As I have mentioned in here at least several times before we live across the street from Tianjin’s Olympic stadium, which has remained staggeringly empty over the last 14 months. Though the stadium is barely used, the same cannot be said for the large square on the north side of the stadium, which is used as a venue for light and blaring sound shows, cadre bus tours and any other event that requires audio-visual people to run invasive sound checks for days ahead of any and all events. It has been unpleasant here recently, especially last night when we could barely hear each other speak sitting in our living room as we were again under painful assault so loud as to set off car alarms all around the neighborhood. They finally stopped at 10:15. Sixty years and we all get to suffer.

There has been much written about the message and the audience of today’s spectacle (here, with links to other sites) in Beijing, and I, too, am of the opinion that it will be an external PR disaster: hard to pass yourself off as a peace loving world power when you roll tanks, artillery and warheads along with thousands and thousands of goose-stepping troops through a space the world has come to know for a past display of live ammo and repression.

Though the main audience will be the Chinese, you can bet that snippets of the mighty show will end up playing on television news programs throughout the world, which will give all of those who are not Chinese a good reason to pause. With that said, I am re-posting a section of a piece I wrote a year-and-a-half ago.
________

Seems odd to dig into the very distant past to flesh out the present, but this is a country with a cultural continuity that can neither be denied nor avoided. This particular road to understanding is rife with potholes, since suggesting uniformity in thought and action can be, and has been, used wrongly and naively to describe present-day China. But sometimes it is not, and the question becomes, as always, “Who do you trust?”

One of the people I trust is David Nivison, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who began his work at that university in 1948 as a Chinese professor, though he eventually held joint appointments in three different departments: Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Chinese and Japanese. Though he didn’t publish all that much, he was known as a philosophers’ philosopher. One of his books which I have is entitled The Way of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy. The first four chapters are lectures he delivered at Stanford, and the first one is titled “Virtue” in Bronze and Bone, where he comments on the character and concept of de, what is often translated as “virtue.” Nivison on de: “… [de]appears to be a quality or psychic energy in the king that the spirits can perceive and are pleased to see in him; and it appears to be something he gets, or something that becomes more evident in him when he denies or risks himself, does something for another…human being.”

There are two passages I’d like to pass on, and I can only hope they stand somewhat on their own. Again, Nivison is speaking in terms of ancient China, though he brings some of it forward to the present.

[So] military dé is not really military. It is the combined impact of awe, perceived prestige, fear and gratitude for the leader’s restraint; and this impact as a felt force actually makes using military measures unnecessary. I would offer this as a paradigm of a “de-campaign”: part of the Shang king’s function, revealed in these inscriptions, seems to have been to lead his forces forth each fighting season, to overawe the borders, showing the flag, and doubly impressing the border peoples by his restraint in showing his weapon’s edge.” [25]
…
“The feeling of a debt of gratitude for a kindness or a gift or service is something we all know. It is part of being human. But in some societies it is greatly magnified, in countless ways, by socialization and social pressure, until it comes to seem to be an ambient psychological force. Chinese society is like this. I think it is now, and I think it has been, for as far back as I have been able to study. In this kind of society the compulsion I feel to respond appropriately, now or sometime, when you do something for me or give me something, is a compulsion I feel so strongly that I come to think of it not as a psychic configuration in myself, but as a psychic power emanating from you, causing me to orient myself toward you. That power is your dé – you ‘virtue’ or ‘moral force.’” (25-26)

Riding around. Showing the flag. Awing the border people.

Sichuan, the ethnic mash-up: Han, Yi, Miao, Hui, Qiang, and Tibetan. Large and sprawling, from the subtropical to the deeply-wrinkled, winter-frozen Tibetan highlands. There are few places on earth so geographically varied. And I’m not even going to get into the food. (They call restaurants ‘renjia’ – the people, the family, the home. You can burn yourself in a ‘renjia’ and love every minute of the Fire.)

One of the issues I have not yet seen addressed is how the Sichuan migrants, a large, wandering bunch found throughout all of China, are coping with the grinds and groans of terrible unknowing. Or knowing. Many of the construction workers in Beijing and Tianjin are Sichuanren, known for their construction skills and industriousness, which, as best as I can tell, means that they are hard to overwork to death. When I have the opportunity I always ask construction workers where their hometown is, and invariably it is either Sichuan or Henan, the two most populous provinces in China. Before Chongqing was sliced off and tagged by the Centrals as its own special zone – a municipality like Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin – the population of Sichuan was close to 100 million. Now, down a municipality, the population is still more than 87 million.

The people of Sichuan travel to work, and they don’t often get to go home. But when they get a chance they take it, and nothing in the world will stop them. Or almost nothing. But this past spring festival, their time to return home, was severely altered by the winter weather that destroyed or damaged over 1 million homes, cut electricity to large parts of central China, and one city, Fuzhou, was powerless for three weeks. It also cut off the travel zone, the large frozen center which they had to pass through in their attempts to get home. Train service was disrupted at this busiest travel period of the year. Imagine trying to control a tightly packed group of a half-million people desperate to get home, as they are being told they can’t get there anytime soon. Guangzhou train station in southern China in the Pearl River Delta must have been packed with Sichuanese, many of whom did, in fact, not make it home. And for how many of them are there no homes left? No families left? A child still buried in the rubble? In Sichuan. This thing is a countrywide affair.

I have been spending a good deal of my Beijing time around construction sites – not hard to do even when you’re not trying. But I’ve been trying, since I am still maniacally focused on the CCTV Headquarters tower and what it does, both literally and metaphorically, with Light. I wander the buzzing Central Business District with my camera. Mealtimes in the CBD puts thousands of men on the streets and it’s a tough bunch doing a tough business. Hard nuggets of men who work close, live close and travel closely together home once a year. These guys don’t drop their stare, don’t look away when your eyes meet passing. They always see the camera, and I’m careful about what and who I shoot. Two tried to sell me their services as subjects of one of my photos, the smaller of the pair letting me know that the last tourist gave them 200 RMB (nearly thirty bucks). I smiled and wished them luck, didn’t tell them I wasn’t a tourist, because they know that someone who’s not like them has got to be a tourist, at some level or other. Though most of them don’t talk, some of them do smile, but only after I smile first. Sichuan all over ‘em.

The most disturbing, though nightmarishly unsurprising horror of all of this has been the collapse of so many schools, an issue that the government will have to aggressively confront since so many people have lost their children. And in many cases, their only child. One-third of the reported deaths so far have been from the collapse of schools. The official state media is reporting the destruction of over 6,900 classrooms, an odd measure of quantifying devastation, which obviously means they know how many schools, though I can only guess they feel that that number must be too much of a twist. (“Why tell them and make us look bad? Let them do the math on their own.”) I imagine that at least several hundred schools were destroyed just as the afternoon classes were getting going. (The Age is reporting that the number of schools destroyed was 7,000. Perhaps the number of classrooms was a bad translation. -May 18.) In one school most of the kids got out of the building only to be consumed by a landslide that swept the schoolyard. “Mei banfa.” What are you going to do, as in, there’s abso-fuckin-lutely nothing to be done. An act of God. But whose god this? Though I don’t lean in the direction of the divine or its retribution, I can hope for a special hell for all those who skimped and skimmed in constructing the schools and sent so many children to their deaths. If they managed to live through the earthquake I would like to think that there are a lot of adults, and overwhelmingly male, who are already on the run.

But it’s a countrywide thing, and Sichuan is everywhere. That’s what Deng Xiaoping, a Sichuanren, did when he let them know that getting rich was glorious. And so they traveled and became a fine-meshed net, small enough to catch the ‘biggest’ fish fleeing the tiniest of ponds, those people who were entrusted to keep safe the children. There’s ‘Special Hell’ writ all over this one.

There is an ever-growing list of books and authors writing on the ‘new’ China, and while I do not claim to read much of it, I am always reading about China, though often the works I read are not focused, per se, on the new. One of the newer books I particularly like is Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. Hessler informs us by digging into the past and doing his best to clear a path up to the present. It is a style that allows a longer and more complicated view of what’s happening in China today. That his title refers to the roots of Chinese written language, from the latter part of the second millennium BCE, is something that suits me well. My interests also lean in that direction. I have been known to spend long hours with my doorstop copy of Jia Gu Wen Zi Dian, the dictionary of Shang characters, a modern work that is still very much a work in progress. The meanings of less than one-third of the jiagu characters have been deciphered. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just like looking at the characters, playing with the various elements used to frame up particular ones, a kind of “Oh, this is how they built this one!” dazzle. More fun than watching bad television, to be sure.

Seems odd to dig into the very distant past to flesh out the present, but this is a country with a cultural continuity that can neither be denied nor avoided. This particular road to understanding is rife with potholes, since suggesting uniformity in thought and action can be, and has been, used wrongly and naively to describe present-day China. But sometimes it is not, and the question becomes, as always, “Who do you trust?”

One of the people I trust is David Nivison, a professor emeritus at Stanford, who began his work at that university in 1948 as a Chinese professor, though he eventually held joint appointments in three different departments: Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Chinese and Japanese. Though he didn’t publish all that much, he was known as a philosophers’ philosopher. One of his books which I have is entitled The Way of Confucianism: Investigations in Chinese Philosophy. The first four chapters are lectures he delivered at Stanford, and the first one is titled “Virtue” in Bronze and Bone, where he comments on the character and concept of de, what is often translated as “virtue.” Nivison on de: “appears to be a quality or psychic energy in the king that the spirits can perceive and are pleased to see in him; and it appears to be something he gets, or something that becomes more evident in him when he denies or risks himself, does something for another…human being.”

There are two passages I’d like to pass on, and I can only hope they stand somewhat on their own. Again, Nivison is speaking in terms of ancient China, though he brings some of it forward to the present.

[So] military dé is not really military. It is the combined impact of awe, perceived prestige, fear and gratitude for the leader’s restraint; and this impact as a felt force actually makes using military measures unnecessary. I would offer this as a paradigm of a “de-campaign”: part of the Shang king’s function, revealed in these inscriptions, seems to have been to lead his forces forth each fighting season, to overawe the borders, showing the flag, and doubly impressing the border peoples by his restraint in showing his weapon’s edge.” [25]
…
“The feeling of a debt of gratitude for a kindness or a gift or service is something we all know. It is part of being human. But in some societies it is greatly magnified, in countless ways, by socialization and social pressure, until it comes to seem to be an ambient psychological force. Chinese society is like this. I think it is now, and I think it has been, for as far back as I have been able to study. In this kind of society the compulsion I feel to respond appropriately, now or sometime, when you do something for me or give me something, is a compulsion I feel so strongly that I come to think of it not as a psychic configuration in myself, but as a psychic power emanating from you, causing me to orient myself toward you. That power is your dé – you ‘virtue’ or ‘moral force.’” (25-26)

Riding around, showing the flag, awing the border people.

The Foreign Ministry Wednesday summoned CNN’s Beijing executives to lodge a solemn representation for failing to apologize for insulting remarks by one of its commentators…. “Journalists should abide by ethics, and don’t have the privilege to slander or rail at anybody or any government”, Liu [Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao] said in the statement noting that CNN’s recent reporting programs completely went against the principles of being objective and balanced – which the network often claimed as its basic standards for news coverage.

As I noted yesterday, CCTV website posted a video and a photo of Wang Qianyuan’s (aka Grace Wang) efforts to mediate a confrontational gathering in Durham, NC (US) between Chinese students and Tibetan supporters with the caption “The most hideous student abroad.”

If CCTV was also summoned to the Foreign Ministry and warned about the “privilege to slander or rail at anybody,” that article hasn’t yet appeared in the China Daily, though I feel quite certain that it will. When I find the link I will pass it on.
________

For those who are not afraid to dive into poetry, there is a brilliant poem by Stephen Dunn which appeared in the March 10, 2008 issue of the New Yorker entitled History. It seems fitting to cite this poem here.

The post-liberation government has been pretty clear that things is about as deep as it gets. But is there religion? You betcha. Always has been. And money and wealth has been what determines access. Look at the Shang tombs that weren’t looted, and you’ll see that the wealthy, indeed, took it with them. There are always things you need on the other side, the same as there are on this one, and some of those tombs were packed with lots of bronze stuff: essential chariot parts, heads of weapons and lots of ritual vessels, some of which probably weighed more than a Tata Nano. Bronze was what you used to talk to those in the afterlife who had a say in how things were going down in this one. It was all part of the political-religious landscape. And bronze, the stuff of kings, wasn’t cheap to get.

Tomorrow is Qing Ming Jie, tomb sweeping day, when folks visit ancestral grave sites – if they haven’t been lost to development – and pay their respects and homage to those relatives who have moved on into the greater qi. This holiday dates back to the Tang dynasty, 732 CE, when the emperor Xuanzong saw that the wealthy held elaborate and expensive private rituals to keep in touch with those who had gone on ahead, and he made the decision that enough was enough. Give it a single day on the calendar and have it over and done with. I can imagine that it must have been a relief to some of those who were dropping serious cash keeping the lines of communication open. If the emperor said that it was so, then that’s the way it was, and no one on the other side could fault you for following the words of the Son of Heaven and distilling it all into one day a year to clean it up, and do the things you needed to do to keep the world whole.

This year this traditional holiday has morphed into an official holiday, a day-off for those who can afford to take it. I have the feeling that many construction workers who are under Olympic deadlines will still be hammering away tomorrow, building this new country, while those who can take the break will be sweeping the graves clean. As far as holidays go, I think it’s a good one. So tomorrow the burning of fake money and the eating of memorial picnics are part of the official plan.

But this year there’s an additional bonus; the Olympic torch is making the rounds, and perhaps that might have had something to do with the official resurrection of this traditional memorial day. Also, it was not, I think, purely coincidental that the Tian’anmen stage that was the focal point of the private torch lighting event this past Monday was a mock up of Yuanqiutan, the Earthly Mound, the Altar of Heaven, where emperors would visit twice a year to petition Heaven for good harvest as well as good weather, one of which is very much an Olympic concern. There was more than just a little religion in staging of that scene.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the official Chinese media you’ll notice that they are using words charged with religious meaning when referring to the torch and it’s traveling travails. Today Xinhua referred to the shuttling about of the Olympic flame as the sacred torch relay, and the job of at least one particular torchbearer, Feng Jicai of Tianjin as “this holy task.” Yesterday there were also at least a few mentions of religious words in regard to the flame and the tour. Clearly this is more than just a sporting event.

But this evening I just read that due to security concerns India has just shortened the relay route through New Delhi from 9 kilometers to 2.5 clicks. That’s some serious reduction! That’s akin to whacking a limb off god, like downsizing Yao to a midget. Man, this is getting downright profane. Religion can be hell sometimes, whether you have all the money or not.

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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 chirring 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 to the family 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.