In LA

I was perusing the net, reading some China stories I intend to share on this blog, when I realized, as I often do, that China has a constant presence in the news in the U.S.A. Open any big city newspaper, turn to page A2, whoomp there it is.

One reason for this could be that as people in the U.S. try to make sense of globalization, this new “flat” world (to paraphrase the title of a book I haven’t read), they end up clamoring for news about China, and the press responds to the demand. Or at least that is one plausible idea why China is always in the news in the U.S. these days. Call it the “look out! it’s coming right at us!” theory.

Another reason could be that not all the world’s news takes place in a country that makes up only a little less than %5 of the world’s population (the U.S. — “we’re number 5!”). Some newsworthy things do actually occur in a country that makes up a little over %20 of the world’s pop. and the U.S. press has finally caught a whiff. Call it the “a welcome correction to the U.S. media’s traditional inward focus” theory.

But the big problem with these theories (ok, hypotheses) is that they don’t explain the lack of such a level of India coverage in the U.S. Sure there are some stories about India (almost 17% of world pop and climbing), but they’re easily dwarfed by the number of China stories. And they’re boring; stories about datacenters full of C++ developers or stories about yet another call center full of Indian folk who answer US customer support calls by saying “Hi welcome to Dell, this is Bobby-Sue Lee Johnson” (1 2 3 4 etc). Neither of these conventional hypotheses can adequately explain why stories about China take up such a disproportionately larger amount of space in U.S. newspapers than stories about India.

I have a different theory which I think explains everything and is airtight when compared to the straw-man theories I’ve fabricated above. The theory: China is the funniest country on earth.

Sit a spell and let that idea roll around in your head while you peruse the following articles and see if you aren’t convinced.

• Almost all of town’s couples divorced, and that’s just the beginning of the tale
  summary: 98% of the married residents of a Chinese town divorced in order to take advantage of a lucrative legal loophole which the government quickly rescinded, leaving everyone poor, single, and bitter.

  
  

• Not from the Western media, but still funny: Photos of the massive crowds at popular tourist sites during the May holiday

  
  

• China’s Spitting Image
• China Changes Coarse
• China warns tourists against spitting overseas
  summary: More on the Chinese Government’s attempts to change the “manners” of Chinese folk. People spitting in the street might not seem funny at first glance. But the fact that it’s such a widespread practice, that people here seem to think spitting improves health (aigh, the “purges toxins” meshugaas knows no border), and that the local government has stooped to driving a camera equipped van around on the street to videotape people spitting and then make them clean it up or face a 50RMB fine (about $6 US) seems pretty funny to me. The cameras are because the perps routinely deny their action.

  
  

• As China goes ecological, Japan fears shortage of disposable chopsticks

And there’s plenty of humor here that has yet to be mined by the media. For example, David Wong’s recent blog entry Laugh or Cry records how a man received 3 years in prison for a spitting-related infraction during the cultural revolution. Ha ha ha!

Hmmm, maybe everything just seems funny from within China?

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.