Voices of New China

By C.J. Shane

Planning on a trip to China or to do business with the Chinese? Learn about China from the Chinese perspective. Chinese young adults tell us in their own words about their lives, their values, their goals for the future, their joys, their challenges, and what they think of us. Commentary by the author on Confucian values, recent Chinese history, and the typical life stages of the Chinese give meaningful context to the interviews. Chinese blue-collar workers, educated professionals, and university students are represented in these interviews which were conducted with adults between the ages of 18 and 35. This is a great guide to understanding modern China and modern Chinese.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rope's End Publishing
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951524081

C.J. Shane

C.J. Shane is an Arizona writer and visual artist. She has worked as a journalist, academic reference librarian, ESL teacher, and freelance writer. She exhibits her artwork nationally and internationally. She is the author of eight nonfiction books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles. She is the author of the Letty Valdez private investigator series: Desert Jade (2017), Dragon's Revenge (2018), Daemon Waters (2019) and Direct Evidence (2022).  A second mystery series, the Cat Miranda Mysteries, includes Kissed (2020), Fair Play (2021) and The Broken Pot (2022). Desert Jade, Dragon's Revenge, and Kissed were all Finalists for Best Mystery-Suspense, New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. Shane's mystery books often have a romantic subplot.

Book preview

1 INTRODUCTION

On September 11, 2001, I was in Wuhan, China teaching conversational English in an intensive short-term program at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. My students were all master’s level computer science students eager to improve their spoken English. They believed that better language skills would enhance their career prospects and would make it easier for them to connect to a larger world. They were a joy to teach and to know, and I was enjoying myself more than I thought was possible.

On that tragic morning, my teaching assistant Liao Feng Hua arrived early at my hotel room. He was there to accompany me to the first class of the day. I will never forget his first words to me.

Your country has been attacked.

What?! I had no idea what he was talking about. Attacked? What did he mean by attacked? Who would attack the U.S.? And why? His words seemed so unlikely. Surely he had made a mistake. As I tried to formulate some coherent questions, other American teachers appeared in the hallway and told me about the hijacked airplanes and the Twin Towers in New York City. I slipped into one teacher’s room where several teachers had congregated. We stared in horror at the television. We watched the Phoenix channel in Hong Kong with its reports in Chinese and English. Those terrifying photographic images of the second plane flying into one of the Towers said much more than words could ever say.

The days that followed were strange, almost surreal in a way.

We Americans teaching on the university campus found ourselves in a state of suspended animation permeated with anxiety. Airports on the U.S. mainland were closed, and no flights could enter or leave the U.S. That meant that we Americans could not return to the United States. Several of us wanted nothing more than to go home immediately, and the impossibility of that just added to the anxiety. Others, myself included, thought it better to wait and see how events would unfold.

We were cut off from normal media sources, and we came to rely on our students and for email from home for news. My students were particularly helpful to me. They read Chinese newspaper accounts and translated them for me. I received one especially chilling email from a friend in Hope, Arkansas. There, she said, residents of that small southern town filled up their vehicle tanks with gas, bought food supplies and bottled water at the grocery store, and then went home to wait – just as they always behaved when a tornado was coming. But what were they waiting for? No one knew. It was all too scary.

In China, the event was a far-away disaster that grabbed many Chinese people’s attention. But that was true only for a brief time. Very quickly life on the university campus returned to normal. I saw grandparents fetching their children from the campus elementary school for lunch each day. Students played basketball in the evenings or rode quietly through the campus on their bicycles. The soft golden haze of autumn filled the air, and laughter and quiet chatter prevailed as people went about their daily lives.

We Americans called a meeting. After some discussion, we decided to return to our teaching. Remembering this several years later, I know now that we really had no other choice. Going back to the classroom provided each of us with some structure and a distraction from the anxiety of being away from home during such an important event in our nation’s history.

Later my students told me that our return to the classroom left them with a very positive impression of Americans. They knew we were distressed, and yet we continued to teach. They concluded from this that Americans could be counted on to do what we said we would do, even in hard times.

YingwenTeach

This event – being in China on 9/11 – proved to be a watershed event in my own life. There was a lot of talk in the U.S. after the terrorists’ attacks that we Americans needed to learn more about the rest of the world. Many of us were having difficulty understanding why this vicious attack on civilians had occurred. Our relative geographic isolation from the rest of the world was not protecting us anymore, especially from small groups of fanatics determined to cause mayhem inside the U.S. We asked ourselves, What more do we not know? After all, fewer than 25% of Americans at that time even had a passport. The vast majority of Americans had never traveled outside the boundaries of the U.S., and had no direct experience with other cultures. Could we learn by connecting to and interacting with the rest of the world? What would we learn? Sadly, the first and last reaction of many Americans was fury and a desire for revenge, rather than a longing for the deep insight and understanding that was truly needed.

I felt intuitively at that time, and I still believe, that China is a nation about which we Americans need to know a lot more. One-fifth of the world’s population is Chinese. Its national economy is developing extremely rapidly. China has begun to flex its muscles on the international stage. Chinese national interests, including the need for natural resources and energy resources to fuel the growing economy, could very well bring the United States and China into conflict in the future. Beyond that, though, there was the hope and vision that our two nations could cooperate to solve global problems such as climate change and the growing global income gap.

Yet we Americans know too little about the land called the Middle Kingdom. What we do know seem influenced more by Nixon-era thinking of 40 years ago than any truly contemporary understanding of modern China. And these days more and more, there is a turn to Cold War rhetoric among American politicians when referring to the Chinese. It's as if China is a country made up of a faceless mass working diligently to destroy anything that gets in its way, and that includes western democratic values.

Not long after my experiences in Wuhan, I left the volunteer group with which I had been teaching. In 2002, I founded YingwenTeach, a cross-cultural educational project dedicated to sending teams of American teachers to China to teach conversational English to the Chinese, especially Chinese English teachers. (Yingwen is the mandarin Chinese word for English"). From the beginning, the idea for YingwenTeach was to foster friendships in the classroom. My hope was that national stereotypes would be broken down, and that cultural information would be exchanged. American teachers would return to the U.S. to teach their students about China, and Chinese teachers would in turn teach their students about Americans and U.S. culture.

This program has worked very well. As I write this in 2013, hundreds of American teachers have taught in China through YingwenTeach, and thousands of Chinese students and teachers have participated in the classes. On-going relationships have been formed via email, both among the teachers on both sides of the Pacific, and among teenage students. A handful of marriages between Chinese and Americans have occurred as a result of YingwenTeach.

The YingwenTeach project came to an end in late 2012. I realized that many of the goals had been accomplished, especially the goal of connecting Chinese and American educators. I decided it was time to close YingwenTeach, and to turn to other projects.

This book, Voices of the New China, is a continuation of the work I started with YingwenTeach. Throughout my teaching terms in China, I had always taken time after class and in the evenings to meet and talk with my students. I knew I was lucky because I learned so much by talking with them. Most Americans never have the opportunity to learn about average Chinese people, about their lives, their dreams and desires and hopes. So I developed a short list of questions, and I began asking these questions in a more formal way through taped interviews, exchange of emails, and informal conversations.

I have had tremendous assistance from Ryn Shane-Armstrong who has also taught in China, and from Ryn’s Chinese wife Xu Yan, a native speaker of Mandarin and former teacher of English in Shanghai. They made it possible to expand the number of interviewees to more people, including migrant workers who rarely speak English.

For those Americans have never been to China or perhaps only have seen China through the windows of a tour bus, my sincerest hope is that these interviews will give the reader an opportunity to get to know in a small way some ordinary contemporary Chinese people. There’s much more to China than the one minute sound bites that we hear on the evening news. I hope reading this book will help the reader to know more about the real China.

The Interviews

All the interviewees in this book were between the ages of 18 and 35 at the time that they were interviewed. They were all born after the Cultural Revolution, they all have been affected by China’s one-child policy established in 1978, and they were born into a time of rapid economic development and relative economic prosperity. They have had more personal freedom and less economic insecurity than earlier generations. They are more open and curious about the world than earlier generations. Like most Chinese, they are very patriotic, and fiercely proud of their culture and their nation’s emergence onto the international stage.

Obvious at first glance is how similar in many ways these young Chinese are to their American counterparts. Americans and Chinese in this age group all have an interest in family, in careers, in global pop culture, in dreams of travel and of service to humanity. But there are also many differences, and we will see these revealed in the book.

What this book does not specifically address is politics. I did not ask any direct question about a political topic. Most people in the world don’t think about politics every day, and I learned that was true also of the Chinese. Also I wanted to avoid the false notion that the typical Chinese is obsessing about shortcomings of his/her society and government any more than the average American does. Most of us, and most of the Chinese, are concerned most of the time with other issues – family matters, job and career issues, what to do in one’s free time, and so on. That said, politics came up on more than one occasion in these interviews, always initiated by the interviewee.

Regarding use of names, I changed the names of all interviewees. I also changed some key biographical data such as the place where an individual works or lives so that the interviewee cannot be easily identified. Several of the interviewees specifically requested that their names not be used, and in one case, an interviewee would only give her adopted English name, not her real Chinese name. Contemporary Chinese have much more freedom now than in the past to discuss political issues and to criticize the government. There is an active blogosphere, too, in which critical comments are often made. However, to put in print in a western publication any critical comments about the Chinese government and attribute these to a specific individual seems to me to be tempting fate. I do not want to be responsible for any repercussions visited upon the people who were kind enough to talk to me. These individuals’ identities remain protected.

The interviewees are divided into three groups:

Students: These are individuals who had only recently graduated from high school or who were already university students at the time of the interview.

Workers: These are people we would think of as blue collar in our own culture. Many workers in contemporary China are migrants who have left villages in the interior to migrate to large Chinese cities in the east and south to find work in factories, in small shops, and in construction. Most have lower levels of education, a fact that they deeply regret because education is viewed as the primary means of personal economic and social advancement. Most workers cannot speak English. All interviews in the Workers section were conducted by Ryn Shane-Armstrong and Xu Yan.

Professionals: The twenty- and thirty-somethings in this group are college graduates who work in business, education, and other professions. Many are married, and many are the parents of one child.

China’s Secret Weapon

My teaching experiences and my travel in China are not the whole story. For me, and for many of us who have participated in various cultural exchange programs in China, what we thought would be a simple one-time adventure has turned into a lifelong fascination with the Middle Kingdom. Many of us return again and again to China. We read books about China, and watch Chinese films, collect Chinese art, and study the Chinese language. Every time we hear the word China, we stop and listen. China becomes part of who we are.

We are not the first foreigners to succumb to China’s charm. On his death bed, Marco Polo was asked by a priest to confess that he had told fables about his journey to the east. Marco Polo refused and said defiantly, I have not told half of what I saw. (1)

British historian Harry G. Gelber writes that China has intrigued visitors since Europeans first began visiting the Middle Kingdom. He said, China has two strong cards. One is the way in which China continues to cast its spell on foreigners.(2). The other strong card, Gelber says, is Chinese patience.

What is it about China that we foreigners find so fascinating? This is a question I have asked myself again and again. After all, I can say without hesitation that China and the Chinese can be frustrating to the point of complete exasperation. The bureaucracy is a nightmare. Laws seem to be suggestions only, not reliable rules, so where one stands in relationship to law is always ambiguous. Corruption is rampant and infuriating. The central government can be depended upon to episodically oppress its own people in ways that we westerners consider to be flagrant violations of human rights. The Chinese cultural fixation on face – how one is viewed by others – can be seen as obsessive by westerners and often very a major obstacle to progress.

So what is it about China? Why do we return again and again?

I thank Rob Gifford in his book China Road for finally articulating what I knew in an unconscious way. He said, What do I think? It depends on which day you ask me. China messes with my head on a daily basis.(3) I laughed when I read that. I understand exactly what he means. China messes with my head, too.

That’s a big part of the fascination with China – the challenge of trying to understand this complex and ancient culture. Trying to understand China is like trying to solve a great and complicated puzzle. The intellectual puzzle posed by the Chinese culture and its people is challenging and promises great rewards if ever solved - though I frequently despair that such deep understanding will ever come to me.

I think probably the greatest secret weapon of China is its people — not the natural beauty of the countryside, not the ancient traditions, not the superb arts. It’s the people. The Chinese themselves will say that their diligence and responsibility and other moral characteristics are their strengths. But there’s more than that. Journalist Rob Gifford spent many years living and working in China. On the eve of his departure for a new work life in Europe, he wrote about what he would miss about China. Most of all I will miss the Chinese people, the wonderful Chinese people. The Chinese heart is so very, very big…… For me, that’s China’s greatest strength - the very, very big heart of the Chinese people. (4)

Footnotes

1. From the 7/24/00 issue of USNews and World Report www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/marco.htm

www.onpedia.com/encyclopedia/Marco-Polo

2. Gelber, Harry G., The Dragon and the Foreign Devils, New York: Walker & Company, 2007, p. 434.

3. Gifford, Rob, China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power. New York: Random House, 2007, p.17.

4. Ibid. Gifford, p. 294.

2 CHINA YESTERDAY AND TODAY

The Chinese View of History

Many Americans are not especially interested in history, and our lack of historical memory is legendary. It is likely that many readers of this book will be tempted to skip this chapter. Please don’t. Understanding modern China requires at least a rudimentary knowledge of Chinese history.

China is a society drenched in history. Next to every fantastically modern architectural wonder in Shanghai or Beijing, you will find even today narrow little alleyways with buildings that date back hundreds of years, maybe even a millennium. The museums are full of amazing artistic achievements that developed over thousands of years, and historical sites abound throughout the country.

History is of deep importance in Chinese culture, and the Chinese people have a deep historical memory. I’ve heard Chinese students discuss historical events of one hundred or two hundred years ago with great passion as if the events occurred only yesterday. One of my informants interviewed in this book said, Chinese people are conservative and traditional. We look back more than we look forward. History is so important in China. History books are so popular in China. There are a lot of TV series about our long history. This is true. Watch Chinese television and many programs are historical dramas set in the Ming dynasty, or during the period we know as World War II.

This contrasts dramatically with our American culture. Our own television series are usually contemporary situation comedies or police and crime dramas, or in recent years, reality shows. Historical dramas are few and far between on American television. We may think we are interested in history, but we demonstrate again and again an inability to deeply consider the past when making decisions about the future. America has many positive cultural attributes, but the ability to consider the consequences of action based on knowledge of past similar situations is not one of our strong points.

When I teach conversational English in China, I bring topics to class that I hope will interest students so that they will feel motivated to overcome shyness and fear of making mistakes. I want them to have the confidence to speak freely in class. I also want to give students an opportunity to explain their culture to me, a task they enthusiastically support.

With this in mind, I asked my students once to explain something that was happening in contemporary Chinese culture. One student volunteered to talk about the topic. He began,

In the Tang dynasty….

Wait a minute, I said. The Tang dynasty was 1,500 years ago. Please speak about contemporary China, not ancient history.

You cannot understand contemporary China, my student said seriously, without understanding the Tang dynasty.

It has happened again and again that one of my students will begin commentary with a statement referring to the past: the Han Dynasty, the Tang, the Ming, the Qing. Americans don’t do that. We can’t do that.

To understand the full implications of statements made by persons interviewed for this book, we don’t have to go back to the Tang Dynasty. But we do need to briefly survey recent Chinese history to provide some context for the interviews. Much like baby boomers in the U.S. who grew up parented by persons who lived through the Great Depression and World War II, contemporary Chinese youth have been deeply affected by the recent historical experiences of the generation that parented them.

So we begin with a very brief review of recent Chinese history including comments on how that has affected the values and concerns of contemporary Chinese people.

The Dynasties

Chinese civilization stretches back to nearly 5,000 years ago. Over the course of centuries, China was often the world’s most important civilization though never an empire-building civilization like the Greeks under Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire. China’s ancient warring states were first united into one nation by the brutal Emperor Qin (259-226 BC). During the Han Dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) that followed Qin, the merit-based civil service examination was established, and a class of bureaucrats known as mandarins was created who effectively administered the realm. The Han adopted Confucianism as the reigning political and social philosophy. Chinese culture gradually became imbued with Confucianism, a way of thinking that has been called the DNA of China.

Over the centuries, the Chinese introduced many technological innovations and inventions, among them paper, as documented by British scientist and historian Joseph Needham in his great work Science and Civilization in China. (1) Stunning art and poetry, too, were hallmarks of Chinese civilization especially during the Tang (618-907) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties. Great public works were significant in the imperial period as