Cover art is by the renowned satirist Badiucao

If you transcribed every twisted, bitter, sick thought you ever had about China, tied it to a brick, then repeatedly smashed it into someone’s skull, you might give them an experience akin to reading Arthur Meursault’s debut novel Party Members (Camphor Press). There is no more unrelentingly savage satire of modern China ever written, and perhaps deserves more attention than it received.

The book traces the journey of Yang Wei, an unremarkable junior official (“one of a billion, not in a billion”) in a third-tier city, destined for the unheralded heights of utter mediocrity — until his penis gains consciousness, and starts telling him exactly what he needs to do to get ahead.

Less a phallic nod to Kafka than a Sino-cidal literary replay of the (largely forgotten) Richard E. Grant movie How to Get Ahead in Advertising, a satire about an ad man with a vicious boil that tell him what to do, it would be far too easy to dismiss Party Members  as a crude schoolboy ode to the adage that men think with their dicks. That would miss the point.

Such is Meursault’s anger with Chinese society that he has intentionally deployed the most vulgar metaphor he can find to prod at its leaders: He thinks Party members are a bunch of dicks and says so, occasionally to devastating effect.

Not for the easily offended or those who lean toward hugging pandas, Meursault’s China flows with faeces, saliva and urine. A man gets clubbed to death by a giant penis. There is a vigorous anal rape. The lust for luxury car-ownership sees men furiously getting off in showroom Audis. Those with a taste for the grotesque will revel in any number of set pieces, many of which are masturbatory: “When they were not talking or playing with their phones, Rainy would lie next to Yang Wei, playing with his penis, letting her hands glide up and down the thick, meaty sausage like an Amazon warrior polishing her spear.”

The venomous sneering takes aim at almost every conceivable headline issue: Food scandals, greed, corruption, pollution, inequality, urban management, civic values, public defecation, GDP obsession, education, parenting, marriage, government and, of course, the Party. In lesser hands, this might be nothing more than the race-tinged rantings of a long-term expat, expanding (condensing?) his every negative thought about China into a flimsy fictional pretext. But Party Members’ dark humour, technical prowess, and outlandish exuberance save it from such a fate — though it sails dangerously close to the wind at times.

A typical members-only party

What mostly saves the book is that it is often very funny (sometimes laugh-out-loud so), not to mention savagely accurate, despite its obvious excesses. It is that rare more than half a dozen pages pass without some pithy caricature or barb, whether it’s aimed at the nation’s terrible television (“…his aging wife falling asleep in front of part 63 of a 745 episode of a Korean soap opera…”) or obsession with Japanese militarism. Often both are merged to comic effect: “Three minutes later, Yang Wei walked over from his chair, swiped the remote from her, and changed the channel back to the local TV channel’s premiere of Let’s Nuke Tokyo 3.”

China’s often ham-fisted attempts at propaganda are easily satirized, and the description of Yang Wei’s third-tier as  “THE FOREST OF PROGRESS” and “THE PARIS OF ASIA” are less satire than stenography (compare the shithole concrete reality of Dongguan, a textiles hub, with its National Foreign City status). So too, the surreal effect of the cuddly, yet sinister sloganeering: “The smiley faces, dancing cats, and knock-off copies of Japanese anime characters that she normally chose to decorate the Party’s contemporary slogans gave off the air of a benevolent dictatorship controlled by a schizophrenic four year old.”

Dongguan (above) as it imagines itself

Dongguan (above) as it is

Sometimes it is difficult to tell if China’s development is more inspired by Charlie Chaplin or Joseph Stalin, a point made in the book by channeling that other totalitarian satirist, George Orwell: “It was a bright, cold day in April, and the large clock atop the Ministry building was striking thirteen. Actually, it was supposed to strike twelve, but there had been a mix-up during the clock’s manufacture and nobody could be bothered to change it.”

For all its searing rage, and certainly because of it, the book has its faults. It does not have any gears: going from neutral observation to China-is-completely-and-utterly-fucked up within a few pages, never really slowing down or changing direction. For those that like their narratives to have a natural rhythm and flow, to gently undulate with plot twists and emotional highs and lows… this is not the book. Aside from the plot-device of an unwieldy and absurdist talking penis, the novel is a bit one-track, like a hammer brutally smashing rusty nails into one’s head, page after page after page.

There’s also a sense that this merciless savagery damages the fiction itself. In the absence of any characters to care about, with Chinese cities given no color other than the bleakest grey, the effect is brutally numbing, making it easy to switch off. If the aim of satire is to affect some type of change, then Party Members misses the mark. The book’s monotonous ferocity drains the book of the emotional impact it might have delivered, enticing the reader to think China is getting exactly what it deserves — and nothing can be done about. That bleakness—nihilism, really — might be too much for some readers to bear. For others, it might be just the tonic.

The author, Carlos Ottery, is on Twitter @CharlesOutre

Ever the Quiet Burier of Ledes, Global Times published a news item Monday that surely qualifies for Hideous China Story of the Year (Relationships Edition)… although GT went for the more casual “Mom jailed for covert contraceptive.”

It’s a Turducken of a tale – one that gradually reveals more unpleasant layers with every sentence until, eventually, everybody loses. The action begins in 2015 with a young graduate, Zhang Yang, whose girlfriend, “Yanzi,” is pregnant. Unfortunately, Zhang’s mother Zhang Xiuqin does not approve of the match, and not only pressures Yanzi into getting an abortion – she does the procedure herself. Medical ethics are clearly not an issue for Nurse Zhang, though:

Zhang Xiuqin was handed six months and a 5,000-yuan ($743) fine…for implanting [a] diaphragm while performing an abortion on the woman, CCTV news reported.

Yanzi only discovered the device years later while seeking treatment because she had been unable to conceive since.

Zhang told authorities she inserted the contraceptive device to sabotage their relationship and prevent them from marrying.

Zhang said she had disapproved of their relationship because at the time her son was a college-educated and Yanzi was working as a waitress.

Things then take a deeply amoral twist for the worse:

Zhang began encouraging Yanzi and Zhang Yang to get back together after learning the former waitress had made a fortune.

For some reason, Yanzi didn’t fancy another invasive Ob-Gyn procedure at the hands of her meddling mother-in-law and went somewhere else to figure out why she couldn’t get pregnant again. The plot unraveled and the sociopathic Nurse Zhang ended up in jail (whether she is allowed to practice nursing again is another story, but am gonna guess probably… yes). Last, quick twist of the knife:

The couple eventually broke up.

The story is filed under GT’s “Odd” section, but is frankly so WTF-awful, it could form one of the plotlines in Party Members and still come off as a little extreme.

h/t Isabella Steger

This latest China-based production of the comedy is not about money, stars, or even an Expat in Chinese Film and TV Award: It’s about the art. To learn more, and help shift some tickets, Beijing Cream had a quick chat with the cast of this 90-minute modernist comedy about “three people losing their shit over a painting” (curtains rise 7.30pm on Thursday; tickets 100 kuai).

Beijing Cream: (stroking chin) So why Art?

Carlos Ottery (actor, Yvan): A screenwriter pal of mine, Peter, wanted to direct the play in Beijing a few years ago but it fell through, as these things often do… putting it on at has been at the back, the very back, of my mind for quite a while.

Gregory Joseph Allen (director/actor, Marc) From the very beginning this has really been all about a small group of like-minded artists falling in love with a script and wanted to share it with others. Oh, and chicks dig theatre nerds… they do, right? Right? I hope that I didn’t just waste three months of my life. Shit.

BJC: Why are there so few small indie productions, like Art, in Beijing?

CO: Money. Unless you are talking about a big Broadway-style show or a particularly commercial performance, theatre makes bugger-all cash. These days a lot of people in Beijing are in things for the money alone…People prefer to lose 10 million dollars on a film that will never get made, or to watch something with Vin Diesel topless, and who can blame them for that.

The other thing is censorship, which seeps in everywhere. It effects everything: public discourse, books, TV, theatre. Who can be arsed putting on a good show, only to be told at the last minute that the censors want you to change things, due to some imagined sensitivity?

GJA: Because producing a play of any kind is really fucking hard to do, dude. I am only kind of kidding… There is just a lot involved in the putting-together of a play intended for public presentation, and unless you are really passionate about what you are doing, it’s hard to justify all of the time and work that it takes to get it done. Also, there are only so many theatre-loving expat actors in Beijing… Most of the quality actors that I know are trying to pay the bills by gigging in the local film and television market. They don’t really have the luxury of taking the time to do a play.

But is it Art? Greg’s knitted vest raises challenging questions

BJC: What are the cast’s theatrical bona fides – other than being three out-of-work chaps who can speak English?

CO: Ha. You have got me down. Even when I am gainfully employed, which I occasionally am, people still seem to think I am out of work. I think it something to do with the way I dress.

Greg is a good one to deconstruct. He played American football in his youth and he has that build, a cross between a drill sergeant and a bouncer. Yet at the same time, he strides around rehearsals quoting Shakespeare soliloquies… he lives and breathes theatre. He’s done hundreds of Equity performances, talks endlessly about Chekov and Stanislavsky, that sort of thing. Basically, if the show comes anywhere close to being remotely professional, then it is all down to him.

GJA: Stand back, bitches, and let the tootin’ begin… I have been acting for about 40 years. I have been in over 100 stage productions of one kind or another. I have a B.A. in Theatre Arts, and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts: Acting and Directing. I have spent the last six years teaching theatre at Tsinghua International School, and since arriving in China I have had the pleasure of acting in several locally produced films [note Gregory’s role as “American Prick” in last year’s Jackie Chan-Jonny Knoxville flick Skiptrace– Ed]. And if you have ever wondered, yes, it is pretty fucking cool to see your big-ass head on an IMAX screen.

CO: Then there’s Sam [Kamanguza, who plays Serge]. A very cool character indeed. Ice-cold. My complete opposite on the stage. I’m all nerves, jangling around, barely able to stand still, and Sam will just stand opposite me and toss out his lines, like someone out of an old cowboy movie. Maybe inside he is all jittery and faking it, but I don’t think so. Funny too – has some great stories about guys in urinals standing next to him to, erm, check him out. Wonder how controlled he is then.  

BJC: Have you paid much attention to the recent Art revival in London?

CO: I saw the three ‘actors’ give an interview on Youtube. One of them was talking about what a great job he had done with his lines, and I remember thinking, ‘the smug git’ – only because I have had such a struggle with learning mine, obviously.

GJA: A couple of my colleagues had the pleasure of seeing it recently. They had nothing but praise for it. If we can deliver anything even near to what they are sharing on the east end, I would consider our production a success.

What particular relevance (if any) will Art hold for a Beijing audience?

CO: These days, China is famed for people paying millions of dollars on art of very questionable value. The play certainly taps into that. There’s also a lot of stuff about the getting rid of the old, to replace it with stuff that is ‘modern’, for no real reason other that the sake of it. I know Beijingers will be able to understand that.

For me the play is really about three blokes arguing to the death over something (seemingly trivial), simply because they have known each other for so long that they can. I think people can relate to that anywhere…

(L-R) Sam Kamanguza, Carlos Ottery and Gregory Joseph Allen play Serge, Yvan and Marc

BJC: What difficulties did you face mounting the play in China? Did you at any point find yourself wishing to punch a nearby wall?

CO: Getting ‘official approval was a problem… our producer was able to pull some strings with the relevant departments at the last minute and rush things through. Fortunately, three blokes losing their shit over a painting isn’t deemed a sensitive issue.

GJA: Producing a play anywhere usually produces a few “wall punch” worthy moments, but our process has been relatively stress free… I wouldn’t be surprised if we sent a few walls to the emergency room before it is all said and done.

CO: It’s put me off producing for life. When it is all over, am gonna switch off my phone, and spend a week in my bed doing nothing but drinking cider, and eating sandwiches. Whilst theatre is a mild passion, what I really like to do is make sandwiches. Recently, I have been experimenting with homemade shish kebabs. I get some lamb skewers from a local Xingjiang place, make my own chilli sauce, throw it in a tortilla from the supermarket: Less stressful than theatre production. And cheaper

A homemade kebab, courtesy of Carlos

ART runs from May 11-13, 7.30-9pm/ May 14, 2.30-4pm (100 RMB/ Students 70 RMB) at Penghao Theatre. Photo credits: Sophia Wong

There was a restaurant? (Pic via Thats)

A swathe of this street that included 3 Rock was demolished last week and, while some mourned, others cheered the ongoing erosion of what grassroots Beijing nightlife. There’s nothing wrong with whisky bars, brewpubs and cocktail lounges, unless you count homogeneity and banal exclusivity. But as Tolstoy said, all whisky bars are alike; each dive bar is divey in its own way.

Beijing is already deep down its path to progress, where no night out is not the same. The orders still go out to “sweep the streets,” yet there’s nowhere left to crack the whip. While cops used to roll up at roadhouse dens like Dos Kolegas, these days they’re reduced to raiding modest French bistros like Café de la Poste, or drug-testing patrons at family pub Great Leap on a Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, among such sites never again to be witnessed at 3 Rock – a Scotsman being served at the bar with his pants around his ankles; half-naked arm wrestling; a drinking game involving a pint of “everything”; two rock chicks playing strip dice; and one of the foulest unisex bathrooms in Beijing.

Here’s some of 3 Rock’s best/worst graffiti to remember it by

This is almost Bukowski-esque

Makes ya think…

Yesterday, an editor at the venerable in-flight magazine of Trump Airlines published an article by one of its many, many, many useless contributors entitled ‘China Expert: I’m Drunk,’ in which the author has a chin-stroker of an evening with a China expert who admitted to having already sunk a bottle of claret and several jars.

The conversation indeed sounds like something one might overhear between Martin Jacques and a barstool around closing time at the Bull and Bear.

Other than being British, the writer of a recently “well-received book” and “not on Twitter,” the expert is unidentified but drunk, you say?

Sounds like he’s been drinking deep of the Cup of Tea.

This has the makings of a promising series: Maybe next week Forbes can huff paint with Dave Shambaugh and ask if he’s cracking up? Note: “Chinese conglomerate HNA Group is in talks to buy a controlling stake in the owner of the publisher of Forbes magazine”

Soon, this is how all China watching will be done

UPDATE 25/4 15.04 – A reader alerts: Forbes seems to have taken down the article without comment

Some disappointing news for this year’s Bookworm Literary Festival, which launched on Friday: headline act Roxane Gay, an American writer, critic and literary figure whose books include the bestselling Bad Feminist, has cancelled her much-anticipated visit, citing “personal reasons.”

Author Roxane Gay, whose books include Bad Feminist and the novel An Untamed State

Roxane was scheduled for a solo talk today, talking about gender activism and her recent novel, as well as a forum on March 15 addressing race, gender, identity, and cultural marginality. The latter, though, will proceed as planned (The Bookworm is refunding all ticket holders for the Sunday talk, and offering the same deal for anyone not wishing to attend Tuesday’s panel).

Last week, Roxane had tweeted concerns about how she might be received in China

Also, theoretically I am going to China in 6 days. I keep hearing horror stories of how fat people are treated there.

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 5, 2016

So I am in a constant state of panic and dread about the trip.

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 5, 2016

Although… being “plus size” in China is an aspiration to many.* Subjects that might be considered taboo or tricky elsewhere – education, salary, medical history, career prospects, home ownership, whether you’re interested in investing in a third cousin’s startup – are sometimes used as ice-breakers in the PRC.

“Hi, good to meet you – are you married? Why not? Did you attend Harvard? OK, see you later” is a conversation we’ve all had, or overheard, or had a few times (by the way, if you’re ever in a desperately awkward social situation: mention that you don’t “get why people have kids, ever,” suggest all property is really theft, or boast about the cartel of Japanese nationalists you befriended last week in a Mongolian nightclub. Problem. Solved).

Big picture, though – times are tough for women. Last year, five were detained by police for handing out leaflets discussing sexual harassment – they were only released after an international media backlash. Those same women have since been sharply warned to keep their mouths shut while Beijing hosted the annual political meeting this month. Meanwhile, officials celebrated last week’s International Women’s Day with an… ethnic fashion show. And just yesterday, before the Bookworm Literary Festival’s morning event called Women’s Rights Around the World, this happened to Beijing LGBT center executive director Ying Xin (a.k.a. Xiao Tie):

An empty seat for Xiao Tie, who was intercepted by cops on her way to her event this morn at The Bookworm #BLF2016 pic.twitter.com/g6WSf5MiHy

— The Bookworm (@BeijingBookworm) March 12, 2016

To be clear: not detained, just not allowed to participate in event Women's Rights Around the World with Bidisha, Clare Wright, Lijia Zhang

— The Bookworm (@BeijingBookworm) March 12, 2016

China already has many bad, bad feminists ­– just look at the All China Women’s Federation. So be well, Roxane: you’re probably needed here. You’ll certainly be missed.

* OK, mainly men. Many men. There’s definitely a tranche of Chinese fellows who’d argue Jabba the Hutt is a jovial wealth creator, simply a KTV-loving slug who makes his own rules. When Jabs is then cruelly betrayed by Princess Leia in Jedi, the lesson becomes ever-clear: Never the trust a woman you’ve kidnapped and sexually demeaned. Right?!? These men should be avoided at all costs, but can be swiftly identified by their pompadour hairstyles, loose polo-and-slacks combo and insistence that you get blind-drunk with them at midday.

As some readers may be aware, new measures restricting foreign content online in China (or “Administrative Regulations for Online Publishing Services”) are dropping March 10 – today. Over at China Law Blog, Steve Dickinson has answers to most of the major players and questions, but we felt obliged to follow up with Steve on a couple of local matters – for, you know, local people.

BJC: How will the rules affect the “expat rags” – English-language listings magazines — usually published in legally grayish partnership with a Chinese firm that has a proper “kanhao” (publishing license)?

SD: Foreign ownership of a print publication (e.g., That’s Shanghai, That’s Beijing, Redstar, City Weekend, Time Out, etc.) is illegal. All these magazines are owned and published by Chinese nationals and are subject to the standard PRC censorship rules. That is why they are so boring.

I am not aware of any foreign-oriented magazines that are published by foreign nationals. If such magazines exist, they are illegal and the publisher is subject to serious criminal sanction. However, I don’t know a printer in China who would take the risk, so I doubt that any such magazines exist that have any serious circulation. [Ed’s note: I know a few do exist but with tiny circulations and usually in Tier-3 type cities]

BJC: What about foreign-hosted websites that mainly focus on China-based content… like Beijing Cream? 

SD: All such websites are illegal in China. However, China does not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction. Instead, China has created the Great Firewall by which it selectively blocks the sites that it decides are objectionable, based on criteria no one really understands. All activities of such websites within China are illegal and participants in such activities (reporters) are subject to either being sanctioned, jailed, or deported. This happens for the foreign political websites that are written in the Chinese language. I have not heard of anyone getting sanctioned for writing for a general interest English-language foreign website. It does, however, remain a possibility. This vague threat of a visit from the government serves to chill the expression of opinion. It is cheap and effective and widely used in single-party Leninist dictatorships.

So there you have it. You’ll still be able to flick through City Weekend and Shanghaiist while waiting for feckless friends to arrive late… for the immediate future. But you never know. Thanks to Steve Dickinson of Harris Moure for the help. (Image via)

– ISIS captive, as told to an interviewer on the Chinese show On the Road.
The entire show has since been censored by Chinese authorities

Zhang (center left, wearing sunglasses) poses with Kurdish forces and members of his film crew

A reality show about a pair of millionaire tourists has been nixed from China’s Internet, after an episode depicting encounters with Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in Syria was broadcast on the mainland.

Married couple Zhang Xinyu, 38, and Liang Hong, 36, made their name crisscrossing the globe for travel show On the Road, getting about as far as possible from the stereotype of the bovine boor abroad: the pair have filmed themselves in unfashionable spots like Somalia and Chernobyl, enjoying their nuptials in Antarctica and recreating an iconic Buddha previously destroyed by the Taliban.

Zhang is a self-made entrepreneur who joined the PLA Air Force when he was 19. After leaving, he invested his savings in a tofu shop in south Beijing. Bean curd was still a relatively rare delicacy in those days and the business flourished. With a line of tofu-making machines and investments in trade, jewelry and construction, Zhang has been able to fund a passion for travel that has established him and his wife as minor celebrities.

Though the affable pair has probably done more for Chinese soft power than any effort by Xinhua, that hasn’t won them credit with the censors. After Syria, all episodes of On the Road were removed from streaming sites such as Youku and Tudou, their Baidu fan forum was shut down, and the show’s official Weibo account – as well as the couple’s personal microblog accounts – was frozen.

Kurdish forces near the Syrian battlefront

Journey to the Middle East

The most recent episode of On the Road depicted the well-tooled couple running with underpowered Kurdish troops in Syria, launching a drone into ISIS-held territory, and interviewing captured Islamic State troops shortly before their (off-camera) execution. It’s surprisingly bold TV – the sort you can’t possibly get away with in China.

While Beijing has condemned the Paris attacks, it’s not interested in having a conversation on terrorism back home. Beijing is as clueless about fighting Islamist terrorism as Western leaders, as bungling attempts to quell the insurgency among ethnical Muslims in Xinjiang well demonstrate. Short of any solution, Beijing is relying on brute censorship to quell all debate in the meantime. (When ISIS executed a Chinese hostage recently, censors played down news of the killing and suppressed any calls for a reprisal.)

Therefore it’s not a surprise that the show got yanked – the Syria incident crosses every red line on what Beijing considers acceptable for public consumption. What’s curious is it even got broadcast in the first place, given China’s much-ballyhooed Internet restrictions, or that some wishful thinker clearly didn’t think it would cause problems in the first place.

Below is an edited translation of crew member “Liu Feng’s” account of what happened during filming of the controversial episode (which was broadcast last week – the episode was still viewable on YouTube until this weekend; it is now only accessible to members*).

“What happened in Paris yesterday has been going in Iraq and Syria every day for the past five years. On the Road’s Season 3 crew drove to Iraq this May, after breaking through Taliban blockades in Afghanistan. A month later, with the help of Iraqi Kurds, the team entered Syria ‘with no permission,’ heading straight to Kobani, the frontline of Kurds against ISIS,” Liu writes.

“The battlefront is very long and not heavily guarded, though everyone was very hospitable to we Chinese, with many saluting us. [The Kurds] lived in very modest sheds and called each other ‘comrade.’ They even prepared tea for us.

“A 14.5mm machine gun was the only ‘heavy weapon’ in the Kurds’ camp, which jammed very frequently. Their weapons were very old and outdated: most of their ammunition was almost 40 years old. Put it this way – the Kurds are fighting a 2015 war with 1960s weapons, whereas their rivals ISIS, after capturing Mosul, took over local Iraqi and Syrian government arsenals, which included many arms left behind by the US army, including chemical weapons.

“The Kurds were fascinated by our crew’s filming drone. They sent the drone above ISIS territory and filmed for a while […].” Three days after the crew left, though, disaster struck the Kurdish team. ISIS “used mustard gas on the Kurds. Seven soldiers who were just drinking tea with Zhang days ago died.”

The team also visited a camp of female Kurdish soldiers, aged 17 to 27, described as “highly limited” in their physical ability to attack ISIS but psychologically effective because “ISIS would most hate to die at their hands… in the world of ISIS, a man killed by a woman will never go to heaven.” When the crew gifted the women their bulletproof vests, “the Kurds had obviously never seen one and had to test them by shooting at it.”

The team decided to help their Kurdish allies seek out some “real action” by sending a drone deep into ISIS-held territory; when the enemy fired on the aerial camera, light tracers betrayed their position (miraculously, the drone escaped completely intact). Soon after, the crew got to meet the enemy face to face.

“[The Kurds] agreed to let us interview a couple of ISIS captives. Yes, real, bona fide ISIS members. We wanted to see what they look like, what they think, how they act, how they face death. Three men were brought into our room, all blindfolded.

Zhang (left) waits to interview one of the seated captives

“We knew they were all going to be executed”

“The first came from Turkmenistan, was extremely handsome and looking not the slightest bit brutal. He had been in ISIS for a long, long time but we couldn’t communicate with him, as he did not speak Russian, Arabic or Turkish.

“The second was from Tunisia, and was strong. He said he had been a house painter before… after the Arab Spring a year ago, he went to Syria and joined the [Free Syrian Army] to fight against Assas. There he was recruited by ISIS and had an ISIS-arranged marriage. During battle in January, he was injured and captured.

“‘Have you killed anyone?’ [On the Road host] Zhang asked. He answered that, because they just randomly opened fire in battle, someone could have been unknowingly hit but he didn’t directly know if he’d killed someone – though perhaps he was trying to play down his own guilt. ‘So do you think ISIS is Muslim?’ He kept shaking his head. ‘Some extremist things that ISIS does is against Islam. This is not Islam.’ He then lowered his head and murmured that ISIS had tricked him: he missed home and he missed his mother.” (Reports from defectors suggest that disillusionment is quite common among overseas recruits)

“The third one pissed us off. He was 24 and a Kurd from Turkey himself. He was studying engineering in Turkey and didn’t even know Koran well. He just watched some ISIS promotional videos at school, contacted some extremists… then just left school and joined ISIS in Syria. On the first day, an ISIS officer asked if he was willing to be a human bomb and go to heaven, and he said no. He was then sent to rookies’ camp for two month. The first time he was sent into battle, he was captured. He considered ISIS simply a rather extremist form of Islam but not wrong. He also thought ‘beheading’ was simply the Islamic form of execution… Zhang asked if he knew what would happen to him. He bit his lip. ‘Do you miss your mother?’ ‘Yes.’ Then he began crying. Because ISIS doesn’t exchange POWs, we knew they were all going to be executed. We heard three gunshots in the camp when we left.”

One of the three ISIS hostages later believed to have been executed by the Kurds

While Weibo searches for the show produce no results, Zhang and Liang’s many fans are using the social media platform to make plain their disappointment at the show’s suspension and express concerns about their personal safety. During the third season of On the Road, Zhang and Liang made global headlines by “recreating” the destroyed Buddas of Bamiyan for their Kurdish friends, and were said to have been captured by ISIS, a rumor they dispelled by attending a book launch in the capital in late October. Instead, they have now vanished from their own country’s cyberspace.

Valentina is a journalist in Beijing. Follow her @valentinaluo

* UPDATE: Reader @Pennyfeathr kindly points out that episodes of the ISIS trip are back on YouTube, albeit at a different account. Watch the two parts here:

The Oriental Star ferry “disaster management” model, in which the goon squad manages to seize control of the information spigot early on and develops the subsequent narrative, is not the “new normal” in China that some may have feared.

Not that censorship is relaxing at all, or that the guidance of public opinion isn’t a priority after Tianjin’s chemical-explosion disaster (114 dead and counting, at least 70 missing and over 700 casualties). If anything, the censors are the only ones appearing to keep their heads in this whole sorry mess.

The Internet regulator seems to be the only functioning government agency at the moment. https://t.co/mH1BuGFdpD

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) August 16, 2015

But it seems the Yangtze disaster containment was probably more of an outlier than a precedent – the ferry’s sinking was rapid, going over in just a few minutes in poor weather conditions on a wide river, deep in the Chinese interior, miles from any major city. There were no pictures or videos of the incident. The few key witnesses, including the surviving crew, were nobbled immediately. (So far as I know, nothing’s even been heard from the captain since his detention, except brief statements via official channels.)

Their success managing the Oriental Star crisis was probably a magical time for propaganda officials – well done handling that dangerous mob of grieving relatives, Comrade Zhang, that was deputy secretary material! But busy as the censors and crowd control were, geographical and logistical restrictions did much of their work for them. It’s hard to report on a story that’s halfway up a muddy provincial river, in which the “crime scene” is underwater and the rural population is motivated toward helping the authorities, rather than media.

The police helped out a little, roughing up relatives who spoke to journalists and generally protecting and serving the government. But I suspect many might agree that heading to Jiangli, the nearest town where the mop-up operation was centered, didn’t really help anyone get to the bottom of the story. If anything, it provided a convenient locus for authorities to contain. (When the Economic Observer, a Chinese newspaper, went to the ferry company’s Chongqing offices and caught them shredding documents – red flag alert! – police summoned the reporter and deleted the report.)

The #TianjinBlast, on the other hand, is a nightmare for censors. Binhai New Area, where the detonations occurred, may not be “Tianjin” in the downtown sense that most people would recognize. It’s an 800-square-mile port, storage facility and giant development zone touted, among its many facets, as a petrochemical-processing hub, home to numerous multinational companies by day and poor migrants/shift workers by night. The latter took the brunt of the initial blast, which was quite some distance from the actual city but clearly not far away enough, by legal zoning standards, from residential buildings within 2,000 km of ground zero. But Tianjin is a high-speed 30-minute hop away from Beijing, where many journalists are based and able to get there – and back – within the day.

How much coverage would this story have received if the blast had occurred in, say, the province of Jilin, where 119 people died at a poultry factory that went up in 2013? There, residents of Dinhui City, heavily promoted as an economic opportunities zone much like Binhai (in this case, an agricultural manufacturing base used for commercial food processing), were awoken in the early hours by a series of massive blasts from the nearby plants, releasing toxic gas and chemicals into the surrounding area. Most of the dead were unskilled workers unable to escape the blaze because their factory doors were sealed. Like Tianjin, there was much handwringing in the aftermath about safety standards, reckless economic growth, ticking time bombs, “the worst fire in living memory,” etc., but that was pretty much it.

Already, the unfolding disaster in Tianjin has yielded much of the same, a rich basket of negligence, dodgy oversight, grim safety standards, environmental hazards and general indifference toward life. Thanks to the hyper-paranoid system, authorities are doing themselves further disservice by fighting another fire online, badly. Take the political cover-up of the company responsible, Ruihai International Logistics (RIL): rumors that ownership of RIL is connected to a senior relative (a former Politburo member? The ex-police chief?) are already rife. So while attempting to explain why its corporate records have suddenly vanished post-blast, officials have bravely tried to claim RIL’s website also got “blown up.” Consider that RIL has yet to even issue a statement on the tragedy caused by its warehousing. Or re-watch the CCTV flub in which a live presser was fumbled after officials were unable to answer a simple question; CCTV cuts right back to the studio, catching the host by surprise.

The fallout, including fears of chemical clouds making their way to Beijing, is growing uncomfortably close to the bigwigs. That’s half an hour away! They have a big, gung-ho military parade in three weeks and the last thing they need is this shit. The pressure to lock it down is growing intense, and comes with increasing political strictures – as the bureaucracy expands to contain the disaster zone, who is in charge and what’s permitted becomes opaque even to those within the system. Confusion and disarray take over, as officials try to cover themselves, different departments say different things, orders are delayed, reversed or rescinded, rumors fly, Twitter tries to make sense of it all and no one believes anything that the government says. 

They can’t be serious. https://t.co/E2NwwjosL3

— Fergus Ryan (@fryan) August 15, 2015

All but certain that evacuation is happening. Our school at the edge of the blast is closed until further notice. https://t.co/CYkD7Q33hD

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) August 15, 2015

A #Tianjin govt spokesman said he’ll need to check who is in charge of the rescue operation of the deadly explosions. pic.twitter.com/8CQMMwYApV

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) August 16, 2015

Rather than the Oriental Star model, an old-fashioned clusterfuck with Chinese characteristics is playing out on social apps (here’s one take on absorbing the events over WeChat that Thursday), with some powerful local media doing their best to defy orders in the circumstances.

With alternative information widely available, the traditional propaganda, such as a decision to play up the “public service martyrs” storyline (it worked so damn well before, with those frogmen in the Yangtze), feels hasty, reflexive and off-key. Particularly, it won’t wash when the rescue workers look like lambs to the slaughter, many barely out of their teens, sent in without any proper protection or information to put out a raging chemical fire with water.

Chinese people may claim to “trust” their government in what they do or where the nation is heading, but that’s only because their objectives – economic growth and nationalist pride – roughly overlap for now. And, really, what’s the alternative in an authoritarian one-party state? But they certainly don’t believe, or place trust, in anything their government says, precisely because those same shared imperatives (nationalism, wealth accumulation) require all kinds of obfuscation, denial and logical gymnastics (“Everything is fine, we’re evacuating the area”).

For the bosses, yet another round of crackdowns and soul-searching – how did we fuck up the cover-up this time? – will almost certainly be in order. If the dust cloud heading toward Beijing has a silver lining of potassium cyanide, it’s this: Whatever serene sense of leadership you may have had about China’s grip on handling crises should be evaporating like a cloud of nitrate gas into the autumn air.

Residents gather next to burnt-out tanks in the aftermath of the crackdown (via CNN)

Last year was the 25th anniversary of the “June 4 Incident,” as it is officially known. State security went full bore over the ultra-sensitive date, harassing journalists and activists, detaining anyone who sneezed on the subject.

They succeeded in maintaining the collective amnesia in-house, earned their bonuses and overtime, but in doing so, trolled foreign media so hard that the blowback was intense. I don’t know how much coverage was originally intended, but several journalist friends indicated they’d been so royally pissed off with the constant intimidation, their editors were all but sounding the bugle on the topic. Coverage was wall to wall, with stories everywhere.

This year, of course, will be much quieter: 26 isn’t as catchy as 25. But Global Times hasn’t forgotten, and duly produces a bungled editorial on the subject, attacking – and casually libeling – a group of overseas students for writing an open letter, requesting transparency over the crackdown. Here’s the closing paragraph:

Chinese society has reached a consensus on not debating the 1989 incident. Students born in the 1980s and 1990s have become the new targets of overseas hostile forces. When China is moving forward, some are trying to drag up history in an attempt to tear apart society. It’s a meaningless attempt and is unlikely to be realized.

Frankly, the rest of the rant isn’t worth the click. Moreover, there is really little point to GT’s article (even less so than usual, that is). No mainstream outlet had even reported on the letter prior to the editorial. The first was the Guardian, which published its article shortly before midnight a day later, referencing GT in the third graf.

If Streisand Effect was the intention of the trolling, so be it. There aren’t any other logical reasons for flagging the date by turning the full glare of the Batshit Signal on this group of 11 Chinese students while accusing them, ad hominem, of being “brainwashed” by a “paranoid minority” in an “attempt to tear society apart.” (Just because they’re “paranoid,” GT, doesn’t mean the government isn’t out to get them.)

It’s telling how an authoritarian apparatus that has engineered a culture of amnesia and self-censorship is, itself, quite incapable of either. Like a sinner with a guilty conscience, GT can’t help running its own mouth. An annual hit-piece on Tiananmen has become almost as symbolic and ritualistic as the candlelit gathering in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park. Rather than memorializing the victims, though, it simply serves to shame the perpetrators.

UPDATE: The shambles continues with an order from the goon squad to “urgently delete the Global Times commentary.” So dignified.

SHANGHAI COCKTALES (A Memoir)

It’s one of the gifts of China that there’s something to write about on every street corner. It’s one of the curses of China that expats keep writing about themselves instead.

That’s not to say there isn’t rich material in it. Somewhere outside the Fourth Ring Road, a nondescript borderline-alcoholic English teacher might be polishing off the manuscript of the China equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Escape, reinvention, exoticism, disillusionment – it’s all there for a novelist or memoirist, plus baijiu, smog and as many happy endings as you can afford. There’s definitely a way to do it right, make it funny, and say something meaningful about how us foreigners (with nowhere else in particular to go) engage with China, or don’t. There’s also a way to do it wrong, and come across as a goon who can’t write his way out of a paper bag.

By now you should be getting an idea of what kind of a review this is going to be.

As a writerly sort and interested party, I occasionally read books which are memoirs – sometimes thinly veiled as fiction – of the expat in question’s China years. Some are entertaining, others as interesting as a concrete overpass. Many have weird hang-ups about sex. Most feature heavy drinking as a centrepiece. Almost all can be summed up in a single sentence: “Look at this crazy wacky time I’m having in China!” But I’ve never seen one which combines all of the things I hate in China writing between two covers until I read the self-published Shanghai Cocktales: A Memoir by Tom Olden.

Can we dwell on that title for a moment? Shanghai Cocktales. It sounds like some “friend” of Olden’s dared him to write a book based around that single, shitty 2am pun. I’m sure it sounded funny after five rounds at his local, but Olden woke up the next morning and still went with it. The chapters are called “Cocktale One,” “Cocktale Two,” and so on until you wish you were dead or drinking that sixth cocktail. Tom Olden (a pseudonym) has all the subtlety and ear for language of a horny, deaf-blind goat. If he ran this blog, it would no doubt be called Beijing Spunk.

The plot is more or less a blow-by-blow dirge of Olden’s nights out, sexual conquests and job interviews in Shanghai from his arrival as a twenty something year-old in 1999 (“the year of the Rabbit”, thanks for that) until now. It’s billed as a memoir but reads like bad fiction. The second sentence begins “As the only white male on a half-full flight, I gratefully enjoyed the extra attention the nubile air hostesses gave me,” and goes downhill from there. I would happily write off that half-full flight as collateral damage if the plane had only crashed and spared us the rest.

Promotional image for ‘Shanghai Cocktales’

At the airport, Olden meets his mate Alex, who wows him by giving an address in Chinese to their taxi driver. (“‘Whadde’fuck?’” … “‘You speak Chinese? Fuck me!’” … “‘Ching-chong, ching-chong, you’re the man.’”) There’s also some artful exposition when Alex quizzes Olden about why he left everything to come to China and asks about a girl called Marie. “‘She’s over and out. Bitch!’”, comes the reply. (“If it hadn’t been for her,” Olden delusionally muses later,“I could have spent my entire time on campus banging freshmen.”) It’s frequently revealed that Olden has “nightmares where I would wake up, bathed in cold sweat, panting from seeing Marie and Kurt in joyous copulation.” I’m on Team Kurt.

It’s not just snappy comebacks and scintillating interior monologue that Olden puts in italics. It’s every sentence he thinks is clever. On local eating habits: “How the fuck can they eat cold fish for breakfast?” On people he doesn’t like: “I’d party with anyone but her. Even French people.” On his soul-crushingly bland inner life: “You’re here now. In Shanghai. Ready for a new beginning.” His favourite refrain is “Whadde’fuck?” Sometimes he switches into italics for whole paragraphs, just for kicks. He also does that irritating thing where he writes the pinyin followed by the English (“‘Mei you wenti.’ No problem”) because ching-chong, ching-chong, he’s the man.

For someone who lived in China for sixteen years, it’s hard to believe how little of interest happened to Olden. He tries valiantly to keep things topical – the Belgrade embassy bombing, the Internet boom – but inevitably gets sucked back into the dull minutia of his sexpatscapades. In one meat market, he picks up a girl with the sparkling line “Hey – can I buy you a drink?” Her reply is “OK. First, toilet”, and I know how she feels. There are exactly two entertaining moments in the book – one where he is fleeced by the notorious teahouse scam into paying a huge dinner bill, the second where he is scammed by conmen posing as police when he’s with a prostitute. Finally, something worth cheering for.

Every woman Olden meets is immediately judged on her appearance. The idea persists among some foreigners – dare I say, especially in Shanghai? – that China is populated by porcelain dolls just waiting to jump into bed with them. Most of the time, it’s just run-of-the-mill Asian sexpot sophomoric dross, which isn’t worth quoting, although I kid you not that the first Chinese girl he runs into tells him he’s handsome and gives him an “exotic giggle.” Often it’s nastier, such as a bargirl who is “probably in her early thirties and had certainly been a pretty girl at some point in life, but now she looked pale and pinched, her slanted eyes rimmed by darkened circles.” I would give anything for a jacket shot of Olden so I could treat him the same.

Besides his alleged close encounters with Shanghai’s beauties, the rest of the book is Olden’s job interviews and miscellaneous score settling, which is all about as fun to read as drinking melamine from the can. He does the rounds of early city magazine websites and paints thinly veiled portraits of various friends and foes using false names. The climactic moment of the memoir is Olden landing a job that pays twelve thousand yuan a month, presumably vindicating him to all his enemies. There’s a whole paragraph about how boring a meeting was. To quote the master: Whadde’fuck?

If you’re a masochist, you can buy the book on Amazon, where there are thirteen customer reviews, all five stars, many of which overuse his full name in the same way. Something tells me the IP log would be revealing. I can’t imagine it sold like hot cakes, as half a year later he started giving it away for free on Twitter.

@Bueller @Bueller @Anyone… @Anyone?

I had an email exchange with Olden – he knows this review is coming – who wrote “I am aware that many people will not appreciate the story, but I wanted to tell it as it was.” He changed the names of people and companies, but everything else is accurate “as I remember it” (unspecified after how many drinks). The motivation to write the thing, he argued, was so that “when someone picks up the book 20-40 years from now, they’ll get a true picture of Shanghai in 1999.”

Curious about this mysterious auteur (Olden’s author bio says he “grew up in a small fishing village outside of Malmo, Sweden”), I asked some friends in Shanghai and we did a half-hearted human flesh search. Eventually, with the help of RFH, I tracked down someone who knows him and was in Shanghai over the same period. “It’s representative of the mindset of foreigners in China in that era,” he told me. “It’s reprehensible drivel, but unfortunately it’s the best record we’ve got.”

You might wonder – I certainly am – why I’m bothering to do a hatchet job on a self-published book with a fundamentally unlikeable narrator that no one except a few of Olden’s remaining mates will read. It’s not the first piece of grot to be written by an LBH (Loser Back Home) who got shanghai’ed into China and thinks his story is unique, and it won’t be the last. Worse books and blogs have been written. As to the offensive sexist stuff, he’s just a minnow in the slipstream of trouts like China Bounder, Robert Black and Isham Cook.

Part of it, I’ll confess, is that writing this is one way to claw some enjoyment back from the hours lost reading the bloody thing. But more than that, it’s because with every tone-deaf sentence I’m reminded of what we might be missing. Again, The Sun Also Rises was also narcissistic foreigners drinking all day. Here’s Hemingway: “You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. … You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate. You hang around cafés.” And here’s Olden, via one of his dolls: “‘Many, many fun in Shanghaijj,’ she lashed on, shaking her head sideways. ‘Yo come anytime and we take care o’yo. Good time. Ayi-yaah. Many fun. Many, many fun…’”

Mostly, I’m reviewing this book because Olden told me that, after sixteen years, he is leaving China in a few months. I want to leave him a memento to remember us by. To borrow his own italicised phrase about a girl he doesn’t take a shine to: “You cannot let bitches like that go without a slap.”

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing, and editor of the Anthill. Information and purchasing details of Shanghai Cocktales are on Facebook or Amazon (includes video). For a much more charitable take on this memoir, the Kirkus Review says it “gives readers plenty to think about.”

UPDATE, 6/4, 12:30 am: here’s our response to Tom Olden’s official response to Alec Ash’s review.

The Cheese Stands Alone: Welcome You to the Xi Jinping Phone App

Something for the weekend, sir? With Chinese cadres under official instruction to behave themselves for, perhaps, ever, the kind folks at Ccln.gov.cn, a website operated by the Central Communist Party School, have offered them a replacement entertainment to getting lobster-faced and curling up with a dead-eyed mistress.

The classics-quoting, picture-rich, cutting-edge “Learning China” app was launched yesterday, and is set to blow your mind – or your phone. Just three minutes after I opened the app, my two-year-old HTC had frozen up –  like its owner, it was obviously having a hard time processing all the fun.

I restart the phone. OK, here we go.

The app, according to Chen Jiancai, the Deputy Chief Editor of the tech-savvy Ccln.gov.cn – which supposedly stands for “Chinese Cadres Learning Network” – is based on the “Xi Jinping database” (huh?) and aims to present Xi Jinping’s important speeches since the 18th Party Congress, when he took over Zhongnanhai, through sections entitled “News, Live Map, Mini Courses, Knowledge Map, Xi Dada* Syllabus, Expert Interpretation, Select Commentary, Ebook, Theoretical Articles, Crucial Analysis, Quoted Poems and Xi Dada Anecdotes” (ooh).

“Everyone can find something that interests him or her,” says Chen. It’s a bold claim and therefore one Beijing Cream was keen to test. Let’s have a look, shall we?

In “Mini Courses,” you may watch 5-7-minute videos, each explaining one of the important political credos dreamt up and spat out since Xi’s big takeover, such as “Hong Kong-Shanghai Express,” “Bottom-Line Thinking” (aka, pessimism, fyi), “The Four Comprehensives,” “One Belt, One Road” etc.

The eBook section includes Xi’s latest masterpiece The Governance of China (for FREE), a collection edited by the People’s Daily editorial team of “classics quoted by Xi,” studying notes of Xi’s articles, Xi Zhongxun’s – Xi the Senior, or Xi Daddy – Anthology, which includes Xi Zhongxun in Shaanxi, Gansu and Ningxia, Xi Zhongxun in Changge, Xi Zhongxun in Guangdong, ad infinitum.

If, by any chance, you need to search for any speech made by Xi at any time and any place, you may go to the star feature of the app, “Live Map” – which is neither live, by the way, nor a map – and see the complete. footage. of it. Thus:

Sing it with Xi: We’re on the road… to rejuvenation… Altogether now!

In this cut, entitled “Xi Jinping attends Panda Garden opening ceremony with Belgian King,” you can see a series of bored white men standing in front of stereotypical Chinese buildings, with Xi Jinping and… a panda! A true bargain: Seen one, seen too much. (Actually, that panda one is a bit of a stand-out. Well worth a look.)

Our favorite tab, and sure to be yours, is obviously the “Xi Jinping Anecdotes.” It’s a combination of heart-warming stories about courage and hierarchy in the face of adversity – “Xi Told Underling to Buy Rubber Shoes for Flood Victim” – and Buzzfeed-style listicles (“15 Comments Foreign Leaders Made on Xi Jinping,” “10 Bits of Trivia That Show Xi’s Respect for the Elderly”) that try hard to make you regret clicking on them: the old clickbait-and-switch.

The app, unfortunately, isn’t available in Google Play yet, because Google notably gave CNNIC, who endorsed the app, a big and well-deserved screw-you just days ago for abusing the trust placed in it by the search engine to outsource its security certifications and thus allowing MITM attacks. 

Comments are already beginning to trickle in on the App Store, and it’s clear that someone is having a chuckle. One review claims to be from a thief who promptly returned the stolen phone after reading the app and seeing the error of his ways.

Another simply notes: “Under Boss Xi’s leadership I downloaded this app instantly when I saw it. It’s so impressive I’ve been brought to tears. Boss Xi’s footprints are all over the world and his speeches motivate the whole country. I must use this app everyday. Boss Xi is the guide and the light. Thank the author!”

It’s getting harder to separate wumao from parody these days

But you may download it directly, using an iPhone or just a phone. Personally I wouldn’t keep it for long on my phone, but that’s just me. The thing is definitely not riddled with spy and malware. 

*Quick Xi Jinping 101: Xi Dada is the cute nickname given to Xi by the propaganda department his adoring people. Means Uncle Xi, not Father Xi (that would be creepy).

Follow the author of this piece @valentinaluo

The case bears strong similarities to a series of racially tinged assaults alleged to have recently occurred in several foreign-centric districts, including Sanlitun, Houhai and Wudaokou, in which foreign witnesses reported being attacked without provocation by local men carrying weapons and traveling in a vehicle. The incidents were widely reported on WeChat and discussed on local forums, such as Reddit, where many expressed concern about possible hate crimes.

Michael (left) takes an image of his injuries shortly after the attack

An Australian student, who asked to be referred to just by his first name, Michael – for fear of possible retaliation – was returning to his BLCU quarters at “around 2am” on 21 December with his Korean girlfriend, Christine, when he says the pair noticed a grey BMW parked ahead.

“We were about 200 meters away [from the university] when [the men inside] yelled out something… they came around in their car and stopped us at the gate,” Michael recalled. Aware of the rumors that a group of men were targeting foreigners with Chinese females, he confronted the gang in an attempt to defuse the situation, explaining: “My girlfriend’s Korean, not Chinese…”

Three men  then attacked him with bats and rods. “Once they started hitting me, I grabbed one of the bats and hit one of the Chinese guys back in the head” – an act he was to later regret –  “and then approached the other two guys… yelling at them to leave and they backed off. I smashed the bat in half,” explained the former rugby winger.

Before he could check the third man, Michael said, he got up and, as the trio approached again, both students decided to run for help but “As we almost got in the dorm, my girlfriend fell down,” and the men renewed their assault. Michael claimed he remembers little of what happened next but CCTV footage shows him being battered on the head, then disarming another of his metal rod.

Inside, a large amount of students (including “a lot of Russian guys”) assisted the pair while others called the police. “One of the attackers who I’d hit tried to come in… the Chinese had gone to their car again and tried to escape” but fortunately a quick-thinking Russian had removed the keys, according to witnesses. At this point, police arrived. A member of the gang accused the Russian of attacking them, and all four were detained.

One of the alleged assailants at the police station is said to have been a US citizen with Chinese parents (his face has been obscured as he has not been charged)

In a similar December incident, detailed over at the World of Chinese, a foreign student who requested anonymity told a reporter he was approached by a group of six or seven men in a “wagon” and carrying “metal sticks,” who questioned his companion’s ethnicity. “They started asking if my friend was Chinese,” he told the magazine. After being assaulted several times, the man handed over a small amount of money and made his escape.

The magazine spoke also to an eyewitness to “a separate incident in Wudaokou, who said that he saw ‘four Chinese holding bats chasing a black guy, shouting at him,’ along Zhanchunyuan West Road, at around 3 am the same morning.” The location of the latter incident is close (1-2km) to where the attack on Michael and his partner took place. Although extreme violence is rare, attacks on foreigners do occur in the nightspots of Beijing for a variety of reasons – examples from Sanlitun being not infrequent, and not necessarily involving Chinese.

Back at the police station, a bloodied Michael says he was threatened by one of the men (to wit: “I know where you guys live, I’m gonna come get you and stab you”) and endured racial slurs, and both he and his friends were accused of instigating the fight. The Russian was detained and later released the next day, while Michael received five stitches; his passport is now with police as the case continues.

“All three are now in jail,” said Michael. “However, if we can get more witnesses, they’ll serve a longer time in jail.” In legal terms, the men have been detained pending investigation. They can be held for up to 28 days without charge and should police decide to press charges, a case will be sent to the “procurator” for consideration. If the case is accepted, a trial will be set and the assailants can look forward to tackling China’s 99.1% conviction rate, instead of unarmed foreigners.

An image taken at the hospital shows Michael’s head wound, which required five stitches

Michael praised both university authorities and Wudaokou police, who he described as “helpful [and] good” but added that the embassy was “useless.” The investigation is ongoing and “slow.” One potential difficulty might be “the injury suffered to the other man, he was in hospital for a while and looks like he is permanently a bit deformed.” The man is alleged to be an American citizen, though both his parents are Chinese.

Readers who have any information about the case, know of any other incidents, or were themselves victims of one of a similar spate of attacks involving a grey BMW in the last two months are urged to contact Wudaokou police, or email us at the usual address (and we’ll pass your details on). Said Michael: “All I want is this not to happen again.”

You can follow the author of this piece @MrRFH on Twitter

John Ross (right), pictured in London

Last week, coverage of the embattled but peaceful pro-democracy rallies in Hong Kong earned the unsolicited though controversial criticism of one John Ross.

Ross, a British academic who describes himself as a “Senior Fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University,” took to Weibo (a Chinese Twitter) to accuse foreign media of being “too hypocritical.”

“In 150 years of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, they never permitted its people to elect their own governor, and the United States didn’t criticize the UK about it,” Ross wrote. In erecting this particularly withered straw man, of course, Ross utterly ignores the actual catalyst for these protests: the promises, originally brokered by the British, then later arguably broken by Beijing, for universal suffrage, as per the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ template agreed in 1984 between the UK and China.

Ross is obviously far too concerned with the hypocrisy of foreign governments to have any time for his own.

He proposes, for example, that the suffrage system now on the table in HK – three candidates, hand-picked by Beijing: Any color you like, so long as it’s red – is “much more democratic than the United Kingdom.” That’s presumably the same UK where calls for a referendum on Scottish independence were ruthlessly censored, its leaders crushed, journalists and activists imprisoned, and where the streets of Dundee and Glasgow are now lined with friendly, tear-gas wielding soldiers to preserve Scotland’s freedoms. To put things in perspective, in 2013 the Economic Intelligence Unit used actual data to rank countries by democracy, placing Hong Kong at 65 out of 165, with a score of 6.42, making it a “flawed democracy” (the UK is 16. China? 143).

Ross doesn’t – yet – enjoy the profitable pro-Party punditry platforms of his fellow foreign cheerleaders, such as Martin Jacques or meritocratist Daniel Bell, but nevertheless is intent on filling the mould of “foreign stooge of a Chinese dictator… manipulated by those who found him useful,” like US constitutional scholar Frank Goodnow before him.  Clearly he believes there’s still gold up in those hills.

So when the “former director of London’s Economic and Business Policy to ex-Mayor Ken Livingstone,” was approached this summer by Chinese tabloid the Global Times (GT) for a profile about foreign China Watchers, he was, no doubt, expecting a nice soap-job.

After all, GT is a state-owned affiliate of People’s Daily, and its Chinese edition (whose bug-eyed editorials the English edition faithfully reproduces) is particularly known for its “nationalist” bent.

Ross, meanwhile, is a loyal toady of the new world order. The Marxist economist is so committed to serving the people that, back in 2004, he gracefully accepted a massive salary of £110,000 – more than the then-Mayor of New York – as one of “Red” Ken Livingstone’s closest crony-advisors. (The post was not advertised, which might have struck even Tony Blair as rather non-egalitarian.)*

Ross and GT would seem natural bedfellows.

Unfortunately, the paper’s reporter went off (Ross’s) script to deliver an actual piece of journalism: a long article about various overseas admirers of the Communist Party – often known as “Panda Huggers” – such as Ross and Martin Jacques, and entitled “Our Friends in the West.”

The cached article as it originally appeared

Within hours of this going online – and being enthusiastically shared among Twitter’s China hands – Ross was on the line to complain. Demonstrating his commitment to Party values by attempting to get the young journalist in trouble, Ross demanded immediate expunging of negative comments about himself. “I am well used to expect such articles by people such as the Southern Media Group,” Ross fumed, “but it was a great surprise to see it in Global Times.”

The reasons for Ross’s rage became abundantly clear: “This article attacks and attempts to discredit me by the typical methods of suppression of information and selective quotation,” he wrote (our emphases). Ross then demanded that several lines be removed – aka “suppression of information” – to make way for pre-approved remarks, supplied by him, inserted in their stead… a.k.a. “selective quotation” (!)

The article originally noted that – in Ross’s own words – he had been criticized by “British right wing [sic] writer Nick Cohen”:

Original text containing criticism of Ross as first written in the Guardian

This passage was excised at an unknown date, after publication, to be replaced with a glowing passage that displays a complete volte face in both facts and tone:

The new passage now features praise from former BBC chairman Gavyn Davies

Of Cohen, all reference had vanished like a dissident in the night (apparently, “Cohen has no knowledge of economics,” as Ross fumed in his e-mail). Also missing:

The original contained a scathing reference to Ross’ tireless work in the state-media sector, now deleted

Not content with neutering these small jabs, the overweening Ross then had an entire 90-word paragraph inserted, in which he demonstrates that he has, at least, apparently as much grasp of modern Chinese history as Cohen purportedly has of economics:

According to Ross, who simply ignores the entire periods of 1949-1976 and 1989-1992,  individual entrepreneurship is now the standard of measurement for a state’s human-rights record

Meanwhile, the fawning comments about Ross from his boss at the Chongyang Institute – a state-backed “think tank” run by a former hack from the Chinese edition of People’s Daily, Wang Wen – were unsurprisingly left untouched. The article, once a spiky piece of journalism, had effectively become a standard fluff piece larded with dripping encomia to Ross – all under the byline of a “senior reporter” who was powerless to prevent it.

Although he was indeed interviewed for the article, Ross concluded his email of complaint by remarking that he was “astonished that Global Times should publish such an attack on myself… without giving [me] any chance to reply to these attacks.”

Well, now we do have Ross’s reply:  In the form of the professional harassment of a female journalist at a state-owned paper, a shrill demand for heavy-handed censorship, and the wholesale manipulation of someone else’s work to further his own agenda. The difference is, we’re not the slightest bit astonished.

p.s.

@akaDashan Please learn colloquial Chinese idioms that even the State Grid understands as no such weibo exists

— John Ross (@JohnRoss43) October 8, 2014

*While in position under Livingstone, Ross enjoyed 12 foreign jamborees in just three years, according to WorkersLiberty.org. But his finest hour came after Livingstone was defeated by Tory candidate Boris Johnson in the bitterly contested 2012 London mayoral elections.

Ross lost his incumbency – a hazard of democracy to the humble public servant-crony – but threatened Johnson with the use of “m’learned friends.” The justification? Before rejoining the ranks of the common man, Mayor Livingstone had slipped a new “unfair dismissal” rule in, which allowed political appointees the same redundancy rights as, well, chimney sweeps and nurses. Well – almost the same. Ross got a thoroughly socialist settlement, in the region of £200,000. Bottles of Karl Marx champagne all round!

You can follow the author on Twitter @MrRFH

Jaycee Chan: as NWA might say, a snitch is a snitch/ if you’re poor or rich

In the hopes of avoiding getting bored to death in a Chinese prison cell, film “star” Chan has allegedly spilled on his friends like an action hero, according to Liberty Times, a Taiwanese newspaper.

The “laundry list” contains up to 120 names including a singer with a Taiwanese band “whose surname starts with F, has invested in two night clubs in Taiwan and his family has strong connections with the military.”

Who could it possibly be? Netizens point to Johnny Fei, whose father is a general – but the latter has already told the media, they got the wrong Johnny.

It’s long been known that you need to be on drugs to properly enjoy Mando-pop; it’s vaguely reassuring to learn, then, that its producers are suffering with us. Look forward, then, to a long series of arrests of artists whose work is but a footnote on the arse grapes of musical history.

Meanwhile, a letter that pusillanimous performing-arts associations have been made to sign, pledging not to hire any musicians guilty of drug crimes, has supposedly been leaked [NOTE: the authenticity of this letter has not been verified]

The letter, leaked on Weibo

 Dear Singers and Actors,

 How are you?

 I’m writing this letter with grave worries and anxiety. As you must have heard, many showbiz professionals have been busted for whoring and doping recently, and the suddenly toughened-up mainland media environment for entertainers is making us very concerned.

 As a major entertainment group, we feel we are duty bound to notice our entertainers of the importance to abide by law and morality. Please, actors, do not give yourself excuses like “releasing the pressure and relieving oneself” to bring unforeseeable disasters to yourself and the company.

 But since we hold the attitude to “always stick with our people,” we have some sweet advice, as below, for you. Please make sure you follow these: 

1)    Reject invitations to any party involving drugs and report to the company truthfully with absolutely truth [sic]. Keep yourself completely uninvolved with drugs and we won’t allow serious doping problems like Chan and Ke to occur

2)   Those with more colorful private life, we advise you to use Liebao Cleaning Master [a smartphone app to delete junk files and boost running speed] to have your personal information cleansed thoroughly, protected and avoid being leaked.

3)   Reject your friends or other people in the business’s invitations and seduction to go to places linked to prostitution and report to the company about such things. Saving racy pictures is prohibited and we don’t allow incidents like Edison Chan to happen

4)   Be careful of your image and stay low-key at bars, clubs etc, and avoid things that damage your image, like drinking, smoking and swearing in public

Please do follow the four pieces of advice above. I’m bloody begging you now. 

Yes, it’s tough being successful in China these days. Officials get vanished, Big Vs are squashed, businessmen fear looting and movie stars get treated like 13 year olds. It looks like the PRC may never get that Cypress Hill tour.

H/T Valentina Luo