Well, I'll be dammed ...

While the nationally heralded joy over Jia Zhangke's win at the Venice Filmfestival with his documentary-style feature film "Still Life" (三峡好人) must be slowly subsiding, it seems not all is quiet yet on the Three Gorges Dam front.

While the film focuses on the tribulations and love stories of the people that had to suffer through relocation because the dam reservoir flooded their original dwellings, a lot of people are now also frowning their eyebrows for more economic concerns. With one of the two shiplocks that take the boats around the dam, in effect locked, one of the major reasons for having the dam built, i.e. improving navigation on the upperreaches of the Yangtze, seems to be in serious jeopardy.

The delays that have plagued boats trying to get around the Three Gorges dam are set to worsen soon when one-half of the two-way shiplock is taken out of service for more than nine months.

The partial closure of the shiplock is scheduled to begin in mid-September and continue until the end of June 2007, Xinhua reports. The five-step shiplock raises vessels to the higher water level in the reservoir behind the dam or lowers them to the river downstream.

The Three Gorges reservoir is due to be raised a further 17 metres after the current flood season, when it will go from 139 to 156 metres above sea level. After the reservoir is raised, the south (downstream) side of the shiplock will be drained to allow construction work on the structure to be completed. With the shiplock's traffic-handling capacity cut in half, vessels going in both directions will have to use the one lane that normally only handles ships going upstream.

The story, which can be found over at CDT and Three Gorges Probe, is just one of those things that makes one wonder whether the benefits will finally outweigh the drawbacks. In the meantime, the bills keep going up on the monsterproject.

Now, in an apparent effort to relieve some of the pressure on the shiplock, the Three Gorges Project Corp. has decided to build a highway from the dam site to the city of Yichang, China News Service reports. The 57-kilometre, 3.6-billion-yuan (US$450-million) road will run from the port of Maoping just upstream of the dam to the Yangtze Bridge at Yichang, and connect with the Chengdu-Shanghai national highway system.

The plan for the new highway appears to confirm the concerns expressed by many, including local governments and shipping companies, that the shiplock is able to handle much less freight than its designers anticipated or project authorities promised.

Clearly, the trials have only begun, as already the first reports start popping up on weather change, not only in Yichang -the dam's location- but areawide in the Sichuan region, which could be due to evaporation of the huge watersurface behind the dam. According to Probe International's Patricia Adams, also the Yangzi flood control argument will not be able to deliver on it's promises:

Meanwhile, the much-touted flood-control benefit turns out to have been nothing more than propaganda. Internal and confidential state documents that were leaked to us confirm that, according to the best analysis done by Qinghua University scholars, the dam will not control Yangtze floods, and the officials know it. But, the leaked documents warn, "never, ever let the public know this."

TGP however is now a fact of life and the Chinese (and the world by extension), whether benefitted by it or not, will have to accomodate whatever consequences it may bring. In view of the huge debate this project has aroused, with fierce criticsm from all circles of scientists, environmentalists, engineers etc ... AND the less than positive track-record they have on dams (over 200 collapsed, several disfunctional due to silting, ...), one would have expected China to be cautious on venturing in further megalomaniac hydropower projects.

Not so the Middle Kingdom. Though TGP will probably remain the largest single project in dimension and size, the sheer number of dams that are on the planning table is incredible. "International Rivers Network" has put up a map on what is in the pipeline for the so-called Greater Shangri-La Region. Extrapolation of this map to the entire country may not be the correct thing to do as there are other area's in China that have far less river coverage than this part, but it gives us an idea on what is on the Chinese planners mind to boost power production fourfold by 2020. When we look at it from this angle and from the first lessons that have been learned from TGP, it may seem that China's environmental nightmare may only have just begun.

The chinese authorities may also have to toughen up further if they want to implement all they have in their drawers, because opposition is also straightening it's back and gets ready to fight. As such, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao already had to order a stop on the building of a dam on the Nujiang River to further assess the environmental impact (Ref. Ma Jun's "Record-breaking Dam Building Boom could make Free-Flowing Rivers and Endangered Species in the World's Most Dammed Country") .

Maybe the River Dragon is slowly awakening and starts to bite back in defense.

One new blog a day ...

From a blog-spotting perspective, this has been a good week. I even think it's fair to say it has been an excellent week.

First I ran into J's "Jottings of the Granite Studio", which makes for really very refreshing reading on Chinese history and how it links into modern China and the rest of the world, or just the opposite way round. Can't go wrong with a guy who can actually blog an entire entry on how he got to the name.

Then today, I stumbled into "The Opposite End of China", a China blog by an American laowai on life at China's outer regions with focus on Xinjiang. Still a lot to be discovered over on that site, but I couldn't resist drawing attention to the magnificent pictures of Michael's last trip to Tibet. I was especially charmed by this one:



The charm, apart from the beautiful colors of the sky, comes entirely from the angle from which it is shot. Not the seen-that-one-thousand-times (yawn, yawn ...) frontal view of the Potala Palace, but a more distant shot from the side, contrasting the building with the relative chaos of the other urban dwellings in front and making it look like one of these Japanese fortified castles like you're bound to see in for instance Kurosawa's "Ran".

Love it, and the best part ... there's plenty more to be enjoyed.

North-Korea: shocking !

A lot of debate ongoing in the blogosphere on North-Korea, the international pariah receiving the unanimous conviction of the entire "civilised" world for the outrageous provocation they have thrown in our face by performing a nuclear test.

To be sure: I don't feel comfortable with these guys messing around with nukes, albeit in the underground of their own country.

But then again, I don't feel any more comfortable with the American or Russian nuclear arsenal, when there is evidence popping up that for instance the Kursk, the Russian submarine that sank on August 12, 2000, may have been grounded by a U.S. launched missile.
I don't feel comfortable when the U.S., in a way that is more becoming rule than exception, is disregarding the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and cooperates with India on it's nuclear development (for civil reasons, of course) while leaving Pakistan in the cold.
I didn't feel comfortable back in 1995 when Mr. Chirac slapped the world in the face by resuming nuclear tests in the Mururoa atol, when 10 years before that the French had already sunk Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior for trying to intervene in similar tests.

I just don't feel comfortable with any nukes, whether they are held by George, Jacques or Kim.

In the Korean debate, I however missed anyone making reference to a pretty good article in Newsweek by Selig S. Harrison. His opening statement read like this:

On Sept. 19, 2005, North Korea signed a widely heralded denuclearization agreement with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations." Four days later, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sweeping financial sanctions against North Korea designed to cut off the country's access to the international banking system, branding it a "criminal state" guilty of counterfeiting, money laundering and trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration says that this sequence of events was a coincidence. Whatever the truth, I found on a recent trip to Pyongyang that North Korean leaders view the financial sanctions as the cutting edge of a calculated effort by dominant elements in the administration to undercut the Sept. 19 accord, squeeze the Kim Jong Il regime and eventually force its collapse.
(emphasis is mine. Notice again the "weapons of mass destruction'-thing ?)

So is that the way we do business nowadays ? Signing treaties and then shoot the cosignataries in the back ? I don't care whether North Korea were communist, Hinduist, polygamist or ... my God, catholics ... they deserved a chance to show that they were willing to make efforts in a process that could lead, if not to worldwide loving embrace, at least to peaceful co-existence with it's neighbours. Israël is given a new chance every time they have trampled on the Palestinians, so why not North-Korea, a "country on the verge of collapse" ?

Do I have any reason to distrust Mr. Harrison ? I wouldn't see why, with his credentials.

I am getting sick of all the distorted thruths we are confronted with every single day, from all sides.

Lotus shoes

This time I couldn't help myself, I just had to buy a pair of those tiny little shoes for those tiny little chinese feet when I saw them on the Shanghai antique market near Huaihai Lu.

Don't worry: it's not that I take these to be the real thing. When I compare what I had to pay, to the prices I find on e-Bay for these items, I either have to conclude that I struck an incredibly good deal, or that I purchased some of these artefacts that roll out of some factory in response to popular tourist demand. I'll stick to the latter option, for the time being. Not that I care. I don't intend to become a collector anytime soon, but just to think of the history behind that kind of shoes made me feel I had to buy it.

Let me first show how they look like:



Isn't it an enormous irony that those who of old were said "to hold up half the sky", -the chinese women in other words- were hardly able to hold themselves upright because of their bound feet that made them rather hobble than walk ? Yet the custom has sustained for over a thousand years. As if these women felt that to mould the world they lived in into a moral universe, of which they had been assigned the keepers, they first had to mould their own bodies into something ... aspiring for more, let's say. The binding of feet, how male-induced it may have been at the core, could not have survived for such a long time if the women, who performed it on their own daughters, were not supportive of it.

There is no way denying the hardship footbinding brought for each and every girl that was submitted to the torture, but look at the shoes -and these may not even be the best of samples- and feel the love and pride that went into them. These shoes were after all the adornment of precisely that what empowered women in a male-centered world: their lotus feet, which purely by concealing them, could drive the men crazy, yet were just as much a token of the characterstrength and the right sense of decorum that could earn the women respect in an otherwise harsh world.

There is an entire new way of research ongoing, steering away from the standard, largely western, christian biased arguments of the early twentieth century anti-footbinding movement and there may be more surprises coming up in the way we view this peculiar custom.

Snowflower and the Secret Fan

"Achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination", that's what Amy Tan had to say about this book as we can see on author Lisa See's website.

I fully concur with the first part of that statement, and I guess also with the second, though the research See has put into the book lifts the novel beyond the pure realm of imagination and depicts a presumably fairly realistic view of life and traditions in a remote part of Hunan province in China.

I was not all that impressed at the opening pages of the book, which gave me the feeling the author was going to present us a "popular" version of some scientific findings on mainly three topics:

1. The "women's script" or nüshu (女书), possibly the only gender-defined script that may have ever existed in the world, as it was at the exclusive use of women in some part of China.
2. Footbinding and it's related processes
3. Different types of relations between girls that existed in China before marriage (e.g. jiebai zimei 结拜姊妹) or could even extend beyond the drastic change that represented marriage in a girl's life (laotong 老同).

The information presented to the reader tends to get a little crowded at the beginning, it's like we have entered the museum of chinese folk customs and we're following the guide rushing us through the different halls.

Lisa See in her afterword gracefully makes allowance for the research of those whose works she has drawn on, among which William W. Chiang, who studied the linguistic and social aspects of the women's script for his PhD dissertation, Japanese professor Orie Endo who has made several field research trips to the area and Anne E. McLaren, professor at the University of Melbourne and with special interest in the interaction between oral and literate culture in China. Readers somewhat familiar with their work will see their influence seeping through onto the pages.

However, once the stage is set, and we have entered Snowflower's and Lily's (the two main characters of this novel) world through the trials and tribulations of their youth, the story that develops is indeed of such an aching beauty (and the word "aching" could not be used more accurate than in the context of this book), that for the first time since my childhood days, when I wept over a cartoon version of the "Illias" of Homer everytime I reached the page where the hero Achilles died, I shed some tears again over a book.

I will not go into the details of the story, suffice it to say that it is one of the most gripping lovestories -whereby the word "love" here has to be understood in a very broad sense- I have read in the past years and I would recommend the book to anyone with the faintest interest in China and it's women.

Once I had finished the book, I was thinking of director Xie Jin (whom I had the honour of working with during my student days in Shanghai on his "The last Aristocrats", though my part didn't survive the editor's cut :-)) as the director of choice to bring this story to the screen. Those among you who have seen his "Stage Sisters" (1964) and "Hibiscus Town" (1986), will know how he can mould these very complicated chinese interhuman relations into movies that stick to the memory of the audience. This story would be worthy of this great director's capabilities.

What I think is remarkable about the story is the quite extraordinary perspective it throws on the role of the women in this microcosmic part of the vast multicolored Chinese society (the main characters are in fact not Han Chinese, but originally of Yao descent). Lisa See, when drawing up the story, understood perfectly well what Dorothy Ko had already pointed out in "Every Step a Lotus; Shoes for Bound Feet":

"Boys and girls were often equally loved, but forces larger than human emotions dictated that boys were valued more. .."

The women may have been subordinate to men, but the efforts the parents of Lily are bestowing on her laotong relationship with Snowflower are quite tremendous, in view of the fact that she is after all only a girl. And in fact See is describing a process that seriously runs counter the common belief that girls were / are (?) unwanted for economic reasons. That standard reality is further described by Dorothy Ko as follows:

The intent was not so much to discriminate against women, as it is often taken to be, but to prevent family assets from falling into the hands of the families of the sons' wives. Unlike our society in which individuals own their houses and cars, in traditional China, strictly speaking, it was the family as a whole--not the sons--that owned houses and land, if any. The wealthiest families thus functioned more as a corporation jealously guarding its assets from hostile takeovers by its marital relatives.
(Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet [Toronto: The Bata Shoe Museum; distributed by the University of California Press, 2001], p. 50)

But in "Snowflower", it is not the male line (Lily's brothers) that brings the family of Lily to a certain standard of wealth, but the linking of Lily by way of her laotong relationship to the relative wealthy family of Snowflower (or so they assume, at least) and the fact that her almost perfect "three-inch golden lotus feet" allow to marry her out to a husband that is higher up on the societal ladder. Though I assume this kind of situation is not in any way to be taken as mainstream, it is an interesting reversal of the angle from which we are normally lead to look at Chinese society.

The last thing I want to mention is the beauty of the imagery of the fan. The nüshu women indeed used to incorporate their writings in their embroideries as well as on fans, among others. Lily and Snowflower's laotong relationship starts with one written verse on the first fold of a fan and through the years their relation lasts, all space gets filled up. So when the narrator (Lily, aged over eighty, a widow -a so-called weiwangren 未亡人, "one who hasn't died yet") ponders over her past, she sees from the fan her entire life, with all the happy and the painful memories, literally un-folding.

Don't hesitate, go and read the book. Even in Shanghai, I found it prominently available in bookstores in English and Chinese.

The times they are a changin' ... or are they ?

Cold sweat, shaky hands, brains going in overdrive ... examination season is coming up again in China !! From June 7 to 9, millions of youngsters will again be faced with what could very well be a turning point in their lives: being admitted to university or being turned down. The impact on their further lives could be enormous and so the already well-to-do families leave no means unexploited to make life of their siblings during this period as comfortable as possible:

With the college entrance examination approaching, local high school graduates and their families have started booking hotel rooms, maids, and appointments with psychologists to help prepare for the important test.

Hotels and guest houses say business has been booming in recent days.

The Shizeyuan Hotel, a three-star hotel in Yangpu District, set aside two floors of more than 20 rooms for students to review lessons during the exam period from June 7 to 9.

More than 95 percent of the rooms have been booked by yesterday. The earliest reservation came at the beginning of May - more than a month before the exam date, hotel staff said.

The Tianping Hotel near Shanghai Jiao Tong University says it has only two or three rooms left for June 7, a common situation at this time of year. Most of the guests are students who are going to sit the exam at schools nearby, according to the hotel's manager surnamed Li.

Taking in consideration the focus and importance that is attached to these examinations, it seems almost like a rite of passage for China's educated youths and I wonder why it is said that the imperial examination system was abolished in China at the end of the Qing.

Theoretically, any male adult in China, regardless of his wealth or social status, could become a high-ranking government official by passing the test, although under some dynasties members of the merchant class were excluded. In reality, since the process of studying for the examination tended to be time-consuming and costly (private tutors had to be hired), most of the candidates came from the numerically small but relatively wealthy land-owning gentry. However, there are numerous examples in Chinese history in which individuals moved from a low social status to political prominence through success in imperial examination. Under some dynasties the imperial examinations were abolished and official posts were simply sold, which increased corruption and reduced morale.

Does this sound so much different from the examinations as we have them today (apart from the gender democratization) ? And as for the corruption, also here ... nil novi sub sole:

A team of monitors will be searching for key words related to the national college entrance exam around the clock starting today to ensure questions aren't leaked online ahead of the test on June 7 to 9, officials with the Shanghai Educational Examination Authority said.

Officials said they believe they will be able to spot any question leaked online within one hour, and have the information pulled off the Web within two hours, but won't go into details about the technology they are using.

To prevent any questions from leaking ahead of time, all of the teachers who helped draft the exam paper are being held away from their family and friends until students are finished writing the test.

So all era's and times may have their own set of customs and specifics, but often at the bottom the basics are very similar.

Vacancy in the Church: Chief Marketing Officer

Read the book. Seen the movie. Been there, done that ... and with me, according to this Wikipedia article, another 60.5 million readers and who knows how many viewers. And counting, of course. 44 translations were made of the original, which, I think is fair to say, should have more than half of the literate world population covered, and I think I'm being conservative here.
Undoubtedly like so many others before me, in the past few days I have been chewing on the question what drives tens of millions of people to go and ... read a book ?! Weren't we in the age, where paper's major role is to collect dust ? Apparently not just yet. So what is it, that triggered off this tsunami of bibliophilia (if bibliophilia, in any way, could be defined by sheer numbers) ?
I barred out some possibilities for myself:

1. It can't be the literary qualities, because (remember: been there ...) in my opinion they are rather poor. I don't believe Dan Brown is in the running for any great literary award, although, to be quite frankly, that is also not what I am looking for foremost in a mystery novel myself. Although if any of you have read Wilkie Collins "The Woman in White", you know it is possible, and in the realm of religious detectives, Browns' bestseller is no match for Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose".
2. I figured, it also can't be because millions of people currently got interested in what really was decided at the Council of Nicaea or wanted to catch up on their knowledge of the relation between Jezus and the Merovingian kings.
3. I could accept that, where the words Opus Dei and Knights Templar fall, some people may suddenly experience a bout of what I would call heightened interest, but for a lot of others they may not even ring the tiniest bell.

So shall we give full credit for this outrageous succes to a plotline, that I would rank as a 10 on the scale of Richter, "pageturner"-wise, that is ? Sure thing, but there are more pageturners out there that will never ever get even 0.1 % of the 182 million results that Google spews out when you search for "The Da Vinci Code". For me there has to be more.

Then is it the Holy Grail, that like the monster of Loch Ness, is bound to come and knock from time to time on our door, in the way urban legends tend to resurface again and again through the ages ? Getting closer, I would say, in view of the fact that the Holy Grail takes on some more inspiring form than a simple winecup. The fact that it is a woman, Mary Magdalene, that gets the story going and that, like Empress Dowager Cixi, she continues to govern the story like from behind a curtain, in my opinion is part of the appeal. The gist however lays in the fact that she is "casted" as Jesus' wife, mother of his child and heiress to his intellectual legacy.

Allow me at this point to steer clear from all debate on historical accuracy, theological correctness and badly researched blasphemy. Because, what do we get in "The Da Vinci Code" ? He/she who wishes to believe in it, is here presented with a Jesus that is as human as it gets, who is as much like us as we may ever hope him to be: married to a loving wife and father of a child (well, unborn still by the time he died, according to the book). What I believe is happening is that a lot of people are thirsting for a more elaborate spiritual life, but are confused by an icon that walks on water, turns water into wine, has a "father" that basically kills him to set humanity free (I feel no ordinary person really has a clue how to interpret that process) and who by his death freed us from the "original sin", whatever we have to understand from that. Though we may admire what he did, I at least never had the feeling that Jesus was one of our league. Pondering on this issue, I had to think of the Joan Osbourne song "What if God was one of us?" from a couple of years ago.

Indeed, what if ... and this more or less is what we get in this book: the Christ from the Bible becomes the nextdoor Jesus and we may be tempted to believe that what he did, we may be able to do. Are we rewriting history in this way ? Very presumably we do, but it is being done all the time and I for one am not yet convinced that all what is written there by Dan Brown is entirely a hoax and utter nonsense.

I may be way out of line and is the success of the book really and truly and only it's captivating plot, but the 60 million figure keeps spooking through my mind and it keeps saying there is something more out there in the form of an explanation.

Anyway, where does the Church stands in the controversy ? Right where we expect them: on the opposing side, of course. For all the fuzz they have made and are still making, they should have realized at least that the more fuzz there is, the more people will want to know what the fuzz is about. Been there, seen that.
But is the Church not loosing out on an enormous opportunity here to get large numbers of people listening again to what the faith is about ? A momentum has been created from the brain from one author and it resounds in all corners of the world. People are discussing religious affairs in cars, in bars and ... well, euhh ... on the streets.
A positive attitude could have given some direction to that willingness to get in a conversation, but alas ... we have been knocked over with scientific and theological exposes on the mainstream character of the decidedly feminine pictorial representation of Jesus' disciple John among Da Vinci's peers at the time and how only the canonical gospels can be relied upon by a true believer to find the way to God ...

Can we maybe change the tune ? Is somebody listening ... at all ?

Faces from Tibet

YAMA 8
LHASA, TIBET

Yama came with her parents and three sisters on a 6 week pilgrimage to the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa from the province of Kham. “Yama helped carry our 10 month old daughter much of the way.” Her father said. “We noticed very early that she was born with the true spirit of wanting to help others.”
(taken from "Phil Borges: people of indigenous cultures")

If ever there was sheer beauty captured in human's face, these pictures are as good as it gets. Go quickly over to this site. I hope there is more to follow with the new website under construction

It's the money, stupid !

If this doesn't create an outrage in China, then I wonder what happened to human dignity. And at least in this instance, the China Daily also seems to get the priorities right.

More than 200 people in camouflage gear demolished a school of disabled and mentally retarded children and beat students who attempted to block the demolition, media reported yesterday.

A Beijing court ordered the school to move out last September because it had no right to use the land on which the school was built. A private company that recently leased the land began sending demolition crews to the Zhiguang Special Education School last Friday.

As of Monday, only several buildings were left untouched. About 70 students and teachers were forced to stay in five dorm rooms at the school in Changping District, reported The Beijing News. Another 30 children returned to their homes in the capital city.

I can perfectly live with a court order stating that the school should never have been built, if that is according to the rule of law of the country.
I can perfectly live with a company claiming it's right to the site, if that is it's lawful property.

And there it stops !

Because after that, you have children, disabled and retarded children as a matter of fact, victims in every possible way of the word you can imagine. Then to hire a gang of 200 thugs to go and demolish the only safeheaven this children may have gotten in their life, just because the land on which the school sits must be turned to profit (let me guess, would it be another skyscraper or another factory ?), is just beyond words.

What about sitting down with all parties involved, how about discussing relocation scenario's for the school, what about leaving the school where it sits and seek for compensation for the company ... what about a spark of humanity in the debate ?!!!

No, none of that. Some guy, in some office, decides that there is no time left to discuss and that he can't be hampered with the fate of a couple of kids that life itself didn't treat mercifully, so the school will have to be demolished, if not by free will, then with violence. And down it goes.

So what's next, I wonder ? How far can you push the buttons of chinese society before it reacts ? Is chinese society WILLING to react to injustices that don't have to do with personal loss or gain, in other words, is there still enough altruism left to fight acts that debase mankind ? I'll be watching.

As for the guy, the woman or whoever issued the command to demolish the school: I hope that next time he or she enjoys some time off on the golfcourt, somebody takes good aim and slaps the ball, real hard, and that there is enough altruism left then to take him/her to a hospital.

A name to remember: Yu Kongjian

I come from a country where the notion "urban design" was flushed down the gutter long time ago. But situation being as it is, our architecture has never been dull (I am herewith not even referring to the big amount of historical buildings spread over the country). You are bound to run into some surprise rounding every corner, laughable a lot of times, but very effective in avoiding our living surrounding to become dull.

Though Chinese architecture has a lot to offer, most of the cities are as dull as they could be. Each has it's highlights, some surpass the average, some overwhelm, but it's the exceptions that confirm the rule. So here is an excerpt I found that basically states what is wrong with chinese cities and where it originates:

"... The country had a long tradition of private gardens cultivated by gentry, and more recently of austere Stalinist-style parks designed to project state authority. But he felt the country needed more. "Landscape architects can't just be garden artists," says Yu. So, in 1998, he founded Turenscape, China's first private landscape-design firm, and set about finding places like Zhongshan where officials were willing to try something different.

Turen is an odd name for a Chinese company. Ren means person, but tu is more complicated. Literally the word translates as "earth" or "soil," but it's often used as a slur, a put-down for anything that is backward or unsophisticated—the manners of a migrant worker, bad teeth, cloth shoes. When Yu's colleagues answer the phone, "Turen," it sounds like they're calling themselves bumpkins. Yu himself remembers being called tu when he arrived in Beijing from a rice farm in Zhejiang to enroll at the Beijing University of Forestry in 1980. He was 17, could barely speak Mandarin and was awestruck by the straightness of the city's poplar-lined roads. This "farmerist outlook," as Yu describes his own first impressions of Beijing, is the reason Chinese cities look the way they do: "We're a country of farmers. When we make it to the city we want to feel as far away from the land as possible. We hate weeds. We want to look up at tall buildings. We shun nature." To be truly urban, Yu says, China needs a new attitude toward tu."

Read the whole article on this remarkable guy over here.

I think all agrarian societies are going through the same process when they turn more urbanized, but Yu Kongjian's point clearly is that if Chinese cities want to become really innovative, it needs to come to grasps with it's roots. Yu is not pleading on an architectural level, he is attacking a mentality, a mentality that tries to shed it's roots and disguise into something it is not. Only when 土 will mean "earth" again and none of it's degrading variants, will there be place for a real healthy and sustainable urban development

I would say it's a fairly refreshing look that is being expressed here, refreshing for China at least, and it gives hope that one day we will not be seeing endless streets lined with white-tiled buildings with blue windows.

Image-ine

Richard over at "The Peking Duck" is paying tribute to the "Tank Man" , the single individual that went to stand in front of a row of tanks on June 5th, after the Chinese army had swept Tiananmen square clean of the thousands of students and supporters that had been camping out there for months. The footage of that man, forcing the tank to veer sideways in it's attempt to continue it's route, is engraved in our common memory as an icon of the opposed trying to resist the oppressor and in this way may have changed the way China will behave were it to encounter the same situation again.

I would like to quote also here the first paragraph of the article from Pico Iyer Richard refers to in his thread, with respect to Tank Man:

"Almost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world's living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square - June 5, 1989 - may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined."

Reading this paragraph, I was reminded instantly of that other individual that, purely by the fact of having been captured on photograph in another such moment of extreme drama, may have changed also to a certain extent the way people perceive war and it's atrocities. I'm talking about that girl of which also nobody knew who she was, the girl that ran towards the camera, screaming from the napalm burning her naked body, the girl that was caught in the lens of Nick Ut, reporter for Associated Press in Vietnam, the girl that from the moment the reporter snapped the world-famous shot started to change the way people thought about the Vietnam war. I'm talking about Phan Thi Kim Phuc, then age nine, living in Trang Bang when a South-Vietnamese fighter plane mistook her and her peers for the enemy and fired off.

Both are images that had the power to knock the world a conscience, both images were the sting in the skin of those who wanted to keep the truth hidden. They have become a forceful accusation of the wrongs of this world, although they are "just" images, but maybe in the end they are our best argument to show that real power does not necessarily come from the barrel of a gun. Just image-ine !

One place less to go

Yangshuo. Almost 20 years ago that I went there for the first time, and what a place it was ...

Lining the Li River in China's Guangxi province, the village was on a 2 hours ride from Guilin's main bus station. Sitting in the majestic countryside with it's typical karst formations, it's one of the most breathtaking sceneries one was likely ever to watch in China. Watched over by Moon hill, the cormorant fishermen would light their lamps at night and send their birds off into the water. You could make magnificent bicycle rides towards the neighbouring villages. Yet this was not the mainstream village you were prone to come across in any part of the vast Chinese countryside. First thing that caught my eye getting down the bus was this sign advertising dorm beds for 10 Renminbi a night in the ... Hilton Hotel. The next morning you could then take your pick of "80 kinds of Western breakfast" in the Charlie Chaplin bar, and the best part of it was that neither was a hoax. You could indeed sleep dirt cheap and have excellent food, while still not having the feeling you were caught in a tourist trap. It was not exactly off the beaten track anymore already back then in 1988, but it was as pleasant as it got in China.

I get very worried however when I read this article from the China Daily.

Musical Dedicated to tourism paradise - Yangshuo West Street

"A long-awaited musical with distinctive ethnic features has finally been presented. After two years of persistent hard work, Yangshuo West Street made its debut in Nanning Theatre of Southwest China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region on September 10, and will continue for 30 performances in Nanning before it will move to Guilin for long-term commercial performances.

With a beautiful story, strong cast, and marketing operations, the program highlights the performing stage of a region known for its signature ethnic flavor. The work is bound to impress the audience with its brand-new notions, visual effects, and artistic brilliance."

Will somebody please wake me up and tell me it's just a dream?

"With a beautiful story, strong cast, and marketing operations" ???!!
"Bound to impress the audience with it's brand-new notions" ???!!

Sure those are the things I am looking for first thing whenever I go to see a play or a musical. I love to engage in discussions on the poor "marketing operations" that can be found in Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" ... so bad to keep people waiting.

All joking aside, clearly as is that this is a marketing vehicle to draw even more tourists to this little enchanting village, one would wonder why the hell they needed it ? The people in Yangshuo, gifted with the entrepreneural spirit common to masses of Chinese, were their own best marketeers. But getting at this point, I find myself always confronted with the question what does it do to the locals ? How does it affect their lives and is it able to pull them out of poverty, of which, to be sure, I saw a fair deal in those days around Yangshuo. Or is the big money going into other pockets and do the real aborigines get moved out to other places ? What if the answer is affirmative ? We, who can afford to be travelling around, may in the end be finding ourselves pondering the choice whether we go to Disneyland A or Disneyworld B today, but at least it will have benefitted a lot of people. Worse is , what if the answer is no ? How about what the world is loosing in places like Yangshuo, getting trampled by mass tourism / consumerism ? Another example of the same sort that comes to mind are the Mosuo, the people from Lake Lugu and their matrilinear traditions (not matriarchal, as is often mistakenly stated). Are they in the end off for the better of the worse ?

Whenever I face the question, I admit I don't know the answer.

A thing of beauty

I love them, these papercuts, because they are so down-to-earth, requiring only a piece of paper, a pair of scissors and two nimble hands. Yet, in their fragility and in the themes they treat, they reach for the sublime. They are rooted in the earth that is tilled by the folk artists and farmers that make them, but they transcend everyday reality and bring to life a total different universe.

The above papercut is attributed to Zhu Manhua, a 60-year old female folk artist from Shandong province, who has practically devoted her life to the art of papercuts.

The computer "artwork" is mine.

Memoirs of a Geisha - more musings

Isn't it strange how a work of art, like a movie, is able to stir up such emotions that people would be actually prepared to go to war over it ? Thinking of it, that is in fact where my country's fight for independence began: after the performance of an opera which inspired my countrymen to rebel against the then ruling king.

But going back to the "Memoirs ...", what is there to fight about ? As I explained in my previous post, the Chinese have all reason to be proud, for the outside world now also seems to acknowledge that apart from their economic feats, China is ready to also contribute in the cultural domain again. Somebody put it back on the map and for sure, China is now here to stay.

I'd rather understand the Japanese, feeling "infuriated" over the fact that their heritage is being incorporated on the big screen by Chinese, but then again we run into the question "why ?". This interesting article maybe lifts a tip of the veil:

Take the mobile telephone industry, an area in which gadget-crazy Japan is hard to beat. Yet you cannot use the vast majority of the phones or their functions overseas. The real story behind the Memoirs of a Geisha ruckus is that corporate Japan needs to think globally.

Could it be that Japan, although exporting masses of consumer goods overseas, is enclosing itself within the shores by which it is surrounded, like for centuries the Chinese were closed off from the rest of the world by the great wall? I'm not familiar enough with Japan to either confirm or refute this statement, but I have the feeling that a common Westerner will not be able to come up with many more contemporary Japanese names than maybe Koizumi. I have the feeling that Japan is all too willing to export the "hardware", but is confining the "software" to itself. Maybe they are right to not rush head-over-heels into the globalization game, for we are not sure yet whether in the end it will be sustainable (although the other options have practically been reduced to nil) . I feel more comfortable with somebody who is not patting me on the shoulder two seconds after we've met, but on another level, it doesn't make you look sympathetic if you don't and as we all know ... it's all in the perception. And I think Japan is to a certain extent paying the toll for that. So I believe they have some more introspection to do in order to come to a conclusion on where they want to go, whether they will allow their heritage occasionally to be hijacked by third parties and then remain silent about it, or switch gears and ramp up their PR army.

Looking at it from another angle, though China has currently (and has had in the past) a circle of very talented directors, it is in my opinion nowhere near yet of equalling the movie-legacy that Japan has left to the world to admire. Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Oshima, Imamura , Kinoshita and many others have created a corpus of masterpieces that very few other countries can claim, so Japan likewise has every reason to be proud. As audiences worldwide watch these movies, it is mostly not the warhungry, cruel nation of Worldwar II it gets to see, but individuals striving for humanism in their existence, struggling with it definitely, Kafkaian at worst, but always with respect for their condition.
But recently I read an interview with Donald Richie, the old Japan-hand with more than forty titles on the country and it's culture behind his name, in which he was relating of more and more being drawn into the somewhat paradoxical position of having to explain to japanese youngsters what for instance the characters in Naruse's movies were saying and why they did what they do. After all, Richie is the foreigner but it is becoming everyday more clear to him that the new japanese generations are loosing touch with their rich cultural history, and THAT is why there will be more Gong Li's and Zhang Ziyi's playing japanese roles in the future. Japan is facing some tough choices, but so (and I would say: even more so) is China.

Memoirs of a Geisha

Last week I went to see the movie "Memoirs of a Geisha", to see what the buzz and fuzz in China and Japan was all about, apart from the fact that the life in Yoshiwara has always been a topic of interest to me. The mix of raw erotics with a high level of refinement and an art scene going from Kabuki performances to the magnificent ukiyo-e prints, is something I couldn't locate in any other country. So throw the word geisha at me and you're sure to have my attention :-)

But this movie has gone far beyond the borders of pure entertainment, due to the fact that it's an American movie with Chinese actresses (Gong Li & Zhang Ziyi) playing the roles of Japanese geisha's. Nowadays, put those two countries together in one sentence and one is bound to bump into an avalanche of links on the Rape of Nanjing, ramblings on Yasukuni shrine etc...

I found this to be an interesting article that pertains to the subject, as the anti-japanese sentiments in China seem to have given rise to a class of youths that get denominated as "fenqing". I will not elaborate on what I consider to be historic stupidity, but I find it so sad that at the time when China can start to harvest the fruit of it's rising international status, a bunch (well, it's more than just that ...) of hotheaded youths is spoiling the party.

Because what are the facts: Hollywood, the Mekka of the film-producing industry (whether one likes that or not), is engaging two of China's hottest actresses to perform the roles of Japanese women. Why would Hollywood not choose Japanese actresses to play those roles ? In my opinion simply because there are none at this moment that can compare to Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi in international acclaim and why is that? Blame it on the "Fifth Generation" of Chinese directors, the Chen Kaige's, the Zhang Yimou's and the Tian Zhuangzhuangs of this world, that in just one decade have managed to pull the Chinese movie-industry from the swamp where it was slowly dying onto centerstage worldwide. No ambassador China has ever had, would be able to do what these guys have done for the image of China outside it's borders. In the wake of their movies, Gong Li has risen to well-earned stardom and paved the way for others to follow her steps. That is why they are chosen for this movie on a particular part of Japanese society and by taking on the roles, they are making a powerful statement that acting is what has brought them where they are, not politics.

The funny, or rather sad, thing about this all is that the Fifth Generation sweep, as I would like to call it, is for a great deal rooted in the "zhiqing" experience of many of those directors. No other movie will make this point so clear as Kaige's "King of the Children" (Haizi Wang). They are part of what was to be a lost generation of urban youth sent down to the countryside to learn from the masses during China's Cultural Revolution. It's proven to be a most painful experience for most parties, and their way back to "civilised" society was mostly filled with more hardship. But then there is this group in the eighties, emerging from the swamp and chaos of the past period like a waterlily grows from the muddy ground in a dirty pond, basically telling what they had seen and experienced in their "zhiqing"days, but doing it with such a technical mastering that it didn't take long before they had the worlds attention. They've seen some bad things in their time, but they've moulded it into something dignified.

So what about these "fenqing"? Compared to their parents, they have all they can ever dream of, they haven't had to live through the atrocities of the war, there is no Japanese that has ever harmed them personally, so what's the point ??!! Oh, I know, history is transferred through several generations and you can't wipe out the pain and wounds of the victims in one generation. So the rage at what happened in the past being still there is something I can still understand to a certain extent, the uncontrolled and fairly ridiculous outing of these sentiments is however unworthy of a China only just knocking at the door of the international community. There have been people in the past who have shown how to do it in another way, so the only reaction befitting to the actresses who star in "Memoirs of a geisha" would be one of respect for them and those who initially got them in front of a Chinese camera. All the rest, the hatred and the dirt-throwing, is just a sickening mockery of what could be a great country.

To enter into the light ...

There's this magazine where I live, that every year, around Newyear, invites the people with name and fame in our small country to answer a few questions on their best and worst experiences of the past 12 months and one of the questions deals particularly with what they consider has been the major trend of that period. So you get to see a lot of answers that refer to the political upheavals we've all witnessed, or to the growing -ism's worldwide (nationalism, egocentrism, puritanism ...) with an occasional young mother happily stating the birth of her son or daughter was THE event of the year and she didn't care about all the rest.

This year, I was wondering by myself what I would have answered to that question. The answer became clear to me when I saw an article stating the number of blogs there were around in China: it was up in the millions ! And then I saw Technorati, keeping track of 30 million blogs ! So it became clear to me that one of the major trends going on worldwide is definitely this thing called "blogging". As it is, I think we are probably only just witnessing the beginning of this phenomenon, that in my view is due -or more carefully expressed: potentially has the power- to have a major impact on the decision processes that rule the way this world functions.

Someone has invented free speech and it's a computer tool. Glory Hallelujah ... !!!

It seems like the Genie is out of the bottle, now it's time to find out what kind of a Genie was in there in the first place.

But why, then I wondered, is blogging seemingly such a huge succes ? What's the attraction? While I was pondering the question, it was this song from Patricia Kaas that came to my mind as (maybe only just part) of the answer:

"Entrer dans la lumière,
Comme un insecte fou ..."

(To enter into the light,
like a crazy insect ...)

Isn't that part of why we all do what we do on our blogs? For sure, we don't all belong to the class of the bold and the beautiful that get followed by the spotlight wherever they go, but we all want our five minutes of fame. At some time, we all want to be under the glow of that light shining on just you, to be there up that stage and the audience at your feet, holding it's breath in awe of your every move. So we have come to flock to that biggest stage on earth that has become the World Wide Web, we are attracted to it like the insect at night is attracted by the light. And we perform, we blog about whatever comes to our mind. Some may harvest big rounds of applause, some will have to do with just one shadow sitting in the back of the theatre and walking off without a sound. But at least, we will have been there and we'll know how it felt. The rest is up to each of us.

So, yes, I decided to also start a blog of my own, mostly because I was always better at writing than I was at talking, and maybe now I'm already not much of writer anymore. But at least, now I have a space where I CAN ventilate some of my thoughts, be it about China, movies, my personal self ... I haven't figured out yet where exactly I want to take this blog to, I'm keeping the options open. For now, I'll just spread my tiny little wings and be off ... into the light.