This video that Ai Weiwei uploaded of a street brawl (allegedly between Han Chinese and Tibetan street vendors) is unreal.  Every time I am in Beijing, a friend and I eat a spicy roast fish in a restaurant a few yards away from this scene. It is one of my favorite things to do in Beijing, because it means I get to eat a whole fish (which I love) and catch up quietly with someone dear to me (which I also love).  I have never seen anything like this there.  In fact, I have never seen a fight in China get so bad that people were running away from it rather than towards it.  Seriously, something so terrible must have happened.  

Or (and this is perhaps Ai Weiwei’s point) maybe it mustn’t have.  Maybe nothing happened and this is just decades of systemic and structural violence, finally taking form in the physical.  Which for all our high theories and philosophies is still its most terrible form.  Seriously, what is happening here?

A moment of doubt, fear.  A place I love, filled with people I feel I could know, suddenly changed.  This is a smaller, lesser outburst than the bombs that exploded in Boston on Marathon Monday, but it’s a testament to my limited, provincial, and selfish sense of belonging that I’m moved in the same way, can feel my whole stomach lurching and roiling.  Here it is again: matter, trembling and terribly out of place.  

The Global Times does it again!

I don’t ever like to say X is Y’s Z, but I really do believe that under slightly different (linguistic and social) circumstances this letter could have turned Amulet Mok into the Bund-at-2AM’s Susan Patton.  I mean, this is really generative stuff. Unfortunately.

In a welcome departure from what usually comes out of its Beijing Bureau, the NYTimes has delivered what's actually really bad news about China in a way that is neither hysterically paranoid nor needlessly absurdist

In fact, David E. Sanger has very skillfully devoted several grafs to pointing out how the U.S. is just as complicit in the very behaviors it accuses China of adopting!  Although the iconoclast in me is thrilled, the China Hand in me is not because this is definitely still bad news all around for everyone and bad behavior in general.  Think good thoughts about my visa application over the next few weeks, if that’s the sort of thing that you’re inclined to do!

Malcolm Moore once again finds and writes the best story in China

This time it’s that SWAT teams in Wuhan are being trained using a “haunted house.” Which, I guess, is almost as practical as anything else and surely more fantastic.

“Had I changed so much that I was my own ghost? Sometimes my entire life unfolded before my eyes like a voyage through foreign worlds. Tribes, cities, countries. Dearth, plenty, ignorance, knowledge, language, marriage. Bourgeoisie, peasants, downtrodden urban masses. And what of the different forms of thought and feeling, of doubts, and, first and foremost, of learned religion? It was such a fragile edifice: an identity constructed at great pains always fractured. One had to gather strength and initiative to grasp life as it flowed through one’s hands—grasp it first, and make something of it later.”
Abdellah Hammoudi, A Season in Mecca

Next week, the MoMA in NYC will start a month-long series of Chinese documentary Screenings

If you have a chance to go, you should—I know I’ll be at as many as I can. In related news, dGenerate Films will be posting about some of the featured documentaries in honor of the series, and today’s post is about Heshang, the documentary I wrote my undergraduate thesis on. The MoMA won’t be showing the 6 hour version (which I have watched 4 times!), but the 1 hour version they do have should be enough to give you a taste of what a strange and sudden work it must have been.  

Another major earthquake has hit China's Sichuan Province

Let’s hope it’s not nearly as bad as 2008.

“While determinism allowed for the planning of the future based on knowledge of the past, in an indeterministic world, such prediction is impossible. With the undermining of the assumption that the future will follow the past, and with the very notion of the future itself becoming increasingly tenuous as it collapses into an extended present, the basis for planning, expectation and the forward movement of the self becomes difficult to sustain.”
Gerda Reith: light reading on this afternoon when so many things seem so very difficult to sustain

The third person who died as a result of the Boston Marathon blasts was a Chinese citizen and a Boston University graduate student.

The Boston Globe, in an article I won’t link to, has already run two different anglicized versions of the person’s name despite the family’s request not to publicize it, which is too bad but certainly not worse than any of the rest of it. 

Chinese applicants to US graduate schools decreased by 5% this year