Month: January 2008

Inhabitat tells me:

About a year ago, Sydney started a trend of turning off your lights for one hour in a show of support for protecting our environment. Soon after, London, San Francisco quickly followed suit. One year later, the organizers of Sydney’s Earth Hour feel that one city at a time doesn’t really cut it anymore. Which is why this year’s event is going global, with cities from every continent, including the US, participating in what promises to be the largest ever show of solidarity in the world on March 29th for Earth Hour.

Yknow what, this is utterly presumptuous of me, but I’m gonna speak for all of China and say we’re gonna sit this one out with the lights on. And the electric heater. Cuz people are still gonna wonder how long their power will last come March 29th. Rest of y’all can pretend to be North Korea for an hour. Some of the world is gonna wanna smoke ’em if they got ’em.

Or as Daniel Drezner quipped “like Benjamin Barber after a three-day coke bender in Macao.”

There are alot of things that I find disagreeable about Parag Khanna’s NYT Magazine cover story “Waving Goodbye to Hegemony”, I’m gonna just pick on one line:

Without firing a shot, China is doing on its southern and western peripheries what Europe is achieving to its east and south. Aided by a 35 million-strong ethnic Chinese diaspora well placed around East Asia’s rising economies, a Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere has emerged.

OK.

The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was something Imperial Japan talked about while engaging in fun things like invading other countries and installing puppet governments. It was ostensibly about getting Asians out from under the thumb of the White Man, but funnily enough all the big partner “nations” in it were under the thumb of the Japanese. It may come as a surprise to Mr. Khanna, but this handy little turn of phrase he’s used is both wildly inaccurate as well as probably one of the most appalling things you could say to Chinese people.

I’m trying to think of something that shoves your foot down your throat as much as comparing the Chinese diaspora to a system that included slave labor and drug trafficking built on the ruins of invasion and atrocities, but I’m blanking at the moment. Perhaps some sort of “yo momma” joke?

Big story #1: The massive snowstorm that crippled China’s rail lines, leading to power and food shortages, loss of mobile phone communications (in poor ol’ Guizhou), at least dozens dead, and the loss of at least 32 billion RMB.

Big story #2: Tainted leukemia medication leaves Chinese patients paralyzed due to contamination.

Guess what these tragedies share in common?

The heavy hand of government fiat! Yes, the power shortages are in no small way due to the fact the government capped the price of power in a short-sighted maneuver so consumers wouldn’t feel the pinch of rising coal prices, and so coal plants had little incentive to stock up for any sudden freezes. Meanwhile the leukemia medication was tainted because the company got sloppy, again in no small way due to the fact that the government ordered that they charge only 1.9 yuan for it, according to the China’s FDA via Southern Weekend via Time.

Aren’t these guys suppose to be Milton Friedman addicts? What happened to the Chinese government being run by a bunch of technocrats with engineering degrees?

How about subsidizing some of that coal for those power producers or medicine from pharmas that you’re asking to be good samaritans?

How about considering the limits of nationalism as a guarantee that you can just up and tell a company to screw making money when you kinda told them that’s all they really ought to spend their time on?

How about thinking ahead to having some sort of plan for how to disseminate information and manage crowds when the only rail link for Sichuan migrants in Guangzhou goes splat?

Fuck that, what happened to paying attention to the weather report?

Or how about thinking about instituting a social safety net before, not during or after, you start gettin’ rocked by inflation?

How about some solution that involves thinking long term, building long term trust between government, business and the public, not subobtimizing everything, and getting everybody in China to stop hunting rabbits all the time and go catch a stag for once. So far the only people who seem to have had even a smidgeon of that kinda thinking the PX actors of Xiamen.

These guys aren’t technocrats. They’re short-sighted, reactive populists. And they’re terrible at it.

I can’t help it. I keep thinking of the myriad ways that the Beijing Olympics can go wrong. Alot of these are not meant (very) seriously, it just keeps gnawing at me so I’m gonna vent them.

The Worst Case Scenario, in which all the following happens:

1) Tibetan monks or the FLG self-immolate during the opening ceremonies.

2) Foreign tourists complain about secondhand smoke, “massage” phone calls to their hotel rooms, spitting, lack of queues and price gouging.

3) Domestic tourists complain about even worse price gouging. Indignant domestic visitors get mad when their tickets are revealed to be fakes.

4) Wiseacre tourists pose in front of the Olympics logo re-enacting this picture. Hilarity ensues when Chinese citizens/officials get wind of it.

5) Athletes complain of racial profiling and repressive security measures at the Olympic Village, though in fairness its the Chinese security apparatus trying to do their best.

6) A phalanx of visitors with protest t-shirts are detained.

7) Japanese athletes get harassed.

8) Triathletes succumb to pollution, or controversy erupts over the US and other teams sporting breathing masks.

9) Nasty poor sportsmanship rears its head when Liu Xiang doesn’t win the gold.

10) Afghanistan’s only competing athlete misses his event due to traffic.

11) African athletes get harassed in Sanlitun.

12) Al Qaeda or some other nutjobs pull a Munich.

I imagine I’m not the only one who has imagined nightmare scenarios. Feel free to submit your own in comments.

Mind you, I don’t think any of this will necessarily happen, nor do I wish any of them to happen (I really wanna stress that – I do not want the Olympics to be a disaster). It does seem, however, that several of the smaller (and I think more likely) ones together could make it a decidedly awkward Olympics (smoke, spit, traffic, masks, pointing, staring, etc.)

Of course, if none of it happens, I can’t help but think that this is the best case scenario:

The Beijing Olympics end up as dull and forgettable as the last few Olympics.

Even if nothing goes wrong, everybody has a wonderful time, and China wins the medal count race, I find it hard to believe that the Olympics will be any kind of watershed moment, either for foreign perceptions of China or Chinese perceptions of themselves. Cynical, I know, but I can’t really picture it. Can you?

Hollywood Reporter says that the film Dark Matter 《暗物质》 has gotten a North American distribution deal and will hit theaters this April:

Based on a true story, the film follows a Chinese science student (Liu Ye) invited by a professor (Quinn) to travel to the U.S. to study for his Ph.D., but the pressures of his new environment cause him to slowly unravel. [Meryl] Streep plays his mentor.

By “unravel” they mean he becomes violent and shoots people. The film was scheduled for release last year, but it got delayed and lost distribution due to the Virginia Tech shootings (where the shooter was Korean, but apparently that was too close for comfort). Dark Matter‘s director, Shi-Zheng Chen, is an unknown, but lead actor Liu Ye ought to be familiar to Chinese audiences from his roles in Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress and more recently The Curse of the Golden Flower.

When the Virginia Tech shootings occurred, it was first reported, erroneously, that the shooter was Chinese. Blogger Josie Liu wrote about Chinese netizens reactions, including that many were “ashamed”. It’ll be interesting to see how the film portrays the lead characters resort to violence in the face of pressures and discrimination, and even more interesting to see how Chinese audiences interpret it. The film premiered at Sundance last year, and Variety had a review.

The 1991 case of a Chinese student who went off the deep end at an American university is dramatized to intriguingly esoteric but ultimately unsatisfying effect in “Dark Matter.” Critiquing both the relentless Eastern drive for success and the insular, self-serving nature of Western academia, this debut feature from opera and theater helmer Chen Shi-Zheng never fully succeeds in burrowing under its protagonist’s skin, despite conspicuous effort. While Meryl Streep in a substantive role reps a bizarre selling point, pic’s superficial aftertaste will limit it strictly to fest exposure and very limited arthouse play.

Structured in five acts, each labeled with a different Chinese character representing one of the five elements, the story begins with student Liu Xing (Liu Ye) arriving at a Western university, where he’s invited by cosmology professor Jacob Reiser (Aidan Quinn) to join his research team. Brilliant, hard-working, obsequious to a fault, Liu Xing so impresses Reiser that the professor initially takes him under his wing.

Liu Xing’s other significant mentor is Joanna Silver (Streep), a kindly patron of the university with a special interest in Chinese culture. It’s Joanna who first hears Liu Xing’s scientific theory about dark matter, which shapes most of the universe — an impenetrable concept that has driven astrophysicists crazy for years, and which is explicated here in barely comprehensible terms for a layperson. When Liu Xing decides to write his dissertation on dark matter, Reiser shoots down his proposal, not least because it threatens his own widely accepted model.

Suddenly facing academic ruin, Liu Xing finds his already strained psyche beginning to unravel; the pic attempts to hint at this early on by inserting brief, disturbing shots of the student looking ominously determined. But no amount of foreshadowing can conceal the tale’s essential banality and lack of psychological depth — a shame, since Liu Ye is rather good at suggesting the moral blankness behind his character’s ingratiating manner.

There’s a smart movie to be made about the often unhealthy pressure Asians face to work hard and succeed, but even as a tale of one student’s destructive choices, Billy Shebar’s script fails to lay the necessary groundwork for Liu Xing’s sudden shift into violence. The result is a middling academic drama that passes pleasantly enough for roughly an hour before detouring into a tacked-on tragic climax.

Quinn delivers the pic’s best performance, imbuing his outwardly friendly, laid-back professor (“Call me Jake”) with a hint of condescension that prickles from the first frame. As a woman who encourages Liu Xing, then watches helplessly as he slides toward disaster, Streep brings some warmth and humanity to the role even as one wonders what attracted her to this material.

Aside from its use of occasional exploding light effects that resemble supernovas — an attempt to forge a thematic connection between Liu Xing’s astronomical theories and personal neuroses — the pic has no real visual style to speak of. Other tech credits are adequate.

“An Wuzhi” (in Chinese) has a Sina page as well.