JUNE 15, 2007: AVAST YE SCUMBUTTLIN' LANDLUBBERS, PIRATE CHINA BE HAVIN' A TALL TALE TO TELL! WHO WANTS A PIECE OF THE DEAD MAN’S TREASURE?
They found skeletons at the high school on Friday when they dug up the playground – at least four by time we left, according to Robert Xiansheng.
JUNE 10, 2007: The Olympic torch came to Songyuan the other day...here it comes again...or so we were told. Photos
We ran in a parade for it, though we saw no sign of it. I looked up the torch relay afterwards and it doesn't even begin until next March. This was a practice run, it turned out, nearly a full year before the real thing.
There certainly weren’t many visible Olympic signs. The ‘Beijing 2008’ logo had to share the back of everyone’s T-shirts with China Mobile. There were rows and rows of adverts for government-owned corporations, masses of flags bearing government corporations’ insignias - both in people's hands and lining the the streets - and thousands of corporate balloons.
It looks like part of a full-scale programme to train the masses of China to consume – every spare wall in the rural areas that is visible from the road is painted with crude “China Telecom” adverts, while above the busier city streets stretch these metal arches every 30 metres or so, the only purpose of which is to coax the folks here from their simple lives into the arms of life’s luxuries...and remind them how much good the oil company is doing.
In other words, the classic Communist Chinese propaganda is being replaced by Western-style corporate Chinese propaganda. I doubt, however, that all those walls in the countryside would have been painted with Communist propaganda. I don’t think they achieved, let alone openly aimed for that kind of saturation.
Our school just about led the parade - only the Red Army was in front of us. Whether this is the case in the real thing next year, i venture depends on Bill's bribing and his representatives' imbibing (he doesn't do dinners himself). But it did give me a perfect excuse to take a lot of photos of the Red Army. Resplendent they were, too, in their little white cotton gloves...
While the army stood to attention in silence just a couple of feet away, we had a run-in with a local Education Bureau honcho. As i have previously mentioned, Boxxy has faced some nasty discrimination from the Asians here on account of her Asian appearance. Bill brought this Education Bureau woman over to meet his teachers. She proceeded straight past the Chinese teachers and stopped at Dora, the Uzbek teacher. After some hesitation she shook Dora’s hand. Then she continued down the line, shaking hands with the foreign teachers.
She ignored Cynth.
After she’d finished I demanded Bill drag her back for a handshake and photo opportunity with her Asian ‘sista’. In the meantime I took about 20 photos of her, the Sunday Times instinct kicking in to seek a particularly ugly one to use under the caption: THIS IS THE FACE OF RACISM IN CHINA
So here is ‘The Face of Racism in China’.
Later, I asked Sam, the other school boss, how this woman in charge of an Education Bureau could display such an imbecilic level of education.
"I think she is like queen in there. Used to lot of flattery. I think maybe no-one criticise her," he said.
"I think these kinds of people maybe have the low-education background."
She’d had her education cut short by the Cultural Revolution, and having gotten to her position some way or another (in the absence of someone qualified), she’d then been given the qualifications - after the fact.
"But these people are being removed from their position," he said.
"I think 5 years ago, a lot of these people."
A Chinese teacher who has spent time overseas was somewhat more direct: "I think these people must be eliminated. But i am used to it."
The joke is that growing up in the Cultural Revolution times and before - times when foreigners were feared and hated and certainly not welcome - has led to this woman today discriminating against those she judges to not be foreigners.
JUNE 8, 2007: We were told we had 3 days off from classes due to big nationwide exams. For our school (the company, that is, not the high school they send us to) this meant crowds like this one that they could parade us in front of. But these are not your average Chinese crowds. Photos
Exams here are a huge deal. Like the TEE except...well, except they actually are a huge deal. You really are screwed if you screw up - no STAT test, no TAFE bridging courses, no second chances at all. They're such a big deal that the police block the roads that go past the exam venues and maintain a heavy presence.
A teacher said the pressure combined with the June heat (it was well over 30C in Songyuan and in Beijing it's usually over 35C) means some students just pass out come crunch time. These students do not get to re-sit. They just have less time to do the same exam once they come-to.
Add all this to the One-Child Policy and it's no wonder hordes of parents simply cannot drag themselves away from the school gates after they bid their children farewell. They sit, fidget and smoke for three hours. They stand, wander and stare. Sunflower seeds are shelled on an industrial scale.
Their glazed eyes and zombie-esque motions mark them as perfect targets for blindsides from leaflet-bearers. Before long the number of flyers given out rivals the number of sunflower husks on the ground.
Our school employed the dual attack of leaflet bombing and foreigner parade in its effort to rope in stunned parents to send their kids for summer holiday classes. The project to canvass every major high school in the area led us away from Songyuan's exam traffic madness all the way to Fuyu.
Until fifteen years ago, the oil-rich northern half of Songyuan City was called Fuyu County. When Songyuan City was founded in 1992, the new government simply booted Fuyu County out to a dusty, Indian-style country town over 100km away. And that place became Fuyu.
In Songyuan City most people drive, take taxis, or ride motorbikes (this means exam time causes traffic madness above). But in Fuyu roughly the same percentage walk. Songyuan's wide, kerbed highways are dominated by the super-rich in their sleek Audis. Fuyu's super-rich navigate their bumpy alleys in brightly-coloured 3-wheel hatchbacks, avoiding crowds of pedestrians. And most predictably, while Songyuan's oil flows steadily, in Fuyu there is absolutely no sign of it. I didn't see an oil pump for at 70km before we arrived.
Aside from the fact the school actually saw fit to advertise there, the only thing i could see going for Fuyu was a strange abundance of shiny 3-wheeled hatchbacks. Perhaps Fuyu's a 3-wheeler manufacturing centre. But even if it is, it's not a very successful one. I haven't seen these cars anywhere else - and i can make a pretty educated guess as to why: The forecast was for 30C, and, though it was only 10am when we got there, the majority of these sparkling, brand new gogomobiles had their bonnets unlatched.
On another madness tack, when the school sent us and about 30 students on a boat ride on Wednesday it hired a second driver for the day to take us to the location down-river. As we drove further and further in the opposite direction from the river, we were all wondering the obvious: where the hell is he taking us? It soon became clear...bloody Chagan Lake again. Goddammit, i thought, do they think because we don't know Chinese that we don't know the difference between a wild river and the same goddam lake we've just been sent to twice in the last 3 weeks? But i held my peace and prepared to make the best of Chagan Lake, again. So did everyone else. But as soon as we arrived in Chagan Lake the driver talked briefly on his mobile and we promptly turned around and drove all the way back to Songyuan. The driver had apparently lost a bunch of money in a stock market crash the day before. He'd followed it up well by losing a bunch of money in fuel.
And on a far more serious madness tack, on the journey to Fuyu a black Camry swept past us doing about 150km/h (yes, Camry - they're a different breed here, only for the super-rich...if you don't believe me, ask yourself when the last time you saw a black Camry was). The fact it passed us on the wrong side of the road was standard, but it did so just as a truck in front of us tried to overtake a peasant cart. Annoyed at being forced to slow down to avoid ploughing into the truck, the driver tried to overtake the truck on the hard shoulder of the WRONG SIDE of the road. They did this completely blindly, though apparently safe in the knowledge that the only users of the hard shoulder are peasants on donkey-carts. I read an article recently in the (government-sanctioned) China Daily decrying the scaled compensation rates for causing the death of a city versus a country Chinese.
"This is essentially a caste system that condemns a vast majority of the nation's citizens to a secondary status, with no safety net of insurance, healthcare or welfare to fall back on. Education is way below the urban standard, and salary-earning jobs are virtually non-existent.
This discrimination extends to the afterlife, so to speak. According to the current regulation, compensation rates are calculated by the average per-capita disposal income of the town, if the victim is a city slicker, or the average net income in the case of a rural resident. Since urban income is much higher, an urban resident, even when killed in a traffic accident, can command far higher compensation.
As revealed by Li Yuling, a member of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, using the 2005 rates, the urban-rural gap for such compensation is 98,000 yuan ($12,700) in Sichuan, 110,000 ($14,300) in Hubei, 130,000 ($16,900) in Hunan, 140,000($18,200) in Jiangsu."Raymond Zhou, 'All lives are equally precious', China Daily, April 28
Car-is-king in practice means rich people are king. The supreme irony of a country ruled by a party swept to power by the peasantry.
JUNE 3, 2007: The bulldozers have no mercy for several old-style Chinese villages that Songyuan City is swallowing whole. The combination of muddy, rutted streets and three-wheeled 'agriculture trucks' might be the only reason they were still there by the time i got around to taking some photos, as you'll see at the end of this post. The first village photos are here.
Chinese people can't seem to understand why anyone would want to take pictures of something ugly or run-down. Even if it's disappearing forever.
A few days ago i had to give personal English lessons to this unmotivated rich kid who's going to Canada soon. It was hot and he can't concentrate at the best of times so we just went for a walk.
By and by we came upon this very modern-looking, relatively solid and very abandoned building. In a country where most of the buildings show less architectural finesse than a 4-year-old's lego house and can be observed decaying in front of your eyes, modern, solid and abandoned is an odd combination. So i whipped out the camera.
Immediately the student asked me, "Why do you take pictures of this? This is not beautiful." (That's still the most advanced English sentence i've heard him utter.) If, like i did, you want to see more, click here.
So, knowing my Mandarin was still not good enough to explain my motivations for even being there, let alone taking photos, i headed into the village. And learned quickly why it is that so many people are happy to abandon their family home to the 'developers' in favour of a drawer in an archetypal crumbling grey filing cabinet.
Razor-thin alleyways, windowless steel doors and bones lying in the mud make for a foreboding first impression.
Aside from the rubbish everywhere - especially food scraps - the sky's reflection in the perpetual puddles is about the village's only colour outside a narrow band of browns and greys.
In contrast, the long rows of crumbling new towers (new, that's right, most of them are less than 15 years old, many less than 5) in the rest of the city mean piped water and electricity, flushable toilets, central heating and no mud.
Of course it's good riddance to the village.
The brightly-dressed kids were the only people i saw until a dude came out from behind his door to ask me the inevitable: "What (the fuck?) are you doing here?"
In our short, awkward conversation i think i managed to ascertain that the 'historic' village i thought i was recording was actually about 50 years old.
I left soon after, but on my way out, the village hit back at the demolition team by overturning one of the three-wheelers as it tried to carry away a load of bricks from a recently-demolished section:
