Photos of five years of changes to local life brought by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam.

Shanghai’s real “Pig Cage Stronghold” (photos).

Stupid blog stuff
The blog’s been down a lot the last few days. So 烦得死去活来！ I don’t have time or know-how to fix it, but thankfully we have friends here who are smarter than me. Hopefully we’ll do all the upgrades and maintenance and stuff that I’ve successfully(?) avoided so far out of fear of messing everything up, and things will go back to normal — I guess this thing just couldn’t stay in 2003 forever. For now it’s limping along; if you get a blank page with a weird error message, that’s why.

Photos!
From today – of all the $0.50 fried noodles in Tianjin, her’s are my favourite:

From Sunday before last – a bit of colour in the morning commute:

Riding that close to all the cars is normal.

Bertrand Russell (in 1922) on China’s future: “If the Chinese were to adopt the Western philosophy of life, they would, as soon as they had made themselves safe against foreign aggression, embark upon aggression on their own accounts….They would exploit their material resources with a view to producing a few bloated plutocrats at home and millions dying of hunger abroad. Such are the results which the West achieves by the application of science.”

From IHT: “The Yellow River Conservancy Committee said that 33.8 percent of the river’s water sampled registered worse than level 5, meaning it is unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the UN Environmental Program.”

Why do the Chinese get so touchy about their country’s image? After a series of difficult conversations outside Beijing cinemas, Dan Edwards has a few ideas.

I stopped by the bike repair corner for lunch yesterday. I brought my own lunch, and figured I’d better bring something to share, since that’s usually how things work. Mandarin oranges — the kind we eat during Christmas in Vancouver — are really cheap right now, so I brought a bag.

Last time I tried to bring food to share with these guys I didn’t understand enough how to offer food to people in China, especially older people. Last time, no one touched the bowl of cherry tomatoes I’d brought, even though we played Chinese chess with a crowd for at least two hours. I talked it over with my teachers afterward, and it seems like I simply wasn’t forceful enough. You’re supposed to be really insistent and disregard their refusals to the point that they can take some without appearing greedy, or something like that. It’s supposed to look like they’re taking the food because they “have to,” at least that’s how the little daily social ritual goes. It’s hard for foreigners because we end up not knowing which refusals are genuine, and which ones are just for politeness sake.

All that to say, yesterday, with my bag of Mandarin oranges, I was determined to make them eat. Both Mr. Zhang and Mr. Lu were surprisingly resistant, but I didn’t care. And I wouldn’t let them eat just one, either. I think Mr. Zhang caved in first just to give me face, since I obviously wasn’t going to back down. I tossed him the second one so he had to take it. Once Mr. Zhang was stuck with one, he started telling Mr. Lu he ought to take one, which he did, but only ate half.

It was weird that they didn’t eat more; this time I definitely wasn’t too weak when offering. So as usual, I asked about it the next day in class. Turns out it has nothing to do with cultural differences blah blah blah. According to my teacher (and Mr. Lu, Mr. Zhang, and Mr. Guo, who I saw again this afternoon), there’s a melanine-sized national Mandarin orange scandal going on right now. “Everyone knows, except the foreigners,” says my teacher. No one could tell me the details, at least not in a way that I could understand, but apparently down south where they grow the oranges some sort of really tiny insect got into all the oranges and now people are afraid to eat them.

If I can’t see it, or can’t understand it because it’s in another language, it can’t hurt me, right?

This morning it dawned on me that I could alter my daily routine and make time to have lunch on the corner with the bike repair crowd in our neighbourhood. The weeks are counting down until we take a hiatus in Canada for a few months, and recently I’ve been feeling more and more like I haven’t spent enough time with people. I had lunch with Mr. Lù and Mr. Zhāng today, and when the river freezes they’re gonna teach me how to ice fish! They’ll be more people there tomorrow.

The don’t call it a language “barrier” for no reason, and one of the mistakes I made — maybe ‘mistake’ is too strong a word — in our first year of language study was spending probably too much time trying to talk with neighbours. When your language is that limited, it just isn’t that helpful language-wise to spend a whole afternoon with one group of people, all of whom have zero English. You can only say and hear so much, and then things just get more awkward and frustrating. (During the first year Jessica did less talking and more book study, and now she’s kicking my butt in Mandarin.) But now that we’re over a year and half into language study there’s a lot more we can do. It’s a little frustrating that right when we start to feel like we’re getting somewhere in the language and could actually really start getting to know the neighbours, we’re returning to Canada for a few months.

But there are — believe it or not — things in life that are more important than learning Chinese, and we’re looking forward to lots of hugs and good times with them while we’re in North America!

From The New Republic: “For years, the Beijing regime has stayed in power using a basic bargain with its citizens: Tolerate our authoritarian rule and we’ll make you rich. And for years, this seemed to work, leading many China-watchers (myself included) to conclude that Beijing was rising into great-power status. But as the financial crisis shows, that bargain rests on weak foundations.”

The majority of China’s 1.3 billion people are not urbanites. But that will soon change: “Over the next 17 years, 350 million rural residents (more than the entire U.S. population today) will leave the farm and move to China’s cities. That will bring the Chinese urban population from just under 600 million today to close to 1 billion.”