San
Francisco—30
April
2011:
Noise, Nonsense & Ai WeiWei
The enemy is noise.
The world loves it.
The buzz, the beat, the mindless rhythm, the endless repetitions.
Hand over your brains, it says; put 'em in the bin here. You don't need 'em.
Noise, noise, everywhere. Nonsense and noise and much much more ...
Noise as marketing, noise as sales, noise as propaganda, noise as punk-youth, in-your-face rebellion. And pure noise: noise for the sake of noise, a negative statement about all things, especially the noise maker.
My mood is not good today. These eyes have seen too much; these fingers have felt the rough edges; this nose has picked up the true scent which comes from the dark slime in the ground below. I have lost my appetite for lunch and life.
It has been a season of foul moods, disruption, and much change, most for the worse.
In China it was visa problem and the Diaoyu Islands, aka Senkaku in Japanese, or Pinnacle if your preference is for English. There was an "incident" involving a Chinese fishing boat and the Japanese coast guard. Then every day it was Chinese Foreign Minister Jiang Yu going nuts on Chinese TV. She said the islands had been part of China since "ancient times"—the usual statement China makes about anything it covets. The Japanese had arrested the captain of the fishing boat and were investigating. She called the investigation "illegal" and any conclusions of the investigation "invalid." She was red with rage and beating her breasts like an ancient war god. A video was released by the Japanese clearly showing the Chinese fishing boat ramming two Japanese coast guard boats. It made no difference to the hysterical Chinese foreign minister. Facts don't matter, she seemed to say, when it comes to "core" Chinese interests.
Of course China has only two friends in the region now: North Korea with Kim Jong il and his "four-star general" son, Kim Jong un; and Burma with dictator Than Shwe. All are enemies of their own people and internationaly despised.
China has become the regional bully, high, it would seem, on its economic success which is based on the sweat and blood of young factory workers. But those young factory workers—grandsons and granddaughters of Mao's peasants—have come from the country and are being forced, economically, to work long hours and live in dormitories under tight security. At Foxcom, manufacturer of the iPhone, ten workers have jumped off the roof of the factory. What would the legendary Mao think of that? Not too much, I think.
Now as retaliation China is suddenly withholding "rare-earth metals," used in high-technology manufacturing, from Japan but says it is not. Call a distributor of rare-earth metals and you will learn the truth. Manufacturing nations have become skeptical of the Chinese. Intel has decided to build its next manufacturing facility in the United States. Others are reconsidering their options.
Then there was the visa problem that developed following Expo. Almost everyone has had "the visa problem." With Expo over many found themselves no longer welcome. Before I was a "foreign expert"; for awhile I had a business-development visa. Then it was down to a six-month tourist visa, not good but still workable. Following Expo government policy became murky and it was necessary to make monthly trips to Hong Kong to get my tourist visa renewed. That was inconvenient: okay in theory but in practice impractical. Train tickets to Hong Kong you could get; train tickets back were problematic. The Chinese agencies that help foreigners get visas gave up until the government clarified its policy, which it didn't. My frustration grew with the two-week wait to get a return ticket. I got to know Hong Kong well and wondered if I might like it more than Shanghai where I had been living for almost a year.
Hong Kong became my expensive home-away-from-home with the "infrastructure" that works: sidewalks without cracks, toilets that flush, far fewer kūnchóng (昆虫) or bugs, signals that tell cars to stop, which they actually do ... I made unfavorable comparisons of my Shanghai home-away-from-home to my Hong Kong home-away-from-home-away-from-home, where people smile more and the newspapers print the truth as they see it, not government propaganda. But then I was tired of it all —I could only take so much nonsense—and decided to leave for awhile. It was no longer worth the trouble and insufferable government lies.
I return to my once-upon-a-time home in San Francisco where I can't really afford to live anymore but keep my eye on China. It seems to be getting worse there. They have now arrested Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo and sent him to prison for eleven years for his suggestion that the party could do a better job. World opinion is ignored by the party and foreign minister Jiang Yu. She calls the Nobel Winner a "criminal." It's not too long until artist Ai Wei Wei has "disappeared." He has been called a "maverick," in part for his questioning the death of so many children in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake: Was it due to kickbacks on school-construction projects that did not meet code? Authorities have yet to inform Ai's family as to why he has been arrested and are telling foreign governments to butt out, it's an internal matter. But the artist, who looks like Confucius, is of international fame; it is hard for the international community to not voice its concern. Later the statue of Confucius, which faces the statue of Mao on Tiananmen Square, is removed. The likeness of China's most famous philosopher, even though dead many years, disappears in the middle of the night. It appears that the philosopher of principled social thought is now a treat. In the name of social stability, will Mao also need to go?
Clearly, the unrest in the Middle East has made the party nervous. They are nipping anything that looks like unrest in the bud. In the process, however, they seem to be destroying the plant. The China that Hu Jintao said was opening up is clearly shutting down, plugging its ears and closing its eyes. The bully still has money but is deserting its cultural roots.
But despite all this I still like China and am in a bind: I have friends there and like its "core" culture.
(Top-of-page photo: At the Chinese embassy in San Francisco on April 2011, Fang Zheng protests the disappearance of Ai Weiwei. Zheng, who is holding a photo of Weiwei, lost both of his legs in the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989.)