The writer’s vanity likes to imagine permanence, but Fuling reminds me that words are quicksilver. Their meaning changes with every age, every perspective—it’s like the White Crane Ridge, whose inscriptions have a different significance now that they appear in an underwater museum. Today anybody who reads River Town knows that China has become economically powerful and that the Three Gorges Dam is completed, and this changes the story. And I’ll never know what the Fuling residents of 1998 would have thought of the book, because those people have also been transformed. There’s a new confidence to urban Chinese; the outside world seems much less remote and threatening. And life has moved so fast that even the 1990s feels as nostalgic as a black-and-white photo. Recently Emily sent me an email: “With a distance of time, everything in the book turns out to be charming, even the dirty, tired flowers.”

One evening I have dinner with Huang Xiaoqiang, his wife, Feng Xiaoqin, and their family, who used to own my favorite noodle restaurant. In 1998 Huang acquired his driver’s license and told me he hoped to buy a car someday, which seemed impossible with his limited family income. But tonight he picks me up at my hotel in a new black Chinese BYD sedan. Huang drives exactly two blocks to a restaurant, and then we drive exactly two more blocks to his family home. These journeys may be short, but they provide ample time for Huang to make full use of his dashboard DVD player.

After dinner he insists on chauffeuring me back to my hotel. He tells me that his brother-in-law, who doesn’t speak English, used a dictionary to read River Town. He went word by word; it took two years. “In your book you wrote that my biggest dream was to have a car,” Huang says. “And this is the third one I’ve owned!”

Read more by and about Hessler, via CDT, and a review of River Town recently posted on the Booze, Food Travel blog.

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Han Han is a big deal in China — and among many China scholars and journalists in the West — and there’s no mystery as to why. He has a large and loyal following among young Chinese, something the three dissidents I listed, as admirable as they are, haven’t attained. And he has consistently been at or near the center of some of the liveliest debates taking place on the Chinese Internet, the closest thing to a public sphere that exists on the mainland.

[...]

How is it that someone so significant and interesting remains largely unknown outside of China? It can’t be because no one has written about him. Back in 2009, Simon Elegant profiled him for Time. In 2010, Foreign Policy included him in its list of 100 top global thinkers and Perry Link celebrated his “Aesopian wit” in an International Herald Tribune op-ed. Last year, the New Yorker ran an excellent piece on him by Evan Osnos cleverly titled “The Han Dynasty,” and Fast Company called him one of the 100 most creative people in business. This year he’s been the subject of an unusually engaging “Lunch with the FT” feature by David Pilling, the Asia editor of the Financial Times, and was discussed in Jacob Weisberg’s Slate essay on Internet censorship in China. And so on.

One reason his global fame might trail that of other Chinese figures could be that nothing he has done has garnered international headlines of the sort that came with Ai Weiwei’s arrest, Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel prize, and Chen Guangcheng’s escape. It’s one thing for an individual to be profiled in magazines, and quite another for him or her to do something that lands them on the front page or the CNN news ticker, displayed on muted televisions at airports and in gyms. And there is something about the narrative of the brave, rebellious dissident that appeals to Western audiences in a way that an inside-the-system blogger might not.

And Han Han’s writings have not been readily available in English. There’ve been plenty of translations of his blog posts, but typically only in outlets read by the China-obsessed.

Read much more by and about Han Han via CDT.

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The Committee of 100’s opinion survey project began in 1994 and produced opinion surveys in 2001, 2005, 2007, and 2012. The objective of this study is to determine American attitudes toward China, and, as a “mirror,” measure Chinese attitudes toward America on key issues in US-China relations and salient domestic issues in both countries. The target respondent groups in both countries include general public, opinion leaders and business leaders with a stand-alone sample of the US policy community.

The survey findings provide unique, comprehensive and comparative information that can be used to enhance US-China relations and formulate recommendations on how to forge mutually beneficial partnerships, including leader-to-leader, people-to-people, organization-to-organization, and many others to foster greater understanding and build trust between the United States and China.

An article in the New York Times summarizes the reports findings, and contrasts them with the Gallup-China Daily USA poll from earlier this year:

Two-thirds of Americans now see China as a serious or potential military threat to the United States. Nearly six in 10 Chinese believe their country is destined to become the world’s leading superpower, and increasing numbers of everyday Chinese believe the United States is trying to prevent them from achieving that status.

Most Americans don’t believe that U.S. media outlets report truthfully about China, and about half of Chinese feel the same way about their media. Six in 10 Americans think the U.S. government has done a poor job handling relations with China — although things have improved since 2007 — while two-thirds of Chinese think Beijing is mishandling relations with Washington.

For the general Chinese public, corruption is the No. 1 concern, followed by jobs and the economy, a growing wealth gap and the rise in housing prices. But Chinese opinion leaders worry most about a decline in morality, followed by concerns over Taiwan, while business leaders cite HIV/AIDS as their top issue.

Almost half of all global executives polled believe that the technology innovation center of the world will move from Silicon Valley to another country in the next four years according to a survey published Wednesday.

KPMG’s global Tech Innovation Survey 2012 found 43 percent of respondents said Silicon Valley’s crown would be passed elsewhere by 2016. China was named as the country most likely to be the next innovation centre (45%), followed by India (21%) and Japan (9%) and Korea (9%).

Israel came in fifth while Europe barely featured.

The survey also found that China and the U.S. are the two countries most likely to come up with “disruptive technology breakthroughs” that will have a global impact in the next two to four years.

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Months ago, in preparing for this show, we started reaching out to Americans living in China and asking for their stories. A shocking amount of the expats came back with stories about different times they were on Chinese television. So many people sent us their China TV stories that we began to wonder, “have ALL of you guys been on TV?! Is this the consummate expat experience in China?” Several expats talk to Ira about why the Chinese love foreigners on their TV shows. And Evan Osnos, a staff writer for The New Yorker who writes about China, says it’s hard for Americans living in China to figure out what to tell friends and family back home.

In this section, New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos interviews Baidu’s Director of International Communication, rock musician and “uber-expat” Kaiser Kuo:

In Act II, author Michael Meyer talks about his experiences living in rural China:

Read more about foreigners in China, via CDT.

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The 21-nation poll found that 41 percent of people said China was the world’s economic power, while 40 percent favored the U.S. Among the 14 nations that were asked the same question in 2008, the margin was wider: 45 percent placed the U.S. on top four years ago, with just 22 percent for China, but in the latest poll China was favored 42 percent to 36 percent.

The trend was especially strong in Europe: 58 percent of people in Britain saw China as the leading economy, versus just 28 percent for the United States. Even in the U.S., respondents were about evenly divided on the question. Turkey and Mexico were the only countries where more than half of people consider the United States the leading economic power.

[...] The survey also found that China’s image has grown more negative over the past year in the United States, Japan and parts of Europe.

Across the 21 nations surveyed, the median percentage with positive views of China and the United States were about the same, at 49 percent and 52 percent, respectively. But Pew noted that overall figure concealed big differences in some countries. In Japan, 72 percent saw the U.S. favorably, versus just 15 percent for China. In Pakistan, 85 percent saw China favorably while just 12 percent said the same for the United States.

Read more about global views of China, via CDT.

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Post tags: China's rise, economic growth, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, views of China
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A spokeswoman said Mr. Cook— who is on his first trip to China since becoming chief executive of the Cupertino, Calif., company— “had great meetings with Chinese officials today.”

“China is very important to us and we look forward to even greater investment and growth here,” said the spokeswoman, Carolyn Wu.

She declined to identify any of the Chinese officials or give further details about the meetings ….

Some fans commented on the Web that the executive’s appearance shows that Apple is paying more attention to China. Many Internet users noted that Apple’s previous CEO, the late Steve Jobs, was never known to have visited China.

Also visiting Beijing recently was the recipient of the 25 billionth App Store download, who in a convenient publicity windfall for Apple happened to be a resident of the strategically vital Chinese market. Fu Chunli was flown to the capital from Qingdao to receive a $10,000 iTunes gift card.

Meanwhile, controversy over various fabrications uncovered in the one-man show ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs’ has roared on. This American Life’s hour-long retraction (PDF transcript) of its earlier episode based on the monologue narrowly broke its predecessor’s download record, defying the adage that “you only need to move your lips to start a rumour, but you need to run until your legs are broken to refute one”.

The show’s creator and performer, Mike Daisey, eventually apologised to colleagues, audiences, labour rights activists and the journalists he misled, while his target, Foxconn, seized the opportunity to recast itself as the wounded but magnanimous victim. “Our corporate image has been totally ruined,” a spokesman told Reuters. “The point is whatever media that cited the program should not have reported it without confirming (with us). We have no plans to take legal action… We hope nothing similar will happen again.”

Much of the post-retraction discussion has focused on the question of whether it can ever be acceptable to lie to promote a greater truth. David Carr suggested at The New York Times that “the short answer is also the right one“:

No.

Daisey has, however, received considerable credit for bringing the labour problems to light. Michael Schreiber stated at BoingBoing that “Daisey’s performance piece came first“; Andrew Keen, who interviewed the monologist for TechCrunch TV last year, similarly suggested that Daisey was the one who had “gotten this issue on the table; it’s an important issue. And you only tell the truth by telling a few lies.”

Among Daisey’s defenders is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (who no longer plays an active role at the company). Wozniak told CNET that the ends justified Daisey’s means:

“I think his monologue has influenced Apple to take steps in that direction the best they can …. I think Mike Daisey got Apple and other companies more attuned to the issue–to do the most they can to make corrections. That’s my impression about what has happened. His method succeeded.”

The influence of Daisey’s This American Life appearance, and of his monologue in general, may be overstated. Apple’s most visible recent step towards addressing its supply chain issues was joining the Fair Labour Association, a move it announced a week after the episode aired. But FLA president Auret van Heerden told ABC last month that Apple’s membership was the product of years of negotiation, including a pair of trial projects beginning in April 2009. Apple also began conducting its own audits as long ago as 2006, and has published annual Supplier Responsibility Progress Reports since 2007. (See CDT’s coverage of the 2012 report.) While the credibility of these in-house investigations suffers from their lack of independent verifiability, they do demonstrate a record of attention to supply chain issues that long precedes Daisey’s 2010 visit to Shenzhen.

The performer has carefully cultivated the impression that his work broke new ground, playing down or disparaging coverage from other sources, portraying his visit to the Foxconn factory gates as radically innovative (“That’s not really how we usually do things in China”, one Hong Kong-based journalist supposedly told him), and suggesting that foreign correspondents in China are largely warmers-up of Xinhua reports and corporate press releases. In a post-Retraction talk at Georgetown University, for example, he attributed the 2010 Foxconn suicides’ fading from Western front pages to a Chinese Central Propaganda Department directive:

… [Y]ou can see how it died, actually really clearly. The fixer I was working with in Hong Kong sent me an email with a link to one of those memos from what they call the Ministry of Truth [possibly a reference to this post on CDT], which is the group in Beijing from the government that tells the media what it can and can’t report on, and there was a memo saying, “We’re done with these stories.”

…  So the story goes out from the Ministry of Truth and the story vanishes in the mainland. It vanishes overnight. Suddenly, no more talk about labor. It’s gone.

And as soon as it dies there, on the ground, you can actually see it, I used Google Analytics, you can actually see it die in the West. Because of course. We all have foreign bureaus over there, but not as many as we used to, right? So, if a story stops coming from the mainland, if there’s nothing there stirring us, the news cycle moves on.

Brendan Kiley described Daisey’s tone in a May 2011 review of ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy …’ in the Seattle-based Stranger:

Daisey alone knows this truth; Daisey alone has emerged from the heart of darkness of Asian industrialization to bring us the horror. In Shenzhen, he says several times, “there’s no journalism.” The “BBC fixer” who was supposed to help him out? Useless. The New York Times? It merely reprints press releases from Shenzhen boardrooms. Thank god Mike Daisey has crawled from the maw of capitalism to tell us the truth.

Except that he’s not telling us the truth. After getting home from the show, opening up my MacBook, and wiping the blood off the keyboard, I did a little Googling. In under a minute, I learned some things: The New York Times that Daisey derides as being nothing more than a mouthpiece for Shenzhen corporate interests? It’s been writing about labor abuses in the city—child labor, days-long shifts, etc.—for at least five years. The BBC has written several stories about Shenzhen, including the suicides that Daisey talks about. Looks like there’s journalism about Shenzhen after all.

Last week at All Things D, Arik Hesseldahl also dismissed the suggestion that Daisey had boldly gone where no one had gone before:

For openers, at the D8 conference in 2010, AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg asked Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs about the situation at Foxconn, in the wake of a string of suicides.

That same year — indeed, only weeks after nine suicides by Foxconn employees — Bloomberg Businessweek’s Fredrik Balfour conducted a three-hour interview with Foxconn CEO Terry Gou, and also several unsupervised interviews with Foxconn workers, for a story featured on the magazine’s cover. The Atlantic Monthly considered Foxconn in the wider context of the rise of China as a leading economic power. The BBC looked at Foxconn after the suicides. Indeed, there had been a great deal of attention paid to matters related to Apple, Foxconn and workers in China, well before the days of Daisey. Who does he feel has not been talking about this?

And at Bloomberg’s Tech Blog, co-author of the Businessweek story Tim Culpan described his own long experience of covering Foxconn, both before Daisey’s trip and afterwards, when Daisey claimed that reporting on the company was “dead”.

Now let me tell you what I’ve seen at Foxconn. I’ve covered the company as a reporter for more than a decade, since before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’s eye and just after Foxconn landed Dell as a PC customer. Then in 2010, when a series of suicides caught the world’s attention and made sure you now know who makes your iPhone, my colleague Frederik Balfour and I started looking deeper. The result was “Inside Foxconn“, a 6,000-plus-word cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek [September 13, 2010 edition]….

Less than a year later, I went back again with another colleague.

We went inside the same Longhua campus in Shenzhen, which required Foxconn’s approval, and chatted with workers. We stood outside the gates (possibly the same gates where Daisey claimed he found underage workers), with Foxconn unaware we were there. We wandered farther into the local neighborhood shopping strip, among the bubble-tea stands and food vendors, where the young workers went on dates and caught up with friends ….

On top of his longstanding complaint at their supposed dereliction of duty in covering Foxconn, Daisey explained to the Georgetown audience that it was actually journalists who introduced errors into his monologue in the first place:

It actually went literally like this: I would have an interview. I would sit down. The person was, you know, briefed ahead of time, they would have read some press release very, very quickly. We’d sit down and they would start the interview on camera or something or radio and they would say something like, “Mike Daisey, now, you’ve gone to China and you’ve done X, Y, and Z,” and they would say something that was a little hyperbolic, not quite exactly correct, and I would feel awkward about actually saying, no, no, no, don’t say that, that’s not true. Or they’d say, “You’ve gone inside of Foxconn.” And I’d be like … I didn’t go inside of Foxconn, but I was outside of Foxconn. And I would find myself not interrupting them because we’re in interview situations ….

… And the next thing you know, my director, who is very good at picking up dramatic details, saw it as a theater problem and was saying, “Well how can that not be in the show? We’ve been doing the show for forever and it’s not in the show. That should be in the show.” And then the artistic director of the theater was like, “Yes, that should be in the show.” And I thought okayyyy, and I put it in the show.

Some have claimed that, as Mike Elk put it at Reuters, Daisey managed to “emotionally connect with people in a way that more boring reporting on the subject of labor abuses in China had not.” But it is also arguable that, as Adam Minter told Time Out Shanghai, “[no] amount of consciousness raising on the part of foreigners can make a bit of difference.” Leslie Chang, whose book ‘Factory Girls‘ closely examines the lives of assembly line workers in southern China, wrote at The New Yorker that the guilt or otherwise of Western consumers is beside the point:

Across China, there are a hundred and fifty million migrant workers, a third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, restaurants, hotels, and construction sites of the cities. They represent the largest migration in human history; their experiences have changed the way they work and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to return to the way things used to be. Should you feel bad? I don’t think so. But whether you do or not is peripheral to a much larger and more important story.

An op-ed in the Global Times was one of many articles which compared Daisey’s emphasis on “raising consciousness” with the Kony 2012 campaign:

In both, the locals were stripped of agency. Daisey claimed to have met Chinese workers who have never thought about how they would change things at their factory, and who saw the iPad as “magic,” like primitive tribesmen encountering a more sophisticated world. He imagined hordes of under-aged workers, flocking to Shenzhen factories to be chewed up in the gears of the machine ….

Of course, consumer pressure can play some role in encouraging foreign-invested factories in China to improve working conditions. Apple has already agreed to be audited by the Fair Labor Association, although labor experts have grave doubts about the methodologies involved in such auditing and the practical effects it will have.

But … the pressure for major shifts on the Chinese factory floor [will] come from the workers themselves, not outsiders. Chinese workers’ confidence in striking, organizing, and voting with their feet has increased dramatically in the last few years, backed in part by a more favorable government environment. It’s the pressure of empowered locals that will force real change, not a Western audience working off imaginary savior narratives.

Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM), on whose research Daisey based some of his monologue’s less fanciful passages, also stressed the importance of local agency, arguing that Apple’s best course of action would be to help secure workers’ ability to protect their own interests:

… [O]nce the audits are over and FLA has gone home, the workers in the factories will again be left to deal, as best they can, with the brutal labour conditions that are imposed on them. Any hope that conditions for workers will improve rests not on the work of auditors, but on the ability of workers themselves to monitor whether their labour rights are being respected and to push for remedies when they are not.

If Apple is genuinely concerned about improving the labour rights of workers that manufacture its products, it must ensure that they can negotiate with their employer to bring lasting change to the way that work is performed and compensated ….

The collapse of Daisey’s credibility has nevertheless brought widespread fears of collateral damage to labour rights journalism and activism. Yang Su and Xin He, for example, warned at CNN that the episode “should not divert attention away from the very real, pressing issue of labor abuses in China.” Daisey, perhaps counterproductively, made a similar point on his blog, while denying his own responsibility for any damage to the labour rights cause:

There is nothing in this controversy that contests the facts in my work about the nature of Chinese manufacturing. Nothing. I think we all know if there was, Ira would have brought it up.

You certainly don’t need to listen to me. Read the New York Times reporting. Listen to the NPR piece that ran just last week in which workers at an iPad plant go on record saying the plant was inspected by Apple just hours before it exploded, and that the inspection lasted all of ten minutes ….

If people want to use me as an excuse to return to denialism about the state of our manufacturing, about the shape of our world, they are doing that to themselves.

Others, such as Max Fisher at The Atlantic, were more ready to hold Daisey culpable:

Now, the story isn’t Chinese labor abuses anymore. The story is Daisey’s own dishonesty, which tinges everything he touched — the made-up details as well as the truth behind them — as compromised and untrustworthy. The people who already know about Chinese labor abuses will immediately see where Daisey’s lies end and the truth begins. Those who don’t — the vast majority, who could help change the world for the better simply by expressing a preference for ethically manufactured iPads — might have a harder time figuring out where the line is. They know they were moved by Daisey’s 40-minute monologue about exploring Chinese factory towns first-hand, and they know that the monologue had to be retracted as a lie.

How receptive will they be the next time a reporter writes about how Chinese laborers are forced to stand for so long they struggle to walk, or that some workers weren’t even given gloves to handle poisonous chemicals? Will they believe the reports that say Chinese manufacturers could fix a number of these problems simply by rotating shifts or allowing workers to organize to ask for gloves, neither of which would cost them (or American consumers) anything? Will they bother to listen to the human rights NGOs who say that American consumers can help fix the problem simply by choosing to buy products that are manufactured under better conditions? Or will they think back to Mike Daisey, and wonder who else might be lying to them?

By lying, Daisey undermined the cause he purported to advance. That’s the real scandal.

There have been signs that other coverage of Chinese labour issues has already been tainted by the fallout from Daisey’s fabrications, particularly in the cases of sources which helped him spread them. At All Things D, Arik Hesseldahl wrote that “at this point, it’s hard to determine what’s more outrageous, Daisey’s lies to Ira Glass and his team, or the national media’s willingness to give Daisey a platform to repeat the same lies and fabrications without making the slightest effort to vet them.” Comments on Hesseldahl’s post suggest that investigative reports from The New York Times, which published a now-edited Daisey op-ed after Steve Jobs’ death last October, may suffer particular guilt by association:

“Are you sure Duigg’s NYT’s pieces are absolutely correct and fair? Are they one side of the picture or the whole picture? Does the NY Times have an axe to bring with Apple? Are they PO’d that Apple is asking too much for their subscriptions and won’t share user data with them? Are they using the power of the pen to strike back at a company they think is being unfair?”

“Duhigg’s reports relied in part on Daisey’s false claims.”

“You have no reason to believe that the NYT’s Duhigg’s reports have any more veracity than Daisey’s fabrications.”

No changes have been made to the reports in question, which Duhigg says were “independently sourced and independently confirmed.” (Co-author David Barboza told Adam Minter that “Daisey’s fabrications were utterly ridiculous …. I did not hear the entire show, but what I heard sounded far-fetched.”)

Beyond the realm of labour rights, the affair also threatens the credibility of Western media in China by feeding a longstanding view of its coverage as riddled with stereotypes and bias. From James Fallows at The Atlantic:

Daisey’s lying will hurt the Western press and international worker-rights groups. When they get all huffy, Chinese nationalists love to present the Western press as being irremediably biased against Chinese achievements and ambitions, and willing to pass along the most outrageous slanders about China without checking them for accuracy or even plausibility. A site called Anti-CNN is a well-known outlet for such views. This is a constant nuisance when you try to write critical assessments. Worse, it gives ammo to those inside China who want to pooh-pooh complaints about safety, pollution, working conditions, and so on. Daisey is everything they warned against, come to life.

In the LA Review of Books, Jeffrey Wasserstrom framed the danger in terms of inaccuracies in accounts of the “Tiananmen Square Massacre”: the location and manner of the deaths, and the disproportionate focus on students among the victims.

… [G]etting the details wrong has made it easier than it should have been for the Chinese authorities to defend their ridiculous Big Lie that no massacre at all had taken place. To support this notion, they insist that the Western press is hopelessly biased against China’s leaders and is willing to take liberties with the facts to make the Communist Party look bad. It helps their cause to be able to point to specific instances in which Western newspapers say things took place that clearly did not occur.

Returning to L’Affaire Daisey, we find very different situation, but one in which some similar issues resurface. Once again, as Fallows notes, getting things wrong makes it easier than it should be for the Chinese authorities to assert that the Western media will make up things at will in order to cast China in the harshest possible light.

Sure enough, this line was pursued in an opinion piece in People’s Daily, which quoted Liu Chang of the Communication University of China:

The report on the Foxconn Group made by the U.S. National Public Radio’s program “This American Life” is not an individual case, and in the current ever-changing ecological media environment, untrue reports of this kind, which involve ethics and morals of media, are increasing ….

International reports of Western media are usually interested in bad news, especially bad news of the countries with different political systems from theirs. The U.S. media’s mistaken reports on China are not technical mistakes completely caused by such things as hasting for efficiency or “not understanding China enough.”

Much coverage from the journalistic side focused on the special circumstances involved in news gathering in China. Jeffrey Wasserstrom pointed back to his 2010 Huffington Post interview with Rob Schmitz, the journalist who unmasked Daisey. Schmitz said that working in China had forced him to become a more diligent reporter:

On the surface, China is a journalist’s playground: It’s changing at an historic pace, it’s home to the largest human migration the world has ever known, and its fate has become intertwined with the world’s fate. The trick is to make sense of all this. China forces you to become a better reporter–you’re constantly having to check your facts, because what you thought were facts oftentimes weren’t facts to start with.

But others suggested that reporting from China could also lead journalists astray. As veteran broadcast journalist Ted Koppel told Foreign Policy’s Isaac Stone Fish, referring specifically to Daisey:

The temptation to makes things up becomes even greater when you’re in a setting like China, where you don’t have ready access to as many sources as you do in the United States. There’s probably not a foreign correspondent alive who hasn’t had a conversation with a taxi driver from the airport to the hotel and then incorporated what the taxi driver told him under the general rubric of ‘local sources,’ here in fill-in the blank. It’s fair game if you make it clear in your story what you’re doing. I think that happens more often in a dictatorship, where it’s hard to get people to talk, and you’re going to make the most of what little contact you have with the population.

Koppel’s comments recall a Bagehot column from The Economist, written in response to the downfall last year of British journalist Johann Hari.

One of the things you find out fast as a foreign correspondent, especially reporting from the developing world, is that there is very little to stop you making things up, except your own conscience. Out in a Chinese field, interviewing a peasant who has had his land stolen, or out in an Afghan refugee camp speaking to victims of Taliban brutality, it soon becomes obvious that if you embellish and improve quotes, nobody is going to find out. Chinese peasants and Afghan refugees are not going to read your work, and are not going to shop you to your editors.

I know some foreign correspondents who have gone down that route, and have had priggish arguments with some of them. Plagiarists, liars, make-it-up merchants, they all exist …. The foreign correspondent who wrote a vivid portrayal of an Asian dog meat restaurant, complete with descriptions of brutal dog-killing, callous chefs and hungry punters, without actually visiting the country in question, and who—when I challenged him–told me “oh that, it was a bit of imagineering”. The gentler souls who use foreign languages to cut corners. (I once knew a correspondent with the amazing gift of diving into a Chinese crowd and coming out, 30 seconds later, with the perfect quote, despite pretty limited Mandarin. I never had the heart to say: great quote, now tell me how you say that in Chinese.)

But Evan Osnos suggested at The New Yorker that the perception of China as unfathomably remote was outdated, and was the very thing that had led Daisey to overreach.

Part of Daisey’s conceit was that he presented himself as a clear-eyed naïf: he would show up at the factory gate in a Hawaiian shirt (that part was true, by the way) and ask people simple questions that exposed uncomfortable truths. But, in a curious way, Daisey’s undoing was that he turned out to be naïve in a way that he didn’t understand. He thought that China was so exotic and far away that it was uncheckable; that it was okay to take “a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” as he put it in his follow-up interview. (That’s a cliché too, of course, borrowed from every fabulist since Janet Cooke.)

But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all.

See also:
- discussion of L’affaire Daisey by a Sinica podcast panel including Rob Schmitz himself
- Nieman Journalism Lab’s summary of the disussion
- Wired.com’s description of the slightly modified penultimate performance at The Public Theatre
- defences of Daisey from other venues with scheduled performances collected at The Understatement
- some more varied responses from the theatrical world at The Wall Street Journal, and
- a strong reaction from Alli Houseworth, who worked as marketing and communications director at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre during Daisey’s 2011 run there, and now urges a boycott of his show. (Houseworth also commented on Twitter, “Sad that many DMd, emailed & called me saying they wish they could share their similar opinions but r scared of professional repercussions”.)

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At his Harvard base last week, he discussed a resurgent Chinese nationalism that “is almost intimidating in its intensity” as the world undergoes a shift of financial and political power from West to East.

It was a strain that he first identified from the reaction of his own Chinese students to US coverage of the Tibet protests. “They were very hostile to the criticism of the Chinese government.

“The key insight for me is that rather than pro-democracy feelings increasing as China grows economically, it is a radical, shrill nationalism that is emerging.”

But it isn’t just the young. For the new three-part series, he also found among older Chinese a growing “Maostalgia”, a nostalgia for the era of Mao Tse-tung. In Western eyes, Chairman Mao is strongly associated with the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, but for many Chinese, he is the father of a modern, booming nation.

See a video of Ferguson discussing the concept of Chimerica:

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: China's rise, nationalism, niall ferguson, views of China
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The resolution passed Thursday night, by unanimous consent, “cannot undo the hurt caused by past discrimination against Chinese immigrants, but it is important that we acknowledge the wrongs that were committed many years ago,” said Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), the lead sponsor.

Judy Chu A similar resolution, sponsored by Rep. Judy Chu (D-El Monte), the first Chinese American woman elected to Congress, is pending in the House. It is backed by members of both parties.

For Chu, the effort to get Congress to acknowledge the discrimination is personal; her grandfather faced the hostile laws.

“He decided to make something of his life anyway. He opened up a small Chinese restaurant in Watts, and worked day and night and he was finally able to make ends meet,” Chu said Friday. “The thousands of Chinese Americans around this country with similar family histories will celebrate the passage of the Senate resolution.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act effectively halted Chinese immigration for a decade and denied U.S. citizenship to Chinese immigrants in the country. The law was repealed in 1943 after China became a U.S. ally in World War II.

Read the full text and more information about the bill, and more background about the Chinese Exclusion Act.

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Post tags: emigrants, U.S. immigration, u.s. senate, views of China
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Despite Kuhn’s claim to the contrary, the CPC has made and is making a number of serious mistakes:

First, the CPC’s most disastrous policy blunder has been its one-child policy, introduced in 1979 and continued throughout the reform era. The one-child policy has clashed with the wishes of the Chinese people. It has been enforced by an intrusive neighborhood surveillance network and by brutal forced abortions, even in late term. In addition to traumatizing many Chinese families, the one-child policy has left China with an aging population and a shrinking labor force. Many Chinese men do not have the opportunity to marry and have children as a consequence of the skewed male-female balance.

Second, the CPC’s current policy of “the state advances, the private sector retreats” strikes at the heart of Chinese growth, which is private enterprise. “State advances, private sector retreats” disadvantages private enterprise in a number of ways and lavishes credit, subsidies and favorable regulations on state-owned enterprises. But it is private enterprises that produce high rates of return despite their many disadvantages. State-owned enterprises earn low or even negative rates of return on bank credit, credit allocated according to political connections. “State advances, private sector retreats,” if seriously implemented, will kill the goose that lays the golden egg of rapid Chinese growth.

Third, the first Chinese reforms were not instituted by the CPC. In fact, during the early stages of decollectivization and creating private trade, the CPC actively opposed reform. In a surprising admission, Kuhn himself admits that reform “has often begun at the grassroots levels and put into ‘gray” practice’, and “it was only after the reform had been working did the CPC leadership recognize the reform’s success and make it official policy.” So the very reform that Kuhn credits to wise CPC leaders emerged from grassroots economic democracy and was opposed until the CPC leadership reluctantly recognized its value.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: external propaganda, political reform, views of China
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For five nights, July 11-15, 2011, Tavis brings you stories from the People’s Republic of China. Taped in Beijing and Shanghai, the series examines the growing superpower’s economic boom and its challenges, including the complexity of U.S.-China relations. The series will feature the following:

Mon. 7/11 – A report on Chinese innovation, technology and the economic boom
Tues. 7/12 – An examination of China’s challenges, including pollution and poverty
Wed. 7/13 – A conversation with Andrew Ballen, an expat who’s bringing hip-hop to China
Thurs. 7/14 – A look at 101 Middle School, one of China’s top schools
Fri. 7/15 – A wide-ranging panel discussion with four prominent Chinese-Americans

Other topics covered include the influence of African-American culture on Chinese youth, hip-hop in China, and women in China.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Hip-hop, special reports, views of China
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London’s black cabs are made by Manganese Bronze, which is part-owned by Geely, a Shanghai-based carmaker that also owns Volvo, a Swedish company. China Investment Corporation (CIC), a sovereign-wealth fund, has the third-largest stake in Songbird Estates, which controls Canary Wharf Group, the property firm behind the towers that dominate the city’s eastern skyline. CIC may soon become an investor in the Citigroup building, another landmark skyscraper, which is for sale.

The Bank of England is not yet Chinese-owned but it is increasingly encircled by Chinese banks, which have bought or leased about 300,000 square feet (28,000 square metres) of office space since the financial crisis. Bank of China, which has been in London since 1929, has recently moved into plush new headquarters that overlook the central bank. Down the road, in King William Street, the builders are at work inside the future home of ICBC, another state-owned giant.

Such visible signs of Chinese encroachment will feed the worries of many Europeans. A poll conducted for the BBC World Service in March found rising concern about the eastward shift in economic power: a majority of Germans, Italians and French people view China’s rise negatively (see chart 1). Americans and Canadians feel similarly. These proportions have gone up since a similar survey in 2005.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: EU trade, Europe, europe china's rise, soft power, views of China
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A sepia-tone image of a street in Opium War-era Peking looks dusty and motionless like an Old West boomtown after a shootout. Guangzhou, not yet a global center for manufacturing, still appears courtly. Seeing one of the images in the Getty Center’s “Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China,” you have no doubt that life was more mundane for the people in the frame, but at the same time it’s hard to believe we would have anything in common with them. The show, which closes May 1, draws from the Museum’s large collection of Felice Beato photographs, supplemented by numerous Chinese artists who had just gained access to cameras. Many of the images are by now unknown photographers, which, despite their clear historical value, makes them seem even less real.

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Post tags: history, photography, views of China
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Like thick weeds, thirty years of societal quandary and dilemma have been concealed by the optimism of high-speed economic development. My work at this time is going in exactly the opposite direction. Starting with today’s apparently glorious results, I will go in search of that which might make some feel uneasy.

This time I hope I’m able to abbreviate contemporary China’s endless chatter into 10 simple words. I hope this narration, which will surpass time and space, can blend rational analysis, emotional experience and intimate stories into one. I hope my diligent work can, from within contemporary China’s earthshaking changes and tumultuous and complex society, open a clear and genuine road of narration.

The people
Each and every one encounters many words in their lives. There are some words that are understood the first time we set eyes on them. And there are some words we interact with our whole lives but still never understand. The word “the people” is this kind of problem.

Leaders
Leaders consider the future in the light of the past. I feel today’s China is already void of national leaders, and only has heads of state.
Reading
With every reading of one of those great works, I am carried away by them … Only after returning do I know that they are already a part of me.

Writing
Writing is like an experience. If one experiences nothing, they cannot understand their own life. By the same token, if one doesn’t write, they cannot know what they are capable of writing.

Lu Xun
Lu Xun’s fate in China went from the fate of an author to the fate of a word. And again, from the fate of a word, back to the fate of an author. From him radiated the fate of China as well. The changes in Chinese history, the turmoil of society, can be seen within the name “Lu Xun,” like finding the coming autumn in the colors of a single leaf.

Disparity
The disparity of today’s China, one could say, is a great disparity. It seems we exist within such a reality where the great pleasures of life flow at once like wine, while the walls of society crumble in ruin. Or it could be said that we exist in a bizarre theater in which a comedy plays on one half of the stage, a tragedy on the other … This is today’s China. Not only do we exist between the great disparity of reality and history, but between that of reality and dream.

Revolution
What is revolution? In my memories of days past, there is varying opinion on the answer. Revolution pervades lives with the unknown. Between dawn and dusk, a destiny can be split in two. In an instant, one is launched into their prime, while another falls into oblivion. Personal relationships – the buttoning of society – are also in a revolution of fasten and release. Today’s brothers in revolution are distant; tomorrow they may be class enemies.

Grassroots
Since the grassroots Opening and Reform, the Chinese legal system has gradually grown sound. Yet many loopholes exist within law and regulation, granting the grassroots players large quantities of backdoor opportunism. So any humanly possible miracle can be pulled from the sleeves of the grassroots reformers.

Mountain Stronghold
One could say the Chinese societal climate is grotesquely fantastic. Magnificence and unsightliness, advancement and backwardness, austerity and dissipation often exist within a single entity. The mountain fortress phenomenon is precisely like this, demonstrating society’s progress, and its retreat.

Hoodwink
The rapid popularization of the word hoodwink is similar to mountain fortress. In the same respect, it illustrates the ethical insufficiencies and chaotic values of contemporary Chinese society. It is the aftermath of 30 years of lopsided development. What’s more, the prevalence of the hoodwinking phenomena in regards to our society is greater than that of the mountain fortress phenomena. When hoodwinking dominates the playing field, we are living in a society which takes nothing to heart or, in other words, a society unyielding to principle.

Vagueness and distance has always existed in the foreigner’s written criticism of China. But only those who have really lived on Chinese soil can produce an earnest description of the Chinese people’s thoughts and feelings. Just as Yu Hua said: “As I recorded China’s pain in this book, so did I record my own pain. Because it is China’s pain, so it is also my personal pain.”

© Don Weinland for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: literature, views of China, writers, yu hua
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I have come up with a dozen that seem particularly worth reading — or re-reading if you caught them the first time around — and then thrown in bonus “track,” published on the first day of 2011, to bring the total up to a baker’s dozen. This is not meant to be a “best China writing of 2010″ list, but more like a non-musical equivalent to an old-fashioned mix tape. The goal is to present an appealingly diverse set of readings that between them provide a window onto some of the main new Chinese developments, recurring Chinese phenomena, and China-related controversies of the year.

One of my main criteria for selection is that each piece continues to have some relevance at the start of 2011 (something I’ll highlight when introducing some of the links). Another is that it is available full-text free online (as of this writing at least). A third is that it each be written in English, since my aim is to provide Anglophone readers with an efficient and illuminating way to keep up with how China changed in 2010, though the value of some of the pieces chosen is obviously at least in part the window they open up onto Chinese language writers, publications, or debates.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2010, coverage, views of China
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- “China Is Communist in Name Only.”
- “The Party Controls All Aspects of Life in China.”
- “The Internet Will Topple the Party.”
- “Other Countries Want to Follow the China Model.”
- “The Party Can’t Rule Forever.”

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CCP, communism, leadership, views of China
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