All over Southwest University's campus, glaring poster boards display large messages and quotations for the student passersby. I have walked by these posters for 19 months and haven't given them a second look until today. I figured I should randomly pick one, snap a picture (below) and translate, character-by-character. Let's take a look:
改革开放是决定当代中国命运的关键抉择，是发展中国特色社会主义，实现中华民族伟大复兴的必由之路 (gǎigékāifàng shì juédìng dāngdàizhōngguó mìngyùn de guānjiàn juézé, shì fāzhǎnzhōngguó tèsèshèhuìzhǔyì, shíxiàn zhōnghuámínzú wěidà fùxīng de bìyóuzhīlù)
What the heck does this say?
It took me about 30 minutes of plugging each individual character into my electronic dictionary, resulting in a mess of words and ideas that needed to "Englishified." I thought it would take me hours to make sense of it...until I did two simple things. First, I was having a problem transferring the 4th-last character into my dictionary, which is 必 bì, but, at least to me, doesn't at all like the character in the picture. I text messaged a few students, giving them the characters before and after this "bì" character hoping them could fill in the blank. To my surprise, they all knew it, and one even sent me the entire quotation from his memory. This got me thinkin'. So, I copy and pasted the Chinese characters into Google and found this article, entitled "Reform & opening up is vital to the destiny of China." Surprised once again, I found the exact text within the Chinese translation at the bottom of the article. To quote this (extremely boring, plagiarized, Chinese Communist Party-line) article, the sign above can be translated as:
"The decision to begin reform and opening up is vital to the destiny of contemporary China, that reform and opening up are the only way of developing socialism with Chinese characteristics and rejuvenating the Chinese nation."
An important note is this specific sign can be found directly across from the School of Political Science at Southwest University, which is a major I find as pointless to study in China as studying astronomy in perpetually cloudy Chongqing. There is very little debate in the controlled Chinese political science classroom, or any Chinese classroom for that matter, except mine and other PCVs' of course.
Propaganda? Yes. Where in the Western World are there college campuses lined with signs telling students how to think and which political ideology to support? I would like to see how long a sign like this would last on an American college campus - even if it promoted absolute DEMOCRACY - before someone sprayed-painted it with satire.
This sign is nothing unique or creative. It can be found over and over again in newspapers and on websites in China. The simple fact that students (of mine) have memorized it sets off the Propaganda Alarm. And it's sad that students aren't encouraged to think for themselves at the university level. It's my students who will be given the power to make real changes in China, yet they are significantly deterred from reaching their full potential as individual, free-thinkers. To back up this idea, I was happy to find a New York Times article this morning that proves that not every Chinese young person is a Communist drone. Hip-hop, arguably the most creative form of music (maybe just behind jazz), is exploding in urban cities around China and these free-thinkers are the ones who speak their minds:
"'Hip-hop is free, like rock 'n' roll — we can talk about our lives, what we're thinking about, what we feel,' said Wang Liang, 25, a popular hip-hop D.J. in China who is known as Wordy. 'The Chinese education system doesn't encourage you to express your own character. They feed you stale rules developed from books passed down over thousands of years. There's not much opportunity for personal expression or thought; difference is discouraged.'"
As one who knows first-hand, I can affirm that Wang Liang aka Wordy is right. By not promoting individualism in their university classrooms, the Communist-run education system neglects to acknowledge that maybe the brightest young people might not be in their classrooms, memorizing, memorizing, memorizing, but on the microphone and graffiting walls with messages of Truth, unlike the picture above.
I love and miss you all,
Phil
蓝麦飞
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