If there’s going to be a deadly intestinal virus outbreak in central China, you can pretty much bet it’s going to happen in Fuyang. The Anhui city, near the border with Henan province, has something of a history of unwholesome happenings.

So, there were no surprises when a CER colleague sent me a link about the recent Enterovirus 71 (EV71) outbreak. EV71 is a variant of hand, foot and mouth disease (HFMD), but with more severe symptoms:

Typically, it starts with a generalized illness, poor appetite, and sore throat, followed by a fever, rashes on the hands, feet, and buttocks along with mouth ulcers.

State media reports that there are now over 15,000 cases of HFMD in China, resulting in 26 deaths. In Yunnan province there are 113 cases, Jiangxi has 114 and Shanghai municipality has reported 1,988.

In Fuyang, EV71 has infected 3,300 people and caused 22 deaths.

Remember 2004’s fake milk powder scandal that killed 15 babies? That was Fuyang.

And last month, the city government’s “white house” (do we mean Capitol building?) made news. At a glance, we’d guess some dubious sources of income may have been involved. A whistle-blower on the project mysteriously died in prison. The central government is investigating.

“Fuyang is the most luan place I know,” our Chinese teacher from Anhui told us. “The government, the people, the mafia … just go to the train station and you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

We may take a rain check on that one.

Related

Danwei: Darkness in the “White House”

Wikipedia: Fuyang disambiguator (there are two Fuyangs, one in Anhui and one in Zhejiang)

I didn’t read the South China Morning Post on Saturday. Fortunately, Imagethief did… and turned up this:

It is a work by artist Liu Yuyi and his daughter, Liu Haomei, painted to mark the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Measuring 7.1 meters by 2.8 meters, Halcyon Days Pearl is Hong Kong’s largest painting.

It depicts President Hu Jintao surrounded by a selection of Hong Kong’s great and good with Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang quite literally standing there as Hu’s right hand man. If SAR critics are looking for more “Beijing’s poodle” material to lob at Tsang, this could be it.

Liu said he wanted to include people of different political views, which explains the appearance of Cardinal Joseph Zen, Bishop of Hong Kong, Anson Chan, former chief secretary to the SAR, and Alan Leong, the Civic Party candidate who lost out to Tsang in March’s controlled election. Tycoons such as Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho earn spots much closer to Hu.

According to the SCMP article, the background of the painting includes Mount Everest (presumably without a road running up the side) as a symbol of mainland China’s support for Hong Kong.

Imagethief makes two interesting comparisons: one to the iconic cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the other to Mao-era propaganda art.

Parallels are drawn between the positioning of Hu amongst the Hong Kong’s elite and Mao in his classic poses surrounded by the proletariat. Similarities can also been seen in the use of positive imagery.

My first thought was that this kind of iconography might be intended as ironic. Apparently not, it seems.

Imagethief’s closing remark is to ask what Hong Kong people might think of it (or where to hang it). I’d also be interested to find out what Beijing’s take on it is. When the official message for the handover anniversary is likely to be along the lines of social and cultural inclusiveness combined with mutual economic gain, it can’t be good PR to have someone drag up images that remind many Hong Kong people of what made them leave the mainland in the first place.

Danwei.org’s Joel Martinsen has a good roundup here of online chatter in the Chinese internet about the tragic massacre at Virginia Tech Monday, where over 30 died. Many comments, he says, are shocked and sympathetic, with some ugly venting here and there. He also includes an interesting excerpt from a CCTV reporter’s blog:

A journalist with a CCTV news program wrote on her blog that this possibility ultimately caused their report to be scrapped. She comments:

Instinct at the time was: not doing it would be unacceptable and a dereliction of duty. However, to do it might run into temporary restrictions, and it might even be killed before being born. Regardless, the first thing is to get going on it. This was the opinion of the editor in chief, and also that of us workers….Originally, the thought was to come up with a plan as quickly as possible and let the leaders pass a verdict on it, but something unexpected came up: the leaders quickly “became aware of the serious nature of the issue” and “stopped up a hole that could be problematic for propaganda.”

Meanwhile, Beijing Newspeak, a blog written by a foreign copy editor working at Xinhua, has a post here on the mood in his state newsroom as it was revealed that the gunman was a Korean permanent resident of the US, not a Chinese citizen, as had been reported earlier:

In the end, we will never know how they planned to approach it but suffice to say the senior editors were delighted when “South Korea” was read out at the press conference. Back-slapping and congratulations ensued - one editor said that it would have been a inconceivable loss of face if the gunman had been Chinese. Xinhua can now go forth and write about the incident all they want but there is no doubt that if the gunman had been Chinese the reporting would have been understated to say the least. Galling really. To think a potential loss of face dwarfed a sense of responsibility to report such a tragic world news event.

A column by Nick Currie (aka Momus, whom I’d only known of previously as a somewhat obscure electronic musician) on Wired.com makes an interesting analogy between airline routes and how language and culture flow across the world: Both either go directly from point to point or radiate outward like spokes from major “hubs”. Like in the airline industry, the trend in cultural communication up until now has been away from point-to-point and toward hub-and-spoke:

One of the articles to emerge from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference was, “Cultural Diversity? A Pipe Dream.” In it, Rüdiger Wischenbart noted some shocking facts about the current realities behind book translation.

Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It’s sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we’d be talking about the kind of world where you can’t fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.

The statistics go on to cover English dominance in movies (only in the US and India do people regularly go to see movies made in their own country) and, finally, the internet. But in this last category there at least seems to be some competition (emphasis added):

What about the internet? Well, English is unsurprisingly the dominant language, with 29.5 percent of all users communicating in it. Chinese is next, with about half the number of English users (159 million Chinese to 329 million English users). But Chinese is coming up fast, with more than twice the growth rate of English online. If it overtakes, does that make English a point-to-point language, or does Chinese just become the new hub, with all the spokes (at least the Asian ones) leading toward it?

A good question, but I wonder how much of that growth rate is coming from native speakers, either Chinese citizens or overseas Chinese (137 million of those 159 million users are inside China, where internet use is growing at an 8% clip), and how much is from second-language speakers from elsewhere in Asia or the world - my guess is that it is overwhelmingly from the former, and that Chinese on the internet is on the whole a fairly self-contained system. However, with more people learning Chinese around the world and the recent trend toward translating the Chinese internet into English, we’ll probably see a few more spokes emerge.

It is art auction season in Hong Kong, with the first of Sotheby’s twice-yearly sales starting Saturday and Chrisite’s offering kicking off towards the end of May.

As is often the case nowadays, all the talk is about Chinese contemporary art. Chinese ceramics, pottery and paintings have long been popular among Asia’s collectors but talk of Xu Beihong’s 1939 work Put Down Your Whip breaking the record for contemporary art in the region by selling for US$8.19 million is far more newsworthy.

Records are routinely smashed at these auctions. Interest from China’s expanding affluent classes and increased awareness of the China market among Western collectors are seen as being behind the rising prices.

Will this year see more of the same? Analysts at the Morgan Stanley Capital International Asia Index have their doubts, saying that the Sotheby’s event will be a test of Asian buyers’ appetite following the February stock market slump.

These are indeed volatile times but it would be foolish to underestimate the robust constitution of the Chinese contemporary art market.

The stock markets rebounded from their February malaise and are now back to record highs. Is art all that different? Perhaps not in terms of general investor sentiment.

Writing about contemporary art auctions a few months ago, I was introduced to a world in the midst of a boom phase, with rapid buying and selling as market players looked to squeeze out every drop of profit.

Everyone was keeping an eye out for the next big thing, spurred on by stories of the money being made by those in the know. With individual - and often poorly informed - investors increasingly playing a role, prices were shooting up, perhaps beyond realistic valuations.

Sound familiar?

It is one of those strange things that keeps happening despite flying in the face of common sense. Movies that will be seen on pirated DVDs across the nation are banned by Chinese censors for obscure reasons that cannot possibly be true.

The latest is the third installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was originally based on a ride at a Disney theme park - an obvious threat to the stability of the nation.

The good folks at the blog Danwei report that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television may ban the movie from Chinese cinemas because Chow Yun-fat, who plays a Chinese pirate in the movie, has unsightly scars and, well, plays a pirate. According to a poll carried out by the International Herald Leader - which is owned by the Xinhua, the state news agency - Chinese people fall on both sides of the debate. On the whole, 60% or so don’t really feel insulted.

Censors around the world tend to be a flaky lot. An interesting webpage provides an unchecked list of books that have been banned at one point or another. Classics like Ulysses, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have all gone under the axe at some point and in some place. They are joined by both the Bible and the Quran. And of course US Senator Joseph McCarthy (not exactly a national hero) did his best to keep Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience out of sight.

Chinese sensors are, in many ways, in a class of their own given the wideth and depth of their activities. Pirates does not represent the first time Hollywood has found itself on the barred list. It is unknown whether the movie will, in fact, be banned and, if it is, whether the reason will, in fact, be some made-up scars.

It would be a shame.

This is the seventh in a series of posts Alfred Romann will file on India.

The list of assets of Mularam Kharida, a driver in Delhi, includes but is not limited to:
- A 24-hour-a-day job as a driver (earning 3,500 rupees, or US$90, per month),
- Access to tourists that tip well,
- The ability to take said tourist to shops that tip him badly,
- A small parcel of land three hours from Delhi where the one-room home for his family of five is,
- Another piece of land in the same village where he is slowly building a new and bigger home,
- Four buffalo,
- One cow,
- His wife’s job as a kindergarten teacher in his home village (earning 1,200 rupees per month or US$30).

Mularam’s list of liabilities includes:
- About 9,000 rupees per month (US$220) in household expenses,
- School fees and expenses (uniforms and supplies) for his two dauthers, aged 18 and 16, and one son, aged 14.
- Lack of sleep (three full hours on a good night),
- Two daughters, aged 16 and 18, that will likely be married soon and require a “very expensive” dowry,
- Ongoing construction costs for his new home,
- Occasional and unexpected medical costs.

The list of things Mularam would like includes:
- Enough money to pay for his two daughters’ marriages/dowries (a few hundred thousand rupees),
- To finish his new home (another year or two),
- Constant electricity,
- A refrigerator (see above),
- Less work,
- For his entire body to hurt less,
- A few nights of uninterrupted sleep.
- Go overseas to work (”I work hard. In a few months pay for my daughter’s marriage. Pay for new house.”)

The list of things Mularam dislikes includes but is not limited to:
- People from Pakistan (”no good people”),
- The cheap three-wheeled taxis that populate the streets of India’s capital,
- People from Bangladesh,
- Coffee (tea with milk and sugar is better),
- People from Sri Lanka (”no good people),
- Chinese trinkets,
- People from the mountainous regions of the country (”no good people”),
- Beer (although rum in moderate doses is OK),
- Local tourists (they don’t tip well),
- Beggars (”Always drugs”),
- His brother in law,
- Mutton (other non-veg meals are fine).

This is not, of course, a comprehensive profile but it is not atypical of the millions of Indians that have, at best, seen marginal benefits from the country’s growth. This is the core of the customer base in the country. Of the 1.1 billion people in India, about 650 million live, more or less, like Mularam.

This is the sixth in a series of entries Alfred Romann will post from India in the coming weeks.

Few cities in the world do extremes like Mumbai.

Home to one of the oldest stock exchanges in the world, started by a group of 22 traders under a Banyan tree more than a 150 years ago, Mumbai is a city of high flying finance.

It is also home to the largest urban slum in Asia, the residence of poor migrants and urban dwellers who haven’t yet read the news that India is undergoing an economic boom.

This is not much of a secret. Politicians and businesspeople know the wealth gap is there and they know that closing it will not be easy. Just look at China, where they’ve been working at it for almost 30 years and, despite remarkable progress, it remains an uphill battle.

Mumbai is to Shanghai what Delhi is to Beijing and the similarities between the two pairs are striking.

Both Delhi and Beijing are imposing cities, dusty and generally unwelcoming to the pedestrian. There is green, but it is found in concentrated spots between huge chunks of city. People in both are obsessed with politics.

Mumbai and Shanghai are, on the surface, nicer. They boast trees (well, in parts) and streets that can be walked. Both have cosmopolitan communities, top notch restaurants of every cuisine imaginable and, at least in their architecture, an obvious blend of local and European. (While Shanghai is home to buildings of French, English and Japanese design, the foreign flavor of Mumbai is purely that left behind by the British colonialists.)

The people also come in many varieties. In a single day, it is possible - in fact likely - to meet a fund manager looking to place US$100 million in Asia, a driver hoping to earn 500 rupees for the day (a little more than US$10), a Bollywood star or producer, a Japanese tourist and a street merchant selling juice.

Walk around the semi-circular Bombay Stock Exchange building in downtown Mumbai and the contrasts are even more apparent. Inside, billions are traded every day. Outside, homeless people look for a spot to lie down and sleep covered by old onion sacks.

With some luck and a lot of work, the spread of the world’s second fastest growing economy will reach them soon.

Interesting article in the International Herald Tribune about “The First Emperor”, a grandiose, US$2 million opera at the New York Metropolitan Opera about China’s founding emperor Qin Shihuang. It was written by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun, featured icons Zhang Yimou and Ha Jin among its creative team and stars none other than Placido Domingo in the title role. (Yes, that Placido Domingo, second of the Three Tenors). A sample:

Indeed the opera, a co-production of the Metropolitan Opera and the Los Angeles Opera, contained so many Chinese elements that People’s Daily proudly proclaimed it “the first China-made opera to be presented at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera House.”

Eager to experience what many viewed as a symbol of their nation’s cultural arrival, Beijing’s better-heeled music lovers flew to New York for opening night Dec. 21, sending back word of a stunning production, a capacity house and multiple ovations. Chinese newspapers were splashed with photos of Domingo dressed in imperial robes. And then, like rain on a parade, came news of the reviews from New York’s make-it-or-break-it critical establishment.

“An enormous disappointment,” declared The New York Times of the score, adding that the vocal writing was “ill-conceived” and gave “soaring melody a bad name.” The New Yorker damned it all as “musical kitsch.” Predictable comparisons to Puccini, whose Chinese-inspired “Turandot” is a standard of the Western opera repertoire, appeared in almost every review.

As the tide of negative, even nasty, reviews washed into Beijing, the excitement turned to confusion and consternation. The English language China Daily requested that Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times classical music critic “elaborate on his criticisms.” It then ran excerpts from his second, similarly unflattering evaluation of the opera alongside interviews with Tan Dun and other members of the creative team, concluding, “Whatever people say about this opera, it is a historical milestone in cultural coalescence.”

More links:

NY Times Review

Chinese opera The First Emperor transmitted live into theaters worldwide

How the West Was Won … or Not

If 2006 was a year when Hollywood warmed up to China as a locale for romantic period pieces and action extravaganzas, 2007 could be the year of the Japanese invasion epic, and it’s already looking ugly. The Rape of Nanking, a co-production between the Jiangsu provincial government and a US studio, is starting production. Supposedly based on the late Iris Chang’s historical account of the atrocity, the film will seek to give victims the “Schindler’s List” treatment, according to one official. For that lofty goal they might have done well to hire someone other than Simon West, director of noisy, no-brow slam-bangers like “Con Air” and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” (think of him as Michael Bay lite), to helm the project. I’m sure it will be tastefully done.

There will be several other movies about the massacre coming out this year (I was approached last night by someone looking for Western extras for a ballroom scene in one of them), the 70th anniversary of the invasion. Some may prove useful, others less so. But perhaps none will be quite as tasteless or inflammatory as Japanese director Satoru Mizushima’s planned “The Truth About Nanjing”, which he says he hopes will prove accounts of the event to be grossly exaggerated by the Chinese government:

“This will be our first effort to correct the errors of history through a film,” director Satoru Mizushima said at a Tokyo hotel, joined by a group of conservative lawmakers and academics who support the project.

China’s Foreign Ministry responded, basically, that it knows quite well what happened, thank you very much, and it is up to Japan to admit it when it feels it is ready to grow up. The most telling bit, however, was the following:

Ms Jiang added, however, that the controversy would not derail the latest bilateral talks aimed at improving ties due to end at the weekend.

“China and Japan have both attached great importance to the dialogue, and the two sides will exchange views on mutual relations and issues both sides are concerned about,” she said.

So have relations moved beyond easily wounded pride and overreaction to the same old slights? Maybe. We’ll know more when we see which films make into general distribution on the mainland.