From behind the Great Firewall

The censorship of the internet is one of the most frustrating things about spending time in China. Every time I am here I experience it, and each time I forget the scope and persistence of it. It is actually a moving target since each time, the list of things that work changes and is different depending on what internet connection you are using. This time for the first time, I have been forced to employ a VPN to try and access various sites I use outside of China and even that has been only marginally effective. Without the VPN, I can't reach Facebook, Wikipedia, Youtube, many news sites, and my RSS reader full of news and blogs also doesn't work. Google's myriad of sites including the search engine, Maps and Gmail are unpredictable. Sometimes they work,  other times they do not. Even with the VPN, I can still not reach any site hosted on Blogger including my own which means for my friends in China, being able to read this in any easy way is doubtful.

Without mentioning anything else about the Chinese government, the restriction of access to the open internet is deplorable. Here in a place where people could benefit so much from access to information and education, access to the greatest body of it in the history of mankind is restricted for the ostensible purposes of preserving the social order. I'm pretty sure the idea is that if people had access to the internet, they would then have access to sites critical of the government and the ability to express those ideas themselves, which would then lead to the downfall of Chinese society and social disorder on a mass scale. So to avert that disaster, the censors play this cat and mouse game of figuring out how to block each site in turn and prevent people from being corrupted by subversive Western thinking or god forbid, a critical statement about the government from one of its own people. Preventing people from accessing information, from teaching themselves new things, and therefore from improving their circumstances is offensive and though it's arguable whether or not it's the worst offense of the government here as I sit surrounded by pollution that is normal here but would be considered an ecological disaster in other countries, it's certainly something about which the government should be ashamed and embarrassed.

My impression is that at least some people I know are aware of this and in some cases express it, but my idealistic view is that without the door being open except to those with the wherewithall and computer knowledge to bypass the restrictions (to the extent it is even possible) then it's going to substantially slow down the rate at which things here improve for a lot of people. If not directly as a result of this censorship of information, then because of the underlying attitude that keeping people from information and education is good for society which seems to pervade the government who implement these policies. I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the countries who keep their peoples from learning because it contravenes some religious edict. Those people are at least operating without the benefit of reason which explains if not excuses their lack of reasoning, but in this case you have a government who has rationally decided to dumb down its society for the ostensible sake of preserving social order or at least keep themselves in power.

Maybe nobody cares that much and maybe if the door were open it would just mean more Facebook and more Twitter, but ideas and thinking change slowly and although we may mock lack of substance on Youtube in the US and elsewhere, we still have the choice and opportunity to access anything of interest we want in an instant while here I am trying to drink from a slowly dripping faucet instead of a firehose.

First few days back in Beijing

I always forget the details of travels, even though I always think I am going to remember them.

I have been in Beijing for just about 72 hours. It's my second visit here. I came mostly to spend time with Meiying and also to see friends in the city and get to know it better. I've only spent a week in Beijing and it seems like such an important city and one that deserves more time and attention than I have given it. I'm even giving the Beijing accent a fair shake after years of negative reinforcement from Taiwanese-accented friends.

I'm staying in Dongcheng, the eastern half of the city. I did remember how big the city was, but the reality of it is always different from the memory. The walk from the nearest subway station is about 20 minutes, which is close by Beijing standards. This city feels so big to me that it's easy to believe that many corners could remain unvisited even after years of living here. The streets alternate between giant traffic and bike filled avenues and narrow winding hutongs, the old streets of Beijing which show their age, even the pieces that have been replaced recently. Even the nicer cars parked in the alleys and almost blocking passing traffic begin to somehow fit in with the falling-apart look of each alley.

As I sit in my small, courtyard hotel in Xigongjie Hutong, I can hear the creaks and groans of random machinery trying to keep people warm in the grip of what is apparently a winter to which most here are accustomed, give or take a few degrees. It's a new experience for me having typically traveled only to warm destinations, or at least not wintery ones. My room has four heaters in it and they are all hanging on for dear life. Every visible pipe or patchworked apparatus sticking out of the walls of these old buildings seems to be held together with duct tape or some inexplicable but mostly functional solution someone has pieced together from materials lying around to keep things running just smoothly enough. The same could be said for every decrepit and rusty unlocked bicycle or motor rickshaw that looks as if given a nudge from the right angle might crumble into a pile of spare parts good for nothing.

The big streets admittedly are noisy and just as full of things to gaze at slack-jawed, but I always prefer the hutongs except for maybe very late at night when even though it is probably completely safe especially for a foreigner, it feels too empty and ancient for comfort. Ancient not in the sense that there aren't modern contrivances visible everywhere, but more in the sense that people have been living in alleys like this in some form or another, in many cases in these exact alleys, for way longer than is imaginable in my limited scope of thinking in terms of a lifetime or a generation or two. Even with the newer cars or power lines, it feels as if those things have just been crudely pasted on top of something that runs much deeper and as much as newspapers or pundits in the west like to report about China's changes and what it means for money, money, money, and while that may be true in other neighborhoods of Beijing or Guangzhou or Shanghai where skyscrapers go up at an impossible rate, in these alleys and on the side lanes of the big streets packed with bikes and pedestrians, it just doesn't seem to matter very much to so many people. I proclaim myself not as an expert, just a reporter of what my eyes have seen so far.

People ask me often why I study Chinese or why I love China and I still haven't come up with an answer. I guess my answer remains a work in progress. I intensely dislike the modern materialism, consumerism, and the mimicing of western culture that both goes with and drives those values. That's hardly unique to China of course. I want to believe those things are not as pervasive as one might believe when only looking at the wealthiest people in China and their sports cars and other luxury items. A friend tells me of her uncle who goes into a watch shop and asks to see the most expensive watch they have. Then he buys it and shows it to people so they know he has the most expensive one. That said, I don't feel like I see that sort of behavior regularly. I'm sure it exists, and maybe the people riding all these bikes and cooking dumplings all want those things too, but maybe what I like is the way people accept what they do have rather than pine for what they don't. Maybe I'm just guessing what is in their heads without knowing, but at the very least it seems to me that people are by and large reasonably happy with what they have. To be sure there are a lot of people who need more. I'm not saying nobody needs anything more than what they have here. There are clearly people who do. I'm just saying that people seem more content just living than they do in the US or in other so-called developed countries. In an entirely selfish way, I like my experience in China for allowing me to be endlessly fascinated by every single thing I see to the point where each moment becomes at the very least interesting or stimulating. Maybe that is simply my desire to see and do new things and to increase my understanding through experience. But that said, I think it is largely something in people I meet here that I like, some kind of world view that I can't qualify yet, but that is at least part of the drive I have to continue bringing myself here and part of the answer people seem to be looking for when they ask me this question, though I suppose once again it's a bit of a non-answer, or at least an incomplete one.

Also the food is great.

Flight to Beijing

Until yesterday, I'd never seen a woman stand up literally within 10 seconds of the landing gear touching the ground, open up an overhead bin, and begin to take her bag out. Another guy stood up and started walking up the aisle to get his bags too. The flight attendant got up to tell them to sit down. The woman didn't understand. The guy was annoyed. We hadn't even finished braking yet.

More to come, mostly testing if I can successfully post to Blogger through the Great Firewall.