滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

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

some conspiracy theories on weibo, not surprising because weibo loves conspiracy theories and after 512 2008 there were plenty of issues that took a while to shake out: geng qingguo's predictions about the quake, school collapses. lots of jokes about guo meimei (http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/stories/guo-meimei-red-cross-controversy-pissing-off-chinese-netizens.html).

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6c0eae0a-a95d-11e2-a096-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2R4yTy6vf

li keqiang in sichuan. mention of reservoirs as a cause (and the three gorges dam were mentioned in 2008).

WEIBO REPORT, WHAT ARE THE TOP 10 TOPICS ON WEIBO RIGHT NOW

1. LINGLONG ROAD - beijing, haiding district. four cars collide, three catch on fire and start exploding. dog died, a guy's balls were on fire.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/63e10c60jw1e40ujvc8s4j20c80pomzj_zps47cb7eff.jpg

video here: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTQ2Nzg3NTI4.html

2. ZHU LING - qinghua student, victim of thallium poisoning, case unsolved but all signs point to her roommate, sun wei, whose personal emails telling friends how to post on message boards promoting her innocence were exposed and whose family happens to be connected (father is cppcc member, uncle former dep mayor of beijing)(this is why the zhu ling case is a sensitive topic). her roommate came out with a new, combative message protesting her innocence.

3. YIBIN - powerful aftershocks in yibin, sichuan, majorish city 5 million people, 200 km from ya'an, quite a bit of damage.

4. EARTHQUAKE

5. YANG CHENGYI - low level local cadre in quakezone removed from post. took the deputy county governor post last year. weibo commenters say: he wasn't doing anything wrong, just fucked up by not making a big show when his bosses rolled through. yang chengyi, honest and good natured to the end, told the reporter through tears: "the job isn't important now-- if i can be of any service, i'll be there."

6. YA'AN

7. SUN WEI - see item #2

8.LIAO ZHI - liao zhi is a dance teacher from hanwang county in sichuan. she lost her daughter and mother-in-law during the wenchuan earthquake in 2008. she also suffered her own injuries, including the loss of her legs. she recovered well and was fitted with prosthetic legs. she continued dancing, just as before. after the earthquake this week, she rushed to ya'an to do rescue and relief work. wearing her prosthetic legs, she delivered food, clothes and generators, and helped erect shelters. her name is liao zhi and she's truly an outstanding woman.

http://i937.photobucket.com/albums/ad215/jiaoqu/7af40ad162d9f2d3cbed95bca8ec8a13622762d0f603ecd9_zps211bcadc.jpg

9. FUDAN UNIVERSITY POISONING - similar to the zhu ling story, a grad student at fudan was poisoned by her roommate after a dispute about paying for water. roommate has been arrested. calls for fundraising efforts for the family, conspiracy theories. they say the fudan poisoning case started over a dispute about water fees. i'm a bit worried. when i first got to my dorm, my roommate and i had a little disagreement over water fees. he said he shouldn't pay as much because he never drinks water. now, i really want to thank my roommate for not murdering me.

10. ZHANG XUEBING - shanghai public security boss was possibly (according to hk media) disciplined by the party for fucking around on his wife, having fake passports, and being generally a bad seed popped up again today in a local government symposium heavily covered by the media. so, who knows that's up with this guy.

makes it look like poisoning is a common thing in china. your neighbors had a big noisy party last night? no biggie, just poison them.

Looks like I'll be in Weihai for a few days in July. Anyone know about cool stuff in the area? Changdao Islands sound kind of interesting from the little information I can find: fishing villages + temples, Westerners allowed only very recently.

that's pretty awesome. i don't know anything about weihai. looking at it on a map. i would suggest you go to the most northeastern corner you can find. take a stone. throw it as hard as you can at north korea. maybe you'll hit something.

*inadvertently starts stone war with NK*

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/apr/25/china-xinjiang-sufi-shrines