Time to think

Its been just of three weeks, I’m loving being in China its an experience and a half. However, it hasn’t been a frenzy of activity, I have had plenty of time to think and plenty of food for thought to. I have no telephone ringing and in one week I only have 2 full days of work (Sat and Sunday), 2 full days off (Tuesday and Thursday) and 3 days were I teach classes in the evening.  I’ve only recently bought a watch, before that my only time keeping device was my UK mobile phone. Some evenings I would get in around 7ish lie on the sofa and think, by the time I had finished thinking it may be around 9 or 10 (things like this don’t happen when I’m in UK).

As been having so much time to think, I’ll share a few of my thoughts with you:

The world is really big

Jinan is actually a big city, if it was in the UK it would be second city. If didn’t come here I wouldn’t even have known it existed. It is one of many similar cities in China. It just blows my mind that there are about 1,300,000,000 people in China. It easy to brush over the numbers, but then you meet real people who have their experiences and challenges. In the back of my mind I keep thinking, I might never have met these people. Makes me think that most the time my perception of the world is so narrow, like I’m not even seeing the tip of the tip of the ice berg. I think sitting a some desk job in London think about renovating my house would drive crazy, when there is so much more world going by.

There’s some messed up stuff out there

Ok, I’m in China earning about 6,900 RMB a month (just over 400 pounds). In the UK, this is peanuts, but in Jinan it’s enough to live like a king. When I go and sit in a street restaurant the staff, who have to work a lot harder than me,  earn about 300-500 RMB a month. I only need to walk to 150 meters to find myself in a red light district, where, mixed in with normal businesses, every other shop has some scantly-clad Chinese lady displaying herself under red/pink tinted light. Or if the head to train station, there is some half naked beggar with his limbs contorted over the back his head, so he becomes like some kind of a flat packed human standing one and half feet above the pavement. The nature of beggars is open to debate, but the most likely theory I’ve heard is that the triads cripple them to make them look more pathetic, then get their begging money and ‘look after’ them .  The way people can become so dehumanised is quite scary.

The most scary thing is that to 99% of people money is the only god. So many incredible people here that would be ready to sell everything they’re for a few more Yuan.

All this would drive me into either madness or denial, if I didn’t believe in huge God who is willing and able to transform lives and societies.

Freedom of thought

So, the poverty of many is acute, but the oppression of thinking is of similar magnitude. The situation is such that there are many topics where disclosing views, which would be widely accepted in anywhere else in the world, would be meet with hysteria and outrage. As school policy so as not to upset the locals we are advised avoid discussion on these three Ts (Tiananmen, Tibet and Taiwan). A foreign teacher was made to leave a certain province, after the outrage caused by him listing Taiwan as a country in one of his classes.

Pretty much every international organisation that has been let into has had to sell out on ‘freedom of speech’ and other such lofty ideals. One thing I know for sure is that KFC and MacDonalds aren’t the solution to China’s problems.

From what here about the education system here, it sound nothing short of oppressive. There are some schools (with kids aged 16-19) where a girl and a boy talking to each other is ground investigation and punishment. They have cameras that observe what the students study and can even read the text the are writing. I had a university professor student telling about the problem of university level students playing computer games rather than studying all the time. The authority are thinking hard about how to rectify these kind of behaviour. I was also informed that it illegal for unmarried couples to live together or for girls to get married before the age of 22 (in case they start producing too many kids).