Blogspot has remained blocked in China nearly continuously for over a year now, so I've put my posting on hold. However, I'm putting together a new (hopefully unblocked) site with the help of some friends. If all goes well it will be up before the end of March.
Tea Leaves to Coffee Grinds: History, Culture & Politics from China and the United States
從茶葉到咖啡渣: 历史、文化、跟政治在中国和美国
Stay tuned...
Taking some time off from the blog. Here's my schedule for the next month or so until I'm back in Kunming:
This post is going to be a short one because as of Monday night the following keys on my laptop are no longer in functioning condition: space bar, backspace, all four arrow keys, and several others found on the rightmost edges of my keyboard. The circumstances behind this tragedy are far too idiotic to comment upon further, except for... Public service announcement: do not reach across your computer if there is a full beverage in front of you.
1. Pictures from my weekend in Dali are up on facebook. I will create a Picasa album soon. Below: Steph and Rachelle in front of one of the city gates.
2. My mother and Charlie (my stepfather) will be landing in Kunming tomorrow evening at 7:30pm. It should be a busy week of sight-seeing and Peking Duck consumption.
3. Brief, but interesting, review in today’s New York Times. The book is Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China by Kang Zhengguo. After I get through Nixon and Mao along with the four books mom is bringing from home, I want to check it out. Having time to read is one of the few luxuries that come along with teaching in China (75¢ DVDs is another one).
4. Finally, Bloomberg announced he’s trading his -R for an -I. He never quite fit the role of conservative ideologue. As Politico points out,
His first major act as mayor was a large property tax increase, his most controversial was a citywide ban on smoking, and the signature accomplishment of his first term was an education reform that mixed centralized control with increased spending.Needless to say the move has already created a flurry of coverage on his potential 2008 ambitions.
Vocally opposed to remarriage for himself, he favors the right to same-sex marriage and has confessed not only to smoking marijuana but to enjoying it.
8 in fact. There's been some good stuff brewing on and off-line, but I guess nothing I felt all that moved to reflect on. I'll be taking my first trip to Dali this weekend, so with any luck I'll have some stories & photos to share. And, if that fails, my mother and Charlie will be arriving Thursday. One of my students has already promised embarrassing questions...
Please forgive the blatant Apple-boosting for a moment, but I’m pretty excited about a new feature on the iTunes store. A new feature – “iTunes U” – now brings course lectures, forums, and potentially innovative educational projects straight to your computer or iPod.
At launch, 16 schools were listed. Among them were ultra-competitive institutions like UC Berkeley, MIT, Duke, and Stanford. As iTunes U matures, it has the potential to help make higher education more accessible at a time when universities are becoming increasingly expensive and selective.
One project that seems to have particular promise is MIT’s “Visualizing Cultures” video podcast. Launched by noted Japan historian John Dower, the project aims to “illuminate history through the images of the time.” I’m currently downloading the introduction along with “Asia Rises,” a piece on the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. With my creaky Internet connection it might take awhile, but I’ll post some comments after I get a chance to watch them.
NPR's foreign desk has a story on tourism in Shangri-La (Zhongdian).* After living in China for so many months, it's refreshing to see something approaching real reporting. That said, I think NPR piece is thoroughly wrong-headed.
Yes, the piece highlights some valid critiques. Well-heeled ethnic Hans (the dominant group throughout most of China) are swarming into what is essentially a Tibetan town. And, as might be expected, the profits are hardly being shared equally.
But those aspects miss the bigger picture of what is going on in Zhongdian. Ten years ago, it was a struggling frontier town. Its economy was heavily dependent on logging, which faced a nationwide ban from Beijing. Life is difficult in rural China, and it is even more so in geographically disadvantaged Yunnan, among the country’s poorest provinces. Large scale agriculture is nearly impossible in northwestern Diqing where Zhongdian is located.
Yet NPR neglects to mention any of that, and by using the passive voice, and saying the city "was rechristened five years ago Shangri-La," the editors sidestep the reasons behind the switch. It was not greedy fat cats that turned Zhongdian into an emerging tourist haven. It was the local government under pressure by an economy on the verge of collapse.
Of course any “rebranding” or “retooling” is going to lead to growing pains. However, I was seriously annoyed that such weighty issues as "too many shopping centers" and a busy local monastery gift shop seemed to dominate the article.
Only in the last line, however, did my frustration finally boil over. Paraphrasing a local photographer, the article claims, “The area's culture and its fragile ecosystem are under threat from tourism.” I’m no expert, but this seems – at best – to be a seriously suspect argument.
While imperfect in motivation, the economic opportunities offered by tourism have made preserving traditional culture profitable – and therefore sustainable. A great example of this is in Lijiang, where octogenarians perform classical Naxi music on stage next to twentysomethings. Profits from tourism there have been invested in educational programs to protect the unique (and nearly extinct) Dongba script.
Zhongdian itself is filled with Tibetan handicrafts that are sold in the same “shopping centers” (actually alley-side stalls) that are knocked in the piece. Just outside Zhongdian, “ecovillages” have emerged by mixing traditional culture, eco-friendly living, and small-scale tourism.
I don’t know enough about the environmental aspect to go on too long, but from my visit it seemed as though the town's chief environmental challenge was the scarred landscape of over-logging from decades past. And logging is exactly the issue that local tourism promotion seeks to address.
*The one point of the article that I do tend to agree with is that "Shangri-La" is so awkward I have trouble writing about it or even taking it seriously. I used the older Chinese name -- Zhongdian -- in this post.
