RUBBER & REAL DUCKS GO VIRAL IN CHINA

COMMUNISTS AND OLIGARCHS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR.....

POLITICAL ART CAN BE GOOD ART

ARTISTS: Self-promotion is not wrong and doesn't pollute art...if you have something worthwhile to promote.


http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/27/arts/design/ai-weiwei-dioramas-depict-his-imprisonment.html

EARTH

                                                                

China

NOT YOUR USUAL POLE DANCING

SHAOLIN TEMPLE "pole dancing" (male) acrobats. Fantastic!.......Who can match China? On the other hand, who wants to give up their parents, childhoods, school, friends, and freedom, in order to be the super-human best in the world, for nationalistic goals. They can't all be given jobs as coaches when they age, but what else have they ever known?....So why doesn't China win every event they enter? Maybe the human spirit can be as vital as regimented glory.  [Thanks to Jack Chien for the site. Comments by Ron.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=QZXYOo_qk2E

CHINA vs. A MAN

The monstrous Chinese government is so terrified of one tiny aging man who smiles and talks of the spirit.....Is a dinosaur terrified of a butterfly, or even a bee?  This gladiator competition is surreal and absurdist bad theatre.....No government can remain is power for long that has no sense of proportion or reality, though it can kill millions of its citizens in its vain attempt...a bloated version of Syria.

VETERANS' HOUSING DEMOLISHED

First, young men are forced by the Warlord to fight the People's Army (which later became the Madman's Guards, then the Oligarchy's Enforcers). Then, the survivors and maimed young men are given concrete bunkers to temporarily live in for 3 generations. Now the apolitical addicted Money Launderers evict them to die, destroying their aging communities, and sentencing their neighbors to invisible extinction.....Life is certainly not fair, at all, at all.

PROPERTY RIGHTS

Property rights only exist until someone wants to make money from your property – then it is seized – in the U.S. by law, in China outside the law.

HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER

The most popular money-grabbing movie Hollywood could make is to show China as leading the world in business, culture, philosophy, social services, tourism, diplomacy, and concern for it's citizens. America would be portrayed as violent, selfish, condescending, Colonialist, deteriorating, and self-delusional. Chinese would be the heroes, Americans the villains....There's a pitch that guarantees a billion dollar box-office.... distributed worldwide by 21st Century Panda.

CHINESE VS. AMERICAN DIPLOMACY

The reason China will ultimately defeat America in practical diplomacy, if not in every skirmish, is that our officials truly believe that our relationship is "maturing," when, if fact, it is and will always remain the same: America is too young and self-centered to realize when it is being manipulated by an ancient wise power that uses extremely precise methods with absolute clarity, whose only goal is to keep itself in power. (Darwin, not the Bible.)....If this means bettering the lives of Chinese citizens, they will do so. If it means destroying the lives of Chinese citizens, they will do so. To the Chinese in power, the fate of a single human being is as unimportant as walking on a thousand ants.

MY CHINA

New York Times Book Review, by Jonathan Mirsky

TOMBSTONE

The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962

by Yang Jisheng  (translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian), 629 pp., Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

In the summer of 1962, China’s president, Liu Shaoqi, warned Mao Zedong that “history will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialized!” Liu had visited Hunan, his home province as well as Mao’s, where almost a million people died of hunger. Some of the survivors had eaten dead bodies or had killed and eaten their comrades. In “Tombstone,” an eye-­opening study of the worst famine in history, Yang Jisheng concludes that 36 million Chinese starved to death in the years between 1958 and 1962, while 40 million others failed to be born, which means that “China’s total population loss during the Great Famine then comes to 76 million.”

NEW FILMS FROM CHINA

LACUNA   2012
醉后一夜  

Director: Derek Tsang, Jimmy Wan. Producer: Pang Ho-cheung, Subi Liang. Screenwriter: Derek Tsang, Jimmy Wan, Zhang Youyou, Kuk Yuk. Cinematographer: Charlie Lam. Production Designer: Jeffrey Kong. Editor: Wenders Li. Composer: Alan Wong, Subyub Lee, Tom Lee. Cast: Zhang Jingchu, Shawn Yue, Chu Yue-sun, Yoga Lin, Lawrence Chou.

One morning a Hong Kong boy and a Mainland girl wake up in each other’s arms in the “Bed and Bath” section of a deserted high-end Beijing department store – without any idea of how they got there.

AI WEIWEI

by Sophie Elmhirst, 10/11/12

Ai Weiwei doesn’t usually dream. He doesn’t remember his dreams, or if he does they are deflatingly

banal. Last night, for example, he says he dreamed he was hungry and feasting on cucumbers, but 

in his eagerness bit his tongue and woke himself up – “Ow!”. His unconscious imaginings haven’t 

always been so prosaic. When Ai was detained at Beijing Capital Airport last year and held in a

secret police cell for 81 days