The Road to Chengdu

Dear River Friends,

"Fen Qian" means "to climb the wall," and it's used to describe using a VPN to bypass Chinese internet censors and used blocked pages like Facebook, and well, this blogging platform. Our new friends we made on the train described this as getting over "The Great Firewall of China."

Here's the friends we made on the train! They spoke English! We had a jolly good time speaking English. Alex Wand, Mississippi bluesman, took this photo.

If I were as good a journalist as I made myself out to be, I would have written down their names. They were very excited to hear I wrote for USA TODAY, which apparently is the only U.S. news source not blocked by China.

The train took 20 hours. They don't have any superfast trains from Shanghai to Chengdu. The way our train buddies explained it was that in the Three Kingdoms period of China, Liu Bei, king of Wei wanted to move into Shu where his brother ruled. His general, the venerable Zhuge Liang presented him with a winning strategy, which was to move troops into Chengdu, the capital of Shu, on the pretense of protecting his brother's land. Then once he had all his troops in Chengdu, Zhuge adviced Liu Bei to pull a fast one on his brother and force him to surrender Shu. This is why Zhuge Liang is recognized as a great hero and strategist in China even to this day, something that even to this day sort of confuses Westerners like us who think taking Chengdu like that was probably a dick move. We brought this up and were assured that it was no big deal, because Liu Bei's brother was probably happy that it was his brother who did this and not some foreign warlord.

Anyway where this story's leading is that as a result of this historical debacle, the Road to Chengdu has been trecherous ever since, and that's why they don't have any express trains to Chengdu.

Space on the train was kind of cramped, but we made do just fine. 

We also made friends with one of the cops on the train. It was the second cop we've met who's been a real nice guy to us. He seemed to use his role as a train cop as an excuse to go from car to car and shake hands with everyone on the train, muss up kids hair and shoot the shit with passengers like us. He let us hang up our river flags all up and down the train car before his superior came and told us to take them down. Later he came by to hang out with us and listen to Mississppi bluesman Alex Wand rock out some songs on the guitar.

Our English-speaking train buddies explained to us that most cops in China are actually real nice guys. I said that was interesting because every single cop in the U.S. is a real asshole. Where the system breaks down, he said, isn't at the level of the cops or the censors, most of whom don't actually like to get people in trouble, or really care all that much about regulations. The problem is the self-censorship of the people of China. People will see something that's illegal and worry that they will get in trouble if they don't report it to the police. The police then worry that since someone else has reported it to them, that they will get in trouble if they don't dole out punishments. It's this fear of a system that nobody understands except to the degree that there are regulations out there, and since nobody knows how they're supposed to be enforced, they just enforce them themselves.

The superior who told us to take the flags down, our friend explained, did so because she couldn't read the English words on the flags, so there was no way that she could tell that there wasn't something written in English that would hurt the government. On the outside chance that we were putting up antigovernment propeganda, than it might come down on her head because she hadn't told us to take them down. However, if we went and put them back up, she wouldn't actually get us in trouble, because she's already got an excuse. She could tell her superior that she already told us to take them down and we just didn't listen, so it wasn't her fault. In fact we were supporting the system by not putting the flags back up. 

Just to be on the safe side, we left the flags down. On the next train we'll take photos before they make us take the flags down.