DalianDalian.com

I’ve been sitting on this little story for a while, but as it’s been more than a year now since the “unfortunate event” I feel ready to let it out. Well, I’ve been the perpetrator of some truly clownish mishaps in my life so far, but this one is perhaps the worst. Just to set the scene, I should tell you that the wedding ring on my finger is not the first. One day about a year ago when I was living with my sister in law’s family, well, how can I put it…

Instructions Concerning How to Flush your Wedding Ring down the Loo

1 Take a big dump in a small asian bog and then use too much loo paper, so you need to flush twice.

2 Flush once, then wash your hands with a good old fashioned bar of soap.

3 Get soap stuck under rim of wedding ring.

4 Take off wedding ring and run under tap, then get some loo paper and start wiping off remaining soap. Leave ring inside the paper for no good reason.

5 Finish off washing your hands. Space out.

6 Realise that loo is ready for second flush and flush it.

7 Turn back to the sink and see some toilet paper lying around which you then just have time to throw in the pan so the second flush takes it down.

8 Finish washing hands…dry hands and look for wedding ring. Look some more. Get puzzled. Get worried. Stop, calm down. Replay previous actions in mind. Reach step 7 then get sick feeling in pit of stomach.

9 Groan loudly in panic. Check pan to see if everything has gone down. It has.

10 Leave bathroom and explain to spouse and family that you have just flushed expensive and treasured symbol of love and conjugal attachment down the pan. Explain again slowly and put up with verbal remonstrations and shakings of head in disbelief.

And the moral of the story is? Well, as any Chinese will tell you, it is quite obviously…”never flush paper down the toilet!” Use the little bin nearby. I should say that all this happened when I was relatively new to China. I always use the bin these days.

And my wife is still my wife. She was wise enough not to take my blunder as a symbolic act..

I've been hearing a lot of talk from friends about the police doing random passport check in Dalian. One of my friends reported having police knock on his door, check his passport, and then head off on their way.

Another friend reports seeing police check foreigners passports at a local MacDonalds. Cops were accompanied by translators, and had a car on hand should you need transportation home in the event that it wasn't on your person.

Has anyone else been subject to such checks?

In related news, 2008 is a somewhat wacky year with regard to visa regulations, and you can find some information on that here.

First, really get the impression it bonds English language and Chinese language information and that some time is put into writing something intelligent. Amazing photos too.

Then, down to business: I expect to arrive in Dalian around September, starting a JV with a local company. We already have a presence in China. But not in Dalian and I'd really like to get a group of buddies. I'm 35 and single, but sorry girls, not looking for a relationship as soon as I arrive. Nothing crazy, just a quite beer once or twice a week. Anywhere or any events to suggest?

Cheers, Nick

GraemeNicol posted a photo:

Yantai to Dalian ferry, Bohai/Yellow Sea, China, May 2008

During travel is when China feels at its most Chinese, perhaps because the collective nature of public transport removes the barriers that I cannot help but bring from my more individualistic culture. Though a foreigner in China may find it difficult and indeed undesirable to play more than the role of an extra in the ongoing narrative of China as a society and a culture, for these seven hours, they are equal participants in the single journey. We start the story together with the Chinese in Dalian and with the first step onto dry land upon arriving at Yantai, conclude it with a full stop. Inbetween, we follow the same narrative. First, there's the excitement of being up on deck, perhaps with some snacks, waiting to sail, then cameras come out as we watch city and coast fade from view, next the pace slows and we retreat indoors, maybe with a beer, as the first signs of discomfort and boredom begin to show, and then after grabbing what rest or sleep we can, there's the final flurry of activity, face-washing, queue standing, as the boat nears its destination. Aside from the sense of shared narrative, what makes it effective for documenting is the confined yet open nature of the boat itself. There's a lack of private space, but also the sensation, if you choose to venture up on deck, of being out at sea. Within this duality some kind of distillate of the human spirit seems to flow more freely than in the city. Throw in some good lighting and some so-bad-it's-good decor and it becomes a photographic playground.

This year’s Reith lectures are about China and are being given by Jonathan Spence, a Sinologist of some renown. His best known books are probably “The Search for Modern China” and “Mao Zedong”.

The Reith lectures are held annually in honour of John Reith, who was the first and probably the finest Director-General of the BBC. He was the guy who coined the wonderful mission statement for the BBC, namely that it should “Educate, Inform and Entertain”. Astonishingly, Reith was given the position despite having absolutely no experience of broadcasting. He simply had a feeling that he would be able to run any company he put his mind to and so when he saw the advert for the job in the paper, he applied. That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

The lectures are being held in the British library this year, home to the oldest book in the world… printed in 868 AD in China. The Reith lectures are a rather “British Establishment” affair and if you listen to them you will hear they are chaired by the prim and plummy sounding Sue Lawley and feature questions at the end from people such as The Archbishop of Canterbury and Oxford Professors of Chinese.

Spence himself is a rather phlegmatic sounding scholarly type and his lectures are solid and well-crafted rather than inspirational. More informing and educating than entertaining. He is also himself an establishment figure, having been educated at Winchester and Cambridge.

Why am I banging on about their backgrounds? Well, these are the kinds of people who ran the British Empire and I can’t help thinking how much things have changed since those not-so-distant days. Spence himself is married to a Chinese, something that would have been rather shocking/baffling until quite recently. And, generally speaking, the Chinese are talked about with respect and Chinese journalists are invited to ask questions at the end. Again, until quite recently, the British Establishment wouldn’t have given a toss what the Chinese thought about what they thought about China…intercultural dialogue was not really their forté.

Spence is giving 4 lectures in all and the first, on Confucius, has already been given and is available online.

Worth a listen. Especially as Confucius is such a hot topic these days..

The other week I had to give a talk about argument in academic writing. Argument is an interesting enough topic but academic writing can be a bit dry and dusty, so I thought I’d “spice up” the talk a bit with some references to argument outside academia.

One of the texts I chose as a condiment was Deborah Tannen’s “The Argument Culture”. Tannen is a discourse analyst/professor of linguistics and also a bestselling author: Respect. The Argument Culture is subtitled “Stopping America’s War of Words” and its main point (argument) is that western-style discourse is all-too-often aggressive, polarizing and counter-productive. She also argues that too many modern Americans (and by implication westerners) believe that the best way to demonstrate intellectual prowess is to criticize, find fault, and attack. Does that ring any bells for you China Expats?

This thesis is used to examine gender differences (her specialty), the education system, the legal system, and the media. In the light of what’s been going down recently with the “CNN versus all right-thinking Chinese” ballyhoo I thought the media section was particularly appropriate. In this part, Tannen chronicles the emergence of an “attack dog” media from the days of Watergate, and shows the damage this can do to the political process and the people who serve in public office.

Point taken. But, it must be said, if America has an “attack dog” media then China’s is a “lap dog”. The media in China is the party’s pet poodle and this is a worse state of affairs, I would argue.

I also found a review of “The Argument Culture” that contains the following:

what this terrific American scholar suggests, to a large degree, is going Asian. Asian cultures…place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.

Yeah…right! That is just such total crap it’s difficult to know where to start ripping it to shreds! Just joking. But actually this sounds quite a lot like one of Tannen’s other books, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation which argues that: “Men grow up in a world in which a conversation is often a contest, either to achieve the upper hand or to prevent other people from pushing them around. For women, however, talking is often a way to exchange confirmation and support.”

So can we say then that the east is feminine and harmonious and the west is masculine and divisive? Well, we can if we want to piffle away with unhelpful and massive generalisations. Actually, China seems a fairly argumentative place to me, with a fair amount of shouting and finger wagging on the streets and at a national/nationalist level there is a readiness to take umbrage at perceived slights that often leads to noisy demonstrations and internet vituperations.

Ask my students what they think of CNN and they won’t wax harmonious. Walk around a Chinese town wearing a Free T1b3t T-shirt and I’m fairly sure you’d get a harmonious pummeling.

In fact, it could be argued that it is the very lack of argument in China’s media that leads to such inflexible opinions (aka pig-headedness) and those notorious “hurt feelings” when the western media presents an argument “the Chinese people” haven’t heard before.

But then again, undeniably, there is CNN’s recent bungling reports of the riots in Tibet and, in general, too many knee-jerk criticisms of China the big bad bully.

There’s no easy answer to all these misunderstandings and confusions of course. Broadly speaking, China still doesn’t “get” western points of view because so much is censored, and the west indulges in sloppy criticism of China because of arrogance or because we cant be bothered to read up about a complicated state of affairs.

Just “Imagine” this though…cue Lennon’s familiar riffs…Less censorship, less aggression, more research, more consideration, more reflection, more patience. World Harmony! Peace and Understanding between Black and White and Yellow and Brown and Emo and Punk and Goth! Wouldn’t that be nice?

What…you don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

A while back, I tried to answer a simple question people often asked me about Dalian: How many people live there?

Simple question, tough answer. Alex found a good dataset, which we put on DalianDalian. Well, the question has come back.

I’m writing a cover story on real estate in China’s second-tier cities for an investment newsletter, and as part of the project, I’ve decided to compile a database of locales, most of which people outside of China have likely never heard (admittedly, there are some I couldn’t have put on a map before starting this piece).

I have a spreadsheet defining cities, provinces, regions, population, major industries, notable real estate and other notes. Most of that information is widely available, especially since these cities are now making a major push for investment. But population has proven tricky. For the map I’ll eventually build off this database, I think I’m going to attach the following disclaimer/explainer:

Counting how many people live in any Chinese city is an imperfect science. For this dataset, we’ve relied on a variety of sources, including government websites, published reports and other online resources.

Part of the problem is the population itself. Chinese cities have been undergoing a massive growth spurt since 1978, when the government first began letting people move to urban areas en masse. Most of this movement is legal, and counted in official surveys. Residents register with local authorities in order to receive government services, such as health and education. But unofficial migration is also widespread, and most cities have large segments that remain uncounted (and unserved).

Further blurring statistics is the way a city is defined. In Dalian, for example, the urban center–what might be called the city proper–is home to about 2 million people. Add in the surrounding “towns” such as Zhuanghe (pop. 700,000) or Pulandian (pop. 900,000)–both of which are a mix of city and countryside–and the total is above 6 million. Different sources count different areas, making a definitive number hard to come by.

This is a long way of saying: Take these numbers with a grain of salt, and please, forgive us if you’ve seen a different number elsewhere.

How’s it sound?

camerabug2 發表相片：

Former Dalian Administrative Building

GraemeNicol 發表相片：

Chinese have long been crossing the Bohai Sea back and forth between Shandong and Liaoning provinces. In fact the original residents brought by the Russian and Japanese colonialists almost 100 years ago to populate the new port of Dalian mostly came from Shandong, and still today there are ties across the water in terms of dialect, cusine, and of course family. Although a hovercraft also makes the trip in three hours, I've always taken the slow seven hour ferry. Travel offers a sense of a shared experience, pleasure turning to discomfort followed by stoicism and finally relief, that seems to bring out the best in Chinese society.

Dalian to Yantai passenger ferry, April 2008.

Graemetric 發表相片：  read more »