version without pictures printable pdf single page March 14 • March 16
I haven’t finished the day but I can report I’ve fallen asleep in 3 out of 4 lectures today. I’ve spoken with several who say their body can’t keep up with the pace. I suppose mine is telling me that but I refuse to listen! Starting tomorrow I will drink real coffee for breakfast! The group held some power today as the daily schedule reported that there were 5 lectures including at 9:45 pm fireside chat with Perry on the dropping of the atomic bomb. By 9 am this had been changed. One panel was dropped and his talk was scheduled for 4:30 pm with a duo concert with Katya and the cruise director Colin Brown playing four hands. I will be thinking of Yelena and Vladimir at that time!
I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I have a reserved seat on the first row bench at all times and that I can put my leg up on the chair so I’m really pleased about that. So it’s doubly silly to fall asleep in the front row!
Roger Porter delivered our first lecture on “China’s Economy: Success, Challenges and Realities.” He began by complimenting the audience for being so engaged. He will describe today 3 of his personal experiences with China. He first visited China in the spring of ’83. He came in advance of President Reagan to try to resolve a labor dispute. He met with US business men who were a part of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce. The Chinese leader gave him a long description of the latest 5 year plan. He finally broke in respectfully to tell him his plans could only be realized if 1) China has several years of political stability and 2) He needed massive direct foreign investors to help him. You will be concerned about being taken advantage of but don’t fear you will be able to set those parameters. He went on to tell him our government doesn’t control our foreign investors. He will need to provide them with a good rate of return or they won’t invest in China.
His second experience involved a trip to see the Great Wall of China. He retains that image to this day. There were no markings on the road, no signs, no center line, nothing. He counted several modes of transportation-bus, truck rickshaw, bikes, cars, oxen carts, pedestrians etc. The rule of the road seemed to be whoever gets to a piece of land captures it! Contrast that today with the traffic we saw in Beijing with all it’s modern traffic signals and what a change there has been!
His third example was the only place foreign travelers could live was the Peking Hotel. He was once in the elevator with writer Theodore White. He invited him up to the room to meet his Chinese wife. He was collecting information with his wife to write an article on Chairman Mao. Collectively they had visited every province. He asked them what was the most striking thing you observed in your travels? The answer was we have traveled all over and we only saw one tractor!
So he has observed that China has had a long rule of political stability. In the beginning people only wore Mao jackets. Now they have many more freedoms. Then they might have graduated from college but they were still assigned jobs. Now that is all changed. There is far more foreign ownership. The internet has helped a lot. His driver spoke English beautifully and he asked him how he had learned his English. The answer was from pirated DVD’s. Now the fear of foreign investment has gone.
China needs to increase the size of it’s farms and allow ownership to make them more efficient. The farms are mostly older generation now and young won’t want to take over without some incentives. Also China needs to invest heavily in their rural education. I believe I forgot to mention that at the kindergarten visit we were told there is no heat in Chinese schools. Shiver!!
China will have to deal with the millions that are moving to the cities. They need to move 15 million a year for the next 30 years to meet their targets. China also has to convert state owned enterprises to the private sector. China needs more transparency if it is to sustain growth. He also thinks China has to deal with intellectual property if they want to join the world leaders. In the long run this will also benefit China. If Wal-Mart was a country it would be the 7th largest country investing in China!
The next lecture was by Professor Jonathan Spence on “China in Western Thought, 1308-2008.” To Phil he is a nightmare to get the notes down because he never pauses or puts in periods. I, however, love to follow his organization just taking a few highlights.
China has received more interest by our scholars than any other country.: 1) The Marco Polo effect, 2) Catholic polemics, 3) Skepticism, 4) Towards contempt, 5) Eroticism and 6) Focus on power and perhaps a 7) on the Cultural Revolution though this may be covered later on a panel.
Marco Polo had a profound effect as a first writer about China. He started a process that has had a life of it’s own. It’s questionable that he ever was in China. He had a house that was at the crossroads of the caravans so he was in a position to gather lots of info from other travelers. His information comes from 1270-1290.
For sure the Jesuit Priests offer the first documentation of China in about 1650. A good account is written in Ricci’s Memoirs. In 1730 there were four volumes of info on China. The Analects were translated in 1650 on the word of Confucius and the word of God. Next there was a battle of the Papacy versus the Emperor in the search for meaning in the Chinese values. How should you combine Confucius with western beliefs.
In the 18th century there was the growth of skepticism about China on the part of France which led to the French Revolution. Another topic of discussion was was whether there was a key to the Chinese language. Was Chinese the language we all came from? It looks like to us philosophers that China was ruled by sheer despotism! Defoe wrote a book about having Robinson Crusoe having a look at China.
In the 19th century there was a move towards contempt of China. In 1784 the US was helped by British traders to introduce them to trade in China. Then the protestant missionaries came and asked lots of questions. They wanted to open schools and educate women. In the 1860’s a Chinatown was developed in the western states. The westerners were not sympathetic to the Chinese and instead were hostile. Mark Twain wrote about how badly we treated the Chinese and pled for more compassion towards them.
In the 19th and 20th centuries there was a search for the exotic in China. China hadn’t changed enough to understand the world. Men wore hair in queues and women bound their feet. This no longer made sense to the outside world. Foo Man Chu springs from this time.
Then there was a renewed focus on power. There was a new nationalism and a new militarism. In the 1920’s we learned about communism and cautiousness. We are still watching for that Chinese power. Mao wanted to get rid of Chinese elitism. It was a horrible period and those between the ages of 14-23 lost their chance for education. I think of our friend Ann Wang who fits in this category and how hard she has worked in the US to catch up. I fell asleep about this time and missed the rest on the cultural revolution!
I decided I would skip lunch with Phil and go swimming and have lunch on the 8th deck or look for a protein bar to munch on. My legs are swollen today and I need to try to rule out salt which is pretty impossible to do here. Imagine my surprise when I found the water freezing cold! I almost didn’t go in but this was the longest time I would have all day to exercise. Someone told me they empty the pool everyday. I guess it hasn’t warmed up enough for my tastes at noon. I plunged in and lasted for 20 minutes and then went into the warm spa for about five. Wrapped in my bathrobe I joined Joan and Tom for a Caesar salad lunch and some ice tea as well as hot tea. I expected to interrupt Phil’s nap but he hadn’t taken one yet. Had a chance to start today’s diary before the next 3 pm lecture.
Bill Mc Shea spoke on “Celebrating Chinese Wildlife.” He has had a career of 22 years with the Smithsonian in the Conservation and Research Department. He gave a slide show centered around the panda but also showed a few other animals and birds.
His projects are privately funded and he works exclusively in the Sichuan Province where the panda are now located. This part of China has a complete range of climate and covers 48,000 square meters. There is the familiar panda that is black and white and there is also a Red Panda. The giant panda has six digits while the Red Panda has five. Most bears have some form of black and white about them. Their babies are born early and they are very small with mainly big lips that can catch a nipple. The wide range where the giant Panda has previously been found has collapsed to a very small area now. They don’t breed very well in captivity. Now there are 275 bears in captivity and the goal is 300 so they are almost there. Once they have lived in captivity they have had no luck in introducing them back to the wild.
Each zoo pays one million dollars to the Chinese conservation fund per year to rent the panda. He’s never seen a panda in the wild because the bamboo forest is very thick and they can hear you coming. In 1998 there was a ban on all logging to help protect the panda. A panda eats 18 hours of every day and only eats bamboo. They sleep 6 hours and have sex once a year. They don’t have the energy to have a baby each year. The greatest aid to finding where the pandas really live have been to use camera trapping cameras which have an infrared sensor that takes pictures of all animals within the view of the camera. This has greatly helped the scientists track them. Now the west only trains the Chinese personnel in how to use these cameras as China does not want the world to know of their statistics on their animal count.
He added that many families in the Washington DC area grow bamboo in their gardens to feed the pandas in the zoo there. I fell asleep a bit towards the end so had a cup of coffee in order to stay awake in Dr. Perry’s fireside chat.
Dr. Perry spoke on “Why did the US drop Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” He said this was his least favorite topic. He personally was sorry about the bomb being developed and told us the history of that development.
In 1939 and 1940 we were afraid that Germany was building such a bomb. Happily for us many German scientists had come to live in the United States. They decided we should build it. In order to convince FDR that this was the thing to do they enlisted Albert Einstein to write a letter to the President. He paid attention to this letter and the result was the Manhattan Project. In May of 1945 when Germany surrendered the bomb was not yet ready.
Three things happened that led to our using the bomb. 1) The battle of Okinawa was the last huge battle. Perry was 17 years old but the next year he was sent to Nagasaki. We lost huge numbers of soldiers in the battle of Okinawa. 2) Kamikaze pilots crashed into our aircraft carriers. Between 1 and 2 we lost over 25,000 and Japan lost 110,000 military plus civilians. We were intensifying our fire bombs. In one night on Tokyo 100,000 men died. All the wooden buildings burned to the ground. 3) In November of 1945 there was planned a large invasion of Honshu and Kyushu. Based on the figures we lost at Okinawa we felt we would lose one million men and the Japanese would lose 10 million. On July, 1945 there was the first successful test of the bomb. The scientists favored that Truman would demonstrate the bomb with a test that was not in a densely populated area hoping that would deter us from using it because the Japanese would surrender.
Truman was afraid the test wouldn’t work and so he decided to use it for real. The Japanese military was still not ready to surrender after two bombs were dropped but Emperor Hirohito intervened asking them to surrender. They still didn’t want to and planned a coup but ultimately Hirohito prevailed. We backed off from an unconditional surrender and relaxed the rules a bit. Truman agreed to their being able to keep their Emperor. This led to the occupation forces being totally accepted by Japan. Perry was a part of that force. He agreed with Truman’s decision to drop the bombs as a way to force a surrender and save US lives. Many of his colleagues did not agree with him. We can form our own opinion when we visit the museum tomorrow and he will like to hear what we decide. We decided to shift our trip to the Atomic Museum rather than the cultural museum we had signed up for.
Tonight was Stanford night with cocktails in a large lounge on deck 8 followed by dinner in our favorite Italian Restaurant where we have eaten twice now. We had a lovely cello concert from one of our members who had quickly arranged to borrow a cello from the Hong Kong Philharmonic. She played Bach beautifully. We sat at a table for 8 and visited with Lola and Mike Thomas who live in Florida but have a 20,000 acre farm in Nebraska where they are growing corn for ethanol. We enjoy them very much.
We left dinner at 9:45 to make the duo piano concert with Katya and Colin Brown our cruise director. Michael guess what their first number was. None other than Mozart’s Rondo Ala Turca. They played it well but it sounded like a fast race. I like Vladimir and Yelena’s version better. In fact they played several of the same numbers that our cousins played. It was 45 minutes of rare beauty that we have come to expect each evening. Such a nice way to end the evening. It’s now almost midnight and we need to be on deck at 6:30 am to watch the interesting lead up to the Nagasaki Harbor. I hope I make it!!