Reworking Fine Art, Chinese Style

A collection of Chinese bloggers have done an awesome job at pointing out the absurdity that is surfing the net in China.

From AFP:

SHANGHAI (AFP) — Chinese Internet users angered by censorship in cyberspace have dressed up images of famous renaissance nudes in a protest against Beijing's crackdown on "vulgar" online content.

Images posted as part of the protest include Michelangelo's statue "David" shown in a Mao suit while black socks and a strategically placed necktie were added to the artist's depiction of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The protest began last week after a user of the social networking site Douban.com complained that images of several paintings, including Titian's nude "Venus of Urbino," had been deleted from an online photo album.

Read On

This recent crackdown on pieces of art shows just how clueless the people controlling the internet here are. Although I don't agree with it at all, I can at least understand why they want to crack down on pornographic content. But fine art, give me a break.

I think that the following is a pretty good definition of pornography: "the creative activity (writing or pictures or films etc.) of no literary or artistic value other than to stimulate sexual desire." Obviously these works which were being questioned do not fall under that category at all.

As the article goes on to say, the photoshoppers who pointed out the ridiculousness of this filtering won and the works of art which were being questioned now aren't.

This story is a testament to the power of a meaningful, well thought out, and subtle standing up to the Man.

Xi'an's Lantern Festival

Today was the official end of China's Spring Festival lunar new year celebration, the Lantern Festival. Jackie and her mom cooked me a delicious lunch, we relaxed in the afternoon, and then Jackie and I went on a walk near Xi'an's Wild Goose Pagoda at night.

Another awesome Spring Festival-related day. It's been a truly great two weeks.

I've been wanting to visually share my Spring Festival experiences on this blog. Today I finally got the chance to take out my camera and take some pictures.

The following photos help show what I experienced this evening:


This one came out pretty trippy... a lantern-face


热闹得很 - a very lively atmosphere


Hordes of people on 雁塔西路 (YanTaXiLu)


Jackie explained to me that on the Lantern Festival Eve people put up little riddles on pieces of paper


A man examining and thinking hard about this riddle


Lantern Festival toys for sale


The Big Wild Goose Pagoda


I made this panorama of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda using Canon's Photostitch


Fireworks being sold.

I've talked before about the importance of fireworks during Chinese New Year. This is my third year to experience Spring Festival and each year I'm surprised by the amount of fireworks lit that night. It seriously sounds like a war zone for hours.

Although tonight couldn't compare with New Year's Eve, there were still plenty of fireworks lit.

Here are a couple videos as evidence:





My first day in China, February 12, 2006, was Lantern Festival. So today marks my three year anniversary living in China (according to the lunar calendar).

How interesting and wonderful these three years they have been!

NFL Struggling in China

Chinese people assume that the NBA is America's favorite sport. They don't understand that it isn't at all. In fact, as of January, 2008, the NBA was America's sixth favorite sport behind the National Football League, Major League Baseball, college football, auto racing, and the National Hockey League.

One can't blame the Chinese for thinking the NBA is king in America though. America's actual favorite sport, football, is still a complete mystery to China.

From The Los Angeles Times:

Reporting from Beijing -- Super Bowl Sunday arrived in China's capital at daybreak Monday, but by kickoff it was standing room only at the Goose 'n' Duck, a British-style sports pub near sprawling Chaoyang Park in east Beijing.

The vast majority of the nearly 350 football fans who braved the frigid morning temperatures were expatriate Americans, many already with beer in hand despite the hour.

But in one corner of the two-story complex was a rabid group of Chinese fans watching the English-language broadcast with the help of two Mandarin-speaking commentators, perched on stools with microphones in hand, who had been hired by the National Football League.

The party, along with a gathering in Shanghai, was one small part of a six-year effort by the NFL to sell its sport in a country where the league has struggled to find a fan base.

Even at its own Super Bowl party, the challenges the NFL faces in China were on full display.

Although the Super Bowl was broadcast nationwide by state-run CCTV, Chinese authorities put it on a 30-minute delay, so organizers of the NFL party piped in a live feed from a Philippine satellite broadcaster. And though local fans were enthusiastic, they frequently stared blankly at TV screens during complicated penalties and on-field rulings.

Read On

When I was a young kid, I was always under the impression that the Super Bowl was the world's biggest sporting event. Sometime in the past several years though, I've come to realize that this is woefully inaccurate. It is, indeed, America's biggest sporting event, but it doesn't even make a peep elsewhere in the world.

As an American, I completely understand America's fascination with football. I grew up in Kansas City, which arguably has the best NFL fans in America. In addition to the supporting the Kansas City Chiefs, Kansas City is also instrumental in supporting the University of Kansas, Kansas State University, and the University of Missouri football programs.

Where I grew up, football is a very serious past time.

But living for a significant period outside of Kansas City, and America for that matter, I have grown to see why (American) football has not and, most likely, will not take off outside of America.

The two things that I see as absolutely fatal death blows to football's popularity outside of America are its complicated rules and its constant stopping and starting.

The first difficulty for people who didn't grow up with football are its myriad of obscure rules. Even to someone who grew up with football, rules like intentional grounding, neutral zone infractions, and illegal shifting can be counter-intuitive and confusing. For people who are trying to get into the game for the first time, these rules are a major barrier of entry.

Next is the fact that, inherent in the nature of football, there is a constant starting and stopping throughout the whole game. One could very reasonably say that football never gets flowing. A short burst of activity happens (usually about five to ten seconds) and then is followed by a much longer period of down time (at least thirty seconds).

A blogger at Wired Magazine recently did an interesting study. He took a stop-watch and timed how much action actually occurs in an NFL game (he did the experiment during a Kansas City - Denver game). His results are pretty astounding:

So, during the two hours and 56 minutes the game took to complete, throughout the 60 minutes of regulation time, the ball was in only in play for 12 minutes and 8 seconds.The rest of the time, players were standing around, plays were being reviewed and I was being bombarded by a multitude of beer commercials and truck advertisements.

I believe that this never-ending lack of action in a football game, which is endimic in the sport, cannot be changed. It is how the game is played.

As that study mentions, indirectly related to this constant stoppage in play are the ridiculous amount of commercial breaks that a viewer of a football game is subjected to. After living abroad and being away from football for a while, this really bothered me when I watched a bit of football while I was back home in December last year.

With commercials and a dragged out half-time, the average NFL game lasts a ridiculous three hours and fifteen minutes. College football games last even longer because the clock is stopped after every first down.

A couple years ago, I talked with an English bloke who'd studied at Pennsylvania State University. College football fans know that Penn State has one of the most storied traditions and best football teams in the country. Yet despite the great level of play this English man had been exposed to, he could not understand why everyone was so into American football. As he said, "People get together and stand around for three hours with an occasional play occurring on the field."

Despite the diatribe I'm currently going on against football, I am still a fan of the sport. Particularly, I like college football. I feel it has much more passion and pageantry than the NFL, which in recent years I've found to be stale.

My favorite team, the University of Kansas Jayhawks, have enjoyed an unprecedented amount of success (in their history) over the past few years. Getting to watch them from afar has been a treat.



I'm not saying football isn't worth watching or that Americans are silly for liking it. Instead, I'm saying that expecting people from abroad to sit down and watch a three hour plus game with all sorts of crazy rules being played by players and teams that they are vaguely familiar with is quite a tough sell.

And the NFL is having trouble getting a foot-hold in China for these very reasons.

Fake Chic

China's fake goods' markets, or shanzhai, are getting more sophisticated and innovative.

From Reuters:

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) - It's time to ditch the designer goods and adopt fake fashion, say some Chinese, as "sham glam" takes the world's most populous nation by storm.

Though previously shunned as unsophisticated, fake products increasingly have their own chic appeal in China and a fashionable moniker -- "shanzhai."

Literally meaning "mountain fort," the term "shanzhai" is applied to everything from knock-off trainers and mobile phones to lookalike celebrities and television shows, and refers to the remote, maybe lawless locations they traditionally get made in.

And the popularity of these goods seems sure to grow as China's economy slows along with the rest of the world and real designer products spin out of the price range of more Chinese.

Many "shanzhai" goods sport altered names, trying to tread a fine line between imitation and straight-out fake, and cost much less than their above-board, well-known brand-name equivalents.

Samsung goes to Samsing, Adidas goes to Odidoss or Avivas and Hike, Like or even Mike substitute for Nike, with the U.S. sports wear firm's mark at times reversed and given an extra flourish.

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I've spoken at great lengths about Xi'an's fake goods' markets. They really are everywhere. You can buy fake Nikes from literally dozens of places around town. In fact, it's harder for me to think of where you can actually buy real authentic pairs. There are places selling the legit western products, but they're fewer and farther between.

This article is interesting where it talks about the difficulty and, often, unwillingness of law enforcement officials to prosecute the the peddlers of fake brands.

There truly is an acceptance of fake goods in Chinese culture. So much so in fact that it's hard to see if and when the culture of fake products will ever end.

That's not to say that every Chinese person endorses the buying of fake goods though.

Jackie, for instance, does not like having fake products. She'd rather have fewer real, quality products than several fake knock-offs for the same price. Jackie refers to the fake clothing as "farmer fashion." By this, she means that only farmers and people from the countryside find the fake clothes and their poor-quality exciting and fashionable.

One aspect that I've thought about recently relating to fake clothing and electronics products is this:

A lot of fuss has been made in the past about Nike's use of sweatshops and terrible labor practices. If Nike, a western company selling expensive products, is considered to have questionable labor policies, one can only imagine what the Chinese-run knock-off counterpart to Nike's practices are.

These fake products' factories can't possibly be pretty sights.

Bone Dry

The other day, a few of my friends and I were trying to remember the last time it rained in Xi'an. We couldn't. We figured it had to have been in November or October.

From The Associated Press:

BEIJING: China has declared a top-level emergency for the country's worst drought in five decades that has hit eight wheat-growing northern provinces and left more than 4 million people without proper drinking water.

The crisis was raised to a level one emergency from level two late Thursday, the Office of State Flood Control and Drought Relief said on its Web site.

That means the Flood Control and Drought Relief office takes control of the relief effort. It also triggers help from railway, civil aviation and other transport departments.

The announcement said rainfall in many parts of northern and central China has been 50 to 80 percent less than normal, and that 4.29 million people and more than 2 million livestock were without proper drinking water.

Read On

Doing a Google search right now, I'm having trouble finding any data about Xi'an's precipitation. Just from living in Xi'an though, I can tell you that it hasn't been here raining at all.

Living in a large city, this isn't that big of a deal. It is surely a bigger deal for farmers living out in the countryside who depend upon falling rain for survival.

This drying of China is nothing new. Northern and Northwest China are currently being crushed by a massive wave of desertification. The Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in China's Northwest frontier are spreading to other parts of the country very quickly.

North China's desertification, droughts, and, general, drying out is a very serious problem. Combining these phenomena with the melting glaciers in the Himalayas and their falling water tables and it's hard to see where China is going to get its water in the future.

The powers that be in China recognize this fact. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has gone so far to say that "water scarcity threatens the very survival of the Chinese nation."

Humans need water to live. It thus makes sense that a country needs to water to survive as well.

China, particularly Northern China, simply must come up with a way to hydrate itself.