Frankfurt book fair

A $15 million propaganda campaign flushed down the fuckin' toilet! I LOVE IT! The world sees through your suits and smiles. It is not the image that projects reality but reality that rudely imposes on your image. The Tiannamen massacre writers and the Dalai Lama books and the Falun Gong stuff IS Chinese culture, the poetry of death and suffering painted with the blood that the Beijing clique have spilled over six decades! The scarred, torture victims is YOUR Guernica, Emperor Hu!

If the Chinese want to be culturally equal to the West here are some steps:

1. Admit our history of Mao's gross mismanagement that have lead to famine and tyranny. American academics across the political spectrum have long come to terms with Indian massacres and removals with bookshelves upon bookshelves of unrestricted research. Until the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution is deconstructed by "revisionist" Chinese academics without fear of intimidation or censorship, China will NEVER be seen as open-minded. Are you nationalists so insecure about modern China that you don't think our countrymen can't handle a little introspection?

2. Accept that socialist management theory has failed to develop original thinkers and inventors. You can buy the IBM building, the IBM labs, the IBM machines but a workforce of suck-ups and risk-averse conformists will always be inferior to the American-educated tinkerer and entrepreneur who will not hesitate to plunge into the unknown. Why is it that American born Chinese who work in China often get the fuck out because they can't stand the fear and regimentation? Why is it that Chinese who get educated in America return to China not to work in government agencies but open their own businesses?

3. Hands off the Internet cafes. Let the rebels rebel. Let the media fly as high or as low as it wants: Expose corruption, expose government officials, dueling editorials, reader's letters, sex columns, movie reviews, book reviews, music reviews from around the world.

And this official complains that the world is biased against China? Those who deny its people free expression deserve neither fairness nor an open microphone. You are not fair to your people, so I will not be fair to you. You have no expectation of being treated equally. The crimes of your state precede you with a deficit of credibility and goodwill. Go back to the occupied Middle Kingdom and report to your superior that you, your ministry and your nation have failed.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KJ27Ad02.html

China's culture offensive hits a wall
By Antoaneta Bezlova

BEIJING - This year's Frankfurt Book Fair may have been more of an embarrassment than prestige for its guest of honor - China - but the country's cultural mandarins still believe that the future of cultural ideas belongs to the Middle Kingdom and that the global financial crisis will play a role in helping them achieve that. Wu Wei - the woman behind Beijing's "going global" project for Chinese literature - told the Southern Weekend, a popular newspaper, last week that the economic downturn has focused global attention on China in just about every aspect. "

In the West in particular, it has made many people talk about China's model and what will happen when China 'rules the world'," she said. "But the West knows little about China's culture and ideas and ignorance breeds fear. It is the source of all kinds of 'threat' and 'collapse' theories. But this interest is also a chance for us to propagate our ideas." Beijing has exploited international attention to the full, raising its global profile in politics and economic affairs and even attempting to export its economic model. Leaving a mark in the world of cultural ideas, though, has presented a tougher challenge. For several years now, Beijing has battled to reverse its "cultural deficit", where it imports 10 times more books than it exports.

Now one of the world's largest economies and trading powers, China has spearheaded a cultural counteroffensive in a belief that cultural industry is the next step in its transformation from global upstart to superstar. As part of this attempt to raise the country's cultural profile abroad Beijing has invested in hundreds of Confucian institutes that are teaching Mandarin around the world and launching new foreign-language media outlets.

In publishing, Wu, as a senior official at the Information Department of the State Council, has led a team of experts tasked with selecting the most appealing titles to be translated and marketed around the world. They spent nearly five years and invested US$15 million preparing for China's debut at the Frankfurt Book Fair - referred to here as the "Olympics of the publishing world" - which was held on October 14-18. The country was featured as the guest of honor - a choice that pleased Beijing in a year marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the communist republic. But to the cultural officials' dismay, the event was marred with controversy and spats over human rights and press freedoms.

Two conflicting images of China squabbled for limelight at the fair - one, of the state-sponsored written word, put forward by Beijing, and the other of China on the fringe, presented by dissidents living abroad and fighting for their voices to be heard. Xi Jinping, Chinese vice president and seen by some people as a likely heir to party chief Hu Jintao, led the official delegation of 50 state-endorsed writers and 600 artists. They presented some 100 translated books - the first fruits of Beijing's "going out" project for Chinese literature.

These included two volumes by former party chief Jiang Zemin - one on China's foray into the information technology industry and another on the country's energy policies. Fiction titles included best-selling works such as Jiang Rong's Wolf Totem and Yu Hua's Brothers. Beijing, however, was clearly uncomfortable with allowing anyone outside of the state umbrella to speak for China. Despite an invitation extended by the fair organizers, Beijing banned author Liao Yiwu from attending the event. After serving a four-year prison sentence for writing poetry about the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, Liao has remained under surveillance by police, who refused to lift his travel ban.

Liao's book on China's underprivileged, The Corpse Walker, as well as his essays about the survivors and victims of last year's earthquake in Sichuan, have reportedly rankled censors at home. Still, there was a lot the official Chinese delegation could not control. Author-in-exile Bei Ling and writer Dai Qing, whose books about the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement and the Three Gorges Dam - the world's largest dam, which has generated much controversy at home and abroad - are banned on the mainland, represented dissident China.

Envoys of Tibetan exiled leader the Dalai Lama and Uyghur pro-independence advocate Rebiya Kadeer, condemned by Beijing as a terrorist, were also present. Beijing could not prevent the foreign media from zooming in on its intolerance of free speech and criticizing the communist party. When German magazine Der Spiegel ran a feature on the fair, headlined "China, the Unwelcome Guest", Chinese delegates protested that European media and political circles were biased. China's clout, though, was felt behind the scenes.

Bei Ling and Dai Qing were barred from making speeches at the closing ceremony. An outcry from the public and the media forced the fair organizers to fire the project manager for striking off the names of the dissident writers from the list of speakers at the last moment. Beijing put a positive spin on the outcome of the fair, despite the embarrassment caused by the tug-of-war between the official Chinese delegation and the dissident lobby. The country's sprawling pavilion at Frankfurt - featuring scrolls with different styles of calligraphy and an engraved "ink pool" - was described by the media here as the "place to be".

"This is an achievement of immense pride for us," Li Pengyi, a delegation member and vice president of the China Publishing Group, told reporters at the end of the fair. "One can say we are going home with two bumper harvests - one for the Chinese culture in general and one for China's copyright trade.” To continue raising the country's cultural profile abroad even in the middle of the current economic downturn, Chinese officials have decided to offer free books to about 100 libraries around the world, according to Wu Wei.

At a book fair at Ditan Park in Beijing, some of the crowd have heard about Beijing's reception in Frankfurt. "Foreigners always seek to embarrass China," said student Zhang Ziying. "With so much prejudice, how can they like any of our books?" But Lin Xuecong, who introduced himself only as a "book lover", says there is little worthy that is being written in China these days. "It is not about who are the authors of these books. It is about whether they can touch your heart and mind."

Punk-ass FOB

Comment # 49 @Brooklynite, your analogy of Cantonese with Kurds, Chechens, etc, is a false one. Han Chinese are one Race, with one Civilization, regardless of which dialect we speak. That issue was settled over 2000 years ago with the First Emperor's reunification of China. And with the return of Hong Kong and Macau and the inevitable reunification of those of our blood in Taiwan, Singapore, etc, China will soon be whole once again. That's the dream of all Chinese people. We are not like the Spanish or English or Arabic speakers, tolerating division.

Too bad the moderator turned off comments.

My problem is with the "etc." in his comment. Does this FOB shithead want to annex parts of Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Phillipines and Hawaii? The dream of all Chinese people? Speak for yourself, FOB-ass motherfucker! Your arrogance will be checked by the Uighur tac-nuke that brings down the Puxi towers!

Reunification of YOUR blood? My blood escaped the fuck out of China and Mao's clusterfuck of a Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. China has done NOTHING for my family and I owe NOTHING to China, except a bullet in the head for whoever attempts to impose Han rule over me and my homeland.

It's assholes like this that have no other identity than Chinese nationalism that makes me want to shove him on the next Shanghai-bound freighter at bayonet point. Your blood will the reunified with the Staten Island landfill, along with all the other fifth-column infiltrators who will have to watch their families harshly interrogated by people like me in their own language. After all, you nationalists wanted me to learn Mandarin right? How about a taste of the same regime you so admire, ah-chon?

Perhaps my first translation will be Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, to be passed among the disenfranchised peasantry of your newborn cities; so much neon, not enough concertina or bollards.

When China breaks up into a hundred fiefdoms, it will be due the machinations of ABCs like me. I will unify China under the reign of chaos.

NY Times: Mandarin eclipses Cantonese

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/nyregion/22chinese.html

In Chinatown, Sound of the Future Is Mandarin
By KIRK.SEMPLE

He grew up playing in the narrow, crowded streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown. He has lived and worked there for all his 61 years. But as Wee Wong walks the neighborhood these days, he cannot understand half the Chinese conversations he hears.

Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants.

The change can be heard in the neighborhood’s lively restaurants and solemn church services, in parks, street markets and language schools. It has been accelerated by Chinese-American parents, including many who speak Cantonese at home, as they press their children to learn Mandarin for the advantages it could bring as China’s influence grows in the world.

But the eclipse of Cantonese — in New York, China and around the world — has become a challenge for older people who speak only that dialect and face increasing isolation unless they learn Mandarin or English. Though Cantonese and Mandarin share nearly all the same written characters, the pronunciations are vastly different; when spoken, Mandarin may be incomprehensible to a Cantonese speaker, and vice versa.

Mr. Wong, a retired sign maker who speaks English, can still get by with his Cantonese, which remains the preferred language in his circle of friends and in Chinatown’s historic core. A bit defiantly, he said that if he enters a shop and finds the staff does not speak his dialect, “I go to another store.”

Like many others, however, he is resigned to the likelihood that Cantonese — and the people who speak it — will soon become just another facet of a polyglot neighborhood. “In 10 years,” Mr. Wong said, “it will be totally different.”

With Mandarin’s ascent has come a realignment of power in Chinese-American communities, where the recent immigrants are gaining economic and political clout, said Peter Kwong, a professor of Asian-American studies at Hunter College.

“The fact of the matter is that you have a whole generation switch, with very few people speaking only Cantonese,” he said. The Cantonese-speaking populace, he added, “is not the player anymore.”

The switch mirrors a sea change under way in China, where Mandarin, as the official language, is becoming the default tongue everywhere.

In North America, its rise also reflects a major shift in immigration. For much of the last century, most Chinese living in the United States and Canada traced their ancestry to a region in the Pearl River Delta that included the district of Taishan. They spoke the Taishanese dialect, which is derived from and somewhat similar to Cantonese.

Immigration reform in 1965 opened the door to a huge influx of Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, and Cantonese became the dominant tongue. But since the 1990s, the vast majority of new Chinese immigrants have come from mainland China, especially Fujian Province, and tend to speak Mandarin along with their regional dialects.

In New York, many Mandarin speakers have flocked to Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and Flushing, Queens, which now rivals Chinatown as a center of Chinese-American business and political might, as well as culture and cuisine. In Chinatown, most of the newer immigrants have settled outside the historic core west of the Bowery, clustering instead around East Broadway.

“I can’t even order food on East Broadway,” said Jan Lee, 44, a furniture designer who has lived all his life in Chinatown and speaks Cantonese. “They don’t speak English; I don’t speak Mandarin. I’m just as lost as everyone else.”

Now Mandarin is pushing into Chinatown’s heart. For most of the 100 years that the New York Chinese School, on Mott Street, has offered language classes, nearly all have taught Cantonese. Last year, the numbers of Cantonese and Mandarin classes were roughly equal. And this year, Mandarin classes outnumber Cantonese three to one, even though most students are from homes where Cantonese is spoken, said the principal, Kin S. Wong.

Some Cantonese-speaking parents are deciding it is more important to point their children toward the future than the past — their family’s native dialect — even if that leaves them unable to communicate well with relatives in China.

“I figure if they have to acquire a language, I wanted them to have Mandarin because it makes it easier when they go into the workplace,” said Jennifer Ng, whose 5-year-old daughter studies Mandarin at the language school of the Church of the Transfiguration, a Roman Catholic parish on Mott Street where nearly half the classes are devoted to Mandarin. Her 8-year-old son takes Cantonese, but only because there is no English-speaking Mandarin teacher for his age group.

“Can I tell you the truth?” she said. “They hate it! But it’s important for the future.” Until recently, Sunday Masses at Transfiguration were said in Cantonese. The church now offers two in Mandarin and only one in Cantonese. And as the arrivals from mainland China become old-timers, “we are beginning to have Mandarin funerals,” said the Rev. Raymond Nobiletti, the Cantonese-speaking pastor.

At the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which has been the unofficial government of Chinatown for generations and conducts its business in Cantonese, the president, Justin Yu, said he is the first whose mother tongue is Mandarin to lead the 126-year-old organization. Though he has been taking Cantonese lessons in order to keep up at association meetings, his pronunciation is sometimes a source of hilarity for his colleagues, he said.

“No matter what,” he added, laughing, “you have to admire my courage.”

But even his association is being surpassed in influence by Fujianese organizations, said Professor Kwong of Hunter College.

Longtime residents seem less threatened than wistful. Though he is known around Chinatown for what he calls his “legendarily bad” Cantonese, Paul Lee, 59, said it pained him that the dialect was disappearing from the place where his family has lived for more than a century.
“It may be a dying language,” he acknowledged. “I just hate to say that.”

But he pointed out that the changes were a natural part of an evolving immigrant neighborhood: Just as Cantonese sidelined Taishanese, so, too, is Mandarin replacing Cantonese.

Mr. Wong, the principal of the New York Chinese School, said he had tried to adjust to the subtle shifts during his 40 years in Chinatown. When he arrived in 1969, he walked into a coffee shop and placed his order in Cantonese. Other patrons looked at him oddly.

“They said, ‘Where you from?’ “ he recalled. “ ‘Why you speak Cantonese?’ ” They were from Taishan, he said, so he switched to Taishanese and everyone was happy.

“And now I speak Mandarin better than Cantonese,” he added with a chuckle. “So, Chinatown — it’s always changing.”

Commentary:
It was said that at the turn of the 20th century, a Cantonese-speaker could not find a job in Chinatown without speaking Taishanese. Hong Kong radio shows of the 50s and 60s were mostly in Taishanese. By the early 70s Hong Kong movies and TV were in Cantonese. By the 80s, characters who spoke Taishanese were mostly there for comic relief, a local yokel with a funny accent.

Mandarin is shoved down the throats of not just Guangdong/Hong Kong, but also in Tibet and East Turkestan, but Westerners learning Mandarin is not such a bad thing in the long term strategic sense. Westerners who speak and write Mandarin will only lead to a greater amount of Western literature and writing to be translated for mainland audiences, maybe not the urban peasant, but the idle children of the middle class, the future Upton Sinclairs, Pete Seegers and Jack Kerouacs of China.

Taishanese may be a dying language but Taishanese as a people have prospered and reached the upper levels of American society as doctors, scientists and businessmen.

Malaise and melancholy

Mexican scrappers and scroungers chatter on the corner, bungee-wrapped duffels and derelict shopping carts in tow.

El viento del norte fuerte y muerde el asfalto de esta tierra se traga el viajero extraviado.

Chinese office-workers with grocery bags retire to their condos, the wrought-iron gate clanging behind them.

The two-tone chime signals the closing doors of the N train and with a low angry boom under the overpass, the steel convoy serpentines its way through the dark wooded path to the next station.

Tired salarymen and women emerge from the pockmarked turnstile house that is the Fort Hamilton station, walls spackled with flea market flyers and lost pet notices.

I join one of the clusters of homebound commuters headed for the Scaturro’s supermarket, calling out orders to the deli counter guys, provisions and foodstuffs for the cold, damp weekend.

This malaise and melancholy this week has taken from me that sense of anticipation and energy for the coming weekend.

Instead I long for window shutters to close and a quiet fireplace to sit in front of, perhaps a subconscious artifact of a Norman Rockwellesque, New England shire at Christmastide, rustic and bucolic, of mahogany tones and hand forged iron.

No more history books or magazines or newspapers. No more television. No more Internet. No more foreign relations studies. No more DHS reports. No more police scanner. No Electric Age extensions of the central nervous system to connect my Faustian mind to the deteriorating world.

Again Camille Paglia, will you marry me?

"What you have described is the Orc-Urizen cycle, a pattern identified by the great Romantic poet and visionary artist William Blake after the French revolution. Blake saw every radical impulse toward freedom eventually ossifying and turning back on itself in a new oppression and tyranny. You are quite right to detect adolescent naiveté in many demands of white middle-class young people in the 1960s. We had been overprotected by our parents, who had suffered Depression and war for most of their lives and were determined to give us something better. Unfortunately, the result of this well-intended paternalism was a cultural banality and stifling conformism that the '60s tried to destroy by any means necessary. But it is still puzzling why that dissident generation so enamored of freedom would have drifted toward today's speech codes, thought control and ideological intolerance."

O Camille, Camille, my razor-tongued Italiana
my femme-de-lettres, how sharp thy mind
thy string of thoughts, fierce and terse
speak what tomes attempt with ten-fold in verse
Alas another woman be thy choice
Will thou not chance a stricken suitor's voice?
What rough tempest must I sail,
what iced peak must I scale,
what foul horde must I fight,
to win thy star most brightest in the night
Why o why o'er Camille must I obsess,
my unattainable Ayn Randian heroine, my Camille.

I'm old, gimme, gimme, gimme!

Graying democratic societies implies an irrevocable socialist policy trajectory – even the most obnoxious heckler at the recent Obamacare townhall meetings accepts Social Security as a fact of life and in no way considers it socialism. Everything is socialist until one gets a monthly check. What about the GOP alternative to Social Security? A partially securitized option? Subject to the same bubbles that brought down Lehman and Bear Stearns?

Neither the Republicans or Libertarians can answer the question of long-term care. Therefore I think the political solution to entitlement programs is unattainable. It is impossible to convince someone to give up their monthly check. Democracy in this case may enable a feedback loop that makes reform impossible; a perfect storm of AARP pressure and mutual loathing within each political party to touch that third rail.

The solution maybe to divest the federal government out of Social Security obligations by passively bringing about the total collapse of the system and then declaring a state of emergency to circumvent the subsequent public outcry.

I forsee global finance decamping out of graying nations to move operations to the tax and legal regimes of younger nations, nations without FMLA, SS, Medicare, EPA, NLRB, EEOC, etc. The remnants would be bankrupt, holding securities, bonds and 401ks about as worthless as 19th century mining scrip; starving, left to the rule of whatever petty neo-feudal order that takes control of America’s dwindling resources.

I'm not opposed to old age insurance per se, but it should be reserved for veterans, teachers and cops/firemen (like the vote IMHO). There is a cultural taboo in the urban US regarding living with one's parents, a product perhaps of Weber's Protestant ethic. In the days of $1/gallon oil and 6% annual growth, one could afford to go it alone or with a roomie.

Chinese families use parents as a free babysitting and cooking service for grandkids, a built-in social safety net that does not rely on daycare centers, allowing for a more efficient sharing of costs and a higher than average savings rate (also fueled by the elderly generations' collective memories of forced labor and starvation in the days of Mao). Thus, the dearth of banks along 8th Avenue and thus the Asian appetite for non-security, non-debt instruments that leave banks scrambling for investment vehicles with enough return on investment to meet reserve requirements, therefore, the overvalued price for land, gold and oil.

Healthcare debate

The cost of medical care has to deflate like 90%. Why should we need insurance anyway? Sorry. The hospitals have to eat it, the doctors have to eat it, the lawyers have to eat it (tort reform), the illegals have to eat it. Put all prices of surgical procedures, diagnostics, hospital stays on the web like Travelocity and Priceline. Race to the bottom. Why not buy pharmaceticals from other countries? One is free to travel and engage in commerce right? Sure, we'll let illegals into the Emergency Room, but they will get fingerprinted and tracked by creditors.

Why charge $150 for a blood test when a little disposable plastic device can run 200 tests with a single drop of blood? The miracle of nano-technology. Destructive creation: Decimating the diagnostic industry to bring cheap home test kits to the public. Why not?

Why treat smokers and drug addicts at all? They made their choice. The earlier their deaths, the more solvent Social Security becomes.

And why limit pharmaceuticals with the FDA? Allow the untested stuff into the market. Let the public know that it's untested and let them decide. And insurance companies should be free to drop anyone crazy enough to try the untested stuff. And why have mandatory licensing for doctors? Let the unlicensed ones operate too, and let the consumer decide on the level risk they're willing to take.

Otherwise electronic capital will electronically beam itself out of a graying United States and into countries without our tax and legal regime burdened with massively inflated entitlements. Even the young people will vote with their feet and emigrate to greener pastures.

http://www.healthcarebluebook.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_prices#Price_transparency_issues