Electioneering

I spent about six hours yesterday, from seven A.M. to 1:30 P.M., watching the election returns in the IES library streamed from the CNN website. IES put on a “party,” which I was reluctant to attend because they’re usually crammed with awkward host families and Language Pledge activities* but since they were offering free coffee I figured I’d stop in for a short while, stock up, and then go somewhere else. However, no host families showed up, and all the Chinese students had class at 8, so it soon became an American, English-speaking enclave. Jackie and Michael were there as well, so we claimed the sofa and kicked back to watch.
From the outset, things looked good for Obama. I had expected him to win ever since McCain chose Palin as a running mate, and the polls leading up to Election Day only bolstered my confidence. The election was by no means a nail-biter, but I got surprisingly into it anyway, cheering at every state Obama picked up. The overwhelming majority of the people in the library with us were also Obama supporters, so it was easy to get swept up in the spirit and the joy of the whole thing.
{I support Obama for a variety of reasons: his support for gay rights and women’s rights, his promise to provide healthcare to all Americans, his willingness to negotiate with leaders of “enemy states,” and the fact that he’s not inches from death, with a chump who thinks Africa is a country (and this was from Fox News) as his second-in-command. Despite McCain’s previous departures from the Republican party line, and Palin’s constant claims that he’s a “maverick” (a big word, coming from someone who thought Africa was a country), he struck me as more of the same, awful administration that I’ve hated for the last eight years. So that’s my rationale.}
When the results finally came in, we all jumped up and cheered, watched his acceptance speech, and then dispersed for various victory lunches. Walking outside, I expected to see the throngs of people taking to the streets that would have been found at any university in America, but life continued as usual; the pirated DVD guy was still peddling his wares outside, the taxi drivers were still leaning on their horns, and the middle-aged men were still taking their Pekingeses out for fresh air and exercise. At least in part due to how its own political system is set up, China is a fairly apathetic country in terms of US politics. Although Obama’s victory earned a couple minutes of airtime on the evening news that night and a front-page mention on this morning’s paper, there wasn’t the kind of jubilance among the Chinese populace that there was in Europe, for instance. To the Chinese people who follow politics (it’s easy not to when you’re the jianbing guy who’s lived under one-party rule all his life) the economy is the most important issue, since the yuan, the Chinese currency, is partially pegged to the dollar. With the US economy in such bad shape, it’s impossible to tell whose economic policies will be better in the long run, so I think the mood in China was sort of unsure (although Zhang Ran told me that younger voters prefer Obama). His election also poses a couple fairly delicate questions to the Chinese Communist Party: why are the American people so happy that their relatively authoritarian government has been overthrown, and how could they elect an ethnic minority to a national office? (It’ll be a long time before you see a Tibetan as a CCP higher-up…)
Anyway, that was pretty much it in terms of the Chinese response, although I caught Zhang Ran on YouTube watching Obama’s acceptance speech because she thought he was handsome. For a country with so much political weirdness going on, so far I’ve found China to be incredibly…apolitical. Nobody seems to care that much, and they all just accept that their lives are the way they are, never wondering if an administrative change would make anything different.

*The next time I see or hear the words “Language Pledge” I will kick the responsible party in the teeth. I am so. Tired. Of. It.