Here are three related articles pointing out that if you want to understand “China’s” recent actions, you’ll need to try and look at the concepts of humiliation and disgrace from a Chinese perspective:
| Chengguan (城管) | China: life & times | Face | Migrant workers | People | Photo posts | Places | Tianjin | Watching the street vendors and the chéngguǎn do their little dance at the street market near our apartment provides an interesting anecdote for two crucial Chinese cultural concepts: 人情 and 面子。
There’s a colourful, bustling, crowded and filthy street market near our neighbourhood (see here for more photos), and I suspect its days are numbered.
Every time I go recently in the late afternoon there are chéngguǎn (城管：”city management” by-law enforcers) cooperatively hassling the illegal vendors who choke the roads leading to the Jade Spring Road Vegetable Market (玉泉路菜市场). By “cooperatively” I mean it’s a big game. The chéngguǎn deliberately and obviously drag their feet. Their van inches around the corner at the far end of one street, giving the vendors plenty of time to yell, bundle up their stuff, and, sometimes laughing, sometimes running, make a show of clearing off. Or they cover up their produce and act like they’re just hanging out… next to closed boxes full of tomatoes. The chéngguǎn take their sweet time pulling around, parking, and getting out. Then they saunter up the street, and as soon as they’ve passed by the vendors roll their sacks back out on the pavement and re-stack their cabbages, fish, rabbits, fruit, or whatever. The day I took the following photo, three of the chéngguǎn were sitting on the side of the road having tea with a couple vendors who had boxed up their stuff and had it stowed away right there beside them. I would have taken their photo, but we had our daughter with us and they were smiling and making faces at her. In the picture below, a chéngguǎn (on the left) ignores a vendor who has obediently folded up her produce in blankets in a pile beside her. She’s just waiting for them to leave so she can uncover her vegetables and start selling again.
I have seen a chéngguǎn in this market get a little mean (it was the guy in the picture above, about 30 seconds before I took the picture), and it was when a cucumber seller decided to ignore him and not make a show of clearing off as he approached. That seemed to make this particular chéngguǎn a little angry and he lunged for the guy’s wooden vegetable box, which was quickly yanked out of reach by a rope and dragged off down a side street. No attempt to pursue, even though he would have easily had it in about two or three steps.
I described all this to one of my Chinese coworkers, and he explained it with two terms: 人情 and 面子。 “Human feelings” 人情 is how he explained why the chéngguǎn carry out their orders to the absolute bare minimum ‘letter of the law’ degree, and how they can sit down and chat over tea with the same people they’re supposed to be hassling. They recognize a lot of these people, he said, and don’t want to stop them from trying to make a living; they personally couldn’t care less whether there’s a street market here or not. It’s nothing personal. But they have their orders, and the point of orders in China is to do just enough so that you can tell your superiors that you did them. The actual purpose of the order, the ‘spirit of the law’, is entirely beside the point, especially when your superiors are only giving you the order because their superiors gave it to them and they want to make their superiors happy because they’re working on a promotion.
The other key term he used was “face” 面子。 Why do they bother with the silly charade of bundling up their cabbages in full view of the chéngguǎn (who’s walking toward them maybe only a few meters away), and scooting off down an alley only to come back a few minutes later? It gives face to the chéngguǎn. It’s an acknowledgment of who’s in charge. Chéngguǎn can give these kinds of people all kinds of trouble if they want to; sometimes they can be brutal (see here, here, here and here). Sometimes the vendors fight back. The vendors are almost all illegal migrants near the bottom of society and without legal protection. They’ll yell and run and make a sincere effort to clear off as quickly as possible when they sense that they need to; they aren’t always laughing and you do sense fear sometimes, depending on the circumstances. But at least for now, in our particular street market, all the chéngguǎn require is a little “face”, a show of deference, a lack of defiance, tails between legs, and they’re satisfied.
These streets are easily the most lively (热闹) in our area, but with the consistency of the harassment, half-hearted as it appears, I bet it’s only a matter of time before this one goes they same way as the street markets near our old place.
There are more street market photos in the Our Tianjin 2010 photo gallery, which I just now finally finished uploading. So if you’ve seen it before there’s some new stuff (like sheep brains and an explosive dog). You can also see video of what it’s like to try and ride a bike through this market here: Tianjin Street Market Dash video.
Related stuff from the blog:
Related stuff from the web:
Here’s a short, funny post about a foreigner bargaining her way into a Port-a-Potty on the Great Wall near Beijing: Port-a-Potties at the Wall.
“Someone asked me, ‘Xinran, what is your dream?’ I didn’t even have to think about the answer. I said, ‘To be a daughter.’”
There are some things I wish I didn’t have to know about China, and this book, with it’s brutal tales of the treatment of baby girls and their mothers, is about some of them: Casualties of China’s One Child Policy. Seriously, don’t read this review unless you’ve braced yourself first.
A guy goes with his wife’s family to 扫墓, or perform Tomb Sweeping Festival rituals at the family tomb. Lots of pictures, interesting information, and first-hand descriptions of the experience: 清明节 (Qingming Festival), paying respect to the ancestors.
(More about Tomb Sweeping Festival here.)
Here are some photos from around our neighbourhood during the Tomb Sweeping Festival 清明节 from the end of March to the beginning of April 2011 (blogged here). For more about the Tomb Sweeping Festival see:
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Here are some photos from around our neighbourhood in the days before Tomb Sweeping Festival 清明节 (April 5). Tomb Sweeping Festival is when Chinese traditionally honour their ancestors by tidying their graves and making offerings to them, mostly by burning spirit money (纸钱) and other paper offerings. See more photos in the Tomb Sweeping Festival 2011 photo gallery.
A family tradition. A family burns spirit money on the sidewalk outside our apartment complex:
Spirit money for sale on the corner nearest our apartment complex:
Spirit money (纸钱) is usually called “ghost money” or literally translated as “paper money”. This man is also in the following photo.
Piles of spirit money ash. Intersections are prime locations for sending burnt offerings to your ancestors:
Local media pooh-poohs on the practice of burning piles paper in public spaces and then leaving the ash to blow around. This neighbourhood notice board says:
“Civilizedly offer sacrifices and tidy the ancestral tombs,
safe and sound Tomb Sweeping Festival”
文明祭扫 平安清明
See more 2011 Tomb Sweeping Festival photos here.
More about Tomb Sweeping Festival:
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
- 2012/03/22
Eating Bitterness: an intro to the unprecedented Chinese migrant worker phenomenon
If you're unfamiliar with the urban migrant phenomenon in China -- as in, the people who make the stuff you buy and their lives -- then China’s Urban Immigrants: A Diet of Bitterness is a fine overview with lots of links for further reading.
"Chinese metropolises are now home to an estimated 200 million rural-to-urban migrants . . . who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities."
For more on this topic you can browse our Migrant Workers category, or if you like documentaries, see these reviews of two good documentaries on migrant workers:
- 2012/05/10
Chairman Mao enshrined -- literally
When one of my young, very privileged Party-family students passionately told me, "Chairman Mao is like a god to us!" I understood he meant it as a simile. And the god metaphor is common when discussing Mao and his Cultural Revolution personality cult. But as it turns out, in some incredible irony, some other Chinese mean it literally. I heard about this before, but this is the first time I've found pictures -- Mao actually enshrined in a local temple: Mao Temple in China – Chairman Mao Becomes Local God.
For more about Mao and the Mao Era, you can browse these topics:
- 2012/05/08
A deeper look into the dynamics of living with Chinese propaganda
Two insightful posts from Seeing Red in China, which is probably my current favourite China blog, about living in an aggressively and explicitly propagandized environment, and how Chinese try to deal with it. The propaganda still works, but in ways different than us foreigners probably tend to assume. Without further ado:
I tell [my daughter] that she must not be afraid to take a clear moral stand. “If you see someone is being bullied,” I said, “speak up for that person.” “Be the keeper of the good.” [But] Chinese parents would have to think twice, three times, or even lose sleep, if they are to instill these values in their children, because these qualities won’t serve them very well in the Chinese society.
We've written lots on propaganda, mostly the Chinese kind, including translations of the propaganda we've encounter in China. You can find it all in our Propaganda category.
- 2012/05/06
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