Eric's Beijing Diary

I have really come to like Christmas in China. In some ways, it is more hectic, because there is no Christmas holiday in China. Foreigners are allowed the holiday, so that does give one an excuse to reschedule classes, but that is not always so easy, and my classes cannot be taught by anyone else. If I am not there, they miss out--that's the bottom line.

But, in fact, it is really less hectic, because Christmas in China is not about gifts. The merchants in China would like to change that, but they are so inexperienced with it, that they just don't have a clue how to go about it. For example, the stores, including the Walmart Super Store near my home, do not sell Christmas wrap. There are professional wrappers who charge an arm and a leg to do it for you, but, of course, no one in their right mind wants to do that. The whole market environment is just not set up to encourage Christmas shopping. It was a bit of a nuisance at first, but I have come to really appreciate it. China is so wonderfully free of the gift obsession that characterizes American Christmas.

The day after Christmas, I asked my students how their Christmas was. One of them said, "Perfect." I said, "What did you get for Christmas?" He said, "Nothing." Can you imagine an American student describing as "perfect" a Christmas without presents? Obviously, I was curious. I said, "What did you do for Christmas?" He said, "I gave some flowers to my girlfriend." I said, "I want to shake your hand. You're a wise man."

Part of the reason that Christmas is a little slow in catching on, in China is because in order for Christmas to work, you have to have at least some true believers. American Christians bemoan the commercialization of Christmas, but in fact, that commercialization is possible because there are so many people in America who celebrate the holiday--I mean, as the birth of Christ. In China, the number of people who really think of Christmas as the birth of their Saviour is certainly growing. But the largest part of that segment of the community (merchants) that would like to see Christmas developed, is really quite uninformed as to what Christmas is really all about.

Church is the one place where one is most likely to be reminded of the true meaning of Christmas. But there are some differences there, too. I don't imagine you would find Santa lashed to the foot of the cross at an American church. To many American Christians, Santa Claus epitomizes the secularization of Christmas that is so pervasive in America. But in China, Santa Claus goes to church. From an historical standpoint, the Chinese have it right. The original Saint Nicholas was a churchman known for providing money to help young women get out of prostitution. But the Santa at Haidian Church doesn't really look that saintly. He's quite American. The present Santa Claus image was developed by cartoonist Thomas Nast during the American Civil War. The stories of Saint Nicholas had been brought to New Amsterdam (New York) by Dutch immigrants. But America changed Santa Claus forever, and he hasn't been the same since. In a sense, Santa Claus is a testimony to the extraordinary influence of things American on China's popular culture. And that is a good thing, and it is a bad thing.

I usually have the Christmas party on Sunday, but Christmas has been wandering away from Sunday year by year, and Jordan had to fly out today, so I decided to have the party yesterday. Jordan had invited us to have it at the Youth Hostel, which is a bit roomier than my apartment, and we started doing that, but the staff at the Youth Hostel decided to cash in on the idea, and told us that we had to pay a fee of 200 RMB in order to stay. Fortunately Jack was there, and he called the folks at the coffee bar where we usually meet on Sunday. They invited us over there, so we decided to move, and it turned out to be the best arrangement. The coffee bar was pretty much empty except for us, so it turned out to be a win win situation. We ordered pizza from Pyro pizza, and this time the delivery guy only got lost once.

Last Sunday, as I was sitting in the English service, I had my Bible open on my lap, and my eyes caught a phrase from the Chinese version. 外邦人的光 (wai bang ren de guang). Translated, it would mean, "Light of the Gentiles." But the term "外邦人 (wai bang ren)" is very similar to "外国人 (wai guo ren)," which means "someone from the outside country." In Japanese, it would be "gai koku jin." For some reason, the concept stuck in my mind. Light of the outsiders. Jesus was an outsider, who was born to outsiders. There was no room for them in the inn. He wasn't from the best part of the country, either. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" is the way honest men described the place. And think of his parents. No place for them at all in polite, upper class society. They were so poor they couldn't afford the sheep that is offered for the birth of the first born son. They had to take advantage of an exemption in the Levitical law that allowed poor people to bring two pigeons instead. Certainly we know that the birth of Jesus to such a family was not an accident. Jesus was 外邦人的光. The Light of the outsiders. The unlucky. I thought about it again last night at the Christmas Eve service. When Lisa asked me if I was going to the Christmas program, I told her that I probably would not, since Jordan was going to be with me, and I didn't see the point in standing outside for hours and hours, only to be turned away at the last service. She told me she could get a couple tickets, so I decided to go. But looking at all the people who didn't know somebody, and were not able to get a ticket, I felt a little guilty going in. Couldn't help wondering where Jesus would be standing if He were there. The light of the outsiders. 外邦人的光. Always and ever, Jesus took the side of those who were not included. Left out. Poor. Dispossesed. This is the real message of Christmas.

Jordan is leaving in a couple days, so I took him to the Christmas dinner at the Bridge Cafe this evening. When I met him, he was waiting for his Korean employer, who was supposed to bring him his final pay. I was not optimistic, because she has been putting him off, and making excuses for not being able to pay him. She finally did show up, and we met her at the Wenjin Hotel. She told him that she would give him 500 now, and the rest later. She owed him over a thousand. Naturally Jordan objected; he is leaving in two days. She upped the amount to 700, and started counting it out. She gave him a few bills and then made a big show of counting out the few ones left in her purse. It was a ridiculous display, and I told her what I thought of it. I won't bore you with the details, but the three of us had a nice, pleasant conversation, after which she decided that it was in her best interest to pay up.

I am not without some sympathy for her. The Korean won has fallen almost fifty percent against the dollar. This has to be affecting her business. But it was clear this evening that she had artfully planned to defraud Jordan, and that was not acceptable. You do need to be careful who you work for in this country.

Went to the English service Christmas outreach last night. It wasn't really that much about Christmas. Very few Christmas carols. Mostly songs from the regular English service. But it went really well. In America, people who go to Christmas programs come with a certain level of expectation drawn from culture. Here they are mostly just very curious. But the English service attracts a lot of students. After the service, they had a prayer time, and many students went up to the front. One student sitting near me said, "Do I need to be a Christian to go up there?" I said, "If you want me to pray for you, I would be happy to do that." Well, you know how it is, if you pray for one person there is sure to be someone else who wants to get in on it. I prayed for four people right where I was sitting. Everybody wants a blessing. That's alright. That's how it starts. Slowly they will begin to realize that the blessing of God is far too rich to be taken in little Christmas morsels. For some, once their curiosity is satisfied, they lose interest. But for others, the desire for God's blessing grows and grows until they are consumed by it.

The media in China has been pretty quiet about the shoe throwing incident in Iraq. I imagine they would not really want to encourage the view that someone who shows that kind of contempt for authority is a hero. Bush gets mixed coverage here in China. I think the powers that be realize that his economic policies have been very good for this country, because Bush is a free trader, and free trade is good for everyone except American labor unions. But China also wants to give voice to those in the international media who bemoan Bush's unilateral approach to foreign policy.

The shoe throwing incident was troubling, because it was such a vivid statement of contempt for a national leader. It was painful to watch. Particularly painful was Bush's response--a rambling discourse comparing the act to road rage and suggesting that this guy was just trying to get attention. You bet he was trying to get attention. And he got it, too.

Perhaps history will be kinder to Bush than the international media has been, because, after all, he did get rid of a dictator. But the way he did it has damaged the reputation of the United States to an extent that is all but irredeemable. It is to his credit that he finally implemented the "surge," even though so many (including Obama) opposed it. Even the Joint Chiefs opposed it. Not surprising. MacArthur always said "counsels of war breed defeatism." He said that because his father said it to him. Arthur MacArthur charged up Missionary Ridge as a 19-year-old Colonel in the American Civil War, and took the hill, all without permission, which was granted retroactively. But I digress. What I'm saying, I guess, is that Bush did some things right. Or at least you could say that he learned from his mistakes to some extent. I personally think it is a travesty of history that the surge even had to be called a surge. But it worked, and as Reagan used to say, "Nothing succeeds like success."

But the disregard for human rights that characterized the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo has robbed the Americans of any right to point fingers. It is this wholesale abdication of moral leadership that is the greatest tragedy of the Iraq war, and of the Bush presidency. And who will take America's place as a moral leader? To cut to the core of the argument, allow me to be a social studies teacher for a minute, and present the issue in the form of a test:

1. The Americans built a prison where innocent people were held in small cages without charge for months and years. They put this prison at an off-shore location on Guantanamo Bay in order to circumvent the strict human rights standards of which of the following countries?

a. United States
b. China
c. Russia
d. North Korea

It's a test with only one question. If you get it wrong, there is little hope that you will ever come to terms with the contempt and disgust that the Americans have generated against themselves throughout the Muslim world. The point is that the Americans built the prison at Guantanamo in order to circumvent their own standards of justice. This hypocrisy has robbed the Americans of any right to speak out against human rights abuses in other countries. I am getting weary of hearing Americans say that terrorists do not deserve special treatment. Nobody likes terrorists (except dispossessed people who are angry at rich, powerful countries like America). But that is a different subject. I am not talking about terrorists. I am talking about innocent people. People who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I remember when two Palestinian journalists were released after two years at Guantanamo. The were held for two years. For what? Writing articles critical of America? And one of Aljazeera's men was just released recently. It took the Americans six years to figure out that he was a camera man! There is no excuse for this kind of injustice. Of course we know there are real terrorists at Guantanamo. Nobody denies that. But this idea of rounding up a whole bunch of innocent people, and then picking out the bad apples one by one at one's leisure is something that would never be tolerated in the United States. Criminal procedure in every state in the country includes very strict laws about how long someone can be held without charge. China is not necessarily bound to such rules (see Education through Labor). Neither is Russia. And we don't even need to talk about North Korea. But America has always been different. Until Guantanamo.

I do not mean to suggest that it is appropriate for reporters to throw shoes at national leaders. The behavior he exhibited cannot, of course, be tolerated. And it was certainly unprofessional. A true journalist would pride himself in being able to write the message rather than throw it. Nevertheless, the reporter's message was timely and poignant. He was not just one isolated crank. He spoke for many, many people.

When I first came to China, I remember reading an editorial in the China Daily about how the Japanese had hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. I had never heard this expression before in relation to an entire country, and it suggested to me that China was a country with a bit of an inferiority complex. The Chinese government was still in "hate Japan" mode back then. Things have changed, now, partly because Koizumi is no longer in power, and partly, I think, because China realizes that it is in the best interest of the region for Japan and China to be on speaking terms. I don't read any more articles about Japan hurting China's feelings. But I was amused by an item in the Danwei blog that chronicles China's hurt feelings over the past half century.

China is changing. As this country matures, I think there will be less sensitivity to what everyone else thinks of China. You would not read an editorial in an American paper about the "hurt feelings" of the American people. For one thing, any media outlet that claimed to know how "the American people" feel would be openly ridiculed. I have heard politicians do it, mainly attributing to all Americans a point of view that matches their own. But these politicians are not taken very seriously. The Americans are a people with very diverse opinions. This is one big difference between Chinese and American culture. Chinese people certainly differ on matters of personal taste. But when it comes to key "hot button" issues, there is an impressive uniformity of thinking, which I notice even when I travel to the far reaches of the country (assuming the people I talk to are Han Chinese). A letter I got from my Kurdish friend some time ago expresses the stereotype like this:

Last month, a world-wide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:

"Please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?"
The survey didn’t get any results because...:

1. In Africa they didn't know what “food" means.
2. In Eastern Europe they didn't know what “honest" means.
3. In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" means.
4. In China they didn't know what "opinion" means.
5. In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" means.
6. In South America they didn't know what "please" means.
7. In USA they didn't know what “the rest of the world" means.

Chinese bloggers are slowly chipping away at this uniformity. They are expressing opinions that do not necessarily agree with the official line. They have to be careful, of course, because China is a very image-conscious society. Revealing "state secrets" is a serious crime, and in China, the umbrella of "state secrets" is considerably broader than it is in the United States. Obviously it includes matters of national security. But it also includes anything that could embarrass China in the eyes of the world. That's why a school teacher who posted pictures of destroyed school buildings on the Internet after the earthquake is right now serving an extrajudicial (no trial, no right to a lawyer) sentence of "education through labor."

Well, back to Yonghegong with the proper paperwork. The ten day deadline really makes things troublesome. I can't renew my visa without my foreign expert certificate. But it takes a couple weeks or so to do that, and the time limit for getting my new passport current is 10 days. Makes things confusing. Even confuses them. The lady doing my paperwork chided me for bringing my old Foreign Expert certificate. "I cannot renew your visa without your new Foreign Expert Certificate," she said. I said, "There's nothing I can do. Your time limit is ten days." She said, "Your right." So I have to turn in a visa renewal application to have my current visa moved to my new passport. Then I have to take it back and get my new Foreign Expert certificate and go through the same process all over again. Ironically, it would be a lot less trouble to just ignore the deadline, and do it all at the same time. Writing, "I have disobeyed the laws of China." would take a few minutes, and could be done in one trip. Oh, what contortions I go through to be a law abiding citizen!

Very interesting post by a Chinese blogger about the recent French President Sarkozy's decision to meet with the Dalai Lama. Although the Chinese government didn't say directly that they were going boycott French goods, they reported that many Chinese people had threatened to boycott French goods.

I have a very simple solution for this problem. The Chinese government objects strenuously when any national leader meets with the Dalai Lama, but all their protestations actually give him more attention than I think is warranted. The Dalai Lama is not a political leader. He is a religious leader. The only reason he has been able to maintain the status he has is because the overwhelming majority of Tibet is Buddhist. If the government would allow lots and lots of Korean missionaries into Tibet, the situation would change drastically. South Korea has been profoundly influenced by Christianity. There is no way a troublesome Buddhist monk could ever position himself as the leader of the Korean people. South Korea is led by a democratically elected Christian president. If Tibet became even twenty-five per cent Christian, the whole scene would change. The Dalai Lama would then speak for no more than half to three quarters of the Tibetan people, and more and more Tibetans would begin to speak for themselves, which is the way it should be.

Don't get me wrong. There are issues. There definitely are issues, and they need to be addressed. The Han Chinese have not always properly understood the Tibetan people, or paid proper attention to their needs. But the people of Tibet should not have, as their only recourse, an exiled monk with a less than admirable human rights record when he himself was actually in power.

Took my new and old passport to the visa office in Yonghegong this morning. The embassy had told me to bring my old and new passport, plus a paper they had given me certifying the date I picked it up. They told me that I would then be able to get my visa transferred to the new passport. They were wrong. The folks at the visa office told me I also needed an application form to be stamped by my university, plus a temporary residence permit. What a nuisance. I have never done anything like this, because the International office usually handles visa renewal, but this is different. This time I am just trying to make my new passport legal in this country to avoid paying a fine. The ten day limit is the big problem. The most convenient way to handle this, since my visa expires in January anyway, would be to do everything at the same time. But it takes at least a couple weeks to renew my Foreign Expert Certificate, which I need to renew my visa. And I couldn't start that process without my passport number, which I couldn't get until I picked up my passport, but as soon as I picked up my passport, the clock started ticking, and I had ten days to switch my visa over. So, I have to fill out the visa renewal application to switch my visa from my old passport to my new passport, then I have to pick up my passport, bring it back and get my new Foreign Expert Certificate, and bring them both back and fill out another visa renewal form to put my new visa on my new passport. What can I say. This is China.

Went back to the embassy today to pick up my passport. They handed me a paper to give the the PSB to get my visa transferred to the new passport. But they didn't say anything about how long I had. I was listening for it, too, because when Michael renewed his passport, he showed up at the PSB office after the 10 day limit, and they took him in a room and made him write, "I have disobeyed the laws of China."

Christmas must be on the way. Got on the elevator this morning, and when we got to the 9th floor, a young girl and her mother got on. "Santa Claus, Santa Claus, Santa Claus." She kept saying it over and over again. A few floors later, a little boy half her size got on. He looked at her and said matter-of-factly, "That's not Santa Claus. That's an American."