To me, the natural progression from designing countries was to giving those countries governments. Not a potentially contentious issue at all! What could possibly go wrong? What about the title of this post? Hah haa. My opinion was that there ought not to be any problems with the lesson if it was purely hypothetical and aimed at the made-up countries my students had invented. To simplify matters, I picked four types of government for them to choose from.

The obvious place to start was ‘Democracy’. I decided to use this term in a more original sense than perhaps it is used today; that is to say, everyone gets a vote in everything. What most people would recognise as a democratic state would probably be labelled as a ‘Republic’, which is essentially where political leaders are regularly voted for by the people, which saves a referendum every time something needs done. At this point, several students recognised the word ‘republic’ from ‘the People’s Republic of China’ and I felt it best not to comment. A couple seemed to notice that my definition of the word, however vague, did not particularly line up with their use of it.

Next was ‘Monarchy’. Incidentally, I taught that the UK is a republic, because explaining the term ‘constitutional monarchy’ (even without using that actual phrase) seemed needlessly complicated; I settled for, ‘It’s a republic because we have a Queen but she is not the leader,’ which pretty much covers it. Finally we had ‘Anarchy’, hence the title of this post. Interesting fact: the Chinese language has no word for Anarchy (that I could find); instead I resorted to saying ‘无政府’ – ‘wù zhēngfǔ’ (literally ‘without government’). My historical example of Somalia as an anarchic state (until 2006) also failed, as it seems to be a common misconception that Africa is a country, so despite having a Chinese name, it was fairly meaningless.

I turned this series of lessons into something of an experiment (highly unscientific, of course), because not only did I ask them to choose a government, I wanted to know why they’d chosen that type. Anarchy scored… surprisingly highly. Even when you consider that at least half of the teams were exclusively made up of teenage boys. The idea of ‘no rules, no school, no work’ seemed so appealing to some that even ‘no hospitals, no Internet and no sanitation’ (assuming such infrastructure requires at least some form of government) didn’t seem to be enough of a deterrent. Similarly popular (but nowhere near to the same extent) was Monarchy. ‘I’m King!’ said one boy, looking around his group, ‘and… and he is my Queen!’ pointing at another (male) student; cue much outrage from said student. Ah, the joys of discovering a language which differentiates between male and female personal pronouns; in Chinese, both 他 and 她 – he and she – are pronounced ‘tā’ which means they often get mixed up.

We had Kieran over for the weekend, a good excuse as ever to go to Essen restaurant and watch a horror film (this time, Cabin in the Woods, which really wasn’t what I expected). There was also the slightly embarrassing moment when, in the supermarket next to our house, I told Kieran I was looking for bleach but had been unable to find it on the last few visits. ‘Isn’t it in the white bottle over there?’ he asked, ‘with ‘BLEACH’ in English written in capital letters on the side?’ Yes. Yes, that would be the bleach. What’s that saying about taking the boy out of Essex?

—TJC

Featured photo: Paris, Tyler, Kieran & I with friends at Nine Dragon Pond.