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- This American Life: Americans in China
- Hexie Farm (蟹农场): The Dragon Boat
- 5 Web Sites on Chinese Philanthropy in English
- Shanghai Subway Tells Scantily Clad Women To Expect Sexual Harassment
- Gu Kailai has confessed to murder of Neil Heywood: Asahi Shimbun
- Sheng Shuren: The Story of a Journalist in New China
- China Cements Ties with Argentina,Uruguay
- Record Dive Follows Space High
- Photo: Bai Men Relaxing, By Jeff Horowitz
- Chinese, Philippines Boats Collide in South China Sea
- The Weekend Twit (@chinahearsay links) – June 23/24, 2012
- Milan Nixes Citizenship For Dalai Lama
| This American Life: Americans in China Posted: 24 Jun 2012 10:48 PM PDT This American Life broadcast a segment on Americans in China. From the prologue:
In this section, New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos interviews Baidu's Director of International Communication, rock musician and "uber-expat" Kaiser Kuo: In Act II, author Michael Meyer talks about his experiences living in rural China: Read more about foreigners in China, via CDT. © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| Hexie Farm (蟹农场): The Dragon Boat Posted: 24 Jun 2012 10:25 PM PDT For his latest contribution to his CDT series, cartoonist Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm honors this weekend's Dragon Boat Festival (端午节) with a nod to Orwell. The characters are taken from Animal Farm; the drummer holds an AK-47 instead of drum sticks. "Great, glorious and correct" and "harmonious" are propaganda terms frequently employed by the CCP which have been usurped and used facetiously by netizens. The Dragon Boat, by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT: Read more about Hexie Farm's CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series. [CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| 5 Web Sites on Chinese Philanthropy in English Posted: 24 Jun 2012 09:23 PM PDT If you are interested in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and desire to know more of Chinese philanthropy, Helen's "5 Web Sites on Chinese Philanthropy in English" might be a good start for you. Helen is currently preparing for GP Common web site, and thinks it would be beneficial to have a clear idea on what is out there on Chinese philanthropy to readers in English. Written by Gloria Wong · comments (0) | |||||||||||||||
| Shanghai Subway Tells Scantily Clad Women To Expect Sexual Harassment Posted: 24 Jun 2012 08:24 PM PDT Can't stand the heat? Want to make a statement and wear something revealing? You may wish to avoid Shanghai's subway.  The dress that started it all It's a bizarre incident that showcases just how far women's rights still have to go in China. On June 20, tweeting from its official account on Sina Weibo, China's twitter, Shanghai's Number 2 Subway Line published a snapshot of a female passenger in a semi-transparent outfit and commented: "If that's what you wear on a subway, then no wonder you will be sexually harassed! There are too many perverts riding the subway every day, and we can't catch them all. Girl, you've got to respect yourself!" A tiny victory for women's rights It's strange enough that a subway line has its own official Weibo account; stranger still that it would voluntarily call out one of its own passengers and effectively invite sexual harassment. While the tweet is disturbing, at least it caused uproar among netizens who subscribed to the subway line's feed. While the woman's translucent dress was far from common Chinese couture, most passengers were disgusted by the commentary. @贺瑜-小鱼儿 exclaimed, "Even if she's wearing a bikini, she should still be free from harassment! What is wrong with this subway line?" @指间_谁de旋律 blames the subway line for its inappropriate comment as well: "It is disgusting to hear this from an official Weibo! How does her outfit make her deserving of sexual harassment? Why should any outfit be considered as an invitation?" The official account of Women's Voice, an NGO for gender equality in China (@女权之声), was also outraged: "Sexual harassment is a crime! The subway line should try harder to be responsible for passenger safety instead of finding excuses for these criminals and blaming the crime on the victims!" Crossing an invisible line  These young women tried to make a statement, but the effort fell flat with netizens Things got even more heated from there. On June 24, Women's Voice organized a small-scale demonstration in a Shanghai subway station to drive its displeasure home. Two young females, each wearing a black veil over their face, stepped into a crowded subway station with signs that read, "I want my coolness under the sun, but not the pervert in the subway," and "I can reveal myself, and you cannot bother me." But instead of showing the expected support, netizens turned on these two females. @王若翰Kitty complains: "We can always get rid of perverts through law or moral regulation, but you can't ask everyone to pretend to ignore you when you wear really revealing clothes! This is an impossibly high bar." @三块花期末有好运 had a more unique take: " I think a woman who wears revealing clothes in public is actually sexually harassing the men there. Regardless of your gender, you should not use the hot weather as an excuse to dress indecently. Public places aren't your locker room; regardless of your gender, if you want to be respected by others, you have to learn to respect other people first." It's certainly possible that the group of netizens reacting to the counter-demonstration were a different crowd than those who initially critiqued the subway's shocking over-reach. Nonetheless, the sharp contrast in reaction suggests that the female demonstrators crossed an invisible line. Netizens took issue with the invasive, blame-the-victim mentality behind the subway line's initial critique. But they showed very little sympathy for the two young women who took it upon themselves to raise more awareness for female autonomy. Perhaps netizens will find it easier to accept creative demonstrations if they become more common in the future. Although Chinese women still have a long road to walk before true autonomy and equality is theirs, netizens' defense of the female passenger is at least reassuring to some of us–especially females who might want to don a short skirt on a subway. | |||||||||||||||
| Gu Kailai has confessed to murder of Neil Heywood: Asahi Shimbun Posted: 24 Jun 2012 06:20 PM PDT
Freer times: Gu Kailai and husband Bo Xilai. (Internet photo) Gu Kailai, the wife of fallen Chinese political heavyweight Bo Xilai, has confessed to the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood and will soon be prosecuted, reports Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun. The admission was allegedly revealed in an internal Communist Party investigation report. While under interrogation, Gu was said to have told party investigators she had Heywood killed after he threatened to expose that she had been illegally funneling billions of dollars overseas. The 53-year-old Gu, a former lawyer, was arrested for Heywood's murder in April. Meanwhile, Gu's husband, disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai, is now being investigated over whether he had participated in Heywood's death or had merely acted as an accessory by covering up the murder, reported Asahi Shimbun. Bo, 62, who has been stripped of his party posts, is being detained for unspecified "serious discipline violations." The scope of the investigation into his activities has reportedly spread to include people he was associated with more than 20 years ago during his time as mayor of the port city Dalian, including dozens of officials and more than a hundred businessmen and celebrities. Sources told Asahi Shimbun that Chinese authorities found that Gu had been hiding money from the government since the start of the 1990s, channeling up to US$6 billion in undeclared income overseas to friends and relatives in the US and UK. Heywood, who had been in Bo and Gu's "inner circle" for more than a decade, allegedly helped Gu open up foreign accounts and exchange currencies. Heywood was found dead in a Chongqing hotel room last November. Local authorities controlled by Bo initially declared that Heywood died from excessive alcohol consumption and quickly cremated his body. The investigation was re-opened in February after Bo's former police chief, Wang Lijun, fled to the US consulate in Chengdu with supposed evidence of Gu's involvement in Heywood's death. During his time at the consulate, Wang reportedly told US officials that Gu admitted to him "three times" that she was responsible for Heywood's death. One source claimed that Heywood had been pinned to the ground of the hotel room and forced to drink cyanide, and that when he tried to spit it out he was forced to consume more. Earlier this month French architect Patrick Devillers, another foreigner implicated in Gu's illegal overseas transfers, was arrested in Cambodia. Beijing has requested that Devillers be extradited to China, though the French government has insisted that Cambodian authorities not hand him over without clear evidence or legal basis. Source: Want China Times
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| Sheng Shuren: The Story of a Journalist in New China Posted: 24 Jun 2012 06:29 PM PDT I came upon the name Sheng Shuren (盛树人) recently when I was reading one of the documents left behind by Uncle Liu Erning. From the reference I learned Sheng Shuren was a man arrested along with Uncle Erning in Xushui, Hebei Province, in the summer of 1958. I very much wanted to know who he was and whether he was still alive; and if so, whether I could find him and ask about what had happened in Xushui. A Google search found him on the list of notable alumni of an elementary school in the east coastal city of Ningpo. I knew then it was him: "Sheng Shuren, also Yinxing, of the Sheng Family in the Luotuo township, was born in 1920 and attended our school in his childhood. He went on to be a graduate of the Department of Journalism at Saint John's University in Shanghai. Before the Liberation of Shanghai in 1949, he worked for the North China Daily News, The China Weekly Review and the British Consulate in Shanghai. After the Liberation, he joined the Xinhua News Agency in Beijing. Later, he was demoted due to political reasons and was not reinstated until 1979. Unfortunately, he had died shortly before that." The clue I had been hoping to find ended right there, but these words did not go away. They gave me another story that weighed heavily on me. A few weeks ago, I did not know there was, or had been, such a person in the world, and today I wanted to know his story. More searches yielded little. At a loss, I read what I could. St John's College was founded by the American Protestant Episcopal Church in Shanghai in 1879. In the beginning, it taught Chinese classics, Western subjects and Divinity in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghai dialect. When St. John's College became St. John's University in 1896, it was the first modern university in Shanghai, and the first all-English university in China, with four schools (Liberal arts, Sciences, Medicine, and Divinity) and an affiliated prep school. It enrolled graduate students in 1913 and women in 1936. By then it had added the School of Agriculture, had a total of sixteen departments, and enjoyed the reputation of being the "Harvard of the East." Its Department of Journalism was established in 1921, the first in Asia, modeled on the Department of Journalism at Missouri University in both philosophy and method of teaching. Soon after the regime change in 1949, the university was forced to cut its ties with the church, and in 1952 it was broken up, along with all of the Christian universities in China, its faculty and students dispersed into other universities in Shanghai and its site becoming the newly-established East China University of Politics and Law under the auspices of the Ministry of Justice of the new People's Republic of China. Among its many illustrious alumni, I found industrialists, filmmakers, doctors, judges, politicians, writers, diplomats, bishops, architects and more. In another place, I saw old black-and-white photos of St. John's as well as a picture of its insignia. Its Chinese motto comes from the Analects, "He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger," while the English simply says "Light & Truth."  St. John's University I could easily imagine an elegant young man, a new college graduate, in light-colored suits, as was the fashion of temperate Shanghai, in the early 1940s, overly cultured for his age, a kind of men we only had glimpses of from faded black and white photographs. In the China I grew up, they had gone extinct. Not only the clothes were different, the expression, the posture, the voice and the words, and the way people carried themselves, had all changed. The sky was invariably gray, when I close my eyes to recall my childhood, and everyone had an alert, suspicious and fearful look in their eyes. These memories, of course, were not factual in the sense of record: the sky was not gray everyday, nor was everybody like that, at least not all the time. But who can say the natural deposit of memory, and whatever processing it has gone through following its own intrinsic logic, has no claim on truth? Might it even be truer than the facts? "Remake" was one of the most frequently used words of that era, and "remaking" was ubiquitous: industry, agriculture and business; cities, buildings and people; thought, language and writing, everything and every moment; visible and invisible. When I started remembering things, this remaking had only been carried out for less than two decades but had already done such a thorough job that it was nothing short of a miracle.  Sheng Shuren in 1948: On a visit to family home in Ningbo. The author didn't receive this and the other photos of him until this piece had been written. On the phone with Erjia, Uncle Erning's youngest brother, a few days later, I mentioned the name Sheng Shuren regretfully. To my surprise, Erjia said, "Oh, Sheng Shuren! I knew him well!" "What? How?" "Aiya!" said Erjia. "He and I wrote each other for many years, and I visited Shanghai once and stayed with him!" Even more surprised, I urged Erjia to tell me everything. It turned out that Erning and Sheng Shuren stayed in touch after they were sent back from Xushui to their respective hometowns at the end of 1960, Erning to Anshan in the northeastern province of Liaoning and Sheng to Shanghai. Too tired from toiling long hours in the fields everyday, Uncle Erning sometimes would ask Erjia to write on his behalf. After a while, Uncle Erning grew withdrawn, and it was Erjia, a mailman, who kept the correspondence with Sheng going and the latter sent his greetings to Uncle Erning at the end of each of his letters. For years, the food supply was rationed in China, and in Liaoning Province, it was a combination totaling 12.5 kilos of wheat four, corn meal, rice and sorghum flour, per adult per month. Shanghai was one of the few places in China where you could buy food tickets relatively cheaply on the black market. For years, Sheng Shuren and Erjia kept a trade of food tickets: Erjia sent money to Shanghai, Sheng Shuren bought food tickets for Erjia, thus solving the chronic food shortage of the Liu brothers. In 1964 or 1965 when Sheng Shuren remarried (his wife had divorced him), he sent Erning an invitation, but Erning didn't go. In the summer of 1972, Sheng Shuren wrote that the water pipes in his house were old and broken, asking Erjia if he could help him buy pipes in Anshan, one of China's steel capitals. Although the house his family had lived in for many years was public property, it didn't belong to a particular work unit, so there was nobody to call on to do the repair, and he had no place to buy pipes to try to fix them himself. He provided the numbers of pipes, elbows, joints and faucets he needed and their specs. Having purchased the 20 plus pipes, each a little over a meter long, Erjia embarked on a trip to Shanghai to deliver the goods and also to visit the great city. He made two train transfers to the port city Dalian, there he was able to purchase a ticket for economy class for nine yuan without trouble. It was "without trouble" because you couldn't go to Shanghai just because you wanted to, and, in Erjia's words, "if they didn't like you, they wouldn't sell you a ticket!" At the time, Erjia was only in his late twenties, handsome, wearing the green postal uniform, and must have looked "pleasant" enough to the eyes of those people. (When I first saw an old picture of the seven Liu brothers, I took immediate notice of Erjia, despite the shabby, dull clothes of that era.) He slept on a bench on the dock for a night. All around him, groups of sent-down youth talked loudly and incessantly in Shanghai dialect, waiting for the ship too to go home for a visit. The next day Erjia boarded a steamer, sailing a day and a night off the east coast of China before arriving in Shanghai. Sheng Shuren picked him up from the dock and the two dined in a restaurant on two dishes and one soup. The first evening Erjia arrived, members of Shanghai Workers' United Front visited Sheng Shuren's house to "check his resident registration." Why haven't you reported you have a visitor? They asked Sheng. Sheng answered: He has just arrived today and I have not had a chance to report. Then they questioned Erjia thoroughly: Where do you come from? What is your relationship to Sheng Shuren? What is the purpose of your visit? Erjia answered honestly: I am here to visit an old friend and also seek treatment for my rheumatism. Perhaps the Workers' United Front felt that a mailman of the People's Postal Bureau (that was the description on Erjia's work ID) was one of their own, they let him off without further ado. Upon leaving, they ordered Sheng Shuren to submit a visitor report the following day. Erjia said, at the time, he thought Sheng Shuren was a normal person after returning to Shanghai and it didn't occur to him that, just like his older brother, he was still an "object of the people's democratic dictatorship" and the security people would descend on his house in response to the merest rustle they heard.  Nanjing Road, Shanghai, in 1970s I asked Erjia to describe how Sheng Shuren looked. "Six feet tall," he said. "Smiled a lot. Smooth pale skin. Large eyes. Kind." When I asked him how he would describe Sheng's desposition, Erjia stammered, groping for words. "He was, uh, very refined," he said. Then, pausing to dig deeper into his thoughts, he added, "He was such a gentleman!" At the time, Sheng Shuren was in his early fifties with two grown children, his son working in a factory manufacturing radio receivers and his daughter a send-down youth along with millions of young people from the Chinese urban centers. Perhaps because he was living with his mother, Sheng Shuren's wife, a worker at the neighborhood factory processing plastic components, lived separately from him with her own folks. Soon after Erjia arrived, a letter from Erning followed. Far in Liaoning, he couldn't contain his excitement about the meeting of Erjia and Sheng Shuren as well as Erjia's chance to see Shanghai. He eulogized that "Your revolutionary friendship….is richer than the most lavish banquet on earth. It gives warmth to this world and makes life worth loving." To brother Shuren "who was also wrongly persecuted and swallows the bitterness of it, and the two of us kept each other company in Xushui," Uncle Erning said he believed "the truth will prevail eventually, turning this upside down world right." (To be continued tomorrow…) (A Kindle version is available on Amazon.com) Filed under: Life in China Tagged: Asia, China, History, Liaoning, North China Daily News, Shanghai, Xinhua News Agency         | |||||||||||||||
| China Cements Ties with Argentina,Uruguay Posted: 24 Jun 2012 09:34 AM PDT For the first time in 27 years, Wen Jiabao, is visiting Argentina to discuss the importation of corn into China. From Bloomberg Businessweek:
Aside from deals on corn, Xinhua reports that Wen's visit to Buenos Aires will also focus on diplomatic ties:
Wen's first stop on this regional tour was Uruguay, and this was his first visit to the country since they had established diplomatic ties in 1988. AFP adds:
According to China Daily, during his visit, Wen claimed that China sees the South American market as an important figure:
© Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| Record Dive Follows Space High Posted: 24 Jun 2012 09:35 AM PDT After a successful docking in space, China has now broken the country's deepest dive record in the Mariana Trench. From Xinhua:
According to China Daily, Jiaolong reached a depth of 7015 metres:
Although China's deepest dive broke the nation's record, other vessels have gone much deeper into the trench. AFP adds:
While one of the three dives was originally scheduled on a different day, the date of the dive was changed to the same day as China's space docking. Bloomberg adds:
Read more about China's Submarine, Jiaolong, via CDT. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| Photo: Bai Men Relaxing, By Jeff Horowitz Posted: 24 Jun 2012 07:13 AM PDT © Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| Chinese, Philippines Boats Collide in South China Sea Posted: 24 Jun 2012 07:02 AM PDT The Philippines claimed Sunday that a Chinese ship accidentally rammed a fishing boat to the north of the disputed Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, according to AFP:
This latest spat with the Philippines comes just days after China and Vietnam traded diplomatic barbs in connection with both sides' claims to sovereignty over the Spratly and Paracel islands. James Holmes writes for The Diplomat that while several speakers at a recent Naval War College strategy forum likened China's policy in the South China Sea to the United States' 19th century Monroe Doctrine, but such claims are misguided:
© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| The Weekend Twit (@chinahearsay links) – June 23/24, 2012 Posted: 24 Jun 2012 06:24 AM PDT Don't expect too much here. Holiday weekend, dog days of summer — interesting news is hard to come by. Tomorrow should be equally as underwhelming, a combination of summer holiday hangover and Monday, which is usually slow here in Greenwich +8 land. I hope you had a lot of fun this weekend playing with your dragon boat, or as we call it here in China, a scull. But enough of my bitching. Somewhere in this country, someone must be talking about something, right? AFP: Chinese ship 'accidentally rams' Philippines boat — I'm writing this around 8:45pm, so God knows what will have happened later on tonight or tomorrow. Details are sketchy, with reports of at least one fatality. Things just calmed down in the South China Sea a few days ago, now this? Might make for a more interesting than expected week. FYI, I like the 'accidentally rams' language, including what I'm assuming are sneer quotes. Ha ha. It's like saying "mistakenly strangled" or "inadvertently disemboweled." NY Times: Chinese Data Said to Be Manipulated, Understating Slowdown — Trying to guess what the "real" economic stats are is practically a sport among China analysts (military budget gurus also). The usual method is to take the official economic growth stats and compare them with proxies, the favorite being electricity consumption. The NYT's Keith Bradsher takes a crack at it, finding that the official data might be overstating growth — golly gee! Changjiang Daily (via Global Times): Foreigners bring new chances and challenges — You remember the story of the "dark-skinned" expat who was beaten to death last week? We still don't know whether it was a crowd of people or the cops who did the deed, but the incident is still giving rise to a lot of discussion. You'd think all the talk would be focused on how to prevent such deaths, but apparently some in the media are more worried about how best to handle the scary influx of foreigners. For shame. China's first female astronaut excels in performance — Wow, is that right? Didn't see that coming. Honestly, I just found this headline/story to be a lot of fun. Not only is the entire "story" completely devoid of any news and is a weak attempt at feel-good propaganda (note that the propaganda A-Team is on holiday), but I detect a subtle, unstated misogynistic extra three words that could have been added to that headline but were not. Can you guess? The three words are "for a girl." I don't recall ever seeing an article written about the performance of a male rocket jockey, do you? If you're looking for other nationalistic, prestige type stories, you have your choice this weekend between the continuing space news (e.g. Chinese spacecraft docks with orbiting module), which is sexy as well as sciency, and China submersible breaks 7000-metre mark. Time to go put my dragon boat back in storage. © Stan for China Hearsay, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
| Milan Nixes Citizenship For Dalai Lama Posted: 24 Jun 2012 06:18 AM PDT The Italian city of Milan has scrapped plans to give honorary citizenship to the Dalai Lama due to concerns such a move would jeopardize Chinese involvement and investment in the 2015 Expo, according to Reuters:
Milan would have joined other Italian cities, including Rome and Venice, in giving the Dalai Lama the honor. The LA Times blog reports that the decision has outraged supporters of the Tibetan cause. © Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us | |||||||||||||||
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