All of us are lumped in this together. Liu Xiaobo’s win is no-one’s victory. Not his, not Chinese liberal’s, not human rights’, not freedom’s, not even hope’s. When we play the blame game we will always find the perfect excuse, yet all of us contributed to the lack of basic sense in our culture, some more, some less, some went blindly with the flow, some drifted along albeit unwillingly, and some, like us, so eager, so anxious and at the same time so plain lost. We are in this together. As a Chinese at this age, don’t ever pretend you have a way out, or that you are a step more retreated in the game.
Contemporary China is a generation war long awaiting to burst. It’s an ideological mixture too confusing for any given person to take a firm stand in. This country has gone through drastic flip-flops of faith that where one’s foot stands now was where another was beheaded. Liu Xiaobo didn’t even do very much by international standard, but the little he did was enough to make many excited with and many others troubled by. This is a country of a vast variety of people. The generations before us had little to no choice in their time that the ideological influences on them were compulsory, like amulets they want to pass them on, they are willing to do what little they can to construct a world recognizable to their eyes. In a way, who can blame them?
Everything happened too fast. When there is an urge to progress, to change, there is always an immense fear of losing everything at stake. We are in this together. When we draw a map of the future we want, it is impossible that it’s the same map billions of others want. There will be conflicts. There will be sacrifices. There will be uncertainties. This is a country with complicated, intertwined realities that make none of us saint. We should not assume that by getting rid of one thing, everything will be fine. Patience is required, and frankly, we are in this together. We can be oppressed by no one else but ourselves.
For what little we can do here we want to stand for an intellectual honesty, a conscience that is bigger than defending what seems the popular thing to do, than resorting toward what seems the only alternative to what we are accustomed to, than making what seems the spontaneous, effortless response to give. There is nothing to celebrate today. The D-word is not a systematic switch, not a button to push, but an urge, if strong enough, will eventually be satisfied.
We have great love for this country and this city. We go through our days trying to tolerate the parts we disdain, trying to understand, and respect what others might want in this, trying to have a friendly, honest debate about what should be the right thing to do, trying to offer our critiques of the world we live in. We want to have the type of conversations we have been too afraid to have, mainly because they are hard to have, not because they are forbidden to be had. We want to think harder than we need to. We need to think harder than we need to.
This is a country with possibilities. There are parts we can do nothing about, and there are parts we want to do something about. The force lies in us, not from the outsiders who can only have a glimpse of how we got here. Start with cleaner journalism, the type that even with restrictions, we at least try not to be lazy about it. Start with learning about things we don’t, with writing down things we think, with seriously reflecting upon things we read. We as a race are known for endurance. Our parents and our grandparents have endured more than us. And where we are, considering what our ancestors have been through, is a preferable condition to build things on than many.
There will never be an absolute state of peace. Utopia is an easy drug to take. We are going to lose to the more powerful and the more fearful sometimes. There might even be casualties. But we believe in this more than some other things, which is why we are all here together. Nothing will immediately change the fact that we are still second-rated world citizens, no matter how faraway from home we get, constantly yearning for approval, for emotional reassurance, while living in an inferiority bubble. But think about it like this, without the pain, we will understand less about the pleasure of achieving something grand at the end.
And this, our friends, is our Chinese dream.
Shanghai’s 15-year-old Students The Very Best in the World, Participants Including Even Technical School Students
December 7, 2010 5 Comments上海中学生不但成绩世界第一，参加的学生还包括了中专技校学生
According to the New York Times, Shanghai’s 15-year-old middle school students scored top of the world on all three subjects, math, science and reading in the international standardized PISA exam. In true Shanghai spirit (one other thing Shanghai must score on or near the top: crazy parents), our much tortured students indeed do crazily well in school. Shocker to the Americans. Not shocking to us at all. Although there was something shocking to even us: even students from some of Shanghai’s technical middle schools, the kind of schools you go to when you fail miserably in entrance exams, participated in the exam conducted in April of 2009, which sampled around 5000 15-year-old students in the city. Shanghai Southwest Engineering School and Shanghai Medical Workers’ College, technical schools whose entrance scores were on average 150 points lower than the ones of Shanghai’s top middle schools, participated in the test.
It did seem that the PISA test was easy for Chinese students. Even the below par students could do well on it. Government press releases in 2009 called the test “fun and practical, focusing on real life problem-solving abilities,” and that “spelling mistakes don’t count as wrong answers.” Now the curious case of Benjamin Button: why are Chinese students still seeking to study abroad at younger and younger age? We can think of one reason: what kind of kids want to be good at math, science and reading anyway? It’s absurd how competitive kids these days are. When we are on the 6 o’clock rush hour subway, there are elementary school age kids talking about math. Not cool. Better go to American high schools and do nothing. Actually New York Times was a step ahead of us, already supplying the story with a debate called “Why many Chinese graduates do no better than migrant workers.” Duh. Good scores don’t matter! And why are these people so concerned? Of course, someone who wrote a book called “Coming Collapse of China” has an opinion on that. (Quite an interesting fact: the book was written in 2001…) Somehow we can’t help thinking about the running joke in the American society now: Americans rank No 1. in the world in confidence, No. 18 in academics. (It looks like they are even worse in this round of PISA results.)
Let’s be upfront here. Dear New York Times, your on-going concerning-trolling about China is just getting more and more ridiculous. You do a story on Shanghai students getting top scores on all three categories in an international standardized test, and second paragraph in, you are already doubting the legitimacy of the test. Certainly you wouldn’t be doing a story like that if Norway had won like last time? Give yourself a break, pretty please?
In all fairness and seriousness, from our own experience, Shanghai’s high schools are quite good in setting up a solid foundation to intense, well-rounded learning in the future. It’s the universities that are intoxicating the young generation by not providing them the incentives to think, to create and to pursue individual academic interests, in turn completely letting the foundation to waste. There need to be a real reform in education, and the top priority should be revamping the entire higher education system, period.