Ok, so I know I promised a post on the Horse Ears Monastery in Yushu (don't worry it's coming) but the summer has been sort of out of control so I'm writing this post to fill the gap. I'll try to post about Horse Ears tomorrow, before heading to the countryside for about a week.
In the meantime, a recent conversation has led me to ask the following question: what are the qualities of a good leader. Jim Collins in his "Good to Great" suggests a combination of determination and selflessness. I personally agree. But even in the west we generally don't look for this. We look for someone charismatic, or larger than life. Here in C, it is still different. There's a distrust of the larger-than-life, charismatic type of person. Those people generally cause social unrest (see the Taiping Rebellion during the Qing among others). Even when that unrest causes lasting change (Mao) the legacy such a leader leaves behind is often somewhat ambivalent. Recently though, I've been looking at the physical characteristics of leaders. And one of the most striking differences to me between Western views of leaders and the leaders in this country has to do with hair. That's right. Hair. Leaders in the west are supposed to have a little bit of gray. It suggests wisdom, experience, knowledge. There are some notable exceptions (like JFK or first-term Obama, the latter has been increasingly gray though), but in general, the leaders of the Western world are supposed to look like they've seen things. In this country, one sees that leaders almost all (uniformly) dye their hair black. Why is this? I'm not entirely sure, and what follows is a discussion of my opinions (these are not facts, and I have nothing other than time spent here to back up these opinions) of why this might be. I encourage anyone who reads these posts (you perhaps happy few) to chime in. My take runs roughly as follows: elders are of retirement age, they are to be looked after, and cared for in their old age by their filial children, not taking the reigns of the state. I noticed that when my mother was here (and she is not particularly old, by US standards) she was frustrated by how often people asked her to sit down and NOT do any work, and to let the young people do it all. The same reverence that old age brings also seems to imply a sense of distrust and weakness. Even after retirement, (former) leaders will often continue dying their hair (like my father in law) seemingly to avoid this very stigma. This is perhaps most interesting when contrasted with some of my sickly looking students who, at the youthful age of a 13 already has more grey in his hair than I do. I gather that this is most likely due to a combination of poor diet, and insane study habits forced on them by their parents. Personally, remembering how cruel middle schoolers can be, I would rather see that child dye his hair than all the leaders, but this is just me talking. While perhaps not fully able to live up to the promising title of this post, I think that this difference (something so trivial-seeming as hair!) does provide an interesting way of approaching some of divergent understandings of peoples' roles and expectations in our cultures.
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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 |