Killer Booze

China's machismo culture of baijiu is under scrutiny.

From AFP:

Image from redbubble.net

BEIJING — One Chinese official is dead and another in a coma in a pair of cases highlighting the risks of China's culture of drinking heavily to seal political or business deals, state media said on Monday.

Jin Guoqing, a district water resources chief in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, died last week of a heart attack after drinking excessively while entertaining official guests, Xinhua news agency said.

Also last week, Lu Yanpeng, a district chief in Zhanjiang city in southern Guangdong province, fell into a coma after drinking heavily during a dinner with a Communist Party official, it said.

They were just the latest casualties in a booze-soaked culture in which officials and businessmen are expected to ply guests with strong Chinese liquor at elaborate banquets amid cries of "gan bei," or "drain the glass."

Xinhua quoted an official in eastern Shandong province, who asked to remain anonymous, saying officials would "lose face" if they do not get guests drunk.

"Neither my guests nor I want to get drunk but we have to play under the unspoken rule, which has been around for so long. We don't know how to do business otherwise," the official said.

Read On

From my experiences, Chinese men to feel the need to prove how manly they are by how much baijiu they can drink. Personally, I think this whole aspect of Chinese (male) culture is a bit silly. I believe I got this kind of stuff out of my system in my late teens.

The ironic thing is that many Chinese men simply don't hold their liquor that well because of their body chemistry. So it's easy to see why and how this kind of binge drinking can be problematic.

One other aspect I wonder about in these kinds of deaths is China's shanzhai culture. Just like every other kind of product in China, there is fake baijiu everywhere.

Little cigarette and alcohol shops notoriously sell fake bottles of the baijiu. The owner of the shop next door to my work got arrested last weekend because of this. I'm sure that the fake bottles of the nice baijiu brands make their way into nicer restaurants as well.

One can only imagine what is actually in the bottles of fake alcohol. If you think real baijiu is foul, imagine how awful fake stuff has to be.

The Tao of Yao

The title of this post has nothing to do with the content of it. Just love the title of this book on Yao Ming.

Unfortunately, Yao Ming and his decrepit body have run into a major stumbling block.

From Reuters:

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Chinese basketball star Yao Ming's foot surgery will keep him out next season, but the National Basketball Association will not feel the pain in China because the U.S. sports league has grown beyond any one player there, analysts said on Friday.

Yao's NBA team, the Houston Rockets, said the towering center would undergo surgery next week after fracturing his foot during the playoffs in May, and would miss the 2009-2010 season.

For a league that has focused on building its fan base in China and making money through its TV contracts and sales of its branded-merchandise, the news was not a total shock as the injury to China's most famous sports personality had previously been called "career threatening."

However, the sport's popularity in China should allow the NBA to shake off the loss.

"Yao was a catalyst for the NBA's growth in China but now shares the stage with so many other players and league-sponsored initiatives," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon.

"Yao's absence, while disappointing, will not damage the NBA China effort," he added. "Rather, it will demonstrate how diversified the business has already become."

Read On

Yao Ming is a great player. I really like him. I've heard a lot of Chinese people, frustrated at this point in his career, say that they don't think he's any good. I always argue that Yao is a great player who plays with such finesse and smoothness for such a tall player. But I do concede that he can't stay healthy.

And at this point, it's safe to say that Yao Ming cannot stay healthy. Yao has missed significant playing time each of the past four seasons. And in this coming year, he will miss the entire season.

The guy is just too tall for his own good. Whether it's the rigorous routine he endured as a child in China or simply a product of being a genetic freak, Yao's body has broken down at the age of twenty-eight.

While Yao Ming missing next season will obviously have some effect on how Chinese people watch the NBA, I agree with the main premise of the Reuters article that the NBA will remain strong in China.

As the article goes on to say, Yao Ming jerseys are the tenth best-selling in the country. While Yao helped the NBA get on a better footing in China, China's love of the NBA goes much deeper than its country's most successful player.

The NBA began being broadcast on China's CCTV in 1987. Chinese people are well aware of Michael Jordan and everything he did in the 90s.

A few weeks ago, Qian and I were talking about Michael Jordan and she brought up Scottie Pippen and the guy who Jordan was a huge rival against late in his career. She couldn't remember his name. I threw out a couple possibilities and then said "Karl Malone." She responded, "Yeah, that's it!" Qian is not much of a sports fan at all. So the fact that she knows who Karl Malone is says a great deal about the roots that the NBA has already seeded in China.

The NBA is stronger than it's been since Jordan left the game in 1998. The league is full of young stars like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Dwight Howard, Kevin Durant, and many, many more. The success or failure of Yao Ming and his compatriot, Yi Jianlian, are not going to determine how well the NBA does in China.

I hope that Yao Ming can recover from his injury. He's a great athlete and seems like a genuinely good guy. But if he doesn't, China is still going to be crazy about the NBA.

Atmospheric Optics Photo of the Day - Rainbow at the Great Wall

I found out about the website Atmospheric Optics from the reader, Jonathan Shock, and his comments on my Great Wall photos post last week. Atmospheric Optics and its photos and explanations of curious atmospheric phenomena is fascinating and is definitely worth checking out.

Per Jonathan's suggestion, I sent the Great Wall with the rainbow in the foreground photo to the AtOptics administrator. The admin said the photo was great and made it the photo of the day today.

Check out the great write up on the type of rainbow I saw and the work he did on the photo here. It looks beautiful.

Thanks a lot to Jonathan and Atmospheric Optics for getting this photo in front of more eyes.

Fitting the Noose Around the White Collar

China is serious about punishing white-collar crime.

From AFP:

Image from Bloomberg

BEIJING (AFP) — The former head of Chinese oil giant Sinopec, Chen Tonghai, was sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve in a corruption case involving millions of dollars, state press has reported.

A Beijing intermediate court handed down the sentence after finding Chen guilty of graft amounting to 195.7 million yuan (28.8 million dollars) when he served as a top Sinopec official from 1999 to 2007, the People's Daily said.

Chen was also convicted of illegally appropriating funds from projects and land transfers during the period when he served as assistant general manager, then general manager and chairman of the board of Sinopec, it said.

The two-year reprieve means that Chen's sentence will be commuted to life in prison if he commits no further crime while in jail.

"Chen Tonghai received large amounts of bribes, the circumstances of his crimes were very serious and warrant the death penalty," the report, citing the verdict said.

Chen, 60, also turned over to the state all of his gains from the graft, it added.

Because Chen helped investigators in the case, expressed remorse, and provided information on the crimes of other people linked to the case, the court issued the two-year reprieve, it said.

Read On

I was drawn into this story by the headline: "Death Sentence for Oil Executive." The whole suspended sentence makes it a little bit anti-climactic (in a sensationalistic sense), but the tough love still says a lot about China's commitment to stamping out corporate crime.

I'm not a huge fan of the death penalty. I used to be. But somewhere along the line the whole idea of state-sanctioned killings.

While I don't support capital punishment, I do like that China is serious about punishing the people who do big crimes. The Ken Lays, Bernie Madoffs, and Chen Tonghais of the world should pay dearly for their crimes. Even if they committed them from behind mahogany desks while sitting in leather chairs.

The Kansas City/Xi'an Connection

Just doing a Google search on Xi'an, I found out that yesterday the local government of my hometown, Kansas City, declared July 13th to be "Kansas City-Xi'an Day."

This isn't ground-breaking stuff here, but I would like to highlight some media on the special relationship my hometown and my Chinese hometown have.

Here is a video from WDAF in Kansas City and an article Kansas City Infozine:

 

Kansas City, Missouri Celebrates 20-year Partnership with Xi'an, China

As part of the celebration, the City Council will adopt a resolution declaring July 13 to be "Kansas City-Xi'an Day.

Kansas City, Mo - infoZine - The City of Kansas City, Mo., will mark its 20-year Sister Cities partnership with Xi'an, China with a celebration from July 12-14. Three delegations from Xi'an, representing government, trade and tourism, will attend economic and cultural activities while visiting Kansas City.

As part of the celebration, the City Council will adopt a resolution declaring July 13 to be "Kansas City-Xi'an Day.

...

The mission from Xi'an to Kansas City represents the culmination of a three-year China strategy, which included leveraging the sister cities program as a "door opener" for trade and as an innovative economic development tool. Mayor ProTem Bill Skaggs led two successful missions to China in 2007 and 2008 focused on trade and the City's global strategy with Asia.

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Kansas City and Xi'an are a perfect match for being sister cities. Both are in the central of their respective countries. Both are "Gateways to the West." And there is some significant history between the two cities in that the journalist and author Edgar Snow is from Kansas City.

Snow's work in the 1930s essentially introduced the world to Mao. His seminal book - "Red Star Over China" - is incredibly famous over here. I've asked several young people I know, and well over half have at least heard of the book. Somewhat surprisingly, a foreigner from Kansas City wrote the official history endorsed by the CCP of the Long March and the communists living in northern Shaanxi Province in the mid-1930s. Pretty interesting stuff.

I know (or have met) several of the people in that above clip. The KC/Xi'an Sister City Organization is actually the means by which how I ended up in Xi'an.

When I was a junior in college, I spent four months studying abroad in Maasticht, the Netherlands. Living abroad for the first time just blew my mind. I knew that after I graduated from college, I wanted to go abroad again. My first choice was to go to Japan via the JET Program. JET didn't want me though. I had an interview at the Japanese consulate in Chicago and then was wait-listed to go, but then never got called up to go to Japan.

After going to Japan fell through, I looked into going to Chile and Taiwan. But after I began contacting schools in those countries, a friend of my one of my parent's friends told my mom about chances to teach English in Xi'an, China. Seeing that I wasn't being blown away by any offers in Taiwan or South America, I pursued the Xi'an angle.

Needless to say, Xi'an is the path I went. And I'm happy I did it. Being rejected from the JET Program and coming to China instead has been a great thing.

For any Chinese speakers reading this, I think the idiom 塞翁失马 (sai4weng1shi1ma3) is appropriate for my path and how I ended up in China. The idiom dictionary at chinesetools.com says this idiom means "a loss may turn out to be a gain."

Seeing the way my life is going at the moment and my general level of contentment/happiness, I feel like I gained having found the KC/Xi'an Sister City Organization back in the summer of 2005.

Survival

An incredible tale of survival has occurred in China over the past month.

From AFP:

Image from Xinhua

BEIJING (AFP) — Three miners were rescued after 25 days trapped in a flooded mine in southwest China chewing on coal and drinking filthy water, local media have reported.

The three were hauled out of the mine in Guizhou province on Sunday, their faces black with soot and their eyes covered by a cloth to protect them from the light, the Beijing News and the official Xinhua news agency reported.

The Xinqiao coal mine flooded on June 17, trapping 16 miners underground, and rescuers had previously only found one body.

The miners -- Wang Quanjie, Wang Kuangwei and Zhao Weixing -- were trapped in a deep part of the mine that had protected them from the flood, according to the Beijing News report.

Rescuer Yang Sen, told the paper the three survivors had survived by drinking some of the remaining filthy water and had relied on the weak light still emanating from their lamps.

Once the rescue team had located the trapped miners, they were able to pump in air through ventilation shafts, the report said.

Read On

I've been thinking a lot about "survival" and Darwinism the past few days. A lot of this surely has to do with the excellent piece on whales from this past week's New York Times Magazine. The article is long, but completely worth the time required to read it. The article left a profound impact on me.

This section was particularly interesting:

Scientists have now documented behaviors like tool use and cooperative hunting strategies among whales. Orcas, or killer whales, have been found to mourn their own dead. Just three years ago, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York discovered, in the brains of a number of whale species, highly specialized neurons that are linked to, among other things, the use of language and were once thought to be the exclusive property of humans and a few other primates. Indeed, marine biologists are now revealing not only the dizzying variety of vocalizations among a number of whale species but also complex societal structures and cultures.

Whales, we now know, teach and learn. They scheme. They cooperate, and they grieve. They recognize themselves and their friends. They know and fight back against their enemies. And perhaps most stunningly, given all of our transgressions against them, they may even, in certain circumstances, have learned to trust us again.

Read The Whole Article

If nothing else, go read page ten of the article. If that doesn't move you at all, I'm not sure what will.

Life, in all forms, is amazing.

Yet at the same time our world is also cut-throat.

In a manner that would make Daniel Dennett proud, Robert H. Frank, also of The New York Times, invokes evolution and survival of the fittest, the means by which life on Earth has reached such a wonderful diversity and sophistication, to help explain why the economy is in the state it currently is.

From The New York Times:

IF asked to identify the intellectual founder of their discipline, most economists today would probably cite Adam Smith. But that will change. Economists’ forecasts generally aren’t worth much, but I’ll offer one that even my youngest colleagues won’t survive to refute: If we posed the same question 100 years from now, most economists would instead cite Charles Darwin.

Darwin, renowned for the theory of evolution, was a naturalist, not an economist, and his view of the competitive struggle was different from Smith’s in subtle but profound ways. Growing evidence suggests that Darwin’s view tracks economic reality much more closely.

Smith is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which holds that when greedy people trade for their own advantage in unfettered private markets, they will often be led, as if by an invisible hand, to produce the greatest good for all. The invisible hand remains a powerful narrative, but after the recent economic wreckage, skepticism about it has grown. My prediction is that it will eventually be supplanted by a version of Darwin’s more general narrative — one that grants the invisible hand its due, but also strips it of the sweeping powers that many now ascribe to it.

Read On

I'm a hardcore Darwinist. I agree a lot with the above-hyper-linked philosopher, Daniel Dennett, and his ideas that Darwin's idea of evolution through natural selection is like a universal acid. Here's a brief explanation of Dennett's attitude towards Darwinism from the Wikipedia article on Dennett's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea:"

Dennett writes about the fantasy of a “universal acid” as a liquid that is so corrosive that it would eat through anything that it came into contact with, even a potential container. Such a powerful substance would transform everything it was applied to; leaving something very different in its wake. This is where Dennett draws parallels from the “universal acid” to Darwin’s idea:

“it eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.”

While there are people who would like to see Darwin’s idea contained within the field of biology, Dennett asserts that this dangerous idea inevitably “leaks” out to transform other fields as well.

If I had financial security for the rest of my life, I'd love to go to graduate school so I could study Darwinism and this kind of stuff more. Specifically, I think it'd be fascinating to get into research into the compatibility of the theory of evolution and Kant's idea of the pneumena.

Mmmmm..... academia...

This post has gone wildly off topic and I need to wrap up my ridiculous ranting...

Basically, living creatures (Chinese miners, whales, investment bankers, etc.) and the survival that they fight for are incredible things to observe.

When in Doubt, Quarantine Away

I've largely ignored the H1N1 news so far on this blog. I just don't find it to be that interesting of a story. Chinese people around me continue to talk about it though.

"You and Qian are headed to America soon," they'll say in a worried tone. "What about H1N1 and all the people who've had it there?"

My response, "What about it?"

Nearly all Chinese people I've heard talk about H1N1 are scared. If I didn't read the news and just based my perspective on the people around me, I'd certainly think that humanity is on the brink of a worldwide flu pandemic.

Reading the following editorial from The Los Angeles Times from someone who experienced a quarantine in China helps explain why Chinese people are on edge:

Image from Xinhua News

When I arrived in China late last month, the hazmat-suited public officials who met my plane had the same question for each passenger: "Have you had contact with pigs?" The officials took our temperatures, and then we were free to pass through customs and go on our way.

As a physician who had come to Shanghai to lecture at a Chinese medical school, I found it interesting to witness firsthand China's public health response to the H1N1 virus. The process seemed like overkill, and it had debatable public health benefits, but it didn't inconvenience me terribly. Or so I thought at the time.

The next evening, I returned from dinner to find two white-coated public health workers waiting for me in the lobby of my hotel. Apparently, a passenger three rows in front and five seats across from me on the flight had tested positive for H1N1. I was given 30 minutes to pack my belongings. When I returned with my bags, I noticed that the hotel staff stood in the corner of the suddenly cleared lobby wearing surgical masks. "I have no symptoms whatsoever," I tried to explain, but the siren of the ambulance that sped to the front of the hotel drowned out my protestations. The back door opened to reveal three fellow American passengers from my flight. I climbed in, and we drove two hours in darkness.

At 3 a.m., we arrived at a rural motel complex. Each of us was assigned to a single room and handed a letter. "Ladies and Gentlemen, I hope you have had a good trip to China," it read without a hint of irony. "In order to combat H1N1 you will stay at the Fengxian Medical Observation and execution institution for these special days. Stay at your observation room, no come out of your room. This temporary separation is for your family and friends' happiness and health. You will find quality services here. Have a nice time at this special moment."

Read On

Simply, the people who are suspected of possibly having H1N1 become, for all intents and purposes, swine on the back of a truck. Seeing this kind of action, it's easy to see why Chinese people are freaked out.

As this doctor acknowledges later in the article, influenza pandemics are something to be worried about. But he does a nice job breaking down why China's interpretation of swift and precise action are both antiquated and off-the-mark.

It is important for H1N1 not to take off in China. The sanitary conditions here leave a lot to be desired.

I remember being dumbfounded when, getting my first medical check examination for my work visa in China, there was no soap in the hospital bathroom for the patrons to wash their hands. So you can imagine the state of the rest of society if hospitals can't even muster up the energy to provide soap dispensers.

Saying that, locking up foreigners who were on the same plane as someone who tested positive for H1N1 doesn't seem to be a proportionate response to this situation.