Via Hexie Farm
Beijingers, did you go to Blue Frog’s You-Town opening tonight and eat all you can, drink all you can for just 100 kuai? If you didn’t, you should read these links instead, you sad, sad fellow.
Um. “A 6-year-old boy’s penis was bitten off by his dad Wednesday morning in Shenzhen. Doctors are understood to have reattached the boy’s penis but aside from being mentally scarred for life, the boy may never regain full use of his penis.” [Shanghaiist, from Shanghai Daily]
Never doubt the power of words, people. “Unlike student protesters who enraged the party by erecting a statue modeled on New York’s Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo who championed Western liberties and mocked party dogma, Du [Guang] is a party member who takes Chinese communism seriously. In some ways, though, that makes him especially troublesome. // His book, an advance copy of which has been reviewed by The Washington Post, doesn’t ridicule the party or call for its overthrow but dissects its theoretical gobbledygook and traces how far it has drifted from its early ideals. The book’s title: ‘Getting Back to Democracy.’” [Washington Post]
Corollary: Top comment currently, by Nymous: “Because of the security services now everyone will want to read it. Nothing creates a buzz quite like vapid and mindless repression.”
Actually, you can sometimes doubt the power of words. Here’s really bad poetry. “The offending poem ‘Hong Kong – an Ugly City’ is written by Dominique Zhang, a postgraduate student in English Language Arts of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University…” [Dictionary of Politically Incorrect Hong Kong Cantonese, via Global Voices]
You’ve heard it said that the most effective way to kill productivity is to have a meeting, right? Well, China’s currently having two of them. “For many Chinese netizens, it serves as a buffet of memes (internet jokes) at the expense of sleeping delegates and Mao’s grandson, as well as a source of outrage when it comes to expensive clothing and accessories. // At the end of the meetings, new laws will be presented and then promptly forgotten.” [Seeing Red in China]
Bo Xilai speaks: “I feel like it came out of nowhere. [...] It looks like that in any place, no matter how good the situation is, we have to be alert and be prepared to prevent unexpected things from happening.” [Just Recently]
Some Qingdao professor thinks 10 million Chinese women are married to gay men. Something is wrong with his study. Go figure it out. “Zhang [Beichuan] estimates that 80 to 90 percent of gay men in China intend to marry or have married, citing a survey of more than 1,500 Chinese gay men.” [Shanghai Daily, via China Digital Times]
Your cats eating human food and walking on treadmill to promote a concert interlude:
Love Bang plays at Haze in Beijing tomorrow at 10 pm.
Finally…
Neocha is a good site. “[Founder] Sean Leow on where to find creativity in China.” [Asia Society]
