Here’s your chance to tell him.

I arrived in one piece. Was hoping maybe winter would be late this year. But no. It’s brutal out there.

I’ll be boarding my flight to Beijing in just a few hours. The trip will be part business, part meeting old friends and going back to the places I love the most.

Apologies in advance if comments are held for moderation, especially first-time commenters. Please be patient, they’ll appear eventually. If any of you in Beijing, Shanghai or Hangzhou want to get together please let me know. I’ll probably get to Yunnan, too, especially if Beijing is really as cold as I hear. I can’t wait to arrive. But then, I never really left.

My recent interview, over here.

I’ll be traveling to LA for a few days and won’t be on line much. You can use this as an open thread.

Get a load of this. Awesome. (It says October 4 but I didn’t see it until today.)

Via this article.

The Tianjin Steel Plant in Hebei province.

Indescribably beautiful (if that’s the right word) photos by Lu Guang of the underbelly of China’s economic miracle, the part we all want to forget. Simply breathtaking in their eerie, terrible beauty.

If anything is to keep China from from becoming a true superpower, the smart money is on pollution.

Via Danwei.

No one told me about the Kingdom of Dwarves theme park when I was in Yunnan (and don’t miss that slideshow!). It’s on my list for the next trip. And for those looking for work, they’re recruiting – as long as you’re under 4’3″ tall.

Is there something wrong with exploiting people’s physical abnormalities (for want of a better word) to lure in the curious, similar to what a freak show does? These people don’t think so, and in fact seem quite delighted with their work.

To many around the world, the very idea of putting people on stage to perform simply because they don’t look like everyone else is cringe-inducing. But even though they must dress up in frilly princess and caped warrior costumes befitting small children and dance for tourists, performers at the bizarre theme park see this place as a haven from the overwhelming discrimination they face in China at large.

“Back home, strangers will stare at and they look down on us,” said Yang Lichun of Beijing, who moved across the country to work at the park this summer with her fiance. “If we can even find jobs at home, we have to work harder than everyone else to prove ourselves.”

….The workers simply see this as dagong — the modern Chinese notion of migrant work, leaving your hometown for a job elsewhere. Tens of millions do it for factory and construction work; these workers came here to put on a show for tourists who want to see little people.

Considering that all parties – the dwarf performers and the visitors who flock to see them – seem happy with the arrangement, I can’t see any reason to be critical. It’s not like we haven’t done anything similar.

Please, go read these two posts by one of my very favorite writers right now. She knows whereof she speaks.

I remember reading how the Georgian peasants were convinced Stalin was unaware of their plight as they starved to death in the 1930s, and if there was only some way they could alert him…. But alas, millions and millions died. And Mao knew, and Stalin knew. No, I don’t believe Mao wanted the peasants to die and there’s evidence he was horrified when he learned what the peasants were eating to survive. (Stalin, on the other hand, ever the “man of steel,” showed no such concerns.) But Mao was too wrapped up in his own ideology to admit his Great Leap Forward was anything but. And the result is one of the tragedies so immense, so incomprehensible, like the Holocaust, that the more we read about it the less we can comprehend it. Xujin’s wonderful posts help us comprehend it, but they don’t make it any less of a crime against humanity.

Thirty percent bad – Deng was awfully kind.

Only, not quite.

Of course, if you were listening to Fox News and the assorted voices of Greater Wingnuttopia today, you’d think Obama had just handed Czechoslovakia over to Hitler.

Superb article that I can certainly relate to. Closing lines:

Last week Beijing saw a display of military and economic might that the Chinese government and a huge number of its people are rightly proud of. But China wants more for itself. The government is constantly calling for home-grown innovation in science, technology and culture, and for China to wield more “soft power” and have a greater cultural influence on the rest of the world. These aims will be difficult, perhaps impossible, to achieve as long as China’s bureaucrats retain their iron grip on culture and information.

Think about that. China is reaching for the stars, its ambitions are boundless and it’s gone so far. But by censoring, by jamming its airwaves, by trying to control its people’s brain-waves, China chokes its own creativity and imposes limits on itself. And of course, it’s just plain irrational. I can at least understand the logic behind banning Epoch Times and Taipei Times. But Danwei?? (Not to mention The Peking Duck.) Dumb, counter-productive and an indication of an infantile insecurity and raging inferiority complex. Try to imagine a China that was confident enough in its own achievements, its own greatness that it wouldn’t have to always be in reactive mode, cowering even in the face of the most questionable threats. Imagine how much greater China would be then. Imagine how much more respect it would command, instead of being snickered at for being so obviously terrified, a cowering child.