Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

That Pig Sale animation was great; French/Millward links too.

Lecturer posted this SCMP link - http://multimedia.scmp.com/tiananmen/ - very, uh, multimedia-ish (is this what Snow Fall was like? NZ hasn't really had many FUTURE OF E-JOURNALISM things).

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?

― ogmor, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 7:50 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:07 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:08 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― dylannn, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:08 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― een, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 9:18 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― ogmor, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 5:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

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

― etc, Wednesday, June 4, 2014 6:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

Time for the 6/4 links

http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2014/05/30/the-other-tank-man-photographs/?mod=WSJBlog

NYT going in, predictably:

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/q-and-a-louisa-lim-on-the-pivot-point-for-chinas-contemporary-history/

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/q-a-liu-heung-shing-on-photographing-tiananmen/

^^ I actually just bought a book by Liu in Hong Kong, called, appropriately enough, 中國夢. Didn't know that Vincent Yu was also photographing then, he's another very underrated Chinese photojournalist

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/02/q-a-chen-guang-on-the-soldiers-who-retook-tiananmen-square/

^^ Very worth reading

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/live-blogging-the-25-tiananmen-square-anniversary/
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/more-hong-kongers-support-89-crackdown-survey-finds/

^ Both times I've been in HK this year I visited Causeway Bay; both times I saw political demonstrations (the first time, in March, it was almost comical; about 10 protestors with megaphones and about 50 police officers. Strangely enough there weren't any police at the second one I saw, which was just a few days ago.) Also saw a guy agitating for HK independence in Mong Kok during my second trip, but nobody seemed to be paying him any mind

Also saw this on Tumblr:

A lot of folks are posting about the Tiananmen Square massacre today, of course. I thought we should share it too, but I wanted to write a little bit about what was explained to me about what happened in the spring of 1989 that the western media often overlooks.
I am a 1.5 generation Chinese American leftist. I was two when the massacre happened. My sister had just been born. My father, who immigrated from China to Hong Kong when he was a toddler to escape the Cultural Revolution, and then Hong Kong to the United States to go to college, tells me he was seeking work in China around this time.

Several summers ago, when we were traveling together in China, he told me about what he understood about Tiananmen Square from his perspective as a young, newly naturalized American citizen who still had deep ties to the motherland. He told me the sense of unrest was not just about state control of the media and politics, but a sense that the state was also imposing capitalist reforms on the Chinese economy without input from the people, and with clear preferential treatment for party cadres and others who had an “in” with the powers that be. Students were upset and anxious about what looked like unilateral decisions about the future that weren’t just about opening markets, they were about neoliberalising the country.

When I think about what’s happening in Istanbul, Turkey, I can’t help but think about this. When we remember Tiananmen Square, I hope we remember that this wasn’t necessarily about the struggle of democracy versus Communism, but that it was about people who wanted to take part in determining the future of their country, and who rejected nepotistic neoliberal reforms. Just like with the media narrative around Gezi, American audiences risk being turned around. A million people don’t turn out and go on hunger strikes against their own self-interest. There’s more to this story than meets the eye.
Remember Tiananmen, but remember it for what it was: young Chinese students and workers resisting their country “modernizing” in the age of Reagan, the godfather of neoliberalism. This is the same ideology that young Turkish students and workers are resisting in Istanbul. It’s the same ideology that has decimated the U.S. economy and that we resist when we say “another world is possible.”

When we ask why the Chinese government still hasn’t admitted that Tiananmen even happened, we should remember that China today is just as cutthroat and capitalistic in some ways as the United States is. They have delivered on neoliberalism, but in the style of an autocratic state, where nepotism and party connections had more to do with business success than anything. Students and workers in China in 1989 were emphatically saying no to this system.

I don't know the first thing about what neoliberalism is but I'd definitely like to know more about the economic aspect. A few things I've read have tried to position the '78-'89 period as being very, uh, hopeful, with farmers actually getting money from selling any surplus they'd have leftover once they met government quotas, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was just an early snapshot of the trajectory that China took post '89

I'm always sort of shocked that the Tiananmen vigil in Victoria Park in HK draws 100,000+ people (this year close to 150,000); for a city with a population of 7 million, that's damn impressive

We were all utterly wrong, a misjudgment that, from a distance of 25 years, dwarfs all the other errors and miscalculations of my own and others’ coverage of the events of June 1989.

We erred in calling it the “Tiananmen Massacre” when nearly all of the killing in Beijing occurred outside the square itself and the crackdown extended far beyond the capital to cities across China.

We should never have labeled the protests simply a “pro-democracy movement” when many of the protesters were angered more by surging prices and corruption than the party’s regular but entirely phony elections.

We should never have given credence to rumors, stoked by Western intelligence agencies, of an imminent civil war fed by very real splits at the summit of the Chinese leadership.

Most of all, though, our mistake in Tiananmen was to think that the Chinese Communist Party had, like its counterparts across East and Central Europe, somehow lost its will to power – and the will and means to make people forget.

— Andrew Higgins

Sort of amazing

http://i.imgur.com/L0mgzZC.png

wow

Also amazing http://i.imgur.com/VXjCdqZ.png

I visited Tiananmen Square in April this year, not really by plan; me and my friend just happened to get off the bus there and we decided to do it

We had to go through two security checkpoints just to get in. Thanks to Beijing's brilliant urban planning you had to go through the Beijing subway just to get to the side that had access to the square. Once you had exited the subway there was another security checkpoint. Everybody has to go through metal detectors and give their bags up for X-raying

My friend (who's a PRC national) had a bookbag with just one book in it. The guard told him that he had a "sheaf of leaflets" inside his bag. My friend produced his book (some book on how to do business) and asked her if that was what she meant. She said yes, and he told her that it was a book, it wasn't leaflets. She told him technically a book was a pile of leaflets since both were made up of pages of paper. Can't remember who ended the conversation but we continued on. My friend was really peeved. Meanwhile on our way out of Tiananmen we passed by three or four people handing out real estate flyers

I guess there's also this http://gawker.com/twenty-five-years-later-it-is-always-june-4-1989-1585624885 but tbh I'm not sure how much time I have for metaphysical ruminations

http://i.imgur.com/S6pp3eQ.jpg

Vincent Yu

http://i.imgur.com/LJN1Pif.jpg

Liu Heung Shing

has anybody read luisa lim's book about tiananmen yet? i read a review somewhere the other day and it sounds solid. also can anyone recommend chinese history texts generally? i'm reading henry kissinger's book about china right now and it's really interesting but i can't help but feel like he's an unreliable narrator given what i know of his character generally.

Keep seeing references to L. Lim's book "The People's Republic of Amnesia," but have not read it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/25-years-of-chinese-silence-about-tiananmen-square-is-long-enough/2014/05/30/b67bedae-e679-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html

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

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/02/im_scared_to_discuss_tiananmen_and_internet_partly_to_blame

The immense interest among those jiulinghou who are in the know has not translated into active discussion, let alone action. Not all of us think it was wrong to use force against the protesters. And we certainly do not all think China should adopt Western-style democracy. But whatever our views are, we dare not openly discuss them online, in public forums, or even in private chats. And since the Internet is where my generation goes to communicate, we are essentially deprived of the chance to engage in civil discourse.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/06/03/mapping_the_protests_that_swept_china_before_and_after_tiananmen

^ One fact that is often overlooked is how many sister protests there were going on nationwide

http://proof.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/qa-stuart-franklins-view-on-tiananmen-square/

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/2014/jun/03/stuart-franklin-tiananmen-square-tank-man

The majority of journalists were not there to witness the scene; lots had moved to another hotel and missed the 'tank man' moment. Most of them started at the Beijing Hotel, but the food wasn't great. Another place nearer the airport did hamburgers, so they had decamped and got stuck outside the city by blockades at the point of the crackdown.

Imagine missing out on one of the most iconic moments of 20th century history because you wanted a cheeseburger, because you were sick and tired of mapo dofu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzHFD1sEqpE

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_myth_of_tiananmen.php?page=all

the church of almighty god took out a fullpage nyt ad???

https://twitter.com/Garvey_B/status/478102017710125056/photo/1

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/murong-chinas-clampdown-on-evil-cults.html?_r=0

and murong xuecun on cults

Is that the cult that killed the woman in the McDonald's

the same

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8I5Z01OKvw

http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2014/06/19/dji-quadcopter-china-detention

The footage is cool, the "I was detained by POLICE!" part is such a non-story I want to die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho8vAFlCeFQ

Just finished this

Great doc

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-tiananmen-square-attack-video-20140624-story.html

In much less serious news, China is, along with Kenya, a featured country at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the national mall in Washington D.C. this year. Not sure who chose the musicians and craftspeople but here's some links:

http://www.festival.si.edu/2014/China/

http://www.festival.si.edu/visitor/evening.aspx special evening concerts with some including : the Flower Drum Lantern performance group, Quanzhou Puppet Troupe, Zhejiang Wu Opera Troupe, singers of hua’er folksongs, Inner Mongolian band Ih Tsetsn, the Miao Music and Dance Group, and the Bimen Brothers and Family, Qiang polyphonic singers.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/25/to-chinese-embassy-united-states-address-no-1-liu-xiaobo-plaza/

Good trolling

That looks cool, wish I could go! xp

http://news.163.com/14/0626/08/9VLDML4E00011229.html

to celebrate international day against drug abuse and illicit trafficking
cctv brings you a televised confession

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/go-south-to-guangzhou-a-home-away-from-home/

Good

yeah, i like that

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1552822/leading-broadcaster-rui-chenggang-detained-cctv-graft-investigation

fucking rui chenggang gets locked up in a graft investigation

also lol guo meimei boasts about gambling on weibo gets locked up too

http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/chinas-infamous-guo-meimei-notorious-for-her-extravagant-lifestyle-has-been-arrested-for-illegal-world-cup-gambling/story-fnk822dn-1226987180331

https://www.facebook.com/notes/penguin-books-in-china/were-hiring-acquisitions-editor/10152292610389331

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

NSFW

http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/photo-gallery/2014/7/china-s-muslim-women.html

how close to collapse was the existing ccp regime at the time of the tianenmen square protests?

Before or during? I'd say not very

When you start from as low a place as China did after Mao's death in 76 it's hard for things not to improve and keep on improving

that was my supposition, but the ccp hierarchy possibly felt differently in the midst of it.....that things could spread to other cities, other social groups etc

that is unverifiable of course

Well the narrative that makes the most sense to me is that the protestors were marching against crony capitalism as much as they were for a form of democratic government and a bill of rights

i.e. the pie was growing very quickly and the hundred surnames sensed that the gains were mostly going to those in the Party

I think the Party probably did balance precariously during the protests, the protests had spread to all major cities nationwide

But if the question is about the danger of collapse from internal factionalism, I don't think that was a threat

idk enough about the facts but i had got the impression that casting it into the human rights freedom and democracy procrustean narrative form was not telling the whole story

Yeah from what I've read the push for democracy and freedom of [x] is what gets emphasized, it carves a very neat symbolic totem for the West

The initial protests were sparked by students but the momentum was sustained by workers and laborers in addition

I think another way of framing your question nakh is asking how close the PLA was to siding with the protestors

And I think the answer was, not very

But that didn't mean the PLA automatically was going to do the bidding of the CCP either

Calling in the PLA to act on Tiananmen cost the CCP a lot of political capital, I think, and has made the CCP much more susceptible to PLA influence since, on a permanent basis

An authoritarian governments needs a final source of authority, after all

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/world/asia/8-people-executed-in-xinjiang-on-terrorism-charges-china-says.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/you-guide-to-the-latest-grim-news-out-of-china/379436/