Holidarity

Day 3: New York

2011-03-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

I took the bus into Manhattan with Jay Z in the headphones and vibing off the blue skies and the raw energy that emanates from the hustle of New York City’s streets. Landed at 2pm, and in the Met by 4pm, staying with Mike, an old Taiwan hand on the Upper East Side. Go Chic would play later that night at Arlene’s Grocery, a Lower East Side indie rock joint, and Fire EX and White Eyes would play the next night at a 320-capacity live house inside the New York nightlife institution, Webster Hall.

The Taiwan government’s new indie rock policy has interesting implications, namely that it’s a way of promoting Taiwan’s name in an arena where China can’t do anything about it. China has prevented Taiwan from participating in the United Nations, World Health Organization and other big assemblies of “nations” for more than 30 years. In the Olympics and other sporting events, the Taiwanese team must arrive under the banner “Chinese-Taipei.” The world’s top biennials of contemporary art have been pressured by the Chinese government to disallow Taiwan from calling its exhibition hall the “Taiwan Pavilion.” But indie rock has no large central organization to apply pressure to, and even if it did, I seriously doubt a rock festival would be sympathetic to a bullying, repressive regime that will not offer them any economic benefits in the foreseeable future. Even more interesting – let’s not forget that this is a policy of Ma Ying-jeou’s generally warm-on-China KMT government.

Day 2: Toronto

2011-03-16T20:15:00.001-07:00

Fire EX at the breakfast buffet

What’s the best way to navigate a 5-day, 800-band festival spread liberally throughout Toronto, where 15-minute cab rides cost around US$25? Especially in the case where I’d heard of maybe a half dozen performers – Janet Jackson, the Electric Six, the Russian Futurists and a Japanese band called Zoobombs that a friend had been emailing me about.

Orbis and I took the easy default. On the penultimate day of Canadian Music Week, we were in the York Hotel from 4pm to 2am, schlepping through conferences, industry mixers, the awards ceremony and room parties. The secret of music festival in the modern age is that, while they are still an entertainment showcase for the punters, they are essentially trade shows. In two days, I saw three artists perform but exchanged a thick stack of name cards. A Filipino promoter. A Singaporean B-girl who’s based in LA and spoke with a Jamaican accent. A New Yorker of uncertain provenance who claimed to have a website that promotes Chinese music. A smooth-talking, dandyish expat from Hong Kong who told us the Flaming Lips generate over US$100,000 in revenue per show and he can easily recoup that in Hong Kong. (I don’t know if we said it out loud, but Orbis and I looked at each other with a look that said, “Really?”) There were also a few potentially valuable contacts from Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Hong Kong and Korea.

The most interesting thing we saw was a seminar called “Music Makeover.” On a stage in a big conference room, a producer with a microphone headset diced up a song by an R&B band (also on stage), and through the process of a “live rehearsal” created a new arrangement that was – truth be told – much better than the original. Watching this was like being in the studio audience of some reality TV show, except that no one got sent home at the end. There real-time critique had its moments, like a good-natured dressing down of the goofy, flop-haired guitarist:

“Real humility is not about being deferential and shy. It’s about accepting the expectations of the audience and fulfilling that role. If you are the lead guitarist, then be the guitar god and step up there and show it. If you just shuffle around in the back, or meekly retreat from the front of the stage after your solo, you simply fail to engage people, and they will become uninterested very quickly.”

This, I told Orbis, was the difference between Japanese bands and Taiwanese. Both sets of musicians tend to be pretty humble offstage, but the Japanese hone their onstage skills until they are razor sharp. Indie rock may claim differently, but in so many ways, rock ‘n roll is not just about music, it’s about the performance. Not many people go to the theater anymore, but they go to rock shows all the time, and whether they know it or not, they have the same expectations: they want to see a show. It’s a lesson that Taiwan’s bands are slowly learning, and what will help is the type of exposure that generates a culture of performance, and a culture of giving that performance whether they’re in front of 20 people or 500. That’s pretty much this tour.

Toronto: Day 1

2011-03-12T11:48:00.000-08:00

I knew Toronto would be one big snafu. That's how this tour was supposed to start. Toronto - a total wash. New York, well, who cares, we're playing on a Monday night and anyway, it's New York. We'll have fun. For this rock 'n roll tour, all the money is really on SXSW, and the "big" Taiwan indie rock showcase there is already showing traction. One radio interview lined up. Japanese photojournalists and Korean bands and promoters psyched to check it out. And that's just on my end. Orbis Fu, director of The Wall Music, says he's getting a lot of interest as will. Things look good.

But for the moment, I'm in Toronto, which, in case you didn't know, is in fucking Canada. Pizza costs $4 a slice, and that's four bucks Canadian, which is like five real American dollars. Why is this place so fricking expensive? And how can our 4-star hotel have an indoor swimming pool but not ESPN?

I arrived Friday night at 7pm, one full day after the Taiwan showcase had ended. What was the point of my being here? The plane ticket, they said, couldn't be changed. We'll buy you a drink, they said. Would I really have to stay in Canada till Monday? This time I called American airlines. I'll make it to New York by noon Sunday and catch Go Chic on the Lower East Side at Arlene's Grocery the same night.

So far in Canada, I've managed to speak Mandarin more than English. I ate mediocre vegan risotto at an over-priced restaurant in The Distillery, a trendy Castle Elsinore-looking district of restored brick warehouses and quaint retro signage where the waiters are too-well groomed and the music sounds like techno played through a pipe organ. Steak dinner and 1.5 beers per person - with me pulling the "I'll just have salad" line - cost C$385 for seven, and I don't even want to ponder what that is in real money. On the way, the tour photographer lost his iPhone 4 in an illegal, untraceable taxi. And afterwards, I caught a couple of bands that didn't particularly impress me, including a set by former lead singer of Dinosaur Junior J. Mascis, before giving up on the 800-band schedule/clusterfuck. So I walked into a normal bar for a few bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and then took a long but fun jaunt past the bars, clubs and late night eateries lining Queens Rd. West. The walk took about 40 minutes, not including the stops for pizza and falafel, and I got back to the hotel by 3am. Then today, after buffet breakfast and three cups of coffee, I walked down to Lake Huron with the members of the bands Sugar Plum Ferry, Fire EX and the top staff at The Wall and got in a snowball fight while they all took pictures of each other in the snow.

Going to the bar last night, I did however get a chance to meet some real Canadians. One of them asked if I was American.

Wondering if' I'd failed to mispronounce "about" or "house" - though I'd been trying to avoid these verbal landmines - I asked "Is it that obvious?"

"It's the PBR."

Which I only ordered because I thought it would be cheap. Oh well. I could live with this.

But these Canadians - Torontoans? - they were friendly. Another tried to convince me Toronto was the fourth biggest city in North America. New York, Chicago, LA...and Toronto? I made a mild protest but quickly deferred, filing a mental note to Google it. A Canadian would not get this wrong. Or too wrong as it turns out. We'd forgotten about Mexico City. Toronto is 5th.

The Thursday night Taiwan gig was, consistent with the snafu-ness of it all, not even an official Canadian Music Week event. They'd been rejected at the eleventh hour, but still managed to organize a show in at some CMW-unaffiliated, Underworld-sized bar. About 50-70 people showed up, most of them Taiwanese studying abroad. Fire EX, Sugar Plum Ferry and Orange Grass played. When I asked band members about the gig, most of their answers amounted to little more than a shrug, though Andy, the soundman said Sugar Plum Ferry's set was awesome.

SPF's guitarist, Su, said their last Toronto gigs - another GIO sponsored tour - had been better. The official concert was mostly Taiwanese, but they also played a couple live houses for crowds that were at least half local and got great response.

"They all bought our CDs," said Su.

Meanwhile, The Wall manger Orbis was spending time at the CMW conference, a series of music industry talks that happens in the afternoons, before the music starts. How were they? "Boring." Then two hours later, Orbis says, "I saw a talk by Lady Gaga's manager." Troy Carter. "He's only 30 years old, and a black guy. Sometimes people think he's her bodyguard."

"People asked questions about everything. 'Would Lady Gaga consider doing an acoustic album?' The manager said, 'Of course!' 'What's the difference between Lady Gaga and Madonna?' Lots of questions like that. After it was over, he was mobbed on stage and security had to keep everyone back so he could leave."

Such was the talk around the breakfast table, where I also learned that Fire EX lead singer, Sam Yang, is being allowed to take a special "vacation" from his mandatory military service to participate on this tour - this arranged by a special gongwen (official letter) from high up in the GIO. "It's for the national glory," jibed one of his bandmates, A-Hsin. Like an Olympian.

I told them I'd seen J. Mascis the night before, but the sound was mediocre and most of the audience was just talking and drinking beer during the set.

"Cool. Then we what we saw was even better."

Oh yeah. What?

"We went to a strip bar!"

Strip bars. I get the feeling this will be a running theme for this tour. Can't wait till we get to Austin. For a long time now, I've been thinking that Orbis really needs a lap dance.

Pangu Reprise

2008-10-13T10:04:00.000-07:00

Drinking Tea with Nanchang Cops, or Espionage for Retards

I went back to China for a 10-day trip to pick up the trail of Pangu's legacy. In Beijing, the trail was mostly cold, and the stay too short to uncover a lot of genuine emotion beyond the fact that most kids don't really know who the band is anymore or know enough to not say anything. It seems the government's tactic of delete and censor has erased most memory of the band, at least in the pop consciousness. But in terms of a deeper memory, a realm of whispers that silently remembers jailed lawyers, displaced villagers, Tienanmen Square and other denied truths, the band is very much alive and imagined mainly as an earlier version of themselves, the one that was credible and raw, not the current status of extremists exiled for a highly unpopular cause. If they weren't remembered, we wouldn't have been "invited" to "drink tea" with the cops of Nanchang for an hour and 40 minutes.

But that was a mistake in judgment on our part too. Pangu is from Nanchang, a provincial city of 2 million a six-hour train ride southwest and inland from Shanghai. The city is famous as the site where the first shot of the Mao's Communist insurgency was fired, and then after Mao died, it became a minor industrial center for its state-run auto factory. Nanchang's central square still boasts a hulking stone monument to the "Aug. 1 Insurgency," a thick column topped by a stone CCP flag. The irony of the monument is just that of Mao's China; the symbol is supposed to soar but instead looks more likely to sink to the bottom of the ocean for its unwieldy weight. It was on the stone steps of this monument that Ao Bo used to sit with his rock 'n roll buddies and dream of destroying these symbols and what they stood for, namely the Communist Party's rule of China.

In August when I spoke to Ao Bo in Taiwan, he got excited about the possibility of our going to see his father, who lives in a miniature cop village next to a prison in New County (Xinjian Xian), across the Aug. 1 Bridge from Nanchang City. The idea came to him as a spark, then ignited in his mind. "If you went, that would be - wow! That would be something!" In emails since, however, he progressively began to dismiss the idea. He hadn't spoken with his father in a year, and convincing him would be a problem. Later, the day after our tea party, he called from Sweden, berating me, "Not just anyone can walk in there! If you wanted to talk to him, you should have set up a meeting outside."

But CC and LL, our local contacts, were also curious. They'd never seen the man, and Ao Bo is the type of figure that makes one wonder what could have caused a person to become like, as LL said, "always supporting some political position or other, but in that, you never got a sense of his own personal self."

So we went on a whim and a chance, and it just happened to be the last Sunday of the National Day holiday, and the community's guard was down. We found the senior Ao, a spitting resemblance, and he was willing to speak with us. What he expressed was a gruff prison-official-of-a-father's love for his intransigent and rebellious son. And we got it on tape.

At the end, we asked the senior Ao if he had pictures of Ao Bo as a boy. He said he might, but he'd have to rummage around. He'd be in touch with LL if he found anything. Then that night, he called LL, saying he'd found some artwork and notes, things we might want to take. We should meet him back at the cop village the next day at 4pm.

We arrived at 3pm, and within five seconds of stopping the car, a uniformed cop had us pegged. LL's ID was taken and we were instructed to drive back to the end of the block, where there was a precinct station. They took LL's car keys and then our passports and brought us in for questioning.

The first cop was egregiously smiley, laughing constantly in phony way and inviting us repeatedly to drink tea and smoke Jiangxi's local cigarettes. We took hot water. I excused myself to the bathroom and called a friend, telling him I was in a police station and would call back in a couple of hours if everything was ok.

The cop, Smiley, asked us our names, place of residence, occupations, and how I had come to speak Chinese so well. And what we were doing there. I told the half truth that I had met Ao Bo at a rock concert in Taiwan and kept in touch through email. When I told Ao Bo I'd be traveling through China, he'd asked me to pick up a few things from his father.

After a few minutes of this, a second, sterner uniformed cop came in, Bad Cop. He had a hard jaw, a louder, deeper voice and slicked back hair. He asked us the same questions, and we gave the same answers. He told us that Ao Bo was a serious matter. That's about as much as they ever told us about Ao Bo, though through opportune mentions of "Taiwan" and a few other things, it was obvious they knew a lot more.

Different cops kept shuffling in and out of the room, but whoever was asking the questions, they were always the same. We were offered more hot water and smokes. Some plain-clothed cops appeared and were introduced by Smiley as being from "our travel agency." The euphemism was so ridiculous I didn't even bother to ask what it meant. I guessed they were the National Security Bureau, though that may have been wrong. The next day, LL was to meet with National Security Bureau agents for questioning. So who the hell were these guys? They all had buzz cuts, wore slacks, dark gangster shirts and bad leather shoes. Two of them were young; they never spoke and unsubtly perked up their heads the couple of times we spoke English. The senior plain-clothes asked us the same questions as the others. We gave the same answers.

One thing they never asked though was why we'd been filming, and this worried us, and not just then, but all of that night as we rode an overnight train in hard sleeper berths to Guangzhou. During the interview a day before, Ao Bo's father had called me a "journalist," and at one point I'd told him I was making a documentary. This was potentially damning. My partner P, in China with the special pseudo-passport that China gives to Taiwanese citizens, was mulling the fact that China has imprisoned tens of thousands of Taiwanese accused of spying. I was even more worried for LL, who had a wife, kid and a government job to lose. As a Western national, the worst that could happen to myself was a few days of detention and expulsion from China. I kept telling myself, fuckit, these are cops, and played dumb, repeated the same story and tried to crack the odd joke.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, P heard one cop say that he wanted to bring in Old Ao. But another said, "No, they're not finished talking to him yet." The father was being questioned somewhere else at the same time, and I think he must have been putting up a smoke screen, possibly for himself, possibly for us, possibly for his son. I'll probably never be sure. But the cops did repeatedly say that Old Ao was "one of our own" and that they had to "take charge" of him and "protect" him.

About an hour into the tea party, we told the cops we had a train to catch, and we showed them the tickets to Guangzhou. They told us not to worry about it and offered to drive us to the train station in a police car. "In America, if you ride in a police car, it is only because you are a criminal," joked Smiley. "But in China, that's not necessarily the case."

Our excuse to get out of this was our wish to have a final dinner with our friend, LL. Also, we had no desire to give the cops even the faintest idea of how much camera equipment we were carrying by putting our luggage in one of their cruisers.

When we opted out of the royal escort, Bad Cop just shrugged and said fine. I got the feeling it would save him some trouble. Our passports were handed back, and LL got his ID and car keys. Smiley waved and said it wasn't a big deal and he hoped he hadn't inconvenienced us. I was about to get in the car, but after thinking about it for a sec, turned back to him and said, "Look, I want to ask you something. There's still one thing I don't understand, and that's why Ao Bo is so sensitive. I don't really know this guy, and now I'm wondering if I should call him up and tell him he's an asshole for sending me here and getting me in trouble with you people."

"No, no, no," said smiley. "It's just that...this is a sensitive area. There's a prison here, and outsiders never come in. You're outsiders. Of course we just had to find out who you were. Next time you're in Nanchang, feel free to come back."

As we drove out the gate of the cop-prison village, I assured LL we'd keep his name out of the film. Then in the back seat, P wrote on a piece of paper, "They may be listening." This was all a little surreal, so I did what anyone else who'd only ever seen movies about this kind of thing would do, I kind of smirked to myself and ran my fingers over the dash, around the rearview mirror, opened the glove compartment...

"Would you stop that!" said P from the back seat.

Dinner was grim. We barely ate, just drank beer instead. CC had just gotten off work and finally joined us. Thank god she'd missed it. She said she wasn't worried, even if the cops did come knocking. She'd been through that before and knew they couldn't touch her. LL also assured us he'd be fine, but I had no idea if he could possibly mean that.

On the train, P and I had a comically paranoid conversation, a long, drawn-out "What would Jason Bourne do?" bull session. I saw two alternatives. One, hide ourselves in a safe house in Shenzhen, have one person cross the border carrying nothing, and if he made it, call back to the other to give the all clear.

"Dude," said P, "That's how drug smugglers get caught." He was convinced they were setting us up, that they'd let us keep going to see what we'd do and who else we could implicate. "You don't know how the Communist Party works! This is the let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom shit!"

The cops' conspicuously blind eye to our filming activities was the unnerving question that kept stabbing back at us. I bemusedly proposed an Occam's razor solution, "Look, since they have to write a report to save themselves from getting in trouble if anything happens later, maybe they are just happy enough to play along with our bullshit story because like most cops everywhere, they are lazy and just want a plausible answer that will save them from any extra work."

P was having none of that. Every other guy on the train had a buzz cut and bad leather shoes, and even though we had bought our tickets through a scalper and without showing any ID, he was lining up suspected shadows.

"Well, how about at the next stop I'll grab my backpack and hide in the bathroom, and we'll see if secret agent Larry does anything," I said.

At least that lightened things up.

"Yeah, what would Jason Bourne do?"

God! he was thinking it too!

In the end, P chose option two - get the hell out. We arrived at Guangzhou East Station around 8am, and he left me with the camera and tripod, took the tapes and bought a train ticket to Hong Kong. I was fine with this. He had the most to lose.

P made it through customs in Guangzhou before 8:30am, too early for whatever the hell it was we were scared of. We'd figured that since the cops let us go around 4:40pm the day before and still had someone to question today, they may not have filed any reports before getting off and we wouldn't be flagged yet. I now doubt we ever were flagged, or else the process was so slow we won't find out till next time.

I headed for a safe house in Shenzhen. Actually, it was a friends apartment I had keys to, but calling it a safe house was really feeding into my whole spy fantasy thing. Now that I look back on things, that whole 24 hours was like the Bourne Conspiracy for retards. It was like, 'Geez, I may be a national security threat for my little videography project, so I'll just hop a train to Shenzhen, switch SIM cards, then go check my email in Starbucks.'

Which is exactly what I did. When I called P that afternoon, he'd just gotten off a plane from Hong Kong and was back in Taipei. "Yeah, there was a little bit of a scare going through customs, but I think it was just a random check." He was fine. I also got an email from LL, who said the meeting with National Security had just been routine, and I hope it in fact was.

Perhaps a bit like Chai Ling, the student leader at Tienanmen Square, I had a lingering hope for a more brutal police display. She had so infamously anticipated - in fact almost awaited - the bloodshed of Tienanmen, saying it was the only way the Chinese people would learn of their government's oppressive nature. Unlike her, I graciously never got my wish. What I got instead was an afternoon of drinking tea with cops and a brick wall sealing out everything people knew about Pangu and would never say in public even if they knew it to be true.

This affected the Nanchang cops and Beijing's rockers alike. The old punks and metalheads I found in Beijing who clearly hated the band wouldn't express anything openly, even anonymously, i.e. with only a voice recording. Talking into a microphone to someone who didn't even know your name was still too public and potentially dangerous for most. My being a stranger and a foreigner I guess had a lot to do with that.

Getting to real feelings may take longer and require less direct questioning, maybe even a different identity. Two and a half years ago, a kid tried to stop me from buying a Pangu CD in a Wudaokou music shop, in no uncertain terms letting me know "Their music sucks!" "They betrayed their country!" "They sold out their country!" This time, the best I could get was some dorky metalhead trying to evade all my questions, but not so slyly saying, "My view on Pangu is consistent with that of the government." That and a Guangzhou music critic saying he thought they were conned by Chen Shui-bian and the DPP, that they were naive and didn't know the deal going in.

What surprised me though was the continuing belief in what Pangu was, an identity the band assumed in person around 1998 and was slowly disseminated throughout China over the next two or three years. I found a steady collection of rockers from Guilin to Shanxi to Xinjiang with a consistent story, namely that when they were 14 or 15 or 17, they suddenly found a band that was telling them the truth through rock and roll. "Before them, I listened to Cui Jian and Zhang Chu and He Yong, and I thought that was great. But then I heard Pangu and realized that everything they were saying was all wrong."

It was not just one kid that made such claims. It was several. And the stories were so often the same.

And it's that memory, of a band that suddenly meant something, which is Pangu's legacy in China. The egregiously political entity they have become since then, for worse in the eyes of most who still even remember them, seems not to be the important thing. It is the whispered legacy of some raw punks from Nanchang who screamed out "You won't let us rock!", who lampooned Cui Jian and the whole Beijing scene, and who intimated that kids had a right to want something better. That's what remains. And that's what's buried behind a wall of official silence, not forgotten, and waiting for its story to be retold.

More on Death Metal and the DPP

2006-07-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

Freddy: "I'm not deep green, I'm pro-independence!"

The lead singer of Taiwan's best loved black metal band and concert empresario Freddy is in the political columns again. Actually, let me just translate this, from Formosa TV:

On the petition brought out by scholars to recall President Chen, one
English name was included - Freddy. Local media has indicated that this is the
Chen supporting lead singer of the band Chthonic, but on July 26
Freddy personally came out to clarify the situation, saying that the name
on the Internet petition was not his, that he doesn't want to get caught up
in political battles, and that he supports Chen as president until his
term runs out in 2008.

The web petition set up by the scholars was intended to use
"democracy" to "fulfill Taiwanese identity," and Freddy's name appeared there on
July 16. Media immediately reacted by thinking the Chthonic lead singer had
turned against Chen before Freddy came out and personally clarified that the
name was not his.

Freddy emphasized that he was a die-hard supporter of Taiwanese
independence who had voted for Chen in the last two presidential elections. His
recent call to "reform justice," he said, was meant to indicate that both the
blue and green camps have made mistakes, but he continues to support Chen as
head of the government.

Freddy said he is now busy promoting his band Chthonic's 10th anniversary
CD release and also with this weekend's Formoz Festival, so how would he have
time to get mixed up in the blue-green political battle?

Another article someone sent me had Freddy talking more about politics, saying, among other things, that there is a difference between the "greens" and supporters of Taiwanese independence, that difference being that "greens" belong to political parties while he doesn't.

Blogging at Fujirock

2006-07-27T06:30:00.000-07:00

The 10th Fujirock Festival is underway as of a couple of hours ago now, and I will again be blogging about it for Fujirockers.org, a festival adjunct. Note I don`t link to the site....This year the e-team has set up a blog for show reports, news, and other hopefully qualified observations culled from the rather less penetrable Fujirock Express site, where content will also go if you want to wade through 70 percent Japanese and pulldown menus that hide most of the articles. Feel free to compare for yourself.

Of minor interest, Fujirock Express becomes a daily newspaper this year (Japanese only) distributed (free? still don`t know) throughout the Naeba Valley. Just another trick they`ve learned from Glastonbury.

Hmmm. Should I bother to read this?

2006-07-22T09:14:00.000-07:00

There's a new book on Taiwan out by Joshua Samuel Brown, you know, of 'Off the Rails' column in the China Post fame. The title, Vignettes of Taiwan, does not make me want to rush out and get a copy... though it did get a decent review from the Shanghai free monthly, City Weekend, where Brown is now a contributor. But for some reason I doubt this will be as good as John Ross' Formosan Odyssey, which is probably a bit underrated and managed to tell us a few things about the island we didn't already know.

Chinese Rockers Play Taiwan for the First Time Ever

2006-07-20T10:13:00.000-07:00

And Cui Jian gets axed from the lineup

Could Formosa TV have screwed up a concert any more royally? Cui Jian (崔建), the king daddy founding godfather ultimate dudeman of Chinese rock 'n roll, had applied three straight years to play the Hohaiyan Music Festival in Taiwan, and this year for the first time by some fluke or brain spasm or act of God finally got approval from Beijing authorities and was ready to come. This was to be a historic first, a landmark in cross-strait music, the first ever Chinese rock bands to play Taiwan.

So what happens? FTV axes Cui from the lineup because instead they want Black Panther and Tang Dynasty, two legendary China bands to be sure, but they are not Cui Jian. If the essence of Chinese rock 'n roll can be distilled to a single man, that man is Cui.

Two Japanese bands, Dragon Ash and 雅 (sorry, no English name at present), were also cut from the bill at the last minute, and some people were pretty pissed off by this.

At least this is what I heard from a longtime Beijing rock scene insider with solid connections to all of Taiwan's music festivals and Japan...

...who told me all this drinking beer outside the Beijing Club D-22, after the 8th band birthday concert for girl punk rockers Hang On The Box, who played for all of 25 minutes. (Great stuff tho.)

Cui Jian, said my can-of-Yanjing-beer-drinking source, wanted to come, but not to FTV's candy-assed pop parade. He wanted to come to the other Hohaiyan put on by Taiwan Colors Music (TCM), a real-deal indie label that founded Hohaiyan 6 years ago and only lost the fest this year through the supposedly "fair" practice of open bidding, which in this case was actually just money politicking. Ronnie Brownlow reported this much in the Taipei Times, but in the end had trouble ironing out the tangle on how the concert was split in two. The bottom line is that TCM got screwed out of the concert it created because the yokel bureaucrats at Taipei County Government controlled all the money and thought they knew better, so in the end TCM decided to do its own concert on the same beach but a week later. Then a typhoon came on FTV's weekend, so they delayed, which of course bumped TCM right off into oblivion. Record label head and visionary behind the whole thing, Zhang 43, announced that the TCM Hohaiyan is now delayed to next year.

"Of course a TV station can run a music festival better than a record company" is how I interpolate the idiot thoughts of the Taipei County Culture Bureau, who through Zhang 43 have stumbled on to a way to make a more popular and international version of the Changhua Flower Festival - "Heck, as long as there area sausage vendors, the people will come!"

(Now whether this has anything to do with the DPP losing Taipei County in last year's election to the KMT I'm not sure, though that was predicted by many. Still, FTV is not far removed from being a DPP propaganda arm....)

The Good News: Tang Dynasty (唐朝) and Black Panther (黑豹) play tonight (Friday), which will be historic. These are the first real rock scene bands from China ever to get permission to play Taiwan, something no one thought could happen after the last Taiwan concert by a Chinese group. That of course was by Pangu in Feb. 2004 - they went into exile immediately after the concert.

So everybody go, and tell me about it. Dagnabit. Wish I were there.

Tang Dynasty - Chinese Led Zepplin

Black Panther - when rock was for dudes!

More headlines:
崔健宝岛行告吹民版海洋音乐祭遭台风搅局停办
(Cui Jian's Jewel Island Trip Cancelled: Hohaiyan Music Festival People's Edition Called Off)
【海洋音乐祭】官版恐因台风遭延期民版伤脑筋
(Hohaiyan Music Festival: Official Version Delayed By Typhoon; People's Version Scratches It's Head)
海洋音乐祭大和解角头义助唐朝黑豹工作人员赴台
(Hohaiyan Music Festival Compromise: TCM Helps Crews for Tang Dynasty and Black Panther Get Visas)

Odd Job Lives!

2006-07-16T21:15:00.000-07:00

And he's a lackey of evil foreigners with mustaches

The carnage. Source: Xinhuanet

This story of a two blond, mustachioed foreigners sending their Chinese friend (or interpreter or bodyguard, depending on who you believe) as a samurai punisher on eight young males taunting them in a Beijing restaurant a few days ago and in a flury leaving seven of them on the ground with non-fatal stab woundsand has been more than good enough to wake me from my blogging slumber, especially as there seems to be at least enough truth to it that it was reported in the local press. First here it is in Chinese on Xinhuanet, and then here's a good write-up on the blog the Shanghaiist(English), which also gives an idea of how in only a couple of days this has already become something of an urban myth with all kinds of bizarre permutations. I first heard that it happened in Chengdu and involved diplomats and their hitman - take this with a grain of salt. But what I really wonder was where was this guy in the Pig and Whistle in Hsinchu?

...okay, now I finally feel like I'm back in China.... and to make a quick follow-up on the last post, Gmail works fine here, so does Google, for the moment...

Gmail Also Affected By Ban

2006-06-09T23:54:00.000-07:00

I've sent a couple pings into China about the Google.com blackout, and I've heard from one friend that Gmail is also affected:

yeah, it's very annoying. I couldn't use gmail and google just now for about two hrs. It's been like this for the past one week, seriously affecting my work...

While in China earlier this year, I also experienced a one or two-day Google blackout on March 14, which was possibly a test run. Though to be honest, I was finding the Internet so full of twists and turns at that point it's hard to say.

Now I wish I knew what the technology issues were here - are Google and Gmail linked so closely that blocking one blocks the other? ...so I posted the question on this Slashdot thread, and hopefully I'll have some replies...

...coz those friggin cloistered geeks really need something to talk about other than whether or not Google is evil (to the tune of like 500 comments on the two newswire stories that came out last week). There are of course other issues, like:

1) Google is nowhere near China's most popular search engine, lagging significantly behind Baidu for example. I wonder who the Slashdot nerds would rather see win that battle, a compromised Google or some homegrown Chinese search engine? Which brings us to the next point:

2) The Chinese government, or at least the whole zeitgeist it presides over, encourages negative reporting on Google and other suspect Western media/new media companies. Remember, Western colonialism (yes, from the 18th-early 20th centuries) continues to be upheld as a popular myth explaining why the country is so fucked up now. Google has been blamed for holding and improper business license and god knows what else, with the media coming down like pitbulls as the government changes the rules every other day. Now let me restate this question about Google vs. Baidu, but in a different way:

3) Google knows what China is not seeing, and for now it cannot show it, but possibly in the future it may bring this awareness into play in very subtle ways. Baidu may be able to get away with more now but will certainly aim for much less, slowly opening up to information democracy at the pace of China's domestic social/political change, which is happening, though not the rate the international press might desire it. (Note: Compare this to the US government's position that: elections-in-Afganistan-now-will-solve-everything! The point being, immediate change is not always deep change.) Baidu will also be more invested in the national ascendance, with better connections to power for good and for ill. But there is no saying when and how a heavily monitored Google.cn will make China more global. (Tho I bets they got some crafty insane anti-Chinese tech-warfare they gonna drop on they flat-assed commie bi-yatches, boyee!) In Google vs. Baidu, it's hard not to picture it as an us (West) vs. them battle, and here my instinct is to root for the home team, but God only knows what's right or best?

Taiwan and Tiananmen's 17th Anniversary

2006-06-04T04:38:00.000-07:00

At the luncheon following this morning's pan-blue June 4th Forum, the best reason I heard for Taiwan's suddenly renewed interest in commemorating the Tiananmen Square Massacre on this, its 17th anniversary, was Lien Chan's visit to China last year. Lien's quest, softbrained and sychophantic as it may have been, has reawakened the idea that Taiwan might take proactive policies towards the Mainland.

Or at least it reminded the DPP that if the blues are talking about this, the greens had best come up with a line of their own. Which was why yesterday, June 3, saw the DPP holding its first ever commemoration of Tienanmen (Chinese articles 1, 2, 3, 4) and giving their usual, vague lipservice to human rights.

Meanwhile Ma Ying-jeou and the blues (Chinese) had their own commemoration, as Ma and the blues do every year. They talked about absolutely nothing related to human rights, which at first confused me before I whacked myself in the head for being so naive. The KMT take on Tienanmen was actually rather predictable: "Gee, the motherland - er, oh right, 'mainland China' - they're about as screwed up as a country can be, well uh, outside of our official ally states I mean, and golly it might take 100 years or more, but, well heck let's talk about it anyway, how and when are we gonna unify with them again?"

Now just in case you were wondering, don't worry, there's not much popular interest in Taiwan over Tienanmen, not any more. The candlelight vigils of 1989 in Taiwan's parks, schools and public plazas are pretty safely relegated to popular memory - i.e. the Taiwanese have been there, done that, and if you ask them you'll see how they unabashedly ask you back: what's it got to do with us anymore?

"Yes, June 4th is recieving more attention in Taiwan than it has in recent years, and the reasons are mostly political," agreed Fang Yuan (方圓), one of the labor leaders during the Beijing demonstrations of 1989, who afterwards quickly escaped into exile and currently heads the China Labor Party from his home in Australia. This might be a good place to credit him with the idea about Lien Chan's visit reviving Tienanmen in Taiwan as political tool.

As this was a solidly pan-blue forum, pamphlets showing President Chen Shui-bian and his coterie in Nazi SS uniforms were hardly a surprise, nor was the "No Justice, No President" t-shirt of the old and slightly retarded-looking man sitting in front of me. In the open section following the panel, someone proposed a law against "selling out the country," claiming the greens were the greatest source of this imminent danger. Quick aside: after a decade of hanging out with and writing about artists and musicians in Taiwan, I can safely say, if you want to find the real freaks, look to politics.

The old boys I lunched with were all in favor of impeaching both the president and vice president - at the same time! - and one of them, Loh Kao-ming (樂可銘), the chairman of some blue splinter party I'd never heard of (the New People's Party? - 新民黨）, had taken out a half-page newspaper ad full of constitutional convolutions that would bring this long fantasized blue coup d'etat to life. All dining concurred that Lien Chan should remain KMT Chairman, and at any mention of Chiang Ching-kuo, their faces washed over with a warm, nostalgic dew.

Loh told a story about an encounter with Ma Ying-jeou: "He was surrounded by reporters, but when they cleared out a bit, he recognized me and I stepped in to shake his hand. As I was shaking it, I told him, 'I have no problem with you becoming the next president, but I cannot support you taking the KMT Chairmanship from Lien Chan.' At that, Ma recoiled as if in horror and tried to pull his hand away, but I grabbed it with both hands and kept talking..."

...Three luncheon-mates had been sentenced to jail, two actually serving it. Loh once got three months as the butt end of some political revenge intrigue, but he'd paid his way out of actually serving time for a little over NT$80,000.

There was Yan Peng, a Chinese political dissident in passport-less limbo, a 1989 era demonstration leader who listened silently as Loh bombastically rattled on, "At Tiananmen, what else could the Chinese government do? During Vietnam, America shot college students too!" He waited humbly through the dinner, until one of the old boys' wives asked where he was from, followed by, "Oh, what are you doing here?"

"Seeking political asylum."

After two years and some months in Taiwan, the first 9 of those months in jail, Taiwan won't take him for lack of a political asylum law and has only been able to arrange political asylum with Honduras.

"Honduras! That would be a living hell!" chuckled one old boys. He had connections to the military.

Yan thought so too and had refused.

"Don't worry, you did the right thing. If you need any help, just ask us." And they handed him name cards and spun the lazy susan.

The third political was a worn-down Taiwanese woman in her early 30s with a blue wrist - some medicinal unguent, she said. She'd spent a month in Chinese jail after going into both the French and American embassies in Beijing seeking political asylum - from Taiwan! She claimed to be the victim of political oppression from the current government, which oppresses her by invisible means, preventing her from getting or keeping any sort of job. This having something to do with the daily reports she sent to President Chen by email of fax from 1999-2001. It was some sort of policy analysis. She was serious, and seemingly rational, for someone with a story that was completely insane.

Okay, now the disturbing thing is this. What brings this whacky fold back into the zone of political reality is that, Chinese dissidents possibly excepted, these are the faithful. These are the died-in-the-wool partisans who must routinely be placated. While Ma Ying-jeou struggles to pull the KMT out of the tar pits of its tainted past, his milieu is symposia and banquets like this, and each has its own Loh Kao-ming, mitts tenatiously clasped and trying to pull him back down.

End note: A quick list of Chinese dissidents in attendance:

Shao Jiang (邵江), Tiananmen student activist. Panelist.
Wang Min (汪岷）, secretary general of the China Democratic Party, Oversease Section. Panelist. Quote: "June 4th is our moral advantage over China."
Fang Yuan (方圓), Tiananmen demonstrations labor leader and current Chairman of the China Labor Party. Quoted above.
Wu'er Kaixi (吾爾開希) - Tienanmen student leader and resident of Taiwan. Uncharacteristically, he did not speak.
Yan Peng (燕鵬), the above mentioned, passportless dissident. Also a Tienanmen-era activist from Shandong Province.

Pop-aganda Battle Notes

2006-05-30T02:25:00.000-07:00

Chinese pop singers coming to Taiwan can now give press conferences as long as the content is "reasonable," announced the Mainland Affairs Council yesterday. Until this decision, Taiwan's pop music policies were actually less liberal than China's. Now they're probably about the same.

In February, mainlander entertainer Zhang Guoli (張國立) was refused permission to come to Taiwan to promote a children's program that had was allowed to air on Taiwanese TV, according to ETtoday (Chinese). And a plan to bring Super Girl Lee Yuchun (李宇春) to film a program was also nixed because the submitted plan didn't match the activities.

Now the bureaucracy here is slightly confusing. This recent news all derives from statements made by Mainland Affairs Council Vice Chair Johnnason Liu (劉德勳), but the permission-giving body is the Government Information Office.

A pending case (Chinese) involves an application by Mainland film director Yin Li to make a movie called Yun Shui Yao (雲水謠) (literally: "Cloud Water Ballad"), which interprets the 228 incident. MAC Chairman Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) has said the film's script "distorts history" and comes from the perspective of "Taiwanese tongbao yearning for the motherland." Sounds like it's gonna get the
axe.

More Filipino Activists Murdered

2006-05-30T01:24:00.000-07:00

The National Council of Churches in the Philippines (NCCP) reports: " In the last three weeks alone, we have had FOUR church workers and members slain by assassins, and TWO frustrated murders...." The latest story is this:

At around 6.00 in the evening of May 27, 2006, NOEL NOLI CAPULONG was on his way home after visiting a "botica ng bayan" project of Bayan Muna. He never reached home. Motorcycle riding men pumped four bullets in his body in Barangay Parian, Calamba City, Laguna.

Capulong was characterized as a leftist leader by INQ7.net, which also wrote he is "the 258th activists to be murdered since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo assumed power in 2001."

Liner Notes: Chinese-Reggae + the Rolling Stones

2006-05-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of interesting music-related posts on Danwei this past week. The first was an obituary of reggae singer Desmond Dekker, the interesting part being that Dekker's well-known hit, "Poor Me Israelite" (alt: "The Israelites") was recorded by a Chinese-Jamaican named Leslie Kong. So were the first songs by Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, according to a backlogged story.

There's also a report that Keith Richards was nearly flattened by a sack falling from above the stage during the Stones recent Shanghai concert. (And no, he wasn't playing "Gimme Shelter.")

Chinese Dissident mp3 Downloads

2006-05-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

Pangu, a band from Jiangxi Province, continues to release and re-release music through free downloads from exile in Sweden. The latest, "The People Are All Sick" (全民皆病) is available here and features songs written between 1995 and 2000, the time when the band became known. You'll need WinRar software to decompress it.

There's still a lot of debate as to how "good" Pangu are or were, and listening don't expect to hear any sort of consitency between tracks and more than one musical idea per song. This album is mostly good because it's rough and full of anger like you will almost never fucking hear coming through any garage-quality demo, which is about what this is. It's mostly bad because it's shit. If you ask kids in China about Pangu, you'll hear either bitter resentment or that this band was hugely influential, both testaments to a certain landmark status they achieved in China's rock scene in the late 1990s. If they can avoind being completely supressed by China's Mind Police, and they might, they will have a few lasting songs but will be mostly remembered for what they dared to say.

Here's how they - I presume this is the band's lead singer, guitar player and general mouthpiece Ao Bo - introduce the album:

Pangu’s “The People Are All Sick” was one of three albums recorded in Guilin in May 2001. The three albums are "Lethal Music", "The People Are All Sick," and "Truth" (as in, “Pangu is the only standard for measuring the truth.”) The three albums were all recorded in three days and 42 songs were recorded in total. After deleting a few songs that weren’t up to scratch, the rest were all put onto these three albums.

In the essay “Pangu-ism” I’ve already basically described the feelings after recording these three albums. Here is an extract:

“…what’s comforting to me is that this time we were finally able to record a lot of songs about people. There’s “How Will One Mad Woman Be Enough” (一個瘋女人怎么夠); “Dragon Snake of Da-ze” (大澤龍蛇) was written for Chen Sheng (陳勝) and Wu Guang (吳廣)[ 1]; “Damn Wages” (死工資) was written for those laborers who haven’t received any wages for a long time; “The People Are All Sick” (全名皆病) was written for the people of this huge society; “Now That The Tragedy Has Been Born, Let’s Not Let It End” (悲劇既然誕生，就不要讓它結束) was written for Yu Luoke, Lee Jiulian, Zhang Zhixin, and Zhong Haiyuan [2]; “A Shameful Sound” (可恥的聲音) commemorates the more than 300 souls who died in a fire in the city of Karamay [Xinjiang]; and “Beasts” (畜生) is for those people who are less than animals.”

Yan Haiguang (殷海光)[3] said: “From ancient times till now, it is the people who bear, and what they bear are the rulers.” ---I can’t bear rulers, and I can’t bear the people either. I can’t bear the rulers’ rule and can’t bear that the people don’t resist.

What I want to say to the people of China is this: If you do not initiate resistance, then when others are successful in helping you resist or resisting for you, you will only become their slaves. I really cannot bear it. People. You have to resist. No one can help you or do it for you. If you try to strike some bargain so you dont' have to resist, then you will be slaves forever.

______________________
[1] During the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC), Chen Sheng and Wu Guang led an uprising in Da-ze County, Henan Province to establish the China’s first ever peasant government.
[2] Yu Luoke (遇洛克), Lee Jiulian (李九蓮), Zhang Zhixin (李九蓮) and Zhong Haiyuan (鐘海源) were all executed by the Chinese Communist Party for dissent during the Cultural Revolution.
[3] Yin Hai-guang, 1919-1969, is a mainland-born scholar considered the originator of the ideal of Taiwanese independence. (He was also a former editor of Central Daily News - see the last post.)

KMT Closes Down Newspaper of 79 Years

2006-05-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

Taiwanese media continues to slide away from the island's classic blue-green political divide. KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou has put the axe to a party mouthpiece of 79 years, the Central Daily News (中央日報), which will stop publication on June 1 (English story here or one of many Chinese writeups here).

Apart from a few aging Nationalist Army soldiers and other blue diehards, I doubt anyone will really care - which just goes to show how political bias doesn't move news anymore, though the media remains heavily politically invested. Of course everyone has known this for two or thee years, since Next Magazine and the Apple Daily appeared and blew the rest of the print media out of the water by chasing scandals at the cost of anyone and everyone, regardless of affiliation. Thankfully it finally put in the background a newspaper ｅｃｏｌｏｇｙ where ｙｏｕｈａｄｔｈｅＣｈｉｎａ－ｆｒｉｅｎｄｌｙｂｌｕｅｓ︰China ＮｅｗｓａｎｄＵｎｉｔｅｄＤａｉｌｙＮｅｗｓ；ｖｅｒｓｕs ｔｈｅｉｎｄｅｐｅｎｄｅｎｃｅ－ｌｅａｎｉｎｇｇｒｅｅｎ︰ＬｉｂｅｒｔｙＴｉｍｅｓ。

Ｔｈｉｓａｌｓｏｅｘｔｅｎｄｓｔｏ Taiwan's Ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈｐｒｅｓｓ，ｗｉｔｈＣｈｉｎａＰｏｓｔｂｌｕｅａｎｄＴａｉｗａｎＮｅｗｓａｎｄＴａｉｐｅｉＴｉｍｅｓ green. Here the situation is even more unfortunate and less likely to change. For rich laobans, the political cred of owning even a small-run English paper easily sets off the losses, and those can be kept in check anyway through belt tightening. Expats hate this because competition never becomes a real issue, which keeps resources spread thin and leaves Taiwan with the three papers that are less than good.

The Central Daily News was establish on February 1, 1928 according to most reports, but for some reason Medianews Online writes it was established in September 1951.

Of minor interest, Ma Ying-jeou shows himself as progressive to some degree by pulling the plug; meanwhile his predecessor as KMT chairman Lien Chan, China-fucker extraordinaire, has said he'd prefer to keep the Central Daily News alive.

Filipino Labor Rights Journalist Assassinated

2006-05-24T21:57:00.001-07:00

Of the innumerable tragedies in the Philippines, the biggest one may be that there is no sign of better things to come. Today let's remember Dong Batul, a journalist who was killed by gunmen earlier this week on May 22. He was concerned with mistreated workers, including some in Taiwan, and the plight of the poor. Excerpts of various emails, news releases and reports (all via the APMM) tell the story:

...another Filipino radio announcer was shot dead by motorcycle riding assassins in Palawan.

His name is Fernando “Dong” Batul. Among his exposes was the situation of Filipino seafarers from Palawan who passed through a Local Government Unit placement agency in that province and who were deployed to Taiwan. These persons are now housed in Hope Center and joined our later protest activities in MECO and have become members of Migrante.

From an article on INQ7, a news web collaboration by major print and broadcast media in the Philippines.

PUERTO PRINCESA CITY-- Months ago, he bought a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Stop Killing Journalists” from a colleague, not knowing that he would later be counted among the long list of slain media persons.

Fernando “Dong” Batul, 36, a commentator of local radio station dyPR and a former vice mayor of this city, was shot dead by two men on a motorcycle at 6:35 a.m. yesterday on Valencia Street here.

He was driving his multi-cab on his way to work, which was 50 meters from the site of the ambush, Palawan police chief Senior Superintendent Elpidio de Asis said.

Batul suffered 12 bullet wounds -- four in the face, four in the chest, three in the back and one in the side, said Senior Inspector Jane Cordero. Police recovered four slugs from a .45-cal. pistol.

He was the 79th journalist killed in the Philippines since the ouster of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, according to the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP).

Last week after a journalist was beaten by a local official and a photographer was murdered, the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists renewed its concern about the safety of media people in the Philippines.

It said that the situation had gone “from bad to worse.”

Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) has said in Paris that the Philippines is the most dangerous place for journalists after war-torn Iraq.

Batul, who earned the moniker “Bastonero ng Bayan,” was on his way to host his program “Bastonero” at the dyPR station owned by Palawan Broadcasting Corp. when he was attacked.

A witness reported that the gunmen, on a blue Honda XRM motorcycle, were wearing dark helmets, De Asis said.

Batul had been receiving death threats. A month ago, two grenades were thrown at his house but did not explode. The attacker left a note saying “it kills to be too talkative.”

Gangster Text Messages

2006-05-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

....uh, wrong number?

Over the past couple weeks a friend has been getting some strange text messages from a few different unknown senders. These SMSs are all in Chinese. A couple have asked if the receiver is the girlfriend of some gangster-sounding dude. Then there are these:

Message 1:

Ur guys dont want A-shan to touch the Boss' business. Coz we want to find out some things so we act like we don't know. A couple days ago on the walkie-talkie Fatty Rui said I was a rat. In front of the Boss and u guys he */text missing/*

Message 2:

Fatty: what i want to tell you is that i didn't spend all the money. I paid it and I'm not gonna say it coz you know what for. So don't keep asking about money and telling me to hurry up. I haven't caught much lately. Tomorrow I'm gonna */text missing/*

No Joy Luck Club Crap Here

2006-05-13T13:41:00.000-07:00

"When a poet becomes an axe murderer, reading his oeuvre gets tricky. On October 8, 1993, after battling mental illness for years, thirty-seven-year-old Chinese poet Gu Cheng killed his wife, Xie Ye, with that primeval weapon, then took his own life." - review of Sea of Dreams by Gu Cheng in The Believer

The Believer, a Brooklyln-based hipster mag linked to the McSweeney's "literary" movement, has reviewed a couple of Chinese authors that don't much tie in to the images of Chinese out there in the global vernacular.

Super-wierd techno avant-gardism doesn't come up too much, so this one also looks intriguing...

Mad Science In Imperial City (image removed)

...for anyone into agrammatical poetry and math equations.

The book "utilizes scientific diagrams, mathematical equations, lists, and even a menu from an imagined Poetry Auction.... Broadly, it relates the experience of someone who left China after the Tiananmen Square massacre to settle in the U.S., carrying the fourth edition of the American Heritage dictionary “wherever I go.” The book uses this emigration to investigate what constitutes the individual and where narration resides." - as reviewed in The Believer

There's the traditional side: "it argues that only through engaging with tradition can we understand our experience of the world as it changes around us." (again, The Believer) And the techno-modern: "Culture shapes itself to grids; or, perhaps, gridding and cultural production are the same thing." - a dust-jacket quote on the publisher's web site

The main question, though, is whether it's at all legible?

A Quick Index: Taiwan's Migrating Women

2006-05-12T21:07:00.000-07:00

A few stats from today's Taipei Times:

Number of foreign spouses who have enrolled in mandarin classes in the last 8 months: 20,260
Number who enrolled in 2005: 16,000
Approximate percentage of non-Chinese foreign spouses now enrolled in classes: 23

Number of Chinese sex workers detained in Taiwan in 2003: 799
Number detained in 2004: 331
In 2005: 96
Cumulative number of those positive for HIV/AIDS: 3
Number of Taiwanese sex workers detained in 2005: 625
Number of those positive for HIV/AIDS: 7
Number of Taipei City Councillors who believe that these statistics show that Mainland prostitutes are leading to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Taiwan: 1 (Chen Yong-teh 陳永德)

Sources are here and here.

New Red Guards of the Chinese Internet

2006-05-12T20:56:00.000-07:00

Mobilizing the youth for nationalist ideology is always scary, and according to this New York Times News Service article, student volunteers are now onboard the Internet cleansing campaign.

Probably related, in March I learned of one Beijing web master who'd received a phone call from the Public Security Bureau to make sure he understood that he needed to take down a link and discussion forum related to the exiled band, Pangu. This despite the fact that the mind control already seemed to be working: the ratio of Pangu haters to supporters posting on the forum was around 4:1, according to the web master. But pulling out the weeds, now how does that CCP slogan go?

FIlipina Victoria Andres Held Incommunicado

2006-05-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

The Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants just issued a statement about inhumane punishment of an undocumented worker, Victoria Andres. Excerpts:

She was caught in front of Fu Jen Catholic University a month ago for being an undocumented migrant worker. The police have not yet released her because up to now her previous employer has not yet surrendered to the police her passport.

Other than that, the police also do not allow her visitors (even if there are visiting hours) including her boyfriend except for a pastoral Church worker. They also refuse even food given to her as gifts by her friends, saying that she has her own rations...

...it is illegal for any person to hold the passport or any other identity papers of another person. This illegal practice is still rampant in Taiwan.

note: for a few hours this post's headline incorrectly read that Ms. Andres was being held in solitary confinement, which was incorrect and not claimed by the APMM. Holidarity regrets the error.

The Return of Massage Boy!!!

2006-05-08T12:13:00.000-07:00

And now for a human interest story...
...including an alternative ranking system for Taiwan's daily English newspapers

The island's annual trade show for art galleries, Art Taipei, is surprisingly good this year and laudably international. Decent representation of Mainland artists + some Korea + some HK + 1 or 2 Sydney galleries and lots of great stuff from young Taiwanese artists.... okay, who cares. It's just fucking art.

But in media booth section, suddenly in front of me in a Von Dutch baseball cap over a bandana'd head was -- holy fuck I'm so glad to see you in a weird kind of way I'm not totally sure about and can't really describe -- Massage Boy!!!! The freelance male masseur/ prostitute now turned part-time transvestite and low-grade pimp!!!! Dumbstruck, I broke off a conversation, gave him an unsure hug, and couldn't manage more than a stunned: "[His real name], oh my God it's you!"

I hadn't seen Massage Boy in years, maybe six or seven, certainly five at least, and when thoughts of him and his disfigured yet cherubic smile did come to mind, I'd usually turn my eyes down to the sidewalk and with a small shrug of guilt - for neglecting a friend, or something like that - and imagine he was in an HIV/AIDS hospice somewhere, or dead. I mean, what other fate are you supposed to imagine for a guy who solicits sex with international hotel guests for money? Especially once he'd stopped hanging out in nightclubs.

It turns out he'd disappeared into a clutch of Tibetan Lamas, one of the several Tibetan Buddhism Centers in Taipei. "I was hanging around there from 8 in the morning till 5 or 6 at night. All day. Sometimes, every day. Yeah, I was chanting sutras, you know, meditating, lots of things."

Then a moment of hestitation, and a contemplative look gave way to a giggle: "Oh my God, what was I thinking! What a waste of time!"

Sweet relief! Same old Massage Boy. He hadn't changed a bit!

Now, now, now...Massage Boy represents something special for me. Not only an old friend, he was also my first big scoop, my first inside story, and the subject of my first freelance job for any Taiwan newspaper. It doesn't really matter which one, but those of you around Taiwan in the mid- to late-1990s may remember a weekend story, "The Stunning Confessions of Massage Boy" or whatever the hell that article was headlined. For research, I remember a night in Blackarm's apartment swilling booze and calling up all the massage ads in the back of all Taipei's English newspapers. Then I shared our findings with Massage Boy, who would call up the competition anyway just to see what they were up to, as they would him, sometimes with curses or threats. I copyedited his classified ads. And then once my story was printed, in gruesome detail, most of Massage Boy's friends figured out the article was about him, he was mildly pissed, and I learned my first minor lesson of journalistic ethics vis a vis anonymity.

But this is an update, not a nostalgia piec. So let me, however many years later, continue to milk my inside source for info on Taipei’s hotel prostitution scene. Cut to the Q&A, where I start off delicately:

Q: So what are you doing for money these days?

MB: Yeah, I’m still doing massage, like that. But now, I’m also a transvestite.

Q: ?!

MB: (He pulls out a photo of himself in drag, and it looks like a bad morning in Thailand...) I wasn’t getting enough business just doing massage and I was trying to figure out what to do. And I had one friend was a transvestite, and she showed me how to do it. So now I have another ad for that. It’s good, I get more business because some people want that. But sometimes with customers from the Middle East or India, their English not so good, you know, and when they try to touch my pussy, they’re like, ‘Oh my God!’ But I write it very clearly in the ad, you know, so I ask them ‘You don’t know what a transvestite is?’

Being a transvestite, you know, sometimes I think it’s changed my, you know, psychology. You start to act different to other people.

He fishes around in his bag for a folded green piece of paper on which he’s written his new classified ads. There are three, two for male massage services and one for transvestite massage. One of the male massage ads is crossed out, and he asks me which one is better while I borrow his pen and clean up the English.

Q: This one’s better. (I indicate the ad he’s X-ed out.)

MB: I just faxed it, but (giggles) they haven’t called me back yet.

Q: Which newspaper do you advertise in?

MB: Taiwan News. I used to use Taipei Times, but now they’re too expensive, and the response was not good. They used to give it to me for NT$4,500 a month, but now they want $9,000, and how can I pay that? Especially if I only get maybe a couple of calls in the month? I can’t even make back the NT$9,000. The Taipei Times, I don’t think they really get that in hotels very much. Plus I owe them a lot of money.

Q: Does Taiwan News get better response?

MB: About the same actually, but they’re cheaper.

Q: What about the China Post?

MB: Yeah, they’re definitely the best. But now they cost a lot! But the response is really – yeah. China Post is the best for sure.

Q: So how would you put them in order?

MB: China Post, then Taiwan News, then Taipei Times.

Q: How many cases do you get a month?

MB: Four or five, or six. Some for the male masseur, some for transvestite, like that….But now I also have some girls to send too!

Q: What? Girls?

MB: Yeah! Actually, they called me. They were doing this before for someone else, but they didn’t like the other agency. So one time I put an ad and they called me. Now I get some calls and I’ll send them.

Q: How much money do you get for that?

MB: You know, I did the same thing before, work for some agency, so I know how it works. It costs NT$4,000 and they get half. So that’s what I ask for, and they know everything, they’ve done it before, so it’s easy.

Q: How many girls?

MB: Two or three.

Q: Are they cute?

MB: (Waves his hand in front of his face in the ‘no-no-no-no-no’ motion and laughs) What, are you kidding me?

Q: Are they young? How old are they?

MB: No. Like 32, 30, 35. They’re office girls. But when people call, of course we say, ‘Yeah, 26, very cute!’ Like that. But they’re very plain, you know.

Q: They’re office girls?

MB: Yeah. They work in an office in the daytime. They just do this – I don’t know, for whatever. But they don’t do sex. Only, you know, hand job.

Q: NT$4,000, that’s a pretty expensive handjob.

MB: You’re telling me.

Q: What about you? After I hadn’t seen you around for a while I’d sometimes worry whether you had AIDS or something. Do you worry about that?

MB: Of course, but the thing is, you know, I don’t do anal sex. I don’t get fucked, at least for that.

~~finis~~

Chinese Workers' Web Shut Down

2006-05-08T11:09:00.000-07:00

Indymedia Hong Kong reports (Chinese):

冰點查封事件的「自由民主」之爭在兩岸鬧得沸沸揚揚之際，同一時間，中國工人網被關閉，卻只成為其中的「小插曲」。我們認為，中國工人網被中共當局以資本額不足而被迫關站，卻是個更重大的事件。

"When the struggle for freedom and democracy over the closing of Freezing Point was simmering on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the Zongguo Gongren [Chinese Workers] web site was also shut down but just considered a "minor episode." We believe that Chinese Communist Party authorities closure of the Zongguo Gongren site on grounds of insufficient capital is actually a more serious matter."

The article goes on to say: that Zhongguo Gongren was set up last year on May 1 by a group concerned with the welfare of farmers and laborers. The site in no way called for democracy and had no political aspirations. In the beginning posters were mostly scholars and other intelligencia concerned with labor, but eventually laborers began posting, describing various work situations and difficulties in China. In short, it was fast becoming an important forum for Labor.

At the moment, I see that the Zhongguo Gongren web site, www.zggr.org does not come up (a message says the server is not configured), but there appears to be a mirror: http://61.222.52.198/user/zggr/. A top post there, from yesterday, is an appeal to restore the site - presumably in China.

Now Who's Hu Wooing, And Who's Wooing Hu?

2006-05-05T05:31:00.000-07:00

For anybody that read page A17 of today's China Times (中國時報), the lead story (Chinese) was about the planned meeting next week in Beijing between Hu Jintao and one of Taiwan's largest tycoons, Chang Rong-fa (張榮發). So while the front page of everything is caught up with this idiotic bickering on where Chen Shui-bian can refuel his plane - I'll wager the implications are maybe a touch less than the CCP inviting Lien Chan, then treating him to a Mao-like fantasy world of adoring school kids who welcomed "grandpa" "home" - there are other cross-strait relations stories happening on the back pages that are probably more weighty.

Preparing for 3 days in Beijing and at least 5 in China next week, Chang is off to see "old friends" - including Hu, the Transportation Minister, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office, the head of the whatever bureau governs airlines, etc. - about setting up a RMB 500 million operations center in Shanghai that will service both one of the world's largest shipping companies (his Evergreen Marine) and his airline (EVA Air). Now Chang is naturally in favor of direct links, which will benefit him enormously, and it does not at all enter into the equation that he's in many ways an emblem of old-school, Japanese-loving Taiwanese tradition. Several paragraphs towards the front of the article were about how Hu Jintao has recently passed on warm greetings to Chang at every possible turn (twice in the last year, anyway). Indeed, some Taiwan-China relations are very friendly, and what's interesting here is this one doesn't fit either of the two major stereotypes of the putative debate broiling in Taiwan - between the 'Mainland-born latter day loyalists' and the 'homegrown Taiwanese identity camp.' Maybe I'm just saying this because I just read Moneyball - which has absolutely nothing to do with Taiwan, China, or even politics - but would somebody please plot some more variables!

Just in case you were curious...

2006-05-05T01:33:00.000-07:00

Been doing this without a profile for too long. So I just added one, terse tho it is.

Also bothered to look at the Settings and open up Comments to those w/o Blogger accounts. My bad.

One Country, Two Rock Scenes

2006-05-02T22:32:00.000-07:00

Among rockers, there's plenty of interest in cross-strait touring, but it seldom happens, especially crossing the strait from from west to east. Big Taiwanese rock festivals Formoz and Hohaiyan have invited Chinese bands in recent years - major ones in fact, specifically Tang Dynasty, Thin Man and even Cui Jian - but Taiwanese promoters say that permission was never granted by Chinese authorities and things always fell through. (There is of course the Pangu exception, but...) So I recently emailed a foreign national (i.e. non-Chinese) musician living in Beijing about the possibility of his band coming to Taiwan, and here's what he had to say:

[a certain Chinese band member] has a beijing hukou [= "residency", approximately]. which means he can go to hong kong very easily. we go there about twice a month
for business reasons.

once you are in hong kong, all you need is an invite
from the taiwan side, and he can get an entry permit
from the taiwan rep office in hk. then we stroll into
the CKS airport. easy.

but you do need a passport to get into taiwan. and
many chinese bands dont have passports. its unlikely
if they walk into the passport office in beijing and
tell them they want to go to taiwan they will get
anywhere. but if you have a band that has been
overseas before AND has a beijing or shanghai or
guangdong hukou they can use this route. Thailand is
another option as well for those not allowed to travel
to hong kong. but again, you need a passport. which is
actually not that hard to get, but many bands are not
good at negotiating this kind of bureaucracy, so if
someone doesnt do it for them, they think its
"impossible"

i know a number of people who have used this route for
various reasons. granted if you are a hugely famous
band like tang dynasty or whatever, it would cause
more of a fuss in the mainland and probably be a bit
more difficult. but for a small unknown band like us
it would be no problem. just a matter of finding the
right venue, etc.

All told, it seems like flying under the radar is still the way to go, and permission from Taiwan to enter is still easier than permission from Beijing to leave. Oh, great. But at least it's possible for this particular band...

Indie-Pop vs. Wanna-Be Mainstream - The Gap is Closing

2006-04-30T05:09:00.000-07:00

Every blue moon I stop in the Ximending Rose Records to check the listening stations, usually just for 10 or 15 minutes because there's always somethig enjoyable about how dumb the latest S.H.E./Machi/Jolin CD is. What surprised me a couple days ago was most of 12 CDs in the players - at least 7 or 8 - were local indie releases. I'm not sure if MC Hot Dog counts as indie anymore, but aside from him the lineup included recent CDs by Tizzy Bac, Natural Q (自然卷), Bear Babes, Rose Din, one folk/ethnic/aboriginal comp, something else that escapes me, and also the Aprils, a Japanese group distributed by Silent Agreement.

So what this basically means is a victory, and if not really for indie, then definitely for indie pop.

Tizzy Bac, Natural Q, and Bare Babes are all predominantly feature female vocalists, and while instrumentals have various influences, the singing is mostly in the pre-R&B Mando-pop starlet style - as in, the milky-tea love melodies of fake Taiwanese virgins? This has something that's never really happened in Taiwan's band scene before as a trend, but now I'm wondering whether the idea of indie pop really ever heralded a different direction? Anyway, now the ugly head is reared.

Ok, some quick reviews (all links have song previews):

Bear Babes I fast-forwarded through with few reasons to stop; they're a semi-competent rock band that at times manages to be cute in singing about how bored and dreamy their lives are. Some songs would make passable radio play, like maybe late night on UFO with Johnny talking over the music and doting on how cute it is.

Natural Q, "C'est la Vie 2" is the most polished, and at times it is not bad if you're in the mood for fluffy light Japanese-style bossa nova, but is even more cutesy than Bear Babes for the simple reason that they're better at it. The CD also has songs that might as well be commercial jingles and these will annoy the holy fuck out of even Stephanie Sun. This is a band, a duo actually, that has achieved reasonable notariety - for example, I heard the news that they "broke up" last month on a Beijing radio station while in a taxi. (I think they're actually just on haitus.) They site Cornelius as an influence, and while they try to make music as comfortable as his, they ignore the reasons why he is rough and jarring, i.e. that easy feeling has to come in relation to something. I'd rate this one: Listenable.

Tizzy Bac - While I've always loved Chris' singing and jazzy almost-ragtime electric piano, and while I also like the way the backup instrumentals are moving more into a driving, heavily rhythmic new wave kind of thing, I'm still waiting for them mesh. This is an interesting album, not bad in a lot of ways, but at times it sounds like two different kinds of music happening at the same time - indie rock + female pop (the vocal melodies here are much less dynamic than on the first album). So I dunno, maybe they should have recorded separately and made a mashup?

And finally, Rose Din, well they just kind of suck in the way that skinny long-haired rocker dudes with nothing else to distinguish themselves other than being skinny long-haired rocker dudes tend to suck. And on top of that they're also trying to be pop stars. But I don't think they're good enough to be May Day 2.

Ok, was there anything that should have led me to be optimistic here? No, of course not. But there is still plenty of marijuana in the Shida area, so music here still may have a future.

For the moment I'll stick with White Eyes (白目) as the best new band to make a showing at last month's Spring Scream. Don't know much about them, but the girl singer really goes nuts on stage, kinda like P.J. Harvey or Yeah Yeah Yeahs style, and the rocker dudes backing her up just step up and rock it like all they have to do is press play. Rock 'n roll power. Nuff respect!

Dongguan Swingers

2006-04-28T07:07:00.000-07:00

Check out this article by blogger/journalist Shenzhen Zen (not sure how to navigate his archive, look for the header "Strange days indeed, mama"):

``Will you help me to practice my English?''

It's not an uncommon question for a foreigner in China to field from
strangers on trains, planes, buses, sidewalks, in stores and cafes. The urge for
Chinese men, women, children alike to learn better English, even randomly and at
inopportune moments, is strong.

In this case the question came from a topless middle-aged woman in the
midst of a mostly Chinese partner swapping party in Dongguan, Guangdong
province. To budding English language student's left, along a 20-foot mirrored
wall and on four large mattresses strewen with condom wrappers, tissues, clothes
and underwear about 20 others were engaged in a, well, the correct world is
``orgy.''

And it just goes on from there, including a funny intro on his trying to get it published at a Hong Kong newspaper.

Midi Fest Pull Quotes

2006-04-25T04:40:00.000-07:00

The Midi Festival, China's biggest annual rock, happens in Beijing next week from May 1-5. Here's a few quotes from fest organizer, Zhang Fan (張帆):

On why goverment rules and red tape limiting advertising and promotion don't present much of a setback:

"If we don't do any promotion, the day it opens, we'll still have 10,000 people show up."

On problems/ things he's had to explain - to the police:

"What I hate most is when there is a line of Public Security Bureau officers standing in front of the stage."

"...The police are afraid that if people stand up and drink some beer, something terrible will happen."

"...I explained to them that people who take ecstasy need more music than just a 45-minute rock set, otherwise they get uncomfortable."

[The festival provides its own security, and they wear t-shirts.]

On band selection:

"We never invite old rock bands because we want new energy."

"60-80% of the bands will be different from last year."

"A lot of the foreign bands are coming as a result of sponsorship and cooperation with foreign diplomatic offices."

On the 10,000+ expected attendees:

"Fifty percent of them aren't necessarily coming for the music. They're just coming to have fun, but that's also bringing them in."

On the festival's goals:

"Before you could never do a big outdoor festival. We're trying to let the government accept that rock 'n' roll is not dangerous."

What's the difference between Midi and Snow Mountain and other festivals?

"The biggest difference is that at the beginning we didn't have any money, while they had big sponsorships. But the [Midi School of Music] had equipment, so that was free, and we used the campus. So we didn't have any pressure. We could grow gradually."

On the Midi spirit:

"No cops, music, pogo, dye your hair, be yourself."

The Return of Rolling Stone China! Well, Kind of...

2006-04-22T04:49:00.000-07:00

After the glorious debut and near-immediate dissappearance of Rolling Stone China in March, the magazine is back - but with a different name, Yin Xiang Shi Jie (音像世界), or Audio World, an already existant but foundering music magazine resurected as a shell for Rolling Stone. So reports Lawrence Li in the HK Standard. Gee, I'm betting the folks in San Francisco are really psyched about this branding/licensing fiasco.

The renamed magazine will continue re-publishing some Rolling Stones articles in
Chinese, blending them with original articles on homegrown music. [Editor in chief] Hao says there is no mandatory requirement on the ratio of translated and original articles.

Quick note about the author: Lawrence Li is a music critic in Shenzhen who runs a blog devoted to avant-garde music, noise, and sound art. His tastes are not exactly mainstream, and that comes out in his criticisms of the first issue.

Also worth considering: while Rolling Stone China got slammed with the Beijing censorship hammer, there are other major western magazine brands with presence in China: Men's Journal, I think, and several women's fashion magazines are on newstands everywhere. So it can be done, They're just not letting Rolling Stone do it.

Filipinos on the loose

2006-04-22T00:11:00.000-07:00

There's a clear gulf here in understanding why this happens, and while migrant groups tend to push aside the issue of economic migration, I don't see the Council of Labor Affairs doing much to open any dialogue.

Why Taiwanese companies say their foreign workers ran away:

- instigation by other foreign workers
- imminent expiration of the employment contract.

Source: 2003 Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) survey of Taiwanese employers, as paraphrased in a recent statement by the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants

Why migrant workers say they ran away:

18% said they suffered abuse
39% found their work too hard
24% stated they were about to be repatriated
6% had finished their contracts
13% gave other reasons

Source: Catholic Hope Workers Center, from the same APMM statement

Beijing Censors vs. Taiwan Street Food

2006-04-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

They rub their greasy fascist hands over everything, nothing too small, xiao chi (小吃) included. This is an email conversation I've been having with the editor of an English-language mag published on the Mainland who asked me to write something about Taiwan street food....

hey friend gram,

can i get a taiwan street food article from you? i'd like to run it for JUNE issue (our food issue). and unfortunately, our censors will want to run it as "local" travel. ridiculous but that's the way it goes. what do you say?

let me know - thanks!
editor guy
email 2:
hi editor guy,

the article should be ok. what's the deadline on that? and do you pay extra
for photos?

as for running as "local" travel, i'd figured as much, though maybe you could ask them for a special label for HK/Macau/Taiwan, playing up the one country two systems thing. I know a lot of media in China and Taiwan differentiate these zones with hai3di4 （海地） vs. nei4di4 (内地). might be worth a try.

best,
friend gram
email 3:
hi friend gram,

i've been bugging our censors about how to couch this and they insist Domestic travel
which is bullshit. we can't do the haidi neidi thing since it's all china baby ... according to the party that is

not sure what to do right now so can we stay in touch? yes, i pay extra for photos. i apologize for this but can we hold off? i'd still love to run it not into looking like an
idiot for running it as domestic travel.

be well,
editor guy

Organ Harvesting Controversy

2006-04-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

The US State Department rebutts Epoch Times claims of torture and murder; or A Hong Kong Coffee with the Falun Gong

Shortly after the Epoch Times called wolf on a medical prison for organ harvesting of Falun Gong practictioners - they essentially described as a concentration camp for some kind of final solution to the Falun Gong - an independent probe with links to the US State Department visited several of the sites described in Epoch Times reports and found no evidence to back up their claims.

After first reading of the hospital in the Epoch Times - their story was sourced from a former employee who defected - the claim seemed so astounding that I couldn't help post on it. Now I'm wondering ~~ and what's developed is a dispute between the Epoch Times and the US govt reports (here).

To be sure, Epoch Times does some of the best frontline reporting on human rights in China.... and the only thing that makes it suspect is their function as a propaganda unit for the Falun Gong. Is this one over the top?

In February I met with an editor and reporter from the Epoch Times in Hong Kong. We met at the Starbucks near the in-town airport check-in desk in Central and talked for close to an hour. Both were women, one a short-haired, attractive, and very proper woman in her late 30s and the other a bony, tomboy type with frizzy hair in her late 20s. They wouldn't agree to meet me at their office and would tell me very little about it, including the number of personnel. They described problems with landlords - changing lease agreements, pressuring them out, and other fishy harassment - and the natural insinuation was that the CCP's invisible hand was behind everything. (The story in Taiwan is quite different. Though I've never been to their office here in Taipei, the address is openly published. Doh! that makes perfect sense...)

Still, I can't help get they feeling they are wary of other outsiders, including the western media, people like me. They want us to pick up on their stories, but not ask too much about how and where they get them. While no one else in the world has bloody photos of massacres like Shanwei, they do. And their sources for these stories must be so delicate that extreme secrecy can be understood. But not absolute secrecy - because in the end that is only propaganda. And I think with something as big as this alleged organ harvesting in Shenyang, outside confirmation is the only thing that will make people believe it - and believe them. In a lot of ways, the Epoch Times' credibility is on the line with this one.

Over coffee, the two women mentioned reports about the Epoch Times they found unfair. They didn't mention precisely which reports or what they said, but they let on to a general suspicion of media. They did offer that they and all other staff were volunteers, and they did not mention numbers but said they were not large. Whatever their staff size, the paper is rapidly becoming one of the largest alternative news services in the world with a presence everywhere in the world you find ethnic Chinese and editions in 14 languages (at least online. Paper editions come out from the big HQ in New York, HK, Taipei and several other places). It is also truly an army of housewives; when I asked, they admitted as much.

Both women said they were Falun Gong practitioners, and when it came to China, they repeated a lot of the moral rhetoric you can read in their newspaper: "the evils of the Communist Cult will be punished by God at Judgment Day", etc. What they said was not as extreme as this but very similar to what you can read in their paper, so I won't describe it more. A big problem with the view is viewing the Chinese Communist Party as a static entity, as something that has not changed, this despite the enormous and extremely obvious changes that have happened - and benefitted the lives of hundreds of millions of people. This is something the Epoch Times refuses to weigh on its scales. Equally perplexing is where it's narrative of CCP collapse will lead: so, what happens after judgement day?

Okay, so is the Falun Gong a just some freaky cult? I had this discussion with a US diplomatic corps guy last weekend over beers. He was inclined to think they were, and this is reason enought to brush them off like sawdust off your shoes. Coz if you don't the sawdust will maybe even get in your socks. He was also inclined to believe that religion is basically useless and has no place in the future of humanity - in a way that reminded me quite a bit of the contemp. French novelist Michel Houllebecq. A few years ago at the wedding of an ABC girl and a mixed Chinese guy, the mother of the bride was a Falun Gonger and delivered a few words when the toasts came around. It was very banal, wishing for peace and love and world harmony, something like that. Later the mother of the groom, who'd studied philosophy and had a raspy smokers' voice, shot off some comments about not being able to stand "zealots." It's impossible for western liberals to accept simple-minded faith in anything, especially there are these secret society aspects hanging around. I pretty naturally find myself on this side of the fence, especially when it comes to establishing the truth of something like a concentration camp which would have major repercussions for world trade and the holding of the 2008 Olympics. But at the same time, if I find the Falun Gong a little strange - on the scale, maybe only a little more strange than the first time I saw a white guy doing Taichi in Washington Square Park (NYC) - I hardly find them threatening. They don't proselytize fanatically and they back a public mouthpiece that supports secular values like human rights and democracy. Maybe the bottom line is that they do some good and little bad. For that, I'm pretty inclined to look the other way when they do their dorky concentration exercises in the park.

But where the Epoch Times is full of shit is the 10 million "resignations" from the CCP it claims will coincide with Hu Jindao's visit to the US. ET has created a site where people can disclaim the Party, but when I asked the two women, they said that this is actually anonymous and in no way involves any official paper shuffling within China. No one is really dropping out of the CCP, and the Epoch Times is wrong for presenting this illusion. What they are instead offering is a hit counter for dissatisfaction with the government, an Internet phenomenon that extends far beyond them. They may be in the front lines with all their crazy hacking technology that breaks through the Great Firewall, but they should still admit as much.

While in China recently I did meet with one bona fide dissident. Around 50 years old, he's been on the government's list since the first campaigns to reign in political thought following economic liberalization in the late 1970s and was in jail as recently as a year and a half ago for essays he'd posted on the Internet. When I asked if he ever wrote for the Epoch Times, he shook his head and said, "Hardly ever. They're too Falun Gong. I usually write for some other sites." If even a lifelong democracy activist is put off by the Epoch Times whiffs the propaganda, is it any wonder that we're also suspicious?

Fishy Food Poisoning @ Formosa Plastics

2006-04-15T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (APMM) is charging that something is fishy about a recent rash of food poisoning cases that affected 31 workers at the Formosa Plastics Yunlin campus on April 13. The press statement seemed to imply that some of the poisoned workers were worker leaders - workers at this plant have held strikes three times since last July for various reasons - but wasn't completely clear on this point. After the first strike last July, several of the strike leaders were forcibly deported, and at least one, Gil Lebria, was beaten severely to scare the group into signing waivers that terminated their employment contracts with Formosa - this according to Lebria's story as reported in POTS. This case is still pending in Taiwanese courts. A local legal assocation is doing pro bono work for Lebria, whom I believe is now back in the Philippines.

Epoch Times claims Chinese concentration camp

2006-04-02T21:15:00.000-07:00

The Epoch Times has done the earliest and most immediate reporting on a number of human rights cases in China, notably the massacre in Shanwei Village, Guangdong a couple months ago. The latest claim seems almost too increadible though: a north China concentration camp for Falun Gong practitioners. Epoch Times is deeply Falun Gong, and is committed to the belief that the Chinese government is "evil" - something that rings more true of the Mao era than today, but this is a difference they hardly recognize. If this concentration camp story is true, international outcry will be warranted. For now, this Reuters story on Boxun takes a look.

Final thoughts on RSC (RIP?)

2006-04-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

Now whatever happens to Rolling Stone China will be a matter of practical finagling, and one thinks it might last. Men's Health and several women's fashion mags also have China editions, but those aren't as sexy to the media as rock 'n roll. Anyway, in case it dissappears, let me get my last thoughts on this out of the way.

From the local perspective, Duo Duo, a rock site webmaster in his early 20s who lives in a basement apartment in the Beijing's ghetto-hipster Haidian District, had two things to say: "I thought it was good," and "I didn't even read the Chinese articles." So for him it was all the translated stuff - the movie and CD reviews especially. I suppose I shouldn't forget that Chinese have a habit of ignoring/ disbelieving the news, though they do maintain faith in info from the
West. The weird effect here actually runs counter to the nationalistic ideas the government seems to be pushing. All the confabulated adoration of US 60s/70s rock and protest culture is just a substitute for two things: 1) the history Chinese rock doesn't have, and 2) the story it can't tell. Now - and this is different from even two or three years ago - Chinese rockers are really finding their roots in the West. Lots of bands in Beijing (Hang on the Box, SUBS, Ret-ros, etc.) are now singing in English, and this is new. And in the Wudaokou record shops, this leaves the playa haters saying, "They're not making music for us here. They're making it for the West, coz they want to be famous."

...also, when I asked about Cui Jian, last week the director of Beijing's major annual rock fest, the Midi Festival, said that in spite of his relative fame - I get the picture he's more famous with the foreign press than the average Chinese - he was still an outsider when it came to government culture and a political hot potato. In other words, he doesn't have good guanxi. "Whenever he does something, it's not necessarily easy." And that's probably why he was the first RSC cover: rock in China is still fighting for acceptability, so it's using the best hero it can muster. I can support this to a degree, but the problem is that once you strip yourself of your values, then it just becomes a power play and the direction of social change becomes an afterthought, which is pretty much how things seem right now.

Rolling Stone China gets the axe?

2006-04-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! This article in Boxun is reporting that Rolling Stone China may be cancelled after only one issue. The second issue would be due out right around now. The majro reason cited in the article is that the deal Rolling Stone China worked with a local partner - local partners are a necessity as no foreign entity can own media in China (see below posts on That's Beijing - 1 and 2) - didn't get the proper permission from government authorities, where the magazine is based.

The article says RSC's first issue circulation was 120,000 and selling well. Through various major media news outlets, it quote a Shanghai official saying that the magazine partnership never got proper permission from the Bureau of News and Publications (trans? 新闻出版局) and a news bureau official saying that the partnership is over. Again, this sounds exactly like the That's Beijing story....The Boxun article has more interesting commentary as well....but RSC editor Hao Fang says they're still preparing the next issue. My guess is it will probably come out - late. And this morass will drag on for a few more issues, and then we'll see....

...and I hope it continues, coz I got a few more things to say....

DPP trashing green laws

2006-03-29T06:40:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the headline, but I couldn't resist.

....it's hard to look at the Chen administration these days and not thing two steps back. A recent move now under protest has the Executive Yuan attempting to toss environmental standards by the wayside for a new Formosa Plastics steel plant and other heavy industries.

Here is the beginning of a protest letter from Wild At Heart, an organization backed by the Taipei law firm Winkler and Partners:

In response to the Executive Yuan's bold statement to the press yesterday
that Taiwan's EIA process has become the biggest obstacle to the country's
development, and demanding that major cases such as the Central Taiwan Science
Park, Kuo Kuang Petrochemical Technology Corp. and the Formosa Plastics steel
plant be approved as quickly as possible, this statement raises the most solemn
objections. Such one-sided public statements by the Executive Yuan not only
seriously affect the image of the EIA system, but also interfere in the
independent and professional review system.

According to the Organic Law of the Executive Yuan, the EIA committee
is a body under the EPA responsible for hearing EIA cases. It was set up to
comply with the administrative reform requirements for professional, rather than
political, methods of dealing with complex environmental issues, and to break
down the traditional hierarchical administrative system, making policy decisions
through joint consultation rather than acting on commands from higher
authorities. Therefore, the requirement expressed by the Executive Yuan to the
Council of Economic Planning (COEP) and Development, and even to the Minister of
the EPA, to intervene in the EIA process and “give as much assistance as
possible within the legal limits of their authority”, is a violation of
the division of work amongst the administrative authorities. Neither of these two bodies has any legal authority whatsoever to
interfere in the workings of the EIA committee, except through a change in the law by the Legislative Yuan disbanding the EIA committee or
transforming it into a consultancy body with no real decision-making functions.

The letter goes on to say that the Executive Yuan has placed direct pressure on the environmental agency to pass certain projects, generally "bypassing the system" and completely trampling [the] image and dignity" of the EIA Committee.

Anyone who wants to read the whole thing email me. I'll be happy to forward.

...but oh, right, THAT'S Beijing

2006-03-29T06:13:00.000-08:00

Reading the article in the below post made me late for an interview I did with the director of the Midi School of Music, which is better known for the Midi Festival, a 4-day rock fest on the park lawns of Beijing now in its 6th year (May 1-4). And at the interview who else shows up but someone from the That's Beijing. I won't say who. This is afterall China.

After we got the low down on the fest I shared a cab with him back across town. Of course I asked him about it, and the answer was, "Yeah, Kitto's been out of the picture for a while. That happened three and a half years ago." The tone was half "what a terrible thing" and half "water under the bridge."

The current deal with That's Beijing is this: the business is not a "magazine," because "no foreign interest can own media in China," so they're an "advertising company" acting as a "consultant" to a Chinese publisher who rents them a license. This is basically the same as in Kitto's story, except now he's screwed out of ownership.

The fallout was that "That's title," as Kitto called his enterprise, was split. Now there are different owners for That's Beijing and That's Shanghai, and That's Guangzhou is a sort of subsidiary of the Shanghai mag.

What's it like writing there? "I get censored on a daily basis."

Then we talked about the possibility of my working there as music section editor, which has a nice ring to it, not to mention the terrible portent of working in state media in Beijing, albeit probably the hippest wing. Hmmm.

Scruples about this kind of thing are hardly in abundance. (Remember, the Chinese are "pragmatic" - which is another way of saying intimidated into submission.) Last week a former Taipei Times colleague - yes, the deep green pro-independence newspaper - over dinner told me of having applied for a job with the ultimate CCP mouthpiece, The People's Daily. I was so bemused I forgot to ask about the personal ethics involved there, and anyway my former workmate turned it down. "They only wanted to pay me RMB 6000 a month, can you believe that? I was asking for 12,000, which is the lowest salary I've ever asked for in my life." RMB 6,000 is US$750.

Right. Pragmatism.

But Beijing does on the surface feel so much like any big city, and it forces people to scrap to survive. And in that situation a job looks like a job. Personally I can think of lots of excuses - a chance to the man on the ground covering a hot, emergent music scene; a chance to see the evil machine from the inside....There are afterall, my Taipei Times friend tells me, westerners working as copy editors for the People's Daily. And really, that's nothing but polishing the party line.

Decline and fall of That's Beijing

2006-03-28T22:38:00.000-08:00

Actually, the Beijing city guide, That's Beijing, still looks awesome, but one wonders for how long in light of this cringe story of how its creator has been entirely screwed out of his own business: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7399

Related, yesterday's Beijing Evening News had a small story about how Google doesn't have a proper license, as it's sharing a license with some other content provider. The article quoted Google spokespersons as saying that they had cleared everything with the government and there was no problem, and really, you have to believe Google is doing things by the letter of the law as much as anyone is able. It's just that the letter keeps changing due to massive political corruption and greed, so all anyone can do is roll with it. Fortunately they have more clout than That's Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou.... The interesting thing about the article though, was that it seemed like the journalists were leading the witch hunt, grilling Google about the shared license relationship saying that the only precedents were merger companies. What unholy pitbulls of power.

Metallica karaoke in Tianjin

2006-03-25T00:28:00.000-08:00

Tianjin is a 50-something Korean businessman in a hotel bar singing Metallica karaoke with a Filipino cover band backing him up and rocking it HARD. Now I've seen everything. And I thought Beijing was fun, but nothing prepared me for Tianjin.

I was there on assigment for the European trade journal I've secretly been working for for the past 8 years. Just before leaving for China I emailed my editor,asking if he wanted me to cover any trade fairs, and there was something lame in Shanghai which conflicted with the Swedish punk rock tour, so the North China International Bicycle Exhibition was the one. From Beijing a week before I called the Industry Association that was putting it on, and as expected got a voice saying, "Who? What? No, you don't need to do anything. The opening ceremony is at 9:30am on the 24th. Is that all? Zai jian!"

Good, the formalities were out of the way, so I just waited till the Thursday afternoon before and hopped on a commuter train to Tianjin, "Shanghai of the North," the city of 12 million that is sort of like the factory for Beijing. To be brief, it consists of a train station, a small old town built by Europeans 100+ years ago, and a new town consisting of roads interspersed with rubble, space-age buildings, and concrete-bunker housing blocks. I stayed on a strip of hotels near the International Exhibition Center overlooking a vast empty plaza beyond which a looping rollercoaster sat possibly a mile away. And along this strip in a building with a sign that read "TIANJIN TECHNOLOGY HOTEL" was the warm glow of a neon sign reading "HARRY'S BAR."

I got to my hotel, the Tianjing Grand Hotel, and as expected there were no rooms available. I had called earlier in the day to make a reservation, and was informed by some clerk with a thick, barely intelligible Beijing accent that: "There are only a couple rooms left."

"Ok, I want to reserve one."

"Just call us when you get to Tianjin and see if they're still available."

"What?"

"Zai jian!"

In China, these elaborate go-betweens are actually a kind of code. The real meaning is: "Ah, you idiot foreigner, if you really understand Chinese culture you will know to just show up and bitch until you get what you want, and in the process you better have lots of hard cash or the right credentials or we will toss you out on your ass." I appreciated this, in part because there is something to be said for a tough culture like that of North China, and alse because I did have the right credentials. Getting a room took only 20 minutes of bickering, and concluded with a grunt slave from the Industry Association usuring me to my room with profuse apologies. I felt justified, asked her some questions about exports and why any white person not writing a doctoral thesis on neo-industrial wastelands would bother coming to this particular trade show - Europe is not a particularly hot export market for 80kg-load rickshaws - then flipped channels until it was time to go to Harry's.

There is an astounding truth evident in Filipino cover bands, and I do not know if it some innate aptitude only Filipinos have for mastering the entire western pop-rock cannon, or proof that rock music is so simple that any five Filipinos can learn all of it within a few years of learning to play instruments. My parteners at the bar were Jerry the Austrian, a man in his late 40s who knew that the real way to party is to crank through two bottles of Jack Daniels with friends and drag random girls onto an empty dance floor, Mr. Lee, who was paying for the Jack and drinking most of it, and Mr. Lee's "companion," a much younger Korean woman with big knockers and an uncovered navel who seemed to be resigned to this as her lot in life.

God it was a dead night. Only a few people in the place. So we requested Deep Purple, Bon Jovi - after Chengdu, Dirtstar might agree with me that cover bands in China do something mysterious for Bon Jovi songs that not even Bon Jovi can do anymore - and when they didn't know "Touch Myself" by the Divynils, it was the old R&B soul classic "Knock on Wood." At the end the guitarist thanked me for requesting this one. He said he knew it was the greatest song in the world when he first heard it when he was five years old. I agreed with him, and thanked him. Then I walked back to my hotel. I have partied deep into the night in an empty bar before and would highly recommend it on certain occasions, but this was not one of them. After Mr. Lee drunkenly emo-ed his way through "Never Never Land," the night was a dead-end alleyway. Even the band was getting ready to leave. And I figured that with only one honest full day of work to do during these six weeks, I might as well do it.

Chinese documentary maker jailed

2006-03-21T05:52:00.000-08:00

This from the blog RConversation shows that the limits of freedom of expression in China are not as free as the major media often paints them to be:

On March 22nd it will be one month since filmmaker and Global Voices Northeast Asia editor Hao Wu was detained without charge. We appeal to the Chinese government for Hao Wu's immediate release!
What happened to Hao?

Hao Wu (吴皓), a Chinese documentary filmmaker who lived in the U.S. between 1992 and 2004, was detained by the Beijing division of China’s State Security Bureau on the afternoon of Wednesday, Febuary 22, 2006. On that afternoon, Hao had met in Beijing with a congregation of a Christian church not recognized by the Chinese government, as part of the filming of his next documentary.

Read the rest here.

Beijing Journo

2006-03-20T19:58:00.000-08:00

I finally read the Rolling Stone China cover story on Cui Jian on the plane from Kunming to Beijing yesterday, and the way they totally elided the man's political importance was pure sophistry genius. The article totally focused on his song Yi Wu Suo You (一无所有) - translated sometimes as Having Nothing, Less than Nothing, etc. - which has a great, great deal of its fame wrapped up in its becoming an anthem for student protestors in Tienanmen Square in the weeks leading up to the June 4 massacre. So Rolling Stone writes the whole story about the song's first performance in 1986 with this aura of divine provenance about how the song was destined for fame because it was just so awesome from the get go, eg. it was only rehearsed once before its TV performance debut and all kinds of stuff like this. Then from 1986 they jump straight to 2006, leaving out all the important history, with one major excuse being that Cui Jian himself isn't willing to talk about it. What a hoot! Of course Cui won't talk about it, my impression being that he's ridden the line for so long and still believes he can do more good on the inside, plus he's famous and revered now so why give that up? The article had one quote in support of the totally naive idea that Yi Wu Suo You was nothing more than a "love song." Interesting to note, when I was recently talking to Hunter Hai - a rocker in his 20s - about this song and the politics of that era, he said the same thing, "Personally, I think it's just a love song." The thing is, there's no "personally" about it. Echoes of the official line - which now seems to be in the hands of rock critics - are a little scary, mainly because they're everywhere.

...OK, OK, I promise to get back to touring with the vegan Swedes soon. Still more to tell.

Rolling Stone China

2006-03-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

I have to say Lijiang has my favorite Internet "bar" in China, not because it's got like 200 kids in here playing video games and doing Internet chat at all hours of the day because they all have that, but because you have to walk up a dark, back-alley fire escape to get in. Totally awesome! And free tea in paper cups too.

...Rolling Stone launched a China edition at the beginning of March, something I've been wanting to comment on for a while but haven't had time to. Given that Rolling Stone - What, King Kong on the cover means selling out? - is many millions of frequent flyer miles from the radical alternative mouthpiece it was in the 60s, China doesn't seem such a weird fit. After all, any venture that's 100% gold-plated commercial Beijing seems to be fine with. But the mag is selling itself in an interesting way. What surprised me the most was that the issue has a piece called "Mavericks Renegades Trouble Makers" that leads off with a page and a half by Michael Moore, then goes on to profile a dozen or so (American) mavericks like Hunter S. Thompson, Cindy Sheehan, Kanye West, George Clooney (?), Fiona Apple (?)...ok, so they're not all that radical, but you get the picture. For foreign content, which makes up at least 60%, there's also a long interview with Bono and a 12-page spread on the history of Rolling Stone covers.

In the Forward, the editor, Hao Fang (郝舫) makes it pretty clear that - I'd say the image - they're trying to tap into is the radical 60s Rolling Stone; the commercial-music-era Eminem-covered Rolling Stone is not mentioned. After wallowing in the Rolling Stone "legend" with his opening paragraph, Hao Fang goes on:

Rolling Stone's legend proves that any magazine of distinction is the
perfect distillation of an individual dream. When this dream is shared by a
sufficient number of people, success is sure to follow. In the mad rush of
today's China, everyone harbors dreams, and Rolling Stone will definitely not
ignore the hopes that inspired them. But more often, we will bear witness to the
wonder of these dreams coming true, share the joy and woe of that mad rush, and
urge on those who may be feeling shades of exhaustion by lighting the way
forward through with the beacons of dream creators who've come before and
by bringing new dreamers to center stage before the entire world. We believe
that the transformations in entertainment, culture, and lifestyle in today's
China, and especially those who are bringing about these transformations, are
worth noticing, watching and defending in the same way that Rolling Stone has
previously done with Lennon or Dylan.

Who might the John Lennons and Bob Dylans of the new China be? The cover boy for issue #1 is the oversafe choice of father of Chinese rock Cui Jian, and there is a long article about him that I've been assured by several Beijing rockers says nothing new. There's also an interview with Mu Zimei, the journalist who became famous for blogging about her sex life - like two years ago. Other local content includes a list of where Jay rips off - oh, sorry, gets inspiration for - beats in 10 of his well-known chart toppers. And there's an article on famous Chinese who blog, an essay (by Yan Jun) on how MP3s are changing music, a profile on a Japanese hip hop producer, and an interview with Blixa Bargeld - who's that? - a former guitarist for Nick Cave who now lives in Beijing and has something to do with architecture.

Some kid, I forget in which city but it was while I was on tour with the Swedish Vegan punks, came up to me asking if I'd heard of Blixa Bargeld, with that quavery intonation that implies, "He's famous, right?" Of course I was like, "Who the hell are you talking about?" But the point is, kids here are so starved for information that they will assume anything they read about in Rolling Stone, or any foreign band they see in a club, or any random foreign thing they get half a grip on - is famous.

When I asked Hunter Hai about the new Rolling Stone - which had no major Chinese content I hadn't heard of 2 years ago, and I'm not that in the know - he just shrugged and said, "What do you expect? It's not a fan zine."

One girl I talked to, Shen Jing, who's in a girl punk band called Hang On The Box (which recently got kind of famous because one of their band mates said she wanted to fuck Maralyn Manson, which made Manson like her band, and it was all good for PR but the verdict on their music is still so so...) had a lot of confidence in Hao Fang, who is a senior music critic, universally respected, in his 40s I think, and generally considered above the friend-favoritism that generally plagues music writing in China. So I should have a quote here, right? "I think he'll be very good." Yeah, I'm pretty sure she said exactly that.

And one more thing. Hao Fang also wrote the Curt Cobain biography - the Chinese one of course - which was a very important wave of the wave of Nirvana adoration that swept China in 1996-7 and influenced virtually every band of that era.

Now, I also hear a nasty rumor that Hao Fang (and Yan Jun, and several other influential rock critics) were pressured by Beijing authorities to write things (I'm not sure exactly what) denouncing Pangu after the band fled into exile two years ago after playing a concert for Taiwanese independence in Taiwan. Interesting, no?

As for the 60s veneration, this is the same shit as Wane the college senior writing her thesis on American protest rock. In China you can publish the most radical American writers you can find, and even use them to feed anti-US sentiment, but don't even think about it when it comes to internal Chinese issues. So the big question - for Rolling Stone, Google, and everyone other well-meaning content provider in China - is whether vastly increased access to information and a new critical spirit will eventually help the Chinese read between the CCP lines, or whether the new bourgios literati will just make the deal with the devil go for self interest and self-censorship? I would guess that good will win out in the long run, but I can't help but seeing a lot of the latter for now.

Anyway, Hao Fang ends his little prelude with a faintly nationalistic tone. He had just spent a paragraph talking about the great writers of Rolling Stone Past - he specifically names Hunter S. Thompson, Lester Bangs, Annie Leibovitz, and Greil Marcus - before writing, in the next paragraph:

"These legends actually echo the unlimited possibilities of todays age of
interactive networks and the age of China."

Hao Fang concludes:

"From this day forward, we are likewise sending out a call to our own readers.
Let us here in the East have no regrets in creating a legend for this era."

How to view Blogger in China

2006-03-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

If you add: nyud.net:8090/ to the end of any Blogger blog address, you can view it from within China.

For example: http://holidarity.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/

Big ups to the people at PlanetLab for offering proxy and a port!

Small Victory in Mailiao

2006-03-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

The Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants reports that Formosa Plastics has granted three concessions to workers at its Mailiao, Yunlin County plant in central Taiwan. Excerpts from the latest release as follows:

On the night of March 16, almost 200 Filipino workers went out of the South Gate
of their plant to meet migrant advocates for a public meeting. It was very clear
that the workers were still restive and defied management and even police by
going out of their compound without a pass. Representatives of management had to
negotiate with the workers and the advocates and took down their
demands.

The next day, more than a dozen migrant advocates held a
protest action in front of the CLA demanding that the problems of the workers
should be solved. They stated that if these were not met, the migrants most
probably would hold another strike.

The concessions granted by Formosa Plastics are as follows:

1. Workers will have their own bank accounts and would have the right to
get hold of all their take home pay. The allowance system will be
abolished.

2. Workers will also have the right to remit their own money.

3. Workers forced to be guarantors of their friends going home for
vacation do not have to pay for the airfare of their friends who decide not to
come back to FPC. The guarantor system will stop.

WORD!!!

More Worker Disputes at Formosa Plastics

2006-03-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

I fully intend to get back to the band tour, but I keep getting email press releases about this and it is certainly worth passing on. The third workers' strike in a year at Formosa Plastics (FPC) town-sized chemical production campus in Mailiao, Yunlin County, Taiwan happened last week on Mar. 13-14. It was the biggest strike yet. Aparently the Thais and Filipinos have put old grudges behind them and are trying to force collectively bargaining with 1000 or more workers ready to come off the lines. This despite laws that forbid aliens from forming labor unions, their general lack of rights, and all the dirty pressure Formosa Plastics has been able to apply, most notably the case of beating up and deporting Gil Lebria and 11 other Filipino workers after the first strike last July.

According to a recent press release by the Asian Pacific Mission for Migrants, the major demands are as follows:

1. They are against the payment of the brokers fee and
2. Against the payment of the board and lodging fee

Here are a few more excerpts from the (fairly long) release:

The CLA has already admitted in the past although verbally that the brokers
fee is actually a management fee. Meaning it is the workers themselves who pay
for the expenses of the employers for their management costs which are being
done by the brokers....

Migrant workers had to pay for their own board and lodging fees starting
2001 because the employers petitioned President Chen Shiu Bian for this. Their
contention was that they would want their production costs to go down. Before
2001, this was guaranteed free in their employment contracts. In essence this
was a wage cut in the guise of payment for board and lodging.

Dodgy practices workers want to see more regulated include: 1) employers' subcontracting workers to other companies with which the workers have no formal contracts or agreements; 2)financial management, whereby companies have complete control over workers' allowances (i.e. the amount of money they can draw to spend while in Taiwan) as well as remittances (i.e. the workers cannot pick their banks and transfer their own cash, as employers insist that they must do this for them).

A practice that is completely illegal yet extremely common is for employers to hold Alien Resident Certificates and passports - basically as ransom against possible flight.

More from the release:

....Going back to the situation in FPC, if the workers conditions are not
improved, other strikes might occur in the near future. The workers both Thai
and Filipino have already proven in practice that they are capable of doing
this. They are not intimidated anymore by the restrictions on their rights being
imposed by the company.

The only solution would be to have another
negotiation in ! the near future between the workers and management. The workers
should be represented by their own choosing and have the right also to choose
other outside groups like NGO¡¦s to assist them in their negotiations and not
only by their government representatives. [Note: only legislators and government
officials were allowed at the last round of negotiations.] During the last
strike, not one migrant was involved in the negotiation process inside FPC¡¦s
administration building.

The Ever-Perplexing Chinese Internet

2006-03-16T07:05:00.000-08:00

The net here is such a feckin' crap shoot I'm not asking why anymore, but I will try to remember to light a couple incense sticks for whatever Daoist god covers firewall tunnelling.

Two days ago when I got to Lijiang, a high plains tourist trap in northern Yunnan not too far from the fabled Shangrila, I could neither open Google, Gmail, nor make any posts on this blog. It was a massive WTF if there ever was one. Google.com would not come up at all - Google!! - which is not only seems sort of like an Internet apocalypse, but it also had me wondering what the hell they were compromising their morals for if their site was blocked by some router for podunk Yunnan? Gmail would also not come up, and Gmail.cn was an imitation or a scam, and I eventually found that Google.cn would come up, but not the English version. Yahoo!, incidentally, came up fine, tho it had an ad-banner sidebar with pictures of naked women that linked to a site for a Peoples Liberation Army hospital for diabetes?! And the biggest pain in the ass, when I logged into Blogger (a Google subsidiary), I got this message (attenuated here):

WARNING
This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots.....

Your blog is locked
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?)

The link telling me what a spam blog is wouldn't come up, though Chainsmoker, who I was MSNing with, guessed it may have something to do with my posting from China, land of the hacker gangs.

Aparently Blogger had to manually verify that my blog was real, which took two days. Now I'm again "whitelisted." I've got one newspaper article to write first, then I'll finish up on the tour.

Day 5: YANGSUO

2006-03-13T07:33:00.001-08:00

Theoretically at least, it was a good idea to take a boat up the Li River to Yangsuo, passing through a place acknowledged as one most scenic areas in the world. So we woke up before 7am to get a bus that would strand us at the dock of tourist trap souvenir stands for an hour before the 10:30-ish departure. Then men paddled flat tube skiffs out to the tourist boats and tried to sell souvenirs through the windows. One of these guys told me he made RMB300-500 a month and had to do this idiotic scam because he didn't have a drivers' license, i.e. a ticket to a better job. Then in Yangsuo we saw the amazingly scenic cliffs, rode bicycles, and paid the locals 2RMB to take photos of their cows - actually they tried to charge 2RMB per cow, and at one juncture succeded in scheming 11RMB out of us for a couple shutter snaps. It was a land of scam merchants.

And decent restaurants. And bargain goods. Stefan bought 4 probably fake North Face jackets, and that's about all I have to say for Yangsuo....We left it on a bus, then in Guilin caught the train for Kunming, with MaD promising us we would get hard sleepers even though all anyone had bought was platform tickets.

The good thing about MaD and Hunter was that they rolled mad cheap. Rarely was it more than RMB40 a night for a room, and often less. For the train from Wuhan to Changsha, they had a friend meet us at the platform with extra platform passes, meaning several had ridden for free - actually RMB2, if you count the price of two platform tickets, and that's basically nothing. The Swedes were paying their way, and they had nairn cash. I think Jonas asked Hunter for a couple RMB for a bus somewhere, at which point he said, "Man, I'm down to my last 20." 20RMB is about USD2.50 - and this was the 5th day of the tour!!! MaD was also talking about moving to a cheaper apartment as he couldn't afford RMB300 a month anymore. It's hard to not call that punk rock.

DAY 4: GUILIN

2006-03-13T06:44:00.000-08:00

Yeah, Guilin, you know, it's got all the famed limestone pillars and shit. But let me tell you one thing, never go in early spring. First of all, Guangxi Province, for which Guilin is the scenic hub, is something like China's version of 1960s West Virginia, a backward-ass country of mud and mountains, home to an amazing breed of jalopie - part motorcycle, part tractor, part car. The engines are all exposed and actually cantalevered out at the front of these contraptions, often with a crotch-rocket motorcycle headlight and housing somehow grafted on. The Guangxi jalopies were actually my favorite part of the whole province, which I couldn't get out of fast enough. One thing I liked about them was how Chinese they were. Unlike jeepnies in the Philippines and tuk-tuks in Thailand, which can all be detailed, pimped out, and are at the very least kept bright, clean and shiny, the Guangxi jalopies are basically just covered in shit all the time....as, somewhat mysteriously were the streets of Guilin. The mystery was that they were almost all paved and no one could figure out why they were still covered with muck.

As we were driving in, rain and dense fog obscured all the "world scenic destination" limestone cliffs, and when Wane said something about how shoddy everything looked, MaD came back, "Guilin is a scenic area, not a development zone."

For the third night in a row, we arrived with only a couple hours before the gig, but at least there was time for some oily fried rice. Eating with the Vegan Swedes was always a challenge, and the thing I could never get was how much they loved vegetarian meat, which is aparently not plentiful in Sweden. They said they needed it for the protein, as they were somehow in disbelief that there was no brown rice in China. Yeah, they really thought that. There was no point in trying to explain.

MaD and Hunter Hai were vegetarian too - Hunter I don't know, but MaD seemed like he'd picked it up as part of his correspondence-school punk-by-numbers, or maybe he was sucking up to Jonas or some other eco-punks he'd interviewed at some point in the past. I asked Jonas about it once, and he was at least clear about his Veganism, saying, "It's an ethical thing. What gives us the right to kill animals?" And that extends to the concentration-camp-like livestock farms, dairy farms, etc. MaD, on the other hand, said he was traumatized because he dad always used to kill fish. I may be a suburban-raised white boy, but I still call that a pussy. And, oh, by the way, vegetarian meat is disgusting. We at it at Buddhist restaurants in Wuhan, Guilin and seems to me somewhere else. I don't mind so much that fake fish is made from taro, because I like taro, but I don't like taro shaped like a filet and doused in slimy sweet and sour sauce. If I hadn't been there, no one would have thought to order eggplant or green vegetables. Otherwise I didn't mind the meatless meals. They were less likely to be rancid.

The gig was in a third-floor wood-framed bar that was more suited to acoustic and folk, and it ended up being the weakest show thus far, though still decent with 60 at the door and a few hippy foreign English teachers. As with most gigs on the tour, it was located not far from a college, the Guilin Electronic Industry College would be the direct translation. The opening band was Banana Peel, who's singer/ guitarist- Liu - was the one who'd set up the show. As with SMZD in Wuhan, it was tight black jeans and tatoos, fast and vaguely melodic. The set-up didn't allow for much slam dancing, so the kids mostly stared. Energy levels were muted.

The hotel was in a crappy mud alley around the back, and when we dropped our stuff there before the show, I thought they had just mopped the floors, as there was a film of water over the tile, both inside and outside the room. This was actually condensation from the cold fog that permeated everything, leaving tile water-topped and slippery. The water was still there when we got back, as it was two days later in the Guilin train station where we waited for a train to Kunming that was running four hours late. It was like sleeping in a cold swamp, and within the next two days me, Jonas, and Erik were all sick.

Day 4: CHANGSHA to GUILIN

2006-03-10T01:39:00.000-08:00

After Wuhan, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and even Beijing, Changsha seemed somehow like a fairly organized city. Aparently lots of mainland celebs call it home; there's also a ubiquity of faux-three-star hotels with massage parlors and saunas and we ended up staying in one in a split building. I forget what our half was called, but the other half was the Butterfly, also the name of my old Taichung standard.

I hit a gentrified tea house for a piece of thick chocolate toast and milk tea for breakfast, and on the way out, I ended up discussing Changsha's foreigner population with the counter girl.

"Lots of foreigners in Changsha come here, there were 15 yesterday," she said.

I said that was a lot, and then after the pregnant pause, she continued: "And the police come around here a lot too, because of the foreigners."

"Uh, why's that?"

"To check up on them, of course. That's their job."

"So it's surveillance?"

She didn't understand what I mean, though I'm sure I pronounced the word correctly - jianshi - but I'm also used to saying things correctly and not being understood from time to time, so I let it drop. And got the fuck out of there.

...somehow the train tickets to Guilin failed to materialize. MaD was asking venue owners to set up transport, and some, like this dickwad, were too pretty to bother. So we ended up hiring a mini-bus, which was just as well. Most of the five hours to Guilin there was a highway. It was only the last 100km or so that was like a government highway in 1960s West Virginia, i.e. gravel on either side and mud not far beyond that. The weather was turning cloudy, then rainy.

Our first stop was at a truck stop full of monsterous Russian rigs with excessive payloads. The road situation was shortly to become a mud-and-rust version of the film Brazil, where the vehicles were either megaton rigs or mini-cars not even the size of a truck wheel, only Brazil didn't quite capture the impenetrable smog and ubiquitous muck of Guangxi....But we're not there yet.

I got out when we stopped to stretch my legs and snap a few pictures of the wheeled leviathans, when somebody started getting out of a car that was slowing down as it drove buy. A soldier in fatigues got out, ran up to me, pulled some binoculars (with cool-ass red Chinese star on them) and put them up to my face.

"Look, they're very good."

Scanning the other side of the highway through the fog, I answered, "Yeah, they are."

"OK! 200 Yuan."

"What? No, I'm not going to buy this."

"Um, OK. 150."

"Look, this is military equipment. You can't sell this."

"We need gas. OK, 100."

"Sorry. I don't have any money, and I don't want any binoculars."

Then I walked back to the car laughing. By the time I got there, the army guys had beat me there and were trying to pawn of the binocs on the Swedes. I asked another of the soldiers why they were selling army equipment.

"Our officer told us to do it."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"And he gets a cut."

"Yeah."

I'd read about this kind of thing in Harper's. In February, I think, their readings included an interview with a PLA colonel or general talking about how the government had essentially set them free to become a commercial enterprise and make cash any way they could, with predictably bizarre results. Aparently, it's all true.

As we got back into the van and were driving off, sans binoculars, Jonas mentioned, "Yeah, they said they had night vision too. I think he said something about being able to see in the dark."

Damn. Shoulda bought em.

Day 3: CHANGSHA

2006-03-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

The person I've neglected to mention so far is a Beijing local I'll call Hunter Hai, the roadie/ merch guy. A little more than two years ago in late 2004 his band was possibly the first to chart the waters and do a thorough tour of China, playing about two dozen gigs in 19 cities over the course of a month. Jonas was the roadie then. In the two years since, big China tours are becoming more and more common by underground bands - and only underground bands, especially punk bands, who are more willing to roll into town at the last minute and whip off a gig.

Liu, guitarist/ vox for a punk band called the Banana Peels put it like this in Guilin a couple nights ago: "Rock in China is a really awkward right now. You have punk, metal, and Brit rock and they all do things different ways. Like metal and Brit rock bands, they're more worried about putting up a good image and getting famous. When they play shows, they have a lot of conditions and won't play if everything's not just so. That's why I like punk." And that's why the more commercial attitudes of those other genres keep them from touring, from being populist. This is what I always respect about punk rock.

...now back to telling the story in order. In the morning MaD brought us to wander around the Yangtze River bank in Wuhan - which is actually three cities, Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang; we were in the Wuchang section - where a bunch of lao touze, or old fuckers, were milling around en plein air selling fake Viagra, trimming corns off each others feet, getting haircuts, and watching Chinese opera rigged with a red cloth and face paint. MaD took us to a musty dock warehouse full of second hand US clothes that come as donations from American homes to Hong Kong, Shenzhen, then here; it's where punk rockers buy vintage leather jackets and Doc Martins for cheap. Then the train to Changsha.

MaD's girlfriend, Wane, a shy little indie waif with pastel patches on her jeans, has joined us, and on the train she sat down across from me to ask Hunter Hai for advice on her college senior thesis: a history of American protest rock?! So Hunter starts in the 40s with Woodie Guthrie and then pulled out a small notepad and drew up an outline that took the tradition through the Vietnam era, then branching out into black music, the birth of punk, the women's movement, political rap, and so on - I interjected a few things along the way, coz you can't leave out Public Enemy. But mostly I watched and listened. Hunter had a much better grip on the pre-60s stuff than I do, but what's more interesting of course is how this fits into the picture of acceptable opinion and dissent in China. I asked Wane why she chose this topic, and she answered with a typical non-reason: "I'm studying journalism, and my teacher said I could do anything I want, and I'm interested in this."

"Why don't you right about Pangu?" I asked in a jokey tone.

She shrugged and didn't answer.

"But really, your teacher is okay with this?"

"Yeah, it's fine."

We were speaking in Chinese, and the car was fairly full, so I switched into English to ask Hunter what he thought, and he was a little more lucid. First he said, "You can write anything you want now, especially like this, if it's just for education. You can do research into anything. And this is just a college thesis, so it's not like many people will read it." I couldn't help pressing him on the obvious point - that it would be impossible to get away with writing an essay on post-Communist Revolution protest movements in China. He waffled on this for a couple minutes, and then did something I've seen very few Chinese ever do, ignore all notions of face and admit I was right. And for this he won my unlimited respect. "You know, it's true that there are some things where we can write about America but not China." And then, making me feel like a hardline journalist dick, he said, "But me, I don't really care about politics" and started reading the sports pages of a local newspaper - both him and MaD follow all the European leagues religiously, the weird thing being that MaD, who buries his nose in soccer pages daily, claims he has neither a favorite team nor players.

Now this kind of parallel universe agrumentation is just the kind of subtlety the Mandarins used to try suggesting new courses of action to the Emperor without getting buried alive or beheaded, and its popping up now in rock and the much bigger intellectual culture that surrounds it. A lot of people will tell you that rock critics in China are actually more important than any of the bands, and as assbackwards as this sounds, it is probably true - more on that later, maybe. Liu also said bands sing in English so the PSB won't know what their lyrics mean, and English in general seems an alternative universe where you can't (as easily) get caught for progressive ideas.

In case you were wondering, no one will complain if you get onto a train in China, take your shirt off, stand on top of a couple of seats and start yelling at everyone within range. Somewhere after Chibi, the land of rolling hills, escapades, and intrigues of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the train filled up with yokels and we had to stand. Another nuke plant rushed buy, as did a couple of ramshackle brick kilns, and the rice paddies were flooded here, though they had not been north of Wuhan.

Changsha - it was only about a 4 hour trip - reminded me a bit of Taichung, especially when the venue we rolled up to turned out to be a 10-story mall in the middle of the downtown commercial district. The bar, called 10 and a Half Floor, was a sort of glass skybox overlooking a movie theater, though fortunately the blinds were closed and it worked well as a club. The kids were all pretty well to do and had definitely dropped some coin on fashion - which paid off at the merch booth after the show as well, much to the band's relief. Wuhan and Beijing had been slow. Erik had an abbrasion on his forehead by now from probably smacking himself with the microphone the night before. And of course there was the short plug-in time - we rolled in at 8:30 with warmup bands starting just after 9pm. O well. After the set, Beggo came up to me and said, "Man, there were so many mistakes tonight."

"Yeah," I said, "But they loved it anyway."

Punk rock. It's all about the energy.

Dakou CDs

2006-03-10T00:30:00.000-08:00

For one thing, I haven't had my passport checked at an Internet cafe since Shenzhen, so maybe I should just chalk that up to bordertown paranoia, or just as likely, in the interior no one follows the rules....

What I wrote about Dakou earlier is wrong, I think. I got a more plausible explanation recently, which is this: Record companies, CD stores, etc. in the west occasionally dump excess inventory of unsalable or surplus CDs, selling them to developing countries as recyclable plastic. Many of them are clipped with an electric saw - thus the name dakou, make a hole - but many are not. In China these end up for sale on the streets, and the selection is weird, everything from recent (surplus) pop - e.g. Beyonce - to 70s has-beens. Last night in Kunming, I saw a guy selling some on the street for RMB 3, or USD 0.38 per disc.

DAY 2: Wuhan

2006-03-07T20:06:00.000-08:00

When I walked out of the Wudakou flophouse at around 6 in the morning it was still dark and there were small piles of garbage burning in the gutters. I went to Jonas' student apartment, on the 13th floor of a big apartment complex that was for everything like a big New York housing project, including the fact that there were no lights on in the hallways. We stuffed all the gear into a van, and a security guard tried to stop us because he thought we were stealing stuff. On the way to Beijing West Station there was a quick stop to pick up some newly pressed CDs. Otherwise it was just baggy eyes and the sun rising over the dusky urban sprawl, and then the mad crush at the train station, and then into hard sleeper berths stacked three high but comfortable, where everyone crashed immediately.

It was over 1200 km to Wuhan, straight south over pancake flat plains, and from Beijing we first entered Hubei, a province that wraps around the city in three directions. Cell phones went off as we crossed the provincial border, with messages telling people they had transferred to a new service provider. This happened periodically throughout the day, and you could use it to guage progress. Hebei was a land of dirt and dust, a stretch of beige crumbly walls and old industrial collectives where slogans and advertisements were painted on the masonry. Altogether, it looked like a place where you didn't want to stop. The next province, Henan, got greener and fields surrounded the tracks. I slept a lot but still remember passing two nuclear power plants.

Wuhan is in Hubei, where hills started to rise out of the countryside. We rolled in at 9pm and went straight to the gig in taxis, passing dozens of bare concrete husks that would soon be 30 or 40-story buildings. Most streets in Wuhan are covered in 2mm of dust and look like modern ghost towns of square apartment blocks. The Left Eye bar was located on one of these and very near the main gate of Wuhan University, the #5 college in China. We walked through the front door with kids shaking our hands - fuck yeah it's good to be in a band! - and were ushered to a back room with a mahjhong table where we stowed our stuff and the guys got ready.

The gig was solid, another crowd of 150 or so, and the leadup band, SMZD, was fun, fast black leather punk. And after it was over, everyone left pretty quickly. They were all kids. But one local I'd been talking to, a nice agricultural engineering student named Fu Tian, suggested another place to go. "You'll like it," he said, buying me a RMB5 big bottle of Snow beer, the local piss. So I told the band I was buggering off as they went in search of vegetarian food, and we hopped in a cab for Vox, which was virtually unidentifiable on the 2nd or 3rd floor of some anonymouse building in another deserted street somewhere, and then I walked in.

It was like the cafe scene from Star Wars, and I was like Holy shit, what are so many black people doing in Wuhan?! I asked one smiling black girl at the bar where she was from and she answered "Jamaica."

The place was full of Jamaicans, Africans, white North Americans, local rockers and students, and the DJ was pumping calypso, zouk, and non-pop hip hop. There was one girl on the dancefloor with a positively pneumatic butt, the kind that can jerk in about 12 different directions by itself without the rest of the body having to move. This was the proverbial Love Shack. Fu Tian kept buying me beers, as his friend, a pint-sized rocker, got the special musicians' price of RMB3, and I turned each and everyone to the heavens to honor the Merciful Buddha of Random Parties amidst the Vast Wastes that had brought me here.

In the course of the evening, a question had developed to how big Wuhan is. The taxi driver from the train station had told me, MaD's girlfriend, and two of the Swedes that the population was 8 million, to which they said, "Basically, that's Sweden." But the number I believe came from an English teacher from Oregon I met at Vox. He said 10.9 million, adding that it was a "shithole;" according to Fu Tian, Wuhan's mayor was recently quoted as saying the city is the "biggest village in China." This came at 3 in the morning when we were standing in the middle of a six lane road, which was the best way to flag a taxi in the middle of the night in Wuhan. And fortunately it only took about 10 minutes.

Meet Insurgent Kid

2006-03-07T19:16:00.000-08:00

Rainy in Yangshuo, and if this tour is going to turn into a fireball it will need more than a bottle Changyu Super Fine Brandy - where can you buy a friggin bottle of Jack in this country? But Dirtstar is coming to Sichuan on the weekend, and in that there is vast potential...

...so the only hitch in the first gig was a drunk French guy who believed in some frogified form of Real Punk almost got into a fight in the rinky-dink mosh pit with one of the throwback mohawk dudeworshippers of the lead singer in whatever the leadup band was. Nothing there. And when it was over some Joe Satriani/ Slash/ Howard Stern-looking white dude was calling himself the Hacker from Hackensack and to come check out his band, then it was, "Hey, we're gonna go in the back room and get high, you wanna come?" Still not in tip top form, I took a pass. And then I saw the bass player, Fredrik, with a mug of beer.

"You drink?"

"Yeah, I'm the only one."

"Thank God."

We clinked containers.

"Yeah, I need a couple just to get ready for a show, and then after to relax."

This is very good news....

...Now maybe this is a good time to introduce the cast of characters:

MaD, Chinese kid from Wuhan, tour manager and backup guitarist. Short and plodding, Internet geek who's into Guy Debord, sort of like the Yoz of the Chinese rock scene except he's too serious to joke around. Check his web site, WuhanPunk.com where you'll also find his zine Chaos. When I first read a flimsy newsprint copy someone had smuggled back to Taipei, I thought it was a bunch of wussy shit, commanding novelty interest mainly for this goofy idea of "anarcho-communism." What I didn't realize was how rare this kind of thing is here, and even though there is not even a hint of a direct reference to any actual government - it's really just some wishful utopianism - MaD says he worries a bit about getting busted, i.e. reeducated, for putting out "a few ideas I think people should pay attention to." Crackdowns have truly kept alternative political thought to adolescent levels. No wonder there seems more room in the fluff of women's magazines and the like, where officially sanctioned commericalism leaves real room to maneuver....But introvert that he is, MaD is on top of things. Every time an organizer fucks up reserving train berths, he's the one that scrambles to fix it, waking up early to go to the train station or wherever and dealing, dealing, dealing....

Jonas, at 32 or 34, is the band's old man, tour treasurer, and drummer. Maybe the only one without tatoos. If this was baseball (cinema), he'd be Kevin Costner's character in Bull Durham. He's been in bands since 1994 and touring somewhere once a year. Metallica once offered to fly his brother, former lead singer in an underground famous band called Refused, to Stockholm to hang out with them, and when bro met Anthrax, they asked to have his picture taken with him; and it goes on: Tom Morello and Vincent Gallo while in Sweden asked Jonas' bro to come chill with them, and basically he couldn't be bothered....back to Jonas: highly personable, cool, takes things in a reasonable and slow manner, almost like he's sedated, but drums with a bit of fire. And oh yeah, he's a straight-edge Vegan.

Erik, the lead singer, has a tatoo of a chimpanzee with an AK47 slung over its shoulder on his right forarm. I asked where he got it, and the answer was "It was just, like, an old t-shirt I had like 5 or 6 years ago." No special meaning. A couple other tats as well. Also straight-edge Vegan, he's skinny, internal, and the perferct image of a punk frontman on stage - a whirling dervish, a man possessed, an Ian Curtis.

Stefan, massive forarm tats and black-died hair and for the last couple days wearing a black metal t-shirt where the script reads DRUG FREE. Nice guy, I talk with him a fair bit, yesterday about straight edge, which he says was a fair sized movement in Sweden a few years ago but has died down a bit. He drank till he hit the legal drinking age, then gave it up. Straight edge is mostly a personal thing, a reaction against punk's hypocrisy of calling for social change while being massively fucked up all the time. He's actually just a fill-in guitarist, as Jonas brother (Dennis, a different brother) couldn't make it. His other band is somewhere between punk and metal.

Fredrik, bass player. Thank god he drinks beer. Also not a Vegan, but vegetarian, as is Stefan. A young dude and a pretty regular guy, rock 'n roll wise.

On to day two....

TOUR DAY ONE: Club 13, Beijing

2006-03-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

This was Mar. 3. At dinner the previous night with banker boys, my contact the tour manager, I'll call him MaD, finally bothered to call me to let me know it was on. About fucking time, but fortunately I was sedated by all the 10-inch prawns I'd eaten and barely excitable. Somehow I didn't expect it to happen, but it has....

I showed up at Club 13 that Friday afternoon. It's in Wudaokou, the rock 'n roll neighborhood abutting Beijing University that's been minorly glorified by wanks at Newsweek, Time, because they probably saw some kids with mohawks standing outside a club and drinking beer or clear rice liquor. Big shit. I saw that too, and it's hard for me to give much big cred to fashion punks who if you talk to them are as skittish in their eyes as jack rabbits; they got spiky hair because otherwise they wouldn't have any personalities at all. And besides, the scene is anchored by foreigners, who made up a good chunk of the crowd of 150, as they probably have been doing all along, because like the bar manager said, "We like them because they get more excited." In other words, they're not fucking voyeurs like they locals.

But I'm getting ahead. When I showed up at something like 4 in the afternoon the Swedes were doing soundcheck, and fortunately the music was good even though the band name is terrible: Insurgent Kid. At least what was coming through the amps was high energy, skater punk rock, some updated tradition of Agent Orange and Minor Threat, though I still don't know if they listened to those bands. They grew up with Metallica, and today in the van they were playing Bruce Springsteen:

"I got God on my side
I'm just trying to survive
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love
...."

Good music for the mudshit byways of Guangxi, but again I drift ahead....

I didn't really talk to them until dinner, and I knew I should be there for the initiation of bottle draining and smoking something without asking what it is. After all, they were young and heavily tatooed.

But when I sat down next to the guitarist, Stefan, my gut turned when I saw the tatoos across the knuckles of his 8 fingers (thumbs of course excluded). It read:

STR8 EDGE

At which I could only go Holy Fuck, this is obviously not going to be Dark Funeral. Those fuckin dudes rolled with Meth Daniels, crystal meth dissolved in duty free Tennessee whiskey. But this is going to be - and then the drummer, Jonas, getting ready to order, is like, "We're all vegetarian. I hope you're okay with that. Actually two of us are Vegan."

Talk about shattered illusions. Clearly rock and roll has changed, died a thousand deaths.

"Oh sure. Actually I'm fine with that."

It's kind of true, actually totally true. I am fine with it. And no question about it, these are all very cool guys. But damn if this wasn't going to be a different kind of tour....

REFLECTOR BAND PRACTICE

2006-03-06T08:20:00.000-08:00

...a backlog of posts to come, as THE TOUR HAS STARTED and it's helter-skelter, in a disturbingly sober way....

DAY TWO IN BEIJING a band called Reflector invited me to rehearsal. When I met the guitarist, TJ, driving a plastic imitation Vespa on some random street corner, he told me he'd thought I was Taiwanese from talking on the phone. Course my Chinese is not good enough to fool anyone in Taiwan, so it must be the accent that's confusing. I heard a similar story about a Beijing white guy coming to Taiwan.

...Reflector's guitarist is out of jail now, actually has been for some time, but for those POTS readers who remember Andy O'Brien's first article (before we even began posting English language content online), he got locked in the hoosegow for hitting some Beijing oldskool punk over the head with a beer bottle. Like his bandmate TJ said, "He knows kung fu."

What happened is this, and I bring it up because there's still a lot of misinformation floating around Taiwan rock circles about the motives behind the attack - nationalism? "Not at all": This is Lee Peng talking, the guitarist who got thrown in jail, and I will assume he's pretty damn sure what the fight was that he got locked up for. "Those fucking punks, they stole a drum pedal" - from Fire E.X., a Taiwanese punk band from Kaohsiung - and that's pretty much the end of the story.

Pretty much. TJ said the Taiwanese kids also brought beer in the bar from outside. "It was fucking stupid. Fighting over small shit." And then there was some backlash involving mafia going to the bar where the fight happened after it was all over, and Reflector got blamed but said they had nothing to do with it. TJ: "Look, we're famous, we don't have to do that. I said to the bar owner, 'Who's more niubi, you or us? Us.' Man, he's the one who looked like a fool."

So Lee Peng was held, detained, jailed, or whatever for half a year, and it was not prison, just the city jail. I can't really claim to understand the penal system here, so I'm just taking his word for it. He said he was in a big communal cell and had to stay there basically until his case went before a judge, at which point he was let out. That took six months, and he said he had to pay RMB 50,000, "mostly for lawyers, but of course a little for the judge. Ha ha."

I asked him what it was like inside, and he just kind of shrugged and called it an experience. "It was not so bad. And of course it was good to get out." I've talked with now three Chinese who've done recent jail time and read several more accounts, and it seems pretty common that those who've been through prison, work camps, and the like don't bitch about it much. Complaining about human rights just means more trouble I guess, so sealing it inside becomes a habit.

After band practice - Reflector is very tight BTW, one of the hotter bands on the circuit, and unlike any underground band in Taiwan they can actually live off music - Lee Peng invited me back to his place, which is a very cool mini-courtyard home in an old Beijing neighborhood, Dianmen. He's got a baby still not one year old with his French girlfriend, a sweet little family and they love the little dude. We drank tea for a while and the cold, clear winter sky went from pale to dusky outside the plastic sheets that covered the windows....

....I walked into a record store near there and asked if they had any Pangu, and the girl told me they'd sold out. She had nothing bad to say about the band, said they'd get the CD in again soon. I was like 'Really?' The interesting thing is that not as many people as I'd thought actually know that Pangu is in exile or that they even played Taiwan. Reflector had heard vague rumors but wasn't really sure till I told them. The woman in the CD store didn't seem to know much either, and I don't think I told her...

...dinner was high grade teppanyaki with a crew of American-Chinese guys plus associates, most in finance, one working for Microsoft, two for a cable network, and one for a cell phone content provider that had just cancelled a contract with the said cable network, making for a drama that went nowhere but a minorly interesting discussion on intellectual property - I say minorly interesting mostly because the people who were having it actually worked for big companies that owned intellectually property. The only real Nazi was a South American guy from the cable network: "No! If you Swingbox our content from the US to your computer in Beijing, you are stealing!"

Dickweed.

Fortunately this ended up somewhere else, at a rundown hotel ballroom called the Hollywood something which was full of Russian and Mongolian prostitutes that were so scary me and the banker boys all flocked to the pool table, which cost USD 12.50 an hour on top of the totally ridiculous USD 5 cover charge we had paid. But after all, there was the ambience. The Monglolian prostitute that ended up trying to talk us up was named Anu, and she spoke both bad Chinese and bad English, but at least she had fake tits. We asked her various things: where are you from? what do you speak better, English or Chinese? and, the only interesting question, can you ride a horse? The answer was "yes."

At one point, when nobody else was listening, I pointed at all the bankers boys and asked her, "Hey, which one of them do you think has the most money?"

I don't really like talking to prostitutes because all they really care about is are you going to fuck them and pay for it, so I figured I'd at least ask something we could speculate on, her probably better than me. Cause really, shouldn't this hooker be able to smell Amex platinum?

She pretended she didn't know what I meant, so I repeated it slowly in Chinese, then in English. Then she wrinkled her face and got up and left.

After that a Russian woman named Olga handed me a card listing her title as "Fashion Designer" and said it would cost RMB 800 "to take a girl out for a short time."

"Gee thanks."

"Just keep my card."

"Yeah right."

"Put it in your pocket."

Then we left.

THE TAKE IN GUANGZHOU

2006-03-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

NOTE: I hear there are some comments popping up, and many thanks for those, but I still can't actually view my own blog. I can only post.

BEGIN: With a case of food poison rising in my gut like bubbles in a cold lava lamp, I wandered the Forbidden City for three hours through the Beijing freeze. There was still snow in a few shadows from yesterday's dusting, and had my gut not been wrenching (and had the Chinese forgotten to shove strangers for a day) it could have been totally serene.

Awesome as it is, the palace is some of the most paranoid architecture I've ever seen in my life. Don't know the kilometer count on all those high-walled narrow corridors, but the Emperors were living like rats in a maze.

...burp. Glad it's abating.

My last day down south I made a day trip to Guangzhou. Bao-ping, a tall, indie girl who works for an online music mag, and her short-haired and stylish friend Neko took me first to see the dakou CD shops, where the smuggled CDs nabbed by customs end up for sale with sometimes a hole punched in the case. Prices are pretty cheap: 10-20 RMB. Bao-ping: "Without this, people here wouldn't know music." Weird selection though: Hall & Outs, Japanese jazz, Offspring... you have to search a lot.

I wanted to go to the local record store, and that was a perfect hole in the wall with 10 cats and piles of dust everywhere. Most of the CDs were previously opened, which made for easy sampling. I ended up buying 2 for 30RMB (USD$4), one a self-burned disc with sloppy handwriting, a badly xeroxed cover, and a broken jewel box, the other a fully professional product.

Part of my purpose on this trip is to see how Chinese kids now view Pangu, the hardcore band from Jiangxi that went into exile after playing Say Yes To Taiwan in 2004. After the CD shop, I did meet a couple people with something to say about them. The first I'll just call dude. He knew the band, respected them but wasn't terribly into them, and had no idea that they had to go on the lam in a quest for political asylum. So I told him. And I also said I got the impression that lots of kids now hate Pangu for selling out the Homeland. He didn't really take that view. Covering his mouth, he said, "You know, but what they were singing about was real."

Speaking even lower, under some loud background noise, he continued, "Have you heard about Shanwei?"

I said yes. Shanwei is a small village in Guangdong Province and the site of a recent massacre. Residents had protested after failing to recieve compensation from corrupt officials who had appropriated their land to build a power plant. After months of peaceful protests, the guards opened fire.

"I'm from there. My mother still lives there," said the dude. "Do you know how many people died."

I said that western media reported around 30, and that I'd seen pictures on the Internet. This had made news.

"The official estimate here was 3 dead and a 4 or so injured, but I know that's not true," he said. "That's not what I've heard. What you say sounds about right."

I had expected south China to be more receptive to Pangu. This was where they began to make a name for themselves, and it is far removed from the ultra-political mindset of Beijing. After all, Guangdong is where in the early 20th century Sun Yat-sen repeatedly came to foment revolt, and even though he flubbed almost a dozen of them and became a notorious threat to the throne, the anything-goes southern province was kind to him, and he was able to keep trying.

I met another guy, a vaguely metal-lookin guy in a limp black sweater with a red Mao pin on it. He said he wrote internal reports for the Communist Party in Beijing, but other people said that was bullshit. Anyway, I'll call him Sen. We got into a discussion of how rock concerts by their very form mimic political rallies. Basically, you've got this lead singer up there broadcasting his message (music/ propaganda) at a bunch of passive receivers, or that's at least what 70s stadium rock was about. If you think about it, there is a resemblance there to any Fascist rally, and we agreed on this. But Sen's conclusion was that music was dead so he put his lot with some pie-in-the-sky ultimate democracy, which was basically one of those absolutely unrealizable ideals Chinese intellectual culture seems so enamoured of, especially if you have to damn the practical consequences to get there. I said the smaller the show, the more interaction there tends to be, and anyway, society needs some leaders.

As part of this fairly useless debate, Sen brought up Ao Bo, Pangu's lead singer, saying that he knew him. "He's just a fool. He has no idea what he was doing." There was no animosity there though. The idea was that Pangu - who sang about killing communists and destroying the country 5% of the time and dirty streets and shitty lives the other 95% - had gone as extreme as they could in China and nothing had happened. So they went a step farther - Taiwan. And that's what got them in shit up to their eyeballs.

On the whole, Guangzhou was hardly damning of these dudes. Beijing, I expect, will be totally different.

NOISE JAM SESSION

2006-02-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Ok, it looks like I'm able to post on my own blog again. Aparently the back end of Blogger is open from China tho no Blogger blogs are viewable here. Somehow tho, Blogger wouldn't even come up in the ghetto Internet "bars" of Shenzhen, or at least the one's I was using. Now I'm in Beijing like 1km from the Forbidden City and things are working fine. Go figure.

REWIND. Last Saturday, I ended up in the apartment of Shenzhen music critic Lawrence Lee for a noise jam session/ preliminary recording session with Karkowski & LIN Zhiying, which was mostly about hanging out and playing with computers. (See Lawrence's blog for pics and parallel accounts, including one - Metal Machine Music - I can't access until I figure out this proxy stuff.)

Karkowski had played a noise show the previous night in a Shenzhen warehouse art space (see post below for review of his HK show a week earlier) to 200-300 people - they came coz it was free - including a bunch of army guys all fatigued out, who stood in formation and clapped at the end.

There was a brief interview after the show, and Karkowski was evasive as ever. Lawrence called his interview style "minimal" on his blog, but it's more that he just doesn't talk about music - with anybody, and he fully admits it. "I've played five shows with Merzbow, and we never talk about music. When we play, we just open up our laptops and start. That's it."

Still, there are a couple things I think I might be able to add. At Lawrence's place - a phat studio on the 20-something floor of a building where HK biznessmen keep there Shenzhen girlfriends - Karkowski picked a book off the shelf, Curtis Roads' Microsounds.

"Hey Lawrence, have you read this?"

"No."

"Me either. But I also have it."

Then after pausing a second, Karkowski picked up with a laugh, "But hell, I don't have to. This granular synthesis, that's what we're doing right here!"

Microsounds - interpolating from a quick scan of the introduction - is a sort of hipster textbook for computer programmers, mathmeticians, and music theorists. The main idea it develops is of quantum particles of sound even more basic than tone and timbre. These are "grains" of sound, and you can plot them on an x-y axis, generate them with equations and all sorts of shit. It's very much theory, and pretty mathematical. And I think this is what Karkowski and a lot of other noise artists are getting at and why they don't want to explain their music. Coz check it, when making noise on the laptop, Karkowski now uses a special patch in MAX/MSP that generates random sound - literally just generating random variables for the x and y coordinates on the sound field or whatever you call that and another variable for duration. He can set it on full automatic, which he did when jamming with Lin, standing up from the computer and swigging some beer, saying, "Look, it's running all by itself now."

After the jam session, Lin, a 23-year-old kid who's been into experimental noise since he discovered Merzbow at 17, was a little vexed. "I couldn't really tell which sounds were coming from you and which from me."

Karkowski, drinking beer, was a bit flippant about it. "Yeah, me either, but who cares? I thought it sounded pretty good. Does it really matter?"

Weirdly, on the plane from Shenzhen to Beijing today (Feb. 28) I read something in Peter Hessler's China Peace Corps book River Town that bears in here. Hessler is writing about teaching English lit. to Chinese college students in podunk Sichuan and finding the student impressions fresh and real compared to the readings of university lit crit nazis. Thinking back to Princeton or Oxford - the dude went to two fucking bluechips - Hessler laments:

"I was disturbed by the politicization of literature in the West: the way that
literature was read as social commentary rather than art, and the way that books
were forced to serve political theories of one stripe or another. Very rarely
did a cirtic seem to react to a text; rather the text was twisted so that it
reacted neatly to whatever ideas the critic held sacred...."

In Karkowski's case, just subsitute "music" for "literature" and "songs" for "books," and maybe there's some insight to be gained into his music and why he babbles and changes the subject when asked about it (and also why he makes fun of DJ Spooky for eating up deconstruction, etc., etc.) It's a new on art for arts sake, maybe a techno-modernism, and what better way to expell politics than barricading yourself behind some pure math.

Karkowski is also totally hopped up on Asia. "There's no more dynamic place in the world." He's into wierd micro-scenes from Singapore to Harbin - the West is where he goes to get paid - and he trips on Shenzhen because it's such a brand new futureland, at 10mil and climbing the fastest growing city in the world, a Le Corbusier-like strip of towers and highways built on the bulldozed rubble of an old fishing village, an identity that's been completely replaced. Karkowski has said before that what he does aims to destroy "music," and when I asked if he still feels that way after the Friday night show, he answered, "You could say that what I'm doing today is trying to destroy what I did yesterday." Shenzhen offers that same kind of total iconoclasm.

...anyway, enough of noise. way too serious....punk rock tour begins friday....

THE WIRE hits China

2006-02-26T02:04:00.000-08:00

First off, I didn't even know The Wire article on Taipei was out yet until I met this blogger at the Dickson Dee-Karkowski noise show in Shenzhen earlier tonight (2/25/2006). He's already got a scan of it on his web site ( http://www.chinesenewear.com/gno/) which is probably the best China music blog IN ENGLISH! on the web. Props to Lawrence, his name. I'm meeting him for coffee or whatever tomorrow.

What this all heralds I don't know, coz the article leads with politics and the jailing of a Chinese dissident for posting some punk rock lyrics on the internet by the most hated band in China, Pangu. The timing, with me just entering China for this gonzo rock tour, is either auspiciuos or ominous, which means actually both. After the show, when I told Lawrence I live in Taiwan, he was like, "The Wire just -"

"Yeah, I know. I wrote it."

"So you're ...."

"Yeah, that's me."

I wonder about the reaction elsewhere, like what are those fuckin punks in Chengdu gonna think of it? I get the feeling that word spreads fast here, sensorship being what it is.

....technical aside. This Chinese Interenet is bugging the holy bejeesus out of me, though I finally got on - you can post on blogger, you just can't read it. Also, I keep hearing stupid rumors, like, you can get to Blogger if you go to English language Google first and post but not read (bullshit). Another good one was that to get English Google you could just type it backwards: elgoog. Not only does that make absolutely no sense at all - Google isn't blocked - but it also doesn't work. There are also proxies to get around the Great Firewall, I've met people who know how but haven't figured it out for myself yet.

DIRTY SOUTH (CHINA) CREW

2006-02-26T01:40:00.000-08:00

Shenzhen has a weirdly high proportion of foreigners with dreadlocks and oversized sports jerseys, even a couple of black guys. There are not too many lao wai here, and hip hop wear is of course a strategy to get laid... which is all to say that, yes, this has been a much softer landing than last time, summer of 2000. Then I ended came off the train and through customs at Lo Hu without any renminbi and only a phone number for my contact, and to tell you how much I've learned this time was exactly the same. But only two prostitutes chased me around the Shangri-la Hotel this time in my scramble for cash and a phone connection - in 2000 I'd been shaking them off like flies, and I never did find any money and ended up in a 45-minute cab ride to the middle of a factory zone, with a scheming hitchiker for a companion and ended up in a karaoke hotel staffed at all times by 200 whores and shining like the lights of Vegas in the desolation of this industrial dessert. I was covering a factory opening, and the Taiwanese boss, i.e. my expense account, said he'd pay for the cab after I used my last few Hong Kong dollars to call him long distance via his Taiwan cell phone, which was then forwarded back to Shenzhen. It was the only way. The boss was of course in a different karaoke with undoubtedly even more and probably cheaper whores when I got to the hotel, but at least the cash was there. So I sat down in the restaurant and billed some food to my paid-for room and began talking to the two white guys sitting there, who filled me in immediately on the prices: US$100 bucks for a night if you picked one from the karaoke line-up, but you could get one for US$65 if you asked a certain bellboy. This seemed excessive, but maybe that's what you'd expect from a Controlled Market Economy.

I heard many other things about prostitutes that trip - for example, that they'd parade through the streets of downtown Shenzhen wearing numbers, so anyone in a hotel could order easily by phone - but they are no longer roaming the streets like zombies. Now they are quartered away safely in saunas, massage parlors, barber shops and the like. There is a block of narrow alleys where they sit in open store fronts on couches and show cleavage and look bored, but you can find that anywhere. It seems relatively tame. Relatively.

The great thing, which I found out about too late, is that there is 24-hour bus service direct from Hong Kong's girlie bar district of Wanchai to a row of saunas in Shenzhen not far from where I'm staying, chez Dirtstar. The city is actually a giant strip many miles long but only a few wide; it has clumped atop Hong Kong's northern border like gunk on top of a rounded skylight. The border is a filthy moat and many miles of razor wire. Population is now around 10 million, compared to 7 million two years ago and almost none in 1979 when it became the SEZ - special economic zone. "From 1992 to 2002, the number of people per square kilometer in the city had risen from 825 to 3,597 with an annual growth rate of 15.32 percent, the highest growth rate of cities in China."(China.org.cn) It's the fastest growing city in the world. Immigrants, tons of them, and that means good Shinjiang noodles, and if there's a lot of beggars, hell, they just make it feel like a real city, not some hospital shopping malls like HK or Singapore. Shenzhen may be a place with no history and huge billboards that say; Consumerism will set you free," but anyplace with poverty also has soul. Yesterday I spent the afternoon taking photos of elementary school kids trouncing around on a half-destroyed old-style village surrounded by highrise apartments, a scene you can probably find everywhere in China. The new, demi-wild SEZ reminds me in a lot of ways of Taipei when I just got there, circa 1995. That's where the lao wai with dreadlocks come in, fuckin mackin it, coz anything goes as long as you know which chicks are with gangsters. The last two nights Dirtstar took me out to a club called U-Bar, where a 10-year expat from Providence, Rhode Island, Jesse was on the decks spinning all kinds of nasty, bumpin hip hop and reggeaton. Hip hop seems less a global scourge if its good, which is the problem with Taipei. If you put the Shenzhen and Taipei club scenes in a horse race tomorrow, Shenzen wins by maybe a length and a half. First, they play music other than 50 Cent and Shaggy, and second, people dance to it. I only saw a couple of geezers in the house wining their "second wives." Local kids no how to move; I even met a Taiwanese kid, Bat, who teaches hip hop dance in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and one other city. The market is friggin exploding, and if you ask how much the party is bumpin, the answer is: more.

SEZ Arrival

2006-02-26T01:39:00.000-08:00

Dude, just got to shenzhen today, and fucking blogger is blocked here! goddamn it. i met with some people in hong kong yesterday who "knew" the mainland, and they refused to send me certain emails until i got back. they were like, "Your using Gmail?! It's Google!" (Here substitute "Evil" for "Google" and watch their motto go to hell.) Other China email advice came when I got here from Dirt Star, who I'm staying with. He said a string of his emails got blocked because it had "Chin3se G0v3rnmint" in the subject header (fucking weird, but I don't dare write it for some reason). So I'm still using gmail and ther eare like at least 150 kids in this dark cave of an Internet cafe, so it doesn't feel that threatening, except that I had to show my passport to get a computer. And believe you me, I'm real fucking happy about leaving a trail of paper computer use records all across China. Should have brought a laptop, so I could go online incognito at Starbucks for free, then all I'd leave is a damn trail of carmel macchiato stains on my one pair of blue jeans from here to Beijing and Chengdu and back. Oh well. (BTW, clothes are so cheap here I almost regret bringing any at all.)

Otherwise this city is awesomely weird, like someone with a thousand billion dollars decided to build a city in 25 years with only 1950s space age comic books for a blueprint. The convention center here, brand new, everything is goddamn brand new, looks like its interior could hold all the jet liners parked outside around Taipei's CKS Terminal One. There is a gold skyscraper. No shit. Maybe 50 stories, so only so-so tall for here, and every reflective window, corner, antenna, windown washing equipment on the roof, whatever, it's all gleaming like the turds out of King Midas' ass.

The one good thing is the mobile phone market, sort of. It seems as completely unregulated as China's economic growth and looming environmental catastrophes are out of control. (Going through Immigration, a fellow whitey, one who said he'd lived in Guangzhou for 10 years, warned, "The line starts here, and on the other side the air turns blue and it smell like shit all the way to Beijing.") Coming through into the plaza outside the Lo Hu train station, where I'd crossed the border, I bought a phone number for 120RMB cash, no questions asked. The only problem is every cell phone in China is 11-digits long, and the lady explained to me that you have to dial an extra 5 digits in front of that to get the cheap rate of zero-point-something RMB per minute. I was gonna asked why, but then I reminded myself, "Oh yeah, now I'm in China."

2006-02-19T09:46:00.000-08:00

An article pitch I just sent to a music magazine, and also what I did yesterday:

In about a week and a half I'll be in Beijing to speak with and see
performances by FM3, inventors of the Buddha Machine and China pioneers in
minimal techno and ambient. I realize the Buddha Machine is pretty huge now -
this little looping transistor radio-like device originally used to
automate Buddhist temple chants but then converted for ambient sound art by
working with Cantonese factories - but there's lots and lots going on in China
now if that would be too dated by publication, and Beijing as always is
the big center. Last night in Hong Kong I saw and spoke with
Dickson Dee and Zbigniew Karkowski at the launch of a tour that goes
into China tomorrow (Monday). Karkowski said this is something like his 7th tour
of China and that the crowds he's getting are big, sometimes up to 400. He says
he's performed with at least a couple increadible musicians, including one kid
from the frozen industrial city of Harbin (north of Beijing) who was making
"increadible noise, and when I asked him, 'have you ever heard of Merzbow, White
Room, people like this?' he just shook his head. It was amazing, this was
amazing real noise music, and he was just reacting to his environment!" I
will probably be touring 8-9 cities in China with a band, checking out music
scenes in various cities, and I will also spend time in Beijing talking to
leading music critic and experimental artist Yan Jun, FM3, the people
at Sanshui Records (who release CHinese breakcore, ambient, etc.) - they're
actually something of a clique. If you haven't had anything on China lately,
this would be an excellent time.

Crowd-wise, going to a noise show is kind of like riding the subway - everybody just sits through it and at the end they just kind of wander off in a stupor. The only difference is that after a noise show your ears are ringing. The typical questions that follow, are: so, what did you think of that? It's fishing for something to say about it, because nobody has any fucking idea how to describe 70minutes of modulated sine waves, feedback, and static but the big fear for all hipsters is to sound uncool. Sure, you gotta walk into noise shows with an open mind, but I wish people would sometimes just say, 'dude, what the fuck was that all about? that sucked.' I should bring a banker.

Karkowski didn't suck tho. In the world of loud-ass jet engines and generated noise, somehow he manages to be good while others are okay. Dickson was doing something interesting with a turntable - some scrub record that just generated noise, which he modulated realtime with controllers, etc., i.e. nothing canned - and it was good for 10-15 minutes but went on too long. I wonder where the hell is the structure, and by that I mean in big terms. Too much noise is random brain paths. Even though it's totally abstract, you can tell the brain is going: I think I'll do this, oh, and let me do this scratchy tone, let me speed up here, let me do the slowdown lowdown. It's too all-over-the-place; too many tangents. What's wrong is forgetting about the listener, because good stream of consciousness (think Faulkner) still has an overarching plan and tells a story, i.e. it's edited. Vs. bad stream of consciousness, which is what you usually get. Technological innovation's not enough. I think Karkowski knows all this and gets it right, even though he's also 100% live, and at the start of the show he is bobbing his head, like he's rocking it, like there's a beat even though it's just steady blasting white noise - and after a bit, I was feeling it too. I don't know exactly what he's got going, but he has something. What's intersting and analyzable is that in his loud-as-shit music he interlaces different timbres. 100 decibels of medium-low register droning won't hurt your ears like static with high pitched spikes will, and he interweavs these things giving you an experience. He was also not too long, 10-15 minutes or so, and maybe with noise and sound art, that's wise. In the entire history of music, I don't think anyone has produced an hour-long composition that counts as good music without weeks or months of work. Noise is no different.

For info on this China tour, check Dickson's blog.

MORE MA

2006-02-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

Ma Ying-jeou also makes the cover of a Chinese news mag on the HK news stands, but here the take is different and perhaps telling of mainland concerns. The magazine is called Wide Angle, and I can't remember the exact wording of the cover text, but it's something like this: If the KMT retakes Taiwan's government, what then? The photo is totally different from the candyboy Ma on Time Express - here it's grainy black and white, hard news gravity. The interesting thing about this kind of viewpoint coming from China is - after sucking up to Lien Chan, James Soong, and specifically the KMT as a party; and if Beijing's first choice of a Taiwanese political candidate short of one they'd appoint themselves actually becomes president - well this getting what they want may turn out to pose a serious problem. The question Wide Angles's cover seems to be asking is: well, if we get the guy we want, holy shit! does that mean we actually have to work with him?

Personal note: Could this be an upside to a Ma presidency? I'm still trying to prepare myself.

MA AS TIME EXPRESS COVER BOY

2006-02-17T02:15:00.000-08:00

The current copy of Time Express on HK news stand shelves has Ma Ying-jeou as cover boy and sporting this gushing grin that makes it more like he wants people to pick him up and hug him than vote for him. It's a near-total puff piece (from a magazine that's basically an ESL tool anyway) , and I expect we'll be seeing a lot of them until Taiwan's next presidential race gets into hardball mode. But this kind of thing will be paving the way. HKese, and even Chinese, really like Ma, probably because he seems sensibly whimpy to them. But talking to an HK gallery owner the other night, a person who aligns himself KMT, believes Chen Shui-bian's use of the assassination attempt amounts to election fraud, etc. - i.e. is predisposed in many ways to like Ma. But his honest judgement is that Ma is too much of a wuss to deal with Beijing without being made their bitch. "At the end of the day, Chinese politics is a very macho culture." This is also the line of Kaohsiung taxi drivers and the rest of Taiwan's south. It's funny to hear a mainlander agree.

AN OPEN SECRET

2006-02-17T02:02:00.000-08:00

Just found out that the US ambassador to China, Clark T. Randt, was "Bush’s fraternity brother at Yale." HK gossip, which first off is basically supportive of Randt as a 3-decade China guy who actually does know his shit and speaks fluent mandarin, says they weren't just frat brothers but actually roommates from sophomore year on, and a few other things as well, which of course, I have absolutely no way of confirming.

CHINA TOUR ANYONE?

2006-02-16T19:47:00.000-08:00

I've been invited along on a 14-city tour of China with a Swedish hardcore/ punk band called Insurgent Kids. The invitation comes from one of the Wuhan punks, a kid Andy hooked me up with (Props). The tour looks like this:

3月03日周五北京@13 CLUB
3月04日周六武汉@左眼酒吧
3月05日周天长沙@
3月06日周一桂林@算了吧
3月07日周二 dayoff (阳朔)
3月08日周三 dayoff (阳朔)
3月09日周四昆明@说吧
3月10日周五重庆@第一现场
3月11日周六成都@小酒馆
3月12日周天西安@
3月13日周一南京@82酒吧
3月14日周二杭州@31艺术酒吧
3月15日周三上海@
3月16日周四济南@
3月17日周五北京@无名高地

Like Hunter S. said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I also met a former banker/ finance guy turned author and publisher, who's done a couple off-the-wall titles like this children's book:

'This book is inspirational and desperately needed.' - National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders.

Pub. A&C Black, London

THE COMING AMPHIBIOUS INVASION

2006-02-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

Lucky that my first evening in town, Hanart Gallery had a show, which not only gave me something to do, it gave me a chance to meet Johnson Chang, who's not only one of the most finger-on-the-pulse guys in the Greater China art market, he's also an alum of my college, class of '73.

On exhibit were two Yunnan artists, Chen Changwei (陳長偉) and Zhao Guanghui(趙光輝) who work with fiber glass and auto paint - they farm the actual work out to some fender repair shops. Zhao made mock-future cars, the most interesting one pictured above.

I spoke to him briefly, said he should make it into a submarine that could be piloted by a child, then mass produce them and use them to invade Taiwan. Despite my insipidly mumbled Chinese, he might have even understood; he's got this clever yokel's face, and he showed crooked teeth at the punch line. Still, it was probably funnier for me.

I asked the other artist, Chen, why he felt like making a big 2-meter bust of Mao. His sculptures all have mottled, rumpled surfaces, a conceptual left turn from the gloss finishes. I heard one wine drinker say he considers it "half digested but not completely digestible," which gives an impression of what he's thinking, but still doesn't really do it for me; ditto for the work. (The whole show was an ironic future thing, not the freshest idea. One piece by Zhao consisted of car parts made to look like bone fossils and half burried in some sand. This was in a corner of the gallery. I thought it should have been installed on some beach Planet of the Apes style. He said he'd never seen the movie.)

So when I asked about Mao, the answer: Because I really like Mao Zedong.

This was good practice, because I'm trying to train myself to not gaff when I encounter people who actually still venerate Mao, though of course when this does happen it is invariably in oddball ways only the Chinese education system can explain.

Mao could really do things. He knew how to clear out everything and replace it with something new. As an individual, if you kill someone or destroy things you are a criminal, but as a leader it's different; it may be for the greater good. And being able to overturn the old culture and replace it is what is needed now. As an artist I can appreciate that. Mao should have been an artist. As a political leader he may have been terrible, but he would have been a great artist. People have said so before. It's hardly a new idea.

Filipino fund-gutting

2006-02-12T21:10:00.000-08:00

A workers watchdog group, the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, has since the beginning of this month been accusing the Philippines' main liason office in Taiwan, the Manila Economic Cultural Office (MECO) of funneling 30 million pesos to current Philippinnes president Gloria Arroyo in advance of her last election in 2004. MECO gets its money from fees charged to Filipino workers in Taiwan, 235 million pesos in 2005, according to APMM. These fees are supposed to take care of its budget and provide services to resident workers (yeah right). Financing embattled Arroyo's reelection would be a scandal, though scandals are so dime-a-dozen in the Philippines it's hard to gauge how big a scandal. Also, it's still not clear where evidence of the alleged transfer comes from, but the story has gotten some attention in a CNA story in the China Post, where MECO denies the accusation.

Mei's in the NYT

2006-02-11T08:34:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Travel Section just published its latest report on Taipei, and the WHERE TO SHOP section includes this on Mei's Tea Bar:

New Yorkers in search of tea will notice a familiar name — Ten Ren, (www.tenren.com), the Chinatown purveyor of oolongs, is all over Taipei. But for a more intimate purchase of fragrant leaves, visit Mei's, 16 Lane 37, Yongkang Street, (886-2) 2394-2425; its proprietor, also named Mei, is a government-approved tea sommelier. (The state exam involves sampling 30 brews and identifying their mountain of origin.) Deep-pocketed tea lovers should ask for Assam from Hua Lien County, 3,200 Taiwan dollars for 2.2 pounds.

Test

2006-02-11T02:41:00.000-08:00

this is just to make the blog appear so i can format it