Την ίδια ώρα, στην Κίνα...

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Πέφτουν οι 10άρες σαν το χαλάζι κι ο πληγωμένος καλλιτέχνης αναστενάζει:

Writer sentenced to ten years for subversion
By Reuters in Beijing

A court in the mainland has sentenced writer Li Tie to 10 years in prison on subversion charges for writing essays that urged people to defend their rights, a relative said, the third person to be sentenced on such charges in less than a month. (...)
 
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AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY

Ai Weiwei is known for many things—great architecture, subversive in-your-face art, and political activism. He has also called for greater transparency on the part of the Chinese state. Director Alison Klayman chronicles the complexities of Ai’s life for three years, beginning with his rise to public prominence via blog and Twitter after he questioned the deaths of more than 5,000 students in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The record continues through his widely publicized arrest in Beijing in April of 2011. As Ai prepares various works of art for major international exhibitions, his activism heats up, and his run-ins with China’s authorities become more and more frequent.

In this unprecedented look at Ai and those close to him, Klayman’s camera captures his forthrightness and unequivocal stance. She gives a larger picture of the artist as an individual, a symbol of China’s oppression, and a powerful voice against a country that still denies its citizens many basic freedoms.

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is Alison Klayman’s debut feature documentary, which she directed, produced, filmed, and coedited. She is a 2011 Sundance Documentary Fellow and one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” She has been a guest on The Colbert Report, as well as on CNN and NPR. Klayman lived in China from 2006 to 2010, working as a freelance journalist. She speaks Mandarin and Hebrew and graduated from Brown University in 2006.


Πρώτη προβολή αύριο στο Φεστιβάλ του Σάντανς. Εδώ ο ιστότοπος του ντοκιμαντέρ κι εδώ η πολυτεχνίτισσα μιλάει για το έργο της:


 
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CHINA HEAVYWEIGHT

In southwestern China, state athletic coaches scour the countryside to recruit poor, rural teenagers who demonstrate a natural ability to throw a good punch. Moved into boxing training centers, these boys and girls undergo a rigorous regimen that grooms them to be China’s next Olympic heroes but also prepares them for life outside the ring. As these young boxers develop, the allure of turning professional for personal gain and glory competes with the main philosophy behind their training—to represent their country. Interconnected with their story is that of their charismatic coach, Qi Moxiang, who—now in his late thirties and determined to win back lost honor—trains for a significant fight.

China Heavyweight artfully captures the playfulness among the trainees, their grueling conditioning, and the guiding principle that athletic achievement is for their country, rather than themselves. Director Yung Chang returns to the Sundance Film Festival (Up the Yangtze screened in 2008) with an intimately observed film that both explores and reflects social change and development in modern China.



International award‐winning filmmaker Yung Chang made his first feature documentary, Up the Yangtze, in 2007. It played at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and was one of the top-grossing documentary releases that year. China Heavyweight is Chang's sophomore film. He is currently in production on The Fruit Hunters, a feature documentary about nature, commerce, and obsession in the fruit underworld, slated for a fall 2012 release. He is also currently writing "Eggplant," his first feature film, about a Chinese wedding photographer.


Sundance 2012 World Documentary Official Competition


Synopsis:
In central China, a Master coach recruits poor rural teenagers and turns them into Western-style boxing champions. The top students face dramatic choices as they graduate -- should they fight for the collective good or for themselves? A metaphor for the choices everyone in the New China faces now.

千錘百煉 : "To be tried and tested a thousand times over."
 
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Η ψυχολόγος και συγγραφέας Εύα Στάμου, μετά το όχι και τόσο πετυχημένο άρθρο της για τον κανόνα της εγγύτητας (στα γλωσσικά δε μου φαίνεται και πολύ καταρτισμένη), γράφει ένα άλλο, καλύτερο κατά τη γνώμη μου, για την μπλόγκερ Ye Haiyan (protagon). [Η φωτογραφία της με τον Ai Weiwei, την οποία αναφέρει στο άρθρο, εδώ)
 
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Ένας αρκετά κλασικός καβγάς στο μετρό του Χογκ Κογκ ανάμεσα σε ντόπιους και σε τουρίστες επιβάτες από τη Λαϊκή Κίνα σχολιάζεται στη συνέχεια από έναν καθηγητή πανεπιστημίου του Πεκίνου, παρακαλώ, σε κινεζικό τηλεοπτικό κανάλι, με εξτρέμ χαρακτηρισμούς (το πιο ωραίο: αποκάλεσε το Χονγκ Κονγκ –που σημαίνει "ευωδιαστό λιμάνι"– "βρομερό λιμάνι"), και πυροδοτεί τις αντιδράσεις που περιγράφει και ερμηνεύει το άρθρο της Guardian, αντανακλώντας διαφορές ιστορικές, πολιτισμικές, γλωσσικές, οικονομικές. [Τα κινέζικα βίντεο, το πρώτο στα καντονέζικα και το δεύτερο στα μανταρίνικα, έχουν αγγλικούς υπότιτλους. Η ιστορία με το κατάστημα του D&G που αναφέρεται έχει παρουσιαστεί εδώ στο #231, και το βραβείο Κομφούκιου για την Ειρήνη που απονεμήθηκε στον Πούτιν, πάλι εδώ στο #201).
 
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Την επαύριο της έκθεσης της οργάνωσης Human Rights Watch για τη θέση της Κίνας στο διεθνή κατάλογο καταπάτησης των ανθρώπινων δικαιωμάτων, εδώ μια ανακεφαλαίωση των τελευταίων μηνών όσον αφορά τους διαφωνούντες διανοουμένους, συν το κλασικό δίλημμα: φεύγω ή μένω (αλλά στη φυλακή); (Asia Times Online)
 
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Τοπικές εκλογές στο χωριό Ουκάν (Reuters):

"For 40 years we've never had a proper election," said a bouffant-haired villager named Chen Junchao ahead of the election of the 11 election committee members by around 4,000 eligible voters in the village. "I've never seen these papers before," said an emotional Chen, clutching a white ballot registration slip stamped with an official red ink government seal. "I was crying when I saw this."
Not all are optimistic. One young woman with a baby swaddled against her said she would vote but worried a power struggle was under way for the March 1 village committee seats that could see some of the old corrupt guard regain influence.
(...)
Village-level elections are now common, if still stage-managed by the Party, but the situation in Wukan is unique in that its fledgling electoral steps were wrought from the jaws of unrest. After rioting in September, villagers of Wukan expelled the old village guard and barricaded themselves in for a dramatic 10-day stand-off in December.
 
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Από μια κριτική του Perry Anderson για 3 βιβλία Αμερικανών γραφειοκρατών για την Κίνα (London Review of Books), το κομμάτι για έναν κάπως λησμονημένο πόλεμο: της Κίνας εναντίον του Βιεντάμ το 1979:

Kissinger gives Deng full credit for what he terms ‘a turning point of the Cold War’ and the ‘high point of Sino-American strategic co-operation’. What was this? China’s war on Vietnam in 1979. Here Vogel and Kissinger converge, applauding Deng’s resolute action to thwart Vietnamese plans to encircle China in alliance with the USSR, invade Thailand, and establish Hanoi’s domination over South-East Asia. Conscious that not even all Deng’s colleagues approved the assault, which was far from a military success, Vogel separates by eight chapters and 150 pages Deng’s tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore to ensure diplomatic cover for the attack he was planning, from the war itself. The first, presented – along with Deng’s far more important tour of the United States two months later – as a triumph of far-sighted statesmanship, receives lavish coverage; the second, less than half the space. In part, this distribution is designed to protect America’s image in the affair: Deng launched the war just five days after getting back from Washington with the US placet in his pocket. But it is also to gloss over Deng’s misadventure on the battlefield as expeditiously as possible. The last word, as usual, goes to an apologist, through whom Vogel can convey his standpoint without being directly identified with it. Lee Kuan Yew, an ardent supporter of the war, has told the world: ‘I believe it changed the history of East Asia.’

Vogel’s account of China’s war on Vietnam is that of a former servant of a Democratic administration. Showering Carter’s point men in the tractations over Deng’s visit with effusive epithets, he is careful to shield the president himself from any too explicit responsibility for giving the war the go-ahead. Kissinger, a Republican and once head of the National Security establishment where Vogel was an underling, can afford to be more forthright. Deng’s masterstroke required US ‘moral support’. ‘We could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to overt military aggression,’ Brzezinski explained. Kissinger’s comment is crisp: ‘Informal collusion was another matter.’

How is this zenith of Sino-American collaboration, as Kissinger repeatedly calls it, to be judged? Militarily, it was a fiasco. Deng threw 11 Chinese armies or 450,000 troops, the size of the force that routed the US on the Yalu in 1950, against Vietnam, a country with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime pep talks were expunged from his collected works, the commander of the air force excised any reference to the campaign from his memoirs, and it became effectively a taboo topic thereafter. Politically, as an attempt to force Vietnam out of Cambodia and restore Pol Pot to power, it was a complete failure. Deng, who regretted not having persisted with his onslaught on Vietnam, despite the thrashing his troops had endured, tried to save face by funnelling arms to Pol Pot through successive Thai military dictators.

Joining him in helping the remnants of the world’s most genocidal regime continue to maul border regions of Cambodia adjoining Thailand, and to keep its seat in the UN, was the United States. Vogel, who mentions Pol Pot only to explain that despite his negative ‘reputation’, Deng saw him as the only man to resist the Vietnamese, banishes this delicate subject from his pages altogether. Kissinger has little trouble with it. No ‘sop to conscience’ could ‘change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge’. Rightly so, for ‘American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle.’

The struggle in question was against the USSR. In these years, Deng continually berated his American interlocutors for insufficient hostility to Moscow, warning them that Vietnam wasn’t just ‘another Cuba’: it was planning to conquer Thailand, and open the gates of South-East Asia to the Red Army. The stridency of his fulminations against the Soviet menace rang like an Oriental version of the paranoia of the John Birch Society. Whether he actually believed what he was saying is less clear than its intended effect. He wanted to convince Washington that there could be no stauncher ally in the Cold War than the PRC under his command. Mao had seen his entente with Nixon as another Stalin-Hitler Pact – in the formulation of one of his generals – with Kissinger featuring as Ribbentrop: a tactical deal with one enemy to ward off dangers from another. Deng, however, sought more than this. His aim was strategic acceptance within the American imperial system, to gain access to the technology and capital needed for his drive to modernise the Chinese economy. This was the true, unspoken rationale for his assault on Vietnam. The US was still smarting from its defeat in Indochina. What better way of gaining its trust than offering it vengeance by proxy? The war misfired, but it bought something more valuable to Deng than the 60,000 lives it cost – China’s entry ticket to the world capitalist order, in which it would go on to flourish.
 
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Μια αρκετά βλοσυρή εκτίμηση για τη ΛΔΚ: πως είναι φασιστικό κράτος (Truth-out). Στο πλαίσιο της ανάλυσης παραθέτει και τον εξής ενδιαφέροντα περιγραφικό ορισμό του φασισμού από τον Robert Paxton:

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Δε θα 'λεγα πως συμφωνώ με το δια ταύτα του άρθρου, για πολλούς και διάφορους λόγους, αλλά πάντως περιέχει αρκετές ενδιαφέρουσες πληροφορίες.
 
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Σε σχέση με τα λεγόμενα του άρθρου που λινκάρισα στο #250, έπεσα σήμερα στον εξής τίτλο, που μπορεί να ενδιαφέρει όσους διαβάζουν κοινωνική ανθρωπολογία:
Susan Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic, University of Chicago Press (1995)
 
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Ο Zhu Yufu έφαγε τελικά εφτά χρόνια για το ποίημα (βλ. #250, 251) και για κάτι μηνύματα στο Skype: υποκίνηση ανατροπής του κράτους. (The Guardian)
 
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Σκέψεις ενός Αμερικανού ιστορικού πάνω στις αναλογίες της κατάστασης στην Κίνα τον καιρό της επανάστασης των Ταϊπίνγκ και στη σημερινή. (ΝΥΤ)
 
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Foxconn lifts wages for workers 25% as Apple lets ABC News into plants (Guardian).

'China can't guarantee the low wages and costs they once did," Ron Turi of Element 3 Battery Venture, a consulting firm in the battery industry, told the paper. (...) Foxconn has also announced plans to invest in millions of robots and automate aspects of production.
 
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Και γαμώ το χρώμα διάλεξαν για τα παραβάν στις εκλογές του Ουκάν! (#248)

Wukan elections.jpg
 
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