I’ve noted the attempts to bulldoze the historic Gulou neighbourhood in Peking near the Drum Tower several times in this blog and the fight goes on while the government allows the structures it wishes to replace with God knows what rot and deteriorate in a policy of slum creation to aid their ends.
Here is a balanced piece in the New York Times with some accompanying photos and video by Matthew Niederhauser that makes interesting reading concerning the ongoing campaigns by both those seeking to preserve the area, the government bulldozer merchants and the community in the middle of it all.
Most foreigners doing business in China have at one time or another come into contact with the dreaded FESCO – Foreign Enterprise Service Corporation – that was set up Beijing in the 1970s to provide crappy services to foreigners in the sure belief that they couldn’t use anyone else and were happy, or had no other choice, but to pay through the nose. Over the years their importance has waned fortunately, as they were (and still are I hear) pretty universally awful). Not sure why Beijing in the 70s decided to call FESCO FESCO, if you see what I mean, but interesting to note that there was an early FESCO in Shanghai in the 1930s offering house cleaning and floor renovations – and all under ‘British Supervision’ no less. Could this FESCO have inspired the naming of that FESCO?
Time to note Christine Loh’s Underground Front – The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong, which is a great book, and now out in paperback, about a subject little covered in English (though quite well covered in Chinese in Hong Kong). Loh, of course, is a well known politician and activist in Hong Kong who runs Civic Exchange (where she found the time to write this I do not know!). As usual here’s the blurb:
• A pioneering examination of the role that the Chinese Communist Party has played in Hong Kong since the creation of the Party in 1921, through to the present day
• Brings events right up to date and includes the results of a survey about the Hong Kong public’s attitude towards the CCP
• The numerous appendices on the key targets of the party’s united front activities make it an especially useful read for all who are interested in Hong Kong history and politics, and readers who are interested in the history of modern China.
Have a look at the these pictures of Tokyo’s Mitsubishi Ichigokan Museum in Marunouchi district – looks like a nice example of old British style architecture in Japan. And so well preserved!! Except that’s it’s all a fraud – the building is a replica and was only finished in 2009 and opened this year. It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to see it in Tokyo and was impressed to be quite honest.
There was a building just like it on the site built in 1894 and designed in Queen Anne style by the British architect Josiah Conder, the man designed Rokumeikan, the Japanese state guesthouse. But that building was torn down in 1968 though the original plans were used to rebuild as well as the use of red bricks and other similar materials. What no exists is a fraud, but a most charming fraud. The building hosts a collection of mostly European art including the Maurice Joyant collection, a group of over 200 works by Toulouse-Lautrec, not a personal favourite of mine but a great favourite of Tokyo cafe designers obsessed by all things Parisian still.
The street the building sits on, Babasaki-dori Avenue, had a number of other excellent European-style buildings previously and was, in the early 20th century, known as Itcho London (1 Mile London). Here’s an old picture of the street from (not to precise on the date sorry) sometime in the late Meiji.
Far too many glowing government issued images of Shanghai around this year what with all the unsustainable pavilions and new towers in Shanghai attracting the fly-in, fly-out journo crowd who mostly have little to say about the destruction of older properties and heritage in the city. A useful contrast is this series of very sad pictures in Foreign Policy from Sue Ann Tay. Hongkou particularly has suffered this last two years as a few structures are left to be surrounded by blocks of ugly high rises eventually creating a very strange landscape of constant same-ish tower blocks with the odd poorly preserved (i.e. usually ripped out inside and then painted a non-traditional colour that makes it look rather odd) occasionally popping up.
Can’t honestly say I’ve ever been a fan of Pearl S Buck but she remains popular both in China and, somewhat, outside still. Of course she is interesting in terms of her early life in China as the daughter of zealous missionaries (few converts, the Boxer threat and constant poverty) and then as a troubled young wife with a severely handicapped child and an agriculture expert for a husband. She later of course found the Communists hard to deal with and compared them to her own over-zealous parents. Anyway, there’s a new biography – Hilary Stirling’s Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth – that I think is the first major Buck bio since Peter Conn’s (much praised at the time) Pearl S Buck: A Cultural Biography in the 1990s.
She recreated the lives of ordinary Chinese people in The Good Earth, an overnight worldwide bestseller in 1932, later a blockbuster movie. Buck went on to become the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Long before anyone else, she foresaw China’s future as a superpower, and she recognized the crucial importance for both countries of China’s building a relationship with the United States. As a teenager she had witnessed the first stirrings of Chinese revolution, and as a young woman she narrowly escaped being killed in the deadly struggle between Chinese Nationalists and the newly formed Communist Party.
Pearl grew up in an imperial China unchanged for thousands of years. She was the child of American missionaries, but she spoke Chinese before she learned English, and her friends were the children of Chinese farmers. She took it for granted that she was Chinese herself until she was eight years old, when the terrorist uprising known as the Boxer Rebellion forced her family to flee for their lives. It was the first of many desperate flights. Flood, famine, drought, bandits, and war formed the background of Pearl’s life in China. “Asia was the real, the actual world,” she said, “and my own country became the dreamworld.”
Pearl wrote about the realities of the only world she knew in The Good Earth. It was one of the last things she did before being finally forced out of China to settle for the first time in the United States. She was unknown and penniless with a failed marriage behind her, a disabled child to support, no prospects, and no way of telling that The Good Earth would sell tens of millions of copies. It transfixed a whole generation of readers just as Jung Chang’s Wild Swans would do more than half a century later. No Westerner had ever written anything like this before, and no Chinese had either.
Buck was the forerunner of a wave of Chinese Americans from Maxine Hong Kingston to Amy Tan. Until their books began coming out in the last few decades, her novels were unique in that they spoke for ordinary Asian people— “translating my parents to me,” said Hong Kingston, “and giving me our ancestry and our habitation.” As a phenomenally successful writer and civil-rights campaigner, Buck did more than anyone else in her lifetime to change Western perceptions of China. In a world with its eyes trained on China today, she has much to tell us about what lies behind its astonishing reawakening.
A new and very interesting collection of essays whose title speaks for itself: Art in Turmoil: The Chinese Cultural Revolution,1966-1976, edited by Richard King. Who’d be an artist in the midst of a Cultural Revolution Maoist style – dangerous waters indeed! As usual blurb below.
“The passage of time and passion, as well as the availability of new materials, bring a new focus to work on the Cultural Revolution. Memoirs of participants put a human face on the decade-long movement. The personal experiences and new documents in Art in Turmoil combine with exquisite scholarship to deepen our understanding of the artistic life of Maoist China.” — Richard Kraus, author of The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture
- Revisits the visual and performing arts of the Cultural Revolution period — the paintings, propaganda posters, political cartoons, sculpture, folk arts, private sketchbooks, opera, and ballet.
- Examines what these vibrant, militant, often gaudy images meant to artists, their patrons, and their audiences at the time, and what they mean now, both in their original forms and as revolutionary icons reworked for a new market-oriented age.
- With over 60 colour and black-and-white illustrations.
Richard King is Director of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Victoria.
As someone who divides his time pretty evenly writing about China now and China back then this seemed like a place to throw all the interesting bits that fall through the cracks somehow and never get used anywhere else. It's basically the stuff that doesn't get used in my writing about modern China or in the books I do about old China — i.e. probably of little interest to anyone but me and therefore ideally suited to an obscure blog up a dark cul-de-sac of the Internet. I'm also adding the odd 'Deviation Posting' about non-China stuff that interests me — Paul French
Some old North Korean fruit juice from about 7 years ago
