MY SOCIALIST ELECTRONIC DICTIONARY

One of the first orders of business after settling down here last September was to buy a fancy electronic dictionary. As I may have mentioned before, one of the more irritating qualities of Chinese characters is that their appearance often gives no clue to their pronunciation. If you don't recognize a character or its component parts, you have no recourse but the awkward and difficult process of looking it up by the number of strokes necessary to write it. There are many ways in which this makes life harder for the student of Chinese and there are also several practical ramifications. One is that if you go into a Chinese restaurant that does not have pictures on the menu than you are pretty much screwed. You don't know what's available and you don't even now how to begin looking up anything you don't understand. Basically you are reduced to pointing, asking about foods based on their color and the absence or presence of meat, and ordering spicy tofu, again.

My uselessness in restaurants was a large part of why I wanted to buy an electronic dictionary - one of the ones with a fancy touch screen and stylus so I could just copy any character I didn't recognize and be told what it was and how to say it.

After an exhausting day of haggling at the Zhongguancun electronics bazaar, Jessica and I brought home these little babies, made by a Chinese electronics company and said to be endorsed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. They didn't come cheap. Although you can get a consultation with a dentist and an x-ray of a chipped tooth on a Saturday morning for about seven US dollars here (long story), you can't buy electronics goods for any less than they would be in the States. Of course this wasn't just any electronic dictionary. In fact, we were unable to find anything that was just a dictionary -- everything had mp3 players or games or movies or a combination. The dictionaries we bought not only had great resources for students of either English or Chinese, but also had a million other little bells and whistles. When we brought our new gadgets home I devoted myself to getting to know all the many new electronic diversions it had brought into my life. This is how I came to watch the trailer for Ice Age 2, how I discovered that I could use the translator function to get the machine to swear aloud in a Chinese or English robot voice, and how I found the games.

The first game I got hooked on was a matching game involving pairs of tiny animals and a time limit. I played it until the fun of procrastination wore off and the anxiety of homework began and then I played it some more. Then, one day, it wouldn't allow me to play anymore. The menu screen displayed a negative dollar amount and I concluded that one had to go online to buy more credit. They got you hooked and then they gave you the bill. Harumph. I told Jessica of my discovery and she swore off the matching game, saving the precious few she had left for some rainy day. I didn't try to translate the message more clearly or look at the website, because really, I had better things to do.

A few months passed. One day, probably while studying for a midterm, I absentmindedly visited the game menu. To my delight, I had credit again. I ran to Jessica with the joyous news and promptly began another slacking spree. This time around I tried a new game. A fighter plane game. This, as you can imagine, was far more fun than matching chickens and ladybugs. It had cool graphics, different characters and planes to choose from, and lots of shooting and explosions. Before long I was out of credit again, and this time, I wanted more. Jessica and I weren't sure what had changed. Was it because I had switched the battery? was giving me another hit just another away to get me hooked? or did it just take time to recharge? At around this same time Jessica started messing around with the electronic pet game on the device, soon discovering that her puppy was rather more demanding than the average e-pet. The dog was forever getting sick and in order to buy his medicine, Jessica had to answer grammar questions in a "Learning English" game. Forgetting to check on him for a few days, she came back once to discover that he was dead. Dead? What kind of sick machine kills puppies to punish you for not studying your English grammar?

Duh.
Suddenly it hit me (and by this time I had already had the damn thing for about 7 months). This wasn't just any electronic dictionary, it was a socialist electronic dictionary, a machine that knows better than you how to best apply your labor power and spend your time. Though produced and traded through open channels of supply and demand, this was no capitalist device. This was not the unrestrained, free expression of individual needs and wants. This was not the invisible hand, but the bold, sinewy, often dictatorial hand, which strangled e-pets and dispersed game credit on a formula based on dictionary usage.

The first thing I felt was outrage. How dare they deny me my fighter game? I'm an adult dammit! and I have a right to play my fighter game regardless of how many words I look up in a day.
After that passed, I had to recognize that there was some validity to the system. Having played minesweeper well beyond the point where my eyeballs lost all natural moisture, I could see that it might not be a bad thing to impose some limits on electronic game play.
Shortly after I began to wonder if I could score game credit by looking up dirty words. I could. I haven't quite figured out how many times you have to look up "scrotum" in order to earn one fighter plane game, but I'll let you know.

One of my teachers last semester was always recommending that I give my once per module speech before the whole school on market socialism in Europe. The first time the topic had come up my teacher was thrown by my insistence that there were aspects of socialism in every ostensibly capitalist country, and that the two systems could in fact co-exist quite harmoniously with an educated populace and a (relatively) enlightened bureaucracy. This wasn't because she didn't know about the positively luxurious parental leave legislation in Northern Europe or universal health care in Canada (she did) but because she hadn't connected those things to ideas about how the relationships between economies and societies and between states and individuals. I think it was also because Chinese citizens aren't exactly encouraged to critically reflect on political ideology. If China is a socialist country, than what China does is socialism, and what other countries do is necessarily not.

Thus, my teacher listened with interest as I described high levels of taxation, publicly funded university educations, and bars required to close early so that working folk were forced to get a good night's sleep. In England, I heard plenty of grumblings about the interference of the government in people's lives, but damned if even the most libertine of my MSc cohort didn't make it into lectures on time every morning after having their evenings end by imperial decree (or so I liked to imagine) at the reasonable hour of 11pm. I know the British "nanny state" has seen some reform in the past few years and the pub laws may have finally been changed (and of course even back in the day you could always seek out a nightclub if you really wanted to stay out late), but I know that my thinking about states and citizens was forever changed by living in a country that gave me free health care and told me when it was bedtime. Like my dictionary, all those lords and commoners in their houses knew what was best for me better than I knew myself. I found that strangely comforting, but then I only lived there for a year.

If thought through to its logical basis, the socialist perspective doesn't paint a very favorable portrait of humankind. A socialist citizen cannot be trusted to make the right choices or to rely on themselves but requires the guidance and assistance of the state. I much prefer the Republican/Libertarian imagining of the heroic individual who can achieve great glories if unfettered by bureaucracy or the disincentives of taxation. Unfortunately, I don't believe it for a second. Perhaps this is because I've known lots of otherwise wonderful people who've made poor long-term decisions on a daily basis, and rather non-judicious decisions on an occasional basis (ahem, MARK). I myself have some pretty hardcore steadfast principles about many things, but I went without health insurance for years, sincerely believing that I couldn't afford it, while all along I was saving up money to travel the world. We all have to live with assholes like me and my friends, not to mention the morons who go on fertility drugs and then are so surprised! when they have quintuplets.

The fact is, unless we are the unabomber (and even if we are) we live in a society, and I've never understood why people, regardless of their political affiliation, can't seem to understand or accept that other people's decisions affect our lives. It would be great if we lived in a utopia where everyone took care of themselves, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Call me crazy, but I'm willing to spend my tax monies on universal health care and maybe even have a few of my freedoms to carry heavy artillery and drive Hummers curbed so that I might live in a safer, healthier place (with bike lanes please!). But often it isn't even as extreme as that. Sometimes acknowledging that you live in a society just means putting measures in place that guide people into making decisions that won't negatively impact others. Thinking back again to my days in London, I recall a magical evening (immortalized in the minds of those present at the time as "The Rising of the Urinals"), when I coerced some friends into locating one of the public urinals which was said to rise from the ground around sunset. These urinals ("yur-eye-nulls" in British English) had been installed on a few popular bar streets whose residents had likely complained about the smell in the streets the morning after a big soccer match. Socialism came to the rescue once again, using government funds to construct high-tech urine catchment devices so that soccer hoodlums could continue to live in peace with all those silly people who insist that urban environments shouldn't smell like piss.

I have not forgotten British former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's famous statement:

"there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first" (1987).

but I don't think that it is necessarily incompatible with my argument. What I'm talking about here, perhaps somewhat nonsensically, is socialism as it pertains to and is expressed in society. Socialist economic systems aren't based on the assumption that people are incompetent and irresponsible, but quite the contrary: people are saints who will selflessly labor for the good of society, but the market must be faulted for not being able to equitably distribute what is torn from the earth and transformed by human labor. (Sidenote: Can you tell I've spent more than 3 years in graduate school?).

Though it blew my teacher's mind to hear it, much of Europe tempers the excesses of capitalism with the softness of socialism, and even better, they use the revenues generated by rapacious free trade to pay for it all. Swedish export-oriented companies like IKEA and H&M maintain their competitive edge with very low tax rates on the production end, while the wealth they generate is funneled back into a system which guarantees health care, unemployment funds, and a full year of maternity leave which can be taken by the mother or split between both parents.

China won't be instituting anything like this in the near future, but they will keep experimenting with the same combination, even if it continues to go by the name of Communism. Modern China can be cruelly, ravenously capitalist, but the growing wealth gaps, environmental destruction, and other contradictions that Marx was referring to when he declared that "Capitalism will eat itself", are for the time being somewhat contained by strong nationalist sentiments and trust that the government will take care of its people. Most Chinese understand the necessity of the transition from the old state-owned enterprises to more efficient private ones, and they think that moving away from a centralized banking system is a kooky idea that just might work! but they don't want to turn into the United States. They believe that there is some news that the people probably shouldn't hear and some rights that they probably shouldn't have.

As for me, I'm not ready to give up my rights to information or free speech (assuming they still exist by the time I get back to the U.S.), but I'm coming around to the idea of my socialist electronic dictionary. Lately I've gotten really good at the fighter plane game and now it takes me nearly a week to build up enough credit to play through a few stages. In a pinch I play the animal-matching game again, which eats up far less credit. I imagine this is kind of like a coke head who buys a little crack for a fix, and it is just about as satisfying. On the other hand, I've been getting a lot of work done, when I'm not blogging that is.