Search Results for: China

In China, Searching for Mysterious Gaps in the Family Tree

Imogene Lim's family: Grandmother Chan with seven of her eight children in Vancouver. Lim's mother, Lillian, is next to her mother, second from right. Mary is on the far left. Lillian and Mary fled Hong Kong during World War II. IMOGENE LIM

Veronique Greenwood | Atlas Obscura | December 2016 | 19 minutes (4,867 words)

Atlas ObscuraOur latest Exclusive is a new story by Veronique Greenwood, co-funded by Longreads Members and published by Atlas Obscura.

In southern China, not far from where the rice paddies fade into the urban sprawl of the Pearl River Delta, there is a place that used to be called the Four Counties. It’s farming country still, even in this age when everyone seems to be heading to make their fortunes in the cities. Small villages of low, tile-roofed houses speckle the landscape. People carry bamboo baskets full of root vegetables on their backs. Stray dogs trot purposefully through the village lanes, eyes alert for kitchen scraps. In the summer, the subtropical sun is like a hammer; in the winter, cold rain sweeps the fields.

It was to this place that Imogene Lim came in 2009. She had just a little bit of information to go on. But Lim, a Canadian anthropologist whose fieldwork has taken her to Tanzania to observe tribes of former hunter-gatherers, was on a voyage of discovery. And with the help of local authorities, she soon reached the object of her quest. She returned this year for a visit. In a Guangzhou hotel room this fall, having recently arrived from the Four Counties (now five, after a redrawing of borders), she took out a photocopied booklet. The cover showed a calligraphic title, proclaiming it to be a genealogy, and inside were page after page of branching diagrams. It had been given to her by a cousin in the village.

“This is my father,” she said, pointing to a name deep into the pages. Underneath it, in a language she cannot read or speak, it says, “Went to Canada, communication lost. Number of children: Unknown.”

Read more…

Trump, China, and the Ties That Bind

Longreads Pick

While Donald Trump champions the need to create more jobs in America, he manufactured his ties overseas. One journalist did what labor groups could not: he located the Shengzhou, Chinese factories that made Trump-brand ties and traveled there.

Source: Racked
Published: Oct 5, 2016
Length: 22 minutes (5,614 words)

The Pleasures of Protest: Taking on Gentrification in Chinatown

Longreads Pick

Working as a tenant organizer in New York’s Chinatown opened Esther Wang’s eyes to the ugly—and complicated—realities of gentrification in New York City.

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 6, 2016
Length: 16 minutes (4,223 words)

The Pleasures of Protest: Taking on Gentrification in Chinatown

Illustration by: Katie Kosma

Esther Wang | Longreads | August 2016 | 17 minutes (4,223 words)

 

On a cold night in the early winter months of 2007, I was with a group of tenants — all Latino and Chinese immigrant families — clustered together in front of their home, two buildings on Delancey Street that straddled the border between Chinatown and the Lower East Side. We were there, shivering in the cold, to protest their landlords.

Ever since they bought the two buildings in 2001, the owners of 55 Delancey and 61 Delancey Street — Nir Sela, Michael Daniel, and 55 Delancey Street Realty LLC — had been attempting to kick out the Chinese and Latino families who had lived there, but in recent months, the situation had come to a head. They had begun aggressively bringing tenants to housing court, often on trumped up charges (one lawsuit argued that, based on the number of shoes displayed inside the apartment, it was obvious that more than just one family lived there); offered several families significant buyouts to leave; and had refused to make basic repairs. For stretches at a time, and in the coldest days of winter, there had been no heat or hot water.

That evening, huddled in our winter coats and clutching hand-made signs, we waited for the arrival of one of the owners, who had agreed to meet with us and discuss our demands.

I had been volunteering with CAAAV, a tenant organizing group in Chinatown, and in the months prior, I had spent many of my nights going from apartment to apartment, often with Zhi Qin Zheng, a resident of the building as well as an organizer at CAAAV, helping to painstakingly document their living conditions and assisting residents in calling the city’s 311 hotline so that each housing code violation would be on record.

Their apartments were cramped, even rundown, but for these families, it was home, and they wanted to stay. Over the years, each building had become a small community, one where people felt comfortable leaving their doors open and asking each other to watch their children. “If we left, where would we go?” Sau Ying Kwok, a feisty grandmother with a nimbus of frizzy hair, wondered aloud. She had become one of the more vocal leaders in the building, along with the soft-spoken You Liu Lin, a man in his middle years with a penchant for Brylcreeming his hair as well as shoving bottles of water and perfect Fuji apples into my hands whenever I knocked on his door.

I often questioned why I was there on those trips. I had moved to the city three years prior from Texas, fresh out of college and possessing a vague notion that I would put my Asian American Studies degree to use and, in the words of 1960s radicals inspired by Mao Zedong, “serve the people.” Read more…

I Was the Most Wanted Man in China

Longreads Pick

An essay by the late Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi. Once China’s leading astrophysicist, Lizhi’s activism helped inspire the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

Source: Literary Hub
Published: Feb 11, 2016
Length: 14 minutes (3,594 words)

Can Americans Learn to Love China’s Favorite Booze?

Baijiu, which is typically bottled between 100 and 120 proof (compared to roughly 90 proof for whiskey), is fermented in mud pits or jars buried underground, distilled, and aged in clay vessels. The drink is often divided into four different “fragrance” categories: sauce (as in soy), rice, light, and strong. In its best iterations the flavor notes range from smoky, not unlike mescal, to fruitcake, like sherry-cask-aged whiskey. Mike and Eric are novice baijiu drinkers, and our first taste does not bode well. While I find the shot to be surprisingly smooth and fruity, at least as far as baijiu goes, I notice a grimace on Mike’s face. I can tell he’s struggling for something to say. “It’s got a pine-nut thing going on,” is all he musters.

Mitch Moxley, writing in California Sunday magazine about baijiu, China’s national drink. Made from sorghum, this clear white spirit lubricates social gatherings and facilitates business, and few Americans have heard it. Those who have tasted it rarely want more, though businesses in both China and the U.S. are trying to change that.

Read the story

China’s Booming Domestic Wine Industry

Although eighty-three percent of the wine China drinks is produced domestically, and baijiu grain alcohol is still its favorite alcohol, that’s changing. China is now the world’s fifth largest wine producer. In The California Sunday Magazine, Amy Qin writes about the changing taste of Chinese drinkers, and profiles Ma Qingyun, one producer who is helping change the face of the country’s fine wine industry:

When Ma started Jade Valley, he was drawn to the idea of saving the village from the fate of so many rural Chinese areas. As China’s cities have expanded and new ones have emerged seemingly overnight, traditionally agricultural regions have been eaten up by urban and industrial sprawl. Ma envisioned a beautifully designed winery that would provide high-paying architectural jobs and draw tourists to the Yushan area, giving it a better chance of fending off Xi’an’s encroaching development.

He pitched the idea to his brother. After years spent working as a technician in a military garment factory in Xi’an, Jianchao had returned to the village to set up a small business growing and selling traditional Chinese medicine. “I knew nothing about wine,” Jianchao says. “I only knew about industrial enterprises — input, output, and raw-material processes.” But as the two brothers talked, Jianchao grew enamored with the idea of helping farmers and bolstering the local economy.

Read the story

The Extraordinary Life of the First American to Join China’s Communist Party

Longreads Pick

Sidney Rittenberg served in China as an army linguist in the 1940s. After his enlistment ended in he stayed in China, became a leader in the Cultural Revolution and spent 16 years in solitary confinement.

Source: The Week
Published: Jul 29, 2015
Length: 20 minutes (5,090 words)

‘Playing Chicken’ in China’s Stock Market

The fact that Chinese stocks were climbing ever higher while the Chinese economy was cooling should have been an unmistakable warning of a bubble, but it caused surprisingly little concern. (Another reason to worry might have been the disparity in prices between so-called “A-shares”, which can only be purchased by investors inside China to keep the domestic market shielded from outside foreign manipulation, and stakes in the same companies available to foreign investors through the Hong Kong exchange, known as “H-Shares”. This disparity suggested Chinese investors were bidding up prices well beyond any reasonable approximation of their value.) In fact, drawn by the casino-like profits to be made in the boom, more and more small investors flocked to the thousands of brokerage houses that are now proliferating in every Chinese city in order to buy and sell while staring up at flickering electronic data boards charting the rise and fall of equity prices.

***

The party might have been excused if it had simply eschewed responsibility for what was happening. After all, markets have a logic of their own that makes them both rise and fall according to their own forces. But, instead of simply saying, “Not our problem”, it launched a massive socialist-style rescue campaign, thereby making the party responsible for everything that happened thereafter.

Why did the party allow itself to become stuck in this quicksand? Leaders evidently felt themselves threatened not only by the collapsing share prices, but by what they also feared would be perceived as an erosion of their own credibility. What they seem to have concluded was at stake was their ability to continue projecting an image of omnipotence – the appearance, at least, of being strong enough to continue guiding and controlling “all under heaven” (tianxia).

—In his Guardian story, “Why China’s stock market was always bound to burst,” Orville Schell explains what led to the rout, and why the government is intervening. “It is a game of chicken,” a China strategist told Bloomberg Business in a story about China’s increasingly forceful efforts to prop up the market. “For now, it seems to be working.”

Read the story

The Latest Human Rights Crackdown in Uncle Xi’s China

Chinese authorities have recently detained or questioned more than 150 human rights lawyers and activists in an unprecedented nationwide crackdown. Some detainees are missing, and a petition is calling on the U.S. to cancel the Chinese president’s upcoming state visit. In his April New Yorker story “Born Red,” Evan Osnos profiled Big Uncle Xi (the state news agency’s nickname for the president), “China’s most authoritarian leader since Mao”:

Before Xi took power, he was described, in China and abroad, as an unremarkable provincial administrator, a fan of American pop culture (“The Godfather,” “Saving Private Ryan”) who cared more about business than about politics, and was selected mainly because he had alienated fewer peers than his competitors. It was an incomplete portrait. He had spent more than three decades in public life, but Chinese politics had exposed him to limited scrutiny. At a press conference, a local reporter once asked Xi to rate his performance: “Would you give yourself a score of a hundred—or a score of ninety?” (Neither, Xi said; a high number would look “boastful,” and a low number would reflect “low self-esteem.”)

But, a quarter of the way through his ten-year term, he has emerged as the most authoritarian leader since Chairman Mao. In the name of protection and purity, he has investigated tens of thousands of his countrymen, on charges ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets and inciting the overthrow of the state. He has acquired or created ten titles for himself, including not only head of state and head of the military but also leader of the Party’s most powerful committees—on foreign policy, Taiwan, and the economy. He has installed himself as the head of new bodies overseeing the Internet, government restructuring, national security, and military reform, and he has effectively taken over the courts, the police, and the secret police. “He’s at the center of everything,” Gary Locke, the former American Ambassador to Beijing, told me.

***

In Xi’s early months, supporters in the West speculated that he wanted to silence hard-line critics, and would open up later, perhaps in his second term, which begins in 2017. That view has largely disappeared. Henry Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, whose upcoming book, “Dealing with China,” describes a decade of contact with Xi, told me, “He has been very forthright and candid—privately and publicly—about the fact that the Chinese are rejecting Western values and multiparty democracy.” He added, “To Westerners, it seems very incongruous to be, on the one hand, so committed to fostering more competition and market-driven flexibility in the economy and, on the other hand, to be seeking more control in the political sphere, the media, and the Internet. But that’s the key: he sees a strong Party as essential to stability, and the only institution that’s strong enough to help him accomplish his other goals.”

Read the story