Interesting that the Chinese character for "control" is the word of the year in China. This seems to indicate a growing expectation that inflation and price hikes should be kept under control.
You can listen to the following piece at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/cdaudio/2011-12/16/content_14278789.htm
New character took control in 2011
[ 2011-12-16 15:43 ]
进入英语学习论坛下载音频
The Chinese character kong 控, a word that generally means control, has been selected as the 2011 character of the year in China.
The word was chosen after recommendations from Internet users, expert reviews and online polling that was jointly organized by the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center under the Ministry of Education, the State-run Commercial Press, and the China Youth Daily, a report in the newspaper said on Thursday.
Two million Internet users took part in the selection, the report said.
Kong, replacing the character zhang (meaning price hikes)from last year, symbolizes a logical consequence of the government launching proper macro-economic policy to keep the hikes under control, said a statement issued by the organizers.
A statement on Wednesday after a three-day central economic work conference attended by senior leaders said the country would maintain the steady macro-economic policy and measures to control inflation, stabilize prices and regulate the property market.
The selection of kong indicates the public's expectations and the government's efforts to respond to the expectations, the organizers' statement said.
Moreover, the use of kong as shorthand for a homophone of the English word "complex" to express a special liking, is also getting popular this year, which reflects a more diversified lifestyle of the Chinese people, the statement said.
In this respect, the word kong usually follows a noun or verb. For instance, weibo kong refers to those people who like to use micro blogs very much and spend a lot of time micro-blogging.
The phrase shang bu qi, which means too delicate to bear a blow, was chosen as the phrase of the year, revealing the public's sensitivity to personal and social problems, and their call for justice and equity.
Also, "debt" and "euro debt crisis" were voted the international word and phrase of the year, showing the public's growing awareness of a globalized world, the report said.
.....................................................
Showing posts with label ancient chinese culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancient chinese culture. Show all posts
Friday, December 16, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Chinese Puzzles at the MOCA
MOCA Chinese Puzzles Family Workshop
Sat, Jun 25 from 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Museum of Chinese in America | 215 Centre Street | New York | NY | 10013
Come join MOCA for its second Chinese Puzzles Family Workshop! Hear stories related to puzzles, try your hand at solving puzzles, and experiment with a puzzles inspired art activity!
In conjunction with Chinese Puzzles: Games for the Hands and Mind, MOCA will offer a series of family workshops on the last Saturday of each month from March to August 2011.
These family workshops are shared experiences for children and their adult companions.
Ages 4 and older with adults.
Admission: $10 per child and adult pair; $5 per additional child; Free for MOCA Family Members. RSVP to programs@mocanyc.org
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Kathleen Ho Feng Shui and Intuitive Design
Visit their site for ways to enhance your life with feng shui.
Kathleen Ho graduated from the New England School of Feng Shui in 2001, completing a year-long study under the instruction and guidance of Feng Shui Masters from around the world.
She brings a unique approach to this ancient art, by employing her feng shui knowledge, intuition,and her love of style and design, home decorating and organized spaces.
www.kathleenhofengshui.com
Kathleen Ho graduated from the New England School of Feng Shui in 2001, completing a year-long study under the instruction and guidance of Feng Shui Masters from around the world.
She brings a unique approach to this ancient art, by employing her feng shui knowledge, intuition,and her love of style and design, home decorating and organized spaces.
www.kathleenhofengshui.com
Friday, February 4, 2011
NY Times: Forbidden City Treasure at the Met
From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04emperor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Art%20Review:%20A%20Man%20of%20Contradictions,%20With%20a%20Collection%20to%20Match&st=cse,
where you can see a slideshow of the treasures on exhibition.
February 3, 2011
A Man of Contradictions, With a Collection to MatchBy HOLLAND
COTTER
When China’s last emperor finally left the premises in 1924, the Forbidden
City was renamed the Palace Museum, and a labyrinthine complex of ceremonial
and domestic spaces, off limits to all but a few for centuries, was suddenly
open to the world.
Still, it kept some secrets. Few visitors, for example, knew of the
existence of a self-contained suite of small pavilions and gardens tucked
away at the Forbidden City’s northeast corner, echoing its shape.
They made up the Tranquillity and Longevity Palace, which, in the mid-18th
century, had been remodeled as a potential retirement home by the adamantly
unretiring and design-obsessed Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong.
He lavished attention on the palace — covered its walls with trompe l’oeil
paintings, fitted it out with false doors, see-through partitions, Buddhist
shrines and clocks — to make it a place that reflected his adventurous
tastes, a place where he might want to live. But in the end, he spent little
time there. And the palace, often referred to now as the Qianlong Garden,
had only a handful of imperial tenants after he died in 1799.
For most of the 20th century it stayed empty. The Chinese government had no
cash to spare for its upkeep, and conserving Qing culture was on no one’s
list of priorities. The building exteriors were maintained, but the
interiors, with their frozen-in-time ensembles of furniture, painting,
textiles and luxury objects, were left to fend for themselves.
Things have changed. China, now (and not for the first time) a global power
in need of an agreeable self-image to sell, has seen the wisdom of
preserving its visual heritage — all of it. And international scholars of
that heritage, once separated by distance, are now thoroughly networked. A
concrete result of this new one-worldism is a collaboration, now in
progress, between the Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund to restore
the Qianlong Garden to its former splendor.
Among the art historians acting as consultants to the project is Nancy
Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Mass. By 2003, the year the restoration got under way, Ms. Berliner had
already scored a Qing-related coup of her own by overseeing the transfer,
from China to the Salem museum, of an intact house dating to the dynasty.
And last fall she scored a second one with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise:
Treasures From the Forbidden City,” an exhibition she organized for the
Peabody Essex, and which now appears, in a different form, at the Metropolitan
Museum of
Art
.
The show is made up primarily of freshly conserved Qing objects — thrones,
cabinets, screens, religious sculptures, paintings — from the collection of
the Palace Museum, many specifically from Qianlong Garden buildings.
Qianlong himself probably commissioned some of the items. Certainly his
sensibility is written all over them.
Born in Beijing in 1711, Qianlong (pronounced Chee-en lohng) descended from
non-Chinese-speaking northerners who called themselves Manchu and ruled
China as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1911. Self-confident and adventurous,
he was a ceaseless mover and doer, constantly making inspection tours of a
country that during his reign was the largest and richest in the world.
Largeness, in fact, was his calling card. His cultural initiatives seem
conceived precisely to generate preposterous statistics. He commissioned and
participated in the creation of an anthology of 2,000 years of Chinese
literature: it appeared in the form of 36,000 handwritten volumes, which he
ordered to be copied several times.
A writer himself, he left more than 40,000 poems behind when he died. When
he was 50, he published a compendium of his calligraphy. He acquired art of
all kinds in record-breaking quantities. At one point he cataloged a
collection of some 10,000 of his paintings, then went on to collect more.
He was a knot of contradictions. He preserved thousand of books in his
anthology, but also destroyed thousands, some of them legendary classics,
that he considered politically subversive. As an art connoisseur, he had an
uncannily sensitive eye, yet he insisted on incising his name into precious
ceramics and writing it repeatedly on priceless paintings, effectively
defacing them.
Although he had many self-portraits made, no cohesive reading of his
personality can be drawn from them. In one painting he is an imposing
Confucian ancestor figure; in another, a humble young Daoist scholar. In a
third piece we find him floating at the center of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala
as the embodiment of the bodhisattva of wisdom, which he believed himself to
be.
As a highly self-aware performer, he exploited the public relations uses of
shape-shifting, offering alternate versions of himself to different
audiences, Manchu, Han Chinese and European.
He was wary of Europe politically, but entranced by vision-tickling aspects
of its art, like vanishing-point perspective and trompe l’oeil realism.
Christianity left him cold — why should he worship a supreme being when he
was one? — but he treasured Jesuit missionary artists like Giuseppe
Castiglione and kept them on his payroll.
Contradiction is also the animating dynamic of the art in the Met show
created to adorn the various buildings — reception halls, studios,
libraries, Buddhist shrines — in the Qianlong Garden.
In the circular portrait of the young Qianlong in scholar robes in the first
gallery, the pictorial space is pancake-flat, depthless. But in a
Western-style mural painting on silk nearby, life-size figures of woman and
child beckon us into a three-dimensional hall. (Several such murals cover
walls in the one Qianlong Garden building that was fully restored in 2008
and can be digitally toured in another Met gallery.)
Realism in Qing art, however, often veers into the surreal, as is evident in
a mesmerizingly bizarre furniture ensemble. Like some version of rustic
Victoriana, all three units — chair, couch bed, foot stool — appear to be
woven from roots and vines, though in this case the interwoven strands look
freakishly alive, writhing and twisting like nests of snakes. Only when you
inspect the furniture closely do you see that this organicism run riot is
strictly an illusion. The roots and vines have been painstakingly puzzled
together from many small pieces of wood, in a design meant to evoke a Daoist
immersion in nature.
This kind of interplay between opposites — the unnatural and the natural,
the grotesque and the spiritual — powers the show. Qianlong went for art and
design that pushed such contrasts to the limit and beyond, short-circuiting
received notions of good taste and bad taste to deliver little shocks of
pleasure.
You can feel such zaps radiating from one work in particular: a 16-panel
wood-and-lacquer screen carrying portraits of early disciples of the Buddha,
known as luohans. These figures are traditionally pretty gross: ragged and
repellent old men, with cartoon faces and hair sprouting from unlikely
places. They’re shown that way here too, but in a medium — white jade inlaid
on black lacquer — that is so ethereal, and worked with such fineness, as to
all but cancel out any impression of ugliness.
The screen holds another surprise too. When conservators moved it from its
original position against a wall, they found that the reverse sides of the
panels were painted with images of trees and flowers in tones of gold.
Stunning!
At the Peabody Essex, the screen was free-standing and could be viewed from
both sides. The Met, by contrast, has placed it in a long wall case, with
the luohans face out, and a few panels flipped to give a sampling of the
painting. And this is just one of the ways in which the Met edition of the
show differs from the Salem original.
Judging from photographs, you can see that the installation Ms. Berliner
devised at the Peabody Essex was spaciously laid out, with an effort made to
simulate the architectural interior in which the objects were once found. At
the Met, the same objects have been squeezed into the narrow Chinese
painting galleries, with almost everything confined to tall cases designed
to hold scrolls.
As if to compensate for a more straightened and prosaic approach, the New
York presentation — organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, curator of Chinese art,
with an ingenious design by Daniel Kershaw — has been enriched with examples
of Qing art from the Met’s collection, including a large Castiglione drawing
and a pair of panoramic scrolls depicting two of Qianlong’s imperial road
trips.
We also get something that in most museums we can only imagine: a real
garden, in the form of the Astor Court. It’s based on a Ming rather than a
Qing prototype, but the components — twisty river rocks set in greenery —
are right. And, because the Met’s display cases are as shallow as they are
tall, we can see everything in them close-up: the cloisonné medallions
adorning a doorway surround, the stitch work in a satin chair cover, the
chips of jade, coral and lapis lazuli embedded in a relief of a blossoming
plum tree that comes across as both garish and sumptuous.
Up close was the emperor’s perspective too: proprietary, absorbed,
evaluative. And — who knows? — it may not be available again, once these
objects return to Beijing and are placed, where they belong, in the
completely restored Qianlong Garden that is scheduled to reopen in 2019, to
what will surely be an avid new public.
*Forbidden-City Treasure*
*WHAT* “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City.”
*WHEN AND WHERE* Through May 1, Metropolitan Museum of
Art;
(212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/arts/design/04emperor.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Art%20Review:%20A%20Man%20of%20Contradictions,%20With%20a%20Collection%20to%20Match&st=cse,
where you can see a slideshow of the treasures on exhibition.
February 3, 2011
A Man of Contradictions, With a Collection to MatchBy HOLLAND
COTTER
When China’s last emperor finally left the premises in 1924, the Forbidden
City was renamed the Palace Museum, and a labyrinthine complex of ceremonial
and domestic spaces, off limits to all but a few for centuries, was suddenly
open to the world.
Still, it kept some secrets. Few visitors, for example, knew of the
existence of a self-contained suite of small pavilions and gardens tucked
away at the Forbidden City’s northeast corner, echoing its shape.
They made up the Tranquillity and Longevity Palace, which, in the mid-18th
century, had been remodeled as a potential retirement home by the adamantly
unretiring and design-obsessed Qing dynasty emperor Qianlong.
He lavished attention on the palace — covered its walls with trompe l’oeil
paintings, fitted it out with false doors, see-through partitions, Buddhist
shrines and clocks — to make it a place that reflected his adventurous
tastes, a place where he might want to live. But in the end, he spent little
time there. And the palace, often referred to now as the Qianlong Garden,
had only a handful of imperial tenants after he died in 1799.
For most of the 20th century it stayed empty. The Chinese government had no
cash to spare for its upkeep, and conserving Qing culture was on no one’s
list of priorities. The building exteriors were maintained, but the
interiors, with their frozen-in-time ensembles of furniture, painting,
textiles and luxury objects, were left to fend for themselves.
Things have changed. China, now (and not for the first time) a global power
in need of an agreeable self-image to sell, has seen the wisdom of
preserving its visual heritage — all of it. And international scholars of
that heritage, once separated by distance, are now thoroughly networked. A
concrete result of this new one-worldism is a collaboration, now in
progress, between the Palace Museum and the World Monuments Fund to restore
the Qianlong Garden to its former splendor.
Among the art historians acting as consultants to the project is Nancy
Berliner, the curator of Chinese art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem,
Mass. By 2003, the year the restoration got under way, Ms. Berliner had
already scored a Qing-related coup of her own by overseeing the transfer,
from China to the Salem museum, of an intact house dating to the dynasty.
And last fall she scored a second one with “The Emperor’s Private Paradise:
Treasures From the Forbidden City,” an exhibition she organized for the
Peabody Essex, and which now appears, in a different form, at the Metropolitan
Museum of
Art
.
The show is made up primarily of freshly conserved Qing objects — thrones,
cabinets, screens, religious sculptures, paintings — from the collection of
the Palace Museum, many specifically from Qianlong Garden buildings.
Qianlong himself probably commissioned some of the items. Certainly his
sensibility is written all over them.
Born in Beijing in 1711, Qianlong (pronounced Chee-en lohng) descended from
non-Chinese-speaking northerners who called themselves Manchu and ruled
China as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1911. Self-confident and adventurous,
he was a ceaseless mover and doer, constantly making inspection tours of a
country that during his reign was the largest and richest in the world.
Largeness, in fact, was his calling card. His cultural initiatives seem
conceived precisely to generate preposterous statistics. He commissioned and
participated in the creation of an anthology of 2,000 years of Chinese
literature: it appeared in the form of 36,000 handwritten volumes, which he
ordered to be copied several times.
A writer himself, he left more than 40,000 poems behind when he died. When
he was 50, he published a compendium of his calligraphy. He acquired art of
all kinds in record-breaking quantities. At one point he cataloged a
collection of some 10,000 of his paintings, then went on to collect more.
He was a knot of contradictions. He preserved thousand of books in his
anthology, but also destroyed thousands, some of them legendary classics,
that he considered politically subversive. As an art connoisseur, he had an
uncannily sensitive eye, yet he insisted on incising his name into precious
ceramics and writing it repeatedly on priceless paintings, effectively
defacing them.
Although he had many self-portraits made, no cohesive reading of his
personality can be drawn from them. In one painting he is an imposing
Confucian ancestor figure; in another, a humble young Daoist scholar. In a
third piece we find him floating at the center of a Tibetan Buddhist mandala
as the embodiment of the bodhisattva of wisdom, which he believed himself to
be.
As a highly self-aware performer, he exploited the public relations uses of
shape-shifting, offering alternate versions of himself to different
audiences, Manchu, Han Chinese and European.
He was wary of Europe politically, but entranced by vision-tickling aspects
of its art, like vanishing-point perspective and trompe l’oeil realism.
Christianity left him cold — why should he worship a supreme being when he
was one? — but he treasured Jesuit missionary artists like Giuseppe
Castiglione and kept them on his payroll.
Contradiction is also the animating dynamic of the art in the Met show
created to adorn the various buildings — reception halls, studios,
libraries, Buddhist shrines — in the Qianlong Garden.
In the circular portrait of the young Qianlong in scholar robes in the first
gallery, the pictorial space is pancake-flat, depthless. But in a
Western-style mural painting on silk nearby, life-size figures of woman and
child beckon us into a three-dimensional hall. (Several such murals cover
walls in the one Qianlong Garden building that was fully restored in 2008
and can be digitally toured in another Met gallery.)
Realism in Qing art, however, often veers into the surreal, as is evident in
a mesmerizingly bizarre furniture ensemble. Like some version of rustic
Victoriana, all three units — chair, couch bed, foot stool — appear to be
woven from roots and vines, though in this case the interwoven strands look
freakishly alive, writhing and twisting like nests of snakes. Only when you
inspect the furniture closely do you see that this organicism run riot is
strictly an illusion. The roots and vines have been painstakingly puzzled
together from many small pieces of wood, in a design meant to evoke a Daoist
immersion in nature.
This kind of interplay between opposites — the unnatural and the natural,
the grotesque and the spiritual — powers the show. Qianlong went for art and
design that pushed such contrasts to the limit and beyond, short-circuiting
received notions of good taste and bad taste to deliver little shocks of
pleasure.
You can feel such zaps radiating from one work in particular: a 16-panel
wood-and-lacquer screen carrying portraits of early disciples of the Buddha,
known as luohans. These figures are traditionally pretty gross: ragged and
repellent old men, with cartoon faces and hair sprouting from unlikely
places. They’re shown that way here too, but in a medium — white jade inlaid
on black lacquer — that is so ethereal, and worked with such fineness, as to
all but cancel out any impression of ugliness.
The screen holds another surprise too. When conservators moved it from its
original position against a wall, they found that the reverse sides of the
panels were painted with images of trees and flowers in tones of gold.
Stunning!
At the Peabody Essex, the screen was free-standing and could be viewed from
both sides. The Met, by contrast, has placed it in a long wall case, with
the luohans face out, and a few panels flipped to give a sampling of the
painting. And this is just one of the ways in which the Met edition of the
show differs from the Salem original.
Judging from photographs, you can see that the installation Ms. Berliner
devised at the Peabody Essex was spaciously laid out, with an effort made to
simulate the architectural interior in which the objects were once found. At
the Met, the same objects have been squeezed into the narrow Chinese
painting galleries, with almost everything confined to tall cases designed
to hold scrolls.
As if to compensate for a more straightened and prosaic approach, the New
York presentation — organized by Maxwell K. Hearn, curator of Chinese art,
with an ingenious design by Daniel Kershaw — has been enriched with examples
of Qing art from the Met’s collection, including a large Castiglione drawing
and a pair of panoramic scrolls depicting two of Qianlong’s imperial road
trips.
We also get something that in most museums we can only imagine: a real
garden, in the form of the Astor Court. It’s based on a Ming rather than a
Qing prototype, but the components — twisty river rocks set in greenery —
are right. And, because the Met’s display cases are as shallow as they are
tall, we can see everything in them close-up: the cloisonné medallions
adorning a doorway surround, the stitch work in a satin chair cover, the
chips of jade, coral and lapis lazuli embedded in a relief of a blossoming
plum tree that comes across as both garish and sumptuous.
Up close was the emperor’s perspective too: proprietary, absorbed,
evaluative. And — who knows? — it may not be available again, once these
objects return to Beijing and are placed, where they belong, in the
completely restored Qianlong Garden that is scheduled to reopen in 2019, to
what will surely be an avid new public.
*Forbidden-City Treasure*
*WHAT* “The Emperor’s Private Paradise: Treasures From the Forbidden City.”
*WHEN AND WHERE* Through May 1, Metropolitan Museum of
Art
(212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org
Monday, December 13, 2010
from the BBC: Chinese archaeologists unearth 2,400-year-old 'soup'
Chinese archaeologists unearth 2,400-year-old 'soup' Experts say the 'bone soup' in the vessel turned green due to the oxidation of the bronze
Chinese archaeologists have unearthed what they believe is a 2,400-year-old pot of soup, state media report.
The liquid and bones were in a sealed bronze cooking vessel dug up near the ancient capital of Xian - home to the country's famed terracotta warriors.
Tests are being carried out to identify the ingredients. An odourless liquid, believed to be wine, was also found.
The pots were discovered in a tomb being excavated to make way for an extension to the local airport.
"It's the first discovery of bone soup in Chinese archaeological history," the newspaper quoted Liu Daiyun of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology as saying.
"The discovery will play an important role in studying the eating habits and culture of the Warring States Period (475-221BC)."
The scientists said the tomb could have held the body of either a member of the land-owning class or a low-ranking military officer, the report said.
Xian served as China's capital for more than 1,100 years.
In 1974, the terracotta army was found there at the burial site of Qin Shihuang, China's first emperor.
He presided over the unification of China in 221BC and ruled until 210BC
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Black Market For Mooncakes.
From NPR: http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/21/a-black-market-for-mooncakes-in-china/
A black market for mooncakes in China
China's mid-Autumn Festival and its tradition of eating mooncakes has lent itself to an underground economy worth billions.
KAI RYSSDAL: There's a big festival coming up on the Chinese calendar tomorrow: It's called the mid-Autumn festival. For the past week or so, stores over there have been stocking up on the traditional gift of the season: Mooncakes. They're pastries, small but rich, with a flaky crust and a sweet filling, usually made of lotus paste.
More than a billion people wanting the same thing on the same day? Smells like a business opportunity to me. Our Shanghai Correspondent Rob Schmitz takes us inside the mooncake economy
ROB SCHMITZ: Mooncakes have been likened to pastry hockey pucks. At around a thousand calories, they're almost as dense. This helps explain why the Chinese don't buy mooncakes for themselves. They gift them.
Shaun Rein is a strategy consultant in Shanghai.
SHAUN REIN: It's a way of showing respect to business partners and people you want to be close to, and it's also a way to give them outright bribes.
Yes, bribes -- and we're not talking about briefcases full of mooncakes, but their paper representations, mooncake vouchers.
Here's how it works: Buy a voucher from a company that makes mooncakes. Give it to your friend, client, local government official. And they, in theory, redeem the voucher for mooncakes. What most people do, though, is sell the vouchers on the black market for cash.
REIN: There's no embarrassment about saying, "We don't want this mooncake." Let's be pragmatic and get some money out of it.
And when a fifth of the world is in on this, that money becomes an underground economy worth billions.
Dozens of workers pack boxes of mooncakes at a Haagen-Dazs redemption center in Shanghai. Thirteen years ago, the company had an epiphany: They realized the Chinese give mooncakes, but many don't eat them. It's like the Christmas fruitcake dilemma in the West. So they thought: Why not make ice cream mooncakes? The ice cream mooncake was born.
Gary Chu manages the company's China operation.
GARY CHU: It's huge business. It's a very important business for us. It's growing at double digits every year.
Soon after, Starbucks, Nestle and Dairy Queen got into the business. This year, Haagen-Dazs sold 1.5 million boxes. To buy one, you'll need $50 to $100 worth of vouchers. Want an ice cream mooncake this year? Sorry. Vouchers are sold out. Your only option is the black market.
A back-alley vendor named Yin Jing wears a fanny pack full of Haagen-Dazs mooncake vouchers. They're made of thick paper; each one has a laser engraved hologram, just like currency. They float like currency, too. Last week, their price peaked. Now with just days to go before the festival, Mr. Yin is looking to unload.
YIN JING: After the festival's over, all these vouchers will be expired. So I have no choice. I've got to start dropping the price.
This selling frenzy reaches the highest levels of society. Just blocks away, a vendor who only gives his surname -- Zhang -- just negotiated a deal on reams of vouchers.
ZHANG: These are all from government officials. They get so many as gifts, and they feel too embarrassed to sell them to me in person, so they ask their wives to meet me in a coffee shop.
Fresh from his secret government rendezvous, Zhang's got his game face on, trying to sell all these vouchers before time runs out. If he fails? He'll be forced to succumb to the spirit of the season by giving away dozens of boxes of mooncakes and keeping a few for himself, at which point the giving will stop, and the losers of this annual game will be forced to eat.
In Shanghai, I'm Rob Schmitz for Marketplace.
A black market for mooncakes in China
China's mid-Autumn Festival and its tradition of eating mooncakes has lent itself to an underground economy worth billions.
KAI RYSSDAL: There's a big festival coming up on the Chinese calendar tomorrow: It's called the mid-Autumn festival. For the past week or so, stores over there have been stocking up on the traditional gift of the season: Mooncakes. They're pastries, small but rich, with a flaky crust and a sweet filling, usually made of lotus paste.
More than a billion people wanting the same thing on the same day? Smells like a business opportunity to me. Our Shanghai Correspondent Rob Schmitz takes us inside the mooncake economy
ROB SCHMITZ: Mooncakes have been likened to pastry hockey pucks. At around a thousand calories, they're almost as dense. This helps explain why the Chinese don't buy mooncakes for themselves. They gift them.
Shaun Rein is a strategy consultant in Shanghai.
SHAUN REIN: It's a way of showing respect to business partners and people you want to be close to, and it's also a way to give them outright bribes.
Yes, bribes -- and we're not talking about briefcases full of mooncakes, but their paper representations, mooncake vouchers.
Here's how it works: Buy a voucher from a company that makes mooncakes. Give it to your friend, client, local government official. And they, in theory, redeem the voucher for mooncakes. What most people do, though, is sell the vouchers on the black market for cash.
REIN: There's no embarrassment about saying, "We don't want this mooncake." Let's be pragmatic and get some money out of it.
And when a fifth of the world is in on this, that money becomes an underground economy worth billions.
Dozens of workers pack boxes of mooncakes at a Haagen-Dazs redemption center in Shanghai. Thirteen years ago, the company had an epiphany: They realized the Chinese give mooncakes, but many don't eat them. It's like the Christmas fruitcake dilemma in the West. So they thought: Why not make ice cream mooncakes? The ice cream mooncake was born.
Gary Chu manages the company's China operation.
GARY CHU: It's huge business. It's a very important business for us. It's growing at double digits every year.
Soon after, Starbucks, Nestle and Dairy Queen got into the business. This year, Haagen-Dazs sold 1.5 million boxes. To buy one, you'll need $50 to $100 worth of vouchers. Want an ice cream mooncake this year? Sorry. Vouchers are sold out. Your only option is the black market.
A back-alley vendor named Yin Jing wears a fanny pack full of Haagen-Dazs mooncake vouchers. They're made of thick paper; each one has a laser engraved hologram, just like currency. They float like currency, too. Last week, their price peaked. Now with just days to go before the festival, Mr. Yin is looking to unload.
YIN JING: After the festival's over, all these vouchers will be expired. So I have no choice. I've got to start dropping the price.
This selling frenzy reaches the highest levels of society. Just blocks away, a vendor who only gives his surname -- Zhang -- just negotiated a deal on reams of vouchers.
ZHANG: These are all from government officials. They get so many as gifts, and they feel too embarrassed to sell them to me in person, so they ask their wives to meet me in a coffee shop.
Fresh from his secret government rendezvous, Zhang's got his game face on, trying to sell all these vouchers before time runs out. If he fails? He'll be forced to succumb to the spirit of the season by giving away dozens of boxes of mooncakes and keeping a few for himself, at which point the giving will stop, and the losers of this annual game will be forced to eat.
In Shanghai, I'm Rob Schmitz for Marketplace.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Peabody Essex Museum the First to Show Off Hidden Works
http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/exhibitionist/2010/07/peabody_essex_m.html
By Geoff Edgers
Globe Staff
A special international partnership will make the Peabody Essex Museum the first place in the world to display a group of 90 imperial objects from a hidden Chinese palace complex inside Beijing's Forbidden City.
Related
Photos
Rare art on display
•Video A preview of the show in Salem
For nearly 500 years, the sprawling Forbidden City served as the home of Chinese emperors. When the last emperor was forced out in 1924, the government closed the doors on a two-acre compound deep within the Forbidden City, filled with magnificent 18th-century artworks and other objects.
Now the US public will see those works for the first time in a show called "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City." The objects, which range from paintings and murals to exquisite pieces of furniture and jades, will make up an exhibition running Sept. 14-Jan. 9 at the Salem museum. Organized by PEM with the Palace Museum, Beijing and the New York-based World Monuments Fund, the show will then travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum.
“These are objects created by the finest artists at the time, and they’ve never been seen before,” said PEM curator of Chinese art Nancy Berliner, speaking by phone this week from the Forbidden City, where she and a group of museum workers are readying the objects that will be brought to Salem for the show.
It is extremely unusual for China to send cultural objects abroad, and the museum will be the first place anywhere -- including China -- that these pieces will be shown to the public.
The partnership springs from an ambitious $25 million project to renovate the palace garden complex, a project that began in 2001 and won’t be complete until 2019. Officials from the World Monuments Fund overseeing the restoration were impressed by PEM’s installation of Yin Yu Tang, a late Qing dynasty merchants' house, at the museum. After viewing the house in 2004, the nonprofit organization hired Berliner as a consultant.
That led to the Salem museum's coup.
This week, as temperatures in Beijing have risen to 104 degrees, Berliner and four other museum staffers have been meticulously packing up the objects in the palace compound created by Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century and last occupied by Emperor Puyi. It is a quiet, contemplative space, Berliner said, where there is often only room to walk single file because the emperor never intended it to be experienced by groups. Of the
27 buildings in the garden complex, just one has been restored so far.
Speaking by phone from a building that had not yet been restored, Berliner said she was holding a flashlight because there were no lights.
“The feeling inside these buildings and in the garden as a whole is a little bit like being in an incredibly luxurious and contemplative playground,” said Berliner, who noted that she has visited the Forbidden City hundreds of times since her first visit in 1980 but only gained access to Qianlong's complex in recent years.
The museum has great expectations for the exhibition, projecting that it will draw as many as 85,000 visitors. That would make it the second most attended at the museum since its reopening after a major expansion in 2003.
But bringing “The Emperor’s Private Paradise” to Salem is not cheap. The exhibition will cost $1.8 million, or more than the museum spent on exhibitions for all of 2009. All but $300,000 is being covered through support from the Carpenter Foundation, American Express, Mandarin Oriental, and other sponsors.
“This is once-in-a-lifetime material,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the museum’s chief curator. “This truly is one of those shows where a lot of stars have aligned to make this possible.”
In Salem, Berliner hopes to use architectural flourishes to re-create the feel of the 18th-century garden complex. The works on hand will provide a stunning window into the private universe crafted by China’s rulers. A Buddhist shrine painted on silk shows a series of holy and supernatural figures with Qianlong, depicted in gold, at the center. A carved wooden throne features bamboo thread marquetry, gold paintings, and a jade inlay. And then there is the jade screen depicting the 16 disciples of the Buddha. Only recently did restorers discover that Qianlong, who commissioned the work, had the screen installed in a way that hid the golden images painted on its reverse side. Conservators never knew of that other side.
“He installed it so the panels were actually up against walls," Berliner said. "When they took it out, they discovered that on the side of the panels that faced the walls were these incredibly beautiful paintings of botanical motifs that had never been seen before.”
The Forbidden City is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than seven million people a year. None of the buildings in Qianlong garden complex, however, have been open to the public.
Peabody Essex Museum director Dan Monroe said that he was moved, walking through the hidden space for the first time.
"There are several gates and doors and pathways, but it shocks you with its immensity," he said. "It’s full of large monumental buildings and small buildings and water features and bridges. And it’s a spectacular space that was designed for tranquility and harmony."
Henry Ng, executive vice president of the World Monuments Fund, said that the Palace Museum's trust in Berliner made it possible to bring the works to the United States.
"I don't think it could be done anywhere else," said Ng. "Nancy is the reason they're letting them go."
Hartigan emphasized the beauty of the works that will be on display.
"The fact that the garden itself is this exquisite combination of art, architecture, and nature and that this comes across so clearly in the exhibition is another important aspect of this," she said. "The notion that not even the Chinese themelves have seen these artworks is really remarkable."
Berliner believes it is unlikely that works from the garden complex will ever be allowed out once the restoration is complete. That means, she says, this will be the first and last time these objects will be seen in the United States.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com
By Geoff Edgers
Globe Staff
A special international partnership will make the Peabody Essex Museum the first place in the world to display a group of 90 imperial objects from a hidden Chinese palace complex inside Beijing's Forbidden City.
Related
Photos
Rare art on display
•Video A preview of the show in Salem
For nearly 500 years, the sprawling Forbidden City served as the home of Chinese emperors. When the last emperor was forced out in 1924, the government closed the doors on a two-acre compound deep within the Forbidden City, filled with magnificent 18th-century artworks and other objects.
Now the US public will see those works for the first time in a show called "The Emperor's Private Paradise: Treasures from the Forbidden City." The objects, which range from paintings and murals to exquisite pieces of furniture and jades, will make up an exhibition running Sept. 14-Jan. 9 at the Salem museum. Organized by PEM with the Palace Museum, Beijing and the New York-based World Monuments Fund, the show will then travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Milwaukee Art Museum.
“These are objects created by the finest artists at the time, and they’ve never been seen before,” said PEM curator of Chinese art Nancy Berliner, speaking by phone this week from the Forbidden City, where she and a group of museum workers are readying the objects that will be brought to Salem for the show.
It is extremely unusual for China to send cultural objects abroad, and the museum will be the first place anywhere -- including China -- that these pieces will be shown to the public.
The partnership springs from an ambitious $25 million project to renovate the palace garden complex, a project that began in 2001 and won’t be complete until 2019. Officials from the World Monuments Fund overseeing the restoration were impressed by PEM’s installation of Yin Yu Tang, a late Qing dynasty merchants' house, at the museum. After viewing the house in 2004, the nonprofit organization hired Berliner as a consultant.
That led to the Salem museum's coup.
This week, as temperatures in Beijing have risen to 104 degrees, Berliner and four other museum staffers have been meticulously packing up the objects in the palace compound created by Emperor Qianlong in the 18th century and last occupied by Emperor Puyi. It is a quiet, contemplative space, Berliner said, where there is often only room to walk single file because the emperor never intended it to be experienced by groups. Of the
27 buildings in the garden complex, just one has been restored so far.
Speaking by phone from a building that had not yet been restored, Berliner said she was holding a flashlight because there were no lights.
“The feeling inside these buildings and in the garden as a whole is a little bit like being in an incredibly luxurious and contemplative playground,” said Berliner, who noted that she has visited the Forbidden City hundreds of times since her first visit in 1980 but only gained access to Qianlong's complex in recent years.
The museum has great expectations for the exhibition, projecting that it will draw as many as 85,000 visitors. That would make it the second most attended at the museum since its reopening after a major expansion in 2003.
But bringing “The Emperor’s Private Paradise” to Salem is not cheap. The exhibition will cost $1.8 million, or more than the museum spent on exhibitions for all of 2009. All but $300,000 is being covered through support from the Carpenter Foundation, American Express, Mandarin Oriental, and other sponsors.
“This is once-in-a-lifetime material,” said Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, the museum’s chief curator. “This truly is one of those shows where a lot of stars have aligned to make this possible.”
In Salem, Berliner hopes to use architectural flourishes to re-create the feel of the 18th-century garden complex. The works on hand will provide a stunning window into the private universe crafted by China’s rulers. A Buddhist shrine painted on silk shows a series of holy and supernatural figures with Qianlong, depicted in gold, at the center. A carved wooden throne features bamboo thread marquetry, gold paintings, and a jade inlay. And then there is the jade screen depicting the 16 disciples of the Buddha. Only recently did restorers discover that Qianlong, who commissioned the work, had the screen installed in a way that hid the golden images painted on its reverse side. Conservators never knew of that other side.
“He installed it so the panels were actually up against walls," Berliner said. "When they took it out, they discovered that on the side of the panels that faced the walls were these incredibly beautiful paintings of botanical motifs that had never been seen before.”
The Forbidden City is one of the world's most popular tourist attractions, drawing more than seven million people a year. None of the buildings in Qianlong garden complex, however, have been open to the public.
Peabody Essex Museum director Dan Monroe said that he was moved, walking through the hidden space for the first time.
"There are several gates and doors and pathways, but it shocks you with its immensity," he said. "It’s full of large monumental buildings and small buildings and water features and bridges. And it’s a spectacular space that was designed for tranquility and harmony."
Henry Ng, executive vice president of the World Monuments Fund, said that the Palace Museum's trust in Berliner made it possible to bring the works to the United States.
"I don't think it could be done anywhere else," said Ng. "Nancy is the reason they're letting them go."
Hartigan emphasized the beauty of the works that will be on display.
"The fact that the garden itself is this exquisite combination of art, architecture, and nature and that this comes across so clearly in the exhibition is another important aspect of this," she said. "The notion that not even the Chinese themelves have seen these artworks is really remarkable."
Berliner believes it is unlikely that works from the garden complex will ever be allowed out once the restoration is complete. That means, she says, this will be the first and last time these objects will be seen in the United States.
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com
The World of Khublai Khan at the Met
Special Exhibition
The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty
September 28, 2010–January 2, 2011
The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor
This exhibition will cover the period from 1215, the year of Khubilai's birth, to 1368, the year of the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China founded by Khubilai Khan, and will feature every art form, including paintings, sculpture, gold and silver, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, and other decorative arts, religious and secular. The exhibition will highlight new art forms and styles generated in China as a result of the unification of China under the Yuan dynasty and the massive influx of craftsmen from all over the vast Mongol empire—with reverberations in Italian art of the fourteenth century.
The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty
September 28, 2010–January 2, 2011
The Tisch Galleries, 2nd floor
This exhibition will cover the period from 1215, the year of Khubilai's birth, to 1368, the year of the fall of the Yuan dynasty in China founded by Khubilai Khan, and will feature every art form, including paintings, sculpture, gold and silver, textiles, ceramics, lacquer, and other decorative arts, religious and secular. The exhibition will highlight new art forms and styles generated in China as a result of the unification of China under the Yuan dynasty and the massive influx of craftsmen from all over the vast Mongol empire—with reverberations in Italian art of the fourteenth century.
Friday, September 10, 2010
NY Times: Following Workers' Trails of Tears in China
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/movies/29home.html?_r=2&ref=movies
IN the quietly devastating documentary “Last Train Home” Chinese migrant workers huddle together in an overcrowded railway car, sweating through their annual ride home for the New Year holiday. One nattily coiffed young man inveighs against the West, complaining bitterly that American consumers who buy the cheap Chinese goods he makes also get to spend most of their higher salaries on discretionary items, while he, who makes those goods, must send most of his earnings home to support his family.
Lixin Fan, who shot, edited and directed the film, might have chosen to stick with this feisty representative of the new China. Instead his camera cuts away to a middle-aged couple who sit in silence. Zhang Changhua and Cheng Suqin, who make this trip every year to visit the children they left behind nearly two decades ago, belong to a mostly ignored generation of roughly 130 million migrant workers who have sacrificed their productive years, and possibly the integrity of their families, in service to China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy.
“Many times I was in tears at all this misery,” Mr. Fan said, seated in an anteroom at the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, where “Last Train Home” played in May after winning praise at the Sundance Film Festival. “If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”
In 2006 Mr. Fan and a skeleton crew of three began documenting the effects of industrial change on this family, with whom he spent three years, on and off.
Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng left their village in Sichuan — Mr. Fan’s home province and the country’s largest exporter of labor — to work in Guangzhou, the world’s largest manufacturing source of denim jeans. The film cuts between the factory where they toil seven days a week, and the bucolic but chronically poor countryside where they visit their little boy and teenage daughter, who are raised by a careworn yet uncomplaining grandmother who suffered even worse privation under Mao Zedong.
Mr. Fan, a slender 33-year-old who cheerfully attributes his fluent English to “fighting with my Chinese-American girlfriend,” showed a sociologist’s grasp of the broad shifts that have afflicted workers like this couple. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction have crippled agriculture, while an outdated housing registration system that denies education and social services to rural migrants in the city has created a sharp class divide and placed untenable strains on the traditionally close-knit Chinese family.
The film’s unnerving railway station scenes — panoramic views of frustrated crowds surging forward, barely contained by nervous police officers with truncheons — underscore these changes and the growing specter of civil war. “The government does not have a perfect track record of dealing with dissent,” Mr. Fan said carefully. “So civil war would be a terrible thing. While I was making this film, it was difficult to figure out where to point the finger. At the government? The factory owners and corporations? The West? I’m not in a righteous place to answer, but I hope to raise this question for my audience.”
Mr. Fan encountered little serious official opposition, perhaps because of his accommodating demeanor, or because national issues are kept mostly in the background of this intimate film, which opens Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.
To gain the family’s trust Mr. Fan and his crew ate with them in their dormitory in Guangzhou, taught them how to manage their own wireless mikes, which they wore constantly, and would sleep on the pile of warm jeans the couple made while the crew waited to tag along after they finished their shift at midnight. “So 15 minutes into the film, after that first train ride,” he said proudly, “we’d already known each other for a year.”
“The mom once told me that they worked for 29 days, 15 hours a day straight,” Mr. Fan said. “The dormitories are right across the street from their factory, so it takes one minute exactly to go from their sewing machine to their bed. So that’s what they did for that month — sewing machine, bed, sewing machine, bed.”
At home Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng encountered their deeply resentful daughter, Qin, 17, who rebels against her parents’ pressure to get the grades they see as her passport to a better life. At one point the simmering tensions come to a boil, forcing Mr. Fan to decide on his feet whether to intervene. “The kids want more attention, and the parents are never around,” he said. “The parents know that education is the only way to, as we call it, jump out of the dragon’s door, out of poverty. But Qin, who is rebellious, independent and smart, did it her own way.”
Still, Mr. Fan doesn’t believe that the Chinese family is close to collapse. “Down deep we are still very family oriented,” he said. “When Qin gets a little older, she will come to understand that.”
He added, laughing, “I still call my mom every other day.”
If Mr. Fan belongs to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers schooled in Western liberal ideas, his spiritual, intellectual and cinematic influences reflect both ancient tradition and modernity. His father was a college professor and projectionist, and Mr. Fan grew up watching foreign films. Like many of his generation, he broke with tradition by leaving home for Beijing, then gave up a prestigious job (“My mom thought I was crazy”) with the CCTV network, briefly relocating to Canada before working as a sound man and associate producer on the well-received 2007 documentary “Up the Yangtze,” about the mass displacements caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam.
“Lixin is not from the foreign-influenced cultural centers,” said Daniel Cross, president of EyesteelFilm company in Montreal, which produced “Up the Yangtze” and co-produced “Last Train Home” with the ITVS television and cable company, which holds the North American television rights. “He comes from the sticks, and that’s what makes him unique.”
Mr. Fan said he is a committed Taoist, and his eye for the interplay of beauty and ugliness is influenced by what he calls the “epic poetry” of the director Jia Zhangke, whose 2004 feature “The World” centered on the youthful staff of a giant theme park that replicates the world’s famous tourist spots.
“I see a lot of Chinese philosophy in Jia’s film,” said Mr. Fan, who added that he hopes to seed his next project, a documentary about China’s green initiative focusing on a state-financed wind farm on the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert, with his earnings from “Last Train Home.”
“I’ll shoot there and in a remote mountain school where Taoist philosophy originated, where they recruit peasant children to teach them Tai Chi with martial art,” he said. “It’s yin and yang, keeping the balance between human desire and what nature can give you
IN the quietly devastating documentary “Last Train Home” Chinese migrant workers huddle together in an overcrowded railway car, sweating through their annual ride home for the New Year holiday. One nattily coiffed young man inveighs against the West, complaining bitterly that American consumers who buy the cheap Chinese goods he makes also get to spend most of their higher salaries on discretionary items, while he, who makes those goods, must send most of his earnings home to support his family.
Lixin Fan, who shot, edited and directed the film, might have chosen to stick with this feisty representative of the new China. Instead his camera cuts away to a middle-aged couple who sit in silence. Zhang Changhua and Cheng Suqin, who make this trip every year to visit the children they left behind nearly two decades ago, belong to a mostly ignored generation of roughly 130 million migrant workers who have sacrificed their productive years, and possibly the integrity of their families, in service to China’s headlong rush into global economic supremacy.
“Many times I was in tears at all this misery,” Mr. Fan said, seated in an anteroom at the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, where “Last Train Home” played in May after winning praise at the Sundance Film Festival. “If you were on this train with hundreds of migrants around us — it stinks, it’s dirty and everyone’s trying to survive, just to see their kids.”
In 2006 Mr. Fan and a skeleton crew of three began documenting the effects of industrial change on this family, with whom he spent three years, on and off.
Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng left their village in Sichuan — Mr. Fan’s home province and the country’s largest exporter of labor — to work in Guangzhou, the world’s largest manufacturing source of denim jeans. The film cuts between the factory where they toil seven days a week, and the bucolic but chronically poor countryside where they visit their little boy and teenage daughter, who are raised by a careworn yet uncomplaining grandmother who suffered even worse privation under Mao Zedong.
Mr. Fan, a slender 33-year-old who cheerfully attributes his fluent English to “fighting with my Chinese-American girlfriend,” showed a sociologist’s grasp of the broad shifts that have afflicted workers like this couple. The lack of farm subsidies and expropriation of farmland for urban construction have crippled agriculture, while an outdated housing registration system that denies education and social services to rural migrants in the city has created a sharp class divide and placed untenable strains on the traditionally close-knit Chinese family.
The film’s unnerving railway station scenes — panoramic views of frustrated crowds surging forward, barely contained by nervous police officers with truncheons — underscore these changes and the growing specter of civil war. “The government does not have a perfect track record of dealing with dissent,” Mr. Fan said carefully. “So civil war would be a terrible thing. While I was making this film, it was difficult to figure out where to point the finger. At the government? The factory owners and corporations? The West? I’m not in a righteous place to answer, but I hope to raise this question for my audience.”
Mr. Fan encountered little serious official opposition, perhaps because of his accommodating demeanor, or because national issues are kept mostly in the background of this intimate film, which opens Friday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village.
To gain the family’s trust Mr. Fan and his crew ate with them in their dormitory in Guangzhou, taught them how to manage their own wireless mikes, which they wore constantly, and would sleep on the pile of warm jeans the couple made while the crew waited to tag along after they finished their shift at midnight. “So 15 minutes into the film, after that first train ride,” he said proudly, “we’d already known each other for a year.”
“The mom once told me that they worked for 29 days, 15 hours a day straight,” Mr. Fan said. “The dormitories are right across the street from their factory, so it takes one minute exactly to go from their sewing machine to their bed. So that’s what they did for that month — sewing machine, bed, sewing machine, bed.”
At home Mr. Zhang and Ms. Cheng encountered their deeply resentful daughter, Qin, 17, who rebels against her parents’ pressure to get the grades they see as her passport to a better life. At one point the simmering tensions come to a boil, forcing Mr. Fan to decide on his feet whether to intervene. “The kids want more attention, and the parents are never around,” he said. “The parents know that education is the only way to, as we call it, jump out of the dragon’s door, out of poverty. But Qin, who is rebellious, independent and smart, did it her own way.”
Still, Mr. Fan doesn’t believe that the Chinese family is close to collapse. “Down deep we are still very family oriented,” he said. “When Qin gets a little older, she will come to understand that.”
He added, laughing, “I still call my mom every other day.”
If Mr. Fan belongs to a new generation of Internet-savvy filmmakers schooled in Western liberal ideas, his spiritual, intellectual and cinematic influences reflect both ancient tradition and modernity. His father was a college professor and projectionist, and Mr. Fan grew up watching foreign films. Like many of his generation, he broke with tradition by leaving home for Beijing, then gave up a prestigious job (“My mom thought I was crazy”) with the CCTV network, briefly relocating to Canada before working as a sound man and associate producer on the well-received 2007 documentary “Up the Yangtze,” about the mass displacements caused by the building of the Three Gorges Dam.
“Lixin is not from the foreign-influenced cultural centers,” said Daniel Cross, president of EyesteelFilm company in Montreal, which produced “Up the Yangtze” and co-produced “Last Train Home” with the ITVS television and cable company, which holds the North American television rights. “He comes from the sticks, and that’s what makes him unique.”
Mr. Fan said he is a committed Taoist, and his eye for the interplay of beauty and ugliness is influenced by what he calls the “epic poetry” of the director Jia Zhangke, whose 2004 feature “The World” centered on the youthful staff of a giant theme park that replicates the world’s famous tourist spots.
“I see a lot of Chinese philosophy in Jia’s film,” said Mr. Fan, who added that he hopes to seed his next project, a documentary about China’s green initiative focusing on a state-financed wind farm on the Silk Road in the Gobi Desert, with his earnings from “Last Train Home.”
“I’ll shoot there and in a remote mountain school where Taoist philosophy originated, where they recruit peasant children to teach them Tai Chi with martial art,” he said. “It’s yin and yang, keeping the balance between human desire and what nature can give you
Autumn Moon Festival
Mid-Autumn Moon Festival
Sara D. Roosevelt Park
9/19, 12pm - 4pm
Boxes of mooncakes are everywhere in Chinatown, and the Better Chinatown Society will be holding its annual festival at Sara Roosevelt Park (Canal and Forsyth Streets) to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival (aka August 15th on the Chinese calender).
It's hard to believe that this harmless-looking bun was used to incite rebellion against the Mongols who ruled China.
Nowadays, mooncakes signfy unity and perfection, and are indispensible gifts, this time of year, for friends and family.
Traditional mooncake fillings are still made from lotus-seed paste (lían róng), and bean paste, but anything goes with innovative bakers with flavors such as green tea, durian, egg custard, and XO brandy. Mooncakes are labor-intensive to make at home, so sample some at local bakeries when you stop by the festival.
The Museum of Chinese in America has also prepared a day-long program of activities on September 19th to celebrate this significant Chinese holiday.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Chinese archaeologists' African quest for sunken ship of Ming admiralSearch for remains of armada which came to grief on a pioneering voyage to Kenya
Chinese archaeologists travel to Kenya this week to begin work unearthing what is believed to be the remains of a Chinese treasure ship, piloted by ancient Chinese captain Zheng He.
Zheng He mapped out many continents in the early 1400s. He is widely believed to have arrived in North America before Christopher Columbus, according to retired British submarine commander and and writer, Gavin Menzies.
Please see the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/kenya-china
Zheng He mapped out many continents in the early 1400s. He is widely believed to have arrived in North America before Christopher Columbus, according to retired British submarine commander and and writer, Gavin Menzies.
Please see the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/25/kenya-china
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
July 23 Free NYC Concert Little Angels of Canton
Thank you to Man-Li K Lin for this info; for details please email her at manlikuo@hotmail.com
The GuangZhou Children Symphony Orchestra will be performing at St. Paul the Apostle Church, Columbus Avenue & 60th St in Manhattan on Friday, July 23rd from 7pm-9pm.
Free Admission
Sunday, January 3, 2010
"The Future Belongs to Mandarin": London Guardian
Do you agree with Martin Jacques, of the London Guardian, and visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, that China is "...regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power"?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Kahn-t.html
January 3, 2010
Waking Dragon
By JOSEPH KAHN
Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.
China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.
In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.
This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.
Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”
Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.
Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.
The enduring loyalty of its enormous diaspora and even the global popularity of Chinese food testify to the appeal of Chinese culture abroad. But the pervasiveness of a country’s culture depends only partly on its appeal. It also depends on strength, which China is acquiring, and scale, which it already has.
Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia. In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.
China has pioneered its own style of economic production. If the Japanese became known for obsessive quality and just-in-time inventory controls, China has developed a reputation for speed and flexibility. Its companies mix and match suppliers; buy, copy or steal ideas; and churn out products just good enough and just cheap enough to sell. Many multinationals have trouble competing, even when they use Chinese labor.
China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.
As China finds its own path economically, it is unlikely to look west for political advice, Jacques suggests. Its ruling Communist Party, having largely set aside its socialist ideology, has become a modern version of an imperial dynasty. China’s Communist leaders have flirted with reviving Confucianist thought, positioning themselves as protectors of Chinese unity, the state’s traditional role. Many Chinese see that mission as sacred. Jacques argues, credibly, that most Chinese will back their leaders, with or without democratic reforms, as long as the country keeps getting stronger.
So how might the world work under Pax Sinica? Jacques ventures some fascinating guesses: The United States often promotes democracy within nations. China insists on democracy among nations. If the power of countries in the international arena were determined by how many people they represent, China would have more clout than all the Western democracies combined.
Jacques has lived in China, and he writes about his travels there. But it seems clear that he has developed his views from reading books and newspapers (a voluminous quantity of them, to be sure) rather than through any immediate experiences in China or by getting to know its people.
Possibly as a result, he dwells little on the everyday turmoil of Chinese life — the mélange of cultures in its cities, the violent uprisings of its peasants, the factional struggles in its leadership, the pollution in the air, the gridlock on the streets, the bubbly economy and the corrupt bureaucracy. Others have and will be more successful at conveying the human struggle for China’s future.
But the fact that China looks messier in practice than in books does not invalidate Jacques’s thesis. He has written a work of considerable erudition, with provocative and often counterintuitive speculations about one of the most important questions facing the world today. And he could hardly have known, when he set out to write it, that events would so accelerate the trends he was analyzing.
Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/books/review/Kahn-t.html
January 3, 2010
Waking Dragon
By JOSEPH KAHN
Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.
China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.
In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.
This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.
Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”
Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.
Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.
The enduring loyalty of its enormous diaspora and even the global popularity of Chinese food testify to the appeal of Chinese culture abroad. But the pervasiveness of a country’s culture depends only partly on its appeal. It also depends on strength, which China is acquiring, and scale, which it already has.
Many Chinese have learned English to compete better in the world economy. But the future, Jacques writes, belongs to Mandarin. It is the national tongue of one in five people in the world, and it is rapidly edging out English as the preferred second language in Asia. In the early days of the Web, the language of cyberspace was English. But the explosion of Internet use in China will tip the balance to Mandarin before long.
China has pioneered its own style of economic production. If the Japanese became known for obsessive quality and just-in-time inventory controls, China has developed a reputation for speed and flexibility. Its companies mix and match suppliers; buy, copy or steal ideas; and churn out products just good enough and just cheap enough to sell. Many multinationals have trouble competing, even when they use Chinese labor.
China also manages its economy in its own fashion. Its public and private sectors blur together in ways that befuddle Americans accustomed to strict separation of government and business. Ferociously competitive entrepreneurs thrive alongside a “hyperactive and omnipresent” state that has never ceded its right to intervene.
As China finds its own path economically, it is unlikely to look west for political advice, Jacques suggests. Its ruling Communist Party, having largely set aside its socialist ideology, has become a modern version of an imperial dynasty. China’s Communist leaders have flirted with reviving Confucianist thought, positioning themselves as protectors of Chinese unity, the state’s traditional role. Many Chinese see that mission as sacred. Jacques argues, credibly, that most Chinese will back their leaders, with or without democratic reforms, as long as the country keeps getting stronger.
So how might the world work under Pax Sinica? Jacques ventures some fascinating guesses: The United States often promotes democracy within nations. China insists on democracy among nations. If the power of countries in the international arena were determined by how many people they represent, China would have more clout than all the Western democracies combined.
Jacques has lived in China, and he writes about his travels there. But it seems clear that he has developed his views from reading books and newspapers (a voluminous quantity of them, to be sure) rather than through any immediate experiences in China or by getting to know its people.
Possibly as a result, he dwells little on the everyday turmoil of Chinese life — the mélange of cultures in its cities, the violent uprisings of its peasants, the factional struggles in its leadership, the pollution in the air, the gridlock on the streets, the bubbly economy and the corrupt bureaucracy. Others have and will be more successful at conveying the human struggle for China’s future.
But the fact that China looks messier in practice than in books does not invalidate Jacques’s thesis. He has written a work of considerable erudition, with provocative and often counterintuitive speculations about one of the most important questions facing the world today. And he could hardly have known, when he set out to write it, that events would so accelerate the trends he was analyzing.
Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.
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