pig$

Today was the first day back in Nanchong. I'll get to writing about my travels in Shandong (eastern mountain) and Shanxi (western mountain) soon, but today was worth noting.

I went to go get dinner with Jason (one of my good friends here). He noted that the price of pork had gone way up ("helicoptered" as he put it) since last semester. Meat is as a whole usually more expensive here, but nothing too excessive. Prices on the menus at university restaurants were blacked out and written over with new prices, many upwards of 20 yuan. $3 isn't a lot to pay for a well made pork dish, but given that it usually costs 10~12 yuan, a 50% increase is considerable.

We weren't able to come to a definitive answer as to what caused the increase. Inflation was certainly a possibility. The new pig virus was another, but it didn't seem like there was any sort of concern from people eating or the bosses. I asked Jason how many did he think actually knew that there was a vicious virus affected one of the biggest pork producing areas in China, and he suspected that very few had any idea. All in all some scary information. I'll be staying off the pig brain for a while. (Here's the article from the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/business/worldbusiness/16pigs.html).

We also talked the role of Confucius in Chinese society. I was surprised that when visiting Qufu (Confucius' hometown) and areas around Shandong province there were so many temples dedicated to worshiping him. Confucius himself was a philosopher, not a religious person by any means. He never postulated any deities or gave any indication that he himself believed in a god. The way he is followed, however, is almost likened to making offerings at a Buddhist shrine.

What Confucius did was create a mildly successful social order that (depending on whom you talk to) had a limited impact on shaping modern China. It should be noted that Mao targeted Confucianism (among other philosophies and religions) as an outdated way of thinking and destroyed numbers of Confucian temples. I equated Confucius worship with that of Marx saying that each were respectively equally influential in their times and certainly moved Chinese society in a different direction. I argued that it would be preposterous though for me to go to a temple and make an offering or pray to a Karl Marx statue. In many ways though, Confucius is the founder of an emergent China in the middle ages and Marx is the founder of a modern China that has become emergent within the last century. Confucius lived around 2,500 years ago; will there be a Marx temple in China in another 2,400 years?