Silence.

Jesus. The grand Chinese firewall took me out for a few months there. It got good enough where the old methods of proxy server circumventing it just didn't work anymore...and the only way for reliable connection is to pay, and I'm too cheap for that. Luckily today I finally found a more code-y hack online that seems to work. Which leads me to today's topic.

For those of you not in the know, China has the most sophisticated Internet censoring system in the world. Social networking sites and any others deemed harmful to state security are blocked. But the Internet is just what we hear about in the West; the actual deletion and distortion of information is much more
pervasive and sinister than that. Local people tell me often that they don't watch TV at all. Real news is covered up, when it embarasses the government. A student of mine who happens to be a police officer told me about a local murder of a young girl by her step mother and was then stuffed in a refridgerator where her body was discovered. Sadly she said this would certainly never be reported. China's grand myth of the Harmonious Society would be called in question. And that doesn't include all the other even more damning news stories that point the finger at government itself. But this topic has been covered a million times before mostly by Western journalists to the point of cliche. I don't want to repeat.  I want to address the issue from a different angle: culturally.

In my view, the real issue is one of how Chinese people deal with uncomfortable topics and problems. In the West, the cultural grounding is to talk about them and try to be honest about the objective facts, and then through that to come to a decision on what is the correct way to handle this issue. Questioning of authority is encouraged. Everyone's voice is heard even if some shrill voices drown out the good of the masses (can any reasonable person still make the argument that the American government system is good at getting things done?). In China, the approach is the exact opposite. In my own personal family, authority was unquestionable. The elders were always right...we were taught to respect our past generations even when they were obviously wrong or just plain ignorant. Small lies made to cover up an uncomfortable truth become larger lies which become historical truth. This particular habit I see again and again everywhere in my life. To protect someone's "face" we must soften the truth or just plain not talk about it.  I see this habit in myself...one that both infuriates me but one that I am strangely not ready to do away completely with. This kind of habit of lies and silence leads to much larger tangible disconnects. My foreign colleagues will often comment that China is all about the surface...the presentation is valued more than the intent. For example, most of the white girls I know here have worked as spokesperson models at some point. Mostly they're asked to go to some shopping mall opening out in the boonies to give face to the local owners who can gain face by hiring white girls to smile while MCs shout into microphones, ribbons are cut. Juxtipose that with local farmers dressed in Mao suits gawking and smoking, deformed beggers begging just within sight. It's jarring.

This topic is too big and grand to really address and I'm saddened that I do not have the time nor words to explain it properly. I am not judging China. But I do want to describe a the web of links that I do see in China: where lies, censorship, complacency, unquestioning nationalism, materialism, history, party line, family dynamics all drink from the same cultural well. Finally I want to say that I come from this looking at my own life and own history being Chinese. We are taught to lie, to cover up, then gradually we start making our own and finally we start believing our own lies. This is the most insidious part of distorting truth.

When you carefully look at something small, it grows until you have a universe.