Dateline: China

Well wishers try to thaw Communist China’s chilly social exterior by offering free hugs, but ol’ Commie Joe says, “No Dice.”

I’m not going to recap the whole story which I’m sure you Sinophiles have already read but if you haven’t here’s a link: Life Squeezed Out of Free Hug Movement.
Now I’m sure the majority of you read that story and thought to yourself, “What’s the big deal? It’s just a couple of youngsters that want to brighten up some people’s day by offering an innocently platonic hug.” But the question you have to ask yourself…Is it really that innocent?

First let’s examine the embrace itself. The hug is, at least in the West, a standard greeting for people who know each other and share a certain level of affection for one another like; family, friends, made members of organized crime syndicates, and cell-mates. Although the mechanics of a hug vary depending on who it is you are hugging their are some static inevitabilities:

1. At least one arm will be clasped around the other’s torso/shoulder, because men often practice the “handshake pulled into one-armed hug.” The handshake says, “Don’t worry, I’m heterosexual.” The one-armed hug says, “I’m heterosexual, but you’re my boy. My bond with you is as resolute as my want not to fuck you.” Classic examples of the handshake pulled into one-armed hug can be seen at NBA All-Star games and reruns of Russell Simmon’s Def Comedy Jam.

2. You are, even for a brief moment, cheek to cheek with the person you are embracing. During this time, if only for an instant, both parties have acquiesced to entrusting their personal space with another. Guards are dropped and trust is displayed. During this period of cheek to cheekness, kisses are often exchanged, caring sentiments are spoken at a low tone into one another’s ears, knives are shoved into the backs of Roman Emperors who grew too big for their tunics.

3. Frontal body contact is maximized. In it’s standard rendition, where both arms are utilized to embrace the other, spatial contact is total from the shoulders down to the hips and thighs. Remove the clothes and rotate the couple to a prone position and you basically have the missionary position. And there’s nothing innocent or platonic about that. And that’s why the Chinese government lead the way they did…with the jackboots.

Now all you liberal idealists out there with your Grateful Dead T-shirts and moonbeams and free love probably think this is just another example of the state crushing an otherwise harmless and overall fun, little exhibition but this isn’t Planet Freakout where conflicts are quelled with pixie dust and drum circles. This is real life…and it stinks like patchouli. Yes, hippies, you’re perfume d’jour reeks something fierce and it’s doing little to mask the fact that you’re adverse to showering in modern facilities with indoor plumbing and fluorinated water. Your hygiene sickens me as much as these “protesters” actions. Because once again like in the 60’s when your high-minded idealism lost us the Vietnam War this Free Hug movement threatens to tear asunder China’s tightly woven social fabric. A fabric made of equal parts distrust, xenophobia, blaring ignorance, and endemic larceny.

These young rapscallions tore mercilessly through the streets of Beijing, Xi’an, and Changsha brandishing signs stating, “Free Hugs,” “refuse to be apathetic,” “care from strangers,”and say ‘no’ to giving the cold shoulder.” You see the picture above. They look Chinese but they couldn’t possibly be Chinese. If they were they’d know that being apathetic and giving people the cold shoulder is the 5,000 year old ethos that has made this proud nation a collective of 1.4 billion wary, humorless killjoys. I once watched a guy pass out from heat exhaustion in the dead of summer in Hangzhou. He laid on that searing pavement for over an hour and a half before an ambulance happened to drive by and pick him up. He cooked like an egg on that street and died before he got to the hospital. Sure, I could have called the authorities but that wouldn’t have been very Chinese of me now would it? And as a guest in this country I respect their way of life, so as much as I wanted to call I couldn’t affront my host nation and care for another human being. Something these young punks need to be reminded of the next time they hit the streets looking to make people feel better. Nothing a few months in a certain prison in Qinghai I know of won’t cure.

Look I’m not a bad guy. I like to spread joy as much as the next Chinese guy. I’ll kick a dog to make a girl think I’m tough. I’ll mock migrant workers shabby clothes. I’ll treat everybody who doesn’t make as much money as I do like a piece of fuckin’ shit. Hey man, when in Rome, but this Free Hugs movement? They’re just moving a bit too quick for us more traditional types and quite frankly society’s just not ready for that step and here are some reasons why:

1. A bunch of nubile, young Chinese girls draping their fertile young bodies over any and all passersby they can get their hands on isn’t going to promote a new found sense of warmth and community amongst the Chinese. It’s going to lead to one thing. Massive, justifiable rape. Just listen to this dude named Li who preaches the historical truth in this Reuters Article:

   “Embracing is a foreign tradition. We are not accustom to this,” a dude name Li stated.

   And he’s absolutely right. Anyone who’s ever studied anything about China knows that all Chinese insemination since the Tang Dynasty has taken place in a lab where the husband and wife were in separate rooms, each with their own licensed “Essence Extractor,” and their respective seeds were combined for fertilization in a Qi-powered centrifuge. Chinese people despise physical contact especially the sexual kind. Just look at the sparse population and complete absence of an elicit sex industry. They don’t even have massage parlors here because, quite frankly, Chinese people hate to be touched.

2. If the people of China, as a whole, acquiesced to the notion of hugging or being hugged by complete strangers, pickpockets the country over would make a fuckin’ killing. People here steal. All the time. If you allow open, random hugging you’re pretty much opening the door to rampant petty larceny.

3. Public hugging, for no reason other than butterfly wings and rays of hope from the glitter well, will cripple the already severely crippled pedestrian flow in China’s cities. You can’t walk a straight God damn line for more than ten feet in any of China’s medium or big sized cities before you have to dodge an oncoming pedestrian, cut around a line of bicycles, or juke some shithead riding his gas-powered scooter down the sidewalk. Now, I have to jockey around people who don’t even know each other who both spontaneously decided they need to stop going where they’re going and hug somebody. Mountebanks my good man.

In all seriousness, I respect what these young kids are doing. It needs to be done. There are times when China just seems so cold and apathetic and it seems this way because it is. For Christ’s sake those four “huggers” in Beijing got brought in and questioned by the cops. Hey Beijing you got a lot of laowai tourists coming in 2008, get yourself a good PR firm, shit like this ain’t gonna fly when a bunch of people who aren’t petrified by the thought of a hug come to visit during the Olympics.

But what pisses me off the most are the quotes throughout the article like the on above by that dude named Li. This innate need inherent in almost all the people of China to protect the facade. To, at all costs, preserve the collective image or “face” and shroud it inappropriately with the moniker, “tradition.” People the world over do this, individually, and out of fear but here it’s the social undercurrent. Accepted and expected. These young altruists did nothing wrong except that they went against the expected social norms for public behavior for the purpose of making the world a little brighter. I quote:

“We were inspired by an event in Changsha city,” said one of the young male organizers.”Free hugs will bring people closer together and will make the world more like a big family.”

Keep the dream alive, brother. Keep the dream alive…from your prison cell in Qinghai you rabbler-rousing schismatist!!