generic cialise=”erniehorsey” src=”http://www.chinaexpat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/erniehorsey.jpg” alt=”" width=”315″ height=”210″ /> “The West is calling – Zai jian amigos!”

Quick survey – do any

of you wishing to know more about China want to read short essays about the place anymore? If so, count yourselves among a demographic resembling Catholics who still want to hear their mass in Latin. Time to come to grips with the fact that we live in a post-literate age. An age of Net-inflicted ADD. Enough with the vocab words and paragraph transitions. 140 characters max, please. Or how about a slide show, high res pics visible even behind the smidgeon of accompanying text. A quick video, optimally.

In the harsh light of new media reality, China Expat shall hereby and forthwith put the articles on hiatus. No requiem necessary, the entire archive is still right here, and searchable. No need to reiterate our focus on the facets of China seldom in the spotlight – history, art, lesser-visited reaches – written in diverse tones, from wry to dry, lightly sarcastic to searingly caustic.

Instead, an absolution, in the “I”, not the “we”. I never wrote an article for the literal ‘China Expat’. In the beginning, I pictured a reader well out of youth and nonsense, well-traveled enough to realize that China just couldn’t be as monolithic as the western mainstream media claims. As time rolled on and the articles rolled out, vocal, erudite commenters like the Mighty Ozymandias looked on from a high jury’s bench as I bowed my head for topics, for angles and closings. On the judge’s bench sat the right honorable Chris Devonshire Ellis, patron of China Expat, whose depth and insight on all things Asia brooks few rivals’. This should answer any future China Expat editor going through the archives and musing, “Why didn’t the bastard ever write about current events China, sensational China?”

“Someone had to go through the storerooms and dust off the Chinese tchotchkes, you mug!” I respond, pre factum.

Eventually the drummer succumbs to forty shots of vodka, or the singer lets his girlfriend break up the band, and the music lulls. But China Expat’s song will remain the same – Chinese cultural observations from the western perspective. You can expect those observations in different formats, and from different voices. But from this writer’s voice, a coda of deepest appreciation and gratitude to all who’ve read, and to the aforementioned Chris Devonshire Ellis, who funds this site out of pocket, yet still somehow under the protest of his wretched bean counters, whom he keeps rattling around in his South China commercial space.

That’s the show, folks! I love you all! Yeah! Drive safely!

Veritas consistit in sola contemplatione,

Ernie Diaz

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-by Ernie Diaz

Lord, words are cheap these days, thank you Internet, a few thousand and 20 RMB barely enough to get you a decent cup of coffee. So the fiction writer’s dream of being mobbed by fans, and having his work turned into a heartbreaking blockbuster starring Tom Hanks and Hugh Grant, is all the sweeter today.

It’s mindboggling when those mobs of fans are Chinese. Although David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas has been out for eight years, it has only recently been published in Chinese, received with the kind of frenzy previously only lavished on John Denver when he was on tour here. Mitchell barely escaped a Shanghai book-signing recently, forced out of his escort car to sign copies.

Writer Xu Xi suggests that Cloud Atlas’ theme of apocalypse is “a satisfying revenge for life in ‘these here times’ of the muddled Middle Kingdom.” Makes sense, given the impact Avatar had on China. Others suggest that themes of contemporary British lives and values resonate strongly with young Chinese readers. Well and good, but those themes sing from a vast canto of English literature, themes that echo off the canyons of both cultures. Before occupying those sofas for six at Starbucks with her 20 RMB cup of coffee, and building on her Harry Potter foundation with Cloud Atlas, the young Chinese anglophile is well advised to ground herself in the following British classics:

Frankenstein, Mary Shelly

Synopsis – Coddled nerd pours all his energy and wealth into creating a modern Prometheus who will bring eternal credit to his family name.

Who Should Read? Mandatory for tiger moms, proof that all their arcane science, however successful in equipping their children outwardly for life, will inevitably turn them into hateful dopplegangers, dedicated to making their parents’ lives miserable.

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Synopsis – Educated, nubile daughter thoroughly grossed out by the business of being married off to the highest bidder. Misses out on sure thing, then on her dreamboat, and finally settles for acerbic outsider.

Who Should Read? China’s myriad sheng nu, so-called “left over” women who are too successful for traditional domestic Chinese arrangements, too old for Prince Charmings. With enough witty banter, left-over ladies, you too can overcome that snarky rich jerk’s P&P, and surrender to your mutual love.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy

Synopsis – Rural worker tries to study his way to success, gives in to reproductive impulses, brings shame and ignominy on everything and everyone he’s involved with.

Who Should Read? The 700 million Chinese without access to city opportunities. First you give up your dreams. Then you go make money. Then you get the women.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

Synopsis – Mild-mannered, successful doctor drinks potion that frees him from morality, comes to from nightlife that tends to leave dried blood and hair on his walking stick. Pays off families of his victims to maintain lifestyle.

Who Should Read ? Any Chinese woman married to a “businessman”.

Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe

Synopsis – Moll works her way from convict to housekeeper to con-artist to failed gold-bricker to kept woman to widow to wife of rich man.

Who Should Read? Basically a playbook for all those Chinese women who would rather be sad in a BMW than happy on the back of a bicycle.

Vanity Fair, William Thackeray

Synopsis – British petit bourgeoisie cheat themselves and others to maintain smoke and mirrors illusion of rich, happy lives: backbiting, scheming, fraud, and prostitution.

Who should read? The millions of Chinese middle-class buy cialis online strivers who believe one-upmanship is the natural progression from socialist doldrums. All Vanity Fair characters, from satirical Becky Sharp to devil-may-care Rawdon Crawley, are represented in China Central Television period dramas, so Thackeray’s observation that people are “abominably foolish and selfish” should ring home as a universal truth.

Brave New Word, Aldous Huxley

Synopsis – State mandated reproductive technology makes for a manageable population, and just the right balance of leaders and proles. Children hypno-learn their lot in life, adults spend rather than mend, and everyone drinks Soma for instant good times. Big Success!

Who should read? Anyone in the PRC who believes there’s the tiniest chance western youth worship, cheery commercialism, and self-involvement might seduce a few unwary Chinese, less grounded in their five thousand years of culture.

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens

Synopsis – Little boy David saddled with abusive stepfather who sends him to workhouse after mom dies. Ups and downs of his life mirrored in panoply of vivid characters who all get their karmic justice. Adult David finally gains peace by marrying homespun girl and making love a discipline.

Who Should Read? Anyone who believes their lives’ ups and downs are somehow larger and of more import than others, because they’re happening to us. So pretty much everyone.

Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

Synopsis – Englishman fortune-tossed to fantastic lands and peoples, only to find that petty myopia is a universal common denominator. Oh yeah, and every form of rule is a hypocritical abomination.

Who Should Read? Anyone who has used a different culture to project their fears and insecurities on. So pretty much everyone.

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-From Silhouettes of Peking

D. de Martel & L. de Hoyer

The dust has cleared from the 1911 revolution and the capital of China has moved south to Nanking. Peking’s diplomatic set – now all but irrelevant – languish in an exotic world suspended somewhere between East and West, between propriety and decadence. Against this backdrop, Jean Maugrais finds himself the target of two married women’s affections.

But he longs for something more than the endless frivolities of the “smart set” and yearns to be more than a silhouette, an outsider skimming viagra cheap on the surface of a great civilization he doesn’t fully understand.

“Wait a bit,” said Maugrai, “I have an idea. The third conclusion is rather troublesome. I see one remedy. Do you know Chatours?”

 
“Who is Chatours?”

“A young man you ought to know, old man. Besides, he is a friend of mine. I can recommend him unreservedly. Each year, by means that would prove expensive to your or me, he manages to save ten or twelve thousand francs which he immediately spends in Egypt, India or wherever his fancy takes him.

This time it is China upon which his choice has fallen. He has been in Peking nearly four months, now, in a comfortable Chinese house studying Chinese history, smoking opium in spite of the prohibition, and frequenting only the Chinese with whom he appears already thoroughly at home.

He is really very original. He cannot understand living abroad without adopting the customs of the natives and becoming absolutely familiarized with their ways. He thinks European society here only makes the outlook ugly and serves to introduce the ideas that are to be deplored.”

“Yes, I have heard people speak of him. He has even managed to get himself a bad reputation in Peking. He has seen, it seems, in a box at the new theater at Qianmen with some Chinese actors. I think it was he, too, who having tried to rape the daughter of the Chinese ex-Minister to Paname, was very indignant at her resistance and declared that it was in direct contradiction with the characteristic docility and the traditional passiveness of the Eastern woman.

I wonder what makes you think such an extraordinary person would condescend to accept the invitation of a humble Occidental like myself!”

Maugrais got up without answering and left the room. Telephoning to Chatours, he asked him to come round at once and share his lunch.

“You will see,” he said when he returned to the smoking room, “the fellow is neither quite wild nor quite civilized. He is shy like all original people, the sight of a stranger of your color will put him out of countenance at first. I will begin by asking if he is free tomorrow. Most likely he is; then he will not dare refuse.

Ten minutes afterwards, Chatours arrived. His head was completely shaved, but in spite of that, he was rather nice looking, even elegant.

“How handsome you look like that,” said Maugrais after the usual introductions.

“It is comfortable,” answered Chatours in a tired voice, “and it saves several minutes of absurd labor every day. I have also discovered a temple which, according to some of my Chinese friends, possesses a priest with Tibetan secrets of the greatest importance. I can talk enough Chinese to make myself understood by this sage, and I mean to wring form his some of his knowledge which has been handed down century by century, from the Brahmins to the Lamas, and finally from a Lama to this priest. A lengthy stay in his temple will help me to win his confidence. Perhaps I may return with treasures of untold worth.”

“Is that why your mane has fallen under the scissors?”

“Yes, at least, that is one of the reasons.”

“When do you leave?”

“In a few days, I hope.”

“I suppose, after this, then, you will only pay flying visits to Peking?”

“Probably, Peking tires me, everything here is just a bit rotten. There are no real Chinese and the sight of all the round heads to which modern ideas have fitted that great invention of this century, the bowler, makes me sick.”

“But there are not only Chinese in Peking,” said Beaurelois, who thought the moment had come to speak. ‘The Europeans, as a community, are quite interesting and you will see the like nowhere else. You would have to search very thoroughly before discovering, in our midst, the ideas that are killing the old world.”

“Perhaps, but I mistrust that legend about broad mindedness across the seas. Does no one talk scandal in Peking? Don’t you take any interest in the doings of your neighbors?”

“No!”

“Well, seldom, and anyhow not maliciously,” corrected Maugrais.

“Don’t you people in Peking ostentatiously extend a very welcoming hand to rich scamps? Are not unknown genius and virtue as we understand them, obliged to give way to mediocrity ‘en place’ as we used to say?”

“You always must exaggerate,” said Maugrais. “Probably we have neither great genius nor great virtues here. There are witty, well behaved and even amiable people and also people we like and others we don’t…”

“And, also, there are no scamps, not even millionaire ones,” said Beaurelois laughing.

“And if there were,” continued Maugrais, “we have not come across them, we don’t even know if they exist, or where they live if they do. Peking is a city of officials, slightly formal and perhaps a trifle snobbish, but, anyhow, clean minded and agreeable to frequent.

It is a casual and temporary agglomeration of people who have seen the world, have stayed in Paris and London; passed through Florence and Athens, played with politics in Petrograd or with finance in America; people who have crossed all the seas, made collections in the East and made love in Venice…but it is above everything else, a city that has given birth to a special type of human being…the Peking silhouette.”

how to work at home om/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RDii.jpg” alt=”" width=”420″ height=”304″ /> He was thinking Governor Bo, Senator Bo, not this, not this….

-by Ernie Diaz

Some of us at China Expat have been compared to divorced fathers, always promising their kids follow up visits, then forgetting all about them. No more. In act of earnest, it’s right back to the Hongerdai, China’s ruling class, turning socialist connections into gold like XO-quaffing alchemists.

Comforting, isn’t it? Or chilling. Just two generations from a Socialist Revolution, and the Red Nobility all have western degrees, and guaranteed VC a phone call away. Herein, a peep at the Hongerdai whose lives most closely resemble story lines from Dynasty.

Li Xiaoyong

The story lines of their parents, now that’s the stuff of motion pictures. You know, the ones that roll the credits just after Willie’s won the chocolate factory, and spare you the site of Willie the bloated fudge mason twenty years on, telling the poor Oompa Loompas they live in a socialist paradise. Li Xiaoyong’s father,Li Peng,Premiered China from ’87-’98, rolling on Tiananmen demonstrators, pulling the strings that raised the 3 Gorges dam.

But that was the unimaginative sequel. Toddler Li Peng lost his revolutionary writer father to KMT arrest and execution. If Chow Yun Fat would consent to play Zhou Enlai, who adopted orphan Li Peng and sent him to finishing school in the caves of Yan’an, we’d have the Chinese Captains Courageous.

Li Xiaoyong’s pic betrays that much-massaged look of the man who need never ask How Much? Question: did Li Peng, the little red mascot of Yan’an, experience even a tic of internal queasiness as his son poured hundreds of millions into Singapore property in order to become a citizen?

Other questions swirl around the name Li Xiaoyong: how far was he into the ’98 Xinguoda ponzi scheme, $80 million vanished and four executed as a result? Why did the police do nothing to intervene when protesters mobbed Beijing’s Xinhua afterwards, chanting, “Li Peng, give us back the money your son took!” See why Chinese parents stress obedience?

A quick rogue’s gallery, then, for although not prime-time-ready, the antics of these Hongerdai players mirror the Rothschild and Rockefeller scions’, and are therefore instructive:

Zen Wei

Here’s who’s pulling those strings when an international company can’t get permission to set up in China until a “deal” is made. Zen Wei has one business principle, and one only – “Don’t bother with anything under 200 million.” Any organization over that shouldn’t be surprised if Zen offers assistance in going public, or in not suddenly going out of business.

“Ehruh, Ich bin ein Beijinguh.”

Jiang Miankang

Don’t let the Members Only jacket fool you, Jiang Miankang went to Drexel and was a resident scholar in Germany. Hell, Jiang Zeming could breed an intelligent child with Snookie. Not that it takes a high IQ to figure out your profit margin when you can get all the land for development you want, free. In 2003 Shanghai RE tycoon Zhang Zhengyi was brought up on corruption charges, but nothing stuck to his partner Jiang.

“Alright, this one time I will allow you to ask me about my affairs.”

Liu Lefei

You want Teflon, though, look no further than Liu Lefei. His dad directed the CCP’s propaganda department, reminding us about paper tigers and abolition of private capital all the livelong day. Liu is CEO of CITIC’s private equity and security arms, setting a China-record $5.5 billion investment in 2006. We’ve got no dirt, but how did that lawyer in Idiocracy put it? “First of all, your honor, just look at ‘im.”

Li Hehe

We promised Dynasty, though, and all the poor-little-rich-family dramas have the renegade son who won’t have anything to do with the family fortune. Li Hehe (huh huh, not hee hee) told his foreign minister dad right out of high school that he was going his own way. In a scene that no doubt would have capped off a season finale, Li senior told Hehe never to come back looking for favors.

Hehe commenced to working his way through U Penn, odd-jobs and top graduating honors to his credit. He took out loans for his dual degrees at Harvard Business School, and actually paid them back (China’s one place the college loan mob can’t get you.)

Then it was on to a job at Oracle, evaporated in the 9/11 attack. He didn’t come back to China until his father retired, figuring only then was it cool to start his Internet company. Tall, handsome, rich and royal, Li is a figure to arouse envy in male hearts, lust in female. The fact that he’s not a vile piece of work begs the question of who plays the lead in Red Descendants: the Series.

Zhuo Yue

A tree grows in Beijing, folks. Among the Hongerdai we have a full-on philanthropist. Deng Xiaoping’s granddaughter grew up donating her pocket money to Project Hope and other charities, mostly under the example of grandma Zhao Lin. True grasp of noblesse even sent her off to rural Shanxi as a teenage volunteer teacher.

After that it was the U.S., for a psych degree from Wellesley. Back in Beijing, she started a PR company to help establish charitable organizations across China. Her favorite piece of advice from grandpa Deng, “It’s not intelligence that counts in dealing with people – it’s wisdom.” Dealing with people, dealing with life, wisdom helps more than power or money, rarer by far than the latter two. When the Hongerdai possess it, cialis without prescription wisdom can transform the land.

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-by Ernie Diaz

There are five broad classes now in China, tallied on the three variables

of wealth, status, and looks. If you’re one of the lucky, you are gaofushuai, ‘tall, rich and good-looking’. The status of the gaofushuai derives from standing in marked contrast to the diaosi, whose derivation is closest to the Spanish term pendejo. Its true meaning is that you are short of the minimum standard 170cm mark, short of cash, and enhance your looks with cut-rate dye jobs, and an iPhone that everyone but your fellow diaosi knows is fake a mile off.

There’s always someone more gaofushuai than thou, though, especially the fuerdai, children of the wealthy, whose parents view pampered descendants as an indispensable mark of their class. The fuerdai must step to the curb for the guanerdai, children of officials, whose wealth is accompanied by the power to take away yours, should you prove to be a nuisance.

At the apex stand a tiny cluster of hongerdai, children and grandchildren of red heroes who helped China break the chains of class discrimination, and banish the concept of profit at the expense of the people. Only the slowest of them aren’t educated abroad, aloof as German princelings back from their academie in France.

Many hongerdai take the road set before them and steward their parents’ baksheesh hoard into respectably oppressive corporations. Many also wear the soured face of those who belong to their families, rather than themselves. We’ll leave most of this type to your imagination, and focus on the ones with tales to shed light on those long shadows cast by hypocrisy.

Take Frances Yung, upon whom the shadow casts but soft shade. After all, her grandfather was the “Red Capitalist”, a pre-liberation tycoon who safely transitioned to CCP by wondrous means. Her dad Larry took the duty of making the family 100% legit in Hong Kong, and giving a healthy taste to Friends of His.

Although a manager in her father’s company, Frances chaffed to honor her tradition and take an executive position. She made her bones in 2005, increasing tolls on the family’s East Harbor Tunnel despite a long-standing beef with the government. A woman, take over the family business? Oh yeah, especially in China.

But not poor Ye Jingzi, for she is adrift in two worlds. Grandpa Ye, a PLA general, chaired the National People’s congress from ’78-83’. Her father retained enough revolutionary fervor to insist that his daughter not grow up a Chinese princess. So he sent her off to New York City to be a material girl, this being the mid 80s.

Manhattaneville College will leave its bohemian stamp on anyone, even a Chinese princess in exile. Did we mention she didn’t take over the family business? Right, because she has her own company, Brilliant Culture. “It’s important that I use my position to help my country and my people,” says Ye. She helps with big lavish events: street races, beauty pageants, and the odd Tibetan treasure exhibition. Hey, help comes in all forms. Easy to forget that for a while there Beijing and Shanghai needed serious shots of pizzazz.

Notice anything familiar about that chin mole? Picture it fez-sized, gracing the mug of Kong Dongmei’s grandfather, which hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City. The maelstrom that threatens Windsor and Kennedy heirs is but an eddie to what Mao’s children faced. Only one of them lived, for goodness’ sake – Li Min, who begat Kong Dongmei.

The best laid plans, comrades, the best laid plans! The granddaughter of China’s socialist liberator majored in English lit. But see, that’s what y’all don’t get about Yellow Jesus. Mao was a poet warrior before he became a philosopher king, and ultimately a syphilitic demagogue, butthat’sbesidethepoint. Kong serves the people with her boojy Bauhaus studio in Beijing’s 798 art district.

But she has one of her grandfather’s best traits, the courage of the sage. Kong has let the family tree spear her on its branches, using her roots to curate Red classics and the least tacky Mao memorabilia. More ballsy yet, she boldly fosters a “diversified view” of China’s revolutionary history. Hopefully Kong doesn’t just mean foreigners opining on the Opium Wars and the Japanese.

Hong Huang, 50, is the child of a diplomatic power couple. Today, as China’s Oprah Winfrey, she is the most evolved of the red descendants, having eschewed projection of her family’s power in favor or her personal voice. Only an unauthorized biography will reveal the true price of that reprieve.

And certainly she’s ridden the dragon of family favor. Hong used her Vassar diploma to bat aside the political lane chosen for her, taking a side step to the corporate fast track, where she was ridiculously well-compensated as an investment consultant and foreign company rep.

But as everywhere else, China’s new deities are worshipped on the screen. A blogger, actress, and TV host, Hong launched to multi-media orbit from a blast pad of fashion magazines, making her a style queen whom China’s Martha Stewarts can point to with pride. This red descendant keeps her shadow pinned to a sliver in the glare of the spotlight.

Funny how that worked out, all the hongerdai mentioned being women, and the mouse begging for a click. The red descendants come bejeweled as well, and will be hauled out for inspection in due course.

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From Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom, by Carl Crow

 

 

“The crow does not roost with the phoenix.”

 

According to a story which has been widely published and generally believed there was formerly a sign on the gates to a small park or public garden of the International Settlement of Shanghai reading:

 

DOGS AND CHINESE NOT ALLOWED

 

The park existed for many years before it occurred to any Chinese that they should be admitted. The issue was raised in 1881 by some one who wrote a letter of complaint to the council pointing out that as the garden was supported by municipal taxes which were levied on Chinese and foreigners alike it was unfair to refuse admission to Chinese The reply was to the effect that owing to the small size of the garden it was obviously impossible to throw it open to the general public, but an attempt was made to meet Chinese desires by a police order to the effect that the garden would be open to any “well-dressed native.” But the individual Chinese did not know whether or not the gatekeeper would consider him to be a “well-dressed native.” The chance of being humiliated by a refusal was so great that few asked for admission.

 

The question was not one in which many Chinese were interested and it died a natural death, or appeared to have done so. But four or five years later it was brought up again. Japanese were coming to reside in Shanghai and the Chinese were mortified at exclusion from places to which Japanese were freely admitted.

 

As the Japanese were foreigners of a nation which had made treaties with China they enjoyed the same rights as other foreigners and missed no opportunity to exploit them. The council now adopted a new plan and issued passes to “bearer and party.” This proved as much of a failure as the previous scheme.

 

In the first six months this new arrangement was in effect there were only forty-six visits. But these visits represented a remarkably large number of people. Each pass-holder interpreted the word “party” to mean all his relatives, both near and far, his friends, children, retainers, and servants. Since they were more interested in the foreigners than in the garden itself the visits were timed to coincide with the hour when there would be the greatest possible number present, and so unintentionally caused the greatest possible amount of annoyance and inconvenience. The issue of passes was discontinued.

 

It would be unfair to compare the Shanghai park regulations with the “Jim Crow” laws which bar Negroes from some public places in the South. While it might appear to be an assumption of superiority on the part of the foreigner its roots went deeper than that.

 

The building of gardens and the establishment of clubs to which Chinese were not admitted were parts of the attempts made by the white man to create for himself something of the atmosphere of the homeland.

 

It was only here that he could escape the great mass of Orientals who surrounded him. A single native in a park like this provided a jarring note – a crowd of them destroyed the illusion completely. And of course the Chinese could not understand why a couple of tattered foreign beachcombers on the benches in the garden were unnoticed by the taipans and their ladies while the presence of a family of well-dressed Chinese should meet such hostile glances.

 

As other parks were built the same rules were adopted. The foreigner who lived in China engaged in a constant struggle for isolation. The Great Wall of China, which the Chinese had built several thousand years previously to keep out the Northern barbarians was no more impregnable than the wall of social seclusion with which the foreigners built.

 

Foreigners and Chinese lived separate lives and neither made any attempt to break down the mutual seclusion. The social customs of the Chinese themselves provided as much of a wall as that put up by the foreigners. To the respectable Chinese, it was unthinkable that men and women should meet outside their own family circle and there was actually now way for foreign and Chinese women to meet socially. Nor was there any common language. Shanghai foreigners did not speak Chinese. Until a few years ago the number of Chinese who could not speak English was extremely limited.

 

While the “dogs and Chinese” sign never existed it did rather accurately depict the attitude of some foreigners. Their number has grown fewer every year, but in the early part of the century there was a very large class who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people and all Chinese institutions.

 

Both the people and the institutions were so contrary to what they believed to be the proper order of things that any approval of them involved what appeared to be an heretical abandonment of principles. They believed that this was the road to ruin, the first step toward “going native.”

 

All of us knew men on whom this fate had fallen. The white man who “went native” whether in China, Japan, India or any other place in the Far East was lower than the natives themselves because he followed their worst instead of their best traits. It was their slovenliness rather than their austerity which attracted him.

 

There were many derelicts who smoked opium and lived with Chinese women. Representatives of this class are to be found in every port east of the Suez, white men who have adopted the ways of life of the native. They are tragic figures. So long as the Englishman or the American loudly proclaimed his disapproval of everything connected with China and the Chinese he felt a certain sense of self-protection. Most Anglo-Saxons who live in the Orient have a genuine though ill-defined dread of what the environment may do to them and encase themselves in an armor of disapproval and hostility.

]]> http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/23/dogs-and-chinese-not-allowed.html/feed/ 0 http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/22/chinas-richest-village.html/ http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/22/chinas-richest-village.html/#comments Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:24:42 +0000 Ernie http://www.chinaexpat.com/?p=8721 Continue reading →]]>

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-by Ernie Diaz

 

Not long ago we gave you a quick rundown of China’s richest cities. But there’s not one city in the world without its poor, well though municipal bodies may camouflage them. Can’t have rich people without poor people – that’s the nature of capitalism, human nature, this dichotomous world.

 

 

But socialism was supposed to be the triumph of man over dialectic materialism. And official Chinese propaganda would have you believe that, at least on the village level, socialism has successfully incorporated nasty western economics and produced a community where everyone is rich.

 

 

 

That village is Huaxi, a few hours’ car ride northwest of Shanghai, a Potemkin for the Consumer Age. Every last one of Huaxi’s close to forty thousand official residents enjoys the global hallmarks of success: a McMansion, two cars (mostly white Beemers and Benzes), a fat bank account, and unlimited cooking oil (that last is a Chinese thing.) Actual free health care and education, like Northern Europeans, not nominal, like the rest of China.

So awash is Huaxi in cashflow that the village owns a private air-service, two helicopters, a six and an eight-seater. Villagers ride free, but a tourist can take a chopper ride for 1,000RMB an hour, birds-eyeing this Chinese paradise and its off-brand Epcot Center, World Park, with scaled-down models of everything from the Statue of Liberty to the Arc de Triomphe.

 

 

 

The chopper pilot, however, had best keep his mind on steering clear of The New Village Tower. 328 meters, higher than any building in England, the tower seems to have been plucked from the Shanghai skyline by some deity of skyscraper redistribution and replanted in Huaxi, as incongruous as a redwood on the prairie.

 

 

 

The half-billion dollar display of wealth is as cheerfully vulgar within as the crowning golden disco ball without. Gold leaf reception, gold-flaked floor, and most ominously for any who still remember the Old Testament, a solid gold ox, worth 31 million pounds when installed, since appreciated, as the gnomes in Zurich struggle to hold down gold prices.

 

 

To explain such inordinate cash reserves, a regular reader would expect us to start pointing to the mercantile acumen of Chinese inhabiting the Yangtze Delta. After all, Huaxi’s nearest big neighbor, faded Wuxi, was the terminus of China’s Grand Canal, an aorta pumping goods and wealth up through China’s upper chambers for centuries. But this outlier of a village, a good three standard deviations from any Chinese community approaching it, owes its singularity to one man – Wu Renbao.

 

 

 

"I'm THIS full of piss and vinegar!"

In the 1980s, Huaxi was indistinguishable from ten thousand dirt-road agrarian hamlets across China. Local Communist Party secretary, rehabilitated via public disgrace of his counterrevolutionary tendencies, immediately grasped the import of China’s market reforms, and began turning Huaxi from crops to corporate aggregation of manufacture and trade. With a twist – all profits went into a community chest. Voila, socialism with Chinese characteristics, more wildly successful than Deng Xiaoping’s most fevered dreams.

 

 

In his eighties now, Wu Renbao still gives regular lectures on his socialist success story, in an auditorium closely modeled on Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The new tower, like just about everything else in Huaxi, was his idea, pragmatically capped at 328 meters so as not to eclipse the capital’s World Trade Center.

 

 

As anyone with a grain of wisdom may have guessed, Huaxi gets much less utopian on closer inspection. The residents, rich though they may be, officially work twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, at the many factories which comprise the publically-listed Huaxi Group Corporation, umbrella for 57 subsidiaries and seven holding companies. Any Huaxi residents who want to are free to leave, but they leave behind the house, the cars, the money, even the oil, as unencumbered as the thousands of migrant workers who do the bulk of the toil for Huaxi Group, sans resident bennies.

 

 

 

Taihu in less disgustingly prosperous times.

Soft, liberal types who visit Huaxi will soon get to wondering how much wider and deeper all that fertilizing wealth could spread, and need to decamp to a natural attraction where the icky vibe of faux-topia can be washed away. Would that place were nearby Lake Taihu, third largest freshie in China, with its many islets, surrounding peaks, and movie town, where so many of CCTV’s fine, interchangeable period dramas are filmed.

 

 

 

But Lake Taihu has been rendered as tragically marred by pollution as a former beauty queen hooked on meth. But she still looks comely from a block away, and so does Taihu, from nearby Xihui Park. Refurbed pagodas and pavilions dot a pleasantly forested valley that breaks regularly to offer views of both the lake and Wuxi, both considerably more attractive from a safe remove.

 

 

 

Or, to put all this nonsense about GDP, have and have not in its proper perspective, there is nearby Lingshan. Lingshan offers the same distance-improved views of Wuxi and Taihu, as well as an 80 meter Sakyamuni Buddha, of bronze, not gold, right hand lifted to cast away suffering, left down and palm out to dispense happiness, not just to the residents of Huaxi, but to anyone who can slow down enough to realize that happiness only comes from within.

 

 

]]> http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/22/chinas-richest-village.html/feed/ 3 http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/20/chinese-scandals-sexy-enough-for-you.html/ http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/20/chinese-scandals-sexy-enough-for-you.html/#comments Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:38:20 +0000 Ernie http://www.chinaexpat.com/?p=8711 Continue reading →]]>

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Gu's 90 year old mom (pictured) is beside herself.

 

 

-by Ernie Diaz

 

 

Just when you thought you had more important stuff to worry about – bonfires across the Middle East, a teetering global economy – China’s juiciest trial since the Gang of Four finally got hauled in. And let’s be honest, the trial only a stage for what keeps all eyeballs glued, high-profile scandal.

 

Toss out the window all that Western MSM speculation about this Bo Xilai fracas testing the CCP’s authority. Whatever the verdict, this scandal will have as much effect on the party’s stability as Bill Clinton’s spare DNA had on his.

 

The politics add clout to Gu Kailai’s trial, but the real reason global Q-ratings are through the roof? It’s sexy. The LIBOR scandal has far graver implications, but it’s not sexy. Fly-blown children starving on piles of refuse, slavery still rampant across the globe… so not sexy. Scandals are sexy, diddling our cultural buttons until millions climax into catharsis. The OJ scandal was sexy as hell, a coked-up Hollywood interracial love triangle.

 

The case of Gu Kailai titillates all the erogenous zones. Corruption (shocker) – check. Love affair – check – and behind the back of her supertzar husband…with a foreigner! Murder – check. Not anonymous drone murder of brown people (tres non-sexy), but a Chinese mistress of the universe, poisoning an Englishman, with help from her butler! Far though the Internet has taken us from Victorian morals, the 19^th century potboiler formula retains the power to keep us waiting breathlessly for the next installment, like old maids in corsets.

 

The trial only took seven hours, incidentally, and Ms Gu will be officially spending the remainder of her days in a country club with chicken wire on the windows. Not incidentally, because the western media circus would demand a much longer act. And what did those MSM flacks think all that “Tiger Mom” stuff was about , anyway– homework? A middle-class Chinese mom will corner you with broad smiles and deferential force of personality. An ultra-wealthy-connected Tiger Mom will turn her claws on you, rend you as the tiger rends the gazelle, if you threaten her young.

 

Maybe a look at some other high-profile Chinese scandals, past and present, will serve to shed light on the Chinese collective subconscious, the attitude towards an authoritarian state, one which won’t set them free to choose whether they want a cool black guy or a rich white guy MC-ing the NWO’s endgame.

 

 

 

Literal Femme Fatale

Jiang Qing

 

Mao Zedong’s fourth and last wife made Hilary Clinton look like a stay-at-home mom, spinning her un-mandated power into hurricane force during the Cultural Revolution. Dilemma: if the Great Leader is infallible, are we allowed to complain that his wife is a vindictive beyotch? That some ex-movie-floozy holds absolute power over all national institutions with her three partners in crime revolution?

 

Just how many Chinese secretly admired Jiang Qing, attacking living gods such as Deng Xiaoping and Lin Biao, Xinhua doesn’t record. But too much power soon drove her off the reservation. She hounded Fan Jin to her death, simply for marrying her ex-husband.She had her Red Guard dogs kidnap Zhou Enlai’s children and torture them to death.

 

 

 

So still got it.

When Mao passed on, so too did her reign of terror. Considering the tragic wake her Gang of Four had torn through China, the fact that her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment speaks not to Chinese respect for women, but the delicate tightrope a State must walk when its leaders don’t make mistakes.

 

 

 

"Only don't tell me you're innocent. Because that insults me, and it makes me very angry."

Chongqing Gang Trial

 

As Master Po would put it to Grasshopper, “Only a tiger can chase away other tigers!”

 

Considering how hard it is to shine light on high-level cockroaches, let alone stamp them out, in China or elsewhere, there must have been a few savvy outsiders wondering at the efficacy with which Bo Xilai cleaned up Chongqing.

 

Chongqing has long been the mainland capital of organized crime for the same reason it was Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital – its Triads, invisible, freemason-affiliated, and an utterly worthwhile realm of study, given the paucity of information on them in their current incarnation.

 

In any event, Bo Xilai rounded up 19 of their bosses, hundreds of members, a total of 4,781 arrests. Whether the party officials arrested, including police commissioner Wen Qiang, can be counted as members or just affiliates, is a fascinating but fruitless matter for speculation. One can only re-watch L.A. Confidential, wherein the cops decide rackets are far too lucrative to be letting the hoods run them.

 

 

 

Two minutes. Not two minutes would you last in her world.

But corruption and murder in spades don’t hold attention. The all-important sexy factor came in the form of one Xie Caiping, the Godmother of Chongqing, and since-executed Commissioner Wen’s sister-in-law. Her stable of young studs and liberal use of profanity during testimony kept the story humming. In China, as in the West, if murders aren’t sexy, they’re just a statistic.

 

 

 

Li Gang

 

On either side of the Pacific, boys will be boys, racing their souped-up rice-rockets down busy thoroughfares. The inevitable hitting of a pedestrian, however, is expected to confer an instant man-sized helping of remorse, at least in the West. After crashing into young student Chen Xiaofeng, who later died from her injuries, Li fled the scene to drop his sweetheart off at her dorm. When apprehended by security guards, he challenged them, “Sue me if you dare – my father is Li Gang!”

 

In the Occident, such blatant name-dropping went out with F. Scott Fitzgerald. And a note to wannabe Chinese princelings, your father better have serious clout if you’re going to swing his name around to get out of vehicular homicide.

 

 

 

Relax, it's an act.

Alas, Li Gang was but deputy director of the public security bureau for Baoding, a dismal little burg of 12 million an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Beijing. Sensing official weakness, China’s avenging internet force soon created enough waves that Papa Gang was tearfully apologizing for his vile sprog on TV, followed soon by an equally lachrymose son. Who is actually serving junior’s six-year sentence? That’s another story.

 

 

]]> http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/20/chinese-scandals-sexy-enough-for-you.html/feed/ 0 http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/16/brothers-in-verse-two-legends-of-tang-poetry.html/ http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/16/brothers-in-verse-two-legends-of-tang-poetry.html/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2012 14:24:51 +0000 Ernie http://www.chinaexpat.com/?p=8705 Continue reading →]]>

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Li Po Laughs; Tu Fu Titters

 

 

Li Po (701-762) was born in China’s far West, and was influenced by his knowledge of Central Asian languages and cultures. To contemporaries, his talents were supernatural. His verses seemed to originate in something other than the human consciousness, speaking directly to the soul.

 

The Ballad of Ch’ang Kan

(The Sailor’s Wife)

 

I with my hair fringed on my forehead

Breaking blossom, was romping outside:

 

And you rode up on your bamboo steed,

Round garden beds we juggled green plums;

Living alike in Ch’ang Kan village

We were both small, without doubts or guile…

 

When at fourteen I became your bride

I was bashful and could only hide

My face and frown against a dark wall:

A thousand calls, not once did I turn;

 

I was fifteen before I could smile,

Long to be one, like dust with ashes:

You’d ever stand by the pillar faithful,

I’d never climb the Watcher’s Mountain!

 

I am sixteen but you went away

Through Chu Tang Gorge, passing Yen Yu Rock

And when in June it should not be passed,

Where the gibbons cried high above you.

 

Here by the door our farewell footprints,

They one by one are growing green moss,

The moss so thick I cannot sweep it,

And fallen leaves: Autumn winds came soon!

 

September now: yellow butterflies

Flying in pairs in the west garden;

And what I feel hurts me in my heart,

Sadness to make a pretty face old…

 

Late or early coming from San Pa,

Before you come, write me a letter:

To welcome you, don’t talk of distance,

I’ll go as far as the Long Wind Sands!

 

 

2

 

I remember, in my maiden days

I did not know the world and its ways;

Until I wed a man of Chang Kan:

Now, on the sands, I wait for the winds…

 

And when in June the south winds are fair,

I think: Pa Ling; it’s soon you’ll be there;

September now, and west winds risen,

I wish you’ll leave the Yangtze Haven;

 

But, go or come, it’s ever sorrow

For when we meet, you part tomorrow:

You’ll make Xiang Tan in how many days?

I dreamt I crossed the winds and the waves

 

Only last night, when the wind went mad

And tore down trees on the waterside

And waters raced where the dark wind ran

(Oh, where was then my traveling man?)

 

That we both rode dappled cloudy steeds

Eastward to bliss in Isles of Orchids:

A drake and duck among the green reeds,

Just as you’ve seen on a painted screen…

 

Pity me now, when I was fifteen

My face was pink as a peach’s skin:

Why did I wed a traveling man?

Waters my grief…my grief in the wind!

 

 

 

Du Fu (712-770) was born near the capital Chang’an, of a family distinguished by service to the state. Du Fu’s poems chronicle his life and times with social conscience and compassion, but also reflect an uncompromising portrait of the man himself.

 

From The Journey North: The Homecoming

 

Slowly, slowly we tramped country tracks,

With cottage smoke rarely on their winds:

Of those we met, many suffered wounds

Still oozing blood, and they moaned aloud!

 

I turned my head back to Feng-xiang’s camp,

Flags still flying in the fading light;

Climbing onward in the cold hills’ folds,

Found here and there where cavalry once drank;

 

Till, far below, plains of Pin-chou sank,

Ching’s swift torrent tearing them in two;

And ‘Before us the wild tigers stood’,

Had rent these rocks every time they roared:

 

Autumn daisies had begun to nod

Among crushed stones wagons once had passed;

To the great sky then my spirit soared,

That secret things still could give me joy!

 

Mountain berries, tiny, trifling gems

Growing tangled among scattered nuts,

Were some scarlet, sands of cinnabar,

And others black, as if lacquer-splashed:

 

By rain and dew all of them were washed

And, sweet or sour, equally were fruits;

They brought to mind Peach-tree River’s springs,

And more I sighed for a life misspent!

 

Then I, downhill, spied Fu-zhou far off

And rifts and rocks quickly disappeared

As I ran down to a river’s edge,

My poor servant coming far behind;

 

There we heard owls hoot from mulberry leaves,

Saw fieldmice sit upright by their holes;

At deep of night crossed a battlefield,

The chill moonlight shining on white bones:

 

Guarding the Pass once a million men,

But how many ever left this Pass?

True to orders, half the men in Ch’in

Here had perished and were alien ghosts!

 

I had fallen, too, in Tartar dust

But can return with my hair like flour,

A year but past, to my simple home

And my own wife, in a hundred rags;
Who sees me, cries like the wind through the trees,

Weeps like the well sobbing underground;

And then my son, pride of all my days,

With his face, too, whiter than the snows,

 

Sees his father, turns his back to weep –

His sooty feet without socks or shoes;

Next by my couch two small daughters stand

In patched dresses scarcely to their knees

 

And the seaways do not even meet

Where old bits of broidery are sewn;

Whilst the Serpent and the Purple Bird

On the short skirts both are upside-down!

 

‘Though your father is not yet himself,

Suffers sickness and must rest some days,

How could his scrip not contain some stuffs

To give you all, keep you from the cold?

 

‘You’ll find there, too, powder, eyebrow black

Wrapped in the quilts, rather neatly packed.’

My wife’s thin face once again is fair,

Then the mad girls try to dress their hair:

 

Aping mother in her every act,

Morning make-up quickly smears their hands

Till in no time they have spread the rouge,

Fiercely painted great, enormous brows!

 

I am alive, with my children, home!

Seem to forget all that hunger, thirst:

These quick questions, as they tug my beard,

Who’d have the heart now to stop an scold?

 

Turning my mind to the Rebel Camp,

It’s sweet to have all this nonsense, noise…

]]> http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/16/brothers-in-verse-two-legends-of-tang-poetry.html/feed/ 1 http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/15/jiufen-boom-bust-boom.html/ http://www.chinaexpat.com/2012/08/15/jiufen-boom-bust-boom.html/#comments Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:10:49 +0000 Ernie http://www.chinaexpat.com/?p=8688 Continue reading →]]>

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Mountains, sea, and mining tourist gold.

 

 

-by Ernie Diaz

 

 

It might be tomorrow, or another generation away, but sooner or later we’ll stop hearing “boom” and “bubble” as buzzwords to describe China. One may hope for stability then. One may hope for the sky to rain hamburgers, as well.

 

To what do we turn, to gauge the crater left once China’s boom is over, the vacuum once the bubble pops? Smaller booms and bubbles, of course. Might as well make it field research, and check out one of those phenomena so common to China – the hidden hill town, close to major urban centers but a world away.

 

Taiwan (“China’s 23^rd province, Mr. Big Brother, sir.”) has a treasure chest full of such towns, so close to Taipei one wonders that they are not wall-to-wall betel nut girls and 7-11s. CEX fully owns its mistake in giving Taiwan such short shrift; like a sow with only so many teats, we tend to stint on our attention to runts, even one as precocious as Taiwan.

 

 

 

Not conducive to quick jaunts into town.

But in the matter of boom towns, we’ll turn our attention to Taiwan’s Jiufen, “Nine Pieces,” so named for the isolation of the town’s original nine families. Whenever a Jiufen villager troubled to clamber down to civilization for supplies, he was more or less constrained to bring back nine pieces or portions of whatever he secured, to share out under the laws of Confucian fair play.

 

 

 

World's largest gold ingot - 220kg - on display at Jiufen's mining museum.

Confucius got blown away by the boom, a gold rush that commenced in 1893 and didn’t peter entirely out until the early 1970s. In a Chinese minute (a year, give or take) Jiufen’s nine families were dealing with thousands of prospectors, not as bearded or bandy-legged as 49ers, but just as committed to ripping gold out of the hills, devil take the hindmost.

 

Who knows what boost the flagging Qing empire might have got out of Jiufen, but alas Formosa went to Japan at the conclusion of their first war, in 1895. Wouldn’t ya know it, the Taiwanese took to the hated invader like Patty Hearsts to a Symbionese Liberation Army. Japan quickly took Taiwan into the Industrial Age, and in response Taiwanese took to giving themselves Japanese names and practicing Shinto.

 

 

 

Even in the shadow of the metastasizing Japanese Empire, Jiufen boomed, especially in the 1930s, when global instability sent gold prices soaring. Bars, restaurants and hotels roared into the night, muffling the non-stop rumble of the mines. No western-style shoot outs in this boom town, run shop-tight by Japanese proxies who forbad rebellious horseplay. Rather, Jiufen’s monikers ran inevitably to “Little Shanghai” and “Little Hong Kong.” WWII only added oomph to the boom, with plenty of fresh allied POWs to work to death in the mines.

 

 

 

The ore started running scarce in the 1960s, and tricled to a full stop by 1971. Jiufen turned ghost town, almost perfectly preserved despite regular typhoons, thanks to solid Japanese construction principles. For twenty years Jiufen lay fallow, an object lesson in what a gold boom looks like when the noise dies down.

 

 

 

Jiufen’s second boom came in the form of tourism, set off from a most unlikely source. In 1989, Hsiao-Hsien Hou City won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion with A City of Sadness, the first Chinese film to garner the prize. A City of Sadness was also the first film to deal with the big skeleton rattling about in Taiwan’s little closet, 38 years of martial law under the Kuomintang Party. That’s right, the Taiwanese most definitely didn’t welcome Chiang Kai-shek and the gang as liberators from their half-century of oppressed modernization. Especially unwelcome was the rampant corruption of the KMT, who made up for their mainland losses by dispossessing, disenfranchising, and generally dissing the locals as though they were defeated Japanese.

 

 

 

 

A City of Sadness deals uncompromisingly with the devastating effects of the KMT’s “White Terror” reign on one family, whose youngest son flees to Jiufen to escape government persecution. The movie focused millions of Chinese eyes on Jiufen, and brought thousands of visitors enchanted by the little town, elegant and cozy as a kimono, draped on a mountain bristling with ogrish mining ghost bunkers.

 

 

 

So now more than a million now come yearly, not to find gold, but rather bringing it, in exchange for what? There’s an old theater, a couple of obligatory temples, a mining museum. Ooh! A really steep staircase where many key scenes from A City of Sadness were shot. Punters galore linger on those stairs, partly because you can’t even see the bottom from the top, quite a climb.

 

 

 

A princely view from the prince's guest house.

You can lodge at the Prince Guest House, or at least pause to get an eyeful of the sedate cypress majesty joined together so that Hirohito might deign to tarry a night (he didn’t, choosing instead to pass the night in nearby Keelung.)

 

 

 

And of course, the two items for which a traveler far from home will always trade his gold mindless of its true value: food and tchotckes. Taro balls, taro balls everywhere: fried, boiled, floating in your tea so you can’t even hydrate without a taro ball menacing your gullet. The trinkets are put together with somewhat less skill than the balls. But you don’t visit Jiufen for what you can buy, so much as for what you feel.

 

 

 

Just as in Lijiang, booming from tourism itself, something about the twisting, precipitous lanes, the houses built for both civility and the terrain, in imitable style. And then the colossal mining buildings, the balconies holding a nonchalant handful of snackers, hanging hundreds of feet over nothingness. What’s it all bring to mind? That’s right – Spirited Away, the only anime movie worth a damn if you’ve greater mental maturity than a fifteen-year-old. Miyazaki saw in Jiufen a place between and beyond worlds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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