[Guests]

Joy, a friend of mine at Peking University, hails from Hunan and studies Information Management (for instance, how Baidu arranges the vast information it aggregates … a hot topic?). This summer, she hopes to be an intern for Boeing’s Future of Flight Aviation Centre, working as a tour guide around the company’s tourism hub and plane factory in Seattle.

She sent me her application to check the English. The form was for Chinese applicants, and one of the questions – in a slightly round-about fashion – targeted how she might handle awkward questions about China from foreigners. (Presumably not: “How dare you use so much cooking oil in your recipes? How DARE you!”)

Here is the unedited last paragraph of Joy’s answer:

4. How do you deal with “culture shock” and communicate with foreigners who hold different opinions with you, especially when you’re talking about some sensitive topics? (Max 150 words)

In no case will I choose something sensitive as my topics. However, when asked such questions, I won’t hesitate to speak out my views. The comments about China positive or not, I will reply objectively, calmly, and on behalf of PKU as well as China.

Note: PKU – Peking University

To what extent are young Chinese representing their country abroad being vetted for suitability to answer questions on ‘sensitive topics’? Will an applicant’s answer to this question potentially deprive them of this opportunity if it doesn’t fill a tick-box? It’s even difficult to tell what the safest answer is.

Joy’s first sentence is spot on, I think. The third too, especially ‘calmly’. It’s the second which leaves room for worry: by ‘speak out my views’, she in some circumstances might be agreeing with the foreigner’s criticism, in others disagreeing. My guess is that the first scenario doesn’t worry the box-tickers: if a single Chinese agrees with criticism of the CCP abroad, it’s no biggie. But in the second scenario: an argument might follow, tempers possibly flare, a scene and major embarrassment could ensure.

Unchecked nationalism is a bigger concern for the government than unmuffled dissatisfaction: it not only gives an impression abroad of China as aggressive, but pressurises the Party to pander to such sentiments if an incident escalates, for fear of the people’s anger turning 180% on themselves (just look at the Belgrade embassy riots, which were allowed to continue so long). And it’s possible to imagine such an incident emerging from a poorly handled tour question.

So I worry Joy isn’t being unambiguous enough. ‘Speak out my views’? Something boring and safe like ‘answer to the extent of my knowledge’ might go down better.

Here is the last of the interviews I filmed in Oxford, this time with the cathedral of Merton College in the background. (Free tip: if you conduct an interview in front of a cathedral, time it so the bells DON’T strike the hour for five minutes right when your interviewee is warming up).

Dr James Martin, author of The Meaning of the Twentieth Century, and founder of Oxford’s James Martin 21st Century School (got it yet? here is a guy who likes to think about the 21st century) talks about the bigger picture impacts the rise of China will have on our fragile world in … yes, the 21st century.

After the jump is a coda in which he describes his first visit to China in the 80s, invited by Tsinghua University in Beijing to see first-hand the ‘awful, clumsy, Communist corporations’ of the time. A couple of decades on, and I’m writing from the glistening technology company hub of China, Beijing’s Haidian district: quick stuff, change, when money is an incentive.

Mandarin translations for both (think of it as a late Christmas present?).

Bye for 2008, see you in 2009!

Here is the coda:

‘Tian’ – one word (most likely the character for ‘heaven’) – presumably found my email address on this blog. He or she mailed me out of the blue towards the end of last month with the below:

Tian's first email

The email of course piqued my curiosity. By ‘make a big case’ I assumed Tian meant petition (the most popular and effective means of protest for those in the countryside to make their grievances known). I wrote a short reply expressing my sympathy and asking for more information. Here is Tian’s response:

Tian's follow-up, after I asked for further details

I won’t comment too much on this, as I can’t verify the full situation and you can never know (or indeed trust) a person from an email. But here are a few thoughts:

* I see no reason why not to believe this is a genuine attempt to give peasant grievances and Tian’s mother’s planned petition greater publicity. In which case, it’s wonderful that uneducated Chinese read foreign blogs on China (especially one as relatively inconsequential as this one) and view them as a means to get their message out to the world. In a world where traditional publications are on the decline or on the censor’s desk, the blogosphere is the new model for speaking out (this one’s for Jeff Jarvis).

* Tian didn’t answer two of my questions: where is he from? and when will his mother arrive in Beijing? (indeed, to do what, where?) Nor did he reply to my next email, so I’ve no expectations of ever finding out what, if anything, happened. The hopes of peasants who come to Beijing to ‘make a big news’ are all too often crushed by the reality of the petitioning process which is adept at sidelining the issue at hand – or even using strong-arm tactics to sideline the people at hand (as in this tragic story).

* This case (which is too vaguely phrased – ‘somebody killed 13 peasant-worker open’ – to decipher) is only one reminder of the difficulties the majority of Chinese – in its vast countryside – face. Such reminders are always welcome in the comfortable bubble of a foreigner’s Beijing. This month marks the the anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms: which were a wonderful thing, but the results of them today mean that most peasants have been left behind – overtaxed and desperate – while the industrious, lucky and less unfortunately born few got rich first.

This said, China’s government is working hard to correct this. I wish them luck with it. I for one have never felt more impotent.

Here are is a quick video (both in English, and Mandarin subtitled) in which I asked Dr Rana Mitter of Oxford University’s Oriental Studies Institute about China’s view of its role in the world:

And a follow-up of Dr Mitter talking about his first trip to China in the 1980s, back when a foreigner in Guangzhou was still something which turned heads:

Here’s a little titbit from an otherwise deeply uninteresting bus-ride a couple of weeks ago. (My silent spell of late has been due to a nasty bout of tonsilitis I’ve been fighting.)

It isn’t unusual, any native English speaker will testify, for foreigners in China to be approached by strangers keen on improving their spoken English. A popular location for this seems to be public transport (no escape routes, see). I was the recipient (victim?) of this honour (time-hijack?) the other evening on my trip home from Beida. My most recent four-bus-stop student was so delightful I can’t resist writing it up.

Below is a picture of ‘David’, a Beijinger in his 50s whose profession I didn’t catch. My conversation with him on the bus (what is the population of England? does everyone have two cars?) took a twist when he matter-of-factly took out a dictaphone and pressed record. When he arrives home tonight, he explains, he will ‘listen to my British English again and practice’. Fair enough, I think. Hao banfa.

Once we exhaust the topic of how much a Brit earns in a month, David produces the most tattered, battered, dog-eared English dictionary I have ever seen. He consults his notebook to check the page number to open it to, points to the word in the top-left corner and asks me to pronounce it in my ‘British English’, while the red-light of his dictaphone hums. Then the one below it. And below that. OK, next one….

At his request, I spend a merry five minutes working my way through an entire double-columned dictionary page. From ‘pathomorphology’ to ‘pheromone’. This, it transpires, is David’s method for teaching himself English. He has been working through this dictionary for 7 years (already at P!), while cornering unwitting English speakers on his daily commute. In retrospect, it explains his impressive, and for the most part utterly useless, vocabulary.

David, wherever you are and whichever bus line you’re frequenting, I wish you luck. Before we parted company, I asked if I can flick through his notebook. It’s full of bizarrely irrelevant English phrases, including the gem:

It is better for the brain to use chopsticks rather than a knife

My curiosity is piqued, but I wouldn’t mind seeing some hard science behind that claim.

David with his dictionary and dictaphone

Chris Patten was in Beijing this weekend. He spoke in the Bookworm on his new book, ‘What’s Next?’ (answer: a painful reminder of how expensive it is to buy English books in China). Here are a few choice quotes, besides his endorsement of Barack Obama:

“The US is still the only country that matters everywhere”

“Why is Europe Venus instead of Mars? Well, we tried Mars and it turned out pretty disastrously”

“I’m a believer in democracy despite Governor Palin”

“The House of Lords [in Britain] is a proof of life after death”

To mark the moment, here is Chris Patten talking to me about his first visit to China: an excursion from Hong Kong to the then “sleepy fishing village” of Shenzhen in 1979. How times change. Below it is a Mandarin subtitled version (translation by Wang Yao).

For more from this interview, see my earlier post. Go on.

Postscript: the following evening, Lord Patten hosted the Beijing launch of the Campaign for the University of Oxford (he is their Chancellor). Contrary to popular opinion, Oxford does not have hidden caves filled with gold bullion beneath its dreaming spires. It needs the generosity of its alumni if it is to survive this century as a world-leading teaching and research University. (Full disclosure: I was the web editor of said Campaign last year.)