Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

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