Some Thoughts on China (scattered)

If there were a way to scientifically measure cultural transformation, China would be off the charts. The velocity of development (or rather, of change) is inconceivably high in nearly every domain: economic, cultural, linguistic, social, and even physical. The immediate analogy for the change of the cultural landscape is the famous Chinese urban landscape. Urban space changes daily: new skyscrapers appear almost overnight, construction being a 24 hour endeavor; roads are changed and subway lines are added, so even the flow of bodies is in flux; and even the air is changing, as government initiatives to reduce pollution before the Olympics brings hints of blue sky behind low-hanging grey smog.
The rate of change is such that by the time any observation is committed to paper, it might well be obsolete. It is thus a daunting task to attempt any stable calculation or fixed analysis of China. As methodologies go, Cartesian thinking will not go far; China almost requires Chaos Theory.

But the Western media overplay the notion of chaos in China. Readers of the NY Times are encouraged to see China as a developmental anomaly, a third world nation so eager to develop that it is bursting at the seams with novelty, change and movement. What Westerners fail to understand is that this sort of chaos is deeply embedded in Chinese society, which historically has maintained the counterintuitive combination of a militant bureaucracy with intermittent, almost constant, social upheaval. Given that the present moment is the fist period in the last century when China has NOT been engaged in some sort of revolution, this chaos can be considered relatively stable.

What Western media is calling chaos is in fact inconsistency, but these are not the same thing. Whereas in the West a cell phone retains connotations of bourgeois excess (owing to its genesis in the 1980s yuppie boom), in China the cell phone has become a champion product of nearly every class. Though seeing a poor migrant worker in tattered clothing chatting on his cell phone might be jarring to Western eyes, this reaction wrongly projects a Western reality onto a Chinese one. No wonder the result appear surreal; it is superimposed. China is piebald, but not fragmented, in flux but not in chaos. To risk sounding like an orientalist, perhaps a Daoist notion of impermanence and change is the best way to understand China....

Social networking is a staple of Chinese culture, and has been for thousands of years. “Guanxi” as it is known, is the notion that everyone you have a relationship with is conceived of not simply as an acquaintence, but as a potential ally in the ongoing struggle to overcome the inevitable obstacles on the road of life. In the West, this kind of networking is reserved for business people or social arrivistes, and connotes a cut-throat and even tactless attitude. However, this connotation comes from the West, where we are raised with the idea that one person can accomplish anything. Yet there are 1.3 billion people in China and as one young professor told me, “Who needs 1.3 billion individuals?” Chinese “guanxi” is a tacit recognition that in the face of a massive totalitarian bureaucracy or a cut-throat emerging marketplace, one person cannot get very far at all. Guanxi is the product of a collectivist society; networking is a way to magnify individual agency by forming an aggregate network-agency, a quiet subversion of an unfriendly reality.

This is relevant to cell phone use especially because it explains away much of the confusing cell phone culture. The first reaction to almost any obstacle is a phone call. If there is trouble with paperwork, one calls a friend who calls a friend, etc. Email is, in many ways, too slow, and text messages convey less urgency. Cell phones allow for real-time access to the Guanxi network, which is more relevant to Chinese lives than the internet and its networks. For example, while French taxis now use GPS machines (Tom Toms) to find any location in Paris, a Chinese taxi driver, when confronted with an unknown address will simply call a friend (or fellow driver) and ask. A pedestrian might well do the same to find a location, or call the destination ahead of time.

For Chinese youth, there is another dimension to networking that is less related to Guanxi, and that is the need for social and emotional connection. Thanks to the one-child policy, China has created a generation of only-children. Aside from being famously spoilt and demanding (the so-called “little emperors” that result from being doted upon), these only-children are often very lonely. Home life is full of tremendous pressure, because as only-children, the successful continuation of the family name and the financial future of the family rest entirely upon their young shoulders. While doted upon and often rewarded with gaudy material gifts (when they succeed), these kids seek release from the tumult of parental expectations in new forms of social activities.

Cell phones are the best thing to happen to teenagers worldwide. Not considered frivolous or luxurious as in the US, cell phones are a basic commodity for all age groups, but for teenagers they allow constant contact with a social world even when they are at school, in transit, or even at home studying. Not only can they be used to make plans, they are an activity in and of themselves: American cell phone calls are often short and to the point, leading up to a face to face meeting, but Chinese cell phones allow for endless frivolous chatting (“liao-tian”) which is a favorite pass-time of all Chinese.