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Helen Gao | The Atlantichttps://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/2013-08-17T20:45:26-04:00Copyright 2019 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.tag:theatlantic.com,2013:50-278729
David Gray/Reuters

Beijing -- In a chapter from his essay collection China in Ten Words, Yu Hua, an acclaimed Chinese writer, recounts the following anecdote from his childhood: In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, Western classic novels, previously denounced as "poisonous weed," started to reappear in the remote village where he lived. Because of the shortage in supply, however, villagers had to purchase these books with ration tickets issued by the local bookstore. On the day the tickets were distributed, Yu arrived at the bookstore at dawn. A line was already snaking out from the entrance, formed by hundreds of villagers who had waited all night long. At 8 a.m., the bookstore owner announced that only 50 ration tickets were available. Yu remembered feeling as if "someone had poured a bucket of icy water over his head in the dead of winter." The 51st person in line, staring at people ahead of him leaving with brand new copies of Anna Karenina and David Copperfield, looked so crushed that the number "51" soon became a village slang for bad luck.

 For book readers in today's China, this episode feels as outdated as the yellowed pages of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. More than three decades into China's economic reform period, the Chinese market is awash in books: The country now boasts the world's largest publishing industry by volume, with 8.1 billion books printed in 2012, up from 7.7 billion the year before. Strolling down the aisles in China's numerous "book cities," customers are greeted by a wide selection ranging from classical Chinese poetry to the top titles on Amazon's best-sellers list. At every other street corner, vendors stand by carts of pirated copies of new releases, hawking titles such as Steve Jobs' biography and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

 Yet the scene described in Yu's book is distant to today's Chinese people for another reason: While the supply of books has exploded in China in recent decades, people's interest in them has not kept up. According to a survey result published by the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication in April, Chinese people read 4.39 books per capita in the past year, a figure that trails far behind major developed countries; for example, the average American read 7, the average French and Japanese person 8.4, and the average South Korean 11. And, on average, Chinese people allocated just over 15 minutes a day to reading, compared to almost 100 to watching television and over 45 for using the Internet. While parents duly chant the old Chinese adage "a book holds a house of gold" to their children, the financial value Chinese consumers place on books doesn't reflect the same conviction; according to the survey, the average price a Chinese person is willing to pay for a 200-page paperback is 13.67 RMB, just slightly over two dollars. That is half the price of a cup of an iced latte at Starbucks, or one-third the average price of a movie ticket.

 In a society with one of the longest literary traditions in the world, where people's avidity for reading drove the invention of paper and movable type, the current state of the book market is surprising, especially given the strides China has made in recent decades in erasing illiteracy and expanding higher education: Government education campaigns reduced the illiterate population from 230 million in 1985 to 50 million in 2011, while the number of college graduates has quadrupled in the past decade. Throughout the world, such progress in education and literacy is usually accompanied by a significant rise in recreational reading, a process that took place in the U.S. and the U.K. following the Industrial Revolution, and throughout the early and mid- 20th century. But in China, the book-reading rate actually dropped over the past 13 years: from 60.4 percent in 2000 to 54.9 percent in 2012.

 Why are the Chinese turning away from reading books? The question has prompted soul-searching among the country's intellectuals, many of whom, like Yu Hua, lament how things have changed since the relatively liberal 1980s. Zhang Lijia, a freelance writer based in Beijing, who wrote a memoir of coming of age during the initial years of the reform period, reminisced fondly about people's passion for reading: "I often had get-togethers with friends where we talked about politics and discussed the books we were reading ," she recalled. "There was such a strong spirit of inquiry." That spirit was decimataed, Zhang says, by China's single-minded pursuit for economic prosperity, which has left its people with little regard for anything else. "People are too restless, too utilitarian," she reflected. "You need some peace in mind in order to be able to sit down with a book."

 Zhang's opinion is echoed by a number of longtime professionals in the book industry, who, since the early days of the industry's market-driven reform, have kept close watch of the public's changing preference in books. Some of them point out that in addition to turning away from books, Chinese people have also abandoned more serious and intellectually enriching stories in favor of easy reads. "In the last decade, best-sellers in China have less intellectual content and have become increasingly practical," said He Xiongfei, a well-known publisher of popular books since the early 1990s. Best sellers in China today, He says, consist mainly of "child-rearing manuals, cookbooks, health and fitness guides, test-preparation books, thrillers, and romance novels."

 Such genres are also popular in the West, but in China, they have pushed more intellectual enriching books into a tight market space that is shrinking by the day. In the 1990s, over 1,500 independent bookstores sprung up in major Chinese cities, selling books about politics and social sciences that rode the public's intense post-Tiananmen Square interest in such topics. But today, just one of the major independent bookstores -- All Sages Bookstore, run by Tiananmen veteran Liu Suli -- remains open in Beijing. "When people talk about the rise of China's middle class, they measure it in terms of their income," said Liu in an interview with Urumqi Evening News in May. "Some of them buy books, but this is just for the purpose of killing time or for test preparation. They are looking for things they think are useful to them. They are not reading."

 He Xiongfei, the publisher, attributes the public's indifference towards serious books to their preoccupation with materialistic goals, as well as the shifting political environment, which he says is choking off Chinese society's space for free-flowing intellectual discourse. "In the decade after the Tiananmen movement, Chinese intellectuals were basically silent. Then, in late 1990s, there was a small renaissance of intellectual debate," He recalled. During that time, he established his reputation in the publishing industry by introducing books by Yu Jie, Qin Hui and Qian Liqun -- all prominent social critics -- to Chinese readers. But then, the atmosphere changed again. "It would be impossible to get Yu published in today's China, not even under a pseudonym," he said. "As such books are getting harder to publish, fewer people are reading them." Yu, a dissident writer, was banned from publishing inside China after briefly seeing his works flourish domestically in the late 1990s. He has since been detained, tortured, and put under house arrest for his criticism toward the Chinese leadership, and eventually chose to seek exile in the United States last year.

***

 Partly as a result of the government's draconian censorship rules, and partly because of the public's changing taste in books, Chinese people have flocked to the Web for more light-hearted fare. According to a 2012 report from the China Internet Network Information Center, almost 200 million Chinese read online literature, although the term lacks a clear definition. A survey by the Chinese research firm iResearch shows that the ten most popular Chinese literature websites receive a total of 12.2 million visitors on an average day. These websites run the gamut of genres, from romance and horror to science fiction and fantasy, and reader interest helps carve them into more specific niches, like military fantasy novels, "officialdom" literature, and stories about time travel. Some websites require readers to pay a small fee, usually less than 5 RMB (80 cents), to access the most popular serialized novels.

 But due to a lack of editorial oversight, the online books vary in quality. Biting social satires, deemed too sensitive for print, mix with martial arts fan fiction from nouveau writers. Distinguished novelists, such as Murong Xuecun, one of China's most prominent social critics, have emerged from the Internet. But the vast majority of the content "belongs to the genre of popular entertainment for the masses," explained Shao Yanjun, a professor at Peking University specializing in online Chinese literature, "whose main goal is to cater themselves to readers' desires," instead of offering literary experiences and knowledge that enrich readers' minds and souls. "The change in the public's preference for the medium of reading reflects a transformation in their taste," said Shao. "Reading is increasingly becoming a purely recreational activity."

 In the U.S., readers who used to buy physical books now flock to digital stores to find content. China's online readers, however, are choosing e-books for precisely what print books lack: critical and realistic depictions of society, and, more often, a cheap form of escape that, not unlike video games and television, offers them a refuge from the complications and concerns of the real world. The average price Chinese readers are willing to pay for an online book is 3.27 RMB, according to the Chinese Academy of Press and Publication survey, or slightly more than 50 cents.

***

 But these approaches prompt the question: Has China left its golden age of reading forever behind?

 Today's China is far different from the closed society in the 1980s, then convalescing from decades of devastating political movements and hungry for intellectual nourishment. It is difficult to imagine that the reading renaissance during that period, kindled by this hunger, would return today. Amid the grim outlook of China's book industry, however, a curious case has emerged: Last December, the Chinese version of the first part of James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake was published after an English professor in a Shanghai university spent eight grueling years translating it. The book became an unexpected hit, with its first run of 8,000 copies sold out in a month.

 What explains its popularity? Some observers attribute it to the publishing house's extravagant marketing campaign, which featured giant billboards in downtown areas in major cities across China; as readers' interests in books dwindle, publishers say, the market performances of books have become increasingly dependent on such campaigns. But others argued that readers are drawn to the book precisely because of the challenges it poses: Its cryptic language, elusive plot, and the literary prestige of the author make the book an intellectual status symbol for the Louis Vuitton-clutching Chinese middle class.

 Still, the translator, Dai Congrong, thinks there are other reasons too.

 "You have to admit that there is a group of people who bought the book out of curiosity and vanity," said Dai, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in March. "But there is also a large group of people who bought the book because they really want to appreciate it."

 Dai said she was pleasantly surprised by the market success of the book. After all, in a country where translations of internationally renowned literature routinely sell less than 1,000 copies, 8,000 copies constitutes a phenomenon. But in a country of 1.3 billion, that isn't saying much.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedWhy Aren't Chinese People Reading Books Anymore?2013-08-15T13:46:06-04:002013-08-17T20:45:26-04:00The country's once-robust trade in serious literature has withered under an increasingly materialistic, results-oriented society.tag:theatlantic.com,2013:50-274764
A man yawns in front of a cell phone store advertising Apple products in Beijing, China. (Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)
On April 2, a catchy headline splashed across the pages of major Chinese newspapers, ending a breathless three-week assault that the Chinese media launched at Apple, which it accused of discriminating against Chinese customers in its warranty policies.

 "Apple Apologizes to Chinese Customers, Promising to Adjust its Warranty Policies" People's Daily announced on its front page. "Apple's Apology is a Step in the Right Direction," titled an editorial on Global Times, its magnanimous tone a stark contrast to the earlier bellicose rhetoric: "As the world's leading high-tech enterprise, Apple can adjust its attitude in a timely manner, showing its professionalism and flexibility," the editorial reads.

 Meanwhile, the discussion unfolding on Weibo, China's popular social media platform, behind the top trending hashtag "Apple Apologized" took on a very different focus. Under Tim Cook's apology letter, reposted from the Chinese version of the Apple website, several commentators rejoiced over the victory Chinese media scored in forcing Apple to "bow its arrogant head," as one user put it. The majority of the commentators, however, were in no mood to celebrate.

 "An aggressive media used its monopoly power to bully others and achieved its political agenda. I don't know why such victory should make one happy," one commentator contended.

 "Hearing about Apple's apology, I am reminded of the Google controversy in 2009," another widely shared comment read, referring to Google's confrontation with the Chinese government four years ago over its censorship policy, which contributed to the company's exit from the mainland. "The company tried to adjust itself while holding its principles, but was still driven out in the end. I never feel it represents a failure on Google's part. When later generations look back on our behaviors today, they will definitely laugh."

 From day one of the Chinese media blitz against Apple, which started with a television exposé on deficiencies in Apple's after-sales services in mid-March, a very different campaign has been unfolding on in Chinese social media. Hundreds of thousands of Weibo users -- students, intellectuals, white-collar workers and celebrities -- voiced their support for the American technological behemoth, while directing their condemnations at the state media for its deplorable public relations tactics. This debate reflects a dichotomy that is increasingly emerging in China- between a heavy-handed, nationalistic government and an increasingly outward-looking public willing to consider global information and ideas.

 Since its flagship store opened in Beijing in 2008, Apple has grown into a shining beacon of success among foreign businesses in China. Thousands of guofen, Apple fans, routinely stand in lines overnight for the release of Apple's newest gadget, and technology geeks, much like their American counterparts, rush to interpret and analyze the devices' novel features. Last year, Apple's sales in China reached $23.8 billion, which made up for 15 percent of its worldwide revenue and ranked China Apple's second largest market after the United States.

 The latest model of iPhone is priced at around $850 in China, two and a half times of the average monthly disposable income of an urban resident. In the luxury-obsessed Chinese society today, where one hears of stories like a college student working at a construction site to pay off the loan he took to buy an Apple product, Apple's significance as a status symbol is not to be underestimated. But deeper reasons also exist for the brand's ultra-popularity in China. On Internet forums, most customers quoted Apple products' superb quality, convenient operating system, and slick design as the biggest draws. Many Weibo users who defended Apple against Chinese media's attacks put iPhone in comparison with domestic mobile products from companies like Huawei, lamenting the gap in user experience with the two brands. "Of course I would choose the better product," one user opined, "and it has nothing to do with which country produced it."

 So far, Apple has not launched many ostensible campaigns to mold its corporate image in China, but here, as in the U.S., the image of the brand is intrinsically linked with its founder, Steve Jobs. Nicknamed "Qiao Bangzhu," or "Master Jobs," the legendary entrepreneur is viewed in China as an iconic innovator whose vision and taste has transcended culture and nationality. With 678,000 copies of his biography sold in the first week of its publication in China, people repeated Jobs' personal story and that of his company with the kind of excitement and reverence rarely displayed for domestic celebrities. They view his life as a quintessential American success story: that a man born into a disadvantageous background could grow up in a tolerant and nurturing society, could try out his ideas in a fair and well-regulated competitive environment, and could go far in life by being an iconoclast instead of a conformist. These conditions form a vivid contrast to the social environment Chinese are all too familiar with at home, where a rigid education system stifles innovation, an immense pressure of living discourages risk-taking, and a connection -- instead of talent-driven environment puts shackles on individual aspirations. Upon Jobs' death in 2011, the Chinese Internet was filled with eulogies, and many shed sorrowful tears. It also set off rounds of deep soul-searching: "Born an orphan, had no college diploma, and without connections, what would happen to Jobs if he were born in China?" some asked.

 On April 1st, after more than two weeks of sustained attacks from Chinese media, Apple offered mea culpa to Chinese authorities. In a letter posted on Apple's official website, CEO Tim Cook apologized for "any concern or misunderstanding" arising from its "insufficient communication" with Chinese government and customers. To this day, it is still unclear what actually triggered the Chinese government's ire: many suggest it may be in retaliation for U.S. government restrictions on Chinese companies like Huawei, and others argue it's simply a "rite of passage" for foreign businesses in China. It was clear, however, that these government-sponsored attacks have largely backfired, as their scathing accusations and nationalistic tone were met with more mockery and anger than applause on the Chinese internet. At a time when China is mired in a slew of domestic issues, from toxic air and poisonous food to drinking water contaminated by tens of thousands of pig corpses, many people were angered by the government's stubborn nitpicking of a foreign brand while turning a blind eye to domestic woes.

 One post on Weibo summed up a widespread public sentiment following Apple's apology. "Apple apologized, but no one apologized for the shoddy schools that collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake; no one apologized for tainted milk powder; no one apologized for SARS cover-up; no one apologized for AIDS villages in Henan, no one apologized for the over 10,000 dead pigs that polluted the Huangpu river."

 In the end, whatever reason lay behind Chinese media's assault at Apple, the brouhaha, like similar episodes experience by other international businesses, reflects the old ham-handed and hostile instinct of Chinese authorities in dealing with foreign influences. More and more, such attitude is at odds with the voices of a more independent-minded and worldly Chinese public. Today's iPhone-wielding, social media-surfing youngsters in China embrace Apple for its chic image, superb product quality, and, increasingly, the kind of society and ideals it symbolizes. Accompanying the material status that owning an Apple product represents should also be the pride and dignity entitled to a modern global citizen, enjoyed by tens of millions of other Apple users around the world, not the kind of dignity, it seems, the Chinese state has ostensibly sought on their behalf in its ferocious campaign.

 "Apple has apologized, and I suggest CCTV, People's Daily and Global Times choose Facebook as its next target," read one wry comment on Weibo. "[Facebook,] you have more than one billion users, and why won't you let the Chinese visit your site? You are discriminating against the Chinese with a double standard. Zuckerberg, please apologize!"
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedHow the Apple Confrontation Divides China2013-04-08T09:00:00-04:002013-04-08T14:34:40-04:00Not everyone in China is proud of the way their government handled a recent fight with the tech giant.tag:theatlantic.com,2013:50-267081
What effect will the Southern Weekend incident have on the future of Chinese media?

 A man reads the cover story of the Southern Weekly at a newsstand in Beijing (Jason Lee/Reuters)

 As the curtain falls on a dramatic week-long standoff between Chinese journalists and their state censors, which had evoked a torrent of public discussion on issues such as freedom of speech, it may have heralded a new era for civil dissidence in China.

 Immediately following the New Year, journalists at Southern Weekend, a newspaper based in the southern province of Guangdong, staged a high-profile protest against their censors, who had watered down the paper's New Year editorial urging greater respect for constitutional rights. The newspaper staff demanded the resignation of Tuo Zhen, the propaganda chief of Guangdong province, and threatened to go on strike, and their moves have galvanized tens of thousands of Chinese free speech advocates. On Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like social network, countless users rushed to post and repost messages about Southern Weekend in an effort to thwart online authorities. Crowds gathered outside the newspaper's headquarters, carrying slogans demanding freedom of expression and other constitutional rights.

 In a nation where censorship is a fact of life, the newspaper staff's brazenness has stunned many observers. The event's quick transformation from an editorial spat into a national-wide political campaign is also remarkable. Together, they are evidence of the public's growing impatience with the state's draconian control of their private lives, and their increasing willingness to find reasons to seek redress for their grievances.

  For a long time, journalists at Southern Weekend, a relatively liberal voice in the Chinese media sphere, have managed to maintain a functional, if uneasy, coexistence with censors. Each article goes through four rounds of scrutiny -- by the reporter, the editor, the managing editor and the editor-in-chief -- before it reaches a group of final "reviewers," mostly retired party-loyal journalists deployed by the state to serve as the newspaper's handlers. To avoid riling the handlers, the paper's staff has over the years learned to exercise their own judgment in navigating the censorship minefield. Although the task of self-censorship has left them disgruntled, by and large they have acquiesced, knowing that the compromises were crucial to the newspaper's survival.

 The censors' most recent meddling with the New Year's Greetings, however, appears to have been the last straw. More than anything else, it has trampled upon the newspaper's sense of journalistic integrity, already weakened through more subtle methods of censorship.

 "It is our view that Minister Tuo Zhen's actions overstep the bounds," wrote a number of former Southern Weekend journalists in an open letter, according to a translation provided by China Media Project. "They are dictatorial ... they are ignorant and excessive."

 "The New Year Greetings is like the face of our publication, and this is a slap in the face," as one journalist -- who left Southern Weekend last year after a 10-year stint and who prefers not to be named -- told me. "If you keep putting up with things like this, how can you live among other media professionals in the industry?"

 If the journalists' anger has led to open letters and a strike, it has led them to conduct some soul-searching among themselves: what have they done, or failed to do, that allowed such things to happen?

 "We are like frogs being slowly cooked in warm water," the former Southern Weekend journalist told me. "We were perishing slowly without knowing it, until this bowl of boiling water was dumped on us."

 "All these years, people like us have seen our articles killed and our voices silenced, and we've started to get used to it. We started to make compromises and to censor ourselves," reflected Lin Tianhong, a Chinese journalist at Renwu magazine, in a message that had been reposted over 5,000 times. "We've gone too far, as if we have forgotten why we had chosen this industry to begin with."

 Just as journalists consider their collective acquiescence to censorship in the past partially responsible for their current humiliation, citizens who decided to speak out are also demonstrating a keener awareness of their own civil responsibilities. Large-scale protests in China in the past were triggered mostly by perceived foreign affronts or economic grievances, and limited mainly to the working class. In the most recent protest over speech, however, both online and on the street, middle- and upper classes have come out in large numbers. Besides the traditionally more vocal government critics like writers, lawyers and academics, movie stars, corporate executives, students, and tens of thousands of other ordinary citizens have joined the fight. Many of their messages at the protests show a new sense of urgency.

 "If I don't stand up today, I won't be able to stand up tomorrow," a sign outside Southern Weekend's Guangzhou headquarter read.

 "We can still choose to stay silent and passive today, in the face of power that has run amok," students at Sun Yat-sen University wrote in an open letter titled "Today, We Have No Choice." "It is because we have yielded to power that it has become unbridled and wanton; it is because we have been silent that the Constitution has become a rubber stamp."

 Similar sentiment has also prevailed on Sina Weibo, where outspoken Web users urged fellow citizens to join their cause. "Don't think press freedom is only the journalists' concern," one user named ConnieLeelixin wrote in a message. "Everyone should have freedom of expression, and that is exactly what [the Southern Weekend journalists] are fighting for."

 "I used to think things were OK as long as I was able to lead my happy life. But now I realize this is the environment we all live in," user mmx139 wrote. "It's the environment our children and grandchildren will live in. If so, how are they going to have a free mind and free will?"

 In a widely reposted message, Web users found inspiration in the story of Rosa Parks, the iconic African American civil rights activist. "Her sitting down allowed African Americans to stand up...Perhaps she wasn't thinking about bravery, but was just very tired, and had had enough of the rules [of racial segregation]," the message read. "When we've all had enough, history has then reached a tipping point."

 Some Western observers have found  parallels  between the current protest and China's democracy movement in 1989. Granted, the new protest, which germinated on the Internet, does not compare in its scale to Tiananmen, which mobilized tens of thousands. The current protestors' demands, which are largely focused on rights enshrined in the constitution, are far less radical than the student rally's cry for democracy and a multi-party system 23 years ago. However, the current protestors do share with their 1989 counterparts a rising level of civil consciousness in their words and actions. They perceive themselves as members of an organic society to which they bear responsibility, and one in which each will be affected by the actions they collectively take or fail to take.

 The Tiananmen movement is still a taboo subject in Chinese public discourse, and few in the most recent protest brought it up. Instead, most protestors made carefully calibrated demands that dovetailed with calls from incoming president Xi Jinping for stronger constitutional protections. Now is a perfect opportunity to test the strength of the leadership's commitment to fulfilling its pledges -- and more tests are sure to come.

 For now, demonstrations over the Southern Weekend spat are winding down, and journalists have returned to work. They put out the paper's newest weekly edition on Thursday. They have extracted promise from provincial officials to loosen some of the intrusive censorship control, and will be closely watching how the deal will be followed through.

 On the day of the agreement, however, another face-off took place at Beijing News, a sister newspaper of Southern Weekend. The News balked at pressure from censors to print an editorial attacking Southern Weekend. The editorial eventually appeared on Wednesday's edition of The News, while a detailed account of the incident offered by a journalist at the paper also came into public view. "The way news is managed, I feel that I should be a witness," it began.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedA Press Renaissance? The Legacy of China's 'Southern Weekend'2013-01-11T12:05:33-05:002013-01-14T15:48:55-05:00What effect will the Southern Weekend incident have on the future of Chinese media?tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-262441
Chinese web users seem to lean toward Obama, but mostly seem love the populism of American politics, a sharp contrast to their own system as well as a reminder of how much the two societies have in common.

Chinese youth pose next to a cardboard cutout of President Barack Obama. (AP)

After the Democratic and Republican National Conventions closed, as candidates charged back to the campaign trail and as the American media moved on, the campaign speeches made their way across the Pacific Ocean to China, where they are still echoing. While the conventions might be derided within the U.S. as political theater, they have sparked nuanced, even fond discussions among tens of thousands of Chinese, about the differences between the American and Chinese political styles.

First lady Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month was such a hit on the Chinese web that one user started a translation contest on Weibo, China's twitter-style service, for a line that had rapidly become the most popular: "We were so young, so in love, and so in debt." Thousands pitched in their ideas, giving creative spins to the unembellished sentence. It was reinvented in the edgy vocabulary of Chinese hipsters, in various provincial dialects, and, in some hilarious attempts, in classical Chinese. Some of the last, if translated back into English, might read roughly as: "Once upon a time, our love saw no boundaries and debt had no limit" or "In those years of green plums and bamboo horses [Chinese idiom referring to youth], our love was ocean-deep, and debt mountain-high."

The translation contest, embraced by Chinese web users with giddy interest, is just one indication of a growing Chinese fascination with American politics and political figures, kindled by the colorful events and bustling campaigns of the U.S. presidential election season. In the past few weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese tuned to the convention speeches as they took place. Volunteer translators rushed to attach Chinese subtitles to online videos and photos of these speeches just hours after their delivery. Mesmerized by what they saw, web users poured their feelings into discussion threads on Weibo that ran thousands of posts long. Despite popular sentiment here that can be at times hostile to the U.S., Chinese web users have this month expressed wonder and praise for American politicians' public demeanors, oratory, and the personal characters that they perceived shining through.

The Chinese adoration for U.S. politics might surprise Americans who have grown frustrated with their politicians and cynical about their government. But it's a reminder of the wide gulfs between the American and Chinese systems, and of a growing Chinese discontent toward their own leaders. It also reflects the similarities in the economic and social challenges both countries face, and the hopes and concerns both citizens share; a possible explanation for the conventions' resonance in China is that the issues the campaigns are addressing also happen to be on the minds of many Chinese right now.

A trait of American politics that Chinese seem quickest to embrace is its open, energetic campaign and the very public personalities of its politicians. Long accustomed to following Chinese politics through the limited scope of state media, where they see robotic officials droning through scripted speeches to halls of stone-faced listeners on the evening news, Chinese observers often refer to the vivid and engaging American campaigns as "entertaining political carnivals," and liken political figures to rock stars and movie actors.

"I only understood one word," touzilicai-shangchao said on Weibo after watching former President Bill Clinton's speech, "but the confidence, humor, and ease he carries shows infinitely superiority over those who just read off a script. People offstage are clapping -- and notice -- voluntarily and spontaneously!" It's a reminder of how different the two political scenes can feel that a Weibo user would think to notice that the audience applauded voluntarily.

"Look at how full of energy American elections are," Jerrychanist commented on Republican candidate Mitt Romney's speech. "Unlike in a certain other country, where everyone raises their hands to agree, and everything passes unanimously."

"A presidential speech there looks just like a rock star's concert, with fans listening to their idol and cheering for him," houqingchundexiaoyoushang observed of President Obama's speech, unintentionally (and, probably, unknowingly) echoing a frequent Republican criticism of Obama. "On the other hand, how big is the chance for common patriotic citizens like me to get excited for a concert of our own leaders in my lifetime?"

Weibo user Stefason said he wished he could put his excitement into action: "My blood is boiling. I can't wait but wish I could vote for Obama immediately!"

Chinese watchers often say that it's the deeper aspects of American politics, beyond the charisma of individual politicians, that they find most moving. Among them: humanity and humility that American leaders seem to so highly value. Having learned in school about the Communist proletarian principles and the motto "serve the people," many Chinese people also value these concepts as defining qualities for good leaders, but often express disillusionment when party leaders don't seem to follow those same ideals.

"When our leaders stop lecturing us with a stern face, when their wives stop putting on airs to give us a lesson, when they can reach to us with sincerity, as 'one of us,' that is the time when China will become civilized," reflected Wang Weijia on Weibo. His message alludes to a recent incident in an eastern Chinese city that stoked public anger, in which a drunken Chinese official and his wife verbally and physically bullied a flight attendant. For this reason, Wang said, he liked Michelle Obama's speech, which conveyed precisely the message he was looking for: "Michelle touched me not as a first lady, but as 'one of us.' "

Other Chinese web users said they were likewise captivated by the personal touches in Michelle's speech, which at over 60,000 retweets on Weibo and nearly 10 million views on video sites, appeared to be the most popular convention speech with Chinese web users. Her anecdote of president Obama sitting down with his daughters for dinner every night to help with "strategizing about middle school friendship" seemed to pull at a number of Chinese heartstrings. "To the fathers who always say you have too much work to spend time with your kids," some asked, "are you much busier than Obama?"

Another favorite line from the speech was, "At the end of the day, my most important title is still 'mom-in-chief.'" Zhipingdesanfentian, along with many others, felt Michelle's story, about the striving of her own generation and her hopes for the next, deeply resonated with the Chinese experience. "Regardless of your nationality and race ... motherly nature is in our DNA," she wrote. "I don't care much about fancy food or nice clothes for myself ... but when I think about my future child, I only want to do what I can to give him the best of everything."

While Chinese discontent with their own officials may be one reason for their eagerness in embracing Western leaders, another may be their distance from less-idealized American social and political realities. U.S. debates over contentious domestic topics -- immigration, gun access, abortion rights, same-sex marriage -- can feel like distant bickering to the Chinese public, which after all lives within a drastically different social-political context and is unaccustomed to watching their government clash publicly over policy.

Americans have learned to filter out rhetoric and to distance themselves from politicians' speeches in ways that Chinese have not had to, which can sometimes make following U.S. politics a confusing and emotional event. The feelings that RIOxu described in his Weibo message are not uncommon among Chinese watchers of American politics: "I've been paying attention to American election for months," he wrote, "and after watching Obama's early speeches, I thought Americans must be nuts not to vote for him; then I watched Republican Congressman Paul Ryan's speech supporting Romney, I thought you must be nuts to vote for Obama; after watching Michelle and Clinton's speeches in the past two days, however, I feel that even if I'm nuts, I will definitely still vote for Obama."

Still, some American campaign messages seem to have resonated particularly well in China. Many web users, after watching the speeches, repeated their favorite lines in the comment section: "Success isn't about how much money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives"; "When you've worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity, you do not slam it shut behind you. You reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed"; and "We don't turn back, we leave no one behind. We pull each other up."

China, after all, is plagued by similar concerns as the country faces as its once-in-a-decade power transition: a widening income gap, a distrust of the government and the wealthy, a disgruntled middle class, and a young generation that faces a dismal job market and stalled social mobility. Sound familiar? A recent survey shows that the top 10 percent of Chinese households now controls 87 percent of the nation's wealth, an increase from 41 percent just a decade ago (the current figure for the U.S. is 74.5 percent). Most citizens, however, don't need to see the statistics to feel the difference: expensive groceries, skyrocketing housing prices, unaffordable hospital fees, the exodus of children from wealthy families to high schools and universities abroad, the list goes on.

It can seem that many Chinese, judging by the scale and sentiment of their online discussions of the U.S. political conventions, express more favor for the Democratic Party's campaign over that of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party's apparent orientation toward the working and middle classes, as well as its emphasis on a greater government role in improving economic and social equality, seem to appeal to a Chinese public growing exceedingly cynic toward its own corruption-laden government, and yearning for a visionary, trustworthy leadership.

"'We're all in this together,' what a great governing concept!" houyangrandy wrote admiringly under Bill Clinton's speech video, quoting the powerful line from the former president. "But for us, it can only be 'you are on your own.'"

The online reactions to Romney's speech seem to have been a bit more lukewarm. While some praised him for his public speaking skills, others criticized his vague platform and his "hegemonic" foreign policy, a common phrase in China to describe all that is loathed about American policy toward China. "Romney is a good actor," kongziV commented. "He criticized Obama and talked about his own belief, which is all fine. But he didn't talk much about what he is going to do." Lianhuashenglotus picked up his reference to China in the speech: "He asked: 'Does the America we want borrow a trillion dollars from China?' and the audience shouted: 'No!' So scary! Are they not going to return it? Anyway, it's good practice material for English speaking and listening comprehension!"

However Chinese observers perceive American leaders -- as rock stars or devoted parents, enlightened thinkers or convincing actors -- their reactions were a moment of transparency and understanding rarely achieved between these two societies, which are often obscured from one another by the strongly worded, assumption-driven discourse between the two governments and in mainstream media.

"Chinese public is paying more attention to [American politics]. They would rather see with their own eyes, listen with their own ears, and make their own judgment," Guanxinsam, a volunteer translator of the campaign videos told me when I asked why he undertook the project. In his late 20s and working a daytime job teaching test tutorials to Chinese students who hope to study overseas, he says he translates videos in his spare time, with the hope of presenting to the Chinese public "an authentic picture of the clash of speeches and opinions abroad." His other translation projects, he explains, include segments from The Daily Show, Real Time with Bill Maher, and the British Prime Minister's weekly Q&A session with the House of Commons.

Why are these videos gaining such traction on Chinese social media? Besides the entertaining drama and the celebrity appeal, it's "the back-and-forth dialogue, [the ability to] openly question and discuss politics," Guanxinsam told me, all factors that are taken for granted in the U.S. but not as normal in China. "In fact, everyone knows the reasons."

But Chinese attitudes toward the U.S. are complicated, often tinged by resentment and suspicion as well as admiration. Within the enthusiastic Chinese applause for American leaders, it is not difficult to detect a hint of bitterness and jealousy: lines of generous praise are often followed by a note of self-doubt on behalf on their own nation. The cynicism in some comments can sometimes reflect anti-Western sentiment, or a distrust of politicians from the U.S. as well as China.

"[Whether] it is real democracy or good acting, should we be watching with admiration or standing by with folded arms?" wangran, a private investment bank manager wrote in a much-tweeted message. "Keep watching, and we will be able to tell."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedEnvy and Spectacle: America's Presidential Race Finds an Adoring Audience in China2012-09-17T07:47:42-04:002012-09-21T12:48:32-04:00Chinese web users seem to lean toward Obama, but mostly seem love the populism of American politics, a sharp contrast to their own system as well as a reminder of how much the two societies have in common.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-261422
The same patriotic feelings that send Chinese to rally for national sovereignty over disputed islands might also explain their surprising and apparently conflicting answers to an online discussion.

Protesters carry banners reading "Declare War Against Japan" and "Japan Get Out of Diaoyu Islands" in Beijing. (AP)

There was another side to the anti-Japanese demonstrations that rocked Chinese cities this weekend, reacting to Japanese activists who had landed on a disputed island chain in the East China Sea. As Chinese protesters asserted their national prestige in ways symbolic and not, their countrymen on social media held a very different discussion on the Diaoyu Islands controversy. These two Chinese reactions, seemingly contradictory, hint at the contours and complexities of Chinese nationalism, and what it means for China both domestically and abroad.

 A web user named oncebookstore posted a question on Weibo, China's twitter-style social network: "If your child were born on the Diaoyu Islands, what nationality would you pick for him/her: Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong or the mainland?" (The islands, also known as the Senkakus in Japan, are claimed by China, Taiwan, and Japan.) It went viral on Sunday, retweeted over 20,000 times in nine hours before censors took it down around midnight. The surprising results would seem to contradict the popular anti-Japanese protests, undercut the government's efforts to stoke patriotism, and may well baffle outside observers: Chinese respondents overwhelmingly picked places other than mainland China. Around 40 percent answered Taiwan, followed by Hong Kong with about 25 percent, followed by Japan. Mainland China was the least popular option. A formal poll, set up on Weibo after the original post was pulled, returned similar results, with Japan at 20 percent and the mainland at 15.

 Chinese will march in the streets to proudly declare their nation's sovereignty over these five rock-like, uninhabited islands, but when it comes to picking which flag could hypothetically adorn their child's passport, China comes last. How could that be? Judging by the surprise and disbelief in the poll's comment section, the result confuses even the Chinese themselves.

 Though contradictory at first glance, the sentiment at the anti-Japanese protests and that revealed by the Weibo quiz are perhaps not as inconsistent as they might appear, and could highlight the dual nature of the nationalistic feelings deeply rooted in Chinese society today. The same Chinese nationalism that drives citizens to stand up for their native land when outside forces challenge it could also sharpen their pain when they observe the depressingly wide gap between China as it is and China as they wish it could be. Some of the Weibo poll respondents suggested that, although they might have grudgingly picked Taiwan or Hong Kong or even Japan for their child's hypothetical nationality, it wounded them not to choose mainland China as they wished they could. Therein lies the common ground between the nationalism of the Diaoyu marches and what you might call the national humility on display in the Weibo poll.

User wang-wei-bin confessed his conflicted feelings after answering the poll in a Weibo message: "Sigh. I picked Taiwan, but in fact I love this country. Just that I feel it doesn't love me."

 "The reason I picked Japan is that I don't want to see my son becoming a traitor to his country like me," feiyuchuqing explained. "What terrible statistics," she said of the results to which she had contributed.

 "If I had a girl I would perhaps pick Taiwan, and if a boy, Japan, but in any case I would always be waving the Chinese national flag on the rocks of the Diaoyu Islands," another user wrote in a response that had been widely retweeted before disappearing with the original quiz.

 "Political slogans aside, as a citizen of the globe, I would rather have the next generation growing up in an place like Taiwan or Japan," said zuzhanggaocangwentai. "I don't want them to have to take poisonous baby formula, sit in brainwashing classes, and love the party that hurts its people."

 Weibozhuanping also saw potential social advantage abroad: "If we speak about society instead of politics, Japan has the most fair and humane society. Workers and farmers won't have as hard a time there as they do in China."

 "I vote for Taiwan," said yingdedaobie, "because that's where you get to vote."

 In fact, web users' responses seemed to be driven more by a deep discontent with the current China than by a veneration for these more developed economies: a large number of participants put their answers as bluntly as "Anywhere but the mainland."

 The popularity of the quiz and the heated discussion it engendered also provide a window into the Chinese public's struggle to reconcile the frustrating social realities surrounding them with the lofty patriotic ideals they have long internalized, partly as a natural result of living in one of the world's oldest and most storied societies, and partly through China's public education and mainstream discourse. These ideals have featured prominently in recent large-scale public protests against perceived foreign aggression: the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, controversy over Japan's tendentious history textbooks, a 2005 dispute over the ownership of the Diaoyu Islands, and as a reaction against the international demonstrations against China during the torch relay prior to the 2008 Olympics. These perceived foreign insults all brought Chinese national rage to a boiling point and monopolized domestic discourse for weeks. This time, however, as the familiar government rhetoric on the islands disputes rolls on, a large portion of the public seems to be distracted by two sensational episodes of domestic disorder: the hunt for a high-profile and notorious serial killer, and the sentencing of a disgraced party official's wife.

 As domestic woes increasingly surface in public discourse here (partly because the rise of social media makes them easier to discuss) and as China sometimes-uneasily engages with the world, Chinese citizens' perceptions of patriotism may be changing. In an essay titled "Patriotism with Chinese Characteristics," Li Chengpeng, a popular blogger and prominent social critic movingly described this struggle and transformation. Having long been a "typical Chinese patriot," as Li calls himself, he saw his beliefs challenged after witnessing evidence of corruption and government ineptitude during a trip to Sichuan after the 2008 earthquake. "My definition of patriotism changed," he wrote, "patriotism is not about bullying mothers of children who died in the earthquake, while calling for people to stand up to the foreign bullies of our motherland. ... [It] is about speaking more truth ... about dignity for the Chinese people."

 Oncebookstore, the creator of the Weibo quiz, agrees. The owner of an independent bookstore in a southern Chinese province, he told me that his initial hope in asking the uncomfortable question was to make the public aware that "there are more pressing issues than the Diaoyu Islands."

 "I hope Chinese people can show as much solidarity as they did in protecting the Diaoyu Islands every time someone is illegally evicted from his house by officials; I hope they can shout like they did to save the pro-China Diaoyu activists every time a Chinese dissident is arrested," he posted on his blog immediately after putting up the quiz.

 "Farmlands, houses, and families, they should be the Diaoyu Islands in our heart."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedDiaoyu in Our Heart: The Revealing Contradictions of Chinese Nationalism2012-08-22T08:00:22-04:002012-08-22T09:30:21-04:00The same patriotic feelings that send Chinese to rally for national sovereignty over disputed islands might also explain their surprising and apparently conflicting answers to an online discussion. tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-260845
A less insular and more worldly China may be turning away from the sport of Mao Zedong's ping pong diplomacy, once a source of tremendous national pride and obsession.

China's Xu Zengcai, left, and Jiang Jialiang compete at the 1988 Olympics. (AP)

The memory lives in every grown-up Chinese: huddling in front of the television with family and friends, the snacks and beer on the table, all eyes glued to a tiny bouncing ball on the screen as the rhythmic ka-donk, ka-dink, ka-donk, ka-dink fills the otherwise silent room. Table tennis, China's unofficial national sport since the 1950s, has given millions of Chinese a taste of national glory and prestige long before their country's more recent rise. Olympic table tennis, in which China has won 23 of 27 gold medals, stirs a national craze that can make it feel like China's Superbowl. But this year, though Chinese state media has covered and re-covered the London matches just as obsessively as before, somehow table tennis failed to evoke the same breath-holding and fist-waving of previous years. Even before the London games, the sport's waning popularity in China had become evident. But, just as table tennis in China was always about much more than just table tennis, so too is its decline a sign of something bigger. As the nationalism that once fueled this sport's popularity recedes, and as China focuses less within and more on the outside world, its increasingly globally minded citizens are shifting their attention to Western sports. China isn't a marginal country anymore, their thinking seems to go, so why should Chinese athletics focus on such a marginal sport?

The history of table tennis in China has long symbolized, and at moments played a direct role in, the fate of the nation. First invented by Victorian English in the 1880s, its early popularity was confined mostly to European intellectuals and aristocrats. Then, in the wake of World War II, as China just rose up from its century of humiliation, it absorbed this parlor game from the imperial power and made it China's own. In the early 1950s, when the International Table Tennis Federation recognized the Communist Chinese government in Beijing over the exile leadership in Taiwan (something the U.S. wouldn't do until 1979), Mao Zedong decreed table tennis the national sport, and invested heavily in cultivating competitive players. China won its first world champion in 1959, defeating Japan on an international stage, a symbolic repudiation of Imperial Japan's brutal 1930s invasion of China. "We listened [to the table tennis match] on the radio with such anxiety and expectation," recalled He Fuming, a retired journalist, of a much-celebrated 1965 match against Japan. "When Zhuang [Zedong] defeated the Japanese, he's all everyone talked about on the street and on the buses."

Perhaps the most famous moment in Chinese table tennis was when Zhuang Zedong befriended an American player named Glenn Cowan at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Japan. The U.S. had still not even recognized the Bejing government, and Cold War tensions defined the standoffish U.S.-China relationship. Zhuang's bold gesture handed Mao a pretext for the first small sign of détente with the United States: ping pong diplomacy. He immediately invited the U.S. table tennis team to visit, which paved way for President Richard Nixon's historic trip the next year.

As Henry Kissinger later said of the 1971 match in Beijing, "One of the most remarkable gifts of the Chinese is to make the meticulously planned appear spontaneous." But the sport was popular for non-political reasons as well. In cramped urban neighborhoods or impoverished rural areas, ping pong tables made of a concrete slate and a row of bricks became a ubiquitous presence. Students played with their teachers, grandparents with their grandkids, and factory supervisors with their workers. In a society sometimes fraught with class or political divisions, the table can be a great equalizer.

China's dominance in table tennis has grown, since its 1988 introduction at the Olympics, into a near-monopoly. In 2008, the Chinese teams won the gold, silver, and bronze in both men's and women's singles, as well as gold and silver in both doubles. As international sports writers sometimes point out, qualifying for the Chinese national team is harder than winning the Olympics. Some players, finding the competition at home too fierce, have chosen to immigrate abroad. Chinese players now so heavily populate foreign teams that the International Table Tennis Federation, fearing the practice was stifling local talent in other countries, announced new rules after the Beijing Olympics that make it harder for the Chinese players who relocated to represent foreign teams.

In London, China is again so dominating the matches that its gold medal was a foregone conclusion before the matches were even over: in the men's and women's finals, Chinese players stood at both sides of the tables. This time, though, once-obsessive Chinese audiences were barely watching. According to the state sports channel, television ratings for table tennis have plunged since the Beijing Olympics. Though official data is still unavailable, the Chinese television rating for the finals at the 2009 World Table Tennis Championships is just 0.5 percent, down from above 5 percent in 2007.

"Watching these games is like watching a TV series that has been on for 53 years, with the same plot repeated over and over again," a columnist complained in a Chinese newspaper, lamenting the lack of suspense in Olympic table tennis. On Weibo, China's Twitter, table tennis is increasingly described as China's "lonely national sport."

"The Olympic committee should cancel badminton and ping pong. They are so boring!" Duren007 wrote in a Weibo tweet.

"Mah-jongg should be listed as an Olympic sport. Then it will at least have a few more thousands of millions of audience," yushenhanyuhuanglaozhinei joked. "It can win more glory for China than ping pong."

The impression that the sport's popularity is declining in China can seem widespread here, especially among young people. Once hailed as the populist "all-people sport," it is now increasingly perceived as a leisure activity for seniors. In street parks, retired cadres pass the ball back and forth as their grandchildren crowd into nearby courts in Jordan sneakers to play what often feels the new national sport: basketball.

"We also played ping pong. But, as boys, we want something that makes us drip in sweat," explained Wang Chen, a basketball lover and a rising sophomore at Yale University from China. On a national level, athletes like basketball star Yao Ming and the hurdler Liu Xiang are new symbols of China's athletic prowess. Swimmers Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen, after their record-breaking performance in London, sparked celebration here in Beijing, while the table tennis victories barely raised an eyebrow.

The once-strong link between table tennis and China's national prestige seems to be weakening as people here move on from the old, somewhat insular ways. Even the party's top-down management of the national athletic system has entrenched the perception of table tennis as a symbol of an outdated China. Chinese Olympians are handpicked by state coaches while they're as young as five or six, sent to sports schools and honed through thousands of hours of practice. Though match fixing is no longer standard practice as it used to be, players are encouraged to put the team's glory above their own. "I don't feel any pressure now," as second seed Wang Hao admitted to the Telegraph before his final against teammate Zhang Jike, "because we are both playing for China."

But is China's single-minded pursuit of gold medals taking something away from the long-popular sport? It's a question more Chinese are starting to ask. In an essay titled "Chinese Ping Pong: Winning the World, Losing the future," blogger Ding Zhengyu argues, "Nobody likes to watch table tennis, because there is no suspense. For a sport to have a future in any country, having strong rivals matters more than winning medals. ... China should abandon its top-down management of table tennis and leave it to the market." He's not alone in losing his enthusiasm for the sport. "When I was young I used to cheer for every medal China won. Now I started to feel the Olympic events like table tennis and badminton are boring," user dingyizhou_1983 wrote on Weibo. "Behind each gold medal is taxpayers' hard-earned money."

As China has become more educated, more middle class, and more worldly, its tolerance for heavy-handed state management of athletics, and perhaps other areas, is running low. With the enormous rise in popularity of sports such as basketball and soccer -- if not necessarily more Western, then certainly less intrinsically Chinese -- table tennis might soon descend from its long-held place at the center of Chinese sports to the back alleys and street parks where children play and seniors relax.

When three-time world champion Zhuang Zedong first met the American player Glenn Cowan on a bus in Nagoya in 1971, he presented Cowan with a silk-brocade scarf, bearing the image of a Chinese landscape, as an ice-breaking gesture. Glenn, a flamboyant hippie with a floppy hat over long locks, later gave Zhuang a T-shirt with a peace sign and the words "Let it be" written on it. After 40 years, these words seem to be finally reaching China's ping pong tables.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedChina, Still the World Champ, Is Falling Out of Love With Table Tennis2012-08-08T06:00:09-04:002012-08-07T18:23:21-04:00A less insular and more worldly China may be turning away from the sport of Mao Zedong's ping pong diplomacy, once a source of tremendous national pride and obsession.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-258787
China wants inventors and entrepreneurs, but its schools, built around the notorious gaokao exam, are still designed to produce cookie-cutter engineers and accountants.

A student, studying for the gaokao, naps on a desk during his lunch break in a classroom in Hefei. (Reuters)

On the morning of June 7 every year, Beijing's normally chaotic streets fall silent. Police patrol the main roads on motorcycles, as construction workers put down their hammers and power down their cranes, and rowdy taxi drivers finally take their hands off the horn. It is the first day of gaokao, the annual, nationwide college entrance exam, which will decide the college matriculation of the nine million or so students who take it. Sitting for nine hours over two days, students are tested on everything from Chinese and math to geography and government. The intense, memorization-heavy, and notoriously difficult gaokao can make the SAT look like a game of Scrabble. How they do on the test will play a big role in determining not just where they go to college but, because Chinese colleges often feed directly into certain industries and fields, what they do for the rest of their life. It's an enormously important moment in any Chinese student's life, which is part of why high schools here dedicate months or even years to preparing for the test.

In many ways, the gaokao is symbolic of China's rise, with millions of Chinese striving and competing to pull up themselves and their nation. But it's also symptomatic of how far China still has to go, as the country tries to shift its economy from exports to domestic consumption, from assembling products to designing them. China's gaokao-style education system has been great at imparting math and engineering, as well as the rigorous work ethic that has been so integral to China's rise so far. But if the country wants to keep growing, its state economists know they need to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity, neither of which is tested for on this life-determining exam.

In 2010, an international standardized test found that junior high school students in Shanghai had outperformed their peers in rest of the world in math, science, and reading, beating the U.S. averages by a wide margin. Many in the West saw it as an alarming indication of their own decline, but in many ways it was a sign of the amazing growth of Chinese education over past three decades, rebuilt from shambles after the decade-long Cultural Revolution ended in 1976. So far, it has served China phenomenally: its nine-year compulsory education system, installed in 1986, has boosted the country's literacy rate to around 92 percent (it was 67 percent as of 1980) and prepared millions of eligible young people for the rapidly expanding workforce. Now, however, as the economy shows signs of cooling, Chinese leaders are trying to engender more domestic innovation.

They hope to see an educated workforce, rather than toiling on factory floors or sitting in the cubicles of Western companies' Chinese branches, found their own businesses or brands that will sell to domestic as well as international buyers. They want domestic moviegoers to stop purchasing bootleg DVDs of Western blockbusters, and for foreign viewers to start raving about Chinese films. But the nation's education system, instead of channeling the youthful energy of China's next generation, seems to be blocking it.

When I first came to the U.S. to start school here, after having just finished my junior year at a high school in my native Beijing, I quickly learned that the challenge I faced was more than just a language barrier. The analytical essays on my history tests felt dauntingly, even impossibly amorphous compared to the straightforward multiple-choice questions that had long characterized my exams. (The nature of China's New Democratic Revolution? Anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism, and anti-bureaucratic capitalism, in that order. The Nationalist Army's stance during the anti-Japanese war? Passively counteracting Japan and actively combating the Communist Party, as neatly summarized by the textbook.) I was used to strictly formatted Chinese argumentative essay topics, for which I had memorized hundreds of paragraphs that I could organize like jigsaw puzzles. Western-education-style papers on, for example, the significance of symbols in a novel was not the sort of expressive, creative thinking for which my Chinese teachers had prepared me.

Education experts in China have debated the perks and flaws of the country's rote teaching style for years, but most students, comfortably immersed in a system that rewards and reinforces their ability to memorize and emulate instead of to analyze and question, might not as easily realize its limits from the inside. But some have rebelled, such as the well-known Han Han, China's most popular blogger. He sparked a small national controversy when, announcing that the Chinese education system left too little room for his more disruptive style of thinking, he dropped out of high school. In one essay, he mocked Chinese education, comparing it to "standing in the shower wearing a padded coat." In other words, he sees it as an exercise absurdly ill-suited to achieving its goals. "The problem with our education is that no one will go take a shower naked," he wrote, "but too many are taking the shower with a padded coat."

Students with ideas that deviate from the official orthodoxy often seem to struggle in China's education system, as do students whose pursuits differ from the system's rigidly defined standards for talent and success. Most students are required to take the same classes regardless of their talents or interests. Their achievement is measured solely by their scores in gaokao, and hobbies not convertible into gaokao points are deemed distractions. Why play soccer or take part in the student council, after all, if it leaves less time for cracking chemistry problems? You live and die by your numbers, starting with your gaokao score, a value system that is reinforced by employers and families alike. Many people in China know and even venerate the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropping out of college to start their own businesses. But when I told Chinese friends that a college classmate was taking a gap year to do mountaineering, they responded with baffled looks.

Whatever your formula for innovation -- diversity of thought, collaboration, risk-taking -- you're not likely to find it in abundance in Chinese schools, where high-stake tests pit students against one other in a zero-sum competition that can feel a little more Hunger Games than think tank. "[When] you feel that the guy sitting beside you is your potential enemy who may rob you of a lifetime of happiness, altruism is not going to be your guide," gaokao veteran Eric Mu wrote in an essay on Danwei titled, "Confessions of a Chinese Graduate." If you find a question you can't answer you certainly don't ask a classmate for help, Mu explained, because "[to] offer your knowledge or even your questions for free is not only time consuming but an aid to your enemies." Students whose unsatisfactory test scores lower their class's average often become social outcasts, as do the students who make everyone else toss in their sleep by working just a little too hard. Teachers and headmasters, whose reputations and salaries are tied to their students' exam scores, have more of an interest in maintaining a good average than in, say, dedicating extra time to a struggling student.

China needs a generation of entrepreneurs to develop a more innovative economy, its national leaders know, but a recent report found that only 1.6 percent of Chinese college graduates started businesses last year, the same as the year before. Opening up local e-commerce stores or restaurants is great, but it's nothing yet on the scale of a Chinese Apple or a Chinese Facebook. The nation's high-profile entrepreneurs, such as Pan Shiyi and Zhang Lan, are worshipped by young, middle class Chinese. But these business megastars are largely perceived as distant celebrities, rather than as role models who should -- and can -- be emulated.

Chinese elementary school textbooks tell the stories of the "Four Great Chinese Inventions": the compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing. First coined by Francis Bacon out of admiration for how powerfully these inventions had reshaped the world, the term is promoted by the today's leaders as evidence of the creative wisdom that runs through China. Chinese educators, eager to surface more young innovators like Cai Lun, who made the world's first sheet of paper, have decided to immortalize the great inventor in their own way, by embedding his name into a three-point multiple-choice question of the gaokao history exam.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedThe Education System That Pulled China Up May Now Be Holding It Back2012-06-25T07:12:18-04:002012-06-25T14:10:48-04:00China wants inventors and entrepreneurs, but its schools, built around the notorious gaokao exam, are still designed to produce cookie-cutter engineers and accountantstag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-258090
Ever-controversial Global Times published a surprisingly frank editorial that hit on a long-running Chinese debate over reform, governance, and democracy.

A woman leans over copies of Global Times at a newspaper stand in Shanghai. (AP).

In the airtight Chinese print media world, where officials wield the power to splash the same headline across many newspaper front pages or to keep a taboo subject out of even obscure one-line advertisements, editorials are usually painless scratches over petty social occurrences. One would not expect them to engage their millions of readers on a controversial subject. But that's exactly what Global Times, circulation 2 million, did when it addressed Chinese government corruption. With one unsigned editorial, the paper sparked a heated, if apparently unintended, debate on a sensitive topic that is usually a no-go zone for such large, public discussions.

The tabloid newspaper, owned and published by party mouthpiece People's Daily, dropped a bomb with its editorial last week titled "Fighting Corruption Is a Strenuous Battle in China's Social Development." It argues that corruption exists in all countries, including China, which will not be able to eliminate it any more than can any other country. Rather, it says, the key is to contain corruption to a level that citizens will accept. Comparing China to democratic Asian countries that are also dealing with corruption, the editorial reads, "China is possibly the country in Asia right now where 'the pain of corruption is most keenly felt.'" But unfortunately there is no quick remedy to this pain, because "corruption in China cannot be eliminated through fighting against it or through reform. ... It is a problem embedded in Chinese society's overall level of development," and thus "needs to be solved through 'development.'"

 In other countries, this would hardly be a provocative or even especially interesting statement. But China is not other countries, and the editorial has drawn disbelief, ridicule, and satire on social media here. The editorial is surprising not for acknowledging that corruption is a widespread problem but for telling readers that they should resign themselves to accepting that "proper level" of corruption. In appearing to diverge from the official line that the Communist Party is committed to fighting corruption in all its forms, and suggesting that it is even willing to accept some corruption, the editorial has unwittingly reinforced many peoples' worst beliefs about their government and its true intentions.

"A proper level of corruption? What level? What kind of logic is this?" user Hailiuliu asked on his Weibo account.

"Yes, we should also understand a proper number of high-speed rail crashes, a proper level of poison in milk, a proper amount of leather in food, a proper use of torture in extracting testimonies, a proper sum of compensation for forced eviction and demolition, a proper reduction in reported embezzled money, a proper degree of lies in news, proper distortion of truth, proper screening of public opinions, proper social regression, and proper loss of civilization..." vented Xu Xin, a prominent Chinese legal scholar.

Zhaobudaoedeganjue summed up the public reaction on Weibo with one line: "You can be properly corrupt, so can I properly protest!"

The immense attention the editorial has garnered underscores some deep-seated belief and anxieties in China regarding the status quo of Chinese society, and where concepts like corruption, rule of law, and even democracy fit in.

In recent months, top Chinese leaders, from president Hu Jintao to successor Xi Jinping, have maintained a drumbeat of warnings against corruption. Perhaps the most memorable statement came from Premier Wen Jiabao, immediately following the ouster of Bo Xilai, Chongqing's former party chief and the investigation into his corruption record. "We have a profound understanding of this: That corruption is the greatest threat to the ruling party," he wrote in an article titled "Let power be exercised in the sunshine." "If not solved properly, the nature of the regime will change, and its rule may end."

It is unclear, however, to what degree this campaign has convinced the public. Despite the party's effort to trumpet Bo Xilai's ouster as a triumph of the rule of law, many people, in discussing the matter on Weibo or in private, seem to believe that Bo's downfall was actually a result of the central party's back-room political jockeying and power struggles. The inextricable linkage between power and wealth in China's top leadership, many people suspect, will likely stem the promised anti-corruption drives. Suspicious of the government's words, many Chinese readers took the Global Times editorial as finally spelling out the party's true beliefs.

"Now they are just being honest, but we are still cheating ourselves," reflected Aaron_zyl on his Weibo.

The editorial has also hit on a deeper public anxiety, which questions whether seeking democracy is the best immediate solution to social woes such as corruption, and wonders whether a more gradual approach might better reform China. Earlier this year, Han Han, a popular young writer and perhaps the nation's most influential non-government opinion leader, sparked a heated nationwide debate on these issues with three essays on his blog. In one, titled "On Democracy," he staked out a more moderate view on political change than many of his supporters imagined he'd held. "I believe that a very strong one-party-system is the same as a no-party system. When the party organization reaches a certain size, it becomes the people itself," he wrote. "So the issue is not to deal with the Communist Party this way or that. The Communist Party is just the name. The system is just the name. If you change the people, everything changes." As a result, Han wrote, he believes China should "go after one small thing at a time. There is no point in frustrating oneself by dreaming about democracy and freedom in our study rooms. Reform is the best answer."

Radical dissidents such as Ai Weiwei called Han's position "too close to that of the authorities" and the attitude "too acquiescent, almost predicated on flattery," which makes the essay "a good piece for Global Times to run." A great number of readers, on the other hand, sided with Han. Reader Miandiandajinshi wrote in a response that he agrees "the so-called problems of the government and the system" are in fact "problems originated from our nation's deep-rooted bad habits." Prominent historian and critic Yi Zhongtian also echoed Han's argument in his blog post: "When the qualities and understanding of our citizens are not high, we shouldn't have too high an expectation." Many others called Han Han "practical and clear-sighted." In this polarized debate, while the liberals firmly held their ground, they have found the strong support for Han's reformist view hard to dismiss.

The argument laid out by the Global Times editorial, though made far more provocatively than Han Han's, contains some parallels to this more moderate view on Chinese social and political reform, held by what appears to be a not-insignificant swathe of the Chinese middle class.

 As the debate raged on, though other official media outlets would have shunned it for its uncomfortable and sensitive nature, Global Times decided to stir it. Hu Xijin, the paper's editor-in-chief, reportedly demanded an apology from Tencent, the web portal that reposted the story with a more provocative title ("China Must Permit a Proper Level of Corruption. Citizens Should Understand"). Posting on his personal Weibo account, which has over two million followers, he urged greater public tolerance to diverse social opinions. "Global Times is trekking a new territory in Chinese media sphere," he wrote. "We can tolerate accusations and sneers and are willing to learn from harsh words. Hopefully all these conflicts and arguments will increase China's social tolerance."

He was at least right about the unique space his paper occupies in Chinese media. Unlike mother-ship publication People's Daily, the pages of which are filled with humdrum bureaucratese, and from other more liberal papers that carefully walk the censor's line, Global Times built its business model on selling nationalism and controversy. Its editorials and coverage on international events regularly feature such headlines as "The West is the Most Responsible Party for Syria's Chaos" and "A new U.S. Strategy to Attack China: Shooting Bullets While Extending an Olive Branch." Its domestic content ranges from muckraking investigations on corrupted officials to party-boosting editorials like this recent one. It has even touched on the taboo 1989 Tiananmen protest, alluding to it at anniversaries. (Here is this year's, on the way politics are discussed on Chinese college campuses.) With a daily print readership of over 2 million and web page view of over 60 million, the paper's business strategy is clearly not failing, while its controversial market positioning has won it the label "China's Fox News."

Is it possible that the entire passionate discussion on corruption and democracy wasn't accidental, but in fact carefully orchestrated by Global Times chief Hu and his editorial team, in line with their typical promotion strategy? Maybe, maybe not. Few on Weibo are asking this question. Yet Hu clearly relishes controversy, and the Chinese public would predictably seize such an opportunity to air its discontent, to level such unveiled criticism and mockery at an easy, government-approved target. (Xinhua, China's official news agency, also published an article berating the Global Times editorial.)

"Properly corrupt, what an engaging topic!" exclaimed Weibo user Hu Maoyin.

"When the editorial appeared online under Tencent's title, a great number of public intellectuals are forwarding it obsessively," Huijian reflects. "And what does that say about us?"
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedThe Fox News of China Sparks a National Debate on 'Proper' Corruption2012-06-05T07:19:15-04:002012-06-04T22:38:19-04:00Ever-controversial Global Times published a surprisingly frank editorial that hit on a long-running Chinese debate over reform, governance, and democracy.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257870
Mayor Wang Zhongbing got a little carried away when Zhanjiang was awarded a contract to produce steel and iron.

Mayor Wang Zhongbing smooches the fated document. (mzsites.com).

In a nation where people are used to seeing government leaders' stoic faces behind the tinted windows of black Audis and hearing their droning speeches at national conventions, one mayor has gained accidental fame for a brief, impulsive show of emotion.

When Wang Zhongbing, the mayor of the southern port city Zhanjiang in Guangdong province, walked out of a central government building in Beijing on May 24, holding an official document that granted his city approval to establish a 70-billion RMB iron and steel production base -- a project the local government had petitioned for 34 years -- he was so full of emotion he could barely speak. Hands trembling, he brought the document to his lips and kissed the fresh ink on the pages. His crew, waiting just outside gate, broke into cheers. A cameraman from the local newspaper clicked the shutter, snapping a photo that both captured the moment's immense sense of victory and, later, shortened it.

As soon as the photo went online, it was picked up by web users and posted on Weibo, China's twitter-style social network. Tens of thousands of netizens commented, few of them joining the mayor in celebration.

"With the overproduction of steel and iron right now, still?" asked Weibo user hugodatouwen, who found the news hard to believe.

"Instead of approving a couple of teaching programs in mountain villages or water conservation programs, you are approving a steel and iron plan," renjianxianxiang fumed. "While asking us poor people to donate to charity, you spent billions with a wave of pen!"

Other Weibo users, apparently locals from Mayor Wang's area, worried that they might never see the blue ocean or clear sky again. "Once the beautiful coastal city Zhanjiang is introduced to the highly polluting steel industry, it will definitely not be a decision that common citizens will celebrate," Miss Noble lamented. "Enjoy Zhanjiang while you can!"

The photo and backlash have underscored some of the economic challenges the country faces, as the newest data reveals a significant slowdown of the long-robust GDP growth, especially in major sectors such as retail and construction. The low level of consumer confidence, combined with restrictive real-estate purchasing policies meant to force air out of the nation's housing bubble, have sent housing prices plunging in major cities, greatly reducing China's voracious appetite for construction materials such as iron ore and copper. Environmental perils have also taken their toll, further limiting the country's ability to grow. Despite all this, the pressure on local officials to keep up economic growth is still, clearly, enormous.

But perhaps instead of pressure, some netizens point out on Weibo, local officials see prize.

"70 billion is like a gold mountain. No wonder he lost control," duoduodiai wrote about the Zhanjiang mayor.

"Now he is finally going to get promoted," Weibo user critical spirit prophesied. "From this moment, his land will be burning with labor and roaring with machines, all lively and vibrant. And even better if he gets to demolish some old residences and build new plants. That's doubling the growth of GDP!"

For local residents like Peter_huanghuangxiangyaogelidaren, it can be tougher to hold a light-hearted tone. "All these years, one by one you have come and gone," she wrote of the succession of mayors of Zhanjiang. "The bridges are up, your wallets are full, and you rise in rank. Now you start to make iron and steel at my front door, boosting your career but sacrificing our sky!"

In what was perhaps an effort to address as well as channel the overwhelming condemnation on Chinese social media over the mayor's photo, Xinhua, China's official news agency published a finger-wagging editorial on the event:

"A government should not govern by winning approval from higher levels, or be driven purely by the impulse to make political achievement," it read. "Instead of kissing the document, it should listen to the people."

Party's over.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedWhat China's Talking About Today: A Mayor Kisses His Town's Steel Contract2012-05-30T18:35:38-04:002012-05-30T18:32:51-04:00Mayor Wang Zhongbing got a little carried away when his town was awarded a contract to produce steel and iron.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257797
Half a century after the famine that killed perhaps 30 million people, censors have quietly loosened their ban and citizens are moving past the taboo. Why now?

A 1958 propaganda poster urges Chinese to produce steel. It reads, "Take steel as the key link, leap forward in all fields." (Wikimedia)

When Bo Xilai, the now-sacked Chongqing party chief, blanketed the city with a Maoist-style campaign of nationalism and state control, the critics who worried about the dangers of reviving red culture in modern Chinese society included the Communist Party's top leaders. Premier Wen Jiabao and others have publicly countered Bo's rhetoric, warning that it could throw China back into the worst practices of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution. But this battle is not limited to government-controlled discourse. As the country looks ahead to its leadership transition amid political and economic uncertainties, Chinese officials and citizens alike are looking back into their country's recent past. The Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine, taboo subjects for half a century, are re-entering the public discourse. As China resurfaces these two traumatic events, the competing narratives may shed some light on the dynamics and tensions of today's China and its future.

 Many of the millions of people who use Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media service, represent the nation's post-80s generation. So they were likely surprised when they logged onto the site in early May and found the service populated with black-and-white photos that looked strange yet familiar. A child clad in rags with a swollen stomach and with tear streaming down his cheeks, or a scrawny beggar lying on the ground with a vacant stare at the camera -- these were images from the country's 1960-1962 Great Famine, following the Great Leap Forward, or, as it's called in Chinese history textbooks, Three Years of Natural Disaster. Though death toll estimates vary widely, a commonly cited number is 30 million, or about twice the number killed in the Holocaust. Having been largely blocked from public discourse by the government for the past half-century, it suddenly caught fire in Chinese state and social media after several prominent Chinese intellectuals made controversial comments questioning the scale and the casualties of the disaster.

The most provocative came from Lin Zhibo, an editor at the party's mouthpiece newspaper People's Daily, who posted a message on his Weibo accusing Mao-bashers of "[fabricating] lies about the deaths of tens of millions of people from 1960 to 1962." His message was immediately picked up and reposted by tens of thousands of Weibo users, who poured out disbelief and outrage.

 "Since Lin Zhibo can deny the Great Famine, it is no surprise the Japanese can deny the Nanking Massacre!" Weibo user Hongludianyue wrote.

"Because of [Lin's comment]...I brought up this bitter episode to my dad tonight, and his voice grew louder, mixed with anger and sorrow," huzizfl wrote. "Calling it natural disaster is to excuse the government for its crime! When the fifty-cents are singing their praise for the party, go ask if the ghosts of the tens of millions of innocent victims will agree!" "Fifty-cents" refers to Internet commentators hired by the Chinese government to post messages that advance the party line in an attempt to shape and sway public discussion. They are said to be paid 50 cents per post.

"Lin Zhibo has daringly torn off the scab over the great historical scar and educated the public about the Great Famine," yemeicun, suggested half-mockingly. "Maybe he is actually a spy from our side?"

Lin at first attempted to defend himself on Weibo, but soon surrendered to public outrage and posted an apology, in which he claimed to have been ignorant of historical facts and was "deeply shocked by what [he has] learned" from netizens' responses.

The apology, brushed off by most web users, has only intensified the Weibo discussion on the deadliest catastrophe in modern Chinese history, and pushed the talk into print media, which is typically censored heavily. Southern People Weekly, a magazine under the Chinese media mogul Southern Daily Media Group, ran an 18-page, in-depth feature on the Great Famine, complete with detailed personal accounts and vivid photos. "Sometimes history is divided into two parts: history itself and the 'admitted history,' " the article reads. "For the new generation, the history of the Great Famine is like a tale ... if we don't save it, it will surely be lost."

Discussions online and in print have focused on two things: estimating the death toll and recounting personal stories from the period. Because official historical research has been so limited, the number of casualties is still murky (some estimates put it somewhere between 32.5 million and 40 million). But, in many ways, this resurgent national conversation is as much about surfacing the human side of these events as it is about reckoning with the past. Web users who have rushed to share their family experiences on social media are helping their society reconstruct a period of history that had been left to fade. Accounts of subsisting on weeds and bark, of watching relatives die, and of cannibalism, posted on Weibo, have validated the memories of those who lived through the catastrophe and informed those who have had little exposure to it.

"After reading some accounts about the Great Famine ... I remembered that my parents were also born at around 1958 and 59." Weibo user shuaihubutaigao wrote. "I called them, and learned that my dad still could not stand at the age of two due to the lack of nutrition. I suddenly want to buy a recording pen and hear about that part of history from my grandfather, who was a commander at the people's militia at the time."

The surge of talk, though only tens of thousands of disjointed Weibo posts and a few articles in national magazines, is mainland China's largest-ever public discussion on the Great Famine. Both the outburst of public emotions and the fact that it is allowed at all, especially at such a sensitive moment, are surprising and fascinating. As the dam that has long suppressed public discussion cracks, many people seem barely able to hold back, releasing a flood of thoughts and memories.

Others chime in for a different reason: to point out ominous parallels between Chinese society today and during the Great Leap Forward, the devastating political movement that directly led to the Great Famine. They worry about the expansion of costly government projects, the rising price of food staples, and political turmoil like that of the Bo Xilai saga. That doesn't mean that they think another Great Famine would happen: the Maoist era of fanatical totalitarian communism is over, as is Mao Zedong's practice of forcing through such disastrous policies as having farmers produce steel instead of tending their crops, which contributed to the famine. Still, as their knowledge of the Great Leap Forward increases, so does their sensitivity to echoes, however faint, of the old political mentality manifesting today, in subtler ways.

"The railways ministry is conducting a Great Leap Forward by building the high-speed rail network, and the local governments are conducting their own versions of it by building highways and airports," jameslin5555 wrote on Weibo. "It worries me that local governments' debt is even worse than that of the railways ministry."

Weibo user I am not an angry youth saw similar risks in Chinese higher education. "[Chinese universities' decision to] increase enrollment is the source of their problems," he said of the universities that aim to win more government funding by expanding. "Like during the Great Leap Forward, they do not have the resource to carry on the size of the student body, but insist on doing it."

This maelstrom of public criticisms compounds the mystery of why government censors have allowed this discussion, and why now. For an apparatus known for its responsiveness and ability to quash or fine-tune social discussions, it's hard to imagine that this might have been a case of negligence. Mark MacKinnon of The Globe and Mail offered one hopeful explanation: Could this be the start of a larger national conversation of the Communist Party's dark moments, right through to 1989?

"Addressing the famine of the Great Leap Forward might open the door to an eventual discussion of the Cultural Revolution, the murderous political milieu that Mr. Xi and his generation grew up in," MacKinnon writes, citing "veteran China-watchers." He goes on, "And after that might come a debate of the biggest taboo of all -- the use of tanks and soldiers to quell the pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square in June of 1989."

Though the Party leadership has long avoided these topics, MacKinnon writes, "Perhaps the rising generation of Communist Party 'princelings' are interested in fighting the battles of their fathers."

Were they to confront history with honesty and openness, the future Chinese party leadership would be fighting for more fathers than just their own.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedAfter 50 Years of Silence, China Slowly Confronts the 'Great Leap Forward'2012-05-29T15:49:31-04:002012-05-29T15:49:19-04:00Half a century after the famine that killed perhaps 30 million people, censors have quietly loosened their ban and citizens are moving past the taboo. Why now?tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257695
A new U.S. policy that restricts Confucius Institutes starts a debate about China's influence abroad.

Chinese President Hu Jintao visits the a Confucius Institute at Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago. (AP)

When the Chinese government, riding the increasing global interest in learning Mandarin, started to open up language and cultural centers abroad by the hundreds, worried murmuring spread among foreign critics. Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms, as these centers are called, have 380 locations in the U.S., and are run by Chinese government-trained and -financed language teachers in collaboration with American education institutions. But, due to the various censorship rules governing what it can and can't say -- no mention of the Dalai Lama or the Tiananmen Massacre -- some in the West have criticized it as propaganda vehicles, a label that has not pleased the Chinese authorities who hoped the initiative would improve China's image. Still, the most painful sting came this week, when the State Department announced new policies to regulate these teaching centers in the United States.

 Chinese language teachers at university-based institutes who are teaching at the elementary- and secondary-school level are violating the terms of their visas, according to the announcement, and must leave the U.S. by June to renew them abroad. It also requires the U.S.-based centers to acquire American accreditation in order to continue accepting foreign teachers.

 "Is it China who doesn't want to connect with the world, or is it America who doesn't want to accept China's rise?"

The State Department denies targeting Confucius Institutes with its new policies, and seems to have done some backpedaling after the announcement. The news has ignited wide discussion on Weibo, China's Twitter-like social media platform, including some thoughtful reflections on China's approach of pushing soft power abroad.

"The case of American [regulation of] Confucius Institutes in fact proves the influence of Chinese culture, but it's not a positive influence," user enterprise soft power wrote. "To improve the and promote our brand in the world, we still have a long way to go."

 "Confucius Institute did promote the study of Mandarin and give foreigners a chance to understand Chinese. Only China has such thinking and capability to create a boom like this in so few years," daodaolaosuisuinian offered. "But everything has its limit. The push from the [Chinese] government should not go against the rules of education in other nations, and should not violate market and entrepreneurial principles."

Other users worry about the escalating tension between the two governments as Chinese official media outlets rush to condemn the U.S. policies, and advise their government to adopt a more levelheaded approach. "Americans see [the Confucius Institutes] as China's global cultural expansion after its economic boom. What China should do now is to solve the problem in America following the American way, so that it doesn't spread to other countries," user Cong Zhongming suggested.

Weibo user  3frank attempted to see the issue from the perspective of a common Chinese citizen, confessing that he has not been the biggest supporter of Confucius Institutes. "Taking tax-payers' money to invest abroad for political considerations, and sending cadres to be so-called volunteers...When there are hundreds of millions of Chinese parents and students who are burdened by domestic education industrialization and cannot afford to go to school, [the government] is spending colossal amount of money to teach foreigners Chinese."

 Not surprisingly, some of the public anger in China is also directed at the U.S. Among the most prominent voices is Kong Qingdong, a rabble-rousing professor at Peking University who claims to be a direct descendant of Confucius.

"Citing visas, the U.S. has set a deadline for Chinese Confucius Institute teachers to leave the country," Kong  said on his Weibo page, which has over a million followers. "Meanwhile, in China, everywhere you look you find Hollywood movies, Silicon Valley microchips and McDonald's french fries. From entertainment to technology to food products, the American cultural invasion is multipolar, omnidirectional, and deep."

Juxingguan also pointed out the disparity between the degree of cultural penetration China versus the U.S. have managed on one another's soil, calling the U.S. move a telling sign of its attitude toward China's rise. "Chinese education incorporates English into its requirements and treats it as an important subject in exams. In America, Confucius Institute is a branch for specialized learning, have to obtain accreditation to operate, and was even once suspected to be a spy agency," he wrote. "Is it China who doesn't want to connect with the world, or is it America who doesn't want to accept China's rise?"

More than a few Weibo users related the U.S. policies to the recent surge of xenophobia in China, and struck a prophetical tone in their comments. "A stupid foreigner trying to rape a Chinese woman on the street, a cellist insults Chinese passengers," user Laoma wrote. "I knew this is going to happen."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedWhat China's Talking About Today: Is Chinese Soft Power Working?2012-05-25T12:46:31-04:002012-05-25T12:46:10-04:00A new U.S. policy that restricts Confucius Institutes starts a debate about China's influence abroad.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257660
When officials spent billions of yuan to blanket Qingdao with pricey foliage, citizens fought back online.

Qingdao officials plant a tree, one of up to eight million. (Dongying city government).

The project rolled out like many others in major Chinese cities: bulldozers wiped over the verdant grass field next to the coast, spades overturned the granite blocks blanketing the city squares, and nearly two million crescent-shaped tree holes popped out in less than a month, along the avenues, by the beach, and under overpasses, turning the serene port city on China's Pacific coast into a dirt sieve. The new mayor of Qingdao, a major city in Shandong province, was pushing forward a massive tree-planting campaign to make his city a "National Forest City" by 2014. It is an act that should have surprised no one in China, where more skyscrapers are shooting up than could be filled, and roads are being reconstructed faster than taxi drivers could keep track. Like these urban developments, the Qingdao tree-planting campaign is part of a Beijing-led surge in national infrastructure spending, a stimulus meant to restore the country's flagging economy.

This innocent-sounding campaign in Qingdao, however, has turned into a tug-of-war between the city government and local residents since its launch in late February. After a few concerned citizens spoke out against what they saw as wasteful spending, their campaign has caught fire on wider Chinese social media and spread to even the tight-lipped state media. The battle has mobilized the Chinese public on an unusual scale and engaged them in an intense civil bargain with the government, the sort of which is rarely seen in today's China.

 When the plan to "Construct a Green Qingdao" was first announced in 2009, in typical Chinese government fashion with slogans veiling details of implementation, it went largely unnoticed by local citizens. It was not until they saw the bulldozing in late March of a large patch of green grass in a local park, a favorite spots for citizens to fly kites, take after-dinner strolls, and go on dates, did the angry murmuring begin. Many long-term residents said they felt the act violated their fond childhood memories of the old city, and posted old pictures of the park on Internet forums side-by-side with new ones of the destroyed grass. The discontent was soon exacerbated by an official announcement that the tree-planting budget for 2012 alone would be 4 billion yuan -- about $630 million.

"Four billion for planting trees ... do you know how many people in Qingdao can't afford medical cost? If you take out one tenth of your tree-planting budget, we can all have universal health care coverage," a Weibo user named national grassroot anti-corruption association wrote.

User sinnryuu, complaining about the hefty cost of her niece's kindergarten education, suggested, "Why not invest the money instead into building schools?" .

Others questioned why officials, before making a decision that would affect the lives of so many, had not sought public approval first, and demanded the right to know the minutiae of the project and spending plans.

"I am 27 this year...and I don't really care about politics. But it all changed after the new mayor took over our city and started planting trees," Panuu wrote in an open letter he posted on Weibo in early April. He included the relevant clauses from the Chinese Constitution that entitle citizens the right to criticize government practices, the transcript of his phone conversations with various branches of city government (which invariably shunned his inquiries), and an approximate calculation of the labor and inventory cost for the project. "Who decided the number 4 billion? How are they spending it? Who is there to supervise? ... Is the density of the trees going to affect our normal life? What is our land size per capita after the project is finished?"

The complaining web users soon gathered into a more organized community, which attracted a number of Weibo celebrities with a million-plus followers each. At their appeal, thousands of citizens flooded the local government offices with phone calls, filled its email inboxes with demands for a public explanation for their actions, and took up cameras to snap photos of places where trees were being unreasonably planted: under bridges, next to the ocean, amid rocks. "Why is it so difficult for you [the government] to admit your mistake?" Several frustrated web users asked.

The city government, focused on planting all 8 million trees before the end of May, first ignored the pleas and censored relevant posts on Weibo. When the movement against their project suddenly picked up momentum in April, however, the officials seem to have been caught unprepared. One official from the Qingdao Municipal Bureau of Landscape and Forestry compared the outburst of discontent to a nuclear reaction, "it was so explosive." The force of the public inquiries seems to have finally forced the government to respond, if reluctantly, first through Internet announcements, newspaper briefings, television interviews, and eventually with an unprecedented online live chat between the city major and the citizens. Over 200,000 users logged on, crashing the server.

 The local government has also started to quietly undo its project, pulling out trees from some overcrowded areas. But the effort, which focused on social rather than mainstream media, has still not cooled public anger. For a government not used to responding to public sentiment, this sort of PR crisis has proven an extraordinary challenge. Many locals took the clumsy response as a sign of insincerity in the supposedly open dialogue. "Why don't you walk onto the stage, give a frank explanation, and apologize?" one web user asked.

The government posted a letter on its official website in late April, apologizing for the lack of communication with citizens and its sluggishness in responding to their questions. This might seem like a victory for local citizens, but the Qingdao web activists confessed that they were disappointed.

"They tried to downplay the incident from the beginning to the end and remained silent most of the time, only putting up a show when pushed by public pressure," web user xiumubuxiang said. "They are not sincere."

Another user, a retired party cadre, said that he saw a wasted opportunity for the government to connect with its people. "Our demands are rational, and the leaders should have used it to conduct an equal conversation with us to build a positive image."

Still, in going after the trees that blocked their view of the ocean, Qingdao's citizen-activists also managed to shake the wall that has long blocked their access to the government and to public dissent. As for Qingdao's officials, they may better see the potential risks of lavish and costly government-administered projects, which are often a component of China's economic stimulus measures, but can sometimes go to extremes. When Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai was sacked, he left behind a city of expensive gingko trees, which cost the government 10 billion yuan in 2010. They were part of his expensive campaign to make the city a more "livable" and "accessible" place, but are now mockingly referred to by the citizens as "Xilai trees."

"Who is party secretary and who is the mayor makes no difference to me," zuoyeben, a leader in Qingdao's anti-tree planting movement, tweeted to his 2,800,000 followers on Weibo. "But I still need to talk to you about planting trees, because I can't talk about democracy."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedThe $630-Million Trees That Sparked a Social Media Revolt in China2012-05-24T17:58:36-04:002012-05-25T10:41:53-04:00When officials spent billions of yuan to blanket Qingdao with pricey foliage, citizens fought back online.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257585
Web users fume over Chinese fishermen held hostage by North Koreans, another turn in a complex relationship going back to the Korean War.

A Beijing art-goer looks at a portrait of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (Reuters)

The Chinese public tends to get angry when they perceive foreign territorial or military aggression against their country, and they've had a few opportunities recently: there was wariness over the U.S. decision to establish a permanent military presence in Australia, fury following the Japanese government's detention of a Chinese boat captain, and the indignation expressed during the ongoing standoff between China and the Philippines over disputed territory in the South China Sea. But there was something different about popular reaction to the recent kidnapping of Chinese fishermen by North Koreans. The response, though, seems to be less about threatened national pride or deep-rooted historical hostility. Instead, it seems to be part of a trend of growing Chinese frustration with this national ally and China's sense of patronizing superiority over its impoverished and closed neighbor as the two once-similar societies proceed on diverging paths and become more distant.

 Many in China can remember the common ground that the two countries once shared. Chinese elementary school textbooks still teach the "Help Korea, Oppose America" conflict, as the Korean War is sometimes described, though the Chinese telling often chides North Korea like a mother scolding an unfilial son. That sentiment of disapproval persists today, and can be seen in Chinese web users' reactions to this week's kidnapped-fishermen incident.

 "Without the Chinese pouring their blood, there wouldn't have been the three generations of Kim regimes; without China's long-term economic aid, North Korean people would have faced a crisis in maintaining their living; without China's political and military support, Kim Jong Un would not have been able to smoothly take over the nation's highest position," Chinese web user Ding Dong wrote in his blog. "Any abuse from a nation like this one is especially unforgivable."

 On Weibo, user Tianwailaike8378 joined in chiding North Korea. "Forgetting your pain after your scar healed, you ungrateful little bastard. The Chinese soldiers' blood was shed in vain."

 "Even raising a dog is better than [raising] this one, and we've done it for so many years!" Nianguoshudehunhun lamented in a Weibo message.

 As the China-North Korea relationship hits these speed bumps, and as the two countries adopt drastically different political and economic models, many in China are starting to question the unwavering nature of the alliance.

 "Why should China support and help as tyrannical and shameless a country as North Korea? What does China need from it? I can't fathom, and I feel so soft and useless on behalf of my country!" A Weibo message asked.

 Neither could user Chenzhicheng see North Korea as a worthy friend for today's China. "How could a three-generation hereditary regime hold a socialist society? How could a nation in such destitute be so closely tied to China? Aren't we lowering our own rank by being its friend?"

 Similar sentiments have permeated Chinese cyberspace before, when Kim Jong Un succeeded his father earlier this year, and when the nation's Unha-3 missile plunged into the Yellow Sea minutes after launching. Largely undisturbed by censors in their discussions, Chinese web users ruthlessly (and hilariously) parodied the Kim regime.

 On other occasions, however, Chinese web users have found compassion for the helpless North Korean citizens, such as when angry Chinese netizens accused its government of "intentional murder" for repatriating North Korean defectors, knowing the harsh sentences they would face upon their return. Perhaps the plight of North Koreans had hit upon memories of China's own history, not many decades removed from the massive labor camps and large-scale flights of refugees. In any case, for a Chinese public that is not often concerned with playing arbiter of international justice, such outpourings for the North Koreans are perhaps a sign of an affinity that, despite the recent tensions, still lingers between the two peoples, who share more than just a 900-mile border.

Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedWhat China's Talking About Today: Hostility and Compassion for North Koreans2012-05-23T13:02:03-04:002012-05-23T16:13:03-04:00Web users fume over Chinese fishermen held hostage by North Koreans, another turn in a complex relationship going back to the Korean War.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-257207
The Chinese national identity has long been tied up with its language, for natives and foreigners alike.

A Beijing woman looks at a poster promoting the use of Mandarin and Chinese characters. It reads, "The country promotes Mandarin and pushes to standardize Chinese characters." (Reuters)

There's an experience common to many first-time visitors to China, who often recount it with surprise, delight, and a sense of discovering something uniquely Chinese. It happens when they utter their first sentence in mandarin to a Chinese stranger -- a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor, or an old man practicing water calligraphy in the park -- and see the person's face instantly light up in amazement. That amazement might turn to reverence if the speaker can demonstrate even a shaky comfort with the language. Waiguoren -- foreigners -- are no longer a rare sight in many parts of this briskly modernizing country, and with the worldwide boom in studying Chinese, an increasing number of them bring language skills. While the novelty is wearing off, Chinese continue to be fascinated by foreigners able to speak their mother tongue. It's a fun moment of cross-cultural bonding, but it's also a product of China's complicated relationship with its own language, which for centuries has been tied up with its national identity. As China and its place in the world are changing, so is the meaning of the Chinese language for natives and foreigners alike.

Most recently, this fascination manifested in Chinese web user's reactions to (and obsessive viewing of) a viral Internet video, in which a young half-Caucasian, half-Asian American impersonates 12 different characters, among them a Beijinger, a Hong Kong Chinese, a Taiwanese, a New Yorker, an African American, and a score of non-Chinese foreigners speaking English with exaggerated native accents. His immaculate Chinese and jarringly precise grasp of the slangs, accents, and subtleties in the language's regional variations amazed his Chinese audience. "What are you trying to do?" Some users, pinching a line from his skit, asked on Weibo, where the video, which has over 5 million views on Youku, has been forwarded more than 435,000 times.

The Chinese language has long been a point of pride for its people, a sense that often comes through when they tell foreigners, smilingly, that Chinese is too hard to learn as a second language. They're telling the truth, which they have lived themselves through years of hunching over their desks in school, scribbling thousands of characters and memorizing Chengyu, special four-character Chinese aphorisms that gives one's speech a cultivated air. For foreigners, learning Chinese can require even more fortitude and patience, a subject eloquently explained in this essay famous among Chinese learners, "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard." The author, an English-speaker struggling to learn Chinese, posits that native speakers "generally become aware at some point of the Everest-like status of their native language, as they, from their privileged vantage point on the summit, observe foolhardy foreigners huffing and puffing up the steep slopes"

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A deeper reason for the extraordinary pride that Chinese people take in their language lies in their view of it as a symbol of the nation's glorious history and blooming civilization. Chinese is one of the oldest known writings in the world, inscribed on animal bones that date back to 4,500 years ago, possibly earlier. It is one of the only logographic languages still widely used in the world, a writing system of pictorial symbols, each intended to look like the thing or idea it stands for. The language's consistent structural principles allow the modern descendants to converse directly with their distant ancestors, and create a remarkable sense of historical continuity that smoothes over the wrinkles of wars and dynasties. At any point in history, it has also been a powerful unifying force, tightly weaving ethnic groups under the rule of the empire and a common national identity. To neighboring countries that admired the civilization of the Middle Kingdom, the langauge was a form of soft power that they absorbed, incorporating Chinese into their own languages. Modern Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese all contain some linguistic traces of China's cultural influence.

Recent history, however, complicates Chinese people's relationship with their language. After repeated defeats by foreigners in the early 20th century, the Chinese began to question the traditional ways that had not saved them, including their sacred script. Scholars in the 1910s called it the greatest impediment to literacy and democracy, and even discussed switching the language to Esperanto or adopting the Latin alphabet. Most ambitious of them all, Mao Zedong, famously told the American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936, "Sooner or later, we believe, we will have to abandon characters altogether if we are to create a new social culture in which the masses fully participate." He might have replaced all Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet, had Joseph Stalin not convinced him that a nation as great as China should have its own form of writing instead of borrowing another culture's. The chaos of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution further exhausted the momentum for language reform, and by late 1970s, people had lost all interest in radical, top-down change. Chinese characters, saved by a foreign dictator and a series of domestic anti-traditionalist movements, survived to be passed on to the next generation.

China's centuries-long status as the superpower of Asia, followed by its still-fresh memory of the century of humiliation imposed by foreign nations -- a trajectory epitomized in the fate of the Chinese language -- help instill in its people a strong national identity and an "us versus them" mindset. When foreigners speak Chinese, they are crossing this invisible identity boundary, still largely demarcated by the Chinese language. It is a phenomenon that can be fascinating, and perhaps a bit disorienting, for a Chinese listener to experience.

As flocks of foreigners enroll in Chinese language schools and universities, Chinese people often read this as a positive statement about their modern society, proof of both China's expanding international clout and the resilience of its culture; proof that, even after being trampled by foreign powers and destructive political movements, China still has not lost its appeal, its place in the world. This reassurance carries special significance at this moment in China's history, a time when Chinese students are pouring hours into English lessons instead of classical Chinese poetry, when Chinese workers are building American products for foreign consumers, and when, for example, Chinese movie-goers are spending more money on foreign blockbusters like Titanic 3D. "I am sad that our predecessors destroyed our culture ... but did not build a beautiful new world," the well-known blogger Han Han recently wrote. "As one from the younger generation, none of us know if we are ever able to make up for everything."

The Chinese government, too, seems to realize that its aggressive campaign to push soft power abroad must also deal with the difficulty of the Chinese language, which is once labeled "a Great Wall erected between the masses and the new culture." It has established Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms -- government-run cultural outposts that teach Chinese language and history -- in more than 700 locations worldwide, including many American universities, and supplied them with a steady stream of Beijing-trained and -financed language teachers. Many universities in the U.S. turned down the offer for fear of government censorship, but others, wishing to expand their Chinese education on the cheap, embraced them. "The Chinese are very clear on what they are trying to achieve," Martin Davidson, chief executive of the British Council told the New York Times. "They want to change the perception of China -- to combat negative propaganda with positive propaganda."

When the first-discovered piece of animal bone inscribed with ancient Chinese characters was found in 1899, China was disintegrating into the hands of Western powers, and the proto-nationalist Boxer rebels were slaughtering missionaries and diplomats in retaliation. More than 100 years later, these events have become history lessons in China's classrooms, as the government courts the West with Chinese language and culture. "Sanshinian hedong, sanshinian hexi," as they may have taught the foreigners, "30 years east of the river, 30 years west of the river." Or as the Americans say, every dog has its day.

When left to the hands of its speakers, Chinese becomes the cursive characters tumbling down the red scrolls on families' front door during Spring Festival, or the snarky, catchy phrases that fill its modern pop music. Or it is the syllables uttered by a foreigner to a taxi driver, a watermelon vendor, or an old man practicing water calligraphy in the park, and instantly lighting up his or her face.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedAs China's Role in the World Changes, So Does Mandarin's Role in China2012-05-16T07:01:00-04:002012-05-16T09:22:57-04:00The Chinese national identity has long been tied up with its language, for natives and foreigners alike.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-256707
 Chen Guangcheng's decision to take shelter in the U.S. embassy extends a modern tradition in China of seeing America as an idealized alternative to their own system.

Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng poses in front of the U.S. embassy in Beijing with senior American officials. /Reuters

When a Chinese police chief and anti-mafia hero, having fallen out with his municipal party boss, dashed out of his home in the megacity of Chongqing; and when a blind lawyer persecuted for fighting cases for women suffering forced sterilization escaped from a 18-month extralegal house arrest in rural Shandong, they both headed to the same destination: the closest American diplomatic residence.

The two most recent real-life thrillers coming out of China, though they involve characters from opposite ends of the power spectrum, both began with a man's frantic attempt to seek refuge from the Chinese system in the embraces of American power. This, more than a coincidence, sheds light on a truth deeply rooted in current Chinese society, but often muddled by the constant bickering between the two nations: the popular Chinese conviction of the United States' unrivaled international clout, and a widely shared perception of the U.S. as the ultimate embodiment of justice, democracy, and the rule of law.

None of these ideas are unfamiliar to the Chinese public. China labels itself as a socialist democracy, and the government has vowed for years to push for legal reforms. Last month's televised announcement that the government would investigate Chongqing's former party chief Bo Xilai -- as a result of Wang Lijun's visit to the U.S. Consulate, where he reported his boss's abuses -- closed with the official affirmation that "our nation is a country of socialist rule of law, and dignity and authority of the law cannot be trampled." Still fresh in the memory of many Chinese, however, are the bloody ethnic protests in Tibet in 2008 and in Xinjiang in 2009, the scandal of tainted milk powder that led to six infant deaths and 300,000 cases of illness, the jailing of Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, and the large-scale arrests of dissidents after the Jasmine protests last year. The reality of China's human rights record has seeped into public knowledge, despite the state's efforts to censor media and the Internet. The government's mistreatment of Chen Guangcheng, long a symbolic case championed by domestic and international rights activists, and now even more broadly publicized by his audacious escape, is a reminder of the tension in China between the state and the people pushing for positive social change. That the episode culminated inside the walls of the U.S. embassy is also a reminder that many Chinese, when they believe their country has failed them, look to America.

In his moment of crisis, though he insisted that he wanted to remain in China, Chen found this plot of American ground to be the "only truly safe place" for himself, echoing similar episodes in Chinese history. At the height of the Second World War, panicked Chinese residents in Tianjin and Shanghai flocked to European and U.S. legation quarters, seeking shelter from raining Japanese bombs. Decades later, when the government turned against its people in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, leagues of Chinese scholars and activists, fearing persecution, fled to the United States on political asylum and special visas. In recent years, Chinese policies have forced religious, ethnic, and intellectual groups into exile, often to the United States. Yu Jie, a Chinese writer persecuted for publishing scathing criticisms of party officials, told me as part of an interview I helped translate for a TV news network early this year in his new home in a tranquil Northern Virginia suburb, that having his personal safety guaranteed in America finally allows him peace of mind. "I won't have to worry about people breaking into my house any moment to take away my computer and books," Yu said. "I can finally focus on my writing."

While Chinese activists, motivated by political ideals, often view the United States as a synonym of freedom and democracy, the majority of Chinese citizens see it as something simpler and more concrete: a society with clean food, safe roads, and government officials that truly serve the people. Last summer, when newly appointed U.S. Ambassador Gary Locke arrived at his post, he found that he was already a bit of a star. A Chinese traveler had taken a photo of Locke, which he posted online, buying coffee with his six-year-old daughter and carrying a backpack at the Seattle airport. The seemingly banal scene's impact in China bewildered many westerners, but for Chinese citizens, who are used to seeing their own officials flashing their wealth and status and tended by a retinue of underlings, the humble image of Locke, who shares their skin color and ethnicity, defies belief. His popularity among Chinese people soared so quickly that Chinese censors restricted coverage on the story, apparently worried that Locke would make Chinese leaders look bad.

Chinese citizens, especially when it comes to scandals within their country, often hold up the United States as a shining contrast against the darker Chinese reality. Last winter, after a nine-seat school van crammed with 62 children crashed into a coal truck in northwest China, killing 21 children and two adults, heartbroken Chinese citizens rushed to Internet forums and Weibo, a twitter-style service, and, knowing accusations toward the government would be red-carded by censors, started posting pictures of American school buses. One picture showed a collision in Indianapolis with a Hummer, which was totaled, whereas the school bus was only slightly dented. The Weibo message simply reads, "There is a big difference." "The Americans are truly devoted to raising their next generation," another Weibo user laments. "In rural China, children's lives don't worth much."

MORE ON CHEN GUANGCHENG

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At times, Chinese admiration for what they see as the transparency and smooth functioning of American society can be complicated by the other, sometimes-contradictory image of America as a meddling, condescending power. An instinctive hostility, triggered when they suspect any U.S. action toward China as driven by ill will, can resurface the sense of victimhood that came with China's "century of humiliation" at the hands of Western powers. When two Chinese students at the University of Southern California turned up murdered, and some U.S. media erroneously reported that one of the victim's second-hand BMW was worth $60,000 (it was worth much less, and the error seemed to suggest the students were involved in something illicit), many Chinese saw the mistake as part of the American media's effort to smear the Chinese victims and divert the focus of the story. Hundreds gathered in protest at the USC campus, where one third of the school's 7,200 international students are Chinese.

The USC story, like Chen's flight to the American embassy, is a microcosm of Chinese respect for the U.S. as well as the heightened sensitivity to any perception of deliberate American embarrassment of China. That families would pay such lofty tuition (even more expensive by Chinese standards) shows the respect for American education. But the moments of apparent sensitivity -- students rallying in protest to an erroneous AP story, the Chinese government reacting severely to Chen's decision to turn to American officials for help -- are a reminder that it is partly because of Chinese respect for the U.S. that any perceived slight by Americans, or loss-of-face before the U.S., can be particularly painful. If the students' murder had taken place in some European country, Chinese students wouldn't have reacted the same way; neither would the Chinese government likely take Chen's flight quite as seriously if he'd walked into a European embassy. America's opinions on China always carry a special weight, among Chinese domestically as well as overseas. If America inspires aspiration and admiration in China, so too does it inspire a sort of nationalist backlash.

Chin's most privileged class, though they seem less willing to admit it, are often even more eager in their approach to embrace the American image and everything it promises. For high-level Chinese leaders, state company CEOs, and wealthy private business owners, America is not just an abstract idea, as it largely remains to Chinese dissidents and common citizens, but an integral part of their living. A joint Bain-China Merchants Bank report found that nearly 60 percent of Chinese with more than RMB 10 million (roughly $1.6 million) in investable assets are either considering immigration to the West or have already completed the process. Most put the U.S. as their first choice. Attracted to its well-established legal protection over private properties and prestigious education opportunities, they find the country a safe haven to park their assets, and a fertile ground for their children's growth. In just two years, Manhattan luxury real estate market has seen what began as a trickle of interest from China grow into a steady inflow of investment. Elite American boarding schools report that their applications from China are increasing several times over. This trend remains largely hidden from the public eye in mainland China, though whispers and speculations are circulating. People were outraged when journalists unearthed details of the luxurious lifestyle that Bo Xilai's son enjoys at Harvard, and when the government charged his wife for murder and illicitly transferring astronomical amounts of money overseas. In these stories, the United States is at once the promise of safety, rights, and equality desired by Chinese citizens and the evidence of the corruption and unequal access to power and wealth they have no choice but to accept.

In the end, both Chen Guangcheng and Wang Lijun, the former Chongqing police chief, left the U.S. diplomatic residences following strenuous diplomatic tussles between Chinese and American officials. Wang, himself a law-flouting persecutor of his political opponents, was turned over to central government officials, who fished him out of the hostile Chengdu police force and is keeping him under custody.

Chen's fate is less clear. Though Secretary of the State Hillary Clinton said he left with "a number of understandings with the Chinese government about his future, including the opportunity to pursue higher education in a safe environment," Chen said he also chose to leave in part because Chinese police were threatening his family. Once reunited with his wife and children, Chen, for the first time, expressed a wish to leave China for a safer place.

Though Chen left the embassy smiling, he quickly soured, later saying he was "very disappointed" with the U.S. and Obama personally, portraying embassy officials as having misled him into leaving rather than seeking asylum. Whether or not he is right to feel manipulated, it's revealing that his expectations for what American could do for him seem to have been so high. In the end, the U.S. told him that they could grant him asylum without his family or they could broker a deal with the Chinese government that would allow him to remain in China with limited freedom, though they had no way of ensuring Chinese officials would hold to the bargain. Chen, seeing their failure to do more, reacted not with understanding that American influence is limited or with acceptance that the U.S. might also consider its sensitive relationship with Beijing, but disappointment that America had not lived up to his own lofty vision of it.

In a flurry of confusion and concern, Chinese citizens rushed to Weibo to parse out the case. Some are angry at the Chinese government's demand for an American apology over the episode, others feared for Chen's safety. "Americans have left. You are in danger now," says one message. More hopeful speculators relate Chen's case to a similar incident from 1989, when Fang Lizhi, the activist at the top of the Chinese government's wanted list following the Tiananmen Square massacre, sought refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Fang, after listening to cautious U.S. diplomats fret over the diplomatic complications of granting him protection, decided to leave the embassy. He and his wife were invited back the same night, however, when Washington officials learned about his situation and ordered the embassy to retrieve him, as "the guests of President George Bush." He spent the next 13 months in the embassy as U.S. negotiated with China, eventually winning him permission to move to the U.S., where, after living an active and devoted life as an astrophysicist and advocate for Chinese democracy, he passed away last month.

"We will keep paying attention to Chen Guangcheng's whereabouts," one Chinese message on an online forum reads. "Any American help for Chen Guangcheng will win the support of the Chinese people."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedThe American Beacon in Beijing: Why Chinese Look to the U.S. for Freedom2012-05-03T14:55:13-04:002012-05-04T11:28:15-04:00Chen Guangcheng's decision to take shelter in the U.S. embassy extends a modern tradition in China of seeing America as an idealized alternative to their own system. tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-255916
China's ultra-popular, Twitter-like service moves too fast for censors or propagandists to keep up, but it's changing more than just the spread of information.

A policeman films Beijing residents who gathered in response to Weibo rumors of a "Jasmine" protest. Reuters

 When the message appeared on the Weibo account of Xinhua, China's official news agency on April 10, announcing charges against the family of high-profile party leader Bo Xilai, it ended many days of public speculation on China's largest political crisis in decades. But it also left Chinese web users even more deeply confused about the distinction between political truth and rumor, one that has always been hazy in China but is now blurred even more by social media.

Chinese web users began speculating, following Bo's firing as Chongqing party chief in March, about the Bo family's possible role in the mysterious death of Neil Heywood, a British businessman with close ties to the family. China's Internet censors muzzled the online discussions. The government spokesmen stonewalled inquiries from the British government and told curious Chinese that Heywood died of "excessive drinking," admonishing them "not to spread groundless rumor."

On the morning of April 11, Chinese web users woke up to find that the reports that had previously filled their Weibo pages -- in coded words adopted to evade the censors -- now featured the front page of every official newspaper. The rumor, repressed by censors and dodged by government spokesmen, had become a state-approved fact overnight.

 "What was treated as attacks spread by 'international reactionary forces' has now become truth. Then what other 'truths' exposed by foreign media should we believe?...God knows!" wrote Weibo user Jieyigongjiang. "How did it all become truth? Was I being fooled?" user Zousifanye asked.

For China's new generation of tech-savvy youth, who compose the bulk of the nation's estimated 300 million Weibo users, the downfall of Bo Xilai is the largest political crisis they have witnessed. The sudden volatility of the official versions of truth on the story has left many of them deeply confused. Some see this as a victory for Weibo, which is moderated by censors but often too free-wheeling and fast-moving for them to maintain total control, over more traditional media, which is openly run by the state. "In this political drama that took place in Yuzhou [alternative name for Chongqing], all the media outlets were following Weibo. The power of social media is manifested here," user Tujiayefu wrote. User Kangjialin agreed: " 'Rumor' is the proof that mainstream media is now falling behind Weibo."

The government controls all forms of media in China, including Weibo. But on occasions censorship of Weibo is known to relax, allowing windows of free speech, particularly in the cases of breaking news. Chinese distrust of the country's traditional media, which regularly covers up food scandals and human rights violations, is leading many people to turn to Weibo for information and news. The Twitter-like service has helped expose incidents of mafia intimidation and money laundering. Weibo-based stories like that of Guo Meimei, the 20-year-old "senior official" at the state-run Red Cross Society who posted photos of her new Lamborghini and Maserati online, ignited firestorms of discussions on weightier, more sensitive, and sometimes forbidden subjects such as corruption within state-run social organizations.

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In the West, social media is treated skeptically for the exact same reason that it is so embraced in China: it is rife with rumors. Its break-neck speed allows little time for fact-checking or editorial supervision, which also means it can move too quickly for censors. Its noisy, open-source discussion -- anyone can say anything and watch it spread -- makes it tougher for Western users to trust, but easier for Chinese users, who know that censors can pressure official news organizations but not a hundred million anonymous citizen-bloggers. That anonymity is slowly receding, but this hasn't done much damage to the service's popularity or power.

In the Bo Xilai saga, many Weibo users had at first dismissed the dramatic speculations over the Communist Party's divisive infighting as sensationalized rumors. Now that the rumors have turned out to be true, they're re-examining the established beliefs that led them to reject the stories and to take the officials at their word. "The result of rumor turning truth is that from now on all rumors will become more trustworthy," concluded Potomac Xiaowu.

The government is fighting back, reminding Chinese web users that Weibo is also a hot bed of invented rumors, and that believing and spreading them can bring real consequences. Less than a month ago, whispers circulated on Weibo of troop movements near the leadership's Zhongnanhai compound in central Beijing. Those whispers soon grew into a full-blown account of a coup being staged by Bo's Party allies in Beijing. Tanks purportedly rolled in and gunshots were fired, a story with terrifying echoes of the 1989 protest on Tiananmen Square. The rumors quickly made it into Western media. Just as it became clear that these stories weren't true, the government ordered the shutdown of 16 websites and detention of six people over the rumors, which it clearly considered threats to public order. The two massive Weibo sites, Sina and Tencent, were forced to shut down their comment function for three days in order to "carry out a concentrated cleanup."

China's heavy-handed censorship may now actually accelerate the spread of rumors, which could be seen as more plausible precisely because they are censored. Chinese web users trying to figure out the most likely truth must speculate not only about the rumors themselves, but also about every move the government makes in response. Did the state order censors to crack down on a particular story because they want quell a false and potentially destabilizing rumor or because they want to prevent an uncomfortable truth from spreading? If censors clamp down on a growing rumor later than expected or not at all, is this because they're simply slow or because government wants to build up public attention for its own purposes? In the days immediately after Bo's removal from his Chongqing office, for example, Internet rumors about his misdeeds circulated freely, in what many suspect was a state effort to build public knowledge of his corruption and turn people against him. For Chinese netizens trying to parse out truth from rumors, every story and its government response are a new mystery, and the guessing game never really ends.

This hall-of-mirrors system can be confusing even for the officials who run it, and social media consumers are not the only people in China who can confuse truth and rumor. Last February, as protest movements stormed the Middle East, starting with the "Jasmine revolution" in Tunisia, a crowd gathered quietly in central Beijing after anonymous calls for their own Jasmine protests. The small crowd was outnumbered by skittish police, not to mention a number of Western reporters. Both groups had also caught the rumor and responded swiftly.

The movement was ended before it had really started, but it continued to ripple through the life of common Chinese citizens in ways its initiators had probably not expected. In the next months, although few or no protesters actually gathered and there seemed to be little momentum for an Arab Spring-style movement, the government seemed to take the social media mumblings far more seriously than the actual activists. Streets were blocked and plainclothes police were stationed at shopping malls and movie theaters every few hundred of feet. Security officials detained dozens of leading activists, including artist Ai Weiwei, in apparent fear of their stirring further unrest, and threatened foreign journalists for reporting on the incident. When Chinese people realized the word "jasmine" was blocked from the Internet and from text messages, though euphemisms for the word were now well-known, and the flower was banned at Beijing botanic markets, the news of the pseudo-revolution had reached a wide public. The government, in its effort to quell the rumor, had ballooned it into an alternate version of truth. Their over-reaction had communicated the rumors of a revolution far more powerfully than had the actual rumors or its proponents.

The tug-of-war between the government and the people over truth and rumor happens every day in today's China. The rise of social media has made the struggle harder and the stakes higher. The night the government announced the charges against Bo Xilai, a crowd of thousands gathered in Chongqing and clashed with local police. The government vigorously denied any connection between the incident and Bo's expulsion, meanwhile moving to delete relevant messages and photos from Weibo. The Chinese web users reveling in the role of social networking sites in revealing the Bo scandals once again fell into debates, while others have been reflecting on larger questions. "Why does the U.S. not censor rumors?" asked one Weibo user last November. "No matter how wild they are, nobody bans them, and the creators of rumors do not worry about getting arrested. Perhaps for places where truth persists, rumors have no harm. Only places that lack truth are fearful of rumors."

Had the censors tried to look for the original writer of this message, they would not have found him or her. The name is lost amid millions of others, who forward the message after each round of rumor-clearing seizes Weibo in a state-run information purge that can never quite keep up.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedRumor, Lies, and Weibo: How Social Media is Changing the Nature of Truth in China2012-04-16T07:46:16-04:002012-05-08T09:57:06-04:00China's ultra-popular, Twitter-like service moves too fast for censors or propagandists to keep up, but it's changing more than just the spread of information.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-255154
As Chinese students flood private American high schools, aided by high-priced "consultants," they are changing concepts of success and security back home, and leading ambitious schools to seek out more of the eager (and often full-paying) mainlanders.

Chinese students at a Middle School in Anxian County. A rising number of them will apply to, and possibly attend, U.S. high schools. / Reuters

When 16-year-old Zhao Weibo flew in from China to tour the U.S. east coast with his father, Zhao Jun, they didn't visit the Statue of Liberty or the Washington Monument. They wound through New England historical villages and affluent suburban towns, in search not of photo opportunities or souvenir shops, but high schools. Zhao Weibo, currently in his last year of junior high school, wants to attend a private high school in America next year. "I like what I heard in China about American private high schools. I like their education style. I think it will be good for my future," he told me.

In the past few years, Chinese students have been flocking to American colleges, anticipating a better education, greater opportunities, and prestige. Last year, 157,588 Chinese nationals studied in U.S. colleges, a 23% increase from the year before. Now, Zhao is part of a booming trend of Chinese students who decide to leave their country's schools for America's before college. Their number is growing even faster than China's GDP. According to the U.S. Department Homeland Security, only 65 Chinese students studied at American private high schools in the 2005-06 academic year. By 2010-11, the number had grown by a factor of 100 to 6,725 students.

Just a few years ago, American private high schools seemed as distant to Chinese families conceptually as they are geographically. On Zhao Weibo's application list is Deerfield Academy, where I studied from 2005 to 2007. When I applied, I had to fly three hours from Beijing to Hong Kong for the mandatory interview; the 600-student boarding school tucked in rural Massachusetts didn't bother to hold information sessions on the mainland. China, though the world's most populous country, didn't have enough interested students. When I eventually decided to attend, my classmates were baffled. Parents' friends urged me to reconsider. Why give up a coveted spot in a competitive Chinese high school, they asked, in exchange for a school of unknown reputation thousands of miles away?

Middle class Chinese families don't see it that way anymore. American high school diplomas are the new must-have for the upwardly mobile. Thousands of miles away, U.S. private schools are adjusting accordingly. Deerfield and other well-known private schools started hosting annual admissions tours in mainland China, attracting crowds of hundreds at each stop. The Association of Boarding Schools, an organization with roughly 300 member schools, has partnered with a Chinese education consulting agency to organize large school fairs in Beijing and Shanghai. In six years, boarding schools like Deerfield and The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut reported a ten-fold increase in the number of Chinese applications. Each received less than 20 applicants in the 2005-2006 academic year and more than 200 in 2011-2012. If they were all accepted, the schools would be one third Chinese. "It is really just incredibly explosive," says Patricia Gimbel, Deerfield Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid.

Four years of private American high school education can cost around $200,000, a considerable sum for American families, and even more for a family from China, where average wealth is about one fifth as in the U.S. However, China's many newly minted millionaires see it as a worthy investment and a reliable path to an even higher goal: Ivy League colleges. In fact, the phenomenon reflects more than just the rising economic prowess of China's middle class. It is also a lens into their complicated and often conflicting psychology: increasingly ambitious and outward-looking, at once sophisticated and perhaps a bit naive, they seem driven by a combination of faith in China's future and distrust of its present; a belief that education abroad will translate into success at home. But, dazed by the new emerging opportunities and eager to follow the latest trend that promises them long-term security, both the parents and their children sometimes get something very different from what they'd hoped for.
• • • • •
Every year in March, affluent Chinese families fill the reception halls of Qide education consulting agency's 20-plus offices. The application deadlines for American private high schools are only nine or ten months away. Parents and their teenage children sit at small round tables that sprinkle the room, leaning forward in their chairs, eyes fixed on the consultant flipping through their transcripts and resumes. An overhanging television screen shows the Gothic buildings and green courtyards of western high school and university campuses.

This is only the beginning of what Bu Jing, the chief consultant at a Qide office in Beijing, calls "one-dragon style" service. After the initial consultation, the agency helps the families plan out the application procedure and pick prospective schools. Some students will enroll in preparatory classes for standardized tests like TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and the SSAT, a test required by many American private high schools. Families agree to work exclusively with Qide, sign a contract, and provide the agency with whatever information it needs. Several weeks later, they receive back neatly filled application forms, carefully crafted personal statements, and recommendation letters extolling the applicants' characters and academic achievements, all ready to be mailed overseas.

When the admission results are announced in March, the consultants again step in to offer matriculation advice, tutor for visa interviews, help book overseas flights, and even arrange pickups once their customers land in America. In some cases, they will also serve as intermediaries between schools and some of their ill-adjusted clients. "An established education agency like us, we have connections with many American high schools," Bu said to me. "Every student we worked with has succeeded in going abroad."

Sophisticated education agencies in China such as Qide are seeing a revenue uptick in their high school application division in the past few years. Their service, however, has made it more challenging for American private high schools to separate the reality of their Chinese applicants from what appears on their applications, which they say get much more than a polish from professional consultants.

David Damico, Director of Admission at Wyoming Seminary Upper School in rural Pennsylvania, says he believes that the majority of the school's applications from China are fabricated by agents. "It does become more difficult for admissions officers to understand a [Chinese] student and discern a student's strength," he says of the fraudulence, as well as the language and cultural barriers that already complicate his communication with them. "I can't get into [the Chinese applicants'] head as I can with Americans."

Patricia Gimble, Deerfield Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, says they've encountered similar problems. Fraudulence has increased as the number of applications from China spiked, a problem that "is very difficult to figure out." "Some of [the families] are told [by consultants] that they can't get through the process without an agent. That's just not true," Gimbel says.

But how do American high schools get that message out to Chinese applicants and their parents, who are separated by language as well as distance? Both Deerfield Academy and Wyoming Seminary admissions offices say that they are putting more energy into direct and personal interactions with Chinese applicants, such as interviews and informal email correspondence. "Everything has to match up fairly strongly," says J.J. Briones, Associate Director of Admission at Deerfield Academy.

Still, the issue is about more than just communication. By the time Chinese students apply to American high schools, they've spent years in China's grueling education system, in which performance is measured almost exclusively by standardized test scores. American applications, which ask open-ended behavioral questions and request casual personal statements, can feel unfamiliar, even confusing. The mandatory recommendation letters and paper samples are altogether out of context in the Chinese system. Education agencies help translate the American application system into concepts more familiar to products of Chinese education: test cram lessons and application guidance: "help you memorize 100 new vocabularies each day" and "write yourself into a hardworking girl with a powerhouse potential." They break confusing application projects into straightforward instructions and routines, not unlike the official guidelines that Chinese students receive before every set of final exams.

Some of the less competitive American private schools do rely on education agencies to publicize themselves and procure students from China -- a reliable source of income as the U.S. economy suffers, and for this reason many agencies are able to promise their clients admission to at least one American school. Still, some Chinese students say they are frustrated with their agents' dubious skills and lofty service fees, and have shared their experiences on popular online forums discussing the reputation of various education agencies.

Some American schools such as Brooks School in northern Massachusetts and the Webb Schools in California are seeking their own help. With the tag line "your China admissions partner," Vericant was founded in 2010 to serve as a third-party organization that helps American private schools verify the identities of Chinese applicants. When requested by American schools, the Chinese applicants would walk into Vericant's office in Beijing, film a 10-minute video interview and take a short writing test on the spot, both of which would be uploaded onto an online interface for the schools to access. Chris Boehner, the founder of the company, says the demand for his service is high now: in one year, he already has 12 partner schools. "The climate here just calls for something like this," he says.

The idea of travelling abroad at a young age to pursue education is not a new one in China. In 1872, the ruling Qing Dynasty sent a group of 120 children to the United States to study Western methods of industrialization and import them to China. Many early Communist party leaders, including Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, also had long stints in the West. Towards the end of the 10-year Cultural Revolution, the government realized that the movement had torn a gaping hole in the intellectual fabric of Chinese society and started sending small batches of young students to the U.S., hoping the business and technological skills they learned abroad could contribute to the goal of rapid modernization at home.

For over a century, bright Chinese students traveled to study in the West so that they might bring those lessons back for their home country's benefit. Now, however, the exodus of Chinese youth seems driven as much by Chinese veneration for Western education as by a desire to escape the social realities of today's China.

Zhao Weibo, the 16-year-old touring private American high schools with his father, says he's determined to attend school here. A star student at a well-reputed junior high school in China and the son of an official at the local ministry of education, Weibo knows that his decision may seem unusual. After all, his prospects in China are already bright. But that's not what most drives him. "I always feel I was born in the wrong country," he says, criticizing the way humanities courses are taught at his school ("the same way as math, we do lots of practice problems") and his English teacher's refusal to engage him in a debate about an answer to a multiple-choice question ("she thinks I was making her lose face"). He believes that an American private high school will be a place that can nurture his interests and his independent thinking, though he has only a vague knowledge about what to expect inside their ivy-covered brick walls.

Weibo's father, Zhao Jun, has supported and largely driven his son's decision. As the editor-in-chief of a magazine issued by the local ministry of education and the husband of a high school teacher, one might expect him to be a proud booster of Chinese education. Instead, he is trying to scoop his son out of the system as early as possible. When I ask why, he speaks in bullet points: "The course design is too rigid, the method of teaching is too mechanical, and the standard for measuring talent is too one-dimensional."

Chinese education is different from Western education in part because it was designed to solve a different kind of problem. In 1950, the literacy rate in China was only 20%; that number grew to 85% by 2001 and today is estimated at 92%. Chinese schools have succeeded in raising the education level of a large population over a short period of time, Zhao Jun says, but they fail to cater to individual students in the way that Western schools do. Because of China's one-child policy, families channel all their hopes into their only son or daughter. Watching their child languish in a cookie-cutter school system can be torturous for parents. Or, as Zhao Jun puts it, "What means one percent to society means 100 percent to a family."

He admits the choice of sending his son to America doesn't come easy, but believes it will eventually pay off. The tuition, high by American standards but astronomical by China's (a discrepancy that's made even more severe by the unfavorable exchange rate), "is a heavy burden for me," he says. "But if he stays in China, I will need to buy him an apartment and a car in the future anyways," a standard practice in China upon a child's marriage. "I'd rather invest that money early in education to equip him with skills."

Sometimes it's about believing in more than just American education. Zhang Mingfang says she started considering sending her son abroad as soon as he was born. She enrolled him in private bilingual kindergarten at three, sent him to his first formal English lesson at five, and travelled with him to the U.S. during summer vacations to help him soak up the culture, all to prepare him for the day he arrived at an American classroom. And that day is not far: now 16 and a student in a competitive high school in China, he made a trip to the U.S. again this winter, this time visiting private schools in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

Zhang hopes these early efforts will lead to a good life for her son, which she believes lies in America. She mentions the country's more leisurely lifestyle and its comprehensive healthcare system. But its greatest promise, she says, is the culture of fairness, which rewards diligence and talent first. "In China everything is based on connection. Things like getting a promotion depend on too many factors. In America, as long as you work hard and deliver results, you will distinguish yourself."

Zhao sees the same hope in America. Asked whether he wants his son to eventually come back to China or live in America, he answers, "I only hope my son could be in a place where he can rely on his talent and capability, in a society defined by explicit rules, instead of where he has to count on, for example, his father's social status. I don't know if I'll be able to compete." He chuckles, and falls silent.
• • • • •
In the fall of 2005, I arrived on the Massachusetts campus of Deerfield Academy, one of only two new students from mainland China, with ear-length hair and two overweight suitcases. Midway through my first day of class, administrators pulled junior English and U.S. history from my schedule and replaced them with English as second language. The next few months were a whirlwind of rules and questions. From the format of biology quizzes to the protocols at sit-down meals, from my classmates' curious enthusiasm about school rivalry to their bizarre habit of popping up the collars of their polo shirts, I found that many of my questions were not answered by the school manual. The classes and extracurricular activities kept me too busy, however, to pause and interpret them all. I needed to swallow them and move on.

Today, many middle class Chinese students and parents can rattle off a list of American high school names in one breath -- an duo fu, ta fu te, huo qi ji si, qiao te, luo si ma li -- but the schools themselves, and the images of what life might be like there, are still distant and foreign. Still, China's middle class families face such pressure to excel, and such fierce competition for success, that they can often barely keep up. It's hard enough to win admission to prestigious American schools and to get good grades once you're there. Who has the time to learn, in advance, what makes an American education different from a Chinese one, or how to survive spending your teenage years in an alien culture with a difficult language? The game is always changing for members of China's middle class, and it's too easy to be late.

Nearly 60 percent of high-net-worth Chinese (individuals with at least RMB 10 million -- roughly $1.6 million in investable assets) are either considering immigration to the West through investment or have already completed the process, according to the China Wealth Management Report, co-released by China Merchants Bank and Bain & Company. (A U.S. law provides a path to residency for foreigners who start a business here or otherwise invest heavily in the American economy.) Fifty-eight percent of them list their children's education as the primary motivation. "The Chinese economy is filled with bubbles -- from the housing market to the stock market," says Shen Jingquan, a senior manager at a state-owned energy company, whose two daughters are both studying at New England boarding schools. "Where else should you invest your money? You should invest it in education. I want my daughters to have my shoulders to stand on when they try to reach for higher places."

In sending their children to America, parents like Shen and Zhao are detaching this next generation from the very society that allows them this freedom while denying it to others. It's a reminder of the growing wealth divisions in China. With wealthier children now spending 4 or even 8 years studying abroad, the economic inequalities are slowly turning into something more entrenched. "In the 1980s, even children who grew up in the countryside could have many options in the future, including going abroad for graduate schools, as long as they study hard at school," Lvqiu Luwei, a Chinese social commentator wrote on her blog after speaking with some parents who have children abroad. "Now, the kids who are studying in American high schools are all from well-off families. They are distinguished by their access to education starting from elementary school or even kindergarten." No longer is the nation's single-tracked education system, which its people have followed for over a thousand years, a reliable channel of upward social mobility. As a rising number of students flock to overseas schools, their less privileged peers at home -- the ones who can't afford consultants and American school tuition -- are out-competed abroad. The number of students who register for Gaokao, China's national college entrance examination, has declined by 700,000 over the last three years.

At the recent "two meetings," an annual two-week event where senior government officials gather to discuss new suggestions for laws, one delegate suggested founding an "elite education system," which the ministry of education approved. By establishing separate campuses within top Chinese universities and funneling the most promising students to the best educational and career opportunities, the government hopes to produce "individuals with highly specialized talent who put national honor and responsibility above their lives."

Whether or not this becomes China's antidote to the brain drain, it's a clear recognition of the problem. But, with anti-elitist resentment already running high in China, setting up yet another opportunity for the privileged class could be politically risky. "Another consequence of having social resources over-concentrated in the hands of the government!" one user on Weibo, China's Twitter-style service, lamented. "Why does it feel like 'mending the fold after the sheep is lost'?" asked another user, borrowing an ancient Chinese idiom. For now, the policy is of little concern for parents such as Shen and Zhao. Government cadres, business entrepreneurs, and well-connected intellectuals are weaving an alternative future for their children, and that future is not in China.

It's a future of a stronger education and freer society -- in America.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedHow China's New Love Affair with U.S. Private Schools Is Changing Them Both2012-03-28T11:01:00-04:002013-07-17T13:24:16-04:00As Chinese students flood private American high schools, aided by high-priced "consultants," they are changing concepts of success and security back home, and leading ambitious schools to seek out more of the eager (and often full-paying) mainlanders.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-253427
Long before the NBA arrived, missionaries, revolutionaries, and communists helped make the game ubiquitous here.

LeBron James smiles during a photo session with university student volunteers in Shanghai / Reuters

 Inside the cobblestone courtyard of the Forbidden City and surrounded by six-century-old palaces lies an unexpected sight for foreign tourists. As they walk under the giant portrait of Mao Zedong and pour through the dark archway of the Tiananmen rostrum, they arrive at two well-maintained basketball courts, their green astroturf and gray concrete clashing with the ancient crimson columns and the dusty yellow tiles.

 Basketball is never out of place in modern China. Its ubiquitous presence often surprises first-time visitors, many of whom consider the sport quintessentially western. Ambling in quiet street parks in early mornings or walking by urban high school campuses in late afternoons, one hears chasing steps, a thumping ball, shouting voices, and the silence of anticipation followed by joyous cheers. Driving along unpaved roads on China's inland plateaus and steppes, one starts to notice the basketball stands and hoops flashing by -- lone statures amid wooden shacks and wild grass. Outside the manufacturing plants that sprinkle the nation's east coast, workers swarm into basketball courts after finishing their shifts to stretch the limbs numbed by long hours on the production lines and to break the monotonous daily routine with sweat and laughter.

An estimated 300 million Chinese people play basketball -- roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States, according to the Chinese Basketball Association. Many Americans are just now learning of China's enthusiasm for the sport as the success of Jeremy Lin, a California-born Knicks player of Chinese heritage, becomes an international phenomenon. But the sport is almost as old in the land of Lin's ancestors, and maybe even more popular, than it is in the U.S.

 Introduced to China over a century ago by YMCA missionaries just a few years after the game's 1891 invention in Springfield, Massachusetts, basketball has seeped into the fabric of Chinese lives. Until the NBA arrived in early 1990s, basketball had come to feel so intrinsically Chinese, most people did not even associate it with America. Unlike in the U.S., where a garden of sports -- from baseball to football to ice hockey -- all play a part in shaping a diverse athletic landscape, in China, basketball is perhaps the only true national sport, the only sport that brings together people of all backgrounds and kindles the nation.

Some of the first groups that embraced basketball in China were college students, western-minded scholars, and, most importantly, members of the Communist party, who loved the sport for its cohesive power. During the Long March (the Red Army's storied year-long retreat in the 1930s to evade the Nationalist army), Communist soldiers and officers played basketball to lift their spirits and boost solidarity.

 The party continued to support the sport after it took power in 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao declared war against almost all Western bourgeois affections, from classical music to novels, but he never wavered in support of basketball. Deprived of all forms of cultural enrichment and lacking the most basic athletic equipment, children and young adults roamed around their neighborhoods, setting up boards and hoops in alleys and courtyards and pouring their energy into the simple game of shooting the hoops. "At that time, China had basically only two sports: basketball and ping pong," my father, a teenager during the height of the Cultural Revolution and a devout basketball fan told me. "If you were young and loved sports, you only got these two to choose from."

 The People's Liberation Army has long encouraged many of its two-million-plus active duty service members to play basketball for its ability to cultivate camaraderie and even tactical teamwork among soldiers. Under slogans such as "Boost National Image" and "Friendship First, Competition Second," basketball became the most popular pastime in the military camps. Different levels of military hierarchy were divided into something like leagues, which hold regular tournaments among their teams. For a while, many star players received high military ranks and such perks as separate dining, cars, and expensive clothes.

 "From 1949 to the early 1980s, the first-rate basketball players were all from the military teams, with the Bayi at the top," recalls Wang Yongzhi, the associate editor in charge of Olympic sports coverage at Tencent.com, China largest web portal. He was referring to the Bayi Rockets, an all-military men's team named after the founding date of the PLA (bayi means August 1). It dominated Chinese basketball well into the 1990s, producing stars such as Wang Zhizhi, China's first player to enter the NBA. Though favored by the country's old military system, Bayi couldn't keep up with the changes of the 1990s and saw its dynasty decline as commercial basketball leagues entered the market and started importing foreign players. Most recently, the team captured international media coverage for brawling with players of the Georgetown Hoyas in a supposedly friendly match last fall.

 Still, playing basketball for fun is just as popular, maybe more so, than watching the professional teams. "For many of my classmates in China, the only sport they do is basketball -- our campus didn't have much space for other sports," said Wang Chen, a basketball lover and freshman at Yale who graduated from a famously competitive high school in Beijing.

Basketball also offers Chinese youth, many of whom have no siblings due to China's one-child policy, a way to form deep connections with their peers. Although China lacks a nationwide college sports association like the NCAA, students still organize sports teams based the academic departments within their universities. Cai Wei, a graduate of Beijing International Studies University, played center for the department of International Economics and Trade basketball team. "We are like a family," she told me. "It's the single large community of friends I had from college." Now a consultant at a U.S. accounting firm in New York, she still keeps in close touch with her former teammates, most of whom are also abroad.

If Chinese basketball was popular before the NBA arrived, it has since become an outright craze. Since 1987, when the U.S. league first gave broadcasting rights to China Central Television free of charge, it has cultivated an estimated fan base of 450 million. Megastars like Kevin Garnett and Lebron James are household names in the country, and Kobe Bryant is revered absolutely. The NBA's popularity in China boomed in 2002, when Yao Ming signed with the Houston Rockets. His first game against Shaquille O'Neal and the L.A. Lakers attracted more than 200 million Chinese viewers. Part of it may be national pride, but it's mostly passion for the sport itself. Zheng Xiuyi, a sophomore at Yale from Shanghai and a basketball fan, said that he cheered for the Rockets initially because of Yao Ming, but is now rooting for it even after Yao retired. "The Rockets is my team," he said to me, paused, and said it again.

"For the kids, it's like the Hollywood and McDonald's," said Wang Yongzhi, the sports editor at Tencent.com. Zheng believes that, as his Chinese peers watch more American basketball, it will lead them to explore other aspects of American society. "I think if you tell young people in China not to look abroad but just pay attention to their own business, they can't do that anymore." Reading about the thousand customers who lined up for the opening of an NBA store in China, or watching the teenage Chinese boys in baggy pants and Adidas sneakers mimicking the cocky drills of their NBA idols, it's hard not to agree.

As international sports brands have rushed into China to capitalize on the lucrative market there, commercializing what had become a beloved pastime, the feel of Chinese basketball has certainly changed. Still, it may not have drifted too far away from the game played by communists on the Long March, by children during the Cultural Revolution, by soldiers in the People's Liberation Army, or even by police guards inside Beijing's historic Forbidden City.

 After retiring from his job at a state-owned company, my father has picked up his old hobby and started playing basketball every morning at a nearby street park. The court, half-size and paved with asphalt, is sheltered from the pebble-stone paths and a nearby highway by a ring of pine trees. Walking into the court at 7 a.m. before starting his warm-up, he would nod to other regular players, with whom he has become friends after matches that left him sore in his waist but full of chatter the next day. There is a retired military official, a district court prosecutor, a mid-level government cadre, a college professor, an IT entrepreneur, a hedge fund manager, a 70-year-old farmer living with his married child, and a sea captain at China Ocean Shipping Company.

As the casual exercise begins, the rhythm of bouncing basketballs fills the park, uninterrupted by cars racing by on the highway or Peking Opera singers practicing in the nearby woods. Thump, thump, thump, thump.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedFrom Mao Zedong to Jeremy Lin: Why Basketball Is China's Biggest Sport2012-02-22T08:34:35-05:002012-02-22T13:59:57-05:00Long before the NBA arrived, missionaries, revolutionaries, and communists helped make the game ubiquitous here.tag:theatlantic.com,2012:50-251973
Alienated and struggling to get by in China's big cities, migrant workers brave chaotic lines and difficult journeys for a chance to reconnect with what they left back home.

A Chinese man carries his belongings through Beijing West Railway Station / AP

It is a scene too familiar to every resident of China's big cities: the normally bustling square in front of the train station seems eerily silent in the winter chill, packed with people standing in lines that snake to the edge of the square and extend onto sidewalks for nearly a mile. Men in army-green padded cotton jacket and women with sleeping babies fastened onto their backs wait with dreary eyes, some taking turns with their friends and spouses so that every few hours they can curl on the plastic clothes they spread by the wall and sleep.

Chunyun, or Spring Festival travel rush, is a period in which Chinese people working or studying in a far-away city return home to celebrate the Spring Festival, also known as the Lunar New Year, China's most important holiday. Over the past three decades, more than 250 million young laborers, mostly from the country's less developed inland provinces, have migrated to coastal cities in pursuit of better job prospects and a more prosperous urban lifestyle. The beginning of chunyun, usually in mid-January, can look like a sort of high-speed rewind of this 30-year trend, decades of migration run backwards over two weeks. Chinese travelers are expected to make 3.158 billion trips over 40 days starting in January 8, the largest periodic human migration on Earth. Many of the trips are over 30 hours long.

When the chunyun migration first occurred in mass numbers in 1995, straining the nation's outdated transportation infrastructure, the government tried to alleviate the pressure by ordering factories to keep at least 60 percent of the migrant employees at their workplace during Spring Festival. Factories were also prohibited from hiring new workers until 30 days after the holiday season. But the dictates fell apart when factories were unable or unwilling to enforce them. People's determination to reunite with their families was so strong that the state relented. Over the years, the number of migrants multiplied, but the upgrades to the nation's transportation system, though amazingly rapid, still lagged behind. After all, why should the state spend hundreds of billions of RMB to build an expansive railway system that, as social commentator Yang Hengjun has pointed out, would sit largely idle for most of the year?

As a result, getting hold of a train ticket around mid-January has turned into an annual nightmare for migrant workers as well as the government. For the first time, the state is allowing people to book tickets online or by phone, an overdue move aiming to reduce the days-long lines at counters. Officials are also requiring all buyers to use their real names and identification numbers when purchasing, to stem the ticket scalping that has plagued chunyun for years. The ticket web site server crashed, however, within minutes of opening, overwhelmed by the roughly one billion visits it receives daily. On phone lines, an individual caller might have to try several hundred times to get through, and even then only some lucky ones were able to secure a seat. The chaos was exacerbated by a rule that allows booking online only 12 days prior to the travel date.

When Zhang Xinchuan, a migrant in southern Guangdong province, failed to get a train ticket, he reconstructed his trip down as a zigzagging chain of long-distance bus rides and short flights. Asked by a reporter from local newspaper Southern Daily why he was so determined to go home, Zhang responded as if the answer were obvious. "Since I am not from this province, why should I stay?"

An observer might be asking the same question as the Southern Daily reporter: why endure such chaotic lines, not to mention an uncomfortable journey of many hours each way? Frustrated at the end of a ticket-purchasing battle and exhausted after a year toiling in foreign cities, migrant workers seem, based on the tenacity with which they pursue a route home, more eager than ever to embrace the comfort of their family and heritage. As modern China's whirlpool of change pulls individuals away from their past, people are finding new significance in the longstanding traditions that still remain, such as returning home for Spring Festival.

Since the 1980s, China's economic opening has lured workers away from their farmland with the promise of economic opportunities in faraway cities. They poured into metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai as well as special economic zones such as Zhuhai and Shenzhen, where underneath the prosperity fueled by their labor lurked the challenges of integrating into a new and very different environment. The nationwide hukou system, a remnant of the Mao era intended to keep farmers to their farmland, restricts access to subsidized services like public education and health care based on one's place of birth. The hukou system dismantled the traditional, multigenerational family structure. Adult migrant workers, unable to enroll their children into urban schools or afford to bring aging parents to live with them, often choose to migrate by themselves and leave their families back home. The number of left-behind children has reached 58 million -- nearly a quarter of the nation's children, according to an official report in 2009.

Migrants' jobs at construction sites or factories allow them to save a portion of their salaries to send home, but with urban real estate prices skyrocketing, buying a place in the city almost always remains out of reach. In a society where urban homeownership is often the definitive measure of success and belonging, the inability to afford a home can leave migrants feeling like losers, heightening their sense of displacement. Policies ostensible designed to "protect their personal safety" further drive them to city periphery, where they live in walled communities under police surveillance. "Without an apartment, we can quarter in small space," a migrant wrote in a letter he posted on a web forum popular among city dwellers. "But please don't ridicule us: Is it our fault that we cannot afford a home?"

The support network of families and friends is essential for survival in rural China, where the social safety net is ragged and often nonexistent. When migrants arrive alone in a new city of strangers, they seek to replicate that network by relying on the help of laoxiang, or fellow landsmen, other migrants from the same town or province. Facing uncertain prospects at recruiting fairs and among the middleman employment agencies known for their questionable credibility, many newcomers land their first job through laoxiang connections. It's not difficult to find construction teams of men all from the same town, or shoe production lines composed of girls speaking the same provincial dialect. In the absence of an effective labor union or other channels to voice grievances, these regional bonds also help workers come together and bargain with their employers. The famous 2010 strike in a Honda factory in Foshan, which sparked a wave of copycats across China's east coast, was organized by two migrants from Hunan province, also the hometown of Mao Zedong, known for its revolutionary spirit.

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 	  Notes on the Rise of China

Discrimination from city elites and recruiters who look down on their regional background may also help deepen migrants' provincial identity. Migrants from the most populous but less developed Chinese inland provinces can be particularly victim to these prejudices. Urban families hiring babysitters or housekeepers often inquire applicants' province of origin before making their decision; recruiting fairs routinely feature signs claiming "only interviewing Zhejiang workers," "not considering Anhui applicants" or "no Henanese." Indignant and helpless, many migrants find solace in tightening their bonds with their laoxiang, or may choose to confront these prejudices by associating themselves even more strongly with their home province, in a sort of proud defiance. In a bestselling book on regional stereotypes, Who Did the Henanese Offend?, the three Henanese co-authors living in Beijing defend their provincial heritage by singing praise for the greatness of the land that bred philosophers such as Lao-Tzu and Chuang-Tzu. "Not everyone can live up to their names like the Henanese can," they wrote.

As migrants move from city to city, the meaning of home becomes both broader and richer. The sense of confusion and displacement that chases nearly every migrant, perhaps an inevitable byproduct of China's breakneck economic development, can often only be escaped when late January rolls around and the migrants step onto homebound trains and trucks. This year as the ticket war rages on, even this brief comfort seems to be in jeopardy for many. The new online ticket purchasing system, the main venue for booking chunyun tickets this year, is poorly designed and too technologically challenging for migrants unfamiliar with computers. Many resorted to the old means, waiting outside ticket booths at train stations, often in line for days, to be told that the Internet buyers had bought up all the slots. In a letter to the Ministry of Railways, Huang Qinghong, a Chongqing migrant working in Wenzhou wrote, "Lining up for tickets during chunyun is a torture for us migrants every year, but when we were eagerly waiting for it this year, we don't even get to have it anymore. ... You came up with the Internet ticket-purchase system while sitting in air-conditioned rooms, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, but have you thought of our life?"

On an Internet forum discussing the letter, another migrant added, "If we have a choice, we won't be going home only during Chinese New Year."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedHomesick: Why Chinese Migrants Will Take 3.2 Billion Trips Over 40 Days2012-01-26T07:15:00-05:002012-05-02T14:36:41-04:00Alienated and struggling to get by in China's big cities, migrant workers brave chaotic lines and difficult journeys for a chance to reconnect with what they left back home.tag:theatlantic.com,2011:50-250488
Christianity's most important holiday is a big event here, but state regulation of religion and a suspicion of all things Western can sometimes get in the way. And, yes, it's too commercialized.

A man dressed as Santa Claus walks past two security guards in downtown Shanghai / Reuters

It's that time of the year again. Santa smiles from the glass doors of hair salons and pharmacies; "Joy to the World" plays in busy shopping malls; plastic trees laced with blinking lights stand in front of restaurants and bars, their dark green softened by the ruby glow of lanterns hanging under the eaves. And written on banners on university campuses and flashing in neon in business districts are the characters, "圣诞快乐!". The world's most widely celebrated religious holiday is in full swing here, in the center of communist China.

Christmas is young in China -- it did not enter mainstream society until well into the 1990s -- and is embraced mainly by the younger generation. According to a well-regarded Chinese business magazine, 70 percent of the people celebrating it here are below age 38. First introduced to the country by western missionaries, it found popularity in 1920s and 30s among converted Christians and in elite circles. Peasants feasted with their priests inside farmhouses; businessmen toasted over candles with foreign trade partners. In 1949, after the Communist Party took power, all things Western were labeled "mental poison" and Christmas gradually became a concept so foreign that people took little interest in it.

The liberal spirit of the reform and opening era in the 1980s reinvigorated western culture in China, and the quickly marketized economy in the 1990s seized onto the holiday's profitable potential. Now, Christmas is both a commercial and fashion statement for many of the young in China, who celebrate in ways that would be at once familiar and alien to Westerners. Stand on Oriental Plaza in downtown Beijing and you'll see girls wearing furry reindeer antlers amble by, holding hands with their boyfriends in Santa hats. Open the government-owned Guangming Daily and stacks of ads on Christmas sales will fall into your lap. On certain streets on Christmas morning, convoys of Audis will glide past, decorated with red ribbons tied into a bow at the front, where a mini-sized Santa stands. The cars are taking happy brides and grooms to posh hotels and restaurants, where lavish wedding ceremonies -- a Christmas tradition here -- await.

Chinese and Americans might both indulge in shopping sprees around Christmas time, but how they think about the holiday is quite different. Christmas in the West represents an occasion to spend time with cherished ones, for families to exchange presents and friends to visit each other. In China, however, it is a social event not for one's private life but for the public domain. Students rehearse dance performances and plays for school-organized galas; foreign companies' labor unions hand out movie tickets and gift vouchers to employees. The intimate western traditions such as building gingerbread houses, hanging up stockings, or gathering as a family to open presents on Christmas morning have no equivalent in China; on Christmas eve, most young people will get together with maybe a dozen friends to watch the latest big release at the movie theater or belt out at a few songs at a karaoke bar. In many Chinese cities, Christmas kicks off what is often the most festive time of the year -- in a couple of weeks, when migrant workers jump onto homebound trains for Chinese New Year, these cities are left with little more than empty streets and closed stores.

The popular Chinese perception of Christmas as a holiday for the masses has two very different causes: peoples' love of communal celebration and the government's effort to distract from the holiday's religious aspect. Growing up in Beijing, I learned to hum "Jingle Bells" in elementary school and heard the story of the birth of Jesus from American teachers. Still, Christmas for me was a Western cultural phenomenon rather than something religious. It had never occurred to me that the holiday is not universally celebrated in America as it is in China until I came to the country six years ago as a student. When a Jewish friend described her plans on the night of the 24th of December, I asked, out of confusion, why none of it involved Christmas. When she told me, I exclaimed, "It is your national holiday after all!"

My surprise was common among new arrivals from China. "It looked like a national holiday to me," Zhongling Yuxiu, a Chinese student at Yale, told me. "In China, Christmas is just like Valentine's Day or other western holidays that we decided to celebrate." Brought up in a Christian household in China, Zhongling had spent Christmases at underground churches in Beijing before she came to America. (There were also government-sanctioned services, but she called them "no different from propaganda.") She says she had considered herself only "culturally Christian" then. Living in America's more tolerant religious environment, where society attaches a much weightier significance to Christmas, she now feels her Christian identity better defined.

Some religious groups in China have tried to reconnect Christmas to its spiritual origins. Wiggling around in what limited space the government allows, the boundaries of which seem ever-changing, these groups do not always have much success. After graduating from Yale, an American I'll call Jane headed to southern China in 2008 to teach English. (She has asked not to be named for fear of putting her friend's church at risk.) A devout Christian, she planned to spend her Christmas in Beijing singing in a choir led by her friend, a pastor. Throughout that year, the Chinese government had been cracking down on ethnic protests and working to suppress negative food safety reports, all prior to the Olympic Games. It had little patience left for respecting Chinese Christians' end-of-the-year rituals. Although Jane's friend tried to negotiate permission for the concerts from the government, even agreeing to forego choir outfits and cut religious words from the carols, the performances -- which had won official approval in earlier years -- were called off at the last minute. The government had decided to cancel all "crowd-gathering events" for the fear that they might spark unrest.

That the state so tightly manages Christmas's image can be off-putting for Christians in China, but it also liberates them from some of the western perceptions surrounding Christianity. Jane says that she feels much more comfortable inviting friends in China to her Christmas choir than she might in America. "Religion is so stigmatized in America. The word Christianity is associated with Republican, Tea Party ... it's politicized." she told me. "In China, because non-Christian people understand so little about the religion, it is less threatening for them than for the non-Christian in the States." Her identity as a foreigner also gives her license to observe Christmas in China, she says. "Other Chinese people pretty much just assumed [I did that] because I was a crazy foreigner," she laughed. When Jane's non-Christian Chinese friends showed up to her choir performance, they saw not just foreigners, but also large crowds of men and women of fellow Chinese, engaging in activities they'd always perceived as western.

There is one thing that China's Christmas and America's have in common: both are widely lamented as over-commercialized. While some in America fight to resurface the holiday's spiritual significance, Christmas-bashers in China warn against allowing Western culture to contaminate Chinese civilization. Shortly before Christmas in 2006, ten post-doctoral students from Peking University, Tsinghua University, and other elite colleges penned an open letter asking Chinese people to boycott Christmas and resist the invasion of "western soft power." They warned, "[Christmas celebrators in China] are doing what western missionaries dreamed to do but didn't succeed in doing 100 years ago." The letter added, "Chinese people need to treat Christmas cautiously, and support the dominance of our own culture."

In the summer of 2007, I taught English in rural Fujian, a coastal province in southern China. One student had taken a few weeks off to work in a factory in Fuzhou, the capital of the province and a large export hub. When he returned to school, on a scorching mid-summer day, he dropped something into my palm, explaining it was a product of his factory that he had sneaked out to bring to me as a present. It was a large piece of gummy candy wrapped in plastic, wet from his sweaty palm, the shape of a white-bearded man in red robes.

"I brought more with me, but ate all of them on the train. It was too yummy." He smiled apologetically. "It was meant to be sent to America, for a holiday they call -- they call --" He struggled for the name.

"Sheng Dan Jie," I said. Christmas.

"Right," he repeated shyly, scratching his head. "Sheng Dan Jie."
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedWhat China Loves About Christmas, and Doesn't2011-12-25T07:30:04-05:002011-12-28T10:23:30-05:00Christianity's most important holiday is a big event here, but state regulation of religion and a suspicion of all things Western can sometimes get in the way. And, yes, it's too commercialized.tag:theatlantic.com,2011:50-249787
The way Americans talk about China can often seem hostile, frustrating, or altogether irreconcilable with the world as a newcomer from China knows it

Wang Chengdong, a Chinese student in Missouri State University's Executive MBA program, works in a library study room / AP

Every September, the price of a flight from China to a major American metropolis like Boston or New York soars. In addition to the usual stream of business managers and tourists shuffling between the two countries is the annual inflow of young Chinese, girls in ponytails and boys in sneakers, headed to their American colleges. Backpacks hiked up on their shoulders and suitcases rolling behind, they carry transparent plastic folders with neatly arranged sheets and pamphlets showing their first destination on the new soil: Yale University, Hamilton College, University of Wisconsin Madison, University of South Florida, USC School of Cinematic Arts.

In the past decade, China has witnessed an explosion in the number of citizens studying abroad, a 21st-century manifestation of a deep-rooted Confucius value that emphasizes education. Even before they enter high school, children of middle class families from cities across China start to see liuxue -- studying abroad -- as the default choice. They devote hours of their class time to preparing for American standardized exams from the SAT and GRE to the International English Language Testing System, often scoring in the top quartile. In 2010, nearly 130,000 Chinese students studied in the U.S., a 30 percent increase from the year before. Having surpassed India, China is now America's top source of international students.

I jumped on the wagon myself in the September of 2005, traveling to far-away Massachusetts for the last two years of high school. After the initial elation of reaching my long-strived-for goal cooled and I figured out my way around the language barrier, I realized that there were bigger hurdles than language for a Chinese student in America. China and its rise were receiving more attention and discussion in the U.S. First as undergraduate in Connecticut and then as a New York Times intern in Beijing, I plunged into the China-related discussions, hoping to gain an alternate, more comprehensive perspective on my home country. But I often find myself wrestling with an instinctive compulsion to take China's side, a feeling not unfamiliar to many Chinese students in the States.

American political discourse -- and American criticism of China -- can clash, sometimes painfully so, with the more closed and more uniformly nationalistic social norms Chinese students are accustomed to. Their desire to share in American prosperity and their admiration for its fair social values are often complicated by a defensiveness of their homeland, instilled in them by a nationalistic atmosphere back home and compounded by an American tendency to talk about China in ways that can sometimes sound condescending, even hostile. Reconciling these feelings and gaining a balanced perspective can turn out to be much more difficult than, for example, the GRE vocabulary section.
• • • • •
On American campuses, Chinese students often steer clear of political debate, something they likely had few encounters with during their single-track life path prior to their arrival in America. Students now in their late teens or early 20s missed their country's brief period of relative political pluralism in mid-1980s, which was ended by the violent Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Instead, they grew up in the pragmatism-defined 1990s, which propelled citizens to trade political rights for material affluence. Champions of China's lopsided education system, they devoted after-class hours to hone their quantitative skills and memorized verbatim their history and political science textbooks to pass the humanities exams.

After a lifetime of experiencing conformity as the social norm, Chinese students are sometimes amazed by the politically charged conversations and expressions common in America. The night Barack Obama was elected president, I watched from my dormitory balcony the carnival-like celebration at my college courtyard, reading the banners and listening to the chants, fascinated by the burst of energy. The scene felt strange yet familiar -- I recalled the joyous parades when Hong Kong returned to China and the cheering crowds when the Olympic committee announced Beijing to be the host city for the 2008 games. But the differences became clear when this political energy took other forms in America. "When I started reading American news, it was incredible to see the two parties throwing rocks at each other," April Sun, a native of Liaoning province in northeast China and a graduate student in education at George Mason University, told me. "I thought, 'How could you have disagreement in front of the public?'"

Amazement aside, the majority of Chinese students, busy adjusting to the new environment, spare little attention to American political bickering as long as their homeland is not involved. However, as America's attention shifts toward China, they often find themselves caught between two more or less opposing ideological camps.

Chinese students typically choose to withhold their opinions for fear of remafan -- causing trouble. When Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, liberal intellectuals in mainland China held underground celebrations and threw secret banquets (despite the government's attempt to block them), while Chinese students in America seemed to remain eerily silent. "We shouldn't talk about it," a Chinese student at Yale University told me in a private message at the time. "We should focus on studying and doing things we can do. Truth comes from practice." The habit of self-censoring, common among China's post-1980s youth, can feel both frustrating and bewildering, even to some within the generation. Jiang Fangzhou, a 23-year-old Chinese writer, calls this phenomenon an "active effort to maintain status quo." These students, she said in an interview with the Financial Times, "dare not stray from the orthodoxy for even one millimeter when they are still 10 meters away from crossing the line."

Though their silence on politics could be mistaken for nonchalance, it's anything but. When a fellow Chinese student in the U.S. deviates from the political orthodoxy, the otherwise quiet community can sometimes erupt. In April 2008, a month after a bloody clash between ethnic Tibetans and Han Chinese in the Tibetan city of Lhasa, a Duke freshmen named Wang Qianyuan became a household name among the Chinese community in America. During a confrontation between Tibetan and Han Chinese students during a pro-Tibet vigil on campus, she agreed to write "Free Tibet, Save Tibet" on one Tibetan student's back. Witnessing the scene, her fellow Chinese schoolmates lashed out, calling her a traitor and ostracizing her.

"They said that I had mental problems and that I would go to hell," she writes in a personal account published by the Washington Post. "There's a strong Chinese view nowadays that critical thinking and dissidence create problems, so everyone should just keep quiet and maintain harmony."

Many students shrug off the incongruity of choosing a Western education at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars a year and resisting the ideological environment that comes with it. For them, the primary draw of an American education is the socially recognized prestige that brightens their job prospects. Serena Zhang, a Georgetown junior from Shanghai, said she applied to U.S. colleges because she considers herself "qualified for them" and "they bring more opportunities." She beamed as she recounted working alongside a senior boss in the American consulting firm that employed her, something she feels would be "hardly possible in China without a connection." Although she grumbled about the "arbitrary and alienating" U.S. media coverage of China, she said it was "unnecessary to dwell upon the details."
• • • • •
As a student in the United States, I yearned for a forum to talk and share thoughts on events back in China: an earthquake in Sichuan, the Olympic Games in Beijing, a Uighur uprising in Xinjiang. But the silence of the campus Chinese community, initially disappointing, became almost suffocating. So I turned to Western media, hoping its open civil discourse could help me make sense of my country. The daily headlines on China gave me feelings of liberation as well as unease: "On Our Radar: China's Environmental Woes," "In Restive Chinese Area, Cameras Keep Watch," "Behind a Military Chill: A More Forceful China."

While it was a relief to finally be able to access direct knowledge on these sensitive domestic issues, as someone who grew up in a middle-class family in suburban Beijing, I had difficulty connecting the Orwellian China described in western media to the one I recognized. Then, working at the New York Times Beijing bureau, I witnessed a different side of China. As I picked up phone calls from petitioners who had fallen ill working in toxic factories and interviewed a Uighur intellectual who was hunted by the government for his "separatist tendency," their narratives muted the defense of China I had long muttered to myself. It saddened me that the powerless in China had to resort to foreign media to find a voice. It depressed me when I pictured my non-Chinese college friends skimming these headlines, shaking their heads at my country.

Though many Chinese students come to the United States to absorb ideas from a society that encourages free exchange of opinions, this much-admired quality can become thorny when the discourse centers on China. To make peace with these criticisms, they are learning first to make peace with themselves.

Joy Zhuang, a graduate student majoring in international relations at Syracuse University and an intern at American Enterprise Institute, loves American television dramas. They helped her learn the language as well as the society before she came here to study, she said. Her favorite was "Boston Legal," which she explained shows her "the collision of different values in America."

Zhuang, interested in the development and function of NGOs, maintains a blog titled "I Study NGO Management in America," where she posts reflections on this topic and others. In July, after a high-speed train wreck left 40 people dead in eastern China, she wrote a post pressing the country's state-controlled media for greater transparency. "I would rather have rumors than have lies," she wrote. In the fall, as Occupy Wall Street kindled popular protests across the United States, Zhuang stopped by Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., to watch the demonstrations. "I always believe people's grievances should be channeled instead of blocked," she reflected. "In China, even when the government makes large moves such as demolishing and relocating rural villages, it never gives the residents a chance to speak and just settles everything with money."

Zhuang is an unwavering proponent of dialogues and free expression, though American discourse about China has at times tested her patience. "Foreign policies toward China only enters mainstream discussion in America in recent years," she said, "because now it needs help from China." She added, frustrated, "On the one hand, [America] praises China for the role it plays on the international stage. On the other hand, it tells its citizens about China's investment in clean energy and technology and argues that America needs to do more in order to not fall behind. That's not the way you speak about a friend [in Chinese social norms] ... it hurts feelings."

She especially dislikes when Western voices predict China's political doom. She is still bothered by an American teacher's comment, while lecturing on China's aging population, that the nation will "get old before it gets rich." She bristles at mass media speculations on the possibility of an "Arab Spring" toppling the Communist Party in China. "If you ask Chinese people, they will tell you all they want now is, for example, free media. But America always calls for 'the collapse of the Communist Party' or 'a multi-party system.' It's too radical." Zhuang believes that gradual change will take place in China through its burgeoning civil society, which she said Western media tends to overlook.

When Lawrence Guo, a soft-spoken, bespectacled boy from the bustling city of Tianjin, learned about Liu Xiaobo winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, he deliberately avoided both Chinese and American media coverage of the prize. He did not want to "be trapped in one side of opinions," he explained. He maintains that democratic reform should proceed cautiously. "I might sound like a Chinese bureaucrat," he chuckled. "Human rights is indeed a sensitive topic in China, but that doesn't mean no one in the government wants to improve the situation. Western governments are pushing it too hard, so it's counterproductive."

Guo, like Zhuang, embraces public debate in America and takes advantage of the vibrant campus environment. Now a second-year student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with a concentration in Latin American studies, he is learning Portuguese. ("Democratic reforms in Latin American countries do not follow a smooth trajectory either," he did not forget to add.)

"Sometimes I think [discussing political matters] is just the government's means of living. It's their job." Guo tries not to take the U.S. government's criticisms of China personally. "America is not only attacking China, it's also self-criticizing all the time." He also separates these criticisms from the opinions of the people he interacts with in daily life, whom he thinks are quite friendly to China. In his class at SAIS, China mostly comes up in the context of its economic miracle, which evokes admiring remarks from his classmates. "It makes me feel proud to be a Chinese," Guo recalled, smiling.

Zhuang, too, tries to reason away the angst she can feel on hearing harsh American criticisms of China. "I am not a Chauvinist, and I have a strong sense of morality. If our government does things wrong, it should be criticized," she said. "But as a Chinese, I cannot disconnect myself with this identity, and sometimes I still feel upset." Difficult as it is for her to digest these criticisms, she eagerly swallows them all. She faithfully attends every roundtable discussion about China her think tank hosts and tracks the event calendars of other major political institutes in Washington. She is grateful that such discussions exist for her to roam into. "Among my peers in China, if you care about anything deeper, they will say, 'Come on, why are you so idealistic?'" she said, lifting her tone to imitate their air. "Being in America actually makes you feel better. People don't judge."

Zhuang's friend Andy Liu, a former Chinese Central Television anchor who just completed his master's in public diplomacy at Syracuse University, described his feelings toward China and America in human terms: "China as my birthplace feels like my parent, whom I can't choose but naturally love. America is like someone I'm dating, with whom I experienced crush, disappointment, and finally settled into a mature relationship." To achieve this inner balance, Liu has had to distance himself from his Chinese perspective. "I can now observe China as a third party, a skill I have intended to learn. Of course my attachment to China maintains, but now it's the difference of seeing it inside or outside Lushan."

Liu was referring to a Chinese poem by the 11th century poet Su Shi, who encapsulated the science of perspective in verses now recited by every Chinese elementary school student:

Sideways a mountain range, vertically a peak.
 Far-near, soaring-crouching, never the same.
 No way I can tell the true shape of Mt. Lushan,
 Because I am standing in the middle of this mountain.
Helen Gaohttp://www.theatlantic.com/author/helen-gao/?utm_source=feedClash of Civilizations: The Confusion of Being a Chinese Student in America2011-12-12T07:00:00-05:002013-07-17T13:29:30-04:00The way Americans talk about China can often seem hostile, frustrating, or altogether irreconcilable with the world as a newcomer from China knows it