China

(下面有中文)

BEIJING Last month while home for  Christmas I attended a ninetieth birthday party for my Grandma with family and friends. Like others returning from China I went through that process of trying to explain the unexplainable fascination with China. Yet more than once I sensed a certain fumbling for questions from my interlocutors, it was them for a change struggling to small talk, not me.

Ultima Ratio Regum Latin for “[War,] the last argument of kings,” this quote summed up the classical approach to warfare, that it was the method of achieving a specific strategic goal of the realm when other methods had failed. In modern times though, it seems that war is often the result of a chain of political miscalculations by heads of state. Such is the situation with Iran and the United States, where armed conflict seems more and more likely the eventual outcome of our current diplomatic standoff.

Like baseball great Yogi Berra, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had his own struggles with the English language, one of his best malapropisms was the coining of the term “unknown unknowns.” Rumsfeld was trying to make a valid point about the uncertain security situation at the time in Iraq – that there were unexpected contingencies that simply could not be prepared for; unfortunately for him (but perhaps fortunately for us), that thought came out as “unknown unknowns.”

BEIJING - First I would like to say thank you to all those who have read my blog over the past year, I appreciate it. I began the year in Beijing preparing to do research for my dissertation, working through multiple versions of an online survey about individuals’ responsibility for solving air pollution, water pollution and climate change. As I end the year in Beijing, I’m now writing up my dissertation, surveying the job market and thinking about future research.

[Author note: To glimpse some of the future faces of Chinese media – my students – please click here.]

BEIJING - Last month I went to the local police station to register again. Just like the last time, as the officer typed in my information I glanced around, and wondered about the binder with the label “学习天安门（study Tiananmen)”. When you fly to China, they give you a little card saying those foreigners not staying in a hotel are supposed to register within 24 hours of arriving in China. I haven’t always quite done that.

BEIJING - Last Saturday I spent a moment staring at a picture of a naked man pulling a cart of coal in an underground mine. Throughout the 3 Shadows Gallery, designed by the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, you could see the juxtaposition of coal + ice (煤＋冰), a show produced by Asia Society’s Orville Schell.

BEIJING - In 2007 during the US Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton voiced support for funding a Woodstock museum. John McCain quipped in opposition, that he wasn’t there, he was all tied up. When I try to explain to myself why it is that American environmental groups are in China trying to make Chinese greener and not the other way around, I often use the same excuse – during the 1960s China was all tied up. While McCain was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam War (1964-1975), China was tied up in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) where intellectual rigor was stymied.

TACOMA– “Christopher, I’m afraid of the Chinese.” My cousin said this to me as I was about to leave my Grandma’s after a Christmas meal. She looked to me to offer some sort of consolation as the closest thing to a resident expert on China, having spent the past ten months in China. My response was limited, so limited that I faintly remember what I said to her other than commenting on the population of China, that 1 in 5 people in the world are Chinese.