When Life Gives You Lemons

Sometimes China depresses me. The country is riddled with natural assets – beautiful landscapes, breathtaking scenery, diverse flora and fauna, and so on. On top of all that, China often boasts about having the longest written historical record in history, stretching back three thousand years or more. But the beautiful scenery is scarce to be found. Everything is urban, modernized, new. Many of those same natural assets are being systematically destroyed to make way for new roads, highways, methods of transportation, and to prevent floods in other parts of the country. Take the Tiger Leaping Gorge, for example. If I remember correctly, this is one of the largest natural gorges in China, maybe in the whole world. It is a place I am visiting in about a week – and good timing, too, because in three years it will be under water. The Tiger Leaping Gorge will be part of a large lake that simplifies river transport from one end of the country to another. At least I’ll get to see it while it’s still around. And this very same country, with a semi-cohesive history spanning thousands of years – where are its relics? The China I see is brand new. It’s only been around for fifty years or so. In Europe, evidence of its age and history is everywhere. You can walk into a building and smell the age that has settled into its cracks and crevices. But here, all I see are modern high-rises and apartment buildings. So many of the structures that hint at China’s great and glorious history have been torn down and replaced with other things. What’s more, the government is a much more present force than what I am used to, even in its absence. When I was in high school, my government class talked about the constant struggle between security and privacy – the more privacy you have, the less secure you are, and vice versa. In China, it seems as though much of privacy has been done away with in favor of security – but I wonder who it is that benefits from it. The government is everywhere; reading my emails, blocking my access to the internet, watching me throughout the day. There are topics of conversation I don’t feel comfortable discussing with the locals. What if someone hears me? They might throw me in jail or deport me. The entire concept of free flow of information that my life has been structured around simply is not relevant here. The government owns the media. The government issues propaganda so that its citizens only know what the government wants them to know. The government delivers its version of Chinese history to its citizens. Truth is not the primary concern – it is the propagation and perpetuation of the government. Consider the recent riots in Lhasa. Everyone had some vague idea of what was going on, but no one really knew, since any mention of Tibet was conspicuously absent in local media. Newspapers, television programs, all reported on things that had nothing to do with Tibet. In fact, it’s still hard to know what went on or is continuing to go on. All foreign journalists were kicked out and tourists are no longer allowed in. It makes me sad – I recently heard my Chinese teacher talk about Tibet, and it was both troubling and depressing. She is an educated woman, but the only things that came out of her mouth were clearly what the government wanted her to believe. “Everyone in Tibet is really very lucky,” she said, “the average citizen in Lhasa is more wealthy than the average Han elsewhere in China.” That wasn’t where it ended. “The situation in Lhasa’s not so bad,” she continued, “really, Tibetans are very lucky people. The government has treated them so well. All of the provinces are required to have building provinces in Tibet, did you know that?” Tibet has the poorest economy of all of China’s provinces.