Salute All Cars, Kids. It’s a Rule in China.

Du Bin for The New York Times

Children in China obeyed a county rule for pupils to salute cars.

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

Published: October 25, 2009

Correction Appended

HUANGPING, China — All the students at Luolang Elementary School, a yellow-and-orange concrete structure off a winding mountain road in southern China, know the key rules: Do not run in the halls. Take your seat before the bell rings. Raise your hand to ask a question.

Education officials promoted the saluting edict to reduce traffic accidents and teach children courtesy. Critics, who have posted thousands of negative comments about the policy on China’s electronic bulletin boards, beg to differ. “This is just pitiful,” wrote one in a post last year. Only inept officials would burden children with such a requirement rather than install speed bumps, others insisted.

This is hardly the only nation where local bureaucrats sometimes run a bit too free. But in China, where many local officials are less than well trained and only the party can eject them from office, local governments’ dubious edicts are common enough that skewering them has become a favorite pastime of China’s Web users. Even the state-run media join in, although they rarely report who was behind the rules or suggest that they indicate a lack of competence to govern.

Often, the skewering gets results. In April, one county in Hubei Province in central China drew nationwide ridicule after officials ordered civil servants and employees of state-owned companies to buy a total of 23,000 packs of the province’s brand of cigarettes every year. Departments whose employees failed to buy enough cigarettes or bought other Chinese brands would be fined, the media reported.

County officials said the increased revenue from the cigarette tax would buoy the local economy. After several weeks of embarrassment, Gongan County officials posted a short message on the government’s Web site that read: “We have decided to remove this edict.”

Officials of Hanchuan, a city in Hubei Province, tried a similar ploy, with the same effect. Determined to boost the local brand of baijiu, a sinus-clearing distilled clear liquor, they ordered state workers to buy a total of about $300,000 worth in a year. Reporters calculated that each employee would have had to buy three bottles a day to meet the quota. The rule was later rescinded.

Another county in Guizhou Province in southern China compelled state workers last year to help inflate the number of tourists visiting the ruins of an ancient village. Every government office was ordered to organize field trips to the site so the county could report 5,000 visitors within two months.

The involuntary visitors had to take several buses to get to a village 20 miles from the county seat. From there, they hired motorcycles to carry them another nine miles down dirt roads, the newspaper Guangzhou Daily reported.

The Guizhou Commercial News reported that some government offices were left unattended while state employees served as tourists. The next month that order, too, was repealed.

But a 2003 regulation that bars male officials in Sichuan Province from hiring female secretaries may still be on the books. China Youth Daily reported then that the official who initiated the regulation wanted “to ensure that work can be carried out.”

An official in the Communist Party’s provincial office said in an interview that she was not aware of a written rule.

No one ever precisely pinned down the origin of an order this May to kill all dogs in the town of Heihe, on the Russian border in the far northeast. Media reports suggested one town official became irate after a dog bit him as he strolled along a river. But the official refused to confirm that.

Town leaders organized teams of police officers and ordered them to beat to death any dog who ventured into a public space. China National Radio, a state-run agency, broadcast the citizens’ outrage. “When we need to walk our dogs now, we have to first go out and look for cops,” one dog owner lamented.

Scholars say the proliferation of such regulations stems from a lack of professionalism among some local officials.

The Communist Party has been trying in recent years to correct these problems by providing better training and more channels for public feedback. Party schools that groom officials now stress administrative skills as well as ideology. Job evaluations are supposed to be based on concrete results.

Some local officials who used regulations to bilk the public have been dealt with harshly. The party secretary of Feicheng, a town in northeastern China, was fired after imposing a fine of $73 on any farmer who cut down a corn stalk without a license. Farmers complained that they could not harvest their corn without fear of being penalized.

Officials of China’s 637,001 villages seem especially prone to excess regulatory zeal. Until being overruled by higher-ups in 2005, for instance, officials of a village in Chongqing forced unmarried women to pass a chastity test before receiving compensation for farmland appropriated by the government. They argued that only virgins deserved compensation.

In comparison, Huangping County’s policy of roadside salutes is arguably benign. Education officials say compliance is strictly voluntary. Asked whether they follow it, elementary students here tend to burst into nervous giggles.

The rule’s purpose is twofold: to keep children safer on the county’s corkscrew mountain roads and to teach manners. Nearly 30 schools are located along roads without sidewalks or speed bumps. Signs posting speed limits are few and far between; virtually no signs indicate a school nearby.

Long Guoping, deputy chief of the county education bureau, said those measures were coming. “Little by little, the government is installing them,” he said. In the meantime, the salute “might avoid some accidents,” he said. “It allows the drivers to notice the children and the children to notice the drivers.”

Luo Rongmei, who teaches first grade at Luolang Elementary School, is all for it. “Since they started saluting there has not been one traffic accident,” she said, as the students ran and shouted in the yard.

Guo Yuozhang, 63, whose grandson attends the Luolang school, said he was more ambivalent. If the cars come from one direction, “that is not too bad,” said.

Cars coming in both directions is a bigger hassle. “Sometimes they are just turning in circles and they get kind of stuck,” he said. He spun around to illustrate the point, smiling slyly.

Xiyun Yang and Sun Huan contributed research from Beijing.

Correction: October 29, 2009
An article on Monday about the dubious rules issued by local bureaucrats in China, so common that ridiculing them is a pastime of China’s web users, included several errors. A school in southern China where students are required to salute every passing car as they walk to and from school, in order to instill courtesy and reduce traffic accidents, is Luolang Elementary — not Luolong or Loulong.

Hubei Province, where last April officials required civil servants and state workers to purchase large quantities of Hubei brand cigarettes to increase tax revenue, is in central China, not northern China. And Heihe, a town where last May police were ordered to club to death all dogs found in public spaces, is in northeast China, not northwest China.

Tragedy in Karachi

Bilal Qureshi

Tragedy stuck Karachi Pakistan the other day when about 20 women died from suffocation while attempting to collect wheat flour that was distributed by a charity. It isn’t the only time that poor Pakistanis have died tragically, but this one is especially awful because it started with very good intentions. Because the price of flour is very high in Pakistan during Ramadan, a rice trader decided to help the poor in the community by giving away for free what is scarce and expensive – wheat flour, but his desire to help the poor destroyed at least 20 families.

President has ordered an inquiry, but it is obvious that no body will be held accountable for these tragic deaths. Actually, from what I have heard and read about the incident, it really was an unfortunate accident. However, if the trader who was actually distributing free flour had a) informed the authoritarians and b) opted for an open venue (perhaps a park), we wouldn’t be talking about this tragedy. But, hindsight is always 20/20 and I know the man who was trying to help poor in Ghori Garden Karachi regrets his noble efforts.

Poverty forces people to take risks, and this too was a risk on part of these poor women who went to collect free flour. They knew very well that the place and the space designated for distribution is too tight and too small, but they went there anyway. Regretfully, 20 women will never come back – they are dead.

This should be a lesson, a tragic but a valuable lesson that right intentions are not enough – there has to be planning and everything has to be taken into account. This becomes more important when someone tries to distribute free food in a poor area. We have all seen images of people fighting with each other when the aid arrives, but this is the first time I have really understood what it means when people fight each other for food. It is just awful.

As always, everybody has started talking about ‘where is the government’ even though, this act of charity was conceived and organized by a trader working independently in Karachi without consultations or informing anyone in the government or the local authorities. But the anger is directed towards the government as always, because people need a villain and the government is always there for everyone to attack. No body would talk sense; no body would ask for calm, no body would ask for the people to understand what went wrong, no way. Instead, they are all talking about government’s failure in preventing this tragedy from happening, even though, the government didn’t even know about the event. But, government in Pakistan can’t do anything right as reported by the media and the government should have somehow figured out that this is going to happen.

Yeah, time to call in the physics!

At times, I do think that sanity has left Pakistan. . Everyone look for a reason to start firing verbal missiles towards the government, even though the society never takes responsibility either individually or collectively. For example, a famous singer in Pakistan was recently in hospital recovering from multiple problems and his family kept saying that the government is not doing anything to help him. When I asked someone why should the government help this man, I was told that this singer is an asset and he has served the country (by singing?) etc and therefore, it is the duty of the government to pay his medical bills. When I asked the same guy that the singer opted to be a singer because anyone in the government asked him to be a singer or he decided to sing on his own, I was told that it was his (singer’s) passion that helped him become a singer.

So, he decided to become a singer on his own, but now that he is sick, he wants the government to pay for his medical bills. Why? Because by singing, somehow he served the national interest of Pakistan. Yeah, I am not joking, this is what is implied whenever there is anyone associated with showbiz is sick here.

Welcome to Pakistan. Here, almost everyone wants a free ride, especially if it is from the government, but never wants to pay taxes or work for it. If you listen to Pakistanis being interviewed by the reporters for TV channels in Pakistan, you will hear the same thing. Government is not doing anything help us, but when you ask them to specify what is that the government should do, a very long list of things is cited that the government in Pakistan should do, but what would be missing from this list is the desire or the need to work for what they want, let alone deserve. Yeah, the overall message from the public in Pakistan is give me all and give me for free. But this mindset has to change if the country wants to become strong, better and independent. What people in Pakistan have to understand is that in order to become a independent nation, they have to first become independent individually without relying on hand outs from the government.

However, the unfortunate, poor and deserving women in Karachi lost their lives while waiting to get free flour won’t come back. It is also a fact that this tragedy was well, a tragedy. But, isn’t time, yet again, to re-think how Pakistanis approach acts of charity and being responsible when confronted with a challenge? The easiest thing today is to blame the government for everything, but is that the right approach? Isn’t it time to be objective, honest and serious about how to fix the problems that are resulting in chronic poverty, joblessness, and sense of doom and gloom in the society?

ontradiction Remains Vital to Pakistan and Its Art

Courtesy of the artist and Corvi Mora

By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: September 2, 2009

As a crew of riggers finished hoisting a big taxidermied water buffalo onto its surreal perch the other day at the Asia Society Museum on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, there was a certain logistical satisfaction for those who looked on. “Watch the tail, guys, the tail!” one rigger yelled as the beast was pivoted into place atop a tall Ionic column, where it seemed to have climbed in its confusion.

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“High Rise: Lake City Drive” by Huma Mulji.

But the sense of symbolic accomplishment in the feat was much greater. The water buffalo is a ubiquitous presence in many areas of Pakistan, where its tail is often painted red with henna. And the ascension of one onto a pedestal — to create a comically eerie sculpture by the artist Huma Mulji — was an apt metaphor for the larger exhibition being installed around it that morning in several of the museum’s galleries.

“Hanging Fire,” which opens next Thursday, is the first major survey of contemporary art from Pakistan to be presented by an American museum. And for many artists and curators who have long worked in relative obscurity in Pakistan’s contemporary art world — one that has been thriving since the 1980s despite and perhaps in some ways because of the country’s instability — it is a highly anticipated event.

“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” said Melissa Chiu, the museum’s director. “It’s a big moment.”

The exhibition features the work of 15 artists, almost all of whom live and work in Pakistan. Most have passed at one time or another through the National College of Arts in Lahore, an influential force in the country’s artistic life, where the show’s curator, the painter and writer Salima Hashmi, taught for many years. (In the exhibition’s catalog the novelist Mohsin Hamid lovingly describes the school as a microcosm of creative Pakistan; many of his friends went there, and he remembers it as a place where “people who prayed five times a day and people who escaped from their hostels late at night to disappear on sexual adventures in the city could coexist.”)

Pakistan’s reputation in the contemporary art world has often suffered from a simplistic conception that it is a society inhospitable to free expression. And certainly during several periods in the country’s 62-year history, its visual arts, theater and film have been hemmed in by restrictions imposed under sharia, or Islamic law, and under military rule.

But even amid the country’s poverty and recent turmoil — an increase in bombings and kidnappings, the deep inroads made by the Taliban insurgency even as Pakistan has become enmeshed in the United States’ strategy in Afghanistan — a network of commercial galleries, art schools and studios has flourished. And work is being made that deals head on with difficult issues like religion, political oppression and the status of Muslim women.

Hamra Abbas, a 33-year-old artist who was educated in Lahore but spent several years working in Berlin, said in a recent interview at the Asia Society that when she moved back to Pakistan from Germany, her work grew more sophisticated, in part because she was able to find the kind of resources artists everywhere need: affordable space, a tight-knit artistic group, a network of friends and colleagues to collaborate with and help her.

Ms. Abbas’s piece in the exhibition is a huge purplish-red winged fiberglass rocking horse based on the popular imagery that has grown up over centuries of the Buraq, Muhammad’s steed. While the horse is “a culturally loaded icon,” as Ms. Hashmi, the curator, notes, it is also seen everywhere in Pakistan, like a brand logo or cartoon character, and seems to be particularly popular as a way to beautify the sides and backs of trucks. Ms. Abbas, who has given the traditionally human female face of the steed some of her own features, imagines it as a kind of life-size toy, one she has climbed up on and ridden herself, though doing so too publicly in Pakistan could court dangerous misinterpretations.

“You have to be careful,” she said. “The smallest things can end up being big things — you never know. And the big things no one seems to notice.”

Though her work has dealt openly with sexual imagery and has been displayed cautiously within Pakistan — like much other contemporary work there — in private showings at galleries, she said that her reasons for sometimes pulling back from making work that might be too confrontational are mostly personal.

“There are things I have thought of doing and did not do, in part because I didn’t want to offend my parents,” she said.

A thread running through much of the work in the exhibition, one that speaks to the experience of life within the country and to the country’s perception by the West, is the difference between reality comprehended close up and from a great distance.

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

“No Two Burns Are the Same” by Ali Raza, part of a forthcoming show at the Asia Society.

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Image courtesy of the artist and Corvi Mora

“Moderate Enlightenment” (2006) by Imran Qureshi.

Rashid Rana builds large hazy images from mosaics of thousands of tiny photographs. One work appears from a dozen feet away to be a lush medallion-patterned Persian rug, but as the viewer approaches, its dark-reddish hues slowly resolve themselves into individual pictures of bloodied animal carcasses and workers that Mr. Rana took in Pakistani slaughterhouses.

Ali Raza, an artist who has spent many years working the United States but who returned to live and work part-time in Pakistan in 2006, makes large collages using scraps of lushly illustrated advertisements and pages from art books and other publications that have been partly burned so that their incongruous imagery and texts peep out from the mostly blackened paper. As they do in Mr. Rana’s work, the tiny elements coalesce into large figurative images, in one case a doubled portrait of a man screaming, based on a newspaper picture of a violent street protest.

Ms. Mulji’s strangely stranded water buffalo (the one here, in an unanticipated conceptual twist, is American, stuffed by a taxidermist in Rhinbeck, N.Y., because of toxicity concerns about the original in Pakistan) grew out of the artist’s exploration of the strangeness of rampant development in a mostly rural, underdeveloped nation. She describes Pakistan as a place existing “300 years in the past and 30 years in the future.”

In many ways the exhibition, which continues through Jan. 3, illuminates the contradictions of Pakistani contemporary art itself and of its being recognized, especially now at such a crucial juncture in the country’s history, in such a prominent international fashion. Quddus Mirza, a Pakistani artist and critic in Lahore, contends in an essay in the show’s catalog that many artists working in the country have often become “exiles at home,” whose work is “slowly drifting away from the local art scene.”

Yet “the more it is uprooted from its native soil, the more accolades it receives in the mainstream art world,” he adds, a paradoxical kind of success.

Ms. Hashmi, whose personal tribulations have often mirrored that of her country’s precarious art world — she was placed under house arrest during the imposition of martial law in 2007; she was not far away from a recent deadly bomb blast — does not necessarily disagree, but adds that the benefits of such success can outweigh the costs.

“The contemporary artist symbolizes a strong hope for Pakistan,” she argues. “Those who gain a foothold in the international art discourse serve as a conduit, inviting a chance to dialogue with those inside — a conversation that may startle, beguile, enlighten and hopefully enrich.”