rolling china thread 2011

yeah, i saw a piece on 60 minutes, i think it was, about a month ago which mentioned the concerns around how it was being rushed

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/asia/10mistress.html?pagewanted=all

some good schadenfreude

http://www.cnngo.com/shanghai/life/chinas-most-ambitious-replica-manhattan-084283

lol they r just doing that to increase GDP

two articles today in the NYT, neither very surprising

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/asia/30china.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/world/asia/30spy.html

i think jonathan spence was the first guy i saw make the really apparent point about 中国不能再乱了 being the great motivator behind chinese at every socioeconomic slot accepting topdown invasive control of things like-- well, everything. like, i hear it when i talk to chinese friends about 6-4... and 7-5 and local urban planning and family planning policy and fuckin everything.... this kind of stuff makes people feel shitty but it's broadly considered worth it. because the alternative is seen as beijing becoming new delhi.

did you read ai weiwei's postdetention thing about beijing? i mean, it's sort of amazing because it's just this unvarnished mean true look at how life is. at the end of the day, a good portion of people are cooool with the state of affairs and fuck ai weiwei what the hell is he trying to do?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/08/28/ai-weiwei-on-beijing-s-nightmare-city.html

yeah 中国不能再乱了 is pretty much the standard feeling of a majority of Chinese people and also the reason why they are so accepting of what mao did - and to a certain extent, I can see what they're coming from, how many other countries are dealing with a billion people, 2/3 to 3/4 of whom have next to no education? it's a big problem

i think jonathan spence was the first guy i saw make the really apparent point about 中国不能再乱了 being the great motivator behind chinese at every socioeconomic slot accepting topdown invasive control of things like-- well, everything.

dayo do you have a link to his English-language writing about this?

haha maybe ask dylannn? but prob
the first stepping stone to understanding that is the intense competitive nationalism that china fosters in its ppl

okay cool thanks

dylannn?

right, 中国不能再乱 is part of the milder contemporary justification for the excesses of the 60s/70s.

but i'm mostly referring to the post 1980s fear of rocking the boat: zhongnanhai is scared of going too far to the right or left, and reformers on both sides are sick of the status quo but have also mostly been raised under the cloud of the cultural revolution, where chinese society basically stopped functioning. there seems to be an acceptance on both sides (the party establishment and their opponents, and other people in the middle) that things can't stay exactly as they are. after you watch the country tear itself apart in the 70s or shit hit the fan in the 80s (not just tiananmen but protests in every other damn city and lots of other state repression like the anti-spiritual pollution campaign) i can get being shy to push too hard.

nationalism is a big part of it too i guess. the national myth is unity, that china has always been china, has always been united, has always been one. china's golden ages come during unity under a single power, and the chaotic shitty times happen when the country is split up or conquered. the nation is a fortress against chaos and poverty and we better hold onto it.

i mean, as far as recommending something, i dunno. i read a good piece on the idea in general-- geremie r barme or jonathan spence? both of them have written enough about reform and the late 80s reform movement in general that they're a good place to start. but i mean it's the subtext of a lot of writing about reform in china. like the last poets said.

what is 中国不能再乱 stop talking secret talk!!

just in general and because i was reminded of him i'd like to say i really really like these pieces by geremie barme

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=021_promise.inc&issue=021

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=017_confession.inc&issue=017

both at china heritage quarterly which is worth checking out

Awesome dylannn, thanks stacks for all that. You've given me lots to go on.

iatee: I gather 中国不能再乱 is basically a belief that China is not capable of descending into chaos.

no, it's all too capable! 中国不能再乱 is what your intelligent sympathetic chinese friends say to you when you ask what they think about everything from tiananmen to language reform to ethnic conflict. deep sacrifices must be made to preserve social stability and harmony. ie. the problem with falun gong isn't that it's BAD but that it causes social instability and social instability is unacceptable in china.

ah

Oh god, 中文语法 will be the death of me. Makes sense now, i.e. 不能 = "must not be allowed to"

Wow, the regime's really under people's skin, isn't it? I mean I'm aware that a certain level of social order is demanded and expected in China but it doesn't help that the govt exploits and propels the sentiment (although in some cases I'm sure it has benefits for the whole).

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2011/08/campaign-2012-huntsman-should-know-better-on-china.html i love huntsman as us china ambassador. so many great awkward moments.

The irony here is that I can't read all the linked articles right now because I'm studying for 中文 exams next week.

nationalism is a big part of it too i guess. the national myth is unity, that china has always been china, has always been united, has always been one. china's golden ages come during unity under a single power, and the chaotic shitty times happen when the country is split up or conquered. the nation is a fortress against chaos and poverty and we better hold onto it.

i mean, as far as recommending something, i dunno. i read a good piece on the idea in general-- geremie r barme or jonathan spence? both of them have written enough about reform and the late 80s reform movement in general that they're a good place to start. but i mean it's the subtext of a lot of writing about reform in china. like the last poets said.

― dylannn, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:09 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah this is pretty otm - gonna be interesting to see much impact the putonghua initiatives will have on the overall makeup of the country. kind of depressing to think that pretty much all new media consumed in china will be in putonghua, and that local dialects (is it even okay to call them dialects?) can't share the same space. (I think this is right - but spitballin', feel free to prove me wrong here?) on one hand it's rad that nowadays a 20 something from guangzhou is gonna be able to converse freely with a 20 something from shanghai but...

deep sacrifices must be made to preserve social stability and harmony. ie. the problem with falun gong isn't that it's BAD but that it causes social instability and social instability is unacceptable in china.

― dylannn, Tuesday, August 30, 2011 11:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

yeah the big mistake the falun gong made was organizing and trying to put anti-party ads in a newspaper iirc? china has also had a history of sects and splinters going on to do major damage (i.e. taiping rebellion)

I'm reading through Spence's search for modern china right now and it's kind of lol to see the same problems in current china were uh, pretty endemic 300-400 years ago too! corrupt officials, problems collecting taxes, wealthy merchants hiding their assets through a tissue of shell companies and owners, nepotism...

...actually that's a pretty good summation of a lot of the problems all countries have today

nah you're right dude. chinese language policy is really, really heavyhanded. i was real interested to see the protests over cantonese use in guangzhou media last year. a serious regional languages like cantonese is pretty safe for the moment. wu and minnan have got tens of millions of speakers and are in decline but fairly safe. it helps that they're attached to major centers that are sort of politically and culturally powerful or just distant enough from the center or have a history of links with the outside world (this fits for guangdong, shanghai, fujian). but there are so many languages (or things that you can genuinely call dialects or topolects) that will disappear without anyone really noticing (unlike cantonese or wu, almost no media is produced in the language, no academic interest in them).

it's completely different from taiwan or vancouver (or hk?), where "speaking chinese" usually means speaking two, three, four chinese languages with some amount of fluency. in vancouver, being able to speak mandarin and cantonese is nearly a guarantee, then usually a hometown/province dialect.

heh yeah I have friends who teach in rural parts of China and they mention how they have students who come from towns separated by like, five miles (albeit maybe with a mountain or valley in between) and their dialects will be mutually unintelligible. so the big push for putonghua is certainly understandable but I'll be really saddened at the linguistic landscape in, say, 50 years.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTQ1NDgyNzY=.html

i pattern my chinese speaking after jia pingwa in this cctv documentary.

Is it true to say that the Chinese are so used to the state shaping their culture on their behalf that they're happy to let it continue?

Re the putonghua issue: Surely it would be far easier for a common-speaking China to mobilise against the government. It just seems like the current situation lends itself to keeping people in line and relatively isolated (this coming from someone who's never been part of an uprising and so is probably talking crap). Maybe the govt has such great confidence in its ability to maintain the status quo that it doesn't see a common tongue as a risk.

the communist party's nationalism isn't something they cooked up in 1949 and convinced people of. they're the people kindling that flame at present, but the myth of the chinese nation/the oneness of the chinese people is something that came up before mao. this isn't command economy YOU MUST LOVE THE NATION stuff as much as it's nationalism by popular demand. plenty of people hate the party but are quick to show it love for stuff like building an aircraft carrier and taking back islands from the philippines and building a strong nation after a hundred years of humiliation by foreign powers. -- this is why spence's book on the chinese revolution is interesting. it covers the last hundred fifty years or so of political change, rather than just focusing on the communist party.

china at ground level is relatively politically open right now (unless you're in tibet, xinjiang, or your criticisms reach a foreign audience). there's that creaking soviet state apparatus creaking above you and it locks a lot of people up or fucks up their lives but i think the first complaint about it would be, basically: it's not effective enough. it's too corrupt. it's bureaucratic and backwards. it's been taken over by capitalists who reward each other with cash and hookers. they're disappearing lawyers and smacking ai weiwei around and i'd hate to be a migrant worker in beijing, sure, but china is rock solid.

nationalism and the myth of the chinese race is an idea with pretty old roots (let's say that they start to crystalize during the qing dynasty, though, and part of it was the fact that the leaders of the qing were NOT chinese/foreign invasion) and at this point, the communist party is less about soviet-style intimidation and oppression. it's a lot more about playing the vibes of nationalism and showing why it's the only hope to keep things real.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEJbNPeYNz8

the communist party's nationalism isn't something they cooked up in 1949 and convinced people of. they're the people kindling that flame at present, but the myth of the chinese nation/the oneness of the chinese people is something that came up before mao. this isn't command economy YOU MUST LOVE THE NATION stuff as much as it's nationalism by popular demand.

Oh yeah, I totally get that Communism was just another flavour of the same approach they've been taking for generations. Also yeah, it seems to be in the blood of the people that they feed off the sort of approach that would kickstart a revolution just about anywhere else, mainly because they hold so much cachet in their historic ability to self-manage (again, please pull me up if I'm talking shit, just trying to coalesce what little I know).

there's that creaking soviet state apparatus creaking above you and it locks a lot of people up or fucks up their lives but i think the first complaint about it would be, basically: it's not effective enough. it's too corrupt. it's bureaucratic and backwards. it's been taken over by capitalists who reward each other with cash and hookers. they're disappearing lawyers and smacking ai weiwei around and i'd hate to be a migrant worker in beijing, sure, but china is rock solid.

Okay so I'm guessing this comes back to 中国不能再乱 in that, for all the missteps the highest level of govt is (or appears to be) taking, most people who care about those sorts of things appreciate the historic and prospective direction of the country and cut their losses. I assume that includes the massive sell-out of Communist/Maoist ideals in favour of the new race for property etc (although tbh I don't see how that can last, given some of the stuff Ai Weiwei said about those left behind in Beijing (in the link upthread)).

I'm really loving your posts btw. It's so hard to get a broad view of a country when so many people seem to disagree so vehemently about what's going on. I'll have to watch the yt video after work.

good article about english learning in china (click the link)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-china

I've often wondered about the wisdom of forcing literacy upon people who don't need it. Absorption is so much more valuable than classes (not that I'm excusing the quality of the classes), and if your trade and your whole world is farming, you can die never having to read much more than warning signs.

there's still a huge belief in the power of english, obviously, at all levels of society.

purely anecdotal, there's a lot of shitty shitty english education out there. but 1) there's increasingly an elite push for undergrad/grad programs just saying fuck it and going to 95% english (cheaper than studying abroad! or good preparation for it), 2) yeah, there's lots of rote learning of english by kids but some of it wears off on them and there are a lot of fucking kids in china that can communicate in english (this is more "purely anecdotal").

The big development over the next couple of years might be universities in the UK, Aus and US setting up campuses within China to deliver satellite programmes. It has been happening for a while but i can see it exploding.

most of the good English speakers I met from China also happen to be really fucking rich

I spent two weeks at a college in a 'rural' town (i.e. still maybe a million or two people living there) and the English level of the kids was... just... even the English majors...

Yeah, the state-school teachers generally aren't of a high standard outside big cities. It'll change, though. The commercial provision of English teaching is getting much more professional.

The big development over the next couple of years might be universities in the UK, Aus and US setting up campuses within China to deliver satellite programmes.

Our unis are big on setting up regional campuses (one even has one in South Africa) so yeah, very likely if it hasn't happened already. The Aus–China link is strengthening by the week atm.

yeah but who will be able to afford to attend those campuses?

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students come to the UK, Australia and the US each year as it stands. Depending on the pricing model, i could see it being pretty attractive to the growing number of middle-class families who can't afford to send their kids abroad but want the perceived status boost of an English-language degree.

There's an Australian organisation (RMIT, i think) that has 12k students in their Vietnam campus already. There's a market out there.

sorry if I'm being cynical and seeing it as a giant cash grab

parents who can afford to send their kids to study overseas are already pretty damn well-off relative to the rest of chinese society

Nah, it's a total cash grab. Transnational education's a multi-trillion dollar business. Standards tend to be decent but there's no doubt it further reinforces the division between haves and have-nots.

Ha, RMIT is where I'm doing my zhongwen course \(^__^)/

fwiw whenever I've seen the promotional material for our int'l campuses it's never clear about the proportion of local students v Australians. They all seem to happen in an exchange programme but I don't remember seeing any South African students in my old uni.

Oh and the students in the photos always look rich.

it's kind of crazy but the buying power of the renminbi in china is pretty equivalent to the buying power of the USD in america - so like a bottle of shampoo that costs $4 in america will cost around 3-4 RMB (sometimes less!) in China. (one reason why americans/most westerners feel like they are the KING OF THE WORLD when they come to China). so you can live by pretty decently on, say, a 4000 RMB a month salary, which is actually really really good if you're a recent college grad or someone who's not a big boss.

but then you try and use that salary to finance your kids education overseas and it's like, damn, education all of a sudden costs 10x what it does inside the country

this is pretty lol

http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90780/7443254.html

China has made remarkable progress in modernization in the last half century, while the same progress took developed Western countries one or two hundred years. China's growth has not only brought direct benefits to more than 1.3 billion Chinese people but also promoted the world prosperity as it has become the engine for world economic growth.

Certain international observers cannot find an answer to this question: How did China make such remarkable progress in such a short time?

"Certain international observers" looooooooooooooooool. I do not know where to start with this.

"waah it took you two hundred years to modernise and look, we just built a highrise in six years!!!! omg"

i just

Sorry for triple post but I know what's bothering me, it's that the article is exactly like when people write their own wikipedia pages. I keep wanting to put "(citation needed)" after everything.

Anyway there's also this (also re the People's Daily) http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/02/us-china-internet-idUSTRE78110S20110902

Basically the party wants to anticipate when some internet thing is likely to catch on and block it before that happens.

Once the government tries to control an Internet technology that has already become popular, it faces "fierce resistance and a backlash" from users, and also international criticism, said the newspaper.

"Clearly, in the future when developing and applying new Internet technologies, there must first be a thorough assessment, adopting even more prudent policies and enhancing foresight and forward thinking in administration," it said.

http://beat.baidu.com/?p=3515

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

we will start the 2012 thread on chinese new year's. the ayes have it.

very surprised at hu's blatant declaration that the US and china are in a culture war

wonder when china pop culture will 'get it.' like, for example, look at their cartoons - they just don't understand anthropomorphism. their shit looks so creepy. like beady-eyes, no expressions, dudes, japanese & american cartoons have big beady eyes for a reason

err *big expressive eyes

id like to see a chinese equivalent of rush limabugh style mock-chinese, preferably on youtube

feel like china's efficiency in mocking wite ppl langauges will have big implications for the kulturkampf

http://blogs.cfr.org/asia/2012/01/04/the-republicans-on-china-who-knows-what%E2%80%99s-up-and-who-doesn%E2%80%99t-2/

interesting take on hu's remarks

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/beijings-culture-war-isnt-about-the-us-its-about-chinas-future/250900/

reminded that so far the most strident efforts have been made against china's own culture-producers like 非诚勿扰

it's always been embarrassing to have to rep for chinese literature because there isn't a lot of it that i feel right repping for and everything that appears in english translation is hindered by being shittily translated (99% of it by howard goldblatt).

so i dunno. to see chinese literature today devote an issue to him... with a fucking self-interview... and everything in the magazine is basically howard goldblatt school of translation stuff. really overliteral and all the chinese idioms are matched with english idioms (which would work if english writing involved a lot of pithy phrases and shit).

anyways.

i was sort of stoked to see them finally drop a second issue because i was supposed to have an excerpt of northern girls by sheng keyi in it. but there was supposedly some "controversy" because it had dirty words in it (book revolves around a girl with huge breasts who fucks her way to shenzhen). but no.

"Has he sold out his prison-mates? Why else would he get such good treatment? A large piece of pork every time."

In any case, pork was a welcome addition to their meal. Sometimes they even joked about it:
"There were bristles on the piece I got. Lots of them standing straight up, like that you-know-what down below. Ha ha ha."

"Is your you-know-what as skinny as a pig's bristle?" someone would ask in jest.

now, this type of shit is basically chinglish to me. why can't we have chinese-english translation where the final result is natural, modern english???

"prison-mates"
"you-know-what down below"
"in jest"

The heat brings out the gamy smell of the beef, but, with the amelioration of spices, only an aromatic meaty fragrance remains.

It is a heavy fragrance.

It has an authentic, delicious flavor.

:(

http://www.ou.edu/clt/vol-2-1/fiction-li-ang.html

it's actually a decentish essay but to me, it's almost unreadable if i have to read

For those under the sentence of death each Thursday night's three-inch piece of pork and cake of tofu could very well mean his "last, sumptuous supper." :(((( why is last sumptuous supper in quotation marks? likely because it represents a chinese phrase but DUDE JUST FUCKING TRANSLATE IT. WHY KEEP TALKING ABOUT A BOWL-SIZED ETC. IN CHINESE YOU SAY SOMETHING IS THE SIZE OF A BOWL OR AS THICK AS A BOWL BUT NO ONE DOES THAT IN ENGLISH

but i really like li ang and the piece is interesting so i guess i just want to say it deserves a more natural, fluent translation and more people to read it.

goldblatt had the one crack at doing jia pingwa in english and fucked it up.

theory: people that study chinese literature are so caught up in the idea that each character is crucial and must be understood and communicated that they miss the idea and the vibe and the soul of the original.

theory: howard goldblatt and lots of the other dudes that get the few chinese lit translation jobs are REALLY OLD. (recent exception cindy carter for dream of ding village and a few more that i can't think of off the top of my head).

but actually: i think howard goldblatt is good as a digging in the crates type of dude and found lots of good stuff that nobody bothered with, especially in taiwan. and i always liked his translation of notes of a desolate man by zhu tianwen.

actually, i take back everything i said about him. that self-interview upset me. it's not his fault he's basically the only show in town.

eh well those are mostly theoretical translation issues. there's the fear of turning into a modern day constance garnett, i.e. someone who translates works into stiff victorian prose.

man i get all fucked up on this hu jintao shit and i forgget that this is the actual countyr where i live and i just took X and made out with a beautiful korean girl in a club bathroom listening to david banner we need and she unhooked her bra for me and i had to ask her the first or second row when i did tback up . god it's snowing in dalian and it's so beautiful and peaceful and all the sttreetsweeper men are out sweeping snow instead of dust and i have my spring festival train tickets and i love it her despite cultural war or whatnot. lol.

http://www.ou.edu/clt/vol-2-1/interview-wang-jiaxin.html

any misty poetry fans in this motherfucker？》》》》》

http://news.ftv.com.tw/NewsContent.aspx?ntype=class&sno=2012105L05M1

http://www.ministryoftofu.com/2012/01/photo-showing-payslip-of-a-chinese-sanitation-worker-strikes-chord-in-netizens/

posting only because I have been to zengcheng!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/11/british-chinese-racism/print

http://www.danwei.com/serial-killers-in-china/

normally i'm super interested in serial killer stuff but I had to stop reading, probably because the police response was so weak

Good look at the Taiwan election result: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137029/daniel-lynch/why-ma-won-the-elections-and-whats-next-for-taiwan-and-china

http://www.zhongnanhaiblog.com/?p=475

thanks to ilxor rent - a good summary of the differences between HK and China on the ground

I think the idea of serial killers in China scares the shit out of me because there would be no police to protect you

http://www.economist.com/node/21541716

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/01/18/iconic_good_samaritan_case_in_china.php

:O :O :O

http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/TKoY3j6yyyM/?resourceId=0_06_02_99

I like the way shanghaiinese sounds!

http://badcanto.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/mainland-scholar-many-hongkonger-are-dogs/

so uh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2uINfAKOxc

fucking A

he actually calls hongkongers 'running dogs'

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

www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/world/asia/china-leadership-transition/index.html

习近平 surprise.gif

Errr

xi jinping, sorry

rolling buried alive in china 2012 btw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02UMJESbwJg

Xi
May be the face I can't forget
The trace of pleasure or regret
May be my treasure or the price I have to pay
Xi
May be the song that summer sings
May be the chill that autumn brings
May be a hundred different things
Within the measure of a day

Hu are you
Hu Hu
Hu Hu

anyone have any recommendations for books on chinese history? i know there's thousands upon thousands of years of material, and i'm not quite sure where to start

interested in a certain period?

i only have a vague notion of it right now. i guess i'd like to start with qin, han, and three kingdoms, and work my way through ming. i'm interested in the culture and civilization aspect, and always found china pretty damn fascinating.

my focus is late imperial/modern china so i'm sure someone else can recommend better books on deep historical china but i'll throw out three

china's golden age: everyday life in the tang dynasty by charles benn. because the tang is the golden age and you need to read about the grandeur and supreme cultural development of yangzhou and xi'an during the tang.
the confusions of pleasure: commerce and culture in ming china by timothy brook-- absolutely 100% best book on ming china. divided by season, each season covering roughly a century. he charts the movement from agrarian society into advanced government/commercial powerhouse. i think this is a pretty common chinese history 101 book and everyone's read about the brick-- he uses the inscriptions on a brick to trace it back to a certain kiln, explains the system of paying taxes with labour, shows how the canal systems worked. lots of non-elite perspectives, but also talks about the ming tribute system, international relations. and check out the troubled empire by brook, which deals with the mongol invasion of china, the creation of the yuan dynasty, song dynasty loyalists, the cultural influence of the yuan on the song.
if you're going to be reading about the ming, i guess i like return to dragon mountain: memories of a late ming man by jonathan spence, a history of the ming through the eyes of a literatus, lots of poetry and courtesans and bureaucracy.
the imperial capitals of china by arthur cotterell does a good job at overview, by skipping through the various capitals of chinese dynastic regimes, goes from the semi-mythical shang to qing dynasty beijing.

these are all recent, too.

if you only read one: confusions of pleasure

these books sound pretty cool, thanks. i love reading about what everyday life was like through history

chinese ambassador on tv here notes that the graphic of china behind him is incomplete: no taiwan

Quite an interesting piece on the Chinese economy and how it has been changing

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/nathan-sperber/the-mayor-economy

it was good. i liked too this nathan sperber piece on macro control: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/02/macro-control-making-sense-of-a-central-concept-in-chinese-economic-policy/.

dylan is hefei worth visiting?