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:

• Poisoned By Propaganda
• An Angry Father

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.

The International Institute of Social History has a collection of Chinese propaganda posters with translations and explanations in three categories:
1. Early years (1949-1965);
2. Cultural Revolution (1966-1976);
3. Modernization (1977-1997).

“Elect Good People to Do Good Things”

I’m riding in a 4×4 with Sweetbert, my Tanzanian language tutor out in the sticks of rural Tanzania — no electricity, TV, internet, nothing, except the odd battery-powered handheld radio. Local entertainment, from what I can see, mostly involves the occasional regional drumming-and-dance competition and getting drunk on village brew banana beer. We get to talking about women, and when I mention that North American men like skinny women, he busts a gut laughing, literally can’t stop. “A beautiful woman must be FAT!” he exclaims between uncontrollable giggles, incredulous, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, as if finding thin women attractive was the most counter-intuitive thing he’s ever heard and can barely even imagine. A few years later he gets married and sends a photo of him and his ‘fat’ wife, of whom he is very proud.

Meanwhile, Western beauty ideals have metastasized throughout every media-saturated corner of the planet. We’re all well accustomed to a large daily dose of visual B.S., but that doesn’t mean it smells good, or that it’s healthy. Criticism is piling up in the West, from “Health Warning” label legislation to movie-style rating systems for manipulated photos. According to the speaker quoted below, our malignant Western beauty ideals are also compounding body issues in the already patriarchal beauty cultures of China and the rest of the world.

It’s no secret that Western beauty ideals rule in first- and second-tier Chinese cities. Of course, traditional and modern Chinese culture has plenty of its own ideas about which faces and bodies and postures, etc. are attractive. But walk through any mall and count the number of ads that use Caucasian models. The highest beauty ideals in China are Western. And the highest beauty ideals in the West require surgically and digitally altering the bodies of underfed, underweight, unhealthy women.

I’m thinking about this because of a recent speech at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, which opened fire not at oppressive patriarchal traditions of 2nd and 3rd World cultures, but at us, calling out our societies for our hypocrisy in criticizing foot binding and female genital mutilation, and for the cancerous effect on women that aggressive Western corporate marketing has in societies around the world, specifically including China. I’ve excerpted much of it below, but the whole thing (not long) is worth a read. Regardless of how much you disagree, it’s a fantastic conversation starter. Emphasis from the original.

Susie Orbach Speaks at the UN Commission on the Status of Women

. . .what has been overlooked have been the vicious body practices that girls and women have come to take on themselves in the west in the mistaken belief that they are doing good for themselves. . .

The west congratulates itself on its distance from Eastern practices of foot binding which constrained and limited women. It fails to see the links between toe operations carried out now to enable women to fit into the latest 4 inch high heels.

The west smugly criticises FGM while sanctioning labiaplasty and the remaking of the genital lips which has become a growth area for cosmetic surgeons.

The west makes appeals about famine victims in the southern hemisphere but has failed to notice the voluntarily insane food practices that exist in their own countries.

The west hasn’t noticed that these are forms of violence and constraint for women. . .

. . .the engine which feeds the tyrannical hold that beauty exercises on girls and women’s energies, dollars and sense of self. . .relates to those industries which grow rich on creating body distress and body hatred in girls and women. . .

The beauty companies, the fashion houses, the diet companies, the food conglomerates who also of course own the diet companies, the exercise and fitness industry, the pharmaceutical industry and the cosmetic surgery industry combine together, perhaps not purposefully or conspiratorially, to create a climate in which girls and women come to feel that their bodies are not ok. They do this through the promotion of celebrity culture, through advertising on every possible outlet from billboards to magazines to our electronic screens, through the funding of media outlets which can only exist because of their economic support. . .

As immoral and unethical as the activities of these companies are in and of themselves, the economics of growth as we currently conceive it depends upon their extending their markets. L’Oreal’s growth rate in China is 26%. They achieve this not by marketing their lipsticks and hair products to Chinese women per se but by marketing the western body as the body to have to Chinese women. They and the other beauty, fashion, media companies promote the western body to the new economies as a way of finding a place to belong in the maelstrom and confusion of modernity.

Alongside the disseminating of western ideals of beauty to Asia, Africa and South America, is the export of the consequences of these ideals: body hatred and body anxiety. This is the emotional fallout from the endeavours of these industries and the basis on which they make their extraordinary and obscene profits.

. . .They are mining bodies as though they were a commodity like coal or gold. Women’s bodies all over the world are being designated as profit centres.

As the western ideal becomes plastered over the globe we bear witness to the loss of indigenous bodies. This is a new frontier of colonialism. Mad eating is normalised. Western style bodies are revered and local bodies are swallowed up as fast as demise of local languages. [Link]

I wonder what my Tanzanian language tutor would think. Then again, they were selling skin-whitening creams in East Africa, too.

Related China & Beauty stuff from the blog:

• Beauty & Young Love… with Chinese characteristics
• White is beautiful… (by Jessica!)
• Beauty is all in the eye…lid? (by Jessica!)
• 瓜子脸 (“melon seed face”)
• 小鸟依人 (“birdie leaning on a man”)
• Woman, man, or East Asian pop star?
• The Men and the Boys
• On love and being “smart enough” (by Jessica!)
• “Beauty”
• Beauty (topic)

Related stuff from the web:

• A Photoshop reality check
• A Perceptual Metric for Photo Retouching
• Does the media require a Photoshop score?
• Legislating Beauty
• Has the Sexual Revolution Been Good for Women? No (WSJ)
• The Paris Paradox: how sexualization replaces opportunity with obligation
• Any-Body.org – …”challeng[ing] the limited physical representation of females in contemporary society.”
• CollectiveShout.org – “a grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture.”
• MelindaTankardReist.com – “…is well known for her work on the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls and working to address violence against women”
• PS Disaster’s Greatest Hits
• The criticism that Ralph Lauren doesn’t want you to see (BoingBoing)
• Vandalism is a crime, but… (creative, but illegal)
• U of Chicago research: conservative Christian women have the best sex. [Research, Slate article].
• “Fotoshop by Adobé“:

Tom at Seeing Red in China makes the case that The People’s Daily is worth reading — and much more interesting and important than you think.

Tom at Seeing Red in China has a very handy summary of the recent Two Meetings. Things are quite interesting this year: Three messages the Party hope you heard at the Two Meetings and the surprise they hope you’ll forget

And as a bonus, here’s an analysis of Chinese online verbiage during the Two Meetings.

According to one of my one-on-one students who loves to monologue about Chinese politics, members of a certain ethnic and religious minority in China keep setting themselves on fire (see here here here here here here here here here here here and here) because they are greedy, ungrateful, and just trying to squeeze more money and privilege out of the benevolent government, which is already giving them a better deal than they deserve, and oh for the life of ethnic and religious minorities in China, they have it so good. (I generally avoid politics with my Chinese students and don’t bring it up, except for one time.)

Of course I’ve heard and read that opinion before; it’s part of the prescribed script in Mainland China. But when I heard it passionately delivered again this week by a 17-year-old ESL student from Shenzhen, some previously unconnected China anecdotes came to mind, reminding me that in China, people do empathy differently.

A policeman stops an ambulance with patient en-route to the hospital so a government official can come down the road unimpeded by traffic. [Link]

I’m wondering if — and if I were still in school this might make an interesting research project — collectivist cultures paradoxically tend to result in a lesser degree of personal empathy or ability to empathize, or in an alternate distribution of empathetic emotional energies (relatively more to in-group and less to strangers), or something. I’m not the first to wonder that, of course. Visitors to China who stay long enough often get conflicting impressions: locals can seem both incredibly attentive (to friends, family and connections) and shockingly callous (to strangers), depending on the situation. A quick google search turned up this article, which:

focuses on the propensity of Chinese young adults (age 30 and younger) to help strangers, investigating how the shift from collectivist values to individualism and universal morality may make young Chinese more likely than older Chinese to help strangers.

Obviously in China, as in any country, there would be multiple contributing factors to this kind of thing.

Anyway, let’s get on with the irresponsible use of cultural anecdotes. :)

If I wasn’t already familiar with China, I’m sure my jaw would have hit the floor when my student went off about the greedy T!bet@n self-immolators. Petty, selfish monks and greedy farmers, lighting themselves on fire like that! After asking him a few questions, it became clear that my student had never thought (and didn’t think it relevant at all) to find out from the people themselves why they were doing it — that was apparently unnecessary to understanding the situation. I don’t expect him to agree with the monks’ complaints or approve of their actions, but I was appalled at his apparent total lack of empathy. And that reminded me of many other startling lack-of-empathy anecdotes — not all of which are so serious:

• The Factory Girls author describes staying in one of her subject’s crowded village homes. The parents wake up extra early one morning for some reason and precede to talk at full-volume as if it doesn’t occur to them to be considerate of a house full of sleeping people.
• Brutal advice-giving and ‘help’ in tragic circumstances, for example, after a miscarriage, when the family members blame the mother directly for transgressing traditional Chinese pregnancy customs (of which there are legion);
• The apparent lack of a Good Samaritan ethos in traditional Chinese culture (which contains a whole string of specific anecdotes);
• Some forms of personal talk, where people draw attention to and comment publicly on aspects of each other that the other person probably doesn’t want commented on: you’re getting pretty fat, you’ve got some bad acne, etc.

None of these actually prove anything, of course. You can cherry pick and present anecdotes of any society to make it appear any way you want, but that doesn’t mean your anecdotes are truly representative. Anecdotes don’t prove anything. They can helpfully illustrate things if they are used appropriately, but I’m not even claiming that here. These are merely what came to mind when I heard my student’s take on the self-immolations.

But thinking it over also reminds me of situations where locals displayed attentiveness above and beyond what I would expect to see in North America; where people seemed way more “tuned-in” to others than I usually am. Two specific instances that immediately spring to mind involve two different couples (Chinese guy, American girl) where the husbands/fiances were way more tuned in to their wives/fiancees than I expected — they put the average American boyfriend to shame, and probably made their fiancees’ foreign girl friends jealous. All that to say, my student’s comments got me thinking about how empathy works in China, and how in at least some ways, they do it differently than we do in North America.

Referenced stuff:

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• “Mao’s Great Famine” and China’s moral landscape
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history

I was in a Starbucks bathroom in greater Vancouver last week where a poster on the wall got me thinking about our relationship as First World consumers to the labourers who make the stuff we consume. And of course that reminded me of the suicide nets hung in the Foxconn factories that make our electronics, like iPhones. Anyway, here’s the text of the poster (I didn’t have a camera with me):

YOU.
Buy more FAIR TRADE CERTIFIED COFFEE than anyone in the world.
EVERYTHING WE DO, YOU DO.
It’s simple. You choose to be our customer, and that means you’re the one that allows us to DO GOOD THINGS IN A BIG WAY. Like doubling the amount of Fair Trade Certified coffee we’ll buy this year to 40 million pounds. It’s a choice we can only make because of the choice you make — to walk into our store.

SO THANKS, YOU.

Starbucks Shared Planet. You and Starbucks.
It’s bigger than coffee.

I think I’m smelling a rather self-serving double-standard on the part of cosmopolitan Euro-Americans, but I have to admit, that is some slick advertising. They make the upper half of Western society — which globally is “the 1%” or darn near to it — feel economically ethical (a feat in itself) for buying $5 coffees (doubly impressive). The bourgeoisie of the First World are made to feel we’re behaving ethically in the global economy because overspending on non-essential creature comfort status symbols is promoting economic justice. In this global village, we’re economically responsible neighbours! Now, I’m glad Starbucks is at least making some degree of effort to be ethical in its sourcing practices. I’m not so sure patronizing Starbucks means First World consumers deserve a pat on the back, but that’s actually not the main point that I want to draw out of this.

“Everything we do, you do.” As far as ethics are concerned, the corporate actions of Starbucks are our actions as well. What they do as an economic player in some far-flung, impoverished coffee-producing nation is actually an expression and extension of our choices and actions as consumers. That, at least, is what the poster implies, and I’ll assume for the sake of the argument that this is true. My questions, then, are: Why limit this kind of thinking to coffee grown in South America? Why not apply this ethical connection between corporate actions and consumers to, say, electronics manufactured in China? If we get moral credit for the good things our favourite companies do through their purchasing and employment policies, do we share blame for the bad things as well?

For example, imagine how the text of that Starbucks poster could be rewritten by other super-popular companies like Apple, who manufacture their products in China:

YOU.
Buy more NOT-FAIR TRADE ELECTRONICS than anyone in the world.
EVERYTHING WE DO, YOU DO.
It’s simple. You choose to be our customer, and that means you’re the one that allows us to TAKE ADVANTAGE OF HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DESPERATE CHINESE PEASANTS. Like doubling the amount of Abusively Employed Desperate Chinese Peasants we’ll use this year to 2 million. It’s a choice we can only make because of the choice you make — to walk into our store.

SO THANKS, YOU.

The 1% Shares the Planet. You and Your Gadgets.
It’s bigger than smart phones.

I’m not singling out Steve Jobs or Apple. We, as 21st century First World citizens, have more access to information, individual autonomy, mobility, and power than any other average citizens of any other civilization in history. If we’re ethically implicated in the coffee we buy, what does that mean for our smart phones?

P.S. - I’ve only recently begun to really think about this topic; I’m mostly just thinking out loud here. So if anyone wants to provide me a foil and challenge the idea that we consumers are ethically implicated in the actions of the corporations who produce our products in China, you’re genuinely welcome. So are suggestions for potentially effective responses to the situation.

The one previous post in this vein is: Steve Jobs, Apple, China and Us.

For an introduction to the connection between your electronics (virtually all major companies, not just industry leading Apple) and abusive Chinese factories:

• 1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who’s to Blame?
• The dark side of shiny Apple products
• Happy Chinese workers spell the end of affordable tech

As soon as I saw this in our mailbox today, it reminded me of something I’d read in the news a couple years ago. A certain religious group in China, famous for being brutally persecuted by the gov’t in the late 90′s, was apparently squandering Western public sympathy by selling tickets to Chinese cultural stage performances that contained explicit (but unadvertised) political and spiritual messages. This was making some Euro-Americans feel deceived. People felt ripped off that they’d come for a family show and got explicit politicking and proselytizing.

I didn’t know if this was them or not. My suspicious were heightened when I read the vague but very spiritual introduction section and this statement:

A performance like Shen Yun can no longer be found in China today because many of China’s best artistic traditions have been lost in recent decades.

The last page confirmed my guess. Turns out the performance advertised in the pamphlet (not mailed but hand-delivered to our door by an elderly Chinese man) is put on by the “evil cult” at the top of the Chinese government’s hit list — one of the largest, most viciously persecuted Chinese religious groups in the last fifteen years. There were propaganda posters in our neighbourhood in Tianjin denouncing them (see here for images and translations), and you have to walk past their demonstration to get into the Chinese consulate in Vancouver. To avoid tempting China’s net nanny I won’t write their name here, but here’s a picture:

I don’t blame them for presenting their religion and protest message through art and entertainment like they do. We Westerners are, after all, well-accustomed to ideological propaganda in our entertainment; that — and money — is what our entertainment is all about. But it takes a little more nuance and subtly to do this effectively to a Western audience, as evidenced by the negative reactions they’ve provoked (here’s an example). Who knows, maybe this go around they’ve tailored their message a little better.

Anyway, it’s interesting to find yet another example of China popping up in the daily life of Canadians. For more about this particular “evil cult”, see:

• Recent propaganda from Tianjin, China: evil, scheming, bloodthirsty cults! (China Hope Live)
• Shen Yun Performing Arts
• Politics and art blend in contentious Chinese show (Toronto.com)
• Shen Yun’s Display of Traditional Chinese Culture Scares Chinese Regime (Epoch Times — the ‘evil cult’s’ news agency)

P.S. – “Shén​ Yùn” refers to charm or grace in art and poetry. Literally it is “God/spirit/divine” (神) + “beautiful sound/charm/appeal” (韵). Here are some different dictionary entries.

There are many qualified candidates for the 2011 Grinch Award, but this year it’s going to the authorities of Xitan Village in Zhejiang Province, because you just can’t violently shut down a large public Christmas party in “Christmas Village” and not get a Grinch Award. Especially when you get caught on video and uploaded to YouTube:

• A very silent night: Chinese officials shut down outdoor Christmas party in toy-making town (WP)
• Video (BI)
• Video (YouTube)

There’s actually a lot of interesting details to this situation; what details we do get suggest a complex local relationship between Christians, Buddhists, local authorities, and Christians and Buddhists who have positions of local authority.

Previous Grinch Awards:

• China’s grinches play hardball
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin

China’s official Xinhua News Agency reports that a senior Chinese Communist Party official has reminded the increasingly religious ranks of the Party what they’re required to believe. From China party official warns members over religion (AP)

“Religious practice among Chinese Communist Party members is increasing and threatens its unity and national leadership, a top party official said in remarks reported Monday.

“Party members are required to be atheists and must not believe in religion or engage in religious practice, said Zhu Weiqun, a member of the party’s Central Committee [...]

“”Voices have appeared within the party calling for an end to the ban on religion, arguing in favor of the benefits of religion for party members and even claiming the ban on religion for party members is unconstitutional,” Zhu said.

“”In fact, our party’s principled stance regarding forbidding members from believing in religion has not changed one iota,” he said.”