Who Needs Pinyin?

One of the most daunting challenges living in mainland China presents is communication. It is tough, even for the Chinese themselves. Reading, and writing Putonghua, the primary spoken language of the Han majority, is taken seriously. A popular TV ad shows people paying the price for illiteracy: job discrimination, bullying, and being shunned from everyday life. An interesting thing about observing Mainland society is seeing how people are punished for having a low-quality education; it's unfair, but still, a great motivator.


I arrived in Beijing expecting Pinyin to be an integral part of how people in the city live and work. Students here start learning Pinyin, the Latin transcription of Chinese characters, as early as pre-school. It is included in the all-important, life-defining mega-exam at the end of high school, and then it's largely forgotten. You will see Pinyin written on street signs and subway ads, but hardly anywhere else. It's not used in the daily newspapers or weekly magazines, nor in most non-reference books.

The big reason there's no readily-available Pinyin in the Mainland is pretty simple. It would give us foreigners a fighting chance. Imagine if we could immediately connect Chinese characters to the familiarity of our alphabet? We would know when the bank holidays are. We could find out which movies use English subtitles. We might even discover why that dude from Chongqing is really in trouble.

Maybe it has more to do with Mainland philosophy in regards to the Chinese language. If China used Pinyin more often, it would mean meeting foreigners halfway, and it seems no one really wants that to happen.

Go To The Back Of The Bike

I've moved to a part of Beijing where the private car culture is just beginning to make itself known. The neighborhood streets are just too narrow to park a vehicle, and the pathways are barely wide enough for a car to fit anyway. So, it's obvious that this neighborhood in the Capital was made for 2-wheel traffic only. After all, the bicycle, more than a bus or a train, has been the historic transportation option for the Chinese people.


It also serves as the key component for romantic pursuits in China, and as such, the shift to automobiles seems especially troubling. Just as in any other country, women in China are attracted to a new, fast set of wheels, especially if it's Lambourghini, Ferrari or Audi.

One young woman who appeared on a Chinese dating reality show shook up the nation a couple of years ago, with her response to an earnest male suitor who was asked how he would woo and win the girl of his dreams. The young man, looking like many male reality show contestants in China, was a bit geeky, but heart-renderingly honest when he suggested a quiet, joyous, moonlit ride on his bike, with the girl as his passenger.

The female contestant stunned everyone by saying she'd "rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of your bicycle."

In the USA or other Western countries, the snappy retort would have been duly noted and turned into fodder for late night talk show hosts. But in China, it was nothing less than an assault on the national character. How healthy could Chinese society be if a young person would reject the object of centuries of traditional courtship for a luxury automobile? Is this what Deng Xiaopeng's opening-up policy has come to, a generation of Chinese that cannot balance materialism with the noble ideals of the state?

It is telling that in less than two years, the Chinese government ordered programs like the aforementioned reality dating show off-the-air. It is clearly not the kind of modernization that China wants. If you're a foreigner, you fear that the future will look like the recent past for the Middle Kingdom. The so-called "morality-challenged" youth of China, quickly being accustomed to nice cars, loud music, body art and basketball, will be rounded-up and told to attend re-education camps in the countryside. And they'll be forced to ride bicycles to get there.