Little bird in China

The Great Wall

In Beijing

At the Forbidden City

Olympic Friendlies and China's One-Child Policy

I have wanted to write for awhile now about the Olympic mascots for the upcoming games in China. I have included here a picture of Albert with some representations of these mascots that greeted us on the way into a Beijing mall. I noticed them because they are (1) everywhere and (2) interesting in light of my ongoing observations about the un-cuteness of India. By the way, Albert was not discriminated against at any Chinese venue and received many compliments during his stay there. In fact, my hostess learned the word for penguin in Chinese as a result of the comments he was drawing. I, naturally, forgot the word immediately.

Anyhow, the spirit of the 2008 games is represented by 5 "Fuwa" or "Friendlies," each of whom corresponds to one of the Olympic rings, a particular set of Olympic events, and to a Chinese mythological creature. All of the Fuwa are children and have very diminutive names - Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying, Nini. If you eliminate the repetition of the syllables in their names, they spell out "Bei Jing huan ying ni" or "Beijing Welcomes You." Pretty cute, huh?

Their official website not only explains what athletic events each Friendly represents, it also explains the particular virtues embodied by each Fuwa, each of which is also one of the five elements of nature (sea, forest, fire, earth, and sky). It is reminescent of reading the placemat at a Chinese restaurant to learn about the animal sign for your year of birth. Jingjing brings joy to children everywhere. Huanhuan is enthusiastic and inviting. (Have you ever noticed how certain words, like "harmonious," immediately make one think of text on Chinese culture?)

I could ruminate on the irony of the beaming Fuwa as the public face of an authoritarian country. But that's just a downer. Also, being back in India brings out my inner Barry Goldwater. All these hippies with their self-important searches for enlightenment. So I say: Down with "Free Tibet" protests!

Anyhow, I'm going to ruminate instead on the connection between the Fuwa and birth control. As follows: I have noticed an inverse relationship between country's fertility rates and the role of cuteness in their popular culture. I posit that as people have fewer children they have a higher probability of purchasing child-substitution items, like small dogs and cartoons. This drives up ambient cuteness, especially in retail. I believe that there is scientific evidence in favor of this mechanism. Because, per the NYT, the aesthetic phenomenon of "cute" is the result of our evolutionary affinity to the features of human babies, like big eyes and stubby limbs.

Consider the following evidence:

Mali has the world's highest fertility rate (7.38 children per woman). And levels of ambient cuteness are shockingly low. Granted, Bedouin chic has a certain romance. But it is emphatically not adorable. Also on the high end of the fertility range and the low end of the warm-fuzzy meter are Yemen (6.49) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (5.99). Paraguay has a medium high fertility rate (3.84) and the main cultural currents there are militarism and a German flavor brought by Nazis fleeing prosecution for war crimes.

Then we get to India, with 2.81 children per woman. And India, as I have pointed out, trails the rest of Asia in the cute column.

The USA comes in at a middlingly level of fertility (2.09). (The world median, by the way, is Israel with 2.38 children per woman.) In the USA, while cute things are generally available, we are by no means a world leader in this field. (Sesame Street not withstanding). Much of our supply of animated creatures is imported from Britain or Asia. And companies that should be putting R&D into cuteness, such as Disney and Mattel, are instead pumping out work that emphasizes glamour, wealth, and a certain precocious (and creepy) sexuality. (See: Bratz, Disney Princesses).

China (1.75) is about on par with Finland (1.73). And Finland is a leader in grotesque-cute, trolls in particular. And, finally, we get to East Asia, the world epicenter of cuteness technology: South Korea (1.28), Japan (1.23), and, with the lowest fertility rates in the world, Hong Kong (0.98).

Thus, the success of China's one child regime -- compared to the relatively modest reductions in fertility in India over the same period -- explains the two countries' divergent attitudes toward adorableness-enhanced individuals like Albert. And we can expect growing Indian tolerance for plush creatures as fertility rates here continue to fall.

Anyone who writes to tell me that development is an omitted variable in my theory is totally uncute.

India actually isn't much like China at all!

I've been hitting the road in the spirit of truly comparative political science, going to last week to see my good friend and fellow field worker, Charlotte. I spent 8 days in Beijing. And now I can report back on all those "India versus China" comparisons one sees in The Economist, FT, and other papers. The outlines of the comparison that I had in mind going in: China is richer, but it's got an autocratic and corrupt system of government. India is poorer, but it's corrupt system of government is a democracy, so it might pull through in the end. (e.g. Thomas Friedman aka "that hack who has his own NYT colum despite the fact that he somehow thinks it is legitimate research to extract a whole theory of the Arab world out of happening to notice Chinese phone card salespeople" wrote on this point in 2005).

Still, even though I knew that these many journalistic comparisons all point out that China is the richer place (GDP/capita of about $7800 versus $3800 in India), I guess I still kind of thought that the presence of all these comparative pieces meant that the two countries were be more, well, comparable.

Now that I've been there, I'm amazed. Beijing is so fancy!!! There are so many skyscrapers and fancy malls. But it wasn't the private opulence that really struck me, but the lack of dump-like-ness that was so very un-Indian. We drove and walked over at least a fair portion of the city and I didn't see any shanty towns and only one beggar. The buildings are toasty warm , despite the snow outside, because of decent utilities. The roads have no potholes but do have sidewalks. And not just sidewalks but sidewalks with markings to aid blind people is recognizing they are coming to a curb. There isn't trash in huge piles anywhere. The buses are really clean and shiny. The cabs are all reasonably new cars and ALL of them use the meter instead of haggling for the price.

Of course, Beijing is also a showpiece city, especially with the Olympics coming up. The government no doubt threw a lot of homeless people out and maybe even razed housing to put up skyscrapers. And there are huge disparities between the city and the countryside. But even comparing oranges and oranges, India looks pretty bad. I live in India's capital and I've been to Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore -- these are the cities that are getting India's new Chanel outlets, but they don't look like Beijing. And, frankly, India's government couldn't decide to raze the shanty towns of Delhi because of an up-coming international sporting event: doing so would create too much open space.

This is part of what makes political science so tricky. China scholars say their country is really corrupt. India scholars say their country is really corrupt. Scholars of both countries lament that the government is dependent on this corruption for stability so that even when the state wants to do something well, it often fails. But China's roads are SO much better. So, are China scholars just deluded about what actually constitutes "a lot" of corruption, sort of like when people in Florida wear sweaters because it is sixty degrees and, therefore, "cold"? Or is China somehow differently corrupt, in a way that makes its roads come out better?

Also, how do we figure out how important this "India is a democracy and China isn't" part of the comparison actually is? Particularly because both countries have a big gap between the laws on the books and what the judiciary actually does: so how much do the laws matter for the comparison? India is a lot more internally violent, though one can probably argue that China is more repressive. But both India and China get very, very bad marks from Amnesty International and keep parts of their country off-limits to foreigners, so how to know which country is likely to have more problems in future with internal stability?

I really want some of my China scholar friends to come here and tell me whether India looks like it is on track to be like China. China's GDP/capita is higher than India's. So maybe India is like China ten or fifteen years ago? Or maybe India is, as my boyfriend suggested, like "Bolivia if no one took care of it"? These options imply very different futures for my Indian friends.

------
Stay tuned for more on "India versus China: Is this Comparison Really Worth Making?" series. Because I'm out of time now but I still have to explain my whole theory of how China's Olympic mascots reveal the reasons for differential success in population control between the two countries.

The tragic decorating consequences of the fad for English language signage

There is construction going on around my apartment and so I’ve been going to coffee shops to write quite a bit. Over the weekend, I wanted to break out of my Barista rut and chose to go to Brown Sugar, the other coffee shop that is less than ten minutes walk away. I really dislike Brown Sugar and wouldn’t have gone at all if it weren’t for the fact that they have milkshakes. My problem with the place is with the décor and becoming totally fascinated with what this décor looks like from the point of view of Delhi young people.

Let me pause to say Brown Sugar is extremely popular with the young, upper middle class Indians in my neighborhood. Big co-ed groups of them come in, wearing jeans and knit tops.

My immediate cultural reference point for “Brown Sugar” is the song by the Rolling Stones, which I always thought was supposed to be a (shocking in its day) ode to the joys of sex with black women. But my friend Ed tells me brown sugar is also heroin. Anyhow, parts of the Brown Sugar coffee shop make me think that the owners, too, associate the phrase with drugs. The sign outside actually says “Brown Sugar: Get Yourself Addicted.” And then, inside, there is a bead curtain as you walk in and the windows are flanked with about two dozen large, colored glass bongs. (I wonder if kids still call them that.) The coffee shop does offer hookas, so smoking is sort of an appropriate note to strike. But I don’t see why they just don’t display hookas. The marijuana theme continues, see below, but there is definitely no heroin chic going on anywhere.

But on the wall to the right is an indication that the owners might have the African-American and Brown Sugar connection in mind after all. There are framed covers of American LPs and these are a celebration of 70s disco and promiscuous black people. There are two albums by Boney M. (“Night Flight to Venus” and “Take the Heat off Me”) that are representative of the motif: check these out at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boney_M. (This article is interesting in its own right since this group seems to have been the German – West Indies musical ancestor of Milli Vanilli.)

Two points: first, this doesn’t work with the marijuana references. It’s a drugs-music mis-pairing here. They need some Woodstock and Grateful Dead posters. Second, why is there also a framed LP of The Sound of Music?

The mismatched cultural references continue. The actual music on the stereo is US maudlin pop. With an occasional bit of classic rock, like a Zeppelin medley. There are a fair number of those raunchy dance tunes by black girl groups (like that “don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me” ditty) but nothing that would qualify as hip-hop. Nor any disco. There is a lot of playing of boy bands and also those male solo artists who are essentially one man boy bands and, yet, the reduction in personnel in no way decreases their loathsomeness.

Then there are the tabletops, which are shallow wooden boxes topped with glass. And in each is a sort of diorama of still more mismatched cultural references. There are tables with seashells, rocks, marbles, trinkets. The other day, I sat at the sand and marijuana diorama. The table top contained regular sand, several stash boxes, and various pipes—again, "stash boxes" were what these items were called back when I was a young person. Busy being not cool enough to get invited to the house parties that actually had drugs at them. So I may be dating myself here.

All of the tables also contain (and the wall opposite the LPs is covered in) signs, buttons, stickers, cards, plaques, and magnets with various quips on them. The kind of quips you see on t-shirts sold on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, on greeting cards at the dollar store, and the coffee mugs at gas stations. Central subjects being beer, food/dieting, sex, money, aging, and gender roles. The sorts of quips that make you feel degraded just reading them. Some in the middle age despair genre: “Some people call it a six-pack, I call it a support group.” “When I die, bury me at the golf course so my husband will visit me 5 times a week.” “Thou shall not weigh more than thy refrigerator.” Some in the unreformed male chauvinist vein: “All women are bimbos, some just make better trophies.” Others in that phoney “Oh, snap!” vein of girl power: “Coffee – chocolate – men: some things are better rich.”

I feel a need to defend my country from this décor. True, each one of the horrendous errors in taste that makes-up Brown Sugar has been committed by an American. But no one American could commit all these errors in taste!

Every time I’m in there I get to wondering what this looks like if you are Indian. For one thing, I really have no idea what portion of the puns and sexual innuendos the average customer picks up on. Nor am I clear on which items seem funny or glamorous versus shocking or weird. What portion of the references and messages implied by this decor are intentional and which are just the unfortunate by-product of a decorating scheme that calls for putting up anything related to people who speak English?

I don’t know what I find most disturbing. To think that maybe these Indian teens think this is what America is really like and will grow ever more convinced that we are an immoral, petty, and soulessly commercial people? To contemplate the possibility that these are the parts of American culture that actually do appeal to these kids most -- that somehow they have seized on the very tackiest part of every popular sub-culture? Or that the steady training of Brown Sugar and like outlets might actually lead them to like this crappy decor? No matter what, I see nothing good that can come of that place. I believe it should be firmly stamped out, much like the opium dens that "Brown Sugar" may or may not be referring to.

The ugliness continues

I am sorry I have not up-dated my blog in a bit. My steady sweetie was in town during Thanksgiving week and after he left there was an extensive agenda of pining and self-pity that needed my urgent attention.

I am afraid I have more bad news about India. I went back to the Taj Mahal last week—Thanksgiving Day, actually—and Albert was once again denied admission. I had thought the first time might have been an isolated incident of prejudice but, apparently, the fear and loathing of cuteness has struck deep into the Indian national consciousness. In fact, I had a small stuffed dog key chain in my backpack as well (his name is Norman) and he was also denied admission to the Taj. Totally unreasonable. Norman is maybe 2 inches high. What could he contain? And it’s not like they can’t give him a good squeeze and tell that he’s all stuffed with fluff.

So here Albert and Norman are. Looking at the Taj from across the river, barbed wire cruelly obscuring their view and symbolizing their ghetto-ization in Indian society.

As was noted by Nora earlier this fall, the cutest people in the world are the Japanese. And, so, in honor of a society that understands the importance of plush animals, the rest of this post will be in haiku.

Oh India. Why
are you so very uncute?
Penguin haters all.

Maybe all the air
pollution drags cute moods down.
The sky IS yellow.

Seriously, they
need to do something pronto.
The air is all smoke.

An Agra street kid
asked “which country” [are you from]?
I said the US.

And he replied with
“Me: India.” Cute because
was there any doubt?

When I ask “where from?”
most answer like I am nuts.
“What does it look like?”

No one says that. But
they do seem to imply it.
What is the reason?

Whites ask no questions?
That I wouldn’t know their town?
Or, why would I care?

It is a very
asymmetric way to chat.
Not this little kid.

Of course I would care!
He’s from India: I should
definitely know.

Haiku is the best
type of poetry of all.
Rhyming is too hard.

Do not write to tell
me I counted the lines wrong.
Syllables are tricky.

The Solution to all India's Problems

Okay, I admit my invention for saving the roads of the third world was half-baked, but this time I am really on to something.

One of the questions I ask myself from time to time is whether India is going to make it. I mean, there is all this enthusiasm about India’s economy and its future as the call-center-and-biotech capital of the world. But India is still incredibly poor and all its public services are a mess: the roads, the telephone lines, the schools, the courts, all of it—and not just in the red tape sense. In the “does not exist as all because all the money was stolen” sense.

So I always wonder if India is going to get stuck at some point because of its miserably bad government. I wonder if India’s future looks a lot like Nigeria at worst or Mexico at best. There are some pretty rich people, there are quality corporations, and there is international investment. But people are poor in some many senses—they have no money, no access to health care or education, no protection from violence, no meaningful rights, and no reason to believe their children’s lives will be any different from their own.

I think India’s problems are manageable. I mean, India is lucky: it is a stable democracy, the government has quite a lot of money and a good credit rating; the military doesn’t want to run the country; and it currently faces no severe internal or external threats.

But India has NO rule of law. Say there is a murder. There are rules on the books about how that murder should be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. But the chances that things will unfold accordingly are, roughly, zero. If the victim is not very important, the investigation will be little more than perfunctory. If the investigation happens, it will be this sort of civil-rights-violation-bonanza of warrant-less searches and confessions under torture. In the event the murderer is identified, the police can be bribed to forget the whole thing. And, even if the murderer is identified and booked, the wait until any sort of trial can be years—decades for less-serious crimes. Civil cases are backlogged by, roughly, a human lifespan. The judiciary is under-staffed and judges are constantly being bribed not to do anything, witnesses get killed, evidence gets “lost.” It’s just disgusting.

The solution wouldn’t be so hard if politicians wanted to do something about it. India’s Central Bureau of Investigations and its highest judiciary are very good—the staff is paid a decent amount and is protected from being transferred, harassed, or killed. So, they do their jobs.

One thing that might help would be real public pressure on politicians to shape up. I think people lack a clear idea of what the alternative would look like. Citizens aren’t that enthusiastic about getting the police and the judiciary more involved in maintaining a decent society because they have no image of those institutions as anything but a bunch of crooks.

So, my idea is: Indian Law and Order!

No, I’m serious. India has no prosecutor dramas, in television or film. It has cops-and-robbers movies. But these are invariably about the gray area between the two. Mafia dons with hearts of gold and such.

What India needs is a show full of high-minded and righteous police and prosecutors. Who confront, in each episode, a “ripped from the headlines” story of brutality and corruption. But then they resolve it in the way it could be settled in a world of high-minded and righteous.

The show would begin with a parental yet passionate voice that would inform the viewers that in the criminal justice system they are represented by two separate, yet equally important, groups: the police who investigate crime and the courts who prosecute the offenders. Then the viewers would watch as the honorable, diligent, and muscular policeman used carefully collected physical evidence and legally obtained confessions to break the case. Then the incorruptible, clever, and shapely prosecutor would see that the dastardly criminal was locked away for ever. This would all take about 60 minutes (minus time for commercials) and the victim’s family would be crying gratefully as the judge announced the verdict. (No jury trials in India). The victim’s family would be mostly cameos by beautiful film stars and cricket players.

Also, in true Law and Order style, either the original or the spin-offs would be on would be on one or more channels at all hours of night and day.

I know this idea might sound trivial, but the idea comes from a study that shows that both male and female respondents' expressed belief in the acceptability of domestic violence went down in rural India as TV came into the area. The investigators believe that is because Indian soap operas show less patriarchal families. Maybe the respondents just learned from the TV that they should self-censor. But, still, changing people's minds about what's normal/cool/tasteful/upper-class is a real change.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Wouldn’t you know it? I go to the protest safely, get back to Darjeeling City, have lunch, and get food poisoning. Just like Ghising, blind to where the true danger lies…

Also, I should never have made fun of India’s effete strike culture. Now Kolkata is on strike in earnest, and I’m stuck here for the next forty-eight hours. And I mean stuck here. At my hotel and its immediate environs. No vehicles today.

By the way, I have figured out why the change from Calcutta to Kolkata bothers me so much more than Benares nee Varanasi or Mumbai nee Bombay. It’s because English words just don’t begin with “ko.” I think koala and kohlrabi are the only two words in common circulation that start with “ko.” And those are hardly your good ol’ Aryan or Romance language nouns.

And no common English word begins with “kol.” I don’t have any idea how to tackle pronouncing that. I realize the intent is to revive indigenous traditions, but the whole point of a transliteration is to communicate how to say a word to people who don’t read your alphabet. And those people, even the kohlrabi and koala lovers among them, don’t know how to pronounce “kol.”

It doesn’t help that everyone says “Cal-cut-ahh.” I don’t know if that is because “Kolkata” is pronounced “Cal-cut-ahh” or because the name change hasn’t really caught on. I need some of those little cartoon speech bubbles.