I woke up this morning around 6:30 after a solid 5 hours' night sleep. I unpackaged the hotel slippers, got dressed, and slippered my way to breakfast. The breakfast area had an unsurprising shortage of Western options, with fried twisted bread being the closest option to French Toast available. Most of the food seemed to be lunch or dinner fair, but I ate my fill and left. When I got back to the room, I noticed that I am having a fantastic outbreak of skin irritation across my face. I don't know if it's the poison ivy I may have encountered at work or my body's reaction to the extreme time shift. The morning lecture was a good overview of the sites we will or will not visit. But the most interesting part of the lecture was when Yun He talked about how the cultural revolution affected the historic sites. She said that China was a country without a history, that the cultural revolution had destroyed the vast history of China outside of history textbooks. Instead, when most visitors come to China, she insisted, they only see a marvel of modern technology and economics, not a several thousand year old civilization. I agree that this is a widely held view of China, most people, including myself, do not consider the huge and diverse history of the nation when thinking about modern China. It is merely thought of as a successful industrializing nation which manufactures most of the goods we use in our daily life. Yun He got very worked up emotionally as she talked about the impact that the Cultural Revolution has had on the preservation of history. I suppose that her education enables her to remember what many Chinese and most Westerners forget about pre-Mao China.
Later on in the day, we went to Tsinghua University. As we rode the mini-bus over and watched the many faces of modern China, I realized the massive scale of capitalism going by my window. Vast tracts of land are being developed, huge buildings stuffed with businesses serve a never-ending stream of clients. It is impossible for any man or agency to contemplate the growth taking place in Beijing, let alone the rest of China. I then realized that sheer feebleness of the Chinese state in the face of such rapid growth. There is no way that the state could keep track of all the business taking place inside its borders or hope to regulate any more than a small section of it. It then made sense why I saw so many elaborately uniformed officers looking pretty on street corners. The state knows that it is impotent in the midst of the torrent of capitalism it has unleashed. So in order to remind the common person of its presence and to preserve some semblance of control over its people, the Chinese government has a massive police presence and clamps down on the civil liberties of its citizens. Does the Chinese government censor the internet and other forms of communication to stifle dissent? Of course not, no sizable amount of Chinese citizens see a need to get upset in a period of unprecedented economic growth. Instead it seeks to flex its control over the people of China and to show the West that it is capable of severely limiting its influence.
A much less profound realizartion is that the brake pedals in Chinese cars should be replaced with horns, since Chinese drivers do not brake for other drivers or hazards, but merely honk at them and keep driving.