CNY, Foxconn, and Baijiu

Happy Chinese New Year!!



I love that video. So happy and joyful. China is a wonderful place to be during the days leading up to and the days following the lunar new year. Qian and I have missed China a lot the past few days.

Now that you've finished reveling in the awesomeness that is China in wintertime, listen to this hour-long This American Life podcast about an American guy visiting the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. This is worth your time.

And then finally, to all of you capping off this taking-in-some-Chinese-culture-session with a shot of baijiu, I say to you ,"Gan bei!"

A Collection of Yue Baoqun's Photograpic Works

I found one of my favorite books while moving last month, a photo book of the Chinese countryside - A Collection of Yue Baoqun's Photographic Works.



A man I knew in Xi'an arranged for a folk arts festival in his home village, about two hours west of Xi'an, every year. He planned a day of cultural activities - including Qin Qiang (Shaanxi-style opera), puppet shows, and a tour of the recently opened art gallery - to give his 10,000 person village an annual shot of activity and money from outsiders. The man I knew is big in the voluntourism industry in China. TV cameras, newspapers, government officials, and a couple minibuses full of foreigners were brought in to the village every spring for the festival.

I went to this festival in 2006, 2007, and 2009. I have very fond memories of going to this event. The mental image that is most strongly burnt into my mind is watching Qinqiang with several hundred villagers laughing and smoking pipes as the performers belted out their songs from the stage. I didn't spend tons of time in the countryside during my time in China. I really cherish the times that I did spend there.

On my second trip, I saw Yue Baoqun's book for sale at the art gallery's gift shop (hardly any village in China would have a gallery like this one has, it only has one because of the voluntourism aspect to the village). After flipping through the book, I was immediately convinced that it was worth its 68 kuai (about $10 or $11 at the time) price tag and got it.

Yue Baoqun is a photographer from Baoji, Shaanxi Province. Baoji is about a two hour intra-provincial train ride from my old home, Xi'an. Yue's book highlights photos of people from the countryside of Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Gansu Provinces. Yue's photos of the Chinese countryside are some of the best I've seen anywhere.

Here are a few of my favorites (I took these photos of the book myself, sorry about the quality, they really don't do the book much justice):


A man playing an erhu in rural Shaanxi Province

I remember seeing a huge blown up poster of this photo for sale at the gallery. It was 250 kuai (about $40). I regret I didn't get it. I love art featuring musicians performing.


Two portraits of Shaanxi farmers


Two photos of ethnic minorities from Gansu Provice


Yellow Hat Buddhist monks in Gansu Province


A farmer on the Yellow River in Shanxi Province.

It was hard for me to narrow down my favorite photos to just five. Just about every photo of this 80 page book is special.

The parts of China that Yue features in his book are some of the poorest in China. The people on the loess plateaus and imposing terrain of northwest China live lives unfathomable to those who've only seen the wealth of Beijing, Shanghai, and other large cities in China.

Yue's book gives the reader an intimate glimpse into a world that is often ignored when discussing "rising China." I think that seeing how people live outside of China's major cities is an important thing to understand. Not all of China has the luxury of being crazed over the new iPhone 4s.

I just did a few searches for Yue Baoqun (岳宝群) on Google and Baidu. I found his blog, but could only find this book for sale on the Chinese internet. If you can read Chinese, you can buy his book here. At 30 yuan (about $5), this is a steal. Yue Baoqun's photos and his book are incredible.

Mr. China

The introduction page to the book, Mr. China: A Memoir by Tim Clissold, is one of the most captivating pages of text I've ever read:

My jaw dropped when I got to the end of that paragraph. I felt like Clissold had written this page just for me (with the Edgar Snow reference and all).

I can relate to the fantasizing of becoming "Mr. China" so deeply. China over the past few years has taken over my life. I lived there for a few years and even now living in the US read about it constantly. If I'm not keeping up with my China-watcher stream on Twitter, then I'm probably reading a book or a blog about China. Expanding my knowledge of China is my most time-intensive hobby. Whether I consciously pursue it or whether it's something going on beneath the surface, becoming a "China hand" is something that I'm really quite obsessed about.

After reading this ridiculously awesome introduction to Mr. China, I was so pumped to devour the book.



Mr. China is a memoir from a foreigner who participated in the first wave of foreign investment in China from after the country embraced Deng Xiaoping's liberalization policies in the early 1990s. Tim Clissold is an Englishman who was introduced to China for the first time through visiting Hong Kong as a young man.

China infiltrated Clissold's person almost immediately after arriving in the country. He quit his job in England to return to Beijing to study after a brief exposure to China. After a couple years of Chinese language study and getting to know the culture, he was re-hired by the firm he quit in England in the first place, Arthur Andersen, as a China specialist in 1992.

It's only a few pages in and is not an integral part of the book as a whole, but reading about Clissold's first experiences in China is another highlight of the book for me. He fell in love with China quickly like a lot of foreigners, including myself, do.

The following passage from pages 12-13 really struck me:

Just like with the introduction paragraph highlighted at the beginning of this post, I was completely taken with this passage. Reading Clissold's thoughts on "willful infatuation" really made me think about the nature of my obsession with China.

Mr. China, a business book, stopped me in my tracks twice by the time I had reached page 13. You really can't ask much more from a book than that, can you? Tim Clissold is a freakishly good writer.

There is a lot of good stuff in Mr. China after page 13 as well. There are a plethora of funny, maddening, and insightful business stories. China in the 1990s was in many ways more of a wild west-like frontier than the country is today.

Reading about corrupt factory owners, two-faced investment partners, and capricious government officials is often times comical. The stresses of working on multi-million deals with the uncertainty that underlines China's legal and business culture are intense.

There are several nail-biting scenes where Clissold and his partners appear to have been taken to the cleaners. I nearly got light-headed and butterflies in my stomach as I read of cleaned out multi-million dollar bank accounts and maniacal factory owners. The actual toll taken on Clissold is seen very prominently when, in his 30s, he has to leave China due to a stress-induced heart attack.

Everybody in the world today hears about "the Chinese economic miracle" and the robust year-after-year growth in China. Few have seen the inner workings of those processes as intimately as Clissold has, though. Getting to see such wheeling and dealing from almost twenty years ago is special.

Mr. China is a very good book. It took me on a much harder and more turbulent ride than I was expecting. It's ostensibly a book on business in China. It's much more than that, though. Few books cut to the heart of China's culture like Clissold's does. Clissold, a financier by trade, is a dazzling writer. Any starry-eyed dreamer thinking of becoming Mr. China needs to pick up Mr. China.

House

The cause of the dearth of posts here recently is that Qian and I just bought and moved into our first house. Anyone who's gone down that road before knows that the preparation and execution of finding the right house, moving out of the old apartment, and getting into the new place is all-consuming. Between my job and all of that house stuff, blogging has fallen by the wayside.

Although I've been busy with life, I'm still engaged with China and still have things to write. I'm hoping things will settle down soon and I'll get some posts up soon.

In the mean time, I have a couple Chinese movies upon which I want to comment quickly.

First, Raise the Red Lantern 《大红灯笼高高挂》directed by Zhang Yimou is incredible. I found it to be just as good as the other Zhang movie I saw recently, To Live. It's the story of a concubine in the early twentieth century. The story is laid out very delicately and is executed with great passion. The cinematography and setting of the movie are still etched into my mind a couple weeks after watching it. I highly recommend it.

And then second, In the Heat of the Sun 《阳光灿烂的日子》is one of the most bizarre movies I've ever seen. Qian and I watched since it was one of the only movies she hadn't seen from the list that was recommended in the comments section of this blog a few weeks ago. It's about a group of rebellious youths during the Cultural Revolution. It is very avant-garde. I appreciated watching this more than my wife did (she hated it), but I'd have a hard time recommending this one.

When a Billion Chinese Jump

My biggest problem with living in China when I was there was the pollution. Language issues, trying to understand social mores, being treated differently because I was a foreigner, and any homesickness I felt being on the other side of the planet from my home all paled in comparison to the you-can-only-fathom-it-if-you've-been-there pollution that engulfs China.

Xi'an's pollution, in particular, is horrific. Xi'an, the city I lived in for three and a half years, is just to the south and to the west of the richest coal reserves in China. Xi'an's streets are choked with cars and its economic activity (carbon emissions) is booming. South of Xi'an stand the mighty Qinling Mountains, a very formidable range. You may not know there are mountains near you if you live in Xi'an, though. The peaks of the Qinling range are not visible 350 days out of the year. The beauty of the Qinling Mountains are no match for Xi'an's all-encompassing smog.

Jonathan Watts, a China correspondent from The Guardian, last year published a book entirely about China and its environment, When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind - or Destroy It.

I'd heard a lot of hype about this book for more than a year in the China blog and Twitter-sphere. Having now read it, the book lives up to the big buildup it's garnered. When a Billion Chinese Jump expanded and refined my knowledge of environmental issues in China a great deal. Watts' book put important facts and figures into my brain to go along with the negative experiences I've had with China's pollution.



The organization of Watts book is very good. It is split into four sections - Nature, Man, Imbalance, and Alternatives - and highlights each of these themes by focusing on different corresponding regions in China - the Southwest, the Southeast, the Northwest, and the Northeast. The result is a full portrait of what is going on in the humongous land mass that is China. The good, the bad, and the ugly all make it into Watts study of Chinese people and their relationship with their land.

I've talked before on my blog about how western China is the most interesting part of the country to me. The West is the frontier land of China that is often overlooked by journalists and policy-makers who only spend time in the large metropoli of eastern China.

Nobody can accuse Watts of not getting the full picture of China in When a Billion Chinese Jump. He visits nearly every nook and cranny of every corner of China - the snow-peaked mountains and glaciers of Tibet and Sichuan, the barren deserts of the former Silk Road in Xinjiang, and the idyllic scenery of Yunnan - to get the widest-ranging scope of China's environmental impact possible.

One thing I found very interesting on a personal level is that Watts visits every city in the on-and-off series on this blog - Chinese Cities that You've Never Heard of But Should Know. The giant factory that is Guangzhou and its surrounding area, the "model village" of Huaxi, the excesses of Ordos, and the Bladerunner-esque city of Chongqing are all places that Watts highlights.

I think it's pretty cool that Watts and I see eye-to-eye on what are the larger-than-life stories going on in China today. There were several points in When a Billion Chinese Jump where I felt Watts had written the book just for my reading. That's a great feeling to get when plowing through a meaty book.

One of my favorite chapters in the book is titled, "Why Do So Many People Hate Henan?" I laughed out loud when I saw chapter title in the table of contents. I imagine that anyone who's ever lived or spent a some time in China know the reputation that Henan Province and its people have amongst non-Henanese Chinese people.

Watts writes: "The antipathy of so many Chinese feel toward Henan seems to mirror the prejudice that many foreigners express towards China: that it is dirty, overcrowded, and untrustworthy."

Watts reminds the reader, though, that Henan is the birthplace of some of the most glorious Chinese things from China: tai qi, kung fu, and Zen Buddhism. Watts writes convincingly that Henan, which at one time was a bucolic place, is the dystopia it is now because of a systematic destruction of its environment. Instead of being known for some of the most beautiful things China has offered to the world, Henan is now famous for pollution-induced cancer villages, corruption-induced AIDS villages, and the worst of the worst man-made problems in China.

The story of Henan is tragic. Watts hammers what's gone on there hard because the entire country of China is on the brink of becoming one big Henan-like hellhole.

I'm going to highlight a passage from When a Billion Chinese Jump that I liked. It features a general theme found throughout the book: ingrained Chinese cultural traits make one wonder whether there is any hope that China will be able to change its attitude towards its environment.

From page 68 and 69:

Whether China's deeply ingrained negative cultural attitudes towards nature can be overcome is going to be one of the most important things to watch in the world over the next several decades.

My only criticism of When a Billion Chinese Jump is that it, at times, sounds a bit patronizing. Hearing Watts, an Englishman, lament fast food's growth, the Barbie store in Shanghai, and China's embrace of materialism was a bit much at times. I do think that it is near impossible to avoid this problem when a westerner writes a critical book about a developing country. Reading about "Barbie's eco-footprint" (the CO2 that Barbie, if a real person, would've been responsible for emitting) made me cringe some, though.

Watts book is a great guide to understanding China's struggle to build sustainable economic and societal structures. Watts knows a ton about China and such is reflected in his very serious, yet readable, book. I recommend anyone with even a hint of a green world-view or interest in China to pick up When a Billion Chinese Jump.