China

I have been in China 8 days, and have yet to blog about it. Here's why:

I don't like China.

Let me clarify, there are parts about China I like, but on a whole, the country bothers me. I tend not to want to write about things I don't like, and therefore I haven't been motivated to write about China.

Here's the part where you ask: why don't you like China?

It took me a long time to put my finger on why, but I think I've got it now, and I'm willing to talk about it.

My first experience with China came in the form of their airport, which is massive. Think two or three football-fields worth of open space and a ceiling that is at least a hundred meters tall. This is impressive and awe inspiring, at least until you look down. The whole area is divided by three-meter-high walls, which hide everything from view and funnel people to where they're supposed to go with expressionless, white finality. There is no way to see more than twenty or thirty feet on a horizontal axis, and the whole setup has me feeling like I'm at the bottom of a well or in a maze looking up at the sky. I honestly think this might be a metaphor for China as a whole. 

My trip into Beijing does nothing to dispel my initial reservations. The city is covered in smog, and what should be a bright day is hazy and orange. The airport tram I'm on was probably shiny and new in 2008, but now is greasy and grimy. Once I'm in the city proper, the smell hits me.

Beijing stinks. The sewer lines aren't open to the streets, but that doesn't matter much. You can still smell rotting fecal matter and the ammonia stench of urine from nearly every manhole cover. There are public toilets too, which you can usually smell before you see them. The streets are filled with cars, tricycle drivers and mopeds, none of which have any concern for anything but getting where they're going. I've been to New York; I've seen New Yorkers drive; they've got nothing on Beijing traffic and the Beijing propensity towards the horn.

None of this really bothers me. Developing countries develop. They're nasty, grimy and half built. I knew China wasn't a first world country, I was expecting their capital to be a little more put together, but at least it's visibly coming together.

And it is. During my time in Beijing I watched a restaurant damaged by fire be mostly torn down and rebuilt in a matter of days. By 2013, there are expected to be two new subway extensions opening up, making Beijing metro one of the largest subway systems in the world. It seemed as though nearly every building was getting an addition or being torn down to make room for something new.

First, I thought this was what bothered me – the smells, the garbage, the pollution, the traffic, the constant building and rebuilding, they're all irritating, gross, or frustrating, but they are not what bothers me.

The thing that bothers me is the utter and complete lack of any kind of free action.

I'm not talking about urinating on the streets, because that's apparently legal here. I'm not talking about smoking wherever you want or screwing around with your friends or whatever. I'm talking about the right to free information.

I'm talking about the right to freely criticize the government.

I'm talking about the right to access any website any time you want.

I'm talking about the right to talk about whatever you want to talk about.

The people here are sitting on the edge of technological liberation. Nearly everyone I see has a cell phone of some kind, many of them iPhones (or knockoffs). There are places selling computers, tablets and e-readers on the street and in market stalls. But the internet is lousy and slow, and the government has blocked every conceivable website that might help people organize.

The police and the train conductors wear the same uniform. There are people in the street with red armbands that say "security volunteer." Everywhere, literally everywhere, red propaganda messages with huge Chinese characters tell you what to think and how to feel.

Our election was a few days ago. It was messy; it was bitter; it was, above all other things, powered by the people. The Chinese change in government is today. The people have no say in it whatsoever. I was told by one of the people that run my hostel that they knew who their new president was going to be four years ago, and that nothing was going to change. When I asked him how he felt about that, he just shrugged. I don't know if they're not supposed to have an opinion, don't care, or just didn't want to share it with me.

 

In this nation I feel afraid to have a voice, and I'm just a guest. I can't imagine what it's like for someone who has lived here all their life, who has been told to keep their head down, not to make trouble, who doesn't get to protest.

This government is exploiting its people, protecting and enriching a few, and doing it all under this vomit inducing guise of being 'father' to the people. They deify Mao Ze-Dong, a man notorious in other nations for starving more than 60 million of his own people to death and sending hundreds of millions more to work camps in the name of Communism. When he died and the government figured out that Communism, true Communism, can't work, they decided to shift to Fascism, and keep on calling it a "People's Republic."

So now I'm here, today, sitting in a dictatorship built on the blood of innocent people. I have wondered at the might of the Great Wall, seen the inside of the "Forbidden City," and tomorrow I will see the Terra Cotta Warriors. But none of them will mean anything. They all seem empty and hollow.

I have also been to Tiananmen Square. To get in you have to go through multiple checkpoints, where surly men and women poke through your bags and glare at you. The square itself has more guards than the average military base in America. A large picture of Mao sits at one end, and his mausoleum sits at the other. The last large protest for democracy happened here. It was rather decisively put down – with tanks. This place means something to me. It was in this place that a dream of freedom died. 

That's why I don't like China. It is the most populous country in the world, and its people cannot speak, they can only obey.

-Doug