- Michael Wolff on Edward Jay Epstein’s new book about the Kennedy assassination and Warren Commission Report
- Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (1991)
- Peking University expels liberal economist (via Marginal Revolution). Plus China’s Nobel Prize in science prospects.
- Paleo bakery in Amsterdam. A friend compared this to dehydrated water, but I am less sure that there were no sweets in Paleolithic diets.
Category: China
Assorted Links
- How little is known about tinnitus
- Michael Lewis on Greg Smith’s book. Published months ago. “The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior.”
- The price of admission to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Businessmen seeking ministry contracts learned of Zhang’s nomination and offered to help. . . . Zhang, using a slush fund provided by the businessmen, cloistered 30 experts from mostly ministry-affiliated universities and research institutes in a hotel for 2 months, during which time they churned out three books on high-speed rail technology that were credited to Zhang.”
- Why was Matthew Shepard killed? I have not yet read this book (I will) but it sounds so good I am happy to publicize it before that. It is being ignored. It supports a theme of Ron Unz and this blog, that lots of what we are told is wrong.
- Someone leaving graduate school at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne explains why he is leaving only a few months before finishing his Ph.d. His complaints about professional (academic) science resemble mine — for example, the dominant role of will this help my career? in all decisions.
Thanks to Joyce Cohen and Allan Jackson.
Queen Late
When a Chinese friend of mine was in first grade, she was habitually late for school. Usually about ten minutes. Her mom took her to school on a bike. One day she was 20 minutes late. The door was closed. My friend opened the door. “May I come in?” she asked the teacher. The teacher came to the door. She took my friend to the front of the class. “Here is Queen Late (迟到大王),” she said.
Everyone laughed, including my friend. She thought it was a funny thing to say, not mean. The name stuck. Many years later, she was called Queen Late by those who knew her in primary school. Her teacher was not a great wit. Other students at other schools were called the same thing. It was/is a standard joke.
Sometimes I think Chinese have, on average, a better sense of humor than Americans, but who really knows? A more interesting contrast is how lateness is handled. At UC Berkeley, about 20 years ago, I attended a large lecture class (Poli Sci 3, Comparative Politics) taught by Ken Jowitt, a political science professor. Jowitt was considered an excellent lecturer, which was why I was there, but he was also famous for being hard on students who came in late. When I was there, a student came in late. Jowitt interrupted what he was saying to point out the offender and said something derogatory. I don’t remember what Jowitt said but I do remember thinking — as someone who also taught large lecture classes where students came in late — that he was making a mountain, an unattractive mountain, out of a molehill. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how he could have dealt with the problem in a way that made everyone laugh.
Dragon vs. Dragon: Same Name, Different Genus?
In a discussion of dragonfruit (common in China), a Chinese friend pointed out that Chinese dragons and Western dragons are quite different. I was surprised, I hadn’t noticed this. My friend was right:
There are two distinct cultural traditions of dragons: the European dragon, derived from European folk traditions and ultimately related to Greek and Middle Eastern mythologies, and the Chinese dragon, with counterparts in Japan, Korea and other East Asian countries.
says Wikipedia. Why two different imaginary animals would be quite similar isn’t obvious.
Chinese Food: China vs America
I skype-chatted with Clarissa Wei, a Chinese-American journalist in Los Angeles whose post about stinky tofu in Los Angeles impressed me.
SR What do you think of Chinese restaurants in America compared to Chinese restaurants in China?
CW It depends on where you’re talking about. In broad America, the Chinese food is pretty different from that of China. In places like Los Angeles and pockets of New York… it’s much more alike
SR I’m thinking of the best ones in Los Angeles.
CW It’s definitely cleaner here that’s for sure. In Los Angeles, the food quality is pretty similar. The major difference would be the price and variety. The selections are also pretty similar. The set-up in American Chinese restaurants is obviously different than the ones in China so that influences things a lot
SR I have never been to a Chinese restaurant in America that resembles a high-end Chinese restaurant in Beijing
CW In Los Angeles — there are a couple high-end Canto restaurants. They typically are your seafood + dim sum banquet types. Lunasia is a great example.
SR What do you mean by the set up?
CW Well in China, a lot of the restaurants are literally hole-in-the-walls. There isn’t that much of a standard in terms of being neat and sanitary.
SR There is vastly more range in China, both better and worse
CW In the rural countrysides, it’s out of people’s homes. But in America, everyone has to have at least some degree of sanitation.
SR Chinese restaurants in China are more playful. Like a toilet restaurant, for example.
CW Very true. Yeah they’re opening one of those in LA.
SR Or a restaurant where everyone says hello when you enter and goodbye when you leave
CW There’s also a Taiwanese “Hooters” in L.A. A lot of the Taiwanese breakfast eateries in L.A. have that “cutesy” vibe.
SR When you were in China were you in any way disappointed by the Chinese restaurants?
CW I was in China in 2011 for 4 months as part of a study abroad program. I was disappointed mostly because I always got sick.
SR What city?
CW Shanghai. But I travelled to Guilin, Dunhuang, Beijing. I got sick from just the regular restaurants on my street. Some were marketed as higher-end. I lost 10 pounds from throwing up. Mind you, I go to Taiwan yearly and that never happens.
SR The first time I went to China I was sick every 2 days, but after that I was fine.
CW I think my toleration for bacteria is pretty low.
SR I get sick no more often in Beijing than in Berkeley. [But in Beijing I eat Korean and Japanese food mostly.]
CW That’s surprising. I was at Donghuamen [a night market selling strange food] in Beijing. Did an article on that place. But I just felt like throwing up because the streets reeked of trash.
SR The cheap restaurants scare me. They use recycled cooking oil.
CW I think that’s changing now with the media coverage on the Chinese food scandals. But in places like Los Angeles..the food is pretty up to par in terms of “authenticity”.
SR How was the food in the various Chinese cities besides Shanghai?
CW It was alright. I get turned off when a restaurant is dirty to be honest. But that may just be because of my American upbringing. It really influences how I consume the food and how much I eat of it. When I was in Dunhuang, there was a vendor making daoxiaomian but he kept on coughing over and over. And we watched him make the dish and serve it to us. I felt disgusted but we were starving.
SR What did you think of the food expertise of the Chinese people you met in China?
CW I learned a lot about Chinese food in China from my Chinese teacher. That’s when I started to gain in interest in the regional differences. The oyster omelette for example in Xiamen is similar to the one in Taiwan, but crispier and thinner
SR It was very hard to buy a kitchen timer in Beijing because I was told no one uses them when they cook.
CW No one uses fancy gadgets or exact measurements there. It’s all passed down and family recipes which is the beauty of it.
SR My students at Tsinghua are more connoisseurs of food than my Berkeley students. A lot more.
CW Food is such a central theme of the Chinese culture. There’s a fascination with Western food too. In Shanghai, my first article for CNN was “Top Western Restaurants in Shanghai”. I brought my Shanghainese friends along to one of the places — a bagel places — and they were fascinated.
SR I went to the best Korean restaurant I’ve been to outside Korea in Shanghai.
CW Shanghai has a tradition of really embracing foreign cooking traditions. One of the best fine dining restaurants I’ve been to was in Shanghai, Mr. and Mrs. Bund.
SR Do people in Shanghai understand how good the food is in Japan?
CW I think so. But a lot of Chinese people really don’t have the opportunity to travel abroad. They don’t have a feel or the exposure to foreign tastes as much as Americans do. In Taiwan, there’s a fascination with the Japanese. Obviously because of the occupation of the Japanese but a lot of the high-end Taiwanese restos are Japanese influenced.
SR Controlling for age who did you think are the more adventurous eaters, Americans or Chinese — I mean the ones you know.
CW Chinese hands down.
SR That’s interesting, I always worry that my students won’t like this or that. [At least, they draw the line at eating insects.]
CW Just because Chinese cuisine has a variety of meats and offal and “bizarre” parts you know. So they’re much more open to try …. snails from France than your average American. Because snails are a Chinese dish too.
Also in Chinese culture, you’re taught to eat anything and everything that’s presented to you. It’s rude to refuse.
SR A friend of mine said that Chinese (in practice) is a language of verbs, English is a language of nouns. One of the verbs is “eat”. Parents tell children: “eat”.
CW Yes. Americans have the luxury of being more picky — look at the whole gluten free, vegan movement in these metropolitan places. If you go into a Chinese restaurant in China and say you’re vegetarian — they don’t really know how to work with you. Some places will just roll their eyes.
SR After you came back from Shanghai to Los Angeles, how did you view American Chinese restaurants differently? The authentic ones.
CW I appreciated it a lot more. The food here is good and it won’t give me food poisoning. Sanitation was like the biggest worry in China. An article recently came out that said the ice from the KFC in China had more bacteria than toilet water.
SR I never go to KFC in China. Now I have been vindicated in that decision
CW The egg tarts there are fantastic. Modeled after the original Macau egg tart recipe apparently.
SR There should be a category: best food in worst restaurant. Also worst food in best restaurant.
CW Chinese restaurants have such extensive menus, it’s always easy to find a bad item.
SR I was impressed that Chinese restaurants managed to make mashed potatoes slightly interesting. That’s baby food! They added raspberry sauce.
CW Again — fascination with Western food.
The Fate of the Tiananmen Students and the Story of Edward Snowden
This post by Ron Unz made me wonder: What really happened when student protesters were removed from Tiananmen Square 25 years ago? Unz pointed to a strange website with undated blog posts (mentioned earlier), which claimed that the students were not harmed, in contrast to the usual Western view that many were harmed, even killed. I didn’t take the website seriously but I had to admit my ignorance.
I asked several Chinese friends about it. One dared reply. She wrote:
My mom once told me that she was near Beijing when the event happened. She said everything is a mess, no one can go into or out from Beijing. The army is everywhere and people are all in an angry mood, no matter the a-rmy (try to pass the possible check so use -) or the citizens. She said the students are innocent, they didn’t start the whole thing. And indeed the army was hurt first. But students are young and easy to be incited. Once the army began to take serious method, they didn’t care whether you are a student or a mob or a citizen, some innocent students hurt in the turmoil and other students try to gather together to fight back. Then everything began to lose control. After this event, all the students who participate in the sit-in were sent to poor countryside far away and never get a chance to get back to big cities in their whole life. (At that time, all the students are getting job position directly from the govern-ment, they don’t have options to choose.) My mom told me some female students were sent to countryside and raped by the local people, or have to marry to the local farmers even they have high education.
All the student protesters, according to my friend’s mother, “were sent to poor countryside” for the rest of their lives. I hadn’t read this anywhere, including Wikipedia. The fate of the protesters was far worse than I had been told by Western media.
My friend’s mother could be wrong. Even eyewitnesses can be wrong. But what people actually say, the story they tell, matters infinitely more than the truth.
I am optimistic that the story of Edward Snowden will begin to change how we talk about whistleblowing. Recent stories are not encouraging. Mark Whitacre (Archer Daniels Midland) spent 8 years in prison. That he suffered from bipolar disorder might be taken to mean that only crazy people whistleblow. Jeffrey Wigand (tobacco) was played in a movie by Russell Crowe but went from a $300,000+/year job to a $30,000/year job. Bradley Manning faces a very long prison sentence. Julian Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for a year, afraid to leave.
Whereas Edward Snowden, whose leaked information is at least as important, has not yet suffered terrible or even humiliating consequences. Maybe he will live the rest of his life in Iceland — as a hero. He won’t just have released enormously useful information, he will have set an encouraging example. That might be his biggest effect on the world.
Useful Knowledge: Arithmetic and Chinese
Long ago, a friend told me that when she was in first grade, she had a lot of pennies. She knew how to add but not subtract so after she spent some, she would have to count them again to know how many were left.
I have finally reached the last lesson (Lesson 12) in my beginning Chinese textbook, which I have been using (fitfully) for more than a year. Later lessons build on earlier lessons. When I didn’t know a word in a later lesson, I scanned the new-word lists from earlier lessons to find it. I have just discovered there is a word index.
How Meritocratic is Chinese Higher Education?
A friend of mine taught at Harvard for a few years. Her husband needed a job, so he taught a writing class. He said his students were so bad it appeared to be an experiment: How stupid can you be and succeed at Harvard? They had not been admitted based on SAT scores or grades, that was clear. In a recent article called “The Myth of American Meritocracy”, Ron Unz described considerable evidence of exactly what my friend’s husband noticed: Harvard admission not based on the usual “meritocratic” measures, such as SAT scores and grades. For example, he found evidence of an Asian quota. If Asians weren’t penalized for being Asian, far more would be admitted.
In a follow-up article, Unz wrote:
Near the beginning of my article [about meritocracy] I had noted that although complaints about official corruption of every sort are a leading topic on the Chinese Internet and also in Western media coverage, I had never once heard such a claim about admissions to elite Chinese universities. This led me to conclude that the process was entirely meritocratic, and a couple of individuals with good knowledge of China confirmed this. However, during one of my recent Yale Law events, a student from China stated that he and his friends were firmly convinced that any of China’s 350 Central Committee members could easily obtain an admissions slot for his friends or relatives, so my claim was incorrect. This conflicting evidence may be reconciled if the number of such corrupt admissions each year is so tiny—perhaps a few hundred out of over eight million—that it is completely invisible to the general public. I should note that the New York Times just ran another major story on colleges in China, emphasizing every possible unfair aspect of the system, but nonetheless indicating that admissions were entirely meritocratic and objective.
Here is one reason that there is zero discussion of corruption in admission to elite Chinese universities (such as Tsinghua, where I teach): Rich Chinese universally want their children to go to college outside China, especially America. The more money you have, the easier this is. I’d guess all children of Central Committee members attend college outside China. None of them attend Tsinghua, as far as I know. At least among my students, this is utterly obvious — that education outside China is superior and anyone who can go outside China will. The brake on this is purely cost. One of my students said she didn’t want to burden her parents with the cost.
The test that Chinese high school students take to get into college is the gaokao. One of my students got the highest gaokao score in Beijing. An astonishing achievement. He didn’t get in to any American university. The Chinese public was shocked. Many newspaper articles were written about it. The rest of my students knew about it. His family is not well-off. This is why he failed where thousands of Chinese students from rich families — who didn’t bother to take the gaokao, but surely would have had a lower score – succeeded. Although he went to Tsinghua as a freshman, he too wanted to escape Chinese higher education. First he transferred to the University of Hong Kong. Then he transferred to MIT.
Why is Chinese higher education so bad that everyone who can avoids it? One of my students (a psychology major) said that as the economy quickly improved, the government quickly expanded the college education system. There weren’t enough good teachers to fill the slots. That’s one reason. Another reason is a certain ethos. I asked a friend of mine, a Tsinghua student not majoring in psychology, “In what fraction of your classes do the professors lecture by reading from the textbook?” 80%, she said. That’s at Tsinghua. Below Tsinghua it’s worse. Of course students go to college outside China for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The most obvious is prestige: It is prestigious to go elsewhere.
Lack of higher education meritocracy in China has a more subtle aspect. It is much easier to get into elite universities, such as Tsinghua, if you live in Beijing or Shanghai than if you live elsewhere, especially poor provinces. Is this unfair? It isn’t easy to say because the gaokao is different in different places. I don’t know the official reason for this (different textbooks?), but the difference in tests makes it easier to have lower admissions cutoff scores for students from Beijing and Shanghai. A Beijing student at Tsinghua will usually have a lower gaokao score than a student at Tsinghua from a poor province. Of course it is much more expensive to live in Beijing and Shanghai than elsewhere. Moreover, a big chunk of the gaokao is about English proficiency. A student’s English proficiency depends heavily on amount and quality of English education, which depends heavily on family income. The richer you are, the better your children’s English.
All this makes political sense. Richer people — whose children have better English — have more political power than the less rich. Those who live in Beijing and Shanghai have more political power than people in poor provinces. Allowing their children get into Tsinghua with lower gaokao scores (Beijing and Shanghai residents) or writing the gaokao so that their children have an advantage (English proficiency) is one way to keep them happy.
If a Chinese Person Says You Are “A Good Student” What Does It Mean?
An American writer named James McGregor (in One Billion Customers) called China “a nation of bookworms”. In China, entry into college is heavily controlled by a nationwide test called the gao kao taken near the end of high school. For hundreds of years, China had the most sophisticated civil service entrance exams in the world. Chinese students study much harder than American students. Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (in which a mother puts a huge amount of pressure on her daughters to succeed in conventional ways) was presented by Chua as reflecting Chinese parenting values. It’s true that Chinese parents push their children much harder to do well in school than American parents.
All of which might lead unsuspecting Americans to believe that Chinese people value being a good student. Not at all. A Chinese friend explained to me that being called “a good student” is essentially an insult. “You are a good student” is what you say to someone when you can’t think of anything nice to say. It means
1. You are not interesting.
2. You have no sense of humor.
3. You have no interests outside of school.
Drone might be the closest English equivalent to the Chinese “good student”, except that no one would ever say to someone “you are a drone” and the meaning of the term has recently changed (to mean mini-planes flown remotely).
Who is the Richest Person in China?
If you open the American edition of Forbes, you will find articles about the richest people in America. If you open the Russian edition, you will find articles about the richest people in Russia. If you open the Chinese edition, you will find articles about the richest people in America.
A Russian friend of mine noticed this. He happened to know an sophomore economics major at Tsinghua. It is incredibly difficult to get into Tsinghua and the economics major is the most desirable major of all. To be an economics major at Tsinghua you need a test score that is in something like the top 1 out of 100,000. Staggeringly high. My Russian friend asked the Tsinghua economics major, “Who is the richest person in China?”
The economics major didn’t know. He seemed a little angry. “Why should I know? We’ve never been taught that,” he said.