When future generations look back at the development of China’s ambitious space program, 2020 will likely be remembered as the year China completed its own satellite navigation network, freeing it from dependence on the US-run Global Positioning System (GPS).
The Chinese system is called the Beidou Navigation Satellite System (Beidou means Big Dipper), and now includes 24 satellites. Project director Ran Chengqi said at a press conference in December that the Beidou system should be completed by the first half of 2020 with the launch of two more satellites.
The Beidou program is now in its third phase, the first of which dates back to 2000. Ran said while its current iteration should be complete by June, the system as a whole will likely not be fully operational until 2035. Nonetheless, the progress represents a tremendous achievement in China’s space program.
China joins a club of only three countries that have satellite navigation systems — the other two are the US with GPS, and Russia with its Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS). The breakthrough will relieve China of a political concern that the US could cut off China’s access in the face of developing geopolitical tensions.
It also gives China an immense leg up in developing future technologies dependent on navigation and 5G, such as self-driving cars. A project integrating Beidou navigation with 5G to guide autonomous vehicles is already underway in Wuhan.
China’s satellite system comes after years of notable accomplishments in space. The country last year became the first to land a rover on the far side of the moon. Since its first manned space mission in 2003, China has launched several space station prototypes, and hopes to soon send a rover to Mars.
A telling report from dating site Zhenai and the data-driven 36r is making the rounds, exposing the younger generation’s increasingly detached love lives.
Drawing on data from Gen Z and millennial subjects 30 years old, which, according to the idiom “而立之年,” is the age when most young people stand up, it provides a detailed analysis of the dating scene, Chinese singles’ romantic and professional preferences, and even their preferred breakup methods.
According to the report, 70% of 90s babies are actively searching for love. Among them, 26.42% expressed an intense desire to get married, but 30.05% were indifferent to marriage. In fact, the study found that almost 40% of singles did not want to have a wedding, women more so than men.
But love is undoubtedly still on the mind: the survey showed that being single was also the number one worry (63.88%), followed by being poor (44.84%) and having no friends (29.09%) — ouch.
To no one’s surprise, WeChat played a role: when breaking up, 40.82% of people used WeChat to deliver the news, while 46.83% chose to do the deed in person.
China’s 100 million singles remain in the spotlight: from viral campaigns highlighting “leftover women,” to marriage markets, to the phenomenon of Single’s Day. The report comes on the heels of Alibaba’s biggest Single’s Day ever; this age group is one of China’s biggest consumer bases, preferring to spend their increasing disposable incomes on consumer goods, pets, and social events.
The report concluded that Chinese 90s babies, more than any other generation, wanted to pursue “high-quality love and authentic lives.” They enjoy more free time and care more about having a comfortable lifestyle than their predecessors. It also stated that as women become more self-reliant and career-driven, men still hold on to traditional dating values like marriage and family.
On city streets, Hong Kong protestors clash with police officers from mainland China. But this isn’t Hong Kong — it’s Los Santos, in Grand Theft Auto V Online.
This month, Rockstar Games released The Diamond Casino Heist expansion, adding new playable games, cars, and clothing options. Players in Hong Kong soon noticed that those clothing options allowed them to recreate the go-to “Hong Kong protestor” outfit — black clothes, hard hat, gas mask.
What followed next was an exquisite virtual happening. Players from mainland China showed up in force, dressed as riot police and wielding water cannons. In the end, China’s water police overwhelmed Hong Kong’s protestors with sheer numbers.
This isn’t even the first time video games have become an unlikely outlet for Hong Kong’s political tension — one Hong Kong-developed simulator allows players to take on the role of a protestor. Meanwhile, a Chinese developer released a game which allowed players to beat up protestors.
“You foreigners think everything is so great. But your subways are shit.”
I deserved that. I was back home in New England for the summer and, in a moment of supreme dickishness, reminded a group of Mandarin-speaking tourists that in Boston most people wait for the occupants of the car to disembark before barreling through the door.
I’m right of course, but any random thirty seconds spent on Twitter is a good reminder that “being right” isn’t always enough.* And this guy had his point. There have been plenty of times over the past few years riding the subway in Boston where I’ve wondered if the water dripping steadily from the ceiling wasn’t, in fact, the city’s eponymous Harbor.
Besides I wasn’t really concerned about spreading the gospel of subway etiquette as I was asserting a perverse kind of moral superiority.
Basically I was being a dick.
We live in a morally superior era. Not that, as the morally superior history teacher in me would like to remind you, the present is a priori morally superior to the past. Just that we live in an age of tribalism where the all-too-human desire to assert our individual and group superiority has been amped up to become the defining zeitgeist.
(An example of this desire might be dropping a priori into the last paragraph even though I’m only 85% sure I used the term correctly.)
Stein’s work focuses on Trump-era America. He wants to understand the divide between urban, coastal elites who despise Trump and the communities, many rural and most in the middle and southern parts of the United States, who supported Trump in 2016.
“I was very, very, like, legitimately scared. Like, I didn’t know if a nuclear war was going to happen. I didn’t know if globalization was going to end, and we’d have an economic collapse,” Stein said recently in an interview with NPR (the Xinhua of the Coastal Elite).
Stein started his project with the required sense of moral superiority. Hence the dickish subtitle for his book. But after spending time with good folks in places like rural Miami, Texas, and with less good folks like Tucker Carlson and Scott Adams, Stein’s view of the problem fundamentally changed.
“The fuel of populism is rage at those who claim higher status. To extinguish the populists’ fire, we have to stop dismissing them as deplorable, racist, ignorant, unsophisticated, sexist, and I’m going to stop here in case someone tweets this sentence, which will impede my strategy. We have to bite our lips, feel their pain, and do that thing where you slowly nod while squinting.”
Or, as he puts it later, “I fail when I’m smug.”
I feel his morally superior pain.
The resentment that middle America feels toward coastal elites in the United States would not be unfamiliar to many people in China and how they view the West, especially the Anglosphere. Consider the term: 白左 or “White Liberal.”
“to describe those who “only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.
Zhang goes on to describe how the users of this term share common traits with members of the Alt-Right in other countries, including a sense of shared frustration with elites.
While Stein limits his book to the American experience, it’s easy to spot the global implications of his exploration of elites versus populism. At one point Stein visits an elite conference and attends a session called “Why Do People Love Dictators?”
The conversation turns to populism, so I ask the ten people in the conference room why the people in Miami, Texas, would think this conference is a scheme to keep power from them.
The answers tend to run the gamut of empowerment, education, and economic adaptation that would fundamentally change rural America into a bucolic version of America’s coastal cities. But, Stein writes, people in Miami do not want a rural Silicon Valley.
They want their way of life to thrive, not to live in cave wall shadows of our world. “What do you think the people in Miami, Texas, would call those people next door?” I ask. They’re quiet for a second. Then someone says it: “Missionaries.”
That person gets it. And that person would also get why so many people in China are frustrated with the West.
Most of the ideas about China coming from the West still sound, intentionally or not, as coming from a place of moral superiority. Our language today may be coded differently than in the days of the missionaries (“developed” rather than “civilized”; “democratic society” where “Christian nation” used to be), but the tone is there.
The problem is that a lot of the commentary coming out of the West about China is valid. As Stein told NPR, sometimes he’s right and the people of, say, Miami are wrong.
I would say that the elites have not done a great job of thinking about you when they pass laws. These people knew more about me and my life, both from visiting cities and watching television, than I knew about theirs. And they’re right. But I would also say that if they want a world in which they can use their smartphone and they can shop at Walmart and they can have peace, then you have to embrace globalism. And you have to embrace immigration. And you have to live in a modern world. Like, their world is basically still in 1985. Like, when I walked into the cafe in town, they were showing “The Andy Griffith Show” on the television. And that’s fine for them. But to try and create the rest of the world as if it was still 1985 is going to have disastrous consequences for America and the world.
And there’s the rub. International media coverage of current events in China, while sometimes a bit tone-deaf, is not wrong. Dangerous things, especially in terms of ideology and the rights of citizens and non-citizens, are happening in the PRC right now. Living in China involves greater personal risk than it did three years ago or ten years ago.
But attempts to raise the alarm internationally are all-too-often met with stony silence or hostility by Chinese audiences. There are systemic reasons for this to be sure, but blaming it entirely on propaganda or “brainwashing” is counter-productive, just as Stein learned that dismissing Trump votes as entirely about “racism” or “nativism” misses a bigger picture.
There have to be ways for the world to understand better what Chinese people want. For example, how to build a society that is both fully modern and fully Chinese? What does a world fully inclusive of Chinese voices look like? There’s a dialogue waiting to happen. There may also likely be answers to these questions out there which aren’t allowed to be discussed in the current (and increasingly repressive) political culture of the PRC.
But smugness makes dialogue impossible.
The first rule of cultural adaptation is not linguistic fluency or mastering 50 rules of etiquette. The first, and really, last, rule is: Don’t be a dick.
*The other day, I took my dog to the “unofficial dog park” near Ditan Park in Beijing. I watched how, when one dog pissed on the bush, all the other dogs, including mine, ran over and sniffed the spot. Then another dog pissed in a different place, and the dogs all scampered over for a whiff. Finally, one pooch took a big old dump, and that was VERY exciting, with one dog, fortunately not mine, even rolling in the fresh pile.
This was the moment I realized I spend way too much time on Twitter.
27-year-old Zhang Zheyuan is prolific. As a violinist, he’s toured with elite performance troupes, traveled the world, and played in Olympic ceremonies. And he’s done it all in darkness.
Zheyuan was born with congenital blindness in southwest China’s Yunnan province. He attended a special school for the disabled, learning side by side with other blind children, in a program designed to equip them with the kind of barebones skills they’d need to survive and make a living, if they were to eventually emerge on their own into the world. And that is an “if” — there’s a tacit understanding that many of the program’s students will never achieve true independence.
For China’s blind, the default path is massage. Some age-old idea posits that, sans vision, one’s sense of touch becomes hyper-developed, allowing blind masseurs to navigate through tensions and knots in the muscles like some kind of bootleg therapeutic Daredevil (having experienced a blind massage, I feel a twang of harsh honesty to recall that it was generally unremarkable). It’s unclear whether the tradition remains alive primarily out of a genuine belief in its tenets, or out of a public willingness to accept it as a sort of de facto, self-sustaining social support system.
Around the time when other children were setting off down the one-way road of massage education, Zheyuan was studying violin. As a productive hobby, of course, not a future career.
One evening while practicing at his instructor’s home, he recalls, rain began to fall heavily outside. The instructor invited Zheyuan to stay for dinner until the storm cleared, putting a Bach record onto the turntable. Zheyuan ate, awash in the white noise of vinyl crackle and raindrops on windows, taking in the sounds of Bach’s compositions. It’s worth noting that Bach too endured much hardship in his life, becoming orphaned at age 10 and eventually going blind himself, dying as the result of a botched surgery.
Zheyuan listened to his teacher, of whom Bach was a personal favorite, as he relayed these stories over Art of Fugue. He recounts feeling deeply affected by Bach’s ability to transform his trauma and suffering into something beautiful that could move others. When the rain cleared he left with a head full of new ideas.
When Zheyuan told his school, no, I don’t want to study massage, I’d actually like to play the violin, he was met with harsh rebuke. Why would someone like Zheyuan want to throw himself into a useless pursuit like that? Why would he want to shuck off the dehumanizing-in-a-way-I-can’t-quite-put-my-finger-on, but also safe and reliable tradition of becoming a masseur? Did he want to starve?
Zheyuan left the school that same year.
Amidst a firestorm of dream-shattering good intentions, Zheyuan’s father was a pillar of support. When others told him to be realistic, it was his father who read Zheyuan’s sheet music aloud, and told him to do something he loved. Zheyuan, with his father’s help, woke up routinely at 7:00 AM and practiced for ten hours each day.
It’s touching, but realistically, it should have been insufficient. When your friends, family, teachers, and caretakers are all telling you that your dream is not of the “come true” variety, but of the “pipe” variety, and when that assessment is bolstered and supported by an unfair and undeserved truth, namely that you are different than others, and less capable than others, and unable to do the basic things that others take for granted (others, they might add, who have failed to achieve the very same dream you’ve identified), the support of one person, sadly, should not be enough to align your inner compass. It’s in this understanding that we move closer to the true nature of Zheyuan’s greatness.
Let’s condense the remainder of Zheyuan’s blow-by-blow history. He called up the China Disabled Person’s Performing Arts Troupe and played his violin on the phone. He was invited to join the elite troupe, and spent the next two years touring the world. He played at the Lincoln Center, placed in a national TV competition, and captivated audiences with a solo performance at the Asia Paralympic Games.
After two years though, uncertainty started to creep in. Zheyuan was undeniably good for a blind man — the best in the world. But Zheyuan wanted to be more than that.
Much to the dismay of his family and friends, who felt that against all odds, he had already achieved his fantastic impossible goal, he went back to school.
The Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing told him they would love to accept him, but unfortunately, didn’t have the facilities required to educate blind students. Zheyuan only heard the first part of that sentence, renting out a small basement near the university and auditing all the classes there.
American schools were stunned by his playing, but turned him away for his poor English. Zheyuan started studying, memorizing a comprehensive English textbook word for word — using the text-reading app on his phone, it was the only method available to him. Clearly, this is a man who doesn’t give a damn if you think he’s already reached his zenith. He has further zeniths in mind, and who are you to tell him otherwise? You probably don’t even play the violin.
That was six years ago. The day that we wrapped on shooting this documentary film, September 20th, 2019, Zheyuan set off on the next leg of his march down an unending and personally-bricked road: a scholarship at the University of Sheffield in England. Goodness knows where he’ll go next.
When it comes to being blind, we tend to feel like it’s quite self-explanatory. The absence of vision. Wouldn’t that be something?
In five days of intensive, 9-to-5 shoots with Zheyuan, we learned that blindness is far more complex, and far less one dimensional than that. It’s not the absence of vision, full stop. It’s the absence of vision as it relates to one’s physical safety, and the absence of vision as it relates to one’s social life, relates to one’s relationships, relates to one’s concept of self. Blindness is not a singular and major affliction that blankets Zheyuan’s life, but a complex and ever-moving truth that changes every aspect of his lived experience, in ways big, small, and diverse.
Shooting one of our RADII Voices films requires a significant commitment from the subject, and most of the time they’re not very familiar with the filmmaking process. Zheyuan, more than anyone, displayed an immeasurable readiness and tolerance for the (often grueling) demands of the shoot.
When the crew was collapsing onto park benches, shoulders sagging with fatigue, Zheyuan was ready for the next shot. When we were scrambling madly to reach our location while the light was perfect, Zheyuan was at the front of the mob. Not once did he question anything or betray a hint of frustration. He was here to make a film, and he brought to that task the same steely resolve he brings with him everywhere.
Interestingly, from the outset, Zheyuan was preoccupied with the visual nature of our project. He wanted to know the shooting style and the visual motifs we had in mind. We sent him references, which he poured over with the help of his dad. When we created a flier for our live music event in Shanghai (Zheyuan improvising with experimental electronic musician Laughing Ears), he sent us back revisions to improve our graphic design.
Zheyuan moves around with a kind of deftness. He bumps into something every now and again, but has an uncanny ability to catch himself that could only come from a lifetime of practice (it’s worth noting that we worked as a team exclusively in environments that were unfamiliar to him). Somewhere like his home or his school, his disability could very well go unnoticed. He can navigate through rooms based on a totally alternate set of sensory skills — he can tell if the walls are metal, and at which point they change to wood, based on the reverberations of spoken voices in the room. Once he’s been in a place for a few minutes, he’s already drawn up a memory map of each object and corner.
That kind of “alternate sensory skill” extends to his specially-designed smartphone, which uses a computer narrator to orate texts, emails, web browsing, etc. It does so at approximately 300 million words per minute, sentences and whole paragraphs whizzing by in a wild gaussian blur. The Mandarin was unintelligible to our Chinese crew members, and when he switched the device to English, I too was stumped. Zheyuan found it amusing — English was his second language, after all, and here he was scoring higher than me on listening comprehension. He had trained to do this.
In between shots, we’d return periodically to Zheyuan’s hotel room for meals or power naps. The hotel was a nice one, with wall-to-wall windows and plenty of natural light. Good feng shui. The only thing that stood out was that some birdbrained interior designer had taken it upon themselves to construct the bathroom’s doors and walls out of perfectly clear glass. Using the restroom, there was an unspoken rule that all would avert their eyes from the glass cube of public shame.
It wasn’t until the fourth day, when we returned to the room with a full crew of additional day-rate cameramen, that one of them cracked a joke about the room’s obvious design flaw.
Zheyuan turned and asked me in English, “The bathroom is made of glass?”
I told him it was. He laughed it off and said something about how silly it was. But I knew that he was having to come to terms, in one instant, with the sudden realization of public awkwardness we’d been enduring all week. Blindness is more than a physical inconvenience — it’s an exclusion from a communal experience that is enjoyed ungratefully by nearly all living creatures.
When we’d wrapped the last scene on day five, we felt that euphoric sense of bliss and relief that comes with crossing any finish line. Zheyuan was beaming. We went straight to a bar to celebrate with beer and chicken wings.
Zheyuan is able to sense the social cues of conversation based on things like the tightened roundness of words spoken with a smile, or the direction someone is facing when telling a story, and the resulting way their voice projects through space. He knows when you’re trying to shake his hand, or when you want to help him with his bags. Sharing a communal basket of chicken wings in the center of the table can be a little tricky, but is overall very manageable.
At one point, I asked him if he could sign the vinyl record we’d used in the film, as a memento of our time together.
“Sign it?” he said. “I can only sign it in braille!”
I’d put my foot in my mouth. Even the simple pleasure of autographing something for a fan (which by now, I had become), writing one’s own name, was outside of Zheyuan’s experience.
But when he’d said that, he’d done it with a sincere smile, laughing about it. This is classic Zheyuan.
The amazing thing about Zheyuan is not that he has mastered the violin. The amazing thing about Zheyuan is that, saddled with a challenge more immense than most people have ever known, he holds himself like someone who is completely unbothered in every moment. More than unbothered, but grateful.
Through one week of intense shooting, outside of his element, being prodded and shuttled around a foreign city by a crew of near-strangers, Zheyuan complained zero times. The only thing he brought forward was productive energy and assurance, even at times when we had little of our own. When he ran out of that, he slept.
It occurred to me that it was this attunement to a greater understanding, and a certainty about one’s place in this world, that allows Zheyuan to do what he does. In spite of his challenges, Zheyuan has mastered his outlook on life, and he has mastered himself, in an almost nirvanic, Buddhist kind of way.
Zheyuan is not amazing because he has mastered the violin. He is amazing because he has mastered Zheyuan. His music is an expression of that — a symptom of the greater “illness” of freedom and conviction in one’s own inner truth. We hope you enjoy Zheyuan’s story as much as we enjoyed telling it with him.
If you’ve ever wished you could take a month off and get away from it all — try giving birth in China. Today, regulated mega-spas — called “yuezi centers” (yuezi zhongxin 月子中心) —are a fast-rising trend, taking care of new moms (and their newborns) who still subscribe to traditional Chinese medicinal beliefs.
Zuo yuezi (坐月子) or “sitting the month,” refers to the month-long period of postpartum confinement traditionally practiced in China. Although these age-old conventions may sound like a punishment to modern ears, the practice was originally intended to help women recover after the strain of giving birth, though it also has its roots in how women were perceived in early Chinese society.
Though China gained wider access to medicine in the 20th century, traditional medicine ideas were often still practiced. Fast forward to modern day, and hygienic luxurious centers have rapidly cropped up — in 2018, there were close to 3,000 centers around China — to meet the needs of mainly middle-class women looking to get their body back on their own terms — and grapple with the challenges of modern parenting.
Getting a massage from one of the center’s nurses
I consider myself like many post ’80s and ’90s-born Chinese who inherited traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) from their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but only practice it when convenient. So naturally when I gave birth to my first child, I didn’t exactly follow all the rules. I took a warm shower the day after I gave birth, and was dining out with friends within a week. However, once I moved into the Aidigong Yuezi Center (爱帝宫月子中心) in Shenzhen, I was forced to follow far more rules than I expected. This included wearing long sleeves, wearing socks, drinking herbal water, bathing with ginger water, and getting aijiu (艾灸, a kind of Chinese herbal aromatherapy) to ease a stiff shoulder I’d developed since giving birth.
But many mothers that I spoke to at the center had the opposite problem. Yan, 32, a mother from Shenzhen that I met during my month there, was at her wits’ end dealing with her mother-in-law, who she felt had more archaic ideas about what it meant to raise a newborn and heal her “broken body.”
“I was ordered [by her] not to get out of bed,” she recalls, adding that her mother-in-law gave her further restrictions on things like showering, brushing her teeth, and turning on the air conditioning — all traditionally adhered to during the postpartum confinement period. In traditional Chinese culture, married women are typically taken care of by their mothers-in-law after giving birth, but women like Yan are often turning to these centers to get care without the generational clash. In extreme cases, the clash has sometimes led to untimely deaths, such as in 2017 when a woman in Shandong died from heatstroke (link in Chinese).
Yan recalls:
“It was unbearable. My emotions were out of control. Seeing my crying baby, I really thought about running away.”
Jia, 35, says that she and her husband wanted to learn what she and many other mothers call “science-based child rearing.” She similarly had clashes with her mother, who she says would put too many clothes on the baby and sometimes burn incense whenever the baby cried.
By enrolling in a yuezi center, and having a nurse on call to oversee them, Jia says that she felt more at ease than when she was on her own. “I read a lot of online articles beforehand,” she says, “but online experts can’t help you in daily life.”
Most of these postpartum centers are located in first- and second-tier cities, where a majority of China’s big business is concentrated and the pace of life can be relatively quick. By comparison, a day in this type of spa can feel like a vacation.
Though the centers may vary slightly, you might wake up when the baby does, and the day to follow mostly revolves around three aspects. True to TCM theory, the morning begins with treatments aimed at helping women’s bodies recuperate and lose baby weight. These treatments often run off the basis of regulating the flow of qi in your body — keeping you warm, but not overheated, is one part of that — and relieving the “blockages” that may have built up within the meridians.
Two-in-one spa treatment
Staff may also whisk away the baby at your request for treatments, baths, swimming lessons, sunbathing, massage, and even baby face masks.
Though perhaps not adhered to as strongly as some people’s in-laws would like, TCM is nevertheless present throughout the entire experience, from treatments to the medical advice to the food — pricey items such as pig’s kidneys, dates, and papaya with bird’s nest are all foods TCM theory prescribes to new moms during yuezi. Peppered throughout are a rotating schedule of monthly classes, which blend Western medicine and TCM — lessons for new moms (and often their partners) on recognizing child illnesses, educational baby games, and how to otherwise take care of their bodies and their infant after they leave the center.
A nurse plays with black and white infant cards
It’s no surprise that yuezi centers are projected to become a 30 billion RMB industry by 2025. These centers are costly; month-long stays at these centers start at around 15,000 RMB (around 2,140 USD) — well over the average monthly salary in China’s first-tier cities, according to official data — and top out at a staggering 460,000 RMB (65,000 USD) for a top-tier package in Shenzhen, according toDT Financial (link in Chinese).
But it’s an expense that more and more new moms are willing to bear. In a 2017 study, 95% of those surveyed were open to the idea of postpartum confinement, and 51% of them said they would consider enrolling in a yuezi center, up from 38% in 2014. Now China’s most popular centers are booked out as much as six months in advance, which means new parents need to make reservations as soon as their first trimester — sort of like a swanky hotel, except that your check-in date is contingent on the day you give birth.
Aside from the price tag — which is indeed hefty — I definitely found more pros than cons to this experience, regardless of whether or not one subscribes to TCM beliefs. After our month was up, I left feeling educated, emotionally supported, and crucially, well rested (it turns out, no sleepless nights for the first month of having a baby makes a huge difference for your well-being). One unexpected benefit was also the social aspect: being able to meet other new moms who were facing similar challenges and fears to my own.
And perhaps most importantly of all, it gives Mom a rare chance to have “me time” outside of her new role and cope with the changes in her life; one thing I feel these centers in China do right is prioritizing moms’ wellbeing as much as their babies. At the end of our month-long stay, both mother and baby departed for the real world healthy, and in mom’s case, ready to take on the challenges of this new stage of life.
