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If you wish to join this blog so as to be able to comment, please first go ahead and follow instructions in blog itself, beginning at "register" in the left hand column menu...but as a safety measure please email me a message at barlowj@pacificu.edu with subject header "join blog please"

In the body of your message just give me one or two sentences explaining why you want to be able to post... and I will then take care of your request as soon as I can. I hate to be so mechanical about security on this blog, but as an academic site we are constantly bombarded with very sophisticated attempts by spammers to register on our various sites and one mistake can be very embarrassing for us.

Jeffrey

Intro of October 2008

This year as I am on sabbatical I have the opportunity to go out to China a bit earlier than usual. I also have a wider variety of reasons for going than my usual simple one of teaching and research.

This year my daughter, Clare, is a student in the Master's Program in International Development at Tsinghua University in Beijing. If you are in the Humanities in China, you would probably think of Beida, (Beijing University) as the best Chinese University. For about everything else, including most especially Computer Sciences and Political Science, you would think Tsinghua. Many of Clare's professors are advisors to the Central Committee in China, and she is getting a wonderful bird's eye view of current Chinese policy studies.

I also have a conference in Beijing, the CAMOT (China Association for Management of Technology) see web pages and conference schedule at: http://www.camot.org/2008conference/2008.htm This will be a wonderful opportunity to meet and discuss current issues with a very large group of scholars and business people from all over the world.

I am also working with the ongoing translation of a very large work I have written on the history and culture of the Zhuang minority people of south China,with friends and colleagues from the Minorities' University in Nanning, Guangxi A.R., in south China on the Vietnamese border. See it on the WWW at: http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/resources/zhuang/index.html

In addition, I have my usual teaching stint at Wenzhou Medical College.

I anticipate learning a great deal this year, particularly since there are so many critical issues unfolding at present, from the American election, to the hopefully temporary unraveling of the world economy.

I look forward to sharing my opinions with you....


Jeffrey

Video Piracy

I have seen and been a part of the growth of the internet since the late 80's. I believe that video piracy is the death of the video market as we know it.

I prefer to download a new release instead of spending $10 for a movie ticket. I prefer to watch my download without being bothered by a plethora of movie goers in a crowded theater where a cup of coke cost you nearly $7.

I believe Movie Studios are going to be force to change their business model because piracy is not going away.

Right again, U.S. discovers China factor....

In today's NYT, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/world/asia/26addiction.html?hp there is a story which makes an argument similar to my own of last Oct-Nov, written from Wenzhou. The argument is wrong in several particulars, notably giving Bernake the credit when rightfully it should go to the sources which I cited earlier, but, of course, we always need confidence in our leadership. This is particularly true in such arcane areas as fiscal policy. And in an economy where it is believed that "confidence" is the key factor, not underlying fundamentals such as productivity, savings, etc., perhaps we need such icons to follow...

I also think on a quick reading of the NYT piece that there is a tendency here to try to move as much of the responsibility for the problem as possible onto Chinese shoulders, rather than recognizing our own contributions. This is too bad, because while we cannot do much about the Chinese policies, we could certainly change our own if we could begin by "owning" them....

But please read the NYT article and my earlier postings and judge for yourself....see also my editorial essays in Interface. see especially http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2008/07/article.php?id=16

After dinner with jazz musicians

As is so often the case while travelling in China, I experienced a very strange sort of in-and-out-of-body experience last night.

Today is Clare's birthday and i wanted to do something she would remember for a while, last night, the previous evening. I had read a story weeks ago in the China Daily in Wenzhou about a couple of touring American jazz musicians Keith Williams and Phil Morrison playing at the Beijing Hilton (See their myspace at: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=215619822 and hear their music too) , and that they sometimes did a sort of fusion of jazz with Chinese traditional sounds. As this sort of East-meets-West collision is a particular interest of mine, I resolved to try to hear them with Clare.

Blogs seem somehow to be an appropriate medium in which to mix the personal and the political for me, so here goes again----as a kid, the absolute travel treat for the family was to go to St. Louis (a staggering one hundred miles away from home...the first time I rode my bike that distance later I was aware that times had seriously changed!) and stay in the Hilton.

There was always a basket of fruit waiting for us in our room, and my brother and I would stand by the window for hours watching police car lights flashing down below and hearing the very alien urban uproar rise up to us. The hotel seemed the epitome of luxury living, and something we could not really afford. As much as we all all enjoyed it, the deep-seated fear of economic depression that had seared mom as a young woman when her family had gone all but bankrupt and had to sell off the "farms" invariably kicked in to somewhat alloy our experience.

And then, later, of course, along came Paris. Paris Hilton that is, and the fruit basket took on a whole new meaning to me.

So I had my China Daily article and a sort of passing acquaintance with the Wang Fu Jing areas of Beijing, essentially the Western hotel and shopping area of old Beijing with a tea shop we frequent which opened its doors in the late 19th century, and a hat shop which I think was opened by Russian Jewish immigrants after the Bolshevik revolution, then became the place for Chinese leaders to kite themselves out for international travel---I usually buy what I think of as the "Chou En-lai model" a spiffy black number, sort of a modified Borsalino, this time in bunny felt. And full of tea and topped with a new hat, Clare and I went in search of the Hilton.

Talk about tough...everybody agreed it was right around the next corner, or perhaps one street over, but Beijinger after Beijinger failed to direct us. We saw a bevy of hotels, some so baroquely gilded as to suggest a Hong Kong triad gangster's idea of heaven, but no Hilton. Finally a kindly concierge in a really nice Chinese hotel got on the web for us, drew a map, and after another mile or so of convoluted wandering there we were.

I suppose originally the entrance was placed in back so as to permit cars to drive discreetly up, but meanwhile the neighborhood had gone into that peculiar Chinese collapse where local shops in a hutong alley abut spectacular modern buildings. The result was a building that reeked of out-of-it. It was really easy to imagine Paris jumping out of the alley and flashing her well-travelled publics at us as we worked our way to the door through construction rubble from the adjoining lot.

The staff was unfailingly polite, told us where and when the jazz musicians would be playing and Clare and I went back to rest up a bit for our banking dinner discussed above.

After dinner we took a cab, and, armed with a card from the hotel visit earlier, assumed we would be whisked up to the door; Wrong, we had done better on foot finding the Hilton than the cabbie could do with the exact address. He stopped at three different Western hotels, none of the staff of which could help us at all. Finally somebody clued us in and we got there...the cabbie, generous soul, had turned his meter off when he couldn't drive right straight to it, and with reluctance accepted a paltry tip intended to compensate him for the wanderings. This is not the space in which to riff on Wenzhou cabbies vs. Beijing cabbies; let's just say they are very different.

I had, along with my other fantasies, envisioned joining a well-coifed ex-pat crowd eager to hear jazz again. Wrong. But the evening was great, precisely because we were wrong. The two of us were pretty much the entire audience for the first hour...Phil and Keith were wonderful, and accompanied by Viva, a jazz singer who was really nice to us, but every time she came up to talk her black lounge dress quite blanked out my mind and I could not get her last name clear. But anyway, the lady sings, big time.

In the audience were some of her friends, one of whom was also a a birthday girl like Clare, at least in an impending way, her true birthday being this morning, the morning after in every familiar sense...Guiness is as good and powerful in Beijing as everywhere else, I have proven once again.

Also in the audience was a Chinese female singer from Hong Kong who took the stage for a bit. It was odd to hear perfectly phrased English language jazz and scat coming out of that equally perfect Hong Kong Chinese face.

As Clare and I were the audience, we rose to the occasion, clapping discretely and everything. We got to talk with all the singers and musicians, an experience with which I was somewhat familiar from my days leading tourists on a cruise ship when Christine and I were basically categorized as "talent" along with the stage acts, which was a lot of fun. So I had some idea what the itinerant life of "talent" is like on the lounge and cruise-ship trail. Phil and Keith have made not only a life out of it, but also a calling...they see themselves---and are---cultural ambassadors abroad.

Now the politics, though such a mix of ethnicities brought together by American jazz is probably comment enough in that regard...Clare and I were usually the only white faces in the crowd, though others came and went, less transfixed than we were. At one point Viva talked with us about her own emergency plan to emigrate if Palin had won. She had selected Thailand as I recall, our family had committed to China, though like her, we were worried about air quality.

One of the things that Americans often miss while travelling are those things that remind you that you really, really. are American; for me it is our diversity, and particularly Black culture...thanks all, for the unique evening...

Beijing