Absurdity, Allegory and China

Things have been a litle quiet in here recently. I’ve been struggling with some computer problems over the last two months, which now seemed to be straightened out, though it took more time to correct than I’d thought it would. So now that I have worked that one out, it is time for me to head south for a few weeks for some scheduled maintenance that is a bit overdue. I may post from the road, depending on access, though from here I am not sure what the internet situation will be, since I am still not sure of the itinerary. I hope to be back up and regulary running in a few weeks.

I have a project which is ‘hanging’ on this site: I posted a Part One entry three weeks ago concerning water, though I  have not had the time to get back to it. I’ve continued on with my Hai River photo project, and will pick that up when I return. There is a link to the photos in the right sidebar. (And yes, Dom, there are even some in color!)

See you soon.

–jg

There has been so much written about June 4th that I have not even tried to throw my hat into the ring. I have nothing new to add to the mix. I was living in rural Virginia then, in what seems like another life. My daughter was finishing kindergarten, my wife, a librarian in Winchester, and I was a self-employed carpenter staying busy as the Washington metro sprawled into the Shenandoah Valley. It was hard not to be hooked by what was happening on the Square, but family, gardens, sheep, keeping the pickup running, cutting firewood for the winter was what commanded the most of my attention. And then came Tank Man, and life somehow changed. There stood a man with shopping bags in front of a line of tanks, jogging as they jogged, not letting them pass, saying “no” and bringing them to a halt.

I have no idea what TAM was really all about. And I haven’t met anyone yet who has been able to adequately tell me. My friends Mark and Annie, who were living in Dongbei at the time, have given me the best sense of how things felt: a sense of dawning hope is about the best I can put it. I have a great friend here in Tianjin whose father handed out small money to students at Tianjin Station as they boarded trains to Beijing. He was a poor working man in 1989, but he was overwhelmed by the possibilities of something happening that needed to happen, and so he traveled from the countryside to the nearest big city, Tianjin, and gave students who were off to the Square a few kuai here, a few kuai there to help them buy food along the way. It was the frog knowing that there was more than just the well. It was imagining a sky that was more than a just a tight, little circle at the up end of a long, dark shaft. Was it democracy? I’ve no idea. But I do know there was Tank Man.

Yesterday a new photo of Tank Man, taken at street level moments before the iconic photo and film footage were shot, was published by the NYT here. It is a harrowing photo since we know what happened next. He is standing in the background a good 75 meters in front of the lead tank, two young men in the foreground fleeing, a man on a bicycle looking over his shoulder, a front-end loader, it’s shovel resting on the street. Without the other dramatic photo and film of the incident, what we have here is a man on the street with tanks. It is a photo. There is no movement, other than the implied motion of the two men in the foreground who are running away.  We view Tank Man from his starboard quarter, patiently standing at attention, waiting for whatever was about to happen next. The distance between him and the lead tank allows us to understand infinitely more his composure and intent. He seems calm, self-contained in the middle of fear and wreckage.

We all know what happened in the next few moments, but we have no idea what happened after that.  As often as I have heard the term “hero’ overused and misused by politicians and people who don’t know any better (George Bush I declared all those who served in his war, Gulf War I, as heroes, thus cheapening the word even more than Ronald Reagan had), I can honestly say that there are few in this world who I would pin with that title. Tank Man for me is Number One.

And so I want him to be alive, though I’m sure I’ll never know. I think about him often as I walk the streets of Tianjin and Beijing, especially in the early mornings and late evenings when I often nod to men with their dogs, smoking cigarettes, hunkering down next to a canal, looking off into the distance. I want him to be one of them: a guy who’d be hard to remember if you had to pick him out of a crowd, but one who is, unavoidably, there. His unforgettableness is immeasurably tied to his anonymity, his heroness is his calm humanity in the face of overwhelming machine. This is the best that I can do with Tian’anmen and June 5th.

Here is a photo from my north porch at 5;35 this evening. Tall apartment blocks, satellite dishes, a three-sided trash hold, an empty six-story former housing unit (w/satellite dishes), the Tianjin TV Tower and clouds. Ominous looking clouds. Clouds that look like they might contain rain. Could we be so lucky? Rain in early June? It’s happened most other years, just not this year. It’s dark, and I am hopeful, listening for thunder, sniffing at the air.

From the north porch in Nankai District, Tianjin

At approximately 16:57 this afternoon (June 2, 2009) in Tianjin Flickr flickered off. Actually there was no flicker about it. Someone here in China threw the switch and that was that. Twitter too has flown the coop. In the moments leading up to the June 4th Tiananmen Square 20th anniversary China has decided that too much truth is … well, just too much. So they’ve seemed to scale things way back. These two sites are just the latest, though they are two high profile, popular sites in China. This was expected, and this is just confirmation on what most of us who have been here awhile have experienced before. Flickr’s last block boosted the popularity of Gladder. This time it looks like VPNs. Though I have no idea how all of this works, I wonder if the VPN tunnels will be the next to collapse. This is how emergent power works. The new world order with CCP characteristics. But please don’t misconstrue this as fear. It’s not that. It’s for the protection of People who do not, I repeat, do not need to have their feelings hurt again. There are just so many hurt feelings that a People can bear.

The following photo strip is from the distant backgrounds of four photos I shot early Saturday morning (May 30, 2009) along the Xinkai River in Tianjin. I was shooting something else entirely, and which turned out to be of little interest except for the small fragment in each one where these four came from, taken between 6:31:31 and 6:31:59 AM.

A trip between Beijing and Tianjin on the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity Rail is one that gets quite a lot of Twitter attention, especially on the weekends. The trip from Beijing South Railway Station to Tianjin Railway Station (aka Tianjin East) on the Hai He (River) in the city center takes 30 minutes.

A recent samplings of tweets include ass kicking, very cool and amazing. And it is all of the above, especially considering what it was before. A decade ago it took close to two hours, sometimes longer, and the exit scrums at both ends and the attempts to get taxis (or a subway tickets at the Beijing terminus) were battles that could go either way. For more than a year leading up to the Olympics the Tianjin end of the line got even worse, since the main train station, closed for renovation, meant that all trains were routed into a warehouse district in the eastern part of the city, a temporary situation that added several degrees of pain and inconvenience to the journey.

Though ingress and egress has been vastly improved at both ends, there are still no subway connections at either terminals and unless you want to deal with very crowded buses, a cab is still a must if you need to get away from the stations. At the Tianjin end of the line there is more to see with easier access if a leisurely stroll through the center of the hometown of mahua, goubuli baozi and Wen Jiabao is the point of your visit. Beijing South is quite a different deal, since it really is in the middle of nowhere. A subway line is coming, but I am not sure when. At one time Septembers 2009 was the target date, though a cab is still the only way I get away. I am sure there are buses, though I’m holding out for the subway.

The always informative and ever-exuberant David Feng (TechBlog 86) provided the following info for purchasing an express rail card for those who travel back and forth on a regular basis.

Head straight for the Tianjin Railway Station and ask station staff where to get the “kuai tong ka” (express rail card). Initial load is at CNY 1,000 for standard class (standard card; about 17 rides) and CNY 3,000 for first class (gold card), and the card’s good for two years. Be prepared to pay cash only in one lump sum.

Look for a blue/yellow arrow beneath a fare gate (often to the right in Tianjin, but at times left at Beijing South). Don’t insert your card on the fare gate, but instead, dip it over the bulls-eye icon. Your credit will be shown and doors will open.

Standard class gets car 6, seats 1-80 reserved; first class gets seats 1-10 reserved in the sole first class car. Within those seats you’re free to pick window or aisle. Show staff the express card when requested.

If upgrading from standard to first, be sure to pay the extra fare difference. Gold cardholders travelling standard do not get the fare difference credited. Cardholders do not have access to Deluxe Class, which are limited to eight per train and can only be bought at ticket counters and are only available for series CRH III trains.

So what does a trip between two sprawling east coast Chinese cities have to do with Tibet? It’s all about the ‘free’ water available to riders.

Tibet Spring water, part of the price of the Beijing-Tianjin bullet train ticket.

(To be continued)

Someone’s blowing things up close to my home, 3:45 on a Thursday afternoon, an odd time of both the day and the week, even in Tianjin. Not sure why, though I am not curious enough to go find out the reason. But for a moment I just flashed on 2003 when SARS founds its way to town. The place where we were living then, off Diantai Dao not far from Tianjin University, set off fireworks every evening at the gate to keep everything in order. Our place was not the only one to make a lot of noise, and in the canyons of Chinese housing it was deafening after the sun went down until finally the ‘all clear’ decree was announced.

There were great superstitions that ran through the Tianjin streets during the time of SARS, all set in motion by the supposed discovery at a construction site of the remains of a very large and very dead snake that was declared to be shewang, the snake king. Then things got really fun as remedies for the disaster, portended by the discovery of mighty legless lizard, took off. There were two folk remedies that readily come to mind, though I am sure that there were more that I am forgetting. The first had to do with buying 6 eggs , though you could only buy one egg per vendor, and the sixth egg had to be from a seller named Liu. If you really wanted to gather creds you could go for eight, the eighth egg, as you might expect, having to be purchased from Eggman Ba.

The other magic bullet was in the form of canned peaches, to protect small children from the disease. Jeremiah at the Granite Studio has the explanation here, a remedy he discovered from his mother-in-law who lives in Tianjin, and which he wrote about last year after the Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Torch debacle had everyone on edge. In the spring of 2003 there was not a can of peaches to be found in Tianjin after shewang showed up.

So, when I heard the fireworks a few minutes ago I flashed on the latest disaster that China is fending off: the swine flu – and I wondered if this was a dispersal of the memo. Once canned peaches start to disappear I’ll know that the cloud has settled in. I guess I could go check the local shops to see how their stock is holding up – which may be a better indicator of the buzz on the street than I could get by watching CCTV or reading the People’s Daily – but it looks like rain, and I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.

This one almost got by me. (Thanks to MMG for bringing it to my attention.) Rem Koolhaas was featured in the Wall Street Journal last month in a piece entitled The Sky’s No Longer the Limit, concerning architecture and the the end of this latest golden age as major building projects throughout the world have screeched to a halt.

The CCTV skyscraper marked the climax to a world-wide boom in iconic architectural projects that commenced in 1997, with the opening of Frank Gehry’s shimmering Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. One of several innovative buildings designed by Western architects for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Mr. Koolhaas’s headquarters for China Central Television quickly became a signature of the Beijing skyline. Now, with a global recession threatening future architectural projects of all kinds, the building seems like a souvenir of days gone by, even though it has yet to be occupied.

What is more interesting to me is Koolhaas’ comment on the TVCC, the hotel that three short months ago looked to be the poster building for “fire in a barrel” architecture. After spending as much time with it as I have, I was amazed by the lines of the post-fire structure, and three days after the fire I commented on it here.

The lines look to be consistent with the pre-fire lines, though what it looks like inside is still, for me, a guess. I don’t believe that there is any fear of collapse, though it was obviously something that looked apparent during the conflagration….

If, in fact, the structure is salvageable, this will become the story, which may be the silver lining for Arup and OMA. There are not many engineering tests that have been so publicly witnessed and so viewed, via youtube, by so many. In the past I’ve told people that if I were in Beijing during an earthquake and had a choice to pick a spot to be if the big one rolls through, I’d choose to be in one of those two buildings. A fire, obviously, is something quite different, but the engineering of this building may very well become the biggest and most spectacular story.

In the WSJ piece Koolhaas addresses this issue, which goes against the swirl of rumors that have the building imminently being razed.

According to CCTV, the fire was caused by an unauthorized fireworks display, believed to have been organized on the site to celebrate the end of the Lunar New Year holiday. Images of the blaze were quickly distributed by Beijing citizens, who captured the fire on their cellphones and camcorders. Those initial images of the blaze suggested that the tower might be nearly destroyed. However, said Mr. Koolhaas, “they are simply rebuilding it as it was, because there was no structural damage.”

Is this wishful thinking on Koolhaas’ part? I’m sticking with my initial gut reaction on this one: that OMA and Arup have withstood the test by fire. But will superior engineering be enough to save it from the spectacle of it exploding in the Beijing sky? And where is Mandarin Oriental in this? Are they about to stake their future Beijing business on the worldwide perception of a building that looked like a giant fire in a barrel? The WSJ has just reported that China Replaces Chief of CCTV:

In a brief report, state-run Xinhua news agency said 61-year-old Zhao Huayong is being replaced because he had reached retirement age. China’s usual retirement age is 60.

Although there was no official mention of the fire in the announcement of Mr. Zhao’s retirement, what will CCTV and the Propaganda Ministry do if, in fact, the structural integrity was not compromised in the fire? Lots of bad juju attached to this one. Lots of questions too. But OMA and Arup may come out of this on the high end, no matter which way CCTV and Mandarin Oriental end up going.

Newt Gingrich, one of a long line of publicly shamed Republicans and a contender for a spot on the 2012 GOP presidential ticket, has an opinion piece in the Washington Examiner entitled Lets NOT meet the Uighurs, which will, no doubt, make the Zhongnanhai boys happy.

So the Obama administration has decided to set the Uighurs loose in America. Most likely, the lucky community that will soon be hosting the Uighurs is a neighborhood near you: Fairfax Country Virginia, where there is already a sizable (non-terrorist) Uighur community.

At Guantanamo Bay, the Uighurs are known for picking up television sets on which women with bared arms appear and hurling them across the room.

Perhaps understandably, the Obama administration believes the Uighurs will need help getting adjusted to northern Virginia society, in which women with bared arms have been known to appear.

Looks like Newt, the famously closet racist and shameless political predator who quit his job as Speaker of the House and abandoned his seat after winning an election in 1998 – just walked away! – may have his sites set on something a little more in this (China) neighborhood, just in case the White House thing doesn’t work out. Newt, who is known to do whatever he can to grub for a constituency, recently converted to Roman Catholicism, no doubt to wrangle the white pro-lifers who are out in force in South Bend, Indiana this weekend to spoil the commencement ceremony of Notre Dame graduates because the President of the United States is going to speak to them.

Newt has recently co-authored, along with his daughter, a self-help book entitled 5 Principles for a Successful Life: From Our Family to Yours, which sounds so very Chinese. Newt, who ramrodded the Clinton impeachment while privately ‘liaising’ with the current Ms. Gingrich while still married to the former, knows a lot about success. Funny how he picked up on Uighurs and women with bare arms. Despite his string of peccadilloes and his far nastier penchant for racist, backstabbing politics (I know, that seems a bit redundant, but I still believe that there are a few politicians who are in it for the right reasons), I believe he’d make a hit over here on the karaoke circuit. With a little hair dye, a few bars of some Hoagy Carmichael’s Georgia On My Mind Tantum ergo Sacramentum, and his revisionist spin on history, he’d blend right in with the rest of the boys, what with his take on the Uighurs and all.

Zaha Hadid’s under-construction new opera house in Guangzhou was the scene of a fire early this past Saturday morning, May 9th according to the Architect’s Journal. Though the fire was extinguished in an hour, the photo that accompanies this piece shows a good deal of smoke pouring out of one side of the building. I’ve not seen any further reports on the extent of the damage. No one was hurt in the fire. This one has been pretty quiet, and I hope it’s because there was not much damage to report.