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.

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.

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.

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:

On the top floor of the Aq Saray, or White Palace, hotel in Ürümchi is a massive reproduction of Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David. It is flanked on its left by a reproduction of Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (which everyone associates with Anna Karenina). Across the expansive red room, otherwise decorated in the style of a Russian tea room, gigantic reproductions of Venetian canals and cityscapes fill out the walls. Overhead murals of clouds, star constellations, and pheasants in flight glow against the ornate heavy white archways that surround them.

The paintings are the works of Dilmurat Abdukadir – who was hired by the owner of the restaurant to produce life-sized images of paintings the owner had found on the Internet. The space is fascinating. Not only does it unapologetically embrace an amalgam of European aesthetics, but it is symptomatic of larger trends in Uyghur restaurant politics and aesthetics.

Somewhere around 2008, scholars began to notice that Turkish imports were on the rise in Xinjiang. Suddenly chocolates from the massive Turkish food conglomerate Ülker could be found everywhere; Turkish coffee products from Mahmood began to replace Nescafe. Advertisements for Turkish products endorsed by celebrity Uyghurs like Abdulla began to saturate Uyghur-language television. Non-Chinese products were suddenly the products of choice for middle-class consumers.

In the years since, the Uyghur food industry has changed in significant ways. As Uyghurs lost more and more control over the architecture of built environment, the interior spaces of restaurants became a space of potential. Inspired by what they had seen on trips to Turkey and Europe, the new class of food importers and restaurateurs began to transform the more traditional opulence of Uyghur banquet halls into spaces whose aesthetic was borrowed at least in part from someplace else.

As social scientists since Pierre Bourdieu have noted, people with disposable incomes purchase forms of distinction by cultivating a sense of taste in what they consume. Middle-class Uyghurs perform their distinctiveness as high-class Uyghurs by eating Uyghur-style Turkish food in uniquely non-Chinese spaces. They go to these restaurants to be seen by other Uyghurs. In an iteration of capitalist development around the world, new upscale restaurants are becoming sites of “conspicuous consumption.”

The expansion of Uyghur interior design to include Turkish and Western elements has translated into a substantial source of income for Uyghur painters such as Dilmurat. Although painting for hire sometimes grates against their passion to follow their own artistic impulses, since the market for their own work is quite small, it is often a primary way through which they are able to supplement their incomes. Most painters who pay their bills doing commercial art for Uyghur businessmen are formally trained. They have studied art history and can talk to you for hours about the purity of art and how it is an expression of their deepest feelings. As Dilmurat put it:

“(Normally) painting is one of the only things I enjoy in life. But when I paint on commission, like with my pieces at Aq Saray, it is just the opposite. It is absolutely depressing. I hate it. I’m copying other people’s work. It feels terrible to me, but I need the money. And having money is also something I enjoy a bit.”

Although new restaurants sometimes pay him to fill out their European or Turkish aesthetic, the same can’t be said yet about private art buyers. He said:

“Uyghurs really haven’t developed much appreciation or understanding of art so I really can’t rely on (art sales). One person who bought my work told me that he just bought it because the frame was nice. He tore out the art work and just used the frame for something else. This kind of attitude is really common.”

Part of the problem here is that given his druthers Dilmurat paints in an abstract expressionist style. When some Uyghurs look at his painting they don’t see anything other than squiggles and lines.

He said: “I came to like abstract forms of art through food. Seeing the way certain foods were displayed in different color formations is what first made me think about painting in blocks of color. I like the feeling and sense of it. I can feel a certain form of rightness as I work with the color and paint.”

He said that, over the arc of his career as an artist, the way he was able to pour his feeling into a painting became an important therapeutic practice for him.

“When I paint I lose all track of time. Ten or 15 hours can pass and I won’t even notice. I don’t stop to eat or anything. I just get lost in time. When I come out of it, I have some results, but I also feel as if that time has just vanished. I have no memory of it. You could say that I am wasting my life, but for me painting is the only thing that keeps me sane. If I couldn’t paint I would probably have a serious mental illness. Painting is one of the only things I enjoy in life.”

As one of the leaders in the Uyghur contemporary art scene, Dilmurat’s passion for art as a-way-of-life seems unmatched. He reads Nietzsche and talks about how true art is the “real expression of the artist” and that the most important thing is that “the artist gets some enjoyment out of it, that it feels good for him.” Despite their marginalization, Dilmurat and his group of contemporary artists still keep painting – if not for recognition, then for themselves. That practice and the friendships that emerge out of it are one of the things that give their lives meaning.

Friendship (2015)

Despite the way Dilmurat likes to distance himself from his work as an interior decorator, if you bring him down to the White Palace you will see that he is also a bit proud to see the atmosphere his work creates. When Uyghur diners walk into the room they are often impressed to see that a Uyghur artist can replicate masterworks of European art with so much precision. For many, entering the room for the first time is transportive. The waiters wear white gloves. A flamenco band sings in Spanish under a galloping Napoleon. The glow of the soft lights. The taste of honey in the mint tea. All of it feels refined.

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|

Initially many Uyghurs were excited about the Uyghur photographer Qurbanjan Semet’s book-length photo essay I am from Xinjiang on the Silk Road. They were thrilled to see Qurbanjan’s national primetime interview on CCTV News. They were astonished to see it translated into English (by Wang Chiying) and sold alongside Xi Jinping’s boilerplate biography at Book Expo America. They wanted to know why people as famous and distant as the movie star Jackie Chan and novelist-turned-harmony-spokesperson Wang Meng were singing its praises.

But when they actually had a chance to look at it, many felt disappointment.

The book (which was produced largely for Chinese- and English-reading audiences) is presented as the portraits and stories of human life in and from Xinjiang. Yet, although the majority of the 100-plus people portrayed in the book are Uyghur, only a small handful are uneducated people from the countryside. So while many Uyghurs agree that the message the book carries – that Uyghurs in general are not “Separatists, Extremists, and Terrorists” – is good, they also feel that it paints a false picture of what life is really like. To borrow a metric from another context, they feel as though the book is representing the life of the “one percent.” It presents the success stories, not the failures and blockages. It shows us an image in which everyone has a college education and a good job in a Chinese company; there are few stories of poverty or the way Uyghur bodies are violently prevented from leaving the countryside; there are no stories that demonstrate the heartache that comes from the way young Uyghur men are chronically underemployed, detained, beaten, humiliated, and jailed. Oddly, if we chose to believe the accounts we are given, most of these successful people represented in the book still seem to see themselves as representative of what everyone can and should achieve — not recognizing that they are the exception, not the rule.

But still, some interesting themes do appear.

The book is broken up into six sections: a brief autobiography of Qurbanjan, followed by portraits and biographical sketches around the themes of “Inseparable Bond of Love,” “Footprints for Future Generations,” “Home is Best,” “The Long Journey to Dream Fulfillment,” and, finally, “A Feel of Xinjiang through Differences.”

In the section on “love” people focuse primarily on love of family, their homeland, and their country. The following sections are where fragments of struggle and conflict begin to appear. A Shanghai-based businessman Perhat Kayum is one of the first Uyghur faces to break his smile. He tells us of how it was impossible for his daughter to get a Shanghai hukou and how this forced them to move back to Ürümchi where he was shocked to discover that Uyghurs are treated with even more suspicion and disrespect by security personnel than in Shanghai. He said: “To my surprise, such monitoring took place not just in the inner provinces, but was actually more frequent and in-depth in my hometown. I could do nothing but let it happen. I simply can’t explain why these things happen, nor do I know how to face them.” The struggle for Uyghurs to obtain an urban hukou and thus receive permission to apply for a passport was a frequent theme with the highly educated sample of the book. Elijan Ibrayin and his wife Mayra Ezız, among a dozen or so others, talked about the struggle to get their hukou switched to Xi’an so they could apply for passports.

Perhat Kayum

Elijan Ibrayin and Mayra Ezız

Another theme that emerged from the ideological framing of the book was about transgressing racial boundaries. There were several stories about Han born in Xinjiang who converted to Islam. About how in the 1960s and ’70s there were numerous intermarriages between Uyghurs and Han and how their families have worked out a way of living despite “opposition from families and friends on both sides.” One of the most interesting stories on this theme is the story of Ai Kezu, a 35-year-old woman who changed her ethnic status from Uyghur to Han as an adult. Born to a Uyghur father and Han mother who met in the 1960s, Ai Kezu, grew up in Kashgar “rejected, blamed and abused.” Her mother, who was one of the “Shanghai girls” that was “tricked” into coming to Xinjiang to marry a soldier, is still a devout Buddhist while her father remains a devout Muslim. Eventually, she said, her family was forced to leave Xinjiang and relocate in an area in a Han-dominated province. Other mixed ethnicity families such as Yang Xiangfeng and Mayshegul Tursunjan have done the same, although in most other cases, the Han member of the new family converted to Islam.

Ai Kezu and her parents

Yang Xiangfeng and Mayshegul Tursunjan

The last two sections of the book are the most interesting. Here we read fairly straightforward assessments of violence and racial prejudice in Xinjiang. Young Han, Hui, Tibetan, and Uyghur former residents of Ürümchi weigh in on the riots of 2009 and how discrimination was built into the fabric of their childhoods. The best stories here are Hui musician Ma Jun’s telling of how lack of respect often turns to violence in the context of Xinjiang, Ilham Izak’s profound distaste for nationalism of any sort, and the Tibetan Xinjianger Zhang Caiyun’s frank telling of how stereotypes have infected her life, and Dilraba Rehmet’s absolute disgust with state-run Chinese media. These are stories in which the subject represented in the portrait has not yet disappeared beneath the cloying cheerfulness that pervades political speech about Xinjiang. These are stories and faces that stick out.

Ma Jun

Ilham Izak

Zhang Caiyun

Diraba Rehmet

Of course, a more honest telling of the Chinese story of everyday racism and oppression is not something that can be published in China. Occasionally there were hints, in the own words of the photographed, about how Han migrants such as Liu Hongliang can be condescending to Uyghur migrants such as Repukat Alken; or how the chengguan target Uyghur street-hawkers such as Rozimurat Nahmet. But much raw feeling seems to seep through despite Qurbanjan’s and his editors’ efforts to dismiss racism as a cause for state violence and its response; and how that response has invaded the lives of everyone who comes from Xinjiang.

Liu Hongliang and Repukat Alken

Rozimurat Nahmet

The English language version of I am from Xinjiang on the Silk Road can be purchased from Amazon. The Chinese language version of the book is available in every bookstore in Ürümchi and every online Chinese bookseller.

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|

A woman in Heilongjiang province — accurately described by our Beijing Blend host as “North of the Wall” — was walking her dog off its leash when a college-age student kicked it. The ensuing tussle saw some ear-biting, Mike-Tyson-style, and a fight worthy of this episode of Beijing Blend.

Beijing Blend is an e-magazine/news digest that blends China culture and conversation. Follow them on Twitter, and come back next Tuesday for a new episode in this ongoing video series.

Filmed at Beijing’s Bookworm, hosted this week by Jennifer Hsiung and Michael Kaufman.

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

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

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

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

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) August 16, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Fergus Ryan (@fryan) August 15, 2015

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

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) August 15, 2015

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

— Li Yuan (@LiYuan6) August 16, 2015

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

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

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

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