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

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

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

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

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

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 5, 2016

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

— roxane gay (@rgay) March 5, 2016

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

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

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

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

— The Bookworm (@BeijingBookworm) March 12, 2016

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

— The Bookworm (@BeijingBookworm) March 12, 2016

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

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

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.

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.

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.

In a recent article James Leibold, a scholar at La Trobe University in Australia, discussed the way ethnic minority struggles against police and structural violence has often been officially mislabeled “terrorism.” At the same time, in China, as in the United States, violent acts carried out by non-Muslims are read as acts of the deranged and mentally ill, but not as “terrorism.” In China, as in the United States, the lives of Muslims which are lost as a result of “terrorist” or “counter-terrorism” efforts go unnoticed and unmourned. All losses of life leave gaping holes in our human social fabric, but why are some more grievable than others? What happens when a population is terrified by the discourse of terrorism?

As in many other parts of the world, the concept of “terrorism” in China was strongly influenced by Bush-era political rhetoric. Prior to 9/11, Uyghur violence was almost exclusively regarded as “splitism.” Since 9/11, as Gardner Bovingdon has shown, Han settlers in Xinjiang have become victims of “terrorism” on a regular basis, according to official state reports. By 2004, “splitist” incidents from the previous decade were relabeled as “terrorist” incidents (Bovingdon, 120). Everything — from the theft of sheep to a land seizure protest to a fight with knives — can now be labeled as “terrorism,” as long as Uyghurs and Han are involved in the conflict. It appears as though “terrorism” (or the “three forces” continuum – separatism, extremism, terrorism, which are now understood as manifestations of the same phenomenon) has come to signify Uyghurs who are verbally and physically un-submissive or “unopen.” That is why a moderate intellectual like Ilham Tohti can receive a life sentence on the charge of “separatism.”

Clearly the American discourse of a “Global War on Terror” has set the terms of “The People’s War on Terror” in China. But it’s been deployed with more sweeping intensity in China, particularly in Xinjiang. Over the past couple of years, Uyghurs in Southern Xinjiang have told me that what they are facing now is much worse for them than the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. They told me that Uyghurs can be accused of “terrorist” sympathies, and once under “enhanced interrogation techniques” in detention — to borrow a Rumsfeldian turn of phrase — they often turn on their own neighbors and friends, offering them up as the “real terrorists,” etc. The way neighbors and family members have been pitted against each other through this process reminds them of the way students turned on their teachers and parents during the Cultural Revolution.

Making matters worse, real terrorism — if we define it as premeditated killing of civilians — indeed exists, as evidenced by the incidents in Tiananmen, Kunming, the Ürümchi train station, and Ürümchi green market over the past few years. These horrific acts of violence are unjustified under any circumstance and must be condemned. Yet we forget that hundreds of unarmed Uyghurs have been killed in protests, shot on the spot for arguing or fleeing, and thousands have been indefinitely disappeared following violent incidents.

As the anthropologist Talal Asad has noted in his book On Suicide Bombing, “The discourse of terror enables a redefinition of the space of violence in which bold intervention and rearrangement of everyday relations can take place and be governed in relation to terror” (28). The label “terrorism” has not only been used as a tool around the world to delegitimize instances of resistance that might be better understood as anti-colonial struggles, but it also allows for a sharp intensification of policing or “hard strike campaigns” among marginalized populations. As the theorist Michael Walzer has noted regarding the “peculiar evil of terrorism,” it is “not only the killing of innocent people but also the intrusion of fear into everyday life, the violation of private purposes, the insecurity of public spaces, the endless coerciveness of precaution” (in Asad, 16). The state of emergency that “terrorism” produces is especially acute among populations which have been identified as the source of “terrorism.” In this framework the anxiety that infects Uyghur lives, governed by the fear of being labeled “a terrorist,” is an example of how cruelty, rather than an ethics of care, has come to govern the world. Asad writes:

It seems to me that there is no moral difference between the horror inflicted by state armies (especially if those armies belong to powerful states that are unaccountable to international law) and the horror inflicted by its insurgents. In the case of powerful states, the cruelty is not random but part of an attempt to discipline unruly populations. Today, cruelty is an indispensable technique for maintaining a particular kind of international order, an order in which the lives of some peoples are less valuable than the lives of others and therefore their deaths less disturbing. (94)

Thinking about “terrorism,” and how it terrifies groups of people, thus opens up questions about whose lives matter. If Uyghurs are now “terrorists” until proven otherwise, when is the loss of a Uyghur life grievable?

Beige Wind runs the 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|

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kurdish forces near the Syrian battlefront

Journey to the Middle East

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We knew they were all going to be executed”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Valentina is a journalist in Beijing. Follow her @valentinaluo

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

Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

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Ed’s note: Everyone! Please meet Beijing Blend, a social media news digest / e-magazine doing very cool things both IRL (creative events, talks, etc.) and on the intranet (WeChat, namely). For the past couple of months, they’ve been uploading short videos on their YouTube page in which a rotating cast of genial hosts discuss a series* of current events. We’ll be posting them here every Tuesday. It’ll be fun. Oh, and go follow them on Twitter. –A.T.

*Or in the case of this video: Jackie Chan.

Filmed at Beijing’s Meridian Space, with hosts Daniel Epstein and Katrina Yu

Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

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Download podcast | Size: 83.8 MB

May 27 saw the gathering of several writers in The Bookworm for an event called Scotch and Stories, presented by the Anthill in collaboration with Whisky Wednesday and with support from Ai Whisky. We’re reliving that event in today’s podcast, timed with the last of those stories going online on the Anthill and The Bookworm’s launch of its new whisky menu.

The rundown:

5:10 mark: Anthony Tao with the poem “Whisky”

8:40: Daniel Tam-Claiborne story “Classifieds”

16:25: Tom Pellman story “Tiger Suit”

25:55: Karoline Kan story “The House by the River”

40:00: Kaiser Kuo story “The Hornèd Hand”

47:45: Kerryn Leitch with faux advice to laowai

55:10: Aaron Fox-Lerner story “Goodbye Joe”

The Creamcast would like to thank Popup Chinese for letting us use their studio and Great Leap Brewing for their generous support.

Download Episode 20 of The Creamcast here, or listen to it on iTunes.

|The Creamcast Archives|

Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

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SHANGHAI COCKTALES (A Memoir)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promotional image for ‘Shanghai Cocktales’

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Bueller @Bueller @Anyone… @Anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

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Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Click to enlarge

Previously in Captain Beijing | Next in Captain Beijing

About the Author | Captain Beijing Archives

Captain Beijing is a “comical strip” produced by the People’s Committee of Panel-Based Cartoon Cultural Enrichment for the purposes of modest entertainment. It is famous and popular at home and abroad, and was solemnly declared “Most Charming and Splendid China Cartoon Art.” It will appear on this website every Monday, or the cartoonist will be punished.

Click to enlarge

Previously in Captain Beijing | Next in Captain Beijing

About the Author | Captain Beijing Archives