滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

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

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

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

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

爸爸是个滚着石头

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

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

come on, embed

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

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

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

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

^

I mean, happy lny and all that

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

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

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

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

a little arty is okay. probably not too arty.

= wkw

yeah chungking express and be done with it imo

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

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

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

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

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

I gotta say, that quality 劣质的。

Here's a better version.

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

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

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

tsai mingliang isn't boring come on guys

i didn't say he was!

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

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

from here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the use of "subjects" seems condescending.

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

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

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

yes they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

deep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

whats yer top 10?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/us-newyorktimes-thompson-idUSBRE9AQ00720131127

NYT may end cn.nytimes.com

A pity

ugh i hate mark thompson's glib fuckboy apparatchik face

lol at america, collectively, for providing him refuge and lucrative employment

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1367110/hostile-aircraft-could-be-shot-down-air-defence-zone-pla-general

This gives China a 'way out' - they'll just claim any aircraft they don't challenge was not acting 'hostile'

But it's generally a boneheaded move by China in general, esp w/r/t antagonizing South Korea

Reading that ADIZ's are not governed by any sort of international standards and are unilaterally set by countries

Japan's was sketched in 1969

Willing to bet that at least part of the reason China is doing this is because they're playing a game of Mr. Me Too

Terrible timing though, or at the very least befuddling - really can't think of any strategic advantage that China gains at this point, other than being able to point at it 10, 15 years down the line and saying that it's become legitimate through time

Last post on the subject I promise but this is being an intersection of Fallows' two most favorite topics, flying and China, I defer to his authority

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/11/how-to-think-about-the-chinese-air-defense-news/281871/

And Fallows big ups this dude here

http://www.andrewerickson.com/2013/11/whats-wrong-with-chinas-air-defence-identification-zone-and-whats-not/

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/25/watch-this-space-chinas-new-air-defense-zone/

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/world/asia/japan-south-korea-fly-military-planes-in-zone-set-by-china.html?hp&_r=0

Can anyone recommend good books dealing with China's economic transition from the death of Mao roughly to the present?

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

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1378201/anti-firewall-tool-lantern-infiltrated-chinese-censors

I had been counting on using Lantern when I go to SH :\

freegate, bankrolled by falun gong and their new tang dynasty media empire,,, is still free and and still works. cheap shortterm alternative to a vpn.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/dec/10/china-five-pounds-facts/

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1378897/chinese-shop-owners-argentina-arm-themselves-guns-amid-violent

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/a-chinese-coal-baron-tumbles-into-debt/

I remember this wedding. Now the guy's company is bankrupt

http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/max-baucus-ambassador-china-101300.html

Lol who the hell is Max Baucus

Happy birthday old Mao

Hey Dayo where is your chinese food thread and where should we go tonight for Christmas chinese food in Flushing (or did you tell me you don't really know Flushing spots too well?)

Fu run and get the Islamic lambchop + cumin lamb + pinecone fish

Probably the jew\chinese thread would be best for today haha

The food thread is called mott street and it's on 7 7

Might be translated as squirrel fish idk

It's a sweet and sour dish

Fu run and get the Islamic lambchop + cumin lamb + pinecone fish

― 乒乓, Wednesday, December 25, 2013 3:57 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Ha, I didn't see this but that's exactly where I went, and we did order the islamic lambchop but not the other two things. We will definitely be going back. We also had some pork/leek DUMPLINGS!, a cucumber seaweed egg drop soup, and a watercress with shrimp paste. Everything was really good. The watercress was kind of the least good because it was so heavily flavored you couldn't really taste the watercress, which already has a lot of flavor normally.

It seems like the thing everyone orders there now are these giant bone-in meat hunks (maybe pork ribs?) that you eat with a plastic glove.

sorry, that "DUMPLINGS!" was not supposed to be all caps with an exclamation point

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1488037_10153634945635304_574877020_n.jpg

Looks good my man. I keep on trying to get people to go to Flushing but nobody bites

Well it's just on the other side of the park from us. I like it there a lot.

There was like one other white people table and I got to feel all superior because they ordered bullshit like chicken fried rice and sesame chicken.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/how-andy-warhol-explains-chinas-attitudes-toward-chairman-mao/282665/

*massive yawn*

http://black-in-asia.com/post/71398835866/its-fascinating-looking-at-representations-of

http://chineseposters.net/themes/african-friends.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-renews-western-journalists-visas-after-months-long-standoff/2014/01/09/fde67b9c-792c-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html

Ramzy out. Jesus christ

http://shanghaiist.com/2014/01/10/taipei-vs-beijing-a-travelers-perspective.php

Hey Caroline Hasselle, fuck you

don't agree with some of those points but jeez it doesn't merit a "fuck you"

No it's bullshit "which of these countries makes me feel more like an entitled white tourist" flab

why does it matter if some white people want to vacation places with clean air and where all the websites they use aren't blocked? not everyone has to be about that ~realness~

Well they should go to Cancun then

3. Religion is an integral component of life in Taiwan.
Christianity has an obvious presence — my granddaughter goes to a Christian school. Buddhist temples in China are largely filled with tourists. It was the crowds of real worshipers in the temples of Taiwan that struck me. The temples I saw in mainland China were more like sterile artifacts. In Taiwan I could observe the religion in action and began to gain a greater understanding of it. It is a shame that such a rich part of the Asian culture has been wiped away in modern China.

...

10. I saw more ancient Chinese artifacts in Taiwan than in the Chinese mainland.
The Forbidden City and Summer Place were somehow disappointing - nothing but buildings — beautiful, but merely shells. All the good stuff appears to be in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Apparently this was because the KMT took it all, after China’s Communist Party (CCP) took over. Perhaps it was a good thing, considering the destruction of the many relics that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. It is a well worth a trip to see. You get a much stronger sense of the culture and history from seeing these relics.

You can convey these thoughts without saying bullshit like "It is a shame that such a rich part of the Asian culture has been wiped away in modern China" or "Perhaps it was a good thing [that the KMT took so many relics]"

"I just want to see Chinese people acting and performing in ways that conform to what I think Chinese people should be like"

i mean i would factually debate the claim that there's "more of the good stuff" in taiwan than in mainland at this point in history, but i wouldn't dispute that a lot of stuff was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and that that sucks. i also don't think that wanting to see certain artifacts in a museum is some kind of indefensible racialist objectification: museums are venues where cultures are performed.

as far as whatever sense of sacrament is lost in mainland temples i think westerners are far more to blame for that (kfc in a hutong right next to yonghegong), which obv is only right to point out. again i'm not sure what she factually means by people being "more genuinely religious" in taiwan, but yeah i mean whatever response i can imagine wouldn't be defensible. so that part is fucked up, i agree

Like museums elsewhere the museums in China have waaaaaaaaay more stuff than they can actually display at one time. What she means is simply that Taiwan has better copied Western modes of presenting historical artifacts, it's not about actual numbers of artifacts at all. She's being very lazy

Anyway all the "good stuff" isn't in Taiwan it's overseas, transported out on imperialist Western galleys floating on the blood of their Chinese victims http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/168296.html

i also don't think that wanting to see certain artifacts in a museum is some kind of indefensible racialist objectification: museums are venues where cultures are performed.

Yeah but the performance of culture, of historiography is also culturally mediated & a part of culture itself. Like I used to be among the people who would cover their mouths and gasp when I heard about hutongs being destroyed or temples being given fresh coats of paint. But really the notion of "preservation" as some kind of act where you only do what's minimally necessary to keep an artifact as it was back when it was created - that's bullshit. Like art museums in the West don't powerwash their paintings. If the Chinese want to keep everything looking fresh then I see no reason not to. Just as there can be a cultural preference for oldness there can be one for newness.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to attend the annual re-embalming of Mao. He's gonna look fresh as h*ck

2014 thread?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/world/asia/chinese-activists-test-new-leader-and-are-crushed.html

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

couldn't find a 2015 thread but i had to lol at this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/opinion/rent-a-foreigner-in-china.html

are white starving artists/writers flocking to china?

穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

Here buddy

thanks pal