A couple of years ago, a Canadian video game developer, Bioware, released Jade Empire, a role-playing video game set in a world based loosely on the history and myth of China. Sold for the Xbox console, the game proved a hit, not only in North America and Europe, but in Asia as well. Naturally, Asian players sounded off numerous reactions to the game, the most interesting of which is the following condemnation of the cast of playable characters: they all look like villains. The game offers the player the opportunity to progress through the story as one of several characters, all of them East Asian in looks, each quite distinct from all of the others. The Canadians, no doubt, did their best to model their characters sensitively, but, apparently, to many Asian eyes, Bioware produced the equivalent of a gang of heroes consisting of, say, Alan Rickman, Michael Ironside, Vincent Price, Joan Crawford, Jackie Collins, Glenn Close, and the guy who killed Mozart.
Yet, the Bioware team, so painfully earnest in interviews, had done its homework: they watched hundreds of hours of kung fu movies, perused reams and reams of art, read volume upon volume of Chinese legend—all to no avail: they never picked up on the facial characteristics—in film, in painted depiction, in written description—that pigeonhole actors in one category or another, stock villain or stock hero, a distinction common to both East and West.
Even further, they hadn’t aimed very high: they meant only to develop charismatic characters for their game, not to form, as we all must do, an intelligent opinion on China, our China, not the one of myth and legend, but of trade, labour, politics, and solidarity. I try to keep their story in mind as China comes up in the media, and it comes up so frequently. Why not?! The Chinese have located the center of the world, after all: their country, and, in fact, a precise point within it. What’s more is that the post-moderns tell us the center’s everywhere—even in space, which explains, in part, why the Chinese just blew up one of their own satellites. It’s about self-regard, for one thing.
Robert Wright and Jeffrey Lewis, a journalist of ideas and a weapons expert (common descriptors; I’ll re-examine them at a later date), blabbed about this test of anti-satellite weaponry for half an hour on bloggingheads. The upshot: we ought to have a treaty that prevents this sort of thing and have a good many satellites up on all sides in order to arrive at “transparency”, meaning “mutual surveillance”. The theory is that the more each side observes the other’s activities, the less ignorance will feed suspicion and mistrust (other things may feed them, but not so much ignorance). That’s rational in a rand institute way, but this requires us, of course, to know what Chinese perfidy—or villainy?—looks like.
Transparency could have side effects of some benefit, even without the understanding necessary to make it function according to our rational hopes. Qiu Xiaolong reminds us a couple of times in his Inspector Chen novels that no direct equivalent exists in Chinese for the English word ‘privacy’. It may work in the favour of both the U.S. and China—and in accord with Messrs. Wright and Lewis, if the Chinese should translate for the Americans a strategic discourse that has no need of that concept. Mutual Benthamitism? It could result in good behaviour, even good manners.
Good Manners! Apparently, the Chinese have chosen to avail themselves of a dose, as the NYTimes reported a few months back that some well-off Chinese send their children to finishing schools. Further, the great bane of the retention of the lessons learned at these schools is vulgarity at home: parents’ “spitting seeds or chicken bones out of their mouth” bedevils the inculcation of good habits. Now, I’ve heard of such uncouthery’s occurring on the Fung Wah or the Luck Star, the Chinatown to Chinatown intercity buses that web throughout the NorthEast, but I’ve never seen it in the several trips I’ve made on them. Just this week, however, while reading Martha Gellhorn’s reporting of the war in China in 1941, I came across this passage: “…he was crouched alongside the charcoal cooking fire in the stern, eating his dinner with the loud smacking and sucking noises, belching and spitting, that are common to China.” The very behaviour they hope to eradicate in favour of certain manners of the west.
Just the thing for them to see through their satellites: the upright practices of the American table. But what would we see in them? Consider the following staccato dispatches from a young American woman, a graduate student in urban planning, who studied development in Shenzhen:
3 disneyesque theme parks here
many gated highrise communities
visited one with its very own wal mart yesterday
traffic is nuts
pollution
fog
shipping containers
three developments
one ultra modern one called "the village" made to mimic old village courtyard
style housing, one that is all out of scale spanish hacienda stuff called
"Vanketown/dreamtown"
the neighborhoods are called :
1. honolulu
2. california
3. Picasso
I’ve never seen so many massive and i mean MASSIVE
but mostly VACANT office parks, highrise towers, mega malls, etc
we went to the largest mall in china today (our hosts seem to think we really
like malls) only to find that 99% of the space was still unleased
these special economic zones are nutty
the motto here seems to be
if you build it - they will come
theres alot i could say about this captialism on steroids
commando style
its opportunistic
very very naively gung ho
and on a crash course to environmental disaster
they decided automobiles were the way to do it in these new cities
and they spread it all out and made it so massively unwalkable
and they are trying to outlaw bicycles... jesus
so fucked
and insanely inhumane towers are their m.o.
It seems, then, that if the Chinese were to shoot down those satellites of ours that spy on them, it would amount to knocking a mirror out of our hands. Perhaps that’s what they don’t want us to see: Chinese in the process of re-making themselves as Americans. Could this be the birth of their need for privacy? Or does it simply amount to yet another appropriation of a symbol of power: nothing says you’ve made it like anti-satellite technology. If they name gated communities after American locales, in order to acquire with the naming some aspect of the original place, what do they call their space warfare program? And if they’re eager to play a variation on Cold War games, will they develop their own Rand Corporation to guide them? It may be helpful to ponder at this point the significance of the fact that, when Bioware developed those character models the Chinese kids found so villainous, the designers had in mind a peculiar kind of gameplay: in Jade Empire, the player makes moral decisions at certain points in the story, decisions that can be either good or evil. Bioware developed the looks of the characters in order to make them viable as both villains and heroes. It’s possible the Chinese players never expected to play that sort of game.
