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

The rundown:

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

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

16:25: Tom Pellman story “Tiger Suit”

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

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

47:45: Kerryn Leitch with faux advice to laowai

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

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

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

|The Creamcast Archives|

Happy Halloween, everybody. For those of you wondering, the some-years-strong Beijing tradition of dressing up and riding Subway Line 2 on the weekend before Halloween will come to a close this year. Authorities are worried about the upcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit, so they don’t want their public transportation clogged with beer-guzzling foreigners doing weird shit and attracting crowds.

Reuters reports:

Beijing police have warned people they face arrest for wearing Halloween fancy dress on the subway as it may cause crowds to gather and create “trouble”, a state-run newspaper said on Friday, unveiling a list of APEC summit-related restrictions.

Specifically:

“Public transport police point out, please do not wear strange outfits in subway stations or in train carriages, which could easily cause a crowd to gather and create trouble,” [the Beijing News] said.

Police had the power to arrest those who “upset order”, the paper said.

“If the chaos is serious and causes a stampede or other public safety incident, the police will deal with it severely in accordance with the law.”

It’s a shame, because the PSB crashed the party last year and we got along pretty well. They rode a stop with us, asking politely that we leave at Dongsishitiao.

Those wishing to call the authorities’ bluff have our full endorsement, of course. Photos, stories, etc., please send our way. (More likely, you’ll be in costume and find yourself needing to use the subway; we’re pretty sure no one would mind, but if you notice anything out of the ordinary or noteworthy, let us know.)

Good news is, there’s still plenty to do this Halloween, and if you’re a slacker who needs some easy-to-make China-centric costume ideas, we have you covered. See if you can beat my DIY costume from 2008 (center):

Note: top image is from the Hong Kong subway.

On Monday morning, Hong Kong media reported that the barricades around Admiralty would be removed after two-plus weeks of bulwarking pro-democracy protesters in their concrete campground near government offices. The evidence was right there on the tele: moving pictures of police clearing the roads! And so, after lunch, I found myself in a friend’s dad’s car going from Wan Chai in the direction of our final destination in the western Mid-levels. We had just gotten onto Queensway and could see Pacific Place, a luxury complex of business and commerce, when we encountered… a barricade.

As we were figuring the proper detour, middle-aged and slightly older men at the scene became suddenly animated by an unexplained rage. We exited the vehicle to this ruckus amid growing layers of interested and camera-phone-toting bystanders. As the men rushed in to dismantle and drag out the barricades, which scraped loudly against the asphalt, they were met by resistance in the form of young people, first one, then others, possibly students, who stood defiantly in front of vehicles. (Yes, the obligatory reference to Tiananmen Tank Man was overheard.) They sat in the middle of the road to form a human barricade:

No one should have been surprised at the resistance. After bunkering down in their cove of dissent, dozing in tents and showering in makeshift facilities, passionately, thoughtfully, and artfully pleading their case, in multiple languages, to anyone who would listen, did authorities really think the protesters — organized and motivated as they are — would quietly step aside to watch their movement extinguished by a giant-claw douter?

Every time authorities have tried to step in, the protests have flared as a result, like an angry flame. Two and a half weeks ago, they tried pepper spray and tear gas, inadvertently giving this movement its distinctive symbol – the umbrella. But popular support for these protesters was beginning to wane last week — at least among Hong Kongers, who increasingly see the protests as a nuisance — when the government made yet another boneheaded decision. It announced, then retracted on Thursday, a meeting with student leaders. Why? In a very non-rhetorical sense, why? Why, if you decide to schedule a meeting — option A – wouldn’t you go through with said meeting, maybe try to win a bit of positive press before using that momentum to cast the Hong Kong Federation of Students and Scholarism as stubborn, callow, and unrealistic? Why, if option B is to never engage, wouldn’t you actually not engage, and let the momentum slowly fade, the protest starved out by boredom, school, and work? Indeed, the worst thing the government could have done was option C: rescind a promised talk one day before the weekend. Predictably, protest numbers skyrocketed. Here’s what it looked like from my vantage point on Friday:

And then, today, while barricades were going down, they were being built — and deployed – just as quickly:

#HongKong #OccupyCentral protesters’ local solution to crackdown peril – bamboo barricades http://t.co/VS3TZfGATo pic.twitter.com/MfRBMbSHXW

— Phelim Kine 林海 (@PhelimKine) October 13, 2014

Students mix up cement in #causewaybay to reinforce new barricades after police dismantled some… http://t.co/6oppFy8Eh5

— Sofia Mitra-Thakur (@_sofiamt) October 13, 2014

Recent reports are that city officials have now gone to Guangzhou for a forum. Government… leaders… what are you doing?

But here’s where it gets tricky. On the corner of Queensway and Tamar, the opposition was not reciting pro-government slogans, extolling the Communist Party, or Leung Chun-ying. They were upset*, sure, but their anger and frustration was directed at the protesters’ actions… not the values they represent, but the hard fact that they had incapacitated the day-to-day lives of many and threatened livelihoods. And all for what? The choice to elect leaders who, in the end, will still be beholden to Beijing? (This isn’t a popular reality, but Hong Kong relies on mainland China and will only rely on mainland China more in the coming years… but that’s a different story.)

*QUICK INTERLUDE: “Go fuck your mother,” an old man screamed at some Occupy protesters. Another man, also fairly senior and on the side of the anti-Occupy folks, blurted, “Don’t curse, don’t curse.”

They chanted, “Open the roads!,” “Clear the area!,” and “Rubbish!” (Thanks to Alicia for the translations.) Signs read, “Retake the road, I’ve suffered enough,” “Save my rice bowl,” and “Hong Kong is my home.” Some, I suppose it should be noted, spoke Cantonese with mainland accents; many others did not. On the other side, protesters sang “Congratulations to you” sarcastically. “Please leave peacefully,” a man in an orange shirt appealed, though it was unclear who he was addressing. “Please protest elsewhere.” He was expressing a sentiment I’ve heard often lately: fighting for what you believe in isn’t wrong, but preventing other people from making a living probably is.

How should we feel about these people? They are called the “anti-Occupy group,” but that term is problematic. It works on a literal level, describing those who oppose the folks occupying Central, but it has a ring of unpleasantness, doesn’t it? As if this nebulous group, in addition to being anti-protest, were also anti-justice, anti-democracy, and anti-Hong Kong. But let’s call them what they mostly are, shall we? Taxi drivers. Restaurant owners. Small business owners. Their spouses. People who understand the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, and who mistrust college students who lecture them about the future. This “group” is not a faceless, masked opposition against values that Westerners on Twitter hold dear. These are the people who will ultimately decide whether this movement moves forward or subsides, because they are the ones who are skeptical — never mind the spirit of the protesters, their optimism, their courage and grace – about whether they can sustain a 30 to 50 percent reduction in business.

Above on the overpasses, pedestrians peered at the action below, snapping pictures as if at a zoo. Underneath Pacific Place, in the Admiralty subway station, a poster extolled “New rail lines for a better Hong Kong” while advertisements cycled between Calvin Klein models and McDonald’s burgers. All the way home via public transport, we heard no chatter about the protests, which seemed to exist in a different realm altogether, a small but significant part of the city that created its own vortex while everyone else went about their day, now night, undisturbed by visions of democracy or the prospect of economic disenfranchisement.

And where do we go from here? Maybe hold hands and hope better decisions are made from the top to facilitate — not hinder – a resolution. No one wants to see Hong Kong fight Hong Kong.

As a postscript: a commendation for the Hong Kong police, from the low-level blue shirts to the plainclothes cops who are asked to rove the streets to find violence to defuse. They inserted themselves between pro- and anti- groups on Monday afternoon and basically kept the peace. There’s time yet for the police to bungle a future task, but so far they’ve performed admirably under difficult circumstances.

That’s a plainclothes cop in the foreground, along with his comrades forming a protective line

As another postscript, here’s how the main Occupy protest area looked during the daytime while skirmishes happened a few blocks away:

The new documentary film Diamond in the Dunes, directed by Christopher Rufo (free streaming on PBS until September 8 for those with VPNs), tells the coming-of-age story of a Uyghur man named Parhat as he finds his way through college. It shows us how he and his Uyghur and Han classmates at Xinjiang University develop a passion for a game, for abilities and skills that don’t rely on ethnicity or Chinese business connections. It shows us how the citywide riots of 2009 shaped their life-paths and how they found ways to move forward despite the difficulties of their circumstances.

Parhat tells this story by showing us how he motivated his fellow players to think beyond themselves and their abilities to speak and act. Even though he lacks the words to fully express what he feels in Chinese, he tries; even though his team has little support and little training in how to play, they try.

Parhat knows what it means to experience feelings of lack — of not being good enough — but he also knows what it means to turn those same feelings into a source of motivation and courage.

Parhat feels as though many Uyghurs lack long-term vision and self-confidence; he feels as though many of them have internalized feelings of depression and defeat. Each new round of violence reverberates in ever widening rings of fear and distrust. Each diverted life drags the lives around it toward feelings of hopelessness and invisibility.

Yet it is by traveling through the “double consciousness” of not being “good enough” to be an ideal Chinese citizen and not being free to be “good enough” as a Uyghur baseball star that he comes to a realization about himself: that standing outside of mainstream Chinese society can also be a way of transcending the circumstances he’s been handed. By learning to be both Chinese and “foreign” at the same time, he can draw on energy that is not available to a person who is more comfortable.

It is on this point that we hear Parhat repeating the moral lesson that many Uyghurs have heard from other Uyghurs: if only Uyghurs would work as hard as other Chinese they would succeed. Parhat tells a struggling Uyghur teammate to just think about how clumsy the Han players looked when they first started, but that through their ambition and tenaciousness they have become competent players. What the film does not quite show us is the way other Uyghurs usually jump in at this point and argue that the lack of vision is simply a symptom of the lack of opportunities that are available to young Uyghurs. Limits on travel, hiring, communication, and education, and the structural violence of extreme poverty, all have a role to play in what a Uyghur might experience as being “less than” other Chinese. But, for Parhat, listing these complaints is just not enough — it describes the cards Uyghurs have been dealt, it doesn’t define how the game of life might be played.

Although the feelings of absolute difference and antagonism between Uyghurs and Han seem insurmountable, the common language of a game, of teamwork, strategy, and skill offers a tenuous bridge across this divide. Even more interestingly for Parhat and the other Uyghur players, it opens a door to another world. Baseball becomes a limiting case of what is possible. Like the physics Parhat studies in school, it becomes a problem that demanded a solution.

In the film, the analogy of baseball to broader social life seems heavy-handed — after all, it’s just a game — and the successes we see seem underwhelming. But the documentary does demonstrate that although broader contemporary social forces invade nearly every aspect of life, people still find ways to thrive. Perhaps the film’s narrative could do a bit more to convey the rawness of personal struggle that accompanies the drama of coming of age in Ürümchi.

Even more concretely, the film doesn’t show the viewer the way Parhat organized a Uyghur Little League. It doesn’t show the viewer how those young Uyghur kids were scouted by American Major League Baseball and the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, and how in the years following the filming of the documentary some of them were given full-ride scholarships to play on top Chinese high school teams as they are being groomed for professional careers.

Yet, despite these narrative gaps, the documentary is rare (given the current circumstance in Xinjiang) in the way it develops long-term intimacy with its characters as they change over the years. The access Rufo was able to gain by framing the film around a seemingly innocuous game like baseball opens up the sweep of time in Ürümchi through the small dramas of life.

If you meet Parhat today you would quickly discover that he is still a gregarious, passionate man who tends to see absurd humor in the circumstances he has been handed. He still teaches anyone who asks how to throw a curve ball, how to love baseball, and how to embrace the possibilities of being a minor actor in a Chinese world. He still tries to tackle the problems of life in Ürümchi with the same tenacity he demonstrates in the film.

Since the film was shot a few years ago, the success of the baseball team has continued to grow. They went to the championship of the China Collegiate World Series in 2010 and 2011, where they defeated the reigning national champions from Guilin Liuzhuan Daxue 8:0.

Until September 8, the 53-minute documentary film can be streamed for free from PBS (VPN needed – US location).

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|

Editor’s note: Empires of the Deep is a much-delayed 3-D epic film that seems destined to disappear forever — for various unexplained but guessable reasons. Neither the film — known rather generously as “China’s Avatar,” starring Bond girl Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace) – nor the full story may ever be officially released. The New York Times profiled the film as far back as 2010, reporting a summer 2011 release. Much later, word on Douban had it that that this supposed USD$150 million flick — financed by real estate mogul Jon Jiang — was slated for cinemas around August 2013. That date has clearly come and gone with no sign of the maritime epic’s splashdown.

It’s now been five years — an appropriate anniversary — so, tired of waiting, we here publish the “production diaries” of a young Australian-British man, Dale Irons, who found himself back in 2009, for various reasons, on the set of allegedly the most expensive Chinese film ever made — and possibly the worst. Big words? Read for yourself. -RFH

~

It all began with a distant classified ad calling for extras for a big-budget Hollywood-style movie about mermaids, or some such shit.

Desperate for cash and willing to sell any pride (and later, any bodily harm) at whatever price to keep me away from a room full of screaming, irritating spoilt brats, this former English teacher took down the address and time. I’d seen Splash with my mother once back in the day, so I was positively swimming with confidence: oh yeah.

Arriving at the audition at Beijing’s The Place [Ed.’s note: This is a ritzy strip mall actually called The Place] I rendezvoused with my old high-school chum, Ryan. We had moved to Harbin from Australia together in 2006, but unlike my own, unaccomplished self, he was managing a rather large nightclub, which he never ceased to shut up about. (Maybe that’s a bit harsh: give me a few drinks and I’ll bore you to tears with my so-called “near-death experiences” in that notorious Dongbei city.)

It became apparent rather quickly that I was at a cattle market for agents, with four or five frantically trying to grab their merchandise to make it clear which livestock they were representing.

The confused herd, about 80 souls in all, was eventually ready to be presented to the casting director, who we’ll call Chen; his rented office was awash with mysterious sea scenes, maritime props, and strange figurines.

Chen, who looked somewhat goblin-like himself, made a speech that at least 80 percent of us did not remotely understand. His assistant proceeded to dramatically reduce this into a few short, welcoming sentences, and then it was down to business.

Chen asked anyone with acting experience to raise their hands and fill out an application form. I had exactly zero background on set; I raised my hand. Filling the form, I populated my resume with fictional commercials, every Australian film we could remember, a TV series in which I was the lead, and thank God IMDB was blocked in China at that time.

After a brief reading, we were asked if we had any “fighting or action experience.” Yes: tons. For my friend — built like a tank with a voice so deep he was actually able to bass you out of a conversation — this wasn’t actually so far from the truth, although the acting was mostly of the “fucking and fighting” variety, in assorted bars and clubs. With my shoulder-length hair and somewhat effete manner, I cringed at the thought of a demonstration of such skills. Luckily, they took my word for it.

After our turn in front of a camera, we were told we would be contacted in a few days if we were successful. The huddle of agents warned their potential stars that we must mention their names if we were successful.

That same night, we went out to dinner to ponder our potential career shift. Around9 pm, Ryan’s phone rang. It was the agent: we had not been successful. Disappointed, we continued to drink. Thirty minutes later, my phone rang. It was Chen’s assistant: we had been successful. We were going to be “featured extras.” And, yes, our faithful agent had unfortunately been cut out of the deal.

After signing a six-month contract, we were told to pack enough belongings for the entirety of the contract and be at Fuxingmen subway at 3 pm a week later.

I flung some crap in a rucksack and was ready to set off for a city we had never heard of, somewhere in Hebei, to film a movie we had no idea about, by a director we’d never heard of, in a language we didn’t understand. It seemed like it would be a fairly typical China adventure.

Arriving at the shoot’s chosen hotel, a basic number, we were invited to relax for an hour before visiting the casting director’s room to hear who we’d be playing.

During the audition, we’d been told that extras would either be mermen or pirates; that much we knew. The crucial part was that the merman role required a complete removal of all head hair. The pirates, meanwhile, would get to keep all theirs. On the elevator down, one of the ripped-off agents from earlier told me I looked like Johnny Depp and would certainly be cast as a pirate. (I look nothing like Johnny Depp, though a drunk Dutch girl once told me I reminded her of Adrian Brody.)

We assembled to await our filmic fate. After the Depp comment, I was confident I’d get to keep my shoulder-length hair and movie-star looks. Alas, as the pirates’ names were being read out, I realized mine was not among them. And after much arguing, moaning, whining, and outright bitching, my name still wasn’t among them: like it or not, I was going Full Mer.

On Day One of the shoot, I was roused from slumber by a rhythmic moaning to find my gorilla-sized pal curled around an unopened water barrel (I later discovered he’d inexplicably pilfered it from reception). The sight of his hairy back, glistening with beads of sweat, was almost harsher than the prospect of a full day’s shooting.

An early-morning minivan took us to the set, where I was introduced to our main role in the production: hanging around, waiting. Followed by more waiting, followed by sudden mass confusion, followed by further waiting. Eventually, the entire production crew gathered to point incense sticks in each nautical direction for good luck.

This was the first and only time when spirits were high.

For the first few weeks, the featured extras (including me) were tasked with playing what could best be described as Roman guards or Spartans in a village scene from 300. Much of the downtime waiting was thus spent kicking each other in the stomachs and shouting: “This is HEBEI!”

The set was populated by various poorly treated farm animals, plus some Russians who were bussed in daily. They were never the same Russians — so let’s hope no one pays too much attention to the blacksmith or butcher in the background.

My first close-up was simple: I had to confront the hero of the movie, who was demanding to be let through the town gates. “You shall not pass!” I told him bluntly and, to my money, theatrically. I was immediately informed that my lines would be dubbed, as I didn’t have a speaking-role contract; I wasn’t that surprised, except by the fact that they appeared to be taking the contracts seriously.

A week later came my first taste of some of the film’s continuity problems. I was informed that, as well as playing a village guard and a merman soldier, I would also be playing one of four helpless villagers who would be captured by the pirates. Wow, they really are getting their money’s worth, I thought.

Obviously, my face had already been captured on camera not letting any damn man pass, but it wasn’t until I was adorned in my Helpless Peasant robes and ready for action that someone else spotted that fact. The obvious solution, which I presented immediately, would simply be to recast me as a pirate — but the crew had other plans. The make-up team was called in to uglify me. I pondered the possibilities: prosthetic nose? A nasty, prominent scar? They decided on a curly wig — the perfect disguise.

For the first scene featuring the pirate raid, a wooden cage had been constructed, which was dragged in by a very unwilling and somewhat angry horse. The animal first came charging into the studio unheralded, and to the alarm of a crowd of Russian extras who had to scatter wildly. After a good half-hour spent calming the beast down, the crew told me to jump up and sit on top of the cage. My first taste of danger in the empire, and my fate was in the hands (or rather, hooves) of an untrained stallion. The cage gained momentum as the nag flew into the village, myself perched perilously atop. Cut. Phew. Danger over… Take two. Wait, what? It would take many more terrifying takes before the horse hit its mark and we were allowed down to live another day…

Continue to Part 2 of Dale’s diary on the set of Empires of the Deep, China’s most expensive — and possibly worst — movie.

Last September, when Literary Death Match swung through Beijing, I performed a poem called Things That Taste Like Purple about the devilry of baijiu, a.k.a. sorghum liquor (dust of the attic, wine of the gutter… with a long finish into the fetor of fragrance). Unbeknownst to me, one of my friends in the audience, the artistic and talented Amy Sands, would go on to create a series of watercolors to accompany my words. The video, which she shot, I post here with deepest gratitude and humility.

UPDATE: You can now read the poem over at Kartika Review.

“…the opening of Symphonie Espagnole…”

If you enjoyed this, I highly recommend checking out the collaboration between former US poet laureate Billy Collins and JWT-NY, which hired animators to illustrate such poems as The Dead, Forgetfulness, and Now and Then (which has a China theme, for what it’s worth).

“Unjust”

The people huddled at the front gates of the US Embassy in Beijing last November were not there to protest the flight of US bombers over contested islands in the East China Sea. Instead, they chanted slogans such as, “Beat down corruption!” and, “The Communist party doesn’t care about the common people!” Plainclothes police officers stood nearby, conspicuous in matching black and gray sweatpants.

This is an almost weekly sight. Petitioners from across China — Chongqing, Henan, Shanghai — congregate at 55 Anjialou Road to engage in a practice as ancient as imperial China, when those seeking justice would journey to the capital to expose local corruption. Modern petitioners face enormous risks by coming to Beijing: the particularly obdurate ones can find themselves thrown into “black jails,” illegal prisons where they might endure abuse (and worse).

That was the experience of Wang Xiuzhen, an elderly woman who began protesting outside the embassy last summer and into the winter, claiming the chairman of her neighborhood committee in Shanghai had wrongfully accused her of a crime. The sign she carried every day told her story:

Aug. 7, 2012, An official at the Office of Justice took my ID, bag, and 200 RMB with gangsters at Hongqiao Train Station. They have used this unlawful method to stop me from going to Beijing. They even illegally kept me and broke my bones several times. The middle finger and wrist of my right hand were diagnosed as injured, and the pinky finger broken.

Apr. 16, 2011, My middle finger was squeezed till broken by Li Chunbao, a security guard at Deying Service Company. It has not healed to this day.

Sept. 6, 2011, I was bullied by a middle-aged man on Nanchang Road, and my right wrist was broken.

Aug. 5, 2012, I was kidnapped by a shameless bullying group in Huangpu area.

Nov. 6, 2012, My pinky finger was broken by someone at Mengxi Elderly Center at Songjiangyexie Town.

Oct. 6, 2012, I was again illegally kidnapped and kept prisoner with twelve people guarding me in turns. These are all illegal. Just because they have a little power, they treat me like this? Everyone should have their own constitutional rights, and I want people with a conscience to judge these unlawful matters.

It is impossible to know whether her claims are true. What is known is that in October, she wrapped herself in a banner with her story written on it and laid on the street in front of the embassy.

Petitioning at the US Embassy is just one of a series of tactics being adopted by demonstrators in China, who increasingly see press attention as the only way to have their causes addressed. These can range from creative to tragic. Last year saw a viral protest in the form of a Gangnam Style dance for unpaid wages; it also saw group suicide attempts to raise attention to causes such as land seizures and broken promises.

“There are whole villages of cardboard boxes that have popped up around official places to petition,” said veteran China reporter Paul Mooney. “By going to these places, you risk arrest or worse — even the US embassy’s rule of law guy was detained and questioned by the police there.”

Another popular protest location is the State Bureau for Letters and Calls, a state-sanctioned agency tasked with collecting grievances. But comparatively, the US Embassy might be a safer option, according to Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a Chinese historian who, like Mooney, has written judiciously about Chinese protests. He emailed:

“Being near to such a symbolically important and publicly observed location could make it harder for police or para-police to interfere with their actions without creating an incident. There may even be people who know that Chen Guangcheng, an important critic of corruption within China, came to the U.S. Embassy last year, and that this was a key stage in his odyssey. ”

Chen, a vocal critic of forced abortions in China, fled to this very embassy in April 2012 before being granted asylum in the US. This has given other petitioners hope. When asked why he chose to lodge his complaints in front of the American embassy, one elderly man told me, “America is good. It is a free country with real rights. Here in China, we have fake rights. Perhaps America can influence China’s government.”

It’s unlikely these people will receive any of the help from the US government. And yet, they return, again and again. “Protesters in Beijing come back all the time,” Mooney said. “They don’t have a choice. They have this rural stubbornness, and they are not afraid.”

(All images by Patrick Lozada)

In 2012 Liu Xiaodong was named the “most socially aware figure of the year” by Art Gallery magazine. He had just completed his Hotan Project in the deep south of Xinjiang. Utilizing his famously “plein air” method, Liu set up his giant life-sized canvases in the middle of a Hotan river floodplain and lived with Uyghur jade pickers. He spent the summer with them in the dust and the heat; in shelters made of stones and earth. In Art Gallery’s assessment of his project, he attempted to capture “the rhythms of people’s lives and the status of their survival.”

This is not the first difficult project Liu has carried out. Liu is famous for them. From the Three Gorges Dam, to the Wenchuan Earthquake site to the Tibetan plateau to inner-city youth in Boston, to his most recent project “between Palestinians and Israelis,” Liu seems fascinated by difference, trauma, and hardship.

Perhaps this is related to his position in the Chinese avant-garde art scene. If you look through Ai Weiwei’s images from his time in New York in the early 1990s, you’ll find images of Liu. But not only has he been a member of that scene for several decades, he was also one of the first contemporary artists to make it big. These days, he has plenty of support wherever he goes. Provocative contemporary Sinophone filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien have joined him on previous projects, and his project in Xinjiang was no exception.

In Hotan, Liu’s collaborators included the world-class fiction writer Ah Cheng, the famous curator Hou  Hanru, and the highly-regarded social theorist, editor, and filmmaker Ou Ning. The four of them together produced exhibitions, a conference, documentary film, and research essays, and an award-winning book.

The Pictures

Liu’s subject was the Uyghur jade pickers of Hotan. They are a new population. It was only in the 1990s that the insatiable lust for jade among Chinese capitalists and conspicuous consumers trickled down to its raw producers and began to transform their economy. Jade pickers are farmers who supplement the earnings they can receive from their 2 mu (a third of an acre) plots on the margins of desert channels. The people Liu represented are just a fraction of the thousands of others who have taken their picks and shovels to the river bed. Rather than digging irrigation ditches, harvesting and peddling the fruits of their labor, they now scour the stones of the rapidly desiccating landscape for fist-size rocks that can buy their children a year in high school.

Liu, like most of his collaborators, is famous for a kind of realism that privileges the immediacy of “on the spot” observation. In an interview, he said working on the scene fills him with an awareness of the complexity of color and form in a way that other kinds of representation cannot. He said “painting is improvisation, I try to make it natural and in harmony with the locale.”

For Liu to see its color, life seems to often require a larger-than-life representation. But some of his images were smaller, darker, and more personal. They combined photos with painting in a way that produced a foreboding atmosphere.

Hands missing middle fingers, skies unnaturally dark. These are subtle details that speak to larger truths that Liu and his colleagues sensed and experienced.

At the Biennale

When I had the chance to ask Liu why he went to Hotan to pursue this project, he said with a smile, “I like to get myself into trouble.” But other than the harrowing experience of life and violence on the high desert, Liu really hasn’t experienced that much trouble.

Perhaps because he is a world-famous artist whose paintings command multi-million dollar prices, Liu’s project was featured as the centerpiece of the inaugural Xinjiang Biennale in 2012. The then-head of the Xinjiang Culture ministry, Han Ziyong, welcomed him and his images of poverty and survival to Ürümchi. The show then traveled on to Beijing’s Today Art Museum.

It is hard to say what impact Liu’s Hotan Project has had. Perhaps its main function was to render the poor of Hotan a safe and legible object to be viewed from a distance. Perhaps many of those who see these images fail to draw in the necessary linkages that implicate themselves in global and Chinese chains of commodification, consumption, and inequality. These images don’t show us how Hotan, China’s poorest prefecture, has received thousands of jade-seeking and subsidy-receiving settlers from other parts of China in the past few years.

But back in Ürümchi the critical edge of neo-realist representation has been taken up by some. The title of a recent exhibition at the brand new Xinjiang Contemporary Art museum of peri-urban street photography borrows both its title and shares a fascination with the acceleration of the two-hour gap between Beijing and Xinjiang, which you can see in Ou Ning’s special issue on Xinjiang in his literary journal, Chutzpah: Xinjiang Time.

And as the second Xinjiang Art Biennale opens tomorrow, more representation of development and those who survive it appears to be on view.

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|

Growing up, Driver Wang’s father thought him a momma’s boy. “Send him to play outside more,” he complained. “The kid needs to get into some scrapes.” Little did Wang Hu know, his son had been through six lifetimes of scrapes. He’d been castrated by a sorceress, strangled by a lover, beaten by roving pirates, and tortured by Red Guards. Yet in his current life as a Beijing taxi driver, Driver Wang is unaware of any of this — until, one day, a mysterious letter falls from his taxi’s visor.

Past lives are the focus of Susan Barker’s latest novel, The Incarnations, based in both modern-day and ancient China. Like the striking mosaic of sketches on the cover, Barker combines the romantic, the metaphysical, the occult, and the Occidental to construct a house-of-mirrors novel that is hard to put down. While it takes a few chapters to get into, one’s patience with its initial lethargy is rewarded once the plot picks up.

On the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a taxi driver receives a series of letters, some of them describing long, elaborate stories, each one a supposed past life. Driver Wang’s current life, bland and fatiguing, is shaken by this periodic arrival of letters. Their mysterious author claims to be his eternal soulmate and determined incarnations biographer. “Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate,” reads the first letter. “I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What’s the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared for over a thousand years?”

With this delightfully strange backdrop, Barker pieces together a mandalic novel, equal parts noir, suspense, and fantasy.

The letters begin to take on an anxious, almost threatening tone. They include long-winded, detailed accounts of two interwoven lives. The fourth letter tells of an imperial eunuch of the Tang Dynasty, castrated by his own sorceress mother for raping his sister, and of the eunuch’s bastard daughter who escapes a sacrificial ceremony and runs off to become an esteemed courtesan of a pleasure district. The letter after tells an equally involved story of two men whose town gets sieged by Mongol warriors, become slaves, and then lovers, while trudging through the Gobi Desert. In both tales, the letter-writer claims to be one of the two main characters; Driver Wang is meant to be the other.

These biographies are what kept me reading. Each is set during a perilous period in Chinese history: the Mongol invasions, the Opium Wars, the Cultural Revolution. In this sense, it is a historical novel, one grounded in past realities of the world. What is history though but a narrative interpreted by individual imaginations? Chinese history through Barker’s eyes, while remarkably gory and cruel, is, admittedly, thoroughly entertaining. The various colloquialisms and euphemisms used during the different time periods are particularly entertaining (such as “Riding the Unicorn Horn” in the concubine letter).

The biographies all follow the same layout: Wang’s incarnation and the letter-writer’s come together under remarkable circumstances; one sabotages the other in a fit of extraordinary passion. All of them end in a violent death.

They’re revealed in chronological order, from the Tang Dynasty, AD 632, all the way to the Cultural Revolution, 1966. Along the way Driver Wang possesses a variety of personalities: an esteemed eunuch, a facially scarred blacksmith turned Mongol slave, a duplicitous concubine, a waolai prisoner of Pearl Delta pirates, and a privileged student leader of the Cultural Revolution at the Anti-Capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls.

But the modern Wang’s story is also absorbing in its own right. He’s the emotionally neglected son of a powerful Ministry of Agriculture official and a socially deviant mother. In college he falls into a deep depression and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for several months. There he meets a charismatic male prostitute and fellow patient named Zeng with whom he shares a brief but passionate love affair.

The Incarnations will be touted as a China novel, and in many ways, rightly so. It takes place entirely in China, and brings to life some of China’s most tumultuous moments. But unlike other China-based literature from laowai writers, Barker’s work doesn’t fall back on the Chinese-ness of it all. While not always perfectly erect, it stands fine on its own as a suspense/mystery novel. You don’t need to be a sinologist to enjoy this novel; all you need is to like good books.

Susan Barker is the author of three novels. Her latest, The Incarnations, is published by Doubleday and available on Amazon.

Brent Crane is a Beijing-based journalist. Follow him @bcamcrane. 

This is part 2 of our look at Hong Qi, a Uyghur folksinger who grew up Han.

Hong Qi discovered Bob Dylan in 2001. That was the year he heard “The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind” for the first time. Speaking in an interview a decade later, he said he liked Dylan’s confidence — the feeling he evoked with his broken voice. Although Hong Qi says his English is “very bad,” the imagery in Dylan’s lyrics touched him deeply.

Over the past decade, he says he has become a Dylan fan. “I like all his songs, his fascination with all images. I respect his political stance. My songwriting is influenced by him.”

In short, Dylan has become Hong Qi’s idol. His intensity and productivity inspires him. Writing in a blog post in 2009, he mused: “His music is not that intense, which enables you to get the force of his appeal. His songs are rough, which helps you understand their warmth elliptically; he is protesting something, shouting something, which I can comprehend across languages. There is no way not to, because he is Bob Dylan.”

Over the years Hong Qi has been influenced by other artists as well. In the poetry chapbook that accompanied his 2008 album Where are you Alimjan?,Hong included poems he had written to the Chilean protest singers Violetta Parra and Victor Jara. In that album he brought the affect of these protest singers to bear on more indigenous sources of communist protest: everyday heroes of the Chinese revolution such as Lei Feng and the Uyghur poet Lutpulla Mutellip. Hong Qi is trying to conjure these spirits of the past in the present circumstances of Xinjiang.

In fact, some of the album critics think Hong Qi depended so much on these sources that the distinctiveness of his own voice was in danger of being obscured. Like Dylan’s critics, some labeled Hong Qi unoriginal because of his bricolage approach to songwriting and image-making — borrowing from sources that he finds active and vital.

Hong Qi’s more recent albums have effectively dismantled accusations of dependency and unoriginality. Not only is he positioning himself as a transnational link in a chain of folksingers across the world, he is also bearing witness to his own unique social position: a Red singer from Hotan.

In his 2014 album Heart of Darkness, Hong Qi dedicated a song to Bob Dylan and the legacy of protest and honesty that he sees him standing for. The song “I Want” is sung as an anthem with a group of folk singers from Xinjiang and across the nation: Erkin, Ma Tiao, Zhang Chu, Zhong Lifeng, and Yang Jiasong. In the interlude, the refrain of “The Answer Is Blowing in the Wind” emerges before it is subsumed once again by a march of desire through Ürümchi streets.

I Want

Ma Tiao:

I want to kiss the person who is not by my side ,
I want to sing a song that is not in my heart,
I want to plant a tree but I don’t have the soil,
I want to give my bones to the embrace of the ocean.

Erkin:

I want to go down a very smooth road,
I want to read a book has the weight of steel,
I want to open doors that have been closed
I want to cut directly through the silence of thought.

Together:

I think I want to wear winter clothes in the summer,
I think I want to hear the clear outlook of birds,
I think I would like to distinguish the weight of bodies
suddenly exposed on a sacred public square.

The song then repeats with Hong Qi and Zhang Chu singing the verses and then Yang Jiasong and Zhong Lifeng alternating through the stanzas.

In 2011 Hong Qi finally had the chance to see Bob Dylan in person. For Hong Qi, this experience was magical. He saw in Dylan a calm, commanding presence indifferent to the opposition of his audience; he was there to perform a task. “At the end of his work he walked away, leaving behind an era.”

This song, like so many of Hong Qi’s songs, invites us to move on with the story of our lives. It is a march of desire to live fully. This is exactly the march that fills the streets of Urumchi every day.

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|

Below is a story by Alec Ash, editor of the writers colony the Anthill, our publishing partner for this event. This is a mirror image story in response to a story I wrote, “Mayonnaise,” which you can find at the Anthill. Both are exactly 808 words — which technically disqualifies them as flash fiction entries, but we present them as inspiration to get you writing. Think you can do better? Show us!

Red Bean Paste

Two expats, both English teachers, step out of their respective classrooms in a university district in northwest Beijing.

“Where do you want to go for lunch?”

“I’m hungover and I need meat. Let’s go somewhere close.”

“How close? There’s a Kro’s Nest up by Tsinghua East Gate.”

“That’s a whole fucking Chinese block away. How is that close?”

“There’s a baozi pu over there.”

“Oh shit, I haven’t had baozi in ages. Let’s see what’s steaming.”

“I went the other day. They had pork and beef.”

“Did you go with Lauren?”

“Piss off.”

“Pork and beef? The Chinese sure know how to pull out all the stops.”

“No, not pork and beef. Pork, and beef. And vegetarian.”

“I could teach those migrants a business trick or two. Location like this you got to hit that Western clientele. We have special needs. What if I want a baozi with pork and beef in it? Think they could do it?”

“You’re lucky to get the beef option, that’s rare. Mostly it’s all pig and chives. They make everything at like 4am anyway, then keep it hot. They roll a thousand or something in an hour. It’s like skyscrapers: one week and there’s a new one.”

“One week? BullSHIT.”

“No man. One week. I promise you, I saw it on a blog.”

“All right, what do you want? They all look the same.”

“I don’t know, let’s ask what they have. This is what I hate about baozi pu, only the top ti is ever open, and nothing’s marked.”

“What tea?”

“Ti. It’s the measure word for those wooden cylinder things.”

“Did Lauren teach you that?”

“Piss off.”

“Next person. Watcha want?”

“What is this?”

“Pork.”

“One ti. What else do you have?”

“Vegetable.”

“Do you have beef?”

“No. Eat here or take away?”

“Eat here.”

“Five kuai. Next person. Watcha want?”

“I want pork and beef.”

“Only have pork.”

(“You’re such a twat.” “Shhh.”)

“That one. One tea.”

“Eat here or take away?”

“Eat here.”

“Four kuai.”

“Do you have four kuai mate? I only have a hundred.”

“You’re such an unbelievable twat.”

“Said the bishop to the actress. Thanks.”

“You’re paying for the next one.”

“I got you that Starbucks. That’s worth at least a hundred baozi.”

“That was three months ago.”

“This seat is filthy. They can’t wipe these off after the last lardass showing more belly than Britney Spears has sweated all over it?”

“Pass the lajiao.”

“Oh fuck!”

“What is it now?”

“What the fuck is this?”

“Did you choke on your own bullshit?”

“That. Is not pork in this baozi.”

“Let’s have a look. Ha. They gave you red bean paste.”

“Who puts red bean paste in a baozi?”

“They put red bean paste in everything man.”

“I’ve never had red bean paste before.”

“Really? How do you like it?”

“I don’t like it. I want pork. Can you give me another four kuai? I pointed at the pork one, it was their mistake, they should switch it for free.”

“Crap mountain. How is it their fault if you point at some random baozi without asking what’s inside it? Why don’t you like it?”

“It’s … sort of like chilli con carne, but with no chilli and zero carne. No, wait, it’s like clay putty mixed with flour and left in the sun too long.”

“Did you eat a lot of clay putty as a kid?”

“How would you describe it genius?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen it all over the place but … I don’t think I’ve ever had it.”

“Ha! Well screw you, Mr. Let Me Tell You About China. You can shove your measure word for wooden cylindrical things up your arse.”

“I’ve only been here three months.”

“We don’t have red bean paste in Essex, that’s for sure.”

“They put anything in baozi man. Congealed duck blood, pig colon, turtle egg. I had a breakfast baozi with custard in it. Chilli bean is nothing.”

“Read bean’s not a chilli bean dumbnuts. It’s a type of kidney bean.”

“Give me one.”

“If I gave you one, they won’t switch it.”

“Just a bite.”

“Well?”

“It is kind of like clay putty. Less chewy than you think it will be.”

“Let me try it again. It’s a bit like a can of Heinz beans was opened after a hundred and fifty years and a radioactive apocalypse.”

“Give it here. Edible plastic explosive. Taco flavoured cement.”

“Processed plasticine. Quorn playdo.”

“Sweetened mud cake.”

“Marzipan, if it were red and made of beans.”

“Tastes like congealed spunk.”

“Is that what Lauren said last night?”

“Piss off.”

“Okay, enough. I’m going to switch it.”

Outside, the stall owner looked at the ti of cold baozi, six with bites out of them, then at the white man, who was waiting expectantly.

“Don’t want. That one. One tea.”

~

Alec Ash is founder and editor of the Anthill. Follow him @alecash.

Flash Fiction for Charity will be held July 13 at Great Leap Brewing’s Original No. 6. Please register in advance by emailing fiction@beijingcream.com. There’s a 50 RMB door fee (includes one free beer), with all proceeds going to the charity Educating Girls of Rural China.

The Uyghur Chinese musician and poet Hong Qi celebrated his 41st birthday on May 6. He doesn’t know if that day was really his birthday. He said his mother just guessed. There is a lot that Hong Qi doesn’t know about his origins: he is one of those rare Uyghurs who grew up thinking he was Han.

Hong Qi was born into extreme poverty. Hotan — the prefecture in south Xinjiang where he lived until age three — is the poorest prefecture in the nation. According to government statistics, in 2012 the average per capita income for the 2 million Uyghurs in Hotan was $183. Although he was born in a prefecture where the population was more than 90 percent Uyghur, Hong Qi didn’t realize his ethnicity until he was 16. That was when his Han parents told him he was adopted.

Like many military families in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, Hong Qi moved a lot as a kid. He spent significant portions of his childhood in Ürümchi. He read a lot of comic books; and he started thinking about the Uyghur identity he knew nothing about.

At 17 he decided to join the army. He was assigned to guard duty in a prison farm (laogai) in rural Aksu prefecture. It was there — in the midst of the misery and boredom of a high desert penal colony — that he first began to write songs. He sang about feeling homeless.

In 1992 he absconded from the military and from Xinjiang. He went to Xi’an. While waiting for his formal military discharge, he worked as a magazine illustrator and hung around Shaanxi Normal University. It was there, like a whole generation of Chinese college students, that he first encountered the music of Cui Jian. He grew his hair long and started singing karaoke. This is how he discovered that women liked him and could be talked into paying for food.

It wasn’t until 2003, on a trip to Yunnan, that he finally turned this rock-star persona back toward his Xinjiang origins. It was here that he first experienced the power of traditional folk music and began to think back to his childhood in Xinjiang. That, and the way the Xinjiang-style music of the Sichuanese settler Luo Lin (Dao Lang), caught on in the Han community.

Since those days Hong Qi’s work has followed a slow coming-to-terms with first his Xinjiang and then his Uyghur identity. Along the way he has found inspiration in the adaptations and co-options of the pioneering ethnomusicologist Wang Luobin, but he has also partnered with Uyghur and Hui musicians from Xinjiang such as Askar, Erkin, and Ma Tiao. One of the most successful of these collaborations resulted in a multi-city concert tour focused on generating awareness around the plight of orphaned, abandoned, and trafficked Uygur children who end up trapped in criminal and gray market communities in Eastern China.

This collaboration followed the direction of his 2007 album “A-li-mu-jiang, Ni Zai Nali?” (Alimjan, Where Are You?), which was inspired by a missing person ad he saw posted by a Uyghur mother at a bus stop in Ürümchi. With the support of the post-2009 Zhang Chunxian administration, he and other musicians and supporters inaugurated a nationwide program to raise awareness and create an institutional network for rehabilitating lost children and helping them find their families.

Since that time, Hong Qi has released two new albums titled “Whose Sheep?” and, in 2014, “The Heart of Darkness.” Both of these new albums include explicit references to Hong Qi’s Uyghur identity. He has begun writing his name in Arabic script.

In these two albums, Hong Qi seems to have become more comfortable in his own skin. As one commentator put it, following the earnest realism of the previous records, his new music seems not to be centered as closely on an agenda. Rather, its focus seems to be ruminations on street life in the Uyghur slums behind the South Train Station – the site of the recent bombing in Ürümchi.

His song “Crows and Sparrows,” featured above, begins with the sound of the trains and then moves in a spirited march through the atmosphere of poverty and marginality.

Crows and Sparrows

As the dawn wrestles rain drops in a game of chess,
White pigeons are released to fly to the hospital,
Stray dogs are visitors coming and going throughout the city,
The branches are filled with crows and sparrows.
Hey-yo, Hey-yo
Pigs and cows are now starting to come and go,
The eyelids of little mynas are quietly fluttering.
There is no final result to the affair which is just about happening,
A person will be baffled to see on every forehead
There are drops of sweat, in eyes there are tears.
Groaning misters, mysterious softness.
Hey-yo, hey-yo
There are drops of sweat, in eyes there are tears,
Bodies shrivel, brains stop thinking.

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|

Found on Ai Weiwei’s Instagram feed, here’s what some cool kids are up to: “hand-held guns,” they call it. There are some uncanny resemblances to The Red Detachment of Women, the famous Chinese ballet that debuted in 1964…

Is there something more subversive going on here, or is the point of this to make us over-analyze a silly meme? Hmm.

UPDATE, 6/14, 1:02 am: Says someone from Ai Weiwei’s studio: “A colleague saw a post of the Chinese dancers then took a photo. The rest of us started doing our own versions.”

UPDATE, 6/14, 8:38 pm: Here’s an informative Guardian article about the “leg-gun” pose:

Weiwei’s so-called leg-gun series certainly raises more questions than it answers. Whether this is a political gesture, a genuinely subversive criticism of state-controlled media, an artistic expression or simply his answer to the famous “Angelina Jolie’s leg” meme remains a mystery. But the fact that one underwear-flashing, calf-clasping photo can produce a global conversation about state freedom, violence, Chinese communism, artistic interpretation and global power speaks volumes about the potency of the artist in our internet age.

As one Chinese commenter said on The Red Detachment of Women image posted by Weiwei, “This firing made loopholes.” We’ll just have to wait and see where those loopholes lead.

And the AWW original that began it all:

(H/T Rosalyn)

China won’t be playing in Brazil – they have appeared at a World Cup just once and failed to score a goal – but millions will stay up late to watch the games, probably starting this Friday at 4 am when Croatia kicks off against the host nation in São Paulo. Here are 10 things in this year’s World Cup with a Chinese connection.

The Balls

As with many, many other things, the official World Cup match balls — the Brazuca — have been made in China. Or at least some of them. Adidas contracted its long-time partner and supplier, Guangdong-based Longway, to make the ball after engineers and developers from both companies developed the Brazuca (notable for its thermal bonding, we’re told). But there was one problem: Longway couldn’t cope with the unexpected demand, and Pakistan’s Forward Sports was drafted in to share some of the load. 

The Fans

Shankai Sports, FIFA’s official VIP package supplier for China, says it has sold about 1,500 packages for wealthy Chinese fans traveling to Brazil, more than twice the number it sold four years ago. In addition, there will be thousands of others making the trip from China on their own.

Tencent and… Mo Yan?

Yup, that’s right, the Chinese Nobel Prize Winner That China Recognizes. Tencent, which has previously hired soccer stars Lionel Messi and Neymar to promote its WeChat app, has sent 33 staffers from China to Brazil to cover the tournament, in addition to the people it already has on the ground. But writer Mo Yan will also be watching the final in some sort of Tencent capacity. No one is really sure if he’s even a soccer fan, but we’ll find out soon enough.

Xi Jinping

Talking of the final, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been invited by his Brazilian counterpart, Dilma Rousseff, to watch the final on July 13. The big man is known to be a big footy fan and just so happens to have a BRICS summit in Brazil on July 15. It would be great if he wore a Chinese national team shirt to the game, but don’t hold your breath.

Panda Power

Paul the Octopus had an 85% success rate predicting the outcome of games at Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup, but he’s dead now. Mani the Parakeet tried to assume the mantle but only got it right 71% of the time. Enter China’s Panda Predictors. Last time we checked, the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Center was still deciding whether its baby pandas would be asked to choose foods with national flags or climb trees with national flags. Either way, it’s sure to make for gripping television.

Sick Notes

Speaking of TV, the time difference in Brazil means that the majority of games will kick off at midnight, 3 am and 6 am in China. It’s a brutal schedule suitable only for the most hardened insomniacs or work-shy students. As a result, online scammers are selling fake sick notes for specified future dates to coincide with probable World Cup hangovers. They’re selling for as much as 300 yuan (close to $50), which, judging by the abundance of quality forgers in China, seems to be a little steep.

The Sponsors

Budweiser, Castrol, Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s… and Yingli. That’s right, the Chinese solar company is an official World Cup “Sponsor” (one level below “Partner” and one level above “National Supporter”). It was surprising when Yingli signed on for the 2010 World Cup, but even more eyebrows were raised when it re-upped for 2014. Estimated cost? Up to $30 million. By the way, when you see Harbin claim to be an official World Cup beer, it’s legit — its owner, Budweiser, is allowed to designate brands to represent it in certain territories.

Lottery Boost

Match-fixing is banned and (hopefully) now out of the Chinese game, while gambling is confined to Macau, but lottery companies are preparing for a World Cup windfall. Sports lottery sales doubled during the 2010 World Cup to 4 billion yuan ($640 million). and US-listed 500.com said online lottery sales in China are expected to jump by at least 70% this year, from 42 billion yuan ($6.7 billion) in 2013, due in part to the World Cup. One small problem: no official licenses have yet been issued.

Chinese Representation

Ireland played in the 1994 World Cup with a team at least half of whom were patently not Irish, so perhaps China has some defectors in the ranks of other teams, as they do in table tennis? Sadly not, but there are six players from the Chinese domestic leagues who will be in Brazil with their national team squads: three Koreans — Park Jong-woo (Guangzhou R&F), Ha Dae-sung (Beijing Guoan), Kim Young-gwon (Guangzhou Evergrande) — as well as Australian Ryan McGowan (Shandong Luneng), Honduran Osman Chavez (Qingdao Jonoon), and Bosnia & Herzegovina’s Zvjezdan Misimovic (Guizhou Renhe). We wish them well.

Online Boost

Finally, the World Cup mode of computer game FIFA Online 3 hasn’t quite stayed true to form in China. That’s because China publisher Tencent begged developer EA Sports not to make the Chinese players too crappy. Zheng Zhi, for example, was given an average of a five-percentage point boost across the board in various skill categories, while striker Gao Lin was another who got some help behind the scenes. The jokes write themselves.

Mark blogs at China Sports Insider. Follow him on Twitter @DreyerChina. His last piece for us was a preview of the Sochi Olympics.

SCHEDULE (all times China; the first letter represents the group)

Friday, June 13:

A: Brazil vs. Croatia, 4 am

June 14:

A: Mexico vs. Cameroon, midnight
B: Spain vs. Netherlands, 3 am
B: Chile vs. Australia, 6 am

June 15:

C: Colombia vs. Greece, midnight
D: Uruguay vs. Costa Rica, 3 am
D: England vs. Italy, 6 am
C: Ivory Coast vs. Japan, 9 am

June 16:

E: Switzerland vs. Ecuador, midnight
E: France vs. Honduras, 3 am
F: Argentina vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina, 6 am

June 17:

G: Germany vs. Portugal, midnight
F: Iran vs. Nigeria, 3 am
G: Ghana vs. United States, 6 am

June 18:

H: Belgium vs. Algeria, midnight
A: Brazil vs. Mexico, 3 am
H: Russia vs. South Korea, 6 am

June 19:

B: Australia vs. Netherlands, midnight
B: Spain vs. Chile, 3 am
A: Cameroon vs. Croatia, 6 am

June 20:

C: Colombia vs. Ivory Coast, midnight
D: Uruguay vs. England, 3 am
C: Japan vs. Greece, 6 am

June 21:

D: Italy vs. Costa Rica, midnight
E: Switzerland vs. France, 3 am
E: Honduras vs. Ecuador, 6 am

June 22:

F: Argentina vs. Iran, midnight
G: Germany vs. Ghana, 3 am
F: Nigeria vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina, 6 am

June 23:

H: Belgium vs. Russia, midnight
H: South Korea vs. Algeria, 3 am
G: USA vs. Portugal, 6 am

June 24:

B: Netherlands vs. Chile, midnight
B: Australia vs. Spain, midnight
A: Croatia vs. Mexico, 4 am
A: Cameroon vs. Brazil, 4 am

June 25:

D: Costa Rica vs. England, midnight
D: Italy vs. Uruguay, midnight
C: Japan vs. Colombia, 4 am
C: Greece vs. Ivory Coast, 4 am

June 26:

F: Bosnia-Herzegovina vs. Iran, midnight
F: Nigeria vs. Argentina, midnight
E: Ecuador vs. France, 4 am
E: Honduras vs. Switzerland, 4 am

June 27:

G: Portugal vs. Ghana, midnight
G: United States vs. Germany, midnight
H: South Korea vs. Belgium, 4 am
H: Algeria vs. Russia, 4 am

June 29:

A1 vs. B2, midnight
C1 vs. D2, 4 am

June 30:

B1 vs. A2, midnight
D1 vs. C2, 4 am

July 1:

E1 vs. F2, midnight
G1 vs. H2, 4 am

July 2:

F1 vs. E2, midnight
H1 vs. G2, 4 am

July 5:

Quarterfinal 1, midnight
Quarterfinal 2, 4 am

July 6:

Quarterfinal 3, midnight
Quarterfinal 4: 4 am

July 9:

Semifinal 1, 4 am

July 10:

Semifinal 2, 4 am

July 13:

Third-place game, 4 am

July 14:

Final, 3 am

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I, Penguin China has released a seven-book series on China-focused Great War history. It tabbed Paul French, author of the popular and award-winning Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China, to contribute Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution. The book “explores China’s betrayal by the West, the charismatic advocates it sent to the conference and the hugely significant May Fourth Movement that resulted from the treaty [of Versailles].” I sat down with the author (over Skype) to talk about the “betrayal,” Japan’s role in it, and how it might have been tipped by — of all things — America’s Jim Crow laws.

Let’s start off with a broad question. Your book is titled Betrayal in Paris; who was betrayed and by whom?

Well, if you look at the series that Penguin is doing on World War I, the series of e-books, the first one they published was by Jonathan Fenby on the siege of Qingdao. That’s an interesting story. Of course, Qingdao was a German colony — if you’ve been to Qingdao you’ve seen the German churches and the German architecture, and of course the Tsingtao Brewery –but the thing about Qingdao is that the Germans used it as a base. The Kaiser always wanted to have an empire like Britain and France, always wanted to put “its toe in warm water,” as they used to say. But they also had a few little odd colonies out in the Pacific islands, most of which are now independent countries or are American trustees like Samoa. And the Germans had a lot of those but they needed somewhere closer to Germany to put their fleet. The German fleet has to leave Qingdao and go to Europe to fight in the North Sea against the Royal Navy. So Qingdao was only defended by one division of German troops. The Japanese took advantage, went in, kicked the Germans out and took over Qingdao and most of the Shandong Peninsula for themselves. China was of course pissed off about this. But China was too weak to do anything about it militarily, and the government was too divided to stop them.

During the war they complained. They complained to people like the British. People always forget that it’s not until after World War II that America really counts. It’s not a great power until after World War II, and people sort of forget that. At that time Britain is definitely the biggest power in the world. They were not going to do anything about Japan because Japan was technically an ally. Like the Chinese, they didn’t fight [in WWI] but they did provide escort ships to the Royal Navy. And also, kicking the Germans out of China was actually a good thing because it was like a thumb in the eye of the Kaiser, and it meant that Britain didn’t have to worry about its bases in the Far East, because the Germans had been kicked out of the Far East. So the Royal Navy could concentrate all its ships in the North Sea, between Europe and Britain, and also in the Dardanelles, in the famous Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey. So the British didn’t want to do anything about it. The French were invaded, basically, so they weren’t going to do anything about it. And the Chinese went to Washington.

They thought that Washington was a place they should go. Remember, this is 1914, the Chinese Republic is only a few years old. And they appeal to the Americans and say, “Look, we’re a republic, you’re a republic; you should help us. We are a fledgling Republican system along the lines of yourself.”

Woodrow Wilson was very encouraging to the Chinese and said, “Look, you know we will sort this out, but it will have to wait until the end of the war. The war is going to consume everything and until the war in Europe is finished, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”

In 1917, German submarines start sinking ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere and they sink a couple of American ships — which is one of the reasons Woodrow Wilson used to get America into the war in 1917. And what he said to the Chinese was, you should declare war on Germany as well. So the Chinese did everything that Woodrow Wilson asked. They also condemned the use of submarines in warfare — it’s hard to remember this now, but submarines were seen as a very sneaky way of fighting a war — it was almost illegal. Of course, then everyone else got submarines. But everyone [at the time] thought that it was cheating to sink a ship with a submarine rather than by a classic naval battle. So the Chinese said, “We oppose all submarine warfare,” and then the Chinese declared war on Germany. It didn’t send soldiers, but as you will know from one of the other books in the series, Mark O’ Neill’s book, they send 100,000 of what was called the Chinese Labor Corp, or the “Coolie Corp” — this is very little known, even in Europe. These are the guys who cleaned the battlefields, who helped in logistics and loading ships and stuff like that.

So China sent men, China declared war when they were told to by Washington and they opposed submarine warfare when they were told to. They had every reason to believe that at the end of the war, when the Paris Peace Treaty meeting took place, that Woodrow Wilson would argue their case against Japan. This is clearly sovereign territory that has been snatched. Shandong was a land grab. There was every reason for them to get it back. And Wilson was supposed to be the champion of the smaller, weaker nations. There were other groups that had arguments [for territory]. But China had a very, very good case. China had been a formal ally in the war. So when everyone sat down in Paris in 1919 to discuss what was going to be the peace treaty from the war, they had every reason to believe that Wilson would defend them.

They hoped that the British and the French, the other two big powers that were there, would support them as well, but you couldn’t be sure about that because they knew that the British and French were old-school Europeans and would only really do what was in the interest of their own empires. But there was no reason why the Americans shouldn’t have supported them, and ultimately the betrayal — which was by everyone of China, but most of all, and certainly the Chinese felt this, the betrayal was most keen from the United States.

You write that Japan originally took Shandong for “influence, empire and profit.” How had the Japanese been governing Shandong? And what did Shandong mean to the Chinese?

Fairly liberally, actually. They wanted it for trade, they wanted it for a base in China. They were looking at it from a 19th-century imperialist point of view. They were looking at how the Europeans had carved up Africa; they had looked at how the Europeans had carved up the treaty ports in China; the British in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya; the Portuguese in Macau; the French in Vietnam (Indochina); they wanted their own empire. They felt that China was naturally theirs. Of course, in 1911 they had annexed Korea and kept Korea until the end of the Second World War. So they had already started empire-building.

But they were sneaky: while the rest of the world was concentrating on Europe, they tried to force greater concessions out of China, some of which they got, some of which they didn’t. But this loss of territory in Shandong was a very deep hurt to the Chinese government. It was a stability issue; if the government didn’t oppose Japan on Qingdao and Shandong, it looked weak, in the way that today if the Chinese government looked weak on Xinjiang or Tibet, it could be accused by its people of being weak overall; and they were worried about that. But this was something that they really wanted — add to that that it is one of the great heartlands of China; it is the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, the great belief systems of China. In Paris everyone else had a lot of issues that they wanted to discuss; China really only wanted to talk about Shandong.

You praise Wellington Koo’s defense of Chinese sovereignty as “robust.” The response from many other delegations, the international diplomacy crowd in Paris, as well as the Chinese students there, was exuberant. From a debating standpoint, the Japanese were quite plainly defeated. With such a strong case then, and a well-argued one at that, how was it that Japan was eventually able to coerce Wilson into siding with them against China?

There are a number of ways they did it, but one was very clever. You see, Wilson didn’t really want territory like the Europeans — the French wanted Alsace and Lorraine; the Belgians wanted a little bit up by Luxembourg; the British just wanted to keep their empire intact (British foreign policy is quite simple: keep France and Germany apart and we win; divide and conquer).

But Wilson’s one great aim was not land, it was not territory, it was nothing like that. What he wanted was this great international organization: the League of Nations, which of course morphs into the United Nations. The League of Nations, from the First World War to the Second World War, really tried to act in the way that the United Nations does now, over territorial disputes and big multilateral issues. He really, really wanted the League of Nations and he wanted America to be a power in the League of Nations. Wilson felt that America had fought in the war; America was a rising power, New York had all the money, Chicago the manufacturing — this was America’s moment, this was America’s century, and it had to be launched from somewhere, and he felt that it should be done that way. Wilson was a democrat — he wasn’t like Teddy Roosevelt, who almost gave America an empire with the Philippines and Cuba. The Americans were never any good at running an empire, but they sort of had one for a while (not forgetting, of course, staging a coup in Hawaii).

What Wilson wanted was the League of Nations. The Japanese said, very cleverly, and knowing exactly what they were saying, “If we’re going to have a League of Nations, and adjudicate fairness around the world between groups of people — races, tribes, countries — no one should be allowed to be a member of the League of Nations if they have discriminatory policies in their own country. And by that the Japanese knew that the one thing that Wilson could not do was overturn segregation in the United States. There was of course also the Chinese Exclusion Act, and there were restrictions on the number of Japanese that could come into the country, but they knew that it was a fair argument that you could make with the Europeans: how could you adjudicate fairness when you have segregation between black and white in America? Wilson did not have the power to overturn segregation, certainly not in 1919. So Japan threatened to veto, with a lot of other countries as well, who were not supporting Japan but thought that this was a genuinely good idea, particularly emerging black nations. How could you adjudicate fairness when you won’t even let black people into the same theater as white people in America? So the Japanese knew that this would force Wilson to comply.

With America they said, “We will wreck your dream of a League of Nations if you don’t give in on Shandong.” I think it was a very hard thing for Wilson to do. He’s still the president who went away for the longest duration while he was president: six months in Paris. That’s a long time for a president to be away from Washington. Remember, Lloyd George could always just pop home back to London for the weekend, and Clemenceau was in his hometown anyway. But Wilson was really stuck there. And in the end he caved. With secret agreements with the Europeans who supported Japan, Wilson caved and China was betrayed.

So after this betrayal, news gets back to China. What happens on May 4th?

May 4th is a seminal date in China. Word got back that despite the fact that everyone could see — everyone could see! American academics could see it, journalists could see it — that China had a great case, it was an obvious win for China, but they were defeated by the Great Powers and America. Young Chinese students, intellectuals first of all, started to protest around Tiananmen. And they called for many things — one of their primary calls was for the return of Shandong — but they called for other things: for the government to start representing the people; they called for elections; they called for all sorts of things. The point being, not what they were calling for necessary, but that this was really the first time in China — even the 1911 Revolution had been done by a relatively small group of people — that there was was broad-based, participatory and democratic demonstrations.

Shops refused to stock Japanese goods and there was a boycott of anything Japanese. Workers came out on strike, proto-socialists, not-yet Communist movements, left-wing anarchist groups joined in as well; ordinary people. Things spread to other cities; there were boycotts in Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou) and elsewhere. And this is really when Chinese politics does one of these 180s and people say we want something more, “We’ve made a revolution, we’ve made a republic, now what do we do?” And one of those things is that what they want — a lot of the stuff that you’ll hear now — is, “We want China to be strong; we’re patriotic; we’re nationalistic; we’re not going to be bossed around by Japan; we’re not going to be told what to do by the Europeans, the Americans”; all of that goes on.

And really, if you look at the sort of people who a couple years later start becoming prominent left-wing activists in the trade union movement and the labor movement, and also of course in the formation of the Communist party in the French concession of Shanghai in 1922 and all of that, these people all really get their political education and launch their political careers around the May 4th Movement.

But the May 4th Movement is something bigger as well. It’s unlike actually what goes on in China now — which is rather sad — but it is a lot like what was going on in June of 1989; it was also about being a part of the world. A lot of the Chinese stuff now, to me, is about ultra-nationalism: “close the doors, we’re going to be number one.” It’s almost like American isolationism but with Chinese characteristics.

This was also a cultural movement. That period involved translating lots of writers; H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf. People had started to go abroad to study. [You saw] the growth of Chinese, technology, research and development. People started to embrace the ideas of psychiatry, sociology — things that are not traditionally seen as really worthy of study in China — things like that. That’s why I call it the “long revolution” in China, which is really on the May 4th Movement — really on 1911, but May 4th accelerates the process of 1911; it democratizes it; it massifies it (capacity-building, I guess we call it now). From that point China goes into the 1920s and of course the bloodbaths in Shanghai between left and right, the pull to the left of Guomindang, the continuing anti-Japanese activity around the annexation of Manchuria in 1932 and 1937, the Second World War. Right through to 1949 and the Communist victory. And you could argue that that process is still continuing. And you can’t deny it now. If you just look at Sino-Japanese relations right now, they’re still in the toilet. This stuff goes all the way back.

Let’s shift gears if we may, and talk about the making of the book. Why this topic?

Amazingly to me, just about every book on Versailles misses the China bit, or plays down that negotiation. If you go back to the newspapers at the time, it’s a massive story! It was one of the big fundamental questions to be sorted out at Versailles in Paris and now it’s kind of played down. It’s not really thought about because I think if you say to the average man or woman on the street — “Shandong, Qingdao” — well, people don’t have much idea about these places. It’s sort of been a bit forgotten, so I wanted to sort of recover it a little bit, and also to make it interesting. It’s a courtroom battle really.

You have two great debaters here, particularly Wellington Koo, the great Chinese diplomat, who was a champion debater at Columbia, very Americanized, very Anglophile. He had been Chinese ambassador to America, very young, was to become during the Second World War Chinese ambassador to Britain, was to be China’s first lead delegate at the League of Nations, and so on. He really was a great debater, and he fought this cause, and it was a passionate cause.

Baron Makino, who was lead negotiator for Japan, was a much more traditional, older character. But he was a great debater as well and a great player of go, Chinese chess. So he knew his strategy very well.

So these two come together in a clash. And of course, like any great courtroom drama, everyone is trying to make sure that the press reports it the way they want it to be reported. All the backchannel stuff is going on and everything; [I thought] you might be able to turn this into a decent sort of courtroom piece. I’m not saying it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or something, but it must have been a classic clash to see it. And they’re doing all this in front of a table at which is sitting Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Clemenceau; the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of France, and the President of the United States. This is a pretty serious judging panel that you’ve got in front of you.

It must have been a very tense atmosphere to have witnessed. Harold Nicolson, the great british diplomat, saw some of it and he said that it was a fantastic clash of debating techniques.

Brent Crane is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. Follow him on Twitter @bcamcrane, or shoot him an email at bcamcrane@gmail.com.