Beijing keeps its film industry on a tight leash. Blockbusters like Aftershock are fine—if they tow the party’s airbrushed line.

With a star system in place, multiplexes springing up all over the country and domestically-made blockbusters on the screens, you’d be forgiven for thinking China’s contemporary film industry is an unambiguously commercial affair. But like so much else here, the hand of the state casts a shadow over the neon glare of conspicuous consumption.

Yet China’s Communist Party finds itself in a bind. Although it still views cinema as an ideological tool and maintains a tight leash on local productions, it also wants the domestic film industry to develop into a global commercial player.

So how can filmmakers navigate the apparently contradictory pressures of commercial success and politics, especially when the ideological position they’re expected to reflect is far from clear? One good guide could be in China’s most recent blockbuster—a homegrown movie that smashed box office records.

© Xiao Qiang for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: propaganda
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The booming Chinese clean energy sector, now more than a million jobs strong, is quickly coming to dominate the production of technologies essential to slowing global warming and other forms of air pollution. Such technologies are needed to assure adequate energy as the world’s population grows by nearly a third, to nine billion people by the middle of the century, while oil and coal reserves dwindle.

But much of China’s clean energy success lies in aggressive government policies that help this crucial export industry in ways most other governments do not. These measures risk breaking international rules to which China and almost all other nations subscribe, according to some trade experts interviewed by The New York Times.

A visit to one of Changsha’s newest success stories offers an example of the government’s methods. Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics, a two-year-old company, makes solar panels and ships close to 95 percent of them to Europe. Now it is opening sales offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in preparation for a push into the American market next February.

To help Sunzone, the municipal government transferred to the company 22 acres of valuable urban land close to downtown at a bargain-basement price. That reduced the company’s costs and greatly increased its worth and attractiveness to investors.

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Post tags: Changsha, global warming, green tech, sustainable development
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As historians have only begun to detail, Mao Zedong’s economic policies from 1958 to 1962 subjected his people to what we know now was the world’s most devastating famine. “The death toll stands at a minimum of forty-five million excess deaths,” according to Frank Dikötter, of the University of Hong Kong, author of “Mao’s Great Famine,” which uses newly opened archives and original interviews to detail the calamity in calm, if unavoidably grisly, detail. (Out in the U.K., scheduled for the U.S. later this month.)

Among the stories of cannibalism and people eating mud, there is also the grand narrative: Why? The answer lies in Mao’s misguided ambition to overtake Britain in the output of iron, steel, and other products in just fifteen years, which triggered a political mania of coercion and deprivation, as people struggled to fulfill unachievable goals. I have often marvelled at the scale of the catastrophe not only because of what it reminds us about the perils of demagoguery, but also for how recent it all was. The vividness of that memory—the sheer determination of today’s Chinese adults to leave behind the deprivation of their parents and grandparents—is an extraordinarily powerful engine, and it helps us understand the drive behind China’s headlong rush into the age of consumption.

Which leads us to the other notable book of the moment: “Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines Are Changing a Nation.”

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Post tags: book reviews, famine, great leap forward, obesity
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In the beauty salon, Liuzhou, Guangxi, by Expatriate Games

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The band is called ‘P.K. 14′, and its music has been called post-punk. But its lead singer says he’s been influenced by everything from Bob Dylan and Motown to the Beat Generation and French existentialism. Mary Kay Magistad reports from Beijing.

Watch a P.K. 14 video:

And read more about the band via CDT.

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Post tags: PK14, punk, rock music, youth culture
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Chen Guangcheng is a charismatic, inspirational figure for civil liberties lawyers who have fought to enforce the rights that are enshrined in China’s Constitution but often breached by the authoritarian government and police. Chen’s harassment and then imprisonment in 2006 after documenting forced abortions around his hometown marked the start of a government crackdown on activist lawyers.

Chen, 39, is scheduled to be freed Thursday from the Linyi City prison, said his wife, who planned to take their two young children and brother to meet him. With a lack of information from prison authorities and high security around their home, she said, it was difficult to plan a homecoming.

“If we don’t even have freedom, then there’s no way to make any kind of plans. We’ll just see how his health is doing. That’s all,” Yuan Weijing said in a terse telephone interview, noting that her conversations were being monitored.

Read more about Chen Guangcheng via CDT.

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Post tags: Chen Guangcheng, defending rights, political prisoners
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Two oil workers are missing and more than 30 have been rescued from a rig off China’s north-east coast, which was damaged in a storm, state media says.

Helicopters and rescue boats are searching for two people who fell from the platform, which is listing at a 45-degree angle in the Shengli oil field.

The oil field, operated by Sinopec, is the second-largest in China.

Sinopec said no oil has been spilled, and said powerful waves generated by Typhoon Malou were the likely cause.

Rescue workers in helicopters saved 34 people from the rig about five nautical miles (9km) off Dongying in Shandong province, China’s transport ministry said.

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Mud houses in China’s powerhouse – The story of Ou

Guangdong province has the highest GDP and the highest industrial output of all of China’s administrative divisions. It also has among the highest per capita GDP in the country, thanks to all those Shenzhen billionaires. Less known, maybe, is how many mud houses there still are in Guangdong.

Take the village of Ou (欧村) for example. It’s a settlement of about 300 people on the outskirts of HuaiCheng, the county government seat for Huai Ji (怀集) county in west Guangdong, the most populated county in the province, and perhaps the entire country, with almost a million residents. Two hundred thousand of them, according to the local government, left the area in search for jobs in other parts of the province. For more than 30 years, Ou Yong was one of them.

Ou is 58 and the father of a 12-year-old girl. He went to Guangzhou in 1977 as a young farmer looking to make a better living. He ended up spending most of the next 30 years in coastal cities, watching the fishing village of Shenzhen becoming a megalopolis, building residential compounds in Zhuhai, sweeping a factory floor in Dongguan, drifting from one low-paying job to another and supporting the family back in the village.

Some people got wealthy this way and moved to the cities they helped build. Others got comfortable, bought an apartment in town, or built a new house in the village. Yet others, like Ou Yong, stayed where they were, which in fast-moving Guangdong means staying way behind. Decades of labor brought him no farther than his old home – a mud house to which he added another room made of bricks. This room the family turned into a small workshop where Ou’s wife, Chen Guiyin, 40, weaves bamboo baskets that she sells for 15 Yuan each in the local market. If she works very fast she produces one basket a day. Ou stays home now and takes care of the family’s only other source of income – one Mu of land on which they plant rice.

“The most important thing is that our girl will study hard and go to high school” Chen says. “We have no education which is why we have to work so hard”. (Chen only speaks the local dialect. Her daughter acts as translator.) The girl’s elementary school fee is only 25 Yuan per term, but that will go much higher next year, when she’ll start middle school in town. This is why Chen stays awake at night in her mud house, making more baskets. Education is the most important thing.

Education has probably improved much since Ou’s days in school but the next generation is still going to Shenzhen en masse. Ou’s nephew, Ou Shenfei, came home at the end of last year after being laid-off from a shoe factory in Zhuhai. He stayed ever since, doing odd jobs in town, and taking care of the family’s rice plot and his newborn baby girl. The girl is now nine months old, the economy is getting better, he heard, and Shenfei is getting ready to go east and south again to look for a new job. “The most important thing is to earn enough to give her a good education,” he says, repeating Chen’s words, pointing at the baby. In Zhuhai, he bought some books, hoping to give them to his daughter so she can learn English and standard Mandarin. One of the books is a TOEFL exam preparation book: Ou himself doesn’t read English and wasn’t very aware of what kind of books are appropriate for young children, since Zhuhai factories don’t often provide courses in child developmental psychology or early childhood education. He only knows this: The child will go to school and he’ll do just about anything to give her the best education he can get. Maybe for her generation, this will finally prove enough.

*Rachel’s self-introduction:

I came to China for three months, with a plan to see a bit of Tibet and Sichuan and to get a taste of rural life in this country before I settled down back home with a job at a law firm. Nearly eight years later, I am still in China, and still as fascinated with its rural areas.

After working as a correspondent in Beijing for two years, in July 2010 I have embarked on what I hope will be a six month journey through the Chinese countryside — listening, watching and telling stories from farmers’ lives. Much has been and is still being written about the “Chinese miracle” (or dystopia, depends on your point of view) and this will only be my added two cents. China, it is often said, has more than 400 million Internet users and hundreds of millions of new urban residents, who are changing the face of the country. It is less often noted that China also has another billion people who have not yet been fully included in these new economic and social changes. The following, if you will, are some fragments from the story of the other billion.

My personal blog is Bendilaowai.

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Post tags: education, Guangdong, other billion, poverty, rural education
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Two White House officials — Lawrence H. Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, and Thomas E. Donilon, the deputy national security adviser — held meetings in Beijing on Monday and Tuesday that were aimed not at fashioning new pacts, but at maintaining a dialogue that had been strained at times in recent months.

“Strategic trust is the basis of China-U.S. cooperation,” said Dai Bingguo, a Chinese state councilor who met with them, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao told the two Americans that China and the United States should not view themselves as rivals, according to the Chinese state news media.

American and Chinese officials have been trying to lay the groundwork for a state visit to the United States this winter by President Hu Jintao, and for the resumption of contacts between the two countries’ militaries. China suspended military contacts last winter to protest a White House decision to proceed with arms sales to Taiwan. Beijing officials regard Taiwan as a renegade province.

But Chinese officials were quick to dash any hopes that a thaw in Chinese-American relations would lead to appreciation of China’s currency, the renminbi. After strengthening on Monday on the hope that the talks in Beijing might produce a breakthrough, the currency’s value retreated in offshore futures trading on Tuesday after Jiang Yu, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman in Beijing, said, “Our exchange rate reform can’t be pressed ahead under external pressure.”

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An outdoor market in Zhongdian, Yunnan, by Matteo Miavaldi

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