Today was our third lecture from Yun He and our visit to Tsinghua Solar. Yun He's lecture was more focused on modern Chinese culture, which is perfect timing for the thinking I had been doing yesterday. It was a lot to digest and reflect on, so I will break it down by topic.
Yun He started off by explaining the Chinese peoples' sense of cultural superiority over East Asia. Despite occasionally being ruled by foreign powers, China has always seen itself as leading cultural changes in the region and influencing the cultures of Japan, Mongolia, and Southeast Asia. I think this is due to China's vast size and its history of swallowing up neighboring peoples and assimilating them into a unified Chinese culture. It is reminiscent of Germany and its sense of kinship with the "Germanic" peoples of neighboring nations. Most of these countries were unified with Germany, either as the Holy Roman Empire or ancient tribes. Now that these countries are their own nations, it is easy to point to them and remark at how influenced they are by German culture, as they were in fact Germany for many hundreds of years. I also think that the severe isolationism of Japan shows that the "Chinese culture" that these people speak of is most likely older than China itself, and more likely was a natural evolution of proto-Chinese culture interspersed with the interactions of the developing countries through trade, diplomacy, and war.
Yun He traced the fall of this sense of cultural superiority to the arrival of Western imperialism. The strange new cultures, and China's inability to either absorb or repel them left the people feeling as if they had lost their place at the center of civilization. Chinese leaders did make strides to modernize China, but the coming of Mao and Yun He's despised Cultural Revolution returned the country to isolationism. I don't entirely agree with this, I think the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward where attempts at modernization through self-sufficiency, instead of trade or dependence on the West.
Some more things I found interesting:
- Grandparents often raise children, worsening the generation gap of pre-capitalism and post-capitalism
- Yun He perceives Chinese media access as untampered and free. Chinese censorship is still huge in limiting print, TV, radio, and the internet. I don't see the truth in this. And even if the Chinese are wise enough to read the New York Times online or stream NPR, their information is at best as tampered with as ours is by the biases of corporations or media owners
- Yun He sees the inverse of social class as a result of the Cultural Revolution as a wholely bad thing. (Where peasants were of higher standing then business owners or scholars).
- The One-Child policy has affected the social structures of children, causing then to seek out brother and sister relationships with their peers, and to be immature in their relationships with the opposite sex, since they do not have many chances to interact with them. Yun He gave the example of Chinese women saying "I Love You" on the first date because they knew that they had to have this kind of relationship with the opposite sex, but had no idea of its implications.
- Although people can technically more about the country freely and choose to work where they want, the Chinese government has a system of permits called hukou's which allow someone with a hukou for a specific city or region to access the government services there. For example, Yun He was born in a southern province, but has moved to Beijing for school and intends to live here. But she cannot send her children to primary school for free because her hukou is for her place of birth, and she has few ways to get one for Beijing, so she must pay a large amount more ($2000 per semester) if she wants to send them to school. Some jobs pay much less than others but attract workers by giving them hukou's for the city.
- Cheating is prevelant at Chinese universities, and college is seen as a time as of relaxation and a second childhood for students who have spent their entire life preparing for entrance examinations. Most colleges pass students even if they do barely anything in the class, and so the meaning of a college degree is diminished for many students. The average monthly salary for a college graduate is 2000 RMB, partially a result of a non-rigorous education, so many students find themselves working as waiters or other jobs that did not require their degree. It sounds like a more severe version of liberal arts majors' problems in the US. The labor shortage for service posistions also increases the draw for students to enter the unskilled labor pool.
- Chinese advertising exploits the strong sense of community in Chinese society. If people see others, even paid actors, all using a product and saying how happy it makes them, they are very inclined to buy the product. Even if they have no desire for it. I suppose that advertising companies have spent a lot of money researching this, much like huge sums invested in figuring out the subliminal or subtle trickery to manipulate American consumers.
- Christianity's success in China, as well as the rebound in interest in other religions, is partly due to a need to fill a spiritual gap. Yun He claims this is from the social destruction of the Cultural Revolution. I again contend that it is due to the false intimacy of capitalism and the need to find meaning and individuality in a country of a billion people.
The presentation we listened to at Tsinghua Solar was a very good overview of both the technical and business aspects of the company's business. Tsinghua Solar manufactures solar water heaters for individual homes as well as larger buildings like apartment complexes. It was interesting to see that 80% of the market for solar water heaters is in China. Europe, the second largest consumer, only takes about 2-3% of the market share. The presenter explained that this is because energy prices in China take up much more of a household's expenditures in China than elsewhere in the world, especially the United States. This is due to the fact that China is a net importer of energy, and energy services are not subsidized to the extent that they are in the states. Europe is a close second because they are also heavily dependent on other countries and regions for their energy, and the recent standoffs with Russia's Gazprom are evidence to the fragility of these crucial relationships. Thus the European Parliament and individual countries have been encouraging renewable energy sources, including solar thermal and solar thermal electrical energy. The presenter quickly dismissed photovoltaics, I think because they are much more complicated and inefficient than the solar thermals that Tsinghua Solar works on and they are in direct competition for newly emerging solar thermal electrical. The presenter also expressed little hope in America opening up as a market for solar thermal energy of any kind, he said that many eager distributors have tested the waters there and seen no interest except the odd "green building". He blamed most of this on the extremely low energy prices in the US, which make the high installation cost and unique challenges of solar thermal energy unattractive. Though he did say that he say he saw the future of the company as heading into pressurized solar thermal energy systems, which operate more like traditional water heater systems and better fit the needs of wealthier households.