Guanxi Master

Past and Present Hollywood Stereotypes and Archetypes of China

One of the great movies of the 50’s is the legendary Around the World in Eighty Days, and part of the charm of the 1956 movie adaptation of Jules Verne’s classic novel is in its exaggerated stereotyping of the characters. It’s a surprise feast for the eye and delightfully flooded with incidental cameo appearances of almost fifty celebrities alive at the time. Directed by Michael Anderson and produced by Michael Todd, the film starred the stately Larry Niven as Phileas Fogg. Nominated for eight Oscars and winning five, it was a late part of that era in which Hollywood “took itself seriously.” Todd’s movie is an affectionately tongue-in-cheek “seriously epic” send up of 1930’s -1950’s Hollywood. Read the rest of this entry »

A Goddess of Mercy becomes a Goddess of Fortune

Last week, I wandered into the Buddhist temple at the famous Shanghai water town of Zhujiajiao. People were charged a 10 yuan admission to enter the main temple grounds, but in the annex, worshippers got a freebie. Before paying the fee, one could kneel on a padded bench before a glass-encased Laughing Buddha (Maitreya Buddha) covered in gold paint, with a mischievous-looking Haibao peeking around the corner of the case. The little blue mascot for the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and the golden Buddha are emblems of the same aspiration among the Chinese: conspicuous wealth and a global showcase of modernization. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern Chinese art and the agony of global urbanization

“The new comradeship will be a comradeship in the task of preserving being itself, a comradeship in the work of facing future danger and menace…Without those values another and terrible possibility could emerge; man might succumb to the power of the anonymous” (Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World).

To understand China today, one sometimes has to take a painful look at what the Chinese are losing while they rise as the next economic force of this century.

In the Spring Showcase of Chinese modern art at the Galerie du Monde of Hong Kong, three famously striking and controversial images by artist Liu Bolin (劉勃麟) show a remarkable state of consciousness among the Chinese today. Read the rest of this entry »

How the West overlooks the positive requirements for constructive critique

In a recent blog at The China Beat, the Association of Asian Studies’ annual conference in Philadelphia expressed dismay that Beijing had prevented its Chinese featured speaker Cui Weiping (崔卫平) from attending. Ms. Cui had been scheduled to participate in the conference’s round table discussion “Against Amnesia: History, Memory, and the Role of Public Intellectuals in 21st Century China,” and while her work commitments were cited as the reason for refusing her exit from China, the title of the session itself may have been enough to raise concerns in Beijing. Control of an intellectual who may potentially be critical of China has a long historical precedent.

In China, artists and intellectuals have been fostered in an atmosphere of an almost religious awe for authority that must be scrupulously maintained in order to keep harmony and prevent dissent from breaking out into social unrest and chaos. When it comes to pointing out flaws in the ruling system, class, or person, the Chinese have a saying: Read the rest of this entry »

As I sat backstage discussing tea with two Chinese opera singers at the television studio yesterday, I thought about tea and its unique impact on Chinese culture and guanxi…

This is the season that all Chinese anticipate with rapture. The year’s best tea, in its “new” and “white” varieties, is coming out in the next few weeks, and the expectation has been a nagging thought in the minds of tea fanatics all over China. We have been looking forward to this moment since last year’s crop ran out in October, and cannot wait for the arrival of a new harvest of China’s finest beverage.

The reason for the excitement is because the best tea leaves are those harvested from the earliest spring growth. They must be picked by hand when only a day old, and then processed immediately the same day. Each tea plant will only give about five pickings of these delicate leaves, yet they yield the freshest and most fragrant tea known to man. Read the rest of this entry »