西安不是中国. 你认为中国人都下很大的无知云, 可是你可以看到从最高的山吗?
Like a great many things in China, people know the things that are supposed to be unknown. Like how to get around the Great Firewall. Like which party officials are on the take. Like Falun Gong. Like porn and homosexuality and AIDS. And the government knows that people know. It's an intricate charade. Everyone breaks the law in little ways that don't create social unrest, and the governnment turns a blind eye. Everybody feels like they've gotten away with something.
不错。 我看懂了。必要我爱人告诉我,你说汉语说得好不好. 现在她睡觉了。但是你对我说得还可以。
我在很多地方爬山了:华山,泰山,松山,黄山。在中国污染的云比最高的山很高!
At any rate, strong effort. It's bad for us foreigners to botch up Chinese to each other. For one thing, a reverse term for "Chinglish" has yet to be devised.
Regarding the idea that everyone secretly knows what happened, well, if they're canny enough to learn English and take trips to America, then maybe they are. They're actually not representative of most Chinese on the ground in China, though. My honest appraisal is that the opinions are not a vast pantomime being played by people who really know what's up. Occasionally I get a question like "Why don't other countries like China?" and in this context, I realize that Chinese news is constantly filled with grievance-peddling that makes Chinese people feel isolated. I could tackle some real issues in this regard, like the outrageously greedy Chinese territorial claims that extend hundreds of miles into the South China Sea to within sight of the Phillipine and Vietnamese coasts. But I never actually do. They want me to say something more "correct" than that. The Chinese who really care about climbing the great firewall, and reading real outside opinions are vanishingly few in number.
And which party members are on the take? Couldn't we make a shorter list of which ones
aren't on the take?
I'm quite aware of the 愤青, but they're still a small minority. Just because they have a myopic view of their own history doesn't CHANGE history or mean that everyone else is ignorant of it. That's akin to saying that just because the US has some angry skinhead Holocaust deniers, the whole US is anti-Semitic.
I was having my plate of 京酱肉丝 in a local hole-in-the wall eatery here a few weeks ago, the kind that you find on any street corner here and can somehow pull off an amazing dish far better than the best hotel fare. I'm eating and the cook comes out and drinks some baijiu with me and starts asking me about Diaoyu Dao. Naturally, I just kept saying that those islands belong to China. As long as the 肉丝 stays free of unreasonable amounts of rat droppings, those islands can belong to whomever the cook chooses. Incidents like this make me doubt your appraisal of the movement's extent. To me, the fenqing seem everywhere and they make it their business to question foreigners. I wish I could believe that it's a charade or merely limited to a similar extent as holocaust denial in America, but I have vast differences with you in calculating the numbers of the Angry Youth movement. It hardly seems uncommon to me.
But where I take the strongest exception is in this notion that you have that all bad things in China come from a certain amorality that you ascribe to not having "found Jesus". You're looking at China with the eye of a missionary and a foreigner. You might live there, but you're still a laowai. Worse, you seem to be a laowai who holds himself apart from the people he's surrounded by -- the spiritual descendant of the sort that lived in the Concessions in Shanghai, and put up signs like "No Dogs or Chinese Allowed". Maybe I'm wrong in that assessment, but you haven't given much evidence to the contrary.
I said a certain morality exists that is peculiarly western for some reason, and then opined that it might be a historical memory of Christianity even though Christianity is now well-advanced into evolving into an atheistic Secular Humanism. There are other systems of morality, which is not to say amorality or immorality. If you think Chinese people believe everything that you believe, and have a system of right and wrong that squares with your ideals about such things, then that's your unfortunate error. Cheating, for example, is not a big ethical deal in the universities here. Students cheat on exams all the time and get caught without serious repercussions. In America, you can have your academic records expunged. Lose four years and thousands of dollars for the gross crime of copying someone else. China is different. Your grave misdeed is their slight infraction.
I'm content with my identify. I
am a laowai here, and I always will be. If you fight this, you'll be unhappy here. More often these days, to their credit, I'm a
waiguoren now, but on a few occasions I have even had the unpleasantness of being a
baigui. In Xi'an, there are certain areas of the city that have hundreds of foreigners each day, but other parts of the city where a western face is as new as as it was in 1999. You'll have children running after you, shouting
laowai at you, no matter how enlightened you are.