I'm a High-Grade White! Hire me!

image by Bianca Bosker: image of imitation Eiffel Tower from Hangzhou


This video  by David Borenstein looks at the practice of renting foreigners to lend prestige to failing housing developments in China. Go through the ad and watch it. It is great.

The basic idea is if you're finding it hard to shift your out of town housing development, you rent a few white people to give it that cosmopolitan feel. It's an extension of the copycat property developments you have had in China over the last 20 years but with the additional delight that you get high-grade, medium-grade and low-grade whites. Oh dear. Which would you be? And what would you hire the low-grade whites for? The mind boggles.

It's like having a guy in a turban standing in from of an Indian restaurant, but with the idea that the white guys are adding a patina of transparency, sex appeal and a virtual doorway out of the country. There might also be something going on under the surface about redressing past humiliations of China at the hands of the West by having a skin colour for hire, but in this video, it's mostly it's about seeing young white men stripped down to their nick-nacks and looking sheepish while Chinese women of wealth and experience cast their lustful eyes over the buff(ish) bodies of Europeans in China. That skin is like a blank slate on which you can project whatever fantasies you like.

If you can't afford a white, blacks are cheaper and still give an international feel. But Indians would have to be specially brought in. There doesn't seem to be a market for them.

The hiring of white people doesn't just come down to their being part of the marketing entertainment for these buildings, or becoming part of a pretence that they're living in these buildings. A lot of people like to pretend white people are their engineers


"The real value of a house or any product doesn't really

matter."


"As long as there is a good image, people will be willing 

to buy."


"For the time being...


the image has become the reality."


But isn't that true of everything.

Watch the whole thing here.

It's China Day at my Daughter's School. Yay!

It's June 4th, 2014 and that can only mean one thing. It's China Day at my daughter's school. Yay! It really is.




It's also the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. This is an event that, according to this Reuters article at least, is fading from the collective Chinese memory, mostly because it's becoming a speech crime to even talk about it.



The novelist Ma Jian wrote about it though in his excellent novel, Beijing Coma. So for today, here is a bit from an old post to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Beijing Coma tells the events leading up to the massacre through the eyes of Dai Wei, a Beijing University student activist. Dai Wei tells of the gathering momentum of a student movement that makes the simple demand of accountability and an end to corruption in the Chinese government. He writes of the splits and factionalism , the bureaucracy, the vanity and power hunger as the protests develop. It's the story of a movement that has energy, dynamism and countless flaws - a human movement in other words.

Spliced into this is his narration of his body's breakdown as he lies in a coma in his mother's flat after getting shot in the head during the June 4th clampdown. As he lies on his mattress, he recounts his physical deterioration, the smells, the sounds, the sores and the faecal, urinary and seminal leakage. The fates of his fellow activists is told through the visits of old friends, girlfriends and family. Some were imprisoned, some exiled and some are now dead.

His mother cares for him and disintegrates as she does so, her whole life a series of "wrong" political choices and associations. Her husband was a rightist, her son a student activist, her life a never-ending litany of criticism and persecution. She seeks solace in meditation and movement, in Falun Gong in other words, and becomes a suspect element in her own right.

For Dai Wei's family, and in China as a whole, there is no room for artistic, political or religious expression. So what is left? Doing business, cutting deals, making money. The aftermath of Tiananmen is a loss of self and a loss of soul, it is modern China in all its facadist money-making glory.

The book builds up to its climax, the shooting of Dai Wei and countless others, but even though we know what will happen, the tension is compelling. Notable is the absence of commentary on the government's reaction to events. Everything is seen from the simulacrumnal (is that a word) perspective of the students. The naivety and idealism shine through, as do the faction fighting and petty politics, a mirror for the CCP and PLA - the invisible hand that guides all things, the unknown entity that is playing out its own power struggle through the student demonstrations.

Ma squeezes everything in, from the venality of the nation's education and medical systems to the corrupt facadism of urban development. And by the end of the book, the question of Dai Wei and his coma is somehow irrelevant. He might come out of it, he might not, but the way things stand, the whole country is in state of suspended animation, a living dead of construction, development and chasing an illusory dragon.

Ma also conveys the sense of inevitability of historical events, and that this inevitability is transferable, that all might seem solid in the Middle Kingdom, but it won't always be that way. That one day the chickens will come home to roost - and that day might be sooner than we all imagine.

Blue Mud Swamp

Filipe Casaca sent me a copy of his latest book,Blue Mud Swamp, a move on in book terms from his previous relationship study, the rather lovely my home is where you are.

Blue Mud Swamp is a colour coded look at the frayed edges of urban China. It's tattered and torn, worn-out with a chemical taint. It's a short term project but it says more to me than the smog-laden cityscapes that have dominated Western landscapes of China over the last 10 years. This is what Casaca told me about his work.

This series developed in Dalian, China. Recently, this city was classified as "one of the best cities to live in China" and an example of the modern patterns of China’s development.

In Dalian, I was attracted to the strong presence of the sea and coastal area – which has some of the few useable beaches in China - where I could find a prominence of youngsters/couples and a variety of leisure infrastructures.Due to its importance and main influence on the city’s characteristics, I decided that the sea would be a guideline in this work.

I observed that existed an excess of entertainment facilities – some in use, while other completely neglected with clear signs of degradation.  Abundance, in a broad sense, is one of the visible faces of Dalian.

The city is filled with multiple stimuli and a big magnet for young couples looking for fun. Nevertheless, their way of being led me to feel that they were “dominated” by a certain absence.

In some leisure facilities such as theme parks, zoo and gardens, I found a recurring presence of animals that have an important symbolism in Chinese culture: the Tiger, symbol progress and protection; Horse, representing movement and power, and Turtle that not only symbolizes wisdom and longevity as the Universe itself in the Far East.

It was difficult for me to recognize "the best city to live in China”, the much-publicized “perfect universe” built by man. Instead, I found worlds artificially created and I came across fantastic scenarios created to sublimate Man, which paradoxically led me to a sensation of emptiness.

Falun Gong

If you were in Bath this summer,  you could have checked out the Falun Gong art show at the Octagon on Milsom St (where the RPS used to be). This was one of the weirdest things I have ever seen; a mix of religious imagery and torture paintings, mostly made using a range of Communist,  Buddhist and Christian iconography  - but entirely believable for all that.

It was interesting to see the number of people dressed like Chinese Jehovah's Witnesses wandering about - they made me wonder who they were. Also interesting were the number of Chinese tourists wandering in and taking a look at something they won't see in their homeland. They seemed to particularly enjoy the picture of a Jiang Zemin lookalike being tortured in the pits of hell.

You can see more of the show work here. Here are a couple of pictures with notes from the website.


Tragedy in China

"A young woman is stricken with grief as her husband lies dead by her side, broken by torture in a brainwashing center. In his hands are documents authorities demanded he sign, disavowing Falun Dafa; they are torn in half. For many, refusal leads to torture and even death. Human rights groups have documented the deaths of over 3,000 Falun Dafa prisoners of conscience in China."



  
Uncompromised Courage

"Bathed in a warm, golden light that represents resilient faith is Chengjun Liu, shortly before his death by torture in a Chinese prison. Ghastly images animate the floor, suggesting the horrors he endured in captivity as a prisoner of conscience. Liu was arrested in March of 2002 for his part in a defiant television broadcast that exposed human rights violations against Falun Dafa and the culpability of government officials."

Cameron in China: What's your poison?

Strange people, strange picture. What's their poison, I wonder, and is it a comment on the quality of Chinese goods, that whatever it was, it was just not good enough.

These four are in China, and they are wearing poppies, ostensibly because of Remembrance Day when we British remember the horrors of war and say Never Again/express our support for the boys in Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran and Yes, Again.

The Chinese associate the poppy with opium, which we forced upon the Chinese in the 19th Century. We were Victorian drug dealers and the Chinese were our junkie scum. That helped us in learning lessons of hypocrisy. It also helped destroy China and led to wars and rebellions that cost tens of millions of lives. And the opium was sold because we had a bad balance of payments.

Chinese officials apparently asked Cameron and co. not to wear the poppy because of this, because the poppy is a vivid symbol of China's humiliation at the hands of the European powers. "We informed them that they mean a great deal to us and we would be wearing them all the same," a British official explained.

Perhaps China's export of  all the plastic crap and tat that floods our shore is their revenge for these past humilitations, a poison of pointless consumption. And just as opium not only destroyed China, but also blighted the heart and soul of this country through the wealth attained by corrupt and criminal businessmen, so China is being poisoned, both literally and metaphorically by toxic wealth, lost fingers and wasted lives.

A Royal Wedding! Very nice, but wouldn't a Political Funeral have been better. Come on China, must do better next time!

More escapism from the cold, depressing reality that is the UK

More escapism from a faraway place of which I know little except that I took some pictures there a long time ago. 

Chengdu 1996

This blog is rambling so it is back to some old pictures of mine, this one from Chengdu in China.

Lijiang 1997

Colin Pantall

Lijiang 1997 -after the earthquake, before the airport.

Chengdu 1996

Another blast from the past. This is a picture I took in Chengdu, China in 1996. The food was fantastic!

The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan

From Okinawa Soba's ( who is responsible for the fabulous T.Enami photostream) comes this picture from a series on Chinese footbinding, which makes for fascinating but horrendous viewing and reading.

Equally horrendous but a whole lot more contemporary  is this series on acid burn victims in Pakistan, pointed out by Stan at Reciprocity Failure. It's not a new photographic subject but it doesn't need to be, why should it be, it still happens, it still continues and it will do for a long time (though the article mentions that Bangladesh has curbed sales of acid which has helped). But then footbinding ended when it was banned by Mao, so there's no reason why this can't end, especially when there are people fighting it on the ground like The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan. From the article

Acid attacks and wife burnings are common in parts of Asia because the victims are the most voiceless in these societies: They are poor and female. The first step is simply for the world to take note, to give voice to these women.” Since 1994, a Pakistani activist who founded the Progressive Women’s Association (www.pwaisbd.org) to help such women “has documented 7,800 cases of women who were deliberately burned, scalded or subjected to acid attacks, just in the Islamabad area. In only 2 percent of those cases was anyone convicted.”

Link to The Progressive Women's Association of Pakistan

.

Chinoiserie

I was going to do a How not to... post on Channelling other photographers (you know the kind of thing - mini Alec Soths: they've got the beard, they've got the camera, all that is missing is the talent). And one of those photographers people channel is Daido Moriyama.

The trouble is when I see work that reminds me of Moriyama, I almost always like it - as in these pictures of China by Wayne Liu. Actually these are very different in many ways to Moriyama, more attached and distant at the same time.


You can see more of Wayne Liu's work here and his fashion here.

It's anniversary time in China right now; the Sichuan earthquake happened just over a year ago. Boris Austin has a slide show of before and after images from the earthquake - it's a little unwieldy at times but there are some great images in there.

Also check out how government corruption is being covered up in the survivor's search for justice in this story - China's quake cover up.

And while we are in China, it's 20 years since the Tiananmen Square events got under way. See images and links to images (as well as references to Ma Jian's fantastic novel on the events, Beijing Coma) in this previous posting here - Tiananmen Square and Ma Jian. It's always good to remind ourselves of certain events, especially when those responsible for them are so keen on forgetting.



pictures: Wayne Liu

Tiananmen Square and Beijing Coma: Photographic influences

Ma Jian's novel, Beijing Coma (his story of the Tiananmen Square Massacre - the 20th anniversary is on June 4th this year) has many photographic influences, including some of the photography of the demonstrations, the hunger strikes and the massacre. The visual representation of Tiananmen tails off towards the end - photographers were beaten, films were confiscated and having a camera was generally considered a bad thing. There are some images on the internet, but not as many as you might expect.

A lot of commentary has been made on how photography should be more subtle and show the build up to events - but with Tiananmen, I think the actual images of what happened, of the shootings, the beatings the crushing under tank tracks carry much more power than anything more tangential, especially because there is relatively little of it.

More images are available here.

Peter Goullart, Joseph Rock and Tribal Wives

The Heading East Blog featured the marvellous photography of Zhuang Xueben.

There is a huge resource of old images of China and Tibet, starting with British Photographers in Central Tibet
(Spencer Chapman is a highlight here).







Tibet has been romanticised at least partly by the absurd myth of Shangri-La (as featured in James Hilton's novel, Lost Horizon), a paradise where nobody ever grows old and wisdom and peace reign supreme.

Hilton's notion of Shangri-La emerged at least partly from the photography and writing of Joseph Rock (whose images you can see here).

Joseph Rock lived near Lijiang in Yunnan, and he recorded the people, flora and fauna of the region for National Geographic.

Hilton borrowed a few of these ideas for Lost Horizon and the result is - Lijiang is the real site for the mythical Shangri La.

Nice line for a travel story and one that the Chinese have lapped up - since the 1996 earthquake in Lijiang, tourist numbers have risen from a few thousand annually to a few million - and Lijiang has been tranformed from a lively and beautiful regional market town for Yunnan minority people to a sanitised showpiece of the Naxi people teeming with Chinese hotels, restaurants and tourists.

Joseph Rock was a marvellous but mad photographer and you can find his images here and in Colour here.

And if you want to find a record of what the places he photographed look like now, go to the In the footsteps of Joseph Rock blog.

Best of all you can read about Joseph Rock and the culture of Yunnan in Peter Goullart's magnificent record of Yunnan market-life Forgotten Kingdom.

Earthquake sympathies

Following on from the Fragments post, the blog joins China in its 3 minute silence for the Sichuan earthquake victims.

China, Tibet and the Innocent Child

In the past, as can be seen from this poster of the minorities of China, there was harmony and unity in the Middle Kingdon.

Then came the violence of the splittist Dalai Clique, spreading disharmony and anguish wherever it reigned, despite double digit increases in Tibetan farmer's income in the previous...

Oh dear, something got into my head there....

Back to reality and China and where do you start really? Tibet, Xinjiang, support for Burma, Sudan, land rights, labour rights (including those directly related to the Olympics), forced labour, China's collecting the cliches of human rights violations (here is the UN declaration of Human Rights - tick off the ones violated in China and then, just for fun, do the same for your country - it always makes for interesting reading).

The interesting thing about the depiction of minorities in Chinese propaganda posters such as the one above was how they were shown as childlike people, playing happily in the fields, tending their surprisingly docile stock, wearing colourful outfits and smiling, smiling, smiling.

This idea of the colourful, innocent native had its roots in Victorian ideas of the Innocent Child. They're innocent, they know nothing, so we have to look after them.

It's a paternalistic idea that is best expressed in the idea that children should be seen and not heard. It's an excuse to ignore, neglect and ultimately abuse. And the children are only seen as benevolent as long as they stay quiet - as long as they remain innocent. Any ability to complain or act independently, and the child is transformed from innocent to evil - it's the virgin/whore syndrome but for kids.

This applies for children. It also applies for peoples and for countries. It's a rationalisation that is at the root of colonialism and occupation of people and land in the name of all kinds of ideologies from capitalist to China's sort-of-communist.

Zhang Huan and the BBC White Season

The BBC starts its peculiar White Season tonight - the basic premise is that the white working class in the UK is becoming invisible. Which it's not.

Marginalised, yes, but invisible, no - and that's the working class in general, not just the white working class.

Interestingly, the BBC has decided to couch the series in racial terms (it includes a documentary on Enoch Powell, whose Rivers of Blood prophecies have proved hopelessly wrong) - though it would be more appropriate to look at the political and economic policies that have resulted in deteriorating education, health and housing for the British working class.

The death of British manufacturing industy and the transformation of the Labour Party from an organisation with ties to unions and labour to something quite different also have something to do with this marginalisation as do numerous other factors - falling numbers of working class students getting entrance to universities, widening wealth and health gaps and - oh, I could just go on and on...

The BBC have decided to advertise their season with this clip here which bears a remarkable resemblance to Zhang Huan's Family Tree pictures. The difference is that in his sophisticated work, Zhang covered his face with calligraphy that related to the complex ties of history, family and society - rather than the BBC man's unconvincing messages of "Britain is changing" and "I love Britain".

Deng and Mao

If you are lucky enough to visit Mao's (pbuh) birthplace in Shaoshan, you will almost certainly visit the Museum of Comrade Mao.

The biggest picture on display when I visited was this one of Mao shaking Deng Xiao Ping's hand - the Great Helmsman and Capitalist Roader weren't exactly mates for life or swimming buddies.

There's a great series of posters featuring scenes from Deng's life over at Stefan Landsberger's site (which also feature the developing city - another great cliche of Chinese art photography).

Chinese Propaganda Posters

Here is an excellent site for Chinese propaganda posters, with posters from Mao's activist Changsha days through to the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and beyond - complete with text giving some historical and political background to the images.

Chairman Mao

The Ultimate Mao avatar.
picture copyright Colin Pantall

Cliches of Chinese Photography

Xiaolu Guo's first chapter of 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth opens with a picture of Mao - one of the great cliches of Chinese photography (and again, there are few pictures that can't be improved by the addition of a Mao somewhere in the frame).

Mao is more than just a cliche though (as Wung Hu explains here) - his cult of personality was such that he is an icon with a multiple personality - with a whole selection of avatars ranging from the young activist/idealist to the soldier, bringer of independence and beyond. None of his avatars are especially true to the real Mao, the unhygienic old lech so entertainly described by his personal doctor in The Private Life of Chairman Mao or the carelessly callous leader that Philip Short writes about in Mao: A Life.

And of course, having a posting on Mao gives me an excuse to run some Mao pictures of my own. And what could be more fun than that.