About six months ago we made a decision – we were leaving Shenzhen before the end of the year, no excuses. We didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t really know what we would do. I had vague hope that outside of China my M.Ed might mean something. We originally set our sights on Australia for no other reason than it seemed a remarkably pleasant place to live and work. One of the few things we knew was that, for various reasons, the wish not to go home was even stronger than the desire to leave English teaching in Shenzhen. We wanted to leave Shenzhen for one big reason. We felt like we weren’t developing.
Tag Archive: China
Discourse is the framework in which we speak and by its nature pulls on how we think about a subject. It’s the lie that’s not a lie, the cheap “spin” of politicians but also that which defines how we define our world, illuminating certain facts at the expense of the greater whole. Foucault argued that it made modern societies nearly totalitarian in that we policed ourselves in what what we spoke and how we thought. In other words, work in the social sciences like the DSMV – the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – are shackles on whole our being not because it’s being enforced on us from the outside, but because internalize these sorts of codified standards of thinking and behaving and often willingly commit ourselves to mental institutions if we fall outside it’s norms. A curious facet of Foucault’s thinking was that he thought it inescapable. You can never destroy discourse, only replace it with a new one. We are, in essence, as blind about the problems of our day as my ancestors were about slavery in theirs.
Take that idea and look at this New York Time’s article about the iPhone supply chain. It’s a discourse that reinforces, uncritically, the global capitalism discourse. The title, alone, is striking: “Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China“. We’re told that the bill of materials, the cost of all the parts that goes into an iPhone, is $187.50. The phone retails for $600, “though the cost to consumers is less, subsidized by AT&T in exchange for service contracts.” The total cost of labor at assembly is thought to be about 7%, but everyone depends “on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.” So now companies like Foxconn are planning to abandon Shenzhen for poorer provinces where they can pay even less to worker.
Huang Hung, writing for the Daily Beast, wrote a fairly powerful essay “Has China Gone Mad?”
….are we monsters who pay people to throw away dead babies, give children poisonous vaccines, eat food cooked with gutter grease, and kill people out of revenge, however justified? As we are becoming more powerful in the world, we must ask ourselves: what are our values?
I want to jump off a cliff and straight into something out of my league and try to explain what I feel, sometimes, is a a lack of morality in China. Now, this is a difficult thing to say. The Chinese are often some of the most moral and honest people you could ever hope to find. To parents, for instance, the Chinese I know would stop at nothing to ensure their happiness. What those parents expect from their children, however, might be a different issue. There’s something deeper and fundamentally flawed about Chinese society today and I think it’s been around for a long time. That something, I think, is a call to a conform to a Greater Good.
Fei Xiaotong once described the structure of Chinese society as being like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a lake. Each ring is a different layer of guanxi (relationships) with the closest being the strongest. For those in the innermost ring you stop at nothing to help them and they for you. My Chinese friends are the most loyal I could ever hope to find. They (seriously) offered to have someone beat up my wife’s boss when I first met her years ago. Today a student showed me an Armani watch a friend gave him upon returning from America. Likewise, children in Shenzhen often give almost all their earnings to their parents back home after deducting for basic living expenses.
But then there’s the darker side. A friend of a friend – an American – went to an ATM in Luohu late at night and was approached by a gang of robbers. He took his card and fled. He ran into a parked taxi and screamed “go go go!”. The taxi driver turned off the car, took the keys, and walked away. The gang beat and stabbed the man who continued to resist. I had another friend attacked outside the gates of his college while the guards who knew him stood by and watched. He had stepped in to help a woman being attacked by a drunk boyfriend. My Chinese friends told him he should had never have gotten involved. There are also multiple stories of bus robberies where the robbers wait till the next stop to get off. Even though everyone knows what just happened, they let them off. To stretch the issue, it’s not to difficult to imagine the Japanese taking the country so easily – nobody stood up to them. It was someone elses problem, no theirs, ad infinitum. Chiang Kai-shek/蒋介石 couldn’t even be bothered to fight them.
The issue, then, is that outside those rings – those relationships – there’s nothing. Meiguanxi, as the Chinese would say. It’s not unimportant that the first time the Chinese ever donated money on a massive and collective scale was in 2008 after the Wenchuan Earthquake. My research on civil society/NGOs in China has led me down a similar path – that there is almost no civil society here. The core institutions of China are those guanxi circles – business, relatives, and friends – and the Party.
Instead of complaining about, I want to attempt to answer the question of why it’s like this. Here’s my stab. Confucianism is fatally flawed by a gigantic blind-side that has forever plagued the Middle Kingdom. Confucianism preaches responsibility to another, but not the Other. The Greater Good, for Confucius, was byproduct of everyone was doing what they were supposed to do. When kings acted like proper kings and sons acted like proper sons everything would flow along harmoniously. Bear in mind that Confucianism isn’t just some patriarchal moral philosophy it’s sometimes made out to be. Husbands and kings had a great deal of responsibility to the people under them. These were not the Lord-Serf relationships of Europe. So with the king/father paying tribute to his people/wife and the people/wife paying tribute to him what could go wrong?
The Blind Side. Outside of those relationships there are no other responsibilities to other people. How are other kings supposed to act towards other kings? Other fathers to other men?
Where Jesus, Buddha, et all summed it up with “treat others as you’d like to be treated”, Confucius took a different road, “treat others the way they’re supposed to be treated” but with a fairly limited definition of “other.”
This is not to say that all “Westerners” follow this path, only that this is a bedrock philosophy of Western Civilization. Some of the greatest progressive social changes of our time have come from simply confronting the issue, are we treating the Other right? The long battle for civil rights in America came by identifying the descendants of slaves as an equal other. From there, the rest of the equation was simple.
She ends her essay with,
I sincerely doubt that the all Chinese hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
I think my answer, likewise, is no.
I’m working on my Master’s dissertation with my academic advisor to get it published (hopefully) soon. Don’t want to jinx myself like I have with everything involving post-M.Ed academics, but it’s good and it’s already getting bites from a respected journal. In our lit review we’ve been going over the origins of civil society and the West and in China. The academic world is one of nuance, but a blog is a world of bombast. I want to say here what I can’t say there. In fact, I’ll just quote Peter Hessler.
Well I can’t do that because I don’t have the transcript, but I’ll just tell you what he said during an NPR interview about his new book “China Road.” A listener called and asked what the social life was like for the millions of young migrants pouring into the new boomtowns of China. Hessler responded that the first thing you notice in these cities is the lack of institutions. There is no church, no volunteer groups, no libraries with reading groups, no coffee shops with a subculture hanging around them. It’s really just the Party and the businesses and millions of individual people and (sometimes) their families. Strong social groups would form at workplaces and would outlast that particular job, but there weren’t many friendships being formed outside that because of the aforementioned lack of institutions.
We work 8:30 to noon most mornings. Usually I go to my other job from six or seven to nine. There’s a lot of empty time in between. We sleep. A lot. Two to four is not uncommon. You try to get up in between. Your cold. Or just tired. It’s difficult. So you keep sleeping until guilt pries you out of bed. It feels like my life in China overall. A quick break that dragged on hours longer than expected. Only the feeling that I should be doing something else, anything else, is what drags you out.
There’s almost no such thing as a “promotion” in this line of work. Usually we sort our own affairs out after a rough or fun first year. You find the money or the students you’re looking for. I’d always wanted to teach college. So that’s what I do. It’s what I’ve done for two years. At core, it’s almost identical work to what I’ve been doing since I got off the boat here. But I can call myself a college teacher. You should see what I did to call myself a Head Teacher for a year.
Yesterday my landlord came demanding 500 yuan more a month – from 3000 to 3500. Two of my other friends who’ve resigned leases report the same (though from bases of 2500 and 5000, both 500 increases [at least we got a new couch out of it]). A straw poll of my adult students here shows a remarkable rise in real estate prices. We’re talking home prices going up 300% in less than five years. My own 75m apartment is worth about $130,000. I could buy a 3 bedroom house in my hometown for that. Let me answer a simple question a lot of people are asking: is there a housing bubble?
I don’t think so.
I think there’s two big reasons why not. The first is that half of Shenzhen people are living on what is officially farmland. They’re living shoulder-to-shoulder with each other in cheap units that are not for sale because they’re not supposed to be there. I’m looking east outside my 29th story window now at my entire neighborhood (click here, we’re the white buildings along the wide road at bottom). Everything straight down and north of me is “real” urban property developed into what are locally called “gardens”. Straight ahead, to the east, is the most densely packed farmland you’ll ever set your eyes on. Usually seven-story buildings with alleys, little restaurants, and even a village where people draw water from a well. Most of these people aren’t poor. They’re mostly working white-collar jobs saving to buy a house. About 1km further is a brand new mall with Gucci and all that goodness. Then theme parks and on to Overseas Chinese Town. All those people down there want to buy what I’m renting right now. All of them. Unscientifically speaking, there’s a lot more of them down there than us up here.
The second issue is cultural. No house, no wedding. Not every single girl in China is like that but most of them are. My good friend who just got hitched sold his factory and moved off to Hainan where he thinks he can get a new job and a house at a reasonable price. It’s that important. This means there’s not as much pressure on the rental market – which is how I’m able to rent for about half the price of a similarly priced American house. People don’t mind living in “bad” housing if it means saving for a real house.
The government is already taking action to stop speculation. There is no “flipping” like we saw in America. Instead there’s a lot of holding. People who’ve bought houses on the outer edges of Shenzhen who are holding on to their units and waiting to sell. It’s driving prices up, sure, but I don’t think there’s anything artificial about this. This is the rise of the largest middle class on the planet. They want nicer things. Car sales are up 40% per year. Is anyone saying that’s a bubble?
It’s the first week of classes. I spend about five minutes introducing myself and another twenty five reviewing what we’ll be doing for the semester. Showing the book I use, my method of teaching, class expectations (a Chinese-English dictionary, notebook, and a pen for every class), and such. I end with this:
“There’s one more thing about this class. If you don’t want to be here, stay home next week. Really. Meishi. It’s no problem. If you don’t want to be here you don’t need to come. Come to a few classes and take the test and you’ll get a C-. Sleep, play computer games, chat online, or come to my class – suibian (it’s up to you). I’d rather have a small class of students who want to be here than a large class who doesn’t.”
It looks like we’re about to see the end of the hukou. A dozen different papers across China had an editorial saying it was time to ditch the social engineering relic that I think played a key part in making the Chinese urban experience what it is. The Party is sending a pretty powerful message that things are about to change (I wonder if this has anything to do with the labor shortages in the cities?). I wrote a paper defending the hukou‘s role in education development in China while studying at Hong Kong University.
It is not impossible to make more than I made as an American high school teacher in China while enjoying the lifestyle that comes from living a developing countries cost of living. It’s the land of $5 massages, $2 meals, and easy-to-find $20/hr part-time work. It usually takes time though. For comparison, Saudi Arabia is usually hailed as having the best salaries for TEFL teachers in the world. An older friend looking to buy a house and retire with his wife in Thailand did the calculations of what it would take to get that house factoring in salary and cost of living expenses. Two years, he said, in Saudi Arabia but just three in China. The bottom line is that you won’t be poor teaching in China, and in fact can have a higher quality of life than teaching in America.
I’ve worked in Mainland China for almost four years now. The first year and a half was as a recruiter for what turned out to be a fairly awful company. I want to share here my experiences working in this field and watching trends since I’ve been here. I really like what EmptyBottle.org did for TEFL in Korea and want to make the same thing for China
Visas are the most common headache for foreign teachers in China. My own wife was “deported” once because of a visa crackdown. Start processing the kind of visa before coming over – it’s much more difficult trying to get things worked out inside of China
Treyopia v3.0 