From China Digital Times CDT
via A Word to Describe Chinese Society.
（at then end of the post, I added a short sequence from a documentary I did in 2009, which at that time made me think of the meaning of 管）
At The International Herald Tribune’s Latitude blog, translator Eric Abrahamsen is ten times as concise as Yu Hua, explaining how the character 管 guǎn captures much about Chinese society.
In the traditional Confucian view of society, power relationships in the state are mirrored by those in the family; guǎn appears just as often in the home as in government. Pushover parents are “unable to guǎn” (管不了, guǎnbùliǎo) their unruly children. A decade later those children will loose the angst-ridden teenager’s cry: “don’t guǎn me!” (别管我, biéguǎnwǒ). Later still, when China’s tottering social welfare programs are unable to “take care of” (guǎn) the elderly, those now grown-up children may recall their filial responsibilities ….
Contrast guǎn with zhì (治), the more abstract term for “rule,” which appears in China’s hot-button debate about the difference between “the rule of law” (法治, fǎzhì) and “the rule of man” (人治, rénzhì), as well as in official terms like “Autonomous Regions” (自治区, zìzhìqū) and “to punish” (处治, chǔzhì). This high-low distinction is evident in urban safety, where the police are in charge of “keeping the peace” (治安, zhì’ān) while employees of “city management” (城管, chéngguǎn) beat street vendors and migrant workers.
On taobao.com, the Chinese equivalent to ebay.com, you can find all sort of deals.
In the last year I bought several pairs of shoes, my kitchen’s stools, some shirts and other items but… I didn’t expect to find a VIP pass for the Ark!!! Which ark? You know, it’s 2012, the entire world is gonna be over soon, exactly as Hollywood prophesied!
Moreover it’s a real deal: the ticket is worth more than 1 billion € and it’s sold online for 5 cny.
For only 60 cents you can join Kim Jong-Il and Moammar Gadhafi, who are obviously alive and already waiting for you on board!
Read more on Wall Street Journal
During one of the last researches I did on behalf of Future Concept Lab, I had the chance to visit different families in Shanghai, to have a meal with them and to chat about their food habits. What do they like to eat? Where do they buy groceries? What kitchen tools do they use? Which rituals and family dynamics characterize their meals? What is food safety for them? These and several other topics become part of a food diary I built for each family. It was very interesting to deliver market insights relevant to my research purpose while telling a story about PEOPLE. I avoided to force them in the structured frame of a marketing interview, on the contrary I allowed them to tell their own stories in their own environment, while guiding them through different topics. The outcome was meaningful, and sometimes it was also very funny: every story, every diary was spiced up by many personal experiences, insights and small anecdotes which really helped me to have a better understanding of their food habits and their “food world”.
I share here the diary of a lovely upper class old couple. Enjoy!
In 1998, when I came to study in China for the first time, I felt a little bit lost in translation. At that time, my guides to the Beijing experience were “Gubo” and “Palanka”, two Canadian guys who were the main characters of an 80s Chinese textbook, named “Practical Chinese Reader”. Thanks to them, I learned to go to the Fragrant Hills on the outskirt of Beijing to see the “wonder” of autumnal red leaves, I got my kaoya (Beijing roast duck) at the oldest and worst serviced Quanjude in town, I learned how to say “four modernizations” before being capable to say “how do you do”.
Anyway, what Gubo and Palanka never told me was that one of the most typical delicacies of the capital is a 56% vol. spirit which tastes like metal scraps. A schoolmate and I soon discovered this precious elixir: Hongxing Erguotou (红星二锅头).
After a day of intensive individual Chinese lessons, we used to spend the evening chatting and drinking a small bottle of Erguotou. When the bottle was emptied, we had the ritual to light it up and check for how long the blue flame could last… If I remember well, the record was around 60”.
Back to nowadays, I recently found a box of a Erguotou in the hallway of my office. Although Baidu.baike, the Chinese Wikipedia, describes it as “rich and mellow, with a silky fragrance“, this pure, transparent, 56% vol. potion usually doesn’t suit foreigners’ taste. When I kindly ask a colleague if they’re arranging a mass suicide ritual, he kindly informs me that in the warehouse everybody really appreciate Erguotou, apparently it’s awesome to clean cables.
Obviously my colleagues – who haven’t neither had the privilege to know Gubo and Palanka – don’t even know that RED STAR Erguotou is part of Beijing history!
Red Star Erguotou is one of the Chinese “old trademarks”, usually called a laozihao, which means a well-known brand with a strong tradition of excellence behind.
Erguotou is a kind of baijiu, a distilled liquor and a common lubricant of relationship building in China, which is mainly made from sorghum. It’s a typical product from Beijing but it’s also widespread all across China and its production dates back to the Yuan dynasty (around 1680).
RED STAR was founded in May 1949 and it was the first brewery created by the Chinese Central Tax Office. RED STAR’s birth is closely related with the foundation of the People Republic of China – if you prefer “Red China” – and the bottle of RED STAR erguotou itself can be considered a kind of revolutionary icon: the alcohol of the People, the national brand, a tradition of excellence brought to the industrial productions by the working class for the working class (a 500ml bottle is priced 5-7 yuan, when a 330ml Coke is 3 yuan).
Nowadays, you can find it almost everywhere in the capital: convenient stores, groceries, supermarkets, restaurants. A “xiao’er” is the small ???ml bottle a “da’er” (da = big) is the 500ml one. Otherwise, real aficionados call it “small consolation” or “big consolation”, referring to its “medicinal” properties.
Since the product can be considered a national heritage, It also had to face the threat of fakes. As for its luxury brothers Maotai and Wuliangye (the two most upscale spirits in China), outside of Beijing you can never tell if you’re drinking a real or a fake bottle.
An old man once showed me the trick to check the authenticity of a bottle of RED STAR erguotou. On the cap there’s a drawing of Qianmen Gate (also called Zhengyangmen, is an old city gate in Tian’anmen Square) on a yellow background, if by heating the cap with a lighter the black lines fade into the yellow background, then you have a real bottle of RED STAR in your hands!
RED STAR’s biggest challenge though, was not the proliferation of fakes.
Since the flooding of new products and foreign brands, the last two decades have put in danger the predominance of old traditional trademarks. The laozihao are most of the times unable to rebrand themselves, to renovate their storytelling and to add some sparks of vitality to a tradition which is risking to relegate products to the role of dusty icons of the past. Although urban consumers might still weigh the importance of tradition, they’re also lured by contemporary communication strategies, captivating packaging, new slogans and new media. The appealing of a tradition is often overshadowed by competitors and new-comers, by means of better branding and more effective storytelling.
Wealthy Chinese classes drink XO, fuerdai (children of wealthy parents) mix Chivas with green tea and RED STAR erguotou risk to become more and more a drink for poor people, old beijingers, foreigners’ one-time-only experience of Chinese edible oddities.
Apparently at Red Star, they became aware of that, and recently a new bottle of Erguotou made its appearance on the shelves. I know all Beijing’s hardcore fans will be against this last piece of tradition torn down, but at least in terms of packaging, I think at RED STAR they know what they’re doing.
The new design is clean, simple, transparent and pure as only pure baijiu can be, and… a big revolutionary red star shines on the frontside of the bottle. Not any Chinese fret or flying phoenix in the graphics, but a contemporary identity, which at the same time recalls the spirit of chairman Mao: he personally supported the foundation of RED STAR because he wanted good baijiu to be affordable for every Chinese family.
While icons of old communist China fade away, nowadays a lot of consumers have a vein of nostalgia for the old times, when life was simple, people were honest, and the revolutionary spirit was pure. It happens for the elders who have been living in Mao’s era, but also for the post 80s, who often dig in their childhood memories to find peace from the frenzy of booming metropolis.
RED STAR ERGUOTOU’s new packaging adapts the iconic elements of the product’s traditional identity to consumers’ demand for a new experience, for new shapes and contemporary aesthetics (for the first time, the English brand name is visible in striking Impact font). Theoretically this blend seems successful, but only time will tell if the new packaging will become as iconic as the old “xiao’er” among future generations of drinkers.
The new version is less alcoholic (only 43% vol!) and therefore probably bearable for a broader audience – 150ml bottle.
The “xiao’er”, the old 100ml, 56% vol.
BRAGGING TIP: When you drive around Dawang Rd, in CBD (the main financial district in Beijing), and you want to brag about your knowledge of the capital, you can tell friends and clients: “You see there, this place once was named Bawangfen and RED STAR BREWERIES used to be there, decades before these skyscrapers were built!”
LINKS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Er_guo_tou
http://herschelian.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/china-and-the-demon-drink/
http://www.redstarwine.com/
http://baike.baidu.com/view/1121015.htm
In the last 7 years I’ve been doing several researches about Chinese consumer culture, ranging from fashion to food, from design to entertainment.
I’ve been helping companies to get a better understanding of the people living in this amazing country: what do they consume? why and how? what is considered appealing and fashionable? what is the meaning of cool in China?
In order to answer to these and several other questions about Chinese consumers’ choices, I’ve been proposing a qualitative approach which is quite unique and has the goal to visually and interactively “immerse” clients in the Chinese world.
In this short presentation, I give you an idea of what I do… beside witchcraft and black magic which still remains my favorites hobbies! 
A few pics of a weekend in Urumqi (Sep 2011)
When Steve Jobs died – and tons of shanzhai copies (-> fakes) of his biography flooded every street book stall – the atavic question of creativity made in China rose again, especially on weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform which is nowadays main stage for every hot debate.
If you want to know the whole story, I suggest you to read this WSJ synthesis, I limit myself to report hereby some illustrious comments:
Wang Wei, chairman of the Chinese Museum of Finance, wrote: “In a society with an authoritarian political system, monopolistic business environment, backward-looking culture and prevalent technology theft, talking about a master of innovation? Not a chance! Don’t even think about it.”
Lee Kaifu, former head of Google China and founder of a start-up incubator called Innovation Works, said: “It’s not that Chinese are not smart or don’t have the potential (to become Steve Jobs). Look at Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Steve Chen of YouTube” (Both were born in Taiwan and immigrated to the US at young ages!)
Chen Zhiwu, a finance professor at Yale University tweeted: “the first thing the teachers do (in China) is to rub down the edges of those students who are different from the crowd.”
Chinese scholar Wu Jiaxiang wrote: “If Apple is a fruit on a tree, its branches are the freedom to think and create, and its root is constitutional democracy,” and again “An authoritarian nation may be able to build huge projects collectively but will never be able to produce science and technology giants.”
While I was pondering about creativity, paradigm breaking thinkers and the bindings of a society where the individual is often a potential threat to collective harmony (the infamous “river crab”), I bumped into a passage of “Family“, a novel written in 1933 by Ba Jin, widely considered one of the most important Chinese writer of the 20th century. For some aspects I find its story very modern. As it happens in contemporary Chinese education system, kids are trained since their early stage of life to conform to a model, instead of getting capable to criticize it and develop their own identity.
The Family focuses on three brothers from the Gao family, Juexin, Juemin and Juehui, and their struggles with the oppressive autocracy of their family. The idealistic, rash Juehui, the youngest brother, is the main protagonist, and he is frequently contrasted with the weak eldest brother Juexin, who gives in to the demands from his grandfather and carries on living a life he does not want to live.
Here’s a short and to me very meaningful excerpt (English translation below):
“Why doesn’t anyone speak up? …you should all curse this kind of life!” The audience stared at him, shocked, they didn’t understand why he was screaming like that.
“Why should you swear at us?” said Jue Ming closing the book, and he quietly added: “We’re like you, we just try to go through in this big family”
“That’s the thing which makes me swear!” said Jue Hui still full of resentment. “You always swallow, you never rise up. How long this is gonna last? You speak about rising against the old family patterns, but in reality you do support them. Your way of thinking is new, but on the contrary your behavior is old. You have no guts! …you are a contradiction, you live in a contradiction!” At this point he forgot being himself in a contradiction.
“Younger brother, calm down, what is the purpose of quarreling like this? Every thing has to be done step by step” Jue Ming still calmly said, “What can you do about it all by yourself? You should know that the big family system has its roots in the economic and social background” He had just read this very last sentence on a magazine and he spontaneously said it out. He then said: “Our sorrow is not smaller than yours”.
I think that culturally speaking, we sometimes can still consider China as a big oppressive and autocratic family, where individual thinking is often seen as an unacceptable threat to status quo.
Before you read this interesting article, a couple of things you should know if you are not a Chinese culture insider:
1) Han Han is a post80 hyper influential blogger, writer and car racer. Thanks to a meticulous self-censorship he’s always managed to convey his message to his audience, by means of a smart and sharp irony. Recently his blogging activity is experiencing a slow down…
2) Last month, during the sixth plenary session of the 17th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party the authorities put the strengthening of Chinese creativity among national priorities in order to become a truly influential world power
China Media Project
via Han Han: when a culture castrates itself.
An inspiring article by Tim Leberecht, Frog Design:
Otherness and other pillars of a new moral economy
“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.
You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.
It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.
continue reading here
The National Museum, one of the main building on Tian’anmen square has re-opened its doors after 4 years of renovation. Its total floor space is around 200,000sqm, over 3 times more than the Louvre. In the frame of a bilateral cooperation between Germany and China, for the grand opening almost 600 art pieces have been transferred from three major German museums.
The theme of the exhibition is the Age of Enlightenment… or in Kant’s words “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error”… now in Beijing, at China National Museum!
I was working for a sponsor of the exhibition, and since I was helping for the video coverage of the opening, I was there with a German client. When we got to the entrance hall, a bust of Kant welcomed us with the motto of Enlightenment: “Have courage to use your own understanding”.
My client felt a little puzzled: “use your own understanding??? I thought we were in China?!”
Actually me too I was a bit surprised myself, I rather expected something about harmonious enlightenment, harmony through knowledge, joyous society etc.
Anyway, I told him that in China, when you talk about Art, there’s more freedom than in other domains, probably because the message conveyed is not so obvious as it is in other media, and for a Chinese common visitor is not so immediate to switch from the philosophical perspective of Enlightenment to the political implications for nowadays China.
During the pre-opening, we saw hundreds of faces seamed by years of hard work, people from the countryside and from the city’s lower classes. These are the usual visitors who join tours organized by local party committees and the first ones to pay their tribute to all the symbols of Communist China (the posh/wannabe crowd prefers a Martini in 798 instead of Mao’s stuffed corpse).
Honestly, in those visitors eyes I could hardly see any concern about the incoherence between Enlightenment message and Chinese regime…
Then the press conference came: all the usual blabla about intercultural love and friendship, and the announcement of a series of cultural dialogues between East and West, which will be side events of the main exhibition.
By the end of the conference, a journalist from German National tv asked the Chinese organizers how could a dialogue be possible when Chinese government put people under arrest for thought crimes and harshly limits citizens’ freedom.
The reply was pretty simple and straightforward: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re sorry but we’ve run out of time and we have to close the press conference”.
Disappointment, giggles, murmurings, everybody left the hall.
In the last few years, my overall opinion about Chinese leadership was positive. I’ve always been thinking that the way a country has to be governed depends on people’s level of education and ethical growth. When you educate a kid you can explain him why he should or shouldn’t do something, but you can only do that within the limit of his understanding. Whenever an explanation would exceed this limit or a situation of urgency or potential danger occurs, you need to be more authoritative and impose rules by means of a strong leadership. However, I believe that a benevolent leadership should protect people but at the same time educate them to protect themselves on their own, nurturing their knowledge, and providing them tools to have and use their own understanding, as Kant said.
I feel that Chinese authoritarianism goes far beyond situations of emergency or situations beyond common citizens’ understanding, and at the same time, I can’t really see citizens’ emancipation as a Party’s main goal.
On the contrary, when I heard the awkward reply during the exhibition’s press conference, when i think about CCTV faking news about Libya, when I know that my access to Google is slow because someone is silently e stingily trying to limit my freedom of choice, well, I someway become blind to all the undeniable improvements the Party brought to common Chinese citizens’ life.
I feel that my idea of a long educational process, carefully leaded by the Party toward the possibility of a Chinese democracy, where people are able to do responsible choices, it’s just a personal utopia.
When you come to facts instead of leaders’ statements, the ultimate goal is still controlling knowledge, preserving ignorance, easing rulers’ life, and once in a while throwing a sop to citizens.
They say “It’s a process”, another political mantra like “harmonious society”.
Am I too critical and/or impatient?
PS: And now Ai Weiwei, one of the most brilliant Chinese artist and political activist, was arrested and now he’s missing.
