Occupy Westminster, and the Elysée

The Occupy movement arrived in Paris this weekend, setting up their tents at La Defense where the major banks have their headquarters, and I went to see them on Friday afternoon when perhaps 200 of them moved in, and again on Sunday when maybe 50 were left - of which only about 15 hardy souls had spent the night in sleeping bags on the cobblestones after police confiscated their tents. This same weekend, a number of mainstream politicians seem to have had a conversion to Occupying things, with Labour leader Ed Milliband writing in this Observer op-ed that he is 'determined the Labour party should rise to the challenge laid down' by the demonstrators camped out outside St Paul's, and a number of US local authorities, such as Albany, New York, choosing to back protesters' first amendment rights.

The protesters I spoke to at La Defense (who came from all over Europe) have no time for any elected politicians, and consider them, along with the 'mainstream media' (especially anyone with a TV camera) as part of a many-headed hydra that has conspired to allow bankers to take home their six-figure bonuses while unemployment soars.

But hasn't this also been the week electoral democracy made something of a comeback? George Papandreou's quickly shot-down referendum plan was a timely reminder that the European project, sold to people as a great liberal plan that would make us all cosmopolitan citizens of the world, has in fact disenfranchised all of us - nobody has asked the Greek people if they want to see salaries cut, or the Spanish if they want to see public sector redundancies, or the French if they want taxes to rise. Right wing French politician told La Croix newspaper this week he thought the latest bailout plan should be submitted to a referendum all across Europe; that might not be a bad idea. 'Austerity' is not inevitable - it's an ideologically driven project in privatising public services and creating unemployment in order to protect the profits of banks, who will not accept that if you lend to someone who goes bankrupt, you can't have that money back. There are alternatives - Argentina in 2002 pulled out of its peg to the dollar and sparked an export boom.

The democratic deficit created by the EU has run parallel with a deficit of political representation in most Western countries, with no-one prepared to voice the view that we might not be living in the best possible economic system.  As this good NY Times piece points out, there no longer seem to be any economists, in university departments, think tanks or governments, that aren't wedded to the neoliberal model, but that doesn't mean there are no alternatives. What's interesting now is that there seems to be a space opening up in electoral politics to talk about the alternative - in Britain we've seen Ed Milliband talk about the need to 'rid the country of irresponsible, predatory capitalism' and admit the relentless pursuit of materialism they see all around them might just provoke rioters to smash up JJB Sports. Here in France anti-globalisation candidate Arnaud Montebourg made a surprise breakthrough in the socialist primary - and polls show around 60% of French voters believe the economic system is broken. François Hollande, who won that primary and now takes on Nicolas Sarkozy for the presidency, needs to listen to those polls, because those are formerly socialist voters who despair of democracy's ability to create fairness. If he doesn't find a language to speak to them, they may well turn to far right Marine le Pen, who's very cleverly found a way to make nationalist discourse seem to provide answers to high unemployment and a feeling of powerlessness.

Naomi Wolf argues in this piece for today's Observer that, instead of rejecting the ballot box, Occupiers should try and make it speak for them, and I think she's right. In the crudest terms, anger at unemployment, austerity and bankers' bonuses is running so high there's an electoral advantage for any centre-left politician to step away from economic orthodoxy and embrace policies Occupiers might want to vote for. That might be a lot to hope for from such very unlikely radicals as François Hollande and Ed Milliband, but this could be a turning point in history - and if we all came up with concrete ideas to help them seize it, that would be a lot more effective that camping outside banks.

Nuit Blanche

I took the camera out last night for one of the most visually arresting evenings Paris has to offer - contemporary art festival Nuit Blanche - so here's some of the highlights.
This spooky figure appeared on the balcony of the theatre where contemporary art legend Christian Boltanski showed, bellowing out unintelligible instructions to the hour-long queue outside. Those patient enough were rewarded with a truly eerie experience, finding yourself on the stage of the theatre while various bestial figures moved in the murky interior and a shadowy prophetess intoned portensions of the apocalypse 'Tomorrow there will be no morning and the sky will run with blood....' that drew heavily on both Greek myth and Biblical imagery.

Antoine Bertin attached microphones to weather balloons he then sent up into the Paris sky, leaving headphones on the ground for spectators to hear the sounds of the Paris night distorted and reflected back - buskers, kids driving around blasting out rap music, and also what sounded like more intimate things - crying, arguing couples, fighting cats. Magical.

The Italian artist Marcello Maloberti processed a series of ceramic tiger heads through town and then threw them down in a ruined amphitheatre and invited spectators to stamp on and destroy them - brilliant acoustics, possibly an interesting comment on the public's tendency to chew up culture and spit it out...

The Quebecois collective BGL addressed the themes of deforestation and the waste of resources - by creating a plastic forest in a gym and then burning it down. Rather literal, but it looked spellbinding.

Chinglish

This will be the last of my series of postings trying to make some sense of China, but I had to write something, as a linguist, about Chinglish - the series of deeply bizarre English translations from Chinese, hilarious, senseless or both, that you see everywhere on signs, product packaging, T-shirts, posters, and everything else in China. There as many people learning English in China as there are native speakers in the United States and Britain put together, and open-minded linguists argue that the language they're developing to speak to each other, while it might not be intelligible to us, is still a valid development in the language's mongrel history, and it would be as regressive to complain about it as it was for the Academie Francaise to try to ban the word sandwich. Even so, much English teaching in China is very poor, taught by teachers who speak poor English themselves and conducted out of ancient textbooks to pass exams, and based on reading classic texts, so you often find students who can't order a cup of coffee in English reading Shakespeare. This leads to howlers everywhere, and there are a few theories as to why the people writing them don't just find a better English speaker, if they're not sure:
1) Hierarchical Chinese boardroom culture - signs may be commissioned by bureaucrats who speak no English, and whoever is given the job doesn't want to defy their boss by saying they might not be up to it, so they make a stab with Google translate,
2) National pride- they don't want to admit defeat by getting foreign translators in,
3) Most English words - or random combinations of Roman letters - that you see on products are never intended to be read by a native speaker, just make the product look glamourous, so it doesn't matter what they say
4) They're translating literally, and they really think the result is English
5) They don't care.
I think it's probably a combination of 3,4 and 5 myself. Here are a few examples.

God and the Communist Party

Lots of recent press about China has focused on its intolerance towards religions the government sees as a threat - see the regime's attempt to appoint its own Catholic bishops, who were immediately excommunicated by the Vatican, or its installation of its own candidate to be the next Panchen Lama in a Buddhist monastery in Sichuan (see an excellent couple of articles in this week's Economist) but one of the things that most surprised me about the country was the presence of religious minorities who have lived among the Chinese with no tension for centuries - a big community of Jews in Kaifeng, and Muslims nearly everywhere, something I didn't expect. My sister says religious intolerance makes no sense to the Chinese; they apparently have no word for religion, preferring 'philosophy' and not seeing any competition between faiths - the same person will happily pray at a Buddhist temple one day and at a Daoist one the next day, apparently.

My preconceptions about Buddhism were completely shaken up on this trip as well - I thought it was an ascetic religion involving vows of poverty and putting aside worldly concerns to meditate on the sound of one hand clapping, so I was surprised to see Buddhist temples as ostentatiously overdecorated as any Catholic church, full of idols covered in gold leaf. They also seem to have enthusiastically embraced capitalism - they charge to have prayers said and flog kitschy merchandise and plastic Buddhas at every temple gate. I was starting to get very disillusioned, when my sister got talking to a monk at the (very commercialised) Shaolin temple - he was so pleased to see a foreigner show some interest in him that he pulled us into a side room, to see beautiful fifteenth-century frescoes forbidden to other tourists. Monks aren't chatty - he wouldn't answer many of our questions, except to say that monks join the monastery very young, and no, they don't get bored of meditating - but the serenity and peacefulness he and his colleagues exuded brought me round to the idea that they may, indeed, be living on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of us.

Xi'an Mosque, which is over a thousand years old.

Muslim snack stall, Xi'an.

A demon at the Shaolin Temple.

Burning (rather expensive) incense, Shaolin Temple.

Our monk friend.

Is China opening up or cracking down, and does anyone there care?

Plenty of people in China are keen to tell foreigners their country is opening up to allow more dissent on political issues than ever before - pointing to numerous reports of corruption in newspapers and magazines that have not only been allowed past the censor, but led to the dismissal of officials, and reporting on environmental issues that has allowed ordinary people to find out just how polluting industry near their homes really is for the first time - as in Dalian last week when a leak from a paraxylene factory led to major demonstrations and a remarkable climbdown by authorities. The optimists say journalists on state TV have been allowed to talk about the corruption and technological cost-cutting that led to last month's fatal high-speed train crash, and they're hopeful this is part of a gradual opening up.

There are also plenty who believe information is more restricted than ever - and are willing to believe all sorts of lurid rumours, like one that spread about the said train crash, saying authorities had buried the whole train to cover it up, even with some injured people still alive on it. What we hear in the international press - stories few Chinese have access to - makes it clear that those rumours may not be true, but the crackdown on dissent is real, as hundreds of activists have been detained, in a sharp rise both in a the number of people being prosecuted for political crimes and the length of their jail sentences since the 2008 Olympics. The treatment of Ai Weiwei- who was subjected to over 50 interrogations - might make headlines, but there are hundreds like him. Mention this to Chinese people, though, and you encounter indifference - they often either say 'if those people are in jail, they must have done something bad' or 'sorry, I'm just not really interested in politics'. This latter is very common among the young, for whom China's recent, deeply ideological history has been reduced to kitsch, neon-coloured Mao memorabilia or T-shirts of Barack Obama as a Red Guard. For democratic activists, apathy is a far more worrying trend than the police crackdown - if you can't get young people to care about freedom of speech, any fight for change is pointless.

A paper kiosk in Beijing, selling a mix of pure propaganda and some slightly more outspoken publications.

Policeman in Tianamen Square.

Socialist-realist art.

Works in Beijing's 798 art district, which began as a centre for protest art by dissidents and now seems to have been sanitised by the authorities, as a place to allow creative expression (and graffiti, seen nowhere else in China) within officially circumscribed parameters (a Chinese tradition that dates back to the Song Dynasty, according to my sinologist sister).

The Chinese approach to cultural heritage - knock it down and build a new one!

One of the most surprising things about touristing in China is that visiting the Forbidden City or a two thousand year old temple, you don't see crumbling old bricks; instead, everything is freshly renovated to look as good as new, like the set for a period drama about imperial China. To Western eyes, this looks like cultural vandalism - all the real heritage is destroyed - but the flocks of Chinese tourists don't seem to mind. According to my sister, being on the same ground as the original Confucius temple (for example) is enough for them, they're not interested in the actual bricks and mortar. She attributes this to China being a more literary than visual culture, but one thing that contradicts that is the thousands of photos Chinese tourists take of absolutely everything - every pot in a museum, every flower in a garden, all the information signs. I think in the West we cultural snobs generally see that as a reductive response, especially to art - tourists taking pictures of the Mona Lisa are putting it on the same intellectual plane as a snapshot of their dog, rather than engaging with it as art - but my sister sees it as evidence the Chinese are less elitist about high culture, less afraid to discuss things loudly in museums instead of maintaining a respectful silence, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Improved economic conditions for many in China, and the difficulties of foreign travel, means domestic tourism is enjoying a huge boom and you can't move at tourist attractions for Chinese tour groups - so here's some pictures of Chinese tourists and their rather interactive engagement with history.

The (entirely reconstructed) Forbidden City.

Historical re-enactment...

A museum attendant showing people around an imperial palace dressed as a courtier ruins the image somewhat by running off to send a text.

Reconstructed historical architecture in the heart of ultra-modern Shanghai.

Young people in China

In any foreign country, one of the first thing any of us want to find out is how people our own age live - what are their university lives like, how hard do they find it to get jobs, what do they do for fun? In China, the answer to the last question seems to be 'not very much' - I was surprised by just how much the lives of my sister's Chinese friends revolve around study and career, ignoring social lives and even relationships at university (it's apparently rare and frowned on for students to have boyfriends in China, in case it distracts them from their work!) to get the best marks,  and then, once they have a coveted office job, working until midnight every evening to keep ageing, authoritarian bosses happy. This started to make more sense to me when I met my sister's friend Lin, and she told me about growing up in great poverty in rural southern China and the sacrifices her parents made to send her to university - with that kind of weight of expectation behind you, you start to see how your own happiness would take a back seat.

Lots of the older people we met complain that China's youth aren't self-sacrificing enough; they're only interested in new clothes and expensive gadgets, they say, too individualistic, too Westernised. I'd say they're actually much less interested in Western culture than appearances make out; there might be Starbucks on every street corner, but most young people we met hadn't been much exposed to, or had much interest in, Western films and music. The idea that they're all agitating for democracy and enthusiastically blogging for change is way off the mark as well; many said their parents' generation had been too blindly loyal to the Communist Party, and they all have complaints about local corruption, but we didn't meet anyone who thought Western government was necessarily better. Young Chinese people are more likely to say Westerners need to understand that in China things are done differently, and many are angry at what they see as Western media bias against China; over Tibet, for example, several people told us they thought the West was being hypocritical about colonialism and should recognise China's right to defend itself. I've even heard it said that the Western media risks alienating young Chinese by criticising the regime; it encourages young people to see a clash of cultures and to view democracy as diametrically opposed to Chinese values.

Schoolchildren on a visit to China's most prestigious university in Beijing - ambition starts young.

So does patriotism...

Young people partaking in traditional rituals at Bejing's Tibetan Buddhist Lama temple.

Others worshipping at the temple of shopping...

One of the Internet cafes where young people spend the free time they have - the very comfy chairs are because many stay for 24 hours or more playing video games without a break.

Little monks dong kung fu routines at the Shaolin Temple.

A PhD graduate who rows tourist boats around a lake because he didn't have the family connections to get a better job - a common problem in China.

Little boy in a traditional hutong street, Beijing.