穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

it was a good run zhou yongkang

but my point was though

-- even if tiananmen is not a topic that can be openly discussed, it's not the only event that's been airbrushed out. the chinese school system does not place much importance on recent chinese history. it reduces it to a nationalist highlight reel of deng xiaoping 1997 hong kong comes back 1999 shenzhou in space 2008 olympics.

-- even if you remember tiananmen and you know something fucked up happened, it doesn't mean you want to mark the event or dig deeper. criticizing the events of 1989 is criticizing the party. the party has brought stability and wealth that the party has brought the country. everyone involved with it is mostly out of visible positions of power (li peng is an exception?).

Hm thanks this comment is actually a bit enlightening to me. Like how it would be unfair to criticize the US in general today by the word "Watergate", or characterizing the UK Labour Party *OR* the UK Conservative Party using the term "miner's strike"?

In other words, lots of political changes + processes taking place as everywhere*, but since there is an actual one-party system it is an easier target (rightfully, imo) seen from the West?

*) idk about North Korea

i think i mean something a bit like that and something a bit different, too. it's hard to compare chinese nationalism to american politics.
of course partly it does seem unfair to criticize the cpc2015 for the excesses of cpc1989 but more:

to criticize the party-- the party that stood up to a century of humiliation by foreign imperialism! that gave dignity to the nation! that cleaned up after chaos and imperialism and famine and disease! that made the world respect china again! ... the party is so linked to the chinese people, the chinese nation. this is why tiananmen... like, the images that most people remember, if they were around in 1989 and not physically at a protest or even just marched in a more placid protest in another city are: the cctv coverage that showed the uniformed man with his guts pulled out, the uniformed man burned alive. the protests were seen as attacking the nation by attacking the party. the student protests represent(ed) for most people-- well, the students were collaborating with foreign powers, promoting foreign ideologies, threatening to send the chinese nation back into chaos and making it vulnerable to getting overwhelmed by the many outside forces that oppose it. that foreigners are so obsessed with the events of 1989 is more evidence of this.

that's how i see it.

and the party's legitimacy is linked to its maintaining the nationalist myth of the party as savior of the country only bastion against foreign invaders and internal corruption that it can't really admit to a lot of mistakes.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/q-a-xie-shi-on-the-brotherhood-of-skateboarding-in-chinas-far-west/?_r=0

i want to buy this book

oh man

i always wanted to make a documentary about lil bubbles of skaters in otherwise-unexpected corners of the world

https://twitter.com/raypride/status/631524072535425029

http://www.rt.com/news/312292-china-tianjin-massive-blast/

The blast had erupted from a shipment of explosives in a key industrial zone in Binhai New Area at about 11:30 pm local time (3:30 pm GMT), state broadcaster China Central Television said. The initial blast triggered a suspected petrol explosion in an adjacent reservoir.

jfc

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

oh that's fake? fuck. anyways, something blew up in shandong.

not fake but a faked headline on the youtube video, i mean.

checked out the IRON MINISTRY with Morbs yesterday, wasn't too impressed

your time would be off better checking this photoset out again http://photoblog.hk/wordpress/46976

Im in Guangzhou right now then xiamen where should I go next

what's the fanciest train in China, go take that

coastal shandong

wenzhou on the way there

come to beijing this weekend and party with me

I actually did want to visit wenzhou but the timing didn't work out would have only been able to stay one full day there

I actually did want to visit wenzhou but the timing didn't work out would have only been able to stay one full day there

is this story true/website trustworthy? http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/attack-09302015174319.html

did i somehow miss this story? i haven't seen it in Western media...

I've seen it elsewhere, but all of them are quoting the RFA story. I was wondering if the attack was related at all to the big layoff of 100,000 coal mine workers but it seemed to be earlier.

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/world/asia/in-a-region-disturbed-by-ethnic-tensions-china-keeps-tight-lid-on-a-massacre.html

Twenty five years in Chinese jazz: http://theanthill.org/jazz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty3iDweGotk

This smog alert, closing Beijing schools and businesses, is pretty major, no?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/beijing-smog-red-alert-issued-schools-and-businesses-to-completely-shut-down-as-chinese-capital-a6763286.html

dont' think the smog is the worst that beijing has ever seen but mayeb the response is the first time they've done something like this?

Kind of a crazy story, although I think the idea that this is some kind of commentary on the "national character" is the wrong way to look at it:

http://chublicopinion.com/2015/12/06/the-unbearable-coldness-of-being-chinese/

good read

twitter is all: pu zhiqiang trial w smiley face hired thugs slapping reporters / "worse than the cultural revolution" repression of uighur communities / choking air pollution / and a good amount of fake island/territorial dispute stuff.
leaving tomorrow to go job hunting in gz.

Pu Zhiqiang trial is bleak AF, as is Uighur situation. Friend's article on her travels in Xinjiang made it into the best NZ essays 2015 book.

G'luck with the job hunt. If you're at a loose end tomorrow evening, I'm v.vaguely doing a thing w/some local music friends at Loft345:
http://www.douban.com/event/25948581/

thank you! looking forward to getting back to guangzhou. are you there for the next little while?

i should be permanently relocating in mid to late-january. my girlfriend is going to be studying at south china normal university.

Leaving on the 27th, sadly. Finish up at 广外 on Christmas day ... would have liked a month to travel/kick back, but my partner's been having a rough time in NZ and wanted me back ASAP after a year away.

SCNU, sweet! As much as I've loved being up by the leafy green vistas of Baiyun shan, 25min walk to the closest metro through random caryard alleys then 20-stop journeys has meant I haven't always gotten out as much as I meant.

NK orders workers in China back home http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=13647

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/18/north-korean-moranbong-anti-american-lyrics

The source said that Chinese censors had not approved of references to the United States an “ambitious wolf”, and lyrics which glorified the 1950-53 Korean War.

(but it was a chinese korean war song) https://adamcathcart.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/japanese-devils-and-american-wolves.pdf

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35144579 industrial explosions, accidents/craziness in shenzhen

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/23/world/asia/journalist-says-china-may-expel-her-for-article-on-uighurs.html

curious if the uighur problem is much worse than even the western media has portrayed it but china has done a good job keeping a lid on it. (i wonder the same thing about iran's often restive ethnic minorities.)

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/travel-12222015110252.html

i would say it's not MUCH worse because it's been portrayed as a decades long campaign of ethnic cleansing. the western media probably hasn't come close to describing the full extent of the violence and oppression of non-han ethnic groups in xinjiang, just the day to day disruption of normal life, the number of people in detention, travel bans, whatever. most of it is happening in rural southern xinjiang, far away from the prying eyes of foreign journalists, or any journalists. maybe the western media focuses too much on the easiest issues to report, which are those connected to the anti-terror strike hard campaign.

Also, the west has a tendency to think that it's only bad for the Tibetans, so it can't be that bad for anyone else. Otherwise, why would Beastie Boys not say so?

i guess with the tibetan situation you do have a relatively chilled out leader-in-exile, no terrorism as we think of it in the west, some violent riots and self-immolations confined to tibet itself. and it might be fair to say that tibetan leaders are often not calling for national liberation but human rights, religious freedoms.

but with the uighur situation, you have terrorism inside xinjiang and attacks outside of xinjiang. it's hard to separate the various forces at play, the various overseas uighur groups, the groups inside xinjiang agitating for national liberation, radical islamist groups, local groups not connected to any particular ideology but motivated by local oppression. you have the world uyghur congress being funded by the u.s. government, but east turkestan islamic movement sending fighters to syria, and both groups with basically the same aim of national liberation. it's hard to sort out who deserves our sympathy. it's not possible to put it all on chinese state oppression and economic disparity in the region, as some western journalists are quick to do. it's a great big mess.

I think it mostly has to do with western hippies thinking of Tibet as Xanadu, and Buddhism being much more chic than Islam.

the story of bookstore / publishing company employees disappearing is frightening.

the latest, went missing from hong kong, called his wife from a shenzhen number: http://www.theguardian.com/global/2016/jan/02/fifth-man-working-for-publishers-critical-of-chinese-government-goes-missing and the others include a hong kong-based swedish national, the owner of a publishing house, who went missing while in thailand + two that disappeared while in shenzhen + one in hk (i believe that's the total in 2015).

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1507002/shenzhen-court-gives-hong-kong-publisher-yiu-man-tin-10-year-prison more than a year ago... yao wentian was going to publish a book critical of xi jinping and got 10 years in prison for carrying paint across the border.

from what i've seen these books are ridiculous gossip rag material, churned out by the dozen every year, full of basic factual errors. they're of interest to older people that aren't accessing twitter by vpn or reading taiwan or overseas news sites. these people, i have to guess, basically support the party line but like reading about xi jinping fucking random folk singers in the 70s.

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

http://news.ifeng.com/a/20160104/46936566_0.shtml

these people, i have to guess, basically support the party line

Interesting. The whole thing seems kind of scary to me. So you're saying they're down with the party based on your reading the books, or...?

It's kind of odd to me that XI would take gossip so seriously. I have to wonder, from a perspective of game theory or whatever, which is actually the more effective way to quash dissent -- by Xi/Putin-style takedowns of critical journalists, or by GWB/Blair-style wall of bullshit to cover the dissent?