滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

There was like one other white people table and I got to feel all superior because they ordered bullshit like chicken fried rice and sesame chicken.

http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/12/how-andy-warhol-explains-chinas-attitudes-toward-chairman-mao/282665/

*massive yawn*

http://black-in-asia.com/post/71398835866/its-fascinating-looking-at-representations-of

http://chineseposters.net/themes/african-friends.php

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-renews-western-journalists-visas-after-months-long-standoff/2014/01/09/fde67b9c-792c-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html

Ramzy out. Jesus christ

http://shanghaiist.com/2014/01/10/taipei-vs-beijing-a-travelers-perspective.php

Hey Caroline Hasselle, fuck you

don't agree with some of those points but jeez it doesn't merit a "fuck you"

No it's bullshit "which of these countries makes me feel more like an entitled white tourist" flab

why does it matter if some white people want to vacation places with clean air and where all the websites they use aren't blocked? not everyone has to be about that ~realness~

Well they should go to Cancun then

3. Religion is an integral component of life in Taiwan.
Christianity has an obvious presence — my granddaughter goes to a Christian school. Buddhist temples in China are largely filled with tourists. It was the crowds of real worshipers in the temples of Taiwan that struck me. The temples I saw in mainland China were more like sterile artifacts. In Taiwan I could observe the religion in action and began to gain a greater understanding of it. It is a shame that such a rich part of the Asian culture has been wiped away in modern China.

...

10. I saw more ancient Chinese artifacts in Taiwan than in the Chinese mainland.
The Forbidden City and Summer Place were somehow disappointing - nothing but buildings — beautiful, but merely shells. All the good stuff appears to be in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Apparently this was because the KMT took it all, after China’s Communist Party (CCP) took over. Perhaps it was a good thing, considering the destruction of the many relics that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. It is a well worth a trip to see. You get a much stronger sense of the culture and history from seeing these relics.

You can convey these thoughts without saying bullshit like "It is a shame that such a rich part of the Asian culture has been wiped away in modern China" or "Perhaps it was a good thing [that the KMT took so many relics]"

"I just want to see Chinese people acting and performing in ways that conform to what I think Chinese people should be like"

i mean i would factually debate the claim that there's "more of the good stuff" in taiwan than in mainland at this point in history, but i wouldn't dispute that a lot of stuff was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and that that sucks. i also don't think that wanting to see certain artifacts in a museum is some kind of indefensible racialist objectification: museums are venues where cultures are performed.

as far as whatever sense of sacrament is lost in mainland temples i think westerners are far more to blame for that (kfc in a hutong right next to yonghegong), which obv is only right to point out. again i'm not sure what she factually means by people being "more genuinely religious" in taiwan, but yeah i mean whatever response i can imagine wouldn't be defensible. so that part is fucked up, i agree

Like museums elsewhere the museums in China have waaaaaaaaay more stuff than they can actually display at one time. What she means is simply that Taiwan has better copied Western modes of presenting historical artifacts, it's not about actual numbers of artifacts at all. She's being very lazy

Anyway all the "good stuff" isn't in Taiwan it's overseas, transported out on imperialist Western galleys floating on the blood of their Chinese victims http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/168296.html

i also don't think that wanting to see certain artifacts in a museum is some kind of indefensible racialist objectification: museums are venues where cultures are performed.

Yeah but the performance of culture, of historiography is also culturally mediated & a part of culture itself. Like I used to be among the people who would cover their mouths and gasp when I heard about hutongs being destroyed or temples being given fresh coats of paint. But really the notion of "preservation" as some kind of act where you only do what's minimally necessary to keep an artifact as it was back when it was created - that's bullshit. Like art museums in the West don't powerwash their paintings. If the Chinese want to keep everything looking fresh then I see no reason not to. Just as there can be a cultural preference for oldness there can be one for newness.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to attend the annual re-embalming of Mao. He's gonna look fresh as h*ck

2014 thread?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/world/asia/chinese-activists-test-new-leader-and-are-crushed.html

according to wiki - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet - 25% of internet users are chinese but only 3.3% of the web is in chinese & only 10 million mainland chinese ppl are fluent in english.

so my question is: what are ppl in china up to online?

i dunno, same as everyone else? streaming video, weibo, wechat, games, porn.

maybe the big difference is that most are connecting to the internet via mobile device

http://www.danwei.com/a-brief-guide-to-chinas-media-landscape-may-2014/

that metric seems to count only the number of top level domain websites, so maybe it's that internet usage in China is more centralized on a few sprawling sites (comports decently with my impression). also could be that china has 25% of the world's internet users but that many of them actually use the internet quite infrequently (this certainly couldn't be said about the younger generation, but i think there probably are a lot of very casual adults/elders who still get counted as 'users').

also: Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

ah not sure how I missed the 2014 thread. yeah this was really a question of where chinese ppl are online. lots of stuff I'm unfamiliar with on the danwei list. It's v interesting to see how&why online culture varies internationally, & I'm definitely much less aware of a chinese presence online in general compared with korea/india/japan. I wondered if it was a primarily a linguistic thing, and the related bigger q of how big a driver of worldwide english literacy the internet may or may not be. there's a distinction drawn between 'english speakers' & 'english users' (who can read english w/out having spoken or written fluency) which seems to explain the wiki figures I quoted. the mobile thing seems significant too. I don't know anyone who's spent much time on the mainland so thanks for helping w/ my inept wondering

Seems a good as place/time as any to ask if anyone's read Jason Ng's Blocked On Weibo?

couldn't find a 2015 thread but i had to lol at this: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/opinion/rent-a-foreigner-in-china.html

are white starving artists/writers flocking to china?

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

Here buddy

thanks pal