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If we have realized the chief objective of the course from which this interpretive anthology was drawn—familiarizing students with contemporary Chinese life through a combination of critical readings and active engagement in the everyday—then the reader of these pages may be disturbed. Disgruntlement appeared early in the reactions of our students to the incongruous details of life in southwest China, yielding a range of questions that reflected an elemental confusion: Why do so many Chinese eat with spoons instead of chopsticks? Why do people live in the partially completed upper floors of high-rise construction sites? Why are many city streets unpaved? Why are horse carts the most common means of transporting heavy loads? Why don’t modern Chinese residential compounds have at least a bathroom on each floor? Why are the Communist Party and the People’s Liberation Army barely visible in the city? Why is the government tearing down old stone and mortar dwellings? Why is the government relocating Muslim Chinese ? Why is China a class society? Why are so many elderly people working in the street picking up trash to sell for recycling? Why do men dance with men and women dance with women? Why are Chinese unafraid of criticizing their officials and the law? Why do so many Chinese believe in magic? Why are Chinese so concerned about hygiene but apparently ignorant of the germ theory of disease? Why are there so many homeless people? Why are some school-age children not in school? Where is the socialism in China? A number of these queries have been answered for the reader in the selections presented above and were answered by the reading and local observation for our students, but their asking revealed a critical chasm between textbook knowledge and experience, thus the consequent disgruntlement. Some of the students had traveled within the United States. A few had been abroad. And some had never left Colorado; thus, a flight around the world should have proved disorienting. But it was not especially, for they had read widely about the places to which they would travel and steeped themselves in works on Chinese culture, history, politics, and society. In our era of globalism—or at least our era of heightened popular consciousness of it—a 341 LIONEL M. JENSEN Afterword Centers and Peripheries, Nation and World journey of twelve thousand miles is actually not much. However, as we have learned in the preceding chapters, it is not the getting to China but the traveling within it that is startling. Here, on the local ground of the nation’s 1 million villages, 100,000 townships and urban wards, and outside the standard national portrait, the distance between what one knows of China and what actually transpires there trebles. Caught in this space, it is sometimes difficult to reconcile text-based perceptions with experienced reality. And, of course, there are always contradictions, as when our students encountered the partially razed grounds and shattered stele of a mosque dating from the fourteenth century that yet bore placards from the municipal Communist Party committee certifying the Party’s political and financial support for Islam and its defense of ethnic diversity. Strategically located in the rear of the provincial capital’s department store (baihuo dalou), the mosque, central courtyard, imam’s residence, acolytes’ quarters, and classrooms , all four centuries’ old, stood astride the path of the department store’s inevitable expansion. One day (indeed, merely a day before the students visited ), a group of young men appeared and torched the classrooms and acolytes’ quarters, stopping long enough to take a sledgehammer to three stone stele commemorating imperial honors bestowed on the mosque by the Wanli (1573–1619), Kangxi (1662–1722), and Guangxu (1875–1908) emperors. Several acolytes who had acted in defense of the imam were badly beaten and taken to jail. Among the myriad stone fragments and dust and the charred classroom remains, the imam assured our students that the compound would be rebuilt and the stele restored, even though, as one student observed, the main gate to the compound had been closed, blocked by the temporary green metal fencing peculiar to construction sites all over the country. In a society undergoing such a vast transformation, there are tensions , but this particular eruption made little sense in terms of the China that the students knew, a China where ethnic groups were constitutionally protected and, more important, were the ample source (as was the mosque) of tourist dollars. It was only when...

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