Listening to China

Books and Culture has published my review of God is Red, a book about Chinese Christians written by an engaging, unbelieving dissident who has repeatedly got himself in trouble with the Chinese government. It’s quite a fascinating book with some dramatic and moving testimonies, and a tendency to subvert standard narratives of the Chinese church. Here’s my review: 
http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2012/marapr/listeningchinese.html
. If you’re not familiar with Books and Culture you might want to peruse it, too–it’s an excellent, intellectual journal.

Emperors and Immortality

As a tourist in China, I found the theme of empire inescapable. In Beijing the must-sees are the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. Both are extraordinary, in very different ways, forming a symbiotic pair. The Great Wall crawls along ridgelines for thousands of miles as a bristling defense of what’s inside—The Forbidden City. Those ancient palace grounds are ornate, many-chambered, beautiful and obsessive. Every detail screams out: you are not I!

The Forbidden City is a huge—about 180 acres, I read—monument to the unique life of the emperor, with his tens of thousands of servants and thousands of concubines. All a modern person can see is extravagance and absurdity. What did an ancient person see?

Xi’an amplfies the same views. Xi’an was the capital of the world in A.D. 700, home to two million citizens and immense wealth, the eastern terminus to the Silk Road.  Today it is known as home to the terra cotta warriors, part of a huge tomb complex built to usher an emperor into eternal life. The terra cotta warriors are life-size clay statues, each one carefully crafted with unique faces. An army of 6,000 has been dug up. If elegance marks the Forbidden City, and brute force is the message of the Great Wall, these are somewhere in between. The effort to build such a tomb complex is unbelievable. And all for one man!

If Mao and the Cultural Revolution wanted to trash this fabulous past, it’s obvious that modern China has embraced it. There is natural and justifiable pride in the strength and capacity of China’s past, with the obvious suggestion that China’s present is in the same league.

But what differences. No doubt Hu Jintao has a nice house, and his death will be solemnly marked (if he is still in political favor). But 3,000 concubines? The age of emperors appears to be gone forever, along with the divine right of kings. Who says that nothing changes?

These emperors all apparently shared the wish for immortality, and tried to ensure it through their elaborate tombs and burial rituals. They have achieved a different sort of immortal fame through the millions of visitors who ogle the monuments they built to themselves. It was not what they had in mind.

Chinese Miscellany

Driving. Having read Peter Hessler (Country Driving) on the massive influx of new drivers in China, I was prepared for mayhem. It really wasn’t so bad. Of course, you must bear in mind that I’ve seen driving in India, Kenya, and (my personal worst) Sri Lanka. It wasn’t so bad compared to these.

You do see a lot of left-hand turns into four lanes of oncoming traffic. You do see pedestrians, bicycles, and scooters all mixing into city traffic as equals with cars and buses. You do see occasional bizarre decisions, like backing up on the freeway to reclaim a missed exit. However, the pace is pretty sedate and reasonably polite, from what I witnessed. Ubiquitous cameras ticket freeway speeders, which seems to hold them in check. And the freeways (all new) are really good!

Public spaces. My biggest surprise was seeing really attractive new parks and plazas, laid out with statues and fountains and lights and greenery. In Xi’an a new plaza stretches a good quarter mile long from the Big Goose Pagoda, an ancient Buddhist monument. This vast and impressive public space has many massive bronze statues memorializing the Tang  Dynesty (618-907) as well as a new art museum and a new concert hall. It doesn’t come off as a monument to the greatness of the current Chinese government. It comes off as a really pleasant place to walk and socialize. One way to pacify restless populations is to give them nice spaces to live in! Compare this with India, a country with comparable riches, that has not invested in a public space since the British left in 1947. It occurred to me that all politics aside, I would prefer to live where the government invests in infrastructure than in places where they don’t.

Chinese tourism. The summer may be different, but the vast majority of tourists we saw were Chinese. Many seemed to be groups from the countryside, seeing historical monuments. (Many of them gawked at us. They hadn’t seen many non-Chinese before. Very often someone would ask Chase, my 6’5” son, if they  could take their picture with him.)

Some sites were completely Chinese. The Birds Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing was so non-western in orientation that the hawkers completely ignored us: they were targeting Chinese. At Mount Hwa, a massive granite mountain with Yosemite-style cliffs, we saw only a handful of westerners out of tens of thousands of tourists. (And entrance was not cheap.) Mount Hwa, we were told, sees 1.7 million tourists a year. The mountain is known as “the most precipitous mountain under heaven,” and its reputation is as “The Most Dangerous Hiking Trail in the World.” I won’t argue; it was a little scary because of the crowds on very narrow trails with long drops close at hand.

Banquets. You may know that the Chinese entertain in restaurants. We ate lavish banquets every day we were in Xi’an, hosted by our very generous family members. Boy, did we eat. The courses just kept coming. And they didn’t repeat themselves. I guess we had 150 different dishes in a week, with only a handful that we saw twice.

One Child. Most people are aware of China’s one-child policy, which demands that families resist the temptation to have a second child. The impact of this was vividly observable in our new extended family. At the various banquets and family gatherings, there were about 15 adults whom we saw multiple times—a good-sized extended family. There was just  one child, a six-year-old. We learned of another small child who could not attend. That was it!

What children we saw, in the family, at church, and on the street, acted like American children—rambunctious, easily bored, full of animal spirits and not easily tamed. With four grandparents and two parents to spoil them, all alone, it’s no wonder.

Going to Church in China

One of the most moving times in our ten-day visit to China was a Sunday morning Catholic mass in the city of Xi’an.

From what we saw, China remains a pretty secular place. Few churches are visible, and religion seems to play little role in everyday life. Historical sites and museums say little about religion, other than Buddhism, which seems to get a semi-official okay.

The Catholic church we attended is an old, elegant building, designed with a mixture of Chinese and western influences. Arches and columns inside are painted mainly with scenes of nature; and I didn’t see any stained glass. There was a large crucifix, and at least two paintings of Jesus. (I didn’t see Mary.) I would estimate that the building held somewhere between 500 and 1,000 people, and it was packed. The congregation was a mixture of young and old, and the presiding priests were very young—in their thirties, I guess.

The service moved me to tears, because it was so obviously heartfelt. Over nearly two hours, hymns and liturgical responses were sung and spoken emphatically by the entire congregation. There was little accompaniment—just an electric organ—but people obviously knew their hymns well and sang with serious enthusiasm. The preacher took the gospel text where Jesus says to “give to Cesar what belongs to Cesar, and to God what belongs to God.” Mostly he emphasized giving to God what belongs to him. “Who do you belong to?” he asked the congregation. “Jesus Christ,” they answered. “Who do your children belong to?” “Jesus Christ.” “Who does your work belong to?” “Jesus Christ.”

He also said, rather boldly, that we should give respect to government but that if the government told you to do something against God, you should not do it.

He was obviously a good communicator, and the audience attended closely. He preached for 25 minutes, and after that the other priest took up the theme or gratefulness, and spoke for about ten more minutes.

We attended that church because one of Helen’s aunts is a member. She is a tiny, bird-like woman with a young son, and she let us know how thrilled she was to meet us. “I thought I was the only Christian in the family,” she said.

Worshiping with that throng, humming along to their unfamiliar tunes, I was overwhelmed by the thought of what believers have been through. I was reading God is Red, Liao Yiwu’s book of interviews with Chinese Christians. Most of them described terrible times under Mao tse Tung, when they were threatened, beaten and imprisoned. Yiwu (who says he is not a believer) interviewed those who had stuck it out, but most of them mentioned that at the time of the Communist takeover, most Christians abandoned their faith. Those who didn’t were targeted by public condemnation meetings, in which their entire village or neighborhood would participate in a gang harassment—spitting, shouting, abusing, beating Christians, and sometimes killing them. Undoubtedly, some of the people I worshiped with in Xi’an had experienced that, either as targets or as part of the mob.

And yet, here was a church full of people who were most obviously inspired to worship God.

Back from China

I’m just back from China, where I had a wonderful ten days. My wife Popie and I went with our son Chase and his wife Helen to meet her extended family in Xi’an. What an experience. Not only did we get guided through some of China’s astonishing sights by the world’s greatest personal tour guides (our family members), but we got welcomed into a wonderful, warm family. We got to see life in China through their eyes. For the next week or so I’ll be posting various reflections, but since I’m jet lagged, and since a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, here are a couple photos to give you a taste. Click on them to see full size.

One shows Popie and me with Xiaolin and Lan, Chase’s in-laws, riding bikes on the city wall of Xi’an. The wall is the largest and best-preserved in China. It was begun in 1370 and is about 14 km in length. Going at a pokey rate, we took about an hour to ride around–twenty feet and considerable solitude above the busy city. Very cool.

The other picture is of an elderly man writing ancient characters on an expanse of concrete in one of Beijing’s city parks. He’s using a brush dipped in water. A metaphor for scribblers everywhere!

The Vitality of India

This week’s Economist Magazine features a rough economic comparison between India and China, suggesting that India may be a better bet long term. That’s largely for two reasons: India has a young population, whereas China’s is beginning to turn old. And India is a democracy, able to adapt to changing conditions in a way that is difficult for a dictatorship.

Of all the places in the world I’ve visited, there is no place like India for standing on a street corner and staring. It’s an extraordinarily complex place, and a lot of the complexity is on display in any traffic jam. How can people live cheek by jowl for a thousand years and yet remain so utterly unmixed?

I’m currently planning a trip to India and reading Nine Lives, by one of my favorite writers, William Dalrymple. In it he chronicles individuals who embody the rich, religious, historic sensibilities of India, in a setting that is very rapidly modernizing.

I’ve read about a Jain nun who gently sweeps the path in front of her in order to avoid stepping on any living thing, and who is so dedicated to the via negativa that she takes the decision to starve to death—a common Jain practice.

Quite different are the dancers/performers of the gods, usually lowly Dalit workmen who for a few months of the year are worshiped. They wear extraordinary costumes and speak frankly of being taken over by the gods while they perform in all-night, outdoor festivals.

Then there are the devadasi, women who by an ancient tradition are dedicated to the gods at an early age so that they can become prostitutes. Driven from Hindu temples by 19th century reformers, they still carry on. There’s genuine religious sentiment and ritual, and more than a little pride among the devadasi at their superiority to ordinary women of the night.

Again, troubadors still make their living by performing epic poetry of the gods—reciting from memory (they are often illiterate) thousands and thousands of lines of poetry that may take several all-night sessions to declaim. Bollywood is cutting into their trade but they carry on, like medieval bards reciting Beowulf.

What’s clear is that some very ancient, very strange traditions survive side by side with skyscrapers and heart surgery and call centers. As horrible as some of these traditions seem to me, I can’t help admiring the remarkable survival of difference. Over the past decade we’ve all been told that China is the world’s future, but the future is very difficult to predict. (Ask Japan.) Is it possible that India, with its chaos and unpredictability, has the vitality and flexibility, indeed the creativity, to deal with the future?

America’s Future

I thought this column by Thomas Friedman was admirably simple, and helpful in thinking about America’s future. (here) He points out that while many people see China ascendant and the US on the downhill side, China has its own problems–an authoritarian government that censors the Internet and jails its dissidents. (He didn’t mention China’s demographic future, but that’s a big worry too.) Meanwhile, America still is a wide open society that loves imagination and entrepreneurship. He thinks that’s the best quality to bring to the economy of the 21st century.

His worry, which I share, is that we may be losing our ability to govern ourselves well–by which he means, the ability to find workable solutions to basic problems like health care and global warming. Politically, we seem to be stuck. That’s why the promise of Barack Obama was so exciting, and his failure would be so depressing. Because if he can’t move things forward under current conditions, who can? Really, who? And if we as a country can’t find answers to basic issues, what’s our future?