This
weeks blog copes not from the comfortably cosy confines of a cafe but from the
copiously cavernous capacity of Chang An library, a sprawling public building
over five floors in the administrative centre of the town. Reliable internet
connections are not the easiest things to come by in the People's Republic of
China but this place is better than most.
Frustratingly, even simple communications seem
to take an age in the PRC. Because of rumours about the 'Great Firewall of
China' and notions of intense supervision of each and every web search, one is
never sure whether the laboriously slow speed of the internet here is more due
to the nefarious activities of those given the role of surveillance or is
simply a technical problem that one could put down to an inefficient
infrastructure. In many ways, most of the infrastructure here would be the envy
of the West, so it comes as something of a surprise that the internet is
habitually so preternaturally slow.
To be fair in this, one should not
criticise China alone when Western governments such as those in the UK and the
US have shown a similar weakness in regards to the temptations to pry into
people's online communications or other activities. These two countries managed
to come to a rather neat arrangement to get around the fact that US agencies
spying on US citizens is illegal, and likewise in the UK. The two countries
simply arranged to swap their data when each spied on the other's citizens -
GCHQ spied on American citizens whilst the NSA spied on the British, thereby
making their activities legal(ish!).
Whenever challenged, the governments of
these two countries trot out the usual excuses of terrorism, paedophiles and
organised crime, thereby ensuring that many of the more naïve citizens will
support the latest clampdown, but the reality is that those in power tend to
love power and want to keep a firm grip on it. People communicating freely
online is seen as a threat to that vice-like grip so the temptation to take
more and more control over the means of communication becomes irresistible for
such folk. In this way, one could at least say that the Chinese are being
(relatively!) honest in their repression, unlike the other two mentioned.
Another
aspect that makes using the internet in China a frustrating experience is the
sheer ubiquity of the advertising. If you, dear reader, are anything like myself, and yearn to simply use the
internet without having to undergo a visual, or even verbal assault, each and
every time you try to visit a site, then China is no place for you. One needs a
degree of patience verging on the superhuman to endure the constant bombardment
that one suffers each and every time one puts fingers to keyboard.
Of
course, advertising is at the very heart of the capitalist process, an attempt
to persuade the viewer/listener that he/she need lots and lots of things that,
in reality, they don't ('because your worth it' as one particularly insidious
offering puts it). It is everywhere here in China – from the internet to
hoardings, from smiling greeters at shop doorways to incessantly repeated slogans
from loudspeakers. This last technique is very common here, one might think
that the originator of this particular method of advertising learnt his trade
on the Korean Peninsula in the 1950s...
In the West the techniques are somewhat
subtler. On Youtube one has to endure a few seconds of trailer for a game or
film before one can assign it to the oblivion it so richly deserves whereas in
China one is forced to endure a minute of such assaults with no option to
abort. If, having finally reached your video, you dare to pause it you will
find that even that gap is felt to be an available opportunity for advertising
and some intrusive sales pitch attempting to tell me that I need to spruce up
my wardrobe for the coming spring, or some other such nonsense, will tend to
fill it.
To some extent, this mirrors life in
China. For a theoretically communist society they are perhaps the most natural
capitalists on the planet. Everything is for sale, no stone left unturned if
there is an opportunity to make some money, no avenue left untraversed. Oddly,
in the West, I think we envision factories and endless production lines. The
reality is often far more mundane. One sees old ladies sitting on kerb stones
outside shops manually inserting some
item into tiny plastic bags or fiddling with some trinket, often in this town it will be cheap
jewellery, the results to be displayed in the supermarkets and stores of the
West a few weeks later. Such people are often piece workers, working their
fingers to the bone for a pittance. One
can see them staring myopically at their work, their eyesight and their fingers
failing. Chang An is a relatively well-to-do area but their presence is an ever
present for all to see.
So it would seem that capitalism won
the argument that raged throughout the twentieth century but... appearances can
be deceptive. Capitalism, whether it be the American variety or the Chinese
(not much of a difference, I grant you) needs to persuade the 'consumer' (for
we are all consumers now apparently, not people any more) that they have wants
and needs that have to be fulfilled (by them of course) in order to be happy.
Of course it is true, people do have wants and needs but often those needs are
far, far less than the advertisers would have you believe, and often for things
that money can't actually buy.
As Samuel Alexander said: 'Simplicity
is the new spectre haunting capitalism' – the fear that people will realise
that to live well they don't actually need so much endless acquisition. After
the crash of 2008 many people, particularly in America, began to question some
of the fundamental assumptions behind the advertising and came to realise that
the endless chase after ever more 'stuff' and the need to buy ever bigger
houses to house said 'stuff' was a very limiting and, in many ways, a deeply
inhuman way to structure a society.
In this sense, I would have to disagree
with the odious Gordon Gecko (as played by Michael Douglas in Wall Street),
when he said that 'Greed is good.' Greed is not good, greed is simply greed –
one of the least attractive traits that human-kind possesses, at best
unpleasant and at worse deeply destructive.
Never before have so many people chosen
to start the process of casting off the chains of consumer culture, stepping
out of the rat race, and living in opposition to the existing order of things.
What they have come to realise is that life gets pleasanter and more meaningful
when you value experiences over things, relationships over acquisition,
personal growth over greed.
Back in the library I notice that the
battery life of my heroically struggling little netbook is coming to a close as
the sun is setting once more over Chang An. I have to admit that it has been a
pleasant couple of hours spent in these quiet environs. It felt slightly
strange to have to produce a passport in order to get an internet connection in
a library, but I guess that is not atypical of China. The staff at least were
more than helpful and very polite too, displaying a much appreciated level of
patience with my hopelessly inadequate attempts to communicate in Mandarin.
This has generally been my feeling of
China and the Chinese. The people are friendly, almost overwhelmingly so at
times, and strangely innocent to Western eyes. There is a pleasant and trusting
naivete to many of them which is almost touching on occasion. There are, of
course, also times when the sheer rudeness of a Chinese motorist staggers
belief but the 'behind the wheel' effect has been noted in many a culture
(though I have experienced none worse than here, it has to be admitted).
The system... that is another matter.
When it comes down to it politicians are politicians – the promise of power
tends to draw those people who yearn to wield that power over others. As the
old cliché has it, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In
this way, China and Chinese politicians are little different from tens of
thousands of other politicians around this globe of ours. Some things never
change...
PS. Just after I finished
this article I came across a piece on the BBC website (which took much patience
to access...). It seems that advertisers in the UK have chosen to partake in the particularly unpleasant American custom of 'Black Friday'. This
had patently foreseeable results – greed, violence and a very similar
unedifying spectacle as people fought over such things as coffee makers with
the promise of £20 off the usual price. These particular items are classic
'stuff' – the sort of thing that people buy, use a couple of times, then
consign to the garage to gather dust until it is deemed useless enough for the
charity shop or the boot sale. Not really worth coming to blows over....
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