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It’s been a while since I put up any new photos, so here’s a fresh one … taken in a packed Christian service I attended out of curiosity this Sunday morning at Haidian district’s church (which clearly wants to be an American mega-church, despite, well, not being quite that mega). While the passionately Christian Chinese acquaintance I went with stood reverent and modest by my side, this girl, bejewelled and in her not-exactly-Sunday-suit, happened to step into my shot.
 "We love party" ... including Christ, I take it?
To no one’s surprise, there’s nothing more than a quiet breeze on the campus of Peking University twenty years after hundreds of its students were killed. To mark the occasion, a few quick thoughts on the back of a year studying Chinese in Beida (short-hand for PKU) as a foreign student:
- What strikes me in terms of students speaking out openly is the absence not only of the anti-authority voices which identified their predecessors twenty years ago, but the absence of any kind of open engagement with contemporary politics that you expect in a top university, and see in universities everywhere else in the world. Their silence over the Sun Dongdong incident on their own campus is a good example (I blogged about it here).
- It’s not just that they know their futures will be better served in a stable political environment and they have more to lose than previous generations (the obvious point). It’s that the majority has an iron belief in the current administration as working successfully to give them a better life. And it was talking with students on May 4th which made it clear to me the extent to which their priorities have changed from patriotism to individualism.
- This all isn’t to say, of course, that there’s no kind of political discussion going on about the “incident” in Beida. There’s a lot. It just isn’t out in the open air for the world – and it’s reporters – to witness. It’s in quiet dorms and crowded canteens. I think the angle of students being intimidated into silence is wildly overplayed in some of the Western media (not to name names or anything). Yes, students are acutely aware of the risks of speaking up, but our press should stop feeding the misconception that China is something out of ‘1984’ where 1989 is concerned.
- There is a very clear control in China over information about what happened twenty years ago last night (James Fallows discusses this on his blog). As Leonidas put it to me, “sometimes a student won’t talk about it not because he doesn’t want to, but because he doesn’t know about it”. Tony, on the other hand, dismissed off-hand the idea that Beida students are in the dark: information seeps easily enough onto the internet.
- But it’s apparent that their dorm discussions are in a different ballpark to those of their counterparts two decades ago. While democracy is still an appealing model, Western ideas no longer hold sway for them purely on merit of being Western. Most consider themselves less naive than their predecessors, and believe that radical reform or protesting simply isn’t the way to fix China’s problems – just as some think of their futures as brighter for the failure of 1989 and the economic miracle which followed it.
All in all, two points: PKU today is as far from 1989 as it is from Orwell’s 1984. I’ll leave the final words with Tony on how fast the game is changing:
I recognise that the government now just does not want to mention [the incident], only to escape from it. … Ten years in the future [they] will probably just need to publish a conclusion on the 80s, mentioning ‘something really bad in 1989, which was the only choice we could take’. And then the problem is over.
My thoughts go out to the families of those who were killed that day. We will not forget it.
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P.S. While I’m on topic, Tony tells me from a friend of his doing an internship with CNN Beijing that CNN will be coming onto PKU campus today to conduct interviews with students. What exactly do they expect the students to say? Surely not anything … oh I don’t know, mildly interesting? Expect lots of Communist Youth League members smiling into camera.
And to those kind folks who have recently blocked Twitter and Flickr in China: besides my twitter-box top-left, I use Flickr to display all photos on this blog, now invisible to anyone in China without a proxy until I move them. I see you are branching out into web design, internet police. Thanks for your constructive criticism: I really did need more white space.
Here’s another bone I have to pick with the recent NY Times article on today’s generation of students at Peking University. It claims in its first paragraph that all 32,630 student’s mobiles received a text message in the run up to May 4th warning to “pay attention to your speech and behavior” that day, given the sensitivity of this year. Well, Tony and other students I know have told me that they and their friends they received no such text.
So, make that 32,630 minus a dozen, Sharon laFraniere of the New York Times?
A more general gripe is that the article flits arbitrarily between two reasonings behind the apparent silence from students on the events of twenty years ago: 1) they are too scared of the consequences of speaking up in an oppressive environment and 2) their generation is too far removed from the event to care, especially given their more utilitarian ‘me first’ priorities. Sure, both reasons come into play. But I get a distinct sense that this article simply can’t make its mind up between the two. And it completely misses the fact that Beida students do discuss ’89 – in their dorms, and even in class with their teachers, I have it from students themselves. Obviously less so on record with reporters.
Well, that’s my beef in an otherwise thoroughly-researched piece. And I can’t help but thinking that if hyper-local blogging can call out big media names like the NY Times on little errors (like not every student received that text), then either those big names will have to incorporate that kind of citizen journalism into their news-gathering model, or see themselves called out time and time again until finally their readership goes elsewhere – and they lose that big name. (Incidentally, the New York Times forcing readers to register – try clicking on the link I gave – before reading a piece, instead of giving us the option, won’t help.) Jeff Jarvis is fun to follow on this theme.
The China Digital Times has picked up on a little story which caught my eye, given that it relates to my old university. Bo Guagua, the son of Bo Xilai (a high-ranking party official), studies at Oxford and has scooped a spot in 2009’s top ten “outstanding” young Chinese in Britain: the curiously named Big Ben award. Read CDT’s posts here and here (they’re blocked in China if you never got that proxy for Christmas).
Now I’m as much a fan of CDT as the next China-watcher who wants 17 unread RSS items a day reminding him of how much CDT’s editors hate China’s government. But I thought it was a little unfair to portray Bo Guagua – in my eyes – as an undeserving playboy, through publishing a handful of (obviously facebook) pictures of him in that first link (see below) with no more in prelude than “while a series of photos of Bo the younger have become hot items in the Chinese blogosphere”. (In which case, by the way, I’d love to see this topic on chinaSMACK…)
I know CDT is only passing on the internet word here: I’m not criticising them but the online trend of hand-picking facebook pictures to ‘represent’ a life. It’s lazy. It’s not representative (of course facebook pictures are party pictures! how many photos of yourself studying alone in your room have you put on the internet?!). Most of all, it’s pissing young people off. And we may be deciding the rate of your pension scheme one day.
There is a lot of discussion going on these days as to whether netizens (be it bloggers, tweeters or BBS-ers) can fill the ever growing journalism gap as more and more papers will fold. I sincerely hope they can. Well, one way to win over the disbelievers is for no netizen to be so sloppy as to use facebook pictures like that.
And for the record: I believe it’s clear from his accomplishments listed the second CDT link I gave that Bo Guagua deserved this award. I didn’t know him at Oxford, but I emailed a friend who did. He replied:
From what I knew of him , he was very hard working, loyal to his friends, and – to your question – absolutely entrepreneurial enough to win such an award. I agree with you – the photos do him a disservice. We’re going to see more of this misuse of facebook photos in years to come as we, the first facebook generation, grow up and step into the real world. I don’t think people have fully thought through the consequences.
Too true. Well *yawn* it’s late, I’m off to … bed. That’s right, bed. I won’t be hurriedly deleting any of my old facebook pictures at all. Comfy bed.
 Along with the great honour, the material award for winning the prestigious Big Ben award is a couple of brunettes in lipstick Note: If you can’t see some of the above pictures, it’s because they’re on Flickr, which has just been blocked in China.
A couple of Peking University themed stories. First, a reminder of why 2009 is not 1989:
- I usually link to articles in the left hand column, under ‘6 things I’m reading’. But given the focus of this blog, I’ll press the point with two pieces on modern students at Beida and Tsinghua, in the New York Times and the FT. Both argue, rightly, that the class of ’09 is a world apart from that of ’89. The FT piece is better: the NY Times overplays the angle of students being scared into inaction. Journalists have even cited the heavy security presence on the gates at PKU as evidence of this. What rubbish: noone who goes to Beida gives a second glance to those guards, like they never go further than the first glance at your ID. More on this topic soon.
Next, a reminder that the more things change the more they stay the same:
- Here’s a telling news story from Beida (a month old, sorry), which I heard from a contact in its administration. A PKU student went into one of the many little photocopying stores on campus to copy a legal letter of protest to a computing company who sold him a faulty computer. Nothing big. Nothing political. But they refused to let him copy the letter when they saw it was legal in nature. As did every one of the other campus copying stores he tried. Evidently some kind of restriction passed down from university administration, which deems students writing legal letters too sensitive. Really shocking. This was picked up by Chinese media I gather, but I can’t find a link.
Happy dragon boat festival! Remember, don’t drown yourself in a river unless you’ve first written some beautiful poetry and been wrongly accused of treason.
The brain drain (China’s best and brightest being lured by life overseas) is still one of China’s biggest problems – that Guardian piece by Jonathan Watts cites a study saying 7 out of 10 Chinese studying overseas don’t come back. So I’ll choose to politely ignore the Folex-hawking China Daily which declared the drain “reversed” back in 2003.
Well, Leonidas is one of the brightest Beida students I know, and he hopes to take a PhD in America, possibly 5 years in Linguistics or a related field. So I asked him – though not in such alarmingly medical phrasing – if he thinks his brain will be drained.
For one, his reasons for wanting to study in the US are different to those of a parallel Leonidas twenty years ago might have been. He simply wants to open his eyes and see what America is like. Just why I came to China. And, like me too (though the jury’s still out…), he wants to “seek a foreign experience but not a different lifestyle forever”.
With China’s growth and the question-marks floating over the Western hemisphere in the wake of the economic crisis, it’s an obvious point that there’s less incentive for Chinese to abandon ship. Their ship is sailing just fine. An obvious point … which Leonidas didn’t make:
Those who go to live in America give up much: fathers, mothers, friends, memories. To go to America is to restart everything. The cost is very high.
Too high for him? Seems so:
I can’t give up what I have in China. I can’t imagine beginning a new life in the USA. If I begin a new life, I don’t know if I can be accustomed to it … After all, I have spent almost 20 years education in a Chinese culture and atmosphere. So I think I have a different cultural system with America. This is too big a problem if I live there forever.
That’s one quote in a shouting shop. Some anectodal evidence for you (what else would you except from a lowly blogger?). Leonidas still thinks the brain drain is a big problem, and so do I. But we both think things are changing quick. Right now, I’m studying in a university way off the top ten lists (50 in the Times list last year). Watch this space 40 years on. (Check in 10 too.)
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