滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

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?

TOP 5 DEAD OR ALIVE

1. shenzhen. everyone is under 35. everyone smokes but the air is clean. burger king. shopping malls. crowds. giant portrait of deng xiaoping watching over the philosophy of the new china made flesh. a city where most of the population is from away, arrived in the city to see what they can make of themselves: one of the reasons why it's such an interesting source of new ideas in business, literature, politics. you can walk to hong kong, which blows my mind still kinda, but it's not very hk-oriented and doesn't at all resemble its neighbor. still not too expensive to live there.

2. nanjing. Thirty years ago no bridge crossed the river at all. Even today the Yangtze redefines the country with a subtle absoluteness. It marks the immemorial divide between a soldierly, bureaucratic north and the suave, entrepreneurial south. Men dwindle in size and integrity as they go south (say the northerners) and the clear-cut Mandarin of Beijing becomes a slushy caress. The dust of the wheat and millet-bearing plains dissolves to the monsoons of paddy fields and tea plantation. The staple of noodles becomes a diet of rice, and the low cottages and symmetrical northern streets twist and steepen into labyrinths of whitewashed brick. ... At the confluence of these worlds lies Nanjing. colin thubron in 1987. this is the closest you can get to what china would be like if the nationalists had won the war (okay, taiwan but...) (the presidential palace where sun zhongshan was sworn in as the first president of the public and where wang jingwei led his collaborationist government is still a landmark, located now in a pleasure quarter named for the birthyear of new china). the cultured stink of jiangnan's lower cities + surprisingly cosmopolitan and liveable. easy to buy weed. good food. you can get to shanghai in an hour and a half, two hours, three hours by the slowest train, if that helps.

3. dalian. like the cities of the pearl river delta, it's quite young: ... modern historians Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary estimate that, during the period 1891-1942, some 25.4 million migrants arrived to Manchuria from China south of the Great Wall, and 16.7 million went back. This gives the total positive migration balance of 8.7 million people over this half a century period. This makes the scale of the migration comparable to the westward expansion in United States, the advance to Siberia in Russia or, on a smaller scale, the move to Hokkaido in Japan.. and it has a peculiar history, having been in close contact with/occupied by its northern and eastern neighbors quite recently. sprawls wildly. cold as hell. a destination for migrants from the north. doesn't have the conservative meanness of other cities in dongbei and is not considered to be part of the dongbei family by cities like shenyang or changchun or harbin. because of its youth and high profile mayors (like bo xilai, who made his name here), it's been scoured by development and is nicely ahistorical and culturally confused and liberal. its universities attract a great number of students from out of province and now out of country. my friends in dalian are arty and rugged. negatives: it's expensive; traffic is horrific and the public transit system is underfunded; food is weak; god, it's cold; the air is coal smoke for six months out of the year.

4. kaifeng. guy sorman talks about parks but some of the most parked out/"liveable" cities in china are some of the most culturally dead. most of those cities are the result of heavyhanded and nearsighted development by urban governments who've had to bulldoze something else to install a urinesoaked lawn or a treeless public square. kaifeng preserves what is deemed unattractive by modern chinese city planners: old shit and a city that wasn't built for universal car ownership. i sort of picked it at random to represent that. but i also live kaifeng. it was one of the ancient capitals and was the city depicted on the scroll "along the river during qingming festival" and was the largest city in the world until 11something until it was razed by manchurian tribes and lost its spot on the list to istanbul or whatever it was called at the time. for most of its history, it was very much on the edge of empire and, like xi'an and lanzhou, became a place where indigenous chinese yellow river culture met cultural influences from the north and far west. it's very different from the cosmopolitan urban environment of dalian or shenzhen. it's been overlooked (in favour of zhengzhou and luoyang) as a manufacturing/business/university center. and apart from a few sites, it's fairly unspoiled. the old city is still there and it's cheap and the people are nice and it's culturally alive and the food is amazing.

5. hangzhou. i was going to put ningbo on the list here, instead, to be contrarian, and then i thought i could get away with listing "suburban shanghai" as an option but what the hell, hangzhou. like suzhou, money and history and geography have allowed them to develop in attractive ways. unlike other cities, the attempts by the municipal government to turn it into some kind of a showcase of progress and modernity are sort of appealing. public transit works. it's walkable. like most other cities on the list, it's a university town.

haha i spent a few days in nanjing a few winters ago; i was legit depressed by that place, went to the memorial museum, twas awful. i guess you do get a sense of age & history thru the tall trees that line a lot of the streets, just seemed like a sad place overall to me. but i should visit in the spring

gonna call out chengdu as being overrated, everybody in china is all like 'man chengdu rocks' but its not all that great. i wanna visit chongqing

i would for sure love to spend more time in shenzhen

one of the skyscrapres there looks like its made out of literal gold

6. yantai. weihai, up the coast, always makes liveable cities ranking lists in china, and everyone knows qingdao, the other major city of coastal shandong. but i like yantai. it's a bit more rugged and lazy than its coastal cousins. but it's cheap and you can go to the beach or wander through ancient smashed fishing villages. seaside development is ugly as hell, but beyond the curtain of gaudy hotels along the water, it's a great city. amazing food. negatives: korean sex tourists and more dog meat restaurants per capita than anywhere on earth (don't get me wrong, i'm cool with eating dogs but dog meat restaurants that serve budget conscious korean sex tourists aren't something you want great amounts of in your city); the development of tourist sites like penglai pavilion has turned them into eyesores, but they're still sorta beautiful despite the shoddy restoration and crowds; coastal china is not exactly an environmentalist's dream, but with a little work you can find spots that are superficially not too ruined.

7. xiamen. like dalian, it always makes most liveable city lists. let me tell you: dalian is unliveable if judged by my personal metrics of liveability. it's sprawly and congested and cold and its showcase features are cheesy "scenic areas" and empty public squares. but dalian and xiamen are liveable in spite of their lame showcase features. xiamen is dope. hometown of lai changxing. negatives: you can't understand anyone; will be overrun by taiwanese soldiers when the mainland is retaken.

8. kunming. yeah, probably overrated but i dig it. but i also visited it after a few months in guizhou.

9. xi'an. sentimental favourite but god, it's ugly.

10. kashgar. before the final third of the old city has been bulldozed.

i feel like changsha is the new chengdu.

you ever order that photobook by rian dundon? changsha? feel like u would vibe to it

http://vimeo.com/43122647

i have it and its pretty great

i got it! i love it.

xi'an i dont remember much of besides walking on top of the wall

one city i'd like to revisit is hohhot, i got a cool vibe from it even though i spent like half a day in it en route to riding ponies in the steppes, plus its probably the city with the best name to pronounce in chinese

i feel like i walked on top of a city wall in nanjing too... could be misremembering

dylannn that is fantastic, and is already forming a basis for my 2014 itinerary

i think i've visited more cities in china than i have in the us : / *moves to china*

dalian is unliveable if judged by my personal metrics of liveability.

i think i meant to say that i think it's unliveable based on the things that are used to generate these lists. i think that's what i meant. it succeeds as a city despite the fact that it's unwalkable and its downtown is being shopping malled out.

yo, double A, my list of cities to visit would be totally different from my list of cities to live in! dalian isn't much fun to visit. neither is nanjing, arguably.

ah right. my interest is greater then just holidays because my future work plans could ride on which cities i like and dislike (e.g. i know plenty of people who work and have worked in dalian), so chunks of this holiday will happen with that in mind

http://dektol.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/deep-sea-diver-danny-lyon-in-china-2005-2009/

the girl in the coal truck.

what do they think of dalian, AA?

i think it makes a big difference whether you're trapped in the development zone, which is a wasteland, or in some other distant suburb (the shame of having to admit that you live in ganjingzi!), or right in the mess of the city. it's another city that's changed a lot since i first went there in 2006-- i lived there for a year, last year, and found that it had changed for the worse in many ways.

i like a lot of things about dalian but as i said, the aspects of the city that are promoted... those parks and beaches and liveability... are a sham. the carefully engineered public entertainment districts are horrible places to spend time, and public parks in china usually don't function as public parks function in the west, although they're put in place with the same imagined frisbee throwers and whatnot, and are often just vanity projects for whatever municipal government officers that need to put something on their resume, placed without care, poorly designed. and unlike a lot of older chinese cities (so, most of them), you either need a car to get around or a great deal of patience. for such a wealthy city, public transit is poor and underfunded. the other thing you'll notice is that even though it's a university town, the 文青 haven't really gained a foothold and outside of a few enclaves, it's pretty conservative and business-oriented. it's more liberal than the rest of dongbei but the atmosphere is completely different from what you'll encounter down south (part of it is the lack of any great literary or artistic heritage but there's also a certain conservatism or northern pragmatism that was first pointed out to me by dalian natives). also, the air sucks.

that's what i have to say about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Y3URkpEFA

let's watch a documentary about artists in beijing in 1990

haha

i watched 'ai wei wei - never sorry' last week

the people i know who have been to dalian have said it's nice (and namedrop the bay), but in a nonplussed way; and the people who live there are mainly proud. all of them work/worked in that software park west of the city.

Bloomberg TV ‏@BloombergTV 11m
BREAKING: Magnitude 7 quake hits near Leshan, Sichuan, China

seems like it actually happened here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya'an

hold tight everybody and hope nobody on ilx is near the earthquake right now!

I am in Xi'an right now and really loving it, especially the Muslim neighborhood (yes i'm a lol tourist). Today we fly to DunHuang, then on to Urumchi and Kashgar by train. Lovin' this thread, keep the insights / opinions / recommendations / truth bombs flowing.

apparently the epicenter was 1300 meters underground, so far it seems like no casualties

well shit http://i.imgur.com/DG2ndUG.jpg

also it was 13km underground, not 1300 meters

lol steph is in sichuan right now http://i.imgur.com/grXSnjA.png

13km?! Why, that's almost... (thinks hard)... almost 10x deeper than 1300m!

http://i.imgur.com/jMF6gsE.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/g2BzzPa.jpg

well judging by these pics there will probably be casualties

:\ http://i.imgur.com/lqmF7K7.jpg

already 2 reported dead http://china.dwnews.com/news/2013-04-19/59166150.html

http://news.163.com/13/0420/09/8ST6Q3FN0001124J.html#sns_weibo more than a 100 casualties so far

government is mobilizing 2000+ troops

and i'm signing off

chinese media reporting 46 dead right now.

i have a friend in guiyang that says she felt it but who knows.

positives: not in as fucked up an area as in 2008 / better disaster plans in place / far weaker quake

still, fuck

the official death toll is at 78. i don't want to just dispassionately update that number over and over again.

pictures from ya'an look fucked. lots of video from chengdu and chongqing of people wandering around outside. lots of this on weibo:

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan_zpse947b49c.jpg

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan2_zpsc6935cf3.jpg

"16 year old junjun died when his neighbor's house collapsed and crushed his bedroom. his grandmother explained while weeping, he was just about to write the middle school entrance exams. today was the weekend, so i wanted him to sleep in. if i had got him out of bed a little bit earlier, he'd be fine."

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaanpanda_zps2ae09988.jpg

http://s.weibo.com/weibo/%E5%9C%B0%E9%9C%87

if ur interested

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan3_zps00071107.jpg

12:40, a vehicle carrying 17 soldiers and emergency workers plunged off a cliff, killing one soldier. the huaxi metropolitan is reporting that the vehicle swerved to avoid a car ahead of them on the road that had blown a tire. let's remember to stay off the roads in disaster areas, save them for emergency vehicles. in this picture a soldier burns three cigarettes in tribute to his deceased comrade.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan4_zpsbc729a87.jpg

meanwhile sichuan tv is playing anti-japanese dramas

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/yaan5_zps959e3742.jpg

some aerial pics here http://news.backchina.com/viewnews-240965-gb2312.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=B7qmEsjRN4w#at=12

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

Here buddy

thanks pal