Double Handshake

Last November, just before 2008’s APEC conference in Lima, Peru, China made news by releasing its first policy white paper describing its overall strategy for engagement with Latin American and the Caribbean. It’s a lengthy and far-ranging document, with sections devoted to political visits, trade cooperation and even sports exchanges. One finishes this document thinking: China’s top priority in Latin America may be procuring natural resources, but it has much more planned than that.

What about the reverse? Does, say, Brazil have an overall strategy for engaging with China? Has it been codified in its own white paper? Are Brazilian students flocking to Chinese language programs in Sao Paulo to gain a leg-up for the explosion of Chinese investment that’s to come over the next twenty years? The answers are all no. From Reuters:

China and Latin American specialists speaking at a conference in Sao Paulo said China sees Latin America as vital to its own future energy, food and economic security, but that the region had been slow to develop China policies.

“Latin America is acting toward China’s expansion in the world in a reactive, disorganized or ad hoc fashion,” said David Shambaugh, professor of political science at The George Washington University.

“When I asked Itamaraty (Brazil’s foreign ministry) about its strategy on China, I got blank stares. There is no strategy.”

Shambaugh, who is very well-respected on China-Latin American relations, has talked about Latin America’s unpreparedness for China before. Countries like Brazil and Argentina granted China market economy status years ago, which has created problems as Chinese manufactuers undercut local producers. “It’s almost as if these (countries) didn’t do their homework,” said Shambaugh. “The United States, Europe, Japan and Australia did not grant China market economy status.”

This alleged lack of strategy includes language. The article notes there are only two serious Chinese language studies programs in all of Latin America, one in Mexico City, the other in Buenos Aires. It is telling that in Latin America, the biggest development in Chinese language learning has come from China itself, in the form of its promoting Confucius Institutes abroad. These centers, which promote Chinese language learning and culture, are springing up throughout Latin America and the rest of the world. As of May, 328 institutes had been established, including a new one at Catolica University in Santiago, Chile.

I’ll add tourism to this list as well. Traveling in Peru, Chile and Argentina, I often asked tour operators about the prospect of Chinese tourists. Many of their eyes lit up at the prospect of a billion customers. Like many countries, Latin American countries are anticipating a wave of newly monied Chinese tourists to arrive in the coming years.

Yet, aside from some enterprising Chinese and Taiwanese businessmen I met in Lima, no one I spoke to was prepared to handle Chinese-speaking tour groups. Nearly no one in these tourism industries speak the language or understand the, um, unique demands of the Chinese tourist (hot water thermoses, slippers, casinos, shopping). It seems that when the tourism wave hits Latin America, it will be Chinese-owned (or ethnically Chinese-owned) tourism companies that will cash in.

So, how long will Latin American countries wait before they formulate their own China strategy?

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an article about Chinese people with rare names and pressures in China forcing them to give them up. One interviewee, Ma Cheng, has a very common surname (马) but an uncommon given name, “Cheng,” obscure enough that my character input system doesn’t include it. In a sense, my problem writing Ma Cheng’s name in this blog post is the same one facing China’s Public Security Bureau.

According to the article, as of 2006, the bureau’s computer system recognizes about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters out there. The newspaper then estimates that “at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure names cannot get new (ID) cards.” So, the question: How do you keep track of these people (on ID cards, in police records) in a digital age?

For the government, the simplest and most ham-fisted solution is to tell these people to get a new name:

Miss Ma said that while her given name was unusual, bank employees, passport control clerks and ticket agents had always managed to deal with it, usually by writing it by hand. But when she tried to renew her identity card last August, she said, Beijing public security officials turned her down flat.

“Your name is so troublesome and problematic,” she recalled an official telling her. “Just change it.”

You can almost see the NY Times reporters licking their chops.

Naturally, a name change is not an enticing prospect for Ma, who a) has obviously has grown attached to her name and b) would have to deal with the fact that “Ma Cheng” has appeared on everything from her birth certificate to her university diploma.

On the other hand, upgrading the government computer systems would cost millions, and even afterward, those with even more obscure names would still be left out, facing the same problem that Ma Cheng now does.

Quick linguistic aside: In English, you have a 26-letter alphabet, whose combination any data-entry software can handle. The US government, say, would have no logistical problem creating a drivers license for “John Doe” or “Fiaoeadvas Jaosvie.” But, with Chinese, you’re not dealing with an alphabet, but a database of characters. That database does not (and likely cannot) include all the possibilities.

A few thoughts about this dilemma:

First, if the government is willing to put up with the cost and trouble of upgrading a system (questionable), there must be an intelligent solution to this problem. You could devise a system focused on radicals – the smaller, fixed components that make up  characters – rather than the characters themselves. If there was a system in place that allowed you to manipulate and “design” new characters with radicals, that open up a number of new possibilities. For example, Ma’s given name, “cheng” is made up of three 马 condensed and placed in a row. If you took the left portion of a word like “zhou,” 骤, for instance, and repeated it two more times, you could write Ma’s name.

Given my interactions with Chinese PSB officers, though, I wouldn’t expect them to cheerfully take up the task. It would mean more work, more hassle. That’s not a good enough reason for people like Ma Cheng to lose her name, to me.

A second thought was: to be sure, documents like one’s ID card are a big deal; it defines “who you are” in an official sense. But in a practical, day-to-day sense, your ID-card name means almost nothing if you want it to. A Chinese friend of mine dislikes her middle name “gold,” which I didn’t realize she even had until looking at her ID card. I’ve never heard her introduce herself or seen any document of her’s in which it appears. Similiarly, almost everyone in China has a nickname or two, which they go by, even in relatively formal settings.

Any other solutions out there?

I spent Saturday afternoon at the Centro Cultural Beijing (北京文化馆) with two dozen, mostly young, Peruvians studying Chinese. The center is the biggest Chinese language school I’ve come across in Lima and is run by Benjamín Gutiérrez González, a Peruvian who lived and studied martial arts in China for years. One Saturday per month, the center puts on Chinese cultural activities. The occasion this past Saturday was the return of two Peruvian girls from their semester abroad in Beijing.

The girls sat at the front of the classroom, in front of posters of Summer Palace and the Great Wall, and addressed the group in Spanish. Most bases were touched: food, weather, safety, friendliness of the people, classes, professors, pollution, censorship, social life, etc. They gave Beijing fairly good marks, with exceptions being pollution – “the sky is gray; people wear masks,” initial comfort – “no one can really speak English, not professors, not other students, not people on the street, let alone Spanish,” and food – “it is not like in Peru, where we love meat; most food is cut into small pieces and greasy.”

I sat next to Ettorena, a Peruvian in her early twenties with long hair and faded blond highlights, and a predilection for all things China. Rena, or 琳娜 or 爱多琳娜 or 小爱 depending on who’s asking, has studied Chinese for two years and works in the center as a secretary during the week. When I first met her two weeks ago, she greeted me at the doorway with chopsticks stuck in her hair. We spoke in Chinese for an hour, and she showed me her key chain with the Olympic Fuwa. I asked her if she got bored at the office during the day with no one else around.

“It’s not so bad,” she told me, “I just chat with my Chinese friends on QQ. I can type characters really fast!” She jotted down some characters in my notebook, about twice as fast as I could have written them.

Rena’s dream is to go and study in China, of course. She told about a job she was planning to apply for here in Lima, at a casino called Atlantic City. The casino is looking for Chinese and Spanish speakers to cope with the influx of Chinese tourists (and gamblers). She reckons if she could land that job, she’d be able to pay for her plane ticket to Beijing sometime next year. During the talk last Saturday, Rena leaned forward with her elbows on the desk, engrossed.

After the talk, we broke into small groups around wooden tables. There were a handful of young Chinese guys there too, from Liaoning, Jilin and Beijing – themselves Spanish students at another language school twenty minutes away. The Chinese speakers dispersed to the seven tables and the groups spoke in a mash up of Chinese and Spanish.

There were three other people at my table: Pablo, a 21-year-old engineering student who’d studied Chinese for six months; Roxana, a Guangdong woman in her 70s who immigrated to Peru in 1982 and owns a shop in Chinatown; and, A Long, an angular foreign student to Lima who’d dropped out of college in Beijing and arrived here six months prior. The conversation was disjointed and tended to flow through Roxana, who was the only one who spoke both languages well.

“Let me tell you about my husband,” she began and proceeded to sketch a biography of the man for about 10 minutes, including his salary a various milestones. I followed about three-quarters of it. Pablo nodded.

“Where are you from?” Pablo asked me when Roxana had finished.

I told him and asked what the hardest part of learning Chinese was.

“Speaking and listening are not hard. Writing is hard. Reading is hard.” He paused for a beat and spoke rapid Spanish to Roxana.

“Money, health, family,” she answered, in Spanish.

Later, on my way out, I stopped by Rena’s table, which was littered with papers filled with Chinese characters.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Call or email me the next time you’re having Cultural Saturday, ok?”

“Dangran!” (Of course!) she beamed. “Zai jian!”