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

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...

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)