Tom Christensen: Providing China news and notes since July 2009

I expect the fireworks industry in China must claim many lives. A friend got hit in the face, and I saw at least one person fall into a frozen lake. But make no mistake: the 4th of July is a sucker’s game. New years in China is a true event, fire, smoke, and light everywhere. Like standing in a field of flowers, all made of light, which grow, bloom, and die, in half a second.

When I graduated, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to be involved in the production of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of China, a wonderful project in which I was able to work with a team of incredibly skilled and generous people. I put a good deal of myself into the project, involved as I was with choosing the subjects to include, working with the authors on what to include in the articles, helping design and compile the images, and keeping the systems running which provided the heart of the project.

I’ve also, as I’ve grown up, been immeasurably unimpressed with large corporate copyright holders, especially in the music and entertainment industry. I am one of the kids who has grown up with music being something that can exist anywhere, and is not a ‘thing,’ but instead more of creature… something that, once turned loose, grows, develops, and multiplies. It is not a disk, or a cassette, or a performance, it is a file. And, as I see people of my generation, who did something every other person between the ages of 10 and 30 in the USA has done, prosecuted for millions, I lose all sympathy with the rights holders. Only half of the previous demo will admit to file sharing, but that’s because the other 50% doesn’t realize that the RIAA would sue them for half a million dollars for the time they sent that song to their friend in middle school.

I now have reason to moderate my opinion in that respect. The encyclopedia I spent a year and a half on was offered for free, electronically, online. This pisses me off. It’s not their work, they don’t have the right to do what they do. It makes me almost quake in anger, but I’m sure from their standpoint, they are doing the same thing I did when I (hypothetically, don’t sue me RIAA) took an album from a friend’s shared iTunes (also hypothetically, after listening to the hypothetical album, I bought the hypothetical new album on iTunes).

So, today, I find myself torn. I still don’t feel sad for the huge music industry figures, but, honestly, if I didn’t know Berkshire was just a small office in the Berkshire hills, I might have been willing to pirate our encyclopedias just by looking at our perfectly modern and up-to-date website. The justification, internally, is simple. A low risk, high reward crime against people you neither know nor suspect you’d like. Perhaps its time for me to get to know some of the people who work in the music industry…

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Last night, our power shut off, while I was in the middle of a Skype call and my roommate was cleaning up after his epic dinner party. It left the apartment immediately in utter darkness. If such an event happens in the States, it is usually the result of at least a few months worth of unpaid electricity bills. In our case, it was more innocent, as electricity here is bought the same way you buy your cell phone time. You walk over to the appropriate office, pay cash, and they recharge your account. After a night in a dead apartment (thank god Beijing heat isn’t electric) I simply strolled over, handed over the cash, and the nice young woman recharged our electricity card, which I then plugged into the electricity meter. Bam, power back on.

A cash economy is a mysterious thing, and I don’t know if there have been any direct studies to see how it effects resource usage. I have read that the single most effective method of encouraging efficient driving is to mount a meter on the dashboard constantly letting you know your MPG, and the Chinese system is certainly similar. I am certainly using less electricity today than I did yesterday, slightly more compulsively turning off lights, unplugging the DVD player, and waiting until things start getting real cold before turning on the electric heater.

So I randomly clicked a link this morning, and was brought to a html’ed webpage… not a particularly unusual occurrence, except the link was to a movie, and the movie was hosted on Youtube, blocked in China for years.

Hooray, thought I. China has finally unblocked Youtube, and I’ll be able to rejoin the normal internet community of the world.. Alas, it was not to be. Youtube is as firmly blocked again as it ever was, and my hopes, small as they were, are crushed.

My best one-liner at Thanksgiving was a macabre tale of international finance gone wrong. Sitting there, in one of China’s most flash hotels (The Grand Millenium, I recommend it highly), we were discussing the nature of America’s current budget, outlook, and how the consensus among retired state department and defense department administrators that Afghanistan, not matter how necessary, not matter how crucial, no matter how honorable, simply could not be won without destroying America.

Pausing, looking at the caviar (from a $25 buffet!) smeared into my tablecloth, bubbling pots of southern Chinese soups, twenty desserts, a full salad and sushi bar, fresh baked italian bread of at least 6-7 types… and I muttered out loud:

“The United States Dollar: Backed by the full Faith and Credit of the People’s Republic of China.”

We all shrugged, and kept eating.

One thing that always surprises me about the Chinese is how they will take English and twist it and take control of it… even beyond what we do in America. One example of prominent use is the term ‘netizen,’ something without any particular cachet in western writing, but that I find used several times in any Chinese article about web users. I do not know if this is simply the unfortunate side effect of some overly-enthusiastic Chinese English-language curriculum developer choosing this somewhat obscure word to define a new social movement among the Chinese, and thus ‘netizen’ becoming the only word at hand for a generation of young Chinese. Somewhat in the same vein, perhaps, as the word ‘delicious’ being chosen as the catchall term for things that taste good, leading to the somewhat odd situation of a Chinese person shrugging their shoulders when asked how a certain food item tasted, admitting, in a bored, disinterested voice, that it is ‘very delicious,’ not even close to the proper use of the word.

My personal suspicion is somewhat different, however. Americans function in a world of independence, born on the cult of the individual which rules so many aspects of policy and society even today. The Chinese do not have this luxury, existing in webs of social responsibility vastly larger than we can imagine. A single twenty five year old professional these days is responsible for the upkeep of up to six people: four grandparents, two parents, all of whom might still be alive when the young person considers having his own children. The net (ironically enough) has no such webs, and so the distinction of who one is online with who one is in the real world (or IRL, for the real gen-Y’ers) may be greater, and require a stronger word… one for which there is no great translation into English, beyond netizen.

China’s artificial class divides has additional benefits: frequently I hear a call from my window, men and women, riding around on tricycles collecting various types of trash. These are then sorted into cardboard, styrofoam, bottles, and hundreds of other categories, in hole-in-the-wall hutong spaces. It is dirty work, but clearly there is a demand. You haven’t lived in Beijing until you see a cart loaded 12 meters high, on only a 1.5 meter-long base, all of which is styrofoam and plastic bottles.

Yet another way in which China is more capitalistic than the USA.