May 22, 2012, 12:00pm
Finally something to look forward to.
May 09, 2012, 10:06am
The Startling Plight of China's Leftover Ladies
The Spicy Love Doctor was running late. A well-heeled crowd one recent Sunday afternoon had packed into the second-floor lounge of Beijing’s Trends Building — home to the publishing offices of several glossy magazines, including the Chinese editions of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar — to hear Wu Di, a contributor to China’s Cosmopolitan and author of an alluring new book, I Know Why You’re Left. The poised, professional crowd, outfitted in black blazers, leather boots, and trendy thick-framed glasses, was composed mostly of women in their mid-20s to mid-30s — prime Cosmo readers and all there waiting patiently to hear Wu, who typically charges $160 an hour for “private romance counseling,” explain their surprising plight: being single women in a country with a startling excess of men. 
When at last she sauntered to the front of the room, microphone in hand, Wu, a pert, married 43-year-old who resembles a brunette Suze Orman (and whose chief advertised credential, it turns out, is an MBA from the University of Houston), surveyed her audience. Then she broke out into a practiced grin and, in the relentlessly chipper staccato common to Chinese public speakers, launched into her talk: a mix of sisterly homily, lovemaking tips, and economics lecture. It’s unrealistic to expect that you will be madly in love with one person forever, she warned, or even that passion can be the right guide to marriage. Her authority? No less than the wandering eye of Bill Clinton, which, she told her solemnly attentive audience, “proves that there is no method to sustain feverish lust between long-married couples.”
The majority of her talk was devoted not to such timeless aphorisms, but to describing a new conundrum in China: the plight of its sheng nu, or “leftover ladies.” In popular parlance, sheng nu refers to women above a certain age — some say 27, others 30 — who are unmarried and presumably “left over,” too old to be desirable. Increasingly, sheng nu are a topic of alternating humor and alarm for Chinese newspaper columnists, TV sitcoms, reality dating shows, and studies by government bodies like the All-China Women’s Federation; according to its 2010 survey, more than 90 percent of male respondents agreed that women should marry before age 27 or risk being forever undesired.
What’s most startling about this national obsession with China’s Bridget Joneses is that sheer numbers would seem to say it couldn’t possibly be so. China has far too few women, not too many. This is a country where 118 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2010, and by 2020 the number of men unable to find partners is expected to reach 24 million. So how could any women possibly be left over? ..read more
May 04, 2012, 5:03am
Visualtraveling - ‘Kim Il-Sung’s Birthday Party’
April 27, 2012, 5:22pm
Food's Biggest Scam: The Great Kobe Beef Lie
Think you’ve tasted the famous Japanese Kobe beef?
Think again.
Of course, there are a small number of you out there who have tried it – I did, in Tokyo, and it is delicious. If you ever go to Japan I heartily recommend you splurge, because while it is expensive, it is unique, and you cannot get it in the United States. Not as steaks, not as burgers, certainly not as the ubiquitous “Kobe sliders” at your trendy neighborhood “bistro.”
That’s right. You heard me. I did not misspeak. I am not confused like most of the American food media.
I will state this as clearly as possible:
You cannot buy Japanese Kobe beef in this country. Not in stores, not by mail, and certainly not in restaurants. No matter how much you have spent, how fancy a steakhouse you went to, or which of the many celebrity chefs who regularly feature “Kobe beef” on their menus you believed, you were duped. I’m really sorry to have to be the one telling you this, but no matter how much you would like to believe you have tasted it, if it wasn’t in Asia you almost certainly have never had Japan’s famous Kobe beef.
You may have had an imitation from the Midwest, Great Plains, South America or Australia, where they produce a lot of what I call “Faux-be” beef. You may have even had a Kobe imposter from Japan before 2010. It is now illegal to import (or even hand carry for personal consumption) any Japanese beef. Before 2010 you could import only boneless fresh Japanese beef, but none was real Kobe. Under Japanese law, Kobe beef can only came from Hyogo prefecture (of which Kobe is the capital city), where no slaughterhouses were approved for export by the USDA. According to its own trade group, the Kobe Beef Marketing & Distribution Promotion Association in Japan, where Kobe Beef is a registered trademark, Macao is the only place it is exported to – and only since last year. If you had real Kobe beef in this country in recent years, someone probably smuggled it in their luggage. ..read more
April 21, 2012, 5:01am
Finally, a new Fiona Apple album coming out June 26’th.
April 03, 2012, 4:50pm
North Korea's 100th – To Celebrate or To Surrender?
For a country supposedly irrationally aggressive, one that is “no a normal state but more a nation-scale exercise in organized crime” (as the Sydney Morning Herald put it), North Korea has been remarkably consistent in its pursuit of the moral goals of equality and respect. Its recent history shows that its interest in negotiations diminishes as other parties attempt to narrow the focus to its nuclear and missile programs and grows as the agenda incorporates comprehensive normalization, a treaty to end the Korean War, multilateral economic cooperation, and Japanese reparations for colonialism. As Leon Sigal wrote in 2009, “Whenever the United States fails to keep its side of the bargain, North Korea is quick to retaliate – in 1998 Pyongyang sought the means to enrich uranium and test a long-range Taepodong missile; in 2003 its reignited its plutonium program; in 2006 it test-launched a Taepodong and conducted a nuclear test; and last August it suspended disablement of its Yongbyon facilities and threatened to resume plutonium production.” North Korea appears to have learned from experience that nothing is so effective in attracting American attention, even earning a grudging respect, as the maintenance of high-level military preparedness. Such tactics are better seen not as recalcitrance, blackmail, or belligerence, but as a calculated response to American (and Japanese) intimidation.
Although there is no doubt that North Korea is a highly unpleasant dictatorship), there is little basis for the view that it poses a threat of regional aggression. Obsessed with security and the search for an absolute guarantee of immunity from attack by its enemies, it has become a kind of “porcupine state,” resisting foreign bodies by stiffening its quills, rather than an expanding or rampaging one. While the world’s attention focussed on whatever might be about to happen on the North Korean launch-pad, huge US and South Korean war games, rehearsals for war, were taking place just off North Korean shores.11 To Pyongyang, that was provocation, just as to Japan and the US, its April launch was provocation.
As at time of writing (30 March 2012) there are several possibilities. Pyongyang might, although it seems unlikely, choose to buckle under the pressure and cancel the launch. Such display of weakness and repudiation of the legacy of the late leader would have unpredictable domestic consequences, and the act of submission would likely encourage the member states of the Beijing group to demand more. If, however, Pyongyang resists all pressures and proceeds with the launch, either the launch succeeds or it does not. If an “advanced geostationary meteorological satellite” duly takes its place in the skies, the world will face a fait accompli. Despite sanctions and irrespective of its poverty and isolation, North Korea’s claim to a place in the ranks of advanced scientific and industrial powers would be reinforced and, sooner or later, the hostile powers would have to return to the agenda of September 2005: a comprehensive peninsular peace and normalization agenda. If on the other hand the launch is unsuccessful and/or the vehicle breaks up or enters a missile trajectory, North Korea would face considerable loss of face both domestically and heightened hostility internationally, making early resumption of the Six Party talks unlikely. Embattled, it might resume nuclear testing (as it did when the Security Council denounced the failed launch in 2009), the regime’s hold would likely weaken and the “North Korea problem” might become just so much more difficult to resolve.
The merciless stare which almost the entire world fixes upon North Korea is not to be understood solely in rational terms. The stare is less fierce, it is true, in the case of Russia and China, but both on this occasion seem at least to be joining the coalition of the hostile in urging North Korea to cancel the launch and avoid “provocation.” For much of the world, however, the country serves as a kind of ultimate “other.” Over much of the apst half century, and certainly since the end of the Cold War, no country has been so lacking in international sympathy or solidarity. The United States and Japan expect others to condemn North Korea, and it is easy to find cause to condemn and much less likely to cause offence in the global quarters that count than any serious attempt to identify and pursue global powers that are responsible for aggression and abuse on the grand scale. Thus the Government of Australia, having shown no previous interest in peninsular matters and no understanding of the historic context or of the core of legitimacy that encapsulates North Korea’s cry to the world, to declare itself threatened by the imminent launch and to demand it be cancelled is simply a cheap and empty gesture. ..read more
April 03, 2012, 6:04am
March 29, 2012, 12:46pm
Westerners have been confounded by Japanese TV for decades, ever since Clive James amused millions in the 80s with clips from a gameshow called Endurance, in which contestants had to undergo a series of increasingly painful and humiliating ordeals. For British viewers, much of the fun came from sheer outraged disbelief that watching people being physically tormented and degraded was considered entertainment.
But of course that was 100 years ago, before I’m a Celebrity transformed low-level torture into mainstream British fare. Nonetheless, you don’t have to watch Japanese TV for long until you see something shocking. The other evening I watched a programme in which a man was shown spooning boiling molten metal into his mouth. This was followed by footage of a man being mauled by a tiger and a rib-tickling sequence in which a studio guest was deliberately poisoned by some kind of sea creature.
Generally though, the TV here is surprisingly dull. The vast majority of programmes consist of several seriously overexcited people sitting in an overlit studio decorated like a novelty grotto made from regurgitated Dolly Mixture, endlessly babbling about food.
Seriously, it’s all food, food, food. People eating food, answering questions about food, sometimes even just pointing at food and laughing. It’s as they’ve only just discovered food and are perpetually astonished by its very existence. Imagine watching an endless episode of The One Show with the colour and brightness turned up to 11, where all the guests have been given amphetamines, the screen is peppered with random subtitles, and every 10 seconds it cuts to a close-up shot of a bowl of noodles for no apparent reason. That’s 90% of Japanese TV right there.
For a nation so preposterously hi-tech, it’s a curiously old-fashioned approach to television. People talking in studios. Forever. Like it’s the 50s. And yet it’s insanely agitated: as though the participants are simply too wired to make a proper TV show, and have subsequently just switched the cameras on and started yelping. ..read more
March 22, 2012, 1:45am
March 19, 2012, 11:43pm
SimCity 5 finally getting released? Took long enough.
March 08, 2012, 10:04pm
Over the past 150 years, several waves of Chinese students have arrived in the United States. But the current wave, which has brought some 128,000 Chinese students to U.S. colleges and universities, is creating problems and opportunities unlike anything that has happened previously.
In a world increasingly defined by U.S-China rivalry, this influx of Chinese students presents an alluring image: future business, cultural, and political leaders of both countries studying side-by-side and learning to understand each other. The reality is less romantic: This is a movement driven not by an agenda for global understanding, but – mainly – by free market economics. Large numbers of American colleges and universities are simply trying to cash in on the Chinese vogue for overseas study; in turn, many Chinese students – often self-financed and ill-prepared – are seeking American academic credentials primarily to advance their careers, with little interest in learning more about the West.
Critics in both the United States and China who know about education have voiced concerns that the education of the Chinese in the U.S. has become just a business – albeit a big business where money is the overriding motivation – not about education and academic excellence. The public in both countries is also disquieted: Ordinary Americans have begun to fear hordes of Chinese students grabbing college places from their children; ordinary Chinese express growing suspicion that the rich are simply buying American degrees. ..read more
March 04, 2012, 1:23pm
The Chollima Movement before its collapse.
March 03, 2012, 11:09am
