Books China Today
posted by on April 24 at 9:59 AM
China in the 20th century:
China in the 21st century:
Both images are about self-empowerment. The first image, self-power is increased by the absolute affirmation of the Little Red Book; in the second image, self-power is increased by learning English. The more English you learn, the stronger you are as a person, and the stronger you are as a person, then the stronger China is as a state in the world system. The New Yorker has a short article on this second, new wave of self-empowerment. I offer four striking passages:
1
Li Yang is China’s Elvis of English, perhaps the world’s only language teacher known to bring students to tears of excitement. He has built an empire out of his country’s deepening devotion to a language it once derided as the tongue of barbarians and capitalists. His philosophy, captured by one of his many slogans, is flamboyantly patriotic: “Conquer English to Make China Stronger!”
2
Li, who is thirty-eight, has made his name on an E.S.L. technique that one Chinese newspaper called English as a Shouted Language. Shouting, Li argues, is the way to unleash your “international muscles.” Shouting is the foreign-language secret that just might change your life.
3
The most serious charge—one that in recent months has threatened to undo everything Li has built—holds that the frenzied crowds, and his exhortations, tap a malignant strain of populism that China has not permitted since the Cultural Revolution.“I have seen this kind of agitation,” Wang Shuo, one of China’s most influential novelists, wrote in an essay on Li. “It’s a kind of old witchcraft: Summon a big crowd of people, get them excited with words, and create a sense of power strong enough to topple mountains and overturn the seas.”
Wang went on, “I believe that Li Yang loves the country. But act this way and your patriotism, I fear, will become the same shit as racism.”
4
[Li] sat down on a couch and began explaining to me a list of new projects, including a retail plan that would create, in his words, the Starbucks of English education.
And your point is?
If you want to see China today, pick up the new National Geographic. It will destroy your mind. Seriously. Everything you've heard about China is true, only 1,000 times more so. Entire cities of millions of people where everybody makes buttons, almost all the buttons in the world! Or paintings! There's a city where 60% of all the world's oil paintings are made. Shanghai ain't the half of it; Chongqing is 31 million people now. They're going to have more cars than the US by 2025, and are DOUBLING coal and oil consumption every fifteen years. 50,000 miles of expressways. Vast new subdivisions that look like Levittown. Erica Barnett's worst nightmare, in other words.
He's doing bad advertising.
Yeah, but it's not going to be sustainable. Of course, when they collapse in the energy crisis, we'll be fucked too, but hey, at least no one is going to be a "winner" when everything goes to shit.
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