I know all this because Alice is my co-worker. We teach English side by side, and then we return to our respective dwellings in Shenyang and stations in life.

While an unabashedly capitalist institution such as my school might segregate foreigners through income, the Chinese government—the government that bats American spy planes out of the sky and would have blamed the entire West had Beijing lost the 2008 Olympics—does the same when it hires foreign teachers for its schools and maintains segregated prisons and dorms.

At first, I wanted to know why Alice isn’t worth it. I wanted to know why someone who works with me, who works longer than me, should deserve so much less simply because she’s from here and I’m not. I didn’t care that her salary is considered good pay by Chinese standards. It still doesn’t buy her a good lifestyle by my standards.

But now I think I understand why everyone, including my co-workers, fawns over the inadvertent imperialists like myself, those of us who are living above the locals and taking from this country because we can. They believe they need us here. If not for foreign teachers, foreign students, even foreign visitors who became foreign prisoners, how would this country develop? Foreign investment, which China depends on, cannot by itself change China as the Chinese seem to want it to change. Foreign people have to come, too. But how many would, if they were offered nothing more than most Chinese receive?

Ironically, then, to state it mildly, because of my 4000-yuan monthly salary, Alice might one day earn closer to it than she does now; because of the relatively luxurious conditions in which I dwell, Alice might one day experience better than she currently does. Until then, the disparities that make me wonder why she doesn’t hate me are part of, and perhaps the price of, development.

And so China, to secure its own survival, is inviting in the imperialists, and Mao is stuck staring silently ahead as the people he left behind sing a new kind of revolutionary tune under his nose.

Sarah J. Ramer ’03, a Crimson editor, is a folklore and mythology concentrator in Dunster House. This summer, she is outnumbered.