When’s the Electricty Coming Back On? – Part II

Once again, I am sitting here one of GZ’s many Starbucks, this one at Grandview Mall, and a man approached me with an iPhone in hand and a picture of a naked woman on the screen, asking me if I wanted some.  I think I am safely assuming he was trying to sell me sex.  Twenty minutes later, another man approached me with an iPhone in hand, but this time the phone had a picture of a marijuana leaf on the screen.  He asked if I wanted some. Both times, I politely declined.  I’m left wondering if this Is this the next step in the modernization of the sex and drug trades?
Anyway, right after my dinner with Professor Cai and her students, I met up with Professor Ai Xiaoming and one of her graduate students over bubble milk tea (珍珠奶茶). Professor Ai is a professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Zhongda, one of China’s leading feminist scholars, director of Zhongda’s Sex/Gender Education Forum, human rights activist, and documentary film maker. She had just arrived back from Paristhat evening where her documentary was being screened, so it was really kind of her to make the time to meet with us. She is a firebrand and met us wearing jeans and a t-shirt, short hair, and a gleam in her eyes. We began talking about her trip to Paris and gradually moved into the realm of human rights. She was discussing her visit to more than a dozen US colleges to show her documentary and some of the ensuing discussions with students. One thing that bothered her was when she asked students what they thought of China, they would respond with how much they respect Chinese history and culture, which she said made her sick because it showed a lack of understanding of what ordinary Chinese people deal with day-to-day. This pat response from American university students may sound as bad as Chinese university students not being able to offer up anything on US foreign relations towards China, but it may also reflect a cultural desire to be polite in the face of someone they do not know from a foreign country. However, Professor Ai seemed to be looking for someone to point out the problems with the government and tell it like they imagine it is, but Americans are also given news about China with a certain bias that can be hard to filter out. The conversation moved on to questions about the Chinese government using incidents like the torch relay to fuel nationalist sentiment and how outside forces could be critical of the Chinese government without risking the possibility that the Chinese government uses that criticism to its advantage to fuel even more nationalism. Professor Ai took issue with using terms like “the government” and “the state”, but would have rather talked about individuals and how person-to-person contact can begin to change attitudes. The seeming flaw in that line of argumentation is that while there are exceptions to the general rule, the challenge is changing the general rule. As long as the government can harness nationalist forces to motivate the majority of the population, outside people and governments are going to have trouble leveling criticism of the system that may be able to effect real change. At this point, the conversation began to die down as it was nearing midnight and we were getting sleepy, so we decided to meet again over dinner in the coming weeks and continue this discussion.
Coming from dinner with people who are steeped in the law and a certain type of reason to drinking bubble tea with an activist who is guided by a different sort of reason mixed with emotion was a study in contrasts. Both Professors Cai and Ai work hard to protect and promote the rights of people who are not normally heard in today’s China, but each does her work in very different ways and armed with completely different tool kits to reach similar ends.