Shanghai incommunicado

Twelve hours in Mumbai

2009-03-23T14:38:00.020+08:00

So I had 12 hours to spend in Mumbai (why? Don't ask...). I arrived in the central train station at 9 a.m., and had to be back to catch my 24-hour train to Delhi by 9 p.m.

Naturally, I knew nothing about Mumbai save for what I'd read in Suketu Mehta's book and the 11/26 coverage, and (of course!) what I'd seen from watching Slumdog Millionaire umpteen times as it played on loop on an interminable Emirates flight. Images of Muslim-Hindu riots, a smoking Oberoi Hotel and slums. SO well-informed.

So:

9 a.m. The train station is a zoo. People sit on overstuffed bags, force their way up crowded stairways out of the station. I stow my bag in a locker-room type place, haggle over a city map and head out into blinding sunlight.

9:15 a.m. Stop at a corner to get my bearings, buy paan from a paanwalla from Lucknow. Leave with betel-stained teeth, little comprehension of where in the city I am.

9:30 a.m. Ocean! At Chowpatty Beach. Glorious in the already stultifying heat. Wade through warm water to amusement of passersby. A young couple perches, legs swinging, on the seawall just above a trash heap where a family has set up a house.

10 a.m. Stop to watch a cricket match at the Police Gymkhana. Still don't understand how this game works.

11 a.m. Made it to Kalbadevi. Wander through crush of markets, small stalls with vendors vending cotton, jewellery, toys, fruit juice, electronics. Crawford Market is a quiet respite from the chaos, with neatly stacked heaps of fruit gleaming in the bizarre, grey, gothic building. Adjacent pet market reeks.

12 p.m. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) is imposing stone. What's odd isn't that the enormous gothic building is out of place; it's that they seem entirely natural in a city by Portuguese and British flavours. The place is packed, but the nearby shady park is closed to the public. WTF?

1 p.m. The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerly Prince of Wales Museum--are we noticing a trend here, courtesy of Bal Thackeray et al?) is closed on Mondays. Argh. But the nearby Jehangir art museum offers air-conditioned respite from the crush of activity and heat on the street. And some gorgeous b&w photos.

3 p.m. Gateway of India isn't nearly as impressive as I had hoped. Just lots of tourists, lots of people looking to scam tourists. Rahhhh colonialism.

3:30 p.m. Taj hotel isn't looking too shabby, under the circumstances. Clientele frighteningly posh.

3:45 p.m. Vendors can't figure out why I laugh at their oversized oblong balloons. Sigh.

4 p.m. Less than 100 metres from India Gate is a collection of ramshackle lean-tos next to a beach that seems to be used both as fishing dock and public toilet. Um, minor problem? (the slum itself, however, is the most friendly place I've yet encountered in this city)

5 p.m. Wander through colourful and fascinating mazes of Colaba, end up in a navy base. Feel distinctly unwelcome. Manage to grab public bus going...somewhere.

6 p.m. End up in Nehru Park in Malabar Hill after bus ride to the north of the city, and then back. The park is crowded with young families, elderly people on strolls, young couples.

8 p.m. Try to walk back to train station, get hopelessly lost (how is that possible? Map made them look so close), take most unreasonably expensive cab in the history of the world.

9 p.m. Back at station and manage to almost miss train thanks to scramble at luggage check. Luggage attendant finds this hilarious. Still think I should charge for entertaining entire subcontinents with foreigner antics.

Soldiers, separatists and soggy houseboats

2009-03-22T10:12:00.016+08:00

Kashmir feels like a place under siege.

The northern valley, which Jawaharlal Nehru famously described as " the face of the beloved that one sees in a dream and that fades away on awakening," is supposed to be known for its natural beauty and the trekking in nearby mountains.

But far more striking for any visitor are the hundreds of thousands of soldiers, police and paramilitaries patrolling every inch of the still-disputed territory.

A brief recap by someone who knows precious little about, um, anything: Both India and Pakistan lay claim to all of Kashmir, which was divided along a Line of Control in 1972 following decades of conflict after partition in 1947. Over and above bilateral hostility and violence, a local insurgency (fuelled, so India says, by money, arms and militants from Pakistan) has been continuing since 1989. Tens of thousands of people have died in the past 20 years.

But Kashmir is supposed to be approaching normalcy as militant activity has died down. Foreigners walking through Delhi's Paharganj are accosted by people enticing them to visit Srinagar houseboats. Everything's fine now, they say; the place is quiet.

It doesn't quite feel that way. Despite largely successful local elections earlier this year that boasted high voter turnout and put a relatively moderate "pro-Kashmiri" party in power, there's still widespread anger over what locals see as a militarization of their home. There's one security forces officer for every seven Kashiris, and the forces in Kashmir are granted almost total immunity under Indian law. As the civilian death toll mounts, so does the anger and tension underlying what have become weekly (if not daily) protests in Srinagar and surrounding villages.

Not one of the Kashmiris I spoke with wants to join Pakistan. Frankly, given what's going on there right now, can you blame them? But they all--even those not actively advocating independence--were furious at the Indian government, felt alienated from the rest of the country and defended the actions of protesters and separatists as necessary in fighting for freedom and their civil rights.

As one angry student put it, the army isn't there to protect the people--it's there to fight them. So why not fight back?

The soldiers I spoke with, of course, saw the situation differently. They laughed when I asked what would happen if they left. The militants would run amok, they said. And angry citizens? They're just stirred up by local separatist groups.

A Kashmiri soldier said people who advocate independence are kidding themselves.

"Have you seen Kashmir?" he asked, laughing and spreading his arms wide to encompass the entire valley.

"We couldn't exist on our own."

That doesn't make people any less angry, however.

So how does this translate for a clued-out gori (white woman)? Think barbed wire and soldiers decked out in camo everywhere, and frisking checkpoints every time you want to enter pretty much any public building. People are eager to air their grievances with the lost-looking foreigner. If only she could speak Kashmiri.

Scooter diaries: A Taj-tastic odyssey

2009-03-17T10:10:00.007+08:00

Let me be clear: I had no intention whatsoever of seeing the Taj Mahal while in India.

If this sounds idiotic or pig-headedly non-conformist, that's because it kind of is. Cool as it looks in photos, the Taj has never really enticed me all that much.

But when a friend offered to take me to Agra via scooter, I found the offer hard to resist.

So off we went, leaving Delhi around 2 a.m. in the hopes of making it to Agra by sunrise.

The trip was, well, a trip. Flyovers and other pavement edifices flew past, replaced by fields punctuated with streetside chai- and chapati-selling dhabas hung with strings of lights. Why we weren't squished in the inky darkness by a passing truck, I have no idea.

Then around 4:30 a.m., it started to get cold. Really, bone-chillingly, seriously fucking cold. We stopped for chai in Chhaat, a place discernible only by the road sign and the godsent dhaba that was inexplicably open at that ungodly hour. The hot, cardamom-spiced liquid was one of the greatest beverages I have ever had--dirty glass be damned. I was tempted to curl up on a pile of blankets on a nearby bench, never to emerge.

We didn't make it by dawn--we hadn't even made it close to the Agra city limits when a painfully bright orb peeked over the edge of the horizon and made the ride a little less frigid. But by 7:30 we were lining up--easily the grubbiest, most suspect-looking supplicants come to pay respects to a marble wonder of the world.

I'm not gonna lie: The Taj Mahal may be Uttar Pradesh's biggest cash grab. It cost an exorbitant 750 rupees to get in, and every subsequent junction featured another way to fleece handycam-toting tourists of all they were worth. 75Rs to check my bag? Really?

But, in the interest of total honesty: The structure itself is pretty incredible. The outer gates and surrounding stone structures, including two beautiful temples flanking the head honcho, are beautiful. But the white marble edifice is beyond stunning. To circle the thing is to be awed by one man's bordering-on-maniacal obssession with architectural perfection--and its largely successful realization.

What's sad, though, is the toll the area's disregard for minor considerations like pollution is taking on the Taj. Crap from nearby factories and refineries, which had coated me in a delightful layer of grime during our morning scooter ride, is also harming the structure, taking the sheen off the previously gleaming white marble. A digital reader in a corner scrolled through levels of pollutants in the air--particulate matter was more than twice what the digital reader stated as the WHO's safe limit, in parts per million.

That's reassuring.

We lunched at a small dhaba on the rural edge of Agra, near a field of grain (hops? barley?) I was told the resident family used to make beer. My travelling partner fell asleep and I spent a couple of hours engaging in stilted, largely incomprehensible conversation with my server and fellow patrons.

How not to learn Hindi

2009-03-15T10:11:00.004+08:00

One of the hardest things about leaving Zhongguo for Yindu was no longer being able to communicate in at least a horribly butchered version of the local language.

I'm the first to admit my Hanyu was, um, bu tai hao. But I could get by. My Hindi, on the other hand, was nonexistent. And although it's possible to communicate here in English--thank you, Queen Vicky; thank you, Rudyard--I figured it would be nice to at least try to learn a few basic phrases.

But I was amazed at how damn hard it is to find an English-Hindi dictionary. Maybe I was just looking in the wrong bookstores. Maybe I'm just a total cretin (well, that goes without saying). But I could not for the life of me find a dictionary that translated an English word into Hindi with English transliterations. And everyone I encountered was astonished at my inability to read any of the translations handily written in Hindi script.

Balls.

So I settled for the next best thing: A book that promised, a "Quick and easy way to learn Hindi."

Well.

Really, the book should have been billed a "Quick and easy way to learn Hindi, circa 1940." Not only does it feature such choice phrases as "Will you let her flirt about, then?" and "A peg of scotch whiskey," it also tells you how to say, "The allies will get success."

Mitron kee jeet hogi.

YES. All my life, this is what I have wanted to say in Hindi.

I'm still entirely bemused as to how, exactly, this book made it to the publisher IN 2006, which is the date of the latest edition on the front flap. Either it actually was published in some crazy-ass time warp, or the good people at "Quick and easy way to learn Hindi" are sadistically insane.

Possibly both.

Meanwhile, it's back to memorizing the lyrics of "Jai ho."

Honking mad

2009-03-14T10:05:00.003+08:00

There are strange and hilarious signs on highways, roadsides and gas stations telling people not to honk.

This confused me at first: As any good, naive Canadian knows, horns are useful for telling other people they're about to turn you into roadkill. You need them.

Well. A few days and several thousand lost cochlea hairs later, I'm of a somewhat different mindset.

Here, horns are used to solely to express frustration--to scream GET OUT OF THE WAY at the several dozen cars in a traffic jam 100 metres long. If honked horns in traffic-clogged areas the world over can be translated into vented emotions, Indian car horns are like punctuation-free, expletive-ridden run-on sentences. People in auto-rickshaws, passenger vehicles and pimped-out transport trucks lean on their horns for minutes on end, as though deafening everyone nearby would somehow get them to their destination sooner.

It's mildly hellish.

But: Horns that bleep Bollywood tracks? Genius.

Holi

2009-03-11T23:21:00.004+08:00

So I spent the day being doused--and dousing others--in coloured powder and dye, in a series of guerrilla-style ambushes.

No, I hadn't regressed to a five-year-old state (although I know several people who would dispute that claim).

I was celebrating Holi--possibly the greatest holiday of all time.

The actual story seems to change slightly each time I ask someone. But it has something to do with a king upset at his son's (nephew's?) devout belief in Vishnu. So he tries, naturally, to burn him to death in the arms of the king's sister Holika, who's protected from fire. But she burns, the kid doesn't and to make up for his aunt's awful death, names a paintball holiday after her.

Or something like that.

Either way, the concept is fabulous: A day dedicated to smearing powdered dye on other people, and ambushing them with water balloons and water guns.

Plus, Holi's traditional drink is Bhang--a crazy liquid that contains concentrated marijuana, vodka, milk and other things. Legal? Not quite. Delicious? Yes. (or so I've heard)

Of course, Holi isn't without its controversies--namely, that a lot of people don't enjoy being covered in paint on their way to work, having their new blouse soaked in water or being grabbed by a stranger's paint-drenched hands.

These are all legitimate complaints, and there are Holi-specific laws about non-consensual dyeing, throwing mud and chemicals at unsuspecting passers-by and even selling water ballons of a certain size during the holiday.

(Unofficially, anyone's fair game before noon on the day of Holi, After that, you're supposed to get a paint-free pass if you really don't want to play.

Luckily for me, I have ludicrously lax hygeine standards, and the maturity of a six-year-old. 'Twas good times.

A word of caution, however: Those dyes never come out. Ever.

Tibetan double-take

2009-03-10T23:03:00.004+08:00

Fifty years ago today, a massive uprising against Chinese rule in Tibet ended with thousands of Tibetans dead, thousands more forcibly resettled and Tibet's spiritual and political leader indefinitely exiled, kicking off half a century (and counting) of quasi-cultural genocide as Beijing paid Han Chinese to move to the troubled region.

Or, fifty years ago today, millions of Tibetan serfs were liberated from tyrannical, theocratic and backwards rule and shown all the wonders of a Communist Chinese society about to plunge headlong into the Cultural Revolution, kicking off half a century of modernization and economic growth.

Take your pick.

I cannot think of a single China-related issue where the gap in conceptions of reality is so friggin' enormous. A quick glance at Chinese coverage and international coverage of today's event in Dharmasala proves as much.

In the eyes of Beijing and most Chinese citizens, Tibet is an inalienable part of China, the Dalai Lama is a troublemaker and the "Free Tibet" movement an example of the rest of the world trying to gang up on China under a Eurocentric interpretation of human rights. Most Chinese people I've spoken with are genuinely at a loss as to why China is seen in such a bad light when it comes to Tibet.

A conversation with a politics professor at Fudan University threw some of these gaps into sharp relief.

He Junzhi in the U.K. during last March's protests--when peaceful protests were met with a massive police crackdown and then turned into violent attacks on Han businesses.

"Most media are very against the Chinese central government and criticised the Communist Party's policy. But a very strange situation is that a lot of the criticism didn't know ... what Tibet is," he said. "Last year, some [Chinese] people were wondering, 'We have given you so much--why did you do this against us? Some people are very puzzled."

He said this criticism of China could only stem from the Dalai Lama's ability to manipulate people who look up to him as a spiritual leader--blinding them, He argued, to other facts.

"The Dalai Lama is very good at the media language. He often uses language the media want to hear--for example, 'human rights', 'autonomy,' 'self-government.'"

Now, He insisted, Tibetans better off than they were 50 years ago and the Chinese government has realized Tibetans care about spiritual aspects of their lives, rather than just material ones. But at the same time, He said Beijing needs to wean Tibetans off their reliance on religion--"the process of modernization is a separation of church and state," he argued.

Now, he said, Beijing has better policies in place to "calm down the Tibetan people" and ensure last year's protests don't repeat themselves.

This yawning chasm between what Beijing sees and what the rest of the world sees never ceases to freak me out.

On the one hand, if "Free Tibet" continues to be a rallying call that demonizes an entire country in the eyes of people who know little to nothing about China or Tibet, China's going to remain on the defensive in an attempt to save face and the Chinese population will be united behind its government against what it sees as a hostile, Sinophobic international community.

On the other hand, Beijing holds a lot more cards in this situation. Freeing up Internet and SMS access in Tibet and allowing foreign journalists in would be a good start; it's hard to convince people you have nothing to hide when you put all your efforts into, well, hiding things.

If the Chinese government continues to dismiss Tibetans' calls for cultural, religious and political autonomy as backwards and something to be answered with renewed efforts to convince Tibetans of how much better off they are now than they were 50 years ago--while avoiding at all costs any serious discussions with the Dalai Lama, hoping he'll just go away--it's unlikely the "Xizang xiqing" will be resolved in the next half-century, either.

Now that's what I call quality censorship

2009-03-07T18:59:00.003+08:00

This is what I get when I try to access taboo sites from Dubai.

A marked improvement to the Chinese Net Nanny's "Nothing to see here, just keep on browsing" error messages, I've gotta say. I'm considering sending some feedback, myself.

Stimulate this

2009-03-05T14:24:00.004+08:00

To the thrill and excitement of all, the National People's Congress began its annual pooh-bah Parliamentary get-together this week.

Of course, this year's conference is more than a CCP rubber-stamping love-in: The jinrong weiji has ensured the world was watching to see what Hu, Wen & Co. have to offer, hoping whatever life raft they offer China will be big and bouyant enough for the rest of the global economy to hang on for dear life.

Or, you know, whatever.

To be honest, I don't know nearly enough about economics to make an educated assessment of the mechanics of China's economic outlook. Then again, there isn't really much to go on, given Wen Jiabao's speil:

“The external economic environment has become more serious, and uncertainties have increased significantly. ... Continuous drop in economic growth rate due to the impact of the global financial crisis has become a major problem affecting the overall situation. This has resulted in excess production capacity in some industries, caused some enterprises to experience operating difficulties and exerted severe pressure on employment”

OK, so that isn't a newsflash for anyone, nor is his declaration that the government will do its best to keep people employed, diversity export markets and somehow convince consumers to buy stuff.

It isn't surprising that China's trying to gloss over any suggestion its economy is tanking with the same craptacular spluttering as the rest of the world; nor is it a shock that Wen's reassurances are short on details and long on platitudes. This is how the NCP rolls, promises of transparency be damned.

What is clear, however, is that there won't be any more mammon manna from heaven--at least not from Beijing's pocketbook. Despite hints last week the previous stimulus package could as much as double in size (that'd make a honkin 8 trillion yuan, if you're counting), it looks like the economy is going to have to cope with a measly 4 trillion--most of it dedicated to infrastructure and the like, and much of it coming from local governments and private sources (as opposed to the central government responsible for all these cash-rich promises).

Will this be enough to keep China's economy steaming along at a pace to satisfy anxious consumers, panicky unemployed migrants and the freaked-out and freakily volatile financial markets?

Maybe. But I'm going to guess no.

For your next family vacation: A visit to the Sichuan Earthquake Theme Park (tm)

2009-03-03T14:28:00.006+08:00

Yep, nothing like turning a national disaster into a tourist opportunity.

Beichuan county, one of the areas worst devastated by the 8.0 earthquake that ripped through Sichuan last May, is being transformed into a "world class" relic site, where the ruins of buildings reduced to rubble that crushed thousands of people in a massive quake will be preserved for visitors.

The projects, which come with a total price tag of more than 50 billion yuan, will preserve ethnic cultural sites and turn Mianyang county into "a first class travel destination that combines sightseeing, meeting, leisure, and holiday facilities."

Ooh la la.

And the sites are already attracting the curious: About 200,000 tourists visited Beichuan during Spring Festival in January, and planners hope their endeavour will bring in enough cash to cover both the cost of the 93 individual restoration projects and the 6 billion yuan Mianyang lost in tourist revenue thanks to quake-related damages (not to mention sightseers leery of travelling a region that has been rocked by twice-monthly mini-quakes since May).

In the meantime, the millions of people left homeless in the earhquake's aftermath are still homeless, and they're wondering where the billions of yuan in earthquake relief donations have gone.

At least some of that money has allegedly been spent on snazzy cars for local bureaucrats; although few people here would ever go so far as casting aspersions on the conduct of the central government, many refer to corruption and misspending by local officials.

Beijing isn't about to let that derail what has so far been a pretty stellar publicity campaign, however. The government has given in-person notice to frustrated quake survivors that if they complain or talk to the press, their asses are grass and they can kiss goodbye any chance at getting help rebuilding homes destroyed in May (as it is, the gov is paying less than a third of the total cost of the homes--the rest will come from savings, or from cash used to pay off families of kids crushed in the rubble of shoddily built schools).

Cries of foul continue, however; a riot erupted in the Mianyang village of Baolin last month as thousands of villagers stormed a police station over disagreements on how the local aid fund was being spent. One person was killed and 10 injured during the fracas. (apologies for the Epoch link; only other English-language article I could find was the SCMP and that's behind a paywall). Residents of the ruined towns now being turned into museums are being relocated to new cities--"New Beichuan," etc--a ways away. Not everyone is delighted at the prospect of

But most of all, residents are just confused and frustrated. Families I spoke with in Shifang earlier this year are struggling to figure out how to build the homes that are still incomplete almost a year after the quake; they also can't figure out where all the billions of yuan in aid money is going to. In a country where people live for--and through--their kids, having lost their only children leaves these families little hope for what looks like a fairly bleak future.

In January, these families were living in tarp-and-bamboo tents permeated by moisture in rural Sichuan's damp climate. If they're lucky, they'll scrape together the money to build real houses, and maybe reconstruct livelihoods interrupted or made impossible by the quake's devastation. If they're really lucky, these now-childless parents will have more kids--maybe they'll even be able to afford medical costs needed for risky 40-something pregnancies in an area with few good hospitals.

And if they're hyperbolically fortunate, perhaps--just perhaps--someday they'll be able to take their kids to the Mianyang Earthquake Memorial Theme Park (TM).

Animal head update

2009-03-01T14:14:00.002+08:00

Joke's on Christie's.

The Chinese man identified as the winning bidder says he can't pay the 15.7 million euros he bid over the phone.

Cai Mingchao, director of the Xiamen Harmony Art International Auction Company (try saying that eight times fast), described the bid as a "patriotic act."

"I think any Chinese person would have stood up at that moment. ... I was merely fulfilling my responsibilities."

Naturally, it's like a harmonious society come early for people in China who were furious over the sculptures' sale to begin with. Commenters have lit up the blogosphere, gleefully discussing the egg they see on Christie's face.

I still think those heads are ugly.

While you were out...someone blew himself up in your city

2009-02-28T02:46:00.006+08:00

So remember the new year? That was way back at the end of January, when 1.4 billion people set off firecrackers and fireworks like it was going outta style, and the country erupted in an earsplitting but benign blizzard of explosions and mixed metaphors. For weeks on end, it sounded as though we were in the middle of a bullet-riddled war zone.

Eventually, the ignorant and explosion-shy waiguoren gets used to it, laughs it off, stops jumping every time she hears the noise and becomes accustomed to the gunpowder constantly hanging in the air. Rah.

Then, a while after returning to Shanghai from Henan via some other places, I find this.

A man triggered an explosion, possibly by blowing himself up, up on New Year's Eve--Jan. 25--outside the Public Security Bureau's Jin'an neighbourhood headquarters. No one was hurt. A man-hunt us underway in Hunan, where the bomber is believed to have been from.

What freaks me out about this is not so much the bombing itself, although to be honest I find it moderately scary.

But what genuinely, truly freaks me right the fuck out is that this wasn't. reported. anywhere.

I admit, my Chinese-reading skillz are, um, crappy at best. So it's possible it's run in a bunch of Chinese-language papers I haven't been able to find. But according to the WSJ blog post, it appeared briefly in a Changsha paper and was then taken down. Now, no one will talk about it.

What the hell?

A friend of mine, who is Chinese and one of the most well-informed people I know, had never heard about this. She says that's not uncommon, however: "Maybe it's just a stereotype, [but] it seems that I've heard a lot of unbelievable news that 'the government' tries to hide," she said.

It's true China's government kinda sorta has some public-disclosure issues. But gone are the days when something truly catastrophic could happen--say, millions of people starving to death--without anybody knowing about it.

...right?

Dude, where are my bronze animal heads?

2009-02-27T03:11:00.007+08:00

China is thoroughly unimpressed with Christie's for auctioning off a pair of bronze animal heads--a rabbit and a rat--in Paris this week. The government's State Administration of Cultural Heritage issued a statement earlier today condemning the sale and threatening "serious effects" on "Christie's development in China" if it went ahead.

Apparently this means Chinese customs is going to be extra wary when checking antique-y stuff Christie's representatives try to take out of the country. What exactly they were doing before with potential cultural relics, I'm not sure.

The story has been all over CCTV for the past couple of days, playing on a loop on the mini televisions in buses across the city. Christie's probably never got so much Chinese airtime.

Behind the beef is the claim the items were looted from Beijing's Summer Palace in 1860, when Anglo-French invaders sacked and looted the place at the end of the second Opium War.

This brings up interesting issues of relic ownership, especially because much of the artsy historical stuff at most European and North American museums has been looted from somewhere (*cough* Greek marbles, Haida canoes). If an item originated in one place and was pilfered half a dozen times before falling into the hands of a rich museum or philanthropist, who gets to keep it? At what point does the colonial douchebaggery end?

As the Telegraph's Richard Spencer points out, it's even more complicated in this case: Although the Summer Palace's looting was a colossal mistake, those bronzes were designed by Europeans to adorn a fountain built for a Chinese emperor. It isn't clear whether they were looted by Europeans or Chinese.

Plus, let's face it: Those heads are pretty ugly.

Photo courtesy of Christie's. Or the Qianlong Emperor. Whichever.

Even Canada thinks Canada's China policies suck: Xinhua

2009-02-25T15:07:00.005+08:00

I can almost guarantee Chinese state media care way more about this than anyone in Ottawa.

Which, I guess, is kind of the point.

Hey, big spender

2009-02-22T11:23:00.004+08:00

It ain't for nothing the Chinese term for "financial crisis" (金融危机; jinrong weiji) contains the word ji 机--opportunity.

As corporate titans around the world scramble for cash to avoid going belly up, China is becoming an unlikely sugar daddy.

As the Christian Science Monitor reports, Chinese companies are on an "international spending spree," buying up stakes in everything from U.S. auto manufacturers to Canadian oil firms to Australian mining companies.

Massive loans to Russia and Brazil--to the tune of $25 billion and $10 billion, respectively--has China swimming in oil.

It seems odd: Local exporters, especially smaller factories, are struggling to stay afloat as foreign demand dives. But both state-owned enterprises, surprisingly flush for cash and with the government's directive to secure massive amounts of commodities and natural resources, and opportunistic private companies are getting in on the game.

It's an exciting time for a country unused to acquiring foreign assets--a bit of a coming-out party for Chinese titans and a welcome reversal of that "century of humiliation" when European and American commercial interests plundered the Middle Kingdom for all it was worth.

Needless to say, becoming everyone's favourite bailout provider (well, maybe after the U.S. Fed. But whatever) has its pitfalls: Australia has yet to approve the Rio Tinto/Chinalco deal and some fear foreign ownership of national industries, especially given the involvement of government and government-backed companies in these high-rolling deals. And China has its own troubled manufacturing sector and ballooning unemployment rate to worry about.

But for now, Chinese firms seem happy to troll the globe's bargain basements. And I doubt the companies on the receiving end of the cash are going to complain.

"We will get along very well"

2009-02-21T11:16:00.008+08:00

She came. She saw. She schmoozed it up with some Chinese dignitaries.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton seems to have hit all the right notes during her whirlwind trip to the Middle Kingdom.

She emphasized China's vital role in helping the global economy back onto its feet, while aggressively downplaying any suggestions of protectionism brought on by the watered-down-to-the-point-of-irrelevance "Buy American" clause in the latest stimulus package. Her suggestion that Americans and Chinese could trade financial traits, with the former saving more and the latter spending more, would be funny if it weren't kind of sad.

She urged the Chinese government to take a leading role in combating climate change, tackling head-on the claim that China's just industrializing the same way the U.S. and Europe did way back on the late 19th century--in an extremely unsustainable manner.

“When we were industrializing and growing, we didn’t know any better; neither did Europe,” she said during a visit to a geothermal power plant. “Now we’re smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth.”

Well, uh, I might debate that last point. But whatever; I'm sure the people giving Hillary her tour were just glad she wasn't touring nearby Tianjin's factories, or testing Beijing's air quality.

China has been under a lot of pressure to clean up its environmental act, and despite continuing protestations that the rest of the world is just a big bully and should pay attention to its own dirty power and overflowing landfills, the government until recently had been doing a lot to highlight its any and all attempts to "green" construction, manufacturing and transportation. Of course that all has changed thanks to the jinrong weiji, which took environmental concerns off the table to replace them with the overarching, panicked imperative to keep the economy churning at as fast a pace as possible.

Although stimulus plans in Canada and the U.S. have made environmental initiatives a priority, China's government has focused on infrastructure, lending and gettings its population to buy something--anything. Less reusing and recycling, more consumption, dammit!

But anyway.

More significant is what wasn't mentioned during Clinton's visit--namely, human rights concerns. A hypersensitive issue in China at the best of times, the minggan factor grew exponentially given the timing--months before the 20th anniversary of the infamous Tian'anmen Square massacre and a few short weeks before the 50th anniversary of a massive uprising in Tibet.

Recently, China underwent its first UN Human Rights Council review. It was awkward.

China got kudos for its success in reducing poverty, and breathless requests for advice from the Philippines, Algeria, Vietnam and Malaysia as to how they could do the same.

But Zhongguo's dignitaries were unimpressed by persnickety questions from the Canuck and Aussie camps: What about those alleged arbitrary detentions of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongols and Falun Gong? When is China going to publish a list of annual executions and set up an independent human rights institution?

Requests like these "did not enjoy the support of China."

Oh, snap.

The U.S. didn't say much then, and its emissary didn't say much this weekend.

Phew.

Clip courtesy of AP and China TV. Not YouTube because mYouTube here is a stinking pile of melamine.

The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!

2009-02-18T22:43:00.008+08:00

Well, just one American, actually. But she happens to be a pretty important one.

Hillary Rodham Clinton started her whirlwind tour today. She heads to China later this week.

The East Asian exravaganza, Clinton's first as U.S. Secretary of State, is also the Obama administation's first chance to prove its foreign policies and methods of engagement are a demonstrable improvement from those of the previous American government.

Clinton indicated as much in Tokyo today:
“America is ready to listen again. Too often in the recent past, our government has not heard the different perspectives of people around the world. In the Obama administration, we intend to change that.”

That's no doubt something a lot of people in this region are glad to hear.

Chinese people I've spoken with still seem unsure how they feel about the new U.S. administration. Sure, Obama's a pretty inspiring guy, one friend told me. But she remains unconvinced he--or any Americans, for that matter--are anything but ignorant of China, eager to criticize the country for nitpicky misdemeanours but slow to praise this newcomer to the superpower stage for things it does right.

There's also the fear Obama & Co. will pressure China on fronts on which the Bush administration was mercifully (in their view) silent--on climate change and human rights, particularly. And the "Buy American" clause is as frightening for Chinese companies and factories as it is for Canadians and Europeans who've been vocally calling foul.

Although it obviously doesn't rival the superstar U.S. president's seven hours spent in Jianada's chilly capital, this visit and its results should at the very least be interesting.

How not to behave at a Chinese wedding: A user's guide

2009-02-15T11:33:00.006+08:00

So my friend invited me to her friend's wedding.

I don't know why she did this. I wouldn't invite myself to my own wedding, let alone the wedding of a close friend. I'm fairly certain at least part of the reason for this unwarrantedly generous invite was the semi-awkward nature of the event: Both bride and groom were former colleagues, and that meant the whole office was invited--including my friend's former boss. Potentially awkard? I guess. But in a worst-case scenario, a random waiguoren guest can act as a handy human shield.

One interesting thing about this event was a total lack of anything North Americans would consider a "wedding ceremony." There was a brief spiel by the maitre d', a friend of the couple, who brought them both on stage and gave a brief speech on how much they loved each other. There was cake-cutting. But no formal ring exchange, no public contract-signing; certainly no religious overtones whatsoever (although rumours flew that this was a shotgun wedding because the bride is pregnant. Don't ask me).

Instead there was a catered dinner at a fancy dining hall in Shanghai's "Circus World." No circus, no acrobats and no prancing horses in this particular event, unfortunately.

But there was an open bar. And half a dozen Chinese men who thought it would be great fun to engage the waiguoren in a drinking contest. So who's complaining?

Memo to global economy: Don't expect a bailout from Chinese consumers

2009-02-12T21:00:00.015+08:00

It's been one of those weeks: The U.S. Congress passed another multi-billion-dollar stimulus plan whose exact execution no one seems to understand; xenophobia's getting uglier in the U.K., where unions are up in arms over another deal with an overseas manufacturer; the G7(8?) is meeting soon but no one really seems to know what good they could possibly do, anyway.

To what remedy could the world possibly turn to save us from this spiralling, panic-ridden economic mess?

I know! Get China to fix it!

Yes, the clarion call for Asian (read: Chinese) consumers to pick up the purchasing slack and buy stuff--lots of it--is still out there.

Even former Canadian prime miniser Paul Martin is insisting economic salvation will come in the form of ramped up consumer spending in the Middle Kingdom.

"The consumer today who is really generating the large savings, but whose consumer needs have not been met, is the Asian consumer....And that consumer is going to have to step in and fill the breach."

Well. Maybe that'll happen...and maybe not.

Things aren't looking all that economically rosy in Zhongguo: Exports plummeted a mind-boggling 17.5 per cent in January compared to January, 2008--a scary number when you consider China's become accustomed to double-digit growth. Until a few months ago, the biggest economic problem worrying policymakers was how to slow down an overheated economy.

Along with that precipitous drop in exports is a plunge in imports-- a dizzying 41.3 per cent. That means fewer commodities (yeah, sucks to be Jianada) to feed and fuel a country of 1.4 billion people who are spending less in the face of a truly global economic slowdown.

It's easy to look at China's huge population and think, "Totally: These people live in the world's third-largest and fastest-growing economy. Why can't they just start buying stuff, and help the rest of us out?"

Chinese people save, on average, about 30 per cent of their income. This is enormous--especially when you consider that up until very, very recently, Americans spent more than 100 per cent of what they made (hello, credit-based society).

True--in some ways Chinese people in a less crappy economic situation than your average American, saddled with a mortgage and credit-card debt and other fun stuff.

But Chinese people save because for most of the past 60 years, the Chinese government's explicit policy was to train its domestic population to consume as little as possible, focusing on an export market driven by an army of low-paid workers. Sure, in the past few years consumption here has risen immensely. Purchases of such luxury items as cars has risen by more than 20 per cent year on year. But those rising numbers are deceptive: China's middle- and upper-class consumers are buying far, far more than they were before because a couple of decades ago such purchases were simply out of the question. Per capita consumption, like per capita income, is still pretty miniscule--especially when compared to the U.S. buyers everyone wants Chinese people to emulate.

And spend more is the last thing anyone in this country wants to do.

There are more than 20 million unemployed migrant workers in limbo between rural and urban areas, trying to figure out how they're going to feed their families in the midst of the biggest drought in more than 50 years. Employees everywhere fear layoffs as companies--many of them the private, foreign enterprises that have become so prized in commercial hubs like Shanghai--close, often without paying staff members what they're owed.

To put it mildly, these people aren't exactly dashing to the nearest mall to buy the latest flatscreen HD television.

And trust me, Beijing's trying.

In January the central government halved taxes on small vehicle purchases. Last week Beijing rolled out a national program offering farmers a 13 per cent rebate on such expensive items as cell phones, televisions and refrigerators.

The government has also announced billions of yuan in funding for health care. The hope is that if people don't have to save up for fear of getting sick and having to pay sky-high medical bills they'll spend that money on a trip to Ha'erbin or a new Lenovo laptop.

No go.

Instead, thousands of people are posting to online forums urging them to live on no more than 100 yuan a week. They swap posts on how they're biking to work, making their lunches at home and cutting back on entertainment costs.

Electricity consumption has fallen to an eight-year low across the country—a sharp contrast to last year's power outages thanks to undersupply.

A January survey found almost two-thirds of respondents—all of them urban, middle-class Chinese—plan to cut back on spending, if they haven't already.

No one I've spoken to plans to spend more than before. Like their North American counterparts, they're terrified of being fired and, if anything, are cutting back in a big way. They laugh when I ask if they think the 4-trillion-yuan stimulus promised last fall will push them to shopping malls (well, okay, they could just be laughing because I'm awkward and foreign. But they laugh harder when I ask about the stimulus).

In the meantime, Beijing has its hands full trying to prevent mass unrest over the worsening economic situation. Plummeting purchases may be bad. But desperate, jobless migrants and freaked-out, jobless college grads will be a lot worse if they riot.

If ramped up Chinese consumption is the bailout the rest of the world is looking for, we should perhaps start casting around for a more stimulating Plan B.

Trouble brewing: Part three

2009-02-07T21:04:00.014+08:00

China is facing its worst drought in half a century. Thousands of hectares of land in the country's north are facing severe dry conditions: Crops and livestock are dying and millions of people are facing water shortages.

Beijing announced yesterday it's pouring 86.7 billion yuan into drought-hit areas, much of it going towards "relief materials" and to supplement farmers' incomes. Local governments get 300 million.

This would be a disaster at any time. But thanks to the jinrong weiji, 20 million migrants are out of work and heading back to the farms they'd left behind because they couldn't support themselves and their families on the paltry sums their tiny acreages brought in. Although some people will be able to find alternative sources of income, it's fair to hypothesize that many (if not most) of these nong min gong will have to go back to farming, full-time--just as a massive drought is wreaking havoc with harvests that are puny to begin with.

Added to that, of course, are the millions of people in both rural and urban areas who rely on those crops for food. As they, too, face layoffs and cancelled annual bonuses, it's unlikely they'll be able to pay more for food that's now become scarcer.

At the same time, this further frustrates Beijing's hopes it can turn its billion-strong population into ardent consumers and ride out the recession on domestic purchases: On Thursday the government announced a nationwide 13 per cent rebate for farmers purchasing big-ticket items ranging from cell phones to colour TVs to refrigerators.

Those expected purchases are looking a lot less likely now, when farmers have nothing to refrigerate.

For now, Beijing has the luxury of pouring cash into farmers' pockets in an attempt to assuage the damage (and subsequent instability and disharmony) this drought will cause, although it's questionable just how much good that will do. But the government can only shovel so much money around at one time: Last fall it promised a four-trillion-yuan stimulus package to boost the country's flailing economy. After millions of yuan was spent in the last quarter of 2008, the government posted a 111-billion yuan deficit. Beijing still has a pretty hefty spending power, but eventually it's going to run out of cash.

Or it could just start calling in U.S. debt.

A geographic recap

2009-02-06T23:34:00.002+08:00

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Aitch-Kay

2009-02-06T14:13:00.012+08:00

So I needed to go to Hong Kong to get a new visa.

Why did I need to do this? Because you can't get a new visa in China; you have to "leave the country" to do that, and then apply from a Chinese embassy wherever you happen to be.

Okay, makes sense. A little anal, but whatever.

But, hold the jiaozi a second: Hong Kong is in China--has been since 1997, when the Brits handed it over after more than 150 years of jolly good colonial-ish rule.

Ha! Joke's on you, Chinese visa office!

Well, no: Joke's on whatever hapless idiot thinks Hong Kong and the People's Republic of China area really, truly the same country.

I made that mistake on my way in, when I fell asleep on the bus from the Shenzhen airport and was shocked to find myself lost and disoriented at not one but two alienating customs checks--one for China and one for Hong Kong. Each of these took a ridiculous amount of time, so I amused myself looking at the frightening posters of what happens to you if you bring raw or live birds into Hong Kong from the Mainland (hint: it isn't fun).

The "We're not in Kansas, anymore" feeling just intensified once I got into HK.

Everyone drove on the wrong side of the street. Even stranger, everone obeyed traffic laws. No, seriously.

Everyone spoke Cantonhua. What's more, they were horrifically offended when I tried to get by on the Putonghua that was getting me places on the Mainland.

The common currency is the Hong Kong dollar, which is worth just a little less than the Renminbi. The new coins and bills looked snazzy and shiny. But the old ones had a familiar profile: Queen Liz II, staring back at me for the first time in six months. It was weird.

To my delight, the Internet was uncensored. I got my fill of all the Wordpress blogs I never get to read, and then just to make a point I checked out Amnesty International, Students for a Free Tibet and the World Uyghur Association websites (really mature, I know).

If Shanghai tries to be New York, Hong Kong aspires to embody London. And to a surprising extent, it succeeds. Leaving aside the British architecture, the double-decker buses and trams (or "ding-dings," as a friend assured me they're colloqiually called) and the British-accented voice on the subway telling passengers to "mind the gap," there's a distinctly London-y feel to the place. And Hong Kongers know it--they carry themselves with a much more cosmopolitan air, and are quick to assure you that although they're as Chinese as anyone from Guangdong, Shanghai or Beijing, they certainly aren't the same as Mainland residents.

Okay. Point taken.

The fascinating and puzzling thing, though, is that technically Hong Kong is still ruled by Beijing--the same government that controls Anhui, Qinghai and Liaoning. Through a bizarre series of legislation I'm still trying to get my head around, Hong Kong and Macau (which was handed over by the Portuguese in 1999, two years after HK) get to carry on more or less the same as they were before. In fact, many people who fled to countries like Canada in the mid-1990s, fearing crazy, apocalyptic crackdowns, have returned to Hong Kong because there are fewer market constraints.

What threw me for a loop the most while in Hong Kong was the overt political protest. Within 24 hours of my arrival I passed Falun Gong posters and protesters in two separate locations on glitzy Hong Kong Island, as well as a public protest whose exact purpose I couldn't ascertain but which I could tell wasn't very favourable towards the Chinese government.

Shit like this would get you disappeared in seconds on the Mainland.

But all this political free-wheeling is catching up with Hong Kong: Last month Macau signed into law legislation on Article 23, part of its constitution that deals with acts of sedition, state secrets and other fun stuff.

Article 23 has been part of HK and Macau's "mini constitutions" for years, but there has never been any laws articulated to back it up. In 2003, huge protests erupted in Hong Kong because the government tried to enact Article 23-related legislation and people were afraid the vague definitions used would effectively clamp down on protest and free speech, PRC style.

The government backed down then, but some people fear Macau's legislation could set a precedent for its more politically vocal and economically central cousin to follow suit.

Interesting times.

Rhymes with maul

2009-02-03T13:37:00.003+08:00

I know my flatmate was desperate when she made me her designated shopper.

I think she knew it, too: She gave me a detailed list of all the cosmetics she wanted in Hong Kong, helpfully including photos, estimated prices and descriptions in English and Hanzi.

What choice did she have? HK is where the Mainland shops for toiletries, makeup and all the luxury items that aren't available in the old-school PRC. I was going to Hong Kong. Therefore, it was my duty to bring her back the coveted items she so desperately desired she would trust them in the hands of someone whose only makeup purchases in the past 20 years have consisted of lip balm, moisturizing lotion and, on a couple of occasions, lipstick.

In an effort to prove myself less than totally incompetent, I accepted this charge with as much grace as I could muster (hint: not much).

But, fuck. It wasn't easy.

I should make one thing very clear: I hate malls. Can't stand the things. Their eerie, too-bright lighting and zombie-like crowds fill me simultaneously with claustrophobia and agoraphobia; the maze of hallways disorients me and I grow increasingly panicky as I search fruitlessly for stores and products I'm sure are right in front of me but I can't see for the glare and everyone else seems to know exactly where they're going and is it just me or is the stale air growing more sickly sweet the longer I stay here and HOLY CRAP WHERE IS THE EXIT?

So, yeah. It was rough.

Finally, after putting myself at the mercy of several jaded salespersons, I found the desired brands and paid more than any sane person ever would for a bunch of products whose purpose I'm still struggling to identify. I think you smear it on your face. But that's mostly guesswork on my part.

Chungking Mansion (or, where to stay in Hong Kong if you're into being fascinated and mildly terrified)

2009-02-01T13:36:00.007+08:00

I wanted to find somewhere cheap to stay in Hong Kong. This was easier said than done: The place is about a zillion times more expensive than the Mainland; prices rival even those of North America. I spent my first 24 hours in the city in sticker shock.

But before I came, the cheapest hostels I could find online were all at the same address. When I arrived, exhausted and disoriented from a surreal customs experience, I took a cab to the one address I had, and arrived at Chungking Mansion.

Imagine an enormous concrete honeycomb.

Now double it in size.

Now cover it in grime and fill it with people.

That's kind of what Chungking Mansion is like.

The building has four "blocks," each of which has 15 floors. Each floor has at least three hostels, with a couple of dozen rooms in each one. I'm shit at math, but that works out to thousands of transient people living in this hulking building.

I was one of the more pathetic ones.

Chungking Mansion, I later learned, has become famous as a stopover for migrants of all kinds. One friend called it the most diverse block in Asia, and he could be right. Bangladeshis, Indians, Gambians and Nepalis come here, either looking for a job in Hong Kong or--more likely--getting a Chinese visa.

All in all, it's a very cool place and I met some fascinating people. And it has the best Indian food on this side of Delhi.

Trouble brewing: Part two

2009-01-25T17:22:00.008+08:00

Taikang is an unlikely candidate for "gaige kaifang"-fuelled economic development.

It's a tiny city (about 300,000 urban residents, plus about 1 million rural residents in surrounding Taikang county) in interior Henan province. Most of its residents are farmers, and even in Taikang city most are first-generation city-dwellers, or they still have plots of land just outside of town.

By Chinese standards, it's pretty underdeveloped: The average income is lower, there's little to no local industry, the ginormous-factory count is way down and fewer people make it through high school, let alone to university.

Taikang's brain drain has been its economic saviour: In the past couple of decades, a growing stream of migrants have left the region to work in China's east-coast industrial heartland. The money they send or bring home has powered growth here that has created new businesses, construction, schools and higher wages. In the past decade, the Wu family here has moved from a one-room apartment in the school where both parents worked, to a small flat downtown, to a roomy house in a new part of the city. They have a car.

But things have started to go sour in the past few months. The nong min gong (migrant worker) migration has been reversed as thousands of east-coast factories shut their doors or simply laid off workers. Plummeting demand for Chinese exports has made operating costs untenable.

Almost four million people returned to Henan province in the final months of 2008. Although most of these people would have been home for the New Year anyway and hope to find work in February, many don't know where their next paycheque will come from. If these "peasants," as they're still officially classified, are forced to rely on tiny plots of land as their sole source of income, that's going to take a massive bite out of Taikang's economy.

One man I spoke with has been working in Shanghai's Baoshan district for the past three years. He made 1,000 yuan a month, much of which he sent back to his wife, parents and now-teenaged kids in a tiny village outside Taikang. He was fired in December when the small company cut back in the face of ballooning inventories and evaporating orders. Most single-family wheat farms like his make about 500 yuan a year per mu of land.

He's heading back to Shanghai later in February, hoping to find work. And if he doesn't...

"So, we'll earn less. We'll live on less."

Uh oh.

Taint China's reputation and die

2009-01-22T12:52:00.002+08:00

The verdicts are in: Two men have been sentenced to death for producing melamine, that pesky, poisonous plastic that sickened 300,000 kids, killed six infants and humiliated China shortly after, uh, you know, that big sports thing in August.

40-year-old Zhang Yujun was sentenced to death for running what was allegedly China's largest melamine-producing factory, and Geng Jinping will die for producing and selling toxic food. A third man got a "suspended" death sentence and will likely end up in jail for life.

Tian Wenhua, the Sanlu executive who admitted knowing about the melamine in her company's milk powder at least four months before Sanlu and the government went public, got a life sentence.

Parents of the hundreds of thousands of children who got sick after ingesting the tainted milk aren't satisfied, however. Some are questioning why CCP officials, many of whom would have known about the melamine long before Sanlu's product recall in September, got off so easily.

The important thing, though, is that China can now hold its head high, free of any food-quality scares.

A pedagogical farce

2009-01-20T16:53:00.012+08:00

Okay, so it was a bad idea to begin with.

But I needed money and at the time didn't have plans for January. And maybe I was feeling a little masochistic, or just overestimated my own virtue.

So I agreed to teach English to children in Taizhou, locking myself into eight hours a day of instruction with eight less-than-eager youngsters.

The students were prodigy of Zhejiang's monied--the ambitious and competitive parents in whose minds a fluency in English was essential in getting their children into good high schools, good universities and good careers; in short, they viewed learning English (as well as playing the erhu, excelling at sports and acing math, science, Chinese and calligraphy classes) as essential to success.

The kids, however, weren't quite that keen. They fidgeted. They brought sugar-rich snacks to class, consumed them messily and then tossed the wrappers on the floor. They threw cherries at each other. Once they realized my Mandarin was, uh, pretty basic, they talked amongst themselves constantly (in my--feeble--defence, I could understand most of what they said; it just took me a while).

I also discovered that eight hours a day, seven days a week is a long time to spend learning a language, especially when you're a hyperactive 11-year-old who should be on winter break. Each day felt like a marathon relay race as I bounced from grammar to dialogue to art-project based compositions to outdoor games that had a tenuous connection to English instruction but were necessary in order for us all to maintain our sanity after four hours inside a cold, concrete-walled classroom.

It takes a run-on sentence like that just to begin to convey how wiped and braindead (not to mention pedagogically useless) I felt at the end of every day.

I like to think they learned stuff. I definitely did.

One of the most surprising revelations was just how prudish these kids were. Yes, that's the age where kids tend to giggle over pretty much everything. But for some reason I don't remember throwing a tantrum every time I had to sit next to a boy in class. Honestly.

The best (or worst) was when I and my fellow teacher, who had a class of her own, showed the kids English-language movies with Chinese subtitles to get them used to hearing the language. Their response to both Back to the Future and The Little Mermaid was "Eeewww!" "Too yellow" (yellow--huangse--actually is Chinese slang for "sexually explicit," so you can imagine how much fun they had with "Yellow Submarine") and "Not fit for children!"

Wait, what?

I tried to explain these movies, all rated G, are actually geared towards kids in North America. But they would have none of it.

Their objections were numerous: Michael J. Fox and his girlfriend kiss. So do Ariel and the prince. Scandalous, I know. It's worth noting, however, that they were far more put off by the Sea King's long hair than they were by Ariel's skimpy seashells.

What gives? When I was their age I remember thinking Tom Robbins was dirty, but that was just another reason to read his stuff.

I'm not sure how indicative these privileged youngsters are of the rest of their generation, but if so there are millions of kids growing up with a very old-school perception of gender and sexuality.
I fear for their tender sensibilities when they discover the Internet.

Trouble brewing: Part One

2009-01-17T16:45:00.008+08:00

Taizhou is one of the ugliest cities I have ever had the privilege of encountering.

It hugs China's east coast, a rich, industrial city in rich, industrial Zhejiang province just a few hundred kilometres south of Shanghai.

It's a shining example of what a few decades of madcap economic development can do: Thirty years ago, Taizhou had no natural resources and therefore no industry; it was the second-poorest city in the province.

Now, it's the third-richest--riding on a wave of manufacturing wealth that has populated the city's streets with swanky new Mercedes Benzes and Lamborghinis.

Unfortunately that wealth hasn't convinced the city's monied denizens or its (justifiably) smug government of the need for urban design of any sort.

So the streets go in all directions. Most buildings look new-ish but grimy and relentlessly out of place. The pavement is filthy despite veritable armies of street cleaners.

There are dozens of stores selling safes, fancy bedding and ugly plastic children's toys and few restaurants or grocery stores (okay, that's more a personal beef than an urban flaw, and there are plenty of fruit-and-vegetable vendors in the old part of town. There's also a butcher shop/mini abattoir doing a wicked trade selling pigs' heads for New Year's).

Crappy urban design is the least of Taizhou's worries, however: This city is one of those hit hardest by the jinrong weiji--the economic crisis--that has dealt exporters a death blow. Few retailers in the U.S. are clamouring for the Chinese plastic this city was shipping out, and that has Taizhou's elites freaked right out.

Both local and national governments are hoping they can convince China's growing middle class to pick up the purchasing slack. A year or so ago, this may not have seemed entirely outside the realm of possibility: Chinese consumers were buying cars, phones and pricey appliances in swelling numbers.

But even the most loaded new xiao zi's spending was nowhere near his or her American counterpart's credit-hungry habits at the best of times. Now that the weiji's effects are spreading and people are settling in for a long-term global recession, what was already a culture that encouraged saving has become one that promotes thriftiness more than ever.

One Taizhou resident I spoke with, even as she extolled the economic virtues of her hometown, laughed when I asked if she planned to up spending as per Hu Jintao's exhortations.

"I was supposed to buy a house this year. Now, there's no question."

Uh oh.

SimChina: The game every young autocrat is dying for this Niu Year

2009-01-14T16:47:00.011+08:00

If you're the central government, China is really one big computer game.

It took me a while to come to this conclusion, which is surprising because it's so obvious.

Remember back when SimCity, that choose-your-own-adventure meets urban planning computer game, was popular?

You could spend hours on end building your ideal city, then flip the switch and see what happened when your hapless citizens went along with their daily lives. You could change things and react to crises as they came along. It was the one of the greatest digital power trips a 10-year-old could want.

Click. Eighteen new (and alarmingly empty) skyscrapers in your downtown core!

Click. Bulldoze those houses to make way for a massive stadium shaped like a bird's nest!

Click. A Magnetic Levitation transit line from an airport all the way to the capital of the next province over!

Uh oh, the locals are protesting--do you bring in the riot police or bow to their demands (or, the increasingly popular Option C: Both)?

Starting to sound familiar?

It's widely accepted that a significant part of the credit for China's surreal development over the past 30 years is due to its government's ability to do, um, pretty much whatever it wants. Without pesky elections or political parties to worry about (or at least none of any genuine significance), the government can ensure everything will go according to plan as it blitzes this billion-person country to a global powerhouse and third-largest economy in the world (sucks to be you, Germany).

The catch, of course, is that issuing no-nonsense legislative demands is a lot easier than enacting said edicts when your domain is friggin' enormous and your bureaucracy nowhere near as centralized as you pretend it is. Sure, you can declare that Shaoxing will be the tie capital of the world and Pudong New Area will be divided into four industry-specific economic zones. But it's damn hard to enforce little things like, I dunno, food-safety laws and labour regulations in Dalian, Baoshan and Kashgar--and everywhere in between.

To make things even worse, residents' reactions to your well-meaning clicks are becoming increasingly unpredictable and harder to manage. It's no longer as easy to delete people, or to cut-and-paste them to some more convenient location. And people keep looking over your shoulder, pointing out minor things you really weren't going to bother about or the way you deal with your denizens.

What's a gamer to do?

Hmmmm...

2009-01-11T22:03:00.005+08:00

Somehow I get the feeling this isn't going to go over well among some of these "freed serfs."

It also goes a long way towards explaining why Beijing's talks with the Dalai Lama are such a colossal failure.

Yes, this is a touchy subject for all involved and I have yet to meet a single Chinese person who doesn't whole-heartedly believe Xizang/Tibet is an inalienable part of Zhongguo (I also talked with a Xizangren in the rain outside Shanghai's railway station who thinks Tibet is Chinese--he also thinks Beijing is leaving Tibetans in the lurch, development-wise).

But...really?

Street meat

2009-01-07T02:45:00.002+08:00

One of the first things people say to you when you tell them you're going to China, right after "Don't organize any 'Free Tibet' rallies," is, "Don't eat the street food."

I tend to break that rule a lot.

Yes, selling things streetside without a licence is technically illegal here. Then again, so are copyright infringements, scalped bus tickets and bribery. Not that any of those exist in China, at all.

Yes, none of this stuff is refrigerated and that can't be good for the ol' lower intestine. Then again, I know for a fact the hygeine in most restaurants' kitchens isn't much better and in a way it's comforting to watch things being cooked right in front of me.

Mostly, though, street food is delicious and cheap; it's also a testament to the culinary creativity of people who are pretty shafted in terms of their lifestyles here.

My favourite couple sells malatang outside the Fudan Daxue Bei Men. He's from Xi'an; she's from rural Sichuan. Their eight-year-old daughter, whom they've somehow wrangled a spot at the local public school, skips rope outside with them after school. They make the best numbingly spicy soup on this side of Chengdu. With a steady stream of students flocking to their stall, this is one pair of migrant workers with no plans to return home for lack of work.

OMG, sry we poisoned ur kid. C U L8r!

2009-01-04T19:54:00.006+08:00

I almost wish I had been poisoned with melamine, just so I could have gotten this.

You know a failing company really cares when it sends you a text message, right?

New 'hood

2009-01-01T03:16:00.007+08:00

So I moved a little while ago--from a dorm room in the fishbowl foreign students' residence of a way-off-in-the-boonies campus to a shared apartment in a neighbourhood of Pudong.

Pudong's a weird place. It's the home of Shanghai's signature skyline--think towering phallic skyscrapers and that ugly, bulbous space station, the Dongfang Mingzhu--on the eastern banks of the Huangpu River. It's also home to the Special Economic Zones the city began in the early '90s to launch Shanghai into the market-driven (but still centrally orchestrated) global economy. On its eastern outskirts are communities of migrant workers and other groups relocated when their old downtown houses were bulldozed and modernized.

Like I said--weird.

The neighbourhood I've landed in offers a fascinating glimpse of the bridge between traditional Shanghairen and their emerging upper-middle class.

My apartment complex is home to a mix of young families and old people, with the odd thrifty businessman thrown in. Like traditional Danwei-style "model communities" it's fenced off, has blase security guards at the entrance and--as I learned to my chagrin early one Sunday morning--the main gate locks up between midnight and 6 a.m.

Across the street from my apartment is a big indoor market boasting a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, hunks of tofu, still-flopping fish and enormous slabs of raw meat. The street outside is dominated by tiny stores selling household goods and steamed rolls; a woman sits on the sidewalk every day at her portable sewing machine and seems to be making a killing.

A block in the other direction is a strip of bars, beauty salons and the first veterinary hospital I've seen in this country. The latter, especially, is a sure sign of a population bourgeois and wealthy enough to worry as much about their animal companions' health as they do about their own.

So there's now demand for a snazzy-looking place where the children of the Cultural Revolution can take Fluffy in for her shots.

Mao Zedong would not approve.

A few blocks north, there's a ramshackle grouping of houses under a bridge, with outdoor water taps and low-hanging laundry lines reminiscent of Puxi's shikumen. Except, of course, these dwellings (and in all likelihood their inhabitants, as well) are a little more illegal.

Over that same bridge is the enormous--and, quite frankly, not a little frightening--Lotus department store. It's your typical disorienting, overly huge Wal-Mart type store, designed to house everything you could possibly want arranged in such a way that you won't find it without plowing through several kilometres of shit you'll never need but will likely end up buying anyway just because it's there.

My housemate loves it.

Cop encounters--the safe and legal way

2008-12-31T01:58:00.001+08:00

I spend a lot of my time here avoiding police. Not because I'm actually doing anything illegal (most of the time), but because the Chinese po kind of scare me.

So I wasn't all that keen on the idea when my friend, panicking after her digital camera was stolen, insisted on calling the police.

But what was I going to say? "No, you shouldn't try to find your 3,000-yuan camera because I have an irrational distrust of people in uniform"? So I waited with her at a wet and chilly Chengdu bus stop as we waited for the promised officers to show.

And waited, and waited.

After about half an hour, I asked if realistically the police were going to come. As someone who has phoned 9-1-1 in a panic to report a just-nabbed bicycle, only to be instructed to phone the non-emergency line and fill out some forms, I know how justifiably unwilling Canadian police are to dash, sirens blazing, to the scene of every petty streetside theft. But she was seriously distressed, and convinced the police would come and be on the thief's trail in no time.

Sure enough, they arrived--the two most laid-back cops I have ever encountered. Shoulder badges flashing, they listened to my friend's story, asked her a few questions, and told her there was nothing they could do and she should come to the station to fill out some forms.

She was not impressed.

I, on the other hand, was callously delighted to get a free ride in a Chinese police cruiser, a free tour of the surprisingly small police station and the chance to gaze in almost total incomprehension at detailed incident reports--so liberally stamped with red-ink thumbprints they were almost illegible.

Naturally, our officer duo found me thoroughly amusing, especially when I tried to answer questions in butchered Mandarin. Oh, joy.

Huoche of Fail (or, how not to take a train in China)

2008-12-29T01:43:00.013+08:00

A word of advice: Do not, under any means, buy a "no seat" ticket on a train more than 12 hours in duration. Better yet, make that 10 hours. Sure, it sounds like a good idea at the time: Trains are booked solid for the next 10 days, you've decided you absolutely MUST go to Chengdu this week and honestly, what could be so bad about a mere 31* hours without a seat?

At this point, anyone with an interest in preserving his or her sanity, dignity, back and neck muscles would turn away from the ticket counter and walk away with the 257 yuan firmly in his or her pocket--a little disappointed, but secure in the notion of having spared oneself a couple of days of severe discomfort.

Why didn't I do that?

True, I have little sanity or dignity left to concern myself about preserving. But I do have neck muscles; or, at least, I did before this misguided excursion. It would seem, however, the instinct of self-preservation that would have mentally linked two days standing on a train with physical discomfort required more foresight than I was capable of mastering at the time.

Smooth move.

In my defence, the train should not have been that full: It was a full month before the New Year, when Chinese make the legendary trip home to the interior and the countryside in mind-boggling numbers. Who on earth was heading in such droves to Sichuan from Shanghai now?

I got my answer in Wuxi, a couple of stops outside of Shanghai.

Migrants.

Lots and lots of migrants.

Jobless migrants, whose work in factories, on construction sites and as casual labourers has dried up in the vice-like grip of the notorious jinrong weijin--the economic crisis--that has China and the rest of the world by the balls.

With no work in the industrial or urban areas where they make their living, millions of migrants are heading home to join their families for New Years early. Millions of migrants with no social security who, if there continues to be no work for them come February, will be stuck, in limbo between the rural homes that can't support them and the slumping industrial heartlands that now has no work for them. Millions of migrants who will be desperate, upset and who will have almost nothing whatsoever to lose.

*Cough*"mass incidents"*cough*

They swarmed onto the train in droves, schlepping misshapen tarp, burlap and plastic-y rucksacks they shoved into overstuffed overhead compartments, jostling noisily--and sometimes violently--for space in the crammed hard-seat car. They filled all the seats and then whose were full they filled the aisles and the spaces between the bathroom, the smoking area, the doors and the hot water tanks. They stared at the seat-less waiguoren with a bemused look normally reserved for freaks of nature or aliens from outer space.

Or, in this case, a combination of both.

Waiguoren, for her part, set about engaging in a stilted and awkward conversation. After insulting everyone who could be insulted (hint: "Minggan" means "Sensitive," as in, "That's too sensitive for me to talk about, so back off, jackass"), she discovered the following: The charming folk in her immediate proximity all hailed from Mianyang, Sichuan--one of the cities hit by the killer quake last May (their families were all okay, though--phew). They did "da gong"--part time work, or casual labour--in Wuxi, but now that has dried up, they're headed home for the holidays early. They plan to return to Wuxi after New Years.

And, uh, what happens if there's still no work in February?

Stony silence.

"There will be work."

Hu Jintao had better fucking hope so.

Size matters ... to China

2008-12-28T23:39:00.008+08:00

Tell your friends: China's building the world's biggest radio telescope.

Why is China doing this?

I don't really know. I'm still not quite sure what the practical purpose of China's space mission is, to be honest.

But you can rest assured China's radio telescope is the biggest. The People's Daily says so: It's as large as 40 football fields, 10 times bigger than the current largest one in the United States and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Maybe not that last thing.

In case you haven't noticed, China has size issues.

This seems kind of weird in a country that is not only the largest in the world in terms of square kilometres, but has the largest population. Especially because no one in China is going to let you forget that for a moment.

Almost every single Chinese person I've met begins at least one conversation on the government's less palatable policies with, "Well, China has so many people ...

... it makes democracy unfeasible."

... you can't have individual freedoms."

... the government can't provide for everyone in a timely manner."

Etcetera.

Does this make sense? To a certain degree, yeah: There are 1.4 billion people here, fer chrissake. To cruelly continue to mock a former Canadian federal party leader who really doesn't deserve to be mocked any longer: You think it's easy to run a billion-person country?

Of course it isn't. It's kind of a logistical nightmare, and in one sense that explains the government's addiction to order (it also explains why almost no Chinese person can ever answer a question beginning with, "How many people ... ?").

But by that same token you could also argue that trying to rule a bazillion people with an iron, one-party authoritarian fist really isn't a realistic goal. I think it's also fair to argue that claiming the country's unfit for things like a competitive political system or the protection of individual rights is really selling this population short. If your argument is that democracy or human rights are overrated and China's just smarter than everyone else, okay. I'll buy that as an argument, although I can't say I agree. But as most ostensibly democratic countries have aptly proven on numerous occasions, democracy can be more farcical than effective.

But the people who can master both killer street food and a cutting-edge space program aren't capable of casting a ballot and send some hapless bozos into government?

Umm...really?

Awkwardfest 2008

2008-12-27T22:59:00.013+08:00

I can't figure it out. No matter how annoying, irritating and Hanyu-illiterate a waiguoren I am, people still seem to want me to hang out with them--even to attend family gatherings, where I'm guaranteed to be nothing but a social leech, smiling and nodding and murmuring basic pleasantries before falling mute once again to gaze curiously at the action going on around me.

So far I've had two opportunities to hang out with the Wang family--an incredibly warm and vibrant clan that knows how to throw a good party (even if they do have unfortunately indiscriminate taste in guests).

Aside from my awe at how graciously my gawking presence was tolerated, the great thing about these events was being able to see a tight-knit, deliciously rambunctious family in action. Even though I could rarely comperehend a word that was said by anyone (most of the family speaks either Shanghaihua or Subeihua, the local dialect in northern Jiangsu province, which means I'm even more linguistically challenged than normal), the familial themes were eerily familiar:

Aggravating questions about marriage/jobs/education: Check.

Teasing about age: Check.

Eating off each other's plates: Well, in China this is actually official practice, whereas in my family we're just rude. Check.

Akward family photos: Check.

Even-more-awkward family hugs: Check.

Cousinly banter: Check--right down to the lewd jokes the adults aren't supposed to hear.

Telling embarrassing stories about the 60-year-old birthday boy in front of an audience of hundreds: Check. Except this time, they had a proper mic.

The trip to Gaoyou to be awkward at Joyce's uncle's 60th birthday, however, was a wholly unique experience. No sooner had we arrived in the small northern Jiangsu town than we were whisked from one food-centred birthday event to another--from a dinner in a hotel's enormous banquet hall to do-it-yourself fireworks in an open lot beside someone's apartment. There were so many people in town visiting we spent the night in massage beds at another uncle's spa. That isn't the weirdest place I've ever slept, but it's definitely up there.

I spent the vast majority of my 20-ish hours in the city lurking in corners, watching goings-on with wide eyes and without the foggiest idea what was going on.

High five.

Shanghai nocturne

2008-12-23T06:01:00.006+08:00

You can tell a lot about a city by what happens to it at night.

Does it shrivel up, snail-style, pulling googly antenna eyes with it?

Does it come alive with crowds of partiers who dance until dawn and piss on their neighbours lawns?

Shanghai can't seem to decide.

Of course there are the omnipresent construction sites that never seem to shut down for the night. Most workers camp out on-site and take breaks or naps periodically, but these mazes of cranes and skeleton buildings are lit and crawling with activity when the rest of the city lies dormant. This partly explains both how the city can erect ginormous structures in the space of a few months and why the gaping maw of Shanghai's growth needs all the migrant workers it can get (or at least why it did until the financial crisis came along to cramp its style).

Most useful places (*cough*the public transit system*cough*) close at ridiculously early hours. I learned this the hard way one night, when I was stranded while transferring stations and was forced out of the subway into then-unfamiliar territory in search of a cab driver with a high tolerance for disoriented foreigners. I'm still very bitter about the often puritanical closing hours of necessities like subways, stores and the gates to apartment complexes (no, seriously--whose idea was that?). The message here is very old-school in nature: Why are you up late? You should be sleeping so you can work hard making steel in the morning, dammit.

Because of this deterrent attitude, and because it's so expensive, most locals don't really go out partying very late. Sure, there are plenty of clubs, etcetera, but they cater primarily to expats and a very select group of well-heeled Shanghairen.

But night time is when Shanghai's shikumen and lilongs come alive. These narrow alleyway housing complexes-cum-mini neighbourhoods become outdoor living rooms at night: People wash dishes, bathe, eat and play cards or mah jong in pools of street lights and hanging bulbs, obscured by clouds of steam emanating from vats of noodles or baskets of dumplings. Past 3 a.m., labourers load miscellaneous crates and cardboard boxes on and off of trucks several times too large for the narrow lanes they lumber through.

This is the part of Shanghai I love, which is saying quite a bit because this is a far-from-loveable city (no one I've met so far, save for especially h-core Shanghairen, actually likes this place at all as an urban entity: They're just here for the cash). It makes one feel as though this surreal, space-age money-making cyborg actually has a beating human heart. Even if that human heart smells a little like fermenting garbage and duck carcasses, and although it serves more than anything else as a reminder of the city's income gap is growing as quickly as its economy, it's pretty fun to wander through after hours.

Firewall THIS

2008-12-22T22:56:00.010+08:00

I get this message a lot. Not as often as I would if I did my web-surfing in Hanzi, but frequently enough to have me punching the wall in extremely disharmonious frustration.

That message pops up--along with a maddening, triangular, exclamation-pointed hazard sign--every time I try to load a website that's been ix-nayed by China's "Net Nanny." I imagine this imposing entity personified by a group of censors huddled over fancy, interweb-intercepting computers, analyzing site addresses and page contents and determining whether they're kosher enough to merit a CCP stamp of approval, or if some seemingly arbitrary rubrick has judged them too incendiary for Chinese browsers.

I say "seemingly arbitrary" because I have trouble figuring out what kind of criteria, exactly, are used to figure out what's allowed through and what isn't:

All Wordpress-hosted sites, including the Maclean's website, are blocked. But Blogspot, evidently, is not.

Thankfully for my sanity, globeandmail.com is kosher. So is nytimes.com, apart from a few days ago when it latter was blocked and then mysteriously restored, eliciting some interesting theories as to why it was firewalled in the first place. But articles about the Dalai Lama take a suspiciously long time to load. BBC is fine in English, but not the 中文 version.

I get search results but can't open anything when I Google Tibetan or Uighur independence. Most Tian'anmen "incident" articles open, just fine, but the image results I get are drastically different when I use Google.cn. Having once done an image search on Hu Jintao (don't ask why that was necessary at the time), I found to my consternation none of the photos that showed up would open.

I know, I don't get it, either--his photo's everywhere.

The creepiest thing, though, is that when I Google something problematic, I find other, normally kosher sites--usually those belonging to major news sources--take an awfully long time to load, and my browser's propensity to freeze rises suspiciously.

Weird.

But the Net Nanny's incessant naggings don't render China's active "netizen" community any less powerful. Quite the contrary: The blogging, QQ-ing community is extremely vocal and active--in expressing opinions, co-ordinating charity events and, most notably, in enacting "human-flesh search engines."

Apart from being a really fabulous name for a band, human flesh (renrou) search engines are part of a vigilante, netizen-driven movement that conducts mass witch hunts aimed at exposing and tormenting no-goodniks--anyone from corrupt officials to frauds, kitten-killers and philandering husbands. The alleged perps find their personal information posted online, making them the targets of a shaming campaign that picks up where what it sees as a grossly inadequate (or nonexistent) official justice system leaves off.

Renrou search engines made the news most recently when a website and individual were ordered to pay compensation in China's first online harassment case. If nothing else, the searches' prevalence indicates the profound power the Web offers Chinese citizenry. In a way it justifies Beijing's censorship-inducing paranoia. But it also makes it patently obvious that censorship is fighting a losing battle to keep mainland China in a harmonious, ignorant bubble.

Silk and stone

2008-12-13T21:28:00.012+08:00

In our latest travel excursion en masse (Attack of the Waiguoren III: Foreigners Strike Back!), we went to Suzhou for the day.

Although the eight-million-person city is dwarfed by nearby Shanghai, until about 150 years ago it was actually far more politically and economically important. It was home to a massively lucrative silk industry--the products of whose well-fed worms fuelled the legendary Silk Road-- and its myriad canals earned it international cred as the "Venice of the East."

The burgeoning silk industry still churns out pretty, pricey fabrics for lovers of swanky ties and scarves the world over, although via more expedient and less romantic route. The canals are still there, faithful to their Italian counterparts by being mostly filled with garbage and sewage.

But the city's gardens were the best part of our hurried tour: They boast grotto-like rockeries built to amuse wealthy officials and intellectuals, and enough trees and greenery to feel almost wilderness-y. It was a welcome change.

Suzhou's museum, designed by hometown hero I.M. Pei, is a beautiful complex housing a collection of incredibly well-preserved local artifacts. It was the best example I've seen so far of historical preservation that neither bulldozed nor Disneyfied (for lack of a better term) the so-called history it was preserving. It's probably just my Eurocentric curatorial bias coming into play, but I'm a sucker for artifacts in warmly lit, thematic/chronological rooms with little explanatory blurbs.

*Cough*loser.

The best part, though--aside from following a trio of 60-something Suzhouren who peered in unison at each glassed-off utensil, debating animatedly--was an exhibit of gorgeous, vivid lithographs by Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki. Zao worked in France during the mid-20th century, collaborating with the likes of Francois Cheng and Ezra Pound. To see the exhibit in Pei's building was pretty sweet.

Across the lane from that testament to modern Chinese artistic genius was the preserved headquarters of the Taiping Rebellion--a nineteenth-century uprising spearheaded by someone who thought he was Jesus's brother, and since recruited by the CCP as a shining example of peasants' resistance to imperialism.

The contrast in that 15 metres was striking, to say the least.

Well, that clears that up, then

2008-12-13T21:02:00.004+08:00

A China Central Television reporter was arrested for allegedly accepting a bribe from the relative of a man she wrote an article about (the businessman, according to her article, had been unfairly prosecuted by a local official). Her story took a turn for the absurd when her lawyer argued the man who gave her the 200,000-RMB (about $36,000 CDN) car is actually her boyfriend--his brother just happens to be the businessman in question.

"The corruption charge is nothing but revenge," the woman's lawyer was quoted as saying in a China Daily article. He added that, "As the brother is courting Li, it is normal for her to accept the present."

Um, ok. Well case closed, then. Move along; no guanxi-related conflict of interest, here.

I'm not sure what pisses me off more: The blow this deals to the already abysmal credibility journalists have in this country, or the fact that prosecuting officials " gained entry to [the journalist's] flat by claiming to check for a floor leak."

Dammit. Makes you miss the usual perfunctory corruption witch-hunts going on hereabouts.

(One issue a politics professor inscrutably interviewed touches on is whether China needs specific laws relating to journalists and the press. I have no idea what those would look like in a place where reporting anything that could "embarrass" China or the government is still a big no-no, but it would be fascinating to find out.)

Fengjing (or, how to turn a Shanghai suburb into a tourist destination, in five easy steps)

2008-12-12T06:00:00.000+08:00

1) Prettify your scenery. Tourists are suckers for canals and quaint little houses.

2) Narrow your streets, and repave 'em with "traditional" paving stones.

3) Make sure all the garbage and crap is kept safely on the non-touristy side of the old city.

4) Banners outside souvenir shops add a festive and colourful touch...

...especially when they remind residents that economic development is always paramount.

5) When in doubt, a little subtle messaging is always a good idea.

(okay, friendly locals are a pretty awesome bonus)

Hilarity ensues

2008-12-02T12:04:00.008+08:00

Yes, China's main news service really does care that Canada's opposition parties plan to topple the government. I hope everyone in Ottawa feels extra special right now.

But I get the feeling the Chinese students here think Canada's having a massive coup. It's probably just my abysmal Mandarin, but you would be surprised how challenging it is to translate, "See, the opposition parties want to take down the government and form their own coalition..."

Daytime television, Chinese-style

2008-11-28T11:56:00.013+08:00

The other day we got second-row seats to witness the bizarre, saccharine fantasyland that is the Chinese charity talk show.

We were allowed to watch the pre-taping of a show set to air around New Years on the English-language International Channel Shanghai. The show profiled a Pudong migrant children's school's English-language program and the corporate volunteers doing the teaching. It was an orgy of tut-tutting, back-patting and self-righteous cooing. It was a painful and fascinating spectacle to watch.

The show started out credibly enough. The host began with interviews with politicians, educators and academics about education for the children of Shanghai's migrant workers, who consistently fall through the cracks in the state's ostensible nine years of compulsory public education. They chatted and passed around softball questions and answers about what a terrible situation it is, how all levels of government are doing all they can and how great it is that there are volunteers and private organizations more than happy to pick up the slack.

The second round of interviews was with people from the private organizations co-ordinating and supplying the volunteers doing the teaching. This is where a lot of the back-patting came in, as the head honcho of this one company waxed lyrical about making the world a better place by bringing English to the masses.

Mmmkay.

These interview sessions were interspersed with videos of lucky migrant children in these underfunded, resource-poor schools, with perky Anglophone volunteers talking about how great it is to work with kids who're trained to behave in class and respond in unison.

The most excruciatingly cringe-inducing block, however, came when a sister and brother were led in front of the cameras, along with their mother, as the host posed condescending questions about their sick father and their New Year's wishes. All three hapless individuals were brought to tears when the children were asked about their dreams--to become doctors and help their dad, who has had two strokes and can't work or even leave the house.

The whole thing felt like an eerie cross between The Maury Show and World Vision commercials. Icky, syrupy and insincere in its hypersincerity.

But the kids got complimentary sweat bands at the end...so that makes it all better, right?

You can't have your sexism and eat it, too

2008-11-26T09:48:00.004+08:00

Pity Chinese men: They're set on marrying women they consider their intellectual inferiors (there's actually an awful saying here--"There are three kinds of people in China--men, women and women with PhDs)", but thanks to decades of female infanticide and sex-based selective abortions, the male:female ratio here is an astounding 119.25 men for every 100 women. By 2025, there are going to be 30 million more Chinese men between the ages of 25 and 40 than women in that same group. Marriage-market beggars, one would surmise, can't be choosers.

I was laughing at this absurdity in class when I realized I was laughing at a potentially devastating demographic time bomb. And am actually a terrible person.

'Scuse me, I'm looking for this really big wall...

2008-11-25T06:16:00.013+08:00

Beijing's one of those hilarious cities with countless, fascinating layers of history that have been systematically razed to the ground by centuries of conquering regimes, only to have its latest leaders realize, a couple of decades ago, "Oh crap, guys--we need something to show the tourists."

As a result, you can check out ancient, culturally rich places like the Forbidden City, the Drum Tower and a dizzying array of temples to marvel at the brightly coloured, meticulously restored architecture and the total lack of anything actually all that, um, old.

All these places have been plundered by previous generations, including in some cases the predecessors of those who've gone to incredible lengths to restore and prettify 'em for the hordes of tourists that flock to their doorsteps. 非常有意思。

The Forbidden City is a really good example of this. I'm not sure if it's Beijing's most oft-visited landmark, but it certainly feels that way as you push your way through hordes of crowds to get a glimpse of the various freshly painted buildings that, captions assure, once housed the emperor and his kitchen, harem, temple and courtiers in the verboten heart of the Chinese empire. There are precious few original artefacts from any of these sanctums, however; many were destroyed in a fire in the early 20th century and others were taken by the Guomindang on the party's way to Taiwan in 1949; others just weren't preserved after the Qing fell. But the buildings are purty.

One intruiging thing about the sightseeing hordes, though, is that the majority (or at least the plurality) of them are Chinese who've made the trek out from other provinces to ooh and ahh at these national icons and wait in line for hours to put a rose near Mao Zedong's meticulously preserved corpse. While they're posing in front of various landmarks, they also snap photos of the exotic foreigners wandering around.

My first attempt to check out Tian'anmen Square proved a total failure--the biggest "public square" in the world is closed from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. When it is open, the crowds who flock to wander its concrete pavestones and pose for photos in front of the ginormous Mao Zedong portrait across the street hanging from the Tian'an Men have to pass first through a security checkpoint, complete with an X-ray machine and stern, uniformed guards posted at each of the square's intersections. I saw several military patrols, decked out in green fatigues, marching to and from the area.

Tian'anmen Square was built originally to convey a sense of the Communist Party's enormity. It succeeds, but perhaps not in the way Mao intended.

Equally cool and much more intimate are the city's hutongs--narrow alleyways lined by small grey brick houses that date to the Mongol period (many of the ones still standing have been restored so the tuk-tuk drivers can tour hapless foreigners around them). I met a family from Shanxi province that came to Beijing to run a noodle shop. Of course they miss their home province, they said. But leave the capital? Not a chance.

Most of the city's migrants, however, still haven't returned since they were cleared out before the Olympics. The ubiquitous banners, buildings and security overkill remain as a visible legacy to the games. For all the ads plastered around this city, you'd think the Olympics were still going on. Except, of course, for the glut of cars zipping through the downtown core. No more even-odd switching for jet-setting Beijingren.

I didn't expect the Great Wall to be a highlight. The name itself is so oft-repeated by tourists and would-be tourists that it has passed almost beyond cliche into the realm of larger-than-life mythology.

But we decided that even if we gave in to the myth and made the trek out to the country's most famed tourist attraction, we were going to go in through the back door. We caught a public bus out to the Beijing suburb of Miyun, knowing nothing except that this city was close(ish) to a less-traversed part of the wall. It didn't take us long to find a local only too eager to drive us to Simatai--for an exorbitant fee--and we were barrelling down a narrow road through small villages and the odd cringe-inducingly out of place tourist resort. Simatai itself boasted the same arresting conrast: About a dozen tiny concrete and brick houses, a resort, a youth hostel and a flurry of souvenir stands.

The wall doesn't look real from the bottom of the rolling hill on which it's perched. But in the thin air following the trek up, its sinuous enormity is mind-boggling. It's hard to imagine an emperor crazy enough to press millions of his citizens into forced labour as they killed themselves building a really big freakin' wall.

It's also hard to imagine this being the best possible way to defend a massive territory from myriad threatening, spear-wielding forces. If I were a Mongol warrior (as obviously I often imagine myself to be), I'm pretty sure the wall would be more of a psychological barrier than anything else--daunting, and peopled by guards in those kick-ass stone watchtowers, but scaleable.

But really, if the Mongols wanted to save time, they could have just bought Tilley hats, walking sticks and disposable cameras and pretended to be tourists.

You say you want a revolution...

2008-11-22T19:24:00.008+08:00

It reads a little like a Chinese version of Germinale.

Last week, dozens of Dongjiang residents took to the streets to protest a government resettlement plan. They trashed public buildings in the tiny village in Gansu--one of the country's poorest provinces--and more than 70 people were injured in the ensuing melee. Thirty protesters were arrested.

No biggie, on the surface. But it's a telling sign of how Chinese people are changing the way they interact with their government and shape public policy. Increasingly, people who have for hundreds of years been acculturated to obey authority and respect societal hierarchies--and who for the past 60 years have been taught that any opposition to the Party line would earn them a one-way ticket to prison, if they were lucky--are getting together and making trouble when they're upset.

The Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 "mass incidents" in 2005, up 6.6 per cent from 2004 and 50 per cent from 2003. And despite their disruption of the government's desire for societal harmony, these incidents seem to be working.

Last year thousands of residents in Xiamen, a southern city in Fujian province, protested the construction of a chemical plant near their homes. After several public demonstrations organized online and through text-messages, the government agreed to relocate the plant.

In Shanghai, middle-class residents have been vocal in their opposition to the local Maglev--a high-speed commuter monorail--being expanded through their neighbourhoods. Although the city still plans to use the Maglev to connect Shanghai's Pudong Airport on the eastern edge of the city with Hongqiao Airport to the far west, it appears they'll have to try to find a compromise with the people over whose houses it's supposed to run.

Last week's protest was much more violent: According to official reports, protesters attacked police with iron rods, chains, axes and hoes; they threw stones, bricks and flower pots--everything, in other words, but the proverbial kitchen sink. Was this increased hostility and violence due to these residents' anger and desperation? Did they lack more sophisticated modes of protest, such as financial clout or Internet access? I don't know. Perhaps their fear of government repression of active opposition was overridden by their desire to vent.

Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the Chinese government responds to these increasingly vocal protests as more of them occur. One notable change is the way the government controls information surrounding these events. I read about this on Xinhua, the day the protest occurred. That's crazy: Whereas previously the strategy was to prevent as much information dissemination as possible--as late as 2005, news sources weren't even allowed to report the death toll from natural disasters--now Beijing is not only permitting (albeit often limited) reportage, it's doing its own news-breaking. The International Herald Tribune has an interesting piece on this. The main reasoning behind the increased press freedom seems to be pragmatic: It's easier to control the message when there is a clear message, as opposed to a sea of rumours surrounding a clammed-up government and state media source. This was evident following the Sichuan earthquake last spring, when the government allowed state and foreign media sources unprecedented access. Of course, that changed when people started reporting the deplorable state of schools that crumbled to the ground while neighbouring buildings survived.

So, okay: What was once a micromanaging, paranoid and close-lipped administration is now a micromanaging, paranoid and (mostly) forthcoming administration. But I would take the latter over the former, any day.

Is this a step towards a freer press and the right to protest, or even a quasi-legitimate public say in government machinations? No idea--我不知道。But the "100 Flowers Campaign" it ain't. And I bet Emile Zola would be pumped.

Oh baby, the socialist realism

2008-11-20T17:14:00.014+08:00

On a whim we went to Nanjing on our way back. Naturally, this involved a detour through Bengbu, which is apparently the Las Vegas of Anhui: Within three blocks of the train station we encountered half a dozen glitzy hotels with neon hearts encircling their doorways and filtering through acres of gauze and other kitschy wedding paraphernalia. Weird.

But we met a group of Qi Gong practitioners marching in a public square. For reasons I still don't undersand they were delighted to see us and sorely disappointed when we wouldn't let them massage our kidneys. One man had a photo of himself and Vladimir Putin in his robe pocket; he was very pleased when we recognized the former KGB dude.

In total we had about 20 hours in Nanjing. It's a lovely city--smaller and more comfortable in its own skin than Shanghai, it feels more like a city you would live in rather than a city you would develop at a breakneck pace in order to do business in. Of course there are soaring skyscrapers and construction sites galore; but there are more small neighbourhoods and, of course, oodles more historical sites.

The former capital of the Ming dynasty and the Guomindang has been transformed into a hub of CCP nationalist iconography. Our first stop, the memorial museum of the Rape of Nanjing, was (just our luck) closed. But the arresting sculptures outside, which depicted victims of the 1937 massacre by invading Japanese troops, were beautiful and harrowing in and of themselves and made clear just how tender this wound still is. It doesn't take a psychological mastermind to figure out that a lot of Chinese people just don't like the idea of Japan (especially because Japan has never been all that eager to own up to some of its less-than-honourable actions during the Second World War). I'm still confused as to how this translates into business transactions; I'm pretty sure it doesn't.

In the south of the city, the memorial to CCP martyrs slain in the Guomindang's purges brings out more traditional socialist realism. The sprawling park is chock-a-block with granite sculptures and friezes depicting stoic citizens with--literally--chiselled abs, gazing in equally stoic adoration at Marx who, of course, is the sun. Hordes of Chinese tourists thronged to have their photos taken posing beside an enormous phallic memorial and stone slabs engraved with the national anthem.

In a small restaurant a few blocks away from the suffocatingly touristy Confucius Temple, we tried to eavesdrop on a heated debate between blinged-out older men--heavily ringed fingers madly gesticulating as they downed one bottle of Tsing Tao after another. Apart from references to the economy and, at one especially tense point in the conversation, Mao Zedong, we had no idea what they were saying. But they seemed to like us: They kept nodding in our direction, and one of them decided what we really needed was some of the cigarettes the half-dozen of them were chainsmoking like it was going outta style (which, in China, it isn't). So the man sitting nearest to me began chucking cigarettes at us. It was a friendly if disconcerting gesture. We bought them a couple bottles of beer before we made our exit into the blinding, bustling Nanjing sunshine.

I never ended up smoking the cigarettes; I get enough tar from the second-hand smoke that pervades just about every public space here. Carcinolicious.

Waiguoren run amok

2008-11-17T20:52:00.015+08:00

It was pitch dark when we arrived. At 5:30 a.m. dawn hadn't yet begun to crack in Hefei, and the murky black added to our disorientation as we staggered out of the train station.

Gloria and I made the short journey to the capital of Anhui province hoping to get a glimpse of the China you rarely see from the uber-urban confines of Shanghai--the rural areas that, according to official Chinese government statistics, still house about 60 per cent of the country's population.

Of course, in China things don't really work like that. A huge number of the millions of people currently classified as "peasants" under China's demographic system are migrant workers, many of whom have moved numerous times to various better-developed urban areas where they can earn a much better living working in masochistic conditions for well under the official minimum wage. In doing this, they studiously ignore the hukou system designed precisely to keep them in the countryside, growing cheap produce to feed the industrial workforce. Lacking hukou, they aren't supposed to get any social services in the cities where they live, but an astounding feat of wilful blindness and double-think on the Party's part has given rise to a raft of parallel services--many of them government-sanctioned. Don't ask me why this makes sense.

The plurality of Shanghai's "floating population" hails from Anhui. We wanted to see what they were leaving behind.

We also didn't have any game plan whatsoever. Nor, we discovered as we staggered in drunken fatigue around the square outside the train station, could we buy a Pinyin-equipped map.

But like the good weiguoren we were, we agonized over the miniscule characters on our overpriced, Chinese-only city plan and wandered early-morning Hefei. The provincial capital, population 1.5 million, is a small city by Chinese standards. It's in the throes of a major residential construction boom, if the ubiquitous billboards promising a joyous, harmonious lifestyle to anyong who buys a luxury apartment are anything to go by. Hu Jintao's an Anhui native, and one of the perks of having the country's president hail from your province is the coincidental flood of infrastructure cash you get. Score.

But most of Hefei, if you avoid the KFC-laden downtown core, still feels like an intimate, small-scale municipality. We watched, and were sorely tempted to join, hundreds of people practicing Tai Chi and dancing in a big public park. Many of the apartment complexes we passed had community gardens or plants sprouting from tiny boxes on balconies or windowsills. We spent hours getting lost in the city's back alleys.

Accompanied by a trio of locals foolhardy enough to offer to show us around, we bused to a remote suburb that was once farmland and is now in some weird rural-urban twilight zone where spanking new apartment buildings abut small, single-family fields of peppers, cabbage and carrots. A gleaming college campus looms in the background. But there's still plenty of mud.

The next day we headed by to a small town chosen randomly on our Chinese-only map. We spent most of the bus ride entertaining a shocked and terrified toddler who kept peering at us, wide-eyed, over his dad's shoulder. Seriously, I need to start charging for this.

The road to Fengyang plows through tiny villages doused in fall leaves, passing low brick-and-concrete houses, tiny plots of land and yards hanging with Hello Kitty- and Kappa-emblazoned laundry. Fengyang itself resembles a weird cross between the wide boulevards and raw construction of a nineteenth-century North American frontier town and the sun-soaked, vine-laden back alleys of a tuscan village. But with a big, pagoda-topped gate on the old stone city wall, which is now smack in the middle of fast-food places and a store with a window full of shiny white sit-down toilets. I'm not entirely sure where the market is for that here.

The weiguoren may as well have dropped in from outer space. Everyone who saw us wore the same expression: "What the hell do you think you're doing here?" When we meandered out of town and into a series of fields of harvested bamboo--now blackened after the leftover stalks were burned, and cold in the evening chill--the people we ran into didn't seem to know whether to look suspicious or incredulous.

This was most hilarious when we tried to get something to eat. Famished, we stepped inside a place that looked like a restaurant (no, I still don't know the character for "restaurant," although I can read with alacrity such characters as "careful," "longevity noodles" and "apple that tastes like a banana").

"Um, 我们可以吃饭这里吗?"

Can we eat here?

Next thing we knew we were surrounded by shelves of vegetables and raw meat, clumsily trying to order before being ushered into a windowless white room that barely fit the single, huge round table it housed. We sat there smiling awkwardly, making heinous grammatical errors in an attempt at conversation as the proprietary family, plus neighbours who dropped in for a chat and some cha, gawped.

The food was delicious.

Power and palpitations from the People's Bank

2008-11-08T21:35:00.011+08:00

Do you need $18 billion?

Do you live in the People's Republic of China, and preferably are in a position to undertake a massive, capital-intensive infrastructure project?

If you answered affirmatively to both these questions, best get in line: That's the imperial sum the Chinese government is prepared to dole out by year's end. That $18 billion is only the first batch out of an enormous stimulus plan--China's biggest, ever--that will dole out a lump sum of 4 trillion RMB ($586-million USD) over the next two years.

Where will all those wads of yuan go? That's still kind of vague: Beijing has made references to addressing the post-quake devastation in Sichuan province, low-income housing, electricity, water, rural infrastructure, environmental protection and technological innovation--the kind of keywords most governments like to toss around in official statements. But it isn't clear how much of this will be direct government-to-project spending, and how much will be channelled through largely nationalized banks and lending institutions.

Either way, the idea is this cash will jump-start not only China's slowing powerhouse economy, but also give the global economy a kick in the pants as one country after another (sorry, Japan) slips into recession.

Or, at least, that's what Hu Jintao and just about every finance minister in the world is hoping.

The announcement came at a pretty fateful moment, as leaders of the Group of 20 met in Brazil to commiserate and try to hash a way out of this global economic mess. The only thing summit made patently clear, however, was that the so-called "developing" economies at the table--notably the swiftly growing BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China)--want a hand in drafting a rescue plan. They all more or less agree with Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's statement that the financial crisis "originated in the advanced countries." Damned if these states are going to return to the sidelines, awaiting whatever sadistically termed medical-sounding procedure the IMF proscribes for their ailing economies (Lobotomy? Enema? Or just shock therapy, part II?). They want a sizable say in whatever goes on from here on in, and they know they have the power to demand it.

The major G7 powers know it, too: IMF head honcho Dominique Strauss-Kahn admitted the international body needs to protect growth in developing countries, because it's likely the only economic growth the globe is going to see for the next little while.

At least in China's case, though, that upward movement isn't nearly enough. The Red Machine's economy was surging more than 10 per cent in the first couple of quarters of this year, compared to 2007; now that's brushing dangerously close the magic eight per cent growth analysts say China's economy needs to sustain just to keep its mammoth population employed.

People here are freaking out, in a calm kind of way. A student I met on a train was counting on his internship with Bosch turning into a full-time gig; now that Bosch has trashed its plans to hire more employees in its Nanjing office, he's panicking. And he's not alone: A guidance counsellor and PhD student here at Fudan says the students she's seeing are growing increasingly desperate because there simply aren't any job openings. Add to that the thousands laid off as more than half the country's toy stores closed this fall and you have a lot of panicked people; so much for a harmonious society.

As demand for Chinese goods drops globally, everyone's hoping Chinese consumers will pull through and make up for the drop in purchasing elsewhere.

It sounds like a good idea given the rise, over the past few years, in demand for such higher-end consumer goods as cars and cell phones. But China's large industrial output (which is still way less, proportionately, than it was in 1800) belies its small per capita income--most people don't have the extra cash they would need to consume like Americans. Old habits die hard for millions of people raised under the Great Leap Forward, whose primary aim was to keep consumption as low as humanly possible (often fatally lower) while focusing on heavy industry. Now, Chinese people are statistically more likely to save, and to save more, than their North American counterparts. That's probably a good trait to have, except when you need a ginormous spending spree just to keep the financial world turning on its axis.

Perhaps at least a few million of that 4 trillion kwai would be best spent on posters: "Support a harmonious Chinese society: Buy more stuff!"

Yes, America can (but does China care?)

2008-11-05T23:40:00.010+08:00

I spent this morning in an overcrowded, overpriced, smoke-filled pub--the kind of expat hangout that caters to foreigners who would prefer to spend their time in China pretending they're at home in Philadelphia/Leeds/Toronto/Adelaide. Under normal circumstances I wouldn't be caught dead in one of those places.

But this morning's events were certainly not normal circumstances.

By 8 a.m. the three-story pseudo-pub was packed to bursting with Americans, almost all of them sporting Obama/噢巴马 '08 T-shirts, posters and other sundry paraphernalia. They sat and stood, eyeballs glued to the flatscreen televisions on every wall of the joint, and launched into raucous, morning booze-fuelled shouts at every CNN PROJECTION that flashed across the screens (The Virginia table practically burst into hysterics when the state was called--it was kind of alarming).

When the race was called just after West-Coast polls closed, the building went berserk: Businesspeople, tourists and expats cheered and hugged and applauded the TV screens. The exuberance was palpable.

But outside "Malone's American grill," the real world was more or less unmoved. Apart from a handful of fist-pumping foreign students on campus, no one seemed terribly interested to know the United States had just made its most cataclysmic and exciting political decision in a helluva long time; certainly one of the mosy symbolically progressive steps since Brown v. Board of Education (which, hold on a sec--was just 54 years ago. Holy crap. No, seriously. Incredible).

Which kind of makes sense. About half the people asked what candidate they prefer in a poll by Beijing-based Horizon said they hadn't been following closely enough or didn't care; whoever's elected, for a lot of Chinese people the United States will still be a superpower to be feared, emulated, grudgingly admired and regarded with suspicion.

That, or people just find it hard to get worked up about elections in a place where the only votes that occur are foregone conclusions--choices between equally unknown candidates where the winner is guaranteed to be a Party member.

As usual, the blogosphere is way more opinionated. This blog seems to sum up the general feeling pretty well: Cool guy; seems to like Asia; also seems to inclined to protect America from aggressive, cheap (Chinese) exports and may try to bully China into doing things it doesn't want to do--like float the RMB and impose stricter labour or environmental regulations.

This one, written before the election, seems more inclined to suggest Obama's talking a lot tougher than he'll be able to act once he's actually in power and attempting to steer the good ship U.S.A out of the shoals of a global economic crisis and into more friendly, less crappy metaphor-laden waters.

At the very least, the demand for those ubiquitous political posters, T-shirts, buttons and wristbands (cause if there's one thing you need, it's another cause-declaring rubber bracelet) should boost their U.S. manufacturers just a little. Unless of course all that swag is actually made in China.

Melamine alert: Fishy.

2008-10-30T19:04:00.011+08:00

In case you were wondering, the plastic-y contaminant hasn't gone away. Although candy lovers can take heart knowing that White Rabbit is back on the shelves (along with signs that say something to the effect of "Now melamine-free, we swear!"), four Chinese egg brands have been found contaminated with the chemical, and Shanghai is inspecting fish feed at 10 local plants. The addition of melamine to animal feed has been a common practice and an "open secret" across China for years, an anonymous insider was quoted as saying in the Nanfang Daily, Xinhua News Service and, tellingly, the CPP's mouthpiece of choice, The People's Daily (tellingly because this is the same news source that disarmingly reported THE NEW MILK IS TOTALLY OKAY, GUYS--NOTHING TO SEE HERE. So if they're reporting bad news...the news is pretty bad).

The government has put new regulations in place officially limiting the amount of melamine allowed in food products and is promising better inspections and tougher penalties. But the emerging cases of contamination demonstrate both how widespread melamine's use has been as a false protein booster, and how deep the cover-up got. Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group, the country's leading egg processor and one of the four with melamine in its eggs, has said it was alerted to the melamine contamination Sept. 27--almost a month before it went public with the problem. It appears both the Chinese government and the dairy companies themselves were aware of the milk-powder contamination months before the products were recalled in early September.

Not exactly reassuring news if you're buying, well, just about anything edible that could maybe contain something from China.

One interesting result of the whole melamine scandal, though, is that at least two private lawsuits have come out of it. This wouldn't seem strange in almost any other country, but civil suits are extremely rare here. Thanks both to a capricious court system--put it this way: It makes George W. Bush's judicial appointments look like a hands-off approach--and low levels of consumer activism and outrage, you just don't see people turning around to sue the company that sold them a faulty stereo/car/bicycle/non-earthquake-proof school for their kids.

Or at least, you didn't.

But two lawsuits have emerged from the fallout of the melamine scandal: One involves parents from Guangdong whose 11-month-old son who developed kidney stones after drinking Sanlu's milk--they're claiming $132,000 in compensation from the dairy company; the other was launched by parents from Henan, suing Sanlu for $22,000 after their 14-month-old son got kidney stones. Lawyers involved in both cases have complained of government pressure to withdraw the suits, and as far as I can tell it still isn't clear if the regional courts will allow the cases to go through. If they do, however, that's pretty huge: It will mean not only that the widespread contamination scandal has touched a raw enough nerve that people are acting on their anger; it also means they feel empowered enough--and have enough confidence in the court system--to act on it through legal challenges.

(Conversely, several families, apparently equally outraged but with less faith in China's tolerance for lawsuits, are bringing their case to the United States: Qingdao Shengyuan Milk Co. Ltd., a Qingdao-based company whose products were found to contain melamine, has a subsidiary in Delaware, and the families have gotten themselves a Maryland lawyer to help them pursue the case. Interesting. And legalistically convoluted.)

In the meantime, I'm going to hope my kidneys have a reeeeaaallllly high plastic tolerance.

Congratulations, Leslie Feist

2008-10-28T21:17:00.011+08:00

I heard your (once beautifully whimsical, now aggravatingly associated with iPods) counting song emanating from a closet-sized electronics store in Wujiaochang this evening.

It was a lovely bit of nostalgia; the only other Canadian music I've heard here is Celine Dion blasting from a Papa John's. Western culture exported at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

Urban jungle and green-space oases

2008-10-25T10:01:00.018+08:00

For a 20 million-person metropolis that throws around new skyscrapers the way Israeli politicians throw around petulant ultimata, Shanghai has some pretty sweet green spaces.

In aggregate they make up an odd assortment of traditional Chinese gardens (mostly renovated, originally imperial-style but now tourist-style); colonial gardens built by the European powers that lorded it over Shanghai during the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and new, sterile-looking modern gardens, with lots of stone slabs and oddly placed neon things.

But the coolest park in the city, at least by people-watching standards, is Fuxing Park. You really wouldn't think it would be all that pleasant: The place was designed by the French when they ruled the roost in the French Concession, and it looks a lot like the Jardin de Luxembourg--right down to that tiered, round fountain. Very weird.

But in the intervening 160(ish) years it has been reclaimed by locals.

On a weekend afternoon it's swarming with Shanghainese gambling loudly, practicing Tai Chi or ballroom dancing and inscrutably fishing for goldfish they buy from a stand beside the pond (I swear, I'm not making this up). Children rollerblade around the water fountain with a reckless abandon that would make Haussmann apoplectic.

Love it--我爱这个.

What's most fascinating about parks in Shanghai, though, is their anomalously cultivated nature: These manicured lawns, meticulously placed rock sculptures surrounding fake-as-you-can-get fishponds overlooked by park benches, are weird oases of calm in a frantic urban jungle. The wild stuff is skyscraper city--undulating glass and oddly angular concrete structures, contrasted with the tame public parks.

For a Canuck raised in a place where "the wild" was enormous conifers and crashing surf, that's a pretty drastic reversal.

Weird. But very cool.

'Wipe out reactionaries thoroughly and completely!'

2008-10-20T14:16:00.018+08:00

It seems fitting that Shanghai's Propaganda Poster Museum is the city's least publicized, hardest-to-find tourist destination.

The three adjoining rooms, plus a tiny gift shop, are down a grey hall at the bottom of a bare set of stairs in the basement of an apartment building--one of four nondescript brick structures in a complex just off Huasheng Lu, a street on the edge of the French Concession.

The place is run by an enthusiastic, bespectacled man who claims the hundred-odd posters constitute the largest collection of their kind in China. It took him 14 years to amass his impressive array of luridly colourful testaments to 30 years of the Chinese Communist Party's propaganda campaign, and he's visibly proud of the exhibits. (For those into propaganda-related memorabilia, he also has old-school, ultra-rare magazines from North Korea. I confess I have as intense a yellowing-newsprint fetish as the next journo-nerd. But the prices were too steep for my kwai-thirsty pockets, and I stocked up on postcards instead.)

The posters on display range chronologically from 1949, when a flushed-with-success Red Army declared a new, utopian era in Chinese history, to 1979, when Mao's successor Hua Guofeng was trying to make himself the focal point in new, equally adulatory "big character" posters (the result is far less impressive). The trail ends there, when Deng Xiaoping ended the big character craze shortly after coming to power. The vast majority of the posters were totally destroyed after that--kind of embarrassing for a country in the process of opening to have hard-core Cultural Revolution, kill-the-rightists-and-American-imperialists posters kicking around, they figured.

The harsh anti-rightist and anti-U.S. invective was impressive, and kind of scary: The grasping, hook-nosed (come on, was that touch really necessary?) Americans look positively alien with their claws, scales and sometimes green-tinged skin. Many sport bloody bandages--from wounds obviously inflicted by the strapping, clean-cut Communist workers, parading across the poster armed with shovels and a look of determination. It's clear these patriots are going to boost the country's iron production or die trying. In most cases it was the latter--one minor flaw in that otherwise brilliant plan is that people can't eat iron.

In some ways, though, the less hard-core posters are a little like zealous public service announcements: Carry out family planning and birth control for the revolution!

The most fascinating are the posters that illustrate Party infighting--several called for the execution of Deng Xiaoping (you know, the guy who took over after Mao and is almost as big a name as the Great Leader himself) as part of the power struggle after Mao's death. 'Cause he was a rightist and counter-revolutionary, right?

It almost makes Canada's Liberal leadership race seem civil in comparison.

(Apology/disclaimer: I wasn't supposed to take photos and the posters were all under gross reflective glass, so these are all really crappy.)

The (propaganda) play's the thing

2008-10-20T09:27:00.003+08:00

At my last pedagogically questionable excursion to Weiliao Xiaoxue, after a rollicking session of English-language introductions with threescore Grade Twos

("What's your name?"

"What's your name?"

"No, no--Zhe yiwei, 'Ni jiao shenme mingze?' 'Wo jiao ... shenme, shenme, shenme.' Nimen shuo, 'My name is ... shenme, shemne, shenme.' Hao bu hao?"

"Hao!"

"OK. What's...your...name?"

"What's...your...name?"

"Crap.")

we moved on to the nine- and 10-year-old English interest group, where the previous week the students had voted to perform Cinderella. I had dutifully put together a qualitatively questionable script that tried to be both interesting and easy to learn, and mostly failed on both counts. Then before our session the laoshi approached us, looking concerned. The students were supposed to perform the play at a Christmas-y winter celebration sponsored by foreigners (no, none of these kids are Christian. But the foreigners are. Please don't ask me why that makes sense). The theme was environmental protection. Could we incorporate that into the play?

Of course we could.

She looked delighted, and left, only to return a moment later, looking concerned again. Could the play's narration be in Chinese, to make it easier to understand?

Sure--no problem. Fabulous.

But the look of concern returned: Could the play be about Expo 2010, the upcoming multi-million-dollar international bout of nuttiness that local officials are treating like Shanghai's own Olympics (and about which I will write a real post when I have more time)?

I looked at my partner and burst out laughing. She and the teacher looked at me in consternation.

Of course. Of course it can be about Expo. Mei guanxi, mei guanxi.

So now I'm writing a play about how the government-organized Expo--which is fascinating but complex and is displacing entire communities as a massive construction project erects enormous, wavy buildings on the shore of the Huangpu just south of Lujiazui's eerie skyscrapers--is helping the environment and truly fulfilling its slogan, "Better city, better life."

How fabulous is that?

I Communist heart CHINA MORE THAN EVER

2008-10-18T10:04:00.000+08:00

Don't you?

I've seen these T-shirts everywhere and am almost positive they're made for tourists but only locals wear them. I love it.

Shaoxing redemption

2008-10-17T09:56:00.011+08:00

Fudan University, in its all-encompassing wisdom, decided what our program needed was a trip to Shaoxing, an ancient canal city a few hours' drive south of Shanghai, in Zhejiang province.

Shaoxing has remade itself in the past two decades as a centre of industry and manufacturing, and is now the tie capital of the world (take that, Italy and South Korea!), among other things. It accomplished this through the magic of China's unique brand of free-market economic development (it's remarkable how a loosening of restrictions and a couple of tax breaks for key industries will trigger a "market-driven" economic boom).

It's also the birthplace of Lu Xun, a famed Chinese writer from the early 20th century who is beloved not only for his writing but also for his social activism and criticism of government corruption in a post-Yuan Shikai China (I've been assured he also hated the Guomindang, and would have adored Mao Zedong if he hadn't died in 1936, 13 years before Liberation in 1949).

For the approximately 33 hours we were in Shaoxing, we were herded from one tour or lecture or organized meal to another. It was very strange, but also englightening: Our tours and lectures were all led by local government officials whom we couldn't really talk to but who were officious and friendly and assured us that this was a shining example of the successful marriage of heritage preservation and modernization, leading to a wealthy, beautiful municipality that attracts oodles of tourists and foreign investors.

The plethora of tourists was visibly evident when we got a tour of Lu Xun's birthplace and the tomb of this dude called Da Yu (literally Big Yu, or Yu the Great), who's a kind of Chinese Noah and saved the country from a bunch of floods around 4,000 years ago.

We got a taste of the foreign investment landscape when checking out a high-tech electronics factory that designs cool stuff like the touch screens on cell phones and crazy high-definition flatscreen televisions. They make things to order for big brand-name companies, who then turn around and sell them at a grossly inflated price.

All the workers were wearing these bizarre biohazard-type suits. 70 per cent of the company's 600 employees are migrants from other provinces, and they live in dormitories on-site. They get 1,400 to 1,800 RMB per month, which is more than minimum wage but not amazing (it's about $300 CDN, now that the dollar has slipped majorly).

The most hilarious part of the trip, though, and unfortunately the least discussed by our effusive tour guides, was our accomodation: We were put up in a Party school, which is where CCP members go when they're being promoted to "learn to love the Party more," as one of the Fudan students explained it to me. The school was located outside the city in a surprisingly North American-looking suburb (there were more private, standalone houses than I've seen anywhere outside rural Xinjiang, except these ones were enormous), which the student said is necessary because the Party schools are so luxuriant they don't want people to get resentful.

The compound consisted of a series of blindingly white buildings, a basketball court, running track, a gleaming gymnasium with a bunch of badminton courts, a two-storey militaristic cafeteria with predictably caf-like food and a series of lecture buildings. The dormitories where Party members-in-training live for the two months they attend CCP ideology lectures here all had ensuite bathrooms, fancy sheets, those weird packaged slippers, teakettles and surprisingly soft mattresses for a country that doesn't really do soft mattresses.

We kept running into Party members in the caf or heading to or from their dormitories or the basketball court, but no one would talk to us. Very, very strange.

Rural develo-whaaa?

2008-10-13T19:17:00.006+08:00

So this is kind of a big deal.

You would think that for a 9.6-million-square-kilometre country, more than half of whose 1.4-billion people are still registered as "peasants," rural development would be a no-brainer.

Not so much.

When Deng Xiaoping launched a raft of economic reforms when he came to power in 1978, he purposely planned for uneven development--the idea was to experiement with market liberalism in select pockets of the country (hello, Shenzhen) and, if that worked, to expand that elsewhere. Fair enough. But the economic development and investment incentives both central and local governments poured into urban areas like Shanghai never reached the rural and remote swaths of the country, where people farm more or less the same way they did hundreds of years ago. This wouldn't be an issue if post-reform social stratification didn't (for lack of a less crude, equally effective term) completely screw over rural peasants quite as much, on quite as many levels, as it has. China, in case you were wondering, has one of the most drastic urban-rural income gaps in the world. For a country that three decades ago was hard-core Communist, that's pretty huge.

In part this uneven economic development was a purposeful decision: When you have more than a billion mouths to feed, it makes sense (or it did at the time, anyway) to keep food prices low and deprive farmers of much power to change the way they do business--hence the restrictive hukou household registration system that endeavours to keep people in their region of origin. This neat little social-control device is supposed to keep Anhui farmers farming in Anhui, Shangdong farmers farming in Shangdong, and Beijing businessmen doing business in Beijing. Etcetera.

But despite the hardships breaking hukou imposes, 100-million migrant workers are leaving the country every year to work in the cities. Without urban hukou they don't get health care, social security or education for their kids, and unless they have a special work permit they're subject to arrest or at least losing their job if officials bother to check. But they go because no matter how crappy their living situation in the slums of Shanghai or Beijing, and no matter how far below the 8RMB/hour minimum wage they're paid, it's way better than what they would get living in the countryside.

Short story long, the past weekend's decisions should mean big things for China's rural population: In addition to promising to provide basic services that by law should be available to everyone already, the government will now allow peasants to sell their land rights. This is big news (the NYT explains why far better than I do) because until now, farming has been restricted to small plots of land controlled by local and regional governments. Under the proposed changes, peasants could sell--or at least transfer the rights to--their land to companies and other private entities, or at least pool their land resources so they could make better use of it and actually make enough money to support themselves and their families.

This seems kind of counter-intuitive to someone whose higher education consisted in large part of burning Milton Friedman in academic effigy, but at the very least the new measures should add new incentives to modernization of agriculture--something that has been an issue since Sun Yat-Sen's heyday--and hopefully address the problem of how to feed a nation whose farmers are booking it to the city for lack of cash.

At least, Hu Jintao certainly hopes so.

Incredible generosity, or just really poor judgment of character?

2008-10-12T23:39:00.021+08:00

So this Uyghur family adopted me while I was in Xinjiang.

They invited me into their home, fed me, showed me around their hometown and their family's houses.

Why did they do this? I have no idea.

But it was a fantastic way to see the region, to get to know the local culture and to be treated wonderfully by astonishingly (foolishly) kind people who didn't seem to mind that my knowledge of their language was limited to "Thank you," "Hello," "Yes/No" and "Where is the bus station?" (for reasons I needn't expound upon, I also picked up "You are very crazy").

Luckily for me, one of the family's daughters is majoring in English in university and translated for me as I gawped and muttered gratefully and cluelessly around their home. She also showed me around Gulja/Yining, where she and most of her family live (her extended family, though, is scattered around much of the province). It's a city she has seen change drastically since her childhood--some changes she likes, and some that make her visibly uneasy.

I also got to attend a dinner celebrating the end of Ramadan at the family matriarch's house just outside Gulja, which was incredible. The woman lives in a traditional Uyghur house, with a courtyard housing cows and a fruit tree; two of her children and their families live nearby--her daughter's house across the street is piled high with corn left out to dry.

This family had lived in Xinjiang for generations, and could trace their family back hundreds of years. They seemed more culturally than religiously observant, but were staunch defenders of their own language and identity, and feared its assimilation. At the same time, they talked about wanting to go abroad or to Beijing or Shanghai to study, work or travel, and wanted Xinjiang to get the same economic benefits as the rest of the country.

They also see a disconcertingly clear divide between Chinese ethnic groups, which seems to be a trend everywhere I go: Even in cosmopolitan Shanghai, people differentiate between other Chinese based on ethnicity and dialect, which indicates their province of origin. It isn't a big deal in most cases, but in Xinjiang, especially, there seems to be a trust issue when it comes to interactions with people not of one's own origins.

In a weird way, being abysmally foreign actually helps in terms of getting people to trust me, because I'm so idiotically clued-out as to be pleasantly harmless.

Or maybe I just tell myself that to make myself feel better.

A province lost in translation (oh, and also ethnic tension)

2008-10-10T00:28:00.034+08:00

Xinjiang is a wild, beautiful, fascinating place whose apparent multiple-personality disorder only makes it more intriguing.

It's also surprisingly hospitable to ignorant weiguoren who can't speak the language.

Um, not that I would know, or anything.

China's northwestern frontier is a vast landscape of desert and mountains, and has never been as fully absorbed into the main country as most other provinces. Its Muslim Uyghurs are the most prominent of the 13 ethnic minorities who live there. They used to comprise the majority of Xinjiang's population but now make up about half the province's 20 million people--the result of successful programs to move Han Chinese into the region as Beijing pumps economic development programs into the province, and pumps oil out of it.

Travelling through Xinjiang feels a bit like inhabiting two parallel universes: Each place has two names--one Uyghur and one Chinese--so if you go to the Han receptionist at a bus station and tell her you want to go to Bourtela, she looks at you with total incomprehension until a passerby takes pity on you and gets you a ticket to "Bole." If you ask a Uyghur minibus driver if he can take you back to Yining, he gives you a dirty look and drives off, leaving you stranded until you find someone who will take you to "Gulja."

Even more perilous is telling the time: Although officially Xinjiang, like every other Chinese province, is on Beijing time, locals are on "Xinjiang time," which is two hours earlier. This kind of makes sense--the distance is farther than that between Vancouver and Toronto--but throws you off completely because all the bus and train stations will run on one time, and taxis, restaurants and stores will have something completely different. Because my sense of time is total crap, I spent much of the week feeling like I was stuck in a time warp.

I arrived in Urumqi (Wulumuqi in Chinese) Sunday afternoon, fresh off the train and completely disoriented. I remained so for most of my time there (well realistically I was pretty disoriented the entire week. But who's keeping track?).

The bustling provincial capital is more of a 21st-century metropolis than a sixth-century Silk Road trading post, but it's still a major hub of commerce.

Except now, the major structures are Chinese banks and office buildings for

petrochemical companies--the bazaars, with skinned dead goats strung upside-down alongside carts of raisins and stacks of metal pots, are still around but off the main streets. Both the petrochem CEOs and the goat-sellers have cell phones.

Almost all the signs here are bilingual--in Chinese and Uyghur, a Turkic language whose writing looks a lot like Arabic--and many are trilingual: The far north and west of the province are home to sizable Kazakh and Mongol minorities, and many of the signs are in Mongolian, as well. Some of the more ritzy touristy places had Russian-language signage. I of course understood none of this, and my ability to read Chinese-language street signs grew immensely. So did my tolerance for being extremely lost for long periods of time.

From Urumqi I went to Gulja (Yining in Chinese) via sleeper bus, which was an exercise in uncomfortable insomnia: I made the mistake of getting a top bunk, which is cheaper but which means even someone as godawful short as myself doesn't have enough headspace to sit up. I spent most of the 12-hour ride listening to the snores of my fellow passengers and peering out the window across the aisle at distant lights of mystery municipalities.

Luckily the squeaky contraption made pit stops every couple of hours so I could stagger off, dance around in the cold night air, take photos of the nearby gas station and pretend I has as much street cred as the Uyghur men who stood around smoking.

Gulja is a lot prettier than Urumqi, and a little less harried-feeling. It's also a telling product of Beijing's plan for large-scale western development, which has brought foreign investment and business from Inner China pouring in. The city's divided almost in half at the bus station: On one side is the modern, upscale new neighbourhood, populated primarily by Han Chinese; on the other is the older area, where most of Gulja's Uyghur population lives. Although Gulja's economy has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade, some Uyghurs say they aren't benefitting from the boost, and are just hit by higher prices thanks to inflation.

Gulja/Yining was the site of violent riots in 1997, when Uyghur and Kazakh separatists took to the streets in clashes that killed several people while wounding dozens more. More than a decade later, the modernizing city still bears some of the scars from the ensuing clampdown: Extreme security measures are still in place and some Uyghur residents I spoke with say they still feel like suspect terrorists by default--especially since the attacks in western Xinjiang around the Olympics this year.

Just a few minutes outside the city centre, traditional Uyghur houses--rooms surrounding an open courtyard, with doors featuring traditional painting and metalwork--line an unpaved road, their courtyards overflowing with corn spread out to dry, often covered with a tarp to keep the household goats from getting to them.

When I was there everyone was celebrating Eid--visiting each other and, in the men's case, going to mosque and to the cemetery to pay respects to deceased relatives (the cemeteries here are separate, too). Beijing has been keeping a much closer eye on religious activity in Xinjiang since the August attacks, and people here aren't sure when stricter restrictions on things like mosque attendance and religious practice by public officials will be lifted.

There's a definite aura of mutual distrust between Uyghur and Han here--there's little mixing, and what interactions there are seem coloured by the expectation on both sides that they're in danger of being ripped off or somehow betrayed. It's very strange.

From Gulja/Yining, it's an eight-hour bus ride through the Tian Shan mountains to Bourtela/Bole. The bus winds along a precarious, dirt-and-stone road, passing construction workers building a wider paved road that will tunnel through the mountains when it's finished (I think it's a testament to my distinctly Canadian brand of racism that whenever I see Chinese people building major transportation routes through mountain ranges under questionable safety and working conditions, I think of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Yeah, I'm an terrible person).

We passed Sayram Lake, a gorgeous and impossibly blue body of water near Bourtela/Bole. I had time to run out, take a photo and prance around before the bus left without me and I had to chase it down or be left with the yurts, bulldozers and tourist stand.

Bourtela and Oursan/Wenquan, which is apparently famous for its really boring hot springs, weren't super interesting. But getting to and from the cities was an experience and a half, which kind of encapsulates what the entire trip was like.

The area southeast of Urumqi is another world altogether--oil derricks and windmills dot the desert landscape, and the crazy rock formations of the Flaming Mountains look like something out of a film set (in fact, part of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was shot there and people go tour the former set. Cool).

The towns around Turpan are famous for their grapes and their cotton--and, now, their oil. The two industries don't go terribly well together, and a lot of farmers are worried they're being pushed out as their land is bought up for oil exploration and extraction.

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it?

The tiny villager of Lianjin was beautiful and fascinating because there were literally oil derricks in people's backyards, and enormous oil trucks would pass three-wheeled taxis on dirt roads. The small-scale grape and cotton farms belonged primarily to traditional Uyghurs who, like just about everyone else I saw that week, couldn't seem to figure out what on earth I was doing there.

Downtown Shanshan/Piqan is bigger, more bustling and boasted a tension that reminded me of Gulja, although not as pronounced. The train station, where I was supposed to catch my ride home, was far out of town and surrounded by oil fields. Around 7 p.m., as I wandered the colourful and grimy streets waiting for my train, uniformed China National Petroleum Company workers flooded the town, coming home from work.

That's when, for some inexplicable reason, I was almost arrested: I was wandering an alleyway marketplace, taking photos of oil workers and minding my own business, when all of a sudden a uniformed policeman grabbed my arm and started speaking to me rapidly in Chinese. He then motioned for me to follow him to a police station across the street. That's when I kind of freaked out--both because I had a train to catch in two hours and because the prospect of a Chinese jail cell was less than appealing.

"Wenti shi shenme?" I kept asking--what's the problem? But he either didn't answer or I didn't understand, and I had no choice to follow him into the station. I managed to communicate that I was a foreigner and couldn't speak Chinese, and he brought his supervisor over. The man shook my hand cordially--"How do you do?"--and asked me where I was from and what I was doing.

For some reason the fact that I was Canadian--"Wo shi Jianadaren!"--and my impending train convinced him to let me go. He wouldn't tell me why they had dragged me in there in the first place, and to be honest I wasn't all that keen to stick around and ask.

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Huoche

2008-10-06T21:07:00.019+08:00

So 42 hours is a long, long time to spend on a train.

But under the circumstances it was actually a lot of fun.

The term "hard seat" conjures the image of a bench of squished souls, tossed to and fro with their crammed baggage as the locomotive rumbles through rough, outdoorsy terrain. But the seats here more closely resembled those in an airplane, if they were attacked by an interior decorator with an armchair vendetta and a lavender fetish.

Seat assignments are rarely adhered to as passengers hop from one perch to another, chatting and eating and pulling apart their luggage—my favourite was the oversized, shapeless, bungee-corded plastic Hello Kitty bags—to search for some travel-related necessity.

For some reason both trains I was on were oversold, which meant the aisles and spaces between cars were crammed with people standing around, smoking outside the toilet or perched on the counter beside the sink.

At night, the place starts to look like the aftermath of either a wild orgy or a scene of bloodless carnage. People sit, slump or lie wherever they can, leaning on each other, feet propped up on the seat across from them, or simply sprawled out on newspapers on the floor.

The whole contraption is like a rolling, multi-day house party. It’s also an excellent arena for awkward encounters if you don’t know anyone, can’t speak the language and are literally the only foreigner on the train: For almost 90 hours, round trip, I was a constant conversation piece, and I didn’t have a clue what the conversation was about.

My trip to Urumqi, I lucked out and was sitting with a bunch of cackling, perennially entertaining women who all worked for a cosmetics company in Shanghai. One of them had her six-year-old daughter with her—an adorable, cherubic-looking kid who turned into a demon about 20 hours into the ride.

Luckily she was terrified of my lack of Chinese language skills and left me alone once she got bored of playing with my camera, so I was spared her temper tantrums and random head-butting.

On the way back I was sitting with attractive Chinese hipsters who were too busy reading manga (or some hipper, Chinese version thereof) to pay me much attention.

The passing landscape was wild. The weird thing about living in Shanghai is that my primary

impression of China is ultra-urban, with all the modernization/Westernization that entails. It’s easy to forget that most of this country is nothing like that.

Zipping through province after province

on a 4,000-kilometre trajectory through the country, we passed rolling hills, rocky cliffs teeming with bulldozers and supply trucks, nuclear power plants and patchwork farmland tended by people wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and using simple implements that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Pearl S. Buck novel. Beautiful and fascinating and puzzling if you’re me, and are mostly ignorant of wh

at you’re seeing save for the odd poorly worded question to your fellow passengers.

But very cool, all the same. I just wish I were better at taking photos through a dirty wind

ow as my train rolls along at 135 kilometres an hour.

Hard seat to Xinjiang

2008-09-26T17:46:00.008+08:00

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So next week is National Week, a fall country-wide holiday where China's rural-urban migration is reversed and students, migrants and sojourners make the trek home (travel costs being what they are, however, few among the migrant-worker population can afford the trip).

I'm foolishly taking a train from Shanghai to Urumqi (Wulumuqi in Mandarin), the capital of Xinjiang. This is the "wild west" of China, with the country's hottest and coldest spots, a whack of oil underground and the majority of China's Uyghur population.

That's about all I know. And I sure as hell can't speak Uyghur. But I do know this train is supposed to take about 42 hours, which is triple the amount of time I've spent in a vehicle of any kind. I'm taking a "hard seat," which costs about $60 each way. Should be interesting.

Here's hoping I nab a window seat.

Laoshi hao

2008-09-25T21:08:00.008+08:00

Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge of 54 Chinese seven-year-olds is nuts. Well-intentioned, but nuts.

I spent a while just now trying to think of a comparably farcical and incompetent pedagogical exercise, but can't.

I totally had a lesson plan, I swear. It just didn't make much sense when I was faced with a gaggle of squirming kids whose language I couldn't speak, as I tried to explain the finer points of English conversation (we got as far as "Hello! How are you?" "My name is..." and, inscrutably, "Good afternoon!" but things started to fall apart at "I'm very good."). The young'uns were tickled pink to have a foolish foreigner in their midst, and liked repeating things in unison, but weren't too into the whole dialogue thing.

In my (feeble) defence, when we arrived at the school we spent a couple of hours of hashing out our roles for the next couple of months and were then told we would just be introducing ourselves to the students. So as we stood in front of a sea of smirking faces and my partner turned to me and told me we had half an hour left and should maybe teach them something, I cried a little inside.

It could have been worse, I think. No one ran from the room crying when they discovered they were being taught by a cretin. And my partner, who, um, did a lot of translating, knows the Mandarin equivalent of, "Shut up and sit still, for the love of all things holy" much better than I. But somehow I don't think we kindled a lasting love of the English language in the adorable rapscallions' hearts.

Maybe it will be better next time. They're very excited at the prospect of getting Yingwen names, blissfully ignorant as they are of the language's colonial baggage.

In the meantime, I'm going to go buy valium in bulk.

wet.

2008-09-20T21:43:00.017+08:00

When it isn't stickily, drippingly, mind-meltingly humid (which is about 90 per cent of the time), chances are it's pissing rain--torrential, sheet-like, enormous raindrop-laden storms.

Shanghainese don clingy, plastic rain capes they drape over bicycles to keep themselves and their basket-bound belongings dry. Some bike with an umbrella in one hand, which amazes me.

The first time I was caught in one of these out-of-the-blue downpours, I was in an off-putting, touristy part of downtown. I wandered until I looked and felt like drowned rat, then ducked into the first convenience store I could find.

I didn't even need to awkwardly attempt to pronounce "yusan" through the wet hair that was plastered to my face. The woman at the counter took one look at me and wordlessly handed over an umbrella.

Milking lax product-safety laws--and tainting consumer confidence in the 'world's factory'

2008-09-20T21:39:00.009+08:00

The milk powder isn't safe. Neither is liquid milk, yogurt or even cream-based candy with a creepy white rabbit on the label (they're apparently hugely popular).

Upwards of 53,000 children have become sick from melamine-tainted milk products made by China's dairy giants, and at least four have died so far. The Chinese government has been in full-scale damage-control mode since Shijiazhuang-based Sanlu recalled 8,875 tonnes of milk powder on Sept, 11, announcing the products had been tainted with melamine.

The purges started almost immediately: First to go was Sanlu chairwoman and general manager Tian Wenhua, who was fired from both her job at Sanlu and her Party position, and then detained by police. Then six other officials were sacked, including Shijiazhuang's Party chief Wu Xianguo, and the city's mayor and vice-mayor. About 20 people have been arrested, and several more "detained." Today, China's chief quality watchdog, Li Changjiang, stepped down. Recalls of further milk products have continued apace, as China and the countries to whom a widening range of products are exported--including Singapore, Yemen and Canada--are yanked off the shelves as a precautionary measure.

The Chinese government has been doing its best to contain the negative fallout from the scandal, or at least to get across the message that it's dealing as best it can with the escalating crisis. Premier Wen Jiabao has been visiting crammed-to-bursting children's hospitals for photo ops and to reassure panicked parents; the government has vowed to cover the medical treatment for infants sickened by the contaminated milk. Last week Beijing went as far as announcing an end to exemptions from food-quality inspection--exemptions that Sanlu and several of the other 22 dairy companies implicated in the melamine contamination all had: Some of these companies hadn't been subject to government inspection since 2005.

But that doesn't really help parents of sick kids, or consumers afraid to buy dairy products that, ironically, the Chinese government has been pushing, big time, in an effort to boost calcium intake. The companies involved weren't two-bit players--Megniu, Yili and Sanlu were among the biggest in the country's $18-billion industry--and commenters on blogs and news websites are demonstrably incensed: . This isn't China's first melamine contamination scare--dog and cat owners the world over went into panic mode when pet food was recalled in the summer of 2007 after it was found to be poisoned with melamine--but it's one of the country's biggest food-safety crises in years. It's causing locals to question the safety of products they depend on daily, and shining an unflattering global spotlight once again on the country that has become famous (and infamous) as the "world's factory."

Worse than shoddy checkups is the nature of the offending chemical: Melamine is used to make plastics and is high in nitrogen. Small amounts shouldn't cause serious damage, but enough of it can cause kidney stones, kidney failure and even death. The chemical boosts the protein reading of milk, and could have been used to disguise watered-down milk and bump up company profits--not exactly an "oops" kind of thing.

It's also clear the cover-up in this case was pretty huge: Even the official news service Xinhua is reporting there were multiple cases brought to the authorities' attention months before the September recall. According to articles on popular Chinese websites Tianya and QQ, at least one father tried to bring attention to his daughter's illness and was bought off.

Although few Chinese I've seen or spoken with will actually question the government's actions, they're angry and scared and sure as hell aren't buying any milk products if they can help it. The fear factor has already started to hurt China's dairy farmers, many of whom are forced daily to dump tonnes of milk they can't sell. The government has started exhorting Chinese people to buy milk and keep the previously burgeoning industry alive, but somehow I doubt that's going to have much of an effect. It will be interesting to see what kind of political or persuasive clout (if any) public opinion holds as this continues. The people hit hardest by the poisoned milk are China's nascent middle class--mothers who would rather (or are pressured to) return to work right after giving birth, and are wealthy enough to afford the status symbol offered by infant formula, or dairy products in general.

It still isn't clear what effect this will have in the long term--not only on a growing domestic dairy industry, but on China's role as a universal and cheap supplier. If the government's serious about cracking down on unscrupulous producers, it's going to become more expensive to do business here, driving away foreign investment; if it isn't, this will continue to happen until people are afraid to buy anything with a "Made in China" stamp on it.

Not-so-still life with mother, child and scooter

2008-09-20T21:00:00.003+08:00

OK, I don't really know the relationship between these two people and am imposing my own preconceptions on them by positing they're a mom and her kid. But this scooter-riding woman and the little dude in the T-shirt caught my eye a couple of weeks ago in the French Concession.

They were stopped at a red light and she pulled out a tissue and started cleaning the little boy's face and fixing her makeup as cars and bikes zoomed around her.

This kid was not impressed.

Waiguoren's day out

2008-09-18T21:29:00.020+08:00

I was surrounded by hordes of squirming, grimacing, guffawing children; half a dozen burly, unsmiling nurses; piles of syringes and rack upon rack of tiny vials of blood.

No, this wasn't a second round of cautionary Tory anti-drug ads. This was a day-long medical check-up for the students at a migrant elementary school in the far north of Pudong.

We arrived first thing in the morning after about two and a half hours in transit via subway and taxi, up past bizarre "free trade zones" and into the thick of an out-of-place residential laneway in the middle of an uber-industrial area. The place was a zoo of small children spending recess running around an open, paved yard and playing ping pong. They gaped, giggled and pointed at the foreigner--"Waiguoren! Waiguoren!"--which was awkwardly hilarious.

Our task was to oversee the children lining up to have their blood samples taken by a row of nurses parked at tiny, retro-looking metal-and-plywood school desks. The classroom itself wouldn't have been out of place in a 1950s Communist China PSA: the walls were whitewashed concrete (or something like concrete, but less dense-seeming); the metal hinges and fixtures on the windows were rusty; the miniature desks and chairs were an off-blue colour and deceptively heavy given their size; there were posters on the wall exhorting rules such as "Love life, love the Party."

The nurses were clad in long white coats and blue tissue caps; they were strong and unsmiling as they knotted taupe-coloured elastic tubes around the students' tiny arms and poked and prodded in search of a vein.

But the best part was the kids themselves: Dozens of students crowded in waves into the small room, clutching medical forms that invariably became crumpled and ripped almost in two by the time they were out. All the kids were handed glass vials with their student number the nurses used to put their blood sample--not the best idea, in my opinion, as the rascals spent the time waiting using the little tubes as pan pipes, mimed telescopes or fake swords. Given the number of times those things were dropped on the floor, I certainly can't attest to their sterility when the blood samples finally got put in them. But whatever.

For tiny children being poked with sharp needles and having their blood syringed out before their eyes, these kids were pretty brave. The little kids didn't seem to know what was going on, so they fidgeted in line, played with their vials and gaped at the weiguoren, whose words of comfort were limited to "Bu yao pa" ("Don't be scared") and who spent most of the day herding kids and handing the post-shot peeps candy to boost their blood sugar and staunch their tears (medical professional right here, everyone). The oldest children, who were around 10, jostled to see what was happening at the front of the line, and shoved each other dangerously close to the syringes.

This was one of the lucky migrant schools to have achieved the status of "ming ban," which means it's considered a privately run official school and gets government funding. But the teaching resources still aren't as good, and of course the kids don't get any medical care at all; these blood samples and eyesight tests could be their only contact with the medical system for years. The depressing part is, if the blood tests reveal something important about their health (one of the doctors testing the samples as they went along remarked she had already found several incidents of gastrointestinal issues, likely the result of poor hygeine and unsafe food), chances are the kids' parents won't be able to afford treatment, anyway.

These kids didn't give a shit about that, though: They were too busy scampering around, cheeks stuffed with candy, proudly displaying their now-illegible medical forms and cotton ball-bandaged inner elbows.

For short-term planning ahead

2008-09-18T20:14:00.007+08:00

There are condom dispensers like these affixed to walls, fences and gates around our neighbourhood, although they're notably absent from trendier, touristy areas downtown, around Xintiandi and in the French Concession. To be honest I'm impressed they're there at all, in a country where HIV was for almost 20 years considered solely the domain of foreigners (and men who have sex with men, which at the time was also thought an "abnormal" Western import) and where HIV was called aizibing--the "loving capitalism disease." A lot has changed since then, and China finally seems to be tackling HIV/AIDS in a concerted manner--the government went as far as promoting prevention among sex workers, which Party members previously feared would further encourage the country's burgeoning sex trade. That said, migrant workers remain an unaddressed risk factor given their statistically higher chances of contracting HIV and their lack of access to health care. Crap.

What I'd really like to know, though, given their prominent streetside placement, is what these little boxes' pickup rate is.

In the land of the xiao zi

2008-09-17T00:30:00.008+08:00

"Little capitalists."

That's the literal translation of a term describing people Westerners might call materialists. The "xiao zi" are the front-line generation in the Middle Kingdom's emerging affluent middle class: While their grandparents went through re-education and Mao's decade-long cultural revolution and their parents endured the brunt of post-1978 economic reforms and the 35 million layoffs they brought with them, people born in the past couple of decades have grown up in a China that's relatively wealthy, and with much more freedoms and access to global information than their parents and grandparents had.

In urban areas, and in Shanghai--the "head" of the economically reformed Chinese dragon--especially, these xiao zi seem to be increasingly prevalent. They see less of a need to conform to the conservative and often austere lifestyles of previous generations; mammon is supreme, but more important than that are the trappings that come with it: Starbucks becomes a status symbol of an emerging middle class that favours clothes and accessories emblazoned with eye-catching, sparkly brand names. They're hip and trendy and are both driving and benefitting hugely from China's superlative development (for now, at least).

The term can be an invective--one former Fudan student said it's used as fodder in an ongoing Beijing-Shanghai rivalry: Beijingers fling it dismissively at Shanghainese they see as too hedonistic, shallow or just economically oriented for their more politically focused sensibilities. But the xiao zi are emerging as an increasingly vocal group. Like most Chinese I've encountered, they won't protest or complain about the government openly until something it does (or fails to do) affects their lives directly. But this middle class has something to lose and feels entitled to stability, predictability and freedom to enjoy the wealth it has accumulated. The xiao zi may not be in the streets calling for an end to Party corruption and the right to vote for their government representatives, but they will protest a new high-tech rapid transit line running through their neighbourhood, just like disgruntled middle-class Canadians. And they aren't too pleased when it turns out the biggest powdered-milk producer in China has been selling melamine-tainted infant formula powder, leading to a massive recall allegedly covered up for months as two kids died and thousands got sick from the stuff.

But anyway.

I'm not sure if these xiao zi exist outside of China's urban centres; my guess is they do, but in smaller numbers and very different forms. But as China's economy grows there will be more of them, and they'll be making more demands on the government for things to which they feel entitled. And if the the Red Dragon's overheated economic growth loses some of its flame power and falters, you can bet the CCP will hear from the little capitalists riding its plumes.

This is Shanghai--part two

2008-09-14T00:29:00.013+08:00

The city's smaller streets, especially in the downtown area, are a maze of lilongs--row houses with storefronts on the ground floor, a single entrance leading onto an outdoor alleyway and the building's multiple units. They're criss-crossed with laundry lines and power lines; people, bicycles, garbage and miscellany. In some, the gutters double as miniature open sewers. Grimy, but they're also the most organic, community-oriented streetscapes I've seen so far.

During the day, these mini-neighbourhoods are hives of small-scale commercial activity. I'm not sure if the people living here own the stores, which sell everything from bean cakes to bicycle equipment, but I think they live above them. At night, they gather to watch TV in the stores, or sit outside and gamble (I'm trying to figure out what the games are but am failing--some play mah jong, but the most popular is a weird one with round tiles and what looks like a checkerboard). There are water spigots on the sidewalk people use to wash dishes or to bathe; I'm not sure if there's running water inside.

As far as I can tell, these neighbourhoods are endangered species in this city: They get rezoned, bulldozed and replaced by towering skyscrapers to feed the urban development craze; their inhabitants get unilaterally relocated, lately to the outskirts of Pudong near the airport.

This is Shanghai--part one

2008-09-12T00:12:00.016+08:00

The crazy financial Lujiazui district of Pudong, as seen from the Bund (or Waitan) on the other side of Huangpu River. The enormous bulbuous space station/phallic object is the Oriental Pearl Tower--Dongfang Mingzhu. Pudong materialized out of swamp land in the past 15 years. This is the iconic skyline the city's planners are going for in attracting tourists to clog the Bund and foreign investors to fill those office towers.

The white thing is the honkin' Radisson hotel near People's Square (Renmin Guang Chang). It has nice bathrooms.

And I totally got this wrong before, because I'm an idiot: Just behind it is the extremely architecturally out-of-place Jinmen Dajuidan Hotel, not the art museum. The hotel, built in 1926 by the Brits as the China United Assurance Company, has an old-school clock face and is apparently supposed to look Italian. It has been refurbished and, like a lot of the old-school colonial buildings in the city, is now a heritage building.

The Shanghai Art Museum is just behind the camera, to the left. It was built by the British in the 1930s as part of a race club (honestly, you can't get much more colonial than that. Way to go, chaps). Last week it hosted the opening of the Shanghai Biennale, which is pretty cool: There were gigantic, iridescent metallic bugs crawling up and down the building.

Crazy-trippy neon signs on the ultra-touristy, pedestrianized Nanjing Dong Lu.

I fucking hate that street.

This can only end badly

2008-09-11T12:36:00.007+08:00

So as part of this program I'm in, we all do volunteer placements with organizations around Shanghai. The one I'm working with, Shanghai Lequn Social Work Service, is one of the first "professional" (read: government-approved) social work organizations in China (well, technically the first in "mainland China," because Taiwan is also part of Zhongguo, don'cha know). It works with migrant worker children. These kids get the shaft: Because their parents come to Shanghai from other provinces looking for work and to fuel this city's madcap development, they don't have Shanghai hukou. This hukou is an outdated municipal citizenship-type thing and it wouldn't have much contemporary bearing except it determines how you access all government-funded social services, such as education and medical care. Because migrant workers don't have Shanghai hukou they can't access those services in Shanghai, and they could work here for years without being able to transfer it. Organizations like Shanghai Lequn try to provide privately funded schools and physical checkups for these kids, which is of course hugely problematic. Anyway--bad scene, but this group seems to be doing incredible shit in an attempt to fill a gap the government can't or won't address. Would like to find out more about where this money comes from--is it from corporations who benefit from these kids' parents' underpaid labour?--but the result of it seems excellent and judging from its modest, understaffed office, Lequn certainly isn't swimming in cash.

Where I come in, apparently, is working in these migrant children's schools. I'm going to teach English and help run an after-school broadcast and print journalism kind of program, where the kids put together a mini-magazine and have a classroom "radio" news show. The idea is to help give them a better sense of perspective, or agency, or something. I'm also helping with medical check-ups.

Sounds great, right?

Except there's one problem: I can't speak Mandarin. Or read/write Chinese. At all. Functionally illiterate doesn't even begin to cover it.

I can count and string together some basic sentences and queries, and I can recognize a handful of characters. But for fuck's sake: The very idea of trying to edit a newspaper I can't read or comprehend is laughable. I can't imagine how I'll teach English to Chinese-speakers when I can't translate that shit to save my life. I may be able to help with medical check-ups if accompanied by a medical professional issuing directions, and if I use muddled hand gestures. But seriously--to whom does this seem like a wise idea?

I actually asked the supervisor, as she was explaining the program through a translator, whether she knew I didn't speak Chinese and whether that would be okay. She laughed.

"Mei guanxi, mei guanxi!" ("Forget it, forget it.")

Um, okay. Whatever you say.

I have to be honest: This is a very cool-seeming program that will no doubt teach me a lot, and about which I'm really excited in a really selfish way: It'll be interesting and enlightening to see how these schools work and just how circus-fucked what appears to be a massive urban underclass is.

But I can't imagine my trying to help out will end in anything but tragedy; I would hate to be one of those annoying, saccharine volunteers that parachutes into a foreign country expecting to save the world. Here's hoping I can just get by with dumb but well-meaning and harmless foreigner.

Bad fucking news.

Zixingche culture

2008-09-10T00:53:00.007+08:00

Projections for car purchases in China are sky-high: About 20 million households own cars, country-wide, and although the growth in sales has slowed in the past few months, there are still hundreds of thousands of people buying automobiles every year.

Gone, then, are the days when the streets here were clogged solely with the two-wheeled forms of transport.

But that isn't to say they're ceding supremacy, or that bikes are anything less than ever-present here in Shanghai. I definitely haven't seen any city--including Amsterdam, almost as famed for its bikes as it is for its hallucinogenic pursuits--with nearly as many bikes.

Most roads have designated bike lanes that are crowded with swarms of bicycles, and cyclists tend to take over other lanes, as well. Row upon dense row of bikes, with kickstands down and rear wheels locked to frames, line Fudan University campus, and numerous streets across the city.

Virtually everyone here seems to have a bike, and bikes seem to be the primary way people get around in their immediate vicinity. I would venture to guess they're still the major mode of transportation after public transit. But they seem almost exclusively utilitarian and commuter-oriented; I've seen the odd mountain bike kicking around, but have yet to witness anyone using a bike for exercise. Whereas in many North American cities bicycle commuting seems to be the exception, rather than the rule (especially with bike theft being so damn prevalent), here the opposite is true.

And forget panniers--the shit people pull with their bikes here is beyond impressive: Many of the street stalls selling everything from books to fruit to cheap DVDs are actually enormous, rectangular fold-out crates attached to bike trailers; almost all bikes I've seen are equipped with a basket or a rack or both, and they're usually loaded down with miscellany. Plenty of cyclists, particularly on campus, tool around with people perched side-saddle on their bike racks. In addition to the old-school tinkling bells, some bikes have loudspeakers--I'm regularly woken up around 6:30 a.m. by tinny broadcast voices from bikes passing the nearby intersection.

I'm sure bicycle prevalence is far smaller now than it was when the CCP championed the two-wheeled wonders a few decades ago, but cyclist commuter culture seems well-enough entrenched to last at least a little longer. This is, I think, due in part to their practicality in a country where pragmatism is paramount and there just isn't enough physical space for everyong to have a car and due in part to their affordability. But bikes also figure pretty prominently in the collective psyche, I think. With the possible exception of popularizing that stylin' suit, pushing bikes on the masses might've been the best thing Mao did.

Random acts of helping the dumbass foreigner

2008-09-09T15:09:00.006+08:00

My guardian angel wore artfully faded knockoff jeans, a Chinglish-emblazoned T-shirt and had her hair in a henna-dyed bob.

"Do you need help?" she asked--in English, because at that point I wouldn't have been able to comprehend even a phrase as simple as that in Mandarin.

I was bent over a sorry excuse for a bicycle, hands covered in grease, face covered in that grimy sheen the city's polluted humidity brings out in wimpy Westerners. I have a feeling those factors, plus the glassy look in my eyes, made it pretty evident I either needed a hand or a dose of valium and a Tsing Tao. Maybe two.

"Um, yeah."

She put down her handbag, flipped the bike over, quickly assessed the damage--a derailed chain and wonky sprocket, apropos of absolutely nothing I had done to the infernal machine, I swear--pulled out a tissue to protect her fingers and ever-so-daintily straightened the sprocket, slipped the chain back on, rotated the pedals a few times and flipped the bike back upright.

I gawked. She handed me a tissue for my fingers. Smiled.

"OK?"

"Um. Yeah. Thanks so much--xie xie."

She picked up her purse and sauntered off, high heels clicking.

The one good thing about having been completely ripped off purchasing a two-bit bicycle whose chain snapped in two literally 15 minutes after I pedalled away is that it has made patently clear just how nice a lot of people are. Twice since the chain snapped and I got it replaced at one of the ubiquitous ad hoc bike-repair stands that appear magically each morning on every other street corner, this piece of mechanical crap has fallen apart. Twice in that time, passersby have seen my helpless flailing and helped me put the thing back together.

Encroyable. I figure I've banked enough of a karmic debt so far, if I ever get back to Canada I'll have to help every tourist and immigrant I can find. I feel a bit better today after I gave directions to a foreign student even more hapless than myself, but my smug, savvy sentiments were short-lived: I was wandering in circles again five minutes later.

I chalk up part of this kindness to what appears to be a sense of obligation towards foreigners as guests--part of this crazy guanxi/renqing system of social networking and social obligation I actually plan on writing more about when I have time and understand it better. Part of it, though, is that when they aren't trying to run me over, people are just nice. Almost embarrassingly so.

I have, however, made a mental note to look less deshevelled and helpless. That can't be doing much good in the cultural ambassador department.

Traffic

2008-09-08T14:54:00.008+08:00

Shanghai traffic is like a massive game of chicken.

Or a high-stakes round of Risk.

Either way, it isn't for the faint of heart.

Naive, overly polite Canadian that I am, I spent my first couple of days here assuming that when the little pedestrian was green, it meant I should cross at the indicated white-striped crosswalk. I assumed, even more idiotically, that oncoming traffic would stop for pedestrians, even when said pedestrian was in the way.

I spent my first couple of days here in the path of oncoming vehicles.

Then, after my sixth or seventh near-flattening, I figured out that the point in most intersections here is not, in fact, to just obey the traffic signals. Sure, you can take a cursory glance at them and presumably the colour of the light in front of you may factor into your decision-making. But blindly obeying traffic signals here is for chumps. If you can make it across any other way, or if you think you can make it across somehow, then away you go, and damn the trucks/pedestrians/junk-laden bicycles.

When people approach an intersection here, be they on foot, bike, moped or car-bound, there seems to be a sophisticated strategizing that goes on between them and the others approaching--a kind of risk calculation that combines guesswork, luck, manouevering skill and some unknown quality I can't fathom, let alone attempt to master. But nobody stops if they don't have to. They may slow, veer, speed up or just honk really loudly as they plow through the intersection, making hairpin turns and swerving dangerously close to anyone in their path. It's incredible there aren't piles of carcasses at every intersection.

I should note, of course, that this is an oversimplification. I have not seen anywhere near every single intersection in this city, and at the really enormous ones there seems to be more of an imperative to stop at the light. But the best example of the aforementioned is at the intersection outside my dorm room, with which I'm obsessed because I'm obsessed (and just a little tetanus-phobic) with the tiny, rusty balcony off said dorm. This intersection is a perpetual collision course: hordes of bikes and mopeds will charge through the intersection as a big, unwieldy bus heading in the opposite direction makes a perilously wide turn, barely missing them; at the same time, oncoming traffic swerves through the middle of the intersection and a tiny man on a rickety bicycle towing a food stand/barrel of garbage/kitchen door makes a slow left turn, appearing motionless in the morass of honking and screeching.

Crazy shit.

I am, of course, nowhere near co-ordinated enough to negotiate a traffic ballet that intricate and intuitive.

So I do a hesitant little dance around the corner, stride confidently into the intersection when it looks like there's a smidge of an opening, and scamper to the other side when I realize I'm being blindsided by an enormous truck. Good times.

Dui bu qi; wo bu huisho zhongwen

2008-09-06T15:17:00.007+08:00

"I'm sorry; I don't speak Chinese."

I've been saying that with alarming frequency lately, and it's getting to be a tiresome mantra.

I'm a pretty communicative (read: annoyingly loud and verbose) person. This makes living in a place whose language(s) I can't speak at all, never mind with anything near passable proficiency, an exercise in excruciating frustration. I knew this going in, but there's something about spending your life in a fog of almost unadulterated incomprehension that drives you around the fucking bend.

I’m a firm believer in “fake it ’til you make it” linguistics: I like to launch into a new language and force myself to learn it through awkward, misunderstanding-laden situations. But with Mandarin, this doesn’t work—I can’t piece together meanings to unfamiliar words, or sound them out while reading them; I certainly can’t guess at the word I’m looking for by bastardizing the English version, which works well in Eurocentric languages (biciclette! abandono! Zehr gut!). But spoken Mandarin and written Chinese don’t conform to Western norms of language, which is refreshing but also shitty if you’re me, and sick of being the jackass who points at things, mutters something unintelligible and then just resorts to speaking English really slowly, as though that will make it any less foreign to people who—quite reasonably—expect you to speak Chinese when you’re in China, dammit.

In some ways, Mandarin is relatively simple: It doesn’t have many (any?) articles, and best of all you don’t need to conjugate verbs when you change tenses. But there are special designators you’re supposed to use when referring to amounts (like a gaggle of geese or a flock of pigeons, but for ALL nouns), and there are five differentiated tones, so you can say the same syllable and have it mean five different things.

I just can’t wait until I confuse the “ma” that means “mother” with the “ma” that means “horse.” That’ll make me some friends.

Written Chinese is a whole other world of pain: it’s ideographic rather than phonetic, which is cool but makes it impossible to read anything by sounding it out. Hello, character memorization.

The sum of all this is, I become the North American tourist caricature I despise: I know a few words but can patch together few full phrases; I use hand signals a lot; I point; I resort to English and get frustrated when I can’t get my point across. It’s crap.

On one level, the helpless, alienated-foreigner feeling is probably a good way to get a sense of what it’s like to be in a completely strange place with no way to communicate. But I know Canadians are far less understanding of visitors who can’t speak English than most people here have been with me. Ergh.

I’m still hopeful I’ll pick up enough Mandarin to haggle, understand directions and maybe even have a conversation about the CCP. But until then, I sit on the subway on a little island of incomprehension in a sea of word I don’t understand—totally incommunicado.