Oreos with Chinese Characteristics

Sweet tooth though I have, I never really liked Oreos. That’s not the case for most of my Chinese students. Typically, they have been spared my silver-filled sweet tooth and tend to prefer fruit to any kind of super sugary dessert . . .unless that dessert happens to be an Oreo. They’ll eat one of those in a flash. But what’s an Oreo in China? To be sure, it’s still a mass-produced chocolate cookie familiar to Westerners, but it has Chinese characteristics.

Oreos, cell phones, high-heeled boots, red-rimmed eyeglasses—all of these products that might be familiar to Westerners—somehow have some distinctly Chinese characteristics in China, if not tangible ones (like the Chinese characters on the package of Oreos or the green tea filling in some of the cookies), less tangible ones (like the social context in which they are produced).  So, what’s the social context—far beyond the factory alone to the larger culture –in which Oreos are produced? As most people know, Deng Xiaoping famously characterized China’s emerging economy as a market economy with socialist characteristics. I’m not sure how socialist it is, but one of the characteristics of Oreos is the consumption rate. It’s huge.

If asked what the primary Chinese characteristic is characterizing anything in China, including its most phenomenal feats and failures, socialist or not, I’d be tempted to name one thing:

Scale.

Scale is perhaps the single most distinctive characteristic I observe in China—whether the scale of the mass-production of sweet things like Oreos (100s of 1000s of tons of them a year, I gather), the scale of a feat like the Great Wall (a very old thing that runs over 13,000 miles, according to one survey cited on Wikipedia), the scale of a failure like the famine following the “Great Leap Forward” (possibly resulting in as many as 43 million deaths, again according to Wikipedia),  a culture that is five thousand years old (imagine that—what other culture comes even close?), or simply the number of people standing ahead of me in the Chongqing train station, people heading home for Spring Festival (“chunyun” has been dubbed the largest human migration in history).

http://www.csmonitor.com/Photo-Galleries/In-Pictures/China-s-chun-yun-peak-travel-season#250365

 Scale is a characteristic that might warrant both celebration and commiseration . . .as Wen Jiabo suggested in a 2003 speech delivered at Harvard, “Any small problem multiplied by 1.3 billion will end up being a very big problem, and a very big aggregate divided by 1.3 billion will come to a very tiny figure." 

Zui. ---est. Biggest. Smallest. Longest. Oldest.

Scale: The number of strokes in my Chinese name (29). The power generating capacity of The Three Gorges Dam (22,500 MW). The length of the Yangtze River—or Chang Jiang (3,988 miles). The Dujiangyan Irrigation Project (the oldest and only surviving no-dam irrigation system in the world, thousands of years old). The number of victims in the Nanjing Massacre (200,000, arguably 300,000).

The number of red envelopes produced for Chinese New Year in 2013 is, I’m sure, colossal. The number of hukou certificates is unprecedented—hukou is the ancient system of household registration considered a stabilizing element by some and something akin to apartheid by others. The number of cars on the road is more than Henry Ford could have ever imagined, and, not surprisingly, the scale of air pollution in Beijing is also unprecedented. The number of bright students taking the gaokao, China’s grueling nine-hour university entrance examination, was 9.5 million in 2012. The number of Google- and weibo-blog users are enough to remind us all that times are changing.

I don’t think we can really appreciate anything about China’s past or future, its feats or its failures, its current challenges, without understanding this:

Scale.