Absurdity, Allegory and China

It’s difficult to get the state-sponsored Chinese media to take the least little bit of a breather from hyping the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games (190 days away and counting – the digital counters are everywhere), an event that is trying its best to supplant the Berlin 1936 Olympiad as being the grandest display of hyper-nationalism ever. But news in the electronic age has a way of eluding border guards in ways that even the Chinese can’t spin their way out of. The winter woes that are gripping the country are getting world-wide attention, and Beijing has had to follow suit.

Cold weather has spread far south this January, and snow continues to pile up in places where it usually doesn’t. All of this inauspiciousness is happening at the worst possible time, the annual Spring Festival, the largest annual human migratory event the world experiences. In sheer numbers the Hajj doesn’t even come close. It is difficult for anyone who has not been to China to witness this extended holiday to understand what this event truly means.

Despite the historic vagaries of shifting polities, Spring Festival has survived as deep ritual, deeper than the inconstancy of news. Unidentifiable as Confucian, Buddhist or Daoist, it is more than the heaped sum of them all could have possibly dreamt up. Even the CCP didn’t mess with it. It is the cultural fulcrum that has survived the erratic extremes of the swinging political and economic pendulums and swords. For a brief mid-winter fortnight it is the correction for a world that, at times, seems to go very mad. It is the essence and timelessness of annual restoration, when even the advantaged east coast urbanites almost grudgingly acknowledge their rustic cultural heritage through rituals with roots deeper than any they can possibly admit to. It is home, and to be at home as the present year folds and next year’s hand gets dealt is critical to the continuity of the individual as a member of a family.

In China, family is the basis of religion, and has been as far back into the past as anyone has been able to venture. It is safe to say that it goes back a lot farther. Kith and kin, hearth and home, this is it. And Spring Festival is the reserve tank that keeps this old engine humming. To get home is a desperate duty, and the travelers press the limits of finite transportation space in order to get on board something, anything that will move them closer to home. There are stories to be told, and food to be eaten and firecrackers to be fired off to fend off all the unseen trouble that naturally awaits us all. Noise is light, the remedy for darkness, which is over there, and over there and over there, too. So they cook and eat and make great clatter until the sun again rises. And they’ll do this for fifteen days, until they push and shove their way back to the cities, loaded with bundles of hometown rations, the things that sustain them, that keep them whole until the coming of the next Spring Festival sets them again on the jammed road home.

But this year things have gone horribly wrong. Foul weather has fouled it all up: trains halted, roads closed, people stranded in places where they angrily don’t want to be. As the snow piles up, so do cars, buses and unbearably overloaded trucks on the nation’s highways. Amid the latest China stories of pre-Olympic crackdowns and tainted drug scandals, the IHT reported 25 deaths in a bus accident in Guizhou province. The state-sponsored media is reporting 50 deaths related to this latest bout of bad weather, but anyone with any sense knows this figure to be a shameful under-estimate. I have spoken with friends in western China on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau, and the grim news from there isn’t even making it out: roads and passes closed, many accidents with many deaths, and herders losing their stock. This does not bode well for the economic outlook in the near-future

Weather has always been a worry for humankind, and the Chinese have a long history of trying to predict it. Pyroscapulimancy, the heating and cracking of turtle plastrons and ox scapulas in order to divine the future, is the first examples we have of Chinese written language, dating back to the Shang dynasty 3,300 years ago. After the sacrifices and cracking ceremonies, an inscriber would record the event on the hairline fractured surfaces. In a few rare cases they even recorded the verifications, though mostly what was left were just the simple charges: “Tonight, there will be no disasters.” “We make burnt offerings to Di’s Clouds.” “To Di’s emissary, Wind, we offer two dogs.” Though there are great blanks in the understanding of what was actually going on in these rituals, the events along with the inscribed records were clearly part of the exercise of political authority. One’s reputation as leader hinged on auspicious and accurate prognostications. If bad news was the only news, it was probably better not to report, record or verify it.

The range of divining topics was wide, from the speculation on the gender in a consort’s womb to toothaches. Disasters of every stripe were also on their minds, and weather was often the source of Shang angst and the focus of their divinations. In another venue I wrote:

“More than 7% of the thousands of published oracle-bone inscriptions refer to the weather: the coming of bugs like great winds or great winds like a myriad charring of bugs; hard rains and no rains and field-baking droughts, floods that swept away royals on their hunts, as well as the kingdom’s crops and the peasants who grew them. The world, then as now, was a dangerous place with forces afoot that needed pacification. There are some things that never change. That Yahweh was referred to as the “rider on the clouds” tells us that anxiety over the weather was not only restricted to the bone carvers of East Asia.”

The problem in a country that has little substantive news reporting is that rumors become as close to news as most people get. But as the game of Chinese Whispers always reveals, what the message bends itself into by the time it reaches the end of the line is often not vaguely related to the story at the beginning. And as human are want to do, when it comes to bad news, the rumors often inflate the degree of suffering. So, in the end, more damage is sown at the grass roots level, where the rumors become the story, than would have been sown if more accurate assessments had been made public from the beginning.

Prime Minister Wen Jiaboa has appeared on television to apologize to the people for what amounts to a lack of adequate infrastructure to deal with the growing calamity, a move that many are seeing as bold. He has even flown to cold, rainy Guangzhou in the far south, a city overflowing with migrant workers stuck on the streets and under the bridges, and ventured into the crowd of hundreds of thousands stalled travelers. This should not be seen as a sign that things are possibly changing as much as it is an attempt to keep the loose-fitting lid on, to help take the edge off a political and natural disaster. No one wants to see this crowd go wild. There are just too many others watching. What China doesn’t need is a riot on the eve of the Olympics in the middle of the economic jitters.

Right now millions are facing the possibility of not getting home for the festival. What is normally a cultural pilgrimage home – a bearing of gifts for parents, mates and children, brothers and sisters, grandparents if still alive – has turned into a colossal disaster. Normally there is another bus, another train to catch, some hope of being delivered home in the nick of time, to be there when the year passes. But not this year. Many of those who have given up hope of getting home are in areas where the sun is shining, the skies are blue, and the weather is fine. Here in Tianjin it is beautiful, with more blue sky days than we know how to deal with. But there are those here who have realized that the blowback from the south is going to affect them too. Maybe they’ll get home or maybe they won’t.

So in the run-up to the Olympics I am left wondering if Premier Hu, within the secret confines of Zhongnanhai, is fiddling with turtle plastrons and mumbling to the heavens, “Perhaps tonight there will be no more disasters.” If he is, I feel quite sure that it won’t show up in the news.