Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

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.

And that 3% figure includes all books in translation—in terms of literary fiction and poetry, the number is actually closer to 0.7%. so, you know.

http://www.guoxiaolu.com/WR_Beyond_Dissidence.htm

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

― 龜, Wednesday, 5 February 2014 12:44 (9 hours ago) Permalink

sup capitalism

Wow the Monkey King was a bag of warm horse piss flung at a brick wall

what‘s this？

Top grossing film last week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monkey_King_(film)

Haven't made my way through the Guo Xiaolu stuff upthread yet but will soon

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/02/07/chinas-rubble-strewn-path-to-land-reform/

^ Good piece - if you've seen A Touch of Sin, the first story is basically this

If you have a lot of time to kill and patience and tolerance for lawspeak, then I'd also recommend this: http://faculty.washington.edu/swhiting/pols502/Pils.pdf

Also the first I"ve read of an update on the Wukan situation:

The need for real reform of rural land law, not just promises from the central government, is illustrated by the highly publicized case of Wukan, a fishing village in Guangdong Province that had once fueled hope for change but which now languishes as an example of the intractable difficulties faced by China’s farmers in defending their rights.

Wukan attracted nationwide attention in 2011 after angry village residents physically ejected the village committee, which had entered into contracts with developers. In 2012, a novel solution allowed the villagers to elect a new village committee composed of leaders of the protest. This was highly unusual. But a year later, there was no progress in efforts to unwind the transactions and retrieve the land. Moreover, although some Chinese observers had referred to the Wukan “model” as a concept for political change at the grassroots, it eventually faded from national discourse.

The Wukan villagers had been supported by Wang Yang, then chairman of the Standing Committee of Guangdong Province. Wang, however, has since been replaced by a successor who favors replacing the village committee with party members. It is no surprise that political activism in Wukan continues to decline. A retired cadre who was a leader of the 2011 protests left the committee in October 2013 and has since given up politics. A new election is slated to be held in coming months, and the local township government will neither favor keeping the current committee members nor try to solve the continuing land disputes. It is clear that the Wukan experiment has faltered and will not serve as a model for other communities.

My understanding is that one reason why local governments do such blatant grabs for land is that reforms to the tax code in the early-00s removed a large source of tax revenue from local governments and diverted them towards the Party proper in Beijing - hence the resort to eminent domain, which is of course unsustainable since there's a finite amount of suitable land to sell to developers

Not really an economist at all but my understanding is that cities & municipalities in Canada / America are allowed to sell bonds related to the infrastructure project that they want to undertake, which local governments in China are not allowed to do

Also Guo Xiaolu http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/xiaolu-guo-why-do-we-still-pretend-we-are-free/

Xiaolu Guo: Self-censorship happens not only in China, or Iran or ex-Soviet places. It can happen anywhere. If an artist penetrates a certain taboo or a certain power through their work, he or she will face this problem. I’m always saying that commercial censorship is our foremost censorship globally today. Why do we still pretend we are free?

Guernica: What are your own experiences with commercial censorship?

Xiaolu Guo: There’s an abortion section in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary. In the beginning my U.S. editor wanted to take it out. She said the Bush government had just issued some policies and that middle-class readers wouldn’t like it, which would reduce the market. I was very angry. I couldn’t believe it. I had lived most of my life in China, and I didn’t know that political and commercial censorship for fiction existed in the United States. Perhaps I was really naïve but you could imagine that in China we’re told the West is a free world. I had a big argument with my editor, and eventually that section was saved. It’s still included in the U.S. edition.

When we submitted I Am China to the U.S. publishers, many houses turned it down, saying it would be very difficult to market. I got more than ten rejections. It’s a novel with multiple narrative layers and sort of an intellectual spirit. The rejections were very much market-oriented, which isn’t a new thing of course, and I totally understood their fears and concern. Anyway, Nan/Doubleday in New York liked my work and they’re publishing it, for which I feel grateful.

Guernica: In your essay on Mo Yan winning the Nobel Prize, you express some frustration that Western media pay more attention to “dissident” Chinese artists than “state artists.” Can you expand on that? Why do you think the West is more interested in dissidents?

Xiaolu Guo: For obvious reasons. But then again, I don’t think it’s the West’s fault. There is very little in-depth understanding in culture and arts between the West and China. Just think of the ending in E.M. Forster’s novel Passage to India, how he beautifully described the profound emotional conflict between the Indian man and the English man. But time moves on. We are on a better platform now I think, with lots of foreign culture introduced in the last few years. I do think there will be a better understanding between the two sides—East and West. And eventually, the so-called two sides will disappear, and there will only be the conflict between those with power and those without it.

Guernica: What are the obvious reasons that Western media pay more attention to dissident artists than state artists?

Xiaolu Guo: You have to ask this question to the sensationalist media and to your industry—not me. You’ll publish a politically famous Chinese artist like Ai Weiwei, but not someone like Liu Xiaodong or Yu Hong, although in my view they’re much greater artists than the ones you have heard of. This is understandable. How can you know anything about them if they aren’t coming to the surface of the Western media? You can’t even pronounce their names, or my name for that matter. I have no problem with this personally. It’s a social phenomenon. Before Liu Xiaobo received the Nobel Prize for Peace, had you ever heard of this person—this great poet? No. Isn’t that so clear?

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/07/amid-raft-of-chinese-financial-numbers-one-to-watch-carefully/

^ Pretty technical but slots in to the discussion above about China's GDP mix

My understanding is that one reason why local governments do such blatant grabs for land is that reforms to the tax code in the early-00s removed a large source of tax revenue from local governments and diverted them towards the Party proper in Beijing - hence the resort to eminent domain, which is of course unsustainable since there's a finite amount of suitable land to sell to developers

lots of talk about big reform goals in china discusses the necessity of first changing how taxes are collected and distributed.

urbanization: megacities like guangzhou-shenzhen-dongguan and shanghai are attractive to migrants because they can afford to provide public services + there's more affordable housing relative to local incomes/space to go around. but moving people from rural areas to second and third tier cities is hard because local governments can't afford to provide basic services and are in debt and making money off land grabs, which displace people and drive up real estate prices and relocate people far from urban centers, and borrowing.

hukou reform: second and third tier cities will always oppose hukou reform because they can't afford to provide even basic services to new arrivals from the countryside. local governments bear the burden of the new urbanized, while collecting a meager share of tax revenue.

local government debt: local governments are forced to borrow or undertake land grab and real estate schemes that result in instability because they can't eat off their share of taxes.

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/15/beijing-moves-to-break-down-the-rural-urban-divide/

that sums it up pretty well.

Yeah I agree with all of that - feels like one of the biggest if not the biggest priority facing the Party right now

It also said that the government would work to “straighten out” the division of incomes between the local and central governments. Currently about 80% of all tax revenue goes directly to Beijing – despite the central government being responsible for about only 20% of expenditures – which it then redistributes back to local administrative bodies. That means local governments have very little discretion over funding. The blue print could be signaling that local governments will likely get a larger share of the tax pie, without saying so explicitly.

This is sort of incredible

https://www.chinafile.com/will-xi-jinping-stop-music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy4fmm7cVGs

Always have wondered who will be the first producer to sample a 钹 and make it into a hot beat

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10628003/Police-declare-war-on-Chinas-Sin-City.html

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1426282/corrupt-guangdong-police-were-secretly-tipped-about-latest-high-profile

attacking biggest symbol of the sex trade in china, the dongguan ktvs and salons and brothels is good pr for everyone involved but meaningless because 1) locally ; serves a large number of visitors from hk and tw rather than native whoremongers, the key players have been tipped off or are out of the area for the holiday, the sex industry is so deeprooted and works under police and govt supervision and is too profitable to move out (at best can be moved to outlying districts like changping or shijie) 2) nationally ; the sex trade is the product of police and govt corruption and a weak legal system that allows illegal business to operate and women to be trafficked and abused, a mixture of conservatism and queasiness about sex (see also discussion about child abuse in china and the uphill battle trying to even tell people it happens) and a culture that has a problem with the idea of equal rights and protection for women and nobody talking about prostitution (they did make handjobs legal a few months ago, right? but Outrage as underage prostitution law protects child rapists, 'Raping prostitutes less harmful,' says law professor, The rape trial of the son of prominent entertainers exposes a social divide) and no highprofile feminist voices, lack of legal protection and social safety net for people that travel to cities to work without a hukou.

Yeah; can't help but think that the 60/40 (is it really that bad?) gender split in this generation is also a not-insignificant factor to toss into the mix

right i was coming at it more from the viewpoint of you gotta 1 enforce laws to protect women, 2 have serious talks about protecting women and people at risk, then sex, prostitution, human trafficking and other topics that are swept under the rug and lead to fucked up situations 3 just decriminalize it and let's worry more about the consequences, realities of the massive sex industry in the country rather than how officials/police are paying for it/getting paid off it.

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/