[Six]

• Yours truly and his humble blog gets a mention from Jeffrey Wasserstrom at the end of his latest Huffington Post article, ‘Illuminating and Misleading Takes on China 20 Years Since Tiananmen‘. Whether I am illuminating or misleading I will leave unclarified for greater suspense.
• I saw Nanjing! Nanjing! the other night in Beida’s packed-to-the-rafters auditorium. I can assure you from the atmosphere at the screening that anger at the Japanese runs deep in this generation, as it has in previous ones. Mind you, the mouth-to-mouth memory of the war seems to have faded enough to allow one group of students a couple of rows behind me laugh blindly at the comedy of a Japanese officer struggling to pull up his trousers … after raping a Chinese girl.
• School’s out for summer, and in a couple of hours - oh joy - I will be boarding a 40 hour train to Kunming. During two weeks traveling in Yunnan and Sichuan, blogging is likely to be thinner than the air at Shangri La.

A couple of Peking University themed stories. First, a reminder of why 2009 is not 1989:

• I usually link to articles in the left hand column, under ‘6 things I’m reading’. But given the focus of this blog, I’ll press the point with two pieces on modern students at Beida and Tsinghua, in the New York Times and the FT. Both argue, rightly, that the class of ‘09 is a world apart from that of ‘89. The FT piece is better: the NY Times overplays the angle of students being scared into inaction. Journalists have even cited the heavy security presence on the gates at PKU as evidence of this. What rubbish: noone who goes to Beida gives a second glance to those guards, like they never go further than the first glance at your ID. More on this topic soon.

Next, a reminder that the more things change the more they stay the same:

• Here’s a telling news story from Beida (a month old, sorry), which I heard from a contact in its administration. A PKU student went into one of the many little photocopying stores on campus to copy a legal letter of protest to a computing company who sold him a faulty computer. Nothing big. Nothing political. But they refused to let him copy the letter when they saw it was legal in nature. As did every one of the other campus copying stores he tried. Evidently some kind of restriction passed down from university administration, which deems students writing legal letters too sensitive. Really shocking. This was picked up by Chinese media I gather, but I can’t find a link.

Happy dragon boat festival! Remember, don’t drown yourself in a river unless you’ve first written some beautiful poetry and been wrongly accused of treason.

• The China Beat blog today republished my post about the Model UN, introducing this blog to their readers. Thank you China Beat!
• So Huang Yueqin, the director of the National Centre for Mental Health, has said that 100 million people, or 7% of China’s population, is mentally ill. That’s funny: in a recent Beida lecture aimed at foreign students, my teacher told us the total figure of all kinds of disabilities was 6.3%. Get your story straight. (And a response a Chinese friend wrote me on facebook to that 100 million statistic: “Let’s put another zero and it’s not far from the truth, hoho”.)
• I couldn’t resist putting up this clever illustration, from a Japanese blog:

Three bits and bobs…

• I’m delighted 6 gets a spot in CNReview’s list of ‘Ten Eclectic China blogs you should follow‘. Cheers!
• Danwei notices that Beida requires its medical school students be not too short and not too fat … presumably not too clumsy enters the mix, also?
• A friend and I recently did a napkin calcution of how many students applying to university in a high school year group will get into Beida or Tsinghua (if Chinese), compared to students who’ll get into Oxbridge (if English). The results … 1 in 100 for the UK, 1 in 10,000 for China.

… is deafening. With apologies. I’ve been travelling in the ‘wild west’ of Qinghai and Gansu for the past fortnight, with a week left before I’m back in Beijing and blogging will rebegin with a vengeance.

Am I - I hear you ask from afar -�cut off from internet, civilisation and all but the most basic toilet facilities, in this ‘wild west’? Did I possibly craft some crude WAP device out of bark and earth�in order to post this?

Not quite (except the toilet bit). But still: being on the road means less time for 6, more time praying for a�suspension system in my stomach to help ease those bumpy bus rides.

Xin nian kuai le everyone!

In 2009, the most important number will of course be none of the above, but rather … 6. If you like, you can think of it as an upside down 9. I, of course, prefer to think of the 9 as an upside down 6.

To celebrate the exciting new year, I will be focusing this blog more sharply on the stories of young Chinese friends and acquaintances of mine. Look out for Marie, the sexy-jazz dancing student of A.I. at Beida, William, the environmental activist, ‘Leonidas’, adept at ancient Greek, Thomas the painter from Qinghai and more.

You might notice my ‘6 moods to indulge’ categorization (frivolous, dead serious etc.) will shift to a ‘6 characters’ (in search of an author?) feature. This way, you can keep track of the meandering narratives of young Chinese in a new China, as they negotiate 2009.

If the 21st century is China’s, it’s the youth of this evening’s shade who will be in tomorrow’s limelight. So follow the future here.