China Vimeos

I've read a few different times that vimeo.com is a much more "artist-friendly" video sharing website than YouTube. I assume that has to do with revenue sharing and the legal protections the video site provides. I know that I've found Vimeo videos to be uniformly excellent.

Below are a few China Vimeo videos that friends either sent to me or I found through Bill Bishop's Sinocism newsletter. They're all worth a view.

The first is a beautiful big-city time-lapse video montage from three of the largest cities in China - Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai (h/t to my friend, Donnie):


Guangzhou'2012/CHINA from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

The second is surreal skateboarding in the empty ghost town of Ordos (h/t to @niubi, aka Bill Bishop):



ORDOS from Charles Lanceplaine on Vimeo.

The third is a quick two minute clip of the making of Crocs-like shoes (h/t to my friend, Timo):



Factory Video from Native Shoes on Vimeo.

And the fourth is a video about environmental activism in Yunnan Province from Jonah Kessel (h/t to @niubi, aka Bill Bishop):



HOPEFUL from Jonah Kessel on Vimeo.

Please feel free to send me any great China short videos you find on the internet. Especially if they're hipster Vimeo videos.

1978 National Geographic - China's Incredible Find

Qian and I went to an estate sale in our neighborhood yesterday. Qian saw an old box full of National Geographic magazines on sale for $5.00 and began thumbing through them. Once she saw the third issue in the pile, she called me over.

This is what she saw:



Knowing how big of a China nerd I am, she guessed correctly that this vintage account of China's terra cotta warrior discovery is something I'd want.

The terra cotta warriors were discovered an hour east of Xi'an in 1974. This 1978 National Geographic account highlights the initial progress that the Chinese were making with the discovery and gives the basic history of the warriors. It's a very interesting read. It's definitely worth the $.50 we paid for it.

I spent a few minutes this morning scanning all twenty pages of the story. My scans aren't that great and I'm not sure the best way to display these images on the confined spaces of this blog. I put together a collage of the story below anyways. I think they're worth posting as is:

Behind the Red Door

When I heard that The Peking Duck blog's author, Richard Burger, had written a book, I knew it was something I'd want to check out. I found The Peking Duck in early 2006 after I'd just arrived in China for the first time. I've been reading it ever since. It was one of the first and most popular China blogs in the blogosphere and it has maintained its quality over the years. Burger has influenced my blog and my thoughts on China a great deal.

Burger, a trained professional journalist, chose a spicy topic for his book that is of interest to anyone: sex. Behind the Red Door: Sex in China, published last month, is a survey of Chinese culture, history, and attitudes towards sex from ancient times to the present day.



Burger's book is broken into the following parts:

Introduction
1. Sex in Imperial China
2. Dating and Marriage
3. The Sex Trade
4. The Family
5. Homosexuality
6. Education and Health
7. China's Shifting Sexual Landscape
Parting Thoughts

The book covers a lot in a little over 200 pages. The book discusses ancient China and a number of the dynasties before the 20th century, but most of the book is about contemporary China. Like really contemporary, as in the last ten years and particularly the last five.

Anyone who's read Burger's blog knows that he is a China news junkie of the highest magnitude. He weighs in on just about every noteworthy current event in China on his blog and has done so for a decade now. This deep and encyclopedic knowledge that he's developed over the years blogging turns out to be a great resource in writing a book. I consider myself a pretty hardcore China news junkie and Burger busts out all kinds of stories and events that I'd missed.

Two of my favorite parts of the book are about something right up Burger's alley: blogging. Burger uses two bloggers - China Bounder's (aka. David Marriot) Sex and Shanghai blog from 2006 and Muzimei's Left-over Love Letters blog from 2003 - as prisms through which to view sex in contemporary China.

China Bounder was the pseudonym used by a British man who slept with dozens of young Chinese women in Shanghai and then wrote about his sexscapades on his blog. After a few posts, the China Bounder blog went viral. Chinese people, in particular, were infuriated with this foreign devil who deflowered untold numbers of Chinese women with no regard for who he left in his wake.

Muzi Mei was the pseudonym used by a woman from Guangzhou who wrote of similar promiscuity (with Chinese men) on her blog. Readers of her romps initially measured in the hundreds and then thousands and then, before the blog was shut down, tens of millions. She was a pioneer in sexual liberation in China.

I was vaguely aware of both of these examples. They were a little before my time, though. I caught the tail end of the China Bounder fame but completely missed the controversy Muzi Mei created back in 2003.  Burger does a great job of telling the two bloggers' stories and how they are related China's ongoing sexual revolution.

Another area that Burger nails is prostitution. I really liked this following passage from pages 72 and 73:

Burger is right on with this passage. I found the same attitudes towards prostitution myself. There were pink light hair salon prostitutes all over the neighborhood where I lived. Prostitution was (and still is) rampant in Xi'an (just like it is in the rest of China). I like the way that Burger ties China's lax attitudes towards paid sex today to Chinese culture and history.

The final part of the book I want to comment on is the discussion of the male/female imbalance in the final Parting Thoughts chapter. I agree with Burger that China's skewed male/female ratio - somewhere around 118 boys born for every 100 girls - is one of the largest problems facing China and the world, for that matter. There are going to be tens of millions of men in China in the coming years who will simply be unable to marry. Burger has a nice analysis of what to expect with this looming disaster.

The only thing that I wish Burger had done differently with his book is include footnotes and references. Behind the Red Door is a non-fiction book with few personal anecdotes. A book like this should've had references in my opinion. It's not as if I would've checked many (or any, honestly) of the sources of information, but I feel that notes for the hundreds of references Burger made would've been helpful.

Behind the Red Door is a nuanced, thoughtful book about China. He's done a nice job with his first book. It's accessible and at the same time informative. Being about sex, it's also quite a fun read.

Lust, Caution

I randomly found the 2007 movie Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee while browsing Netflix a few weeks ago. I'd never heard of it before. I saw a couple Chinese people on the cover, looked up the Chinese title on IMDB - Se, jie (色，戒), and then asked my wife what she knew about it.

Qian said that she'd heard that it was a really risque film and that the lead actress in it had been banned from Chinese media for three years because of it. I noticed that the film had an NC-17 rating (meaning that no children would be allowed to see it in theaters, even if accompanied by an adult) as Qian was mentioning that.

Hearing about the controversy surrounding the movie and seeing its explicit rating were more than enough incentive for us to give the movie a chance.



Lust, Caution takes place in late-1930's, early-1940's Shanghai and Hong Kong (it's in Chinese subtitled in English on Netflix). It's ostensibly about a group of Communist party insurgents who are trying to assassinate a Chinese man who's working closely with the occupying Japanese invaders. The main thrust of the movie, though, is about the passionate relationship between one of the young ideologues, the beautiful Mrs. Mai played by Tang Wei, and the Chinese traitor/Japanese sympathizer, Mr. Yee played by Tony Leung.

The movie has a very slow pace. Early parts of the movie are dominated by catty discussions between high-society women playing ma jiang and drinking tea. I can see how one would be turned off by the glacial speed that the movie begins with. I wasn't bothered by the slow beginning, though. I really enjoyed taking in the portrayal of bygone Shanghai and Hong Kong. I'm not sure how "realistic" the scenes at the ma jiang table, markets, stores, cafes really are, but they were quite romantic and cosmopolitan and really nice scenery for the movie.

After an hour-and-a-half or so (the movie is two-and-a-half-hours-long), things really begin heating up between the main couple, Mrs. Mai and Mr. Yee. Mr. Yee is married and about thirty years Mrs. Mai's senior. Being a powerful, politically-connected man, Mr. Yee has the capability to arrange places where he and Mrs. Mai can romp around. And romp around they do.

The most memorable scenes of this movie are most certainly the duo's sexual escapades. Very little is left to the imagination during these minutes-long performances. The two engage in a wide variety of different sexual positions. It's almost as if a Daoist sex manual is being demonstrated for the viewer. It's hot stuff!

The passion between the two and the forbidden relationship that they develop become the main focus of the movie. Mrs. Mai began the affair with him so that she could set him up and ultimately kill him. But this plan gets complicated as she falls in love with him.

Lust, Caution is most famous for its incredibly explicit sex scenes. The movie is more than just those lustful scenes, though. I appreciated the movie on a few different levels. The two main characters put on quite an acting performance. There are a number of complicated relationships and plot lines too; it's well-written. And the disturbing ending is a good pay-off for the time that the viewer has invested into watching this film.

Qian and I enjoyed this film a lot. I recommend it.

One final comment on the movie: Mr. Yee, played by the famous Hong Kong actor Tony Leung, looks so much like President Obama in this movie. It's uncanny.

Mao's War Against Nature

In the summer of 2006, I stopped at the train station in the small industrial town of Panzhihua in Sichuan Province. I was on my way to the touristy mountain paradise of Lijiang in Yunnan Province. Although Panzhihua was smack dab in the middle of an idyllic mountain setting, it was a dystopian industrial hellhole.


Photo of Panzhihua from greensos.cn

My assumption at the time was that Panzhihua was simply a casualty of China's post-Mao-era rapid economic development. It turns out that my assumption was wrong. Panzhihua's landscape is not a result of contemporary China's economic boom. Instead, it is a victim of Mao's 1960s Cultural Revolution-era attempts at military might.

Mao's War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China by Judith Shapiro is about Panzhihua and a number of other examples of Mao-led destruction of nature. The book begins in the late-1940s/early-1950s and goes over Mao's systemic attacks against nature through the end of his life in the mid-1970s.



Shapiro's book, published in 2001, is broken into five sections that move linearly through Mao's reign:

1. Population, Dams, and Political Repression
2. Deforestation, Famine, and Utopian Urgency
3. Grainfields in Lakes and Dogmatic Uniformity
4. War Preparations and Forcible Relocations
5. Legacy

These chapters are pretty self-explanatory based on their titles. I found the sections on dam construction, agriculture during the Great Leap Forward, and stories about educated youth - educated urban young adults who were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants - to be the most interesting sections.

A couple of Chinese idioms that I've talked about before - 人定胜天 ("man can conquer nature") and 人多力量大 ("a larger population means more power") - show up again and again in Sharpiro's book. Both of these Mao-isms say so much about Mao's simplistic attitude towards the environment and political governance.

Here is a nice summary of Mao's basic views on nature from page 67-8:

Mao's War Against Nature is a nice complement to a couple other books on China's environment that I've read - China's Water Crisis by Ma Jun and When a Billion Chinese Jump by Jonathan Watts.

My biggest take away from Jun's book is that China's destruction of nature goes back millenia. Although his book is mostly about China's current water problems, a large focus of the book is on China's centuries-long destruction of and influence on nature.

Watts book is solely focused on China's economic destruction in the more recent boom years. Watts takes the reader to every corner of China to highlight the severe and, in many cases, irreversible damage that is ravaging China's environment on a daily basis.

Sharpiro's Mao's War Against Nature does a nice job of filling in the gap that exists between the two books. Mao, between 1949 and 1976, did so much lasting damage to China's environment: the countless dams, the ludicrous collectivization of China's farms, and the massive resources poured in to military industrialization, like in Panzhihua, that changed China's landscapes forever.

The main problem I had with Sharpiro's book is that it often goes into mind-numbing detail that I just didn't want or find interesting. The book is, in many ways, written in a reader-friendly journalistic fashion. Parts of it attempt to be more academic, though, and go into way too much detail. I didn't really appreciate when Shapiro gave several paragraphs to how many hectares of Yunnan Province were destroyed or the year-by-year population estimates of Panzhihua during its military industrialization. Those sections don't really fit with the totality of the book, in my opinion. I wanted more of an overview compared to an academic study.

Despite the sections sections that go into too much detail, I feel that Shapiro's book is a worthwhile read. Anyone wanting to get a very detailed picture of the history of China's destruction of its environment should check out Mao's War Against Nature.

Chinese Art in Kansas City

A new exhibit of centuries-old paintings stored in Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas are now on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

From The Kansas City Star:

 

The most enchanting show of the summer is tucked away in the Chinese paintings gallery at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. 

“Faces From China’s Past” is a walk-in album of charming portraits from the 16th to the 19th centuries. 

Their subjects — imposing matrons and fetching young women, stately ancestors and learned men — seem remote from us in customs and dress, yet seeing them enjoy their pets and favorite pastimes in lovely gardens and elegant interiors, one immediately feels a sense of kinship. 

And there’s just enough of a “boy meets girl” theme to keep things interesting. 

That notion gets quite an airing in a series of exquisite illustrations for an erotic novel, “The Plum in the Golden Vase,” chronicling the amorous adventures of a rich merchant, Master Ximen. He’s a randy and at times cruel character, not above climbing a garden wall to have a tryst with his brother’s wife or punishing a wayward concubine with a whip. 

Nearby, “Listening to the Qin by Candlelight,” a 17th-century piece showing a man playing the ancient stringed instrument for a female companion, presents a much more civilized approach to romance. 

Drawn from the collections of the Nelson and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, the artworks in this show were made for enjoyment and commemoration by mostly unknown artists. And many of the works have languished in storage for years. 

“Scholars weren’t interested in this type of painting; it’s not what Chinese consider mainstream,” said Colin Mackenzie, the Nelson’s senior curator of Chinese painting. The mainstream is landscape painting, he said, “created by the educated elite to express a philosophical view of art.” 

 

Read On  

The Nelson-Atkins Museum has one of the finest collections of Chinese art in the world. Here is a summary of the Nelson-Atkins' permanent Chinese collection:

Since it opened in 1933, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has actively collected, preserved, studied and exhibited works of Chinese art. Even before the Museum was built, its benefactors planned to include in it the first major gallery in America devoted solely to Chinese art. As early as 1930, the focus was to build a collection that would represent China’s highest achievements in every medium and from every historical period. As a result, the Chinese collection is one of the finest in the world. 

With more than 7,500 works of high quality, the Chinese collection comprises masterpieces from every historical stage and in every medium of China’s artistic activity – from Neolithic times to the 20th century. 

The collection of Chinese paintings is one of the best outside Asia particularly in the rarest and desirable period of early Chinese landscapes, the 10th through 13th centuries C.E. The richness of nature’s nuances can be seen in Xu Daoning’s Fisherman’s Evening Song, arguably the greatest surviving Northern Song landscape handscroll. Later period works include exceptional Ming and Qing paintings, such as Shitao’s A Landscape Album for Liu Shitou (K'u-kua miao-t'i). 

As a pioneer in collecting Ming furniture, the Museum’s collection is virtually unrivaled outside of China. The comprehensive ceramics collection spans 5,000 years and includes both sculptures and wares that chronicle the great epochs of Chinese ceramic innovations. 

Buddhist sculpture and wall paintings range from the Northern Dynasties to the Qing period and offer some of the best examples of Buddhist art in the west. A jewel of the Museum is the Chinese Temple Gallery (Gallery 230). Among Buddhist statues exhibited here is an 11th/12th-century C.E. polychrome wooden Avalokiteshvara, Seated Guanyin Bodhisattva, internationally heralded as the finest sculpture of its kind outside China.

Qian and I have been to the Nelson, which has free admission, several times in the three years we've been in Kansas City. The whole museum, on top of the Chinese collection, is just an awesome display.


The Nelson-Atkins Museum

The Chinese works of art are far superior to anything I ever saw in China. I haven't spent a lifetime checking out other cities' museums' Chinese collections, but I have to believe that the Nelson's is up there with any collection in the world.

If you ever find yourself in Kansas City, be sure to check out the Nelson-Atkins Museum's Chinese collection. Send me an email and I'll go with you. We can catch some BBQ after we see the museum too. Kansas City's BBQ, my favorites being Oklahoma Joe's and Jack Stack, is as good as it gets.

Invisible China

Invisible China: A Journey Through Ethnic Borderlands by Colin Legerton and Jacob Rawson is a really pleasant book. I randomly found it on Amazon. I'd never heard about it from the Chinese blogosphere or anywhere else.



The two authors - Legerton and Rawson - went on two epic backpacking trips in the summer of 2006 and spring of 2007 that covered a ridiculously large swath of China's territory:



Legerton and Rawson, who were already proficient with Mandarin before their big trips, studied up on Korean and Uyghur before they embarked on their gargantuan journeys.

Their rigorous study of minority languages says a lot about the duo. They have immense respect for the cultures that they saw and made the most of their great opportunity to see cultures that, for many of them, are on the brink of extinction. The authors handled the people and situations they encountered with great care and painted very delicate pictures of the individuals and landscapes they witnessed.

Invisible China introduced me to a wide range of ethnic minorities in China I wasn't familiar with before: the rustic hunting cultures of the Ewenki, Oroqen, and Daur of the northeast, the fishermen Kinh of the southwest, and the central Asian-influenced Tajiks of the far west.

I particularly liked that two-thirds of the book is focused on China's southwest and far west. I've said it many times, but for me, China gets more interesting the further west one goes. The jungles and Himalayas of the southwest and the deserts and plateaus of the far west made for great settings.

My only real complaint about the book is that it is too short. There is so much covered in only about 230 pages. I wish that the authors had laid out more facts and history about each ethnic minority they were profiling. Brief histories of each group were given, but not much more than the basics and then the duo's experiences visiting their homelands. Seeing that they profiled fifteen different peoples and had thirteen different chapters, 230 pages felt squeezed. It easily could've been twice as long and I'd have been happy.

Invisible China is a great primer to the surprisingly diverse peoples on the fringes of the People's Republic.