people have become accustomed to lying. People lie as naturally as they breathe, to the point that lying has become a virtue.
[...]
“In this system, people only care about short-term profits. In this system, not following the rules is the rule, and unscrupulous means are the only means in government and business so only the dirtiest players emerge victorious. In this system, everyone is a criminal so no one needs to repent.”
Chinese “Lies That Bind” (Frog in a Well)
“because they live in closer and longer lived groups, Chinese are more focused on the social consequences of a statement than its literal truth. [...] these differences cut two ways. To be “free” or “independent” can also be “irresponsible,” “lonely,” or “selfish.” What Chinese call “harmony” can be “conformity” or “repression.” American “straight talk” can be childish, reckless, or self-righteous, and Chinese “sweet talk” can cover up realities until they fester.”
Do the Chinese Lie? That Depends… (The Lingua Franca)
“In short, for most Chinese people, lying is not really lying. What we in the West would consider to be a bald-faced lie, a person in greater China might think of as a courtesy, a convenience, or a smart tactic, none of which are immoral. In fact, lying to achieve some business or social aim, and getting away with it, is considered to be a sign of intelligence and social skill among many Chinese.”
Dumb Americans (Seeing Red in China)
To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xin-yan (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb.

…to speak your mind straightforwardly, to defend your position forcefully, and to uphold what you believe without compromise, are all signs of childishness. A lot of Americans, alas, fill that bill.
Chinese people like it when you “lie” to them? (China Hope Live)
“Interpersonal communication ‘with Chinese characteristics’: A little understanding goes a long way when feelings get hurt by Chinese/Expat miscommunication”
To “lie” or not to “lie” (China Hope Live)
“If you stop to think about it, there a tons of common situations in English where we use words to mean what they don’t actually literally say, but to us it’s “obvious” in those situations what the intended meaning really is. Our delivery, the context, and our non-verbals all speak quite loudly and quite clearly, so clearly that we would never think of such instances as “lies.” Sarcasm is only one kind of example.”
Free Advice – for you and your Chinese friends (China Hope Live)
“If you’re a Westerner with Chinese friends, or a Chinese person with Western friends, you probably ought to read this. It’s from the end of Communicating Effectively with the Chinese, which is co-authored by a Chinese and a Western scholar and easily the single best-all-around book I’ve read on the subject so far. They should force-feed it to all China-bound Westerners, in my opinion.”

Straightforward, honest & principled? Or just naive, simple & silly? How Americans appear to Chinese

Joel 大江 — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 05:31:05 +0000

In Dumb Americans, Yaxue Cao explains how some valued American character traits and ideals appear to many Chinese:

“he had spent a significant portion of his formative years in the US. But instead of shaping his values, America was this wonderful place filled with dumb people for him to take advantage of! And he is by no means a singularity among Chinese living in America.

“To many Chinese, Americans don’t have xīn-yǎn (心眼, meaning, literally, eyes of the mind; or figuratively, calculating, wily), they trust what you say, and they believe you are doing what you say you are doing. For that, they are dumb.
[...]
“To many Chinese, the guilelessness on a face, the heartiness of a voice, or/and the confidence with which a person carries herself/himself can all seem rather shǎ (傻，foolish, simple-minded).” [Link: In Dumb Americans]