Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

i feel like... it was sort of very much in keeping with the way that local governments/police forces work... like, there was a legal process that should have been followed but they mostly used the law as a threat ("it's easier this way, you might end up being banned for five years, being blacklisted" / "if there's a trial, your company will be in really big trouble but if you just leave and come back in a legal fashion you can continue work"), a method of coercing me into doing what they wanted me to do. i ended up volunteering to take part in an extrajudicial deportation, if that doesn't sound too over the top.

minor corruption at the detention center was rampant. you could tell who had cash/connections based on when/how much they were smoking, what they got to eat, how often they got visits from family, etc. most of the other people i came in contact with were either petitioners or petty criminals that weren't facing a real trial but just being held for a few days.

but yeah, everyone was extremely nice, the warden, the police at the prison, the guards (mostly early 20s goofy boys with large hairstyles and tight jeans), the other prisoners....

dylannn i hope stuff is okay where you're at! xx

it's all good! the whole process wasn't horrible, alhamdulillah-- more like, just, vaguely insulting and surreal. i have the privilege of holding a foreign passport, which the majority of people caught up in the same system don't have.

i feel like... it was sort of very much in keeping with the way that local governments/police forces work... like, there was a legal process that should have been followed but they mostly used the law as a threat ("it's easier this way, you might end up being banned for five years, being blacklisted" / "if there's a trial, your company will be in really big trouble but if you just leave and come back in a legal fashion you can continue work"), a method of coercing me into doing what they wanted me to do. i ended up volunteering to take part in an extrajudicial deportation, if that doesn't sound too over the top.

― dylannn, Wednesday, January 29, 2014 12:58 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

I spent the last week learning about this kind of stuff

To me, it sounds like you got caught up in a internecine squabble between your company & some other organization and unfortunately you were the pawn that got sacrificed

IDK though I also know that China has issued new visa regs in the past year so maybe it's just part of a general broader crackdown

Not gonna fuck around with the PSB anymore though

Damn I remember Jianlibao

Delicious drink

Used to get it in Chinatown

The big draw was that it had honey mixed in

Damn shame you can't get it anymore

Yikes, dylannn.

Whoa- that's crazy! How long were you in the jail altogether?

what a weird story man

19 days from arrest to flying out of beijing.

Sheesh. I guess if you stay in hotels when you travel, they're supposed to take care of that registering with the local police stuff for you. Still scary though.

the hotel takes care of that and they send the photocopy of your passport and the necessary forms straight to the psb. otherwise, if it's not in a hotel, you've got 24 hours to register.

Yikes!

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1416497/xu-zhiyongs-trial-makes-mockery-beijings-pledge-enforce-rule

Jerry predictably (and righteously) rips into the CCP over the Xu Zhiyong case

i had the opportunity to watch a lot of tv the last month and i love 中国好歌曲/sing my song. i will embed youtube videos of performances now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd5Y19pF6EA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6POjXt4Hm0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yqc8QwtcBA

all three of these videos involve the judges crying
ranging from manful weeping to hysterical sobbing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSgVluV93a0

《咱们结婚吧》 first episode with engl subtitles. not the freshest show right now but i adore it.

My mom made me watch them and the first guy was the only guy I liked. Chinese dashboard confessional

The judge from Singapore has such a big Singapore accent, also endearing how she slips in and out of English

Also thought it was bullshit that they waited til the last possible second to pull the lever for my man. I woulda slammed as soon as I heard him hit the high note on the chorus

Also kind of interesting that he wrote the song that the last yi dude on the show used and sang!

Also he's hella short

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCmDB2X-bsQ

tanya meets a fellow singaporean

Is this the thread where we wish people a Gong show fat hoe?

the 莫西子诗 i like above all else. i saw it on cctv 3 the first time and caught the cctv 1 rebroadcast the next day so i could record it on my phone. when he hits the first 这颗心就稀巴烂, his girl singing along to 你呀你 终于出现了 and then can't hold it together or decide if she's crying or laughing, the fucking story about her letter. kills me.

http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/30/why-the-u-s-embassy-releases-pollution-data-in-beijing-but-not-in-delhi/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

and i didn't realize Delhi’s air is roughly twice as bad as Beijing’s when measures of one of the most toxic pollutants are compared.

Yeah somehow I ended up in Beijing during the week when it's experiencing unusually low air pollution

Like the PM 2.5 was below 25 today, I think

http://i975.photobucket.com/albums/ae232/daggerlee/SH/29738B1D-20EC-4F5B-942A-32D40380A18F_zps2pvjawsn.jpg

Took this on New Year's Day, then left the country for 5 days

Came back and it was still like this

I don't know you anymore Beijing

*hears PLA shouting during drills through my window*

Ahhh, I miss Beijing

I'll have to wait til I get back to Shanghai to find out but I definitely feel like my VPNs aren't as crack as they are in Shanghai

Feel like the Party has extra-secret-battle-hardened internet filtering out here in the capital

"Chinese dashboard confessional"

Dashboard Confessional wishes. This guy is the real deal. Damn.

Well it wasn't just in reference to his singing voice, also to the lyrics (which the judges comment on)

The title (and chorus of the song) translates to (roughly and directly) "If I die, I must die by your hand"

I actually think that's the reason the judges held back - it's a bit too morbid and melodramatic

But as the starter of the only Chris Carrabba thread on ILX I obviously love it

if you didn't light it
it can't be called a flame

if your hands didn't touch it
it can't be called a gem

you finally appeared
we only exchanged a glance
it tore my heart apart
the whole world fell to pieces

if i can't die by your hands
living is meaningless

you finally appeared
we only exchanged a glance
it tore my heart apart
the whole world fell to pieces

when i die in this life
i want to die by your hand
i want to die by your hand
i want to die by your hand

Excellent translation

Man the other family in our tour group brought along a piece of horse sausage on our trip and I had some

Feels a bit inauspicious to start off the Year of the Horse with that but otoh I've had hundreds of burgers and wings and stuff during the years of the Ox & Rooster etc.

It tasted good tho

can't wait til 2018 and 2020

Was reassured that eating a horse in the Year of the Horse has no inauspicious effects

In related news, I'm thinking about getting a puppy

http://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/1419428/china-losing-status-worlds-factory

Feel like this has been a popular idea in the past couple of years but wondering what does the data say? Not a WSJ analyst so don't know what the relevant numbers are but do the gross manufacturing output numbers point to a decline here, is what I'm wondering

I guess I find myself also thinking about the descriptions of the Pearl River Delta region seen when Obama questioned whether or not Apple could move all its factories to America

Like the close confluence of these factories where if a new part were needed it could be developed and prototyped and sent into production and then to the factory that needed it, all in a dazzlingly short timespan that wasn't possible in America

I don't know if China's advantage is simply just its 'cheap labor'

xpost
in canton the arguments that i always heard and which convinced me were -- even with costs from rising wages and cost of land, etc. china maintains an edge by: cost of/access to raw materials (africa or southeast asia might be cheap but you might end up shipping your raw materials or semi-finished materials from china), expertise + efficiency (the speed at which you can go from an empty lot to putting finished product in containers is faster than anywhere else, and even if you're paying a chinese factory worker more, they do it better and faster than anywhere else), infrastructure, shipping + you have a huge consumer market RIGHT THERE, even before you put it on a boat + the longterm financial plan in china doesn't depend on or support the gameplan of making the cheapest shit for the most people possible, so southeast asia and africa (with chinese investment even) taking over some of the market while china transitions up the foodchain is fine, but for now making cheap shit in china is still more profitable and easy than making it other places.

Wow ask and ye shall receive

Full year 2013 China GDP was released on January 29. The total was just over $9 trillion USD for the first time, at CNY 56.9 trillion (2013 average CNY/USD rate: 6.313). That’s up 7.67% over 2012 (and is the level the United States was at in 1992, in 2009 dollars; versus just about $16 trillion today). Here is a significant fact: as of the end of 2013, China’s services sector is officially the largest segment of its economy for the first time in the modern era, at 46%, versus 44% for industry and manufacturing and 10% for primary activity such as farming. That updraft in the share of services started in about 2006, and should keep going for, oh, I’d say about another 20 years before flattening out. That’s a pretty important change in the structure of growth, and one that Xi Jinping’s Plenum reforms both recognize and react to, on the one hand, and aim to bolster and sustain on the other. Remember: investment in services sector capital stock doesn’t just mean ice rinks, movie theaters, hospitals and schools, but also the injection of value-adding services activity into manufacturing giants like China Aluminum, which to date have been all about smelting and little about sales and marketing, R&D, environmental engineering, new applications development and other white collar multipliers of profit.

That's pretty heartening

My impression is that export-manufacturing is a pretty shitty anyway for China - lots of foreign money pours in initially, sure, but once factories are established etc. very little of the capital that then pours in remains in the country. The manufacturer's margin is very thin and the lion's share of the profit is retained by the multinational conglomerate that contracted for the manufacture, is my understanding

Also I spoke too soon about the pollution, it's back to ~200 PM2.5 and it was pretty hazy today

There was blood in my phlegm today too but that was totally unrelated and due to this badass cold I caught in Korea

http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/wheres-the-rage/

Haven't read any of Mo Yan's work myself but agree with the sentiment here:

Kamila Shamsie: The decision to give the Nobel Prize for Literature to Mo Yan was heavily criticized by many writers, not because of his work’s literary merit, but on the grounds that he had refused to sign a petition calling for the freedom of Liu Xiaobo, a fellow laureate. The criticism grew even stronger when Mo Yan defended censorship, comparing it to airport security. You’ve always been politically outspoken, and have expressed your frustration with writers who remain quiet over political issues. You might have been expected to join the chorus of disapproval. Instead you turned around and criticized those who were criticizing Mo Yan. Is there a contradiction here in your own position?

Pankaj Mishra: I should say right away that at no point did I defend Mo Yan’s political positions, and that in fact made clear my own strong disagreement with them. What I objected to was the attempt to delegitimize his literary achievement through some selective reference to his political choices, like his refusal to sign a petition. If we were to take that narrow measure to many of the canonical figures of Western literature—from Dickens with his bloodthirsty writings during the Indian Mutiny, to Nabokov, who adored the war in Vietnam—those writers would have to be dismissed as worthless.

The other point that got lost in the rush to condemn Mo Yan was that we need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let’s not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn’t actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech. And let’s not forget also, alas, that freedom of speech doesn’t guarantee great literature.

The recent past is full of diverse examples of writers—Mahfouz in Egypt, Pamuk in Turkey, and more interestingly, Pasternak in the Soviet Union—who have conducted their arguments with their societies and its political arrangements through their art in subtle, oblique ways. They didn’t always have the license to make bold pronouncements about freedom, democracy, Islam, and liberalism, but they exerted another kind of moral authority through their work.

^ Having finished the whole interview, is also one of the most OTM pieces I have read in months

Yeah, Western liberals criticizing Chinese writers/artists for not being more outspoken against their government is never a good look, IMO. Mishra is great as usual at puncturing complacency, though I think he maybe underestimates how many Western writers did/do speak out against, for example, the Iraq War, drones, etc. I can think of a few and I'm not particularly tuned in to the political pronouncements of literary figures.

I read him more as wondering why Western artists hadn't incorporated the war into their work

Like I can only think of Safran-Foers 9/11 novel but I don't really follow that circuit, all I know is that one of the popular new novels of the past few years was called 'All the Sad Young Literary Men'

That's a good question. I think it's partly the fact that today's "all-volunteer" army doesn't seem to attract people with the sort of background who tend to end up in MFA programs. And writers these days are taught to write what they know.

mishra relentlessly otm.

there's something to be said about how state role in arts has weighed on writers like mo yan and changed the language that he writes in but there weren't many among the critics that had any willingness or background to dig into that element. and i don't think a lot of critics had the experience in reading chinese literature or knowledge of how the chinese literary community operates to go beyond "mo yan, party stooge, copied a poem by mao zedong."

part of the problem is that nobody understands or really even reads world literature esp if it's not written in english. three percent of published writing in america in translation, a very small amount of it from writers in asia, africa, etc.

if you don't read chinese, i feel comfortable saying that most of the important works written in chinese over the last 60 years are still untranslated or hard to find. work translated into english is overrepresented by "dissident writers," "banned in china" books, so more people are reading wild swans and shanghai girls rather than jia pingwa, su tong, sheng keyi among the big names and there's next to nothing from young writers or new writers or writers from the greater sinophone world.

Otm

http://japanfocus.org/-Ho_fung-Hung/4207

I'm far from an HK expert
So I found this
Interesting

Will try to dive into that when I have some head space

http://i.imgur.com/8Md1ODn.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/kQ5YSM9.jpg

lol

a+

http://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

我来时很好，去时，也很好

(Reuters) - A leader of Hong Kong's student protests called on Thursday for a respected intermediary to help arrange a trip to Beijing where the students want to make their case to China's leaders for greater democracy in their city.

Will this be even allowed to happen?

Well no - I don't think Beijing would ever agree to that

http://www.clb.org.hk/en/content/i-speak-blood-poetry-foxconn-worker-xu-lizhi

http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/nov/10/japan-shinzo-abe-china-xi-jinping-handshake-video

Inscrutable

lol dont u think its notably frigid even by the standard of these things

abe is trying to be concilliatory though, the froideur is from the other side

CCP has whipped up anti-Nippon sentiment to such a degree that Xi really had no choice

abe is far more constricted than xi, between his own nationalist right and the reality of the balance of powers
everything about that is emphasizing japan as a supplicant
not at all inscrutable

http://thediplomat.com/2014/11/ishiharas-stealth-attack-on-the-japanese-constitution/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/world/asia/zhou-yongkang-china-arrests-former-security-chief.html

I guess they finally dropped the hammer - wow

Better late than never, I guess.

When I saw "drop the hammer" I first thought you were talking about China versus Hong Kong protestors

http://i.imgur.com/HwxAVJx.png

bullet train?

Yeah - they hope to achieve these times (measure from Beijing, obv) by 2020

BJ to HK would be amazing - right now it's 24 hours

http://qz.com/208119/china-is-reportedly-thinking-about-building-a-bullet-train-that-reaches-america/

omg

only ilx thread on nk is stupid but 2 recent interesting things on border issues from sino-nk:

http://sinonk.com/2015/01/06/low-key-north-korean-soldier-murder-yanbian/
+
http://sinonk.com/2014/12/31/command-and-conquer-the-co-option-of-market-forces/