Travels in the People's Republic of China

Getting There, and Dealing With The Languages

U.S. Government map of China.

I've been to Hong Kong to teach one-week courses in networking protocols and information security. It was TCP/IP for a major U.S. telecommunications firm, and a public Intro to Infosec course. In both cases I extended the trip to look around a little.

Once I spent a few days in Guangzhou, then returned to Hong Kong and crossed over to Macao. The other time I went to Guangzhou for the day before continuing by overnight train to Guilin and minibus to Yangshou. This is a composite of the experiences and pictures.

Hong Kong is an excruciating 16-hour flight from Chicago. An only slightly less tiring way of getting there is a flight that stops in Narita (Tokyo) for a couple of hours so you can walk around and get the blood flowing again. Literally.

From there it's a short train ride to Guangzhou, details on that appear later. Guangzhou provides easily accessible socialist squalor, complete with everything the discerning traveler looks for in totalitarian dictatorships:

• Suppression of religion
• Suppression of pretty much everything else
• Spectacular pollution
• Genocidal policies

From Guangzhou, it's an overnight train to Guilin and then a minibus about 90 minutes south to Yangshuo and the fantastic scenery of Guangxi Province.

I also took a day trip to Macao, another outpost remaining from European colonialism in East Asia.

Language

Before jumping in, what language do the locals speak? Multiple languages, actually. Saying that people in China speak "Chinese" is like saying that people in Europe speak "European". To start, what's the name of the place? Well, that depends....

Wikipedia map of Chinese langauges or dialects.

Guangzhou is generally pronounced as "guan-zho", with "guan" rhyming with "swan" and "zho" as a voiced "show".

The place used to be called and spelled Canton in the west — the city of Canton was the main city of the province of Canton. Now the city is spelled "Guangzhou" and the district is spelled "Guangdong".

Some of this has to do with the huge differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, which apparently aren't even mutually intelligible, and part has to do with the difficulties of Romanizing Chinese. That is, attempting to represent it in Roman characters. All the Romanization schemes ignore the system of tones, of which there are four in Mandarin and six (or nine, depending on who you ask) in Cantonese. The Pinyin system, currently in favor, includes the brilliant idea that while some letter combinations could used for obvious purposes, like "zh" and "sh", the most useful way to represent the sound of "ch" is the letter "q".

All this is further complicated by the fact that the Chinese themselves can't necessarily read the language — there are no phonetics encoded into the symbols. The symbols represent a concept but have nothing to do with sound.

If they can read Chinese writing, at least the different dialects map the same meanings onto the symbols. However, the sounds vary widely between dialects. Thus an educated Mandarin speaker could communicate with an educated Cantonese speaker if they wrote everything down using symbols they both knew. Oh, and there are several ways of drawing the same sign, from a very elaborate old-time fashion to a relatively simpler new fashion (which was imposed by the government and hasn't really caught on).

There aren't really symbols for numbers, Chinese text usually uses the western style of Arabic numerals. There are symbols used for the digits, but they don't really mean the numbers themselves — they are words culturally associated with the number for no apparent reason. Thus the Hong Kong craze about auspicious and inauspicious numbers, where people pay tens of thousands of dollars to get (or avoid) particular license plate or telephone numbers. Sometimes westerners get really good deals on apartments because they're willing to live in apartment number "death-death-pain" or some such. It's enough to make Arabic look simple.

The only Chinese I know are a few words of Mandarin, or at least what I imagine is Mandarin and might be just barely intelligible to an actual Mandarin speaker. A friend in grad school taught me how to say:

• Hello comrade!
• I want that, comrade.
• Thank you, comrade.

Apparently almost no one in China calls each other comrade any more, it being backward and downright Maoist, a somewhat embarrassing reminder of the Cultural Revolution and other self-destructive collectivist nonsense.

That, of course, just encouraged me to use it as much as possible.

However, be very careful — the Wikipedia article for the word tongzhi says: In recent years, however, this meaning of the term has fallen out of common usage, except within Communist Party discourse and among people of older generations. It remains in use in a formal context among political parties in both mainland China and Taiwan. In the Communist Party of China, the labelling of a person as a "comrade" is especially significant for a person who has been denounced or demoted, because it indicates that the party has not completely rejected the person as "one of its own".

So far, so good. But then it goes on to say that tongzhi is increasingly being misappropriated by the Chinese homosexual and bisexual community as a term for a member of the "sexual minorities", much like the fate of the word "gay" in English.

If I could apply one of my Three Sentences, I would follow it with jingoistic Soviet-era Russian explaining that what I really wanted was a proletarian cup of hot tea or a train ticket in Revolutionary Class ("Just like Lenin's train to the Helsinki Station in Sankt-Peterburg!") or whatever.

I've read that Chinese grammar is relatively simple. Verbs aren't conjugated. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives aren't inflected or declined for number, gender, or case. That's the good news, you can just string words together: "Newspaper, comrade, want, no want?" The bad news is the extreme complexity of the writing system.

Sections:

• Getting There, and Dealing With The Languages
• NEXT: Hong Kong
• Teaching a Course in Hong Kong, and Visiting Macau
• Guangzhou, Part 1 — Logistics, Shamian Island and the Pearl River
• Guangzhou, Part 2 — Qingping Market, Temples, Street Scenes
• Yangshuo, Guangxi Province
• Up the Li Jiang, or Li River

Other Travel Destinations

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