Eric's Beijing Diary

Flew into Shenzhen this morning. I have always wanted to see this "miracle city" of China. Shenzhen was born out of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms, which began in the eighties. Shenzhen, which used to be a small fishing village, was commissioned as an "special economic zone." The official word was that Shenzhen was being set up to facilitate trade with Hong Kong (which was true, of course), but the more important issue, in my opinion, is that Shenzhen was an "experiment" with capitalism. Picture the situation: You have Hong Kong, the most capitalistic enterprise in history, just across the causeway from a little fishing village in a country where established orthodoxy says that business is evil. Suddenly, the government in that country says, "OK Shenzhen, you can operate like Hong Kong, and we will look the other way for now." The result was an economic force flow that saw a city of 10 million people explode out of the Delta in a 20 year period of time. It is meaningless to talk about what Shenzhen was before this happened, because it's basically irrelevant. There is virtually no relationship between what is here now, and what was here then. This is not a metamorphosis. This is a quantum leap.

Linda picked me up at the airport, and we took the bus back to her dormitory. After a good afternoon nap, we decided to walk around a bit, and happened to walk by some protestors sitting in front of a restaurant that was closed. There was a whole bunch of them. I don't read Chinese very well, yet, but Linda told me that they were protesting because they had worked for many months without pay, and their boss had just absconded with the money. Disappeared. They had no chance of being paid. I took a picture of them, and we walked on...oops, not so fast. The police officer stopped us abruptly and told me that I had to delete the picture from my camera. I told him that I didn't know how to do that. It was the simple truth. When I bought this new pocket camera a few months ago over in Zhonguancun, I went to the Canon web site and downloaded a .pdf file of the manual in English. But I haven't had a chance to go through all of it, and truthfully, this was not one of the things that I needed to know, because when I bought the camera, I also purchased a 1 GB memory stick. I can take hundreds of pictures before having to worry about filling up the space (unless I am taking lots of movies). So I usually offload the jpegs to my laptop, and then decide which ones I want to keep. Anyway, the police officer was definitely not satisfied with my story, and it was beginning to look like it was going to be a long day. Linda to the rescue. She grabbed my camera cheerfully and said, "No problem, I can delete it." She fingered my camera like an expert for a few seconds and deleted the offending picture. She gave it back to me, OK, it's done. The cop let us go. I was a bit disappointed to lose the picture, but Linda assured me that we had no choice, and I didn't want trouble, either.

Actually, the fact that a police officer can walk up to you and tell you what you can and cannot take a picture of, is, in some ways, a bigger story than the protest itself. Or maybe I just feel that way because I have been so thoroughly inculcated with the "right to know" as a divine right. To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what the concern would be here, it is very possible that the cop was acting on his own, I just don't know. After all, these folks weren't protesting the government. They were protesting (a bit futilely, I think) against a boss who was not even in the picture any more (no pun intended). At any rate, it does seem to be another example of the extreme image-consciousness in this country that is so noticeable to foreigners. This is one problem I have with journalism in China. China wants the world to understand and appreciate it's perspective, and even advertises the news show on CCTV as bringing the "Chinese perspective" to the world. But the purpose of journalism is not to present a particular perspective. It is to present the facts. To be sure, that would include the perspectives of parties involved, but the perspectives should be presented as objectively as possible. So I do not completely buy into the Chinese approach to journalism. But the American approach to journalism is so far to the other end of the spectrum, that it becomes repulsive and amoral. Objectivity at the expense of humanity. I will never forget hearing Peter Arnett in "Live from the Battlefield" describing the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk in Vietnam,

"As a human being, I wanted to intervene, but as a journalist, I knew I could not."

So Arnett stood there and watched a Buddhist monk burn himself to death because he didn't want to be come "part of the story." American journalists often go to such elaborate lengths to avoid being "part of the story," that they lose their humanity in the process. That's not good news. And it's not good journalism. Objectivity is not a god to be worshiped, it is a value we adopt as a matter of integrity. But when objectivity becomes detatchment from reality, this detachment itself becomes a more important story than the one being covered.

My purpose in taking a picture like this is not to show how bad China is. It is simply to give a voice (for whatever it's worth) to people who don't have anyone to speak for them. Have you ever been in a situation where you desperately wished you had someone to speak for you? It's a desperate, helpless feeling.

Linda and I proceeded to a coffee bar, where we met a guy from Istanbul who was waiting for his wife to do some shopping. I talked with him about my visit with the Turkic Uygur people in Xinjiang last summer. While we were talking, I was flipping through the pictures on my camera, and realized that the "deleted" picture was still there. Linda said, "I know. I'm not familiar with that camera. I don't know how to delete pictures." Could have fooled me. Did fool me. Anyway, that's the long and short of it. I got the picture, and Linda gets an Oscar.

Labels: Shenzhen, Work