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

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.