In an effort to cash in on the Olympics, a flurry of books has been published recently on the topic of Beijing. These include several histories of the city, such as Geremie Barme's _The Forbidden City_ and Lillian Li et al, Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City as well as books by Stephen Haw and Jasper Becker, all of which have come out in the past year or so. It seems that everyone is rushing to the publisher to get their Beijing book out before the Olympics hit in an effort to boost sales. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does have the potential pitfall of creating a bunch of hastily written thinkpieces. I haven’t read any of these books so I’m not qualified to say whether or not this is true of those authors I’ve listed above. However, while perusing the shelves of Garden Books in Shanghai, I did recently bump into Michael Dutton’s book, Beijing Time, which also fits into this category of ‘get the damn thing out in time for the big games’. Published by Harvard in 2008, _Beijing Time _ is a study of the contemporary city with references to both its imperial and Maoist legacy. The book waxes philosophical in places--the title should be a dead giveaway--about what photographer Greg Girard has called the “hard flow of time” through the city. Girard was talking about Shanghai, but the term is equally applicable to the national capital, which has seen many great upheavals over the ages, not least of which are the upcoming Olympics. I first visited Beijing in 1988, when the city and country were just emerging from the revolutionary days of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. There was only one KFC, bicycles were everywhere, and cars almost non-existent. I lived in Beijing in 1996, when the city’s hedonistic side was beginning to come out, and Sanlitunr was beginning to earn its reputation. I lived there again in 2007, as the city rushed to finish its vast infrastructural preparations for August 8 ‘08, and cars and their exhaust pipes were now literally choking the ring roads. While not an expert in the city’s history, I have taught courses on the subject, and I do feel that my experience in Beijing, some of which has been recorded on this blogsite, qualifies me to make some personal judgments about Dutton’s take on the city. First, let me tell you about the good things about this book and why you should read it. It’s very engaging and thought-provoking. Dutton is obviously writing for a broad audience, though he does make liberal assumptions about the reader’s background knowledge, and passing references to historical and contemporary Chinese society abound. China experts will find themselves on familiar ground. Those without a background in Chinese history, society, and culture may be lost in places, but probably will be curious to learn more. Dutton’s writing style is full of sardonic wit. He’s not afraid to poke fun at just about anybody and anything, from Mao’s bloated body “rotting” in his mausoleum, to the “con artists” at Panjiayuan or 798 who make a living by exploiting foreigners’ endless fascination with Maoist revolutionary kitsch. Overall the book does a good job of providing the reader with a feel for the “hard flow of time” through the national capital. We learn how and why the “Ten Great Building Projects” were undertaken in record time during the 1950s, and how Mao succeeded in pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes by completely rebuilding Tiananmen Gate where his portrait famously rests without anyone but the workers who did the job in the know. How thousands of workers kept this secret from the Chinese people for 30 years is anyone’s guess, but Dutton chalks it up to revolutionary fervor and the peoples’ undying love for their fearless helmsman.In one of the best parts of the book, Dutton takes us on a tour of an old Hutong neighborhood to talk about one of his favorite subjects—local neighborhood security. Dutton was one of the first researchers from abroad to dig deep into this sensitive topic of local policing. Last year one of my Dartmouth student groups researched the topic of policing in Beijing and found that it was extremely difficult to get any information about the subject, and that the local police were unwilling to provide much if any assistance, so even today this is no mean feat. The rest of the book covers themes of waste and recycling. Dutton takes the reader to Bajiacun, a recycling center where the waste of contemporary capitalist society is continually put to other uses by a team of indigent migrants working round the clock sorting through vast stinking piles of rubbish. He then does the same for Panjiayuan, the famous antique market in the southern part of town, where flashlight-wielding connoisseurs poke through piles of detritus to find nuggets of gold. Most of the things for sale there are fake antiques and Maoist kitsch, but occasionally a real antique is mixed into the pile without the seller knowing, or so goes the urban myth. People will also spend countless hours sifting through discarded books and letters to find precious artifacts, such as rare photographs or letters by famous authors. The power of both of these recycling centers to connect imperial-revolutionary past to capitalist-commercial present and their metaphorical meaning for the city itself are not lost on Dutton, who makes numerous references to Walter Benjamin and his theory of the ragpicker.Another form of recycling comes in the way of the dakou or “sawgash” CD. In the ‘90s, these reject CDs from the West began pouring into the city and country by the thousands. Selling them on the black market was a great way to make money, and inadvertently introduced Beijingers to music they never would have encountered otherwise. I recall how jazz musicians in Beijing in the mid-90s learned a lot of their music by collecting dakou CDs of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and so forth. The same was true for other styles of music, including rock. Today the dakous are still around if you look hard, but most people prefer to download music from the internet.Finally, Dutton takes us to 798, once a munitions factory on the eastern edge of town, now a set of galleries featuring the latest Chinese contemporary art. Again, the theme of recycling is apparent here. First there is the re-use of the space, which had fallen into neglect after the Mao years, and eventually found a new purpose as a showcase for art. Second we have the recycling of Maoist iconography into a form of commercial capitalism through the work of Chinese artists. This has been going on since the ‘80s when artists first learned to cut and paste Mao icons onto incongruous backgrounds. The recipe is simple: take a Mao, add a Coke, Pepsi, KFC, or MacDonalds sign in the background, and voila, avant-garde art! Nobody takes this stuff seriously anymore, but it can still be found all over Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere.Here is one place where I find that the research of Dutton and his Chinese assistants falls short, or as the Chinese like to say, you dai jia qiang. To be sure, 798 is no longer the progressive art studio complex that it was a few years ago; it has upscaled into a posh gallery district with plenty of Western-style cafes and restaurants. But there is a lot more to the scene there than Maoist kitsch, and one can still find representative examples of some of the best art in China and abroad if one knows where to search. The Long March Art Gallery, Contemporary China, and many other galleries do a wonderful job of presenting great Chinese art, most of which has nothing to do with Maoist kitschography. So in this sense I believe that the book mis-represents the art world of 798, and of contemporary China. I have similar reservations about other parts of the book. In his effort to criticize the capitalist development of the city, Dutton overlooks some of the positive aspects of commercialization. In his chapter on Jiaodaokou, he decries the “disneyfication” of some of the old hutong neighborhoods, mentioning that of Nanluoguxiang, which in recent times has sprouted a number of boutique stores, cafes, and bars out of the original homes. Fair enough, but one should also keep in mind that this sort of commercialization is one of the only ways that these neighborhoods can be preserved. As is made clear in the book and everyone who knows Beijing already understands well, the hutong neighborhoods, which more than any other feature of the city defined everyday life for centuries, are being relentlessly destroyed (chai) to make way for the new high-rises and department stores. If made commercially viable, some of these neighborhoods might be preserved into the unknown future, and that can’t be too bad a thing.I also found the section on dakou CDs and the punk rock scene very superficial. The dakou phenom is definitely worth mentioning in a paragraph or so, but spending a few pages on it seemed overkill to me, especially since dakou have lost their cache since around 2000 when China discovered mp3s. Dutton spends some time talking about Cui Jian, but mislabels him as a “punk rocker.” Disappointingly, he doesn’t mention any other Beijing band by name. What about Brain Failure, the New Pants, re-TROS, SUBS, or any other of the numerous great bands that have emerged since the late ‘90s? In his zeal for recycled products (aka dakou), Dutton takes us into the student enclave of Wudaokou, but his description of this area is thoroughly disappointing. I kept expecting to see D22 or Propaganda crop up in the analysis, but it seems the author and his research assistants have no interest in checking out any of the bars and clubs that they so callously dismiss as part of the hipster commercialization of the city, although we are treated to a nauseating round of karaoke in a section that could describe any city or town in East Asia in the past two decades. Moreover, the book claims that Houhai is the big hip nightlife district of the city. Nothing could be further from the truth. Houhai may fool the tourists, but any clubber in the city knows that Chaoyang West Gate and Sanlitunr are the places to be. This gets back to my original critique, which is that too many people are pumping out fast products in an effort to cash in on the Olympics. I’m sure we’ll see a similar thing happen with the Shanghai Expo in 2010. Clearly this book had a deadline and the author rushed to meet it. Deeper analyses of many of the phenomena covered so cursorily in this book can be found in other books, such as Wu Hung’s masterful and wonderfully candid study of Beijing, which is referenced in Dutton’s book, or Madeleine Yue Dong’s treatment of the theme of recycling in her book on Republican Beijing. There are also plenty of studies on Beijing’s art world, and many good studies of the rock and punk scene though surprisingly little after the 1990s, which may help explain my criticism of Dutton's treatment of this scene.That said, this book was obviously never meant to be an original work of scholarship, but rather a broad, thoughtful, and approachable sketch of the city for a wide readership. In that respect I think it succeeds, and the author should be commended for getting it out in time for the big games. ...full story at Shanghai Journal
from Shanghai Journal on Sun, Jun 29 2008
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What Happens Next? China's Role on the World Stage »
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Freedom, Beijing Style » Shanghai Journal One of my projects while in Beijing is to research and experience the city’s notorious “underground” live music scene. The scene is not that underground really--for several years now clubs have been operating in the open, featuring... |
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A Chinese Rock Odyssey: On tour in Hunan and Wuhan with Beijing punk band SUBS and Veteran Rocker Cui Jian » Shanghai Journal Above: Cui Jian exhorting the crowd in Hunan to kick loose and boogieAn epic weekend. Two cities, Changsha which I’d never been to and Wuhan which I hadn’t visited in 20 years. Three rock bands and a “concert on the sand”... |
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Writer in the spotlight: Alan Weisman » China Dialogue Envisioning a post-human planet healing itself, The World Without Us is “an experiment in thinking”. Its author tells Kate Cheney Davidson how the book evolved – and hails a “courageous” China.Alan Weisman’s environmental reporting has taken him to the farthest corners of the earth. From Amazon rainforests to the Korean demilitarized zone to New York City’s vast underground rail system, the American journalist has gone in search of places where humans have had their greatest, and their least, impact on the natural world. In his latest book, The World Without Us, Weisman travels to where no one has gone before – to an imagined time when the earth, suddenly rid of humankind, begins to heal itself. The bestseller, which has now been translated into 30 languages, including Chinese, has been called one of the most provocative “thought experiments” of our time. chinadialogue’s Kate Cheney Davidson caught up with Weisman to talk about the genesis of The World Without Us and what it says ultimately about our human condition. Kate Cheney Davidson: Why this book and why now? Alan Weisman: I got a call from a Discover magazine editor in July of 2003. She wanted me to explore the idea of what would happen if we just left, you know, like now. Tomorrow, we’re all gone. Would nature bounce back without us there anymore? Once I got beyond the theoretical possibility, then I realised that this could provide us a really fresh perspective on the world. It would be a new way of looking at things from the other direction rather than worrying about how we can undo everything. KCD: So the magazine article obviously evolved into a book-length project. How did you know that people would be interested in a book that is largely not even about them? AW: The initial reaction from people when I told them I was working on a book about what the earth would look like without people was, “God, wouldn’t that be great?!” That was really interesting to me. It made me wonder what was going on here. Do we all miss the Garden of Eden on some level? Is this just some fantasy we have? Or is there really something to it? Suddenly I realised that what I had here was something so fascinating on lots of levels, but also there’s something in us that just loves to watch things break down. KCD: Why do you think that is? AW: I think there might be a few different mechanisms operating at once. Part of it is this animal inside of our nature in which we miss a beautiful, natural world that isn’t cluttered with all this stuff, and we kind of take great glee in watching nature eat it all up. There’s a novel by AM Homes called Music for Torching. At the very beginning of the book, you meet this totally stressed-out suburban family and they accidentally do something that could set the house on fire, something that they could have easily put out. But then they just sort of look at each other, and despite the fact that they are in the midst of this seething argument, they look at each other and look at the flames and they sort of smile and walk away. As if to say, ah, just let it go. I’ve had people say similar things to me about my book, especially the chapter about how the walls of your house, or the walls around our entire culture like the city of New York would fall apart without us there to hold them up. Lots of people said to me that they had so much fun reading that chapter. KCD: How has the experience of writing this book made you think differently about things like global warming? AW: I think about global warming in the same way. Climate change is always occurring on earth, but this one [the change since the Industrial Revolution] is pretty clearly traceable to our activities because it’s easily documented how much carbon we’ve thrown into the atmosphere and the correlation between rising temperatures and the amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases that we have created. As a kid, I was fascinated by paleontology and I’m okay with the earth being in a state of constant flux. What I’m not okay with is my species being out of control. So my feelings about global warming haven’t changed. They’ve been reinforced. I haven’t run into anything that would cause me to be less concerned. KCD: After writing this book, do you think the situation is hopeless? AW: My feeling about hope, or about being encouraged by what’s going to happen to nature, actually did go through a change and went through a change for the better. I’ve been really depressed about the environmental destruction I’ve seen, and I’ve thought about it in terms of the world coming to an end. That’s a very anthropocentric point of view. It may be the earth as we know it coming to an end and -- sadly enough, because of our own activities -- it may mean the end of my [human] race, but life is not coming to an end. I’ve seen continual examples during my research for this book of how amazingly indomitable life is. KCD: Okay, so the earth will survive us. But are we, the human race, a lost cause? AW: I’m just not ready to give up on us. I would like to think that human life will go on and that’s really why I wrote this book. It’s called The World Without Us, but I really want us to look hard at what’s going on, understand the totality of our impact. I didn’t want this book to be a polemic, but rather to show people stuff and let them make their own conclusions. But at the end, I pose this other fantasy: suppose that maybe we do keep living, but we only produce one child per family? KCD: That’s long been the policy in China, but the idea is still very unpopular in your country, the United States. What reaction have you received from readers there? AW: Mixed. Some of the reaction has been appreciative, but then Rush Limbaugh [a conservative American radio talk-show host] damned me to hell on his show. KCD: How do you think, or hope, your book will be received in China? A country whose population, as you say in your book, is still one of the most active “breeders” on the planet? A country, by the way, that does not see itself as the ones who started the global environmental problems we face today. AW: They’re not the ones who started the mess. However, by proliferating to the point that they have, they are definitely a world leader in increasing the population. They’ve also been a world leader in trying to do something about it. I think that the Chinese experiment [the one-child policy] was very courageous, and very, very difficult to try and implement and it showed us a lot of the pitfalls. But that is what experiments are supposed to do. I hope that the Chinese are honored for having created an experiment that did point out a lot of the problems that we would have to overcome, and I hope that we will consider that experiment again. It’s just like at the beginning, everyone down-played the issues about global warming and didn’t want to face it, but now we’ve come around to realising that we have to face it. I think that the Chinese were pioneers, just like Al Gore was a pioneer, in talking about global warming. KCD: Are you really a proponent of the world adopting a one-child-per-family policy? AW: This book is an experiment in thinking. Even the overpopulation thing, or the one child per family. I’m not comfortable with that at all. Not only do I love my sister, but I’m a second born so I wouldn’t even be here. But we’re facing uncomfortable choices. The idea that we can green ourselves back into existence by eating forest-friendly foods or something is ridiculous. We can’t consume ourselves into sustainability. We have to lower consumption. That means we either consume things over and over again by recycling, or we consume fewer things. There are limits to how far growth can take you. Alan Weisman is an American journalist, author, documentary-maker and educator. Kate Cheney Davidson is a San Francisco-based journalist and US editor of chinadialogue. Homepage photo by rogiro |
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The Best of Old and New Beijing: Historical Sites and Live Music » Shanghai Journal It’s been way too long since my last post. Here’s a brief rundown of what I’ve been up to over the past two weeks.Sept 21: Ed Lanfranco, journalist and old Beijing expert extraordinaire, gave a fantastic talk to the Dartmouth... |
| 29 Jun 08 |
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Shanghai Gloaming: A Videographic Portrayal of the City in Flux » Shanghai Journal Above: One of Greg Girard's many intriguing photos of "old Shanghai" as it disappears from the contemporary urban landscapeAs usual, too many events have been piling up in my life and I find myself cramming to post them. The past two weeks were rather awful both weather- and healthwise. First, I caught a cold that morphed into a nasty energy-sucking flu complete with a bad case of diarrhea. At the same time, my back went out on me and for several days I languished on the floor of our new apt, unable to stand or sit properly. My wife blames this all on too many late nights, and she may have a point. Nightlife/music research always carries its share of health hazards. To top it off, we're smack in the middle of plum rain season. For the past three weeks, the sun has disappeared and it's been clammy, foggy, and rainy. Only yesterday did the sun finally emerge, giving us a glorious if unseasonably cool day. But today the sun is hiding once again. I look out from my 18th floor Zhabei apt window, looking south over Zhabei Park, which since 6:30 am has erupted with the sounds of Chinese folk and pop music and old folks doing their renditions of revolutionary tunes from the Mao era on tinny loudspeakers, and see a forest of concrete buildings enshrouded in fog. Suddenly, another burst of rain explodes from the heavens and only the dim silhouettes of the cityscape can be perceived.Speaking of the Shanghai cityscape, yesterday I took my mother (who is here for a two-week visit) and Mency to see a documentary film showing at the Glamour Bar on the Bund. The film, directed and edited by my NYU-in-Shanghai colleague Eric Ransdell, focuses on photographer Greg Girard's effort to capture the changing urban landscape through his project, which led to a book Phantom Shanghai and an international exhibition. Last year I interviewed Greg for ShanghaiJournal. I've been an admirer of his work for years, but only yesterday was I able to see him in action as he made his way into the city's neighborhoods and into the private homes of Shanghai's residents to archive a disappearing world. Ostensibly, a photographer makes for a rather poor subject of a film documentary. Where is the drama? Where is the action? Isn't it only a guy lugging a tripod and camera around and shooting scenes? Why not make a film about a filmmaker and turn the camera on itself? But seriously, despite the lack of high drama, this was a beautiful and accurate depiction both of Greg’s work and of the people and city he was trying to preserve. The drama, where it exists, comes in the form of Greg’s interactions with Shanghai folks. First, how does he gain permission to get into enclosed neighborhoods and homes and shoot people’s private lives? We see several scenes where he’s clearly not welcome, but persists anyhow in his efforts to document fading neighborhoods, and somehow gains the trust and respect of the people he's shooting. The key is his lovely assistant Emily, a local Shanghainese gal who serves as his interpreter and helps get him through closed doors. It’s inside the homes of residents that the film really shines. We not only get voyeuristic glimpses of private lives (though nothing really revealing), but we see Greg interacting with the sensitivity of a seasoned journalist, asking them questions about their lives and their personal histories. Once inside people’s homes, a whole private world opens up to the photographer—family stories are told, and private photo books opened to show the inquisitive foreigner. If there’s any dramatic impact of the film, it’s in scenes such as that where an 88 year old Shanghainese man tells Greg about his life of privilege in the pre-Liberation city, showing him a photograph of the man as a 20 year old fresh from a private ball held in his honor by his family, with over a hundred guests in attendance. We then see the man dancing in a contemporary Shanghai ballroom with middle-aged women, who are delighted to discover that this man pushing 90 can still foxtrot and rumba with the best of them. Unfortunately the story ends there, as do the other vignettes that are presented in the film. But we get the general picture: this is a city teaming and pulsing with life and with personal stories that are all archived in the physical environment, which is being rapidly torn up to make way for the new city of the future. As the physical environment is destroyed and recreated, we feel the pangs of loss but we also get a sense of anticipation for a better future. After the film was over, I asked the director how he structured it. This is a pressing concern for me given that I’m now in the phase of scripting and structuring my own doco film on the Chinese rock scene. Unlike Eric, who edited the film himself, I’m working with my friend Jud Willmont who has offered his production studio and his excellent assistant editor Cai Cong to finish the film. Having shot and edited my own homemade films in the past, I was curious to find out how Eric went about it. Judging from his response (and from the content of the film), it was a bit hit or miss, but he seems to have structured it around the storyline of Greg’s “pushing into” the hidden corners of the city, and around his relationship with his assistant Emily. I found myself wanting to learn more about the girl—how much she was paid, how often she worked with him, and whether their relationship extended beyond professional assistance (were they friends, or more?) as I’m sure others who watched the film did as well. The one big “teaser” that the film offers is Emily’s family. We are told towards the beginning of the film that Emily’s mother refuses to let Greg into her home to photograph. He persists in asking to be let in, but to no avail. Finally, at the end of the film, she has relented. The last scene shows him walking into the apartment, and in his narration, which Greg himself scripted, he ends by saying “I don’t know why anyone lets me in.” We don’t actually get to see the apartment, but I suppose this was a clever way to wrap up the film.Those who wish to learn more about this film, which has been aired on TV in some European countries and is being distributed by a French company, can go to Eric’s company website. Personally I give the film two thumbs up and look forward to showing it to my students in the future. |
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