So this is Christmas (and what have you done...)

As I start this latest set of meandering musings I find myself back, if only just, in a very wet England. This, as yet, is second-hand knowledge rather than directly experienced. For now, my first act on entering this literally benighted land was to head over to the Caffe Nero in Terminal 2 at Heathrow and treat myself to a large and thoroughly pleasant Americano. I have a soft spot for Nero's, the coffee is excellent and the décor much to my taste – old, tatty, sunken armchairs and sofas, ideal for cogitating whilst one waits, flaneur style, for the hubbub of the evening rush hour to die down before embracing the delights of London's antiquated underground system.
After this particular flight, it is with some relief that I take my seat and sip my coffee. Not only was it an incredibly long eleven hour flight (mostly spent reading and chatting as there was not an offering of note on the 'entertainment' system), but it finished in fine style with the aircraft being heavily buffeted by some very strong winds on the descent followed by visits to both sides of the runway as it slewed and skidded quite alarmingly on landing. Far too much excitement for me, I prefer my landings to be barely noticeable.
In my bag, folded up very carefully, I bring back a gift created by one of the guys at the martial arts club. Jun and I had shared many a conversation in the past few weeks, from politics to policing, wandering to wushu, communism to Confucius. Jun was both a devotee and a well read student of Confucianism. Something of a gentle giant of a man, he expressed himself powerfully through his martial skills, but also rather more subtly through calligraphy, the latter being something of an art form in China. Before I left he had presented me with a piece he himself had created on fine tissue paper, about two foot by four foot, of a saying from Confucius: Ching Xian Wei Fu – which roughly translates as 'Leisure is Happiness' (Jun had come to know me well during my stay in China…).

Would that more of the Chinese people could reconnect with such ancient wisdom. Instead, the words that one hears all the time is 'Ying Gai' which can be translated as 'should' or 'ought to'. Modern Chinese life, much like modern life in the West, seems to consist of rather a lot of Ying Gai; a huge long list of social and civic duties that one should do in order to be acceptable in Chinese society. Formal law in China is nowhere nearly as strongly enforced as it is in the West, but informal law, those pressures and constraints imposed by peers, familial expectations and those from the surrounding culture are very strong indeed. From cradle to grave, Chinese life seems to consist of a long and daunting list of Ying Gai's.
Of course, such societal and cultural constraints and strictures are by no means the exclusive preserve of Chinese society. We all live lives that are an endless reflection of having to conform with so many 'shoulds' and 'ought tos'. A lengthy list of our duties and responsibilities, of what is expected of us to earn at least a modicum of acceptance within our given cultures. This time of year perhaps, such pressures are felt even more strongly as we churn through, yet again, all the rather onerous demands that make up Christmas, often fearful that some aspect will go horribly wrong and we will be exposed for the miscreants that we are! The right cards need to be sent, the right presents should be bought, the requisite amounts of money splashed out, the right people should be seen, the right food prepared. Many at this time of year find themselves feeling pressured, fearful of making some dreadful social faux pas, of creating some dreadful cock-up of a meal or of not including all the people we 'ought to' include, but really, what if a present remains unopened, the food uneaten, the parents unseen, the dishes unwashed, the napkins unfolded, the gifts unwrapped, the crackers unpulled, the bottles unopened, the turkey unstuffed, mince pies unfilled, words unsaid or the wine unmulled? Somehow, I am not sure quite how, but somehow the world seems to manage to go on much the same at it ever did…

'Don't sweat the small staff', a modern day apophthegm appropriately assures us. Without apology, I would go a step further and urge the non-sweating of the big stuff too. Remarkable as it may seem, despite all the dramas, big and small, personal and impersonal, urgent and non-urgent, somehow the world keeps on spinning, the sun comes up, the sun goes down (or, if you are currently in the UK, it just keeps on raining...). People work themselves up into apoplectic states of annoyance and vexation, indeed, some seem to specialize in such posturing, spending much of their time in such a state of mind. Scarcely, perhaps never, does all this sound and fury, whether it be externally expressed or internally withheld, result in anything positive, useful or even significant.
Back in Caffe Nero's, I take a sip of coffee and realize that with all this cogitation my Americano is now completely cold, although still surprisingly tasty. Tis a problem I commonly face when working on these blogs (if one can call it 'work' – it often feels like an indulgence to yours truly). I find myself looking forward to a few weeks of clean, fresh air after the challenges of the Chinese environment, but I am guessing that pretty soon the inclination to resume my travels will have me yearning for other places, other climes. The UK is a very beautiful country … from May to September; the rest of the year has me dreaming of other realms, other shores. We shall see...

How you gonna keep them down on the farm…(after they’ve seen gay Paris)

This week I am indulging in the pleasure of returning to an old haunt, although it seems largely unchanged from a year ago. The Café de Coral in Chang An is one of the few places where the theoretical ban on smoking in restaurants in China is actually observed and enforced, thereby rendering it one of the more salubrious places to relax, think and write. Not all is quite as I would wish it, at this time of the year they do insist on playing endless Christmas songs in the background, usually conversions of Western songs performed by prepubescent children with screechingly high-pitched voices, the Chinese ideal of cuteness (my idea of annoying...). The PRC very definitely celebrate Xmas and not Christmas – all references to Christ himself are expunged from the celebrations and what remains is yet another excuse to justify yet more consumerism (as if there were a shortage of excuses for such splurges already...)

It is somewhat early in the morning, around half past eight or so, a little too early by normal standards to find oneself committed to composing a blog, but the air quality outside is 160+ for PM 2.5s, those nasty little particles which are so small that the body has no defence whatsoever to and allows them to filter down deep within the respiratory system. A mask would need to be about as thick as a brick to stop the inhaling of these pesky particles. Once inside the lungs they tend to sink to the bottom where they are absorbed into the bloodstream and thence into the arteries, causing tiny lacerations to the walls of the blood vessels as they make their way around the circulatory system. Such lacerations then attract plaques which, if unchecked, eventually lead to the blockage of arteries, heart attacks and strokes, and even, not to put too fine a point on it, death.

Chang An is an outlier suburb of Dongguan, a second-tier city in the south of China. It used to be the base for much manufacturing, but in recent years has undergone something of a transformation to become a centre for finance and banking, with very few factories and no coal fired power stations in the vicinity. Nevertheless, on some days here the air quality is bordering on the unbreathable. Some of this is due to windblown pollution from the numerous other conurbations along China’s east coast, but far more emanates from the presence of so many motor vehicles, particularly diesels, belching out huge amounts of particulates, day in and day out.

On a personal level, I like to indulge in at least a little exercise each day; of late that has meant tai chi, qigong or twirling nunchucks. None of these activities is particularly strenuous, but in the current conditions I tend to avoid even such minor exertions, my slightly paranoid suspicion being that one probably does far more harm through the inhalation of the PM10s and PM2.5s than any good that the body could potentially gain through the exercise.

The news in China in the last couple of weeks has frequently referred to the problems in the North of the country where measurements for these pollutants have either been very high or, quite simply, off the scale. This comes at quite a sensitive time for those steadfast guardians of environmental virtue, the Chinese government, as they are trying to run an intense PR campaign to demonstrate just how positive they have been in addressing the problems of global warming and pollution whilst engaged at the Climate Change Conference in Paris this week. If their ever reliable, totally immune from propaganda, manipulation or statistical fixing reports are to be believed, they are the ‘good guys’ who are spending far more than their Western counterparts in the battle to stabilize the climate.

Unfortunately for these protectors of truth and integrity, the facts are pretty stark. Whilst most Western governments are reducing their emissions from levels already below China's, the Chinese wish to go on increasing theirs until the year 2030. The justification often cited for this somewhat dubious policy (given that hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens are dying of pollution related illnesses every year) is that China is a ‘developing’ country, as opposed to the developed nations of the West. From my experience, China is not only developed, it is possibly even over-developed (although often badly developed, as pointed out in a previous blog). Many Chinese people remain very poor not because of lack of development but because of an uneven distribution of wealth. The wealthy are exorbitantly, outrageously, beyond the dreams of avarice wealthy, whilst the poor are abysmally, hopelessly, desperately so. This state of affairs is unlikely to change significantly in the next 15 years, so the rather feeble excuse that China needs to develop in order to care for its people is, effectively, a smokescreen in a country of smokescreens (smogscreens?), both physically and metaphorically. 

Over the years, the Chinese government have lived in mortal fear of threats to ‘social stability’. To remain in power they feel it is necessary to forever go on increasing living standards. As they understand it, this means such things as more consumerism, flats, cars and all the other paraphernalia of Western style ‘developed’ countries. Their belief is that if they can maintain growth at the kinds of levels they have seen in the last 25 years, then all will be well. But even the densest of observers is beginning to comprehend that endless material growth at the cost of the environment does not lead to a better lifestyle. To slightly amend some words of wisdom form the Bible: what profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world but cannot breathe!?

Chinese citizens themselves are becoming increasingly restive in recent times because of the air pollution problem and the increasingly obvious effects it is having on the health of the nation. Last year, a Chinese journalist Chai Jing, worried about the effects of pollution on her baby girl, created a short documentary on the subject entitled ‘Under the Dome’. This production was originally backed by the Environment Ministry here, but when it was noticed that over a hundred million downloads of it had been made in the first couple of days alone, they were overruled by an even higher authority leading to the film being banned for fear of being too great a threat to ‘social stability’.

(Oddly, readers can easily view the film...as long as they don’t live in China. It is readily available on youtube.com, and very worthy of viewing if one wishes to understand the nature of China and its government as well as the air quality problems here. As a small aside, this week a Chinese minister stated at an internet conference in Northern China that there was ‘no web censorship in China, merely sites that are blocked’. George Orwell would, I imagine, have been amused by such a blatant example of ‘double speak’.)

Criticism of the government in these areas is becoming stronger and stronger of late. One knows that something is amiss when even the official news organs, such as the Global Times, start to criticize the government and their inability to effectively address the problem. The government's reaction to criticism is often to threaten to jail critics for making ‘socially irresponsible’ comments on blogging sites and suchlike. The sheer amount of comments and discontent is becoming a problem now though, and given that the problem is likely to get worse in the next few years, then clearly the Chinese government needs to amend its ideas as to which is the greater threat to social order.

Back in the café, people are going about their business in much the same way as ever, kids run around playing, adults indulge in conversation or stare, blank-faced, into their mobile phones.  One cannot help but notice now though, how many Chinese people are getting into the habit of wearing masks. Previously, here in South China, one saw these on the faces of a few cyclists only. This year, they are far more common and many pedestrians also resort to what limited protection, more apparent then real, they offer. This will probably be my last post from China for some time. Although there are reasons to come back in the not too distant future, part of me is really quite reluctant to do so until they get a grip on this particular challenge.

At the Paris conference, Xi Jingping, the Chinese Premier, made an opening speech during which he lectured Western countries on their responsibilities towards remedying global warming. One cannot help but think that perhaps now is the time that such people should resist the temptation to lecture others and start to put their own house in order.

Wanna Fight ?

Another evening spent in the enjoyable, if somewhat controversial, company of martial arts practitioners at the local Jeet Kun Do School. For this particular group of Wushu experts, the training itself is often interrupted by long interludes of sipping tea from tiny cups seated around the heavy wooden trunk alluded to last week. The conversation is mostly related to technique, exactly how to inflict the most damage possible with a given punch or kick, or everyday life in China. As such, it is a source for much material for this blog, although the conversations can get a tad surrealistic at times.

The Chinese seem to love a fight. So much of the culture here is related to, or directly involves, martial arts. In matters on the macro scale, the Chinese military have not shown themselves to be particular competent in any area, their greatest victories coming when they are fighting each other, as in the Chinese Revolution. The modern day People’s Liberation Army seem to be in the business of liberating people in much the same way as the Americans liberated Iraq in 2003 or the Russians liberated Poland in 1940. Their most notable victory in the last fifty years came when they briefly entered Vietnam in 1979 whilst the main Vietnamese forces were away in Cambodia. When these threatened to return, the PLA quickly changed strategy and advanced in a generally backward direction to the safety of China. For all their historical limitations militarily, on the smaller scale, as in hand-to-hand combat, the Chinese fighting man represents a formidable foe.

 The attitudes contained within the Wushu (martial arts) lifestyle are, in a sense, almost a national metaphor. The ways to success are often seen in militaristic, martial or very directly competitive terms within this society. Far from being a particularly co-operative or socialist society, the underlying culture is one of constant struggle against others who are seen in terms of being fellow competitors.

Even a short trip down a metropolitan Chinese road will aptly demonstrate this point. Co-operation is the very last notion to cross the mind of the average driver here. It is very much dog-eat-dog and too bad if you cannot keep up. An interesting statistic will serve to illustrate this point. A person in charge of a motor vehicle in China has, per capita, something like eight times the likelihood of becoming a fatality on these roads as on the roads in the US (which, in itself, is hardly the least competitive society on the planet). Of course, there are many other factors involved in that statistic, but the vast majority of the accidents here are down to ‘driver error’, a pleasant enough euphemism for ‘driving like a lunatic’.

During this current stay in China, I have had many fascinating interaction with some very interesting, and even occasionally charismatic, martial arts practitioners, from those practicing the gentler skills of tai chi to the representatives of the local school whose skills are far more practical in nature. Personally, I am getting a tad long in the tooth (and carrying a few too many injuries) to train too seriously with these folk, but I have enjoyed learning to use nunchucks, a strangely fascinating and absorbing activity the learning of which requires a great deal of concentration, perseverance and the willingness to take the odd bruise here and there as the fast flailing handles forever shoot-off in random directions each time I lose control of a sequence.

The sheer variety of skills and techniques studied and employed here in China is enough to boggle the mind of the Western observer. In my short time here, I have seen people training with swords, short-swords, long-swords, cutlasses, daggers, spears, both short and long, staffs, sticks, nunchucks, flails and fans and observed them using various techniques to stab, jab, slash, cut, skewer, pin, impale, flail, smash and generally do untold amounts of damage to their opponent. Happily, all the violence I have witnessed using implements has been of the practice variety, although I have seen several injuries even within that context (I have my own bruises from the nunchucks to illustrate my point all too painfully….).

The more direct weaponless techniques allow for tightly controlled contests to take place. Last weekend, I witnessed my first ever Taekwondo tournament. Originally a Korean martial art form, Taekwondo has been happily adopted by the Chinese who now have hundreds of thousands of active participants in the sport. The contests are conducted mostly with the use of kicks, scoring kicks being made to the central anatomy and the head of the opponent who wears thick pads around his/her ribs and a helmet incorporating some protection for the face and skull. These protective measures are very necessary as the power of the kicks from a properly trained practitioner is impressive indeed. When training with these guys, the sheer weighty thud of a well placed kick into the heavy punch bags is enough to send a shiver down my spine. One would definitely not want to be in the way of such an attack, even if wearing protective pads…

 The wushu specialists at the school I attend are fairly liberal and eclectic in their approach to martial arts – almost any technique is countenanced if it is likely to have the desired effect. At times, one can watch them practicing punches, slaps, backhand slaps, elbows – both horizontal and vertical, knees (usually applied to a particularly vulnerable area..), kicks to the ankles, legs, stomach and head and even butting for street fights.  

Oddly, each and every one of them seems a relatively gentle, even genteel, soul when not fighting. We sit around the intricately worked trunk and consume the tiniest of tiny cups of green tea. The cup is forever replenished as long as you drink it. The host, whoever that is on any particular evening, has the duty of ensuring that your cup is never empty. Each cup is but a couple of sips, but the teas are often delicious, each practitioner taking it in turn to supply his own particular tea. Each of these gentlemen has enough knowledge of martial arts techniques to do considerable damage if they so desire, but each seems to be the perfect gentlemen in such surroundings. It is my good fortune to have met and learnt so much from these gentlemen whilst in China.

Anti Socialism

This week I find myself pondering a conversation that took place around a rather beautifully carved tree trunk of gargantuan proportions that had been made into a very elaborate and very decorative tea table. Such items are not rare in China, but this particular one was one of the most impressive examples of the form I have yet come across. The subtle planes and curves had been carved and created in such a way as to allow any liquids that escaped from the processes of tea making and consumption to flow gently and gracefully down to a drainage point. Within the design there were temples and stairs, elaborate paths and gardens, hints of creatures and men. In an odd way, it reminded one of an M.C.Escher creation – one of those gorgeously illogical illusions wherein the stairs seem to forever lead upward but somehow manage to simultaneously descend in a never ending spiral.

There were several of us gathered around this table in the vestibule of a martial arts school. The son of the shifu, who went by the wonderfully prosaic English name of 'Stan', felt the need to enlighten me as to the fundamental nature of the peoples of the East as opposed to those of the West. According to Stan, those of us from the Western hemisphere are physically much stronger than those from the East. To make up for this perceived lack, those from the Eastern parts, and particular the Chinese, are able to compensate by employing their superior intelligence.

An interesting theory I thought, though perhaps not fully supported by such things as facts or scientific evidence (or even logic, for that matter). Stan seemed quite enamoured of this theory however, and went on to elucidate the finer details of his challenging concept. He pointed out that the Chinese, unlike Westerners, were often 'naturally' very poor at team games, such as football or basketball, but made up for this lack by being very, very good at such individual pursuits sports as ping pong and badminton. The reason for this apparently was that unlike their rather slow-witted Western counterparts, the Chinese were far too bright to be limited by such dull considerations as the good of the team.

The others sharing the delights of both the liquid libations and and the conversation with me, all of whom were of exclusively Chinese decent, could be seen nodding sagely at this point, in full agreement apparently with the underlying gist of Stan's theory. Thus encouraged, our host went on to point out that this was why the Chinese made such poor drivers. Their intelligence quickly determined that there was little to be gained by following the rules of the road when it would be far more advantageous to simply look after one's own needs so, unlike Western drivers, they felt themselves unconstrained by such restrictive notions as giving way, signaling, stopping at red lights or pedestrian crossings, and so forth.

Although much of the conversation was by this stage striking me as almost surrealistically absurd, there was a germ of truth contained within his words (a very small, undeveloped and microscopic creature to be sure, but a germ nevertheless). There does seem to be an individualism to the Chinese people that totally belies the notion of communist automata that they are painted as by some in the West. Indeed, the individuality here is often so pronounced that it spills over into the most extreme of anti-social behaviours. The thinking seems to be that if you or those in your immediate group can gain advantage, then the effects on others is of little or no consequence or concern. This breeds an indifference, even a callousness, that has to be seen to be believed at times.

A few common examples may serve to illustrate my point. Currently I am residing in a small flat in a sub-district of the City of Dongguan. My days are fairly long, as befits a slow moving flaneur, often leaving at around eight in the morning and only returning at around ten at night, by which time I am usually somewhat tired and in need of some sleep, or at least the semblance of a decent rest. Oft times though, this desire is thwarted by the drivers of cars in the quiet street outside. Even the slightest notion of something that might possibly impede the manic momentum of these drivers is enough to draw loud, prolonged and repeated sounding of the horn from them. Bearing in mind that at two o'clock in the morning, they are often the only car moving along the lane and all that is bothering them is the sight of some distant person wandering home or the odd stray cat (the notion of simply slowing down seems to be an anathema for such folk). The horn will be sounded full blast, maybe three or four times, without the slightest heed to the hundreds of people trying to sleep in the nearby flats. Whether it be 3 am, 4 am or 5 am, seems to be of no import.

At other times, one's attempts at much needed repose will be disturbed by the sound of people having discussions in the street outside, often seemingly at the tops of their voices, no matter what the time. Not the slightest consciousness apparently of their impact on the wellbeing of others. Such a notion would seem to be a foreign concept, perhaps one of those awful Western ideas like freedom, democracy and an independent judiciary that Xi Jinping recently alluded to.

Added to these assaults on one's tranquility, we are also blessed within the small block I am occupying with the presence of a young couple who perhaps are not exactly ideally suited to each other. They have a developed a liking for coming home at three in the morning or so, and proceeding to have loud and vicious arguments, often accompanied by shrieking and the throwing of objects at one another (sadly, at such a time in the morning, I sometimes find myself wishing that these objects would actually hit their intended targets occasionally...). I enquired of a multi-lingual friend as to the nature of the argument, what exactly was the awful calamity that raised such splendidly splenetic passions, and was told that mostly the disagreements are over such things as who didn't put the top on the toothpaste or the whereabouts of the girl's nail clippers. No matter the triviality of the problem, these people can wax loud and unpleasantly for up to an hour at a time, the female metamorphising from a pleasant looking lass in the daytime to a nocturnal shrieking shrek of a harridan with a voice pitched at such a level that it shreds one's already frayed and frazzled nerves like a proverbial knife through butter.

On a recent occasion, the young man involved managed to come home very late (around 4.30 am) one morning and had, unfortunately, forgotten his key. His response was to throw bricks up at the side of the building (not for him such modern wonders as the mobile phone apparently), which thudded loudly into the the masonry before crashing down onto the metal roof of an outbuilding below. Not being entirely impressed by the lad's behaviour, and lacking the necessary words in Mandarin, I did kindly request of the young man that he go forth and multiply, or more exactly, employed an Anglo-Saxon phrase of similar meaning, but he seemed unimpressed…

These are just small personal examples of an underlying attitude that one comes across again and again in China. People are profoundly, and often very callously, individualistic. To be fair, they are also often friendly and warm as well, but there seems to be absolutely no sense whatsoever of how the consequences of their actions affect others around them, almost as if a blind spot exists in the culture, a kind of space, a vacuum where a sense of responsibility ought to be.

One last example. In this country, queuing for a ticket at a rail station is often an exercise that would try the patience of a saint. The queues are often quite long and a little ill-tempered. The ill-temper is mostly due to the fact that so many people steal in at the sides of the queues at the last moment, often thrusting money in front of the uniformed clerks (one feels sorry for these damaged souls, perhaps marred by having to deal with so many difficult people, whose main role in life seems to be to treat the customers as disdainfully as humanly possible). At times, there seem to be more people jumping the queue than in the queue itself. This creates the bizarre phenomenon of queues of queue jumpers queuing on both sides of the main queue…

Hmm, I think I should take my cue at this point and retire the blog for another week. So many examples spring to mind that one could fill pages with them, but that would readily get as tedious as the behaviour itself. China can be splendid in many ways, offering sights and experiences unique to this land, but it can also be a dismal and disgusting dystopia, a nightmarish vision of the consequences of 'progress' unhindered by any other consideration. Development it seems, when economics is the only driver, merely relates to infrastructure, not to the society itself or the people within it.

On that slightly depressing note, I think I will sign off, slink off, and treat myself to an Americano at the nearby C-Cafe. Hopefully, the upper, non-smoking lounge, will be bereft of smokers for a change, and I can enjoy a coffee and cogitate in relatively un-polluted peace...