24 Manchu Hours

(PS (pre-script, I guess): if anyone knows how to better manage posts with lots of pictures in blogger, any help would be much appreciated >.< ) 

Ahhh, November in Beijing. The days grow cold, the air grows thick (“it’s just fog, guys, we swear!”), and the roads constantly seem to have a few inches of puddles in them. Though a beautiful freak snowstorm (auspiciously timed to the start of the Beijing Forum) briefly turned our campus into an early winter wonderland, opportunities for outside experiences had returned to the state perfectly encapsulated by the words on the online summary of most Beijing landmarks, “uhhh, November probably isn’t the best time to visit here…”

So, there is but one thing for the restless student to do — bust out of the city! And that’s we did a few Wednesdays ago. In my searches for day trips around Beijing, I came across a TIME article entitled “Five Reasons to Visit Chengde”, and was instantly captivated. Being a Yuanmingyuan aficionado myself, the promise of a summer palace, but with mountains (!) was quite appealing to me. We got together our solid traveling crew, and booked our trip.

We would be taking the night train to Chengde - 6 hours of sleep were the theoretical upper limit, but we were confident that the promise of sightseeing and walking through the snow would keep us fueled for the day. Our train left from Beijing Zhan (Beijing Station — I’m only missing Beijing BeiZhan now in my travels out of the four main stations in the city!), the oldest and most classically beautiful train station in the city. Built by the PRC as part of its ’10 Great Buildings’ to showcase the strength of the new regime and opened in 1959, it was within the former old city wall and boasted some beautiful high-ceilinged waiting rooms that we skipped in favor of a quick (if shitty) burger at the McD’s on the first floor. The roof of the main passage over the tracks was still in full Olympic flair, with murals depicting every continent’s major landmarks dimly seen in the late night lighting. It was roughly midnight; a few night trains were still scheduled to depart, but the station was about as empty as a major piece of transportation infrastructure could get (in that there was a crowd of several hundred around the entrance to our track, but few others milling about). 

BeiJingZhan at midnight

Early morning in the southern suburbs of Chengde

Naoya had pulled the short straw as assigned by the booking algorithm and was banished to the next soft sleeper compartment over (we were five, soft sleepers only have 4 beds a compartment and hard sleepers with 6 were sold out), but for now, until we got too tired, we all gathered in one compartment, sitting on the lower bunks and waiting for the train, K7742, to leave. The compartment was relatively well put together; four bunks, two to a side, framed a small table by the winter with a kettle for boiling water. The door out of the compartment locked and had a mirror on its inside. Access to the top bunk was through a foldable foothold by the door, and each bunk and a little reading light to itself. The space above the corridor could be used for luggage storage if one looked past the crumbs and dirt of many train trips that covered it. The sheets were more or less clean, if one looked past the occasional off-colored stain. 

We left on time, at 12:25 am, passing slowly through the Eastern suburbs of Beijing before turning North towards the mountains. I accidentally gave my ticket to the conductor in exchange for a thicker credit-card-shaped token (apparently a service for the safekeeping of tickets during the night, since they were needed to exit the station). Chips and drinks passed the time before we one by one retreated to our bunks (Naoya to his exile in the next room over). Thankfully the top left bunk that I chose was long enough for me, and honestly, pretty comfortable. I fell asleep very quickly, and woke up to a grey, snowy morning as we rumbled by a series of equally gray new skyscrapers. We had entered the outskirts of Chengde.

It was too foggy to see the mountains around us, but for the last twenty minutes we passed through a town that already felt different from Beijing. Due to geography, the high-rises did not follow the same permanent grid pattern in Beijing, and the architecture became slightly more angular. We arrived in Chengde on time at 6:30am. Outside the station, a socialist statue welcomed us. Hungry, we got some beef noodle soup breakfast at a small restaurant on the train station square, and made our way onwards.

If you ask me, this is the perfect weather to visit this place

Our first destination was the Qing Summer Palace in Chengde, the 避暑山庄 (lit. “mountain villa for escaping the heat”), closer to the dynasty’s Manchu homelands North of the mountains. Though it was cold and snowy out, morning old folk dancing was going as strong as ever in the first square inside the park, Chinese dance pop blasting out across the moving crowd of roughly a hundred. We quickly realized (to our happiness) that we were likely one of only very few tourists who dared make the trek in the winter; almost all other park guests seemed to be locals with season tickets.

The park was fantastic. The light blanket of snow coupled with the lack of crowds gave the whole area a dreamlike quality; palace buildings faded into the fog and small side buildings were perfectly reflected in the absolute stillness of the lake at its center. The mastery of Chinese landscape architecture was once again on show - the terrain itself was used as part of the garden aesthetic, with the mountains both framing the gardens and allowing for pagodas to pop out of their forests to add a background as well. Everywhere in the palace were little reminders that the Qing Dynasty did not tick the same way that most other historical rulers over China did. As presumptive conquerers (they were Manchu, originally speaking a different language, composed of a different ethnic group, and from an area somewhat separate from the main Han-dominated historical region of China), their foreignness followed them throughout their regency. The Qing tried to embrace it as an example of a multicultural China; most of the inscriptions and steles here are written in Manchu, Tibetan, and Mongolian in addition to Chinese (an attempt which ultimately proved to be futile - one of the somewhat incredible abilities of Chinese culture was to completely Sinicize more or less any invaders: today, the Manchu language is all but non-existent, and the last Manchu emperor was said to only speak it at a very basic level. There are currently estimated to only be around 10 native speakers left). 

The multi-ethnic focus of the Qing was also present in the architectural styles of the palace; slightly more varied than one would find in a traditional Han palace, as exemplified by the highest pagoda on the grounds. Octagonal, beige, brick, with a gilded round spire on top, the pagoda did away with the flourishes of earlier Chinese architectural styles and incorporated a Buddhist stupa top. Its courtyard retained a more traditional collection of stone steles carried by large Bixi (stone tortoises that I’m convinced were the inspiration for the Lion Turtles in Avatar), but inscribed in multiple languages as opposed to the traditional (at least for royal palaces) Mandarin.  

The Qing Mountain Resort

Unfortunately, the mountain paths seemed to be closed for the winter (come on, you have a place called the “Pagoda for Watching Snow” and you don’t let people watch snow from it!?), so we had to make do with the “Plains Area” of the palace, still enough for a few hours of leisurely strolling. 

Lunch was the most famous Manchu restaurant in Chengde, and did not disappoint. Deer with vegetables, fried rabbit, and camel meat pancakes (friggin’ amazing) filled the table, accompanied by a thin and flaky Machu-style pancake that tasted more or less like a better fortune cookie that we bought a few packs of for snacks back home. 

Fake, but honestly pretty aesthetically pleasing windows

Two Chinese-style pavilions on top of the Little Potala,
facing the back wall of the Mountain Resort

What's that? This was supposed to be a
Tibetan-style building? Well, this is China. So deal with it.

After lunch, our way took us to the next valley south, to two of the “8 Outer Temples”, built by the Qianlong Emperor (just like everything else in the Qing Dynasty, it seems) primarily to host traveling monks and guests. Our main goal was the “Little Potala Palace,” a small-scale replace of Tibet’s most famous building. Once again, the multi-ethnic composition of the Qing worldview was on full display. From far away, the compound is clearly modeled on Tibetan architecture - the Qianlong Emperor frequently used this place to host Tibetan envoys (though Tibet was no longer the massive empire that could militarily threaten China as it did in the 7th-9th centuries and was now a protectorate of the Qing, it was still an important region to the empire both strategically and culturally). 

View over the valley of the 8 Outer Temples

The campus of the Little Potala. In the background
you can see the ski slopes that the Qianlong Emperor
used to access the temple more quickly.
He was quite the avid skier [citation needed].

But the inside of the palace was unequivocally Chinese. Chinese-style pavilions crowned the building, and the inside of the primary red structure could be mistaken for a Confucian temple in Beijing, barring its larger height. But its status as a replica was clear. Nearly all windows were fake - parts of the wall painted red to mimic the shutter style of the original - and most buildings didn’t even pretend to have a door to enter their empty shells. In a sense, this was once again representative of the struggles the Qing felt - never fully integrated, and having to spend massive amounts of resources to give at least the appearance of a multi-cultural empire that the majority Han were uncomfortable with accepting. The Qing finally fell, and with it Imperial China, after a series of revolts, rebellions, and, most importantly, foreign colonizations, in 1912. 

The way back was on a normal day train, K7712, an old workhorse consisting of double-decker carriages, 5 seats across. Unfortunately, the seat backs themselves felt as if they made less than a 90 degree angle with the seat, so my advice would be to avoid these trains for longer rides. Thankfully, the lack of too many other passengers (no doubt the fact that the train is currently slower than a bus trip to Beijing by a fair bit until the opening of the Beijing-Shenyang High Speed Rail Line in a few years contributed to the low occupancy) meant that we could spread out and nap across the seats (well, this mainly meant I had to enjoy the Yanjing bottle I bought on the way to the train station myself…). Beijing was reached around midnight. Our 24 hours had been successful. 

Last order of business: update the wikitravel page to reflect that no, visiting Chengde outside the summer isn’t ‘depressing’, and also that there are more trains than the 5 listed there. 

Migrant Schools and the Effect of Rural-to-Urban Migration on Education

Hey all! Just a warning: this post is incredibly long, and deals with serious issues and academic quotes. So, if you're not into that, I have a great post on a 24-hour trip to Chengde coming up soon, with pretty pictures and all. 

Deciding what content to put on this blog isn’t always easy. So far, I’ve focused on some of the little things about my current life in China; hospitals, fun propaganda videos, and hiking trips have actually taken up much of my experience. For most of these topics, I’ve tried to dig deeper after the fact in writing my summaries—one of my main motivations for writing here is to frame my own experiences in a way that makes them more meaningful or enlightening for myself. This focus has also probably slowed down my update frequency; I have several drafts at various stages of completeness, but have lacked the motivation necessary to morph them into something that not just blandly or humorously describes what I’ve been experiencing, but to try and allow me to understand how those experiences came to be (this is an apology as well, I see from site statistics that people actually regularly check this blog for updates, so many apologies for the long delay :p Also I'm flattered, thanks guys).

It is for this reason that I’ve held up on talking about more serious or complex issues, such as, for example, college housing, or the topic of this post, migrant schools, things that I have definitely had experiences with, have definitely fascinated me, but things that I don’t feel comfortable talking about yet. I am acutely aware that having grown up and lived for my whole life elsewhere coupled with my own relative lack of decent Chinese skills deprives me of much of the sociocultural context that would allow me to fully examine these issues. If there is one thing that I’ve learned since coming to China it is that the differences in culture and society between “the West” and China (ignoring for a moment the inadequacies of that broad categorization) are large enough so as to severely hamper the accurate study of societal themes for casual observers. 

However, I think I’m going to start digging deeper once more. Writing on this blog has really allowed me to understand various phenomena better than I would have without doing the (admittedly superficial) research necessary to put together these posts. So, I hope that in doing so, I will be able to get closer to how society, culture, policy, and government work in China, and hopefully share that a little with those of you who haven’t yet been here. 

"From here on in… I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron." - Prof. Dumbledore

I will start with the case of migrant schools.

(NB: the following developed out of a group project for one of my classes, ‘we’ refers to the research group I was in)

The Hukou System

The vast majority of social services in China are tied to an all-encompassing household registration system known as the Hukou system (户口簿). A Hukou record contains birth, death, marriage, parents, and, most importantly in this present context, the identification of the record-holder as a resident of a specific area. This system is the basis of public resource allocation throughout state roles—the number of schools and teachers hired in a certain place is often based on how many people are registered in a certain place. 

Most importantly, the hukou system prevents free movement of place of residence within the country. A Chinese family registered in a small village in underdeveloped Ningxia Province can’t just pack up and move to Shanghai on their own decision. Though it is possible to change the place where one is registered, this process is incredibly difficult and usually involves a point-based system designed to only let in educated, well-off rural-to-urban transplants. However, this system has not discouraged millions from seeking better job opportunities and quality of life in cities anyways. To put this movement into perspective, 54% of China’s population lives in cities, but only 36% of China’s population has an urban Hukou - in other words, roughly 250 million Chinese live in cities without being registered in cities. It’s pretty important to note that, ironically enough, Chinese economy growth would have been much more modest without this massive migration —for example, the World Bank estimates that labor allocation from (rural) agriculture to non-agricultural sectors has contributed 16% to Chinese economic growth 1978-2005. 

The consequences of this discrepancy between domicile and ‘official’ residence strongly affect the lives of rural-to-urban migrants. Only urban hukou holders are able to completely access government services, including welfare and pensions. And, as will be explained below, access to the official public school system is difficult or outright impossible for the children of migrant families. 

I won’t fully go into the origins of the hukou system or its original intents, since the history of the system is pretty complicated and beyond the scope of this post (for now). 

Barriers to Entering the Public School System as a Migrant Child

Because of their status as ‘illegitimate’, migrant children face significant administrative and financial barriers to enter the normal state-sponsored public school system. For one, public schools usually require a long series of documents that migrant families often can’t produce. One study (Goodman 2015) saw that up to 8 documents from parents were required before migrant children could be enrolled, including a state ID card, a temporary residence permit, an employment permit, both parents’ health certificate, population planning certificate (in the same vein as the One Child Policy), social insurance certificate, guardianship or birth certificate, and the child’s health certificate. Sometimes these documents are still in the family’s home county, and sometimes they are just physically unable to get them due to their own illegitimate status. 

In addition, public schools usually require extra fees from migrant families. The same study in Beijing found 2 official government fees for children without residential permits, an educational compensation fee （教育补偿费）of 1000RMB per semester, and a temporary schooling fee of 680RMB per semester, not to mention up to 15 other fees. Total fees can rise up to 8000RMB (around $1250) per year for primary school, with that number rising for junior and senior high school. The families in Beijing facing these fees usually have a monthly income of 700 - 1200RMB (around $100-180). All in all, migrant children are required to pay 5 to 6 times the fees charged local students. These numbers vary greatly depending on local policies; a lack of a coherent national policy (or at least a lack of compliance to any national policy) on the subject means that local governments have the ability to more or less arbitrarily set fees, including “donations”, and entry requirements.

Attending a Migrant School

As a result, only 12.5% of migrant children in Beijing could afford to attend state schools in 2002. These numbers can be very different depending on the location and year, being strongly influenced by local policies, but in general, across the country the majority of migrant children in urban areas end up in migrant schools—private schools of often dubious educational quality but which are significantly cheaper than their public counterparts. 

These schools are often defined by poor facilities (including missing blackboards, cracked chairs, lack of heating, in extreme cases the schools are housed in abandoned warehouses…), poor teaching quality (Goodman 2015 even recorded an English teacher who did not know what any of the words she copied on the board meant), usually no physical education, meal support, or health support (usually offered at public schools), and some schools are forced to relocate frequently to avoid getting shut down by authorities.

Source: Chen and Feng 2013

The graph above shows a couple of results from a study done in Shanghai and published in 2013. In general, teachers in migrant schools are less well-educated and have less experience, as can be expected given their unofficial status. The third statistic, showing the percentage of parents of migrant children who think that the urban school is better than the school their children left behind back in their rural origins, is important in light of the incredible disparity in educational quality between rural and urban China, which will be briefly covered below. Finally, the percentage of families with incomes of over 3000RMB in the study group in Shanghai in public and migrant schools shows how the current system exacerbates income inequalities in education, as is to be expected given the barriers to entry to the official system.

Consequences

Because of barriers to entry into the public school system and the lack of quality migrant schools, the problem of migrant education results in undereducated migrant children (at least compared to their urban counterparts) and an exacerbation of urban inequality. 

Source: Chen and Feng 2013

The above graph, from the same study in Shanghai, shows scores in a standardized test the researchers gave to migrant and local students in public schools and migrant students in migrant schools. The differences are clear; the education gap between migrant students in public and local schools is much greater than that between local and migrant students in public schools. However, the above graph also provides hope; the top two rows show that migrant students are capable of catching up to urban students when given the chance.

Finally, the hukou system directly interferes in even migrant education in underground schools. Since higher education examinations must be taken in the district of one's home hukou, most migrant children without urban registration status cannot continue their schooling in urban areas after their graduation from junior high school. One study on several schools in Beijing showed that 60% of migrant children reported they wouldn’t continue their education in Beijing after graduating from junior high schools, with the vast majority blaming the hukou system as main obstacle for uninterrupted schooling experience (Liu and Jacob 2011).

Migrant Schools in Perspective

Now, as you may have noticed, I have so far focused primarily on the gap between urban and migrant students in urban areas, and ignored the disparity in rural to urban education. In general, migrant students, despite the low quality of their schooling, often have a significantly better education in migrant schools than in their home villages. A recent study (Xu and Xie, 2015), the first to use left-behind children (children whose parents have left to migrate) and rural families who haven’t migrated as control groups, showed that in general migration had a significant positive effect on childrens’ objective well-being (academic outcomes, overall health and nutrition) with no measurable aggregate negative effect on their subjective well-being (depression, self-perspective, etc.). This result speaks to the incredible disparities between rural and urban areas in China in government attention, basic services, development, and most other measurable categories, composing the reasons that motivate rural families to move to cities, even when their status or destination is uncertain. (An interesting extra conclusion of the paper is that left-behind children and non-migrant children are roughly equally well-off because of the strong Chinese family structures that normalize the raising of children by grandchildren completely or as a supplement to a one-parent household)

Conclusions

Where does China stand on the problem of migrant education? This question isn’t easy to answer; by objective measures, migrant children, despite their disparity with their urban counterparts, are almost exclusively benefitted by movement towards cities, showcasing the complex multi-layered structure of inequality in Chinese society. However, migrant children are still often excluded from the educational opportunities theoretically granted to all urban residents, with the poorest most likely to be excluded. These migrants are here to stay; the current urbanization plan, as articulated by Premier Li Keqiang calls for an increase of the urban population to 60% of the country’s total, with 45% holding urban hukou status. China needs these migrants in their cities, especially now that the shrinking work force (a combination of the One Child Policy and similar policies and slowing birth rates from economic growth) is being more and more noticed by government statisticians and planners. In the long term, if hukou reform does go through and migrant children are given equal educational opportunities in cities, there is a danger that the current system will produce a generation of undereducated children unable to escape the lower class in the future distribution of inequality. 

Things are slowly changing. Hukou reform is high on the agenda of several prominent officials, and technically migrant students are legally required to receive the same education are urban students in the same city (though this directive has rarely been followed). For the first time, these directives are by monetary resources, breaking the hold of the hukou system on local resource allocations. The government has begun more serious crackdowns on migrant schools, though such a policy can only be positive if the local system that prevents migrants from attending regular schools is correspondingly boosted, which is unfortunately not always the case.

But the only way to truly fix the education gap will require massive investments in rural areas as well, where schools and opportunities are so bad that even a one-room schoolhouse in a former warehouse in a big Eastern Chinese city feels like an improvement. Even now, migrant children who make it into urban public schools often face an educational deficit because of the subpar schooling they have so far received back home. Additionally, discrimination against migrants is rampant in both the urban society and bureaucracy, with frequent microagressions and even refusals of schools to allow migrants to gain academic honors. 

Postscript: Our Visit to a Migrant School

We wanted to put a more concrete face to the statistics and papers we had read, and an opportunity to do so presented itself when one of our group members knew a migrant school in Haidian district. A few days ago, we took a cab there to talk to one of its teachers. 

(NB: some location/place descriptors have been omitted or anonymized, while I *highly* doubt the Chinese government reads my blog, I’m not entirely sure how in danger this specific school is to unwanted authority attention)

We entered a relatively poor, older neighborhood. These are ubiquitous among many urban and semi-urban areas in China, and reminded me strongly of many of the alleys I walked through in Hangzhou my last time in China (except without the prevalent smell of stinky tofu (literally, 臭豆腐 chòu dòufu) that thankfully doesn’t dominate the alleyways of Beijing). A main, but narrow road stretched between a seemingly endless row of three-story buildings, a complex, almost overwhelming haze of gray house fronts and red text. The ground floors lining the road on both sides were invariably composed of various shops, restaurants, or food stalls, with the odd service store thrown into the mix—a pretty high-class barber shop seemed slightly out of place between a fruit stand and a second-hand electronics store. Flags and banners were strung across the street at irregular intervals. Trash usually ignored any designated receptacle, and the population of adorable stray dogs seemed as strong as ever. But what I think fascinates visitors most to these neighborhoods is that despite the poverty (especially its stark contrast to the towers of Zhongguancun, ‘China’s Silicon Valley’, occasionally visible only a few miles away), the streets were alive. What urban policy in the United States especially is enthusiastically rediscovering as ‘mixed-used development’ can be seen naturally (without the influence of zoning codes) arising in so many neighborhoods in the developing world — when work, home, and errands happen in the same space, public life naturally follows. People sold their fruit. Scooters screamed past, honking from a block away. Stall keepers were offering up pastries, butcher shops showed their raw meat, clothes stores were filled with casual shoppers (I almost got a much-needed belt). The neighborhood was more or less self-sustaining. 

And here it was that we found our destination. The school was placed onto a lot prefaced by a cracked driveway flanked by two rusted basketball hoops. We were welcomed by a cry of “外国人!” (foreigners), shouted by a small, cheerful kid in a fluffy blue jacket against the November chill. We soon saw two dozen other 4th graders milling around the complex, some of them greeting us with similar cries of “美国人!” (Americans) and one or two cries of “老外!” I slowly realized the futility of my presence as my companions with much greater Chinese skills took the lead in finding our contact person. We were told to wait, and proceeded to do so in the small yard between the school wings. We were instantly surrounded by several dozen hyperactive kids on what I assume was their lunch break. Without really any supervision or organized play, they amused themselves in ways that kids everywhere develop spontaneously, by running around, playfully (or not so) shoving each other, and yelling questions at us. “你是哪国人?” (where are you from?) was common, along with many things I couldn’t understand. The sheer number of students was a little overwhelming; forty were on average crammed into each of the classes. 

The school was not the worst migrant school in Beijing. It probably wasn’t even the worst one in the area, at least of the schools that survived the latest crackdown. The teachers seemed motivated, and the students seemed more or less cheerful. There was even a computer lab with less-than-a-decade-old windows desktops (which many public schools in the US can barely boast). Students from a nearby university came by to volunteer from time to time. 

But it is still clear to see that this school did not have the educational resources offered by the city’s other public schools. It’s hard to see how teachers couldn’t also be somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer density of students in the small school compound. Guided PE and health counseling, required at those schools, was likely nonexistent here.

Whether or not new policies mean the end of this migrant school remains to be seen. Every crackdown has so far only hit a subset of the remaining schools, and every policy officially designed to integrate migrant children into the public school system has so far failed at fixing the problem. As long as insurmountable barriers to entry to the official public school system exist, these migrant schools will likely continue to open their doors, providing a ‘better than nothing’ opportunity for children stuck at the whims of a registration system that doesn’t value them as ‘rural’ residents. 

References

Branigan, Tania. 2010. “Millions of Chinese Rural Migrants Denied Education for Their Children.” The Guardian, March 15, sec. World news. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/15/china-migrant-workers-children-education.

Chen, Yuanyuan, and Shuaizhang Feng. 2013. “Access to Public Schools and the Education of Migrant Children in China.” China Economic Review 26 (September): 75–88. doi:10.1016/j.chieco.2013.04.007.

Goodburn, Charlotte. 2009. “Learning from Migrant Education: A Case Study of the Schooling of Rural Migrant Children in Beijing.” International Journal of Educational Development, Education and Development in Contemporary China, 29 (5): 495–504. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.04.005.

Hao, Lingxin, and Xiao Yu. 2015. “Rural-Urban Migration and Childrens’ Access to Education: China in Comparitive Perspective.” Background Paper ED/EFA/MRT/2015/PI/39. Education for All Global Monitoring Report. UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002324/232466e.pdf.

Liang, Zai, and Yiu Por Chen. 2007. “The Educational Consequences of Migration for Children in China.” Social Science Research 36 (1): 28–47. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.09.003.

Liu, Jing, and W. James Jacob. 2012. “From Access to Quality: Migrant Children’s Education in Urban China.” Educational Research for Policy and Practice 12 (3): 177–91. doi:10.1007/s10671-012-9136-y.

McMahon, Diny. 2013. “Beijing Moves to Break Down the Urban-Rural Divide.” The Wall Street Journal China Real Time. November 15. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/15/beijing-moves-to-break-down-the-rural-urban-divide/.

Xu, Hongwei, and Xie Yu. 2013. “The Causal Effects of Rural-to-Urban Migration on Children’s Wellbeing in China.” 13-798. PSC Research Reports. Population Studies Center: University of Michigan. http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr13-798.pdf.

Zhou, Minhui, Rachel Murphy, and Ran Tao. 2014. “Effects of Parents’ Migration on the Education of Children Left Behind in Rural China.” Population and Development Review 40 (2): 273–92. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2014.00673.x.

"If you wanna know what China's gonna do..."

Watch the following video. Go on, I'll wait. It may be the greatest, most beautiful example of modern soft power propaganda you will ever get the incredible privilege to see in your life.

If you're one of those ingrates who doesn't watch videos online after being told to, this is a music video, in English, about the next Chinese Five-Year-Plan (a gigantic planning document released every five years detailing major programs and national strategies for the next planning period). The narration is clearly done by Americans, and the animation is a perfect example of early-2000s JibJab video style. And the theme is just so damn catchy. It is made by a mysterious film studio (full-ish story here) that has been difficult to pin down, but is clearly supported by the Chinese government, seeing as their videos are often reposted by Xinhua or Chinese ministries on social media.

In recent years, China has greatly increased its efforts in promoting a kind of soft power diplomacy and propaganda to better its image in the world, to an almost obsessive point. On the topic, Xi Jinping has been quoted as saying, “China should be portrayed as a civilized country featuring a rich history, ethnic unity and cultural diversity, and as an oriental power with good government, developed economy, cultural prosperity, national unity and beautiful mountains and rivers." Olympic Games, study abroad programs (I won't deny my program probably contributes to this effort, even if it isn't explicitly part of this planning), and Chinese language courses are of course a major component of these goals, but occasionally the people in charge seem to take little tumbles off the deep end, and some of those even might end up working at our dear mysterious friend, the Fuxing Road Studios. 

So far, I personally doubt China's more esoteric soft power efforts on the cultural arena have been all that successful. Historically, a lot of Chinese communication trying to project a friendly, positive image to the West has failed as a result of misunderstandings in how to reach Western audiences. Giving out free copies of China Daily at every street corner in DC is probably going to have a negligible impact on American perceptions, when the refutation of its sanitized stories is readily available on every other news source the reader has access to (and when the Epoch Times, the Falun Gong newspaper, is also distributed for free in stands usually directly adjacent to the China Daily ones). And of course, Western audiences will see these kinds of videos more as a joke than as a bringer of epiphanies about the inner workings of China. We've been trained (among other things, by history) to see overtly cheery government-produced videos as likely dishonest, and seeing these videos come out of China likely only reinforces Western popular views on the untrustworthiness of the Chinese government. 

In the end though, it is probably easy to overstate the importance of these videos to the Chinese government. A few investments in the tens of thousands of RMB into a Western-oriented propaganda video pales in comparisons to the real heavyweights of Chinese soft diplomacy in education and development support. The many thousands of scholarships given to students in developing countries to study at major Chinese universities or the $49 billion in aid given to African countries, for example (including major financial help with the new African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa), show where the bulk of these efforts are concentrated. In the end, stories of Chinese mistreatment of local laws and workers aside, this is the kind of soft diplomacy that is likely to have a long-term effect on international views on China. The obvious parallel of course would be American investment in postwar Europe as part of the Marshall Plan and the sheer number of international students studying at American universities, both of which undoubtedly have had a positive effect on America's moral standing in the world. 

It will definitely be interesting to track the further development of the Chinese soft power approach, especially since it seems to be the best strategic fit with recent broader Chinese development strategies (i.e. the "Peaceful Development Doctrine") and is appealing to a country with large geopolitical ambitions that doesn't yet have the economic or military strength alone to give it the place in the world order that it wants (especially considering that soft power is notoriously ephemeral). 

I will leave you with another beautiful example of modern Chinese video propaganda, this one produced by the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, in which international students studying in China wax poetically on how they want their future husbands to be like Xi Jinping:

(Also go back to the QZ article in the first link above for more Fuxing Road Studios propaganda masterpieces. The one on how China chooses its president is also great, if mainly for the animation of Obama punching Mitt Romney in the face to win the White House)

How to Succeed at setting up Taobao without Nearly Crying

Have you heard of Taobao? You haven’t? This must be changed. What is Taobao, you ask? Taobao is the greatest temple to 21st century consumerism you will ever find. Think Amazon, if everything cost 1/5th as much. What can you buy? Everything… as long as it isn’t western political literature. Otherwise, if it doesn’t exist on Taobao, it’s probably not worth buying. If it does exist on Taobao, it probably isn’t worth buying either, but I digress. Clothes, sports equipment, books, furniture, food, cars, travel packages (I refuse to correct what google translate presumably incorrectly told me was a trip to America, “so easy” for only “3999 direct American freedoms”), real estate, paternity tests, semen (*record scratch* and you thought I was kidding). During the most recent largest online shopping day in the world (Chinese Singles’ Day! 11/11. Of *course* someone would try to take advantage of impulse buyers on the day their potential loneliness is thrust in their faces), Taobao raked in $9.3 billion. The fact of the matter is that they should have a different word for shopping addiction, one much more evil sounding, to capture what could happen to you once you discover Taobao.

I too, wanted in. As the ultimate example of the incredible evolution in Chinese domestic consumption demand, I thought it crucial to join to better understand modern Chinese culture (well…. okay, I wanted a rug and an air filter. And a keyboard. Maybe some socks. Also some…). Of course as a usual Chinese system, it’s pretty easy to access and navigate if you neatly fit the person for whom this system was designed. Unfortunately, for the first time since coming here, I was very clearly not that person. Read on, dear foreigner, and learn from my struggles. 

1) Get hooked

I was first motivated to look on Taobao for socks. This may sound unexpectedly banal, but a very unexpected difficulty I’ve had to deal with is that I apparently have giant monster troll feet, at least from the perspective of the average Chinese shoe store. The local hypermarché maxes out at several sizes below mine and the attending staff just laughs when I ask if anything bigger is available. So I turned to the internet. After a brief search, I found some socks I liked (though for some reason part of the advertisment on the page was pictures of the socks being burnt over a teacup and the (English) words “FASHION SOCIALIST PUBLIC IS POPULAR”. I guess there’s some deeper hidden meaning I’m missing out on here), 5 pairs for roughly $1 no less, and clicked the buy now button. I get asked for a login.

F*** the system, I think?

2) First Attempts

You see, Taobao is connected through a common parent company with Alipay, itself another Chinese modern consumerist legend. The Chinese name for Alipay (支付宝 - Zhīfùbǎo) is for some reason rendered as PayPal by the Google Translate Chrome plugin, but once again, it is more than just a mere “Chinese [insert Western tech company here]”. It has all the patently Chinese innovations such as the possibilitiy of logging in, paying, or sending money to friends by the scanning of a QR code with your phone and an incredibly annoying sign-up process for foreigners. Therefore, to buy anything off Taobao, you must have a functioning Alipay account. So much so good, and I proceed over to the Alipay website to conduct the formalities.  

3) First Succeses

I signed up for an alipay account. It was pretty easy, honestly. On alipay.com, clicking 登录 (log in) and then 免费注册 (free register) on the subsequent popup will direct you to a straightforward registering process familiar to anyone who’s been on the internet. Google translate will even be enough to get you through this. Say you’re from China when it asks. If Taobao looks at you funny, just say *shhh* and move on (if you’re reading this from the U.S. or Europe, no, Taobao hasn’t come to your country yet). Get your sms verification code sent, and after some more registering that took an hour (because lolz, I can’t speak Chinese that well), you’re back at the home page of Alipay. You tentatively put in your username and 密码, spend 5 minutes trying to read the nearly illegible captcha, and are logged in! Success! The glory of consumption was only some clicks away!

4) Or so it may seem

So now you’ve set up your alipay account. Next you think, rationally, that it’s time to make your alipay account able to pay for things. There are two ways to do this; load money onto Alipay itself or link Alipay with a debit card. I of course chose the latter, I didn’t want to waste time during purchases to remind myself of how much money I’m spending by such frivolous distractions as recharging an online account. Welp, time to do some more registering. After navigating the same procedures again (phone number, verification codes, fun stuff), I hit a first snag. I’m asked for my citizens’ ID number, likely a consequence of my insistence on being from China. I try my passport number, which my bank has as my ID verification. Nope. 18 characters needed, no more, no less. There are suggestions on just filling the number with 0s until 18 characters are reached, but that seems no less sketchy. I try again, thinking I might’ve missed a button for foreigners. No such luck. After another hour of pressing around and looking for solutions, I give up. Clearly, this link between Alipay and my bank card was not meant to be. 

5) False hopes

Thankfully, there’s another option! I quickly mover over to the function to load money onto my account. For some reason, this goes much more smoothly. In no time (well, as with everything relying on my Chinese skills, ‘no time’ seems to mean an hour), I had my first 500 kuai loaded, ready to be thrown at the world’s greatest online marketplace. I go to Taobao, pick a random thing that costs next to nothing, and attempt my purchase. Once again, I’m faced with a login screen, now one that I approach confidently. I fill it out, and am hit with another variety of the amazing world of Chinese captchas - the ‘identify the quoted character by clicking on it in this picture’. This, thankfully I can do, unlike the much more terrible “identify the picture that corresponds with the impossibly blurry character” I had to go through trying to get my qunar.com train booking account set up, or the “deconstruct the blurry chinese character into its components” which google images claims exists as well. I click on whatever wavy, struck through character they ask me to, slide a little slider all the way to the right, and finally convince the computer that I am, in fact, human (muahaha?). Here, finally I meet my true enemy - the real-name verification system. It pops up on a screen, taking me to Alipay’s verification site. 

6) Meeting my Archnemesis

Another registration? Urg. Okay. I’ve heard rumors of this. Something with passport pictures. I can do this. Thankfully here’s a 外国 button, *finally*. Once again, I put in my phone number, and get a text verification code (man, they’re obsessed with these). I pass onto another page, where I need to input all my personal information, including scans of my passport information page and my Chinese residency permit. I had both, so I put them in. I gave my Chinese address associated with my bank account, and move forward. The next page asks for my bank account. This, once again, I can do. I click the “your bank” drop-down menu, scroll down to look for ABC (Agricultural Bank of China, our illustrious bank in which all our stipends are deposited), aaaaaand………. nothing. I look again. I turn off google translate to see if maybe it translated wrong. Nope. In between the ICBCs, China Merchant Banks, China Industrial Banks, etc etc, my Agricultural Bank of China was nowhere to be found.

7) Defeat

I frantically restarted the process, and was stuck at the same place. I started looking for alternate buy buttons on Taobao, anything that would let me use the money already in my account. Nothing. Even adding the item to my online shopping cart prompted the verification procedure. Jesus. After a long time of trying, I decided I was done. Clearly, Taobao was not meant for mere mortal foreigners such as myself. From behind a thin veil of water in my eyes, I can make peace, and go back to bargaining for too small socks at the corner store. 

8) A New Hope

At this point, a friend with both the qualities of being effectively fluent in Chinese *and* not having a Chinese ID card number (therefore having faced the 老外 struggle before) jumped in to help. We went through the steps above several times, and he confirmed that I haven’t missed anything. He turned to Alipay’s customer service, who mentioned a curious point - apparently, the Agricultural Bank of China (and ABC alone) could not verify bank accounts if the names were written in non-Chinese writing systems. For some reason, this was a problem only with ABC, and represents another incident in the long line of things that make it difficult to trust my bank (a fellow Yenchinger was required to produce his (US) social security number while opening his bank account and was sent away when he refused to give it out, for example). It was impossible for me to complete the process with my current bank. 

9) The Slog Continues

So, I go to ICBC (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China - the largest bank in the world, apparently. Yay government-required support for SOEs I guess?) the next morning. What they lacked in having an ATM 2 minutes away from my dorm, they made up for in being seemingly more legitimate, having english-speaking ATMs, being able to actually process non-Chinese names, and having a generally more appealing red-ish tone in their logo than the agricultural green in ABC’s. As usual, this process took another few hours, partially because in general in Beijing the average wait to see a teller at a bank as a private customer is never under an hour, and opening a bank account requires the signing of over 12 similar-looking documents probably giving away my first-born (you know, usual banking practice). To avoid a mistake I made with ABC (something I didn’t bother elaborating on to not make this terrible Odyssey any longer in print), I specifically asked for online banking, and after several other signed documents, I received my little electronic sign-in dongle, a USB device used to authenticate (?) online banking (??) logins. 

10) The end is in sight

My heartbeat quickened. I rushed back to my dorm room and went to Taobao, triggering its authentication desires. I quickly passed through the registration pages, uploaded my passport, put in my name (which I had to try a few times, because of course “Kevin Schwarzwald” by itself doesn’t work, but “SCHWARZWALDKEVIN” does - always make sure it’s the same as what’s written on your bank account) and my bank account number, SUCCESS. Within a few days, so Alipay tells me, a small amount of money will be deposited in my account, and I just need to tell them what it is. The next day, 0.14 kuai landed in my bank account. I told Alipay. They told me to wait another 1-2 days for final verification.

I was excited.

11) Glorious, glorious victory

Finally, I received the beautiful message from Alipay that my authentication had gone through. After a crazy emotional rollercoaster that wouldn’t throw me off for over 8 hours spread over at least a week, I was now integrated into the world of Chinese online shopping. My first purchase was an air filter (by these guys —> they’re cool, apparently they’ve made one that’s just as effective as the ‘professional’ 5000kuai+ ones for just 200) that’s now derpily gracing my desk. Socks and a diplomacy board are on their way. If there is any moral to my story it's that just as you become complacent as a foreigner, China will find a way to surprise you. Also that the bureaucracy is great as long as you are exactly the target audience that it wishes to speed through, and if you are not part of that group, even the simplest of things, like signing up for online shopping, might turn into a multi-hour/day/week affair. (Also that consumerism is bad or something? Probably?).

Derpy air filter, meet desk

PS: 

As far as I can tell, everyone who has attempted this process has a different story. One friend apparently even managed to get it done with ABC, and many spent far less than 8 hours trying to set this up. Regulations and procedures seem to change on a relatively frequent basis as well, meaning that the process is basically a crap shoot anytime you try it. 

Orange Skies in the Morning, Sailor Stay in Bed with a Mask On

My first memory of Beijing was a literal bad taste. Two years ago, on a four-day trip North from Hangzhou, where I was staying for much of the summer, we stepped out of the airport terminal to head to the waiting tour bus and I made the mistake of opening my mouth. I instantly perceived a stale, metallic taste, as if the entire atmosphere had spent too much time in the shut basement of a power plant. This taste followed me around the entire trip, despite our best efforts couldn’t be washed out with water, overly spiced chuar, or even baijiu, and didn’t truly leave my mouth until we landed back in Hangzhou.

This is my sexy face.

So far, we’ve been hit with similar experiences. The AQI on a normal day in Beijing seems to hover in the low three-digits, technically in the ‘Lightly Polluted’ range (according to the Chinese ministry of health – comparisons between countries is difficult due to the different types of particulate matter included and the different calculations used). It's easy for me to tell without even looking at my phone's AQI forecast because the sunlight hitting my white bedsheets, naturally close to white as well, leaves a light orange color. But, for example during the last day of the National Day Golden Week (a week-long state holiday) when pretty much everyone that had a car was in it driving back from vacation, this index jumped up to almost 450 – “severely polluted,” essentially, stay home, board up your windows, and wait for the zombies to come. China watchers (or just people anywhere near a facebook news feed last week) might remember the ’50-lane traffic jam’ from that day. We didn’t leave without industrial-strength 3M masks on our faces, but our throats were still in pain if we made the mistake of breathing in too deeply, visibility was one (admittedly large) Beijing street block, and we developed a cough so common among foreigners in the area that it has its own Chinese name – the 北京咳 (Beijing Ke).

 

Pollution in an outer Beijing suburb

Of course, we all hear legends of the air pollution in China, we’ve seen pictures of 100-yard visibility and masses of people wearing surgical masks, but it’s quite different to actually feel the pollution in person. You may have noticed, if you’ve been following my facebook, that most of my pictures of the trip so far have featured blue skies, infinite visibility, beautiful landscapes, basically the kind of weather that would come from a nice late fall trip to Southern California. Well, readers, do you remember how (if you went to college in places with real winters) on the first non-winter day of the new year, when suddenly the main quads were filled with students basking in the first rays of happiness in months? And how suddenly the entire admissions department’s photo team came crawling out of the woodworks to create that year’s admissions booklets? Well, my pictures so far have about as much to do with the full Beijing experience as your college admissions booklets do with your winter quarter.

Everyone has an air quality
app on their phones....

See, Beijing is the center of a vast plain containing some of the most polluted cities on the planet. Sure, part of the reason that a blanket the color of chaogan often floats over the North China Plain is geographical. When 3000 years ago the city-state of Ji first built a walled settlement in present-day Beijing, those mountains surrounding the city on two sides and decent access to the sea probably seemed like great strategic assets. Well, one industrial revolution later, the prevailing Easterly winds from the ocean work together with the Jundu Mountains and the Xishan Hills to effectively trap much of the locally produced smog in place.

But the real core of the problem stems from the rapid industrialization that China has undergone over the past few decades. Though the primary cause of air pollution in Beijing proper is vehicle exhaust, it is also severely affected by the industrial output of surrounding Hebei province, home of over a quarter of China’s steel output, almost a third of China’s coal-burning, among other fun polluting things. It doesn’t help that Beijing has been pushing its own factories and industrial plants to the province to better the air quality in the capital.

The results are staggering – over a million people are estimated to die prematurely every year in China due to air pollution (for context, that number is roughly 1/7^th of the total death rate). And there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance for any near-term reprieve from the deadly smog. Though China is legally very progressive with regards to environmental legislation, little of the in theory legally binding pollution standards are ever respected. Corruption is rampant (as long as it’s cheaper to buy the inspector than to buy an air filter, this problem will never get solved) and often the central government’s authority is diluted through the massive layers of bureaucracy between the Politburo and local officials. In addition, China is far from being a modern, post-industrial society. It’s GDP per capita is still at most 1/4^th the level of that in Western Europe and the United States, and this type of pollution-heavy, industrial-heavy growth is still the only way homo sapiens has developed to achieve that higher number. It’s hard to convince the small industrial worker in Qinhai Province to care about environmental protection that might slow down economic growth when he’s still living in abject poverty. And, now that the world economic crisis is over, energy-heavy and pollution-heavy industries that China does better than the rest of the world (such as steel) will be roaring strong again.

There is some hope, however (well, at least for Chinese citizens). Smog has gotten better in Beijing, at least, over the past few years, and decreasing dangerous pollution to acceptable levels during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will require more than just short-term shutting off of industry to achieve (winter is traditionally the worst in terms of pollution, both due to temperature inversions due to the surrounding mountains and the peaks in energy demand due to heating requirements). The government does care - the optimistic will say because it doesn't want its people to die, and the cynical can note that the Chinese leaders stuck in Beijing's Zhongnanhai government complex have to send their kids to school in the same deadly smog as the rest of the country (pod-playgrounds notwithstanding). But the long-term “solution” will be the same that dumped all of the pollution on China in the first place. Europe’s industrial revolution culminated with such things as the “Great London Smog” of 1952, which killed 12,000 over a period of only 4 days before industrial capacity was outsourced towards developing countries, most notably China. And China seems ready to repeat this phenomena – labor costs are already too high to support industrial labor in such former industrial hot zones as Shenzhen, and factories in Hebei are already starting to move to the next frontier of development in Africa and South-East Asia. And so the great circle of industrial life continues.

If there’s one, small benefit to this brown mess, it’s that when the wind shifts from West to East and the cold gusts from Mongolia push out the smog over the ocean the city becomes truly magnificent. After a week of construction masks, there are few more uplifting things in the world than walking outside, taking a deep breath, and seeing the impeccably blue sky above you while being lifted up by a strong Northerly breeze. And that weather motivates you like few things in the world to go out and do something. This is the explanation behind my facebook album – the second the weather turns beautiful, plans are made almost by themselves, and we rush towards the parks, the mountains, the natural and man-made beauty which Beijing seems to have in incredible excess… as long as you can see it through the haze.