Ladies and gentlemen, we have Jiang Zemin – “the elder.”

Jiang Zemin was a pretty popular president in his own time. Though not without criticism, his term marked a breaking point in the widespread reforms that would go on to define the successes of post-Cultural Revolution China. By today’s standards, Jiang could be called conservative, but in the early 90s when he came into power, he was a revolutionary. His China in the 1990s was in many ways more liberal than it is now. Jiang Zemin was a powerful and respected president, but today the 91-year-old man, still very much alive, is reborn as a meme beacon of hope to China’s millennials.

Younger Chinese have adopted the leader as a beloved character of their own, despite not being old enough to clearly remember his presidency. Grainy video clips are enough to document the ex-leader’s unscripted public persona (a trait unmatched by perhaps any party official to come before or after him). In the clip above, Jiang scolds a reporter for asking if China’s elite had personally selected Hong Kong’s next president. Jiang rises to his feet and marches straight to the camera, in order to deliver a riveting oral address in three languages. He asks the reporters why they can’t be more like CNN’s Mike Wallace, whose company Jiang says he enjoyed very much. I’m speaking to you as an elder, he tells them, unwittingly generating his eternal nickname. He tells them they must raise their journalistic standards, then switches into English to denounce their questions as too simple… sometimes naïve!

Given the otherwise standard history of CCCP leaders as either cold pragmatists or calculated androids of Communist ideology, Jiang Zemin’s animated, genuine demeanor is a welcome breath of fresh air. It would be natural to write this outburst off as a one-time kind of occurrence. We’re happy to tell you, it’s not. In different videos Jiang can be found waltzing with the French president’s wife, playing the ukulele for a crowd of onlookers, and singing Elvis tunes.

Jiang Zemin pulls out a comb to fix his hair at a meeting with the Spanish king

The unlikely cult of personality that’s grown around Jiang is called moha (膜蛤), or toad-worship, referencing the leader’s admittedly amphibian features. Toad lovers who admire Jiang will use his most famous phrases frequently, and quickly bond with anyone who can respond with a Jiang Zemin quote of their own.

In China, though, even something as innocuous and positive as praising one of the country’s significant leaders is not so simple. In recent years, searches for Jiang’s name have become increasingly censored. Part of it had to do with a surge of untrue rumors about his death (remember, he is still alive). Really, the central government in Beijing doesn’t want people talking about politics at all, but searches for Jiang’s name are especially obscured in the context of Xi Jinping’s presidency. He and Jiang were political rivals, and there’s speculation among the people in China that Xi’s crackdown on corruption serves the secondary purpose of removing Jiang Zemin supporters from the party’s ranks, which falls in line with further speculation that Xi might attempt to stay on for an unprecedented third term.

Connections have been drawn between the beloved toad Jiang and another froggy figure who stands between the worlds of politics and internet memes: Pepe. The cartoon frog rose to a position of holding actual political influence when he was adopted as symbol of the alt-right during last year’s American election. Pepe went from a crude drawing circulating on message boards to a figure of political weight. Jiang Zemin looks like he might one-up the situation, going from a major political figure to a meme, and thereby back to a major influence on the digital generation that’s building tomorrow’s China.

One toad lover explained his own love of Jiang:

“I think it’s hard to pinpoint one reason for the phenomenon. I think it’s just his personality – his behavior is so different from the other Chinese leaders, especially Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping. They’re more contained, more restrained, very careful with their words. Also, the younger people didn’t really live through his period, so that contributes to the mystique around him.”

It’s 2017 and memes have actual power now. Jiang Zemin’s unlikely rise to internet superstardom could very well have an effect on the next generation of China’s leaders – he really was one-of-a-kind in the country’s history. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with these nonsense memes.

This piece originally appeared on the China digital media platform Radii, and this edited version is republished here with permission.

It’s the kind of balmy Sunday afternoon that makes you want a cold drink, and the Chinese street artist known as SHUO is taking me on a stroll through the hutongs after showing off one of his pieces.

“Did you see that?” he suddenly asks on our way to get milkshakes. A grin breaks out over his face. He says that I just missed an old lady on the street wearing an awesome shirt that said something about explosions. He’s very excited about the old lady’s awesome shirt and suggests that I write about awesome stuff like that. He doesn’t seem to be joking.

SHUO’s childlike excitement catches me off guard, if only because I expect him to be a little more cynical. The twenty-something 3D animator from Henan leads a quiet double life as an underground street artist in Beijing. He started off doing graffiti but moved onto stencil work — “I thought that stencil could express some things more easily, more concretely” — though he’s been playing around with cheaper and faster alternatives, like pasting stickers. His pieces are often deeply ironic takes on Chinese society, like this wheelchair-bound boy with his phone and charger stylized as an IV drip –

– or the URL http://www.china.com/ juxtaposed with a virus alert on a wall about to be knocked down:

SHUO is wearing white Converse sneakers, dark wash jeans, and a short-sleeved black t-shirt that doesn’t cover his tattoos. A pair of headphones is casually slung around his neck. One of his sleeves is streaked with dirt, as if he’d been scaling rooftops to put up his work — which is exactly what he did for the piece he just led me to see:

The weather-beaten blotch of paper above this Huguosi Xiaochi snack shop is one of his few extant pieces, too high up for sanitation workers to reach. It’s barely legible, a stencil of a pixelated Microsoft Word icon labeled  “个人简历” (“Personal Resume”). Last year, SHUO put up several of these around Beijing in a parody of the job application process, as if to comment on how hard it is for young Chinese like him to find employment.

Even the t-shirt SHUO’s wearing — self-designed, I learn — can be construed as a knowing jab at the new normal of air pollution. It’s embellished with a blown-up version of the green shield sticker found on the 3M face-masks commonly worn around Beijing.

The 3M motif appears elsewhere in his work, as in one piece where he superimposes a mask over a child’s face in a poster of an urban paradise with blue skies and green spaces:

In SHUO’s mind, it seemed to me at first, everything is ripe for this brand of dark humor.

I was surprised to learn that this isn’t quite the case.

“I don’t care about the law, I don’t care about other things, but my starting point is fun”

One is tempted to label SHUO the “Chinese Banksy.” Like the famous UK street artist, SHUO makes provocative stencil art behind a cloak of anonymity. But while Banksy’s choice to remain unidentified might have started out as a way to avoid prosecution, it now constitutes an important part of his identity; it’s both the mystique that makes his brand so appealing and a means of control over his public image.

For SHUO, anonymity is less of a choice: his work goes mostly unnoticed.

“Making these street art pieces, I’ve never been caught or chased, no one really cares about me. Even when doing it during the day, I don’t think it matters,” he says. (This isn’t completely true; he puts up a piece of work only if the coast is clear, as it were.) The fact that his work is always taken down or painted over doesn’t help, but he’s reluctantly accepted that his individual pieces are destined to be short-lived.

“Sitting on the street is boring,” he says. He wants more things — like his art, like that woman wearing that awesome shirt about explosions — to be fun.

SHUO’s “Personal Resume” on the wall of a Beijing subway station, before and after

The New Yorker referred to Bansky in a 2007 profile as “a sort of painterly Publius” who “surfaces from time to time to prod the popular conscience,” but SHUO couldn’t even prod the popular conscience if he wanted to. His art lingers in obscurity, both offline and online. “No one really pays attention to me. One friend of mine thinks it’s really weird, that in 2014, at my peak, I never took off, and after that the response just kept mellowing.”

Why is that? “I think it’s maybe that there are relatively few people doing [street art].” SHUO says he’s one of only two people in all of China making this kind of stencil art, as opposed to spray-paint graffiti, which is far more common. (The other artist, he says, is ROBBBB.) “First, [people] just don’t have the awareness. Second, they don’t know what this [kind of art] is. If they don’t know what something is, it’s really easy for them to ignore.”

“If the government says it’s reactionary, then it’s reactionary”

Offline, SHUO prefers to remain anonymous out of a sense of self-preservation. When he was in middle school, he went online and posted a question about rumors of Xinjiang people stabbing people on the street with needles to spread HIV. The next day, two police officers came to his house and told him he’d broken the law. They let him off because of his age, but the incident left a deep impression on him.

SHUO won’t post certain pieces for fear that the police will trace them to his home, as social media platforms like Weibo require real-name verification. Besides his graffiti friends, none of his acquaintances or family know him as a street artist. He doesn’t even sign his work, and says he doesn’t want it to attract too much attention. “Because I’m acting on my own, if I suffer one blow, I might just, disappear…” He trails off.

Perhaps the most important difference between an artist like Banksy and SHUO is what animates their work. A self-described “art terrorist,” Banksy creates tongue-in-cheek pieces that reek of anti-establishment sarcasm, such as his dystopian theme park Dismaland, a blockbuster critique of the Disney franchise. Banksy told The New Yorker in the 2007 profile, “I originally set out to try and save the world, but now I’m not sure I like it enough.” In his art, the world is a big, bad joke, and although he might have run out of charity for it, he never tires of pointing out the punchline.

SHUO’s work can be much more ambiguous. He once put up a Wi-Fi sign outside of a police office — complete with the official logo — because every time he passed it, the officers inside were playing with their phones:

“It has the feeling of human warmth,” he says about the piece. “If you play with your phone, okay, I’ll give you Wi-Fi. It’s not that I’m criticizing you, not that I’m mocking you; it’s to make you feel more comfortable, I guess.”

His explanation triggers a kind of gestalt shift in how I view that work. Far from merely making fun of the police, he’s employing them in his little joke, and then sharing it with them. 

If Banksy-style sarcasm feels kitsch nowadays, it’s because it has become formulaic, and there isn’t much surprise to be found in reiterating the absurd. As hard as it might be to believe SHUO when he says his motives are innocent, his art is eye-opening in its capacity for both ridicule and earnestness, in its ability to appear sarcastic and yet still double back on itself to avoid descending into cynicism.

It is also completely his own. As he said in an interview with Beijing-based website Loreli in December 2015: “I’ll never stop, it’s part of my life. I have this problem that every time I take a picture of what I’ve done and put it online, everyone that comments just writes: Banksy. Just the word: Banksy. And I’m like, Dude, it took me ages thinking of the idea, I’ve finally had time to go paint it, can you not appreciate it?”

SHUO’s art is eye-opening in its capacity for both ridicule and earnestness, in its ability to appear sarcastic and yet still double back on itself to avoid descending into cynicism

In SHUO’s worldview, dark humor can be light. One of his more sensitive pieces saw him inserting the letters A, B, and C onto a poster touting “socialist core values,” turning it into a multiple-choice question:

The piece raises questions about whether all of these values can feasibly coexist, or whether some, like democracy, are more important than others in Chinese society.

He thinks it’s harmless, though he sees the friction between different interpretations. “If you use a different logic, like in real society, some things are very harmful. Like the ABC piece, if the government says it’s reactionary, then it’s reactionary. But if I tell my other friends I’m making a joke, I think it’s pretty funny. It’s very ambiguous.”

Real society exists in tension with SHUO’s society. “I think society is a really fun game, and you can freely play this game,” he says. “But if you think according to this principle, it’s actually pretty crazy, pretty chaotic, because…” He trails off over his chocolate milkshake, collecting his thoughts. “I don’t care about the law, I don’t care about other things, but my starting point is fun. I don’t want to hurt people.”

The other day, SHUO says, he was talking with a friend about how they could make society feel more like a community. Everyone could feel like neighbors, like a big family. If he saw someone he didn’t know on the street and liked their clothes, he would feel comfortable complimenting them, without fear of misunderstanding.

I ask SHUO if he’s ever done anything like that. After all, he didn’t tell that old lady we’d seen earlier on the street that he liked her shirt.

“No,” he laughs. “I was just talking about it with my friend. We thought it would be fun if we could do that.”

It’s only a hypothetical. But his street art? It’s very real, and very fun.

This piece was published on Radii. Most of the photos above were taken with permission from SHUO’s (private) Flickr account, with some first appearing on Loreli.

Megan Pan is a writer and undergraduate at Northwestern University majoring in Philosophy and double-minoring in Poetry and Chinese.

Per usual, no idea about post frequency, etc. But there it is. We’ve entered the cashless society!

You don’t care about any of that, though. You want to know about this:

Yes, that is Donald Trump in a PLA uniform.

No, that is not a real photograph — we have People’s Daily, a Chinese government publication, to thank for it, as they recently released a fun meme-maker that lets people upload photos (of themselves, I think is the point) that are then superimposed onto PLA uniforms from different eras. For example, I uploaded the picture of the Donald above onto a uniform from World War II.

Naturally, we wanted to see how the Donald looks throughout all the eras. Let’s start from the beginning and move forward:

There he is, a spry young man, during the Nanchang Uprising, the first major engagement in the Chinese Civil War on August 1, 1927. What a moment in history, when the Donald, full of theory and idealism, and blessed with ignorance, entered the fray as the ultimate underdog in a campaign to upset the established order.

Of course, there would be much hardship in the coming years, as he and his fellow politically ostracized “bandits” were driven into the heart of the country, where humble, family-oriented, salt-of-the-earth villagers welcomed him with a fervor and passion which his opponents could not understand.

The “Red Army” marched across the country, rallying the underclass to their cause while evading a better-stocked, more experienced and “refined” enemy. For the Donald to have any chance at victory, certain… tactics would need to be employed.

But guerrilla warfare suited the Donald just fine.

The conclusion of the internecine conflict saw the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with Mao, modestly dressed in a woolen jacket, declaring it so on October 1, 1949 from the rostrum of Tiananmen. If you squint really hard at some of the footage from that time, you can see, to Mao’s left as he faces the crowd, the unmistakeable smirk of this figure:

But the rigors of bureaucracy proved difficult for the Donald, who demanded loyalty above all else — to himself, not the country. He formed unholy alliances with oligarchs and despots. He set traps for the intellectual class, which he hated with all his lifeblood, for he himself had been rejected by them. He made speeches, albeit infrequently, to consolidate his power. He had his stooge call an enemy “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” He turned his countrymen against one another, and would have gladly destroyed a once-proud culture to preserve his legacy. All the while, he held the expression of one who is unable to find the letter Q on a Write and Learn Touch Tablet.

Who could he turn to in times of need? Who would, as he so often does in front of a personal ornate embossed antique gold framed mirror, pucker up at his every glance, and execute with incurious resolve the duties of the true patriot?

The years wore on the Donald.

His eyes sagged underneath the weight of his responsibilities. He lost the ability to give proper physical response to natural stimuli. His every bodily movement became a simulacrum of basic human behavior. His smiles became squints. His words became grunts. Standing over the toilet, pinching the squat end of his prune, he shat when he meant to pee.

He lost his smile.

Gaze long upon his eyes, and you might glimpse the abyss.

Lord have mercy on us all.

Editor’s note: On July 23, the writer Zhang Wumao published an essay called “In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live” to his public WeChat account. As of the following morning, it had accumulated more than 5 million views and nearly 20,000 comments. 

Of course, the article was removed that very afternoon.

But by then, the essay had attracted thousands of responses. As our correspondent Megan Pan wrote for Radii:

Though the hubbub online has died down, the essay, a meditation on varying facets of life in Beijing, has since spawned over a hundred thousand countering essays in response. Titles include plays on the original essay’s title, such as “In Beijing, 20 Million People and “In Beijing, 20 Million People are Bravely Living,” and even direct digs at the author, such as “Mr. Zhang, You Aren’t Even a Beijing Kid So Why Are You Acting Like a Know-it-all.” The original essay has been lambasted as “making a fuss over nothing.”

But “In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live” resists easy summarization – it’s framed as a series of Zhang’s loosely related reflections on living in Beijing, heavily supported by anecdotes. He touches on a variety of topics that hit close to home: the everyday absurdities of urban sprawl, the never-ending struggle to buy a house, and alienation from home. As a nonlocal from Shaanxi who has been living in Beijing for the past eleven years, he also attempts to negotiate the tensions and differences between locals and nonlocals.

What follows is Megan Pan’s translation of that now-censored essay.

在北京，有2000万人假装在生活
In Beijing, 20 Million People Pretend to Live

1

北京没有人情味.

Beijing has no human warmth.

经常被外地朋友批评：北京人钱多装逼不热情。都到了同一个城市，干嘛不一起聚聚？几十年的交情，还不把我送到机场？事实上，北京人很难像外地人一样热情——来去接送，全程陪同，北京人真的很难做得到。

I am often criticized by nonlocal friends: Beijingers have a lot of money and act unfriendly. We’ve all made it to the same city, why don’t we get together? A few decades of friendship, and you won’t even send me to the airport? In reality, it is hard for Beijingers to be as friendly as outsiders – picking up and dropping off, accompanying all the way, these things truly are hard for Beijingers to do.

北京人很忙，忙到晚上11点，还在三环路上堵着；北京社交时间成本真的太高，高到从石景山去通州吃饭，还不如去天津来得快；北京真的太大，大到根本就不像一个城市。

Beijingers are very busy, busy all the way until 11 o’clock at night, and even then they are still stuck in traffic on the Third Ring Road; the time cost of socializing in Beijing is too high, so high that it is faster to go to Tianjin than it is to go from Shijingshan to Tongzhou to eat; Beijing is really too big, so big that it isn’t like a city at all.

北京到底有多大？它相当于2.5个上海，8.4个深圳，15个香港，21个纽约，27个首尔。2006年，张先生来北京，地铁只有1号，2号，13号线，现在的北京地铁到底有多少条线，不用百度还真记不住。10年前我坐着公交去找工作，拒绝去四环外的公司面试。现在，京东、腾讯、百度这些大公司都在五环外。

How big is Beijing? It is equivalent to 2.5 Shanghais, 8.4 Shenzhens, 15 Hong Kongs, 21 New Yorks, and 27 Seouls. In 2006, when Mr. Zhang [referring to himself] came to Beijing, the subway only had Lines 1, 2, and 13; if I didn’t use Baidu, I really wouldn’t be able to remember just how many lines the Beijing subway has now. Ten years ago, I took the bus to look for work and refused to go beyond the Fourth Ring for job interviews. Now, big companies like JD, Tencent, and Baidu are all outside of the Fifth Ring.

外地朋友来了北京，以为我们就很近了，实际上咱们不在同一个城市，咱们可能是在若干个城市，它们是中国海淀，中国国贸，中国通州，中国石景山……如果以时间为尺度，通州人和石景山人谈恋爱就算是异地恋，从北五环来趟亦庄就可以说是出差。

When nonlocal friends came to Beijing, they thought we were closer, but we weren’t actually in the same city, we may have been in a number of cities: they are Haidian, China; Guomao, China; Tongzhou, China; Shijingshan, China… If we use time as a measure, then someone from Tongzhou dating someone from Shijingshan would count as long-distance, and going from North Fifth Ring to Yizhuang can be called a business trip.

十年间，北京一直在控房控车控人口，但这块大饼却越摊越大，以至于西安的同学给我打电话，也说自己在北京，我问他在北京哪里？他说：我在北京十三环。

For the last ten years, Beijing has been controlling housing, controlling cars, and controlling population, but this large flatbread continues to sprawl and grow larger, to the point where my Xi’an classmate called me and said he was also in Beijing, and when I asked where in Beijing he was, he said: I’m in Beijing’s Thirteenth Ring.

北京是个肿瘤，没有人能控制它的发展速度；北京是一条河流，没人能划清它的边界。北京是一个信徒，只有雄安能将它超度。

Beijing is a tumor, whose speed of development no one can control; Beijing is a river, whose boundaries no one can draw. Beijing is a disciple, and only Xiongan can release it from purgatory. [Editor's note: Xiongan is a recently established state-level development hub in nearby Hebei province.]

北京的人情淡薄不只是针对外地朋友，对同处一城的北京朋友同样适用。每次有外地同学来京，聚会时外地同学会说，你们在北京的应该经常聚吧？我说，你们一年来几次北京，我们差不多就聚几次。

Beijing’s coldness is directed not only at nonlocal friends, it is also similarly applied to Beijing friends who live in the same city. Every time a nonlocal classmate comes to Beijing, when we all get together the classmate will say, you guys in Beijing often meet up, right? And I will say, however many times you guys come to Beijing is about how many times we meet up.

在北京，交换过名片就算认识；一年能打几个电话就算至交；如果还有人愿意从城东跑到城西，和你吃一顿不谈事的饭，就可以说是生死之交了；至于那些天天见面，天天聚在一起吃午饭的，只能是同事。

In Beijing, exchanging business cards counts as recognition; calling a couple times a year counts as best friends; if someone is willing to go from the east to the west side to have a meal with you without talking business, then you could be called friends for life; as for the people you see every day, eat lunch with every day, they are only coworkers.

2

北京其实是外地人的北京。

Beijing is actually the outsider’s Beijing.

如果要让中国人评选一生中必去的城市，我相信大多数人会选择北京。因为这里是首都，这里有天安门，有故宫，有长城，有几百家大大小小的剧院。话剧歌剧传统戏，相声小品二人转，不管你是阳春白雪，还是下里巴人，都可以在北京找到属于自己的精神食粮。但这些东西其实和北京的人没多大关系。

If you let Chinese choose their must-go cities in this lifetime, I believe that most people would pick Beijing. Because here is the capital, here is Tiananmen, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the hundreds of theaters, big and small. Drama, opera, traditional drama, crosstalk, two-person skits, whether you like highbrow or popular art, you can always find what your spirit needs in Beijing. But these things actually do not have much to do with Beijingers.

走进北京各大剧院，十个人里面有六个人是口音各异的外地人，还有三个是刚来北京，没新鲜够的文艺青年，最后剩下一个是坐在角落里刷手机，熬时间的北京地陪。

Walking into Beijing’s various big theaters, I see that among ten people, six are outsiders with differing accents, three are young literary types that have just arrived in Beijing and haven’t gotten enough of the novelty, and the last remaining one is the local guide sitting in the corner, playing with his phone to kill time.

来京11年，我去过11次长城，12次故宫，9次颐和园，20次鸟巢。我对这个城市牛逼的建筑，悠久的历史完全无感。登上长城，只会想起孟姜女，很难再升腾起世界奇迹的民族豪情；走进故宫，看到的只是一个接一个的空房子，还没我老家的猪圈生动有趣。

In the 11 years since arriving in Beijing, I have gone to the Great Wall 11 times, the Forbidden City 12 times, the Summer Palace nine times, and the Bird’s Nest 20 times. I feel complete indifference for this city’s awesome structures and long history. Climbing the Great Wall, I only think of Lady Meng Jiang, finding it difficult to stir up that lofty pride for the wonders of the world once more; walking into the Forbidden Palace, I see only one empty building after another, which is even less lively and interesting than my hometown’s pigpen.

[Lady Meng Jiang, according to folklore, wept bitterly at the Great Wall for her dead husband, who helped build it.]

很多人一提北京，首先想到的是故宫后海798，是有历史有文化有高楼大厦。这些东西好不好？好！自豪不自豪？自豪！但这些东西不能当饭吃。北京人感受更深的是拥堵雾霾高房价，是出门不能动弹，在家不能呼吸。

When bringing up Beijing, so many people think first of the Forbidden City, Houhai, and 798 [Art Zone], of how Beijing has history and culture and high-rises. Are these things good? They are good! Am I proud? I am proud! But these things cannot be what we live off. What Beijingers experience more deeply is the congestion, the smog, the high housing prices; it is how, when leaving the house, you cannot move, and when at home, you cannot breathe.

3

北京是终归是北京人的北京。

Beijing, in the end, is the Beijingers’ Beijing.

如果说北京还有那么一点烟火味的话，那么这烟火味属于那些祖孙三代都居住在这个城市的老北京人。这烟火味是从老北京人的鸟笼子里钻出来的，是从晚饭后那气定神闲的芭蕉扇里扇出来的，是从出租车司机那傲慢的腔调里扯出来的……

If Beijing is said to have that hint of the smell of smoke, then that smell of smoke belongs to the old Beijingers who have been living in this city for generations. This smell of smoke curls out of old Beijingers’ birdcages, fans out from the leisurely palm-leaf fan after dinner, is pulled out from the taxi driver’s haughty tone of voice…

老北京人正在努力为这个城市保留一丝生活气息，让这个城市看起来，像是个人类居住的地方。

Old Beijingers are currently trying to preserve a bit of breath of life for this city, in order to make this city look like a place where humans live.

老北京人的这点生活气息是从基因里传下来的，也是从屁股下面五套房子里升腾起来的。当西城的金融白领沉浸在年终奖的亢奋中时，南城的北京土豪会气定神闲地说，我有五套房；当海淀的码农们敲完一串代码，看着奶茶的照片，幻想自己成为下一个刘强东的时候，南城的北京土豪会气定神闲地说，我有五套房；当朝阳的传媒精英签完一个大单，站在CBD落地窗前展望人生时，依旧会听到南城土豪气定神闲地说，我有五套房。

This breath of life that old Beijingers have is passed down through genes, and also rises up from the five houses underneath their asses. When Xicheng’s [Beijing district to the west] financial white-collars are absorbed in the excitement of their year-end bonuses, Nancheng’s [district to the south] Beijing tuhao [Chinese term for people of wealth/nouveau riche] will leisurely say, I have five houses; when Haidian’s manong [coders] finish typing out a string of code, looking at pictures of milk tea* and fantasizing about when they will become a Richard Liu [founder of JD.com], Nancheng’s Beijing tuhao will leisurely say, I have five houses; when Chaoyang [District]’s media elite finish signing a large order, standing in front of the CBD’s [Central Business District] floor-to-ceiling windows forecasting life, they will still hear Nancheng’s tuhao leisurely saying, I have five houses.

* ["Milk tea" is a reference to JD.com founder Richard Liu's wife, Zhang Zetian, whose nickname is "milk tea sister."]

没有五套房，你凭什么气定神闲？凭什么感受生活气息？凭什么像北京大爷一样逗鸟下棋，听戏喝茶？

If you don’t have five houses, on what basis can you act leisurely? On what basis can you feel that breath of life? On what basis can you be like an old Beijing uncle, playing with birds, playing chess, listening to operas, and drinking tea?

在北京，没有祖产的移民一代，注定一辈子要困在房子里。十几年奋斗买一套鸟笼子大小的首套房；再花十几年奋斗换一套大一点的二套房，如果发展得快，恭喜你，可以考虑学区房了。

In Beijing, this generation of migrants without inherited property are destined to be trapped within the housing system their whole lives. They struggle for decades to buy a house the size of a birdcage, then struggle a few more decades to swap it out for a slightly bigger second house, and if you make strides, congratulations, you can now consider school district housing.

好像有了学区房，孩子就可以上清华上北大，但是清华北大毕业的孩子依旧买不起房。那时候，孩子要么跟我们一起挤在破旧的老房子里，要么从头开始，奋斗一套房。

It is as though if you have school district housing, your kids will be able to go to Tsinghua and Peking University, but kids that graduate from Tsinghua and Peking still can’t afford to buy a house. Then, they will come live with us in that shabby old house, or start all over again, struggling to buy a house.

4

2015年，电影《老炮儿》热映，朋友圈里有好多人吐槽电影里六爷的北京味。我深有感触。

In 2015, Mr. Six was popular in theaters, and on my Wechat Moments were many people complaining about Mr. Six’s Beijing flavor. I felt very much the same way.

来北京十多年，我拒绝去五棵松看首钢，拒绝去工体看国安，因为没有发自肺腑的热爱，也学不会京腔国骂。但在北京久了，你会和老北京人达成某种和解。对他们有了更立体的了解，就没法再把他们简单地标签化。

Having been in Beijing for 10 or so years, I refuse to go to Wukesong to see the Beijing Ducks [basketball team] and to go to the Workers’ Stadium to see Beijing Guoan [soccer team], as I have no love for it from the bottom of my heart and I can’t learn Beijing-style cursing. But if you stay in Beijing for a while, you will reach a kind of understanding with the old Beijingers. Once you have a richer understanding of them, there is no way to stereotype them.

事实上，不是所有的北京人都排外，我身边就有很多友好的北京土著；也不是所有的北京年轻人都不求上进，坐享其成，大部分的北京年轻人和我们一样勤奋。

In reality, not all Beijingers oppose outsiders, many of my friends are Beijing natives themselves, and not all young Beijingers are idle and only enjoy what they already have. Most young Beijingers are just as assiduous as we are.

你可以不喜欢《老炮儿》，不喜欢北京人的自大京骂吹牛逼，但你得尊重他们，就像尊重东北人戴金项链，尊重山东人吃大葱一样，这就是人家的文化和习性，不能入乡随俗，至少也得敬而远之。

You can dislike Mr. Six, dislike Beijingers’ swaggering style of cursing and bragging, but you must respect them, just like you respect Dongbei [northeastern] people wearing gold chains and Shandong people eating scallions. These are people’s culture and habits, and if you can’t do as the Romans do, you must at least respect them from a distance.

有一次打车去林萃路，怕师傅不认识路，我打开导航准备帮师傅找路。师傅说不用导航了，那地方我知道，30年前那里是个面粉厂，十年前面粉厂拆了，建成了保障房。我说，你咋这么清楚？师傅满脸忧愁地说，那是我老家。

The first time I took a taxi to Lincui Road, I was worried the taxi driver wouldn’t know the way, so I opened up my navigation app to help guide him. The driver said he didn’t need it, I know that place, 30 years ago it was a flour factory, 10 years ago the flour factory was torn down and turned into affordable housing. I said, how do you know so much? With a face full of sorrow, the driver said, That was my old home.

我从师傅的话里能听出一丝乡愁和怨恨，北京对于新移民是站不住的远方；对老北京人却是回不去的故乡。

I could hear in his words a hint of nostalgia and resentment; to new migrants, Beijing is the distant place where they cannot stay, to old Beijingers, it is the home to where they cannot return.

我们这些外来人一边吐槽北京，一边怀念故乡。事实上，我们的故乡还回得去。它依旧存在，只是日益落败，我们已经无法适应而已。但对于老北京人而言，他们的故乡才是真的回不去了，他们的故乡正在以前所未有的速度发生物理上的改变，我们还能找到爷爷当年的房子，但多数北京人，只能通过地球经纬度来寻找自己的故乡。

We outsiders complain about Beijing while missing our homes. In reality, we can still go back to our homes. They still exist, it is only that they fall increasingly behind day by day and we cannot adjust anymore. But for old Beijingers, they truly cannot go back to their home, their home is now undergoing a physical change at an unprecedented speed. We can still find grandpa’s house from back then, but many Beijingers can only search for their own home by the earth’s coordinates.

有人说，是我们外地人建设了北京，没有外地人北京人连早餐都吃不上；是因为大量的外来人口抬高了北京的房价，造就了北京的繁华。但是你想过没有？老北京人也许并不需要这繁华，也不需要我们来抬高房价，他们和我们一样，只需要一个说青水秀，车少人稀的故乡。

Some people say, it is we outsiders who built up Beijing, if there were no outsiders, Beijingers wouldn’t even be able to have breakfast; it is because the migrant population has raised Beijing’s housing prices, creating Beijing’s prosperity. But have you ever thought about it? Perhaps old Beijingers don’t need this prosperity and don’t need us to raise housing prices. They are just like us, only needing a home with idyllic scenery, with few cars and less people.

5

今年，北京核心城区开始治理开墙打洞，越来越多的小商店、小饭店、小旅馆被迫关门，越来越多低端行业的从业者被迫离开，这种脱衣服减肥的管理方式让北京在高大上的道路上一路狂奔，但它离生活便利的宜居之都却越来越远，离包容开放的城市精神越来越远。

This year, Beijing’s core city area has begun to clean up “holes in the wall.” More and more small shops, restaurants, and hotels are being forced to close, more and more people working in low-end sectors are being forced to leave. This kind of shed-clothing-to-lose-weight style of management has allowed Beijing to hurtle down the road to sophistication, but it draws further away from the livable city, further away from the open and inclusive spirit of the city.

那些追梦成功的人正在逃离，他们去了澳洲，新西兰，加拿大，美国西海岸。那些追梦无望的人也在逃离，他们退回到河北，东北和故乡。

Those who have successfully achieved their dreams are currently fleeing to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the west coast of America. Those who have chased their dreams in vain are also fleeing, they are returning to Hebei, Dongbei, and their hometowns.

还剩下2000多万人留在这个城市，假装在生活。事实上，这座城市根本就没有生活。这里只有少数人的梦想和多数人的工作。

And in this city remain 20 million people, pretending to live. In reality, there is no life in this city. Here, there are only the dreams of few and the work of many.

~

Megan Pan is a writer and undergraduate at Northwestern University majoring in Philosophy and double-minoring in Poetry and Chinese.

Oh, bother. https://t.co/KZBz255r0c

— Dissident Pooh (@DissidentPooh) July 17, 2017

I really hope the person behind this account has “Pooh” and “Tigger” on Google Alerts, if only to run an experiment to see how many times characters from Winnie the Pooh will be mentioned in relation to China:

Let this be the start of a beautiful thing… and not one of those two-week Twitter fads.

Follow @DissidentPooh now.

Today was a good day in Beijing, weather-wise, if not a bit on the hot side, and humid. There were blue skies and white clouds. Moments after Liu Xiaobo’s death, this was the scene:

Liu Xiaobo will be remembered by the Chinese people — someday, even if it’s not today or in the near future — as a man of immense dignity and unyielding grace, whose unshakeable conscience caused him much suffering, but in the end elevated all those who understood what he stood for and why he persisted. He will be celebrated.

240 years, American friends! Longer than the Yuan. Longer than the Sui. Not as long as any of the good dynasties, but still a good run!

— The Relevant Organs (@relevantorgans) November 9, 2016

Self-Portrait in a detail of Yarmemet Niyaz’s 2013 painting “

A good while ago the anthropologist Stevan Harrell asked me to consider the unique position of Uyghurs as heirs to an urbanism that predates the rise of Chinese cities in the region. He asked me to think through the ways in which this urban tradition has affected Uyghur social organization. I’m still thinking about this.

Uyghur thinkers are too. They are thinking about the way new urban forms reorient their lives. They are grappling with the way certain spaces draw them in by reflecting their pasts while other forms face them with a blankness that does not allow them a way in.

One of the most remarkable paintings at the first Uyghur contemporary art art exhibition in 2015 was a mixed media piece in which the artist Yarmemet Niyaz inserted a small rectangular mirror onto the side of a bright blue house next to an old coal stove (Uy: mesh) that many people use in Uyghur oasis cities. The mirror interpellates the viewer. You can literally see yourself in the painting. As you do this you imagine yourself in that place, or, for many Uyghur viewers, you imagine yourself in that past: standing in front of a mirror combing your hair with a comb that hangs on a string before walking out into the bazaar.

Uyghur urbanism is still with us. For some it exists in memory; for many it exists in the ways spaces are used. In three of Tahir Hamut’s poems, which we recently translated and published in the US-based literary journal Banango Street, we see the way a young man settles into a place like the city of Ürümchi. We see how over time he gradually comes to terms with approaching middle age. We see the way he comes to know the parameters of his life.

Like a city, life seduces. The beauty of its ugliness makes Tahir care for it. The filth of the streets, the pollution in the air, the bitterness of the cold, the blankness of the walls and the apathy of strangers, all of these elements coalesce as a strange machine. Through familiarity with its estrangement, it comes to feel like a place where making a life is possible. The jumble of Uyghur urbanism, dusty streets, calls to kebab and to prayer are still there, but the future is opening up to a concrete world of “stubborn streets, angry cars, glaring lamps, immoral roads, lonely trash, beautiful dungeons, naked concrete.” This is Tahir Hamut’s Ürümchi.

Here are excerpts from poems about the city by Tahir Hamut:

The latest issue of Banango Street is not the only place where Tahir’s work has appeared. Joshua L. Freeman, a doctoral student at Harvard University, has also translated and published his work in Gulf Coast, Crazyhorse, The Berkeley Poetry Review and Words Without Borders. Many of these stunning poems from the 1990s and early 2000s are focused on Tahir’s attachments to the places he came from – Kashgar and the dusty, time-worn traditions of Southern Xinjiang. They take us out of spaces of capitalist development into the deep time of Uyghur worlds. The poems I’ve chosen to highlight here are more pedestrian. They make us think about the present condition of the Uyghur every day. But they still make us wonder, how does the past live in the present?

Beige Wind is Darren Byler, an academic in Seattle. He will be posting under his real name on his website The Art of Life in Chinese Central Asia, which attempts to recognize and create dialogue around the ways minority people create a durable existence, and, in turn, how these voices from the margins implicate all of us in simultaneously distinctive and connected ways.

|Dispatches from Xinjiang Archives|

The Naisbitts with Ken and Tenniel Chu at the world’s largest golf resort, where the seminar took place

Kneeling over the toilet at the clubhouse of the “largest golf course in the world,” I’m furiously vomiting gray liquid. It is, most likely, the result of dodgy alcohol from the previous night; then again, it might be the 90-minute speech I just heard from the husband-and-wife American “futurists” as they remorselessly praised China again and again and again. Hard to tell.

I’ve nothing particularly against Westerners that end up as apologists for the Chinese government. I can see how it happens, even indulged in some myself. In my early mid-twenties years in China, my teaching days, students would occasionally disarm me by asking my thoughts on China’s political system. I would stutter that things were probably getting better… China was unique… complicated… it was easy to criticize. Mine was a shitty answer, informed by a misplaced blend of politeness, sincerity and fear of being shot; while I believed that the arc of the universe was long and full of bastards, I hoped it might also bend toward justice. But that was 2008 – the heady days of that great modernizer and moderate comrade, President Hu Jintao.

Still, there are apologists. And there are Apologists.

I doubt many readers will be that familiar with John Naisbitt, or his 1980s Megatrends franchise. But back when it was “Morning in America,” Naisbitt’s book Megatrends (1982) sold the best part of 14 million copies and was widely hailed as having predicted “the Information Age.” Now this aging visionary is embedded in China, and I was eager to see his predictions for an Asian-Pacific century.

In hindsight, I’d have been better off staying at home, reading straight from the Communist Party copybook (you know what they say: starve a cold, feed a fever, Xinhua a hangover).

John and Doris Naisbitt

Sitting in the bowels of a huge, illegal golf resort, situated just outside Guangdong’s fourth most famous city (sorry Foshan – I have you marked as five), Naisbitt, 86, with his younger Austrian wife and co-author, Doris, went through a list of central office memes – “hostile” Western media (a constant refrain); the decline of the West; the inevitable rise of China; its meritocratic leadership; the ineffable glory of the Chinese Dream.

The latter was particularly harped on, probably due to its close association with President Xi Jinping. Apparently, it’s like the American Dream but Chinese, so quite unique. At the no-fee seminar, entitled The Global Game Change Talks China, I further learned that Xi’s latest edict to build a “New Silk Road” was a monumental task of a kind never before conceived, and perhaps never again. Forget about the old Silk Road – the Naisbitts compared Xi’s one to the moon landings. Three times.

All this was ostensibly in aid of the couple’s latest book, Global Game Change: How the Global Southern Belt Will Reshape Our World, published last January (Chinese only, alas). But it’s difficult for me to give you a proper appraisal of the book’s central thesis here. Rather than iterating this global transformation in any practical terms, the Naisbitts simply cloved to tired Party maxims: the most specific takeaway was that the “Global Southern Belt” – a term previously unfamiliar to this news buff, but roughly equating to Africa, South America, and China – is going to completely change the way the world works, because that is where the major economic growth lies; not in Europe or North America. The theory could be a lot more sophisticated than that, and probably is, but nothing in the seminar suggested so.

What Naisbitt did emphasize, though, were his credentials.“The Financial Times said I did not get even a single thing wrong,” Naisbitt noted at several points, referring to the original Megatrends. But 1982 was a long time ago. Since then, his career has had two main phases.

First, dining out on Megatrends. Spin-offs include Reinventing the Corporation: Transforming Your Job and Your Company for the New Information Society (1985); Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s (1990); Global Paradox: The Bigger the World Economy, the More Powerful its Smallest Players (1994); and Megatrends Asia: Eight Asian Megatrends That Are Reshaping Our World (1996).

From 1996, Naisbitt entered Phase Two: China. According to Naisbitt legend, on meeting a fawning President Jiang Zemin…

I said: “President Jiang, Taiwan is a small story. But it tells it very well. China has a big story; it’s a pity it’s being told poorly.”

President Jiang thought for a moment and said: Why don’t you tell this story?

Naisbitt eagerly took up Jiang’s offer, and performed about as badly as it’s possible to do. China’s Megatrends dropped in 2010 and was soundly thrashed by reviewers both in China and abroad (“Its depth is even less than an educated staff at the lowest level of the propaganda department,” noted one Chinese reviewer; another observed: “To put it plainly, it is propaganda. There is no intellectual value in it.”) Naisbitt subsequently dropped off the English-language map, but has kept his mainland publisher busy with 2012’s Innovation in China: The Chengdu Triangle and, latterly, Global Game Change.

A universal criticism of China’s Megatrends was its piss-poor research methods (as one reviewer noted, “[the Naisbitts] hired dozens of students and instructed them to comb provincial [state] newspapers… Using this pile of ‘objective facts’ to understand China in a new way”). When asked about his research on Global Game Change this time, Naisbitt gives a vigorous response: “Talking to people. That is the way to do it. Get in on the ground and actually talk to people. It’s more visceral. We have spoken with hundreds of people in China from all over the place.” In which case, where is the variety of opinion, the diversity, the doubt? Why does everything from their lips sound like a Communist Party self-help tape?

Asked by a Hong Kong journalist about the city’s place in the world after the Occupy Central movement of 2014, Doris smoothly interjected before John could respond: “Hong Kongers have got to learn to push, but not push too much.” She then switched topics to emphasize the importance that China “tells the world of its beauty,” and how much of the world, for example, was not even aware of the pure, natural beauty of the city she was talking in right now.

I glanced around, making sure of my surroundings: a second, probably third-tier city that barely existed 40 years ago, utterly devoid or depreciated of any natural beauty at all. Later she told another exasperated interviewer, “The likes of what China is going through now is more significant than the Reformation.”

For as long as China has fumbled at “telling its story,” there has been a fawning foreigner willing to try his hand, accepting its coin while turning a blind eye. From Edgar Snow via Robert Kuhn to more recent let-us-welcome-our-new-masters evangelists, such as Martin Jacques and his bargain-basement Marxist colleague John Ross, the formula is the same – access in exchange for acquiescence. Having established the Naisbitt Institute in Tianjin, and been largely ridiculed outside Chinese media for his output since, Naisbitt is perhaps the granddaddy of them all. But what does it profit a man, etc.?

That is what I wonder as Naisbitt, who makes his way to the podium with obvious care and difficulty, winds down his talk. Apparently, he has other engagements in other cities to come – where he gets the energy from is anybody’s guess. Although he has the beard and former build of a Victorian polar explorer, Naisbitt looks faintly exhausted at the meet-and-greet after. He asks if I have read his latest book, and I politely answer that my Chinese reading is not up to scratch. “Don’t worry, we have that problem too,” he kindly tells me, and, for a moment, it sounds a little like he hasn’t read his own book. (I briefly imagine Naisbitt being told by some mid-ranking official what is going on with his next book, how much he’ll be paid, what the talking points are, as he politely nods away and looks forward to lunch.)

Blandishments from those within the system are part of the game. When an economic aide to the leadership told the Wall Street Journal at Davos that, “China is blessed with the strong and long-term focused leadership of President Xi Jinping, the best leader in the world,” the reaction is to snort. But there’s also a wince at the evident requirement for the wise but wretched official, forced to spout such dismal obsequies. No such charity can be afforded to the foreign water-carrier, however, whose motives, devoid of political or ideological imperative, are typically base.

The thing is, Naisbitt must on some level believe everything he says. What else could possibly possess a man of that age to spend his twilight years as a lickspittle attraction, wheeled around various Chinese backwaters bombastically mouthing propaganda? But I wonder who else does – surely not the propaganda chieftains, who have so little confidence in what they’re saying that they fall over foreign mouthpieces to speak on their behalf? On the way out, I ask a straitlaced journalist from Shenzhen Daily what she thought of the whole thing. “Too pro-China,” she replied. “Boring… The government will like it.”

The author is an itinerant filmmaker in South China. Additional reporting by BJC editor-at-large RFH.

Protestors in Hong Kong clashed with police in the early morning hours today, reportedly over the removal of illegal street food vendors in Mong Kok. The AP says the violence was the worst in the city since the pro-democracy protests of 2014.

In the nearly 10-minute video above, protesters are seen hurling bricks, glass bottles, and other objects at police. Something gets lit on fire around the 5:30 mark.

SCMP reports that running street battles lasted about six hours, and that police fired two warning shots into the air.

Even as late as 8am, an angry mob could be spotted at the intersection of Sai Yee Street and Shantung Street, continuing to hurl bricks and glass bottles into the police lines as curious residents watched from the bleachers and commuters walked to work.

And here’s AP again on the early fallout:

Acting District Commander Yau Siu-kei said 23 men and one woman were arrested on suspicion of assaulting and obstructing officers, resisting arrest and public disorder. The arrested were as young as 17 and as old as 70. Police said 48 officers were hurt by glass and flying objects and confirmed that two warnings shots were fired.

Monday was the first full day of the lunar new year. The street vendors of Hong Kong, even those operating without licenses, have traditionally been ignored during the holidays, and it’s unclear the reasons for the crackdown this year.

Hong Kong’s annual Chinese New Year Victoria Harbor fireworks show is scheduled for tonight. It’ll continue as planned, with extra security.

CNN has some photos of the Mong Kok riots:

Ursula Gauthier exiting China from Beijing Capital International Airport (photo via Fred Dufour, @freddufour_afp)

Ursula Gauthier, erstwhile Beijing correspondent for the French newsweekly L’Obs, left China for good in the early hours of January 1. It was not, as they say, of her own volition.

When the clock struck midnight on 2015, Gauthier’s press visa expired and was not up for renewal. According to official organs, she had offended the Chinese people with her November 18 article written in the aftermath of the November 13 terrorist attacks on Paris. Gauthier’s refusal to publicly apologize for remarks concerning China’s attempts to link Paris with its own problems in Xinjiang was taken as the final straw.

But her departure merely concluded a weeks-long saga of intimidation and mudslinging directed from the highest reaches of China’s propaganda and foreign affairs departments (a typical example here). In a statement, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC) summarized the campaign against Gauthier, in which her photograph and address were published on a military forum, and expressed its unqualified disgust: “Insinuating that Ms. Gauthier supports terrorism is a particularly egregious personal and professional affront with no basis in fact.”

Indeed, on the basis of this (to say the least) unbecoming treatment of an accredited journalist, foreign correspondents have presented a united front, whatever they might have thought – and privately grumbled about – the substance of Gauthier’s piece. So let us be as similarly bold, so there’s no confusion: China’s official response to Ursula Gauthier’s piece in L’Obs is puerile, petty, and idiotic.

It can’t be said enough: expelling journalists for their work is not only a bad look – puerile, petty, idiotic, one might say – but terrible policy. As this excellent China Law and Policy blog post explains, Beijing has used the typically broad strokes of its Foreign Media Regulations to libel Gauthier as “championing terrorism,” offering a pathetic veneer of legality to its shit fit, and signaling a re-hardening of attitudes toward any who dare approach the invisible red lines of China reportage (ethnic policy, finances of the leadership, etc). It’s interesting to wonder whether Gauthier’s visa would have been affected if her article came out in June – six months before she needed an extension – as China renews all press credentials at the end of the calendar year; certainly, the timing benefitted her critics. Still, if Gauthier’s expulsion was meant to be a warning, it’s not likely it’ll rattle journalists worth their salt: within days of the announcement came a New York Times report entitled “Xinjiang Seethes Under Chinese Crackdown.”

But nor is any journalist willing to ask serious questions of Gauthier’s reporting, for fear of validating the response. Unfortunately, this code of silence – though broken quite frankly in private – is not only sketchy ethics (“We always report fairly and objectively – unless it’s one of us”), it’s a gift to Chinese propagandists who prefer their critics to be a homogenous, hostile mass – “Western media” – than an independent and wholly diverse group of earnest scrutineers.

Gauthier’s article – her English translation can be found here, via China Digital Times – was fatally flawed in one way: she failed to differentiate between terrorism – defined as the violent targeting of innocent civilians for political purposes – and Terrorism™, the post-9/11 brand, which is an empty shell of counterproductive rhetoric.

China wanting in on Terrorism’s™ endless war should not surprise anybody, because that “war” – for all its ceaseless costs and stupidity – is a stirring political success. Of course China’s ruthlessly savvy and shrewd politicians would like to be a recognized component of a globally legitimized campaign against Extremism. And naturally, when a journalist calls them out, they call her a hypocrite, kick her out of the country, and create a poll that asks, “Do you support expelling the China-based French journalist who championed terrorism,” then relish in the fact that 94% of respondents said yes. The War on Terror™ in the United States, by the way, has led to discrimination, censorship, lunacy, nationally televised bigotry, forfeited civil liberties, increased militarism, violence, and a real war that cost trillions and radicalized countless. But who cares, right? TERRORISM.™

In attacking China’s rhetoric on Terror™, Gauthier could have done herself a service by pointing out that this rhetoric is US-born and incredibly dumb. It’s not about using different yardsticks for China vs. “The West” – those yardsticks all suck. How is China’s War on Terror™ different than any other country’s? It’s not – it’s equally pathetic.

But Gauthier’s other, bigger mistake was the following passage, which – and many reporters, even those who vehemently support Gauthier’s cause, will admit this – veers too far from any factual basis to be considered good journalism:

But, bloody though it was, the Baicheng attack had nothing in common with the 13^th November attacks. In fact it was an explosion of local rage such as have blown up more and more often in this distant province whose inhabitants, turcophone and Muslim Uyghurs, face pitiless repression. Pushed to the limit, a small group of Uyghurs armed with cleavers set upon a coal mine and its Han Chinese workers, probably in revenge for an abuse, an injustice or an expropriation.

“Probably in revenge for an abuse, an injustice or an expropriation” is a sentence that will flunk you out of Journalism 101. (And how could these coal miners, among the most disenfranchised and vulnerable group of workers in China, possibly have it coming?) Even if this was a magazine column, where there’s room for occasional editorializing, the speculation probably outreaches the research. Ignoring this simply reinforces the “Us and Them” dynamic so beloved of state media’s criticism of the “Western media.”

And Gauthier’s kicker:

China is unlikely to win the sort of cooperation from the US and Europe that it garnered after September 11^th. Given the smothering control over Chinese society and territory that the authorities enjoy, it is equally unlikely that Islamic State jihadists will link up with infuriated Xinjiang residents. But so long as the Uyghurs’ situation continues to get worse, China’s magnificent mega-cities will be vulnerable to the risk of machete attacks.

Seen in light of the Baicheng attacks – in which scores of coal miners were knifed to death – the phrase “China’s magnificent mega-cities will be vulnerable to the risk of machete attacks” reads as tone-deaf, and dangerously close to the sentiment, Maybe they deserved it. (Gauthier doesn’t say those words, and maybe she would never try to imply it, but it’s a sentiment that some people hold, and that disembodied sentiment lurks in the context of what Gauthier did write.) For the record, there’s a way to say “repression can radicalize the marginalized” without sounding callous.

Should Gauthier have been expelled for publishing this? Absolutely not. Xinjiang is a place of swirling ethnic tension, where many Uyghurs have legitimate fears of “being labeled ‘a terrorist,’” as BJC columnist Beige Wind wrote last month. But the issue is with the label itself, and the War on Terror.™

China is not the first – and won’t be the last – country to politicize a tragedy. (They certainly could have picked a better time than post-Paris to point at their own terrorism problem, particularly a massacre they were more than happy to suppress at the time.) Then again, they didn’t come up with the original terms for the War on Terror™, and seem to have only the faintest understanding of what it entails. Blame them roundly for expelling Gauthier, yes. But let’s remember that they’re merely parroting a flawed rhetoric, one that a significant number of leaders probably don’t believe themselves, except for the political benefits that they deem theirs to share.

Happy holidays, everybody!

The author, in The Den circa 1999, wearing a wig for reasons unclear and not committed to memory.

Beijing has no use for your nostalgia. But when news that The Den was closing reached abroad last week it warranted a moment of reflection.

I have not set foot in The Den since 2002, and from the sounds of reports from Beijing this week, that was for the better. The Den, a European sports bar? That’s what Hidden Tree was for. Then again, Zhang Yimou makes CPC propaganda now.

Early Sanlitun was a dynamic, rogue, multicultural municipal experiment. And The Den, for a time, was its prince.

When The Den opened in 1997 it was a fresh, sexy, low-lights nook that evoked both opium den romance and illegal speakeasy raucousness. Today this bar-with-Mandarin-characteristics design — red lacquer and carved wood — is replicated in countless pubs across China as well as every Shanghai Tang boutique. New York City’s Pearl River Market sells for cheap the design elements that made The Den unique when it opened. In 1997, Beijing’s framed 1920s cigarette girl antique ads were all real and Alan Chan was just some guy in Hong Kong making retro postcards.

The Den combined two things Sanlitun revelers had already proved they wanted. The refinement of Jazzya and the drunken youthful abandon of Poacher’s unfussy dance floor. (This was the first, illegal, fire-trap Poachers on north Sanlitun before it moved into Chaoyang Park.)

The rugby brutes listening to Van Morrison had Durty Nellie’s, and the moody sophisticates giddy to bump into Cui Jian or Kaiser Kuo had Jam House. The horny old men had Maggie’s (and, honestly, 90% of the other bars in Beijing). The expats blinded by the optimism of youth and excited by a future in which their adventure in China was meaningful had The Den.

The Den’s owner, Meng Tong, was the closest Beijing will probably ever have to Rick. A friendly and handsome Chinese rake with a mysterious backstory, Meng was a presence over whom even the foreign girls swooned. (Too bad, ladies, at the time Meng was dating the daughter of the US ambassador.)

I spent no small amount of time with Meng in those early years. My roommate and I launched a monthly networking event — Young Professionals Happy Hour — and often held it at The Den. For a time, The Den also sold some of our hats and bags under the label The Chopstick Factory. More than once I jumped behind the bar and served free drinks to crowds swaying shoulder to shoulder, all with Meng’s blessing. One night, we convinced a traveling Hawaiian hula troop to drop by The Den and perform. To promote the event we “borrowed” a neon palm tree from the theater department at the International School of Beijing (then at the Holiday Inn Lido). The crushing crowd and ensuing half-riot ended with the Hawaiians fleeing into Ernie’s next door (formerly Frank’s).

And the dancing. Oh the dancing. The Den doesn’t have dancing anymore? What good is it then?

Unlike the cavernous, airline hanger dance halls popping up then (Big Ball; Nightman), The Den was tight. In fact, The Den was too small with ceilings too low to really be a dance space at all, which is what made it a perfect dance space. It was before good DJs came to Beijing, so dancers pinballed off each other in the tight upstairs to whatever the terrible hits of the day were, from the Spice Girls to Ricky Martin. If you bet me The Den played “Mambo Number 5” eight times in one night I would hold my money. Santana and Rob Thomas provided the soundtrack for tipsy young lawyers grinding on diplomatic contractors hoping to someday pass the foreign service exam. Nobody could tell what was the sweat and what was the spilled gin and tonics, and nobody cared. When Chumbawumba got knocked down (but got up again) the floor felt like it might collapse. And it being China, it might have been close. And if it did, well, we were going to the downstairs bar for a refill soon anyway.

The Den’s momentum was not sustainable, of course. Even by 2000, its popularity was ebbing, eclipsed by nearby haunts in the shadow of Workers Stadium, like the Havana Club and Vic’s, the latter having been opened by Meng himself.

Fun at the early Den was not just its unpredictability but also its inclusion. Unlike the predator-prey dynamics of most of the period’s expat bars, The Den was home to young professionals both Chinese and foreign. Students who grabbed a miandi (面包车 taxis) over from the west side universities rubbed shoulders with Chinese junior associates at foreign firms, expat interns at NGOs, and China Hands-in-training. Chinese and expat colleagues now often socialize together, but in 1997 that was rare. But not rare at The Den. Unlike the crowds at other Sanlitun nightspots, a surprising number of expats in The Den spoke at least a workable amount of Mandarin. The in-it-togetherness of the early Den created an atmosphere of respect, if a naughty one.

Abe Sauer has lived on and off in China for a quarter of his life starting in 1987. He’s an author and on Twitter @abesauer.

Sunday, December 13, 2015: The Den’s final night

Since 1997 in Beijing, it’s been possible to answer “Where can I get a really nasty Old Fashioned and a 900-gram burger at 5am?” “Who’s showing the goat-wrestling qualifiers?” and “What happened to my phone?” with the same words: The Den. Last weekend, all that changed. Seventeen years after President Jiang Zemin ordered the Chinese military to give up its illegally owned commercial enterprises, local units in Beijing have begun to reluctantly comply (further closures have already been announced). As of Monday,  the city’s only 24-hour all-in-one sports bar, restaurant, short-time hotel, crisis-counseling centre, divorced men’s networking club, Pattaya tribute venue and dipsomaniacal dog whistle is no more.*

The Den… shut?

“A continuing expansion of competition and a slowing economy may both be playing a role in the changing of Beijing’s bar scene,” reckoned the Beijinger when the news surfaced some weeks ago. Competition? Slowing economy? Changing bar scene – The Den? All that seemed grist to its mill. The Den was not only recession and puke-proof, it was the kind of place people went to because they were unemployed. One doubts its patrons gave much of a passing care about “scenes,” artisanal infusions or whatever pop-up concepts make the long, hard-seat journey from the West to Beijing. The craft beer revolution was something that just happened to other bars; The Den was popularizing gastro-enteritis long before the gastro pub humped its way into the local consciousness. To the world outside it may have been 2015, but over in the People’s Republic of Denezuela, it was perpetually 2007.

For a long time I didn’t get the appeal of the place, finding it always populated by aging sports enthusiasts whose faces had exploded. My mistake was timing: I was coming in at sane hours, like lunchtime or 11pm on a Thursday. You needed to hit The Den at a very exact sweet spot. Peak Den was between the clubs closing on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday and the rest of the world getting up and going about its respectable business: say, 4 am – 7 am. This was when the magic happened. There aren’t many bars in Beijing where it feels dangerous to get chummy with the regulars after a certain hour, but The Den firmly ranked as one. For all its friendly aggression, actual fights were rare, though the staff were regularly called upon to remind emotional patrons how to leave. Closing time: You don’t have to go home, but maybe you should, because it’s midday and you’re hitting on barstools and frightening children.

Here’s an Iranian man being helped to the door on a quiet Thursday afternoon

Tributes have been pouring in since the news broke, ranging from pithy (“Wut?”) to prosaic (“Fuck”). What was it about this place that inspired such poetry? What ensured its runner-up success in such categories of the Beijing Cream Bar and Club Awards as Bar Where a Lay is Most Likely Followed by Postcoital Triste, Probably Because You Paid for a Hooker (2^nd place, 2012) and Worst Place to Go if You’re Feeling Mildly Suicidal (2^nd place, 2012), before stealing the crown at 2013’s ceremony for Most Likely to Encounter a Cockeyed Sot Who Harbors Bad, Bad Intentions?

What was the Definitive Den experience?

The people

Sure, there was the half-price pizza, the five-hour Happy Hour, the football, the fact that it was open. But for many, it was about the people: you’d get the full gamut, and gamut is definitely the word we need here. Tourists would wash up here at 4 am and not believe their luck. Surly Eastern European dancers and Gongti shift workers, Aeroflot crews on layover, aging expats who could remember visiting the Goose & Duck Ranch; Chinese students visiting in the mistaken belief that this was a suitable venue to bring someone you hadn’t slept with yet; visiting scholars; Tier-88 entrepreneurs pressing business cards into the hands of elderly Australian men; borderline schizophrenics; saturnine Germans that arrived at 3 am to watch Munich Bayern battle for the third-place playoffs of the Hofmeister Cup (who drank four pints and spoke to no one); expat sporting societies almost as old as The Den; the entire cast of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet ; angry Russians who’d been exiled from the Russian exile community… all were Denizens.

Denders

Because The Den never closed, it invited the most ridiculous benders: Benders seemingly without end, benders that would leave your taste buds numbed for a week. 24 hours in The Den? Child’s play.

A Russian man expresses his love of The Den

Hookers

Probably the most overplayed aspect of Den life. Sure, in the wee hours, there was usually someone happy to meet your glassy-eyed gaze and steadily hold it; the odd brass; the occasional strumpet or two. But The Den wasn’t exactly the Red Mansion. More a last-chance saloon for Nigerian baby mamas on their way to a sweet retirement gig jacking-off pensioners.

The ‘Denu’

A multipage, pleather-bound tome with a nice heft to it, covering a wide array of, uh, “cuisines,” The Den’s food was part of the venue’s core appeal: No nonsense. Solid. Unpretentious. If you’re down with The Den’s food, then you’re all right with me – you’re OK.

This beef tenderloin, priced at a gentle 68 yuan, was Tao’s last Den meal and supposed to come with mash but they’d run out. He didn’t mind

Unlike most restaurants, The Den’s picture menu was unafraid to dramatically lower customers’ expectations with blurred, two-megapixel shots of congealing sauces atop lonely cuts of meat, captioned with unpunctuated, unadorned prose describing the various ingredients. If a menu could be said to have a “voice,” then The Den was Samuel Beckett reading aloud government warnings from a carton of Mongolian filterless cigarettes. Thus, the actual quality of the grub was a consistent surprise. Hits included the pizza, steak, sausages and mash, and, of course, “Eggs Norway,” the classy European breakfast choice for any true international Denizen. On the other hand, the “Lamb donner pitta roll” [sic] was a diplomatic incident waiting to happen. For my final repast on Sunday, I spun the wheel and chose the Corned-Beef Hash with Sweet Peas for the first time. Like a chef on condemned-man’s-last-meal duty, The Den produced something thoroughly digestible that I would, like the venue, never revisit again.

What are your thoughts, Beijing? Be a true Denizen and have no shame while sharing your best (and worst) Den moments. (Feel free to email.) Whatever your story, it’s not gonna beat this:

*The Den will be back, don’t you worry. But for now, if you see a fifty-year-old bleary-eyed British man tottering about and banging on the locked doors of Gung-Ho Pizza at 4 am, give him a hug.