前天晚上去了豫园看灯会，观摩的主要是人海，但是喜气洋洋的，感觉还是不错。后来跟朋友在老城区溜达，久违的灵感也终于回来了，当然，这也跟我带新的相机出去也有关。谢谢长辈的提携以及各位朋友的支持！我要坚持拍下去！

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From Shanghai

Saw this sign/banner when I was in the Shanghai South Train Station. Thought it was a more felicitous form of Chinglish than one normally encounters, so I took a snap. 传播 is usually translated as spreading or broadcasting. 播下 is usually translated as to plant or sow. So I guess the common character is where you get the idea of creating a metaphor based on seeds.

It also reminds of how Chinese people always liken teachers…to gardeners (and it was Teachers’ Day on Sept 10). I guess they are doing their faire share of sprinkling.

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Hua died on August 20, and as you can expect w/ someone of his particular stature and role in history, obituaries are going to be terse at best:
On Baidu news, the Olympics coverage dominated most of the top of the web page, and you had to scroll down slightly to get to a few sparse links, as you can see from the image below:

百度新闻搜索——全球最大的中文新闻平台 via kwout

Not that many articles went in depth into who Hua was or what he did, and none of them really were obituaries except perhaps this one. Most of them were, like this one, made note of his passing and threw a timeline of his career in there, which is nice as a reference though totally useless in terms of explaining to the uninitiated what this guy was all about.

THe news of the Communist Party of China website had the following article:

人物春秋：粉碎“四人帮”后的华国锋–中国共产党新闻–中国共产党新闻网 via kwout

This article talks about Hua’s career, mostly with regards to his role in the “smashing of the Gang of Four,” duly noted as a positive political accomplishment, whereas his “two whatevers” policy, based on the unabashed obeisance to the gospel of the Chairman, was considered, in hindsight, to be a political “error.”

I can’t help but smirk a bit at reading the translation of 两个凡是 as the “two whatevers” because whenever I hear the word “whatevers” I hear some southern Californian moppet intoning the word with a roll of the eyes.

I’m going to keep track of what the Chinese media has to say about Hua, if anything, in the coming days and weeks.

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Want to beat the heat? Try a ‘man-kini’ via kwout

I love fun journalism, or at least pretend to for the sake of not seeming like a totally uptight egghead.
The CBC has a series called “Olympic Vignettes”and this one is about how men roll up their shirts to keep cool. It’s been dubbed the “man-kini”, which I think is a neologism that deserves much more attention than it’s getting.

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北京白领群租生活:100多平米可住80人_网易新闻中心 via kwout

Frankly, when i read this headline I didn’t think it could be true, but here’s the article, judge for yourselves. You remember this issue cropped up in Shanghai maybe a couple of months or a year ago, when they started cracking down on people living together and demanding more red tape if people wanted to live together. Well, if this article is true (and why shouldn’t it be) then this problem, at least in Beijing, has not yet gone away. What is amazing is that they used partitions to divvy up 100 square meters into 20 rooms, each of which has at least 2 people or, if the headline is right, an average of four people per room. There is only one bathroom and one “kitchen.”

It’s amazing that something like this might exist: I suppose when you’re poor there’s not much choice but still to lower yourself to sleeping like this, and to let that damn landlord make money off you that way…well, it leaves me speechless.

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Hu Yang (胡杨) is the Shanghai based documentary photographer that takes shots of people living in Shanghai, in their native environments–their homes. He did a series that got a lot of publicity in the last year or so, it was called 《上海人家》 and showed Shanghainese people (or at least people who live here) from all walks of life in their homes, which was quite interesting not only sociologically but because many of the rooms had a personality of their own and showed us personal idiosyncracies that were far more interesting than any broader, social truth that might have (but ultimately was not) gleaned from the picutres. Well, I was leafing thorugh the pages of Shanghai Photography Magazine and saw that he’d done some new pictures, portraits of young people born anytime between 1970 and 1989. The photographs are nothing to write home about, but I guess there is still that minimal portrait of a generation value to it. In the actual exhibit and article in the magazine you read what each subject answered to a questionnaire given to them by the photographer, stuff on what their personal interests and hobbies were, etc. Anodyne but interesting, I suppose.

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The debate rages on, with many Wenchuan local residents, according to a survey, inclined
to get out of there while they can. This article claims that out of 768 people surveyed, over 90% of them wanted to leave and rebuild their homes and their lives somewhere else. There’s a passage that’s particular revealing as it talks about the uneven economic development in the area.

过度发展招来泥石流

汶川城从原先的5000人发展到如今4.5万人，修路、建厂，开发过程中破坏了很多山体

地震后，四川省地矿局的刘洪涛进入汶川考察。他在对县城所有的地质灾害点进行摸底后发现，由于县城逐渐扩张，直接引发县城周边的30多处地质灾害点。“这些隐患多数是人类活动造成的。”

上世纪50年代，汶川县城由绵虒镇搬迁到如今的县城所在地威州镇。1984年，整个县城面积是91公顷，进入上世纪90年代县城面积扩展到3.5平方公里。人口从原先的5000人到后来的4.5万人。

建设部抗震救灾规划专家组驻阿坝州组长、清华大学建筑学院副院长尹稚来考察后说，汶川城这片土地只合适5000人生存。

刘洪涛在县城里看到多处地方，有削山建房屋的活动痕迹。他说，这样就容易造成山体下挫，发生滑坡。

汶川城在弹丸之地新修了校场街和校场横街，而后又修岷江路。地震前，县城还准备向南北扩展，合并雁门和绵虒一些区域，将人口发展到7万人。

地震中断了汶川的发展梦。

地震当天下午3点，汶川时代广场新开楼盘杨柳水岸小区原本约定业主收房。开盘前，地震发生。这个位于峭壁边上的住宅小区其一楼迅速被山上滚石淹没。如今，有些楼房的三四层楼已被埋于土下。

龙溪乡乡长周光辉说，希望地震后，过度发展与山区承载力的矛盾能引起重视，如果村民都回去原址重建，且不说目前还有没有地方可建，就是能重建，以后也会严重破坏山体，破坏生态环境，带来更多的地质灾害。他建议，对于他们龙溪乡，最多只能回去 1000多人，其他的地方进行封山育林。

The thing is that in the 1990s, as mining and other industries spurred economic development, the population grew from 5000 in in the mid-1980s to about 45,000 in the 1990s. However, the article claims that this parcel of land was not really meant to support more than 5000 people. The picture that I am getting from both this article and the other that I translated and read is that the headlong rush to economic development has complicated the issue. Now, what was once （and some believe still is) a good place to live faces numerous dangers–the mountains, the rivers, the buildings. In a situation like this, it’d be hard to convince any of the survivors to stay here. If I lived there I would feel less than safe, and that’s not even considering the trauma of being in the place where it all happened. It seems quite understandable that people would want to start afresh somewhere else. One of the people quoted in the article said that even if they had to rebuild their lives in Xinijiang, they would go and never look back.

Technorati Tags: wenchuan, sichuan, earthquake, houses, people, building, construction, environment, degradation, politics, chinese, disaster

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Original article about Yellow River here.

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…according to an article from Xinhua, as we reach the 50 day until the start of the Olympics mark. The article cites purely anecdotal evidence to say that while everyone is still looking forward to the Olympics, the enthusiasm has been tempered by the natural disasters that have befallen China–the snows, the floods, the earthquakes. There is something more calm and rational, and there’s additional meaning to the Olympic symbols–they have come to include mourning for the victims of these calamities, mutual understanding between China and the West, our common humanity, blah blah blah

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