Wait – it’s the author of this article in the Global Times that draws the comparison of an outrageous show for kids at the Summer Palace with Quentin Tarantino’s film. And the analogy is spot-on. This is wild and crazy stuff.

The lotus flowers are in bloom at the Old Summer Palace, a magnificent royal compound destroyed twice by foreigners, in 1860 and 1900.

This catastrophic loss to the world’s cultural heritage occurred more than a century ago, but the ruins loom large as a central symbol of China’s humiliation at the hands of Westerners.

I saw first-hand an example of how this sense of indignity and outrage is kept alive during a stroll on a summer evening, when I stopped and watched the shadow puppet show The Legend of Yuanmingyuan.

….Watching the show, I was confused by what was happening before me. In battle after battle, Chinese soldiers and villagers used martial arts and tricks to defeat the buffoonish French and British invaders.

The foreigners got hatchets in the face, spears in the eye, and bayoneted repeatedly while lying helpless on the ground. Wily Chinese fighters jumped into the air, causing foreign troops to accidentally kill each other… I was wondering if I had stumbled upon China’s answer to Inglourious Basterds, the Quentin Tarantino revenge fantasy in which a group of Jews scalp dozens of Nazis and then kill Hitler.

The delightful show has an obvious intent: to generate in impressionable children as much rage against foreigners as possible.

In The Legend of Yuanmingyuan, the foreigners’ only motivation is greed and spite. When they first enter a Chinese village near the start of the show, a soldier says, “Let’s steal everything.” His commander replies, “Stop it. We shouldn’t act in haste because Chinese people are smart. You don’t know how smart they can be.”

To the laughter of the children and adults in the audience, the solders mispronounce the names of their own countries, for example, saying they are from the country of “Epilepsy” rather than the near-homonym Great Britain.

During one comical scene, soldiers fight over the loot from the Old Summer Palace, staggering like drunkards with their heavy load. The soldiers, played by real pint-sized actors on stage, are so venal that they reach off the stage into the crowd to find even more things to steal, grabbing at audience member’s mobile phones. One foolish soldier, intent on stealing everything that isn’t screwed down, burns his hands trying to steal one of the stage’s footlights….

One of the most disturbing things about watching this spectacle was seeing little people teaching little people how to hate. At the end of the show, the children in the audience were invited onstage to pose with the actors. To my surprise, it was announced that the performers were not children at all, but adults suffering from dwarfism, with an average age of 22 and an average height of 1.26 meters (4 feet). Their particular form of dwarfism makes them resemble children.

…[A spokesman] called the show “very good patriotic education,” and added, without a trace of irony, “It’s a pity that no one knows the history in detail.”

Kudos to the Global Times for running a piece that makes this look like the cheapest, most vulgar and nauseating propaganda. As the writer points out, the park’s Chinese and English web sites have very different copy. The hysteria and anti-foreign sentiments somehow got airburshed out of the English translation.

We really do have to give the writer credit:

Hatred, like forgiveness, can be taught, and hanging on to hurt and outrage is the central message of this show.

To be sure, a clear-eyed look at the history surrounding the Old Summer Palace and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty offers many lessons in arrogance, barbarism, and how regimes rise and fall from power. These lessons are valuable today.

But these lessons were far from the caricatures of history I witnessed in this show. Beyond the looting and destruction of the palace by foreigners amid war as the Qing emperor fled, there was little in the way of history. This puppet show, of course, is hardly unique, but instead a very normal example of the methods by which past hurts are nurtured for purposes that have nothing to do with understanding the past and everything to do with fueling nationalism.

The looting of the Summer Palace is one of those third-rail topics that I learned long ago to avoid at all costs. It’s one where I’m tempted to use the “b” word (it rhymes with “train quash”), and this show confirms it’s justified. The looting was a shameful thing. But to carry that much anger in their breasts nearly a century and a half after the fact is bizarre. But it’s not bizarre – it’s cultivated at a young age when kids are at their most impressionable, and it perpetuates the stereotype of victimhood and keeps it fresh and raw. A friend of mine once talked about it to me with tears in her eyes, as if it happened last week. I just listened, knowing there was nothing I could say except that I understand and sympathize.

One person’s aid is another’s oppression. Or so it always seems in Tibet, where the CCP is striving, as usual, to create harmony through relatively lavish investment.

They come by new high-altitude trains, four a day, cruising 1,200 miles past snow-capped mountains. And they come by military truck convoy, lumbering across the roof of the world.

Han Chinese workers, investors, merchants, teachers and soldiers are pouring into remote Tibet. After the violence that ravaged this region in 2008, China’s aim is to make Tibet wealthier — and more Chinese.

Chinese leaders see development, along with an enhanced security presence, as the key to pacifying the Buddhist region. The central government invested $3 billion in the Tibet Autonomous Region last year, a 31 percent increase over 2008. Tibet’s gross domestic product is growing at a 12 percent annual rate, faster than the robust Chinese national average.

The perennial problem, of course, is that a lot of Tibetans feel they get the short end of the stick, with job opportunities and favors going disproportionately to the Han Chinese. The more investment and “progress,” the more disenfranchised many Tibetans seem to feel.

Robert Barnett, a scholar of Tibet at Columbia University, said the goal of maintaining double-digit growth in the region had worsened ethnic tensions.

“Of course, they achieved that, but it was disastrous,” he said. “They had no priority on local human resources, so of course they relied on outside labor, and sucked in large migration into the towns.”

Now, a heavy security presence is needed to keep control of Lhasa. Around the Barkhor, the city’s central market, paramilitary officers in riot gear, all ethnic Han, march counterclockwise around the sacred Jokhang Temple, against the flow of Tibetan pilgrims. Armed men stand on rooftops near the temple.

It’s not quite Lost Horizon.

The article doesn’t overlook the fact that much of the aid and investment is appreciated by many Tibetans. But with the apartheid-like pattern of Han bosses and Tibetan laborers as well as simmering resentment over education (classes are conducted in Mandarin) and CCP indoctrination, not to mention armed Han guards patrolling outside their temples, it’s a safe bet ethnic strife won’t be going away any time soon.

Go right now and listen to this excellent podcast over at Popup Chinese. Excerpt from the blog post about this:

The China blog is officially dead, moribund, cadaverous, extinct, buried, bereft of life, defunct and totally-and-utterly-inert. It could even be said to be resting in peace, save for the fact that Will Moss drove a silver stake through its heart before recording this podcast. “We single-handedly made the China blog obsolete,” he joked in our studio after further sawing off its head. But he has a point. Because who reads blogs these days?

Does anyone even remember the China blogs of days past? Back then there were greats like Peking Duck, ImageThief, Sinosplice and Danwei, and you could even indulge in a little China-bashing at Talk Talk China. Then came Sinocism and EastSouthWestNorth, and then the mainstream media blogs from magazines like Time and journalists like Malcolm Moore, Peter Foster and Tom Lasseter. And then the explosion of blogs like the Shanghaiist, China Geeks, China Hearsay, ChinaSmack, ChinaHush and CNReviews, not to mention the more eclectic and academic writings of China Youren, Jottings from the Granite Studio, In the Footsteps of Joseph Rock and The China Beat?

Well… we’re sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but all of these blogs are dead. Or that’s the opinion of the curmugeons in our studio this week: Kaiser Kuo, Will Moss and Jeremy Goldkorn, veteran bloggers in China who’ve seen the ups and downs of social media and are prepared to tell it like it is. So join us this week on Sinica for a dissection of the Chinese blog scene. And then get the hell off our lawn. What is it with kids these days anyway?

Obviously this is something that’s been on my mind as I try to keep my own blog going. Twitter has obliterated what I used to use the blog for, namely sharing links and offering some commentary. And the China blogosphere is so fragmented it’s much harder to be heard above the din.The fact that I’m caught up in my own issues (I’m planning to launch my own small business soon; I’ll keep you posted) hasn’t helped make this blog more productive. But even if I were as productive as in 2003, the site would be in decline. China blogs are too many. and blogging in general is becoming increasingly antique.

I do miss the “golden age,” from 2003-2005, when I could open a thread before bedtime and wake up to 300 comments. But that required full-time posting and, at its peak, the help of three or four other bloggers all putting up copy throughout the day. At least I’m not alone. Danwei, Imagethief, Fool’s Mountain – nearly all the blogs have seen some decline, according to the podcast, even the journalists’ blogs.

This is a great podcast. Jeremy, Kaiser and Will talking about the rise and fall of the English-language China blogs – what more can you ask for? (Oh, and Jeremy was being very, very kind when he said, “The Peking Duck is still going strong.”)

A most interesting article that once again highlights China’s conservatism on the one hand and its tolerance on the other. While I can imagine this sort of thing being seen as cool among some segments of American society, it’s hard to picture weiniang (fake ladies) going mainstream anytime soon. (Then again, Liberace was popular all across America.)

The bottom line is that millions of Chinese youth are celebrating cross-dressing guys, at least some of whom seem to be true transgendereds. They are wildly popular. While there may be examples in the US of toleration for cross-dressers, we’ve never seen it go mainstream like this.

On a separate note, one quote from the article baffled me.

But noted sociologist Gu Xiaoming from Fudan University says weiniang shouldn’t be a cause for concern.

“It used to be a fad even in the Western countries,” Gu says. “In the movie ‘Titanic,’ Leonardo DiCaprio stunned many people with his feminine features.”

Were “many people” really “stunned” by DiCaprio’s “feminine features”? Did he seem at all transgendered or ladylike? I’m not convinced this was a widespread reaction.

Update: Then again, when it comes to other teen-oriented TV shows, the Chinese authorities can show a lots less tolerance.

Cross-dresser Xu Long, who insists he only dresses like a man. You decide.

It’s true, I almost never post about sports, and it’s safe to say I would never even dream of posting about the coma-inducing sport we Americans call soccer unless it had a strong angle related to my interests, like China. Which brings us to an interesting debate going on over at the NY Times blog as to why China doesn’t play in the World Cup.

I don’t know enough about the game itself or China’s Football Association to offer much wisdom here. But I do know that one of the arguments jumped out at me.

The Chinese men’s soccer team has not been able to improve its world standing in the past two decades for the same reason that its swimming and track and field have not improved….

The Chinese state-supported system works well for sports in which children begin highly specialized training at a very young age, and it produces success in women’s sports because it gives equal support to men and women while most other countries do not.

But that system loses its comparative advantage in men’s sports that have good financial backing in other countries, and it does not work well for sports in which stars emerge slowly from a wide participation base, where talent becomes apparent only as the athletes mature physically.

In January 2009, the revelation of rampant corruption in the professional soccer league partly answered the question of why the Chinese team performed so poorly in the 2008 Olympics. Commentators recognized that one reason for the corruption is that soccer is only partly subject to market forces.

The Chinese Football Association, an organ under the State General Administration for Sport, is responsible for its administration, and the Football Management Center — in theory a “public institution” — is responsible for managing corporate sponsorships and business affairs. But in fact this is a “one office, two signs” situation, which characterizes much of the economic and political system. The same person acts as director of both organs, and where power and money are concentrated in the hands of one person, the system is open to corruption.

Why is there no Chinese soccer team at the World Cup? To answer that question, one has to ask why China has this state-supported system narrowly focused on Olympic medals rather than grassroots sports. The answer is that the sports system –- and Chinese soccer in particular -– are microcosms of China’s current position halfway between a state-planned and market economy.

Interesting to see from this and other arguments that it’s not just the often-cited educational and anthropological factors (relatively little emphasis on problem solving/teamwork, lack of competitive spirit, which, we’re told, is why China sweeps diving and gymnastics but not team sports) but also sociopolitical and economic factors like corruption and an economy that’s still developing.

The comments are worth a glance, too, despite the irritating nationalists on the one hand and the equally irritating “the Chinese aren’t smart enough” jerks on the other. Your typical comment thread on China.

Funniest thing I’ve seen in weeks. I really needed that laugh. Go there.

A once militant Tibetan monk named Norgye stops worrying and learns to love the CCP.

Norgye demonstrated with other monks in 2008 shouting “Tibet is not free!” Now, after some struggle sessions, he admits he was wrong, and says he’s grateful to be taught about the law in China. Classwork completed, lessons learned. He insists he wasn’t tortured or beaten; he simply saw the light.

Norgye spoke of his successful re-education to a group of foreign journalists being led on a government tour of Tibet this week. Is this for real? You decide. (Genuine or not, many of his fellow monks seem less contrite and subdued.)

Then came the journalists’ tour, and the incendiary statements by 30 monks in the Jokhang [a Lhasa temple] who had suddenly burst in on the journalists: “The government is telling lies; it’s all lies,” and, “They killed many people,” the monks said, according to reporting by an Associated Press correspondent on the trip.

Patriotic re-education — hours of classes on the law and Communist thought — was ordered for many monks like Norgye following the March uprising. Monks were told to denounce the Dalai Lama. The authorities emptied rebellious monasteries, and some monks fled to India.

On Tuesday, asked by reporters whether Tibetans have religious freedom, Norgye said, “Yes,” with a quiet voice and bowed head.

The Chinese government forbids all worship of the Dalai Lama, who lives in India. Photos of the Dalai Lama are banned.

Norgye was asked whether there was freedom to worship the Dalai Lama. He replied, “It’s freedom for one person to believe or not to believe.”

Pity the CCP. They try so hard and spend so much money to portray a jolly, peaceful, contented Tibet, and then the serene picture gets smudged by those pesky Tibetan people, all of them no doubt in the service of the jackal and his clique, and probably even the CIA.

Maybe Norgye will be Tibet’s Lei Feng, someone all Tibetans can emulate and learn from as he tells them, head bowed low and his voice a whisper, that Tibet is free, the Chinese government its savior.

Update: Forgot my mandatory disclaimer: I am no Free Tibet bleeding heart and realize how complex the situation there is. I understand that Tibet is a part of China, and that a lot of the 2008 violence was generated by angry monks and other Tibetan demonstrators. I also well understand the West’s dreamy-eyed and utterly false perception of Tibet as a Shangri-La. I always try to see the situation in Tibet from both sides. The CCP has definitely done some wonderful things in Tibet, and nothing hurts it more than its ham-fisted attempts to completely control the perceptions of outsiders and to airbrush away any signs of discontent. They are SO their own worst enemies.

This is not a new topic. But it’s not one you normally see in your US newspaper, and I was surprised to see a syndicated article on it today in the front section of my local rag, the Arizona Republic. It was a topic I was all too familiar with.

They think that Yu Xiaofei, with her cropped black hair and dark-rimmed glasses, looks too much like a tomboy, and they think that Jiang Yifei’s distaste for children is suspicious.

So what are these young Chinese women to do? They’re 24, out of college, employed, living at home – and they’re in love with each other and desperate to find a way to stay together.

“The most important thing is that we cannot hurt our parents,” Yu said. “They put a lot on us.”

That means finding two men in a similar predicament. Their plan is simple. Yu and Jiang will find a gay male couple, arrange a living situation and lay down some ground rules. Then, they’ll pair off with the men and get married, just as their parents expect them to do.

They still have time, and they’re using it to take in every last kiss and touch before these gestures become even more complicated than they already are. Still, their proposed arrangement is no grand tragedy for the pair – it’s practical.

Beneath it all are the Confucian family values that still underpin Chinese society: As a son or daughter, it’s your duty to maintain and carry on the family line by having children.

“We have to – that’s tradition,” said Jiang, who sports long caramel-colored hair and clinking bangle bracelets. “That’s what (our parents) think we should do.”

The story does not have a comforting ending. Yes, in Shanghai and maybe some other big cities it’s possible to live a relatively open life. But for those without the means to get there and live there, there are few good options. China is more liberal and open now than ever before, but social stigma remains a powerful force.

Few topics about China have disturbed and fascinated me as much as the tragic situation most gay Chinese face due to family pressure to marry. I actually debated writing an extended article or even a book about it during my last few months in China but gave up the idea for the simple reason that there wasn’t enough to write about – nearly everyone I interviewed about it had the same story and the same point of view: We have to get married. We cannot disappoint our parents. The few that decided never to marry were aware they were putting their family to shame. They felt bad about it but decided they couldn’t lead a double life, one that would inevitably cause terrible suffering to the woman they married. I respected them for this. But this forced them to be totally dishonest with their parents. To keep up the act, they developed a script to dodge the questions about when they were getting married. It, too, was an act of deception. To the day their parents passed away, they would have to lie to them.

Before this blog had any readers, I wrote a post back in 2002, when life for gays in China was much, much different. I described their lives as a plight. The social safety net then was less wide than it is today, and things have improved a thousandfold. But still, there is an element of plight to the lives of most gays in China. The pressure to marry makes it virtually inevitable.

One of the most common and, to the Western mindset, most bizarre arguments I heard from gay friends I knew in China was that this was a temporary situation, as if they were “going through a phase”: When it is time for me to marry I will. I will love my wife and I will have children and I will never be gay again. I didn’t argue back, or say I thought this was impossible. I tried to ask questions, like, “Do you really think you can simply change your sexuality the way you would a light bulb? Do you think this would be fair to your wife, to hide from her such a key a part of yourself?” The response was usually the same. I will become straight.

Again, if you are in Beijing or Shanghai it’s easy to get a very skewed perspective of this situation. I remember talking on the phone to a friend in Hefei who was sobbing hysterically; he had nothing in his life but loneliness. “Why did I have to be born in Hefei? Why couldn’t I have been born in Beijing?” I cannot put into words the misery of this conversation. It was nothing less than seeing one’s life as a death sentence, as torture, as a life without a future.

I gave up the idea of writing at length about this for two reasons: experts like Li Yinhe were much more qualified to do this sort of thing than I, with my intermediate-level Chinese, and because of the uniformity of the responses I heard – too similar to sustain a lengthy analysis. Not all were hysterical or hopeless, like my friend in Hefei. But nearly all the responses boiled down to this: we have no choice but to marry, to do something we know is wrong, that goes against who we are, and that sentences us to a life of duplicity, desperation and unfulfilled dreams. And yes, it’s better than it used to be and it’s better in the big cities. But for the vast majority of gay men and women in China, life promises to be a well of loneliness.

By nature, anyone who is gay needs to come to terms with shame. The shame of bullying, of knowing they are different, of having to create a double life, of knowing they are disappointing their parents. Despite the idiotic arguments of Focus on the Family and moralists on the far right, no one ever chooses to be gay. No one chooses bullying, deception, stigmatization and pain. So being gay is hard enough as it is, no matter how liberal your society. But to be gay in China is a unique tragedy, especially for those who can’t afford to live and study overseas or to live in a city like Shanghai.

As the article says, maybe there will be some years of freedom, a short time in the life of gays in China when they can be themselves, before the time arrives when they need to marry.

Yu Jing said that despite the hardships she’s suffered with her parents – watching her father cry, her mother screaming at her – it’s these youthful days without weighty expectations that she’ll recall throughout her life.

“I think it’s worth (dating girls),” she said. “Maybe five years later I’ll be a very normal person in this society, but I can still remember my past.”

How terrible, to have only a memory of a brief, happy time when you were free to be yourself – until the day comes when night falls like a hammer, and for the rest of your life you are sentenced to live a lie.

There is so much I love about Chinese culture. The fixed notion of family and face before all else is not one of those things.

Update: If this topic interests you, you absolutely must read this piece from several weeks ago by my friend Zhang Yajun

This is an interesting post in response to recent attacks on ethnic Chinese in Paris. A sample:

If French discrimination against Africans and Arabs comes from their sense of superiority as former colonizer, then their feelings towards China are much more complex. 20 years ago, Chinese were considered poor refugees coming from a third world country and treated with generosity tinged with pity. However, as China has developed and prospered, French people’s attitudes towards Chinese have changed. During my two years in France, a number of people reacted to the discovery that I was Chinese by asking whether China would overtake the US and become the world’s strongest country in twenty years. Once, my French professor singled me out in front of the entire class, telling me “you Chinese took away all of the jobs from France.” As the Chinese residents of Paris can attest, the combination of fear and resentment towards China is growing in French society.

Will antagonism toward ethnic Chinese everywhere intensify as/if China continues to grow, or is this something uniquely “French”? Here in the US I’ve heard a lot of anger directed at China for “stealing jobs,” but not at the Chinese living here. That would be hopelessly declasse.

I think it’s safe to say that with it’s huge leaps and bounds China is always at some sort of crossroads, whether it’s dealing with organized labor, promising national health insurance, launching a soft power campaign or what have you. One of the smartest China hands, David Wolf, has an excellent piece in Ad Age China on perhaps the most important crossroads of all, the economic one, and on what it means for foreign companies doing business there.

Suddenly, just as people in China were starting to wonder if they still needed foreign capital and know-how, we went and proved to the Chinese that we were greedy, dumb, and actually needed China’s help to pull us out of our own mess…

Not only did that that gave the government the opportunity to put an end to policies that favored foreign companies in China, it was also a signal to the Chinese people that they could no longer take for granted that foreign brands were better than their local counterparts. Maybe they were just overpriced.

China, in other words, is starting to say “no” to our employers and our clients, and the above trends suggests that this is likely to get worse. Smart Chinese competitors are figuring out that they have an opportunity to take back some of their home turf, and they are refocusing their efforts on domestic operations.

This doesn’t mean, however, that China has all the answers, and is gliding through the crisis. Wolf spells out why China isn’t out of the woods, and why the current economic crossroads is so critical, and tenuous.

The global financial crisis has revealed the fundamental weakness of the nation’s export-driven economy: even in a healthy financial environment, the world cannot buy all of the goods China needs to sell to sustain 8-10% growth indefinitely. With no social safety net, Chinese consumers are focused on saving, and industrial productivity is so embarrassingly bad that nobody even talks about it.

Political stability in China is built on an unspoken social contract: the government delivers constant improvements in opportunities and lifestyle, and the people accept single-party rule, warts and all. Delivering on that promise is getting harder as China’s export engine sputters, as inflation grows, and may become impossible if the stock-market and real estate bubbles burst and the middle class demands that the government cover personal losses.

A thought of my own that popped up while I was reading it: The “Chinese financial crisis” is a phrase we don’t hear much anymore. I think we’ve been almost hypnotized into believing there is no economic crisis in China, that it was all about the US, and then Europe, with Asia remaining largely invulnerable. Indeed, a powerful meme took hold among financial writers over the past year, portraying China’s authoritarian system as superior in many ways to democracy because the party can make things happen fast without getting tied up in lawsuits and hearings and protests (usually). And this one-party system protected China from the crisis, allowing the government to launch a massive government spending program that kept the country afloat and free of the misery faced by weak democracies.

Wolf reminds, however, that the Chinese economy right now is quite tenuous, and that the shock absorbers that have seen it through so far – namely, government spending – may not be enough to hold everything together when the economy sours (and all economies sour).

“Read the whole thing.”