Ma ding lu da jin - MLK in China

Today was another one of those hectic Thursdays. I woke up at around 9ish to get ready for our interview session at 10am. I am working on the Martin Luther King Jr. Project in China which is headed by a Stanford Alum. So my part in the project is camera man and documenter; I and another student are working on a five minute promo piece for the whole project; the piece is going to be used as a means for fundraising. As part of the video, one of our tasks is to interview some Chinese people on the streets to get a sense of what typical Chinese people know about MLK. Today was our third time shooting and this time we decided to get off campus; we didn’t it expect it to be nearly as easy as it was to get people to respond at Beida (Peking Uni), but we also didn’t expect it to be nearly as hard as it ended up being.

So our motley crew consisting of myself, the assistant to the project’s producer named Miao, and Ryoko set out for Beida’s West gate. The idea was to find a place that looked visibly Chinese and to position the shots so that we could get the interviewees in front of the very Chinese backdrops. We approached a few men that looked like Chinese tourists, blue suit pants and jacket, a dark farmer’s tan and the standard Chinese haircut—it’s the kind of haircut that you would get if the only thing your barber used was clippers. The three men were unresponsive and after a few attempts, we got the message and just moved on. Eventually we were able to get a few people to respond to us, but most were pretty cautious about what they were willing to talk about; as soon as they heard that we were doing research on an a Black American, most of the interviewees shifted the conversation to being about America-China relations. After a while at the West gate, we decided to hop on a taxi over to the Summer Palace; there we met quite a few Chinese men interested in the fact that we were shooting, but unfortunately they didn’t know anything about Martin Luther King so they weren’t very helpful. We did happen to chat with these to old men that happened to be in Beijing during the time MLK was leading marches at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. They said that they were to old to be involved in such discussions about equality and civil rights—a comment which I found amusing—but nonetheless they said that his teachings were important for China.

After some more interviews we headed back; I was pretty exhausted at that point so I decided to go back to take a nap. At four we had our Red Guards Class; the Red Guards happened during the first two years of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to the end of 1967. It was considered to be the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao denounced the bureaucrats that had become in his eyes, nothing more than counterrevolutionaries. The Red Guards were students that had taken Mao’s call for a Cultural revolution throughout China to prevent the country from following a similar path towards phony socialism, as was the case of their once ally, the Soviet Union. We watched a documentary about the Red Guard movement which I found to be shocking on multiple levels. Essentially, for two years, all senior high schools and universities became student headquarters for revolutionary activities. The students would continue living in their dormitories; they would continue to receive food and their stipend while they took part in the revolution. During this period students committed heinous atrocities against their teachers and officials in the party that were considered to have lost touch with the revolutionary spirit and were given into the devil’s capitalist spirit. Anyone that was middle class or bourgeois/intellectual were hunted down, humiliated and sometimes beaten to death. Students trashed cultural landmarks, burned books and generally wreaked all kinds of havoc. Because Mao had decreed that no one should interfere with the students’ revolutionary experiences, they were not stopped until Mao himself in 1967 decided to disband the Red Guards due to his dissatisfaction with all their in-fighting. What I found most interesting about our discussion was the point that Professor Walder brought up about the effect that the group has on personal decision making. He said that in most cases students that had initially been opposed to the violence eventually gave in due to peer pressure; and once students started, they became addicted to the rush of beating people. But on the flip side, he said that all it took was one right person to stand up for what they thought was right in order to confirm that notion of moral rightness in everyone else in the crowd; essentially the group needed one person to confirm the feelings that everyone else had been feeling but had been to afraid to admit. I’ll throw out more about this topic later, I still haven’t processed it all yet.

After the class, I made it over to the Foreign Studies Institute to have our first discussion about MLK with Chinese students. The room was packed, there must have been close to a hundred students present. I was impressed by the fluency of the students’ English and their understanding of world politics and history; one student asked about why some people in the south still continue to wave the Confederate flag—I had no good answer for that one except for that everyone has got the freedom to believe and act as they wish so long as it doesn’t infringe upon the well being and rights of others. Most students really admired MLK and his teachings and thought that it was important to understand and learn about, but I didn’t get a good sense of how they thought it might be applied in China. Racial discrimination isn’t much of a problem in China; the main problems are class, job and gender discrimination and these problems are more of an issue in the western, more agricultural provinces. The students that we talked to summed up the problem as a problem of economics; though lately it seems as if all Chinese think that all of China’s problems will go away as the country advances towards becoming a modern economic superpower. And then there is the issue of religious freedom, but apparently China is pretty liberal about that too; people are allowed to believe what they want, at least that is what the Chinese students told us—it’s just that most Chinese don’t care very much to believe in anything but the government. But I’ve been finding that that is even changing in China right now. So much to think about, but so little time…