Black and White Cat

The Xinhua headline was like a dagger in the heart. A fire had killed one person in Rongshui county, Guangxi. A Frenchwoman was missing. As I clicked on the link to open the article, I desperately hoped it was someone else. Someone else’s tragedy. But it could only have been one person - Francoise, who meant so much to so many people and without whom thousands of Miao, Dong and Yao girls would have grown up illiterate, never having gone to school.

The fire broke out in the wooden house she had built late in the evening on December 9. When firefighters had extinguished the flames they discovered a body too charred to be absolutely certain of its identity without DNA tests. Francoise had not been seen since.

She was about to go to Macau to raise more money for the children, their schools and communities. Alliance Francaise announced the event was canceled “for unexpected reasons.”

It’s nearly ten years since I first knew Francoise. We worked for different departments of the same publishing group in Beijing and lived in the same complex. But it was more than a month before we actually met because she was simply not there for so much of the time. She took every opportunity she could to go back down to Guangxi to do what she really wanted - walk through the mountain villages, compiling lists of all the girls who could not go to school (virtually all the girls in every village) and find sponsors to pay for them. Friends often covered her shifts and pocketed her salary.

She arrived there by accident after a chance meeting in a queue in Guilin. The person she met was a doctor working in Danian township for Medicins Sans Frontieres. They needed an interpreter. Francoise had been working as a tour guide for some time, but gladly took the chance to do something more meaningful. As soon as she arrived in Danian, she knew this was where her soul belonged.

Going from village to village with MSF, she was shocked to find no girls at all in any of the schools. The average annual income was 300 yuan and it cost about the same to send a child to school. If a family could scrape together enough money for the fees, it was spent on a son. Daughters worked in the fields and tended ducks and cows. If they ended up in factories, they could hardly speak Mandarin, let alone read it, making them one of the most vulnerable and exploited groups of people in the country.

Some years earlier, Francoise had started a small organization called Couleurs de Chine that researched the culture of minorities in China. It now radically changed its focus, finding sponsors, mostly in France and Belgium, for the Miao, Dong and Yao girls in Rongshui.

Things didn’t all go smoothly. The local government was divided about Francoise. Some cadres believed she could help the township and its villages develop. Others were suspicious of her motives and thought she was a troublemaker. At one point, early on, they banned her from ever setting foot in Danian again. But she couldn’t stay away and one day she sneaked back. To her amazement, she was not only allowed to stay, they gave her a plot of land to build a house.

In 2000, she left Beijing, which had only ever been a temporary necessity, and went back to live in Danian for good. With funds raised by Couleurs de Chine, local craftsman built a beautiful three-storey house which became her home, her office and a hotel. It’s guests were Europeans, mostly French, who she took up through the mountain paths into the villages where they learned about the lives of the local people, met the girls they would sponsor and took back with them a far greater understanding of a culture than they could ever hope to have in any other way. All the money they paid for their visit was channeled into the local schools and communities.

Couleurs de Chine and its sponsors paid for thousands of girls to go to school, some of them going on to university. It built new schools in the villages and a dormitory in the township.

Francoise was passionate about the work she did and the people whose lives she shared. She was fiercely proud of their culture, their strength, their history. And she was proud that they were her friends. She was determined that they should develop and escape grinding poverty, but equally determined that they should not lose the culture that had evolved over thousands of years, only to become sellers of trinkets for tourists.

I took the picture directly above in a village near Danian in May 2001. The picture above it, of Francoise’ house before it was destroyed by fire, is from her blog which she began in November, 2007. The one at the top is from here.

Below is a translation from a blog post written by a Chinese friend of Francoise, just after the news of her death.

On December 9, 2008, a blazing fire carried my French friend Fang Fang away into the sky along with her beloved wooden house, that museum of ethnic culture. She became a distant rainbow, always, forever, remaining in the great Miao mountains that she devoted herself to for ten years, remaining in the hearts of more than 5,000 children she loved and helped.

When the tragic news of your death arrived, I simply couldn’t believe it! Just one week earlier, we climbed together up to the Miao villages and visited Dong homes. Together, we braved the dangers of the river and together we listened to the songs of the Miao. You pulled me along with you up the precipitous mountain paths. During the Dong toasting songs you urged me, who never touches a drop of alcohol, to drink that symbol of friendship. Together, we talked about life and ideals. Together, we edited your essay, crafted with meticulous care for ten years. The bamboo basket you sent me hangs in my living room, the Yao mountain tea still wafts its faint scent and the precious Miao embroideries you sent are gathered in the wardrobe, still waiting to send your affection out to other places. Those DVDs, recording your life and the children unable to go to school, lie gently in the drawer, still waiting to be appreciated by more friends….

Just two days before you went away, the sound of our laughter still reverberated in the computer. I asked you when you would come to eat jiaozi. You said the Euro had dropped and funds were tight. You had to go to Macau to give a fundraising lecture. On March 10, you would come to my home. You joked that I shouldn’t worry about cleaning my place up. All this remains vivid, like yesterday. How can I believe it? How can I imagine that you have gone like this?!

Perhaps you really were an angel sent by God, your mission completed and returned to heaven. Ten years ago, no shadow of a girl could be seen in the schools. Today, more than 90 percent, even one hundred percent of girls go to class. Your painstaking work wasn’t wasted! The first female Miao and Dong university students have returned and, influenced by you, have devoted themselves to their villages. The State has also changed for the better. Miao mountain children no longer have to pay so many fees to go to school and every day they are given free lunch. More and more people in the mountains send their daughters to school. At Danian Middle School, heavily financed by your Couleurs de Chine, all miscellaneous fees have been abolished. The dormitory is free and, if the children bring some rice, so are all the meals.

Every day, you were busy in the mountain villages. Every day you hurried along the mountain paths. One after another, you repaired and rebuilt old school buildings. One after another new schools sprang up. Stilt-houses still resound with your hurried footsteps. The warmth of your words is still felt in the homes of the girls you helped. For the sake of young girls who had had to leave school, you made the hard journey to Guangzhou, traveling so far to bring child laborers back home. You worried so much about children sent out to work and you rushed from one place to another, making appeals for the future of the Miao villages! You really wore yourself out. Your work never stopped: by day in the mountain villages, by night under the light of a lamp. One contribution after another, you personally made sure was used properly. One letter of thanks after another, you personally wrote. Perhaps God had pity and wanted to let you rest. He knew how deeply you loved these mountains. He knew how deeply you loved everyone here. You said in your last life you must have been Miao. You said this was your home that you had searched long and hard to find. God knew how much you hated the cold and used this strange way to let you live forever in the flames, nirvana in the flames, forever remaining in your beloved Miao home!

Perhaps there were things that God overlooked. Perhaps there were things he did not take into account. He knew you raised money to help children study, but he didn’t know you were also a scholar of ethnic culture. You immersed yourself in historical texts of the Miao and devoted yourself to research of Miao culture. “There are two ethnic groups in this world that have been through many hardships but have survived to be strong: they are Miao in China and the Jews scattered throughout the world.”*[see note below] These words by the ethnographer Geddes ring out in your book. You gave your deep love to the people here. You walked from one mountain village to another in search of Miao customs and culture. You interviewed white-haired elders to understand the condition of the local people. You hated the erosion of traditional ethnic culture. You exhaustively researched Miao songs, Miao clothing, batiks, embroidery and ancient crafts. It didn’t matter if you were in the land of the Miao or in Paris, you always wore Miao clothes and you almost forgot your own language. You said: there are ten million Miao, as many people as Belgium. I wear their clothes and speak their language to show my respect for them!

Inspired by you, more and more French people, Belgians, Europeans and Americans began to understand Miao history and culture and began to come to these great mountains. In one village after another, ramshackle drum towers, symbols of Dong culture, were restored. Drum towers that had burned down were built anew. Miao baby bags, Dong embroidery and Yao medicine went to homes all over the world. Bamboo baskets, carrying poles and homespun cloth flew to all corners of the Earth. Traditional ethnic culture has amazed the world! You are an envoy of ethnic culture. You are rainbow over the Miao mountains.

There are no tears or sorrow in heaven. You should rest. In heaven, watch over your Miao mountains. In heaven, listen to your Dong songs. In heaven, care for your Miao mountain girls. Maybe the reason God let me know was to help you complete your goal. Our book is now finished - it’s just a shame that I never received your last additions. I will tell your story to all Chinese people. Even more people will go into the Miao mountains. Even more will help the people there. Rest! My friend, rest! Forever my dearest companion!!!

*Black and White Cat note: “There are two ethnic groups in this world….” This phrase appears in a number of Chinese texts. It is possible that William Geddes did say or write this, but it seems more likely to me that it is a simplification and alteration of a phrase from his book Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao of Thailand:

The preservation by the Miao (Hmong) of their ethnic identity for such a long time despite their being split into many small groups surrounded by different alien peoples and scattered over a vast geographical area is an outstanding record paralleling in some ways that of the Jews but more remarkable because they lacked the unifying forces of literacy and a doctrinal religion and because the cultural features they preserved seem to be more numerous.

On Tuesday evening, Liu Xiaoyuan, who has acted as a lawyer for family of Yang Jia, announced on his blog that Yang will be executed within a week. Yang Jia’s mother told him that around 7pm, she was visited two officials from the Shanghai Higher People’s Court who notified her that the Supreme People’s Court had approved the death sentence for her son. According to the Criminal Procedure Law, the sentence must be carried out within seven days of that final approval.

Beifeng says Liu Xiaoyuan believes the execution will take place today. (Update: A terse one-sentence statement from Xinhua reports that Yang Jia was executed this morning - Nov. 26.)

One of the strangest things about this case has been the number of people who have supported Yang Jia. You could almost think he was a campaigner for social justice who had been framed, rather than a man who murdered six police officers and wounded three others and a security guard. (For anyone not familiar with the case, see the Washington Post for an overview up to the middle of November)

You have a serious PR problem when so many people support a police-killer rather than the police. But from start to finish, the police and the courts have demonstrated why they are disliked so much.

The stage was set two years ago when Yang, from Beijing, was allegedly beaten by police in Taiyuan station in Shanxi province. Then, last year, police in Zhabei district, Shanghai arrested him on suspicion of stealing a bicycle that he rented. At the police station, Yang said several police officers dragged him into a room where they punched and kicked him for two to three minutes.

Yang Jia’s first trial was held in closed session, but during his appeal trial, the prosecution presented a recording of Yang Jia inside the police station. The recording contained no beating and Yang Jia could provide no evidence that any such beating had occurred.

However, the tape also showed Yang Jia was indeed dragged into another room by police officers and the police failed to produce any recording of what took place there. Yang Jia could hardly produce a tape of what happened in that room - that was the responsibility of the police. And it’s hardly surprising that Yang Jia could show no physical injuries a year after the alleged beating took place.

There was also the issue of Yang Jia’s sanity. He was pronounced sane and capable of standing trial, but his lawyers’ appeals for a second opinion were denied.

And then there were the lawyers themselves. When Yang Jia’s father tried to hire a lawyer to defend his son, the authorities refused, saying they had already appointed one to represent him. That lawyer just happened to have close ties to the very police station where Yang Jia went on the rampage - suggesting a strong conflict of interest.

It got worse. Yang Jia’s mother, Wang Jingmei, had signed a document approving this lawyer for her son. But Wang Jingmei had disappeared without trace in Beijing immediately after the killings in Shanghai. Where was she? How did the police find her to get this signature if her family had no idea where she was?

The answer to that came on November 9 when Wang Jingmei’s sister, Wang Jingrong, discovered she was being held for compulsory psychiatric treatment in the Ankang Hospital administered by the Beijing Public Security Bureau. She had been sent there the day after her son’s crime in Shanghai.

If Wang Jingmei required compulsory psychiatric treatment, how could she possibly be competent to sign a power of attorney that would decide who would represent her son.

This news was announced on November 10 by the lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan. The next day it was the subject of a full-page set of articles in the Southern Metropolis News.

For four whole months, the Beijing police knew perfectly well where Wang Jingmei was, but they failed to inform her family. She had been effectively “disappeared.”

If she was mad, then was this hereditary and could it have been passed on to her son? If she wasn’t, why was she committed to a psychiatric hospital? And why did this illness suddenly require treatment immediately after her son was arrested? Many people felt that this new information justified a reopening of the case. It seems the Supreme People’s Court disagrees.

The Yang Jia case also tested the Regulations on Open Government Information which went into effect in May this year. In October, the lawyer Hao Jingsong filed a series of applications for information from the Taiyuan railway police, the Shanghai police and the Zhabei district police. The information he wanted included the 2006 incident at Taiyuan station, the whereabouts of Yang’s mother and the contents of the tapes recorded during Yang’s detention in Shanghai last October.

On November 11, he received the following replies, all of them rejections, saying his requests did not fall within the scope of the regulations: (Continued)

Shanzhai, as defined by ChinaSMACK:

山寨 = shan1 zhai4 = literally “mountain stronghold” in reference to historical warlord holdouts that were outside of government control. A “shanzhai” edition product thus refers to products outside of government regulations that are widely reflected in the numerous fake and knockoff electronics/commodities made in China today. The term “shanzhai” can also refer to things that are improvised or home-made and are generally crude in both form and function (the closest English equivalent would be “ghetto”).

Thus, a shanzhai train:

This photograph of a van-train is one of a set that that has been doing the rounds on the Chinese internet. Southern Metropolis News trawled through the forums to find out who had originally posted the pictures. Not everyone believed it was real - a spoof (egao) perhaps, or maybe something made for a TV drama series.

The reporter decided the first person to post the pictures was someone going by the name of Longqian at the Gearer forum, who said they were taken on November 11 at a work site in the suburbs and seemed to be transporting coal. There was no mention of where they were taken, but according to the poster’s registration details, he/she is from Xi’an in Shaanxi.

From November 20 onwards, they started spreading under the title “Super-shocking shanzhai train.” Hence my title. Various people started to post information about this kind of hybrid. Some of them run on private tracks belonging to big enterprises. But they also run on normal lines, like this one photographed at a station in Guizhou last year：

And it’s not just vans. There are motorbike-trains as well:

Perhaps this could be the solution to the Spring Festival travel crush, joked one commenter.

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. And there’s more than one way to report a story. For example, will dozens of Chinese-made passenger planes soon be winging their way through the skies of the United States? After this last week’s news, most readers and viewers here in China would probably say yes. Others might say otherwise. The development of the ARJ21 is certainly a big deal. But what exactly was the deal signed with GE on Tuesday?

Extracts, not entirely in their original order, from Xinhua and the Wall Street Journal:

Xinhua:

CHINA TO SELL 25 REGIONAL JETS TO U.S. MARKET

WSJ:

GE TO BUY FIVE CHINESE PLANES

Xinhua:

China signed its biggest aircraft export deal, in terms of the number of jets and contract value, on Tuesday at the 7th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition here.

The Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China (COMAC) will sell 25 ARJ21-700 regional jets to GE Commercial Aviation Services of the United States.

WSJ:

General Electric Co. signed a deal Tuesday here to purchase five 70-seater regional passenger jets from Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China, or Comac, but will the plane ever fly outside China, especially in the U.S. or Europe?

…

On Tuesday, GE’s leasing unit GE Commercial Aviation Services placed a “firm order” for five ARJ21-700s at the Zhuhai air show in southern China. The deal includes an option to buy 20 more.

Xinhua:

The deal is valued at 5 billion yuan (733 million U.S. dollars).

WSJ:

If all the jets are purchased, the contract would be valued at as much as $750 million. GE also supplies engines for the ARJ21.

So, at this stage, the order is for five planes, not 25, though there might be a fixed order for up to 20 more in the future. GE will be leasing the planes to airlines. Where?

Xinhua:

Roger N. Seager, vice president of the GE Commercial Aviation Services… said more clients have shown an interest in the ARJ21. “Some customers of GE Aviation have already expressed interest. I can’t tell you the names but there are Chinese customers, and European and American customers as well.”

WSJ:

Asked if the ARJ21 will ever fly in the U.S., Mr. Seager stressed the ARJ21 is “global aircraft” and is aimed at both Chinese domestic and global customers. The GE executive acknowledged the Chinese regional jet’s immediate potentials are in China, “but that we’ve got a lot of interest, for example, coming out of Europe for the aircraft.”

Mike Wilking, head of GE’s aviation sales for China, said GE plans to lease those aircraft to China’s domestic airline companies to be used within China.

So the planes aren’t actually being exported. For now, at least, all the orders seem to be for Chinese flights.

WSJ:

U.S. government officials and aerospace industry insiders foresee grim prospects for the ARJ21-700 in advanced aviation markets, citing issues around customer acceptance and apparent certification problems it has encountered with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. “It will never fly in the U.S.,” said one U.S. government official, who declined to be named.

Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. China’s growing market (once the current financial storm has passed) should be big enough to carry its aircraft through initial skepticism and teething trouble. In the meantime, though, those five and twenty “exports” look as if they’ll be staying right here.