China

The Unseen During The Olympics

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Watching the Olympics in Beijing has got me to thinking about China again.  I’d like to make a point about the legacy of the damage done in the last 50 years.

You might like to read “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up” by Liao Yiwu.

Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003, and Yiwu’s oral histories begin with him.

This is from a review of the book by Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, who covered China from 2003 to 2008 and who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

We know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. Thus the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.

Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up , gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”–with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Each story provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.
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China’s Opening

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With an unlimited budget, China’s most illustrious film director has achieved a lush multimedia feast that I cannot imagine will be surpassed anytime soon. As expected it was embedded with the political…for local consumption as much as for the world.

Images…visions…symbols…and then…mirage…illusion, the ideal…and then…if you pay attention: signs.

In Tai Chi, movement in one direction often begins with a movement in the opposite direction… perfect alignment is created as hundreds and thousands of actors move as one when they have perfect awareness of where their neighbors are…water moves gracefully away from resistance and conflict…but then soldiers march to drumming rumble…

Soldiers? At an Olympics opening?

Great propaganda, China!

19th Anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre

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The world must not forget.

China’s Grief, Unearthed

NYTimes.com
June 4, 2008

By Ma Jian

FOR three days last month, China’s national flag flew at half-staff in Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the first time in memory that China has publicly commemorated the deaths of ordinary civilians.

Crowds were allowed to gather in the square to express sympathy for their compatriots. Despite a death toll that has risen to nearly 70,000, the earthquake has shaken the nation back to life. The Chinese people have rushed to donate blood and money and join the rescue efforts. They have rediscovered their civic responsibility and compassion.
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2008 Chef Olympics

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My son the chef!

abp_5253.jpgHere is a picture of me and my chefs!!

Josh says: “The two in the grey are myself on the right, chef de cuisine of “One East On Third” Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing, and Ivan, on the left is chef de cuisine of “Elements,” another restaurant in the Hilton. In the blue in the front is Boris my pastry chef, the guy in white on the left is William, the exec sous chef, and the guy in white on the right is Jason Ong the exec chef.”

Can you guess the sports??
Enjoy
Josh

A Blog For China Watchers

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An excellent site in English for people wanting to understand China is “The China Beat…Blogging How The East Is Read.”

One of the writers is Peter Hessler Peter Hessler (b. June 14, 1968) who is an American writer and journalist. He is currently the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker and a contributor to National Geographic. He has previously written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and other American newspapers and magazines. He is best known for his two books on China: River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (2001), a Kiriyama Prize-winning book about his experiences in two years as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English in China, and Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (2006), a collection of journalistic stories he wrote living in Beijing. His stories are about ordinary people’s lives in China and are not politically themed.

In 1996, he joined the Peace Corps and spent the next two years teaching English at a local college in Fuling, China. Since 1999, he has lived in Beijing as a freelance writer.

Chinese Students Fight View Of Their Home

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New York Times Article

By SHAILA DEWAN

Published: April 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES — When the time came for the smiling Tibetan monk at the front of the University of Southern California lecture hall to answer questions, the Chinese students who packed the audience for the talk last Tuesday had plenty to lob at their guest:

…….

As the monk tried to rebut the students, they grew more hostile. They brandished photographs and statistics to support their claims. “Stop lying! Stop lying!” one young man said. A plastic bottle of water hit the wall behind the monk, and campus police officers hustled the person who threw it out of the room.

Scenes like this, ranging from civil to aggressive, have played out at colleges across the country over the past month, as Chinese students in the United States have been forced to confront an image of their homeland that they neither recognize nor appreciate. Since the riots last month in Tibet, the disrupted Olympic torch relays and calls to boycott the opening ceremony of the Games in Beijing, Chinese students, traditionally silent on political issues, have begun to lash out at what they perceive as a pervasive anti-Chinese bias.

Last year, there were more than 42,000 students from mainland China studying in the United States, an increase from fewer than 20,000 in 2003, according to the State Department.

……..

As the U.S.C. session wound to a close, the organizer, Lisa Leeman, a documentary film instructor, pleaded for a change in tone. “My hope for this event, which I don’t totally see happening here, is for people on both, quote, sides to really hear each other and maybe learn from each other,” Ms. Leeman said. “Are there any genuine questions that don’t stem from a political point of view, that are really not here to be on a soap box?”

At that moment, the bottle hit the wall

Read the full article here.

Another View Of The Torch Runs

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This is an interesting post in response to the Australian who described his experience in Canberra with the passing of the torch (read below.) This writer was born in China and has lived in China, Mexico and now France. She is well educated and speaks several languages.

After our discussion, I checked several big forums and found that almost all internet surfers are proud and encouraged by the passage [of the torch] in Australia. And Chinese who had taken part in the passage in Canberra (includes some of my friends who live in Aus) felt honorable. Today I read also some news about the torch in Korea. I just have no words and am really worry about the nationalist state [of mind] of many Chinese!

To explain the difference of Chinese value to the west is a bit long and complicated I think. I try to give you some examples. Chinese [were] educated by Confucion thoughts since more than 2500 years which [are] totally different from the west thought – freedom, equality, personally value, etc. For example, [the word] “Country” in Chinese is “Guo (state) Jia (family). Chinese also used to compare country as mother. That means for Chinese there first have country then family, the country’s (mother’s) interest is much more important than self interest. People could even forget or modify their own interest to adapt [to] the group or the country. For Chinese, though mother (country) has many faults, this has to be keeping [kept] inside. That means this is a family case, the others should better not criticize on.

Since last later of the 19’s century, china invaded by west countries and had been in a chaos. That’s the reason why when PRC was founded; china stopped almost all communications with the world. Later 70’s, Chinese understood that they have to reopen the country to make up for lost time, then Chinese try to learn as much as possible on other developed (democracy) countries. So there is a kind of complex feeling on Chinese, as I said in my last posting when we talked about the Tibet issue, which confused by pride, inferiority, curiosity and fear.

I have awareness about the problems, but I don’t think it works to simply complain and support one side. That’s why I suggested “less critical” and tried to explain about China and Chinese. Personally I feel there have big inner difference between two values. There are a lot problems in China, some can be treated and changed by exterior influence, some have to be changed from inside. Such as Tibet issue or any other human rights, culture reserve etc. This is just like a person who has many problems, people around him can give him suggestions but finally it’s himself who have to recognize and to change. If we criticize too much on him and forced him to follow our ideas, he would never listen and accept at all. Things would turn contrary as we would like to see. This just identifies the recent reactions from Chinese, no? Combined [with] the bad experience in the past, Chinese people feel one more time the “west control” on China and then the nationalism comes back more than ever this time. This is very dangerous and worries me a lot.

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A Protest That Didn’t Make CNN

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I have been following a thread on a discussion forum on Couchsurfing.com about the Olympic Torch Relay in Australia. An Australian fellow who was among the Tibetan supporters wrote the following posts in response to what he experienced that day. Some of it is repetitious because he is responding to some others who are defending China, primarily a French girl living in Britain who felt that China should not be censored because the people there have not had much experience with protest movements. In the interest of space I am not reprinting her comments here… most of which were in marginal English and it was very difficult to tell what she was intending to say…which was part of the problem with the exchange. My intention, however, was just to reprint his description of what happened…not to argue the pros and cons of it.

However, that said, it is my opinion that the fired-up students were probably sent in to provoke the Tibetan demonstrators so China could capitalize on the unrest. I saw this repeatedly in Oaxaca Mexico during a peaceful teacher strike that was joined by many civil organizations. “Students” (called “porros”) were paid by the government to infiltrate the strike, provoke disturbances, and then the teachers would get blamed. The teachers never knew who was who during the marches when they were joined by several thousand supporters. We also saw it during the protests against the Viet Nam war. Sounds like China is getting the idea…it just needs to learn not to be so obvious.
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Josh In Beijing

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Wanted to post some pictures of menu items created by my son Josh at the One East On Third Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel Beijing where he is the Chef de Cuisine but am despairing of getting menu descriptions from him. So here are a couple of pictures…one of Josh and another of his sous chefs. His wife Amy and I had two dinners there when I visited in January-February 2008…absolutely wonderful…even though I thought I was going to freeze to death during China’s recent hard winter.

p1030564.JPGjosh.jpg

A Question I Asked Myself

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How did China learn how to spin Tibet?

From Salon.com

By Andrew Sullivan

“Trust a public relations professional living in Beijing to write by far the best analysis I’ve seen of the Olympic-size mess that China has created for itself through its actions in Tibet. Writing in his blog Image Thief, William Moss provides detail and perspective that significantly outclass How the World Works’ own effort to make sense of recent events.

It’s a must-read for China watchers. The entire piece is great, but one section jumps out. Here, Moss is summarizing the ways in which China has effectively managed perceptions of the riots for a domestic audience.

For a good overview of the Chinese approach to all of this, see Mark Magnier’s interesting article on China’s P.R. efforts around the Tibet riots. It includes this damning quote from Chinese blogger and journalist Michael Anti:

“The [Chinese] government is showing more confidence and learning more about spin,” said Michael Anti, a well-known Chinese blogger on a Nieman fellowship this year at Harvard. “They’ve learned more PR tactics from Western people. They see the way the White House and the Pentagon do it.”

Yet another legacy for the current administration to be proud of: teaching the Chinese Communist Party how to spin.”