June 8th, 2007 Chris
Good thing I shaved my head this week. Otherwise I’d be yanking my hair out about now. Here’s a photo the Net Nanny ought to see:
Yee reported last night that Flickr’s photo feed is blocked in China. The site itself is still running, but photos come up as empty boxes.
John Kennedy of Global Voices links the Net Nanny’s latest temper tantrum to recent protests in Xiamen, where photos of the anti-PX rallies made their way to the photo sharing site.
Yee agrees:
Any reasons of baning this excellent photos share websites? So many! Especially in this June, like Xiamen people’s march against PX project happened on 1st June and someone did a live report of the whole process on flickr.
I wonder what this will mean for Yahoo’s plan to create a Chinese Flickr.
Update: The San Francisco Chronicle has a story on the blocking (h/t China Webmasters), though it makes no mention of the Xiamen protests and the role Flickr may have played there.
The Web site also hosts a smattering of images that may be frowned upon by Chinese censors, including student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, which includes the famous photo of a man blocking the progress of Chinese army tanks, and bodies of students who were killed in the streets as part of a government crackdown.
China’s tight control over the Internet has become a high-profile issue in recent years as the online world makes increasing inroads with its vast population. Authorities routinely block access to online information about political opposition groups, Taiwanese independence and overseas Web sites such as BBC News, prompting outrage from human rights advocates.
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June 8th, 2007 Chris
Yesterday was Gaokao day, when teenagers from across China finally get to empty their skulls of everything that has been shoehorned into them the past dozen years in the hope of finding their way to a university that has books (read: not mine). Assuming you’re not in recovery from such test, be sure to read two excellent posts on the subject:
From Jeremiah in the Granite Studio
As hard as the gaokao is, it’s nothing compared to the ordeal of the imperial civil service examination. For three days exam candidates were locked in a cell and forced to write formulaic essays that required instant recall of the entire canon. But as Sam points out, despite their “Confucian” content, these kinds of examinations are not to be found in the original Confucian classics. In fact, given Confucius’ emphasis on moral rectification and reflection, he probably would have seen the cramming and rote memorization of form that became the imperial examination system as somewhat antithetical to his goals of becoming a “man of humanity.â€
And the exams were tough. Scandals were common. As were mental breakdowns. Throughout the imperial period there was all manner of cheating–bribery, ringers, crib sheets, prep books, even full suits of underwear with the entire text for the Confucian classics written out in tiny characters. I remind my students of this every year: There really was no form of academic shadiness unfamiliar in the examination hell (I mean, “halls”) of Imperial China.
And from Sam at the Useless Tree
A casual observer might think that this is just a modern expression of the traditional “Confucian” veneration of education. You know: the Chinese have long emphasized education, going back to the old examination system that recruited bright young me into the imperial bureaucracy. It’s a Confucian thing.
But those who actually read Confucian classics - like the Analects and Mencius - know that the hyper-competitiveness of the gaokao has little to do with what Confucius understood as education. The college entrance exam is all about getting ahead materially: get into college, get a good paying job, live a more comfortable material life, perhaps even become rich. Now, I have nothing against those folks who are trying to gain a higher salary and a better place to live and the like. Those, however, are not the goals Confucius had in mind.
These are just snippets. Both posts are well worth a full read.
And speaking of exams, back to grading…
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June 7th, 2007 Chris
Anyone who’s taught in a Chinese university likely knows the perils of soliciting students’ opinions. There’s a predictability to it, you can almost guess the answer before it comes, and many will flat out refuse to register a thought. But us foreigners can be just as guilty of this, of refusing to engage, of thinking the Three Ts are secretly at the top Chinese students’ agendas, too. I’ve certainly made that mistake in the past.
“No one ever asks us what we think,” one of my students told me after class on Monday. I asked them one question: “If Hu Jintao decided you should be the next president or prime minister of China, what would be on your to-do list?” Here’s what they wrote:
- Improve standard of living (4)
- build more roads
- protect the environment (5)
- rebuild our lost civilization
- reform the college entrance exam (2)
- improve medical care for farmers/peasants (2)
- make the country more democratic (3)
- prepare for the 2008 Olympics
- control the population size (2)
- conserve water
- reduce/eliminate college fees
- change China’s relationship with Japan (2)
- limit the use of oil and coal
- education reform (5)
- help the poor (3)
- set the minimum age to marry at 25
- call on all children to play football (soccer)
- let foreigners play on China’s soccer team
- lessen the income gap
- cut taxes (2)
- Hope Project
- develop Western China
- protect endangered animals
- improve traffic
- make food safer
- give everyone a car
- pay more attention to polls
- give more funding to the army (2); to education (3); to scientific research (2); health care (3)
- take back Taiwan (4)
- make buses free
- expand Chinese culture around the world (2)
Links are mine. I lumped some things together, cleaned up the grammar as best I could, but otherwise tried to stay true to what the students wrote. These are all freshmen, ages 18-20, in an elective English class. They’re considered the best in their majors, but this is the first class they’ve all taken together.
I kept the brainstorming anonymous, because even empowered with opinions, I’ve met few students (I teach close to 300) who are ready to stand up and defend an idea that isn’t already widely accepted. Otherwise, two things strike me about this list:
It’s overwhelmingly domestic. Few suggestions even referenced China’s neighbors, and those were old strawmen, Taiwan and Japan. One student wanted to invade both, but only one.
There’s much to be done. Democracy got a few votes, but not as many as education reform and environmental protection. Every student had at least one issue of their own, and the overlaps were shallow.
What would you add? Has anybody else asked their students?
Posted in the Dalian life | 4 Comments »
June 5th, 2007 Chris
It’s a rare Chinese cabbie that can speak English, but on my second night in China, while slumming it with friends in Beijing, our driver saw three westerners get in his car and my mother tongue came pouring out. He went right for the good stuff, too, or rather the bad stuff. He wanted to swear like a native speaker.
We took him through the basics: “Fuck that,” “Those fuckers,” “That’s bullshit.” It was international cooperation through cussing. He tried it out on passing cars on the Second Ring Road, who gave plenty of excuse for vulgarity.
I lost the conversation when it turned to Chinese, but my friend Lindsey, who has lived here three years, kept chatting with him. My mind drifted to the passing lights of the Beijing night and my future in China and other insignificant things until a familiar word brought my attention back into the cab.
Tiananmen.
“Was he there?†I asked Lindsey. “Yes,†she said quickly before switching back to Mandarin.
And finally we came to the driver’s real reason for needing those choice English phrases.
“That was fucked up,†he said of the 1989 massacre. “It was bullshit.â€
—
Foreign teachers like to talk about all those things we can’t talk about. We joke about the three Ts—Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen—and Falun Gong, and politics, and everything our students and employers like to pretend doesn’t exist. A year of this has left me exhausted. Something twitched in me last night, and I just said, “Screw it, I’m curious.”
OK, so I didn’t show BBC videos from 18 years ago, and I didn’t read Nick Kristof’s account of the massacre from China Wakes
. Actually, we didn’t talk about it at all.
I wrote the date on the board: June 4. “Does today have any significance to any of you?” I asked 30 college freshmen. The oldest among them is 20, so it’s a matter of what they’ve heard, what they’ve learned in school, and what they’ve found on their own.
Silence.
I added the year. “Does anyone know what happened on June 4, 1989?”
Blank stares.
I’ve embarrassed my students enough to know when they’re holding back. They stare at their desks, avert their eyes and suffer a sudden loss of all ability to speak English. Every student in this class was staring at me, dumbfounded, with no idea what I was talking about.
Which doesn’t really surprise me. It is, after all, taboo. The Net Nanny knows her job.
One student finally whispered as I passed, “Do you mean…Tiananmen?”
Today I asked one of my better graduate students on the way out of class what he knew about Tiananmen. He shrugged: “Maybe they had too much free time. I don’t really know what it was about. You know, I was small when all that happened.”
—
It’s possible I just did something monumentally stupid. I could get a call any minute now from the foreign affairs office for a proper dressing down because I brought politics into the classroom, though my contract makes no mention of any such rule (religion is the only subject specifically barred). Maybe they’re already processing the deportation paperwork.
But I doubt it.
First, my university has never shown any interest in what happens in my classroom. I’m certain no one was aware that I missed a class last month after spending a night regurgitating bad clams. If the department cared, they’d have given us books. And second, my students are the university’s best defense against controversy. While the younger students are curious, the older set tell me, time and again, “We (Chinese) don’t like to talk about politics.”
The interest gap might be worth pursuing, though. Before bringing up Tiananmen, I put my class of freshmen through a less controversial exercise: Pretend you’re the next president of China. What would you change? What needs fixing? Thirty lists came back, each with four or five bullet points, and almost no subject overlapping.
Build more roads. Lessen the income gap. Take back Taiwan. Reform the college entrance exams. Nothing revolutionary, but they’re thinking (I’ll give the complete list in a follow-up post). “No one else asks us what we think,” one student told me after class, the same one who knew what yesterday was.
There are reasons to remember Tiananmen, and reasons to forget. It’s easy to get caught up in the Three Ts, to snicker about controversy, to poke at Chinese nationalism and national forgetfulness. But it’s hardly the top issue for my students, who will have to figure out where this country is headed long after I give up and go back to a more familiar locale.
Who is talking:
Global Voices Online » Hong Kong and China: June 4, 18 Years Later
Eighteen Years Later, Memories of Tiananmen Massacre Online :: China Digital Times (CDT) ä¸å›½æ•°å—时代
RConversation: On eBay: Tiananmen Massacre PLA Medal Watch
Posted in the Dalian life | 5 Comments »
June 1st, 2007 Chris
My students can be a docile bunch. Simple questions get simpler answers, and complex questions yield 31 pairs of downcast eyes. Asking “What do you think?” is usually the most frustrating part of my day.
So I was pleasantly surprised on Wednesday when a student, who is usually talkative anyway, sought me out at a cafe near campus to tell me: “We went on strike today.”
All three of my undergraduate classes, 93 students total, staged a protest this week against the university’s plan to send its foreign language department to an auxiliary campus in Lushun, about an hour bus ride from the school’s current site on HeiShiJiao Street.
I should note here that no one from the English department has ever officially told me of this plan; I heard about it from students. When I asked the Foreign Affairs office, my liaison told me, “Maybe in September some departments will move.” He added that teachers would still live at the current campus, but they’d take a bus down to their classes. When I asked where his information came from, he said he too heard it all from students.
Whatever uncertainty exists in this plan, there was enough substance to spook my students into action. On Wednesday morning, they surrounded the administration building, and when the department heads walked out, they shouted at the administrators to let them stay in Dalian.
OK, so it wasn’t subtle or eloquent, and they’ll probably catch hell for it. But they won.
As one student, whose English name is Stream, put it: “We have struggled for this decision and we have succeeded.”
They argued, once things quieted down, that the university had told them nothing of moving to Lushun when they enrolled two years ago. The administration was effectively breaking a contract with them by relocating their department without consultation.
“Before we came to this university, we didn’t know we would move to another school, so we didn’t accept it,” Stream said.
It sounds like incoming students will still be sent south. Dalian Foreign Language University is already there, and Medical University is set to move in July. Students and teachers from both schools have been complaining for months.
There are two problems with Lushun: It’s 45 minutes from the main university area in Dalian, and probably 90 minutes or more from downtown. Getting there is tricky, and it’s not as developed as the main city.
It’s also restricted. Because there’s a naval base at the southern tip of the peninsula, foreigners risk detention or worse going down there. Friends of mine have been fined and delayed by going where they shouldn’t, entirely by accident. It’s a sketchy situation.
My friend Kerrilee visited the new Medical University site with some of her colleagues from that school. While there, they planted what she called “memorial trees to remember our foreign teachers.” There won’t be many next year.
For students, studying in Lushun means isolation from a growing and dynamic city. It means going downtown to shop or visit friends is now a day-trip.
“We just did it for ourselves, and for our department and students, for everyone,” Stream told me. “Everyone doesn’t want to move. That is so remote a place.”
Posted in the Dalian life | 7 Comments »
