The other day, I was walking through my old stomping grounds around Xiang Mi Hu, which, by the way, I miss and want to move back too, when I noticed a disturbance in the street. It was the cops making one of their token busts of a street vendor. These folks operate under the government radar and pay no taxes for their sales, hence provoking the ire of the man. Due to the rampant capitalism here and the sheer number of these vendors, you’d think that the cops would be busy all day breaking up these little units, but they don’t. For every one bust I see, there are, oh, five hundred that appear to be unmolested. I’m sure that they all experience harrassment of some sort (usually in the form of having their little store kicked over or their merchandise thrown into the street), but it’s selective.

Anyway, I felt sorry for these folks. I don’t know what they were selling but they were an older couple. The woman was visibly distraught, yelling and crying as the policemen stoically locked their goods in the police van. The man gave more resistance, trying his best to hold on to the remaining merchandise. A small melee ensued. I’m not sure what happened to the people, they were either fined or maybe taking to jail for a while. I didn’t hang around too long.

I was worried about taking video or pictures, but I noticed a large number of people filming the incident on their cell phones. Though you can’t really tell the cast of characters in the movie, the owner of the wagon, which the vendor used to sell his goods, is hanging on to it for dear life.

The selective busts reminds me when some of the DVD stores have to temporarily vanish into the woodwork for a weekend while the “bust” takes place. Which reminds me of a new tact by some of the DVD places. They mix their inventory with legitmate DVDs. Normally, the DVD movies come in plastic sleeves which is complete with the standard coverwork – they just don’t bother putting it into a plastic DVD case. Anyway, they leave the big boxed sets of fake TV series out on display. This is because it’s hard to distinguish the real from the fake. However, it’s fairly easy for us native English speakers to tell the difference because the translations on the back are usually really bad.

Here’s a highly mobile street vendor. This guy is literally in the street, on the off-ramp of a major 6-lane artery, mind you:

Here’s a high quality communist sign located in Shekou, visible to those who opt to arrive in China by the ferry from Hong Kong or Maccau. These sorts of signs are frequently found along highways and bridges. There usually not translated to English, which makes this one so special:

Here’s another neat example of Chinese characters conveying their meaning through pictographs. I learned this one from a colleague and was able to apply it when visiting Tiger Leaping Gorge. The character itself is the character for “gorge” or “canyon”. Phonetically, it’s pronounced “Xia2″, the “2″ indicating a medium-pitched tone rising to a higher pitch. “Xia” is pronounced something close to “Shyah” in English. Here is the character:

The character above is actually made up of two other characters. The character on the right is “Jia1″, where “1″ is the high level tone. This character can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun, the character (most commonly with a “zi” sound after it) means “clip”, “pliers”, or something that can hold two things together with a force like a clip. As a verb, it means to “pinch” or “clip”. Here’s the character:

And, the character on the right is a simple one:

This character is “shan1″, which means “mountain” in Chinese. So, you see what happens when you put them together, you have a mountain that pinches…or a gorge. Pretty neat. Even if someone doesn’t know the character for “gorge”, they can most likely guess the meaning by the combination of characters to form a new word.

The rumors are true!   Youtube access has indeed been shut down in China.   I got a comment on one of my own youtube videos a couple of days ago and I was unable to go see the comment.   I thought to myself, “That’s funny; I thought youtube wasn’t blocked.”   Other big ones, like wikipedia, I’m aware of.   I didn’t think of piecing it together then because I was heading off to work where I had open access to the Internet.   Many businesses in China, as you may know, have no web restrictions.   China doesn’t want to stop that fantastic economic growth.   A day or two later, Robert, told me that China had shut down internet access due to video showing crackdowns of the Tibetan protests appeared on youtube.com.

It’s interesting asking Chinese folks what they think about this.   The most extreme answer I’ve gotten is, “Some of those Tibetans are troublemakers.”   More common ones are:   “They shouldn’t try to win independence this way”, “<with an I don’t care tone> I don’t know why they’re doing this.”   Hard to say if this is the result of the spin of China’s media.   If it is, I think it’s only a small part.   When I tell Chinese people about American views of Tibet, and I’m sure to mention the “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, they usually either laugh or give me a confused “Why?” look.   Though I can’t clearly explain, I tell them how we have our media spin too (from the AP):

TONGREN, China – When riot police with bulletproof shields lined up outside the monastery in this Qinghai province city on Sunday, scared residents ducked indoors and wary businesses shut down…

Having been near some of the trouble spots just recently, the bias I read in tone of this opening line feels magnified.

As promised, here are some links to high quality movies from the 2008 annual party. I titled this post as “Cultural Study 1″ because these movies demonstrate some interesting and fun cultural differences. So, just imagine that you’re in China and you’re going to your first company party. You’ve got an opinion and an expectation about what a company party is like. How close is what you see in this video to what you were expecting?

Here is the full movie of the 2008 Annual Party. It’s a large download (about 120 meg). It’s worth watching the first performance though. If you’re curious about my performance jump to the 9th minute. Or, just watch the next video.

Here is the video of Sally and I performing “Lin Mei Mei”, a popular Chinese opera tune which is taken from a famous book in China.

So, realize that these are all your coworkers singing, dancing, and acting in front of one another. For all the openness of the US, would you imagine that your coworkers would ever do this? It took some courage for me to do it, but once I finally realized that this was the culture and folks just enjoy having a good time regardless of ability (’cause my singing is quite bad), it was easy to commit to. Still, my expat colleagues were quite impressed by my “courage”.