rolling china thread 2011

you jewish bro?

i was trying to find the sexy beijing episode where she interviews her dad who was a refugee in hangzhou in the 40s...

no but there's a jewish side of my family

http://www.urbanphoto.net/blog/2010/12/09/judaism-with-a-hong-kong-flavour/

I saw it a few times from looking out the windows of buses but I never walked around that area, so sad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GpZ20EYV2s

yo that dude went HARD

do i click play y/n

i dont like the look of that cunt whatever it is

the kaifeng seems like self-indulgence from some enterprising religious types trying to ~save the lost tribes~ and you really can't blame people wanting to leave impoverished home for a better life etc

http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/682723/Ai-Weiweis-tax-evasion-case-takes-a-new-twist.aspx

I love the global times, it's like found poetry

forgot about the homer simpson shovel

All Hail the Chinese Military Shovel WJQ-308

http://www.chinahush.com/2011/11/08/just-another-food-scandal-landfill-becomes-cattle-feedlot/

looool

compared to melamine in milk and gutter oil, this can't be called a scandal

this is almost wholesome.

yah but how about garbage soup

http://shanghaiist.com/attachments/joelherrick/garbagesoup.jpg

okay back to subsisting on green tea ice cream flavor oreos and coke zero.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/how-walmart-is-changing-china/8709/

laughs:

the descriptions of "chinese workers, who are more used to drab frocks and olive-colored breeches, are now falling in love with the unfamiliar shades of capitalism, the vibrant pinks and greens that cloak the invisible hand of the market" are absurd.

the general weird shock at CHINESE PEOPLE CONSUME PRODUCTS LIKE WE DO AND GO TO SAM'S CLUB but--key difference--they call it SHANMUHUI hehehehehe.

"people's republic" scare quotes.

breathless descriptions of "but instead of doritos and tomatoes from peru, there are horse eyeballs on crushed ice, hog testicles in aspic, swallows nests (with living swallows still chirping within them!), and attention deficit razor clams"

the part about how wal-mart and china share an "ideology" (also put in joke quotes), because sam walton is like mao.

south park episode summary that would be too long for a wikipedia article.

the part about how america has turned the chinese off "leninism" by bathing them in "the solvent of the open marketplace" (not fake quotes this time).

okay, i couldn't get past the first page... maybe it gets better

“Now, whenever we create a new towel, we always think about the environment!” pipes up Li Yongzhi, the assistant manager, reminding me of how the heads of Revolutionary Committees used to boast during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution about how many jin of corn they could harvest from so many mu of land, under the guidance of Chairman Mao. “We have begun experimenting with such things as new fibers derived from bamboo, and even from milk, which we mix with our cotton stock so that it will be faster-drying, and thus produce more-energy-saving towels.”

dude fuck off.

In fact, one could say the same thing about China, which—after so many decades of defiant proletarian opposition to capitalism, consumerism, and American imperialism—has embraced the American-style market and is ardently following the Walmart path to prosperity.

actually there might be some interesting reportage on, like, middle class chinese consumer trends in this piece but good god

Liu Mei, who has adopted the English name Lucy, tells me how Walmart advisers initially visited the family-owned Dalian Xingyeyuan Group to explain how, by selling directly to large outlets, the business—and the co‑ops with which it worked—could be more efficient and profitable.

just a detail like that, about how she's ADOPTED an english name, just comes across so horribly patronizing.

In a Loftex conference room decorated with tabletop bouquets of plastic lilies, a Venus de Milo–like statue (with arms!), a cast-iron sculpture of a bucking bronco (homage to Frederic Remington?), and some abstract oil paintings, I ask the factory’s general manager, Wang Hongxing, a smart, affable middle-aged man in a dark suit and tie, if he was present when Lee Scott gave his 2008 Beijing speech.

ho ho! with arms, eh?

Liu Mei, who unlike her ancestors walks about in knock-off Adidas running shoes instead of the "long, stinking" foot binding rags, and has recently adopted Western dress, tells me how she has recently purchased a transistor radio and hopes to take part in "limited government-authorized market activities."

laugh me a laugh

Like nitinol, a unique nickel-titanium alloy that possesses “shape memory,” bending at low temperatures only to regain its original form when heated, China has long rebuked foreign efforts to change it.

this is a really tortured analogy

lol @ atlantic at characterizing the essence of wal-mart as 'anti-communist', as if you could characterize it in any other way than 'pure capitalism.'

this really does read like a high schooler's, lift the veil from the teacher's eyes "so THIS is how the government is implicated as a coconspirator in the OKC bombings" paper

writing a piece based on a long, extended and byzantine analogy about how wal-mart and the CCP parallel each other is just such a nagl

that is a really horrible article

they couldnt get jim fallows to read it over or anything??

If anything, WalMart demonstrates that command economies can work, provided a surplus of labor / producers and ample computing power for inventory / distribution management.

~~supply chaaaaain~~

started reading peter hessler's country driving today. hessler's 3 china books are probably the best most unassuming writing on contemporary china. not just because the competition is orville schell. love how he can do adventure story (driving his jeep down dry creekbeds in gansu, dodging the local public security bureau), reportage (on world bank desertification projects + corruption at this part in the book), and the character sketches he's always been good at, where he drags a character out of the background and takes apart their life in this really sympathetic beautiful way that illuminates them and the world they live in. funny, too.

every day I'm hesslin'

will check out (if I have time)

http://the-diplomat.com/china-power/2011/11/11/property-bubble-bursting/

happy singles day, everybody

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singles_Day

Speaking of hessler, i just finished river town--it was great--gonna track down oracle bones next

I just read "River Town" too. I second the admiration for his ability to sketch a character in a way that doesn't seem superficial.

Thought this was kind of interesting:

Lipton tea faces safety scandal in China

I recently bought some very nice Chinese oolong tea, btw.

yeah

The Anglo-Dutch consumer group Unilever, which sells the aptly named “Iron Buddha” oolong tea under its Lipton label, said in a statement that the rare earth metals had come from the soil where the tea was grown and could not have been added in the production process.

the ground is polluted. the soil, the fields, the earth. farmers know their crops are polluted, they take them to towns far away to sell where those townspeople don't know about the pollution. it's a giant game of hot potato.

wastewater and heavy metal runoff is poisoning the fields. the US (superfunds) went through this too, so did Japan (minimata), but that was 30-80 years ago.

Yeah, the pollution and food safety issues seem out of control, and the government is not helping:

The ruling Communist party is extremely wary of any organisation not under its own control and has blocked attempts to set up independent consumer advocacy groups, even going as far as to jail some people who attempt to form such groups.

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-kane-sellout-taiwan-2011-11

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uNWzzt-n3s

http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/11/12/who-is-chen-guangcheng%E2%80%94-a-celebration-of-life-on-his-40th-birthday/

great profile on chen guangcheng

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/12/world/asia/picking-brand-names-in-china-is-a-business-itself.html?pagewanted=all

great article

Marriott, Wan hao, or “10,000 wealthy elites.

lol

Precisely why some Chinese words are so freighted with emotion is anyone’s guess.

Each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own.

The Chinese are famously inscrutable and modern Orientalists have long speculated on whether or not the mysteries of their language will ever be fully explained.

One is reminded of the story of Pepsi's introduction into Latin-American markets, where the name literally translates as 'grey, flaccid penis'-- which certainly did not appeal to the machismo of Latin men!

Apple's Chinese moniker, Ping Guo ("apple") is a rather direct translation. But it has a second possible reading: Flat Pot. One wonders if the ad wizards at Apple were smoking a bit of flat pot themselves when they came up with the Chinese transliteration!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/opinion/to-save-our-economy-ditch-taiwan.html

idgi

flat pot or ditching taiwan to save the american economy?

no I mean your post before that one

um i dunno, i guess i found it a bit silly to say things like "each character is a collection of drawings that can carry meanings all their own" or say that we can't know why some characters have certain connotations. i'm a bit skeptical that anyone whose native language is chinese is treating these brand names as anything but transliterations. i mean, they're reading 宝马 not as the chinese characters TREASURE HORSE but mostly just as a sound... it's a transliteration.... the characters have connotations but i think they're also common characters when transliterating foreign words. just like nobody is reading 奥巴马 as "secret tail horse."

if 耐克 NIKE means something in chinese, why does 希尔顿 hilton "mean nothing"? they both MEAN something but neither really mean anything. like 家乐福 carrefour is three common characters with distinct meanings or whatever but in everyday use they're serving a phonetic purpose and just work as a transliteration. they don't become a chinese word because they're written with chinese characters that have a meaning-- they use those ones because they're common characters for transliterations and will announce that the name is a transliteration of a foreign word. i guess it's different when it comes to shampoo names or whatever.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_blunder#Urban_legends

idk as someone who is nearly a native speaker I do think that they have to choose the transliteration carefully. I haven't talked abou this topic specifically with any chinese people but it's crazy to think that companies choose their names willy nilly out of a hat.

and carrefour, 家乐福, well I think that's pretty good! "home happy fortune" - right, they sell housewares, they're a big box department store, makes sense. much better than 假了负, for example.

and I'm pretty sure obama had no hand in choosing his transliteration - a corporation on the other hand, would definitely want to invest money in choosing a good name!

this is a culture that worships the number 8 because it sounds like prosperity, and hates the number 4 because it sounds like death - homophones are at the root of a lot of chinese jokes!

right right but i also think part of 家乐福 is that it reads like a transliteration, not a chinese word. i guess it was just kind of overstating things, i guess. i just wanted to riff on it too. sorry.