Asian Studies Commons^™

How To Talk To Strangers: Beijing’S Advice, Mary S. Erbaugh

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

US parents warn their children, “Don’t talk to strangers!” But Chinese adults traditionally avoid even superficial greetings to strangers. This preserves a distinction between insiders and outsiders (nei wai you bie) which honors insiders but deflects con artists and unwelcome requests. People remain wary until they know someone’s title, surname, and background through networks of connections (guanxi) with kin, classmates, and colleagues. People do not say “hello” even to neighbors on the street. In stores, restaurants, train stations, taxis, post offices or clinics, customers request service without pleasantries: “Pork chop noodles!,” “To the east bus station!” Good service focuses on …

Painting Over Mao: Notes On The Inauguration Of The Beijing Olympic Games, Geremie R. Barme

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The ancient city of Beijing was literally turned on its head to help achieve the effects of the Olympic opening ceremony on Friday August 8, 2008. Six hundred years ago the city was designed around a north-south axis that runs from the south of the old city through the Forbidden City and on north. Along this axis the spectacles of imperial times would unfold (including the imperial “Tours of the South” or nanxun that were a major feature of the reigns of the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors in the Qing dynasty). Since the 1910s, however, Chang’an Avenue, now a multi-laned …

From The Us To China, By Way Of Israel, Shakhar Rahav

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I have recently returned to my native Israel after a long sojourn in the USA. One of the things I have been looking for here is the way in which China is covered and portrayed in the Israeli media, and what images of China arise in local discourse.

As elsewhere, there is much media coverage of China these days–most of it fed by economic and commercial interests on the one hand, and by interest in the Olympics and the Olympic-hype on the other.

Indeed, most interest in China is generated by commercial interests and as such reflects our globalizing world, …

President Bush Wanders Onto Nbc Set

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

George W. Bush was interviewed live on NBC by Bob Costas just a few hours ago. A short but wide-ranging interview, the President covered China’s human rights record (“America better remain engaged”), China and religion (“once religion takes hold in a society it can’t be stopped”), Georgia (“I was very firm with Vladimir Putin”), Sudan (“Joey Cheek has just got to know that I took the Sudanese message [to the Chinese government] for him”), and doping in sports.

The interview was enormously casual–to Costas’s question if Hu Jintao was “receptive” to Bush’s message on Sudan, Bush responded “It’s hard to …

What Happened To The Women?

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was so magnificently awe-inspiring as to prompt the NBC anchors to declare that, if there were a trophy for the opening ceremonies, then it must be retired. Vancouver and London certainly have their work cut out for them.

Yet as I watched a string of stunning performances of Chinese men—banging on brass drums, doing quasi-qigong dance, executing a shanshui painting with their bodies while dancing on the world’s largest LCD screen, etc., etc., all capped by the 7’6”-tall flag bearer Yao Ming—I wondered, where did China’s 640 million women go? Sure, a 9-year-old …

Big And Small Nation(Alisms): A View From Aotearoa-New Zealand, Paola Voci

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

And so it was. All as expected; all that is indeed the stereotypical China: the long civilization, the characters, the Confucian traditions, the big inventions, the huge number of people, and of course the fireworks. Zhang Yimou copied and pasted it all together so that the audience—both “them” and “us”—could safely enjoy familiar images, saturated with spectacular effects.

And there I was watching it all on TV like billions of others, an Italian “sinologist” turned into a Chinese film and media researcher in the USA, who ultimately landed in New Zealand five years ago to teach about China in Dunedin, …

Building Beijing, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Even before Beijing was awarded the Olympic Games in 2001, the pace of construction in the city was frantic and relentless. A combination of expansive central planning, low interest loans, and a real estate bubble have all contributed to the construction of hundreds of new buildings and massive infrastructure development. Lax regulatory and environmental laws combined with a desire by politicians to make Beijing a “showcase” have enticed dozens of the world’s best architects to experiment with new designs and new materials on a scale not possible in New York, London or Berlin. While some critics bemoan these new designs …

Questioning The Olympic Project: Lessons From Seoul, Sam Goffman

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“You Americans look down on us—you think of us as low-educated and savage. I hope the Olympics can change all that.”

One could be forgiven for thinking the above statement is from contemporary China. In fact, the statement is from a South Korean travel agent, who said it on September 16, 1988, one day before the opening ceremonies of the 1988 Summer Olympics, held in Seoul.[1]

It is striking how many of the expectations regarding what the Olympics will do for China’s status in the world reflect earlier expectations in other East Asian countries that have hosted the Games—Japan in …

Beijing Olympics 2008: The View From Vancouver (Host To Winter 2010 Olympics), David Luesink

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It is interesting to note the similarities between criticisms of Olympic preparation in Vancouver and Beijing. Although the famously beautiful city of Vancouver is still two years away from hosting the winter Olympics in conjunction with the mountain village of Whistler, we are already running into the standard problems and criticisms familiar to Olympic planners of the past few decades. While air quality and the national human rights record are not likely to be the major issues for Vancouver, other themes show up on a regular basis in the local press, including cost overruns, natural disasters, transportation problems, and the …

Contemporary Chinese Journalism: An Interview With Judy Polumbaum, Timothy Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I’ve just finished reading China Ink: The Changing Face of Chinese Journalism by Judy Polumbaum with Xiong Lei. Given the plentiful recent discussion of the Chinese media and censorship during the lead up to the 2008 Olympic games, this book makes for fascinating and very timely reading. It consists of a short introduction by Judy Polumbaum, Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Iowa, and the transcripts of interviews that she and Xiong Lei, who has worked as a reporter in Beijing for twenty-five years, conducted from late 2005 until late 2006 with journalists currently working in …

Beijing’S Olympic Pollution Forecast: "Haze" And Hot Air, Alex Pasternack

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

For an idea of what kind of air athletes and spectators can expect during the Olympics–and what Beijingers can expect for some time to come–the past week has offered telling indications.

Or it hasn’t.

At the start of last week, for the fourth day in a row, emissions made it hard to see down the street, despite the fact the government ordered half the city’s cars off the road and closed factories. Officials said they would implement an emergency contingency plan on top of the existing anti-smog measures if pollution lingers closer to the Games.

Twenty-four hours later, the difference …

Wishful Reporting, Pierre Fuller

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

My tea nearly dropped to the table here in Leicester, England, when I saw The Independent headline. “Beijing 2008 Olympics: Tiananmen orchestra fails to drown out clamour of protests,” it read, conjuring up images of Richard Gere and a chorus of Tibetan monks chanting a hundred violinists off a Tiananmen stage. So, it’d finally come, the wellspring of protest of the regime had burst, I thought. I started to read. An orchestra of 2,008 musicians was flown in from all over the world, I learned, while “foreign and local groups… have been told to give plenty of notice” for permission …

The Olympics Around The World: Japan, James Farrer

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

While the English language press has been reporting that over 100,000 police and 30,000 soldiers have been readied to protect China’s Olympic city, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun has come up with figures a full order of magnitude higher. The August 4, 2008, morning Asahi Shimbun (Tokyo edition) ran a front page feature article reporting that despite claims by the Chinese government that no one has been made to leave the city, nearly 1.4 million migrant workers have been moved out of the city for the Olympics. In turn, the report says, nearly 1.2 million police and 200,000 army personnel have moved …

A Few Olympic Readings

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Just in case you can’t get enough, here are a few more:

1. Geremie Barmé’s excerpt on Wang Shuo on Danwei is a fascinating twist on “sports competitions” and national humiliation.

2. Monroe Price has a recent piece up at the Huffington Post on internet censorship.

3. Check out this charmingly self-reflexive piece by the L.A. Times‘ Ching-Ching Ni on the experience of returning to Beijing and finding the city of her childhood gone.

4. Exhausted by the Olympics already? How can you feel this way when there’s 2016 to think about?

5. Find out “Who’s Your Buddha?” in this …

Class And The Olympics, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Only a short six-hour ride on board the shiny new bullet trains moving at 230km per hour from Beijing, the formerly sleepy port city of Qingdao will be host to the Olympic sailing events for 2008. As a sport with relatively high costs and requiring access to the ocean or at least large lakes, sailing is not a popular sport in China but is emerging as a favorite of the newly rich. In Qingdao and Beijing the influence of class has fundamentally affected government planning and China’s Olympic development. Rather than bring investment and tourism into poor or less developed …

China Overload

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

What’s that, you ask? We couldn’t tell you. We can’t get enough of the China coverage splattered across magazine covers and op-ed pages. A lot of the stuff is for subscribers only, so we won’t be directing you to recent China pieces in Harper’s and elsewhere. Here are some links to the free pieces, found on the pages of the usual suspects as well as some unusual ones:

1. Here’s an unusual one: Architectural Digest has a series of stories on contemporary decor and architecture in China, including a photo spread of a “villa” outside Chengdu, a slideshow of 19th …

Terracotta Ambassadors, The First Emperor, And The “Cursed” Farmers, Xia Shi

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

About twenty terracotta figures are currently on display at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, California in an exhibit scheduled from May 18 through October 12. Later, the exhibit, including statues of ten warriors, court officials, an acrobat, a bare-chested strongman, musicians, a stable boy, chariot horses and bronze water birds, will make stops in Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, D.C. It is said that this exhibit not only includes pieces of the highest quality, but is also the largest collection of the figures ever to leave China.

“As China gears up for the 2008 Olympics, it’s a …

Nobody (?) Likes A Spoiler, Miri Kim

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

On July 31st, SBS, a major South Korean broadcast network, aired a short clipshowing details of the carefully guarded rehearsals for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics (the video clip has now been removed from all major news and video sites). As the news (and the clip) spread on the web, Chinese and Korean news, portal sites, and users on blogs and message boards expressed, to put it mildly, consternation. On popular Chinese portals like sina.com and 163.com, polls show that a large percentage of the respondents support revoking the offending station’s broadcasting privileges, or investigating who bore …

Chinese In Cambodia, Caroline Finlay

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Foreigners travelling to Phnom Penh in the mid 19th century didn’t find a sleepy Khmer fishing town. Instead, they happened upon thousands of bustling Cantonese traders. Their legacy in the Sino-Khmer population continues as these long settled immigrants dominate the oil and tourism industries and own countless shop fronts in Cambodia’s cities, while newly arrived mainland Chinese invest in garment production and construction.

In the 1800s, French colonials allowed Chinese-run businesses to flourish. William Willmott, a mid-century expert on Chinese communities, claimed the ethnic Chinese controlled 92 percent of Cambodian commerce in the mid 1900s. They traded in urban areas …

Faq#7: Why Were Chinese People So Angry About The Attempts To Seize The Torch In The International Torch Relay?, Susan Brownell

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I have just returned from five days in the earthquake disaster zone in Sichuan province, where I was a member of the “People’s Olympic Education Promotion Team” that visited Deyang city to conduct “Youth Olympic Games Re-enactments” at six local primary and secondary schools. There I realized that for the people we encountered, The Torch is a sacred object. I call it The Torch because that is what they called it – 火炬 – as if there were only one, and no further adjectives were necessary.

The project expressed the mission of Donnie Pei, a professor at the Capital Institute …

Smoke And Mirrors: China And India

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

After reading a short excerpt from Pallavi Aiyar‘s new book, Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China, at Danwei.org, we wanted to ask her a few questions about her experience as a journalist and writer working in China (Danwei has also postedan interview with Aiyar, asking for her insights on the relationship of and comparisons between China and India; and additional reviews of the book have been posted at the WSJ China Blog and The International Herald Tribune). Here are her answers to our questions, followed by a short excerpt from the book.Smoke and Mirrors can be purchased at this …

China Beat Contributors Around The Web

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

1. Jeff Wasserstrom was recently interviewed about the Shanghai NIMBY protests for a Danish newspaper.

2. For visitors heading to the Olympics, Wasserstrom also recently published a few suggestions at Outlook India for a Beijing itinerary for “culturally-minded tourists.”

3. Contributor Richard Kraus was referenced recently in a New Yorker article on the classical music scene in China.

4. Pankaj Mishra (oft-referenced in these pages) published a short piece a few weeks ago in The Guardian on inter-war travel writing. Mishra mentions off-hand that, in contrast to the quickly seen and sketched travel writing of the 1930s, “the best non-fiction …

Susan Brownell Around The World

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

China Beat contributor Susan Brownell is showing up all over the web these days, as her special knowledge on Olympic and Chinese sports history is in high demand. Here is a list of some of her recent media appearances:

1. On PRI’s “The World,” Brownell talks about some of the differences between Western and Chinese notions of body and sports; the report also includes a short excerpt from Jonathan Spence’s Reith Lecture “The Body Beautiful,” which Xu Guoqi blogged about at China Beat earlier this month.

2. Brownell has also been cited in several NPR reports, including these two by …

Securing The Olympics, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

More than any state-of-the-art sports complex or amazing athletic performance, many visitors will remember the Beijing Olympics as the world’s largest security event. In an effort to squelch any sort of protest or more serious terrorist act the government has instituted strict new rules and enforced many existing but hitherto disregarded laws. Estimates of total security personnel range from 250,000 to 500,000, depending on the criteria, but visitors should be either alarmed or comforted to know their every action is monitored and scrutinized.

The epicenter for Olympic security is Tiananmen Square. Since 1989 and even more so since the Falun …

A Defense Of Jiang Rong’S Wolf Totem, Timothy Weston

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

I have a confession to make: I was moved by Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, think it’s an important novel and that it’s well worth reading. The reason I say I feel a need to “confess” as opposed to just being able to state this is because recent postingson The China Beat, as well as some of the reviews referenced in those postings, attack the book with a sharpness and thoroughgoingness that initially made me question my own taste and to think that I was politically incorrect for liking and being impressed by the novel as I read it. But after …

What We’Re Reading Today

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

There are a few themes we’ve been tracking lately at China Beat, including growing Chinese nationalism, middle class protest, and India-China comparisons. Here are a few stories we’ve noticed around the web this week that address some of these issues:

1. For a thoughtful take on the fenqing phenomenon, check out Evan Osnos’s recent New Yorker piece, “Angry Youth: The New Generation’s Neocon Nationalists.”

2. Financial Times ran a recent piece on the efforts to stop construction of a nuclear power station in Rushan (southeast of Beijing)–see “China Pressure Groups Learn to Tread Carefully.”

3. Earlier this week, Danwei.org ran …

Rocking Beijing, Eric Setzekorn

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

Like almost every aspect of Beijing life in the past five years, the live music scene has undergone rapid but uneven development. Beijing has always prided itself on the gritty originality of its live music compared to the dominance of cover bands in Shanghai or the saccharine Canto-pop of Hong Kong. The recent opening of new, modern venues on both sides of the city has allowed dozens of new bands and a newly affluent urban youth to establish a flourishing but still shallow live music scene.

For live music, particularly rock and hip hop music, the Olympics are bringing challenges …

Beijing’S New Flame, Rob Gifford

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

The essence of Beijing has always been found in its buildings. The city has no major river, no coastline. There are some hills to the west and the north, with the Great Wall stretched across them, but there is none of the geographic razzle-dazzle that created towns like Hong Kong or San Francisco or Sydney or Istanbul. As the historian Arnold Toynbee noted when he visited in the 1930s, Beijing as a city owes little to nature and everything to art.

The art of which Toynbee wrote was contained within the ancient walls of the Forbidden City, where the emperor …

Faq #6: Are The Beijing Olympic Games Being Used As A Propaganda Campaign To Prop Up The Communist Party?

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

“Olympic education” is the IOC’s label for the educational efforts that are supposed to be an integral part of the Olympic Movement as required by Fundamental Principle #1 of the Olympic Charter, which states that Olympism is a philosophy of life that blends sport with culture and education. Since 2005 Chinahas been carrying out the largest-scale “Olympic education” campaign in history.There have been academic and professional conferences, textbooks and courses for public schools and universities, educational television and radio shows, magazine and newspaper essays, websites, and more.

In fall of 2007 I was added to the “experts team” of Beijing …

China Around The World: Australia, Rowan Callick

China Beat Blog: Archive 2008-2012

It’s hard for me to compare how Australians and others cover China, in part because we rarely actually meet each other to swap notes, except for the occasional encounter via the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (an admirable organization, but one without formal standing in China because it lacks—for obvious reasons on both sides—the sponsorship of a party or government body) and in part because the whole structure of journalism in China does not bring reporters together frequently, as it does in most other countries.

I sometimes go for weeks without encountering another journalist. For China has few press conferences, …