Just checking to see who is home....

Despite the reputation (and official stance of communist atheism), churches are not uncommon in China. Some are semi-official, although with some limitations. For example, despite the fact that the Catholic Church is established within the People's Republic, it is not fully recognized. The government will not allow any truly independent organizations, and the Vatican won't countenance being told by the state whom they must choose as bishops. If you would like some additional perspective on Catholicism within China, I refer you to the excellent blog Shanghai Scrap, whose author Adam Minter often comments on the subject.

Unofficially, so-called "house churches" are said to be widespread in China, although there is no way to know how many of those there are. For those of us who are expatriates, however, the rules change entirely. The government has no problem with expat churches, so long as there are no Chinese citizens invited, and no proselytizing.

And that brings me to this little story. Last Sunday evening, we hosted a "fireside", a gathering of youth from church, in our home. There is a sizable LDS (Mormon) branch in Suzhou, and the membership is quite varied, including families from a handful of Asian nations.

Before I go any farther, I need to make a digression. All of the apartment compounds here have guards at the gates. It is often rather questionable as to exactly what their purpose is, as they typically don't actually stop anyone. At least, they usually don't stop people at other apartment compounds. Here at ours, they usually do. Our theory has been that our apartment complex is quite small, and therefore they have a better sense of who actually lives here. Just this week, a second (and compatible) theory came up, because we learned that there are many local government officials living in our compound. For some time, it has also been noticeable that Asians are stopped at the gate far more consistently than Westerners. This includes our apartment agent, hired workers, and friends (as a digression within a digression, our friend Elvina, who is Chinese-American, born and raised in New York City, gives some poignant perspective on this in her own blog entry about the confusion with which the locals, including our gate guards, treat her).

With all that as context, let me get back to my story. Over 20 people, a mixed group of Westerners and non-Chinese Asians, nicely attired in dresses and suits, came to our apartment. That isn't exactly a normal sight around here, and this wasn't the first time. We have joked together that the guards must be completely baffled.

Some time after the the gathering was over and everyone had left, the doorbell rang. I answered to find one of our familiar young guards there. He looked somewhat uncomfortable, and he didn't seem to know quite what to say at first (although maybe that was just searching for words that he hoped I would understand). He finally asked me, in Chinese, if there were any Chinese people here.

I told him that there were not, and he left. The brief exchange represented the limits of my rudimentary Chinese anyway, so there wasn't much to talk about.

The point is, why did he come?

We are not naive, and despite the fact that I joked above about our guards being baffled, we know that any insightful observer is going to eventually realize the obvious.... that all of these people could only be gathering for a church meeting of some kind. As I said, the congregation represents a mix of nationalities, and while those who are from other Asian countries are under the "foreigner rules" when it comes to churches, they are not, of course, easily distinguishable from Chinese (and even ethnic Chinese are exempt from the restrictions on churches if they hold foreign passports). Proceeding then, from the assumption that our guard was there to make sure no Chinese citizens were being included in our little gathering, a long list of other questions comes up. For example:

Are the local gate guards actually integrated into the police force? In the U.S., of course, they would not be.

Is it already within the mandate of even the lowly local gate guards to keep an eye out for renegade church meetings? That question very much intrigues me, whether or not they have standing orders to be on the lookout for such things. If so, did they sit down there in their guard booth together discussing a course of action and reading their manual or something?

Did he make this check on his own initiative, or did someone tell him to? Did he have to call in and ask for orders? Or to report his findings?

Did someone have to spy or search to figure out which apartment they were going to? This wouldn't take much. There are other Westerners in our compound, but we are pretty conspicuous, and we do get a lot of visitors, but still....

All very fascinating.


P.S. This post has become the first time I have had signficant blog readership outside family and friends, so suddenly I'm feeling like I need to be more careful in my explanations. Based on the one person who commented, there is a confusion that I can clear up. It is probably bad form to quote myself, but here is what I say in my own comment:

" Actually, the Chinese can have churches, they just can't mingle with expat churches. This incident wasn't about making sure that the Chinese don't go to church, it was about making sure that they weren't going to church with us. That is not to say that they have freedom of religion as we would concieve of it, but I will leave it to people who know more than me to elaborate on that."

The Forbidden City

Just a few quick pictures of the Forbidden City from our May trip to Beijing. It really is immense and impressive. However, I did have, in a way, a bit of a strange reaction to it. Generally, this is the first great stop that tourists make in China. Under those circumstances, I can see that it would be quite overwhelming. But after nearly a year of living here, I have to say I felt a bit jaded. We've seen a lot of this sort of thing, just never quite so big.

In any case, it really is a fascinating companion to the some of the other great palaces I've seen, like Versailles and the Medici palace in Florence. Of course, both of those would fit inside with room to spare.

John, on a separate outing from the following pictures (no, we didn't stay until dark and change clothes in the public toilet). On the right is The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

The following are some random pictures from within. As a side note, when I was buying tickets, I am quite sure that I guy tried to pick-pocket me and failed. It is among my major lifetime goals to never get pick-pocketed. I've trudged all over France without the Gypsy rings ever getting me, and I'm trying to keep the streak going. So far, I've never seen any street hustling in China that anywhere approaches the kinds of things I've ever seen in Europe.

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This last item is from a clock museum within the Forbidden City. It contains a huge collection of spectacularly ornate clocks that were gifts of state from the European nations to the Chinese emperors. Some of them are ingeniously elaborate, and include such things as singing birds (the songs produced by slide whistles powered by bellows), dancing figurines, fountains, and a golden elephant that swings its articulated trunk as it marches. A few clockworks are actually demonstrated twice a day, but many of the best ones are at least shown in action in a looping video.
The 18th century English clock above was my favorite. When the hour chimes, the mechanical figure writes a few Chinese characters in calligraphy. The actual action is only shown on the video mentioned above, but even still, it honestly ranks as one of the coolest things I've ever seen in a museum.

Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!

You may be aware that in three weeks it will be 20 years since one of the major events of modern Chinese history. I shall refer to this as the anniversary of The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. The Chinese authorities, of course, would prefer that no one remember the anniversary at all, but barring that, I suppose that they are trying to make do with the Must-Not-Be-Named part. If there is one word that you just can't say in China, that is it.

There are elements of absurdism in this. Several weeks ago I read a report from a China blogger that signs for public squares were quietly being taken down around the country.* It was surmised that the rational was that, if you keep people from thinking about the "Square" part, they won't think of the "Must-Not-Be-Named" part, and that will keep them from thinking about all that unpleasantness with protesters and tanks.

When we were in Beijing two weeks ago, we had to get our bags searched just to go into The-Square-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. I don't know if that is a normal thing, or if it is just precaution for the anniversary. What I do know is that some time ago I started to say to people that we could all expect to see a whole lot more net censorship as the day approached.

Unless we just had a huge coincidence, it appears I was right. You may be aware of "The Great Firewall of China", a partly derisive term for the sporadic efforts of the Chinese government to censor and restrict Internet access. On Friday, May 15th, access to popular blog hosting services like Blogspot (which I use), Wordpress, Typepad, etc., suddenly disappeared. So far, outlets like Facebook are still working, but I expect that a lot more sites will go down over the next couple weeks. Nevertheless, enforcement is completely capricious and arbitrary. For example, as far as I can tell, news of the newly published memoirs by Zhou Ziyang, the one government official who sided with the protesters (and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for doing so) has not been restricted at all.

Of course, you might note that I am writing on a Blogspot hosted blog right now.... That is because I just purchased a subscription to a VPN (Virtual Private Network). Given what they just did for me, I don't at all mind giving the good folks at Witopia.com a free plug. The service costs $40 a year, and it routes me through an IP address in Washington D.C., making it appear to the Chinese authorities that my computer is located there, not here.

It might seem obvious that the Chinese government would move on to blocking access to VPN services like this, but they don't really, and here is my theory. I think they don't care. The Internet is a very unruly beast, and they can't control the whole thing anyway. However, they can make things difficult, and they can keep people reminded that they are paying attention. Also, subscription sites like this one are not an option for a lot of Chinese anyway. A typical schoolteacher, for example, makes around $500 a month, which makes even a $40 subscription prohibitive. Not to mention that I don't know if they have a way to make the payment with a Chinese credit card.

There is also the fact that the Internet enforcement is sporadic. Based on some quick research of mine, this is at least the third time Blogspot has been blocked (the others were 2005 and 2007). So, rather than really make an effort to beat the system or plot revolution, people just wait for the rules to unexpectedly change again. It is like being a lab rat in a classic Skinnerian behavioral psychology experiment. Why should one have a plan when the results are random anyway? Just keep pushing that lever until your food pellet comes out, or your web page loads.

Nothing quite like random reinforcement to keep the lab rats occupied. Well, here is my own small revolution. Take That, Chinese Net Nannies!


The unknown "tank man" takes a stand on June 5th, 1989, on a street leading to Tiananmen Square.

Post Script: 18 hours later, and Blogspot is up and running again, sort of.... it is working, but all of the pictures are blocked, except that I found one blog that wasn't.

Like I said, random reinforcement!

P.P.S: 36 hours later, and Blogspot is down again. Why I outta.... Oo! food pellet!



* Note. It is some time later, and I wanted to clarify the comment made above. I am still quite sure that I read somewhare that the authorities were physically taking down signs for "squares", however, the closest I can find is a comment that it was speculated that they might take down signs. On that note, I have now included a link to a blog post by James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly. I really need to branch out on my sources, because I think this is the third time I've quoted him.

I had a hard time finding this link for some reason, and I emailed Mr. Fallows with a question about it. He was gracious enough to reply. The following is a quote from his email to me:

On the “square” business, yes, here was my story: I appeared at both the Shanghai and the Beijing Literary Festivals this year. They had a very nice description of me in the program, picture, and all the rest. But one thing was different in my write-up and that of the other 30+ writers: I was the only one whose book wasn’t named. That was because (I was told by the person who produced the programs) they considered the title “Postcards from Tomorrow Square” too “sensitive.” You know, “Square” and all.

I asked the guy (a Brit) whether they planned to rename the Tomorrow Square building in Shanghai, or for that matter People’s Square, which takes up half the downtown. He said, “Don’t get me started…”

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum

This post is all from an outing I took with John about a month and a half ago to Nanjing. It was a different trip from the one shown in an earlier post. Lee and the girls were up to something or other for the day (I can't remember what), so we did a little father and son outing.

John has a book of World War Two sites that can be seen in Asia and the Pacific. Nanjing is the only one on the list that is in easy range of us. The big thing to see there is the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum, and that is where we went.

Upwards of a quarter of a million Chinese in the Nanjing area were killed by the invading Japanese during the war. It is a very sore subject for the Chinese, not only for the horror itself, but for the continuing Japanese tendency to ignore and dismiss wartime atrocities (huge protests broke out a few years ago simply because yet another round of Japanese school textbooks were adopted that whitewashed the whole affair).

I don't have an organized story to go with this, so I will just drop comments as I go. Outside of the museum is a line of rather abstract statues. They have something of the effect, perhaps, of Picasso's Guernica. Each one has a caption that is worth reading, you should be able to read them if you click on them. They kind of capture the general tone of the place, which could just as well be called the "Nanjing Anti-Japanese Memorial". Throughout the memorial and museum, the sense of rage and despair are very palpable.

Past this line of statues (there are several more beyond these four), is the entry to the museum and memorial. At the gate, each guest is asked to write their nationality on a list. I've never had anywhere else ask us to do that. One could assume that this was just for statistical purposes, but I did look through the list quickly and I noted that there were no Japanese on it. Then again, if I were Japanese and coming here, I would sign as a Korean.

The grounds are quite dramatic, and make very good use of space to seem otherworldly.


Here a few pictures of photos and displays within the museum.

The Japanese entry into the city of Nanjing.

The Japanese entry into Suzhou, including a Japanese flag signed by soldiers to commemorate the day.

A torture device, a gibbet of sorts, in which the victim was tumbled. If you look closely, you will see that there are spikes lining the inside. There were actually far more gruesome implements and images, but some of the areas had guards standing by, and the Chinese prohibition of photography is always completely arbitrary. I didn't want to antagonize anyone.

Human remains in an excavation. This is in a different area than the pair that follows.

The centerpiece of the museum is a large excavated area of victims that have been left in situ, and the building has been built around them. It was quite a moving exhibit, even allowing for the distracting horror movie style music playing softly through the PA system.

A very interesting incident occurred for us here. A Chinese woman (probably around age 50), seemed to shadow John for part of the walk. When he stopped part way through, she stepped up to him and said, in English, "Do you believe it is real?!", in a tone that seemed to suggest that he must go forth and bear witness of what he saw there.

As I said, this place brings out real passions for the Chinese.

Watch this Place.

I haven't got around to/felt like making a blog post lately. That's too bad, because I've got a lot of good pictures, some good stories, some righteous indignations, a report on swine flu hysteria, and last but not least a lead on good Mexican food in Shanghai. You will just have to check back later. Maybe I'll muster some ambition this weekend.

So, as a little placeholder here, I thought I'd through in an interesting link to the total solar eclipse that is going to pass right over Shanghai and Suzhou on July 22. Unfortunately, that will be when we are back in the U.S.. That is actually disappointing, but life is like that sometimes, and it will be good to go home.