"Study Lu Xun's revolutionary spirit", 1978

The literary and online communities are calling this “Lu Xun’s Great Retreat” and there are already theories floating about trying to explain why this is happening now. The official line has been to claim that different generations require different textbooks to reflect different conditions. In an interview with the chief editor of the Jiangsu Education Publishing Company, the removal of some of Lu Xun’s works are attributed to their length and complexity.

The Chinese blogosphere points to a more sinister motive: the government is nervous about what young children might think about this society if they read Lu Xun’s social and political commentaries, look around and see that history is busy repeating itself.

Today’s Lu Xun

Yet, if this is really a move by the censors to remove certain troublesome aspects of Lu Xun’s literature, then this would not be the first (or presumably the last) time. In 2007, there were discussions concerning the removal of Miss Liu Hezhen, which was supposedly replaced with Jin Yong’s Kung Fu inspired short stories. In fact, the Chinese education system has a long history of re-arranging its curriculum based on the winds of change and Lu Xun is just one of the more prominent victims.

If one takes the time to read and analyze all of the works above and then place them within the context modern Chinese society, there probably is a valid reason why the Story of Lin Xiangru is being replaced with MLK’s Speech. That is beyond the scope of this essay, because when this began it was under the assumption that Lu Xun alone was being removed and after further research the truth, whatever that might be, has become blurred by the competing, confused cries of Chinese Netdom.

Lu Xun's hometown, called Shaoxing, in Zhejiang Province

No One Can Be Sure

A statue of Lun Xun and his wife in Guangdong Province

Something is happening within the Chinese education system. It might be political revisionism, which has many a precedent in China (and in the US school system for that matter) or it might be a modernization of the system through the introduction of foreign writers (which also has precedent in China) or it could be a sinister plot to protect the filthy rich bastards that speed around in unlicensed black sedans by leaving out any social commentary texts that might help children see them for they are: filthy rich bastards. Many a precedent for that last one.

Or nothing is happening at all, which is the case according to this article published in China’s Education Daily, which quotes yet another Jiangsu Education Publishing Company editor as saying that, NO, there were no changes made whatsoever to any of the textbooks in any grade.

This could be a classic case of news leaking and then the officials responding by obfuscating any and all references to the news or it could be a phenomenon known as “fake news,” in which the Chinese gossip mill fueled by a million bulletin board groups and 370 Million users takes a snippet of something and turns it into a mountain.

We don’t really know. But we’ll follow this story to its murky end and keep you, the reader, informed of what muck we step in. If any of you can shed light upon the subject or have an opinion or thought to share, we welcome your comments below.

For a continuation of this discussion, head over to ChinaTravel.net  …

My Affinity With Chengdu

All my friends in China refer to Chengdu and me in the same breath and I am proud of that. Wherever I go, people say I speak Sichuan dialect and I am proud of that too. I am an alien in China and for me having a place that feels like home is important.

I have been moving from place to place all of my life and I fear that I will never find a place that I can truly call my home, but when I fly into Chengdu’s Shuangliu International Airport, breaking through the cloud blanket onto dusty south Chengdu, I feel good. I start beatboxing to myself, find the nearest cabbie and start spitting my dirtiest Sichuan hua. The cabbies are awesome because they take it in stride and just hand me a smoke.

I love Chengdu. But I gotta go.

I took a job editing Chinatravel.net in the antithesis of the ‘Du: glitzy, glamorous Shanghai, hereafter known as The Hai.

Representing

You know how you can tell a German apart from an Englishman or from an American with just a glance at his bearing, clothes, facial expression and the look in his eyes? The same thing exists for laowai.

When I see a Kunming laowai walk down the street I know it when I see it and he knows it too. He might be a little bit dusty and his dress code screams “Fuck a 9 to 5!” and when he swings his head around at the scent of Southwest cuisine a lone dreadlock might crack a passerby in the jaw. I know he is from the Spring City and he knows I am from the ‘Du.

When I see Beijing foreigners walk around I can usually tell that too, because although they tuck their shirts in and most likely do not sport dreadlocks, there is a grittiness about them that bespeaks underground clubs and a circle of friends dominated by thinkers. Laowai from the provinces inbetween Chengdu and the coast have that special lost look about them that says: I may have forgotten my mother tongue and my stomach can’t handle Mom’s cooking anymore.

The Shanghai Vibe

Shanghai is different from the rest of China in a way that isn’t exactly cool, although laowai in Shanghai would say that Shanghai is by far the coolest city in China.

There are a lot of ex-frat boys and MBA grads here: East coast boarding school cats with trust funds and famously rich grandparents and I have never identified with them or their hand-me-down sense of superiority. The Hai also has a large population of young, beautiful foreign women. This is a very unique thing in China, because as we all have noticed, beautiful foreign women don’t often venture out to Chongqing or Urumuqi. They tend to stay where the living is easy and the shopping diverse.

Way back in the day I read The eXile book: Sex, Drugs and Lies in the New Russia , founded by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi and they mentioned a phenomenon known as “expatella,” which refers to Western women trying to live in places like China and Russia.

Western women tend to lose out to local girls in one-on-one confrontations over men, for a variety of reasons that I don’t really care to get into right now. So, in order to distinguish themselves from local girls, Western women tend to adapt a somewhat bitter, perhaps wary attitude towards Western men, maybe they go ahead and give local guys a shot, maybe they go all out and try and be the party girl, but basically, they change a bit in order to compete with local girls. No disrespect, I’m just calling it how I see it (and others have seen it as well).

Now in Shanghai there is a Western woman population with some confidence and some style — they might still display a few expatella traits, but its not the same as the Western girls out in Chengdu. Its interesting and merits further investigation.

Shanghai's cityscape is like a sprawling labrynth of new construction and development

Shanghai has a bit of Gotham to it, with all of the high rises that block the views for most people, but at the same time there are shopping districts like Xintiandi and the like where you can watch trophy ladies strut their stuff in high heels, swinging tiny little brand name shopping bags as they saunter by. Off the boat Europeans and rich Middle Eastern families are on display.

There are a lot of hot, nice cars cruising up and down the French Concession and you can hear them revving up and down the boulevards late at night, no doubt filled with laughing harlots in Daisy Dukes and ketamine addled rich kids who just don’t give a damn.

Every morning when I head to work, I take the subway (Line 10 to Line 2) and the 9-5 crowd really trips me out. I feel like a lurid observer, but then i look down at my key card dangling from my neck and realize separation is an illusion. I remember laughing haughtily at tales of stuffed subway cars and bobbin’ my head to Del’s Bob Dobalina (Youtube blocked? Freedur has the key!) track and now I find myself elbowing fat sweaty dudes out of my way so I can get to the escalator 2 seconds quicker.

Its just one of those types of towns: up and coming, flush with office workers, fast cash and loose women. The city feels like it is trying to prove to itself and to everyone else that it truly deserves to be mentioned along with New York and London and Tokyo by doing all the things expected of an up and coming city. Whatever I might think about offices and suits, you gotta give propers where propers are due: Shanghai is goin’ global and doing it in style.

Urban Analysis

Now, Hong Kong has a similar environment — riches, hard dialect, good shopping — but the vital difference here is history. Shanghai has the French Concession and a history of being the Pearl and such, but the Hai is constantly re-inventing itself. It lives in the trendy moment, just a hair’s breadth behind Tokyo and a length or two behind Paris or New York.

But Shanghai tries so hard to be those cities and that smacks of fakery and pretender-ism. Hong Kong has an elegance that permeates the trendiness of this Fall’s coming fashion, whereas Shanghai seems to be constantly  re-designing its own identity. It’s a fashion-money-sex city in many ways, but its the fashion of the 20-something sex kitten, constantly changing her hairstyle, not the more mature diva, whose honed style influences the kitten.

What is the Hai Exactly?

I am not sure yet. I go on the impressions I built in my many stays here. I have friends here that can fit in anywhere and will be my friends for life, transcending any No Coast – East Coast rivalry that really only exists in my head anyway. It is one heck of a leap, from down low country living to a 9 to 5 in the big city, but I remain adaptable and life here will most likely proceed according to Sascha Time as it always seems to.

I hope that over the next few months I discard my “Chengdu Spy in the Belly of the Beast” mentality and just be a missionary of Southwest culture out here or — which is much more likely — just accept the fact that repping your spot stems from fear and enjoy this new chapter of my life: Dirty ‘Du Veteran Chillin’ in the Hai.

Or do they?

Traditional gong fu, the kind that Pai Mei employed to turn Uma Thurman into wonder woman in Kill Bill and the type of gong fu old Jackie Chan classics, like Drunken Fist, display in copious amounts is hard to find anywhere these days. Pads and mirrors have replaced wooden dummies and piles of stone. Parents pick up their children after a belt ceremony instead of leaving them at the Master’s school for months at a time to be molded by an iron fist. Master’s are “coaches” now and are beholden unto the parents instead of disciples bowing down before their Master and pledging their lives to him.

But traditional gong fu still lives, after thousands of years, and we here in Chengdu are lucky enough to have our own Gong Fu Family school right outside of Chengdu in a town called San Sheng Xiang. The school was founded by Master Li Quan, the eighth student of Grandmaster Dai Kang of the Dai Shi Men Marital Arts School, which practices a traditional form of the Emei Style Southern Fist Gong Fu System (known in Chinese as 南拳).

Southern Fist Kung Fu is the Real Deal

Bruce Lee is a famous practitioner

Southern Fist Kung Fu in Sichuan is not your Shaolin Temple tourist attraction stuff. It’s getting up early and running through the dark streets of broken down Sichuan towns, backwaters rife with crime and violence and poverty, and returning to do a full workout. It means kicking a sandbag filled with sand and stone until you can’t walk and then kicking it some more and then going to the iron circle and banging until your forearms are purple. Afterward, the master will rub a traditional Chinese medicine concoction on your appendages and sit you down for a discussion on what it truly means to be a kung fu person. It might not sound like fun, but if you dream like I do about kicking an apple down from a low-lying branch and handing it to your love, or if you too are determined to feel the buzz of Qi flowing from your diaphragm, up through your chest and down into your fingers then this type of training — and only this type — is your chance to fulfill those hopes.

Master Li Quan’s school in San Sheng Xiang has all of the equipment a traditional gong fu school needs: iron circles, wooden men, stone dumbbells, heavy sandbags and above all an entire gong fu family extending from the 80 year old Grandmasters who carried on the old tradition and live active lives in the hills of western Sichuan to the their unruly great-grandchildren sent to the gong fu school to learn discipline and honor.

Gong Fu Family

But you don’t have to put yourself through the ringer just so you can say you did it. Master Li’s school is first and foremost a martial arts school dedicated to spreading the traditional art of gong fu and instilling a gong fu spirit of honor, courage, justice and respect in the youth of today. This goal does not require a hard core regimen of pain and suffering. All it requires is a Master and a supportive network of gong fu brothers and sisters and that is also what this school brings to the table.

Master Li surrounded by friends and students at his previous school. I'm on the right. Taken 2004

At the Grand Opening last weekend, a hundred kung fu brothers showed up and celebrated the fruition of years of work. Master Li is assuming the responsibility his Master before him held up for 40 years, the preservation and promotion of one of the world’s greatest cultural jewels.

Master Li’s brothers have already started arriving from the hills and are setting up shop in his school, teaching various Tai Qi forms, kicking forms, helping to train the young kids on pads, holding forth on the virtues of honor and respect and hard work. It’s a family affair and if you want to come and visit for fun, join up and work out or become a dedicated gong fu warrior, stop on by:

The school is located in the He Tang Yue Se district of San Sheng Xiang Flower Town. You can contact Sascha via the Chengdu Forum or visit the Kung Fu Family Blog (Chinese) for more information or if you don’t need to hear any more, just go ahead and contact Master Li Quan at enter8256@gmail.com or via mobile at 13881739611. He speaks decent English and is eager to hear from people interested in learning more.

Have you ever practiced Kung Fu or are you interested in learning?

Back then, I lived outside of Chongqing and although that city is not as suitable as others for foreigners planning on staying in China long term, it sure does have some character. Everyone has an entry point when they encounter and eventually sink into a foreign culture and mine was Chongqing: it was the first time I realized that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” meant “fat cat capitalism”. It was the first time I saw the people most alien to my own do things I do every day. It was here that I first stared at a crowd and experienced “population-induced vertigo”. Chongqing’s counterpart in the West is probably Mexico City, neither of which have any real counterpart in the developed West, but it was here that I found out that the things that bind us together far outnumber the things that tear us apart.

Legends of the “Mountain City”

Chongqing has so many legends surrounding it that just trying to list them all makes me fall in love with the place all over again. I’ll just give you a brief overview here, because what I really want to do is tell you about the differences between Chongqing and Chengdu as I see them by explaining why I moved from one to the other.

Chongqing has the hottest women in China. The interesting thing is why: why are the hottest women in China living in one of the hottest, sweatiest most crowded example of social stratification, gangster government and rag tag modernization in all of China? I have heard the following:

1. When the Nationalists ran from the Japanese sack of Nanjing and made Chongqing their capital, they brought all of their concubines with them. In the 50 odd years since, these concubines have populated the city with their sexy, audacious offspring.
2. The Ba Kingdom, as Chongqing was once and still is referred to, was a multi-ethnic empire that eventually became one people. The fusion of the many tribes that once dominated the many valleys and mountains of Chongqing produced a rare individual and a rare beauty.
3. The water here is special. The confluence of the Yangzte and the Jialing Rivers and the flowing of the greater combination thereof through the erstwhile Three Gorges produced a rare individual and a rare beauty
4. Hot Pot was invented here. The sublime aroma and taste of this most potent of southwest concoctions produced a rare individual and a rare beauty.
   

Chongqing’s Motto: “Yeah, we crazy!”

“Luan jiu luan” (乱就乱, roughly acknowledging Chongqing’s hectic nature) is a suitable motto for Chongqing because these rare individuals truly embrace the craziness. If you have ever seen the movie Crazy Stone (highly recommended!), then you have an idea of what Chongqingnese think of themselves and what the rest of China thinks of that. In the movie, a professional thief from Hong Kong is repeatedly humiliated by a bungling band of irreligious scam artists. The band know they bungle. They thrive off of it. They try to bungle, Chongqing-style, just to prove a point. Chongqing is luan. Luan means chaotic, but it means so much more than that.

Looking down onto Jie Fang Bei, Chongqing's most prosperous district which is adorned by skyskrapers

It means the streets zig zag around piles of buildings not only inhabited, but housing a flourishing business clinging to the last days as five-star hotels go up on either side. It means that there will be a fist fight at 5am in the morning between two motorists on their way to work. Real fistfights, not the “get out and check your ride for tiny scratches while all of China is backed up behind you type of mini-scuffle more concerned with money than anything else”-type of car accident. I mean a real fist fight with someone going down for the count. I am not even coming close. This city was built on mountains so the first floor of one might be 10 floors below the first floor of its neighbor and they will be connected by quaint stone stairways, skyways, scaffolding, balconies, business storefronts and roof gardens. In every one of these connecting routes, there will be:

1. Three hairdressers
2. Two hot pot restaurants
3. A poor man’s Wal-Mart
4. A stationary store

I know I know, you are saying to the screen, Sascha, all of China is like this. No my friend, it is not. All of China is described like this, but very few places can keep the show going for more than a few city blocks. Chongqing is this chaos spread out over an entire 32 million people-and-counting municipality beholden only to Beijing, and that only in name. Every neighborhood in Chongqing is infected with Chongqing-itis, which basically is a willful pride in all things irreverent. Other cities care about their face and will try to show foreigners and rich Taiwanese or officials from Beijing their pretty face. Chongqing has it written in blood that any local that bows and scrapes to outsiders is actually a Chengdunese spy, trying to learn the secret of hot pot.

Someday, I’ll write down all of my Chongqing stories, but now I gotta turn to the city I chose as my home away from the world, Chengdu.

The Chengdu Vibe: “Anyi” (Comfortable)

I left Chongqing’s madness for Chengdu because the city was flat, the roads spider-webbed and the living easy. Chengdu is the fat provincial nobleman to Chongqing’s beer and hotpot steel worker; the Shu to Chongqing’s Ba, 安逸 (comfort) to Chongqing’s 乱 (craziness). They constantly sneer at each other, but Chengdu’s sneer is preceded by a quick peek left and right. Chengdu also has a reputation for beautiful women and a penchant for the good life, but there doesn’t really need to be an explanation for it. It’s just the way it is. Chengdu is smack dab in the middle of the Land of Abundance and the genius of Li Bing’s waterworks in Dujiangyan are a constant wind blowing south, carrying the smells of good food, jasmine flowers and the slow sweatiness of a lazy land.

The pandas aren't in too much of a rush in Chengdu. Neither are the people. Everything is laid back

I can’t help it. In Chongqing, I would have had to be a gangster or end up in the gutter. Here in Chengdu, I can get a feta cheese hamburger. There aren’t many hamburgers in Chongqing.

Chengdu is for me the most suitable city in China to live in. Kunming comes a close second, followed perhaps by Dali or maybe one of the coastal cities like Xiamen, but basically I am a southwest boy at heart, no matter where I am. There is a vibe here in Chengdu that attracts a certain type of foreigner and I consider myself to be representative of that type of person. Chongqing does not attract foreigners. I love it there and I still go back every chance I can, but its a tough place to live. Not when you have the easiest city in China just an hour away.

What do you think of the contrasts between Chengdu and Chongqing?

For the past several thousand years there has been a certain way of doing things that has kept the Chinese culture and society from disintegrating in the face of overwhelming changes — the family values trumpeted by the American Right and demonstrated throughout Asia. The ceremonies and customs that govern doing business, buying a home, getting married, or getting riotously drunk with a group of brothers have been in place for so long that no amount of Western business practices or modern sensibilities can shake them completely from their foundations. Foundations built upon the annals of Chinese literature, the undying spoken language and in the tales and legends of an ancient people. Together, these ceremonies and the patriotism they encouraged have brought China to the position they are in today.

Successful as they are, still these practices are in need of an update, because patriotism and culture have given birth to a nationalist ideology that, although powerful, is still a stunted form of what China’s original revolutionaries tried to build.

Sun Yat-Sen, 1866-1925

The revolution in thought, literature and politics that Sun Yat Sen initiated in 1919 was carried on by heralds such as Lu Xun and warlords like Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai Shek. Until very recently, the “update” that Sun dreamed of for his country involved destroying the old and returning China to a “clean slate.” Cleaning the slate meant demolishing customs in order to progress past the times when the Emperor was the “Father” of a vast nation of children. The events of 1919 and the years following were meant to cut Chinese off from their past so that they might be free to learn the ways of the West — in order to be as powerful as the West, like Magua in Cooper’s novel Last of the Mohicans. Yet, Magua’s character in the book is inferior to Uncas precisely because his desire for power twists him away from who he truly is and hinders that last step to maturity that makes Uncas an undying hero and Magua just his antagonistic foil.

In the January edition of Phoenix Weekly, Guo Tie Cheng discusses China’s maturity in a column entitled, “Making Patriotism an Ideology.” In this column, Guo argues that Chinese people have turned to nationalism to replace the foundations of the past, instead of turning within and creating an individual that is self-aware, confident, and mature enough to navigate through the modern world without resorting to “Us and Them” ideologies to reinforce or justify himself.

But writers like Guo are not as interested in China’s adventures abroad and the fears of the West. They are more concerned with creating the nation that they want to see, the kind of country that fosters and nurtures a certain type of person. Guo uses the analogy of a mother nursing her babe to describe the eventual break a person must make from their mother/country in order to fully mature. This maturity that Guo writes of requires a much deeper journey than that of 20th century China, which stripped itself of the “Emperor’s clothes” and threw off foreign domination. Guo’s is a philosophical search for meaning that should underpin the customs and patriotism that are natural to any ethnic group, not be subject to them. Guo is tired of hearing his fellow Chinese describe themselves as passive products of 5,000 years of history, he wants them to start making a new history.

Chinese netizen reactions to movies like Red Dawn 2010 and international issues like the Copenhagen climate talks support Guo’s belief that the real work to be done is here at home, not abroad. Some netizens are beginning to discard the vitriolic nationalist ideology that helped make the Chicomm Troll famous — in fact, one the funniest comments on the Red Dawn discussion forum on Douban.com parodies a still-common Chinese reaction to foreign criticism of China: “All (American) patriots give an outcry and boycott this directors work, which has outraged all (Americans)! Every (American) patriot who supports say Aye!” (rough translation)

A brief survey of Chinasmack‘s coverage of Akmal Shaikh’s execution shows that the Chicomm Troll still lives, but the trend is already moving away from the screeching nationalists we saw during the 2008 Olympics and toward the modern Chinese citizen able to distinguish between himself and his nation. The movements in modern Chinese society are exceptionally quick, yet still rooted within the ancient customs and traditions that hold the nation together — it is this paradox that is being struggled with right now throughout Chinese society.

So what is the role of the West now? Now that Chinese banks and construction firms feel they have learned all they have to learn from western institutions; now that America’s struggling economy only reinforces the belief that there is nothing more the West can offer China; now that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is powerless to stop a British drug smuggler from being executed in China: what now?

In essays like this one by author and China researcher Kerry Brown, the key is to help China along. This view is not founded upon an utopian view of brotherly love between nations, but on the very concrete truth that national interests across the West merge with China’s peaceful transition from the nationalistic ideologues (that helped China survive and grow in the last century) to the mature global citizens that can help the world survive and grow in the coming century. Instead of paternalism or antagonism, Brown encourages exchange.

Another sentiment can be found in David Goldmann’s essays for Asia Times as Spengler. Goldmann derides the lack of will amongst Americans to carry on the mantle of hegemon and, like his pseudonym, predicts dire consequences if the US sheds the “burden” of leadership. For Spengler, America must prevail across the world in its various struggles in order to maintain world peace and China is one of the players that America must deal with, by all means necessary.

Perhaps the true battle lies not in the fields of Pipelinistan or in the boardrooms of Wall Street and Hong Kong — but in the minds of the people seeking the right way to live. Just as Americans voted in an intelligent man of mixed heritage, so the Chinese are engaging in a soul-struggle over what it means to be Chinese. These two movements are compatible and represent a generational search for meaning in a globalized world that pokes fun at oppressive nationalism (a la the CCP) and renounces corrupt crusades (a la War on Terrorism). A conflict arises between these movements and the entrenched interests of a different generation, visible in the US Congress’s gridlocked partisanship in the face of veritable dissolution and the cries of Traitor! that meet any Chinese questioning of the State as is.

The outcome of China’s soul search will determine the timbre of the 21st century, for all of us.