Category Archives: China

by Joel | 24 October 2007 · 11:00 pm

China Diary, 1988: Subtropical Winter Cold

In 1987–88, the Far Outliers, with their two-year-old daughter in tow, spent a year teaching English at a new community college in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China. The following is one of a series of articles I wrote in 1988. I sent them to a Honolulu newspaper, but they were not interested. So now I offer them as a retrospective on coastal China twenty years before hosting its first Olympics. At the same time, I am scanning in a lot of our old China photos and uploading them to my Flickr account or to my WordPress blog to illustrate this series.

Zhongshan lies just below the Tropic of Cancer at almost the same latitude as the Hawaiian Islands. Bananas and sugarcane, hibiscus and bougainvillea, mango, papaya, and palm trees are abundant. But the continental weather makes the winters much colder than Hawaiian winters—unless you live halfway up Mauna Kea or Haleakala.

The first time we got a real winter monsoon, the temperature dropped from 25 degrees Centigrade (77F) to 5 degrees (41F) in 24 hours. During winter, the southerlies and sunny weather can give daytime highs of 20 degrees Centigrade (68F), and the northerlies and cloudy weather can take overnight lows down to 5 degrees.

Houses are unheated, with no hot running water. The floors are mostly bare concrete or tile. The universal building material is plaster-covered brick and mortar. The doors and windows fit so poorly in their frames that houses are drafty. So the temperature inside is almost the same as it is outside, except for a slightly lower wind-chill factor.

The average is 22 degrees Centigrade (72F)—11 degrees (52F) in the morning, 11 in the afternoon!

Our apartment sat on a hilltop, fully exposed to the north wind blowing down over the flat delta. The kitchen, bathroom, and toilet all faced north. The winter wind gave each room its special torture.

The half-inch gap under its balcony door makes the kitchen the coldest room to work in. Chinese kitchens don’t have ovens, and wok meals require minimal cooking time and a good bit of washing and chopping time. Icy tap water didn’t make washing anything very appealing.

The watertank lid on our western-style toilet broke before it was installed, and the jerry-rigged flushing mechanism fell to pieces soon after we started using it. So after testing our mettle on the cold toilet seat, we had to dunk a hand in freezing water and pull out the rubber stopper to flush.

Until well into winter, we either took cold showers or filled a small plastic tub with hot water to wash with. Those are the two options available in most houses there. Then, in January, our school finally installed the gas hot-water heater they had bought for us.

The water heater had first been mounted above the western-style bathtub. But there was no room to fit the gas canister in the same room, so it was taken out again.

Several months later, it was remounted in the bath, holes were drilled through the wall into the toilet where the gas canister was put, and a rubber tube was run through the wall to the heater. Then it turned out the water heater needed repair, so it was taken out again. A month or so later, it was reinstalled. This time both water heater and gas canister were placed in a more open area outside the toilet—to reduce the chance of asphyxiation in the toilet or explosion in the bathroom. The workmen had to drill new holes and run new pipes through the toilet and bathroom walls. But they didn’t feel the need to clean up the debris they left behind.

So now the hard part of taking showers was turning the hot water off and feeling the cold air all the more severely. The hard part used to be first turning the cold water on yourself.

There were two real advantages to the cold indoor temperatures.

First, the household mosquitoes take a vacation. Still, we usually lowered our mosquito nets at night, if only for that added layer of gauze between us and the cold.

Second, we didn’t have to refrigerate the Chinese-made old-fashioned peanut butter to keep the oil from separating. In fact, we could have just unplugged the refrigerator if we hadn’t kept a few things in the freezer.

To counter the cold, we drank many cups of hot tea, using the teacups to warm our hands as the tea warmed our throats. We learned to make ice tea from hot tea in 20 minutes—without ice or refrigeration.

We didn’t have to count calories. We just had to keep shoveling them in. We developed more of a sweet tooth than we used to have, and our bodies demanded between-meal snacks to keep the furnaces stoked.

We dressed for dinner—and for lunch and breakfast—in the cold dining room. We even had to dress for bed, sometimes sleeping with our socks on—a barbarous custom!

As friends from Winnipeg, Canada, who were teaching there observed, cold is not so bad when there is somewhere you can go to get away from it. In our house, the only place we could escape the cold was under our quilts.

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by Joel | 23 October 2007 · 6:08 am

China Diary, 1988: Cheap Rent, Expensive Food

How would you like to spend only ten dollars a month for rent? The only catch is that you have to move to Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province, China, and work at a local company for local wages.

Rent in Zhongshan looks good no matter how you figure it, but comparing the cost of living there with the same in Honolulu is still a bit tricky.

If you convert a Honolulu income of $2,000 per month to Chinese currency at the official rate of 3.7 yuan to the dollar, you would have more money to spend in a month than most people there make in a year. At the blackmarket rate of exchange, you would have twice that much. A couple who wanted to retire in Honolulu and live on their Zhongshan pension of 500 yuan per month would find first that they could not legally convert their yuan to “hard” currency at the official rate. If they then exchanged it on the blackmarket, they would end up with little more than $60 a month to live on.

But of course most people in Zhongshan earn Zhongshan wages and most people in Honolulu earn Honolulu wages. We need to match prices and wages in each place. So let’s compare fairly average working couples with one preschool-age child. Both couples are full-time teachers. Each month, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang in Zhongshan receive 500 yuan between them, if you average in the periodic bonuses they receive. Mr. and Mrs. Hara in Honolulu bring home $2,000 after taxes, union dues, and so forth.

A typical monthly wage in other parts of China would be about 100 yuan. Prices are also lower, as are the choices of goods available.

Each month the Haras turn over $600, nearly one-third of their take-home pay, to their landlord, Mr. Chong, Zhang’s uncle. The Zhangs’ work unit—their college—provides them housing, but charges them 10 yuan each month for rent, 2 percent of their income. Gas, water, and electricity cost the Zhangs about 30 yuan (6 percent of their income). The Haras pay $40 a month (2 percent) for utilities.

The Zhangs are very lucky to have a telephone. It costs them about 25 yuan per month (5 percent of their income). They pay by the minute even for local calls. One time Zhang called his uncle in Hawaii and talked 10 minutes, at 12 yuan per minute. He’ll wait for his uncle to call him next time. The Haras pay $25 a month for their phone (1.25 percent). They rarely call the mainland but do call the neighbor islands occasionally.

The Zhangs pay about 40 yuan per month (8 percent of their income) for full-time daycare for their 3-year-old. That includes breakfast and lunch six days a week and occasional doses of medicine. The Haras pay $300 a month (15 percent), to a private daycare center. That includes lunch and snacks.

Since their work unit furnishes their house, the Zhangs live close to work and pay little for transportation. They own two bicycles. Mrs. Zhang bought hers for 170 yuan (34 percent of their monthly paycheck). The Haras owe one more year of car payments at $170 a month (8.5 percent of their combined net), on the car they bought three years ago. They alternate chauffeuring.

Both the Zhangs and the Haras keep in touch with their relatives by mail. It costs the Zhangs one yuan (0.20 percent of their monthly income) to send ten airmail letters within China. But it costs them 20 yuan (4.0 percent) to send ten airmail letters abroad.

The Haras, by contrast, pay $4.50 (0.225 percent of their monthly net) to send ten airmail letters to Japan. It costs them $2.50 (0.12 percent) to send ten letters to the mainland.

The Zhangs recently made photocopies of family documents to help a relative emigrate. They paid 2.50 yuan for ten pages (0.50 percent of their income that month).

The last time the Haras photocopied ten pages, they paid 50 cents (0.025 percent).
The Zhangs spend about 40 percent of their income on food, 200 yuan per month. The Haras spend about 20 percent of their net on food, $400 per month.

Both couples eat a lot of rice, the Zhangs 50 lbs. a month, the Haras 25 lbs. Each 25-lb. purchase costs the Zhangs 12.50 yuan (2.50 percent), and the Haras $5.00 (0.25 percent). The Zhangs could buy government-ration rice through the state store but the quality is much worse. So they cash in their ration and use the money to offset the cost of the better rice they buy on the private market.

The Zhangs eat much less meat than the Haras. They pay about 4.50 yuan per pound for pork (0.90 percent of their monthly income), 3.50 per pound for chicken (0.70 percent), and 3.00 yuan for a 12-ounce can of luncheon meat (0.60 percent). The Haras pay about $2.70 per pound for chop suey pork (0.14 percent), 99 cents per pound for chicken (0.05 percent), and $1.30 for a 12-ounce can of luncheon meat (0.07 percent).

Produce such as bananas, bean sprouts, cauliflower, celery and tomatoes cost between .40 and 60 yuan per pound in Zhongshan, 0.07 to 0.12 percent of the Zhangs’ monthly income. Similar produce in Honolulu ranges from 39 to 99 cents per pound, 0.02 to 0.05 percent of the Haras’ monthly net.

In proportion to typical local incomes, then, rice and meat cost ten times more in Zhongshan than in Honolulu. But fruits and vegetables only cost two to three times more. Of course, the Zhangs are able to spend much more of their money on food because they spend less than one-tenth as much on rent.

Imported food is outlandishly expensive in Zhongshan. A six-ounce jar of instant coffee costs the Zhangs 20 yuan, two months’ rent (4 percent of their earnings). It costs the Haras about $4.00 (0.20 percent).

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by Joel | 22 October 2007 · 6:37 am

China Diary, 1988: The Allure of Hong Kong

When all of China converts to daylight savings time during the summer, Zhongshan stays on Hong Kong time. To people in Zhongshan, Hong Kong and Macau seem at least as important as Guangzhou and Beijing.

It takes about two hours by hovercraft from Zhongshan Port to Hong Kong. There are two boats per day to Kowloon and two to Hong Kong. They are always full. There are also larger, slower, and cheaper ferries between Zhongshan and Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone directly across the border from Hong Kong.

So when you buy vegetables at markets in Zhongshan, you shouldn’t be too surprised if you find “Golden Boat Gift Shop, New Territories, Hong Kong” written on the plastic bag the vendor puts the potatoes in. (The fact that the vendor supplies the plastic bags is unusual enough in China.)

But there is even more traffic across the airwaves. Fewer than ten percent of households throughout China own TV sets, but it seems as if ninety percent do in Zhongshan. Many are tuned to Hong Kong. The special antennas and signal boosters needed to pick up Hong Kong cost extra money but are not hard to get. Televisions imported from Hong Kong have a special switch that toggles between the different audio channels used by Hong Kong and China.

Hong Kong stations present their weekly broadcast schedules on the air. So viewers who don’t read Hong Kong newspapers are still able to keep well abreast of upcoming specials. Rambo, First Blood was a big hit in Zhongshan.

The commercials shown during English-language broadcasts give a strange picture of the desires of English-speaking consumers, many of whom pass through Hong Kong, few of whom live there. A great many ads are for luxury products: cigarettes, watches, furs, cars, fashions, perfumes, electronics, the sorts of things advertised in airline magazines. And the ads themselves are glitzy and expensive-looking.

But if you watch the Chinese-language programming directed at residents rather than travelers, you can witness the Hong Kong equivalents of American low-budget ads for car dealers and furniture stores.

In October 1987, the government launched a campaign to discourage viewers, especially party members, from watching Hong Kong TV. The authorities didn’t want people tuned to Hong Kong while government stations were broadcasting the 13th Party Congress from Beijing in October or the 6th National Games from Guangzhou the following month. The campaign had some success. Everybody watched the National Games. The athletes from Guangdong Province won the most prizes.

In the months before we left, the provincial government was interfering with the Hong Kong TV signals and trying to bring in more clearly the provincial and national broadcast channels from Guangzhou. Some people told us that the officials in charge of public security thought Hong Kong TV helped keep people glued to their TVs and out of trouble, while those in charge of political education thought Hong Kong TV politically unacceptable.

Although Macau TV is less attractive, the city of Macau is even easier to get to. It takes less than an hour by bus from the center of Zhongshan City to Gongbei, the border town in Zhuhai Special Economic Zone. Every day thousands of people cross the border, carrying fresh food and Chinese medicine to Macau, and returning with as many goods and cigarettes as they can hide in their bags and clothing. Empty cigarette cartons litter the floor inside and outside of the restrooms that stand between the duty-free shops and Chinese Customs.

Officials responsible for political education are hard put to counter the allure of these two enclaves of rampant capitalism. A recent film, Escape to Hong Kong, deals directly with the issue. It tells of four people who escaped from Shenzhen during the Cultural Revolution. The only woman among them is forced into prostitution when no one will ransom her from the gangsters who hide the four in Hong Kong. Her husband finds work as a day laborer, they sleep in shifts, and he eventually kills himself. Another escapee finds respectable work as a chauffeur, and the fourth achieves some worldly success, but at the cost of marrying his boss’s idiot daughter.

Many Zhongshan schools bought tickets to this movie for their entire student body. The accompanying short subject had a complementary political message. It was a documentary—with plenty of bare skin and bulging muscles—about New China’s first-ever body-building contest, held in Shenzhen.

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by Joel | 21 October 2007 · 7:48 am

China Diary, 1988: Mao Wore a Zhongshan Suit

Zhongshan City is named after Sun Yatsen, better known as Sun Zhongshan in China. His birthplace, Cuiheng Village, is the major local tourist attraction. Tour companies in Macao do a brisk business in one-day tours of Zhongshan. The tourists walk through Dr. Sun’s house, a museum about his life, the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Middle School, and a model factory or two. Their lunch in the revolving restaurant of either of the international tourist-class hotels may include pigeon, a local specialty, but not dog, another local favorite.

Sun Yatsen is the most durable and universally admired national hero in China. He led the struggle to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty in 1911. He also created the style of clothing known in the west as the “Mao jacket” and in China as the “Zhongshan suit.” Almost every major city in China has a Zhongshan Road or a Zhongshan Park. Many also have streets named after Dr. Sun’s Three Principles: minzu, minsheng, minquan, “(people’s) nationhood, livelihood, and civil rights.”

Zhongshan has over one million current residents, and is also the ancestral home of half a million overseas Chinese. So the local stamp collectors already had plenty of the standard U.S. overseas airmail stamps that we received regularly.

Formerly known as Xiangshan, “fragrant mountain” (a good match for nearby Xianggang “fragrant harbor”), Zhongshan was once an agricultural backwater in the vast and fertile Pearl River Delta. It is still mostly countryside, with an urbanized administrative center at Shiqi.

However, in 1984 the region embarked on an ambitious program of industrial development and foreign trade. It is now officially a prefecture-level city directly under the province administration, no longer a rural county.

Getting local goods to major cities used to take a long time. But now, over the improved roads and new toll bridges, you can get to Macao in about one hour and to Guangzhou in under four hours. From Zhongshan Port you can reach Hong Kong by hovercraft in two hours.

The port can also handle container shipping, and you can occasionally see a huge container truck slowly threading its way among the bicycles down the old narrow streets of Shiqi.

The booming local economy is fueled by:

Government investments in infrastructure, such as 1440 new bridges, over one million square meters of housing, direct-dial telephone lines to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macao, and a brand new college affiliated with Guangzhou’s Zhongshan University.
Overseas infusions of capital and expertise, such as the over $100 million invested in 98 joint Chinese-foreign enterprises.
Earnings from exports of local food and industrial products, the latter earning $185 million in 1986, a fourfold increase over 1978.

Not all export earnings are reinvested in industrial development. Many private shops offer such imported consumer goods as Coke or Sprite, Marlboro or Kent cigarettes, Mateus wine or Remy Martin cognac, Nestles instant coffee or powdered milk, San Miguel or Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Kjeldsens Danish butter cookies, Camay and Palmolive soap, Johnson’s baby shampoo, Pears lotion, Kingsford corn starch, even Sunkist navel oranges and California apples and grapes. Japanese tape recorders, stereos, televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, copiers, and motorcycles are also much in evidence. You can buy all of these items in local currency, but the prices are very high.

Construction is everywhere. Every roadside village seems to have a newly painted gate and several big, colorful new houses going up. The flat fields surrounding the town of Shiqi are disappearing under factories and apartment blocs. The noise of the pile drivers is more constant than the periodic bursts of firecrackers. Our two-year-old daughter studied closely all the details of concrete-making. She knows all the ingredients.

On our college campus, we would wake up and go to sleep to the hum of bulldozers rearranging the landscape. Yesterday’s path to school might be covered with dirt or rubble today. Noon and evening meal times were marked by sharp dynamite blasts from the nearby quarry that is turning a rocky, grave-covered hillside into gravel. Dynamite, bulldozers, and a thousand picks and shovels have taken large bites out of most of the hillsides on the edge of town.

Similar changes are taking place in other parts of China, especially in Guangdong Province, which is a pacesetter for the reform policies and has spawned several special economic zones: Shenzhen, opposite Hong Kong, Zhuhai opposite Macao, and now the entire island of Hainan, which is becoming a separate province with much more flexible economic policies.

Most China-bound tourists come to marvel at the magnificent achievements of the country’s long history. Visitors to Zhongshan will be impressed much more by the direction and speed of change taking place in coastal South China, the bellwether of the country’s future.

UPDATE: The economic growth that was getting a head start in South China in the 1980s seems to be spiraling out of control as it spreads to more isolated parts of the country (via Arts & Letters Daily).

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by Joel | 10 October 2007 · 9:27 pm

Interview with the Indonesian Archimandrite

Ever wonder about the Orthodox Church in Indonesia? Yeah, me neither. But I just came across this interview with Archimandrite Daniel D. B. Byantoro of the Gereja Ortodoks Indonesia. Here’s the lead-in (with a few editorial corrections) and one excerpt about the Archimandrite’s theological approach in Indonesia:

Orthodoxy was first established in Indonesia in Batavia, Java, as a parish of the Harbin Diocese in accordance with the Ukase of the Harbin Diocesan Council of November 23, 1934, № 1559. In the late 1940s, the parish was under the omophorion of Archbishop Tikhon of San Francisco. Unfortunately, after the Dutch relinquished their powers to the local leadership, many of the Russian parishioners fled during this period of civil unrest, and eventually the parish closed in the early 1950s, when its rector Fr Vasily immigrated to the USA.

The following is an online interview conducted by orthodox.cn with Fr. Dionysios (and his wife Presbytera Artemia Rita), one of the six newly ordained priests in Indonesia….

Theologically speaking, Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro also used the existing thought patterns of Indonesian culture to package Orthodox teaching within the Indonesian mental set up. Just as the Church Fathers had to face Greek paganism, Judaism, and Gnosticism in order to present the Gospel intelligibly to ancient peoples, Orthodox theology faces similar challenges in the context of the Indonesian mission.

Those challenges are:

The Islamic strand that has similarities with Judaism.

The Hindu-Buddhistic strand that has similarities with Greek paganism.

The Javanese-mystical strand called “Kebatinan” (the “Esoteric Belief”) that has similarities to Gnosticism. (It is a blend of ancient shamanistic-animism on the one hand and Hindu-Buddhistic mysticism and Islamic Sufism on the other, and is divided into many mystical denominations and groups, just like Gnosticism was.)

The secularistic-materialistic strand of the modern world.

The first three strands have made the Indonesian people intensely religious. Into this religious and theological climate, the Patristic approach to ancient Greek paganism, Judaism and Gnosticism has provided, for the present writer, a paradigm to deal with all those strands inherent in Indonesian culture. In this regard, Orthodoxy must build trust among religions in Indonesia before it can have any significant influence. By maintaining a harmonious relationship with other religions existing in the country, Orthodoxy can contribute toward combating the pernicious influence of materialistic secularism.

In term of Orthodox religious practices, there are religious practices that cannot be described as belonging to any particular religion in Indonesian culture. They are practiced all over Indonesia, and although they have many different names and some slight variations in practice, they basically have the same pattern. These practices include fasting, ascetic labor, communal meals, prayer for the dead, and the keeping of relics. Archimandrite Daniel Byantoro had to deal with these cultural religious practices carefully, in order that Orthodoxy be acceptable to the Indonesian people.

For example, the practice of sitting on the floor for religious purposes is adopted in the worship of the Church in Indonesia. “Coned rice” instead of kolyva is used for commemorating the dead, since Indonesians do not eat bread as their main staple and do not grow wheat. The prayer of the Trisagion is used to replace the traditional Indonesian practice of honoring departed ancestors. Women wear veils in the Church, as was traditionally done by Orthodox people, but also conforms to the idea of the pious woman in the Indonesian culture. Icons and relics, with a right Orthodox and biblical understanding, have replaced amulets and heirlooms. Communal meals are usually done during festivities in the Church, as well as during Lent, where everybody breaks their fast together in the Church after Pre-Sanctified Liturgy. Some cultural symbolism has been adopted as well for the usage of the Church, such as the usage of young coconut leaves for decorating the Church building during festivals and feasts.

via Slainte, which looks to be an interesting new blog

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by Joel | 3 October 2007 · 6:28 pm

Burma: Engagement Has Failed, Isolation Has Failed

I’ve posted a good bit about Burma since starting to blog almost four years ago, but I’ve been hesitant to post much now because I feel we are all little more than drive-by rubberneckers, turning our heads toward Burma just long enough to catch a glimpse of yet another passing segment in the endless video of disaster news that no one can really do much about—apart from finding a way to pin the blame on one’s favorite ideological demons, of course. Every disaster is good for blind partisans.

But a current article in Foreign Affairs seems to offer a useful retrospective on two opposing diplomatic dead-ends. Both engagement by its neighbors and isolation by more distant but powerful forces seem to have failed.

U.S. policy toward Burma is stuck. Since September 1988, the country has been run by a corrupt and repressive military junta (which renamed the country Myanmar). Soon after taking power, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), as the junta was then called, placed Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition party the National League for Democracy, under house arrest. In 1990, it allowed national elections but then ignored the National League for Democracy’s landslide victory and clung to power. Then, in the mid-1990s, amid a cresting wave of post-Cold War democratization and in response to international pressure, the SLORC released Suu Kyi. At the time, there was a sense within the country and abroad that change in Burma might be possible.

But this proved to be a false promise, and the international community could not agree on what to do next. Many Western governments, legislatures, and human rights organizations advocated applying pressure through diplomatic isolation and punitive economic sanctions. Burma’s neighbors, on the other hand, adopted a form of constructive engagement in the hope of enticing the SLORC to reform. The result was an uncoordinated array of often contradictory approaches. The United States limited its diplomatic contact with the SLORC and eventually imposed mandatory trade and investment restrictions on the regime. Europe became a vocal advocate for political reform. But most Asian states moved to expand trade, aid, and diplomatic engagement with the junta, most notably by granting Burma full membership in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997.

A decade later, the verdict is in: neither sanctions nor constructive engagement has worked. If anything, Burma has evolved from being an antidemocratic embarrassment and humanitarian disaster to being a serious threat to the security of its neighbors. But despite the mounting danger, many in the United States and the international community are still mired in the old sanctions-versus-engagement battle….

If ASEAN and Japan are critical components of any international approach to Burma, China and India could be the greatest obstacles to efforts to induce reform in the country. China has many interests in Burma. Over the past 15 years, it has developed deep political and economic relations with Burma, largely through billions of dollars in trade and investment and more than a billion dollars’ worth of weapons sales. It enjoys important military benefits, including access to ports and listening posts, which allow its armed forces to monitor naval and other military activities around the Indian Ocean and the Andaman Sea. To feed its insatiable appetite for energy, it also seeks preferential deals for access to Burma’s oil and gas reserves….

It will also be a challenge getting India on board. Despite Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s trumpeting of democratic values, India has actually become more reticent when it comes to Burma in recent years. This is particularly regrettable considering that Congress was one of the Burmese democratic opposition’s strongest supporters during much of the 1990s and that Suu Kyi continues to cite Mohandas Gandhi as a model for nonviolent resistance. The change occurred during the past decade, after New Delhi detected that China’s political and military influence in Burma was filling the void left by the international community’s deliberate isolation of the junta. Like China, India is hungry for natural gas and other resources and is eager to build a road network through Burma that would expand its trade with ASEAN. As a result, it has attempted to match China step for step as an economic and military partner of the SPDC, providing tanks, light artillery, reconnaissance and patrol aircraft, and small arms; India is now Burma’s fourth-largest trading partner. Singh’s government has also fallen for the junta’s blackmail over cross-border drug and arms trafficking and has preferred to give it military and economic assistance rather than let Burma become a safe haven for insurgents active in India’s troubled northeastern region….

Given the differing perspectives and interests of these nations, a new multilateral initiative on Burma cannot be based on a single, uniform approach. Sanctions policies will need to coexist with various forms of engagement, and it will be necessary to coordinate all of these measures toward the common end of encouraging reform, reconciliation, and ultimately the return of democracy. To succeed, the region’s major players will need to work together.

Fat chance of that happening, I’m afraid.

As a gesture of mourning for the lives being sacrificed to ‘keep the peace’, I’ll retain one header image for the rest of the week. It’s a stupa-style memorial dedicated to Japanese war dead in Burma, which I came across in the massive Okunoin cemetery at Kōya-san, one of Japanese Buddhism’s holiest sites.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by Joel | 7 September 2007 · 10:07 pm

The Mexican Telenovela Wave, 1990s

From True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino, and the Bronx, by Sam Quinones (U. New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 53-54:

In 1992, as ex-Yugoslavia tore at itself in a frenzy of ethnic slaughter, a far sweeter note played on television. A Mexican telenovela—a soap opera—known as Los Ricos Tambien Lloran aired in the warring republics. The Rich Cry Too, starring Veronica Castro, was the story of poor Mariana, an orphan and maid to a rich family, who falls in love with the family’s son, has his child, goes crazy and gives up her child when her lover is unfaithful to her, then spends the rest of the show fighting to recover the baby. And every night while it played in Serbia and Croatia, where at the time happy endings were at a premium, life would stop for an hour….

And it was the highest-rated show on Croatian television that year. Since then, Mexican telenovelas have swept the world up in their teary melodramas of romance, passion, good and evil, betrayal, lies, and happy endings. Televisa, Mexico’s entertainment conglomerate and the world’s largest telenovela producer, has sold them to all of Latin America and to 125 other countries as well, among them Armenia and Azerbaijan, Belgium and Bophuthatswana, Iran and Iraq, Singapore and South Korea. China has aired twenty-two Mexican telenovelas. Cuna de Lobos (Den of Wolves) was a huge hit in Australia.

Telenovelas have taken over daytime television in the Balkans. Serbian television producers have even begun filming their own, with plot lines revolving around characters who inherit lots of money, then scheme to get more by cheating their relatives. Three Televisa novelas compete on prime time every night on Indonesia’s three main stations. The network’s newest sensation, Thalia, was mobbed when she visited the Philippines in 1995 and 1996. The press reported Philippine women naming their newborns Thalia or Marimar—one of the heroines the actress plays. In Romania a change in broadcasting law decreed less sex and violence on television. Mexican novelas perfectly filled the void left by more violent programming. One novela, Esmeralda, became so popular that women copied the hairstyle of star Leticia Calderon, and Bucharest ambulance crews were said to be getting to their calls late; finally televisions were removed from the station houses.

By 1996 Televisa could claim its novelas were Mexico’s largest export product, ahead of car parts and Corona beer.

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by Joel | 23 August 2007 · 3:22 am

The Fall of the Ming and the Rise of the Dog Shogun

From The Dog Shogun: The Personality and Policies of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, by Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), p. 67:

Japan’s leadership was confronted with serious questions [after the fall of the Ming dynasty]. Northern China had more or less peacefully capitulated to the invading Manchu forces, abruptly ending the supremacy of the nearly three-hundred-year-old Ming dynasty. From Shoho 3 (1646) onwards over some forty years the bakufu received requests for military assistance from the supporters of the beleaguered Ming holding out in South China. These served as a constant reminder of the fallen giant. Chinese scholars seeking refuge in Japan readily pointed out that the Chinese imperial house in no small way had been brought down by misgovernment and the discontent of the commoners. The question of how Japan would stand up to a Manchu threat could not be ignored. We know that the senior councilor Matsudaira Nobutsuna probed Kumazawa Banzan on this topic. The latter feared that last-minute preparations for battle would create enormous logistical problems with regard to food supplies. Shortage of rice would cause mutiny and riots, making it easy for the invaders to conquer Japan. Even if the invaders were repelled, the social and economic havoc resulting from the attempted invasion would leave Japan in a state of anarchy and civil war.

A solution in accord with Confucian concepts was to better the lot of the commoners so that they would rally behind their government. This was to be achieved by Confucian-style benevolent government (jinsei), where the commoners were administered with increased expertise, efficiency, and dedication on the part of samurai officials. Education brought enlightenment and reduced violence. Yet education and appointment commensurate with performance challenged the inherited birthright of the samurai. Moreover such benevolent government often required financial sacrifice. Especially at times of natural calamities, the military was expected to forgo tax collection and contribute to relief funds.

In opposition stood the resolve to maintain the political status quo by consolidating the privileges of the ruling class. This strategy meant adherence to Ieyasu’s maxim that farmers were to be taxed so that they barely retained enough grain for seeding and burdened with corvee leaving just enough energy to produce good crops. Education encouraged insubordination. As Sakai Tadakiyo had advised Ikeda Mitsumasa, in these troubled times expenditures on military and public duties were more appropriate.

From the publisher’s blurb:

Tsunayoshi (1646–1709), the fifth Tokugawa shogun, is one of the most notorious figures in Japanese history. Viewed by many as a tyrant, his policies were deemed eccentric, extreme, and unorthodox. His Laws of Compassion, which made the maltreatment of dogs an offense punishable by death, earned him the nickname Dog Shogun, by which he is still popularly known today. However, Tsunayoshi’s rule coincides with the famed Genroku era, a period of unprecedented cultural growth and prosperity that Japan would not experience again until the mid-twentieth century. It was under Tsunayoshi that for the first time in Japanese history considerable numbers of ordinary townspeople were in a financial position to acquire an education and enjoy many of the amusements previously reserved for the ruling elite.

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by Joel | 9 August 2007 · 6:02 pm

Is China Globalizing Religiously, Too?

The Asia Times columnist who calls himself Spengler speculates about the history of world religions in China.

Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter’s veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world’s largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history. If you read a single news article about China this year, make sure it is this one.

I suspect that even the most enthusiastic accounts err on the downside, and that Christianity will have become a Sino-centric religion two generations from now. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground for mass evangelization. If this occurs, the world will change beyond our capacity to recognize it. Islam might defeat the western Europeans, simply by replacing their diminishing numbers with immigrants, but it will crumble beneath the challenge from the East….

The World Christian Database offers by far the largest estimate of the number of Chinese Christians at 111 million, of whom 90% are Protestant, mostly Pentecostals. Other estimates are considerably lower, but no matter; what counts is the growth rate. This uniquely American denomination, which claims the inspiration to speak in tongues like Jesus’ own disciples and to prophesy, is the world’s fastest-growing religious movement, with 500,000 adherents. In contrast to Catholicism, which has a very long historic presence in China but whose growth has been slow, charismatic Protestantism has found its natural element in an atmosphere of official suppression. Barred from churches, Chinese began worshipping in homes, and five major “house church” movements and countless smaller ones now minister to as many as 100 million Christians.* (*See Luke Wesley, “Is the Chinese Church predominantly Pentecostal?” in American Journal of Pentecostal Studies 7:2 [2004].) This quasi-underground movement may now exceed in adherents the 75 million members of the Chinese Communist Party; in a generation it will be the most powerful force in the country.

While the Catholic Church has worked patiently for independence from the Chinese government, which sponsors a “Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association” with government-appointed bishops, the evangelicals have no infrastructure to suppress and no hierarchy to protect. In contrast to Catholic caution, John Allen observes, “Most Pentecostals would obviously welcome being arrested less frequently, but in general they are not waiting for legal or political reform before carrying out aggressive evangelization programs.”…

Where traditional society remains entrenched in China’s most backward regions, Islam also is expanding. At the edge of the Gobi Desert and on China’s western border with Central Asia, Islam claims perhaps 30 million adherents. If Christianity is the liquidator of traditional society, I have argued in the past, Islam is its defender against the encroachments of leveling imperial expansion. But Islam in China remains the religion of the economic losers, whose geographic remoteness isolates them from the economic transformation on the coasts. Christianity, by contrast, has burgeoned among the new middle class in China’s cities, where the greatest wealth and productivity are concentrated. Islam has a thousand-year presence in China and has grown by natural increase rather than conversion; evangelical Protestantism had almost no adherents in China a generation ago.

Great. First Korea, now China. Yet another reason for Christian missionaries to Japan to feel inadequate. Can we blame/credit Wal-mart?

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by Joel | 14 July 2007 · 12:19 pm

Hawaiian Kanji Syllabary Design

Language Hat recently noted a kanji syllabary devised at a very unusual state charter school in Hilo, Hawa‘i, where Hawaiian is not just the medium of instruction, but also

the language of administration, support staff, grounds keepers, and school events for parents. This creates an environment where Hawaiian is growing much stronger than in standard immersion programs and also leading to a major increase in the number of families using Hawaiian as a first language of the home.

That’s exactly what the language needs to survive.

The kanji syllabary was not designed to replace the existing, steadily evolving orthography of Hawaiian. Instead, it was designed to give the students a better understanding of East Asia, where many of their ancestors came from. It also strikes me as a brilliantly concrete and practical way to instill some key linguistic concepts into young minds: the arbitrariness of signs, the phonetic basis of all full writing systems, evolution of writing systems, orthography design, syllable structure, and so on.

Unfortunately, the PDF version of the article posted online contains only graphic images of the entire kanji syllabary, the Hawaiian word chart on which the syllables are based, and actual samples of writing. So this blogpost unpacks the images and presents the characters as text in order to examine the design of this syllabary and compare it with similar systems. See the chart below.

Citation Order

The list-ordering sequence commonly referred to as “alphabetical” order differs according to the writing system of each language. In Korean, all the consonants of the alphabet precede all the vowels: ga na da la ma ba sa … a ya eo yeo o yo u yu …. Japanese kana are commonly cited starting with the five vowels, then adding a consonant before the same vowels: a i u e o, ka ki ku ke ko, sa si su se so, etc. Bilingual dictionaries in both languages arrange the native-language entries in those orders.

The citation order for the Hawaiian syllabary, known as hakalama, goes back to the earliest days of teaching Hawaiians to read and write. It owes little to foreign antecedents. Like Korean, however, consonant-initial syllables are cited before vowel-initial syllables. Unlike Japanese, all the consonants are pronounced with each vowel, then all the consonants with the next vowel, and so on: ha ka la ma na pa wa ‘a, he ke le me ne pe we ‘e, etc. If applied to Japanese kana the same principle would yield the order a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wa, e ke se te ne he me [y]e re [w]e, etc.

Choice of Symbols

The hakalama syllables of Hawaiian could easily have been written in Japanese kana, but Chinese characters (kanji) were chosen because they were common to all the East Asian ancestral homelands of the students: China, Japan, Korea, Okinawa. The first step in choosing logographic symbols was to turn the hakalama syllable chart into a chart of basic words starting with the same syllables—on the same principle as A is for Apple, B is for Boy, C is for Cat, and not Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta (or Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog), which are designed to enhance auditory discrimination. Thus, Ha is for Hana ‘work’, Ka is for Kanaka ‘person’, La is for Lani ‘sky’, and so on.

Basic kanji were then chosen to match the meanings of each of those words. Thus, Ha and Hana are written with the kanji for ‘work’ (作), Ka and Kanaka with the kanji for ‘person’ (人), La and Lani with the kanji for ‘sky’ (天). (Although I knew most of the Hawaiian words, I learned a few of them from the kanji.)

UPDATE: It should be stressed that these kanji were borrowed only for their semantics, not for their sound values in any other language. Thus, 人 is free of any possible Sino-Hawaiian readings (kini?) or Japano-Hawaiian readings (hiko?). Despite the origins in other languages, these symbols are used in strictly monolingual fashion.

Diacritics and Variant Readings

The kanji syllabary was not really designed to become a comprehensive orthography. It was primarily designed to expose students to East Asian Sinographic traditions, especially the concept of logography, where a symbol can stand for a whole word. The primacy of logography in its design is apparent from the clumsy way that diacritics are used.

When the symbols are used as logographs, no diacritics are required; but every time they’re used as syllables, diacritics are required to show whether the vowel is long or short. Thus, 石 without diacritics is to be read pōhaku, while the syllable pō must be written 石¯ to mark the long vowel and the syllable po must be written 石° to mark the short vowel. This seems completely backwards. In a true syllabary, symbols that represent syllables should be the unmarked case, while logographic usages should be the marked case. Matt at No-sword discusses the diacritic issues in more detail, with plenty of examples.

Hawaiian Kanji Syllabary Chart

Syllable	Word	Meaning	Symbol
ha	hana	‘work’	作
ka	kanaka	‘person’	人
la	lani	‘sky’	天
ma	maka	‘eye’	目
na	nahele	‘forest’	森
pa	pahi	‘knife’	刀
wa	waha	‘mouth’	口
‘a	‘ai	‘eat’	食
he	hele	‘go’	行
ke	keiki	‘child’	子
le	lepo	‘dirt’	土
me	mea	‘thing’	品
ne	nele	‘lack’	欠
pe	pepeiao	‘ear’	耳
we	wela	‘hot’	暑
‘e	‘ele‘ele	‘black’	黒
hi	hiki	‘able’	可
ki	kino	‘body’	身
li	lima	‘hand’	手
mi	mile	‘mile’	里
ni	niho	‘tooth’	歯
pi	pipi	‘cattle’	牛
wi	wili	‘mix’	混
‘i	‘ike	‘see’	見
ho	holo	‘run’	走
ko	komo	‘enter’	入
lo	lo‘i	‘paddy’	田
mo	moku	‘ship’	舟
no	noho	‘stay’	住
po	pōhaku	‘stone’	石
wo	wō (= hola)	‘hour’	時
‘o	‘oki	‘cut’	切
hu	hulu	‘feather’	羽
ku	kū	‘stand’	立
lu	luna	‘high(er)’	上
mu	mū	‘insect’	虫
nu	nui	‘great’	大
pu	pua	‘flower’	花
wu	wū (= makuahine)	‘mother’	母
‘u	‘umi	‘ten’	十
a	ali‘i	‘chief, king’	王
e	ea	‘life, breath’	気
i	i‘a	‘fish’	魚
o	ola	‘life, live’	生
u	ua	‘rain’	雨

UPDATE: Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat offers a very interesting analysis of writing systems that are not syllabaries, but do mark in an interesting variety of ways the vowel codas or lack thereof after each consonant.

In Canadian Syllabics, for example Cree, the shape of a symbol represents the consonant, while its orientation represents the vowel that follows it, and length or labialisation may be represented by dots.

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