It’s midterm exam time so students are (supposed to be) busy studying while us professors have the added responsibility of administering and grading the exams.
APEC
The 22nd annual APEC Summit ended a few weeks ago and the recent issue of the Beijing Review covers the meeting. One thing I found interesting was the order of appearance of world leaders in the magazine’s pages. First, the cover shows Obama and Putin flagging Xi Jinping as the Chinese leader leads the APEC group from their meeting hall into the viewing public. Xi Jinping has his right hand raised in the air, palm up, as if to both welcome the leaders and demonstrate his his vision for the world. That’s my reading, anyway.
War
The next thing that caught my attention was the ordering of the world within the pages of the magazine itself. One of the first articles discusses how Obama and Xi Jinping are forging closer ties. The next article is about Sino-Russian relations, that is, how China and Russia are developing their trade ties and, especially, how they have not matured as much as trade ties between the US, the EU and China. The third article in the sequence depicts Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Xi Jinping shaking hands and goes to on discuss a few of the agreements the countries are in the process of finalizing, among which include the Daioyu islands to which both countries lay claim.
But this brings up one more interesting point, that of being “on the other side of the coin.” Being a Canadian, one of the few countries in the world that hasn’t directly been invaded nor seen a war on its soil in recent times, coming to China where they are still feeling the effects of WW2 or, as the Chinese name it, the War of Japanese Aggression. This idea especially hit home because November 11th, known as Remembrance Day or Veteran’s Day in North America and Europe, is not commemorated in the same way in China.
China, on the other hand, has dubbed November 11th as “single’s day” which is supposed to both celebrate the single life and, more recently, has become an online shopping day. You may have heard the raucous about Chinese tech giant Alibaba (who recently listed on the NYSE) turning over more than $2 billion in sales. (I, on the other hand, seemed to have missed the shopping day because I had no idea where to look or what to look for. But to return to the point…) Here I am in a country with a very different take on November 11th and recent modern history. We are now 100 years from the start of WW1 and I’m wondering if maybe, in response to the Chinese shopping day, November 11th will become a nominal holiday instead of officially observed. I suppose there’s nothing saying that the observance can’t coincide with online shopping. For the record, China does commemorate its soldiers on August 1st with the “Army Day of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army”.
We also live in a time that we can all but smell the effects of war. That is to say, first it was with writing, then with movies, and now cheap electronics that transmit images around the world in the blink of an eye. We can hear people die. We can see their limbs get blown off or their heads chopped off. We are exposed to more violence in a much more indirect way than ever before. And I don’t think we’re used to it. World War 1 marks the first time a war was recorded by the common man, the soldier in the trenchers. Before WW1, war stories were just that, stories retold by soldiers or bards. Now, however, with advances in technology, war isn’t such a popular option as death and dying is pretty gruesome.
Anyway, I suppose that’s enough of a digression on war. Needless to say, November 11th made me think, that’s all.
Chinese Lessons
My interest in learning Chinese has slowly awakened, though I do so out of necessity instead of pure interest. Some might view that as a slight against my new host country but, all I can say in my defense is, in my experience, learning a new language takes time and it doesn’t pay to spend a lot of time on something that may not develop into much. Thus, I’m cautious about learning yet another language should I decide, or need, to move again.