::This article was originally published on Global Human as The Dream, The Reality of The Games::

For this American teacher in China, the buildup to the Olympics raises global questions she (and her students) cannot ignore

by Sarah Menkedick

Photo by Jorge Luis Santiago "Peeking at the Birds Nest" Beijing, 2007

It started with a sea of red flags. Walking past the university dorms one afternoon – the sky a uniform gray, as usual (the composite of factory wastes, cars, smokestacks, and coal fires) – I noticed something strange. At least every other window had a bright red flag hanging from it. The flags flapped in the wind and advertised themselves to passersby. From one day to the next, the dorms had gone from average drab university housing to a bold nationalist statement, a reactionary manifestation of solidarity with “China.” “China” being that vague concept of the motherland that is so successfully exploited by the men in black Audis that call themselves Communists, or Socialists, or whatever fits the moment until they need to shift the ideology again. My first reaction was somewhere between confusion and outrage. I read the flags as a threat – this is China, take it or leave it, and don’t say a damn thing against it.

“How ridiculous,” I said, “how utterly ridiculous. These kids absorb whatever the government tells them, whatever unbelievable stance the Party takes on ‘Western Media’ and its supposed inventions. It is just sad.”

The last week had seen the Olympic torch pass through Europe and North America to a wave of surprisingly fierce protests. In Paris, protesters attempted to wrench the torch from a Chinese athlete in a wheelchair, sparking a furious backlash in China against what were seen as attempts by the West to bring China down in its moment of glory. The Chinese reaction soon ballooned from hurt into outrage, and finally into a full-on nationalist movement. We read about it in our usual China media sources – blogs, Global Voices, Chinese English dailies – but the flags brought it to life. It was yet another reminder – this one with a harsh edge to it – of just what a separate reality we came from. After seven months in China, it still seemed that the Chinese existed in a bubble of rhetoric-tainted information; a bubble which, as foreigners in China, we could neither completely enter nor escape from.

My sympathies, at first, were with the protesters. I saw a picture of the Free Tibet flag hung over the Golden Gate by protesters in San Francisco, and I laughed.

“Badass,” said my boyfriend, “let’s see what China says about that.”

Our support for the protesters was based more on instinct than on nuanced intellectual arguments. My boyfriend and I felt a natural solidarity with people we recognized both culturally and physically, who had a basic set of morals and values that paralleled our own. Freedom of speech, individual rights, democracy, “self-determination” – these were unspoken values we didn’t fully realize we shared with other Westerners, or we held so deeply and innately, until we moved East.

But our initial response to the torch protests went beyond the allegiance we felt to our own assumptions. We were bitter. Seven months in China had us feeling impotent and caged in. I knew of the censorship and authoritarianism before I came (I had been warned by other faculty not to say anything “political” or anything, god forbid, against the Communist Party) but knowing this intellectually and living it in the day-to-day are two very different things. I suppose that, for good or bad, is why I travel. “How will it actually feel to live this?” I wonder before going, and that exploration of other realities with other parameters is what keeps me moving to new places.

Sure enough, the censorship quickly ceased to be an intellectual curiosity and became a big annoyance. There was no access to blogs (at times blogspot came unblocked, but 90% of the time I couldn’t access my own blog or anyone else’s without a proxy, which was itself eventually blocked), most of the time there was no access to Wikipedia (also randomly blocked and unblocked) and there was no access to any site with mentions of Tibet, Tienanmen, “human rights in China”, or any other keyword selected by the 30,000 people constantly policing the internet in China. The feeling of frustration every day, trying to look something up and getting the same straight-faced page reading “the connection has been reset” had me furious. Add to this the sense of being stifled in the classroom as I tried to tiptoe around issues of Tibet and the Olympic torch.

“This is insane!” I would shout. “How can they do this??! How can a country like this have the Olympics??”

I would go outside and wander, ever more frustrated, through the haze of 400+ pollution. There were days in which I could not see the university building where I taught, which was across the street from my apartment. I could not see the high rises down the block through a fog that gave me headaches and made my eyes burn. And again, I would grow furious. I would rant to my boyfriend about the injustice of holding the most important sporting event in the world in a place where it was not recommended to leave the house on certain days, and a “blue sky day” was cause for celebration.

And there were the migrant workers. There are the migrant workers, to be accurate – although they have now been hurried out of the city and back to the provinces while the foreigners explore China’s dragons and temples and charming young nymphs for the month of August. These migrant men came to Beijing from impoverished regions of the Chinese countryside, giving their entire lives over to work, returning home to their families for one week in the spring and one in the fall during the national holidays. They wore rags and cloth shoes. They smoked cigarettes, up to their knees in cement and rubble outside the subway stations the government was building. They slept in tents about ten meters long by five meters wide that held 30 men or more, crammed together in bunk beds on bedrolls they carted across the country on trains. They ate squatting in the street, slurping noodle soup and beer. They made about a hundred dollars a month for a minimum of ten hours a day of work. China’s runaway capitalism trampled them, using them – as capitalism always does – as expendable human fuel to accumulate wealth. The men who built the B&B beside our apartment (in a period of six months) worked day and night non-stop. I would go for a glass of water at 4a.m. and watch them in the darkness, drilling and shouting and illuminating the lumps of concrete for one another. I raged.

With all of this in mind, these sights and experiences on a daily basis, I found myself strangely vindicated by the actions of the protesters. All of the pent-up anger and frustration I could not express in such a closed, censored society was finding its expression in the West. I supported the protesters out of vindictiveness, and the sense that China should not get away with something this scandalous, something this awful, that no one in the country itself could or cared to talk about.

And the Chinese reaction to the protests only seemed to verify what I felt I already knew: that the country was sick, sick with a diseased idea of modernity and what should be sacrificed for it, and that the government had succeeded in thoroughly brainwashing the people. I read about a Chinese student at Duke University who received thousands of death threats for trying to mediate between Chinese students and Free Tibet protesters. I read Chinese blogs declaring death for anyone who expressed sympathy with protesters, and declaring the protesters themselves should be killed. I heard my students talking about Western conspiracies to “bring China down” and, in the irony of all ironies, disparaging the Western press for being so despicably biased. I saw the dormitory windows go from dust brown to flaming red in a day.

All of this seemed to me repulsive. And the foreigners living in China who justified it as merely “different” – merely the result of a different culture with different morals which could not be judged according to Western standards, incensed me. At what point, I wondered, do “cultural differences” become a pathetic excuse to stop asking oneself difficult questions, and to excuse oppression and poverty in the name of culture?

But in the midst of this anger I would get the nagging sensation that everything didn’t quite fit. I didn’t agree with many Western ex-pats’ arguments that everyone should just let China be China without problems or questions, but it was also too easy, too neat, to write China off as an ecological and social disaster and argue for robbing it of recognition as a rising power. Living in China, teaching and talking and eating and riding the subway every day, it wasn’t as easy to maintain a sense of self-righteous outrage. None of these people showed any hostile feelings towards me, my country, or my hemisphere (I never thought in terms of hemispheres before moving to Asia). None of them were displaying the kind of outrageous behavior described in the media, and they did not seem to be brainwashed Communist zombies. No, rather, the man I bought milk from and the waitresses at the orange-lit, cheapie restaurants we frequented, and my students and the university deans, were unmistakably human, real, and kind.

Humanity always throws a wrench into one’s political convictions.

For as much anger as I felt with regards to the government, and the way its policies had affected and continued to affect people and the environment, I also felt a connection to the Chinese. These were real, flesh-and-blood people, not issues or morals or stances or news stories. And in this protest period, each time I interacted with someone here, be it ordering beer or talking after class, I felt a slight pang of guilt, a sense that I wasn’t being entirely honest with myself or fair to the Chinese. They were neither dupes of their government nor of their history and culture, and I started to think that maybe they were wiser to their country’s problems, and more willing to solve them through dialogue with the West, than I’d imagined.

Thus, the more I found my initial observations and frustrations vented in the Western press, the more I felt unsatisfied with them. They were too clean-cut and flawless to explain why so many I people that I met, liked, and felt were good and kind at heart could be so wrong and misguided, and so hopeless with regards to pushing for change. These Western arguments, including my own, neatly and swiftly excluded the Chinese from the Olympic dialogue, assuming that it was all or nothing – a Commie China that posed a grave threat to Western (economic, cultural, moral) hegemony, or a tamed China that suddenly, in the course of eight years, fully embraced Western values.

So, caught between worlds and perspectives, immersed in China with solidly Western values, I came to see that the type of conversation taking place between the West and China about the Olympics allowed for very few Western voices to be heard in China, or Chinese ones to be heard in the West. The dialogue between the countries consisted of closed circuits interrupted only by insults or threats. Neither culture seemed to take into account the other’s vastly different viewpoints. The arguments stayed safely contained in their respective hemispheres and communities.

Which led me to a question beyond the right or wrong of holding the Olympics in Beijing: if change is going to take place in China, how is it going to happen? Who should concede, and where should the change come from?

I began to transition from reinforcing my negative ideas about Beijing and validating my frustration with the Chinese government to thinking from a Chinese point of view. Seeing my views and my anger reflected in the Western press forced me to realize the difference between understanding cultural differences and empathizing with them. It is the difference between understanding the grammar of a language and speaking it fluently. You can understand every verb tense but until you can communicate without constantly relying on translating your own language, until you can launch yourself into an uncertain realm and trust the instinct of another language, you haven’t really gotten it.

I had understood the differences before, but I had no empathy for them; I had assumed that, regardless of our differences, the Chinese should possess an innate morality similar to my own. Only when I began to empathize could I see that moving beyond these differences was an enormous but not unimaginable task. So I started thinking again about cultural differences and how they were affecting these arguments about the meaning of the Olympics. I looked at these differences not with the goal of explaining why China was sick, or why the Olympics should be banned, but with the hope of finding a way to form some sort of mutual understanding. The first place I found answers was the place where I had most contact with the Chinese: my classroom.

I decided to go ahead and bring the protest issue up in the classroom. I had avoided anything remotely sensitive for so long and I figured that with two months left in the semester, and with my students’ trust in me as a friend, I’d just go for it.

I started with the boycott of Carrefour, the issue du jour. Carrefour is a French supermarket found in most Chinese cities. It is normally packed to the gills with Chinese shoppers buying everything from pickled chicken feet to 2004 Cotes-du-Rhone. However, in the wake of the protests in Paris, the Chinese were passionately anti-French. Millions of anonymous text messages were going out to cell phones, claiming the French were responsible for the riots in Lhasa and several attempts to overthrow the Chinese government. Soon enough, a boycott of Carrefour was proposed for May 1st, and angry protesters started to form around Carrefour stores in various cities. I knew my students would be on board with it. I came into class, reiterated the same points about the need for a clear thesis and creativity, and then very tenderly – like nudging a soccer ball onto the field to see if anyone will come up and kick it around – I brought up the boycott.

“So, let’s talk about something else.” The class was all ears. We very rarely strayed off topic with my paranoia of being observed from hidden rooms within the building. “There’s a lot of news this week about a boycott of Carrefour, the French supermarket.”

I waited. Silence. No one would take it up just yet. They were waiting to see where I’d take it.

Very casually: “How many of you support it?”

A surge of hands, like lollipops stuck straight into the air. The students’ faces were earnest, unwavering.

“You all support the boycott, then? Why do you think it’s a good idea?”

One student, a sincere, determined girl who listened to everything I said and gravely recorded it in her notebook, answered me.

“It’s ridiculous,” she said. “They don’t understand anything. They don’t understand China, this is the new China. The Olympic Games are not about this kind of fighting and it’s very insulting to us. I think it’s terrible. I won’t buy anything from Carrefour.”

“Western media wants to keep China down.” A bold, slightly nervous male student piped up. Nods around the room.

“Western media are so biased. They don’t know anything about China. They lie and manipulate. I think the boycott is a very good idea,” said a girl, one of the few to express truly creative and original opinions in her papers. She said this in a very calm and deferential voice, as if she were explaining a preference for apples rather than oranges. Other students nodded. Not a single one questioned the validity of the boycott, although a few wondered if boycotts would hurt the Chinese workers at Carrefour.

I pushed them a little bit – aren’t the Olympic Games always political? What about South Africa? What about certain countries being banned? But the moment I asked the big question – “Why do you think people are protesting the Olympics?” – they clammed up. It was as sudden as plugging a drain. The water just stopped flowing. No more facial expressions, no more nods, no more discussion, the whole classroom went dry. That was the end of that.

“Ok!” I said, “See you Wednesday.”

This conversation epitomized the two most important cultural differences that stoked misunderstandings between the West and China: 1) the control of an authoritarian government vs. (relatively) democratic ones and 2) the significance of arguing as opposed to achieving consensus.

The first was obvious in the fact that students were too scared to clearly explain why people were protesting China. They could regurgitate the media and the government’s rhetoric, but actually identifying problems (Tibet, human rights, freedom of speech) out loud was far too dangerous.

In China, the assumption that one places one’s faith (and one’s life) in the hands of authority has held for millennia. It has held partially because it fits so well with Confucian and Buddhist philosophies, and the Asian morality drawn from them – a morality that emphasizes humility, deference to authority, harmony, and consensus. It has also held, however, because questioning authority in China has often meant death. And if not death, isolation, exile, and/or prison. Religion and social morality, coupled with repression and a well-honed instinct for self-preservation in the face of it, have maintained Chinese authoritarianism for thousands of years. And Chinese authorities have thus maintained their iron grip on information and dialogue. Hence, my students’ passive refusal to take up discussion on anything outside of the official lines.

This refusal to question the boundaries of authority or to explore a situation for themselves had been systematically programmed into them since the first days of elementary school. My students grew up memorizing textbooks, and I would find them before class murmuring to themselves in the hallways with their eyes closed, committing pages to memory for their exams. Some of them memorized random essays from the internet and wrote them out word for word in class. The single biggest challenge I faced in the classroom was how to teach arguments, and individual, creative thinking, to a class of people who have been taught from day one to copy and repeat common mantras.

Which brings me to Cultural Difference Number Two: integral to maintaining and verifying authoritarianism is the Chinese emphasis on consensus as the most important factor in social harmony.

Arguing is a lauded cultural, social, and political value in the U.S. It demonstrates intelligence, commands respect, helps form and cement friendships, and gets presidents elected. In China, arguing is not a form of discourse. Arguing against a teacher, elder, or (imagine!) revolutionary leader would be unthinkable. The job of students is to burn the wisdom of Confucious and Mao into their brains and use it, in university papers and job interviews, to make their way up in society. The student who can express Maoist or Confucian doctrine in the most “beautiful” and deferential way has the best chance at success.

Chinese writing is based on circular reasoning – consensus is good for the society because a good society is based on consensus – and common, unchallenged assumptions – consensus is good for the society because it makes the society harmonious. The idea of questioning what harmony actually is, or whether it is always a good thing, is entirely alien to many Chinese. It was certainly alien to my students, as I found out during the week I spent banging my head against the wall trying to explain what an assumption is.

When a society values consensus, agreement, and harmony above individuality, creativity, and challenging the status quo, what might the reaction to outside criticism be? In the case of the Olympic protests, it was a outright rejection of such criticism and instant solidarity between members of the group. Since the Chinese don’t accept argumentation as a tenable or valid form of communication, they don’t play by or even understand American/Western rules. This is not because the Chinese are unintelligent. Rather, the basic rules of argument that Americans often take for granted – an argument is immature and unconvincing when it gets too personal, an argument has to be supported by logical and convincing evidence and explanations, an argument needs to effectively address the other side’s beliefs and debunk them – do not exist in Chinese culture.

So when Americans and Westerners start arguing against Chinese policies in ways that seem fair, logical, and normal to them, the Chinese see it as a personal affront. They interpret it very differently than an American might interpret an anti-war protest or the French and the Mexicans might interpret a strike in opposition to a government bill. And their response is not to argue with the West on its terms, but rather to do what they have always done in school, work, and at home – to achieve consensus among one another.

This is one major reason why I think many Westerners tend to look down on the Chinese as being less intelligent or incapable of defending themselves “logically” or convincingly. It is also one major reason why I think Westerners and Chinese were unable to achieve any sort of dialogue during the Olympic protests. Westerners continued to feel angered and repelled by Chinese nationalism while the Chinese felt increasingly offended by Western protests and Westerners’ supposed failure to understand China.

But – and this is the “but” that one has to allow once one has met real, complicated people behind the government and the media in China – the people are not the government. Even if they support it. To confuse the two is playing into politicians’ hands.

In China, the people want change. They see the Olympics as a giant knockout symbol of change. My students, and many people I met, wanted dialogue. They wanted to know what the West was and is like, they wanted to go there, they wanted Westerners to come to their country and explore it. They wanted to show, volunteering hundreds of hours of their time, that China is changing and its people want to become part of a wider global community.

So imagine the reaction of these students of mine, who study by candlelight into the early morning after the dorm electricity is shut off at 11, who volunteered their weekends and summers to volunteer for the Beijing Olympics, when they saw Westerners chastising Beijing and saying China is not deserving of the Olympics. They were pissed. They thought, we are doing all of this work to welcome people here and to show them that we want to open up to them, and what do we get? The same old censure and condescension from the West – that which the West tends to reserve particularly for poorer countries that are beginning to develop Western power in uncomfortable ways.

And while I think outside criticism of the Chinese government is well-deserved, and recognizing the government’s power through the Olympic Games makes me cringe, I could understand where my students and many Chinese were coming from. My students saw themselves saying: “Take China seriously. Take us seriously. Let us invite you here and let us become part of your community.” And the West responded by demanding cultural and political changes that were not only so far from the reach of these students and most people, but also a literal reversal of thousands of years of history: the kinds of changes that do not happen in eight years.

I believe in the power of protest, but in contexts in which protest is understood as a type of dialogue. Protest for protest’s sake, without concern for the political consequences seems to me an arrogant demonstration of moral superiority. If all it achieves is reuniting a people with their corrupt government, what, really, is the point? Members of the Chinese government – secure in their Audis, enjoying their banquets – need only seize these moments of tension as opportunities for validation through solidarity. Westerners have to ask whether we are doing this for us, or for them?

In the midst of the Olympic firestorm, we went to a soccer game at Worker’s Stadium. It was a qualifying match between the women’s teams from Brazil and Ghana. The whole stadium was decked out for the Olympics, ceremonial music playing, banners everywhere, the place overflowing with enthusiasm. We walked up to the security gates and at least 15 Chinese kids, in their late teens or early twenties, beamed at us and said, “hello, welcome, thank you for coming!” I could tell they were so nervous and so excited, and they’d practiced this phrase in English for months. Entering the gates, a young Chinese volunteer gave us a huge grin and said, “Welcome to Beijing!!” and we replied, “Thank you!”, and suddenly I felt tremendously sad for everything happening in the grand political sphere when these volunteers were so excitedly and so earnestly greeting us in our language, welcoming us to their country. It made me wish we could all back up a little, and step a little bit out of our self-righteous cultural and political boxes. “One World One Dream” is just another communist slogan, but the Olympics could be a lot more.