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Shanghai Diaries - May 09


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Just a quick explanation on why there'll be no vlogs for a few days - or maybe ever, should my fate be the same as my best friend's, who found out 20 hours prior he had to leave China.
aricsqueen

10 responses
Shanghai Diaries - May 09

  • Hope to see you online again soon.
    mutantjedi
  • Sorry to hear about your friend, Aric, hope things go well, but even if your visa did go through, would you still consider taking the visa and staying here in China? or end up leaving China for good or at least for a little while?, wish the best of luck to you, I've always enjoyed your [current] vlogs and prior [show]. Hope to see you again.

    -Stefan
    Stefan_Boston
  • Thanks guys - it's just....absurd. About to take him to the airport now.

    mutantjedi - good question. I go back and forth. If/when I get my visa, I'm going to stick around until a month or so after the games to see how things go. Soon after that, I'd like to go somewhere else, as that would make it almost 5 years here. sounds like you're here?

    thanks [to both] for support.

    a
    aricsqueen
  • (sorry - that was stefan_boston!)
    aricsqueen
  • Yep. It's easy to get confused with the speech bubble for comments type thing. Still. Stefan asked the question I was wondering as well.

    I was in Beijing for 春节. I was quite impressed with how the country responded to the snow crisis. However, I'm a bit sadden how the clock gets turned back in the current situation.

    I'm hoping to return in the Fall.
    mutantjedi
  • mutantjedi - the snow crisis? I'd like to hear your side of this because, well, for us here, it was an absolute disaster.

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/articl...

    on one hand, yeah, they did some good, but more than a 1/4 of a million people stranded? 1.3 billion in damage? you can never plan for this kind of thing, of course, the US is as guilt of it as any, but I didn't see anything here that overly impressed me... but would like to hear a positive angle on it.

    funniest thing was Kissinger coming over to present an award:

    http://www.nerve.in/news:253500130880

    does *anyone* want accolade given by him?!

    aricsqueen
  • Hope you can sort things out and you´ll have your Visa soon!
    take care!
    excuter
  • excuter - thanks very much, will let ya know on Tues/Wed...one way or another.
    aricsqueen
  • It was a disaster.

    And the disaster extended beyond the rail system, for which there is an estimate of 6 million people stranded throughout southern China, to collapsed houses and power outages. 10's of millions of people were severely affected by this. 100's of millions. A staggering number. For me, especially, as a Canadian, where the total population of the country is only about 30 million, the magnitude of the crisis is hard to imagine.

    Jan 27th, I arrived in Beijing. I was planning to take the train to Urumqi but those plans switched to getting to Hong Kong by Feb 7. Embarrassingly, I didn't know the magnitude of the weather crisis before arriving. I knew that it was going to be busy, difficult, but not necessarily impossible to travel during Spring Festival. Friends mentioned snow but my focus was elsewhere. After all, what's snow to a Canadian, eh? Incidentally, my few days in Hong Kong, when the nights were getting down to 9°C or less, in an unheated flat, taught me just how sheltered we are in Canada. And it gave me a very small taste of what was happening in the rest of the country.

    After arriving in Beijing, I watched with great interest what was happening between Beijing and Hong Kong. I got a real appreciation for the phrase "人山人海". I watched the mini-biographies of the electricians killed while trying to remove snow and ice from the power lines. I watched Premier Wen Jiabao and President Hu Jintao in action. So many people trying to get home and so many people without homes.

    100 to 130 people died from the storms. With the magnitude of the disaster, compounded by the fervent need to be on the road or rail to get home, those numbers could have easily have been much much higher. So, yes, I was impressed with the government and the people's response to the crisis. That was the positive angle for me.



    Interestingly, the crisis also started to bring into focus for me on how disconnected, in a sense, Western media can be towards Chinese stories. While in Beijing, the official media presented the story in a way that made sense to me - crisis during 春节: the big stories are how are people going to get home, how is the government going to ensure the safety of these people, and what are the solutions. The stories weren't unlike what I remembered from the Ice Storm of 1998. Canada even had a huge deployment of 15,000 troops to help in disaster recovery. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_ice_storm_o...

    However, in the West, and even in Hong Kong, there was a sort of vigil for social breakdown in their reporting. Even in the link you gave me, we see anticipation for the bigger story when Macartney writes "In a sign of official anxiety that the travel chaos could trigger social unrest, Premier Wen Jiabao ordered local officials to mobilise all possible resource to ensure people get home." A similar story in Eastern Canada was about "Operation Recuperation" but when it is in China there has to be a hint of "social unrest"?

    mutantjedi
  • Some really, really good points - and I think you made me realize something:

    Living here is hard, anyone can tell you that - we have a great lifestyle, but actually immersing oneself in the culture is difficult - it's a different world.

    At times, the frustration builds to a point of explosion (this is the only country I've ever lived in where everyone seems to have a '6 Week Rule', meaning ,every month-and-a-half, you must leave the country to relax) and it becomes easy to spin a negative on everything.

    What would be considered an accident back home turns into 'God, they're so stupid'. A bad meal at McDonalds turns into 'Can't they do *anything* right?!' And when something like this happens, the unfair prejudice of the gov't takes over...and this is something that has been a huge problem in the Olympics - there is the occasional 'picking on China' and hopefully, more people like yourself can bring another take on what was originally a dig.

    Thank you for taking the time to post that, I learned a few important things ;)

    aricsqueen

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