EXHAUSTED DILIGENCE

MOVING MATTERS

2011-11-22T15:42:00.000-05:00

My humble appeal to my (dozen?) loyal readers: as of a few months ago I've moved rather permanently to the hodge-podge hyperlink-laden commonplace book which is Tumblr. What is lost in advantage in Google search results is gained in interface ease. I hang my head in microblog shame but sport no regrets.

Click on the spot where Hu Jintao and Barack Obama's lips meet to be rerouted to (Less) Exhausted Diligence.

MV Exoticism: Indians

2011-04-16T04:53:00.000-04:00

旺福-印倫情人MV (Won Fu- Indian Lover)

MC Mong ft. Bi - Indian Boy

Purchasing Power Parity

2011-04-11T04:23:00.001-04:00

Six Million Dollar Man (1974)

"The Six Million Dollar Man is an American television series about a former astronaut with bionic implants working for the OSI (which was usually referred to as the Office of Scientific Intelligence, the Office of Scientific Investigation or the Office of Strategic Intelligence^[1])."

Sixty Million Dollar Man (1995)

"Sing offends local crime lord Fumito (Joe Cheng) by dancing with Fumito's girl in a Pulp Fiction-inspired dance contest. In a fit of rage, Fumito orders his henchman Mark (Charles Shen) to kill SingWhen Tat comes to rescue his son, both are caught by Mark and tied together in a bathroom stall, where Mark planted a bomb. Sing chops off his arm and manages to let his father escape on an ejector toilet seat, leaving Sing to apparently die in the explosion. Sing's brain and lips are recovered. There is technology to construct a new body for him at the cost of $60,000,000. However, since Sing renounced his rich father, he doesn't have the money. Tat can only provide $6,000. Chang (Elvis Tsui), offers to create a body for $6,000. After some trial and error, such as creating legs out of arms, Sing is transformed into a cyborg. "

The Six Million Rupee Man (2007 via Goodness Gracious Me)

"Sanjeev Austin..the man's barely alive. We can rebuild him. We have the power. We have the capability. We don't have the ideal exchange rate...."

Notes from The West Island

2011-03-31T03:03:00.003-04:00

THINGS I'VE MISSED IN HONG KONG

March 21st three hour master class with Jia Zhang-ke, hosted by the Jockey Club's Cine Academy?! This one killed me. What the hell was the Jockey Club's Cine Academy, how did I miss this, I thought while reading David Bordwell's blog posts on the HKIFF launch. (I've only attended The Strange Case of Angelica so far.) Started in 2010 to "provide young people with a better understanding of film production and enhance their ability to analyse and appreciate film-making techniques." Over. Like tears. in. the. rain.
Kenzanburo Oe at the HK Literary Festival. He didn't end up winning the Man Asian Literary Award, but he'd been one of my idols since I stumbled into Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids at the St. Louis County Library as a freshman in high school. Therefore I both coveted and loathed the chance to meet him. Anyways, I self sabotaged on this one, delaying until the day before the panel to buy tickets despite planning to go since his nomination was announced. My face was wrenched in both relief and pain when Razor Lim of Parson's Music told me that the tickets were all long gone. I thought about the fact that I had sabotaged this while scalping tickets to a Super Junior M concert from a 17 year old the very next week. I did not feel comfortable at the thought.
Giant neon phonograph in the Kowloon Walled City Park for the Arts Festival, and a titillating staging of The Golden Lotus. The titillating 3-D release in two weeks adapting The Carnal Prayer Mat should make up for the latter, at least.
The 200-something person protest in Central over Donald Tsang's ill thought out scheme to curb inflation by.... putting 6000 HKD into people's retirement funds?! And then the subsequent macing of those "protesters." Pansy riot. Pansy draconian response. [Background here.] High expectations Asian Father via The Dark Side.

OTHER NOTES:

Someone noted glumly on a taxi ride from Stubbs Rd. that income inequality in Hong Kong was appallingly surprising. Fact: A monthly salary of 50,000 HKD per month puts you in the top 10% of households. That's about 77K . In the US that comparatively just puts you in the top 25% or so. Hong Kong's full time employees make below 15K HKD per month (excluding all domestic workers) - that's a bit shy of 24,000 USD. Even correcting for purchasing power parity issues, pretty bad. But don't take my word for it! As of 2009 Hong Kong had the highest GINI coefficient in the world.
China technically should be lifting its quota on foreign films. I'm hopefully revising a paper on the political economy of Chinese film production (eh) soon but more thoughts on this later. A good article in the Guardian on the topic here.
Above, a postcard from 1910 that depicts the world in 2000, as imagined by in a series of French postcards. An electric train would have linked Paris and Beijing. More paleofutures (past imaginings of the future) here.
And below, snippets from Ming Wong's "Devo partire. Domani / I must go. Tomorrow," where he plays all characters from Pasolini's Teorema (1968). A snatch from the Singapore Biennale that condenses how I feel lately, frame for frame.

Immaculate Hoardes: Visual Correlatives of Swarm Fear

2011-02-10T03:52:00.002-05:00

A quick response to a post on [The China Beat] that caught a trend I've been meaning to post on for a while. Writes one T.S. Mullaney about Foreign Policy's recent "Rise of the Hans" feature:

Whoever at Foreign Policy thought of this image—in particular, thought of using the metaphor of clones—captured the essence of Kotkin’s argument flawlessly: the Han, we are meant to believe, is a singular mass of physically, politically, ideologically, socially, culturally, and linguistically indistinguishable replicas, one that brings to mind the clone troopers of Kamino in Star Wars or, perhaps, hive-like, sci-fi adversaries, such as the “Buggers” in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Trilogy, the Arachnids of planet Klendathu in Robert Heinlen’s Starship Troopers (who, incidentally, was writing in the aftermath of the Korean War and was also fascinated by the racist idea of an ego-less, self-less, and homogenous Asian adversary), or the Borg of Star Trek (a tendency that some commentators have explicitly used to refer to the PRC—something that one of the co-founders of China Beat criticized in a piece that appeared in Foreign Policy itself last year). Kotkin omits, or perhaps does not know, that the Han is one of the least homogenous groups history has ever known: contained within its ranks are people who literally cannot understand each other’s spoken languages and people who—let’s just be basic about this—exhibit the same sort of diversity of worldviews as one would expect to find among a group of one billion people anywhere on earth.

Let us call this discursive construct Neo-Borgian Yellow Peril, earlier images of which are exemplified by the two TIME covers below (locusts are 1950, teeming mass from 1963. From ChinaSMACK.) The mass, which in the early 20th century may have ridden very quickly on horses to invade America, but now ride very studiously on state-owned enterprises to invade world order. I am remiss in finding one particularly amazing image from the mid-1970s that depicts Mao as an aggregation of clamoring peasants and mandarins.

The Neo-Borgian Cloud has in fact been a trend in the visual representation of many Chinese events since the Olympics (see images below).The eeriness comes from a post-processing that invariably sharpens digital images, heightens color and smooths noise to convey that squeaky gleam of capitalist modernism - and a simultaneous proclivity for compositions that capture seemingly boundless duplication (ie terror of scale), immaculate repetition (ie terror of forced homogeneity) that projects the power of an authoritarian state.This is not to say that there is not a desire to project this very image of state power.
There is likely a good term for this. Perhaps it exists already in the fecund world of art criticism. I suggest militaristic hyper-modernism.

From various sources, two shots from Olympic opening ceremonies, security exercise outside of the Bird's Nest, laborers outside of their factory and students preparing for exams.

Link Party: Exchange Rates, Diamond Skulls, Jet Li

2011-01-13T23:29:00.001-05:00

PICKING UR BATTLES: At the NYT, David Leonhardt argues that US should be less concerned about the RMB exchange rate and more concerned about intellectual property theft. Renault has just this week rocked France by unveiling a huge industrial espionage scandal - electric car technology was leaked, and they think Chinese spies are behind it. Matt Yglesias disagrees, saying that undervaluation of the RMB is basically a "regressive sales tax" benefiting "politically powerful Chinese exporters" - and that China's lax attitude towards intellectual property provides useful tension with the US' strict IP regime. Bradley Gardner disagrees with Yglesias' disagreement, citing RMB undervaluation as motivated by domestic public welfare concerns, and the IP issue as one that actually hampers tech. development in China itself.
CONFUCIUS IN TIANANMEN: Here.
BANNED IN PRC: Baysian statistics, the term "civil society",
SHOWS: Damien Hirst solo show to launch at new Gagosian Gallery in Central (above Shanghai Tang on Pedder); Wang Qingsong and Others at "Photography from the New China" show at Getty in LA.
PHILANTHROPY: After much hubub, Jet Li's foundation finally has legal status in China and will now be registered in Shenzhen. There's optimism that this means a much more generous Charity Law will move a bit faster towards materialization. Yet the above banning of "civil society" as a term perhaps palls hope that this will lead to richer associational freedom.A great review of NGO related news in 2010 here.

Long Bin-Chen (陳龍斌) - Book Sculptures

2011-01-06T23:11:00.001-05:00

Above, a sculpture from Taiwan-based artist Long Bin-Chen, carved from New York City phonebooks with "first a band or chainsaw, then a dental sander." [via Oddity Central. Don't ask.] Apparently Long only takes materials purchased from trash collectors or directly plucked from the streets.

Bumped due to highly circulated NYT article today "Selling a Book By Its Cover" - once in a while I catch whiff of a job that boggles my mind. These people. Get paid. To design other people's libraries. Almost exclusively based on the appearance of the book covers.

Some gorgeous galleries of other book-as-sculpture projects here and here. Perhaps we can use Long Bin-Chen's Boddhistava to smash Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes.

Patents Per Million, Retraining Ant Colonies, "Cursory" Observation of Quantum Teleportation

2011-01-04T04:05:00.000-05:00

Quick bits on technological innovation and more importantly technological imagination:

1. Two PRC related pieces on this recently much circulated - in the NYT, a piece analyzing a document put out in November by China's State Intellectual Property Office of China, “National Patent Development Strategy (2011-2020)." The major question is whether high-tech "innovation" oriented industrial policy will work, having not worked so well in Japan in recent years. (Yet, recall that the Tigers - Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea - are the celebrated cases of successful industrial policy in their early rise.) Fun quote:

The Chinese patent strategy document is filled with metrics, right down to goals for patents owned per million people.

2. In a less meaty article in FP, Vivek Wadhwa also tackles the topic, his position summarized perhaps by the title "Chinese and Indian Entrepreneurs Are Eating America's Lunch." Citing his own previous research, he posits an interesting suggestion vis-a-vis the phenom of super low wages among college grads in China (the "ant colony"): its a result of crap training rather than a crap market:

India and China now graduate three to six times more engineers than does the United States. The quality of these engineers is, however, so poor that most are not fit to join the workforce; their system of rote learning handicaps those who do get jobs, so that it takes two to three years for them to achieve the same productivity as American graduates. As a result, significant proportions of China's engineering graduates end up working on factory floors; Indian industry has to spend large sums of money on retraining its employees, as my research team at Duke and Harvard learned.

3. And since this seems to have weirdly not made it on the parts of the China blogosphere I surf, some key WikiLeaks science and tech related wires are collected here. A key quote from a wire BRS forwarded, about Hefei's University of Science and Technology:

(COMMENT: A cursory walk through their labs seemed to indicate they had already succeeded in single-particle quantum teleportation and are now trying to conduct dual-particle quantum teleportation.)

WAHHH. Repeat: WAHHHH?

Adorno X Caixin

2010-12-21T09:00:00.000-05:00

And what would Theodor say, to a Caixin headline today, which at first reads immensely naturally:

"Insurers Asked to Support Culture Industry"

Oh we do, insurers say.

Irritating Infatuations with Strauss and Schmitt: Mark Lilla New Republic

2010-12-17T03:06:00.000-05:00

AHH. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Mark Lilla has an amazing piece in the most recent ed. of The New Republic here (gated - I can e-mail to interested friends) that seizes on a tide of neoconservative thought among China's students/intellectuals. (This despite the magazine's own hawkish foreign policy turns in the last few years, under Peretz. Ugh, anyway. Lilla points to an excellent article by Evan Osnos two years ago. A key moment is probably his meeting Strauss disciple Harvey Mansfield on tour, baffled by why he is a big deal in China, but nevertheless wearing a "honey colored panama" and loving it.)

There was a running joke when I was in Cambridge about working on Karl Schmidt, an obscure medievalist, as Carl Schmitt has also become mindlessly vogue among trend-driven, chain-smoking intellectual historians. (Or as Lilla says,"the short, elusive books by this once Nazi collaborator have attracted Western radicals too soft-minded for Marxian empiricism and charmed by the notion that tout commence en mystique et tout finit en politique.") So at first the title was funny for seeming somewhat obscure, then it wasdepressing.

Choice quotes:

Strauss and Schmitt are at the center of intellectual debate, but they are being read by everyone, whatever their partisan leanings; as a liberal journalist in Shanghai told me as we took a stroll one day, “no one will take you seriously if you have nothing to say about these two men and their ideas.”

"Students of a more conservative bent actually agree with much of the left’s critique of the new state capitalism and the social dislocations it has caused, though they are mainly concerned with maintaining “harmony” and have no fantasies (only nightmares) about China going through yet another revolutionary transformation. Their reading of history convinces them that China’s enduring challenges have always been to maintain territorial unity, keep social peace, and defend national interests against other states—challenges heightened today by global market forces and a liberal ideology that idealizes individual rights, social pluralism, and international law."

"...for the young Chinese I met, the distinction between sages and statesmen and the idea of an elite class educated to serve the public good make perfect sense because they are already rooted in the Chinese political tradition. What makes Strauss additionally appealing to them, apart from the grand tapestry of Western political theory he lays before them, is that he makes this ideal philosophically respectable without reference to Confucius or religion or Chinese history. He provides a bridge between their ancient tradition and our own..."

The core of it - how educated young intellectuals are, distressed with China's progress, whipping away from liberal ideas and seizing upon soveriegnty and "cultural nationalism" as an alternative- I see as intimately connected with two other debates. First, this background gives far more context to the "universal values" debate that was in the background of LXB's Nobel Prize, so I think its quite timely given the recent ceremony. What are the consequences of an rising Chinese intelligentsia that firmly holds political liberalization in opposition to sovereignty, and begins to situate that within the narrative of modern Western philosophy? Second is the public philosophy debate. I have been thinking (not alot but some) about Daniel Bell's work, which by some accounts has tried, in reaction precisely to this first question, to sketch out a sort of softer "neopaternal NeoConfucianism" as a public philosophy for China's 21c. The last para from Lilla implies that that this little dance of proto paternalism isn't far off from proto fascism, whichever way you spin it.

A Pattern Representing The Pattern of the Chinese Past

2010-12-14T22:46:00.002-05:00

Economist's View via Daniel Little reviewed a new volume on visualizing economic data - Famous Figures and Diagrams in Economics (Mark Blaug and Peter Lloyd) - and pulled out the following chart, presented by Mark Elvin "to represent his theory of a high-level equilibrium trap in agricultural development in The Pattern of the Chinese Past." The question - why was there no Industrial Revolution in China, given relative stability, prosperity, and advanced scientific methods? Elvin's answer, circa 1972 - there was enough cheap labor producing good enough yields, and there wasn't an impetus to pursue new technologies (and a bit of bad luck in the progress made generally not being disruptive technology.)

Explanation below:

"This diagram represents several different kinds of historical change in one compact figure: gradual technical progress along a production curve, shift of production curves through technical innovation, and the maximum production possibility curve that lies above each of these. The axes represent "total output" and "rural population." The concave shape of each curve has a very specific economic and demographic meaning: as population grows within a given mix of techniques, output grows more slowly; so average output per capita approaches the subsistence line OS. The HLET is graphically and laconically indicated on the upper right quadrant of the graph; there is no further room for technical improvement, and population has increased to the point where there is no surplus to fund radical technological innovation. (Elvin's theory of the high-level equilibrium trap is discussed in my Microfoundations, Methods, and Causation; link.)"

The theory has been well received by a number of economists, though many other explanations have been offered - I'm not that familiar with this but there's the "intellectual culture was hostile to rational scientific method" bucket (Joseph Needham), the more neoclassical "lack of domestic competition, property rights and all that free market love" bucket (which is closely tied to the "China was far away from everyone" bucket, Jared Diamond), the "silver drain and serial political instability" bucket, and a "Great Divergence AKA Europe got some colonies" bucket (Kenneth Pomeranz).

Hm. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

Non-Profits, Civil Society, Expertise

2010-12-09T19:32:00.002-05:00

Wanted to point to an excellent post by Guobin Yang at TheChina Beat contextualizing the career of one of China's pioneering environmental activists. Liang Congjie had founded Friends of Nature, the first recognized environmental advocacy group in the PRC, in 1994, battling against poachers and renegade loggers while mentoring a generation of younger scholars and activists. (Photo caption for the left, aptly: ANTI POACHING SQUAD.)
Yang points to the post '89 crumbling of the Chinese academic world as the key background to this move - the turn towards NGO creation offered "a logical way of seeking meaning at a time of intellectual crisis" but simultaneously helped create a new class of public intellectuals more intimately connected with grassroots, civic movements. As Yang summarizes:

Perhaps more than anything else, the combination of the image of an active and participatory citizenry with the Confucian image of a world of human-nature harmony epitomizes Liang Congjie’s vision as a scholar-environmentalist in action.

The last three months in HK have pulled me into a number of conferences - on impact investing, social enterprise and philanthropy - all primarily revolving around the burgeoning civic sector of China. [An excellent and yet developing reference to social enterprises in the PRC here, btw.] Having somewhat settled down now, I'm trying to figure out the analytical lenses most useful for cutting into what I've been observing, and at least one rough dynamic is certainly the role that scholars play within the sector. I'd been coming from a group whose primary goal was to better integrate scholarship and policy, so was somewhat surprised to notice that scholarly expertise was not only enlisted by every association in this tightly knit NGO community - but seemed a necessary prerequisite for any sort of legitimacy.

Also, re: the reading list, BUMP to the top Guobin Yang's The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (Columbia University Press, 2009) - which for all my talk of loving him, I haven't actually read yet.

Hong Kong Street Art - Space Invaders

2010-12-06T07:38:00.001-05:00

On way to lunch found this crucial 8-Bit addition to the street @ 2 Lyndhurst (look down, on the bottom of a step.) Tiled onto the concrete. Apparently put up almost 10 years ago! Ancient.
http://www.space-invaders.com/hk.html

Reading List

2010-12-01T19:02:00.000-05:00

During a small break from work I collated a fat stack of papers from The China Quarterly to read and save my brain, and hammered down a must read list for myself over the next few weeks. No, months. Book club, NEbody?

China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Daniel A. Bell. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.
From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Wendy Larson. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009
Wandering Spirits: Chen Shuiyan's Encyclopedia of Dreams. Translated and with an introduction by Richard E. Strassberg. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008
A Cultural History of Modern Science in China. Benjamin A. Elman. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006
Back Alley Banking. Kellee Tsai. . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002
China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy Minxin Pei. Harvard University Press, 2008
Sentimental Fabrications. Rey Chow.
Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China. Craig Calhoun. U of C Press. -> Craig Calhoun btw is an unstoppable BALLER. Big ups.

Two useful resources at Five Books, a critical cheat sheet to everything interesting:

Question: Why is Fredric Jameson the go to PoCo theorist in China?

Dream of Red Mansions

2010-11-28T06:22:00.000-05:00

I was moderately humiliated after teetering to Central Library to pick up some materials related to Louis Cha for a piece I'm working on - everything I'd hauled from the Hong Kong Literature room was reference, and I was left checking out an illustrated version of Dream of Red Mansions that caught my eye among the children's books. Jing Yong FAIL, however I think I'm going to start collecting some key works from this genre of comic book literary canon classics and posting critical "stills" here."

Second note is I was browsing through an excellent volume on the guaizhi (怪志) genre - a mostly Qing era short story genre employing Kafka-esque tales of the strange, Pu Songling being the most famous of this set - and came across this awesome improbably phrase:

"A WAGON FULL OF GHOSTS GATHERED IN DESULTORY JOTTINGS."

Thirdly I'm trying to note some of the hideous deployments of sort of literary theory jargon, sort of butchered Carl Sagan half-thoughts that design stores around Hong Kong are especially guilty of. On the way from TST to East TST, there is a key one for K11, featuring a confused looking reindeer robot among plastic trees.

"CHRISTMAS SALE..... BUT WHO IS THE ARCHITECT OF GOD?"

2015 - Chinese Cities, Metrics

2010-11-18T01:27:00.001-05:00

One of the biggest factor's shaping China's landscape in the next dozen or so years will be the path that its second-tier cities take on development. (Second/third tier basically refers to any city of about 170 in China that have populations of over 1 million, but are not Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen or Guangzhou)...and a huge chunk of the money has flown into the architectural, urban, and economic development of cities like Chongqing (which on its own, had a GDP of $95.5 billion in 2009), Dalian and Wuhan.

Two pieces of recent news were therefore quite fun and heartening. First, via Danwei, Chongqing is shooting to be one of the "happiest cities" in China by 2015.

"According to a new blueprint released at a government conference yesterday, in 2015, Chongqing's GDP per capita will reach USD 8,000, twice as much as current level; the city's regional GDP will by then reach 1500 billion yuan, surpassing Shanghai's current level; the income gap between urban and rural residents will be shrunk to 2.5:1. These projections, once achieved, will make Chongqing "one of the happiest regions" in China. Or at least the Chongqing government officials would like you to believe so."

The use of per capita GDP (instead of aggregate growth numbers) and reducing the urban-rural inequality gap is using metrics that do come much closer to more holistic indicators of well being. (Sidenote: China experimented with a "Green GDP" index in 2006 but abandoned it when it indicated a 3% drop in productivity.)

NEVERTHELESS, the second piece of fun news is that the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC, not NRDC) has picked five provinces and eight cities as the first hubs for "greening" - by 2015 each will be used as pilots for significantly reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption. (They'll be Guangdong, Hubei, Liaoning, Shaanxi and Yunnan, and Tianjin, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Xiamen, Shenzhen, Guiyang, Nanchang and Baoding.) [via CommidityOnline]

H-KAGE - City-O-Rama

2010-11-12T11:39:00.000-05:00

Video installations through ten locations in HK, buried in flower shops, butcher stalls, and nail salons alike. Running through the 18th!

14E Elgin St | Elgin St (opposite of Chow Kee) | Top of Pottinger St (opposite of Kila Bar) | 27B Stanley St | 20 Old Bailey St | 6A Gage St (Wet Market) ｜ 32 Wellington St ｜ 9， 11－13 Gage St (Wet Market) ｜ 74-74A Hollywood Rd

125@ndrc.gov.cn

2010-11-12T04:14:00.001-05:00

Public comments are apparently being solicited globally for feedback on the Next Five Year Plan? Is this a joke?

Comments from those who live overseas can be submitted to media organizations like China Daily and People's Daily Overseas Edition, Sun said.Over the next two months, individuals and agencies can send e-mails to 125@ndrc.gov.cn, preferably in either Chinese or English.

From the People's Daily November 3

Also:

On the appreciation of the RMB, most alarming indicators have included the rise of tea egg prices from 60 cents to 1 dollar on the street, and the doubling of cabbage prices. Above, NYT picture from feature on Korean panic over rising cabbage prices. Oh, the agony.
Goodbye Expo!
Statistics:

half of the US trade deficit has nothing to do with Chinese imports - it is oil.
Chinese buyers - mix of state and private - represent 10% of cross border deals by value.
65% of mass rural uprisings are triggered by land disputes.

Weekend.

Romain Rolland/Jean Christophe in China

2010-10-28T13:47:00.001-04:00

Need to be in office early and have been up too late tinkering with mixing software, but I am in the middle of trying to crack this mystery.
That is, not really any mystery, but the seeming centrality of Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe to a generation of Chinese intellectuals that came to age in the 60s and 70s.
Above, RR chilling with Gandhi. Word.

"Government Waste", G20, Quantitative Easing

2010-10-24T01:30:00.003-04:00

Quick note on a video that's been circulating the web. Citizens Against Government Waste portrays a Chinese professor lecturing in some not so distant future about the downfall of great societies, and lo and behold there's Lincoln and an American flag up there after Rome and Atlantis etc etc. The classroom titters as he pronounces that America now works for China. And the reason for the epic downfall? DEFICIT SPENDING. Oh right, duh.

As far as I understand it, the seeming reliance of the Fed now on quantitative easing - basically making more money - has been an enormous sore point for China in the middle of the heightened tension over RMB appreciation, and the "currency war" fear that looms at the core of the current G20 meetings. An article in the NYT last week explicitly pointed to the confusion and frustration of high level Chinese officials that direct stimulus programs weren't a stronger part of the American recovery plan. But, fiscal stimulus?! Off the docket of conversation as we face a hard wave of Democratic losses in midterms. [Detailed destruction of the ad from Matt Yglesias here.]

In short, the cutting irony for a lefty/Keynesian etc watching this is that the video's purpose itself (successful Tea Party and the likes rallying against government spending) is a far more likely cause of the dystopic future envisioned therein.

GDYE October 16

2010-10-15T23:47:00.001-04:00

Mild wonk alert.

UNIVERSE: Out of the many things to think about, one of the strands I've gravitated towards in the discussions of Liu Xiaobo's Nobel has been the resurrection of a debate on universality of values in the Chinese Academy. The Economist had a really excellent review of this, with many links to original Chinese language articles I'm hoping to go through this weekend.
FIVE YEAR PLANS: Everyone in their mid-20s needs one, especially me, but the CCP is putting out a new one soon. Between projects I finally read the big work of last year, Yasheng Huang's Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics, that deftly maps out rifts within the 80s and 90s party leadership. He marks the current leadership as much more in line with the 80's, rural-oriented reformists - consistent with many of the comments made by Wen Jiabao on CNN recently, which faced media blackout at home.
NOXIOUS FUMES: Ai Weiwei's sunflower seed exhibit -awesome. Ai Weiwei's exhibit's noxious fumes leading to shutdown of said exhibit - not so awesome. He'll be speaking at Hong Kong University on October 26th, 6:30 PM.

Things Which Have Eluded Me

2010-10-12T00:36:00.001-04:00

Events I have sadly missed in Hong Kong so far:

The exhibit commemorating Eileen Chang's birthday w/ Roland Soong giving a guided tour slash English language book launch + beginnings of the Cao Yu Drama Festival.
The anti-shark fin flashmob in Causeway Bay
Being arrested for spraying champagne on police officers in celebration of Liu Xiaobo's Nobel Prize.
Neverending Story art gallery rager near my house.

Jia Zhangke - Beijing BC MOMA Speech Translation

2010-10-06T12:06:00.004-04:00

While sick and dazed I read through the last few months of the Modern Chinese Language and Culture (MCLC) emails and found a Chinese transcript for a speech Jia Zhangke had delivered mid-July in Beijing, detailing some of his feelings about the Sixth Generation of filmmakers. An abridged version appears here in Chinese [Southern Weekly] and dGenerate films had translated excerpts here. I took a quick stab at translating the full speech, though it's a bit patchy and enigmatic at various parts. With The World, these were the precise sentiments that I think many saw him wrestling with - juggling multiple audiences, and the prerequisites for commercial appeal. There it was implicit in his stylistic transitions - here its quite explicit.

I Wish I Knew will be showing at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival on October 29 and 31st.

I Don’t Believe You’ll Predict Our Ending
Jia Zhangke
July 21, 2010

Personally, I hadn’t known what the category of “Sixth Generation” really marked, what it meant. Speaking purely in terms of age, I’m 7 years younger than Zhang Yuan, who released Mama in 1990. And I’m half a year older than Lu Chuan, who self identifies as a “Seventh Generation” director. It was after I directed Xiao Wu at the age of 28 that people gave me the tag “6th Generation,” and that was in 1998.

I’ve always thought that fervent emphasis on this generational affiliation and fevered opposition to it were in some ways one in the same. At core, its about wanting to avoid being labelled into a certain set, and of course to some degree, its about retaining your sense of individuality, or avoiding the negative connotations or what-naught carried by having such and such label. For instance, to be “Sixth Generation” was basically synonymous with having awful box office sales. But, I thought, if other people were willing to have that tag, I may as well too.

[FULL TRANSLATION AFTER THE JUMP]

****

The first time I heard the term 6th generation was probably around 1992, when I was finishing up exams at the Beijing Film Academy. I’d finished an exam and went to the art gallery for a show, and while there, picked up the latest copy of The Chinese Arts Bulletin. There was an essay introducing the so called “Sixth Generation” directors. Back then, Zhang Yuan had directed Mama, Wang Xiaoshuai put out The Days, Wu Wen Guang had the documentary Bumming in Beijing - The Last Dreamers. It was from these films that China began to have an independent cinema movement.

The Past: This Was Not A Dream of Freedom

In that article, there was a description that I recall to this day. The article described Wang Xioashuai’s experiences filming The Days, clining to the back of coal trains and buying the cheapest black and white film from outside of Baoding. I often imagine Wang, now a bit plump with fortune, if you will, in the full stride of his youth then, nimble and vigorous and full of vitality, criss-crossing the wild expanse of Hebei, whirling through countless trains, living in his cinema the very dreams of youth.

But, this was not a dream of freedom.

Back then, there wasn’t any sense of collective consciousness - people didn’t think that, as an individual, you could use film as a medium to express individual experience.

I was a 21 year old kid from Shanxi, I’d read a few novels, and had a scattered background in the arts. I am a follower of the "6th Generation,” and have constantly looked to them as models.
Years later, when people began to refer to the “6th Generation” as some sort of unbelievable community - Don Quixotes that were out of their depth, and monstrously out of sync with their times - I flashed a sort of dumb smile.

The Syrian poet Adonis has a poem:

The vast sea has no time to talk to the sands,

for he is always busy charting the waves.

The poet considers things with an open eye, which is worthy of the “6th Generation’s” study. But, I must say, have we really forgotten all this?

We look at today’s youth - darting through the city with their dyed hair - and they are able to freely choose, and even be open with, their sexual orientations. Isn’t this the result, in some ways, of films like Zhang Yuan’s autobiographical East Palace West Palace?

In these changing times, there are more and more people relegated to the fringes of society by the powerful, by the market - and which films are the ones which have constantly chronicled these people, and struggled to turn all of society’s eyes towards the powerless and marginalized? This has been the power of the “6th Generation” directors and their work. In my opinion, the culture of 6th generation cinema was been the most vibrant part of Chinese culture in the 90s.

These films may not have ways to really generate profits, but why can’t we help these films reach a wider audience, and better public reception? Our films have had an audience that’s been growing for over a decade now, and behind us will stand an enormous community. And when we’ve each taken our own films, and finally were allowed to show them on the market, our supporters - those who welcomed us - weren’t a bunch of youth who’d been conquered by Hollywood. Many directors can feel so powerless - but the revival of Chinese film, the expansion of our cinematic pulse, has been made possible by true believers, people who maybe are just as out of the mainstream as we are.

In 1997, economic change yet again picked up pace. This year, Lou Ye filmed Suzhou River, Wang Xiaoshuai released Frozen, Zhang Yuan was preparing to film Seventeen Years, and Zhang Ming had just completed Rainclouds over Wushan. This was the year I started shooting Xiao Wu, and I am honored that I’ve been called part of the "Sixth Generation."

As a cinematic movement, the "Sixth Generation" has already dissolved today - they have each evolved into different spheres, and in the span of a relatively short span of time, we’ve each shown some personal shortcomings, and even some of the weaknesses of the power of film. We should be happy for one thing, however - that most of our films have chosen to ally themselves with realism, and with truth. These films all supplement one another, and are interlinked, and have captured a faint outline of the rapid changes in today’s China.... we have not allowed the real experiences of the Chinese people to disappear into the clamour for materialistic gain. This has been a thread of a scarred, painful era - and we feel such pain ourselves.

Now: Surving in “Commercial Warfare”

Among my most memorable moments was in 2003, the day at the Beijing Film Academy when the ban on most “6th Generation” directors was lifted. A government official had said, we are lifting the ban on you today, but you should understand that soon, you’ll be the “underground” films of the industry. In the nearly six years following that announcement, I can personally say that I experienced a totally new ruthlessness within the market. Of course, its necessary to say that, in reality, we aren’t all opposed to the market - a free market is one of the many permutations of a free society, so we don’t have too much to complain about in that regard. Even knowing that the “market” can saddle itself with entrenched power, we’re willing to embrace the market, and even expend all our efforts and resources on it.

The greatest irony is that with each new film, the media now puts enormous emphasis on ticket returns, and loves to announce the “death” of the “Sixth Generation.” Art films require a relatively long period of time to catch on, and even the first month or two of release can be an exploratory promotion phase. But even prior to a film’s release, you’ll hear announcements that this and that film will be a total flop at the box office, and its hard for a director not to feel desperate. One just loses the ability to even wait a few days, and the audience disperses. No one wants to watch something that’s pronounced dead on arrival - they only want to see miracles.

So that was commercial warfare, and in the billowing gun-smoke, we’re still standing. I am certainly willing to be part of this relentless group of survivors, known as the “6th Generation.” And though this movement may be at an end now, I myself have a much longer career ahead of me. After New Wave ended, Truffaut was able to become a commercial film director with wide box-office appeal, while Godard became more of an auteur, and of course, a wide range of directors took a middle path. Individual changes cannot represent a group, and likewise one cannot fault a group for the faults of an individual. This is all passe.

No matter what, we are a bunch that remains faithful to cinema, and whatever obstacles we face - market forces or other - we will persevere. If you are willing to admit that a nation’s films should have cultural significance, I’ll tell you now - in the last ten years, the films that have contained the most cultural force have been those by the “6th Generation” of directors. And it is difficult to imagine a scenario where we lose the work of these directors。Our film culture hangs by a mere thread: what else could we show to the world to prove that yes, Chinese film culture is alive.

As for the audience, as for the market, I still have the most primal passion for it. There’s another poem, from the Latvian poet Vizma Belševica:

If you draped upon yourself the joyous cries of stars,

I would set my love aflame on your body,

Each time you hurt me,

I would extinguish a star,

Then, why do I still sigh with such sadness?

Future: I do not believe that dreams are false

As with any generation of directors, we will age, and sooner or later, lose our creativity. Day by day, that self that seduces us to give up, to sink, will grow stronger - physical exhaustion and a world weariness that was unprecedented in our youth will emerge as well. Selfishness will even begin to have its own appeal, and that appeal will slink besides us with a smile. But to me, just seeing bustling streets is, for now, enough to incite a flash of feeling in my heart, and I remember the reasons I began to make movies in the first place.

To learn to place that pulsating passion of life, and the true self, into ones own work - that is why we must continue to make films in the future. It is unfortunate that some “6th Generation” directors have, I believe, have confronted the problem of the “self” or first-person within film quite erroneously, and due to a lack of familiarity, confuse it with modes of egoism or narcissism. If a movie does not have, through and through, a “consciousness” animating it, they say that the movie has no subject at all.

Yet, I believe even the most unformed narrator can still communicate genuine and important personal experience.

Don’t worry about our paranoia - film should be a fun, and for the most part, we’re now defending the right of the film to serve as entertainment. However, a multiplicity of views shouldn’t be exclusively filed as mere entertainment. As culture loses its final grounds of liveliness, the carnival of the masses will begin to establish new reigns of power.

Among our crowd, there will be directors who put out all sorts of masterpieces, and also people who put out all sorts of crap. Yet, I believe that as long as the self is still valued, the spirit will be retained. As long as there remains a keen perception of realism, then we will still be full of creative energy.

I must apologize - I’ve said “we’ far too much, and of course, the broader cinematic spirit is not constituted by one person alone. Before closing the essay, I’d like to evoke a habit of older literary norms, and quote a few lines from Bei Dao:

I do not believe the sky is blue,

I do not believe the thunder’s echo,

I do not believe dreams are false,

I do not believe death eludes retribution.

I’ll add a line: I don’t believe you will predict our ending.

Rare Earth Metals

2010-10-04T10:44:00.000-04:00

As some readers will know, China recently successfully pressured the Japanese into returning a wayward captive sea-captain by threatening to withhold rare earth metals, which would have devastated the Japanese electronics industry.

My first point is that this seems like a scenario that I played once in Civilization IV or perhaps the subplot of a movie that also includes mega Gundams and space colonies.

My second point is that reading more broadly on the rare earth metal monopoly China's developed (nearly 97% of the global supply - link is to a Bloomberg piece), I asked myself who was in THIS meeting:

"A generation after Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made mastering neodymium and 16 other elements known as rare earths a priority, China dominates the market, with far-reaching effects ranging from global trade friction to U.S. job losses and threats to national security."

It doesn't matter what color the neodymium is, as long as it helps power your laser mouse.

The Treacherous Treis, A Treacherous Move

2010-10-02T23:39:00.001-04:00

1. Relocated to Hong Kong, so as I hope to start posting regularly again, they'll likely be crass commentary on local exhibits, shows, and films peppered in. 文化沙漠？(A prominent Chinese scholar spat that Hong Kong was a "cultural desert" a few years ago, which has prompted countless millions of dollars being injected into "cultural" events throughout the city, special immigration schemes for artistic talent, and of course, the hype around the mega development the western parts of Kowloon.)
2. Edison Chen has bounced back from a rocking sex scandal and gone the way of James Franco, attempting to restyle himself as a pop artist. A choice work from his exhibit, "The Treacherous Treis," showing now in Singapore, Maona Lisa. I want to see him climb through the ranks and get caught in flagrante behind the curtain at some Sotheby's auction.
3. Delicious pop-up books as profiled in the New York Times. See and touch Yunnan in three dimensions, and also two dimensions, then three again.
4. Takashi Murakami X Versailles!
5. Matt Yglesias has quite a good post that ties together two recent pieces of major news in the Asian philanthropy world (my new world) - first the seemingly enormous failure of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates' recent trip to China (where they hoped to bring a good slice of wealthy PRCers into their donating pledge). Second is the recent set of rumors that Jet Li's ONE Foundation may pull out from operations from the Mainland, given the series of administrative and bureaucratic trip wires they've run into in their tenure. As Yglesias points out, charity is in some senses illegal in China - only a very small percentage of organizations can formally fund-raise at all, which is often forgotten when people discuss the seemingly vibrant sector of civil society constituted by an emerging network of grassroots NGOs.

Wallpaper* Taiwan - Decoding a Menace

2010-06-16T19:01:00.000-04:00

I went bonkers when Wallpaper* highlighted Taiwan in their last issue, with the following blurb:

"Asian hipsters have long flocked to Taiwan for its unbeatable combination of jaw-dropping scenery, culture, retail therapy and addictive food culture -- something the West has only belatedly come to appreciate. And good timing, too, as Wallpaper* recently pitched up in this gem of an island for Operation: Taiwan Revealed."

I went more bonkers when there was a link to the tourism bureau, which for years had been touting an ugly motto of "TAIWAN: TOUCH YOUR HEART." Were the heartstrings of a generation of Americans still remembering Taiwan as Cold War ally the intended audience? Or was there some other island fever brewing in the minds of tourism bureau peeps? Taiwan needed to be branded as hyper-chic, wrenching back the spot Japan has long had and Korea is now inching towards! Pop music could not be where the dreams of cultural hegemony ended!

But my question - what is this logo? What is this menacing madness all my semiotics training can't unfold? Is that a cardboard box with an umbrella stuck to it? HELP ME JESUS WHAT AM I MISSING?!

Lu Xun X Jules Verne

2010-06-14T20:42:00.005-04:00

Here's a link to a fab. piece at the China Beat - a group of academically minded wonks blogging on China coverage in US media, and nearly always fab. - on science fiction in the Chinese imaginary! A choice tidbit:

"A young Lu Xun, later the greatest writer of 20th century China, translated Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, and wrote an unforgettable slogan in his preface, “Leading the Chinese people forward begins with science fiction!” (导中国人群以进行，必自科学小说始)."

This is a pretty great Wikipedia entry on science fiction in China to accompany your thoughts. One of the first early 20th C. pieces was a vision of settlement on the moon colony...written in 1904. Illustration from the piece above.

Green Dam Youth Escort! June 1!

2010-06-01T19:37:00.004-04:00

China has banned evidence obtained by torture. Zhao Zuohai had spent 11 years in prison for a murder extracted by beatings, until the alleged victim of said murder showed up to pick up a welfare check.
China has unblocked pornography?
Dawning Nebulae strikes! China makes a the second fastest supercomputer, clocking in at1.27 petaflops. [BBC]
New blogs I'm reading include Sinopop, RedBox Review and ArtHub China. Much more in the gallery/art scene
Exhausted Diligence in the ECONOMIST YO! The room. Not this blog. ["Sleeping Beauty:Reviving a Chinese imperial treasure means reversing 80 years of neglect." More than a name we have in common I see.]
Above - David Lynch X Marion Cotillard X Dior X Shanghai X Novalis. Dior's patent leather purse is a blue flower, AKA the "central symbol of German Romanticism." And such magic is contained in the Pearl Tower.
East vs. West. vs. Kant's 3rd Antimony. That's right.

Ulysses S. Grant and Noh Theater

2010-05-09T19:59:00.004-04:00

"Noh might actually not have survived if General Ulysses S. Grant had not arrived in Tokyo on a goodwill tour in 1879 and declared that this fine art should be preserved.”

The Mystery of Female Grace | The New York Review of Books

Grant was in fact one of the first foreigners to see Noh theater, traveling for two years after resignation as US Prez. in 1877 - by 1879, he arrived in the court of Lord Iwakura Tomomi (in the course of a few meetings with the Meiji emperor). The man was a noh patron, and, lo and behold, Grant's praise motivated him to be much more of one, establishing the Noh Society and building the first permanent noh stage for the general public in Tokyo's Shiba Park.

Before hitting Japan, Grant hit up India, China, Russia and others on a grand world tour -- below is a restored photo from the same year (1879) that catches Grant eerily floating in a background-less setting with Chinese Viceroy Li Hung Chang. The photograph's restorer points to JF Packard's 1880 account of Grants trips, describing the scene:

"The visit of the Viceroy to the General was returned next day in great pomp. There was a marine guard from the Ashuelot. We went to the viceregal palace in the Viceroy's yacht, and as we steamed up the river, every foot of ground, every spot on the junks, was covered with people. At the landing, troops were drawn up. A chair lined with yellow silk — such a chair as is only used by the Emperor — was awaiting the General. As far as the eye could reach the multitude stood expectant and gazing, and we went to the palace through a line of troops, who stood with arms at a present. Amid the firing of guns, the beating of gongs, our procession slowly marched to the palace-door. The Viceroy, surrounded by his mandarins and attendants, welcomed the General. "

Revivification: Johnnie To

2010-04-27T22:41:00.006-04:00

Weekly post-rate here finally leveled out to zero, so here's a brief set of ramblings

1. Exhausted Diligence has been battered by Chinese-language link posts in comments, which is simultaneously awesome and discouraging. In my very brief entertaining of the comparative structure of spam-botting, it does seem marginally better than some English counterparts, though (a) differences in labor structures could mean human spambots are cost effective, or (b) that grammatical ellision actually makes Chinese spam easier and perhaps French spam least believable or that (c) sheer numbers of native Chinese language spammers and users means that the evolutionary learning curve of the programs (which iterate themselves, at times, and obviously, are iterated by spam progenitors) has been more steep than the English. An easy answer is also that my English is superbly better than my Chinese.

2. Tumblr has been eating my online life, as a primary goal of this whole thing had been to more effectively bookmark my own readings and give a little structure to my Asia-web wandering. But that turned out to be so much better with a bookmarklet!

3. There has been a major Johnnie To kick in my household(s). And Johnnie To is producing Jia Zhang-ke's next film -- his first big-budget piece -- which both terrifies and intrigues me. But more importantly via Paper Republic here is an old FBI guide by one agent Fritz Chang to Canto gang slang.

4. Two fantasy lives of intrigue -- photographer Jing Quek is looking for a production assistant, Imagine living the world he tags Jingapore (below), and getting coffee for it.

5. One of the articles that has stuck in my mind -- this is not arts -- is a recent piece by Steve Walt in Foreign Policy -- "China's New Strategy." I'm repelled in many ways by realism (rational-choice applied to IR, positing nation-states as black-boxes motivated solely by their "interests"), but the arguments he lays out rattled me. As he puts it

"On one side are realists who believe that if China continues to increase its economic power, then significant security competition between the two countries is virtually inevitable. On the other side are those (mostly liberal) theorists who believe that the potential for trouble will be muted by economic interdependence and the socializing effects of China's growing participation in various international institutions. (This was Bill Clinton's rationale for getting China into the World Trade Organization, for example). And if China were to make a gradual transition to democracy, so the argument runs, then democratic peace theory will kick in and there's nothing to worry about.
On Saturday, the New York Times published an important story supporting the realist view. It described the rapid expansion of China's naval capabilities (a classic manifestation of great power status), as well as the more ambitious new strategy that this growing capacity is designed to serve. Briefly, as China's economic power and dependence on overseas raw materials (e.g., oil) has grown, it is seeking to acquire the ability to protect its access. In practice, China's new strategy of "far sea defense" means acquiring the ability to project naval power into key ocean areas (including the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf), while denying other naval powers the ability to operate with impunity in areas close to China."

Google, Isaiah Berlin, Guobin Yang

2010-03-24T18:53:00.006-04:00

I've been posting much to a tumblr - EXCURSUS II -- for ease of access, esp. since the interface makes it easier to pop on links or images I find interesting during the course of the workday. While browsing the Social Science Research Council's mash of articles, I came across a great article on Google's projected China exit by Guobin Yang (one of the real academic leaders on the political implications of networked communications there.) "Why Google Should Not Quit" makes an interesting pivot on the ways in which the exit would shift both positive ("to do", capabilities) and negative freedom ("freedom from", non-interference) in the PRC, arguing that the censorship landscape would essentially not change (negative freedom won't be affected) BUT that the reduction in competitiveness may lead to a more impoverished internet landscape generally (reducing positive freedom.) he says:

"It is hard to imagine Google continuing to operate in China by censoring its search engine as if nothing had happened. But neither can I imagine Google retreating into its inner citadel. I find it unlikely, as Isaiah Berlin might put it, that when faced with two methods of freeing itself from the pain of a wounded leg, one of difficulty and uncertainty of finding a cure, the other of cutting it off, Google will opt for the second. Perhaps we will soon see another moment of Google creativity."

More potently, I do wonder whether this is the beginning of a great divergence in global information landscapes.

1937

2010-03-03T20:30:00.002-05:00

"Americans saw China as a great future trade partner and President Franklin Roosevelt himself had family business connections in China. Americans applauded the advances that American Christian missions seemed to be making in the country. China would one day be the United States of Asia: prosperous, Christian, and free."

-From Chris Bayly and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945.

The Chinese Embassy in Paris, 1900

2010-03-01T17:42:00.003-05:00

I was browsing The Commons on Flickr, where the Library of Congress and tons of other museums/collections have uploaded their public collections. There's a scant East-Asia related set, but I found this treasure in the George Eastman House Collection. Author of "Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling" a biography of the lady in waiting to Empress Dowager Cixi, explains in the comments that the boy striking the Napoleonic pose is in fact Xinling, member of the Manchu royal family and elder brother of the aforementioned Princess Der Ling. Chinese Embassy in Paris, taken around 1900.

PS: [I think I may be assaulting the RSS feed of this blog with false-starts on entries. Never again!]]]

Yang Yang (b. 1969) -- 命题游戏之一 (?A Game of Fate Pt 1?)

2010-02-26T23:37:00.002-05:00

What I thought was a striking piece from painter Yang Yang. Not much on her in English but I was really rapt by these baroque riffs on Botticelli that seem to run through her work. Some more of it here (a compendium of prominent female painters) and here (which has some bio information too.) It also rang a bell and then it struck me! Porcelain bust on cover of the NYRB ed. of Eileen Chang's "Love in a Fallen City."

Found after browsing Art Scene China's site -- they have I think one of the biggest showrooms in the 798 space, though I may be wrong. [[798 is a Bauhaus-era textile factory abandoned then transformed into the art district of Beijing. My lasting impression when I went -- via motorcycle the summer after my freshman year, due to some botched directions -- was some artist who was popping EEG headgear onto unwilling participants and asking them to use their beta-waves to paint lotuses with lasers on the warehouse floor.]]

Bucky Fuller and the Chinese Secretary of Communications, 1979

2010-02-23T21:31:00.003-05:00

"In 1979, Fuller was invited by the Chinese Secretary of Communications for a three week visit. On arrival in Peking, Fuller was asked by his host: "How low would it take to make a complete disclosure of your general philosophy of the grand strategy of problem solving?" Fuller replied: "Sixteen hours."

"...according to a recent report, Fuller's 1963 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth is number one on the list of the ten most widely read American books in the People's Republic of China today."

- From Introduction to Humans in the Universe. R. Buckminster Fuller and Anwar Dil. 1983

Search prompted by latest issue of Volume, which included a project set up as a tribute to Fuller: "Buckminster Fuller showed us how minimal energy domes could open a way to a more environmentally sustainable future, could an umbrella dome lead the way to a more socially sustainable future? The Bucky Bar is a full-scale model of such a future."

Above is "Tensile-Integrity Structures Tensegrity from the portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One."

"Locked Out -- Beijing's Border Abuse Exposed" Perry Link in NYRBlog

2010-02-22T22:32:00.002-05:00

"On February 12, Chinese human rights campaigner Feng Zhenghu was allowed to return to Shanghai after a 92-day stay in diplomatic limbo at the Tokyo Narita airport. Having left China last April to visit family in Japan, Feng, who is a Chinese citizen, was repeatedly denied reentry by Chinese immigration officials; when he was sent back to Tokyo last November, he remained in the Tokyo airport in protest, waiting for the Chinese government to change its mind. The international press has portrayed Feng as a solitary figure, pursuing an admirable if somewhat flamboyant quest for his personal rights. But the point of Feng’s protest goes much, much deeper than the fate of one man, and Feng hopes that the world will understand why."

-"Locked Out -- Beijing's Border Abuse Exposed" Perry Link in NYRBlog

"Ink Mountain":: via NeochaEDGE

2010-02-21T13:45:00.001-05:00

I think I've posted briefly about NeochaEDGE's consultancy wing before -- but the core of the group is their successful launch of a MySpace for Chinese hipsters.(More properly -- a social networking site for creative artists in China, and hugely popular.) But also they have a great blog. A featured piece from the other day by Shadow Chen from Ningbo above. They posted a set of animated shorts from promising artists that I LOVED earlier this year/late last year.

I also came across this London-based group of designers recently - Chinese Design Region -- but haven't dug much.

Given the much spoken significance of Obama's meeting w/ the Dalai Lama taking place in the map room, I've been cobbling together a post on old maps from the Tibeto-Sino border. Secondly I've been thinking recently about how much of a cultural arbiter Howard Goldblatt has been, and how awesome he is generally.

"Empress Dowager Cixi with foreign ladies" (Wikicaption)

2010-02-18T22:58:00.001-05:00

NYT - "Tracing the Path to Chinese Finesse "

2010-02-16T17:32:00.000-05:00

Posting a NYT review of a new exhibit at the Met -- “Mastering the Art of Chinese Painting: Xie Zhiliu (1910-1997)." The review points to a "curiously dispassionate, not to say bloodless" feel to the work, but emphasizes that the exhibit's worth is largely in its revelation of method:

"... it is not for artistic merit that Xie’s work is on view. Maxwell K. Hearn, the exhibition’s organizer and a curator of Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Met, explained in an interview that the show’s main significance is in what it reveals about methods used by traditional artists. It turns out that the kind of graceful naturalism that Xie achieved in his best works came not from extensive study of nature but by tracing over and over the works of other artists on sheets of semitransparent paper.
If Xie’s procedures typified the way artists had been working for centuries, as Mr. Hearn said they do, then it challenges the idea that Chinese art is as deeply grounded in real-life experience and observation of nature as is commonly believed. Copying was the royal road to aesthetic perfection."

Hello Kitty Instantiated

2010-02-15T13:43:00.006-05:00

I saw these two Hello Kitty related pop-ups in Shanghai mentioned on the Asian Art Museum blog recently, and the magnetic pull of Sanrio pulled me further. I was pulled back to some of the most pleasant flights I've ever had, on EVA Air, which happened to be on EVA's "Hello Kitty Jet" (left).

Shanghai's No. 6 line, which is the only to run only in Pudong, is named the "Hello Kitty Line" -- all accents are a happy shade of pink. [Pictures via Wangjianshuo's blog]

Listed as one of the "most bizarre hostels in the world," the Hello Kitty Houses -- also in Shanghai -- offer luxury amid cat-shaped chairs and lots of pink ribbons. [More photos here.]
But forget not Bank of America's recent launch of Hello-Kitty themed debit accounts. And the MAC makeup line? And the Hello Kitty Parachute Paradise iPhone game?
The question on the mind of every 11 year old in Sanrio Puroland: How can Sanrio have so effectively leveraged their brand to move from fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) to full blown infrastructure projects?
Scholarship holds the answer. Perhaps we may find the key in this business case study on SUPERbranding. Or this one, which guides the young entrepreneur through Hello Kitty's move towards unisexual appeal. See also "Hello Kitty and the Identity Politics in Taiwan" for a post-colonial perspective. Or "Japan's Gross National Cool" (Foreign Policy) for an international relations perspective. "Hello Kitty Items a Global Rage in “Zen cuteness” (Japan Times) may touch on problems of religious syncretism as well. Hello Kitty Darth Vader has a magnum opus cooking on this one.

Artspeak China - Rauschenberg

2010-02-11T12:42:00.004-05:00

A fantastic new bilingual wiki for contemp. Chinese art - Artspeak China. The easy interface organizes information by major artists, events, institutions and movements. Already, according to Shanghaiist, garnering tens of thousands of hits per day.

My first dally in - Rauschenberg's 1985 exhibit at the Beijing National Gallery - the first officially sanctioned American exhibit since the 30s. [[ Purchase Rauschenberg's piece, left, "China Tour, 1985" here.]] From the article:

"Author Zhang Zhaohui recalls: “The exhibition halls were crowded with people who felt refreshed by a totally new form of art that they did not quite yet understand. It served to excite young Chinese artists' enthusiasm to learn from him, and the show proved a stimulant to the nascent avant-gardemovement. Overnight, a number of Chinese artists began producing 'ready-mades' and installations, and hundreds of avant-garde art groups and experimental art exhibitions appeared.”

The moment was a decisive game-changer for the direction of modern Chinese art. And there is likely no shortage of commentary on how Rauschenberg's ready-mades may have, to the bureaucrat charged with the thumbs-up or down, seemed like innocuous objects properly flaked off of the great stream of capitalist production slowly opening to the PRC. (Coded in there, too, I bet, is a sophisticated albeit unconscious theory of the political limits of irony.)

Li Wei Photos on Wallpaper - Photoshoot

2009-11-15T21:35:00.005-05:00

All of their MADE IN CHINA issue available online.

Flashback - The Convertible Capitol Building

2009-11-01T13:57:00.007-05:00

Reading an old Robert Darton article in the NY Review of Books, "The Library in the New Age":

"Let's begin with the Internet and work backward in time. More than a million blogs have emerged during the last few years. They have given rise to a rich lore of anecdotes about the spread of misinformation, some of which sound like urban myths. But I believe the following story is true, though I can't vouch for its accuracy, having picked it up from the Internet myself. As a spoof, a satirical newspaper, The Onion, put it out that an architect had created a new kind of building in Washington, D.C., one with a convertible dome. On sunny days, you push a button, the dome rolls back, and it looks like a football stadium. On rainy days it looks like the Capitol building. The story traveled from Web site to Web site until it arrived in China, where it was printed in the Beijing Evening News. Then it was taken up by the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, CNN, Wired.com, and countless blogs as a story about the Chinese view of the United States: they think we live in convertible buildings, just as we drive around in convertible cars."

Some criticism of Darton's account here, an original story in Wired, and from 2005 about another incident where bloggers cycled rumors that Google was preparing to purge all information it couldn't index...also from an Onion article. [via Danwei.] And the original Onion article here.

Related and separate, a story from two years ago here about Pasadena Now, which has outsourced local reporting to India [one staffer sits in Bombay on a $12K salary, another in Banglore on a 7K salary]. Maureen Dowd [ugh] last year wrote a foreign-local correspondent on the job:

I checked in with one of his workers in Mysore City in southern India, 40-year-old G. Sreejayanthi, who puts together Pasadena events listings. She said she had a full-time job in India and didn’t think of herself as a journalist. “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always,” she wrote back. “Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

GDYE 9/27

2009-09-28T11:58:00.002-04:00

Quick Links, Grouped. More in depth on all of these eventually.

1. Visual Arts.
MOCA (The Museum of Chinese in America) had a grand opening earlier this month. The space - designed by Maya Lin - looks beautiful, though the opening exhibit seems to have garnered mixed receptions. I sympathize with the reviewer in the NYT:

"But the first-person stories here suggest that the dominant identity model has its own form of exaggeration, heightening trauma and minimizing promise. The hope is that over time this will be amended (and not just in this museum) with a fuller understanding of both sides of a hyphenated identity."

But the sentiment under-girding it is a much broader one - that Asian-American identity doesn't fit into the standard civil rights discourse... or its genre . "The dominant identity model" in this case must refer to the Af-Am model (yes, no?), and in many ways, the notion that the form "heightens trauma" is a elliptical way of hinting that there is not comparable trauma in the Asian context, or, that is is now erased because there are not comparable issues of endemic poverty, etc.

On another note, Wallpaper* and cognac house Courvorsier bumped heads to create a listing of peeps capturing the essence of the 21st century. Of note and new to me on there were architect Pei Zhu and photographer Li Wei.

2. Thuggery

A recent bust releasing five sex slaves in Changning revealed again the links between organized crime, prostitution, and kidnappings. Kerry Brown at OpenDemocracy spent a month traveling in rural areas of China, and fears that in many districts, local government has become hostage to the "hidden sector" of organized crime.

3. Lettres.
Via Paper Republic, Penguin is sponsoring a Lu Xun Translation Contest! Fears of 2046 begin - China attempts to bar publication of a book, Chinese History Revisted, in Hong Kong. The Guardian reports. Bao Pu, head of the Press - and also lead editor of the Zhao Ziyang papers (Prisoner of the State) that recently came out - ignored the suggestions and pushes forth today.

Sadder news: The Far East Economic Review is being wiped out into the fold of the WSJ as Dow Jones "reorganizes." And Time's China Blog is folding as well, though they've begun a Detroit blog to make up for it.

On good news, Evan Osnos reports via Guangzhou newspaper Southern Weekend of the awe of some Chinese denizens that fact-checking still exists in some venues, though ever rarer. See “I WAS FACT-CHECKED BY THE NEW YORKER.”

4. Migrant Workers

A film debuted at the New York Film Festival yesterday - Ghost Town - chronicling the lives of migrants from one small city in Yunnan. Trailer here.

In a New York Times piece on the film, director Zhao Dayong said:

Mr. Zhao, 39, said getting the approval of the censors was never a consideration. “It’s like asking to be raped,” he said this month in an interview here. “The government certainly has its own agenda. They want us to stop. But at the same time we know we’re doing something meaningful.”

See also Howard French's photos, and the Global Post's excellent web-portal (I know no other word for this.)

5. Human Flesh Engine Search Documentary.
I haven't opened it yet, but it seems worth it. As described by an old Forbes article, for explanation of this new form of frontier justice:

"A human flesh search engine is where thousands of volunteer cybervigilantes unite to expose the personal details of perceived evildoers and publish them on the Web"

6. Fashion Week

Pick up the new "Trand" - Warren Buffet's loving a new menswear brand from China. Yes. Called Trand. I don't think this detail made it into Ralph Nader's new utopian novel, starring in part the Oracle from Omaha.

And Louis Vuitton makes chopsticks now. Nice!

7. Intellectual History

The Global Times charted "60 foreigners who shaped China's 60 years" - I thought this list would be more revealing, but a lot lies between Isaac Newton (1) and Michael Jordan (60).

This beautiful feature allows you to scroll through the covers over 60 years the mag China Pictoral. Really, really amazing.

Lastly, Warcraft is back online in China after a temporary ban - more than half of that social imaginary is populated by PRCers, it appears. Also, in my browsing I came across an wild consulting company - CHINA YOUTHOLOGY. Friends at McKinsey take note.

On Friendship - Matteo Ricci

2009-09-21T19:34:00.004-04:00

From the Columbia University Press:

""On Friendship, with its total of one hundred sayings, is the perfect gift for friends."—Feng Yingjing, renowned scholar and civic official, 1601
Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) is best known as the Italian Jesuit missionary who brought Christianity to China. He also published a landmark text on friendship—the first book to be written in Chinese by a European—that instantly became a late Ming best seller. On Friendship distilled the best ideas on friendship from Renaissance Latin texts into one hundred pure and provocative Chinese maxims. Written in a masterful classical style, Ricci's sayings established his reputation as a great sage and the sentiments still ring true. Available for the first time in English, On Friendship matches a carefully edited Chinese text with a facing-page English translation and includes notes on sources and biographical, historical, and cultural information. Still admired in China for its sophistication and inspirational wisdom, On Friendship is a delightful cross-cultural work by a crucial and fascinating historical figure. It is also an excellent tool for learning Chinese, pairing a superb model of the classical language with an accessible and accurate translation."

Question: What does it mean to be a "late Ming best seller?"

Answer

1626 Magazine - Very Punny

2009-09-14T21:05:00.003-04:00

Via Danwei, fashion magazine 1626, teaches the masses to more accurately pronounce the transliterations of names in haute couture... so that they may "freely make the most of big-brand style, and if we use other brands we can still find a name-brand feeling." Iconic? Ironic? Hypnotic?

I've been long looking for a place to embed myself and do a wild experiment in internet ethnography. I'd never seen 1626, let alone logged onto its site, let alone seen its social networking side - "1626 Club." ("They have to be making these people up," I think, before I fabricate my own profile.)

I'm not sure if I should be telling American Apparel or Harajuku to be eating its/their heart(s) out. Either way I see trouble on the horizon.

Psychological Returns on Stamp Collecting in China...or Not.

2009-09-08T21:24:00.005-04:00

Sometime last month I saw the following study on an SSRN's (the Social Science Research Network - where academic working papers go to procreate) Cognitive Science Network newsletter: "Does Psychological Return Matter? Evidence from China Stamp Market"

ABSTRACT: Previous literature has challenged the traditional claim that collectibles have high returns and expensive collectibles tend to return more. However, only financial returns were examined previously while psychological returns was completely overlooked, which may result in underestimation of returns on collectibles. This paper examines the returns from investment in China stamp market and the existence of psychological returns. The empirical results suggest that stamp returns in China stamp market are very dispersive and expensive stamps tend to have a low return. Potential psychological returns generators have negative effects on financial return of stamps, which implies the existence of psychological return.

After fond flashbacks to trolling around moving sales in St. Louis through childhood (dusty stamp collection were a staple of the event), the first few questions in my mind were

Why stamp collecting? Don't behavioral economists at Peking University have something more...interesting to study? Like pornography or blood donations ?
What are those most expensive stamps in China these depressed collectors are staring at?

So towards an answer this article in City Weekend Beijing describes the Yuetan Stamp and Coin Market in Beijing. Pictures above are: the one and two cent Mauritius stamps that sold for $3.8 million each in 1992. The rarest stamp in the world - the Tre Skilling Banco Yellow, first stamp of Sweden and one of a kind and sold for $2.3 million in 1996. The most expensive stamp of China was a 19th Century Qing stamp - "One-Yuan Red Revenue Surcharged Small Issue" (Red, Top). A "1897 Three Cents Red Revenue stamp" going to auction later this month may be the next catch though.

PS. Most predictable/hilarious instantiation of the state in the aforementioned study: "special stamps” (including "less serious topics, such as folklores, flowers, birds, vegetation, architectures as well as paintings of famous artists") have a significantly higher psychological and monetary return than "memorial stamps" (which cover political themes such as "the 50th anniversary of the foundation of the People’s Liberation Army, the victory of the Resistance War against Japanese Invasion and the opening of the 17th National Congress of CPC.")

The Founding of the A Republic (建国大业)

2009-09-07T14:23:00.007-04:00

So much has been written on film and the project of nation building - but the pending release of "The Founding of a Republic," to be released on the 60th anniversary of, (surprise), the founding of the People's Republic, makes the association all too obvious now. [I'm a bit slow on this, I realize.]

Anyhow, see a 2007 article in JumpCut, "Dialect and Modernity in 21st Century Sinophone Cinema," by Sheldon Lu, for a cool excursion on the general topic.

The New York Times story about the production is here, and the trailer is below. The original footage from the announcement of the PRC's founding below as counterpoint.

Key questions: will there be a resurgence of Mao suit chic? And was that soundtrack pulled from one of the Final Fantasy games?

Green Dam Youth Escort Daily Log

2009-09-01T20:35:00.007-04:00

After another period of delinquency, I have decided to update regularly at the cost of topicality. This blog now traces the madness cycling in the contours of East Asia writ large, for an audience writ large.

As broader background, the Green Dam Youth Escort was a content-filtering software mandatorily installed on all computers sold in Mainland China. One is not required to boot it, but the program (according to Colin Maclay at Harvard) does log all pages users access. To hold myself accountable, I now offer the panoply of links that the GDYE captures, though unfortunately it may reveal my more economically lilted day-job:

"Strange Bedfellows" at the FT. Will Manmohan and Hu join hands to stomp the Uighurs?
"Lifestyles of the Chinese Rich" at the WSJ Wealth Report. A recent edition of the Hurun Report, which puts out reports that mirror the Forbes 100, maps out the consumption patterns of the rich in China. What would Roland Barthes say to the fact that: "The Chinese rich have at least three homes, often filled with porcelain and jade collections mixed with modern art. They spend more than $7,000 a year on piano lessons." ? Let it be also noted that this is the Robert Frank who wrote a widely cited paper titled: "Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation?" His short answer is YES.
"Viewpoint: Why China Could Turn Green" at Time. Is China the unrelenting polluter we think she may be? Maybe not... though the author marshals some unconvincing pictures of Tony Blair and Jet Li parading around with solar panels in rural China as evidence. For anyone not yet acquainted with ChinaDialogue (started by the phenomenal woman behind openDemocracy), that's the REAL portal for environmental news. The bilingual site is an experiment in cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, netroots environmental activism in China, and hopefully I'll be able to blog on some of the interesting threads there soon.
"The Changing Roles of the Media in Taiwan's Democratization Process" via Brookings. Ok so I haven't read this report and am trying to force myself to. I came across it when a colleague at work mentioned that Elton John was attacked by the media in Taipei earlier in August, exploding into a furious ball of glitter, fury, and insult.

FIN!

Imagined Battle for the Soul of Cosmopolitanism (Han Han vs. Guo Jingming, Queer Olympiad vs. V Monologues.)

2009-06-28T22:23:00.008-04:00

Below, two fist-fights I would like to see. At stake is likely the future of Chinese cosmopolitanism. Judge as seen fit.

1. Han Han (韩寒)vs. Guo Jingming ( 郭敬明)

Likelihood: Declared arch-rivals, making this somewhat possible.

These two sexy young men are among the best-selling authors of young China, continually wrestling for the top spot on paperback sales rankings (sweaty, sexually repressed tweens are an unstoppable market force worldwide now.) Han Han, semi-professional race-car driver and high school drop out [RIGHT, with razor to face], would unforgivingly wallop the effete and flamboyant plagiarist, Guo Jingming [LEFT, with hand sweeping through bouffant].

Let it be said that I happened up this not-uncommon thought after MJ's death, first embarking on a many-hour'd long journey into the horrors of botched plastic surgery, into the prolific and totally hush nature of it among Asian idols [realizing in horror that Rain had holes cut in his skull to recede his eyeballs to allow for the normal double-eyelid procedure], then to suspected nose jobs among male idols.

On this front, my verdict is that the all-natural Han Han would bust Guo Jingming's plastic nasal bridge. No proof, but will troll BBS forums if it is so requested.

Potential Referee: Tie Ning, presiding ruler of the China Writer's Association.

2. Participants in Shanghai Pride Weeks Queer Olympiad vs. Cast of the Debut of the Vagina Monologues

Likelihood: Elbows get thrown on the Bund all the time, rendering this possible.

Pride Week in Shanghai wrapped up a few weeks ago, posing a funny counter-point to Tiananmen. Xinhua's coverage exposed the beautiful instrumental moral logic of tolerance:

"Yet, if Shanghai cannot even show acceptance, understanding and tolerance for LGBTs, how can it expect it to attract and respect the diverse people coming to visit the Expo and develop in future the working environment for a global financial and shipping center."

As double-counterpoint, the Vagina Monologues debuted in on the 19th of this month, ending a ban (though under the moniker "The V Monologues.") The leading troupe, the Théâtre du Rêve Expérimental , didn't have readily available pictures, so I have placed co-director Wang Chong in place of them. My verdict is that speedos and megaphones overtake the umbrellas and fake orgasms.

Potential Referee: Cui Zi'en, Chinese activist who brought queer issues most outspokenly onto the scene from the 1990s to now.

China Intangible Cultural Heritage - Hairy Monkey, Memento Mori

2009-06-14T11:50:00.009-04:00

From the English language China Daily, a woeful catalogue of the aptly titled "intangible cultural heritage" of China:

1. A Shadow Puppet Family
2. Hairy Monkey
3. Dough Figurine Lang
4. Chinese Gourds
5. Hu Pengfei and his Rabbit God
6. A Clothname Card for China
7. Burning Picture
8. Yang Yingying and her Chinese Pictures
9. The Art of Paper Cutting
10. Hao Shaoxi the Artist

I challenge my five regular readers to use this list as a basis for a table of contents - novel, flash fiction, memoir, etc.

Hairy Monkey (毛猴) to the right and below. These constructions, part of a broader miniatures art culture, are made from cicada extremities and magnolia buds, and often used to make humorous set pieces, tableaus, etc. But I ask - are these figurines "cute and lovely," or among the most terrifying memento moris around?

Also, Politically Charged Sunburn

2009-06-13T16:41:00.000-04:00

Also, via Danwei, via Ai Wei Wei's blog - the artist protests through the double-movement of (skin) exposure and (sunscreen) omission. Delicious. And another pleasant view below. Is he echoing the fullness of maternity in an act of ultimate, subversive empathy? Can the politburo be destroyed through the inversion of the signification of Ai Wei Wei's belly, jiggling nakedly into the eye of the patriach? Evan Osnos' profile of some of his US photos from a few months ago here. (Swoon.)

Branding Differences: Buick (2个男人之间的心跳）

2009-06-08T22:53:00.008-04:00

I don't know much about cars, but as its been crashing, GM has apparently announced that the Buick will be the core part of its new American sales strategy.

Again, I don't know much about cars, but....what? As car blogger Matt Stone (linked to above) comments: "A now-retired GM exec once said that Buick was going to become GM's Lexus. Has that happened? Don't think so."

Buick was for a long while the No. 1 selling car in China, it seems. (Puyi had two Buick's in his garage, according to the report - the model of one of the cars is produced left. Sun Yat Sen and Zhou Enlai too.) See also the rather depressingly titled article: "Take a Glimpse of What Pu Yi Once Cherished."

A popular video below - "HEARTBEATS BETWEEN TWO MEN／(2个男人之间的心跳" - is a Buick ad that begins with two men egging one another on to eat spicy noodles. (?!)Another article on the curious synchretism can be found here at Autotropolis.com

Gaokao Exodus in Wuhan

2009-06-08T22:16:00.003-04:00

Great picture in the English People's Daily today:

CAPTION: "University aspirants walk out of the No 6 High School in Wuhan, Hubei province, after finishing the morning session of their college entrance exam yesterday."

See, of course, ChinaSMACK's photos from the deluge here - much paperwork thrown onto the street. One of my favorite articles on the madness of the entrance exams from Time, last year, here.

(All About Women/女人不坏): Tsui Hark + Sex And the City = ?

2009-06-06T16:10:00.011-04:00

Originally pinned as Tsui Hark's big comeback film, and poised as a follow up to Peking Opera Blues, this film was panned, doing somewhat poorly in the box office despite lots of lead up. (It looks like there is not a US distributor lined up.)

Now Tsui Hark comes from (or more adamant defenders would say defines!) that slapstick tradition of the Hong Kong action film where you often find the juicy combination of femme fatales, eunuchs, cross-dressers and other such gender-bending. [See Stephen Teo's treatment in the Film Cultures Reader, here.]

So, I was a bit shocked when the film was marketed as an analogue to Sex and the City. The Sex and the City film release also released a deluge of somewhat stale commentary on how it fits into the general discourses on gender and feminism. [EG In the Guardian, Alice Wignall asked "Can a Feminist Really Love Sex and the City?" (I more or less fall on the side of finding it an "orgy of consumerism and triviality.")]

So whither the women in this film, particularly given that Peking Opera Blues and The Swordsman II have been read so positively by feminist film scholarship?

In either case, the film ultimately loses any possible emotional content to the explosion of camp - one ultimately senses from viewing (as you do with Wong Kar-Wai) that the script was rewritten everyday....in part because (as with Wong Kar-Wai), it was. Regardless, it is really, really fun to watch, with explosions of color, costume and stylized artifice giving the flat caricatures that run through the film a miasma of character. (Or, again, maybe just camp.) Based on just my limited knowledge, one could place it in an aesthetic category with with Tsai Ming Liang's A Wayward Cloud, in turn situated in earlier films like Tati's Playtime, Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Schraeder's Mishima. But where the gender politics goes is a difficult question, and (as with Wong Kar Wai), the ultimate destination may be the great revolving nebulae of Tsui Hark's ego.

Where are the 21 Most Wanted Students from Tiananmen Now?

2009-06-04T20:56:00.002-04:00

Skipping right back into things today. Had been wondering whether there was a list compiling the 21 "Most Wanted" list after Tiananmen and where they are now, and it turns out there is quite a well done, comprehensive one done by the Human Rights in China group, compiled by one Stacy Mosher. The report - "Tiananmen's Most Wanted - Where are They Now?" - is at times heartening but strangely depressing to read. No 1, Wang Dan (pictured at the protests in 89 below), wrote a piece today that ran in the LA Times and HuffPo, and just finished up a PhD here in Cambridge last year. Most seem to have scattered, with some running "internet companies," at least one in a hedge fund, and two untraceable. Many of them, like Wang, have continued onto a life of activism abroad, and done quite well, particularly considering what they may have faced. Yet, reading it, I got the feeling that I suppose one might have when you go to a high school or college reunion, and nothing seems to fall in place, and you meet those bright young shooting stars that have hit the end of their burning light and fizzle out into mediocrity, and you suddenly see in a flash (cheaper yet, montage) all those wide-eyed days you wasted.

As another note, the NY Times Lens blog surfaced a new picture of Tank Man. The video (below), is mindblowing. I toyed with an entry tracing some of the various ways that Tank Man has gone viral, but the only entertaining and juicy bit I came across was a "Tank Man Tango" (described as "a memorial of dancing bodies") that went on this year in Australia to commemorate events.

As child of the diaspora here, I primarily remember the set of events as a series of panicked faxes. The onset of the fax machine had been crucial in helping organize the protests, and getting a record of what had happened out of the country and out of sight of censors. (By one account, guards had been posted by all publicly available fax machines the morning of June 5.) I've yet to see [though I certainly haven't dug deeply] a good account that captures this dynamic though - there is not so much action, of course, in the clicking, whirring noises of a fax transmission. But to that nerve-wracking noise, many abroad received their handwritten notices sometime twenty years ago, far before the news stories broke, and anti-climactically felt the tide turn.

Shepard Fairey's rendition of a picture by Ed Nachtrieb above.

Trek II: CNSA Logo, and "My Friend is Obviously Chinese"

2009-05-11T22:05:00.004-04:00

So, two connected thoughts before my weird, re-invigorated Trek madness evaporates and I incriminate myself and this nascent blog further.

1. "My Friend is Obviously Chinese"

Episode: The City on the Edge of Forever (Aired April 6, 1967)

Spock: "You were saying you'll have no trouble explaining it..."
Kirk: "My friend is obviously...Chinese. I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain...."
Spock: "Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had as a child...."
Kirk: "The unfortunate accident he had as a child....He caught his head in a mechanical...rice-picker. But fortunately there was an American...missionary living close by who was actually a ...skilled plastic surgeon in civilian life...."

2. Was Spock Obviously Chinese?

After an embarrassing run through my Baidu skills, I was finally able to run searches on Spock [史巴克] and Vulcans [瓦肯] "Live Long and Prosper"? "Only Nixon could go to China"? That Confucian combination of altruistic ethics and repression? Striking of the gong before Pon Farr? Plausibly impossible at the height of the Cold War, yet see The Journal of Cold Warstudies, even, for their treatment.

3. Final exhibit of evidence, the Chinese National Space Administration Logo, as pointed out by this blogger:

My mind is burnt from work - updates on thoughts on Ai Wei Wei and Mei Lan Fang ASAP.

The World of William Shatner: Oriental Sex (Playboy)

2009-05-07T19:21:00.001-04:00

After a terrible hiatus, and in celebration of the forthcoming disaster of the resurrection of the Star Trek franchise (sex'ed up Vulcan grips and all!), here is a tidbit from Playboy 1959 feature "Oriental Sex."

Covered are productions of The World of Suzie Wong - where Shatner headlined as the love interest of that hooker with a heart of gold (left, not looking so fun now) - and the Flower Drum Song (below, Nancy Kwan singing in the 1961 film). The news hook

"Gone, happily, are the days when the showbiz idea of Asian beauty was Myrna Loy with upswept eyebrows as the Daughter of Fu Manchu. Now, the legitimate stages of Broadway and the desert casinos of Las Vegas have become truly oriented to the Orient and are featuring Far-East femininity which is (if we may be allowed to shift gears and invoke the name of another Irish gentleman) the McCoy."

Let it be said: UHURA HAD IT BETTER.

Cigarette Cards and Opera Masks

2009-03-31T22:38:00.007-04:00

Waylaid without excuse (attempts: HBO, escalation of stress at work, Bonfire of the Vanities), but here are some cigarette cards from the New York Public Library's collection. The norm of including one of these tradable card series in cigarette packages was a gimmick thought up be James B. Duke in the late 1870s - I tried to dig around (lazily, albeit) but couldn't figure out the first appearances in China, where (I imagine) they must have represented some of those creeping innovations in modern advertising born from more familiar comic-like art (incursion of an internationally tradable unit of graphic design, or something of the sort.) Zhou Xun traces a cultural history of smoking during the early 20th C. in Smoke (one can never have enough cultural histories of single commodities, except, when one has had enough.)

Doing research for Joyce Chaplin, J. Specht discovered a highlight of American cigarette slogans in the 50's: "Blow on her face, and she'll follow you anywhere."

"Who After Mao" Foreign Affairs 1973

2009-03-29T09:49:00.000-04:00

Also, blast back to the Cold War. From a Foreign Affairs article, "Who After Mao," Mark Gayn, Jan. 1973;

The great hurrahs of the Cultural Revolution, the slogans, the messianic fervor, the public humiliation of the heretics are all gone. A visitor to Peking is impressed by nothing so much as by the return to normalcy, by pragmatism and-if one could imagine it in a Spartan land-a feeling of relaxation. Indeed, one might easily think that there had never been the awesome upheaval of 1966-69 "to change men's souls." Human frailty is once again understood, and there is at least an implied recognition that man does not live by faith alone.

Sino-African "Relations" - The Chafrica Epic Continues

2009-03-27T11:26:00.011-04:00

The string of stories about Chinese investments in Africa that began to perculote out three years ago into the mainstream media continues. Yesterday's story in the NYT, "As Chinese Investment in Africa Drops, Hope Sinks,"describes the usual hawkish investment tactics of Chinese companies waning in the crisis (Breakoff from a major hydroelectric dam project in Guinea was the center of the story.) Photos (which revolve around Jinya Group employees, it looks), here.

Stefan R. Landsberger at Leiden University, The Netherlands, has quite a collection of propaganda available online (most published in a book Chinese Propaganda Posters—From Revolution to Modernization). One page of his site deals particularly with representation of Africans in early PRC materials (posters Landsbergers' scans)- from Landsberger:

"The appearance of colored peoples, and blacks in particular, in Chinese propaganda posters always has been problematic. Before the CCP grasped power, the only attention devoted to colored peoples in Chinese art was of a negative tone. Once the PRC was established, however, this attitude changed. Now that racial problems were seen as class problems, China increasingly discovered similarities between its own traumatic experiences with ‘white imperialism’ and those of other victimized ‘colored’ people in the world. It was time to downplay the traditional and deeply ingrained feelings of superiority. One of the first official steps to gain credibility as a supporter of the oppressed was taken in September 1950, when the Chinese lodged an official protest against the policy of apartheid in South Africa. Africans soon became regular guests in Beijing, where they were entertained at parties and met with the highest state leaders. By the late 1950s, many delegations had passed through Beijing and Zhongnanhai. But the Chinese did not actively spread the gospel of revolution and national liberation yet. They merely positioned themselves as a model that needed to be followed to gain independence."

So thus from the international struggle for rights to the neoliberal imperial clamour.

Related:
Evan Osnos in the New Yorker on Guangzhou's Canaan Market and African merchants -"Nigeriatown" (Audio Slideshow) and "The Promised Land"

And a from "the ground" article translated from the Southern Metropolis Daily: "“Chocolate City” - Africans seek their dreams in China"

And lastly, a story that (I think? Perhaps I was off the beat) was not on the radar of mainstream media during the Olympics as much but was a buzz on the blogosphere - police allegedly told bars to not serve "black people or Mongolians." (Original Shanghaiist piece.)

Later reports contended that "black" may have meant triad members (literally the "black society") - "Mongolians" had few homonyms to fall back on.

Dramatic Capital - 戏剧资本论 - and other incarnations of Das Kapital

2009-03-21T11:43:00.003-04:00

So Danwei had a brief feature about a new (not the first) attempt to bring Das Kapital onto the stage. Snaps of the original article on Sina were translated as such:

"To director He Nian, Das Kapital and the theory of surplus value are serious issues, yet he wants to make them fun to watch. He will set the play in a business. In the first half of the story, the employees discover that their boss is exploiting them and learn of the "surplus theory of value." However, they react differently to the knowledge of their exploitation: some are willing to be exploited by the company, and the tighter they are squeezed, the more they feel they are worth. Others rise in mutiny, but this ruins the company and leaves them out of work. Still others band together and use their collective wisdom to deal with the boss....He Nian said that due to the different points of view held by the boss and the workers, he would borrow the structure of Rashomon to show things repeatedly from different viewpoints."

Above and around are images from the Japanese manga adaptation mentioned too, released just winter of last year - see coverage at Japan Probe, the Times, a blog titled "Hungry for Words", and Rachel Maddow.

How will the elements collide?

Science and Chinese Secularism

2009-03-17T14:21:00.011-04:00

Wanted to just post a few thoughts on the review of the Joseph Needham biography by Eric Hobsbawm in the London Review of Books. [Caution - I've not read Winchester's book or Needham's Science and Civilisation.]

Much of the review focused on the intellectual richness layered around the natural sciences during Needham's time and place - Cambridge, the 1930s. Not merely "A Man Who Loved China," Hobsbawn seems to say, Needham's project revolved around a dialectical materialism that had melded into materialism proper ("organic Marxism"), and a fascination with the seemingly casual monism of Chinese cosmologies. From the article:

The whole organism, [Needham] argued, could not be fully grasped at any one of the lower levels of increasing size and complexity – the molecular, macromolecular, cells, tissues etc – and new modes of behaviour emerged at each level which could not be interpreted adequately in terms of those below or at all, except in their relations. As he wrote in Order and Life, ‘The hierarchy of relations from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and the ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.’ Process, hierarchy and interaction were the key to a reality that could be understood only as a complex whole.
And – though one would not discover this from Winchester’s book – thisview drew him towards the country and civilisation to which he devoted the rest of his life. China was the dialectical home of Yin and Yang, of an ‘extreme disinclination to separate spirit and matter’, as Needham put it, of a philosophy which, it has been well said, saw the cosmos as a vast symphony that composed itself and within which other lesser symphonies took shape.
[...] Needham loved and admired China and the Chinese but, oddly, his heart went out to the imperial past rather than to the revolutionary present to which he was committed and which he defended (though he seems to have become a critic of Mao’s policies in the 1970s, even before the death of the Great Helmsman). He felt at home not only with the Chinese view of nature so lovingly reconstructed in Science and Civilisation in China but with a civilisation based on morality without supernaturalism, a great culture where the doctrine of original sin didn’t prevail and a country where no priesthood had ever dominated.

[Above, an image from a chapter in Needham's book on "Civil Engineering and Nautics."]

This brought to mind a few posts I'd seen on one of the many interesting SSRN blogs, "The Immanent Frame" (which largely is an expanding set of commentary revolving around Charles Taylor's The Secular Age. Disenchanting, ey?). Three posts by Richard Madsen (UCSD, Sociology) on Chinese secularism were very interesting , but I wasn't quite sure what to make of them (all drawn from a forthcoming chapter in a SSRN edited volume.) Examples of statements that I didn't feel like I agreed with but didn't have a basis for objecting to:

Discerning the religious spirit of secular states in Asia
"But the secular form of Asian political institutions often masks a religious spirit. Some examples: Japan has a secular constitution, but many of its government leaders have felt compelled to pray for the spirits of the war dead at the Yasakuni shrine."
Embedded religion in Asia
"However, this dynamism is of a different kind than that found in the United
States, and it cannot be explained in terms of the narrative Taylor uses in the North Atlantic world.
Asian religious developments are often misread by both Western observers and Asian scholars trained in the Western social sciences. When Western scholars have looked for religion in Asian societies, they have often looked for it in the form of private faith. But in most Asian societies, much of religion is neither private nor faith."
Hybrid consciousness or purified religion
"Taiwan’s state has taken a secular turn with democratization, but it still relies on religion to provide public stability and generate international recognition."

My quips probably lie with the analytical categories at play, and their usefulness - measuring degrees of embeddedness also, in some way or another, forces one to gauge the veracity and typology of belief. Embeddedness, in this context, may be a way of expressing what Needham had seen - a tendency not to see "spirit and matter" as radically separated, thus rendering secularism a somewhat sterile concept, a matter of institutions and practices rather than belief. Food for thought, in either case.

Other articles of interest:
"The Public Sphere, Civil Society, and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for Contemporary China Studies", Modern China 19:10 (April, 1993).

"The Spiritual Crisis of China's Intellectuals" in Ezra Vogel and Deborah Davis, ed. The Social Consequences of the Chinese Reforms (Harvard University, 1991)

Also, I had seen that Du Shu magazine (Readings) had, in their June-August 1995 editions, played out a series of essays under the title "Why Not Collectively Build a Spiritual Homeland?" Perhaps of interest.

Little Reunion (小团圆) - Eileen Chang

2009-03-16T22:38:00.003-04:00

Roland Soong's amazing blog EastSouthWestNorth has recently been jammed up due to a considerably large event - the publication of a posthumous, autobiographical manuscript of Eileen Chang's. (Free international shipping of the volume on YesAsia - what YesAsia is, I'm not quite sure. )

According to his recent post, it's already gone through FIVE PRINTINGS in the last month since its release in HK and Taiwan.

I first discovered Soong was the executer of her literary estate when I came across these archives of letters, commentary, and other resources when I was doing dinky research for my dinky project on Ang Lee. It seemed like a funny venue to be discovering these (I wondered why I wasn't stumbling into NTU or HKU's websites), and the rich and luminous commentary was a welcome medium of transfer. A sort of sad and hilarious passage he's recently translated on Lust, Caution (which apparently contains a number of factual mistakes, esp - the story was shipped to Roland Soong's father, not the poor publishing house manager described.)

At the cocktail party for the Taipei premiere of . I saw my old friend Kao Hsin-chiang come in. I asked him what he came. He said that his son Kao Ying-hsien had a role in the film (as the chauffeur and landlord) and therefore he came from Beijing to attend this premiers. I told him that I have a series of essays critical of which United Daily published without my permission. He said that his wife showed him the clippings as soon as he came back. His wife is a devout Christian who read the essays and she "promised to close her eyes and pray whenever there is any sexy scene during the movie."

I said: "You're the one who created the problem." I object to because of the story. It is based upon an Eileen Chang novel published while Kao Hsin-chiang was the chief editor of the China Times supplement section.

Kao Hsin-chiang said: "Chang's story was turned over to me in 1978 by the Hong Kong literary expert Tang Wen-piao. Tang is the initiator of the Eileen Chang craze and edited the published by China Times. When Eileen Chang saw the book in the United States, she was very angry because she felt that Tang had violated her intellectual property rights. So China Times had to stop distribution. In June 1985, the China Times Publishing House general manager called Tang Wen-piao in Taichung and told him that there were 400 more copies of the book in the warehouse. 'If you like, I will rent a van and shipped them over to you; if not, I will destroy them.' Tang said that he wanted them. So the driver brought the books over to the door of his house, and Tang had to carry them to his first-floor apartment by himself. Tang had nasopharyngeal cancer for years already, and the effort caused him to bleed to death. A friend in the Taipei literary circle cried when he learned the news: 'Sigh, Tang Wen-piao, you loved Eileen Chang to death!' In modern literary history, Tang is the only person who died as a result of loving Eileen Chang."

Of those I have read, one of my favorite posts on his Eileen Chang blog is on her bilingualism, with one tracing a discovered English language version of her essay, "A Return to the Frontier", chronicling a trip to Taiwan in 1961, and an expanded Chinese version, and another English story "Stale Mates." A second contains three English to Chinese translations of Thoreau poems, and a Chinese version of an introduction she wrote on Thoreau in a compilation of American poetry translations.

And a last treat I found last night was a flash feature in Tofu Magazine ("mini-tofu no. 6") that plays with Eileen Chang's drawings.

And above, a painting by Chinese artist Liu Ye, of the writer ("Zhang Ailing"), which auctioned off at $34 USD.

Shibboleths of the The Gowned Brotherhood

2009-03-15T23:34:00.007-04:00

Reading an article by Texas A&M Professor Di Wang, "Mysterious Communication: The Secret Language of the Gowned Brotherhood in Nineteenth-Century Sichuan", tracing the specialized code-switching of one anti-Manchu/Qing secret society (published in the June 2008 ed. of Late Imperial China.) BRS had stumbled on to Di Wang's book on street culture in Chengdu, and we became engrossed in his faculty page.

One practice described is clandestine tea-ware arrangement paired with recitation of poetry - the graphic below, from the paper, illustrates a few for the budding revolutionary. A sample exchange may proceed as Wang describes:

If a member went to another lodge to ask for help, he would set up a “single whip formation” (danbian zhen), a teacup facing the mouth of a small teapot. If the host agreed to offer help, he would drink the cup of tea; if not, he would spill the tea on the ground and then pour new tea into the cup, drink it, and recite the poem, “A whipping horseman is running on the horizon, / Who’ll clear all clouds and come here alone. / Changing golden dragon shows fortune / And help our lord mount the throne.”(Wang 92)

William Stanton's The Triad Society or Heaven and Earth Association, full text online via Google Books, describes some of the other interactions you may see between lodge brothers loafing in wait for one another in the teahouse:

“Why is your hair so unkempt?/I was born under a peach tree”; “Why is your hair so ruffled?/I have been to extinguish a fire”; “Why is your hair so wet?/I have not long been born”; “Why has your hair got so many cobwebs in it?/They are not cobwebs, but five-colored silk.”

Euro(trash) Book Marketing

2009-03-12T22:24:00.004-04:00

So BRS had mentioned to me a funny book marketing escapade of Time reporter Alex Perry, who had his book, Falling off the Edge: Travels Through the Dark Heart of Globalization, sell modestly here and fairly well in Europe (where the subheader was changed to "Globalization, World Peace, and Other Lies.) The book cover contrast is pretty amazing, along the same lines, he pointed out: cosmopolitan, safe, in the Thomas Friedman genre here, and dystopic, furious, in the Guy Debord genre there.

Now below note the same phenomenon with Simon Winchester's recent book, in the UK titled Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, and in the US, titled The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. [Cool review in LRB by Eric Hobsbawm! here.]

Almost as amazing as the transformation of the Rock into "a down-on-his-luck cabdriver who inherits the super twins as his magical fare."

Wang Qingsong's "Dormitory"

2009-03-11T19:08:00.002-04:00

The browser cannot contain its fully glory in this form. See Dormitory here lso see his triptych "Past, Present and Future" and China Mansion - all bizarre and somewhat mesmerizing panoramic, staged tableaus.

The movement of these from his earlier work is pretty phenomenal. See Adam and Eve (97?) left:

From a 2004 NYT article, The Venus de China:

"Mr. Wang has turned his own case of cultural whiplash into very large-scale photographs of dazzling beauty, present-day equivalents of history paintings packed with whimsical details and dramatic effects. ''Romantique'' (2003), measuring 4 feet by 21 feet, presents a garden of earthly delights -- orange groves, lush green grass, cobalt-blue sky -- filled with more than 50 live models, all Asian, re-enacting poses found in Western art history. On the far left are Michelangelo's Adam and Eve and the quartet from Manet's ''Déjeuner sur l'Herbe.'' In the center, Botticelli's Venus rises from her clamshell, surrounded by voluptuous bathers and lounging maidens reminiscent of paintings by Ingres, Velásquez, Matisse and Gauguin.

But off on her own at the far right, a nude woman sits in a rickshaw. She is a concoction not found in the Western canon, yet she stares directly at the audience with all the forcefulness of a modern-day Olympia. Her presence adds a cautionary note to this otherwise bucolic scene, a warning that the new China might not be simply a picturesque paradise ripe for exploitation by foreign investors or for total immersion in Western influences."

Book Review Binge This Week

2009-03-10T11:46:00.009-04:00

IN THE NYRB:
The Death and Life of a Great Chinese City, Richard J. Bernstein

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed, by Michael Meyer. Walker, 355 pp., $25.99
Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China, by
Philip P. Pan. Simon and Schuster, 349 pp., $28.00

Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China, by Jen Lin-Liu. Harcourt, 341 pp., $24.00

IN THE NYTIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

'Brothers'

By YU HUA, Reviewed by JESS ROW
A popular Chinese epic about growing up during the Cultural Revolution and chasing love and fortune in the new market economy.
First Chapter Sunday Magazine: A Profile of Yu Hua

'The Vagrants'
By YIYUN LI, Reviewed by PICO IYER
Centered on the aftermath of a young woman’s execution in a desolate part of China in 1979, Yiyun Li’s grieving and unremitting first novel examines the costs and consequences of a society gone mad.
First Chapter

'China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation'

By XINRAN, Reviewed by JOSHUA HAMMER
A Chinese journalist coaxes reminiscences out of Cultural Revolution survivors.

ALSO

Gish Jen, Yu Hua, Ha Jin, and some prominent translators will be talking in Cambridge Thrusday at 5:30, at the Northwest Building, 52 Oxford Street, B103.

The Black Book on Red China, and the Origins of Brainwashing

2009-03-08T21:06:00.004-04:00

Picked up a few books in front of the Cambridge post office today, including a copy of Sade's Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man that turned out to be worth a bit - [my amateur antiquarian book hunting continues!] - but more directly relevant to the blog, there was a review copy of The Black Book on Red China, written in 1958 by Edward Hunter for The Committee of One Million, which protested the admission of China into the UN quite successfully for nearly two decades.

Turns out Edward Hunter [all the while a CIA operative. Manchurian Candidate indeed.] was the first person (as credited in the OED) to introduce the term "brainwashing" into the US. From Wikipedia:

"The term xǐ năo (洗腦, the Chinese term literally translated as "to wash the brain") originally referred to methodologies of coercive persuasion used in the "reconstruction" (改造 gǎi zào) of the so-called feudal (封建 fēng jiàn) thought-patterns of Chinese citizens raised under pre-revolutionary régimes; the term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing/washing the heart" (洗心 xǐ xīn) prior to conducting certain ceremonies or entering certain holy places, and in Chinese, the word "心" xīn also refers to the soul or the mind, contrasting with the brain. The term first came into general use in the United States in the 1950s during the Korean War (1950–1953) to describe those same methods as applied by the Chinese communists to attempt deep and permanent behavioral changes in foreign prisoners, and especially during the Korean War to disrupt the ability of captured United Nations troops to effectively organize and resist their imprisonment. The word brainwashing consequently came into use in the United States of America to explain why, unlike in earlier wars, a relatively high percentage of American GIs defected to the enemy side after becoming prisoners-of-war in Korea."

Will dig around for the article in 'The New Leader" mentioned - and will be trouncing through this book in the coming week. Also, in another post [trying to establish mini-research projects for myself], will blog up some of this moment of UN representation changing hands from the Republic to the People's Republic, with a focus on the trauma to the Isle Formosa.

Reconstruction, the Mississippi, and the Orient

2009-03-06T14:58:00.009-05:00

I: Missouri and China

Came across a fun article - "From the Midwest to the Far East" - tracing early connections between my homestead, Missouri, and the happy Orient. Connections range from exceptionally sad (The "New Shanghai Theater" in Branson) to ambiguously "good" (MO Born Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China.)

Excerpt of interest:

"The originator of the lineage can even be said to be none other than Mark Twain,
the first Show Me State citizen to gain global renown as an author. Though he
never made it to China on his travels, Twain was fascinated by the country, and
he wrote everything from an epistolary tale about a Chinese immigrant
(“Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again”), to a newspaper editorial denouncing the
“unequal treaties” that the West had forced upon the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) in
the mid-1800s, to essays sympathetic to the anti-Christian Boxer insurgents
(since, in his mind, any foes of missionaries couldn't be all bad).

I hadn't been familiar with any of these pieces, and will be digging through soon.

I add one, the newest development - the midwestern hub for Chinese airlines will be, yes, drumroll, St. Louis! Who knows what the long term economic consequences of this corn-field diplomacy will be - for now, I expect the plans to create a veritable Chinatown on Olive will get fast tracked. Also, please imagine Chinese Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, Kit Bond, and Claire McCas kill on the BEIJING-ST.LOUIS Hub Commission.

II. EQUAL TREATIES

Just got this in the mail, will try to go.

"For the Equality of Men---For the Equality of Nations": Anson Burlingame and China's First Embassy to the United States John Schrecker, Professor of History Emeritus, Brandeis University, and Associate in Research, Fairbank CenterIn 1861,
President Lincoln appointed Anson Burlingame, an anti-slavery leader, minister to China. After Burlingame had served in the post forsix years, Beijing selected him as its first ambassador to the Westernpowers. The Burlingame Mission came to America in 1868. The talk willfocus on (1) how the politics of reconstruction determined attitudestoward the mission; (2) Burlingame's presentation of China as a nationthat wished to be treated equally, was modernizing, and could both learn from and teach the West; and (3) the famous Burlingame Treaty with America---the first equal treaty between China and a Western power since the Opium War."

III. TWAIN AGAIN

Twain to Burlingame in 1868 [Citation and more on the friendship here]

"Don't neglect or refuse to keep a gorgeous secretaryship or a high interpretership for me in your great embassy... I would like to go with your embassy as a dignitary of some kind or other... I want to be a mild sort of dignitary... Pray save me a place."

III. FINAL WORD
"....with God's help we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.” -Attributed to Senator Kenneth Wherry (R-Nebraska) 1940, though reliable citations seem yet to be found.

"You commie homo-loving sons of guns"

2009-03-04T17:41:00.007-05:00

So, this is a bit late to count as Oscars coverage, but CCTV's translation of Sean Penn's acceptance rant was quite funny. "You commie homo-loving sons of guns" went through the Chinese Room (take that Searle) to become a "You guys are TOOOO generous!"

One blogger imagines the sad plight of the employee charged with the task of translation:

It’s quite possible that the subtitler didn’t understand what Sean Penn had said and didn’t have time to find out. But supposing he/she did understand. Imagine you’re this poor CCTV employee and your ultimate boss is a senior member of the politburo. You’ve got very little time to decide what to do with a phrase that links communism with “homo-loving.” Your decision may not be appreciated by the leaders. OK, just make something up. [via Black and White Cat]

Left is a picture from a gay pride parade on Qianmen Ave. in Beijing this last Valentines Day, covered in (surprisingly, the WSJ). As far as I've read (which is admittedly very little), public attitudes have been a mingling of passive distaste and active neutrality, with few hate crimes reported, and with sodomy decriminalized in 1997 and homosexuality removed from the rolls of "psychological disorders" in 2001. The media censuring would likely be cited not as active homophobia, but processed merely an attempt to "not encourage" gayness (a tangled cognitive position I've heard echoed by one a many Asian parent too). I haven't read much at all on how gay rights movements are progressing in HK/Taiwan, or even Japan and Korea - is the coalition building at all analogous to US movements? Are they part of a new "left" (though left and right are fairly useless in the Chinese context) harboring purportedly cosmopolitan values, including democratization and visions of ethnic pluralism? (These somewhat asinine thoughts emerged when I was about to title the post something like "Human Rights Incursion/Hilarity", but realized I hadn't a single clue whether the rights movements there situated themselves in a human rights discourse at all.)

In any case, HuffPo and Shanghaiist describe some other censured caesuras in previous Oscar runs. Obviously, previous news bulletin titles have failed to hit the screen, eg: "Homosexual film fest to open in Beijing" (Xinhua covering PKU's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2005)?

Wang Ningde （王宁德）- Interview Part I

2009-02-22T15:54:00.018-05:00

Wang Ningde is one of my favorite contemporary photographers in China - perhaps not surprisingly, he spends most of his time as a photojournalist.

These are from his "Somedays" series, which has gotten play abroad - see the Goedhuis Contemporary on him, and this SF Camerawork piece. Taking a stab at translating sources on him - below is a choppy first take at the first portion of an interview with Chinese blogger Li Nan.

It's quite a bit longer - will upload the rest soon.

Wang Ningde’s Influences: My understanding of photography, from my contempt of it.
Guest: Wang Ningde
Moderator: Li Nan
Piece: Photographic Reproductions of The Mona Lisa

When I asked Wang Ningde “What differences do you sense, visually and in meaning, between the original and the reproductions of the image?” the photographer replied slyly: “ You’re analysis is quite adept - the question you’ve asked is the question I’d like to ask. You’d surely answer this question better than I might.” Of course, I wasn’t about to fall for that answer – what I was interested in, really, was the fact that this particular memory of a budding interest in photography is shared by many. I, for example, immediately think of the many beautiful hanging wall calendars I saw as a child, all reproducing famous works of art from the West. Photography is its own form of expression, yet at the same time, can serve merely as the medium for other forms, and in the process of pervasive transmission, the medium of representation becomes a part of the artwork itself.

Within the lively contemporary art scene, re-performance of classic works is a standard. In choosing to revisit such a masterpiece, Wang Ningde’s sensibilities seem “modernized” as well.

WANG NING DE

To be honest, it’s been something like five years since I read up on/studied any image. So, I can only revisit my childhood. Of course, I have to think about how to make this all sound a bit more exciting – I’ll be speaking of a photographer whose name I don’t even know.

I was born in 1972, and it would have been around the early 80s – I wasn’t even old enough to be in school yet. One afternoon, at my grandmother’s house, I found a stack of magazines in the corner by the wall. It probably was the Liaoning Youth , and on the back cover was a print of the Mona Lisa. The Cultural Revolution hadn’t ended too long ago, and famous art from around the world, particularly Renaissance works, were being printed en masse. My feeling is that monumental changes happened earlier in this arena than any other realm of sentiments or attitudes.

It was this reproduction – this “photograph” – that sparked my deep interest in photography, planting the seeds of art in my young soul, moving me to where I am today. (Laughs).
[con't]

Viral Videos from the Celestial Empire

2009-02-21T16:16:00.008-05:00

1. Pulled from other blogs, but the video that has recently circulated is worth an extra link - highlights from the schoolchildren's patriotic chant 2009, Go China!

Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China
Lead: Did China retreat?
All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!
Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of the Celestial Empire
All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!

(Translation from the China Digital Times)

2. On a similar path of self-destructive dedication, Youku buzz is purportedly doing a whole series on digital love letters. "I love you so much I'll freeze my nipples off" is among the canon. Much of the video cycles back to a desperate entreaty for the wooed to merely turn her cell phone back on. Note the dolphin sculpture he has chosen to place himself in front of (nothing marks an iron-will like frolicking sea mammals).

(Beijing) Restoration Project

2009-02-15T16:09:00.006-05:00

The Studio of Exhausted Diligence, alternately known as the Lodge of Retirement, is due to open sometime this year, and has been the Palace Museum's first real leap into heavy-duty restoration projects. Digging out craftsmen under 40 with the chops to tackle the work has proved to be more trying than originally planned, but with the help of the World Monuments Fund, the finery has returned full force.

Much of the design is credited to Italian Jesuit painter Giuseppe Castiglione, who migrated to China on mission at the age of 27, and came to be affectionately known around the Qianlong gardens as Lang Shining (郎世宁). Rumor has it that some sections of the wisteria-trellised roof were done in the hand of the man himself.

Thus the WMF spouting their symbolic investment in the project, with the vice-president saying in 2002 that "his lodge represents the crystallization of a moment of encounter between East and West.''

While Castiglione's chop-stamped ink-brus h paintings offer one permutation of cultural exchange, the warrior of god below, wielding the inscription of Christ on her shield and the sartorial sense of an oriental water nymph, is certainly another. [Castiglione's Höllensturz - RIGHT] (See renderings of Chang'e, moon goddess, for the comparison, eg.)

(Any hints as to the English title and location of this painting? "Hell Fall" has done little good in google searches so far.)