somewhere in between

As Gary Busey once said in Under Siege, listen to the shit that I’ve had to put up with. Going into a local sports bar with some friends, having a beer, having some food, and watching whatever is beamed in from the Ben Sports Channel. Every commerical break was bumpered with the following editorial written by the channel’s owner.

Reading halfway through it made me want to vomit.

Mother,
The world laughed at you for being backward;
The world was full of envy and anxiety when you opened up and progressed into a financial powerhouse;
The world condemned you when you put law and order into the upheaval and lawlessness created by followers of a self proclaimed Robin Hood in t¡bet but failed to applaud when you used your influence to save the lives of Burmese monks;
The world threatened to boycott and disrupt the August Olympics on ground of your violations of human rights standards set by the West who by apartheid policies and discrimination of coloured people blatantly violated for ages the same standards set.
Let me tell you Mother as a dragon seed brought up outside China;
They fear you Mother as you out compete them;
They fear you Mother as you are set to replace them at the healm of world order faster than they can accept;
They fear you Mother as you refused to take sides in every international dispute as you believe that to each his own and from each his best;
They fear you Mother as you have by hardwork hastened the failure and decadence of self assumed western supremecy system;
And finally for the period 12th May to eternity, you have shown the world the tenderness, love and care of the best guardian government and leaders the Chinese People can ever have contrasting greatly with the aftermath of the Florida and Burmese cyclone.
Mother, words of praises and admiration will never come from the West as they have painted you falsely as a hardcore monster with no feelings for your own for too long and the Western World is watching with total disbelief on CNN, BBC, Fox Media, live, the search, rescue, care and rebuilding operations to restore life and normalcy into the millions of displaced victims led by brothers Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao demonstrating love care and simplicity with no political agenda whatsoever.
Mother, we whether in or out of the Great Wall are lucky and proud to be descendants of the ever Supreme Dragon.

Amen
Mr. Ben Chairman/CEO Bensports Satellite TV May 2008

We’re not in the usual place that you associate with porn stars.

We’re in an expensive sushi restaurant smoking cigarettes. Jack leans over and offers me a Marlboro Light cigarette - “My mother sends them to me from Hong Kong. They’re real.”. I take one from him. He’s been smoking them since six this morning. Caffeine and nicotine are good enough for him. We haven’t even started talking about the porno industry and he tells me what he will and won’t do.

“I do straight scenes. Maybe a couple of girls but no gay stuff.”

I ask about the gay stuff. He seems pretty straight. There’s tight, brown skin over well defined bones, he has a wicked, geniune laugh, and a brilliant smile full bright teeth that speaks of a black sense of humor and intelligence rarely seen in the porn industry.

“There’s some things I won’t do. Gay-for-pay isn one of them. I’ve been in the business too long.”

Gay-for-pay is apparently a situation arise where a male performer is required for a porn shoot, and there are only straight guys available. Straight guys who will, apparently, do anything for money. I should explain our setting. It’s an expensive - and I mean expensive - sushi bar in Jiangwomen called Sakura..

The clientele is mostly Japanese, and we can’t just talk about gay people fucking gay people wherever gay people fuck gay people these days. In China one has to be careful about talking about such things. The man opposite me seems completely oblivious to the people around us. He talks about ripping off a condom and ejaculating on a woman’s breasts without a flicker. He bombards me with so much porno jargon I have to stop for another cigarette. Subconsciously, I’m shifting in my seat and clenching my buttocks while the guy opposite me is talking about anal sex between two men.

Moving away from the from his job for a second, I ask him how he got started in the industry. I had contacted him through an advertisement on a Beijing website that was asking for western hardcore performers, the director didn’t want to be interviewed because even viewing the stuff over here can land you in jail. She put me in touch with a couple of numbers in Hong Kong, and Jack happened to be in town at the right time.

Sex is nothing in Hong Kong, the Wanchai district alone caters for the lonley Hongkie looking for a one night stand. Men use condoms to avoid getting girls pregnant, not to avoid getting AIDS. Heading home at 4am in the morning, unable to find a willing woman, the younger men prefer smoking a joint to having sex. There’s always tomorrow.

Across Asia, sex things are different. There’s a brewing crisis in Japan, where the hardcore porn industry caters for the dissatisfied Japanese man, leaving the women without children, and stuck in a sexless marriage. The Japanese stats are appalling, 34% of all couples responding to a survey say it’s been over a year since they had sex with their partner. In China, things are going the other way, chastity is venerated and actively promoted. A chastity belt has recently been patented, which, the inventor hopes will bring couples closer together, and put the hookers out of work.

To the rapidly rising and highly financed young people in the country, parents are nagging their children to remain pure in the hopes of finding a better husband.

As with everything in China, there’s a diametric opposite to what one person says. Parent’s want their children to be virgins till their wedding night, but there’s a dawning realisation that the wedding night may never come. In the Southern Weekly, Shen Fan preaches about the wonders of chastity, whereas in reality, aging parents are taking photos and their offspring’s vital statistics to parks in the hope capturing an eligible bachelor that will, in turn, capture their daughters hearts. The marriage marts can be found in any park in any major city in the country.

The advertisement are depressingly desperate: “Boy - 28 yrs, has own apartment in Fuxing district, no mortgage, Communist Party member” reads one battered paper, another is for a daughter: “Girl, 35 yrs, 1.6 meters tall, PhD, University teacher”. Some of the adverts show a preference for people born in a certain year (one initially baffling paper reads “Rat preferred”), while another shows that a 28 year old IT professional avoids gambling. Some parents are getting old and don’t care anymore, one white haired woman says that “I don’t mind if the girl is Chinese or foreign. She must have a good heart and be in a good job,” with the reporters who interview her, she leaves her mobile number in case they run into someone who might be suitable. Of course, the desperation isn’t limited to out and out lying, parents will show their sons a fake photo in the hope of at least getting them a date, and the children are becoming more and more wary of meeting up with anyone their folks unearth at the local park.

In Japan, things are taking a more extreme turn - more and more women are turning to sex volunteers to get laid. Japan, is, as the stats tells us, on the verge of a demograpic disaster with the birth rate hitting record low of 1.29. In 2000, 70% of all Japanese men were unmarried, and the ones that were are thinking of their wives more as substitute mothers than lovers. There are increasing repurcussions on nearly all aspects of Japanese life, exam hell is less of an ordeal because of the reduced competition, divorces blamed on sexual inactivity have skyrocketed, and amusement parks are closing across the country.

And back to the porn. Illegal as it is in Mainland China, there’s still a market for it. No one really knows where it’s made, but then, no one really knows where anything is made in China. Handheld, underground “Gonzo” porn dominates the market. One video, filmed in a hotel room, has the man wearing a balaclava while engaged in a number of variations on the sexual act. HK porn is tame - so tame in fact, that locals prefer imported Japanese AV, while the authorities, increasingly under the influence of the mainland government’s purity drive hunt down and arrest the illegal dealers and website owners.

The whole thing fell apart in 2006.

Jack leans in with a wolfish grin.

“No one knew Jackie Chan had done hardcore. Can you fucking imagine?”

He falls back in his chair, paralyzed by a lengthy fit of hysterical laughter. He never really opens his mouth while laughs, you can just see his flashing white teeth, and the crinkles in his tobacco cured skin. He stops, gasping for air.

“And then they found out Sammo Hung was in it. And they called it a comedy!”

He barely gets the last few words out without going ultrasonic. He’s lost in another uncontrollable bout of laughter - he’s on a roll, at the back of my mind I can hear my mother saying “you lay ‘em, we’ll sell ‘em”. Jack manages to sit up, wiping the tears from his eyes with the ball of his hand, trying to keep the cigarette alive, while simultaneously trying to get the idea of the overweight kung-fu star making a hardcore porn movie.

Watching some of the “real” movies, there’s nothing really to discern it from the regular porn from the US.

“Some of the guys are gangsters,” Something in his tone tells me that he’s deadly serious about this, “Their bosses bankroll the movie, and they get to star in it. They can’t act for shit, and can’t do a scene properly. Some of them get to write the movie, but most of them want to be the one fucking the girl.”

With the police cleaning up on “unhealthy content”, producers are going mainstream, with job adverts being placed at popular student job fairs in the city. Sun Power Productions ran an ad that required men and women to “strip down” as the owners searched for the next big thing. After horrifying attendees for a full 90 minutes, the advert was removed.

Jack crushes the last of his cigarettes in the ashtray, and downs the last of out sashami. He’s headed out to Hong Kong tomorrow, with a shoot started late in the afternoon. From what I can tell, he’s stuck in the industry, but when his girlfriend, who speaks no English, turns up to join him, he looks like any other funny guy in his mid thirties with a cute-maybe-you-would-probably-you-wouldn’t Chinese girlfriend.

He answers his phone in Cantonese, says goodbye to me in his fluent English, and they both walk off holding hands. I’m left to find a taxi home and I can’t help feeling a little jealous. Every where I go, I see happy people, and they all seem to be having more sex than me.

Lots of people have written lots of songs and proverbs and sayings about the power and pain of love. More and more I discover that the proverbs and songs are of little help to the people who are on the recieving end of this emotion.

Packing up my things for yet another apartment move brings past events sharply into focus. For most of the time, happy memories, but the one hang up that I still have is that I lost a woman who was in love with me, and who I was in love with. The cruellest blow for both of us is probably the fact that things ended up being radically different that the way that we had imagined being together would be like, and the fact that someone you love doesn’t feel that same way and would rather be without you than with you is tough to deal with. Some people are stronger than me, and can deal with losing people, they understand the fluidity of life, and accept that nothing can last forever. When someone comes along and makes you feel like you thought you would never feel like again, it’s a tough break and harder to handle. Being able to see the world as others do, and to share with someone is like setting a prisoner free, then telling him there was a horrible mistake, and he has to go back to the life that he thought he had left behind, and snatching the life that he had dreamed about for so long away from him.

I did pretty much every corny thing that a man in love could do. I lay away at night watching her sleep and dream, wondering what the hell I had done to deserve to have such a beautiful woman lying next to me. Boring routine things became brighter, laden with laughter and less boring and routine. A simple pleasure like cooking pasta for her turned in a labour of love. Eating my meal too fast so that I could sit back and watch her eat in the candlelight and the wonderful sensation of sleeping next to someone after having her leap into bed after you.

Everyday images and sounds bubble up, things that I had never thought about before suddenly become precious to me, a way of preserving and reliving something that I probably won’t see again. Looking at her walk around purposefully in her underwear and a pair of huge pink slippers, kissing her in bed before leaving for work, and watching her cover her face with the duvet, smiling with pleasure underneath it and the way that she used to say “mashed potato”.

All these things, all these memories won’t fade like her final teardrops in the rain. All we have now are memories, and I would dearly give anything and everything I had to go back in time and fix all the bad things I did and all the cruel things I said that culminated in the feeling she must’ve felt one afternoon when she realised that being without me would be better for her than being with me. I loved her, and I couldn’t force her to love me, now, in my utter foolishness, I’ve lost her forever.

There’s no such thing really in China as a long term investment. Everyone is out for a quick buck, which more true than ever when you look at what is happening over the Olympics when it comes to finding (and staying in) a home. For the tenants who have a contract which covers the Olympic period, rents are more than likely being raised.

One friend of mine who works as a waitress managed to get her rent increased by 1000RMB a month. The rent in our place has gone up a mere 400RMB, but the landlord is salivating so much about the huge amount of money that he thinks he going to making renting out the place to tourists that he’s asked us to leave. Another friend of mine has been booted out of his flat 6 months early because of the bullshit that some agent has fed his landlord.

Olympic apartment rental is flawed in a number of ways:

- Everyone who has Olympic tickets booked their hotels last year.
- None of the landlords I’ve met can speak a word of English
- All foreigners must be registered with the local police. If they are staying in private accomodation (ie, an apartment), they must register with the police showing their passport and their rental agreement. No one is really sure if the landlords will issue one month contract (and it seems unlikely) so foreigners will be fined for not being able to register because of the greedy landlords.
- None of the apartments in Beijing are what you might called luxurious. In my apartment, there’s no hot water in kitchen, irregular lifts (I live on the 11th floor) and there is a bold and prosperous rat population.

Of course, the last and best reason is that westerners in these apartments will simply move somewhere else, the knock-on effect being that when landlords break the rental agreements, people move out, and with only 40 days to the event itself, they’re going to need to do some fancy footwork to get anyone to pay anything to live in their apartments.

The first of July is also the birthday of the CCP, whatever you might think about them, you’re probably right. Hu Jintao visited the offices of the People’s Daily, and apparently “press circles and websites are still cherishing the fond, sweet memories” having been in the presence of the Dear Leader. There’s communist rhetoric and brown nosing that hasn’t been seen since the days of dear old Chairman Mao over at People’s Daily Online.

When I leave China in September, I’ll have spent exactly two years in the country, and never before have I read about such idiocy and downright lunacy from the morons who are given column inches in this God-forsaken backwater.

The main crux of the issue is that in the movie, Kung Fu Panda, there is a panda. The home of the panda in China is Sichuan, which, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past four weeks is where the largest and most destructive earthquake in China’s history struck. So, because of this, Chinese people say the movie should be banned, claiming that Hollywood (home of the twin evils of Steven Spielberg and Sharon Stone) is exploiting both kung fu and the panda for it’s own ends. The official statement says that “If the Hollywood film ‘Kung Fu Panda’ is released on Jun. 20, it will be just like snatching the necklaces and watches from the corpses of disaster victims.”

This rather brilliantly illustrates how Chinese people feel about the non-Chinese outside world. While Chinese people venerate their country’s history and culture, they’re also the first ones to exploit it for their own ends. Hawkers on Tiananmen Square sell Chairman Mao watches, and tourists have to haggle over overpriced English prints of the little red book. Something needs to be done about the defensiveness that exists in China over both the people’s feeling of nationalism and how they think that outsiders see them.

Following a tip off from inside the China mainland that I “might want to think about deleting my anti-government blog”, I’ve deleted the mirror of this blog on today.com, and have changed all the entries on thie Livejournal to ‘friends only’ in order to protect myself.

Apparently what has happened is that a copy of my blog ended up in the hands of either David Kedwards or Tim Daniels at Wall Street Institute (who I don’t work for anymore). The worry is that an anti-government blog could make it difficult for me to get a further visa for China, although I’ve already secured a L visa and will be getting a Z visa in a few weeks.

Technically there shouldn’t be a problem. Livejournal is blocked in the mainland, and I post on Today.com that is unblocked, but since Wall Street depends upon essentially bribing the government (donating free English courses to various governmental organisations) the effects of having an ex-employee rail against the government that they depend on for business could have some ramifications in the future.

Since no one really posts on here apart from the people in my friends list anyway, there should be no real interruption to normal service. I just need a little more control over this blog, and plausable deniability should any questions be asked.

I’m always copping heat because I always seem to manage to find something negative about living in China (for those of you who are getting tired of it, rest easy, I’m out of here in a few months, maybe even sooner if this new visa doesn’t come through). The truth is that while there are a few good things about the place, the vast majority of the negativity is actually created by the CCP themselves. People like me don’t go around looking and digging up thin slivers of Hu Jintao’s nasty work, it’s quite easy to sit on the grass and pick up the the apples as they hit you on the head.

This time, it an effort to enforce public mourning by blocking access to entertainment websits and TV programming.As I’m in Hong Kong right now, and therefore aren’t subject the Great Firewall (I’m writing this on my Livejournal with no use of a proxy), I have full access, but apparently on the mainland, The official announcement is here. The saliant points are:

1. All websites are to immediately report and give priority to reports on the national mourning days declared by the Central Government, the State Council and in your province. While spreading the word online, also exhaust all mobile means including SMS, MMS, etc. The statement by the State Council is to be given priority spacing on the home page of all major websites.

6. Strict discipline for those departments, localities and websites that have not kept in line with standards. Closure awaits non-compliant portals and investigation to follow to pinpoint responsibility.

Of course, the bitter irony is that earlier, the Chinese were actually praised for their media openness in the early response to the quake, and now they’re forcing entertainment, gaming and video uploading sites to shut down for the three days on the penalty of being permanantly shut down. There is, as well, the fact that it’s a wildly different culture to what westerners would be used to (and the “cultural differences” excuse is used almost to bleeding point here), the question is how will this apparent U-turn on the government control of the Chinese be seen by westerners?

One of the things that it does do is that it creates the impression of spontaneous national grief, it seems that everyone has agreed with little intereferance from anyone that for three days, concern for the victims of the earthquake will be more important than the concerns of making money. The idea of everyone being united in grief is a great tool for the government to use both to create unity out of the “political capital” that has been created by the disaster (if more unity were needed, that is) and to strengthen their power base, fostering a new kind of personality cult behind the two heads of state, and ensuring political stability for the ruling CCP.

Over these last few weeks, I can honestly say that I’m sick and tired of hearing the word ‘visa’.

When I left Wall Street Insititute in January, I had assumed that since I hadn’t surrendered my passport that I would be free to coast along on the Z visa that was issued to me until October. It was only when two officers from the Entry and Exit Department of the PSB that I discovered that the visa and my foreign experts certificate had both been cancelled by the company, and the person responsible for visas at Wall Street hadn’t bothered to contact me via email or through my old manager at the centre I was working at. The end result was that for 2 months, I had unknowingly been living in the country as an illegal alien.

The favoured way of working here in Beijing was to secure a F, or business, visa, and work part time, either as a private tutor or for a company. Since the government, in their infinite wisdom, decided that there are to be no business meetings over the Olympic period, no F visas are available, and the ones that are being issued, only run until the 31st July. Furthermore, it’s now impossible to convert a tourist visa, which can only be renewed twice, giving you a maximum of 90 days in China as a tourist, to an F visa, which is what a lot of people have been doing.

If you’re a tourist who has no interest in the Olympics but wants to come to China, then you’re out of luck because tourist visas are only being issued on the provision that Olympic tickets have been bought, along with proof that you can spend at least $100 a day, and confirmation of your hotel booking.

The process of getting a Z (working) visa has also changed. Before, it was quite common to do the “the visa run” to Hong Kong, taking advantage of the islands “it is, it isn’t” Chinese status to apply for a Z visa “outside” China, but in a place that is technically part of China. For some 33 countries on a special blacklist (no pun intended), it’s now impossible for nationals of those countries to apply for a Z visa, even if they have come to China specifically to find work. For example, if you’re a Khazak, then you need to go back to Khazahstan to get your Z visa.

The problem is, is that while there are rules, the rules are not uniformly enforced. One example on the That’s Beijing visa forum where one helpful poster from Shanghai pointed out that a visa agency was able to get 6 month F visas for passport holders. Some people who apply in Hong Kong are being issued Z visas, and some are not, no reasons are given for the visa refusals.

While you might think that there’s nothing unusual about a government requiring people to either be tourists, workers, business folks from abroad, or students, bear in mind that while the visa rules where changed some three months ago, no information from the government was really given out until the start of May - this information included the important list of countries whose nationals were required to leave the country in order to apply for a Z visa. With the tighter visa rules being enforced, there’s scope for Chinese officials to hit back at countries that have previously made life hard for China and Chinese citizens. One example is the French restaurant owner who was denied a visa, when questioned, the official in charge simply said “It’s because you’re French”.

The knock on effect of singling out certain nationalities for retribution has been that a lot of trips have been cancelled. Take the recent case of a Swiss and a German coming to China for a holiday. The Swiss guy was given his normal 30 day visa, but the German was only allowed to stay in the country for 5 days. Unsurprisingly, the couple cancelled the vacation.

Despite all the evidence that there are visa changes, the Chinese government says that there haven’t been any, Jiang Yu at a recent press conference said that “The Chinese people will welcome foreign friends in a warm, enthusiastic and open-minded way,”. The freelance writers who contribute to English language magazines in the city, like That’s Beijing and City Weekend beg to differ with Jiang.

Everyone has a problem with the new rules, mostly the people who’ve been living here on business visas and have largely settled down with wives, husbands, girlfriends and boyfriends, but the EU is now saying that the new rules will hamper business relationships with the People’s Republic. The European Chamber of Commerce in China said that business trips were now uncertain under the new rules, and the limit on the number of entries on one visa put a bigger financial burden on business who wish to invest in the country.

It seems that while the Chinese government say that the people who complain about various Chinese crimes, Tibetan independence, freedoms of speech, and everything else are not acting in the spirit of the Olympics, kicking people out of the country who have lived here for years, and who have complained about nothing isn’t exactly what is preached by “the Olympic spirit” either. The amount of animosity that hase been created by the Chinese government (yet again) is probably not the political basis on which to build Olympic goodwill in the coming months.

Well, this last 10 days has been a bit of turbulent one.

First of all there was the rather predictable break up of me and my girlfriend, which didn’t really surprise anyone following the rather boring move from Ya Yun Cun to Dongzhimen. The equally unsurprising knock-on effect has been that I’m finally in a position of cutting my time here drastically short, and hopefully will be in a better and friendlier mood once I get out of the country.

The other thing that happened was the rather nasty backlash following the efforts of the members of Reporters Without Borders (one of the myriad …Without Borders organisation who’s members seem to do a lot more thinking, and probably have way too much time on their hands than most other Without Borders groups) have managed to piss of China. Put another way, the French have managed to piss off China.

This isn’t really a good move by either country, since France has quite a lot of money (and several branches of Carrefour) in the country. For china, it means that they’ve managed to find a way of boycotting one of the countries that weilds more power in the European Union than any other.

Chinese people have been eager to show that they love China, and have been eager to tell, er, other Chinese people that they love China in an apparent show of solidarity, by adding a little “(L)China” message to their MSN personal message thingy. The screenshot below best illustrates what has happened.

Into the fray walks Mr. Jack Cafferty, who, even by my standards says stupid things, like calling Chinese people “thugs and goons”. Now I have quite a few friends who are Chinese, hell, my ex-girlfriend was Chinese, and while I’m no Communist sympathiser, I really do take offense at what this overfed fatuous American moron has said about these people. Here’s a video of the magical moment over on Shanghaiist.

And so we are winding our weary way down to the Olympics. What exactly is going to happen is hard to say, mainly because the two forces that are involved are so strong. The attraction of the media exposure the Olympics will bring will be irresistable to do-gooders who want to see China change to America 2 overnight, and then there’ll be the Chinese people themselves, who are apparently becoming more Nationalistic rather than becoming disillusioned with the leadership that the CCP is providing.

“Oh my God. Someone has a gun in front of me. There’s a group of about 20 people - two of them have handguns. They are walking the street.They’re shooting. They didn’t have uniforms, but the way they were in a group I thought maybe they were police. They went down the street and the first one fired, that’s for sure - I think the others did; there was so much noise I can’t be sure. Then some of the citizens threw stones, but not at them - in the other direction. So I don’t know if they were police or maybe Tibetans.

“I have just been out to get my things. We are staying at the hotel tonight. There are still people on the streets but only Tibetans - if they see anyone Chinese they throw stones.”

More coverage on the Guardian wesbite about the rallies that turned violent. Which has several eyewitness accounts of what happened. Check here and here for more. There’s also analysis from their correspondents and from the newswires.

The Chinese government propaganda machine has wasted no time, with Xinhua kicking and screaming (Chinese people are victims, yadda yadda) in playing down the riots…while the death toll on Xinhua is 10 civilians dead, the reports on the Guardian put this figure closer to 300. The headline makes light of the Tibetan deaths, and focuses on the fact that 12 (Chinese) police officers have been injured, and has been quick to blame everything on the Dalai Lama. Where he fits in is anyone’s guess, but hey, he’s an evil speratist, er, peaceloving, pacifistic Buddhist who wants Tibetans to rule Tibet, so he’s the perfect scapegoat.

The CCP is going to have to pull something out of it’s ass pretty quickly to try to get out of this one.

EDIT - 18th March

And…er, they didn’t. Bascially, the state owned government mouthpiece that masquerades as a news network, Xinhua, launched several attacks on the Dalai Lama (the winner of the Nobel PEACE Prize) for orchestrating the rioting, and wanting to use force to seperate Tibet from China, undermine the Olympics, and all other kinds of nasty shit that would subvert state power or poison the minds of Chinese young people, or do something that someone didn’t like somewhere.

The writer’s words would probably carry more if the Chinese hadn’t themselves killed around 70 million of their own people through political purges and self-induced famine. The well worn tactic of appearing to be the victim is the only PR self-defence that Chinese people know, they like to paint themselves as the underdogs, fighting to moderise their country, when really, there’s nothing but a lot of whining, diguising the fact that quasi-developing nation only knows two things - how to fight and how not to fight.

Any pretence that the ruling Communist Party is peace-loving should stand with the admittance of the blunders that it has made, and that it continues to make in the presence of it’s peers. Chinese people should be ashamed, suicidally ashamed of what their so-called government is doing in their name.