Xenophobia on the Shanghai Underground

We expats have a strange relationship with the phenomenon of xenophobia. These occasional encounters of the red-neck kind are a two-edged sword for us bloggy types. They can be a morale-sapping reminder of inescapable ‘otherness’, whilst providing excellent grist for the expat mill, that sees us shaking our heads at the nonsensical society we have immigrated into. A perverse bunch, we may look to this expat media mill to feed our self-esteem, and bring morale back to the baseline. Some insights as to why we do this may be provided by Richard Nisbetts' intriguing book ‘The Geography Of Thought’, which describes how much more westerners are psychologically dependent on their individual sense of worth.

Whilst drinking fruit juice in the Shanghai underground, a white expat friend of mine recently found himself being told not to ‘mess the platform’, by an elderly Chinese lady, as “this is China, not your own country”. This rather impressive, and fearless (my friend is about 6 foot 6), display of public racism seems to justify Chinese people urinating and defecating in public places, and throwing litter on the floor whilst standing metres from a public rubbish bin, with the contention that it is acceptable to do this as long as you are Chinese. The ticking off was particularly aggressive as it was pre-emptive – my friend had not made a mess of any kind, except for his own personal appearance.

It is tempting for us ex-pats to bandy these stories around, and smile cynically at how xenophobic the Chinese are. Doubly so because of the flat out denial by many natives here that Chinese are in general really rather racist. I suspect very few expats are able to engage Chinese people in a dialogue about this (feel free to contradict me), and so we content ourselves with righteous blogs much like this one.

It is worth remembering, though, that expats have a definite tendency to take the action of an individual, and use it to demonstrate the validity of our own generalizations and racism. At least, I know I am prone to this. I was happily doing so, in my head, after hearing my tall friends story, when I recalled another obnoxious old woman – Mrs Steelwell. When I was a young lad, growing up on a housing estate in Sussex, myself and 4 or 5 of the local kids would go and play in a small wooded area a few minutes walk from where we all lived in a leafy cul-de-sac. Mrs Steelwell lived on her own in a house abutting the area we called the Little Woods. I suppose the noise of a bunch of kids playing games outside her house may have grated on her nerves, and she seemed to have a fairly joyless existence, living on her own, occasionally visited by her daughter, who drove a Ford Fiesta. On her bad days she would come into her front garden, and heap abuse on the only ‘not 100% white Anglo-Saxon’. My father being Moroccan, she would call me the ‘Macorcan Boy’, and tell me to go back to where I came from. Of course, I delighted in telling her I came from the cul-de-sac up the road. One time she attempted to throw a basin of dirty washing up water over me. The other kids were rarely the focus of her ire. Maybe I just have ‘one of those faces’, but I strongly suspect my non-whiteness was a deciding factor in my getting the brunt of the abuse.

The Chinese woman is like Mrs Steelwell. She has a bee in her bonnet, and someone is going to get abused. Mrs Steelwell was Irish and quite possibly racist. Fortunately, I didn’t use the incident to create a stereotype of Irish racism. I waited until my 20’s to do that. But I suppose the point is that we need to be aware of our own tendency as expats to be racist, and to take individual occurrences like this one as our justification. These experiences give us an insight into the personal reality of some individuals, but we should be wary of extrapolating this further. I reserve the right to ignore my own advice on this point, as will everybody else.

Just when you thought it wasn't safe to enter the water.

Dolphin Cavalry

Fortunately during these difficult times, the forces of harmonious ascent onto the global stage have an ally. Dolphins are highly intelligent marine mammals, and obviously recognize the importance of China's role in international trade to the 'greater good'.
As such, a large task force of Anti-Pirate Dolphins has been taking matters into their own, erm, hands in the Gulf of Aden, foiling an attack of Somalian pirates on Chinese freight ships. The pirates could only "lament their littleness" in the face of overwhelming odds, as reported by China Daily.

Hold on. Why would dolphins come to the aid of Chinese ships, and not the poor old Americans or French, whose special forces have to go a lot of messy effort to rescue captured sailors. Or is there something else going on here?
Could it be that THIS is where the vast un-disclosed sums of military investment are being channeled? The millions, no billions that didn't make it onto the annual 'White Paper' of military expenditure released by the government to the bored and sceptical looking faces of foreign journalists obediently attending the press conferences as arranged by the CCP. Imagine! Fleets of remote controlled dolphins, indistinguishable from real ones by ordinary sonar, pirates and new age eco-tourists, these friendly looking robo-flippers can reconnoitre the oceans un-hindered. Remember. You read it here first!

Corruption? Mei Banfa.

If there is any single popular phrase in the Chinese vernacular that annoys me to the point of wanting to jack it all in and head west muttering under my breath, then it is “mei banfa”. As well as being a perfectly reasonable way of expressing the sentiment that there is nothing you can do, it is also used as a handy panacea to dismiss any inconveniently prickly issues that forthright analysis of may prove embarrassing. If the issue is one which may attract international criticism, then it automatically qualifies as embarrassing, not to be discussed (at least in my presence) under ordinary conditions.

Perhaps one of the most outstanding of such issues is that of corruption. I did manage to get my father in law to-be to comment on this, as he is maybe a little ‘wordier’ than the average Joe, and has a theory on everything. What he said echoed all of my close Chinese friends whom I have got an opinion from: ‘yes it’s disagreeable, yes people in positions of power and influence all over the country are making vast sums through bribery and corruption’, but it’s always been like that. Mei banfa.

As someone who suffers from occasional attacks of idealism, perhaps being under the influence of the sanctimonious ideoscape of the West, I find it hard to accept their acceptance, especially in light of the fact that corruption often involves already wealthy people demanding large sums from people less well off in order to perform a service that should be free. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not saying that corruption is a restricted to developing countries. The recent Siemens ‘slush fund’ scandal in Germany, and ‘pay for a peerage’ (to the House of Lords) in the UK are just recent examples of corruption in Western European ‘big business’, and the corridors of power.

But when people roll their eyes at corruption, and say ‘mei banfa’, what are they really saying? Here are a couple of suggestions:
1. Mei banfa refers to the fact that the average Chinese person’s relationship with their governing institutions has a clear duality. They are appreciative of the governments successful attempts to better the life of its’ citizenry – most Chinese would argue that they now enjoy a better quality of life than in living memory. However, they are also presented on a regular basis with the unarguably distasteful phenomenon of wealthy individuals in a position of power using their privilege to extort money from those less wealthy than themselves. This appears to have been fairly consistent over time in Chinese society, and so ‘mei banfa’ articulates an acceptance in taking what’s on offer, warts and all.
2. Corruption is not a result of faulty institutions, or individual ethical shortcomings, but of a society where the economy of morality is divorced from political institutions. The moral economy is instead based around family ties, and informal personal relationships. Under these conditions privilege is seen as a ‘cake’ to which a certain circle of associates/family are entitled. Under pressure to meet these obligations, individuals in positions of influence do what everyone else is doing. ‘Mei banfa’ refers to the conservative nature of Chinese society, and the un-likeliness of a radical change in these social dynamics in the near future.
3. Life’s a bitch.

What is your personal brand?

I'm a bit new to this blog business. As much as it is an over-used cliche, and the opening sentence is probably the single most abused sentence in the history of blogging (statistics anyone?), I am feeling my way through the process of (hopefully) becoming a blog-savvy netizen. The sheer influence of the blogosphere in China, and the growing role it plays in both influencing and reflecting the rather mercurial currents of public opinion here, have led to my resolving to bite the bullet, sit down and learn something new. Phew!

So, yesterday I posted my first blog. Today I tried to 'hook up' my blog to my Linkedin profile, which tends to languish in a kind of cyber-limbo, half populated with my personal information, playing a sorry second-fiddle to Facebook. First of all, in describing and advertising the application which allows me to show a blog link on Linkedin, the function was hyped up by a statement to the effect that 'everyone knows that blogs are the best way to cultivate your personal brand'. What? Cultivating my personal brand? Like Coca Cola or something? I instantly felt like I was being coerced into joining the Linkedin Club for promoting neo-yuppy corporate-speak......talk about the privatisation of everything, including our points of view! I was just about comfortable with the idea that a brand is a set of ideas or associations which creates a perception in the target market, encouraging loyalty to the product (no I didnt look in Wiki - feel free to correct me). But now, by writing a blog I am creating my own personal brand! Soon I will be floating myself on the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

But seriously, am I just being excessively pedantic? Or is there an 'ideological tint' to this idea of 'my personal brand', as defined by my blog. What is the purpose of my personal brand? Marketing? Maybe. Perhaps Linkedin are just an Internet service with 'capitalist characteristics'. Perhaps I am stuck in the ideo-polarised past. Perhaps I have just used the whole thing as an excuse to subscribe to what must be the biggest cliche of Blogdom - making use of my blog to vent my spleen and have a good rant about something of little or no significance.

Materialism and family relationships at Spring Festival.

In spite of this being my second Spring Festival at my girlfriends parents home in rural Hunan Province, I still felt no little apprehension at the prospect of being with the family 24-7 for a week. Perhaps this was in part due to the fathers daily ritual last year of telling me that according to traditional Chinese culture, there are certain expectations for a (not so) young man in my position, for example buying a house etc etc. I was mightily impressed by the loudness and frequency of firecracker explosions, which would suddenly erupt in the street outside the sitting room, where I slept on the sofa, waking me in the small hours. I wondered at the cultural gap, which would see British people calling the police at a phenomena that probably caused pleasant feelings of nostalgia in the average Chinese, recalling childhood excitement at the years most rewarding festival. My avoidance of pork, as a Muslim, didn’t help matters, and neither did the mothers attempt to ‘fatten me up’, by trying to persuade me that a pigs trotter was in fact cows nose, so that I would eat it. Tempting.

Replacing the usual enthusiasm I feel at the prospect of novel cultural experiences, the seeds of this years apprehension were almost certainly sown last year. As well as being told I should buy a house this or next year, and where I should buy it (near to the hometown, of course), I was told that I should borrow money from friends or family if I couldn’t pay for the house myself, in spite of my tactful suggestion that this would be difficult as it is not usually an option in my own, and my country’s, culture. The same advice was echoed this year, although to ‘future father in-law’s’ credit, less often than last year. This time the elder sister also had a boyfriend on location, which may have served to distract attention from me. One incident which caused the indignation to rumble up in me more strongly than ever before, last year, was when during a heated discussion at which I was not present, the parents said to my yet-to-graduate girlfriend that if I was truly in love with her, I would pay her tuition fees for that final semester. As an outsider coming into a new culture should I feel angry at the fact that a monetary cost had been set as a criterion of my feelings and intentions? I certainly felt justified in doing so. How much of this is due to cultural differences between East and West, and how much is due to individual idiosyncrasies, which could also be expressed as ‘opportunism’ by an offended Brit, I am yet to decide.

Anyway, I stocked up on pious tolerance, which was fortunately on special offer at Carrefour; and chanting my mantra “water off a ducks back, water off a ducks back….” I set out once more to brave the future in-laws. The cows nose incident was a piece of cake, and the giving of money to relatives was no problem either – nothing excessive, it all seemed rather nice, and I even got a little red envelope too. I felt I was ‘participating’, not a foreigner who was simply there to enjoy the view, and the mutual appreciation of novelty value. I twitched ever so slightly when I was informed that it would be polite if I bought an aunty a piece of clothing, and on the subsequent trip to the shop, the mother in law spent three minutes choosing her sisters clothes, and then 45 minutes choosing one for herself, which was put on my tab without a word (mum had just been given a red envelope with 5 grand in it for her own use by hubby, as business was good, so she wasn’t exactly short!). Repeating to myself ‘I am just being an anal-retentive foreigner’ again and again, we went home, and assumed the customary position on the sofa, with jackets on, and feet placed on top of the electric heater in a wooden box, all covered with a thick blanket to keep feet and legs from going numb. I was regaining my saintly equilibrium, when in casual conversation I mentioned my grandparents advanced age- 90 +! The mother in law paused, and then asked “who does the house go to when they die?”. Anal boy was back, and I bridled, saying: “I don’t know. It’s none of my business”. She didn’t seem to pick up on my tone, and asked how many brothers or sisters my mother had, and then again, whether I knew who would get the house. I soon stopped any further attempts at conversation, aware that my apparent fascination with the inane TV show in front of us would not go un-noticed by my girlfriend. From here on in, nothing seemed warm and friendly anymore, and I kept noticing points worthy of my righteous criticism: “Girlfriends’ sister and boyfriend insisted on speaking their (unintelligible to me) local dialect, instead of Mandarin, when the four of us went on a walk, leaving me effectively out of any conversation. I took offence to peoples’ unwillingness to make allowances for my slowness at Mah Jong, when I was just a beginner after all. In fact, I had already decided to pass the rest of the time in self-contained cynicism, when one afternoon we went to visit one of the relatives who lived on some farmland out of town. When we arrived we found him about 50 metres from the house, at the grave of his wife, who had recently died suddenly, in her early fifties. We set off the obligatory firecrackers at the tomb, and I followed my girlfriends' example of kow-towing to the grave while the firecrackers exploded around us. As usual, I wondered how many people a year were blinded by stray firecrackers blown away from the main string, and whether anyone in the world in fact knew this statistic. As I stood up, I was surprised when the uncle grasped my hand, and said something I couldn’t understand, before bursting into tears. Crying, he then gave me a cigarette, and led me by the hand through the fields back to his house, to drink a beer and smoke another cigarette. I felt some of my belligerent isolationism fade away, at this show of emotion and intimacy from a man I had never met before. Maybe I was part of the family after all.

In my post-festival ponderings, I have struggled to separate personal ideosyncrasies from cultural ones. I have tried to justify what seems like opportunism as a hangover from the hard times that my girlfriends’ parents’ generation grew up in. Her father was orphaned before his second birthday, and raised by the eldest of his 9 siblings. When he met the mother he lived in a shack, with a couple of planks for a bed, and a cooking pot on some bricks. He has pulled himself up by his boot-straps, ruining his health with the baijiu-soaked spicy lunches and shared cigarettes that are a necessary part of relationship-building in China’s rural business community. He now runs his own little factory making pig-feed supplement, has a largish house, and a Volkswagen car, and can afford to send up some of the biggest fireworks on his street every New Year. He has also put two daughters through university. The cost of this is visible on his face. He looks tired, and now has stomach ulcers and a mild disorder of the thyroid gland. Can I justifiably resent these parents for wanting their daughters to be provided for? Should I expect my outside values of non-obligation and personal choice to be accepted in this little town, just because China is now a wealthy nation with a burgeoning urban middle class? Conversely, is it reasonable to expect me to abandon my cultural values just because I live in China now?

While pondering the above, I returned to my teaching job, and gave a class of students a picture of a man and woman sitting at a table, clearly having a serious discussion. Thought bubbles from the mans’ head showed an office scenario with men and women. I gave the students the title ‘A Great Opportunity’, and asked them to come up with ideas as to what the discussion is about. The article accompanying the picture describes a man who has been given a promotion opportunity, dependent on his moving abroad to work. He is telling his fiancée. I was surprised when most of the students told me that they thought the man is being unfaithful, and is having an extra-marital affair with the woman in the thought bubble picture. Why would they interpret the picture in this way? It came to me that in an environment where personal relationships may be primarily defined by the economic opportunities they offer, would extra-marital affairs be a common means of fulfilling other emotional/physical needs, while the woman involved (the house-wrecker, tramp) is simply making use of an economic opportunity herself? A friend who had spent several years in Korea once told me that the national press had done a survey, and found that a staggering 50% of men had had extra-marital affairs. I wonder if this statistic is available for China?