After reading CHINA ROAD, Introduction - Chapter 7, share FIVE specific insights Gifford makes about Chinese culture that you find important, and ONE specific question you have after finishing the reading.
Please use 2-3 sentences for each observation, and cite page numbers, so we can all follow your thinking.
Post your reading response below, as part of this blog thread.
Xie Xie,
Dr. W
Chapter 1 (page12): In order to open the Chinese market, the British brought opium from India to trade for other luxuries. The First Opium War, caused by Beijing’s opposition to British trade, resulted in the Treaty of Nanjing after China’s defeat by the British militia. The treaty ceded Hong Kong to the British as forced the Chinese to open five ports to foreign trade.
ReplyDeleteChapter 2 (page 25-26): Today young people who sign up for the Chinese Communist Party join because they are good students, not because they agree or believe in the CCP’s ideology. They think of themselves as the “ziwo yidai” or the “Me Generation”.
Chapter 3 (page 29): Route 312 is a national road known as a “guo dao”. It serves passengers traveling in every mode of transportation – from pedestrian to bicycles, to scooters, to cars, trucks, and buses.
Chapter 5 (page 57): Rural peasants make up 750 million of China’s population. Most are unable to earn a living off their land, land that didn’t even belong to them in the first place. As urbanization spreads into the countryside farmers are forced to sell their land; if they refuse local officials have the ability to seize the land and sell it to developers.
Chapter 6 (page 70): In order to maintain it’s economic power China, through the Chinese government, must help develop rural areas while slowing the industrial growth of inland cities. By doing this there is a chance China will not only be able to sustain its position among world’s leading nations, it may be able to develop into a “creative superpower”.
Question: Part of Chapter 7 discusses the modern institutions of China: the sauna massage facility and the karaoke bar. One of my friends lived in China with a host family and as soon as she heard I was going to Beijing said I had to visit a karaoke bar. Are there karaoke bars that don’t also serve as brothels?
Pg XX. Many people in China think that their country is weak and will take many years before it will compete with the US. But China has 49 cities with an inhabitance of a million people, the US only has nine.
ReplyDeletePg 18. One thing that has happened to China in the pat 10 years is the increasing amount of choice that the “average” person has. You can now choose where you work in China and whom you marry,( something that wasn’t a choose too long ago). I agree with Gifford, this increase in choice will eventually lead the Chinese people to want to choose new political leaders.
Pg 26. The new young generation of Chinese call themselves the Me generation. A time when personal choice is at a all-time high. They understand that the world they live in is changing rapidly, and different from the one their parents lived; “We have to look after ourselves” We believe only in ourselves.”.
Pg 58. “Pity the poor, long-suffering Chinese peasants, I feel bad for these hardworking people. Because China is urbanizing so rapidly, its cities are expanding extremely fast and are consuming large amounts of land; Land that used to belong to the peasants. Its getting harder and harder for these farmers to get money, and as a result many are leaving to find work on the costal factories.
Pg 80Karaoke is one thing that confuses. Its clearly a staple pastime and something that many people do to relax and have fun, but its also a cover for prostitution and probably drugs. What is even more interesting is that the China the police and the military have been some of the biggest sponsors or owners of brothels.
How many of the karaoke bars are actually legit, or are they all brothels?
1. (pg xvii)- Experts say that 150-200 million people have left their homes in the villages to move to the city where they can find work. This really goes to show how China is moving very fast, becoming a very industrialized country.
ReplyDelete2. (pg 35) The Golden Delta is thought of as the a sea of factories that produces good that make up 20 percent of China Economy. This is outstanding because this percent of the money this area brings in is higher than New Zealand, South Africa, and Thailand.
3. (pg 55) Mao took Marxism and applied it to the Chinese community. There were a lot more peasants than there were more workers so he took it to the peasants. They were the ones supporting the revolution. I feel that this is very important because Communism is still in effect today in China.
4. (pg 64) China has 49 cities that have a million inhabitants and most of the world doesn't even know their names. China is so big and is growing so fast. They are learning to expand their factories inland to cut costs and make it cheaper to produce things.
5. (pg 74) China has the highest rate of female suicide in the world and this is the number one cause of death among women between the ages of 18 and 34. This is a very important number because many rural women are committing suicide and this is because despair is creeping back into China.
Question: Are women committing suicide because they are so poor compared to many other people in China that have moved to cities?
Hen Hao on the blogging, for THREE of you.
ReplyDeleteMissing:
Katrina
Jen (illness)
Skyler
Tyler
Rob
Git 'er done! We are Beijing-bound!
Dr. W
1. Page 5) He talks about how there is not elbow room in China until you reach the Gobi desert. I really hope the cities in China are not that crowded.
ReplyDelete2 page 17) China has lifted 400 million people out of poverty since 1978 That is larger than the entire population of South America. But at what cost Tienanmen square is still fresh in my mind from that documentary we have watched. Its making me question China.
3 Page 38-40) I find it interesting that the first authors that drew the Chinese people as more than savages and barbarians in literature were missionaries.
4 Page 46-47) "The museum is especially disturbing to me, because only nine months before, i had visited japan and interviewed the infamous right-wing mayor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, who had denied to my face that the Nanjing massacre ever took place." Its insane that a person can say this and get elected, I believe it is a crime in Germany to deny that the holocaust happened.
5. Page 65) "The government is doing everything to encourge it. In recent years it has introduced an old Confucian concept into its propaganda. The word it uses is xiaokang it means moderate prosperity." Funny that It went from To be rich is glorious to being everyone should be prosperous but not too much.
Question: In China are there any rich cities inland from the coast or does the wealth flow outward with less and less vigor?
3) My friend was just telling me about his idea for a magnetic train. I guess the Chinese are already on track. No pun intended.
ReplyDelete11) The Chinese are still trying to wipe away the remnants that subtly haunt their cities. The remnants of course being the destruction from the colonizing, opium slinging British.
30) Americans view the road as an accomplice to their escape. Whether you are escaping authority or the strife's of life. According to Gifford, the Chinese don't realize the significance of the open road.
43) It's interesting that the Chinese didn't claim a "Western Capitol". I wonder if it's because they had doubts about the West or they simply didn't want to put forth the effort to build one.
85) "It's difficult being a person". It just goes to show you that, sadly, somebody has it worse.
Funny how history repeats itself. Everyone knows China is on the up and up but can they become the center of the universe again? For real this time.
1. Thousands of tourists, Chinese and Western, are milling along the pedestrian walkway, their flashbulbs popping like fireflies in the half-light. The Westerners are doing what Westerners always do in Shanghai, trying to re-create the past as they snap photos of the old colonial buildings. The Chinese are also doing what Chinese people always do, trying to escape the past as they snap their photos in the opposite direction, grazing out across the river towards the dazzling ziggurats of Pudong. (page 9).
ReplyDelete2. There is a consumer boom, but the majority of people have no access to it. If in the United States you need money to get power, in China you need power to get money. China’s prosperity today is just a patina or wealth, accessible mainly to the corrupt and the very fortunate at the top, which disguises a seething mass of urban social problems, such as unemployment, crime, and outdated housing. And don’t even mention the countryside. Just go a mile from the neon of the Bund and Nanjing Road and you will find thousands of people living on forty dollars per month, severance pay from their former jobs at now-defunct factories. They have no health insurance, and if they become really sick, all they can do is go home and die. (page 15-16).
3. In China, wherever there are people, there are karaoke parlors. In fact, where there are no people, there are karaoke parlors. There is probably a karaoke parlor on the Chinese side of Mount Everest. (page 36).
4. Historians say the problem was that China peaked too early. It founded a very successful Confucian system of bureaucracy under an all-powerful emperor and, for a premodern society, attained an amazing degree of stability and relative prosperity. But by the late eighteenth century, China’s population had grown so much that it was putting strain on the land. There was bureaucratic corruption too, of course, and overtaxation, and toward the end of the eighteenth century, China began to sink under the weight of its own success. And then, as we have seen, along came the hairy barbarians from the ocean, and everything that Chinese people previously thought was magnificent and a sign of their superior culture suddenly became a symbol of backwardness and humiliation, as the Ocean People semi-colonized China. (page 42).
5. There are nine cities in the United States with more than one million inhabitants. In China there are forty-nine. You can be traveling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think, I’ve never even heard of this place. That is how it is for many foreign visitors to Hefei (population 4.2 million). (page 64).
My question is how similar to the United States are the cities that have more than a million inhabitants? Are they built up cities like the big cities are here?