Posts by Chris Waugh
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When did you last see a chart-topping pop record sold on its words?
Ummm.... never, I think. But I would argue that the mark of a truly great songwriter is that their lyrics can stand on their own as poetry. Not sure if Lorde's quite there yet, but she's certainly showing promise. Must go check out more of her songs.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That would have been before Clapton came out as a nazi?
Wow, I was completely unaware of that.
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Perhaps belongs in that art on the street thread.... oh well... tag + NB (=niúbī/牛逼*/lit. translation "cow's cunt", meaning "awesome!") + bìyè le! (graduated!). Somebody was glad to see the end of Teaching Building 3.
*interesting that my IME gives me a common character substitution rather than the taboo to the point of almost unknown actual character. I believe the bī, if we're not worried about taboos, should actually be composed of a 尸 (shī; body, corpse) above and down the left side of a 穴 (xué; cave, den, hole).
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Don’t know who did this pruning.
But at the opposite end of the park, there is at least one worker in the temple under very slow construction.
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Big Red Tobacco, yes. And Big Red Tobacco is state owned, so there does seem to be a revenue stream there. I have read, though, that smoking costs the government more than it collects in tobacco income, but others have argued that the health system has been purely market since reform and opening up and you have to pay the full cost of medical care. Then of course there's lost productivity due to ill health... but as I already said, how do you separate that out from ill health due to air pollution or industrial causes?
I really can't answer most of your questions, except to say that the history of smoking in China goes way back at least into the Qing Dynasty, possibly even the Ming. There's this strange old attitude that Men Smoke, and it's kinda jarring to watch historic kung fu films like Ip Man or Once Upon a Time in China, films about Chinese folk heroes with at least some basis in actual history, and see the hero, a martial artist and, in Huang Feihong's case, a TCM doctor, puffing on a pipe.
I don't know if you can call this tacit encouragement, but Mao's and Deng's favourite brands were well known and there are "luxury" brands of cigarettes that cost Western prices, while most cigarettes are dirt cheap.
Then smoking has a role in communication among Chinese men. Handing out cigarettes is like a handshake. It used to be that handing out cigarettes could help get a favourable deal in a market - but no smoking rules are spreading further and more and more enforced for both fire safety and public health reasons. I'm sure it does still help business deals get done. I have heard that people will give a carton of fancy cigarettes and a bottle of expensive baijiu to a teacher if their kid gets a lower grade than they deserve - the characters for smoke and booze (烟酒/yānjiǔ) have a very similar pronunciation to a word that can be translated in this kind of context as "think it over" (研究/yánjiū) - and oddly enough, 烟酒 and 研究 are the first two suggestions my IME gives when I type "yanjiu" - trouble is, nobody's ever tried that on me. It's annoying, because gifts like this can be recycled, I could turn it into cash. In facct, nobody's ever really tried to bribe me in any way. So much for rampant corruption.... anyway...
Rising life expectancy, well, I doubt that's got much to do with healthier lifestyles, I suspect it's a lot more about economic development, more secure food supplies and greater political stability. Most people can now afford meat and food supplies are guaranteed year-round rather than only seasonally, and there's a greater variety of food available thanks to improved transport infrastructure. My wife remembers winters when her family had nothing but cabbage, noodles and vinegar to eat, Chinese New Years where they couldn't afford any meat. There are still plenty of malnourished people in the poorer, more underdeveloped regions (China's per capita GDP is still about right for sub-Saharan Africa, remember), but it's been a while since the last famine. And there aren't many people being beaten to death in struggle sessions these days. And although health care is expensive, insurance is available and the quality is vastly improved as China has been catching up with Western medical science and technology. Oh, and senior doctors are no longer bullied out of their clinics by their students and interns for having an inappropriate class background or being a bit too strict....
But China's population is aging and smoking and binge drinking are still a huge part of social, business and official* life for very many Chinese men, and economic development has brought massive environmental destruction and all kinds of industrial illnesses, partly through using old, dirty technology, partly through cost- and corner-cutting by bosses desperate to make the maximum short-term profit (cos who knows how the political winds are going to shift tomorrow, so better make sure you're well set up now for any future eventuality).
So yeah, haven't really answered your questions, sorry, but that's what I've got right now.
*We'll see how Xi Jinping's austerity drive affects things long term. Short term I've heard a lot of fancy restaurants have been struggling since the official banquet income stream has been choked off, but it's still early days.
ETA: Sorry, national efforts to cut smoking. Yes, they exist, there are anti-smoking posters around, stronger and more strongly enforced no smoking rules, and as I already mentioned, quit smoking clinics. But still, very much early days. There also seems to be more chatter about the health risks of smoking. I don't know the price of a pack of cigarettes (could ask my students, obviously, but I'm not in class right now, which I hope is equally obvious), but although there are "luxury" brands, most seem to vary between cheap, dirt cheap, and practically free.
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Hard News: Local interest, in reply to Richard Aston,
2015? Australasian Super-City. Prosperous. Healthy. Shining. Pumping. First class. NZ’s new capital?
Convert all of Australasia into a Super-City which would be capital of New Zealand, even though all of New Zealand and Australia would be under the jurisdiction of the new Super-City? Geez, and I thought our current constitutional set-up was hard enough to get my head around.
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Hard News: Not so insane, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I tell my students to quit smoking before they head overseas because it's too expensive and there's no way anybody would tolerate them lighting up inside. Now I'm going to add "smokefree campus" to the list of threats - "You guys will be getting really fit if you go study overseas, what with having to sprint off campus for a smoke then sprint back to class".
I have no idea of smoking-induced lung cancer rates here and struggle to see how you could separate them from general air pollution-induced lung cancer rates. But with officially 60% of Chinese men smokers (and everybody I know thinks the real rate is higher) it must be ridiculously high. Add in second hand smoke, not helped by the assumption that corridors and men's toilets are smoking areas (with many exceptions in hospitals, commercial premises, airports, etc, although policing of those exceptions sometimes can be a bit lax) and the rural Chinese assumption that one can light up anywhere, including in somebody else's home right in front of somebody else's kids, and it gets a bit scary. What's worse is young women are getting more and more open about smoking. It used to be something only "bad girls" did, so very few women smoked, and those who did wound up as fairly light smokers, a bit like what Islander described in terms of how much they smoked, because smoking was something they could only do in secret. Now the younger ones care less and less about those traditional values, which is a good thing in most respects, except that with smoking it'll lead to more women smoking more, which is only going to increase the toll it takes on Chinese public health.
On the plus side I see more and more urban Chinese men taking care to take their cigarettes away from the kids - once even had to stop my daughter effectively chasing some poor guy off campus because she kept trying to play where he was trying to have a quiet smoke without hurting the kids - and the Yanqing County hospital in the northwestern exurbs of Beijing has a quit smoking clinic, so the "smoking is bad for your health" message is getting out, but there's a hell of a long way to go and a hell of a lot more to worry about.
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Hard News: Not so insane, in reply to Islander,
My small world is the exact opposite. Whenever I call break time or class is over, an awful lot of my male students sprint out into the corridor to light up. I've even seen my boys warming up for a basketball match cigarette dangling from their lips.
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A little morning kindy-run experiment. Sunrise through the muddy windows of the bus (it rained yesterday, hence the filthy windows), one of those exceedingly rare occasions when my phone and I actually see the same thing.
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I think we need to be careful about getting bogged down in what has already been "proven" in the Western medical tradition and not be so eager to dismiss "alternative" medicines. Western medicine is not all scientifically proven but is still developing and science is constantly developing new therapies and casting doubt on the efficacy of old therapies. Many alternative medicines are traditions developed over hundreds or thousands of years. To simply dismiss them as bunk because the underlying theories are weird and unscientific and the therapies don't look like what would happen in any GP clinic or state hospital in NZ strikes me as being highly irrational.
Take Traditional Chinese Medicine as an example, but let me first get something clear:
1: Deer penis wine, powdered rhino horn, and all that nonsense is not real TCM, it's just a stupid mix of vanity, insecurity and superstition.
2: Chinese folk medicine is just like any other folk medicine, a set of customs passed down through families over the millenia. It does involve a lot of superstition, ignorance and old wives' tales, but there are good reasons why folk medicines persist. Even if it's only comfort or placebo, it helps, but there are almost certainly aspects of it that do actually have some medical use beyond comfort.
3: TCM proper is taught in universities by actual doctors who have studied the TCM system. These days TCM students also learn a lot of science, and modern scientific diagnostic tools are used by TCM doctors. There's also been more and more science done investigating TCM - sure, an awful lot of bad science, but that's a start, at least, and I'm sure there's some good, or at least adequate science being done. Some have already mentioned that with acupuncture. Also, don't forget that an awful lot of Western medicine is of herbal origin. Surely TCM doctors must be on to something when they prescribe certain combinations of herbs for certain conditions... After all they're working in a tradition that thousands of years of trial and error behind it. There's a story about the Yellow Emperor touring around China trying every herb and noting its effects before taking some tea to stop those effects turning fatal.... until he got to the last herb he tried, which killed him before he could get his tea.There's a TCM hospital just down the road from me. It has both Western (well, Chinese, but trained in the Western tradition) doctors and TCM doctors. When you go in a nurse asks your symptoms and makes a recommendation of which doctor to see, but you're free to disagree with her. The TCM doctors use stethoscopes and those blood pressure measuring machines whose name I forgot and will send you off for x-rays, scans, ECGs, blood tests and whathaveyou as well as take your pulse TCM-style and inspect your tongue and ask about a bunch of things that have no obvious connection to your symptoms to a Western mind, and good TCM doctors* will tell you when Western medicine would be more appropriate.
This approach of scientifically investigating other medical traditions and blending them with the Western tradition seems to me to be the smart way to go.
And if a Chinese person, TCM doctor or not, tells you that you have shànghuǒ (how to translate? "fire has risen"?), don't dismiss it as superstitious nonsense, understand it as potentially a very useful metaphor for the effect your psychological state is having on your physical health. Rinse and repeat for other strange-sounding diagnoses from "alternative" medical traditions.
Also what Bart said about science being the best way we have to figure out how things work, but we certainly don't know everything yet.
*hint: go for the older ones, they were trained at a time when making vast amounts of money wasn't the national obssession and any sons they have are probably married off already, meaning they face a lot less financial pressure.
