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

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!)