Jottings from the Granite Studio

New Post at Rectified.name: “On the Yak Trail in Southwest China”

Jeremiah — Thu, 17 May 2012 12:20:36 +0800

A new post over at Rectified.name about my latest trip to Yunnan. Sad to see how much that province has changed over the past decade. While tourism brings many benefits to local communities, the effects of so many people trampling through the hills and valleys of this beautiful place cannot be ignored. Can the government, with the help of local and international NGOs, find a workable solution for the environmental challenges associated with the development of the region?

Jottings from Rectified.name

Jeremiah — Tue, 15 May 2012 16:29:01 +0800

As many, if not both, of my readers by now know, I have joined forces, Avengers-style, with my fellow China-based bloggers Brendan O’Kane, Dave “Davesgonechina” Lyons, Will “Imagethief” Moss, and Yajun to form a new group blog called Rectified.name. Yes, that’s both the title and the url. It’s been a great experience and I’ve really enjoyed both the opportunities (and challenges) of collaboration.

What does that mean for this space, Jottings from the Granite Studio? Well, I’ve written this blog since 2006 and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it so I’m not going to close up shop anytime soon, but one reason for deciding to team up with Rectified.name was a fear that with teaching, research, and life, maintaining a blog was becoming…work. I started this blog because there were things I wanted to write for which I didn’t have a suitable channel in my academic career. I never wanted it to become something I felt I had to do. Sometime last year I reached the point.

The good news is, however, that writing for Rectified.name has kind of reinvigorated my desire to write and already I’m finding there are things I want to post which might not fit even on a blog as eclectic as Rectified. So, to mix metaphors, while we’ve decided to form a minor China blogging super group (less CSN&Y and more West, Bruce, and Laing) I think I’ll have enough material for some solo efforts that I hope you’ll enjoy. In fact, look for one later this week on Chinese historical teledramas and the Manchu language – the kind of blending of nerd rage and arcane information which was the original point of this blog.

I’ll also be cross posting posts so anything I put on Rectified will also be linked here. Thanks for all of your support.

Ps. In the meantime, check out some of these recent posts from Rectified.name:

The Game of Thrones guide to the 2012 leadership transition, Part 1 and Part 2

Bo Knows Hollywood: Brendan and Jeremiah try to pitch the year’s craziest political story as a potential movie project.

So Bye, Bye Bo Xilai. Tripped up by your wife and a dead Laowai. Because you can never have enough Bo Xilai jokes.

The Last Scoundrels: Translation and commentary on the state of Patriotism in China today.

“Authoritarian modernization always works until quite suddenly it doesn’t”

We cannot stop the Linsanity, we can only hope to contain it…

Jeremiah — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 20:02:29 +0800

I have played a lot of basketball in China and I’ve written before about some of the quirks of the game here in the PRC. Obviously, the sudden emergence of Jeremy Lin for the New York Knicks over the past few weeks has generated more than its share of media attention, much of it focusing on how Lin, a Harvard-educated Taiwanese-American, seems an unlikely NBA superstar. As a high-profile athlete of Asian descent his race has become an issue in the US and abroad, and in the PRC Lin has become more fodder for an ongoing debate over what it means to be “Chinese”.

Richard at The Peking Duck has a post, following up on an excellent essay by Adam Minter at Bloomberg, which poses the question of whether China could have produced a Jeremy Lin. The Chinese government and media can seem obsessed with sports as an indicator of a national development and even national strength. As a result, the relative lack of success by China’s men in international team sports, like basketball and soccer/football, is not only troubling for the sports fan but also raises disquieting issues of nationality, gender, physicality, and, of course, race.

In the past few years, China has done much better in the individual events. The usual argument is that you can badger a kid into being the best chess player, weight lifter, gymnast, or sprinter because in the end, despite all the coaching and support, once in competition it’s you, your skills, your training, and your thoughts against everybody else.

Whether you can really manufacture champions at individual sports or not, preparing for success in team sports is not as simple as churning out perfect athletes on an assembly line. Yes, you need to develop individual skills but the best teams (and the best players on those teams) are not always those with the greatest collection of individual skills. Most great players developed their game by playing thousands of hours on dozens of teams throughout their life, from local rec leagues where the moms bring the orange slices and every kid gets a trophy, up through the ranks — traveling teams, high school varsity, camps, invites, college, pro, national. The system is flawed as hell, but it does produce some incredible athletes.

Like a lot of things in China, though, this is changing. At the courts where I play basketball on weekends, I’ve seen increasing numbers of ordinary kids, both boys and girls, practicing and playing for ‘local’ teams, with their parents showing up carrying water bottles and oranges and a harried old coach taking time out of his weekend to teach 15 rambunctious eight-year-old girls how to dribble the length of a court. Some of the kids come with limited skills but lots of enthusiasm; others show a bit of early promise. Will any of them ever play for China’s national team? Probably not. But if any of them do, those early years spent playing with their peers will make them much stronger competitors at the higher levels. And those that don’t become sports stars will learn about teamwork, camaraderie, and good sportsmanship, all the while getting a little physical exercise, the lack of which is becoming a serious problem among urban Chinese kids. Of course, rec sports leagues require money and volunteers. Even in the US many communities are finding it harder to provide recreational sports opportunities for kids. Not all Chinese communities and parents have the affluence or motivation to establish a rec sports league.

The US also has a deeply ingrained and well-established system of university scholarships for athletes. Yes, the NCAA is so corrupt it makes Chinese local government look like a model of transparency and self-sacrifice, but it does provide a ticket to university for a lot of men and women student-athletes. (How many actually graduate is a whole other story….) There’s nothing like that in China. If you want to go to a top school in China, you study and everything else comes second. Sure there are parents who see value in children participating in sports as part of their development, and that number is growing, but it will be a long time, before China has a youth sports culture on the same level as the United States.

In the history of the league, six Chinese players have suited up for an NBA game.[1] That’s a respectable number. Not all of those players have had Yao Ming’s career, but it’s not like China hasn’t contributed to global basketball culture. Jeremy Lin, a Taiwanese-American Christian from California is an unlikely standard-bearer for “Chinese basketball.” But he’s fun as hell to watch, and if it gets kids interested in playing ball here then I’m for it. While academics like me can talk about discourses of race and the body and Chinese government officials fret about the implications of “Chinese-ness” in a global world where nationality seems to matter less than group affinity, Chinese basketball fans can simply sit back with fellow hoops fans around the world and enjoy the next miraculous episode of the Linpossible Dream.[2]

[1] I was going to say “born in China” but then we’d have to include Tom Meschery, who was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Meshcheryakov in Harbin in 1938 to White Russian refugee parents. He grew up in a Japanese internment camp before the family emigrated to the US where Tom went on to average 12.7 points and 8.6 rebounds for the Seattle Supersonics and the Philadelphia/Oakland Warriors in the 1960s.

[2] There was no chance of me not dropping at least one “Lin” pun into this post. Just be happy I removed the other 48.

Nixon and Mao are ready for their close-ups, forty years later.

Jeremiah — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:31:04 +0800

February is a big month for presidents.

In presidential history, February is not only the birthmonth of George and Abe (who share a day) but also that of Ronald Reagan and William Henry “Coulda Shoulda Woulda worn a coat” Harrison. Stretching a bit, we can include William McKinley and Franklin Roosevelt, who were really born in January (the 29^th and 31^st respectively) but qualify as Aquariuses and there’s useful symmetry to including into our February celebration the president with the longest tenure (FDR) along with the shortest (Harrison).

China’s next president looks to be Xi Jinping, who is trying very hard to impress (his home audience) this week while in the United States. On one hand, it’s very easy to look presidential standing next to Joe Biden. On the other, the need to be diplomatic and low-key isn’t something that comes all that naturally to Vice President Xi and in most of the photo ops I’ve seen so far, his attempt as looking ‘Chairman-esque’ has often resulted in making a face which rather resembles a constipated wombat.

Vice President Xi Jinping mentally summoning a wombat dookie

It shouldn’t matter because, as I’ve been reminded approximately 452 times now, Xi has a hot wife, who happens to be both a model AND a major general.

February is also, of course, the month in 1972 when Nixon changed the world, the subtitle of a new documentary written and narrated by Mike Chinoy as part of the USC China Institute’s Assignment: China documentary series. Whether Margaret MacMillan minds that Mike Chinoy is using the same subtitle as her 2007 book Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World is moot, because Nixon, in a fit of not uncharacteristic blather and grandstanding, proclaimed the week to be just that, 40 years ago this month during his final stop in Shanghai.

Unlike MacMillan, who took us through the political and diplomatic machinations before and during the visit, Chinoy’s film is specifically about the message and the messengers: the press corps who followed Nixon to China and who struggled to cut through the opaque fog of Chinese public relations and CREEP propaganda. Or was it the other way around? This was an event made for television, and it’s a little unnerving at how simpatico Nixon’s people, including H.R. Haldeman and Ron Ziegler, were with their Chinese counterparts in crafting a public face for the president’s visit. After a week of watching Pat Nixon visiting school children and touring the kitchen of the Beijing Hotel, the press corp was in full revolt, stymied by the best efforts of the White House and Zhou Enlai who served up nothing but bland quotes and carefullly choreographed images.

The Chinese limited the number of reporters who could accompany the president, and Nixon cut the list further by (temporarily) nixing any reporters from the Washington Post or the New York Times in separate fits of paranoid pique, but the roll call was still an impressive roster of old China hands like Theodore “Thunder out of China” White, established news veterans like Walter Cronkite, and lesser known names like Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Ted Koppel, and Diane Sawyer (who was on Nixon’s staff during the trip and so was playing for the other team.)

Do we learn anything new in the documentary? Well…Walter Cronkite had battery-powered socks that kept malfunctioning, and it’s entirely possible those had been sabotaged by Rather, who even four decades later still seems as pissed as a rabid one-eyed jackrabbit in a hole full of gophers that he was told to wait like a lackey in Beijing while Cronkite accompanied the president to the Great Wall. Barbara Walters felt lonely and ostracized by the male reporters on the trip. Former US Ambassador Winston Lord III sounds shockingly like Boston Celtics great Bob Cousy. Not sure that was even possible. Diane Sawyer wore disposable pantyhose (don’t ask). The print media, devoid of quotable copy, resented the hell out of the TV people, who were overjoyed at the images they could beam back to the US of smiling schoolchildren doing exotic Chinese-y things like ‘dancing with ribbons’ and ‘eating with sticks.’

Those who feel that today’s foreign correspondents come loaded with an agenda can take comfort that it was once worse. Much, much worse. Ted Koppel lamented his translator’s inability to tell a joke in English, insinuating what I don’t know…Mao outlawed humor? Chinese aren’t funny? Recalling the trip four decades later, former CBS foreign correspondent Bernard Kalb, who really ought to know better, ill-advisedly drops the phrases ‘mystery country,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘hidden kingdom,’ and ‘secret country’ in one unfortunate 45-second clip so dripping with Orientalist cliche I half-expected him to bang a gong at the end and then wai the camera.

The film isn’t overly kind to Richard Nixon, but given that half the people interviewed ended up on his enemies list at one time or another, that shouldn’t come as a huge shock. Nixon’s infamous Great Wall quote (“It really is a great wall…”) once again gets truncated.[1]

The behind-the-scenes footage, much of it available elsewhere but used to great effect here, is fascinating. There are candid clips of Zhou Enlai making jokes as well as a few off-hand remarks by Nixon which suggest his affinity with Mao – another paranoid egocentric doomfreak with no friends, a batty wife, and an enemies list – was perhaps more than just political expediency.

Despite the rather sizeable role Kissinger played in negotiating and orchestrating the event, Hank seems oddly marginal in this film, perhaps because he left it to Nixon to put a public face on whatever the hell was being negotiated behind closed doors:

“Great. Yes. I will give you rapprochement, plus the island of Taiwan, in exchange for a clevely worded communique, future access to your government for anyone who pays me the ducats in exchange for said access, a platinum membership to the Beidaihe Number One Bathing Beach Spa and Massage Paradise Lounge, two mated pandas, and a guaranteed photo op with me and every Chinese leader during my lifetime plus whichever two emerge after I’m dead. Nobody will know the difference.”[2]

The film joins a growing list of useful and impressive research into the history of reporting in China. With so much attention placed these days on the mindset, mentality, and motivations of foreign correspondents, it’s worth looking at how attitudes and techniques for covering China have evolved over time. Notable contributions in this field include Paul French’s excellent Through the Looking Glass: Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao and the relatively recent volume edited by Susan Shirk Changing China, Changing Media. For that matter, the hilariously ribald (if often fictional) memoirs of Edmund Backhouse, whose collection of Chinese whispers and Manchu pillow talk provided grist for the columns and dispatches of George Morrison and others, shows that unsubstantiated rumors, no matter how goatshit insane, had juice even in the pre-Weibo era.

Assignment China: The Week that Changed the World is a good companion to these works, and would make a superb addition to a Modern Chinese History or US-China Relations course syllabus or possibly as a gift for the Barbara Walters fetishist/completionist in your life.

[1] He followed up with “…and it must have been built by a great people.”

[2] It’s possible I may have paraphrased a bit.

Tales of a Chunjie Agnostic

Jeremiah — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:21:33 +0800

I am a Spring Festival agnostic and I really want to believe in the power of the Lunar New Year. I like dumplings, I like family, and having grown up in New Hampshire, the festive blending of an excuse to alcoholic excess plus the availability of cheap explosives makes me sentimental, wistful even.

I’m amused by the annual Ayi exodus. Since it’s rare to see a Beijing expat lift anything heavier than money, this seasonal retreat of our nannies, waitresses, cooks, cleaners, drivers, dry cleaners, convenience store owners, and jianbing purveyors is a useful exercise in deprivation and self-reliance…like an outward bound experience for the neo-colonialist in all of us.

I really enjoy temple fairs. I think of it as a way to spread wealth. Two years ago I had my wallet nicked. Last year somebody managed to walk away with YJ’s cell phone. I’m taking my students to Ditan Park next Wednesday. If anybody is looking for a used iPod, blackberry, or expensive camera, check the local pawnshops in the Beixinqiao area on Thursday morning.

I love the gala. The gambling possibilities are limitless. Currently I have 50 RMB on the Over/Under for “first sighting of happy dancing Han dressed as minorities singing about how much they love the Party” and “Number of Dashan wannabe foreign minstrel acts.”[1] I also have a three-way teaser on a Song Zuying song + Jiang Zemin sighting + shot of Mrs. Jiang Zemin looking like she really wants to crack one of Jiang’s nuts in a hydraulic press.

I’m disappointed Zhao Benshan won’t be performing. Never figured the guy to ‘retire.’ I guess I had always hoped he would go out in a blaze of glory, one final performance busting out blue jokes sufficient to make a Shenzhen hooker sit up and take notes while mooning the CCTV censors with a man-sized ass. Pity, really.

I like that my in-laws live in Tianjin. While I enjoy friends talking about the travails of journeying to remote county towns in farthest Dongbei or a 45-hour train ride to Guangdong to take part in family bonding, I prefer staying closer to home. Actually, I’m so congenitally lazy I’ve finally worked out a scheme whereby Tianjin comes to Beijing thus sparing me the ‘effort’ of a 35-minute train ride. To be fair our apartment is a little bit more guest convenient than where we stay in Tianjin, but my mother-in-law laments that Beijing is quite boring during the Spring Festival. To make her feel at home this year I’ve hired a few mercs from Blackwater Security to shoot RPGs and random bursts of gunfire off our rooftop at midnight on Sunday. It should up the explosion quotient but if that doesn’t work, I’ll simply put an unopened can of soup and a bottle of ergoutou in the microwave and press “start.”

Actually, as longtime readers of my blog know I seriously lucked out in the Chinese In-Law Lotto. My father-in-law neither smokes nor drinks which means that I don’t need to ring in this year by sacrificing future years through participation in quaint customs like “tobacco-as-testosterone,” “toasting-with-jet-fuel” and my favorite, “drinking-to-the-point-of-delirium-before-going-outside-with-sufficient-explosives-to-end-the-Taliban-and-lighting-them-with-the-cigarettes-dangling-from-our-mouths.” My mother-in-law is an incredible cook, and her ability to dote on my wife to the point of psychological scarring should someday find its way into a textbook.

Perhaps the mystery of Spring Festival will always elude me, but at least I can enjoy it as a time to catch up one work, fulfill my jiaozi quota for the quarter, and write snarky blog posts about the holiday season while pretending to work on my laptop.

Happy Year of the Dragon!

[1] Yes, Granite Studio read Dashan’s rebuttal on Quora to two decades of criticism of Dashan. All Granite Studio can say is that Granite Studio has trouble taking anybody seriously who talks about one of their ‘identities’ in the third person. He’s a xiangsheng artist for Christ’s sake, not Batman.