Final Thoughts on Beijing

In our last few months in Beijing we did a bit of a “tick the bucket list” of travels and things around Beijing and China. To name just a few we travelled to Guangzhou to see a friend we’d been promising to visit for years, we took another hiking trip with Beijing hikers and this time to a rural village, we went back to the forbidden city to tour around it, and of course we went to Tibet as we figured it would be hard to ever do that again. 

After 5 years in Beijing(and 2 in Shanghai) we’d covered a good amount of ground in China (its a big country, if you've not noticed) traveling to far flung places like Harbin, Xian, Wuhan, Guangzhou, and Lhasa. We’ve seen a good bit of the country as well as some of the, “is this China?” Places like Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. We did make some Chinese friends, though I would say not too many. Mostly this is because we were too busy and/or the timing just was hard to coordinate meet-ups. This is partly to do with the busy nature of the work I was doing those 5 years in Beijing, basically putting the gas to the floor to work as much as possible and having little time to do much else. 

There were many things we enjoyed about Beijing and I think the friendly nature of one to one interactions and the attitude of “whatever flies” was something we usually liked. We liked to say, "In China anything is possible", good and bad. In many ways, on the street level, people in Beijing are much more free than people in the west or Japan. No one seemed to care about noise or dirt or proximity or place and in many ways this was freeing. There was a kind of chabudou, or close enough, sort of attitude. Tidiness was not much of an issue, but we did notice through our years that generally businesses, public places, etc. were getting cleaner and some might say less interesting. Noise was turned up no matter the place or situation. If you want to go for a peaceful walk in the park good luck, every rock is a fake rock/speaker belting out a "soothing" tune. I often felt like, to blend in a bit more, I would have to speak really loudly when using my Chinese to make it more authentic. Oddly, we did have one noise complaint against us in our 5 years and we can’t figure out why both because we were watching tv at a low volume level and... everything else in China was so noisy we couldn’t fathom someone actually making a noise complaint. 

The police largely left us alone, though we did have 5-6 officers show up to our apartment door one Friday night as they thought I was my friend who failed to register with the police while visiting but did not fail to put my address as where he was staying when he passed immigration. That worked out fine, but the police were largely a mystery to us. We rarely saw them doing anything and when we did they were sleeping in a car or loitering around seemingly doing nothing. We did go to the police stations a few times for registrations, but each time I was surprised that it was a pretty lax process and I was always struck by the long lunch hour (2 hours!) that I had to try to avoid. Despite that, China seemed safe from violent or confrontational crime. We never heard or experienced any robberies, mugging, thefts, or worse amongst our friends whereas in Malaysia everyone had or knew by one degree of separation someone who had been robbed or harmed. Perhaps that isn’t too surprising though since the state and the police had a presence that was seemingly always there and citizens do not have a lot of rights against their own government should they find themselves in opposition or trouble.

Throughout our time in China we ran into many stories of people being detained without cause(Not people we knew personally), jailed for inciting opposition to the government, or held on house arrest. The government is everything and to oppose them, even peacefully, is not accepted for very long. Human rights lawyers and environmental lawyers were routinely held without cause and charged without strong evidence. If you made trouble for the government, they made sure to make trouble for you. 

In the first couple of years we did try to talk with our Chinese friends about some of the issues that were hot buttons in Chinese society such as unjust incarceration, the role of the government, or environmental pollution, but these never turned out to be productive dialogues. Perhaps it is because of our delivery, but I think it is more about a defensiveness Chinese people have as they identify China and its government with themselves rather than as in the west where many, but not all, people identify the people and the government as separate entities. Most of these conversations turned into a “whataboutism” that did not exactly address the issue but intended to deflect or equivocate. I remember one such conversation my first year in Beijing where I was complaining about the pollution, it was something like 350aqi at the time, hazardous and obviously thick smoky air. A Chinese friend said her in-laws lived in Beijing and that they didn’t think the air was that bad. I said that the numbers don’t lie and it was in fact unhealthy air most of the time. She then whataboutismed me with stating that LA also had polluted air (yes, and?) For reference, dear reader, LA air quality is the worst large city air quality in the US, but it is less than half as bad as beijing air year on year. I encountered this type of argument time to time. Human rights abuses? What about how America treats minorities? Restricting protests? What if it happened in the US, the police would surely shoot. And on and on.  

Most of the time the Chinese government used scapegoats to release the pent up aggressions of Chinese citizens. Protesting against the government is a no-no, but if you want something to protest against how about the Japanese? What about Korea? Once while on a field trip with students a Chinese teacher blurted out, unprompted, that the Japanese were always provoking China and that is why there was constant tension between the two. I couldn’t understand why the teacher had said that (seems to me a good amount of provocation on both sides), but on the train ride back to the city the teacher was reading the Global Times, a party newspaper notorious for having editorials say the things the government wanted to say, but couldn’t directly. I asked her jokingly if she read the paper daily as I assumed she just picked it up on the train with nothing else to read. She said yes, everyday. At certain times while watching news such as on BBC the tv channel would just cut out and we would later hear that there was something about Tibet, or Taiwan, or something else sensitive to the party that was being discussed. It was hard to understand how the party justified this and got away with it, but citizens would often echo sentiments of outside forces meddling in Chinas affairs. To me, it seemed like a bit too much paternalizm. 

In a closed system of media, whether by paper or by internet, there was a certain danger in playing the constant victim. There was always someone else to blame and march against, but only when the government approved. If they did not sanction it, large groups could not gather. That was illegal. At one point, there was even a beer festival I was going to attend that was cancelled as that would mean a large group gathering and the proper permission was withdrawn. If you cancel the beer festival I'm going to, that is a line crossed!

Permission was a bit of an odd thing. Sometimes you had it when you shouldn’t, sometimes you had it then it was taken away, sometimes you couldn’t get it but can’t figure out why. Most people said, just do it and ask for forgiveness later if it is wrong. 

Many times we were told, you are foreign so you wouldn’t understand. Maybe. Maybe that is true. It is hard to tell. If it is true, we might not know it, but either way we would have to rely on someone’s word and that could be difficult when they are seemingly contradicting themselves. As an example, we had one friend, unprompted, tell Aya that she was ok with the internment of Uighers in the western provinces. When asked if she would be ok with it if it were her own family she said yes (was this defensive?). On the same day but previous to this conversation she said to another friend, I just wish westerners would respect China and the Chinese. In a way, this puts me and a lot of westerners in a mental pickle. I do respect the Chinese people and the Chinese nation for the achievements that they’ve earned, but its hard to respect the Chinese government for interning its own citizens and even harder to respect Chinese citizens who say they are fine with that. How can I respect a China/Chinese citizen who doesn’t seem to respect the human rights of other Chinese citizens? Is it because I am a foreigner and wouldn’t understand the Chinese concept of human rights? Most Chinese would probably say, yes. 

These things came up every couple of months. Something would happen or someone would say something to us that would make us think, do we not understand fully what is happening here? I often felt like we did, but maybe we never did. I’m not sure though that people in China really know either. In some of the final weeks we were in Beijing and we went to the rural village of Cuandixia To do some hiking. Here there were many old houses with slogans of the cultural revolution fading away on their sides. Our guide told us about the slogans and talked about how during the war with the Japanese some buildings and temples were destroyed, but never a mention of why the cultural revolution or the Great Leap Forward actually did to the area. We never heard much about these events, or Tianaman square for that matter. Even at the national history museum the terrible events of the 60-70s gets barely a mention among halls and halls of China’s national history. The Chinese often point to Japan and say they should examine their past more closely about such things as the Nanjing massacre and I think they are right, but ask the Chinese to reciprocate and it suddenly becomes taboo to discuss national past wrong doings. Do they know about it? Sure, but how well do they really know it if a full array of opinions and sources are not used to discuss it? (yes, I'm a teacher!) Just because what you hear is true does not mean you are hearing the truth. Truth can be negated by omission. 

 I have come to have an affection for Chinese people and the Chinese nation.  As China continues to play an every larger role on the world stage, I worry. What vision of the world and themselves will the Chinese citizens have? Can they move forward peacefully without a full vision of themselves?  What view will the world have of China and the Chinese as this happens? It is my sincerest wish that the Chinese and the world find a path forward together and that, perhaps, a westerner might finally understand. Who knows, perhaps someday I will return and understand China better.