JISHOU, HUNAN –Chinese observers seem to draw two opposing conclusions from the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The more common (state-approved) conclusion is: capitalism is bad, Marxism is good. The more thoughtful conclusion is: if the Chinese government doesn’t deal with widespread corruption, China might see similar protests in the not-too-distant future.

Recently, one of my friends asked me what Chinese reactions to OWS were. So, I’ve spent some time poring over Internet reports and blogs to get a sense how OWS is playing over here. Since my grasp of Mandarin is weak still, and my access to movers and shakers is limited, take my comments here with a grain of salt.

Official Chinese news coverage tends to characterize OWS as a confrontation between the very poor and homeless (the victims of heartless capitalism) and the rich and powerful (heartless capitalist dogs). The Communist Party is using OWS as an object lesson in the superiority of China’s Marxism.

Comments to an article about the clearing out of Zucotti Park in New York City are representative of netizen reactions. Several comments are rabidly anti-American and pro-Chinese, leading other commenters to accuse those writers of being paid pro-government trolls. (The Party reportedly pays people 5 mao, or 0.50 yuan, to post pro-government comments on the Internet.)

The more staid party publication, Global Times, predicts OWS will amount to nothing in the end and China should just wait and see what happens.

The Global Times, a widely read Chinese tabloid published by Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, noted in an editorial that “western countries can withstand street demonstrations better, since their governments are elected”.

“The conflicts may be minor or serious, but it will not bring significant change,” it added. “China needs to stay calm and observe how the street movements in the Western world develop and to make the rights choices for its own good.”

(From The Telegraph, Oct. 17.)

Lost in this state-approved presentation are several salient truths about OWS. It’s not just a poor people’s movement. OWS draws supporters from the middle class, too, including retired police chiefs, Iraqi war vets, housewives, grannies and working stiffs, as well as scruffy looking students. Chinese media ironically play up police roughly dealing with OWS protesters (subtly implying it’s a government crackdown), while obscuring the freedoms of assembly and free speech that permits OWS to be so widespread.

No one in the current government would dare remind anyone here of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protests, which brought out thousands of students and intellectuals to rally for civil rights and resulted in a quick and brutal reaction by the Chinese police and military. Most of my students, in fact, know very little about that episode in Chinese history.

As an example of how the message of OWS has been skewed, we can look at a street protest in Zhengzhou by supporters of OWS. Some of them included cadres (important workers who are party members) who seemed to believe that OWS was a rally in support of Marxist ideals and against capitalism. Perhaps the protest was Party-sponsored.

Earlier this year, when the Jasmine Revolution was underway in North Africa and the Middle East, the government here quickly acted to foil any similar movements in China. The usual suspects (likely organizers) were rounded up and detained for several months, the Internet was “harmonized” — scrubbed of any rallying cries for a Jasmine Revolution in China — and official media portrayed the successful Arab Spring people’s movements, as yet more evidence for the superiority of the Chinese Way.

Ironies of ironies, you may be thinking, since China was after all founded as a people’s republic after a people’s revolution against a repressive government. That was before all those “peasants” ended up in power themselves, of course.

It’s that bitter irony that other Chinese recognize. The Party and its economic policies of the last 30 years have enabled China to become a major player in the world’s economy and allowed enterprising Chinese citizens to become rich beyond Mao’s imagination. Meanwhile, freedom of expression is tightly controlled, the Internet and media are closely monitored and censored (I had to use a network proxy to search for “Jasmine Revolution,” in fact), and government officials and business magnates help each other become fat cats.

To help grow the economy quickly, the State has given favored businesses considerable freedom to operate as they see fit (another irony, laissez-faire economic policy), sometimes at the expense of the common citizen, whose protests, when allowed, are ultimately pointless. We hear reports of entire city neighborhoods being evicted and razed for a new construction project, of a miner’s widow being denied access to her husband’s remains and being forced to accept a cash payment as compensation for his death, of bad food resulting from lax regulation, poor construction practices, and environmental disasters.

Many have resulted from the close personal and economic relationships that have developed between government officials, who look the other way, and the favored business leaders, who pay them to look the other way. Having given businessmen an inch, China’s political leaders have seen big business take a mile, and become a troublesome barrier to reform.

This is precisely the same message of OWS, which has not been lost on more thoughtful Chinese observers, who warn that China may yet have its own Occupy movement. As long as China can keep its growing middle class content and comfortable with material wealth, protest movements will gain no traction, however. China has largely been insulated from the economic crises of the USA and EU.

But, if the Chinese economy goes sour and middle class folks lose their jobs, homes and comfy lifestyle, China’s leaders will have an enormous problem that all the ‘Net harmonizing in the world will not solve.

—————–
You might also check out this reports.

Stratfor Analysis

Bloomberg analysis

JISHOU, HUNAN — The Atlantic Monthly has an interesting article about the surprising alliance between multinational corporation Walmart and China’s Communist government to improve product quality and foster environmental responsibility among the retailer’s estimated 1,000 Chinese suppliers.

China has been plagued by a series of food-safety scandals and environmental disasters in the last decade. Chinese shoppers no longer trust the products they buy are safe to eat. They trust foreign hypermarkets, like Walmart, Metro and Carrefour, more, and Walmart, for one, is playing that card to its advantage.

Walmart got all green and organic a few years ago, and has been trying to impose its more stringent requirements on its suppliers in China. Thought its prices may be higher for some products, concerned shoppers here are willing to pay extra for products labelled “green” and “organic,” because they trust Walmart is telling the truth.

Meanwhile, China’s central government, which has been woefully ineffective in monitoring regional and provincial food and environmental safety standards, benefits from Walmart’s quasi-governmental influence.

As the article infers, it’s a marriage of convenience that seems to benefit everyone concerned. I recommend reading the whole article. Walmart may treat its workers in the USA like crap, but in some respects it’s not entirely evil.

Never assume anything. That’s true in science, journalism, and working in China. Because the new guy was not here in September to teach the juniors’ Business English classes, he and the students have to make up the missed classes. So, his schedule is 16 classes of just teaching those students that one subject.

That means I will keep on teaching the freshmen, whom I was rather reluctant to give up, anyway. They were also not happy to lose me as their teacher this term. So, in that respect, it’s a win. (I also get paid extra for the extra classes, another winning point.)

On the negative side, I won’t have a respite from my busy teaching schedule. I have 22 classes a week, Monday through Friday, and on two of those days I need to commute to the old campus where the freshmen live. That’s a 20-minute shuttle-bus ride each way. Still, it’s fewer classes than I had as a high school teacher, so I can’t complain too much. And really, I am not complaining. I’m just a little chagrined — I miss those three-day weekends.

Naturally, there were compatibility problems.

There were some major changes to the main university dining hall this summer. The second floor got new tables and chairs, new serving lines and (bless us all) air conditioners. The other big change was, beginning this week, we can no longer pay cash for our meals.

Previously, there were two payment options: good old fashioned cash money and the SIM cards in our cellphones. Most students paid with their phones. Each serving line had a “wave-and-pay” near-field reader: hold your phone against the reader and the meal cost is deducted from your account. It’s a pay-as-you-go arrangement, so students periodically have to refill their accounts at the dining hall or cellphone office.

I, however, just used cash, because I eat less often at the dining hall (also known as the canteen here) than the students do. But that option ended this week. After a two-week transition period of requiring us Luddites to buy meal tickets at the door, the university switched completely to the wave-and-pay system.

For four days, I relied on my forgiving students to pay for my meals with their phones, but today decided it was time to get on the bandwagon. So, my colleague Gordon Ye and I went to the dining hall office to set my phone up.

Except it didn’t work. While my phone is only two years old, the SIM card is older, and not compatible with the payment system. Time to upgrade! Fortunately, there is a China Mobile office on campus, so we headed over there to get a spanking new SIM card for my Nokia.

As with any other upgrade, it always takes 10 times longer than you expect to get it to work. First, the tech said the phone couldn’t accept the new card. I replied several students had the same model phone, and had no problems. He tried again. Success! (But I had to disable my security app twice.) Then I had to drop 100 yuan into my phone account — not so bad, since China Mobile is offering a “pay 100 yuan, get minutes worth 500 yuan” deal for the fall term — and wait for the salesclerk to work her magic on the computer terminal. Then we went to another part of the office to set up the wave-and-pay system on the new SIM card.

Again, there were some small glitches. Another tech asked us what my four-digit employee payroll number is.

“Well, I don’t have one.”
“How does the university pay you, then?”
“Direct deposit, but the Foreign Affairs Office makes those arrangements, not the payroll office.”

I gathered that everyone, except the foreign teachers, apparently has a four-digit number that accompanies their university account. An employee has one for payroll deposits; a student has one for deductions from his or her bank account for tuition and other fees. Gordon worked something out with the tech, and in a few more minutes, my SIM was being programmed and soon had 100 yuan on it for eating at the canteen. (That’s enough for about 25 meals, by the way.)

The entire process, from dining hall to mobile phone office, took two hours. Quicker than upgrading Windows, anyway.

Here’s an excerpt describing the typical day in a Chinese high school. Contrast his description with life in your own high school.

I have to say that high school is a monastery and an army boot camp combined. Eleven classes every day. We had to rise before dawn and went to bed after 11. After the last class, we were encouraged to use any bit of extra time for study. There was one student who would go to read his lessons every night in the toilet, because that was the only place where the light would be kept on 24 hours. Everyone hated him, because his breach of a delicate equilibrium that is vital for us to live in peace with each other — he studied just a little too hard. The school encouraged us to be frugal with our time. It had a slogan hanging from the main building: “Time is like water in sponge; if you squeeze harder, there is always more.”

And contemplate this paragraph about the possible consequences of tying teacher pay to students’ performance on standardized tests.

It was not only the students dealing with a lot of stress, but the teachers as well. A teacher’s salary was determined by how many of the students that they were responsible for went to university. Even the school principal would be evaluated on such statistics. At my junior year, a girl committed suicide. Not a big surprise. There are always weak ones who just can’t make it. That is how natural selection works. The cause of the suicide was that the girl’s head teacher asked her to forgo the college entrance exam. Not that he hated her personally. He simply talked to all the students who were deemed hopeless and would only dilute the average results of the class. The girl refused. The teacher told the girl something that must have been very humiliating, and she drowned herself in the sea that afternoon.

It’s a different world here for students, folks. College is a picnic in comparison to the final three years of secondary education.

I made the Community Spotlight at dKos!

As of right now (1:30 am EST), it’s had 58 comments since I posted it yesterday. And its plea for foreign teachers has netted three responses so far. Not bad for a couple hours of work.

Today – July 25: Yongshun, about two hours from here, co-leader of a teachers’ workshop for middle school English teachers
July 26: leave for Changsha, hang out a day or 2
July 27 or 28: leave for Beijing, hang out till Aug. 1
Aug. 1: Beijing to Tokyo to Los Angeles
Aug. 1 (local time): LA, hang out a couple of days
Aug. 5: Chicago, then W. Lafayette, Indiana
Aug. 6 – 13: ???
Aug. 13: Leave Chicago for Shanghai, arrive Aug. 14 local time
Aug. 14 – ??: Shanghai

I’ll blog when able.