-by Ernie Diaz

Even the die-hard materialist eventually comes to the realization that people are a nation’s greatest resource. Pity that the best people always want to leave their nations for others, ey expats? In this regard we must pay tribute to Taishan, where China has been hemorrhaging its best and boldest for centuries. That’s what you get, China, when a hardworking man can’t rise above coolie without a rich helping of guanxi. Growing inequality in the West and the growing number of freebooters in China can’t be entirely unrelated, either.

Capable of making it anywhere but China.

Western inequality certainly didn’t impress Taishan folk enough to make a dent in their emigration plans. In fact, up to three-quarters of North America’s Chinese population, as of the mid-twentieth century, had come from Taishan, or could trace their ancestry to the place. Oh, and for the record, we’re not speaking of the holy mountain in Shandong that new emperors scaled out of divine obligation. This Taishan sits downwind of Macau and Zhongshan, in the Pearl River Delta, a few days’ junk-sail from Hong Kong.

A prosperous region now, by many standards, and a quantum leap from the dire straits it found itself in five generations ago. Untold thousands, year after year, left Opium War for Gold Rush, tribal vendetta for bonded labor, and certain poverty for an outside shot at respectability. Not all that many came back, what with 8 or 9 million worldwide claiming Taishan ancestry, and a little over a million in the city proper today. Or perhaps their descendants await an appropriately Great Gatsby moment, as did Gary Locke, although Taishan ren’s duties keep him close to Beijing.

You’d certainly be pressed to find in Taishan any of the blatant despair that chased so many of its own overseas. Instead, you find in the city echoes of the concrete chaos that is Guangzhou, and farming and factories in its wide skirt.

So should you find yourself in Taishan’s environs with leisure time to spare…wait. How likely is that – your gadding about Taishan with leisure time to spare? In fact, there should be about 8 or 9 million of you due back to track down your roots, and another bunch of you that might find yourselves in the Pearl River Delta trying to find a factory that still ignores minimum wage laws.

Once night falls, you can stroll down Taishan’s pedestrian street, all the more a blessing in a city where walking requires the reflexes of a matador outside of it. No car-no rights! Try some of the steamed eel on rice which makes Guangdong mouths water, or some of the even more adventurous meat dishes that give Guangdongren full stomachs and the rest of us epidemics every twenty years. Don’t expect fancy craft beer or cocktail joints, but do try a watering hole or three. Sipping mojitos with pinky aloft whilst listening to live jazz does not a China expat make, Shanghai/Beijing dwellers. Warm Yanjing beers with a deranged “outsourcer” and an English teacher from Senegal named Crown, now THAT’s true China expat nightlife.

And there are a nice pair of islands within Taishan territory, golden beaches and Bob Ross-palette sunsets. Shangchuan Island is the larger of the two, also the more crowded, with locals doing their damndest to provide all the surf options that draw more-monied tourists to Thailand and Bali: kayaking, paddle boarding, windsurfing, and the like.

There are plenty of other distractions on the island once you realize how boring the fabled beach flop is, a massive Buddha and other statuary gracing the shore, the church of St. Francis, first missionary in China (not the peacenik with the birds). Plenty of protected-status monkeys and bamboo cypress for the full-on tropical South China Sea vibe.

But let’s keep it real. Hainan is a long bus-ride from Taishan, and at least there you can get some decent sushi for dinner after beaching about all day. Hong Kong is even closer, making a protracted stay in downtown Taishan for any reason other than work-related rather ridiculous.

A.L. himself

The Taishanese won’t blame you for it. Heck, they colonized Hong Kong long ago, where they are known as the Sze Yap community. No relegated, back alley caste, the Sze Yap dominate Hong Kong’s entertainment and banking communities to the extent you’d think they have a covenant with Yahweh. Andy Lau, more integral to the Hongywood film than a tinny soundtrack, is Sze Yap, as was Lai Man-Wai, the father of Hong Kong Cinema, who would be more accurately remembered as the godfather. Tony Leung, Danny Chan, Karl Maka, a constellation of cinematic supernovas you’ve probably never heard of, but who enjoy fame and fortune nonetheless, without having to resort to the cross-cultural self abasement that Jackie Chan indulges in.

Jackie might have been more content in banking, seeing as he’d endorse Massengill feminine products just to have a new wad of bills to count. But alas, Chan Long is not Sze Yap, like Sir David Li, head of the Bank of East Asia. His lack of Taishan-rootedness will also keep him off the board of mega-Asian food brand Lee Kum Kee. We could go on with Sze Yap mercantile accomplishments, but as long as our point from up top is made. No Qing courtier cared if every last Taishan peasant left for greener pastures, but look at the value they’ve created elsewhere. More topically, seeing as almost a third of Hong Kong is Sze Yap, how many of them are joining in the recent protests at the Mainland “locusts”?

-from The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra

When the Eastern mystics tell us that they experience all things and events as manifestations of a basic oneness, this does not mean that they pronounce all things to be equal. They recognize the individuality of all things, but at the same time they are aware that all differences and contrasts are relative within an all-embracing unity.

Since in our normal state of consciousness, this unity of all contrasts – and especially the unity of opposites – is extremely hard to accept, it constitutes one of the most puzzling features of Eastern philosophy. It is, however, an insight which lies at the very root of the Eastern world view.

Opposites are abstract concepts belonging to the realm of thought, and as such they are relative. By the very act of focusing our attention on any one concept we create its opposite. As Lao Tzu says, “When all in the world understand beauty to be beautiful, then ugliness exists; when all understand goodness to be good, then evil exists.”

Mystics transcend this realm of intellectual concepts, and in transcending it become aware of the relativity and polar relationship of all opposites. They realize that good and bad, pleasure and pain, life and death, are not absolute experiences belonging to different categories, but are merely two sides of the same reality; extreme parts of a single whole.

The awareness that all opposites are polar, and thus a unity, is seen as one of the highest aims of man in the spiritual traditions of the East. The whole of Buddhist teaching – and in fact the whole of Eastern mysticism – revolves about this absolute point of view which is reached in the world of acintya, or ‘no-thought’, where the unity of all opposites becomes a vivid experience. In the words of the Zen poem,

‘At dusk the cock announces dawn;

At midnight, the bright sun.’

In the East, a virtuous person is therefore not one who undertakes the impossible task of striving for the good and eliminating the bad, but rather one who is able to maintain a dynamic balance between good and bad. This notion of dynamic balance is essential to the way in which the unity of opposites is experienced in Eastern mysticism. It is never a static identity, but always a dynamic interplay between two extremes. This point has been emphasized most extensively by Chinese sages in their symbolism of the archetypal poles of yin and yang. They called the unity lying behind yin and yang the Tao and saw it as a process which brings about their interplay: ‘That which lets now the dark, now the light appear is Tao.’

I have already asserted that a similar plane has been reached in modern physics. The exploration of the subatomic world has revealed a reality which repeatedly transcends language and reasoning, and the unification of concepts which had hitherto seemed opposite and irreconcilable turns out to be one of the most startling features of this new reality. Modern physicists should therefore be able to gain insights into some of the central teachings of the Far East by relating them to experiences in their own field.

Examples of the unification of opposite concepts in modern physics can be found at the subatomic level, where particles are both destructible and indestructible; where matter is both continuous and discontinuous, and force and matter are but different aspects of the same phenomenon. In all these examples, it turns out that the framework of opposite concepts, derived from our everyday experience, is too narrow for the world of subatomic particles.

Eastern mystics, on the other hand, seem to be able to experience a higher-dimensional reality directly and concretely. In the state of deep meditation, they can transcend the three-dimensional world of everyday life, and experience a totally different reality where all opposites are unified into an organic whole. When the mystics try to express this experience in words, they are faced with the same problems as the physicists trying to interpret the multidimensional reality of relativistic physics.

For a better understanding of this relation between pairs of classical concepts, Niels Bohr has introduced the notion of complementarity. He considered the particle picture and the wave picture as two complementary descriptions of the same reality, each of them being only partly correct and having a limited range of application. Each picture is needed to give a full description of the atomic reality, and both are able to be applied within the limitations given by the uncertainty principle.

Niels Bohr was well aware of the parallel between his concept of complementarity and Chinese thought. When he visited China in 1937, at a time when his interpretation of quantum theory had already been fully elaborated, he was deeply impressed by the ancient Chinese notion of polar opposites, and from that time he maintained an interest in Eastern culture.

Ten years later, Bohr was knighted as an acknowledgment of his outstanding achievements in science and important contributions to Danish cultural life; and when he had to choose a suitable motif for his coat-of-arms his choice fell on the Chinese symbol of tai qi, representing the complementary relationship of the archetypal opposites yin and yang. In choosing this symbol for his coat-of-arms, together with the inscription Contraria sunt complementa (Opposites are complementary), Niels Bohr acknowledged the profound harmony between ancient Chinese wisdom and modern Western science.

-by Ernie Diaz

Honghe, ‘Red River’, in Yunnan, ‘South of the Clouds’, is a name too poetic to say in the same breath as “autonomous prefecture”. Besides, doesn’t autonomous mean something along the lines of “not controlled by outside forces”? Could a cop on the run, for example, claim sanctuary in Honghe Autonomous Prefecture, and be safe from high-level pursuit?

Despite the contradiction in terms, Honghe is a beauty of an A.P., especially considering how easy it is to die from exposure or dehydration in most other ones. Yes, the two minorities enjoying self-determination within its bounds, the Yi and Hani, truly got a great deal, as did the Han, who, not astonishingly, outnumber the former two tribes in their very own prefecture.

Even so, we’re still only talking about a scant three million spread out over 33,000skm, giving Honghe a sense of lebensraum you feel elsewhere in China only when SARS hits, or when you’re 50km from the nearest food and shelter. A holdout, a secret, a gentle hideaway writ large, Honghe beckons the expat who has the time for an extended walkabout, and the refinement to avoid serious China wilderness-travel.

Fifty generations ago, Yi and Hani were one. Any Hani with a three-digit-IQ can name each generation down to herself, for proof. Somewhere along the line comes the name Wu Fengpo, who during the Hongwu reign of the Ming Dynasty began developing the practice of the terrace paddy.

Under-inspired Chinese writers fill pamphlets and travel magazines with blather about the terraced fields showing the marvelous resolution of the Hani to triumph over nature.  One look from afar at Yuanyang’s paddies, shaped as if by the cosmic forces of wind or water, convinces that Old Wu was one with the Dao, and cultivated in the faith that submitting to nature is at last far more fruitful than any semblance of conquering.

They aren’t just pretty from afar, the terraces. Each paddy is akin to a tide pool, a microcosm of eels, snails, fish, water flora floating and submerged, as well as the owls, swallows, and storks that feed on it all. A lot of rice and mud, too, so bring hip boots, and plenty of cigarettes for the farmers you’re trespassing on.

Railroads tamed the Wild West, and the East’s Wild Southwest. It took six years, until 1909, to build the Bisezhai Railway Station, more for pain in transporting materials than anything else. Soon after, with China’s first private joint-stock railway company established, the externally humble station became the hub of Yunnan commerce: lumber out, bricks in, and opium through.

A key stop on Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, the town that grew around the station inherited a certain amount of French saveur. There are still two or three dozen well-preserved examples of interracial architecture. There is also a middling holiday resort and a few railway museums, which shouldn’t dampen too greatly the thrill of exploring an otherwise accidental relic.

Not to worry, much of Honghe has stayed virgin, despite the efforts of both hungry farmer and French savoir faire. None of it more so than Dawei Mountain Nature Reserve, a revolutionary soldier’s march from Vietnam.

The reserve also borders Hekou, and Yuping City falls under its northern shadow. Within, however, a sanctuary for all that rightly fears the two-legged. Those who scale Dawei’s heights are well-rewarded.

On approach, Yisa is Camelot, a shining city on a hill. Historically, though, it has ever been a starting point, not a destination. After all, its name means “lacking water”. It never lacked for enterprising souls who had to make it rain one way or another. When the Qing Dynasty at last fell, remote Yisa was free to begin trading far afield. They had that which to trade, but no way to get goods in or out, so thus began decades of building ‘horse roads’, which took them throughout Southeast Asia. Many from Yisa stayed abroad, or came back rich, giving the place the once-dubious honor of being Yunnan’s emigrant breeding ground.

Prosperous Yisans brought back western gadgets, built western homes, and worst of all, had western ideas. It’s OK to go abroad again, thankfully, even desirable, but Yisa has yet to recover from the long days when it wasn’t.

Want to see how close you can get to Vietnam without actually getting the visa? Hekou’s for you! It’s also for drug/porn/prostitute smugglers, so a more wretched hive of scum and villainy you’ll not find. Outside of Capitol Hill, of course.

Oh boy, here we are, bastion of China diversity, representing as though Honghe’s people are busy farming, trading, or otherwise obsessed with the material and how to get more of it. Shiping County, however, has turned out top scholars since the Ming Dynasty, world-class poets, calligraphers, historians, and other all-around rice buckets in profusion. They didn’t do too badly, in more civilized times, as you can see from Shiping’s preserved scholar residences.

For true easy living, though, consider bats and swallows. They neither sew nor reap, yet life is one never-ending buffet. Would that we could dines so contentedly on mosquitoes. All three dwell in profusion at the Yanzi Cave complex, yawning from the center of a 30,000 mu natural forest. Those who forget their Off! Spray should stay near the camphor and holly trees, whose scent repels blood-suckers.

Lots of yin in caves, to balance things out, thus little wonder that Dry Cave has been a Daoist temple of sorts for centuries, starting with high-priest Duan Zhigang. The tablets and banners show the reverence for nature that Yunnan has always and shall continue to inspire.

-by Ernie Diaz

It’s good to be proven wrong, but still have your point made. At every historic Chinese calamity, no matter how the people suffered, women suffered worse. Post-China liberation, with each stride ahead, women walked a respectful five steps behind. Always the model worker, never the commune leader, always the factory-line jobber, never the foreman. Always the head accountant, never the manager.

You can argue the east-west balance of feminism until CCTV moderator Tian Wei snaps her pencil. You can point to discrimination in the Chinese workplace and peasant village. But don’t deny that Chinese women are grabbing power wherever it’s left unguarded, and that kind of power waits in the marketplace. No matter how governments talk about female-equalizing policies, money will always talk louder.

So CEX is vindicated. Despite sobbing on cue whenever the subject of the third-class Chinese woman comes up, we maintain that she is her country’s largest reserve of under-utilized capacity. Yes, women make up half of university enrollment and household income now, according to uber-wonk Shaun Rein. More encouraging, however, are the numbers of Chinese female business women turning brains and guts into fortunes, into power and freedom.

China is the expat’s to bash, not any old lao wai’s. So for the westerner with unexamined, spoon-fed opinions about this authoritarian regime we live under, whose tune we all march to, how nice to throw in his face 34% of China’s senior management posts, compared to a world-wide 20%. Better yet, give him He Yongzhi. Chongqing in 1982 saw her with neither guanxi nor a marketing budget, just a tiny sidewalk hotpot joint in a city packed with them. She invented the yin-yang hotpot, divided so that the people who need it hot could sit at the same table with weirdos. OK, whether or not she invented it, she surely gave birth to the Little Swan chain, since grown into a golden goose that lays hot-sauce spinoffs and craps hotels.

Sequoia is on board, hoping to ride the swan to the land of unseemly rates of return. He could well turn billionaire this year with the IPO, and if she does, she’ll be increasing China’s self-made female billionaire club to eight. That’s the diamond core of a female business elite comprising one tenth the nation’s richest business people. Yes, that’s a huge percentage, averaged globally. If it makes you feel any better, know that it has nothing to do with socialist planning, and everything to do with the unalloyed steel of the Chinese female character, tempered then hammered on a Confucian anvil.

Wu Yajun

Look at them yoyos – that’s the way you do it. You build your towers in the CBD. Better start where you are though, and for billionairess Wu Yajun, worth a Gatesian 3.9 to the ninth power, the start was Chongqing. Right, hometown of He Yongzhi and her Little Swan. Both are hopefully hastening the day when Chongqing women aren’t called “spicy beauties” but rather “Yes, Boss.”

China’s richest woman surely has a brain capable of going both macro and micromanagement , spreadsheet to tough decision over and over, with Caterpillar reliability, yet that brain is no polished product of a slick MBA program. The larger lobes are nerd-oriented, you notice, as you review her science degrees, her time as a South Weekend reporter, her admission that she spent high school secretly reading novels in class and still acing the tests. So we’ll withdraw the “yoyo” comment, at least in Wu’s case.

Whatever she learned about making properties rain cash flow while working in a meter factory, later on a newspaper, was surely not laid out for her. Turning her apartments into apartment buildings into developments into Longfor Properties couldn’t have come from that background. We’ll reckon it’s the karma of who-knows-how-many Wu taitais who ran domestic affairs with a ruthless efficiency that would have made them taipans, had they been allowed loose on the market. Who would have left any male scholar less some face, had they been allowed into imperial examinations.

Very well, as long as our point is made about the power of a Chinese woman to make serious cake, and the environment they have to do it in, we’ll stop working melodrama into the story of someone who’s business partners with Ping An Insurance, the Singaporean government, has more money than God, and is not yet 50. Instead, we’ll shine a brief spotlight on the rest of the Chinese billionairess club.

"You rang, Ms Hawken?

She sports about as Xiu Li Hawken, but whatevs. Her mama call her Dai Xiu Li; we gonna call her Dai Xiu Li. That’s the thing with Hong Kong folks like “Hawken” – they go English with a vengeance. Hawken’s shares in Renhe Commercial Holdings are worth close to two-and-a-half billion, built on a foundation of underground shopping centers. Not bad for a Chinese lit major.

Chu Lam Yiu

Another Hong Kong tycoon, worth 2.1 billion from a controlling stake in Huabao International. What’s the Huabao empire based on? Tobacco flavoring – mmmm, tobacco flavoring.

Zhang Xin

Here’s one of the club whose rise to super-pockets seems a tad more logical. Econ Master’s from Cambridge, vetted at Goldman Sachs, and Pan Shiyi as a husband to co-found the mighty mighty SOHO empire.

Yan Cheung

Ms Cheung took Deng’s mandate for people to start making paper literally. She set up a paper-recycling company with four thousand bucks back in 1985, way before sustainability was hip, and turned it into a close-to two billion dollar monster known as Nine Dragons.

Chan Laiwa - you would for a billion.

Nothing humble or paper-based about Chan’s fortune, a property-development cash cow fattened up by Regent after Rolex after Lamborghini tenancy deal. She’s just over the billion mark, but avoids vulgar displays of wealth while curating museums and doing diplomacy work for the Smithsonian.

Now what do you, or Lei Jiufang, do with an advanced degree in physics? Of course – start peddling Tibetan medicine! Qizheng Tibetan Medicine specializes in ointments, plasters, and powders for taking away pain and congestion. Ms Lei’s stock trades on the Shenzhen floor at 46 times earnings, give or take. Obviously it ain’t the business – it’s the business woman.

-by Ernie Diaz

Scoff at feng shui all you like. Call it New Age nonsense. But not before you consider that this so-called reality, your all-too-solid flesh, any anivegimineral, is in fact corrupted light – pulsing very, very slowly. Energy, if you like. And energy has to flow. So if your love life is less than satisfactory, you have to let the love flow. Feng shui is all about the flow. It’s about cockamamie symbolism, too, so feel free to use the following tips as desired. They’re certainly as useful as looking for love in a club.

Might as well start in the bedroom, where the closing act to the gentle comedy of romance typically occurs. If your closing act typically occurs out of doors or in back seats, read no further: you’ve got your mojo working – no need to worry about feng shui. The rest of you, focus on the bed. Is it crammed in a corner? Well then how is someone going to climb onto it with you, if they have to climb over you in the morning to slip away while you’re still asleep? You want your bed with even space on both sides. Night tables must be paired as well – makes it that much easier to leave some money, or other tokens of esteem.

The bed itself, should not be king, lest you’d be king on an island of one, not twin, lest you prefer all love on the side, and not waterbed, lest you’d be adrift on a sea of hellish Burt Reynolds-style romance. Big memo to organizational, space-maximizing, feng-shui-ignoring types: the space beneath the bed is not for storage. Little doubt there are enough skeletons in your closet. Sleeping on top of your musty yearbooks, emergency underwear, moth-balled mash notes from the one who got away, guarantees that a legion of ghosts will be hovering around your bed, and won’t stop staring until the one you’re celebrating your love with has gone away. Makes even celebrating your love for yourself kind of creepy.

Ah, but you don’t believe in ghosts. Fine, maybe there are no disembodied souls, but there are the ghosts in your head, and we all have a tendency to project them into our environment, often to the detriment of the love and power of now. Honestly, what’s that picture of your dear departed grandma doing on your dresser? You want to make a good-old fashioned Chinese family shrine and put it there, great move, but grandma doesn’t want to see her future generations in the works. Mirrors by the bed, which by all means make parts of romance more interesting, also make them less intimate. And you will inevitably, in the darkest hour, get up for a groggy bathroom trip, see your reflection but not recognize it, and lose a boatload of qi, if not bladder control.

Not just your past but your present baggage can slow down the train to Love Town. “Home office” in the corner? The unwanted business cards, the crummy swivel chair, and worst of all the computer, where you manifest all that is most self-centered and lustful, will eventually drive away every suitor, have he the tenacity of a Jehovah’s Witnesses or otherwise. A TV in front of the bed, as well, is the non-Middle Earth equivalent of the Eye of Sauron. It’s watching you, believe us, and even the most wholesome relationship will eventually wither into a Gollum before it.

Besides electromagnetic radiation and Hollywood’s evil pull, there are other kinds of energy that you can expend in many places, but not the bedroom, not where you want romance to flourish. No working out, besides sexy-time workout. That’s the energy of extending life, not giving or making new life. Those dumbbells in the corner may as well be concrete blocks to tie on the feet of your relationship, and throw into the East River. Besides, she doesn’t care if your lats are coming in or not. Honestly.

See, we want to keep this about the energy side of feng shui, since even a php programmer with Asperger’s can wrap his mind around the possibility that there just might be some cosmic operating principles the men in lab coats haven’t quantified yet. So we won’t necessarily recommend that you never sweep or vacuum under the bed while trying to conceive, and banish the little soul who swirls about, trying to get in mom’s belly. We won’t endorse candle-burning to heat things up, either, since that all too easily results in burning out of the most tragic kind. Neither are the results in on finally getting some skin with skin-toned wallpaper. That all speaks to visualization and positive imagery of the Oprah variety, and we’ll gladly leave a sister to it.

Just keep the qi flowing, is the essence of the best feng shui advice, in the bedroom or otherwise. Be as unto a river of qi, and flow from your front door to the bed. Kick aside the muddy trainers in the way, brighten up the dingy corners where love gone wrong pools, and spill out at last beneath the covers. Now get some rest. Sex is nice, sleep is divine.

-by Ernie Diaz

These waves of Chinese students the last ten years have seen off to Australia, England, the States, larger and larger…a global game-changer, if not sexy enough for the front page. Not sexy, and by no means a new phenomenon. China realized quite early on that something would have to be done about these barbarians and their infernal gunpowder, steam ships, devilry they’d been devising while the Middle Kingdom had been hard at work refining its culture. That something was obviously education abroad. Hand-picked by governments rather than rich parents, the early waves of students ventured overseas. Book-cramming in an alien world, just the first canto in lifelong quests to help China gain equal footing on a world suddenly tilted to progress, not harmony.

First Wave: 1872

"Do your best to fit in, kids!"

Horribly glib, perhaps, to compare a country losing a war to taking a butt-whooping and getting said butt in gear as a result. Countries count more than lives though, according to rhetoric. The Qing court promptly dropped a good hundred years’ rhetorical pretence after the Opium Wars, a wake up call which the Qing government answered with its first study-abroad program. One hundred and twenty students, twelve to fifteen years old, went to America, Land of the New, between 1872 and 1875.

The cynical may show little surprise that a select team of young Chinese smarty pants acquitted themselves most honorably in American halls of academia. Again, though, twelve to fifteen, in a land where Chinese meant coolie and colored meant cut off from any authentic assimilation.

Lord knows what the Yale rowing crew made of Tang Shaoyi making his way across Beinecke Plaza, struggling to keep a dignified detachment, or if they made the connection later, when he became the Republic of China’s first premier. Not a chance the wittier among Harvard’s eating clubs spared Tang Guoan their arch jests. Sticks and stones, maybe he forbade bullying as the first president of Tsinghua University. It’s ennobling to be made sport of for your differences. Remember that, expats. Conservatives in the Qing Court dismantled the program in 1881 for being too un-Chinese. Remember that, conservatives.

Second Wave: 1877

To Yan Fu, Thanks for Everything.

That first study abroad program was defunct in all but name by 1875, as mentioned. That was the year the Guangxu emperor came into power, malleable enough to make a modern American president look decisive, to his mean old aunt Cixi what George Bush or Obama are to their handlers. Besides the Dowager, most of the court wanted harmonious bridge-building off the menu, to be replaced with course after course of martial science, and hopefully military development apace.

Having recently concluded a civil war, and with the glory of beating the ghost of the Spanish Empire still a few years off, America was hardly the dojo for self defense lessons. Conquest was determined largely on the sea then, so while cadets such as Sa Zhenbing and Deng Shichang returned from the European continent molded for careers ending in admiralty, it can’t be coincidence that the true hero of the second wave, Yan Fu, attended the Naval Academy in Greenwich.

Not coincidence, actually, but wonderful irony. For Yan Fu became no Sino-Horatio Nelson, raining hell on his foes for China and the prize. While he did receive his officer’s commission and an important command, Yan Fu threw his weighty cache into advancing China’s scientific frontiers. Later, he set his mind to translating the two tomes he felt China need most: Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, and Wealth of Nations. Master and commander, lab rat and library mole, Yan Fu was an ideal choice to first preside over Peking Imperial University, since dis-imperialized.

Third Wave: 1902 to 1910

Hipster Li Dazhao, More Revolutionary Than Thou

Maybe that’s what five thousand years does for you, teaches you to humble yourself to a mightier foe, surely wiser than all that head unbowed to the bitter end nonsense. Did America ever send a scholastic legation to Vietnam? Oh right, that was a tie.

In any event, just as America drew not reprisal but enrolment for its part in the Opium Wars, Japan saw Chinese matriculation rates soar in its schools after coming out best in the Sino-Japanese War. For cooler, wiser Chinese heads, here was a defeat even more instructive than the previous. Here was a feudal eastern nation – a vassal culture, by the stars! – transforming itself by the week, like a geeky exchange student suddenly supplied with steroids and Ritalin.

Yes, the glorious Meiji Restoration surely overshadows Japan’s rebirth after World War II, in terms of sheer metamorphic scale, if not resilience. Some six hundred students did their intelligence gathering for mother China in the first years after the war’s conclusion in 1894, no mean sum, considering the chagrin a mother must feel for a child with the temerity to strike her; she taught the child to write, by the stars!

That number is tiny compared to what came after the wound-licking dwindled: more than twenty thousand Chinese students filling out Japanese attendance roles in the first decade of the 20^th century. China sought modernization, did it? Ah, then countries must be careful what they wish for, as well. At the nucleus of this Sino-Japanese, soy-based intellectual ferment was the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance, founded in Tokyo in 1905 by Sun Yat Sen. Yes, the first father of China got the parental itch in that place, along with a roster of 1911 Xinhai rebels and CPC founders whose scions’ motorcades today stop traffic on Chang’an. Visualization assignment: what if young Mao had received a scholarship to study in Japan, rather than moldering in Peking U.’s library with a dog-eared copy of The Communist Manifesto?

-by Ernie Diaz

You know, just because we’re a Chinese culture website doesn’t mean we look at all Chinese culture as wine and roses. And were Chinese culture embodied in a person, why we’d stroll right up to that person, poke a finger in his chest, and demand, “Hey, you got a serious record for abusing women, pal.” Then we’d run like hell while he started summoning all his buddies by cell phone.

Not that we’d suggest women have it as easy as men anywhere else, unless they’re divorcing basketball players in America. But no other country is going on about “5,000 years” and “ancient culture”. Sorry, Koreans are too. Memo to Korea: black eyes are not badges of love.

See, tradition comes not from spontaneous action, but codified reactions. So how in the world could women act that would cause men to crimp their feet in reaction? Moot point. Finland has nothing but reindeer, other than empowered females, and they’ve got the highest literacy and highest tech. People are the only resource that matter, China. Half our resources are underutilized – put it that way.

Hu Ming’s work is by no means cutting edge or one-of-a-kind, but so what? It’s titillating, and there’s a huge shortage of titillating content online. Plus, anything you can truly put yourself into has value. Would she be painting like a latter-day Georgia O’Keefe had she grown up in Finland? Oops. Equality doesn’t necessarily engender great art, does it?

Not reactionary equality, to be sure. That’s what we’ll call the Cultural Revolution that Hu Ming came of age in, a time to get even with landlords and other one-percenters. When school stopped for Hu Ming and her generation, so did her parents’ dream of her becoming a doctor, such as they were. The child loved to read, a good sign, but she only had her Little Red Book now, and made up for the lame plot with endless sketches of Mao’s portrait.

Hmmm, now what to do with an imaginative, artistic child in China circa 1970? Why, let her join the army at fifteen. No one else was hiring, so Chinese youth found themselves defending their newish country in numbers approaching those of Western youth DJ-ing and party promoting today. Ahh, progress.

And no one but reactionary capitalist roaders would argue that women serving in the armed forces was also progress, even if they got all the namby pamby jobs. Hu Ming found herself trucking around China as a projectionist first. Then Red Army brass gave her an assignment no male soldier would dishonor himself with, librarian. Great Leader Mao himself had been (assistant) librarian at Peking U, but in those days there was far too much ideology in the air to feel irony at all keenly.

Even more irony was wasted in the very idea of being a librarian in Cultural Revolution China, akin to being a Wall Street Socialist today. Book burner, now that was a growth industry. One day, several trucks full of Western books arrived at Hu Ming’s post to be incinerated, but the last load was spared, and given to Hu Ming to file away, and most definitely NOT to read.

To bright minds, curiosity will always be a stronger force than ideological fervor; thus our survival as a species is assured. Hu Ming’s bright mind devoured Tolstoy and Dickens, but nearly choked on a volume of Michelangelo’s human anatomy. Action: millennia of objectifying women,and “decadent” sexuality. Reaction: ban any sign of gender difference. Sublimate the primal urge to revolutionary passion. Hu Ming smuggled the book right back to her bunk and began copying the drawings.

Those shiny, rounded Michelangelo proportions are very evident in Hu Ming’s work. True, all those boobs and heinies are far too lovingly rendered for the pictures to attire themselves in too many layers of meaning. An enterprising comics publisher, for example, would no doubt recognize in Hu Ming a cash cow. That’s a compliment: considering the size and scope of the comics industry today.

In the Information Age, where we’re all infantilized by our profusion of choices and lack of consequences, body-worship is not simply outgrown and discarded. There’s no secret as to why, of all the millions of animated heroes and the billions who admire them, not a one who isn’t drawn as a paradigm of sexual vigor.

The pipsqueak reacts to bullying by sending away for a Charles Atlas course. The insecure teen reacts to the impossible standards of beauty given her with bulimia. Hu Ming was moved from hospital library to the burn ward. Her reaction to deformed limbs, withered skin, not to mention two decades in a sexless society, fill out canvases far more nicely than they would a printed page. As for the bursting army uniforms and red star caps – it’ s not kink, folks. Hu Ming was there; if that’s what she saw, that’s what she saw.

-by Ernie Diaz

We’ve visited the touchy subject of environmental determinism. We’ve determined that those from the frozen North don’t necessarily lack warmth, or spend an inordinate amount of time developing DIY furniture.

But come on, there must be some link between a people’s surroundings and their cultural characteristics. Humanity can’t altogether escape Darwin’s biological gaze. Look at Jiangsu. A more populous and chaotic tide pool you’d not have found pre-Tang Dynasty.

There’s far more to adaptation than kill or be killed, though. Rivers bring change, new species, and at last refinement. That’s the long view, of course. In the meantime, environment doesn’t determine history, singular people do.

Herein a brief tale of how a little town went from muddy bank on a river to a place of great cultivation, a place you can easily visit today, after you’ve realized that the charm of Suzhou is best taken in through travel pamphlets. That little town, 15 klicks west of Suzhou, is Mudu, “Wood Clogging the River”.

The Spring and Autumn Period of China’s history may sound poetic, but then there’s that alliterative lilt to “World War One”, as well. In those days, in Suzhou as in Sparta, nothing was better than to crush the enemy, and to hear the lamentations of their women. The local kingdom of Yue had taken a drubbing from neighboring Wu, but even back then the Chinese were adepts in the long-horizon art of submitting one’s way to victory.

Yue king-turned-vassal Goujian was rotting in his new overlord’s dungeons, but he also had that indispensable dynastic accessory – a canny minister, one Fan Li. Knowing a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, he considered the new King of Wu, renowned for over-exercising his broad sexual prerogatives. Fan Li guessed that  a woman of both unsurpassed beauty and righteousness would so preoccupy a hound like new king Fucai that the vassal state of Yue would be neglected until the time was ripe for rebellion.

Suzhou and its surrounds are famed for female beauty – something about the water and eating silkworm pupae. So there were loads of babes in the area, even in the rough and tumble Spring and Autumn Period. There were babes, and then there was Xishi. So lovely and graceful was Xishi that, when she washed her silks in the river, the fish would forget to swim, making her dinner an easy catch. However, hers was also that virginal, innocent beauty much prized in a culture whose men still find that air of inexperience irresistible. Fan Li had his ideal horny king bait.

Maybe one highly-principled organism changes the environment, and then the environment shapes all the more easily- molded creatures. Hardened conqueror Fucai proved malleable clay in Xishi’s chaste hands. He fired capable generals, cut Yue prisoners slack, anything to get himself into her good graces, and hopefully her bed.

He even built Guanwa, ‘Babe Palace’, on nearby Lingyan Mountain, a three-year project, just to please her. Forests were made wood-pile, then shipped down the river to the mountain, in such profusion as to give Mudu its name.

To no avail. Fucai most likely gained her bed, but never her favor. The struggle went on seventeen years, by which time the neglected Yue clique gathered enough power to usurp and rout the Wu army. King Fucai took his own life, and Xishi took to life on a houseboat with Fan Li, her handler. Whether she drowned later is still a matter of speculation, but all are in agreement that she is one of China’s Four Beauties.

That was all twenty-five centuries ago. Another singular individual, Qin Shihuang, would transform conniving from martial to legal pursuit. Many setbacks along the way, but by the Song, Jiangsu was a home for civilized souls, free to cultivate and eat their silkworms, provided they honored their place in a harmonious society.

Private space is the better half of Chinese aesthetics, nowhere more manifest than in Mudu, like its now tawdry sister once a horti-heaven of much manicured, walled-off nature. Poets and scholars thrived here, bringing home imperial champions out of all demographic proportion.

America peddles its cartoon and cowboy fantasies in theme parks. The Chinese fantasy lies in an idealized past; of course it must be flogged, recreated for pride and profit in towns like Mudu. But competing on those terms is pure folly. No rides in these towns, and no one’s returning our calls about local IMAX thrill rides into battle against Yuan cavalry.

If you want to score, you work with what you’ve got. Mudu has the gardens and canals, but on much smaller scale than Suzhou. That’s kind of the point nowadays, though, isn’t it? This cultural trough, with Hollywood in its deepest crevasse, this age too must pass. How many hundred years hence people will look back to Gershwin, not Gaga, surely. There’s the environment, and then there’s the survival instinct.

An ancient Chinese compass

Many believe that, long before Columbus, Zheng He, or even the Vikings, the Chinese sailed to the Americas. Some of the most compelling research was compiled by Dr. Hendon M. Harris, Jr. (1916 – 1981), a body of work carried on by his son, Hendon M. Harris III. This is a re-post from the latter’s blog, Chinese Discover America.

In order for ancient Trans Pacific travel to the Americas to have been possible for the Chinese and other Asians they would have had to have the technology that would make such a trip possible. Only desperate men with no regard for their lives would forage far out into the ocean without navigational knowledge and the tools necessary to use that knowledge. That is precisely why it took Europeans until the period between 1487 & 1577 (90 years) after The Inconvenient Maps and new navigational information and technology from China had shown up in Europe to develop the confidence to sail into “The European Age of Discovery”.

What is apparently hard for the world to accept is that Asians had the technology to make such trips from ancient times. It isn’t a wild claim. Scholarly works by recognized experts on these topics such as Joseph Needham, Robert Temple and many others have set up the basis for these theories to be expressed and explored. (It must be stated here and clearly understood that to my knowledge neither Dr. Needham or Dr. Temple have ever made claims or theorized on the matter of ancient Chinese or Asian Trans Pacific travel.) What they both have shown through their research is that the ancient Chinese had developed and maintained major technological knowledge and equipment well in advance of their European counterparts. These inventions and discoveries included among many others advanced astronomy dating back to 2136 BC, the magnetic compass, recorded navigational ability and shipbuilding skills that produced fleets of ships the size of which wouldn’t be rivaled until the mid 20th century.

The acceptance of the above premise is foundationally important to your possible acceptance of the theory of the ancient Chinese discovery and exploration of America. If you cannot or will not accept ancient Chinese technological advances then “the dots do not connect” and the rest of the theory fails at least for you.

However if you have a problem with the above then you will certainly stumble over the fact that the Chinese were “deep well drilling” all the way back to 100 BCE. This started out as their search for salt but soon led to their discovery and use of natural gas and petroleum. This is not theory. This is accepted fact and a stellar example of ancient Chinese technology. (The Genius of China/Robert Temple, pages 56-59, Deep Drilling For Natural Gas and pages 89-92, Petroleum and Natural Gas As Fuel.)

Another example of Chinese ingenuity was their ability to fly probably from at least the 4th Century BC. The first recorded flying event occurred between 550 & 577 AD. Even earlier Taoist author Ko Hung 282-343 AD had made numerous references to “hard wind” in conjunction with references to gliding flight. This is interesting because it appears that the only ones “hang gliding” were the Taoist priests who referred to themselves as “feathered guests”. (The Genius of China, pages 191-195, Manned Flight with Kites) and (Dr. Benjamin Olshin “Feathered Guests” and Taoist priests/Feathered Guests.)

If there is one book you should buy for this theory to make sense it would be The Genius of China by Robert Temple. Not because the book promotes the theory but because the book details the environment in which ancient Chinese inventions were made.

It was in this innovative environment that the knowledge of astronomy grew, the compass was invented, world navigation became possible, Chinese map making flourished, shipbuilding technology increased and Chinese inventions occurred to meet the needs of an advancing civilization. This advancement did not happen on a straight line upward. There were times in ancient China when books, maps, and even scholars were destroyed. However, overall there was invention and technological progress until 1433 when China began isolating itself from the rest of the world and in my opinion gradually sank into its own 500 year Dark Ages from which it has just recently emerged.

Navigation is an outgrowth of astronomy. Astronomy was huge in the ancient world as evidenced by the pyramids located around the world as well as the observatories of the North American Anasazi Indians and numerous other ancient people. The story of the Magi is the story of three Sage/Astronomers from the East responding to what they saw as an star anomaly in the skies at the beginning of the Common Era.

Astronomy, the magnetic compass, maps and centuries of shipbuilding advances made Chinese Trans Pacific voyages to the Americas possible and I believe many of them took the trip. Even if one argues that no such trips were made it is not possible for them to argue that the technology for such trips was unavailable to them. Information refuting that is everywhere.

by Ernie Diaz

“Ooh – a dragon year! That’s lucky, right?” Wrong. It’s not unlucky either. It’s all relative, not least to what you make of the new year, moment-to-moment. There are other factors. We could tell you that if you’re born in a dog year, to keep your tail down, and that the rats and monkeys among you will find favor with the dragon. We also know you’d be highly unlikely to give it any serious consideration.

Why? The moon has invisible but irresistible influence on the tides. At the atomic level, you’re made of the same stuff as the stars. Still, the idea that the stars influence our experiences is largely for the under-educated.

But how about the idea that you resonate most with one of the five natural elements that make all matter – water, wood, fire, earth, and metal? Like, everything’s inter-related, man, see? Maybe you don’t see, not yet. Maybe after the winter solstice, when the Age of Aquarius is finally upon us. In the meantime, since you know your animal sign from the Jade Garden place mats, we’ll tell you what your element has to do with your personality.

METAL

Type: People born in years ending in ‘0’ and ‘1’ are metal, yang metal if the former, yin metal if the latter. All about balance in Chinese cosmology, folks. You deeply need to succeed, at something big that will attract notice and praise, and to hell with what it costs you physically or emotionally. That’s if you’re yang metal, what you’ll do when you’ve made it preoccupies the yin metal person.

Personality: You are ruled by your nose, so that unwashed tech guy in the office will bother you more than he does others. You pride yourself on being sharp, born ready, then lapse into melancholia when no one’s around, putting pants on only when the pizza arrives.

Career: For yang metal people, any kind of demagoguery will do. Start a world-changing social media platform, or a world-destroying political movement. Yin metal folk, try to be born with a trust fund.

Leisure: Your time of year is autumn, when the harvest comes in and clans get a good war in before settling in for winter. Try gardening, or raiding your neighbor’s garden.

Environment: You hate clutter and over-ornamentation. White and metallic hues are your colors. Prosperity is yours if you rent an office in a hospital and put up tin foil for wall paper.

WATER

Type: If your birth year ends in ‘2’, you’re yang water, ‘3’ means yin. Like your element, you have a knack for taking the path of least resistance yet somehow getting mixed up in everything. Transparent, cool, flowing, you’re good for putting out fires and getting out of tight spots. Yin types, your waters run supernaturally deep, giving you a gift for the paranormal.

Personality: Talkative, with lots of hand gestures and errant saliva spraying. Given to phobias, life in China for you is a never-ending struggle to find the nearest place to wash your hands.

Career: Since being slippery and smooth-talking are natural fortes for you, give Amway or evangelical ministry a shot. You’re more than likely a good dancer, so neither Broadway nor Stringfellows is necessarily out of reach. Yin waters, you’ll always have palm reading, dowsing, and communicating with the departed to fall back on.

Leisure: No, not swimming, unless that’s your thing. Travel, that’s what the water people love, even more than non-watery types, who think new places will give them new reasons to enjoy life. Your kidneys are your trouble zone, though, so ironically you’ll have to watch out for the local water.

Environment: Cool, quiet spaces permeated by the sound of running water. Take a water wife and you may never get her out of the bathroom.

WOOD

Type: Woods, born in ‘04s and ‘05s, are exponents of the creative, nourishing, feminine principle. Yours is the strength that pushes new shoots and gives life, the metal people your bane. The yin is actually the more powerful of the wood duo, able to draw the best from people.

Personality: Compassionate to a fault, wood peoples have no-loan-repaying, no-call-first, no-goodnik friends who ruin every serious relationship that could have gone somewhere. Fostering growth in others is your thing, not in yourself, so good luck to those who question your radical liberal values and hippy-dippy viewpoints.

Career: Helping and healing the less fortunate are your true calling, so be prepared for a reward in heaven, and a lot of awkward pauses at networking events.

Leisure: Heaven help you, there’s no letting go and indulging for the wood person, try as you may. Downtime for you has to have some higher purpose. Habitats for Humanity always needs a few extra hammer-swingers.

Environment: Why not add a mini-nursery of plants to your list of living things that need you? This is why the neighbors don’t answer your calls when you’re going out of town, by the way. Minding your three-legged dog is bad enough.

FIRE

Type: It’s all highs and lows with you 6’s and 7’s. One minute you’re the life of the party, Jim Carrey meets Cary Grant. The next, you’re Brittany Spears after a custody battle, all hope for yourself and humanity extinguished. Yin fires from the ‘7’ years don’t crackle so brightly or burn so low, a far better choice for a steady flame.

Career: Anything that requires more heart than brains, and an ability to leave all rationality behind. Actor, warrior, hell even politics, have you a narcissism complex to match your volatility. As long as its not day-in-day-out work, for you are the most likely of the elements to go postal.

Leisure: All the nonsense that people put on their bucket list but have no serious plans to actually engage in: paragliding, jet-packing, skinny-skiing the North Face of the Matterhorn. No normal sports for you unless there’s an “X-treme” before it.

Environment: You know you’re in a fire person’s living room if it could easily be mistaken for an Old West bordello. Red wallpaper, overstuffed furnishings, and colored glass make for the kind of interior bombast that a fire type can relax in, confident that the attention is no longer on him.

EARTH

Type: Solid, steady, earnest well beyond the moment it becomes awkward, you 8’s and 9’s are the kind we want by our sides in the midst of battle, and who we want to get lost as soon as its time to celebrate the victory.

Career: In an age when all is form and no substance, all sizzle and no steak, you are the strong, silent type. You don’t care for bullcrap. You don’t care to hear it, and you don’t care to speak it. The manual arts beckon, may you make master brick-mason before your lower back gives out.

Leisure: Legos, puzzles, ships-in-a-bottle, anything that demands long hours of concentration, and ignoring that buckling metal door to the closet deep in your heart where you keep your feelings.

Environment: Nothing fancy, just as long as it’s built to last. Shame no one dances at your parties, the concrete under those maple floors has double the IFE-requirement of rebar.