Woke up at 7 am, pretty tired this morning. Class went fine, although neither of us remembered that beyond the homework we were supposed to debate (the teacher forgot as well, so we did an off the cuff discussion of if celebrities should be able to have personal secrets.)
After class, I recharged my meal card for on campus with another couple hundred kuai, which should last for quite a while.
I didn’t do a whole lot over the lunch period break, talked to some people, wrote some emails, and started a bit of homework.
At two was our core class. The same lecturer as last week was there. The topic for today was the rural versus urban population. He was pretty pessimistic, saying that china now was going much to far towards the US, and it was really going to hurt the country in 10 years. Apparently there will be a new law up for discussion soon that extends land contracts from 30 to 70 years, which will result in much of the rural area becoming effectively privatized. There is also talk that rural residents can fully sell off their land rights to companies.
The problem is that for the 150 to 200 million migrant workers, right now there isn’t rebellion because even if there are economic downturns, they have a guaranteed safety net in that they can go back to their villages and get a house and a plot of land and can be self sufficient. If that goes away, there could be a major rebellion from a market downturn.
Someone asked about tibet, his response to that was also different from what we hear in the US. Tibet has been interwoven with china for about 1200 years, originally most of sichuan was part of their empire, but once Buddhism spread to the area the tibet culture retreated into the mountains. More recently, tibet has gotten a ton of development money from china, but the tibet people are not good at capitalizing on that, and so han chinese have migrated into the area and made most of the profits. During the cultural revolution the communists signed a pact with the tibet leadership saying that they could have another 20 years of their dual government / spiritual system without reforms. Now the dahli lama is on the payroll of the US, getting close to $200,000 usd/year, and has no reason to re-unite with china. Any time he suggests it, the US gives him hope that they will back him to form a strong new country that can take over sichuan again, and he cancels talks. China isn’t about to give up the region though, because in the modern era it would be economically stupid to give up land.
After the class, we had our first session of calligraphy. we got through how the traditional calligraphy is drawn, although we haven’t exactly learned the brush techniques, but at least we can reconstitute the ink, and can hold the brush (approximately) correctly. Calligraphy, it turns out, is done with the right hand, so that’s been an experience so far. Since it’s entirely from the elbow with small flicks of the wrist, my stuff today doesn’t look any worse than anyone else, and who knows – maybe it’ll help me become ambidextrous.
After that class it was about 6. Most people took off to get dinner immediately, I was asked to return the projector to the office. I found jeremey still the the dorm, so we went over to a hot pot place for dinner. (still on campus, of course). I hadn’t been there, but now that the weather’s colder I’ll go there a lot I think. You grab a basket when you go in the door, and add skewers of food into it. At the end of the skewer area you give the basket to an attendant who counts the number of skewers and rings you up, then your number is called and you get a bowl of soup with the stuff you picked out. For 10 kuai I got noodles, mushrooms, bok choy, meat dumpling things, weird rectangles that turned out to be fake crab meat, quail eggs, and other vegetables of various sorts. There were several noodle choices, and it looked like you could also ask for a big piece of chicken to be added at the end.
Came back to the dorms, and did a bit more homework this evening, although it isn’t due until monday. fridays are review days, and apparently we will be doing some review and also learning about colloquialisms and how Chinese is spoken in day-to-day conversation. It should be fun.
Looking forward to going to the museum tomorrow, and maybe we’ll end up going to an Indian restaurant I found tomorrow evening.
Oh, One last thing I accomplished this evening that I’m really happy about, is that I took another crack at making my iphone work, and it now has internet access. It turns out that the only problem was that I wasn’t properly telling it to proxy stuff through china mobile’s WAP gateway. To do that you have to edit a weird preference file deep in the iphone’s system – not something to take on lightly – but now I have internet anywhere in the city which is quite cool. It’s only really practical if you’re here for a while though because it takes about a month for the company to get around to enabling your account to use it (Mine was supposed to start getting it october 1st, and It’s taken me a week to get around to making it actually work)