Hai from Shanghai
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Showing posts tagged New Yorker
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”China has taken the gamble of seeking to make people rich before it has made them free. By the standards of the Enlightenment, that is either an illusion or a cruel con, though a free marketeer might argue that the liberties bestowed by trade and consumption—the strange half-freedom of the television commercial, for example, which enslaves us even as it promises the wealth of the world—are not to be sniffed at, and may, indeed, be what most of us ponder and pursue. (We shouldn’t worry more about the price of gas than about human rights in China, but we do.) As I dined, one day, on a Big Mac in a thunderstorm, seeking and failing to find refuge in a packed McDonald’s beside the Olympic Green subway station, I heard the Olympic theme song, playing on a tape loop inside, and watched a Chinese teen-ager in the doorway. She sucked on her milkshake and then sang along, swaying; she was, at once, everything that the capitalist corporation could hope for, and everything that the Communist Party had planned. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke no English; besides, what young person wants to be asked if he or she feels free? What kind of question is that? I thought of the sign I had seen on the first full day of the Games, in the Forbidden City, as I headed back from the cycling. “Hall of Earthly Tranquillity,” it read, and then, at the bottom, in smaller letters, “Made Possible by the American Express Company.” One world. One dream.
The conclusion to Part 2 of the annoyingly brilliant Anthony Lane’s annoyingly brilliant two-part report of the Beijing Olympics in The New Yorker
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”At times, (our guide) marvelled at Europe’s high standard of living—bombarding us with statistics on the price of Bordeaux wines or the average height of a well-fed Dutchman—but, if there was ever a time when Chinese visitors marvelled at Europe’s economy, this was not that time. Li made a great show of acting out a Mediterranean life style: “Wake up slowly, brush teeth, make a cup of espresso, take in the aroma.” The crowd laughed. “With a pace like that, how can their economies keep growing? It’s impossible.” He added, “In this world, only when you have diligent, hardworking people will the nation’s economy grow.
From “The Grand Tour,” Evan Osnos’s wonderful piece about a Chinese tour group’s trip through Europe, from last spring’s New Yorker Travel Issue. The story works on two levels, with deep insights about that Great Inescapable 21st-Century Topic (i.e., the Inevitable Rise of 21st-Century China) woven into a hilarious travelogue (Oh, those wacky Chinese — so different than we…).
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”Zhu said that Chinese interest in Europe contained a deeply personal motivation: “When Europe was ruling the world, China was strong as well. So why did we fall behind? We’ve been thinking about that ever since.” Indeed, the question of why a civilization that had printing six hundred years before Gutenberg slumped in the fifteenth century runs like a central nerve through China’s analysis of its past and its prospects for a return to greatness. Zhu offered an explanation: “Once we were invaded, we didn’t respond quickly enough.” It was a narrative of victimhood and decline that I’d often heard in China. (Historians also tend to blame the stifling effects of bureaucracy and authoritarianism, among other factors.) But Zhu did not trace all of China’s troubles to foreign invaders. “We cast aside our three core ideas—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism—and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978.” He paused and watched his wife and daughter snapping photographs at the railing, an orange sun sinking into the city beyond them. “We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster,” he said.
More from “The Grand Tour”
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”I asked what he knew about Facebook’s being blocked. “It has something to do with politics,” he said, and paused. “But the truth is I don’t really know.” I recognized that kind of remove among other urbane Chinese students. They have unprecedented access to technology and information, but the barriers erected by the state are just large enough to keep many people from bothering to outwit them. The information that filtered through was erratic: Promise could talk to me at length about the latest Sophie Marceau film or the merits of various Swiss race-car drivers, but the news of Facebook’s role in the Arab uprisings had not reached him.
And yet more from “The Grand Tour”
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The Suicide Catcher
The Electric Typewriter recently posted this one. It’s a little too long, but the vivid descriptions of modern-day Nanjing and its world-weary inhabitants make it worth the read.
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”There are two religions in China,” the rabbi said. “One is food. the other is money.” He told a story about a time, a few years back, when he addressed a group of Chinese authorities whose approval he needed in order to continue to working in China. Having been warned by a colleague not to bring up God during his presentations, he explained to his audience that a kosher-certified factory could potentially bring in an extra million dollars a year in revenue. “Their eyes lit up,” he said. “Then one of them asked the big question: ‘What is kosher law based on?’ I asked him if he had ever heard of Atkins diet. I said that Atkins wrote a diet book that’s very popular in the United States. And that, similarly, Moses gave Jews the kosher diet, with rules that are also codified. I said that, from the little I’d read about Confucius, he, too, would have done the same thing. The Chinese all smiled. And they said, ‘Rabbi, even if what you’re doing here is illegal, keep doing it! We’re going to try to get the laws modified so you can do lots of business in China.’
From “Kosher Takeout,” by Patricia Marx, in a January 2009 New Yorker, about mashgihim (kosher inspectors) in China, which is now the fastest-growing exporter of kosher goods on earth
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Five Books on China
The following are all by deeply knowledgeable writers with original observations (rather than a pastiche of the conventional wisdom), and, most unusually, there is not book among them with a dragon on the cover.
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When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail
Just read the “Briefly Noted” review of this one in The New Yorker. Sounds like a good holiday gift for all you/us American ex-pats here.
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”It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it. When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded that “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!
Evan Osnos, The New Yorker’s China correspondent, on gun control and the Newtown massacre
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CYBERDOG
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SHANGHAI’S GANGNAM GRANNIES
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HOW MY ST PATRICK'S DAY ENDED
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Huskies look pretty pumped to be taking part in a training session at Feshiebridge, in Aviemore,...
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WALKING PAST THAT CD HAWKER ON DONGHU LU WHO'S ALWAYS PLAYING 'THE ROSE'
