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This one is from Gingdao
[please discuss] China
I love China, and I love braised pork belly. That's why we have China Fact of the Day, and that is why I eat and cook so much Chinese food. (French food is its only rival.) The pragmatic optimism of the Chinese is a delight. It's a shame about the Great Leap Forward and all that other stuff. I never get tired of reading books on Mao, the recent biography and the one by his doctor are especially good. Chinese opera has marvelous quivering timbres, although they are usually ruined by electrification and by recording. The Story of Qiu Ju is my favorite Chinese film, although there are many good ones. Soul Mountain is my favorite Chinese novel. China is also the future of Western classical music. Tang horses are overpriced but still they are amazing and subtle.
Here is why China will not take over the world, sadly the trip to Shanghai still awaits us. By the way, their nominal exchange rate peg is not a real peg in the medium- to long-run.
#09 in a series of 50.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on March 2, 2007 at 07:41 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink
Comments
Tyler, Tyler - Please comment on something - tho I realize
it's too late to add to or amend THE 50 - why are nearly
all whistlers male? Of course it's purely anecdotal, but
I'd say as much as 90% are males. So why?
- avian tendencies? to attract females?
- canine attributes? warnings to other males?
- hand-in-pocket syndrome? as a friend said - whistling HAS
to be related to putting hands in pockets, and guys do that
all the time!
Thanks!
Posted by: glenn at Mar 2, 2007 8:01:05 AM
I think you mean Qingdao (the modern spelling of the city with the eponymous beer Tsingtao; it was a German settlement at one point).
If you get to Shanghai, keep in mind that Shanghai/Hangzhou/Suzhou are certainly not representative of the rest of China, economy-wise. Even Beijing is only half the per capita GDP of Shanghai, and the central and western provinces are quite a bit poorer. That said, China is the great success story of our time, and all the more amazing when, after reading the two books you mentioned, you see just how poor the country was!
Posted by: cure at Mar 2, 2007 9:19:24 AM
I am reading Chung and Halliday's biography now. Fascinating and even more terrifying than those I have read earlier. He is mentioned only once in the book, but I remember reading Jan Myrdal's "Report from a Chinese village" many years ago and being stunned at the ability of someone to perceive China in 1963 as he did. I also remember sitting in a history class with a friend while studying at Loyola. It was a history/political science course on development taught by two very good, but left leaning professors. The elder of the two was an especially kindly man who loved gardening.
Thus my friend and I were stunned when he was discussing gardening and remarked how he had always liked the idea during the Cultural Revolution of having the intellectual elite go into the fields and get their hands in the soil and connect with the life of the peasant. Being freshman for the most part the implications of what he just said seemed to just float over the students heads as they discussed the merits of the idea. Thus I learned the power of romantic imagery to obscure and entice the totalitarian instinct. Robby and I could hardly speak and we still recall some 20 years later the chilling cheerfulness of people discussing one of history's greatest tragedies in the context of gardening and its positive aspects.
Posted by: Paddock at Mar 2, 2007 9:38:41 AM
What do you think about "The Last Emperor"? I still find it to be one of the most beautiful films I can remember.
Posted by: steveintheknow at Mar 2, 2007 9:59:38 AM
Japanese food is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Chinese food.
Posted by: Andrew at Mar 2, 2007 10:38:33 AM
I know what you mean about books on Mao. Why is it not long after you've put one down, you have these cravings for another?
Posted by: knackeredhack at Mar 2, 2007 10:46:47 AM
> Chinese food. (French food is its only rival.)
For vegetarian, South Indian hands down no contest. I appreciate that's a minority interest (outside South India)
Posted by: Alan Little at Mar 2, 2007 10:54:44 AM
Alan: You do have fine taste!
Posted by: Anand at Mar 2, 2007 11:44:49 AM
Tyler: Do you read or speak Chinese? Any thoughts on the cost/benefit of learning to do either?
Posted by: eddie at Mar 2, 2007 11:52:46 AM
Alan is certainly correct. And eddie, unless you are a naturally gifted linguist the costs are very high.
Posted by: eriks at Mar 2, 2007 11:58:28 AM
That bio of Mao by his doctor was something, wasn't it?
What I remember most are a few of his ... hygiene habits.
Never brushed his teeth, just swished green tea around.
Never washed (if I remember right), just "bathed "his
genitals in the vaginas of young peasant girls.
Oh, and the number of worshipful, terrified young peasant girls that he worked his way through was pretty impressive.
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Mar 2, 2007 11:58:45 AM
I am learning gong1wen4 (i.e. Chinese) in school. I actually had my midterm this morning and I must say that the opportunity costs are high. Unless you are literate in Cantonese or Japanese, Mandarin is particularly difficult. I speak neither, and I struggle through class daily. But it is well worth it.
P.S. I am studing abroad next semester in Shanghai. I'm so excited. All that yummy food and great shopping!
Posted by: Brooke at Mar 2, 2007 12:13:51 PM
Many facets of the Chinese economy is still dominated by the state. This is the reason why I feel that their explosive growth will continue - because there's so much room for improvement. I feel that Chinese technocrats undertstand this, and privatization will continue to occur.
That said, I had much more faith in Jiang Zemin than I do in Hu Jintao. Sometimes, Hu's protectionist and socialist rhetoric scares me. His ironfisted, machiavellian removal of his liberal enemies in Shanghai certainly gives reason to pause. I just hope that within the CCP, the more liberal factions of the party can effectively keep Hu in check.
Posted by: Chris at Mar 2, 2007 12:24:53 PM
"By the way, their nominal exchange rate peg is not a real peg in the medium- to long-run." Is it even possible to peg the real exchange rate? Doesn't the Penn effect suggest that as incomes rise in China the price of Big Macs and haircuts (in dollars) will rise as well no matter what the Chinese monetary authority does?
Posted by: eddie at Mar 2, 2007 12:36:18 PM
Cure - 'If you get to Shanghai, keep in mind that Shanghai/Hangzhou/Suzhou are certainly not representative of the rest of China, economy-wise.'
Lynn's 'IQ and the Wealth of Nations' put Shanghai's avg IQ at 109.4, which is pretty enormous. In the late 19th century it became the worlds third largest commerical city for a while, but then the Communists ruined everything. I see it becoming a major, major financial centre into the future.
Posted by: adrian at Mar 2, 2007 1:45:09 PM
adrian...I agree; it already is a pretty big center, isn't it? That said, it's tough to compete with the path dependency of HK, isn't it? Chinese companies worth their salt are already on the Hang Seng and not any of the Chinese exchanges.
Brooke...what gongwen is that? I've never heard that phrase for Chinese before: zhong1wen2 certainly (and many more: huayu, putonghua, hanyu, etc.).
Chris: the technocrat situation is interesting. The finance ministry, for instance, is very outward looking and well-trained in modern economics (Wu Yi in particular is sharp as a tack), but the same can't be said for other bureaus. The Hu/Jiang dichotomy is everywhere.
Posted by: cure at Mar 2, 2007 3:13:40 PM
I'm learning Chinese at the moment and would like to throw my hat in the ring by saying that it's a particularly easy language. The main reason here being that there are 1. no articles and 2. no conjugation of verbs.
So, as a counterpoint, German uses Der, Die and Das (for our 'the') for Masculine, Feminine and Neuter nounds..well, unless of course the noun is plural, or in the dative or accusative sense. Oh, and the type of noun can have no relation to whether or not it is a masculine or feminine noun - see Mark Twain's enlightening 'The Awful German Language' for more color here.
Chinese forgoes the whole mess by not having articles in the first place, lovely. As well, verbs are not conjugated, e.g.,
I am
You are
She/He/It is
In Chinese is:
Wo shi
Ni shi
Ta shi
Gotta love it. Well, yeah, I mean there's that whole character vs. Roman alphabet issue, but let's set that aside.
Posted by: Alex Ambroz at Mar 2, 2007 4:34:53 PM
@Alex Ambroz on learning Chinese:
1) It's true that there are no articles, but in their place you get measure words, which are almost as difficult.
2) No conjugation is great. But without verb tenses like future, conditional, etc., you lose a lot of descriptive power. And you have to use the aspectual marker 'le', which is complicated.
And 4 more reasons why Chinese is very difficult, in ascending order:
4) The common use of idioms (成语), which unlike English idioms are not always easy to decode from just the words alone - you often need the history behind the idiom)
3) Characters (汉字) - you can't just set them aside - no way. While I find them fascinating, they're also extremely time consuming to learn and you can't just "sound it out." Of course, their utility in uniting a country/empire with thousands of local dialects is another matter entirely...
2) Relatively small number of syllables makes listening comprehension difficult. Sure, English has homonyms too, but not nearly as many.
1) Tones (声调) make good pronunciation really, really hard.
All that said, I love learning Chinese and have found it very rewarding.
@ Eddie on the cost/benefit: I assume you're talking about Chinese for business purposes. It is a huge investment of time and effort to learn Chinese up to the point where it would be actually functional in a business context. That said, there is no doubt some value in being able to speak any Chinese when interacting with the Chinese because it demonstrates that your interest in China runs beyond just business. In my experience, a lot of people will instantly warm to you for that.
Posted by: ede at Mar 2, 2007 7:15:52 PM
Go read Chairman Mao's work, at least his quotes. I don't know why the doctor wrote that book, but I don't believe in him. I judged him by what he said and what he wrote. If Mao hadn't said "women hold up half of the sky", I think the "story of Qiu Ju" would have been another version.
Soul moutain became famous because of the Nobel Prize, I wonder how many Chinese are really interested in it.
Posted by: jiade at Mar 2, 2007 7:43:40 PM
Also, one wonderful thing about Chinese is spoken Chinese uses the same sound for "he/she/it". English really needs a gender-neutral third person pronoun, and "she" isn't it.
Posted by: Foobarista at Mar 2, 2007 8:27:59 PM
jiade, do you think that the doctor had a motivation to lie or are you privy to information that he wasn't? Personally, I judge Mao based on how many deaths he was responsible for.
glenn, I compulsively have my hands in my pockets, even when I'm nearly running, but I can't whistle for the life of me. What is your theory for why we put our hands in our pockets so much?
Posted by: TGGP at Mar 2, 2007 8:28:17 PM
TGGP, I don't know whether the doctor lied or not. But the book somehow made Mao look like a wanton and corrupted emperor, which he definitely was not. Some people may think Mao just used Maxism to obtain power for personal interests. I don't think so. I believe Mao genuinely care for the welfare of the Chinese people, although the way he tried to achieve his ideal may not be wise.
Btw, how many death was Mao responsible for? I don't think he was cold-blooded, but an hero like him might think it is worthy of the cause. That doesn't make him right, but he's not evil. He risked his life trying to liberate China and he lost his son in the Korean war. Now his family virtually has no political or economic power in China.
For those who believe Mao and his party are evil, I challenge you not to blindly endorse common views but to read CCP's constitution, Mao's work and other CCP members' work to find out yourself whose interests they have been fighting for. Do you know China is trying to build a harmonial society now?
Posted by: jiade at Mar 2, 2007 11:37:21 PM
If you read Mao: the Unknown Story, you should also read Jonathan Spence's review of the book. The great historian Spence would tell you how terrible that book actually is.
Posted by: ranc at Mar 3, 2007 1:55:25 AM
"but an hero like him"
Mao?
Crikey
Posted by: Stuart at Mar 3, 2007 7:15:59 AM
I don't care what Mao wrote in the CCP Constitution (constitutions in communist countries aren't even schelling points), or his Little Red Book, I care about what his government actually did. What he did puts him on the top of the list of the 20th century for many in terms of mass-murder and no lower than number three for any analysis I've heard of. His policies were disastrous. The word "harmonious" and the "Cultural Revolution" don't belong in the same sentence. China may be trying to build a "harmonious society" now, but it is all thanks to Deng and in spite of Mao.
R. J. Rummel on "China's Bloody Century"
Death Tolls of the Hemoclysm
Posted by: TGGP at Mar 3, 2007 4:54:23 PM
