Articles & Posts

April, 2010 
Vicky invited me to the opening ceremonies of the 3rd Annual Hangzhou Reading Festival.   She promised me a visit to the new Hangzhou main library, a gift of books from the No. 1 in Hangzhou, dancing girls, and a chance to be on TV.    Stronger men might have been able to say no, but books and dancing girls were just too much.The new main library is in the new Central Business District, the new CBD, as everyone here call it.   Predictably wonderful.   New building, of course, with a grand interior atrium and nice blending of marble and wood for accents on walls and detailing on doors.The library floor guide is pretty cool, arranged like a book table of contents.   It is six metal pages, unfolded like a tour guide brochure, with the inner five leaves making two tents with the wood base on which it sits, with descriptions of floors and book and material locations, in English … and Chinese.Taking a book out is pretty easy.  The scanner that you put the book under tells you when it is due, prints a reminder,  and annotates your central file at the same time (this is just my guess.   (note – this was …

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October, 2009 
Steven Shen Kanming and his wife and son and I went to Anji, which is in Huzhou, a small city in Zhejiang Province.  A couple of you will like this one, because it is an adventure, not hiking through Afghanistan for sure, but an adventure nevertheless – hidden dragons, many waterfalls, and how face can be made in China (sometimes).Steven picked me up in the afternoon of national day, after the big parade in Beijing.  Or, I should say, Steven and his driver.   Let me tell you, it does wonders for one’s public image to have the big black car with the driver pull up in front of your apartment, and the government official jump out and greet you warmly.  I highly recommend it.  Over the last few years of being in China, the standard mode of travel is just that- black car, driver, my buddy in the back seat.   At ZUST,  I keep waiting every morning for the car and driver to take me from class to class, but so far it hasn’t materialized.   Must be on back order.Huzhou is a small city between Shanghai and Jiaxing.   It borders Lake Tai, which is famous as one of China’s largest …

 The G20 in the Potemkin Village           September 2, 2016
First off, let us stipulate –

• It is vitally important for a nation to ensure security during the G20. National leaders will be present, en mass.  With terrorism threats salient everywhere, China wants to show off its prowess as a new member of the elite club.  In Hangzhou, terrorists and protesters,  ils ne passeront pas!
• At the same time, China shows the major democracies, all of which are G20 members, and the world, that there are ways to ensure stability and harmony. No Seattle 1999 here!   Chinese soft power in action. 

 
The question for the G20 members, all of whom are seeing a Potemkin village Hangzhou, is what cost for stability.One expects some concessions in time and convenience for a meeting of world leaders.  But perhaps the concessions go too far.There are “checkpoint Charlie” locations everywhere going into the downtown districts.  All vehicles must stop to be checked, registered, and if desired, searched.  The checkpoints are at major arterial streets going toward downtown, generally 30 to 45 minutes driving time from Xihu, West Lake, the focal point of all directions in downtown Hangzhou.On the way to the train station this morning, …

Al should have been there. Most of you know Al Day as the local musician who made good.   He does more than keep a hand in, playing with his own trio around Chicago and Evanston, and he knows more about music and musicians than I know about anything.So Al should have been there when I attended the first anniversary at MeToo Café in Hangzhou.   MeToo is an art gallery, despite the Café in the name.  It is one of dozens of show spaces for young Chinese artists, and it is a gem.   The look of New China is … new.   There is very little that is more than thirty years old.   Every hotel, every highway, every office building, every school, every store, every urban tree (almost) has that New Suburban look.   Schaumburg, circa 1970 or … anytime.   So the MeToo is a real find.Chen Dongfan at MeToo, Fall, 2009It is in a one story factory building, clearly more than thirty years old and rehabbed.  Really rehabbed.  Brick walls, exposed.  Old horizontal lines of parallel steam heating pipes, now painted black and serving as decoration and as a place to hang art.   Something that looks like an DC-12 airplane engine, but with …

Summer, 2004 One of the fun things to do in Hangzhou is attend the Romance of the Song Dynasty Show.   The Song Dynasty extended for about 300 years, ending in about 1275, with the conquest of the Mongols.   Now I don’t think there are many people in the US who would attend a show titled the Romance of the late Dark Ages, or the Romance of the Era of the Imperial and Magnificent Church.   This was the 1200’s, and we all believe in the progress of history.  But Barbara Tuchman subtitled her famous book about the 14th Century, the next century, the Calamitous 14th Century.    So this emphasis on romance just feels …. sort of misplaced, to me, the westerner. Except that this is China.  Now, really, not even I take the Romance of the Song Dynasty performance as a historically accurate guide to events.   The lasers, smoke effects, and stage lighting are probably later inventions.  But the Song is one of the most celebrated and sophisticated of Chinese dynasties, and Hangzhou was the capital city in the late Song, so there is some local promotion going on here too.   When Hangzhou was the capital of the Song, it was one of the wealthiest …

June, 2010 Anybody in Chicago who has met Alice Zhou Xiaofang remembers her.  She is the number 2 government person in the urban planning department in Shaoxing, but she is a mayoral advisor and all-around whip smart, dedicated, open, public servant.  Who asks questions and tells you what she thinks.  Who is also an electrical engineer and knit me the blue scarf I wore all last winter.   I was in Shaoxing to look at another ancient town, called An Chang, which is on both sides of a narrow waterway on the outskirts of Shaoxing.   It is now surrounded by modern buildings and cars and development, but some of the old town still remains.  Old, in this case, is late Ming-early Qing dynasties, which puts the buildings at about 400 years old.   This is based on fading inscriptions in stone, and on what I am told by Alice and others.There may be some George Washington’s hand ax element to this, since wood exposed to the weather doesn’t normally last for 400 years.  (Those who don’t know the George Washington story are encouraged to ask Rob Clarke).   But there is no doubt about the style of buildings, and that what is there is …