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 Rabbits! Chinese New Year 2011 fireworks from Tianjin, China!
• Photo Gallery: Tianjin 2009-2010 Fall & Winter
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!

Click any of the photos below to see the best of our 2011 China photos. Most were taken in Tianjin, but a few are from Qingdao/Huangdao and Guangzhou.

People, places, food, “food”, Chinglish, traditions, festivals, social issues… basically we took photos of anything we thought looked or represented something interesting.

Captions in the photo gallery provide info and links.

You can browse a list of all our photo galleries in the sidebar of any photo gallery page.

And here’s some beer-in-a-bag… Merry Christmas!

Every year Beijing’s brutal air quality (and even brutal-er public reporting on it) makes international news. But this year Beijing finds itself with a domestic P.R. problem in which its own citizens are no longer willing to accept the gov’s Orwellian “blue sky days”, “fog” and “light” pollution levels. And a large amount of the credit goes to… the U.S. embassy in Beijing.

From Beijing Air Pollution Brouhaha:
“Since flights at Beijing’s airport have been canceled on any number of occasions over the past two decades because of pollution, why all the attention now?

“Several reasons… But the real catalyst for the current contretemps is the U.S. Embassy. If Beijing citizens were once resigned to living in this alternative state of reality, then that’s no longer the case. The U.S. Embassy has changed the way the game is played. On a daily basis, the embassy tweets data reflecting the real air quality for the area in which the embassy resides. Last Sunday, for example, as NPR reported, the pollution recorded by the embassy hit a level described as “beyond index.” The Beijing Municipal Bureau of Environmental Protection, in contrast, reported the air pollution as “light.””

We’ve got lots of our own stuff on pollution in the Beijing area, including comparison photos. See our Pollution category for everything.

Beijing’s air quality is making news rounds again, partly because some Chinese bloggers discovered a company that claims to provide air purification equipment for the homes and offices of government officials, adding clean air to a long list of resented privileges. It’s long been known that Beijing and other local governments drastically downplay the pollution levels to their own populations (see our own comparisons here and here). If you aren’t familiar with the remarkable air pollution situation in Beijing, Tianjin and much of the rest of China, here are three recent articles to catch you up:

• U.S. Embassy air quality data undercut China’s own assessments
  “Perched atop the U.S. Embassy in Beijing is a device about the size of a microwave oven that spits out hourly rebukes to the Chinese government. One day this month, the reading was so high compared with U.S. standards it was listed as ‘beyond index.’ But China’s own assessment that day was that Beijing’s air was merely ‘slightly polluted.’”
• The Privileges of China’s Elite Include Purified Air
  “But even in their most addled moments of envy, ordinary Beijingers could take some comfort in the knowledge that the soupy air they breathe on especially polluted days also finds its way into the lungs of the privileged and pampered. Such assumptions, it seems, are not entirely accurate.”
• ‘Time Is Not Ripe’ for Honest Air Pollution Readings
  “state-run media did little to suggest Beijing was prepared to tackle its air pollution levels, among the worst of the world’s major cities. The state-run Global Times newspaper early this week reported a dense “fog” had descended over the capital. The local government was reporting “slight” pollution levels even as readings by the U.S. Embassy described pollution as “hazardous.””

For more of our crying about how unbelievably brutal the air quality is, with pictures to help you believe (that’s right: we can photograph the air), see our Pollution category, or check out these selected bits:

• Beijing/Tianjin air polluton advisory warnings: Chinese vs. American
• Tianjin: Where Jogging is Bad For Your Health
• Behold the power of China’s weather gods!
• Chewing Tianjin’s Air
• Putting the OMG! in Smog

Even an untrained, inattentive eye will notice evidence of the pervasive prostitution industry in Tianjin. If you’re clued in to the typical indicators, you’ll see that it’s a flourishing open secret, hiding in plain sight. Study some Chinese and read up on Chinese society, and it will ooze all the more out of your increasingly legible and intelligible surroundings. In the especially attuned gaze of a group of local women who are actively reaching out to the girls and trying to provide them with alternatives, prostitution in Tianjin is like an advanced form of malignant cancer, metastasized deep into the cultural and economic fabric of the city. And Tianjin is certainly not special in this regard.

Prostitution is so ubiquitous that the clueless can accidentally find themselves in very, shall we say, unintended circumstances. It needs no red light district. Walking along the nicely treed side street to our former apartment complex, with the WèiJīn canal (卫津河) and ZǐJīnShān Rd. (紫金山路) on your right and buildings on your left, you’ll find, in order: a first-floor window converted into a sex toy shop, a bar with prostitutes, a restaurant, a bath house with prostitutes, a karaoke club with prostitutes, a preschool, our apartment buildings, and a foot-massage parlour with prostitutes.

I’m reminded of all this because I’m reading Factory Girls and came across this bit describing the garbage-strewn side streets of a factory city in the south [p.111]:

the walls of the buildings were plastered with ads for gonorrhea and syphilis clinics; in China these flyers broke out like rashes wherever prostitution thrived.

But this actually describes our second Tianjin apartment complex, which is full of retired university professors and their families, with an elementary school across the street, and is, I want to emphasize, a normal Tianjin neighbourhood; we weren’t living in a migrant worker ghetto. And it’s saturated with these kinds of ads. There are six of them just on one side of the main gate, and we accidentally ended up broadcasting three more all over North America when we announced our second pregnancy via a photo taken outside the entrance to our stairwell, which was also plastered with them. Basically no matter where you look in our neighbourhood, if you can read Chinese you see “VENEREAL DISEASE, GONORRHEA, SYPHILIS” in big bold black font. Here’s a closer look at one ad, with a partial translation (mouseover the Chinese for pronunciation):

Venereal Disease One-shot Effectiveness
性病一针灵
Imported Western medicine, one shot gives the desired effect, will never recur
进口西药 一针见效 永不复发
Gonorrhea (specialized outpatient service) syphilis
淋病[专科门诊]梅毒
Inflamed glans, prostatitis, spermiduct pus, painful and difficult urination,
龟头红肿、前列腺炎、精管流脓、尿痛尿难、
syphilis buds, pubic lice and itching, acute viral genital warts, vaginal odor
梅毒花蕾、阴虱阴痒、尖锐湿疣、白带恶臭
Acute viral genital warts (cauliflower-shaped granulation/anal warts) removed then
尖锐湿疣[菜花状肉芽/肛门湿疣]当时脱落
Chlamydia, mycoplasma, non-gonococcal urethritis
衣原体 支原体 非淋菌性尿道炎

So you can imagine how becoming partially literate in Chinese can change the feel of a place.

In the months before we temporarily left Tianjin for the second time, Jessica was volunteering with a group of women who reach out to local women in prostitution. Originally, part of the idea was to help these girls find other jobs, but it was difficult finding people willing to hire them. So the group created jobs by starting a jewelry workshop as a viable first big step out of prostitution.

Related stuff on sex and Chinese society:

• Dark side of a Tianjin bathhouse
• Teaching school girls how not to become mistresses
• Sex, drugs, and Tianjin University students
• On Love and being ‘smart enough’ (by Jessica!)
• Moonlighting as Sexperts
• Sex and Politics
• Bright Future
• ‘True Love Waits’… with Chinese characteristics
• Interview with Chinese exile, women’s rights campaigner and founder of All Girls Allowed
• “Painless”, “cozy”, “cheerful”, “3-minute”, “sweet dream” abortions in Tianjin, China
• 色
• Sex and Politics
• Expatitis: Are You Infected? (from My Health Beijing)

July 1st is CanadaChinese Communist Party Day! And what could be more appropriate than a little translated propaganda? It just so happens that the most galling bit of propaganda I’ve ever seen in our few years in China coincides with the CCP’s 90th birthday. After reading it, you’ll lose control of your adjectives, too.

Below is my abridged version of this English translation of this Chinese article from the official CCC/TSPM website.

I so wish I was making this up. As if helping the police bully detained worshipers wasn’t enough…

—————————————————–

Beijing Municipal Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee and China Christian Council Hold a Praise Concert to Celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the Chinese Communist Party
北京市基督教两会举办庆祝建党90周年音乐赞美会

On June 11, the Beijing Municipal Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee and the China Christian Council held a praise concert at the Century Theatre called “One Heart, One Direction” in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the [Chinese Communist] Party.
[...]
Before the performance started, Cai Kui, chairman of the Beijing Municipal Christian Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee, made these remarks on behalf of the many pastors and lay leaders in the capital. He said: “In the past 90 years, the Chinese Communist Party, while closely uniting people of various nationalities and various walks of life in China, has never stopped caring about and helping Chinese Christianity. Especially since the beginning of the new period [i.e. period of Communist Party rule], with the generous help of the Party and the government, churches have been built everywhere across China and great efforts have been made in training clergymen who actively engage in social work and walk a path compatible with socialism. At the same time that the living and working conditions of the vast number of clergymen have greatly improved, their social status and political treatment have also risen without interruption. Facts have proven that the Chinese Communist Party is sincere in its treatment of and support for the development of Chinese Christianity. And Chinese Christianity has already formed a constant and changeless relationship of co-dependency and mutual aid with the Chinese Communist Party and the Central People’s Government and will always be of one heart and on the same path with the Party and the government. As long as we adhere to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party as we always have, adhere to serving the overall interests of the Party and the government, adhere to the policy of independence and autonomy in religion, adhere to being of one heart with and on the same path as the Party and the government and firmly abide by the Three-Self policy in the road ahead, then we will certainly create a more brilliant tomorrow for China.”
[...]
“Picking a Camellia Flower to Give to the Party” movingly expressed the gratitude of Christians toward the Party and the government for the many years of care and help they have given to Christianity…

The entire performance included both Christian hymns and revolutionary songs praising the Party … all the believers responded with round after round of enthusiastic applause. When the famous singer Liu Bingyi sang, “I Produce Petroleum for the Motherland,” his passionate song not only brought the whole concert to its climax, it also greatly inspired the audience’s love for the Party and the country.
[...]
The theme that was unfurled in this praise concert was that when everything is well with the Communist Party and the state, then everything will be well with the church. [The concert] once again demonstrated the Christians’ true feelings of support for the Party, love for the country and love of their religion, and expressed the eternal theme that Chinese Christianity has always been of one heart with and on the same path as the Chinese Communist Party and the Central People’s Government. In particular, the inscription by Pastor Yu Xinli on the title page of the program all the more expressed the deep gratitude of the many Christians on this 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party: “The Chinese Communist Party and the people of China have been of one heart and on the same path for 90 years, and the Party has led us from victory to victory, has brought about the revival of the Chinese nation and our lives are becoming better and better. May God bless our motherland and its people!”
[...]
[The concert] is a profound embodiment of the support of Beijing Christians for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and their firm adherence to the path of loving their country and loving their religion. It is also a vivid portrayal of the support for and allegiance to the Party and the government on the part of the many Beijing Christians. … This will surely inspire all the Christian clergy of Beijing in their enthusiastic and indefatigable efforts in the construction of a “harmonious society!”

—————————————————–

I’m not the kind of person who takes a hardline black-and-white stance regarding Three-Self churches. And it’s possible this whole event isn’t meant to be taken literally; it could just be a big kowtow, a scripted sop that church leaders put up to please and appease their overlords, a big exercise in obligatory face-giving hierarchy-affirmation, similar to the relationship between illegal migrant street vendors and chéngguǎn (城管), that they are especially obligated to perform right now given the on-going weekly public standoff in Beijing between the authorities and a big TSPM-rejecting church. But with the prime criticism of China’s Three Self churches being that they are politically compromised tools of the explicitly and aggressively atheistic government, this kind of stuff isn’t helping.

Of course, we need to understand this outpouring of religious allegiance to the CCP in the context of what else happening in Beijing right now, i.e. the aforementioned unprecedented weekly showdown between the authorities and a large unregistered church that refuses to join the Three Self and refuses to stop meeting in public. You can catch up on that on-going story here:

• Happy Easter, China [Update #4] — Treatment of detainees deteriorates, shift in interrogation tactics
• Happy Easter, China [Update #3] — Formal petition calls Beijing out
• Happy Easter, China [Update #2]
• Happy Easter, China

You can see all our propaganda-themed stuff here. (Note: the word “propaganda” does not carry negative overtones in Chinese.) And if the original article link breaks, you can download the text and photos here: Chinese Communist Party Worship Service.doc.

The carapace is tough but flexible. Biting down causes hot mush to burst out into your mouth. Two more chews and two squirts later it’s finally empty. You manage to down the bug guts in two or three swallows, but the outer shell is the challenging part. It takes a lot of chewing, and the thought of sliding it to the back of your mouth in order to swallow makes you wonder if you’ll gag. Your choice: try to swallow all of it quickly in one go and risk gagging, or chew and chew and chew, swallowing little shredded pieces of it at a time, prolonging the experience. You take the second option, feeling each piece of the exoskeleton slime across the back of your tongue and down your throat. Thankfully it doesn’t have much taste. And without legs and wings, it’s easier to eat than that giant cockroach in Thailand.

You can see more info and pictures of silk worm chrysalis (蚕蛹) here. I heard separately from friends and students that one of these things has the equivalent protein of three eggs.

We love this sidewalk BBQ place because of the 热闹 atmosphere. The wide sidewalks are usually filled with folding tables and stools and diners. This night we had to walk through the kitchen and eat in the back alley because three chéngguǎn were charged with doing nothing but standing on the opposite sidewalk from the afternoon until 12:30am to make sure none of these restaurants put out their tables! I went and complained to them. They were friendly, and said they had to manage that particular road (the restaurant is on the corner of a T-intersection). The other road, literally around the corner in plain view, had tables and stools and the usual illegal street vendors, but these three guys were only watching these particular restaurants on this particular road. All they did was stand there, for hours, looking at the opposite sidewalk. That’s how things work here. They’re the ones that said, Don’t worry, you can eat outside in the back alley.

The blurry, non-flash-or-tripod photo above on the right shows the true colours and lighting and warmth.

To put things in perspective, this place also offers giant (giant!) white snails, bullfrogs, the usual assorted animal organs, and… wait for it… sheep penis on a stick. So all things considered, silk worm larvae are not so far out of one’s comfort zone.

Related stuff:

• The Tianjin Chengguan Street Market Game
• Curiosity + China = way more than I bargained for
• Know your edible northern Chinese insects
• Dead puppies (don’t look, Grandma!) – menu included
• Snake soup
• Sheep brains (photo)
• An Irresistible Opportunity

爆炸

Pronounced: bàozhà
Means:
1. explosion; to explode.
2. What happened at a government building in Tianjin this week by a guy who wanted revenge on “society” (according to China’s state media). Example:
“An explosion happened at the front door of the Tianjin government.”
天津政府门前发生了爆炸。

报复社会

Pronounced: bàofù shèhuì
Means:
1. Get revenge on society.
2. The alleged motivation of the guy who set off a bomb at a government building in Tianjin this week.

This one’s for all the budding entomologists and/or homeschoolers out there.

If you’re the kind of person who stops to smell the flowers in Tianjin (yes, there are flowers, sure, sometimes they’re plastic, but let’s not be picky), then chances are good you’ve seen some of these lately:

Our two-year-old daughter loves to dig in the dirt and play with bugs. Recently (second half of May) the trees and bushes all over our district have been infested with these things, but I don’t know what they are or if they bite. They can jump and fly short distances, and they start to move away when they sense the camera but they’re not so fast that my daughter can’t accidentally squish them when she tries to “touch” them. Our neighbourhood grandpas told me a word that translates as “ladybug” (花大姐), but Google image search didn’t turn up anything resembling these. I’m not the first lǎowài to wonder what they are.

So I asked BugGuide.net, WhatsThatBug.com and the Natural History Museum. Some of these folks are quite the bug sleuths. It looks like these things are some kind of immature (nymph) form of one of the following, which I image searched in Google and Baidu and which may or may not all be the same thing — I wouldn’t know. Mouseover the Chinese for pronunciation and definition:

• 青黑白蜡蝉 (google – yes; baidu – yes)
• 蓝翅蜡蝉 (google – yes; baidu – yes)
• Lycorma (Google – yes; Baidu – yes)
• Lycorma meliae(Google – yes; Baidu – yes)
• Lycorma olivacea (google – yes; baidu – no)
• Lycorma delictula (google – yes; baidu – yes)
• Wax Cicada (google – yes; baidu - no)
• Fulgorid Leafhopper (google – yes; baidu – no)

It would make sense if these will one day grow up to be cicadas, because cicadas infest Tianjin in the summer so loudly that you have to yell when you’re reading Harry Potter out loud to your wife under a tree.

If anyone wants to provide a definitive answer, be my guest!

But the bug experts didn’t answer the most important question: do they bite? So I took matters into my own hands. The next time we were out I grabbed one and shook it around to see if it would bite me, and OOOWWW! HOLY COW! … just kidding. Nothing happened, so now I let our daughter play with them. :)

Of course, this is not our first notable photogenic insect encounter in China:

• Know your edible northern Chinese insects
• Nine Dragon Mountain weekend getaway
• Flower-Bird-Fish-Bug Market
• Creepy, eh? (Taiwan)
• Elephant Mountain hike (Taiwan)
• An Irresistible Opportunity (Thailand)

P.S. – Curse you to the Nth generation, Great FireWall of China! Trying to do Google image searches when your proxy has been torpedoed (temporarily, I hope!) is as frustrating as it’s intended to be.

According to one of the greeter/usher/crowd-control guys (who just became my best friend for finding me a place — out of range of all the ā​yís and their unsolicited advice — where I could change a mid-Sunday school poopie diaper), the Shanxi Lu Three-Self church can hold almost 1600 in the pews. These pictures are from this morning, half-way through the early (8:30) service, outside the overflow room where people who couldn’t get seats inside the main split-level auditorium or who can’t climb stairs watch the proceedings on a video screen.

Looks like they ran out of stools.

People were even camped out around the corner listening through the side doors and windows of the overflow room:

I would have had better pictures, but these were all I was able to squeeze out of my dead camera batteries if I let them rest in between shots.

Shanxi Lu is the biggest of the four Three-Self churches in Tianjin. “Three-Self church” means a legal, registered Chinese church that is officially under the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement”, which is one of two Party organizations controlling all legal Protestant church activity in China (there are other organizations that control the Catholics). The term “three-self” is a missiological term from the 19th century referring to missionaries’ desires to have local churches be “self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating.”

ABC News’ “True Believers” feature has recent reportage on the legal, illegal-but-tolerated, and illegal-and-not-tolerated churches in China.