Tuesday, May 25
I thought today's lecture helped bring many of my observations thus far to new light. Dean Moses introduced us to the politics and government of China, both of which are confusing and mysterious. It was fascinating to learn the ways in which he tries to figure out how the government works and despite how much he’s learned, the government is still a big mystery. I didn’t realize how difficult it was to be able to read a paper that actually had relevant news and accurate facts. One issue that Dean Moses brought up that does concern me is how the general public is aware of news manipulation and therefore don’t really trust state-published news. Are they concerned enough about this issue to seek real news elsewhere? I think the general consensus, at least from what I gathered from Dean Moses’ lecture, is that people are either genuinely apathetic or take the news with a grain of salt.
Since the lecture, I’d find myself looking for the black Audis that the Party members drive around in. Dean Moses’ explanation of how the party generally worked off consensus instead of comprise was interesting and fit well into my observations from Olympic Park the night before. On the one hand, it’s a great idea because everyone in the Party backs all decisions. However, decisions are almost always delayed because there is no compromise and a consensus must be reached. In this regard, democracy seems to work a lot more efficiently but so far as I can see I think China’s government and political system is working fine for them. The 2008 Olympics is an example of a project that was a huge success and no doubt had everyone’s support. However, now that the Olympics are over, it seems as though the government abandoned the buildings to move on to other projects. They could easily use both buildings as venues for other events such as concerts and broadcasts, have a few exhibits open to the public, and set up gift shops. There are various ways these famous structures could be utilized for profit but the government seems more concerned with moving on to other things.
Following the lecture we went to CCTV and sat in the studio audience for the Dialogue program, which was interviewing Hilary Clinton. It was interesting to listen to the translation and then hear Clinton’s response to the questions. She answered all the questions in detail but they were very political and carefully thought out. She did maneuver around certain issues such as the North Korea incident and China owning 1/3 of the United States because of all their investments in our securities. I thought it was extremely clever how she addressed those critical issues in a way that did not point fingers at China but still brought them to light. It was extremely imperative that she carefully choose every single word she said and I was able to understand why because of Dean Moses’ lecture. The Chinese government would edit and ban anything that put them in a negative light and so Clinton did a clever job of subtly making sure she made her point across while avoiding censorship. I wished I could have understood Chinese so I could see if anything was lost in translation, especially whether or not Clinton’s translations were later manipulated or edited.
When we got back to campus we all headed out to the Silk Market. It was quite an adventure and I wasn’t sure quite what to expect. I was familiar with the Korean style of shopping where you could engage in price bargaining but I had never bartered where I couldn’t speak the language and couldn’t quite gauge the value of things and how low I could buy things for. We also didn’t know how things were priced or what value we should actually try for. An NYU student who was studying abroad in Beijing helped me by bartering in Chinese with the store merchants and from that experience I was able to get a general sense of the price range I should shoot for. It made me appreciate my experience in Korea more, since I understood the language and could speak it. My first few purchases, I knew instantly after I had paid that I had definitely bought them at a far too high a price. I remember feeling guilty when I asked them to lower the price that I didn’t have the heart to go too low once the price seemed decent. It's unfortunate, but you do need to have thick skin to go head-to-head with some of these merchants.
I walked away from the Silk Market with a cute tube top dress, a pair of flats, two pairs of earrings, a hair clip and bracelet. We all got on the subway and then taxi'd to the Muslim restaurant for Jasmine's birthday dinner. I made sure to send everyone ahead with the address and got into the last cab with Shane and Tim. However, we ended up being the first ones to arrive and I began to get worried. Eventually people filed in and we all had various types of food and watched the different belly dancers perform. We told the staff it was our friend's birthday and the belly dancer tried to get Jasmine up on stage to dance. She was like 'Nope' and just walked off. It was really funny.
Afterward we headed toward the main Sanlitun street and explored. We did a little barhopping. At one place, I ended up DJing for a while with my iPod because they kept playing the same Lady Gaga songs and remixes over and over and we were getting sick of it. The boys loved it when this really hot pole dancer would pretty much just hang from the poles on stage and climb up it without using her hands. They had a male pole dancer too and just as he climbed up the pole our group got up to leave. Not because of him necessarily, but the timing was unfortunate because it just looked like a group of 20 or so people left because they didn't want to watch him. We left because these creepy old foreign men felt up one of the girl's skirts as we were getting off stage and the guys got really upset.
It was an interesting experience. Some of the guys kept trying to bargain for cheaper deals at various bars, especially after we found out that they were charge 3 yuan a beer for the Chinese locals but 10-20 yuan for us. Definitely not fair. They were trying to use our group size as a bargaining chip but because we were clearly foreign, it was a losing battle. We still had a great time though. Jasmine had an interesting 21st birthday in Beijing :).
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