This video is such a wonderfully awful capsule of urban life in a lower-tier Chinese city. (Specifically Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, in this case.)
At the start of this video, the man behind the camera says, "Just like Chinese people, to fight over pictures."
But just over pictures? Or is this an expression of a deeper discontent, a deformity of neither behavior nor genetics but something more fundamental and universal?
In the summer of 2012, 46,000 (some estimate up to 60,000) Uyghurs gathered regularly for three hours of interethnic agonistic struggle. They came from hundreds of miles away, old bearded men, rotund mothers, young men and women clad in sky blue. They came to engage in identity politics, but even more important, they came because for 90 minutes in that southern Ürümchi stadium, they were free to be proud of their complex subjectivities.
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!” – Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being ~
"It's not just children who like it. The core value of the rubber duck is to bring back childlike innocence to all of us, especially weary adults." – Zeng Hui, head of the Beijing Design Week Organizing Committee
