The preacher talked to me and he smiled / Said, come and walk with me, come and walk one more mile

This is an interesting, and I think fairly perceptive overview of China's possible media future, from journalist and media observer Charles Mabbett:

When China’s most popular blogger Han Han had his recent post about a spate of violent attacks in Chinese schools taken down, it wasn’t the first time that he had courted controversy and it is unlikely to be the last.

The post entitled “Children, you’re depressing grandpa” was critical of a media ban on reporting the latest attack in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, at a time when the Shanghai World Expo was due to get underway. Evidently, Sina.com, the website that hosts many of China’s most popular blogs determined it was too sensitive to keep online.

Han Han represents a relatively recent phenomenon in China, one that commands millions of readers and is highly influential as both social commentary and barometer of public sentiment. As of April 2010, his blog had attracted 350 million hits, making him by far and away, the king of China’s blogosphere.

[From Bloggers and Chinese Twitter, China’s new media wave | Asia New Zealand Foundation]

The underlying fact that should never be ignored is that China is only 30 years into the post Mao era, and the massive social momentum that Charles saw in-country is hard to describe unless you see it first hand. And never underestimate the Chinese pragmatism.

This fairly radical revision of the boundaries of twitter, which I didn't know, fascinates:

While Chinese Twitter can accommodate up to 400 characters, it is more common for users to post messages up to about 120 characters. Compared with English, Chinese characters allows between two to eight times more information to be packed into the same number of characters.

Which makes it vastly more powerful as a social networking and news dispersal medium. Twitter has played a huge part in the bloody political head-butting that hopefully reached some resolution yesterday here, and I'm keen to find out the Thai script limitations.

Update: Shorty after I posted this, I found this post on the Bangkok protests and the rise of Moblogging:

About the same time as my first tweet, I also posted my first "moblog". This is an abbreviation of "mobile blogging", which, as the name suggests, is blogging from your mobile phone. This was the most exciting development for me. For the first time I was able to post blogs while I was still on location and my thoughts were still fresh. If you visit www.mythailandblog.com you will be able to see some examples of my moblogs. The main difference between the blogs here at www.thai-blogs.com and those moblogs are obviously the number of words. However, if you compare my earlier moblogs to the ones I do these days, you can see that I am now typing longer moblogs on my iPhone. Sometimes, I post about the same event on both blogs, but the moblog is definitely more laid back and relaxed and has more of my daily life that I don't write about at www.thai-blogs.com. Even if the events are the same, the pictures are always different. This is because I use my big DSLR for this blog and my iPhone camera for the moblog. As I carry my iPhone around with me all the time, unlike the heavy DSLR, you will find the I write moblogs more frequently. And I also now find it easier to process pictures and video in my iPhone and then use a Word Press application to write my moblog. These are then uploaded up onto the Internet. Whenever possible, I try to post while I am still at the event.

[From Paknam Web: An iPhone, Twitter and the Red Shirt Rally - (Thailand Travel, Culture, Food and Life)]

Although I didn't for a moment feel threatened going about my daily business in the city, and I think the same goes for just about every expat here, there being absolutely no outflow of resident non-Thai and an ongoing daily arrival of 20,000 tourists (down from the normal 30,000 a day) which is still an incredible number, the live twitter stream on google, which in my office I kept open on my second monitor, was pretty much the live news stream I needed to carry on in a fairly normal way.

The world, how we approach it and how we draw information from it has changed just that little bit more in the past few weeks.

Feel like being a monkey man one more time…

Happy New Year, from the cusp.

Any chance we could use this year to save the last of these wonderful cats, so that these ones, made of flowers in Hong Kong this week, are not all we have left when the next Year of the Tiger comes around?

They’re smiling in your face / the backstabbers…

Technorati Tags: China,opium

So the Chinese have executed a Briton for perhaps smuggling opiates into China. I think it’s thoroughly appalling, but without wanting to get into the pros and cons of the death penalty (which, as I’m sure any reader of this blog would likely be aware of, I’m, without reservation, opposed to), one can’t but wince at the British hypocrisy.

It’s hard not to recall that much of the wealth of The British Empire in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century came from stepping over the bodies of countless Chinese with who they fought several wars to ensure were addicted to opium supplied and controlled by Great Britain. The armies, the great banks of the empire, the homes and finery of upper-class Britain and much more, were funded in a large part by the imperial importation of noxious drugs into China:

The first Opium War was followed by a second in 1856-60. The British were joined by the French as junior partners, the French having appointed themselves the ``protectors'' of China's Catholics. The combined British and French forces looted and destroyed the Emperor's Summer Palace.

In the treaty ending the second Opium War, the Chinese were forced to accept the legalization of opium. With Chinese resistance broken, large scale opium production in China was begun, supposedly to stop the drain on silver caused by opium imports. Both imports and domestic production soared, with imports reaching 105,508 chests by 1880. It is conservatively estimated, that China's opium-addicts numbered between 30 and 40 million, at that time.

Parallel to this, the British gained a stranglehold on the Chinese economy and government finances. In 1853, the British were able to grab control of Chinese Customs in Shanghai, because of the Taiping revolt. Twenty years later, all Chinese customs were managed by the British, with all Customs Houses of China within reach of British shells. For 40 years after 1860, Britain dominated China's commerce. By 1895, China's trade with Britain's represented two-thirds of all China trade, which then totalled 53.2 million pounds sterling.

Opium remained at the head of the list, averaging 10 million pounds sterling a year during the 1880's. By 1900, a great part of government revenues went to pay indemnities, imposed on China by various ``peace'' treaties.

Opium went hand-in-hand with foreign conquest and revolution. China was rapidly broken apart by the centrifugal forces introduced by the effects of British looting.

And, yes, ancient history and all, but the roots of the scourge that still afflicts China (and much of the world) lies in the trade.

Indeed, when the Communists came to power in China, 10% of the population were said to be opium addicts, and similar figures existed in Hong Kong, Singapore and much of the global Chinese community much, much later.

I’m old enough to remember the opium dens infamous in Auckland’s Grey’s Ave and Hobson Street which lived into the ‘70s, and sat and listened to the notorious old Herne Bay madam, Flora, telling us horrific stories of death and pain in the immigrant Chinese community in the later part of that decade.

None of which excuses the Chinese, or justifies what they’ve just done, but it perhaps needs to be said.

In Peking there is a son / who is much greater than you want to be

Terril Jones had only shown the photograph to friends.

While working as a reporter in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, he shot many photographs and recorded several hours of video. It wasn’t until weeks afterwards, when he had returned to Japan, that he discovered the magnitude of what he had captured — an iconic moment in history from an entirely unique angle.

His version of the tank man has never been published until now.

[From Behind the Scenes: A New Angle on History - Lens Blog - NYTimes.com]

Like a Glittering prize / Always on a clear day

Warning: Shanghai virgin alert.......

The train from Shanghai’s airport to the city was very fast.

In fact, they claim the Maglev train is the fastest in the world and since you hit speeds of 430 km/h it’s hard not to find that rather believable. Yep, it’s an impressive tube of high tech and the level of that tech is nailed when one passes the train going the other way at a joint 860km/h..faster than most jets.

The whole world shudders when that happens.

That said, the bits at each end are a disaster. To get on the train you trudge about a  kilometre through poorly signposted tunnels, with virtually no trolleys in sight (we found one eventually, with a bumpy wheel), to buy your tickets ($6 each...can’t really grumble about that) and are then faced with a grey, non air-conditioned, standing room only waiting room. When the train is ready to board you then battle, now trolley-less, through a massed rush to a single narrow escalator (no lifts a-la Hong Kong, Singapore or KL) and, once down, face an unbending conductor telling you loudly and very firmly in either shrill Shanghainese or Mandarin (don’t expect me to know which) which door to enter (the one farthest away naturally).

At the other end you are dumped in an industrial wasteland / building site some distance from the city centre, face another narrow escalator, a walk across a few  roads to a taxi rank and then 45 minutes in relentless traffic, admittedly over some of the more astounding bridges I’ve ever seen, to your hotel.

And that really sums up China, I guess.

Shanghai is astounding. There is no other word for it...well maybe mindblowing. Either way I’ve seen nothing like it and I’ve been to many of the world’s larger cities. There is nothing quite quite the same as sitting at M on the Bund, where Brigid took me for my birthday brunch, high up amongst a row of large early 20^th century commercial buildings, in which, clearly, no expense was spared in design or construction by the financial institutions of the occupying powers in the years before it all came tumbling down, now topped by large Chinese flags, looking across the Huangpu River, with its boats with massive electronic billboards to the futurism of Pudong’s skyscape. It’s a city of not just massive contradictions but overwhelming visual drama.

There are, they say, 1042 high rise buildings, with new ones every week.

 

We were lucky in Shanghai, we had the guiding hand of our old friends, Philip Kelly and Tracey Lee, who’ve been living there for some months, to lead us. It doesn’t matter how many guide books one owns, local knowledge is, as always, absolutely everything.

So we found ourselves, on my birthday evening (Philip having given me, as a gift, a magnificent print of a photo he’d taken of Detroit meister, Paul Randolph..Brigid gave me a MacBook Pro 17” but that’s another post)  at an astoundingly good  Hunanese restaurant, Lost Heaven, where we drank New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc whilst eating, and at pretty good prices (Shanghai, like Hong Kong, was not by Western standards expensive, even at the higher end) and from there to Constellation, a long narrow bar with a killer cocktail list that could easily have slipped out of that golden late night era that was Auckland’s High Street circa 1995 (you had to be there I guess).

The next night we were taken to LAN, a four story bar / restaurant complex designed and themed by Patrick Gilles and Dorothée Boissier in a rather dramatic way, from the Jellyfish Tank to the infinity long room. The place was surprisingly empty which suited us and we were taken on a guided tour of the whole place and wandered from theme to theme, and ate (modern pan Asian ..but isn’t everything) for probably a quarter of what it would’ve cost us in anything approaching the place in Australasia.

My earlier experiences of China were in the south..in Guangdong, and the psyche seems quite different further north. Whilst in Guangzhou I found the populace as a whole extremely gracious, helpful and generous. Shanghai is different though. There we found the pushiness and rudeness that we’d been warned about earlier but not encountered. People pushed, no threw, you out of the way, they yelled at you in what I can only assume is the legendary local dialect, and the driving....in particular the taxis, who seemed unable to see a red light no matter whether it had been red for one minute or three and simply careered through pedestrian crossings with horn blaring, and people jumping in every direction.

A bit like Bali really, except here every does it. And at least in China there seemed to be some rules and some people trying to enforce them.

And we saw fights...lots of them...the most dramatic being two guys in a pet market fighting over something which ended with one throwing turtles at the other! Not for the faint hearted. Clearly the Shanghainese are a little more highly strung than their southern compatriots.

The river divides the city into two clear halves. There were several ways to cross the river..taxi of course, the ferries, and foot and bus. But we chose the most exciting. This was my birthday after all.

Just about every guide to Shanghai recommends the train under the river. Why do  they recommend it? Is it the thrill, is it a glass viewing tunnel (which would give one a view of brown sludge judging by the river), is it a tech blast?

No, none of those..the recommendations all come because it is so unbelievably awful it can’t be missed. So we had to do it.

In Shanghai terms it was quite pricey..about US$4 a head, but after wandering around trying to find the booth, we handed over the dosh and got our tickets. They included a complimentary pass to the Shanghai Museum of Sex!

And down we went, we three and three happy German backpackers, until we came across the train, except it wasn’t really a train it was a wee capsule and in we all went and off we went through a tunnel lit with what locked like a neon lighting show left over from some early 20^th Century future tech show. It was, as they promised, so truly awful it needed to be seen. And then, just to emphasis that point, two blow up rubber ghosts popped up and everyone began to laugh.

  And it was over. We decided to give the Sex Museum a raincheck and we walked out into the sunlight and the base of the Pearl Tower, with busloads of Chinese tourists swarming around, touts offering to take your photo (folks from the villages, bussing in for the Chinese National Day holiday, likely don’t always have digital cameras for those shots to take back to the village) and a bunch of milling Australians looking for the Bund.

We wanted to go up the Jin Mao Tower, the 5^th highest building in the world, partially so we could look at World Financial Center, recently opened and the 2^nd tallest in the world, partially because the other had huge queues and partially because the deco-ish geometric stainless steel structure really appealed.

 Wondering into the wonderfully named Superbrands Mall, a faceless relic of a Stalinistic past, like the No.1 Department Store across the river in Nanjing Lu, we worked out, as we were buffeted by the holiday crowds, that both the map and the eye showed a short walk to the Jin Mao and headed off.

It wasn’t to be. We walked across the road and were quickly diverted into a loop into the other direction. We walked and followed the signs which said in several languages that we were going the right way despite our eyes telling us we were walking away. At issue were vey large road works which seemingly are part of the massive (and I mean absolutely massive) building projects that are redefining central Shanghai, partially for the Expo 2010, and partially just because that’s the way it is: In China they build and do so in a way we can’t comprehend in the rest of the world.

So we walked..we walked further and further away, through the spotless, groomed parks that fill the city, across multi-laned roads, dodging taxis accelerating through red lights into scattering pedestrians, until eventually we swerved back and, having watched a fight between a courier on his electric tricycle and a office person in his pressed white shirt, we got to the base of the 5^th tallest building in the world. The sign on the side said ‘no climbing’ so we decided not to and went it.

One of the things I like most about very tall buildings, and I’ve done a few, is the speed of the lifts. The lamented WTC in NY had, until now, the fastest I’ve experienced but the Jin Mao, from the basement (why is it that lifts to the top of tall buildings often leave from the basement?), is like a rocket. Seeing that this was the week that China had put another man in space, it seemed somehow appropriate. I wonder if the thought occurred to the two lift attendant girls who were busy checking their hair and makeup in the stainless steel walls on the way up? No, I guess not.

The view of course was incredible and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. I bought a badge I think (I like a souvenir) but lost it. It said something about Pandas but there were none there, that I’m sure of.

We decided to get a taxi back and headed across to the French Concession to eat more. The day before Isabella and I had walked main drag in the Concession..looking at the Hugo Boss and Gucci shops before wandering south. I had an urge to visit the famous site of the first Congress of The Chinese Communist Party which was a block or two in that direction. Brigid had gone fabric scouting and I needed to see this, at least so I felt an affinity with my Shanghai Tang red stared baseball cap I’d bought a few days earlier and because, well, I was in China, so you do these things.

Bella and I wandered past antique stores, Starbucks, several rather pricey looking design stores with Stark and Herman Miller chairs, a Porsche showroom and a cluster of expensive cafes and restaurants until we came to it. It was free to enter so we went it, with me trying, under my breath, to explain to Bella what this placed was about. It was impressive, fusing technology with understated design and it did some justice to a place, regardless of your politics, where one of the most important political parties of our time fused it’s first manifesto. We walked through until we came to a life-size diorama of the congress, with it’s dozen or so participants. Standing at the table was a young man. Isabella asked who that was..Mao Zedong I said. Wasn’t he an evil monster Bella asked very loudly?

I shut her down rather quickly as several stern young men looked angrily in our direction. Were we headed for re-education or a lifetime of floor scrubbing in some western new town.

I rushed her downstairs where the looks seemed to have abated somewhat and I bought a souvenir..a Mao keyring and we walked outside where I noticed an Amway presentation in the park over the way. It seemed oddly appropriate as was the fact the CCP’s congress happened in a precinct with some of China’s most desirable property now and we sat down in a Coffee Bean cafe new door to ponder these things and the fact that Mao no longer appears in any High School text books in the city.

And that’s Shanghai I think. A vast vision of the future overwhelmed with it’s long past history but not quite sure how to treat it’s more recent past. Or at least as best as I  could figure out in a week there.

As in Guangzhou I had no problem accessing most web sites. I read Wikipedia’s Tiananmen pages and watched video of both that and Tibetan protests. My friend Philip said that in his exclusively, aside from Tracey and he, Chinese residential compound, the free internet periodically came up with a blocked page, but if one waited a minute or two and tried again it usually came up. Any censorship seemed very half hearted. I, on the also free, very fast broadband in the serviced apartments we were in, was able to access everything aside from Huffington, who notoriously pissed off the Chinese some time back. So is the blocking of websites overstated? I can’t say that, but on both my visits to China, in two regions, I had no real problem in or out of hotels.

What else? Well I loved the cynical twists on revolutionary art and communist icons which we saw in the hip young designer shops in the back alleys of the French Concession...Mao with first generation gameboys and the like. And I wish I’d been able to comprehend some of the literature in the vast Chinese language bookshops..although I could look at the graphics books with some awe. As I did at the high end DVD copy shops with it’s box sets of art-house directors (I bought a box of 43 Hitchcock movies, beautifully packaged for around US$30, and collections of classic music videos for a buck a disc)

Then there is the long neon Vegas like overstatement of the designer mall strip that is Nanjing Lu, complete with hustlers offering you watches, strange roller-skating devices, bags and them scuttling as a cop arrived.

And even a week wasn’t close to enough...on the last day we discovered the missing modern art museum...missing because every day we’d run out of time and missed getting there. So, with Beijing and the north beckoning too I think Shanghai will be a destination I’ll need get to again, hopefully rather sooner than later.

The never-ending joys of being in Asia....

Technorati Tags: China,Shanghai

c'mon little butterfly / try and fly

One last word on China....from The Bulletin:

The Australian may be immoral, and very often is, but the Chinaman must be....
He has no alternative, for the utter lack of ennobling purpose and elevating ideal confines his every thought to the pleasures of his body. ...

from September 1, 1886.

Looking at this page and the comments below the main piece, in 130 years not much has changed.....

Technorati Tags: China

There's a thousand variations / every witness has a smile

 

China is a huge and seductive practical joke which defeated the westerners who tried to modernise it, the Japanese who tried to conquer it, the Americans who tried to democratise and unify it…and Chiang and Mao John Paton Davies

It was a long slow trek from Hong Kong to Denpasar…some 12 hours including a four hour stop-over in Brunei which we filled with a gratis tour of the city. Brunei seems  pleasant enough but less than exciting.

Our tour guide, after telling us that there is absolutely no alcohol there, smilingly let slip that many young people slip across the border on a Saturday night for a quick lager. He also showed us the massive Sultan’s place and gorgeous mosque as well as the brand new parliament building which seems to serve no purpose beyond window dressing given as the Sultan is one of the world’s last remaining absolute monarchs in this rather dull, oil rich state.

 

 

And I thought of the double standards in the west..how we tolerate political ugliness in Saudi Arabia but not in China. Then I guess Saudi Arabia plays a compliant game and offers no real threat to a US dominance. China on the other hand not only threatens but increasingly dominates and controls the game. And that is very obvious when you are there, or in Hong Kong, which, despite it’s friendly face is very much a part of the People’s Republic.

I may, to those that have been there many times, sound hopelessly naïve, but here are a few more thoughts and comments about China.

· Even for a resident of Indonesia, with some experience of mega cities like Jakarta, the vastness and enormity of the country when you are there really hits and almost overwhelms one but as much as that, as per John Davies above, ultimately seduces you.

· There is something about the stream of container trucks transporting goods along the six lane highway carved into the mountainsides into Hong Kong that is very Silk Road and that is accentuated by the fact that the three biggest container gateway ports in the work are in servicing South Eastern China.

· Simple numbers like the fact that I'm told that there are more PhD students in Chinese Universities than students in the whole US tertiary system, or that China consumes almost two billion pairs of jeans a year, before, it exports any. Or that there are allegedly some 200 million people in the country not listed in official census numbers by virtue of those that slipped through the system because of the one child policy

· I was surprised in Guangzhou as to how many non-Chinese looking residents I saw. My friend from Hong Kong who does extensive business in the city tells me these are as likely folk from the western provinces. The oft quoted restrictions on internal travel no longer exist, the only restriction is that one cannot take ones social benefits from province to province. In other words, if you need the dole you need to come home.

· The Shanghai to Ningbo sea bridge is the longest in the world, and has been built exclusively by Chinese companies and engineers. Whilst the west was smugly sitting around, China caught up. And nowhere was that more evident than in the Tianhe area of Guangzhou, where vast tree lined boulevards around massive modern structures, often architecturally inspiring, looking like some immense sci-fi set, sit where I’m told dirt roads existed ten years ago.

· Whilst the old central train station looks like a Mao-ist relic virtually every other public facility we entered was absolute state of the art, and mostly at least partially privately owned. Make no mistake this is a market driven economy

· Both Brigid and I agreed that the people we encountered in China were, as a generalisation, the most friendly, considerate and open we've encountered anywhere on our travels, west or east. We were repeatedly amazed at how helpful and polite complete strangers could be and there was none of the pushiness we'd been led to believe was the norm.

· The term ‘one party’ state is a subjective one. One could reasonably argue that there is perhaps a wider raft of opinions in a huge party such as exists in China than the current please-tell-me-the-difference between them UK Tory / Labour split.

· I abhor capital punishment in any form and don't believe any nation that kills it's own can claim to be civilized but several people pointed out to me that on a per capita basis China is way behind 'friendly' nations like Singapore and Saudi Arabia. And the family paying for the bullet thing is a long past thing.  That said, it still revolts me and I can find no excuses to justify it in any form. When there the former Shanghai head guy was convicted of substantial fraud and sentenced to life in jail. There was much comment that such a crime would have meant a needle (as that is how its done now) a year or three back.

· At the back of one’s mind the whole time of course you have Tiananmen Square, although that was 20 years ago, and a raft of other questions but you can only hope that China, which has had a truly horrific past century is coming out of something. I found myself looking at old people over and over and wondering just what they had seen. The Chinese history I've been reading recently means something altogether more when you look at the faces. But, the simple fact that the modern urban China of today, and the wonder that is Hong Kong are happily tolerated speaks volumes about the future I would hope.

 

After close to a week in China, we then went to Hong Kong.

I’d not been to Hong Kong as an adult and it simply blew me away. We were lucky enough to be guided by good local friends so had a step up. But sitting in the legendary Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club drinking NZ wines felt rather good. As did dinner at the Peak Restaurant..it may be a tourist trap, but it too had a hell of wine list.

I’d always imagined it was a little like Singapore, but, no, this city, even with a PLA regiment sitting on the island, has soul.

Technorati Tags: China,Hong Kong