A Monster Mash(up) with Chinese Characteristics: Breaking News from the PRC for those Intrigued by the "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" Phenomenon

By the end of this post, readers will have been able to click on a word to be introduced to the sounds of "Redgrass Music" (a genre that uses Chinese instruments in a novel manner), seen the special look of a curious vehicle recently displayed in Shanghai that one journalist has said should be called a "Lexiac" ( like a Pontiac from the front, like a Lexus from behind), and discovered something important that Zhang Yimou and Jane Austen have in common (hint: surprise appearances by the undead are involved in each case). First, though, some background about "mash-ups" (aka "mash ups" and "mashups"), for "China Beat" has dealt with this subject before and even run pieces with mash-up-like titles, but never before confronted the phenomenon of contemporary mash-up mania head on.

The first point to stress is that mash-ups are not completely new by any means. Even if the term has a short history, the mixing and matching it suggests has been taking place in China as well as all sorts of other place for ages. Fusion food was already a big thing way back in the twentieth century. (And what were nineteenth-century creations like chop suey and chow mein if not a kind of culinary mash-up avant la lettre?) Artists have been bringing together elements from and playing with juxtapositions of features of different genres and even different media for centuries, even if it is only recently that such efforts have been called "mash-ups," "samplings," or "post-modern" efforts. Turning from cuisine and art to politics, China is one of many countries that has a long experience with approaches to ideology that involve striking juxtapositions of concepts and assumptions, with just two of many examples being the effort by the Taipings (1848-1864) to fuse aspects of Christian eschatology with various kinds of indigenous concepts and the current experiment with "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," which Nicholas Kristoff has dubbed "Market Leninism," a term that captures even more effectively the mash-up-like quality of the approach.

Still, one could certainly argue that, thanks partly to the ease with which new technologies allow for re-mixing and combining, there's something special about the current rage for various kinds of mash-ups. (Even though the literary one currently making news, which features Austen characters battling zombies could have been published before the days of computers; it could just not, as the creator has noted, been published before Pride and Prejudice went out of copyright and entered the public domain.) The mash-up has become so omnipresent that there's not just one entry for the term in Wikipedia, which likes the hyphen-less spelling of this sort of hybridity, but four separate ones, running the gamut from "Mashup (digital)" to "Mashup (web application hybrid)," with "Mashup (music)," aka "bootlegging," and "Mashup (video)," aka having fun with YouTube (a format that has introduced new audiences to such classics that of the genre that pre-date the coining of the M word as "Bambi Meets Godzilla"
and "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"), in between.

This said, I'll invite readers to figure out where exactly they fall on the spectrum that runs from the "there's nothing new under the sun" to "the coming of the web has changed everything" continuum where mix-and-match creations are concerned, and simply make what they will of these 5 mash-ups created within the PRC (the first two of which have ties to the Warcraft family of games, whose popularity in China we've dealt with before on this site, here and here:



1. Pride and Patriotism and Zombies (hat tip to Danwei)...

Not content to wait to see exactly how Zhang Yimou, who choreographed the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Games, handles the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, some Chinese students, who don't seem to have a satirical intent (but I'm not sure how one would know if they did) have come up with this version of that upcoming event (the real thing takes place October 1, 2009), substituting monstrous and mythical characters from Warcraft 3 (like those shown below) for the humans who will actually do the marching that day.

2. One World (of Warcraft), One Dream

In a similar vein, here, from the ChinaSmack site, is a monstrous mash-up, featuring World of Warcraft characters, which has fun with the song that was used to whip up excitement for the Beijing Games (note the original version of the song below it, which has Jackie Chan and other celebrities taking turns with the lyrics).


3. Redgrass Music (hat tip to James Millward of "The World on a String" blog, and Chris Hesselton for alerting me to the good post awaiting me there)...
The music speaks for itself if you click here.

4. Confucian Blues
Staying with music, there's a fascinating video of novelist/vocalist Liu Sola available here, originally broadcast on CCTV, which looks at her writings and includes clips of her on-stage experiments with fusing styles as dissimilar as Chinese Opera and American Blues.

5. Last and Maybe Least, the Lexiac...
Shown here with front and back views, of course...

Jokes from Post-Reform China

Last week, we ran the first part of a series of popular Chinese jokes, translated by Guo Qitao, a UCI history professor. While the earlier jokes were from the Cultural Revolution period, the two jokes presented today are more recent and address issues at the core of the Chinese people's concerns about their nation: responsible governance, inequality, and corruption.

Translated and Glossed by Guo Qitao

江泽民来到天安门城楼上。

江泽民来到天安门城楼上。
往南看，贪官污吏一大片；
往北看，下岗工人八百万；
往东看，走私货轮正靠岸；
往西看，百姓全是穷光蛋；
往下看，法轮功还在转；
往上看，美国导弹到处窜；
往后看，接班人挤向前；
往前看，问毛主席怎么办？
毛主席说：你下来躺着，我起来干。

Jiang Zemin mounted the gate at Tiananmen Square to survey the scene.[1]
Looking south, he saw a sea of grubby officials all on the take;
Looking north, eight million workers with no money to make.[2]
To the east, ships of smuggled goods were coming into port;
To the west, the unwashed masses all left with no support.[3]
Looking down, Falungong was still doing its thing;[4]
Looking up, American missiles were plummeting.[5]
Behind him would-be successors were vying to be Number One;
In front lay the late Chairman Mao and so he asked: “what‘s to be done?”[6]
The Chairman said: “you lie down in my place, and let me have another run.”

--Anonymous, circa late 1999-2000

[1] Jiang Zemin served as Secretary General of the Communist Party of China from 1989-2002, as President of the People’s Republic of China from 1993-2003, and as Chairman of the Central Military Commission from 1989-2004. These positions made him the preeminent political leader in China from 1989 until his retirement.
[2] Northeast China has been home to much of China’s state-run heavy industry; since the 1990s, workers at these state-run factories have been laid off in droves.
[3] The fruits of China’s economic “take-off” have not been distributed equally; while wealth in cities along the eastern seaboard has burgeoned, China’s largely rural interior regions in the west have remained poor.
[4] Falungong (lit., “Dharma Wheel Practice”) is the name of an outlawed but popular breath-control and exercise cult. In April 1999, practitioners of Falungong staged a silent protest outside the central government compound in Beijing.
[5] This is surely a reference to the U.S.-NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999.
[6] The mausoleum to Chairman Mao, housing his preserved body, is situated in the center of Tiananmen Square, directly south of Tiananmen Gate.


The Rookie Cop

A young man gets hired as a local policeman. He is issued his new uniform, and to celebrate his new job, he decides to take in a movie.

He goes to the movie theater and stands in line to buy a ticket. When he gets to the ticket window, the woman selling tickets takes one look at him and says, “Oh, you must be the new policeman for this area.”

Pleasantly surprised at being recognized, the new policeman asks, “How did you know?”

The ticket seller says, “Only a rookie cop would stand in line to buy a movie ticket. The seasoned ones just walk right up to the front of the line.”

The policeman nods in understanding and enters the theater. When he hands his ticket to the ticket taker, the ticket taker says: “Oh, you must be the new policeman.”

Surprised again, he asks: “How did you know?”

The ticket taker says: “Only a rookie cop would actually buy a ticket to come into the movie theater. The seasoned ones just walk right in.”

The policeman nods in understanding and finds his seat in the movie theater. An usher walks by, spots him, and yells out: “Oh, you must be the new policeman!”

Surprised that everyone seems to know him, the policeman asks incredulously, “How did you know?”

The usher responds: “Only a rookie cop would actually sit in his assigned seat in the theater. The seasoned ones sit in the front row, and they even kick their feet up and rest them on the lip of the stage.”

The movie begins, and just then the new policeman’s cell phone rings. It’s an emergency call from Headquarters. The new policeman is told that the Public Security Bureau has just gotten a tip about a prostitution ring that seems to be operating out of some rooms in the back of a certain movie theater. The new policeman has been assigned to investigate.

As chance would have it, the new policeman is sitting in that very same movie theater. Eager to take on this new assignment, the policeman quickly makes his way to the back of the movie theater. He takes out a flashlight and checks the doors of the back rooms. He hears noises inside one of them, and he kicks the door in, rushes into the room, and turns his flashlight on a man and a women lying naked on a bed.

“Aha! I’ve caught you,” says the new policeman.

The prostitute looks up from the bed and says: “You must be the new policeman.”

“How did you know?” says the new policeman.

The prostitute points at the man lying beside her on the bed and says: “Only a rookie cop wouldn’t recognize his Bureau chief.”

--Anonymous, circa 2005-06

Jokes from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)

(Part One)

Understanding jokes in another language is often the highest test of fluency, based as they often are on puns and insider cultural knowledge. When Guo Qitao, professor of Chinese history at University of California, Irvine, mentioned to us that he collects clever Chinese jokes, we asked if he might share a few at China Beat. Even better--he offered to translate and gloss them. The first set we offer here are of jokes from the Cultural Revolution, a period when political rhetoric and in-fighting predominated in the public sphere. Through these jokes, we see the way that Chinese people skewered national political campaigns by punning their dogmatic rhetoric.

Translated and Glossed by Guo Qitao

(1) Something Is Missing

During the Cultural Revolution, all kinds of “bad elements” were punished for no reasons, and the ordinary people suffered a lack of necessary goods (food or materials). In the midst of the absolute poverty, the following rhyming couplet was posted:

One, two, three and five,
Six, seven, eight and nine.

Horizontal coda: South & North

What’s missing?

“Four and ten” (sishi) and “east and west” (dongxi)

Translator’s notes: The last phrases are puns on shishi, meaning “facts,” and dongxi, which as a compound also means “things.” The implication is that “bad elements” are being punished based on groundless assertions (without “facts”), while people are deprived of basic consumer goods (“things”).


(2) “You’re Late!”

Once, the Central Political Bureau convened an expanded meeting. Several founding marshals including Chen Yi, He Long, Xu Xiangqian, and Nie Rongzhen were notified to attend.

The time for the start of the meeting had already begun, but after waiting and waiting, the several marshals still had not made an appearance

Finally, the marshals all arrived together. Wang Hongwen (the youngest member of the Gang of Four who was promoted from a factory worker to the vice chairman of the Chinese Communist Party) pointed an accusatory finger at them and said: “You’re late! How can you be so lackadaisical?!”

Marshal Chen Yi explained, “You dropped in suddenly from Shanghai via helicopter lift; we came from Yan’an riding “Mao” donkeys—how could we possibly get here as fast as you?”

Translator’s notes: There is a pun at work in the reference to “furry donkeys from Yan’an.” The “fur” or “mao” is a subtle reference to Mao Zedong. The implication in Chen Yi’s retort is that “we have been with the revolution (with Mao) from the Yan’an years,” whereas “you (Wang Hongwen) are just an upstart from Shanghai who has been ‘lifted’ to power quickly through your connections with Jiang Qing.”


(3) Nothing Can Stand without Destruction

Wang Hongwen went to see Marshal Zhu De, requesting him to hand over power. “You may take over, but only if you can make this egg stand upright,” Zhu said, while handling him an egg.

After trying for several days, Wang was still unable to make it stand, so he went to see Deng Xiaoping for help.

“This is easy,” said Deng, and he forcefully smashed the egg down into the table.

“Ai ya, it broke!” Wang exclaimed.
“Chairman Mao has said, ‘nothing can stand without destruction,’” said Deng, “look, isn’t the egg standing upright now?”

Translator’s notes: The phrase “nothing can stand without destruction” was a revolutionary slogan that encouraged destruction of old, feudal things.


(4) Mao’s Statues

The Lin Biao clique drafted a directive ordering the erection of statues of Mao throughout the country. Mao intercepted it and refused to send the order out saying, “You all get to sleep, while I’m going to have to stand on guard no matter whether rain or shine. I won’t do it!”


(5) From Sun to Son

During the Cultural Revolution, all middle schools stopped offering classes in Russian (to show opposition to Soviet revisionism), which were replaced by English. All of sudden, the country became notably short of English teachers. One school had to select someone with little English to teach the language. As it turned out, one day in class this teacher misspelled the word “sun” as “son.” Right then and there, a student pointed out the mistake. As a result, the teacher was publically accused of having “venomously belittled our Great Leader, Redder than the Sun,” and dismissed from the school.

Translator’s notes: Mao was likened to the Red Sun during the Cultural Revolution.


(6) The Color of the Sun

A woman poet had to do physical labor while being investigated for her reactionary words and deeds. One day, after working in the fields, she wrote in her diary the phrase, “The golden-yellow sun casts forth its brilliant rays…” The diary was discovered by the Red Guards and became new evidence of her “venomous slander against our Great Leader.” The Red Guards organized a struggle meeting to criticize her at which they said: “Chairman Mao is the Reddest, Reddest sun in our hearts, but you dared to say that the sun is golden and yellow! What’s gold? Gold is the stuff of the capitalist class. As for yellow, it represents decadent and dirty things! If this isn’t an attempt to humiliate and vilify Chairman Mao, then what is?!”

Translator’s note: The color yellow is used to denote pornographic literature or matters, much the way in English we might use “blue” or “red” (as in a “red light” district.) In Chinese, that would be a “yellow district.”


(7) Go Ask Liang Shengbao

Liang Shengbao is the protagonist of Liu Qing’s novel Making History, and his lover, Xu Gaixia, is its female protagonist. At a struggle meeting, the Red Guards interrogated Liu Qing: “Why did Liang Shengbao dream about Xu Gaixia when he fell asleep at the Guo County railway station? When he took a break from cutting bamboo on Southern Hill, why didn’t Liang Shengbao organize the masses to study Chairman Mao’s works, instead playing the chess? When he served as a leader of a mutual aid team, why did he focus on peaceful competition, but not on the class struggle?”

To these questions, Liu Qing said, “I, too, am puzzled, you should go ask Liang Shengbao.”

Marxist Mash-ups

Danwei.org recently called attention to plans being made in Beijing to stage a musical based on Karl Marx's major tome, Das Kapital, and the Guardian also ran a piece about this effort to create an unlikely mash-up of Vegas style entertainment, a Broadway song and dance extravaganza, and a closely argued (and very long) work of political economy. These reports (as well as Jeremiah Jenne's earlier review on this site of a film about Mao that makes use of unexpected visual techniques) set us thinking about other kinds of unlikely textual or visual mash-ups with either a Chinese or Marxist dimension to them, and here's the top five list (with some links that definitely provide some levity for those in a Frivolous Friday sort of mood) that emerged from those musings:

1) As Danwei's original post mentioned, there's been a popular manga out in Japan based on Marx's work. You can see a story about this and one sample illustration from it here, but it is worth noting that long before the Marx manga, there were the illustrated "for beginners" books by the cartoonist Ruiz, who had a field day with Mao's thought as well as Karl's life, times, and ideas..

2) Even better (if you like cartoons that move) is the Marx mash-up to end all Marx mash-ups, the video called "Manifestoons," which uses images taken from classic works of animation to illustrate the points made in "The Communist Manifesto."

3) Not quite in this same category, but still worth a mention, is the report by the Financial Times' Geoff Dyer that the Dalai Lama's speeches have "been played on the dance-floors of London nightclubs." Alas, there's no video of said dance hall performances provided by the FT, though the pop culture hungry will find a nifty color caricature drawing of the Tibetan spiritual leader provided at the start of the piece, as well as an unexpected but illuminating juxtaposition of celebrities in a comment by Pankaj Mishra, who is quoted as saying that the Dalai Lama "seems as ubiquitous as Britney Spears" these days.

4) The Olympics Opening Ceremony wasn't exactly a mash-up, but we did get to hear songs from the Chinese Revolution mixed in with tunes of more recent vintage and more bourgeois lineage, with a quote from Confucius thrown in, so surely it can get a nod here. And the critique by one Chinese blogger, mentioned on this site in piece we ran by Geremie R. Barmé, that the show was supposed to be like a "banquet" but ended up merely like "hot-pot" is much the kind of thing that would be said about a mash-up gone astray.

5) Last but far, far from least, there's the one-of-a-kind, won't even bother trying to explain it (just click to watch it) Monty Python sketch that brought together Marx, Mao and Che (among others) to participate in a quiz show that touches upon such crucial texts of classical revolutionary theory as...the songs of Jerry Lee Lewis.

Quiz Winners and a New Quiz

We received many correct answers to last week’s Frivolous Friday quiz. For the prize of a copy of China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, Jeff Wasserstrom asked readers to guess which two people he had in mind to answer this question: “If you could bring back to life, for a day, two people you've written about who are now dead, and ask them questions about what Shanghai was like then, who would they be and what would you ask them?”

The clues were:

1) Both people were cosmopolitan women who spent time in both China and the United States.

2) Though only one was an American, each went to college in the U.S., attending in each case schools that had "W"s at the start of one part of the institution's name.

3) One had a husband who studied in Hong Kong and then was later detained in London, while the other had a husband who was imprisoned in Hong Kong and then later taught in London.

4) One was played on screen by Maggie Cheung.

5) One had a husband whose name began with the letters "Cha," while the other had a father whose name began with those same letters.

The correct answers were Emily Hahn and Song Qingling. We thought we might get more than one correct answer, so as a tie-breaker, Jeff added these subjective questions:

1) What's a question that it would be particularly interesting to have these two people discuss (if they were brought back to life)?

2) Can you think of a pair of people you think would be more interesting to quiz about Shanghai's past than the two Jeff had in mind?

3) Which actress should play the member of the pair Jeff is thinking of who, as far as we know, has not yet had a movie made of her life (but probably should have one made of it someday)?

The judging was incredibly tough, as all respondents had interesting answers to these questions. We have selected this response as our winner:

1. I would be interested in hearing Hahn and Song discuss Hahn's portrayal of Song in her book The Soong Sisters. As a secondary topic, it would be great if both women discussed Sterling Seagrave's book The Soong Dynasty.

2. The two people I would love to ask about Shanghai's history would be Du Yuesheng and Sterling Fessenden.

3. The historical actress who could best portray Hahn's combination of wit, feminism, and glamour would be Myrna Loy—I could just imagine Loy with Mr. Mills on her arm at some swank gathering. If I had to choose a living actress to play Hahn, although Loy would be my first choice, it would probably be Jennifer Jason Leigh (think Hudsucker Proxy).

The winning answer was submitted by Lane J. Harris, and he will be receiving his award in the mail shortly.

Evan Osnos sent us a note (though he excluded himself from the competition due to “unfair interest in the subject”) nominating his choice for actress in a movie of Emily Hahn’s life: “Hahn must be played by Naomi Watts, because Watts starred in the remake of King Kong, so she has experience working alongside monkeys, as did Hahn, e.g. gibbons.” (For instance, see Hahn’s book Eve and the Apes.)

Other proposals for the actress nominated to play Hahn included Meryl Streep (Out of Africa, redux? She received three nominations), Katharine Hepburn, Cate Blanchett, and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

We also wanted to share a few “honorable mentions” from respondents with you.

“Most Substantive Question” for Song and Hahn:
How real where the newfound freedoms for women in China at the time? (Submitted by Nick Wang.)

“Most Original Pairing of Those to Bring Back to Life” (with bonus points for one being fictional!):
Kyo Gisors, Malraux's invented organizer of the 1927 rising against Chiang Kaishek in Man's Fate, and Eugene Chen, the Trinidad-born journalist and secretary of Sun Yat-sen. (Submitted by Donald Sutton.)

“Most Touchingly Uxorious” (and describing the person who Jeff would certainly also see get the role in real life if the film were to be made—Myrna Loy, alas, being dead, and Naomi Watts having gotten to make her Shanghai film already):
(To #3): My wife. (Submitted by Robert Bickers.)

“For Giving Jeff Second Thoughts” about the pair he would choose to bring back to life (as seeing what Emily Hahn and the cosmopolitan Communist activist Pan Hannian made of one another is a fascinating notion):
Pan Hannian / H. Shippe (Moses Grzyb /Asiaticus) (Submitted by Thomas Kampen)

Because we (and you too, based on your answers), had such fun with this, we thought we’d do it again. Please send your answers to China Beat Editor Kate Merkel-Hess at kate@uci.edu. The winner of this quiz will receive a copy of the forthcoming China in 2008, signed by as many of the book’s contributors as make it to the Association for Asian Studies meeting in Chicago, as well as Kate Merkel-Hess and Ken Pomeranz (who won’t be making the trip).

Please send answers to these questions:

1. The Prettiest (photo of China you can find on the web—send link or the photo itself, but please include link to where you found it so we can credit appropriately)

2. The Wittiest (title of a China book, article or blog post)

3. And the Grittiest (your choice for best muckraking journalist who worked the China beat, past or present)

No one is exempt (meaning, we encourage those who have submitted before to do so again!) We’ll announce the winner next week.

Free Book up for Grabs

China Beat's First (and Maybe Last) Quiz with a Prize for the Winner

Jeff Wasserstrom recently mentioned in an interview with City Weekend magazine that he's hoping someone at the audience for his March 15 PRC book launch of Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 will ask him this question: “If you could bring back to life, for a day, two people you've written about who are now dead, and ask them questions about what Shanghai was like then, who would they be and what would you ask them?” Well, he wouldn't tell the magazine who he was thinking of, but he's now told us and offered to let us give us a copy of his 2007 book, China's Brave New World--And Other Tales for Global Times, to the winner of an online contest related to this mystery. Here's how it works:

See if you can figure out from the following clues the identities of the two people he had in mind, one of whom gets a lot of attention in China's Brave New World, the other of whom gets quoted at some length in Global Shanghai.  Please send your answers as well as the supplementary material described below to Kate Merkel-Hess, the Editor of China Beat, at thechinabeat@gmail.com:

THE CLUES:

1) Both people were cosmopolitan women who spent time in both China and the United States.

2) Though only one was an American, each went to college in the U.S., attending in each case schools that had "W"s at the start of one part of the institution's name.

3) One had a husband who studied in Hong Kong and then was later detained in London, while the other had a husband who was imprisoned in Hong Kong and then later taught in London.

4) One was played on screen by Maggie Cheung.

5) One had a husband whose name began with the letters "Cha," while the other had a father whose name began with those same letters,*

*There are important ties between the two women, especially a connection established by a book, but these clues focus on other things, including the men in their lives, since mentioning that publication would give the game away too easily.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

To make this as fair as possible (so that it doesn't privilege people living in particularly time zones), we'd like some additional information to use to break a tie if multiple correct answers to the main question come in within the same 24 hour period.  So please answer the following questions (keeping in mind that we'll be judging these on cleverness):

1) What's a question that it would be particularly interesting to have these two people discuss (if they were brought back to life)?

2) Can you think of a pair of people you think would be more interesting to quiz about Shanghai's past than the two Jeff had in mind?

3) Which actress should play the member of the pair Jeff is thinking of who, as far as we know, has not yet had a movie made of her life (but probably should have one made of it someday)?

[We'll probably publish these comments on the blog when we announce the winner.]

Playing Politics with Cats and Dogs

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

As regular readers of this blog already know, I recently crossed the Pacific to take part in the Beijing Forum, a fascinating if sometimes hard to figure out event that was valuable in part simply because of how many different countries were represented by at least one presenter. How often, after all, does an American academic find himself or herself in a room where there is an exchange of opinions going on between a scholar based in Moscow and a scholar based in Cairo, or hears an administrator from a university in Nairobi respond to comments his counterparts from Sri Lankan and Australian institutions have been making? (I know that dog and cat lovers may be getting impatient with this lead-up, but I promise I will get to animals and politics eventually, so feel free to skip to the final paragraphs.)

After the Forum concluded on November 9, as followers of China Beat also know, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Beijing Foreign Correspondents Club of China. This was memorable for various reasons. One was that just before, during and after the formal event, I got to take thoughtful questions from and exchange ideas with a mixture of both people whose bylines I often come across, such as Mark Magnier (who writes for the Los Angeles Times, the paper I read with my morning coffee) and Melinda Liu of Newsweek (who graciously hosted the event), and journalists I hadn’t known of before (but will now look out for on the web). Another thing that made it memorable was that the talk’s setting afforded a great bird’s eye view of part of the city, which according to local residents is still enjoying post-Olympic reduced smog levels. And, finally, the talk led to me being quoted, for the first time ever I think (and quoted very appropriately at that), in an Indian newspaper.

Over the next week or two, I’ll blog about other parts of that quick trip, which began right after the American Presidential election (the result of which was seen as a very good one by every Chinese person I encountered who voiced an opinion) and ended with a few days spent in the big city on the Huangpu River that's the subject of my latest book, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010, a work due out in Britain in two weeks (with slightly later release dates in other parts of the world). I’m not sure yet what the focus of my future trip-related posts will be. I’ll likely have things to say about how Shanghai is gearing up for the 2010 Expo, the event that provides the endpoint for my book. I’ll also have something to say about two publications by China Beat contributors I read and enjoyed while traveling: Lijia Zhang’s engagingly written and often moving Socialism is Great! A Worker’s Memoir of the New China, and Xujun Eberlein’s compelling short story collection, Apologies Forthcoming.

In addition, though this site hasn’t gone in for restaurant reviews in the past (and probably won’t often run them in the future), I’ll have something to say about two eateries that were mentioned recently on China Beat in the interview with NPR's Louisa Lim, “Fish Nation” (pictured in the accompanying photograph) and “Southern Barbarian,” since I had enjoyable meals in very interesting company in each of them. I’ll also likely refer to other restaurants I ate in or simply noticed that provide windows into how China is changing and the complex ways that globalization can work.

For now, though, just some ending comments about the feline turn that political commentary about the American election took while I was in China, just as U.S. discussions of Obama made a lot about the puppy problem his family is facing. Let me begin with the canine conundrum—or what in Mao’s day might have been dubbed the canine contradiction. On the night before my Beijing FCCC talk, I caught a CNN report on President-Elect Obama’s first press conference, which included his now much-dissected humorous reference to being torn between getting a specially bred hypoallergenic dog (due to one of his children being allergic) and getting a shelter dog (even though these tend to be “mutts,” a term he said could also apply to himself).

Nothing related to dogs came up the next day (if the Chinese press latched onto the mutt maodun, they didn’t do so in the papers I saw). But cats did—via the first joke in Chinese I have ever been sent via text messaging. On my second day in Beijing, I had bought my first Chinese mobile phone—it didn’t take long to discover how essential it is to have one of these, in part simply to be able to inform people you are planning to meet how late you will be due to traffic delays. Until November 10, though, the only text messages I had gotten had either been spam advertisements or queries about whether traffic delays were going to make me late for a lunch engagement (for once, they didn’t). Then, as I sat with a colleague, he began chuckling at a message he’d received and when I asked him what he was laughing at, he said “why don’t I just zap it to you.” So, through the wonders of modern technology, the joke, which had likely made its way around much of the PRC by that point (since I later learned it was a more refined version of one that China Daily had written about a few days before), moved through the ether from his phone inches away to mine.

It was a perhaps predictable play on Deng Xiaoping’s famous line, which has been riffed and mocked and modified in so many ways before, that it is foolish to be too ideologically dogmatic, for when it comes to catching mice, it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, just whether it gets the job done. The Chinese characters that showed up on my phone said, in essence: “It used to be that in the electoral process, the American people would only choose white presidents, never black ones. But then after the American people studied Deng Xiaoping Theory, they realized that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, a cat that can solve a crisis is a good cat.”

By the way, the photo of the dog at the top of this posting obviously has nothing to do with the presidential election. It was just a shot I found interesting, since it was taken on a street that in general looks much like those I remember from my first trip to Shanghai back in the mid-1980s (in the way that, say, the face-lifted and spruced up Nanjing Road doesn’t at all), yet via the pet in the sweater flags one of the many ways that the city has changed since then.

Keeping up with “The China Beat”—5 Recent Developments

This is just a little list, for the "Frivolous Friday" feature, made up of tidbits about the site. It may have curiosity value for longtime readers, and it may serve to provide an overview of the blog to those who have just started tuning in.

1) Thanks to an off-hand remark by Don Sutton, whose insights on mourning practices appeared on this site yesterday, contributors to the blog now have an official name: China Beatniks. This has a nice ring to it and, according to Wikipedia at least, it has a special meaning for a blog that has been paying special attention, via Ken Pomeranz's postings, to things that happened in years ending in 8: it was coined 50 years ago in 1958.

2) We've been footnoted for what I think is the first time (though if anyone finds an earlier citation, please post a comment). The footnote I have in mind comes in Geremie Barmé’s latest article, a wide-ranging look at “Olympic Art & Artifice,” which appears in the July-August issue of The American Interest and is well worth reading, containing more than its fair share of the clever turns of phrase and deft moves to bring past and present together in meaningful ways that we've come to expect from its author. When mentioning the response to the torch relay, he points readers to his guest post on this site.

3) This veers from the “Frivolous Friday” theme toward the "Self-Promotion Saturday" one (so you might want to wait a day to read what follows), but it still seems worth mentioning that we’ve begun to regularly hit or top the 500 readers-a-day mark. As we’ve been “live” for just about 5 months, this suggests a growth rate of about 100 readers a month. Another number to note is that May was the first month we’ve been in operation when we had more postings (32) than there were days (31).

4) This month, we've gotten what I think are our first comments in the response section from journalists (though we've had posts before, of course, that were either by or based on interviews with reporters), a couple of whom responded to Pierre Fuller’s piece on clichés in coverage of China. And one of these came from a journalist, Richard Spencer of the Daily Telegraph, whose own blog many of those writing for “China Beat” read. This, to switch into academese for a moment, nicely reveals the “intertextual” and "dialogic" nature of the blogosphere--and also the international nature of it (as Pierre was writing from Irvine, California, while Richard runs his blog in Beijing and another journalist weighing in with a comment, Iain E. Marlow, is based in London). We’ve had one comment recently as well from someone (Adam Teslik), who has an interesting blog called “China Government Watch” that I hadn’t paid attention to until he posted his remarks, but now will check in on periodically.

5) If May was noteworthy for an increase in the sheer number of posts, June is shaping up as notable for an expansion of disciplines and types of writers heard from. When it comes to academics, we’re moving beyond the tendency for historians and anthropologists to dominate, though historians do still account for most of the posts from within the academy. We’ve gone philosophical lately, for example, with guest pieces earlier this week by two scholars from that field, Daniel A. Bell and Daniel Little. And via the latter’s piece on Charles Tilly, sociology has been brought into the mix for a second time--the first being through sociologist James Farrer's May posting on coverage of China in Japan. (Political science has also been represented in the past, in the form of a February interview that "China Beat" reporter Angilee Shah did with scholar in that field Benjamin Read, as has comparative literature in the form of David Porter's posts.)

Looking beyond the academy, we’ve run things in the past by official “Beatniks” and guest contributors with a background in free-lance writing (Leslie T. Chang, Peter Hessler, Caroline Finlay) and by one British journalist-turned-novelist (Catherine Sampson). But June has seen our first posting by a writer of fiction originally from China (Xujun Eberlein) and our first interview with the author of a memoir about growing up in in the PRC (Lijia Zhang). And, as a final comment and yet another sign of the lack of importance of geographical boundaries where cyberspace is concerned (aside that is from issues of censorship), we were delighted to see a Shanghai-based site called "The China Herald" point its readers to Irvine-based Nicole Barnes' "China Beat" interview with Beijing-based Lijia Zhang when encouraging its readers to attend a talk the author was about to give in its city.

Boycott Tidbits and Queries: Some News and Views that Didn't Fit

1) Some Questions:

How do you say “I’m from Quebec” in Chinese?

When protesters gathered outside of Carrefour stores in China and sang songs (they must have sung something: one photograph shows someone with a guitar), were any of these reworked versions of “Frere Jacques”?

Why hasn’t anyone commenting on the boycotts of 2008 mentioned the one that took place one hundred years ago?

How can focusing on fried chicken alter our sense of the similarities and differences between the Chinese student protests of 1989, 1999, and 2008?

These are some questions that I either started pondering while I was writing my latest piece for the Nation’s website, which came out recently under the title “Battle of the Beijing Boycotts,” or that I began to think about after it appeared. I’ll explain the background for each question in a minute, but first…

2) A Digression (something blogs allow) about a Side Topic (what blogs allow):

As someone who writes commentaries for newspapers, magazines and online journals of opinion, I see one of the nice possibilities that writing for “The China Beat” opens up is the chance to share tidbits of information or ideas that don’t quite fit into works I do for those venues. Sometimes a thought is too obscure (for a magazine that assumes no previous knowledge about China), an opinion too irreverent (for a newspaper intended for serious readers), or an allusion to the past too difficult to communicate concisely (in a genre where word length counts). The blog can also be a place for me to mention things I wish I had thought of when I submitted a time-sensitive piece, but that didn’t come to mind until the chance to add things had come and gone. And it can give me an opportunity to point readers to supplemental readings that I agreed with or have a gripe about, when I’ve written something in a venue that doesn’t allow citations. So, this may end up being the first in a series of postings I do that supplement a commentary I’ve published elsewhere, it could start a trend that other contributors follow (in which case maybe we should add a “Self-Indulgent Sundays” to complement our “Self-Promotion Saturdays” one)—or it could turn out to be just a one-off kind of thing.

3) Finally, Some Explanations

If you are still with me at this point, you deserve to know the stories behind the question posed above. Let’s begin with why Quebec, a place I’ve never been, has been on my mind lately. The answer is simple. When the anti-French agitation began in China last month, many people were reminded, myself included, of the anti-NATO demonstration of 1999. I happened to be in Beijing while those were taking place, and as I mention in the chapter of China’s Brave New World devoted to the topic, one favor that a journalist friend did for me was to tell me how to say “I am Australian” in Chinese, just in case the mood got particularly nasty at any point. This made it natural to muse on how someone from France might use a similar geographical bait and switch to avoid becoming the object of criticism in attack.

The “Frere Jacques” question has deeper historical roots, as I’ve been tracking for some time the way that the song, which is very easy to put protest lyrics in any language due to the role of repetition in it, has been adapted by generations of Chinese students. It was sung with “Down with Imperialism” lyrics back in the 1920s and “Down with Deng Xiaoping” ones in 1989 (though some version then focused on the government having lied to the people), and it was also sung in-between those periods by Red Guards and 1940s activists (one group that wanted to go to Nanjing to present a petition but couldn’t get anyone to take them by train sang “Houche bu kai, houche bu kai, zijia kai, zijia kai”—very rough and meter-free translation: “If the train won’t start, if the train won’t start, we’ll start it, we’ll start it”…and the students ultimately drove it themselves). I’ve also heard that students put new words to the tune in 1999, so why not in 2008?

Of course, the irony would be singing a French song to protest the French. But even that isn’t new, as the French were among the imperialist powers that Republican era youths wanted to leave China be, and the Red Guards used the tune at times to denounce all capitalist Western countries. If there is something ironic here, though, it would be very hard to imagine anyone in China thinking of it that way. I once asked a friend who grew up in China during the Mao years if she found it ironic that a French song had been used to denounce the West. She asked me what song, and when I hummed “Frere Jacques,” she looked at me quizzically and said she’d always though of that as a Chinese folk tune.

The 1908 connection is just one that I should have thought of when writing the piece for the Nation. In that commentary I referred to the 1905 anti-American boycott and various anti-Japanese boycotts of 1919 and later years as precedents for the call for a boycott of Carrefour, mostly just trying to show that it was silly to think of the tactic as merely an imitation of Western calls for a boycott of the Olympics. I’m not sure why, as someone who likes to think about round number anniversaries, I temporarily blanked on the Tatsu Maru incident and the anti-Japanese boycott it inspired exactly a century ago…Maybe that event should be the subject for its own “Its Not Just 8/8/08” posting.

As for Coke and KFC and the relationship between the 1989, 1999 and 2008 student protests, there are some curious ways to take this. For example, though 1989 is generally placed in one category, while 1999 and 2008 are placed in another, focusing on these two American companies shakes things up a bit. There are reports of students gathering at the Colonel’s place to talk about protests in 1989 and 2008, while in 1999, I saw signs go up saying that a good way to show one’s patriotism was to boycott KFC. (There are also some interesting things to do with Coca Cola’s shift from a target of protest in 1999 to a kind of patriotic drink in 2008, due to the company’s sponsorship of the Olympics.)

Finally, three things to read that I either like or disagree with on issues related to the boycott piece…

1. An excellent essay from several years ago by Geremie Barmé on related themes, which in timely fashion has just been reprinted by Danwei.org to accompany an update on the Carrefour protests.

2. A Bangkok Post commentary by Philip Cunningham that has a great title (“Let One Hundred Boycotts Bloom!”) and makes some good points about young Chinese not the only ones who have grown very suspicious of late about the American mainstream media—but errs in presenting the anti-French boycott as an “imitation” of recent Western behavior (and the author, who has done some very fine pieces in the past, has covered East Asia for long enough to be well aware of the problem with this suggestion).

3. The latest weekly update by AccessAsia.co.uk, which does a far better job than I could hope to on squeezing humor out of the current situation (not one that lends itself to much frivolity). They are an excellent source of both insight and amusement, a site definitely worth book-marking. Their best line from this week is that by manifesting “dislike of the French,” we surely have a “sign that China is now fully part of globalised populst opinion.” Which just leaves me wondering, is there a Chinese translation for “freedom fries”?

Frivolous Friday: From China, to India, to Southern California

(Posted by the China Beat on behalf of Nicole Barnes)

I live in Southern California where I always have to look my best, so I get my eyebrows threaded at Vinita’s Beauty and Threading Studio in Tustin. Vinita’s is owned and largely patronized by South Asian women. I’m frequently the only white woman in the place, but I get a sweet deal: a full eyebrow threading for only 5 minutes and 6 bucks! In case you suffer through waxing, you really need to know about the wonderful process of threading. It’s literally done with a sewing thread: the “threader” holds one end of the thread in her mouth, wraps the middle around two or three fingers in her left hand, and manipulates the other end like a pair of scissors in her right hand. This way she can grab a whole row of eyebrow hairs and yank them out before you even notice; it’s only a little bit painful.

Although in the US and UK most enterprising eyebrow threaders are Indian women, in India the work is done mostly by Chinese immigrants. Still, there is virtually no consensus on its exact origins; there are claims that it originated in Iran, India, China, and Egypt, and it is practiced all over the world, on both male and female clients. It seems that, no matter our nationality, we are all obsessed with shedding our simian roots through depilatory arts!

Perhaps eyebrow threading does in fact allow us to change our very nature. Sohu.com has a feature that describes your personal character and destiny according to the shape of your eyebrows. So when you get tired of your Big Dipper brows (beidou mei) giving you an overactive libido, or when your Rebel brows (luohan mei) are making it hard for you to find your soulmate, you can go for a threading and adopt the forthright friendliness of Sleeping Silkworm brows (wocan mei).

Frivolous Friday: China Beat Goes Hollywood

Last year saw some curious news stories appear that linked China with Hollywood, from ones involving Mia Farrow’s critical views of the Beijing regime, to ones reporting Paris Hilton’s trip to Shanghai to attend an MTV awards show, to ones detailing sex scenes being cut from the version of Ang Lee’s film so that it could be showed in the PRC. With these still fresh in China Beat’s mind, this week’s “Frivolous Friday” offering takes the form of quiz, which tests the pop culture acumen and in some cases also the Sinological savvy of our readers. (Answers as well as bonus “You Might Be a Sinologist If…you know this factoid” queries come after all the questions.)

1. Which of the following actresses studied Mandarin at Harvard and wrote a senior thesis on anti-African sentiment in the PRC?
a) Jodie Foster
b) Mira Sorvino
c) Nicole Kidman
d) Uma Thurman

2. Which of the following actors took a Chinese history class with Jonathan Spence at Yale, cites this as having inspired him to make a film set in China, and says he read one of his former prof’s books to prepare for his role in that movie?
a) Tim Robbins
b) Ralph Fiennes
c) Kevin Bacon
d) Ed Norton

3. Which of the following actresses can be seen speaking Chinese and quoting Confucius in a film called “Stowaway”?
a) Judy Garland
b) Mae West
c) Shirley Temple
d) Lana Turner

4. Which of the following celebrities performed in a film whose name flagged a Chinese location—but did not include a single scene set in that location?
a) Jack Lemmon
b) Rita Hayworth
c) Owen Wilson
d) Jane Fonda
e) All of the above

5. Long before Steven Spielberg agreed to serve as a consultant to Zhang Yimou for the extravaganza that will open the 2008 Olympics, he made a film that opened with a song and dance number (“Anything Goes” by Cole Porter, fittingly enough) being performed in a nightclub in Old Shanghai. Was that film:
a) The Empire of the Sun
b) Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
c) 1941
d) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

ANSWERS:
1. b—and we’ve been told by a Harvard prof who read it that Sorvino’s thesis, with a little work, would have been publishable, meaning that Hollywood’s gain, in this case, was Sinology’s loss.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you can tell us what Uma Thurman’s tie to China studies is…Answer: Her father is a noted specialist on Tibet.

2. d—though the other actors all have ties to China, since Robbins recently starred in “Code 46” (a film set in a Shanghai of the future), Fiennes starred in “The White Countess” (a film set in a Shanghai of the past), and Bacon’s architect father (who later played a key role in the redevelopment of Philadelphia) spent some time as a youth working in Shanghai.
You might be a Sinologist if you can guess which of Spence’s books Norton says he turned to in order to understand the character of the British doctor he played in “The Painted Veil”…Answer: To Change China.

3. c.

4. e—the films in question are “The China Syndrome” (a and d), “The Lady from Shanghahi,” and “Shanghai Noon” (that’s the only one with scenes set in any part of China, but only Beijing is portrayed).

5. d—though the action quickly moves from Shanghai to India.
Bonus question…You might be a Sinologist if…you know why it is somewhat anachronistic in the film when the Chinese gangsters who appear are dead set on getting hold of the ashes of Nurhaci, whom they seem to treat as a sacred figure…Answer: members of the kinds of secret societies to which these gangsters belonged tended to look at the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) as foreigner usurpers from Manchuria who had unjustly wrested control of China from the Ming (1368-1644). Since Nurhaci was a Manchu leader, they wouldn’t have worried about his ashes being scattered or destroyed in their fight with Indiana Jones.

Frivolous Friday

Rachel DeWoskin's Babes in Beijing is only one example of an increasingly frank discussion over the past few years of the experiences of foreign women in China. Anna Sophie Loewenberg, a journalist and filmmaker, has been making videos about her life in China (with particular focus on love) for the past year or so under the title Sexy Beijing. You can find more, including contemporary news briefs, at the Sexy Beijing YouTube page or homepage.



The popular American television show, America's Next Top Model (hosted by Tyra Banks), took its final episodes to Shanghai and then Beijing last fall. Below, the would-be models' reactions to "fashion capital" Shanghai; the complete episode (and the follow-up episodes in Beijing) are available at YouTube (just click on the video itself to follow the link to YouTube).