A New Modest Proposal

Famous satirist Jonathan Swift once wrote an essay called "A Modest Proposal" wherein he suggests that the poor might sell there children as food, mocking attitudes toward the poor. Well some of the local governments in China seem to think that selling children is a great idea, just not for food. This New York Times article tells the story of how in some rural areas of China local officials are grabbing children from there parents on trumped up charges, or just because they can, and selling them for adoption. There are several things I find amazing about this. First is the just cartoonishly evil nature of what they are doing. The Chinese government does a lot of bad things but here I feel there must be some one twirling a mustache and laughing maniacly as children are ripped from the arms of there parents. This is also another interesting example of how little control the central government really has some times. In a society as autocratic as China you'd think the central government would be able to control the local governments easily but that's just not the situation. Local government seem to have a significant amount of power to ignore the national government on all but the biggest issues. With reporting of corruption also out the window, no part of the government really wants to encourage that since they're all corrupt, no one is able to do much about horrible situations like this.

P.S.
I'd also like to note that my sister has started writing a blog which is included in the links to the left.

Japanophobia

I've been traveling to a lot of countries around East Asia since I've come to China, but one I've been very interested in going to, but haven't had the chance, is Japan. Basically it's just too expensive for me to do on my China salary, I'm hoping that my parents might want to go now that they're moving to Beijing, but for me it's just too much. Going to Singapore for even a few days cost way too much and Japan might be even more expensive. I've read a few books about Japan and I'd really love to see some of the sights, Japanese culture is certainly interesting as well, but I also feel that living in China has given me a very negative view of Japanese people as a whole. China is rife with anti-Japanese sentiment, partially due to the horrible crimes Japan committed against Chinese civilians during there long war and occupation, and partially due to the fact that the communist party finds it convenient to focus people on a foreign enemy to deflect public anger away from them and raise nationalism.

When I first got to Japan I shrugged off most of this as just sour grapes. They were talking about some pretty old crimes and just couldn't seem to let it go. But the more I learned about how the Japanese treat there history today the more I agreed with the Chinese. Unlike Germany who after WWII made a huge effort to confront and apologize for what happened, Japan's attitude has always been somewhere between, "It happened a long time ago," and "You would have done it to us had you gotten the chance." Americans ted not to know as much about Japanese atrocities during WWII and German ones, but the number of people killed by the Japanese was also staggering. In China in particular they endorsed the wholesale slaughter of civilians in many occupied areas, in a mix of brutal colonialism and the sort of rape and pillage attitude armies had in the middle ages. In America this also gets downplayed somewhat do to some form of national guilt about ending the war with two atomic bombs. Finally we always tend to overlook the past wrongs of our current allies and Japan has been a strong friend of America since the end of WWII.

But in China there is still a deep resentment and some rubs off. Not only in China though is there still historical anger at the Japanese. South Korea still violently disputes some islands with Japan, oddly even North Korea can get behind the south when Japan in the enemy. And in a lot of other countries in Asia I've visited there are monuments and museums to what the Japanese did during WWII. My point here isn't so much to discuss the past but to note I was pretty suppressed when I realized how much more negative my opinion of Japan had become after living in China.

Everything's Changing

Well I'm back in the good old US of A until September, and it's nice to be back even if it's 100 degrees in Washington some days. Next semester I'll be working in Guangzhou, I'll talk more about that in my next post, but not only am I going to China my parents are as well. My dad took a posting with his paper in Beijing, he's been there for several months already, but now both he and my mom are going to be living there for about three years. They're renting there house, the places in the expat areas of Beijing are actually lot more expensive than I thought they'd be. Both my parents seem excited for the move, even my mom likes it more after seeing India it gives you a new perspective on what crazy means that makes China seem much more reasonable. My sister also is quitting her job in Madison and is going to backpack around South-East Asia. She might even end up in China for some time around, I just have to assure her that China's big enough she never has to bump into me. So coming in September the whole family might be in China. I've loved my time in China but I never thought my whole family would end up there. It's not that everyone is coming to China to live next to me, though I think my dad would be happy if I moved to Beijing, but I'm pretty sure if I hadn't been living in China everyone else wouldn't have ended up there. So that's me Daniel Davis trend setter.

To Everything There is a Season

I've got less than two weeks left in sunny old Alaer and things are really busy. I've still got to get a train ticket, my last paycheck, change my money, pack my stuff, give and grade a lot of finals, and teach a few extra classes. The semester is ending with a bang this time instead of the usual whimper since I don't have much time and there are a few places I want to go before I go back. My flight back to DC is on the 20th of June, but before that I am going to go to Kashgar, which is an old city famous for it's ancient buildings and gigantic Mosque. I'm also coming back to Changzhou for a few days to see my friends there and go to a wedding party Sean and Sarah are throwing. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the people in Changzhou again. After I booked my plane tickets, which was only after I told the school when I was thinking of leaving, the school turns around and asks me to stay longer to teach some other class. I told them I couldn't despite there repeated begging. It's annoying to deal with people who have mostly never taken a plane in there life and don't really have the concept of planning ahead more than a day in advanced. But everything seems mostly resolved now and the biggest problem I have is that I may not be able to transfer money home so I might have to travel around for a week with five or six thousand dollars in cash which isn't great, but China's a pretty safe country. Anyways I'll be home for the summer, until either August or September, pretty soon and I'm looking forward to it.

The End of Days

I've been following some funny new out of America where some crazy preacher with a radio station has been predicting the end of the world will be this Saturday the 21st at 6pm Eastern Standard Time, since God of course goes off Eastern Standard Time. The Times had a hilarious story about one family where the mom was really into this and the kids just sort of thought it was really embarrassing. No one in China has really heard of this but they all love the 2012 stuff. I don't know exactly why that's taken off so much, could be the movie, but I heard about it even before that came out. It might have something to do with there perception that there's an increase in the number of natural disasters, there really isn't people have just been paying more attention to them than normal. I think it has to do with living in a country with so little reliable information. If the government spends all it's time lying to you and censoring real information I imagine it gets hard to tell truth from fiction. In China both the truth and crazy rumors have to circulate in the dark corners of the internet or by word of mouth. In both cases the state controlled media downplays them. Maybe that's the unintended consequence of the government trying to control all media, China is now a nation of conspiracy theorists.

Computer Madness

Usually when I get up I check my e-mail and few other things before class. But yesterday when I went to start up my computer I was just met with a series of errors. No matter how well you take care of a computer sometimes things will just go wrong. I've been dealing with these sorts of computer problems since I was old enough to read, but being out here in Alaer adds another worrying dimension to the whole affair. Usually if something goes really wrong I could take my computer somewhere, even in Changzhou there were places I could have gone, or borrow another computer to help diagnose the problem, but out here in the middle of nowhere every time anything goes wrong with my computer I have this sinking feeling that I'll never be able to get it working again and have to spend the rest of my time in Alaer watching paint dry, or whatever the locals do for fun around here. I'm also worried about the effect all the endless dust in the air will have on the lifespan of my computer, but there's not much I can do about that. I was finally able to get it fixed but it took almost all day just to get it back to the way it was working the previous day and even then I lost some things. Well I guess I just have to hope that nothing more serious goes wrong, that or there's some kid here better with computers than I am.

Dora is Magic

One of my better students Dora has been mentioning for some time that she is the singer for a band on campus, and yesterday she invited me to come watch them preform outside the library. It was certainly interesting to see them preform, the music was more rock than I was expecting from the usually pop loving Chinese. The only problem was the whole thing took on a bit of a children's recital atmosphere as I was told it would start around 9pm only to have Dora not go on until 11pm and then only sing one song. That's a lot a watching Chinese music I don't really care at all about. Most of the people were doing covers of Chinese, or a few English songs, one group even did a Green Day song which I thought was funny. The song Dora did was a cover also but I don't really know the original Chinese song so it's all new to me. I got a video of her singing. The quality isn't very good but she's the one in the front. There group is called Magic, or 魔术 (Móshù)