Paddle Boat The Day Away and Boogie Down At Night

China Travel Blog by Janna

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Hey I should Travel to Beijing”? Well I did and I do not regret it, in fact if I could I would live in this diverse and booming city for as long as possible. However, I don’t think one could see and experience all that Beijing has to offer in one life time. This being said there are a few must see places for those who only visit for even a week. First of all everyone should check out the numerous Beijing Tours because everyone’s taste buds for fun are different. But if you want to spend a day exploring on your own, Houhai Lake in the Gulou area of Beijing is the place to be even on Sundays. This district is constantly alive with the sound of music and laughter and if you like me love to be on boats you can rent electric boats, paddle boats and guided boats to see the district from the lake. It is about 120rmb for a six person boat and if you split the cost it is much cheaper and more fun than say the swan boats in the Boston commons. If you are more adventurous you can try one of the Dragon boats but it is quite tiring. If you do go out on the lake look out for the swimmers and fishers, I personally almost hit a few. The view from the lake is gorgeous in every direction and Is a great photo opportunity. Another word of caution though if you want to go under the bridge to the narrower part of the lake you might get caught in a traffic jam of boats trying to do the same thing. It is not an unpleasant experience in fact it is quite funny and everyone caught in the jams laughs and says high to each other. You might, like me, even end up reaching over your boat to shake hands with a complete stranger you have just bumped into. In the winter I have been told that it is the primary place to go ice skating outdoors, now that I want to try.
If you are not into boating another option is to just walk around the street and see the shops and vendors running about. Or you can rent bikes which zoom all over the area. There are even tandem bikes large enough for three people. When I was there this past weekend a man selling erhus or Chinese violin as it is called by many foreign countries. When he came by my friend Ellen wanted to try to play one so he let her and even gave her some short instructions in broken English. However, when she started to play (terribly might I ad) tourists from all over the area began to flock around her and take pictures of her attempting to play this tricky instrument. I ended up buying one to play in my free time however my attempts to play made Ellen’s seem like sweet music and I was quickly asked to stop by my other friends. After this riveting experience we went to get a frosty beverage and one of the many restaurants and bars on Houhai’s bar street. Many of these bars are very nice and often have rooftop seating for a great view of the lake or even comfy chairs right next to the lake. Most have amazing live music, hookahs and even karaoke which I must say I am quite bad at. My favorite of these bars is called Michele Jackson and it is completely decked out in pink chairs with rhinestones in them. This is just one of the many places to visit on your China travel. If you have ever thought of going to China go, it is a place where everyone can find their own unique and fun experiences.

Wind from the East

China Expat - Chinese Cultural Observations From The Western Perspective by Ernie

Another Cultural Revolution - Paris in May, 1968

-From “Wind from the East”, by Richard Wolin, a fascinating account of how French students and workers in the late 1960s were influenced by China’s Cultural Revolution.

The story begins with a small group of gauchistes - political activists who had positioned themselves to the left of the French Communist Party – who were students of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser at the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. Fascinated and impassioned by political events that were transpiring nearly half a world a way, they began to identify profoundly with Mao’s China – which they came to perceive as a panacea for metropolitan France’s own multifarious political ills.

None spoke Chinese, and reliable information about contemporary China’s was nearly impossible to come by, since Mao had basically forbidden access to outsiders. Little matter. The less these normaliens knew about contemporary China, the better it suited their purposes. Cultural Revolutionary China became a projection screen, a Rorschach test, for their innermost radical political hopes and fantasies – which in de Gaulle’s France had been deprived of a real world outlet. China became the embodiment of a “radiant utopian future.” By “becoming Chinese,” by assuming new identities as French incarnations of China’s Red Guards, these dissident Althusserians sought to reinvent themselves wholesale. Thereby, they would rid themselves of their guilt both as the progeny of colonialists and, more generally, as bourgeois.

Increasingly, the “real” China ceased to matter. Instead, at issue were questions of political eschatology. The “successes” of Chinese Communism – or its imagined successes – would magically compensate for the abysmal failures of the communist experience elsewhere. The young gauchistes viewed themselves as pur et dur- as true believers who refused to compromise with the sordid realities of contemporary France. In their eyes, there could be no going back to the faded glories of French Republicanism – a tradition that, in their view, had been fatally compromised by the legacies of colonialism and Gaullist authoritarianism. One senses that if the Cultural Revolution didn’t exist, the gauchistes would have had to invent it. Mao’s China offered the students a way to perpetuate the intoxications of the French revolutionary tradition – the glories of the Bastille, of Valmy, and of the Paris Commune – in an era when oppressive nature of “really existing socialism” had reached undeniably grotesque proportions.

Were it not for the political maladroitness of the Pompidou government, which in spring 1970 abruptly arrested the Maoist leaders and banned their newspaper, their story, when set against the overall tapestry of the May events, would probably rate a minor footnote. But owing to the authorities’ heavy-handedness, overnight the unheralded Maoists became a cause célèbre. None other than Jean-Paul Sartre took over the Maoist newspaper, in bold defiance of the government’s arbitrary and brutal political sweep. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Maoism had acquired immense caché as political chic. It began attracting prominent intellectuals – Michel Foucault as well as Tel Quel luminaries Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva – who perceived in Maoism a creative solution to France’s excruciating political immobilism. After all, the Socialist Party was in total disarray. The Communists had become a “party of order.” The Gaullists, with Pompidou now at the helm, pointedly refused to relinquish the reigns of power. Yet, here was a left-wing groupuscule active in the Latin Quarter that, in many respects, had become the heir of May’s ’68′s emancipatory quest.

It was at this point that French intellectuals learned to follow as well as to lead. As a result of the May events and their contact with the Maoists, they bid adieu to the Jacobin-Leninist authoritarian political model of which they had formerly been so enamored. They ceased behaving like “mandarins” and internalized the virtues of democratic humility. In May’s aftermath they attuned themselves to new forms and modes of social struggle. Their post-May awareness concerning the injustices of top-down politics alerted them to the virtues of “society” and political struggle from below. In consequence, French intellectual life was wholly transformed. The Sartrean model of the engaged intellectual was upheld, but its content was totally reconfigured. Insight into the debilities of political vanguardism impelled French writers and thinkers to reevaluate the Dreyfusard legacy of the universal intellectual: the intellectual who shames the holders of power by flaunting timeless moral truths. Ultimately, thegauchistes came to realize that human rights and the values of libertarian socialism, rather than operating at cross-purposes, were mutually complementary.

The Maoists’ story is worth telling insofar as it represents a paradigmatic instance of a constructive political learning process. The Maoists started out as political dogmatists and true believers. But they soon found it impossible to reconcile their pro-Chinese ideological blinders with the emancipatory spirit of May. Once they ceased deluding themselves with revolutionary slogans, they began to understand politics in an entirely new light. The idea of “cultural revolution” was thereby wholly transformed. It ceased to be an exclusively Chinese point of reference. Instead it came to stand for an entirely new approach to thinking about politics: an approach that abandoned the goal of seizing political power and instead sought to initiate a democratic revolution in mores, habitudes, sexuality, gender roles, and human sociability in general.

Among historians and political commentators, May ’68 has had its share of naysayers and detractors. Critics on the right, led by none other than de Gaulle himself, have accused the sixty-eighters of abetting a “breakdown of civilization.” Cynical observers on the left have dismissed the May uprising as a little more than a way-station on France’s long march to capitalist modernization – a political blip on the road to “post-Fordism” or “flexible response” production.

These objections notwithstanding, French society did change radically in the May uprising’s aftermath, although undoubtedly the transformation was not as far-reaching or thoroughgoing as many former sixty-eighters had hoped. The changes that occurred were more subtle and long term, more evolutionary than revolutionary. For the most part they transpired in the more indeterminate realm of “cultural politics,” which helps to account for the significance that the Chinese Cultural Revolution assumed in the eyes of various leftist student groups. The transformation in question pertained to modes of sociability and the perception of social roles; to questions of sexuality, claims to authority, and the status of heretofore underrepresented or marginalized social groups – women, immigrants, gays, and the unemployed.

At base, the May revolt effectuated a sweeping and dramatic transformation of everyday life. The politics of everyday life functioned as an “exit strategy” allowing French youth to escape from the dogmas of orthodox Marxism as well as the ideological straightjacket imposed by the French Communist Party. It enabled the activists to address a variety of pre-political, “existential” concerns: issues pertaining to psychology, sexuality, family life, urbanism, and basic human intimacy. It was via the discourse of everyday life that the student militants were able to renew the lexicon of contemporary social criticism, making it relevant for the peculiar challenges of the modern world. For one of the activists’ central problems was that under conditions of late capitalism domination was no longer confined to the wage labor-capital dyad that had been central for Marx. Instead, in advanced industrial society the logic of commodification – the process whereby relations among persons become quantifiable, opaque, and thing-like – had surpassed the workplace, penetrating and suffusing social life in its totality.

Since the eighteenth century French writers and intellectuals have enjoyed the status of a lay aristocracy. In Republican France they functioned as arbiters of the True, the Right, and the Good. The high-water mark of this trend occurred during the Dreyfus Affair, when, under Emile Zola’s tutelage, intellectuals helped to reverse the miscarriage of justice that had victimized the unjustly disgraced and imprisoned colonel.

The May insurrection provided French intellectuals with a lesson in humility. None had anticipated it. The structuralists had famously proclaimed that historical change was illusory. “Events,” they declared, were a thing of the past. The mainstream left looked to the French working class to play its assigned historical role as capitalism’s gravedigger. But, in truth, French workers were quite content to enjoy the fruits of postwar affluence:les trentes glorieuses or the “thirty glorious years.” Hence, when the May revolt erupted, intellectuals were relegated to playing a series of bit parts and supporting roles – menial tasks to which this proud guild was largely unaccustomed. The marxisant bias of postwar French political culture was still predominantly focused on the workplace. Yet, the revolt had broken out elsewhere: Nanterre, the Sorbonne, and the oblique byways of the Latin Quarter.

The only intellectuals who had accurately foreseen the transformed parameters of revolt were those located to the “left of the left”: the gauchistes who were associated with innovative avant-garde organs such as theSituationist International, Arguments, and Socialism or Barbarism. One of the hallmarks of the May revolt was that ideals of direct democracy and worker control migrated from the periphery to the center. We have seen these ideals revived today among the Occupy Movements and calls for Horizontal Democracy that have emerged in response to the global economic crisis.