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

Previously:

Rolling Chinese Dream 2014

滚着滚着 rolling china + sinosphere 2013

rolling buried alive in china 2012

rolling china thread 2011

Let's just have one going forward for now I doubt we'll break ILX

dylannnnnn do you know this guy? I thought this was pretty good:

http://elevenelevenjournal.com/2014/12/09/he-qifang/

MAGIC GRASS

The books on magic speak of a certain species of miraculous grass, whose power is such that not even the most complex and difficult lock can withstand it. The words uncap my imagination. From deep within the mountains the harvesters come searching for it, bright blue-green, to close it tightly inside a wooden box and leave to dry for many days; then when it is dry and yellowed, it possesses unmatched arcane power. Grief has long held me captive in darkness and mystery, left me pacing up and down before my own door like a man banished from Paradise. Sometimes, I would rather be one of those children peddling matches—go out in the frigid night and scrape golden sparks from off the wall like opening a window, maybe catch a glimpse of happiness shimmering inside. Only now do I realize that the key I am searching for is really a blade of grass, extinct from common use and unknown to men.

Not a few magical rituals have already disappeared from practice. When I was a child, I often heard that in the nearby city, in a district filled with small-time salesmen and the broken poor lived an unemployed and solitary man, who spent all day walking in ragged clothes and flapping shoes up and down one narrow street, his left hand shuffling a couple of old bronze coins held in his right. He’d shuffle, shuffle and shuffle—and suddenly there would be another coin in there. That was how he earned the money to eat every day. “So how come he’s still so poor?” I would ask, usually to a barber or a shoemaker, who were all the fans of this strange man. “Money like that can’t be saved up. You have to use it as you get it.” But again, how come? Gradually I came to understand the principle: students of magic had to swear an oath to their masters that they would accept some kind of unpleasant handicap as the price of enlightenment—become blind, crippled, unable to have children. This explanation alarmed me and my fantasies, and inspired a fear of magical power, as well as a genuine sympathy for that remarkable poor friend of mine.

Yet it by no means diminished my attraction to magic, and I still listened intently when, beneath lamplight or by fireside, the wondrous legends were told. One of my ancestors over a hundred years ago was just such a legendary character, and knew much magic. I once went to sweep his tomb at Qingming*; I saw that the carving on the black stone steps and on the stele itself was rough and unaffected, not like the other tombs, and made me conscious of the difference of the times.

When I was that age, the magical ability I envied most was the freeze-frame—to instantly make a man believe that he stood on the sheer edge of a cliff or was surrounded on all sides by water, so that he didn’t dare move in the slightest. They said that my old ancestor frequently went out traveling, on foot and leaning on a cane; if he were accosted by some rude young man, he would cast this spell and leave him frozen stock-still by the roadside. Then he would continue on until he met someone ahead with whom he could leave the magic words to set the kid free. All the witches of the day respected him. On one occasion, he went to some family’s house to observe witches perform a ritual. But the idiots there (who perhaps didn’t recognize the famous old man) received him carelessly, so he found an opportunity to slip quietly out the door, and immediately two massive stones from the courtyard leapt into the house, bounded into the main hall and began accompanying the witches in their dance, frightening the party into sudden realization of who their erstwhile guest had been.

And yet, my ancestor never suffered from any sort of visible handicap. Though they say that when he got older, it became necessary to send him away on holidays when the family wanted to slaughter a pig; otherwise, if he heard the squeal of the doomed pig, and his heart but fluttered once, the animal was suddenly impossible to kill. Perhaps this made him weary of his magic. Yes, in his heart he must have undergone endless consideration, endured all kinds of hidden torment, and that was why he never passed on his magic but took it to his grave with him. Yet I was only a child then, and never considered any of that. I merely listened enraptured to the stories they told about him.

In addition to his store of secret knowledge, it was said, my ancestor was also an educated man. For a long time, he hosted in his house another old man of humbler origin who was writing an annotated version of The Book of Changes. The two often sat in the study, animatedly discussing and flipping through pages tangled with notes. On hot summer afternoons the family sent them in refreshments; they would take the food, dip it in a pot of ink and eat it, leaving the sugar untouched. Every time his family celebrated a marriage or the New Year, he would sling his books over his shoulder, pick up a cane and travel home. Yet, having arrived, he’d find a shady spot somewhere near the house and sit down to rest, then pull out a book and read until it got dark, at which point he could only put himself together and go all the way back again, then take a rickshaw home the next day. Eventually, his annotated Book of Changes made it into print, and his great-great-grandson, who formally presented the book to the Imperial Court and who knew how to divine with tortoise shells, was my childhood mentor.

I saw that book once amid the disordered pile of other books in my trunk (it may have fallen apart by now) but never paid much attention to it. At the time I was looking for a book on magic; then adrift in tide of war, as adults were agonizing day and night over how to avoid disaster, I dove unhindered into fairy tales and novels, finding there a space for my imagination. I was most enchanted by a kind of invisibility grass spoken of in one of the stories; merely tie one blade of it to your body and no one could see you.

Just now, beneath the lamplight, I have written a title on a piece of white paper: The Origins of Magic. I want to use a pessimistic perspective to explain that the nascence of magic was an entirely natural occurrence, like the arrival of dreams at night. The true Sage, having lost the Self, should be dreamless; and while that state of being is certainly a pure one, we everyday people are still repelled by its emptiness. My pen suddenly halts in its course over the page. Eh, there you go daydreaming again. And to what distant land has your mind flown off to this time? Nowhere, I answer myself, my mind has stayed right here, beneath the cone of this light. Lamplight, like white fog, compasses its boundary all around me, as a tomb does its guest. I throw down my pen. It’s at a time like this I’d really like to have a little White Lotus sorcery—a covered basin of clear water, a small canoe of woven grass, and I’ll venture out on my own private ocean.
—

*The traditional Chinese holiday “Clear and Bright,” known to us as the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, held in early April.

Chai Jing's Under the Dome: Investigating China’s Smog, banned after 200 million views.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6X2uwlQGQM

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

where's that?

...the number of criminal trials held in Xinjiang rose more than 40 percent to more than 29,500 last year compared to the number of criminal trials in 2013.

The number of trials for obstructing social administrative order doubled to more than 4,500 in 2014, the report said, noting that authorities use this category to target unauthorized Islamic and Christian groups. It also covers the distribution of religious materials as well as assemblies and demonstrations.

http://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/criminal-trials-in-xinjiang-increase-03112015163454.html

Xinjiang, photographed by Carolyn Drake - check out entries under 'Wild Pigeon' http://carolyndrake.com/

Why don't American students who want to get a job in China just go there and get a job washing dishes at Pizza Hut or Outback Steakhouse and live 8 to a room w/o papers?

― 龜, Friday, March 13, 2015 12:04 PM (8 hours ago)

i think the maybe equivalent of that is teaching english in an unlicensed school in a third tier city. plenty are still up for doing that.

i would say there are lots of lucrative jobs in china but not many of them require chinese lang proficiency or they require actual chinese lang proficiency + serious literacy + understanding of the country, but not much in the middle.

http://www.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/12/chinese-governments-warning-to-the-dalai-lama-youd-better-reincarnate-on-our-terms

dalai lama says he might not reincarnate

Zhu Weiqun, a Communist Party official who has long dealt with Tibetan issues, told reporters in Beijing on Wednesday that the Dalai Lama had, essentially, no say over whether he was reincarnated. That was ultimately for the Chinese government to decide, he said, according to a transcript of his comments on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper.

how many europeans or north americans without chinese ancestry get to that level of proficiency

people learning languages without spending enough time to get anywhere is one of the most delusory practices

I think learning languages is fine if it's a hobby, can be fun, but agree if it's for vocational purposes

i think europeans or north americans without chinese ancestry that get to that level are rare and most are dedicated hobbyists or in academia. but there are lots of people that speak the language well and can't claim anything close to near native literacy and lots in academia with great literacy that speak the language competently but not fluently. it requires i think time in country or longterm immersion combined with longterm, serious study.

Something I've noticed/struggled a bit with is also most high level instruction teaches you very standard PTH

Which is great if all you hang around with are highly literate and educated CCP types or academics

And also great if you're in business, probably

But it's also very hard to learn the local dialect and there aren't many resources to turn to other than find a local dude and hang out w/ dude n buddies

This is true even in Beijing, home of "PTH"

i guess i kind of agree but at the same time teaching dialects or even listening to nonstandard accents is pretty much impossible and native speakers i think are even worse at it than non sinophone learners (they're more used to guessing at phrases from context, less tuned to tonal quirks that throw off native speakers). but it is kind of surprising that even for languages like wu or cantonese with hundreds of millions of speakers and their own distinct culture and literature the learning resources are few.

but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou_Television_Cantonese_controversy type of stuff so it's not really surprising

now that i'm kind of attempting to learn japanese i get discouraged by flashbacks to sitting at my desk writing characters over and over again, the shame of seemingly not being able to competently ask for the right type of zhongnanhai even after studying the language in university, years of trying to feel my way through conversations that i understood ten percent of, prepping for classes with remarks that i hoped would seem improvised and trying to predict possible professor questions while also trying to figure out a photocopied never translated into english story about an aristocratic family in late ming china written in a combination of vernacular and classical chinese. so, flipping through introduction to hiragana and a book of simple greetings, i know that even mastering those things will take too long and my mastery will be unsatisfying and i will look and feel like an idiot over and over again, even if i work at it for years. but when i get that six figure salary working for toyota it will have been worth it. #futureintlangofbusiness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0o7lajjzBg

http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0105/c98649-8831651.html

http://i.imgur.com/7fjzkg8.jpg

Photo shows a female SWAT member in Sichuan ripping apart a steel wash basin barehanded. Four hours physical training every day turns an ordinary woman into an invincible soldier. (Photo/CCTV)

lol

Example of the strength of Chinese soldiers, or of the poor quality of Chinese manufacturing

Idk if anybody else still watches 非诚勿扰 but lately they've had an 'anonymous' woman on who only appears in Avatar makeup?

http://i.imgur.com/NIn484z.jpg

http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health/article/1742243/changes-chinas-alcohol-use-policies-urgently-needed-researchers-say

For nakh

http://xw.qq.com/news/20150323058980

http://news.sina.com.cn/s/p/2015-03-23/145131635580.shtml

weibo user returns to hometown of handan, hebei. "reports most funerals in the area feature strippers to 'liven things up.' spectators don't know whether to laugh or cry. as soon as the funeral dirge concludes, the strippers hit the stage."

http://hongwrong.com/hong-kong-dystopian/

Kinda cliche'd by this point but I still love it

http://i.imgur.com/h92fGmu.jpg

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth

Who wants to go with me

always appreciate your links, thanks

can confirm even without having visited toxic lakes that baotou is one of the worst places on earth

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/supporters-of-detained-feminists-in-china-petition-for-their-release/?_r=0

i keep feeling like i'm missing something with the detention of these women... they were going to be "distributing stickers and leaflets protesting molestation in buses and subways"? on international womens day? i'm more proparty than the average chinawatcher and i can usually see the fucked up logic they operate on but i really must be missing something here. hillary clinton otm.

http://i.imgur.com/FrQ97Ny.jpg

https://twitter.com/XHNews/status/587838236468256768

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/1780225/china-confirms-three-killed-north-koreans-border-village
+
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/china-confirms-killings-on-border-with-north-korea/

http://sinonk.com/2015/03/24/parties-with-different-ideologies-chinas-new-ambassador-to-north-korea/

Despite perceptions of China’s allegedly influence over Pyongyang, China operates in a generally unstable climate in which North Korea’s response to overtures such as building roads to connect it to Chinese-financed cross-border activities, indicating intention to restart Six-Party Talks, or toning down relations with South Korea, is tentative and unconvincing. China, therefore, appears to be treading on relatively thin ice.

...

While China has made certain moves in the past year and a half to “normalize” the relationship with North Korea (meaning to deal with North Korea under the auspices of the Foreign Ministry rather than ILD), the appointment of another ILD bureaucrat to staff the Embassy in Pyongyang could indicate that Beijing is not yet prepared to move things too quickly in that direction.

Who wants to go with me

― 龜, Saturday, April 4, 2015 7:04 AM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm in

Nice it is a noize trip

how do you get to there

Start digging s tunnel

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/CoejI5n

pls somebody email that to noah feldman

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/what-a-difference-a-decade-makes-xinjiang-film-emerges-from-the-past/

Hope this screens in NYC

is ed hardy a thing in china

No idea

http://i.imgur.com/U7hAYkZ.jpg

potpourri, snack, or both?

Chinese flower/herbal tea is the best fuiud

I hadn't heard of the term "nail house" before encountering it in this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32900601

Google image search of "nail house" turns up some pretty incredible photos.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-american-pundits-china-isnt-a-country-its-a-fantasyland/2015/05/29/24ba60e0-0431-11e5-a428-c984eb077d4e_story.html

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-01/macau-s-casino-revenue-drops-37-as-slump-hits-one-year

Macau casino revenue down 37%, leading to 24% YOY decline in regional revenue. It's being linked to a crackdown on corruption on the mainland.

Lmao

More Korea than China, but there's a bit of MERS going around:
http://chinadailyhk.com/nation/2015-05/31/content_15270486.html

it's that time of year again

so my parents are in beijing right now. they were at tiananmen square today + apparently most people don't really know anything about 1989? their tour guide said that another group had told them about it but otherwise didn't really know much? it reminded me of a friend (who passed away last year) who came out of the USSR around 1985 and said that until she left the USSR she had no idea that WW2 had anything to do w/ the Jews. she knew that the Nazis killed lots of Russians but apparently it wasn't open knowledge in the USSR that the holocaust had gone on.

that's not that surprising

i guess i'm just surprised that in 2015 a country as large + modern as china could still keep the wraps on that kind of thing. is it that the internet is still pretty monitored? or is it more that you have to make an effort to find out this kind of thing and most people aren't really looking?

state controlled media is an amazing thing

"apparently most people don't really know anything about 1989" is... i think we've talked about this on rolling china etc threads before but no, people know about it. it hasn't been kept secret for 26 years. if you were alive in china 26 years ago and old enough to be watching tv or listening to the radio, you heard about it. if you are a beijing native you've heard of it. not including like... i dunno... most people who are in their 40s, 50s have heard of it.

00 that doesn't mean you want to discuss it with the tour groups you take through tiananmen square.

00 and if you're under the age of like... 30 even if you're vaguely aware you probably don't know a lot about it / care a lot about it and it appears to belong to another era in chinese history. it might as well be the campaign against spiritual pollution or the cultural revolution. if you're a kid working in beijing, the china you grew up in is so different from 1989 that it's like studying ancient history. yo mordy ask some 17-24 year olds what went down on 9-11 and try to get a better answer than "iraq flew planes into buildings."

00 there are people that think 6-4 was a tragedy but was necessary or the only alternative to the fall of the government. they see people that mark the event overseas and in hk as trying to destabilize the party and the people's republic.

00 yeah state controlled media but i think the way the event is remembered in the west and how it's remembered is... maybe out of proportion to what it really means/meant in china

yo mordy ask some 17-24 year olds what went down on 9-11 and try to get a better answer than "iraq flew planes into buildings."

i've done this before btw. american schools ime are doing a lot of education re 9/11.

okay but i mean could they give a satisfying answer to what made people fly planes into buildings?

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?).

that sentence should be: the party has brought stability and wealth.

for people of the generation old enough to have been in beijing or seen tv coverage, they probably also grew up in a more chaotic time or their parents grew up in a more chaotic time. even if you think the party erred in its treatment of the protests, the party has led china to unimaginable prosperity and stability and you're probably willing to overlook a few misssteps.

i mean it could be the tour guide was just putting my parents on and she actually knew all about 89 and just didn't want to talk about it [with them, or in general]

more likely knows vaguely that something went down but has been instructed not to discuss political topics while strolling through tiananmen. or they're in their 20s, came from far outside beijing and haven't heard of it because with or without internet censorship there's a lack of interest in tiananmen and in recent chinese history and the event isn't remembered the same by those that were around in china as it is in the west where it's one of a handful of things people can come up with when asked about china.

I DUNNO

Probably the better analogy would be to Iran Contra or any of the innumerable horrible things Reagan did while in office

Im sure tour guides talking to tourists about 1989 get a e-ticket to prison so I wouldnt talk about it either.

talking to american tourists about china's internal politics is probably not very rewarding
after you have the 60000th dude says, "HEY TELL ME HOW THERE WAS A MASSACRE HERE IN 1989"/"HEY ISN'T THIS A COMMUNIST COUNTRY HOW COME YOU GUYS GOT SO MANY FANCY CARS"
whether you end up in jail or not

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?

this is anecdotal or mostly conjecture, i guess but the people buying the books are
-- from the mainland
-- born before the start of reform and opening
-- follow party politics to some extent
very likely to agree with the overall aims of the party and be shy to criticize the people that ended the hundred years of humiliation, etc.

these books are mostly run of the mill gossip rather than critiques of the system, say, one of the more common counter-party viewpoints in china, whether far left or mild liberal or the fliers you get in long distance bus terminal lots from fringe religious groups. the readers of these books are not interested in overthrowing the party as much as they're interested in reading about, like, jiang zemin's mistresses. (from what i've seen!) like, the books are not criticizing xi's foreign policy or heavyhanded censorship of the internet but basically saying: he's a sleaze and the party's leadership especially at the local level is a bunch of whoring, boozing scumbags with a taste for quattroportes, 19 year old ktv girls and louis xiii.

i mean, everybody knows the party's leadership is a bunch of thugs and perverts. but they still support them! the party is extremely sensitive about their secrets. more than any other story, reporting on party leader finances received the most backlash directly from the top: bloomberg/nytimes were slapped with a great firewall block and had visas for reporters blocked (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/world/asia/reporter-for-reuters-wont-receive-china-visa.html / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/01/world/asia/times-reporter-in-china-is-forced-to-leave-over-visa-issue.html and For journalists working in China, there is no more sensitive subject than the wealth of the top leadership; it poses more potential problems than anything one could write about Tibet or Taiwan or human rights.: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-not-to-get-kicked-out-of-china).

Thanks. I'd heard that about the sensitivity to those issues and I guess it makes sense that most of the top party members are most concerned about protecting their own little fiefdoms. I don't want to sound like a China-hatin expat but it does seem like people here have a remarkable propensity for denial regarding the deeper issues in Chinese government etc.

Meters/bonwe shares have been suspended from trading after the CEO (China's 65th richest billionaire) disappeared. There's speculation that he might have been picked up in a corruption investigation but it's strange to see rich / influential people just plucked out of the air without explanation. Seems part of a wider trend though:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/china-business/12079283/Chinese-companies-warned-to-tell-investors-when-executives-go-missing.html

china is fucked up.

they even tore down that gold mao statue in henan.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35338484 --- Gui Minhai said he turned himself in after being on the run for 12 years over a drink-driving conviction. Mr Gui, a Swedish national, is one of five Hong Kong booksellers to go missing recently. --- glad this was resolved.

one of the remaining four has contacted his wife, who requested the police cease involvement. the other three, who knows?

Interesting article about Chinese foreign students in the US converting to Christianity:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/11/leave-china-study-in-america-find-jesus-chinese-christian-converts-at-american-universities/

http://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-mao-mango-cult-of-1968/

I guess this will come as a surprise to nobody, but an interesting tale nonetheless:

Hong Kong Bookseller Says He Was Detained by China
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/world/asia/hong-kong-bookseller-lam-wing-kee.html

@dick_nixon
I asked Chou En-lai what he thought of the French Revolution. "Too soon to tell," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98RNh7rwyf8

what is it with chinese govt visions and shithouse videos

attempt :failed

it's informative!

i'm waiting for the han sanping-directed epic featuring huang xiaoming as li keqiang.

I wish they'd cover "want you back" but tie it into wanting the silk road back

REMEMBER ALL THE GOODS THAT WE TRADED PRIEST"

this is crazy if true

11 million+ Muslims in China will have their DNA & iris scans collected. If you’re a Muslim who lives outside of this region, you will need to report to the govt & provide your DNA. https://t.co/9xqhIR1c7p

— Yasmin Yonis (@YasminYonis) December 13, 2017

i'm reading from people who follow chinese politics that this has been going on for a very long time so interested to see how this plays out now that they're finally admitting to it

https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Policy-Politics/Chinese-local-governments-rush-to-admit-fake-data

In Liaoning Province tax receipts and income from various fees were padded by 20-30% according to counties and cities during the period of 2011-2014. Inner Mongolia has said that a quarter of the fiscal revenue stated for 2016 were actually fake.

Fiscal revenue does not include proceedings from land sales. Therefore, it is considered a key indicator of the local government's true financial health.

"Chinese bureaucrats were promoted based on two figures -- GDP and tax revenue," according to Nie Huihua, a professor at Renmin University of China. Making fiscal revenue look better than they actually are, have always were important for aspiring bureaucrats looking to move up the ladder.

Recently, there has been a spike in similar cases. In December 2017 the National Audit Office announced that 10 cities and districts in Hunan, Yunnan and Jilin provinces and the direct-controlled city of Chongqing had overstated their fiscal revenues by a total of 1.5 billion yuan ($238 million).

...

Overall local government revenue growth slowed sharply to 5% in 2017 from 29% in 2011. Meanwhile, local government spending has continued growing at fast paces due to swelling social security spending.

The growth rates of regional government outlays surpassed those of revenue growth for the three straight years through 2017. Most local governments are struggling with serious fiscal strains.

In its desperate efforts to make up for revenue shortfalls, Liaoning went so far as to take such measures as collecting taxes for the following year and delaying tax refunds due to special tax breaks.

Local governments have piled on debt to fill budget gaps. Total local government debt reached 15 trillion yuan at the end of 2016, according to official statistics. But the International Monetary Fund has estimated the actual amount including off-the-book debts at 32 trillion yuan.

Most local governments cannot finance their spending without cash from Beijing. In many provinces, state subsidies provided to local governments exceed the taxes and fees they pay to the central government.

...

So much so that many internet commentators offered the same advice: "Admit inflating fiscal revenue and receive more subsidies from the central government."

it was admitted in 2015 too, faking data over the previous two years. i'll respond out of a sense of obligation to the thread.

i guess it's probably about taking more in conditional grants from the central government. also a response to a central government crackdown on inflated data and local governments going into debt. from my limited knowledge of the chinese taxation system, there are not really subsidies but some grants to equalize the provinces and shit. basically the provinces collect tax revenue and send it up and get it back in a system of transfer payments, like provincial governments collect most of the tax revenue (but can't really make tax policy or keep much of it, which is why there's a drive to develop or grab land because they make money doing that, one of the nontax revenues provincial governments bring in), send it to the central government and it's sent back down based on the central budget + revenue brought in by the province + cash to keep up with equality between the provinces. i dunno. there's definitely a pressure i think to send smooth lines up to the central government, because the promotion of local government leaders is tied to performance (see also falsified crime statistics?). maybe they want to make sure they take more conditional grants from the central government, too.

ya, the more i read about china's falsified and doctored numbers, the more it seems widespread -- from the agricultural period during mao to police reporting to pollution (apparently the're just moving factories around?)

it's kind of surreal

also this is an article from 2016 but pocket just recommended it right now:

https://www.economist.com/news/china/21712173-golf-footballyou-name-it-what-china-claims-have-invented

lol

well fuck

China plans to remove presidential term limits from its constitution, potentially allowing President Xi Jinping to stay on beyond his second term, which ends in 2023.

i didn't really expect this although the signs were there and... i recall saying as recently as like a week ago that it was improbable and the party needed a smooth post-xi transition to maintain legitimacy.

Wow, came to the President for Life Jinping news via the Guardian article. Biggest news of global import since the Trump election.

holy shit.

It really brings home how Xi ha sheen able to concentrate power like no other leader since Deng Xiaoping.

china has banned the letter n

the fucking letter n

also:

- ‘Ten thousand years’ (万岁), which is China’s way of saying: ‘Long live!’ or ‘Viva!’

- ‘Disagree’ (不同意)

- ‘Xi Zedong’ (习泽东) - a hybrid of the names of Xi and Chairman Mao Zedong

- ‘Shameless’ (不要脸)

- ‘Lifelong’ (终身)

-‘Personality cult’ (个人崇拜)

-‘Emigrate (移民)

- ‘Immortality’ (长生不老)

The name Yuan Shikai, a Qing dynasty warlord who unsuccessfully tried to restore monarch to China, was also banned as were the titles of two George Orwell books, 1984 and Animal Farm.

i even bought the chinese version 1984 paperback in china, what the fuck

just reference to the title banned on social media though. animal farm 动物庄园 was referenced in some older essay circulating in the past couple days, so i'd guess that's why?
interesting to see the reaction and the crackdown happen in realtime on the chinese internet

this is interesting: https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/emperor-xis-censors-no-clothes/

http://chinamediaproject.org/2018/02/28/li-datongs-open-letter/

li datong former editor of freezing point 冰点 the shutdown of which in 2006 occasioned maybe the last time party elders came out against censorship-- in 2018 the league faction and its power has been mostly rooted out so... hope for the best--and another great open letter from li: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060126_3.htm (remember eswn??) ...

Two questions: The economic opening of China, is it still called Gaige Kaifang? And is there a really good book written about it?

yes? that's the name for market reforms of say 78-92, household responsibility system, TVEs, flood of foreign investment, special economic zones.
maybe. maybe ezra vogel's thick deng xiaoping biography, deng xiaoping and the transformation of china, is the best option. and then barry naughton's textbookish the chinese economy: transitions and growth. there were many many books written around the earlytomid1990s about the reform era but they usually put undue weight on reform stalling out in the late 1980s, protest movement and crackdown, etc. it was too early to see exactly what deng had accomplished and what reform would really mean. so, the naughton book is good, from 2007.

turns out you need a visa to change flights in shenzhen. not even to leave the airport, just to change flights. and NOBODY told me until i was stood at check in.

i thought 24 hours transit without visa outside of the 72 hour visa free cities

Isn’t their also the pearl river Delta visa on arrival or does that only apply to land crossings form Hong Kong and Macao?

i thought 24 hours transit without visa outside of the 72 hour visa free cities

they wouldn’t even let me get on the fucking plane

that's fucked up. do you know what the actual rule is on it? i heard about similar problems with people trying to do the 72 hour thing and airlines etc not even having heard of it

That sounds like the airline’s fault, not knowing the rules. I’ve had to show the airline the page on the Chinese immigration website to be allowed to do the Transit without visa thing. 24hrs is allowed anywhere in China.

It’s been a while since I’ve had issues but IIRC it was with BA in London, it took the check-in person calling their supervisor to confirm that transit without Visa for Shanghai was a thing.

That sounds like the airline’s fault, not knowing the rules.

well their fuckup has cost me a pile of money so if that’s the case i will fucking explode

oh god

https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/guangdong/shenzhen/visa-on-arrival.htm

fuck, thank you, going to follow this up

wait it says border crossings, doesn’t mention the airport

which makes no sense at all

it looks like shenzhen is excluded from 24 hour no visa transit because they have a far more liberal 144 hour no visa transit policy. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/cityguides/guangdong/144hours-visa-free.htm

also hey i wrote an article about jordan peterson in china https://supchina.com/2018/04/10/jordan-peterson-and-chinas-white-left/

Interesting piece, is that your first for SupChina?

yes first

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPJbokaT2w8

The 'City in the Sky' of Larung Gar (Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China) in 2015, before the mass demolition ordered by the Chinese authorities. pic.twitter.com/Qqwq3djfXa

— Irène DB (@UrbanFoxxxx) May 18, 2018

some 2015/16 photos of an incredible looking Tibetan prefecture formerly dubbed a "city in the sky", which has probably been completely ethnically gentrified/destroyed by now.

The 'City in the Sky' of Larung Gar (Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China) in 2015, before the mass demolition ordered by the Chinese authorities. pic.twitter.com/Qqwq3djfXa

— Irène DB (@UrbanFoxxxx) May 18, 2018

some 2015/16 photos of an incredible looking Tibetan prefecture formerly dubbed a "city in the sky", which has probably been completely ethnically gentrified/destroyed by now.

oops doublepost.

https://thediplomat.com/2017/08/china-tears-down-the-tibetan-city-in-the-sky/

https://www.apnews.com/6e151296fb194f85ba69a8babd972e4b
good reporting from xinjiang summing up the situation

i have a conflicted relationship with the country and it seems strange to make this post right after one about ethnic cleansing in china's borderlands.
i'm going to be in beijing from mid-june to august. i haven't spent any significant time in the city except the airport since around 2006. any hot tips, gang?

NY mag just published this. looks eh imo http://nymag.com/travel/urbanist/beijing-is-a-city-that-rewards-those-who-delve-deep.html

some of that stuff isn't bad? i guess, but kinda confirms—not a major revelation—beijing has changed greatly and become even more dull over the last decade.

So uh my little brother wrote this about Taiwan! https://www.wantaiwantravel.com/2017/10/06/old-taipei-in-12-hours/

I think he used pics he already had to accompany it. Unfortunately he didn't take any of the food, I feel like he missed a chance there.

i'm going to be in beijing from mid-june to august. i haven't spent any significant time in the city except the airport since around 2006. any hot tips, gang?

I'm going to be in Beijing for about five days towards the end of June. ILX China FAP?

my plans changed, so i'll be there june 2-9 + going back in august for the book fair.
what have you got planned in bj?

We're going to see Hedgehog (http://hedgehogrock.com) on June 23, but really our plan is to just outside and see what's going on. Never been to China before and Beijing will be the last stop after GZ, HK, and Shanghai.

ive got some work stuff to do but basically just hanging around, too. ive lived in china incl a stint in guangzhou but never had any inclination to visit beijing. unfortunately, everyone i need to see is there, though.

http://www.baldingsworld.com/2018/07/17/balding-out/

i like balding and this was interesting.
but
come on an american libertarian getting upset because everyone cuts in line, stewing over the fact that nobody respects the law, "the pure rule of the jungle with unconstrained might imposing their will and all others ignoring laws to behave as they see fit with no sense of morality or respect for right" yeah uh-huh
and again the tired argument that china is fucked up because people lack values and respect for the individual while he calls for more of that good free market AND sympathizes with xi jinping's authoritarian revival, taking to bloomberg to call for more aggressive neoliberal marketization and opening up of the chinese economy to western capital.

Wake me up when protests begin again

Lol

Libertarianism isn’t a free for all or chaos dude

sure, i guess that's fair. but can't i appreciate christopher balding simmering with rage in a kfc line in shenzhen, reconsidering xi jinping's strike hard campaign against queue jumpers?

balding is good on the chinese economy especially the writing on his own site, and he understands the subject more than most people. but the idea -- and i'm simplifying his take -- that economic restructuring to remove state control + protecting freedom of speech will eventually sort things out is not a good one.
in this piece in particular, though, he seems to write off economics entirely and seems to see problems ("complete and utter lack of respect for the individual or person" / "brutally chaotic because there are no rules" / "no concept of justice" / "no value system" / "no exogenously held right or wrong") as being result of some fallen culture (perhaps resulting from the excesses of maoism although he doesn't say that) + authoritarianism, rather than any economic factors (or not authoritarianism hand in hand with neoliberal economic policy) (and post-reform and opening china is at the 40 year mark while maoist china lasted 30 years, 20 years if you put it great leap forward and the hard push for collectivization to september of 76).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL46TjUaebs

This Fan Bingbing situation is really creepy. Has this happened to anyone else as high profile?

maybe the closest is zhao benshan. he is/was arguably more famous or recognizable than fan bingbing, traded on his celebrity to build a business empire, net worth estimated in the hundreds of millions, but around 2014, after bo xilai (popular party chief of chongqing, mayor of dalian, etc. possible choice for politburo standing committee), a buddy of his, was sent to prison for life, rumors started to circulate, but whatever happened, he basically disappeared / completely blackballed. unlike fan bingbing he wasn't doing much in overseas media.

Making the rounds everywhere today:: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies

the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice

iswydt

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/yan-liankes-forbidden-satires-of-china
i hope everyone reads this piece on yan lianke

Thanks D

Yeah

that's a great piece

at the beijing book fair in august, it was interesting to see the combined jealousy (at yan's literary skill? but also his overseas buzz, the sweet deal he has with grove, the best treatment any chinese writer has gotten in translation) and let's say wariness with yan lianke, weird situation where literary heavyweights like jia pingwa struggles to get published in english and published in the right places (jia's translations have come out on a combination of academic presses, tax writeoff schemes that mostly public self-help books, and amazon's imprint), because it's a good look, politically, but yan lianke gets reviewed in prestigious places, books coming out on grove (without having to have his foreign publishing bankrolled by deals between publishers and chinese instuitions and/or chinese grant money), and he's politically doing decent (provincial writers' associations and literary federations-level okay) but he's also treading a very, very fine line and is probalby doing less well financially/politically than other heavyweights.
the foreign publishers (incl a guy from grove) that were there talked glowingly about yan lianke while translators, chinese publishers and writers looked uncomfortable.

Haven't read anything by him, but will give it a go, some great quotes there that really ring true.

dylannn where's your list of top ten cities in china?

i dunno. don't see it on the rolling china threads. was it best ten cities to live in?

something like that. dalian and kaifeng were both on it

thoughts on a zhengzhou / kaifeng / luoyang trip? partially inspired by that yan lianke profile.

Do it !

oh okay, based on that kaifeng thing i found the post: here
but that's 2009 dylannnnnnn, i can't stand by any place on that list.

kaifeng, especially, i've been back to kaifeng since then.
when i went the first time in 2006, the central city was mostly still there, lots of twisting lanes, everyone out in the street on a summer night, the famous night market still shabby and fun, the museum to judge bao and the area along the lake the only concession to the tourist trade. these places, though, you know especially kaifeng, with not much going on, the money flowing in and a mayor with a five year mandate to radically change things: a lot was torn down since 2006. kaifeng was one of those cities where they destroyed the old city to rebuild an old city more capable of housing retail and condos, bringing in tourists. this 2012 article says they planned on taking down 5.8 million square meters of old buildings in the next four years. they had to move a third of the city's population out to new suburbs. so. i mean, that's happened everywhere but the resulting tourist infrastructure that dominates the center of kaifeng is completely uninteresting to me, personally. partly out of spite, i hesitate to recommend anyone visit kaifeng.
luoyang is better off, maybe becuase it had more actual history to preserve and less to create, so less of the city is fucked up, good mix of redeveloped fake old and lively real old. also if you;ve never been to the longmen grottoes and especially if you can go outside of the summer busy season it's impressive, white horse temple there, a chance to see the villages out along the way. luoyang is good.
zhengzhou is something else entirely. it would make my places i'd like to live if i was 24 years old again list.

here is that list Living/Working in China

of the cities listed only yantai is still an option.

Really agree about that dylannn, was so sad to see all the life sucked out of the cities I lived in, even in somewhere modern like Zhuhai there were barbecue restaurants all along the seafront which are all gone now as part of some "civilised city" campaign, anywhere with tourists is doomed it seems. The only places less touched by this stuff are my in-law's hometowns in rural Hubei, and that's because there is nothing to see there (except, of course, really good food) so hardly something to recommend. I usually advise people to go straight to Yunnan / Guangxi where at least they have amazing natural scenery and local culture, but even there places like Guilin and Yangshuo have gone the same way.

pretty much everywhere i've ever lived in china has been wiped out by redevelopment.
i married a girl from xuzhou, her parents lived in an old factory dormitory that had luxury-ish gated compounds go up around it and they waited for years to get the cash or the property to move out, ended up going to the edge of the city, dormitories taken down, and now even their new house is slated to be taken down to put up an extension of a mining college / residential complex, and that building has been standing only like... just over a decade? and that area around the dormitories, she remembers it as the very edge of the edge of the city, almost rural, and now it's just on the edge of the central city, but the city itself has expanded dozens of miles past there. first time i was there, in 2006, the center of town had a carrefour and two gaudy department stores GOLDEN EAGLE and GOLDEN something else, but the rest was mostly older neighborhoods, built in the 80s at the latest. all of that is gone, now, and there's a wal-mart and a bunch of new apartments, and they've remade the central square for the 5th time in the past two decades. the old neighborhood around the train station, between the river and the train station, it was one of the oldest in the city, narrow lanes, the last place with a community feeling after the area around ximatai was redeveloped, but it was allowed to decay when the high speed rail station went up far from the center of town—and this was never a particularly nice place, stunk of diesel all the time, and parts of it were slumlike, lot of rough shops popular with the men that came in from xinyi and fengxian or further to work in the city, cinder block shacks for the prostitutes and dog meat restaurants—and then it was piece by piece dismantled and everyone sent away... but all the places i remember going in the city are basically gone now, pretty much.
dalian, i lived way out past the airport in ganjingzi pao'ao, in an apartment built on a landfill, with nothing but gravel quarries past it. area still had a few red brick buildings with cultural revolution slogans stenciled on them. they started building big ol apartments nearby and next time i went back, almost everything i recognized had been taken down. same with datong, where the mayor geng yanbo had a plan to completely clear out the old city and put up a city wall and tear down the old temple complex to put up a copy of the old temple with more room for tourists. the situation in the old city was shit because nobody had ever given a fuck until it was time to absolutely clear it out: not much compensation, slow to come, sending people way out to the middle of nowhere in whatever NEW AREA whatever DEVELOPMENT ZONE neighborhoods.
just in beijing, i mean, that's an old story by now, from the first time i visited to the most recent time, unrecognizable, and even going back between march? and august, the lama temple area was being bricked up so fast that you could see things disappearing, that quickly.
get used to everything you love being wiped away and replaced with people and places that are less interesting.

some of it's normal and to be expected, since the housing that people are living in in some places is atrocious, but the compensation offered (and sometimes not paid)(and if you're renting in beijing and your place goes up for demolition, you've just got to move and the landlord walks away with the compensation) and the places that people are forced to relocate to are not very good.
beijing is a whole other story, currently being completely remade, evicting the undesirables, bricking up everything interesting. rest of the country, neoliberal restructuring of the real estate market is part of the problem, combined with the money to be made by local governments redeveloping land, no real protection for those that get turfed out, no effective social housing scheme, but before those get fixed, and this might be just as improbable, it would be great to have a legit local election for mayor and party secretary and head of the local public security bureau... maybe it would result in more farsighted development instead of mayors and party secretaries bouncing around trying to make their name, perhaps some accoutnability, possibly slightly less corruption, fewer guys like ji jianye (mayor of yangzhou and then nanjing who helped bulldoze many interesting features of the city while taking millions in bribes and getting sentenced to 15 years), geng yanbo (subject of the documentary the chinese mayor who displaced 500k residents bulldozed 200k homes in a failed attempt to turn datong into a tourist destination), zhang zhongsheng (vice-mayor in a shanxi backwater who got the death penalty for taking usd 100 mil+ in bribes), li lianyu, zhou liangen, chen baogen... names go on and on.

living in japan now, different situation for a couple reasons, not least of which is that japan gets fucked up by earthquakes, landslides and typhoons regularly, but pretty much everything not wrecked by bombing or previous chaos was torn down when the country boomed, led by the construction state, concrete dumped over most interesting stuff. especially all the stuff not old enough to have been preserved over time, like an old fishing village or whatever, old machiya houses, even gaudy bubble era stuff, torn down or set to be torn down. they're better at making tasteful fake old stuff here, though, and nobody complains about all the castles having been rebuilt from ferrocement in the mid-1980s.

“The Quad”: As the effort to contain China gathers momentum we may be hearing more about the entente btw US, India, Japan and Australia first conceived during Bush administration. https://t.co/UjasZavTzY

On the background check out:https://t.co/xrhmlpdrgH pic.twitter.com/GWdvzWNGBF

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) November 18, 2018

Big article by Philip P Pan in the NY Times today - nothing really new here, but seems like a good overview, and looks like its the start of a series which could be better.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-rules.html

china, the new america

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/world-built-by-china.html

Beijing is heavily focused on its neighbors, lending them money for extensive road-building projects. Pakistan is running out of money to repay the loans, part of a broader pattern of what critics call China’s “debt trap” diplomacy.

China has a different view when it comes to labor and environmental strictures. To staff overseas projects, Chinese companies have flown in their own workers by the thousands, drawing complaints that they are doing little to create local jobs. Safety standards have been uneven.

And Beijing continues to export polluting technologies like coal-fired power plants, even as such projects have become unpopular in China.

Western governments and multinationals generally steer clear of politically volatile countries. The Chinese government has been less skittish, lending heavily to nations like Venezuela, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

But China’s lending is not usually largess. Countries that run into financial trouble must renegotiate their loans, putting them deeper into debt. Sometimes projects are left in limbo.

Ecuador spent over $1 billion to prepare a site for a $12 billion Chinese refinery that was supposed to be finished in 2013. It’s stalled.

china's at it again

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612458/exclusive-chinese-scientists-are-creating-crispr-babies/

He’s choice to edit the gene called CCR5 could prove controversial as well. People without working copies of the gene are believed to be immune or highly resistant to infection by HIV. In order to mimic the same result in embryos, however, He’s team has been using CRISPR to mutate otherwise normal embryos to damage the CCR5 gene.

The attempt to create children protected from HIV also falls into an ethical gray zone between treatment and enhancement. That is because the procedure does not appear to cure any disease or disorder in the embryo, but instead attempts to create a health advantage, much as a vaccine protects against chicken pox.

For the HIV study, doctors and AIDS groups recruited Chinese couples in which the man was HIV positive. The infection has been a growing problem in China.

...

Behind the Chinese trial also lies some bold thinking about how evolution can be shaped by science. While the natural mutation that disables CCR5 is relatively common in parts of Northern Europe, it is not found in China. The distribution of the genetic trait around the world—in some populations but not in others—highlights how genetic engineering might be used to pick the most useful inventions discovered by evolution over the eons in different locations and bring them together in tomorrow’s children.

Such thinking could, in the future, yield people who have only the luckiest genes and never suffer Alzheimer’s, heart disease, or certain infections.

The text of an academic website that He maintains shows that he sees the technology in the same historic, and transformative, terms. “For billions of years, life progressed according to Darwin’s theory of evolution,” it states. More recently, industrialization has changed the environment in radical ways posing a “great challenge” that humanity can meet with “powerful tools to control evolution.”

It concludes: “By correcting the disease genes … we humans can better live in the fast-changing environment.”

allegedly at it.

there is at least one confirmed couple who is going through with the birth of genetically modified sisters

Some high-quality content here from Global Times, enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8SCM-4SWl8

okay friends that know something about how intelligence services operate
not knowing anything, i start to wonder, what are the odds that spavor in particular, who met kim jong un and was deep with the dprk, wasn't "debrief" by csis or the cia / wasn't an "asset" (quotes around words i'm not sure i know the full meaning of here)

"debriefed"
on the other hand, i know "stealing national secrets" is an easy enough charge for china to make over some weak evidence, and you could make it on just about anyone that publishes work about the country

Facial recognition in China: when you ignore traffic signals, your face will be displayed with warning ⚠️ pic.twitter.com/it2VM1StQq

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) March 20, 2019

easy ways to lose social credit.

One of my least favourite bits of living in China was the utter contempt for pedestrians.

One of my least favourite bits of living in China was the utter contempt for pedestrians.

In Wuhan, at least, pedestrians beg for contempt.

I got married in Wuhan, first three things to happen to me when I arrived there:

1. I couldn't find my train ticket and had to be smuggled out of the station through a secret door as they wouldn't let me leave without it
2. We stood in the rain trying to get a taxi, but every time we hailed one someone else jumped in first in the five seconds it took to pick up our bags
3. The taxi we eventually got tried to rip us off.

They still have the best breakfasts in China, I'll give them that.

What are Chinese breakfasts like?

Depends where you are. In Wuhan there are "hot dry noodles" with sesame and chilli sauce, doupi which is sticky rice with a tofu skin and these savoury donuts, all of these things are 10/10. In the north they have long fried dough sticks and soymilk, in the north and in the east there are various kinds of steamed or fried buns, some of which are also excellent, worst is probably Guangdong where they have boring noodles, so better to wait a couple of hours and do dimsum instead. Everywhere seems to have tea eggs. Quite often people will tell you they had a "western breakfast" which is an abomination featuring a slice of untoasted bread with no toppings and a carton of uht milk.

Jack Ma = one of the most evil fuckers in the world

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47934513

https://xfiatlux.wordpress.com/2019/06/04/tiananmen-and-my-father/

this piece on the significance of tiananmen was interesting to me, an ignoramus

Re: Tiananmen, this photographers insta account has some astounding original photos: https://instagram.com/gregforaday
(This is also the dude who was involved with putting together the City of Darkness book about Kowloon)

Also this

https://www.instagram.com/p/BySwKq3CGFE/?igshid=4yzvq0lr6yf8

Thanks for linking to that story Ogmor, fascinating read. (and thanks to cals and camarade for the photos!)

Anyone else following today's events in Hong Kong?

On one hand I'm really glad that they've shown the Chinese govt that they won't be a pushover

On the other, worried about what might happen next

I've just been following it loosely through WS reports. God knows what is coming next. I'm sure they don't want tiananmen 2 on their hands but also they don't seem like they'd maintain a "gently gently" approach, well lol plastic bullets rather than tanks. It was weird listening to someone saying: as we were a UK colony for over a century London should be putting diplomatic pressure on the CCP. They'll be lucky with this current shower and the mess they are in, not that it would make a difference.

So true, comrade Lam. We love all our children dearly, but sometimes we have to ruthlessly suppress them with military force for their own good. https://t.co/JK5Leg0Mia

— The Relevant Organs (@relevantorgans) June 12, 2019

the pics of the 2 million people protest are astonishing. The CCP issuing an apology seems quite.. unexpected. Some knobhead in the Torygraph seems to think they had regular elections under British rule after spotting a protester with a union jack. Well they certainly didn't according to the Chinese expat I follow on twitter.

it's not the ccp issuing the apology though, it's carrie lam (not a party member) and the hk government, and this is still one country two systems. without knowing that much, if forced to describe the situation pre 1997, i'd say: there was never universal suffrage in hong kong, but it loosened up with demands from citizens and also the british governors in the 80s and 90s especially when they knew 97 was coming up but at the same time prc meddling also increased.

i guess this is so huge because 1) 2003, 2005, then 2014 umbrella protests barely slowed the integration and it's clear it's coming down to the wire, 2) unlike the battle of hk politics which would be fine for many or not change their situation much, you have like a threat to every any segment of society, so feminist activists or government critics or labor organizers but also bankers and anyone that's moving cash through hk, so all bets are off now, 3) the prc even since 2014 has become even more fucked up, 4) hk is fucked up in lots of other ways not necessarily connected to prc integration that are getting worse.

I heard someone from HK saying on WS that half of their problems are the evil oligarchs within.

yeah agrees with my limited understanding of hong kong politics. it's guess it's easier to get people out in the streets when 20% and climbing are below the poverty line, longest working hours, can't take part in the benefits of economic growth, zero hope of ever buying a house or having a life there, and i think a lot of that resentment is channeled into anti prc stuff with good reason (or always sold in western media as purely a democracy movement?)

shit i mean i said it's not carrie lam apologizing but i guess xi jinping has to have approved it or given his blessing or maybe even pushed her. that border is very thin and you've got tens of millions of migrant workers and active labor activists ready to go across guangdong and up the coast.

I’m in Central, Hong Kong, near the site of the recent protests against the China extradition bill. I want to show you a few things that might give us hints about where the protests are coming from. Follow this thread for a quick walking tour!

— Alan Wong (@alanwongw) June 16, 2019

thread here about the pro-democracy movements roots as a reaction to tiananmen, but without giving you much of a clue about the internal social ills of HK though. But i think this is pretty much how western media are portraying it as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/podcasts/the-daily/hong-kong-protests.html?rref=vanity

temporarily changing the topic

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/06/24/liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

i don't like liu cixin much, he's a reactionary and a bad writer, but this is a very good piece by jiayang fan who wrote the yan lianke piece i linked upthread, sensitive portrait and a good summing up of his work and philosophy.

Hey, this is a total n00b request but a friend of mine is reading the Three Body Problem and is amazed at how much anger there is at the Cultural Revolution in it, considering the book has a good standing in China - I'm aware times have moved on and etc. but what's the general take wrt that period from official sources?

couldn't answer that at all but a really brutal, first hand account of the murderous chaos of that era in the Daoxian region is Tan Hecheng's The Killing Wind. Would be also be interested if that is banned in China, cos it doesn't pull any punches.

many people still look back fondly/ambivalently/indifferent on the cultural revolution, and not only left maoists (a mostly powerless far left faction associated with the utopia group, other old men, a few young folks active on boards like redchinacn, while the new left, who are now completely sidelined, mostly tried to distance themselves from ultraleftism, and you have guys like bo xilai, who took over chongqing and had people sing cultural revolution anthems, but even he was not really into the bombard the headquarters rhetoric), especially since many people that benefited from the period haven't been #1 in line to enjoy the benefits of market reforms.

but official stance since the 80s has been: that was a very bad time, when factions within the party (blame is mostly shifted away from the party itself to those renegades, like the gang of four, lin biao, chen boda, kang sheng, etc.) made terrible errors that led to a decade of turbulence. (some western journalists covering china have taken to calling the prc under xi jinping a new cultural revolution but that's a bad comparison for a number of reasons—it's viewed as a turbulent wild time in china, rather than a period of authoritarianism.)

i'm not really familiar with what liu cixin has written about the cultural revolution, but contrasting the leftwing madness of the 60s and 70s with the steady hand on the rudder authoritarianism and entrepreneurial socialist harmony of the present is just fine. it would definitely be more unusual if he had written in praise of the period. also these books were all written in the mid-2000s a relative golden age for writers and academics, before the political climate turned chillier post xi jinping accession in 2012. it's definitely not completely forbidden to criticize the cultural revolution now, but i can see an editor now pushing for anything that could be construed as criticism of the party to be cut.

https://chinachannel.org/2019/05/27/empires-dust/ i recently reviewed a book by jiang zilong that's like important and notable, required reading for bureaucrats at one time (but also a product of the relative golden age of the late 90s and 2000s), and sort of sums up the post 80s take, which is: ultraleftism was bad but possibly a necessary stage of development, and we've perfected things now, over time, in the forms of socialist market economy, reform and opening, scientific outlook on development, harmonious society, xi jinping thought on socialism with chinese characteristics for a new era.

also like the cultural revolution only really raged for 5 years, but it's been 40 years since reform and opening, so like it always looms large in western imagination of china (and maybe also for elite liberal intellectuals and steady hand authoritarians) but you know it's important and it was wild but misunderstood and maybe not that important to understanding the country.

my nightmarish memory of the Tan Hecheng cultural revolution book is of groups of quite ordinary people as opposed to the top cadre people who caused lots of the trouble during the GLF, plotting in smoky working men's club type dives who they've decided was a class enemy and was going to get it. Which was in many cases just old score settling of course. I wimped out half way through it, the last straw was the description of people being covered with burning lime whilst still alive in pits. It was too depressing for me at the time.

i never got through that tan hecheng book either. that kind of situation is one of those things i think is misunderstood or maybe it's better to say nobody really knows about it, even in china. that kind of specific stuff, you can't really talk about it, even if it wasn't really errors of the party, when you get right down to it. daoxian which tan hecheng writes about was particularly bad, but it was almost like the end of, like, a century of violence and despair. the countryside is where things got scary for a few years, especially in the south. you've got limited leadership, all those clan and family relationships far more important, nobody around to put a stop to it or really direct it, coming out of a century of no strong central or local government. roughly a century, pick a date in the 1860s to the late 1960s and that covered the taiping rebellion, panthay rebellion, nian rebellion, countless other local rebellions, a couple bubonic plague pandemics to go along with the regular epidemics, massive floods, extensive and longlasting famine, the entire country divided up by warlords, a civil war, multiple revolutions, over the 18th century a crazy jump in population that put stress on local government and everything else, and even when things weren't completely out of control, despite the view of a peaceful imperial china, things were bleak and violent, with the qing government ruling through torture, execution and their own mass movements. so it was basically just tossing gasoline again on family rivalries and feuds dating back decades or centuries, not really an organized massacre of anyone in the countryside but just a hatfield-mccoy war nightmare purge situation.

I liked Stephen R Platt's Taiping Civil War book- not to make light of the all the mass human suffering and death (maybe not too soon!)- but some of the outlandish actors involved from all sides are very interesting to say the least. Hitler only got rejected from the Vienna art school once, poor Hong failed the excruciating imperial exam 3 times! I still haven't got around to his opium wars book Imperial Twilight, but it is on the kindle and seems well reviewed.

China Snares Tourists’ Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App

I've a friend who had to delete Orwell's 1984 from his Kindle upon entering China, but this seems like a step further?

was listening to someone saying on our state run broadcasting station the other day that other state run media in mainland China was reporting that in Hong Kong pro-government activists were carrying banners with: "I support the police" on them!

All for enforced deletion of Orwell tbh

I always keep my kindle in airplane mode cos of all the "cheeky nandos" l1bg3n content anyway, and am more paranoid about untrammeled evil american corporations doing something to brick my device or something, the bunch of fucking greedy scumbags!

Yeah, no problems there. xp

Hong Kong is a nasty episode though. It got me thinking: has the Mighty, Superior West completely forgotten about Tibet? The 'Free Tibet' festivals where pop stars raked up the karma points where absolutely everywhere 10, 15 years ago. But now? Been a long time since I heard about any effort to pressure China on this. Must be a new 'cause of the week', or have 'we' given up on Tibet entirely?

Students for a Free Tibet is old news, Students for Justice in Palestine is the new hotness

The US is still trying to cope with the reality that China is the new great power of the world. They won't throw any solids to Tibet at this stage.

I guess, but the Tibet thing had a reach well beyond the US. I had a neighbour for a couple of years who 24/7/365 had a Tibet flag out and stickers on his car. He wasn't the only one either! He moved though :(

Tibet should have had a freedom referendum, that would have sorted everything out!

i’ve bought two different chinese translations of 1984 in china on two separate occasions, and the one i read (from 2013-ish) seemed to be a pretty accurate and faithful translation, so perhaps this is another indication of how much things are changing there

Any good sources for what's going on in Hong Kong? (or is there a HK thread?)

The Guardian was live blogging today, if they do that every day I'll follow along, there were some good links.

The duration of the protests means it isn't getting the coverage, but it's just getting worse every weekend. Each weekend I think it can't get any worse, but it does.

#HongKongPolice shooting POINT BLANK at protesters inside an MTR station pic.twitter.com/mcFFQZlq1p

— Victor Ting (@VictorTing7) August 11, 2019

I have no words.

there is a Chinese twitter account I used to quite like when it was about food, huge infrastructure projects, Chinese culture and history etc.. But since the protests started he's posting lots of stuff that has my questionable crank alarms ringing ...like consistently showing the protesters in as bad a light as possible. I might even agree with some of it - like fules using the old HK colonial flag ffs or occasionally acting like thugs. But this is looking like the MSS or whoever is really involved in how this situation is being "dealt with" is obv not playing by the rules and it is escalating into a dangerously bad situation that only can get worse.

My Hong Kong born friend, who is otherwise quite sensible, spends lot of time on the Chinese internet. He's pretty pro-mainland to start with but I'm starting to hear a lot of the crazier stuff through him. His most frequent line, not specifically about the latest developments in Hong Kong, is that China should be allowed to develop with a disregard for human rights because of the disregard for human rights that the western colonial powers had when they were developing (and still do). Essentially he sees a massive double standard and has a fairly large chip on his shoulder about it. I don't think he's necessarily wrong but I would hope to hold everyone to a higher standard.

On Hong Kong the sees wholly as the work of Agents Provocateurs and mercenaries training rioters. Again, if Hong Kong didn't have foreign meddling going on it would be the only place on earth that didn't, but he seems to completely deny that Hong Kongers have any agency in the situation at all.

China should be allowed to develop with a disregard for human rights because of the disregard for human rights that the western colonial powers had when they were developing

Irony alert. Japan took a very similar line in regard to the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s. The Western powers allowed one another to massively exploit their colonies, but were incensed when Japan tried to accumulate its own colonial empire, partly through the invasion of Manchuria. See also: The Rape of Nanking.

it's incoherent and sometimes ppl will try 'human rights is a western concept' instead but china is hardly alone in pointing to the west to justify heinous shit.

i thought this was pretty good: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hong-kongs-fight-for-life

That is a good article, i’m Interested to see what my friend thinks.

Dylannn, where the best writing on japan happening in English right now?

no idea! china, for many reasons, has the attention of journalists, academics, natsec think tank guys, etc. dedicated sections of the economist, fp, ny times (sinosphere seems not to have been updated for a while though), still a million blogs covering everything from labor struggles to literature to translating state documents, variations on whatsonweibo translating and covering web content. also over the past decade or so, you have more chinese/taiwanese/hk folks writing in english, too.

i have no idea. maybe the japanese equivalent of all of those is out there, but i haven't found it. lots of coverage that's translated content about fads or whatever, not much critical writing in english, I DON'T THINK. i'm sure some japanophile ilxors could help out here, but it seems like japan blogs i read in the past have mostly gone dormant. i read neojaponisme even when i didn't care about japan. maybe there was never much, possibly explaining how momus became a respected voice on japanese cultural affairs.

i do like https://www.tokyoreview.net/ which launched 1 or 2 years ago, inviting academics to put their work into readable form.

Chinese state media showed armoured vehicles assembling near Hong Kong

Again, with the link:
Chinese state media showed armoured vehicles assembling near Hong Kong
https://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/news/world/images/2019/8/12/Screengrab-Video-PAP-forces-Shenzhen.jpg

While I'm sympathetic to the protesters, the tactics of vandalism and shutting down the airport/economy doesn't play very well with mainlanders. China will face no repercussions from its own public (or for that matter, Trump) for Tiananmen+30.

They have other viable options?

The protesters?

I don't speak Chinese, nor have I followed this closely.

My impression is that the PRC needed some protester activity that would enrage the mainland public before they could move in. As ineffectual as a daily peaceful demonstration might have been, it wouldn't have given the PRC the licence to roll over the protests with martial law and the armor/mechanized infantry elements of Southern Theater (~ 6 divisions).

As for the PRC, whose major concern is unrest in the mainland, this played well for them. To mainlanders, the government probably looks overly tolerant.

The music is Chinese state media's choice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIi1mP5Yce8

But nothing came of the peaceful demonstrations? Violent crackdown in Hong Kong would be devastating to the financial economy there, no? A lot of capital flight, I'd assume.

Read the article Dylann posted

That does not really seem to be a view from the ground as much as standard leftist explanations I could read everywhere?

xp: There will be shiploads of people fleeing, but capital? Capital doesn't give a damn about liberal democratic ideals, so long as there's reliable property rights, contract law, and tolerably low corruption.

freddie b how much more from the ground do you need? wilfred chan is in hk currently and was there for 2014 as well, born and bred hong konger. i thought it was a pretty good summing up of what the hell is going on over there.

on capital flight i think i agree with sanpaku. it wouldn't be a violent crackdown on protest that would cause capital flight but the potential for beijing to fuck with the money, which is why business elites are not into the extradition bill either. all that money is flowing into hk from the prc now, for the reason that it's safer/more reliable, not because they're a quasi-democracy still. they're also the most vulnerable to interference from beijing. who cares about dissidents getting dragged over to shenzhen, since that's already going on, just ask gui minhai, but if a ceo or two get nabbed and put on trial and they go after their ill-gotten gains, it's a problem. xiao jianhua getting kidnapped from the hong kong four seasons to stand trial in beijing was a sign of things to come.

He could be as much a Hong Konger as possible, but if the story begins with neoliberalism and ends with a call to support Bernie Sanders it's just completely useless to me. Thousands could write exactly the same thing all over the world. And does. I know all that already, so what's the point?

lol fair enough i missed the part about bernie
i think the meat of it though was that hk no longer has the leverage to demand much since their usefulness to the prc is mostly gone, it's become pool of dirty mainland money meaning that the political and business elite can't risk shutting off the tap by calling for political change. those people are out of the game. they've made their plans already. but for most people the place has become an unliveable shithole and they can't get out and are pissed off about their living conditions and the failure of protests in 2014 (and smaller protests through the 2000s and before). so now the protests are "about" about extradition (or the five demands, which are mostly about police brutality, and throw in universal suffrage as an afterthought, bottom of the list, completely impossible) but more about anger, frustration at the state that the political and business elite has left hong kong in, but they're destined to fail because there's no direction, no leadership, "no obvious escape routes, no postcolonial models of self-determination."

i dunno, what's your take on it so far b?

That it's the most important news story of the year... That's basically my take away, and I'm just following along to see what happens. But just looking at history in a broad sense I think it's way too early to dismiss what happens because it's not having direction or leadership, that seems to me to be a misreading of historical upheavals in general. The anger is the point, it's not that they have, like, the right anti-neo-liberal way to look at it. The mainland ledership will seem to have everything under control until the exact point they don't.

same here, buddy. just following along. but i tend to think this is the end of something, the final convulsion of what started in 2005 or 2010, rather than the beginning. i'm not writing it off because of the lack of leadership or direction, but that makes it tougher to call what "their" next move is, and it's nearly impossible to make a call on a prc-managed crackdown with reinforcements from across the border, since there's no precedent and we have no access to what's going on at top levels in beijing.

one more question, frederik b... talking about "historical upheavals in general," which do you think provide the best lessons for those involved here or map onto this protest most accurately? just to name one so that i seem better informed, is it the orange revolution in ukraine?

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019

how many times in a situation like that would a cop just shoot someone dead? fucking hell.

No, I'd agree, it seems like an end, almost knowingly trying to confront the PRC into doing... something... no matter what. The obvious historical comparison seems Tiananmen, or the Green revolution in Iran, or the various failed protests against Putin. Although what's going on there at the moment is really interesting as well.

also following the story of the alleged undercover cop who was being struggled, and currently strapped to a luggage cart, it seems.

Pan-dem lawmakers Fernando Cheung and Kwok Ka-ki are now negotiating with protesters who have tied the man to a luggage trolley. Very ugly scene pic.twitter.com/Xk578seTYL

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) August 13, 2019

There's a lot of stress in the world right now, where you can't really be half a dictator anymore, to paraphrase a shitty American tv show.

he was wearing a press vest, they grabbed him, thinking he was a cop, and then found an I❤️警察 t-shirt in his bag...

ICYMI let’s fill in some blanks https://t.co/21Fhvs6QQF

— tricialing (@tricialing) August 13, 2019

hope it doesn't turn out like this

i dunno, imho ideally stop this and get back to occupying government buildings and scuffling with triad thugs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EB3LhTyU8AAqDS4?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

attacking other HK citizens is terrible tactics, even if they have "i heart the bizzies" t shirts or are wankers who are the HK equivalent to the UK FBPE posse.

turns out he was a reporter for global times.

live feed from hkg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7IvjtgSawY

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019
― XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxXxxxx (dylannn), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 12:07 PM (forty-three minutes ago)

This video is crazy. It was only after watching it a few times that I noticed the bystander with the wheeled luggage trying to hurry by and getting caught in the melee.

congrats on the bbc finding some myopic, thick as pigshit UK twat describing it as a "bitter pill to swallow" cos it has inconvenienced his honeymoon, hope she's shagging the milkman by next week ya weapon!

My (wife's) family in Hubei are in full meltdown about the Coronavirus. Sister-in-law is actually due to fly from Wuhan to the UK next week. Bit concerned.

There's a lot of racist crap out there about "Chinese eat anything" but this cunt has not done anyone any favours, ridiculous that this sort of thing is still being permitted anywhere in 2020.

Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX

— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020

There's a lot of racist crap out there about "Chinese eat anything" but this cunt has not done anyone any favours, ridiculous that this sort of thing is still being permitted anywhere in 2020.

Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX

— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020

My sister-in-laws's flight has been cancelled, so I guess out of our hands now and not to worry about so much, but parents-in-law are in Ezhou, and our feeling is that there the response is a bit half-hearted. it's a sleepy town of a million or so people, lots of them commute into wuhan, seems like an obvious place for the disease to spread from.

Hu Xingdou, an independent political economist, said Chinese people’s love for eating wildlife had deep cultural, economic and political roots.

“While the West values freedom and other human rights, Chinese people view food as their primary need because starving is a big threat and an unforgettable part of the national memory,” Hu said.

“While feeding themselves is not a problem to many Chinese nowadays, eating novel food or meat, organs or parts from rare animals or plants has become a measure of identity to some people.”

I would like to know more about this identity claim. Does the rarity of what's eaten give social prestige, or is it something more personal than that?

things that are rare (to be eaten or otherwise) can get you a degree of social prestige, yes, but also certain animals are supposed to have particular medicinal qualities (not just as an aphrodisiac) which combine with the "you have to be rich to afford this" factor in a way which parallels alleged "superfoods" in the west.

Ok, thanks. Is the "wild"ness of the animal a factor in its having these medicinal qualities?

I know a little about bushmeat practices in Africa but little about them in China, except for the little I've gleaned from time spent in Chinatowns around the world.

CHANG: And why are wild animals so popular as a delicacy in China?

SI: Eating wild animal is considered a symbol of wealth because they are more rare and expensive. And wild animals is also considered more natural and, thus, nutritious, compared to farmed meat. It's a belief in traditional Chinese medicine that it can boost the immune system, you know? Of course, some people eat wild animals just because they were driven by curiosity.

CHANG: (Laughter).

SI: It's really difficult to change the mindset of, you know, eating wild animals is better than eating farmed animals. But it's a common kind of mindset in many parts of China.

Ok, this clarifies things a bit more. The wildness is thought to contribute to its naturalness, and thus its goodness. I don't know much about Chinese Romanticism but now I want to!

I live with it, my wife is training to be (eventually) a TCM doctor (but not the bad kind that use animals! there are a few very different schools of TCM, I have found out)

http://chuangcn.org/2020/02/social-contagion/

He adds that certain species, including primates, bats, and rats, are higher risk than others, because of the number of diseases they harbor and the likelihood of those diseases making the genetic leap required to infect humans. “Some of the Southeast Asian rats are quite big and I’m sure they’re very tasty. There’s nothing wrong with eating them per se, but rodents carry a large number of viruses with zoonotic potential—having them in the food chain is really, really high risk,” he says.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, though, interest in these foods appears to be rapidly diminishing: a survey of almost 100,000 Chinese conducted in the midst of the Wuhan outbreak found that nearly 97 percent of respondents opposed eating wild animals, up from about 50 percent in the 2014 study.

“These are not traditional habits,” says Kang, citing, as an example, how a drink made from antelope horn, a traditional remedy given to children to treat colds, has become a widely consumed daily tonic. “It’s a combination of traditional concepts with business people promoting a modern concept of, ‘We should try interesting new things because we have more income’. Eating exotic species is about people showing on social media that they are cool.”

China’s propaganda machine has recently gone into full gear to undermine that idea. Kang says a spontaneous social media backlash has also driven the point home. A hashtag that translates as #TheSourceoftheNewCoronavirusisWildAnimals quickly racked up 1.2 billion hits on Weibo, the main social media platform in China.

“In my friend circle, there is a person who in the past liked to showcase his experience with wild animal food on social media,” says Kang. “Previously, my friends would say nothing, or they’d say ‘cool’. But now he can’t post those things, because people would say if you continue to do that, you’re not cool.”

https://thefern.org/2020/03/can-asias-infectious-disease-producing-wildlife-trade-be-stopped/

https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&extparam=%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23&luicode=10000011&lfid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D10%26q%3D%23新型冠状病毒来源是野生动物%23

I am seeing plenty of racism against Chinese online of late, especially from supposedly left-wing animal rights people. Bit depressing, though I knew it was under the surface anyway.

Animal rights people sus af to begin w

Yes. The thing I have been trying to explain to people today is that "wet market" doesnt mean "exotic meat slaughterhouse" and that the vast majority of what is sold there is vegetables, just with some live chickens in one corner, and that if you are "campaigning to shut the wet markets" you are campaigning for factory farming and supermarkets.

I have never found “trying to explain” to be a profitable use of time but the problem is likely on my end

it's true that I am probably wasting my time.

I mean not everything we do has to be profitable

China are using this unprecedented time to make another power grab in HK. There is rioting going on at the moment.

More tear gas rounds are fired in Causeway Bay, near the Sogo. pic.twitter.com/UlNmUiJ5NL

— Hong Kong Free Press HKFP (@HongKongFP) May 24, 2020

Close to $100bn wiped off the edtech market today, following a leaked document saying that the government intends to force tutoring companies to go not-for-profit and ban foreigners from online teaching. The bricks-and-mortar tutoring sector has already been crushed by COVID.

The rationale for this is supposedly the idea that intensive tutoring is stressful for kids, makes education more expensive at a point when the government is trying to encourage people to have more children and makes it easier for wealthier parents to get their kids into selective schools and universities. The more cynical take is that too many middle-class kids are competing for those places with the genuinely well-off, who will still be able to afford 1-to-1 tutoring.

Leaving aside the general academic stuff, it’s hard to see how this wouldn’t lead to a fairly hard stop on the growth of English proficiency, particularly in smaller cities, or even a regression. State provision of English is variable but generally a lot weaker than the private sector can offer and companies like VIPKids that recruit teachers from the Philippines deliver a pretty good, affordable service to millions outside of the big cities, in places where traditional private language schools have been patchy. If New Oriental and others are forced to scale back, it may also impact the number of students going to university abroad.

Which would be a blow to the cashflow of a lot of large universities…

These last few months have seen a series of increasingly troubling announcements from Beijing, not sure if calling it the "second cultural revolution" is right, but the direction is certainly not great.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/10/chinas-cultural-crackdown-few-areas-untouched-as-xi-reshapes-society

My in-laws have not been allowed to renew their passports, and at work all of the Chinese students have decided to work virtually rather than travel to the UK.

the growing cultural authoritarianism of Xi seems very dangerous, but the extreme violence and mass murder that occurred during the OG cultural revolution ... well that was the cultural revolution to end all cultural revolutions or perhaps not. I heard this bizarre shit on the radio a few weeks back on CCCP rappers doing propaganda raps about how great the govt is etc. They can't foist any of that shit on K-Pop ultras!

My sister works at a NGO and scuttle among the world traveller, NGO, panglobalist crowd is that some sort of Taiwan action will occur in the next year or two (my sister bets that it'll happen right after the Winter Olympics in February)