Here's a disturbing experience I had in a Beijing taxi recently: Last week I went to a trivia night (my team won, due in part to my unhealthy knowledge of the TV show Friends) at a bar way across town, and the subway stopped running before I made it all the way home. Outside the subway station I jumped in an unofficial taxi, which is how many people here make a living. Sometimes drivers hang around to see if they can pick up a couple extra people, as this driver did, so there were two other passengers with me.
The driver did the thing where he went the wrong way up the off-ramp, which was old hat to me except I would have preferred to have a seatbelt since I was in the front seat. Then we got off the expressway and onto the frontage road, where he really started to make me nervous.
I hadn't noticed that the sun visor on the passenger side had a DVD player in it. I watched as the driver inserted a DVD and resumed watching a movie as he swerved in and out of traffic in the dark. His eyes darted between the road and two leather-bound chicks fighting each other on motorcycles, I don't know what it was - Ice Cube was in it. I mean, just what he needed to be watching: a movie about reckless driving where no one gets hurt.
On an unrelated note, here is an old but excellent Atlantic article that explains how China views Tibet.
Also, the Olympic torch was re-lit in Tiananmen Square today.
China Fun Fact: 1.28 million Chinese people die from lung disease each year.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Blackout
So, about Tibet.
Finding reliable news updates is frustrating because third-party reporting is available only from the few foreign correspondents who were already in Lhasa. Otherwise everything we get is from the Chinese government, which isn't entirely true, or the Tibetan exile government, which isn't entirely true either. It's in the papers here, with an emphasis on how it's a political conspiracy by the Dalai Lama and everyone in Tibet is united in opposition to it except for a few misguided souls (of course, they can also always blame Björk).
American broadcast news rarely carries any international stories, except for the occasional, reluctant tour through half a dozen countries in two minutes. So I was surprised when NBC Nightly News, which I download and play in class every morning, included a lengthy segment on Friday about what's happening in Tibet - 2 minutes, 44 seconds, in fact. That's an eternity. We watched it in class earlier this week and had a brief discussion about it. My students know that Tibetans are unhappy but think they should remain part of China; they're justifiably concerned that this will tarnish the Olympics and hope the conflict can be resolved quickly, although they didn't say how.
The Chinese government is not messing around with this. YouTube is blocked (again). I don't get BBC or CNN in my room, but if I did I would see them black out at regular intervals. (As one online commenter described it, "CNN International, viewable here in Beijing, keeps cycling every half hour or so to coverage of the Tibet protests, whereupon the TV goes blank, then comes back on right when CNN moves on to covering the McCartney-Mills divorce.") Then there's this report about Beijing police barring expat Cub Scouts from meeting the Dodgers last weekend at China's first MLB exhibition game. There's no evidence linking that decision to the turmoil in Tibet, but it's not implausible.
So all this was making me a little paranoid this morning when the NBC Nightly News podcasts for the last couple days were nowhere to be found. Thinking maybe NBC had neglected to update its site, I tried ABC and CBS as well, with no luck. Is China blocking podcasts with coverage of Tibet? I wondered. But this afternoon I was able to download what I needed, and the news is back to normal: Obama-Clinton-economy-What-are-gas-prices-like-today?-Boy-that-Spitzer-really-screwed-up-And-now-for-some-random-celebrity-news-And-finally-new-research-revealing-something-we-already-knew (news flash: Americans don't get enough sleep and that makes them tired!).
Finally, in a case of extremely bad timing, last week China released its U.S. human rights report, the full text of which was printed over three pages in China Daily on Friday. The annual report is a response to the State Department's country reports, and basically says 1) violent crime is increasing, 2) law enforcement officials abuse their power, with police brutality rampant in Chicago (also the U.S. has the world's largest prison population), 3) the American government has tossed civil rights out the window to fight its war on terror, 4) homelessness and food insecurity are on the rise, 5) women and minorities still face discrimination, 6) the U.S. condones and practices torture overseas and at Guantanamo, and 7) the U.S. should STFU and address its own problems. Some valid points, to be sure, but it's hard to take them seriously when paired with statements like, "Almost every American, even ex-criminals with felony records and minors, has firearms" and criticism that the U.S. restricts union membership (whereas in China, independent unions are flat-out illegal).
China Fun Fact: Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China.
Finding reliable news updates is frustrating because third-party reporting is available only from the few foreign correspondents who were already in Lhasa. Otherwise everything we get is from the Chinese government, which isn't entirely true, or the Tibetan exile government, which isn't entirely true either. It's in the papers here, with an emphasis on how it's a political conspiracy by the Dalai Lama and everyone in Tibet is united in opposition to it except for a few misguided souls (of course, they can also always blame Björk).
American broadcast news rarely carries any international stories, except for the occasional, reluctant tour through half a dozen countries in two minutes. So I was surprised when NBC Nightly News, which I download and play in class every morning, included a lengthy segment on Friday about what's happening in Tibet - 2 minutes, 44 seconds, in fact. That's an eternity. We watched it in class earlier this week and had a brief discussion about it. My students know that Tibetans are unhappy but think they should remain part of China; they're justifiably concerned that this will tarnish the Olympics and hope the conflict can be resolved quickly, although they didn't say how.
The Chinese government is not messing around with this. YouTube is blocked (again). I don't get BBC or CNN in my room, but if I did I would see them black out at regular intervals. (As one online commenter described it, "CNN International, viewable here in Beijing, keeps cycling every half hour or so to coverage of the Tibet protests, whereupon the TV goes blank, then comes back on right when CNN moves on to covering the McCartney-Mills divorce.") Then there's this report about Beijing police barring expat Cub Scouts from meeting the Dodgers last weekend at China's first MLB exhibition game. There's no evidence linking that decision to the turmoil in Tibet, but it's not implausible.
So all this was making me a little paranoid this morning when the NBC Nightly News podcasts for the last couple days were nowhere to be found. Thinking maybe NBC had neglected to update its site, I tried ABC and CBS as well, with no luck. Is China blocking podcasts with coverage of Tibet? I wondered. But this afternoon I was able to download what I needed, and the news is back to normal: Obama-Clinton-economy-What-are-gas-prices-like-today?-Boy-that-Spitzer-really-screwed-up-And-now-for-some-random-celebrity-news-And-finally-new-research-revealing-something-we-already-knew (news flash: Americans don't get enough sleep and that makes them tired!).
Finally, in a case of extremely bad timing, last week China released its U.S. human rights report, the full text of which was printed over three pages in China Daily on Friday. The annual report is a response to the State Department's country reports, and basically says 1) violent crime is increasing, 2) law enforcement officials abuse their power, with police brutality rampant in Chicago (also the U.S. has the world's largest prison population), 3) the American government has tossed civil rights out the window to fight its war on terror, 4) homelessness and food insecurity are on the rise, 5) women and minorities still face discrimination, 6) the U.S. condones and practices torture overseas and at Guantanamo, and 7) the U.S. should STFU and address its own problems. Some valid points, to be sure, but it's hard to take them seriously when paired with statements like, "Almost every American, even ex-criminals with felony records and minors, has firearms" and criticism that the U.S. restricts union membership (whereas in China, independent unions are flat-out illegal).
China Fun Fact: Sixteen of the world's 20 most polluted cities are in China.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Accepted
I spent all day Saturday with one of my students, who invited me to a college fair at a downtown hotel. The day started off well when I checked my e-mail to find a message from the University of Colorado at Boulder saying the school has granted her admission. It was nice when I met her dad to be able to say, “Nice to meet you – by the way, your daughter has been accepted to college.”
After the fair we went to Jingshan Park and Beihai Park, both ancient imperial gardens. During a peasant revolt in 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself in Jingshan Park when it became clear that it was over for him anyway. At Beihai Park, I randomly ran into someone from my Chinese class at McGill (amazing that I recognized anyone from that class, considering how often I went, and remembered his name; even more amazing that he remembered mine). We’re having dinner this week.
We had then planned to take a driving tour around Tiananmen Square, but traffic was bad due to the “two meetings” in progress – the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. Police brought traffic to a halt on our side of the street so the other side would be clear for party officials leaving that day’s session. We waited about 20 minutes until several charter buses drove by in the opposite direction. I observed that they were mostly empty, but my student wasn’t surprised.
“They are the important people in China,” she said with unusual force and resentment. “So they can waste the resources.”
We continued on to her apartment, where I met her mother and we chatted before going to dinner at a Sichuan restaurant.
On Sunday Niall and I had dinner at Beijing’s first Ethiopian restaurant, which opened last week.
China Fun Fact: Beijing’s subway network set a new one-day record two weeks ago, with 3.5 million passenger trips (Washington, D.C. tops out at about 800,000).
After the fair we went to Jingshan Park and Beihai Park, both ancient imperial gardens. During a peasant revolt in 1644, the last Ming emperor hanged himself in Jingshan Park when it became clear that it was over for him anyway. At Beihai Park, I randomly ran into someone from my Chinese class at McGill (amazing that I recognized anyone from that class, considering how often I went, and remembered his name; even more amazing that he remembered mine). We’re having dinner this week.
We had then planned to take a driving tour around Tiananmen Square, but traffic was bad due to the “two meetings” in progress – the National People’s Congress and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress. Police brought traffic to a halt on our side of the street so the other side would be clear for party officials leaving that day’s session. We waited about 20 minutes until several charter buses drove by in the opposite direction. I observed that they were mostly empty, but my student wasn’t surprised.
“They are the important people in China,” she said with unusual force and resentment. “So they can waste the resources.”
We continued on to her apartment, where I met her mother and we chatted before going to dinner at a Sichuan restaurant.
On Sunday Niall and I had dinner at Beijing’s first Ethiopian restaurant, which opened last week.
China Fun Fact: Beijing’s subway network set a new one-day record two weeks ago, with 3.5 million passenger trips (Washington, D.C. tops out at about 800,000).
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