Uncouth Reflections

Fenster writes:

I was going to write about urbanism and bikes in Beijing but it’s been done before.

The New Urbanism Blog has a short piece, and a nice picture, of group dancing in front of St. Joseph’s Wangfujing Church, in downtown Beijing quite near the Forbidden City.

That was exactly the scene as I walked by last week, so it is a regular thing.  And, as the blog points out, it’s a nice urban thing, too. Check it out.

Meanwhile, I was also going to write about bikes and e-bikes, but it turns out that this guy Eric Osnos at The New Yorker has done so, and done it quite well.

The nerve of that guy Osnos, though.  He obviously copied me by entitling his series of articles “Letter from China”, and to make things worse, he got them into print before
I got mine online.  Sheesh.

But take a look at his e-bike piece.  This article and the blog piece suggest that, despite China’s overall seeming indifference to urban values in its headlong development spree, such values continue to have a place there, at least in Beijing.  Hutongs, bike lanes, a busy streetside retail scene and density that does not allow for hiding out.

So this will not be a letter from China.

But let’s consider the e-bike phenomenon while we are on the subject.

E-bikes have exploded in popularity in the past few years in China.  In 2009 China had 25 million cars but four times as many e-bikes.  That proportion has probably grown further in favor of e-bikes.

A Goggling of the topic reveals that just in the past several years there has been a similar explosion in Europe, Canada, Australia and other parts of the world.  The explosion is not as big as China’s–how could it be otherwise?–but it has been remarkable nonetheless.  Further, Googling also reveals scads of links dealing with e-bikes in other parts of the world but almost none dealing with e-bikes in the US.  That’s because, in effect, no one is interested in buying them stateside, though they are available.

Much is made of the car culture being the reason for this.  I buy that, but it can hardly be the only factor.  It is probably also the case that the bike culture resists as well.

I am myself much in favor of promoting cycling in the US and for a while commuted about 15 miles each way to work in Boston and Providence.  But bike culture, while a lot more than an affectation, is still an upper-middle class thing, and a statement about values as much as a means to keep fit and save money.  Looked at from that perspective, e-bikes are a fairly reprobate phenomenon.  A schlub in Beijing looking for a cheap and easy way to get to work is likely to have no such reservations.  So while I suspect e-bikes will take off here at some point in the not-distant future, they still has something of an image problem for being neither fish nor fowl.

Here’s one on the way from Germany.

Would you consider one?

Fenster writes:

When I had not yet begun to study Zen thirty years ago, I thought that mountains are mountains and waters are waters. Later when I studied personally with my master, I entered realization and understood that mountains are not mountains, waters are not waters. Now that I abide in the way of no-seeking, I see as before that mountains are just mountains, waters are just waters.

Heavy-duty Sixties retreads like me may recall this quote, from the Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk Qingyuan Weixin.  More will likely recall its Western popularization:  the folksinger Donovan’s refrain “first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.”

Nice sentiments but what mean?  I don’t know for Zen, but I have made my own Western adaptation to the quote appropriate for my own experience.   That is, while the Buddhist monk sees in the quote the move to enlightenment, my take is much more pedestrian.  For me, the quote sums up nicely how learning, and all change, happens.   Learning is not primarily a matter of accreting new facts on top of the old.  It’s more a process of disruption, in which a former settled view becomes unsettled, then becomes settled again in a new way.  First you know you know.  Then you are made unstable by knowing that what you know may not be true.  Then you once again know you know.  That’s called learning–the disruptive accretion of falsehoods providing useful new perspectives.

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It is now a week since I arrived in China.  An interesting amount of time—long enough to begin to dispel  erroneous first impressions but too short to give confidence that you know anything yet, really.   I am, I suppose, in the “no mountain” stage.  That’s my caveat, my disclaimer, as I write the letter.

I was asked to come to China at the invitation of a Chinese university.  I’d come to know, and to like, the senior administrators of the university when I served as the lead trainer for them on a visit to the United States in the summer.  They’d come to take a closer look at American higher education, a topic with which I am familiar from many years of work.  We agreed that I would visit them later to teach and to do research.  A two week visit was arranged.

I first spent a few days in Beijing visiting with the parents of a Chinese exchange student now living with my family at home.  Then it was on to several destinations in Shandong province.  My host university manages three campuses in Shandong: a main campus in the ocean side city of Qingdao and two smaller campuses in Jinan and Ti’ian.

So my experience here is not only severely constrained by time but also locale. I have seen a small sliver of a small slice for a split second.  Yet it is hard to square that reality with my experience of the past week, experience in which the new came at me so hard and fast that time seemed to stretch out, like a kid’s experience of an endless summer by the Fourth of July.

For sure, some of the intoxication came from being by myself as an American.  For most of the time here I have been totally and completely with the Chinese.  I have had the pleasure of being accompanied from two skilled translators from the university assigned to me.  But the level of English among older Chinese, even at a university, is not high, and so I have had to go native—or at least as native as the hospitable Chinese permit a foreign guest to be.

Other factors contributed to an almost surrealistic feeling in the first days here.

First, there’s the jet lag.  That’ll get you.

Then there’s the juxtaposition of old and new in peculiar ways. The bright red banners with Chinese slogans, redolent of an earlier Communist era, mirrored by the strikingly similar use of bright reds and yellows in the ultra-sophisticated product advertisements all around.

And then there’s a freakily robust popular culture.  We know our popular culture is freaky but we take that as a sign of our freedom, and China is hardly free.  It’s enough to make you want to revisit Marcuse’s concept of repressive tolerance, and not just for China.  Some things come across as not only Westernized but echt-so, as though I had somehow fallen into Minority Report by way of Brazil.  Is this the future?  No, just the present.

Club LA in Beijing

Adding to the surrealism is that odd haze that hangs on in Beijing and its environs, prompting cognitive confusion  as to whether it is a sunny day or a cloudy one, with the buildings fading off in the distance like in an old Chinese painting of the far mountains.

This not a proper and complete letter, I know.  I will add more as I go along, episodically and intermittently.