山寨金葛/Ge Jin's Miu Log

I find my idol: Joe Wang. I still have the comedian dream also!

沧桑

This is my vision of golden childhood. But nothing is as beautiful as it seems.

Shanghai's Indie Film Scene

The following article discusses the indie film scene in Shanghai, and I appear in the article as an innocent bystander.

CNNGo 影像隧道的独立电影

My documentary Gold Farmers mentioned in it can now be viewed on Youtube if you can bypass the Great Firewall, just search for Gold Farmers and Ge Jin.

 

Is Free Speech a Western Conspiracy?

Some netizens in Beijing have been sending flowers to Google Beijing Office to show sympathy, but pictures and reports about this public action are deleted in most websites including Baidu--the most popular search engine in China. What kind of Internet do we have, we already lost youtube, blogspot, facebook, and twitter, now Google might be gone too.

What pissed me off most are some comments I heard. Some nationalists are saying that Google embodies nothing but western imperialism. Its western value is of no use to us. It, like other foreign forces, is just trying to prevent us from rising as a superpower. Really? So freedom of expression is just a western conspiracy? If people are not allowed to be informed about things that shaped their life, is it better for them? For example, is Baidu a better search engine than Google? Baidu is a company that censored reports like those on the milk crisis or the violent displacements of people for real estate development under the pressure of government officials. Baidu makes its money by ranking the search results according to who pays more rather than relevance.

Some people are commenting that Google is stupid to lose such a big and promising market for political reasons. Yes Google is just a corporation from capitalist America. But it might just believes one thing many Chinese government officials and companies don't understand: that money cannot buy everything.

But Maybe I'm the one who don't get it. Maybe "Don't be evil"--Google's motto--is against our value? Maybe that's what Chinese values mean now: we respect nothing but power and money, we don't need western values such as justice or public accountabilty; we need peace and stability, for that we must get used to submission and delusion.

You Have to Look at the Bottom to See if It's Truly Rising

China has a system of household registration that divides China's rural and urban residents. The rural residents are not entitled to the same access to education, health care or job opportunities as urban residents.

My city Shanghai thrived because of this system: the rural workers come to built the highways, subways, office building, apartments and malls, but once the jobs are done, they no longer have the right to be here and Shanghai is not responsible for their welfare. This gives some of my Shanghainese friends such a sense of superiority! I often hear they say that rural workers should be kicked out of Shanghai because they just look so dirty and poor, which taints our image in front of the world (Shanghainese like to think the whole world is watching us).

My cousin's boss recently beated up a young man severely because of a dispute over parking space. This boss, managing a state-owned enterprise, is so powerful that he is able to scare that young man from suing him. This young man is a quite successful engineer, but this is what my cousin said about him: "You know what we found out? Although he can speak Shanghai dialect, he is actually not from here! Once we knew that, he has no chance, he will be kicked out of Shanghai if he dares to sue".

Also recently a foreign friend of mine, who used to be a huge fan of the so-called "China model", turns less positive about China's social system. She used to advocate the so-called vertical model of democracy in China, which basically means it's more efficient for a big country like China to let the intelligent leaders on the top decide what's good for the people than to have the endless democratic public discussion before any decision can be reached. But recently she was hurt by a rude stranger for a trivial dispute, she went to the police but this stranger happens to know some police officers, she went to some jounalists, but the journalists are afraid that they might get into trouble for writing about such a story. Suddenly she realized that the problem with a vertical system is that the people at the bottom have no way to keep those above them accountable.

All the Olympic metals China won or the 8% GDP growth during the world-wide financial crisis might impress the world, but until I see the people at the bottom living with more dignity, I cannot celebrate the rise of China light-heartedly.

Last Train Home

In China, hundreds of millions of rural workers migrate to the coastal cities for jobs, they are the creators of that miracle called "made in China". During the Spring Festival, the most important holiday for family gathering, these migrant workers would try everything to catch a train to go home. So every Spring Festival, the largest annual human migration on the earth happens in China. Here is a good documentary that captures the dynamics of this phenomenon:

last Train Home Demo

 

Think Outside of the Bubble

Once the debt crisis of Dubai World appeared on the news, I happily went to my nationalistic friends to ask, "don't you think Shanghai will be the next Dubai?" No, they didn't even think about it. Of course Shanghai is different: Shanghai is not in the desert; it has a big local population; it has full backing of the Chinese government and the Chinese banks...

What Dubai and Shanghai have in common is that all their resources are concentrated in the hands of a few power elites. And these elites can indulge themselves in self-aggrandizement with few public accountability. Just look at the skyscrapers in these two cities. Now that the Burj Dubai is left half-done, the Shanghai Center--the 632m tower--might become the tallest building in the world when it is finished in 2014. Why is it a bubble? Because office buildings in Shanghai are already facing over-supply, the occupation rate is around 50%, and you cannot get your investment back from rent (according to current rent-purchase ratio) within 50 years. The power elites' obsession with erecting tall buildings might be a good case for psycho-analysis, but I will only write about what I know for sure, that they are betting with public money.

In the case of the Shanghai Tower, the developers are three government-owned companies. They are using the public land for free (In China, all lands are owned by the state), and they get their funding from state-owned banks. So what if the Shanghai Tower becomes just another empty building? The banks will write it off as a bad loan. What if the banks cannot survive so many bad loans like that? The government will use public money to bail them out (as it did in 2004). In other words, everyone is blackmailed by the bubble.

Dubai thought it had found a new path to prosperity when it stopped exporting oil. Shanghai is not that different, when it can no longer depend on exporting cheap labor (our unique natural resource), it resorts to credit expansion and construction as the engine of growth. Others have failed in that path, Dubai, Spain, Japan...but somehow many people here have no doubt that we will be the exception.

Shanghai-skyscrapers

Casual Climate Talks

The Copenhagen Climate Talks is receiving a lot attention from Chinese media. There are debates over whether the US is taking too little responsibility and China is taking too much as a developing country. But you don't hear the kind of skepticism towards climate change common in the US (maybe because the smog in Chinese cities is quite hard to ignore). But certain argument from the American conservation radio shows will not make any sense to Chinese: If you are believe climate change, you must be anti-freedom, anti-America, elitist, and sissy. Some Chinese are against environmentalism because it is not profitable or convenient, but they don't have the moral imagination that they are defending a free-consuming lifestyle, defending normal and moral people against the threats of intellectuals or science, or even defending masculinity (I don't really get that part)... 

Are there more good people than bad people in the world?

I observe that, the far right in the US often viewed the people of the third world as backward, stupid and even barbarian, whose development depends on the help from the West; but the far left think of the people of the third world as innocent, peaceful, and free from all the materialist desires of capitalism. I just think both views are far from reality.

Reality is of course complicated. I have my own simplistic view though, I think the people of the third world are as bad as those in the first world, they are just as prone to prejudice, violence or greed. Yes I'm pretty cynical. So it's amazing that I met quite many nice and noble friends! I doubt my experience can be generalized into an assertion that there are many good people in the world though. I am probably just lucky.