1. I’ve been using twitter aggregator ‘Summize’ to read the absolute latest updates on the Sichuan earthquake. Of course, the search works in Chinese as well.

2. But twitter is not a panacea - Kaiser Kuo at ogilvy reminds us that there are plenty of other ways to keep up on breaking news in China.

3. Instead, consider getting your coverage from an independent Chinese media source like the Economic Observer (English) or Southern Weekend (Chinese)… with Chinese reporters and photojournalists in the field. The EEO article on why schools collapse is particularly good.

4. Get a feel for the geography and terrain to better understand what actually happened using one of these Visualizations from Google Earth.

5. After you take a look at the various hydroelectric dams scattered throughout the quake zone in Google Earth, read a bit more about the acknowledged threat of collapse here at WSJ.

6. And in case you were wondering about the pandas & tourists… the article is well done and a bit of a cliffhanger.

7. I wish I had seen the ancient irrigation system at Dujiangyan before the quake and I hope it survives intact because I’d still love to see it. In the meantime I enjoyed the fun panoramas here even though they’re a slow load. It’s amazing to think that leaders were doing a better job of designing water infrastructure more than 2000 years ago than they do today.

8. I can’t not link it. Peter Hessler’s students - the ones he talks about in River Town and Oracle Bones - update him on how the earthquake has impacted them. I just skimmed for their calls and emails. Most foreigners who live / have lived in China (particularly southwest China) have heard this kind of news from friends in the past week.

9. A very interesting article that compares Chinese and Burmese disaster response. I don’t appreciate the tone this article takes but it does raise a relevant point. The article starts annoying me when it suggests that disasters like this prove turning points for ‘authoritarian’ regimes. It seems to me, though, that the more public participation and sentiment is allowed / expressed, the more a government stands to be affected by the quality of their disaster response.

10. Wondering what you can do? This wiki explains how to donate to the quake relief effort.

Unlike China, where I now have a basic framework for understanding what I see around me and what I hear in the news, Bangladesh has been constant information overload. I can’t understand a word of local language or dialect (except, of course, when they talk about food… channa masala, aloo matar, kebab, naan, and so on). The entire political, economic, and technical/infrastructural context is different.

After the jump, excerpts from an email I sent to friends about the trip.

Tomorrow is the first day I’m going to have the time to escape the glitterati for a bit and take a rickshaw or better yet, walk. The food is amazing so far but I can guarantee that the street food is going to be better.

I can’t tell you how many times I wished you all were here… To sit in on these incredible discussions of pan-asian politics, overhear debates about the nature of media freedom, learn about the public health crisis in the wake of a cyclone/flood in November, see the inner workings of a Muslim majority country that is incredibly liberal, diverse, free, and run by a wholly secular government… or to jump in a motor rickshaw with me to take off across town and just wander around and see something that isn’t an attraction or a nice clean restaurant that meets health standards.

which reminds me: rickshaws are all brightly colored and covered in paintings. most people commission them and some paint their own. they’re all personal and many reveal political and religious beliefs. i’m busy trying to decide what i would paint on my rickshaw, if i was to have one….

Four hours in Kunming for the bourgeoisie:

Instead of Yunnan Nationalities Village, check out Yunnan Nationalities Museum. Granted, there are no giant stone phalluses surrounded by crowds of half-naked Wa minority dancers, but the overall picture you’ll get of the ethnic minorities of China will be a bit less exploitative. This is one of the best museums in Kunming (read: actually worth going to) and boasts a wide range of textiles, jewelry, and displays of the art, archetecture, and traditional tools of the 25 official minority groups represented in Yunnan.

Climb Xishan if you’re feeling energetic, but if you’re super lazy like me, catch a bus to Golden Temple, north of the city. Make the much shorter trek to the top for a decent view of Kunming and then explore the temple complex and surrounding parks and gardens. Bring a frisbee and take advantage of some of the only open grass in the province. If you’re rich, head next door and pony up the 100 (or is it 200?) RMB to visit the World Hortacultural Expo 99 gardens, then feast at the excellent Thai restaurant inside.

Skip 1910 La Gare du Sud and try out ShiPing Huiguan for Yunnan fare in a historical courtyard complex just south of Green Lake Park. Same food, half the price, half the tourists, and better local atmosphere (although the place is upscale and really clean). Periodic performances of traditional Yi minority songs by beautiful girls in costume are unintrusive and actually add to the experience. Stroll down to Green Lake Park after dinner and watch all of Kunming come out to play. (For the adventurous, try out any one of these restaurants specializing in Yunnan mushrooms. It’s all in Chinese, I know, I know, sorry.)

Instead of drinking Pu’er tea to relax, head to the natural hot spring spa, Dianchi Spring Spa, near lake Dian. Forget four hours, because for just over $10 US, you can the whole day relaxing in beautiful outdoor pools of scalding hot water. Throw in a few more bucks for massage, rubdown, fish eating your skin off, bowls of delicious ramen and pitchers of ice cold beer etc. This place is posh and clean and will give you fluffy terrycloth bathrobes and enormous towels and will not steal your swimsuit if you leave it behind. Oh yeah, they’re open ‘till 3 AM. Find them here.

Four hours in Kunming for the proletariat:

Check out the awesome free (or very cheap) exhibit on the minorities of Yunnan at Yunnan Nationalities University on 1-2-1 Street. Bus 10 and/or 55 will get you there, get off at the Minzu Daxue/ 民族大学 stop, walk through the main gate and ask around, someone will direct you to the museum.

Grab a map and stroll through Yunnan University’s campus south to Green Lake Park and then over to Yuantong Temple. Admission to the temple should be around 5 RMB, it’s a legitimate working temple filled with average Kunming people and few tourists. Don’t be afraid to wander off the main streets into some of the tiny alleyways and explore along the way. If you notice a wet market, step in and check out the selection of unidentifiable produce, tofu products, and animals you’d never want to eat. Help yourself to some grilled tofu, deep fried corn cakes or potatoes, fruit on a stick, or whatever other street food you happen across.

Eat at Heavenly Mana (located just next to Salvador’s Coffee Shop on Culture Alley). The menu boasts all the local Kunming specialties and has been fully translated into English. It’s a challenge to spend more than 15 RMB/person on a meal here, but if you’re looking to splurge, grab some homemade ice cream (10 RMB) at Salvador’s after dinner, or walk north along the alleyway about three minutes and get a cup of pure mango (5 RMB?) in the blender from Fresh juicebar.

If all the walking around tired you out, go to Linna’s Massage for a fantastic massage in a very unadorned little shop. Linna is blind, fluent in English, and reads English braille fluently as well. Her mother and a couple other staff also give massages — prices are clearly marked and last I was there it cost 25 RMB/hour for full body massage. Linna’s is located a 5 minute walk past the main gate of Yunnan University on Qingyun Jie/ 青云街.

For those who are short on time, the article basically describes a process by which the Chinese government, ethnic Chinese living on both sides of the China-Myanmar border, and a Burmese-Chinese paramilitary that controls the Shan state are using an opium-crop substitution program to get rich, bankrupt ethnic minority farmers, and acquire huge tracts of land. Central to the problem is the fact that the Chinese-produced varieties of hybrid rice being distributed in the area require heavy pesticide and fertilizer inputs - driving farmers into debt - and absolutely no technical trainings are being provided, leaving farmers at a loss for how to deal with toxic chemicals and a new and fussy crop. In the meantime, governments, militaries, and traders are making huge profits off the sale of seeds and chemicals in the region. Further, it is likely that the emphasis on rice-crop in this area is largely export-oriented, since Myanmar is perennially short on foreign exchange.

The article touches on quite a few of the most critical issues in agriculture: ‘modern’ vs. ‘traditional’ varieties, small subsistance farms vs. large managed farms, illegal crops and their microeconomic effects, property rights, tenure security, and political stability… playing out in what is really a very bizarre and singular political-economic situation. I got so excited that I did a bunch of background research that I look forward to putting up on this site in the very near future… in the meantime, GO READ THAT ARTICLE! I’m considering writing a personal letter to Asia Times to thank them for bothering to cover something well.

People in China’s rural areas are easier to be victims of inferior goods and unsafe foods because of lax supervision and financial difficulties.

How profound. But why is the government suddenly advocating this campaign in the first place? (If you answered ‘saving farmers from food poisoning,’ you might want to pick up a copy of anything written on China in the last ten years). Pressure to address food safety problems comes largely from the comparatively more informed and empowered urban Chinese as well as international businesses hoping to appease foreign consumers who are now terrified of buying Chinese products. The inspections are likely to largely target the same farms and factories supplying the urban and export market. Interesting, though, that Xinhua (and thus the government) are bothering to justify this push as benefiting rural areas at all. Maybe they’re having a difficult time getting the local government buy-in, and think it’s easier to explain that controls are tightening for their own personal safety than the bottom line of international pet food manufacturers.

Let’s take a minute and let that sink in: More pressure for food safety reform in China has come from the death of a handful of American pets this year than from the potential tens of thousands of Chinese citizens who die each year from similar toxins in food. Why the disparity? An official US total of 16 cats and 1 dog died as a result of feed grade gluten and rice protein tainted with Melamine, unofficial estimates reach thousands of pets. I know this because I can find it here and here and here. I can also find the US government’s food safety monitoring data, as it is regularly released and published, good or bad, in the popular press. International newspapers, those not subject to government content control, know that scandal sells, and almost no scandal sells better than one that potentially jeopardizes the entire readership (or their beloved kittens). Companies are desperate to keep their salad dressings, toothpastes, and frozen bagels off the front page, so they double and triple-check their production line for risk.

The Chinese government, in contrast, works hard to disguise the scope and degree of the food safety problem from the general public. Routine monitoring results at the local level are generally either not released or highly suspect. Investigative journalism on issues like this is discouraged, and reporters who push the envelope in controversial areas do so at what appears to be fairly significant personal and professional risk. Two prominent, recent examples: it is common knowledge at this point that reporting on Blue Ear Disease in China’s pig population is being heavily downplayed and controlled, second, when domestic reporters uncovered cardboard being used in steamed bun production in Beijing last June, the journalists were skewered in the domestic press for staging the whole thing, which (the rumor mill indicates) coincided with a convenient purge in freelance (non-contract) television journalists affiliated with CCTV. The reporters involved hired some migrant workers and staged their footage of cardboard bun production, but it is still widely believed that they acted in response to actual information that cardboard was being used in steamed bun production.

Asking local governments to “severely punish producers of fake or substandard goods” assumes that these governments have the technical expertise, resources, and incentives to aggressively enforce food safety policies… which they largely do not. My bottom line is this: the central government’s goal would be better served by turning a profit-motivated journalist corps loose on producers of shoddy, toxic food (or whatever else) and watching these producers go under as their names are smeared across the headlines.

If you read Chinese, check out the Economic Observer’s coverage of media and product safety for more on this same issue. I’m quoted here, although my professional qualifications are somewhat suspiciously inflated.

In the meantime: a big thank you to the folks at ChinaTattler for mentioning me in their list of (just barely acceptable) laowai blogs about China. Not entirely sure I agree with their assesment of western vs. Chinese media, but I do agree with the better part of their blog related rant, particularly that that ‘a wise man says a lot with few words, while a fool says nothing with many words.’

And on that note…

Spring Festival, the most important holiday of the year in China, is approaching fast. That means those of you teaching English at a Chinese university probably haven’t been working since Christmas-ish and may very well have vacation until the end of February.

The rest of us ‘migrant workers’ have to wait until China’s central government officially announces the holiday vacation dates, at which point we charge to the nearest train or bus station to get in line for tickets home. People regularly spend full days waiting to buy tickets, and often are forced to camp out in the hopes of getting a reasonable seat home. A fairly accurate depiction of this phenomenon is presented here, in the hilarious (Chinese) satire film entitled “Spring Festival Travel Evil Empire.”

I was considering bypassing the charge this year and booking a flight somewhere until I noticed an article in Shanghai Daily about a price freeze on Spring Fest train tickets.

Saaa-weeet! This means they won’t jack up the prices an extra 20% just in time for everyone to be socially, culturally, and morally obligated to go home for their single yearly visit. As one of my coworkers put it last year, “It’s not like if you charge me more I will tell my grandma, ‘Grandma? Sorry I am not coming home for Chunjie this year.’”

The article mentions the fact that China’s 150 million migrant workers make up a large part of those travelling home for the holiday. Since these workers make very little, and are often owed thousands of RMB in unpaid back wages (see previous post), many get increasingly desparate when it comes time to get in line and buy those train tickets. Which leads to:

A huge outbreak of theft every year in the month or two leading up to Spring Festival. Shanghaiist Zat Liu reported on her personal experience with this phenomenon, a missing pair of “masculine” riding boots, as well as some information on where in Shanghai theft is most rampant.

I can identify, as I have had a cell phone cut out of my purse on a public bus and mysteriously “lost” a wallet in a crowded bar in the last two months. Needless to say, I’m getting a bit paranoid.

I was able to find a collaberative map of thefts in Beijing, but it is in Chinese and there are only a few additions. This article (Chinese) also details cooperative online maps of high-theft areas, and highlights the Sanlitun, Xizhimen, and Gucheng areas, as well as major hospitals (where people often carry large amounts of cash to cover medical bills).

After kissing the fresh fruit and blue skies of Kunming goodbye, I made my official migration to Beijing just before Christmas with two papayas in my carry-on luggage. I’ve spent the last month moving and the last week or two in a cesspit of holiday debauchery, but I am, at last, back on track with the latest in agricultural and migrant-related gossip, not to mention a healthy dose of Yunnan and Beijing hearsay.

It Sucks to Live in Rural China

I may have been on hiatus, but People’s Daily was still hard at work, bringing us insightful and groundbreaking news like this article: China’s rural life still harsh. Now that’s a shocker.

The story follows two migrant workers who, after the repeal of agricultural taxes was announced last year, returned to their home village to work the 4 mu (.65 acre or .2 hectare) allocated to them. A typhoon hit, and flooding submerged most of their land, and the husband was diagnosed with cancer. With no insurance, the family spent their entire life savings (just over $1,000 US) on hospital bills.

Two things worth noting about this article:

The couple had been working in an urban area as ‘migrant workers’ - the typical translation for 农民工 or farmer-workers in Chinese. They worked in the city long enough to save a substantial amount of money - and yet the 4 mu of land in their home village was still there, awaiting their return. Would this couple be better off if they could sell their farmland to a neighbor and use that capital to relocate permanently to the city? Under the current legal system, agricultural land is state property, and farmers can’t sell (and in some cases, can’t even lease).

Second, this is a classic example of the fallacy of a “poverty line” - in many cases, Chinese farmers’ savings level pushes them above the line and disqualifies them for all kinds of aid, but in practice, lack of access to insurance and inability to access the value of their land, they immediately return to poverty if they must pay tuition or hospital bills.

More rough life for the poor after the jump…

At least, according to this article, also from the People’s Daily, China’s minority populations are much more likely to be poor than average Han Chinese in rural areas.

China’s ethnic regions still have 11.7 million people living in abject poverty, accounting for 49.5 percent of the country’s poor rural dwellers, a Chinese legislator said Wednesday. […] Besides the historic, natural and social disadvantages in these areas, local government failure to carry out national policies and laws, and the misuse of funds were also to blame for the lack of development, he said.

And in case you thought moving to urban china was a panacea,

It Sucks to be a Migrant Worker

China Daily reports on this story, eventually picked up by the international press, of a migrant worker who was beaten to death after demanding back pay for himself and his construction crew.

A survey of the Ministry of Agriculture shows China’s migrant worker population has grown to 114.9 million with an estimated 6.7 million new migrant workers this year. The central government has ordered local officials to make sure workers are paid on time and in full, but enforcement is lax. A recent investigation found that 980 employers in northwestern Gansu Province owe 130 million yuan (US$16.6 million) of wages to some 130,000 migrant workers. Most of the debtors are construction firms and restaurants, according to the provincial labor and social security department that investigated nearly 6,000 businesses in October and November to make sure all migrants’ wages are paid. (emphasis mine)

The entire article is a fascinating set of stories about companies that fail to pay workers and then disappear into a corrupt and inefficient legal system. The article makes the point that most migrant workers simply don’t have the time to wait around for back pay, since they desperately need to send money home to their families. It seems from the article that this problem is very widespread, which would not surprise me, given both the state of the legal system in China and friends’ personal experiences with similar situations. If an accredited school or university will try to screw foreign teachers out of money, I’m sure that construction companies treat their impoverished and status-less workers much worse.

One way she has done that is by expanding SDSU’s international studies programs. Students now are able to attend universities across the globe, paying only what they would for tuition at SDSU. Last school year, almost 175 South Dakota State students studied abroad. In September 2004, she and her husband, Bob, led a contingent of SDSU staff and students to Kunming, China to visit Yunnan Normal University and discuss an ongoing exchange with that school. She not only wanted students to check out the study opportunities there, but the nightlife and the social opportunities to ensure it was a place young Americans would want to go. Matt Anderson, a 21-year-old biology and pre-med major from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, was on that trip. A product of the prairie who had never strayed much beyond the Midwest, Anderson said the culture shock was enormous - but the experience was priceless. “It was incredibly valuable to meet students over there and get their perspective on America,” Anderson, a senior, says.

I always hoped that there would be progress on the study abroad program they were hoping to establish, but haven’t heard anything about it in the last 16 months in Kunming. Most kids from South Dakota, even the brightest and most successful ones, don’t consider out of state options for college, let alone international study abroad.

A cursory search seems to indicate that SDSU has made a few exploratory trips to Kunming but has yet to establish a formal exchange program of any kind. They’ve also published a serious mis-estimate of Kunming’s population (they say 1 million, accurate figures over 4 million).

Last year, last storm season, in several countries lining the far side of our moody Pacific, ferocious wind and rain, suddenly hungry rivers and streams, took away 700,000 Thai and Malay homes, destroyed 1.5 million Chinese dwellings, ruined 3 million Indian, Nepali, and Bangladeshi houses. And these losses represent only three of 2005’s record-breaking 73 storms in and around Asia. Those numbers are numbing. That’s more houses washed away than family homes standing in Oregon and Washington combined.

In fact, in a dozen more weather-sent calamities following the Leyte disaster, in other just as vulnerable areas of our aching earth, families sunk into misery even deeper than the poverty they endured before those storms. Poor people in poor countries got poorer still. The good news is In each instance also, we hasten to add, immigrant Americans responded immediately to their homeland’s suffering. Millions of U.S. dollars were sent or hand-carried back to where our hearts linger and our ancestral bones lie. It’s no secret that remittances from American Asians keep families back home, indeed keep entire developing countries, afloat. Foul weather on not.

The article goes on to ask whether immigrant communities can/ should take a larger role in changing US government climate policy formation, since disproportionately, it will be people in tropical coastal areas (and not Americans) who are affected by warming and related weather issues.

It seems like immigrants from coastal areas might have more at stake than the average American… but I don’t see coastal Texans leading the charge for progressive environment and energy policy while Minnesotans drag their heels. The larger problem is that no one wants to think about the implications of warming — not even those most likely to feel direct affects.

Similarly, I don’t see many Chinese Americans lobbying for increased public health projects that fight childhood diarrhea, one of the top killers of children across Asia — but I do see them sending money back for medical emergencies, and I also see them warning their immediate families not to eat the food or touch the water when they travel to China. Awareness of a problem does not necessarily beget a movement to solve it.

This article on the German grocery superstore Metro charging for bags in Kunming from China Central Television (CCTV) floated across my radar today — it piqued my interest since I spent Tuesday trying to track down more information on trash bags in Northwest Yunnan.

I’ve always been vaguely aware of the ban on plastic bags in effect in Lijiang and Zhongdian (technically, all of Lijiang and Deqin prefectures) but never thought much about it until last August, when I travelled to Zhongdian with a friend who asked me what the deal was with the strange pseudo-cloth, pseudo-paper yellow bags we kept getting whenever we bought stuff. I mentioned that plastic was banned and guessed that this was some sort of biodegradable alternative material. We’ve been trying to figure out where these bags are coming from ever since, and it came to a head on Tuesday, when responsible travel company WildChina expressed interest in buying a few.

We’re not having a lot of luck tracking down the supplier of these bags in Northwest Yunnan — online research and some cursory asking around hasn’t even determined for sure if the bags are being distributed by a non-profit, for-profit, or local government. On the other hand, we have learned the following:

The ban on plastic bags seems to have been implemented in 2002. There is some interesting related information in this report from the Yunnan Environmental Protection Bureau, including the fact that .7 million plastic bags were confiscated. The whole report is worth a read if you are into that kind of thing. The backstory of the ban is explained in this article (Chinese) , and basically adds up to the local governments realizing that if millions of domestic and international tourists were going to show up each year and shop, they needed to do something about the pollution. No one wants to go to a world heritage site that has been buried by a waste dump.

In my hunt for more information on the ban on plastic bags (and possible biodegradable replacements) in Lijiang and Zhongdian, I turned up this article on the larger waste issue in Lijiang by Jo Kent, a new friend here in Beijing. She writes simply and honestly about the incredible trash problem here in China, particularly the “just throw it on the ground” culture that prevails everywhere from rural Yunnan to the big city (at a somewhat lesser degree).

Free Chinese Lesson! Biodegradability: 生物降解性 sheng wu jiang jie xing Biodegradable bag: 生物可降解袋 sheng wu ke jiang jie dai Sub in any Chinese noun in the blank to say that thing is biodegradable.

Although the English is a bit fun and creative at times, it is perfectly possible to book through the English language website but input your delivery address in Chinese. This means I am less concerned about first time booking mistakes, but still can receive my tickets without trying to explain my address in Kunminghua over the phone.

It is possible to select (right on their website) an option that allows you to hold your tix with a credit card. This guarantees that you can make the booking even though you can’t or won’t take delivery for a day or two. You may also be able to pay on a credit card… but I can’t remember.

So far, they have had every ticket I booked on their website at the price I booked it… and I haven’t heard from any friends that ticket prices changed. This was one of my biggest frustrations with Elong as it further delayed my purchase of alternative tickets.

Local travel companies are good too, and I have yet to have any problem with them. But I can’t usually save my name and identification numbers at their offices… and Ctrip does that for me. Oh yeah, and also? Ctrip sends me a text message the day before my departure with weather in the city I’m flying to. Beat that.

I continue to have utterly no affiliations in this sector, I just like a cheap and efficiently delivered plane ticket.

Loyal readers (for example, my father): Do not fear, although I have been a bit lazy lately, I will continue to blog. I will admit I have been on a rather long hiatus, however, I’ve been preoccupied with the details of my impending move to Beijing and a number of personal projects and issues. Although I will continue to write here until further notice or Princeton cuts me off, a few changes will be in store in the coming month:

1. I will be blogging from Beijing beginning in late December. I will still focus on development, agriculture, and environment, and I will probably be writing a good deal about Yunnan province, but since I will be living in Beijing, chances are you’ll be reading more about the frozen northern urban wasteland, and specifically, the migrant workers (of the impoverished Chinese variety) who have it really rough up here. More on that coming soon.

2. I won’t be blogging much about work. Why? Because I will be working for the US Department of Agriculture and am pretty well committed to stay away from anything interesting (read: controversial) that comes of it. Sorry. Line between blog and job must be maintained. On the other hand, if you want to read some thrilling market reports or hear about the latest food fair, watch this space!

3. The banner photo may have to change. I mean, honestly, there is nothing green up here. At all. When my Ipod shuffled up the song “California Dreamin’” this morning, I could identify for the first time in a while:

All the leaves are brown And the sky is grey I’ve been for a walk On a winter’s day If I didn’t tell her I could leave today California dreamin’ On such a winter’s day…

Over the course of the last year, I have become increasingly concerned with what I would consider to be painfully shallow and trite China coverage on the part of many major American news outlets as well as other English language publications.

After speaking with a few friends who are working or have worked for the China bureaus of some of the leading English-language newspapers and magazines, I was given one startling piece of advice: If you want to be a journalist covering China, go home. If you are hired to research or freelance in China, you are not in line for your own byline for the office. Some of the world’s best news outlets hire their China reporters predominantly out of the US offices. They’re sent over with plenty of journalism background, but little understanding of China, and rarely any language skills.

(More ranting after the jump)

I watched one fairly well-known journalist roll into Kunming and conduct at least 5 or 6 interviews in a day with many local NGOs. Little or no interesting information came out of this fishing expedition due to an absolute lack of cultural subtlety, incredible time constraints, and an insurmountable language barrier. (The journalist’s champion translator won my utmost respect, but no one on this earth can translate stuff like persistent organic pollutants without any background). In the end, one of my coworkers was misquoted in a major US newspaper, but we were not notified of the publication and failed to discover the error until a few weeks had passed.

Since Americans already know very little about China, reporters and their editors and publications can get away with murder in terms of everything from blatant errors and misquotes to sweeping stereotypes to outright drivel. Take, for example, this piece in Slate, wherein a very intelligent and well-qualified woman named Deb Fallows is guilty of making some of the most basic, generalized, and uninteresting observations about life in Shanghai I have ever read, and getting them published in a respected magazine with wide readership. I first read about her diary here, in the blog Shanghaiist. Over 50 Shanghaiist readers commented, some suggesting that the bloggers were arrogant and elitist for expecting better, while the majority supported the author’s perspective that this kind of China coverage is insubstantial, unchallenging, and empty.

A second example of is this article in the New Yorker about mathematician ShingTung Yau. He subsequently sued for defamation over inaccuracies in the article (warning: PDF). While it makes for a fascinating read, she gets away with a lot, because the general public (even the readership of New Yorker) views the math academe as mysterious and impenetrable. This sentiment is only intensified by weaving China and Chineseness into the story — again, a mysterious and impenetrable subject that American readers are willing to accept sweeping generalizations about. In effect, she writes for an audience who knows little or nothing about her subject matter and thus, her standards of accuracy (and decency?) slip.

Over lunch today, I had a conversation with a friend who has been living in China and working in a number of highly professional capacities for a few years now. Peter Hessler’s book, Oracle Bones, came up, and she said she never bothers to read the expat in China books, because most of the time she’s done all the stuff they describe, and much of the time she has gone through even more extreme experiences. I think that reflected some of the feelings of everyone at the table: while books like River Town and Iron and Silk and Foreign Babes in Beijing are exotic and interesting to a US audience, but they describe cultural friction that has become completely mundane to those of us here in China.

So we’re in a bit of a bind. The Times runs through its ever-recycling repertoire of “water story,” “dissident story,” and “mismanaged banking system” story — have you noticed that these recur every 2 months or so? Lately they’ve been peppering in the “China gives aid to Sudan/ Iran/ Myanmar” story. In the meantime, people like Nick Kristof and Peter Hessler write much more informed but still incredibly mundane pictures of daily life in China. And of course the Chinese state media continues to churn out its special flavor of schlock.

Leaving the international audience aside for a moment, you can see that even those of us living and working in China are somewhat at a loss as to what to read to become more informed.

But why should anyone, especially those of us over here in China who already have some idea of what is going on, really care?

Friedman’s November 10th op-ed in the New York Times argues that China is the country “most likely to shape US politics in 2008” and precipitate “the coming civil war among the Democrats.”

China, in other words, is inevitably going to move back to the center of U.S. politics, because it crystallizes the economic challenges faced by U.S. workers in the 21st century. The big question for me is, how will President Bush and the Democratic Congress use China: as a scapegoat or a Sputnik?

Gimmicky alliteration aside, if Friedman is right that China policy is about to divide the democratic party, I just wish I had some sense that Americans, particularly politicians who have a prominent role to play, had any source of decent information on what is happening over here — politically, economically, culturally.

I also wouldn’t mind having something more to read. Recommendations, anyone?

One of my favorite places I’ve ever travelled in Yunnan province is a village called Shaxi — pronounced shah-she, deposed leader of Iran, followed by the female counterpart to he. I was there during Fall 2004 with a student group on my first trip to Yunnan. We stayed with local families, and I lucked out, living with a grandmother and grandfather whose children were grown and hosting some of my classmates.

I have often encouraged friends to travel to Shaxi, but to be frank, it took me a while to find it on a map, and there aren’t very regular or convenient forms of transportation to get there. Looking for more information, I happened across a website on Shaxi that may help independent travellers make it there knowing there is somewhere to stay at the end of their trip.

What is so great about this place that I am talking about it even though I haven’t been for two years? Well, first off, today is my last day at work (as you can tell I finally have a bit of free time) and I’m going to try to get out there during my mid-December unemployed period.

Additionally:

Shibaoshan Temples: Having lived and traveled in China for a couple years now, I have seen my fair share of temples. Shibaoshan, however, stands out in my memory as a host of some of the coolest temples I’ve ever seen. The mountain is covered with Taoist and Buddhist temples, connected by a network of paths. If you make it all the way to the top, you can get to some near-deserted and windblown places of worship that are obviously not targeted towards tourists.

Jianchuan (Shiling) grottos: If you continue to follow Shibaoshan along the ridge range, you can visit the most historically significant (coolest) grottos in southern China. These suckers were built during the Nanzhao Kingdom period in Yunnan’s history (Tang Dynasty), or between 700 and 1000 AD. So basically they are old. They include historical figures and depict some of the first transmission of Buddhism into China, with strikingly South Asian looking carvings. There is also an incredibly old carving of female genitalia that local women still pour oil on to pray for pregnancy. Local rumor has it (although I can’t cite this, can anyone help?) that premier Zhou Enlai deployed the military to protect the grottos from the red guard during the cultural revolution. At any rate, the military did show up, and only minimal damage was done.

Southern Silk Road: Also referred to as the Tea-Horse caravan, this trade route linked Burma with Yunnan and crossed the Tibetan plateau to reach the Western Silk Road. One of the largest and most well-preserved markets on this route is in Shaxi village, currently being preserved by an international project. In 2004, the project was just beginning, by this point, I’m sure the preserved areas are very interesting and accessible to travellers.