The Trouble with Technocrats

Lest we forget, we’re not the only ones doing a bit of political spring cleaning: China’s restive Xinjiang region has a new boss. A couple of days after the initial rioting in July 2009, ex-head honcho Wang Lequan’s face appeared on giant screens around Urumqi, Xinjiang’s largest city, telling people to calm down and return to their houses. He was ignored by the Han Chinese who armed themselves with improvised clubs and iron bars and patrolled the streets. When, several months later, rumours spread of syringe attacks on Han Chinese, angry protestors called for Wang’s removal from his post as Secretary of the Communist Party in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

China’s autonomous regions have a sort of dual power structure: the Chairman of the regional government comes from the largest local ethnic group (the Turkic Uyghur in the case of Xinjiang), while the Party Secretary, in fact the more powerful position, comes from the Han Chinese majority. So it was Wang Lequan, rather than the Uyghur Chairman Nur Bakri, with whom the buck stopped when things went wrong. Now he has finally been demoted and replaced by Zhang Chunxian, formerly Party Secretary in Hunan (a long long way from Xinjiang.)

So what did Wang do wrong? That depends who you ask. He was certainly no friend to the Uyghurs, instigating ‘Strike Hard’ campaigns against perceived separatist threats. He also made bizarre comments on the ‘backwardness’ of the Uyghur language (related to Turkish), suggesting that economic development would always elude the Uyghurs if they continued to use their mother tongue. To remedy this he encouraged Mandarin-medium education at the expense of the Uyghur language. A recent, much-satirized propaganda video has brought one Uyghur word (‘Yaxsi’ – ‘good’) to the attention of many Chinese, but this is about as far as the government goes in promoting the Uyghur language. With the recent large-scale migration of Han Chinese to the resource-rich Xinjiang province, many Uyghurs feel that their culture and language are under threat.

If the Uyghurs resented Wang’s cultural chauvinism, many Han Chinese felt he wasn’t firm enough. The riots in which many Han Chinese died happened on his watch, and there was a strong feeling that the government was not doing enough to protect its people from ‘terrorists’. (It is interesting to note the effect that the War on Terror has had on the way people in China conceptualize ethnic conflict. ‘Terrorism’ is also an extremely useful term for the Chinese government, since it denies any possibility of legitimate grievance). The demonstrations against Wang Lequan after the syringe attacks showed the depth of feeling amongst Han Chinese.

Xinjiang’s new leader, Zhang Chunxian, was of course appointed by Beijing, not elected by the people. He appears to be a classic, post-Reform Era technocrat; just as it’s odds-on that the members of a Tory cabinet all went to top public schools, so is it highly likely that if you played Chat Roulette with the upper echelons of the Chinese government, you would end up face to face with an engineering graduate. At the risk of offending those more capable of building hydroelectric dams than I am, I want to suggest this ‘rule by engineers’ lies behind some of Xinjiang, and China’s, problems.

In the late 1990s a railway was built linking the city of Kashgar with the rest of China. A journey by train from the regional capital Urumqi still takes over 20 hours, but this new line has hastened the Sinification of this most Uyghur of cities: it is Han Chinese, for the most part, who use the train. The huge infrastructure projects that can be seen all over Xinjiang employ mainly migrant workers from China proper. Many Uyghurs resent this ever-increasing Chinese presence in what they see as their homeland. But according to the particularly one-dimensional idea of modernization which is fostered by the Chinese technocracy, roads and railways, runways and dams can only ever be a Good Thing. ‘Uyghur culture’ under this kind of technocracy becomes little more than colourful exotics doing appreciative dances on a newly-built motorway (see the video above).

It is of course difficult to argue that infrastructure projects are necessarily a Bad Thing. My point is rather that when a ruling class is made up almost entirely of technocrats, there is a danger that such projects are seen as an end in themselves and are divorced from their cultural implications. When this is combined with a blatant disregard for local languages and cultural practices, such as those of the Uyghur, there is clearly the potential for unrest.

Zhang Chunxian is apparently fond of using the internet to communicate with the masses. It is fitting, then, that he has been posted to Xinjiang, where the internet was shut down for months following the riots. One suspects that he is going to need more than New Media skills and an engineering degree to ensure the quiescence of the local population as China seeks to maintain its firm grip on this strategically important region.

Cameron's Gaffe

During last night's election debate, David Cameron defended the Trident nuclear weapon system, saying that we could not know what threats the future hold, and suggesting that it might be needed to defend against China. Surely quite a substantial foreign policy faux pas? Aren't we meant to be sucking up to China? Looking forward to the debate dedicated to foreign policy...

9 Mountains Monkey

The Chinese language has a huge potential for creative punning and recent internet memes have been exploiting this with a series of mythical creatures. The '9 Mountains Monkey' (九岭猴 - jiulinghou) above is a pun on a word which refers to the generation born in the 90s (九零后 -jiulinghou), often derided as venal and vacuous by those a bit older.

This website has several of the classics, including the 'Civil Service Ape' (公务猿 -gongwuyuan) whose name sounds the same as the Chinese for civil servant.


There is also the 'River Crab' whose name sounds the same as the Chinese for 'harmonious', and is a play on the government's Harmonious Society propaganda campaign. In Chinese internet slang 'river crab' is now a term for government censors.


Wikipedia has a good piece on the original mythical creatures. Note in particular the Franco-Croatian Squid.

And here, for more on the grass mud horse that got everyone so excited.

LeftCentral

My piece on Google and the hukou system is now up on LeftCentral

Sinogrime

I just came across an old post from the end of last year at lower end spasm, on a short-lived subgenre of grime which the writer calls sinogrime. To be honest, the music sounds more like that 'chopsticks' tune that everyone can play on the piano than 'the sound of Shanghai towerblocks and the millennial promise of a new superpower'. Sino- then, in the same way that Hong Kong Phooey is representative of the Public Security Bureau. Still, this Kode9 mix starts with a nice sample from a Chinese airport tannoy system, which is enough to guarantee a sympathetic listen from me.

Much like cheese, genres of dance music are often strongly associated with a particular region or city. Detroit - techno, Chicago - house, London - dubstep/grime, Berlin - minimal techno. So what might 'the sound of Shanghai towerblocks' actually be like? (see my earlier post for why a London towerblock is not a Shanghai towerblock) Beijing's Acupuncture Records has been doing its bit for minimal techno in China, but while admirable in conception, it hasn't really come up with stuff that I haven't heard done better elsewhere. Shanshui Records has also done important work in promoting Chinese electronica artists but since it verges more towards the IDM end of the spectrum, there's not enough proper beats n bass dance music. The old White Rabbit club in Beijing (like Shelter in Shanghai) was a great place to hear good dance music - underground with bare concrete walls - but basic booty hip-pop still predominates in most of the clubs.

In the summer of 2009 Acupuncture organized a minimal techno festival in an abandoned factory on the edge of Beijing. The location was suitably post-industrial, all steel pipes and machines. The organizer had clearly watched a lot of Metropolis. If this jarred somewhat in a country that is very clearly still industrial, most people didn't seem to mind. I suppose it may just have looked ahistorically 'cool' - nice and postmodern. A bit like Fort Dunlop in Birmingham. Anyway, people did mind when the Public Security Bureau chucked us out at 11pm because of unspecified safety concerns. It seemed that dance music in China was still definitely at the teething stage.

Japan appears to be quite a long way ahead of China in this respect. The Mule Electronic label has done a lot of excellent stuff, producing some quality deep-ish house long before it became popular again in Berlin. What are the conditions necessary for the development of innovative dance music? I'm going to go away and ponder that. I think it's safe to say, though, that if really exciting dance music starts coming out of Shanghai towerblocks, it's not going to sound much like the plinkety-plonk of sinogrime.

Uyghur Pop

Some wonderfully cheesy Uyghur pop

Consonant Please Carol

Part ii of Layman's Linguistics.

Cantonese mong (as in Hong Kong's Mong Kok) becomes wang in Mandarin (Mong Kok = Wang Jiao)

[Cantonese is supposed to be closer to older forms of Chinese.]

I'd always thought this was a strange consonant mutation until the parallel dawned on me:

Old English mid becomes with in Modern English.

While this is presumbably blindingly obvious to anyone who has studied linguistics, I find it quite exciting.

Worn-out Shoes and Exile

Reading a translation of the Chinese social anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo, an analysis of the foundations of Chinese society, I came across his discussion of the different conceptions of justice and morality in the West and China. In it he quoted the following extract of Mencius:

Tao Ying asked, “When Shun was emperor and Gaoyao was the judge, if Shun’s father had killed a man, what should have happened?” Mencius said, “Gaoyao would have arrested him.” “In that case, would Shun not have tried to stop
it?”
“How could Shun have stopped it? Gaoyao would have had the authority to deal with the matter.” “Then what would Shun have done?” “Shun would have regarded abandoning the empire as throwing away a worn-out shoe. He would have secretly carried the old man on his back and fled to the edge of the sea. He would have lived there all his life happily and forgotten all about the empire.”

Fei’s focus is the precedence in China of the personal relationship over the public one. But I think this passage also contains a wonderful image of the casting-off of power, with its echoes of Aeneas carrying Anchises on his back from the ruins of their city state. Shun will live on the margin, the margin of the sea and land; beyond the reach of the state, beyond the idea of a state. We are very used to the idea of a universal justice, even when its mechanisms, in The Hague for example, are somewhat faulty. The light of justice must shine in all the dark corners of the world. The idea that one could avoid the state’s pursuit of justice by removing oneself to a watery, marginal place at the edge of that state, after which the state would leave you in peace, is now very foreign to us.

The entire world, save perhaps Antarctica, is now locked in to the map lines of states. True exile is now impossible. Of course, the vagaries of extradition laws mean that you could probably find a country which wouldn’t send you back, but you would still be bound by the state. What Mencius’ piece suggests is the existence of liminal, state-less areas: marshes, seas, mountains, with which the state does not concern itself. Only there would an exile from power, responsibility, and the state, be truly free.

IZ

Last night I went to see IZ, a band from Xinjiang, performing in London. Their songs are sung in Kazakh and the group appears to be made up of three Kazakhs and one Han Chinese drummer. My friend had earlier suggested they sounded like an even more boring Beta Band; I think in this respect they may have been victims of Myspace misrepresentation. Online they sound rather overproduced, indeed rather like a middle of the road indie band with a few ‘ethnic’ touches. Live, though, their sound is much more raw; the deep, layered vocals much more resonant.

They make great use of the dombra, a type of traditional, long-necked lute. Its delicate strings allow for a flicking action which produces a shower of notes. Then there is the kobyz, a bowed instrument which is pitched rather like a viola. And of course there is the traditional electric bass guitar which gives the music the requisite drive.

I can’t say anything about how ‘authentic’ this all was, if indeed that is something we should even worry about. The Men’s Urinal school of musical criticism opined that it was ‘quite aboriginal’. I think this particular critic really was detecting notes of the didgeridoo rather than making a political statement regarding the disputed indigenous status of Turkic tribes in Xinjiang. I’ve often worried that many people have a tendency to see ‘World Music’ as a genre of music, like ‘Indie’ or ‘Dubstep’. It’s all just funny foreign people playing funny foreign instruments and sounding ‘atmospheric’.

I don't think it helps that non-Kazakh and non-Chinese speakers at the gig, in other words almost everyone, would have been unaware of the intimations of China's complicated linguistic politics. The songs were sung in Kazakh by the front man, Mamer, with two others accompanying him. However, Mamer introduced the band and the songs in Chinese, which was then translated by the drummer into English (I suppose that he could not speak Kazakh). It reminded me very slightly of ethnic minority performances on CCTV which are introduced, 'framed' as it were, in Chinese: minority languages are for performance, Chinese for the official stuff. Mamer probably learned Kazakh and Chinese at school and didn't get the chance to learn English. If you're educated in your native minority language in Xinjiang you learn Chinese as your second language and don't study English; this is why many ambitious parents choose to send their children to Chinese-medium schools, where they are not taught in their mother tongue.

When the multitude of types of music from around the world are reduced to 'World Music', and the word 'aboriginal' is bandied about, we lose much of the nuance and subtlety of the musical experience . We have to reestablish the context of the music and its performance, which the World Music vacuum does so much to negate.

Bad Language

There was an interesting article recently on Chinasmack about a post on 'sexist' Chinese characters purportedly written by a Chinese lawyer, which recommended that certain offending characters be rewritten. The claim that this would 'reduce rape by 2o%' presumably means that the post is not meant to be taken entirely seriously, but I do think it points towards some of the bizarre ideas about the Chinese language that have floated around, both in China and the West, over the years.

Many of the old characters denoting what we now call 'ethnic minorities' or 'minority nationalities' in China were written with a dog or insect radical. For those not familiar with Chinese characters, the effect of this is akin to filing those particular peoples under the dog or insect section of the encyclopedia. While this is fine in Imperial China where there is Chinese civilization and then there are barbarians, it is obviously a bit embarassing once you get to the twentieth century and Communism. So the bestial elements of these characters were removed and replaced by the radical for 'man'. Whether this changed the position of minorities within Chinese culture is debatable.

The poor Chinese language must have had more nonsense written about it than any other. This week it was Paddy Ashdown's turn in the Guardian. His introduction to their 'Learn Mandarin Chinese' pullout got a few things wrong: Chinese is not the only tonal language in the world, nor is it monosyllabic. I can see what he is trying to say - each character is a monosyllable and a semantic unit (though even this is not entirely correct) - but that does not mean that the language is monosyllabic.

Misconceptions about Chinese have a long history. In the seventeenth century scholars often (mis)used it in their debates about language, with some even claiming that it was the language spoken by men before Babel. This was at a time when English radicals were rewriting English words to show their true, divine meaning; so 'crystal' became 'Christ-all' and 'spiritual' became 'spi-right to all'. Geddit? This wasn't mere bad punning but rather an attempt to find a holy power in language that overcame the separation between sign and referent. While we may sneer at this from our post-Enlightenment heights, similar ideas about language are still with us. Look at the Supreme Alphabet of the Nation of Gods and Earths (an offshoot of Nation of Islam).

Even now the Chinese language is credited with a quasi-mystical power. Think of all those people who get Chinese tattoos, which, even if they in fact read 超市 (supermarket), are believed to have spiritual significance. The idea that Chinese is entirely logographic - each character is a little picture of the thing it denotes - still persists.

The Chinese language is indeed wonderful, but its pictorial element, as well as its powers to reduce rape or ward off racism are exaggerated.

Beyond the Starchitects

As a rule, the British are not supposed to like high rises. We have always preferred gardens on the ground to streets in the sky, it is alleged. Tower blocks are said to be a 'failed experiment', dumping grounds for a particularly lumpen proletariat. Things have been changing over the last decade or so: Ernő Goldfinger's Brutalist Trellick Tower has been rehabilitated as a London Landmark and Denys Lasdun's Keeling House sold off as luxury flats. Out with the council house, in with the penthouse. Thus the New Labourthatcher 'urban regeneration' paradise. Though, of course, no one who has read J.G. Ballard's High Rise can be entirely comfortable with the thought of living in a luxury tower block. Ballard's account of middle-class meltdown starts as it means to go on with one of the best first lines in literature: 'Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.'

Tower blocks seem rather different in China. In Wang Meng's story Kite Streamers, first published in 1980 and set in Beijing, high rise living is altogether more human. He describes two young lovers and their difficulties finding somewhere private, since they have no apartment of their own. While out walking together they are caught in a storm and finally find an empty, newly-finished fourteen-storey apartment block where they take shelter. They climb up to the top floor and it is 'as though they had reached paradise'. They have discovered their private place where they can hold hands and whisper to each other. The ordinary high rise is sexy.

Photos of Beijing from the first half of the twentieth century show the Drum and Bell Towers rising above a sea of pingfang (single storey buildings). The 50s and 60s brought 5 and 6 storey apartment blocks, but Beijing before the Reform and Opening remained a largely low-rise city. It was at the end of the 1970s that high-rise apartment buildings began to be constructed. Some of these older ones are oddly charming; bold shapes with none of the bombast of the recent starchitect contributions. I like the way the yangtai (enclosed balconies) typical of Chinese apartments are missing on some of them, and the window frames don't match.

I'm not quite sure what these great greenhouses on top are:

Penthouses for cadres? Or probably, more prosaically, boiler rooms, as in the Trellick Tower:

(photo:pyrsokomos)

Beijing's first generation high rises are a lot more flimsy than the British Brutalist masterpieces, and there would certainly be a Channel 4 programme devoted to their destruction were they in Britain, but I hope they're not all going to be knocked down and replaced by nickname architecture (The Bird's Nest, The Egg, The Gherkin).

More than Two Chinas

I watched 'Piers Morgan On Shanghai' on ITV the other night. I wanted to see how they handled Shanghai, and I am drawn to anything in which Morgan is involved - a fascination of the abomination. There were all sorts of problems here, many stemming from the fact that Morgan is one of the most irritating people in the world. Skilled in the art of utter boorishness, he is the man I would least like to have representing my country to China. 'When I think of shipping tycoons, they don't normally look like you', he leered at a young businesswoman. He found a self-raising toilet seat very funny. While helping to drill a new subway tunnel (why did they let him?) he quipped 'I'm literally boring Shanghai'. Ha!

The programme was packed with the expected cliches: Shanghai is 'the capitalist playground that the rest of this socialist state aspires to'. It's 'the gateway to the world'. There is 'a tension between ancient East and modern West.' Time lapse photography and taiqi. Shiny skyscrapers and dirty alleys. Cadillacs and condemned homes. Tycoons and the evicted urban poor. Shanghai is where, opined Morgan, 'the super rich and the desperately poor live together in this vast, smouldering cauldron'.

I wonder when the popular image of China in Britain is going to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy of superwealth vs. huddled masses. It's been a staple in images of China for over 20 years now - the peasant cycling past the skyscraper. This is not to dismiss the extremes of wealth that currently exist in China. In fact, the potentially most interesting point of the programme came when Morgan was chillin' with some successful female entrepreneurs and asked one of them which Western brands her company made clothes for. She was embarassed and giggled and said she was contractually obliged not to say. It all got a bit awkward, and behind the awkwardness was the elephant in the room that Morgan refused even to glance at: Why was she a 'successful entrepreneur'? Why can't she reveal which companies she works for? Because she's exploiting the labour of migrant workers from Anhui, one presumes.

There are clearly thousands more important stories to be told about China than the fascinations of the Shanghai rich with Barbie dolls, but having a few token scenes where Morgan stands outside a condemned house and talks about 'capitalist winners and socialist losers' does not qualify as balanced journalism. Nor does briefly mentioning a lack of independent trade unions and then spending five minutes discussing the popularity of foie gras. Perhaps one can't ask much of ITV, but you do see similar stuff in more respectable places.




These hoary old journalistic motifs ignore the majority of urban residents who are neither forelock-tugging migrant workers nor plutocrats mispronouncing luxury car names while smoking cigars in champagne jacuzzis. If ITV really want to show that the Chinese are 'just like us', they would be better off leaving Xintiandi and its fluent English-speaking sophisticates who know who Simon Cowell is.

In fact, ITV would have done much better to subtitle and screen an episode of 蜗居 ('Dwelling Narrowness' as it's horribly translated). There's a Wall Street Journal piece on it from a while back here, and one on China Hush here.

It's a Chinese soap opera about the problems of middle-class residents of a pseudonymous city, clearly Shanghai. These aren't the kind of foreign-educated shipping magnates Morgan banters with in English in the ITV programme, but white-collar workers with degrees from Chinese universities. In the midst of China's housing bubble they find themselves unable to get a foot on a property ladder. House prices feature heavily in the dialogue which often gets a bit wooden. The Daily Mail would like these bits. However it gets much better: there is sex with corrupt officials, marital breakdown and familial estrangement. It's bleak (so far, at least - I'm only half way through). So close to the bone is it, that, reportedly, the government stopped it from being screened on TV before the series had finished.

I can imagine it being screened here late night on Channel 4 (or perhaps the Channel 4 of 15 years ago), but I wish ITV would run it instead of Morgan. It might be quite popular; it certainly touches on an issue close to many middle-class hearts in Britain. (I meant house prices, though after Mrs Robinson-gate, perhaps there are others...). It might also mean we could increase our collective understanding of China a fraction. Surely Morgan and others would approve of this, since they seem so worried about China 'taking over the world'.

The Yellow Emperor's New Clothes

Recently I've been looking at hanminzu.com, a website which promotes Han ethnic identity. It is interesting to see that on it there is a large section about Han traditional clothing (汉服), since costume is one of the ways in which minorities in China are commonly distinguished from the Han. They wear the funny clothes, the Han dress normally.

I remember the new subway line 4 in Beijing had (perhaps still does have) an accompanying advertising series in the stations which featured portraits of people from around China. The minorities wore 'traditional' costume, while the Han were dressed in office or casual wear. What is more, while every portrait bore the name of the person and their location in China, the Han ones gave their profession but not their minzu, while the minority ones gave their minzu but not their profession. The Han have careers while the minorities have 'minority-ness'.

These 'family portraits of all 56 ethnic groups' have been doing the rounds. While the artsy lighting is new, there is much that is familiar here to anyone who has watched Chinese TV or browsed through Chinese National Geographic-type publications. As expected, the minorities are wearing their nice pretty costumes, even if the Bonan, Hui and Dongxiang men aren't really getting into the multicoloured spirit of things. Of course, their white hats and dark jackets hint at the many problems that lie behind the neatness of the "China = 56 nationalities" equation. Take the Hui, for example: since they are only really distinguished from the Han by their Muslim heritage, they don't lend themselves to the simplistic colourful costume/ethnic difference paradigm that is so common in representations of ethnic identity in China.

It's interesting to see the Han making an appearance, though. I initially thought they wouldn't get a look in, much as the Han zone at the Beijing Nationalities Park ( 中华民族园) was still 'under construction' when I last went. So what are they wearing? There seem to be quite a few qipao in evidence; some suitably old-school proletarian clothing for the chap on the far left; what look like the clothes you wear in Citizen Kane's newsroom for the man in front of him; and a great retro-chic polkadot skirt for the little girl. I'm personally very glad to see buxie (traditional cloth shoes) poking out from quite a few trousers, as I regard them, along with printing, gunpowder and pasta (discuss), as one of the finest Chinese inventions.

I can imagine the photographer asking the minorities to 'wear those traditional clothes, you know, the ones off the TV'. I can't imagine him saying the same to the Han family. The lack of an agreed 'traditional' dress for the Han here is again much as expected (see Beijing subway adverts). One might point out that while the minorities are made 'other' by their exotic dress, the Han family, who must be made to fit in with the genre of this photoessay, are here made other by their old-fashioned dress: 'time-exotic', perhaps, where the minority families are 'place-exotic'. The exotic minorities are figured as inherently backward (backwardness being the flipside of pretty clothes and exciting dances), whereas the Han family must become backward by donning the clothes of generations past.

So while this photo project claims to be a celebration of 'Harmonious China', it is really testament to the continuing importance of ideas of social evolution, found in the writings 19th Century ethnologists such as Lewis H. Morgan, for the way in which minorities, and their relation to the Han, are viewed in China. Of course these ideas, entering China via Marx, are mixed up with traditional Chinese ideas of civilization vs. barbarism (inside and outside the Great Wall).

I'm interested, then, to see the traditional 'Han' clothing on hanminzu.com. I'm not going to stir up a hornet's nest by suggesting that these clothes, to the untrained eye, rather suggest the Korean 'traditional' costume. (yes, yes, I'm sure the Koreans got the idea from China). What I think is interesting is that there is a dress that is seen (by some) as explicity Han and traditional, and that people are wearing it and taking photos of people wearing it.

I must now declare that, as an Englishman, national costumes make me feel uneasy. Much of this feeling must stem from once seeing (by accident, on TV) a Miss World competiton in which a Scottish Lass was dressed very-Scottishly (apologies Hugh Trevor-Roper) in a kilt, while the English Rose was dressed as one of those royal guards with half a bear on their head. At the time I felt a bit jealous that England didn't have a national costume, though I've since recovered. (simplistic parallels between English identity in the UK and Han identity in China, anyone?)





Ultimately I think the aim of national unity (minzu tuanjie) would be better served if the depiction of minorities was more nuanced than funny costumes/energetic dances. However, if funny costumes are going to be around for a while, I think it's probably a positive thing if the Han wear them too. It seems a bit less patronizing than the vision of big brother Han, furthest down the road of social evolution, looking back in bemusement at the minorities, still mired in backwardness. Bring on the traditional Han dance revival.