rolling china thread 2011

yeah. thinking back I think it's probably enough to acknowledge that there is going to be a pretty big cultural gap between china and the_west, and it doesn't really matter what the cause of that gap is, and it's tough to talk about these subjects without accusations of essentialism. or to look to china's conception of itself might be turning over the wrong stone.

http://www.danwei.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/9-11-on-China-e1315963034827.jpg

on 9/11 of course

that guy otm

http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/09/13/china-cracks-down-on-gutter-oil-a-substance-even-worse-than-its-name/

"China consumes about 22.5 million tons of cooking oil annually, and as much as one out of every ten restaurant meals has been cooked in waste oil(..)"

that's why chinese food tastes better in china

Source: South China Morning Post (9/14/11):
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a
0a0/?vgnextoid=bfd67c5fe7662310VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&ss=China&s=News

Brainwashing the only option, says writer
Agence France-Presse in New York

Banned Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, speaking in the United States for the
first time since fleeing his country, said on Tuesday his only crime was
to resist "brainwashing".

Liao, who spent four years behind bars for writing the poem "Massacre"
about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, said personal freedom in China
is only granted to those who surrender their spiritual freedom.

"In China, the biggest problem is brainwashing. If you don¹t have your
memory, or your conscience, everything is possible ­but you have to forget
about your personal stories," Liao told an event of PEN, a group of
authors active on human rights, at New York¹s New School.

Liao said he would have "lived a very good life in China" if he had
stopped trying to think independently.

The author of the newly released God is Red: The Secret Story of How
Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China said he is not a
political activist, but was persecuted simply for telling the stories of
ordinary people.

In his earlier book, The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories, China From the
Bottom Up, he recounted tales of people on the margins of the economic
superpower¹s deeply repressed society.

"I first started wanting to tell stories when I was in prisons. I was
locked up with unique people," he said, including traffickers, murderers
and thieves. "Gradually my brain was turning into a tape recorder."

"When I was first locked up I was a political prisoner. I didn¹t think I
had anything in common," he said, speaking through a translator.

"I felt like my brain was exploding. I couldn¹t even take their stories
any more. But it was like the only path for them: they wanted to tell
their stories to me and they wanted to tell me before they were executed."

"All the people I have interviewed, they have no interest in politics, but
they want the freedom to express themselves."

In his new book, God is Red, Liao explores the way that rural Chinese defy
official restrictions to follow Christianity.

Liao said that while he is not a Christian, he admires their determination
and faith.

Like other forms of self expression, all religions are permitted on one
condition: "First you have to believe in the Communist Party".

"If you are willing to pursue your freedom, seek out your freedom, then
you could be in trouble," he said.

Liao, who also played traditional Chinese instruments at the PEN gathering
and gave an intense recitation of "Massacre," is renowned for his
straightforward approach to his subjects, his quiet humour and courage.

Novelist Salman Rushdie introduced the Chinese writer on stage as one of
"the few people who are the real writers" around the world.

Liao did not discuss details of his departure from China earlier this
year, when he walked into Vietnam before making his way to Germany.

However, his more personal stories are becoming known through a prison
memoir, which has sold briskly in Germany, but has yet to be translated
into English.

He told the audience on Tuesday that he was known to other prisoners as
"the big lunatic" for his defiant gestures.

When a thief on death row asked him to organise for him "the same memorial
service as accorded to a senior Chinese leader, Liao obliged, writing a
eulogy that got him sent into solitary confinement as a punishment for 23
days. "That¹s why they called me the lunatic."

During his three days in New York, Liao said he had been stunned to find a
huge immigrant Chinese community in Flushing, an area of Queens. "I¹ve
never seen so many Chinese," he said to laughter, before describing how he
ran into "swindlers" trying to sell fake phones.

"It feels like that¹s going to be China without communism," he said to
more laughter.

China this year launched one of its biggest crackdown on dissent in years
in response to a wave of pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East.

Acclaimed artist Ai Weiwei was detained for nearly three months and last
year¹s Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, a writer and activist who has
been active in the Independent Chinese PEN Center, remains in prison.

Liao was barred from attending literary festivals in New York and Sydney
earlier this year prior to his self-exile.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/world/asia/china-sentences-four-uighurs-to-death-over-unrest.html?_r=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/world/asia/axe-wielding-farmer-goes-on-killing-spree-in-central-china.html

par for the course. thank god for china's strict ban on guns.

http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/4520

the attitude expressed by the farmers here is so typical. ugh

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/asia/kinmen-seeks-to-evolve-as-china-and-taiwan-improve-ties.html?pagewanted=all

I had no idea that kinmen even existed! :O

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/16/world/asia/0917taiwan.html

lol how the hell is this still in Taiwan?

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/09/16/world/asia/0917taiwan/0917taiwan-popup.jpg

yeah i tried to post the map and failed. it wd seem kinda difficult to defend no matter how many mines u laid down

100000 people live on that little thing!

I was v surprised to find out that this took place in the US

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/nyregion/couple-accused-of-stealing-food-money-from-red-apple-preschools.html

given that it seems every 3rd day a story comes out of china about some preschool principal feeding a class of 100 with 6 apples and pocketing the rest of the money

a lesser nation might see a conflict of interest in the directors of a chain of private preschools running a nonprofit school

smdh @ this as well

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-14/when-a-woman-dares-to-say-he-hit-me-in-china-adam-minter.html

In a Sept. 13 interview with China Daily, he said, "I hit her sometimes but I never thought she would make it public since it's not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders.”

fucking animal

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/asia/2011/09/09/ordos-boom-town-ghost-town

lol @ this

We ended up spinning around and around city blocks, searching for a store selling water. Eventually we found some - but not without the feeling we had gone on a treasure hunt. There is no major supermarket in Ordos, because not enough people live in the city.

This just seems nuts. I am neither an economist nor a dedicated, full-time financial reporter; but I do know Ordos is not habitable. The numbers might look good, but from a qualitative standpoint, there is a problem if you cannot buy bottled water around the corner. Something is just terribly wrong with this situation.

for reference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h7V3Twb-Qk

ladies and gentlemen, I give you...

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

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

http://i.imgur.com/VVG2Q.jpg

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

http://i.imgur.com/6IfIN.jpg

...the new Harbin Pharmaceuticals Plant

not *so* infuriating when you realize that apple is doing the equiv

http://cdn.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/1313264850-renderings-2-528x352.jpg

then again apple is the richest company in the world

http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=3791

lijia zhang responding to ai weiwei's beijing, plugging book

http://books.google.com/books/about/Streetlife_China.html?id=mN8Fn1w5VgwC

somehow reminded of this. i've liked this reader since i came across it. it halflooks like maximumrocknroll and half like a proper reader. good introduction and some of best writing on STREET LIFE in china. good stuff. check your local library.

haha, well she wasn't thrown into solitary confinement for 3 months! xp

I am picking this up from the library today

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520077966

gonna look for that streetlife book too

http://www.ted.com/talks/yasheng_huang.html

some older stuff

http://www.slate.com/id/2254176/

Even lesser disputes can lead to violence. My friend Wan Jia, a railway engineer, recently clashed with the workmen he hired to renovate his apartment. The contractor demanded an extra $1,000, and when Wan Jia refused to pay, he sent hired thugs to Wan Jia's office to intimidate him and follow him around. Wan Jia finally called the police.

But the police didn't care to get involved. They brought Wan Jia and the crew of thugs to the police station and left them alone in a room. "They said, 'It's your problem; deal with it yourself,' " Wan Jia told me. "As long as no one gets hurt too bad, the police don't care."

With no one to rely on but himself, Wan Jia called his wife and told a white lie about needing to take a last-minute business trip. He dug his heels in and stayed in the room for the next 26 hours. His opponents worked in shifts; at one point, Wan Jia found himself facing off against 10 men. But in the end, the contractor's general manager agreed to negotiate a new price—and Wan Jia was able to go home.

fucking crazy

has anyone read tom scocca's book "beijing welcomes you"? im intrigued by it cuz i love scocca's writing but i dont know anything about china/beijing

I don't know who that is but my friend recommended this book

http://site.whenabillionchinesejump.com/

dunno what he's like as a writer but it's supposedly super interesting from an environmental pov (for example, under a 'green GDP' calc China's GDP is actually decreasing per year)

reading an excerpt on slate and it seems pretty good

obv if you have no direct experience with a country you are going to be constrained to the lens of the person who's writing, could be good or bad

For some reason I couldn't imagine, deep deposits of broken eggshells filled the hollows in the dirt, along with broken bricks and burnt-out fuel cakes of pressed coal.

this is otm though, for some reason every refuse heap in china has a layer of broken brown eggshells on top, dunno why

I wonder if there are still de Tocqueville style "my first experience of America" books being published abroad

has anyone read tom scocca's book "beijing welcomes you"? im intrigued by it cuz i love scocca's writing but i dont know anything about china/beijing

― max, Sunday, September 18, 2011 9:17 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah been wondering too

you guys should read it, tell me what you think

most travel writing is just "man this place is really weird...and cool...and scary!" tho

well its not just travel writing, he lived there for a couple years during the run-up to the olympics. and iirc his wife is chinese, or chinese-american.

yeah but ~how much can you ever really know about someone else~

I mean it'll probably be more nuanced than most, but it'll still be from the perspective of an outsider (and that's not a bad thing!) - I'd prob treat it as 'creative nonfiction'

I tend to treat all nonfiction as creative though so don't mind me

arent we all outsiders tho think abt it

~kant~

you guys should read it, tell me what you think

― Whiney G. Blutfarten (dayo), Tuesday, September 20, 2011 8:00 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

sry, kant

I mean, writing about other cultures is tough! commenting about other cultures is tough. you are always treading a thin line between exoticizing/romanticizing that culture and being ethnocentric about that culture. things that appear outre to you may be totally normal if you were socialized in that culture. blah blah blah

by the same logic its in a way easier to see things abt foreign cultures

oh yeah totally. it's a tough balancing act though. I catch myself making sweeping generalizations all the time, it sucks, feels like I'm walking on eggshells

the world is a refuse heap

Subject: reporter killed after cooking oil story
***********************************************************

Source: South China Morning Post (9/20/11):
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2af62ecb329d3d7733492d9253a0a
0a0/?vgnextoid=4666d08d4f582310VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD

Reporter killed after 'gutter' cooking oil story
Agence France-Presse in Beijing

A journalist who had been following a scandal involving the sale of
cooking oil made from leftovers taken from gutters has been stabbed to
death, police and state media said on Tuesday.

Li Xiang, 30, a reporter with Luoyang Television Station in the central
province of Henan, was knifed more than 10 times early on Monday as he
returned home from a karaoke session with friends, the Zhengzhou Evening
News reported.

The laptop computer Li had been carrying was missing and police were
treating the case as a murder-robbery, but have not ruled other motives,
the report added.

Police said that Li "died in the early morning of September 19" but
declined to comment further as the case was still under investigation.

An editor at the television station declined to comment.

Li, who was due to be married in October, had apparently been following
the latest food scandal to hit the mainland, a "gutter" cooking oil scam
that led to the arrests of 32 people caught selling the carcinogenic
product.

Police in Henan and the eastern provinces of Zhejiang and Shandong have
found more than 100 tonnes of the recycled oil illegally made from
leftovers taken from gutters, the Ministry of Public Security said in a
statement.

The last post on Li¹s micro-blog on September 15 said web users "had
complained that Luanchuan county (in Henan province) has dens
manufacturing gutter cooking oil, but the food safety commission replied
that they didn¹t find any".

Bloggers said they suspected Li¹s death was related to his previous
reports on the "gutter" cooking oil cases.

"Luoyang Television Station reporter Li Xiang got stabbed to death, I
suspect it¹s related to his reports on Œgutter¹ cooking oil," a web user
said on Sina¹s popular social networking site Weibo.

"Li Xiang¹s stabbing death is the unfortunate outcome of investigating the
gutter cooking oil cases," another user said.

jesus

I should get a mod to rename this thread to "rolling depressing china thread 2011"

yeah i was gonna say

yeah... i was thinking that when i posted it, too: there's probably enough about gutter oil and tortured dissidents on here.

but what are you gonna do?

I've been reading a bit on China's incursion into Africa recently (much of it good news), I should start linking stuff from here.