Palaces and Politics

This past weekend we took a trip to the Summer Palace outside Beijing. The complex of buildings built around a huge lake was impressive, but the most interesting part for me was seeing the marble boat that Cixi, the late-1800s empress dowager, had had built for herself . The money spent on the boat was supposed to have been spent on modernizing the navy. I guess she thought the future of naval technology was in marble, but this thing wasn't too seaworthy. We also went to the Yuemingyuan, or Old Summer Palace, which was mostly rubble, having been destroyed by the nefarious Anglo-French Allied Forces in 1860. Restoration efforts, which according to plaques had happened in the early nineties, seemed only to have consisted of putting similar-looking blocks into piles.

I'm still having a good time here, and I think my Chinese is slowly progressing. The vocabulary we're learning is becoming more abstract, and much of it is immediately useful in conversations with my teachers and language partner. We tried to do karaoke with our teachers on Friday night, but despite the fact that the place is enormous, it's apparently quite hard to get in without booking weeks in advance. We ended eating at a restaurant and walking around for a while, which was a lot of fun. Our teachers are young and easy to get along with, and it was fun to get to know them outside of grammar drills, where we are instructed to answer questions like, "Do you have a girlfriend?" with, "I don't discuss my personal affairs with strangers. Let's change the topic of conversation."

I had a startling conversation today with my language partner, Wu Yue, on the topic of Tibet. I was surprised at how agitated she got, but I guess I was asking for it by bringing up such a politically charged subject. When I suggested that Tibet should be independent, she said (as one other Chinese person I talked to had) that it had first been part of China during the Tang dynasty (618 - 907 AD). She then launched into a condemnation of the Dalai Lama, who apparently had been supposed to co-rule Tibet with another leader (I’m not sure who this would be, does anyone know? I am, not surprisingly, having trouble getting to the Wikipedia page on Tibet.) but had tried to take power for himself, at which point the Chinese exiled him to India. She, unbelievably, compared him to Hitler. When I said that Hitler had been a terrible person who had killed millions of people, and that killing was against the principles of Buddhism, she scoffed and said that maybe the Dalai Lama didn't want to kill so many people, but that he had the same way of thinking and the same territorial ambitions as Hitler did. In any case, she was sure he was a huairen, or bad person. Citing the recently completed Beijing to Lhasa direct rail line, she said that recent Chinese development has been helping the people of Tibet, and that since the air is so thin they can’t grow enough food to sustain themselves and depend on imports from mainland China. And even if China wanted to let Tibet be independent, it wouldn’t be practical at this point, given the intermingling of people that has happened. Having “explained” the situation to me, she made me promise that we wouldn’t talk about the subject again. I apologized for upsetting her, and said that I was just interested to hear Chinese people’s views on the topic.

Needless to say, this conversation made me pretty upset. At first I was angry with Wu Yue for being so ignorant, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was the government’s doing. I hadn’t realized the extent to which government propaganda still controlled people’s views about sensitive issues, even in universities. Just last week, when I asked about the huge famine during the Great Leap Forward, Wu Yue told me that China, unlike Japan, acknowledges the mistakes its government made in the past. When I pressed her further, she said that she had only learned about the famine after coming to college. I suppose this honesty about the past doesn’t extend to current political conflicts, but after years of learning about totalitarian propaganda in school, it is eye-opening and shocking to see such a sweet person so dogmatically attached to what the government has fed her.