A PhD in Parochialism
Nearly a month into classes already and all’s going swimmingly, except, alas, for “PhD Oral English,” which—and I scarcely would have thought it possible—I despise even more than last year. A more sheepish, passive, moon-faced group would be hard to imagine outside a home for advanced Alzheimer’s patients.
Struggling to elicit any sort of response from them, in my last class I hit upon the idea of talking about the American election. And—get this—not a single student out of the 25 or so could name the Republican candidate for president. These are PhD candidates! If this is China’s scientific brain-trust, the rest of the world can sleep easy.
Not that I was entirely surprised. Never mind the Wall Street implosion which has sent shockwaves around the world or McCain’s desperate, crazy grandstanding: “foreign news” is as much a blink-and-you-miss-it afterthought in Chinese media as it is in the States. Ergo, this week we’ve had hour after hour after hour of coverage of the Chinese space mission—exciting to the Chinese, no doubt, but of no conceivable interest to anyone else. I suppose during the Space Race the US’s every mission was similarly used as an occasion for national(ist) pride, but as an outsider I found the hoopla fantastically, embarrassingly overblown.
And then there’s the never-ending milk & melamine scandal. This is a great deal more interesting, less for its sordid particulars—the tens of thousands of infants sickened, the months-long cover-up, the complicity of the CCP at the highest level to make sure that the story didn’t break during the Games—than for what it reveals about the fragility of the entire system. What’s alarming is not that the Chinese authorities do not control the food supply chain. What’s alarming is that they cannot control the food supply chain. Weak and funding-starved as the USFDA is, it’s still 100x more on on-the-ball than any agency here.
In a normal country, of course, this kind of thing would probably bring down a government; here it only means arbitrary sacrificial heads, such as that of the mayor of Shijiazhuang, will roll. But how long can the CCP keep walking this tightrope? People are pissed. Orwell was right: information is the enemy of authoritarianism…and it seems only a matter of time until a tipping point in China is reached. Sooner, rather than later, I suspect.
