I’ve got Joe Levano’s
“Six and Four” from the 2005 album “Joyous Encounters” in my ears and it sounds
good. Got me shaking my head, nodding up
and down as I write. His “Autumn in New
York” had me all mushy for my home town a few tunes back. The tenor-man was born two days before the
end of 1952, in Cleveland Ohio and continues to play out. I hope he makes it
over here to the swingin’ side of the Pacific one of these days.
You may have noticed, they’re blowing up buildings, and cars
and who knows what’s next over here these past few days. As mentioned a few posts back the decisive
Party Plenum is coming up and this may be anchoring the attention of those who
would explode things to assert their myriad
agenda.
First there was the SUV that careened along the Tiananmen
Square pavement for 500 yards before bursting into flames, beneath the iconic
Mao portrait, killing the three passengers and two tourists and injuring forty
more people. The Party central leadership
was all meeting at the time, at the Great Hall of The People, not far from the
explosion. http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-tiananmen-square-china-leaders-20131029,0,359829.story#axzz2jAa7zXYj
Authorities are claiming this was a suicide bomber attack, by
Uighur separatists, and that a green banner with Arabic script was unfurled
before the explosion, though as Italian journalist Francesco Sisci points out,
its unclear since when that suicide bombers started traveling in trios. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CHIN-01-301013.html
Embarrassed by the attack on hallowed ground, so close to government meetings
and right before the decisive Plenum is to begin, heads have started to
roll. Last Sunday, only a few days after
the event, General Peng Yong, chief of the People’s Liberation Army in
Xinjiang, was removed from the autonomous region’s Standing Committee.
Next there were a series of small explosions
outside the tall government buildings in the city of Taiyuan about five hours
south west of here, which killed one person and injured a dozen others. http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/explosions-near-communist-party-building-in-china/
The explosive was packed with nasty ball bearings to ensure maximum injury. To my knowledge no one has definitively tied
this attack to Uighur separatists, but coming as close as it did to the
Tiananmen attack, there is much speculation.
As the article suggests though, the last time there was a bomb attack on
a public building a few years back in Fuzhou, it was suspected to have been
done by a Han Chinese angry about the paltry compensation he’d received when
his home was demolished to make way for a highway.
Unlike most cities, though perhaps like Paris,
Beijing is zoned so to prohibit skyscrapers in the city’s inner core. The effect is fascinating, wherein
constructions get progressively shorter as you make your way towards the old
Imperial cross hairs of the emperor’s throne.
The Great Hall of The People, to the west of Tainanmen Square, built
immediately after liberation in a Soviet style is large and imposing. But the building is dwarfed by the larger
commercial constructions to the east, beyond the second ring road, the former
city wall. It is also thematically
dwarfed by the Forbidden City, and therefore by China’s history, itself.
The effect, in tier-two and in particular
tier-three cities in the Chinese countryside is rather different. There, Party constructions often dwarf
everything else. That, or they are matched
by imposing constructions of State-Owned-Enterprise, (SOE) from industries like
telecoms or petroleum, which reinforce the message of Party power. That a ruling party would want to send such a
message of order and authority after the nation endured 150 years of domestic chaos
is understandable. It’s not unlike the
urge to host a lavish, if wasteful banquet after having endured years of
famine. But when gratuitous banquets
become rule, not the exception, when every town requires a towering monument to
Party rule, something is out of balance.
Xi Jinping has already warned officials to keep
official meals on the nation’s dime, to “four dishes and a soup” invoking the
old Ming Dynasty adage, or face sanction. I would suggest that he pipe up as
well, to insist that official buildings be zoned and held to more subtle
standards. The photo of the official
building in Taiyuan
(Where I haven’t been in a decade and which may
be choked with skyscrapers by now, for all I know), speaks to this
tendency. These monoliths all become
targets.
A good friend of mine who’d lived for a long time
in Japan, once told me, “I would never want to be here as a foreigner, during a
major earthquake.” No one, of course,
would want to be anywhere near any place experiencing a major earthquake. His point though was that knee-jerk
xenophobia would spring into gear and foreigners, more bristly and complicated
to manage, would be segregated out and managed roughly as a problem such during
a crisis.
This may or may not be true. I don’t recall any stories of cattle cars or
barbed wire enclosures during the Sendai earthquake. Fortunately, though, the epicenter was not in
a major city and Tokyo was spared much of the destruction. But I understand my friend’s point. Civility for any people has its limits when
all hell breaks loose and xenophobia, politely managed in a homogenous island
nation like Japan is only ever so far, beneath the surface.
And I think of his comment, living in
Beijing. If a major terrorist attack
were to take place in this city, I shudder to think of what the aftermath would
be like. No one wants to think of such a
thing happening in any city. But this
civilization, continental and despite the vast “Han” majority, more
heterogeneous certainly than Japan, tends to close in on its enormous self, to
heal or scratch, when wounded. Angular,
complicated otherness, like myself will no doubt be escorted, briskly or
otherwise, away.
So China will need to improve its preparedness
for a terrorist attack, just as New York should have after the first World
Trade Center attack in 1993. And, should
a devastating attack ever take place here, they will invariably overreact the
way the United States did after 9/11, from the Iraq invasion of 2003 till the
NSA tapping of today. Sometimes a sunny
fall day, an “Autumn in Beijing” not so different from an “Autumn in New York”
with all the problems and compromises, and unknowns and challenges can seem
like halcyon days, 舜日尧天[1] when one
considers peoples’ will and capacity to destroy. Or ignore.
[1] Shùnrì
Yáotiān： sage
Emperors Shun and Yao rule every day (idiom); all for the best in the best of
all possible worlds
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