Christmas in My Home Town

Christmas in China is a (by now, predictably) strange affair. Chinese society, although pervaded by a blithe ignorance of almost all religious principles and an at best hazy understanding of what Westerners do with their leisure time broadly conceived, is unexpectedly titillated by the coming of an alien holiday that almost no one knows how to celebrate. I was shocked to come upon parts of downtown Changsha - a city with a barely-there foreign presence - festooned with Christmas decorations and blaring relatively accurate versions of holiday standards. I understand this to be a recent development in Chinese culture, which is a most distressing notion: they seem to have skipped a few steps in the evolution of Christmas and jumped right to the secularized conclusion (inelegant commercialism) without savoring the intermediate stages of piety (elegant commercialism).

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair

Foreign visitors to Xi'an, China's former capital and currently the capital of Shaanxi Province (Administrative Region #15), sometimes report feeling underwhelmed after visiting the city's main attraction, the feted Terracotta Army. Located in the Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, constructed about 2200 years ago, the throng of a few thousand uniquely carved statues cannot reasonably be labeled unimpressive. Similarly, the statistical estimates that accompany the display are staggering. You don't need a degree in Taylorism to know a whopping number of man-hours when you see it. No, the display's weakness lies in the lusterless milieu it inhabits. Unlike the majestic environs of old Xi'an, which draw on ancient Chinese architecture to cultivate a sense of the elusive and the recondite, the pits from which the statues have been excavated are merely mounds of dirt in an open-air chamber that feels something like a hangar. The statues stand erect but incomplete beside a motley assortment of ruins that didn't quite survive the trip. Qin Shi Huang, the emperor at whose command a few hundred thousand men are said to have labored to craft the army, wanted a legion to help him rebuild his empire in another world. Instead, they are a savage monument to extravagance in this one.

The ones we know we know

The issue of what constitutes a debatable proposition becomes predictably fraught in a society where all of the most salient ones are treated as settled questions. But Chinese students don’t really buy into those formulations. In fact, they know when they’re being duped; they just don’t seem to mind all that much. Dozens of students can openly and vigorously debate topics like “Is the stability of society rooted in law or morality?” for hours without managing to evince, or even graze the surface of, a single opinion about their country’s public policy. When one class was prompted to produce controversial topics for persuasive speeches, almost everyone wrote down some (mangled) version of “Should Hunan University make us do [onerous activity] even in the frigid winter from which there is no escape?”, yet not a single person raised the most obvious objection that arises in these conditions: shouldn’t the government pull us out of the nineteenth century and just give Hunan some damn heat? There is no detectable source of censorship at HuDa, but in China, it usually seems to enforce itself, and that kind is of course the strongest of all.