view from the China desk
Had the good fortune to be invited along by my buddy from China Twenty-One to a conversation between Howard French, professor of journalism at Columbia and former New York Times journalist and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom from The China Beat on journalism past, present, and future in China. (That's not what the talk was called, but that's what it was about.)They brought up a lot of fascinating issues and were able to volley back their insights as journalists and academics, but Wasserstrom made one point that I thought was particularly relevant for this blog.
As I may have mentioned, I'm often more surprised by the issues that are actually covered in the English language media here in China than the ones that are censored, but Wasserstrom said that was part of a government strategy to control the way the country is perceived abroad. Since such a tiny percentage of the Chinese population would bother reading the English language media, the government can safely use it to create an image of a media and a society that are much less regulated and more free than they actually are. So while I might enjoy reading about the struggles of homosexuals to be...
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More babies being born with syhphilis
More and more babies are being born with syphilis, a disease that was nearly eradicated (according to state media) in China 50 years ago. Even in first-tier cities like Shanghai, babies are being born with the tell-tale symptoms including red spots and bone deficiencies.Doctors blame the increase on migrant workers far from families and wives who frequent prostitutes in big cities.
"It's difficult to promote condom use among these prostitutes because they are poorly educated and some cannot even afford a condom," added Chen, who co-authored the paper on syphilis published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Infection rates have also soared among farmers and retired people, according to a 2006 report on syphilis and gonorrhea by the STD center of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
"Even if they know they have caught syphilis or another STD, these three groups are often too ashamed to see a doctor because of the stigma, and will most likely pass the virus to their spouses," said professor Gong Xiangdong at the STD center.
Chinese people are still deeply conservative when it comes to discussing sexual health, and discrimination against those diagnosed with STDs, as well as many other conditions, remains a real problem.
Because of this reason, studies that suggest more than half of China's syphilis sufferers do not seek the medical treatment they need.
China required couples to undergo health screens before marriage until 2003. Now, the screens are optional but obviously encouraged.
"Being cautious about your own health is not only showing respect to yourself, but also shows respect to the people you are with," said Wan Shaoping, a professor at the Sichuan Institute of Dermatology and STD Prevention.
I couldn't have put it better myself.
More on bread and love
A poll carried out among 992 female students in Guangzhou by the Guangzhou Women's Federation and Guangzhou Women's Society earlier this year reveals that young Chinese women want Mr. Right to be both rich and charming.- 60% want to marry wealthy men.
- (68% of college men don't like women chasing rich men.)
- 40% want to marry men with stable jobs, like a civil servant (otherwise known as being in possession of a "iron rice bowl").
- 30% think a successful marriage is more important than a successful career.
- Only 3% don't want to get married.
- 58% are willing to settle for a man with good prospects who hasn't struck it rich just yet, as long as he is loving.
- 11% are counting on loving only one man in their lives.
- 13% think they can love two men at the same time.
- 78% expect their husband to be faithful, but 13% will understand if he steps out every now and then.
- 26% think cohabitation before marriage is normal.
- 65% think it's okay for other people to cohabitate, but it's not for them.
- Most want more than a "naked marriage," or a bare-bones wedding ceremony.
- Most think love and marriage don't necessarily go hand-in-hand.
Xiao Yahong, a university student in Guangzhou, said compared with the rich second generation, she prefers a man with "high-potential stock" who is a few years older.
"The living environment in today's society gives money a very important position. It would be hard to buy an apartment and a car solely on your own. But if you are married well, you have an upper hand."
rare species in Shanghai
This morning, on an unusually crowded bus (as in the bus is always crowded but this morning especially so), I had to stand, dangling by one arm from the bar above my head, my always-heavy purse and my laptop bag swinging from my shoulder, for a very long time. Seats were vacated as people arrived at their stops, but other passengers were better positioned to take them. A seat opened behind me and the man who had been standing next to me since I got on the bus tapped me on the shoulder and gave me his seat.I don't know why. I am young, and probably just a little younger than him. There was a young Chinese woman standing behind him. Maybe it was because I was a foreigner, or female, or obviously carrying a lot of baggage. Whatever the reason, I only held out for a second before thanking him profusely and taking the seat. He stayed on the bus for another stop or two and then got off.
It was a nice affirmation of my new strategy to stop putting up a fight about everything and just going with the flow. It's very, very easy to spend most...
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Shopping in Shanghai
A friend of mine from Taiwan was in Shanghai to visit the World Expo and I happily met with her and a friend for dinner on Friday night. She talked about what she had seen at the Expo and the places she'd visited in Shanghai. Of course, she had spent most of her time shopping when she wasn't visiting pavilions. She mentioned the stores she had been to, including H&M, Zara and a few others on Huai Hai Zhong Lu and Nanjing Lu, and then we complained about the prices."If everyone in China has no money and only earns 1,000 or 2,000 yuan a month, how can they buy these clothes that cost 500 yuan?" she asked me.
It's a common misconception. The majority of the population isn't earning much and can't afford to drop RMB500 on a pair of jeans, but there's a tiny elite percentage that doesn't have to think twice about how much they spend on clothes, cars, houses, or handbags (for instance, the world's most expensive dog was recently purchased by a woman in Xi'an). Most of the wealth is concentrated in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai, so it's easy to get a very...
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Google in China
I'm not going to get it into here except to say that I find the stand-off between Google and the Chinese government fascinating. And here's a link to a helpful chart on which Google services are being blocked (most recently, that list has expanded to include Google's mobile services).My friends and I that are a little left of center (or more) have often talked about the hand major corporations have in controlling international affairs. I don't think anyone has conceived of Google as an Enron-like entity or something as insidious in its reach as say, Coca-Cola, but it's going to be interesting to watch a major corporation go head-to-head with a national government. Rather backwards, too, as I think the typical accusation is that governments are masking their corporate interests and here Google is being accused of hiding its American government interests.
Time to fire the ayi
Beau and I have decided it's time to end our relationship with the ayi. While we were at first ambivalent about hiring a local woman to clean our house, we quickly embraced the luxury, only for the relationship to deteriorate into a source of resentment and frustration. She gladly took on the task of cooking meals for us when she came three times a week, but has evidently decided this is her only task. In the past four months, she has used more cooking oil than soap or laundry detergent. The bottle of floor cleaner has been collecting dust under the kitchen sink.Read More!
Happy Holidays!
上海
我刚刚知道我可以用电脑打中文字。太可惜，我不能打台湾用的字。我应该要多学中国大摞用的字。It's Golden Week, so I don't have to go to work for ten days. I have A LOT of time on my hands.
Here are some more quotes about Shanghai:
"If God allowed Shanghai to endure, He owed an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah." —Unkown
“A city with forty-eight storey skyscrapers built upon twenty-eight layers of hell.” — A Chinese journalist in Bernard Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai
"Beijing is a great Chinese city. Shanghai is a great city, which happens to be in China." —Post in an online forum
That last one leads me to a personal interjection: I really don't like it when people say Shanghai isn't "real China," like you can have a more authentic experience of life in this country if you go hang out in Farmer Wang's rice paddy. Shanghai is maybe not a typical Chinese city—though I think even that is an unfair description—but it certainly is not a typical city in England or the US or India or Mozambique. Shanghai is a special Chinese city. It definitely boasts all the conveniences of modern Western life (except deodorant sticks...), but it shouldn't be underestimated just because it has a couple dozen McDonald's.
Which leads me to another thought. Moving here was perhaps the easiest transition I've ever made in my life because this is the third or fourth place in Asia that I've lived or visited extensively. I am pretty comfortable using the subway system, getting in a taxi without being fluent in the language, eating street vendor food, and buying toiletries with Chinese labels at Watson's pharmacy. So while each city I've visited definitely has its own personality, its own energy, there's enough overlap that traveling between the biggest cities isn't really stressful at all.
Shanghai eternal
I spent many hours online looking for this quote, only to find it where I thought it would be all along:I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank richly clotted life. —Aldous Huxley
What intrigued and attracted me most about this description was that it was written in 1926 but it might be even more true in 2009.
Here's the rest of it:
"Old Shanghai is Bergson's elan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself. Each individual Chinaman has more vitality, you feel, than each individual Indian or European, and the social organism composed of these individuals is therefore more intensely alive than the social organism in India or the West. Or perhaps it is the vitality of the social organism - a vitality accumulated and economised through centuries by ancient habit and tradition. So much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing - the spectacle of it inspires something like terror. All this was going on when we were cannibalistic savages. It will still be going on, a little modified, perhaps by Western science, but not much-long after we in Europe have simply died of fatigue. A thousand years from now the seal cutters will still be engraving their seals, the ivory workers still sawing and polishing, the tailors will be singing the merits of their cut and cloth, even as they do to-day, the spectacled astrologers will still be conjuring silver out of the pockets of bumpkins and amorous courtesans, there will be a bird market, and eating houses perfumed with delicious cooking, and chemists shops with bottles full of dried lizards, tigers' whiskers, rhinoceros horns and pickled salamanders, there will be patient jewellers and embroiderers of faultless taste, shops full of marvellous crockery, and furriers who can make elaborate patterns and pictures out of variously coloured fox-skins, and the great black ideographs will still be as perfectly written as they are to-day, or were a thousand years ago, will be thrown on to the red paper with the same apparent recklessness, the same real and assured skill, by a long fine hand as deeply learned in the hieratic gestures of its art as the hand of the man who is writing now. Yes, it will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever-all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through old Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty. And even India seems by comparison provisional and precarious."
