Frog in a Well

Simon World’s HK Dave has a nice discussion of recent Chinese suicide statistics.

The Independent of Britain ran a story on the high suicide rate in China – 250,000 people killed themselves last year; according to the article they were victims of the country’s fast changing society. Unfortunately, numbers on that scale look shocking to anyone not from China, including the article’s author. You would need to look at the rate per 100,000, which is the measure adopted by most countries globally. There you discover that China is slightly lower than the global norm of 25 per 100,000 as provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2000. However, that rate is certainly increasing if you compare it to the rate of China in 1999 of 13.0 for men and 14.8 for women, a worrying trend.

The first chart here suggests that 1999 might have been something of a trough, in statistical terms, so that the long-term rates are still open to question, but the second one suggests that suicide is the leading cause of death for all Chinese, which is astounding.

For homework, here’s the detailed country reports (PDFs, but small) for the US (surprisingly stable over the last half century), Japan (huge peak in older males since the Bubble burst), and China mainland, 1987-99 (almost zero gender differential) and HK.

One of the things I came across recently is a 文史资料 piece by 杨芳毓. Yang was a returned student who was a subordinate to the Sichuan warlord Liu Xiang in the 1930s and also served as the director of the Chongqing electric steel-smelting factory (重庆电力炼钢厂). In the article he mentions the seven steps to a better province that Liu was in favor of.

1. Is provincial loyalty. Yang says that they must counter Chiang Kai-shek’s slogans口号with one of爱国爱川，反共抗日(Love the nation, Love Sichuan, oppose the Communists, resist Japan.

-This one is pretty obviously an attempt to establish provincial identity in the context of national identity, in part by emphasizing love of province but also by elevating the struggle with Japan to equality with the struggle with Communism (As opposed to Chiang’s focus on the Communists.)
The thing that struck me was the emphasis on slogans, which I have seen before but never really thought about. I have seen lots of references to debates about 口号, long before the communists come to power. Often a conference or meeting would apparently regard the slogans they came up with as being the chief products of their work. Where did these fit into the culture of political debate in China?

2. Using the contradictions between Chiang and the imperialists. Here Yang talks about using British and French-flagged vessels to ship weapons upriver from Shanghai. Chiang was aware of this, but powerless to stop it.

-This one made me think some about the problems with 文史资料 evidence. I would have little problem using this as evidence that Liu was buying weapons direct from the foreigners in the 30’s. I am really suspicious of the framing device of exploiting contradictions between Chiang and the imperialists. Is that really how Yang would have phrased it in the 1930’s? Or is it an overlay of the fact that he was writing this after 1949?

More (possibly) to come

[via Simon World] An expert has outlined the six most significant problems facing China, which is to say, facing China’s government:

• Demographics
• Energy and Raw Resource Consumption
• Ecological deterioration
• Urbanization
• Regional Gaps and Rural Economics
• Sustainable Development and Power

This is an interesting, if entirely unsurprising, list, because it focuses on what the government can and should do for the Chinese people, but leaves out the three most significant challenges to the government itself:

• Ethnic tensions and national identity
• Political liberalization, aka democratization
• Information access and control, aka censorship
• Update: regarding the second and third above, see this

In answer to the above six problems, the government has offered, in rather stereotypical Chinese fashion, a 45-year plan with a slogan: “Three Zero Growths,” meaning stabilization of population, energy and resource use, and environmental decay. There’s some positive aspects, including education and tech sector growth, life expectancy increases, and “wealth creation” though all of those are processes that will occur pretty naturally, if the government doesn’t interfere with them, so that’s not the ambitious aspect of this plan. The continued committment of the Chinese government to mass social and economic engineering (and to retention of its near-absolute authority) is perhaps the most significant thing this tells us.

Watching the coverage of the New Orleans flood I was reminded of the 1998 Yangtze floods, and it occurred to me that this is yet another example of how China is becoming a liberal (or maybe Confucian) nation state. In the Yangtze floods the state made a big deal about the work done by the PLA to help people. Although I can’t find them now, there were pictures of PLA soldiers locking arms to hold back the floodwaters with their bodies. From this point of view, the flood was a godsend to the state, as it gave them yet another chance to show how deeply they were concerned with the well-being of the people. On top of that, the PLA got into the act, Maoist-style enthusiasm was in, and no matter what the state did the problem was sure to get better.

The New Orleans floods are an example of state incompetence, of course, but also of how deep the new libertarian, post-liberal state has gone in the U.S. Yes, there has been outrage from the likes of Kevin Drum about the new dispensation, but the people who think the U.S. government should leave things like disaster relief to private charities have won pretty much all the elections in my lifetime. (Yes, Dems win on occasion, but only those who look as conservative as possible.) 9/11 was an example of something that was able, for a while, to pull together an atomized society, but apparently the Big Easy is not. I suspect that this will become even more apparent as reconstruction starts. The current American administration would of course find any sort of technocratic, state-led role in reconstruction ideologically unpalatable, but most imaginable American governments would find it hard to win support (and money) for a visionary plan to rebuild a city full of music and black people.
I assume that were a historic Chinese city to be wiped out there would be a strong, state-led effort to rebuild it just like before only better, in part because (Suzhou, Xian, whatever) is a sacred symbol of the national culture and in part because the state has a strong desire to be seen as leading the nation into the future, and to be seen as competent technocrats. The U.S. is looking very post-national right now.

* Either a line from Bob Dylan’s Crash on the Levee, or advice to flood victims from the director of FEMA. Take your pick.

A huge underground complex, according to this site which a student sent me (He’s working on an urban history project). Is this common knowledge among those who’ve been in Beijing, and what, if anything, does it mean?

Chinese food culture

There is a current series on Amsterdam on Slate where Seth Stevenson suggests that the Dutch are almost never seen walking and eating. Americans, of course do it all the time, and of course we also drive and eat. This got me to thinking about Chinese food culture and wondering if I had been behaving badly. In China and especially in Taiwan there is of course a lot of street food, and I of course have eaten a lot of it. One of the things I don’t remember seeing very often is someone eating and walking. People buying 生煎包子 and taking them home in plastic bags I remember. I can recall at least a few people getting 包子 for breakfast and parking themselves on the street right near the place and eating, but that was rare. (I did it all the time, so I am pretty sure on this one.) Lots of places seemed to have little tables for quick eating, whereas for Americans they might not be needed. Eating breakfast at your desk at work seemed more common, or at least more obvious.

None of this is all that surprising, of course. Watson’s Golden Arches East had some stuff on how the all-powerful arches had failed to change the cultures of eating food in East Asia. I am not surprised to see that American food culture is not universal. What I would like to know is.

1. Is my impression that Chinese don’t eat on the move correct? I was not really paying attention. I’m not really talking about things like lunchboxes, but the American style of eating a hotdog while walking down the street. (Is ice cream an exception? I eat a lot of ice cream while walking, but don’t remember others doing it.)
2. If it is less common, where does it happen? Is this culture changing, and if so how?