The Useless Tree

As Chinese society becomes less Confucian, Japanese society becomes more Daoist

OK, maybe that's a rather sweeping title, but it is the idea that comes to mind when contemplating several recent articles simultaneously...

First, on the China front, we have this story in the People's Daily today: "Millions of young people battling depression, insecure about future":

More than 30 million young people are battling depression and fighting behavioral problems, experts said during a youth development forum in Beijing Sunday.

The Xinhua News Agency reported that many youngsters are having difficulty getting along with parents and are pessimistic about their future.

The report, citing a survey conducted by the China Population Communication Center, said 40 percent of university students do not have a plan for the future, while 84 percent of high school students feel depressed and stressed. Nearly 50 percent of primary school students said they feel anger and shame after their parents and teachers express negative opinions of them.

The survey found that most university students said they share a large gap with their parents, and that their parents do not understand them.

The report said change in social structure and industrialization has affected family life significantly, which exert pressure on adolescents....

Sounds rather familiar: a fairly standard anomie born of high speed modernization, something found in other societies at other times, though the ultra-competitive environment in China these days does make it harder on young people there, even college graduates.  The stress and breakdown of parent-child bonds would sadden a modern-day Confucian.  As would this: "Home alone, China's elderly need better care and support":

Statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that there were 167 million people over the age of 60 in China at the end of 2009, accounting for 12.5 percent of the population. That proportion exceeds the figure of 10 percent recommended by the United Nations.

Nearly half of these older people are living in "empty nests", a term that describes the emerging social situation in which the elderly are forced to live alone as their children live and work in other cities.

As the proportion of the elderly in China's population increases, more attention needs to be given to what extra support older people need.

One problem is that many older people cannot afford the fees charged by many nursing homes and are forced to continue living alone.

Again, not very surprising here, and not very Confucian.  But we shouldn't expect China to be any more Confucian, really, than any other modern or modernizing place.  A rapidly modernizing society is characterized by social mobility: young people leave home for jobs, they try to move up the economic and social ladder, they have to commit more time to their own careers and children, and elderly parents are left alone.  Now, some elderly parents might like this, to be unencumbered by the intrusions of the younger generations.  But the costs in isolation and loneliness and alienation are obvious.  

We see the same things in Japan. A couple of months ago there were stories (here and here) about how government record-keepers had lost track of tens of thousands of elderly Japanese, which lead to some unsettling questions:

For the moment, there are no clear answers about what happened to most of the missing centenarians. Is the country witnessing the results of pension fraud on a large scale, or, as most officials maintain, was most of the problem a result of sloppy record keeping? Or was the whole sordid affair, as the gloomiest commentators here are saying, a reflection of disintegrating family ties, as an indifferent younger generation lets its elders drift away into obscurity?

“This is a type of abandonment, through disinterest,” said Hiroshi Takahashi, a professor at the International University of Health and Welfare in Tokyo. “Now we see the reality of aging in a more urbanized society where communal bonds are deteriorating.”

Disintegrating family ties - this is not particular to China or Japan or any other place.  It is common everywhere.  It is what modernization does...

But an intriguing response to the atomizing flux of modernity is emerging in Japan: grass-eating men.  Generally, young people are not marrying and having children at rates they did in the past.  Indeed:

It came as a shock to demographers when the 2005 census showed that the number of deaths exceeded that of births for the first time: the population had started to shrink two years ahead of schedule. The 2010 census results are currently being processed and preliminary results are due in February 2011.

Although this trend has been underway for a long time, it has been exacerbated by the secular decline of the Japanese economy.  After the boom-time eighties, the "lost decade" of the 1990s brought a certain cultural malaise, one that has persisted in the new recessive economic environment of recent years:

It does not help that unemployment is high and incomes are low among the young—especially among young men, who increasingly give up even looking for jobs. One of Japan’s most prominent sociologists, Masahiro Yamada of Chuo University, thinks that most young Japanese women still want to be housewives, but are struggling to find a breadwinner who earns enough to support them. He points out that half the young people of prime marrying age—20-34—still live with their parents. In the 1990s he coined the term “parasite singles” to describe them. They seemed to be getting a good deal, saving money on rent and spending it on foreign travel and luxury goods instead. If they wanted privacy, they could always go to one of Japan’s ubiquitous love hotels.

And some young men, enough to coin a new term: soushoku danshi - something like "grass eating boys" - refuse to engage in competitive social and economic activities.  They are simply opting out:

Yoto Hosho, a 22-year-old college dropout who considers himself and most of his friends herbivores, believes the term describes a diverse group of men who have no desire to live up to traditional social expectations in their relationships with women, their jobs, or anything else. "We don't care at all what people think about how we live," he says....

...Fukasawa contends that while some grass-eating men may be gay, many are not. Nor are they metrosexuals. Rather, their behavior reflects a rejection of both the traditional Japanese definition of masculinity and what she calls the West's "commercialization" of relationships, under which men needed to be macho and purchase products to win a woman's affection....

This has a vaguely Daoist ring to it.  Would Zhuangzi be a grass eater if he were in Japan today?  Did he aspire to grass-eating in his own day?  His image of Liezi rather suggests it:

At this, Liezi realized he hadn't even begun to understand Dao, so he returned home and didn't leave for three years.  He cooked for his wife, and fed the pigs as though he were feeding people.  Human pursuits meant nothing to him.  He whittled and polished himself back to utter simplicity: a body standing alone like a clump of earth.  Taking this refuge in the midst of all confusion, he kept himself whole to the end...(111)

I know, I know, Liezi has a wife and contemporary Japanese grass-eaters are single.  But notice that line: "Human pursuits meant nothing to him."  That seems to capture something of the soushoku danshi ethos, I think.  And maybe the picture Zhuangzi paints is a kind of basic subsistence, which in  his day required spouse, a situation that now, under conditions of modernity, can be attained in even greater social isolation.  Who needs a spouse to cook for you (or to cook for) if your elderly mother (whose life span is longer than the average in Zhuangzi's time) will do it for you, or you can run out to a local take-out joint?

So, maybe there are Daoist-like responses to the stresses of modernity in Japan.  And, who knows, as has generally been the case for the past 140 years or so, perhaps Japan's experience of modernization will manifest itself, in similar though somewhat revised form, in China.....

The Breakdown of Family Duty in China

China is becoming more like the United States, and not in good ways. 

I remember back in the 1990's, people like Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew argued that "Asian Values," which for him were always rooted in Chinese culture, contrasted sharply with the breakdown in social order in the United States.  The family, he argued, was the basic building block of ""Eastern" society, unlike the wanton individualism of America.  From this, we might have expected that the fulfillment of familial obligations would be more prevalent in China than the US.  And that might have been true historically.  But in recent decades, economic and social change, which in various ways have hastened a kind of cultural individualization, have weakened family ties.  Two stories in the past couple of days illustrate this transition.

NPR reports on the soaring divorce rate in China:

One in every five Chinese marriages now ends in divorce, double the rate a decade ago.

Beijing has the highest divorce rate nationwide, with 39 percent of all marriages ending in a split.

This trend is sparking concern. Experts fear that the divorce rate will continue to soar, particularly among the younger generation of Chinese born under the country's one-child policy and during China's explosive economic growth.

My sense is that this is a reflection of the hyper-materialism and competitiveness of contemporary Chinese society, as suggested further on in the piece:

Some experts blame financial considerations — and the rising price of housing — as factors behind the surge in lightning marriages, and lightning divorces.

Given these money worries, young people may see economic benefits of moving in together as soon as possible, to get out of the parental home and to save money. Even after marriage, many couples remain financially dependent on their parents, causing more problems.

Confucius and Mencius would be appalled at how far China has fallen from their moral visions.   Indeed, Confucians would take marriage very seriously: it is a publicly stated obligation to care for another person and, through that care, carry on the great project of enacting Duty according to Ritual to advance toward Humanity.  It is not about apartment prices and paychecks.  It is about sincerity, standing by our words, living up to our vows.  Divorce might not be impossible for a Confucian, but certainly marriage should not be taken as lightly as seems to be the case in China now for many people.

Another story is more anecdotal, a single young boy, but tragic: he is six years old, an orphan with AIDS, who no one will take in for fear of the disease.  He lives in a dilapidated shack with his dog.  His grandmother comes around occasionally, but she says she cannot take him in, and his uncle seems unwilling to:

This reporter asked the grandmother if she was able to live here and raise A-Long until he is big? She hesitantly said that she herself is a little afraid of living here. Could she take A-Long to his uncle’s place to live? The grandmother did not answer, lowered her head, and sorted the cabbage she had just picked.

This is a single family, and we cannot generalize.  People in the village keep an eye on him, but clearly this boy needs a better situation.  On the face of it, it is the kind of familial breakdown that Lee Kuan Yew deplored.  Family values are just not working here.  Unfortunately, there are many, many AIDS orphans in China, perhaps as many as 250,000 .  There is a lot of great work going on to help them.  But there are also too many failures of family support networks:

They also  have to live with ,the fear of losing their loved ones, and isolation from relatives and friends.

All of which makes the recent government-enforced closing of an AIDS activist organization unconscionable...

Here's A-Long, the six year-old orphan, with his dog Blackie:

Nothing good will come of this

That is: the destruction of the old alleyways - hutong - around Gulou (the Drum Tower) neighborhood in Beijing.  I understand the complaints of local residents, who have to put up with substandard housing, but a more organic, grass-roots process would yield a better combination of preservation and improvement.  Unfortunately, Beijing city authorities are acting like jerks: not releasing plans, disrupting a local preservation organization.  I share the fears of those who look at what the Qianmen district has become and see that as the future of Gulou:

Critics say the most egregious example of this trend can be seen just south of Tiananmen Square, where the city’s most fabled shopping district, Qianmen, was replaced by a soulless but expensive facsimile of its former hurly-burly self.

“The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” said Mr. Yao, the urban planning professor.

Qianmen is a garish simulacrum driven by hyper-commerce.  But money and profit rule in Beijing these days, and the pursuit of the highest return may well make Gulou another Qianmen.  It doesn't have to be that way.  My sense is that Nanluoguxiang is a better mixture of commerce and preservation. The old hutong architecture is better maintained there than at Qianmen, and many local residences have been upgraded.  But the big developers and bureaucrats will demand big, top-down, sprawling, development for Gulou that will pull in big, big profits. 

And Confucuis would be appalled:

When the officers of Lu were planning to rebuild the treasury building, Min Tzu-ch'ien said: "Just rebuild the old one.  Why make it new and different?"

"He's a man who rarely speaks," commented the Master, "but when he does speak, he's always right on target."  11.14

Why make it new and different?  These days the answer in Beijing is depressing clear: because that will yield more profit for investors who do not actually live in the area.  They have the power and the pull, and the historic character of Beijing will continue to suffer on account of their greed and short-sightedness. 

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Modernization and Westernization

I raised a big question in one of my classes last week: is modernization Westernization?  We had a good discussion.  They had read a chapter from Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben's Formations of Modernity, and a chapter from David Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (which is explicated fairly well here). 

I like the Harvey book in particular, because it reminds us of how destabilizing and destructive modernization has been in the West.  Indeed, the history of the twentieth century, especially the first half of the twentieth century, suggests that the "West" itself was experiencing the same sorts of upheavals as were happening at the same time in Asia.  Thus, the "West" itself had not yet gone through the most intense and horrible experiences of its own modernization when imperialism was bringing modernization to Asia.  To press the point a bit further: the West was still undergoing "Westernization" (if by that we mean a form of modernization peculiar to the "West") as modernization was taking hold in Asia.  If that is true, then "Westernization" is not a process that occurred completely in the West and was then transferred to Asia but, rather, was the Western expression of a common process of modernization that was happening globally.  It might then be better to say that modernization in Asia is not really "Westernization" but simply the Asian expressions of the common global process of modernization.

We discussed this possibility.  There is a counter-argument, of course.  Since Asia was subject to imperialism, the experience of modernization there is inextricably related to a sense of Westernization.  Western powers, however much they may have differed and fought among themselves, were united in forcing Asian countries to adopt modernizing practices.  In the "West" the agents of modernization - bourgeoisie, certain rulers, some cultural innovators - came from within; in Asia the basic frameworks of modernization were imposed from without.

In both the "West" and Asia, when scapegoats for the instability of modernization were sought out and/or created, they came from both within and without.  But in the case of Europe a powerful internal process of victimization - making enemies of the Jews and exterminating them in the Holocaust - stands out as historically distinct.  In Asia, while there were internal enemies, the external imperialists bore the brunt of the blame for the depredations of modernization; and that furthers the perception of "Westernization".

Bottom line: modernization in Asia is not Westernization, in that both Asia and the West experienced similar destabilizing and destructive processes at close to the same historical time; but modernization in Asia is Westernization in that, because of imperialism, much of Asia experienced modernization as externally-imposed.

I think about these issues when I ponder the revival of Confucianism in China. Some intellectuals, and perhaps some politicians as well, look to Confucianism to provide an antidote of sorts to modernization: an indigenous philosophical basis for social, political and cultural practices that are fundamentally distinct from modernity.  Of course others see Confucianism as simply one element, and perhaps a rather modest element, of a Chinese modernity, still ensconced in the broader trans-historical processes of modernization but with a particular Chinese expression.  My sense is that the former desire - for a fundamental alternative to modernity - is largely impossible, because so much of what China is now is so deeply embedded in modernity.  Thus, the most that might be expected from a revived Confucianism is something less than what it may have been in pre-modern Chinese times, something that has been compromised with the modern, but still something more than May 4th nationalists or Maoist socialists would have wanted.

Can a Black Person be Chinese? - Update

Last September I wrote a post, "Can a Black Man be Chinese?," that attracted a fair amount of attention. I followed this up with a briefer thought, "Can a Black Woman be Chinese?"  Interestingly, Evan Osnos, at the New Yorker, has an article, "The Promised Land," (registration required for web access) in this week's edition that speaks to some of what I was discussing last fall.  He also has a video and an audio interview (both of which can be accessed without registration!).  Lots of good stuff.  

Clearly, social interactions between Chinese and Africans are increasing.  Mixed marriages are happening.  Children are being born.  Down the road a few decades the racial possibilities of Chinese-ness may well have expanded to include African-Chinese.

Also, last June the blog, Fools Mountain: Blogging for China, had a translation of a Southern Metropolis Daily article on "Chocolate City," the African secion of Guangzhou. 

And another also, Osnos adds a few more items on his blog. 

Modernization is not Americanization

David Marash, a veteran journalist who just spend four months in Shantou, notices how American consumer culture has become common in China:

In the United States of the late 1940s and 1950s, people once-shackled by Depression-era want and caution and wartime uncertainty and sacrifice were liberated as consumers. They bought, for one, huge numbers of new homes. So, too, in China. These exuberant Asian Levittowns are dense and vertical rather than green-patch horizontal, but since the late 1990s apartments have been selling like noodle soup at noontime. And so have home furnishings, home appliances and all the accoutrements for the lifestyles that go with them.  
 
To most Chinese the idea of such a life, freely expressed, freely financed by your own best efforts, is American. And so is the inspiration behind almost every particular component of this lifestyle. They buy American and so do their kids.

It is undeniable that mass consumption has boomed in China in the past thirty years, and that many of the most popular commodities are American.  But, even though Marash does not quite go so far, this does not add up to something like "Americanization."  Especially in the political sphere.

I say this because it might be tempting to read Marash's piece and assume that not only is China becoming more like America, but that the US might be able to derive some sort of "soft power" advantage from this.  There are obviously limitations on US soft power in China, and the world, these days.  The popularity of certain American commodities and cultural practices does not simply trump the unpopularity of US foreign policy, most notably in the Middle East.  Also, while Charter 08 is a significant thing, we should not expect a direct and smooth development of American style democracy in China any time soon.  The social and economic and political and cultural contexts are simply too different.  In the realm of political culture, for instance, the legacy of Legalism, especially in the minds of political elites unwilling to accept even modest expressions of opposition, makes political liberalization difficult. 

That said, I agree that the emergence of a modern mass consumption society in China has some parallels with the US.  And the analogy with the 1950s and 1960s might have some merit.  People do have more choice in more areas of their personal lives.  They may not be able to pursue political projects outside the rather narrowly defined Party restrictions, but more people have more social and cultural freedom than the Maoist period.  Where that will lead to, however, is what is unknown, and we should not hold up the American present as an image of China's future - that's been tried too many times in the past and has failed.

We might be able to say, however, that China's mass consumption present is certainly leading it further away from its Confucian past.  To the extent to which consumption takes on what Marx referred to as the "fetishism of commodities" - that our personal identities become expressions of the material things we surround ourselves with - the sadder a Confucian would be.  Confucianism embeds our identities (which can never be as autonomous and individualized as liberal theory would have it) in the performance of our familial and social duties.  Confucius himself takes a rather dim view on chasing after more and better material possessions:

The Master said: "Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow - that is where joy resides.  For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds. (Analects, 7.16)

And renown and honor come from doing the right thing by your family and friends and community.

So, maybe we cannot say that China is Americanizing (it is experiencing more general processes of modernization that are not tied to any particular nation or national outcome) but we can say that it continues to de-Confucianize.

Is Confucianism the answer?

Here's a sad story, from the Straits Times (Singapore):

BEIJING - A TWO-YEAR-OLD boy was orphaned in the southwest Chinese city of Chongzhou when his parents drank pesticide after a nasty row.

The tragedy, reported in the state media last month, bears testimony to the dark side of reform - suicide rates that are now among the highest in the world.

On average, a Chinese person takes his or her own life every two minutes, giving the world's most populous nation a dismal record as it prepares to celebrate 30 years of otherwise spectacular economic reform.

'With the reforms, society has become more complicated,' said Dr Huo Datong, the first psychoanalyst to practise in China.

'Individualism has become more pronounced and psychological problems have become more and more serious,' he said from Chengdu, a city in the southwest.

Since reform kicked off in 1978, the Middle Kingdom has been through enormous upheavals and so has the psyche of its 1.3 billion people.

Society has been uprooted as traditional family and clan structures have disintegrated, straining social relations and putting the individual under immense stress, experts said.

I will not challenge the underlying empirical claim - that suicide rates are rising in China.  We probably just have to accept it as a depressing indicator of contemporary modernization.  And I am willing to accept that some portion of that modernizing dynamic has been created in the era of "reform and opening" since 1978.  But why assume that Chinese modernization, or even intensive Chinese modernization, begins in 1978?  The Maoist period was all about uprooting "traditional family and clan structures" and social relations were incredibly strained and damaged by the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.  Indeed, I think it is more accurate to argue that the social anxieties of the reform era were exacerbated by the radical modernization of the Maoist era.  It is only now, with Mao long dead and gone, that traditions are revived and reinvented, some indigenous and some foreign, to respond to the alienation created by modernization. 

Notice, too, how the story describes the contemporary moment:

The Chinese are caught in the middle of the often conflicting demands of Communism, Confucianism and capitalism, and they do not know which one to turn to, experts say.

'This is not like the West where the majority have a religious faith,' said Dr Zhu Wanli, a psychologist from the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing. 'Most people here do not have any religion, especially not the young.'

And if they do go to the temples, for many it is in order to light incense in a pious plea - for money.

This suggests that Confucianism has revived to sufficient enough degree that it is now on an equal footing, in the public imagination, as political ideology and economic interest.  Is that true?  Perhaps a diffuse Confucian-esque impulse, which isn't really all that Confucian (i.e. children should care for parents - an expectation found in many cultures, not only Confucian cultures) creates a tension between personal interest and family obligation.  But I suspect those kinds of claims were fundamentally weakened by Maoist communism and have not revived to a point where they are qualitatively stronger in China than in, say, the US.  

My sense is that the problem is a purer alienation born of capitalism.  And that would open up the possibility that more Confucian practice (because Confucianism demands that its ideal be enacted on a daily basis) might somehow be a solution for the pathologies of Chinese modernization.

But I don't think that is true, either.  It is not at all clear to me, given current conditions of globalized capitalism, that Confucianism could ever be reasserted in a manner that diffuses the competition and uncertainty and confusion of the market.  Or, to put it another way, the key problem is not to revive Confucianism, but to just give up on the pursuit of personal profit in the market (which is what Confucius would tell us, after all; as would Taoism).  And it is really hard to see how that happens at the level of society at large.  I can imagine certain individuals (I think Confucius expected that only a very few people, like his favorite student, Yen Hui, would be able to really achieve Sage-like Humanity) using Confucianism to find peace in modernity.  But Confucianism as such cannot transform a whole society in a manner that rejects the creative destruction of competitive global market capitalism. 

Or maybe I'm wrong....

But is seems that Confucianism might be the answer for a few, not the many.

Can a Black Woman be Chinese?

     A brief follow up to my earlier post about immigration, identity and race in China.  A commenter, darts, makes a point that I want to bring forward for further discussion.  Here it is:

Sorry if the below seems excessively focused on sex as a driver of societal development, but ... I imagine "mail order brides" will likely be the major component of foreign migration, like in Taiwan and South Korea (two countries with similar cultural backgrounds and, more importantly, sex ratios nearly as bad). There's already about a billion women on earth who live in countries with lower per-capita incomes than China. As China's growth continues, that number is only going to get larger.

These women (and the children they bear) are going to be the ones who make rural Chinese men want to rethink their attitudes, when they see racial discrimination happening to their own loved ones. At first, the brides will probably be from the "near abroad", the same countries that supply TW and SK with women --- Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Uzbekistan (and maybe North Korea, if Kim Jong-Ill becomes Kim Jong-Dead); the women won't quite pass for Chinese, but their children could easily. But of course, China will have tens of millions of "bare branches" by 2020, and in any given country, the proportion of women who are willing to get married to foreign strangers is not going to be that high. So the Chinese are going to have to start looking farther afield to fill their demand - Moldova/Ukraine/Belarus, the poorer countries of Latin America and Africa, etc.

      As various commenters have noted, there is a significant racial aspect to "Chinese" identity, which makes it difficult to foresee a multi-racial notion of "Chineseness" emerging in the near future.  I am not going to give up on the possibility of wider Chinese multicultralization, but this counterargument is strong.  That being said, I had not thought about the gender dimension of the question until darts raised it.  And it seems to me that this could be an important dynamic.  We know of the very significant sex imbalance in PRC society, due to the one-child policy and the historical preference for male children.  It seems plausible to me that the millions of young, single, Chinese males could very well search for brides from foreign countryies.  And that dynamic could eventually lead to an expansion of the racial definition of Chineseness. 

     I continue to take the counterargument - i.e. that "Chinese" has become fused with certain racial assumptions such that a white person or a black person will not be considered Chinese by most Chinese - so there still may be a certain socio-cultural limit on how far sex-driven multiculturalization might go.  But if the process begins to unfold, if more and more "foreign" women, women from racial categories not traditionally considered "Chinese" (I'm thinking India here) marry Chinese men and have children, might that open the door to at least a future possibility that a black woman might be accepted a Chinese? 

     The short term answer to the question is no.  But let's think into the future fifity years.  Then, perhaps my daughter will meet Chinese people who would be open to saying "yes, a black woman - and thus by extension a black person - can be Chinese." 

     I'm imagining I won't be around to see it myself.....

Modern Mimicry

Here's a post that I liked, over at The China Beat.  Timothy Oakes builds on accusations that China is "faking" its way through modernization, the lip-syncing and video enhancements of the Olympics being the least of it.  He didn't go there, but it reminded me of Homi Bhabha's discussion of mimicry.   In any event, this paragraph from Oakes stood out:

Accusing China of faking its way into modernity is equivalent to accusing China of doing exactly what the dream of modernity demands of its supplicants: a will to hide disorder with order, to keep at bay the ever-present chaos of the world with a reliable façade of predictableness, indeed an ability to hold out the threat of disorder as reason enough to demand that people willingly play their roles in maintaining harmony. The ‘paradise’ of order and harmony that modernity promises, like all utopias, cannot but be realized without dissolving the boundaries between the real and the fake, the sacred and profane, the original and the virtual.

   We are all fakers, in essence.  Maybe that is what Chuang Tzu has been telling us all along:

We set out like ingenious machines declaring "yes this" and "no that."  Or we hold fast like oath-bound warriors defending victory.

We can say that to fade away day by day is to die like autumn into winter.  But we're drowning, and nothing we do can bring any of it back.  We can say this drain is backed up in old age, full and content, but a mind near death cannot recover that autumn blaze.

Joy and anger, sorrow and delight, hope and regret, doubt and ardor, diffidence and abandon, candor and reserve: it's all music rising out of emptiness, mushrooms appearing out of mist.  Day and night come and go, but who knows where is all begins?  It is!  It just is!  If you understand this day in and day out, you inhabit the very source of it all. (19)

Can a Black Man be Chinese?

I wrote something about the possibilities for increased immigration and expanded multicultralization (yes, I'm making it a verb) in China.  I even submitted it to a journal, which today told me they would not publish it.  Without time to work on it further, I am going to post it here.  It is a bit long, ca. 2000 words.  I will tuck the bulk of it below the fold.

     During the Olympics the world went to China.  And when Games ended the athletes, the spectators and the media all packed up and went back home; the world left China.  If China’s economy continues its dynamic growth, however, a new question may arise: what happens when the world wants to stay in China permanently?  How will China accommodate the globalization of its multiculturalism?