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Thursday, June 22, 2006

"There's Something Happening Here"

3:56 PM

I quote Stephen Still's classic protest song in the title of this post because it immediately came to mind during a conversation I had yesterday with an exceedingly knowledgeable China scholar, and then even more strongly when I read Joseph Kahn's report in today's The New York Times on student rioting at a college in China's Henan Province.

Why? Because for sometime many of us who live and work here in China have been feeling a certain rumbling tension just beneath the surface of Chinese society. We, of course, felt it later than did our Chinese friends and colleagues, whom have been aware for quite a spell that "Everybody look what's going down" for them wasn't just another lyric in the Buffalo Springfield's anti-war anthem vintage 1966.

Perhaps the Central Government felt it before anyone else, which would explain many political decisions that have confounded even the most experienced old and new China hands.

Below are the opening graphs of Mr. Kahn's article, with a link to the rest of it in The New York Times. If you have any interest in China, you need to read all of it.

XINZHENG, China, June 21 -- Shengda College in central China has a diverse curriculum, foreign faculty members to teach English and a manicured campus, where weeping willows shade a recreational lake.

But many students paid the college's rich tuition -- at $2,500 a year one of the highest in China -- primarily because Shengda promised that their diplomas would bear the name of its parent, Zhengzhou University, a more prestigious national-level institution, and not mention Shengda at all.

So when the graduating class of 2006 received diplomas that read "Zhengzhou University Shengda Economic, Trade and Management College," students erupted last Friday, ransacking classrooms and administrative offices, shattering car windows, scuffling with the police [...].

The protest, still simmering on Shengda's now tightly guarded campus, reflects the reality that the country's exploding population of college students must grapple with petty fraud, substandard instruction and an intensely competitive job market. Students, a traditional bellwether of political volatility in China, have become a fresh source of unrest in a society already angered by land grabs, unpaid wages and environmental abuse.

Once a magic ticket into the government or business elite, college has become an expensive gamble for millions of cash-short families who find that even the most prestigious degrees cannot guarantee success in a market economy.

Please continue reading at: The New York Times.

3:56 PM / Editor / permalink 2 comments

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2 Comments:

Quoting Nick Kristoff from a June 20 (updated on 21) NY Times Select piece:

" I don't see how the Communist Party dictatorship can long survive the Internet, at a time when a single blog can start a prairie fire."

He'd started 2 incendiary blogs in Chinese and waited to see how fast they got taken down. It didn't take very long, but before it was squelched, thousands of other Chinese bloggers had linked to him.

Yes, something's happening ... Stills wasn't just prophesizing our own era, he wrote an anthem for its seedlings as well.

Ellen

By Anonymous, at 11:39 PM

Dear Ellen,

I had read and noted the Kristof piece you mention. I did not post it here because The New York Times' lawyers contacted me recently and told me to stop putting TimesSelect pieces in full on the site. Of course, they were absolutely right, it was a copyright infringement and I was actually quite embarrassed to be caught in violation of same. After all, I am a content provider and do not want my intellectual property to be "stolen" either.

They were quite nice about it; I can use the material in my teaching, but I can not put it up on The LongBow Papers.

With love,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 1:20 PM