Background Context: "Being in Time" as Pedagogic Inter-Cultural Videographic + Transmedia Practice in Covid-19 China

NOTE: This was originally written over 2023/05 - 2023/12 as a series of blog entries chronicling my preliminary pedagogic practice of Inter-Cultural Communication [IC] within Chinese tertiary education during the Covid crisis. The blogs were intended as a background context and commentary concerning the making of an autoethnographic film for pedagogic purposes, the film having been accepted for online screening by peer reviewed journal The Autoethnographer. The blogs featured links to early autoethnographic video experiments intending to profile my background as an EFL teacher in China, specifically incorporating reflections on my formative lived experiences in Xinjiang [XUAR], at the time of writing subject to much Western narrativization of "forced labor in Xinjiang" as methodological "genocide". That this did not align at all with my lived experience of XUAR prompted much introspective reflection and research into Western media discourse construction of this anti-China narrative. The final Appendix A anthologizes in chronological order from 2021/05 to 2023/05 (and the commencement of the original blog series context) a series of disconnected writings ranging from aborted introductions, journal type entries, poems and political commentaries.

1. Reflection: Late Career Pedagogic Pathways

It's an "interesting" time to be a tertiary English as a Foreign Language [EFL] Inter-Cultural Communication [IC] teacher in Shandong, China: the summer 2023 semester begins this week (holdover exams from the end of zero-Covid last semester being the immediate priority). The rejuvenation of a winter semester break (and fifth consecutive Chinese New Year) in my Shanghai apartment on Wulumuqi Lu dissipates in early morning reflection for me now: up well before class - at my PC. Before dawn. As I turn 54, I find myself at peaceful solace in these reflective, solitary moments and hope to utilize them well this semester, in ongoing IC lesson planning. I start the reflection period musing over my life and career in China, on what my "cultural story" may offer as auto-ethnography (especially given the recent attention on auto-ethnographic methodologies within Chinese EFL: Busteed, 2022: Huang, 2022; Kulich, et.al 2022) and journey both logically and evocatively from there, using various dissemination means to signpost and even aesthetically render the results.

My IC course begins in a week yet though: am contemplating integrating a personal "cultural story" on the basis of Kulich et.al (2022) and research conducted at Shanghai International Studies University during China's zero-Covid policy. Constructing multimedia elements of my such story trans-culturally scaffolding personal experience in a context-specific Second-Language Acquisition [SLA] student-teacher bridge - to facilitate greater case study discourse analysis applying the introductory theory covered in the course: incorporating auto-ethnographic authentic materials design into Chinese EFL IC pedagogic practice. Narrativized personal story-telling is the concern though: how to incorporate it?

There is a music video I recently saw that I think can be included in this personal "cultural story" introduction to the IC course, and indeed in my other teaching workload this semester, especially to tie into any use of personal video archive content for pedagogic purposes; Public Image Ltd. "Hawaii". The cultural legacy of PiL singer John Lydon in this case being a potential window for Chinese students into Western culture, of personal resonance (I have listened to Lydon over some time now and he is an active icon in a period of history covered in Chinese books on the topic). Either way, as a found artefact, this one has pedagogic potential and I will include it here - as a digital ethnographic record of my Internet browsing (while maintaining this trans-media project) resulting in pedagogic "authentic materials" lesson content selection.

VIDEO 1: Artefact (music video) - PiL "Hawaii" | in style, intent and evocation, the most affecting new popular song I have heard recently in that it directly resonated with my professional pedagogic practice and so was integrated into praxis of such: soothing, basic English, explore evocative meaning for students.

In an interview, Lydon explained his choice of footage as being to evoke inter-personal memory of his prior romantic experience with his wife (who now suffers from late stage Alzheimer's). A videographic feature I am working on - Being in Time - is constructed with a similar montagist methodology and intent and I integrate footage of my parents while they were still alive (my mother died with Alzheimer's). I also integrate footage pertaining to romantic (and other) memories. Aside from the "synchronicity / serendipity" psycho-cognitive context in these associations via social media (YouTube) browsing that intrigues me, it's that auto-biographical qualification of the critical reflection I adopt as an auto-ethnographic framework that best contextualizes my trans-cultural experience as a foreign (Australian) EFL IC teacher in contemporary China. So too, it is the genuine empathy in Lydon's rendition of "Hawaii" that makes it a humanist work additionally intriguing for Lydon's seminal role in the cultural upheavals of the 1970s, the birth of the UK "punk" movement: so distant in tone from "Hawaii" and so ripe for compare and contrast task-setting.

Just as Lydon evokes place memory with autobiographical relevance, the lyrics' evocatively personalized quality I would argue makes the song auto-ethnographic, especially knowing the wider context of Alzheimer's care; and including the song's (unsuccessful) bid for selection as Ireland's entry in the forthcoming Eurovision song contest. Place memory is similarly a theme in my videographic work: it was the conceptual foundation for a video travelogue I filmed over my first year in China, in Xinjiang [XUAR] 2011-12. I began my formative EFL teaching experience (after obtaining a GCTESOL and GDIS in Australia) - establishing the foundations for a decade long EFL pedagogic practice in China (alternating the tertiary sector in Shandong and the private sector in Shanghai) - living and working as a Middle School EFL teacher over that year in Xinjiang. I underwent the "culture shock" process (honeymoon included) there as a participant-observer in the education system, answerable to my Chinese Ministry of Education [MoE] stakeholders, and even commenced an MTESOL by distance (at an Australian university), utilizing what I was learning in designing lesson plans for my Han, Uygur and Kazakh students Indeed, over that year in Xinjiang, I documented my experience in a video travelogue, using a handheld camera: including within my workplace environment - a secured, guarded education facility (as indeed are most throughout China). The emergent rough cut was 8+ hours, covering excursions outside Xinjiang to Chengdu and Beijing but mostly confined to my living, working and travel conditions in Xinjiang.

As I had been a SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] immediately before coming to China, I offered the film to the NFSA to add to my Fellowship work stored there, but the NFSA declined it, sight unseen. As a consequence I thought to expand the project with a written account and use the video as fieldwork data, but as I left Xinjiang (only to return to Australia to complete the in-class requirements of the MTESOL) the project was shelved. The video - and raw footage - remained in a personal archive shot over a decade in China - until I started re-viewing it in the context of Western mainstream media's mis-representational reporting on Xinjiang: specifically that of supposed "forced labor in Xinjiang" as methodological Uygur "genocide". In that context, I sought to re-edit it into a greater perspective of my experience in China (as fieldwork footage). Lacking media production resources, but trained in psycho-analytic film theory, I then sought to incorporate this footage into my ongoing auto-ethnographic trans-media, which had started with contextual publications on a second website and lengthier pieces on a substack account and now extends into post-production of the first part of the intended film series Being in Time.

As an example, I will include here an experimental video I made over 18 months ago in first reckoning retrospectively with my career trajectory, edited under "lockdown" conditions as Covid-19's "emergency response" directions were released through China's Ministry of Education [MoE] and filtered through to the university in Shandong where I lived and worked. Although I now hesitate over some of the transitional choices, however, it does indicate the shifting terrain of the education industry and should be viewed as an (experimental) auto-ethnographic film - an evocative construct borne of personal experience, but extrapolated for socio-cultural comment. It's an introduction also to the film-making style that I use throughout Being in Time and any additional original auto-ethnographic video content featured throughout the trans-media project and this website.

VIDEO 2: Experimental Short | a short film edited to chronicle three stages of my career as an EFL teacher in China - formative in Xinjiang, evolving in Shanghai, and during Covid-19 in Shandong. Using original personal archival footage of Xinjiang and Shanghai and integrating Chinese news as found footage artefact.

The video was followed by two others in a similar style, which sought to contextualize my initial experience of Xinjiang in relation to events and media coverage in Australia of what was at that time being rhetoricized as "cultural genocide". That was the impression of Xinjiang that I had formed prior to arrival: a perspective shaped entirely by Western media and biased in favor of a separatist, extremist and terrorist Uygur diaspora. The facts of the case as I finally researched them belied this: an Australian Refugee Review Tribunal hearing had granted a protection visa to an unnamed Uygur in 2011 (who arrived in Australia on a student visa) who admitted collaborating and communicating with the World Uygur Congress [WUC] in coordination of the 2009 Urumqi riots. Given that the WUC denied such involvement, the Australian government transcript establishes them as liars, deploying the term "human rights abuses" strategically and deliberately in the transcript, without qualification of any evidentiary details, in order to smear and misrepresent China through emotive rhetorical allusion: false empathy. This is an ethical outrage to me - the moment in which the Australian government compromised its integrity to serve an anti-China US/Uygur agenda (not the last of such moments as it turned out).

I experimented with how I could use my footage (and film training) to critically deconstruct this Western narrative: intended as a YouTube series progressively reconstructing my travelogue footage, with contemporary commentary. Budgetary limitations and time constraints prevented more than two episodes from being trialed - they are included below also for archival purposes. Budget. Absence of a creative team. Doing everything myself - original videography, editing, post-production - by myself imposes certain limitations upon my current film-making methodology. However, now that I have returned to the topicality of place memory in "cultural stories" for pedagogic IC purposes and have expanded the scope to include the entirety of my experience in China in Being in Time, I am taking steps to gain resources and anchor the trans-media publishing production base this website coordinates. To which, in Shanghai for Chinese New Year 2023, I began to develop a production team for future videographic work over the coming year. Although my early experimental video series centered on Xinjiang was not carried through, the context they set makes them worth including here, as personal artefacts in a sense.

VIDEO 3: Experimental shorts (2) | intended YouTube series in which I sought to contextualize contemporary Western MSM on Xinjiang in relation to my own participant-observation in the region. Again using personal archive footage, found artefacts and text-based narration of both expository and personal content. NOTE: by error, text in the second video refers to Xinjiang as a "province": it is an "autonomous region" not a province, however. The error escaped the final check-over but, as the work is now only of archival interest, remains. This error will be corrected in any update or future reference.

Needless to add, the "cultural story" I relate in IC class will not extend this far - it is merely an 8 week bridging course for English majors who choose a career path outside of pedagogic practice. But the theory behind it is well-developed and contemporary: I was enrolled in post-graduate study by distance (at a university in Australia) in this research field but had to withdraw for medical and other reasons during the zero-Covid policy in China. With or without the additional Academic qualification at my late-career stage, the research undertaken nevertheless informs my pedagogic practice, in media res: as praxis. Just as, for autobiographical parallel, my formative EFL pedagogic practice in Xinjiang shaped by mid-career and Covid-19 practice. In one respect, having started my career in Xinjiang is merely an autobiographic circumstance of no innate methodological input into my pedagogic practice during Covid-19. But not entirely. With place memory as auto-ethnographic research thus perhaps topical given the current discourse surrounding Xinjiang in Western media, I independently devote time and resources to exploring it, even if it is on the fringes of Academia.

Being in Time is the longitudinal film component thus in what is an independent trans-media auto-ethnography exploring the role of place memory in my professional pedagogic practice as a foreign EFL teacher in China over a decade since first arriving in 2011, in Xinjiang. It is released on this website with 1) a complementary tie-in graphic novel, which further explores the personal narrative in which this investigation occurs, 2) an ongoing explanatory press kit / ebook offering an exegesis of the film series. Part journal, part experimental screen, it is where my late-career segues from exclusively teaching to IC materials and media design and is intended as a business venture, though has not been developed to that stage yet, pending reception and feedback. It's a journey, my cultural journey, commencing here and now but with uncertain course and destination - in media res; praxis. As I remain an EFL teacher, the analytical context through which to frame this auto-ethnographic inquiry is in relation to changing IC pedagogic practice in China.

And here again, place memory of Xinjiang has personal import. Beginning in 2011, research in Urumqi had identified an EFL "problem": as all lesson delivery was in Mandarin, native speaking Han students were at an advantage over their Uygur counterparts in learning English (a second language for the Han, but a third language for the Uygur) (Sunuodula and Feng, 2011: Ahut, 2013). In an experiment to remove this advantage/dis-advantage, my (and foreign teacher) classes were delivered in English, the target language as the medium of instruction, eliminating any preferential Mandarin native-speaking advantage. In this environment, Han, Uygur and Kazakh students had equal access to EFL learning. This was a context-specific factor of EFL in Xinjiang due to its large Uygur minority population that further qualified what is standard native speaker recruitment protocols throughout China. Far from imposing Mandarin on Xinjiang students, the MoE sought to equalize English language learning and take away any Uygur student learning disadvantage - a facet of Xinjiang education that goes unreported in the contemporary Western media accusations of linguistic Imperialism. I have students from Xinjiang every year in my Shandong classes now: to see them have the opportunity for higher education and employment throughout China is heartwarming, as is it to facilitate (and maybe have facilitated in some small way), their successful learning journey.

2. Reflection: Meta-Cognitive Engagement

Venturing now into a second blog, I recall Mark Carrigan's somewhat auto-ethnographic writing on Academic blogging at the London School of Economics (Carrigan, 2022]: inferring the Academic blog's irreversible obsolescence but noting its endurance. Indeed, Carrigan (2022) mentions a thriving eco-system of Academic blogs and related network of alternative publication venues /journals for Academics and independent scholars (usually short form). One such "alternative" Academic literary / arts online periodical adhering to peer review standards, but in more conceptual/methodological expression as creative multimedia - The Autoethnographer - has grown since its debut (circa lockdown) to exemplify exactly such a "thriving eco-system". Interesting, having followed the online journal since its inception, it recently accepted (for online publication / hosting / screening) the completed first part of my film (series) Being in Time. I had been thinking of approaching this potential digital journal publisher since I began making the film in 2020/1 and so was delighted at the submission acceptance, although somewhat surprised given the submitted film's politically themed content, and related accompanying blog / hyperlinked material. The journal's editor shared a similar background in EFL (in Japan) before turning to auto-ethnography and my auto-ethnographic film was oriented to my EFL pedagogic practice in China, so it was a targeted first (successful) submission: either way, the film's first part is scheduled for its US premiere on The Autoethnographer in a year. That will mark the first time any of my personal auto-ethnographic film work is publicly shown (let alone via US based and archived hosting), within an exemplary "thriving eco-system".

As Labor Day holiday sweeps across China, classroom teaching on my Inter-cultural Communication [IC] course finishes and I await the return of the take-home exams (next weekend). As was my intention, I used an extract from my film Being in Time in the IC classroom: that is, the introductory sequence (5-6 mins) and the "Filial Piety" episode (with some context). The extracts were selected for inclusion after an hour long deliberation with a Chinese EFL lecturer (a peer: we sometimes taught Masters of Translation & Interpretation [MTI] students together in experimental bilingual Communication Language Teaching [CLT] themed classes at the University I work for in Shandong). One short section was left in for the IC class only, where it would otherwise be removed (along with another brief shot: totaling about 10-15 seconds of the 34 min running time) from any normal showing in a Chinese setting. Simply because the aesthetic trope - juxtaposition - is radically disorienting for a Chinese culture not used to seeing this montagist technique deployed with certain content: it was used to model the importance of critical decision making in aesthetically communicating inter-cultural content for audience meaning-making: i.e. an introduction to semiotic discourse construction in a Chinese tertiary IC context.

As an interlude: It was nice to be in my Shanghai apartment again, after booking the last train seat available (business class) during the peak holiday travel season. I am venturing slowly into media production and related archiving there with the help of a location scout / pre-production assistant documenting daily expat life (live entertainment specifically) surrounding the local Jing An expat music and amateur performer scene (and related venues). I had made similar auto-ethnographic documentaries on disabled / LGBT+ underground performance "art" (spoken word, AV production, digital publishing) in my hometown of Adelaide, South Australia and, with a lot of remaining unused footage, hoped to counterpoint it culturally with the scene in Shanghai (including archival footage). It was at that time intriguing to be in a nexus of government-funded + "underground" performance art: the two experimental, raw counter-culture auto-ethnographic documentaries I made on this context-specific sub-cultural hybridity are in Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] (researcher access only - they are personalized auto-ethnographic research films never intended for public dissemination beyond the participants: made using the shared resources available to government disability-arts grant receiving participants and their extended social and cultural networking). As representations of disability in Australian film was my research subject while a SAR Research Fellow at and a US publisher (of my previous two film-theory monographs - Serial Killer Cinema and Terrorism in American FIlm) approached me to update my unpublished NFSA manuscript and the subject is one that retains a personal interest; however, a return to Australia to complete such work is impractical just yet. Either way: my ongoing films are also research films - auto-ethnographic, but informed by a decade in Chinese EFL (75% government funded tertiary sector) since my formative pedagogic practice in Xinjiang in 2011/12. And: the 8 hr+ video travelogue I made there as a participant-observer - foreign EFL teacher.

I'll place this memory (and original travelogue) in context via a specific contemporary location: my apartment and the burgeoning Uygur culture around it, basking in the radiance of nearby Jing An Temple, on Wulumuqi Lu in Shanghai. Jing An Temple Metro Station was my geographic anchor when I first arrived to live and work in Shanghai: indeed, my current apartment is a short walk from this downtown landmark, not far from the Paramount Theatre. As mentioned last blog, its a significant location for me, a link between my formative experiences in Xinjiang (including trips to Urumqi) and my current late-stage career: the social harmony of modern China under Xi Jinping - the daily life in my actual location completely belies the rhetorical misinformation about "cultural genocide" propagated by Western media, especially since 2017 (when I first arrived in Shanghai and entered the private, corporate EFL education sector). Ironically, Wulumuqi Lu became somewhat notorious in this same Western media when it was the site of a precipitating event in the public protests in 2022/12 during the end of the "zero-Covid" policy in China. There were even Western MSM reports implying that Shanghai police were concealing street signs bearing the name "Wulumuqi": gazing upon a clearly visible street sign marker from outside my building made the ridiculousness of Western MSM coverage of China seem insidious: it prompted me to take video of my building's immediate exterior and neighboring venues, presented here in montaged (and scored) extract from a longer work in progress production of the second part of my Being in Time film.

VIDEO 4: Labor Day 2023 (04/30 - 04/02) Travelogue - extract from the second part (in production) to my film Being in Time - evoking my perception of / establishing the thriving Uygur cultural hub outside my Shanghai apartment building on Wulumuqi Lu, and subsequent Hongqiao Station based return journey. NOTE: The original, ongoing edit contains an evolving text-based narration timed to the music - this text has been removed from much of the extract.

This location was briefly also shown in the extract from the first part of Being in Time used in my IC class exam. Relatedly, as an assessment task on the professionalism of foreign teaching in China (from an IC analytic perspective), I set the student (sophomore English majors), as a short journal entry style text, a description of my own pedagogic practice with Han, Uygur and Kazakh students in Xinjiang, and set them a reflective case-study analysis / assessment of the strengths and weaknesses in the context-based pedagogic practice of my own formative EFL experience in China. As the commencement of my personal "cultural story" in China, it integrated an auto-ethnographic methodology into the classroom (Chi, Zhang & Kulich, 2022). With additional case-study discourse analysis in the IC exam - on the use of metaphorical language (with Chinese characteristics) in international political speech and its subsequent (mis-)interpretation by non-Chinese / Western audiences - the final task was set as a prototypical collaborative (evocative) auto-ethnography.

For this, I 1) screened the John Lydon video for Hawaii; 2) contextualized the historical and cultural context to Lydon and UK "punk" (using the anarchist staple "God Save the Queen" as an authentic AV material); 3) sketched Lydon's career to date (using the Leftfield Lydon "Open Up" as authentic AV material), and 4) anecdotally mentioned my long-standing interest in Lydon's music making this particular song much more personally evocative due to my own familial connection to Alzheimer's (my mother's passing) and the communication circumstances in such, further showing them a brief Lydon interview about his role as Alzheimer's carer. Consequently, I showed them 1) an article abstract on the influence of a traditional cultural value (filial piety) on aged/dementia care in China and South East Asia, followed by 2) an evocative Chinese video (fictional narrative: 3-4min AV artifact sourced during Internet browsing) on just this cultural context - filial piety. It was intended as a cultural comparison to the evocation of aged care and dementia in PiL's Hawaii: the compare and contrast directed IC framed discourse analysis singling out the specifics of collectivist and individualist approaches to caring for the elderly within families. I've included it below as the second cultural artifact encountered while Internet browsing and used in ongoing pedagogic practice.

VIDEO 5: Artefact (Chinese short video) - "Filial Piety" | In style, intent and evocation a suitable inter-cultural counterpoint to the earlier selection of PiL's "Hawaii", enough that with facilitated scaffolding, student compare and contrast analysis could be expressed creatively and analytically, within the multimedia text + exegesis genre requirements of literary / arts journal based ethnographic writing.

The second extract I showed from the first part of Being in Time was the sequence titled "Filial Piety", with my related "cultural story" (rooted in autobiographical experience) of being in China and unable to return to my home country of Australia to personally care for my father in what were his dying months / weeks. It was preceded, however, by the first extract's deliberate inclusion of a juxtaposition effect which, when screened, elicited aural surprise and bewilderment, even with prior explanation of the literal meaning of the term "juxtaposition" and visual examples of such. As I mentioned, my prior discussions with a Chinese peer had isolated the specific iconographic content within this split-screen juxtaposition (several seconds in duration) as liable to confuse and even shock Chinese students. The few seconds were not excised precisely for 1) the "culture shock" affect on Chinese EFL students of experiencing this content-based aesthetic trope in original AV context (in a Chinese tertiary education exam setting), with 2) my explanatory exegesis of the critical IC analysis applied in creative decision-making in deliberate iconographic selection criteria as inter-cultural discourse construction. Their final task was a group video on the same theme - filial piety in aged care - to which they had to creatively and evocatively deploy aesthetic tropes, to be submitted with a group statement comprising exegesis of their creative intentions in doing the film (for an audience outside of China) as they did, and their individual contributions to the final group submission.

With an explanatory booklet handed out, cumulatively covering the preceding thematic content formulated by the students during group presentation tasks jointly formulated in a constructivist classroom environment, the exam set their understanding of their basic IC theoretical and analytical principles within both authentic "cultural story" (integrating auto-ethnography as an action research methodology) from personal case study to discourse analysis to IC-themed discursive content-creation. It will be interesting to read their examination papers and see their group videos / exegesis. Either way: the notification of my film's acceptance for publication / exhibition via The AutoEthnographer posits the intriguing possibility of a more detailed methodological account of this particular case study in IC pedagogic practice for potential submission elsewhere. However, that remains to be seen, particularly in relation to the potential future involvement in the production of the second part to Being in Time of further Chinese peer consultancy. With now a second blog entry, however, I am tempted to quote one of my favorite movies -- Walter Hill's The Warriors (1979): "stay tuned boppers, stay tuned."

VIDEO 6: Artefact (film extract) - The Warriors (1979) | scene from the classic US cult film in which news of an ongoing gang battle is transmitted in sporting references across the airwaves.

Curiouser and curiouser. I received an email soliciting my potential submission to the SAGE journal Ethnography. A form email, but still: they found me somehow. Either way: now considering it. Likewise, after accepting an editorial request from another SAGE journal - Journal of Contemporary Ethnography - to review an Inter-Cultural Communication [IC] methodologized ethnographic research paper and sending my review, I have 60 day access to SAGE. And a reviewer profile: updating my ORCID public profile (in case in this late career stage something eventuates), and corresponding with Clarivate now. After over a year of stress-related illness - anxiety, immune system issues and the onset of a thyroid condition - which forced me to withdraw from a late career enrollment (by distance from China) in a GDRM (in Australia) - its intriguing now on recovery to have this access. Especially in the current geo-political context in which I am situated as a foreigner living and working in China.

In the film (first part) of Being in Time (accepted for literary / arts journal exhibition in 2024 as mentioned last blog update), I sought to render (through experimental montagism) the transformative affect of critical reflection on my personal experience of living and working in China (since beginning my formative EFL career in Xinjiang in 2011/12) in this current geo-political climate: beset by Western MSM discourse on both China (Xinjiang) and Russia, the latter in relation to 1) Ukraine's Nazi influences post-2014 Maidan coup as documented in the Igor Lopatonok directed / Oliver Stone produced film Ukraine on Fire (which I saw first on YouTube before it was taken down following the 2022/02/24 Russian military operation in Ukraine); and 2) my then recently deceased father's recollections of his own childhood under the Nazis in then occupied Czechoslovakia (as a Slav thus to the Nazis an "untermensch" as were Russians so considered). In utilizing extracts from a filmed interview with my late father one of the last times I saw him - and my mother - alive, I selectively edited it based on an experimental short edit of an approximately 2-3 hours of interviews concerning his lived experience as a WW2 "displaced person" who came by UN ship to Australia as part of the first immigration wave: collectively termed "new Australians" by a resentful, prejudicial Australian population. More of the collected interviews will be utilized in the film's second part (and longitudinal development) but for now, included below is my first attempt at a personal film reflection on my father's revelations.

VIDEO 7: "Jiri's Tale 1: I Untermensch" - Experimental intended pilot for a YouTube series exploring personal reflection accompanying an interview series with my late father over the few times I saw him alive prior to his death (being unable to attend his funeral due to Covid-19 travel (and financial) restrictions to Australia. This was my second attempt at an episodic YouTube format following two Reflections on Xinjiang episodes (Video 3 in Blog 1).

It's been over a year since last reading Academic research papers as stress-related illness following my father's death interrupted such a pursuit. My focus at that time was auto-ethnography in Chinese EFL: the research context being the call for a change in pedagogic practice, research and educational design innovation during the 2020-2022 Covid-19 emergency response period. Specifically: the call for a change in pedagogic practice in China in Poo (2021) re-iterated that originally delineated earlier, in an EFL context, in Liu, et.al’s (2015) qualitative justification of the need for a “paradigm shift” in EFL pedagogic practice in China. Poo (2021) specifically delineated this “paradigm shift” as that from the “didactic towards the inspirational”. Though not acknowledged, the potential (and precise) methodological facilitation of this shift - and its epistemic justification - was inherently implied in Liu et.al (2015) as innovative research design: the incorporation of foreign teacher analytical auto-ethnographic participant-observation praxis-based methodologies. Liu, et.al (2015) thus effectively applied and validated, for the first time in Chinese EFL educational research design, the somewhat controversial field of analytical auto-ethnography: apt, since underlying Poo (2021) was the rationale that “Innovative minds are shaped by education and life’s experiences (italics added)”. Lived experience. Given the domination of quantitative methodologies in Chinese EFL literature, this was a radical innovation.

Indeed, Liu, et.al (2015) posited as a research field the methodological implications of the auto-ethnographic mode of inquiry on educational design reforms in China: i.e. establishing foreign teacher participant-observation praxis as a new core “globalized” pedagogic best practice educational research design principle in China’s National EFL Curriculum Reform Agenda. Significantly, the Liu et.al (2015) methodological application of analytical auto-ethnographic inquiry into Chinese EFL pedagogic practice drew on Canagarajah (2012)'s specific conception of EFL as a “global profession” and similarly challenged the current modeling of Chinese EFL pedagogic practice on imitable native-speaker standardization. Canagarajah (2012) self-examined “the ways in which he negotiated the differing teaching practices and professional cultures of the periphery and the center in an effort to develop a strategic professional identity”. Following on from Caravaganah (2012) EFL pedagogic application in a specifically Chinese EFL context was Gao’s (2014) auto-ethnographic study of how language ideology affected educational design principles in Chinese EFL curricular reform, concluding that functional over reflective ideological concerns dominated Chinese EFL curriculum design (p. 553). In this, Gao summarizes three main affective points of auto-ethnography in EFL education, centered on personal narrative inquiry: “(1) Narrative inquiry makes researchers or teachers understand experience, (2) it helps researchers grasp information that is often neglected or unconsciously known even by themselves, and (3) it also assists researchers to perceive the experiential changes of people and events” (Gao, 2014, p. 555).

In initial response to the methodological research design gap in Chinese EFL tertiary education - and consequent internal MOE directive to address it as an immediate priority, including through the incorporation of qualitative research methodologies - Zhang et.al (2020) asserted that “arguably, one of the most pressing current tasks is to conduct in-depth investigations into Online education... and support students’ successful re-adaptation... after the epidemic”. Referencing again the paradigm shift in pedagogic practice first iterated in EFL in the Liu, et.al (2015) analytical auto-ethnographic study, this arguably epistemic re-contextualization of contemporary Covid-19 inspired BL content selection and course design consequently incorporating Content-Based Instruction [CBI] research in China on the basis of what Zhu & Liu [2020] termed “conceptual and philosophical re-thinking”. This “paradigm shift” discourse indeed had informed MOE research directives consequent to Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s delivered speech before the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party on 18 October 2017, or Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, a detailed clarification and long term strategy for the realization of “the Chinese Dream”. With this, Liu, et.al’s (2015) stated “paradigm shift” now had in Zhu & Liu (2020) a specific epistemic correlation to the “rejuvenation” conceptual ethos underlying Xi Jinping’s vision of a “globalized” China and, in Poo (2021), a methodological goal for educational design research in EFL: to facilitate in corresponding CBI BL curriculum design the construct-valid paradigm shift “from didactic towards inspirational” pedagogic practices that would theoretically constitute a “globalized" Chinese EFL.

Interestingly enough, however, within auto-ethnographic research for educational design based pedagogic practice, the precedent exists in Duncan (2004) who sought to use auto-ethnography to improve her educational design practice:

"To answer my research question, How do I improve my practice of hypermedia design?, it became clear that what I needed to do was externalize my inner dialogue of decision to find and develop fully the central themes and outstanding questions that were emerging."

It was during the lockdown circumstances of China's zero-Covid policy, however, that I began to explore contemporary "design theory" in relation to IC course and curriculum design. However, as no Chinese EFL literature had to that date specifically examined a particular IC context, I sought to draw on the newly emerging greater ASEAN / Global South literature on “design thinking” and resultant curriculum design modeling of Crites and Rye (2020) and the earlier work of Barrot (2015) specific to “sociocognitive-transformative instructional materials design model(ing) for second language (L2) pedagogy in the Asia Pacific” as a base for Content-Based Instruction [CBI] modification in the Vygotskian context informing CBI research in Chinese EFL in Wang (2018), Fu (2019), Wang (2021), and Sun & Zhuang (2021). Indeed, I incorporated that into my online teaching during China's Ministry of Education [MOE] "emergency response" switch to online and blended learning during the zero-Covid period (as much as practical given my IT and language limitations - my Chinese ability is basic (regrettably). So too, following the end of the zero-Covid measures, I re-integrated it into my recently completed IC class, utilizing extracts from Being in Time.

Drawing on these sources, I designed a classroom mediated IC exam task (one of five) based on a socio-cultural examination of a Western social media genre - the YouTube mashup video: the form's signature montagist re-deployment of found footage to new music as a form of personalized cultural "ownership" having influenced my own conception and montagist construction of Being in Time). For this, I 1) showed the Alzheimer's Disease influenced John Lydon / PiL music video Hawaii (video 1 in blog 1) as an example of old found footage to new music (with text-based narration / lyrics), 2) showed the Chinese video on filial piety (video 5 in blog 2) as an example of a Chinese-oriented social media circulated video on the theme of ageing in relation to a traditional Chinese socio-cultural value, and 3) showed the "Filial Piety" extract from Being in Time as an example of a mashup video exploring ageing and similar values. The video assignment (as group work, to be accompanied by an exegesis and personal contributor statement), was then a Chinese mashup video exploring the importance of traditional filial piety in China's treatment of the aged suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. Of the submitted videos, two in particular made me tearful: although all stand as innovative examples of a uniquely IC themed Chinese mashup video (especially so since the mashup is not as yet a common video practice outside of Douyin / TikTok). Permission and institutional clearance pending, I may post these in a later blog now that final grading is completed and the course finalized.

Although in the IC I did not give further examples of my own mashup work - exploring the role of cultural artifacting in identity construction - I will close this blog with a sample of such work, albeit one which is comparatively less overtly politicized: unlike my first experiment in such found footage montaging - as autoethnographic reflection - made during zero-Covid lockdown in 2020-1 and automatically age-restricted and thus audience limited on YouTube. In comparison to the age-restricted video, this is more of an auto-ethnographic music video homage, as it integrates footage I shot of Australia into found footage taken from several US movies - credited - to a personal favorite song and poem extract.

VIDEO 8: "Blue Turk" - an auto-ethnographic video homage / tribute intended as an experimental montage of found footage (from Hollywood movies) incorporating footage personally shot while driving at night so as to integrate my own experience in direct relation to rec

3. Reflection: Incipient Intersectionality Blues

As independent scholarship through the fringes of Academia grinds on, my life in China has been low-key pending sporadic peer review flirtations: I was asked to submit a paper to Sage following my reviewer invitation some months ago, so am finishing one, taking the time my innate sloth requires and settling into the irresolute reflections of mature age solitude. My initial optimism for this fight is slowly dwindling: however, I have begun to experiment with diary films to augment the discourse construction of the afore-mentioned "Being in Time" project reflected on in these first blogs. In that I am buoyed by recent attention in autoethnography given the diary film format (Smolny.org), since its methodologizing as a research tool by Bancroft (2016).

VIDEO 9: Experimental diary-film inspired by a visit to a Beijing venue called "Nashville" and hearing a Chinese cover band cover US song classics, one of which triggered a memory of my first stroll down Urumqi, in XUAR, where I streetside heard the iconic American song playing outside of an eatery. NOTE: the video features only actual sound from location but was nevertheless subject to a (c) strike - either way, this is Eagles, overheard playing in XUAR.

Uncertainty prevails this semester break: an email inquiry to The Autoethnographer online journal to confirm their acceptance of my multimedia submission and announced screening of my film "Being in Time" (reported in blog 2) has yielded no result as yet and I am concerned they will change their mind and not publish the video, given its geo-political take. That would put me back at the proverbial square one, though related write-up of a potential SAGE pre-print (following their invitation to submit) is forthcoming - autoethnographic methodologies in Chinese EFL-IC. To which, the home website has been updated to reflect the longitudinal transmedia digital publishing nature of the project as I envision it as praxis. Taking shape. Coincidentally, however, as I prepare for brief travel back to my home country of Australia, I see the research field in which I operate be increasingly politicized: the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI]'s latest report - Singing from the CCP Songbook - effectively seeking to obscure the legitimate methodological precepts behind the recent "My China Story" video competition, in which several foreigners produced content related to XUAR.

I had considered entering the competition but was hampered by professional budget and related equipment concerns. To me, it is the competition's celebration of the "cultural story" (Chinese specific) that has the most profound implications, discursively, not least for their extrapolation into the public sphere of EFL-IC pedagogic principles. For context: Fu Ying, former Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs and Chairperson of the Center for International Security and Strategy of Tsinghua University, stated in China Daily (Fu, 2020) that:

To tell China’s story well, we need to not only speak about the Chinese system, but also relate the joys and sorrows of ordinary people. In doing so, we should use innovative methods of communication and narrative concepts, so that we can ensure that what we want to tell can be heard by foreign audiences and enhance the affinity of our communication. We can start from the everyday lives of Chinese people, so foreigners can better understand the true myriad of “Chinese life”, and in this way gain a better appreciation of the Chinese path, Chinese theory, Chinese system and Chinese culture. (Fu, 2020)

At issue is inter-cultural communication, facilitating greater Western understanding of, and dialogue with, China through narrativized cultural storytelling by foreigners which presents a Chinese informed perspective such as would qualify their inter-cultural (and culture shock) experience. Evidently, anti-China advocates are threatened by such authentic lived experience and its means of inter-cultural communication: as it somehow, for ASPI and suchlike, "telling China's story well" is inherently to be feared. Significantly, the condemnatory ASPI report was funded through the auspices of the US State Department, specifically the Global Engagement Center [GEC], which has long been concerned with ensuring the proliferation of US propaganda. ASPI, however, deleted their initial mention of this funding bias from the current PDF version. Through ASPI and their US State Department sponsors, the attempt to smear all foreigners in China who may use media or social media to speak out in favor of China - or even merely relate their personal lived experience of being a foreigner in China (to tell their own inter-cultural story) - is intended to taint all foreigner discourse emanating domestically, to negate the effectiveness of any greater role such has in inter-cultural communication. In smearing such as formulaic propaganda, however, ASPI et.al deliberately ignore the underlying research-driven basis in auto-ethnography as a legitimate qualitative methodology for such inquiry: (geo-politically informed) personal narrativization, with "social justice" re-configured with "Chinese characteristics".

The imposition of an anti-Chinese epistemic bias to thus shape the ideological divide over “discourse power”, in relation to the narrativization of foreigner stories of China being so demonized by ASPI, thus serves to antagonistically discredit the authenticity of these foreign voices in auto-ethnographic narrativization by associating them not just with state-owned or state-decreed “propaganda” but even with psychological warfare. This blatant politicization ignores the conceptual foundation of such inter-cultural storytelling in auto-ethnographic research, participant-observation methodologies and related media production. For China’s foreigner community, auto-ethnographic multimedia storytelling from an IC participant-observational prism offering a conceptually justified, construct valid form of narrative inquiry and transmedia disseminated positionality.

ASPI (2023) assert that:

“foreign influencers are involved in a wave of experimentation and innovation in domestic and external propaganda production that’s taking place at different levels around the PRC as officials heed Xi Jinping’s call to actively participate in ‘international communication’” (p. 1).

The bias in this assertion is in 1) the qualification of “influencer” for what more accurately is simply “foreigners”; and 2) the manipulative substitution of the word “propaganda” for what more accurately should be simply “media” or “multimedia”. Furthermore, the experimental innovation they assert as spreading through PRC at “different levels” deliberately omits the specific Academic context in which such foreigner generated media is theorized and delineated: ASPI state such is a means of China asserting "discourse power". But what is that underlying Academic discourse? To objectively strip the fundamental bias in ASPI’s assertion:

foreigners in China are involved in a wave of experimental innovation in domestic and external media production anchored in recent Academic discourses within Chinese Inter-cultural Communication [IC] pedagogy.

Removed of ASPI’s bias, this is a simple statement of fact, however in need of further qualification it may be. As qualification thus: emerging from Shanghai International Studies University [SISU] is the delineation by Chi, Zhang and Kulich (2022) of a “cultural story” exercise as a means of facilitating inter-cultural communicative competence [ICC] within Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language [EFL] based IC pedagogic practice. As outlined in this author’s current work-in-progress independent research paper:

Chi, Zhang and Kulich (2022) described previous “cultural stories” classroom activities developed by intercultural instructors:... a “digital project designed for pre-service teachers, who are encouraged to make self-portraits by creatively mixing multi-modal cultural artifacts (believing) that these artistic visual representations of their ‘cultural, literacy, and teacher Self’ are funds of knowledge for meaning making”. Expanding this emphasis on teachers’ cultural identity were efforts at generating student awareness of their cultural legacy as an introduction to the course, thus Holliday and Brennan (2020) “introduced the ‘Home Culture Story’ as one of the key assignments in a teacher-training program (as) a digital presentation of the origins of one’s core cultural values related to their identity... designed to train prospective teachers to make use of their students’ cultural stories by exploring their own cultural stories first”. Consequently, Chi, Zhang and Kulich (2022) stated that “(t)hese designs share an emphasis on self-reflexivity and more perceptive contextual-awareness (and that) a similar activity that has been designed for, effectively used, regularly evaluated, and critically adjusted in a different socio-cultural context would, therefore, be a worthy addition to the list if details of and outcomes from its learning process and pedagogical adaptations are explained”.

The stated objective to facilitate student exploration (and rendering, or “telling”) of their own cultural story by first modelling such on foreign IC teacher experience is the pedagogic platform upon which foreign vlogging in China - and potential future contest entry content creation - could lead to the further innovation and channel expansion which ASPI securitize and fearmonger. From a “cultural story” rationale for Chinese EFL-IC best pedagogic practice to foreigners in China telling “My China Story” based on the narrativization of lived experience as a means of foregrounding inter-cultural communication is merely the logical (if experimental) extension of autoethnographic methodologies from their Academic origins into the public sphere. So too, from a methodological template of autoethnography “with Chinese characteristics”, content creation underlaid by multi-polar geo-political reconsiderations of autoethnography’s core belief in “social justice” strips it from the constraints of US/Western epistemic bias. Little wonder ASPI are concerned.

Presciently regarding just such a movement, on 2023/12/02, foreign vlogger Jerry Grey interviewed Shanghai Daily’s Andy Boreham (featured prominently in the ASPI report) about foreigner narratives within the Chinese media system, to which Boreham responded “(Western) people have such a bad understanding of China... if we can reach a tipping point and get them to understand the real China...the governments and the media wouldn’t be able to continue the scaremongering... the more (Western) people who could see those stories of real people... would be really beneficial” (Grey, 2023). So too, Grey and Boreham suggest that due to the currently unfolding Israeli/Palestine conflict that anti-China XUAR issues are again being promoted by Western media, and that the challenge to Chinese media is that of inter-cultural communication. In fact, Grey specifically suggested the promotion of Hofstede’s dimensions of culture as a means to educate foreigners about Chinese discourse construction: Hofstede is the basis for IC course design in Chinese EFL.

With my own EFL-IC pedagogic practice now resolved pending a belated write-up of methodological reasoning, a contact by my US publisher - McFarland & Co. Inc. - has led to an intriguing possible book deal again. !2 or so years ago, just before coming to China and arriving in XUAR to live and work over a year in 2011-12, I was a SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive, following a development grant through ArtsSA: I researched representations of disability in Australian film. The resultant monograph - a chronological case by case account from the silent era to then present-day 2010 - was never published through uploaded onto Academic social media. It was highly critical of government policy and related media treatments. By chance, McFarland expressed interest in me reducing and updating the monograph to reflect the current state of disability politics in Australia and its media presence. To update the monograph would require examining the rise in disability politics in Australia with the visibility of Greens Senator Jordon Steele-John, whose input into Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme [NDIS] have been enormously influential. To which, tentative contact emails about related research were sent out in anticipation of resuming research for an updated volume though my schedule this trip is limited. By chance, thus, I must now prepare for a short return to my home country of Australia after being in China since before Covid-19 in 2019, and in the process potentially re-visit the concerns I had as a SAR Research Fellow prior to coming to China and XUAR. Inevitably, would such engagement yield a new set of intersectionalities in my unfolding cultural story?

Appendix A: Aborted Blog Writings / False Starts

1. Night of a Thousand Reflections

   
   

Checked that QQ was working for first online class tomorrow. New students. Writing class. Looking forward to the new semester in Chinese EFL: the developments in Content-Based Instruction [CBI] at tertiary level since the onset of Covid-19 are intriguing to say the least. Last semester's incorporation of student perspectives on the XInjiang cotton industry crisis (spearheaded by Western fabricated rumors of "forced labor") and wolf warrior diplomacy tasks were revealing, especially in regard to the latter in Inter-Cultural Communication course I was asked to design and deliver without much materials support - textbook distribution issues: from motivation to cognition to meta-cognition. All the current Western social media buzz about the new CPC regulation of CBI in the corporate, private EFL EdTech sector amuses me though: US outlets complaining of shareholder losses while some foreign teachers bemoan the inevitable loss of jobs following the reported bankruptcy of such as Wall Street English. As to US shareholder losses I couldn't care less - to Hell with American Imperialists - but I can understand the lament by those foreign teachers now facing the loss of their jobs. However, on that: a YouTuber (serpentza), who claims to have been a teacher in China - but is better known for once motorcycling around the country and now badmouthing it because, over the course of Xi Jinping's reforms, he lost the white privilege he once enjoyed - commented that "the party is over". Yes, for "teachers" like him who came to "party" and have a good time traveling and whoring while contributing nothing of value or merit to Chinese society, it is over: good riddance.

Pedagogically, however, for professional teachers, the most exciting time has just begun. This blog though is not the forum to comprehensively disseminate the changes in China's National EFL Curriculum Reform Agenda protocols since XI Jinping came to power (shortly after I first arrived in Xinjiang); but it is very revealing, especially the move towards what is termed the "globalization" of the EFL program. Long time coming, exacerbated by the onset of Covid-19 and the out of control EdTech boom now targeted by the new CPC regulations. There's another perspective not much discussed in relation to this though: the re-conceptualization and re-development / re-designation of content once provided by the numerous training centers and corporate giants affected by this, two of which I worked for when I was in Shanghai. I will not mention them at this point, suffice to say that one of them had a contractual stipulation that teachers were not allowed to reveal corporate agendas, substandard (or illegal) work practices or even any health and safety violations that may damage the corporation's public image / face. Face value was their main priority as it was their selling point; "face" being a traditional value in Chinese culture. After working there a few months, I understood why that clause was in the contract.

The English service provider in question was a major international corporation, with what proved to be a bad, hidden social media reputation for treating its teachers like dispensable "slaves": indeed, the contract was practically inviolable after signing - lock in, with no option of redress bar a health and safety loophole. Anyway, the corporation normally provided EFL tutoring to children and teens (including online tutoring they tried to push on genuinely concerned Chinese parents as a "quality education" supplement to normal curricular subject studies) but were branching into additional non-nationally accountable content-provision and teaching for select, trial, tertiary institutions in Shanghai. The content they delivered, however, was pre-packaged and mostly unsuitable for tertiary-level students - senior high school at best - with no evident scaffolding. So too, teachers had to follow an equally pre-packaged Communicative Language Teaching [CLT] template, but without any context-specific modification related to Chinese EFL (or, what I might term CLT with Chinese characteristics). This combination of set but non-scaffolded content - and strictly timed, formulaic delivery minimizing teacher input - made the teachers dispensable functionaries, easily replaceable on short notice - what professional teachers call "white monkeys". Disposable.

On one occasion for instance, my performance monitored by the Director of Studies (DOS) - a Canadian male in his late 30s who admitted later he could not find effective employment in his home country - the lesson content I had to deliver included a reference to the Western (specifically British) class system, but without any context-specific explanation of "class". The students had a delineated time set aside in the lesson plan template to discuss the reading, the CLT reasoned timing specifying minimum teacher input and maximizing time for student L2 discussion. Fine. However, on asking the students what was meant by "class", they thought it was a collective of students in a delivered lesson. Consequently, I took time to explain, briefly, what is meant by "class" in reference to the Western British class system - essential context-specific CBI instruction such that they could actually understand the passage they were required to read for discussion - as it was evident they did not (and thus that any discussion would be fruitless as a knowledge-gaining exercise). By subtracting time from the template mandate for inter-active student L2 use in discussion, however, I was disciplined by the DoS, who said that my explanation was additional to the pre-packaged lesson and thus a violation of corporate policy and pedagogically unnecessary: my obligation was strictly to ensure all, especially the bottom students, could pass the exam (one of the endemic conditions of Chinese education traditionally). When I brought up the fact that unless I explained the CBI context the students would have no / incorrect understanding, and thus build false knowledge, I was told that the corporation prided itself on being the "McDonalds" of EFL education services in China. McDonalds? Junk food! And proud of it they were no less, the DoS' eyes beaming with false pride: company man to the last. In essence I was delivering McValue EFL - temporarily filling but of no nutritional / educational value.

Without getting into the details of how I managed to leave the corporation, I can fully understand the CPC's regulation of the corporate, private EFL sector, especially since the EdTech boom opened the market to foreign "teachers" outside of China whose qualifications and experience had not been verified by Chinese authorities but were potentially teaching augmented curricular CBI, again of which there was no effective "quality education" design control / monitoring or, let alone, national standardization . So, for "teachers" like the afore-mentioned YouTuber in the previous blog post (who titles his video on the CPC policy initiative as "the party is over") there is no longer an option to exploit the Chinese people by superficially delivering CBI of no educational value as a cover for selfish travel, adventure or suchlike. The decision to regulate the corporate, private EFL sector will undoubtedly prevent many "teachers" like this YouTuber from entering China, but this should be welcomed. Although there are travel restrictions now on so entering China, due primarily to Covid-19 and the uncontrolled spread of the Delta variant in the Western 5-Eyes countries (ironically enough), qualified, experienced foreign EFL teachers can still participate in what is the most pedagogically challenging (but simultaneously exciting) EFL sector in the world, especially now with Xi Jinping's emphasis on "globalizing" China's EFL program: global citizens we remaining EFL teachers in China truly have now become.

2. Solitary Man Blues

The struggle to remain optimistic is waning tonight as I turn to a blog post to distract myself, my musical selections assisting somewhat also in that. Semester start gives me some distraction, but following the first class, my mind slowly drifts back to negativism. I think this blog - which at present nobody is reading - may sometimes veer into a form of therapeutic auto-ethnographic (and creative) writing in more targeted elaboration of its stated narrativization. That is: to explore the evocative aspects of reflective journal writing. But of evoking mood, my emotional states turn on a dime, as the saying goes. Not manic so much though as psycho-activated. Innately so, evidently a pre-existing condition that emerged rather disturbingly in adolescence accompanying a change in my family living circumstance from the small outback opal mining town of Coober Pedy to what was for me a traumatizing high school experience in a (for me) large city. The move was a considerable change for my father in his mid-life also, something I failed to realize at the time though have become acutely aware of it in retrospect.

But I am no longer in childhood, nor even thirty-something: I am now in soft middle age in what Western media describe as an "authoritarian" country. However, my feelings on Australia having soured during the Covid-19 crisis to date, I now hold the value re-orientation that as my Dad is Czech, so am I, though I was born in Australia and carry that nation's documentation. That matters to me now more that any nationalism amidst a creeping amalgamation of resignation and discontent over a life with nothing substantial (at least financially) to show for it. As I said in the previous blog post - a worthless man. Not wholly a wasted life though, I can't say that definitively of myself (at least not just yet) - I am an effective EFL pedagogic professional and that has yielded positive student learning outcomes, though that does not give me as much solace as it used to. There is a temptation though, towards a sense of futility. Futility:

that Babylonian demon

with which the afflicted

must constantly negotiate

terms of temporary settlement,

before the ground shifts beneath their precarious stance and the wretched monster calls for amendments to your contractual obligations, inevitably in its favor. Not inevitably in every instance, but without a solid platform upon which to exact leverage, the demon will never yield to the bungled and the botched. Let alone one like me. Maybe its just that I am running out of time.

"One more roadside human casualty

the traffic passes by without noticing;

scraped up and flushed away,

no trace of bloodline remaining."

I will live and die in anonymity, and should reconcile myself to that fact - maybe then I will be at least content as middle age ebbs: if not exactly happy, the pursuit of happiness having proven for the most part as elusive as any El Dorado. Some kind of internal peace of mind maybe I can still find, at least to... curb the melancholic tendencies.

I am struck by the knowledge that living with the illusions constantly reinforced through Western simulacra - an adoration of (especially American) movies and unwilling sponge to the values they constructed and the reality they projected - has left me in a psychological limbo now that I have cut my way through their web of facades and reached what now seems like the final reckoning. As I perhaps foresaw in design sketches, when last in Shanghai, I caught the last Metro to Jing An Temple. I am hiding in plain sight behind paranoid and critical eyes. A solitary man by personally enforced socialization over time if not by psychological inclination (at least until now in middle age), every night I lie down alone. I have forgotten the soft, warm human joy of simple touch by a woman. I am forgetting even that I am human, with human needs and wants, and desires. But I am not a rock, unfeeling by choice; I am a raggedy man who dreamt he could contribute to the broad field of human knowledge by qualitative research and reflective, autobiographical experience, especially of a life impoverished by circumstance.

Even while I was a SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive, I was homeless, unable to maintain an apartment in Adelaide in absentia while resident in Canberra for the fellowship's 7 week duration. Ironic: a homeless man resident in the center of the nation's cultural heritage, the capital territory, his meagre contribution added to the collection with due process, pomp and circumstance and then immediately abandoned as he returns to find at least temporary accommodation where once he had a secure apartment home. Even more ironic: though I was researching representations of disability in Australian film, the building in which I resided had no disability access, and the adjacent Arc cinema had only two corner wheelchair spaces. This ironically made any disabled film retrospective there (as discussed with my SAR program supervisors) unfeasible as the target audience could not possibly access the intended venue in their entirety if more than two were wheelchair users, which would have been likely.

Have I lived a good life (not that it is completely over just yet)? Does that even really matter? I feel now what greets me. Insignificance. I should resign to it, rejoice in it: be free in it. The species is doomed to extinction; perhaps the sooner the better.

"Surrender to it:

the weight of the world will be lifted;

Sisyphus will rest calmly atop the mountain,

refuse to descend:

 'fuck it"' he'll whisper to himself."  

I am the last of the Mohicans, without a noble savagery of birthright: unable to have children, my contribution to the human gene pool dies with me not too long hence. Mine is perhaps thus an inconsequential life, no matter what "texts" may be left behind finished, unfinished or eviscerated. And what I know of what I have lived, such memories that still flicker, all is impermanent and fleeting, transient rather than transcendent. Still, I shed no tears, though sometimes I long to sob once again. After love thrice lost, no tears well any longer. It's better to be like the song says - comfortably numb. Better to accept that now than to propel myself with false hope, comforting though it may be to still think of some "success" to accompany hard work and perseverance, whether it be Academic, financial or, should the opportunity yet present itself, carnal. I have become an abyss. I am, in time.

And then like that, the consciousness stream is interrupted as I lose my one remaining contact lens, and damage it while searching for it. Unusable. Short-sighted I can now barely see - only things up close, like filmmaker Stan Brakhage or the Donald Pleasance "forger" character with progressive myopia in The Great Escape, a movie that always makes me think of my father and the times we watched it together over the course of our lives. The quiet of the evening and after-the-rain autumnal crickets give me some tempered distance from my unfortunate mis-judgement in damaging the lens accidentally though. I am angry at myself, but accept the reality of being without visual aids for some time while I try to get a replacement set in China. My own fault: should have got a new pair before now. I tried, but my prescription could not be filled in Australia any longer, nor a new set sent to me in China without a test, so I made do with one lens after I was advised not to use the other. An old, blind man; writing obsessively on a blog that no-one reads, to thoughts of Neil Young. Will ever read? No matter. Hard not to see the comedy now - the reading glasses I used to augment the lens are now useless too (as they were just magnifying lenses and without corrective vision just make things blurrier). It's a fuzzy world of soft, hazy pastels, and I must focus close-up and intense now to envision clarity, albeit with wild Manson-esque eyes: the delirious minutiae of everyday perception manufacture all new simulacra: like being re-born in time, second by second, every second.

3. On Leaving Nothing When I Die

It is not mortality which troubles me,

nor leaving nothing when I die. No hardship for any heir

with no wealth, asset or property to inherit. It is that I cannot reconcile

to indifference as well as I should under circumstance. Maybe I had promise once

of life in measured achievement of potential. But a life of anxiety,

anguish, scorn, ridicule and failure; worthlessness reinforced

by imposed conditioning as Other by virtue of so-called psychological disorder;

surely inherited if I had reproduced: and so myself thus better off dead.

So they say. Who am I to disagree? And just as with me, dies my bloodline,

so too should it be my species. Exterminate them all!

4. Interlude: Having my Picture Taken

Interesting. In EFL speaking class yesterday evening, a student (gently encouraged by her adjacent classmate / friends) took a mobile phone snapshot of me while I was seated and resting during the 110 min lesson's 10 min break. I was initially unaware of having my picture taken but the student drew my attention and interacted with me briefly, enough to communicate that she wanted me to make the popular "V" sign for a knowing snapshot. I was happy to

do so, of course: I usually oblige such requests from students). This morning, the student sent me the snapshots via WeChat. Although my first reaction was to notice how much greyer my hair had become recently, I was most struck by the presentation: a glimpse into how students see and perceive me as a foreign teacher, of elder status, but casually seated (somewhere between a slouch and a slump) at equal eye level. That was most revealing and informative to me today so far, a learning experience; as was talking individually with another student who tackled the fear almost all students have of "breaking the ice" and began communicating with the foreign teacher outside of the classroom environment (but still on campus - where the students reside in 4-8 bunkbed dormitories and I reside alone in an apartment in a campus residence building). Less a teacher than merely a "foreigner": the student concerned never having previously talked with a foreigner or had a foreign teacher class.

It was not what I was expecting, though is very Chinese in its additions. What struck me though about the photo was twofold: 1) the evidently playful affection towards the old man in the picture, 2) the brief English keyword content featured to that point in the lesson as glimpsed on the classroom projector screen. The textbook based lesson (from a new round of Beijing authorized tertiary level textbooks: 1st year oral English) was on the topic "Getting along with others" and contained content on social skill acquisition, understanding and experience, with discussion and role-play tasks. With the students, we briefly discussed the English phrasal verb use, the ideas and values behind it and how this related to contemporary China's values, a process which yielded the phrase "social harmony". Social harmony is, of course, a cornerstone of Chinese society and culture and the concept and content not new: only its expression in the English L2 including phrasal verbs. So too, the students related the content texts to the concept and moral value of "social harmony" as a Chinese characteristic, finding solutions to the communication problems and situations presented to them in the tasks. Two points about this gave me pause to reflect,

1: Several years ago, circa 2017, Western media began to quote Chinese MOE representative statements to the effect that Western values should be removed from Chinese EFL textbooks. The Western media seized on this as reactionary evidence of Xi Jinping's ideological control and evidence of China's tightening restrictions on foreign content. Having used Chinese textbooks with English text content (written and AV) I am reminded of an English language audio recording used in a 2nd year EFL Listening class. Tedious and boring, although a model of standard English, the content on slavery in America was so old-fashioned that it was tantamount to excuse slavery (as having been of some benefit) and even went so far as to state one of the most common racial stereotypes - that black people have more rhythm and dance better than white people. Standard English or not, the abhorrent Western / US values inherent in the text were (and are) loathsome and if students are also expected to gain content-based knowledge from what they listen to, as opposed to dictation or gap-fill / cloze listening skill exercises, then the text is wholly unsuitable. In the new textbooks, this listening content has been removed - as well it should: removing Western values from textbooks is not the negative, reactionary moral authoritarianism the Western media depicts - for instance, in the new versions are authentic recordings from interviews on the Ellen show, a seminal piece of American culture, but more carefully scrutinized as to both practical task-setting and content appropriateness for scaffolded CBI learning. In short, Xi's measures have improved the textbooks and curriculum content.

2. The students' communicative English use when reporting their group talk to the class and teacher, interestingly also followed a rhetorical pattern in discourse structure - and marking / signposting - characteristically Chinese and reflective of what is termed "Xi Thought". While this is not unusual, I am moved to recall Western criticism of "indoctrination" and "brainwashing" in relation to educational programs under CPC control in China, especially in certain provinces. The commonality in the student's discursive structure would inevitably be interpreted by these same Western interests as indicating only conformity: such accusations fail to acknowledge the specific cultural circumstance in operation here - namely, China is a collectivist society. Judging a collectivist culture from the perspective of an individualist (neo-Liberal) culture, as Western media repeatedly does, shows the Western lack of understanding of cultural diversity (ironically enough) and their dismissive bias evidences their subsequent inherent sense of moral superiority (tied in as it is to US exceptionalism and colonialist Imperialism). However, listening to the student discussions, as a peer learning use of groups, and also teaching Academic writing and Inter-Cultural Communication, what interests me on reflection on this is the inclusion of CLT methodologies to facilitate critical thinking within China's National EFL Curriculum Reforms under XI Jinping's guidance of the Ministry of Education [MOE]. Over the decade I have been teaching EFL in China to date (since first arriving in Xinjiang before Xi Jinping became president), this fusion of a collectivist, shared knowledge (in English) with Western, Socratic CT methodology more associated with individualism is transforming EFL education in China. Again, Xi's stewardship of education in China - as it pertains to EFL - has yielded great methodological innovation.

But I look old in that picture. Man, I didn't see that coming. "Don't get old" my father used to tell me - I tried my best to heed these words but in the end... I fought the law and the law won. When I started teaching in China, I had greying sides (had since early 30s actually) but still looked more like about student "uncle" age: I'm heading towards elderly uncle and grandfather association now. I'm touched by the affection in the seeing circumstances though. Other pictures are quite different:

As a university teacher in China, my salary is lower than kindergarten or private training centers but there are invisible rewards to teaching that have perhaps more solace than a higher salary. I say a qualified perhaps though: time is getting shorter, and time - as the Capitalists are fond of saying - is money(?). I may have more of a media presence and even vlog soon, including onscreen interaction, so the student photo-op (so to speak) also makes me think more now of how I may present myself in such a circumstance, partly with a view to potentially leaving teaching and developing media content as a registered media company here in China (while not completely leaving the education sector however). Too old? Maybe. Next few weeks may reveal more about that prospect. To which, I will conclude with a line of dialogue from a personal favorite (if decidedly pulpy) movie, The Warriors (1979): "stay tuned boppers, stay tuned".

5. Reflection: Chinese University Withdrawal from International Rankings Systems
   

“We cannot blindly follow others or simply copy foreign standards and models when we build world-class universities of our own. Instead, we must proceed from our country’s realities and blaze a new path to developing world-class universities based on Chinese conditions and with Chinese characteristics...” (Xi Jinping, 2022/04/25)

As a foreign EFL teacher in China for a decade - living and working in tertiary education in the mainland (Shandong) throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to date - a recent article in the South China Morning Post (Liang, 2022) on the unfolding re-conceptualization of Chinese universities’ relationship to the international rankings system is also a matter of personal and professional interest in terms of its potential relevance specifically to Chinese EFL education (and my experience within it). Recently circulated on Twitter, it has drawn response from insiders critical of the international rankings system in relation to China (as underpins Xi's statement) and understandably so. Indeed, the recent announcement of Renmin University of China [RUC], Nanjing University and Lanzhou University withdrawing from the international rankings system reverberated through the Western apparatus, leading to them postulating potential ramifications for the for-profit system (Sharma, 2022).

In this blog post, I briefly reflect on it also: not to suggest I am an authority on the matter, but to add a commentary that is related (however peripherally) to the matter due to my current employment within the Chinese tertiary education sector, having been previously socialized into the greater ideology of the Western Academic establishment system now under scrutiny. Not that I support the existing system; far from it as a matter of fact - I can not only relate to Xi's statement and this reported initiative but also hope that any future EFL career I may yet still have in China as a "foreign teacher" may contribute to the facilitation of Xi's reforms in some small way.

That said, since I began my career in Chinese EFL - my formative experiences were in Xinjiang [XUAR] in 2011-12 teaching EFL to Han, Uygur and Kazakh students - it became increasingly evident to me that my theoretical training in Western Academic internationally standardized Communicative Language Teaching [CLT] models - while certainly offering pedagogic principles I maintain to this day (and which China has selectively incorporated into its National EFL Curriculum Reform Agenda - was problematic in practical pedagogic implementation in a Chinese context (as I discovered in XUAR). So too, such problematics were arguably created by Western epistemic, cultural (and even cognitive) biases, as indeed has been much (if not all) ethnographic research into XUAR, unduly favoring Uygur separatist perspectives in interviewee selection criteria (as in, most notably, Byler (2018)). Adhering to Western educational standards of pedagogic practice was, potentially, thus unsuited to the Chinese EFL context due to many of these conceptual biases, no matter how conventionally (within consequently formulaic neo-Liberalism) reasoned their supposed generalizability in accompanying peer review discourse dominating the citation indexing apparatus sustaining research within the conventionally better ranked universities.

That said, methodologically key standardized principles and practices were indeed incorporated (with context-based modification) into Chinese EFL pedagogic practice. However, as an anecdote: after several years teaching tertiary EFL within a Chinese government (public) university, I sought a career break in the then-booming private, corporate sector, working for [redacted] in their Academic Partnerships program at a university in Shanghai's Songjiang area. [Redacted] were simply applying a lowest common denominator methodological CLT template without any consideration of its contextual content-based suitability or subsequent necessitated modification. Hence, when I questioned my Director of Studies about the suitability of this format in a tertiary EFL class, he stated that company policy was to be the "McDonalds of EFL in China": i.e. the illusion of fulfillment at the expense of any actual nutritional / educational value - "McEdTech meal" delivery in which the teacher was a monkey merely there to coordinate formulaic, un-scaffolded content delivery in strict adherence to template-defined time management scheduling. My complaint was specific: the methodology determined the exact duration students were to speak (practice English) on the lesson content, with no time to contextualize the content - in this case the content was about the "class" system influencing social interaction, referring to the British class system (and Marxist discourse); however, many of the students interpreted this as "classroom"-based education and were discussing irrelevant and misunderstood content. When I intervened to provide the proper direction to the class discussion, I was afterwards summoned by the Director of Studies and disciplined for deviating from the template and reducing the allocated student speaking time: the corporate CLT template formula needed adhering to regardless of any meaningful discussion during the time allocated; I was there simply to coordinate McValue meal digestion time, nothing more. Hence, China's regulation of the private, corporate sector in late 2021 (by which time I had left the corporate sector under selective conditions of non-disclosure, and returned to the government-run tertiary sector) was, to me, also a valid, necessary step towards progressive improvement of China's education system.

Regarding Western biases then: the formative experience of living and working in XUAR over two semesters (with a mid-semester return to my native Australia) arguably politicized my subsequent career trajectory. It clearly revealed an evidently malevolent ideological compromise in Western media reportage on the province (at that time following the 2009/07/05 Urumqi riots) resulting in a strategically mis-representative rhetorical lexis which deliberately shaped discourse construction to suit a pro-US Westernized agenda: hegemonic Imperialism, such as now influencing "forced labor in Xinjiang" discourse. Thus, from early career, for me at least, it was increasingly evident that to develop a "successful" foreign EFL teaching career specifically (and only) within China ideally required in Chinese EFL pedagogic practice a context-based modification of traditional CLT such as that first proposed by Bax (2003) but subsequently (and regrettably) neglected in favor of an increasingly standardized traditional CLT peer-review citation orthodoxy that eventually birthed a "one-size-fits-all" methodological educational design template such as recounted in my anecdote above. This concept thus, of a potential alternative CLT "with Chinese characteristics" and its CBI potential, propelled my career path subsequent to my formative experience in XUAR (where I had commenced an MTESOL by distance from an Australian university steeped - sometimes mechanically - in CLT convention) and currently informs my incipient (long-delayed) attempt at a Dissertation in Education research proposal at the same university (again by distance), concentrating on foreign teacher experience in Chinese EFL during Covid-19, from the initial "emergency response" Ministry of Education [MOE] directive on 2020/02/05 through the now-finalizing 2022/04-05 lock-downs in Shandong (where I work and mostly reside) and Shanghai (where I maintain an apartment residence).

To the point, however, Liang (2022) refers to Xi Jinping's directive for Chinese universities to “blaze a new path” instead of “blindly following others or simply copying foreign standards and models”. For me, it's a welcome perspective, but perhaps for personal context-specific additional reasons: for instance, the Capitalistic domination (and capitalization) of peer review journal discourse by the Academic establishment (Elsevier end user data tracking anyone?) and the imposition of prohibitive (c) access costs has long situated rich Western universities (arguably privileged with higher rankings accordingly) over those in developing countries and the so-termed "Global South", including China, and forced them to conform to according dictates. Indeed, the cost of IT and the "digital divide" thus privileged Kachru's inner circle of native English-speaking (and related Westernized European) countries, while the university I worked for mid-2010s (in a 2nd tier city) could barely afford software upgrades, let alone student or faculty database access. To thus hold Chinese universities accountable to enforced Western Academic Establishment standardization and then place economic obstacles (based on what is tantamount to Academic capital) and consequent Imperialist / hegemonically justified pedagogic / administrative practice standards seemed inherently unjust: why should Chinese universities subordinate themselves to a system that, as the current climate of rabid Sinophobia (in imagery comparing the Chinese to pestilent infestations) indicates, inherently considers them "Other"? And furthermore: a political bias behind that Academic establishment that would continue to sabotage China's economic, cultural and educational progress, as it is doing by advancing the pro-US "forced labor in Xinjiang" as methodological "genocide" narrative and framing Xi Jinping's tertiary reforms as "authoritarian" rather than what they are, progressive policies "with Chinese characteristics": in EFL, being towards a "global English" inclusive of Global South research discourses and de-prioritizing domination by the Kachru inner circle establishment.

Take my home country of Australia for example. There, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI], a "think-tank" funded by the US State Department, US Department of Defense and its Military Industrial Complex [MIC] sponsors - Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Raytheon - is using the "forced labor in Xinjiang" narrative to petition for closure of all Confucius Institutes within Australian universities. Denying all Chinese perspectives on grounds of protecting / preserving "Academic freedom" from Chinese "propaganda" while advancing a politically predetermined narrative of "forced labor in Xinjiang" is both hyperbolic "China-threat" theory writ large and a monumental hypocrisy that ties into the current US Department of Homeland Security's "Disinformation" Division - colloquially being referred to on Twitter (and even by such right-wing commentators as Tucker Carlson) in Orwellian allusion as the "Ministry of Truth". Policing Academic discourse so that it reflects only official US narratives is clearly ASPI's agenda for Australia, and likely the ultimate target also of the Ministry of Truth. It can even now be seen on such a platform as Academia.com, an open-source Academic information sharing and social network recently inundated with sub-par pieces (including those of US military academy rhetoriticians) endorsing the perspective of a Uygur separatist, extremist and terrorist-apologetic minority while completely ignoring alternative discourses which both question this narrative and expose the historical / historiographic revisionist biases which underlie it. I pity Australia's universities if ASPI can police and sanction such "approved" discourse.

This evident bias is thus now confounding my own current Dissertation in Education: concerning the teaching of Inter-Cultural Communicative Competence [ICC] through selective AV multimedia based Content-Based Instruction [CBI] task-setting in Chinese EFL during the Covid-19 "emergency response" period to date. Much relevant (even radical) contemporary research I found on this, with few exceptions has been from Global South sources, from institutions not especially well ranked in the international ranking system and journals not held in high regard or much cited by the Western Academic Establishment that so delineates them. From a supervisory point-of-view, that made some of my argumentation problematic and needing revision to be better accommodated within the bulk of established "officially" validated Western peer reviewed CLT discourse (and related citation indexing apparatus), a discourse I saw simultaneously being revised and challenged by the emerging Global South literature (not only from China but from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Colombia for example) but precluded from acknowledgement. While I obliged, conceding to institutional format requirements (with protracted ongoing research modification), it struck me that a perspective skewed to a Western Academic sensibility and pedagogic / theoretical prioritization was perhaps not just a requirement for Academic standardization, but potentially an imposition of such, a compliant rite of passage for dutiful acceptance into the Western hegemonic educational elite ("Academia"), the same elite in Australia now ostensibly seeking to police and officiate acceptable discourse on China. It's an irony that I thus find increasingly paradoxical: I want to complete my proposal and Dissertation in Education (if possible in middle-age now seguing into elder statesmanship) but increasingly loathe the network into which successful completion within the Australian tertiary system would position me should ASPI's recommendations be followed through en masse.

My personal bind aside, the growing "disinformation" management in US media (at the moment deliberated primarily over the Russian military operation in Ukraine but bound to re-focus on China and, especially, XUAR) in conjunction with ASPI's singular intention to apply this to now police and officiate acceptable peer review discourses in line with official US narratives ("human rights") inherently devalues (even invalidates) the supposed freedoms of the same peer-review based Academic establishment underpinning and determining the international rankings system's metrics. The consequences for China of this decision are yet to be fully seen given its own historic accord of status in employment and immigration policies, but the context in which it is occurring is both fully justifiable and understandable as an initial transformative, progressive initiative. In a global climate where the West seeks to impose its ideological biases upon Academic pedagogic standardized practice (officially privileging research - and research methodologies - on such basis), and increasingly misrepresents and devalues anything Chinese as "Other" from a spectrum of epistemic superiority and a desire for financial decoupling, of what validity are existing or consequent international university rankings? In this, Xi Jinping's call to incorporate "Chinese characteristics" is not authoritarian (as it will undoubtedly be interpreted in Western media fallout) but necessary to facilitate greater multi-polarity and challenge the continuing domination of Western / US hegemonic biases monopolizing tertiary education standardization - and related ranking assessment protocols / metrics - across the globe to favor their ideological and political agenda at the expense of rival methodologies, principles and practices that are far more validly context-specific in justification (if not generalizability). Although I approach this from an internalized EFL perspective rather than that of international rankings metric criteria (though intersecting citations per faculty), it is a debate which also informs disciplinary pedagogic practices.

So too, if one considers the other metrics used in the international university rankings system, other than student / faculty ratio (itself a consideration facing China as a highly populous nation in comparison, and one increasingly isolated by US animosity), consideration of internationalization of the student population, for instance, no longer reflect the realities of China's position on Covid-19 and effectively could thus stigmatize and penalize China on that basis: an unjust situation that again privileges Western Covid-19 (non-)management and its Capitalist socio-politic. That the action by Chinese universities in withdrawing from the international university rankings system is politicized may be the case, but the realities of the post-Covid-19 world as the US seeks financial decoupling from China to further isolate it undermine the supposed objectivity of the metrics, skewing them in favor of countries under US hegemonic control. Rather than be subordinated to an arguably increasingly unfair and prejudicial system prone to political interference to favor US policy standardization, China is arguably asserting its independence from such and challenging the monopolization of a system which, given the growing division between the US and the Global South (and the prioritization of the former in determining standards), is sacrificing any claims to objectivity. The increasing demonization of China in response to its Covid-19 policies (and the policing / sanctioning of only narratively acceptable discourse on XUAR) arguably thus necessitate this call for reform given such a future as ASPI envision and the further stigmatization of China / Chinese education which would likely result because of it.

6. Old Man Blues: a Reflection on the Death of the Aussie "Fair Go"

53: an old man.

My recently deceased father always told me not to get old. I laughed it off at first, then told him I was doing my best. But I lost that battle. I would tell him now that he was right, but it is too late. All I loved is gone. And I am alone.

A diagnosis of an acute immune deficiency condition (thyroid-related) has led me to now contemplate chronic, potentially debilitating and disabling illness. It's disconcerting: my inter-personal relationship is dwindling into nothing and financially I cannot bear current pressures much longer: I am old, an idiot and poor she tells me, with barely disguised contempt (while living at my expense). An old fool: but I mistakenly perhaps cared for her. The anxiety and depression are overwhelming as I await blood test results and subsequent medical advice. The negativism is becoming increasingly defeatist with each heartbeat: literally, I am better off dead, I think.

At least then I'd be free of the anguish.

With such a diagnosis, smoking and drinking indulge a death wish.

Get it over with and save me the burden of mind.

But the survival instinct dies hard. In 2020, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) released a report on disability and ageing which stated that:

Rates of disability in Australia are increasing, due in large part to the ageing population, and survival into old age is now a reality for many people who have a lifelong disability. These patterns are creating challenges for the disability and aged care services systems.

So what is the Australian government's response to the convergence of disability and aged care? Decrease financial support for those affected at the older age of onset to prevent any need for increased disability and aged care budgetary increases.

A quick check of my home country of Australia's disability support and chronic illness payments reveal I am eligible for nothing, partly by being overseas - but I have nothing in Australia to return to - but also because of my age ironically enough: Ausralia's Disability Support Pension is eligible only if applied for under 15 years from aged pension: from 53 t 67 - if a disability or chronic injury occurs in incipient old age (which is the statistical likelihood) you are not eligible for either: no support.

Australia's government will not spend on disability acquired as age increases.

I am caught in a no man's land between the allowable age for disability pension and the age pension: the limbo that essentially leaves chronically ill and disabled people over 52 (unless diagnosed / labelled earlier) to poverty and a slow death, forced onto a job seeker payment but with compromised job-seeking ability and few prospects, no matter how professional one's resume / CV may be (I am an experienced tertiary EFL educator and former SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA]) - kept below the poverty line, dependent and powerless to combat it: no additional support.

How is this not ageist and disablist discriminatory prejudice - as Australian government policy.

So what will happen: assigned to a reduced number of disability employment providers under a quota KPI to maintain their funding;little to no support in even getting to the premises, let alone if homeless.

I am a worthless man. That is what I am.

A worthless man.

It wasn't always that way: a Disability Support Pension was a lifeline, with the opportunity to also work some hours (tax free) and receive it for six months if overseas (where living expenses can be much cheaper than Australia, especially now in the post-Covid-19 / post-Ukraine military operation. Now its a stigma: a slow death sentence to poverty, forever under threat of being further taken away, a signal of in-validity, not only in terms of medical impairment but also as a human being and effective Australian citizen - unable to work and thus what former Liberal government members described as a "useless eater" and a "passive welfare recipient".

For invisible disabilities, like mental illness, this reality is further problematized.

Governmental disability organizations proclaim accessible equality but this tokenism is a facade. Disability is a social construct defining an underclass. And that underclass is stripped of dignity, humanity and resources just as it is patronized by social justice advocates championing the Disability Movement but unable to achieve real-world improvements in living conditions. What fair go? On Centrelink? Whose impersonal bureaucracy exists to make it so difficult to obtain support that people give up rather than plow through the obstacles.

This is unsustainable. I am unsustainable: better off dead.

Too old to fight anymore. Too weary to enjoy life.

7. Game-Changer

Two weeks ago, I went for my annual physical checkup, here in Jinan, China. A shock: a diagnosis of Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an auto-immune system based disease which usually affects far more women than men (7/10:1) but is common at my age (53). Also noted rapidly fluctuating (high) blood pressure, something that can also be apparently caused by this condition though may have been stress-influenced. Still awaiting the blood test results as I have recommenced tertiary EFL pedagogic practice. Doctor's advice meanwhile is to avoid anxiety, exercise more and strengthen my immune system. Despite the advice to avoid anxiety, the prospect of deteriorating chronic illness is weighing on me. Still this diagnosis potentially explains a lot of the harrowing symptomatology experienced over the last 9-12 months (if not longer), which I attributed solely to stress related to the death of my father late 2021 and which cost me an attempt at a further Academic qualification.

8. Mid-Life Crisis: Reflection of a Worthless Man on the Sinister Dr. O

   
   

This is the story of someone I once knew,

an American male about 32:

I'll simply call him Dr. O. MD not PhD:

or so he claimed to be

when first inviting me

to hang around and see

what US enterprise would bring

if China opened up to investors like he:

the future according to Capitalist decree.

Friends at first - maybe something more unconsciously -

he was intelligent company: until his business brain

figured out how he could best use me

to facilitate his usury: the Devil's Advocate he thus first made out to be

determined to show me what benefits the deadly deal would yield:

money, sex and drugs he thought would be enough of a reveal

to one in mid-life's ebb, though I could only look but never touch:

participant/observer always at a remove. I wanted more from this seduction

but the distance suited me better for it's inherent reflective study,

torment though this, my Doctrine of the Mean, has proven to be.

The girls he knew he quantitatively valued by the number of fucks,

seducing them with an admitted charm, aided no doubt by the money he flashed,

but never shared, figuring by smarmy entitlement that others pay for his company.

He introduced me to these girls, one of whom said she felt like she'd known him forever:

he later confided in me she was good for about 40 fucks. Much later she contacted me,

wondering why he didn't reply to her WeChat anymore and asking my intervention:

she lent him 10,000RMB and he never re-paid.

Dr. O's business was usury - investment in exchange for partial equity -

accumulating royalties siphoned off other people's fossil fuel deals. At first

due diligence was the entry-level carrot dangled before me by this parasite

knowing full well though that it would always be just out of reach

for every time I inched closer to it, he would dangle it a little further away;

sustaining my hope and dwindling my idealism with glimpses into his lifestyle

as if I could attain in middle age, and live like I was 32 again -

this time indulging the heady hedonism I had failed in my real life to do

yet to which aspired out of what I thought for the longest time was fearful trepidation,

hesitance at taking the road of excess while not seeing any Palace of Wisdom beyond.

Though now at 52 - some lingering reflection at instead choosing the road less traveled,

wondering what could have been if I'd never seen pornography -

notwithstanding the remnants of sexual physiology,

some previously indulged, some remaining as fantasy;

no longer either regretted nor prioritized as urgency,

in time unchecked as morbid pathology. What I saw, I saw:

what I did, I did. Some things I can't un-see, so be it;

but nothing I would undo. When Covid-19 went beyond Wuhan though,

Dr. O chose his US homeland while I remained in the Chinese mainland:

best decision I ever made, second being my vasectomy:

I am the last of the Mohicans; my seed died before me

and with me dies my bloodline. No regrets. No difference, no ill will to Dr. O,

his Napoleonic complex and all; but the Devil I summoned through him

is my confidante now as mid-life ebbs:

hello Darkness, I've come to talk with you again.

9. Melancholia in Media Res

I have re-commenced EFL teaching for the 2021/22 year for some 8 weeks now, although the first week's classes were online (via QQ), an added protection measure against the then recent outbreak of the highly contagious Covid-19 Delta variant. Due to this Delta outbreak, I and indeed all teachers at the govt. university where I work in Shandong provincial capital Jinan, foreign and Chinese, were prohibited from travel outside the city limits over the preceding semester break / summer holiday. For a short time, I also had to report my temperature daily (taken three times over the course of one day - morning, afternoon and evening) via a university App. I regretted (and, I admit, resented) not being able to go to Shanghai over the holiday as other foreign teachers in Jinan, working for other educational institutions, government-run and private, had no such restrictions. My closest friends are in Shanghai, and if I again face travel restrictions in the forthcoming holiday, I will investigate in more detail a job transfer to a position in Shanghai and leave Jinan to avoid this predicament. As I have lived and worked in Shanghai before, this would not be a difficult move beyond the inconvenience of dealing with my meager personal possessions.

Indeed, I was on semester break holiday in Shanghai when Covid-19 first began to change the world in January 2020. I made the decision not to try to return to Australia, declined a friend's offer to get me on one of the last planes to the USA, and thus remained in mainland China (the best decision as it turned out). However, although my working circumstances were affected, being outside the country, I was denied Australian government Covid-19 relief payments, never mind being unable to return. Catching one of the last G-trains to Jinan before Shanghai Hongqiao train station was closed, I returned to my campus apartment to monitor, in solitude, the subsequent lockdown and health/safety responses enacted by the CPC in the mainland and the mounting chaos globally. I broke the solitude over the next six months by talking on the phone with my octogenarian father in my former home town of Adelaide, South Australia, where he resides still independently in a two-bedroom retirement home unit. In our discussions, I learned from him that he was in somewhat pressing need of "elective" prostate surgery but unable to get it, due to the Australian government's decision to cancel all "elective" surgeries for the elderly and hold the beds in reserve for what they clearly expected to be a wave of (younger) Covid-19 patients. Although my father received home nursing catheter care once a fortnight, it was clear to both of us that his condition would progressively worsen without the surgery: being inclined to reactionary hyperbole, to me this meant his protracted deterioration / dying.

A year later, and with his condition worsening (albeit thankfully slowly), he is still unable to get the needed surgery. As Australia now reckons with new lock-downs following its own Delta variant outbreak, it is clear to both of us that he will never have the surgical procedure he needs. Our phone conversations are amiable and pleasant, but tainted by the knowledge that his time is limited. Like me, he is a solitary man though and makes the most of his time toying on his PC (although without effective Internet skills or Skype for us to communicate face to face even if separated by great distance). As I am currently unable to return to Australia - and prohibited from coming back to China should I enter Australia (as such restrictions had been placed on all Australian citizens mid-2020) - I realize (as does he) that I may never see him face to face in person alive again. While that is a fact many contend with in life, my bitterness (and anger) is increased by knowing that the hospital beds freed up by the Australian Coalition government's cancellation of "elective" surgery went unused and unoccupied for a year.

To me: my elderly father was condemned to slow death so that unused hospital beds could be held for a year for projected younger Covid-19 patients who did not materialize (until Delta) a year later). How different this Australian government cost-cutting at the expense of human life to the Chinese response to Covid-19 - building new dedicated emergency hospital facilities in Wuhan within days. So too, the Australian government's denial of Centrelink (government welfare support) services and payments to me reveals my lack of human worth to Australia: there is no benefit to Australian citizenship beyond the passport ID I travel under to establish my identity. It wasn't always this way - progressive Liberal governments systematically eroded all benefits and with it any sense of innate human self-worth, making me feel like trash. With next to no savings, I am in effect - for all intensive purposes thus - a "worthless" human being. This sense of worthlessness is compounded by a cultural condition of being so long in China, a country that traditionally values filial piety - what kind of selfish son am I who would choose my own stability over my father's quality of life in his final years? Worthless.

Although I take some solace in my pedagogic professionalism after a decade of EFL teaching in China since beginning in Xinjiang in 2011/12 - enough to now hesitantly re-enter a post-graduate degree by research at an Australian university (by distance) - it seeps away nightly as I battle the (admittedly partly self-imposed) solitude of my campus apartment existence. It feels as though the country that still simultaneously seeks to imbue me with a sense of national pride, has condemned both my father and I - as economically insignificant (or burdensome) - to the afore-mentioned slow death. Australia wasn't always that way, but it is now and it is a country to which I have no pride whatsoever in having been born there: as the first generation Australian in my European family heritage. I pass the time thus, with thoughts of mortality, of worthlessness: in a world where "legacy" (equated increasing with net dollar value or what such can enable in reputation-building) is a legitimization of human worthiness and significance, my "legacy" is to eventually die childless in anonymity, a fate I accept with but some minor lingering reservations, turning to auto-ethnographic videography (for its experimental subjectivism more so than its therapeutic components however, though perhaps there is too an element of the latter).

10. White Fellas from Down Under: Manufacturing Consent for Another Gallipoli?

I'm on strange footing as an Australian in China, having been here throughout the Covid-19 pandemic to date and currently unable (and I must admit unwilling) to return to my birth country. Recently more so, but more on the main reason for that at the end of this introductory blog post. I don't feel any loyalty to Australia any longer, certainly no reason to maintain even a semblance of national pride. Except when remembering that Julian Assange and John Pilger are also Australian: at time of writing, Assange is in jail and Pilger's prescient film The Coming War on China is being retrospectively scrutinized, as it should be. Worth seeing to understand the hegemon Australia obeys so terrifyingly - a good starting point.

Shame is taking its place: all I see emanating from my birth country now is ASPI's stage-managed "China threat" discourse writ large - warmongering to serve a monstrous US hegemony. An Imperialist Capitalism, a Military-Industrial Complex [MIC] corporate totalitarianism which - by virtue of its self-proclaimed "exceptionalism" from international accountability, ethically validated by a Puritan delusion of "Manifest Destiny". And imposed upon all other nations by military force, fear thereof or fear of threat by an Other: from "yellow peril" to "Chinese virus". And its media propaganda now incentivized with a US$300 million governmental allocation to manufacture yet more profitably fear-mongered consent through its "allies" to preserve "democracy", that is, maintain the US' tyrannical legacy of indigenous people genocide (a genuine "American holocaust") and institutional racism. All the while concentrating media ownership to the point of corporate-level near-monopolization. A hegemon whose ladder of command keeps Australia at the end of a "special" leash, despite Australia's grandiose illusions as to being the US' "deputy sheriff" in the Asia-Pacific - protecting home turf claims Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton at the National Press Club firstly by "stopping the boats", removing criminals and potential terrorists from the community, and responding to "Chinese aggression" with a view to peace. A lie: there is no profit for the US in a world of peace - it must have war (or the perpetual threat of it), at all costs: it profits from maintaining global instability in the guise of policing it. A global war-footing aura suits that agenda: living in fear of an aggressive "Other" it can demonize to mobilize popular support for its hegemonic "rules-based international order": who made these rules? Who do they benefit?

Australia's smug self-importance is ironic: the culturally backward nation prides itself on obedient, Pavlovian loyalty to the US - never mind that current US President Biden couldn't remember Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's name, referring to him as "that fella from down under". Deputy Dawg Morrison reneged on a prior submarine deal with the French government to commit AU$billions to nuclear submarines from the USA - from French Bread to Yellow Cake in the AUKUS agreement. Why when aged care is in crisis and social security payments in jeopardy of being subject to privatized cashless debit card-based removal of discretionary spending does Morrison commit Australia to defense spending on AUKUS agreements that benefit the US MIC arms industry manufacturers: complicit collusion with war profiteers on the basis of a manufactured Chinese threat to "democracy"? If so, Defense Minister Peter Dutton is complicit and conspiratorial in this manufacturing of consent for MIC profiteering, justifying with faux earnestness the conduct of the Australian Defense Force and Australia's commitment to the US agenda in Taiwan. The same honorable Australian military who David McBride revealed committed war crimes in Afghanistan, one whistleblower of which was found dead amidst an epidemic of former military service suicides. In its collusion with US war criminality, Australia's slavish obedience to US interests is now so foregone a conclusion that the US can take it for granted Morrison / Dutton will do whatever the US tell them to do: why should a US sitting President even bother to remember the name of the US's puppet leader of a tributary vassal state: the reeking arse end of the earth's miracle-believing King Shit?

If Australia is indeed the arse end of the earth, then Morrison, Dutton et.al are its biggest turds to date - the king-size floaters that won't flush out. These fecal white-fellas from down under are glorifying vainglorious wartime nostalgia awash in spurious historical "appeasement" analogies spearheaded by US Military Industrial Complex [MIC] funded "think tank" APSI. They can't wait to commit Australia (and Australian troops) to front-line, US proxy, combat against China, or at least threaten to in the theory that greater deterrence through military buildup is the preferred solution. And how has that strategy worked out so far in post-WWII world history? These same arse-hole fungi who say the 2021 Beijing Winter Olympics under Xi Jinping are historically equivalent to the 1936 Munich Olympics under Hitler and that we must learn from history make false equivalence just as they gleefully instigate another arms race and new Cold War - what else can a tributary deputy do for its master hegemon? Somewhere in Canberra offices and Sydney CBD banks, due diligence privileges the US MIC above even considering the validity of the globalist alternative of international win-win co-operation and mutual peace and prosperity alongside China. Why?

Because its China; the malevolent Other against whom Australia's white-fella arse-clowns would rather again justify the slaughter of its citizen soldiery (and maybe more) as an honor - to preserve "democracy", in Taiwan; while never questioning this term's implicit specification that this be "American style" token democracy, nor acknowledging Chinese democracy as in any way valid, let alone a valid alternative to be examined seriously: the willful ignorance and hypocrisy here are palpable - the clever country? These rabid, contagious US-backed dogs of war should be mercilessly put down like the rescue dogs New South Wales Covid-19 workers shot dead. And what kind of war creature is Australia? Dutton's sniveling back-benchers Hastie and Paterson believe they're wolverines, whose battle hymn of the ANZAC Republic is "oi oi oi". Wolverines: as in the John Milius film Red Dawn (1984), a popular US propaganda screener, more so than the Marvel superhero character though its juvenalia carries through in their infantile antics - putting claw-mark stickers on Parliamentary inner corridor walls. Small, furry, vicious rodents as a matter of literal definition. Pests. In that analogy, Dutton is a gnawing pain in the arse end of the earth: which Paul Keating valiantly attempted to lubricate in his recent National Press Club address.

Not only a US vassal state, but a tributary one at that, Australian PM Scott Morrison's cowardice is epitomized in his appeasement of US interests vis-a-vis unjustly imprisoned Australian citizen Julian Assange.

So now Australia's war drums are beating to dogs' barking the Star-Spangled Banner as snarling wolverines acquiescently crawl, willing future Australian soldiers to die to the tune of the background audio to broadcast media's obligatory manufacturing of consent for the will of its hegemonic corporate MIC masters in the US. One nation under God. Gott Mit Uns!  To which: I recently watched Prepare for Armageddon: China's warning to the world | 60 Minutes Australia. (and the deconstruction / analysis by Daniel Dumbrill, Brian Berletic and Australian Citizens Party spokesperson Robbie Barwick in Reaction Video: 60 Minutes Australia Prepare for Armageddon - War with China). It was a war-footing advocacy program continuing the ASPI engineered "China threat" discourse of their earlier War with China: Are we closer than we think? | Under Investigation to which the independent "pro-China" YouTubers Daniel Dumbrill, Brian Berletic and Carl Zha responded with a geo-strategic deconstruction: Reaction Video: Watching the 60 Minutes Australia Episode "War with China". Sidestepping the eschatological Judeo-Christian rhetorical appeal to "believers", now that Morrison has committed Australia to a front-line position in its new Cold War (and potential hot war) against China in the AUKUS agreement, it's interesting to note that the 60 Minutes videos in montage and post-production effects not only use ominous, militaristic music but sequence their interviewee contributions in what is tantamount to an appeal to Aussie "patriotism": a little subtler than Red Dawn as propaganda but equally as ridiculous, and infinitely more reckless. Implicit in this 60 Minutes dross is what uniquely qualifies Australian "patriotism" - its core national identity myth - ANZAC, the sanctity of which Australian Education Minister Alan Tudge says should not be questioned as anything other than "sacred" in the National Curriculum.

Sacred? Like, a holy day? Tudge, furthermore asserted that the idea that the ANZAC myth of a nation forged in vainglorious but disabling wartime sacrifice (serving Australia's colonial masters) was ever questioned was "ham-fisted culture wars" rubbish: no social opposition to populist mythification foisted on the Australian public by the Rupert Murdoch produced, Peter Weir directed film of Gallipoli to be had here. Not exactly Mr. Tudge. When I was a SAR Research Fellow at Australia's National Film & Sound Archive [NFSA] a decade ago, in the national archives is a considerable body of film work which does in fact question the sanctity of the ANZAC myth, in fact going so far as to subvert it. That this body of film work is uniquely qualified by a disability politics perspective is something Mr. Tudge also seems to gloss over: war is disabling on the individuals who are caught up in a personal sacrifice for what Tudge considers the noble sake of a quasi-mythical "Australia" that he believes in ideological and cultural jeopardy if ANZAC is questioned, apparently lest any resultant critical thinking lead Australians to not rush to war like pestilential wolverines: "oi, oi, oi".

But what post-colonial fake cause would Australian gullibility be manipulated into supporting: equally nostalgic for wartime glory? Defense Minister Dutton has the answer - "democracy". Australia's? No... Taiwan's. Indeed, Dutton has single-handedly committed Australian troops to supporting the US (the hegemonic master to supplant the colonial one) in defending Taiwan from Chinese "aggression", although both the Australian and US' official position is that Taiwan is part of China and not a separate nation. The irony: while Lithuania was paid US600 million in a trade incentive to go against the One China policy as a US vassal state and begin to recognize Taiwan, Australia had to pay to maintain its "deputy sherrif" position: an AUKUS tribute to the almighty MIC in hegemonic appeasement. Lithuania was bribed to be a US vassal, Australia is its tributary state in the "new Cold War" agenda over Taiwan.

So: consider this:

Yet, Dutton as his ilk propaganda-ize the issue any war is supposedly to be fought over: to preserve "democracy" by coming to the "defense" of Taiwan if it is "invaded" by China, blaming Chinese "aggression" for any impending conflict and framing Australia's actions as thus purely defensive. In this, 60 Minutes clearly reproduces the "China threat" discourse initiated and forwarded by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI], an ethically vile "think tank" funded primarily by US MIC interests and thus advancing US war policy. Indeed, ASPI, significantly, commenced this process of US war policy usurpation of Australian "sovereignty" via an instigating propagator of the Uyghur "genocide" and "forced labor" narrative. In Australia, this concurrently opportunistic anti-China Uyghur forced platform was advanced by senator Rex Patrick in collusion with the East Turkestan Australia Association [ETAA] although the proverbial mantle has been taken on by useful idiot (and ostensibly "faithful" Catholic) Drew Pavlou, a suspended University of Queensland student (and foul-mouthed, barely articulate reported online bully) whose anti-China war-mongering was also legitimized by a 60 Minutes Australia report: Student becomes 'enemy' of China after protesting human rights violations | 60 Minutes Australia. The populist mythification of Pavlou as a "human rights" martyr, however, is dubious and deceptive, for the 60 Minutes report conveniently failed to mention (let alone question) Pavlou's prior unproven assertions: that a Uyghur friend's relative was arrested and subject to detention in a Xinjiang "concentration camp" after a supposed hack of his emails. More disconcertingly, Uyghur "activist" Inty Elham, one of Pavlou's new political party running mates - in my South Australian "hometown" of Adelaide no less - in a Spotify interview with a gullibly ignorant halfwit named Hamish Roland Voyage stated the following:

IE: ... (China) put out these concentration camps Q: What kind of concentration camps... gas?... gas to kill people? IE: That as well... Basically, the Holocaust again.

Elham should face legal action for this accusation. On social media platform Twitter, ASPI's subtly steering the anti-China Uyghur "genocide" rhetoric of Pavlou alongside that of Taiwan, responding to Pavlou's posting of a WW2 era newspaper clipping on Chamberlain's "appeasement" of Hitler as an apt historical parallel to the dangers of "appeasing" China over Taiwan and furthermore questioning whether the Xinjiang "concentration camps" would be next in store for Taiwan if China takes over. Pavlou's ASPI handlers show their trail publicly now with increasingly overt Nazi Holocaust allusions strategically interjected into the discourse by Uyghur human rights lawyer Nury Turkel's calculated spin-doctoring for Falun Gong funded Epoch Times, after earlier allying the Uyghur "genocide" to the Nazi-era Holocaust in his appearance for The American Jewish Committee. This is shameless Military Industrial Complex [MIC] pandering by ASPI. As their website proudly boasts, ASPI's main sponsors are the same MIC corporations that benefit from Aussie PM Morrison's AUKUS tributary appeasement. And as to the beneficiaries of AUKUS, it's the originally cited 60 Minutes report's vainglorious embrace of the Military Industrial Complex [MIC] that resonates most here: an interim aside suggesting Australia needs to better arm itself. War-footing. Patriotism. Defend (US style) Democracy. Defend Taiwan at Tai-Gallipoli. Oi oi oi. Onward Christian soldiers!

Appeasing US rhetoric towards Taiwan - which has nothing to do with preserving democracy but everything to do with Taiwan's chip industry and sabotaging China's Tech sector growth (just as the Xinjiang "concentration camps" rhetoric has nothing to do with preserving Uyghur human rights but everything to do with sabotaging China's Belt & Road) - and the US' apparent willingness to have its "deputy sheriff" function as its front-line war proxy, situates Australia where? Manufacturing consent for war with China in the echoes of self-aggrandizing ANZAC mythology: the "land down under" forged on the noble sacrifice of Australian lives in front-line service at Gallipoli to appease its colonial war powers - the nationalistic absurdity dominating the shrill, belligerent stupidity of the white-fellas from down under. How many Australians are ready to die or be disabled for Morrison and Dutton's appeasement of hegemonic US Imperialism? Would the wolverines volunteer for combat duty in Taiwan? ANZAC should be questioned, deconstructed and discarded!

My parents were European immigrants - refugees who came on UN boats as "displaced persons" following WW2, the last of which, my father (whose childhood was spent under the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia) I learned just prior to completing this first blog post passed away. He was awaiting "elective" surgery for prostate cancer postponed for a year to keep empty, reserve beds available for younger Covid-19 patients that never materialized. Morrison and Dutton et,al let old people wait for needed surgery until they died rather than spend money to build new Covid-19 treatment centers and hospitals as China did during the original Wuhan outbreak. And China is the aggressive enemy of democracy? How: by caring for its people over profits? And my father died alone, after voting Liberal his entire life: the Liberal Party has clearly shown just how worthless they considered him after his voting utility was exhausted; and me with him for that matter, denying me Covid-19 relief payments or viable re-entry to Australia. Plenty of money for AUKUS and a potential new wave of war disabled, but none for aged care nor the disability care this same new generation of Tai-Gallipoli victims would need. Not that it matters though, for who after all am I? A worthless old man, to die alone like my father before me? I am a stranger here myself.

11. Autoethnographic Poem: To Live and Die in Worthless Anonymity

I am unsure how to introduce myself to strangers, though I am a stranger here myself. I am a foreign EFL teacher in China, Australian by birth if not parentage - Eastern European WW2 displaced persons if it comes to that. I have spent the best part of over a decade in China since arriving in Xinjiang [XUAR] in 2011/09 where I remained for a year (my formative EFL experience). My narrative self-positioning in his work is thus uniquely qualified by that distinct autobiographic formative professional pedagogic circumstance above all, though there is more to it than that. On professional pedagogic practice, I have had to date a career in mostly tertiary sector EFL (from Academic Writing to Inter-Cultural Communication) in friendly Shandong though intersecting the private, corporate EdTech sector in Shanghai prior to Xi Jinping's warranted regulation of this problematic EFL industry. The industry-wide consequeneces of these regulations, and the advent of Covid-19, prompted many foreigners to leave China. But I stayed: partly by choice and partly by not being able to return to my birth country due to travel restrictions and financial limitations.

11.1. The Death of Humanism

I remember:

during the Trump/Clinton US presidential election lead-up debates,

Trump stated that he was worth - however many - billion dollars,

implying that such wealth entitled him

to a position of international leadership and due admiration

for his accomplishments: human worth equivalent to net dollar value!

so too, "significance" to humanity. In that equation, the American Way;

I am a worthless man: insignificant. My life is meaningless,

but remains all I have, though for how much longer

is perhaps the only choice I can still exercise

with any real sense of reason: it's a rational decision;

only the final date remains unset.

11.2. Reflection: Worthless Indifference as Pre-Cursor to "Global Citizenship"

I am a worthless man, my father too. Worthless in that, in each of our respective lives, we have never been able to accrue substantial monetary wealth, and emerged in elderly life (I am 53 now, he passed away at 88) with no net dollar value (I have no assets, bar the small pending estate value he willed me). But such is a condition of human existence in a Capitalist society such as that in my home country of Australia, where I spent nearly 40 years of life prior to coming to China - Xinjiang - as a newly qualified EFL teacher: wealth is significance, the signifier of human value and thus of the right to human life (regardless of the US' self-serving rhetoric in support of "universal human rights": they are bought and paid for - owned). Not so in socialist China I found: every life has worth, has authentic value independent of net dollar value - prosperity is not measured in economic, fiscal terms alone, and where it is, it is as an indicator of collective achievement, of social harmony. Not individual "success" as per the loathsome US model that my birth country slavishly follows to suit the profit motives of its wealthier, investor classes in their allegiance to the US war machine. What human right is determined by the goal of individual success at the expense of collective empowerment?

Subordinating the individual to the collective is, of course, anathema to the vile Western, US epistemic of Neo-Liberalism, however, and although I would like to transcend it, am perpetually bound in negative self-talk wherein I conceive of myself - and my life to date - as a "failure", primarily for said fact of having no financial assets to show for it. Though in part, this compels me to radicalized rage against the machine of my conditioning, so too is there the recognition that in all likelihood, I can do nothing about it, nor change the wider social conditions that would in any way make my case generalizable. But, as I watched, over the length of Covid-19 to date, my father's medical condition deteriorate because the Australian government would not increase funding for the aged and health care sectors - while pledging up to AU$100 billion for the recent AUKUS nuclear submarine purchase from the US Military Industrial Complex - I now disavow any and all allegiance to my home country of Australia: by circumstances of my birth, I hold its passport, that is all. And when my father died, not long after receiving an mRNA vaccine... well: the Australia "fair go" seemed to wither and die with him.

11.3. Humanity In Media Res

I remember:

in a smoky Shanghai bar,

a young African lady of the evening

danced with me to forget, or to remember. Her lies aside,

I felt sympathy for her dilemma: to accept money for contact unwanted

to pay for accommodation, or face homelessness. Distraught and tired

to the point of nervously sleeping at the bar, in urine soaked jeans,

she declined a phone offer from a wealthy man. She needed two weeks rent

before she would catch a plane home. I had just a little money,

and sent it to her in installments over two weeks

after I left Shanghai: all I could earn as I earned it. She called me "sir";

better than "darling" she said, truthfully. I never asked for, nor expected, any return

though I did entertain the prospect momentarily. After she went to the airport,

I never heard from her again. Back in Shanghai a month later,

I saw her again at the same bar, same hustle for free drinks. She said the flight

was cancelled and she was stranded and tried contacting me. Her situation

was thus the same as when I had met her, new lies too. And I wondered,

why she did not send any word in the interim? But my money was gone,

and what I would earn from then I would not this time give to her:

partly for cynicism, but mostly for need of the little money more than I could spare it.

Once again thus in-validated as a human being;

for I am a worthless man: insignificant.

11.4. For the Devil I Know, My Old Friend

I remember:

at the same dingy Shanghai bar, closer to dawn than sunset;

another lady of the evening sat beside me, and told something of her tale:

twenty-something, gorgeous. I didn't know why these women

talked to me as confidante as seemingly now they did. But in some strange telepathy

the Devil in her confided that sometimes she talks to one like me

for to be with one who can see right through such as she. She despised her own beauty

for the commodification it had made of her life, hating the mirror

for the abuse she now suffered from men. Her attitude struck me:

"I could fuck anyone here" she boldly stated,

as if fucking them made up for the abuse, empowered her

in some retributive poetic justice. I saw her later, after she had left:

she was with three men of a single mind. She too needed money,

to maintain subsistence. She was not as yet desperately

prowling the streets, but that future was perhaps awaiting her

if she lingered here. She was open to more with me, for money,

but I declined. Too old, not interested. Instead, I bought another drink

and left her to her fate. I could not help her, again to my admitted regret,

both for another lesson learned and again for my lack of resources

even to provide a semblance of humanity, or dignity. And silently I wept,

for never being successful, for never generating wealth.

For being what I am: a worthless man: insignificant.

11.5. The Last Reckoning

I remember:

in Shanghai, not caring of mortality,

before Covid-19. Not even thinking of it,

my mother's passing | my father's sorrow,

I had my own concerns: I needed money

to survive and I had a potential "friend". A rich American friend,

who dangled a carrot before a tired, old workhorse

knowing it would always be out of reach,

wondering how far the horse could go before dropping.

He showed me the Botox elite, pussy paid for by corporate executives,

mired in faux meetings exploiting Chinese investment law. He promised

me due recompense for my time and input,

but never paid what he had so valued,

using me when it suited him until I left, having learned

enough of the American dream to flush it from my psyche.

But one young woman I met, and to whom I did give shelter and support

despite my poverty, and her wishing I was richer (as she thought

all foreigners in China were), again to my shame. She stayed despite my

idiosyncrasies. She will not become like those beyond my capacity to help

as long as I can help it, though I will live and die in anonymous poverty. Yet,

I wonder too what she may really think of me, or if she too may be using me.

For I am insular, introverted and solitary; kind, gentle and mild

but don't communicate as well I should, humanity being lost to me

as, not being in moneyed time, I am a worthless man: insignificant.

And again, though I sponsored her, communication dwindled and died:

for I was again but a cash cow, an "old idiot" she last called me,

wishing me dead; then asking for yet more money. Though, by the end, I refused,

paying for her accommodation and a small stipend for 9 months prior:

it was over but for the separation and goodbye.

But still I felt, and even now in retrospect feel:

"Stay with my well-wishes then my love,

wistful though they may be,

to the end of your road,

now you need choose a different fork than I

and traverse your own road less traveled:

perchance thereon, remember fondly our brevity,

and smile when you think of me in time."

Three strikes. I'm out of the game.

12. "Genocide Games"?: Australian Complicity in the US' Fake "Uygur Genocide" Narrative

Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin recently (20/01/2022) wrote a column referring to the upcoming (at time of writing) Beijing Winter Olympics as the "genocide games". On similar basis of unproven "genocide" Newsweek claims that China should thus be boycotted. The real genocide "games", however, are not the Olympics but the dangerously faux historical analogies and allusions perpetrated by The Washington Post and other US/Western media outlets in slyly and cynically evoking the Nazi Holocaust to smear China and pro-China supporters. This smear tactic also has a long genesis, primarily through the auspices of a radicalized separatist Uyghur minority diaspora under the umbrella influence of the US National Endowment for Democracy [NED] funded World Uyghur Congress [WUC] and - in particular - Uyghur "human rights" lawyer Nury Turkel. For instance, Turkel recently equated Xinjiang strategist Chen Quanguo to Adolf Eichmann and Xinjiang’s policies under Quanguo’s direction to a “final solution”. Although in this, as mentioned last blog, he has been joined by opportunist Australian political candidate Inty Elham from the Drew Pavlou Party in asserting gas chambers were used in Xinjiang "concentration camps", a libelous claim for which no evidence or prior mention exists. These accusations in turn spur from the assertions by Uyghur "activist" Erkin Sidick as repeated by CJ Werleman on his multiple platforms. These assertions, it must be noted, cannot and have not been independently verified nor have they been cited even by the most ardent anti-China Western media sources: as such, they cannot be relied upon in any way except as a representation of the radicalized extremist Uyghur bias feeding the "genocide" narrative in the leadup to the Beijing Winter Olympics.

Yet, when "foreigners" in China (including those who have been to Xinjiang) protest against this diabolical misrepresentation to suit US hegemonic interests, such as The New York Times reach a new low - no doubt to be soon exceeded in its callousness - in suggesting that China's zero Covid policy was reminiscent of the "evil" that led to the Holocaust. This particular Nazi Holocaust analogy is, in relation to the rhetoric of "genocide denial", merely the extension of a long-standing deliberate strategy to demonize China based on faux historical parallel and for purely US hegemonic interests, centered on Xinjiang and intending to sabotage the financial success of Xi Jinping's Belt & Road Initiative [BRI], beginning with the cotton industry in mid 2020 but primarily targeting the semi-conductor industry under allegations of "forced labor" promoted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute {ASPI) but discredited by The Grayzone and independent scholar Jaq James. Recently, this media debacle was succinctly encapsulated by independent investigative journalist Nury Vittachi:

This particular NYT demonization effort follows their 12/2021 New York Times article on pro-China "influencers" on YouTube and Twitter which accused several China-based foreign vloggers of being paid to spread Chinese "disinformation". In this earlier smear piece, the NYT essentially parroted the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI] asserting a Chinese disinformation campaign on social media using the hashtag #StopXinjiangRumors, drawing also on lying populist anti-China YouTube propagandist Mathew Tye, as exposed by Brian Berletic. So too, the NYT journalist Paul Mozur's interview tactics were exposed in a live pre-interview released by China-based YouTuber "Matt", while other foreigners in China have been using YouTube to expose Western media bias on the Xinjiang issue. APSI, on their part, maintain their claim that an organized campaign was in place utilizing foreign social media "influencers" to deny "forced labor", "cultural erasure" and "genocide" in Xinjiang, the latter two terms commonly collocated elsewhere as "cultural genocide" and increasingly obscured in a conflated reference to "forced labor" as the preferred rhetorical designation for the same anti-China discourse. So too, the Washington Post has repeatedly inferred such outspoken pro-China foreigners to be a phase in a "genocide denial" campaign in a calculated rhetorical gambit to smear them with the taint of "genocide denier" in an inverted, faux allusion to authentic Nazi Holocaust denial, by association; never mind that no conclusive proof of genocide, cultural genocide or even forced labor in Xinjiang beyond the work of Adrian Zenz is forthcoming and (as mentioned) ASPI's own assertions citing Zenz have been discredited twice, first by Grayzone's analysis of their US Military Industrial Complex [MIC] financing and more recently by independent scholar Jaq James' CoWest Consultancy paper, which exposed ASPI's manipulation of international law protocols to suit their "forced labor" agenda/bias and was recently drawn to Australia's attention.

While some of the vloggers mentioned in these US media smear reports had indeed made paid tourism promotional videos for the Chinese broadcast industry (as is a standard practice), and have influence over their international subscriber base, the NYT assertion that they had been co-opted to serve the CPC political agenda, specifically over Xinjiang, was an accusation refuted by such as YouTube content creator Gweilo60 delineating the NYT agenda bias to discredit authentic foreign reporting revealing the actuality of lived experience in China. In this context, I find myself in a deepening predicament: I'm not a pro-China "vlogger" per se, nor a social media "influencer": although I have an incipient platform on many of the same social media networks, I keep a low profile and concentrate on somewhat more Academic perspectives on, specifically, Chinese EFL education in relation to my personal experience - as an Australian citizen in China - commencing formative in-service EFL teaching experience in Xinjiang, where I lived and worked for a year. However, I empathize with these YouTube vloggers in wanting to counter the constant spread of US disinformation in Josh Rogin's op-ed pieces on China concerning "genocide denial" in the lead-up to the Beijing Winter Olympics, which now involves concerted publicity-seeking campaigns in the country with whom I maintain erstwhile citizenship - Australia - via narcissistic "independent" university dropout and obedient ASPI useful idiot Drew Pavlou and even a recent book length publication by Australia National University [ANU] press, which negates to acknowledge in its introduction the history of Uyghur separatism and terrorism throughout the C20th and C21st in Xinjiang until Xi Jinping called for its complete removal, nor acknowledge Australia's complicity in shielding Uyghur separatists, extremists and terrorists who helped coordinate the July 5th, 2009 Urumqi riots.

As mentioned previously, Australia is manufacturing consent for war with China over Taiwan's "democracy" and "independence" and ANU demonizing China by misrepresenting Xinjiang history suits that agenda. Yet: Australia does not officially recognize Taiwan as an independent nation despite its pronouncements to the contrary - the facile drivel of a gutless US proxy unwilling (or unable) to think independently. Australia, the US, UK and the international community abide by the One China principle. Or so they claim to while the US covertly sponsors anti-China violence in the guise of "human rights", such as beset Hong Kong prior to new Chinese laws and the return of peace. Taiwan is not a country, it is a province (often referred to as a "renegade" province due to its Kuomintang political base since the end of the Chinese Civil War and Communist Party of China [CPC] authority over the People's Republic of China [PRC]) with a different governmental system to the "mainland": and China's stated intent towards Taiwan is its peaceful re-unification with that mainland. And yet, Australians, like patriotic halfwits, seem to be eagerly lining up to be the first casualties in any hot war that may result from the US hegemon's new Cold War strategy: never mind ANZAC Day, they want a new AUKUS Day - replace the Union Jack on Australia's flag with the stars and stripes because, as Paul Keating rightly infers, Australia is too timid a nation to embrace authentic sovereignty beyond blind cultural obedience to a colonial master (whichever one promises to protect it from the evil Asian Yellow Peril). So too, they will eagerly seize any opportunity for anti-China rhetoric - the most recent being Pavlou's arguably copyright / personal name infringing exploitation of tennis player Peng Shuai to support Australia's ASPI backed core brand of anti-China advocates, known as the "wolverines" (most notably James Paterson).

That's it in a nutshell, so to speak.

As an Australian in China, "mainland China", I find this pro-US braggadocio and "gonecide games" Holocaust allusion to be, in fact, absurdly ironic, even ludicrous. Just how gullible, how stupid are Australians to be willingly manipulated by their media in this way? Only Cassandra alone, however, truly knows how complex a self-fulfilling prophecy Australia is committing itself to in acquiescing to the US desire for a regional proxy in courting hostility with China, just as it courts Ukraine to combat Russia. And on that front, there is no difference now between national broadcaster the ABC, public network front-piece 60 Minutes and Murdoch-owned SkyNews. Indeed, cumulatively, Australian media is promoting a revitalized national mythology that would potentially yield another generation of wartime disabled as ANZAC becomes AUKUS and the land down under needs a new Gallipoli for its vainglorious, tributary self-sacrifice; which this time Defense Minister Peter Dutton would situate in Taiwan. Just as the country's GDP suffers its third-lowest level in quarterly growth, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison lets aged care flounder to direct Australia to defense spending and AUKUS on the basis of a supposed "China threat", a discourse constructed and advanced in initiating conjunction with the Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI]. And new Magitsky laws are being mobilized to support US anti-China interests threatening to violate market principles in hegemonic self-interest. No wonder China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs [MOFA] is rebuking Australia.

And as far as rebuking the Australian government - choose your ethical criterion: a sitting Liberal senator anally raping a woman while she slept?  As detailed in recent correspondence. Or: Violently kicking a naked woman out of bed while claiming that Australia's noble ANZAC legend never be questioned lest it lessen Australians' willingness to uncritically die for their culturally backwards US tributary state? In this denying the mere existence of a substantial body of work addressing ANZAC's role in what Australian disability cinema uniquely considers a "crisis of disablement". Committing war crimes in Afghanistan in support of US foreign policy?  Secretly enabling a Uyghur separatist (who colluded with the WUC in coordinating a terrorist attack in Xinjiang) refugee protection to which he was not legally entitled?  And yet Australia slavish as always to the US takes the same moral high ground as its exceptionalist Manifest Destiny master, still centering on ASPI accusation of "forced labor" in relation to accusations of Uyghur "cultural genocide", accusations (as mentioned) recently deconstructed for their unethical misuse on international legal standards.

Culture. Genocide. "Cultural Genocide"? Even the ANU volume is reticent to use the term, while tacitly acknowledging it. Xinjiang. East Turkestan. "Uyghur Identity".

I was there, in China's Xinjiang, for a year (as I mentioned last blog). Indeed, my "identity" as a foreign EFL teacher in China was shaped by this experience and the film I made from it (and am in the process of potentially re-editing and re-conceptualizing for potential VOD release and/or festival screening.

I taught Han, Uyghur and Kazakh students in line with CPC language education policy English as a Foreign Language [EFL] research incentives. I filmed my Xinjiang experience over that year: I was there in 2011-12, following the populist Western media dissemination of the term "cultural genocide" in relation to the July 5th 2009 Urumqi riots and subsequent populist mythification via Melbourne Film Festival screening of a "documentary" on then World Uyghur Congress [WUC] leader Rebiya Kadeer; the WUC since 2004 being funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA's funding network to destabilize Xinjiang as part of US foreign policy - the Silk Road Strategy [SRS]. Two months prior to my arrival in Xinjiang, the then Australian government granted visa protection to a Uyghur separatist / extremist (not entitled to refugee status) knowing he would subsequently be involved in anti-China activism through the East Turkestan Australia Association [ETAA], which now openly calls for donations to the World Uyghur Congress, whose leader Dolkun Isa's WUC account was the intended recipient of a money transfer via Australia's Commonwealth Bank, then under investigation for international terrorist funding / money laundering, and while Isa was under Interpol Red Notice status. So too: recently in Australia, the Xinjiang "genocide" proponents Drew Pavlou, Rex Patrick and Bob Katter openly posed alongside ETAA propaganda. But Katter is a nationalistic moron, Patrick an anti-China jackaroo mouthpiece for ASPA "forced labor" allegations (to serve his own financial interests?) and Pavlou is ASPI's Pavlovian Pet Pooch, what his fellow Queenslanders would call a "dumb-cunt". And these arse-clowns now use bogus Holocaust analogies to double-down on the Washington Post's "genocide games" accusions: what fou hypocrisy - how proud the US hegemon must be of its "deputy sheriff".

Heel. Bark. Good Pavlou. Good Paterson. Good Dutton. Have a biscuit. Perhaps Pavlou wants to be alongside fellow "Christian" Scott "I believe in miracles" Morrison and pose in the new AUKUS submarines like Tony Abbott in the warplanes that comprised Australia's prior defense industry tributary (in acquiescence to the US MIC and recite the US "One Nation Under God" pledge while the salivating wolverines hoist their AK-47s in the air and cry "oi oi oi". They are using nationalistic identity politics to play "genocide games" in order to gain populist sympathy via allusion of the Uyghur "genocide" and "cultural genocide" in Xinjiang. Pavlou would undoubtedly sieze as another opportunistic photo-op the opportunity to pose in a new tank purchased (while he lets the aged care sector perish and the elderly die from exposure to Covid-19) ostensibly acquired for defense against China, never mind that there is no land border with China: Pavlou can swim alongside them? Those playing "genocide games" are bogus, unscrupulous Uyghur separatists, lying US warmongers and their servile, salivating Australian wolverines, scholarly lackeys and useful idiots eager to create a new generation of Australian wartime wounded: fuck them all!

I, as at least one Australian, will not die for the US economy.

FURTHER READING:

Contextualizing the Uygur "Genocide" Narrative: Manufacture, Dissemination & Mythification in US & Western MSM Construction of Xinjiang "Human Rights" Discourse

“Genocide Games”: Deconstructing "Forced Labor in Xinjiang" Discourse During the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics (also on Academia)

2022/11/24 - 2022/11/30: Australian Media and Uygur Diaspora Response to the 2022/11/24 Urumqi Fire