Adventures in China

There is a pervasive lack of questioning in China. I don't think it is just me overly romanticizing the United States, though I am often disappointed with how little we question some of the things around us, here. But there is very little sophisticated questioning going on in China, this is why students are considered so dangerous: they question what is going on around them.

It isn't necessarily a belief that the authority figures are infallible or that they always make the best decisions, but it is a very uncritical view of the world. For instance, no one questions the information they see on (government regulated) TV or in (government regulated) papers. It just doesn't occur to people to question the source and validity of their information.

For instance, there was a story in my city about 3 boys who were murdered. The story was that the boys had been playing video games in an arcade (which I thought was coin operated), but had somehow left without paying. The owner was so enraged by this that he tracked the boys, killed them, chopped them to pieces, and buried them in another province. This seems like a nearly fantastical feat to me, given how crowded and busy China is. In any case, this was used as justification to shut down all the arcades in the city because they are obviously bad places.

My impression was that everyone was accepting the system, even though they didn't necessarily accept all of the people in the system. For all the examples they had around them of the wealthy buying their way out of trouble, people still generally trusted and believed the police. The fault would lie in the wealthy people, not the police. And, so, people seemed to respect authority figures not because they trusted them as individuals (often times they had specific issues with the person and their policies), but because they trusted that this was how the system was supposed to work.

I think this is why the Communist Party tries to contain the distribution of information so much. If enough information becomes widely circulated enough that people no longer question individuals, but also question the system, they could be in serious trouble. But I wonder how dangerous that information really is . . . it is easy to think that the system is problematic, but still be unable to believe in another solution. To challenge the Communist system, people have to be angry and have to have another path to follow. The potential problems aren't so much in the individual pieces of information becoming more widely distributed, but in people finding common dissent and challenging the authority of the system.