[please discuss] China
I love China, and I love braised pork belly. That’s why we have China Fact of the Day, and that is why I eat and cook so much Chinese food. (French food is its only rival.) The pragmatic optimism of the Chinese is a delight. It’s a shame about the Great Leap Forward and all that other stuff. I never get tired of reading books on Mao, the recent biography and the one by his doctor are especially good. Chinese opera has marvelous quivering timbres, although they are usually ruined by electrification and by recording. The Story of Qiu Ju is my favorite Chinese film, although there are many good ones. Soul Mountain is my favorite Chinese novel. China is also the future of Western classical music. Tang horses are overpriced but still they are amazing and subtle.
Here is why China will not take over the world, sadly the trip to Shanghai still awaits us. By the way, their nominal exchange rate peg is not a real peg in the medium- to long-run.
#09 in a series of 50.
Tyler, Tyler – Please comment on something – tho I realize
it’s too late to add to or amend THE 50 – why are nearly
all whistlers male? Of course it’s purely anecdotal, but
I’d say as much as 90% are males. So why?
– avian tendencies? to attract females?
– canine attributes? warnings to other males?
– hand-in-pocket syndrome? as a friend said – whistling HAS
to be related to putting hands in pockets, and guys do that
all the time!
Thanks!
I am reading Chung and Halliday’s biography now. Fascinating and even more terrifying than those I have read earlier. He is mentioned only once in the book, but I remember reading Jan Myrdal’s “Report from a Chinese village” many years ago and being stunned at the ability of someone to perceive China in 1963 as he did. I also remember sitting in a history class with a friend while studying at Loyola. It was a history/political science course on development taught by two very good, but left leaning professors. The elder of the two was an especially kindly man who loved gardening.
Thus my friend and I were stunned when he was discussing gardening and remarked how he had always liked the idea during the Cultural Revolution of having the intellectual elite go into the fields and get their hands in the soil and connect with the life of the peasant. Being freshman for the most part the implications of what he just said seemed to just float over the students heads as they discussed the merits of the idea. Thus I learned the power of romantic imagery to obscure and entice the totalitarian instinct. Robby and I could hardly speak and we still recall some 20 years later the chilling cheerfulness of people discussing one of history’s greatest tragedies in the context of gardening and its positive aspects.
Japanese food is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Chinese food.
> Chinese food. (French food is its only rival.)
For vegetarian, South Indian hands down no contest. I appreciate that’s a minority interest (outside South India)
Tyler: Do you read or speak Chinese? Any thoughts on the cost/benefit of learning to do either?
That bio of Mao by his doctor was something, wasn’t it?
What I remember most are a few of his … hygiene habits.
Never brushed his teeth, just swished green tea around.
Never washed (if I remember right), just “bathed “his
genitals in the vaginas of young peasant girls.
Oh, and the number of worshipful, terrified young peasant girls that he worked his way through was pretty impressive.
Many facets of the Chinese economy is still dominated by the state. This is the reason why I feel that their explosive growth will continue – because there’s so much room for improvement. I feel that Chinese technocrats undertstand this, and privatization will continue to occur.
That said, I had much more faith in Jiang Zemin than I do in Hu Jintao. Sometimes, Hu’s protectionist and socialist rhetoric scares me. His ironfisted, machiavellian removal of his liberal enemies in Shanghai certainly gives reason to pause. I just hope that within the CCP, the more liberal factions of the party can effectively keep Hu in check.
Cure – ‘If you get to Shanghai, keep in mind that Shanghai/Hangzhou/Suzhou are certainly not representative of the rest of China, economy-wise.’
Lynn’s ‘IQ and the Wealth of Nations’ put Shanghai’s avg IQ at 109.4, which is pretty enormous. In the late 19th century it became the worlds third largest commerical city for a while, but then the Communists ruined everything. I see it becoming a major, major financial centre into the future.
I’m learning Chinese at the moment and would like to throw my hat in the ring by saying that it’s a particularly easy language. The main reason here being that there are 1. no articles and 2. no conjugation of verbs.
So, as a counterpoint, German uses Der, Die and Das (for our ‘the’) for Masculine, Feminine and Neuter nounds..well, unless of course the noun is plural, or in the dative or accusative sense. Oh, and the type of noun can have no relation to whether or not it is a masculine or feminine noun – see Mark Twain’s enlightening ‘The Awful German Language’ for more color here.
Chinese forgoes the whole mess by not having articles in the first place, lovely. As well, verbs are not conjugated, e.g.,
I am
You are
She/He/It is
In Chinese is:
Wo shi
Ni shi
Ta shi
Gotta love it. Well, yeah, I mean there’s that whole character vs. Roman alphabet issue, but let’s set that aside.
Go read Chairman Mao’s work, at least his quotes. I don’t know why the doctor wrote that book, but I don’t believe in him. I judged him by what he said and what he wrote. If Mao hadn’t said “women hold up half of the sky”, I think the “story of Qiu Ju” would have been another version.
Soul moutain became famous because of the Nobel Prize, I wonder how many Chinese are really interested in it.
jiade, do you think that the doctor had a motivation to lie or are you privy to information that he wasn’t? Personally, I judge Mao based on how many deaths he was responsible for.
glenn, I compulsively have my hands in my pockets, even when I’m nearly running, but I can’t whistle for the life of me. What is your theory for why we put our hands in our pockets so much?
If you read Mao: the Unknown Story, you should also read Jonathan Spence’s review of the book. The great historian Spence would tell you how terrible that book actually is.
I don’t care what Mao wrote in the CCP Constitution (constitutions in communist countries aren’t even schelling points), or his Little Red Book, I care about what his government actually did. What he did puts him on the top of the list of the 20th century for many in terms of mass-murder and no lower than number three for any analysis I’ve heard of. His policies were disastrous. The word “harmonious” and the “Cultural Revolution” don’t belong in the same sentence. China may be trying to build a “harmonious society” now, but it is all thanks to Deng and in spite of Mao.
R. J. Rummel on “China’s Bloody Century”
Death Tolls of the Hemoclysm
Jen,
My Chinese wife, Ping, is for some reason always getting mail addressed to P.Gu.
Well “I” find it sidesplittingly funny.
TGGP -
to keep our hands warm?
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Thanks for loving China! As a Chinese, I am proud.
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