A friend of mine was asking for help in downloading The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers for free. In December, I thought about downloading the book for ten dollars to my iPod, but didn’t think it was worth it. I think I was afraid it would burst me from my bubble.
This morning while watching the movie “The Truman Show” with my students, I realized that like Jim Carrey’s character, Truman Burbank, I am living in a similar scenario, “The China Show.” When someone wants to know about the history of the Communist Party, or tries to tell the difference between President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, (even the NY Times can’t), it feels like they want to know about the executive producers behind the scenes who are responsible for making sure that the show doesn’t stop.
Here on the set of “The China Show” we worry about the incredibly expensive price of apartments, and students play the Three Kingdoms game. As my Chinese teacher pointed out, the movies and the television shows in China are harmonious, befitting a harmonious society, a path set by President Hu Jintao. I tell people that the Chinese movies I watch in the United States, outside the television studio, are what might be called “art house films,” often intentionally banned within China to get more viewers in the U.S. and Europe. These movies are about people stealing police uniforms and using them to extort pedestrians on the street, or the woman who is sent to the fields and becomes a one-person brothel in an attempt to regain her old city life. Back within “The China Show,” the movies are about people from an ancient period, quite often with the ability to fly.
Last week, I had a brief moment where I felt like I was teaching, using clips of movies like “Forrest Gump” to talk about school integration and the Vietnam War draft. I asked one of my students what she would do if her friend was drafted and sent to the Vietnam War, “Would you want to watch the news, or just ignore the whole thing?” She replied, “I wouldn’t watch the news.”
This week, many of my students returned from their attempts to leave “The China Show” through obtaining visas to study in the U.S. Some were successful and some were not. Like my student who would not want to watch news about the Vietnam War, these students did not want to do anything in class that required critical thought or analysis. Talk about the economy and other finance-related discussions, such as finding an internship when no hope of a job exists, quickly dissolved into movie-watching and playing computer games. As a dutiful cast member of “The China Show,” I put on movies, TV shows and cartoons, full of people flying and bending water. All of this entertainment and more is free here in China.
As I walked along a street with a former co-worker, I told her that this was supposed to be the site of some protests planned via the Internet. She couldn’t understand why, since she believed there was nothing wrong in China. Like the traffic that magically appeared to keep Truman from leaving the show, street sweeper trucks appeared out of nowhere and did a dutiful job of making sure that every inch of the pedestrian street was cleaned regularly, both of dirt and potential trouble makers. When I mentioned to my Chinese teacher that a friend’s husband had been in jail for two months for trying to protect citizens’ rights, there was a look of confusion on my teacher’s face. These stories didn’t correspond with a harmonious plotline.
Lately, I have been trying to get a job teaching about environmentalism here in China. The Deans of different study abroad programs regularly tell me that students from the U.S. are not interested – the interest is in the politics of producing “The China Show.” Students want to know about what’s going on behind the scenes, but for me this is too tiring. I want to be able to better understand those I meet everyday on the streets. The Communist Party members preparing to celebrate their founding 90 years ago are untouchable and rarely seen, living behind red brick walls, perhaps in some ways like studio walls.
A friend of mine who teaches international relations has not let the Communist Party dissuade him. He can rattle off cast members of “The China Show” like it’s his family tree as I stare in befuddlement. However, the problem for me is that I’m still not sure if I should try and do the same, or if I should just join the conversations with the common cast members, I mean citizens, talking about the expensive apartments like we did last week, last month and last year, and putting on more cartoons about air-benders to keep the students entertained.
Mr. Eberhardt made a splendid comparison of his current environment to the film “the Turman Show.” But I doubted it could be phrased as “the China show.” His activity area is limited in Beijing, and his contacts are limited to those bilingual Chinese students and scholars. From Mr. Eberhardt’s point of view, it might be true that he is living in a circumstance like where Truman lives. But to all the Chinese who can read English, we would rather call it “the Eberhardt show.”