Американский Бродяга

Han Han’s (韩寒) Censored Comments on CCTV Fire

Long, long time no-blog, I know, but seeing this has inspired to dust off this tumblr…

Han Han (韩寒), a Shanghai based twenty six years old popular young writer, race car driver and leading blogger, immediately posted a comment on his blog when he heard about the CCTV fire, before any news had been reported about the cause of the accident or the death of a firefighter on the scene. Han writes in his typical witty, sarcastic style, translated by CDT’s Linjun Fan (the post has already been censored, but is still being reposted by many of his fellow bloggers):

1. It’s said that the building had not been put into service when the fire took place, which was a fortunate thing in this disaster. I hope nobody got injured or killed in this accident.

2. The most important and toughest question is: Who lit the fireworks that caused the accident? Was it some ordinary residents or CCTV employees themselves? The government must give the public a truthful answer. It should not equivocate, or avoid responsibilities, or use a scapegoat.

3. We must be careful with safety issues when setting off fireworks.

4. The burned building has always being called “the thing underneath the Big Underpants.” Now CCTV burned its own “thing,” such self-castration just perfectly fits the image of CCTV being the world’s number one eunuch media. For sure, the present CCTV does not deserve to have one.

5. When I turned on my TV to watch a CCTV news program immediately after the fire, there was no mention of the fire. The anchor’s emotion was stable.* News footage of the Australia Fire was being aired repeatedly.

6. If CCTV’s premium evening news program started airing at that time, the cameramen could move their lens toward the window after news anchors introduced what was happening with the fire —they would get the images of the fire and produce the first unedited news story in CCTV’s history.

7. I asked my friends to check out news about the fire on the Internet. They accused me of lying and told me they saw no news coverage on the accident.

8. I checked again and indeed found all the coverage gone. It turned out that the “order from the emperor” had come, which said, “all the news websites, please publish only the stories provided by Xinhua News Agency on the fire at the CCTV Tower North Addition. Do not publish photos or video. Do not publish investigative stories on the incident. Put the news articles under domestic news section, and close the public commenting function under the articles. Do not place blogger discussions on the incident on the top. Do not post them as recommended articles.”

9, Thus our officials make big incidents appear insignificant, and hope the public will ignore them. It might not be a big deal to lose the valuable state property, since our taxpayers’ money is being wasted anyway. It either gets burned or eaten away [by government officials]. I just wish the construction workers and the firefighters won’t be injured and can go back home safely. I admire and respect firefighters very much, especially when I see them at a fire or car accident scene.

10, As for CCTV, this is so hard to imagine, such a always truth-speaking media, how could it be hit by such a tragic event? The gods must have been blind.

* “the emotion of the family members of victims is stable” is a standard CCTV broadcasting cliche when reporting disasters.

韩寒发言:
1：不幸中的万幸，听说大楼在装修阶段，希望不要有人员伤亡。
2：最重要的也是容易纠缠的一个问题是，这个烟花究竟是老百姓放的，还是央视元宵晚会之后自己放的，相关部门一定要给一个公正的答案。不搪塞，不推卸，不栽赃。
3：烟花爆竹的燃放一定要注意安全。
4：此楼一直被说是央视裤衩下的鸡鸡，现在央视自己把鸡鸡给烧了，这样的自宫行为，彻底的符合了央视身为全球第一大太监媒体的形象。的确，央视暂时还不配有鸡鸡。
5：第一时间，我打开电视，看中央电视台的新闻，央视很镇定，情绪很稳定，在不停的播放澳大利亚的火灾。
6：如果央视的新闻联播在那时候开始，主持人播报完情况，镜头可以直接摇向窗外再摇回来，成为史上第一个无剪切新闻。
7：我告诉我朋友，看网站上的新闻，火灾了。朋友打开一看说胡说，根本没有新闻。
8：我一看，果然都没了，原来是圣旨到——”各网，中央电视台新大楼北配楼发生火灾相关报道，请各网站只用新华社通稿，不发图片，视频，不做深度报道，只放国内新闻区，关闭跟帖，自然滚动，博客论坛不置顶，不推荐。
9：我们就是这样大事化小，小事化无。财产损失就损失吧，反正纳税人的钱不是烧了就是吃了，横竖总是个浪费，只是希望元宵佳节，楼里的施工人员，消防人员可以平安回家。尤其是消防员，每次在火灾或者车祸现场看见他们，觉得他们还是非常可敬的。
10：至于央视，真是没有想到，一个永远在讲真话的媒体，居然会遭受这个创伤，上天无眼。

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Outrage of the day: the dickheads of Zhongnanhai have now seen fit to block the New York Times. I can still access it, of course, but only through excruciatingly slow medium of proxies. I can live without the HuffPo and most of the other stuff routinely banned, but having to ritually kowtow to get the NYT? Infuriating. 肏他祖宗十八代!!

Sojourns in the Parallel World   by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discovers
just where we've been, when we're caught up again
into our own sphere (where we must
return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)
--but we have changed, a little.

Neglectful

What to say? Like many Americans I was profoundly moved by Obama’s election…so moved that I have very little to add to the many, many folks who’ve already posted about this new chapter in the American experiment. I’m only middle-aged, but am inexpressibly grateful that I, too, should have “lived to see the day.”

In a similar, but lesser, vein I feel as though I’ve already been silent on so much that has gone down this fall in Beijing, that “catching up” is impossible. Just this last week, for instance, saw R. explicity baiting W. at the faculty lunch (“So, I told this Chinese kid to ‘fuck off’…) and that lunatic, pretentious, grey-haired laowai playing an amplified sheet of glass at “noise night” at club D-22 where I went with T. M. and D. There are things to talk about hereabouts, if I felt the need to talk about them.  But the imperatives of the American election have, quite correctly, made my own idiosyncratic narrative seem of little consequence, even to myself.

Instead, I’ll content myself with linking some of my favorite reactions to the New Day Rising: Judith Warner, James Laxer and, especially, The Onion.

希望还是恐怕?

Voted the other day, absentee, of course. Never have I felt so much trepidation about an election, not even in ‘04 when the stakes seemed so impossibly high. Despite the rosy projections on pollster.com, I think it’s going to be a nail-biter. I want Obama to win so badly it makes my bones ache.

It’s a little surprising that it should turn out this way, as I still really haven’t changed my opinion that he wasn’t among the best Democratic candidates in the running in January. At the time I actually found all his “Hope-mongering” vacuous and a little arrogant…as if he were the one and only hope of ending the 8-year tragedy of the Bush presidency, and that Chris Dodd, say, would be “more of the same.” This was parodied on the Right as a messiah-complex—unfairly, of course, but not randomly.

But these last weeks have finally given “Hope” a true resonance for me, because the other candidate has been running in a very real sense as the candidate of “Fear.” His rallies have become exhibitions of paranoid, contemptuous, xenophobic, Birchist lunacy. But it was the 3rd debate that showed it in highest relief: the subtext of every word McCain said, the message behind his every grimace and eye-roll, was “Be very, very afraid.” Never in my lifetime has a major-party candidate run on so explicitly craven a platform.

How did it come to this? How did a man once known for integrity and courage become the candidate of lies and cowardice? I stood in the cell he occupied at the Hanoi Hilton—or one very like it—and know that it must have taken all kinds of guts to survive there; and as recently as this spring I harbored a grudging admiration for the man, even if I was rendered queasy at the prospective policies and appointments of a McCain administration.

No more. As Macbeth teaches us, the quest for power can corrupt as absolutely as power itself. We’re now in about Act IV, scene I, and the American polity, like a hell-broth, boils and bubbles. Is that Birnam Wood on the Nov. horizon? I have the audacity to hope so.

Good Luck Cow Happy Happy!

Further to Chinese superstition / synchroicity: it was drawn to my attention today that the Official Mascot (tm) of the Beijing Paralympics was 福牛乐乐, a.k.a. Good Luck Cow Happy Happy, and that with the Sanlu melamine scandal it joins the other chirpy-yet-creepy FuWa in being taken by the Chinese as sinister avatars of this year’s bad news, to wit:

贝贝： the sturgeon, symbolizing flooding in southern China this spring.

晶晶： the panda, Sichuan’s best-known tourist attraction, symbolizing the devasting earthquake in May.

欢欢：the torch, symbolizing the attacks on Chinese torch-bearers in Paris and London

迎迎: the Tibetan antelope, symbolizing the Tibetan riots in March.

妮妮：the swallow. Evil potential still unknown / unrealized, though the most determined blame it for the train crash in Weifang in April.

Back in the spring we fed up 外国专家, nauseated by the relentless kitsch—as saccharine as Hello Kitty!, as inescapable as Hannah Montana—were threatening a “bonfire of the FuWa.” I wouldn’t be surprised if most Chinese would join us now…

A PhD in Parochialism

Nearly a month into classes already and all’s going swimmingly, except, alas, for “PhD Oral English,” which—and I scarcely would have thought it possible—I despise even more than last year. A more sheepish, passive, moon-faced group would be hard to imagine outside a home for advanced Alzheimer’s patients.

Struggling to elicit any sort of response from them, in my last class I hit upon the idea of talking about the American election. And—get this—not a single student out of the 25 or so could name the Republican candidate for president. These are PhD candidates! If this is China’s scientific brain-trust, the rest of the world can sleep easy.

Not that I was entirely surprised. Never mind the Wall Street implosion which has sent shockwaves around the world or McCain’s desperate, crazy grandstanding: “foreign news” is as much a blink-and-you-miss-it afterthought in Chinese media as it is in the States. Ergo, this week we’ve had hour after hour after hour of coverage of the Chinese space mission—exciting to the Chinese, no doubt, but of no conceivable interest to anyone else. I suppose during the Space Race the US’s every mission was similarly used as an occasion for national(ist) pride, but as an outsider I found the hoopla fantastically, embarrassingly overblown.

And then there’s the never-ending milk & melamine scandal. This is a great deal more interesting, less for its sordid particulars—the tens of thousands of infants sickened, the months-long cover-up, the complicity of the CCP at the highest level to make sure that the story didn’t break during the Games—than for what it reveals about the fragility of the entire system. What’s alarming is not that the Chinese authorities do not control the food supply chain. What’s alarming is that they cannot control the food supply chain. Weak and funding-starved as the USFDA is, it’s still 100x more on on-the-ball than any agency here.

In a normal country, of course, this kind of thing would probably bring down a government; here it only means arbitrary sacrificial heads, such as that of the mayor of Shijiazhuang, will roll. But how long can the CCP keep walking this tightrope? People are pissed. Orwell was right: information is the enemy of authoritarianism…and it seems only a matter of time until a tipping point in China is reached. Sooner, rather than later, I suspect.