And the winner of the privilege of hosting two more worthless stingy backpackers is...

JUNE 25: In Kunming, on the road out of the country. We're now undeniably those stupid backpacker types, complete with backpacks. Photos of the long-awaited China-land, Juicebox's cave, Shanghai

Yeah, the Commies have gotten paranoid and put an end to easy visas - that is, put an end to foreigners living in China and doing whatever they liked. So we're heading to Laos, hopefully to return after the Olympics are over.

The "Ho Chi Minh Trail" awaits - the Reds' Vietnam War supply line, and the reason why Laos is constantly referred to as "the most heavily bombed country on earth". That's the plan in my head, boxxy doesn't yet know. I'm still pondering how best to introduce the idea of unexploded bomblets and landmines to her. The most important thing is that we stay well away from the alternative - the "Banana Pancake Trail."

In the weeks before we left, the scourge of the 'xiao-qu', or "Little Area", had been babies. Nay, fucking toddlers. I hate the word. There are about 6 or 7 aged between 1 and 4 in our former "Little Area", whose unrelenting tantrums have got me worried for the future of China. I'm talking daily, daily screaming and yelling that's quite obviously born of bad temper: not only does it sound angry, as opposed to in pain, the fits very often stop as abruptly as they start. The kid simply screams when it doesn't get what it wants, continues screaming until its personal servant delivers, then is silent until next time, which is usually under 30 minutes. Of course, more than once a day the Little Emperor's demands cannot be met, in which case the rage is sustained for anything up to an hour. I'm not kidding. Meet one i photographed through the window (the blurring is artistic, right? kinda dehumanises the inhuman...grrrh)



In China babies have long been revered. Well, male ones at least, and what i've observed is mostly behaviour of male specimens. The common way to refer to babies is as "Bao bao", or "Treasure-treasure". A baby being a treasure, full of good uses, you'd naturally have many of them. Then came the One-Child policy, and with it 'Little Emperor Syndrome', where the efforts - and more importantly, the attentions - of grandparents, parents and often great-grandparents, traditionally shared between up to 20, is now directed towards one child.

Reference is often made to the "generations" of Chinese Communist Party leaders", which share some core similarities, e.g. the Mao-era military-politicians, the "Third generation"s mostly Soviet educations, the "Fifth generation" (currently next in line) being the first born after the Communist victory. It scares me to think what kind of generation the 10th or so will be.

As such, we were rather shattered when we boarded the 37-hour train to Kunming and were immediately greeted with a groaning baby in our cabin. Who left a suspicious liquid on my bunk. Thankfully, the baby was taken away, but this time the opposite generation was to prove my nemesis. I had booked the tickets 2 weeks in advance, mainly in order to secure ground-level bunks, the benefits of which are too numerous to warrant mention, except to say many of them revolve around the curvature or otherwise of my spine. Before we even set off, a lady approached me and very politely, very reasonably requested that her sick - he appeared to be dying - father take my bunk, as he couldn't climb to the ones above. I really couldn't say no, and though i was duly shattered, the probable urine patch i was leaving to him greatly lessened the pain.

I'm sure everyone who goes to China floods the internet with their train photos, so i suppose i'll do the same. The more loyal among you might remember my reference to the environmental disaster zone that northern China is. Well, Shanghai was as far south as we'd gone, and two days ago we gave up our beloved Migrants' Cave and took a train right through the vortex of southern China. It's an incredible ride, revealing all is far from lost in China's environment. The whole way from Shangai through Guizhou is thoroughly dominated by humans. If you're the glass-empty (or anti-human) type, all has been lost for many centuries anyway, but these thousands, literally thousands of kilometres on end of heavily cultivated hinterland are unbelieveably beautiful. The luscious green rice paddies stretch out, perfectly flat like endless carefully manicured lawns, only far more interesting for the irregular patterns created by the embankments between. Every available space is used by humans: the gentler slopes and undulations are terraced, creating even more interesting patterns that are actually contour lines. Yet wherever the slopes get too steep, which is most of the land, the human domination gives way to dense forest:


The housing, too, is surprisingly picturesque, though this is probably influenced by proximity to the railway. Unlike the ubiquitous boxes of the north, the village houses here are tall, almost Dutch-looking, with steeply angled roofs. Just to cap off this ode to the superficial, the people working the fields still wear those classic Asian peasant hats.


On the train two compartments down were a pair of young cops, really nice people, escorting two Burmese "economic migrants" back to the warm, caring Junta. The one i talked to at length said he had no knowledge of Burma's government except that it was a military one. He was very open, however, about China's problems, and was a real delight to talk to compared with most his age or younger (about serious topics, that is). He was particularly interested in the fate of Australia's Aborigines, and my experience of an Australian state-provided education that propounded a dim view of many Australian state actions. As we passed through Mao's hometown, i asked him why young people aren't interested in Mao's calamitous fuckups, why they say Mao was 99.99999% right, rather than the official party line of 70%, and 30% wrong. To which he answered that they were too interested in getting rich. Ironic as it may be, the Chinese state is a lot more critical of itself than the population it rules - thanks in large part to Mao and his ignorance/senility.

But no, the warm and fuzzy idea that the wise leaders, the Great Helmsmen of today, are doing the right thing, it didn't last. The sight of Burmese prisoners in handcuffs on the platform being guided, gently but firmly, back into the arms of their paranoid, negligent, greedy, China-reliant terrorist go vern ment will do that to you. (It should do the same about Thailand, too.)

All you good cunts out there, help FREE BURMA!

EXCLUSIVE: (we all know what that means)...A superficial skim of multinationals' foolish Chinese names

A careless English brand name can temporarily halt a Chinese company's export aspirations, but the Chinese language causes unique headaches for 'global' corporations used to simply swaggering in and globalising new territories with their meticulously polished 'global' brand images.

Chinese manufacturers have from time to time entertained the English-speaking world with hilariously misguided brand names: "Pansy" mens underwear gave 1990s blokes a rare chance to fully demonstrate their lack of insecurity, while seasick ferry passengers in the 1980s could distract themselves with "MAXIPUKE" playing cards.

"Fang Fang" lipstick was not well received in Paris and New York, though "Golden Cock" alarm clocks are now sold as a collectors' item on eBay. No list of misguided brands would be complete without the unforgettable "Skinababe" baby powder offered to US mothers by a Japanese company.

Of course, the more cynical among us might delight in such innocence in an age of relentlessly psychological marketing, and purchase the product on principle. Sadly, the consumer brethren disagree en masse and the market tends to weed them out swiftly.

Many of the super-brands that dominate the Anglophone market do so with meaningless, self-referential names—names of people or places, or arbitrary combinations of letters chosen for their manly or ladylike sound. The all-important meaning of a brand is naturally easier to sculpt if the name itself is a blank slate.

But the jewel in globalisation's empire, China's millions, must be reached through its ancient writing system, a system in which almost every character is to some extent meaningful. The closest thing to meaningless characters are those that refer to noises, like "oh" or "ah", and even these can convey meaning. In fact, the founder of Wahaha, one of China's biggest drinks producers, used such characters to name his company after the sound of a chortling infant.

This doesn't fit in too with those companies who want a consistent, 'global', name, and by extension, brand image. Foreign expats and tourists in China find it difficult to get their tongue around many of their favourite products' Chinese names, for example, Coca-cola is pronounced "Ke kou ke le" (it means "Tasty-Happy"). "With 50,000 characters to choose from, couldn’t they have found one that made the pronunciation more like 'Kou ke kou le'?" grumbles an expat online.

Yes, they could. In fact, when the syrupy black stuff arrived in Shanghai in the 1928, Coke's diligent Chinese sellers, in the absence of any company-sanctioned alternative, wrote large signs encouraging the consumption of "Kou ke kou la"—an almost perfect rendition of the original pronunciation that meant, depending on the characters used, "Female Horse Stuffed with Wax", or "Bite the Wax Tadpole".

The lesson being that if a company doesn't coin its own Chinese brand names, Chinese consumers will do it for them. Polo, the high-end clothing manufacturer, tried to avoid taking a Chinese name and became known as the "Three-legged Horse" brand.

Google somehow managed to become widely known on the Chinese internet long before it took a Chinese name, but its market share was (and still is) puny compared with its near-monopoly in the West. Problem was, 'Google' was difficult for Chinese to remember how to spell—a vital prerequisite, one would think, for total domination of the internet-search industry. In early 2006 the company finally caved, announcing with great fanfare the adoption of 'Gu ge', (pronounced "Goo-guh") meaning "Valley Song" or "Harvest Song", as its Chinese brand.

Said Google China CEO Kai-fu Lee: "We think searching is like harvesting—you're reaping rewards and celebrating having great results, so we like that poetic aspect."

Plenty didn't. Before all this, Google had been known in China by a variety of unofficial and in some cases beloved Chinese names, most popularly 'Gou gou' (Dog-dog) and 'Gu gou' ("Ancient Dog"). After the company launched its bucolic new image, thousands of Chinese internet users (presumably Google's hardcore fans) howled protests and signed a petition against the name on a dedicated website, noGuGe.com. "Uncool!" they cried, "rural!" "backward!"

Of course, those who actually cared enough about Google's name to launch protests were something approaching a lunatic fringe. But more importantly, while 'Google' is now officially a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary, the choice of 'Gu ge' has scuppered its chances of repeating such an extraordinary insertion into the Chinese language.

As Andy Chuang, CEO of Chinese naming consultants Good Characters, puts it, "it does not have verb potential". Though many Chinese words are both nouns and verbs, you definitely can't "song" anything. Ironic too because its Chinese nemesis, Baidu, which continues to pummel it in market share (58 per cent to 26 per cent in 2007), has pounced on the idea—its search button now reads in Chinese, "Baidu it", and it's catching on.

But for some companies simply being foreign can be enough to ensure a brand's popularity with Chinese consumers, and there are now exist a group of characters used almost exclusively in foreign words—a bit like Katakana in Japanese.

Lexus changed its Chinese name in 2005, from 'Ling zhi', meaning 'High Ideal', to the completely nonsensical 'Lei ke sa si'. Well, almost completely nonsensical. All four characters are commonly used to render foreign words, but 'sa si' is a common rendering of SARS, the killer virus that had terrorised China in 2003. Yet sales have soared since the name change. Company spokesperson Vanessa Hou says the rebranding "made the connection to the name Lexus clearer, thereby better establishing the brand image."

The problem for foreign companies using these "foreign-looking" characters, however forgiving the Chinese public may be towards a brand's negative connotations, is that Chinese companies have taken a distinct liking to their connotations of foreignness.

It's a common tactic outside China. Australia's Dolmio pasta sauces are made by Masterfoods and have never graced the shelves of Italy, while ice-cream giant Haagen-Dazs is New York born-and-bred. But University of Montana business professor Dr Fengru Li says foreign-looking transliterations have become almost useless for foreign companies in China.

"That is probably not going to be a trend any more," Dr Li says. "They are no longer uniquely representative of foreign ownership, nor of the assumed premier quality. The consumers' perceptions have changed."

While some Chinese companies may want to appear foreign, foreign companies are often quite content to appear Chinese. Lucky characters referring to happiness, good fortune or wealth are quite bankable as Chinese names, leading to an amusingly Maoist lack of distinctiveness among many major global brands.

For example, wealthier shoppers may be seen in 'Jia le fu' (Carrefour) hypermarkets stocking up on 'Jia le shi' (Kelloggs) cereal and 'Jia jie shi' (Crest) toothpaste before heading home to down 'Duo mei le' (Dominos) pizza with 'Mei le' (Miller) beer under a 'Mei de' (Midea) air conditioner.

But who can blame companies for staying with the tried-and-tested formula? Standard Chartered Bank's Chinese name, the "Scum-dozen Bank" probably doesn't draw too many new local customers through the door, judging by responses around Shanghai.

"The feeling is bad," said a woman in a Shanghai restaurant. A man on a subway train was even more decided: "If I had money in the 'Scum-dozen Bank', I'd definitely move it to the 'Bountiful Collection Bank' (HSBC)," he said.

Standard Chartered's name hails from another place, from Old China, when only a small minority of the Chinese population could read Chinese script—though those who could were presumably wealthy.

Legendary Old Shanghai adman Carl Crow's strategy addressing this was "to make every advertisement as complete as possible without the use of a word of text." His agency was probably not responsible for the early 20th century posters showing elegant Chinese ladies glamorising 'Forced to Vomit the Spirit' baby formula (Lactogen) and 'Stupid Turnip' medicines.

Crow understood Chinese characters couldn't just be thrown together like letters, and before he sent an advert to press carrying a new Chinese name, he would run a "test for ribaldry".

"China is the paradise of punsters, and the most sedate phrase may, by a simple change in tone, be turned into a ribald quip which will make the vulgar roar," he wrote in 1937.

Andy Chuang echoes this today, pointing out that many companies fail to factor in regional China's many dialects and regional pronunciations.

Chuang cites the worldwide Nissan model whose Chinese name the company translated directly as "Blue bird". Innocuous enough in Standard Mandarin, but in the Hakka dialect spoken by more than 30 million it's a homonym for 'male genitalia'.

And if there's no other way to get shame and scorn heaped on your brand name there are always good old national sore spots to poke.

Toyota thought it was just rolling with the latest fashion when it named its Prado SUV the 'Rule-by-Force' ('Ba dao'). The character 'Ba', meaning tyrant, has seen a recent surge in popularity among Chinese brand names, and one of the country's leading local shampoo brands is named 'Ba wang', or 'Overlord'. Toyota ran an advert in an auto magazine showing a pair of Chinese-style stone lions deferring to the Prado, accompanied by the text, "Rule-by-Force: You must respect it".

But coming from a Japanese company, tyranny is not at all trendy—understandably so given 20th century history. Hundreds of thousands of complaints poured into the censors' office, which promptly banned the advert after originally allowing it to print. Toyota not only withdrew the ad, they rebranded the car.

The Toyota 'Rule-by-Force' didn't offend everyone in China, though. According to the Chinese internet, it was particularly popular with one group: local government officials in Sichuan Province.

Bye bye to Shanghai

Uh, we have to leave Shanghai. China actually.

It was our day off Work so then it rained on us It rained very hard.




China make strange thing They call it coffee cola Then i do it too




Migrant worker house Migrant workers seek not get Foreigners ok




Foreigners want more China time China say no So they go away



Raining pictures here Nine faces as Guce mocks Box End of house there too

China softens its hard line against free hugs?

I was surprised to see this 3-par filler story appear from the China Daily (officially-sanctioned English language paper):

"A company in Changchun, Jilin province, encouraged 70 young people to give pedestrians of the opposite gender a big hug on the streets as a way to rid them of shyness or timidity when meeting strangers."

Back in November 2006, free hugs got people arrested - in Shanghai of all places.

Now gorgeous babes have been doing it in Beijing, there's even an organisation dedicated to promoting street hugging between foreigners and Chinese in China.

This is all pretty lame as far as subjects go. But one last thing: The China Daily article above seems to say a private company - not an international hugging organisation - hired or co-opted these 70 random "young people". Why? And why was it specifically the opposite sex the young people had to hug? See if i can't work my ol' Jilin contact list and find out...

Found: One Shanghai slum

MAY 10, 2008: For a time, i remember arrogantly thinking that where we live is as bad as Shanghai gets.

There's a bridge about 3 minutes walk away, down where the canal over our back fence runs into the Dingpu ("Sediment Beach" according to my chosen interpretation of two multi-meaningful characters) River. I walked down there today to take some photos. On the opposite side of the bridge is a green, tree-lined boulvard with spanking new 25-storey apartment towers. The smooth, new concrete surface of the boulevard continues across the bridge, and stops abruptly at my side of the bridge. On this side, it's muddy, rock-strewn and bumpy.

That's not to say this is what the roads are like on "my side" of the canal - they're mostly quite good - it's just that the good roads on this side don't link up with the good bridge. This little corner has been wholly left to fester.


In the corner bordered by the canal and the river, there's a guy arranging his scrap wood into large stacks in the corner formed by the waterways. Past him there are more piles of scrap wood leading down to some kind of factory. And some of these piles of scrap wood, i discovered as i walked through, are actually people's houses. Houses made from plywood, chipboard, cardboard and tree branches, with curtains for doors. Oily carpet lies submerged in the mud. Not a window to be seen.

Two women in jeans and t-shirts chatted outside their shanties. Loud conversation in some dialect emanated from a pile next to the canal. I asked a couple of blokes if i could get through to the other side. Beaming, and insisting my Chinese was perfect, he gave me directions.

Despite this friendliness (no different to anywhere else) i just couldn't pull out the camera. Sure the scene was poignant to me, and perhaps to others of a similar persuasion, but the people already have so little privacy without me poking around, let along taking pictures. Am i projecting my own opinion of their houses onto them? Perhaps, but i have to think they'd be all too aware of their predicament, given the high-rise towers all around which close to the whole population of the city, not just the rich people, live in. It's not so much that i think they should feel ashamed of anything - hell i think poverty's virtue in many ways i won't go into - but that in China's vicious Darwinistic society, i have every reason to think they themselves would feel ashamed.

This is compounded by the fact most Chinese people can't see why anyone would take a picture of anything "not beautiful".


I'm sure there are plenty of worthy photographers and journalists out there - far more worthy than the waste of space that's me - who would just barge right in, grill people about the abominable state of things, and snap away with the camera in the name of the greater good. But for me, to do slum photos/stories right is to know the background of the area first, not to talk to people purely because they're the only ones who have to shit outside.

In the countryside, where everyone shits outside, it was different: the photos i took out there were of normal daily life, rather than an enclave of deprivation in a city of relative wealth. Even in the most backwards of places, peasants, i don't think, would feel as put down or scrutinised when a foreigner takes photos as they travel around seeing the land.

Now sure, compared to the next-worst kind of dwelling - our kind pretty much - the slum is horrific. But in truth, with 200 million or more migrant workers it's quite a miracle there aren't more of them in China. If i can find out the reasons for this one's existence i'll go back and talk to the residents about the place. It's most likely the lack of low-cost housing...hmmm i guess that would make me responsible, according to my instinctive pissweak liberal way of seeing things. Grrrrrrrgh get some China into ya son! Obviously i haven't been in here long enough.

Prizes for patriots!

When I loaded up a computer at the internet bar a couple of days ago i was greeted with a generous offer of "heavy" prizes! (note, translation corrections are more than welcome; i'm pretty shit)

Apparently all i had to do was love China and i could get QQ money, "experience" or props for QQ's online game.

Of course i clicked the link. But to my disappointment it was a wrong address.

Determined, as a lover of China, to get my free "experience", i entered some of the text into a search engine, and it turned out more interesting than i even imagined.

On 17173.com, China's busiest gaming website, the promotion, roughly translated, is introduced thus:

"The mood in QQ Huaxia [online game] is urgent and angry - this is intolerable! It's been learned that "Concealing Dangerous Drugses" are hiding in the northern region..."

So what the hell is a Concealing Dangerous Drugs?

Well, it's ugly, has bad breath and is easy to kill. Oh and it's name, "Zang-du" (藏毒) is uncannily similar to "T!betan 1ndependence". ("Conceal" shares the same character as "T!bet", while "dangerous drug" shares the same pronunciation as "independence".)

And did i mention you get a "certificate of patriotism" for killing one?


You'd think perhaps, having gone to the trouble of renaming the monster separatists "Concealing Dangerous Drugses", QQ itself wouldn't admit the connnection with real Tibetans, but they do. This from an announcement of the upcoming promotion, titled (roughly as always) "Take your liberties with 'Zang-du' - QQ Huaxia to provide new services for angry youth to vent their rage":

"This time, QQ Huaxia stands up!

[...]

We're supporting the Olympics with our unique anti-T!betan 1ndependence online game content"

Of course, the online community doesn't exactly see a distinction either. And why should they? Chinese internet discussions about
T!betan 1ndependence have often used "藏毒" in order to avoid the censors and/or the Golden Shield, like i'm doing (probably unnecessarily) with that "T!bet" shit.

Now, lest i commit too severely the sins i have recently been preaching against, let me say that QQ Huaxia claims to have 1 million players, which isn't very many by Chinese online game standards. Still, they're obviously hoping that number will pick up.

"The most entertaining way for players to oppose T!betan 1ndependence - QQ Huaxia, with its patriotic new services, calls patriotic players around the world to spread the true red heart of patriotism, support the sacred flame and oppose T!betan 1dependence!"

It's significant to see a privately-owned company running a marketing ploy so unashamedly aimed at the fenqing (angry youth) and their nationalist sentiment. (Ironic, too in that the same market-driven principles resulted in China's recent rough ride in the American media.)

How well this works will be interesting, if not telling. But even if it's a huge hit, we can't forget our most popular games in the west are downright horrific if we take them at face value like this. The biggest difference is the marketing rhetoric from the company.

There already may be signs it's too bloodthirsty for many users online: at the bottom of the 17173.com page is a poll asking "how do you feel after reading this?", to which 25 out of 30 responses have been negative.

After all that, i'm not really any wiser on what the "experience" i could win for loving China is. But perhaps killing "Zang-du" isn't the one everyone on the Chinese internet is after.


Update 4/5: Needing QQ to play (i think it also costs money), i've been denied the opportunity of downloading the game and experiencing killing 'Zang-du' myself. If anyone out there can get on it please tell me how it goes...number 1 question, how does it feel compared to, say, igniting the 10 Hare-krishnas with the flame thrower in the original GTA, or stomping hecklers in the new GTA, or running down dogs with tanks in "Red Alert" (yes the 1996 one)?