Capitalists: Taking All Comers

Globalization entails an undeniably creepy element of reliability, especially when it comes to food. Everywhere you go it seems as if corporate cancers have begun to feed on (as well as feed) the locals, the whole world becoming like a backdrop to a bad science fiction novel.

Even amidst the most ancient food cultures and in the most impoverished settings, you can find Ronald McDonald or Colonel Sanders, heralding a new era for the people who stand beneath their florescent glow.

But when we see so many brands, like recurring nightmarish memories, situated in bizarre contexts, it is not so simple as to claim cultural imperialism on the part of the west.

I mean, people like the stuff. I know I do.

I'm a pretty dedicated coffee drinker so Starbucks is not only a comfort but a necessity here in China. And not just for foreigners like myself.

"I just like to go there on the weekends, and just sit there for a few hours," a chinese friend told me while we were walking through Xidan shopping district, after having remarked on the pervasive presence of Starbucks in Beijing.

And why shouldn't he? The environment that Starbucks has created at many of its venues here is not only cozy, but also incorporates Chinese design and art. Starbucks, like other brands, has made an effort to be region-specific.

Starbucks has green tea lattes and a meal at KFC comes with a side of rice rather than mashed potatoes.

I have read quite a bit about the success of KFC, McDonalds, and other fast food chains in China, but frankly, one doesn't have to read much to understand the phenomenon.

The price point for these places is a little higher than traditional Chinese fare, but the expanding wallets of Chinese customers seem to match their expanding waistlines.

At Home in China

The conclusion that where you live is who you are might seem overblown, but its certainly reflected in the homes I've seen in China. The home is one of the most intimate spaces and we fill it with things that tell us stories about our own lives - relics, status symbols, indulgences. When you buy your first home you make it a shrine to yourself, defining your space and letting it define you. The behavior is hardly culture-specific, but the objects you choose may be.

Early in my stay I spent a weekend with a couple who lived in the Beijing suburbs just beyond the fourth ring. I had been sent to live with them to experience a "typical" Chinese home and family and what I experienced was anything but "Chinese."

If they did not live in Beijing, their gated community would be fit the archetype of the American suburbs: space for two cars, a jacuzzi for the master bathroom, and a full living room set situated around a television larger than the couch.

The reality was perhaps unsavory, but increasingly typical.

This revelation was hardly a shock, but it did make me aware of the fact that my own petty cultural expectations would not always be met. Chinese tastes for western homes can be explained in much the same way as our own: they are not only affordable, but also in style.

Dai Shuo, a friend and tutor of mine, recently moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Beijing that his family lived in for a number of years with his girlfriend where the two had the opportunity to decorate the space however they chose to.

The apartment is still in transition, but many of the materials that they have selected so far are, not surprisingly, non-traditional.

"My parents chose this light," Dai Shuo said, directing my attention towards a chandelier that projected red, green, blue, and orange light through fake crystals onto the ceiling and walls.

Looking up at the little light which could turn the atmosphere to anything from "strip club" to "sanctuary" I was reminded once again of my useless nagging prejudices.

In bemoaning the advance of western culture I had inadvertently saddled the Chinese with some a responsibility above my own to cherish their ancient culture. It has taken some time, and I'm still moaning, but I'm trying to let it go, at least for my sanity.

The Original Free Market

Beijing is an international city and my neighborhood is full of foreigners, but one of the only places where I continue to get strange looks is at an outdoor market. This is where the Chinese shop and where watching a laowai negotiate the price of peppers is something of a novelty.

Supermarkets might feed the stomach and shopping malls can feed the ego, but only an outdoor market feeds all the senses. Outdoor markets arent just about food or goods - they are, after all a sort of precursor to the all-in-one store.

There is also an undeniable social element. Vendors give a face to your food.

This isn't to say that an item, whether it's a grapefruit or a Gameboy, has any greater mark of authenticity or quality just for being there. The open-air market is full of guarantees from the mouths of hucksters, not written or disclaimed in the fine print, so there is an implicit tradeoff of authenticity of goods for authenticity of experience.

The hordes of people that can be found in a market place on any given day are a reassurance that this is one cultural staple that is not going to be scratched from the urban landscape any time soon.

A Young Professional, an Old City

If you want to get a feel for the population size of Beijing, try taking the subway. Once the flood of people has pressed you up to a pole and you are sucking air from a vent in the ceiling, the scale of the city should become clear.

In Beijing words like "overpopulation" are not hypothetical scenarios, but lived, not to mention inconvenient realities. Just trying to get from A to B, whether by subway or expressway, can be a complicated - and sometimes harrowing - venture.

I recently sat down with Roy, an urban planning student who explains that they are putting in around 10 new subway lines for the city filled so far beyond its capacity.

"It would be unbelievable in other countries," Roy said, "but not in China."

Most of the masses, he went on to say, are not even Beijingers, but people from elsewhere in China. "Everyone wants to live in Beijing," he said with more than a little self congratulation that he was among those who had made it.

In this respect, Roy is a bit of a paradox in and of himself.

He is no native to the city, and while he has spent the last several years studying the ways in which people like himself are stressing the limits of the infrastructure, he has no intention of leaving.

Old Wall, New Invaders

I've been told that you can see the Great Wall from space, which is good because all you can see from the ground are the tourists. The wall is a Unesco World Heritage sight and a veritable wonder of the world, but its heralding as a "must see" has been its destruction.

The wall is, no doubt, a marvel of engineering (not to mention hubris and paranoia). Somewhat overly optimistically, I had come to the Great Wall hoping for to see some storied relic of the past, something beautiful, something haunting. Haunting my visit was not, but telling it was.

When I bellied up to the t-shirt counter with the rest of the tourists to grab some quick mementos I reflected on the phrase printed on my shirt, "I Climbed the Great Wall," it said. And yes, I thought, I did, but what else did I do?

Maybe I am too critical (the verdict is in), but the symbolism and arresting grandeur is quickly squandered by the hordes of tourist who mob the attraction at the designated points from which it can be accessed.

When I arrived back in Beijing, proudly toting my humorous t-shirt, I was informed by my roommate that I, like most people, had not seen the true great wall, but rather the Disneyland-style production put on for the tourists. He, he pointed out, could take me to the true wall, the one that was slowly crumbling to pieces and falling down the hillsides that it spans.

Accessing the wall in more remote areas could be more dangerous he said, but when you go to see the real ruins he said, there are no lines, no handrails, and no one pushing t-shirts.

Hutong 2010

When we think of Chinese cities of the past, which is mostly in the fantastical way that hollywood has presented them, we think of grey brick and tile roofing, courtyards and ginkgo trees. We think, more or less, of hutongs, the iconic, insular alleyway communities that once made up the fabric of Chinese cities.

But as most people know by now, these traditional communities are being swept away by the flood of capital. It is no longer the new neighborhoods, but the old ones that feel out of place in Beijing.

My advice: see them while you can because while many pieces of Chinese culture are transforming rather than disappearing, these intimate urban settings are soon to be all but non-existent.

Country People, City Kids

Almost every home in the village - only a 40-minute car ride from Beijing - looks the same as theirs; windows framed in rough timber, covered in peeling paint or paper, a small courtyard full of vegetables with a blackened stove sitting in the corner, and an interior plastered with garage-sale-grade catholic iconography. Such was the home in which I was sitting on the first day of my weekend stay in Yanzikou village, a small community of about 260 farmers - now with internet access.

“Can I see the computer?” I asked the teenage boy and his older sister, and was taken to a room with a bed the size of a car seat, a few pieces of run-down furniture and a desktop computer jammed in the corner.

Just on the edge of the girl’s sea foam colored table, weathered and flaking from neglect was a pocket mp3 player, it’s red LED indicator blinking obliviously to its surroundings.

This is the modern age in rural China, I thought.

Material ambitions have outstripped the means to achieve them and while people may be living in houses without heat or proper plumbing, they have IP addresses and big screen TVs. That with Internet access comes the opportunity for all manner of enlightenment and apathy is no surprise, but against a rural, sometimes seemingly medieval backdrop, the change is more jarring.

In a small Chinese village most people are related and you do your social networking through your family, not your Facebook. Everyone in China gets referred to as “uncle” or “auntie,” but in these cases, the terms are literal and when you envision your friend’s you probably don’t see a thumbnail picture with their name under it.

As is the case most everywhere, the younger generation is more tech-savvy than their parents, but what that means is not only ability, but also access. Put simply, kids living in the village are no longer confined to it in terms of educational, cultural, or social horizons.

Take the girl for example: she not only uses the computer to earn a degree and one day pursue a job, but also keep up on her American sitcoms, and manage her social life. Not only that, but she also uses it to manage her spiritual life.

Her attendance of a school in the city keeps her from going to the Catholic church in the village, so she listens to sermons online for touch-of-a-button spiritual guidance. For the young student and aspiring professional the Internet has superseded, at the very least out of ease, her community as a source of council.

While their parent’s are more attached to the television as entertainment, the children and young adults have accepted the computer and the Internet as something much more – a cultural hearth.

A Southern Capitol Plagued by the Past

Walking around Nanjing this weekend, the city felt like it was still full of ghosts. The glossy new veneer thrown over the old capitol city cannot begin to cover up the horrors of its recent past; the history of the place seeps through even the name of the city itself. And although flows of capital have given Nanjing new life, but there is still a lot of bad blood.

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937, an event of unmentionable violence, can only be imagined with visions of brutality of the most perverse order.

But for the Chinese, the event has endured in the popular imagination not only as a tragedy, but a symbol of Japanese wrongdoing and a landmark of nationalism. The wounds left by the event, it seems, have been perennially reopened and the younger generation still grapples with the pain and are still taught to be outraged.

As I entered the Nanjing Massacre Museum, one of my chinese teachers, a young, well-educated woman told me, with great indignation, that the Japanese had muddied the event to the point of outright dishonesty in their text books.

"History is history." She said, as if to say that the past was indisputable, and that atrocities should not be denied.

The fact that she did not see the hypocrisy of the comment, in light of Chinese practices of academic and historical censorship, was simply stunning. But she, like most young people, had been conditioned to resent the Japanese.

Those who experience atrocities of war are marked for life, and little can be done to change their prejudices, but to find such sentiments among a younger, better educated, and more well-connected generation left me at a loss for words and with a head full of questions.

Mostly, these questions were about China's feasibility as a superpower, not because of their culture or people, but because of their government's influence on the two. Every country is nationalistic to some extent, but when that nationalism has resonated in the hearts of the young, I begin to worry.

If The New York Times' video in which young people at a music festival burn a Japanese flag is any indication, the Chinese youth culture is going in a dark and frightening direction. Rock music is supposed to unite people, but from the looks of the footage, it's just background noise to the hateful zealotry of young nationalists.

One imagines that the connectivity of this capitalist century encourages global citizenship and cross-cultural understanding, but if the youth - the most connected people in China - harbor such fervent animosity, the reality of capitalism without democracy seems bleak.

The Best things in Life are... Knockoffs?

I was at the little supermarket here at Peking University, as I am almost every week, buying a few western dietary necessities. Glancing down at a plastic-wrapped parcels of apples I noticed that they were,in fact, Washington apples. My head spun at the improbability of these delicious red orbs being here in Beijing. Food miles be damned, I thought. I'm getting these.

I returned to my room, ready to crack into these crisp, fresh delights of the pacific Northwest. But when I began to peel the familiar little sticker off, I noticed that there was something peculiar about the insignia. First of all, it wasn't coming off. What demented Washingtonian had crazyglued the stickers on? Then I realized that these were not in fact "WASHINGTON" apples, but the produce of "WASHNGTON."

Counterfeit... fruit?

Now, barring the possibility that there is a Washngton, China that is famous for it's produce, I would say that these were elaborate fakes.

As fakes go though, these were impressive. Exempting the typographical error, the iconography was spot on, as is the case with a lot of the counterfeit goods here. For a moment I felt like a dumb foreigner who had gone looking for a western product at cut rate prices and been duped, but I consoled myself in the reassurance that the Chinese bought these fakes by the barge load.

The Silk Market, which is the most popular and iconic place to buy knockoffs, has universal appeal to westerners and Beijingers alike. The fakes at the Silk Market are more than passable, even flawless in many cases. But it isn't generally the quality that people are interested in, it is the iconography of a designer label.

The namesake of a brand or a designer seems to be more impactful than the credibility of the article itself. My beloved Washington apples are somewhat analogous to a "Duke & Gabbano" belt buckle or a "Nokig" cell phone. The typography is similar, the look is decent, and the attitude is, "why not?"

"Ipones" can be bought for a few hundred RMB and an pair of "Levis" goes for clearance prices at the most, but buyers are hardly in the dark about the brazen misrepresentations of brand. So whatever admiration there is for western goods is far overshadowed for the irreverent passion for fakes. Even if the fakes aren't the best quality, the label itself serves a need of the mind without the high price tag.

As for needs of the stomach, the apples were still delicious, even if they weren't from Washington.

City Malls, Mall City

Recently I feel like I’ve been touring a lot of shopping malls. It sounds really horrible, I know. But I didn’t exactly plan for it. I kept running into the reality of having to visit a mall for this or that – maybe a restaurant was there, maybe I had to get something for my camera, maybe I just needed socks. Whatever my reasons have been, I keep encountering the shopping mall. If my experience is any indication, shopping malls are just as much a part of life in Beijing as they are in the United States. And in a way, shopping malls make me feel at home, unfortunately.

Walking through a mall is somewhat of a paradoxical experience. Malls are both inviting and alienating, attractive and repulsive, salient and innocuous. I say innocuous because so many things are going on around you, acting on your senses, that you can’t possibly keep track of all of your physical surroundings. Standing in a shopping mall corridor is like walking through a video game; so many stimuli rush past you that you cant even keep track of details that would otherwise be glaring and obvious. From the outside, malls in Beijing are often nondescript, sometimes underground or incorporated into office buildings, but inside is a commercial funhouse of shining floors and attractive shops primed to receive the newfound wealth of the newfound wealthy.

As a customer you are selecting the stores and the stores are selecting you – they vie for your attention and you receive their messages about yourself and your world. And the messages people in Beijing are receiving – the messages they want to receive – are mostly about the romance of material things. Beijingers, like everyone, are being sold the intangible qualities rather than the substantive ones - the qualities that make things more special and you more special for having them.

Shopping mall culture, the culture of things for the sake of things, might signal things to different people, and I’m not prepared to say that it’s an indicator of anything besides a universal passion for newness. It’s unfair to cast the expectation of reverence of one’s own culture on any country that happens to be a couple thousand years older than the US. Besides, I'm pretty sure the Cultural Revolution shattered any hope that the refinements of traditional material culture could remain intact.

Without being too judgmental, I would still say that shopping malls are awful, but not because of what they sell. It’s the culture of shopping malls and the lifestyles that they create that I am resentful of, not the people who choose the new and vulgar over the old and elegant.

798

Most of the time I think of capitalism as an obvious perpetrator of culture-cide, but in the case of the arts, things become more blurred. Even though 798, a military factory transformed into a once affordable artists community, seems to have gone high buck, the art showcased there still presents the strongest visual culture I’ve seen so far that is distinguishably “Chinese.”

Last week I stumbled around a few galleries and studios and while a lot of the art was culturally indistinct, good deal, maybe even a majority of the pieces were China-centric. I’m no expert on Chinese classical art, but sufficed to say that they had an aesthetic that echoed the classical, but which broke away from classical forms in terms of materials or subject. I saw classical symbols and materials twisting into new forms, self-aware and emboldened.

More heartening than anything though, was the fact that a lot of the artists actually had something to say about China itself – and that people were buying it. I won’t get into a protracted discussion of whether or not sold art is in some way tainted, because that’s for the artist to decide. And everyone selling art at 798 must have made up their minds by now. After all, even Leonardo needed patrons.

So maybe glossy boutiques and over-furnished coffeehouses are an incurable cancer that eventually afflicts any artists-colony-turned-yuppie-colony, but the malignancy here has yet to be seen. Hopefully the hipsters overrunning New China won’t just turn out to be a scourge of culture-consuming tourists, but zealous investors in arts and other staples of cultural discourse.

Far From Home, Familiar

The cabbie smoked all of the way from the airport to Peking University, breathing back little puffs of smoke that would be my first taste of Beijing air. I didn’t really mind, though because I was more focused on the city around me. But squinting through the thick smog and 1 am darkness, I saw nothing but screaming lights and skyscrapers. And all I could think was, “where is Beijing?”

To be honest, even after a month, I’m still asking the same question.

People always say that China has finally entered the world stage, but from where I’m standing it looks more like the world has entered China. And the global offerings of choice for the Chinese are undeniably, almost invariably western. The torrential flows of capital into China have created a landslide of consumers yearning to perennially redefine themselves.

Often times Beijing has just seemed like a bad dream, a consumerist nightmare. Don’t get me wrong. The energy here is beyond description, but so is everything else. Beijing overloads your senses and for a while I was reeling from the sheer amount of commercial stimuli and its frightening similarity to the US. The only thing that’s different is the scale, which compared to the United States feels steroidal.

What some might call surface changes, the adjustments of a culture to the capitalist system, seem like much more to me. Not just western fashions, but western lifestyles, too are becoming more and more appealing as people move out of old neighborhoods, away from each other, and into high-rise apartments and far-flung suburbs. To an American, a Middle American to be more specific, the aftermath of the commercial siege of Chinese culture looks eerily familiar to the sort of shopping mall surroundings I grew up with. The whole city, and maybe even the culture are up for grabs in the new economy and are being sold at the lowest measures of value: money.

People here are refurbishing their lifestyles, their lives, and when all’s said and done probably their culture - not just their apartments.