Posts by Chris Waugh
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I watched the full interview with John Campbell and was really impressed with the passion and drive he displayed for his show and, dare I say it, his mission.
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Field Theory: Man Moments, in reply to Tristan,
I want to ask a serious question if the rat pack is out what images of men can you use to appeal to men that does not result in accusations of sexism or ignoring women?
A man in a sharp suit holding his own ashtray and with an open, engaging expression on his face, the woman standing next to him on an equal level?
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For fans of k-pop and Hong Kong comedy, Stephen Chow's been Gangnam Style'd. Hope that link works for those outside China who might be interested.
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Cracker: Weapons of Mass Production, in reply to Yamis,
it’s like something from Simcity or one of those other build your own city games.
Yeah, it does seem to happen that fast. Just a couple of hundred metres north of where I'm sitting there was a market a year and a half ago. Now it's yet another real estate development nearing completion. Out where my brother in law lives was once a small town on the east bank of the Chaobai River in Hebei, then the developers realised it was close enough to the Beijing CBD to commute. The expressway from Beijing to Tongzhou was stretched out and across the river and highrises shot up like mushrooms. Now if you drive down the main road of that town you'll see hustlers trying to shove advertising for these real estate developments through the windows of every car that looks like it might slow down and turn off the road, with the exception of taxis and trucks almost every car has Beijing licence plates instead of Hebei plates, and the locals resent Beijingers because they can no longer afford an apartment in their own town. SMS spam is more likely to be for real estate than anything else. There's even at least one pop song about the real estate boom (no idea if that link will open outside China or if its geoblocked, if you can watch it the imagery is unsubtle enough that you don't need to understand Chinese).
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Cracker: Weapons of Mass Production, in reply to Graham Dunster,
Similar vein – politics/mark-kitto-youll-never-be-chinese-leaving-china
Ah yes, did see that. Kitto makes some very good points, but I find he overstates his case somewhat. That article struck me as being unnecessarily bitter, in other words. Having said that, I do intend to get my own family out of China in the near future (progress report: my daughter is now officially Kiwi. Next step: my wife needs a visa) and for reasons very similar to what Kitto outlines in his piece. I’m just not having as rough a time of it as he seems to be.
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Cracker: Weapons of Mass Production, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Oh, the staring still happens. Not so much in the big cities, although there is a certain subset of Beijingers who have a lazy "another foreigner" stare, but certainly even in the suburban and rural regions of Beijing and, of course, the smaller cities obvious foreigners are enough of a rarity for people to stop and stare.
I have a book that has a photo of Rewi Alley sitting with Zhou Enlai in Workers' Stadium here in Beijing in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, acres of empty space around them. His book Yo Banfa! is fascinating in its cheerful optimism that China was just about to overturn everything and build some kind of utopia - which seems to have been a pretty common attitude in the early 50s. I would've loved to have heard his stories of 60 years in China - in freer times than when you met him, naturally.
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Cracker: Weapons of Mass Production, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Guangzhou was the first Chinese city I visited on a memorable trip in April/May 1976.
Wow, Hilary, that trip must've been amazing. I was too busy being a newborn baby about that time to visit China. The changes I've seen since I was first blown away by the sheer size of the Xiang River back in 1999 are incredible. Reading Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk was a bit of a mind-bender because his descriptions of Changsha in the early 80s had enough that was familiar to me from Changsha in '99/2000 for it to be really familiar, but enough of a bygone era for it to be completely foreign.
Chou En Lai (not sure about modern spelling)
Zhōu Ēnlái
Tien an Mien
Tiānānmén
Tone markers are generally considered optional in hànyǔ pīnyīn, but really should be included. Though your spellings aren't any less modern, considering that various forms of Yale, Wade-Giles, and other competing systems of romanisation are still in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and the diaspora as well as historical contexts, adapted to Cantonese and Hokkien/Fujian and I imagine also Hakka languages and dialects as well as Mandarin.
Damian's 4th photo reminds me very much of both a generic Chinese city and my first experience of Guangzhou. That first experience of Guangzhou was July 3, 2000, on a China Southern flight from Changsha. The plane zigzagged lower and lower, the buildings (exactly like in that photo) getting ever more uncomfortably closer, and the rivers such a thick brown colour I started to think that if the pilot couldn't find the airport we could just land on one of the rivers. Judging by Damian's photos, although the buildings have got higher and the people more, the colours of the city haven't changed.
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Those days [of sweatshops] are far gone.
Or moved inland, perhaps, as recent reports of unrest at Foxconn plants in Taiyuan and Zhengzhou may suggest.
Question for the lawyers: Does New Zealand have an equivalent of the US's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? If not, is one in the works?
I think China sees any new business as a good thing for the country as a whole, so they try and make it as easy as possible
Better be careful with that, things are changing.
Better hurry, got a class to run off to... What Geoff said about the students.
And I'm with Ben: Great story. Could we have the NZ media clone you, Damien? Because we need a lot more reporting like this.
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Went to Longtan Park today. I was hoping to see a few ducks, but it seems they'd either sensed the changing season and had taken off for more hospitable climes, or they were hiding from the holiday crowds. Heard plenty of other birds, but couldn't see them (sneaky recordings played over the PA system?). Did get this kite, though. Well, it's bird-shaped and flies.
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an hour later, still chilly
