Vignette

The Promised (Disney)land

Alec Ash

Middle-class aspirations at Shanghai Disneyland – Alec Ash

Wang Zhigang flew three hours just to see Mickey Mouse. In swimming shorts and a colourful umbrella-hat sold by peddlers outside the entrance to keep the sun off, he queued in 97 degrees heat for hours to get on the best rides. All because he made a promise to his son while Shanghai Disneyland was still under construction, that they would go when it opened. Wang Zhigang is a good father.

With his eight-year-old son, Xinbiao, he flew from Bazhong in Sichuan (just another anonymous Chinese city of three million) to Pudong international airport by the Pacific ocean. He took a plastic bag into the theme park. In it were two pots of instant noodles, a cylinder of chips, three bottles of water and a pack of what I can only describe as miscellanious meat jerky in shrink wrap. In his line of work as a travel agent, he explained, he has been to many of China’s tourist destinations, from the Sichuanese nature reserve Jiuzhaigou to mountainous Zhangjiajie in Hunan. “China has famous mountain and water scenery,” he told me – a stock phrase – then seemed to doubt his own pitch. “But it’s just mountains and water. Disneyland is more experimental.”

Reviews

Bringing Political Science to the Taiwanese Masses

Lev Nachman

Lev Nachman talks to Yen Wei-ting, founder and contributor to the blog and book, “Who Governs?”

菜市場政治學 – literally “Food Market Political Science,” or its official English name “Who Governs?” is a blog and a book that translates ivory-tower political science concepts into easy, understandable language for a Taiwanese audience. Originally, the blog was started by professor Yen Wei-Ting who, at the time of the blogs' founding, was a graduate student. 

Translation

Mo Yan Country

Chenxin Jiang

The rise of China’s Nobel-Prize winning novelist – Wei Yi, trans. Chenxin Jiang

This article from One-Way Street Magazine is published in partnership with Paper Republic. The translation was assisted with the generous support of Bill Bishop at the Sinocism newsletter, a daily digest of news and commentary on China.

On the afternoon of 12 October 2012, Mo Yan appeared at a press conference in a hotel meeting room that has since become famous worldwide. The hotel was in Gaomi, Mo Yan’s hometown, a small city in Shandong province in northeast China. Mo Yan was still wearing the same lilac dress shirt he’d been wearing the night before. He began by fielding two questions from reporters. Most of what he said quickly appeared online and disappeared just as quickly, perhaps because it wasn’t considered politically correct. Even before he’d won the Nobel Prize, Mo Yan’s politics had already been widely criticised as pro status-quo. In response, he said that his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature was a triumph not of political correctness, but of literature.

Q&A

Cab Talk

Brian Spivey

Brian Spivey interviews former NPR Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt

While working as NPR’s Shanghai correspondent from 2011 to 2016, Frank Langfitt observed that China was at a crossroads. The enormous economic growth of the previous three decades had yielded a more prosperous and worldly population, but had also led to stark inequality, rampant corruption, and a cooling economy. Langfitt wanted to understand what ordinary Chinese people thought and cared about during this inflection point. To find out, he drew on his prior experience as a taxi driver in Philadelphia, and drove people around Shanghai in exchange for conversation, for a series of radio stories.

The resulting book, The Shanghai Free Taxi, provides an in-depth, sensitive and informed look at what ordinary Chinese think several years into Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream.” I talked with him on the phone about why he decided to drive a taxi for free in Shanghai, the kinds of interesting people he met while doing so, and what those people think about the social and political changes they are living through.

Little Red Podcast

Cashing in on Social Credit

Little Red Podcast

The state and commercial agendas of China’s proposed social credit system

AN EPISODE OF THE LITTLE RED PODCAST

By 2020, less than half a year from now, a social credit scheme will cover people and companies across China, “allowing the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” It’s long been assumed the Chinese state would take the lead, but favored companies will doubtless profit from a database that will house every citizen’s tax records, criminal history, traffic offenses, family background and marriage details. There are signs these companies are likely to export a surveillance-for-profit regime to other regimes keen to keep a close eye on their people. To ask whether China’s future looks like Lei Feng, Black Mirror or Dave Egger’s The Circle, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Gladys Pak Lei Chong and David Kurt Herold of Hong Kong Baptist University. ∎