rolling china thread 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ok right, i guess i misunderstood u xp

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

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

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

o snap

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

i am going to move to dalian.

forreals?

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

lmao never take photos

experienced firsthand the pervasiveness of prostitution in china is impressive

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

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

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

my alma mater btw

bubble starting to burst?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

because it's indefensible and reprehensible and sucks

evan osnos does it more elegantly

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

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

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

er, america, i mean

I think you've gone native

or put in any other marginalized antiestablishment intellectual figure

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

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

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

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

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

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

not quite sure I get this but I love it anyway

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

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

more analysis of the revisions to the criminal code

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i don't know what to think.

i'm in china btw

oh sweet, in dalian?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

good overview of the level of security detail around chen guangcheng

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

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

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

prison built for officials convicted of corruption

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

looks like it was built by Marriott

what a cruel fate for those officials