The Dish

Pearl Sydenstricker reports on the rising number of Han Chinese tourists in Tibet and the politics behind it:

It’s government policy: tourism is an officially designated “pillar of the economy” in Tibet. The goal is to attract fifteen million tourists a year by 2015 in the so-called “Tibetan Autonomous Region,” which has a population of only three million. In the first half of 2013, tourist visits to Lhasa surged by 36 percent, according to state media. Rather than threatening Tibetan monks with army troops, the government is smothering them with throngs of pushy tourists, who show their sympathies with their fashion statements: green camouflage is in. On recent summer and autumn days, they wore camo hats, camo hoodies, and even camo leggings, as if each were playing a part in the paramilitary.

In the Chinese media, Tibetans are always portrayed as the poor beneficiaries of Chinese aid.

Their costumes are funny, their cultural beliefs hopelessly “backward,” tourists tell me. One villager I speak with in Hebei, thousands of miles away, complains that his taxes are going for charity for this distant group. The government seems to have drawn up a caricature—somewhat like Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens”—depicting Tibetans as lazy. No surprise, then, that Han Chinese carry on loud cell phone conversations in prayer halls and walk counterclockwise against the flow of pilgrims, deliberately interrupting these “superstitious” rituals. As I walk through the Barkhor, the newly reconstructed “Old Quarter” of Lhasa—one of the holiest sites and top tourist destinations in all of Tibet—armored vehicles rumble past souvenir stands. I count forty-seven police stations in half a square mile, all of them clearly marked on the tourist maps set up in the streets, like at Disneyland. Tourists may fulfill their role in the soft-power paramilitary, but it’s no secret that the real paramilitary is here too.

A related Dish thread, “Why Do Chinese Tourists Have Such A Bad Rap?,” is here, with a post specifically addressing Tibet here.

(Photo by Desmond Kavanagh)

J. Hoberman praises Peter Maresca’s Society is Nix: Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip, 1895-1915 for illustrating “just how sensational this newspaper art form was in its early years”:

The comics were the high-tech weapon of the great newspaper circulation war and tumult, if not violence, was the new medium’s stock-in-trade. The term “yellow journalism” itself derived from the first comic-strip star, a denizen of the teeming, single-image slum tableaux Hogan’s Alley, who became known as the Yellow Kid. This jug-eared, barefoot urchin, draped in a canary-colored nightshirt, was created by thirty-three-year-old magazine artist Richard Felton Outcault at Pulitzer’s New York World….

Although replete with racial and ethnic stereotypes, the first newspaper comic strips were not so much an extension of vaudeville as precursors of the equally déclassé and temperamentally anti-authoritarian motion picture. The early strips thrived on choreographed violence, including runaway horse carts, baroque streetcar collisions, and a panoply of what [newspaper magnate William Randolph] Hearst might have termed polychromous explosions.

In an October review of Maresca’s book, Steven Heller summed up how the genre got its start:

The genesis of Sunday funnies began with technology providing a way to cheaply produce color newsprint pages, and out of a desire for an outlet to lampoon new social developments in transportation, communication, power. This was also a period of huge immigration, particularly from the poorer countries in Europe where English was limited and accents were the fuel of comic and stereotypical ridicule. A growing working class from different backgrounds shared a thirst for entertainment.

“With the masses specifically in mind, newspaper comics became the first popular culture as we know it today: synchronous, predictable, ephemeral, and with a near-universal appeal, well before cinema, radio, and TV,” Maresca says.

(Image of The Yellow Kid by Richard Felton Outcault, 1897, via Wikimedia Commons)

In an excerpt from their new book, Larry Downes and Paul Nunes explain how disruptions in the tech market work:

[T]oday, new products and services enter the market better and cheaper right from the start. So producers can’t rely on a class of early adopters and high margins to build up a war chest to spend on marketing to larger and later markets. For better and for worse, thanks to near-perfect market information, consumers are too savvy for that. Everyone knows right away when some new offering gets it right — or, conversely, gets it wrong. The bell curve, once useful as a model of product adoption, has lost its value as a planning tool. This kind of disruption has its own unique life cycle, and with it its own best practices for marketing and sales, product enhancement, and eventual product replacement. Markets take off suddenly, or they don’t take off at all. Since adoption is increasingly all-at-once or never, saturation is reached much sooner in the life of a successful new product. So even those who launch these “Big Bang Disruptors” — new products and services that enter the market better and cheaper than established products seemingly overnight — need to prepare to scale down just as quickly as they scaled up, ready with their next disruptor (or to exit the market and take their assets to another industry).

They give the example of Kinect, an add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox 360:

Kinect was an enormous hit, selling eight million units in just the first sixty days. According to Guinness World Records, that made Kinect the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history. A little over a year after launch, twenty-four million Kinects had been sold, pushing sales of Xbox 360 consoles and games along with it. In 2010, Microsoft took the top spot in the fiercely competitive console market for the first time since Xbox 360’s launch in 2001. For Big Bang Disruptors, however, catastrophic success invariably leads to rapid market saturation — and with it decline and sunset. Within six months, the pace of Kinect sales dropped precipitously. Though stragglers continued to buy the product in peaks and valleys over the next year, the product had largely fulfilled its mission in its first ten months. For Microsoft — and other game developers — it was time for another innovation.

A reader writes:

You quoted Nelson Jones: “The problem with surgical intervention isn’t just the theoretical one that it violates the integrity of the body but the practical one that the doctors might well make a mistake.” The possibility that the child grows up to express a gender different than the one assigned is real. However, it’s important to understand that the sexual surgeries usually performed on intersex infants are mutilating, even when the gender assignment is not “wrong.”

The most common surgeries are intended to make the child’s clitoris smaller. That is done by removing clitoral tissue. Lots of clitoral tissue. Psychologist Suzanne Kessler asked female college students to imagine having been born with the kind of clitoris that causes children to be targeted with these surgeries (any clitoris over 3/8 inch):

Students were then given the physician’s standards for genital lengths, and women were asked to imagine having been born with a clitoris between 1.0 and 2.5 centimeters. Under what conditions would they have wanted it surgically reduced? Ninety-three percent would not have wanted their parents to agree to clitoral reduction if the condition were not life threatening and if it resulted in the loss of orgasm or pleasurable sensitivity. Over half of the women would not have wanted surgery even if the condition were unattractive and made them feel uncomfortable. This was particularly true of the lesbian and bisexual women in the sample. Twelve percent of the women would not have wanted a clitoral reduction under any circumstance

— Kessler, S., 1998. Lessons from the intersexed. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. (page 100-101).

Other sexual surgeries performed on intersex children include:

* vaginoplasty (a part of the colon is transferred to the perineum to form or to lengthen a vagina)

* gonadectomy (the child’s gonads are removed, both sterilizing the individual and rendering her dependent upon exogenous hormones for life)

* hypospadias surgery (skin flaps are used to try to extend the penile urethra so that the penis urinates from the very tip instead of somewhere further back along the underside)

Intersexed people all over the world who have been subjected to these surgeries (including myself) are calling for them to be stopped because we have experienced them as mutilating rather than normalizing. The vast majority of us remain in the gender that we were assigned, so the harm is by no means limited to wrong gender assignment. Surgeons claim that most of their patients are happy with their surgical outcomes, but you will search in vain for such silent, happy graduates of the intersex normalization process.

Shame is even more crippling than mutilating sexual surgeries. These surgeries are a response to shame. Ironically, by delivering a message that intersexuality renders the individual unloveable without mutilating sexual surgeries, they actually serve to reinforce shame. Those of us who are speaking out are the ones who have managed to transcend shame.

A reader writes:

Your post was right on the money.  I drive an 18-wheeler and haul cars in the US and Canada. When entering Canada, I’m treated with professionalism, asked specific questions, and granted access. But when I return from Canada, I am treated as if I’m, at minimum, smuggling something illegal and asked numerous questions, sometimes the same question more than once. I can only imagine the way foreign nationals are treated if I am treated this way as an American citizen. And I’m a white guy in my 60s who doesn’t fit any kind of a profile that would warrant this level of scrutiny.

Several other readers share their experiences:

Nice timing of your post, as I was just mailing my wife’s I-751 form to lift her conditional status on her green card.  Being born here myself, I had no idea on how badly we treat people trying to immigrate here until I went through it with my wife.

She’s from Germany, and before we got married we had to worry each time she entered the country, even though we were following the rules and doing nothing wrong.  She was grilled each time she entered and it was always the same; they presumed she was up to no good and she had to convince them otherwise.  All it takes is for one immigration agent to have doubts and you can be sent back and ruin your chances to complete the immigration process. I, on the other hand, never had any problems going to Germany and was never treated there like she was treated here.

Then we had to go to the immigration agency to be interviewed to ensure our marriage was legitimate.  I wasn’t worried, because from my perspective we had nothing to hide, but once the interview started it became apparent that the guy who was handling our case wasn’t simply interested in confirming that we were genuine about getting married.  He proceeded to tell me that I was a bad father because I was getting remarried soon after getting divorced and at one point looked at me and said, “You know your kids will be messed up for life.”  It was all I could do to not jump over the table and strangle the guy. My kids wellbeing have ZERO to do with the legitimacy of my marriage, but he wanted to get me mad, say something to give him a reason to deny her a green card.

I’m educated and have a good income, plus my wife’s from Germany, so I can only imagine we had it much easier than those without money coming from Third World countries.

Another:

This story is consistent with your post:

A virtuoso performer is devastated after he claims customs officials at John F. Kennedy International Airport destroyed 13 handmade flutes. Boujemaa Razgui says he was passing though the airport when he was questioned about the unique instruments the was carrying. He was then given a number call, only to discover that that his valuable nay and kawala flutes had already been deemed agricultural products and crushed. Razgui said: “They told me they were destroyed. Nobody talked to me. They said I have to write a letter to the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. This is horrible. I don’t know what to do.”

It’s also consistent with what I hear from travelers generally, even those who are US citizens but who also may be of a darker hue or whose name is something suggests an ethnicity other than white, non-Hispanic.

Another:

I’m a US citizen who has lived outside of the US since 1998. My least favourite country to travel to is the US. While I’m sure that my experience is not as brutal as yours or as others who apply for visas, it can also be brutal for US citizens going home.

A year ago at Christmas my family (my wife and daughter are also American) was traveling home to be with our extended family. The border agent – I think this was at LAX – after asking us many questions about where we worked and what we did then asked us why we were coming to America. I wanted to tell him to fuck off as it was none of his business why I wanted to come home to my own country. Of course all I could do was smile and answer or else suffer the pain of being pulled into an interrogation room for hours. Previously to this he’d subtly changed our answers and repeated the same question back to us to try and catch us out as he appeared to assume we were lying. Mind you, I probably shouldn’t have told him that my wife worked in UXO removal eliminating the ongoing legacy of secret US bombing in Laos.

I’ve been pulled aside, carefully searched, and had my checked bag marked with a big red “Security Risk – Load Last” tag in Heathrow (I was working in Afghanistan at the time) and thoroughly questioned at many other borders. But they are almost always polite and in the case of the Heathrow agents apologetic for my treatment. But US border agents are almost unfailingly rude and brusque even if you’re an American flying home.

Another US citizen:

On your tourism post, I’m not exactly a world traveler, but I’ve traveled to Europe a good bit.  Last year my wife and I went to England and Turkey.  We flew into Heathrow and it took us about 10 minutes to be on the way to the Heathrow Express.  We filled out a little form and told a very nice man that the reason for our visit was pleasure and, after a stamp in my passport we were off.  We flew from London into Attaturk Airport in Istanbul and the wait was a bit longer because we had to go through two lines (one for the visa and one for customs) but it might have taken 30 minutes total as the lines were long.  Again, we filled out a little form and told the men at the two booths that we were in Turkey for pleasure, got stamps and we were off.

It was quick, easy as about as painless as checking out of the grocery store.  Given that I’m an American, I had no idea getting into here was so hard, but I’m certainly not surprised.