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.

Growing old in China

I was fascinated by older people in China - it's stunning to think of the history they have lived through, and interesting to wonder how they're adapting to new, ultra-consumerist, high technology modern China given the radically different political ideologies they have lived with, and often the great poverty and deprivation as well. Many work far into their old age, due to poor pension provision, and in lots of cases pressure from local officials to carry out 'voluntary' community work in exchange for the benefits they are entitled to; so in China you see pensioners sweeping the streets, patrolling them in uniform and selling snacks on street corners. Millions are also bringing up their grandchildren, especially in smaller towns where all the young people have emigrated to cities to work; in some smaller towns we visited we saw no local people aged between about 20 and 50. That generation has become the labour force that makes 'made in China' goods, leaving the country towns for pensioners and children. We talked to as many of these older people as we could, and heard a lot of similar views - China's younger generation have too much material comfort, are too caught up with consumer culture, and can't understand the poverty and deprivation their parents went through. Lots of them were nostalgic for an era when the state provided homes and healthcare, and said they were proud to keep serving their communities - even a street sweeper in her eighties - complaining that young people are too individualistic. I was shocked that people who had lived through the Cultural Revolution, and endless purges before that, where neighbours denounced one another for tiny or imaginary ideological offences and former friends meted out violent punishments, could still have such faith in community and belief in working for the good of society. I couldn't go into these complex political and psychological issues with the people we met, but I did read an extraordinary book that does, China Witness by Xinran. It's a collection of first person life stories of Chinese people in their seventies and eighties, helping you see how a policeman who jailed hundreds in the 1950s because going to high school had put them in a bourgeois social class, or because they had listened to foriegn radio, could still believe he had stuck to fair moral principles, as far as the orders given him allowed; how a lantern maker banned from practising his craft after it was labelled too old-fashioned for Communist China still supported Mao Zedong because his regime improved housing for the poorest; and how a couple of soldiers forced to separate because love was considered sentimental and Western rekindled their relationship 40 years later, amongst other moving stories. A mix of survival instinct, near blind faith in the Communist party (partly explained by the great hardship many suffered under previous governments, and partly by real rises in living standards), a cultural tendency not to question authority and fear for their lives seems to have let her subjects pull through with their sanity intact - interesting to think about when you meet older Chinese people now.

Passing the secrets of Chinese traditional music down a generation, in this case to my sister - the man she is talking to was playing in the street with the fiddle player pictured above, they both complained young Chinese aren't interested in learning their old instruments.

We often saw older people sleeping in the street...

and collecting rubbish.

Many make crafts to sell - this lady is selling shoes.

They do still have some fun though - mostly having very long games of go on street corners, often with an appreciative audience.

Building the new China

I've just come back from four weeks travelling around China, observing, meeting people and taking pictures, so I thought I'd write a few posts to share some of those thoughts and pictures. I travelled with my sister, a fluent Chinese speaker who has lived in the country for some time and tends to strike up personal conversations with strangers on trains, old ladies selling snacks, taxi drivers, pleasure boat oarmen, manicurists and just about anyone else she comes into contact with, so I had a chance to get an insight into ordinary people's lives that I could never have had travelling alone, but I've still come back with more questions than answers. My sister says she still feels the Chinese way of thinking and doing things is so different from ours that even if she stayed there forever she still wouldn't really understand; so I'm not claiming to have become an expert.

The thing that struck me most quickly about China was the speed and urgency with which it seems to be building skyscrapers, installing new technology, and knocking down old buildings, as if they were trying to raze the surface of history and build from a blank slate. It seems bizarre that a country with so much history should be so disrespectful of the physical remnants of it; according to my sister, the Chinese just aren't as attached to old bricks and mortar as we are, and everyone but the very old has no desire no live in an old house anyway, preferring a shiny new flat in a skyscraper. Corruption and unscrupulous developers have also played a big role; a tiny museum called the Hutong Conservation Centre in central Bejing shocked me with displays showing the capital's historic hutongs (narrow nineteenth-century streets with low traditional houses, often decorate with beautiful elaborate woodcarvings) are being destroyed far faster now than they ever were when the Cultural Revolution was encouraging young people to smash anything old as bourgeois. The main culprit is developers who buy formerly state-owned housing, bribing plenty of officials along the way, evict the residents, with hired thugs if necessary, raze the houses and build flats for the middle classes. Quite what happens to the people who once lived there is harder to fathom - the modern streets are dead of street life, while the old alleys that remain buzz with street sellers, snack stalls, and groups of people of all ages playing cards or board games, or just hanging out. China boasts some of the best modern architecture I've ever seen, especially in Shanghai - but I'd like to know whose houses they were built on, and where those people are living now. 

Office block in the wealthiest part of Beijing.

Brand new skyscrapers are born behind the 8th century city walls in Xi'an.

The spectacular Shanghai skyline.

Some of the old alleys, and the street life in them, hang on in the ultra-modern city...

Sorry about the sideways pictures, technical issues!