As a folklorist I suppose I must comment on this: folk singer Pete Seeger passed away a few days ago. Rest in Peace, sir.
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Dear Venice,
We spent the (Western) New Year in St. Mark's square. You guys don't know what fireworks are. I'll give you an A for the effort, but the execution was flat-out poor. I live in Xining, a relative backwater as far as China is concerned, but Xining's fireworks… fireworks individual families have put together out of their own homes no less, put Venice's to shame. In Venice, my wife said, "Really? They think these are fireworks?" A number of interesting articles have been circulating on WeChat recently. I've desperately wanted to translate some of these, but have refrained from doing so for a variety of reasons. Firstly, time is not on my side these days. There's a chance I might find the time during the Spring Festival period, but certainly not before. By that time a number of these popular "articles" will have faded from peoples' posts. Additionally, what time I do have is generally devoted to that all-consuming parasite of my life: my dissertation.
That being said, some of these were so interesting that I felt the need to give a summary of the top two that have come across my message board in the last few weeks: 1) 'Jigs med rgyal mtshan's most recent discussion of language and education. 'Jigs med rgyal mtshan is one of the most recognizable clerics in A mdo at this point. He is very well respected not only as a man of the maroon and gold cloth, but also as an educator. His most recent post is a series of nine points about education gleaned from some talks he has given at recent conferences. They include: encouraging a better Tib. language curriculum for teaching not just language but also math and the sciences [leading my always clever wife to wryly comment that C probably doesn't want too many people out here overly skilled in chemistry], providing better and more teachers on the plateau, getting leaders who are more sympathetic to education, learning from C education which incorporates foreign ideas without giving up its cultural "heart" [a viewpoint eerily similar to late Qing ideas of 中学为题,西学为用] , development programs that better understand local conditions, better and funding for environmental preservation programs, ignorance preventing unity, and finally the need to translate more official documents into Tib language. In some ways, none of these are very penetrating, but it has still been re-posted time and again throughout the Tib intellectual WeChat-o-sphere . 2) A less popular article was one in which a young Tib. woman told of her childhood, how she took some undesirable jobs in order to help her sick mother, how that led to prostitution and AIDS. This tell all provides some disturbing details about life on the plateau; the sorts of details I would love to translate but wouldn't dare (they wouldn't exactly make me popular with, umm, anybody considering the very one-sided discourses many demand). Anyway, maybe someday I'll have time to translate the first of the two. I'm too cowardly to try the second. Dear all, I won't apologize for my recent absence from the fiber optic channels that bring you my random musings on life out here. I wasn't here. I was on my (long delayed) honeymoon. But now I'm back and an article on the BBC caught my attention (you can find it here).
Let me summarize the article for you: UK scientists suggest that urban green spaces significantly improve the quality of peoples' lives. Now just because a group of scientists got something published doesn't mean that I put any weight in it. Scientific publishing is a joke. Science, in our 'modern' world is held up on a pedestal, but I'm sure you can find a published, peer-reviewed, scientific study that can contradict or disagree with any other scientific study. It's ridiculous. If you set the right parameters, you can find what you want. Regardless, this topic seemed to stick out to me, because the C seems to be waging a war on green spaces. I think I have mentioned before--and Emily Yeh recently has in her new book--that modern "green living" (as defined and ubiquitously advocated in propaganda) usually means living in concrete buildings in the absence of anything that actually naturally is the color green. It's amazing how they've been cramming ever larger numbers of people into smaller spaces, building ever upward, and destroying the environment at rapid rates while still trumpeting green living and crowing about their own greatness (for this last issue, just notice how many C leaders send their kids to school in the US, that's pretty telling… I know for a fact that the last two leaders of the country and several other high leaders sent their children to pursue post-secondary degrees in the states). Let's use Xining as an example. There are parks, but only a handful of them haven't been completely paved over. People aren't even allowed to walk on the green spaces that remain. I know middle schoolers who have never (let me repeat that, never) walked on grass. This is sad. Modernity doesn't have to mean the absence of green spaces, but it seems that modernity and nature are viewed as opposites in C's development framework. Nature is something to be conquered rather than something that can co-exist profitably with humans. More recently, C's newer whole-hearted (though poorly implemented and under-planned) ecological conservation projects has meant further exerting control. I'm digressing from the original topic, but it's worth mentioning: pastoralists have been removed from their land in the name of grassland conservation, but removing herders and their livestock from the land actually hurts the grassland quality. Herds eat grass, but that only prepares the land for new grass, their manure fertilizes re-growth; without these, grasslands are actually deteriorating further necessitating state and scientific intervention. Vicious cycle. Urbanization is not inherently bad, but C's version of it, with its utter obliteration of natural green spaces just depresses me, as the BBC predicts. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |