Trying to civilize the Chinese - Jongo News - Daily News of China

Let’s get it out of the way. Golden Week has just wrapped up here in Beijing. The sun is shining, busloads of tourists arrived from the provinces, and every Lao Wai with a credit card and a few days off from work went somewhere else. May 1 is also the unofficial start of summer here in Beijing. Last week the weather was nice and we were eating lunch comfortably outside and walking around in fashionable sweaters, this week it feels like somebody flipped the switch on God’s Own Microwave. Seriously. I will now be spending the next 150 days sweating through my shirts as I walk to the subway.

Not that life in the capital city is without its amusements.

Foreigners love Chinglish. And spitting. And the non-existent queues. We giggle and scoff at the “Line Up Days” in Beijing: the 11th of every month—get it, 11 looks like two people standing in line—when volunteers don arm badges and force people to wait in orderly lines for buses and subways. Every month or so the Beijing nanny issues another set of directives for people to sit up straight, stop spitting, quit shoving, use inside voices, and a host of other rules that wouldn’t look out of place covered in stickers of flowers and bunnies and posted in your local kindergarten.

Frankly, if I were Chinese I’d be upset. Every time a new list of rules goes up, Western journalists write it down and foreigners both inside and outside the Middle Kingdom lap it up. Why?

Success.

China’s been too successful and we’ve lost our edge. I first started coming to China ten years ago and there are people I know in this town who have been here for twice as long as that. It’s a whole new ballgame here these days. Even five years ago, your average English teacher could still party like a rock star and have a pick of places to live. Now we live in walk-ups or outside the 6th Ring Road and party at Nanjie. Foreigners in Beijing are no longer seen as something odd or even particularly noteworthy.

“Ah, yes…a foreigner,” they say while waiting to have their BMW serviced. “I have one of those in the living room. Keep him next to the potted plant.”

A friend of mine in town who teaches English knows this feeling all too well:

“I show up to this dude’s house. Massive place. Top of the line electronics. And me sitting on his imported Italian leather sofa with my CD player attempting to teach English while he poured tea. At that moment, I realized that my career choice was about one cheap qipao and a microphone away from ‘KTV xiaojie.’”

This is why we giggle over the Chinglish. It’s why we complain about the lines. It makes US feel BETTER. We are modern. We get it. Our running internal monologue goes something like this:

“Sure they’ve turned geopolitics on its head and somehow accomplished double digit economic growth for the better part of two decades mainly by taking our investment dollars and turning it into consumer goods while feeding us the credit necessary to mortgage our future on cheap plastic crap, but come on…look at how they line up at the subway. How civilized and modern can China be?”

And therein is the crux: how do we define the terms “civilized” and “modern?” What are the standards?

The sort of “let’s clean up our act so the foreigners take us seriously” directives have been around for over a century but what’s striking is how the sort of behaviors or activities labeled as “backwards” by Chinese governments, activists and elites frequently echoed the criticisms of Western observers of China. Footbinding and concubinage went from being markers of elite status to symbols of China’s backwardness. Reformers like Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, and other writers of the May 4th era launched critique after critique of the “old culture”—savage indictments that strikingly echoed the contempt of foreign observers—often missionaries—of China in the 19th century. (Seriously, if I was to start quoting Liang Qichao’s views on eugenics in this space, they’d burn my house down. Let’s just say Liang had an interesting view on the “practicality” of mixed White and Asian marriages that wouldn’t win him any friends on a local bbs.)

It’s not just in manners. The creation of modernity—the invention of what it means to be modern if you will—could find its way into a whole assortment of fields. In her 2004 book Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China, historian Ruth Rogaski argues:

“In spite of these fluctuations and moments of resistance, however, the resulting overall pictures reveals a growing hegemony of biomedical approaches to health in the public discourse of Chinese elites, and a concurrent acceptance of a picture of the Chinese people as inherently lacking when compared with Western-defined standards of health…few, if any, alternative voices emerged from the treaty-port elite to challenge its underlying power.” (p. 9)

In other words: Chinese people spit and so were somehow less “modern” than the West. If China wished to be a modern country, it must remove these bad habits of hygiene and etiquette. China’s early 20th century elites felt that by correcting certain things—ironically those areas that were most problematic for Westerners in China—they could establish a kind of equivalency with the West.

And I’m not defending the practice of spitting. Let’s be clear about that. I was here during the glory days of SARS. One of the few good things to come out of that period was a useful debate over the casual relationship many people have here between “public space” and “snot rockets.”

But when the discourse of hygiene, etiquette and public space becomes conflated our images of modernity and “civilization,” it becomes problematic. Foreigners do it all the time here—walking around with arched eyebrows and knowing smirks about “these people.” But the Chinese do it too. Western ideas of modernity have become so internalized by Chinese elites that the urbanites (resident members of what my good friend Nels calls “the global cognitive elite”) apply them to their own countrymen. They mock the guy in the cloth shoes sipping his jar of tea as they themselves sidle into the local Starbucks in last year’s Prada.

But who gets to decide what is modern and civilized and what really is the relationship between these two words? We see them used together so often in Chinese press and propaganda that we take them for granted. But words have meanings and—as is the case of these two words especially—a history.

It’s a fundamental paradox that has existed in Chinese thought for over a century: How to be both fully modern and yet fully Chinese. Can China ever establish true equivalency with the West if it uses the West to set standards for its own development? Leaving aside for the moment that “China”, “The West,” and “modernity” are terms not as easy to define as most people might think.

In the rush to the Olympic Games, I see more and more attempts on the part of the Beijing government to “modernize” Beijing and to create a more “civilized” city for 2008. I just wonder: for whom?