Tag Archives for Sichuan

» YUSHU EARTHQUAKE RELIEF EFFORTS: Fact vs. Fiction

On April 14, 2010, a 6.9-magnitude quake struck the predominantly ethnic Tibetan area of Yushu, Qinghai, in southern China. Over 2000 people were killed and over 12,000 were injured, according to “official” reports.

There is rarely agreement between “official” and actual accounts in China, especially when politicized matters involving Tibetans are concerned.

A friend of mine here in China speaks excellent Chinese and keeps a close eye on a number of important things. Today I am sharing some of his work. He writes:

A Chinese blogger combined pictures of pre-quake Yushu with this article by Ai Mo艾墨, “The Stage,” that appeared recently in Hong Kong’s Mingbao newspaper. The full text of that short article, which did not appear on the Mingbao website, is copied below, after my translation. [Some papers in Hong Kong face pressure over the publication of sensitive material and do not keep such material online. I have no direct knowledge of the track record of Mingbao in this regard. - ed]

This story points out the great cultural gulf between Tibetans and Han Chinese and the difficulties of doing culturally and religiously sensitive relief work.  Probably because of some ethnic chauvinism and perhaps because some think it will affect the Chinese-ness of Tibet, many Han Chinese find it hard to appreciate the profound cultural differences between the Han Chinese and the Tibetans. Well, many Chinese Buddhists understand, but the mainstream media doesn’t reflect their views much and the Chinese government strives to prevent the thousands of Chinese Buddhist who want to study in Tibetan monasteries from doing so.

The Stage

By Ai Mo 艾墨 (portions printed in Mingbao, Hong Kong)

A cold evening in Yushu, in the tents, a cadre sent by the province irrigated by high plateau barley wine, rubbed his unwashed dirty hands, and turned towards me, saying sincerely, “Young lady, look now, this natural disaster has been swiftly politicized. Got out of here as soon as you can. Leave this trouble spot.”

When I heard those words, I regretted the decision that I had already made to take a bus early the next day and leave Yushu.

For me, during these four days and three nights in Yushu, this place of cruel death and difficult survival, the word politics has a bit of a foul smell. During the rescue period where saving lives was the top priority, it laid low, it seemed to understand something important, this country plagued by disasters has finally learned that “lives are the most important thing”. However, when the 72 hour golden period for rescuing survivors from the ruins had passed, when the mammoth-scale cremations began, it seemed like something changed, the disaster area had become a stage.

That is something I don’t want to say, but yes, it had become a stage. The difference between the stage and reality is that in reality things happen and appear but on stage there is a director, a leading role, and a supporting role and they are sent on stage as needed. That is what Yushu was like. President Hu and Premier Wen had the top leading roles, given the nature of China, that is not anything to criticize, even the local Tibetans took the sincere tears of Prime Minister Wen and the promise of President Hu that they will have new homes like the words of Living Buddhas.

The official rescue troops had the secondary leading role. “We won’t be able to rescue any more people” the rescue workers knew as the fourth day after the earthquake began. One PAP officer who had done relief work after the Sichuan earthquake said that with the timber and earth construction of Yushu is not as good as the reinforced concrete of Sichuan since when the building collapses, unlike in Sichuan, there are no empty places left in which some people might find a place to breathe. So the miracles of survival are much rarer in Yushu.

On the streets of Yushu there were many officers and soldiers who had nothing to do. One could see many roadside ruins of houses that apparently nobody had sifted through to look for survivors. Although there were many flags and banners proclaiming the outstanding quality of this or that group of rescue troops.

Another journalist doing interviews in Yushu told me that he had the impression that there was a lot of “showing off” going on. That is not to say that the rescue troops were not working hard, they had to struggle hard to do their job given the difficulties of the physiological effects of high altitude, that nobody can criticize them. It was just that the so-called “showing off” was in inverse proportion to the amount of rescue work that they had actually done.

The disaster victims had the third leading role — that is to say the disaster victims who cooperated with interviews had the third leading role.

Many people like to ask, ‘What was the difference between the Sichuan earthquake and the Yushu earthquake?’ Nobody yet knows how to compare the scale of the earthquake. One hundred thousand people died in Sichuan, perhaps not as many as 10,000 died in Yushu. Yet that comparison isn’t meaningful and shouldn’t be made. As a journalist in the Yushu disaster area, I and my colleagues, strongest impression is that in Yushu you don’t see the wailing and pounding on the earth, and even rarely see weeping. If it were not for the sight of many collapsed buildings and the many homeless on the streets, you wouldn’t guess that many people had died here. People who have lost their relatives wear solemn and respectful faces. They read scriptures. They take the corpse to the monastery. They ask the monks and Living Buddhas to help them pass to the next world, and pray that they escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth and enter blissful happiness.

Ninety-seven percent of the population of Yushu is ethnic Tibetan. They believe in Tibetan Buddhism. For them, through the monasteries, life and death connect each of them to the Buddha and their ancestors. Very many journalists from mainland China didn’t find the “story they wanted” — the family of the victims did not display “extreme grief” and those rescued did not “shed grateful tears.” There is no way for you to share their sorrows. Their ideas about life and death are so far beyond your own that you cannot comprehend them. They — really, they don’t understand how to act according to your instructions. In Yushu, there is much thankfulness. A simple old Tibetan mother can shed tears of gratitude and say “Long Live the Communist Party”. But performing to script according to needs is not what they do — they are not “grateful” or “sing praises” in a particular circumstance because that is what the script requires. Take a look at the mainland China TV broadcasts on the disaster, you will see that these Tibetans just don’t act that way.

On the director’s stage, the monks were the only supporting players forced to the margins of the stage. This despite the fact that in real life, these people in red robes have the most important leading role of all, even more important than the role of the rescue troops.

Two days after I left Yushu, I heard from a journalist colleague that monks not from Yushu had already been “admonished to leave” Yushu with the reason given to “ensure the effectiveness of relief operations”. Some had driven several hundred kilometers to Yushu from their monasteries in Ganzi Prefecture in Sichuan Province, others monks hurried from Qinghai, Gansu and many parts of the Tibetan Autonomous Region to help. They don’t understand specialized relief work but they understand the Kampa dialect and they know how to assist the souls of the dead to pass on to the next world. They know how to truly console the people of Yushu who have lost relatives. Even before official help arrived, the monks were making donations in the disaster area. Disaster victims received from the monks noodles, mineral water and even hot porridge. But what does that matter? This is a stage and the supporting role can never become the leading role. At the very least, the audience that watches the stage as it is broadcast will never see this.

On the stage of the Chinese Central TV disaster evening program, there were the names of companies that had given one million, two million, 10 million or 20 million RMB, and individuals who contributed and wanted to do something good. But what truly moved them was the idea of  themselves doing good. For the National Day of Mourning, the state organs forbade all entertainment activities, including on stage and online. The Yushu disaster area was far away but they said in chorus, “This evening we are all Yushu people.”

My dears, I really do have to tell you, that is not wounded Yushu. That is only a stage.

» LOVE IS THE WATER UNDER THE WATER

The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.

– Wilhelm Reich

Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.

What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?

When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.

In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid; even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?

When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.

Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism, it’s a dictatorial form of coordinatorism) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.

This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metasticized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.

Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.

As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.

And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” (To be fair, the Chinese mostly see it as just a word, not as a word with literal meaning, much like people in the U.S. rarely think of Chicago, Manhattan or Seattle as Indian words with actual, you know, meaning.)

That said, I have been called meiguoren (美国的, literally, “beautiful country person”), probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and it’s own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?


Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and ascending commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.

At the beginning of this, I quoted Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud’s cohort and fellow psychoanalytic theorist, who was the victim of the only U.S. government-ordered book burning in history, and who died in prison, a mad man, after being imprisoned for what he dared to think and write. (Sound familiar?) Freud thought people were violent sadistic animals, who had to be controlled and taught to “civilize” themselves for the good of society and stability. You can fairly say that Freud’s ideas were status quo – he never asked whether conforming to a sick society was natural or not; it was just assumed that being “well-regulated” and conforming was desirable and healthy. This makes me think of the deeply moving and staggeringly far-reaching speech Martin Luther King gave (presented in 1963, at WMU, and well-worth reading if you aren’t already familiar with it), where he attacks the concept of being “maladjusted” in a society to which he did not want to “adjust”:

Reich thought people were loving and good, and that it was the mutilations of society and government, the imposition of unnatural order, that caused neuroses and dysfunction. It was the systematic and unnatural control of people, in other words, that caused them to be violent, and to behave irrationally. Think of a house cat going slowly loopy, eating houseplants that make it sick and playing manically with a toy mouse when all it really wants to do is be outside, eating real mice, rutting at the appointed time, and following its nature. Reich thought eros was the highest expression of human health and actualization, and that it should be given free reign and support if we were to link hands with our higher selves. There are a great many things to take from Reich’s theory and story, but the one I think of most often, and which springs most readily to mind looking at this little Chinese girl caught between repulsion and friendliness is this: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.

» PLAY GO! (玩 围棋!)

“{It is} something unearthly . . . If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.” — Emanuel Lasker, international Chess Master

First things first: No, outside of there being white and black pieces placed in alternating turns, it’s nothing like Othello. And it was invented by the Chinese, but is most often referred to by its spiffy Japanese name: Go.

Go, or wéiqí, was created by Chinese emperor Yao about 4000 years ago and was allegedly invented to help a stupid son learn to think better. Or it was invented by Chinese tribal warlords as a strategy aid. Or it began as a fortune-telling medium.

The reality of the game is more interesting than the lore:  Go (碁 in Japanese), baduk (바둑 in Korean), and wéiqí (围棋 in the original Chinese), is a game with true majesty for those who devote themselves to it. For its devotees and for mathematicians in almost equal measure, the game inspires reverence and awe. Due to its extremely open-ended play and staggering mathematical possibilities for variation, the game is by far the hardest to teach computers. That fact, along with the clip below, from Darren Aronofsky’s film, π (or Pi) sealed it: Go was the game for me.

“Listen to me. The possibilities of game play are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. That is the truth of our world…there is no simple pattern. — From π, or Pi

Until recently, Go resisted a high level of mastery by computer intelligence, but advances in artificial intelligence and computing power appear to be making lamentable headway. I’d like to think maybe it was just human beings manipulating things behind the scenes that led to this breakthrough. Call me a human sentimentalist and anti-silicon bigot if you like, but I’m just not into the idea of carbon-based people being bested or replaced by our silicon-based creations. I interviewed a Carnegie Mellon robotics expert, Hans Moravec, several years ago, about a book he’d published arguing that people like me are just squeamish and failing to see that robots and machines are simply “children of our minds.” And I can see his point, in a way. If I were someone who spent all of my time with machines and mostly tinkered away happily in my basement, sans human contact, I might find the ineffable qualities of human experience trivial as well. I might mistake a program for a child.

Speaking of children: Watch out for them and do not take them lightly when playing Go! Many are much better than your calcified adult mind might think. When a friend and I took a dawn train from San Francisco to Palo Alto last year to play at a “qualifying” tournament (to become official card-carrying members of the American Go Association), we faced mostly skilled Korean and Japanese teenagers. And in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’m presently staying and receiving instruction from an 8-dan master, I lost to one of his many students, a 12-year-old kid dressed very oddly like an American Boy Scout.

Earlier today (late-March), I had lunch at a Buddhist temple in Chengdu with my wéiqí teacher and five Russian business students (one from Siberia, the rest from Moscow). Before meeting them, I had fancy visions in my head of meeting some Serious Russian Go Players, but Svetlana, Alexandra, Dmitrii, Anzhela, and another woman who was too cool to offer up a card, turned out to be newbies who were drawn to the game more for its reputation than for anything more substantive. I learned during our meal that they had contacted my teacher to learn more about the game because they thought the principles of Go might be useful if applied to business. They wanted to know: what competitive edge might Go-playing give to aspiring businesspeople?

During the lunch, I wondered if I might have offended any of the Russians when I said that Go had ruined me for chess. “Why?” asked Dmitrii pointedly. “Well,” I explained, wary of giving offense to a game that many Russians revere and are quite skillful at, “chess is mechanistic and deterministic, whereas Go is more open-ended, with many more possible plays and patterns to understand. That’s why it’s easier to teach a computer to play chess than Go. In some ways I think it rewards creativity more than memorization.”

One odd footnote to this meeting was that while writing this post, I thought to hop over and email the Russians about some of the questions they’d had, about travel Go sets, about good Go tutorial books, and about online servers for Go players. (Several of them offered “visiting help” if I made good on my plan to take the Trans-Siberian train back to Moscow before returning to the U.S.) Every single email address bounced and came up as “invalid.” So either they were traveling with bogus business cards for reasons you could speculate endlessly over, Gmail was being blocked by Russia, or the internet or IT department at the school that issued their cards (Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a real institution) was having a particularly bad day.

Whatever the case, they paid for a bunch of delicious food and I do believe I was the most ravenous of the eaters present.

But I digress. Play Go. Immerse yourself: Start watching Hikaru No-Go, a highly addictive Japanese manga series credited with reviving the popularity of Go in Japan. Then check out Sensei’s Library and learn about the theory, practice, and culture of Go. Learn the ABC’s through an interactive tutorial at The Interactive Way To Go. Solve ranked and categorized problems at Goproblems.com. Then log-on to one of the two major online Go servers: KGS or IGS. Both are free and allow records of games for review. KGS tends to be friendlier and new players can often find helpful instruction and tutorial games with other members.

Then, for a game, email me or come find me on KGS, username: loudcanary.