Looking back

So, our dinner was really good. We went to a really really good dumpling house. They had pork shanghai style dumplings, in which you put soup as well as meat, and those were amazing. They also had red bean paste dumplings and buns, which were remarkably good. These were desserts, as red bean paste is sweet and has a very rich flavor; Val compared it to chocolate. I think this is a very good comparison actually- the really good red bean paste has the same richness of flavor that really good chocolate has. It was definitely one of the best dinners of the trip, though there have been lots of those. I'm going to miss the food here so much.

We said our goodbyes to the sushi place on campus at lunch today. I think since Shanghai there have been two or maybe three days max during which I haven't gotten one of my meals at that place. We had the same waitress nearly every time, and by the end she knew exactly what we were going to order ("dragon rolls", which were a kind of chicken roll, spicy tuna rolls, and unagi rolls, which are squid, or perhaps octopus- some kind of cephalopod).

Yesterday for lunch we had gone to a really good Japanese buffet with Vivian, the linguistics phd student who helped us on our trip and who also taught survivor chinese to val, liz, one of the sarahs, i, and jim. she is very nice, and the buffet was very very good.

Anyway, enough of food.

I've been doing some thinking of what I've learned from this China trip. First, some thoughts on what I've learned from the Imperialism class:

Earlier I described an idea that Imperialism could be viewed as a system more effective at manipulating the world displacing one less effective than it. I still think there is merit in this.
One refinement I have made, however, is the understanding that imperialism is a location specific process (not that I didn't think this before, but I have considered more of its importance lately). The Qing dynasty in China, for all its power and wealth, found itself unable to stop the British and other Western powers, not only because of their guns, but largely because the Western powers were far away and many parts of the processes of Western incursion took place far away from the places the Qing could effectively manipulate. The Western powers, on the other hand, developed methods that were very effective in supporting their systems far from their home bases.

Another question is, why did the Europeans devote so much time and energy to developing these systems while the Qing, who in many ways had huge head starts on the Europeans in the times when modern Europe was formulating, never did so? This arose in part because the Europeans had to develop such methods; they had been repeatedly kicked around in the middle ages and many times driven to being wiped out or swallowed by more powerful civilizations. During the times right before European imperialism began, the Europeans were desparate to find new ways to aquire the spices and other goods from India upon which they had become dependent. The Muslim control of the Mediterranean made it expensive, difficult, or impossible for the Europeans to go through the Mediterranean for the spice trade, depending on the politics of the day.

China, on the other hand, had managed to establish a nearly self-sufficient kingdom. This was not entirely true: China also imported significantly from India and the Middle East, but their trade was never seriously threatened. In this case as well, perception of the situation is as important or perhaps more important than the actual reality: As the Europeans saw it, they had to find a way to expand trade and their ability to spread their trade system to the East or they'd be cut off from their supplies. In the Chinese mind, they had all they needed or at the very least had relatively easy and unthreatened access to it. The Chinese view of their kingdom as the center of civilization, and other civilizations as periphery, reinforced their tendency to regard the rest of the world as not particularly worth the effort of trying to get to anyway.

From what I have seen in China, China has largely adapted many of the Western systems that allowed the West to imperialize them a century ago, in technology, certain social patterns, etc. Not that all these things are Western in origin; indeed, I think the actual origin of something is relatively unimportant compared to who uses it to the most effect (paper money was invented by the Chinese, but it didn't really catch on there much to popular extent- it was brought to a much greater level of use by other groups of people and reintroduced in China, so to speak, by the imperialists. Even then, it wasn't enacted with that much succuess til the CCP takeover in 1949).

Eh anyway, I'm bored of that, which means you are probably even more bored. OK last topic for now:

China has a lot of people. A LOT of people. This, really, it the source of most of their problems. America and China are roughly the same in land area (as well as geographical areas in comparable climate zones really- though China has only one coast). America has (officially) around 280 million people right now (probably closer to 310 or so), whereas China has 1.3 billion. That is a lot of people. This is causing lots of problems for the CCP and PRC government.

Corruption: OK, so perhaps the Confucian emphasis on personal connections and the tradition of regionalism reinforced by the Warlord Period of the 1920s and 1930s play roles in this as well, but the problem of corruption (which some estimate drains 2% of China's GDP each year) largely stems from the fact that China simply has too many people for the central government to effectively govern, or at the very least, not without a lot of difficulty. Purely the information that needs to be organized and the number of people you need to coordinate to try to get any policy enforced are staggering.

The Environment: China is facing an environmental crisis on all fronts. Pollution, stemming from industrial plants and power production (China is very dependent on coal, which is very dirty), is a big problem in both airborne and water related forms. Beijing and Shanghai air quality are both very poor (the CCP is trying to do something about Beijings before the Olympics, but it is a hard issue to tackle). Water quality in many big cities is suspect. In Beijing and Shanghai, it is not advisable to drink the water- even for locals. All the restaurants in Beijing serve only boiled or bottled water. China is quickly entering an oil based economy, which will bring further environmental damage.

But the two environmental issues I thought are particularly telling are those related to food and water. In water, China has been using up its lakes. In food, China is overtaxing its farmland so much that much of it is being lost to desertification. These are particularly alarming issues, because they reflect a difficult situation in which the biological systems that support the population are being stretched beyond a sustainable limit. Pollution can be mitigated at least in part with cleaner technologies, but if you are trying to get more energy in the form of food from your environment than the natural processes can support, there is little you can do.

Anyway, these are complex issues so I won't spend too much more time on them. I will say, however, that my time here has changed my perspective on many things. The problems China is facing are of a different scope than any American analog. This has changed my view on some of China's policies: for example, the One Child policy, often seen or at least depicted in America as being authoritarian or cruel or such, I now view as a virtual necessity. Perhaps, of course, it could be better implemented, but the cold reality is that if China does not get its population to controllable levels, it faces ecological and societal collapse.

The other thing I have realized in both my stay here and the classes I took, is that the problems that China faces are not theirs alone, in either the causes or the solutions. Many of the factories that are polluting China's air and water are those of companies based in the US, Japan, and Europe that are taking advantage of China's cheap labor and relaxed regulations. We cannot afford to pretend that we only need to worry about what goes on on our own soil when those systems intimately connected to our nation are doing such things in other countries. This matter goes well above and beyond even humanistic concerns: pollution and environmental problems don't observe any national boundaries, and what effects one area of the world ecologically will soon effect all of them.

OK well, you get the point. It is late and I'm going to try to stay up a bit longer so I can sleep on the plane, but I'm done writing for now.