As soon as I saw this in our mailbox today, it reminded me of something I’d read in the news a couple years ago. A certain religious group in China, famous for being brutally persecuted by the gov’t in the late 90′s, was apparently squandering Western public sympathy by selling tickets to Chinese cultural stage performances that contained explicit (but unadvertised) political and spiritual messages. This was making some Euro-Americans feel deceived. People felt ripped off that they’d come for a family show and got explicit politicking and proselytizing.

I didn’t know if this was them or not. My suspicious were heightened when I read the vague but very spiritual introduction section and this statement:

A performance like Shen Yun can no longer be found in China today because many of China’s best artistic traditions have been lost in recent decades.

The last page confirmed my guess. Turns out the performance advertised in the pamphlet (not mailed but hand-delivered to our door by an elderly Chinese man) is put on by the “evil cult” at the top of the Chinese government’s hit list — one of the largest, most viciously persecuted Chinese religious groups in the last fifteen years. There were propaganda posters in our neighbourhood in Tianjin denouncing them (see here for images and translations), and you have to walk past their demonstration to get into the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. To avoid tempting China’s net nanny I won’t write their name here, but here’s a picture:

I don’t blame them for presenting their religion and protest message through art and entertainment like they do. We Westerners are, after all, well-accustomed to ideological propaganda in our entertainment; that — and money — is what our entertainment is all about. But it takes a little more nuance and subtly to do this effectively to a Western audience, as evidenced by the negative reactions they’ve provoked (here’s an example). Who knows, maybe this go around they’ve tailored their message a little better.

Anyway, it’s interesting to find yet another example of China popping up in the daily life of Canadians. For more about this particular “evil cult”, see:

• Recent propaganda from Tianjin, China: evil, scheming, bloodthirsty cults! (China Hope Live)
• Shen Yun Performing Arts
• Politics and art blend in contentious Chinese show (Toronto.com)

P.S. – “Shén​ Yùn” refers to charm or grace in art and poetry. Literally it is “God/spirit/divine” (神) + “beautiful sound/charm/appeal” (韵). Here are some different dictionary entries.

There are many qualified candidates for the 2011 Grinch Award, but this year it’s going to the authorities of Xitan Village in Zhejiang Province, because you just can’t violently shut down a large public Christmas party in “Christmas Village” and not get a Grinch Award. Especially when you get caught on video and uploaded to YouTube:

• A very silent night: Chinese officials shut down outdoor Christmas party in toy-making town (WP)
• Video (BI)
• Video (YouTube)

There’s actually a lot of interesting details to this situation; what details we do get suggest a complex local relationship between Christians, Buddhists, local authorities, and Christians and Buddhists who have positions of local authority.

Previous Grinch Awards:

• China’s grinches play hardball
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reports that a senior Chinese Communist Party official has reminded the increasingly religious ranks of the Party what they’re required to believe. From China party official warns members over religion (AP)

“Religious practice among Chinese Communist Party members is increasing and threatens its unity and national leadership, a top party official said in remarks reported Monday.

“Party members are required to be atheists and must not believe in religion or engage in religious practice, said Zhu Weiqun, a member of the party’s Central Committee [...]

“”Voices have appeared within the party calling for an end to the ban on religion, arguing in favor of the benefits of religion for party members and even claiming the ban on religion for party members is unconstitutional,” Zhu said.

“”In fact, our party’s principled stance regarding forbidding members from believing in religion has not changed one iota,” he said.”

Pronounced: guó ​bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and “national treasure” often means “panda”. A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: “how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó ​bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character.”

With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around “Pandaman vs. Batman” jokes, and photoshopping “Pandaman” into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.

Pronounced: hēi gǎi kǔ jiào
Literally: dark reform bitter education
Means: “The labour camp is dark and reeducation through labour is bitter.”

Related phrases include:

• 劳动改造
  láodòng ​gǎizào
  (Reform through labour)
• 劳改
  láo​gǎi
  (1. shorthand for 劳动改造; 2. a prison camp)
• 劳动教养
  láo​dòng​ jiào​yǎng
  (Reeducation through labour)
• 劳教
  láo​jiào
  (shorthand for 劳动教养)

You can see/hear some of these terms, with English subtitles, between 7:10 and 8:47 of this Al-Jazeera investigative report.

The sign says:
Who are you
What is this place
Why have you come here

You can find the answers to those questions in the video linked above.

Every year Beijing’s brutal air quality (and even brutal-er public reporting on it) makes international news. But this year Beijing finds itself with a domestic P.R. problem in which its own citizens are no longer willing to accept the gov’s Orwellian “blue sky days”, “fog” and “light” pollution levels. And a large amount of the credit goes to… the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

From Beijing Air Pollution Brouhaha:
“Since flights at Beijing’s airport have been canceled on any number of occasions over the past two decades because of pollution, why all the attention now?

“Several reasons… But the real catalyst for the current contretemps is the U.S. Embassy. If Beijing citizens were once resigned to living in this alternative state of reality, then that’s no longer the case. The U.S. Embassy has changed the way the game is played. On a daily basis, the embassy tweets data reflecting the real air quality for the area in which the embassy resides. Last Sunday, for example, as NPR reported, the pollution recorded by the embassy hit a level described as “beyond index.” The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection, in contrast, reported the air pollution as “light.””

We’ve got lots of our own stuff on pollution in the Beijing area, including comparison photos. See our Pollution category for everything.

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:

• How to fix the drain gas problem in your Chinese apartment
• The Dragon has Raised its Head (and it’s driving us insane!)
• How your Chinese apartment affects your relationships with locals
• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto
• Baking with the neighbours & a word about Chinese apartments
• Negotiating rent in Chinglish – Round One
• How to: Stay warm before they turn the heat on
• Our current home by the numbers
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish

You can browse or download All Girls Allowed’s annual report on gendercide and forced abortion in China here. (WARNING: contains very disturbing and graphic content.)

Related:

• Who is Chen Guangcheng – Fighting forced abortion and his trial (Seeing Red in China)
• When the news is real life
• October’s propaganda: anti-”gendercide”
• Chinese Academy of Social Sciences publishes the latest and most negative data on sex-selective abortion in China
• Famous Chinese novelist writes on the enforcement of China’s family planning policy
• What can happen to a 6-month illegally pregnant women in China
• Sex, drugs, and Tianjin University students
• Sex and Politics
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• Interview with Chinese exile, women’s rights campaigner and founder of All Girls Allowed

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)

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