cold china

Panoramatown

2009-05-22T03:36:00.005-12:00

I have been obsessed with making wide shots almost everywhere i go. Maybe my photos would be a bit better if i wasn't so obsessed. It's been quite the Wild Guce Chase.

However, i finally stitched them all together, and whole collection (of 40, yeah, ridiculous) has now been slapped online.

In each case i had no idea whether they would work, and most didn't. Some at least worked well enough, so at the conclusion of this latest epic journey, epic of course for its shortness, panoramas are here. (They may well look shit and pointless but they tend to reveal themselves when clicked.)

Tiger Leaping Gorge:

Southwest entrance, above Qiaotou

Southwest end of TLG

Old Tea Horse (and bandit) Road snaking round the mountainside

On the Low Road towards the northeast

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Sichuan

Yangtze shoreline (recommend click)

Chongqing suburbs

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Hua Shan:

From South Peak

Temple

From Central Peak

Cliff house

The top of Hua Shan

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Lijiang:

Old Town rooftops

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Shanghai:

Pudong Airport

The old Chinese city

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Hong Kong

Across the Harbour (big version is not as good as the small seems to suggest)

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Bangkok

Phra Athit

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Here are a few from a very different, and almost no less spectacular (only almost), side of China: northern China, 2007.

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North Korea

Across the Yalu River, the border

The town of Manpo

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Ningxia

Industrial revolution-era Qingtongxia. Note sky colour...

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Inner Mongolia

From atop the Great Wall

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Shanxi

Pollution-smeared sky, near Datong

Random Shanxi, Great Wall visible in large version

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Hebei/Beijing

Strange mountain probably in Chicheng County

Valley outside Zhangjiakou

Near the border of Beijing "province"

Beijing

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Panoramas album

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Romeo

2009-05-21T03:35:00.001-12:00

"I'm Chinese," he said, "i understand the Chinese. The Chinese are a war-loving people. If China was as strong as America you would have been finished long ago."

An attention-grabbing comment in these times.

"If 9-11 had happened to China, the Chinese would have massacred a whole country."

Yes indeed, you could probably even get the attention of a Songyuan Oilfield High School classroom full of oil-honcho little-emperors with comments like that...

Romeo was the first person i heard criticise the Communist Party in Chinese. He also became my best friend south of the Yangtze. I met him at the 30RMB all-u-can-drink night (now equal to $6 but it was about $4.70 with the exchange rate at the time) - one of the very last, perhaps even THE last of those golden opportunities to experience the worst hangover in Shanghai. Everyone in the room was loose, obviously, but Romeo was even looser with his talk.

It must be hard, mentally, to be so negative of the Chinese, yet at the same time be Chinese. I mean, Americans are often very critical of America and the American people, but they criticise themselves from the comfortable position of assured superiority to everyone else. Perhaps it's the same with Romeo - he often says what a good country Shanghai would be.... are Shanghai people are the Americans of Planet China?

Well, Romeo does swear he will never go to north China - get this - because he's afraid: "Chinese people aren't united. They'll treat a foreigner better than someone from another part of the country."

I asked him where he got all his hyper-critical views from, and he simply replied, "Many of my friends have been thinking this way since we were in high school." Well i only met the friends he was talking about once, at a big feast, and politics wasn't on the menu. But he had two neighbours whom we would hang out, smoke and "liao" a lot with, and who didn't exactly agree with his views. One, an older fellow, was a perfect model of moderation, while the other, maybe 50-55, was always nostalgic about the Chairman Mao days. (When i asked the other two why the latter liked Mao despite having witness his destructiveness, they replied, "Well, he's a relatively lazy person. He had an easy job [i.e. a tenured easy job] until Deng Xiaoping.")

These three would sit together day after day, and i was struck by the great respect they seemed to have for each other's views. They never tried to convince the other of the rightness of their position, they just each stated things as they saw them, whether that contradicted the other or not.

All of this would take place in Romeo's somewhat filthy restaurant in a superb location right near People's Square. His Sichuan cook would do an amazing "Oyster Oil Beef" with green chillies, and aside from the lunchtime rush-hour, Romeo just sits, chats and watches TV all day - like 99% of all other small Chinese shopkeepers. He certainly isn't building a business empire. Which is half the reason he's 31 and can't seem to find a wife.

China's gender imbalance problems are well documented, but Romeo faces what's possibly a uniquely Shanghai problem: he's too good for a country girl - his parents would never accept one - but not good enough for the Shanghai girls, who are all either more successful than him (many are so this instantly rules out a great many possibilities) or dreaming of roping in a big boss or a foreigner.

Worse, even though women are in short supply, in Shanghai there would still appear to be a Sex-and-the-city-style class of spinsters (i would find out for sure if i were a journalist). For example, another Shanghai friend of mine, my language exchange partner actually, is a single lady over 30. As a talented graphic designer with her own business, the marry-up requirement limits her potential partners to a very small pool of hard-to-score high-flyers - and they of course can afford a different 19-year-old every night. Even if she eventually ropes in one of these rare beasts, she must then somehow mitigate the threat her successful career might pose to its self-esteem - probably by giving up graphic design.

Romeo would probably say only Chinese men are averse to successful women, that Westerners are more "advanced" and "understanding", but even where that is the case it's only because the idea of mooching off a woman has a simple rational appeal - but only outside the Chinese social system. Fair enough though, his impression of the west and westerners (nandao China and the Chinese also??) is deduced, according to his own estimation, entirely from Hollywood movies, which he watches at an alarming rate. (He has quite a few thousand DVDs, most of which were given to him by a friend who had quit selling them roadside.)

Similarly, like most westerners, Romeo spends all the money he earns - remember i met him at a discount mega all-u-can-drink night. And it was he who introduced me to the wonders of all-u-can-eat "Baxi BBQ" (Baxi pronounced "Bashie" and meaning "Brazil"... i'll take any excuse to say it out loud it's so much fun). But though Romeo may be westernised in most of his consumer behaviour, he certainly is not in his culinary preferences. On my last night in Shanghai i went round to his place and he grabbed us some takeaway: frogs' legs, jellyish pig tendons and pig kidneys.

Beijing, Songyuan and away with me

2009-04-29T01:59:00.005-12:00

March 17: The night i came down from Hua Shan i caught a train to Beijing. Most of that journey's waking hours were spent in conversation with a peach promoter from Pinggu district.

An announcement on the train's PA system as we pulled into the station boasted of Beijing's "complete" subway system. Unfortunately i was on one of the very large number of Beijing trains that go to Beijing West Railway Station, which the subway system as yet does not reach. So my introduction to the capital consisted of being rudely jostled into a corner by peasants on a bus, followed by the bus driver opening the bus door, which opened into my corner and forced me to rudely jostle the peasants to get out of its way.

Beijing's not that dense a city - the buildings aren't really that tall and as a result, it's geographically massive. From the bus stop it took another 25 minutes' walk to reach the hotel. From there the nearest subway station was 15 minutes away. But walking had its advantages: all around i found wonderful breakfast foods - baozi, jiaozi, congee, flatbreads, chilli chicken burgers. I almost felt what might have been a more general ambivalence to or even animosity towards foreigners - glances averted, people shuffling away at the bus stop. Actually that comment pretty much confirms me a country bumpkin. Or maybe i was just subconsciously missing the celebrity-style burning attention i tend to get almost everywhere else....

But my roommate, a "trader" (he refused to be more specific) from Cameroon who wants to spread the Good News, told me of the racism he had struggled with in China. He claimed it was because Africans were poaching all the Chinamen's girls. Strange, i've only ever had Chinese men encouraging me to go after Chinese girls. Anyway, whatever the reason, he spoke of "deliberate humiliation", being ignored as a customer, etc., and i could certainly see it happening, although for his part he himself didn't come across as very willing to adapt to China. He saw it as "very uncivilised and very backward", particularly because of the spitting in the streets, which people presumably don't do in Cameroon. Have heard about good cheap French baguettes in Cameroon... and no spitting in the street too? This Cameroon sounds like the place.

I spent my day in Beijing in an internet bar where i met Mr Liu, from Jiangxi Province, who had come to lodge a petition against a local government honcho he said had ruined his life.

He told me it started in 1994 when his family added a side door to their home, allowing them to enter via a communal strip of land shared with the neighbours. Who happened to be relatives of a powerful local official who intervened on their behalf.

Unfortunately Mr Liu and his family were a little too justice-bent - they tried to bring a lawsuit and things got serious. His brother had half his face slashed off and went insane. Thugs attacked Liu on several occasions, and he considers himself extraordinarily lucky to be alive.

Since then he says he has been constantly watched and followed, prevented from getting a job or getting married. Needless to say he was an angry man and i asked him if he knew about the "black prison" phenomenon in which petitioners are known to have been arbitrarily and illegally arrested in Beijing. He just didn't give a shit, and i feared for his safety in the internet bar as he yelled obscenities about the government to the foreigner.

This - and the man himself - all seemed pretty reasonable, and, more importantly, perfectly sane, given a Chinese professor's recent claim that more than 99% of petitioners are mentally unsound.

Then he sent me the "full story" via email. Poor Mr Liu.

I don't have much doubt that what he told me is true, that he's been menaced, followed, intimidated and attacked. But the full story was heartbreakingly insane - involving roommates dispatched by a hidden puppet-master to disrupt his studies for 2 years before eventually killing him. The would-be murderer had decided against completing the job. That was more than 10 years ago.

I would speculate that Professor Sun is just about right, most petitioners probably are insane to some degree. Not 99+ percent, but would it be any wonder if you went through the harrowing, soul-crushing shit that these people go through, that you ended up disturbed. How many of these people are being driven insane? Or is that actually Professor Sun's theory, and the reason for his apparently crazy comments? It's unlikely he would have been implying that his petitioner-insanity correlation was a coincidence.

Poor Mr Liu, that's all i can say. I don't know what to say to him now. If anyone happens to read this (at any time) and also happens to know someone or some NGO who helps petitioners, i've been looking for you. Please leave a comment down the bottom, or contact achubb|at|gmail|dot|com

The exchange probably was a timely reality check because i went from the internet bar straight to the Olympic Park. And there it was. I don't know whether it was Liu's tale or the fact i'd been up country too much lately, but i wasn't impressed. As incredible as these structures may be as feats of human imagination, skill and effort, they really pale in comparison to nature...

I crossed the road and got drunk in a supermarket that ripped me off. It was the ethnic minority hangout next to Ethnicity Park. My drinking partner in the supermarket, a Mr Zhang, fluent in German and shakily ok in English, introduced to me these peoples' minority wonders:

Me: "So what goes on there, in Ethnicity Park?"

Zhang: "They can dance."

Me: "Anything else?"

Zhang: "Umm..."

Me: "Surely they do more than just dance?"

Zhang: "They can do service."

Behold, the splendour of China's 56 ethnicities! I was feeling a tad cynical that night.

I took a bus to Sanlitun, a well-known centre of foreign debauchery. I didn't have any spare cash so i settled for sauntering up and down the street and street drinking in front of "Bao An", or public security police, who, in their camouflage uniforms looked a lot more like an army. Their rule was far from martial though as they paraded up and down in military formation past the pimps, drug dealers and underage drinkers (and street drinkers).

I got chatting to a Dongbei pimp (from the Northeast, where we started in China) who, with his partner/wife, was hustling the best way he knew how - calling obscene propositions in English at every foreigner who came within earshot. Particularly, for some reason, People of Middle Eastern Appearance.

But his phrases were all jumbled after repeating the same mistakes every night, as though he had been playing a months-long game of Chinese Whispers with himself. I offered to help him renew his arsenal and asked him in Chinese the phrases he would ideally be using, from a marketing point of view.

His wishlist:

1.) "Have you fucked a Chinese girl?"
2.) "She swallows cum," and
3.) "No pubic hair!"

The big three - he was very confident thereafter. I may have made him a rich man.

On the way back to the hostel in a taxi, without my even mentioning the pimp, the taxi driver of his own volition just launched into a random, vicious rant on the evils of Dongbeiren (Northeasterners). People in China seem to see fellow-provincials the same way we westerners see fellow-countrymen; they sometimes appear to look at people from other provinces as we look at foreigners. That would make foreigners in China the equivalent of space aliens. China is its own planet.

My flight to Dongbei was the following morning. It started with a near-disastrous wrong-terminal problem. It never occurred to me that there might be another terminal at Beijing Capital Airport besides the glittering, cavernous new one. But upon finding my flight missing from the departures board i made inquiries and was redirected to a shitty little rolled aluminium shed of a Terminal 3 that reminded me a lot of Perth Airport.

By the time i had transferred from Changchun Airport to Changchun Bus Station to Songyuan City, i had about 11 hours to "play" with my old friends in Songyuan, and i have to say it was very good to be back. Songyuan seemed a lot more rural than i remembered it, with the donkey carts and various classes of "agricultural vehicle" roaming the massive 8-lane boulevards freely. Outwardly, it just looks like a very rich "Xian" (county capital) - it essentially is 2 separate Xians joined by a bridge. It really is rich - so rich that its inhabitants even admit it, and as far as i remember that's rare in China. And Feiyu Jinlun Huayuarrrrr, the luxury apartment complex we lived in, has taken over two more villages and is now so massive it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one side to the other.

Predictably, most of the people i knew from the school had left - especially the Chinese staff, of whom only 3 remained from 2007. Had a time catching up with those who were there, which became especially fun when i made the mistake of insisting on paying our own bill in a place called Kebab Bar.

Two blokes next to us had been engaging an American teacher and me in riveting conversation regarding New York policewomen and other matters, and had taken to keeping our beer glasses full. Then they said they were going to pay the bill and i asked the American teacher if she was happy with that and she was ambivalent.

I went up to the counter and insisted on paying our bill ourselves. The fuwuyuarrrr, however, couldn't be bothered with the bill-paying games, and as the two drunkards had already given her money for our bill, she took the money i gave her and slapped it down on their table.

Suddenly the drunks were deathly silent. They didn't touch the money, and i instantly realised i'd fucked up...this was a mortal insult: two guys get drunk, build face by stacking up the beers on the table to show how much they've drunk, foreigners come in, they win even more face by engaging them in conversation for an hour, they generously express their appreciation by paying their bill, and the foreigners not only publicly shun their generosity, an insultingly small sum of money gets thrown at them as though they need it. A truly disastrous loss of face...

My mind flashed back to the taxi driver in Beijing the previous night, and it gave me an idea: rectify the situation by cravenly stoking regionalism. "I'm sorry," I said, taking the money off their table and stashing it in my wallet, "I owe you an apology. I've been out of the Northeast for too long and, well, people in the South are just not as polite and kind as you Northeasterners. Actually they're really very rude. They don't have your level of culture. Or quality."

"We'd heard that too," one of them replied. And all was well.

I was out of there at 5am the next morning, back to Changchun, a short reunion with Mr Robert, airport, plane to Pudong (i agree with the departure boards in Chinese airports - Pudong doesn't count as Shanghai), then Maglev to Shanghai in six minutes or something ridiculous:

Hua Shan

2009-04-29T01:57:00.002-12:00

March 15, 2009: I had come to Xi'an with the intention of heading north onto 2007's Great Wall journey route and catching up with a couple of nice people in shitty polluted towns.

But somehow instead i ended up at the second completely unreal scenic location of the trip.

When i reached Xi'an i found that a timetable change (it was actually much more likely a case of a Chinese train info website being plainly wrong on the existence of the train in question) meant would mean i would only get to one place - and that, i decided, would be Shenmu County. In fact, flying in the face of my "shitty and polluted" description, Shenmu was recently crowned number one among Shaanxi's 10 "Super-Counties" 强县 in social and economic development in 2008 - although in Shaanxi obviously the competition isn't as strong as elsewhere. The provincial government said it was based on a combination of 30 indices, including those of 'economic institutions, social development and ecology and environment'. Going by my recollection of the state of the environment up there, i think it's probably safe to assume it's the economy and society that are propelling Shenmu to the top of the ratings.

Actually, all of our North Shaanxi favourites from the Great Wall trip were right up there at the top of the list - Dingbian and Jingbian, Shenmu and Fugu. (One day 30 years from now, when the bored grandsons of today's coal miners find themselves hangin' on street corners and hatin' on the (clean) air they breathe, i predict some little red-guard-without-a-cause will end up rapping about those four places.) Even Hengshan, which gave me the impression of being somewhat closer to Burundi than Beijing, was there at number 14, and the whole thing appears to be saying (i may simply be misreading it completely) that sandy, barren, mountainous, rotten North Shaanxi 陕北 is doing significantly better than the rest of the Shaanxi countryside. I continue to rant at people about China's miraculous elevated superhighways (don't worry they all deserve it - especially the foreigners - after asking the question, "What's China like?"). The one between Xi'an and Jingbian County just ploughs through range after range of steep, sandy mountains, bringing the whole "Shaanbei" region within 5-10 hours of the provincial capital, where before it was days - conceivably weeks in many places - distant. The idea appears to be "maintain elevation at all costs", with 400-500km of alternating tunnels and bridges. Mountain in the way? Tunnel straight through it. Deep, wide valley on the other side? Keep the road going straight outwards, Wile E. Coyote style, just add concrete legs underneath, getting longer and longer as required. Just awesome feats of engineering that bring massive social benefits:--

So i messaged my Shenmu County "Taiwan Hand-pounded Pancake" chain store dude (actually "chain sign" would be a more accurate description as the franchisee doesn't need to have anything more than a table and a hotplate) and wondered how he was going. He replied that he was pleased i had remembered him but he "wasn't in that place anymore," that he was now a policeman, and he wished me a safe trip. This i interpreted to mean he was not in Shenmu and didn't have time to see me, and now, reading back over the messages i'm not so sure. Still, i had to make a decision at that point, and the decision was that instead of sitting for a whole day on a train, stopping for 2 hours in a coal town, turning around and getting back on the same train as it crawled back, i would go to Hua Shan, one of China's five Sacred Tourist Mountains.

While in Xi'an that night, i visited the backpackers bar that was the scene of "what's my cat gonna do now?", definitely my personal funniest moment of the last two years. Insanely, one of the two poms from that episode was there in the bar playing pool! He wasn't overly keen to talk it through in detail in front of the other people he was with...perhaps he was fearing i would bring up the bit where he's jumping around like a gazelle trying to escape Randy...

I set off the next morning.

It's a very civilised mountain, as you can see above - the paths are all paved and probably have been for eons. Most tourists take the cable car straight up to the north peak from the other side, bypassing probably half the climb. As i neared the north peak, through the silence i started hearing a buzzing noise like a swarm of bees. It became louder and louder until it finally took form as the sound of swarms of people - although as you will see further down if you get that far, this being low season, these swarms would certainly not qualify as such.

Even now the taming of the mountain continues. This guy and his mates were constructing a new paved viewing platform, presumably out of the mountain itself.

Although there are a few crazy vertical ladders (e.g. above), i saw nothing at Hua Shan that really matched the danger described by this dedicated anti-Huashan website. My biggest danger came from my heavy backpack, whose shoulder straps snapped three times. Whenever this happened i would be dragged violently towards one side of the path, which on occasions meant towards a massive drop. However, the backpack may have actually saved me too: most of the climbing was above the snow-line, on the couple of occasions when i did slip over, my backpack ruled out the possibility of cracking the back of my head.

Most of the time though the bag just made me labour like an old-time coolie. Actually, beyond the cable car station a few times i found myself overtaking or being overtaken by a porter carrying supplies up the mountain for the numerous mini-shops and guesthouses up there. These guys would just about be the coolies' closest contemporary relatives, but given the prices up there (Coke 12RMB, pack of biscuits 20RMB, "convenient" noodles 15RMB) i would hope they were very well-paid. Shame i forgot to ask one his income. Somehow, despite the presence of these hardy, hardy troopers, Chinese fellow mountain-goers still saw fit to comment - sometimes to me, other times to each other thinking i wouldn't overhear/understand - on my "ferocious" European body strength. When i pointed out that most of the people climbing the mountain were Chinese and that their bodies were holding up just fine, the reply would invariably be to the effect of, "Yes but your bodies are better than we Chinese'." After a few times i started inquiring as to the status of Africans' bodies - and indeed, black bodies are physically better than white ones. Although that assessment seems to play out true in the form of the Olympics and ball games, i still find the Chinese tendency to rank the races very interesting. In terms of civilisation Chinese people will sometimes say the Chinese are more civilised than blacks and less civilised than whites, though of course they're more than well aware that the Chinese were civilised long before Europeans. Taking, then, China as the longest-running civilisation, and Africa as the most recently civilised (or uncivilised) continent, China with the worst bodies and Africa with the best, i wonder if many Chinese people would perceive a link between civilisation and bodily decline. And of course, physical degeneration in the form of obesity and no exercise has been a status symbol in China in the past. This idea even Orwell touched on, when he discussed his fear of "progress" leading to brains-in-bottles, in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Impeccable timing, thinking of this now as i'm just about to leave China for years!

The top of Hua Shan is just beautiful: the three main peaks, South, East and West, are clustered together, with a triangular bowl of forest between, covered in snow at least a foot deep. It's dotted with temples, and quite a few trees are marked as being over 300 years old; one was 800. I stayed the night in a guesthouse on top of the mountain, sharing a room with an extremely generous fellow from Hebei who showered me with biscuits and other sustenance-related products. Soon we were joined by another guy who was keen to shout us 15RMB beers (actually probably more like 20RMB - i wasn't paying), and even keener for us to share his long-life chicken feet. We got up early to watch the sunrise from the East Peak, along with about 40 others, mainly students it seemed. I think they got even more of a kick from it than i did: whooping noises reverberated around the peaks all morning, long after the sun had peeped over the pollution line.

Mountains made of this kind of rock must have been the inspiration for the Mario Bros. mountains, no?--

I descended by cable car, which must have increased the number of visitors tenfold when it opened. It's quite a blessing that many visitors don't even climb at all, instead just taking a look at the view from the North Peak cable car station and then going back down again. As i mentioned above, the North Peak was buzzing this time, and just imagine in summer when even these racks, this stockyard, can't control the cable car queues....

...actually it was a local tourism bureau official who told me that, and he told me rather enthusiastically. Maybe he just felt he needed to justify the empty racks. Or maybe to him crowded mountains, as tourist attractions, are, well, touristically attractive.

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Photos

A badly-connected taxi driver gets me to Xi'an...eventually

2009-03-29T23:05:00.009-12:00

March 14: He roped me in at Yichang bus station. Probably as thoroughly roped-in as i've ever been.

I told him to take me to the train station, and he asked me why i'd want to go there, as there were no trains tonight. I replied that i knew this, and i was going to take tomorrow's train.

To where, he asked.

Xi'an.

"Oh you should go by bus, there's sleeper buses - buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight."

Yeah, i said, i know about the sleeper buses. They go a long, long way with very infrequent stops, which stops me from whiling away the journey with beers. I'll take the train.

But he did well, talking me round by pointing out the whole extra day, plus cash, i'd save.

I asked him what time the bus left. He didn't reply, but rifled through a stack of business cards before pulling out a typical bus owner's card and calling the number on it. This was a bad sign; i'd been under the impression that by "buses with beds going to Xi'an tonight" he'd meant buses leaving from the bus station. This was a different game - the game the peasants have to play, hailing down buses in the mostly-vain hope they'll stop cold on a superhighway.

Anyway, the outcome of the call, he told me, was that the bus was indeed coming, and we negotiated a price that i found quite reasonable. He dropped me off at an internet bar and said he'd be back in two hours to take me to the bus.

Two-and-a-half hours later he rocked up and told me the bus was running late and would be coming at 1.30. AM, of course. So i wasted another hour online before he picked me up and we headed to the supposed meeting point, under a highway bridge. Half an hour we waited there with no sign of any bus before taxi finally agreed, on my urging, to call bus and check the other's present location. For once i understood the conversation almost-perfectly, and it wasn't encouraging: it was clear that the bus driver wasn't all that fussed whether or not this deal (delivering me to Xi'an) came through or not. The taxi driver was an irrelevant minnow in the transport business; he didn't know the bus driver personally, he'd just come by his card somehow and was now trying to cultivate his "guanxi" (Chinese-style 'connections', or 'netw**king') with these great sharks on the intercity bus scene. The bus driver hadn't bothered to notify him of a change of plans, and he now had to drive 20km out into the countryside if he wanted to make the deal. He laughably tried to get me to pay, then quickly recanted as i started to get out, and away we went to the outskirts of Yichang at top speed.

Once again, however, the bus driver hadn't thought it relevant to tell the taxi driver that the bus was still more than an hour away. Not only did he waste his own petrol and risk our two worthless lives, he was now risking his whole livelihood driving at 140km/h down wet roads to make this deal.

Waiting under another highway bridge, it was now 2.30am and i was getting pretty keen for the bus-bed. Taxi convinced me it would be a good idea to go up onto the bridge, in the rain, to wait for the bus which would be here "on the horse", (ie. a very non-specific "soon"). After about 5 minutes of this a cop pulled up and banished us from the bridge, effectively forcing the taxi driver to pay the toll to enter and use the highway just to stop in the rest zone 500m ahead to meet the bus. Still he fought the inevitable - he stopped the car just before the toll gate and we watched for the bus, which still didn't appear. It looked and felt decidedly like a wild guce chase, but i actually felt sorry for him, this taxi driver who had got me into this and deprived me of a night's sleep. After witnessing his struggle to make it happen I actually wanted him to make his deal. At 3.30, with the bus now a full 4 hours late, he called the bus driver again and discovered that the bus had already gone past us. Luckily, at least as far as our immediate aim of getting me onto the bus was concerned, it had some kind of mechanical problem and was still there in the rest zone ahead. So he floored it, paid the toll and i got on the bus.

Inevitably, having finally got on the bus, desperate for sleep, there turned out to be no berth for me, but i was so tired that the floor proved very inviting.

The next day i awoke as the bus pulled into a(nother?) mechanic's, presumably for the same reason the bus was so late. But inside ten minutes those passengers who had braved the drizzle to relieve ourselves on the green and sodden Hubei countryside were being herded back on board.

The driver seemed to be avoiding the superhighway, instead hurtling along side-roads, probably to maintain proximity to mechanical services. But we weren't hurtling for long before we reached a traffic jam where a "horror smash" had recently taken place. A truck and a passenger bus had apparently collided head-on and the front of both vehicles was completely mangled. Somehow, people said, no-one was seriously hurt, but nothing was getting past on that road. So, after a farcical 10-minute, 15-point turn, we backtracked the 20 minutes to the superhighway entrance.

I was at this point holding the bus bosses - the driver and the owner - responsible for all that had gone wrong, and had decided the previous night, in a fit of pique upon learning i had only the floor to sleep on, that i wouldn't be speaking to either of those two dirty scheming wretches. But as the questionable nature of my decision to devour fresh fruit for breakfast became clear (they don't call fresh fruit 水果 "water fruit" for nothing), i asked when the next stop would be. I didn't quite catch the reply, but apparently when the bus is late there are no bathroom stops. I suggested i could use a plastic water bottle to relieve myself, which the bus bosses found hilarious and quite awesome. Two hours later i was about to crank out another bottle, but the bus owner insisted a plastic bag was a better idea. These seemingly "low quality" behaviours - i don't normally litter China but that double-blue piss bag obviously went straight out the window - apparently endeared me to them, and the owner invited me to stay up front, which was much more comfortable than being walked on in the aisle.

The pair of them, boss and driver, from the start plied me mostly with dirty questions, and the conversation actually ended up quite worthwhile. The boss, who said he was 51 but looked about 30, was a former soldier who'd gone into business with the money he'd saved from the army - an extremely common story in China. He'd bought the sleeper bus for 200,000-odd RMB, and said it took 2 years to recoup the initial outlay. He then had 6 more years in the profit zone before the bus would get pulled off the road. At this point the driver chimed in with, "he's really rich!" He didn't look it, but he's certainly doing alright.

The conversation came pretty quickly round to sexual practices when he told me very confidently that he knew the West was all about "free love" whereas "we Chinese are conservative". I replied that the situation in China's cities was almost exactly the same as in the West - that people pick up in nightclubs, but obviously not everyone does it all the time. He laughed, saying he didn't believe me, that i was trying to protect my "country's face"...so i told him every fucked-up detail i could think of about the treatment of Aboriginal Australia, and he seemed genuinely taken-aback that i would tell him such things, and (possibly, or so it seemed) keener to consider what i was saying.

Maybe it means nothing, but perhaps it could be the start of a legitimate tactic for foreigners trying to talk about controversial issues with Chinese - start by talking about the worst crimes of the Wild West or the British Empire. Make it something worse than they've even heard about - like Younghusband's invasion of Tibet in 1904, if Tibet's the topic under discussion - and your Chinese counterpart may decide your points are more worthwhile considering. The Iraq War might offer some excellent opportunities because the Chinese media, according to the Chinese professor behind this fascinating speech/article, covered it and the all-important leadup to it very similarly to Fox News, only probably less critically. The speech was made in '04 but my experience, or more specifically the near-complete absence of anyone in China ever bringing up the Iraq War with me in the last 2 years, would seem to suggest that the mainstream Chinese media have continued on a similar trajectory.

We drove into a tunnel in the rain and came out the other side in the snow.

Then we came down from the mountains and we were back in Xi'an, the Tang Dynasty capital with the awesome wall. If only Beijing's hadn't been pulled down...

The Yangtze's Three Gorges are looking quite full these days

2009-03-29T23:02:00.025-12:00

March 13, 2009: I'm pretty sure the toothbrush salesman had exhausted his supply by the time we reached Chongqing. I headed straight to the "wharf" to look at Yangtze River travel options.

I wanted to visit Fuling, home of some nice varieties of pickled vegetables and the "River Town" of Peter Hessler's classic book. I wanted to go there via the river, as Hessler had done before, but i was assured that no passenger boats went to Fuling.

"How do peasants from Fuling go home then?" I asked the taxi driver.

"They sit on a bus. It takes 1 hour. Sitting on the boat takes 5 hours. Why would they sit on a boat?"

The superhighway screws the river then, or rather, the (former) river transport operators - actually it's probably good for the river itself if the peasants are kept away from it... However, the truth is the river's already screwed. a situation educated Chinese blame on a lack of awareness of one's place in the world that they often refer to as part of people's "素质“, or "quality". For the "low quality" people who throw their household rubbish into the river, they say, the river takes the rubbish away from their world - their immediate area - and that's it, full stop. Throwing rubbish into the river is thus a reasonable plan. The really fucked-up irony is that as poor people's material position improves, their non-biodegradable rubbish output probably shoots up much faster than their education level. Given "low-quality" people make up a good 800+ million of this country's population, the logical conclusion is that the whole world is fucked. I wonder what percentage of China's population have even been told the idea of biodegradable and non-biodegradable.

Eventually i gave up on Fuling, so all i wanted now was a plain old ticket that entitled me to go by boat through the Three Gorges. But apparently no-one in China wants that - only packages that include marked-up entry to the various tourist attractions along the way. After all, what's travelling in China without temples and trinkets? I was about to find out. After long negotiations the company admitted there was a plain simple ol' 3rd class ticket - and at 435RMB for the 2-night, 2-day cruise it was a bargain.

Chongqing reminded me a lot of Changchun with the addition of a skyline. It's very confusing and chaotic, a bit greasy on the pavement side of things, and undeniably, potentially endearingly, ugly...well, the parts i saw anyway.

It's built on steep slopes (not in the photo above) above the Yangtze, slopes so steep that in the central city area there are many massive retaining walls - up to 20 storeys or maybe more - so you generally can't just walk from A to B, you have to know where the staircases are and they're not advertised; and huge highways dominate the river banks, adding to the messy effect and pedestrian mayhem. The passenger wharf is so far above the river (the river looked relatively low when i was there) that a special kind of toothed railcar is provided (and whose tracks mean you must take a long detour if you want to walk down) just to get up and down from the boat.

It appears to be a converted city bus, but i've no idea how or why they'd go to the effort of bending a whole bus into the required shape, rather than just making a platform with walls. Maybe it was a face project in the 80s - "Come to Chongqing - where you can sit on a bus right down to the water's edge!". Speaking of water's edge, the rubbish layer is visible even from afar:

Chongqing is also famous for awesome greasy, spicy snacks including chilli potato pieces.

The tourist boat turned out to less shit than i was expecting, given the discount price: a three-storey floating hotel, basically, like this one.

When i first boarded, the staff simply couldn't understand what i was doing coming aboard with a boat-only ticket. Did i understand i wouldn't be able to get into the "attractions" we would be stopping at? They immediately commenced upselling me the tourism products and services i'd just spent more than half an hour eliminating.

Fellow passengers, too, didn't understand why one would go travelling down the Yangtze but not participate in tourism activities. But of course, the next day when they would return to the boat from this or that temple or fun park, i would ask them how it was and the reply would be that it was just like all the others.

A suitably motley crew of characters had emerged by the second morning on that boat: The Shanxi Coal King who was desperate to "treat" me to a Chinese prostitute at the next port;

...the paranoid Taiwan Cryogenics Mogul who, after giving it to me, wouldn't let me look at his business card in public lest the details on it be seen by the Mainland riff-raff;

...the Shaanxi county-level government goons, who oversee welfare in their county (although they had strangely little to say on the subject, about as uncontroversial as subjects get, when asked);

...and the Ningxia book editor with a daughter too fond of Chairman Mao for her liking.

So i kicked back, drank beer, smoked pipes and waited alone on the boat at various Yangtze ports, until we reached the entrance to the Gorges.

Unfortunately the most immediate way they looked to me was "flooded". Although the mountains all around are probably still at least 1,000 metres high, and the portion underwater is only a bit over 150m, they really looked like the peaks of mountains sticking up out of the water. I'm sure a huge part of the Gorges' former glory and impact on travellers was due to their narrowness, which effect is obviously completely gone now. Still insane to think there used to be massive, raging rapids 150+ metres straight down below though.

And the disappointment of a spoiled foreign tourist here or there is, of course, very irrelevant. I'm convinced that the dam has brought benefits to the majority of locals. For a start, the new towns - i didn't see the old towns, of course, but by all accounts they were shitholes by comparison. And river freight transport is so much more efficient than road that these massive drive-on-drive-off ferries for trucks are almost the most common type of vessel. The multi-storey part at the back is presumably a floating inn for the truckies.

The cruise ended at Yichang, or rather, the river port before the dam that they choose to refer to as "Yichang" but is actually an hour's bus ride from that city. Luckily, by blending in with the package tourists (ie. everyone else), i was able to sneak aboard their bus and save myself the cost of a ticket.

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Photos

The Great Toothbrush Salesman of Sichuan

2009-03-29T21:23:00.006-12:00

March 10, 2009: Rattling along through the famed Sichuan "Land of Abundance" to Chongqing...

on this train...

and i was almost falling asleep listening to some stooge try to sell Chairman Mao collectible cards when...........this guy, this golden toothbrush salesman arrives on the scene.

He had a hard sale to make here, believe me - toothbrushes are not exactly in short supply in China. I bought 6 toothbrushes from him. Or was it 10? The Chinese Dream, or rather, the China Dream in action, people.

Definitely one of the funnier episodes of the trip. And if anyone by chance sees this who understands the parts i don't - please let me know what the hell he says.

The badlands of Panzhihua

2009-03-29T16:16:00.021-12:00

March 9, 2009: Being a tourist city, people don't really stare at the foreigners in Lijiang. But the moment i set foot on the bus from Lijiang to Panzhihua, i was out of the tourist zone and back in "real China" (i.e. the sort of China that 90% of China is). [Update: see comment 2 at the bottom for notable Panzhihua history i neglected to mention]

Every head turned, every eye on the bus burned into me, and in an attempt to express my exasperation good-naturedly i decided to say "Ni hao" loudly to each and every starer. Most turned out to be peasant kids from Sichuan who work in Lijiang.

The road across northern Yunnan Province to Panzhihua on the Sichuan border is not particularly long, but it's a steep and winding 7-hour journey. Probably 2-3 hours max if they built a superhighway. In my second pleasant China roads surprise in 24 hours, the bus driver was an absolute legend: not too fast, not too slow, drove carefully around donkey carts and peasants on foot, used the horn reasonably, and made no outrageous overtaking maneuvers. He even drove slow enough to take photos out the window, and witness the process of urbanisation:

20 years, my guess, and the towns and villages will have joined up.

Quite abruptly the country turned scrubby, reminiscent of Shanxi, as the brown haze that seems to blanket most of the Chinese countryside returned, meaning we were now in Panzhihua's atmosphere of influence. It's an iron ore city, a young one by Chinese standards, only founded in the 1960s. A far-flung outpost among wild mountains on what was traditionally the edge of Chinese civilisation, i must admit Panzhihua's noise, grime, crammed buses and predominance of massive dump trucks was a rude shock after a few days in the tourist wilderness. The signs of what i would term backwardness were pretty abundant in Panzhihua: compulsive staring, "hel-lauwww?", quite a few unfriendly gawks and glances - and, of course, the obligatory touching warmth and hospitality to a total stranger. The ticket sales lady at the Panzhihua train station, for example. She helped me work out what random station i needed to get off at to hike through and see some of the Sichuan countryside and when there would be a train, and whether there were any seats, all the while simultaneously selling tickets to other people. She finally came up with a train leaving at midnight that would allow me to avoid spending the night in the city, going instead straight through to Emei, named for the famous Emei Mountain.

I had 6 hours to kill, to which end i went for a walk into the back alleys, and the further i strayed from the train station, the stranger the stares became. I chatted to a family in their drugstore for a couple of hours, the highpoint being a strikingly Japanese-looking hot-blooded youth who ranted and ranted against (who else but) Japan, completely in Chinese of course but with the occasional, "Nnnnnnaw! Fucka!" thrown in, accompanied by much manic finger-pointing. People told me there were foreigners in Panzhihua, although the amount of staring really kinda suggested otherwise.

The Chinese today are keen to label most places in China, and indeed China itself, as "backward" (the essence of the usual shutdown of China democracy). Presumably this is a post-Mao phenomenon because as far as i'm aware Mao-era propaganda portrayed China as the luckiest country on earth. (Meanwhile Australia was proclaiming itself the, uh, "lucky country".)

A lady waiting for a train even asked me, "Is Australia or Panzhihua richer?" At last! Someone in China who, as Donald Rumsfeld might put it, knows their unknowns: I'd never heard this as a question before, only blanket statements along the lines of, "Australia is a rich country, China is very poor."

The next day the brushes with Chinese mass philosophy continued. When i arrived at Emei town it was raining and foggy and i very decisively abandoned the hiking idea in favour of a day on the internet. My next train, this time to Chengdu, was at 3am. Being just a 4-hour ride i was happy to go on a hard seat (25RMB, the equivalent of $5), and somehow i unwittingly set off a hardcore anti-Cultural Revolution, anti-Mao struggle session. These guys, two middle-aged and one quite old, were all of the opinion that Mao's only good point was that he united the country.

Actually I've always felt it much easier to talk politics and history with older Chinese people than young. I seem to remember that night in Tiger Leaping Gorge the Granite Studio blogger made a point to the effect that he is disappointed to see so many Chinese students overseas seeing complex issues like Tibet or the Western media in black-and-white, with no interest in mutual understanding or consideration of opposing viewpoints. The Grace Wang case being a prime example, in which a girl was mercilessly vilified on the internet, and subsequently "Human Flesh Searched", for trying to get Tibetan independence and Chinese government supporters to talk to each other. I would almost extend his point to cover young educated Chinese in general. From my perspective there seems to be total unawareness of the possibility that things might not be as they seem. A recently-graduated student saw me reading an article about Tibet and asked me what i thought. The article claimed the Tibetan independence movement had the "full support" of "the West" and i told him that as a "Westerner", it certainly wasn't consistent with my own experience of "the West". Credit to him for caring to ask, but he appeared to have been only fishing for agreement in the first place because he immediately replied, "No, the whole article is true."

It reminded me of the mindless absolutism of the girl in Songyuan whom i asked about the Communist Party's 70/30 judgement on Mao, to which she replied, "Nnnnaw. He was 99.9999999999 per cent right."

Older people, on the other hand, in my experience at least, tend to be much more cynical about the Chinese media and what the government says - they've witnessed the Cultural Revolution (or at least heard people talk about it), seen the 180-degree backflips of the Deng reforms. As these older people are less educated, it would seem that education may be closing, rather than opening minds - which stands to reason really, given what we know about the Chinese education system when it comes to history and politics. The irony is the kids' ignorance isn't just due to schools' political correctness, it's the old people's fault for not TALKING about this stuff with their kids. A few days later a lady told me of how her daughter complained to her that life was better in the Chairman Mao times, and how she had snapped back, "I'm going to cook you cabbage and nothing else every day for a week, then you'll know what life was like back then." But how did she let her daughter come to such a misguided conclusion in the first place, when she herself had first-hand knowledge she could have imparted? This might simply be an intrinsic part of being Chinese - you generally just don't talk about the bad shit. If something's dark and terrible, why would you talk about it when you can talk about something positive? That said, Chinese people generally respond well it when i bring up the idea of learning from the past by studying its mistakes (particularly when i talk about Australia's historical darkni). It's a part of western philosophy that they can understand and, it seems, even respect. Whether China will at some stage face the past head-on is less about the Communist Party than we assume, and more about the people themselves.

We pulled into Chengdu just after 6am - plenty of time to connect with the 8.11am express train to Chongqing. But the train stopped just outside the station and waited. Why, no-one knew. And then it continued to wait until someone decided the time was right and we finally entered the station in...at 8.10, just in time for me to see my Chongqing express roll gracefully out in the other direction.

With another 3 hours to kill, i sat down front of the rather impressive new Chengdu Railway Station, ate some dumplings and watched as a team of security guards issued fines to peasants en masse for spitting or littering.

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Sichuan photos
Yunnan photos

The magnificent Tiger Leaping Gorge

2009-03-26T17:56:00.024-12:00

March 7, 2009: I'm not generally that much into laudatory posts, but there is no room for cynicism in talking about Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some people were cynical that it would soon be filled up like the Three Gorges, but as far as i can tell that's a non-story. That dam project was shelved in 2007 after successful environmentalist lobbying - now that's a story, successful non-governmental lobbying in China - but there's (breathtaking, towering, spectacular, magnificent, incredible) mountain scenery to describe. And so, with those used and abused adjectives out of the way (can they be kept at bay for the whole post?)....I rocked up very early to the bus station.

"No bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge today."

"What do you mean no bus?"

"There's no Tiger Leaping Gorge bus, ok?"

"Is there a bus that goes to Tiger Leaping Gorge?"

"Yes."

"Quick, what bus?!"

"You can take the Shangri-la bus and get off at Qiaotou and then take a taxi."

This didn't sound promising. "I thought Shangri-la was a fictitious place...."

"It's not fictitious. The bus leaves in 4 minutes. Do you want the ticket or not?"

Qiaotou, it turned out, is a town at the very entrance to Tiger Leaping Gorge. The reason i had to find this out for myself was the bus station ticket saleswoman, as Lijiang locals are apt to, had never been there and probably wasn't the slightest bit interested in ever going. So unless you're taking the special tourist bus (i.e. the one called "Tiger Leaping Gorge Bus") they don't know anything about it. Qiaotou was perfect. No taxi needed, just a 1km walk and i was on the trail - the Old Tea Horse Road to Tibet.

The only disadvantage of going through Qiaotou is the troll-under-a-bridge-like presence of an evil old Australian witch. I was in the ticket office (it's a national park) and just about to set off when this hideous creature approached me with a look of utmost alarm and broadsided me: "Are you alone? Oh no, you'd better come with me, it's very dangerous..." and then after a pause, "I live here." As she said this, her wild-eyed expression suggested a psychopathic state one might expect from someone who tries to scare people for a living. I replied that i'd be right thanks, and she walked off, turning back a few times to indicate that she expected me to be following her. I glanced over and saw a giant beanpole of a German, very blond and looking about 18 years and 2 weeks old, waiting with his backpack next to her shop with a look of extreme unease on his face. He stared right at me with a look that seemed to be begging for advice but for some reason i just laughed. He'd obviously been terrorised into signing up for a couple of days by this hag's side and it wasn't my place to go save him.

Then, as i set off, she heckled me from across the street! "You'll get lost!" and then, "Don't be so arrogant!" I don't know why i didn't lacerate her in reply, i think i was just too stunned or maybe i was considering the poor German child, who would doubtless become yet more confused if his expensive "guide" were publicly labelled a witch. But fuck you old hag, i thought, this is one of the last great scenic areas left for people to enjoy exploring for themselves, and with common sense it's perfectly safe - you only need to look up the abundant maps, photos and travel stories to know that.

One kilometre down the road, an arrow marked the beginning of the trail, and up it went. After about 45 minutes of steady climbing, the trail rounded a sharp corner...

I had been looking forward to exploring it on my own but i was wary of my weak body having got out of hospital less than 24 hours earlier, so when a car drove up and a fat Israeli and her Chinese guide jumped out, i agreed to walk with them. This worked for me because by going at a fat girl's pace i would make sure i didn't over-exert myself, and it certainly worked for them because both of their English was shoddy and they were struggling to communicate. As it happened, the guide, from Lijiang, had never been to Tiger Leaping Gorge before, and he didn't admit this until after he had taken us up the wrong path. We were set straight a few hundred metres up the road when we came upon a large gathering of local families building a house, and our stupid tourist waves were met with frantic pointing back down where we'd come from. At that point i decided to follow instead the large red arrows painted on rocks at every possible wrong turn.

In between gasps of air, and when not laughing at the cows or making observations such "whoa, a satellite dish," this Israeli girl decided the time was right to impress on me just how great Israel was. Israel even has Australians who have chosen to move there, she said, including her boyfriend. He dumped her but he chose to stay in Israel, she said, seemingly with patriotic pride.

I assured her that when i eventually hit the Middle East, Israel would certainly be on the list.

"No!" she said. "The other countries - it's very dangerous. There is nothing there."

"Which ones do you mean?"

"All of them. There is nothing there."

"Which ones have you been to?"

"None of them. Trust me, there is nothing there. You should only go to Israel."

I'm guessing she might have been some kind of hardcore illegal-settler type of Israeli. The kind that supports the idea that Palestine should be wiped off the map. Oh wait, it already has been. Anyway, indisputably the kind that guys like this...

...who live in a village cut into the mountainside that would look, from the opposite side, a lot like this...

...make their living off....But no siree, there was no 100RMB for the pair today, just true grit from the sweaty Israeli. What's more, as we pushed on, the trail got even steeper and i found out she was trying to walk the entire trail in one day (i had two days), and thus couldn't stop, even for the scenery.

When we reached a "add oil station" - a small house selling surgically-chosen backpacker products like Snickers bars and marijuana. I purchased a bag of the latter, just in case it worked, and sat down for a rest and they went on. They wouldn't have made it by nightfall.

The owner of the "add oil station" was heavily promoting their honey tea, which was not exactly in keeping with the backpacker-product menu, the honey coming straight from the beehive with chunks of wax and bee legs and shit covering the surface like the Yellow River in darkest Shanxi/Shaanxi. It looked so terrible i even saw fit to check if there was yak butter in it. This was, after all, the arse end of the Himalayas on a road to Tibet.

I continued to take it easy as the road continued to climb, and eventually on one of my many scenery/rest stops, a pair of Dutchmen, or rather, a Dutchman and a Belgian, caught me up and they turned out to be great blokes. Great blokes with great names: Dijs ("Dice") and Brik ("Brik"). Classic. Brik couldn't speak English, but he managed to express that he was a manual labourer, and manual labourers in Belgium get 1 year of long-service leave, paid, in Euros, for every two years they work. That's why he was there. Dijs is a mountaineer who climbs the Alps every summer, and i was fascinated to listen to his mountaineering tales as we trekked along about 1000 metres above the Yangtze torrent below.

The Tea Horse Guest House is about halfway along the gorge, and is home to sensational handmade pizzas, dogs that won't shut up, and, on this occasion at least, exalted company: one of the elite of China bloggers just happened to be there with a bunch of his students from Beijing on a uni expedition. What's more, he did me the honour of opening forth the fountain of knowledge for most of the evening, for the low low price of just one cigarette - contraband for him, being on uni camp - which he was promptly caught smoking by another teacher. Click the above link to his blog if ever you care to be educated about China and Chinese history.

The second day in the Gorge was just one of those brilliant days that makes life worth living and death inconsequential. Early start with the sun sending streaks of light over the giant craggy peaks opposite, followed by Yunnan coffee (not as good as Lao but still pretty good), a giant hash brown from the Tea Horse's kitchen, and a joint rolled by Dijs's expert Dutch hand. He even used two big papers to make it one of those awesome cone-shaped joints of Amsterdam. I was expecting the weed to be something similar to our Gansu ditch weed that tauntingly grew everywhere but offered no effect whatsoever. But strangely enough and to my delight, it worked.

Then Dijs pulled out the munchies: weed cookies. Strong ones. So just as the effect of the joint started to wane, the cookies kicked in!

We set off, the trail now almost flat, winding along the side of the mountain, more than a kilometre above the river, and with a 4-kilometre high wall of rock topped with Mordor peaks facing on the other side. In my absolute wonder i could barely keep my eyes on the path and several times i stonedly misstepped. Had i been unlucky and it happened in the wrong place, i would quite assuredly have been smashed to death on the mountain.

Though i somehow hadn't realised at the time, the steep, stony trail we were walking is known as the "Old Tea Horse Road", and is an ancient tea caravan route along which trade still passes on horse/muleback/pack donkeys. We, nay I, as the Dutchmen were smart enough to phase away from the edge to make room, was almost run over the edge by a couple of small caravans of mules loaded with building materials: the path has regular passing places but it's usually much narrower that a loaded pack animal, whose loads often stick out horizontally. At one point we strayed from the path and ended up down in a tiny village where a new wooden house was under construction. Dijs wanted to take photos and the workers, perched on thin beams 2 or 3 storeys up, were a little frosty about this idea until Dijs explained that his father was a carpenter and it made him happy to see people still building by hand. (Chinese people really need to get over this "we are backward" hangup.)

We passed several waterfalls, the last of which required fording over slippery rocks with a vertical drop a few hundred metres straight down around 40cm to the right. This photo didn't capture it, but it did capture the attempt to capture it (Dijs is in the background).

Dijs was on hand to explain the finer details of what we were looking at - "There, between those two sharp peaks, that's a glacier"--"See this? It's a natural bonsai. The rock has stunted its growth. It's probably a few hundred years old."--"Look at those two peaks there, they look like they're next to each other, right? There's a whole valley in between them."

And also, "Look at those dots on the wall of rock there. They're goats."

At various points i found it great fun to imagine caravans of traders and all the hiding places that banditos would've had to ambush them from. (The panorama below, and the other panoramas, are worth clicking on to see big because the file has already loaded).

Alas, no banditos these days, just backpackers, and very few were Chinese. Plenty of Chinese tourists down below on the big road at the bottom near the river. But they just drive in, have a look around from down below, and drive out again. It's crazy that they don't care to see their own country's magnificence (does that count as a repeated adjective?), though it's obviously good for the ecology of the place and for that dumb type of traveller who, like me, is always seeking the 'untouched' destination to go and touch.

When we got to the aforementioned road we wandered down to a guesthouse restaurant in front of the view shown at the top of this post, where weed pancakes were the local specialty.

The drive back from Tiger Leaping Gorge to Lijiang was most notable for the minibus driver getting pulled off the road at a police checkpoint for driving without plates. The cop exuded an Australian-style cop meanness, and what looked to be a surprisingly formal and strict enforcement method. Given the driver wasn't allowed to go on, my feeling is that at least part of the money he will pay will be legitimate fines. He said the general unwritten rule was that when you buy a new car you get 30 days to hoon around recklessly without plates, although officially it is 7 days. If this whole incident is a sign that China, or at least parts of China, are now clamping down on cars without plates then that's a damn good thing. But everyone in the van felt sorry for him; and i was in turn feeling sorry for the pleasant couple sitting next to me from Essex, England, just because of their accents.

The driver wasn't even allowed to drive away - he had to organise alternative transport for all his 8 passengers. We eventually were transferred to another minivan about an hour later, and once back in Lijiang i stayed the night in that ever-present cheap accommodation option, the internet bar. The whirlwind had to go on: early the next morning i was on the road to Sichuan Province.

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Photos, including more megapanoramas.

The city of clean streets and dirty hospitals

2009-03-08T00:00:00.013-12:00

March 5, 2009: My time in Lijiang was divided almost equally between the spotless Old City and the dirtiest hospital in China.

Well at least it's the dirtiest i've seen in China, emperor among a number of royally dirty hospitals...

Yunnan Province's name refers to "云之南", or "South of the Clouds", and i found it interesting that this could actually be seen from the plane. For the first 90 minutes, China down below was simply blanketed in thick, low cloud - well below the plane. As soon as we hit Yunnan, the clouds were blocked by high mountains (it happened so suddenly i didn't have time to get a photo; one of the mountain ranges is actually called the "Cut off the Clouds Mountains"), and the weather below became the sunny "Eternal Spring" that Yunnan's capital, Kunming is famous for. From Kunming, where I landed, I took the fast bus to Dali, another historical city, which, if Lijiang is anything to go by, is also now an ancient-China-themed theme park for Chinese tourists. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I was willing to pass by Dali in the dark on another bus headed for Lijiang.

Under a massive snow-capped mountain, Lijiang's Old City is pretty well maintained - even by theme park standards. Among its large mass of pretty upturned roofs and cobbled streets it appears there are no residential buildings at all. Every single space ("berth") i saw was either a shop (tea, silver, fabrics or artwork), a guesthouse/ restaurant, or a public toilet (sensationally frequent and sensationally clean for China). The exception was one street, namely "Alcohol Bar Street". Built along both sides of a fast-flowing stream like many of Lijiang's streets, it is a street of hanging lanterns and little stone bridges, lined with ancient trees and insanely loud bars and clubs all blaring a horrible fusion of traditional Tibetan singing backed by aggressive imitation-Casio keyboard beats. "Tibetan with Chinese Characteristics" it might be termed.

Each bar has spruikers making sure you feel welcome; pity i was already feeling lousy by the time i walked down there, and thus didn't stop to let any of them try to sell their bar to me. But the main purpose appears to be generally agreed upon, at least that's the impression i got from the various male tourists who throughout the day who all started the conversation by telling me Lijiang was a "good fling place".

Where Lijiang really is beautiful is along the little rivers that run through the city - all bubbling and full of goldfish and koi. Here, earlier in the day as i lazily, stingily phased from tea-shop to art-shop to tea-shop drinking free quality tea in exchange for conversation, i had met a band from Kunming who were particularly keen to hear some East Timorese folk tunes (it comes up surprisingly often because Chinese people often ask "Which countries have you been to?"). Tragically though, in two years i have completely forgotten almost every song i ever knew on guitar. Except some Metallica so i played that.

I don't know whether it was the delicious "baba" flatbread i nailed for breakfast/lunch, or the delicious well water, which i saw many others drinking, but by 10pm i knew i was in trouble. By 1am i felt like i'd lost most of my body's water and was moving towards losing consciousness so i struggled down the stairs and found the guesthouse's steel roller door down, as formidable a fire-escape barrier as the one in Fugu, Shaanxi. But luck was on my side: roller doors are one instrument by which you can actually wake a Chinese person. I banged and rattled until i got the required attention, and headed straight to hospital.

What a hospital it was, Lijiang Hospital. Dirt caked up in the corners, goobies and cigarette butts on the floor, and sweaty unchanged sheets. To complement this, the nurse was the kindest sort imaginable - especially considering the hospital staff appeared unanimously to believe my problem was drinking-related. At one point i suddenly yakked up a vicious, bright yellow solution of liver bile into a ceramic pot beside the bed. The bottom of the pot was curved, and the yak so violent that a large amount of the said solution just looped the loop and flew right back out again, ending up all over the floor, sheets and nurse. "Don't worry," was the nurse's response. I suppose if this had actually meant she would have to mop up, change the sheets and even change her own clothes then she might have been less amicable about it. But my making a mess didn't mean she had to do a thing.

Then there was the toilet: there were 5 cubicles, 4 of which were literally piled full of plastic medicine bottles, tubes and god knows what else. A large plastic bin was in the middle of the floor, half full with used syringes and used syringes only. The place stank worse than a Dongbei shit pit in spring, there was nowhere to wash your hands, and worst of all, absolutely nowhere to hang an IV-drip bottle while you're squatting.

Despite the initial 2 bottles of saline solution, 4 hours of unremittent usage of this toilet had meant i was still feeling bone dry on the inside, so i requested two more bottles, big ones this time. I demanded the drip be turned up to hit me with full speed (last time they denied me proper speed). By the end of the first one i was feeling fine and so i decided to leave the hospital, but as i was getting up someone in another bed said, "Hey - leaking!" pointing to my drip. I looked down at my arm but there was no sign of leakage so i said, "Yes, right, thanks," or something to that effect, and continued on my way. The patient repeated, "Leaking," pointing at my hand, and only then did i notice it had swelled up fatter than a sumo's, and was squidgy to the touch. It wasn't painful at all, although it was kind-of stuck in a fist shape...what would happen if i'd just kept going for the second bottle...how big could it get? Would make a very appropriate the Fist Challenge, Steve Foxx.

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Lijiang Photos

El Finale begins as expected, but early

2009-03-01T18:35:00.021-12:00

March 1, 2009: I left today on my 16-day, 6-province rampage that is supposed to provide enough China to get me through the next 3 years or so.

I haven't left though. I'm sitting in this cavernous airport and will be until tomorrow morning, asking myself what the fuck happened today.

It was always a sure thing that shit would go horribly wrong. It just happened earlier than i expected. I left an envelope containing almost all the money i have in the world, and 3 plane tickets, in the stairwell of a taxi. I was on the subway to the airport when i realised. I got off at the next stop and caught a train going back the other way, repeating to myself under my breath, "I'm not going anywhere." In a state of shock, i very slowly retraced my steps to the place where the taxi dropped me off. And there it wasn't.

Is it possible that there are positive signs to be read in being utterly gobsmacked by one's own stupidity? Well, i guess if i was still this stupid but didn't know it, that might be worse... no, actually that would be better.

No, no positives.

So, almost penniless, i got into another taxi (a strange thing to do for someone just made penniless - i was in shock), and directed the driver to take me home, thinking how pleased boxy would be that i'd come home so soon...absurd, i phoned her a little while later and she wasn't pleased at all.

Very slowly and deliberately, i told the driver my situation. I would like to find one particular Shanghai taxi driver, but i had no receipt, no driver number, no driver name or company name. I had the turquoise colour of the taxi and the fact the driver had a strange croaky voice.

But turquoise turned out to be representative of one company only. I called their complaints line and they took down the pick-up and drop-off points and times, and my phone number. I don't know if they just sent a text message to all drivers or if they analysed the various slivers of information super-quickly, but just as i arrived back at the gates of our apartment complex my phone rang, and a voice croaked on the other end: "Where are you? I'm bringing your thing over. I was worried a passenger was going to take it."

I plyed him with several 100 yuan notes for his trouble, and he raced me out to the maglev station.

The maglev did the 30km to the airport in 7 minutes, but it still wasn't fast enough. I got there 18 minutes before the flight departed and the airline company wouldn't check me in. Now China's overpopulated, mostly state-owned, domestic airline industry is brilliant in the way it allows you to miss a plane and simply transfer to another flight or even another company if necessary. But my 73%-off internet value ticket screwed me - only customers who pay at least 40% of the original price have the transfer thing available. I bought a new ticket for 1000 yuan, twice what i paid for the original ticket that went to waste.

But my luck was about to change. I'd brought one of Ima's joints with me, in anticipation of having a relaxed smoke-up before the flight. As such it was a very good thing i missed the flight because i doubt i would have remembered what was in my pocket and would have been risking arrest. Instead, having just missed the last flight of the day, i went outside and got nicely, unhurriedly toasted. Pudong Airport's massive terminals are very simple: two long parallel rectangles with an undercover drop-off area in the middle. Where i came out i found i was about 9/10 of the way along this drop-off area, so i walked to where the sidewalk ended. Having only one joint and no-one to share with, but carrying a butane lighter, i was in the unusual position of hoping for wind to blow the joint out after i lit it - so that it wouldn't go to waste. Sure enough, as i moved out from the shelter of the drop-off area, a wall of fresh sea-wind blasted me, and the view opened out to planes docking and taking off. With no-one within 200 metres, it made a pretty special place for an mp3-enhanced tokeup and the air guitar was freely abused. The closest vehicle was a cop car with flashing lights. That didn't actually mean anything (cop lights are always flashing in China) but it made me start thinking of the potentially farcical and tragic fate of a stoner who did the same at Pudong airport...

He first comes to the authorities' attention when he walks away from the departures hall entrance pushing a trolley out into the strong, cold wind. Others are smoking outside but they huddle near the door, shielded from the wind by the terminal building.

He pushes the trolley as far as he can - to where he can't be seen on the terminal's cameras, and the security monitoring room requests assistance from on-site police in monitoring him while he is off-camera. The first thing they see after they park at the terminal entrance 200 metres away is him rustling around in his bag and pulling out his black stoner beanie - a balaclava from a distance where the lack of eyeholes can't be made out. He puts it on his head, folding back the face-covering part.

He stands with the airport spread out before him, surveying the scene.

He has headphones on. The airport security police have been trained to be especially suspicious of suspicious-looking persons listening to music, as the headphones may in fact be a communications earpiece. Then he pulls from his pocket a small electronic gadget with a wire coming from it.

His mp3 player is not an iPod and it takes him nearly 3 minutes to to scroll through all the albums to choose what he wants to listen to. He finally puts the device back in his pocket, then proceeds to pace back and forth, his lips clearly moving now and again.

"Can't be programming a control device. He would just set it up before he came to avoid taking it out of his pockets," says a young, low-ranking uniformed cop in the car 200 metres away,

In the same car a sergeant whose eyesight is failing him, asks the young officer next to him: "What race is he?"

"Not clear. But he's foreign for sure," replies the officer reassuringly.

"Foreigner!? What do you mean foreigner, you pailful of contaminated river mud! What's that supposed to mean? You little post-80 son-of-a-donkey, do you realise your foreigner-worship could one day cost thousands of lives? We will be MORE vigilant if someone looks foreign, do you hear me? To be suspicious of foreigners is the reason we're here!"

The young officer doesn't argue.

The stoner continues pacing and talking, pacing and talking. The climax of his stoner-rock song arrives, and starts stomping around manically, almost-rhythmically, with one one arm outstretched.

"Uh, looks like a ritual. Maybe..." the young officer trails off.

"You useless turtle, it is that minority's dance, what was it - the Salazu? Yes, the Salazu's dance. Hunting ceremony. Didn't you watch the New Year Gala? Just keep watching. It's definitely the Salazu....... Maybe the Mowuhazu. They have people with hair as yellow as any foreigner's. They've made a fool of you. He's not foreign. He's Mowuhazu. I'm calling this in."

The ritual ends when the mp3 track does, and the now thoroughly-stoned stoner takes off his jacket and moves back towards the terminal, carefully tucking the wires of his headphones inside his shirt.

"404." says the sergeant "I repeat, 404. Enact procedure 36a and train cameras. Resolutely maintain vigilance and do not approach."

Inside the cavernous terminal the CCTV zooms in on the stoner's eyes. They are darting around nervously as he pushes his trolley aimlessly around, scanning for a bank of seats all to himself to sleep the night on. He scans all round the terminal - past the departure gate and security check, all the way to the other end, but there are none.

"What's the status of the 404?"

"Walking chaotically. His intentions are not clear," reports the CCTV monitoring station.

The stoner turns around and walks back the way he came. He nears the security zone for the second time.

"This is Main Departures Gate. We've just had a male walk past looking aimless, and now he's coming past us again. This constitutes a 691, no?"

"Incompetent shit collector, consult reference materials! This male is already being monitored as a 404!"

With nowhere else to go to avoid human contact, especially eye contact, the stoner once again heads outside, to the same spot, the end of the drop-off area. He rummages in his bag for another jacket, this time his windproof one.

"He's rummaging," says the sergeant, squinting. "Closely monitor the rummage."

"It's another jacket. He's walked out in a blue jumper, back in in a yellow shirt, and now he's wearing a gray jacket. He may be trying to affect our monitoring process..." says the young officer.

"Elevate to code orange. Dispatch threat team to vantage."

"Look boss, he's switching to a baseball hat. He is attempting to divert our attentions."

The stoner pulls out the small wired device from his pocket, looks at it, replaces it and moves back towards the terminal. His lips move quickly as he quietly raps along now to his favourite stoner hip-hop music.

"Look, his lips are moving. All units stand by. Target is approaching the building and he is in communication, repeat, he is in communication....dispatching approach. Maintain position, suspected control device is located in his left pocket."

"This is Approach. His eyes are moving rapidly, he looks afraid. Repeat - he looks afraid. He has seen me, and he looks afraid. Hey! - what are you doing here?"

Through his headphones the stoner hears a voice shout something and looks up to see a bulky man with a serious expression heading towards him. The stoner turns, startled, and immediately reaches into his pocket to pause his loud music.

"Vantage Group clear!"

Pop pop pop!

Cue the cartoon super-stoner alternative ending, or else, the stoner slumps.

---

"Try paranoia - it's fun"

Remembering the former glory of Cold China - with products

2009-02-27T18:14:00.000-12:00

February 25, 2009: As this blog nears its death-knell i think it only appropriate to return it to its glory days. And of course that can only mean products.

But this presumptuous "blog" downright bloggy enough to "link" back to its own blog posts? Hell yes, they're all down the left side... However, the hardworking folk at Cold China (so hard-working they post once a month and then change the dates back to when they should have been posted) wouldn't be so lazy as to serve up refried "fashionable" horse beans from 2007. No sirs and madames. Behold, despite their surly countenance and resistance to being photographed, your intrepid correspondent got up in the face of four BRAND NEW PRODUCTS!

First up, we can see, we're actually not talking Chinglish here, but rather Chileans and their dodgy English. Because everyone knows the Andes are really known as the Ands in Chile. And "mouthfeel" is just one of those words that doesn't translate well from Spanish. This lack of guidance as to its advantages almost ruined this rare drop, with its fine bouquet of methylated spirits and ever-so-subtle undertones of rotten grapes.

The makers of the above two products are definitely clued-up cats, globally - anyone who's been to the UK can confirm it does indeed smell strongly of petroleum-derived edible lard.

I must say, however, the Appetizing Salt Soda line of biscuits really lives up to its name, especially with a hefty smear of vegemite. A worthy candidate for rebranding as "Australia Smell Biscuit" i say.

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Getting weed in Shanghai

2009-02-05T18:05:00.004-12:00

February 5, 2009: I met Ima as i hurried past his flatbread shop on a beer-buying errand, stopping in my tracks as he called after me, "Hashish marrrwana." (the rrr is supposed to indicate a rolled r).

Well actually, yes please.

I'd been waiting almost 2 years for this, though never expecting it to happen. He took me into an upstairs room decked out like an Arabian desert tent with middle-eastern carpets and pictures of Xinjiang, his homeland, covering the walls. There we puffed on a couple of fat joints and drank bowls of Xinjiang tea for an hour or so before i left to continue on my errand. Once i reached the street however, i was seized by the thought of getting locked up if the police noticed, and i made straight for home, which thankfully was just around the corner.

I needn't have worried of course, given Ima's willingness to shout out "Hashish marrwana" on the street outside his shop whenever a foreigner walks past. As he pointed out the next time i saw him, the police in China barely even know the existence of "Big hemp", much less know it by the names the rest of the world knows it by. Almost nobody in China would even know the smell. The smell, that is, of the buds being burned. As some of you may recall, we discovered last year, a non-potent version of it grows freely in Gansu, both in fields entirely dedicated to it and also in ditches and wasteland alongside major roads, where it is considered a kind of easy-to-grow sesame seed. (Actually hemp and sesame are both represented by the same Chinese character.)

His weed isn't cheap by Chinese commodity prices - it's about the same price as in Australia or the UK - but it's strong enough. Ima claims "everyone" (that is, everyone except all the women) smokes it in his hometown. Judging by Ima, those stuck down here in China Proper wouldn't tolerate simply being without this essential element of their culture... I imagine from now on, the second-last month of our time in China, it will always be quite easy to obtain weed, as the supply lines are undoubtedly direct from Xinjiang, and people are coming and going from Xinjiang in large numbers every day by train. It would be very easy for him to simply get whatever friend-of-a-friend who was coming down to Shanghai next to pack a pack of the green stuff, and i'm sure many, many Uighurs - or other indigenous ethnic groups who i'll call collectively Xinjiangis - have such supply lines open.

That next time i saw him happened to be my 25th birthday - today (well, it should've been today so i'm backdating it). Until then it had been quite possibly the shittest birthday ever, spent reformatting my computer and re-installing windows. Then there was Ima's weed cafe for lunch. Not only did he supply weed, we ordered Xinjiang food for munchies, the main part of which turned out to be one of the best ideas i've ever seen in cooking. It was pieces of mutton and vegetables (not particularly special but delicious nonetheless) in a deep plate of soupy sauce - and here's the crucial bit - with a flatbreat submerged in the sauce...So fuckin good - the question i have now is: Why don't more people put flatbread at the bottom of juicy, sloppy dishes? In addition to all of this, he whacked on some music video VCDs that alternated song-by-song between fascinating lute-based Xinjiangi songs of love and loss filmed among the spectacular scenes of that land, and random 70s and 80s funk/soul - not your average Marvin Gaye or anything, but real random stuff that no-one's heard for more than 20 years. He told me these songs were popular on Xinjiang radio way back when he was a kid. Globalisation ain't no new thang eh.

A glorious monument to overproduction

2009-02-02T15:37:00.001-12:00

February 2, 2009: Kenty and Tess have come and gone, and their admirable touristic fervour led me to experience the Real Shanghai, from a foreign visitor's perspective, for the first time.

First up was Yuyuan, the Mandarin's Garden, right near my place though i'd never gone inside.

Nice fishes they've got there.

From that rather desolate collection of crazy paving and courtyards (this may be a bit unfair as the day was very cold, but with its courtyard walls it's certainly designed to receive minimum sun) we hit up the world's highest observation deck, in the World Financial Center or whatever that massive building known as The Bottle Opener is actually called.

(Its non-identical 'twin' tower, the Jinmao Building across the road, is one building i really like.)

My cheapness meant we didn't go all the way to the top deck at 474 metres, only to the 430 metre one. Kenty, who seemed keen to spend RMB in a way somewhat resemblant of foreign sailors in Old Shanghai (the analogy doesn't actually extend to cheap hookers) wanted the extra 44 metres, and Tess seemed nonplussed, so my convoluted pseudo-mathematical protestations about the exponentially-decreasing significance of additional height beyond the pollution line won out.

We got there about half-past four and the sun was still above the above-mentioned pollution-line. However the astonishingly lame, compulsory, "Intro Show" on the basement floor - which consisted of a one=metre scale model of the tower embedded with LED lights, spinning around and around - was there to save us from seeing the city in its full, sunlit glory. When we reached the observation deck the mists were rolling in and the sun had all but disappeared into the haze.

Nonetheless we had spectacular views of the Sim City known as Pudong. (For the uninitiated that's the east side of the river, which has been almost entirely constructed since the mid-90s.)

Next up came Kenty's moment of glory, the Shanghai Tourist Tunnel. I'd never even heard of it, and his introduction to the idea of us going began, "I know it's crap but...." But despite the bitter wind, my scepticism, and Tess's continuing nonplussedness, he nonetheless emphasised repeatedly his burning desire to see it, due to its being there for tourists. And despite the total fluke required to actually find the entrance, tucked away in the forecourt of some big hotel, and despite its consisting of only 2 elements - WackyWavingInflatableArmFlailingTubeMen and more of those surplus LED lights from now-defunct Guangdong factories (I guess this is what's respectfully termed "the early signs of over-production"), i think anyone who says the Shanghai Tourist Tunnel is crap just isn't opening their mind (or maybe camera lens) long enough.

Bravo kenty, for speaking out for the unpopular cause.

"Menace" the mayor and other random images

2009-01-10T21:42:00.006-12:00

January 11, 2009: Saw this crazy reflection in the window just before we moved from the other room.

Anyway some other random images. This building was across the road from our latest Hong Kong hotel room, a 9x6 foot box in a great location downtown:

I wonder how that overhang can remain, apparently completely unsupported.

If you ever go to Hong Kong and you need the cheapest clean hotel room in town (you probably will) then look no further than Mirador Mansion.

Don't be put off by its foreboding exterior, nor the maze of an Indian shopping mall on the lower floors (you have to go up 3 different flights of steps to reach the hotel part, but if you get lost don't miss the chance to stock up on Masala Munches). There are at least 20 guest houses here in one building, right near the harbour in downtown Kowloon, and they are without question the cheapest decent accommodation in the city.

Love the random 45 degree angles - this place would definitely be derelict by now in Australia or the UK.

How did they make those flowing concrete ballustrades eh? Pure 60s genius.

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A fire in TEDA. Big one it seemed. Sunday Times ambulance-chasing instinct apparently still lies dormant within me...

I scooped the fire trucks, too.

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Lastly, it's been too long, but anyway, i've been meaning to bring these posters to the outside world since we left Thailand.

Bangkok was having a mayoral election just before we left, and despite the election being decided months ago i absolutely must express my position. Lining the streets were literally thousands of posters for the various candidates - i think i mentioned this at the time - namely, Smirky, Sofftey and Menace. But it's always one candidate's poster repeated every 30 metres or so down an entire street, which greatly adds to the effect.

Here are a couple of Smirky's best efforts:

But Menace is the one you wanna meet - this is a man with a vision for the city:

The guy on the left is Sofftey. He was only in the shot to emphasise Menace's anger. But i'm sure Menace's anger needed no emphasising when the voters elected Sofftey. We knew Thai politics was in a bad way...

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Hong Kong
Products (including mayoral candidates
Shanghai 2
Tianjin and Tianjin antics
<

We never had it that bad

2009-01-10T17:10:00.006-12:00

January 11, 2009: Just before we left on that last journey we got the chance to swap rooms - still in the same flat, but now on the other side of the building. Photos

Sweet deal - halfway point of the lease, same price, practically the same room basically but this one has a balcony instead of a bay window. And of course the view swung round 180 degrees.

The view from this side is not much less spectacular but definitely more interesting. We're looking out on a large expanse, probably the largest expanse of original Chinese city rooftops, ~~almost certainly from the 1800s and maybe before~~ [horseshit. obviously from the 20th century most of them] (we're in the middle of the small part of Shanghai that was here before the foreigners came--a small walled city).

They look to be in the process of a systemactic re-roofing of every house, which will ensure less people live in dank and mouldy conditions with water dripping through when it rains. The current roofs are that crazy-jumbly Chinese type that seem to use about 10 times as many roof tiles as necessary, while the new roofs are boring, Modern (yes Karl Langdon would be proud) type ones at the cost of completely ruining the visual effect for worthless foreigners like me. At least this means they're not planning to knock them all down.

Judging by the fact they're doing every house in a pretty poor area, along with the total lack of regard for aesthetics and historical value, some government authority is behind the re-roofing. So it's going to get very interesting when they get to these ones below:

Will the owners just roll over and allow their hard-earned, probably slef-built 2nd-floor shanty to be dismantled, or will there be confrontation? [they didnt get to them, they stopped after doing about 1 out of every 5.]

One place that could really do with a new roof probably won't get one though. Right below our new balcony is the worst housing i've seen in Shanghai.

It looks like it came from the same design sheet as our Minhang place but it's older, more dilapidated, and appears to be built on a kind of rubbish dump. The outside fence that faces the big, wide, modern street is decorated with some kind of fake bricks and a huge poster of gorgeous dramatic landscapes. I don't think anyone lives in the end apartment (the one with the roof missing), but still i feel very sorry for anyone who has to live there. Residents hurl their rubbish and pans of cooking grease off the balcony towards the wasteland, where an old man with a cart collects it from, and where kids joust with huge bamboo poles.

There's apparently no undercover route to the toilet - a feature always alluded to in classic industrial revolution slum descriptions. People scurry back and forth in the rain and cold, i saw one woman carrying her tissue bucket in and out. That's the bucket you put your used toilet paper in instead of flushing it cos the pipes are too thin. I didn't see any men carrying tissue buckets. I wouldn't like to see the men's room.

Even with all this though, being a relatively modern building, conditions there are probably still better than conditions in Old Shanghai under the roofs i was just ranting on about above. The ancient couple who i buy beer from run an open-front shop in a brick house somewhere in the mass of rooftops, and they still live on a wooden platform above the products, just like Carl Crow described 70 years ago.

All of this to ponder and imagine during smokos on the balcony. And as a bonus we no longer have canisters of explosive lobbing past the window every saturday morning. (Many if not most of the apartments in our complex, which comprises about 5 or so 20-25 storey buildings, are completely blank i.e. virgin concrete, never been lived in. They're not unsold, they're mostly just investments that people snapped up during the property boom with no intention of doing anything with but sitting on. In these days of real estate carnage people are actually starting to and move tenants in - or move in themselves. And of course when you move into your sleek brand new property in the centre of Shanghai, the first thing you do after you step out of your sleek brand new black Audi is banish the evil spirits. With explosives.)

Orientals vs Foreign Devils: Who is the cruelest of them all?

2009-01-09T22:57:00.002-12:00

January 10, 2009: My apologies to anyone who might have checked this site in the last 2 months and found only the same old dog-whacking to look at. Here's some cat-whacking.

After leaving that horrific shit in people's faces for so long, i'm going to play at being a real blogger for once and follow up. I think i speculated at the time about acceptance of animal cruelty on the part of the Chinese and as such this definitely needs pointing out:

Another recent animal cruelty case to come out was about photographs of cats crammed in crates being shipped by train from Nanjing to Guangdong to be skinned and boiled in Cantonese restaurants.

A Chinese blogger, Nalan Jingmen, originally made the 'discovery', taking a bunch of photos. Afterwards, a newspaper picked up the blog entry (as Chinese newspapers often do), and an English language China website in turn reported the Chinese newspaper story.

The reader responses at the bottom of the story on the Chinese blog overwhelmingly expressed sympathy for the animals. But until some hardcore American cat lovers and Indian vegans came along, comment on the English language website was running principally along the lines of "who gives a shit?"

I remember similarly heartless responses in a local newspaper a few years ago about live cats being used as crayfish bait.

Sharing the dirty snow in TEDA

2008-12-31T17:04:00.006-12:00

December 31, 2008: It's weird, i get this sinking feeling whenever i arrive back home, the closest thing i've experienced to depression, as circumstances are actually quite good. Photos from Hong Kong and Tianjin.

It doesn't matter where the home is or what it's like either, cos it's happened when i've gone back to my old place in Australia, back to our nice apartment in Songyuan, our dank migrant workers' hole in Minhang, and now our average room in Shanghai.

Anyway, so last month we were staring down another visa-enforced tour of shame - this time to Hong Kong. Actually it was possible to renew the visas here in Shanghai via the various backdoor operators who are now back in business after the Olympics, but i calculated that HK train tickets + accommodation + outrageous HK prices for a day equalled a saving of about 500 yuan.

We wanted to catch up with Dell, our pal from Kansas, over xmas and he was up in Tianjin, the northern port city near Beijing. So we plotted a whirlwind 9-day triangular route from Shanghai to HK to Tianjin and back to Shanghai.

The critical part of this whole triangle was that we were to take a plane from Shenzhen (just outside HK and much cheaper flights) to Tianjin on xmas eve. This was to be the first time we would take a Chinese domestic flight, so we were a little nervous but generally kept the faith, reassuring ourselves by arriving at the Shenzhen airport 14 hours early and sleeping the night there before our 9am flight, saving between 150 and 300 yuan in the process.

After a bad night's sleep we awoke to the sound of the trilingual passenger announcements. If you think of all the passenger announcements at a busy airport, then multiply that by three, the result is the speakers are pretty much always blaring. In this case i could understand 2 out of the 3 languages, the third being Cantonese. I'd heard Cantonese spoken quite a few times before and been fascinated by its distinctive sound in relation to Mandarin, but i could never nail down what was distinctive about it. In that airport, with Cantonese versions directly following the Mandarin announcements, one word i kept hearing over and over - aeroplane - the mandarin "fei-ji" becomes "fuyh-guyh". Suddenly it was clear what the distinction is: Cantonese is Mandarin spoken as though one is retarded! "Fei-ji"...."Fuyh-guyh"!

And then i looked at the departure board. Our flight wasn't on it. Cancelled. China Southern airlines ran one flight a day - that one. Bear in mind, xmas eve, we'd already - voluntarily of course - been in that airport for about 12 hours, and you can probably imagine the general state of shatterment. However, one thing we hadn't considered was the truly ridiculous number of airlines operating domestic routes in China. I thought they would return our money (internet special price, 75% discount - the reason we could actually afford to be flying) and tell us to go over to another airline desk and buy a ticket (0% discount, out of the question).

But - and maybe this is because so many flights get cancelled - they have what seems to me to be an amazing system of co-operation between airlines, whereby with a slip of paper and a red stamp they transferred us to another airline who were running a flight 3 hours later.

Unfortunately the other airline, Shenzhen Airlines (even cities have their own airlines, it's ridiculous!) was having some computer problem and they said they couldn't tell me whether they had seats for us. They told me to come back in 2 hours. So i went across to their ticket sales desk and claimed i wanted a ticket on that fight. It seemed the sales desk's computer was more receptive - and they didn't have 2 seats, the girl said.

So back i went to the China Southern counter, and told them the result of my sleuthing. After about 10 minutes of rapidfire phone conversation, my conclusion was verified, and they finally agreed to switch us to a third company's flight, this one 4 hours later, but at least it had seats.

I had expected that for domestic flights it would almost be like the good old days of air travel - just strolling to the gate and hopping on as you get on a bus. But the security checks were the most thorough i've ever witnessed, much more even than international flights from Heathrow, Hong Kong, wherever. The xray operators analyse each bag for a good 30 seconds, and the walk-through metal detector is so sensitive it picks up the zipper of your jeans. Anyone who sets it off, which is about 50% of all passengers, has to stand on a block and get the full-body scan with the hand-held metal detector, arms and legs spread etc. They were totally undiscriminating - everyone got to experience being "of middle-eastern appearance".

We finally got through. and into the gentle care of Hainan Airlines. Hainan is an island that was only given province status a few years ago. I would venture to guess it was Hainan Airlines' only plane. Either way, they afforded us a great view of the Guangdong pollution, followed by Jiangxi mountains, followed by a couple of excellent products:

It seemed to me, when i saw this out the window, that we might have just had a near miss with another plane:

Seriously, the photo doesn't show it very well but that vapour trail was maybe 200 metres from my window!

Our friend Dell has a very cushy life. He actually still works for the school in Songyuan that brought us here, only he's been dispatched to the Tianjin Economic Development Area as private tutor to the chairman of the area government. The chairman is so busy that he only has class about 3 or 4 times a week, and never for longer than 2 hours. So he works about 6-8 hours a week.He never has class before 6.30pm and he never continues beyond 9.30. So all day every day is pure free time for Dell and not only that, the chairman comes to Dell's house when he wants English class. And not only that, because the chairman comes to him, the school boss back in Songyuan has set him up with a swell apartment designed to impress the chairman (and help him decide whether to allow the boss to open up a school in TEDA).

We actually passed through the TEDA last year, on our way to the port, and the first impression of it then was "incredibly rich, incredibly tacky". It's actually about 50km away from Tianjin, and is a city unto itself. Quite reasonably, the English name got abbreviated to TEDA, but then, once its status as a Special Economic Zone (tax free for foreign companies) ran out, they decided to give it a Chinese name...a Chinese name based on the sound of "TEDA": Taida. It happens to mean "Peaceful Achievement", which i'm sure they thought was very cool. But really, a Chinese city named after an abbreviation - an English abbreviation at that?

In fact, when i think about it, it's actually sums up quite well the non-Chinese, and indeed non-anything, completely alien, culture-free character of the place: endless rows of the same apartment building, broken only by 8-lane roads, Disneyland theme park-like "European style" buildings, "drive-thru" fast food outlets, a giant elevated freeway running through the middle of it. Etc.

And if the place lacks a bit of life, it's not due to our friend Dell. As his classes never finish later than 9.30pm and he never has to get up in the morning, he goes out most nights. As a result he knows all the bands (mostly Filipinos, Colombians and Trinidadians), all the bouncers, all the bar staff, and all the regulars in all the local bars. That despite knowing very little Chinese.

The north had had snow storms just a couple of days earlier, so we got to experience a snowy xmas. "White xmas" would be the wrong term because it very quickly turns brown in many places.

Unfortunately on xmas day we were in no state to be frolicking in the snow, or anywhere at all. The minute we arrived at Dell's place he sprung upon us tickets to a 1488RMB xmas eve celebration being held by the government (the price was printed proudly on the front of the fancy envelopes alongside "merry christmas"), which the chairman had obtained for us when he heard Dell had friends coming. Thanks, chairman, as a token of my appreciation i won't name you. So we threw down our bags and, showered and headed out to the palatial, 5-star "Harborside" restaurant, a massive buffet with unlimited beer. We were then hustled across the brand-new hotel compound to the indoor tennis court, the exterior of which looked like a 17th century church built by Dale Alcock Homes (apologies to Macca).

Inside the "gala" was being held - one of those events where everyone sits in silence on McDonanlds chairs for 4 hours while an endless roll-call of half-hearted singers and dancers perform in front of a backing poster proclaiming the purpose of the event, accompanied by screeching loudspeakers. In this case, the specially-made backing poster stretching across the stage showed a giant santa claus of the coca-cola type, along with the English words, "Meeting in Binhai, Sharing the prosperity" (Binhai is the county TEDA lies inside). A rather ironic choice of slogan, given the ostentatious price printed on the front of everyone's fancy ticket envelopes. As a finishing touch, facing the stage on the far wall was a massive olympic sign that had clearly just been hastily painted by some dodgy workmen.

Thankfully we came late and they couldn't find seats for us, so we stood at the back and smoked and talked as the dancers on stage did the bare minimum. In true Chinese style, of course, the audience of party goons and their families matched their enthusiasm when it came to applauding. After about 1/2 an hour we were able to slip away and hit the bars, long and hard, which we proceeded to do each night thereafter.

XINHUA: One person dead from rabies in Yunnan's Nila County, government orders the killing of all dogs and cats

2008-11-03T23:26:00.006-12:00

Caption: A dog in a net being killed, before being dumped in a hole, the cullers will throw the dog into a hole.

It was "Whacking Day" in Nila county, Yunnan, after a rabies death. The less-acknowledged face of 'humanism' ...ai-yaa

One thing i'm noticing about these Xinhua news stories is their total lack of style. (ok maybe it's my substandard Chinese understanding that makes me miss the subtleties.) But surely repetition is one thing that's unnecessary in any language. What about that caption above??

Regarding the contents of that caption, sadly i rather doubt every dog and cat will be dead before they're buried. It would be unlikely, you would think, that the 'pounce-killers' would have the endurance to thoroughly crush 90,000 skulls.

I wonder whether the local CCP honchos' trophy-dog collies and pugs and golden retrievers somehow 'escaped'. Funnily enough though, with the people's doubts in the lead para, and the government's explanation left to the last para, and indeed left to a random "Livestock Bureau staff member surnamed Li", the Xinhua rundown seems to be somewhat slanted against the local government's pounce-killing ('culling', we like to call it). Even the headline seems to be offsetting the "one" person with "all" dogs and cats.

The bigger background, however, to the extreme whacking measures is that according to one of China's most respected news magazines rabies is "running rampant" through China - yet no-one is talking about it. Caijing magazine says more than 3,300 people died of rabies in 2007, compared to only 153 in 1996, making China second only to India for rabies deaths.

---

ONE PERSON DEAD FROM RABIES IN YUNNAN'S NILA COUNTY, GOVERNMENT ORDERS THE KILLING OF ALL DOGS AND CATS

According to a "Capital Times" report, after a recent death from "Crazy Dog Disease" in Nila County, the county government ordered every dog and cat in the county to be pounced on and killed, with heavy fines for anyone hiding one. Some locals questioned the total-cull method, to which officials replied that people's lives were more important than dogs'.

According to local Livestock Bureau statistics, Nila had over 90,000 dogs in total as of September 3, of which 84,187 were immunised, and 11,505 had been pounce-killed.

One person dead, whole county kills dogs

A cable from Nila County Government Office assistant director Zhang Cheng shows that when the first "Crazy Dog Disease" death occurred on July 25 in Niyang town, rabies-prevention leadership groups immediately sprung into action: every dog and cat within a 5km radius of the neighbourhood was killed.

To date, 6 "Crazy Dog Disease" deaths have occurred in Nila County. [ed: it doesn't say since when...]

"Crazy Dog Disease can be prevented, but it can't be cured," said Zhang Cheng, so taking the most severe prevention methods was inevitable.

Livestock Bureau claims pounce-killings legal

"Rural security fundamentally depends on the dog," some locals say. If there are no dogs anywhere on the farm, how to prevent theft becomes the most pressing problem. Besides, why the need to pounce-kill dogs that have received registered immunisation injections?

Countering these questions, a Nila County Livestock Bureau Office staff member named Li said Crazy Dog Disease is classified as a type of animal epidemic, and according to the Animal Epidemic Prevention Law rules, the rabies virus carried by dogs in the epidemic area can mutate, and dogs could carry the virus before the rabies death case occurred, hence the total pounce-kill.

--
Original link: 云南弥勒县1人死于狂犬病政府令捕杀所有猫狗

Animal cruelty, as anyone who has walked past a turtle seller in a Chinese market while a sale is in progress can attest, is a part of daily life here. You wouldn't believe some of the shit i've seen on Youtube, too, believe me you don't want to see it. The cruelty i saw in Timor, so much poorer, i concluded was mainly due to people's lives being such a struggle that consideration for animals wouldn't cross their minds. But here i think it is ingrained culturally; certainly acceptance of it is. The fact that the official government news agency refers to the mass slaughter as 'pounce-killing' - where English invariably uses the deceptive "culling" - suggests the same. I don't know if it's the supreme humanism of Confucius . . . i would have thought the old guy would say given animals' noble acceptance of people's superiority, people should treat animals as any superior should treat their inferior - kindly. I may be getting ahead of myself here, but the Chinese word for 'animal' literally means 'moving objects', apparently placing them alongside all other inanimate objects, with their distinction being only that they move.

This is of course not a judgement of the Chinese, by the way. I've seen enough western factory farming exposes, yet I still eat meat. I would click a Get-up button labelled "take action", were one to conveniently appear on my screen....

Reckless fireworks - back in Shanghai

2008-10-18T05:16:00.006-12:00

OCTOBER 18, 2008: To faithfully go back to this "blog's" origins, here's a (digitally enhanced) group email. Photos

Why? Well people just now started recklessly firing off big fireworks amidst the spinney of skyscrapers that boxxey and i find ourselves living in now. I'm talking big explosions going off right next to the people's windows in the buildings opposite us maybe 50m away. The explosions were happening maybe 5 metres from some other people's windows. (The photo is the place during the day.)

If any of said windows happened to be open, as ours was, the people inside could expect to be sprayed with fresh and colourful hot embers. I don't know if you knew this, but it seems fireworks, at least home-use fireworks here in the home of fireworks, only get about 10 storeys up before they run out of thrust. They launch into the air like a Spider Burton mongrel punt, and when they hit the top of their trajectory and start to fall, then they explode. Actually this morning we had these little canisters of explosive floating past our 9th floor window in slow motion and then exploding. That they explode then the is plan, but i saw at least one fail to and fall, smoking, into the bottleneck entrance of the underground car park. Brave, whoever picked it up and got rid of it.

This place we're in, it must be said, absolutely rocks, but the journey here, on our no-seat train tickets, sucked worse than we imagined. We got to the train station's departure gate (Chinese train stations, we were reminded, are like airports elsewhere) about 4 hours before the train was due to leave, which was about 1/2 an hour before the next person. The strategy worked, and when we were let on we staked out a position next to the slinky-style carriage-join area, by a locked door with a window. Sitting on our luggage we were quite comfortable, even smug, until between 10 and 15 more people arrived to inhabit the same slinky-join. As we protected our initial advantage it became a bladder battle. Everyone was going to Shanghai, 18 hours away, so if you got up, any breathing space you previously had would be gone when you got back.

At Huizhou, the first stop out of Shenzhen, even more people piled on despite there being nowhere for them to go. This fella below used the chaos to his advantage by jumping off and snatching 2 instant noodle cups from a hapless platform cart-pusher. Over the following hours, he managed to phase himself into our leg space. He was a chain-smoking kid of about 20, his shirt stained and holed, heading away from his family home during "Golden Week", to look for work in Shanghai.

Which is pretty much what we were doing. On the day we arrived, on zero hours sleep each, we somehow managed to house-hunt through about 5 or 6 rat infested holes before coming across the place we're in now.

We're smack in the middle of the old city, the somewhat forgotten walled city (the wall's gone and no-one seems to know about it nowadays) that existed before foreigners came to Shanghai, and home of the Mandarin Garden and that tea house that's on just about every "oriental" bowl, including the Turk's. Our ninth-floor bay window has one of the most interesting views i could have hoped for: the old city is ringed by an oval-shaped road (Zhonghua Rd) built on the site of the former city wall. Within this road (wall) is an expanse of low-rise, high-density Chinese bustle, ringed by the dense skyscrapers outside. The high-rise we live in is part of a mohawk cutting down the middle of the oval, so our room overlooks a quilt of jumbly rooftops across to the forest of skyscrapers beyond, which is pretty unreal. In the other direction, through the unremarkable blockade of the neighbouring buildings in our complex, we can see skyscrapers in Pudong on the other side of the river that play ads and tripped-out visualisations on their, uh, well, themselves - The whole skyscraper is basically a giant TV screen.

Here's a panorama from the other side (someone else's room), it's quite detailed and probably chopped off here so suggest clicking to view full size.

I can say that based on what i've seen most of Shanghai outside of the old areas is - how did they describe Perth that time? - "boring and functional." Not even in a communist way. Just in a chaos-being-well-under-control way, a place with plenty of malls, where people can live inane lives inanely, walking on nicely paved, tree-lined sidewalks wide enough not to have to bump others or step over roadside sellers' blankets. In other words, quite nice. But where we are, the tiny back streets and alleyways within that jumbly patchwork are the most interesting i've seen Shanghai get, all "chaos constructions" with split-system airconditioners, fighting-insect mini-markets, illegal gambling tables with crowds of onlookers (some holding card games, others holding insect fights), and occasional interesting smells between the rubbish piles. In one filthy thoroughfare I saw a woman walking her trophy-dog, a magnificent Collie, with the leash in one hand and a brush in the other, stopping about every 10 steps to brush some part of the dog. I wasn't much of a Shanghailander last time, probably because Minhang isn't exactly in Shanghai. But with about 90% of Shanghai's interesting places within 1/2 an hour's walk, there's really nothing to complain about...ah, nothing to complain about, that good old boring group email formula.

The apartment we live in is supposed to be a 3 bedroom one, i believe. The owners are apparently a union of family members from Fujian who have bestowed responsibility and residence benefits on a Gen-X relative, Mr Zhou (i.e. "Mr Joe"). Zhou was kind in letting us move in the day we arrived, saving us hundreds in foreigner-hotel fees (you can't stay anywhere cheap in Shanghai if you're a foreigner). But the apartment wasn't yet finished, and we were the first to move in.

The whole apartment, it turns out, is a DIY job. When performing some installation task or another, Zhou is the archetypal cowboy - cigarette in mouth, mobile in one hand, massive powerdrill in the other, digging out big holes in the brand new wall. Wonky archetraves and non-flush skirtings aren't the worst of Zhou's worries. He's also had to rewire the whole house in order to count the individual rooms' electricity consumption. I'm somehwat surprised that he survived, especially when i asked him if being an impromptu sparky was dangerous, to which he replied "impossible!"

Once he'd finished making 3 bedrooms into 5 and renting them out as such, Zhou decided to move his own family in. Problem was, he had nowhere to go. So what did he do? He ordered in some glass panels and sliding doors, and sectioned off a part of the communal living area. Then he moved his family in, who now live behind the glass.

XINHUA: "Human flesh search engines": the embrace of angels and demons

2008-10-15T02:56:00.009-12:00

Google China's April Fools joke this year was to advertise "Google Human Flesh Search", which could, they said, find even "the prettiest jungle girls, the most impressive mountain herdsmen, the most mysterious desert caves, the most most romantic final encounters...its highest aim is: 'not seeking the best, just the most meat'.".

It took me quite a while to work out what 人肉搜索引擎s, or 'human flesh search engines', actually were, so of course i fell for Google's joke . . . ha ha. I initially thought it was about searching FOR human flesh, but the essence of it is flesh-and-blood people - the 'human flesh search engines', who are usually hardcore bulletin-board vigilantes - doing detective work online. However, considering the cases 'human flesh search engines' have been involved in - tracing the Tibetan torch-grabber, getting the stiletto-wearing Hangzhou kitten stomper fired, finding the students who filmed themselves abusing their 70-year-old teacher, and identifying the girl who ranted against earthquake victims, to name but a few - the 'human flesh' part actually does fit both searcher and the searched. Given that you can't ban the former (or anyone) from joining dots, it's in the latter's perspective that the issue lies. That's why i've mostly called it 'human flesh searching'.

It's a weird fusion, this 'human flesh searching', of Mao-era mob 'criticism' and the internet's power over (Communist-style) information suppression. The most interesting perspective i've seen is that from a Chinese-American writer called Xujun Eberlein, who said she considered it was a uniquely Chinese phenomenon that was born of the high number of smart, well-educated, intellectually under-utilised young people. I like this theory cos i often wonder at all the well-presented uni graduates standing all day glassy-eyed in department stores being ignored, mindlessly repeating "welcome welcome", clapping outside shoe stores, waiting on tables and even flipping burgers (though apparently the latter has status). I'm quite prepared to believe that some of these people live exciting online lives of blog wars, scandals, outrages, clues, investigations and torches of righteousness.

This article has me close to my wits end with Xinhua, definitely with Xinhua's features. I think i'm gonna stick to short, punchy "news" articles. You'll know why when you don't get to the bottom of the article below!

---

"HUMAN FLESH SEARCH ENGINES": THE EMBRACE OF ANGELS AND DEMONS

September 24, 2008

Source: Young China Online/China Youth Daily

After a rent dispute, shared-house tenant Ms Cui left without saying goodbye, and the owner, Ms Lin, posted a 1000RMB reward on the internet for anyone who could find Ms Cui. The post included Ms Cui's real name and telephone number, and set off the 'net pals'[*] "human flesh search engines". Ms Cui believed Ms Lin's actions have influenced her reputation and work, taking Ms Lin to court demanding an apology and 10,000RMB compensation for spritual damage.

On the afternoon of September 19, Beijing Changping District People's Court handed down its decision, rejecting Ms Cui's demands.

"We can look at this case as typical of the disputes that 'human flesh searching' produces. So, how should we regard 'human flesh searching', this new and rising online phenomenon? How do we go about making rules to ensure law-abiding citizens' rights and interests aren't intruded upon? These questions merit eveyone's consideration." The academics and common 'net pals' this reporter recently interviewed are all concerned at the constant stream of 'human flesh search' incidents.

Actually from the day it appeared, 'human flesh searching' has prompted a number of uproars and online incidents: From 2006's "Cat cruelty" incident to the "Tongxu-gate"(?) incident, from late 2007's "Beijing white-collar women death blog" to this year's "Online videos insulting the Sichuan Earthquake disaster zone", 'human flesh searching' has allowed the details of the searched to be publicised in detail, leaving them with nowhere to hide from the force of the internet.

Should 'human flesh searching' be completely condemned?

Generally speaking, 'human flesh searching' refers to the information search and provision method in which "collectors" put out questions and "respondants" answer. In the narrow sense it refers to the internet as a platform and a resource to progressively obtain someone's or some people's information, then arranging and analysing it and finally identifying a person - it's a process by which people find people.

Psychological consultant Hu Juan believes 'human flesh searching has grown into a huge force due to its being based in "power in numbers". Many of today's citizens' rights are agglomerated and realised through online mass mobilisation activities.

The "online community" gives people the right to participate equally, converting them from passive receivers of information to active providers of inforation, increasing the sense of self-accomplishment. So 'human flesh searching' is a step towards allowing everyone to become "policemen", "judges" and "moral adjudicators, and the online masses, representing a grassroots population, are experiencing an unprecedented "illusion of rights".

In Hu Juan's opinion, 'human flesh searching' certainly doesn't lack positive socialism - it is a harbinger of the modern citizenry's consciousness and maturity, and passion for the full protection and restoration of society's moral values system.

'Net pal' "Silver Romance" believes 'human flesh searching' has a definite use - 'human flesh searching' has taken the clues left by fake, ugly, evil etc. phenomena and brought about an excellent kind of public supervision and restriction, answering the whole society's longing for fairness and justice.

At the same time, 'human flesh searching' can gather into one single technology all the jumbled bits of information that search engines miss, expanding the internet's usefulness. After the Great Wenchuan Earthquake, communication and transport were cut off across a large area, and hundreds of thousands of people couldn't get information from friends or relatives. Many websites quickly launched people-search functions, mobilising the power of the internet to search for information from the disaster zone, making use of the 'human flesh searching' technology.

With some public issues, 'human flesh searching' has had an extremely important influence. For example, the "South China Tiger" incident, where the 'net pals' discovered the [Calendar picture tiger] and dug up the factory it came from, completely changing the course of the issue. And with the "Cat cruelty" scandal for which two nurses were fired, the victory of morality and justice was easy to see.

One website community board editor says: "The internet has gone beyond the power of imagination, when villainous scandals appear, the 'net pals' come together with unprecedented unity, and with a sense of responsibility and righteousness. With search engines allowing for investigations, people power is stronger than ever.

Where are the boundaries of 'human flesh searching'?

Wang Fei, the plaintiff in what media have called "China's first case of internet violence", whose wife recorded his liaisons with a mistress on a blog, [and then committed suicide saying this was the reason] making him the target of the human flesh search engines. After his phone number, address, and work details were revealed, Wang Fei took the host website of his wife's blog to court, claiming the website had invaded his privacy and damaged his reputation.

As in Wang Fei's case, Ms Lin wrote a post on the Tiantong Gardens message board with Ms Cui's real name, phone number and named her as "a cheater to the end who broke her oath with Tiantong Gardens! I hope people can provide clues." Ms Cui believed Ms Lin's post contained insulting and degrading language, publicised her personal information and had defamed her.

According to media reports, the Beijing Chaoyang District People's Court has already heard Wang Fei's case three times but has still not reached a decision. The Chaoyang Court has convened judges to deliberate on the 3 critical questions of 'human flesh searching': 1 - the relationship between publication of common individuals' personal information and invasion of privacy; 2 - the inappropriate absence of supervision of 'net pals' comments and their degree of responsibility; and 3 - the limits of moral criticism and privacy protection.

A judge named Wang told the Beijing media, searching the internet is not under scrutiny, the issue at stake is that some 'human flesh searches' haven't been limited to the online world, but have led to real physical and mental harm approaching that of real-world incidents of violence, and will come under the jurisdiction of the law.

In the September 19 judgement, the Changping Curt found Ms Lin's posting behaviour hadn't constituted defamation of Ms Cui. The presiding judge found that citizens have the right to freely express their opinions, and this freedom included making comment on real issues and expressing one's emotions. Although the post contained the words "cheater" and "disgrace", this should be seen as Ms Lin's expressing her angry response under the circumstances of the rent disputes she had experienced and Ms Cui's consistent procrastination when paying rent. The situation wasn't one of fabricating a story and privacy violation [?].

Public opinion is more responsive on the question of whether to regulate 'human flesh searching'. This year in June this publisher carried out a public opinion survey which indicated nearly 80% of the masses believe 'human flesh searching' should be better regulated. 28.8% agreed that "Realising the real-name internet system will make people take responsibility", and 26.4% of the masses believed "Internet administrators must strengthen monitoring to make behaviour stay above society's bottom line." 24.8% of the masses support "legislation and enacting comprehensive regulation and restriction."

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*I refuse to use the word 'netizen' and this translation is direct from the Chinese anyway.

ORIGINAL LINK: “人肉搜索”天使与魔鬼的拥抱

XINHUA: Premier Wen Jiabao and Australian PM Kevin Rudd on the Phone

2008-10-06T19:44:00.005-12:00

Maybe it's the tone slip-ups that add amusing surrealist moments to the most inane conversations. More likely it's simply novelty value, but either way, oreigners who speak Chinese - from the "knee how"s right through to the old China hands - have a certain automatic charisma in China.

Kevin "Lu Kewen" Rudd is popular among the common folk here. Given they know nothing of any of his policies - he has none anyway - his popularity is the kind of that has been forbidden fruit to the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party since Mao's personality cult. So being seen and associated with "Lu Kewen" as much as possible might help fill the gap left by the Chinese leaders' self-imposed charisma embargo. Crackpot theory? Sure, but why on earth was the text below the #2 story on the front page of Xinhua today?

And if you find yourself wondering if Kevin really said the paraphrased words attributed to him in the third para, i assure you that he did. In fact, they probably didn't need to be paraphrased, as Kevin's Chinese is all "steadfast"s and "facilitate"s and "promote"s; it's made for Xinhua.

PREMIER WEN JIABAO AND AUSTRALIAN PM "LU KEWEN" ON THE PHONE

Xinhua Beijing, October 10.

State Department Premier Wen Jiabao held a telephone conversation with Australian PM Kevin Rudd ("Lu Kewen") on the 6th, with both sides exchanging views on Sino-Australian relations as well as the international financial crisis, climate change and other problems.

Wen Jiabao positively appraised the progress made by the two countries in mutually benefitcial cooperation, and indicated that China was keen to strengthen coordination and cooperation with Australia and the international community in response to the many current complicated global challenges, and jointly advance world harmony and continued development.

"Lu Kewen" lauded the Chinese side's positive actions and clear stance in response to the international financial crisis. He said the international community needed to strengthen cooperation, establish robust institutions and ensure the international financial system's transparency and consistency. The Australian side wanted to continue to strengthen communication and cooperation with the Chinese side in this and every other bilateral area.

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ORIGINAL LINK 温家宝总理与澳大利亚总理陆克文通电话

XINHUA: Official-flavoured names taking over in the schoolyard

2008-10-04T07:22:00.005-12:00

I find this article interesting because of the way it adopts the pro-Cultural Revolution stance of heaping the blame for a modern problem on traditional culture, that problem being the Communist Party presence on campus. I may be up a creek with no paddle here, but it's as though the Party is trying to retain face while paving the way for reducing its own influence on campus. I love the way both the writers and the speakers feel the need, in making their criticisms, to lay down their pro-harmony credentials!

TEACHERS BECOMING "DIRECTORS", OFFICIAL-FLAVOURED NAMES TAKING OVER IN THE SCHOOLYARD

From: Xinhua Net Zhejiang Channel

Reporters: Liu Lili & Zhang Daosheng

Before our eyes, more and more students have started calling their teachers in administrative positions names like "Head", "Director", "Secretary" etc. Even among the students, "Squad leader", "Chairman" and "Minister" have replaced "classmate", "brother" and "sister".....

More than a few people believe this "official title-isation" of school titles could have an unhealthy influence on the formerly simple staff-student and intra-student relations. But others believe it could allow students to become accustomed to society earlier and that there is no need to stop it.

---Schoolyard "official-flavoured" naming becoming heavier---

With higher-education's proportions continuing to increase, almost all higher-ed institutions have large numbers of Directors, Deans and mid-level cadres, outside of the overall school leadership. Additionally, under every institution are large numbers of Department Heads, Office Heads, Student Office Heads, Laboratory Heads, etc. and most those who have taken on such positions are actively involved with teaching, many with high technical posts and high-level backbone positions. Since these teachers began their administrative roles they became leaders, and for students, "teacher" has become "Dean", "Director", "Section Chief", etc.....

Not only has the addressing of teachers changed, more than a few classmates have started calling each other "Chairman" and "Minister". Besides the various types of higher education institutions' student organisations, there are also the Communist Party Youth Leagues, student unions and other organisations etc., and each one has created numbers of its own Ministers, and Vice-Ministers. Additionally each class has established a "Squad Monitor" and "Assistant Squad Monitor" and "Union Branch Secretary", and even within the classroom there are floor leaders and classroom leaders.

Zhejiang Forestry College 2nd year foreign languages major Gu Jiewen said: "In first year when we first entered the university our class were all very close. Since then many classmates have taken on school and college cadre roles, and many of their classmates have begun calling them "Minister" etc.; I think there is now a distance between classmates. Since then i have also taken on a student union leader role, and younger students have started calling me "Minister". So many people say it that i'm used to it now."

Zhejiang University Chinese Department researcher Shang Yiying said: "Before, when i used to come to the school administration bureau to deliver reports and analyse activities, it didn't matter whether the others had administrative positions, we just called them all "teacher", and the feeling was very cordial. But recently under the "leadership" of some high-level students it has started to be more convenient to address people by their official title, and i've started calling these teachers "Director", and "Division Head" "

In opposition to the "official title-isation" phenomenon in the schoolyard, Zhejiang Forestry College's Youth League [Party??], has issued the following suggestions to the student body: "Within the schoolyard, it is better to address each other as 'teacher' and 'classmate' "; "Let student-teacher and inter-classmate relations become more upfront."

Many students have expressed support for this suggestion. Gu Jiewen believes the "bureaucratisation" of schools isn't desirable and could easily ruin close relations between teachers and students. "There are now fellow students suggesting a return to the previous ways of address, and i absolutely agree."

---Addressing according to position in order to be ready for society?---

Those behind the proposal believe that since the official titles' "invasion" of the schoolyard the change has not only been in name-calling, it's also had an influence on relations between classmates and teachers, to the detriment of the construction of harmonious culture within the schoolyard.

Regarding the proposal, Zhejiang Forestry College Youth League teacher Wang Kang indicated his support: "Relations between teachers and students and relations between students and students can't be equated with other relations in wider society. We can't simply regard it as administration being administered or as relations between higher and lower levels." He said, "I believe this proposal can help clean up schoolyard culture, and can actively help to maintain proper student-teacher and student-student relations; it's deserving of support."

However, there are also those who believe schoolyard name-calling doesn't matter at all. They say schoolyard "official title-isation" can help students understand and become ready for society, and it really doesn't have any disadvantages for their future.

Zhejiang Forestry College Economic Management College student Jiang Feng believes getting students used to addressing their counterparts by strict titles has no disadvantage. "Isn't it just a name? I believe that addressing people by their title is a form of respect," Jiang Feng said. "And our whole society has developed this kind of atmosphere - after university students graduate, they'll definitely want to be using official titles for their bosses and superiors. This isn't just a traditional rule of interpersonal communication, it's about good communication and has a use in exchange between people. I believe that when students start using these official terms of address while studying, it has the benefit of allowing them to integrate into society faster."

Other students believe social intercourse is a field well worth knowing, that knowing how to address someone is a point of refinement and that calling people, particularly those in high positions, by their titles can express greater respect and thereby facilitate opportunities for communication.

Zhejiang Forestry College Student League Cadre Zhang Lingling said: "Despite the lack of closeness shown by the official addresses between students and teachers and among students, you can't kill the [practice] with one whack of a stick; and especially among those later-year students marching towards society, there's no harm in learning proper manners at school. And besides, the callng by official title of leaders and Cadres within the school environment also corresponds to a trend in society."

On the opposite side, experts and teaching personnel generally believe the "official title-isation" is actually the embodiment of the Chinese people's many years of official-minded ideology, and that it is not worthy of promotion. In the schoolyard, for them, calling one another "teacher" and "classmate" is better.

Zhejiang Forestry College Youth League Secretary Cai Yonghua has assumed the work of overseeing student cadres for many years. He believes that university students are the group of young people who grasp knowledge best among society, and are leaders of social trends; despite society's existing official addresses, he says, especially in official circles, this isn't society's actual direction.

"For thousands of years, in every dynasty of China, there has existed the "Scholar-official" and his official-minded ideology. But this doesn't mean it's right or popular," Cai Yonghua said. "When it comes to university students, we should still be actively promoting harmonious student-teacher and student-student relations. Only then can they, after they graduate, lead society's practices to facilitate greater harmony between people."

Zhejiang Forestry College's Professor Wang Changjin has continuously undertaken research into traditional culture. "China's culture really emphasises moral relations, specifically speaking of superior/inferior and equal relations, and so as long as we accept each other, what we call each other makes no difference," Professor Wang opined. "In general, official titles are used for work purposes, but China's official-minded culture has a very deep influence, which people often take from their work into their general lives."

Professor Wang said the promoters of schoolyard "official title-isation" were taking a one-dimensional view because systems of organisation in schools, civil society and work units weren't the same.

Zhejiang Forestry College Assistant Director of Students Ma Xiaohui said: "Some university students call their superiors by their official titles because they think it will benefit them in their career, the reason being that they have brought their thinking from their homes and society into the school; we can also say it's the influence of traditional Chinese official culture on them. But in fact, employers are humanising and are becoming more and more human-oriented. Many work-units' ideas are even the exact opposite of the students', and this is a huge change brought about by social development."

---

Original link 老师变"处长"，官味称呼入侵校园

Long awaited videos!

2008-10-04T04:58:00.006-12:00

At last, here are the videos promised in two previous posts.

In case you've been following this blog, these are the videos you've been waiting for. If you haven't, and you're here anyway, these videos are probably why you're here.

The first one i must say, from a position of no humility at all, is probbly one of the best videos uploaded to the internet this hour....as for the second one, the Klong Boats one, it's atrociously filmed, i admit, but if you haven't been on them then it's probably right to subject yurself.

Specimen 1: England's glory

Specimen 2: The fastest way to get across Bangkok...by a mile. As long as you don't mind occasional splashes of raw sewerage; i did wake up expecting blood on the pillow for several mornings after a large globule managed to score a direct hit into my inner ear.

Chinese service & the Bangkok train - more similar than one might think

2008-09-29T05:45:00.004-12:00

SEPTEMBER 29, 2008: We arrived back in China today, though i've been inhabiting a world full of uniquely China worries since Thursday.

We've flown into Shenzhen and need to get to Shanghai, thus timing our journey to perfectly coincide with more migrant worker chaos on the railways (just like then and then and then .).

On Thursday i finally realised that the National Day 7-day holiday starts this week, so i got on the phone to try to organise Shenzhen-Shanghai train tickets. Too late, i was told by two friends, the tickets for Monday will be long gone so you'll have to fly.

So i got onto a few Chinese discount airfare reservation sites. Infuriatingly, however, the website with the cheapest fare, the only one we could actually afford, appeared to be down. The main page, strangely enough, was working so i suspected it was a ploy to simply suck customers onto the site.

After about an hour wasted trying to navigate through to the promised fare, i tried the whole process again, from the start. This time it worked, and i got as far as to be staring at a "Reserve ticket" button. But when i clicked on it, nothing happened. In fact, it was quite clearly not linked to anywhere at all.

The "reservations hotline" was prominently advertised all over the website, though this fare was supposed to be a special cheap internet fare. Once again i suspected a desperate ploy and was proved wrong. I called up the "hot" line and a fellow answered. I explained to him the situation, principally that i wanted to reserve two of the affordable tickets i saw advertised on the website. "You can reserve them on the website. That's how you get that fare," he said. I reiterated that i had already tried that, and that's why i was calling etc. etc., at which point he went off into a diatribe that i didn't understand. So i suggested we communicate via email, he agreed, and i sent him the details of the fare i wanted.

An hour later after no reply i called the "hot" line again, and this time spoke to a young woman. I explained in my best "distressed" voice that her friend's inaction had greatly disappointed me and could i please book immediately. She replied that i could, but there was none of that cheap fare left, and i would have to pay RMB140 extra.

Here i encountered a problem that i had never imagined.

What were the passengers' names?, she asked.

I told her.

How do you write that?

I told her, but she stopped me at "A-N..."

"Which 'aey'?" she asked (all of this was in Chinese of course).

"Umm, A for Apple."

Silence. Then again:"Which 'ae'?"

"Oh, uh, anquan de A ('the A of anquan'),"

A pause, then, "Is that the A of ABC?" she asked.

"Right, right."

"And then?" she asked, still in Chinese - amazingly there actually is something to be learned from the movie "Dude Where's my Car?"

"N"

"Which 'emn'?" came the voice down the line, like the new Metallica album (and, apparently, 2000s music in general - ht titcho) fuzzy at the points where there should be critical and subtle difference. If i sounded the same to her, i could understand why she had to ask.

"Uhhh, the N of November...uhhh, the N of 'nvshi'(lady)."

Silence.

"Do you bright-clear?"

No

"Okay, it's ABCDEFGHIJKLMN de N ('the N of ABCDEFGHIJKLMN')."

She gave up. She told me to put our names in an email, which i sent immediately.

Thank you. So how would i like to pay for that?, she asked via email.

Can i come in on the 29th when i get to Shenzhen?

Yes, but she 'feared' they wouldn't have that price any more.

Could i pay by credit card?

"We will help you keep the fare to the best of our ability."

"Ai!." i replied, "Thanks, but we're students, we can't afford any unexpected thousands of yuan. We need a confirmed reservation. Do you have a secure server that i can pay by credit card on?"

"Let us help you."

"Thanks, but can you send me some kind of documentation of this reservation? Your name?"

"I'm sorry, i want to rest. My name is Ms Bu. Thankyou."

So what the fuck is the point of this "hot" line supposed to be? You can't use the web to pay, and you have to actually be in Shenzhen already to buy the ticket! Not to mention the uniquely Chinese 'let-him-work-it-out-at-the-time' service ethos. For fuck's sake. This whole process took about 6 hourss and i happened to be wracked with fever.

So it was to my great pleasure, therefore, when i discovered the "no seat" tickets on the Shanghai train, enabling us to blatantly stand them up. Unsurprisingly, however, this afternoon i found a message in my inbox from yesterday, stating that they in fact could not help me at all. The only surprise was that they bothered to inform me.

Decidedly more reliable was the Bangkok train we rode to get to the airport. It was an effective scheme that got us 9/10 of the way there for 6 baht each. It was full of middle-aged poor ladies who get on at various tiny markets. The train barely stops for them; sometimes the driver just slows down to walking pace and opens the doors and they get on while it continues moving. They sit on the floor in giant groups, gossping (or so it appears) loudly, carrying their unsold meagre wares home in supermarket baskets. The train's reliability was rather a mystery, though. It was one of those trains that just looks like a normal carriage but can move itself, and i spent the journey standing at the front of the train in front of the hole where it can link up as part of another train, seeing almost exactly what the driver sees.

Just near the station the eastern line branches off on its own, down a single track, an alleyway for trains that is no wider than the train itself. The slums on both sides are built out to within a few inches of the train windows, and the train-alley is used far less by trains than by people and animals. It's covered in rubbish. Through the whole inner-Bangkok area the line is in unbelievably bad condition.
The train jolts over large gaps, swaying side-to-side. This is particularly alarming
when you notice that the narrow-gauge track is perhaps only a quarter as wide as the train itself. Parts of the track are almost buried beneath sand around construction sites, and whenever the train switches tracks the driver must slow to a walking pace to get through the points. Poverty clings to the train line for many miles, in devastating contrast with the glassy Suvarnabhum airport. This was the parting gift of bejewelled Bangkok, as memorable for me as the Klong boats

So now we're in Shenzhen; tomorrow we ride the big, stable, China train to Shanghai, and our tickets are of the "no seat" type. Whether that means "no seat for you", or just "no allocated seats", we've yet to discover, but what's certain is we'll have 18 hours to think it over, and a carriageful of worker-peasants to talk it over with.