rolling buried alive in china 2012

dylannnn I'm not big on chinese lit on general, but thought you might find this interesting

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/china-stories

hey, bo, where you wanna go?

lai changxing, smuggler, pimp and folk hero, subject of the great book inside the red mansion, who made it to canada and had a good run before being kicked out and sent back to china with a promise not to kill him...

going on trial
in xiamen

http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/stories/hierarchies-of-snobbery-and-contempt-by-chinese-netizens.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkRkAS11k2A

china is like a bunch of 12 year olds arguing whether the ps3 or the xbox360 is better xp

right. this is pretty absurd.

taking it serious for a second...

Social Networks: Facebook > Kaixin > Renren > Tencent Pengyou

u on any of these these dyao? i was surprised that facebook is like the one site that people are willing to bother downloading freegate for (FG same initials as its #1 moneygiver FAL** GO** and the u.s. state department i think). i sort of just set it aside until i realized everyone i knew was on it (that was under 35 and prob wealthy + spoke english). i checked out renren and kaixin but hated both. and i actually like qq pengyou because it has the qq userbase
just like weixin
which is the most necessary thing to have on your mobile device in china (love the LOOK AROUND feature).

Cell Phones: Blackberry > Apple > Xiaomi > HTC > Samsung > Sony Ericsson > Nokia > Motorola > Lenovo > ZTE > shanzhai mobile phones

mannnnnnnnnn... i don't even know what xiaomi is. blackberry shouldn't be on there. htc is a step above shanzhai. apple is #1 for sure. samsung is #2, i think! nexus is def widely coveted and snobbish.

Fast Fashion: Topshop > Zara > H&M > Forever 21 > Vera Moda > Metersbonwe/Yishion/Bossini.

http://www.granta.com/New-Writing/Shen-Congwen-a-letter

hey u guys think shen congwen ever banged ding ling?

the granta CHINA WEEK was boring. never want to read another interview with mo yan again.

not on any of the chinese ones, but a lot of my friends are on renren, and of course everybody has QQ + weibo

everybody in HK is on facebook

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/half-a-world-away-a-familiar-name/

Is HK firewalled?

nope

that's why google.cn redirects to google.hk

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/4/24/bo-guagua-statement-to-the-crimson/

harvard must be thrilled at the uptick in web traffic

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so ah chen guangcheng escaped??

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/activists-blind-chinese-lawyer-flees-house-arrest-16224458

so should i read The Fat Years?

what else do you have to do?

I cna't keep up with the chen guangcheng saga it's too much

big mords.
as i said above
it reminds me a lot of late qing/republican era utopian novels/national allegory novels. sort of unsophisticated somehow and it isn't helped by the oldfashioned translation.
more interested to read about than actually read.
listen to the eleanor wachtel interview.

i'm guessing he's not leaving on hillary's plane
as he's asking
but i've been wrong about stuff like this before. but hiding out in the us embassy was probably a good move longterm even if possibly they weren't 100% honest with how they dealt with him.

this is going to sound terrible, but it's so rare to read a contemporary novel that really matters to any ppl anywhere - or at least it seems that way to me. that's at least 80% of my interest. the other 20% is that i have a thing for dystopias.

http://shanghaiist.com/2012/05/07/photos_college_grads_dress_as_migra.php

these people are really gross

mordy: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2012spring/koonchung.php

that review was written by my former TA who knows his stuff

agree with everything there and it was what i was trying to say

fits in tradition of most modern chinese fiction -- didactic, characters are wooden and moved around in simplistic plots with the most inelegant fiction moves you'll ever see, dialogue often turns into lectures on the lesson that the work is trying to inform us about

and of course, modern chinese lit has a small stable of translators (goldblatt & duke account for 99% of every chinese novel in translation i think) that seem incapable of turning chinese into modern english. the translations often remind me of the english of novels of the 40s and 50s. so much so much bad chinese-english translation.

http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/1280

v interesting, confession I once thought about doing comp lit for a living

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/02/06/120206fa_fact_chang?currentPage=all

I had no idea that leslie chang was married to peter hessler

not really a fan of that style ofw riting though, a little too smug, positing america + historical china as better paradigms. uhh, america is pretty fucked up too, and historical china is not that much better than current china

hessler's book about driving in china (which is really good) is dedicated to her and i think
factory girls was dedicated to him

i think i wrote briefly about du lala's promotion on chinese littranslation site paper republic
not sure. but it's fairly horrifying. chang's piece here isn't... .... bad..............

Shanghai Index drops 64.89 points on anniversary of Tiananmen Square (which occurred on 6/4/89)

o_0

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-04/tiananmen-date-match-bars-searches-for-china-stock-index.html

Provocative analysis of how the Chinese economy is rigged to the benefit of the elite:

http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2012/06/macroeconomics-of-chinese-kleptocracy.html

no surprises there

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/30/world/asia/hong-kong-national-education-controversy/index.html

sigh

Interesting speculation on how the Bo Xilai situation may play out and what it all means:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/aug/02/bo-xilai-unanswered-questions/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvb1kjP2mSY

lol my dad taught me these exercises when I was 7 -_-

feels good man

massages seem like a disgusting indulgence when i'm in the western world but in the mystical east i like them because 1) xxx xxx x xxxxxxx xx xxx xxx and 2) the intense face massage where your sinuses are pounded and you feel the masseuse's fingers going into these hidden miniature holes in your face, feels like your skull is being dismantled.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/world/asia/hong-kong-voting-for-legislature-is-heavy.html?_r=1

interesting story about 1) support for pro-democracy candidates having some success 2) pro-beijing candidates having some success (article suggests part of the success is through gaming the byzantine hk electoral system):

The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong used this arrangement to its advantage, running multiple slates in election districts across Hong Kong and using its formidable logistical network to guide tens of thousands of supporters to vote for one or another of its slates. As a result, the party won a series of seats for its top-of-the-slate candidates despite a weak overall vote count.

and there's this element, which has been mentioned before:

Only 40 of the legislature’s seats are elected by the general public; the other 30 are chosen by industries like banking and by professions like the law and Chinese medicine. These functional constituencies, as they are known, are mostly dominated by people who have connections to mainland China, many of whom have investments there; they tend to choose pro-Beijing lawmakers.

also interesting that the "national education" program has been set aside for the moment.

i had dinner in shenzhen a little while ago with some women that graduated college in the late-80s and were involved in the student movement (first time i ever heard of smashing bottles in protest of deng xiaoping-- i always thought deng came out okay in 89 and didn't realize there was much protest directed at him. i always thought his concessions to smashing protest was understood as self-preservation, because he was so linked to hu yaobang and zhao ziyang. and then in 92, he basically restarted the reform process with his southern trip and swung influence away from the hardliners. but this was just how i understood it). they had lots of stories about their fathers, who were the first people going into hk in the 80s and how they came back with books, magazines, news and hk was like a gleaming beacon of freedom (another common story: after 89, the news from hk stopped and their fathers wouldn't say shit about what they had seen/heard about tiananmen and the crushing of the student movement and it clearly freaked them the fuck out). but as soon as i mentioned anything like, say, being shy about speaking mandarin in hong kong and disturbed by "national education" and politicians speaking mandarin or being unnerved by the legions of 7-series with 粤 plates and the way mainland political and business influence would change the city in negative ways (my opinions are mostly emotional and maybe nearsighted and wrong and show a superficial understanding of hong kong's situation), i was met with unexpectedly fierce nationalism. one woman said that in shenzhen when they learned that hong kong would return to china in 97, they were saddened, but that now it's just inevitable and right that hk be absorbed back into the people's republic as quickly as possible because IT'S PART OF CHINA. they also reminded me that hk has no future outside of china: no resources! how many financial centers does china need? hk only made a living when china was closed! yeah.

elsewhere

http://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/gazettetimes.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/2/be/2bedb1c8-f96c-11e1-9c2e-0019bb2963f4/504ac6f6e9c02.preview-620.jpg

Citing “strong resentment from the local Chinese community,” the Chinese government has asked the city of Corvallis to force a Taiwanese-American businessman to remove a mural advocating independence for Taiwan and Tibet from his downtown building.

before i saw the images, i expected it to be a little more subtle...

xp hk needs china like a forklift needs broccoli. btw singapore's doing all right w/out resources or indon/malayan control, so idk maybe those people are not into regional comparisons when they're poised to consume the region's biggest open market.

I've not been to shenzhen but it always struck me how shenzhen seemed quite jealous of hk (despite being a sez pilot), but in hk you'd be forgiven for not knowing that shenzhen existed (although I couldn't read 简体 (much less 繁体) when I was last there, so maybe there's a whole 深圳 consciousness that I just didn't see). it seems to be the destination of choice for tourists to hk who want a better range of knock-off shit.

my feeling was the opposite, shenzhen felt far more selfcontained and less hk-oriented than i expected. i'm always surprised that so few shenzheners i talk to have never been to hong kong. but still, maybe i was talking to the wrong people, because there are a couple hundred million border crossings a year at shenzhen/hk.

shenzhen-hk relationship is defined by econ development i guess, rather than like cultural/political trends. shenzhen and hk are both economic rather than political powerhouses and their political role is defined in economic terms (not sure if this makes sense but i don't know how to say it in a way that makes sense). and looking at hk and shenzhen's economic relationship, shenzhen needs hong kong less and less: the centers of shenzhen have moved away from tight up close against the border (the first SEZs in shenzhen were chosen for proximity to hk, right?) and the new central business district has been intentionally cityplanned distant from territorial crossings, and the old idea of 店前厂后 is outdated because shenzhen now functions as both 店 and 厂. if in china, there's a big split between economic vs. political power center (maybe this isn't even true), hong kong will continue to be marginalized esp in comparison to shenzhen.

^------ not sure how much of this is actually true or is expressed in a way that makes sense

www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=2100

slightly related. this is a really good collection of essays on pearl river delta history. but mostly covers a span of history that ends in 49, when there is an end put to major exchange between hong kong and the rest of guangdong.

"The main inspiration was G. William Skinner's idea that Chinese history has been a pattern of unique structural transformations of regional systems."

hong kong def needs china in order to stay alive

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/foolish-and-backward-nation-a-self-effacing-chinese-satire-of-america/261946/

http://www.triciawang.com/bytes-of-china/2012/6/23/mapping-the-city-first-stop-sex-workers.html

i like her blog. i think she's pretty. american ethnographer, who we last noticed working a food cart in a suburb of shanghai.