滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

i was missing this. and i plan to be in china for most of this year.

PM2.5 particles are small enough to go deep into the lungs and can cause lung cancer, bronchitis and asthma. Last week there were readings off the scale – more than 500, up to 755 at some points, and possibly beyond. A level above 300 is considered "hazardous", while the World Health Organisation recommends a daily level of no more than 20.

And Beijing is nowhere near the worst – it ranked 75th worst for air quality out of 149 cities in China listed at the weekend, with the worst reading in the northern city of Harbin.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-plans-emergency-measures-to-control-worsening-air-pollution-8459248.html

爸爸是个滚着石头

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8JbgNqwea4Q

in the still deeply conservative north
the gary, indiana of 东北
within spitting distance of the SINUIJU SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION which will
someday be the dprk's shenzhen
dancing a modified 忠字舞
militant 服务员 stomp the floor and perform martial parade maneuvers
shoes are removed

come on, embed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JbgNqwea4Q

everybody I've met from 东北 has been ashamed to admit that they're from 东北

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VImVx8cJCIc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

i'm reading this and it is excellent:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1906838550

^

I mean, happy lny and all that

i want to show my sister some classic chinese cinema but i don't know what chinese cinema is classic. i have a copy of a lei fang film from 1969. i'm looking for recommendations for 3-5 chinese films that might be interesting to a high school senior.

my knowledge isn't very good but afaict mainland chinese cinema doesn't really take off until the 80s

but u should probably go through this article and see http://www.fandor.com/blog/video-100-essential-chinese-movies

does she like weird/arty films cuz i don't wanna recommend a buncha tsai ming-liang and have her bored out of her skull

a little arty is okay. probably not too arty.

= wkw

yeah chungking express and be done with it imo

if it's for a high schooler then probably you want stuff post-80s and beyond, starting with zhang yimou et al: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_of_China#Rise_of_the_Fifth_Generation

if she has no exposure whatsoever to chinese films wouldn't it make sense to start with the super mainstream 2000s-on wuxia films? crouching, hero, daggers, etc? that probably fits the "little arty" criterion

and iunno. i would rep for john woo/tsui hark but those are probably too much dude movies. as far as "classic" is concerned i would start with yimou too. fwiw my white dad looooves "to live" and he is real not arty

Thunderstorm 雷雨 is a 1937 play by Cao Yu that was simultaneously made into two films. One is a Shanghai production from 1957 (me thinks) and the other is from Hong Kong (perhaps early sixties) and stars a very young Bruce Lee. The play is wonderful, quick paced and exhibits a certain western influence on Chinese drama and theatre in the early 20th century, pre-communist revolution. It may skirt the border of what you're looking for. On one hand it is aged in appearance, but the intertwining plots and complexity of it all really make the film quite thrilling. Since it's based off of a play, it is predominantly dialogue driven and includes limited locals. I recommend though; the ending will not disappoint.

The Shanghai version is on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc1FcajE09o 太好了！

I gotta say, that quality 劣质的。

Here's a better version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKoZES1s-uY

chinese cinema po5 off top of my head
5) xiao wu / platform / unknown pleasures -- esp unknown pleasures or maybe esp platform, jia zhangke grimy shanxi accent bricks and mortar the """truest films about postsocialist china
4) flowers of shanghai -- hou hsiao hsien quiet beautiful end of the empire dialogue in wu dull convuluted beautiful like a ming erotic novel
3) hibiscus town -- the only filmic representation of scar literature directed by xie jin who got fucked over royally during the cultural revolution but 2 key films of post revolution china, the red detachment of women and stage sisters -- and it features the debut? of jiang wen who showed up in a few zhang yimou movies and directed devils on the doorstep
2) red detachment of women ----------
1) devils on the doorstep / red sorghum ------- 2 v different films about rural china under japanese occupation/attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mg4b6jvftes

tsai mingliang isn't boring come on guys

i didn't say he was!

http://www.brookings.edu/research/articles/2013/02/china-xi-jinping-li

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/files/images/1-120f913551k01.jpg

from here

http://www.boston.com/news/world/asia/2013/04/02/china-more-rare-bird-flu-cases-new-steps-taken/2PU66vBqMDvsYGm1ar1uiI/story.html

fuck me i'm gonna be in china this summer ugh

aw shit I'm traveling with my dad for ten days in april / may in china, including rural regions, and we leave really soon. Yikes!

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/will-chinese-be-supreme

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/09/cias-cancelled-war-tibet

The Chinese leaders’ gnomic statements on international strategy were taken as ultimate examples of the realist wisdom of an ancient civilization, instead of the ignorance about the world that they really represented.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/04/for-gay-chinese-getting-married-means-getting-creative/274895/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/12/the_love_fest_china_us_military

乒乓, if you get down spending the summer in china, just remember that there are other people who will be spending the summer in Saskatchewan.

Other people will spend their summer cleaning out white rat's cages and refilling the water dispensers that hang on the side of the cage. For minimum wage.

i, on the other hand, will catch bird flu and die in a developing country

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_asian-megacities.html

i generally agree with the observations about beijing, havent spend enough time in shanghai though the stats about underutilization of office space if true are a lil troubling. have never been to seoul but now i really wanna go

i have some minor disagreements with that article and some comments. i will tell you what they are:

Both are founded on the hierarchical Confucian philosophy; both have been influenced by Buddhism.

when i read this sort of idea deployed to talk about modern city planning, the alarms go off.

China’s cities, by contrast, reflect the autocratic and corrupt rule of the Communist Party.

okay, sure. but the language here makes one think of a vicious command economy and grey tower blocks. most chinese cities developed into what we now see them during the late 80s, 90s and 2000s, when the old fashioned rules of capitalistic profit seeking and real estate speculation (+ a small touch of central planning) held sway. they reflect less the autocratic rule of the communist party than the myriad of attempts that businessmen (and there are lots who are in the party and connected to it) have made to circumvent the rules of the party.

Officials view the peasant migrants who work menial jobs in Shanghai as a stain on the Western-oriented city and prevent them from living there or sending their children to local schools.

this is basically true, but it's hard for anyone to live in shanghai, as the author says earlier. a shanghai hukou is fucking hard to get (here's a brief explanation of who you need to be to get one: 上海外地人办理上海户口的条件). this is by design, of course. but over the last decade, it's become nearly impossible for even people who could get a shanghai hukou to settle in the city. that wasn't by design.

All other migrants who work in Shanghai, though, must return by night to the shantytowns or shoddy workers’ dormitories at the city’s periphery, far from the cosmopolitan city center.

"shantytowns" is a pretty strong word. there aren't exactly vast landscapes of corrugated tin shacks, okay? and that "other migrants" category includes, as i said, an increasingly high proportion of the people working in the city, who are kept out by the high cost of living (and this is true in other modern cities, where real estate speculation and other factors have driven up the cost of owning/renting, which is why i live in richmond instead of in a tidy apartment on robson street, near where i work).

the household registration system that restricts people settling in shanghai isn't unique in east asia. it was abolished in south korea in 2008. it's deeply fucking divisive in china partly because it doesn't work in a country with a large migratory work force and there are so many ways to circumvent it. and the party has attempted to fix it and it will be gone someday soon.

These traditional neighborhoods could have been saved or modernized, but the reformers razed them in the name of hygiene (the official motive) and real-estate speculation (the real motive), erecting huge office towers in their stead. The hutong dwellers were moved to shoddily built, city-owned shoeboxes on the city’s edge, where rent is cheap but modern amenities like elevators and proper heating are often lacking.

right, but the hutong homes that remained were either 1) part of a wave of gentrification that had little to do with official motives and had been transformed into luxury courtyard homes or hipster businesses, or 2) were fucking falling apart. they didn't have "proper heating" or elevators (or, often, private bathrooms or reliable/safe wiring or even running water). the local government severely mismanaged the move of people out of the hutongs but it wasn't a totally a dick move to fuck them over and put them on the edge of the edge of the edge of the city.

i guess the question is... imagine beijing isn't hosting the olympics and isn't the seat of government the communist party... the hutongs would have been swept under the tide of market forces and turned into a yuppie paradise anyways. the people living there would have been fucked, eventually.

Beijing is not a friendly city. There are few places to walk and almost no parks. It sometimes seems as if the city wants to fill its every void with concrete to the maximum possible height. Stand-alone shops are rare, since they take up too much space; malls have replaced most of them. As oppressive as the city feels, the police presence is not that visible. Chinese subjects know that any lawbreaker will face serious punishment, which makes the country’s urban areas safe.

i think this is sort of bullshit. even now in beijing, which is one of my least favourite chinese cities to spend time in, where more and more people are forced out to the suburbs by the high cost of living, central beijing is still pretty exciting and alive, especially compared to ANY north american city. it's also far more walkable than any north american city.

the use of "subjects" seems condescending.

Seoul is unusual among Asian cities for the diversity of its cultural life, from pop confections exported across Asia (sitcoms and rock bands boast millions of Chinese and Japanese fans) to sophisticated contemporary art.

seoul is dope but... i don't think modern asian cities with a diverse cultural life are "unusual."

Should the North Korean regime collapse, Seoulites don’t expect anything like the wave of refugees that surged into the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

yes they do.

shanghai and beijing aren't great cities (shanghai comes closer and, even if you live in a fucked up, distant part of it, getting into the city is easier than a commute from maple ridge to downtown vancouver, to use another lower mainland example). but they're poor examples because they've been hit by the competing forces of marketization and central authority. so, you have disgusting real estate speculation driving up prices and hamhanded attempts to control the population and accomplish the party's ideological goals and remake it in the party's vision of modernization.

i think shenzhen is a more interesting city to look at the successes and failures of urbanization in china. it's distant from the twin capitals and doesn't have the historical baggage of shanghai or beijing but it also had the most rigid urban residency system. the attempts to reform that system often originate in shenzhen-- and there have been lots of really interesting stories about hukou reform coming from there.

it's also a fairly lively city, because it's decentralized in a way that beijing and shanghai aren't. so, it's got a network of central hubs, rather than one key area. and hong kong is right across the border, which gives it its own very different atmosphere from beijing or shanghai.

the interesting thing about shenzhen is that the majority of its citizens do not hold a shenzhen hukou. even when the city tried to bring rural hukou holders into the urban fold, there was limited success. when offered official urban registration, many chose to maintain their rural residency permits. this is partly because shenzhen has made it possible for, for example, children of migrants to still attend school, which is a big issue in shanghai, where without a shanghai hukou you're fucked but your kids are even more fucked. but also because holding a rural registration provides a buffer should the vagaries of modern urban life leave one without a job. many of the people taking the urban hukou in shenzhen are doing it because they've been screwed out of their land back home.

i think the most likely thing is that, in the next ten years, the hukou system will still be in place but it won't be used to determine access to social services and public education.

in a china ruled by market forces, having your workforce scared to build your cities and toil in your factories because they can't send their kids to school and are, at the same time, being hassled by rural land management, is bad for business.

i think guy sorman, even if he wrote a book called economics does not lie, relies far too much on analyzing the psychology of the party as some kind of maoist zhongshan jacket-clad cabal rather than a bunch of guys that feel the pressure of market forces and also want to enrich themselves and their friends.

the guy is wetting himself over skyscrapers built by daewoo and lotte, so, i'm not sure i take the seoul part too seriously, either.

it's so weird how you can know about stuff by knowing about it instead of not knowing about it

deep.

yeah, i agree with you on most of your disagreements with the motives behind the results, but the results still stand. beijing is a terrible city to live in

i've only been in shenzhen for a few days but it def did seem different. i think the city i most wanna go back to is guangzhou.

right, but the hutong homes that remained were either 1) part of a wave of gentrification that had little to do with official motives and had been transformed into luxury courtyard homes or hipster businesses, or 2) were fucking falling apart. they didn't have "proper heating" or elevators (or, often, private bathrooms or reliable/safe wiring or even running water). the local government severely mismanaged the move of people out of the hutongs but it wasn't a totally a dick move to fuck them over and put them on the edge of the edge of the edge of the city.

i agree w/ this - my parents lived in a hutong - no heat, no running water, a pretty inefficient use of land (one story!). the ones that have been preserved look pretty sorry

otoh the way of life that was possible in a hutong/siheyuan arrangement sounded like it was pretty awesome - multiple families living together with common shared spaces, lots of chances for socialization. p far away from people who hole up in their apartments or suburban duplexes. i dont know how the majority of beijingers live nowadays. probably in big complexes

the first time i was in beijing was 2006 and the last time in 2012. the difference between the two cities i saw is hard to believe. neither of them were very great cities, though.

there are a dozen cities i'd choose to settle in before either beijing or shanghai.

whats yer top 10?

TOP 5 DEAD OR ALIVE

1. shenzhen. everyone is under 35. everyone smokes but the air is clean. burger king. shopping malls. crowds. giant portrait of deng xiaoping watching over the philosophy of the new china made flesh. a city where most of the population is from away, arrived in the city to see what they can make of themselves: one of the reasons why it's such an interesting source of new ideas in business, literature, politics. you can walk to hong kong, which blows my mind still kinda, but it's not very hk-oriented and doesn't at all resemble its neighbor. still not too expensive to live there.

2. nanjing. Thirty years ago no bridge crossed the river at all. Even today the Yangtze redefines the country with a subtle absoluteness. It marks the immemorial divide between a soldierly, bureaucratic north and the suave, entrepreneurial south. Men dwindle in size and integrity as they go south (say the northerners) and the clear-cut Mandarin of Beijing becomes a slushy caress. The dust of the wheat and millet-bearing plains dissolves to the monsoons of paddy fields and tea plantation. The staple of noodles becomes a diet of rice, and the low cottages and symmetrical northern streets twist and steepen into labyrinths of whitewashed brick. ... At the confluence of these worlds lies Nanjing. colin thubron in 1987. this is the closest you can get to what china would be like if the nationalists had won the war (okay, taiwan but...) (the presidential palace where sun zhongshan was sworn in as the first president of the public and where wang jingwei led his collaborationist government is still a landmark, located now in a pleasure quarter named for the birthyear of new china). the cultured stink of jiangnan's lower cities + surprisingly cosmopolitan and liveable. easy to buy weed. good food. you can get to shanghai in an hour and a half, two hours, three hours by the slowest train, if that helps.

3. dalian. like the cities of the pearl river delta, it's quite young: ... modern historians Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary estimate that, during the period 1891-1942, some 25.4 million migrants arrived to Manchuria from China south of the Great Wall, and 16.7 million went back. This gives the total positive migration balance of 8.7 million people over this half a century period. This makes the scale of the migration comparable to the westward expansion in United States, the advance to Siberia in Russia or, on a smaller scale, the move to Hokkaido in Japan.. and it has a peculiar history, having been in close contact with/occupied by its northern and eastern neighbors quite recently. sprawls wildly. cold as hell. a destination for migrants from the north. doesn't have the conservative meanness of other cities in dongbei and is not considered to be part of the dongbei family by cities like shenyang or changchun or harbin. because of its youth and high profile mayors (like bo xilai, who made his name here), it's been scoured by development and is nicely ahistorical and culturally confused and liberal. its universities attract a great number of students from out of province and now out of country. my friends in dalian are arty and rugged. negatives: it's expensive; traffic is horrific and the public transit system is underfunded; food is weak; god, it's cold; the air is coal smoke for six months out of the year.

4. kaifeng. guy sorman talks about parks but some of the most parked out/"liveable" cities in china are some of the most culturally dead. most of those cities are the result of heavyhanded and nearsighted development by urban governments who've had to bulldoze something else to install a urinesoaked lawn or a treeless public square. kaifeng preserves what is deemed unattractive by modern chinese city planners: old shit and a city that wasn't built for universal car ownership. i sort of picked it at random to represent that. but i also live kaifeng. it was one of the ancient capitals and was the city depicted on the scroll "along the river during qingming festival" and was the largest city in the world until 11something until it was razed by manchurian tribes and lost its spot on the list to istanbul or whatever it was called at the time. for most of its history, it was very much on the edge of empire and, like xi'an and lanzhou, became a place where indigenous chinese yellow river culture met cultural influences from the north and far west. it's very different from the cosmopolitan urban environment of dalian or shenzhen. it's been overlooked (in favour of zhengzhou and luoyang) as a manufacturing/business/university center. and apart from a few sites, it's fairly unspoiled. the old city is still there and it's cheap and the people are nice and it's culturally alive and the food is amazing.

5. hangzhou. i was going to put ningbo on the list here, instead, to be contrarian, and then i thought i could get away with listing "suburban shanghai" as an option but what the hell, hangzhou. like suzhou, money and history and geography have allowed them to develop in attractive ways. unlike other cities, the attempts by the municipal government to turn it into some kind of a showcase of progress and modernity are sort of appealing. public transit works. it's walkable. like most other cities on the list, it's a university town.

haha i spent a few days in nanjing a few winters ago; i was legit depressed by that place, went to the memorial museum, twas awful. i guess you do get a sense of age & history thru the tall trees that line a lot of the streets, just seemed like a sad place overall to me. but i should visit in the spring

gonna call out chengdu as being overrated, everybody in china is all like 'man chengdu rocks' but its not all that great. i wanna visit chongqing

i would for sure love to spend more time in shenzhen

one of the skyscrapres there looks like its made out of literal gold

6. yantai. weihai, up the coast, always makes liveable cities ranking lists in china, and everyone knows qingdao, the other major city of coastal shandong. but i like yantai. it's a bit more rugged and lazy than its coastal cousins. but it's cheap and you can go to the beach or wander through ancient smashed fishing villages. seaside development is ugly as hell, but beyond the curtain of gaudy hotels along the water, it's a great city. amazing food. negatives: korean sex tourists and more dog meat restaurants per capita than anywhere on earth (don't get me wrong, i'm cool with eating dogs but dog meat restaurants that serve budget conscious korean sex tourists aren't something you want great amounts of in your city); the development of tourist sites like penglai pavilion has turned them into eyesores, but they're still sorta beautiful despite the shoddy restoration and crowds; coastal china is not exactly an environmentalist's dream, but with a little work you can find spots that are superficially not too ruined.

7. xiamen. like dalian, it always makes most liveable city lists. let me tell you: dalian is unliveable if judged by my personal metrics of liveability. it's sprawly and congested and cold and its showcase features are cheesy "scenic areas" and empty public squares. but dalian and xiamen are liveable in spite of their lame showcase features. xiamen is dope. hometown of lai changxing. negatives: you can't understand anyone; will be overrun by taiwanese soldiers when the mainland is retaken.

8. kunming. yeah, probably overrated but i dig it. but i also visited it after a few months in guizhou.

9. xi'an. sentimental favourite but god, it's ugly.

10. kashgar. before the final third of the old city has been bulldozed.

i feel like changsha is the new chengdu.

you ever order that photobook by rian dundon? changsha? feel like u would vibe to it

http://vimeo.com/43122647

i have it and its pretty great

i got it! i love it.

xi'an i dont remember much of besides walking on top of the wall

one city i'd like to revisit is hohhot, i got a cool vibe from it even though i spent like half a day in it en route to riding ponies in the steppes, plus its probably the city with the best name to pronounce in chinese

i feel like i walked on top of a city wall in nanjing too... could be misremembering

dylannn that is fantastic, and is already forming a basis for my 2014 itinerary

i think i've visited more cities in china than i have in the us : / *moves to china*

dalian is unliveable if judged by my personal metrics of liveability.

i think i meant to say that i think it's unliveable based on the things that are used to generate these lists. i think that's what i meant. it succeeds as a city despite the fact that it's unwalkable and its downtown is being shopping malled out.

yo, double A, my list of cities to visit would be totally different from my list of cities to live in! dalian isn't much fun to visit. neither is nanjing, arguably.

ah right. my interest is greater then just holidays because my future work plans could ride on which cities i like and dislike (e.g. i know plenty of people who work and have worked in dalian), so chunks of this holiday will happen with that in mind

http://dektol.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/deep-sea-diver-danny-lyon-in-china-2005-2009/

the girl in the coal truck.

what do they think of dalian, AA?

i think it makes a big difference whether you're trapped in the development zone, which is a wasteland, or in some other distant suburb (the shame of having to admit that you live in ganjingzi!), or right in the mess of the city. it's another city that's changed a lot since i first went there in 2006-- i lived there for a year, last year, and found that it had changed for the worse in many ways.

i like a lot of things about dalian but as i said, the aspects of the city that are promoted... those parks and beaches and liveability... are a sham. the carefully engineered public entertainment districts are horrible places to spend time, and public parks in china usually don't function as public parks function in the west, although they're put in place with the same imagined frisbee throwers and whatnot, and are often just vanity projects for whatever municipal government officers that need to put something on their resume, placed without care, poorly designed. and unlike a lot of older chinese cities (so, most of them), you either need a car to get around or a great deal of patience. for such a wealthy city, public transit is poor and underfunded. the other thing you'll notice is that even though it's a university town, the 文青 haven't really gained a foothold and outside of a few enclaves, it's pretty conservative and business-oriented. it's more liberal than the rest of dongbei but the atmosphere is completely different from what you'll encounter down south (part of it is the lack of any great literary or artistic heritage but there's also a certain conservatism or northern pragmatism that was first pointed out to me by dalian natives). also, the air sucks.

that's what i have to say about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Y3URkpEFA

let's watch a documentary about artists in beijing in 1990

haha

i watched 'ai wei wei - never sorry' last week

the people i know who have been to dalian have said it's nice (and namedrop the bay), but in a nonplussed way; and the people who live there are mainly proud. all of them work/worked in that software park west of the city.

Bloomberg TV ‏@BloombergTV 11m
BREAKING: Magnitude 7 quake hits near Leshan, Sichuan, China

seems like it actually happened here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya'an

hold tight everybody and hope nobody on ilx is near the earthquake right now!

I am in Xi'an right now and really loving it, especially the Muslim neighborhood (yes i'm a lol tourist). Today we fly to DunHuang, then on to Urumchi and Kashgar by train. Lovin' this thread, keep the insights / opinions / recommendations / truth bombs flowing.

apparently the epicenter was 1300 meters underground, so far it seems like no casualties

well shit http://i.imgur.com/DG2ndUG.jpg

also it was 13km underground, not 1300 meters

lol steph is in sichuan right now http://i.imgur.com/grXSnjA.png

13km?! Why, that's almost... (thinks hard)... almost 10x deeper than 1300m!

http://i.imgur.com/jMF6gsE.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/g2BzzPa.jpg

well judging by these pics there will probably be casualties

:\ http://i.imgur.com/lqmF7K7.jpg

already 2 reported dead http://china.dwnews.com/news/2013-04-19/59166150.html

http://news.163.com/13/0420/09/8ST6Q3FN0001124J.html#sns_weibo more than a 100 casualties so far

government is mobilizing 2000+ troops

and i'm signing off

chinese media reporting 46 dead right now.

i have a friend in guiyang that says she felt it but who knows.

positives: not in as fucked up an area as in 2008 / better disaster plans in place / far weaker quake

still, fuck

the official death toll is at 78. i don't want to just dispassionately update that number over and over again.

pictures from ya'an look fucked. lots of video from chengdu and chongqing of people wandering around outside. lots of this on weibo:

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan_zpse947b49c.jpg

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan2_zpsc6935cf3.jpg

"16 year old junjun died when his neighbor's house collapsed and crushed his bedroom. his grandmother explained while weeping, he was just about to write the middle school entrance exams. today was the weekend, so i wanted him to sleep in. if i had got him out of bed a little bit earlier, he'd be fine."

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaanpanda_zps2ae09988.jpg

http://s.weibo.com/weibo/%E5%9C%B0%E9%9C%87

if ur interested

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan3_zps00071107.jpg

12:40, a vehicle carrying 17 soldiers and emergency workers plunged off a cliff, killing one soldier. the huaxi metropolitan is reporting that the vehicle swerved to avoid a car ahead of them on the road that had blown a tire. let's remember to stay off the roads in disaster areas, save them for emergency vehicles. in this picture a soldier burns three cigarettes in tribute to his deceased comrade.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan4_zpsbc729a87.jpg

meanwhile sichuan tv is playing anti-japanese dramas

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan5_zps959e3742.jpg

some aerial pics here http://news.backchina.com/viewnews-240965-gb2312.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B7qmEsjRN4w#at=12

some conspiracy theories on weibo, not surprising because weibo loves conspiracy theories and after 512 2008 there were plenty of issues that took a while to shake out: geng qingguo's predictions about the quake, school collapses. lots of jokes about guo meimei (http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/guo-meimei-red-cross-controversy-pissing-off-chinese-netizens.html).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6c0eae0a-a95d-11e2-a096-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2R4yTy6vf

li keqiang in sichuan. mention of reservoirs as a cause (and the three gorges dam were mentioned in 2008).

WEIBO REPORT, WHAT ARE THE TOP 10 TOPICS ON WEIBO RIGHT NOW

1. LINGLONG ROAD - beijing, haiding district. four cars collide, three catch on fire and start exploding. dog died, a guy's balls were on fire.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/63e10c60jw1e40ujvc8s4j20c80pomzj_zps47cb7eff.jpg

video here: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTQ2Nzg3NTI4.html

2. ZHU LING - qinghua student, victim of thallium poisoning, case unsolved but all signs point to her roommate, sun wei, whose personal emails telling friends how to post on message boards promoting her innocence were exposed and whose family happens to be connected (father is cppcc member, uncle former dep mayor of beijing)(this is why the zhu ling case is a sensitive topic). her roommate came out with a new, combative message protesting her innocence.

3. YIBIN - powerful aftershocks in yibin, sichuan, majorish city 5 million people, 200 km from ya'an, quite a bit of damage.

4. EARTHQUAKE

5. YANG CHENGYI - low level local cadre in quakezone removed from post. took the deputy county governor post last year. weibo commenters say: he wasn't doing anything wrong, just fucked up by not making a big show when his bosses rolled through. yang chengyi, honest and good natured to the end, told the reporter through tears: "the job isn't important now-- if i can be of any service, i'll be there."

6. YA'AN

7. SUN WEI - see item #2

8.LIAO ZHI - liao zhi is a dance teacher from hanwang county in sichuan. she lost her daughter and mother-in-law during the wenchuan earthquake in 2008. she also suffered her own injuries, including the loss of her legs. she recovered well and was fitted with prosthetic legs. she continued dancing, just as before. after the earthquake this week, she rushed to ya'an to do rescue and relief work. wearing her prosthetic legs, she delivered food, clothes and generators, and helped erect shelters. her name is liao zhi and she's truly an outstanding woman.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/7af40ad162d9f2d3cbed95bca8ec8a13622762d0f603ecd9_zps211bcadc.jpg

9. FUDAN UNIVERSITY POISONING - similar to the zhu ling story, a grad student at fudan was poisoned by her roommate after a dispute about paying for water. roommate has been arrested. calls for fundraising efforts for the family, conspiracy theories. they say the fudan poisoning case started over a dispute about water fees. i'm a bit worried. when i first got to my dorm, my roommate and i had a little disagreement over water fees. he said he shouldn't pay as much because he never drinks water. now, i really want to thank my roommate for not murdering me.

10. ZHANG XUEBING - shanghai public security boss was possibly (according to hk media) disciplined by the party for fucking around on his wife, having fake passports, and being generally a bad seed popped up again today in a local government symposium heavily covered by the media. so, who knows that's up with this guy.

makes it look like poisoning is a common thing in china. your neighbors had a big noisy party last night? no biggie, just poison them.

Looks like I'll be in Weihai for a few days in July. Anyone know about cool stuff in the area? Changdao Islands sound kind of interesting from the little information I can find: fishing villages + temples, Westerners allowed only very recently.

that's pretty awesome. i don't know anything about weihai. looking at it on a map. i would suggest you go to the most northeastern corner you can find. take a stone. throw it as hard as you can at north korea. maybe you'll hit something.

*inadvertently starts stone war with NK*

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/25/china-xinjiang-sufi-shrines

when i made my top 10 list of chinese cities to live in, i put down yantai, which is an hour's drive away from weihai and has a wal-mart and thousands of dog meat restaurants and korean sex tourists everywhere. weihai is superficially nicer, i guess, and it does make those questionable liveability lists, but once you get out of the development zones on the edge of town, it's pretty beat down. the waterfront area is grey and mean and grotesquely developed and marred by one of the ugliest buildings in china (and it's called happiness gate). i don't know how much time you've spent in china... i almost think it's more fun to wander around aimlessly than go to the trouble of seeing tourist sites (july, weihai, they'll be fucking packed).

changdao islands are cool. you can see similar fishing villages along the mainland coast, too, among the industrial zones and golf courses and AAA NATIONAL ECOLOGICAL TOURISM AREA OF XXXXX. outside of the cities (and even outside of the cities' economic development zones and main streets) and beyond the thin strip of coastline that's been developed, shandong is quite impressively rural and underdeveloped. penglai is worth checking out, too. most of the old city was torn down this decade (same deal in yantai and weihai, which had an interesting history as coastal cities and fell under various colonial powers and... all vestiges of that were pretty much torn down). you can go see penglai pavilion (one of the four great towers of china!), which will be a mad house in the middle of summer, but is still beautiful despite years of misguided development as a tourist spot and the crowds.

i think coastal shandong has the best food in china.

but eh, it's hard to tell you what to expect. to me, weihai = muddy backlots beside a string of pinklight microbrothels by the ferry docks ((if you had longer, you could take a ferry to dalian 9 hours/fast boat 3 hours and there's a ferry to incheon) and the concrete mausoleum lowceiling tunnels of the korean wholesale clothing market the source of all university district clothing shops and nightmarkets in easternchina and wide highways out to the extravagantly named economic zone exurbs welcome to the high technology commerce and transportation special development zone of the prefecture of huancai and the korean food naengmyeon and all the markets full (why coastal shandong has good food: sweet spot of agriculture + ocean, history, passionate food culture) cheesy tourist shops with glass cases of sea cucumber the generic chinese city architecture the last pieces of the old city rotting late 70s 80s bathroom tile rubbing up against dirty glass of the new new the gated communities PARIS COMMUNE statues of greek gods and the beach where while waiting for a ferry to arrive from dalian i saw two kids accidentally drown a dog.

just give yourself a lot of time to screw around if you can, i guess is my advice.

why areyou going there?

mordy my man did you see thing i like the ms http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/world/asia/violence-in-western-china.html?_r=0

that is intense!

this is cool: http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/2013/04/24/178900162/explore-madame-maos-hollywood-fantasies

there are more pics like that, i posted them to the catalogue famous people thread... hol up

http://photographyofchina.com/Zhang-Yaxin#.US44LOvF00x

http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2013/04/23/Shanghai-Auto-ZX-Libyan-Rebel-Model-042313.aspx

i need to drive this.

...it's hard to imagine any attendee out-crazying China's Hebei Zhongxing Automobile Co. Ltd or "ZX Auto." ...the automaker presented a "Libyan Model" of its Grand Tiger truck, complete with rear heavy weapons mount, Arabic stenciling and an accompanying photo gallery showing the model in action against Muammar Gaddafi.

see also: How I took my ZX Auto Grand Tiger To War Against Gaddafi

Thanks for the Shandong tips, dylannn. I'm going to Weihai for work so not much flexibility there but hopefully I can find a few days afterwards to potter around the area.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/26/iron-man-3-chinese-edition

http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/films/1371

dylannnnnnnn, any recs from this list??

for mordy, more zhang yaxin: http://photographyofchina.com/Zhang-Yaxin-1#.UYEe5yvF1Fo

as far as change the world documentarymaking, i don't think anything like river elegy has been reproduced. it was the most widely available piece of critical thought around in china in 1988 (summary: all the symbols of civilization that are cherished by the chinese people are a sham. the great wall is a symbol of isolationism. the yellow river is a stagnant shitsmelling puddle. china was conservative and introverted. meanwhile, the europeans went out onto the big blue ocean and created a market economy and allowed intellectual freedom that led to amazing scientific discoveries)-- when deng xiaoping and his faction had destabilized the chinese political elite and the entire country, it was also a broadside in support of their reformist goals, which is why i suppose it was allowed to be broadcast in the first place. 77 to 89 was not a solid period of dengist reform but a series of freezes and thaws as various factions within the party jockeyed for position. river elegy and the little island of intellectual freedom created in the press + academia at the time was met by a hard freeze and the people that worked on it and supported it in the press (right up to the highest levels in the party) didn't escape criticism or punishment. even if the neoliberal crew in the party eventually wrested control back, the critique of the pillars of chinese nationalism (esp their use within narrative of chinese civilization growing from yellow river, glorious great wall etc) still doesn't fly.

i'm not sure how it would work condensed into an hour. there's lots of good background material to read on it, including a great annotated translation of the script, deathsong of the river. i'd probably go see it.

i'd want to go see wu wenguang in conversation! he made that artists in beijing documentary that i embedded somewhere up there. and he made fuck cinema, which is another one i'd go see.

out of phoenix bridge is beautiful and sad.

i love jia zhangke but you might have already seen 24 city and you've probably seen qiu ju.

if i had to pick something that i think you might really like, i'd say san yuan li + disorder.

i think longing for the rain sounds amazing from the description. i need to see that.
erotic ghost story + surreal depiction of female sexuality + social documentary.

also, petition is worth it, if you haven't seen it. and west of the tracks is pretty wellknown as like an over the top concept, 10 hour documentary on postindustrial shenyang wasteland. i think i quite liked it. but i also just sat through wang bing's labor camp nondocumentary the ditch.

i feel like amateurist could also offer some pointers here.

i've seen disorder! i will try to go and see the ones you mentioned. just my luck that this stuff happens in the midst of finals season

i didnt realize rian dundon was a personal english tutor for fan bingbing, also took lots of pictures http://www.chinafile.com/being-bingbing

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/wp-content/gallery/china-report/z-10-china-daily-forum.jpg

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/china-report-weapons/

yeah, MoMA series is starting as my work leave is coming to an end...

I reviewed the short version of Petition, wd love to see the long one but don't know if I could last 5 hours right now outside of home.

i saw the fan bingbing series before and i really liked it, grainy out the window of a mercedes pictures, the shot of her in the long parka, theres so much emotion and detail in them especially in the direct contrast between fan bingbing's usually sunglassed distant elegance and her environment and the shots of movie sets and the raw blankness of an school auditorium in smalltown jiangnan adoring fans. im stuck on that shot of her getting out of her car with her team wrangling her into an appearance at a shoe wholesaler in shenzhen, the crowds behind her, the intersuburban bus idling. i really like them, even if my description here of why i really like them might not be clear. if he could extend the fan bingbing series to a booklength project i'd buy that too.

i hate to hear him sound so dejected about photography. honestly, the changsha series meant a lot to me: the material is so compelling and familiar to me and im deeply impressed with the way he shot those subjects, that setting.

and i also had no idea he was fan bingbing's personal english tutor!

heh his thoughts on photography in his latest tumblr post almost exactly mirror mine, down to the getting depressed if not making pictures / BUT questioning the value of it all.

is it possible he made any money off changsha or does it have the potential to make him any money in the future?

big mo, i'd love to hear your thoughts on petition and other films on the programme! some of the selections struck me as a bit odd but lots worth checking out.

if anyone has a chance to go see chris berry talk, i think they should. his writing has introduced me to a lot of chinese filmwork / theory on + hes had the biggest impact on how chinese film is treated in academia + is a good writer and speaker.

the total funding for changsha was like, 17,000, probably there's a couple thousand dollar profit built into that.... 8 years of work turned into rent money for a couple of months, i guess

photobooks don't really make money except in the secondary market, you can't pump them out w/ regularity unless one becomes a megasuccess i think, haven't really heard of a 50 shades phenomenon in the photo community, not even sure how many copies these new vivian maier monographs are shipping

i remember a comment about steidl, like, publishing the steidl version of the americans is what enables them to do so many other cool photobooks that lose money

if rian were smart he'd print 1000 copies, sell 500, wait for prices to hit $1000 on the used market and then slowly sell his others on the used market

http://www.amazon.com/Wonderland-Fairytale-Monolith-Jason-Eskenazi/dp/0974283673

i bought this for $35 from jason -_-

would they hit $1000 on the used market? wht would that take?

i have no understanding of this kind of thing. from reading talking barnacles' behind the scenes photobusiness stuff, i got the impression patrick tsai made very little money but was able to pay for a modest lifestyle with a lot of hustling and maybe a bit of photobook cash.

nah they probably wouldnt hit $1000, $1000 sticks in my mind because it was the high price for a copy of wonderland according to TOP, but i'm sure that didn't sell. realistically probably would be looking at 1-200. even something like http://www.amazon.com/Winogrand-1964-Trudy-Wilner-Stack/dp/1892041626 sells at like, $2-400 for an average copy.

photobooks just don't sell in the same way that books sell, and when you want to do a reprint i imagine you have to secure time on a printing machine, of which there are gonna be a lot fewer + a lot more expensive than a normal printer, that's my guess.

well a critic friend and I lol'd when independently we both wrote that Petition was a doc mix of Bleak House and Kafka, so perhaps my insights are not that vital.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/05/chinese-diy-inventions/100511/

i recognize this diy impulse very much

http://micgadget.com/34884/wtf-chinese-woman-poops-in-glass-elevator-in-shenzhen-subway-video/

what an appealing URL

does what it says on the tin

diy china and slightly more life or death than robot rickshawmen, homemade dialysis machine built from surplus medical equipment: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2266412/Chinese-man-kept-alive-13-years-HOMEMADE-dialysis-machine.html

this is where i mention half the furniture in our house was DIY built by my dad

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/09/zhang-yimou-seven-children-claims-china

this isn't very important but
there was a story a few days ago on my qq popup news thing about zhang remarrying and i noticed, woah, the guy has a lot of kids, eh?

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1232976/chinas-underdog-youth-find-success-diaosi-or-loser-identity

ive seen this piece + a few others in english over the last couple weeks trying to figure out the meaning of 屌丝, including one piece that says:

...I want to argue that one of the latest of these, the rise of "diaosi" – or "loser" – culture on the Chinese internet, is interesting enough to deserve close attention from a political perspective. The popularity of this identity among people who do not seem like natural losers is a major challenge for Xi Jinping as he makes his current push for legitimacy on the strength of the "Chinese dream." China PowerA New World Order‹ Back to China Power Could This Be China’s Youth Movement? (short answer: no)

scmp gets a bit closer, identifying it with smallscale achievement, online diy culture. but goes wrong looking at the overachiever diaosi and talks about wei xiaobo from the deer and the cauldron and ah q as prototypical diaosi heroes-- maybe wei xiaobo gets a bit closer but i still don't think so, and ah q has a very specific meaning, i think, as someone who's self-deluding, whereas i think of diaosi as very aware/resentful of their social position. and i think lots of these pieces ignore the very male resentment embodied by the term, dudes who can't get pussy.

although the term is so widely used now that my reading of it is probably too narrow. and i see it more often used now to talk about backdoor achievement and more of the general stuff that the scmp article talks about, but i still think it's missing the point to talk about diaosi as overachieving slackers! that's how i feel.

so, i guess it's okay to use the term for guys that can't get any pussy and resent their social situation but i also understand exactly when people refer to <a href="http://shanghaiist.com/2013/03/19/zhao_xiyong_fake_communist_official.php";>zhao xiyong</a> as diaosi.

always forget that convert simple html to bbcode button.

my friend when i asked about a good working definiton said, you are totally diaosi.

it also calls to mind 草食男子 in japan i think but i'm not an expert on that term either, but i think it has its similarities in that it refers to men turning their back on traditional masculine pursuits because of deep resentment about their social situation + economic situation.

grass-eating boy? hehe.

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

ah okay, i'm familiar w/ the phenomenon but had not heard that term!

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/05/201351364213913782.html

good on u guys

i saw that. i assume it'll allow a change in the legal status of same sex marriages, too, and maybe push the situation in china.

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1236762/ai-weiwei-shares-video-beijing-street-brawl-between-chinese-and

what's ai weiwei up to? producing content for the ilx street fights thread, stoking ethnic tension

how is ai weiwei not already dead dot com

something less depressing: http://boingboing.net/2013/05/13/inside-the-worlds-largest-gh.html

south china loll could become a business park

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/15/chinese-internet-censorship-campaign?CMP=twt_gu

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwdemery/sets/

a lot of photos here but dang i just love old photoso

http://gawker.com/abducted-23-years-ago-man-uses-google-maps-to-find-his-508302419

my girlfriend's mother was abandoned on the streets of shanghai in 1961, sometime during the tail end of the great leap forward. she has some memories of her hometown, somewhere in zhejiang. she was was given a new name and sent to an orphanage in northern jiangsu. she's done lots of work with groups that try to reunite missing children with their parents. there's an uncountable number of kids in that situation: abandoned or kidnapped or just misplaced, usually at a very young age, and with no real network or government agency or anything like that to help them out.
yeah.

yeah i donated a lil' to charlie custer's documentary project about that phenom http://livingwithdeadhearts.com/

oh man xp

as a kid going to china, my mom's biggest fear was me getting kidnapped lol

going back as an adult, it gets p tiresome to explain to new dudes that the beggar kids hanging around the bar districts are probably kidnapped kids. whether that affects giving them money or not is another q

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1237558/not-single-person-persecuted-anti-rightist-movement-says-vice-director

i'm not sure if this is of interest to anyone.
there was a recent story about a rare prosecution for a murder committed during the cultural revolution, which was seen as a minor victory for opening up formerly locked down political history.
but li shenming at the chinese academy of social sciences and heavyweight in the deformed stalinist bureaucracy, representing the far left maoist orthodoxy crew has come out to say that nobody was persecuted during the anti-rightist campaign-- there's been some debate about what exactly he said and the original text seems to say that people were persecuted (not that it was wrong that rightists were persecuted, i guess li shenming would say) but that nobody was executed for crimes.

1) it's interesting to see the continued tensions over theory in the party elite
2) i wonder how much these theoretical battles and the supposed pull of far left elements in the party really matter. i feel like reformist elements in the party have moved away from entering into battles over theory, even as they're forced to make use of the theoretical framework of the ccp-led authoritarian model to justify reform.
3) what will be xi jinping's contribution to the ongoing development of theory of socialism in china? does he have a three represents in him?
4) does any of this matter?

http://www.scmp.com/comment/blogs/article/1238794/mystery-deflated-rubber-duck-were-cigarette-butts-blame

:(((( poor duck
i wasn't surprised when the first suspect was cigarette flicking MAINLAND TOURISTS. i'm fascinated by the tension between hk-mainland visitors.

heh kinda related is that i'm always a lil surprised at just how much kids in china know - talking with chinese nationals studying at my school, i ask em about political sensitive stuff sometimes if the topic comes up. one guy in particular told me that he got really really excited over some speech xi made, where xi promised reform or some bullshit. then his friend on renren linked to him a story from 20 years ago, where jiang had made the exact same comments upon being sworn in. he gave a sad lol

hkers love to blame mainlanders for almost everything, but when mainlanders are in the watch and bag shops they'll do a complete aboutface. i joke w/ my friends that if i really want great service in central, i'll speak mandarin and not english. i should also get some nice khaki slacks, a belt w/ a gold alligator on it, some pointy shoes, and oversized polos.

the amount of political reform in china, over the last 30 years, say, is pretty impressive, though! it's still fucked and there's guys hanging around proclaiming the continued relevancy of the stalinist model, and most public proclamations of commitment to political reform have turned out to be imaginary. but... the backstage work of reformers-within-the-system must be intense-- even if the individual motives of reformers and the motives of the party as a whole might not always be pure.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxpost

i'm easily sucked in by the backlash against boorish pointy shoed property bubbling 粤plated audi driving mainlanders, even if it's a bit irrational. i do long hong kong.

i'm still thinking this through but i think the backlash might not be against all mainlanders so much as northerners

have memories of taking the star ferry and sitting across from mainlanderse w/ 4-5 shopping bags, who are literally sitting there taking off their old shoes and putting on their new lacoste sneakers

i think you're right. i thought it was interesting that the rumor specifically stated that the cigarette flicker was from shenyang.

i think the fear is also a kind of china-specific form of gentrification, nouveaux riche from the mainland coming in and paying tens of thousands of hkd for a square foot of property, encouraging the bankruptcy of p much every mom and pop shop in causeway bay so that another luxury watch shop can open. coming down, yelling in putonghua at everybody. eating ramen noodles on the mtr, a feeling of being untouchable. i've defended mainlanders to hkers before but i can't deny that they can be really rude and demanding, almost american in their attitude of - i'm giving you money so you better give me top notch service.

it's also a culture clash, hkers view themselves (probably a lil wrongly) as being more cultured and civilized and mannered than mainlanders, which might be true in that hkers dont spit on the streets, but i've seen plenty of boorish behavior from hkers too.

not to mention that all hkers were mainlanders at one point. lol

most hkers i knew still had lots of family in the mainland, but they were always concentrated in guangdong. i'm not sure where the new generation of mainland immigrants hails from. you'd probably have to look at where those shenzhen mothers come from and who they're having babies for, sneaking over and calling 9-9-9 when they go into labor.

by and large though, most hkers i think are still very southern-looking, if you get what i mean. i know the HK birth rate has fallen below 1 or w/e the metric is for self-sustainability of population. but the immigration pressures are still so great that it's gonna be like, 20-30 years before there's any fear of hk's population declining.

i guess i just love hk so much because it's a testament to the idea that chinese people arent all fuckups, they can do things right. how well run the city is! the mtr. the buses. HKIA. we can do things just as good as japan if we wanted to.

there are lots of mainlanders flying from the north into hong kong and shenzhen, but also, even if they're coming from the big cities of the pearl river delta, the demographics of those places have shifted hugely over the last 30 years (fewer 本地 guangdong people and cantophones.

taiwan is a different situation and there isn't the same situation of the mainland having final political say and just fewer mainlanders visiting and taking part in the local economy, but i think that despite taiwan's cultural nationalism, the fact that a large portion of taiwan's population and most of the political/economic elite are from northern chinese stock plays some part in the lack of tensions between local taiwanese-mainland visitors. eh. yeah, it's a completely different situation, though. i get that. but still.

haha when i went to taiwan i was like, man, this is just like china.

would love to spend more time in taiwan

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/world/asia/exposes-of-chinas-elite-a-big-lure-in-hong-kong.html

i thought crossborder book shopping had faded away as more mainlanders started freegating their way around the wall. but i guess it's still a thing.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2013/04/24/32799/

from harmonious society 和谐社会 to china dream 中国梦
tracking the official and unofficial uses of the term
中国梦 as push for media control

To this end, we propose the following:

1. [That we will] sing loudly the China Dream as the strongest voice of the era. [That we will] sing loudly the main theme (主旋律) of the era, and pass on positive social energy, strengthening the mainstream public opinion field (主流舆论场). . .

Hey China thread stalwarts, I'm gonna start following this thread, because a few bits and bobs in my life are making me more interested in China, seeing as it's a huge place full of people that I know next to nothing about. (Hoping for a rolling Africa thread someday.)

rolling africa would be great

I follow this thread on the regular b/c my job is basically remotely directing Quality Assurance for a portfolio of products made at like 40 different factories. But I've never been over because of my chronic health problems. So my life is emailing with ppl in China (p much sz and hk folk) many of whom I've never met.

welcome to the 3rd annual rolling china thread, guys.

thanks! Looking forward to learning a thing, will hold off on dumb ("What's up with that Ai Weiwei?") and very dumb ("So would visiting Hong Kong be like 'beginner China'?") questions.

i'm subscribed to an email list where there are sometimes offers of translation work by official chinese government agencies, sometimes subcontracted by mainland translators-- they're subcontracted because the offers horrible: they pay very poorly for mountains of dull, official text and nobody will ever read them. anyways. there was recently an officialish text about anti-cult activities among official church groups in china (i'm not the right person to explain the situation of christian organizations in china but roughly: there is an officially sanctioned catholic church and an officially sanctioned protestant church, which are both under direct control of the government, and there are lots of unaffiliated christians with connections to overseas groups and indigenous organizations that mostly try to stay under the radar but are mostly tolerated as long as they don't fuck around). the focus of the text was: EASTERN LIGHTNING.

i think i first heard of them mentioned by falun gong and the name quánnéngjiào 全能教. but EASTERN LIGHTNING is clearly a better name.

EASTERN LIGHTNING destroyed my family

christ has come back as a woman from henan province, basically.

so, if anyone wants to look into that, there you go.

-- ai weiwei has a new show in hong kong that is: a map of china made from baby formula cans. there was a problem with baby formula in china, see. my verdict, following the contemporary ccp's statement on mao, 70% corny 30% yeah okay i see what you're doing there.

-- my first time visiting hk is documented on ilx. i lived in china for three stretches in nanjing, shanghai, and dalian before i visited for the first time. it was such a strange experience to walk across the border from shenzhen. the border crossing at luohu on the shenzhen side, you can miss it, if you aren't careful and the architecture of it is weathered concrete and corrugated green plastic and you leave either walk out through the giant shenzhen station square or up a flight of stairs and get on the train and across the border, you're suddenly in a different world. i love hong kong. i don't think it's china for beginners.

what would the real china experience be? if it's hectic, urban, hot and dirty? you could find that in hong kong. but there are so many different experiences of china possible and it's a massive country with more than a billion people and every experience in china will be "beginner china." so, it's no more beginner china than visiting zhengzhou or shenyang or xiamen or taipei would be.

http://www.smartbeijing.com/articles/community/culture-bureau-matthew-niederhauser

^this guy sounds like a real asshole btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUkFnXd0qHo

lovin all the diff accents in this

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/psb-1_zpsf29d918d.jpg

aww, you can't even read that... damn. okay, forget about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1SvXimwsVs&list=SPsRNoUx8w3rPXBfxhypgTkcIntwhtMi_W

i like andrew field. i studied in china.

the majority of american students that study abroad still go to europe. he plays this for laughs. "our american students are going to the uk to study english!"

but... what is the value of studying in china? academically, chinese universities operate by very different rules than most of the world and are not in the same ballpark as the big draw schools for study abroad in europe or australia or canada or south america or the rest of east asia. there are lots of reasons for chinese students studying abroad but one of the reasons is surely that chinese universities are not held in high esteem, even among top university-bound chinese students, who might have the option of going to a first tier school.

in my experience, chinese language programs for foreign students at chinese universities are poor. there's the option of programs like andrew field mentions, study abroad programs taught mostly by american professors, but... i dunno.

why doesn't he mention the numbers of students studying chinese/chinese studies at american universities?

he asks the question: will the next generation of great american writers, artists, and thinkers spend their formative years in china? and the answer is no.

also, i think a lot of american undergraduates with only a passing interest in china would be concerned about studying abroad in a country with the death penalty for drug offences and no beaches or access to facebook (and poisonous air, no elections, industrial adulterants in common foodstuffs, stuff like that).

i wonder why andrew field thinks it would be valuable for an american president to be able to address a chinese audience in chinese.

i know a ton of creative types who have gone to china because it's cheap, idk if they're producing any work of value tho

jon huntsman spoke competent chinese, lived, studied and worked in taiwan for several years, and then popped up in wangfujing in an american flag bomber jacket, looking for the jasmine revolution.

乒乓, will the next generation of great american writers, artists, and thinkers spend their formative years in china?

still too early to tell, they have tumblrs tho

what generation is he comparing this current one too - the one that spent 'formative years' in europe around WWI/WWII? cause that was a couple of generations ago

Fulbright scholars, maybe.

Similar programmes (to send US students to Chinese universities for a while) are getting billions in private investment at the moment.

my study in china was paid for in full by the chinese government.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/aiweiweidumbass_zps4d99a5f1.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR23emE_QCM&list=SPsRNoUx8w3rPXBfxhypgTkcIntwhtMi_W

from the same series as the andrew field talk, grant horsfield "rethinking poverty in china"
interesting because i don't often pay attention to first person china reports from people like grant horsfield but i find myself agreeing with a lot of his points
even if i have some problems with how he makes them and i question the validity of some of his points

but:

-- talking about the price of poverty in the west (the extra amount that the poor end up paying for basic services like food, phones, housing) versus the inclusiveness of the chinese economy.
-- western misunderstanding of chinese poverty. he says a lot of what i said when talking about the article about urban life in chinese cities vs. seoul ie "i've never seen any shantytowns" and the experience of china's poor.
-- the upward mobility of china's poor / the difference between hopeless, multigeneration urban poverty in the west and the entrenchment of old money old power vs. the reality of millions of chinese taking part in the economy, the power of new money.

"it means that anybody has the opportunity, no matter where you are in the social rung, you can transact with what you can afford ... that's what it means to be an inclusive economy, where you give everyone a chance to be part of the economy, make them feel they are a part of civilization, of society. once you do that, you start to change the dynamic of the poor. and that's how only 2% of the population in shanghai are living homeless."

and

"to change a nation, to change poverty, perhaps it's about time we start looking at our ideas of what's right and what's wrong and look to china for solutions. ... poverty is one of the greatest problems facing the world. ... for whatever reason, in this country it's not growing. but 20% of the people in california live without a home."

i had a few jolly good lols at the work of
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2013/05/20/chinese-photoshop-trolls-part-3-this-time-its-personal/
my favorite : "Make me like a gangster". bummer thought: they could be made up, not based on real requests.

i just got a haircut and this guy from 江苏 (and who has only been here for less than a year) gave me a 山寨 HK hair style from three years ago

it's actually p awesome

my state govt pays people $10k to study in 江苏 for a semester, seriously considered it yesterday

also, pics

http://blog.angryasianman.com/2013/05/what-language-are-they-speaking-in.html

youtube comments suggest its a shanxi dialect?

http://www.mostartists.com/features/kechun-chinese-dream/

i just get pages of comments in arabic. but it doesnt sound like shanxi or even shaanxi dialect or anything else from central china. it sounds more southern, like min nan? but there are no recognizable syllables or anything that i can really hear that makes me feel that way, except a certain flavor to it. i think it's babble-- but ill look bad if it turns out to be something specific and obscure.

only based on the one video of the makeup race.

i enjoy those zhang kechun photos. not so much the ones that appeared in the telegraph piece as a group but the ones in the MoST group but i like to read them as following from the yellow river series, everything looks temporary in the same hazed out large format, the new river and coastal world of xi jinping's new china dream world echoing the civilizations that rose up along the yellow river. like the tang that was also a cosmopolitan empire absorbing influences from western traderoutes and building amazing structures that were mainly buried back under the dust, or the postqing centrally planned westward migrants that constructed those concrete tomb blocks and all the architecture of modern shanghai or wuhan or wherever it is, prada parking lots and hastily built luxury gated communities will be swallowed up in the slow haze of grey rivers and runoff dust and industrial discharge.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2013/05/31/33325/

Mao talked about breaking through everything, but every word he spoke was seen as the truth. Deng talked about making big experiments, but Deng also created forbidden zones for reform. . . The late 1980s showed that as the government let go of more, society made greater progress; those areas that the government couldn’t manage, society took charge of, and miracles happened. History also has a way of toying with people. Deng Xiaoping also left much in suspense for those who came after — I’m talking about those forbidden zones he marked out. Dealing with these forbidden zones is something that has tested generation after generation of leaders since. To this day, we’ve had three generations of leaders whose only answer was to perpetuate these forbidden zones, and successors seems to lack the intelligence or courage to break through them. Will Deng and Jiang serve only as unsurpassable marks?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/28/us-china-xinjiang-idUSBRE94R03Z20130528

China says Xinjiang minorities too busy dancing to make trouble

Ethnic minority people in China's Xinjiang are far more fond of dancing, singing and being good hosts than making trouble, a top official said on Tuesday, dismissing the idea that the far western region is a hotbed of unrest.

Many Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who live in energy-rich Xinjiang, chafe at Chinese restrictions on their culture, language and religion, and the region is frequently the scene of deadly ethnic violence.

Last month, 21 people were killed in clashes in the heavily ethnic Uighur part of Xinjiang near the old Silk Road city of Kashgar, the deadliest unrest since July 2009, when nearly 200 people were killed in riots in the Xinjiang capital of Urumqi.

other things out of xinjiang recently:

clarissa sebag-montefiore at nytimes blog : In 2008 the energy industry generated 57 percent of Xinjiang’s G.D.P. But only 1 percent of its work force is Uighur, the rest are mostly Han Chinese who have immigrated to Xinjiang to work. Such stark inequality was a major cause of the 2009 riots in Xinjiang, in which nearly 200 people died.
---------- poss. too busy singing and dancing to work in the resource sector

+

economist with intro to bingtuan : To use its full name, the 38th Regiment of the 2nd Agricultural Division is part of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. This state-run organisation, usually referred to as the bingtuan (Chinese for a military corps) controls an area twice the size of Taiwan, broken into numerous parts scattered around the province. A few bits are city-sized. Most are more like towns or villages. Of their total population of more than 2.6m people, 86% are ethnically Han Chinese. In Xinjiang as a whole, in contrast, Han officially make up just over 40% of the 22m inhabitants. The rest are Uighurs and a few other ethnic groups.

+

radio free asia says that local officials in northwestern xinjiang have started registering religious adherents :: The photos, posted on the Uyghur Online website, showed registration documents dated 2013, which categorized the people registered according to their beliefs and activities, as well as adding key personal information about them, including their personal circumstances, level of religious knowledge, current attitudes and social connections. ... The documents also identified whether a person was a target for "priority surveillance." + reported ban on wearing headscarf here --------

MILITARY ENGLISH LEARNING

192. Did you watch on TV the tragedy of Columbia Space Shuttle of the U.S.?

你们在电视上看到美国哥伦比亚航天飞机的悲剧了吗？

i just accepted a job in guangzhou, i guess.

oh ace! details pls

english translation + sales
i'm going to sell wood

i like the idea of living in guangzhou and i need to go to china, so even if it doesn't work out, i get to renew my foreign expert certificate and i have a good place to live and look for other work.

fantastic

To say anything more now is superfluous. In a few days, it will be the 24th anniversary of the June Fourth tragedy. During this long 24-year period, we, the Tiananmen Mothers, have written 36 successive open letters to the Two Congresses and Chinese leaders since 1995, along with announcements and eulogies. To this day, all our efforts have been in vain, we have received not a single response from the government.

deeply fucking sad

http://iso.hrichina.org/content/6709#.UafQRZAAfcp.twitter

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rt2vy_QftKU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt2vy_QftKU

http://i4.minus.com/iHHVQwK8L6s3u.jpg

i never saw it uncropped.

obviously i still have the visceral reaction anyone has to those pictures but i wonder about what they really mean, posting them here, because even if i've had cause to think about tiananmen a lot coming of age when i did, when tiananmen was the modern china event that everyone in the west feels familiar with, when the tiananmen pictures were already the only entry on china after 79 in school textbooks, modern china was tankman-- i know that the pictures are kind of trite and have been used alongside explanations and narratives of the events that i don't trust
students agitated for democratic reforms and were cruelly murdered by the communist party
when the events of the summer of 1989 and the previous ten years that led there and the next twenty years of trying to sort out 1989 are complex and misunderstood on both sides. and i don't want to contribute to diminishing the complexity and reinforcing misunderstandings.
my feelings on it have been confused by views of the events that i have been exposed to since i thought i cared about modern china,
--all the friends and professors i've had that came out of china after 1989 or were already abroad in 1989
--people my own age that had the same hazy imagination of tiananmen but were on the other side of the pacific and saw vague cctv reports about it (i think the post80s chinese kids lasting image from tiananmen if mine is the tank man is the disemboweled soldier that was a big part of domestic news reports immediately after) and maybe saw men with placards out a bus window (tiananmen was tiananmen but it was also taking place in cities and noncities all over china) or heard about things from people that heard about things
--cold academic analysis of the events.
when i was at ubc every day i arrived on campus, walking by the students union building on the way to usually a lecture on modern chinese literature that was written under the shadow or in defiance of the shadow of state social controls after 89 i walked by a recreation of the goddess of democracy statue.

i guess i want to say that those images are emotionally powerful but my thoughts on the events of 89 are more complex than can be summed up in a picture of a man standing in front of a tank and i have no idea what to say about tiananmen when asked about it by chinese or western interlocutors, no matter how often i'm asked about it.

anyways

people are paying to do internships in china: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/world/asia/foreign-students-seek-internships-in-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

CRCC Asia and Absolute Internship charge almost identical fees, about $2,900 to $4,900 for their Beijing and Shanghai programs, which run one to three months. Absolute Internship also has a two-month Hong Kong internship program that costs $5,999.

my aunt smuggled some rolls of film of tiananmen, to be developed outside of china, i've seen em

what i remember most vividly was a picture of a burned corpse of a pla soldier hanging from a bridge in broad daylight

rright i went looking for the photo of the murdered soldier that i think i recall seeing but... you knw

http://www.56.com/u53/v_OTE3MjUwODI.html#sm_bp

tremendous

just to clarify, the pic was in the roll that my aunt developed. i'll scan em all one day

i identify with that girl very much.

would love to see yr aunts photos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfpZC6akXPY

this is pretty good

dylannn when do you leave for 广州？

i want to be in china by july, hopefully spend some time hanging around and start work in the first week of august.

i just found out that a good friend from vancouver, who is a guangzhou native, will be moving back in september.

basically i have a car i need to sell (quick way to lose ten grand: buy a 2013 car, sell it several months later) and i need a visa and i'll be gone.

cool, im gonna be in hk for july + half of august, if i make it out to gz ill let u know

but yeah, i generally feel ambivalent about tiananmen too. i definitely don't think it was purely a massacre of innocents on the side of the party, all those reports of pla APCs being burned w/ soldiers still inside them, but obviously what happened was insane and terrible and sad. it's a depressing legacy, i often wonder if china couldn't have done a slow gradual easing into a more free/democratic state were it not for tiananmen & the reactionary battening down of the hatches that happened afterwards

is it too late?

Here is a dumb question, why are lots of Chinese websites numbers? Is it because of domain names not being available with non-ASCII characters and thus numbers are more likely to be intelligible to a Chinese audience than pinyin or nonsense?

ya i guess so. easier to work with a string of numbers than pinyin that might be prone to misspelling or mishearing. and there are strings of numbers that very vaguely like chinese phrases and are a bonus feature on top of being easier to deal with than spelling out a phrase.

3q

Some initial thoughts about the popularity of QQ's Wechat (aka Weixin) + bonus translated 10 rules for having a weixin one night stand (involves 8-10 days of work, not ideal)

if i was a chinese kid i'd either have been sent to a vocational school in shaanxi or i'd be working in a brick factory because gaokao

2013 GAOKAO COMPOSITION TOPICS ARE OUT
2013 GAOKAO COMPOSITION TOPICS ARE OUT
2013 GAOKAO COMPOSITION TOPICS ARE OUT

http://english.people.com.cn/203691/8277153.html

The containers for milk are always square boxes; containers for mineral water are always round bottles; round wine bottle are usually placed in square boxes. Write a composition on the subtle philosophy of the round and square.

or

Material composition. The conversation between two scientists. How would Thomas Alva Edison react to the mobile phone if he came to the 21st century? No less than 800 words, choose your own title.

o_O

During your time in high school, there must be something you cannot forget, be it a heated argument with your classmates or the inspiration from others.

Some agency has carried out a research on the relationships between classmates in schools. The result shows that 60 percent of the students find the relationships consent, while 36 percent of them consider it OK, and 4 percent thinks the relationship is unsatisfied. The reason of the intense relationship can be over self-awareness, personality clashes or competition.

Another 72 percent of the students are quite confident about creating a harmonious atmosphere.

Choose your own angle and style to write an article with the given material. Do not digress from the material.

read this five times, absolutely nfi

^ two guys headed to a vocational school in lanzhou

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?hp&_r=0

China has long been home to both some of the world’s tiniest villages and its most congested, polluted examples of urban sprawl. The ultimate goal of the government’s modernization plan is to fully integrate 70 percent of the country’s population, or roughly 900 million people, into city living by 2025. Currently, only half that number are.

100% uninformed q.: is this just like, so bananas?

I think they're like, 40 or 50% of the way there?

i was thinking not so much of being on schedule as of massively discombobulating everyone and everything involved

if china truly moves to big agro machine agriculture, living in villages is stupid and inefficient

iatee to thread

In the early 1980s, about 80 percent of Chinese lived in the countryside versus 47 percent today, plus an additional 17 percent that works in cities but is classified as rural.

so, 53% already in cities plus 17% = 70% already. and that 17% figure might not be totally reliable due to the problem of counting the floating population of migrants, seasonal workers, etc. that might live in cities for most of the year but aren't counted as urban population because they retain rural registration and work informally and avoid coming into contact with apparatuses of urban administration.

1. the factors pushing people away from first and second tier cities (trouble finding affordable housing, hukou issues that make accessing services difficult or impossible) are usually seen as being outweighed by the benefits of settling in the city. the problem is probably attracting people to third tier cities and urban areas in underdeveloped regions. there's a big difference in urbanization rates between eastern coastal provinces and western and southwestern provinces. jiangsu's urbanization rate is 63% but guizhou's is only 35%. i'd say there's limited benefit for a poor rural resident in guizhou to move into an urban area and it's also the kind of place most likely to see coercion or violence to move people out of rural areas. fucked up places like guizhou is where the process will most likely be "massively discombobulating."

2. if the focus is on urbanization, hopefully there will be real hukou reform. there have been lots of pledges and calls for reform at the national level, but since shit like healthcare and public schooling is administered at the local level, there's always pressure from city mayors and provincial officials to maintain the status quo. it keeps things cheap for local governments if they don't have to provide services to 15-20% of the population and, whatever, rural residents keep arriving to work and the wages for the kinds of jobs that migrants do in urban areas keep increasing, but it's probably not a humane or sustainable system in the long run, if the goal is encouraging urbanization of rural residents.

so, reforming the hukou system is nearly impossible without pretty serious reform of other aspects of chinese government. to get local governments on side, there have to be changes to the way taxes are collected (most taxes sent straight up to the national level and local governments wait for national help or make money from land sales, which is a good recipe for corruption and fucked up land deals for whoever is unlucky enough to live on the land). moving on from there, the reforms that are always called for have to be actually enacted, like diminishing the role of state owned enterprises in the economy, changing rules about real estate ownership (hot on weibo right now is the story from a hong kong newspaper claiming that approx 6000 beijing residents own at least 300 aparments each)....

Leave Chinese Alone - Prostitutes Cry Out

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/world/asia/china-dissident-says-hes-being-forced-from-nyu.html?_r=0

whelp

that was the hot china watcher topic over the last few days. surprisingly, the consensus has been that it's unfair to suggest that pressure from the prc had anything to do with the decision. he's done quite a bit of work at nyu without any interference, it's been pointed out; and paul mooney, who's working with chen on his engl lang memoir, reminded everyone that nyu signed up for one year and that was going to be it. i dunno, i think it's naive to think that chinese official pressure had absolutely nothing to do with the situation.

i saw him talk; much less sophisticated than i would have liked. :\ but i suppose the state of law is not very developed in china.

in fact, i have a really bad cell phone photo i took with him. but i won't post it since i still want to apply for china visas.

if cgc is rolling with bob fu and is down with being an anti-communist/"pro-life" mouthpiece for the evang christian wing of chinese dissidents, maybe fordham would pick him up but that profile makes him attractive to lots of other schools/institutions.

nyu has had campuses in singapore, and has a campus in abu dhabi, and now one in shanghai. they like to chase the money

*has had a campus in singapore

Mr Chen, who made his name defending Chinese women forced into abortions, has received a three-year offer to work at the Witherspoon Institute, a conservative pro-life think-tank. The institute attracted controversy last year for funding a study suggesting that children of homosexual parents were at a disadvantage.

The activist is currently a fellow at New York University’s Law School but is also in negotiations to become a visiting scholar at the Leitner Center, a human rights programme at New York’s Fordham School of Law.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/1748ef26-c9e6-11e2-8f55-00144feab7de.html#axzz2WSCTHqNJ

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1261750/preserved-egg-plants-shut-toxic-chemical-scandal

exactly the reason why i never have 皮蛋 anymore... think the last time i had it was at a five star hotel's restaurant, figure they must be able to source their eggs well. hopefully.

i was always told not to eat too many because they contain lead... never stopped me.

People close to Mr. Chen have said the self-taught lawyer is being given advice by an entourage that includes Christian Chinese activists and other religious conservatives who are eager to for him to become a more outspoken critic of the government.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/06/19/mystifying-blind-activists-adviser-speaks-out-on-pressure-claims/

chen is now being represented pro bono by CORALLO MEDIA STRATEGIES

"Called ‘the master of disaster' by many, Corallo has been in the crisis management game since the mid-1990s. ... From Sept. 11 to Karl Rove, the self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie has had a hand in almost every newsworthy piece of Republican crisis management in Washington over the past decade."

"Besides handling press for various Bush administration officials and policies that have come under fire (Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, the USA PATRIOT Act and the war on terror), Corallo and Barbara Comstock are masters of Congressional investigations. They go back to the days of the House Government Reform Committee under then-Chairman Dan Burton (R-Ind.), who investigated everything under the sun...."

i'm not sure this is important but since we're following the story

nyu says bob fu's crew installed spyware on chen's phone to track him
prior to releasing him to nyu

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/21/us-china-activist-usa-idUSBRE95K05720130621

http://shanghaiist.com/2013/06/24/six_dead_in_shanghai_shooting_spree.php

how the hell did this guy get a guuunnn

National authorities have already gotten involved in the case, and may attempt to use this case as a spring-board for national gun reform.

maybe that's a joke, a comment on american gun control politics but in china there's a complete ban on private gun ownership....

well the people who died would have been able to protect themselves if they only had access to guns

i mean, i saw guys in china with guns that probably shouldn't have had guns.

even if only military/police/etc. are allowed to own firearms, imagine the number of people that fit or have fit that description over the last 30 years. that's a lot of guns. there must have been some sino-vietnam war veterans that held onto their type 56s. if you count up all modern firearms still hanging around from the period after, say, 1937, you've got a lot of guns. like, 40 years ago there were red guards shooting out in the streets of major chinese cities. china's borders are porous in places and there's drugs and money and people moving back and forth between china and some pretty fucked up places like northern burma and north korea and afghanistan and other central asian states. there must be some guns moving back and forth there. china is the worldwide #1 manufacturer of arms. if point something percent of those guns are diverted to the black market and most of them head over the border, that still leaves a lot of guns. it adds up, i guess.

if you're in the right spot, like a bus stop bathroom in liaoning or a ketamine-drenched nightclub in rural jiangsu, the 办证 graffiti is often outnumbered by "卖枪QQ1393945559."

yeah i can see that. though a ban on private ownership of guns is probably very positive in that a pro-gun culture is simply never allowed to develop over there.

there were stories of triads holding up banks in hong kong with ak-47s and submachine guns imported from the mainland, back in the 80s, if i recall correctly.

i want to learn chinese, how do i shot

tough language to pick up on your own, unfortch

what if I live in a bustling metropolis

the learning curve is really steep i think. but you should check out the mandarin thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLCM5UXXEAA

anyway gbx idon't mean to scarea away potential mandarain bros!! but wanna be realistic. (i have been accused twice this week of giving advice that is too realistic already.) the thing is mandarin is like, totally different than english or romance languages. romance languages are hard to learn yeah, not exactly an analogue to english, but a lot of similar ideas. sentences are SVO for the most part (subject verb order), verbs are conjugated w/r/t time, past present future etc. there are a lot of cognates. you have a few foreign concepts like masculine/feminine that don't map onto english. but words are based on an alphabet, it's easy to look up words. when youre listening, youre only listening for pronunciation, not really tone, and that's already hard enough.

w/ chinese, it's just uh... different. verbs aren't 'conjugated', you add separate characters to denote timeframes, and not always next to the verb, maybe at the end of the sentence. you can still convey intricate time concepts like past perfect continuous or something equally crazy, but it'll probably be really different in sentence structure than the equivalent english. sentences aren't just SVO but are often also TC (topic comment), and sometimes those comments get looooong. there's a lot of flexibility but it'll take some time to get familiar and being able to freestyle. memorizing characters is pretty tough if you didn't grow up writing them 1000s of times a day (which is literally how students in china learn how to read/write). paper dictionaries are terrifically hard to use because you have to look at a character, decipher how many strokes there are in it (or recognize which radicals constitute it), and then laboriously pore over a character table in the dictionary. (it's much easier to look up words online where you can copy paste or use something like pera-pera kun.) the spoken language adds the element of tone, and being able to 'hear' tones and pronounce tones is gonna be way different than english too. it's like remembering to end questions in a rising tone, but you have to remember a tone for each word you pronounce.

all that being said, learning chinese now is probably easier than ever thanks to ~technology~, iphone dictionaries and the aforementioned perapera-kun make it really easy to look up stuff now. but you have to be prepared that it's gonna be a totally different universe. in some way it's probably a little easier to do so as an adult, because you're able to think rationally more about how to approach those differences, instead of committing the cardinal sin of teenagers learning language of "oh, if i just translate this word for word into english i'll get the meaning." you'll be able to think around that.

gbx why do u wanna learn chinese?

like, say you want to learn french or spanish and you're a literate native english speaker, you can work on it and inside of a few months, you should be able to read a modern french or spanish novel and not be totally lost and also have a grasp of the spoken language well enough to be able to bum a cigarette off a guy and chat about the weather. learning chinese, you almost have to separate the spoken and written language and tack a year onto those few months to be able to get to the same level, just because of the things dyao notes.

maybe it's good to approach it in a more compartmentalized way, deciding what exactly you want to be able to do. like,
-- first: i want to learn really basic conversational mandarin but basically ignore the written language, so i can give a simple greeting and maybe bum a cigarette off a guy, ask and answer a few simple questions.
or,
-- i want to be able to read very basic texts in chinese (recognize 100-300 characters and have a decent knowledge of how chinese grammar works) while mostly ignoring the spoken language. it would be cool if i could read a news article in chinese with the help of an online dictionary and be able to sort of get the gist of it.

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/files/2013/06/original_74DG_44280002e528121b.jpg

illustration for a voice of america story that sums up the key changes in chinese government's final solution to the tibetan problem: 上百藏人自焚后北京放宽对藏区政策？

this story here talks a bit more about the policy change: Tibetans Allowed to Openly Revere Dalai Lama in Two Chinese Provinces

Official statements introducing the new policy, which the source described as “experimental,” also criticized as "wrong" an earlier Chinese practice in which monks and nuns were forced to harshly criticize the Dalai Lama, the source said.

probably helpful and i'm not all about some free tibet shit but the chinese government still has a fucked up relationship with tibet + tibetan history/culture ++++ minority ethnic groups and their place in the chinese government's nationalist vision.

at the same time,

The state-run Xinhua news agency said 27 people were killed in a riot early Wednesday in Xinjiang's Shanshan County. It said unidentified rioters stabbed people and set fire to police cars, killing nine security personnel and eight civilians before police opened fire and killed 10 assailants.

It was the highest reported death toll from a violent incident in Xinjiang since ethnic riots involving Uighurs and Han Chinese killed about 200 people in the regional capital, Urumqi, in 2009.

http://www.voanews.com/content/xinjiang-uighur-china-violence/1690086.html

had actually been thinking of visiting xinjiang this summer, guess that wipes that off the table

i tihnk we scared away gbx : (

more likely 2 get run over by a porsche panamera in shenzhen or suffer severe neurological damage from cadmium-marinated century eggs than get killed by rioting uighurs imho

yeah but it takes p much a day of travel to get there, and a day back. i think it's more of a likely candidate when i'm in shanghai next spring. (whoops did i just let that leak)

i am absolutely terrified of landing into a sudden sidewalk sinkhole, btw.

i tihnk we scared away gbx : (

totally thought I responded itt, weird

anyway, gimme a minute, I'm tired

are you going to be in shanghai permanently or semi permanently?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/world/asia/ghanas-crackdown-on-chinese-go
ld-miners-hits-one-rural-area-hard.html

the shanglin story is interesting……

for a semester xp

http://finance.china.com.cn/money/cfsh/20130515/1471087.shtml

i saw this a few weeks ago, story about miners from shanglin coming home in maseratis. the story is told in a familiar style: chinese ingenuity and hardwork, going abroad to 吃苦 and rolling home a millionaire. miners went from heilongjiang in the late 90s and miners from hunan went in the 2000s and couldn't make it happen, but shanglin villagers with middle school education cracked the code and they were basically scraping up gold with makeshift pumps and hours and hours of labor, gold that no legit mining company could invest in exploiting.

can i ask what school u r going to be at in shanghai/for what?

im going on wednesday next week to get my z-visa. im going to spend the last 2 weeks of july in south korea visiting friends etc so if anyone has any things to do in seoul/incheon tips let me have them. then china for aug 1.

http://slide.news.sina.com.cn/z/slide_1_33131_33290.html

90后外来工 90s kids workin in the city

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-16/alibaba-s-ma-faces-social-media-backlash-for-tiananmen-comment.html

2 perceptions of 6/4 in china are:

1) nobody knows about it-- not really true because: millions of people involved in var protests in many cities during that summer + still frequently discussed in tones ranging from casual to somber / even if people aren't interested, there's a lot of discussion of it online esp around the anniversaries. i've seen at least a half dozen variations on this: show kids at chinese universities pictures of tanks rolling through the streets around tiananmen, ask them if they know what they're looking at, then "these chinese university students, attending school mere blocks from the murder of unarmed democratic activists, are completely unaware of the events of the june 4th, 1989."

2) everyone that knows about it agrees that it was an unnecessary massacre of chinese civilians agitating for democratic reforms-- not really true, either, because of the many strains of dissent that came out to protest in 89 with the group calling for western-style democracy representing a minority voice.

i think jack ma's thoughts on the issue are representative of the majority of prc citizens that have an opinion on 6/4, esp the 80后 kids that were either young enough that they mostly remember cctv coverage of that day or are too young to have any significant memories of the event. even if they've made themselves aware of what happened, the opinion i've most often heard expressed is something in line with what jack ma said. part of it is the question, still unanswered: what really happened? but the two plus decades of stability and wealth (compared esp to the soviet union, other regional rivals like india, and emerging powers) that followed 6/4 have served to prove the party right.

stating the obvious but the perception of 6/4, what it was all about, the next two decade are v different in mainland china as compared to hk and the diaspora and it's not just because nobody in the prc knows what happened/is interested in what happened.

saw this interview with zhang xin a couple of days ago (not sure who it'll work for, geoblocks &c.; if you have bbc world on your cable thingo you might still catch it): she seems optimistic (although not necessarily with any real confidence) that china will progress, that social media will drive a new push for democracy etc. (topic starts at ~14.30). if so, not sure how that can be reconciled with 6/4 and other blanket bans. but hey, good that she's out there talking it up.

i'm not sure how to phrase this or defend it, but i feel like a certain element in the party elite has an appetite for reform that is not matched by the chinese middle class or wealthy chinese-- or rather, the party elite sees economic and modest political reforms as a way to maintain stability for the country and the party, and the average chinese weibo user is mostly satisfied with how things are/have been disappointed by past reform/see reform as basically impossible and probably not an improvement on the status quo/unaware of how much thoroughgoing structural reform is probably necessary to maintain the country.

i think hukou reform is a good example. there's not much pressure from below because, 1) it hasn't gained much ground as a social justice issue (providing schools and healthcare to all chinese citizens), 2) urban chinese that have a voice in the media, whether traditional or social, don't see hukou reform benefiting them, 3) there's confusion among people that would conceivably benefit from hukou reform and many have resisted reform in cities where it's taken place, maintained rural hukous, and just found workarounds.

the party can see that hukou reform must take place to maintain social stability, drive economic performance, and smooth the urbanization transition that has to take place. so, the element in the party pushing for hukou reform is battling against local party officials (hukou reform requires massive changes to taxation rules that would have an impact on how local party officials make a living), conservative elements in the party, as well as middle class urban chinese.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfJtRENbYb0

hanging out at one of zhang xin's husband pan shiyi's developments 2006

billionaires is billionaires

dylannn, I am going to Yantai on Saturday...what is good to do there?

last time i was in yantai i took a taxi from the airport to the bus station and smoked a half a pack of the taxi driver's cigarettes and he offered me a place to sleep at his house. i've been there a couple times because i've taken the ferry to dalian from there. i haven't really been there in a bit so i'm not sure how good this advice is.

i wouldn't bother going to any of the actual tourist attractions unless you got time to kill and spend a lot of time in china anyways.

i guess i'll start with what not to do:

penglai pavilion is quite a thing to see in high tourist season, i guess. genuinely beautiful literary landmark constructed during the song dynasty, a thousand years old, climbing up to it you can walk in the footsteps of generations of pilgrims and poets-- but there's also a water park and ten million people and it's tacky as fuck and, like lots of chinese tourist sites, it was "renovated" in the mid-80s. it would probably be surreal and horrible in late july, if you're into that-- i'd actually be into it, to be honest.

all the other GRADE 7 STARS NATIONAL HISTORICAL ENVIRONMENTAL HERITAGE locations are pretty fucking lame. don't get sucked into going to any parks or mountains. there's a giant museum right downtown on the water devoted to changyu wine company. i think there's some kind of watch museum there, too. you definitely don't want to be talked into that shit. the one exception might be changdao island.

i once saw some kids unintentionally drown a dog on a leash at the beach at yantai.

lmao

yantai isn't exactly a list of great destinations to check off. i bet i could come up with something better if i lived there. my advice is honestly just to wander around and look at shit. i think it's fun to wander back inland from the big gaudy oceanfront area. yantai was once known as chefoo and was a treaty port and there's some interesting old shit and the remains of what life looked like before violent redevelopment. you wander in off the tiled seaside and fake tourist shit and find the grey stone cube that once housed the belgian consulate, families living there from the time the communists rode in in the late-40s. and see, this might just be all gone by now because i haven't walked through there in a few years.

eat seafood. perfect geographical location for good food. easy to find.

eat korean food. maybe some dog meat. number of korean sex tourists + ethnic korean-chinese from up north in yantai makes for some good korean food.

go to babyface and order red label and iced tea or get fucked up at a ktv.

It is also home to Asia's first bowling alley, which is located on the fourth floor of Parksons department store.[citation needed] There is also the haunted house, a highly exhilarating tourist attraction.

somehow i left those out. so, take my advice with a grain of salt.

unfortunately, over the last fifteen years, every chinese city has begun to look like every other chinese city. yantai and weihai and those other coastal, central cities have had it even harder because they're a very attractive place for real estate development. both of those cities, if you're looking at real estate ads anywhere in jiangsu or shandong big cities, there are, like, organized apartment buying bus tours to yantai and weihai: clean air, developed from nothing into something, ocean right there, close to home, good rail service in and out.

http://www.jaynestars.com/movies/michael-manns-cyber-shoots-in-hong-kong/

Cyber

im probably going to end up watching that about twenty times

last time i was in yantai i took a taxi from the airport to the bus station and smoked a half a pack of the taxi driver's cigarettes and he offered me a place to sleep at his house.

― dylannn, Wednesday, 24 July 2013 22:11 (Yesterday)

does this sort of thing happen to you a lot? are ordinary chinese people just very pleasantly surprised by any westerner in their midst who can actually speak their language and express any curiosity for their culture

i mean... just my experience, not trying to get on some massive cultural stereotypes about a billion point six people, it's easier to get over the preliminary stages of friendship with chinese people, especially the move from small talk to someone saying, "this is my phone number. let's go out for dinner, get some beers."

part of it is that chinese people place an emphasis on the building of personal networks.

cultivating personal relationships is a surefire way to get ahead in chinese society. you never know when someday, say... your niece will be trying to get into such-and-such an elementary school and you can check your contacts list and call someone that might be able to make a direct phone call or put out a call to their network of contacts.

so, you call me about your niece because you know i work at a school in the city, and i put out a call to a few people that i know and there's traction and i get a few offers from another school that could accept your niece and i relay them to you, and finally, maybe, my boy calls someone he knows that can make it happen.

i can expect a favor back from you, a 人情. if you want to avoid paying on that 人情--and everyone tries to avoid owing too many 人情-- you could take me out to a nice meal. and at that meal, i'll meet some of your friends and family and exchange contact info with them! so, if i'm that taxi driver and i get your niece into school, i might call you a week later and see if you can help my friend out with a ride out to the airport or a lead on a job.

even in that situation, we're both angling for our personal benefit. when he gives me his card, you better believe i'm going to be calling him everytime i'm in town and i need a ride, or if i have friends that need a ride or if i have some other request that could be fulfilled by a taxi driver. and by cultivating a relationship with him, i'm cultivating a contact that knows a lot about the city and won't fuck me on a trip.

part of it is, sure, speaking chinese when you aren't expected to. westerners that can speak chinese aren't accorded the same undue respect and admiration they were before, thank god. it's not uncommon and westerners and africans and arabs, definitely, speaking chinese isn't a rare sight, especially since living in china without being able to speak chinese is a big hassle and there are more longterm expats in china right now.

if you can't speak chinese, you can't really get in the door on those kind of exchanges. it's more about being able to have a conversation and less about being a westerner that can have a conversation-- the westerner part of it is, can't lie.

but it's also being respectful and chilled out. that works around the world, i think.

part of it is that cigarettes are cheaper than toothpicks.

the first part of the story is, of course, on trying to get a ride in to the bus depot, a half dozen taxi drivers swarm trying to get quadruple the going rate. making a quick buck always trumps the long game, if a long game is even possible, especially with out-of-towners and out-of-countryers.

do these friendly strangers try to call in the favours? cuz however useful foreigners might be, a peripatetic foreigner isn't going to be there when their niece needs help with something

well sometimes a relationship is made but the fix is never called in

seems like HK is a popular destination for movies now - did it start w/ that batman dude leaping off the IFC?

cultivating personal relationships is a surefire way to get ahead in chinese society

there is a lot of turd in the uk press about china, either the lapsed marxist martin jacques / philip dodd 'china will free us from pax americana' hypemanship or more troublingly the new right who want to secede from european union norms and establish some freefloating switzerland/western australia/singapore hybrid of deregulation and enterprise

so the 'importance of strong interpersonal and business ties based on trust and shared norms' part of their imagined ~asian values~ playbook neatly synchonrizes with traditional english nepotism

do personal relationships have the same importance in japan and south korea?

nb maybe this isn't the right thread but i think all of the people with knowledge of east asia on ilx is reading this thread

the move is usually: invite new friend to dinner/social activity -> reinforce relationship, evaluate new friend -> start out small. it's good to have the relationship, even if you don't ask for a favor, because you're making a new social link and then have access to the social links that your contact has.

it's not a good idea to ask for significant favors or ask too much. there's a scoreboard and both sides should know who's leading in the favors department. nobody wants to owe favors. the favor you're asked in return might be more significant or troublesome than the favor you provided and, because you owe a favor, you're not in a position to wriggle out of it without losing face.

do these friendly strangers try to call in the favours? cuz however useful foreigners might be, a peripatetic foreigner isn't going to be there when their niece needs help with something

boring groundlevel personal relationship anecdotes and examples:

i'm usually fairly permanent. if i give someone a phone number with a local area code and exchange, i can be sure i'll get a few text messages. when i'm in china my contacts list swells with entries like: 李报文 trade ctr ele french / 王玉强 lady taxi animat-- li baowen that i met in the elevator trade center, whose daughter wants to learn french / wang yuqiang, met in a taxi, might have translation work for an animated series. if i don't contact them, i'll get a text message that says: "hey, buddy, this is li baowen, we met in the trade center. want to come sing ktv with us?" open-ended invitations, simple greetings.

so, i can go out to dinner with li baowen and we have a good time and hand cigarettes across the table to each other and feel each other out and compete to pay the restaurant bill. this would be a really happy coincidence but, hey: i find out li baowen or one of his friends is deep with the public security bureau. i give li baowen's daughter french lessons. i need help with a residency permit and i call li baowen and he makes a phone call and helps me out.

and the bonus might be that li baowen is a cool guy to get hammered with.

there is a lot of turd in the uk press about china, either the lapsed marxist martin jacques / philip dodd 'china will free us from pax americana' hypemanship or more troublingly the new right who want to secede from european union norms and establish some freefloating switzerland/western australia/singapore hybrid of deregulation and enterprise

so the 'importance of strong interpersonal and business ties based on trust and shared norms' part of their imagined ~asian values~ playbook neatly synchonrizes with traditional english nepotism

i don't have a firm grasp of what traditional english nepotism looks like. but i think it's a different beast entirely.

there's an old guard in the communist party, distinguished families, relationships built at universities, etc. but less emphasis on social status and connections within certain institutions. inside the party, the various cliques operate on a system that's a bit more like an old boys network, but outside of the party elite and regional iterations, it seems a lot more democratic-- the multimillionaires of china usually didn't have the chance to go to an elite school and their social relationships were built everywhere they saw opportunity.

this relationship building is necessary to get through almost every hurdle in chinese life: getting your kids into school, getting a university degree, getting a job.

their idea seems to be that as well as the old boys network, england could innovate its own sort of 'nepotism for the masses' like you describe

if you are in the west and don't follow china with any diligence and just read things here and there you are navigating between different halfbaked ideological formulations about what china is supposed to be or worse what china could mean for us

did you know that in chinese the word for crisis is a combination of the words danger and opportunity

i need to somehow enter the grand pronouncements about what china means business.

on the real, 95% of what's written about china--outside of academic works that nobody should be reading except for academics--is wrong or
built on horribly out of date ideas that didn't make much sense when they were in date or
xenophobic and racist or
tries to use ideas that the writer doesn't comprehend to talk about issues that they cant't understand (scramble for the back button if "confucianism" is mentioned) or
stupid and myopic or
a reflecting pool or
completely insane and
all of it is nearly useless.

i need to get put on at salon or huffpo writing shit like

Could Confucianism rejuvenate the Democratic Party?
China's economy falters: What it means for American homebuyers
Lessons Sarah Palin could learn from the Anti-Rightist Campaign

on the south korea/japan situation, i feel comfortable half-speculating. the same system of personal relationships exists in those countries but isn't allowed to be as important and certain elements of it are unnecessary. there are tighter legal restrictions on government and business relationships, more transparency-- relative to china, of course.

also falling into the trap here of treating something like this as a uniquely chinese or east asian social phenomenon, when there is lots of work in western context about social capital.

yeah it's not like 'networking' doesn't exist in the west

but keeping a mental scorecard is pretty chinese

Confucius and the Social Network: How an Ancient Chinese Sage Can Teach us to Facebook Better

"Bro, Do Me A Solid": Applying Guanxi To Your Everyday Relationships

ime in beijing about 25% of cab drivers get excited when they meet a white person speaking chinese and will be v nice to u, and the other 75% are their normal curmudgeonly selves because cab drivers in beijing work 12 hour days and barely get by. other reasons they are normally unfazed are that 1.)they are probably picking you up in a district where there are a lot of white people, and they probably work that district often and 2.)a pretty high percentage of cab patrons are white anyway b/c they can afford it

also can't bestow enough otms on how ineptly china is covered in western journalism, like you can say whatever you want as long as you talk about how it's ˜significant~ because the audience feels like that must be true and also ~unknowable~ because the audience doesn't know v much about china and feels like that must also be true

yantai isn't exactly a list of great destinations to check off. i bet i could come up with something better if i lived there. my advice is honestly just to wander around and look at shit.

Cool - this is my standard tourist m.o. even in cities where there is famous stuff to look at.

on my favorite topic hukou reform

But the 13-year-old will soon have to decide whether to leave her hometown and the school that's only a bike ride away and move to a rural province far from her parents and friends.

The reason is that Keyu doesn't have a hukou — or residency permit — for Beijing. Her hukou is for Shandong province, where her parents were born.

No matter that she was born in Beijing, no matter that her parents — both working in information technology — have lived in Beijing for two decades and own their apartment here. Because her parents were born in Shandong province, Keyu is legally registered there.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-education-discrimination-20130725-dto,0,3324839.htmlstory

Populous Henan province in central China has only one university for a population of more than 90 million.

not that it matters but: henan has at least a dozen post secondary institutions, including two national key universities (zhengzhou university, a national project 211 school, where i went to school for a semester, and henan university, which just celebrated its centenary).

http://nplusonemag.com/a-brief-history-of-time

as much as i rag on chinese-english translation work and the wasteland that is contemporary chinese literature, that's a good look

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/behind-chinas-hindu-temples-a-forgotten-history/article4932458.ece

YEah the story reminds me of garcia marquez, which is weird/ironic right, because i only know his works through translation as well

i was talking to a friend of mine who just got an assistant professorship at hku, who specializes in chinese english translation. he said he actually likes howard goldblatt's translations of mo yan, says that mo yan is one of goldblatt's favorites, that goldblatt puts a little bit more care and love into the tranlsation.

lol just sent the n+1 to that friend and his response was 'done by a friend of mine'

thinking about quitting everything and becoming a translator. they get paid handsomely, right? *dies penniless*

eric a. is a very casual friend of mine too
i ended up writing some--looking back now really cringeworthy--things for paper republic

i mean there's money in translation but not much and the limited amount of money is in doing dry, dry, dry biz or government shit on tight deadlines for a meager payday.

even branching out into assignments that seem interesting... like film subtitles, you're dealing with--even on projects that will have a massive international audience--people that don't want to give you any money and want you to crank shit out and will arbitrarily fuck with your work after you turn it in.

penguin china's sort of put out a few things in fits and starts and that was supposed to be a big deal. i think eric a. is doing a translation of some bureaucratic novel that may or may not have come out. but even the payday for that isn't great. the amount of translated chinese fiction is just... there's nothing being published. i haven't even heard of many projects being okayed or interest being expressed post mo yan nobel.

cindy carter's dream of ding village is one of the best major chinese translations of the last few years, if anyone wants to read something fairly contemporary in translation.

howard goldblatt, guy's done more than anybody for discovering and promoting chinese lit, and lit from greater china. i think his zhu tianwen translation is a huge achievement: the translation is competent, but just the work of getting that published is a big deal. but he's done some lame, lame work (i swear he singlehandedly killed any chance of jia pingwa getting seriously translated, and jia should be winning the nobel btw) that i'm quick to forgive.

i think the problem with chinese-english translation is that it's mostly done by chinese lang-focused academics and not enough, i dunno, passionate amateurs or writers.

most chinese literature in translation to me =

Winter-gourd Wang walked around her apartment and contemplated going to the market to purchase seven catties of mutton, a half liter of rapeseed oil, a half kilo of wood ear fungus, and some hollow-heart vegetable to prepare lunch for her uncle's nephew, Praise China Liu. She knew that Praise China Liu was once a member of the Village Commune Work Committee at Yellow Hearth Village, a village several kilometers from the county seat. She knew that he once owned seven oxen and a Red Flag car. She called to her mother's younger sister, "Auntie, I am going to travel to the market and purchase food. I will prepare lunch when I return. I'm going."

Her mother's younger sister called back to her, "Go slowly!"

She carried her bag down the stairs to the alley beside their apartment building. On her way down, she met Baldy Huang, who was known as a notorious color wolf in their small neighborhood area. Baldy Huang looked appraisingly at the shape of Winter-gourd Wang's bosom under her padded woolen jacket. "Expansive bosom and broad waist," he said to himself under his breath and struck a match to light a Seven Wolves cigarette.

even I know that 空心菜 is water spinach / morning glory, you asshole

lmao @ 'color wolf'

sorry! it's more about the forced way that chinese ideas or concepts are brought into english and the unnatural way that it reads in translation. especially when it uses words that have fallen out of use or common use in contemporary english. or unnecessarily translating things that in most other foreign language translation would just be left italicized. and people having the name "baldy."

but complaining about something this is fuckin INSANE because nobody really cares and this stuff makes up .001 percent of annual things published in english worldwide and i have a cordial relationship with lots of people that work in the tiny world of chinese-english literary translation.

and of that .001 percent, most of it's pretty good!

fight the real enemy.

nah i totally agree, it's out of a misguided sense of fidelity i think

i laughed at 'color wolf' because i had a student who also tried to translate 色狼 into english but this was in conversation and also came up with 'color wolf.' if you're a translator why don't you just say pervert

ill be in shanghai aug 10-15?? if anyn wants to hangout

color wolf!!

not the first time ive been called that

how was yantai, big man?

Fun! I didn't see or do anything phenomenal but I'm pretty new to China so I get a lot of mileage walking around looking at things and watching how people live. I was walking around the park with the old consulate buildings when I met another tourist who happened to be a PhD student from Hanzhou and was happy to hang out/practice her English/translate signs/find us a good place to eat cheap noodles. We swapped emails and I thought of your making-connections stories from upthread. (actually something like this happened every single day I was travelling alone)

People in Weihai and Yantai were usually pretty stoked to see a Westerner - locals of all ages would come up to me, say "Hello!" and grin, I say "Hello!" back and grin, everyone's happy. On the one or two occasions I was having problems there was always a teenager nearby to translate. Limited experience but I would much rather potter around Shandong than Beijing.

be careful of the practice-my-english scam!!

anyway, let's all lol: http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/799620.shtml

sava hassan has published: http://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Intellectual-Man-Sava-Hassan/dp/059537557X

Currently, he is teaching the conceptual art of English writing in China.

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Making_love_a_sensual_experience.html

The second part focuses on slightly fictionalized true events about the relationship between, ENRICO, a reasonably handsome chubby Arabic-Canadian educator, in his middle fifties, and ANNABELLA, an attractive Mongolian-Chinese woman, in her middle forties. ... They started as coworkers and progressed toward a friendship that developed into a passionate, yet full of conflicts, love relationship. ... At that time, they were residing in a country entrapped in a net of old traditions, which restricted communications between the two genders. ... At the time of their first encounter, ANNABELLA was married to a Mongolian individual, while ENRICO was a divorced man. That made their interactions, with one another, a difficult task, to say the least. Fortunate or unfortunate for them, depending upon one's views, they were working together.

another thing about yantai is:

http://img0.yododo.com/files/photo/2012-08-27/013966C8E4901B5DFF80808139644010.jpg

giant mollusk shell over the train station.

this is the building that it replaced:

http://news.shm.com.cn/attachement/jpg/site1/20061228/xin_56120327074815813515.jpg

Ah I see what you mean about the "practice my English" scam...I guess my guard was down a bit compared to my "don't make eye contact with anyone" approach to Beijing. I'd like to think I would still have spotted something sketchy but after walking around for an hour with someone friendly telling me their complicated backstory, who knows.

yeah - just be careful if they invite you to go drink tea, or, as I heard recently, visit an 'art gallery'

"practice my English" scam?

http://wikitravel.org/en/Beijing#Stay_safe

thats not a very time-efficient scam but its probably better than getting executed for making more than 50g of meth

the people who i know who have been victims of it paid between 3-6000 cny

you land it once a week or even once a month you're doing pretty well

3-6000 is unbelievable. from what i've heard all they can do is threaten to call the cops, and i can't imagine a chinese person laying hands. my general advice would be don't walk around with more than a couple hundred. even in the expat districts that's plenty for one day.

casually thinking about fulltime running an art student/hooker extortion scam in shanghai.

kind of like those french foreign students in nanjing that started a crepe stall.

and got beaten to death by chengguan.

i think i posted about this before but i think some shanghainese tried to run the scam on me, too - i was hanging around nanjing road in shanghai (the wangfujing of shanghai), by myself, had my camera - got approached two women who asked me if i was from out of town. i said yes, they said they were too! we should go get something to eat or drink.

girls working in pairs, opening question where you from = textbook example

because shanghai's this crazy big city and it's hard to find people to hang out with especially on vacay so why don't we go and get a couple of steamer baskets and drink some tea.

in 2006 i heard that women in shanghai referred to white foreigners as 'plane tickets.'

Pair of fun gals prove Shanghai isn't just for kiddies anymore! :-)

i have nobody to hang out with in shanghai :( maybe i can reverse scam them and win their admiration and friendship.

i've never been scammed or attempt-scammed in china, as far as i know.

in 2013, i refer to girls from shanghai as 'plane tickets'

een, r u in china?

I go to Shanghai and Beijing in Feb/March. Protips such as "beware the art students" are helpful, thanking u.

o rly? i'm gonna be in shanghai then

OH SWEET!

ILX meet-ups are always great, but especially when they occur trans-hemisphere.

Also iirc you speak Mandarin? And maybe other dialects? And are really into delicious foods. Me too! Uh, only the last one. So please hustle me for free meals and drinks because winner is me.

I will post exact dates when I have them but basically like last week or two of Feb and first week or two of March. Two, two-and-a-half weeks or so.

And then we go to North Korea so I need to eat a lot (A LOT. SO MUCH) of delicious food in Shanghai because not sure about North Korean tour cuisine.

oh man what's the application process like? i may need to try and do that

We haven't put down the dollars yet, but have been in touch with the company about various details (including getting dollars back if necessary) and have been pleased with the responsiveness (and reviews) thus far. These were the dates that worked into our schedule, no special reason otherwise:

http://www.koryogroup.com/travel_Itinerary_2014_march.php

We liked that they have an actual office in Beijing and will deal with all of the visa stuff for us, including return visa to China. We'd do the return train option (both of us really like trains), but not an option on a US passport at the moment.

But to be honest from what we've researched it doesn't much matter which tour company you choose; once you arrive in NK it is all in their hands. The ease of the before/after and the company track record is what guided us to this joing (as well as budget; I mean we'd love to travel "independently" but that still means DPKR official guides and such, which adds up to costing more than a tour company package).

why do you want to go to north korea?

i guess, why not?

-- can we totally put aside ethical concerns re nk tourism? i guess. like, tourism dollars aren't bankrolling the missile program that will eventually turn tokyo into a radioactive wasteland, but maybe every little bit counts and maybe it's just kind of horrifying to think about visiting a state that still does supremely fucked up shit to its citizens. ---- but maybe you can still visit north korea and not have that line drawn, but i guess i'd say it's kind of creepy at the minimum.

like those vice dudes bowing to the statues and knowing it'd be on nk tv showing american pilgrims showing love to the juche idea/kims il sung and jong il, visiting all those monuments and statues and shit is kind of like the same deal on a small scale.

-- if your interest in the country or its people doesn't extend beyond casual fascination, doesn't it seem kind of weird to willingly be led around on a government safari of a country starving to death for your own... recreation or to say you crossed it off a list?

-- maybe a year of living in northeastern china turned me permanently off the idea of going to north korea in february. shenyang, changchun, they've got starbucks and reliable electricity and they're still goddamn depressing in february, low on my list of places i need to get back to.

tragedy porn

i'm massively interested but it'd be the shittiest fakest most depressing 'holiday'

i did like the recent vice nk special despite the tone of my reference to it.

yeah i saw that and it was enjoyable enough even though the vice bro was almost parodically vicish and imbecilic

i think recent vice video work incl a lot of what didn't make it on the vice hbo show. part of the reason i mess w vice is that they cover places and people that escape even serious news outlet coverage or get minor minor coverage, and vicish and imbecilic behavior isn't a big factor in most of what they do but i have a high tolerance for vicish and imbecilic behavior anyways.

the hbo show was mostly pretty good and i recommended it to several people without being bothered to assuage all of their fears about how vicish and imbecilic it would be (surprisingly little, apart from the schmuck who did the nk episode)

the niger delta segment was horrifying and idk 'compelling'

the china work is sort of... okay. they have good ideas of what to cover but there are always moments that make me cringe and weird prejudices or misconceptions that seem to be played up to add some excitement or tension or whatever. but judged against the wasteland that is mainstream media coverage of china, it's not bad and nobody really goes to china and gets beyond "there's a starbucks here and look over there, a collapsing tenement block!-- people are shopping at a megamall and there is an army truck over there!--"-type "china is a land of contrasts" really superficial bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tssxPLon8P8

^^^^ i like this.

Your points re: NK are otm, wouldn't much argue any of them. So why go? It's a place like no other, and I'd like to see it while I can, I guess? It's five days, I like to see stuff I've not seen before. Also really want to go to Iran so y'know axis of evil tour or what have you.

nah, i feel you. those points are just what i came up with while considering a trip to north korea and i'm not 100% firm on them.

i think the last point is my primary reason for losing interest. northeastern china, especially non-urban liaoning province checks off all the items on my depressingest place on earth list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtnPgXa8bAw

a walking tour of beautiful guangzhou

i think the last point is my primary reason for losing interest. northeastern china, especially non-urban liaoning province checks off all the items on my depressingest place on earth list.

This makes sense, but so far my most depressingest place on earth experience is central Florida somewhere in the strip-mall-sinkhole-golf-course netherland between Orlando and Tampa; I realize this means I need to see more of the depressing world. So, NK!

This might be interesting:

http://thepienews.com/news/china-to-hold-first-inbound-mobility-conference/

China is looking to double the number of inbound international students over the next seven years.

haha, i once got berated by a ~heated~ cab driver for asking to be dropped off at beida. he told me it was too easy for foreigners w/ bad chinese to get in and wouldn't listen to me when i told him i didn't actually go there. should fwd him this article

"well, it's too easy for taxi drivers from hebei with bad mandarin to get jobs driving taxi in beijing, so suck it up"

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/shanghell_zpsa5185c53.jpg

50 = 122 btw
shanghai btw

i'm reading julia lovell's great wall, which i never picked up before because the idea of reading a book about the great wall seemed like a bad idea. i mostly know her from fict translation, zhu wen, lu xun, but this is really good-- uses the great wall as a central theme, the various walls constructed by various states, from the early qin walls to ming rebuilding and construction, and the many reasons they were built and the many uses they were put to, but more about: how var states that occupied the geographical space now occupied by china constructed their idea of what their nation was etc and then how the idea of china as a single monolithic state was created in response to foreign invasion/internal rebellion during late qing + nationalist period, created in response to modern western conceptions of nation, tailored to post-49 communist ideas, tailored to post-89/post-socialist utopian ideas.

this is one of the few "explaining china in 500 pages" books i can recommend with a clear conscience.

http://www.savetibet.org/multi-million-dollar-propaganda-spectacle-opens-in-a-lhasa-under-lockdown/

i mean, yeah, that url and everything makes me sorta uncomfortable still but it's a good roundup of links re the fucking over of tibet, the work toward creating a pacified, sinified domestic tourism utopia.

this is one of the few "explaining china in 500 pages" books i can recommend with a clear conscience.

are there any others? honest q

as long as you have absolutely no follow up questions, yes.

there aren't any other 500 page surveys of chinese history that work as well as julia lovell's, though.

there are quite a few "explaining modern china in 500 pages" books worth checking out, though. jonathan spence's gate of heavenly peace is probably the place to start.

thx!

i enjoyed being a flaneur in guangzhou & you make that lovell book sound v good

i just got off the train, dalian to guangzhou, with a stop in between, a few hours in nanjing and that was the last place i sat down for 30 hours, 40something hours from dalian to guangzhou, no seat tickets 无坐的, 站票, whatever, tucked into the narrow space between the car attendant's room and the bathroom, pressed in with 18 and 19 year old kids going back to jiangxi and hunan to work at home or going to guangzhou and shenzhen to work. so, like, you could sleep on the floor but there was no room to stretch out, people constantly arriving to use the bathroom, hitting the boiling water faucet. there was, like... i don't know, everyone had just met a few minutes before and a girl was passing out ripped sections of newspaper she had cached in her bag to provide bedding, toilet paper was rationed, cigarettes and food were shared, everyone talked for hours and fell asleep laying pressed against each other, mostly sitting hard upright against a rocking train wall. it was fucking crazy to wake up in rural jiangxi, stopping at every surprisingly sprawling 镇 and the clusters of villages with skinny three and four story single family towers that are like the kaiping diaolou 开平碉楼 but with money sent from factory and city work in places like guangzhou and changsha instead of from california or british columbia-- okay and then to say "and it's 13 hours til we get there." and all the jiangxi and hunan accents, the sheer number of times i heard people say, "what? i didn't understand" behind some dialect issues, talking about bullshit and smoking about ten thousand cigarettes and the balance between goodnatured complaining and making the best of it, the kid from jiangxi going home to work at his brother's window factory and gaming the longlegged girl from guangdong for the whole trip and giving up when he knew the situation with her boyfriend. at the end it had broken down to me and this dude sleeping rough on the steel walkway in front of the exit doors and getting covered in ash and dust and just letting people walk over us. i think it was the closest falling asleep experience to peaking on mushrooms, instant hallucinations when i closed my eyes.

pulling into guangzhou, fucking relief, 30 hours after leaving nanjing. nanjing, pulling into nanjing, it seems choreographed, or it looks really good, even if you're just cruising through and if you do walk out the view from the lakeside train station is amazing but the entrance to guangzhou after coming through shaoguan is smashed up brick apartment blocks and cement plants and chaotic green that all looks like banana trees to me but i might not be because i've never lived this close to the equator. walking out of the guangzhou train station and the struggle and thousands and thousands of people are held in a bowl of city with overpasses and overoverpasses rising around them, fucking crazy.

so, that's it.

^^^loved reading this, hope you keep it coming!

thanks, pal.

good lord its hot here though.

anyone with any ideas about things to do in guangzhou?

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/08/09/new-release-of-lao-she-books-revisits-a-dark-history/

my sister was born in guangzhou iirc

ive. heard her mentioned a few times

i think ill prob go to the peasant movement museum tmrw because free + airconditioning+ honour the grassroots agrarian socialist movement that paved the way for autocratic capitalism and out of control consumerism or whatever this is

Keen on those Lao She reprints. I've got digital access to the Anne Witchard book on his time in London in the 20s, kind've intrigued by that scene (maybe because my partner's showed me a bunch of Anna May Wong stuff).

cat country is a decent leftfield choice, especially when there's some (?) interest in chinese speculative fiction among fans of the genre and among a more literary crowd that was feeling chan koonchung.

but i agree with eric abrahamsen. the other books that penguin china has put out so far seem like... well, they're sort of unusual choices to me. the civil servant's notebook, translated by eric abrahamsen himself, i think that's a strange choice, a not very high profile bureaucratic novel, maybe the best example of the genre-- but not a great book and of incredibly limited interest to general readers. i dunno. i think there are better choices and certain markets that are untapped.

I wonder how big the Penguin China team are (but am too lazy to Google etc)? Eh.

Also, if you wanna know what the CI are up to in my town (but haven't done any promotion for outside of the Chinese dept at the uni):
http://i39.tinypic.com/2hyxpva.jpg

i actually interviewed for an editor position @ penguin china about... two years ago now? my feeling is that it's a relatively small team, four or five?, and the translation work so far has been contracted to the core group freelance of chn-eng translators working right now.

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/803544.shtml#.Ugow3mTwJgI

the greatest novel published in chinese during the last 60 years.

there was a chinese-english translation floating around, done by someone at northwest university with close connections to jia pingwa. howard goldblatt had a look at it for an american publisher and deemed it absolute garbage, unfixable, requiring a total retranslation.

"We translated the protagonist's name Zhuang Zhidie into Butterfly Zhuang, with an explanatory note on a proposition by ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi," Hu said.

this sentence makes me think it might not be an improvement on that translation. butterfly zhuang. man.

howard goldblatt's own attempt at a jia pingwa novel, turbulence was, like... pretty good, i guess.

I saw HG's xlation of Rickshaw Boy in the local secondhand shop and thought of you, dyl.

How much of The Abandoned Capital did you get through translating yrself / did you ever revisit it?

Once again, the Global Times writing too much with too little evidence. I
don't know who these translators are, but their manuscript won't find a
publisher anywhere, because it was completed without the authorization of
the domestic or foreign rights holders. Jia Pingwa himself had no idea
they were doing it, nor did People's Literature Publishing House, who
currently publish Feidu in China and have contracted with the author for
global representation rights.

Canaan Morse
Paper Republic
www.paper-republic.org <http://www.paper-republic.org/>;

i don't remember.... a half dozen ten thousand word chunks? something like that. it's, i dunno, an incredibly rich text that has a cult following and people who've devoted their academic lives to its close reading and it's remarkably hard to translate while maintaining the richness and specialness of the original, but not impossible.

http://on.wsj.com/17mqPQM

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-08-13/buffett-style-dinner-auctions-lure-chinese-seeking-just-society.html

hey u guyz did u hear about the dog pretending to be a lion

when and why did china stories go from poison milk dead babies + earthquake dead babies + aborted rural female dead babies to lol human interest / wacky novelty stuff

with the occasional sewerpipe baby for old times sake

it was after huawei bought the nytimes iirc

lol

i'm really not sure about the american side media regarding china coverage. when there's only so much interest in the rest of the world and people are being killed in bulk in the middle east, it shifts time and space away from coverage of china stories, i guess. maybe that's part of it. also china just isn't that scary anymore.

those stories are still out there, i think, and there's still interest in certain quarters for esp female dead babies stories (judging by the groups that were courting chen guangcheng based on his work against family planning measures). i'd trawl through the internet to find some horrifying stories for you but, as you can imagine, all my sources for horrifying stories are blocked. and right now, i don't think there's a great, horrifying big story out there to capture any interest. i think the story about life expectancy in the north vs. south as a result of northern air pollution from burning coal was sorta big, right?

the last earthquake is already faded into memory and it was fairly low profile in western media and handled reasonably well and minor incidences of corruption or mismanagement were allowed to be exposed in the media/social media and were dealt with satisfactorily.

there hasn't been a major food safety crisis, has there? there've been a few small ones: the thing with hum!, something about rat meat kebab, bad straws, the continuing fear of sewer oil, etc. there've been some silly-ish human interest stories about people bulk buying milk powder in hk and people drinking human breast milk. in china, there's a lot of fear about food safety but it's more general paranoia and fear of everything.

i think a lot of the issues that generate shock&anger on weibo/chinese social media in general often don't interest the west and they might seem a bit abstract or fall outside of the areas of expertise of asia bureau reporters or whatever: housing prices, social mobility, rural/urban issues, hukou reform, rule of law, domestic economic issues.

when and why did china stories go from poison milk dead babies + earthquake dead babies + aborted rural female dead babies to lol human interest / wacky novelty stuff

― Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Friday, August 16, 2013 9:22 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

i always wonder if other countries have a http://wtfhub.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/kentucky-man-forced-to-eat-beard.jpg perception of america. do only our wackiest news stories make it across our borders?

http://24.media.tumblr.com/075cbbf9c09c7caf7126218fb99d7179/tumblr_mrm4ut5Stt1s12nr9o1_500.jpg

america, so fuckin weird

that was in england wasn't it

the difference between american/china is that as well as the westboro baptist church and 400lb people getting stuck in doorways there is obama, sandy hook, trayvon etc

tv news about america always has more of an entertainment angle though

the daily mail are doing a lot more tabloidy wacky china stories

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2375931/Life-slow-lane-Workers-stop-nap-busy-highway-China-traffic-zooms-past.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2380798/Chinese-air-crew-learn-kung-fu-combat-unstable-passengers.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2376851/China-couple-strip-naked-middle-road.html

and there it is, dead baby killed by malfunctioning incubator

there are lots of school stabbings, chengguan beating deaths, show trials featuring former party elite, airport bombings, pollution scandals, corruption, etc. to cover on the china beat, still

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1297667/deadly-floods-cripple-guangdong-rail-service

it's still raining too.

http://www.chinafile.com/carried-off-abduction-adoption

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1298306/son-chinas-war-hero-apologises-attacking-teachers-during-cultural

cultural revolution was never a completely forbidden topic and there were always ways to talk about it even really explicitly but i think the recent interest or revisiting of the time period is vaguely interesting, esp when it's resulted in criminal charges being brought against former red guards.

for some reason, i feel like... when chen xiaolu mentions "unconstitutional behaviour" and seeing the attention given to the story.... i feel like it's at least a bit part of a larger movement within the party elite to redefine how the law is going to work in china-- like, the bo xilai trial might be kinda fucked up but it's very much the party using the law, the constitution to smack down a guy that behaved in a way that violated chinese law and the chinese constitution. also, there's a connection between bo xilai's leadership and cultural revolution thought, and chen xiaolu mentions avoiding glorification of the cultural revolution.... kinda reaching here but i still think there's some relationship.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/21/world/asia/at-bo-xilai-trial-a-goal-to-blast-acts-not-ideas.html

and you can read about the bo xilai trial.

oh, i think this looks sort of interesting, too.

http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/porter.htm

it could be terrible but perry link is reasonably trustworthy.

also, here is a picture of me drunk in the middle of a highway in guangzhou last night

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/fatsextourist_zps9f63c0b3.jpg

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5961

i actually interviewed for an editor position @ penguin china about... two years ago now? my feeling is that it's a relatively small team, four or five?, and the translation work so far has been contracted to the core group freelance of chn-eng translators working right now

It's quite a bit bigger than that. Not hundreds of people but certainly dozens.

i just meant the team that's been doing chinese-english books... is it that many? i know penguin china is a big deal though.

Ah, i see. Yeah, that's probably about right.

i need to find a good bookstore on this side of the hk-gz border. the selection of english books available at most chinese bookstores is heavy on the 19th century, dickens, murakami translations and government-produced guidebooks.

http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/08/ambassador-observer-spectacle-being-african-in-china/

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/chronicling-chinas-changing-cities/

good photo series and feels truer than a lot of other ones being done rn

Woah I saw this girl on the subway around wudaokou, she's beautiful irl

also i feel i'm pretty jaded about most gruesome stories but the one about the 6 year old boy who was drugged and had his eyes gouged out, jesus fucking christ

That photo set is really good.

xp :(

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/08/police-break-beijing-independent-film-festival/

The directors, jury, and invited guests of the festival, among them those who had taken the train from Xinjiang or been flown in all the way from Sweden and Iran, would be handed out DVDs containing the entire programme of films. We would be permitted to watch them, on computer screens or televisions, in groups of two or three, but no more than five.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/world/asia/china-debates-effect-on-law-of-bo-xilais-trial.html

based on conversations about this w numerous people + reception of media coverage in mainland, which is obv assumed to be bombast and propaganda with 10% truth, i think this was basically a success for the party and based on numerous revelations at trial bo xilai is even harder to defend.

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1300582/photos-boy-urinating-canadian-mall-spark-strong-online-reaction

tired of mainland chinese kids peeing and eating on subways stories to be honest.
richmond most fertile ground for hker disgust at mainlanders--- post 97 and crowd got their first and built richmond only to have it infiltrated by rich mainlanders and their peeing kids.
quite often heard talk of "chinese people" referring to mainlanders used by hong kong chinese that came first and often came as a result of fear of mainland meddling in hk politics.

oh and from the sidebar of that story comes

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1297937/canadian-home-prices-frustrating-hongkongers-waiting-buy

what near beijing has a strong i.t. industry? current plan is to spend 1–2 weeks in tianjin but it seems a bit manufacturing.

xp fwiw i stay away from sites like chinasmack because of the whole worst-of-the-worst focus

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2013/09/18/working-in-china/

aa who brought up chinasmack that you're xposting with??

i always understood dalian to be the major northern i.t. center

i'm in china drunk at 8 am and just ate a 7-11 hot dog btw

are they the same, there?

i often want to talk about living in china on the rolling china thread but i'm not sure what i have to say about living in china would be interesting to people reading the rolling china thread, even if i don't talk about 7-11 hot dogs and even if a limited number of people are following the rolling china thread. but i think guangzhou is the most vibrant, liveable, interesting city i have ever lived in but frustratingly hard to understand or describe due to its size and the variety of experiences and people and ways of life and everything else it contains. but yes, the hot dogs are basically the same.

i was only there for a weekend but i loved guangzhou so much

i'm a little bummed that the program i'm gonna be in is in shanghai and not guangzhou. i would live in a boat on the river.

aa who brought up chinasmack that you're xposting with??

― dylannn, Thursday, 19 September 2013 09:57 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nobody, just referring to your peeing-and-eating-on-subways-stories post (i.e. agreeing).

cheers for the dalian tip.

i feel like the revulsion among hk + overseas chinese directed at recent immigrants is more interesting than the chinasmack china-is-weird-and-gross-and-now-read-fucked-up-racist-comments-below stuff but i guess even in scmp it doesn't really get covered in a serious way and they just end up quoting a hot import nights message board that i can't think the name of right now.

especially when i lived in richmond, which is unofficially 75% chinese, i always noticed a tension between recent immigrants and slightly less recent immigrants (and less so among oldschool chinese families with limited or no connection to hk or china or taiwan) and even if it boiled up in "chinese people spit" it was often more about perceived values and whatnot, in richmond/van esp about the way that hk immigrants became model immigrants and became successful citizens and experienced little friction with the communities they moved into, which is not the full story really but that's how the story is told now. and economic resentment, talk about "where's the money coming from to buy all these houses that are driving up real estate prices???" which is also about values too and... yeah, it's still sort of interesting to me, even if in english language media it really reads as gross racist shit about chinese people peeing in weird places-- it's interesting that that's in canada at least really driven by ethnic chinese that are also often recent immigrants or the children of immigrants.

also interesting to read about tensions between fujianese and cantonese in new york chinatowns + the emergence of little fuzhou.

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

but in vancouver it seems the recent immigrants from the mainland have a lot more economic clout than fujianese immigrants to manhattan but the same pattern of rising cost of real estate in chinese immigrant enclaves, fear of the base and uncultured ways of new mainland immigrants, suspicion that they're going to fuck up a good thing for previous generations of immigrants.

WORST TYPHOON IN 34 YEARS

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1312965/hong-kong-braces-worst-storm-34-years-typhoon-usagi-closes

there've been typhoon alert sirens blasting all morning

life in prison for bo xilai

alright. trial went better than expected. verdict gives bo a good chance of spending a few years in prison, parole for medical reasons, set up somewhere quiet.

typhoon update: typhoon party ended early when we realized that it was really only a light rain + a stiff breeze and everything in the city was running as normal. happy to get the day off work, though.

http://www.chinafile.com/strangers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendid_China_(Florida)

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/25/unequal-in-life-and-death/

whoa

http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/fame-is-fortune-in-sino_science

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/09/24/chinas-ghost-cities-may-not-be-so-spooky/?mod=WSJBlog

Go East, Young Man

xp

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/

pretty uninspiring esp compared to the few other chinablog wings of major publications esp new yorker's letter from china / economist's equally poorly named analects. but didi kirsten tatlow has always seemed okay and i had no idea that there was a new building in beijing that looks like a cock.

well it's new

and evan osnos has gone back to the thirteen colonies

xpost sorry. i'll actually read it. the list of contributors has a lot of people i like esp phil pan who wrote one of the best china books ever and ian johnson and austin ramzy.

the economists' offering is actually called 'analects'?? haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

more like anal sects

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/books/prison-notebooks?page=0,2

is that blog a part of new international nyt? greatest thing ever imho.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304330904579135220056016750.html

this remains a booming move for the philippines

xp not sure - i was surprised that the nyt had started india ink first before a blog focused on china, tbh

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/devils-in-red-dress/

the tone of this bugged me a little bit but i can't quite put my finger on why

so far NYT sinosphere seems about 75% content-scraping from all the other english china feeds, 25% original reporting

courtesy of the international NYT:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/opinion/the-worlds-wartime-debt-to-china.html?hp&_r=0

One major consequence that remains of great relevance today is that the old enemies of Asia never struck a multilateral settlement of the sort that took place in the North Atlantic after 1945, with the formation of NATO and what has become the European Union. The United States’ decision to put China on the sidelines of the postwar world order it dominated has meant that China and Japan never signed a proper peace treaty.

the other major consequence is that it left taiwan's status up in the air, probably one of the longest-ticking time bombs of the current geopolitical order

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/oct/15/china-dream-posters/

it's impressive how thoroughly these posters have covered the country. i haven't seen anything like it in the five or so years i've been coming here. i kind of like them.

i think despite the blanket approach, throwing them up everywhere, i can't say a lot of people take them seriously... riding the guangzhou metro, where the posters take up at least 50% of advertising space, they still sort of fade into the background and i've only heard people comment on them ironically, not being able to take seriously slogans about socialism and the communist party as savior of the people.

http://images1.wenming.cn/web_wenming/jwmsxf_294/zggygg/pml/ctmdxl/201309/W020130929572830566129.jpg

ok
i think many of these photographs are beautiful
http://www.photoblog.hk/wordpress/46976/

http://www.photoblog.hk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/massupload/287606train20.jpg

the one i wanted was the girl playing er hu with toes wrapped around the opposite side bed with the people looking up and the man leaning over the bed abovve to watch her

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/world/asia/xia-yeliang-an-outspoken-chinese-professor-says-he-has-been-dismissed.html

http://i.imgur.com/Ycxr8I2.jpg

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/q-a-yang-fenggang-on-the-oxford-consensus-and-public-trust-in-china/?_r=0

In late August, two dozen Chinese public intellectuals from four of the country’s main ideological schools — Confucian, New Left, Liberal and Christian — met at Oxford University’s Wycliffe Hall to discuss their country’s problems.

i'd like to hear how other people's views on this because... maybe living in china and following chinese politics to a limited degree through domestic news sources and social media gives me a skewed view of this kind of thing but just turning to that opening line and it sounds ridiculous to describe confucianism or christianity especially as main ideological schools... and the new left's inclusion is legit, i guess, but in china it's a term used to describe marxist left guys like wang hui and neomaoist nationalists but yang fenggang insists that they're anticapitalists that have no interest in marx/lenin/mao and that makes no sense and isn't true.... these definitions make no sense when discussing chinese politics and even when yang fenggang is asked to define liberal in his interview, he couldn't come up with anything that wasn't contradictory.

The statement has not been widely reported in China, although a long feature appeared in the influential newspaper Southern People, or Nanfang Renwu, a sign perhaps that the initiative has not completely run afoul of the government’s continuing tightening of public discussion.

a) nobody cares about these people. nobody cares what these people have to say. b) there was nothing new or radical or provocative in their statement. compared to what people with a real voice/power in china have said about adherence to the constitution or individual rights, it's weak. compared to what is being discussed on weibo or a lot of newspaper editorials, it's weak.

She pumped it in and out of her mouth unceasingly, until white saliva overflowed from her lips, and rouge stains appeared on the stem of his organ.

Just as he was about to ejaculate, the woman question Hsi-men Ch’ing, saying, “Ying the Second has sent invitations inviting us to his place on the twenty-eighth. Are we going to go, or not?”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/at-last-an-english-translation-of-the-plum-in-the-golden-vase

http://www.dvafoto.com/2013/10/alan-chin-another-home-8000-miles-away/

maybe more appropriate for a sea turtle thread but i dig it

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/10/23/world/asia/23SINO-REPORTER01/23SINO-REPORTER01-blog480.png

FREE GUCCI

reporter on BBC this morning was all "aren't there better ways of handling dissent than imprisonment???" and the interview subject was like "um, it's not a free media you know?"

this wasn't really 'dissent'

well, accusations of corruption + book cooking - but iirc that was the word the journalist used.

from what i can tell it's a private company, not a SOE

this is the kind of story the western media loves to run w/ but idk, there are way bigger problems inside china to worry about

why would local government get involved in accusations against a private company? it was my impression that there was some bleedover into the public sector?

Mr. Chen was formally detained on Saturday under “suspicion of damaging commercial reputation,” said the police in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province and home to Zoomlion’s headquarters. The New Express, a scrappy tabloid, had run a series of articles questioning Zoomlion’s revenue and profit figures.

Zoomlion, which is partly owned by the Hunan government, has denied allegations that it faked its results. Trading of the company’s shares in Shenzhen and Hong Kong was temporarily suspended in May after The New Express accused Zoomlion of doctoring sales numbers.

probably because the execs of the company are pretty chummy w/ the local police

not sure if 'partly owned' there means members of the gov actually sit on the board of directors or w/e or is just a shareholder

http://en.zoomlion.com/english/about/org-structure.html

quick scan of the directors show that some of 'em held gov positions in the past but not sure if any do now

http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders-overview.html?t=ZLIOF

nothing really suggests the gov owns a significant portion or that this is about 'dissent' in the sense of advocating for democracy / civil rights / free speech in the sense of using it to criticize the government or bring to light unsavory details about china's history

from what i've read, it looks like a private company that was created from or merged with some elements of preexisting state owned entities during the early 90s and most of the people who started the company likely came from state-owned companies because that's how these things work-- but the forbes article i just read refers to them as a "state-owned firm" so i dunno.

even if it was a state-owned firm, i don't read anything extra sinister about them having a journalist arrested. i don't think "state-owned firm" really means arm of the government anymore and any big corporation in a 2nd tier city would probably have the necessary pull to have a journalist brought in for questioning.

http://thediplomat.com/2013/10/14/kashgar-on-the-move/

i like reading about the far west and i hope you guys do too

yeah idk, first thing i thought of was w. eugene richards photographing in tokyo, getting the shit beat out of him by thugs hired by the chisso corporation. idk, i feel like there are probably places in america where you could get 'arrested' for snooping around too much, under some bullshit charge.

http://o.canada.com/news/national/rcmp-arrest-journalist-in-new-brunswick/

i guess i was thinking of efforts made to cover pipeline spills, i.e. you'll have corporate 'security' cordoning places as off limits.

anyway the legal system as it exists in china is still very nascent and if the 'law' is on the books and a police officer arrests you under it, idk, we'll see what happens next.

the guy that exposed the recycling of cooking oil in henan ended up being stabbed twenty times outside his house a few days later... absolutely coincidentally, victim of a robbery, totally random and nothing to do with causing a nationwide crackdown on a massive conspiracy.

so, i mean, good that they just filed a police report.

i'm not sure how to phrase this or put it into a coherent thought but something like this: there's been a lot of interest in using the chinese legal system, chinese law as it exists on both sides of the line... the government using the law to trip up bo xilai, just using the law as it's written, rather than some hazy political reason... lots of fighting against the system whether death penalty stuff or forced abortions going on in courtrooms and party basically tolerating it... the filial piety law using laws as a way to address a perceived social problem... i can't think of any better examples. in the bo xilai case, part of the whole spectacle was like a partial remaking of the legal system or at least trying to say, hey, the law works and it's fair and transparent and even if you're one of the most powerful men in china you can't escape it and we're using the law to make the country fairer and more just. so, it's kind of interesting, the company filing a police report and going the legal route.

the thing with the chinese legal system is that nobody trusts the chinese legal system. you have a lot of law on the books, pretty much all of it written in the last... 30 years? 40 years? and not much of it has been interpreted. it's not reliable. p much the entire goal of having a legal system is to induce reliability in society, that is, if i've been wronged, i can go to court and there should be clear precedent as to what will happen with my case. the problem is that my impression is that everybody knows that decisions as to how to rule are handed down from the party, not from judges who have independence from the party. who a party to a case knows and whether they have an inside way of getting the judge's son into that sweet international school or w/e has just as much a chance influencing the case as does the settled law on the matter. well, i don't know if that's strictly true. but i wouldn't bet that that it's 100% NOT true, either.

the bo xilai trial was a step in the right direction, allowing bo to defend himself was a good touch, but the whole thing was still shrouded in secrecy and the official reports were still redacted.

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2013/10/23/has-chinas-debt-crisis-moment-arrived/

kinda worried about this. local governments borrowing tons of money to build shopping malls and high rises that nobody can afford to go to or buy.

i mean, we've known about that for a long time, but maybe now the headsman is coming.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/two-stabbed-to-death-in-forbidden-city/?_r=0

I used to work here. jesus

http://www.popehat.com/2013/10/25/feds-confiscate-investigative-reporters-confidential-files/

idgi - lol daily caller?

does china have any spirited national liberation movements other than tibet that foreigners can overidentify with in a cartoonish reductive form?

uyghur pride

Thought this was a good read (above/beyond the 'look cool graphic stuff!' elements)

http://www.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2013/10/27/south-china-sea/

dayo i don't see a huge western interest in the journalism story. i saw an article or two about it on nytimes and heard one report on the bbc but otherwise it has been pretty quiet - i'd be surprised if it showed up in the week magazine. iow i don't think ppl are overdramatizing the incident out of bias - if anything it just seems like another data point on this kinda ongoing story about academic/journalist/intellectual dissent to the communist party and how they're trying to handle it.

i really don't think it can be read as a story about dissent against the communist party. you could just as soon read it as a clash between corporate interests and an increasingly free media. this isn't a state owned enterprise in the traditional sense and it was operating out of purely ruthless moneymaking interest and was able to enlist the help of a compliant local police force (and by filing a police report, pursuing legal action). the journalist wasn't questioning the legitimacy of the party and the newspaper has been free to publish editorials calling for his release.

if you're looking for stories of journalistic or intellectual dissent, i don't think there's any shortage. plenty of journalists being arrested in china for covering corruption or fucked up things that the party doesn't want to talk about.

but they tend to disappear very quietly or nobody knows what happened to them and the story only appears on a few human rights websites maybe and there aren't front page editorials in chinese papers demanding their release.

On July 10, several media outlets published stories accusing Zoomlion of financial fraud based on reports by a person surnamed Chen. The latter was vaguely described as a market insider. A whistleblower also submitted reports to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in June and the China Securities Regulatory Commission in July.

Gao Hui, an assistant to Zoomlion's chairman, said the company traced several Sina Weibo posts critical of Zoomlion to a user named "Don Quixote Chen." It later learned from an attached document that his real name was Chen Yongzhou and he is a New Express journalist.

it's a fucked up situation, a company in hunan being able to call in favors with the police and send their guys across the border to guangdong to grab him, but it just isn't a clearcut case of a crusading journalist fighting against state corruption-- most guangdong newspapers have lots of gossipy financial rumors, partly because so many people are playing with stocks, but this seems to go beyond that.

dayo i don't see a huge western interest in the journalism story. i saw an article or two about it on nytimes and heard one report on the bbc but otherwise it has been pretty quiet - i'd be surprised if it showed up in the week magazine. iow i don't think ppl are overdramatizing the incident out of bias - if anything it just seems like another data point on this kinda ongoing story about academic/journalist/intellectual dissent to the communist party and how they're trying to handle it.

― Mordy , Friday, October 25, 2013 5:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

eh to china-watchers this story has been pretty heavy - if osnos was still writing letters from china there would be no doubt that he would make this the subject of his next piece. it just doesn't seem like a story that rises to, say, the level of ai wei wei being detained by the CCP for 'tax evasion.' i don't really see the CCP's involvement in this at all - local police organs are pretty far removed from beijing. if anything, i see the CCP working behind the scenes right now to try to reach a resolution that won't leave egg on everybody's face.

i may have spoke too soon! this sounds very fishy http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/detained-chinese-reporter-makes-confession-on-state-television/

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/chinese-newspaper-apologizes-for-articles-by-detained-reporter/?_r=0

lol so now the newspaper (or, tabloid?) has published an apology.

i dunno what to make of this anymore - ok, so let's say you take the conspiracy theorist angle. i can believe that they threatened this guy's family or w/e to get him to recant publicly, make a forced confession. but could they extract a full, public about face from the newspaper as well? what leverage does this company have over a tabloid 700 miles away? is this guy's subsequent release (hopefully) conditioned on the newspaper publishing an apology? are they even going to release him - if their evidence is as bang-up as the newspaper apparently now acknowledges, won't they just go ahead and prosecute the guy? if their evidence was that good, could the police have avoided the public call by showing the newspaper the evidence before this all went down?

it's also the rare case where the claimed motivations for this guy's actions - 'personal wealth' and 'recognition' kind of make sense. short sellers can make a ton of money if a company's stock falls (although i'm not even sure if short selling is legal in china.)

unfortunately, zoomlion's only traded on the shenzhen stock exchange, so they're not subject to the stringent disclosure requirements of foreign exchanges. we're probably not gonna get a muddy waters exposé on zoomlion's shoddy financials, if they are shoddy. i would have taken the attitude, free this guy, and let's see how this company does in the future, are they really an enron or worldcome, because if they are the house will collapse sooner or later. but i dunno, if they're operating p much exclusively domestically it's probably easier to paper over any gaps in their financial statements going forward.

well, actually looks like zoomlion is traded in hong kong too, which has pretty good disclosure requirements iirc, at least better than the mainland. maybe some scrappy hong kong investigative reporters have been spurred to go over zoomlion's books w/ a magnifying glass.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-27/chinese-newspaper-apologizes-over-journalist-s-zoomlion-reports.html

bloomberg has a more thorough write-up, including the hunan government's ownership interest.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/3-dead-after-vehicle-bursts-into-flames-at-tiananmen-square/?_r=0

man i don't think cars just 'catch fire' after a crash.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/140168/john-pomfret/in-search-of-the-real-china#

this looks interesting. anybody have a subscript or has read / is going to read the book?

http://www.chinafile.com/how-police-got-it-so-wrong-arresting-journalist

i'm still capable of being surprised by how poorly the central or provincial govt can bungle things like this, even if they're cleaning up after a fuckup by lower levels of govt or police operating beyond the rule of law. central govt could come out and say that the law must be respected, get the journalist into custody in guangdong, tell everyone they're investigating, have a trial. i tend to think that there was something weird going on with chen yongzhou's weibo posts and ratting out the company, so if it's such a slam dunk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahplx5mlyRk

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/why-young-women-in-rural-china-become-the-mistresses-of-wealthy-older-men/
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-chinese-youth/
http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/james-palmer-traditional-chinese-medicine/

james palmer has three longish pieces at aeon magazine that i think would be a good primer for people interested in a breezy introduction to big topics in contemporary chinese society.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1342554/eight-suspects-mostly-uygurs-sought-deadly-tiananmen-crash

http://www.avclub.com/articles/abc-apologizes-for-jimmy-kimmel-skit-where-kid-sug,104880/

has this crap made news in china?

Yeah

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1343568/slideshow-doctored-photos-chinese-officials

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/china-art-fraud/

潘家园 is highly recommended if you ever go to beijing

http://www.chinafile.com/trial-tv-what-does-reporter-s-arrest-and-confession-tell-us-about-chinese-media

had no idea that zoomlion was that big - and details some of the party connections that may or may not be involved at the top-level management of zoomlion. also provides a plausible answer for who would actually have been paying chen, were the confession real. (and it might be! who knows.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/top-chinese-banks-post-biggest-bad-loan-surge-since-2010.html

meanwhile, loans are defaulting at an increasing pace. china crash in next 1-2 years?

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/a-lonely-passion-chinas-followers-of-friedrich-a-hayek/

i don't know naything about hayek. do you, mordy?

i know a little bit- he's a classical liberalism / free market guy.

http://twitter.com/diabetes

http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/9/85313/World/International/China-names-Islamic-group-as-supporter-of-Tiananme.aspx

http://www.chinafile.com/china-s-chilling-effect-investor-research

man it doesnt pay to be a financial reporter in china

forwarded that to my co-workers, very interesting

did you get my email?

the article? Yes. I haven't gotten around to it yet.

there are clearcut cases of corporate interests and the government colluding to suppress real journalists. but then there are cases of journalists trying to shake down corporations or getting paid on the back end for not running with stories or paid on the back end by other interests.

i'm of the opinion that cheng yongzhou might have been doing some unethical things and zoomlion was definitely doing some unethical things. it's cool that there might be effective laws protecting journalists and also protecting corporations and the party says we should govern the country according to laws it's written. but no one really cares at a local level because everything is hopelessly corrupt at the local level, and no one really cares at a national level, either.

trial by cctv is tolerated because it puts an end to the situation quickly. the story fades and, yeah, chilling effect. 杀鸡给猴看: nobody is willing to look into it or pay people to look into it because it results in people getting their heads shaved and the head staff of newspapers replaced.

also, i'd be very curious to know who was paying or going to pay chen yongzhou all the money. i feel like we probably won't see them on cctv with their head shaved, though.

because obv 1) they don't exist, 2) they're equally or more hooked up than the zoomlion crew

i'm in shenzhen right now, after three days over the border. today i walked from somewhere around mei foo to city university, which is set between a luxury mall and nice gated communities on streets named osmanthus and peony and looks a more fortified point grey, vancouver, lots of barbed wire and high walls, and then the length of nathan road from boundary to salisbury with lots of detours through small streets and tiny alleys in the run between mong kok and jordan. and then back to city university and took the metro back to luo hu or lo wu. it's a fascinating city and i know i've never really seen most of what's outside of outside of central and wanchai and mei foo is about as far off track as i've ever gotten. i love hk and i used to think i wanted to live there, but now that it's only an hour away and i can go whenever i want and i've been going there quite a bit, i don't know. the feeling of going back across the border to shenzhen was like going home.

http://www.scmp.com/comment/article/1348342/beijing-must-avoid-paranoia-over-hostile-foreign-forces-hong-kong

http://kotaku.com/mysterious-chinese-restaurant-in-tokyo-raises-eyebrows-1458709314

there are i dunno thousands? of similar restaurants in china that vary in their degree of cultural revolution kitsch. it's less about evoking a period of political unrest and more about good food, good fun, and a whole lot of crazy crap on the walls + some nostalgia on the part of chinese that lived through the period and a large majority of people born after 76, who have a limited idea what the cultural revolution involved and/or just think it's a fun idea and that historical period has no particular meaning to them.

Purges and harassment. Torture and destruction. And millions dead. Those are what China's Cultural Revolution evokes.

the view of westerners casually acquainted with chinese contemporary history and who might have read a jung chang book and the view of many non-elite chinese that grew up during this period is vastly different.

is it just the anticipated distance of reading about instead of living through historical events, or are there specific things that you notice westerners misunderstand about events like the cultural revolution?

well you have to ask, how are westerners accessing information about the cultural revolution? what are their sources? how is it framed? to me it's really more just about basic differences in historiography

i think that's fair.

it's not fair to say that everyone was living it up during the cultural revolution but a lot of chinese were untouched by elite-level political struggle and student movements in urban areas.

jjjust anecdotally living in northern china especially going to smaller cities and talking to people that would still hang a portrait of mao in their living room there's a lot of nostalgia for the period but part of it is about the just as rapid destruction of that maoist period way of organizing people and the relative shittiness and alienation and social confusion that came after and not being able to figure out how to live in a society that no longer provides a strong social network and guaranteed livelihood and disgust with widespread corruption and the celebration of wealth and excess. to a lot of northern chinese, the idea of smashing the old society and building a new society was attractive because the old society was chaos and starvation-- even if that also took place during land reform and the great leap forward and the cultural revolution. so, there were no good old days pre-mao and for all the talk of lifting millions out of poverty etc there are many people that have missed out on the contemporary economic miracle or have mixed feelings about it. even among post 80s kids, there's a lot of nostalgia for the period directly after the cultural revolution when things were still organized in socialist communal fashion and you get people my age waxing nostalgic about life in factory housing and going to the danwei daycare.

living in guangzhou, there's a lot a lot less of that sentiment, obviously.

things blowing up

http://rt.com/news/china-party-headquarters-blasts-279/