This unpaid internship at BJC is becoming a tricky business, especially as one now has to negotiate the new raft of advertising taken aboard. I was invited to join Fall of the Third Reich Tours, no doubt with Doyen historian Antony Beevor acting as tour guide. I can just see it now. At the end of the tour, Mr. Beevor ushering everybody into the memorabilia shop to buy SS keepsakes, and then quietly trousering his commission. We also get to Meet Chinese Lady to warm up you soul. Obviously, the copy writer here was referring to Gay Chevara’s East-West experiences in the lust department.

After dissing the guy’s idea of sartorial style, one can only recommend Patrick Chovanec’s mid-December 2012 analysis of the clash of the economic titans over auditing requirements being enforced by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Chinese firms listed on the US stock market. Chovanec brings all the threads together in a detailed and elegantly written manner. And his conclusion – ” … each action (the SEC) takes brings the United States and China one step closer towards an ugly financial divorce” – shifts the focus away from all those military war games op pieces which clutter The Diplomat and its accompanying discussions, which basically boil down to mine is bigger than yours. Now, if you’ve just visited your local Chinese press stand and purchased every glossy military hardware magazine on offer and still haven’t got decent high, try the China Defence Blog.

Sites which function as aggregators or news vacuum cleaners have their uses, I suppose. They are always selective, induce no flame wars and are the last resort of the lazy or those without access to Google News. However, they should be avoided, since you would have missed Links: The International Journal of Socialist Renewal and got to read Paul Le Blancs keynote address on Lenin’s Thought in the Twenty-First Century at a conference held at Wuhan University in October last year. It’s a name-dropping and very long Cooks Tour of commie thought leaders which will challenge your very conditions of existence. Note to the organizers: why no mention that Rosa Luxemburg (the subject of their 2006 conference) was viewed by her contemporary and straight-laced co-revolutionists as a woman who gave fooling around a bad name? Better still, this journal offered you the opportunity to join the The Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network’s solidarity brigade to Venezuela – i.e. help reelect Chavez and his life support device – at a mere $4,500 for two weeks.

Anyway, back to the normal world, two relative newcomers and a fixture come to mind.

The mission statements provided by The China Hotline and SinoScoop make similar claims. The former goes for an agricultural metaphor, aiming to “separate the wheat from the chaff,” while the latter seeks to “cut through the cacophony of China news by highlighting the most important items related to the PRC,” and then present within context. I would opt for the latter since it provides some very handy maps of China and has links to the central organs of PRC government and its ministries. This is very useful stuff and recalls those two tremendous organisational charts found on the front and back inside covers of Craig McGregor’s The Party. Probably a good bookend site would be China Vitae, which contains a database and mugshots of some 4,000 Chinese leader types.

However, the above are lite-on news gatherers when compared to Sinoscism: A China Newsletter, run by Bill Bishop, an individual who claims to be some sort of consultant and venture capitalist with OPM. Not one to hide his light under a bushel, you can read his CV here. However, it is his Disclosures which capture one’s attention. Five densely scripted paragraphs of weasel words which translate into “if you read my newsletter and your finances go pear-shaped, don’t look at me.” Reading this document is a bit like swimming through wet cement, and I’m sure there’s even an “out” clause should one of his cakes be discovered to contain something foreign and nasty. Moreover, he “was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the top 100 foreign policy ‘Twitterati’ and by Danwei as Twitter ‘Model Worker of the Year’ for 2012.” More likely, two prime candidates of the old world order who should lead the parade when the tumbrels roll and the crowd jeer. CORRECTION: Bishop doesn’t claim to be a “venture capitalist with OPM,” and the cakes are, of course, his wife’s. They would never contain anything foreign or nasty.

Getting over the class wars, a google search is always more satisfying, especially when you encounter Mark Zuckerberg spouting the Party line:

The main similarity is a fanatical insistence that people should have only one persona that follows them online and off. “You have one identity,” Mr. Zuckerberg told author David Kirkpatrick a few years back. “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

This is creepy stuff from the fb Toad who has reversed the natural order of things. Doing some very loose sociology, the idea of agency implies that individuals have the freedom to act independently and, if they wish, the ability to adopt a number of personas in their lives. A good dad and loving partner at home, a right bastard at work, and something else again on the net. Zuckerberg and the Party would like to limit personal freedoms/HRs by imposing real-life identity, digital regulation and something we may as well call corporate Stalinism. Life is fraught enough already without this new imposition. These are no-fun guys who want to tame the Wild West and rein in individual egos and personal conceits.

In the world of blog conceits, few have exceeded the ambitions of General Yan Xishan, who was obviously a Beijing resident due to his references to the Juicy Pants army. He riffed on the Wiki entry of the real “Yan Xishan, (8 October 1883 – 22 July 1960) … a Chinese warlord who served in the government of the Republic of China. Yan effectively controlled the province of Shanxi from the 1911 Xinhai Revolution to the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War.”

Unlike the real Yan Xishan who displayed reforming, modernizing tendencies, The Blogging “Model Governor” was a gross creation who spent a lot of me-time on his giant kang surrounded by his harem and empty liquor bottles. At one point in the blog before it was discontinued, The General’s Internet persona mentioned his attempt to subvert the world of historical fact, after Wiki fact-checkers blocked him from writing his caricature into the original entry. Great past fun.

My Laowai, another blog claiming to have some relationship to the past, made its appearance in April 2007. It began on a semi-serious and satirical note, but soon devolved into a racist screed that just continues and continues. Obviously, it provides a venting space for embittered expats dealing with continuous staffing and logistics problems, as well as more general complaints about quality of life issues in China. Not worth a link, since there are far better sites on lifestyle issues available, namely China Dialogue. The London editor is Isabel Hilton, who also writes for The Guardian, while the Beijing Branch consists of some of China’s leading environmental investigators. Its real value resides in the fact that its reports come in both English and Mandarin. Thinking of pissing off back home because you’re concerned about tomatoes with the same steroid count as a Bulgarian Weigh Lifting Team, try this read on China’s questionable organic food boom. Finally, Isidor’s Fugue excels again with some tremendous photos of a recent trip to Malaysia.

|Blogging the Bloggers Archives|

Aside from family animosities, hangovers and relief in seeing in another year relatively unscathed, there is little worth celebrating in the Sino-English gulag. Drawing up lists of the best and worst sites is a fool’s errand. Ditto content. It is as if this digital corner has been leached of enthusiasm and experiment. Site lords and their communities are sticking to their respective mission statements like grim death. Quite a lot of shared content with different top and bottom commentary. All in all, a pretty depressing picture. I also suspect that many folk simply overestimate the importance of the China English digital world. You could mount a strong argument that it runs a poor second, when compared to the Farsi (Iranian/Persian) English inter-tubes which are bursting with health, despite the best efforts by Ahmadinajad and his turbaned pals.

Why so? Content fatigue. Or more likely, you can write the commentary and then wait for the right news report to present itself. Also, expat folk marry, return home and get a life. Chinese contributors enter the SOE world of work, and also get a life (marriage and mortgage). Whatever. The above situation cannot be explained away as a technical issue. WordPress is ever-expanding as a publishing platform, free to use and, as a multimedia median, has its best years in front of it. It requires few technical skills, and you get a major high after hitting the launch button, i.e. being able to see your misguided opinions and obsessions in instant print. And this optimism about online scribbling comes from a digital immigrant.

If there are any new, interesting or quirky sites lurking in the background, please advise. BTW. Hating on African music and black folk generally is despicable, and for the initiated, there is another side to Japanese culture.

Having mentioned two of the Amigoes, let’s focus on the third, namely Stan at China Hearsay who has been writing on China Law, Business and Economics for eons, and from a neo-liberal and legalistic framework. He dissects corporate behaviour with the skill of a mortuary technician, and is not above a bit of jeering, having described the HH posse as “chemically imbalanced.” Surprised to note that Stan wished his readers Merry Christmas. This is a bit rich, coming from a guy who prides himself on being a militant atheist who positively enjoys kicking the Christers. However, Stan’s attention to the legal niceties is beyond the point when you get reads like this from Spiegel Online.

If you have a strong constitution and the ability to digest a continuous diet of official ChiCom moral uplift, Just Recently’s Weblog should be a mainstay. JR, aficiando of shortwave radio, cold war warrior and gentleman farmer, provides diverse translations of various official Chinese media as well as discussions dealing with its pre-Commie past, all of which are beyond my pay scale. Up there with China Media Watch, but marred by his secret agenda of wanting to attract followers to his crazed Kat Kult. Bizarre stuff from a serious voice on China’s domestic political affairs.

Another schizophrenic site is SinoMondiale and its little brother site Sino-NK, run by Adam Cathcart, an academic who abuses his sabbatical leave arrangements to play cello in various classical formulas around the world including China. SinoMondiale is an eclectic mix of comment on diplomatic policy, sorties into deep Cold War history and comprehensive lists of academic references for those folk seeking to complete PhDs with the minimum of effort. Tremendous photography and examples of poster art. These sites obviously attract the erudite. How else would one become aware of North Korean Economy Watch, a dedicated site which should assist you in organizing your pension plan? Similarly, there is china Avant-garde, where Paul Manfredi focuses on the aesthetics of modern Chinese film, art and poetry and, you guessed it, more on Mo Yan and fatso Ai Weiwei. If you’re going AA on tabloid titillation, begin with the above.

Every now and then one comes across a subject so sensitive that one treads very carefully, and here I refer to the practice of racial miscegenation, which I should add was made respectable by the Portuguese in Brazil and elsewhere. (Not to be outdone in the colonial world, the British offered cricket and sanitary engineering, while the French provided scholarships to their institutes of higher learning.) It is easy over time to work out which of the expat bloglords married locally to Shanghai/Beijing material girls and, reading between the lines, most of these alliances appear to be a success. While this has really pissed off the truly rabid end of the FQ set, aka Mongol Warrior, they shouldn’t feel so aggrieved, judging by this list of sites devoted to Western women who took up with Chinese guys. I was about to explore in detail, but that deep tongue wedding photo at the top of the fold was a complete turn off.

Living out in the piney woods, I’m totally cut off from all the behind the scenes agendas, perceived slights, jealousies etc. which swirl round the tabloid end of the market. A good guess is that it is probably a mix of Dallas and The Bold and the Beautiful. With this in mind, some belated due diligence on The General was called for. His twitter playground follows a mix of potential news sources, Beijing arty types and serious big cheese weblords, but I couldn’t make rhyme or reason out of his tweets. However, if it helps a guy feel crucial, what the heck. His CV is here, and it goes without saying that The General leads a dashing social life.

All this frenetic energy, broken I suppose by long bouts in sports bars watching NBA, has to amount to something, so I turned to the unpaid analytics of Alexa.com. BJC is ranked 172,523 globally and 71,318 in China, and surprise, surprise, it is big in Macao (14.5% of its total readership), probably drawing in the croupier-working girl set. Furthermore,

Compared with the overall internet population, the site’s users are disproportionally college-educated, and they tend to be childless men under the age of 35. Visitors to this site view 2.0 unique pages each day on average. The time spent in a typical visit to this site is approximately three minutes, with 73 seconds spent on each pageview…

To translate, BJC has captured a significant market share of under 35 bare branches, who have both very short attention spans and college degrees: the latter simply indicating the fact that they can spell their names correctly.

Finally, I come to the Shaun Rein-Joseph Goebbels Award for 2012. Some background. Shaun is a major league “thought leader” with a virtual office staffed by a rotating menagerie of unpaid interns, and author of a heavy tome on Chinese economic and cultural trends. A twitter island unto himself, he only follows Bill Bishop/Sinocism, a hard news site. The rest of you can plain sod off. He is also a great believer in the say-it-loud-and-often-enough school of modern mass communications.

The panel didn’t even have to form a sub-committee to arrive at a worthy recipient. Godfree Roberts, Amherst PhD, literally blitzed the field. While you have to admire the guy’s entrepreneurial vision, he has a second string to his bow, namely that of commenter on Chinese affairs. Sinostand and Seeing Red in China are but a few of the sites which have benefited from his insights. Try this example or the comment he left on this site:

The Steering Committee og 8-9 engineers is extremely honest and remarkably honest. They’ve produced a country that is increasingly prosperous, confident, and supportive (85%, according to Pew, Edelman,,and Harvard) of their government.
It’s the USA that has the corruption problem, as it’s retrogression so clearly demonstrates. What else could explain its failure? Bad luck?

Such single-mindedness and dedication. If I could devote a similar time and effort to my card cheating skills, 2013 would be the Year of the Bank Account.

|Blogging the Bloggers Archives|

The weblogs which concern us here are a mix of vanity press and sociopolitical discussion forums. But first and foremost, they are terrains where weblords attempt to manage and regulate discussion, cross-cultural differences and those rotten anarchic impulses intended to derail thread trajectory. And it goes without saying that different sites attract different digital communities. Throw in market share, monetisation (“Meet Juicyfruit: I love the hip hop and r@b. Design the handbag”), a couple of the seven deadly sins, and it’s time to discuss those About and Commenting Rules buttons.

China/Divide attempted to address the regulation issue in a democratic manner by attaching a vote up/down button alongside each comment. Okay, the conversation usually oscillated from the silly to the serious, and the voting function pandered to egos of every stripe — it was doomed to failure. Sneaky bastards opened second mail addresses to inflate their ratings. Kai Pan, one of the Amigos tasked with dealing with these sneaks, usually ended up putting IP addresses between certain ranges into moderation mode. While this identified the perp, it also pissed off the innocent. Eventually, the function was disabled and the GFW did the rest. Also, in its day, China/Divide set the standard in terms of layout and appearance, no competition.

Sticking with the Amigos, Charlie Custer tightened up his commenting rules in March 2010 (and again in September 2012) after persistent threats, entreaties and a lot of fucking bad language, all in the vain hope of elevating discussion and keeping it on topic. He took valuable time out of his budding directorial career to write this comprehensive statement on posting sins, any of which would result in partial or total deletion. Logical fallacies were definitely not on the menu, and his wiki link to this multifaceted mortal sin was enough to cow and terrify. That is, unless you had PhDs in Logic and Latin. There were Formal, Propositional, Quantificational, Formal Syllogistic, Informal, Red Herring and Conditional Fallacies to deal with. His shock and awe campaign has been a great success since it has virtually strangled discussion. Or maybe, weblogs of the type Custer helped pioneer have a finite life span.

Hidden Harmonies China Blog adopts an entirely different approach. We are initially introduced to the Editorial Team, Allen, DeWang, Melektaus et. al, and can read about their backgrounds and aspirations for The Great Red Dragon in the 21st century. For example, Melektaus “is a 1.5 generation Chinese American living in the heart of Appalachia. He received his formal education in philosophy and hopes to be travelling to China soon to do some work with educating the youth.” No Deliverance jokes, okay. DeWang comes from my home province Fujian, so it is little wonder he fucked off in 1984, and don’t be surprised if his hometown is Fujiang, aka Snakehead Central.

Before commenting, you must go to the FAQ and read their Terms of Service:

Welcome to Hidden Harmonies! Before you begin participating in Hidden Harmonies, you must read and agree to the following terms and conditions and policies, including any future amendments (collectively, “Terms of Service”):

After perusing the 10 terms, you come away with the feeling that you are either about to buy a massive publishing joint venture or sign up with Jenny Craig. Now many non-harmony folk have attempted to negotiate these terms over the years to post dissenting opinions, clarifications, etc. They have included bright young thing FOARP, Custer, Richard Burger, and all came away sounding demoralized, abused and swearing never again.

Yet, the HH posse have their moments, particularly when they champion human rights as witnessed by their take on Li Xiaojie, the iPhone shopper who got tasered by cops in a hurry to finish the shift with all their paperwork completed. There are dark threats to boycott Apple products, even after Pugster recommends the Galaxy G3. After this “call to action,” we meet john_hugo@comcast.net, the… um… fiance (comment #21):

I am from Boston. Xiaojie Li, is my fiance and the love of my life. She was burtally attacked by the police for no good reason and continues to suffer from the effects of the physical violence, the emotional trauma and the loss of her dignity. (sic)

Then things get positively surreal.

Li is likened to “a present day Rosa Parks, (because) she stood up against prejudice and injustice,” and is advised to involve the ACLU because Apple is “racially profiling Asian customers” (#23). Hugo then mistakens one of his interlocutors for the Director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) (#26). Finally, the real facts emerge after a major challenge to this convoluted drivel by some poster called The Truth (#38). Li is a Christian (surely a damning fact in itself) who owns steakhouses in China (# 38). Hugo then takes it on himself to defend Li’s honour (#54):

The fact is, that we do not yet live together yet. She is a conservative woman and has children at home.
So who cares where she sleeps? Anyway it is nobodys business what we do in private.

Forget the Terms of Agreement and the taser biz. The Li story is just another sordid Christian menage a trois divided by two continents.

Richard at Peking Duck skips the comment policy statement altogether and relies instead on a mix of personal authority and warnings to maintain order in the yard. And to his credit, the system works while generating some truly massive threads. However, I’m not sure if I like the view that a blog is like one’s house (or Pommy castle): a lounge room and therefore subject to the owner’s invitation and unstated rules. Wipe your feet, no loud throat-clearing and don’t scuff the furniture.

You get the feeling that he is rather proud of his regular trolls and their capacity to generate FQ-Western thread chatter. The poor bastards are continually told to get their heads right and not indulge in tu quoque arguments. This rejoinder has been used so often now that one suspects his rusted-on FQ posters suffer from some congenital disorder. Put simply, continuous harping on about this commenting crime has drained quoque-ism of all meaning.

We all know that Asians have a long historical record of being perfectly beastly to their own citizens and near neighbors. However, Richard conveniently forgets the fact that, in spite of its much vaunted Constitutional framework of government, Yankee Land has quite a bloody FP record over the past 40 years. Nixon and his SS divided the nation internally, while practicing warfare on an industrial scale in Southeast Asia.* The rebuttal that he was eventually brought to book and disgraced means bugger to those who were on the receiving end of bombs, napalm and defoliants. We can add Reagan and his covert financing and other support for right-wing death squads in the South Americas, plus the Bushies who drained the nation of its blood and treasure in the belief that they could socially engineer democracy in the Middle East.

Oh yes, the response. I voted Democrat, and anyway, we’ve got China under the microscope here.

Tomorrow is a big day for the Christers. You’ve met the type at Hong Kong airport. Porcine males with buzz cuts, wearing drip dry shirts and wide belts, spending their stopover time fiddling with tablets and talking loudly on mobiles. Eric at Sinostand has written a great piece on Cadres and Evangelists. As a bookend, I would go for Tom’s thoughtful piece in Seeing Red in China titled “Eastern Lightning may be a cult, but they still have rights.”** There is nothing more gratifying than watching this inter-Christian franchise war, with larger believer groups grassing on their slightly weirder competition.

And if you find yourself an orphan tomorrow, you can always hit up a google search – evangelical underground Christian cults China – and bone up on the various franchises and their doctrinal differences. I shouldn’t be flippant here, since this is an important topic which gets little blog attention as a general rule. It will be quickly forgotten once the recent spate of headlines on end-times and apocalyptic entrepreneurship enter the archives.

* This is a rehash of a point made recently on Peking Duck.
** Despite being a mainstream Christian, Tom is consistent in his application of human rights arguments.

|Blogging the Bloggers Archives|

If you were a late arrival to the Sino-English web world and entered via the wrong portals, you probably encountered a toxic mix of serious players, gunslingers with a veneer of academia, trolls, half-wits, cannon fodder and individuals burdened with monomania. And it’s pretty well a male universe with the testosterone meter ticking away and a vanity press to boot.

My first inkling of the possibilities of net scribble came thru a chance meeting with Ben Ross and his site. Despite his first teaching gig in Fujiang, arguably the most corrupt city in Fujian province, it reads like an optimistic and non-judgmental discovery complete with great pics of people and street life. And few blogsters can claim that their mother provided their first comment. Being a fan of the cheap local barber, a bit like young Master Che, his account of a month working in a hairdressing shop resonates.

Rachel Betairie used to have a site called Bendilowai before she went on to provide some great real-time reporting on the Wukan experiment. Simply cannot relocate the link, but it operated in a similar vein. Rachel wrote and photographed average families out in the boondocks, and you came away with the feeling that she became a temporary member. A sort of big sister with the language, a camera and a liking for a good old chin wag in the kitchen. No lense scrutiny of her subjects. All very unmediated and a reminder that race and cultural differences can be little consequence in the larger scheme of globalized travel.

Brian Glucroft’s photography site Isidorsfugue – the name alone arouses curiosity – also has a place in the Department of Goodness. Brian obviously has a job, something to do with technology and creativity, which involves constant travel. While he keeps his persona details well hidden, except for the fact that he is a glutton when it comes to Chinese food, he is definitely the visual recorder of street life in China today, with an occasional foray into traditional and modern Chinese architecture.

Yet to encounter a photo in which his subjects appear ill-at-ease. Commentary is presented in a neutral manner aside from the occasional complaint about his VPN. While his site doesn’t drown in comments, judging by his twitter account (the usual go-to suspects on Sino land), it must get pretty heavy traffic, and deservedly so. Worth a weekly visit, and even a comment if he captures locations which you recognise. Hint to Brian. Lighten up when you respond to a comment.

Let’s not beat around the bush. When it comes to really bloody awful sites, chinaSMACK edges out the competition and its clone China Hush. Three/four years ago threads would actually go somewhere in the intelligence department, and even the trollery and one-upsMANship was not without wit and humor. Then, the preceding sampling of remarks by the Chinese chatterati were not worth the effort expended at the keyboards. Today, the situation is reversed: threads are now populated by Western half-wits, fuck-wits and those with a long lunch break and time on their hands. It almost makes one want to sign up for a eugenics program aimed at the virtual world.

Really rat shit, murky layout. Predictable stories and an “as seen on” media list which includes every outlet in the known universe except my local community newsletter. (Western reporters must be really lazy bastards nowdays.) And the monetisation of this franchise knows no boundaries. Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Russia are now having this formula inflicted on their less intelligent net communities. I can’t wait till it extends its reach to Tajikistan and Afghanistan. While Fauna is no slouch when it comes to identifying market opportunities, I suspect one of the Three Amigos from ChinaDivide is playing a key role in the chinaSMACK boardroom.

While Charlie Custer’s site and The Peking Duck used to go head-to-head when it came to chatterati warfare, Custer is now simply going through the motions, sick of his own opinions, that of his followers, and with better things to do with his time. One thing about Custer is his political consistency, despite this ass-hole piece by a site called The Fourth Estate, by what appears to be a Canadian bilingualist. Custer’s film has been in the offing for about four years, and has now totally saturated Google search with that fact. The Global Times provides a good overview.

Heading for the third part of the title, and if you are wearing full body armour and enjoy a bit of trench warfare, The Peking Duck is the site for you. Richard’s MO. Post a serious piece of China, namely something on the Great Leap Forward, Mao or disputed islands in the Pacific Ocean, and watch the fur fly. Loawai cold war warriors duke it out with a posse of Chinese posters, most of whom live in the US. Some posts constitute a chapter of a book, and no i or t is left undotted or crossed in this take-no-prisoners, let’s-eat-the-wounded back-and-forth. Since I’ve rather blotted my copybook there lately, will return to this subject at a later date.

Turning to musical matters. I know. I Know. General Tao has two Harvard law degrees and a social life most of us would envy. However, his musical selections are fucking awful. Do we really need youtubes of the Grateful Dead and the Doobie Brothers in 2012? Hairy ’70s behemoths who should have been taken down to the bottom paddock ages ago and put out of their misery. The Tao is not the only perp.

Patrick Chovanec, Tsinghua lecturer and owner of a site which explains the mysteries of the Chinese economy, also has issues in this department. Note: pride of place on his blogroll goes to China Hush, so we should not be surprised. A few months ago, I turned on the ABC and accidentally caught a current affairs program dealing with China’s economy. Before they got down to the nitty gritty – rebalancing, bank debt, SOEs, etc. – they began with this heavy-hitter kicking backing and enjoying a bit of quality me-time in some near-campus bar. There he was, dressed like a Rotarian nursing a small beer, and doing a pretty heavy head nod to some bloody ghastly local rock band. It didn’t inspire confidence in his words of wisdom.

King Tubby also blogs. You can find him here. |Blogging the Bloggers Archives|