Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

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/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-01/13/086r-011300-idx.html

this is kind of fascinating
xi'an underworld
stolen pistol
little orchid
bill clinton
massive manhunt

not a current event but
learned about it from annotation bad translation yi sha poem

Read the new-ish Evan Osnos & Howard French books lately, both p.good in a chatty (well, letting others chat) New Yorker-y way.

Seems like Xinjiang's gotten pretty travel-restricted re: needing ID at all times w/it determining whether yr permitted to move outside the region, according to a prof who's just come back from a conference. Was hoping to head to XJU for six months (I'm heading over to GuangWai in early Feb for at least a semester), but I'm not too sure the CI'll be too keen on foreigners in the north-west, heh.

Just promise to faithfully and truthfully report on every ethnic incident you see and I'm sure you'll have no problem

Ma told CNBC that he had got the idea for his business when he visited the US, and looks to Forrest Gump for inspiration. Ma said he had watched the Tom Hanks movie at least 10 times.

“Every time I’m frustrated, I watch the movie,” he said. “I watched the movie again before I came here. It’s telling me: ‘No matter what changes, you are you.’”