Absurdity, Allegory and China

When I first came to China in the late 90s, many of the people who are now stuck in traffic in their cars were still bicycling everywhere they went. Their dreams of ‘more things’ were there – of cars, of houses, of the latest in the latest, whatever that latest was – but money was still tight, though it was beginning to shake itself loose into their accounts. Most of my Chinese friends were children during the Cultural Revolution, and they knew what it was like to not have stuff, which put them in the same category as their parents. But unlike their parents, there was the possibility of a future of material wealth that most of the older generation never had the chance to imagine for themselves. When I asked them what they wanted, to be rich was at the top of the list, and more often than not they compared their desire for wealth with Bill Gates. The desire to have billions and billions of bucks was not restricted to the Chinese. But the nearly invariable comparison to Bill Gates was. “I want to be as rich as Bill Gates,” was a pretty standard response. Understandable, too, as most had either just purchased or wanted to purchase a home computer. In 1998 all computers sold in China were Windows-based and Bill’s face was on permanent national display in all Xinhua bookstores. To most Chinese Steve Jobs sounded like an employment statistic or a column header in an Excel spreadsheet. Or better yet, a question: “What does Steve Jobs mean? And why is it capitalized?” It was all-Bill Gates, all-the-time, despite the fact that Bill only had a high school diploma. (Prediction: sometime in the future it will be discovered that Bill Gates was actually born in Sichuan, a distant cousin of Deng Xiaoping, and that he graduated from a small technical university in some spicy hot backwater. But the evidence is still buried in an, as yet, anonymous basement stuffed full of boxes of files. I can see a roadside memorial erected by a rural county tourism bureau: a stone beefed-up Bill in windblown robes writing code on a scroll of bamboo slips with a calligraphy brush. It’s only a matter of time.)

So when Mr. Shao (as usual, no first name given), dean of Lanxiang Vocational School in Jinan, one of the two schools reported to be at the possible eye of the Google hacking storm, said “It’s impossible for our students to hack Google and other U.S. companies. They are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level,” I thought, “Right Mr. Shao, how could it possibly be anyone from your school. After all, they probably don’t even have a certificate yet.”