Westernmost City in China...under the knife

Like all other old towns across "the Other China," the mud brick structures of Kashgar's old town are slated for de-population. Half of the city residents live in the old town, apparently an intimate, safe, comfortable place for the region's non-Han Chinese Uighur Muslims. But as the WSJ reports, 25% of those residents are being "relocated with a Red smile" to other parts of the town in anticipation of demolition.


Opposing attitudes of local residents: fight or play along

"They want us to live like Chinese people but we will never agree," said a 48-year-old woman in a red jacket and brown head scarf, who declined to give her name. "If we move into the government apartments, there are no courtyards and no sun. Women will need to cover up to go outside and we will have to spend money to finish decorating our rooms. This is our land. We have not bought it from the government."

A 60-year-old man with a neat beard and a wool hat expressed his disapproval as he walked to evening prayers along a narrow road that would soon be widened to 20 feet under the government's plan. "If the government gives me money, I will go. Everybody is unhappy about this, but government is government, we can do nothing," he said.

(Image via www.hittheroad.cn)

South Africa Bends Over

"We are shamelessly succumbing to Chinese pressure; I feel deeply distressed and ashamed."
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

UPDATE via NYT 12h later: Peace Conference Canceled

Organizers of a peace conference that was to have been attended by five Nobel Peace Prize winners in Johannesburg said Tuesday that they had canceled the conference after the South African government denied entry to the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader and one of the Nobel laureates.

From WSJ (via IOL) :

Outrage has greeted the government's ban on a visit to South Africa by the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, who was due to take part in a 2010 World Cup-organised peace conference in Johannesburg on Friday. The Dalai Lama was invited to speak at the conference, whose line-up includes the Nobel Peace Prize committee from Norway and Charlize Theron and Morgan Freeman, who plays Mandela in a movie about the Rugby World Cup in 1995.
...

Over the past two years, South Africa has been China's key trade partner in Africa, accounting for 20.8 percent of China's trade with Africa, while Chinese foreign direct investment in South Africa was about $6 billion (R60bn), and South Africa's foreign direct investment in China came to $2bn (R20bn).

Compare these two statements and we may be looking at the beginning of a New World Order.

Linguistic Rebellion: Grass Mud Horse

So here it is, the new "character" created to embody Chinese retalliation against internet censorship. It is not a real character and there are several pronunciation suggestions : jia4 or yu2. This is the new Chinese language or the new Chinese protest?

This is an invented character that encapsulates/represents the "mud grass horse", a mythical internet creature whose pronunciation "cao ni ma" is a homonym for, well, "f*#k your mother." According to Shanghaiist, "The 艹 radical refers to 'grass' (草), 尼 resembles 泥 and both are homophones, while 马 is the character for 'horse'."

We have all been following this because it is a deliberate attempt by Chinese netizens to catch the internet moniters and censors off-guard. This homonymn tactic is pretty clever and portends many changes. Hilarious, as well....

From the New York Times, March 11, 2009:

A YouTube children’s song about the beast has drawn nearly 1.4 million viewers. A grass-mud horse cartoon has logged a quarter million more views. A nature documentary on its habits attracted 180,000 more. Stores are selling grass-mud horse dolls. Chinese intellectuals are writing treatises on the grass-mud horse’s social importance. The story of the grass-mud horse’s struggle against the evil river crab has spread far and wide across the Chinese online community.

...

The grass-mud horse is an example of something that, in China’s authoritarian system, passes as subversive behavior. Conceived as an impish protest against censorship, the foul-named little horse has not merely made government censors look ridiculous, although it has surely done that.

It has also raised real questions about China’s ability to stanch the flow of information over the Internet — a project on which the Chinese government already has expended untold riches, and written countless software algorithms to weed deviant thought from the world’s largest cyber-community.

World Bank Says....China OK for now

From Foreign Policy magazine's blog, Passport

The Good News for China
Elizabeth Dickenson, Wed, 3.18.2009 - 9:03am

The World Bank published its quarterly update on China today, and the news is mixed -- but much better than what most countries are hearing. In summary:

While China's real economy has been hit hard by the global crisis, it is still holding up."

The bank predicts a growth rate of 6.5 percent -- lower than the "magic" 8 percent that mythically promises to prevent social uproar.

But while the news is not all good, why is no one noticing that the silver lining is, well, gold? China's banks are "largely unscathed," the report finds. Says the World Bank country director for China, David Dollar:

China is a relative bright spot in an otherwise gloomy global economy...Shifting China's output from exports to domestic needs helps to provide immediate stimulus while laying the foundation for more sustainable growth in the future.”

Given the brutal global context, sounds like victory for China to me.

And for a direct link to the inside of David Dollar's head, check out his World Bank blog here. It is so cool that the World Bank allows and promotes their senior staff to write blogs and interact with commentators.


A selection of his recent posts:

Reading tea leaves for signs of China's recovery

Discussing China's new growth model: the role of consumption

Mongolia: Stretching your legs as far as the blanket allows

China’s 4th quarter GDP: glass half full?

Considering China's options in weakening global economy

China’s economic year of living dangerously

China’s reform: 'Change the system, open the door'

30 years after China’s reform, students have more opportunities

On exchange rates, think multilaterally

How can China use its foreign reserves to help?

China bloggers all agree...

Richard at Peking Duck:

Everyone seems to agree that Kunming is one of the most enjoyable and relaxed cities in all of China, and I want to say they’re right. Aside from the highway insanity, every minute here has been magical. The food is beyond belief and as cheap as food can be without being free. The people seem unhurried, laid back and eager to help lost foreigners. I could retire here. Today. Lisa says the only place in China even more relaxed is Chengdu; I’ll find out in a few days. A near-perfect trip so far.

Keeping my eye on the food ball

Campbell and Esselstyn suggest ways Obama can change the health debate, and keep our eye on the real causes of health and preventative cures for illness.

The No. 1 cause and cure of America's health care crisis is right under your nose - it's what you put in your mouth.

Unfortunately, the scientific findings on diet and disease are marginalized by the political power of huge, mutually reinforcing commercial interests - meat, dairy, sugar, drugs and surgery.

These industries are desperate to sell a solution that obscures their part in the problem. If they can convince people that the cause of our health crisis has nothing to do with eating unhealthy food, and everything to do with increasing access to drugs and surgery, Americans will spend trillions more on health care without improving their health. That's what happens when you leave science out of public policy.

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of nutritional biochemistry at Cornell University. He is co-author of "The China Study."

The China study is an amazing piece of science that concludes, basically, that the more protein (meat and dairy) we eat, the more likely we are to get all sorts of diseases. It is a direct correlation. Anything over 10% protein in a diet will certainly dramatically increase risks of fatal disease. Learn more at Wiki, but read the actual book if you can.

I am also pleased to announce Green Kunming, fresh organic veggies delivered to my neighborhood, twice weekly. 40rmb/5kg. Direct from my favorite organic farm, Hao Bao.

Recycling: Global Scrap

It seems the global demand for recycled products is shifting...downwards.

Things once bound for export and re-use are heading to landfills.
Prices for recyclables are down. Good for buying. But what if there is no customer?
China seems to be refusing international waste shipments. Chinese companies making products out of recyclables seem to enjoy the price drops, but are having a harder time finding domestic suppliers. Chinese retail recyclers are seeing their deposit rates fall as people elect to repair and patch broken items once bound for the recyclers.

ANECDOTE: Yesterday, I went to visit the woman (and her small child) who perch outside my complex collecting recycling. This is the woman who had no idea how to recycle old clothes. She knew exactly what to do with the overflowing bag of Qing Dao beer bottles.

10 Bottles.
Original price each (with beer): 4rmb
Cost recovery per bottle: .2rmb
Actual beer cost: 3.8rmb
Actual total cost recovery: 2rmb (used for 2 one-way bus fares)


I think I had a dream last night about our throw-away society.

I thought about the average amount of stuff we have as compared to my grandma's generation that grew up during the Depression. My grandma had ONE DRESS that she wore for 20 years. My grandma saved every scrap of fabric and spread every last bit of butter off the wrapping. She made food at home rather than go out.

On the New Hard Times: A NYT video of a13 yo Oak Park, IL kid interviewing his 78 yo grandma, reflecting on the Depression, then and now.

I blame Old Navy. Over the last 10 years, Americans (and indeed citizens of the world) have come to expect their clothes to last for a year. They buy dozens of cheaply produced t-shirts knowing they are quickly bound for the trash heap as soon as the Fashion changes or the bad quality starts to show. At the second hand market here in Kunming, I found vintage clothes, but nothing truly well-preserved. The days of good quality for the masses might be gone.



But the same thing is happening in electronics. The race to get the best fanciest newest fangled devices is making quite a global mess, spreading the "e-waste" to distant corners of the world to be disassembled by desperate people looking to make some cash at the expense of their health.

From Time Magazine:

A lot of exported e-waste ends up in Guiyu, China, a recycling hub where peasants heat circuit boards over coal fires to recover lead, while others use acid to burn off bits of gold. According to reports from nearby Shantou University, Guiyu has the highest level of cancer-causing dioxins in the world and elevated rates of miscarriages. "You see women sitting by the fireplace burning laptop adapters, with rivers of ash pouring out of houses," says Jim Puckett, founder of Basel Action Network (BAN), an e-waste watchdog. "We're dumping on the rest of the world."

A 13-photo slideshow of Guiyu, a poisoned village working for that money, as seen above.

The city of Guiyu is home to 5,500 businesses devoted to processing discarded electronics, known as e-waste. According to local websites, the region dismantles 1.5 million pounds of junked computers, cell phones and other devices a year.

Guiyu — and places like it in India and Africa — fluorish because it is far cheaper to break down e-waste there than it is in the developing world, where companies must follow strict guidelines.

According to Guiyu's own website, the e-waste business generates $75 million a year for the town.

If the above figures are to be trusted, each family averages over $13,000 US dollars a year for their part in recycling our e-waste. I wonder... If there was a health care system that was responsive to the massive environmental degradation and human health consequences, would the benefits still outweigh the costs? Would there be a role for government safety regulation? Or are we destined to have a permenment eco-underclass of people destined to remain well-paid, but suffer sickness and early death? Are we satisfied now with our new Blackberry?

Speaking of gross, excess consumption...!


Cans Seurat, 2007
60x92"

Depicts 106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds.

I recently came across the work of Chris Jordan. His photographs depict volumes of things: incarcerated prisoners in the US, jet trails, oil barrels... He is trying to put massive quantities in visual scale. This one is particularly clever, but they are all impressive and worth looking at. Each photo has detail pictures so you can see how insane these numbers look when given a physical presence.

Bamboo Behind the Bamboo Curtain

This is a joke, an inside joke...with myself.
I was cleaning the house, moving the heavy glass vase with thick bamboo roots into my bedroom. As the sun set, the curtain was drawn...and this concept popped into my head.

The Bamboo Curtain was a term I first encountered in my studies of East Asia back in college.

According to Wikipedia:

The Bamboo Curtain was a euphemism for the east Asian version of the Iron Curtain. As a physical boundary, it was marked by the borders around the Communist states of East Asia, in particular those of the People's Republic of China that were shared with non-Communist nations, during the Cold War. As such, this term did not include the Chinese border with the eastern Soviet Union, North Korea, or Mongolia.
Today, the term is more often used to refer to the tightly-guarded borders of Burma.

The term came back to full force with Robert Kaplan's article for the Atlantic magazine in September 2008.

Lifting the Bamboo Curtain
Robert Kaplan in the Atlantic

As China and India vie for power and influence, Burma has become a strategic battleground. Four Americans with deep ties to this fractured, resource-rich country illuminate its current troubles, and what the U.S. should do to shape its future.

Here are some other things on my Burma Reading List:

Drowning: Can the Burmese People Save Themselves?

George Packer in the New Yorker

A Political Prisoner:

Hnin Se is tall and slender, with black hair flowing down her back; she cuts it short during times of crisis. She maintains the outward calm that is typical of the Burmese, but once, when I asked how the rule of the generals could ever end, she hissed, “Kill them all.” She grew up in a fishing village in the Irrawaddy Delta. Her mother was a teacher and her father owned an ice factory; he took to drink and left the family, but not before encouraging his daughter’s artistic temperament. By the age of six, Hnin Se had read “Gone with the Wind” in Burmese. At fourteen, she was sent to Rangoon to continue her education, and for years she picked up dried fish and rice sent by her mother to the Rangoon jetty and sold them in Aung San Market to support the family. She was in her third year at Rangoon University, and just beginning to write fiction, when the events of August, 1988, took place. She saw police driving students into Inya Lake—where many drowned—and beating and shooting others who tried to escape. “As a nineteen-year-old girl, I might not have any knowledge about democracy,” she said, “but I had the sense to distinguish right from wrong.” In 1991, she distributed poems protesting the government’s refusal to let Aung San Suu Kyi, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize, travel to Oslo. Hnin Se was arrested and sent to Insein. When she first laid eyes on the prison, she smiled. “I was already a writer, and I thought this would be a new experience,” she said.

A Monastery:

On a hazy Sunday morning in February, at the beginning of the hot season, we drove out of Rangoon, across the wide, sluggish Hlaing River, into a marshy landscape dotted with low-slung industrial buildings. Just off the highway, down a dirt road lined with banana trees and palm groves, was a village of five hundred families. Next to a muddy lily pond stood a monastery—two stories, with a rusted metal pagoda-style roof and walls of reclaimed boards and woven thatch. In these cramped quarters, monks ran a school for three hundred students, including sixty orphans. Hnin Se and four friends from her book club were helping to support the school, and had raised about a thousand dollars.
....

A visitor arrived: a matronly woman from Rangoon with oversized glasses had come to pray, as she did every Sunday. Seeing us, she bowed obsequiously. The abbot told me that she was a member of the regime’s civilian mass movement, and that she was sent to keep an eye on him.

James Fallow's running blog on Burma...

My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.

A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in "lucky" denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.

...and vintage Atlantic, Burma: A Special Supplement , 22 articles, stories and essays about Burmese Entertainment, Contemporary Burmese Art, and the Concept of Neutralism, among others. As they self-describe, it is "a 70-page supplement on Burma—covering arts, culture, politics, and more—written mostly by Burmese and published by The Atlantic in 1958."

...and a quick (well-reported) doom and gloom, out on the streets piece from the Washington Post with no by-line from August 2008.

I try to keep up on Burma, since it is right next door to Yunnan. Perhaps these articles will satisfy some curiosities since it seems my next Southeast Asia border run will not take me southwestward towards the tropical mountain border to Burma.

Need a nurse in Taiwan?

There is a clinic in Taiwan that has been fined for using nude portraits of the nurses to attract customers. I bet it worked.


(via artbaba)

The Asian in American Art

Franz Klein (1910-62): Post-War abstractions
Mary Cassatt (1844-1926): Japanese composition and printing techniques
Ad Reinhardt (1913-67): Estatic minimalism seeking trancendence through abstraction


The Guggenheim Museum in New York City has a fascinating exhibit on display Jan30-Apr19, 2009 called The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989.

This exhibition traces how Asian art, literature, and philosophy were transmitted and transformed within American cultural and intellectual currents, influencing the articulation of new visual and conceptual languages.

I happened upon an advertisement for this exhibit reading New York Magazine, a guilty pleasure for sure. When the website loaded, I was not impressed with the formatting in particular and the text blocks were squeezed on the left side. After reading the narrative, I craved pictures, slideshows, videos of the things they were sharing. I wanted to SEE Ezra Pound's manuscript of his translations of Chinese poet, Li Bai, written despite his total inability to read or speak Chinese. I enjoyed the Martha Graham video of her collaboration with Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi in the work, Frontier. I was happy to see Georgia O'Keefe and Arthur Dove who played with the concept of landscape, fuseing the pastoral or natural with the patterns of the mind.

The artists of Asia have spiritually-realized form rather than aesthetically invented or limited form, and from them I have learned that art and anture are Man's environment within which we can detect the essence of man's Being and Purpose, and from which we can draw clues to guide our journey from partial consciousness to full consciousness. -- Morris Graves

Then, scanning my friend Kat's company newsletter, RedBox News, I came across a review of the exhibit by Brooklyn-based author Ellen Pearlman. She does a great job tracing the outlines of the exhibit.

Some catchy lines:

...The Third Mind proposes a new art-historical construct––one that challenges the widely accepted view that American modern art developed simply as a dialogue with Europe...

...To truly understand China’s role requires a separate show focusing on the origins of Chinese influence in Japanese art and tracing it all the way to up through modern times...

Osnos to Vietnam

I am on a visa that requires me to leave and re-enter the country every 90 days. Yunnan borders Laos, Burma, Vietnam.... so after a 12h bus ride, I could theoretically wake up in Norther Vietnam, say, tomorrow. As I currently scheme to make a living, I am considering another trip to Sapa across the border in March or April.

That is why it was so exciting to see Osnos' posts about his trip to Vietnam last week. He noticed a swiftly-implemented helmet law that is decreasing head injuries by 30%. (China, take note!) He noticed that Vietnamese translators had granddaughters who craved the new Miley Cyrus biography and the Vampire series books in English. And he noticed that China has claimed natural domination in the region for thousands of years, thus diminishing the reveberations of the "American War" that are so quickly fading into touristic memory.

I need to get back to Vietnam. But first, I want to study my Google Earth to remind myself that vast metal detritus of American ordinance still scars the Vietnamese countryside. I want to review that whole French War, American War, Chinese War historical progression. I wonder how Vietnamese industry and trade and tourism are being affected by the economic slowdown to the North.


Two faces of Sapa.
So many little girls... So many faces...

Dali, a quick trip

I am always amazed that Dali continues to remodel, renovate and reconstruct itself. I am amazed that the construction industry and the government continue to find new places in need of total overhaul. First in 1999, it was the reconstruction of the "ancient city wall." I remember the main drag being retrofitted with Parisian style lampposts a while back. I remember the huge marble arch erected over Foreigner Street commemorating the worldwide reputation of Dali last year.

Now the government has turned its gaze to, perhaps, the most famous street in Dali. The "Third Moon Street" is home to the ancient (and aptly-named) Third Moon Festival. For centuries, people from far and wide have come to Dali to race horses and trade goods for two weeks during the third lunar month. It is also well known to tourists, local officials and surprised evening strollers as the Red Light District. Should that be in capital letters? In Dali, perhaps this cracked, dusty hill boulevard of sex work and off-key karaoke should remain in lowercase. Soon, the revelers and service staff will be strolling on new pavement to the burbling sounds of new sidewalk waterways.




As I was leaving my house on the mountainside, I have to cross a new 8 lane highway. A few years ago, this was a 2-way dirt road lovingly called 'the old road.' Today, this is quickly becoming the swift road with few lights that cuts the time from the new city of XiaGuan to the old town of Dali to 20 minutes. In many ways, this road is awesome. I have to cross this road to get into town. I know it can be dangerous trying to cross in the best of times, and with adverse conditions such as scalding sand whipping down the mountain, it can be quite trying.

I was not surprised to see this funeral parade crossing skittering to the center island. They were wearing white head scarves, blowing crude trumpets and carrying the tent-like coffin. They were circling the body, clapping and chanting. I could not help but wonder: "Is this the way old people in Dali are dying? or Is this the way young people are dying in Dali?"

Highway safety, people. I hear it all the time: Country bumpkins have no culture. They have no idea how to follow traffic regulations. Whine, whine, whine. Yes, they are new to big fancy highways. Especially when those highways cut through their old pedestrian-friendly towns, their traditional market trekking patterns and their sacred ancestral lands. I have heard people whisper about ghosts of vehicular homicide victims stalking Dali, unsettled by their method of demise. Instead of griping about how people do not know how to cross the street, maybe there is a way to encourage safe crossing by, oh I don't know, traffic lights, cross walk enforcement, signs, warning bells, creating detours on market days.... I know there are ways to keep people from dying while walking across an 8 lane highway. Combined with increased car ownership and growing road rage, pedestrian health in should remain a priority in an ever-complicating China.



This is the beautiful Blue Mountains. They are not blue, usually green with trees or grey with rain and snow. This is the March 1st snow cover atop the 4000m peaks. I love these mountains for their height, their depth, and their simple unfolding magnificence.