Thursday, May 08, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Love/ Hate China
Today lots of small red hearts icons have suddenly started appearing on my msn messenger list of contacts. They followed the following message that seems to be spreading fast across the chinese internet community:
"转发;请在msn名字加上括号L括号CHINA,让全世界都知道中国人的团结,请转发你们的msn朋友们"
Which translates as follows:
"Pls forward - add in front of your MSN name with bracket-L-bracket-China to let the whole world know Chinese people are all united. Please forward to your MSN buddies"
Which leads us to the highly sensitive subjects of the last few weeks: Tibet, human rights and misunderstanding between China and the western world.
I have been wanting to write a post on this subject for long, while struggling with knowing where to start from...
I have listened to many chinese across different age groups, mainly in big cities. The general feeling is one of consciousness that the chinese government is censoring the information about Tibet. But interestingly this censorship is accepted for the sake of the unity/ harmony of the country. "The government hides part of the information in order to prevent further social problems to spread" is one explanation I heard a lot.
Over my few years in China, I got to the belief that the unity of the country is to the Chinese, what the freedom of expression is to western countries: the cornerstone of the Society, the thing that will always remain the priority over anything else.
The other thing I got to realise is how proud the chinese population is of welcoming the Olympics. They see that as nothing less than the coming out of modern China on the world stage. A unique opportunity to show to the whole world what China today is and how it has dramatically changed since the dire years of the Cultural Revolution (many mainland chinese I spoke too are still convinced that most of the western people see China and chinese people today, the way they were thirty years ago).
Net, there is a growing feeling within the chinese population (which the government naturally and dangerously helps growing in my opinion) that the West is trying to spoil their moment of fame by interfering into so called internal politics.
The recent news coming from France (the torch relay, the human rights badge, Sarkozy saying yes but no but yes to his attendance to the opening ceremony...), have made France a favorite target.
I have started seeing msn personal messages (those that appear next to your name on your friends contact list) that say in chinese:
- 'ban french products: buy counterfeited Louis Vuitton bags'
- 'we don't have a say on Crosica's independance, so why do you interfer into our internal affairs?'
- 'who are the french to tell us what to do ?'(a good question actually that the whole world has been asking itself for a while... but that's another subject)
I am not saying that China should not get any political counter while its under the Olympic spotlights. As a matter of fact, the chinese government was the first to make these Olympics a very political event: the journey of the torch is an example: from its start in Kazakhstan to its try to bring back Taiwan into the list of chinese cities hosting the torch, or its journey to the top of Everest in Tibet...).
I am just thinking the West should be careful before embarking lightheartedly into somehow sterile protests and David vs Goliath fantasies that only end up bringing together one nation into nauseous nationalism rather than affecting the way its government behave.
Below is a video of Jin Jing an handicaped chinese athlete who was holding the torch in Paris. Look at it from the perspective of a chinese person and get a sense of how you might feel...
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Winter of love, final part?
It seems like Chinese censorship authorities (the SARFT) did not enjoy neither the big success of 'Lust, Caution' censored version in Chinese mainland cinemas nor the even bigger success of the full version on pirated DVDs in China...
Tang Wei, the young and beautiful lead actress of 'Lust, Caution' had just been hired by Unilever as brand ambassador for Pond's. As part of a massive relaunch plan, the brand leveraged her fame by making implicit hints to 'Lust, Caution' erotic atmosphere.
The SARFT released a statement on March 7th that read as follow:
[Chinese regulators objected to any film that ]"disrupts social order" [and vowed to censor films that promote] "pornographic and lewd content, showing promiscuity, rape, prostitution, sexual immorality and perversion" [and other] "wanton values."
The statement was not explicitly mentioning 'Lust, Caution', but a few days later to make things clearer, the SARFT ordered a ban on showing Tang Wei on TV, in cinemas or in any film festival happening in China.
You can still view the Pond's ad here:
Tang Wei, the young and beautiful lead actress of 'Lust, Caution' had just been hired by Unilever as brand ambassador for Pond's. As part of a massive relaunch plan, the brand leveraged her fame by making implicit hints to 'Lust, Caution' erotic atmosphere.
The SARFT released a statement on March 7th that read as follow:
[Chinese regulators objected to any film that ]"disrupts social order" [and vowed to censor films that promote] "pornographic and lewd content, showing promiscuity, rape, prostitution, sexual immorality and perversion" [and other] "wanton values."
The statement was not explicitly mentioning 'Lust, Caution', but a few days later to make things clearer, the SARFT ordered a ban on showing Tang Wei on TV, in cinemas or in any film festival happening in China.
You can still view the Pond's ad here:
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Winter of love part 2
As I postponed and postponed again the writing of this post, the story is not really fresh anymore and has already made it in many western media...
For those who missed it, Edison Chan is a famous singer and actor from Hong Kong who has been bragging a lot for years about being a sex symbol.
With the un-requested help from a computer repair man he proved it.
6 months ago he went to a PC repair store to have his computer fixed. As he recognized Edison Chan, the repairman made a copy of his hard drive, then to discover a file with more than a thousand pictures of Edison photographing his sexual performances with a broad range of famous Hong Kong actresses and singers.
Apparently the repairman kept the file for about 6 months without mentioning it to anybody. But one day, as he was throwing a party at home with friends, he could not resist mentioning the pictures and showing them.
Rapidly pictures got uploaded and a few days later the whole of Hong Kong and a large part of Mainland China got them and circulated them further despite the authorities threatening of legal action against anybody having them on their computer (which is why you won’t see any on this blog).
Because all the girls involved (and they were very involved indeed) were so famous, because there were so many of them and only one man for them all, and because the photos got released bit by bit, this story made the headlines in Hong Kong for about three weeks non stop.
All around Hong Kong pictures got shared and looked at in the work place with colleagues and no kind of embarrassment. As I don’t speak Cantonese I am certainly missing a lot of conversations topics. But it felt like the first time since I arrived two years ago that sex was such an openly discussed subject in a country where the gap with Brazil may be even bigger on this topic than in term of football abilities.
Here are Edison’s official apologies:
Maybe because one of the girl that appeared on the picture was the niece of the biggest entertainment producer in Hong Kong (who is accidentally notorious for his acquaintances with the local mob), Edison has since then decided to move to Los Angeles and pursue his career there…
We wish him all the best.
To me the best part of the whole story was to see hard core sex pictures of stars, taken with their full consent, spreading across China, while the very same girls had been relentlessly promoting no sex before marriage and done their self promotions with too many kitsch pictures holding another kind of little furry animals (those that 5 years old kids are more likely to play with).
May that be the end of Hong Kong infantilism…
For those who missed it, Edison Chan is a famous singer and actor from Hong Kong who has been bragging a lot for years about being a sex symbol.
With the un-requested help from a computer repair man he proved it.
6 months ago he went to a PC repair store to have his computer fixed. As he recognized Edison Chan, the repairman made a copy of his hard drive, then to discover a file with more than a thousand pictures of Edison photographing his sexual performances with a broad range of famous Hong Kong actresses and singers.
Apparently the repairman kept the file for about 6 months without mentioning it to anybody. But one day, as he was throwing a party at home with friends, he could not resist mentioning the pictures and showing them.
Rapidly pictures got uploaded and a few days later the whole of Hong Kong and a large part of Mainland China got them and circulated them further despite the authorities threatening of legal action against anybody having them on their computer (which is why you won’t see any on this blog).
Because all the girls involved (and they were very involved indeed) were so famous, because there were so many of them and only one man for them all, and because the photos got released bit by bit, this story made the headlines in Hong Kong for about three weeks non stop.
All around Hong Kong pictures got shared and looked at in the work place with colleagues and no kind of embarrassment. As I don’t speak Cantonese I am certainly missing a lot of conversations topics. But it felt like the first time since I arrived two years ago that sex was such an openly discussed subject in a country where the gap with Brazil may be even bigger on this topic than in term of football abilities.
Here are Edison’s official apologies:
Maybe because one of the girl that appeared on the picture was the niece of the biggest entertainment producer in Hong Kong (who is accidentally notorious for his acquaintances with the local mob), Edison has since then decided to move to Los Angeles and pursue his career there…
We wish him all the best.
To me the best part of the whole story was to see hard core sex pictures of stars, taken with their full consent, spreading across China, while the very same girls had been relentlessly promoting no sex before marriage and done their self promotions with too many kitsch pictures holding another kind of little furry animals (those that 5 years old kids are more likely to play with).
May that be the end of Hong Kong infantilism…
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Winter of Love, part one
30 summers after the American Summer of Love, the time may have come for the Chinese Winter of Love.
In China - and Hong Kong is no exception to that- sex is quite a big taboo. As an example, a scene of a TV ad for my favorite toothpaste brand, where you could see a young married couple lips kissing under the water, had to be cut for moral issues after China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) reviewed it.
The fact they showed their affection for each other in a swimming pool, how silly it was, was acceptable but lip kissing definitely wasn’t.
Sex is a sensitive subject, a subject that I have very rarely heard as part of a discussion with local friends or colleagues. But things may be changing, thanks to a respected Taiwanese film director who bowed Chinese censorship to better bypass it and a Hong Kong male star who had to get his computer repaired.
The film director is Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain…).
To me this guy is THE master of perversion. With movies that look rather innocuous he manages to create big disturbance through his ability to manipulate powerful icons and cultural symbols.
In Brokeback Mountain, you could not help seeing the Marlboro cow boy, you could not help seeing western mass market symbols of virility and freedom. Yet they were gay.
Now with his latest movie ‘Lust and Caution’ is making it again but this time in China.
The movie takes place in Shanghai in the forties during the Japanese occupation and shows the heroic behavior of young enthusiastic Chinese patriots trying to kill a senior Chinese collaborator.
All great stuffs for Chinese censorship to allow enthusiastically the movie to be release, as long as Ang Lee would accept to cut all the sex scenes…
As a matter of fact the young patriot is an attractive Chinese woman with a mission to seduce to approach and then kill the nasty collaborator. The whole story revolves around their relationship that rapidly gets very physical.
Ang Lee accepted the censorship to the condition that he would be the one doing the Chinese cut. The film got about 15 minutes shorter (and quite likely emptied of much of its substance as the intensity and ambiguous character of their sex relationship IS the main subject of the film).
Meanwhile the full version got released in Hong Kong in mandarin and cantonese.
I went to the screening on the first week and it felt like watching some secret files from the CIA: we and our bags got checked before we entered the cinema and during the whole movie someone from the movie theater staff kept patrolling in the alleys to make sure nobody was filming...
In the following weeks, the box office surprisingly kept growing as more and more people from southern Mainland China, who knew about what happened to the film in China, went to see the full version in Hong Kong.
And of course pirate DVDs of the full version started to appear in China turning the official censored version into some kind on trailer for the full version.
Ang Lee is a smart man.
In China - and Hong Kong is no exception to that- sex is quite a big taboo. As an example, a scene of a TV ad for my favorite toothpaste brand, where you could see a young married couple lips kissing under the water, had to be cut for moral issues after China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) reviewed it.
The fact they showed their affection for each other in a swimming pool, how silly it was, was acceptable but lip kissing definitely wasn’t.
Sex is a sensitive subject, a subject that I have very rarely heard as part of a discussion with local friends or colleagues. But things may be changing, thanks to a respected Taiwanese film director who bowed Chinese censorship to better bypass it and a Hong Kong male star who had to get his computer repaired.
The film director is Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain…).
To me this guy is THE master of perversion. With movies that look rather innocuous he manages to create big disturbance through his ability to manipulate powerful icons and cultural symbols.
In Brokeback Mountain, you could not help seeing the Marlboro cow boy, you could not help seeing western mass market symbols of virility and freedom. Yet they were gay.
Now with his latest movie ‘Lust and Caution’ is making it again but this time in China.
The movie takes place in Shanghai in the forties during the Japanese occupation and shows the heroic behavior of young enthusiastic Chinese patriots trying to kill a senior Chinese collaborator.
All great stuffs for Chinese censorship to allow enthusiastically the movie to be release, as long as Ang Lee would accept to cut all the sex scenes…
As a matter of fact the young patriot is an attractive Chinese woman with a mission to seduce to approach and then kill the nasty collaborator. The whole story revolves around their relationship that rapidly gets very physical.
Ang Lee accepted the censorship to the condition that he would be the one doing the Chinese cut. The film got about 15 minutes shorter (and quite likely emptied of much of its substance as the intensity and ambiguous character of their sex relationship IS the main subject of the film).
Meanwhile the full version got released in Hong Kong in mandarin and cantonese.
I went to the screening on the first week and it felt like watching some secret files from the CIA: we and our bags got checked before we entered the cinema and during the whole movie someone from the movie theater staff kept patrolling in the alleys to make sure nobody was filming...
In the following weeks, the box office surprisingly kept growing as more and more people from southern Mainland China, who knew about what happened to the film in China, went to see the full version in Hong Kong.
And of course pirate DVDs of the full version started to appear in China turning the official censored version into some kind on trailer for the full version.
Ang Lee is a smart man.
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Mix and match
Something has surprised me since I am in China. When ads represent ethnic mixed couples, you will always find the same pattern: a Chinese guy married with a western girl, NEVER the other way round.
My European post colonial heritage and western prejudices first lead me to look for some inferiority complex as a potential explanation.
Happily enough I was wrong.
Then I thought about the image of ‘easy women’ that western women sometimes have in India or Middle East, where the few pornographic stuffs that get through cultural and government censorship come from abroad.
I was happily wrong again as I realized, when I finally got to ask the question to my Chinese colleagues.
It all goes back to the traditional role of the woman within the Chinese family.
A fundamental reason why most families in China still prefer to have a boy is because a girl is expected to ‘leave’ her parents as she gets married to enter her husband’s family and take care of her parents in law…
As the norm today, even in big cities, remains to have three generations living under the same roof; a western girl, with her different cultural background and her expected lower ability to communicate in mandarin, would not be seen as ‘qualified for the job’.
Or more brutally as my Chinese colleague puts it: in China it doesn’t matter who you marry your daughter to, but it’s a big deal who your son will marry.
My European post colonial heritage and western prejudices first lead me to look for some inferiority complex as a potential explanation.
Happily enough I was wrong.
Then I thought about the image of ‘easy women’ that western women sometimes have in India or Middle East, where the few pornographic stuffs that get through cultural and government censorship come from abroad.
I was happily wrong again as I realized, when I finally got to ask the question to my Chinese colleagues.
It all goes back to the traditional role of the woman within the Chinese family.
A fundamental reason why most families in China still prefer to have a boy is because a girl is expected to ‘leave’ her parents as she gets married to enter her husband’s family and take care of her parents in law…
As the norm today, even in big cities, remains to have three generations living under the same roof; a western girl, with her different cultural background and her expected lower ability to communicate in mandarin, would not be seen as ‘qualified for the job’.
Or more brutally as my Chinese colleague puts it: in China it doesn’t matter who you marry your daughter to, but it’s a big deal who your son will marry.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
No U turn
UCCA (which stands for Ullens Center for Contemporary Art) opened last November in 798, the Beijing neighborhood famous for gathering most of the city’s contemporary artists and galleries. This is the most exciting and biggest permanent display of Chinese contemporary art in the country (http://www.ullens-center.org) I have seen so far.
It was created and financed exclusively by Guy and Myriam Ullens, a belgian couple who made their fortune in food-related industry. Their business gave them frequent opportunities to travel to Asia and over the years they started buying Chinese arts, progressively focusing on contemporary art.
Cynics say that the main purpose of this museum is to increase the value of their personal collection by exhibiting it. And given how Chinese contemporary art is turning into a very speculative market nowadays, they may not be completely wrong…
Anyway, they turned a former ammunition factory, built by East German engineers in the 50ies, into a great place for art and to me, that’s enough to pay little interest to their fundamental purpose.
The first exhibition, called Chinese New Wave, presents local artists who emerged in the 80ies as China was opening up after Mao died in 1976.
The 80ies where the time when China started recovering from the dire decades of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the country ideology got redefined to ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as he theorized it then. This was a time of growing freedom, a time of experiment: capitalism started being ‘tested’ in Shenzhen next to Hong Border, media had more freedom, foreign art could be shown in China and artists could express themselves beyond Realist Art and propaganda images (to know more about this period click here).
Through the work of the key artists of this period exhibited in UCCA, you can literally feel the energy that could suddenly be released. But the one thing that moved me the most was the sign poster with the ‘no U turn’ sign shown above.
The exhibition indeed starts with a long wall displaying a chronology of the main events in Chinese Society and Arts in the 80ies. That chronology of Chinese liberalization ends in 1989 with the deadly repression of the students peaceful protests on Tiananmen Square on 4th June.
Because Tiananmen repression is a controversial subject, to say the least, the mention of the ‘events’ is very minimalist in order, I assume, not to hurt Chinese censorship. But as often, symbols can be much more powerful than words. The poster standing right above the year 1989, is a poster for China Avant Garde, a major art exhibition that was held in Beijing… in February 1989.
At the end of a decade of liberalization, this poster was making a bold statement that sounded like a warning to Chinese authorities: there is no come back possible. What happened four months later, made this poster sadly wrong. Yet today in this exhibition it sounds like a premonition and one more warning for today’s authorities.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Xmas is coming: keep the young virgins safe at home!
I don’t read Chinese but from times to times the cover of a Chinese newspaper would trigger my curiosity and I would ask for translation.
That definitely was the case when I saw the above cover page in Hong Kong main newspaper, as Christmas was approaching, and Wham’s ‘last Christmas I gave you my heart’ song was to be heard in every alley of every store.
When Xmas in western countries is in the best case all about happy family gathering and in the worst about eating too much of too many things that don’t match together, the above article was warning parents about the issue of teenagers being at risk of having their first sexual relationship! The number 10 alarmingly referring to the age of some of the girls supposedly under threat…
Indeed in Hong Kong and all over China where Christmas is getting more popular every year, the whole meaning of it has more to do with ‘our’ Valentine’s Day or summer holiday mood. Chinese New Year is all about family gathering and celebration when Xmas bears much more of a romantic meaning and is more of something to enjoy in couple than with your grand mother.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.JPG)