Eric's Beijing Diary

Finally back in Beijing. Sunday the driver for the foster home picked me up in Linyi (in Shandong Province) and took me to my friends' home. They have a foster home for 35 handicapped children. Their home is in the countryside, so it is a very pleasant rural location. These kids are pretty lucky. The orphanages they come from are glad to let them go, because they are still registered as being cared for by the orphanage, so the orphanage gets the money from the government. But the orphanage is not actually putting out any money for their care.

Steve is from California. His father was an Assembly of God pastor. His wife is from Shandong Province. I first met them when they were involved in the Living Tree, a foster home on the east side of Beijing. Now they have moved to the countryside, which is a really nice environment for the kids.

The staff there are all Christians. Every morning at 6 am they meet for devotions and prayer. In the evening, they have a group Bible reading. Most of them are from the neighborhood. Hard to find a neighborhood in China that doesn't have a family church or two nearby.

Yesterday I caught a ride to Rizhao with a youth group that had stopped to visit the foster home. I wanted to go to Rizhao, because I figured since it is the originating station for the train that goes to Beijing, it might be easier to get a sleeper ticket. The guy who took me to the train station was horrified when I told him I didn't have a ticket yet. I explained to him that I had no way to get one, and if they didn't have sleeper tickets, I would just have to take what I could get, because I really needed to get back to Beijing. Fortunately, they had added an extra car to the train just before I walked into the station, so they had a few sleeper tickets available. Relief. I don't like the hard seats. It isn't that the seat is so uncomfortable. The problem is that they sell a whole bunch of standing tickets for the same car, so even if you do have a seat, it is absolutely impossible to move.

Minnie has been so nice to me the past couple days. The youth hostel really was full, but she managed to find a cheap hotel for me. At a nice one, too. When I first came to China, "cheap hotel" usually meant an old, run down place in a bad neighborhood that wasn't supposed to accept foreigners. But recently, I have started to see these new places that are clean and new, but come with a number of very tiny rooms for a bargain price. Because of the standards of cleanliness, they are also approved for foreigners. The price isn't quite as good as a youth hostel, but not that bad. The rooms don't come equipped with broadband, but they do have a few computers in the lobby for patrons to use. I wasn't looking forward to that--I'm spoiled, I guess. If I use a computer in a lobby to check my email, I have to go to the web sites for my email accounts one at a time and log in. I am used to just opening up Outlook, and watching it all come in automatically. I don't like web email. But it's not just that. My files are not readily accessible if I use a strange computer. So, when I got to my room, I did what I always do in a new place. I opened my computer and did a search. By God's good mercy, someone in the neighborhood had an unsecured router, so I have been able to use the Internet from my room.

But I have had lots of trouble getting a ticket. As soon as I got in on Tuesday, I went to the ticket window to try to buy a sleeper ticket to Beijing. No luck. Minnie mentioned that she had sometimes been able to find cheap air tickets to Shandong, so I got the idea of going to visit some friends who live there. Shandong is not that far from Beijing. But when I checked, the place where they live is quite a distance from the city Minnie mentioned. This morning, I decided to go to the other train station, and I was able to buy a sleeper ticket to a town not far from where my friends live in Shandong. When I got back to the hotel, there was a message from Minnie telling me that the next available ticket to Beijing is one from Shenzhen on the 8th of August. She urged me to go and get one right away. I called her and told her that I had a ticket to Shandong Province. Hard sleeper tickets are not expensive. So basically, I paid for my trip to Guanzhou by doing this. The problem is that when I get off the train on Sunday, I will not be home. I will be somewhere in the middle of Shandong Province. We'll just have to wait and see if that turns out to have been a good idea.

Bought a ticket on the through train to Guangzhou. I am in Hong Kong now. I got a one year multiple-entry tourist visa a year ago in San Francisco. It expires July 21st. Sort of. Actually, with a multiple-entry tourist visa, you are limited to 60 days, 90 days, or 120 days each stay. Mine is 90. So the visa doesn't actually say "Expires July 21, 2011," it says, "Enter before July 21st 2011." So I decided to leave China and go back in just before the 21st, which will give me an extra 90 days to decide what I am going to do with my life.

But I hadn't anticipated the level of demand for tickets. For the first time in my life I was unable to buy a train ticket to Hong Kong. I finally got a ticket on the slow train to Shenzhen, which is not too much different, because the train station is right at the border. But now I am trying to go back. I had thought of stopping to see Minnie in Guangzhou but decided against it, because the youth hostel in Guangzhou had no openings. Same with the youth hostel in Shenzhen. But now I just found out that there is only one ticket on the train from Hong Kong to Beijing, and it is a soft sleeper ticket. Those things are expensive. The extra cost would easily pay for my ticket to Guangzhou, and a couple nights in the youth hostel. So I bought a ticket on the through train to Guangzhou and decided to take my chances on getting a bed at the youth hostel, even though they are telling me they're full. Surely at least one person will cancel out.

Fascinating editorial in the China Daily today. Seems the Chinese government is up in arms about news that the Americans may have developed a way to make it possible for Chinese people to connect to the Internet without using local infrastructure. I am skeptical, but what caught my attention is this sentence:

"It is feared that the product will be used to help dissidents in countries where governments have strong control over cyberspace."

It is feared? Feared by whom? Certainly not the netizens of China. I never heard any of them expressing their terror over having easier access to information.

This is entertaining. China is terrified that someone may invent a way for Chinese people to get around the Great Firewall of China, thus making it harder for the Chinese government to control the flow of information. I have news for them. It's already happening, and it isn't being done from outside. China's increasingly restrictive policies have motivated enterprising Chinese young people to look for workarounds. The Great Firewall is slowly eroding, and there is nothing China can do about it.

Except deny it. A government official recently made a complete fool of himself by saying that "Supervision and management of ideology and new media in Western countries is far stricter than that in our China." He was promptly pilloried online by young Chinese Internet users, who openly mocked his comments.

指鹿为马. It means, "Point at a deer and call it a horse."

Full two-page spread in the China Daily today giving a timeline, with comment and pictures of the history of the Chinese Communist Party. I was drawn to this statement:

At the crucial juncture of China's reform and opening-up course in January 1992, Deng Xiaoping tours southern China where he delivers speeches aimed at clarifying whether the establishment of special economic zones is capitalist or socialist in nature. After a visit to Shenzhen, he says Shenzhen's achievements are socialist not capitalist in nature, as they have improved productivity and people's livelihoods. His words help push forward China's reform and opening-up in the 1990s.

So here's how it goes in China: You implement a socialist system, condemning capitalism as evil. When socialism proves to be a dismal failure, you implement capitalism, but call it socialism. This approach to governance in China goes back to the Qin Dynasty, when an evil minister, in order to test the loyalty of his underlings, brought a deer before them and told them to call it a horse. In China, it has become a standard idiom, that manifests itself in so many ways.

When I first came to China, my freshmen students asked me, "What is the difference between socialism and capitalism?" I would answer by asking them a question:

"If you have a company, do you think you should own it, or would you rather have the government own it and you just work for them?"

Their answers were predictable. "I think I should own it." Then I would tell them, "Then you're a capitalist. If you think the government should own it, you're a socialist." I would often tell them to go to Dictionary.com and look up the two words. The definitions are quite simple:

Socialism: Public ownership of the means of production

Capitalism: Private ownership of the means of production.

The reason for the confusion, of course, is that students look around them and see capitalism, but they are told it is socialism. So naturally, they ask, "If this is socialism, what is capitalism." I had to tell them, "This isn't socialism. Your grandparents had socialism. This is capitalism."

This is the irony of today's China. It is not politically correct to actually believe and teach Marxist philosophy. But it is also not politically correct to publicly admit that we no longer believe what Marx taught. So we continue to "point at a deer and call it a horse."

Labels: Capitalism vs Socialism, Doublespeak