An interesting piece in The New Yorker on April 30th, titled China’s Crisis, by Evan Osnos (no idea who he is).  Wanted to share a bit of it with you:

The gap between rich and poor has become so inflammatory and unsustainable that the Chinese government has simply stopped releasing an official measure of the distribution of wealth. (Unofficial studies now put China’s inequality beyond the point that a former Prime Minister once estimated would trigger social unrest.)

For now, the streets are quiet, because one thing that all factions of the Party agree on is that they could lose everything if the Bo Xilai case opens a wider schism. But do they recognize the longer-term problem: that their refusal to share the affairs of state with their own people is the greatest peril of all?

There’s an interesting point there. Sometimes it seems as if all we ever see in the media are stories about how rich everyone is in China, how many millionaires and billionaires there are, the astonishing amounts of money they spend.  And yet we also get the stories about Foxconn workers working 80 hour weeks for US$300 a month.  And these Foxconn workers are doing far better than at least 1/3rd of the country’s population, those that don’t live in or near the big cities, those who have yet to be “uplifted.”

So what is the truth?  Are the poor and dispossessed keeping their mouths shut in the traditional hope that if they keep their heads down and work hard they or their children will one day join the ranks of the rich?  Or will all these tales of massive corruption lead to unrest and instability?

Everyone has their theories, no one really knows.  Least of all me. But I find this to be interesting stuff.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the animosity between “mainland locusts” and “Hong Kong dogs” is a serious issue.  I don’t think it will go away.  Oh, it may fade out of the news for awhile, but it will surely come back again.  And again.  Because the simple truth is, there is no way that Hong Kong can win this one.  No way.  China won’t intercede, or if they do, if they start running ads somewhere saying “be nice to the Hong Kong dogs,” it will be a half-hearted attempt.  And the crappy excuses we have called “the Hong Kong government” can’t go against China, they can’t and even if they could, they wouldn’t.  So the only resolution would be if Hong Kongers kept their mouths shut, kept their opinions to themselves and learned to love their mainland brethren, or at least pretend to, because there is no other possible outcome.  Hong Kong secede from China?  As if.

As I wrote to a friend earlier today, I see definite parallels with Tibet.  The Chinese government actively encouraged Han Chinese to move to Tibet.  They gave them all kinds of incentives with the notion that if Tibet looked more Chinese, if it sounded more Chinese, it would eventually become more Chinese.  50+ years later, nope, still hasn’t happened.

My friend is someone who has lived in mainland China for the past 15 years and has traveled extensively throughout the country.  I think his opinion is as valid as anyone else’ on the topic, if not more so.  Here’s some of what he wrote back to me.  (He’s asked me to not use his name in the post but otherwise given me permission to quote him.)

Re HK/mainland – it’s very significant. HK has an important role to play in the future of China. The view of many – that I have argued against – that HK is being turned by the commies, is simply not true. there is a fundamental cultural/social difference that is growing not shrinking, and Legco elections etc are not a reliable gauge of the state of play.

Prof Kong’s comments are enormously important – he’s Peking University, and these people are very sensitive to speaking within accepted parameters. i.e. his comments reflect a position beyond himself within the ruling class.

There is a connection here to what is happening in Tibet, another place where the party thought they could bring pressure to bear and things would eventually fall their way. It seems I was wrong on Tibet – I used to say the Dalai Llama would one day die and it was game over. I think it’s going to be more complicated than that.

The background to all this is two issues – the party’s incapability of doing respect, to anyone or to any entity, and the power of the Internet to provide transparency.

There is a confluence of issues raising pressure on the party at the moment. How it plays will be fascinating.  They are smart, but they are more selfish than smart, so I would expect them to make more and more mistakes. Watching developments is more fun than TV.

I’d like to write more on this topic but, frankly, I’m just too tired tonight.  So in the meantime, let me just direct your attention to new-ish blog Dictionary of Politically Incorrect Hong Kong Cantonese.  What this guy is doing is taking all the various stuff from HK newspapers, Youtube, Weibo, Facebook and other sources and translating it into English.

Read this stuff and try to convince me that this is something that will just blow over.  Oh, there may be some pauses, some times when everyone is united in their hatred for the Japanese or the Americans, but this will return, again and again.  ”Hope for the best, expect the worst,” as they sang in the Mel Brooks movie The Twelve Chairs, and I suppose to many non-Chinese, there is a kind of Mel Brooksian feeling to this entire thing.  Surely these people cannot be serious.  (Yeah, I know, stop calling you Shirley.)  And yet many of them are.

This is life in Hong Kong in 2012.  It may feel a bit like 1Q84 but last time I looked there was still only one moon in the sky – on those increasingly rare nights that one can see past the pollution.  Donald Tsang has refused to address this in any meaningful way and Henry Tang hasn’t even managed to get off his fat ugly ass long enough to have a platform or positions on anything (to the point where even China has called him up and said, “Yo, Hank, WTF?”).  And so when I look at possible projections of the future, I’m worried.

By now all of you, or at least all of you who live in Hong Kong, have heard of Kong Qingdong, the Beijing professor who called Hong Kong people “dogs” and said that the Rule of Law is only needed in trash societies like Hong Kong and Singapore.  Very indicative of how tempers have flared in the aftermath is this column in Asia Sentinel by Alice Poon – not so much for what she has to say as for the extreme racism and misogyny in the comments on her editorial.

So, my take?  Who the fuck is Kong Qingdong and why should I give a shit about what he has to say?  As near as I can figure it, he’s China’s answer to Rush Limbaugh – a big bag of gas who says whatever he thinks will land him media coverage, whether he believes it or not.  I mean, come on, if Hong Kong is a trash society, what about a place that practices extreme censorship, puts people in jail without a trial for expressing their opinions, puts melamine in milk powder or builds schools out of cardboard in earthquake zones?  Strike all that.  How many people does China execute every year?  China has the rule of law, too, it just doesn’t enforce it equally across all walks of life and classes of people.   Kong says he’s a direct descendant of Confucius, by the way, 73rd generation.  And what should that count for?  I mean, after 73 generations, I think the bloodline might have thinned out a little bit.

The whole tempest in a teapot comes on the heels of the D&G photo mess, which presumably started because some rich mainlander didn’t like having his picture taken in their shop.  It’s all a slap in the face to Hong Kong, which is now seriously dependent on mainland policies and mainlanders for much of its economic survival.  Remember back in the 90′s?  Damn, HKers loved to make jokes about mainlanders, how they dressed, how they acted, how they spoke.  It was hard to say who was lower in HK eyes back then – mainlanders or white people.

So now the tables have turned.  HK needs mainland money.  HK needs mainlanders to come here and buy over-priced shitbox flats and LV bags and Rolex watches by the bushel to keep the economy going, never mind how that money managed to illegally cross the border.  There is a divide – a cultural divide as well as a language one – between Hong Kong and the rest of China.  Anything that attacks at that divide, that tears down the wall, gets people upset.

Am I being harsh here?  Some will say yes, others will say not harsh enough.  Maybe Hemlock or others will take it further.  All I can say is this: who the fuck is Kong Qingdong and why does anyone care what he says?

Maybe the answer is that people are afraid that what he’s saying may not be true but that it represents, at least to some extent, the thoughts and feelings of the ruling class in China – otherwise why would he be allowed to say it and not be tossed in jail afterwards?  And if that is indeed the case, what happens to Hong Kong?

Both sides are wrong.  Both sides are right.  What’s next?

Here are excerpts from some of the comments that Ms. Poon received:   ”A coward old b!tch whining about mainland.” “her degenerate and prejudiced opinions” “Wannabee White’s like this Alice Poon are disappointed that she longer has the priviledge to asskiss the Brits.” “she is a neo-liberal hell-bent on trying to propagate the so-called western values like demoncracy, human rights, free speech etc. unto HK in particular & China in general That is alright if she balances her such admiration of the white man’s ideas with the darker sides of these same western bullshits which now prove so disastrous economically humanity-wise with equal zeal.”  ”I think Alice Poon is whitewashed” “This Alice Poon like so many Hong Kongers are traitors.”

Pleasant stuff, eh wot?  Maybe I’ll get some “you white piece of shit how dare you comment on China like that” kinds of things.

Let’s add “because the government is filled with idiots who stick their noses in where they don’t belong” to the list of things that seem to stymie true innovation in China.

Node.js is an open source programming framework that is growing in popularity.  But at the moment, if you’re in China, you can’t get at it.  You might ask why.  You might ask what subversive element it contains that could lead to the destruction of the second largest economy on the planet.

The answer is … the software version number.  The current version is 0.6.4 (as in June 4, 1989, Tienanmen Square).  So it’s blocked by the Great Firewall of China.

What a bunch of fucking maroons.

(The same article mentions that the CTO of Joyent, the company responsible for node.js, says that people shouldn’t point a finger at China over this because the US is headed in the same direction thanks to pending legislation called SOPA.  But I don’t think SOPA will pass.  And even if it did, that doesn’t make the guardians of the Middle Kingdom any less maroon-ish.)

I’ve lived here for a long time without ever checking out ZhuHai, “the pearl of the sea,” the Chinese city immediately to the north of Macau.  Since it’s so close, it’s always been on my list of things to do but I never pushed it because I was never quite sure of what I’d do once I got there.  Finally on Thursday I had an excuse to go – business meetings.  However because it was business I didn’t have a chance to really check anything out.  I did get driven along that long beautiful park and beach that runs along the river; I got to see the famous statue sitting on a rock several feet off shore, drove past the amusement park (Pearl Land) and so on.  But since it was business and the person behind the wheel a virtual stranger, I couldn’t very well ask her to pull over and stop and let me get out and take some pictures.

The ferry ride from Shun Tak Centre takes about 70 minutes and costs HK$190.  The “entertainment” on the boat consists of several ads for places in ZhuHai including of course real estate ads for some development that touted itself as Geomantic, amongst other things, and then old episodes of Mythbusters.   I arrived, I got picked up, I got driven to a meeting.

Following the meeting, the woman who was taking me around (no, it wasn’t like that at all, she was an executive with one of the companies I was meeting, married, kids, over 50) took me to lunch.  It turns out that while ZhuHai may be almost as famous for its seafood as Hong Kong is, she doesn’t like seafood, so she took me to a restaurant that had almost none on the menu.  The restaurant was named Mao Jia and was dedicated to the chairman.  Walk up the stairs and you’re greeted with this vision:

The balloons are a nice, festive touch, eh?

The rest of the restaurant was pleasant but ordinary.

The manager saw me take the above two pictures and rushed over to explain that those were okay but that I wasn’t allowed to take pictures of one corridor lined with Mao photos.  So of course I tried, but from our table this was the best that I could get:

I have no idea what was so special or secret about any of that.

Mao was born in Hunan province and I’m guessing that the food there was meant to be representative of where he came from.  I asked my hostess what dishes were good there and she replied, “Everything!”  I asked her if she could recommend any particular dish and she replied, “All!”  Not terribly helpful.  I ordered a beef dish and a pork dish, each slightly spicy yet somehow also somewhat bland.  She ordered a vegetable – stir fried cabbage (sigh) and some rice.  The menu (pictures and English) had the usual bizarre Chinglish names for dishes; this one took the prize:

“Pseudobagrus fulvidraco in a pan”.   Now I know it’s the latin name for a fish sometimes referred to as yellow catfish and occasionally as Korean bullhead.  But at the time all I knew was that the picture did not look very appetizing.

After lunch I was driven to this place:

With the government deciding that software development should be a key industry in ZhuHai and with 10 universities in town, this software park is home to more than 150 software development companies (some local, some branches of larger Chinese companies like Kingdee) is over 80% occupied.  Rent is crazy low here, about US$5 per square meter.  It’s a beautiful campus with one tower and six identical smaller buildings:

Unfortunately, while I was here to hopefully meet some companies that could supply services to mine, they had misunderstood the purpose of my visit.  They thought I was there to rent offices to establish a China foothold for my company, not quite the case.

One thing I did learn is that in Zhu Hai, a junior programmer – university graduate with 1-2 years experience – could expect to earn 5,000 RMB (about US$780) per month; more experienced programmers could make up to 10k per month.  It may not sound like much but I was also told that small apartments rent for around 300 RMB per month, so that 5k would actually go quite far.

After finishing here, there was what seemed like a very long (albeit scenic) drive back to the boat terminal.  It was only 4 PM and I could have stuck around but to do what?  I’d seen plenty of shopping malls but I couldn’t imagine I’d find anything in shops there that I couldn’t find in Hong Kong, Shenzhen or Macau.  The only tourist-y thing I’d seen was the beach and the park and taking a hike along there alone didn’t strike me as having much potential.  I could have easily gone to Macau but I just wasn’t in the mood and knew I had too much work waiting for me back home.  So I simply hopped on the next boat and 75 minutes later was at the China Ferry Terminal in TST.

Not the most exciting of trips I know.  Sorry if you’ve fallen asleep by now.  It is indeed a beautiful city, especially what I believe to be the Gong Bei area around the river.  There were long stretches there that probably resemble Hawaii – the city is beautifully maintained.  But frankly, if I want to take a walk along the water in a nice park and then eat some seafood, there are plenty of places in Hong Kong where I can do that.  I mean, come on, I live in Sai Kung, beautiful waterfront parks and beaches, great seafood restaurants, I don’t need to pay 400 bucks and sit on boats for 2-1/2 hours to do that, I can do it in my own backyard so to speak.   If I had some friends to meet there or was going up with a large group of friends, maybe it would be different.  Otherwise, I don’t think I need to rush back.

Or is there something up there that I don’t know about that’s worth another trip?

Fr0m Fast Company.

In the U.S. everything has been politicized to the point where progress is crawling to a halt.  Even the environment has become a political football.  So in the US you get the people who deny climate change and those who accept it but think that dealing with it in any responsible way is bad for business and bad for the economy and bad for jobs.  (Sounds kind of like Hong Kong, eh?)

But green tech is big business.  And it’s going to get bigger and bigger.  There are billions of dollars to be made there on a global scale.  And the US is getting left behind.  Two excerpts from the graphic:

Click on the images to see ‘em larger or click over to the link up top to see a whole lot more bad news.

(from here)

This first item offered up without comment.  I’m just sayin’ …

Catching up on last week’s episodes of The Daily Show.  One night the guest was author Jon Ronson, promoting his book The Psychopath Test.

Amazon’s description of the book is:

In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them.  

The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson’s exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world’s top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psychologist who is convinced that many important CEOs and politicians are, in fact, psychopaths teaches Ronson how to spot these high-flying individuals by looking out for little telltale verbal and nonverbal clues. And so Ronson, armed with his new psychopath-spotting abilities, enters the corridors of power. He spends time with a death-squad leader institutionalized for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York; a legendary CEO whose psychopathy has been speculated about in the press; and a patient in an asylum for the criminally insane who insists he’s sane and certainly not a psychopath.

Ronson not only solves the mystery of the hoax but also discovers, disturbingly, that sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and more, defined by their maddest edges.

In the interview, Ronson states that 1% of the population are psychopaths, 25% of those in prison are psychopaths and 4% of CEOs are psychopaths.

It’s probably worth noting this from Wikipedia:

Psychopathy is a term which, until the 1980s, formally referred to a personality disorder characterized by an abnormal lack of empathy masked by an ability to appear outwardly normal.

Despite being currently unused in diagnostic manuals, psychopathy and related terms such as psychopath are still widely used by mental health professionals and laymen alike

According to Christopher J. Patrick in his Handbook of Psychopathy, clinicians generally believe that there is neither a cure nor any effective treatment for psychopathy; there are no medications that can naturally instill empathy, while psychopaths who undergo traditional talk therapy only become more adept at manipulating others.

The prototypical psychopath has deficits or deviance in several areas: interpersonal relationships, emotion, and self-control. Psychopaths gain satisfaction through antisocial behavior, and do not experience shame, guilt, or remorse for their actions. Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright. Psychopaths also lack empathy towards others in general, resulting in tactlessness, insensitivity, and contemptuousness. Psychopaths can have a superficial charm about them, enabled by a willingness to say anything to anyone without concern for accuracy or truth. Shallow affect also describes the psychopath’s tendency for genuine emotion to be short-lived, glib and egocentric, with an overall cold demeanor. Their behavior is impulsive and irresponsible, often failing to keep a job or defaulting on debts. Psychopaths also have a markedly distorted sense of the potential consequences of their actions, not only for others, but also for themselves. They do not deeply recognize the risk of being caught, disbelieved or injured as a result of their behavior.

No comment.

Meanwhile, in China, the source of every day’s odd news, comes word via M.I.C. Gadget that a local businessman has now received a license to give breast massages after taking a 3 month training course.  (Really, it took 3 months?)

Big ups to the guys at M.I.C. for translating this important news.  Some excerpts from the story:

Xia Jun, the CEO of a housekeeping service company in Shanghai, claimed to be the first quantified breast massage therapist after three months of training from reputable provider. He is planning to promote breast-massaging service throughout China, as he thinks breast massage is a very potential market at the moment.

After Xia granted his license from the China Employment Training Technical Instruction Center at the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, he is considering to expand breast-massage therapy throughout China by providing ‘scientist training’ for his male’s employees in 160 branches.

His managers had told Xia of an emerging need for breast massage on the market: New mothers have been struggling in recent years to produce enough milk for their infants.

“They don’t want to miss out on the market, but most of them are male and so are too shy to learn it, therefore Xia decided to get the training himself first.”

From Xia’s explanation, sending his female employees for the same training would not be a wise investment, citing fears of high employee turnover after acquiring new breast-massaging techniques. He said, “if I sent female employees of the branches to be trained, each may cost me 3,000 yuan ($461.40).”

Presumably the male employees are willing to pay to take the training class.

A new post on Dylan’s web site, ostensibly written by Dylan, to my fans and followers.  First, he writes about not playing in China in 2010.

First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China. This was all drummed up by a Chinese promoter who was trying to get me to come there after playing Japan and Korea. My guess is that the guy printed up tickets and made promises to certain groups without any agreements being made. We had no intention of playing China at that time, and when it didn’t happen most likely the promoter had to save face by issuing statements that the Chinese Ministry had refused permission for me to play there to get himself off the hook. If anybody had bothered to check with the Chinese authorities, it would have been clear that the Chinese authorities were unaware of the whole thing.

He also refutes rumors of censorship.

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There’s no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

And he ends with a light-hearted touch.

Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.

Read the whole piece here.

One thing you gotta love is the wide variety of sexual euphemisms you come across in Hong Kong.  They can be amazingly descriptive or astonishingly crass.  Very often they relate to food – ugly women are referred to as pork chops while a massage with no happy ending might be deemed a veggie.

Anyway, was reading this report here.  ”Alex Fong Lik Sun has taken legal action against a Mainland magazine that reported a relationship between him and Zhang Xinyu.”   Here is a picture of Mr. Fong and Ms. Zhang from that site.

Apparently elsewhere in that article, the magazine referred to Ms. Zhang as a “Mainland Milk Cow.”

My guess is they mean she has large breasts.  While it’s not immediately evident in that photo above, a bit of Googling provides more proof.

The term is funny and yet it seems a shame to hang such an epithet on such a lovely and generously endowed lady.

I’m taking off this entire week but not flying off anywhere, a “staycation” as some call it.  I need some time to chill out after deal with the stress of Spikey’s passing.  Yesterday I went up to Shenzhen with a friend.  As I hoped, a few days before the official holiday, things were quiet.  No line at immigration at all and able to get into the Laurel restaurant at the Lo Wu shopping mall without having to wait an hour – without having to wait at all.

In the evening, my friend mentioned he’d never been to Shekou.  I’ve only been there a couple of times and the last time was probably 4 years ago so off we went.  The problem was that I don’t even know the name of where in Shekou we wanted to go in English, let along in Putonghua.   I also didn’t know that the Shenzhen Metro now reaches out to there.  So we grabbed a taxi and I told the driver we wanted to go to Shekou and off we went.  He never asked me where in Shekou we wanted to go and I thought, “Okay, looks like a smart guy, sees two white guys going to Shekou, probably figures we want to hit the expat bars there.”  Nope, he took us to the ferry terminal.  So then I’m trying to explain to him that we want to go to the bar area and he has no idea – probably more my fault than his.  I see a sign for the Nan Hai Hotel, the big hotel that’s been there for a long time, and I ask the driver to take us there, guessing (correctly) that they’ll have staff who can direct us.  And yes, they did, they gave us a hotel card with a little bilingual map of the area and we walked over to Sea World.

We’re walking around and everything is so quiet.  I keep thinking, and finally say out loud, “Gee, it’s awfully dead here for a Saturday night.”  And my friend looks at me and says, “Dude, it’s a Monday!”  Oh, right.   Two American women call out to us.  ”Excuse me, we’re trying to get back to Hong Kong and we spoke to a taxi driver and not sure if he understood us, can you help?”   Um, I don’t know, my Cantonese and Mandarin are both pretty basic.  ”That’s better than the no Chinese we’ve got” or something to that extent. So I walk over to a taxi, tell the driver that they want to go back to Lo Wu and Hong Kong and right away he says no problem.  A little weird, no?

We walk around for a bit and choose a place called Tequila Coyote Cantina, “Mexican With Attitude.”  Well, we didn’t get much attitude pro or con from the place but I gotta say it compares quite favorably with the “Mexican” places in Hong Kong.  The food was far better than I expected it to be and of course it was at Shenzhen prices, not Hong Kong prices.  It’s amazing what you can do when you’re not being raped by your landlord.  A “yard” of frozen margarita there was 105 RMB for the first one, 99 RMB for refills.  One could get seriously wasted in this place for very little money.

Then, because things were quiet there everywhere, we decided to just head back early and I was home before 11.  Nice relaxing day.

Anyway, take a look at the picture below.  The gentleman in the photo is Donnie Yen.  I’m a big Donnie Yen fan.  Not the greatest actor in the world but the camera likes him; I think he’s got great screen presence and as near as my uneducated eye can tell, he does the martial arts thing pretty damned well.  He’s not Jet Li but to my mind he’s not that far behind.

(Photo from here.)

That lovely woman on the left hand side of the photo is his wife, Cissy Wang.  The woman on the right hand side of the photo is her sister, actress Wang Yuanyuan.  No wonder he’s smiling, right?

But Donnie, what the fuck is with that outfit?  That shirt and that bowtie?  Green pants, black plaid shirt, red bowtie?  Did you get dressed in the dark?

Then again, he’s fucking Donnie Yen.  Aside from the two hot women surrounding him, that look on his face seems to be saying, “I dare you to make a comment about this tie, I’ll crush your fucking head. For real.”

I can do it because I’ve brought along a secret weapon.  Donnie, meet Jamie Chung.

(Photo from here.)