East-West Station

Recently there have been some street scuffles in Bangkok between pro and anti-government protestors. The anti-government posse is called Pad and according to the Guardian:

The People’s Alliance for Democracy (Pad) is a collection of rightwing activists, business people and former army chiefs…The movement wants to replace the country’s electoral democracy with a system that would be dominated by appointees from the bureaucracy and the military. It claims the country’s rural majority is not sophisticated enough to choose good public servants.

Bloody peasants keep on voting for the wrong party! Suggestion:Why not switch to the Chinese system?

Anyway, during the street fights one of the pro-government peasants, a 55 year old man, was killed. He was beaten to death with golf clubs. Apparently, golf clubs are “the weapon of choice” for the Pad and this speaks volumes. Golf encapsulates very aptly the gap between the prosperous, leisured, often right-wing urbanites, and the great unwashed of the countryside. What…those Lao bumpkins have the temerity to vote for a party we don’t like? Let’s batter them with golf clubs.

I’ve nothing against the game of golf of course, just what it has come to stand for. Most “golfers” are not really that interested in golf and are arrogant cocks, and the golf courses themselves gobble up water at an alarming rate.

I say ban it! Anyone who disagrees gets pummeled with a pool cue.

is a line from a famous and provocative poem by Psychopoet Sylvia Plath. The poem’s name is “Daddy” and it equates her daddy, her husband, and male authority figures in general with Nazis and with vampires who suck the life force out of their female victims. Sylvia Plath committed suicide three months after she had written this poem.

But since a lot of the poem is actually attacking “daddy”, is the famous line better interpreted as being ironic? Maybe…but there is also a well documented type of trauma that results from physical as well as psychological abuse from husbands and fathers due to the strong and irrational feelings of love the victims foster for the perpetrators.

And the line, and the ones that follow it, and the connotations of the type of trauma described above, all made me think of Mao.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

When I think about Mao, one of the things that baffles me about his ongoing popularity amongst the CHINESE is that this was the guy who was responsible for the unnecessary death and suffering and humiliation of millions and millions of CHINESE. He didn’t inflict much suffering on other countries, it was his own nation of CHINA who bore the brunt of Mao’s murderous madness. And CHINESE culture didn’t fare too well under Mao either. Let’s face it, his reign was an almost unmitigated disaster for CHINA and it was only after he died, and after Deng XiaoPing managed to get rid of Mao’s legacy, that CHINA could start to thrive and prosper again.

So why would any proud CHINESE who loves CHINA have any fond feelings (let alone love) for a man who wrecked the country they love and killed the compatriots they love?

Well, I guess one reason is because whatever else Mao wanted, he certainly wanted a great and powerful China. He wanted China to be a world power, of course, and everything he did, every sacrifice he made, was in the name of that cause. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, or without starving millions of your countrymen, or without starting a cultural revolution that closes all the universities, or without…etc etc.

And I suppose another reason is because younger Chinese don’t know what villainy Mao got up to because it’s all been airbrushed out and all that’s left are portraits of a chubby uncle with a ruddy friendly face and a big smile. “Our founding Father who fought off the Japanese and established a new free China! Hurray for Mao! And hurray for the CCP!”

And these reasons make sense to me, and I find they help explain his popularity. But those lines of Sylvia Plath’s also come to mind and they unsettle me and suggest a darker, more troubling, but also - it must be said - slightly less convincing reason.

How many of those who have been brutalized by a strong male authority figure really do end up trying to pardon him and find love in his actions? It’s kind of pre-modern “old testament” stuff, I guess, though probably quite a common psychic tic amongst females in strict Islamic cultures.

But it doesn’t really ring true. In much the same way as the Plath quote isn’t really trying to be “true” either, it’s trying to grab our attention by shockingly overstating the case.

And in China I don’t see such a big gender split. It’s definitely a sexist country in many ways, but not a profoundly sexist one. Women don’t have much power in the public realm here, but at least they don’t get overtly discriminated against, and at least there are some female business leaders and politicians. And the situation is getting better because Chinese women are not prepared to put up with it so much anymore.

But what the lines also point to is a love of power. A big fascist daddy is a power figure, and a lot of Chinese do seem very hung up on power. “I like the US because it is a strong country”. “One day China will be number 1″ are comments I have heard more than once. And I suspect that some of the Chinese love for Mao is a love for and fascination with power. And the fact that he massively abused that power seems neither here nor there!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all idealistic here. We will never be able to extract power from the equation…it’s part of the psychic air we breath, as the following quote from the French philosophe Foucault nicely captures

“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

But fascism is power manifested in a particularly nasty and mean spirited way, and it needs to be rebelled against. And Plath’s poem has a strong, sassy, and liberating ending to it…

And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The day the Chinese are through with that bastard Mao will usher in better times. Dancing and stamping on the old waxwork in Tiananmen would be cool. And the day that citizens all around the world can get through with power worship in general will be a very happy day. May it happen soon. World peace, dudes.

When I went to live Hungary in 1991, it was not that long since the fall of the Berlin wall, the lifting of the iron curtain, and all the consequent changes to the region. And so there was still a fair bit of talk about “the bad old days” and my curiosity about what life under Communism had been like was satisfied by normal conversations without me having to be overly nosy about it.

And people at the time still told “Communist jokes”. These were largely concerned with how inefficient Communism was (or rather had been) or how stupid the police/soldiers/politicians (enforcers of Communist doctrine) were. And often they had an anti-Russian slant to them.

Some samples…

A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”

Capitalism stands on the brink of the abyss. It will soon be overtaken by Communism.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”

And there’s even an Olympic related one…

Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics “O-O-O-O-O.” “No,” his aide whispers to him, “that’s the Olympic logo.”

Well, we live in a Communist country here in China, don’t we? And have I ever heard any Communist jokes here? No.

I can only guess at the reasons really, but the first thing that springs to mind is that while the Soviet Union was presiding over an unconcealably crumbling and risible economy during the 1970s and 80s, China’s economy under the stewardship of those Commie bastards has quite obviously been on the up and up since the death of Mad Mao. (Maybe it was an ironic joke to put him on the banknotes?)

And so a fair few of the kind of Commie jokes told above simply wouldn’t be applicable for modern China, and so would not be funny.

But if it is true, as one pundit has it, that “The Communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda” then there should have been jokes-a-plenty during the years of Mao’s misrule, where the gap between reality and government propaganda was more than yawning, it was gaping and gigantic…it was sound asleep. But I have never heard or read any jokes from the Mao era. Perhaps everyone was too shit scared or starving hungry to tell jokes. Political jokes are dissent and dissent was deeply dangerous during Mao’s murderous reign. Or perhaps I have just missed them somehow because they never got translated from the Chinese and published in places I might read.

But another reason I don’t know any Chinese Communist jokes is probably because the Chinese don’t actually make as many political jokes as Europeans. After all, this Soviet Union era joke would certainly apply to China today…

When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, “Go ahead, choose your wife.”

Now, credit where credit is due…since Mao shuffled off his mortal coil China has progressed a lot in several ways, not simply economically. And the CCP has to be given some credit for that. But the government in China needs more jokes to be told about it. It deserves some satire and some jibes for locking up decent people like Hu Jia, and for censoring anything it doesn’t agree with, and for treating its adult citizens like children (not least by refusing them the vote), and for trying to erase or alter its sordid past.

Not to laugh at the CCP would be laughable.

Anyone know any good Chinese Commie jokes??

The other week I had to give a talk about argument in academic writing. Argument is an interesting enough topic but academic writing can be a bit dry and dusty, so I thought I’d “spice up” the talk a bit with some references to argument outside academia.

One of the texts I chose as a condiment was Deborah Tannen’s “The Argument Culture”. Tannen is a discourse analyst/professor of linguistics and also a bestselling author: Respect. The Argument Culture is subtitled “Stopping America’s War of Words” and its main point (argument) is that western-style discourse is all-too-often aggressive, polarizing and counter-productive. She also argues that too many modern Americans (and by implication westerners) believe that the best way to demonstrate intellectual prowess is to criticize, find fault, and attack. Does that ring any bells for you China Xpats?

This thesis is used to examine gender differences (her specialty), the education system, the legal system, and the media. In the light of what’s been going down recently with the “CNN versus all right-thinking Chinese” ballyhoo, I thought the media section was particularly appropriate. In this part, Tannen chronicles the emergence of an “attack dog” media from the days of Watergate, and shows the damage this can do to the political process and the people who serve in public office.

Point taken. But, it must be said, if America has an “attack dog” media then China’s is a “lap dog”. The media in China is the party’s pet poodle and this is a worse state of affairs, I would argue.

I also found a review of “The Argument Culture” that contains the following:

what this terrific American scholar suggests, to a large degree, is going Asian. Asian cultures…place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.

Yeah…right! That is just such total crap it’s difficult to know where to start ripping it to shreds! Just joking. But actually this sounds quite a lot like one of Tannen’s other books, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation which argues that: “Men grow up in a world in which a conversation is often a contest, either to achieve the upper hand or to prevent other people from pushing them around. For women, however, talking is often a way to exchange confirmation and support.”

So can we say then that the east is feminine and harmonious and the west is masculine and divisive? Well, we can if we want to piffle away with unhelpful and massive generalisations. Actually, China seems a fairly argumentative place to me, with a fair amount of shouting and finger wagging on the streets and at a national/nationalist level there is a readiness to take umbrage at perceived slights that often leads to noisy demonstrations and internet vituperations.

Ask my students what they think of CNN and they won’t wax harmonious. Walk around a Chinese town wearing a Free Tibet T-shirt and I’m fairly sure you’d get a harmonious pummeling.

In fact, it could be argued that it is the very lack of argument in China’s media that leads to such inflexible opinions (aka pig-headedness) and those notorious “hurt feelings” when the western media presents an argument “the Chinese people” haven’t heard before.

But then again, undeniably, there is CNN’s recent bungling reports of the riots in Tibet and, in general, too many knee-jerk criticisms of China the big bad bully.

There’s no easy answer to all these misunderstandings and confusions of course. Broadly speaking, China still doesn’t “get” western points of view because so much is censored, and the west indulges in sloppy criticism of China because of arrogance or because we cant be bothered to read up about a complicated state of affairs.

Just “Imagine” this though…cue Lennon’s familiar riffs…Less censorship, less aggression, more research, more consideration, more reflection, more patience. World Harmony! Peace and Understanding between Black and White and Yellow and Brown and Emo and Punk and Goth! Wouldn’t that be nice?

What…you don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

When studying literary criticism (litcrit) back in Uni. in the eighties, I can remember how some of our seminars would introduce sexy Frenchmen such as Derrida and Foucault into our analysis of the canon.

It was pretty exciting stuff at the time, I remember, because these guys were “philosophers” and their concepts such as “deconstructionism” and “episteme” sounded chic and sophisticated and radical.

And one of the tools of Derrida’s deconstruction that we were introduced to was the “lacuna” which (if I understood correctly and I probably didn’t) basically means a revealing little hole in a text that gives you a peek into the constructions of an ideological edifice that is trying to appear solid, coherent, and all-explaining. Or, as one of my lecturers explained, it is like a loose thread in the discourse that you can pull at until the whole garment unravels…and reveals the naked body of ideology beneath. Yes, you have to mention “ideology” all the time if you’re doing French-tinged litcrit.

Well, these little buggers are everywhere - if you know how/where to look - but the trick is to find funny ones and show them to your friends with a knowing look so you can feel all superior and clued up.

So, that said, here is a nice example from a New York Times article about the recent brutal beating to death of Wei Wenhua by so called “parapolice” or “chengguan” (aka thugs/goons). The article notes that many bloggers and local citizens were outraged and disgusted enough by this murder to kick up a big fuss and embarrass the local government who hires these bully boys. But, fret not, the government has got it covered, and here’s the quote that made me remember what a lacuna is…

“We’ve already solved the problem,” the director of publicity in Tianmen said Thursday by telephone. “You can read Xinhua’s articles. There’s no more news about it.”

Did that dude really say that with a straight face? Can you pull at that thread until you get some bare-faced Zhongnanhai?