rolling china thread 2011

so common & vulgar

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/books/review/deng-xiaoping-and-the-transformation-of-china-by-ezra-f-vogel-book-review.html?pagewanted=all

pretty good 5 minute overview of deng

I know people who love to point out deng as the true savior of china and not mao but guess what dengs hands are dirty too

what do ilx china hedz think of peter hessler

the dude who won the macarthur? I read an interview with him in chinese once and he seemed to have insights but I haven't checked out his books

he's moved on to other topics now hasn't he?

yeah but he has 3 books on china that a friend recommended

he was the nyer china correspondent for years, i remember digging his pieces, but i thought maybe hes just an orientalist like the rest of them

you should probably read them then

thx for the advice <thumbs up>

glad I could help ;)

http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/680047/Condom-app-lifts-off.aspx

condoms @ your door

i like peter hessler a lot

first book about teaching in really remote sichuan is enjoyable
oracle bones is the most impressive

tumblr, twitter, facebook, blogger, wordpress... give them back to me

just ordered river town, ill do oracle bones next

river town is the best in the little microgenre of MAN SPENDS YEAR IN CHINA books, i think.

others that aren't terrible: iron and silk by mark salzman (it's okay), the last days of old beijing by michael meyer (good)...

i read iron and silk a long time ago and thought it was funny but dont remember it very well

i guess zachary mexico's china underground fits into the category, too: pseudonymous kid hangs out in shanghai with uighur stoners and other zany characters.

you had your own thread of wild china travelogue writing too didn't you?

i don't recommend that

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/25/world/asia/attempted-visits-to-chen-guang

lol, fair enuff

from what I can tell there is actually a grassroots movement inside China to visit chen guangzheng, pretty cool, you can't throw them all in jail huh

according to my mom xi jinping is more reform minded and will hopefully curb some of the excesses when he takes the stage

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2010/10/20/who-is-xi-jinping/

not too particularly promising

but wikileaks cables say he really loved 'saving private ryan'

http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/10/25/8476025-china-cracks-down-on-economic-leaks

good overview of what constitutes a state secret other than keeping dead hookers in your basement

re: the chinese toddler

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/24/hugo-alfredo-tale-yax-doz_n_550854.html

According to the Financial Times’ Geoff Dyer, Xi is also sympathetic to pro-market reforms. Writing in the FT on Monday, Dyer said:

‘He is the son of…an important ally of Deng Xiaoping in the introduction of market reforms in China in the 1980s (and) spent much of his career in some of the export strongholds of the Chinese economy.

‘As a result, many see him as a natural supporter of continued economic reform. (Hank Paulson, the former US treasury secretary, famously once called him “the kind of guy who knows how to get things over the goal line.”)’

what is meant by "pro-market reforms," exactly?

letting the wealth gap increase at a rate never before seen, obviously

that sucks.

actually, is that all it means?

i wish i knew more about the chinese economy, so i could wrap my head around this. what further pro-market reforms are on the horizon in china? maybe he's talking about less topdown control of the economy or something. or maybe it does just mean letting the wealth gap increase at a rate never seen before.

when it comes to market reforms, i mostly hear a lot of "more of the same": building domestic demand, building the middle class. people talk about guys like bo xilai being liberal or whatever, but i can't quite figure out what it means in real terms. i don't know anything.

yeah I was being facetious. I guess the thinking is that since xi jinping's father was such a revolutionary hero, was imprisoned for 16 years during the cultural revolution, etc. and that xi jinping seems to have wholeheartedly bought the narrative of the people, that means he will be more of a reformer and institute policies more favorable to the middle class and to rural farmers and migrant workers.

or 'pro-market' could mean he favors a reagonomics approach, that a rising tide floats all boats and we'll let capitalism continue unfettered and even supported by the state's money, and migrant workers will eventually be able to purchase toothpaste at regular intervals.

*shrug*

I suppose this was going to happen eventually

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/26/china-social-media-censorship?CMP=twt_gu

Analysts believe that officials will not shut down social media sites because they are simply too popular, and closing them would create a backlash. Chinese authorities have sought to use social media proactively, launching their own accounts.

Instead, they are likely to step up pressure on the operators, who have large in-house teams of staff to monitor, block and remove sensitive content.

"The more important risk we see for Sina Weibo and other (microblogs) is that they self-regulate out of business (interests) … and that they self-neuter and that makes the platform so boring no one wants to use it," said Michael Clendenin, managing director of RedTech Advisors, a research company.

http://www.echinacities.com/dalian/city-in-pulse/dalian-to-build-china-s-first-floating-city-in-2014.html

jealous?

extremely

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/the-dangerous-politics-of-internet-humor-in-china.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D
=38585&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=25&cHash=af92db93d512ed71f3894bf20441f385

or just click here

that censorship article is good but seems like it prob puts that guy in even more danger?

the guy in beijng or the guy in hong kong

beijing

probably, but I guess he doesn't care

my friend taught me an expression in chinese "the bird who sticks its head out gets shot first"

I think the thing w/ that internet rebellion humor article is that it needs context. what % of chinese internet-users are aware of this? what % actively participate? etc.

and I guess that's prob hard to measure. but a couple million people is still a drop in the bucket, really.

that's true, but a person who has the knowhow to use weibo and is interested in getting around censorship via slang and double entendres is likely to be in the middle class/upper middle class. china has 1.3 billion, true, but I'm pretty sure the majority of that number are farmers.

it's the velvet underground theory, only 100 people saw that tweet but they all went and wrote a blogpost about it

i think the kuang kuang cartoons could be considered hugely popular. they looked good and fit into a sort of tradition of that kind of web cartoon shit. not that everyone took it as a dead serious strike a blow against dictatorship thing. and the ramblings of a drunkard blog was fairly popular too, right? not doing han han numbers but it was big. i know that doesn't really give much context either, but i guess i'd say that a big proportion of middle class internet users in china's major cities were aware of them and follow similar stuff.

what's my point here? i know lots of people that aren't hugely politically active or whatever but like dayoooo said follow internet rebellion stuff just because it's entertaining and badass. most people that are intelligent enough to engage with that kind of stuff are basically in on the joke. you know? they know that everything is not exactly as it should be over here and they're down with thumbing their noses at the man. not everyone that makes a 河蟹/和谐 joke gives a fuck but sometimes it's cool to just be in on the joke.

yeah that gives me a better perspective on it. it's just really hard to tell from that article alone how 'important' something like this is at this point.

the internet is tightly controlled enough that a lot of normal people not searching for rebiya kadeer's email address will reach a point where they have to circumvent things. the rest of the world is using the internet to look at facebook and porn and those are two things you probably have to leap the great firewall to get to. i guess that's why people appreciate dudes that will fuck with the system. there's a natural curiosity, too, to see what attracts the attention of censors.

yeah, well according to the latest CCP meeting they are gonna take big steps in reining in social media by installing more censors I think, so I think it's one of the CCP's bigger concerns xp

if you google info about stuff like tor or witopia or vpn services on google.hk or whatever the mainland is directing you to nowadays, even with filtered results, you can see that a huge portion of china's internet users are being forced to leap the wall. a lot of the censorship/harmonization jokes come from annoyance, rather than a deep discontent with the prevailing social order.

personally, i advocate the violent overthrow of the chinese communist party simply because i have to open tor to look at girls i went to highschool with on facebook.

internet censorship annoys the shit out of me more than anything else in the world.