Cash, Food, and Sino-Japanese Relations

Our landlord just came by to pick up our rent. Chinese landlords generally want to be paid on quarterly, semi-annual, or even annual basis. Pictured above is what we owed for the next three months, plus a little extra for our DSL bill.

This image captures, in a small way, what happens when a society has not yet developed a strong reliance on bank drafts, as in the United States. China has a fairly developed secured transactions law, so it's actually somewhat odd that Chinese banks don't issue personal checks. I suspect it has something to do with standardized processing mechanisms, but I'm not sure what. In any event, it was just one more thing we had to get through this week, as we are becoming increasingly burdened by preparations for the end of the term.

In school this week we had two papers due, one on economics and the other a draft for Chinese criminal law. The economics paper concerned the Gini index, a statistical measure that can be used to chart wealth inequality in a particular jurisdiction. Our economics professor, Dr. Dong, asked us to write a comparison of China's index with that of our home countries, so I was surprised to discover that both China and the United States find themselves at almost the same level of wealth inequality. If you have some time and would like to read a somewhat mediocre submission on the subject, I've posted a version of my paper on Google.

Our criminal law deadline was for a draft of our final paper. Professor Shizhou Wang has asked us to write research papers on particular aspects of criminal law in our home jurisdictions. It's an interesting pedagogical choice, given that we all came to Beijing to learn Chinese law. But I suspect that he is simply treating us as professors treat normal graduate students at PKU, i.e. as researchers. Indeed, it seems that our papers will be published in a book later this year that will be distributed to reform-minded legal scholars in China looking for new ways to modernize the Chinese legal system. So, on Professor Wang's urging, I have been reading a lot about America's private prison industry, while Katie is focusing on criminal punishment of antitrust violations.

We also had dinner with some Chinese friends this week. There's a restaurant near campus that specializes in food from Yunnan province, so we decided to try it out. After our experience there, we are agreed that Yunnan cuisine is our favorite food of all the provincial styles we've tried here in China. While Beijing and Uyghur cuisine tend to be extremely oil-ridden, Yunnan food focuses more on interesting spices and flavors than recreating the Exxon Valdez spill in every dish. Granted, Yunnanese cuisine shares the general Chinese tendency of non-discriminatory inclusion of animal parts, but overall the food was some of the best we had since arriving in China.

Part of our dinner conversation, however, was quite unexpected. Somehow we got on the subject of Chinese attitudes towards the Japanese. For those not in the know, the Chinese have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the Japanese: on the one hand they tend to adopt Japanese fashion trends and pop culture with vigor, but on the other hand they seem to maintain an almost vitriolic hatred for their eastern neighbors.

So we were somewhat shocked when one of our guests stated that, "I know my hate of the Japanese is irrational, but I am still proud of it." She likened her feelings to how Jews hate German people because of the Holocaust, at which point we reminded her that , for the most part, Jews have mixed feelings on the subject, but would never unabashedly proclaim pride in any prejudice they might feel. She agreed, and explained that the "Chinese view" of such things (if one can generalize in such a manner) is that the Japanese continue refuse to take responsibility for atrocities committed during World War 2. Thankfully, the conversation moved on to more cheerful topics, like the AIDS villages in Henan.

All in all, it was yet another interesting week in China. But we have more papers due in the coming weeks, as well as a few exams coming up, so we might not post as often. Until the next time...