China Digital Times

China news tagged with: foreigners in China (68)

• In Chinese City, WWII Enemies Are Now Partners

  

  From Los Angeles Times:

  Looking back, Japanese businessman Tomatsu Ito says, he might as well have moved to Mars rather than a few hours’ flight away to China.

  Unlike in his publicly polite homeland, drivers in Dalian were chaotic, often careening through crowded crosswalks. Worse, he couldn’t muster even the most basic Chinese.

  Often desperate, he would phone JianHua Yang, his second in charge at the branch office of an Osaka, Japan-based software company. Yang is a Dalian native who, like many here, speaks Japanese.

  “I’d call him out of nowhere,” Ito recalled. “I’d say, ‘I’m lost again. I have no idea how to get home.’ “

  » Read more
  • May 25, 2009 5:23 AM

• How Vada Pav Travelled from Ulhasnagar to China

  

  On her blog, Reshma Patil, the China correspondent for the Hindustan Times, writes about her discovery of the only authentic Indian food in China at the trading center of Yiwu:

  More Indians travel to little Yiwu than to Beijing and Shanghai. And clearly the traders from Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan outnumber those from other states because Yiwu’s restaurants serve all the food you cannot find in China’s boomtowns. From 8 am to 3 am. Their counterparts in Beijing shut shop at 11 pm and some take an afternoon break as well.

  [...] I discovered what could be the best Indian food in China, as I scanned the 300 dishes at Swad-e-Hindustan. The two-storey establishment is owned by a low-profile father and son duo — Ghansham and Girish Haryani — who hail from Ulhasnagar on Mumbai’s fringe. In 2003, they were the first to see the business opportunity for an Indian eatery in Yiwu while its international market was still being built and modernised. Actually, the Chinese have not stopped expanding the market. It is still being built.

  When Girish, 29, reaches his restaurant, he enters after saying a long prayer on the street. Then he prays again by the Ganesha on his office desk. (Girish’s Ganesha is not Made-in-China). If an elderly Indian customer walks in, he bends to touch his feet. He knows almost everyone by name.

  Inside this restaurant, surrounded by walls lined with Indian art painted by Chinese artisans from Shanghai, I ate dosa and idli with two chutneys while the 1990s Hindi serial Vikram Aur Vetal played on the television set. I forgot I was in China.

  » Read more
  • May 24, 2009 10:08 PM

• Directory of Women English-language China Bloggers

  

  CNReviews is compiling a list of China blogs written by, or primarily by, women. They are accepting suggestions of additional sites in their comments section. From the introduction:
  

  Last week, after my post about Eclectic China Blogs–offering an antidote to the “standard business and current affairs white-dude-in-China blogs”– an interesting blog and email conversation emerged between Adam Minter, Laurence Sheed, Fiona Lee, and myself about why there seem to be fewer women writing English-language blogs about China.

  Do women bring a different and distinct voice to the English-language China blogosphere? Why do expatriate men in China blog? Do expatriate women blog for different reasons? What do women choose to express that men do not? And other way around?

  I started to organize a list of English-language blogs about China written by women.

  » Read more
  • May 4, 2009 9:08 PM

• Flu News from China: Mexican Citizens Being Detained

  

  On his blog, James Fallows gives several examples of Mexican citizens being quarantined in Beijing solely on the basis on their nationality. He says the reports are “based on first-hand reports from people I trust.” From the first example:

  A family of tourists — two parents; a son age 8; and daughters ages 6 and 4 — were staying in a five-star Beijing hotel. Like all foreigners in China, they had presented their passports for inspection on arrival. Their passports were from Mexico. At 4 am last night they heard a pounding on the door. Public-security officials asked them to come to the hospital for a few quick tests. In fact they were taken to a hospital and not allowed to leave. They received no drugs or treatment of any sort and were placed in a room where the beds and sheets still bore the marks of the previous ill and bleeding patients. They managed to contact Mexican officials by phone — which was the first the Mexican government had heard of their situation.

  See also “Netizens Angry Shanghai Allowed Swine Flu To Enter China” from chinaSMACK.

  » Read more
  • May 2, 2009 4:10 PM

• John Thomson: Photographs of 19th Century China

  

  An exhibit in Beijing includes the photographs of 19th century China by Scottish photographer John Thomson. BBC has a slideshow of his work here. From his biography on the 10 Chancery Lane Gallery site:

  John Thomson was born in Edinburgh in 1837. In 1862, he made his first journey to the Far East where he set up a photographic studio. However, he soon realised that there were far more interesting subjects for his art outside the studio and began to travel extensively throughout the local countryside, photographing people as they were, at work or at rest in their own environment. It is Thomson’s empathy that was to dominate his work until his death in 1921. Whether his subject was a beggar or a king, he attempted to capture the individual behind the veneer of social status, thus reflecting his own very deep social values and personal identity.

  More of his work can be viewed here.

  » Read more
  • April 19, 2009 9:09 PM

• Beijing Sixty-Six: Portrait of a Lost Generation

  

  China Beat writes about Beijing Sixty-Six, an exhibit of photographs of the beginning of the Cultural Revolution taken by Solange Brand:

  Solange Brand was 19 or 20 years old, the same age as these young Red Guards, when she was sent to work as a secretary at the French Embassy in Beijing. Unknowingly, with her Pentax she captured the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution.

  What, with indescribable emotion, the Chinese photographers in Pingyao saw was perhaps a “self-projection” or “self-identification” with the faces of these young men and women, even children, who could have been themselves from a long lost memory.

  Here lies the power of photography: What the Chinese viewers experience is like taking a swab of reality—an operation of “cut and paste”—and transposing it to fill in the void in our imaginations, to fill in the empty place in our collective memory, to fill in the absence as in our absentmindedness. We are confronted again by Roland Barthes’ famous “Ça a été—that has been.” Photography’s immediacy acts to set up an instantaneous observation of the experience of its author. As a result of the cut and paste, this transposition becomes an affirmation of “I have seen this” or “I have been there.” Hence the excitement we feel in the possibility of scrutinizing each face in the crowd and asking of ourselves: Was that how we looked at that time?

  

  

  

  
  
  
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  • April 14, 2009 12:16 PM

• Nigeriatown

  

  On the New Yorker’s website, Evan Osnos narrates an audio slideshow about so-called “Chocolate City” of African immigrants in Guangzhou:

  In this issue of the magazine, Evan Osnos writes about African merchants living in China. Here, Osnos narrates an audio slide show about the economic, social, and religious life of African migrants in Guangzhou. With photographs by David Hogsholt.

  Read more about “Chocolate City”, via CDT.

  » Read more
  • February 2, 2009 8:27 PM

• Ashes of the American Raj in China: John Leighton Stuart, Pearl S. Buck, and Edgar Snow

  

  Charles W. Hayford writes in the Japan Focus:

  In a minor skirmish in the history wars, or what might be called “ashes diplomacy,” Chinese authorities finally allowed the ashes of America’s last ambassador to China before 1949, John Leighton Stuart (1876-1964), to be interred next to the graves of his parents in Hangzhou, the southern Chinese city where he was born.

  Earlier this fall, local authorities in Zhenjiang, a city on the Yangzi known for its vinegar, opened a Pearl Buck Museum in the house where Buck (1892-1973) spent most of her first eighteen years. The ashes of another historic figure, Edgar Snow (1905-1971), are divided between the Hudson River and a spot by the Nameless Lake on the campus of Beijing University, which had been the campus of Yenching University. Leighton Stuart was president when Snow taught there in the 1930s.

  » Read more
  • December 12, 2008 8:53 PM

• Once Denounced by Mao, Now at Rest in China

  

  John Leighton Stuart was an American born in China to missionary parents, and was the last U.S. ambassador to the country before ties were cut off in 1949. Forty-six years after his death, his wish to be buried in China has finally been fulfilled. From the New York Times:

  Mr. Stuart died in Washington in 1962. He had written in his will that he hoped his remains would some day be buried in China, where he had been born the son of Christian missionaries in 1876 and had helped found a prominent university, but where he was no longer welcome.

  For decades, the answer from Beijing seemed to be no.

  But on Monday, 46 years after his death and after years of sensitive negotiations about the political implications of such a burial, Mr. Stuart’s ashes were laid to rest at a cemetery near the eastern city of Hangzhou, about two hours south of Shanghai.

  A small ceremony honoring Mr. Stuart on Monday was attended by Chinese and American officials, including the mayor of Hangzhou and the United States ambassador, Clark Randt Jr., as well as several alumni of Yenching University in Beijing, the institution Mr. Stuart helped found.

  » Read more
  • November 19, 2008 10:58 AM

• The New American - Chris Jones

  

  Esquire magazine recently published an article by Chris Jones on the new international yuppie factor in Shanghai.  Yet, the breed isn’t as stereotypical as meets the eye.  They are, as Jones illustrates, culturally savvy, ambitious, and more than temporary expat.  Jones writes about one such maverick:

  In his first days in Shanghai, he thought he could help change this place, make it cleaner and fairer and better. Change has come, but it has come slowly, and while Comiskey remains an idealist, a believer in an almost quaint theory of world progress, inching forward transaction by transaction, Shanghai forced him to develop a more practical streak. He decided, instead, to let the city change him. He hasn’t joined the ranks of pirates and robber barons — the “devils with white faces,” the Chinese call them — except when he drinks in their bars just before sunrise. He is still Barrett O’Connor Comiskey, proud Irish son of New York. But in his time in this city, he has also become a new kind of American, one made in China along with everything else.

  

  Snapshot of Shanghai

  
  Further on:

  It didn’t help that Shanghai’s expatriate community is as insular as the Chinese can seem. There are the true expats, the mostly male executives whose wives shop on Nanjing Road and whose children attend posh international schools. They live in the suburbs with their maids and gardeners, drivers take them to their offices, and they pick up dinner at KFC or McDonald’s, counting off the days until they can return home to Chicago or London or Frankfurt. They are in this city but they are not part of it. They believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect nothing. Then there are those foreigners who have integrated themselves completely — in fact, they have gone over the wall and become Chinese in their hearts and minds. They in turn look down at the third brand of foreigner here, the relentless waves of plunderers who drink Coca-Cola and fumble with their chopsticks, the neocolonialists who believe, This is China, and therefore I can expect the world.

  Comiskey set about working his way somewhere into the middle of everything and everyone. In his first difficult months, he wanted to feel at home in Shanghai, drawn into its irresistible currents, but he also wanted to stay true to his essential Americanism. He had to choose which parts of him he would fight to keep and which parts of him he was willing to lose. That’s how he ended up where he is today. This is China, he believes, therefore everything is possible, but nothing is easy.

  See this CDT posting for a variation on the theme.

  Good Magazine did interesting profiles on several notable expats.

  » Read more
  • October 17, 2008 9:28 PM

• Who Can Begrudge the Ordinary Chinese Their Joy?

  

  As New York Times journalist John F. Burns watched the Olympics, he recalled a marathon he ran in Beijing in 1973:

  The runners will gather, as we did, under the gaze of Mao’s portrait on the great vermilion gate guarding the Forbidden City. And they will run down some of the same tree-lined boulevards. The crowds, though large, could hardly be more dense or clamorous than the million or more people who lined the sidewalks 35 years ago, when the race, like President Nixon’s visit the year before, was a watershed in the thawing of the Cultural Revolution.

  I haven’t set foot in China since 1986, when my second posting there, for The New York Times, ended with imprisonment and deportation, on charges of using a motorcycle trip across the Chinese heartland as a cover for spying on the country’s missile program. That imbroglio, long since settled by a private apology from the Chinese authorities, meant that I left China for the last time just as it began its ascent to its current wealth and power with Deng Xiaoping’s repudiation of Mao and the reforms that put an end to the Maoist delusion of economic autarchy.

  All of which has made me, perhaps more than most, a fascinated spectator, via television, of the Beijing Games.

  » Read more
  • August 25, 2008 12:55 PM

• US Prisoner Freed After 10 Years in China Prison

  

  AFP reports:

  A US citizen has been released from jail in China after serving 10 years of a 16-year term for violating tax laws, a US official and rights groups said Thursday.

  Jude Shao was released from a Shanghai jail on parole on Wednesday, a US embassy spokeswoman in Beijing, Diane Sovereign, told AFP.

  [...] Shao was arrested in 1998 and convicted of tax evasion in March 2000 when his 16-year sentence was handed down, according to the www.freejudeshao.com, a website set up by his former classmates at Stanford Business School.

  » Read more
  • July 4, 2008 4:07 PM

• Want Access? Go Easy on China

  

  Foreign scholars of China are learning their are limits to their access if their research doesn’t fit the Chinese government agenda. From The National:

  Foreign scholars are finding the China field an increasingly dangerous territory to navigate, and some readily admit to avoiding certain topics and to tweaking their research. And the situation is getting worse as China grows more economically and politically powerful.

  One of the authors of the banned book - titled Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland - who declined to use his name, said Beijing is stepping up efforts to control how China is perceived internationally. “We’re in a period where China’s influence is expanding and they’re seeking ways to control the message outside of China just as they do inside China.”

  …The problem is that it is not always clear where the invisible line is drawn. Scholars say that being purposely vague about what causes the problem subconsciously forces people to be more cautious than they probably need to be, a strategy that has been successful against intellectuals and the media in China.

  » Read more
  • June 25, 2008 11:23 AM

• The China Diary of George H.W. Bush

  

  The New Republic takes a look at former U.S. President George H.W. Bush’s sojourn in Beijing as head of the U.S. Liaison Office, 1974-1975, as documented in the recently published book, The China Diary of George H.W. Bush:

  When Bush landed in Beijing on October 21, 1974, its wind and dust reminded him of places he had encountered in the oil business. “It reminded me very much of West Texas and also of a trip to Kuwait,” he observed. He soon tried to establish high-level contact with Chinese leaders. He paid a call on Deng Xiaoping, then a vice premier under Mao Zedong. Bush’s initial impression of Deng, eventually the father of China’s economic reforms: “He was a very short man.” (For American one-liners about China, this ranks right up there with Richard Nixon’s verdict on the Great Wall: “It really is a great wall.”)

  In fact, Bush’s introductory session with Deng was misleading. Over the coming months, Bush discovered to his growing frustration that he couldn’t see many people or do much. He had little access to top Chinese leaders because he faced two huge obstacles. One was the Chinese government, which kept rebuffing his requests for meetings with the line that it was “bu fangbian” (not convenient). The other problem was, in Bush’s words, “Kissinger’s strong arm on everything to do with China.” The secretary of state wanted all high-level contact with China to be conducted either in Washington or on his own visits to Beijing. Bush was supposed to keep a low profile.

  Bush consoled himself by trying to enjoy Beijing. He devoted himself to tennis at the International Club (one of his tennis buddies was the foreign correspondent John Burns, then of the Toronto Globe and Mail). Bush made repeated visits to the low-priced Hong Du tailor shop and took bike rides around the city with Barbara. Meanwhile, he held endless rounds of meetings with other ambassadors, most of whom tried to pump him about what Kissinger was up to with China and/or the Soviet Union. Bush wished he knew.

  » Read more
  • June 23, 2008 10:51 AM

• “Chocolate City” - Africans Seek Their Dreams in China

  

  Blogging for China translates a Southern Metropolis Daily report about the lives of African traders living in Guangzhou’s so-called Chocolate City:

  Religion and business are the two things that most closely bind Africans and Guangzhou. Catholicism and Islam are the two dominant religions. Every Friday is the holiest day of prayer for the Muslims, and African Muslims also stop their work. They congregate at the mosque across from Yuexiu Park; carefully they wash their head, hand, and feet, and kneel in the direction of the mosque, saying their prayers to the true Allah.

  After prayers are finished, Omar walks over to the adjacent hall, and joins a ceremony unique to African Catholics. A few hundred Africans clapped and danced to a religious music that only they can understand. With the dance finished, one person stood up, and called on everyone to raise their hands, close their eyes, their mouths muttered and gradually grew faster and faster; their faces showed a frantic expression. After Omar faithfully finishes the ceremony, he returns to his typical well-mannered attitude. Pulling out his cell phone, he uses fluent Chinese to tell his wife that the brothers are meeting for dinner that night, he won’t be returning for dinner.

  Amongst the Africans who’ve come to Guangzhou, Omar belongs to the small number who’ve received higher education. He even studied Chinese in university. He came to China from Nigeria three years ago, thinking that his advantage in language would allow him to quickly adjust to this new life. But he tried Beijing, no luck; moved to Shanghai, still no luck; continued onto Zhejiang, and still no luck. At the time, one of Omar’s countrymen in America tried to talk him into going to the United States. There, people of different skin colors live together, and no one can tell at a glance that he’s a foreigner.

  Finally, he ended up in Guangzhou and set down roots in Chocolate City. Guangzhou has the densest concentration of African businessmen in China. Areas and cities surrounding the area has thousands of factories that take tens of thousands of African orders, originating from Chocolate City, every day.

  Read also a perspective from James Fallows: “A simple point about being a foreigner in China.”

  » Read more
  • June 16, 2008 2:35 PM

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