In America, death disappears (even though death never disappears).  From the lonely sterility of nursing homes into which the old vanish to vanish alone….. to bird’s eye view drone attacks eradicating marginal others below…to daily eating habits through which the flesh of the living animal is magically transformed into meat - we de-materialize death…  
 

I have been on a bus for 40 out of the last 72 hours.  Even when I went to sleep in my hotel room last night, I could still see the motion of the Taklamakan Desert passing by, projected on my closed eyelids like on a movie screen.  Frequently, on the bus, I felt as if “I” was no longer there.  The person who enjoys eating certain foods, obsessively checks his e-mail, laughs all the time when he is happy – that person disappeared into the road, heat, and sand.  It is not like I know how to meditate, or decided intentionally to do it. Sitting on a bus for so long, stopping when it breaks down, when the bus driver wants to pick up additional fares, when the passengers need to relieve themselves behind a sand dune, pretty much demanded a detachment from my previous sense of self, wants, and comforts.  To further heighten my sense of disorientation, Xinjiang has 2 time zones that function as parallel universes.  All of China operates according to official Beijing time.  There are no time zones like there are in the United States.  1pm Kashgar time is 1pm Beijing time…. but it isn’t.  The local, unofficial Xinjiang time is11am as locals tell us with grumbling discontent.  So it appears as if both times are inhabiting the same space, leaving me unsure whether I ate dinner at midnight or 10pm.  The above photos are from a place in Turpan, Xinjiang my Uyghur friend mis-translated as “The Sand Ambulance”.  These are not beaches, well, because there is no water.  Instead, it is a park of sand where locals go to therapeautically bury themselves and in the faulty translation of my friend “restore their knees to freedom”.  In this endless stretch of sand without water and unbounded time, I drift at the limits of myself.  In poetic form, my friend told me on the last night in Turpan, “sometimes I look at the clouds, and they look like shit….”  (more pictures to come of the beautiful things I’ve seen)

From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.   – W.G. Sebald

I was only in Lanzhou for 24 hours.  Enough time to talk to a retired man about his bird collection, stroll down some gray, dusty streets, eat fantastic lanzhou niurou mian (noodles and beef), get my shoes shined (I am not sure the logic behind getting my shoes shined before going to the desert, but hey!), replace my cell phone, and sleep like the dead for over 10 hours to recover from my cold.

“Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.” – Samuel Beckett

In April, I was in San Francisco for a conference.  After the talk, we went to an all-night dance party where I was overwhelmed by the noise and anxiety arising from my inability to talk to other people due to the deafening loudness of the speakers. I realized how much I rely on language, both spoken and written, as my medium with the world, as if I have a body and face composed of words that is more solid and real than my body of flesh and bone.  So when I cannot represent myself through speech, and cocoon myself in words (ironically, as I am doing now), I become hyper-aware of my body; its slightly slouched posture; its anxious tics; and its physical presence in space as an object in the field of other people’s line of vision.  Second realization, my unease with dancing was due to this lack of trust I had in my body; as if my body would betray me, and make a fool out of me (as if there is a “me” apart from my body).  As if. For there is no spirit apart from the body (and vice versa) but there is also no unity between body and spirit – only fragile disjunctures and frictions and pleasures.   I digress. 

Traveling alone though China last month, speaking only Chinese, I was again overwhelmed by a repetition of the same feeling I had in SF.  My awkward Chinese can manage to establish islands of communication (continually flooded by misunderstanding) and I can communicate basic, elemental needs, but always leave stranded in inexpressible solitude more complex thoughts and feelings.  As a result, I began to confront the question: how does one occupy space (or to use Heideggerean speak, “be in the world”) as a body without pretext, justification, or fear?  Perhaps, at stake is a struggle with society’s demand to have a reason for what you’re doing and a destination for where you are going.  Even ‘leisure’ and ‘tourism’ supply such reasonable alibis.  But a refusal to justify and offer up a meaning for what you are doing, and the heavy physicality of silence, provokes unease…When you travel, every government demands your reason for visiting and your address when you are in the country.  The basic existential condition of being a human drifting in ignorance will not get you a visa!

When I was in Myanmar, all of my reasons came undone.  Not in any traumatic sense, but in a way that, I think, released me from the anxieties of my own identity, speech, and so on – disarming my explanations of the world, expectations of other people, and my own personal limits.  Without a real reason for being there, I fell in love with the country.   My body, quasi-insitinctively, adapted to situations that were previously unimaginable to me, like walking in water up to my knees when downtown Yangon flooded during the monsoons (see picture below); standing in awe of the Shwedagon Pagoda at night (see picture below); showering with only a bucket of cold water in Pakkoku (for decency’s sake, no photo included), and waking up at 4am every morning to the sound of monks using a loud speaker to beg for alms; swimming in the lake in Yangon at dawn, and so on.  I felt like I was somersaulting through a field of contradictions: between the warmest and most wonderful people in the world, and the omnious shadow of soldiers armed with rifles patrolling the streets; the sheer magnificence and opulence of religious sites juxtaposed with the disrepair and poverty of surrounding areas… But most of all, the Burmese people, persisting in the midst of all of it, offered me a true glimpse of the sublime.

And suddenly,  I felt myself shatter into the world as flesh, sweat, laughter, and silence.

Mudslide Traffic Jam 1

Mudslide Traffic Jam 2

Mudslide Traffic Jam 3

what happens when you stop
your little repetitions
and someone takes your fetish away?

the ground opens
and kisses your belly
with an ache so great
it reverberates
in the dead bodies of your ancestors.

you have no time to put on your face
cause everything is
pounding against your temples
and you just need to show up
but you are never ready

(image of Saddam Hussein statue being toppled)

(image of Lenin statue being toppled)

and…….?

(image of Mao statue taken by author in Chengu)

In the seminar on East Asian Political Economy I attend, we are in the China phase of the course.  For the past the past few weeks, we have read Mary Gallagher Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (2005); Kellee Tsai Capitalism without Democracy: The Private Sector in Contemporary China (2007); and Yang Dali Remaking the Chinese Leviathan: Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China (2004).  I do not intend to provide a summary, book review, or comparison of the above-mentioned titles.  I simply recommend reading each of them on their own terms, as they offer distinctive insights into China’s contemporary political economic landscape.   However, my reason for mentioning these monographs is that they provide unique, and differing, accounts of why China has failed to democratize.  While our seminar debated which political scientist provides a more persuasive account for China’s absent democratization, a simple but striking incongruence occurred to me – why are we even asking the question ‘when will China’s government collapse’?; do we devote entire seminars and endless heated discussions to the question ‘when will the United States government collapse?’  Clearly, the latter question is politically unthinkable and, if it were asked, would be most likely greeted with derision.  However, this is not the first nor will it be the last seminar, conference, book, or article in which Western political scientists will predict, speculate, and debate the exact moment and cause of death of China’s Communist Party.

Moreover, this incongruence belies social science’s pretense to analytic objectivity and political impartiality.  Instead, it casts light upon two deeply engrained desires and anxieties, which structure the debates and discourses within political science departments in the United States.

First, despite the fact that certain political scientists have distanced themselves from, and critically deconstructed, teleological accounts of democratization (for example: see the work of Lisa Wedeen; Levitsky and Way; Andreas Schedler; and Thomas Carothers), the teleological fantasy that all regimes will at some point (no matter how glacially slow they move) become liberal-democracies modeled after the West remains at the core of our political imaginations.   For example, how else can we interpret the fact that US AID described the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa) as engaged in a “transition to a democratic, free market society” other than as a desperate fantasy?  Regimes are not measured on their own terms but are “automatically analyzed in terms of their movement toward or away from democracy” (Thomas Carothers).  This hidden normative investment can have life-or-death consequences when a country’s democratic status determines what kind of aid package, or mode of diplomacy, it receives or is denied.  Also, it can blind us to the persistent violence and abuses exercised by Western liberal-democracies (US drone attacks in Afghanistan resulting in ongoing civilian casualties; Italy’s abominable treatment of African immigrants; and so on).

Secondly, when I was in the car today with my friend Pete – he mentioned that this desire to see China democratize and become like us dates back to 1949 when China’s Communist Party defeated the Kuomintang and claimed victory on the mainland … At that time, the rhetoric in the United States was dominated by the sentiment “We lost China.”   The powerful desire/fantasy in the West to witness the collapse of China’s Communist Party is a continuation of the Cold War trope, lamenting China’s recalcitrant disappearance from the orbit of US hegemony.

I want to be clear that I am NOT claiming that any of the books I mentioned at the beginning of this post are guilty of indulging in this desire (they are brilliant analyses disproving the inevitability of democratization)– my argument points to a pervasiveness within our political language and imagination that is deeper than the content of any monograph.   The question ‘when will China democratize’ reveals a smoldering fantasy at the heart of our ‘impartial’ research projects and analyses – a consoling dream that the world is exactly like us, which easily slides into aggression when the resemblance is shattered.

A word of caution: this desire for the Mao statues to be toppled and the Party-State to come undone might not have the best interests of the Chinese people at heart (even though it often clothes itself in a humanitarian costume) – and we should not be shocked if, in the future, a democratizing China does not even remotely conform to Western blueprints.

This is a music video from my dear friend Ceschi recorded in my apartment during SXSW this year.  I sincerely urge you to explore his record label “Fake Four Inc.”  http://fakefourinc.com/  Ceschi has a new album dropping very soon, so look out for it.  Thanks for being a patron of the arts.  – christian