Neighbors

China has a lot of neighbors.  Fourteen countries border it, and across the water a ways there are the Philippines, Japan, and Taiwan.  You also have Hong Kong and Macao, which are special "Administrative Regions" of China.  If you are Chinese, you need a passport and visa to go those two places, and, well... it's complicated.  In fact, having this many neighbors is very complicated.  Some of these neighbors, you would not want living next door, in fact most of them you would rate as undesirable, and the Homeowner's Association would never have even allowed them to come to the open house, let alone buy a place.
Four of their neighbors have nukes: India, Russia, Pakistan and North Korea.  
Pakistan recently made the news when a pregnant woman was beaten to death with bricks outside of the courthouse of its second largest city, Lahore.  By her family.  For marrying a different guy than the one they wanted her to.  This kind of thing happens a lot.
It also turns out that the husband had murdered his first wife, but that it was OK since his son legally pardoned him, which makes it alright in Pakistan!  You can't make this stuff up.  Stephen King would have considered this one of his finest story ideas and maybe have retired, knowing he had reached the ultimate pinnacle of horror twists.
They also have crazy Muslims that blow themselves up in crowded public places and kill and terrorize women who want to go to school.  And they have nukes.  Howdy, neighbor!
Afghanistan also shares a border with China.  It's a kind of stone age Pakistan, more savage, and without nukes, but which has the distinction of being the graveyard and black hole of empires.  There are several more "Stans", backward places all.
Drugs and firearms come in from Myanmar, Laos and the Stans. Crazy Islam filters in.  Human trafficking.  Cheap porn!  This neighborhood kind of sucks.
You might think that China would want to try to create some stability here.  They kind of do, sometimes.  They haven't had a border conflict with India in a while, and... Um..... Let me think....Oh, yeah!   Russia is mostly a good neighbor, having just closed a big gas deal with China! They have a long, Commie relationship.  Stalin and Mao had a complex loathe/hate affair, each trying to outdo the other as to who could be the biggest rat bastard of the 20th century along with Hitler and Tojo.  Today Russia provides China with a lot natural resources, and China provides a place for Russians to work, along with an unlimited source of bootleg electronics and luxury items.  And the governments never say a bad word about the other.
Another of China's neighbors is North Korea, without a doubt the shittiest place in Asia to live.  This is the result of 3 generations of draconian rule by the Kim family.  Baby Kim, the present ruler closely resembles an evil villain from a 1960's James Bond movie. He takes great delight in eliminating his enemies in ways so deviously creative, that schlock Hollywood writers have bookmarked "North Korea Executions" on their Google news pages in order to get ideas for their next Vin Diesel script.
This chubby, cherubic faced twenty something has all the charm and predictability of a rabid, meth crazed badger.  Oh, and he has nukes.  Fortunately, his delivery system consists of rockets cobbled together from whatever parts are available on the black market and designed by ill educated, stressed out engineers, whose families are being held hostage by the sadistic minions of Baby Kim.  Nobody works well under the kind of stress caused by the knowledge that errors may result in Medieval family planning practices.  The rockets have had success in leaving the North Korean borders and landing in the ocean, much to everyone's relief.
The hapless citizens of this hellhole regularly starve, are imprisoned, disappear, and suffer a daily existence completely devoid of joy.  The lucky ones die at birth.  This Communist experiment in human misery could not exist without the support of China, which feels the need to keep a buffer zone between itself and the US military which keeps a substantial force along the border between North and South Korea.  The US, in turn can make a valid case for these troops being necessary to keep Baby Kim from sending his million brainwashed soldiers over the border in order to impose his version of Workers' Paradise on the entire Korean peninsula.
China really would not like this, since it does billions of dollars in business with South Korea, and the Chinese looooove Korean soap operas.  By the way, watching South Korean soap operas in the North will get you executed or worse!  Just goes to show how far China has progressed.  
It's a sorry state of affairs, and even though Beijing would prefer that the Kim family had produced a less odious offspring, they still seem OK with this arrangement.
One would think that having most of your borders adjacent to backward bastions of savagery would be cause for unease, but China seems mostly unfazed.  Instead, China has been enjoying some neighborly squabbles in the South China Sea with the Philippines and Viet Nam, claiming islands and territory for itself in spite of lack of proximity to China's shores.  Throw in their more legitimate claims to some rock piles that Japan says are theirs, and you have some potentially very troubled waters.
This neighborhood that China occupies is a lot more interesting than that of the United States.  The US borders two countries that it mostly gets along fine with, and apparently longs to be in a more interesting place, so it is Pivoting to Asia.  At least the part of Asia that is not Afghanistan.  Pivoting out of there.  Of course, to keep things interesting, they would pivot to support the Japanese in their shaky claim to those uninhabited rocks.  We have a treaty with Japan!  It seemed like a good idea at the time, since we had completely defeated them in WWII and they had a constitution that prohibits them from going to war, but they have right wing nationalist prime minister who seems to wax nostalgic for the good old days of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.
Japan still enjoys near universal loathing among East Asian countries due to the fact that they conquered most of them, ruled with unrivaled cruelty, practiced savage mass murder and slavery, and the government has never publicly apologized for these acts. 
Fortunately, the only nukes Japan has are in the crappy power plants that dot this earthquake and tsunami prone country.
Rather than pivot toward Asia, the US might be better served by pivoting on home, and leaving this place to be messed up by its own people.  Bring the jobs back home and build a big wall along the West Coast.
This neighborhood that China occupies is dangerous and edgy.  Not many of the neighbors are the type you would invite over to barbecue or would feel comfortable loaning your lawn mower to.
Your back yard fence might include razor wire, guard towers, mine fields and a clear field of fire.
Won't you be my neighbor?

The Dog Breath Days of Summer

I had a wonderful dog, a Black Lab.  She was and exuberant bundle of joy, a perpetual motion machine.  Even on the hottest days of the summer, she would fetch, play, and go, and occasionally come to me for some affection.  The pit stops of affection included her panting rapidly, hot steamy breath blasting in my face.  Canine love.
Here in the subtropics, at end of May, the "sub" can be dropped.  It is hot and humid.  At night, you feel it most.  It doesn't get cool, it just gets dark.
When you walk from an air conditioned place into the world, it's as though you have stepped into an atmosphere of dog's breath.  Only you can't dodge it, or throw a stick to make it go away.  It's there huffing on you, and it will be there until October inserts the "sub" back into sub tropical.  The dog breath days of summer.

Eating Dog Meat is a Savage Practice

11 jailed for selling toxic dog meat in Central China

This headline is from today's China Daily with a story of seven people who were sentenced for selling poisoned dog meat.  It's barbaric and awful.  I'm glad they went to prison.  I sort of don't feel bad for people who ate the tainted canine.  

The excuse I hear for the barbaric practice of dining on dog is especially popular in the winter.  People claim that it helps keep you warm.  Bullshit.  So does a dog on your lap.

Civic Self Improvement

Our city is trying to improve itself.  This is an effort to attain official recognition as something other than a massive village populated by uncultured peasants.  From time to time, high level officials from the Guangdong government make an inspection of the city.  Their reports determine whether or not Zhanjiang can be classified as a green city, or a tourist city.  It managed to get green city classification recently, but the tourist city status keeps eluding it. That bar is apparently set higher.

Recently there was another official inspection.  Cops were out in force.  Water trucks were constantly spraying the streets.  Street cleaners were working overtime, and there wasn't an illegal sidewalk vendor to be found anywhere.

There are many tactics used in the grand strategy for self improvement.  On the back wall of the nearby middle school these posters appeared.  They are part of the Anti Douche Campaign, a bold effort to get people to behave better.  I could have made an effort to have these translated, but I think for the most part they are self explanatory.  Even illiterate and foreign douches should get it.

Click the image for larger view.

 Don't paint graffiti on the Police. 

 Don't park like an asshole.

 Don't drive like a Chinese person.

 Get out of the street, those are Chinese drivers!

Do not disturb the spirits of your ancestors.

Holiday Loan

May 1 is International Labor Day, and an Official Government Holiday here.  It landed on a Thursday this year and the government declared it to be a three day holiday.  Oh, boy!  Three days off!  Sort of.  Everyone gets May 1 off, or at least students, government workers, and anyone else with a holiday minded boss. They didn't have to work Friday or Saturday either.  However, everyone had to work Sunday to make up for the day off Friday. And they already had Saturday off, so actually they only got one day off.  Friday was just loaned to them.
This is just a con.  A shell game.  Three days off in a row, then six days in a row working passes for a holiday in China.  Party like it's 1959!!

Pivoting Tourists

When I first moved to our current home, I went to transfer my internet to the new place.  I was informed that since it was part of the University, that I could only get the University internet.  It was cheap!  And shitty!  Because why would an institution that fosters knowledge and learning want to have internet that allows someone to quickly access information?  It also blocks the ability to have wifi because..... I have no idea!  I was able to find a student who with his tech savvy colleagues has developed a clever hack that can provide you with wifi.  Except that it keeps failing, so they come back and do some voodoo and it works again, but slowly since it's connected to the crap system from this institute of higher learning.

For a while, the internet was tolerably OK, but lately it's been doing a Chinese imitation of 90's dial up, thus my frustration.

I do have a dongle, which connects me via a cell carrier.  It's faster, and expensive.  I'm using it now so that my head does not explode.

*****

I just finished reading "Mao the Unknown Story", which took about a year because it is both long and depressing.  I had to put it down for long periods in order to allow myself time for my spirit to heal.  Near the end of the book I learned that Mao had coined the term "Third World".  He said that the Capitalist western countries, the ones with all the goodies, were the First World, the Soviet Union was the Second World and China was the Third World.  The term has since evolved to mean that underdeveloped countries were the Third World.  China has lots of goodies now, but they are not available yet for all the people.  Large swaths of the country are definitely Third World by today's definition.  The steam driven antiquity that is my internet falls into this category.

*****

President Obama just made a visit to parts of Asia.  It's all part of the "Pivot to Asia" strategy.  This strategy means that America is going to use its idiot politicians to wreak the kind of havoc they have provided to places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.  Obama got off to a good start in this quest for mayhem by telling Japan that the US would back them in their dispute with China over the Diayou/Sekaku Islands.  Someone should tell him that when you have a strategy that has you pivoting somewhere it might be a good idea to do some research about the place you are pivoting to, and that your research should come from a source other than CNN.  A more thorough research on this dispute can be found here.  Japan's claims are certainly questionable enough that telling Japan's right wing nationalist douche of a prime minister that you would support Japan in this situation exhibits a lack of deep thinking.  Perhaps offering to mediate this situation or encouraging the two sides to seek redress in the international courts might be a more prudent path.
Of course China is being a very bad neighbor to the Philippines and Vietnam making aggressive moves on maritime territory that has everyone pissed off and very worried.  The Philippines is liking the idea of a stronger American military presence there.  
Anyway, the President pivoted around, and hopefully didn't cause too much diplomatic damage.  With any luck, his line in the sand over the Diayou Islands is no more firm than the red line he drew for Syria's chemical weapons, otherwise that great icon of diplomatic solutions, Vladimir Putin will have to save his ass again.
Meanwhile, Baby Kim in North Korea is having a heyday executing real and imagined opponents in highly creative ways, and waving his nukes around like an ape with an AK-47, adding extra drama to an already tense region.

I'm not sure that the Pivot to Asia strategy in its present form is the best idea for easing tensions in the region. The list of American failures in meddling abroad is far longer than its successes.

The Pivot was also an attempt, at the request the US government's corporate masters, to try reach a final agreement on the very secret Trans Pacific Free Trade Agreement.  Didn't happen.  Fail.  Most likely a good thing for anyone not a corporate criminal.  
The Asian trip was a mixed bag of a few successes and some failures.  At least the President showed good judgement in one area. He was smart enough to take Air Force One to Malaysia instead of Malaysian Airlines.

*****

And speaking of diplomacy....
Any person traveling abroad is an ambassador for their country. How one acts abroad is a reflection on your country for better or worse, so one should try to behave in a manner that shows the best side of your homeland. 
The US and China have the two biggest economies in the world. There is speculation about when China will surpass America as the number one economy.  There is another area where the US has dominated in the world, but looks to lose its leadership role to China---The World's Worst Tourists.  The US used to dominate this category.  Fat louts in gaudy clothing, talking loudly, throwing money around, oblivious to local customs, were every country's favorite tourist to hate.  However, the rapid rise in income for the Chinese along with the government loosening travel restrictions has loosed hordes of Chinese tourists around the world, bringing with them behavior, that while commonplace in China, is not quite acceptable in other places.  A quick Google search on the internet will bring up endless accounts public urinating and even defecating (mostly toddlers), spitting, nose picking, smoking wherever they want, rudely arguing with shopkeepers and hotel staff, queue cutting, littering, stealing, defacing property, being extremely loud, and generally being inconsiderate of others. Basic everyday behavior in China.  I've noticed that the most arrogant behavior here comes from the people with more money, and since they are the ones traveling, you have an even worse "diplomatic corps".
The Chinese government was alarmed enough to issue a 64 page etiquette guide to people traveling abroad.  It's an in depth effort to try to educate people who have had a lifetime of less than genteel behavior.  Good luck with that!

Toys!

This is a real Chinese toy, or at least it was made in China by a Japanese company. 

If I had written something describing this you would not have believed me.  But now when I write about weird stuff I see here you will have less tendency to doubt me.
They do sell some questionable items as toys here, all with parents' approval.  All schools have stores surrounding them catering to the needs of China's youth.  Everything from paper and pencils to junk food and toys.  And not the wimpy kind of toys you see in America. We're talking toys that shoot pointy projectiles.  Toys that cause hearing damage.  Laser pointers.  No, really.  They sell laser pointers to kids as toys.   As you can see in the video, toys that shoot flames.  Toys painted with lead based paint that shoot flames and pointy projectiles!  They probably have something that glows in the dark, made from radioactive waste, that shoots flaming pointy projectiles at deafening noise levels, that you can aim with a laser sight.  Tasers for tots!  OK, I'm making some of this up.