Shanghaied!

So it's about time I start my blog, as I've been in China for a while now. Incidently, Blogspot, the site you're viewing right now, is blocked by the Chinese government, lest I post things to stir unrest in the country. I'm accessing it and other blocked sites, like Facebook and YouTube, through a VPN. I wasn't able to post things my first few weeks when I was traveling around China. I first arrived in Shanghai on Jan. 21, and after I had adjusted to the 14 hour time difference, made my way to Beijing, then Shenyang, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong before returning to Shanghai for work.

Through this blog, I hope to share what I'm doing and experiencing here, as well as offer my own insights into Chinese government and everyday life. I'm in China for an internship in the Shanghai Agricultural Trade Office (ATO) of the Foreign Agricultural Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. The mission of the ATOs around the world is to increase U.S. agricultural exports by offering help and market information for American companies looking to export products around the world. Though I'm working for the government, the views expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the U.S. government or its agencies.

Naturally, I'll be drawing on other life experiences for comparisons to China. Forunately, I'm blessed to have many points of comparison: I've lived in both rural and urban parts of the U.S. (Iowa and Washington, DC), western and eastern Europe (Germany and the Czech Republic), and Japan. Still, going from Traer, Iowa, (pop. 1,600) to Shanghai (pop. 23,000,000) is a big change. Having already lived in the world's largest city, Tokyo (metro pop. 33,000,000), I'm not phased by large Asian metropolises.

As a political scientist with an interest in economics, I'm going to be including a lot of information about the Chinese government and economy. Obviously, China is very interesting and contradictory in those aspects; it has the world's second highest GDP but is still very much a developing country run by a communist government with an economy that is more cut-throat capitalist than most others. For those of you who have no interest in politics or economics, fear not, you can easily skip over these parts and just look at my pretty pictures.

By the way, the title of this section of my blog, "Shanghaied," refers of course to the city in which I'm living. The term originally meant to be put aboard a ship by force, often with the help of liquor or a drug, and has since come to mean to kidnap or put into an undesirable position by trickery, force, or threat. The practice was popular in the U.S. northwest in the mid-19th century due to a combination of factors, including: 1) Once a sailor signed onboard a vessel, it was illegal for him to leave before the voyage's end and 2) There was a shortage of labor as crews abandoned ship because of the California Gold Rush. Some were sailors who joined a crew on their own terms, only to realize later they were stuck. Often, men were the victims of "crimps," or kidnappers. The most straightforward way for a crimp to shanghai a sailor was to render him unconscious, forge his signature on the ship's articles, and pick up his "blood money." Finding crewmen was the job of boarding masters, who were paid blood money "by the body." The boarding masters would pay the crimps and by the time the sailor regained consciousness, he was on the ocean somewhere, commonly Shanghai.

I'll try to keep these posts coming. If there are aspects of China that you're curious about, feel free to email me or comment. I'm always looking for topic ideas.