Potentially as the result of developing a very niche skill set (asset management in the Chinese mainland), and a pseudo-familiarity with China in general, many media articles come off as either incorrect or under researched. Bank of China to Issue New Shares (Wall Street Journal) originally reported that Bank of China was issuing lots of bonds to increase its capital, which had been depleted by lots of lending. This was true, though the original article missed that it was a simultaneous bond and stock issue, and that the bonds were convertible. The article was later edited, though I cannot imagine a similar omission being made with regards to, say, Morgan Stanley. This distinction between bond/convertible bond is significant insofar as mainland fixed-income markets are not very well developed by global standards, and a move by such a large player is important for anyone who cares about the depth of China’s financial markets (which relates to global imbalances caused by high savings rates). The alternative explanations in these cases: I simply misread the Chinese, or the world has suddenly turned into an interactive Kafka novel.

Even the NYT’s reporting on China often seems anecdotal at best, though certainly the quality of the work the publication delivers, given time and resource constraints, is impressive. However, every month or so there’s an article about Americans working in China, the latest of which concluded that ‘in some workplaces there are conflicts. If they happen while Americans are working in China, they must be due to cultural conflicts because China is strange and different.’ The article came off as under-researched, and played up broader narratives for the sake of mass appeal, such as when the author notes that “Chinese workers have a deeper understanding of the influences, like Confucianism and Communism, that play a part in their country’s culture and economy.” Sure these two systems existed at different points throughout Chinese history but they aren’t particularly relevant modes of discourse at present. It comes off as crass as writing “France’s Catholic history, a religious system that stresses a particular combination of guilt inducing mechanisms and flagellant self-sacrifice, has made the nation particularly amiable to the demands of the modern welfare state, unlike its Protestant neighbors.”

As for myself, I tend to have many more genuine cultural conflicts with people from the east coast of the US – they are tall and mean – whereas urban Chinese are polite and fun to talk to.

My attempts to understand Chinese politics and perceptions of race are often fraught with difficulties; the understanding so far focuses on a pro-Han nationalist / anti-everyone international axis, since it’s the avenue most easily accessible / relevant to me (as it stands, I barely understand American politics). So a week or so ago Obama bowed to the Japanese Emperor – an African-American (viewed here as sort-of sub-American, since the “respectable foreigners are Caucasian”) kowtowing before the former titular ruler of the evil Japanese Imperial house – reactions to this should be thoughtful. The following opinion is not exactly representative (though the author is probably pro-U.S.), and comes from Tianya; it does capture the tone that these in which things are discussed:

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Sort of related topics: every few days one of the local papers will carry a story about a child drowning to death or being hit by a car while crossing the street. Each time, the article will say “the child’s parents were working nearby…” Even this NYT article profiling child abduction in Shenzhen carries the same line:

Peng Gaofeng was busy with customers when a man snatched his 4-year-old son from the plaza in front of his shop as throngs of factory workers enjoyed a spring evening. “I turned away for a minute, and when I called out for him he was gone,” Mr. Peng said.

Evidence from interviews conducted here suggests that these cases are almost always migrant children – primarily because their parents are too busy working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week; and they have not been [brainwashed] with basic safety knowledge. Thinking back to how many times my parents drilled “look both ways, memorize your phone number, you will begin practicing swimming when you are six months old” I begin to see how ubiquitous this is in Western culture. Urban Chinese are not dissimilar, though probably take more risks with their children than would your average American.

It’s not that migrants don’t care about their children – they certainly do – but rural lifestyle perhaps doesn’t inculcate these same values. As one person explained: “In the countryside, we know everyone. They watch out for our kids. There’s no traffic there. There’s nowhere to swim. A lot of people just don’t think it’s going to be different in the city.”

Another interesting phenomenon relating to youth culture is the extent to which concerns about internet addiction are present in common discourse. Tricia Wang, a PhD student at UCSD, hypothesizes that internet cafes can serve as a form of child care for the aforementioned migrant parents with too little free time:

I suspect that internet cafes are a form of an after-school program for the kids – the parents feel comfortable knowing that they are in one place. I also suspect that the youth do not know how to use the internet for educational purposes – or more so are their educational resources in China for students? Must find that out.

This makes sense. So why are the other half of urban parents deathly afraid of internet addiction that they will send their children to ‘recovery camps’ that utilize electro-therapy? (“I just want to check my email *buzz* no wait I need to level a little in WoW *buzz* please I just want to update my status!” *buzz buzz buzz* – actually the electrotherapy was recently banned. Still. Seriously.) So why don’t people in the U.S. talk about internet addiction? I’m pretty sure that if you took away the laptop, in about six hours flat, I’d be writhing on the floor clutching at phantom keys in a desperate attempt to imagine my way back into connectivity. If that doesn’t count as addiction, not sure what does.

Jin Ge, a videographer from Shanghai who profiled WoW goldfarming explained to me that: “For parents with the time and money, they are worried about every sort of behavioral ‘defect’ their child might have. The common conception here is that these things can be ‘cured’ with things like electrotherapy. There might be internet addiction in the U.S., but parents think differently about it / deal with it differently.”

Additionally, many Chinese internet users will spent a lot of time in public internet cafes, whereas the majority of Americans, I would assume, are comfortably “addicted” on a personal computer in their parent’s basement. University students will often just sleep in the internet cafe, since most dormitories have curfews of around 11:00 / 12:00. As a result, a lot of these behaviors are more observable, especially the all-nighters and subsequent zombie flash mob-esque walks of shame back into campus.

There also seems to be some credibility to the notion that escapism is more attractive here due to greater amounts of alienation. Again, to use a tired U.S. / China comparison, I found myself being beginning to live independent of my parents at 17/18, whereas your average Chinese student will be wholly dependent until they are 22/23 – this seemed fine until a classmate (this guy is 21 years old) said that he still “sleeps with his parents when I go home on vacation because it makes me feel safe.” Your average upwardly mobile Chinese youngster also goes from being an only child, and then thrust into a university setting where s/he has 7 roommates. The feeling of being alone – even surrounded by others in an internet cafe – is probably a very powerful draw for these students.

Regardless, these issues warrant more exploration and attention – especially the promotion of basic safety knowledge among migrant children (that seems like a very low cost high return type activity), and providing constructive (or at least non-destructive?) extra-curricular activities for migrant children.

Some of my favorite headlines: <insert preferred party here> insults all of the Chinese by… The latest affront is the sale of plunder by Imperialist French war criminals and the dilettante charlatans at Christie’s Auction House. In case you’re curious, here’s a list of the countries that have insulted China – and the frequency with which they’ve dared do so (English). 

Perhaps I haven’t quite run into the truly proto-nationalist crowd here yet – but no one really seems to care at all about centuries old tin animal facsimilesnational treasures; and some of the discussion that can be found (see translated comments here) seems downright reasonable. To what extent does Western media report only on headlines (themselves directly from Chinese State-Media outlets, which in these cases naively assert that every single member of the 1.4 billion strong Han diaspora are ‘furious‘)? Should we be worried about such a bias?

In an editorial, ‘Walking along a French Corner, Revealing T|bet’s History” (走上法国街头，展示西藏历史) in yesterday’s Global Times, Professor He Qing (of Tsinghua and Zhejiang Universities) writes:

During the 10 years I spent in France, I conversed with countless French people about T|bet. You could say that for every 10 French people, 9 would be of the opinion ‘T|bet is an independent state – China’s army invaded and is currently occupying (T|bet).’ I’m not sure if this is because of the French education system, the media, or the result of long-term indoctrination. Regardless, the general conviction (among French) is that T|bet is an independent country. 

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This is getting quite a bit of media coverage here – a 22 year old university graduate beaten to death by plain-clothes police. Here’s coverage in English. This occurred on October 11th at Box (a nightclub not too far from HIT – I’ve been there briefly twice). Chinasmack has good coverage of reactions to the incident, from a number of China’ large web-forums. The reactions there are as almost as staggering as the event itself. Opinions are largely divided between “he was a spoiled brat who started the fight and deserved it” and “this is just another example of unwarranted police brutality.”