Your Mid-Week Links

Yet another difference between Hong Kong and the mainland: Some Hong Kong people raised HK$100,000 to buy an ad in Apple Daily denouncing mainland Chinese births in Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese would go to the local print shop and drop 20 RMB for a design, then post onto an Internet forum where the ad gets seen by about four times more people. But, whatever, it's not like HK$100,000 can buy food or anything. [Shanghaiist]

Global Times editor-in-chief joins Twitter. Welcome, @HuXijinGT. I wonder how long the poor chap will last. [China Rises]

Corollary: "Two jokes are currently circulating in Chinese cyberspace which take on current events: // The first one refers to recent tensions over the East China Sea. // [Diaoyu Islands belong to which country?] Answer: Bring a laptop computer there. If you can open Twitter, they belong to Japan. If you can’t open Twitter, they belong to China!" [China Digital Times]

Ai Weiwei on Chen Guangcheng: "Chen Guangcheng is an activist from Shandong who lost his sight as a child; but he is a bright light that shines in the darkness." [Wired]

MSNBC jumps into Foxconn reporting. Nothing interesting or new to report until the paragraph that starts: "On Monday, tens of thousands of people lined up outside a job agency to apply for an estimated 100,000 new jobs Foxconn is seeking to fill at its factory in Zhengzhou, the capital of central Henan province." Tens of thousands of people. [Behind the Wall, MSNBC]

A nice book review of a bad book. Charles Custer takes on Tony Parfitt's Why China Will Never Rule the World. Turns out you can judge a book by its title. [China Geeks]

New to the blogroll: All Roads Lead to China, Hidden Harmonies.

NON-CHINA READ (HT@Alicia): "It was over the last century, says Cain, that society began reshaping itself as an extrovert’s paradise—to the introvert’s demise. She explains that before the twentieth century, we lived in what historians called a 'culture of character,' when you were expected to conduct yourself morally with quiet integrity. But when people starting flocking to the cities and working for big businesses the question became, how do I stand out in a crowd? We morphed into a 'culture of personality,' which she says sparked a fascination with glittering movie stars, bubbly employees and outgoing leadership." [Forbes]

Easier said than done, Mr. Hu

This latest from the New York Times is about President Hu Jintao's comments regarding soft culture. Apparently China is losing the battle to the U.S. (This is where you put on your best "Gee, really?" quizzical face. Do you raise an eyebrow? Do you pout your lips and slowly nod? Do you throw both hands in the air, scrunch up your neck and gape?)

According to the article (emphasis mine):

“We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China, and ideological and cultural fields are the focal areas of their long-term infiltration,” Mr. Hu said, according to a translation by Reuters.

“We should deeply understand the seriousness and complexity of the ideological struggle, always sound the alarms and remain vigilant and take forceful measures to be on guard and respond,” he added.

Those measures, Mr. Hu said, should be centered on developing cultural products that can draw the interest of the Chinese and meet the “growing spiritual and cultural demands of the people.”

Spiritual demands.

Here is a country whose spirituality is that of commerce. It's a place where an injured lady can libelously sue the person who helped her, win the case, and see the legal fallout create a dystopia-like scenario in which people avoid helping strangers unless the incapacitated peeps, "It is not anybody's fault. I fell by myself."

This is the society we're dealing with, the one that Hu Jintao wants to rescue from the minor-key tunes and mild electro-synth grooves of Lady GaGa, lest China loses the rights to the zeitgeist of the 21st century.

Pop and entertainment, something the rest of the world sees as, well, pop and entertainment, i.e. mostly inconsequential, served best for leisure and diversion with a cocktail, is politicized by China's top leader as a thing to be "on guard" against and "respond" to. (Remember all those automaton responses to political questions during the Olympics? "Don't mix sports with politics..." Apparently pop and politics is not a problem though!)

If Hu wants to fight a culture war, his side will be massacred. The U.S. is -- I'll borrow a phrase the Chinese are fond of using -- a developed country, which means its people have the time and resources to be creative. In China, on the other hand, untold millions are just trying to scrape out a living, while millions more are caught in the rat race, and millions more are dealing with the day-to-day management of ambition vs. happiness, work vs. family, making the difficult choices those in Suburbia, USA can't imagine, not asking "Could I love him?" but, "Should I risk getting sued and help this dying man?"

But amid this backdrop, China is not a place that, despite its leaders' best efforts, only produces mindless drones and grubs in lockstep. I see this populace's resilience every day: normal working people who dare to call bullshit on the propaganda they're peddled. And it's not just me who sees it: you do too. China is a place that has produced intellectuals such as Gao Xingjian, who confronts his personal past to save his country's soul; courageous people like Chen Guangcheng, the blind lawyer whose story could be a Hollywood movie; people for whom the struggle is not between nations but much simpler, between individuals: a struggle for answers to confirm our humanity.

There are people, in short, able and willing to produce real culture, the kind you would write home about, to question spirituality or create it, to do something people actually care about. Pardon the cliche, but theirs is art as mirror for life.

And what, you ask, becomes of people like them? They are exiled. They are crippled and imprisoned. They are gagged. They are censored.

(Meanwhile, China's most well-known "pop" writer playfully acts the part of a self-aware troll.)

Chinese officials believe the way to the public's heart is through "socially responsible" TV shows. As it concerns the Chinese public, they're not completely wrong -- hey, I have older relatives who are socially conservative. But if that's what the authorities want, they should stop fooling themselves about the culture "battle," that there even can be one. They've lost. It's over. They can't even save face by banning Western culture, because it's one thing to censor a New York Times article, it's quite another to tell a 19-year-old in the club what kind of music should excite them.

So here's a proposition: that we not search for China's version of Lady GaGa -- indeed, Chinese people like America's GaGa in part because she is as American as they come, with all those implications -- but search for ways to create a society that will make the question Whose culture is better? irrelevant.

China's leaders have made a deal with its constituents: stay out of politics and we'll stay out of your lives. I think it's time for our counteroffer: you can stay in power if you stay out of art and culture. Otherwise, we have nothing.

The Chinese government on Christian Bale, and another protest

From the Associated Press:

"But he was not invited to create a story or shoot film in a certain village," said [Foreign Ministry spokesman] Liu [Weimin]. "I think if you want to make up news in China, you will not be welcome here."

There's no sense getting angry at Chinese government mouthpieces. They're just doing their jobs. No one really cares about what they think, not the Chinese, certainly not, I hope, Christian Bale.

But you know what? Fuck you, Liu Weimin. Fuck you.

OK, glad we got that out of the way.

MEANWHILE in Guangdong... another protest!

From Huffington Post:

Thousands of people besieged a government office in a southern Chinese town Tuesday and blocked a highway to demand a halt to a planned coal-fired power plant because of concerns about pollution, protesters said.

Riot police used tear gas in an attempt to disperse the protesters at the highway in the town of Haimen in Guangdong province, and the demonstrators hurled rocks, water bottles and bricks in return, said one of the protesters, a 27-year-old man surnamed Chen.

It is the second major protest in two weeks in a corner of coastal southern China that has been seeing periodic unrest over the last few years, primarily over land disputes. In much of Guangdong province, conflicts have been intense because the area is among China's most economically developed, pushing up land prices.

You treat your people like shit, and they'll throw rocks at you. Literal and metaphorical. The literal rocks you probably don't care about, since you have armor and guns. The other kind? It'll ruin your day, believe that.