Seventy-eight, Part 1

Continuing on talking about classes, I figured I’d come back to Humanity in Globalization, coded POLI0078. This class has been by far the most applicable to what I studies overall, and continues to surprise me (and did surprise me, see part 2!) every day.

In response to genocide (specifically talking about Rwanda), we began talking about the Responsibility to Protect, lovingly abbreviated as R2P. This article itself came as, in part, a result of the Rwandan Genocide. Apparently, it seemed, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafted back in the day (itself a response in part to the holocaust), forming an integral part of the United Nations, was no longer effective, so another piece of whatever you’d call it was drafted same in scale, larger in implications, would remedy the situation.

It reminds me of a problem that we have back in Los Angeles. It isn’t dealing so much with human rights as with convenience, but the same logic can easily be applied for both. In Los Angeles, we lack serious public transportation. Yeah, there are tons of bus routes that I’ve yet to hear any one I know of take, regarding what I’m talking about, buses crowd the roads too. It’s pretty apparent that we love our cars in (Southern) California. We have our sprawling freeways that traverse the landscape that frequently get clogged to the point of stopped traffic. For years and years, the solution has always been to expand the freeways, costing billions of dollars in the end, more often than not requiring the acquisition of additional right-of-way to accommodate the additional 12-foot-wide lanes.

In Thousand Oaks, California, my hometown, the secondary freeway was expanded from two lanes to three just a year or two ago and just a few months later began experiencing massive congestion again. Yeah, cars moving off surface streets onto freeways create a lot of the additional traffic, but the fact of the matter is that cars are big and roads are bigger, and creating more efficient infrastructure by expanding roads rather than building light rail/a subway system proves both illogical and inefficient.

For a city of Los Angeles’s size, it’s amazing that there are only a handful of light rail/subway lines. There is one dedicated bus route running at street-level that encountered more than its share of accidents in its first year of opening as well. The one (or two as they’re labeled) subway lines barely go anywhere, though I think that in the last I’ve read they’re in the process of being extended.

The Responsibility to Protect is, in essence, an expansion of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and while it purports increased accountability for states failing to intervene in critical situations, the fact of the matter is that in the current state-system set-up, it really can’t.

Take what France and Belgium did during the Rwandan Genocide. As people were being slaughtered in the country, they sent a surprise mission to rescue all the French and Belgian nationals, despite the fact that the Tutsis were in more dangerous than either.

Take what Bill Clinton, president of the United States of America did during the Rwandan Genocide. After all the Americans were successfully evacuated, he managed to say that there are no more American interests in Rwanda, so it would not be necessary to continue any further in the Rwanda conflict.

So what makes this piece of pseudo-legislation any different from the former? As I posted on the Humanity in Globalization class blog in early October, I said:

“What stands out to me the most in reading about R2P and watching Lloyd Axworthy go about this ‘responsibility’ is the thought that changing the words regarding such acts does nothing but change the words regarding such acts. Codifying rather than broadening the scope of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, it seems, in my opinion, to serve as a feel-good measure ultimately lacking teeth.

“I would have to agree with Hannah[, friend and fellow blogger,] in saying that R2P seems rather difficult to fully implement. Ultimately the differences between a ‘right to intervene’ and a ‘responsibility to protect’ dissipate as leaders contemplate spending resources on something that has little national benefit.

“In the documentary ‘Ghosts of Rwanda’ that we watched in class, change of wording would likely do little to push states into protecting another state’s nationals. The original wording of the term ‘genocide’ was a majorly insignificant issue that turned politicians into lawyers as while people were being murdered, the official line of United States leadership was that what was happening were “acts of genocide” but not genocide itself, hence no right to intervene.

“To say that countries now have the ‘responsibility to protect’ would then have bureaucrats defining ‘responsibility,’ no matter how well or narrowly defined the term is in the appropriate documents.

“Not to sound overly pessimistic, but it appears that in the international community it is easier to do nothing and then apologize afterwards. And it makes sense (devoid of morality). If country A intervenes in country B’s business, it would be difficult to justify, not to mention resources would be diverted to something that may not have any benefit for country A. Alternatively, country A, not having any interests in the affairs of country B would not intervene, choosing instead to abstain from the conflict and apologize for not having done something after the fact. Apologies cost no money.

“And as a last point, to say that there would be some sort of framework so that developed countries intervene when appropriate, such as fines, would be to say that an organization such as the United Nations is entirely effective. Ultimately states are their own sovereigns and do what they please in our accepted international law framework.

“So in my logic, where would the solution be?

“Well, there is no easy solution of course. In order for us as a people and as a world to be entirely effective at preventing such events from occurring, we must see ourselves as a collective whole in the cosmopolitan sense, and by extension, the government.

“And unfortunately, there is no legislation for this. (Though R2P seems to promote cosmopolitanism.) We can try our best, but ultimately only time and our future history will tell.”

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: The Productivity of Communism

Everyone knows China’s growing at a rapid pace. It scares many Americans that China’s economy will, in all likelihood, become the largest in the world. But is it really any surprise and are the fears well-founded? Would it really be so bad for the United States to be second?

Many rationalize their fears by saying that it’s because China’s ultimately a communist that its power should be controlled in some way (though it can’t be). I’m going to turn the coin over and say that it’s because China’s got a communist (or at least authoritarian) base that it’s growing at such an alarming pace.

Let me start off my saying a few things: I like my (representative) democracy, so don’t go pulling a McCarthy on me. Second, is it really any surprise that China’s economy will be the largest in the world, considering that a fifth of the world lives in China? One has only to look to the past to see that since the beginning of civilization, China’s always been a great state. Even at the same time as the Roman Empire was at its peak, a third of the way across the world, Han China was more productive in the economical sense. In the United States, we just happen to glorify Rome over China because of our western roots.

Even during this global crisis, China is still growing at an impressive pace. Though not quite at the double digit increases that it was experiencing before, the fact that China’s economy is still growing over 5% annually is more than notable.

Just look at the Olympics. Many of the things that the government did would not have been accepted in other parts of the world. Overnight, neighborhoods were knocked down to give way to sports arenas. Factories and plants were told to shut down to help clean the air. The poor were bused out of the city to show a picture of harmony to the world that many feel, in light of its human rights records, just doesn’t exist.

The concept of face is amazing. We all do it, but here in Hong Kong and in China people are renowned for their sheer adherence to it. In seeking to keep a positive, or at least neutral image of oneself towards others, there is a tendency to stay removed from new social situations and new people. This is highly visible on both the macro and the micro levels.

China wanted to show the world that it’s here again, and that’s its ready to join the world again. In its “coming out party” that is the Olympics, it sought to create a spectacular event for a reputable organization steeped in ancient philosophy, and in many ways it did. In many ways it didn’t. In attempting to show the world its harmonious face, it displaced many people and gave itself a facelift that was both highly expensive and highly publicized despite the notorious lack of freedom of press.

As it repaved sidewalks and built a hundred new subway stations though, everyone remembered China’s record. People found brought up Tibet (an issue people are not fully informed of) to show the great disparity of many sorts in China and found the audacity to disrupt the mission of the Olympic movement in the name of politics.

In trying to create a harmonious picture for the nation, it succeeded in created a great Games but failed in creating a new world image. It failed to address many public issues that should have been addressed. The blame is placed on the government and its lack of accountability, so to speak.

Here in Hong Kong, there is freedom of speech; there is a transparent government; there is also face. In local students trying to retain face by only speaking to their friends, many alienate exchange students. This lack of integration and their unwillingness to approach others actually damages their face in many opinions, and while they think they are projecting harmonious face, they happen to be demeaning themselves.

Right now, many people in China do want a say in government. Many outside China wonder then why they don’t get it. Most people in China put economic well-being and economic growth in front of such a say, and I saw one documentary where a man said that while he doesn’t like his government, he has to trust it.

Right now, it seems that the government is acting in the economic interests of the state as a whole. It has managed to keep its economy in good shape and its people relatively happy. At some point though, communism will fail to serve China. For the country to keep progressing, something will eventually have to happen. Just look at how far China has come since 1949. I believe that eventually, democratization with come.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: Culture in a Land without Speech

I’d like to start by saying that I love Hong Kong. It’s become something of a home to me though I’ve only been here for a few months, and as I’ve explained, as much as I’d like to extend into to next semester, I just can’t. Yes, I’ve said my fair share of bad things about Hong Kong, but in my defense, I feel I’ve said some good things as well, and I voiced my criticisms in a respective way with reasons stated. So as a basis for comments voiced thus far on a particular blog post, I still have no regrets in coming to Hong Kong over many other choices of places to study.

In less crude terms, I’ve described many aspects of Hong Kong to be quite hollow. Hong Kong’s culture seems to be the lack of, and in a sense, the business and international finance aspect of Hong Kong is really the culture in and of itself. In many ways I’ve seen an identity problem here, as people acknowledge their British past before claiming to be part of the People’s Republic of China, even in the purely state sense.

So over reading week, I traveled to a city that seems more than proud to call itself Chinese. I’d been there before two years ago, but now, I got to see the nation’s capital in a new light, from a new perspective, having studying in Hong Kong for a while now, seeing how the locals view China and how they view their position in the world.

Probably a month ago now, we had Margaret Ng, a politician, as a guest speaker in my Hong Kong and the World class. At one point, she broke out to explicitly address the local students. “You are not any more special than Mainland Chinese students. Nothing about you having grown up here in Hong Kong makes you superior to students coming out of China.” She went on to say that they were smart and skilled, hinting at their English skills even being better than Hong Kong students. (No surprise there.)

On another note, in California (and probably in the United States), we value highly well roundedness in studies and a balance in life between work and fun. Likewise, majoring in music causes no overt criticism in saying that a major in neuroscience is just better. In the States, it’s about money, but it’s also about interest for most. “Do what you love,” everyone likes to say.

Do I think most Hong Kong students love business and finance? No. Could I be wrong, not likely, but at the same time very much so. Students here seem to lack interest in the arts or life as an academic and it seems like the few that don’t lack find better more conducive environments to their interests outside of Hong Kong.

In my Hong Kong and the World class again, they mention that businesses seeking to enter Asia, and especially China, go through Hong Kong because of the rule of law and free flow of information (which we would call freedom of speech back home). It seems though that for a people that have free speech, they don’t use it. In no way does that mean it should be taken away, but the fact that there is little visible political activism here (I’ve personally only heard whispers), while possibly a cultural thing, means that people here take a lot for granted and expect their business environment to stay open without much maintenance in that arena.

And I find myself more often an observer than an activist, but I think this lack of well-rounded interest, should it not change, may lead to the fall of Hong Kong. And of course it may not, and if I’m wrong, the more power to them. But thinking about their freedom of speech makes you think about places that don’t have it to the full extent that we do in the United States or in Hong Kong.

Take China, where I went to, where the Internet is censored and Tiananmen Square is supposedly monitored for unrest by PLA soldiers dressed as civilians. My friend, in searching for a particular bar in the hotel room, was blocked by the government and he lost Internet privileges to access Google for at least fifteen minutes as punishment.

Beijing just clicked as a city that’s on the right track to something. Yeah, the people spit (indoors too, sometimes) and horns honk as traffic breaks ranks, but the thing is that there’s more to Beijing than just business, or anything else for that manner. I’ve always heard that Beijing is China’s political center and Shanghai its economic, but the thing is that there’s so much more going on that just politics in Beijing.

There are sports and arts highly expressed around the city. Music blasts out of some shops, and Mandarin-language music in much higher quantity than just American music. In Hong Kong, the only places with music open at night and serve mostly tourists and expats looking for a good time. Street food so prominent around Beijing (though ultimately a way to make money) serves to ground the city and give it character, whereas in Hong Kong, non-locals struggle to find good street food, which is noticeably less common here than elsewhere as many people have moved onto restaurants and such.

It seems that to me, as well as my friends, all the little things that made the place more human and less business affected the environment. Beijing just turned into something that I wanted to keep exploring and keep experiencing.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: Ten Percent Annually

We ended Tuesday at the Olympic Village. Basically, it was an impressive site for an impressive country. Well, what do I mean by impressive? For one, the Beijing Olympics were massive. With everything involved, including the actual events and the trademark stadium involved, there was also the fact that Beijing’s bid including massively upgrading their mass-transit system and that most of the sports venues had to be built from the ground up.

For those who don’t remember, the games ended up costing somewhere along the lines of $47 billion USD. The opening ceremony alone, directed by the renowned Zhang Yimou, cost about $300 million USD. With China’s reemergence onto the world scene, the Olympic Village shows all the money put into it.

For one, the grounds are huge. The commonly-called Bird’s Nest that served as the centerpiece of the Olympics and was used to hold many events. The architecture is astounding and bold, with the seemingly crisscrossed beams making their way over the functional part of the stadium. Much like the Coliseum in Rome, the events held inside were as impressive as the façade on the outside.

Across the massive plaza there sits the Cube, which is groundbreaking in its own right. Serving the aquatic events, the building’s frame is filled in with filled, custom-cut plastic sacs and lit on select nights to a variety of colors, the least of which being blue, of course.

The subway system is now world-class and still growing. All but a few of the sites that my friends and I saw we got there by the subway system. It’s clean and efficient, and the voice speaks English in addition to Mandarin (albeit with the most annoying way of saying the [æ] in “trANsfer”).

The second reason I feel China is one impressive country is the sheer economic growth they’ve been experiencing—and it most definitely shows. Before the economic slump, the nation’s economy was growing at over 10% a year, year after year. Now, it’s probably under 10% but still positive, largely because China’s stimulus package was so effective.

When I visited in 2007, we flew into one of the two old terminals of Beijing Capital Airport. They were dingy and dirty and as soon as we walked outside, the rampant pollution permeated every piece of clothing you were wearing and burned the back wall of your pharynx.

Yeah, Beijing is still polluted, but whatever they’ve been doing, it’s been making the air cleaner. Of course, doing so was one of their promises in their Olympic bid, but for a metropolitan population of twelve million, it’s no easy (or small) task.

Most of the days we were there, the air was remarkably crisp and seemingly clean. At the south side of Tiananmen Square in the morning you could see all the way across to the north side and the entrance to the Forbidden City and Mao Zedong’s portrait. At the Summer Palace, it was easy to see the life of luxury and relaxation that the emperors lived in as the wind brushed against your face and the water splashed against the shoreline.

Just two years ago, the weather at the Summer Palace was horrific. After seeing the water in that lake, we decided never to eat fish from China again. Though still polluted, that water has definitely improved; and looking back and pictures from my last time in Beijing, where there were dead plants there are now thriving lilies.

In the Forbidden City, much of which covered by scaffolding being restored for the Olympics, now shone in the clean air. Once temple once rumored to have good views of the Forbidden City you could now see from the Forbidden City. The funny thing that I noticed though was that not all of the intricate painted surfaces were restored. While some were left put all together, others were restored only on the front—the areas that show up in pictures. Much of the roof undersides were left showing their age.

Going through the Forbidden City though, one had to think that on this massive scale how many people were displaced. Going through the Olympic Village as well, how many hutong were demolished and how many people were displaced?

A hutong (胡同) is a more traditional aspect of Beijing. It’s a neighborhood comprise of interlinked buildings house many families, and as of recent, have been disappearing to skyscrapers and more monumental structures. There was a time in Beijing when there was the palace, which was surrounded by hutong. Now, you have to into backstreets to find them. The ones that aren’t in the alleys have had to find their niche (usually alcohol) in some way.

Two years ago, the hutong that our tour group showed us was interesting to say the least. It was rundown and needed a bit of revitalizing. Coming back two years later (and on accident to this particular area), it’s now the bar district. It all came back to me when we crossed this one small bridge over the main canal. In one fell swoop it all came pouring back in. I have no idea what it was called back then, but it was probably named the same thing as now—Houhai (后海).

Just a few years ago, these storefronts were just storefronts. Now they were relatively well-appointed bars with music blasting out of their seams. I’m not going to assert that the change was bad, but it’ll at least say that it was different.

And back to the Great Wall. I visited it two years ago because that’s just one of the things you have to do in Beijing. Back then it was impressive, though the pollution came all the way out there.

And so it turns out that we went to the same section of the Great Wall that I went to two years ago. Badaling (八达岭) is one of the most popular tourist spots on the Great Wall, and when I went there in 2007, there was a dirt parking lot in front of the wall with vendors nearby. For a price, you could dress up as a Manchurian emperor and pretend to be coming through the gate to Ming China.

Today, the wall itself remains the same. The environment changed. Of course, it’s now fall and the leaves were a different shade. It was windy and the air was crisp and clean rather than hot and humid.

I basically had another Houhai moment. I was standing right in front of the Badaling gate and it all came back again. The unpaved parking lot and ground peddler shops was now an elegantly-tiled, well-arbored plaza with a memorial-style retaining wall commemorating the Great Wall. The retaining wall was covered with a bronze relief of a Ming general in the foreground and a mock outline of the Great Wall in the background. The actual Great Wall had flags on the watchtowers with the character 明, as in Ming dynasty.

This makes me wonder, how does the People’s Republic of China view its past? Most people would agree that the Cultural Revolution led to the destruction of history in many regards. Does the fact that they’ve refurbished the Great Wall to suggest the Ming Dynasty show that they venerate the past, or do they do it just for tourism? I can tell you most of my friends didn’t know what the 明 on the flags meant.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Peux ce que veux

I am one disgusted individual and I know it.

Throughout most of my life I had been an incurable pessimist. I don’t know if I can say that I had that childhood sense of fantasy and imagination that many adults so intensely envy. I can say that as an adult, I’m glad that I didn’t have it, because while I’m willing to pick up the slack, I don’t like creating that slack for everyone else to pick up.

Parents say things that they don’t want their kids to hear and they know it. Fights happen, and while many kids would have ignored what’s happening and go back to their plush toys and action figures, I guess I’ve heard everyone argue, least of whom parents.

And therein lies my origin. I’ve been surrounded by more reasonable-sounding pessimists than logical optimists. And in weighing those two options, I joined the pessimists’ side in an attempt to follow reason.

Despite my pessimism, I’ve always had a positive outlook on my life personally. I grew up in a good neighborhood, always attended good schools (and still do), got to experience my share of extracurricular activities, and was given the opportunity to find my imagined niche.

My parents had always said to learn from their mistakes and learn from them the easy way rather than go and make the same mistakes and learn the hard way. I believed them, though the hard way seems to have a more everlasting impact than the easy way.

I had always been told by friends that moved away with family or for college that the world outside of East Ventura County is a different place. I believed them, and for that I prepared myself for an outside world of despair.

I’ve always complained about my hometown. I found drivers abnoxious and dangerous. People too snobby and pretentious, and kids to drowned in their alternative realities of perpetually green grass that cuts itself for $300 a week. The thing is though that I’ve stopped complaining about my hometown because I’ve begun to realize how trivial that is.

Basically, we’ve got bigger problems on our hands. (Well duh, James, you must be thinking.) The thing is that everyone says that. But who actually does anything?

Certainly but a few in the case of Rwanda. The reason I bring this up, first of all, is that we discussed the Rwandan Genocide in my Humanity in Globalization (political science) class. The second is that this topic serves as a catalyst to bring up this aspect of my personality not yet quite mentioned, and worth mentioning now in case circumstances change.

The title of this post comes from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general heading the peacekeeping force in Rwanda for the United Nations during this conflict, who ended his letter requesting to use force to prevent major loss of life with “peux ce que veux,” translating idomatically to “when there’s a will, there’s a way.”

This has been something of an upswing to me. Though there were other factors in my upturn from a pessimist to an optimist, namely religion, “peux ce que veux” has become something of a motto for me.

And those of you who know the specifics, this sentence did nothing for Dallaire’s efforts. Up to a million people were killed for immoral reasons and no state saw a reason to intervene because of a lack of state interests.

In short, maybe I’m too idealistic. I understand that I’m still young in my years, but some things I hope don’t change; some things I know won’t change.

I feel that money is only worth as much as the people without it, and to live a life past what could be called comfortable is not a goal for me. To spend money on lavish curtains rather than give to those in need is a simple moral dilemma in my view. I study political science and aspire to be a leading academic someday. I wish to attain a law degree to help advance and guarantee human rights, but where would I start?

Not caring so much about money is a start. With all the garbage that I had been fed by people like Bill O’Reilly, I had to re-evaluate my opinions. Yeah, lower taxes would be nice, but if we get see the social services we get in return (which we often look past) would accepting that some things are better than wealth be all that bad? If all illegal immigrants are trying to do is live and feed their families, would it be so bad to view them as fellow humans than non-Americans and see about helping them out as well?

I am an optimist, but not in the current framework. And within my optimism I remain a pessimist. I feel that in our current state system, with the artificial concept of nationality and citizenship now being so engrained in our lives, we have lost our common humanity. This is not a system that is coming apart any time soon in our realist world created my neoconservatives and the like.

I have made the little efforts that I can right now. Of the 44% Asian American population of UCSD, I do not belong. I always check “Other” or “Decline to State.” I don’t care about race and ethnicity statistics. We’re all human, and until we all thoroughly understand that, we as a people are going head-first into a glass wall comprised of seas, fences, and demilitarized zones.

But hey. Peux ce que veux. Y cuando la gente pueda y quiera hacer lo que nosotros, los serhumanos, tenemos que hacer, quizás la Tierra pueda entrar la nueva época.

你们要不要哏我去?

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.