rolling china thread 2011

we've never had one of these before. might as well start it off with the high speed train crash that killed 40 and injured 191 people. good article on the online reaction in china

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/asia/29china.html

also really hilarious and upsetting that the first reaction by the wenzhou government was to... bury the train! because they obviously already knew the exact reasons why it had failed and would know how to prevent it in the future!

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2011/07/poll-98-say-wenzhou-train-buried-to-destroy-evidence/

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-07/29/c_131018337.htm

the passing of the hot potato is almost charming

and of course the accident wasn't at all surprising - no shortage of articles on the cut corners and corruption prior to the crash

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/are-chinas-high-speed-trains-heading-off-the-rails/2011/04/22/AFHzaNWE_story.html

yeah, i saw a piece on 60 minutes, i think it was, about a month ago which mentioned the concerns around how it was being rushed

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/asia/10mistress.html?pagewanted=all

some good schadenfreude

http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/chinas-most-ambitious-replica-manhattan-084283

lol they r just doing that to increase GDP

two articles today in the NYT, neither very surprising

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/asia/30china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/asia/30spy.html

i think jonathan spence was the first guy i saw make the really apparent point about 中国不能再乱了 being the great motivator behind chinese at every socioeconomic slot accepting topdown invasive control of things like-- well, everything. like, i hear it when i talk to chinese friends about 6-4... and 7-5 and local urban planning and family planning policy and fuckin everything.... this kind of stuff makes people feel shitty but it's broadly considered worth it. because the alternative is seen as beijing becoming new delhi.

did you read ai weiwei's postdetention thing about beijing? i mean, it's sort of amazing because it's just this unvarnished mean true look at how life is. at the end of the day, a good portion of people are cooool with the state of affairs and fuck ai weiwei what the hell is he trying to do?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html

yeah 中国不能再乱了 is pretty much the standard feeling of a majority of Chinese people and also the reason why they are so accepting of what mao did - and to a certain extent, I can see what they're coming from, how many other countries are dealing with a billion people, 2/3 to 3/4 of whom have next to no education? it's a big problem

i think jonathan spence was the first guy i saw make the really apparent point about 中国不能再乱了 being the great motivator behind chinese at every socioeconomic slot accepting topdown invasive control of things like-- well, everything.

dayo do you have a link to his English-language writing about this?

haha maybe ask dylannn? but prob
the first stepping stone to understanding that is the intense competitive nationalism that china fosters in its ppl

okay cool thanks

dylannn?

right, 中国不能再乱 is part of the milder contemporary justification for the excesses of the 60s/70s.

but i'm mostly referring to the post 1980s fear of rocking the boat: zhongnanhai is scared of going too far to the right or left, and reformers on both sides are sick of the status quo but have also mostly been raised under the cloud of the cultural revolution, where chinese society basically stopped functioning. there seems to be an acceptance on both sides (the party establishment and their opponents, and other people in the middle) that things can't stay exactly as they are. after you watch the country tear itself apart in the 70s or shit hit the fan in the 80s (not just tiananmen but protests in every other damn city and lots of other state repression like the anti-spiritual pollution campaign) i can get being shy to push too hard.

nationalism is a big part of it too i guess. the national myth is unity, that china has always been china, has always been united, has always been one. china's golden ages come during unity under a single power, and the chaotic shitty times happen when the country is split up or conquered. the nation is a fortress against chaos and poverty and we better hold onto it.

i mean, as far as recommending something, i dunno. i read a good piece on the idea in general-- geremie r barme or jonathan spence? both of them have written enough about reform and the late 80s reform movement in general that they're a good place to start. but i mean it's the subtext of a lot of writing about reform in china. like the last poets said.

what is 中国不能再乱 stop talking secret talk!!

just in general and because i was reminded of him i'd like to say i really really like these pieces by geremie barme

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=021_promise.inc&issue=021

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=017_confession.inc&issue=017

both at china heritage quarterly which is worth checking out

Awesome dylannn, thanks stacks for all that. You've given me lots to go on.

iatee: I gather 中国不能再乱 is basically a belief that China is not capable of descending into chaos.

no, it's all too capable! 中国不能再乱 is what your intelligent sympathetic chinese friends say to you when you ask what they think about everything from tiananmen to language reform to ethnic conflict. deep sacrifices must be made to preserve social stability and harmony. ie. the problem with falun gong isn't that it's BAD but that it causes social instability and social instability is unacceptable in china.

ah

Oh god, 中文语法 will be the death of me. Makes sense now, i.e. 不能 = "must not be allowed to"

Wow, the regime's really under people's skin, isn't it? I mean I'm aware that a certain level of social order is demanded and expected in China but it doesn't help that the govt exploits and propels the sentiment (although in some cases I'm sure it has benefits for the whole).

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/08/campaign-2012-huntsman-should-know-better-on-china.html i love huntsman as us china ambassador. so many great awkward moments.

The irony here is that I can't read all the linked articles right now because I'm studying for 中文 exams next week.

nationalism is a big part of it too i guess. the national myth is unity, that china has always been china, has always been united, has always been one. china's golden ages come during unity under a single power, and the chaotic shitty times happen when the country is split up or conquered. the nation is a fortress against chaos and poverty and we better hold onto it.

i mean, as far as recommending something, i dunno. i read a good piece on the idea in general-- geremie r barme or jonathan spence? both of them have written enough about reform and the late 80s reform movement in general that they're a good place to start. but i mean it's the subtext of a lot of writing about reform in china. like the last poets said.

― dylannn, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah this is pretty otm - gonna be interesting to see much impact the putonghua initiatives will have on the overall makeup of the country. kind of depressing to think that pretty much all new media consumed in china will be in putonghua, and that local dialects (is it even okay to call them dialects?) can't share the same space. (I think this is right - but spitballin', feel free to prove me wrong here?) on one hand it's rad that nowadays a 20 something from guangzhou is gonna be able to converse freely with a 20 something from shanghai but...

deep sacrifices must be made to preserve social stability and harmony. ie. the problem with falun gong isn't that it's BAD but that it causes social instability and social instability is unacceptable in china.

― dylannn, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah the big mistake the falun gong made was organizing and trying to put anti-party ads in a newspaper iirc? china has also had a history of sects and splinters going on to do major damage (i.e. taiping rebellion)

I'm reading through Spence's search for modern china right now and it's kind of lol to see the same problems in current china were uh, pretty endemic 300-400 years ago too! corrupt officials, problems collecting taxes, wealthy merchants hiding their assets through a tissue of shell companies and owners, nepotism...

...actually that's a pretty good summation of a lot of the problems all countries have today

nah you're right dude. chinese language policy is really, really heavyhanded. i was real interested to see the protests over cantonese use in guangzhou media last year. a serious regional languages like cantonese is pretty safe for the moment. wu and minnan have got tens of millions of speakers and are in decline but fairly safe. it helps that they're attached to major centers that are sort of politically and culturally powerful or just distant enough from the center or have a history of links with the outside world (this fits for guangdong, shanghai, fujian). but there are so many languages (or things that you can genuinely call dialects or topolects) that will disappear without anyone really noticing (unlike cantonese or wu, almost no media is produced in the language, no academic interest in them).

it's completely different from taiwan or vancouver (or hk?), where "speaking chinese" usually means speaking two, three, four chinese languages with some amount of fluency. in vancouver, being able to speak mandarin and cantonese is nearly a guarantee, then usually a hometown/province dialect.

heh yeah I have friends who teach in rural parts of China and they mention how they have students who come from towns separated by like, five miles (albeit maybe with a mountain or valley in between) and their dialects will be mutually unintelligible. so the big push for putonghua is certainly understandable but I'll be really saddened at the linguistic landscape in, say, 50 years.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTQ1NDgyNzY=.html

i pattern my chinese speaking after jia pingwa in this cctv documentary.

Is it true to say that the Chinese are so used to the state shaping their culture on their behalf that they're happy to let it continue?

Re the putonghua issue: Surely it would be far easier for a common-speaking China to mobilise against the government. It just seems like the current situation lends itself to keeping people in line and relatively isolated (this coming from someone who's never been part of an uprising and so is probably talking crap). Maybe the govt has such great confidence in its ability to maintain the status quo that it doesn't see a common tongue as a risk.

the communist party's nationalism isn't something they cooked up in 1949 and convinced people of. they're the people kindling that flame at present, but the myth of the chinese nation/the oneness of the chinese people is something that came up before mao. this isn't command economy YOU MUST LOVE THE NATION stuff as much as it's nationalism by popular demand. plenty of people hate the party but are quick to show it love for stuff like building an aircraft carrier and taking back islands from the philippines and building a strong nation after a hundred years of humiliation by foreign powers. -- this is why spence's book on the chinese revolution is interesting. it covers the last hundred fifty years or so of political change, rather than just focusing on the communist party.

china at ground level is relatively politically open right now (unless you're in tibet, xinjiang, or your criticisms reach a foreign audience). there's that creaking soviet state apparatus creaking above you and it locks a lot of people up or fucks up their lives but i think the first complaint about it would be, basically: it's not effective enough. it's too corrupt. it's bureaucratic and backwards. it's been taken over by capitalists who reward each other with cash and hookers. they're disappearing lawyers and smacking ai weiwei around and i'd hate to be a migrant worker in beijing, sure, but china is rock solid.

nationalism and the myth of the chinese race is an idea with pretty old roots (let's say that they start to crystalize during the qing dynasty, though, and part of it was the fact that the leaders of the qing were NOT chinese/foreign invasion) and at this point, the communist party is less about soviet-style intimidation and oppression. it's a lot more about playing the vibes of nationalism and showing why it's the only hope to keep things real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEJbNPeYNz8

the communist party's nationalism isn't something they cooked up in 1949 and convinced people of. they're the people kindling that flame at present, but the myth of the chinese nation/the oneness of the chinese people is something that came up before mao. this isn't command economy YOU MUST LOVE THE NATION stuff as much as it's nationalism by popular demand.

Oh yeah, I totally get that Communism was just another flavour of the same approach they've been taking for generations. Also yeah, it seems to be in the blood of the people that they feed off the sort of approach that would kickstart a revolution just about anywhere else, mainly because they hold so much cachet in their historic ability to self-manage (again, please pull me up if I'm talking shit, just trying to coalesce what little I know).

there's that creaking soviet state apparatus creaking above you and it locks a lot of people up or fucks up their lives but i think the first complaint about it would be, basically: it's not effective enough. it's too corrupt. it's bureaucratic and backwards. it's been taken over by capitalists who reward each other with cash and hookers. they're disappearing lawyers and smacking ai weiwei around and i'd hate to be a migrant worker in beijing, sure, but china is rock solid.

Okay so I'm guessing this comes back to 中国不能再乱 in that, for all the missteps the highest level of govt is (or appears to be) taking, most people who care about those sorts of things appreciate the historic and prospective direction of the country and cut their losses. I assume that includes the massive sell-out of Communist/Maoist ideals in favour of the new race for property etc (although tbh I don't see how that can last, given some of the stuff Ai Weiwei said about those left behind in Beijing (in the link upthread)).

I'm really loving your posts btw. It's so hard to get a broad view of a country when so many people seem to disagree so vehemently about what's going on. I'll have to watch the yt video after work.

good article about english learning in china (click the link)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-china

I've often wondered about the wisdom of forcing literacy upon people who don't need it. Absorption is so much more valuable than classes (not that I'm excusing the quality of the classes), and if your trade and your whole world is farming, you can die never having to read much more than warning signs.

there's still a huge belief in the power of english, obviously, at all levels of society.

purely anecdotal, there's a lot of shitty shitty english education out there. but 1) there's increasingly an elite push for undergrad/grad programs just saying fuck it and going to 95% english (cheaper than studying abroad! or good preparation for it), 2) yeah, there's lots of rote learning of english by kids but some of it wears off on them and there are a lot of fucking kids in china that can communicate in english (this is more "purely anecdotal").

The big development over the next couple of years might be universities in the UK, Aus and US setting up campuses within China to deliver satellite programmes. It has been happening for a while but i can see it exploding.

most of the good English speakers I met from China also happen to be really fucking rich

I spent two weeks at a college in a 'rural' town (i.e. still maybe a million or two people living there) and the English level of the kids was... just... even the English majors...

Yeah, the state-school teachers generally aren't of a high standard outside big cities. It'll change, though. The commercial provision of English teaching is getting much more professional.

The big development over the next couple of years might be universities in the UK, Aus and US setting up campuses within China to deliver satellite programmes.

Our unis are big on setting up regional campuses (one even has one in South Africa) so yeah, very likely if it hasn't happened already. The Aus–China link is strengthening by the week atm.

yeah but who will be able to afford to attend those campuses?

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students come to the UK, Australia and the US each year as it stands. Depending on the pricing model, i could see it being pretty attractive to the growing number of middle-class families who can't afford to send their kids abroad but want the perceived status boost of an English-language degree.

There's an Australian organisation (RMIT, i think) that has 12k students in their Vietnam campus already. There's a market out there.

sorry if I'm being cynical and seeing it as a giant cash grab

parents who can afford to send their kids to study overseas are already pretty damn well-off relative to the rest of chinese society

Nah, it's a total cash grab. Transnational education's a multi-trillion dollar business. Standards tend to be decent but there's no doubt it further reinforces the division between haves and have-nots.

Ha, RMIT is where I'm doing my zhongwen course \(^__^)/

fwiw whenever I've seen the promotional material for our int'l campuses it's never clear about the proportion of local students v Australians. They all seem to happen in an exchange programme but I don't remember seeing any South African students in my old uni.

Oh and the students in the photos always look rich.

it's kind of crazy but the buying power of the renminbi in china is pretty equivalent to the buying power of the USD in america - so like a bottle of shampoo that costs $4 in america will cost around 3-4 RMB (sometimes less!) in China. (one reason why americans/most westerners feel like they are the KING OF THE WORLD when they come to China). so you can live by pretty decently on, say, a 4000 RMB a month salary, which is actually really really good if you're a recent college grad or someone who's not a big boss.

but then you try and use that salary to finance your kids education overseas and it's like, damn, education all of a sudden costs 10x what it does inside the country

this is pretty lol

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90780/7443254.html

China has made remarkable progress in modernization in the last half century, while the same progress took developed Western countries one or two hundred years. China's growth has not only brought direct benefits to more than 1.3 billion Chinese people but also promoted the world prosperity as it has become the engine for world economic growth.

Certain international observers cannot find an answer to this question: How did China make such remarkable progress in such a short time?

"Certain international observers" looooooooooooooooool. I do not know where to start with this.

"waah it took you two hundred years to modernise and look, we just built a highrise in six years!!!! omg"

i just

Sorry for triple post but I know what's bothering me, it's that the article is exactly like when people write their own wikipedia pages. I keep wanting to put "(citation needed)" after everything.

Anyway there's also this (also re the People's Daily) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/02/us-china-internet-idUSTRE78110S20110902

Basically the party wants to anticipate when some internet thing is likely to catch on and block it before that happens.

Once the government tries to control an Internet technology that has already become popular, it faces "fierce resistance and a backlash" from users, and also international criticism, said the newspaper.

"Clearly, in the future when developing and applying new Internet technologies, there must first be a thorough assessment, adopting even more prudent policies and enhancing foresight and forward thinking in administration," it said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/world/asia/03china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

very troubling

china should chill out and stop executing and disappearing everyone

More Chinese Dissidents Appear to Disappear

interesting phrasing

radiohead should send someone to assist the chinese g'v'ment

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/business/global/china-changes-direction-on-car-sales.html?pagewanted=all

this is great news - cars are such a fucking scourge in china. this past winter in beijing, sat in two half an hour long traffic jams in which my bus did not move a single inch until a traffic officer was called in to untangle things.

related, terrifying lols:

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjk5ODM1NDA4.html

hope it's fake but also totally believable, the things chinese parents will subject their children to is really unlimited.

also speaking about losing dialects, the manchu dialect is pretty much done:

http://www.bruce-humes.com/?p=4985

When Ji Jinlu , 66, was a boy, he was unable to speak Putonghua until he went to school at age nine. Today he has hardly anyone to talk to in his native tongue.
Ji is an ethnic Manchu - a descendant of a nomadic tribe from northeastern China that became the imperial rulers of the country for more than 250 years. He is one of fewer than 100 remaining Manchus with a working grasp of the language.

Like most remaining speakers, Ji's native tongue has become rather rusty over the years as most people in his village, including his children and grandchildren, are unable to speak it.

"Even if you speak Manchu with them they don't understand," said Ji, a farmer born and bred in remote Sanjiazi village in Heilongjiang province, where farmers grow rice and keep dairy cattle. "And they don't want to learn anyway."

Although there are more than 10 million people in China who are classified as ethnic Manchus - most of whom live in Heilongjiang, Liaoning and Jilin in the northeast - linguists say that Sanjiazi is the last Manchu-speaking community in China.

Even then, only three villagers - all over 80 years old - are fluent in their native language and another 15 - above 70 years old - are conversant to some degree in their mother tongue, says Professor Zhao Aping , director of the Manchu Language and Culture Research Centre at Heilongjiang University.

The traditional nomadic lifestyle Ji knew as a boy is gone forever. And the Manchu language, which is rich in hunting terms and the names of wild animals, has never seemed more irrelevant or obsolete in the lives of the villagers.

"My grandfather took me hunting and together we would catch foxes, eagles, rabbits. But I haven't hunted for more than 40 years and children these days don't even learn to ride horses anymore," Ji said. "People have forgotten the Manchu language. I suppose it will disappear in 10 or 20 years - I guess this can't be helped."

Shi Junguang , 34, is one of the few villagers who senses the urgency of saving the language, and has spent the past few years building a sound archive of old villagers talking Manchu. He knows that once they go, so too will their heritage.

The former farmer faces an uphill battle. Hardly anyone in the village is interested in preserving their ancestors' language. Most young people, who are brought up speaking Putonghua, have left the village for the cities and others stay home to grow corn, soya beans and rice.

But Shi, who took pains to learn his grandmother's native tongue, became a Manchu teacher when the village school resumed teaching the language in 2006. It is the only primary school in China offering classes in Manchu, even though it is not part of the mandatory curriculum and students only take two classes a week.

"I can see the language just disappearing," Shi said. "If we do nothing to preserve it, our children will blame us one day. The language is the root of our identity."

But even with Shi's enthusiasm and the classes he teaches at the school, linguists say it will not be easy to revive Manchu. Social and economic changes as well as years of persecution of the Manchu identity mean the language is not in a fit state to survive.

One of the Tungusic languages, a family of endangered tongues in Siberia and the former Manchuria, Manchu was the language of the Qing imperial court after its conquest of China in 1644.

A mutually intelligible dialect, Xibe, survives in somewhat better shape on the other side of the country in the Qapqal Xibe autonomous county in the northwest of Xinjiang . Xibe is spoken by descendants of members of an ethnic group allied to the Manchu army sent there by Emperor Qianlong in 1764.

But the Manchu language has been in gradual decline since the population migrated to other parts of the country with the Qing court and was assimilated into the mainstream Han culture through social contact and intermarriage, despite an official policy of maintaining a separate identity.

With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, the Manchu identity, with its association with the ruling class and the special privileges it enjoyed, became an embarrassing liability. During the Cultural Revolution, Manchu speakers were labelled as spies for using their mysterious tongue, forbidden from speaking it and often jailed. Many ethnic Manchus adopted Chinese surnames, changed their officially recorded ethnicity to Han, abandoned their language and hid their ancestry from others, including their children.

Although there has been a recent resurgence of interest among ethnic Manchus, some of whom take weekend classes to learn the language, linguists say it is almost impossible to stem the downward trend.

"The death of Manchu is inevitable," Zhao said. "When these old people in their 70s and 80s pass away, so will the language."

According to a study by the Inner Mongolia University, 85 per cent of Sanjiazi's population were Manchu speaking in 1961. But in later studies by the Heilongjiang Manchu research centre, the figure had fallen to 50 per cent in 1986 and 18 per cent in 2002, just 186 people. Another study in 2009 found that fewer than 100 people in the region - mostly Sanjiazi residents with some living in other villages in Heilongjiang - still had some ability in Manchu.

Sanjiazi - literally "three families" - was a close-knit community descended from three Manchu families that made up a military garrison sent there in 1674 during Emperor Kangxi's reign to defend the border against the Russians. The village was virtually cut off from mainstream Han culture until the 1950s when a road was built connecting it to the nearest town.

As Han Chinese settled in the village in subsequent decades, the linguistic environment changed dramatically, making it a necessity for the Manchu-speaking villagers to communicate in Putonghua.

Linguists say the obligatory use of Putonghua at school, the lack of Manchu lessons in the formal school curriculum and an absence of qualified teachers have also contributed to the demise of the language.

Shi and a colleague, probably the country's only primary-school Manchu teachers, are non-native speakers and rely on old textbooks that emphasise vocabulary and the language's Mongolian-derived script, rather than conversational skills.

Perhaps a greater factor in the demise of Manchu is that the villagers themselves are voluntarily giving up their own language, mainly due to the restricted social use and the perception of its low value as a tool for economic and social advancement, linguists say.

"A language needs a proper environment to thrive," Zhao said. "With rapid modernisation and economic development, people want to find jobs in the outside world, and the Manchu-speaking community has become out of touch with mainstream society."

Putonghua has long been the default language in Sanjiazi. Even elderly native Manchu villagers greet each other in Putonghua, switching to Manchu only occasionally. Local people even call Manchu fan hua, the foreign language.

"Manchu is in fact already a dead language because people don't converse in it anymore," said Professor Guo Mengxiu , who is the deputy director at the Manchu research centre in Heilongjiang.

To arrest the decline of the language, linguists are calling for government initiatives to promote the use of Manchu in education and society. They would like to see Manchu classes included in school curriculums in traditionally Manchu-speaking areas, to give residents social and economic incentives to use it.

"This is an endangered language and the task to preserve it is very urgent, yet there is no plan to save it," said a Manchu expert who declined to be named, bemoaning the lack of a government strategy or funding to save Manchu from extinction.

Examples abound overseas of successful government programmes to resuscitate endangered languages. In Wales, government grants are given to voluntary or private-sector organisations that support activities leading to the increased use of Welsh. Charles, the Prince of Wales, has studied the language. The use of Ireland's ancient Celtic language and the minority Basque and Catalan tongues in Spain are also supported by government initiatives, including radio and television stations in regional dialects.

Experts say Manchu is among more than 3,000 endangered languages in the world that are likely to die out by the end of the century. Manchu is classified by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation as "critically endangered".

Amid the lack of official initiatives to formally protect it, the task of the preservation of the Manchu language has been left to a handful of ethnic Manchus and scholars who are keen to preserve their roots.

Li Dan , 33, and Liu Feixiong , 27, both ethnic Manchus passionate about discovering the culture and identity of their ancestors, have been running free Sunday classes in a Beijing hutong since 2007. The classes are taught by volunteers who, like themselves, have only learned the language over a few years from the available books and dictionaries and from other non-native speakers.

"I was just curious: how did my ancestors speak?" said 25-year-old Sirdan, an auditor and amateur Manchu teacher who started learning the language four years ago.

Linguists applaud their resolve, but said their efforts would sadly not be able save the Manchu language.

"The efforts of enthusiasts will help a little bit, but not in the real sense of passing on the heritage," Guo said, noting that native speakers had long abandoned the language. "If the people themselves are willingly giving it up, others' efforts to save the language will be in vain."

sad

I know! the manchus were fucking baller.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurhaci

I am totally stealing "Aisin Gioro" for my indie rock band name

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisin_Gioro

yeah always sad to see a language die, but one with that kind of history is extra poignant and significant.

i feel bad for the old ppl. if i was them i would grab the youngsters of the village by their collars and tell them listen to me speak manchu. but i guess if there's no point there's no point.

keep xibe alive

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/arts/chinese-art-collectors-prove-to-be-a-new-market-force.html?pagewanted=all

lol @ anybody pretending these dudes are in it for any reason other than being mercenary profiteers, hope the vicissitudes of the art world leave their new 'investments' in flames

also color me surprised (not)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/world/asia/07china.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2Yuv92ttt4

found this at http://adamcathcart.wordpress.com/, thought i'd drop this off here, since we were talking about nationalism, chinese cultural identity (and manchus came up too right?). wakeman like a lot of other contemp china historians (outside of china) emphasizes that china as a great big solid idea one nation one race never really existed. lecture proper begins around 14:50.

I guess it doesn't matter much what the historical basis is if it's being pushed as the party line

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/07/7647012-c-section-baby-boom-in-china

lol @ chinese mothers

also lol @ article for calling this a bribe: "She spent about $3,000 on her surgery, which did not include the "red envelope" of $150 she gave to her obstetrician and anesthesiologist, a common bribe offered by Chinese patients before a big surgery."

so here's the new proposed criminal law code mentioned in the nyt article

http://www.npc.gov.cn/COBRS_LFYJ/user/UserIndex.jsp?ID=2526729

and here's an unofficial translation of article 30 which I found to be pretty accurate

Residential surveillance2 should be carried out at the residence of the accused criminal suspect; those without a fixed residence can be held at specified location. As for those suspected of harming state security, terrorist activities, or major corruption, carrying out residential surveillance in their residence could pose obstacles to investigation, [so if it is approved by] the immediately superior people’s procuratorate or the public security organ, the residential surveillance can be carried out at an appointed location. However, the appointed place does not need to be a detention center or a designated case center [专门的办案场所].”

The family members of the person being held should be notified of the location and reasons for the detainee’s detention at a designated location for residential surveillance within 24 hours of the detention being carried out, except in cases where notification is impossible or the detainee is suspected of involvement in harming state security or terrorist activities, or if informing them could impede investigations.

http://maryannodonnell.wordpress.com/

i wanted to recommend that to somebody for a while. she writes really well about contemp china and urban change in a place that i think is not written about often enough or not written about well enough, shenzhen.

yeah shenzhen is super important. third or fourth biggest metropolitan area in china right? I think I've seen her blog before - she was featured on cnn go's hk site I think.

some promising news: http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2011-09/09/c_122010702.htm

the long decline of hong kong into china's shadow is going to be sad to watch

re: li keqiang's visit

The Laguna City housing tour went well until a resident, Wong Kin, and his daughter ventured too close to police lines. Wong was arrested presumably because of the T-shirt he was wearing. On the back was printed in very large red and blue Chinese characters: “REVERSE THE VERDICT ON JUNE FOURTH; the Revolution Has Not Yet Succeeded; BUILD DEMOCRACY; Comrades Must Still Persevere” (Standard, photo, Sept. 2). June Fourth refers to the 1989 removal of protestors from Tiananmen Square, Beijing, after their movement was officially designated subversive. Hong Kong democrats’ favorite rallying cry is to reverse the 1989 verdict and remove the subversive label that justified the crackdown.
Wong was physically picked up and carried away by several plainclothes members of the VIP protection team. One of the men reportedly told the daughter that it was “rude” to wear such a shirt. Police later said they arrested the man because he moved in too close to their security zone, and then subsequently fined him for an old jaywalking offense. Police also prevented a TV cameraman from filming the whole scene (Apple, photos, Aug. 31). Later they claimed they mistook his camera for a “black shadow” and reacted instinctively.

re: china's virulent nationalism

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/09/when_china_rules_the_world_well_see.html

One key difference is that China is not a nation-state but should be understood as a "civilization-state." Its identity was formed well before China assumed the status of a nation-state. What defines the Chinese, therefore, is not their sense of nationhood but their sense of civilization, a civilization frequently claimed to have existed continuously for the past 5,000 years. Another difference, says Jacques, is that China is increasingly likely to revert to an ancient conception of its East Asian neighbours as tributary-states rather than as nation-states. Until little more than a century ago, China was organised in relation to these other peoples. Yet another difference is that there is a distinctively Chinese attitude to race and ethnicity. Unlike the world’s other most populous nations, the Chinese do not acknowledge or seek a multiracial character. The Han Chinese, comprising a majority of some 92%, believe themselves to comprise a distinct race whose superiority, when a long view is taken, they regard as self-evident. In this view, Western ascendancy is a recent and brief anomaly, following which China will return to its natural position at the centre of the world. It is this latter point which gives rise to one of Jacques' most compelling concepts: the "middle kingdom mentality."

(can you tell I'm catching up on my google reader feed)

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/09/chinas-iceland-moment.html

happy midautumn festival ya'll

that martin jacques book got a fair amount of attn here a couple of yrs ago

i guess it's useful that he calls into question the durability of the westphalian order but he does seem like an old trot axegrinder and probably not /that/ literate wrt to china

yeah wouldn't be surprised if the book was an attack on the_west w/ china as a useful vague placeholder threat/alternative

bestseller china books are shit and no one writing them is "/that/ literate wrt to china." martin jacques misunderstands chinese history and misunderstands contemporary ideological and cultural trends in china. i think.

i think this is worth reading:

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:RG8GH6hRllIJ:docs.china-europa-forum.net/s12a_zhang_yongle_-_patters_of_chinese_thought.pdf+THE+FUTURE+OF+THE+PAST+wang+hui&hl=en&gl=ca&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESggz1UE0tS5j_dbgDjNGenE7HPRAcYN5uuh8MTItC4oZ-hkoFi3sMX3w7__qxBSs4HD20BLVyv1kqxDrUUykcod_QJWuxHt-P8HeA7V0jRak9WpFTt7mXeZp5E5EfVgknnqSRVg&sig=AHIEtbS5EbMmd0cDwlStayZp02hLQM5tmQ

i noticed a while ago how many ppl write wrt to and now im doing it too oh well

it's a useful new prep. phrase and serves as a more intellectual signal than 'about'

dylannnn I'd be interested in hearing more about your criticisms of jacques (I haven't actually read his book, just thought the book review/summary raised interesting points)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAS_syndrome

what would you say your stance is wrt wrt

there are lots of talking point china economy criticisms. but bestseller china books tend to ignore them: horrible horrible corruption, inefficiency and lack of innovation, an export oriented economy with household consumption consistently hovering around 30% of gdp, a fucked up relationship between china's banks and its state owned enterprises which has led to questionable investment and a lot of unpaid debt, the destruction of the country's air and water, the increasing inability to secure resources, a huge gap between rich and poor. china can't keep growing without heavy duty restructuring.

but beyond the economy. china is not building its growth on an ancient indigenous philosophy or a radically different view of modernity.

china's elite are reading neoliberal economists not mencius.

"confucianism" should be banned from discussions of china. it should be banned from all discussions. it is meaningless, except as vague shorthand for "traditional philosophy of east asia" by people that are unfamiliar with the traditional philosophy of east asia.

china's development will definitely follow its own unique path. but its current model is fucked and can never be successful in the long run. even now, there is widespread protest.

jacques is quick to point to the racial makeup of china, its strong nationalism. but china is not racially homogeneous and pushing the nationalist myth is a project that the central government spends billions on. where we see a big ol country called china, there has been 6000 years of warring competing states.

south korea is another place that's racially homogeneous and makes a big deal of it. south korea is pretty fucking nationalistic. south korea is culturally distinct from the west. south korea has its own unique cultural institutions. but it also has rule of law and democracy and cleaves to a vaguely western idea of modernity (if that matters).

yeah I do agree with a lot of that. but I am interested in how chinese people conceptualize china, and, if we're being real, how han people conceptualize china, because that's what counts right now right? like it's interesting to me that you ask any US citizen about the history of the US, they are probably going to start more or less in the 1700s - maybe some discussion of amerigio vespucci and all that but our conception of the US as a modern nation state nicely dovetails with the enlightenment. and if you ask any chinese person about the history of China, the rote answer is going to be that China has thousands of years of history - four thousand sometimes! and they're going to start talking about 秦始皇 and all that.

and yeah I totally agree with you about the nature of china's nationalist myth - but you can't deny that in today's age more than ever the chinese government has exactly the right tools and promulgation techniques to make sure that gets indoctrinated everywhere!

i guess i'd just argue that the average chinese people know very little about the ideological debates that really shaped china as it looks like right now, post 79. the 5000 years of grand chinese history conception has very, very little to do with what actually guides the nation. even if folky nationalism and qinshihuang are important myths. major disconnection between 老百姓 conception of china and elite level ideology. i guess similar to american grassroots rightwing people being disconnected with actual nuts and bolts ruling neocon ideology. i don't know if i phrased that in a way that makes sense to anyone but me.

yeah. thinking back I think it's probably enough to acknowledge that there is going to be a pretty big cultural gap between china and the_west, and it doesn't really matter what the cause of that gap is, and it's tough to talk about these subjects without accusations of essentialism. or to look to china's conception of itself might be turning over the wrong stone.

http://www.danwei.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/9-11-on-China-e1315963034827.jpg

on 9/11 of course

that guy otm

http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/09/13/china-cracks-down-on-gutter-oil-a-substance-even-worse-than-its-name/

"China consumes about 22.5 million tons of cooking oil annually, and as much as one out of every ten restaurant meals has been cooked in waste oil(..)"

that's why chinese food tastes better in china

Source: South China Morning Post (9/14/11):
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a
0a0/?vgnextoid=bfd67c5fe7662310VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=China&s=News

Brainwashing the only option, says writer
Agence France-Presse in New York

Banned Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, speaking in the United States for the
first time since fleeing his country, said on Tuesday his only crime was
to resist "brainwashing".

Liao, who spent four years behind bars for writing the poem "Massacre"
about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, said personal freedom in China
is only granted to those who surrender their spiritual freedom.

"In China, the biggest problem is brainwashing. If you don¹t have your
memory, or your conscience, everything is possible ­but you have to forget
about your personal stories," Liao told an event of PEN, a group of
authors active on human rights, at New York¹s New School.

Liao said he would have "lived a very good life in China" if he had
stopped trying to think independently.

The author of the newly released God is Red: The Secret Story of How
Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China said he is not a
political activist, but was persecuted simply for telling the stories of
ordinary people.

In his earlier book, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the
Bottom Up, he recounted tales of people on the margins of the economic
superpower¹s deeply repressed society.

"I first started wanting to tell stories when I was in prisons. I was
locked up with unique people," he said, including traffickers, murderers
and thieves. "Gradually my brain was turning into a tape recorder."

"When I was first locked up I was a political prisoner. I didn¹t think I
had anything in common," he said, speaking through a translator.

"I felt like my brain was exploding. I couldn¹t even take their stories
any more. But it was like the only path for them: they wanted to tell
their stories to me and they wanted to tell me before they were executed."

"All the people I have interviewed, they have no interest in politics, but
they want the freedom to express themselves."

In his new book, God is Red, Liao explores the way that rural Chinese defy
official restrictions to follow Christianity.

Liao said that while he is not a Christian, he admires their determination
and faith.

Like other forms of self expression, all religions are permitted on one
condition: "First you have to believe in the Communist Party".

"If you are willing to pursue your freedom, seek out your freedom, then
you could be in trouble," he said.

Liao, who also played traditional Chinese instruments at the PEN gathering
and gave an intense recitation of "Massacre," is renowned for his
straightforward approach to his subjects, his quiet humour and courage.

Novelist Salman Rushdie introduced the Chinese writer on stage as one of
"the few people who are the real writers" around the world.

Liao did not discuss details of his departure from China earlier this
year, when he walked into Vietnam before making his way to Germany.

However, his more personal stories are becoming known through a prison
memoir, which has sold briskly in Germany, but has yet to be translated
into English.

He told the audience on Tuesday that he was known to other prisoners as
"the big lunatic" for his defiant gestures.

When a thief on death row asked him to organise for him "the same memorial
service as accorded to a senior Chinese leader, Liao obliged, writing a
eulogy that got him sent into solitary confinement as a punishment for 23
days. "That¹s why they called me the lunatic."

During his three days in New York, Liao said he had been stunned to find a
huge immigrant Chinese community in Flushing, an area of Queens. "I¹ve
never seen so many Chinese," he said to laughter, before describing how he
ran into "swindlers" trying to sell fake phones.

"It feels like that¹s going to be China without communism," he said to
more laughter.

China this year launched one of its biggest crackdown on dissent in years
in response to a wave of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East.

Acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei was detained for nearly three months and last
year¹s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, a writer and activist who has
been active in the Independent Chinese PEN Center, remains in prison.

Liao was barred from attending literary festivals in New York and Sydney
earlier this year prior to his self-exile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-sentences-four-uighurs-to-death-over-unrest.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/world/asia/axe-wielding-farmer-goes-on-killing-spree-in-central-china.html

par for the course. thank god for china's strict ban on guns.

http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4520

the attitude expressed by the farmers here is so typical. ugh

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/asia/kinmen-seeks-to-evolve-as-china-and-taiwan-improve-ties.html?pagewanted=all

I had no idea that kinmen even existed! :O

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/16/world/asia/0917taiwan.html

lol how the hell is this still in Taiwan?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/16/world/asia/0917taiwan/0917taiwan-popup.jpg

yeah i tried to post the map and failed. it wd seem kinda difficult to defend no matter how many mines u laid down

100000 people live on that little thing!

I was v surprised to find out that this took place in the US

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/nyregion/couple-accused-of-stealing-food-money-from-red-apple-preschools.html

given that it seems every 3rd day a story comes out of china about some preschool principal feeding a class of 100 with 6 apples and pocketing the rest of the money

a lesser nation might see a conflict of interest in the directors of a chain of private preschools running a nonprofit school

smdh @ this as well

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-14/when-a-woman-dares-to-say-he-hit-me-in-china-adam-minter.html

In a Sept. 13 interview with China Daily, he said, "I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it's not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders.”

fucking animal

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2011/09/09/ordos-boom-town-ghost-town

lol @ this

We ended up spinning around and around city blocks, searching for a store selling water. Eventually we found some - but not without the feeling we had gone on a treasure hunt. There is no major supermarket in Ordos, because not enough people live in the city.

This just seems nuts. I am neither an economist nor a dedicated, full-time financial reporter; but I do know Ordos is not habitable. The numbers might look good, but from a qualitative standpoint, there is a problem if you cannot buy bottled water around the corner. Something is just terribly wrong with this situation.

for reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h7V3Twb-Qk

ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

http://i.imgur.com/PaZcs.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Wikuo.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/VVG2Q.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/jVuPx.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/6IfIN.jpg

...the new Harbin Pharmaceuticals Plant

not *so* infuriating when you realize that apple is doing the equiv

http://cdn.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/1313264850-renderings-2-528x352.jpg

then again apple is the richest company in the world

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3791

lijia zhang responding to ai weiwei's beijing, plugging book

http://books.google.com/books/about/Streetlife_China.html?id=mN8Fn1w5VgwC

somehow reminded of this. i've liked this reader since i came across it. it halflooks like maximumrocknroll and half like a proper reader. good introduction and some of best writing on STREET LIFE in china. good stuff. check your local library.

haha, well she wasn't thrown into solitary confinement for 3 months! xp

I am picking this up from the library today

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520077966

gonna look for that streetlife book too

http://www.ted.com/talks/yasheng_huang.html

some older stuff

http://www.slate.com/id/2254176/

Even lesser disputes can lead to violence. My friend Wan Jia, a railway engineer, recently clashed with the workmen he hired to renovate his apartment. The contractor demanded an extra $1,000, and when Wan Jia refused to pay, he sent hired thugs to Wan Jia's office to intimidate him and follow him around. Wan Jia finally called the police.

But the police didn't care to get involved. They brought Wan Jia and the crew of thugs to the police station and left them alone in a room. "They said, 'It's your problem; deal with it yourself,' " Wan Jia told me. "As long as no one gets hurt too bad, the police don't care."

With no one to rely on but himself, Wan Jia called his wife and told a white lie about needing to take a last-minute business trip. He dug his heels in and stayed in the room for the next 26 hours. His opponents worked in shifts; at one point, Wan Jia found himself facing off against 10 men. But in the end, the contractor's general manager agreed to negotiate a new price—and Wan Jia was able to go home.

fucking crazy

has anyone read tom scocca's book "beijing welcomes you"? im intrigued by it cuz i love scocca's writing but i dont know anything about china/beijing

I don't know who that is but my friend recommended this book

http://site.whenabillionchinesejump.com/

dunno what he's like as a writer but it's supposedly super interesting from an environmental pov (for example, under a 'green GDP' calc China's GDP is actually decreasing per year)

reading an excerpt on slate and it seems pretty good

obv if you have no direct experience with a country you are going to be constrained to the lens of the person who's writing, could be good or bad

For some reason I couldn't imagine, deep deposits of broken eggshells filled the hollows in the dirt, along with broken bricks and burnt-out fuel cakes of pressed coal.

this is otm though, for some reason every refuse heap in china has a layer of broken brown eggshells on top, dunno why

I wonder if there are still de Tocqueville style "my first experience of America" books being published abroad

has anyone read tom scocca's book "beijing welcomes you"? im intrigued by it cuz i love scocca's writing but i dont know anything about china/beijing

― max, Sunday, September 18, 2011 9:17 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah been wondering too

you guys should read it, tell me what you think

most travel writing is just "man this place is really weird...and cool...and scary!" tho

well its not just travel writing, he lived there for a couple years during the run-up to the olympics. and iirc his wife is chinese, or chinese-american.

yeah but ~how much can you ever really know about someone else~

I mean it'll probably be more nuanced than most, but it'll still be from the perspective of an outsider (and that's not a bad thing!) - I'd prob treat it as 'creative nonfiction'

I tend to treat all nonfiction as creative though so don't mind me

arent we all outsiders tho think abt it

~kant~

you guys should read it, tell me what you think

― Whiney G. Blutfarten (dayo), Tuesday, September 20, 2011 8:00 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sry, kant

I mean, writing about other cultures is tough! commenting about other cultures is tough. you are always treading a thin line between exoticizing/romanticizing that culture and being ethnocentric about that culture. things that appear outre to you may be totally normal if you were socialized in that culture. blah blah blah

by the same logic its in a way easier to see things abt foreign cultures

oh yeah totally. it's a tough balancing act though. I catch myself making sweeping generalizations all the time, it sucks, feels like I'm walking on eggshells

the world is a refuse heap

Subject: reporter killed after cooking oil story
***********************************************************

Source: South China Morning Post (9/20/11):
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a
0a0/?vgnextoid=4666d08d4f582310VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD

Reporter killed after 'gutter' cooking oil story
Agence France-Presse in Beijing

A journalist who had been following a scandal involving the sale of
cooking oil made from leftovers taken from gutters has been stabbed to
death, police and state media said on Tuesday.

Li Xiang, 30, a reporter with Luoyang Television Station in the central
province of Henan, was knifed more than 10 times early on Monday as he
returned home from a karaoke session with friends, the Zhengzhou Evening
News reported.

The laptop computer Li had been carrying was missing and police were
treating the case as a murder-robbery, but have not ruled other motives,
the report added.

Police said that Li "died in the early morning of September 19" but
declined to comment further as the case was still under investigation.

An editor at the television station declined to comment.

Li, who was due to be married in October, had apparently been following
the latest food scandal to hit the mainland, a "gutter" cooking oil scam
that led to the arrests of 32 people caught selling the carcinogenic
product.

Police in Henan and the eastern provinces of Zhejiang and Shandong have
found more than 100 tonnes of the recycled oil illegally made from
leftovers taken from gutters, the Ministry of Public Security said in a
statement.

The last post on Li¹s micro-blog on September 15 said web users "had
complained that Luanchuan county (in Henan province) has dens
manufacturing gutter cooking oil, but the food safety commission replied
that they didn¹t find any".

Bloggers said they suspected Li¹s death was related to his previous
reports on the "gutter" cooking oil cases.

"Luoyang Television Station reporter Li Xiang got stabbed to death, I
suspect it¹s related to his reports on Œgutter¹ cooking oil," a web user
said on Sina¹s popular social networking site Weibo.

"Li Xiang¹s stabbing death is the unfortunate outcome of investigating the
gutter cooking oil cases," another user said.

jesus

I should get a mod to rename this thread to "rolling depressing china thread 2011"

yeah i was gonna say

yeah... i was thinking that when i posted it, too: there's probably enough about gutter oil and tortured dissidents on here.

but what are you gonna do?

I've been reading a bit on China's incursion into Africa recently (much of it good news), I should start linking stuff from here.

hah I'll bet you a ten dollar to a donut that there's a dark side to that too

always

Zambia had its elections today, the incumbent (Banda) running partly on the strength of his initiative to bring in the Chinese. It seems to have all gone a bit bloodbath.

I don't think you need me to point out that the overriding drive for china's presence in Africa is natural resources. yeah they're building hospitals and schools there too and putting money into the region, but...

my uncle worked for pretty much his whole life at a metallurgical company in china, he has pictures of himself in the 70s or 80s in Africa on a business trip including one where he's shaking hands with some African dictator or another

Yeah, Africa gets short-term benefits and China gets a continent. So much of Africa is so fucked they'll do anything to underscore the wealth of the top 1% boost their chances, especially with China tailoring its goodies to each country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/21/world/asia/anger-and-suspicion-as-survivors-await-chinese-crash-report.html?pagewanted=all

had no idea about the bureaucratic structure of the railway ministry - they have their own court system? 2 million employees? crazy!

in some lighter news, yao ming makes an unexpected appearance at the world basketball championship (or somtehing like that )

http://sports.creaders.net/newsViewer.php?nid=485986&id=1091943

my bad, I'm pretty sure it's the asian basketball championship

Zambia had its elections today, the incumbent (Banda) running partly on the strength of his initiative to bring in the Chinese. It seems to have all gone a bit bloodbath.

― Autumn Almanac, Wednesday, 21 September 2011 19:58 (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Sata won this. He's less favourable toward China making inroads so this will be interesting. Bloodbath was overrated btw.

more bummerz

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/world/asia/rape-case-is-a-rarity-in-chinese-justice-system.html?pagewanted=all

"Anhui province is today announcing the cancellation of Chaohu city."

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/21/140633602/the-curious-case-of-the-vanishing-chinese-city?sc=tw&cc=share

sounds like a borges story

when I started reading it I thought "bet this is going to be economically motivated" and hey it was

"It's a good thing," says one old man who gives him name as Mr. Guo, as others nod in agreement. "There's too much corruption. The officials take all our money."

hmm

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/world/asia/two-tibetan-monks-set-themselves-on-fire-in-protest.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/what-we-really-need-to-fear-about-china/2011/09/14/gIQAPrMy0K_story.html

During my most recent trip this past week, I also I taught classes at Tsinghua University, for an entrepreneurship program run by UC-Berkeley’s Center for Entrepreneurship. The students there were very much like those I teach at Duke and Berkeley. They were hungry for knowledge, connections, and ideas. The only difference I noted was in the answer to one question: Why do you want to become an entrepreneur? American students usually talk about building wealth or changing the world. The Chinese said they saw entrepreneurship as a way to rise above “the system,” to be their own bosses and to create their own paths to success. They clearly did not cherish the idea of working for a stodgy state enterprise, an autocratic government, or what they deemed to be an opportunistic foreign multinational.

they wanna be their own bawse

that may be an interesting distinction on a theoretical level but I bet it just means they want to make a lot of money and be a baller

Take Robert Hsiung, who graduated from Stanford in 2008. He received several job offers in Silicon Valley, Singapore, and Hong Kong. But he chose to become an entrepreneur and to move to Beijing, because the economy was booming and the number of Chinese Internet users was increasing rapidly. Robert’s first start-up, a social-media company called OneCircle.cc, was a moderate success. His next company, FoxFly, failed because larger players moved into his market space. In August, he launched his third start-up, which is building a professional-networking application. Robert told me that he had absolutely no problems recruiting top engineering students. And even though he had failed, Chinese investors readily invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in his latest start-up.

this? this is the best anecdote you got for us?? a guy who failed 3 times?

article doesn't have any real substance to it

tho it is true that americans are not particularly entrepreneurial these days, it's silly to frame it as a competition w/ the chinese and it's better to talk about reasons why (access to $, health insurance, etc.)

otoh
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204010604576595002230403020.html

it's about a broader change in culture that's begun to accept failure as a part of the entrepreneurial cycle. sure, it's a trend piece and ultimately trend pieces are always a touch puffy, but plenty of what i'm reading suggests there's a native entrepreneurial streak taking root. is that what you're contesting?

I'm contesting 'Our policy makers are right to worry, but they are worried about the wrong things.'

china's entrepreneurial streak is the worst thing that's ever happened to it

it has to be pointed out that the 'failure is a good thing in the world of entrepreneurs' is actually a pretty foundational bedrock tenet

basically there are good reasons to have beef w/ china (cue dayo jpg) but 'they will suddenly become the world entrepreneurial leaders + this will be bad for america', I mean...

it has to be pointed out that the 'failure is a good thing in the world of entrepreneurs' is actually a pretty foundational bedrock tenet

― dayo, Tuesday, September 27, 2011 7:59 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark

of what

entrepreneurs!

it's their mantra - so that when they do inevitably fail they will pick themselves up by their own bootstraps because they are self-motivated and self-driven and that's why they are destined to succeed, do you see

china's entrepreneurial streak is the worst thing that's ever happened to it

― dayo, Tuesday, 27 September 2011 19:58 (11 minutes ago)

it's their mantra - so that when they do inevitably fail they will pick themselves up by their own bootstraps because they are self-motivated and self-driven and that's why they are destined to succeed, do you see

― dayo, Tuesday, September 27, 2011 8:10 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

sure, there's a sense of false hope embedded in the thing, but i'm not really seeing what you're getting at?

"a bunch of failing business are bad for china"?

I was just responding to iatee's point that a entrepreneur w/ 3 failed businesses is somehow to be lauded - it's not, but it's not necessarily a bad thing either from the view of someone encouraging entrepreneurship

if those businesses have been depending on an economy w/ too much easy money floating around, then yeah

ok right, i guess i misunderstood u xp

chinese have very different cultural conceptions toward credit than americans do ime. I don't think it's that easy to get credit, nor do most chinese want credit. think all bets are off though if you're a state-owned company

a lot of chinese people still operate on a straight cash, homie tip. banks in chinatowns are built with an extra-ordinary number of safeboxes because families like to keep their assets in hard cash in the safebox rather than in a bank account.

but china's new middle class is getting more and more into credit cards now, from what I can tell. so there's a cultural change happening too, credit cards probably act as a signal of wealth. but I'd be surprised if it was reported tomorrow that a lot of individuals were suddenly overextending themselves on credit in china.

o snap

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/world/asia/shanghai-subway-accident-injures-hundreds.html?_r=1

i am going to move to dalian.

forreals?

http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/pictures/infamous-beijing-nightclub-heaven-internal-training-photos-leaked-online.html

lmao never take photos

experienced firsthand the pervasiveness of prostitution in china is impressive

http://maryannodonnell.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/historic-ironies-the-fanshen-metro-station-shenzhen/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/03/china-rural-poor-left-stranded
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/02/china-becomes-an-urban-nation

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/guida.jpg

my alma mater btw

bubble starting to burst?

Bankruptcy crisis in Wenzhou impacts nearly 90 percent of families
http://news.qq.com/a/20111008/000146.htm
(2011-10-08) ― On October 4, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao paid an official visit to the southern city of Wenzhou, long known for its entrepreneurial streak, to address a crisis of surging bankruptcies in which small and medium-sized businesses have defaulted in startling numbers on high-interest loans provided by private lenders in recent years, as larger banks have refused loans to smaller enterprises. The Beijing News reports today that the crisis has “dragged in” close to 90 percent of families in Wenzhou, where private lending has become a common form of investment. Since April this year there have reportedly been regular suicide attempts by company bosses in Wenzhou, and since last month alone there have been 25 documented cases of bosses jumping from buildings or throwing themselves in front of traffic.

http://news.qq.com/a/20111008/000146.htm

a good post on what it means for your family when you go against the g'ment in china:

http://chinageeks.org/2011/10/the-utterly-indefensible/

Fuckin' hell, I did not really know about the Hukou system. (xpost to dylannn's Guardian link)

oh yeah, hukou system is key. my girlf is in rural guizhou right now so those caught my eye. it's the poorest province in the country and yeah like those two guardian pieces.............

i've been trying to follow that wenzhou thing, since all the mandarin lang media here are running with it as a bubble bursting story but................

why am i so burnt out on shit like that chinageeks "essay"????????????????????????

because it's indefensible and reprehensible and sucks

evan osnos does it more elegantly

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos

i hate to say that, actually, but my reaction is like... yeah, okay, six year old kid detained... who gives a fuck? who gives a shit about liu xiaobo????? i am open to being convinced that guys like this matter but i feel like they're so irrelevant to the realities of "life on the ground" (1) because teh government marginalizes them obv 2) because their interests are........) and we'd be better off if we kept our eyes on stuff like wenzhou's private lending meltdown or the hukou system or WHATEVER, shit that is actually fucking up millions of lives. it's just a reality that china produces cranks and lunatics and not credible figures of opposition. i take liu xiaobo a bit more seriously than i take li hongzhi.

sometimes i feel like..... it's like if someone tried to understand china by reading a lot about noam chomsky

er, america, i mean

I think you've gone native

or put in any other marginalized antiestablishment intellectual figure

i don't want to write them off and i sympathize with them deeply and the communist party is a monster and everything but liu xiaobo and ai weiwei are irrelevant

http://static.youku.com/v1.0.0704/index/img/smiley/Yo17.gif

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/ee.gif

i don't want any trouble at the embassy on tuesday, okay?

http://static.youku.com/v1.0.0704/index/img/smiley/Yo17.gif

― dylannn, Monday, 10 October 2011 13:53 (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not quite sure I get this but I love it anyway

reading it in a global sense i.e. people overlook the pervasiveness of social networks and just <3 everything

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/2011/10/more-on-proposed-revisions-to-chinas-criminal-procedure-law.html

more analysis of the revisions to the criminal code

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/business/global/households-pay-a-price-for-chinas-growth.html?pagewanted=all

I don't understand finance at all but I can understand the general gist of the article - you can see the relationship to the wenzhou crisis

i hate to say that, actually, but my reaction is like... yeah, okay, six year old kid detained... who gives a fuck? who gives a shit about liu xiaobo????? i am open to being convinced that guys like this matter but i feel like they're so irrelevant to the realities of "life on the ground" (1) because teh government marginalizes them obv 2) because their interests are........) and we'd be better off if we kept our eyes on stuff like wenzhou's private lending meltdown or the hukou system or WHATEVER, shit that is actually fucking up millions of lives. it's just a reality that china produces cranks and lunatics and not credible figures of opposition. i take liu xiaobo a bit more seriously than i take li hongzhi.

― dylannn, Sunday, October 9, 2011 10:45 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I dunno dude, it's not really what liu xiaobo and ai weiwei are saying, it's more what they stand for - an alternative voice to the state. you can call them cranks, yeah, but if that's all they are then why the detentions, prison sentences? why the harassment and virtual imprisonment of their relatives and friends? you can measure china's progress in a lot of ways, some of which will exceed the metrics, but if you measure it in the way it responds to dissent, the CCP is still an autocratic and downright fascist government.

I feel you man - there's a lot of heinous shit going down in China atm, internal politics that nobody outside will ever give more than two shits about. but China wants to perform on the world stage too - and it needs to accept all the responsibilities that that entails. which means not doing shit like petulantly locking up a six year old just because the international community decided to honor her father.

I'm happy that china is pulling itself up by the bootstraps, and I'm happy that so many more people are being pushed into a better way of living, some perhaps screaming and kicking, and all on the backs of hundreds of millions of farmers (really, the number one sob story in china) and raping its own land. china has a right to feel proud - but there's no reason for that to turn into an unhealthy and ultimately damaging jingoism.

i've been thinking about this and a friend recently told me how when she was in hong kong she was following the ai weiwei story and when she came back home, she was completely out of the loop, wanted to know how it all worked out for him, and it kind of PUT THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE...

you're right on with the question of why the imprisonment and the harassment. "CCP is still an autocratic and downright fascist government"-- this is true. even if i'm skeptical about ai weiwei, his opponents are so fucking grimy that i can't help but root for him.

i don't know what to think.

i'm in china btw

oh sweet, in dalian?

idk whenever i talk about ai wei wei with my family, they just parrot these character-assassination points - how he's so ugly! his art is no good! so who cares if he gets put on lockdown? which is besides the point. because you can take ai wei wei and replace him with, oh, let's say chen guangxin - which the media/the_west has been doing these past few days - and it puts into relief how insidious this all is.

I 'get it' that China has a ton of problems facing it right now, some much larger than others, but that's not an excuse to justify these 'smaller'* transgressions against civil liberties!

*to even accept that these transgressions are 'smaller' is to accept the framing of the CCP - these acts are complete bullshit, full stop!

link 4 u AA: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/in-africa-an-election-reveals-skepticism-of-chinese-involvement/245832/

fucked up, considering this is a national newspaper (i.e. if they deign to publish this, then things must be really bad!): http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/678355/Beatings-more-usual-than-bonuses-for-Chinese-women.aspx

yep dalian. is there anyone else on ilxxx in p.r.china?

the domestic abuse thing has been getting a lot of burn, common discussion topic on fm radio call-in shows, weibo, etc. and it's probably a good start. the statistic about rural women killing themselves is.......

Cheers for the links dayo. The Zambia thing is particularly interesting in that (a) they're new to properly democratic elections and (b) ~things~ were on the improve under Banda, largely due to his dealings with China (but also in gaining the tourism that Zimbabwe has lost). When I was there last year (albeit in tourist bubbles) there was a distinct buzz of optimism, getting things done etc. Reading further into it though, it's clear that Zambians were worried that their already high jobless rate would suffer under the growing influx of Chinese nationals, not to mention the mine violence etc. Sata's pre-election response involved (a) being heavily antagonistic toward China and (b) promising to p much move Zambia 6km to the right within 90 days of winning the election.

There's tension further south as well, with the Dalai Lama not getting a visa to visit Desmond Tutu for his 80th birthday because the Sth African govt fartarsed around until he cancelled his trip, all the while denying that it was kowtowing to China. All this pro-China sentiment among govts on the continent is really starting to backfire.

btw my interest in Chinese affairs has risen sharply in recent weeks because we're giving serious thought to working in zh/tw/hk for a few months/years.

I didn't post about it because it was all over the (western) news but the two year old toddler died :( :( :(

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/world/asia/chinese-toddler-who-was-run-over-twice-dies.html

poor little poppet, the video is the most disturbing footage of anything I've ever seen. haunting and hideous.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-10/19/c_131200476.htm

part of the great wall is collapsing due to mining hollowing out the ground underneath it

http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4418

bohai oil spill - hadn't heard about this before. good job, chinese media!

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/2011/10/the-most-dangerous-man-in-china.html

good overview of the level of security detail around chen guangcheng

btw the old lady who saved the 2 year old toddler is being accused that she only did so to become famous

"A lot of people are now saying that I'm doing it to get famous, and to get money. Even my neighbours are now saying so!" she said. "That really wasn't my intention, and I'm so afraid of hearing what people are saying that I don't dare to watch the news. I'm not out for fame or money."

http://bbs.ifeng.com/viewthread.php?tid=4109251

prison built for officials convicted of corruption

http://i.imgur.com/A3xmE.jpg

looks like it was built by Marriott

what a cruel fate for those officials

so common & vulgar

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/books/review/deng-xiaoping-and-the-transformation-of-china-by-ezra-f-vogel-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

pretty good 5 minute overview of deng

I know people who love to point out deng as the true savior of china and not mao but guess what dengs hands are dirty too

what do ilx china hedz think of peter hessler

the dude who won the macarthur? I read an interview with him in chinese once and he seemed to have insights but I haven't checked out his books

he's moved on to other topics now hasn't he?

yeah but he has 3 books on china that a friend recommended

he was the nyer china correspondent for years, i remember digging his pieces, but i thought maybe hes just an orientalist like the rest of them

you should probably read them then

thx for the advice <thumbs up>

glad I could help ;)

http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/680047/Condom-app-lifts-off.aspx

condoms @ your door

i like peter hessler a lot

first book about teaching in really remote sichuan is enjoyable
oracle bones is the most impressive

tumblr, twitter, facebook, blogger, wordpress... give them back to me

just ordered river town, ill do oracle bones next

river town is the best in the little microgenre of MAN SPENDS YEAR IN CHINA books, i think.

others that aren't terrible: iron and silk by mark salzman (it's okay), the last days of old beijing by michael meyer (good)...

i read iron and silk a long time ago and thought it was funny but dont remember it very well

i guess zachary mexico's china underground fits into the category, too: pseudonymous kid hangs out in shanghai with uighur stoners and other zany characters.

you had your own thread of wild china travelogue writing too didn't you?

i don't recommend that

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/asia/attempted-visits-to-chen-guang

lol, fair enuff

from what I can tell there is actually a grassroots movement inside China to visit chen guangzheng, pretty cool, you can't throw them all in jail huh

according to my mom xi jinping is more reform minded and will hopefully curb some of the excesses when he takes the stage

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2010/10/20/who-is-xi-jinping/

not too particularly promising

but wikileaks cables say he really loved 'saving private ryan'

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/25/8476025-china-cracks-down-on-economic-leaks

good overview of what constitutes a state secret other than keeping dead hookers in your basement

re: the chinese toddler

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/24/hugo-alfredo-tale-yax-doz_n_550854.html

According to the Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer, Xi is also sympathetic to pro-market reforms. Writing in the FT on Monday, Dyer said:

‘He is the son of…an important ally of Deng Xiaoping in the introduction of market reforms in China in the 1980s (and) spent much of his career in some of the export strongholds of the Chinese economy.

‘As a result, many see him as a natural supporter of continued economic reform. (Hank Paulson, the former US treasury secretary, famously once called him “the kind of guy who knows how to get things over the goal line.”)’

what is meant by "pro-market reforms," exactly?

letting the wealth gap increase at a rate never before seen, obviously

that sucks.

actually, is that all it means?

i wish i knew more about the chinese economy, so i could wrap my head around this. what further pro-market reforms are on the horizon in china? maybe he's talking about less topdown control of the economy or something. or maybe it does just mean letting the wealth gap increase at a rate never seen before.

when it comes to market reforms, i mostly hear a lot of "more of the same": building domestic demand, building the middle class. people talk about guys like bo xilai being liberal or whatever, but i can't quite figure out what it means in real terms. i don't know anything.

yeah I was being facetious. I guess the thinking is that since xi jinping's father was such a revolutionary hero, was imprisoned for 16 years during the cultural revolution, etc. and that xi jinping seems to have wholeheartedly bought the narrative of the people, that means he will be more of a reformer and institute policies more favorable to the middle class and to rural farmers and migrant workers.

or 'pro-market' could mean he favors a reagonomics approach, that a rising tide floats all boats and we'll let capitalism continue unfettered and even supported by the state's money, and migrant workers will eventually be able to purchase toothpaste at regular intervals.

*shrug*

I suppose this was going to happen eventually

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/26/china-social-media-censorship?CMP=twt_gu

Analysts believe that officials will not shut down social media sites because they are simply too popular, and closing them would create a backlash. Chinese authorities have sought to use social media proactively, launching their own accounts.

Instead, they are likely to step up pressure on the operators, who have large in-house teams of staff to monitor, block and remove sensitive content.

"The more important risk we see for Sina Weibo and other (microblogs) is that they self-regulate out of business (interests) … and that they self-neuter and that makes the platform so boring no one wants to use it," said Michael Clendenin, managing director of RedTech Advisors, a research company.

http://www.echinacities.com/dalian/city-in-pulse/dalian-to-build-china-s-first-floating-city-in-2014.html

jealous?

extremely

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/the-dangerous-politics-of-internet-humor-in-china.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D
=38585&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=25&cHash=af92db93d512ed71f3894bf20441f385

or just click here

that censorship article is good but seems like it prob puts that guy in even more danger?

the guy in beijng or the guy in hong kong

beijing

probably, but I guess he doesn't care

my friend taught me an expression in chinese "the bird who sticks its head out gets shot first"

I think the thing w/ that internet rebellion humor article is that it needs context. what % of chinese internet-users are aware of this? what % actively participate? etc.

and I guess that's prob hard to measure. but a couple million people is still a drop in the bucket, really.

that's true, but a person who has the knowhow to use weibo and is interested in getting around censorship via slang and double entendres is likely to be in the middle class/upper middle class. china has 1.3 billion, true, but I'm pretty sure the majority of that number are farmers.

it's the velvet underground theory, only 100 people saw that tweet but they all went and wrote a blogpost about it

i think the kuang kuang cartoons could be considered hugely popular. they looked good and fit into a sort of tradition of that kind of web cartoon shit. not that everyone took it as a dead serious strike a blow against dictatorship thing. and the ramblings of a drunkard blog was fairly popular too, right? not doing han han numbers but it was big. i know that doesn't really give much context either, but i guess i'd say that a big proportion of middle class internet users in china's major cities were aware of them and follow similar stuff.

what's my point here? i know lots of people that aren't hugely politically active or whatever but like dayoooo said follow internet rebellion stuff just because it's entertaining and badass. most people that are intelligent enough to engage with that kind of stuff are basically in on the joke. you know? they know that everything is not exactly as it should be over here and they're down with thumbing their noses at the man. not everyone that makes a 河蟹/和谐 joke gives a fuck but sometimes it's cool to just be in on the joke.

yeah that gives me a better perspective on it. it's just really hard to tell from that article alone how 'important' something like this is at this point.

the internet is tightly controlled enough that a lot of normal people not searching for rebiya kadeer's email address will reach a point where they have to circumvent things. the rest of the world is using the internet to look at facebook and porn and those are two things you probably have to leap the great firewall to get to. i guess that's why people appreciate dudes that will fuck with the system. there's a natural curiosity, too, to see what attracts the attention of censors.

yeah, well according to the latest CCP meeting they are gonna take big steps in reining in social media by installing more censors I think, so I think it's one of the CCP's bigger concerns xp

if you google info about stuff like tor or witopia or vpn services on google.hk or whatever the mainland is directing you to nowadays, even with filtered results, you can see that a huge portion of china's internet users are being forced to leap the wall. a lot of the censorship/harmonization jokes come from annoyance, rather than a deep discontent with the prevailing social order.

personally, i advocate the violent overthrow of the chinese communist party simply because i have to open tor to look at girls i went to highschool with on facebook.

internet censorship annoys the shit out of me more than anything else in the world.

speaking of internet censorship, dayo or anyone else???? do you have a chinese translation of the ai weiwei beijing piece handy or within search engine distance?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html <--- that one

this is dumb but these are probably the links to it and i just need one of yall to paste it here or webmail it to me

googling terms 北京是一场噩梦？？ 暴力城市北京恶梦挥之不去？？

try this?

http://www.voanews.com/chinese/news/20110829-AI-WEIWEI-ATTACKS-BEIJING-OVER-JUSTICE-AND-HUMAN-RIGHTS-128613763.html

I'm finding a lot of news stories but can't find the original text atm sorry

THAT'S OKAY that's okay. i'm using a friend's computer in a hotel room in shenyang and i can see all the google results but can't open any of them to check. not voanews for sure. SORRY. i am partway through just translating it. i will photocopy it 300 times and distribute it out of spite.

haha. I think maybe the thing is, that it was originally written in english for newsweek? I can paste one of the news site translations if ya want

【大纪元记者王嫣然编译报道】6月才获释的中国知名维权艺术家艾未未8月28日在美国《新闻周刊》网站上发表文章，猛批中共政府剥夺其公民的基本人权。他表示，北京是一座暴力的城市，是一个挥之不去的恶梦。

这是艾未未2个月前取保候审以来，首次在美国主流媒体公开批评中共政权。他说：“北京是一座暴力的城市，在北京，最糟糕的是你绝不能相信它的司法制度……北京是个恶梦，一个挥之不去的恶梦。”

民工贫困绝望 官商灯红酒绿

艾未未表示，北京是两座城市，一个是“权力和金钱”的北京。人们不关心自己的邻居是谁，他们互不信任。另一个是“绝望”的北京。公车上的人，他们眼里没有希望。他们甚至无法想像自己会有能力买房子。他们来自非常贫穷的村庄，那的人从未见过电或卫生纸。

北京穿西装、打领带的官员告诉外国人，他们可以了解这个城市，鸟巢、央视大楼。官员说我们都是一样的，我们可以做生意。但是他们却否定了人民的基本权利。民工学校关了，医院看病人没钱缝上的线都能再拆开。这是一个暴力的城市。

艾未未在评论中还批评中共当局猖獗的腐败现象和农民工政策。他指，每年，数以百万计的民工来到北京建桥、修路和盖楼。每年他们建造的建筑物面积相当于1949年的北京城。他们是北京的奴隶。他们蜗居在违章建筑里，而北京因不断地扩张又不断地将其拆毁。谁拥有住房？那些政府官员、煤矿老板和大企业总裁。他们来北京行贿，餐厅、卡拉OK厅和桑拿中心的生意都因此火爆起来。

艾未未认为，要正确设计北京城，必须让城市有不同的利益空间，使人们可以共存，使社会形态完整。城市是能提供最大自由的地方，否则它就不完整。我的艺术“鸟巢”不代表北京，我从来没有去想它。奥运会后，老百姓就不讨论它了，因为奥运会并没有给人们带来欢乐。

黑暗司法制度折磨身心

艾未未并以自己被警察非法关押的亲身经历，揭露中国司法制度的黑暗。他说，在被秘密关押期间，他经历了巨大心理折磨和压力，监狱里的经历让他明白，中国有许多地点秘密关押那些没有身份的人。他只不过是一个匿名制度中的一个数字，“他们（当局）剥夺了我们的基本权利”。

艾未未说，被秘密带走后，被关押在一个不为人知的地点，“只有你的家人为你的失踪四处奔走呼号，但是你得不到任何答覆。”艾未未的妻子每天写各种请愿书、打电话至派出所，询问丈夫的下落，但一切如石沉大海，渺无音信，她得不到任何官方出示的正式扣押丈夫的文件。

今年54岁的艾未未，参与了北京奥运场馆鸟巢的设计，因他引起争议的艺术作品和他对当局的犀利批评，在今年4月4日搭飞机前往香港时被扣押，之后音讯全无，被当局以莫须有的罪名关押了81天，国际社会一片愤怒声讨中共违反人权。在压力下，中共当局并未出具正式起诉艾未未的证据，最后只是以艾未未涉嫌经济犯罪，继续对他进行调查，于6月底才释放他。但当局却非法地规定艾未未在1年内不得接受媒体记者的采访、会见外国人，或使用互联网或同人权活动人士联系。

旅美的政论评论家胡平说，以艾未未的个性和这些年来的所作所为，在获释后经过一段时间的心理调整，还会像以前一样对中国现状的不满发出他的呐喊。

胡平说：“从这里，我们更能看到一个本色的艾未未，另外也由于他在海内外的声誉，使他的这些揭露，在现在就尤其更有份量。”

路透社报道说，艾未未再次公开批评中共当局，对北京提出直接挑战，看北京如何处理中国名声最大的社会批评人士。艾未未此前已经通过他的推特，为被关押的异见人士作出呼吁。

“好好活着 看中共灭亡”

艾未未在该评论文章上说，上星期一些在公园遇到他的行人，虽然没有跟他交谈甚么，但对他竖起大拇指，拍拍他的肩膀，表达他们的敬佩和支持。

艾未未说：“没有人愿意开口说话。他们在等甚么？他们总是对我说：‘未未，赶紧离开中国吧。要不，好好活着，看着他们灭亡。’”

艾未未曾表示，绝不远走他乡。但是他在最近的文章中说：“要么离开，要么耐心，看他们怎样消亡。我不知道我将怎么做。”艾未未还表示，不知道这篇文章的发表将会给他带来甚么样的后果。

hol' up think I found one

原文：The City: Beijing
作者：艾未未
发表：2011年8月28日
本文由"译者"志愿者 @Michae1S 翻译
本文配有“每日译文精选”MP3音频

北京是两座城市。一座是权力和金钱之城。人们不关心自己的邻居是谁，他们不相信你。另一座北京是绝望之城。我看到公交车上的人们，我从他们的眼睛里看不到任何希望。他们根本不敢想象自己能买得起一所房子。他们从连电和厕纸都没有的贫穷乡村来到这里。

每年数百万人来到北京，为这个城市修桥铺路、盖房架屋。每一年他们都建出了一个1949年时那么大的一座新北京。他们是北京的奴隶。他们蜷缩在违章建筑里，被政府摧毁后又卷土重来。谁拥有房子？那些政府的人、那些煤老板、那些大企业的老板。他们来北京送礼――因此北京到处都是饭店、卡拉OK和桑拿会馆。

北京对外国人说，你们能读懂这个城市，我们有同样形式的建筑：鸟巢、中央电视台大楼……官员们和你们一样西装革履，我们是同类，我们可以做生意。但他们拒绝给我们最基本的权利。你们会见到民工子弟学校被关闭，你们会见到医院把病人的伤口缝合后，发现病人没钱，于是再把伤口拆开。这是一个暴力之城。

【原文配图：对一位被关押又被有条件地释放的人来说，不能相信邻居，不能相信生人，不能相信北京官员，也不能相信法庭。 Chien-Chi Chang/Magnm Photos】

在北京最糟糕的事情是，你永远不能相信司法体系。没有信任，你无从分辨。就像一场沙尘暴。你无法把自己当作这个城市的一部分――这里没有一个地方与你有关，没有一个地方你乐意去。没有一个角落，没有一块地方被阳光照耀。你对任何材质、纹理和形状都不会留下回忆。所有的东西都一直在改变，依照某些人的意志、某些人的权力。

想要合适地对北京进行设计，你必须让这个城市为不同利益的人群提供空间，这样人们才能共处，这样才是一个完整的社会。城市应该是一个能为人们提供最大自由的地方，否则它就是不完整的。

我不得不难过地承认，在北京我没有喜欢的地方。在这个城市里，我不想去任何地方。这个地方如此单一。你根本不想看看经过你身旁的那个人，因为你完全知道他在想什么。没有好奇心，甚至也没有人与你争论。

我的作品全都不代表北京。鸟巢――我压根没想过。 奥运之后，普通人不再讨论它，因为奥运没有给人们带来欢乐。

北京也有积极的方面。人们仍然在生小孩。这里有几个不错的公园。上周我走进一座公园，几个人走来向我竖起大拇指，或拍拍我的肩。为何他们要用这种隐秘的表达方式？没人愿意说出来。他们在等什么？他们常常对我说："未未，离开中国吧。"或者："你一定要长寿，要看着他们死掉。"无论是离开这个国家，还是耐心的等着看他们怎么死，我都无所适从。

我的痛苦经历使我明白，在这个大监狱里，他们有很多秘密关押人的地方。那些人没有姓名、只是一个号码。他们不关心你要去哪里、犯了什么罪。他们看见你，或者没有看见你，没有一丁点的差别。这样的秘密关押点数以千计。只有你的家人在为了你的失踪奔走哭号。但你无法从街道办或者官员嘴里得到答案，甚至最高层，法院、警察、国家领导人也不知道。我的妻子每天都写这样的申请、每天都打电话到警察局。我的丈夫在哪里？请告诉我我的丈夫在哪里！没有文件，没有信息。

那些秘密关押点最可怕的地方是它完全地彻底的切断了你和你记忆中熟悉之物的联系。你被彻底隔离。你不知道你将在里面呆多久。但是你真的相信他们可以对你为所欲为。你连质疑的机会都没有。没有任何东西可以保护你。我为何在这里？你会对时间都不确定。你开始丧失心智。对任何人来说，这都非常可怕，即使是对有着坚定信仰的人来说也是如此。

这个城市与他人无关、与建筑无关、与街道无关，只与你的心理建构有关。如果我们还记得卡夫卡写的他的那个城堡，我们就能有所体验。城市确实是一种精神状态。北京，是一个梦魇，一个无尽的梦魇。

haha that's a translation by someone else - yeah don't think Ai Wei Wei published one in chinese. but that should help in yer translation effortsss

Wang sweet compilation was released in June of well-known Chinese artist Ai Weiwei Rights on August 28 in the U.S. "Newsweek" article published on the website, Mengpi the Chinese government denied their citizens basic human rights. He said that Beijing is a city of violence, is a lingering nightmare.

wang sweet compilation otm

yeah, i knew it was originally in english. i had never seen a full chinese version. someone asked me to find one for them today. thanks, dude!

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/10/china_smells_like_2008_gloom_and_doom_edition.html

china bubble bursting soon? no more free candy in the form of government backed bank loans? just a side-effect of measures put in effect by the CCP to slow down the economy?

O_O

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/10/29/driver-dodges-hundreds-of-steel-rods-during-collision/

surely a hommage to the british pavillion at the shanghai expo

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/10/28/kim-lee-li-yang-files-divorce.php

*pumps fist for kim*

but jesus christ, li yang, you go fucking die:

Li Yang has in previous interviews described his marriage as a cultural experiment. In one interview, he explained why he married Kim as follows:＂I found out that she came to China because she wanted to have babies with a Chinese man, and so I agreed. Our child grew up in the United States till she was about two. When we moved her to China, we discovered that she was very different from other two-year-old Chinese kids. She was very independent. So, in order to research American family life and education, I decided to marry her."

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzE2Mjc3OTMy.html

四川话 is so cool, mad jellies right now

nakh who is this dude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFEX9EVmnZA

and uh, more falling housing prices

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/10/26/is_the_bubble_finally_bursting_shan.php

i love the beautiful soft focus tea/tarts kfc commercial that's running at the start of every youku video right now, dunno if you guys get it out there

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/10/31/photos_fog_descends_on_beijing_othe.php

i just got home and i could see my breath, despite it being 16 degrees. inhaling and exhaling fine brown dust.

global times says:

Nobody likes air pollution, but China cannot singly pursue improving air quality.

paul merton isn't a bad sort really, he used to do this sort of wounded idiot savant routine on british tv and was sometimes witty

i guess he is still going, i saw a bit some programme of his on india which was really bad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qian_Yunhui

had no idea about this guy O_O what a horrible way to go

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/Jessica%20Colwell/ai-weiwei-tax-bill-tweet.jpg

ai wei wei's tax bill is 15 million yuan or 2.3 million dollars, or as he says 1 year's profit for the ministry of rails

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/10/is_jon_huntsman_fluent_in_chinese_.html

1. from what i've seen, he's a clown (thinking of the jasmine revolution incident).
2. the answer seems to be that no, he isn't fluent in chinese.
3. but i'd like to hear his taiwanese!
4. but is geoffrey sant fluent in chinese and what's his deal?
5. but does it even matter?

fluency in chinese is overrated

if youre a white guy in china you just need to say like 3 words and everybody will cheer and guffaw and bring you wine to drink

idk what can be said about this, but china sure seems fond of small-number sets like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Furnaces
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Classical_Novels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Great_Books_of_Song
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Great_Kung_Fu_Masters

this is a thing, right?

yeah dont underestimate the penchant for grouping things together

also the idea that if you take a bunch of good things and combine them you get a super thing

or if you take something and make it bigger it becomes better

or the idea that if you build a replica of something that implies superiority

or the idea that the more expensive something is the better it is

sorry, just ranting

what are the other four great taxonomic penchants?

http://gizmodo.com/5852973/350kg-stainless-steel-fake-leicas-arent-fooling-anybody

this piece of hubris, for example, I'm sure was justified by the idea "it contains elements of the the leica m3-m9, it must be great!" and completely misses the point of a leica

smh

the idea that the more expensive something is the better it is

this is a classic 'nouveau riche' trait right? which makes sense, in context

where's the hubris? it's just a crappy sculpture. if it misses the point of a leica, then leica themselves are missing the point. they paid for them.

i think the blame is all on leica for commissioning that piece of garbage.

see also:

http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/shop/only-china-leicas-24carat-camera-154867

Grouping stuff actually helps retention for a learner, e.g. 10 heavenly stems, 12 属相. Probably does sod-all for a native speaker though.

if youre a white guy in china you just need to say like 3 words and everybody will cheer and guffaw and bring you wine to drink

― dayo, Tuesday, 1 November 2011 22:48 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This principle elevated our previous (and probably next) PM to Chinese stardom. I don't know precisely how good he is at Chinese but the Chinese carry on like he's a genius. Saw his Chinese biography in a shop the other day, it seemed to cast him in a better light than anything written about him here.

there is a leica shop opening the next block up from where i live, the first one outside shanghai/beijing/guangzhou, i think. hope it features a giant stainless steel homer simpson car leica.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-anti_and_Five-anti_Campaigns
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Represents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_of_Four

"homer simpson car" is the guiding design principle for china

http://asiancorrespondent.com/59851/chinese-man-builds-home-made-ipad/

it's like cool, you spent all that time building a... windows tablet

http://i.imgur.com/9FTPk.jpg

two trucks carrying 72 tons of dynamite explode at a gas station

like, really?

nakh, is this football with chinese characteristics

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/01/shenhua_coach_invades_pitch_to_lift.php

there was a story many years ago about china taking its best football prodigies to some outback location in brazil where they were to be intensively coached by native talent, ready to explode onto the world stage about.....now, i guess

lol at homemade tablet w/ apple logo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4yW6Y54168&feature=player_embedded#!

two trucks carrying 72 tons of dynamite explode at a gas station

like, really?

― dayo, Wednesday, November 2, 2011 11:08 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

O_O

global times says：

Nobody likes trucks of dynamite exploding at a gas station, but China cannot singly pursue trucks of dynamite not exploding at gas stations.

ahaha

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-03/the-busiest-place-on-earth/3611032

I love the hell out of Mong Kok but I've never lived there (obv) and 4'11" 'er indoors couldn't see over the swarms of people. Didn't know until now that it's the densest human population on Earth but it's no surprise at all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/world/asia/03iht-letter03.html?_r=3

interesting look at chinese historiography

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/the-china-conundrum.html

I think this has the potential to be a really good thing! I'm totally cool w/ the rest of the world using the american university system as a luxury good, if it means we pay less. and a chinese 20 something probably is getting more out of the university of delaware than most americans there.

http://v.youku.com/v_playlist/f12279621o1p0.html

is that the woman falling from a bridge one? might need a warning.

I think this has the potential to be a really good thing! I'm totally cool w/ the rest of the world using the american university system as a luxury good, if it means we pay less. and a chinese 20 something probably is getting more out of the university of delaware than most americans there.

― iatee, Thursday, November 3, 2011 10:29 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

dunno if it's a 'luxury good' - a lot of times these kids are blowing through their parents + extended family savings. chinese families are willing to fork over a hell of a lot more for anything education related.

otoh, most universities in china outside of the top tier ones are frighteningly bad. and qinghua/beida barely crack the top 100 worldwide.

http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/11/04/human-rights-watch-reports-abuses-in-chinese-run-mines-in-zambia/

surprise, surprise, but q: are conditions in zambian mines better or worse than conditions in chinese mines?

also remember stories about chinese bosses in africa opening fire with machine guns on the disgruntled local work force, and getting away with it

yeah that's a good point I was looking at this from the 100% 'what's good for americans' perspective.

xp

very cool

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/04/portraits-government-buildings.php

http://i.imgur.com/54JwN.jpg

yeah that's a good point I was looking at this from the 100% 'what's good for americans' perspective.

xp

― iatee, Friday, November 4, 2011 2:58 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah. otoh I am pretty sure that the majority of these kids come from upper middle class and upper class families. after all they're renting apartments off campus! and I bet you'd see a lot of designer labels and luxury handbags if you could briefly survey them.

still though, it's a lot of money - $60k a year for four years = $240k, or about 1.5 million chinese yuan

the average college grad in shanghai makes 3300 yuan a month or about 6000 usd annually

let's assume that going to an american university triples your earning potential and you can land a 10000 yuan a month job or about 18000 usd annually

that's still not a very good return investment

but most of these kids probably go home to plush jobs in their father's factory, I bet, or maybe they just play a lot of ps3 and xbox

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/world/asia/the-privileges-of-chinas-elite-include-purified-air.html

lol - they don't even breathe the same air as the commoners

“They don’t have to eat gutter oil or drink poisoned milk powder and now they’re protected from filthy air,” said one posting on Sina Weibo, the country’s most popular microblog service. “This shows their indifference to the lives of ordinary people.”

the ccp hierarchs should take a lead from that japanese mp who drank fukushima water and publicly feast upon congealed poison milk deep fried in gutter oil

a big plate of thick sliced donkey dick tossed in congealed poison milk deep fried in gutter oil

there it is

http://images.buddytv.com/articles/Image/blinky-the-fish.jpg

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-independents-20111106,0,3629826.story

innaresting barbara demick report, independent candidates for people's representatives

yeah, surprise surprise

kind of lol'd at this in the sidebar

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-jews-20111016,0,1440710.story

okay. is this kaifeng jews thing for real or not? i guess it doesn't matter now, since they've decided to go to israel and get into it. but i think even sidney shapiro, famous jew in china and scholar of judeo-chinese things, concludes that there were very, very few jewish families a long, long time ago and that there are now probably very few little scraps of history, like a surname or two, a street name....

http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles2/china.htm

kaifeng is beautiful btw if u are ever nearby.even if it doesn't have jews, it has a huge christian populationa nd the little alleys are full on sundays of processions of people going off to chruches, official and house. it's like the appalachians of china:; it's mostly fucking poor and the henanese have their accents made fun of and are the subject of tons of jokes and discriminatd against by hr people at factories down south where they go en masse 4 work. but if it's possible to say that a place "has nice people" you can say it about henan. and about most of the forgottoen brutally poor parts of central/western china.

haha every place that's not a city in china is like the appalachians

some thoughts about li keqiang's visit to HK earlier this summer

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/MK01Ad01.html

think I posted about it before but it's a real fucking shame how quickly HK's leadership is falling into china's arms

I was sad that I didn't get a chance to visit the synagogue in HK before I left

you jewish bro?

i was trying to find the sexy beijing episode where she interviews her dad who was a refugee in hangzhou in the 40s...

no but there's a jewish side of my family

http://www.urbanphoto.net/blog/2010/12/09/judaism-with-a-hong-kong-flavour/

I saw it a few times from looking out the windows of buses but I never walked around that area, so sad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpZ20EYV2s

yo that dude went HARD

do i click play y/n

i dont like the look of that cunt whatever it is

the kaifeng seems like self-indulgence from some enterprising religious types trying to ~save the lost tribes~ and you really can't blame people wanting to leave impoverished home for a better life etc

http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/682723/Ai-Weiweis-tax-evasion-case-takes-a-new-twist.aspx

I love the global times, it's like found poetry

forgot about the homer simpson shovel

All Hail the Chinese Military Shovel WJQ-308

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/11/08/just-another-food-scandal-landfill-becomes-cattle-feedlot/

looool

compared to melamine in milk and gutter oil, this can't be called a scandal

this is almost wholesome.

yah but how about garbage soup

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/joelherrick/garbagesoup.jpg

okay back to subsisting on green tea ice cream flavor oreos and coke zero.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/how-walmart-is-changing-china/8709/

laughs:

the descriptions of "chinese workers, who are more used to drab frocks and olive-colored breeches, are now falling in love with the unfamiliar shades of capitalism, the vibrant pinks and greens that cloak the invisible hand of the market" are absurd.

the general weird shock at CHINESE PEOPLE CONSUME PRODUCTS LIKE WE DO AND GO TO SAM'S CLUB but--key difference--they call it SHANMUHUI hehehehehe.

"people's republic" scare quotes.

breathless descriptions of "but instead of doritos and tomatoes from peru, there are horse eyeballs on crushed ice, hog testicles in aspic, swallows nests (with living swallows still chirping within them!), and attention deficit razor clams"

the part about how wal-mart and china share an "ideology" (also put in joke quotes), because sam walton is like mao.

south park episode summary that would be too long for a wikipedia article.

the part about how america has turned the chinese off "leninism" by bathing them in "the solvent of the open marketplace" (not fake quotes this time).

okay, i couldn't get past the first page... maybe it gets better

“Now, whenever we create a new towel, we always think about the environment!” pipes up Li Yongzhi, the assistant manager, reminding me of how the heads of Revolutionary Committees used to boast during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution about how many jin of corn they could harvest from so many mu of land, under the guidance of Chairman Mao. “We have begun experimenting with such things as new fibers derived from bamboo, and even from milk, which we mix with our cotton stock so that it will be faster-drying, and thus produce more-energy-saving towels.”

dude fuck off.

In fact, one could say the same thing about China, which—after so many decades of defiant proletarian opposition to capitalism, consumerism, and American imperialism—has embraced the American-style market and is ardently following the Walmart path to prosperity.

actually there might be some interesting reportage on, like, middle class chinese consumer trends in this piece but good god

Liu Mei, who has adopted the English name Lucy, tells me how Walmart advisers initially visited the family-owned Dalian Xingyeyuan Group to explain how, by selling directly to large outlets, the business—and the co‑ops with which it worked—could be more efficient and profitable.

just a detail like that, about how she's ADOPTED an english name, just comes across so horribly patronizing.

In a Loftex conference room decorated with tabletop bouquets of plastic lilies, a Venus de Milo–like statue (with arms!), a cast-iron sculpture of a bucking bronco (homage to Frederic Remington?), and some abstract oil paintings, I ask the factory’s general manager, Wang Hongxing, a smart, affable middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie, if he was present when Lee Scott gave his 2008 Beijing speech.

ho ho! with arms, eh?

Liu Mei, who unlike her ancestors walks about in knock-off Adidas running shoes instead of the "long, stinking" foot binding rags, and has recently adopted Western dress, tells me how she has recently purchased a transistor radio and hopes to take part in "limited government-authorized market activities."

laugh me a laugh

Like nitinol, a unique nickel-titanium alloy that possesses “shape memory,” bending at low temperatures only to regain its original form when heated, China has long rebuked foreign efforts to change it.

this is a really tortured analogy

lol @ atlantic at characterizing the essence of wal-mart as 'anti-communist', as if you could characterize it in any other way than 'pure capitalism.'

this really does read like a high schooler's, lift the veil from the teacher's eyes "so THIS is how the government is implicated as a coconspirator in the OKC bombings" paper

writing a piece based on a long, extended and byzantine analogy about how wal-mart and the CCP parallel each other is just such a nagl

that is a really horrible article

they couldnt get jim fallows to read it over or anything??

If anything, WalMart demonstrates that command economies can work, provided a surplus of labor / producers and ample computing power for inventory / distribution management.

~~supply chaaaaain~~

started reading peter hessler's country driving today. hessler's 3 china books are probably the best most unassuming writing on contemporary china. not just because the competition is orville schell. love how he can do adventure story (driving his jeep down dry creekbeds in gansu, dodging the local public security bureau), reportage (on world bank desertification projects + corruption at this part in the book), and the character sketches he's always been good at, where he drags a character out of the background and takes apart their life in this really sympathetic beautiful way that illuminates them and the world they live in. funny, too.

every day I'm hesslin'

will check out (if I have time)

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2011/11/11/property-bubble-bursting/

happy singles day, everybody

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singles_Day

Speaking of hessler, i just finished river town--it was great--gonna track down oracle bones next

I just read "River Town" too. I second the admiration for his ability to sketch a character in a way that doesn't seem superficial.

Thought this was kind of interesting:

Lipton tea faces safety scandal in China

I recently bought some very nice Chinese oolong tea, btw.

yeah

The Anglo-Dutch consumer group Unilever, which sells the aptly named “Iron Buddha” oolong tea under its Lipton label, said in a statement that the rare earth metals had come from the soil where the tea was grown and could not have been added in the production process.

the ground is polluted. the soil, the fields, the earth. farmers know their crops are polluted, they take them to towns far away to sell where those townspeople don't know about the pollution. it's a giant game of hot potato.

wastewater and heavy metal runoff is poisoning the fields. the US (superfunds) went through this too, so did Japan (minimata), but that was 30-80 years ago.

Yeah, the pollution and food safety issues seem out of control, and the government is not helping:

The ruling Communist party is extremely wary of any organisation not under its own control and has blocked attempts to set up independent consumer advocacy groups, even going as far as to jail some people who attempt to form such groups.

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-kane-sellout-taiwan-2011-11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/11/12/who-is-chen-guangcheng%E2%80%94-a-celebration-of-life-on-his-40th-birthday/

great profile on chen guangcheng

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/world/asia/picking-brand-names-in-china-is-a-business-itself.html?pagewanted=all

great article

Marriott, Wan hao, or “10,000 wealthy elites.

lol

Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone’s guess.

Each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own.

The Chinese are famously inscrutable and modern Orientalists have long speculated on whether or not the mysteries of their language will ever be fully explained.

One is reminded of the story of Pepsi's introduction into Latin-American markets, where the name literally translates as 'grey, flaccid penis'-- which certainly did not appeal to the machismo of Latin men!

Apple's Chinese moniker, Ping Guo ("apple") is a rather direct translation. But it has a second possible reading: Flat Pot. One wonders if the ad wizards at Apple were smoking a bit of flat pot themselves when they came up with the Chinese transliteration!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/to-save-our-economy-ditch-taiwan.html

idgi

flat pot or ditching taiwan to save the american economy?

no I mean your post before that one

um i dunno, i guess i found it a bit silly to say things like "each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own" or say that we can't know why some characters have certain connotations. i'm a bit skeptical that anyone whose native language is chinese is treating these brand names as anything but transliterations. i mean, they're reading 宝马 not as the chinese characters TREASURE HORSE but mostly just as a sound... it's a transliteration.... the characters have connotations but i think they're also common characters when transliterating foreign words. just like nobody is reading 奥巴马 as "secret tail horse."

if 耐克 NIKE means something in chinese, why does 希尔顿 hilton "mean nothing"? they both MEAN something but neither really mean anything. like 家乐福 carrefour is three common characters with distinct meanings or whatever but in everyday use they're serving a phonetic purpose and just work as a transliteration. they don't become a chinese word because they're written with chinese characters that have a meaning-- they use those ones because they're common characters for transliterations and will announce that the name is a transliteration of a foreign word. i guess it's different when it comes to shampoo names or whatever.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_blunder#Urban_legends

idk as someone who is nearly a native speaker I do think that they have to choose the transliteration carefully. I haven't talked abou this topic specifically with any chinese people but it's crazy to think that companies choose their names willy nilly out of a hat.

and carrefour, 家乐福, well I think that's pretty good! "home happy fortune" - right, they sell housewares, they're a big box department store, makes sense. much better than 假了负, for example.

and I'm pretty sure obama had no hand in choosing his transliteration - a corporation on the other hand, would definitely want to invest money in choosing a good name!

this is a culture that worships the number 8 because it sounds like prosperity, and hates the number 4 because it sounds like death - homophones are at the root of a lot of chinese jokes!

right right but i also think part of 家乐福 is that it reads like a transliteration, not a chinese word. i guess it was just kind of overstating things, i guess. i just wanted to riff on it too. sorry.

http://data.007gzs.com/upload_files/3/G/GD/gdDTq31.jpg

maybe kfc would be less successful if they had gone with this earlier transliteration

lol

yeah, I mean 家乐福 is definitely a transliteration but the characters were chosen pretty carefully I think. I do think that chinese choose names differently than amurricans - to name a thing is to exert power over it etc. etc. but the underlying principles are kind of different?

like I knew a lot of women in HK who were have like 宝 and 贵 and 玉 and 珍 in their names - you know, characters denoting fortune, treasure, jade. precious metals. and a guy is probably more likely to have other kinds of characters in his name, like 国 or 正 or something. or if you have clever parents they might name you after a 成语. like thought goes into what the names mean, too, whereas in amurrica you might just say "jada sounds cool" or "quincy is cool name" idk.

so yeah, I think it is interesting to see how foreign companies choose their chinese names - some of them go for the pure transliteration like hilton, some of them go for a transliteration w/ meaning in chinese, some of them go for a completely chinese one. I'd have to ask some more of my chinese friends if they notice things like this or if they pay attention to it.

and yeah those introductory explanations from the nyt article do sound like they come from a "teach yourself chinese in 5 minutes!" book but they are still kind of true! traditional chinese characters oftentimes are easier to remember than their simplified counterparts because you can make stories about the radicals. you still can, with a lot of simplified characters. like 捉, makes sense cause you can catch something by binding its feet and hands. my favorite is 噩, for a while I couldn't even stand to look at it - so evil. four mouths around the emperor - eunuchs whispering lies.

sometimes the radical is just a sound-loan, but a lot of times the radicals do contribute meanings.

I'm probably just really sensitive to this kind of stuff since I'm picking up the written language as a newbie, it's probably not ob

but yeah, a native chinese learner is probably not as sensitive to the little 'stories' a character can sometimes tell. just like how an english speaker may not realize breakfast comes from breaking a fast, or disintegrate is literally dis-integrate, or coincidence comes from co-incident!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s&feature=player_embedded

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

i've been in hong kong the last week and yesterday we crossed the border at lo wu into shenzhen. it was so incredible how in one 10 minute train journey the atmosphere and the people change so much. we only got to spend a few hours so we wandered around being pestered by "sale's managers" from the nearby shopping center. kinda annoyed i didn't get to see more.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/ccs1ic?med=1;sort=ccs1ic_id;type=boolean;view=thumbnail;rgn1=ic_all;q1=ccs1ic

yeh it is literally, literally, night and day, the passage between hk and shenzhen

whenever I made that crossing it always felt like 'coming home' and 'civilization' idk weird feeling to have about a place you've lived in for only a few years

i never know how appropriate it is to ask these sorts of questions in the middle of threads or whatever and when i should just email but

yo dayo, are you still in hong kong?

no I came back to the states this past summer

but if you need any pointers lmk also there is at least one ilxor still in hk

one of the coolest ilxors ever btw

okay!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/asia/murong-xuecun-pushes-censorship-limits-in-china.html?_r=2

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/china-gigantic/

AWESOME

"If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone," - Michele Bachmann

"If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's building enormous patterns in remote mountain plateaux. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone," - Michele Bachmann

pronounced "plat-ooks"

for once the folx at slashdot provide some cool/helpful stuff

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2525304&cid=38054096

First comment suggests a relation between the desert project and a map of Washington, D.C....

http://gizmodo.com/5859081/why-is-china-building-these-gigantic-structures-in-the-middle-of-the-desert

And then all the other comments suggest it's a wind farm...

lol uh that is truther stuff right there xp

if you thought walking to school uphill both ways in the snow was bad

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/11/14/treacherous-road-to-school/

also huge LOLs

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/15/breaking_vladimir_putin_winner_of_t.php

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzIwNjM2NDc2.html

"If you look at China, they don't have food stamps. They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's building enormous patterns in remote mountain plateaux. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone," - Michele Bachmann

― max, Monday, November 14, 2011 11:28 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

loool

I'm just gonna post the NYT take on the confucius peace prize because it's so lol

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/world/asia/chinas-confucius-prize-awarded-to-vladimir-putin.html

“Those wars were righteous wars,” Qiao Damo, the self-described co-founder and president of the Confucius Peace Prize committee, said in a telephone interview. “Mr. Putin fought for the unification of his country.”

“His iron hand and toughness revealed in this war impressed the Russians a lot, and he was regarded to be capable of bringing safety and stability to Russia,” read an English version of the committee’s statement. “He became the anti-terrorist No. 1 and the national hero.”

The award, co-sponsored this year by Moutai, a liquor company

yeah hey dylannn i'm here. happy to help out or meet up or whatever. let me know. im not that cool but im pretty cool. if you're here before december 4th (i think) this is definitely worth checking out.

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/17/video_of_tibetan_self-immolation_fr.php

haven't watched this yet, dunno if I'm going to

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8893337/Chinese-man-sets-himself-on-fire-in-Tiananmen-Square.html

1984, forrealz

oh hey, okay dude!! thanks for the offer. aware of yang zhichao as performance artist but hadn't heard of the notebooks project. would like to check it out. has yang zhichao staged a selfimmolation yet?

actually, i will say this right now, if anyone is ever in northern china, feel free to stop by and visit :))))

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/rBGpV6bjdhU/

http://shanghaiist.com/2011/11/18/google_maps_mystery_structures_actu.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdJVASZknBg

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2011/11/18/reporting-on-china/

Fox Butterworth, the New York Times’ first post-Mao China correspondent, tells the story of a young woman who opened up to him (off the record) about the sex life of Deng Xiaoping’s China and wound up in a prison camp for embarrassing the country.

now I'm intrigued

my dad tried to explain to me that mao wasn't a sex-crazed peasant, that he was just 'curious'

he lived up to the old kmt line about 共产共妻

actually, i know he had a few wives but never really heard much about mao's sex life.

heard mao had the pick of the litter of all the nubile young female peasants in the countryside, there have been books that go into this in more detail but you can never be sure how apocryphal the tales are or if they are really true

What has lent Mr. Gingrich’s written and spoken work, or, as he calls it, his “teaching,” the casual semblance of being based on some plain-spoken substance, some rough-hewn horse sense, is that most of what he says has reached us in outline form, with topic points capitalized (the capitalization has been restrained in the more conventionally edited To Renew America) and systematically, if inappositely, numbered. There were “Seven key aspects” and “Nine vision-level principles” of “Personal Strength” (Pillar Two of American Civilization), there were “Five core principles” of “Quality as Defined by Deming” (Pillar Five), there were “Three Big Concepts” of “Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (Pillar Three). There were also, still under Pillar Three, “Five Enemies of Entrepreneurial Free Enterprise” (“Bureaucracy,” “Credentialing,” “Taxation,” “Litigation,” and “Regulation”), which would have been identical to Pillar Four’s “Seven welfare state cripplers of progress” had the latter not folded in “Centralization,” “Anti-progress Cultural Attitude,” and “Ignorance.”

In Window of Opportunity, Mr. Gingrich advised us that “the great force changing our world is a synergism of essentially six parts,” and offered “five simple steps to a bold future.” On the health-care question, Mr. Gingrich posited “eight areas of necessary change.” On the issue of arms control, he saw “seven imperatives that will help the free world survive in the age of nuclear weapons.” Down a few paragraphs the seven imperatives gave way to “two initiatives,” then to “three broad strategic options for the next generation,” and finally, within the scan of the eye, to “six realistic goals which would increase our children’s chances of living in a world without nuclear war.”

haha when I was reading that I was thinking the exact same thing

newt gingrich really is a remarkable man

i did always love how clearly mao outlined stuff

newt gingrich's 'ten taxonomic precepts of sedition' will be required reading for ccp plants worldwide in 2k12

http://beat.baidu.com/?p=3515

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/ddddddddddddddddddddd.jpg

we will start the 2012 thread on chinese new year's. the ayes have it.

very surprised at hu's blatant declaration that the US and china are in a culture war

wonder when china pop culture will 'get it.' like, for example, look at their cartoons - they just don't understand anthropomorphism. their shit looks so creepy. like beady-eyes, no expressions, dudes, japanese & american cartoons have big beady eyes for a reason

err *big expressive eyes

id like to see a chinese equivalent of rush limabugh style mock-chinese, preferably on youtube

feel like china's efficiency in mocking wite ppl langauges will have big implications for the kulturkampf

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2012/01/04/the-republicans-on-china-who-knows-what%E2%80%99s-up-and-who-doesn%E2%80%99t-2/

interesting take on hu's remarks

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/beijings-culture-war-isnt-about-the-us-its-about-chinas-future/250900/

reminded that so far the most strident efforts have been made against china's own culture-producers like 非诚勿扰

it's always been embarrassing to have to rep for chinese literature because there isn't a lot of it that i feel right repping for and everything that appears in english translation is hindered by being shittily translated (99% of it by howard goldblatt).

so i dunno. to see chinese literature today devote an issue to him... with a fucking self-interview... and everything in the magazine is basically howard goldblatt school of translation stuff. really overliteral and all the chinese idioms are matched with english idioms (which would work if english writing involved a lot of pithy phrases and shit).

anyways.

i was sort of stoked to see them finally drop a second issue because i was supposed to have an excerpt of northern girls by sheng keyi in it. but there was supposedly some "controversy" because it had dirty words in it (book revolves around a girl with huge breasts who fucks her way to shenzhen). but no.

"Has he sold out his prison-mates? Why else would he get such good treatment? A large piece of pork every time."

In any case, pork was a welcome addition to their meal. Sometimes they even joked about it:
"There were bristles on the piece I got. Lots of them standing straight up, like that you-know-what down below. Ha ha ha."

"Is your you-know-what as skinny as a pig's bristle?" someone would ask in jest.

now, this type of shit is basically chinglish to me. why can't we have chinese-english translation where the final result is natural, modern english???

"prison-mates"
"you-know-what down below"
"in jest"

The heat brings out the gamy smell of the beef, but, with the amelioration of spices, only an aromatic meaty fragrance remains.

It is a heavy fragrance.

It has an authentic, delicious flavor.

:(

http://www.ou.edu/clt/vol-2-1/fiction-li-ang.html

it's actually a decentish essay but to me, it's almost unreadable if i have to read

For those under the sentence of death each Thursday night's three-inch piece of pork and cake of tofu could very well mean his "last, sumptuous supper." :(((( why is last sumptuous supper in quotation marks? likely because it represents a chinese phrase but DUDE JUST FUCKING TRANSLATE IT. WHY KEEP TALKING ABOUT A BOWL-SIZED ETC. IN CHINESE YOU SAY SOMETHING IS THE SIZE OF A BOWL OR AS THICK AS A BOWL BUT NO ONE DOES THAT IN ENGLISH

but i really like li ang and the piece is interesting so i guess i just want to say it deserves a more natural, fluent translation and more people to read it.

goldblatt had the one crack at doing jia pingwa in english and fucked it up.

theory: people that study chinese literature are so caught up in the idea that each character is crucial and must be understood and communicated that they miss the idea and the vibe and the soul of the original.

theory: howard goldblatt and lots of the other dudes that get the few chinese lit translation jobs are REALLY OLD. (recent exception cindy carter for dream of ding village and a few more that i can't think of off the top of my head).

but actually: i think howard goldblatt is good as a digging in the crates type of dude and found lots of good stuff that nobody bothered with, especially in taiwan. and i always liked his translation of notes of a desolate man by zhu tianwen.

actually, i take back everything i said about him. that self-interview upset me. it's not his fault he's basically the only show in town.

eh well those are mostly theoretical translation issues. there's the fear of turning into a modern day constance garnett, i.e. someone who translates works into stiff victorian prose.

man i get all fucked up on this hu jintao shit and i forgget that this is the actual countyr where i live and i just took X and made out with a beautiful korean girl in a club bathroom listening to david banner we need and she unhooked her bra for me and i had to ask her the first or second row when i did tback up . god it's snowing in dalian and it's so beautiful and peaceful and all the sttreetsweeper men are out sweeping snow instead of dust and i have my spring festival train tickets and i love it her despite cultural war or whatnot. lol.

http://www.ou.edu/clt/vol-2-1/interview-wang-jiaxin.html

any misty poetry fans in this motherfucker？》》》》》

http://news.ftv.com.tw/NewsContent.aspx?ntype=class&sno=2012105L05M1

http://www.ministryoftofu.com/2012/01/photo-showing-payslip-of-a-chinese-sanitation-worker-strikes-chord-in-netizens/

posting only because I have been to zengcheng!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/11/british-chinese-racism/print

http://www.danwei.com/serial-killers-in-china/

normally i'm super interested in serial killer stuff but I had to stop reading, probably because the police response was so weak

Good look at the Taiwan election result: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137029/daniel-lynch/why-ma-won-the-elections-and-whats-next-for-taiwan-and-china

http://www.zhongnanhaiblog.com/?p=475

thanks to ilxor rent - a good summary of the differences between HK and China on the ground

I think the idea of serial killers in China scares the shit out of me because there would be no police to protect you

http://www.economist.com/node/21541716

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/01/18/iconic_good_samaritan_case_in_china.php

:O :O :O

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/TKoY3j6yyyM/?resourceId=0_06_02_99

I like the way shanghaiinese sounds!

http://badcanto.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/mainland-scholar-many-hongkonger-are-dogs/

so uh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2uINfAKOxc

fucking A

he actually calls hongkongers 'running dogs'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_dog

www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/world/asia/china-leadership-transition/index.html

习近平 surprise.gif

Errr

xi jinping, sorry

rolling buried alive in china 2012 btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02UMJESbwJg

Xi
May be the face I can't forget
The trace of pleasure or regret
May be my treasure or the price I have to pay
Xi
May be the song that summer sings
May be the chill that autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day

Hu are you
Hu Hu
Hu Hu

anyone have any recommendations for books on chinese history? i know there's thousands upon thousands of years of material, and i'm not quite sure where to start

interested in a certain period?

i only have a vague notion of it right now. i guess i'd like to start with qin, han, and three kingdoms, and work my way through ming. i'm interested in the culture and civilization aspect, and always found china pretty damn fascinating.

my focus is late imperial/modern china so i'm sure someone else can recommend better books on deep historical china but i'll throw out three

china's golden age: everyday life in the tang dynasty by charles benn. because the tang is the golden age and you need to read about the grandeur and supreme cultural development of yangzhou and xi'an during the tang.
the confusions of pleasure: commerce and culture in ming china by timothy brook-- absolutely 100% best book on ming china. divided by season, each season covering roughly a century. he charts the movement from agrarian society into advanced government/commercial powerhouse. i think this is a pretty common chinese history 101 book and everyone's read about the brick-- he uses the inscriptions on a brick to trace it back to a certain kiln, explains the system of paying taxes with labour, shows how the canal systems worked. lots of non-elite perspectives, but also talks about the ming tribute system, international relations. and check out the troubled empire by brook, which deals with the mongol invasion of china, the creation of the yuan dynasty, song dynasty loyalists, the cultural influence of the yuan on the song.
if you're going to be reading about the ming, i guess i like return to dragon mountain: memories of a late ming man by jonathan spence, a history of the ming through the eyes of a literatus, lots of poetry and courtesans and bureaucracy.
the imperial capitals of china by arthur cotterell does a good job at overview, by skipping through the various capitals of chinese dynastic regimes, goes from the semi-mythical shang to qing dynasty beijing.

these are all recent, too.

if you only read one: confusions of pleasure

these books sound pretty cool, thanks. i love reading about what everyday life was like through history

chinese ambassador on tv here notes that the graphic of china behind him is incomplete: no taiwan

Quite an interesting piece on the Chinese economy and how it has been changing

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/nathan-sperber/the-mayor-economy

it was good. i liked too this nathan sperber piece on macro control: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/02/macro-control-making-sense-of-a-central-concept-in-chinese-economic-policy/.

dylan is hefei worth visiting?