Persecuting pajama-wearing grandmas in Shanghai made the list (#8), but blacking out phones and internet for six months out west (among other things) did not. Crackdowns are simply a part of life in China, and here you can have the officially sanctioned list from the China Daily and an unofficial response to it from the WSJ:
Central planning and control means, among other things, that China can plan and build entire cities all at once. Unfortunately, sometimes the People don’t cooperate, as you’ll see in this video report on Ordos, an empty city designed for one million inhabitants. Ｉt’s “a ghost town without any ghosts.”
… what would it sound like?
“VerdantMountains Cannot Stop Water Flowing; Eastward the River Keeps on Going”
…the sincerity, confidence, resolve and effective efforts Premier Wen brought to Copenhagen, which fully demonstrated China’s image as a responsible big country dedicated to development and cooperation.
[...]
History will remember the important contribution of the Chinese government to the success of the Copenhagen conference.
Now, imagine that all day, every day, everywhere that anything important is mentioned. And that’s just the intro…
It’s a long, expensive, fruitless road for most American families who try to find their adopted Chinese daughter’s biological parents, but not for all: Adoptive families’ quests to trace Chinese roots often meet dead ends
| Christmas | Cultural perspectives | Photo posts | Places | Running wild in the streets | Silent Night (平安夜) | Tianjin | Midnight on Christmas Eve 2009 in Tianjin, China (they call it “Peaceful Night” 平安夜):
If you put New Year’s, Mardi Gras, Valentine’s Day and the commercial side of Christmas into a blender and then reincarnated the unappetizing mush into an overpopulated midnight carnival, you’d have Christmas Eve in Tianjin. Clowns, stage shows, blowing artificial snow (soap-sud machines), a countdown to midnight (pictured above), and a bunch of foreigners performing Christmas carols (us) were all out two nights ago among the masses and their blinky, battery-powered headgear. In between our two performances on stage there was a choreographed Michael Jackson dance routine by five 5-foot tall pelvis-thrusting minors who looked way too young to be grabbing the front of their pants that way in public (pictured left).
Random strangers occasionally asked to get their picture taken with us, since we’re foreigners. We obliged, of course, and I got my revenge when I saw this line up of 90-pound Santas:
But it was all for a good cause. A local company decided they wanted to get into the real spirit of Christmas by holding a fundraiser for the Special Education Project. 
They aggressively hawked these LED Christmas candle things all day and night to the throngs of people on Tianjin’s two busiest outdoor shopping streets, which is Christmas Eve Central for T. The two girls pictured on the right had me and a friend cornered before we had a chance to tell them we were with the group they were raising money for.
Since we’re associates of the N.G.O. that was receiving the money, the company asked us to put together some songs for before and after the midnight countdown. We had a group of carolers, which included some of our local friends and students, two guitars and a flute. They wanted us to get the crowd into it, and below you can see the line of police in front of the stage holding back all our rabid 粉丝. Ok, maybe they’re not actually our fěnsī, but they were in a good mood and it wasn’t hard to get a response from the crowd; all we had to do was show up. They’re supposed to play part of it on TV today, so I may have finally made it on TV in Tianjin. :) Here’s our the helmeted crowd control:
It didn’t actually feel all that Christmasy, but at least it was something to mark the day. Actually, packing into an apartment with a bunch of friends (Chinese, German, Brazilian, Canadian, American) earlier in the evening to practice the songs over snacks and coffee wasn’t a bad way to spend a Christmas Eve. For two of my students it was the first time they’d done anything to celebrate Christmas, so that was kind of special. A few more photos below (none of these photos are mine; I was too busy playing guitar).
All these blobs are the blowing artificial snow soapsud bubbles (it looked cooler in real life):
These are the LED things they sold for the fundraiser:
If I can find any photos of us on stage, I’ll add them below when I get them.
圣诞快乐！
Friends who also wrote on this surreal experience:
[2010 Jan 08] Here we are in the newspaper:
The caption says:
The other day Tianjin TV’s “Art & Entertainment Food 8 Street” news column at Heping Lu business walking street held a groundbreaking special evening party, not only was there brilliant cultural performances, also can’t count the many different kinds of interactive games spectators were invited to participate in. Additionally, foreign volunteers working in Tianjin from the USA, France, Italy and etc. countries also got on stage and sang impromptu songs for the audience. Newspaper reporter: Cao Tongshe
Of course, we didn’t have anyone from France or Italy, but hey, who’s counting?
[2010 Jan 18] Finally got hold of some shots of us on stage:
Other Christmas and Christmas-in-Tianjin posts:
Image (c) 2009 AFP
For some of the millions of Mainlanders who find meanings in Christmas that are deeper than shopping and dating, it is not a very merry Christmas. Click the photo to read more.
It’s time for the annual Christmas posts, but we’re a little handicapped this year without youtube, plus I don’t want to repeat, so no poems, cute TCKs, crucified Mickeymouses, or churches with Santa painted on them all year long.
Instead you get to hear some Christmas songs for grown-ups. It’s not the ultimate Christmas song selection (for that I’d need the Trans-Siberian Orchestra stuff we accidentally left in Canada), but we like it. All the songs are from Over The Rhine‘s 2007 Snow Angels album. OTR gets points from us for mixing real Christmas (i.e. love, forgiveness, hope, Jesus, etc.) with married-people’s business. I’ll let you figure out for yourself which songs are about which, or both. You can buy these and other OTR music here.
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More Christmas posts on the way; we have a little Tianjin Christmas adventure planned for Christmas Eve.
Other Christmas and Christmas-in-China posts:
09-12-18, 7am — Hypothesis confirmed: a direct correlation exists between the amount of coffee in my system and the amount of Chinese I’m able to speak before 9am.
That’s TCM as in Traditional Chinese Medicine, not transcendental meditation (TM), though they do that, too, here. I’ve been told that many Chinese people assume that Western medicine is better for things like surgery and that Chinese medicine is better for colds and flu and diarrhea. It’s flu season the last couple weeks, lots of people have been sick, and they were passing around the most common and famous packaged Chinese flu medicines in the office. They didn’t taste bad, but do they do anything? I was surprised how clearly they were able to explain things in this little Q&A: Chinese Medicine & Flu: A Q&A With TCM Doctor
TCM-related posts:
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guó bǎo
Literally: National Security/National Treasure
Means: The two terms are homophones, and "national treasure" often means "panda". A writer at Seeing Red in China explains the rest: "how panda becomes the symbol for Chinese security thugs: Chinese national security (more like secret police) is called 国保 (guó bǎo) for short, and it’s pronounced exactly the same as 国宝, national treasure. Netizens sometimes refer 国保 as 国宝, jokingly, hence Panda, China’s national treasure. Kungfu Panda movies provided the basis for Panda to be a martial character."
With the recent confrontation between Batman actor Christian Bale and some infamous Chinese security thugs, online Chinese are been passing around "Pandaman vs. Batman" jokes, and photoshopping "Pandaman" into all kinds of scenarios, including movie posters and images from other security embarrassments and scandals. See here, here and here for more.
- 2011/12/19
Those aren't Chinese New Year's fireworks; they're "recreational munitions"
From Nankai Rob's Chinese New Year 2012 post "Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load":
"...parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions."
For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:
Happy Chinese New Year!
- 2012/01/22
Tension rising with Mainland students in American universities
Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA -- in contrast to Chinese from other countries -- are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It's Bad Out There.
It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don't play well among their American classmates. For example:
"They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate."
"One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again."
- 2012/01/11
A brief introduction to Watchman Nee & the Little Flock Movement
You've maybe heard the name "Watchman Nee" before. That's because he founded one of the largest Christian groups in Chinese history before dying in a Chinese labour camp. Here's a summary of a longer article on him and his work, with a link to the PDF of the original article: Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Maoist China
A basic understanding of the place of Watchman Nee and the Little Flock Movement in Chinese history adds some helpful nuance to understanding the relationships between the Party, Chinese Christianity, the TSPM, and Chinese patriotism and anti-foreignism.
- 2011/12/29
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