Tag Archives: China

The Founding of a Republic

My experience of writing a game diary for Hearts of Iron 3 prompted me to do some extensive reading on the Chinese Civil War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Naturally, this led to seeking out and watching The Founding of a Republic, the 2009 historical film made to mark 60th anniversary of the country. So who says that videogames aren’t educational?

There is no doubt of course that this is a propaganda film. It was explicitly commissioned by the China’s film regulator and made by a state-owned film company. It’s main claim to fame outside of China is that it features dozens of celebrities, albeit mostly in very minor roles, all of whom worked for free, no doubt out of a sense of patriotism, or maybe just out of fear of causing offense and missing out of paid gigs. Yet within China itself, it has established itself as the highest grossing domestically produced film, suggesting that despite being propaganda, it is not entirely without merit.

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Shaolin

My wife and I watched the new Shaolin during the Chinese New Year holidays. As my wife commented, it looks like a shoo-in for the Hong Kong film awards. For my part, while it’s production values are undeniably sky high and it has decent kung fu, the Buddhist philosophy is conveyed is far too blunt and heavy-handed a manner. I tend to agree with this reviewer’s take on it being a self-indulgent extravaganza. Since it was made with the close cooperation of the real Shaolin temple, it’s no surprise that the temple is portrayed in excessively reverent terms.

For anyone curious what the real Shaolin temple as it exists now is like, this article from the National Geographic magazine is much more interesting. Most of it is a very respectful account of the last respects paid to a Shaolin master, Yang Guiwu, as well as a meeting with his most famous student, Shi Dejian. It’s quite amusing how the modern world has managed to intrude into the world of ancient martial arts.

Shi, having decided that the Shaolin monastery has become too busy and too worldly for his purposes, has retreated to a more secluded and difficult to access mountaintop where he has built his own monastery, but as he recounts, his fame is such that even this does not dissuade admirers and challengers. Within the space of a week, he has had to entertain a television crew who had brought along a professional mixed martial arts fighter to challenge him, a research team from Hong Kong University who wanted to study how his meditation regimen has affected his brain activity and a Chinese Communist Party official who wanted him to cure his brother’s diabetes.

The article is too polite to criticize the Shaolin temple too harshly but it’s hard to shake the impression that the writer is at least disdainful. He describes how the temple was, contrary to the portrayal in the new film, essentially a wealthy estate with its own private army and its has frequently being criticized throughout its history for its riches and its taste for luxurious furnishings. Today, the various projects the temple is officially involved in include television and film ventures, an online store selling Shaolin branded products, touring kung fu troupes and a plan for Shaolin franchises abroad, including one in Australia. It appears that many of the workers at the temple, wearing robes and bearing shaved heads, aren’t even monks at all but employees paid to look the part.

Such is the importance of the kung fu teaching industry that the  city of Dengfeng is now full of competing martial arts academies who pay commissions to touts to welcome new arrivals and bring them to their schools. The masters interviewed for the article even bemoan how high kicks and acrobatics aren’t part of Shaolin kung fu at all, but students expect them and so many academies incorporate these moves into their repertoire. So it turns out that even at Shaolin itself, traditional Shaolin kung fu is in danger of being forgotten as students learn what is effectively the movie version of kung fu instead.

The rise of China’s military power

Late last year China sent Western defense analysts all atwitter when it released photographs of their supposed new stealth fighter, given the designation J-20. Pundits spent much time and effort theorizing what all this meant, especially since the leak was timed to coincide with US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visit to China. Another worrying sign was that when Chinese President Hu Jintao arrived in Washington DC on January 18th, he was understandably quizzed by US President Barack Obama about the subject, but the Chinese delegation seemed to be genuinely unaware of the J-20, leading some to speculate that China’s civilian and military leadership were at odds with each other.

This week another new development took place, one that suggests that the threat of the J-20 is less than what it appears. China’s state broadcaster, CCTV, ran footage of what was lauded as a live-fire exercise by the J-10 fighter. The J-10 appeared to fire an air-to-air missile that hit and destroyed another aircraft. However, attentive bloggers analyzed the video frame by frame and noticed that the video seemed identical with scenes from the 1986 film, Top Gun. As the Yahoo article points out, Chinese media has been known to do this sort of thing before, and it could be just another example of journalists being lazy and sloppy. But it could also be a sign that China’s military, egged by a newly confident and assertive public, is tooting its own horn.

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Baidu.com is awesome

I’ve written about China’s censorship of the Internet before, so I didn’t have much to say that’s new about the brewing dispute between the U.S. and China over the cyberspace attacks that Google recently went public with. However as everyone knows, if Google does pull out of China, the company that stands to gain the most would be Baidu.com, China’s dominant search engine with more than 60 percent of the market. Baidu.com’s shares have duly shot up on the news of Google’s possible withdrawal.

Being a home-grown Chinese company, Baidu of course has absolutely no qualms about enforcing any of the country’s censorship edicts. Since the search engine is actually accessible from anywhere in the world, it’s possible to test it for yourself to see how it filters its results. For an easy test, search for the keywords”falun gong” on Baidu.com and see what happens. Warning: don’t do this if you are actually in China or any territory controlled by China and don’t do this if you’re actually afraid of getting onto China’s hatelist.

Jackie Chan joins in the anti-democracy bandwagon

Just a bit of news that popped up over the weekend:

Action star Jackie Chan said Saturday he’s not sure if a free society is a good thing for China and that he’s starting to think “we Chinese need to be controlled.”

Chan’s comments drew applause from a predominantly Chinese audience of business leaders in China’s southern island province of Hainan.

The 55-year-old Hong Kong actor was participating in a panel at the annual Boao Forum when he was asked to discuss censorship and restrictions on filmmakers in China. He expanded his comments to include society.

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

And of course the predictable backlash from Hong Kong and Taiwan:

“He’s insulted the Chinese people. Chinese people aren’t pets,” Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator Leung Kwok-hung told The Associated Press. “Chinese society needs a democratic system to protect human rights and rule of law.”

Another lawmaker, Albert Ho, called the comments “racist,” adding: “People around the world are running their own countries. Why can’t Chinese do the same?”

In democratically self-ruled Taiwan, which split from mainland China during a civil war in 1949, legislator Huang Wei-che said Chan himself “has enjoyed freedom and democracy and has reaped the economic benefits of capitalism. But he has yet to grasp the true meaning of freedom and democracy.”

My wife’s first reaction was to say that he’s an uneducated idiot prone to make shallow comments. Someone on QT3 commented that he’s actually illiterate and needs people to read his scripts to him, but I don’t know how true that it. Anyway it’s clear enough that he’s an airhead who only gets attention due to the gigantic soapbox he gets from his superstardom, but I still wish someone famous from the Chinese entertainment world would be brave enough to speak out on behalf of democracy and freedom.

China should buy Malaysia, jokes The Economist

The Economist, one of the most influential and respected news outlets in the world, is well known for its concise and informative writing style. Regular readers however will note that there’s often an element of dry wit as well, and at times even a touch of whimsy.

One recent article presents an excellent example of this sense of humour at work. Inspired by the new president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed’s public musing that his country should set aside a portion of its revenues from tourism to buy a new homeland to replace its islands that are expected to be engulfed by rising sea levels, The Economist has extended the idea as a solution for all kinds of problems. Note the following line:

China could stop making aggressive gestures towards Taiwan and buy Malaysia instead. It’s already run by Chinese, so they’d hardly notice the difference.

I would imagine that the Malays would be none too amused to read that but you really have to credit those crazy editors at The Economist for their imagination and creativity in coming up with this wild scheme.

China Taxes MMO Gold Farmers

Anyone who plays MMOs will know how insistently gold sellers spam their services. Many of these outfits get their gold (or equivalent virtual goods) from legions of Chinese players for whom farming the virtual currency and selling it to more affluent players mostly from western countries at a mark-up has become their primary occupation.

Now The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chinese government is getting in on the action by imposing taxes, now set at 20%, on profits earned from such sales. I’d imagine that the move is less as an effort for the state to gain tax revenues from the growing industry than to dampen it and keep it under surveillance. If virtual currency can be freely convertible into Chinese yuan, it’s easy to imagine that it might one day cause problems in the greater financial system, given how tightly the yuan is regulated.

What will be interesting, as the article notes, are the implication this has for the legal rights of owners of virtual goods. If the Chinese government legitimizes the trade of virtual goods, does that mean that the players own the goods as opposed to the MMO companies?