#104 Sketches From The Silly Season

August 31, 2016

By now his foot is in the rescue boat; his Europe starts here. Part-lifted, part-pulling himself out of the overcrowded inflatable. Fine features, full lips, corkscrew hair. Eyes closed perhaps out of modesty – no self-respecting young man should be seen succumbing to the embrace of the broad-shouldered Spanish coastguard. No worries, though. Only the same as hand-on-head whenever a perp gets into a police car.

Still sitting in the dinghy that’s just far enough off the Libyan coast for a credible distress call, among the many, far too many tightly packed in, two men next to each other, one grinning, the other grimacing as they watch the younger man going aboard the Spanish vessel. There are hundreds more migrants to be carried over before their turn comes.

Sitting, squatting, hardly anything to eat, doing nothing except trying not to get sick. For the ones that didn’t get away, every wasted day in Libya’s internment camps, surely seems interminable.

Would-be escapees hidden in warehouses and farm buildings. Valuable human cargo, although from the smugglers’ handling, you wouldn’t think they’re worth more than 10 cents.

Perhaps a quarter of a million trying to get in; or maybe as many as 800,000 (least conservative estimates from the most conservative sources). Either a Carthaginian army set to invade Rome; or the population of a small city, lying listless in the sun like elephants with their tusks removed.

Blocks of seats in the civic sports centre painted in different shades, giving the fleeting impression of a stadium filled with spectators sporting opposing team colours. But this is China’s New Ordos, rich in resources including rare earth metals, the ‘ghost city’ built for a million Mongols to live in but only a hundred thousand turned up. read more

#17 ‘Human Instinct To Do So’

May 26, 2014

A street vendor, in Western news reports named only as Mr Li, caught and saved a one-year-old baby who rolled off the ledge of a second storey window in Xiaolan town, Zhongshan city, Guangdong province, Southern China.

Mr Li’s hands outstretched:

Because the prospect of a baby’s head split open and raspberry coulis coming out ontothe pavement, piddling away in the warm rain, is unthinkable.

Because the promise every infant makes to each one of us, is too big to be allowed to fail.

So:

Man Alive, Alive O! Wholly given over to the baby about to fall, he is the goalkeeper moving to meet the (otherwise) through ball; he is the wise old men in adoration of the Christ child (the last time any of them could have stretched themselves this far); he is young Romeo reaching for Juliet from below her balcony. He is all of these things.

Chicken wings for limbs, angel’s head and a bare bottom – down comes Baby. Mr Li moves into the flight path……

Falling, falling, fallen as he foresaw. But the sudden weight takes him by surprise; struggling not to let go he must swing lo and then arc the baby upwards to a level ofsafety.

He and the infant capsule are only coming to rest when the mother arrives plucking and clutching, cluck-clucking away with the future of the world in her arms.

Describing his actions afterwards, Mr Li said: ‘It was nothing but human instinct to do so.’

Better Things To Do

December 15, 2013

What’s this? Not only have the Chinese arrived on the moon, when it comes to cultural references their recent space mission has also landed a few doubles.

Inside China’s lunar lander there was a lunar rover named ‘Yutu’ (as in ‘U2’ but with cute spelling), which is now frolicking across the surface of the moon using ground penetrating radar to look for minerals. The dear little creature looks like Wall-E, but even Pixar would have to admit that ‘Yutu’ comes more trippingly off the tongue; especially when you discover that in English it means ‘Jade Rabbit’.
In Chinese mythology the mother of the Jade Rabbit is the moon goddess Chang’e; hence the name of Yutu’s mothership. That is, lunar rover = Jade Rabbit/Yutu; lunar lander = Moon Goddess/Chang’e. Bob Dylan couldn’t have said it any better: with China’s arrival on the moon, the times they are a-Chang’eing.

Although the Chinese have arrived on the moon in some style, in cultural terms there is still a way to go. Their mission control room seems to have been lacquered into shape – too much dark wood evoking Imperial tradition or perhaps Art Deco; either way, according to the global etiquette of mega-event branding, it doesn’t translate into 21^st Century Technology: The Image.

Likewise, the rocket which brought the Chinese payload to the moon really is called a ‘Long March’ – here’s hoping the pun is intentional, but even then it’s as quaint as a Jimmy Stewart movie. Under this name, China’s rocket cannot be propelled into global consciousness as a cutting edge icon.
Furthermore, it was as if China’s mission controllers haven’t yet understood the significance of the bon mot. This can hardly be the case – not after all those centuries of Confucianism. So why no ‘one step….’ to mark the occasion? Only a CCTV (state television) broadcast which made the lunar craft descending look like soap on a rope, followed by a few techie types being seen to shake hands with each other. Because of lack of attention to the mise en scene, the event came close to becoming a non-event. To some Western eyes it will have come across as a low-budget re-make of Capricorn One (N.B. Hollywood film suggesting Apollo landing was really a studio set-up).

On the other hand, if their considerable technological achievement wasn’t fully presented as a descent to make the spirits rise, perhaps that’s because, unlike the West (in the week when Obama and Cameron went to Mandela’s memorial to make themselves into a better selfie), China is not yet fully occupied with self-presentation. read more

The fight for press freedom, Guangzhou-style

January 7, 2013

They all look cool enough for the Hollywood remake of Big Bang Theory; but this is clearly not a comedy. Whereas Western protesters usually kid around for the camera, keen to be seen as not too serious, not wanting to be thought of as boring old adults, these supporters of censored Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly, gathering on the streets of Guangzhou in the interests of press freedom, are strait-laced and po-faced. Not that they’re ignorant of the repetitive double-take which is the essential credential in today’s Western culture. With retro-hair and glasses (big, black, square), they’re already doing that knowing impression of the Asiatic Geek who isn’t really so Geeky (prototype: YouTube’s Steve Chen). But just being there, standing holding a chrysanthemum and an A4 sheet of neat, orderly characters (‘End press censorship, the Chinese people want freedom’), these young people are putting their careers on the line. School days drenched in exams, the fierce competition to get in to a top university, the pressure to get a good degree – all that exertion could be wasted away with a few deft strokes of a bureaucrat’s pen. Fear of committing career suicide – it’s enough to straighten out even the most twisted ironist. In open letters to Communist Party officials penned by well-respected lawyers and academics, there is a different kind of rhetoric. Of censorious Tuo Zhen (the regional propaganda chief who replaced Southern Weekly’s New Year message and lied about what happened), it is said that: ‘wherever he goes ten thousand horses stand mute’, i.e. they are silenced by his decrees. But this is the language of an older generation, which grew up alongside the incoming cohort of top-ranking ministers. The new vernacular, personified in young protesters picking up the chrysanthemum petals which dropped onto the pavement during their demonstration, combines outward signs of Western kidulthood with seriousness of purpose. They manage to be mature and tender at the same time. read more

Beijing’s Reservoir Dogs

November 17, 2012

Acres of red carpet, a plantation of decorative greenery, enough gold leaf to turn the ceiling’s vast expanse into a midsummer night’s dream forest. Xi Jinping’s Big Hair: blue-black and quiffed back as high as Elvis’. Further down the production line of suits, ties and the heads and shoulders inhabiting them, a preference for see-through plastic spectacle frames as worn 30 years ago by Andy Warhol. The staging is as camp as Rylan going Gangnam Style on X-Factor. But this is Reality TV: real-time footage of the first public appearance of the newly appointed Politburo, highest ranking body of the Chinese Communist Party, possibly the six most powerful men in the world after Barack Obama. In the West, not famous even ‘for 15 minutes’ (Warhol); but these men in suits will be holding the reins of power for years to come. Like their stylistic counterparts in Reservoir Dogs, they don’t do double entendre. Whereas in the West we have an endless supply – a double take for everything they say; a re-make of everything they are. Accordingly: Xi says a few words – raising the level of productive forces, against corruption and ‘bureaucratism’ – before waving and walking off stage; unlike Rylan, he is never going to need your vote.

Existential crisis, Chinese-style

September 26, 2012

Striding across the stage, the men who aren’t there. ‘Faceless bureaucrats’, Westerners are wont to say, but these ‘suits’ are minus even more. China’s new Poliburo has no existence yet – no face, no body, neither legs nor feet, because, though overdue, the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hasn’t been convened; not while the stink of scandal lingers over Beijing like a London smog. Malodorous developments include: suspended death sentence meted out to murderous wife (Gu Kailai) of former Politburo-crat Bo Xilai (sentence commuted to life imprisonment for killing British business associate, Neil Heywood). Playboy son (Ling Gu) of close presidential adviser (Ling Jihua), presumed dead at the wheel; naked girls trapped and paralysed in the wreckage of his £250k Ferrari Spider. For Ling Jnr, a shadowy existence suspended between life and death: his death still not officially acknowledged, though he’s not been seen alive since the day of car crash, back in March; and his father has already been edged out of his top job. Not even the patronage of retiring president Hu Jintao could stop Ling Snr becoming a non-person. Hu’s likely successor, current vice-president Xi Jinping, recently affirmed his bodily existence by appearing at Beijing’s Agricultural University after two weeks hidden from public view, possibly as a result of a back injury. Xi boasts big hair. Like Elvis, he thinks, though with his small features the effect is more like Roy Orbison, laureate of the lonely. After a spate of suicides at Foxconn telecoms parts plants across China, earlier this year the Taiwanese corporation appointed counsellors to deal with acute loneliness among young migrant workers living in company owned, factory-dormitory towns – cockroach-infested dormitories, factories forensically clean as an autopsy table, or a Beijing courtroom. On Monday night (25/9/12), two thousand workers swapped their habitual loneliness for a collective, teenage rampage through Foxconn’s Taiyuan assembly plant, situated in China’s northern coalfields. Ten hours of life-affirming riot, eventually quelled by militarised police: the CCP’s Terrorcotta Army. Fleeing the police assault, Taiyuan’s rioters may even have found themselves – and each other. It’s the Politburo which is feeling lonely and insecure; right now, it still doesn’t exist. read more

Boys and Girls

September 18, 2012

Flipped like a toy and over it goes. Car up-ended by a bunch of Chinese boys – no longer mere ‘boy’, are they, guys? – scouting Beijing for Japanese products they can vandalise. Gleefully, thoughtlessly smashing windows. Not stopping to cross-reference: ‘I love the sound of breaking glass’; just lovin’ it. In another part of the city, thousands of girls are coming out to Cos-Play: it’s an international convention of youngsters (mainly young women) dressed up in costume and play-acting parts from animeand manga, taking place in Beijing this year. The girls slide into a pose. Hold it; then strike another. Holding still is what they came for. Having to move between freeze frames is their dead time, like silence on the radio. Inspired by Japanese comic books and films, posing and vogueing like New York’s finest trannie, Cos-Playing China Girl is as self-conscious as any female impersonator. Meanwhile, Beijing’s boys are firing their ire on a Canon photo shop.

The Colour of Desperation is Orange

September 6, 2012

Bright as a fire marshal’s vest, corn cobs piled high in front of the villagers’ houses. Is that what you would have lived on, Qu Huaqiang, if you hadn’t entered a government office in China’s Shandong province, and blown yourself up with home-made explosives? Twenty years after the big city accident which exiled you to your home village, perhaps you couldn’t stand the corn getting stuck between your teeth yet again. Almost 20 years ago, same vintage as the construction job that crippled you, London’s ‘postmodern’ building boom produced No 1 Poultry, EC2. As featured in H.M. the Queen’s camp Olympics cameo with James Bond; clad in that garish, marbled limestone which has been ageing orange ever since. Were you sad to see it hadn’t remained salmon pink, Madame X (unnamed 30-something Asian female in business attire)? Is that what tipped you over the edge of the restaurant roof garden? Leaving behind a floral print bag and a glass of wine (one sip taken). Plummeting past eight floors of Aviva offices – viva meaning lively, full of life. Falling to the ground face down – hummph, in another desperate death.

Pace of Change

September 1, 2012

Debris shoots out horizontally. Arterial spray. Twin towers lean towards each other. About to embrace? They never get the chance. The crowd ‘ooohhs’ and ‘aaahhs’ – approving noises with only a hint of surprise – as two skyscrapers crash to the ground and rise again solemnly in slow moving circles of dust and rubble. This is the southern Chinese city of Chongqing, where the cycle of construction and reconstruction is anything but slow. Demolished to make room for something bigger and better, these old buildings lasted less than a decade.

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