The Tail that Wags the Dog part 2 of 2

The Old Guard that currently runs the country will one day be replaced by a new generation of leadership that did not come to power in the shadow of Mao’s legacy. A new generation is coming down the line that has managed work-arounds to get past China’s notorious Great Fire Wall that limits access to the internet and they’ve seen the movie “To Live.” They have a much fuller pictures of where China has been and what alternative futures could look like.

The big fear at the time of the handover was that Hong Kong was going to be absorbed into and become indistinguishable from the rest of China. But fourteen years into the fifty-year grace period, Hong Kong is holding steady. It is China that is changing. It’s not necessarily that Hong Kong with her seven million people exerts undue influence on the rest of China with its 1.3 billion. Rather, as China seeks to become a more fully integrated member of the world community, its people will start to demand some of the same freedoms and rights that so many of their compatriots form around the world –including in Hong Kong- have been enjoying for years.

Thomas Jefferson observed that the natural order of things is for the State to encroach and for individual liberty to recede. While Jefferson was right, it is also true that humans have never stood by idly and let nature have it way. We fight back against the forces of nature. It is why the people of China built an enormous damn to control the raging floodwaters of the Yangtze. It is how the people of Hong Kong have carved out for themselves a secure and prosperous future from an oversized rock with few natural resources in the South China Sea.

An argument can be made that the ninetieth century belonged to the British, the twentieth century to The United State, and that the Twenty-first century will belong to China. In the least, with her sustained eight-percent annual growth, China will play an increased role in the world. How big of a role is yet to be determined. More importantly, it is yet to be determined what exactly this new, more prominent China will look like.

China has learned from the missteps in the 1960 and 70s that grew out of it experiments with a command-and-control economy. It has started to liberalize it markets. So far, so good. Now we can only hope that Beijing sees the benefits and rightness of bringing the same liberalization to the personal lives of its people.

My prediction? Free minds are an inevitable companion to free markets. Liberty will prevail.

When the handover happened in 1997, the question that lingering in the air on that rainy July day was “Who will change who?” Where on the field of history will these two divergent societies converge?

Thirty-six years from now, when the handover is complete, China in 2047 –with its greater prosperity and inevitable gains in personal freedoms- will resemble Hong Kong at the time of the hand-over more than Hong Kong of 2047 will resemble the China of 1997.

The Tail that Wags the Dog part 1 of 2

After 150 years of holding it as a colony, Great Britain handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese with great fanfare on July 1, 1997. Hong Kong’s laissez fair capitalism and China’s command-and-control economy could not have been more different. As part of the handover agreement Beijing promised that they would leave Hong Kong the way it was for the next 50 years. “One country, two systems.” Hong Kong was to be a Special Administrative Region and would retain a large degree of autonomy.

The skeptics were dubious, at best. But happily –and somewhat surprisingly- that is exactly what has happened. For the last fourteen years, things have been merrily chugging along.

Which for Hong Kong means they have been busying doing what they do best: living their lives and growing prosperous.

For the Chinese, it means that they have been steadily trying to implement Capitalism with Chinese characteristics. It’s an interesting experiment.

It has always been my contention that economic freedom and individual freedom go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. At least, that's my belief. China -of course- is doing its darnedest to prove me wrong. For the last twenty years, Beijing has been liberalizing markets while simultaneously maintaining an iron grip on the hearts and minds of its people.

This Spring, a handful of would-be Chinese dissidents tried to bring the Middle Eastern/North African Jasmine Revolution to China. It lasted all of about seven minutes. This past weekend, a Beijing minister and members of his congregation were once again arrested when they tried to worship in a park. They are without a church building because the Communist government put extreme pressure on the landlord to not renew their lease. While China may be liberalizing markets, the rest of Chinese society remains quite illiberal.

But personal freedoms will find their way to China. It’s inevitable. As goods and people move back and forth across borders, they have a pesky little habit of bringing ideas along with them. And ideas have power. As a trip over the border to Shenzhen on any random Tuesday morning will confirm, the border between Hong Kong and China is incredibly fluid and porous. Goods, people –and yes, ideas- move back and forth freely between Hong Kong and China.

The quest for individual freedom is too universal and too powerful. The desire to speak and read and publish as you see fit, the human instinct to assemble with other like-minded people, the thirst to worship –or not worship- as one sees fit are all too fundamentally human to be repressed indefinitely.a

Mao & Me

History's Palate Cleanser part 3 of 3

All that Mao memorabilia? I think that short of an outside force coming in and completely vanquishing a regime and it leader, the people of a nation are never going to fully turn their back on the founder of their modern nation-state no matter how mixed his legacy may be. Perhaps, we’ll just have to chalk that up to “Yes, he was a dictator, but at least he was our dictator.”

And my portrait with Mao? After three days, the city of Lijiang wore down my resolve. I had my picture taken with Mao Zedong –well at least his wax likeness. But just for the record, I was pointing out to him a particularly heart-wrenching passage from “Wild Swans,” waging my finger, and asking him to give account for his actions.

Later, as I examined the picture, I noticed that waxy Mao was freakishly large. The sculptors had made him ever so slightly bigger than life-size. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The currently regime in Beijing has a vested interested in making sure that Mao Zedong looms large in the minds of the people. After all, they are direct beneficiaries of Mao’s legacy. Continued veneration of Mao helps to solidify their hold on power.

Mao Zedong: bigger than life. Literally.

History's Palate Cleanser part 2 of 3

As my family and I traveled through China, I read two autobiographies each by Chinese women. The first, “Wild Swans” chronicles the life of three generations of Chinese women from the 1920 to the 1970s. The author’s parents were high-ranking officials in the Communist Party but that didn’t prevent them from being denounced and purged as “capitalist roaders” when they fell out of political favor. In her youth, the author was a member of the infamous Red Guard –a nation-wide mob of idealistic youth who Mao manipulated and leveraged to shore up his faltering popularity. (Wild Swans is illegal in China and I felt a little subversive carrying around my English-language copy.)

The second book, the ironically-titled “Socialism is Great!” is set in the 1980s and tells of the author’s coming of age and her growing disillusionment with the Regime in the years when China was just starting to emerge from its dark years of self-imposed isolation.

Both books chronicle not only the tragic consequences of communism on a national scale, but on the personal level as well. As the nation blindly followed communist ideology and Mao Zedong’s collectivist policies, the economy was devastated. Families were debased. Neighbor turned on neighbor, student on teacher.

During the decades when so many nations from Africa. South America, and Asia were embracing communism, alternatives existed. These nations could have followed any of the numerous examples from around the world and built their societies on free markets, the rule of law, and individual property rights. But they chose a different path for themselves. Eventually they found that communism is not only an ineffective way to organize a society, but it actually makes life worse for the people it claims to help. As a result, almost all of these nations have abandoned communism. Even China is undergoing rapid market reforms. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng Xiaoping put China on the path –albeit a slow and highly controlled path- away from communism and toward markets and private profit. If China continues on the trajectory she is on, within a generation or two she will be communist in name only.

It just seems so tragic that so much of the world’s population had to suffer through years of communist oppression before realizing the hollowness of its rhetoric and the emptiness of its promises. If only history had unfolded differently, it wouldn’t have been necessary for so many to have toiled and suffered at the hands of dictators who used sheer force to impose their vision and will on the people.

I struggle with this. Why couldn’t they have seen then what they see now? The lost years and the lost lives seem like such as waste. These countries have ended up in a place where they could have been decades ago. Seeing all those Mao ashtrays and lighters in the Night Market certainly doesn't help ease my frustration.

But, as people in the twentieth century tried to overcome colonialism, poverty, and feudalism, I guess the rhetoric and promises of communists were just too appealing to avoid.

Perhaps that’s it.

Maybe that's the role that communism plays in human history. Communism was never a sustainable system to organize ourselves; but maybe the radical revolutionary rhetoric and the utopian promises of communism were what was needed for some societies to rise up and throw off their past.

There is no love lost between me and communism. It is a failed ideology that increases human suffering. But maybe –just maybe- communism has played a role in moving nations from where they were to where they need to be. Maybe Marx got it backwards. The natural progress is not for nations to go from pre-industrialized to industrialized to communist as he predicted. But instead, the natural progression –for some nations- is to go from feudalism, poverty, and colonialism to communisms to market-based economies rooted in individual rights and private property.

Taking this perspective, it is possible to think of communism as a cosmic solvent that washed away so many of the antiquated structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just as leaders such as Nehru, Ho Chi Mihn, and Lumumba were great at rallying the masses to revolution but were not effective at administering once they were in charge; so it is with communism. Communism didn’t offer a better alternative to what came before, but it cleared the slate. It is not a good way to govern, but it sure has great rhetoric if you are trying to foment revolution and make a break with the past.

Perhaps communism is history’s great palate cleanser.

If that’s the case, it still seems tragic and avoidable, but I guess I can wrap my brain around that. As we wait for the last remnants of communism to be shrugged off and to fade away, I think I can make my fragile peace with communism and the role it has played in world history.

History's Palate Cleanser part 1 of 3

I stood in the doorway conflicted. The history buff in me with his weak spot for kitsch was doing battle with my better judgment. To my wife’s credit, she was doing her best to protect me from myself. It was our first evening in the old town of Lijiang and we had stumbled upon a photo studio. For a dollar a person could have his or her picture taken with a life-size wax figure of Mao Zedong. The wall behind the cashier’s counter was lined with 8x10 photos of groups of smiling friends, families, and couples all cheerfully gathering around The Great Helmsman.

Whether I’ve seen it Hong Kong or in the Mainland, I continue to be taken aback by the amount to Mao Zedong, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution memorabilia that’s for sale. There must be a fairly robust demand for it based on the sheer volume that‘s available. Pins, posters, figurines, Mao’s little red book, t-shirts with the benevolent visage of The Chairman beaming down upon the masses. In Berlin the wall may have come down over twenty years ago, but here in China, echoes of Mao’s cult of personality still resonate.

Given communism’s track record, I stood by a little perplexed shortly after we move here while Hong Kong –who purports to still be fairly independent from Beijing- pulled out all the stops to celebrate the 60th anniversary of birth of communist China.

In the 1840s, Karl Marx, the German philosopher and father of modern communism, predicted that communism would take hold in the industrialized nations of the world such as England and Germany. As with so many other things, Marx got it wrong. Instead, communism took hold in pre-industrialized, feudal nations (such as Russia) and in impoverished and colonialized nations (such as Vietnam).

The twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history primarily because governments –predominantly communist governments- turned guns on their own people. Fascists in Germany exterminated six million people, but Stalin in communist Russia was responsible for the death of 10 million of his countrymen. Mao Zedong was responsible for the death of 20 million of his people - in just one year.

But for some reason, communism doesn’t seem to draw down upon itself the same type of unequivocal condemnation that other failed, brutal ideologies do. In Germany, not only is memorabilia from their dark, mid-century past not collected as kitsch, it is actually illegal to do so. Yet, five train stops from our apartment, I could go to the Mong Kok market tonight and buy a Che Guevara shower curtain or a Mao Zedong mouse pad.

Don't Look Back

Julie and I are sticking around until the first of August in order to teach summer school. But on July 9, we put the girls on a plane for Chicago so they could re-connect with friends and start to get acclimated to life back in The States. Since they were traveling as unaccompanied minors, we had to pay Continental a little extra so they would have and escort at either end of their journey.

Continental's Hong Kong escort met us at the ticket counter and we walked together to security. Julie and I with no boarding passes, were not allowed any further. Annika, Elise and the escort were fast-tracked through security. We could just see their heads through the crowds. They had to stop on the far side of securty as the escort took care of some business in a side office. Just before they sat down to wait, both girls turned to give us a little wave and thumbs up. We could just barely catch glimpses of them as they sat on the chairs outside the office.

The escort emerged and the girls were moving again pulling their rolling carry-on suitcases behind them.

Julie whispered under her breath “Turn around, turn around. One more time . . . ”

I whispered under my breath “Don’t turn around, keep walking. You’re fine . . . ”

The girls disappeared around the corner without looking back.

“Awe, they didn’t turn around.”

“Yes! Well done girls.”

I took Julie’s hand as we went to go get some coffee and wait until their flight was in the air.

Sticking it to the Man

Our flight out of Beijing had a layover in the coastal city of Wanzhou. As we went through security, I was once again pulled aside and brought to the security desk where the security guard handed me over to his supervisor. He placed my Chinese farmer’s bamboo shoulder stick on the counter. The supervisor picked it up, smiled, and shook her head. I started to protest, but realized my efforts were futile. My bamboo shoulder stick had made it all the way from Dali to Lijiang to Xi’an to Beijing. We had hauled it all over China. My daughters had taken turns lugging it from one city to the next. And now it had been confiscated on the very last leg of our journey. I guess my future students will not be carrying buckets of sand from one side of the room to the other. The loss of my bamboo stick put me in depressive funk for the for the first hour of our flight home.

Lost cameras and bamboo shoulder sticks aside, it had been a fabulous journey across the expanse of China. With seventeen days we had barely scratched the surface of the world’s biggest country and her 1.3 billion people and her 3,000 years of uninterrupted history. But we had gotten to see China past and present from the south to the north. We had been able to clomped through her mountains and felt her rivers pulsating in our chests; we had wandered the countryside, ambled through villages, and immersed ourselves in the hustle and bustle of her cities. And we had met some amazing people along the way and managed to learn just a little bit of their stories and where they had been and where they were going.

It made us hungry for more. Seventeen days had only served to whet our appetite. But, alas life in Hong Kong –and beyond that, life in back in the States- was beckoning.

We arrived back in Hong Kong where we no longer had a home. Staff housing was now being prepped for all the new staff that would be arriving in a few short weeks. As we settled down into our seat on the upper level of the A-41 bus from the airport, Julie rummaged around in the bottom of her purse for the keys to the apartment where we would be flopping while our friend was back in New Zealand for the summer. We were going to spend our last five weeks in Hong Kong once again living out of a suitcase.

Beijing assorted pictures

An Olympian Effort part 2 of 2

After spending the better part of the day fighting the crowds at the waterpark, we showered up, exited the Water Cube, and set out on foot in search of some dinner. We had come into the Olympic Plaza from the south so we decided to continued north through the plaza. It was huge. It was a hundred meters wide and a kilometer or more long. It was one broad, empty plaza.

In preparation for the 2008 Olympics, the powers that be bulldozed large swatches of Beijing including dozens of hutongs –or traditional neighborhoods made up of courtyard houses. I’m sure that in order to hold the number of visitors they expected for the Olympics it made sense to create such a massively large plaza, but three years out, that decision was starting to look a little dubious.

A few early evening revelers wandered about, an old man had a string of a sixty miniature kits high in the air, two young men sang and played guitar into a portable amp and had a dozen peopled gathered around them. But for the most part, it was a large paver-lined desert in the middle of the city.

I am sure that Beijing is probably looking at this plaza as a giant blank slate upon which they can continue to recast Beijing according to their vision.

Sadly, former host cities around the world are littered with the decaying, underused carcasses of expensive infrastructure that promised to be a catalyst to future development. Beijing –as successful as her Olympics were- does not seem to be the exception. We wandered until we found signs for a mall on the plaza. It was an subterranean mall consisting of a McDonalds , a movie theater and a lot of empty store fronts.

We made our way back above ground and to the edge of the Olympic plaza where we hailed a taxi. I put my Pictionary skills to use, sketched a picture on the back of a scrap of paper and managed to communicate to our driver that we were interested in eating some of Beijing’s celebrated Peking Duck. Twenty minutes later he pulled up to an excellent Peking Duck restaurant –far from the Olympic Plaza.

An Olympian Effort part 1 of 2

Somewhere in the 1970s and 1980s, it became a pretty common rite of passage for young Americans such as myself to buy a Eurail Pass and spend a summer backpacking through Europe. As much as I would have loved to have done this, somehow, it never happened. I missed out and for the last two years my daughters have been paying the price. I have been dragging them all over southeast Asia with packs strapped to their backs. I have made them wander through countless villages, hike mountains, sleep in tents, and ride rivers on bamboo rafts.

The end of our four days in Beijing was marking the end of our seventeen-day trek through China which was marking the end of our two years in China. I told them that on the last day I was going to let them decide what we did for the day.

How generous of me.

Options included a couple of amusement parks, the aquarium, and the Beijing Zoo with its pandas. But the girls decided they wanted to go to an indoor water park housed in the famous Water Cube building that was the site of the swimming and diving events in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. One portion of the Water Cube has been re-purposed as a mid-sized, indoor water park.

We managed to figure out the Beijing subway system and got ourselves to the Olympic complex on the northwest side of town for just twenty-five cents each rather than taking a more expensive taxi or –heaven forbid- joining a tour bus.

The afterglow that Beijing is continuing to enjoy almost three years after wrapping up what were arguably one of the most successful Olympics in recent memory is palpable. As we entered the broad plaza, the horizon was dominated by the Water Cube to the west and the Bird’s Nest stadium to the east. They were impressive. We joined the faithful making their pilgrimages and took turns taking pictures of each other in front of these two wonders of modern architecture. What should have taken two or three minutes, took twenty, because the girls insisted on pictures of themselves simultaneously jumping in front of each building.

Easier said, than done.

Great Wall assorted pictures

Tiananmen Square part 2 of 2

For many people, a trip to Tiananmen Square is nothing short of a sacred pilgrimage to hallowed grounds –not that any of us would dare to lay down a wreath or light a candle. It is a place to learn, commemorate, reflect, honor, mourn, hope and pray.

And in light of all this, how does the Lonely Planet China guidebook capture the spirit and summarize the hope-filled and tragic events that happened in Tiananmen Square just over twenty years ago? Lonely Planet –who commits an entire shaded sidebar talking about some modern skyscraper primarily because the locals have dubbed it “Big Underpants”- gives the actual Square three quarters of a page. After rambling on for several paragraphs about the layout and the architecture of the Square, the grand sum of Lonely Planet’s comments on the events of June 1989 is the following single sentence:

“In 1989, army tanks forced pro-democracy demonstrators out of the plaza.”

What?

That’s it?

“In 1989, Army tanks forced pro-democracy protestors out of the plaza”?

A 1056-page guide to China, and that’s all they can muster up to say about the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989? The notice in my local MTR station reminding me to hold the handrail as I ride the escalator uses more words.

Unbelievable.

Lonely Planet: lapdog for despotism and suppression the world over.

While their self-censored guidebooks continue to reach millions every year, I guess I will just continue to plug away reaching young people twenty-five at a time with an inspirational story of one generation’s quest for something more, something better.

I have a grainy, black and white poster to help.

Tiananmen Square part 1 of 2

Immediately south of the three-hundred-year-old Forbidden City is the relatively new Tiananmen Square conceived and built by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to showcase the scope and power of the communist party which had recently come to power. It is the largest urban plaza in the world. Over the years, Tiananmen Square has been home to many key events in modern Chinese history. To the western mind, the most famous is probably the prodemocracy crack down of June, 1989.

My Chicago classroom is chocked full of artifacts from around the world. Hanging high and prominently in the back of my classroom is a poster of the iconic photograph of Tank Man –the unidentified, lone protestor who stood before a column of sixty Red Army tanks and silently used his body to say “If you want access to these protestors, you are going to have to roll over my body.” It hangs in my classroom year round.

I use this poster as Exhibit A when telling my students the story of the events of late spring 1989 that led to the June 4 crackdown. Triggered by their desire to mourn the death of the relatively tolerant former General Secretary Hu Yaobang, Chinese students gathered in Tiananmen Square. Then things gained momentum. In the spirit of Gandhi and King, students used non-violence and civil disobedience to call for more freedoms. A movement took shape.

Chinese students poured into Tiananmen Square by the bus load from around the country to join the month-long demonstrations. Students went on hunger strikes. The demonstrators were joined by factory workers and eventually farmers. Art students made a papier-mâché statue of the Goddess of Democracy. When one student leader realized that others wanted to speak out but were afraid to do so, he had them write down what they wanted to say, pass it forward, and he read it out on their behalf. At its peak, the crowds swelled to hundreds of thousands of people. One couple got married in the Square. When the Chinese army started to move toward Tiananmen Square in early June, local Beijing residents moved trucks and wagons into the street in an attempt to block the army’s access to the protestors. Smaller demonstration were held in factories and on campuses around China. Hope had sprung that spring.

While the protests were going on in Beijing, 1.5 million Hong Kongers participated in an organized march in support of the students in Tiananmen Square. 1.5 million: that’s one fourth of the population of Hong Kong at the time!

When I am telling this story to my students, I usually have to pause several times to compose myself. That stark image of Tank Man in the back of my room gets to me every time.

The demonstrations in the spring of 1989 are generally referred to as prodemocracy demonstrations. But at their core, they were so much more than just a call for democratic processes. They were fundamentally a collective expression of the yearning for autonomy and a modicum of control over one’s life. It was a flexing of the natural desire to be able to gather together with like-minded people and express yourselves without fear of reprisal. Essentially, the demonstrations were a longing to be free from oppression. It was one of the most organic, beautiful, and ultimately tragic expressions of the desire for freedom the world had seen in modern times.

But then, on June 4, 1989, the tanks rolled in and while the world watched the Chinese government turned its guns on its own people. The official government estimate is that several hundred protestors die, but several international organizations put the death toll in the thousands.

Beijing's Forbidden City

Hostels can be cheap. But you have to be careful, many charge not by the room, but by the person. If you are traveling alone, US$12 a night is a great deal. But times that by four and you’re talking a decent chunk of change. For US$50, you can get yourself a pretty nice hotel room, which is exactly what we did in Beijing. We stayed in a hotel just north of the Forbidden City. Our train arrived midmorning and we hailed a taxi for our hotel. After checking in and dropping our bags, we headed out again. With just four days in Beijing, we couldn’t afford to use a morning to rest up.

Our first stop was the Forbidden City.

For the seven years prior to moving to Hong Kong, I taught one section of sixth-grade world cultures which included six weeks on China. I was not a history major in college, and the class was a journey of discovery for me and the my students.

The 1987 movie “The Last Emperor” won nine academy awards including best picture. The opening scene shows the young emperor Puyi being coronated in an elaborately staged sequence with a cast of hundreds that was shot on location in the Forbidden City. It is a great scene that captures a China on the cusp of major change. I show this ten-minute opening scene to my students who have always responded very favorably. It helps that the three-year-old Puyi is unbelievably cute. Over the years, I have probably watched this scene thirty times.

To say that I was pretty stoked to see the Forbidden City in person, would be an understatement.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to show The Last Emperor to my own daughters before we embarked on our China tour. While on the steps of the Hall of Supreme Purity, I tried to describe to them the significance of what they were seeing and I tried to paint a picture of what that last coronation ceremony was like. But it just wasn’t the same as the scope and pageantry that Bernardo Bertolucci captured in his epic movie. But now the girls have pictures of themselves in front of the Hall of Middle Harmony and when they eventually do watch The Last Emperor, they will be able to say, Hey, I was there.

Likewise, not only will I be able to show my future students back in Chicago the open scene from The Last Emperor, but I will be able to show them pictures of their dear old social studies teacher in front of the Palace of Heavenly Purity.