Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

Xu Zhiyong about to be subject to the kangaroo court tomorrow (Wed 1/22)

Jerry Cohen, Evan Osnos:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/2014/01/jerome-cohen-on-the-upcoming-trial-of-xu-zhiyong.html

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/01/the-trial-of-the-chinese-dream.html?mobify=0

yeah that's fucked, but the fact such opposition exists is surely encouraging

Well opposition has always existed and always will exist

http://qz.com/168705/westerners-are-so-convinced-china-is-a-dystopian-hellscape-theyll-share-anything-that-confirms-it/

:D

I meant the level of opposition; it would appear to be a serious & prominent swell of peaceful dissent. the Party can't hold on like this forever right

What system of government can

rolling zen angst

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/01/21/u-s-exports-its-factories-and-pollution-to-china/?mod=WSJBlog

What’s more unnerving, though, is that while several of the media outlets updated their posts already, none has changed the headline or noted that the story isn’t true. Does that mean that accuracy and accountability don’t matter for click-bait pieces about China that “feel” true? Unfortunately for readers, that seems to be the case.

^ how i feel about so many israel-related articles

I assumed that the Beijing sunrise-simulator thing was a hoax when I saw it circulating on Facebook. Nice to have it confirmed though. I didn't know it had been picked up by reputable news organizations though (not sure whether Daily Mail qualifies). That's embarrassing, but it does look like CBS News at least has thoroughly re-edited the story to emphasize the combination of sunrise video and smog was just a coincidence.

I haven't watched the Japanese general's lecture, but the full 2005 Lee Kuan Yew interview is interesting:

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/01/keep-your-head-down-and-smile.html

The part excerpted is pretty OTM

http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/25/22449116-china-jails-prominent-rights-activist-for-four-years

Four years. Fucking hell

this is fantastic:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/01/28/265468566/remaking-all-that-jazz-from-shanghais-lost-era

i was just deported from china.

what happened??

Holy shit dude

No!

it wasn't even a deportation, as far as i can tell.

the first time i went to china was 2006 or late 2005, so i've got almost a decade's experience going in and out, living in the country.

the nature of the china visa system has made my legal status in china questionable at time, but no more questionable than a large proportion of foreigners in china, especially non-corporate longterm residents. like lots of other people, i treated the f class business visa as a sort of coverall visa for when i didn't have secure employment from a work unit licensed to hire foreigners. i always felt like... when the chinese government sees my sketchy invitation letter from some dude in guangzhou that runs a textile factory inviting me to do an internship... they kinda know the deal, right? the chinese government agrees to sort of look the other way and i agree to not get involved with the public security bureau during my stay and everyone is happy.

this time, i got my z class visa, the foreign expert certificate, a contract from a work unit licensed to hire foreigners (because i was working for a state-owned corporation, i was basically working for the chinese communist party), residency permit, all my papers in order!

anyways. so, i was working in taiyuan, mostly, and i had an apartment there. but i was also traveling to datong and staying in an apartment there, which was owned by the company. i got a 10 a.m. visit from the psb, got invited down to the station, got interrogated and... i told them openly that i was staying in datong and hadn't registered with the local police department. they bought me kfc and drove me to jail and said they'd contact my company to get it all sorted out.

i waited and waited and chilled in a cell and ate cabbage and watched cctv-1 and stayed locked down 23.5 hours out of the day and shit in a bucket. most of the guys in the neighboring cells were petitioners picked up in beijing and sent back to datong to suffer the consequences. it was a very, very strange experience. i was treated extremely well and got pictures with all the guards and got a weekly pack of cigarettes. but it was boring and cold as fuck and the only thing that saved me was the fact that cctv-1 shows 《咱们结婚吧》 every afternoon (thoughts of 未未, the barren temptress, kept me warm on cold dusty shanxi nights).

my boss came and told me, hey, don't worry, give it a week and you'll be out. he came back again and said wait another three days. another day. then on sunday, the psb came back and basically said, use our computer, book a flight out of the country OR ELSE you will be forcibly deported at our expense and banned from entering the country for five years.

i booked a ticket out of beijing. tuesday morning, two psb guys came for me, said they'd accompany me to beijing. they flew me from datong to beijing, took me out for dinner at the REAL KUNGFU restaurant at the beijing airport, posed for pictures with me, and stood guard until i went through security.

so... i'm in canada.

i haven't managed to get a hold of anyone at work in taiyuan but they probably still think my situation is going to be fixed before spring festival. i feel like the psb was playing them all along too because they were paying for the prison stay (25 rmb a day) and maybe even my datong-beijing flight.

also, i got nabbed on the day before payday, and had to pay for a ticket home during primetime spring festival time, so i ended up losing about 6000 usd on a fake deportation, not including yet the cost of the trip back + visa application.

wow @ all of that

Guess your boss didn't have that 关系. Damn dude. i Need to register with the 派出所 ASAP

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/28/get_out_of_jail_cheap_chinese_prison_corruption

:(((( dylannn

i feel like... it was sort of very much in keeping with the way that local governments/police forces work... like, there was a legal process that should have been followed but they mostly used the law as a threat ("it's easier this way, you might end up being banned for five years, being blacklisted" / "if there's a trial, your company will be in really big trouble but if you just leave and come back in a legal fashion you can continue work"), a method of coercing me into doing what they wanted me to do. i ended up volunteering to take part in an extrajudicial deportation, if that doesn't sound too over the top.

minor corruption at the detention center was rampant. you could tell who had cash/connections based on when/how much they were smoking, what they got to eat, how often they got visits from family, etc. most of the other people i came in contact with were either petitioners or petty criminals that weren't facing a real trial but just being held for a few days.

but yeah, everyone was extremely nice, the warden, the police at the prison, the guards (mostly early 20s goofy boys with large hairstyles and tight jeans), the other prisoners....

dylannn i hope stuff is okay where you're at! xx

it's all good! the whole process wasn't horrible, alhamdulillah-- more like, just, vaguely insulting and surreal. i have the privilege of holding a foreign passport, which the majority of people caught up in the same system don't have.

i feel like... it was sort of very much in keeping with the way that local governments/police forces work... like, there was a legal process that should have been followed but they mostly used the law as a threat ("it's easier this way, you might end up being banned for five years, being blacklisted" / "if there's a trial, your company will be in really big trouble but if you just leave and come back in a legal fashion you can continue work"), a method of coercing me into doing what they wanted me to do. i ended up volunteering to take part in an extrajudicial deportation, if that doesn't sound too over the top.

― dylannn, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 12:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I spent the last week learning about this kind of stuff

To me, it sounds like you got caught up in a internecine squabble between your company & some other organization and unfortunately you were the pawn that got sacrificed

IDK though I also know that China has issued new visa regs in the past year so maybe it's just part of a general broader crackdown

Not gonna fuck around with the PSB anymore though

Damn I remember Jianlibao

Delicious drink

Used to get it in Chinatown

The big draw was that it had honey mixed in

Damn shame you can't get it anymore

Yikes, dylannn.

Whoa- that's crazy! How long were you in the jail altogether?

what a weird story man

19 days from arrest to flying out of beijing.

Sheesh. I guess if you stay in hotels when you travel, they're supposed to take care of that registering with the local police stuff for you. Still scary though.

the hotel takes care of that and they send the photocopy of your passport and the necessary forms straight to the psb. otherwise, if it's not in a hotel, you've got 24 hours to register.

Yikes!

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1416497/xu-zhiyongs-trial-makes-mockery-beijings-pledge-enforce-rule

Jerry predictably (and righteously) rips into the CCP over the Xu Zhiyong case

i had the opportunity to watch a lot of tv the last month and i love 中国好歌曲/sing my song. i will embed youtube videos of performances now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd5Y19pF6EA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6POjXt4Hm0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yqc8QwtcBA

all three of these videos involve the judges crying
ranging from manful weeping to hysterical sobbing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSgVluV93a0

《咱们结婚吧》 first episode with engl subtitles. not the freshest show right now but i adore it.

My mom made me watch them and the first guy was the only guy I liked. Chinese dashboard confessional

The judge from Singapore has such a big Singapore accent, also endearing how she slips in and out of English

Also thought it was bullshit that they waited til the last possible second to pull the lever for my man. I woulda slammed as soon as I heard him hit the high note on the chorus

Also kind of interesting that he wrote the song that the last yi dude on the show used and sang!

Also he's hella short

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmDB2X-bsQ

tanya meets a fellow singaporean

Is this the thread where we wish people a Gong show fat hoe?

the 莫西子诗 i like above all else. i saw it on cctv 3 the first time and caught the cctv 1 rebroadcast the next day so i could record it on my phone. when he hits the first 这颗心就稀巴烂, his girl singing along to 你呀你 终于出现了 and then can't hold it together or decide if she's crying or laughing, the fucking story about her letter. kills me.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/why-the-u-s-embassy-releases-pollution-data-in-beijing-but-not-in-delhi/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

and i didn't realize Delhi’s air is roughly twice as bad as Beijing’s when measures of one of the most toxic pollutants are compared.

Yeah somehow I ended up in Beijing during the week when it's experiencing unusually low air pollution

Like the PM 2.5 was below 25 today, I think

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/SH/29738B1D-20EC-4F5B-942A-32D40380A18F_zps2pvjawsn.jpg

Took this on New Year's Day, then left the country for 5 days

Came back and it was still like this

I don't know you anymore Beijing

*hears PLA shouting during drills through my window*

Ahhh, I miss Beijing

I'll have to wait til I get back to Shanghai to find out but I definitely feel like my VPNs aren't as crack as they are in Shanghai

Feel like the Party has extra-secret-battle-hardened internet filtering out here in the capital

"Chinese dashboard confessional"

Dashboard Confessional wishes. This guy is the real deal. Damn.

Well it wasn't just in reference to his singing voice, also to the lyrics (which the judges comment on)

The title (and chorus of the song) translates to (roughly and directly) "If I die, I must die by your hand"

I actually think that's the reason the judges held back - it's a bit too morbid and melodramatic

But as the starter of the only Chris Carrabba thread on ILX I obviously love it

if you didn't light it
it can't be called a flame

if your hands didn't touch it
it can't be called a gem

you finally appeared
we only exchanged a glance
it tore my heart apart
the whole world fell to pieces

if i can't die by your hands
living is meaningless

you finally appeared
we only exchanged a glance
it tore my heart apart
the whole world fell to pieces

when i die in this life
i want to die by your hand
i want to die by your hand
i want to die by your hand

Excellent translation

Man the other family in our tour group brought along a piece of horse sausage on our trip and I had some

Feels a bit inauspicious to start off the Year of the Horse with that but otoh I've had hundreds of burgers and wings and stuff during the years of the Ox & Rooster etc.

It tasted good tho

can't wait til 2018 and 2020

Was reassured that eating a horse in the Year of the Horse has no inauspicious effects

In related news, I'm thinking about getting a puppy

http://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/1419428/china-losing-status-worlds-factory

Feel like this has been a popular idea in the past couple of years but wondering what does the data say? Not a WSJ analyst so don't know what the relevant numbers are but do the gross manufacturing output numbers point to a decline here, is what I'm wondering

I guess I find myself also thinking about the descriptions of the Pearl River Delta region seen when Obama questioned whether or not Apple could move all its factories to America

Like the close confluence of these factories where if a new part were needed it could be developed and prototyped and sent into production and then to the factory that needed it, all in a dazzlingly short timespan that wasn't possible in America

I don't know if China's advantage is simply just its 'cheap labor'

xpost
in canton the arguments that i always heard and which convinced me were -- even with costs from rising wages and cost of land, etc. china maintains an edge by: cost of/access to raw materials (africa or southeast asia might be cheap but you might end up shipping your raw materials or semi-finished materials from china), expertise + efficiency (the speed at which you can go from an empty lot to putting finished product in containers is faster than anywhere else, and even if you're paying a chinese factory worker more, they do it better and faster than anywhere else), infrastructure, shipping + you have a huge consumer market RIGHT THERE, even before you put it on a boat + the longterm financial plan in china doesn't depend on or support the gameplan of making the cheapest shit for the most people possible, so southeast asia and africa (with chinese investment even) taking over some of the market while china transitions up the foodchain is fine, but for now making cheap shit in china is still more profitable and easy than making it other places.

Wow ask and ye shall receive

Full year 2013 China GDP was released on January 29. The total was just over $9 trillion USD for the first time, at CNY 56.9 trillion (2013 average CNY/USD rate: 6.313). That’s up 7.67% over 2012 (and is the level the United States was at in 1992, in 2009 dollars; versus just about $16 trillion today). Here is a significant fact: as of the end of 2013, China’s services sector is officially the largest segment of its economy for the first time in the modern era, at 46%, versus 44% for industry and manufacturing and 10% for primary activity such as farming. That updraft in the share of services started in about 2006, and should keep going for, oh, I’d say about another 20 years before flattening out. That’s a pretty important change in the structure of growth, and one that Xi Jinping’s Plenum reforms both recognize and react to, on the one hand, and aim to bolster and sustain on the other. Remember: investment in services sector capital stock doesn’t just mean ice rinks, movie theaters, hospitals and schools, but also the injection of value-adding services activity into manufacturing giants like China Aluminum, which to date have been all about smelting and little about sales and marketing, R&D, environmental engineering, new applications development and other white collar multipliers of profit.

That's pretty heartening

My impression is that export-manufacturing is a pretty shitty anyway for China - lots of foreign money pours in initially, sure, but once factories are established etc. very little of the capital that then pours in remains in the country. The manufacturer's margin is very thin and the lion's share of the profit is retained by the multinational conglomerate that contracted for the manufacture, is my understanding

Also I spoke too soon about the pollution, it's back to ~200 PM2.5 and it was pretty hazy today

There was blood in my phlegm today too but that was totally unrelated and due to this badass cold I caught in Korea

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/wheres-the-rage/

Haven't read any of Mo Yan's work myself but agree with the sentiment here:

Kamila Shamsie: The decision to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan was heavily criticized by many writers, not because of his work’s literary merit, but on the grounds that he had refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow laureate. The criticism grew even stronger when Mo Yan defended censorship, comparing it to airport security. You’ve always been politically outspoken, and have expressed your frustration with writers who remain quiet over political issues. You might have been expected to join the chorus of disapproval. Instead you turned around and criticized those who were criticizing Mo Yan. Is there a contradiction here in your own position?

Pankaj Mishra: I should say right away that at no point did I defend Mo Yan’s political positions, and that in fact made clear my own strong disagreement with them. What I objected to was the attempt to delegitimize his literary achievement through some selective reference to his political choices, like his refusal to sign a petition. If we were to take that narrow measure to many of the canonical figures of Western literature—from Dickens with his bloodthirsty writings during the Indian Mutiny, to Nabokov, who adored the war in Vietnam—those writers would have to be dismissed as worthless.

The other point that got lost in the rush to condemn Mo Yan was that we need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let’s not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn’t actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech. And let’s not forget also, alas, that freedom of speech doesn’t guarantee great literature.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers—Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union—who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn’t always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

^ Having finished the whole interview, is also one of the most OTM pieces I have read in months

Yeah, Western liberals criticizing Chinese writers/artists for not being more outspoken against their government is never a good look, IMO. Mishra is great as usual at puncturing complacency, though I think he maybe underestimates how many Western writers did/do speak out against, for example, the Iraq War, drones, etc. I can think of a few and I'm not particularly tuned in to the political pronouncements of literary figures.

I read him more as wondering why Western artists hadn't incorporated the war into their work

Like I can only think of Safran-Foers 9/11 novel but I don't really follow that circuit, all I know is that one of the popular new novels of the past few years was called 'All the Sad Young Literary Men'

That's a good question. I think it's partly the fact that today's "all-volunteer" army doesn't seem to attract people with the sort of background who tend to end up in MFA programs. And writers these days are taught to write what they know.

mishra relentlessly otm.

there's something to be said about how state role in arts has weighed on writers like mo yan and changed the language that he writes in but there weren't many among the critics that had any willingness or background to dig into that element. and i don't think a lot of critics had the experience in reading chinese literature or knowledge of how the chinese literary community operates to go beyond "mo yan, party stooge, copied a poem by mao zedong."

part of the problem is that nobody understands or really even reads world literature esp if it's not written in english. three percent of published writing in america in translation, a very small amount of it from writers in asia, africa, etc.

if you don't read chinese, i feel comfortable saying that most of the important works written in chinese over the last 60 years are still untranslated or hard to find. work translated into english is overrepresented by "dissident writers," "banned in china" books, so more people are reading wild swans and shanghai girls rather than jia pingwa, su tong, sheng keyi among the big names and there's next to nothing from young writers or new writers or writers from the greater sinophone world.

And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%. so, you know.

http://www.guoxiaolu.com/WR_Beyond_Dissidence.htm

My impression is that export-manufacturing is a pretty shitty anyway for China - lots of foreign money pours in initially, sure, but once factories are established etc. very little of the capital that then pours in remains in the country. The manufacturer's margin is very thin and the lion's share of the profit is retained by the multinational conglomerate that contracted for the manufacture, is my understanding

― 龜, Wednesday, 5 February 2014 12:44 (9 hours ago) Permalink

sup capitalism

Wow the Monkey King was a bag of warm horse piss flung at a brick wall

what‘s this？

Top grossing film last week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_King_(film)

Haven't made my way through the Guo Xiaolu stuff upthread yet but will soon

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/07/chinas-rubble-strewn-path-to-land-reform/

^ Good piece - if you've seen A Touch of Sin, the first story is basically this

If you have a lot of time to kill and patience and tolerance for lawspeak, then I'd also recommend this: http://faculty.washington.edu/swhiting/pols502/Pils.pdf

Also the first I"ve read of an update on the Wukan situation:

The need for real reform of rural land law, not just promises from the central government, is illustrated by the highly publicized case of Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong Province that had once fueled hope for change but which now languishes as an example of the intractable difficulties faced by China’s farmers in defending their rights.

Wukan attracted nationwide attention in 2011 after angry village residents physically ejected the village committee, which had entered into contracts with developers. In 2012, a novel solution allowed the villagers to elect a new village committee composed of leaders of the protest. This was highly unusual. But a year later, there was no progress in efforts to unwind the transactions and retrieve the land. Moreover, although some Chinese observers had referred to the Wukan “model” as a concept for political change at the grassroots, it eventually faded from national discourse.

The Wukan villagers had been supported by Wang Yang, then chairman of the Standing Committee of Guangdong Province. Wang, however, has since been replaced by a successor who favors replacing the village committee with party members. It is no surprise that political activism in Wukan continues to decline. A retired cadre who was a leader of the 2011 protests left the committee in October 2013 and has since given up politics. A new election is slated to be held in coming months, and the local township government will neither favor keeping the current committee members nor try to solve the continuing land disputes. It is clear that the Wukan experiment has faltered and will not serve as a model for other communities.

My understanding is that one reason why local governments do such blatant grabs for land is that reforms to the tax code in the early-00s removed a large source of tax revenue from local governments and diverted them towards the Party proper in Beijing - hence the resort to eminent domain, which is of course unsustainable since there's a finite amount of suitable land to sell to developers

Not really an economist at all but my understanding is that cities & municipalities in Canada / America are allowed to sell bonds related to the infrastructure project that they want to undertake, which local governments in China are not allowed to do

Also Guo Xiaolu http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/xiaolu-guo-why-do-we-still-pretend-we-are-free/

Xiaolu Guo: Self-censorship happens not only in China, or Iran or ex-Soviet places. It can happen anywhere. If an artist penetrates a certain taboo or a certain power through their work, he or she will face this problem. I’m always saying that commercial censorship is our foremost censorship globally today. Why do we still pretend we are free?

Guernica: What are your own experiences with commercial censorship?

Xiaolu Guo: There’s an abortion section in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary. In the beginning my U.S. editor wanted to take it out. She said the Bush government had just issued some policies and that middle-class readers wouldn’t like it, which would reduce the market. I was very angry. I couldn’t believe it. I had lived most of my life in China, and I didn’t know that political and commercial censorship for fiction existed in the United States. Perhaps I was really naïve but you could imagine that in China we’re told the West is a free world. I had a big argument with my editor, and eventually that section was saved. It’s still included in the U.S. edition.

When we submitted I Am China to the U.S. publishers, many houses turned it down, saying it would be very difficult to market. I got more than ten rejections. It’s a novel with multiple narrative layers and sort of an intellectual spirit. The rejections were very much market-oriented, which isn’t a new thing of course, and I totally understood their fears and concern. Anyway, Nan/Doubleday in New York liked my work and they’re publishing it, for which I feel grateful.

Guernica: In your essay on Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize, you express some frustration that Western media pay more attention to “dissident” Chinese artists than “state artists.” Can you expand on that? Why do you think the West is more interested in dissidents?

Xiaolu Guo: For obvious reasons. But then again, I don’t think it’s the West’s fault. There is very little in-depth understanding in culture and arts between the West and China. Just think of the ending in E.M. Forster’s novel Passage to India, how he beautifully described the profound emotional conflict between the Indian man and the English man. But time moves on. We are on a better platform now I think, with lots of foreign culture introduced in the last few years. I do think there will be a better understanding between the two sides—East and West. And eventually, the so-called two sides will disappear, and there will only be the conflict between those with power and those without it.

Guernica: What are the obvious reasons that Western media pay more attention to dissident artists than state artists?

Xiaolu Guo: You have to ask this question to the sensationalist media and to your industry—not me. You’ll publish a politically famous Chinese artist like Ai Weiwei, but not someone like Liu Xiaodong or Yu Hong, although in my view they’re much greater artists than the ones you have heard of. This is understandable. How can you know anything about them if they aren’t coming to the surface of the Western media? You can’t even pronounce their names, or my name for that matter. I have no problem with this personally. It’s a social phenomenon. Before Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Prize for Peace, had you ever heard of this person—this great poet? No. Isn’t that so clear?

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/amid-raft-of-chinese-financial-numbers-one-to-watch-carefully/

^ Pretty technical but slots in to the discussion above about China's GDP mix

My understanding is that one reason why local governments do such blatant grabs for land is that reforms to the tax code in the early-00s removed a large source of tax revenue from local governments and diverted them towards the Party proper in Beijing - hence the resort to eminent domain, which is of course unsustainable since there's a finite amount of suitable land to sell to developers

lots of talk about big reform goals in china discusses the necessity of first changing how taxes are collected and distributed.

urbanization: megacities like guangzhou-shenzhen-dongguan and shanghai are attractive to migrants because they can afford to provide public services + there's more affordable housing relative to local incomes/space to go around. but moving people from rural areas to second and third tier cities is hard because local governments can't afford to provide basic services and are in debt and making money off land grabs, which displace people and drive up real estate prices and relocate people far from urban centers, and borrowing.

hukou reform: second and third tier cities will always oppose hukou reform because they can't afford to provide even basic services to new arrivals from the countryside. local governments bear the burden of the new urbanized, while collecting a meager share of tax revenue.

local government debt: local governments are forced to borrow or undertake land grab and real estate schemes that result in instability because they can't eat off their share of taxes.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/15/beijing-moves-to-break-down-the-rural-urban-divide/

that sums it up pretty well.

Yeah I agree with all of that - feels like one of the biggest if not the biggest priority facing the Party right now

It also said that the government would work to “straighten out” the division of incomes between the local and central governments. Currently about 80% of all tax revenue goes directly to Beijing – despite the central government being responsible for about only 20% of expenditures – which it then redistributes back to local administrative bodies. That means local governments have very little discretion over funding. The blue print could be signaling that local governments will likely get a larger share of the tax pie, without saying so explicitly.

This is sort of incredible

https://www.chinafile.com/will-xi-jinping-stop-music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy4fmm7cVGs

Always have wondered who will be the first producer to sample a 钹 and make it into a hot beat

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10628003/Police-declare-war-on-Chinas-Sin-City.html

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1426282/corrupt-guangdong-police-were-secretly-tipped-about-latest-high-profile

attacking biggest symbol of the sex trade in china, the dongguan ktvs and salons and brothels is good pr for everyone involved but meaningless because 1) locally ; serves a large number of visitors from hk and tw rather than native whoremongers, the key players have been tipped off or are out of the area for the holiday, the sex industry is so deeprooted and works under police and govt supervision and is too profitable to move out (at best can be moved to outlying districts like changping or shijie) 2) nationally ; the sex trade is the product of police and govt corruption and a weak legal system that allows illegal business to operate and women to be trafficked and abused, a mixture of conservatism and queasiness about sex (see also discussion about child abuse in china and the uphill battle trying to even tell people it happens) and a culture that has a problem with the idea of equal rights and protection for women and nobody talking about prostitution (they did make handjobs legal a few months ago, right? but Outrage as underage prostitution law protects child rapists, 'Raping prostitutes less harmful,' says law professor, The rape trial of the son of prominent entertainers exposes a social divide) and no highprofile feminist voices, lack of legal protection and social safety net for people that travel to cities to work without a hukou.

Yeah; can't help but think that the 60/40 (is it really that bad?) gender split in this generation is also a not-insignificant factor to toss into the mix

right i was coming at it more from the viewpoint of you gotta 1 enforce laws to protect women, 2 have serious talks about protecting women and people at risk, then sex, prostitution, human trafficking and other topics that are swept under the rug and lead to fucked up situations 3 just decriminalize it and let's worry more about the consequences, realities of the massive sex industry in the country rather than how officials/police are paying for it/getting paid off it.

http://english.caixin.com/2014-02-11/100637463.html li yinhe on the situation

Dong Youqing, an analyst at Minsheng Securities said the episode could hurt Dongguan's economy. The city's sex industry generates about 50 billion yuan in annual revenue, or about 10 percent of local GDP. The nation's sex industry is estimated at 1 trillion yuan.

One thing that's really struck me about Shanghai is how there's literally a massage parlor on every single block

Not on my block :(

OK I have not read any of this thread, yet (but am bookmarking for future catch-up).

In other news, I have a week off of school coming up in a few weeks and want to pick a place to fly on the el cheapo (think Spring Air) from Shanghai. Would very much value suggestions. Open to anything.

My default is Hong Kong (so, er, not exactly China); spouse has been and would be happy to go back, but some place new to both of us that would help balance our Shanghai + Beijing (plus, er, Taiwan) experience of China would be great. I have no idea, really.

Also I would totally move here if I could have a Mandarin SIM card installed in my brain. Oh hell, it is great even not speaking the language.

Also thanking u dayo for VPN rec; working a treat so far.

Sweet how was your trip in

Did you take the Maglev

Which VPN are you using

The danger of Hong Kong is you'll go there and realize how superior it is to Shanghai

But I would definitely recommend it

Trip in was good except for, er, Manila. Manila actually set up Shanghai for being Most Awesome City Ever, even after the next-level of urban civilization that was Tokyo. I mean I am sure Manila has its charms, but they were not much in evidence in my 24-hour experience. Shanghai is like 10000000X more civilized than Manila.

We took dylannnnnnn's and your suggestion--after much tiresome Manila shit--to just get a taxi (that has a working meter and a non con-artist driver!) to get into town. In the cab, partially from being a bit worn out, I was HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT MEGAMONDOPOLIS OMG OMG HUGE MISTAKE??? OMG THOSE SECTION 8-STYLE APARTMENT MEGAPLEXES OMG WTF.

I mean, it seemed a lot more OMG HUGE HUGE HUGE URBAN CRAZY than Tokyo, and certainly Taipei, and much more so than my urban comfort zone of Washington, DC.

But anyhow, once we got off of the freeway/skyway/elevated stuff it became a lot more human-scaled, obv. Our joint is a block or two south of the South Shananxi Rd station in the French Concession. The neighborhood is way swanky and pretty easy to get settled in to, which eased my WHAT THE FUCK reaction to the cab ride in from the airport. Low-rise buildings, lots of trees, great park--what is not to love? The air quality seems a lot better than Manila, at least!

Today we took care of some banking and visa shit for our upcoming North Korea adventure, checked out the crickets at the Bird and Flower (but mostly Bird and Cricket) market, and stocked up on cheese at the CityMarket lolAmericans :)

Using sen vpn. No real probs except some stuff is sloooooow to load, but no idea where the bottleneck is, could just be our service.

Try the HK server for SenVPN

Ah OK. But will that give me my damn netflix, is what

Gimme a day or two to get settled and make some headway on the approx 40000 pages of reading plus paper due on Monday and let us rendezvous and eat our heads off OK?

I feel like I should clarify that my "WTF" reaction to the drive from the airport to downtown Shanghai was not "OH THE HORROR" but just, like, whoa, when they talk about China building shit up, this is beyond what I had imagined. It is beyond impressive. Also: intimidating.

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/in-restive-remote-china-uighurs-piety-and-peace/

did i advise taking a taxi into the city? it's probably easier. if i'm coming into the city by train, i usually take a taxi because i've just gotten off a long uncomfortable train ride. if i'm flying in, i take the bus. leaves every 15 minutes. air conditioning. last time i landed in shanghai it was 40+.

how about xiamen and greater fujian for a week trip?

or if not a full hk trip, guangzhou + shenzhen + a quick visit to hk.

I think it's gonna be HK, which seems the most do-able for four nights (I can't swing the whole week). Excited! Will also investigate some day or overnight trips from Shanghai. Are the canal towns (Suzhou or something smaller like Tongli) worth a trip, do you think?

hk is probably my favorite city in the world but dyao otm will make you rethink a city like shanghai.

Yeah I mean

In the cab, partially from being a bit worn out, I was HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT MEGAMONDOPOLIS OMG OMG HUGE MISTAKE??? OMG THOSE SECTION 8-STYLE APARTMENT MEGAPLEXES OMG WTF.

I mean, it seemed a lot more OMG HUGE HUGE HUGE URBAN CRAZY than Tokyo, and certainly Taipei, and much more so than my urban comfort zone of Washington, DC.

I've seen these in Shanghai and they're cool but in HK you have

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

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

suzhou is more than just a canal town. home to 5 million people, the source of jiangnan culture and language, was one of the centers of chinese culture, art, society for centuries, still beautiful despite tourist siteificiation of some key areas.

with a fast train, lots of places are possible daytrips. nanjing is like an hour away on the train now. changzhou.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z76YcdyxwRU

I just watched this badass for 12 minutes

Maybe take a tranq, turn the lights off but light a candle & hit play

Additionally, his film credits include Big Trouble in Little China, The Joy Luck Club, The Nutty Professor, Wedding Crashers and The Prestige. He was featured in the short film by Maya Deren, Meditation on Violence, in 1948.

suzhou is more than just a canal town. home to 5 million people, the source of jiangnan culture and language, was one of the centers of chinese culture, art, society for centuries, still beautiful despite tourist siteificiation of some key areas.

Laughing at myself right now because duh suzhou is like 20x bigger than DC (for better or for worse, my city touchstone) and I refer to it as a "canal town."

Another great day in Shanghai even with rain. I have a serious question about brown liquid sold out of jugs at a local mom&pop grocer, saw someone buying some today and am all WHAT IS THAT I MUST KNOW. There are like a dozen different clay/ceramic jugs. Guess I need to take a picture.

Might be soy sauce? That'd be a super old school way of doing things

Back in the days of/before the Cultural Revolution you'd bring your soy sauce jar to the grocer and they'd refill it out of a giant vat and it'd cost like 20 cents or something

Probably afterwards too, I dunno when the dream of a Lee Kum Kee bottle of soy sauce in every pantry was fulfilled

In my brane I narrowed it down to soy sauce or some kind of hooch, was leaning toward hooch. I'll go tomorrow and investigate further. I mean if I just uncap and take a whiff it should be pretty obvious, right?

If it is soy sauce, then I'm in trouble because I'm going to want to know what each one tastes like.

Unrelated except that the salon is near the mysterious jug of brown stuff shop: shampoo + blowout for under $7 USD. Not sure I can go back to the U.S., where I have to do my own hair why because blowout is $40 USD.

Another srs question re: brown stuff. Is Lee Kum Kee considered Actual Chinese Food? Because it is a lot easier for me to negotiate those bottles than those that are exclusively in Chinese.

Yeah most hair stuff should be cheaper here

Knew someone who chemically permed her wavy hair to make it straight & it was like 2-3 times cheaper in HK to do it than in the States

Lee Kum Kee is fine though I try to stay away from it because if you look at the ingredients they've gone down the Big Industrial Agro route and put in preservatives & food coloring &c.

It's also probably has a higher chance of being safe

The Taiwanese brands I usually get in the States (very simple ingredient lists: for example, Water, Soybeans, Salt for soy sauce) I can't find here :(

I have concluded that Taiwanese rice is the Best Rice Ever (sorry Japan) and bought some at the CitySuper here at exorbitant cost.

Has the food safety issue been discussed in this thread? I have not read it all, yet. I get that there has been tainted formula, but what, exactly, are the other food safety concerns? Like, have there been problems with non-processed foods? Need I fear the carrots from my local veg vendor?

just off the top of my head...
cadmium in rice
melamine in milk/egg products
vegetables coated in pesticide residue
DUMPLINGS! stuffed with newspaper
gutter oil

Rotting mantou recycled into fresh mantou mix

i follow common sense rules about eating out, buying at markets, etc., and nothing approaching the misguided and ineffective paranoia of some chinese and foreign friends. i don't really think about food safety issues in china anymore than i do anywhere else beyond not eating anything obviously unwise, like anywhere in the world. whether that's a wise approach or not i dunno.

just buy your rice at a normal supermarket or spar or carrefour or tesco or something, man.

Yeah... like I'm still gonna be downing jars of Jif even after

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/02/21/apnewsbreak-feds-indict-4-over-200-salmonella-outbreak-linked-to-georgia-peanut/

You're only gonna be here for a few months or less, I doubt anything you eat in this span will kill you (with the exception of Chongqing hot pot)

Oh I'm not particularly worried on the personal front. I have pretty much zero paranoia about eating basically everything, all the time, in great quantity. The only times I've ever had a problem was the time I gave myself food poisoning with a mushroom veloute I made in my own damn kitchen, and two viral GI infections (one picked up in Mexico, one picked up at home in DC).

I'm mostly curious about food safety as a national/international issue for China. I've not read up about it, just kind of wondering what the temperature is these days.

Are any of the english-language newspapers in China worth reading? I got thoroughly attached to the Taipei Times, but I'm guessing the journalism is gonna be pretty different here on the mainland.

Are any of the english-language newspapers in China worth reading?

no.

I buy rice grown outside of china for personal consumption

But I eat pretty frequently at a place on the corner that taxi drivers frequent and a dish + rice is 12 rmb

And I drink Mengniu yogurt (company behind milk scandal) because it's the only decent yogurt out here in sh, the local company (Guangming) is shit except for their higher priced lines

That's probably cadmium rice and melamine yogurt

Don't care

Cardboard DUMPLINGS! iirc turned out to be a hoax. But a boy did have an allergic reaction to fried chicken in Beijing and died

food safety is still a major issue in china but once certain issues are dealt with by the central govt they kind of pass into sensitive topic territory like melamine and gutter oil, which is CASE CLOSED. but still lots of hot issues like bird flu 2014 and lots of groundlevel paranoia esp around milk and milk powder + bird flu + i think a distinctly chinese approach to food and eating which can strike one as slightly superstitious (you cannot combine papayas and crabs you cannot combine beef and beansprouts etc) and a less distinctly chinese newly affluent approach to paranoid unfun eating which involves posting pictures of organically farmed cabbage on wechat moments. anecodtally ill say i've been dragged to quite a few meals aat resstaurants in malls in the name of avoiding gutter oil and questionable meat.

I think being able to be concerned about food safety might be a hallmark of having 'made it' to the middle class; having enough disposable income to consider eating out at restaurants with clean interiors, individual laminated menus (not a plaqueboard hanging from the wall); a stash of 3M disposable masks in the glovebox of your BMW

Some things I think are more in your control than others

Like it's reasonable to think that a higher end restaurant won't use gutter oil or bad meat

But rice? That happens at the time when the rice is planted, not at the restaurant. Unless the restaurant guarantees the only use imported rice...

I also think that food safety is an area where the State media feels a little more OK naming and shaming offenders... but when it reaches the level of a Mengniu melamine scandal, they will put the clamp down

I just ate a century egg I bought from the egg seller on the street... I probably have lead poisoning now

Been studying the Analects again

Got up too late, and felt restless all day long. Read the Book of Changes, but could not concentrate. Then I decided to practice quiet sitting. But after a little while, I fell asleep. How could I have become so lazy? Some friends came in the afternoon to show me some of their literary work. I praised them very highly, but deep in my heart I didn’t think they were well written at all. I have done this many times lately. I must be sick. How can people value my words anymore if I praise them every day? I have not only deceived my friends but have also deceived myself. I must get rid of this bad habit. At night, read the book of Changes. Wrote two poems before going to bed.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/17/as-edgy-chinese-films-sweep-berlin-festival-pride-and-caution-at-home/

Have had half a mind to start an all-inclusive sinospheric film thread

http://www.mensjournal.com/article/print-view/the-ivory-highway-20140213

The big jars full of brown stuff from upthread are 黄酒 jars, I discovered today

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTcxMDg5MzAw.html

I'd download this on Napster

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/whats-it-like-to-be-disabled-in-china/

james palmer who's written about
mistresses
chinese medicine
and post-80s kid

Is reading that article going to make me really angry

it's...
yeah probably

i mean if you've lived in china for a while none of it is surprising

or maybe it is because the disabled are nearly invisible in daily chinese urban life usually except for beggars

http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica/the-disabled-in-china

jeremy goldkorn and kaiser talk to james palmer
and john giszczack "co-founder of Abled Lives, a med-tech company focused on improving the quality of life for disabled people in China."

whoa OK gonna read this but man I was just recommending Taipei to my brother, who has paraplegia/is wheelchair-dependent. I was struck by how wheelchair-friendly Taipei was and wanted to think that was a reflection of Chinese influence but gah. HK is my SIL (wife of said brother's) favorite city (she travels there for work frequently); I'm headed there next week and was hoping that I could report back to him that it would be easy like Taipei. Maybe not. Gah.

Was just reading a bunch about the ADA and Bob Dole's (!) thwarted efforts--foiled by his own f'n party--to promote ADA-type legislation internationally.

Gah.

HK is pretty disabled-friendly from what I recall

Reading now; thx for posting this, dylannnn. I had developed some thoughts around Taiwan re: support for the aged and/or disabled, but that is maybe not for a thread entitled Chinese Dream.

xpost It would be great to see if HK was pretty wheelchair-friendly; my brother is a stubborn SOB who will basically make shit work if he decides he wants to do it, but that is not a luxury for lots of folks including the ELDERLY which, if we are so lucky, we will all be at some point! Taiwan (along with Finland, thank u Tuomas) is an international model for elder care--I kind of figure it would be similar in mainland China, but maybe not. Gotta learn more about this stuff (I am likely to pursue geriatric/end of life social work).

In a related vein: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/rare-images-hope-to-spur-action/

http://writecantonese8.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/cantonese-proverbs-in-one-picture/

Hella dope

http://i.imgur.com/E74rIiA.jpg

i like it

http://chinachange.org/2014/02/23/fury-and-angst-the-recent-confrontation-between-state-media-and-social-media-in-china

Also from my experience in HK

• I think most or all MTR stations are wheelchair accessible, as is the MTR - from what I've seen, wheelchair users notify station staff, who will call ahead to the destination station. Staff at both stations will then get out the wheelchair ramp that they use to assist the wheelchair user onto and off the train
• Big city buses run by Kowloon Bus and New World City Bus for the most part are wheelchair accessible and should have areas inside where wheelchair users can be strapped in (though there are definitely some older ones that might not be)
• I have recalled seeing in malls and stores on more than one occasion outings by groups of developmentally disabled people, accompanied by their caretakers, and nobody batted an eye
• There are dedicated schools for the deaf and blind that I can recall off the top of my head
• One memory that has really stuck with me was walking around at night in Hung Hom and passing by a teenage couple in school uniforms - and it wasn't until I was 10 feet or so past them that I realized that they had been signing to each other. Just a really sweet memory, for me, personally

xpost
reading it closer interesting mostly for bit about the reaction to the dongguan raids on weibo and not original thoughts about controlling public opinion. kind of mixes together role of nonstate traditional media and social media, and overstates importance of weibo and political liberalness and wondefulness of weibo chatter.

i want to offer an anecdotal gz-hk comparison but i dont know if it would be valuabel

Forgot that

• Every single walking signal uses loud beep sounds to indicate when the light is green or not green; and drivers in HK are really good at respecting no-turn-on-red and wait-for-pedestrians-on-green
• Have often seen blind and deaf couples just out and getting dinner or taking the train or whatever and it was nbd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEAGQDrj8dA

all guangzhou metro stations and the train itself are wheelchair accessible, gz metro is fresh and most metro stations were built in the last decade so it doesnt have the problems of older systems i guess. announcements direct to the correct car. gz more than any other city ive been in was a place where it wasnt rare to see disabled people on public transit. in other cities its pretty hard to get around.
but buses are difficult.
there are a small number of wheelchair friendly and otherwise friendlier for people with accessibility issues, those london looking taxis made by geely. there aren't enough probably but theyre around.
for a while in gz i worked at an international school which is not a perfect snapshot of the experience of most china but i guess maybe as the result of relative wealth in gz and less state family planning pressure i saw more than anywhere else in china disabled kids and support in the classroom and school for them but also heard from those kids and parents that part of the idea for an international educat was that going abroad would give them the opportunities they couldn't get in china as disabled.

That's super interesting

I haven't really been keeping track around Shanghai, just haven't been here long enough

I was just thinking yesterday that since so much of modern China is basically being built right now that I hope that building codes w/r/t wheelchair accessibility etc. are being implemented regularly, but so far I haven't really kept track

After reading dylannnnnnn's link upthread I watched "The Dying Rooms" doc today. I have a lot of issues with the film, but the combination of the one-child policy + social preference for male children (hardly unique to China/Asia) has been. . . I'm not homing in on the right word at the moment. Still processing. Though I think it was a pretty shitty doc as far as docs go.

One of the things that struck me about Taiwan vs. US vs. Japan vs. China (limited to Shanghai so far) was in Taiwan how *visible* folks with disabilities (obvious age-related and non-age-related physical disabilities and developmental disabilities) were. Wheelchairs, whether motorized or manual or assisted, seemed much more present, along with folks with developmental disabilities out and about and working in the community. I know I'm over-attuned and biased in my observations, but my experience of Taipei was as a much more universally-designed city than most of the US cities with which I am familiar.

A big think I don't know the first thing about is China's education system and how/what/if/etc provisions are made for disabled children's education. It is considered a clusterfuck in the US, but there is legislation behind it at least (not that it matters much in general practice).

right. the metro in partic in gz was really only getting underway by the turn of the current century and most stations are only a few years old and large parts of it were built in prep for the asian games, so it's friendly to people with accessibility issues. most of the city, in fact, was built or rebuilt in the last 20 years with some of the usual nods to allowing universal access to shit and getting across gz and getting shit done it isn't perfect but it's not as bad as it could be. but. yeah people with physical or developmental disabilities aren't totally missing from the urban landscape as they are in other chinese cities but their presence is rare enough that i usually note it.

education there's legislation behind it in china too but in practice it's an uphill battle or impossible to get services for disabled kids according to people ive talked to which results in a normaler or overrepresentation of disabled students at private schools (poss not true anecdotal based on experience in guangzhou).

A 2001 China People's Daily news article reported that Zhou Tingting was China's "first deaf college graduate" and that she had been accepted to Gallaudet University.

<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/25/china-toxic-air-pollution-nuclear-winter-scientists";>China's toxic air pollution resembles nuclear winter, say scientists</a>

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;

China's toxic air pollution resembles nuclear winter, say scientists

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/26/former-hong-kong-paper-editor-stabbed/?mod=chinablog

^ Some triad shit

Taiwan's the last bastion of free speech for sinosphere culture, eh?

[insert examples of prc exerting python in chandelier influence over tw media]

oh shit

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-26/crisis-gauge-rises-to-record-high-as-swaps-avoided.html

they were talking about the smog this morning on the bbc and interviewing this woman w/ a young baby who hasn't been able to go outside for a few days bc of the air conditions. they got an air purifier and kept the windows closed but she was bemoaning the fact that even when you open the windows there isn't much sunlight to come in and it sounded like she was maybe getting a little cabin fevery. :(

http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/asia/story/chinas-president-xi-jinping-mobbed-surprise-public-outing-20140225

xi jinping addresses the air quality issue with a novel plan: we should control pm 2.5:

http://news.163.com/14/0227/02/9M2BFQOK00014AED.html

if we want to tackle the problem of air pollution, deal with our smog problem and improve air quality, the first task is controlling pm 2.5. the only way that we can reduce the amount of coal we burn, strictly control the traffic situation, regulate real estate, increase environmental management, build joint cooperation, and pursue legal management of the various factors is through setting strict targets, strengthening environmental law and seriously take responsibility for the problem and making progress toward improving it. -- xi jinping

Rumor has it that the 14K is behind the Ming Pao editor attack and the police already have suspects in custody

U S A!

http://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2014/02/28/China-report-slams-US-on-human-rights-record/UPI-45681393605488/

China OTM

^^baffles the mind that most people think the u.s. is in a different league from china w/r/t "human rights" in 2014. also that people still use the term "human rights."

china and the u.s. are in vastly different leagues wrt human rights.

the u.s. might be fucked but i think statements like that downplay or trivialize? the actual problems in china.

the league china is playing in looks like this: single party dictatorship in which any but the mildest dissent and sometimes just things that look like they might be dissent are ruthlessly suppressed. the party that rules the country took power following a civil war and hasn't loosened its grip on power in 65 years, a reign that has seen the unnecessary deaths and imprisonment and displacement of millions of people.

a legal system that isn't independent of the party. even when legal reforms are passed by the party, the reality of the situation doesn't change because the judiciary is not independent of the party and tends to serve the interests of the party.

free speech severely restricted. newspapers are censored, the internet is censored, tv is censored, radio is censored.

freedom of movement restricted. you can go live anywhere in china but don't expect basic services.

religious freedom restricted: it's all good unless you run a house church or you're tibetan that wants to hang up a picture of the dalai lama or you don't like going through a metal detector under the supervision of public security bureau officers on your way into friday prayers.

no such thing as freedom of assembly or freedom of association.

active and violent campaigns against ethnic minorities.

i wouldn't want to spend a couple decades in solitary at pelican bay and the u.s. has the most people incarcerated in the world but china competes with that number and also throws in re-education through labor camps, torture, plenty of extralegal detention, including a network of facilities for political opponents and activists and regular folks protesting for payment of their pensions or fair compensation for land seizures. and executing more people than any country on earth (maybe all countries combined, but the party doesn't make those numbers public) also helps to keep the incarceration rate low. :)

13% of chinese lived on under a buck twenty five a day in 2008 and an estimated 3 million people are currently enslaved in china. the situation of human rights can look shitty through the lens of coastal china but if you live in a rural area, are an ethnic or religious minority, disabled, poor, or a combination of those, you're fucked.

political freedoms nonexistent except within the party structure. even calls for mild reform are answered with violence or oppression if they come from outside the party. charter 08 which was a petition for, among other things, an independent judiciary and freedom of assembly resulted in a strike hard campaign that involved police harassment at the min and ten plus year prison sentences at the max. reformers within the party are sidelined but those outside the party that keep up calls for reform are often hounded out of the country, tortured, have their families harassed by police, are locked up legally or extralegally, or are killed.

What the hell is going on in Kunming?

27 murdered and over 100 injured by uniformed men in a mass knife attack at the train station.

Five attackers shot dead, several more have apparently escaped.

official media says: wait and see. unverified weibo rumors of course say: uighur radicals.

if it's xinjiang-connected then first time for direct attacks on civilians (not incl riots in xinjiang which were not really terrorist attacks on the same model) rather than representatives of chinese state or symbols of party authority.

Yunnan would seem to be a strange place to start it, wouldn't it?

not that strange, i don't think. there was a recent attack in taiyuan, shanxi, which seems less probable even.

there was a xinjiang radical-linked bus bombing in kunming in 2008. there's a decent uighur population in kunming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthay_Rebellion
mostly unrelated but i thought about this

You're right, i'd forgotten the bus bombing.

dylannn I agree with a lot of that but some pushback:

I think the chief resentment felt whenever the US criticizes China on the issue of human rights is the feeling on China's side that the US is able to use its position as world superpower and thought leader to criticize China, but fails at acknowledging its own abuses happening within, and without, its borders.

You're right that the two countries are in different leagues w/r/t this but they're also in different leagues, period: one is a country that experienced its last major frissure in 1865 and has had relative peace within its borders since then, the other in that same period has had multiple changes of power and has not had a stable base from which to develop until 1978, after Mao's death and the disposal of the Gang of Four.

I don't think the case on cracking down on dissent is as bad as you make it out to be - if you said 'organizing' and specifically 'organizing with even the slightest tint of being seen organizing against the government,' then yeah I'd agree. But I think what ends up being surprising to a lot of people is the way that you can come out and criticize the Party without being thrown into a labor camp - as long as you're doing it in a personal capacity

Legal system - I agree, but keep in mind that China is a country that had literally had no laws until 1978, then literally only had 6 statutes in play for years after that. The Western legal tradition simply does not exist in China - and whether that tradition is something China should aim for with its legal reforms, or if it should try to create out its own type of legal system (a legal system with "Chinese characteristics",) that's going to be a very interesting question. I think the progress the legal system has made in the past 30 years has been promising - you've gone from a system where the judiciary was a way to keep retired PLA officials busy and happy to one where the judiciary is now comprised by actual graduates of Chinese law schools. Keep in mind also that China didn't even have its first school of law until the 80s either. My feeling is that the judiciary will probably never be independent of the Party, and that means that cases against the Party, or cases dealing with matters of 'national significance' (i.e. the Mengniu milk scandal), will never be resolved in the courts. The courts might never play the role they do in America of being a venue where the citizenry can try and do impact litigation and get statutes struck down or precedent set. (And of course, that's a double edged sword - so many court decisions have gone the other way and struck down progressive legislation, set bad precedent, etc.) And it often feels like two steps forward, one step back; for all the legal reforms announced at the Third Plenum, the televised trial of Bo Xilai where Bo was allowed to testify on his own behalf, you also have the lockstep of the Xu Zhiyong trial (thus the saying: the police department prepares the rice, the prosecutor serves the rice, the judge eats the rice.) Right now, I think the legal system is at least adequate as a way for dispute resolution between private parties and commercial disputes - you don't need too independent of a judiciary to handle the majority of divorce cases, civil torts, contract disputes, etc.

FYI re-education through labor was abolished as of the Third Plenum, iirc.

W/r/t the freedom of religion, assembly, etc. - Yeah I agree with that. But I'd point out that a belief that those are basic human rights is grounded in a society that has, as its root foundational belief, that every human being is born with a set of inalienable rights. And of course, what makes those rights inalienable is not the existence of the person herself but a society that believes in the inalienability of those rights and that is willing to let the citizen assert those rights against the State. Obviously, that sort of structure does not exist in China and has never been part of the (wait for it) Confucian tradition. The question for me is whether you can have a society that doesn't have those rights (and resist taking the completely opposite view that just because a society doesn't recognize those rights, the society is completely against those rights) but can still organize itself in a way where the majority of the citizenry can exercise those rights? If that makes any sense.

For me the greatest irony, or sad lol, is that for all the US does in centering the discourse around China on 'human rights,' multinational corporate conglomerates (I'd say the majority were US-based) were lining up outside of China's door a mere year after Tiananmen and quietly moving capital into the country in 1991, 1992

Death toll up to 34 with 130 injured, according to SCMP

http://wickedonna1.tumblr.com/post/78223148381/2014-3-1

Comprehensive compilation of pictures of the attack culled from Weibo, if you're so inclined (obviously very graphic and disturbing)

The local municipal government has stated that there's evidence from the scene showing the attack was carried out by "Xinjian separatists"; Xinhua has officially labeled this a terrorist attack

right. american criticism of chinese human rights is fucking stupid and i dont think its worthwhile to compare china to a modern western democracy founded on self-evident truths that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights, or to try and drag it down that road (charter 08 always seemed kind of naive and wishy-washy to me because it was asking for legislative democracy, a federated republic, etc. and you can't really abruptly slap an idealized model of western democracy on china).

when i started listing those human rights abuses, i was reminding myself of the right wing americans that pounce on chinese dissidents that wash up in the states. i'd usually be on the other side here, pointing out that the chinese party still basically represents the ideas of most chinese people on the question of how a society should be governed and what rights should be granted and restricted. the party is trying to reform the legal system, etc. the hukou system will be abolished within the decade. re-education through labour is done (right). within our lifetimes, freedom of speech and the freedom of the press has expanded.

but i feel like sitting in a western country and saying, "look, china and america are both in the same league with human rights" isn't accurate and even if they both suck, i'd challenge anyone that thinks the situations in both countries are comparable to do a little more reading on what it looks like when people come up against the interests of the party in china.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/01/blood_and_fear_in_xinjiang

Yeah cross-country comparisons are rarely helpful

That article was bouncing around in my head as the news unfolded; I admit that I don't know much more about the history of the region beyond what was presented in the article, here's a non-paywall link https://www.chinafile.com/strangers

One possibly good effect of China's tightly controlled media is that they have the ability to shape the discourse around this event much moreso than the Western media industrial complex. Hopefully that means they'll be able to limit some of the more inflammatory voices that pop up, that you won't have your Sarah Palins and your Bill O'Reilly's polluting the discourse... unless the Party decides to do an about face and turn on the firehose and vilify the Uyghurs. I don't think that would be in China's best interest, obviously.

Sorry, I shouldn't have specified Uyghurs; all the authorities have said so far is that the attackers are from Xinjiang

right the state media and any other mainstream media will definitely and have so far gone supermoderate on this situation. there will be hard strikes against xinjiang even more clamping down on any groups or communities that could get out of hand, but no media will single out uighurs or any other ethnic or religious group but only mention terrorists and those that seek to disrupt the harmonious society. no discussion who the splittists really are, why they have beef with chinese state authority, any religious element, etc.

crowds of people at a train station in kunming, just not a good target.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-03/02/c_133153594.htm

Strange that a condemnation can seem so bland

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1438589/horror-railway-station-eyewitnesses-tell-kunming-slaughter

SCMP continuing to report 4 more dead than Xinhua's official figure, the eyewitness accounts are brutal to read through. You forget why swords were the preferred way of doing combat before guns came along

In more heartening news, thousands of HKers have turned out to protest the attack on Kevin Lau http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1438571/they-cant-kill-us-all-hundreds-rally-protest-ming-pao-editor-chopper

I guess I haven't felt this shaken since Sandy Hook, just a little more than a year ago. Fuck

http://imgur.com/nNMMGjM.jpg

Will do Mandy *buys 100,000 of those tshirts and gives them to all my friends*

what does the text say?

"emergency notice: my friends, if you see anyone wearing this shirt on the street, immediately run away or call the police. the shirt is like the picture below, doesn't matter what color it is. check for the crescent moon and get away from there." mentions kunming terrorists, etc.

http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s?__biz=MzA4OTI1OTkzMw==&mid=200009295&idx=1&sn=126c02a9cbd65426da11c4236c2809a8&scene=1

but i feel like sitting in a western country and saying, "look, china and america are both in the same league with human rights" isn't accurate and even if they both suck, i'd challenge anyone that thinks the situations in both countries are comparable to do a little more reading on what it looks like when people come up against the interests of the party in china.

― dylannn, Sunday, March 2, 2014 2:29 AM (12 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sorry for taking long to respond, but dude i'm not contemplating exclusively domestic treatment here. as is the history of the countries from which liberal democratic ideals are born, the u.s. exports its abuses to foreign countries. the article that dayo originally posted mentions specifically the ccp criticism of drone strikes; this issue alone makes the countries comparable in my view. the estimates of innocent civilians killed in afghanistan, iraq, and pakistan since 9/11 range from 100,000 to 200,000. figures of government and academic studies. the u.s. has arbitrarily furnished countries with weapons that have caused the deaths of innocent people on a substantially larger scale than otherwise would have occurred, inconsistently and opportunistically propping up opposing sides; the interventions of the american military have nothing to do with ideals and everything to do with consolidating power. i don't know how better to term these interventions than human rights abuses. in the last 15 years alone the american government has killed more innocent people than the chinese government has since deng xiaoping, even considering it's 1/4th the size. this puts them in the same league.

it's amazing to me that the scope of the term "human rights" is supposed to include political philosophies that have in 90%+ of their history in the international arena have been employed exclusively when they favor the outcomes of the country from which they come, but shouldn't be concerned with firebombing buildings where a suspect is believed to be hiding regardless of who else is inside, all in the face of the meaningless pursuit of people who killed far fewer innocent members of our country than we did of theirs. looking back on my post i realize i was tuomas level naive in as far as i didn't give any indication that i wasn't using the "human rights" in its normal (asinine) context, but the judgment i'm making is that in the past 25 years the u.s. government has done more harm to the world than the chinese government. i am glad the u.s. government is calling attention to the abuses of the party, i am glad the party is calling attention to the abuses of the u.s., they're comparable.

alright i got it. i think we're absolutely on the same page with this.

cool, sorry for being stupidly unclear in the first place.

Booming post een

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1438711/while-world-reels-shock-kunming-attack-news-notably-absent-chinas-front

http://english.cri.cn/6966/2014/03/04/191s815639.htm

Have seen a lot of anger in my feed from PRC nationals against US media outlets for not calling it terrorism

http://i.imgur.com/tX4eBkr.jpg

Me irl

i don't get it.

wang lixiong excerpts his own my west china, your east turkestan to talk about kunming (no engl translation of the book exists so this is good) http://chinachange.org/2014/03/03/excerpts-from-my-west-china-your-east-turkestan-my-view-on-the-kunming-incident/

this is kind of a mess but interesting for the note about uighurs in kunming crossing to laos http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/desperate-03032014224353.html i didn't know about that and some uighurs went to cambodia post xinjiang riots too http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/laos-deported-uighur-asylum-seekers-report and got deported back to china

http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-china-attackers-new-details-20140305,0,2676616.story now after the rfa story the yunnan party chief mentions the thwarted attempt to get outta china

The Wang Lixiong excerpt is excellent, thanks

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/world/asia/china-remodels-an-ancient-silk-road-city-and-an-ethnic-rift-widens.html

that's sad but then the ccp doesn't seem to have much of unesco type sacred preservationist instinct with a lot of its own nation's history

needless to say, a fascinating part of the world, worth reading things like lattimore's 'the road to turkestan', the vestiges of the trade routes & the attendant towns across inner mongola, dzungaria, then over to the tianshan passes etc

how much are eg the kunming attacks an admission of futility and a concession to the sort of egregious, spectacular violence of various doomed near-eastern jihadist-secessionist projects (doku umarov etc)

why don't they focus on attacking chinese paramilitary targets in their homelands, do they expect some grand insurgency of dejected lunatics from all over the world scurrying across the mountains to fight for turkestan

the kashgar situation is pretty fucked. the fact that it's part of a project to sinify the far west makes it even more fucked.

https://twoyeartrip.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/20130822-072039.jpg

when i was in shanxi, i lived in the shadow of a billion dollar ancient city wall, built on land that was once home to one of the more well preserved old cities in northern china. the old city was demolished as part of a project of "protective demolition" 保护性拆除 and the sale of the land allowed the space for the project and financed it through the sale of extra land to developers.

the main street of the old city was turned into a pedestrian walkway and var tourist attraction. the old temple was expanded tenfold and there was a 80 rmb entry fee. there are two mosques in the city and the one left in the old city was sort of abandoned in a historical amusement park. (when we went for friday prayers the first time, they demanded we pay the ticket price to get in. a cover charge for friday prayers! we got out of that and it was chill after that but it was a weird thing, friday prayers with tourist strolling the grounds and plainclothes police too). there was once a sizeable hui muslim community living around the mosque and their homes were replaced with souvenir shops.

and the wall was a massive greyblock thing that ran through the center of the city and created a deadzone of citylife around it and charged 100 rmb to get on top of it. most people in the city i talked to explained that they simply repaired and partly rebuilt an existing wall but it was mostly built from nothing and the history was mostly fiction.

datong had been sort of a trading city with the north but once the ming came to power, things started heating up with northern powers and the ming put up walls of rammed earth, covered with unfired brick in a few places. by the time the qing came to power, northern aggression wasn't a factor anymore and the capital was moved to beijing, just down the road, so starting in 1611, the wall was already unimportant and started being dismantled. the nationalists tore down most of the rest of it in the 1910s and when the communists came in 1946 (datong-jining campaign), the walls weren't really a defensive structure anymore. in the 50s, the parts of the wall that had been covered in brick were gone and the city government took down all the existing watch towers and bell towers, etc. by the 1970s, the only parts of the wall that remained were sections of the outer dirt wall (because they didn't have bricks to steal and were far enough out to escape urban renewal projects). but the history of the wall in datong is presented as: the wall was built during the ming and then repaired last year.

beyond the silliness of building an ancient wall in 2014 and the builders ignoring the facts of history, it's just a shitty project and a waste of money and killed the old city. i'm sympathetic to urban renewal projects in china. the project of moving people from homes without running water and heat to modern housing is great but you end up with those people not being properly compensated and tourism-centered deadzones in cities that don't attract enough tourists to make it worthwhile.

i saw the same thing in other cities, like kaifeng, where the old city was torn down completely. they built a theme park dedicated to song dynasty magistrate bao gong 包公 and there was a plan to spend the equivalent of 20x kaifeng's 2012 fiscal revenue to build a gigantic song dynasty-themed amusement park. when i was there in 2011, the last section of the old city was around dongda mosque and even that was set to come down.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/indepth/2013-09/20/c_132735417.htm -- the hui muslim community will be "settled in a residential community nearby" and everything authentic was scheduled to be replaced with "streets dedicated to halal food, Muslim shopping and demonstrations of ethnic culture."

maybe you could say something about the communist party's wish to control history, even if it requires remaking historical artifacts wholesale, but mostly it's the way that local governments function: making money off land, the 5 year term pushing mayors to spearhead massive projects on tight time limits.

dylannnnn remember you had Kaifeng in your top 10 cities in china last year; you think it's still worth visiting?

i forgot about that when i was claiming that the entire city had been bulldozed and replaced with a song dynasty epcot center.

the entire old city hasn't been demolished. it's still worth visiting.

wonderful: Popular app for calling taxis shakes the foundation of China's one-party rule

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/09/china-taxi-app-competition-monopoly

I admit I get pretty pissed off when I flag down a taxi and it drives a lil' bit ahead of me and some guy tapping on his cell phone gets in...

oh mandy...

http://imgur.com/rHfGrRu.jpg

http://news.ifeng.com/society/2/detail_2014_03/15/34792922_0.shtml

广州：小偷被抓大喊“有人砍人” 市民四散奔逃

【小偷一句话引起恐慌】广州警方刚刚通报：今天（3月15日）上午8时30分许，在广州沙河大街某服装城的保安员抓获一名小偷，该小偷突然大喊一句：“有人砍人！”引起周边群众向四周跑散。目前，该名小偷已被警方控制，事件仍在进一步查处中。现场秩序逐步恢复正常。

Guangzhou: Citizens scatter after cornered thief shouts, "They're stabbing people!"

One word from a thief caused panic. Guangzhou police have just published an announcement regarding an incident that occurred today in the city (March 15th) at approximately 8:30 in the morning. After a thief was nabbed at a Shahe Avenue clothing market by security guards, he began shouting, "They're stabbing people!" People nearby immediately began running in all directions. The thief is now in the custody of police, who are investigating the incident. The scene is slowly returning to normal.

mandy, by the way, is a very nice girl.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1450123/construction-workers-pay-price-chinas-rush-development

An interesting piece by Hua Hsu on Shanghai jazz standards reinterpreted as modern electronic music: http://wonderingsound.com/feature/shanghai-restoration-project-art-assimilation/

http://i.imgur.com/yBKdK3Z.png

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/23/national/uighur-expert-professor-at-kobe-university-goes-missing-during-trip-home-to-china/

Wang’s disappearance follows that of another Japan-based Chinese scholar, Zhu Jianrong, who went missing while visiting his home city of Shanghai last July.

The Chinese government detained Zhu, an expert on Chinese politics and diplomacy and a professor at Toyo Gakuen University in Nagareyama, Chiba Prefecture, for six months before releasing him in January. During his period in detention, Zhu is believed to have been interrogated by Chinese authorities on possible charges of espionage.

Anybody been following the Legislative Yuan protests?

Not I :(

Unrelated: am I just unlucky or Not Doing It Right with Beijing cab drivers or what? So far, 50% have declined to actually give me a ride after stopping for me.

You give them an address and they won't take you? They're probably looking for a big fare

Yeah, except for the airport one where the dude was like "too many bags!" and kicked us out. Next lady had no problem with us (to be fair, we have a lot of bags, but we schlep them ourselves and unless your trunk is full of shit, it isn't a problem. Also, if your trunk is full of shit, maybe you shouldn't be looking for fares at the airport.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/58451159@N00/sets/72157642882125603/

Amazed tha the US Consulate has been in the same spot since the 60s

http://www.businessinsider.com/gifs-of-chinese-city-growth-2014-3

quincie: just open the door and get in

I have done that, only to be kicked out!

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/30/us-china-corruption-zhou-idUSBREA2T02S20140330

14 billion in assets seized - wow

the one thing i took away from the economist's "democracy has failed" essay was the description of the wealth of the npc:

The 50 richest members of the China’s National People’s Congress are collectively worth $94.7 billion—60 times as much as the 50 richest members of America’s Congress.

the number is surprising because with all the longterm rumblings about his ouster, i'm sure he had the time to cache a lot of money overseas too.

There are six times as many members of the NPC though and i'd guess that most have very little direct political role. Would be interesting to find out the personal wealth of the party core.

previous attempts at figuring out a solid-ish number were unsuccessful and the final conclusion was: they have a lot of money, their friends and family and business partners and political allies have a lot of money, and most of it might be overseas.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/31/tiananmen-25-years-money-ideas/

i think lots of the conclusions perry link usually comes to are wrong. maybe not having been in the country for twenty years is part of the problem and the comparisons to other authoritarian governments is part of the problem, but when he talks about the methods or motives of government control it doesn't seem accurate, neither does his conception of how the average chinese citizen relates to the party in 2014. his description of the economic makeover of china is simplistic and wrong (basically, lots of people worked hard because they had nothing else to do). and his "ideas" seem only to include dissenting ideas, while ignoring a lot of interesting shit happening in the country by writing off anything that is allowed to flourish or shown indifference by the party... because the party is illegitimate and anything it gives legitimacy to is therefore suspect (link, for example, called mo yan an "inside-the-system writer," who was unwilling to take the risks that liu xiaobo did).

Their official rhetoric holds that “the Chinese people have long ago reached their correct historical verdict on the counterrevolutionary riot.” If the authorities truly believed that “the Chinese people” approved of their killings, however, they would throw open Tiananmen Square every June 4 and watch the masses swarm in to denounce the counterrevolutionaries. That they do the opposite is eloquent testimony of what they really know.

despite the lack of public debate or even public statements on tiananmen, lots of the kids that were in grade school or not born yet when perry link left the country have come to their own conclusions about tiananmen. even if they wouldn't be interested in denouncing counterrevolutionaries, the majority, i think, are of the opinion: whatever happened in '89 was horrifying-- and i'm not going to trust western sources for numbers on how many died-- but it was necessary and, hey, it worked. to me, that's kinda fucked up.

but coming at the problem from the viewpoint of "the chinese should desire elections and a free press and tiananmen truth and reconciliation commissions but they don't because of fear and dread and stalinist machinery of oppression" is a problem.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/feed_the_world/2014/04/why_does_china_not_have_famines_anymore_capitalist_and_socialist_reforms.html

So they did—as would anyone when given only one channel for the application of personal energies. They worked hard—at low pay, for long hours, without unions, without workman’s compensation laws, without the protections of a free press or independent courts, and without even legal status in the cities where they worked. Moreover, there were hundreds of millions of them and they worked year after year. Is it strange that they produced enormous wealth? The fine details of the picture are of course more complex than this, but its overall shape is hardly a mystery or a “miracle.”

Yeah this is really, really wrong-headed

Yeah, that jumped out at me ... strange piece; was posted by one of my lecturers w/"excellent article, great analysis" as commentary.

i think part of perry link's problem with looking at tiananmen and it's aftermath, what the party did following 1989 is having such a simplistic view of the economic story in china.

the protests in 89 weren't wholly or maybe even mostly a call for democratic reforms. that was a big part of it but the big issue was economic: inflation getting out of hand, failures with state-owned enterprise reform and decollectivization. and one of the reasons why the party has maintained its control over the country is by addressing the overall economic problems facing the country... like, finding a way to reform state-owned enterprises and safely decollectivize. and, finding a way to grow while keeping inflation in check. and, food sef-sufficiency as a policy. and, moving away from an ideologically driven foreign policy to policies that promote a chilled out global order and plentiful markets for chinese exports. the party did clamp down on dissent and continues to do so, but they head off the key source of social instability in china which is economic complaints, material scarcity.

Man Guangzhou is dope as heck

greatest city in china

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/world/asia/united-states-and-china-clash-over-contested-islands.html

U.S. and China Clash Over Disputed Group of Islands
By HELENE COOPER 7:48 AM ET
Tension between China and Japan prompted the American defense secretary to warn that the United States would honor treaty obligations to defend allies.

lol, sure we will

Why anybody pays attention to the rhetoric exchanged about the Diayou/Senkaku islands is beyond me

Man I usually give whatever small change/bills I have to people on the street

But today came across a man who obviously had been tortured/mutilated by Triads

Like both wrists broken and made to heal at a right angle, chest completely burned, lower lip cut away, teeth broken and jutting out

Terrible

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b040h5nz
(starts at ~11:45)
"To discuss what's happening in the Chinese literary scene - the popular trends including the spy novel, the issues facing today's authors and who to watch out for that's heading our way, Mariella is joined by translator Nicky Harman, journalist and novelist Karen Ma and translator and co-founder of the literary website Paper Republic, Eric Abrahamsen."

Mentions:
Daughter of the River, by Hong Ying
Last Quarter of the Moon, by Chi Zijian, translated by Bruce Humes
The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver, by Chan Koonchung
Snow and Shadow, by Dorothy Tse
Scent to Heaven, by Wang Anyi
The Chilli Bean Paste Clan, by Yan Ge

i've got a lot of love for harman and i am casually acquainted with abrahamsen but to be honest, the books they're always repping leave me cold.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/04/02/fed-up-chinese-residents-blast-dancing-grannies-with-42000-sound-system/?mod=WSJBlog

I love everything about this story

^^^ my mom was just talking about this story! I loved the dancing grannies in my Shanghai 'hood, but they were far enough from the apartment not to be annoying.

that story is awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEYRLDvJaxo
lmao

Thinking about visiting one of the blighted coal cities

Yea? Nea?

what is the most polluted shithole in china

Would depend on which type of pollution you were talking about

recommended.

Yeah I have 5-6 days off for Labor Day so I'm trying to figure out a good circuit of cities to visit

you're based in shanghai, correct?

Yeah. Easiest would be to do a coastal tour, pick any 2 of Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Wenzhou, Xiamen

Was also thinking Changsha/Wuhan/Kaifeng

none of those are blighted coal cities!

Yeah I mean I haven't considered the blighted coal city circuit yet

shanghai -> kaifeng -> xi'an -> yan'an -> ordos -> hohhot, then back down
datong -> beijing -> shijiazhuang -> zhengzhou -> shanghai

maybe too long.

but if you did go out to kaifeng, the blighted coal cities of the north are within striking distance

http://imgur.com/hlrXmcq.jpg

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/apr/17/photography-surreal-wonderland-pagan-china-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu <---- beautiful pictures, weird copy emphasizing PAGAN and VOODOOESQUE

All the images in the book are shot with a Holga camera

You don't say

More fotos available on his website

http://www.zhangxiaophoto.com/class.asp?aid=20&nid=287

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2013/08/26-years-of-growth-shanghai-then-and-now/100569/

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/2-charts-that-put-the-chinese-pollution-problem-in-perspective/360868/

Just bought that guy's book ;-\

Zhang Xiao appears to be a photographer right in my wheelhouse

That's why he [Göran Malmqvist] believes sinologists should not only engage in academic research but also in translation; and for himself: "It's to allow people from my country to appreciate the Chinese literature I like."

Unfortunately, he says, there are as many poor translators as there are good writers in China.

"What makes me angry, really angry," he cries, eyes blazing, "is when an excellent piece of Chinese literature is badly translated. It's better not to translate it than have it badly translated. That is an unforgivable offence to any author. It should be stopped.

"Often translations are done by incompetent translators who happen to know English, or German, or French. But a lot of them have no interest and no competence in literature. That is a great pity."

There are notable exceptions such as the late British sinologist David Hawkes' rendition of Cao Xueqin's epic novel The Story of the Stone, which he regards as a rare gem of translated Chinese literature.

http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1486045/meet-goran-malmqvist-nobel-prize-member-and-champion-chinese

i have reduced my thoughts on that down to a few things:

1) i read lots of translation by passionate amateurs and junior academics and it's not very good either. it's not very good-- maybe nobody's really seen what can be done with chinese literature in translation, because they still go to school and read old timers like michael duke and goldblatt (whatever though he's still the boss even if i talk shit about him but his language at this point reads as dated and translationese-y, even when in his best work like zhu tianwen's notes of a desolate man) or at least pick up the few chin-engl massmarket publications and they're pretty lame.

2) it's still true that the people capable of translating chinese literature or with an interest in it or with the language skills to shelfdig hidden gems are usually academics.

3) there's still a generational thing about old chinese literature, things written before '49, western academics holding up pre-communist lit as being pure of language while post-'49 literature is tainted by ideology and its effects on the language and literature from taiwan and hk is a fringe pursuit. everyone that's still a big name in chinese literature in the west mostly came of age in a time of red, closed china and i think there will be a shift in how people view chinese arts and literature and culture after the majority of the kids that grew up doing a few semesters overseas at qinghua and experienced the country and culture directly come back and try putting modern chinese into modern english.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1491428/chengguan-officials-seriously-injured-after-assault-large-crowd

http://i.imgur.com/SHoOX9w.gif

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/30/us-china-xinjiang-blast-idUSBREA3T0HX20140430

xi jinping visits xinjiang
3 killed 79 wounded in train station attack

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-knife-attack-20140505-story.html#axzz30uxn1gVO

^ Knife attack at the GZ train station today

i'm not sure how to say this but i hope it makes sense. the train station attacks are particularly sad and scary to me because there's a certain feeling i get at train stations in china. like, they're really visibly literally the crossroads of the country. it's kind of a microfied version of the country, where you see people from all walks of life. everyone is forced to walk through the same steel barriers, fuck with the same ticket machines, wait in the same shitty lines-- this is less true because of new luxury trains and their waiting rooms, and some cities even have separate high speed only stations. the gz attack hits even more intense because i was in that square so often. i used to take the metro from panyu to hang out in the gz train station square, just buy a pack of hongtashan and a newspaper and sit against one of the cement tree planters, watching all the arrivals coming out the station gates dragging their red-white-and-blues and busted suitcases. i picked up my girlfriend coming in from guiyang a few times, met her at the kfc that you can see in some of the post-attack pictures. waiting for someone, ready to meet the girl I loved at the train station KFC, take her suitcase from her and walk her to the line of gypsy cab touts and confidently give a local address and instructions about what bridges to take. or i'd be going out there to meet my friend that worked in sanyuanli after work.

China's rail network is a national treasure imo

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/SH/57EF4260-4115-4FD0-A1AC-9DF4DCDE66D1_zps9parrm9z.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/world/asia/china-says-goodbye-in-the-key-of-g-kenny-g.html?hp&_r=1

I didn't know I knew this song but when I played it I know I knew it and I now I know why

http://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2014/may-august/not-altogether-illusion-translation-and-translucence-work-burton-watson

Have several works translated by Burton Watson and they are all very enjoyable

I have a Chuang Tzu translation by Watson which I like a lot.

that was a great piece. i guess i tend to read a lot of classical chinese / chinese poetry in translation quite unthinkingly.

http://paper-republic.org/brucehumes/champa-the-driver-tibetan-dreamer-in-an-alien-land/

this sounds... i dunno

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/opinion/why-chinas-political-model-is-superior.html

The fundamental difference between Washington’s view and Beijing’s is whether political rights are considered God-given and therefore absolute or whether they should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.

The West seems incapable of becoming less democratic even when its survival may depend on such a shift. In this sense, America today is similar to the old Soviet Union, which also viewed its political system as the ultimate end.

coulda put that in the right-wingery thread

i haven't read this (it's paywalled) but, two editors from the economist say the asian model is better

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/article1411616.ece

Framing it in terms of Better or worse is unhelpful when no political system will be able to escape the resource and climate change wars that will consume the planet in 2040

well, when there is no "escape" the question is which system/polity will be better able to get its hands on the scraps

Hah assuming there are polities in existence to get the scraps ; )

That post was meant half-facetiously

Was on my phone last night so didn't click the link. But that NYT op-ed is written by Eric X. Li who is a noted China partisan

He's been rehashing that same oped fifteen different times now

I mean, that byline

Eric X. Li is a venture capitalist.

yeah, zackly

what's it mean that he addressed tiananmen directly? is he a chinese citizen?

Not sure - but probably not a big deal that he referenced Tiananmen in a newspaper that's blocked in China anyway

i suppose if he's pitching americans on chinese authoritarianism he'd have to address it

i guess tom friedman has kind of done the same thing tho right

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1517695/explosion-rocks-urumqi-wake-xinjiang-attacks

Looks like a car bomb was set off in Urumqi

Reports are 31 dead, 90 injured

Tensions between Han Chinese and Uygurs in Xinjiang have been simmering for years. Human rights organisations and Uygur exiles say curbs on their language, culture and religion have created anger, a claim that Beijing rejects.

is there any good longform analyses or investigative writing about the recent terrorist attacks? i'm sort of struggling to understand them too. most reporting seems to focus on the tension over repression of uighur language and religion but identifies certain areas of xinjiang with more radicalized populations where the campaign against uighur culture or religion has been harsher. but i don't really have a sense of what the links between the groups or individuals responsible for the attacks are or what their end goal is, whether it's separatism or just lashing out like the yunnan attack seems to be if the reports about a foiled border crossing are accurate.

china seems to be in the tighter part of its open then closed cycle, lots of direction from the top on strike hard campaigns against everything, one of those periods of ban everything lock it down. even before the attacks in tiananmen and yunnan, a campaign was heatng up against uighur communities and intellectuals and activists.

whatever here's animation. based on a jia pingwa story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APLtSPTjch8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYFRUMa67Q4

if i could be in any city in the world

Yeah probably my biggest regret of this China jaunt is not spending enough time in GZ

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/elderly-suicides-reported-after-city-announces-phase-out-on-burials/

Appropriately dystopic story, but wow that's a lazy lede

is there any good longform analyses or investigative writing about the recent terrorist attacks? i'm sort of struggling to understand them too. most reporting seems to focus on the tension over repression of uighur language and religion but identifies certain areas of xinjiang with more radicalized populations where the campaign against uighur culture or religion has been harsher. but i don't really have a sense of what the links between the groups or individuals responsible for the attacks are or what their end goal is, whether it's separatism or just lashing out like the yunnan attack seems to be if the reports about a foiled border crossing are accurate.

― dylannn, Monday, May 26, 2014 9:41 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

Haven't read it yet but this was just published in the LARB, via Fallows:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/chinas-two-problems-uyghurs

that was good.

i want to dump some chinalinks without comment or minimal comment

http://www.icrosschina.com/profile/2014/0526/312.shtml -- cute xinhua blog gossipy cultural revolution stories about cheng hong, li keqiang's wife, “Iron girl” was the “sexiest” title a female “Zhiqing” could win at that time, when Mao’s famous observation that “women hold up half the sky” prevailed; women who were strong-willed and could work equally as hard as men did were regarded beautiful.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-05/31/c_133375212.htm -- quannengshen 全能神 members arrested for murder, interesting term "heretic sect" which i've only seen xinhua using recently, part of a large but relatively quiet crackdown on the group.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/27/316299135/china-turns-to-africa-for-resources-jobs-and-future-customers -- howard french talking about china's second continent on china's interest in africa but also more specifically chinese in africa.

https://www.chinafile.com/China-Experiment-Deliberative-Democracy -- talking about deliberative democracy at the local level as the way the party will answer calls for political reform.

Tiananmen memoirs starting to get published ahead of the 25th anniversary

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/springtime-in-tiananmen-square-1989/371542/

Author never seems to have lost her sense of being an outsider, but always good to have some firsthand reporting

That Pig Sale animation was great; French/Millward links too.

Lecturer posted this SCMP link - http://multimedia.scmp.com/tiananmen/ - very, uh, multimedia-ish (is this what Snow Fall was like? NZ hasn't really had many FUTURE OF E-JOURNALISM things).

according to wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet - 25% of internet users are chinese but only 3.3% of the web is in chinese & only 10 million mainland chinese ppl are fluent in english.

so my question is: what are ppl in china up to online?

― ogmor, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 7:50 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, same as everyone else? streaming video, weibo, wechat, games, porn.

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:07 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe the big difference is that most are connecting to the internet via mobile device

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:08 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.danwei.com/a-brief-guide-to-chinas-media-landscape-may-2014/

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:08 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that metric seems to count only the number of top level domain websites, so maybe it's that internet usage in China is more centralized on a few sprawling sites (comports decently with my impression). also could be that china has 25% of the world's internet users but that many of them actually use the internet quite infrequently (this certainly couldn't be said about the younger generation, but i think there probably are a lot of very casual adults/elders who still get counted as 'users').

also: Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

― een, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:18 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ah not sure how I missed the 2014 thread. yeah this was really a question of where chinese ppl are online. lots of stuff I'm unfamiliar with on the danwei list. It's v interesting to see how&why online culture varies internationally, & I'm definitely much less aware of a chinese presence online in general compared with korea/india/japan. I wondered if it was a primarily a linguistic thing, and the related bigger q of how big a driver of worldwide english literacy the internet may or may not be. there's a distinction drawn between 'english speakers' & 'english users' (who can read english w/out having spoken or written fluency) which seems to explain the wiki figures I quoted. the mobile thing seems significant too. I don't know anyone who's spent much time on the mainland so thanks for helping w/ my inept wondering

― ogmor, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 5:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Seems a good as place/time as any to ask if anyone's read Jason Ng's Blocked On Weibo?

― etc, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 6:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Time for the 6/4 links

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/30/the-other-tank-man-photographs/?mod=WSJBlog

NYT going in, predictably:

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/q-and-a-louisa-lim-on-the-pivot-point-for-chinas-contemporary-history/

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/q-a-liu-heung-shing-on-photographing-tiananmen/

^^ I actually just bought a book by Liu in Hong Kong, called, appropriately enough, 中國夢. Didn't know that Vincent Yu was also photographing then, he's another very underrated Chinese photojournalist

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/q-a-chen-guang-on-the-soldiers-who-retook-tiananmen-square/

^^ Very worth reading

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/live-blogging-the-25-tiananmen-square-anniversary/
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/more-hong-kongers-support-89-crackdown-survey-finds/

^ Both times I've been in HK this year I visited Causeway Bay; both times I saw political demonstrations (the first time, in March, it was almost comical; about 10 protestors with megaphones and about 50 police officers. Strangely enough there weren't any police at the second one I saw, which was just a few days ago.) Also saw a guy agitating for HK independence in Mong Kok during my second trip, but nobody seemed to be paying him any mind

Also saw this on Tumblr:

A lot of folks are posting about the Tiananmen Square massacre today, of course. I thought we should share it too, but I wanted to write a little bit about what was explained to me about what happened in the spring of 1989 that the western media often overlooks.
I am a 1.5 generation Chinese American leftist. I was two when the massacre happened. My sister had just been born. My father, who immigrated from China to Hong Kong when he was a toddler to escape the Cultural Revolution, and then Hong Kong to the United States to go to college, tells me he was seeking work in China around this time.

Several summers ago, when we were traveling together in China, he told me about what he understood about Tiananmen Square from his perspective as a young, newly naturalized American citizen who still had deep ties to the motherland. He told me the sense of unrest was not just about state control of the media and politics, but a sense that the state was also imposing capitalist reforms on the Chinese economy without input from the people, and with clear preferential treatment for party cadres and others who had an “in” with the powers that be. Students were upset and anxious about what looked like unilateral decisions about the future that weren’t just about opening markets, they were about neoliberalising the country.

When I think about what’s happening in Istanbul, Turkey, I can’t help but think about this. When we remember Tiananmen Square, I hope we remember that this wasn’t necessarily about the struggle of democracy versus Communism, but that it was about people who wanted to take part in determining the future of their country, and who rejected nepotistic neoliberal reforms. Just like with the media narrative around Gezi, American audiences risk being turned around. A million people don’t turn out and go on hunger strikes against their own self-interest. There’s more to this story than meets the eye.
Remember Tiananmen, but remember it for what it was: young Chinese students and workers resisting their country “modernizing” in the age of Reagan, the godfather of neoliberalism. This is the same ideology that young Turkish students and workers are resisting in Istanbul. It’s the same ideology that has decimated the U.S. economy and that we resist when we say “another world is possible.”

When we ask why the Chinese government still hasn’t admitted that Tiananmen even happened, we should remember that China today is just as cutthroat and capitalistic in some ways as the United States is. They have delivered on neoliberalism, but in the style of an autocratic state, where nepotism and party connections had more to do with business success than anything. Students and workers in China in 1989 were emphatically saying no to this system.

I don't know the first thing about what neoliberalism is but I'd definitely like to know more about the economic aspect. A few things I've read have tried to position the '78-'89 period as being very, uh, hopeful, with farmers actually getting money from selling any surplus they'd have leftover once they met government quotas, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just an early snapshot of the trajectory that China took post '89

I'm always sort of shocked that the Tiananmen vigil in Victoria Park in HK draws 100,000+ people (this year close to 150,000); for a city with a population of 7 million, that's damn impressive

We were all utterly wrong, a misjudgment that, from a distance of 25 years, dwarfs all the other errors and miscalculations of my own and others’ coverage of the events of June 1989.

We erred in calling it the “Tiananmen Massacre” when nearly all of the killing in Beijing occurred outside the square itself and the crackdown extended far beyond the capital to cities across China.

We should never have labeled the protests simply a “pro-democracy movement” when many of the protesters were angered more by surging prices and corruption than the party’s regular but entirely phony elections.

We should never have given credence to rumors, stoked by Western intelligence agencies, of an imminent civil war fed by very real splits at the summit of the Chinese leadership.

Most of all, though, our mistake in Tiananmen was to think that the Chinese Communist Party had, like its counterparts across East and Central Europe, somehow lost its will to power – and the will and means to make people forget.

— Andrew Higgins

Sort of amazing

http://i.imgur.com/L0mgzZC.png

wow

Also amazing http://i.imgur.com/VXjCdqZ.png

I visited Tiananmen Square in April this year, not really by plan; me and my friend just happened to get off the bus there and we decided to do it

We had to go through two security checkpoints just to get in. Thanks to Beijing's brilliant urban planning you had to go through the Beijing subway just to get to the side that had access to the square. Once you had exited the subway there was another security checkpoint. Everybody has to go through metal detectors and give their bags up for X-raying

My friend (who's a PRC national) had a bookbag with just one book in it. The guard told him that he had a "sheaf of leaflets" inside his bag. My friend produced his book (some book on how to do business) and asked her if that was what she meant. She said yes, and he told her that it was a book, it wasn't leaflets. She told him technically a book was a pile of leaflets since both were made up of pages of paper. Can't remember who ended the conversation but we continued on. My friend was really peeved. Meanwhile on our way out of Tiananmen we passed by three or four people handing out real estate flyers

I guess there's also this http://gawker.com/twenty-five-years-later-it-is-always-june-4-1989-1585624885 but tbh I'm not sure how much time I have for metaphysical ruminations

http://i.imgur.com/S6pp3eQ.jpg

Vincent Yu

http://i.imgur.com/LJN1Pif.jpg

Liu Heung Shing

has anybody read luisa lim's book about tiananmen yet? i read a review somewhere the other day and it sounds solid. also can anyone recommend chinese history texts generally? i'm reading henry kissinger's book about china right now and it's really interesting but i can't help but feel like he's an unreliable narrator given what i know of his character generally.

Keep seeing references to L. Lim's book "The People's Republic of Amnesia," but have not read it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/25-years-of-chinese-silence-about-tiananmen-square-is-long-enough/2014/05/30/b67bedae-e679-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html

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

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/02/im_scared_to_discuss_tiananmen_and_internet_partly_to_blame

The immense interest among those jiulinghou who are in the know has not translated into active discussion, let alone action. Not all of us think it was wrong to use force against the protesters. And we certainly do not all think China should adopt Western-style democracy. But whatever our views are, we dare not openly discuss them online, in public forums, or even in private chats. And since the Internet is where my generation goes to communicate, we are essentially deprived of the chance to engage in civil discourse.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/03/mapping_the_protests_that_swept_china_before_and_after_tiananmen

^ One fact that is often overlooked is how many sister protests there were going on nationwide

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/qa-stuart-franklins-view-on-tiananmen-square/

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/jun/03/stuart-franklin-tiananmen-square-tank-man

The majority of journalists were not there to witness the scene; lots had moved to another hotel and missed the 'tank man' moment. Most of them started at the Beijing Hotel, but the food wasn't great. Another place nearer the airport did hamburgers, so they had decamped and got stuck outside the city by blockades at the point of the crackdown.

Imagine missing out on one of the most iconic moments of 20th century history because you wanted a cheeseburger, because you were sick and tired of mapo dofu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHFD1sEqpE

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all

the church of almighty god took out a fullpage nyt ad???

https://twitter.com/Garvey_B/status/478102017710125056/photo/1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/murong-chinas-clampdown-on-evil-cults.html?_r=0

and murong xuecun on cults

Is that the cult that killed the woman in the McDonald's

the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I5Z01OKvw

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2014/06/19/dji-quadcopter-china-detention

The footage is cool, the "I was detained by POLICE!" part is such a non-story I want to die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8vAFlCeFQ

Just finished this

Great doc

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-tiananmen-square-attack-video-20140624-story.html

In much less serious news, China is, along with Kenya, a featured country at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the national mall in Washington D.C. this year. Not sure who chose the musicians and craftspeople but here's some links:

http://www.festival.si.edu/2014/China/

http://www.festival.si.edu/visitor/evening.aspx special evening concerts with some including : the Flower Drum Lantern performance group, Quanzhou Puppet Troupe, Zhejiang Wu Opera Troupe, singers of hua’er folksongs, Inner Mongolian band Ih Tsetsn, the Miao Music and Dance Group, and the Bimen Brothers and Family, Qiang polyphonic singers.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/to-chinese-embassy-united-states-address-no-1-liu-xiaobo-plaza/

Good trolling

That looks cool, wish I could go! xp

http://news.163.com/14/0626/08/9VLDML4E00011229.html

to celebrate international day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking
cctv brings you a televised confession

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/go-south-to-guangzhou-a-home-away-from-home/

Good

yeah, i like that

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1552822/leading-broadcaster-rui-chenggang-detained-cctv-graft-investigation

fucking rui chenggang gets locked up in a graft investigation

also lol guo meimei boasts about gambling on weibo gets locked up too

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/chinas-infamous-guo-meimei-notorious-for-her-extravagant-lifestyle-has-been-arrested-for-illegal-world-cup-gambling/story-fnk822dn-1226987180331

https://www.facebook.com/notes/penguin-books-in-china/were-hiring-acquisitions-editor/10152292610389331

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

NSFW

http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/2014/7/china-s-muslim-women.html

how close to collapse was the existing ccp regime at the time of the tianenmen square protests?

Before or during? I'd say not very

When you start from as low a place as China did after Mao's death in 76 it's hard for things not to improve and keep on improving

that was my supposition, but the ccp hierarchy possibly felt differently in the midst of it.....that things could spread to other cities, other social groups etc

that is unverifiable of course

Well the narrative that makes the most sense to me is that the protestors were marching against crony capitalism as much as they were for a form of democratic government and a bill of rights

i.e. the pie was growing very quickly and the hundred surnames sensed that the gains were mostly going to those in the Party

I think the Party probably did balance precariously during the protests, the protests had spread to all major cities nationwide

But if the question is about the danger of collapse from internal factionalism, I don't think that was a threat

idk enough about the facts but i had got the impression that casting it into the human rights freedom and democracy procrustean narrative form was not telling the whole story

Yeah from what I've read the push for democracy and freedom of [x] is what gets emphasized, it carves a very neat symbolic totem for the West

The initial protests were sparked by students but the momentum was sustained by workers and laborers in addition

I think another way of framing your question nakh is asking how close the PLA was to siding with the protestors

And I think the answer was, not very

But that didn't mean the PLA automatically was going to do the bidding of the CCP either

Calling in the PLA to act on Tiananmen cost the CCP a lot of political capital, I think, and has made the CCP much more susceptible to PLA influence since, on a permanent basis

An authoritarian governments needs a final source of authority, after all

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/world/asia/8-people-executed-in-xinjiang-on-terrorism-charges-china-says.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/you-guide-to-the-latest-grim-news-out-of-china/379436/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-01/13/086r-011300-idx.html

this is kind of fascinating
xi'an underworld
stolen pistol
little orchid
bill clinton
massive manhunt

not a current event but
learned about it from annotation bad translation yi sha poem

Read the new-ish Evan Osnos & Howard French books lately, both p.good in a chatty (well, letting others chat) New Yorker-y way.

Seems like Xinjiang's gotten pretty travel-restricted re: needing ID at all times w/it determining whether yr permitted to move outside the region, according to a prof who's just come back from a conference. Was hoping to head to XJU for six months (I'm heading over to GuangWai in early Feb for at least a semester), but I'm not too sure the CI'll be too keen on foreigners in the north-west, heh.

Just promise to faithfully and truthfully report on every ethnic incident you see and I'm sure you'll have no problem

Ma told CNBC that he had got the idea for his business when he visited the US, and looks to Forrest Gump for inspiration. Ma said he had watched the Tom Hanks movie at least 10 times.

“Every time I’m frustrated, I watch the movie,” he said. “I watched the movie again before I came here. It’s telling me: ‘No matter what changes, you are you.’”

how the fuck does one company gain 80% of online commerce in china?
thats the sort of thing one might expect to see in transnistria

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/shrimps-Even-Forrest-Gump-would-have_236444271.html

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/POP-Art-Oil-painting_204818927.html

I would say, probably a first mover advantage + lack of established domestic big box B&M retailers therefore lack of competition from any online presences they might have tried to forge

http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/high-quality-hitler-bust_1902562700.html

PRetty much every city in China has a place that will do busts to spec of anybody you want, including you

is that one supposed to be putin

Some pics of the last one I encountered

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/pphotos/IMG_4677.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/pphotos/IMG_4679.jpg

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627011/pphotos/IMG_4680.jpg

Seems very common for color posters in China to fade to a cyanish verdigris

this site is incredible
the mystery now is 'why only 80%'

I've always found it a very unfriendly site from a user experience pov

Tons of keyword spamming

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/asia/china-court-sentences-uighur-scholar-to-life-in-separatism-case.html

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/28/hong-kong-clashes-kick-start-plans-activists-blockade-city

Came here looking for HK protest talk. I really don't follow the news there, or know the current status quo beyond a vague outline of how HKSAR works in the most general way. Could anything meaningful come of these developments?

I doubt it

Also no doubt in mind that the CCP is screwing the pooch here too

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

Photoshopped??

Oh looks like it's from 2012

http://i.imgur.com/5eHxznT.jpg

h/t ken c

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/28/6856621/hong-kong-protests-clashes-china-explainer

Hard to truly appreciate how bad Max Fisher is until he writes about something close to you

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2688692/china-blocks-instagram-mentions-of-tear-gas-amid-hong-kong-protests.html

x-post- uh, why is Max so bad? I know little about Hong Kong and China I confess.

He brings all the clarity of someone who headed his high school's Model UN congregation

https://time.com/3444164/hong-kongs-protesters-are-fighting-for-their-economic-future/

I think this is a much better overview of the issues at hand fwiw

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-warns-hong-kong-protesters-of-unimaginable-consequences/2014/10/02/245eb391-e506-4c24-9cdc-f1c62528e6fb_story.html?hpid=z1

Is it gonna get ugly?

Probably not - at worst more tear gas and rubber bullets

Really hope the protestors won't try to 'occupy' government buildings as happened in the recent taiwan protests

Btw curmudgeon I figure you would know - what's the precedent for occupation of non-public space?

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/09/25/pro-beijing-media-accuses-hong-kong-student-leader-of-u-s-government-ties/

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/884956.shtml

:)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/02/british-banker-charged-murder-hong-kong

possibly unfair but anyone who calls their kids rurik probably gives them other problems too

Saw that - for a city of 7 million people, HK has had a lot of weird and grisly murders

if there is any area in the world i would expect to find an "American Psycho style" murderer it is Wan Chai

Otm

http://japanfocus.org/-Ho_fung-Hung/4207

I'm far from an HK expert
So I found this
Interesting

Will try to dive into that when I have some head space

http://i.imgur.com/8Md1ODn.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/kQ5YSM9.jpg

lol

a+

http://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

我来时很好，去时，也很好

(Reuters) - A leader of Hong Kong's student protests called on Thursday for a respected intermediary to help arrange a trip to Beijing where the students want to make their case to China's leaders for greater democracy in their city.

Will this be even allowed to happen?

Well no - I don't think Beijing would ever agree to that

http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/i-speak-blood-poetry-foxconn-worker-xu-lizhi

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/nov/10/japan-shinzo-abe-china-xi-jinping-handshake-video

Inscrutable

lol dont u think its notably frigid even by the standard of these things

abe is trying to be concilliatory though, the froideur is from the other side

CCP has whipped up anti-Nippon sentiment to such a degree that Xi really had no choice

abe is far more constricted than xi, between his own nationalist right and the reality of the balance of powers
everything about that is emphasizing japan as a supplicant
not at all inscrutable

http://thediplomat.com/2014/11/ishiharas-stealth-attack-on-the-japanese-constitution/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/world/asia/zhou-yongkang-china-arrests-former-security-chief.html

I guess they finally dropped the hammer - wow

Better late than never, I guess.

When I saw "drop the hammer" I first thought you were talking about China versus Hong Kong protestors

http://i.imgur.com/HwxAVJx.png

bullet train?

Yeah - they hope to achieve these times (measure from Beijing, obv) by 2020

BJ to HK would be amazing - right now it's 24 hours

http://qz.com/208119/china-is-reportedly-thinking-about-building-a-bullet-train-that-reaches-america/

omg

only ilx thread on nk is stupid but 2 recent interesting things on border issues from sino-nk:

http://sinonk.com/2015/01/06/low-key-north-korean-soldier-murder-yanbian/
+
http://sinonk.com/2014/12/31/command-and-conquer-the-co-option-of-market-forces/