A few random hits from around the China blogosophere on this Sunday morning…
****
In Foreign Affairs, Mixin Pei considers the challenges facing the Communist Party as the world’s economy tumbles downward and even China’s much bally-hooed economic miracle takes a bit of a stumble:
Until recently, most leading China watchers thought the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had become remarkably resilient. Through learning and adaptation, it seemed, the world’s largest and most powerful one-party regime had become politically nimble and skillful enough to overcome difficulties that would have overwhelmed lesser autocratic rulers. For two decades, the party has compiled an impressive list of achievements: at home it has kept the economy growing at a gravity-defying double-digit rate, while abroad it has pursued a pragmatic foreign policy, avoiding confrontation with the United States and methodically gaining prestige and influence.
Because of the global economic crisis, however, Beijing is in trouble. The problems are numerous: China’s exports are plummeting, tens of millions of migrant laborers have lost their jobs, millions of college graduates cannot find employment, industrial overcapacity is threatening deflation, and the once red-hot real estate sector has nose-dived. The country’s faltering growth is posing the hardest test yet to the CCP’s resilience.
h/t CDT.
*****
The Economist sees it a bit differently, worrying that the economic woes of the industrialized West will add fuel to nationalist fires long smoldering in the PRC:
IT IS an ill wind that blows no one any good. For many in China even the buffeting by the gale that has hit the global economy has a bracing message. The rise of China over the past three decades has been astonishing. But it has lacked the one feature it needed fully to satisfy the ultranationalist fringe: an accompanying decline of the West. Now capitalism is in a funk in its heartlands. Europe and Japan, embroiled in the deepest post-war recession, are barely worth consideration as rivals. America, the superpower, has passed its peak. Although in public China’s leaders eschew triumphalism, there is a sense in Beijing that the reassertion of the Middle Kingdom’s global ascendancy is at hand.
The accompanying article opens with a slightly overwrought account of a nationalist salon in Beijing, works its way through the recent naval shenanigans in the South China Sea, and concludes with a shout-out to the recently published polemic “Unhappy China.” The only thing they left out was one of those maps you used to find in 1950s anti-Communist propaganda films showing the “Battle Plans for Red China.”
*****
On a slightly odder note, Tim Johnson, Beijing correspondent for McClatchy, re-prints an email he received last week from a filmmaker in the hinterlands of China who is having some trouble buying a top of the line computer:
Last month I was back in Dali and chatting with a couple of western filmmakers who also work and live here in China. I told them of my plan to buy a good “power” computer and start doing my thing again. They both laughed and said good luck buying my computer in China. I said I found it on Lenovo’s website and I was sure I would have no problem. They went on to tell me it was next to impossible for the average Joe Blow to walk in off the street to the dealer and actually BUY one of those big computers you see online. They told me their experience here was that the government DOES NOT want the public to have these powerful computers. They said I would find I’d have to go home to buy a good Lenovo. Well, I just couldn’t believe that.
And neither really can I, but then again I do all of my writing on a five-year old Toshiba laptop with a bad cooling unit and missing five keys…so, it’s been awhile since I’ve been in the market for a computer. I’d be curious if any of the tech types out there can shed some light on the situation. It sounds a bit unbelievable, but then again….
*****
Odder still, Stuart at the Found in China blog, has a little bit of geologic satire (not, I would assume, a category with many entries). If a volcanic island emerges off the coast to China, and there is no propaganda department to spin the event, does the island exist? Sounds like an episode of Lost, but I digress…
Officials in Beijing have said the new island bears all the hallmarks of a piece of their own turf and ‘experts’ claim to have historical records stretching back two millennia that prove that the island is, and has always been, a part of Chinese territory. Therefore, and in accordance with Chinese law, territorial waters have been redrawn to encompass all areas covered by joining the dots between Hainan, the Korean Peninsula, and the emerging island. China’s state media have been referring to this are as the ‘Harmonious Triangle.’
There’s more, check it out.
******
Finally, as we reach the inner chambers of oddity, the always entertaining Madam Miaow is in high dudgeon over the new London stage musical production of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert:
I saw the original film when it opened at the 1994 Edinburgh Film Festival. I’d been looking forward to it as I’d always warmed to the men and women I’d met in the gay community who were full of the exuberance of challenging their oppression and winning major battles. I found them to be great role-models and lots of fun. Here, at last, was a movie made about them.
Imagine my surprise to see the all-white troupe of drag queens at the centre of the story looking after their own interests as a minority; cast as heroes, not against their enemies in the real world, but against Cynthia, an evil East Asian woman who is a Filipino import bride with a manic compulsion for firing ping-pong balls from her vagina. Depicted as the shrewish scourge of Bob, the beloved blue-collar mechanic, in reality the women she represents make up one of the most pitiful, least powerful minorities on the planet. Cynthia fulfils every dirty sleazy lazy stereotype conceived around the Yellow Peril and their sexuality.
Read the review, if only for the hilarious description of Madam’s own previous performance piece satirizing stereotypes of female Asian sexuality. I think she refers to it at one point as “Suzie (Wong) with an Uzi.”
*****
Have a happy Sunday and I hope your tournament bracket looks better than mine does.
Hey, since when did the Economist start making its articles available online?