Che, you live in the heart of slant-eye rat country. any comment? any personal observations regarding how you may find the Han despicable? Comments on pollution? health? human rights? censorship? food? working/living conditions? social strata? justice? education? mindset? I'd like to hear from you. you always have an opinion, and you have the experience to have the right to speak and be heard in this case....
Pollution:
2 years ago when I was in Datong for a quick stop over to get to Pingyao I experienced some of the worst pollution of my life. The coal dust was so think in the air I stayed in my hotel room most of the time praying for a swift end to it all. Now that I'm up higher in the Mountains near Tibet the air quality is much better. On occasion I take this absurdly long train ride down to Langzhou to meet up with some friends and I find myself in this pea soup sort of toxic haze of air.
The Chinese pollute like crazy and it is only going to get worst. Apparently air quality is so bad in Beijing during the spring due to toxic sand storms stirred up in the Gobi desert that they run around with plastic bags over their heads. I've never seen this myself, but I can attest that the regular air quality in Beijing is so bad that my nostrils feel a slight burning sensation whenever I'm in the city.
Health:
Most Chinese are fairly healthy in the sense that traditional Chinese cooking is a hell of a lot healthier than American food. They have smaller portions, but the food is often cooked in oil. Alot of Chinese are getting big on the whole Western food craze though, and when you couple that with the Chinese tendency to smoke and drink excessively you have a fairly unhealthy state of affairs.
I often find myself at the gym on the treadmill trying to downsize my hairy ass with a Chinese guy on the next machine running away like a squirrel whilst smoking a cigarette.
Human Rights:
This is the country that has mobile execution vans. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006 ... -van_x.htmCensorship:
It really doesn't affect me that much. I have had books mailed to me from the US with no problems. The Chinese govt. firewall pisses me off more than anything as I have to use a proxy to get onto facebook. The central government is clamping down more and more with the hopes of creating a more civil society of internet users. I translate this as a society of people who don't openly criticise their government anonymously.
Work:
I work 19 to 22 hours a week depending upon how many hours I invest into doing my lesson plans. My Chinese coworkers are nice enough and I have no complaints. If anything I have more praise for most of them than anything else. My foreign manager is a nice girl from the Phillipines who has absolutely no idea how to manage herself let alone Americans. Her management tactics are to ask nicely, beg, and then get a friend to do what she needs done once I tell her no a few times.
My Chinese boss is a nice little guy who really is the product of the one child law. His pampered upbringing didn't prepare him for the reality of being a manager. The school headmaster is a guy who used to be an apple farmer. He's a tough old bastard and I've had to get the regional manager to set him straight a few times on contractual issues.
My apartment is nice enough, the pay is adequete if not a bit extravagent for China, and the location ideal. Not to hot, not to cold, a very temperate climate for China.
Other employers aren't as decent as mine. The stories of corrupt school owners are rampant here in China. It didn't used to be such a big deal when the visa laws were lax and you could skip out on the crooks. Now that they are tightening them up it makes it hard to change employers.
Education:
Monkey see, monkey do- 40 kids a class all repeating the same boring shit over and over again.
Justice:
If you are a Big Potato, local moniker for Party official, you are pretty much free to do whatever you want. A drinking buddy of mine told me a story about a guy who killed the son of a Big Potato. The kid had raped the guy's sister and the police had let him go after they ascertained his identity.
Justice for me is pretty basic. Unless I'm out killing, pissing on a picture of Mao, waving a Tebitan flag, or raping 10 year old girls the police will more or less ignore me. I was walking home piss assed drunk a few weeks ago and I staggered through a crowd of cops, walked about 30 more feet, pissed in a bush, and the cops never bothered with me.
Justice for the Chinese is all about Guanxi, the special favors and relationships that exist between people, and the size of the bribe they can afford to pay.
Comments:
China is an expanding economy, but eventually their lack of infrastructure is going to catch up with them. The millions of peasants out in the country are watching the explosive growth of the cities and sooner or later they are going to want in on that. They'll either have to become more repressive to keep people in rural areas on their farms and quiet or spend the trillions needed to bring some of these luxuries to the countryside.
It ought to be interesting to see how China works this out.