10/22/08 – Lester Ness – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, it's Chaos Radio 92.7 in Austin, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And our first guest today on the show is Lester Ness, he's a friend of the show from the comments section over at antiwar.com, an American in China for living there for the last 11 years and teaching English and I invite him on the show to help teach us a little bit about China.
On the phone from southwest China, a province called Kunming and I asked him before I brought him on the air how to say hi in Chinese but I already forgot so I won't try.
Hi Lester, how are you?
I'm just fine.
Oh, we got fiber optic pretty good speed it sounds like here between southwest China and Austin, Texas today.
Yes, yes.
Good deal.
Alright, well so I'm not even really sure where to begin other than tell us about the province where you live, the city where you live and what it's like where you teach English there in southwestern China.
Well, I live in the city of Kunming, the province is Yunnan.
Kunming because there was a big U.S. Air Force detachment here during World War II.
Yunnan is...
Oh, the Flying Tigers and all that, right?
That's correct.
Yeah.
Well, Yunnan is next door to Vietnam and Thailand and Burma, Tibet is sort of northwest.
It is sort of a mountainous region though not as high altitude as Tibet.
It's historically been a borderland.
Besides the Chinese people proper there are a lot of what you call minority groups like American Indians comparable to.
I see.
Now I am teaching English at a, it's called the Yunnan University of Finance and Economics.
So a lot of my students are business students.
At the moment Yunnan is kind of remote.
It's not very developed, not like the east coast but we're relatively close to India here and also to the sea coast of Burma and Thailand and as roads and railroads improve probably commerce will thrive quite a bit here.
That's cool.
And is that actually in the works right now?
Better roads and that kind of thing?
Yes.
Oh, that's cool.
There's already highways between here and Thailand.
During World War II there was a road between Kunming and the nearer parts of India and it's now being repaired and upgraded.
They're also building railroads.
Railroads carry a lot more goods than trucks do.
And other things.
There's an oil pipeline in the process.
It's supposed to go between Kunming and the coast of Burma, things like that.
And is it already working, the increase of trade, is it already working to help establish ties between the people of these countries?
Yes.
Certainly the commerce between us and Thailand, us and Vietnam is growing.
Laos and Burma, the other two neighboring countries, have a lot of political problems so they're not very developed.
You would think India and China, the two big developing countries, would have a lot of commerce but it's less than you would expect, though both sides want more.
And you say in the class that you teach you're mostly teaching business students there?
Yes.
And how many students do you have, what's that like?
I have six classes.
They're each around 20 to 30 people.
So 6 times 20, 120.
6 times 30, 180.
That's about usual.
I'm interested in what sort of business students they are or maybe what sort of future they're looking toward.
Trade with the West, trade with other Asian countries, what sort of businesses they might be looking to be in, that sort of thing.
Most of these are freshmen and sophomores, they're just beginners.
I see.
A lot of them have ideas of starting their own business and doing something but they're not sure what.
I think mostly they think about trade with the U.S. right now.
The U.S. is very popular in China.
People, they don't think about governments, they think about the movies and TV shows and NBA.
So the U.S. is everyone's idol at the moment.
Really?
Because over here there's a lot, well not a lot, but there's still, I don't know, quite a bit or something of scaremongering.
You've got to have an enemy somewhere and at least China can somewhat fight back so they're a credible enemy to pick on.
The Chinese army, people are afraid of a shadow.
China is not a militaristic power.
The Chinese army runs factories and things like that.
Yeah, I mean the idea that, I don't know, they're going to somehow invade America through the Long Beach port or the Panama Canal or something.
How many troop ships would it take to get the Chinese army over to the west coast of America?
Well, they haven't been able to do anything, they haven't done anything with nearer countries.
Well, so the people of China, you say, right now America is the big fat or whatever, they really like us.
What about the state there?
They think of NBA, National Basketball Association.
They think of American movies, things like that.
Movies like Sleepless in Seattle are sort of cult movies.
Yeah.
So what about the Politburo?
America is the biggest developing country right now, so that's what they think about.
Yeah, but what about the Politburo?
Are these guys, you know, are they going to be trouble for us regardless of what the people in China think?
The national leaders are nearly always, nearly all of them engineers, middle-aged engineers.
They're interested in building highways and things like that, railroads, new ports.
They're interested in the economy and development.
They're not militaristic.
Well, you know, I read a great article about, oh, I don't know, a year ago or so by Lou Rockwell.
And, man, maybe it wasn't even that long ago.
And it was about all the scares about toys with lead paint and bad toothpaste and these kinds of things.
And all the kind of fear-mongering and freaking out that's going on here in the United States.
And he was saying, hey, wait a minute, you know, let's just look back a generation or so and compare and look at what's happened to China.
They went from basically the world's biggest prison under Mao Zedong to just taking light-year leaps toward liberty and modernity in uncountable ways.
Do you agree with that assessment?
In a general way, yes.
You know, all the problems that people are complaining about, manufacturing and lead-based paints and melamine in the milk and so on.
This is, all this is caused by, is connected with private enterprise.
These are unscrupulous private businessmen.
These are not state-owned companies that are doing all this stuff.
You know, if anything, well, the U.S. was like this in the Industrial Revolution a century ago.
There were always problems with people putting water in the milk or other weird things, strange patent medicines.
But in terms of like, well, see, here's the thing.
I got to tell you, Lester, I know nothing about China.
I mean, you can tell I'm struggling even to figure out what are the right questions to ask you.
And I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that nobody else anywhere near me knows anything about China either.
So, you know, I guess if you could sort of just, you know, help explain, I don't know, like you said, everybody's into the NBA over there and what have you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It sounds like, in your experience, the life of the average Chinaman is almost middle class in effect.
It sounds like everybody's doing a lot better.
Oh, no, no, definitely not.
I'm sorry?
First of all, something like 60 or 70 percent of the people do not live in cities.
They live in the countryside.
They raise all their own food.
Their lives are fairly primitive.
You know, maybe they have electricity.
My students were telling me about some of them have thrashing machines when they have to.
It's time to harvest.
But, you know, a couple months ago I went on a bus trip and people were harvesting the wheat alongside the road.
And they were using sickles and scythes and they were thrashing their wheat.
They were throwing it out on the highway for the cars to drive on.
You know, that's not high tech.
Right.
Well, a lot of younger people are moving to cities to get factory jobs, but there are a lot of problems there, too.
They don't have the slums.
Chinese cities do not have the kind of horrible, unsanitary slums that you'll find in, say, Africa or Latin America.
But to be a construction worker in China is still a fairly rough existence.
So, you know, this is certainly a period of transition as people are moving around.
And, well, let me ask you about this.
You talk about problems in the factories.
And this is a big argument here in America is about how it's not fair that they have such low wages there and are, you know, competing American industrial jobs out of business, that kind of thing.
I mean, are the people who work in the factories in the cities in China in general, do you think they're being terribly exploited or they move to the city on purpose?
Is this the best job they ever had and the highest standard of living they ever had?
It's sort of got to be, I guess, a little bit of both.
It all depends on the circumstances of the factories.
Like, I used to live on the East Coast in Fujian Province, and a lot of my students, a lot of their classmates from high school were working in shoe factories.
And it was fairly rough work, but they would work for a few years until they got old enough to get married.
And then they would take the money they'd saved and start a small business.
That's not so bad.
On the other hand, the people who do construction work, they're often exploited rather badly.
You know, they work 12, 18 hours a day.
They get paid once a year.
Once a year?
Once a year.
Well, I hope it's a lot.
The construction contractor gives them a place to live, a rather rough dorm, gives them some food.
And they're supposed to get their money once a year, just before the Chinese New Year, so they can take it home to their parents.
Now, some of the more unscrupulous construction companies, they will refuse to pay.
They'll let a guy work for a year, and then instead of paying them, they'll have thugs chase them away.
That sounds like a kind of company town set up going on there.
Well, not exactly a town.
But maybe a work site.
Yeah.
Well, and so is there any kind of recourse for a worker who gets screwed like that?
I mean, around here, I'd take you to small claims court.
There's no small claims court.
There's no kind of, there's no real way of people having accountability for stuff like that for the week.
If you have friends who are powerful.
China's a country that works on relationships.
China's a country that works on relationships.
You know, if your friends are powerful, they can help you.
You know, they're not legalistic in the same way Americans are.
If you get a bad reputation as a factory owner or a businessman, then people will stop working with you.
And that could hurt you.
But it works mostly on reputation.
I see.
You know, we hear things about, I guess, the guy responsible for the toothpaste or the guy they said was responsible for the toothpaste.
They shot him, right?
I don't know about that.
The man who owned the toy factory with the lead paint, he closed his factory down, paid off his workers.
And then he killed himself to prove that when he said he was sorry, people would know he was sincere.
Geez.
You know, they do that in Japan, too.
But people definitely want a good reputation, even at the cost of their life.
Yeah, because their reputation gets passed down to their family and that kind of thing, right?
That's right.
I think I did hear one of these cases where the guy gets a death penalty.
Yeah.
The guy who was head of their equivalent of the FDA, he got shot.
He'd been taking bribes to look the other way at these things about toothpaste and medicines and so on.
Well, and it actually really was the head of the department, not the deputy secretary of whatever?
Well, yes.
Yes.
I don't know.
They shoot corrupt officials fairly frequently here.
And even people like governors of provinces get condemned to death or governors, mayors of cities.
Sounds like they kill each other almost as much as their people.
The government over there.
About five years ago, the mayor of Shenyang and his entire upper echelon were condemned to death.
And I think he got off in exchange for ratting on the others, but the others ate bullets.
The guy who had been in charge of managing city property had taken all the city's income and spent it gambling in Macau.
Wow.
Yeah, that's pretty severe.
Yeah.
It's funny, isn't it, the kind of difference?
We're here in America.
Any politician can get away with anything with 100 percent impunity and immunity.
And over there, it's too far the other way.
Well, not everybody gets shot by any means.
But, you know, I came to China in 1997.
And next year, 1998, was the year of Bill Clinton's impeachment.
And I got called on to go to this class and that class and explain impeachment.
About the same time, the mayor of Beijing was on trial for vast corruption, hundreds of mistresses, etc., etc.
And he didn't get shot, but he's enjoying 17 years in prison.
Well, I sure would like to see Bill Clinton do 17 years in prison.
That might just be me.
Everybody else seems to forget and love him now.
I can think of a number of others who ought to.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I didn't mean to exclude anyone from that.
Hey, so tell me this.
My dad used to do some business in Asia.
He told me, well, I hope I'm paraphrasing him right, something to the effect of Shanghai went from nothing to two or three Houston's worth of city in the space of, what, 10 or 15 years over there.
Can you tell me about that?
Something like that, yeah.
Well, what years is he talking about?
Because Shanghai was founded about the mid-1850s, 1860s.
Oh, well, yeah.
I mean, he didn't, I don't think he was saying it didn't exist before, but just it was a podunk little town and it turned into like you could take downtown Houston and Dallas and a couple others, combine them together is what Shanghai looks like now.
Yeah, it's a huge city now, 20 million people perhaps.
Wow, so what kind of business is going on there?
Tell me all about this.
Well, Shanghai is like New Orleans.
It's at the mouth of the biggest river.
You know, the Yangtze River connects East and West China where the Mississippi connects Minnesota with Louisiana.
So there's all kinds of commerce going back and forth on the river.
You know, it connects Shanghai to the major commercial outpour for half of China.
And before the revolution, Shanghai was a major port too.
But after the communists took over, they basically closed foreign commerce there and they focused all their foreign trade they had on Hong Kong.
I'm not sure why, but they did.
But yeah, since it's opened up since about 1979, the opening up, I think.
Yeah, Shanghai has prospered again.
And now it's got all kinds of new skyscrapers and so on.
Now, I wonder about, you know, with all that expansion, I wonder if they kind of have the same problem that we have here with these housing bubbles, development bubbles, and phone currency.
Are you guys going through the same stuff over there?
Not quite so much.
Well, it's curious.
In some ways, the communists instead of being leftists have been pretty conservative about how they manage the country.
China has not run up the huge debts that some developing countries do.
They're having some problems with inflation now, but most of my years here, there hasn't been much inflation.
Actually, I assume the banks here were shakier than they seem to be.
And I assumed the U.S. banks were more stable than they seem to be.
What do I know?
Yeah, it just goes to show what commies we are and what capitalists the Chinese are now, I guess.
Something that foreigners don't realize is that the central government actually is not as powerful as it seems.
There are a lot of Americans, even people ought to know better, assume that the president, that Mr. Hu can just give an order in Beijing and that everyone will obey him.
That's not the case.
You know, the most common proverb here is that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, which means I'm going to do whatever I want, no matter what the law says.
Mr. Hu can't assume that anyone will obey him if he's not looking at them.
Officials down here in Yunnan in particular, they just do whatever they want.
I heard a story.
I'm trying to remember where I read this or heard this.
Somebody was talking about they were way out doing business at some factory kind of way out far from the center of things or what have you.
And he was going through the paperwork with the manager of the factory there working, making stuff for this American company.
And he goes through and he says, hey, you're not withholding taxes from any of your employees.
Couldn't you get in trouble for not paying your taxes here?
And the guy says, oh, no, we're way too far away for that.
That's quite true.
Everyone gets paid in cash, too.
So it's hard to keep track of what they're getting.
Yeah.
There's no checks here.
There's no checking system.
I wonder if there's any place in America where somebody could hide out where the IRS couldn't get to them eventually, you know what I mean?
Distance is never a problem for the IRS around here.
No, no.
Well, I mean, there's supposedly a national police force, but they frighten me less than the FBI does or Homeland Security.
So you would really argue then, I guess, that whatever total power the Communist Party had there, is it that their power has really diminished or that the power of the people of China has just grown up around them so much that, by comparison, they just don't weigh that heavily anymore on the society?
I think of both.
First of all, it's not really communist anymore.
Okay.
China is post-communist, like Russia or Poland is.
There is this political entity that calls itself a communist party, but, you know, real communist parties do not recruit businessmen and entrepreneurs and things like that.
It's just this organization, like a political machine, like maybe in Chicago.
The Republicans.
Well, I'm thinking the Republicans are powerful in Cincinnati that way.
Maybe like the liberal Democrats in Japan.
You know, Japan has elections, they have parties, but somehow the same people keep winning every time for 60 years.
Well, would you argue, I don't know, compare civil rights in Japan versus China?
I mean, the Politburo in China certainly has more power than the liberal Democrats over the people of that society, don't they?
Well, the permanent civil service in Japan has most of the real power, I'm told.
But I'm not an expert on Japan by any means.
Yeah.
But so like the average guy on the average day, you would think, is basically as free as the average Japanese in China?
Might be more because the society is different.
The society is different.
Japanese people are very conformist.
Chinese people are not so conformist.
You might compare them to Germany and Italy, you know.
China is a lot like Italy, only bigger.
It's disorganized.
It's chaotic.
People don't necessarily care about anything except their own family.
Families are very strong.
That's actually something I've kind of noticed just from, you know, my extremely limited education about China, which probably hell mostly comes from movies and that kind of thing.
But it does seem to be a society with a real strong tradition of, in a sense, of individualism and entrepreneurship and kind of inward looking, almost an American style, you know, rugged individualism in a sense.
But the families are stronger.
The families are stronger.
The families are stronger.
You always want to have your, you work together with your relatives.
Is that because people rely on the state less there?
Yeah.
We rely more on the state here in America rather than our families than in China.
Well, for example, if you go to get sick and you have to go to the hospital, in America the nurses will feed you and change your linen, right?
Sure.
Or in China they don't.
You have to get your family to feed you, change your linen, et cetera, et cetera.
Huh.
So the guy that wrote on my blog the other day that he fled Africa to come here to America to be free and that now if we become the worst police state here, he has nowhere left to go.
This is as far west as he can go without going east again.
Actually, he could go to China and it wouldn't be that bad.
Well, there are quite a few African students I've run into here.
I think I'd like to visit.
Chinese universities, engineering or something.
China does a lot of business in Africa now, mostly buying commodities, but they're building roads and stuff.
Now, what about the media there?
How many different channels are there?
Is there an independent press at all?
Not really.
It's getting more independent than it used to be, but they're still pretty much more controlled.
Well, more controlled nominally than in the U.S.
The U.S., what, six major media companies?
Yeah, I mean, it might as well just be state media here, as far as I can tell.
There are a lot of newspapers in China.
They all have to sort of stay on the right side of the powers that be, but they're getting more and more freedom.
They can't talk too much about politics, but say food scandals like this milk thing or other things.
They love food scandals.
Well, the earthquake when all the schools fell down, that was a terrible thing.
I saw pictures of regular citizens screaming in the faces of military policemen standing around, and the military policemen basically standing there and taking it.
And I thought, wow, hey, that's progress, it seems like.
I mean, it's obviously a horrible situation.
Well, a lot of that has to do with one of the other big problems in China, that is corruption.
There's really horrible, massive corruption.
All these construction companies, they will cut corners at every cost.
If they can get away with sticking in pieces of bamboo instead of rebar, some of them will do it.
And once in a while, they'll get caught.
And see, that kind of goes back to the questions of accountability and what people can do about that.
And I don't know exactly how right this is, but actually, the little I know of it is another article that Lou Rockwell wrote, where he explained that really, you look at which buildings fell down, it was the schools.
And sure, private contractors built them, but they built them on government contracts.
That's why they were so shoddy.
Well, they do whatever they think they can get away with.
That's the biggest problem, political problem in general, is corrupt officials collaborating with crooked businessmen.
And they may well be related, too.
Probably the biggest political issue is developers getting a hold of farmland by bribing officials.
Building up on the apartments with somebody's food.
Because remember, all these farmers, they don't buy their food at the grocery store like in America.
They raise it themselves.
They lose their land, they're in trouble.
Yeah, eminent domain problems over there.
We have that here, too.
That's funny.
What an interesting end to the Cold War, as China becomes more like America and America becomes more like China.
Well, I hope it's the end of the Cold War.
Yeah.
The sort of people who have been looking for trouble in the Middle East, they probably dream about looking for trouble in China, too.
Well, sure.
In fact, if we look back to the beginning of the Bush administration, the one major fight that Colin Powell won was when the spy plane incident happened and the American spy plane was forced to land in China.
He said, we're going to play this cool.
And there were people in the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office who wanted to, I don't know what degree to which they wanted to drum it up, but they wanted to make a real incident out of this thing.
Yes, I remember.
And that was the last bit of Powell's political capital, I guess, right there.
Yeah, yeah.
So, yeah, you're right, indeed, that that is not a danger that has passed for certain.
I like to believe, Lester, that the billionaires in America who don't necessarily make all their money from selling weapons and so forth, but actually do real business with real customers, I like to believe that they still have enough money and enough power that they can tell somebody like Dick Cheney, no, you don't, man, this is our money you're messing with here.
I mean, that's the only thing really keeping our government from starting a fight, right?
Well, something else you ought to consider, there are at least some end times nut cases who have the idea that the book of Revelations decrees there must be a war between U.S. and China.
Wait, China's in Revelations now?
No, it isn't, and neither is the U.S., but if you're imaginative enough, you can find anything.
Boy, I'll tell you, because I always thought, I thought the latest version anyway was it was going to be Russia and Iran were going to do it.
I don't think China's going to come.
Well, some people have picked one of the numbers in Revelations literally, and they think there's this 200 million man army, that must be China.
Oh, well, yeah, it's as simple as that.
So, if you've read Revelations, you know, you shouldn't take anything in it too literally.
Yeah, like Bill Hicks said, oh, well, I can't really argue with that kind of, you know, research.
Fine, I guess that must be right, 200 million, where must they come from?
Maybe India.
Hey, tell me about this, do you keep track of watching Taiwan relations, because it seems from my end that...
To a degree, yeah.
It seems like my government is trying to arm the Taiwanese and make their weapons sales and stuff, but it also seems like the Taiwanese and the Chinese have really been working together a lot.
Well, a sort of arms contractor to sell guns in the U.S., sell them everywhere else, too.
They would like Taiwan to buy a bunch of stuff.
The Taiwanese are not necessarily so eager to buy.
Taiwan does have two major political groups, and the one right now is the former Kuomintang, what used to be Chiang Kai-shek's outfit.
And they are friendlier to the mainland.
Many of them are, well, many of their parents came from the mainland, so they still have ties across the Straits of Taiwan.
The others, people, I don't know how much they want independence or not.
Economically, Taiwan and the mainland get more and more connected all the time.
You know, a lot of Taiwan companies actually have their factories on the mainland now.
Even before, nowadays they're beginning to let people fly back and forth.
They're beginning to have ships that go back and forth, early stop on the islands in between.
Even before, if you had to fly to Hong Kong and then on to Fuzhou or Xiamen, that still wasn't too far a flight.
People went back and forth all the time.
Well, if you're a shady Taiwanese businessman and you want two wives, it's easy to have your second wife on the mainland.
That's funny.
And these are all basically recent developments, is what you're saying?
Yeah.
It's been going on over ten years I've been here, anyway.
Yeah.
Well, that's really good to know.
You know, when I lived on the coast in Fujian, that's right opposite Taiwan.
You know, you can't see Taiwan.
It's about a hundred miles out to sea, but it's not far away.
And there's generally good feeling there?
There's a lot of economic connections, a lot of cultural connections.
And there's generally good feelings between the people of both countries at this point, or not?
Generally speaking, yeah.
Chinese people generally are not very belligerent.
They try to avoid fighting and quarreling.
So even if there are hard feelings, they will not talk about it too openly.
Well, and I'm sorry for jumping around so much, but more back on the civil liberties questions and the power of the government there.
Are you worried at all that this call's being recorded and that they might get mad at you and want you out or something like that for doing something like this?
No, I don't think so.
I'm not too worried, no.
Because I sort of am just from the American end.
Well, I would be more worried about the American end, too.
But you know, you're not saying anything too bad about Bush.
Well, maybe not during this hour.
Actually, you should have tuned in the first 15 minutes of the show.
I don't think they care what I personally do.
I am useful to them, okay?
If they don't want me, they can just refuse to renew my visa.
I'm here year by year.
You know, I don't have a permanent residency.
Well, how bad would they take it if I was to try to interview the kids in your class about what they think about the government there?
Oh, I have no idea.
Probably they wouldn't care too much.
Really?
Well, I mean, I'm teaching courses right now on introduction to culture of intimately speaking countries and like that.
And I was lecturing to them the other day a little bit about U.S. history.
I was talking about the revolution and the war of independence.
I tried to give them some interactive activities.
Some of you pretend you're loyalists.
Some of you pretend you're independence activists.
Which would you rather be, independent or part of the British Empire still?
A lot of them say, oh, we want to be independent.
We want to have our own elections, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Yeah, ask some Chinese whether they want to be a colony of the British Empire or not and see which way they answer.
Well, Shanghai was sort of a colony, but Britain didn't have formal colonies.
Well, they sure had Hong Kong and they sure tried for a long time.
Boxer, you have to allow us to sell our heroin products in your country.
Oh, yeah.
They had a whole war over that one.
You know, the opium sellers, Jardine and Matheson Company are still big in Hong Kong.
You know, a few years ago, I think it was Cato Institute was talking about how great business the Hong Kong government was because they didn't have any restrictions on business.
And this is true.
But that's why Hong Kong is the second most expensive city in the world because they let these people have monopolies and cartels.
So all the stores, all the retail outlets are owned by two companies.
They obviously cooperate to keep the prices high, even though they're next door to a very cheap place.
Hey, tell me how the U.S. elections look in China.
Are people paying much attention and commenting on their favorite and that kind of thing?
They haven't been paying any attention at all.
Really?
I can listen to it anytime I want to.
You know, I get BBC on my shortwave.
I can connect to BBC radio through Internet if I want it.
But, you know, people here are pretty busy with their own lives.
Yeah, that's interesting.
You know, it seems like this is probably well on the last one, too.
I mean, the world, people around the world, at least from the media I see, are more interested in who's going to win in America than they have been in a long time, especially as a result of this.
Well, BBC is certainly interested, but it's colorful, too, you know.
Bush versus Obama or McCain versus Obama.
They are a colorful group.
Right.
But you're saying, like, it seems to me like most people in China just couldn't care less either way, huh?
Well, unless they're intellectuals, and that's not the majority anywhere.
I mean, BBC had some, just today they had some writer from Beijing talking on their program, and he was saying some of his friends think this, some of them think that.
But, you know, this is sort of an intellectual in Beijing.
People around here, my students are interested in boyfriends and girlfriends and maybe getting an apartment or a room off campus so they don't have to live with four roommates.
And exploring the naughty underwear store down the street and things like that.
This is the only time in their life they're really not under their parents' control.
Well, you know, toward the beginning of the interview, you mentioned about some of the ethnic minorities.
I think you compared some of them to American Indians and that kind of thing.
And really, you know, in relative terms, the, as you say, non-expansionist Chinese nation-state as it is today really is a giant empire left over from olden days.
It is a civilization, as well as a country.
Same thing for India.
Yeah.
Well, so how many different ethnic minorities and different majorities and ethnic groups and whatever are there in China, really?
The government has an official recognition of 56 ethnic groups.
Wow.
About half of them live here in Yunnan.
Because this is, well, very mountainous, very rugged terrain.
And until within the last 50 years, not closely governed by the national government.
So a lot of my students are Yi people, for instance.
Yi people are the biggest group here.
They're maybe 7 million.
I don't like to call them minorities because 7 million is not a minor group of people.
That's almost twice as many as there are Irishmen in the world, for example.
Yeah.
Zhuang people.
Zhuang people are 20 million.
That's the population of Australia.
Wow.
So they're pretty numerous.
And you said you lived up in Mongolia, too, for a while, right?
Half the population.
You said you lived up in Mongolia, too, right?
No, Manchuria.
Oh, Manchuria.
Yeah, see, I don't know.
Well, tell me about that.
Well, that is in the far northeast of China, almost the opposite end of the country.
You know, we're subtropical.
We're at the same latitude as the southern tip of Florida here.
When I lived in Changchun, that is the same latitude as Mankato, Minnesota.
Okay?
A bit south of Minneapolis.
And it has a climate similar to the upper Midwest.
You know, I am from Iowa originally, and it reminded me a lot of my home in Iowa.
Less snow in the winter.
Less wind.
Otherwise, similar climate.
Hmm.
That is the big industrial region.
That was the region that was occupied by Japan starting about 1931.
And the Japanese built a lot of industries there.
That's where a lot of their war materials were made.
So that's the heavy industry part of China.
Hmm.
Changchun has what the first auto factory was.
They have several auto factories now.
They make railroad cars.
They make all kinds of stuff.
You know of the French Alstom company that makes the French bullet train, the TGV?
They are beginning to make cars for the TGVs up there now.
And I think eventually the government wants to build a bunch of bullet trains around the country.
So tell me, with all this development and what seems like actually a great leap forward in the sense of the increased standard of living for people and that kind of thing, is there generally a sense of future-oriented optimism about how things are going to be?
Yes, there is.
Certainly with my students.
Yeah?
I think that's cool, man.
Yeah, that's cool, man.
It's sort of a shame really that the Pacific Ocean is so big between here and there.
It seems like our civilizations could really benefit from much more exchange.
Well, I agree.
Lots of Chinese students like the idea of studying in America or even living in America.
A lot of engineers, I taught at an engineering university one year, Tsinghua University.
That's kind of like MIT.
And I was told maybe 40% of their graduates go on to further study in the U.S.
And many of them become U.S. citizens and U.S. engineers.
Well, do many of them come back home?
These days more and more of them are coming home, yeah.
There's even a phenomenon of people who have, say, emigrated to the U.S. a long time ago, moving, coming to Shanghai to start businesses or something.
I've talked to one or two such people on the airplane.
I think it was Doug Casey I talked to a few years back who said, Oh, forget this.
I'm teaching my daughters Chinese, man.
China's the future.
I'm moving there.
Well, the Chinese language is not too hard to learn.
You have to be willing to work at it.
Reading and writing is a bit difficult, though less difficult than you might think.
But yeah, why not?
The more languages you learn, the easier they get.
You know, I think that, well, as little as it may seem, you know, just for the hour, conversations like this are really important for people to have the opportunity to overhear.
There's nothing scary and alien and dangerous that we need to be worried about here.
Reasonable people know better.
That's right.
The big interest in China is having something nice to eat.
They're very interested in food.
You know, Americans...
We love their food, too, here.
...teach American children to say, but Chinese children always learn that Chinese food is the best in the world.
I think that's what American school children learn, too.
I love Chinese food.
The only problem is I'm always hungry like half an hour later.
Eat your rice.
Or eat your noodles.
Hey, listen, I want to really thank you very much for your time on the show today, Lester.
No, it's a pleasure.
It makes me feel important.
Well, you are.
Keep it up, man.
No, thank you.
All right, folks, that's Lester Ness.
He's a friend of the show.
You can find him sometimes in the comments section at antiwar.com slash radio.
And he teaches English to business students in the Yunnan province, a city called Kunming in southwestern China.
This is Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back.