CHINAYOUREN

I just noticed this picture I took this morning in the little lane. The intention was to illustrate how the Olympic spirit is finally coming to the Shanghai local communities. The result is I unwittingly took a cool portrait of myself reflected in the announcement board glass cover.

This is the typical Chinese motivational message that can be seen everywhere, often in the form of rhyming Dos and Don’ts. For a while now many of them are appearing with the Expo as central theme. The Post had an article yesterday announcing new measures in some districts to have locals take responsibility for their street’s cleanliness.

Handwritten signs like this are very usual in the lanes. They are organized by the residents committee following directives from above. The task of writing the signs is often delegated to the local calligraphy hero, and then you get beautiful pieces of writing (but not in this case, IMO)

The particular content of this one is:

The “Seven Builds” proposed by the City of Shanghai’s “Welcomes the Expo Civilized Activities Plan”:

• Maintain order – Build a lawful City
• Keep Hygiene – Build a Healthy City
• Protect Environment – Build a biological City
• Be Polite – Build a Polite City
• Have solid Credit – Build a honest City
• Love Science – Build a Study City
• Give Kindness – Build a Friendly City

Any corrections welcome. As I usually say, Chinese slogans are very hard to translate because they rarely make any sense, so I didn’t bother to take out the dictionary. Use at your own risk.

I visited an Expo for the first time as a kid, when my school took all my class together to Seville ‘92. Spain was living a crazy year, the Olympics where happening at the same time that Summer, and the Expo was designed to be one of the largest ever. Like now in China, there was some debate about the corruption and the money squandered, and people didn’t really know what the show was all about.

In many ways, that first Expo was very similar to the one China is doing now. Spain had to prove something,  it had passed its own 改革开放 (reform and opening) in the late 70s with the transition to democracy. Then it went on to  join the European Union in the 80s, and by 1992 it was finally starting to look like a developed country. The old pessimistic phrases “Spain is different” and “Europe starts behind the Pyrenees” felt already like something from the past.

Granted, the Reform here has “Chinese characteristics”, and massive population of China needs more time than Spain to complete the Development.  But overall, there is a clear parallelism between Spain 92 and China 2008-2010, and that is one of the reasons I am so excited about the Expo. It was great stuff in 92, and I have some cool memories of chunks of icebergs in the Chile pavilion, or an outdoor temperature control system that was unseen at the time.

In the case of Shanghai, not only the host will be doing its best to impress, but also the participant countries are facing the most promising tourism market in the World, and they have a strong incentive to come up with good shows. If the Canada pavilion is representative of the rest, their Cirque du Soleil should give you a good idea of the World class material we can expect.

I had an article published yesterday on Danwei, where I explain why I think the Expo is an event worthy of attention.  Since a large part of the readers of China blogs are American, the most expo-skeptic country, my effort is unlikely to be successful. Even among the Chinese, I see little enthusiasm at 40 days from the inauguration, but I think the commenter on Danwei hits the nail when he says these long duration events become more popular after the opening.

I will be writing more about the Expo and Shanghai, so stay tuned. On the MiniYouren I also do updates of interesting daily information on the Chinese press related to the Expo (subscribe via Google buzz or reader). Let me know if you have any suggestion of aspects you might want to read about.

Finally, I recommend you check the following sites for good Expo articles:

Shanghai Scrap, Adam Minter’s blog.

A Sorry Spectacle, and article about the US pavilion on FP, also by Minter.

Lost Laowai Blog, great review of some pavilions by this classic of China blogs.

Official page of the EXPO

Shanghai Morning Post EXPO special (in Chinese)

This morning I was doing some tests on Google to see if there was any change in the search results, and I noticed one detail I had not thought of before: although everyone is describing Google.cn as “hosted in China”, the IP is American, as you can see on whois.

In fact, other than the deals with advertisers (the revenue-generating part of the business), there is little of Google.cn that is really in China.  The data collected by Google.cn is a valuable asset for the company and it is kept in the US databanks, together with all the other Google countries indexes. Among other reasons, because Google.cn is nothing more than Google.com translated and censored for the Chinese.

This made me think of a possible outcome I hadn’t thought of before: that Google.cn may uncensor its content completely and continue to function normally served from the US, hosted under a different domain (since .cn extensions are controlled by China). From a practical point of view this wouldn’t make any big difference, as it would just be a copy of Google.com in simplified Chinese. But from a political and “face” perspective, it could be extremely damaging for Google relations with China, and probably lead to GFW of all Google services.

I sincerely hope this does not happen, and I hope that Google leaders will give due face to the Chinese government. One thing is to be consequent and decide to stop censoring content, a position that I respect. But a very different thing is to slam the door and slap the face of a government that is representing a whole country, whether we like it or not. That kind of arrogance would be completely unwarranted from any corporation, especially one with strong ties to a government that is not precisely an international model of respect of human rights.

I guess we’ll know the answer to this very soon. In the meantime, someone has an explanation for this “hosted in China” thing? I am puzzled, because Google.cn does behave like a site hosted in China (ie, no Reset Connection blocks), but unlike Baidu, the IP is outside. This is the only such case I have seen of outside IP not triggering RC terms, I guess it is part of  G’s deal with the government.

PS .For explanations on the technical stuff see the related posts below.

PSS. Another new thing on Google.cn that has been around for a few weeks is the advert that shows up once in a while on top of the searches: 小提示：”G.cn，值得信任” — 通过 G.cn 上谷歌. (announcement: you can trust G.cn–visit Google through G.cn). Ironic that this message has replaced the “censored results” notification that used to be on top of the search results.

Disclaimer: In the interest of science, this post contains sexually explicit material. If you are underage and/or a sensitive person you are advised not to scroll down. If you don’t read Chinese it’s OK.

This is the continuation of the previous post in the series, where we ended up rambling off the main topic and into a thick soup of political terms. Today I am back to impose some discipline. The article was meant to be about sex, and sex we will do. Just stick around for a few paragraphs of theory, or scroll right down to the examples if you prefer.

The question we considered last time was: why communist regimes, most of which have abolished religion at some point, are in fact among the most puritan countries regarding porn? Which can be otherwise formulated: why are Chinese commies so prudish? With the ever growing impulse of the porn censoring machine, this may well become one of the fundamental questions to understand modern China.

My take on the question

One obvious answer is that prudishness is not strictly related to religion, but rather to the character of a society and its leaders. You only need to see the thousands of starched black-suited cadres participating in the NPC, looking exactly like their CCP ancestors preserved in formol, to realize that the leadership of the party is overwhelmingly conservative. And it is perfectly normal that they should be conservative, since the main objective of the CCP today is harmony and maintaining the status quo.

But this short answer is not completely satisfying at least in two ways. First, the Chinese communists were already prudish long before 1949, according to first hand accounts of their life in Shaanxi. Besides, conservative people as described above are focused on following the path of their predecessors, they wouldn’t have such a problem with porn if it hadn’t been condemned by the party founders in the first place.

A better answer to my question is that, contrary to some common believe probably spread by Cold War propagandists in the West, communist was never about having sex in common. Instead, it is a very boring economic theory written by a German philosopher, more concerned with the proletariat and the means of production than with naked calisthenics.

When it came to its practical application, most communist countries soon realized that the theory required extreme levels of pressure and discipline on the “proletariat” to ensure it behaved according to plan. Sexual freedom and lewd behaviours have never fitted well with discipline, as Mao himself knew very well. Not only they divert energy from the revolution, but they also promote individualism and conflict among men. In fact, one might argue that a market phenomenon like porn will always be more comfortable with Smith’s Invisible Hand, wherever this hand might have used to wander in its free time.

In China in particular, the case for suppression of lewd behaviours was even stronger than in other communist regimes. This is because the old society that communists were set to destroy was characterized precisely by the exploitation of women by men, and of all by aristocrats and capitalists. From feet-binding to concubines, an important part of the injustice in pre-revolutionary China was directly caused by the lust of the powerful, as illustrated in works like Pearl Buck’s classic  ”The Good Earth“.

Maoism emphasized the “purity” of thought and criminalized those behaviours that were inevitably tied to the old society, both for practical discipline reasons and as a matter of necessary consistency with his rhetoric of liberation from the feudal society, especially in the early days. Some interesting anecdotes of Mao’s initial crackdown on prostitution after taking Beijing are told in the excellent “Peking Story” by David Kidd.

This legacy of communist policies has still a deep influence on the conservative minded cadres that rule the party today, and it will probably take a few more generations of leaders before the party changes its views on porn and “unhealthy” content in China.

Conclusion and some examples of Chinese Porn

One of the main reasons I needed to write this post is that the crackdown on porn doesn’t make much sense from a pure “follow the money” perspective. Porn, just like prostitution, is a huge parallel market, and like all shady businesses everywhere it is a great source of revenue for the powerful who protect it. The links between prostitution and the army are well known in China, and there should be strong economic motivations to establish similar links with online sex providers. I hope this post explains why this is not happening.

As I already clarified in part 1 of this series, I don’t really give a damn for the companies that run pornographic sites, and I am just as happy if they all get banned in China. I think Western netizens waste way too much effort in such basic pursuits as could be fulfilled better offline, to the point that porn has become the first commodity on the internet. For a self-confessed internetholic like me, it has always been a source of embarrassment when offline people link both concepts together.

Regarding the consequences of these restrictions on porn in China, some commentators suggest they lead to frustration and an increased obsession with erotic content on the internet. While this obsession is certainly there, I don’t see it is any worse than in the West. In fact, in many ways it seems healthier, judging by the email forwards I regularly get from my (male) colleagues. The pictures that are popular  in China often show a cute girl, fully or at least half dressed, smiling for the camera. In contrast, the ppts I receive from the West rarely involve just a girl, or even a human being. They tend to cover a range of sick scenarios that you surely do not want to explore clicking here.

But enough with the theory. Have you ever seen porn done with Real Characters?

Here I leave you with the most amazing examples of Chinese porn that have still not been banned from the internet!

Click to continue »